Right Wing Nut House

I think Franklin Roosevelt said something eerily similar about the New Deal:

US President George W. Bush said in an interview Tuesday he was forced to sacrifice free market principles to save the economy from “collapse.”

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”

Bush’s comments reflect an extraordinary departure from his longtime advocacy for an unfettered free market, as his administration has orchestrated unprecedented government intervention in the face of a dire financial crisis.

“I am sorry we’re having to do it,” Bush said.

But Bush said government action was necessary to ease the effects of the crisis, offering perhaps his most dire assessment yet of the country’s economy.

“I feel a sense of obligation to my successor to make sure there is not a, you know, a huge economic crisis. Look, we’re in a crisis now. I mean, this is — we’re in a huge recession, but I don’t want to make it even worse.”

Let’s get something clear. What Bush and Obama are doing has nothing to do with “saving” the free market” and everything to do with saving the hides of politicians who are responding to the cries of frightened people by overturning sound economic principles in favor of corporate handouts to failing companies who gambled and lost and now want the taxpayer to subsidize their recklessness and incompetence.

And just what does Bush call this economy if not “collapsed?” He is pumping $8 trillion into the economy and I would like to know what difference it has made? The credit markets are no better, unemployment is skyrocketing, businesses from Main Street to Wall Street are either failing or hanging on by a thread. Negative growth, prices deflating, and consumer confidence is the lowest it has been since records have been kept.

Tell me, what good has all this free money done? What has it prevented? Worse? It is hard to see how things could be much worse. If Bush had allowed market forces to work as they should have, we would have seen bankruptcies, mergers, reorganizing, and a general winnowing out of winners and losers. Yes, people would be no better off - they would still be losing their jobs, companies would still be closing their doors, unemployment would still be skyrocketing.

But the seeds of recovery would already have been sown. Successful companies would know how to weather this storm and emerge on the other side even stronger. Once recovery began, it would be rapid and robust.

All of this bailout money has delayed the inevitable. It is not steering the economy to a soft landing. It is not saving one single job. Even the auto bailout is delaying the inevitable collapse of car companies that make few products that people want to buy and who refuse to face the fact that their labor costs and business plan are outdated, outmoded, and out of luck. Eventually, we are going to have to nationalize The Big Three completely or keep pumping tens of billions of dollars down a black hole of failure, cowardice, and incompetence.

George Bush is a fool if he think he has “saved” anything.

This blog post originally appears in The American Thinker

You’ve probably heard by now that at a press conference with Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq yesterday, an Iraqi journalist reporting for an Iraqi TV station based in Egypt threw two shoes at George Bush, narrowly missing the president:

“This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” the journalist shouted (in Arabic), Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times reported in a pool report to the White House press corps.

Myers reported that the man threw the second shoe and added: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

The president showed a lot more class than liberal bloggers about the incident:

Welcome to Baghdad. An Iraqi reporter set off pandemonium Sunday by hurling two shoes at President Bush during a news conference that was the centerpiece of his secret goodbye visit.

Bush was cool under fire and prevented an even bigger incident by waving off his lead Secret Service agent, who was prepared to extract him from the room.

Video shows the president’s lead agent rushing to the podium, but the president immediately and subtly motions to him that it’s OK. The agent backs off.

The president successfully ducked both throws. Photos show him with his head down near the top of the podium.  The embarrassing incident marred a visit meant to show off the improved conditions since the troop “surge” dramatically reduced casualties to U.S. troops.

Lefties are beside themselves, using the incident as an excuse to spout inanities about Bush, the war, and America. Matthew Yglesias’s response is fairly typical:

Some people got very upset when I said I thought throwing pie at Tom Friedman was funny, but I’m having trouble coming up with appropriately humorless language with which to express my fake outrage at this incident.

A website has been set up to allow patriotic lefties to sign a petition to free the journalist who tossed the shoes. Others are urging that liberals send their old shoes to the Bush Library.

Now tossing your shoe at someone is a very grave insult in the Arab world, akin to tossing rotten fruit at a politician here - perhaps even worse. But lefties who are chortling over the incident are typically missing the point - as is the Bush deranged Iraqi journalist.

The liberals who are taking such pleasure in seeing the president embarrassed  are not realizing that this is an insult to the United States and her people. In other words, the jokes on you, dummies. When abroad, whether you like him or not, agree with him or not - even if you are still deranged enough not to accept him as “your” president - George Bush represents the government and hence, the people of the United States. Liberal views of him as a leader matter not in the slightest. The shoe toss was as much an insult directed at the left as it was Bush. The fact that they don’t realize this only makes their cluelessness all the more entertaining.

The rest of the Arab world sees the shoe toss as an insult to the US government with George Bush being its most visible manifestation. The government of the United States - last I looked - was a government of, by, and for the people. In other words, the government is us. And any insults directed at the government are insults hurled at each and every American regardless of party affiliation, ideology, or, in the case of liberals, intelligence or the lack thereof.

As for the Iraqi journalist, would he have been so brave if, instead of Prime Minister Maliki standing up there, horrified at the insult to his guest, it was Saddam Hussein? Somehow, I think the prospect of being taken out and shot would have stayed the journalist’s hand - or shoes as it were. The point being, Saddam has gone missing courtesy of the US Army and President George Bush. The journalist may face charges (try throwing a shoe at someone in America and you can be charged with assault) but will probably be released in the end so that he can practice his America hating craft safely and without fear of being arrested in the middle of the night and shot.

All of this has gone straight over the heads of our liberal friends who are chuckling over the insult they believe is Bush’s alone.

But hey! I won’t ever call them unpatriotic.

When the history of the Iraq War is written a decade or more from now, it will include a lot more perspective that the press and the war’s foes are giving it now. It will no doubt view events on the ground in that country as other wars have been chronicled; a mix of stunning bravery, horrible leadership, incomprehensible decisions, and the quiet, unremarkable brilliance of the ordinary US soldier in combat.

In a decade, we will also know whether the war was a net plus or minus for US interests. (To make that judgment now is folly. Example: Viet Nam, where many historians now see the war as a pivotal event in the collapse of the Soviet Union.) We will also know a lot more about the corruption, the confusion, the dishonesty, and the jaws dropping incompetence of the the Administration, the Pentagon, the State Department, and many other government agencies who had a hand in the reconstruction fiasco.

We have known for years that the Bush Administration was unprepared for the aftermath of the invasion. We’ve known about the wasted, stolen, and misappropriated reconstruction funds. We’ve known that the Pentagon was not always honest in its assessment of the progress of Iraqi security forces.

What we didn’t know until now is just how truly bad it was.

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Over the years, the Pentagon has simply lied to us about the readiness of Iraqi forces to “stand up” so we could “stand down.” Certainly they justified some of this lying as “good for the war effort.” But it is just horrific that Rumsfeld could face the press everyday and lie about the progress of training the Iraqi army. We already knew he was a “glass half full” sort of fellow when it came to war news. But this wasn’t spin. These were deliberate lies told to maintain support for the war at home. Those of us who bought these figures and argued with war opponents that progress was being made and asked for patience it now turns out that we were just actors in Rumsfeld’s little dramas.

But it is in the reconstruction area that the Bush Administration reveals itself to be not only incompetent but probably criminally negligent with American taxpayer dollars.

You haven’t heard about it because of a government gag orders but there are at least 70 cases of Iraqi contract fraud across the country waiting for January 20, 2009 to start up against American companies who did business in Iraq with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Some trials have taken place already including one involving the company Custer Battles that was given a contract to convert the Iraqi Dinar to a new currency and ended up robbing the taxpayers of at least $10 million. Another case involving Philip Bloom who admitted bribing DoD officials with sex, booze, and cash in order to get millions in reconstruction contracts. His co-defendant was a CPA official.

The list of transgressions is staggering. Uncompetitive bidding (including the granting of Haliburton a multi-billion dollar contract without any other bidders) outright theft, contract manipulation, nauseatingly incompetent accounting by the CPA, bending and breaking of regulations, political favoritism, and $8 billion in cash that has simply gone “missing.”

That last may involve some wretched accounting by the CPA. But don’t worry, there’s plenty of evidence that a lot of that cash just up and disappeared - stacks and stacks of crisp, brand new $100 bills. How could that happen?

Because the Iraqi banking system was in tatters, the funds were placed in an account with the Federal Reserve in New York. From there, most of the money was flown in cash to Baghdad. Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash. And that is where it all began to go wrong.

“Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money,” says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. “We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced.”

The environment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. “American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone,” says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. “In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did.”

Does “criminally negligent” apply? That 513 page report mentioned up top supplies some answers:

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money.

The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort.

That’s right. To this day, the administration remains clueless about not only the finances of Iraqi reconstruction but even how to go about the task of organizing the effort.

Criminally negligent? Can’t say for sure but there is certainly plenty of evidence that the Bushies didn’t care enough to resolve the parochial disagreements and turf wars that hampered efforts to consolidate the reconstruction effort and get a handle on how much was going out to pay for what and to whom.

There will be an effort in Congress next year to get to the bottom of all this. With the ascension of Henry Waxman to the chairmanship energy committee, the oversight committee chairman could very well be Ed Towns, a New York Congressman who is dogged, thorough, and much less a partisan than Waxman. But I still think it best that an independent commission be formed to look into the entire question of Iraqi reconstruction. We need to investigate the entire episode and not just cherry pick individual occurences of corruption. Congress is much to busy to do a good job in delving into the whole narrative, hence, a bi-partisan panel should be empowered.

The charge of “war profiteering” against some contractors is no doubt overblown. There are hundreds of honest businessmen who contracted with the US or Iraqi governments to supply goods and services who, by all accounts, performed magnificently - sometimes at great personal risk to themselves and their employees. But there is also a growing body of evidence that dozens of contractors saw an easy way to defraud the taxpayer and through bribery, theft, and fraud, enriched themselves.

UPDATE

He’s the only other conservative writing about this story but I still think James Joyner is on the wrong track with this:

That sounds about right. Of course, the Marshall Plan involved giving the money to leaders of advanced countries to rebuild war-ravaged infrastructure after the conflict had ended, whereas this effort had outsiders with virtually no knowledge of the area trying to create a modern state out of an underdeveloped one while terrorists were trying to undermine the effort at every turn.

My history is a little fuzzy but I remember reading Theodore H. White (who wrote extensively about the Marshall Plan when he was working with Colliers Magazine) that the entire taxpayer expenditure for the Marshall Plan was around $15 billion from 1947-51 and that the primary success of the plan lay in its building currencies and creating markets for goods. Using the dollar to stabilize currencies and aiding France so that it could buy German wheat or Great Britain so it could buy French steel are examples of specific Marshall Plan goals. More than one historian has pointed to the plan as a boost to the idea of a European Common Market.

The point being, there was a government wide effort involving State, Defense, Treasury, and Commerce to realize reconstruction based on cooperation and a specific plan. According to the conclusions in that history of Iraq war reconstruction, the Bushies never even took the first step of organizing their own administration and to this day have failed to do so. It wouldn’t have mattered if Iraq was a western industrialized nation or a third world backwater; the problem lay in a lack of focus on putting an overall plan in place with specific goals and targets.

But kudos to James for highlighting what I’m sure is going to be a big story next year.

Conservatives are rightly up in arms over the trillion dollar (and climbing) taxpayer funded bailout packages being thrown around Washington these last weeks. Beyond that, many are livid at the ridiculous notion being advanced by lefties that the free market “failed” and that government takeovers (if not in fact then certainly in effect) of the financial industry, banks, insurance companies, and now The Big Three will somehow solve this crisis, stemming the flow of lost jobs and re-opening the credit markets thus getting the economy growing again.

I have come to the conclusion that anyone who says anything definitive about the “root causes” of this crisis is a loon. There are as many theories about what caused the sub prime collapse, the mortgage security mess, and the subsequent contraction of financial institutions as there are economists. Both right and left have their favorite theories (”de-regulation” on the left and “government interference” on the right) none of which will probably be proved true in the end. Once historians sink their teeth into what caused the crisis a decade or more from now, I fully expect many factors to have been at play - some of which are probably not even dreamed of at this point by any of the “experts” who so confidently rail against capitalism or Democratic interference in the mortgage industry.

That “failed” free market just finished giving the United States the longest, the most sustained period of economic growth and prosperity in the history of western industrialized civilization. But there is also little doubt that someone, somewhere, should have applied the brakes to the mortgage security madness both at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and on Wall Street.

In the end, I believe that like 9/11, one key factor that will be highlighted when historians make their judgements may very well be a failure of imagination by government and the Big Banks to anticipate the consequences of some of the actions taken by the players involved. Yes there were doomsayers - just as there were Cassandras warning of a terrorist attack. In hindsight, it is too easy to say policymakers and regulators should have listened to them. This should be obvious but never is to those who see history as a linear progression of events rather than the confused, contradictory, babble it truly is.

So historically speaking, the “root causes” arguement means little at this point. But politically, it is everything. In the real world, Barack Obama and his team are formulating policy based on their perceptions of what happened and why. They are planning a response to the crisis based on their political understanding of events and their lifelong experiences that have shaped their worldview. They also feel constrained to act because the voters who just resoundingly elected them want the government to “do something about the problem.”

The soothing assurances we are getting from the Obama camp that a half a trillion dollar “stimulus package” and bailouts of the auto industry and other troubled concerns are all well and good. We should expect them to have confidence in their ability to turn things around and prevent an even worse downturn than the one we will surely have to endure regardless of what the new Administration does.

But are they right? And for my conservative friends, I have an even more difficult question.

Do you want Obama to be right? Do you want him to succeed?

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with this site knows that I am not in the business of cheerleading for liberals. But we are in a very bad spot and wishing Obama to fail - even if it means that success might mean his certain re-election - cannot be an option if you care about America.

If it is your desire to see us sink into a deep recession or even a depression because we know Obama’s policies won’t work, then you have no conception of what that will mean to millions of your fellow Americans not to mention the extraordinary damage it would do to entire industries.

Should we fight the bailouts, the stimulus package, and the rest of his program? Absolutely. In fact, stopping a lot of his ideas from becoming law may be our salvation. But to do so, we must have alternatives that we can offer rather than simply screaming “NO” at the top of our voices while openly cheering on the destruction of our economy. Bailouts are not the answer but what about steering some of that money away from business failures and offer loans to successful companies where we would have a reasonable expectation that the money would be paid back? Companies on the verge of bankruptcy are not going to be hiring anyone. Companies who are successful but suffering as a result of the tight credit would benefit both themselves and the nation if they used that money not to stay afloat but to hire on more workers and expand their businesses.

Rather than giving money to taxpayers outright, why not lower taxes permanently? Instead of enacting protectionist policies, why not approve the Columbian trade agreement? There are many conservative responses to this crisis that are not being pushed because we’re so busy screaming “socialism” that nothing else matters.

I think we should try and help Obama succeed. His success is America’s success at this point. We know that his policies carry enormous risk and the potential to make things worse by propping up failed businesses led by incompetents. Better to offer rational, reasonable alternatives that would accomplish the goal of restarting the economy and get people back to work - even if it means Obama gets the credit.

No, it is not likely that that this will happen and Obama will go on his merry way, throwing money that we don’t have and can’t pay back at businesses not likely to survive this downturn. But I for one will not hope that his policies meet with utter failure. The consequences of this would be too terrible for the country.

As President elect Barack Obama seeks to expand the size of government to previously unheard of proportions, conservatives find themselves in a very difficult position politically. The fact is, there is no way, in principle, conservatives can compete with Obama when offering government help to anyone and everyone with their hand out. To do so would be to betray basic princples of the conservative movement.

But the political problem faced by conservatives is that they are in a position only to say “no” to the Bush/ Obama bailouts - playing Grinch to the next president’s Santa Claus. The question of a conservative alternative to this madness - except to allow the market to do its dirty work and pick and choose which businesses deserve to live or die - has rarely been raised, largely because the cure involves more economic pain than Obama is promising.

The “solution” that applies the principles of big government liberalism is unacceptable because, at bottom, it alters the social contract between the people and their government, substituting dependency for freedom (not to mention utterly failing when tried previously during the Great Depression). The other way - also tried during the depression - is to allow the market to function as executioner while perhaps taking most of the rest of down a path to economic ruin that we would be a decade or more recovering from.

The fact is, conservatives have no viable response to the Obama bailout program. On the one hand, the next president offers to save jobs, save companies, and prime the non-existent Keynesian pump with hundreds of billions in federal dollars that will - he says - put people back to work. On the other hand, conservatives are telling the American worker that he will have to take a hit due to the incompetence and short sightedness of his managers and be patient while the market sorts out the winners and losers.

One kind of government is too big. The other kind is too small. Clearly, what we need is a government that is “just right” - or at least an expression of “limited” government where conservative principles are married with the needs of a 21st century society.

“Too big to fail” is being overused in this crisis. But there are other ways to avoid failure than simply handing out unthinkably large sums of money to managers who have performed incompetently and whose actions caused the crisis in the first place and where such handouts presuppose that government can then dictate how that company or industry does business.

What about intelligently structured bankruptcy, government facilitated mergers with healthier companies, and even in special cases, guaranteed loans where the chances of the taxpayer being burned is very low? The point being, when one way being pushed involves big government solutions and the other way offers a small government conservative alternative that doesn’t address the real needs of real people, what is needed on the part of conservatives is a little imagination where proposed solutions will keep many if not most employees working, save important companies, and address the worries of the American people (a side benefit of which could be a boost in consumer confidence that might get money circulating a litte more freely). Most importantly, there must be ways for government to assist business in this crisis without ending up having what amounts to ownership rights that would for all practical purposes nationalize entire industries.

The Wall Street Journal laid out some alternatives to the auto bailout plan while showing how the Democrat’s plan would basically nationalize the Big Three by forcing them to accept the government’s own business plan:

Yet amid all the hopeful talk about the brave, new green car world, the men from Detroit were studiously silent on whether they can sell these new cars at a profit any better than they can their current lineup. Yes, the restructuring plans, especially GM’s, have some stark numbers about downsizing — 30,000 blue collar jobs are on the chopping block at GM alone. And this is accompanied by gauzy predictions of matching Toyota’s labor costs by 2012. But it’s hard to see how that gets done without a bankruptcy judge to tear up the contracts and start over. Once the auto makers agree to let Barney Frank run their businesses, does anyone really believe organized labor will roll over and let them gut the United Auto Workers?

The core problem is that the companies can’t pay their creditors in fuel-economy standards. Two economists testified that the ultimate cost of this bailout would certainly be much, much higher than $34 billion. Mark Zandi of economy.com put the number at up to $125 billion — and he supports the bailout. NYU’s Edward Altman said the company proposals were “doomed to fail.” He proposed a prepackaged bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler, with the government providing the debtor-in-possession financing if necessary. His point, which ought to be sobering, was that outside of bankruptcy there is no way to make these taxpayer loans senior to existing secured debt — meaning the government might never get paid back if the companies go bankrupt later.

Mr. Altman’s suggestion has a lot of things going for it. Instead of the politically driven “car czar” being mooted to oversee the bailout, you’d have a bankruptcy judge to make sure that the companies did, in fact, emerge as more viable businesses. The resulting restructuring would be far more likely to be driven by business considerations

What we’re talking about here is not “small” government but “limited government” - the idea that government can go this far and no farther consistent with Constitutional principles and conservative ideals. But we’ve been so busy railing against “big government” that other ways and means of dealing with this crisis have escaped our notice. In the process, we have become irrelvant in this, the most important debate in more than a generation that, at bottom, is one that deals with the size and scope of federal power and whether and how much it should be expanded at the expense of the states, private industry, and individual citizens.

In truth, Obama and the left don’t want to have this debate. That’s because they wish to use this economic crisis to remake American society - from the top down:

The thing about a crisis — and crisis doesn’t seem too strong a word for the economic mess right now — is that it creates a sense of urgency. Actions that once appeared optional suddenly seem essential. Moves that might have been made at a leisurely pace are desired instantly.

Therein lies the opportunity for President-elect Barack Obama. His plans for an activist government agenda are in many ways being given a boost by this crisis atmosphere and the nearly universal call for the government to do something fast to stimulate the economy.

This opportunity isn’t lost on the new president and his team. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week.

He elaborated: “Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

He ticked off some areas where he thought new doors were opening: energy, health, education, tax policy, regulatory reforms. The current atmosphere, he added, even makes bipartisanship easier: “The good news, I suppose, if you want to see a silver lining, is that the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution.”

Note that Emanuel sees the GOP rolling over and playing ball with this radical restructuring of American society because conservative alternatives are not being pushed by the party leadership. Any “ideas” advanced by Republicans will involve fiddling with Democratic legislation at the margins, not offering viable, limited government alternatives.

William Kristol correctly identifies the problem but offers the wrong solution:

Now it’s true that the size of the government and the modern liberal agenda are connected. It’s also true that modern conservatism has to include a strong commitment to limited (though energetic) government and to constitutional (though not necessarily small or weak) government. Still, there’s a difference between a conservatism that is concerned with limited and constitutional government and one that focuses on simply opposing big government.

So: If you’re a small-government conservative, you’ll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you’ll be open to the government’s stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you’ll tend to favor those policies — universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations — that, consistent with conservative principles, don’t reward irresponsible behavior and don’t politicize markets.

The solution, as Scott Johnson eloquently points out, is not “big government conservatism” but “limited government” bounded by the Constitution:

Yet a debate framed in terms of big government versus small government is sterile without the notion of limited government. The proper understanding of limited government provides the judgment on the government programs on offer from the current and prospective administrations.

The gist of the column seems to be Bill’s is opposition to small-government conservatism. He urges conservatives opposing big government public works programs not to oppose them as irreconcilable with the proper ends of constitutional government, but rather to accept them as inevitable.

“Small government” conservatism is, as I have argued, intellectually satisfying but unrealistic and even politically counterproductive. If you are concerned with the philosphy of conservatism as a coherent set of principles that should be the ideal for a just and moral society in the abstract, then small government conservatism makes sense.

But if you seek to use conservative principles to govern a hugely diverse nation of 300 million people with clashing interests, differing needs, and even different ideas of what it means to be an American, then there should be a realization among conservatives that there is no “big” government or “small” government at all. Rather, it is using government to address the legitimate needs of the people consistent with the Constitution that matters in the end.

After all, there is nothing in the Constitution which states that government needs to be big or small. There are only limits placed on what government can do. Inherent in those limits may be the ideal of small government. But surely there is room for limited government while recognizing government’s legitimate responsibilities. For instance, the question of whether we must have drinking water that won’t kill us if we drink it is not addressed in the Constitution. And common sense should inform us that we can’t have 50 different standards for clean water. Ergo, assuring a supply of clean drinking water for its citizens is a legitimate function of the federal government.

We can argue the finer points of the Clean Water Act, including some regulations that are unnecessary and burdensome. But the basic notion that only the federal government can keep criminally irresponsible individuals and businesses from contaminating something so basic to life remains.

Is this “big” government? Or is it recognizing that in a nation of 300 million people who need clean water to stay alive that it must be the federal government’s responsibilty to oversee the process?

Readers here have engaged in spirited discussions in the comments about the nature of modern conservatism and its relevancy in a 21st century industrialized democracy. I believe that unless that debate includes ideas about the political relevancy of conservatism in a nation where “limited” government is preferrable to either “small” or “big” government, then conservatism itself will become an irrelevancy and the remaking of America by Obama and the liberals will become a foregone conclusion.

Yes, campaign promises are a dime a dozen and few people believe most of them.

But even for someone who promised the moon to so many, Barack Obama’s campaign promises are being quietly shelved or thrown under the bus at an unusual rate.

His tax policies are in ruins. And many of his prized ideas are now going to have to be financed through tax increases on every working American or their cost added to the ever ballooning deficit - the result of George Bush’s massive bailouts.

Then there’s his personnel choices which hardly give substance to his call for “change.” The establishmentarians he has hired on to run his national security and economcs shops fall laughably short of any promise for a “fresh breeze” to blow through Washington - more like a fetid wind of revolving door government.

Does this make Obama a failure? Not hardly. In a sense, it might have done more good than we realize at this time. Disabusing the new president of some of his more problematic notions of governance could very well moderate some of his policies and cause him to scale back some of his more grandiose plans on education ($4,000 tax credit in exchange for “community service”), the environment (1 million hybrids on the road by 2015), and most of all, the “middle class tax cut” which could add another half trillion to the deficit.

You could certainly blame some of Obama’s problems on the Bush deficits but not all. Much of Obama’s problem lies with his dishonest accounting of how he was going to pay for his programs to begin with. That, and a shortsightedness about the vagaries of the oil market will now doom almost all of his domestic initiatives to the ash heap.

With oil trading at below $50 bbl and OPEC apparently unwilling to cut production very much, the Obama team is quietly shelving one of the cornerstones of their economic program - a “windfall profits tax” on the oil companies.

Obama’s promise to give every American family a $1,000 “energy rebate” seems to have come a cropper of - what else - reality.

Obama and Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on the Obama-Biden long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief.

How about his other tax raising proposal - the one he was going to foist upon the rich? That, too, has gone the way of the dinosaurs as his broken promise will now raise taxes on everybody because he plans to roll back the Bush tax cuts when they expire at the end of 2010.

To argue, as Obama defenders try to do, that this is not a tax increase is laughable. When you pay X amount in taxes one year and the following year you pay Y amount, with Y being a larger sum of money than X, most kindergartners - and maybe even some liberal economists - would call that a tax increase. And those tax cuts affected people in all income brackets - not just Obama’s idea of who is or who isn’t “rich.”

How about those 5,000,000 “green jobs” that were going to be funded by the oil tax revenue that was going to be invested in new technologies? Gone, along with the silly notion that taxing oil companies will create more oil or even bring down the price of the commodity. The market proved more efficient than anything or anyone in the US government in deciding how much people will pay for energy.

Do the math. Obama was expecting hundreds of billions of dollars from this tax to fund his social welfare schemes. He was expecting tens of billions more by increasing taxes on “the rich.” He either must shelve almost all of his program or raise taxes on everybody - substantially.

From Reuters:

President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday.

“President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel,” an aide on Obama’s transition team said. “They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that.”

Oil prices have fallen from a record $147 a barrel in July to under $50 this week.

Obama, who signaled early in his campaign for the White House that he would take an active approach to oil markets as president, had planned to use the revenue from a windfall profits tax to fund a tax rebate for low- and middle-income families struggling with high energy prices.

But the aide said Obama’s presidential campaign had already taken the price drop into account six weeks ago. When Obama laid out his economic plan for the middle class in mid-October, revenue from a windfall profit tax was not included because of the price change, he said.

Oil companies steadfastly opposed a tax, saying it would stifle exploration and innovation.

Obama is whistling past the graveyard if he thinks he can fund the massive giveaway that polls show was the major reason for his electoral win. With trillion dollar deficits staring him in the face it would be fiscal madness to advance the kind of broad based rebate and handout that he so proudly pushed when running for president.

The dash of reality about revenue that this pullback represents calls into question some of  the primary goals of his Administration. Unless he is willing to push marginal tax rates much higher than he said during the campaign, it appears he will have to renege on that promised giveaway  of hundreds of billions of dollars.

I don’t know whether Dick Cheney or Albert Gonzalez are really in trouble as a result of an indictment handed down by a Willacy County grand jury in Texas. But if I were a ham sandwich, I would definitely take it on the lam:

A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County’s federal detention centers.

The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

Cheney’s indictment on a charge of engaging in an organized criminal activity criticizes the vice president’s investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and “at least misdemeanor assaults” on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.

Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment.

The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons.

Of course, lefties are short stroking their way to ecstasy. Our friends at Firedoglake:

Gonzales and Cheney have been indicted by a grand jury. The indictment is related to prisoner abuse at Wallace County Federal detention centers, which are run by Vanguard Group. Cheney has an investment in Vanguard and is charged with conflict of interest and “misdemeanor assault” on detainees through the company, while Gonzales is charged with using his office to quash an investigation. (h/t Perris)

Get out the popcorn, this could be interesting.

And maybe it will shine a light on the privatization of the prison system in the US, which has led to even greater abuses of prisoners than before.

The “Gun Toting Liberal” takes aim at…himself:

If you bothered to click on the aforementioned AP article, you’d have learned the South Texas jurorists indicted The Vampire the vice president on CRIMINAL charges stemming from making money through some sort of a hedgefund designed to abuse and torture federal prisoners and his pal “Gonzo” for — what else? — OBSTRUCTING federal investigations into The Veep’s [again... "alleged"] high crimes and misdemeanors. Gotta give ‘em both credit, because, again — COUNT of our Lame Duck President Bush to bail his fellow criminals out of any sort of a legal mess this whole fiasco might lead to — in other words, the only CHANCE we might have to see this trio behind bars is via International law and many, MANY of my fellow Americans share my point of view that justice just MIGHT be served the day they are sentenced for and held accountable by, The Hague for their [Pssst -- again -- "alleged"] war crimes. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen too many “pardons” going on over there lately; correct me if I’m wrong, which I, of course, frequently AM.

So just who is this brave, intrepid prosecutor who dares to do what the mealy-mouthed, weak-kneed, chicken-sh*t Democrats in Congress have failed to do all these years

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

[snip]

After Guerra’s office was raided as part of the investigation early last year, he camped outside the courthouse in a borrowed camper with a horse, three goats and a rooster. He threatened to dismiss hundreds of cases because he believed local law enforcement had aided the investigation against him.

On Tuesday, Guerra said the indictments speak for themselves. He said the prison-related charges are a national issue and experts from across the country testified to the grand jury. Asked about the indictments against local players in the justice system who had pursued him, Guerra said, “the grand jury is the one that made those decisions, not me.”

It is not your average prosecutor who would camp out in front of the courthouse with a horse. And if he is an extremely horny fellow, I see the reason for the 3 goats. But it takes a certified, first class, loony tunes, nutcase to subject a rooster to this kind of abuse. Was he using the fowl as an alarm clock? Maybe it was part of some secret religious rite where eventually, he would have bitten the rooster’s head off a la Alice Cooper. More likey, he enjoyed stimulating conversations with the bird about the law and how he would get back at his “enemies.”

There has been no word on the fate of the ham sandwich but I’m betting it’s already disappeared. Evidently, Guerra was contemplating indicting a bologna sandwich as well — for impersonating food — but in the end, the grand jury balked and then broke for lunch. Guerra thought it suspicious that several of the jurors appeared to be eating bagged lunches with both ham and bologna sandwiches but before he could make his move, the evidence disappeared.

This isn’t the first “ham sandwich” indictment in the history of US jurisprudence and it won’t be the last. Perhaps the most famous Deli indictment was the Jim Garrison travesty that saw a perfectly innocent man - who happened to be a homosexual - indicted for the Kennedy assassination.

Clay Shaw got caught up in a Jim Garrison’s desire to be governor of Louisiana while also being the victim of the prosecutor’s pathological hatred of homosexuals. The Oliver Stone film JFK depicting this man as a hero may be the most cockeyed, dishonest, twisted, and disgusting view of history ever put on film. It’s as if Springtime for Hitler was actually made as a serious look a Nazi Germany.

Garrison has been thoroughly, completely, and deservedly discredited by so many reputable historical and journalistic sources that one must studiously and deliberately ignore the facts in order to give him even the benefit of the doubt for making an honest mistake. Garrison based his indictment on a “tip” from an alcoholic private investigator named Jack Martin who confessed to the FBI within a week of the assassination that he concocted the whole story while he was drunk.

In truth, the “story” Garrison tried to sell kept changing as his “investigation” unfolded. What was clear was his sick animus directed against gay men. He had actually made a name for himself “cleaning up” prostitution in the French Quarter a few years earlier. What is rarely mentioned when portraying Garrison as a courageous battler for justice is that almost all of the arrests in that effort were of gay men - many who were not prostitutes but simply cruising.

His first “theory” of the JFK plot was that it was a “homosexual thrill killing.” Only later, when that theory fell apart because one of the main “plotters,” a homosexual named David Ferrie, died of cancer (that Garrison said was actually given to him by the CIA) did he charge “the military industrial complex” with the crime.

Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, James Phelan relates a wacky, surreal conversation he had with Garrison about the plot:

In an effort to get Garrison’s story into focus, I asked him the motive of the Kennedy conspirators. He told me that the murder at Dallas had been a homosexual plot.
“They had the same motive as Loeb and Leopold, when they murdered Bobbie Franks in Chicago back in the twenties,” Garrison said. “It was a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime. John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not — a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man. You can just picture the charge Ferrie got out of plotting his death.”

I asked how he had learned that the murder was a homosexual plot.

“Look at the people involved,” Garrison said. “Dave Ferrie, homosexual. Clay Shaw, homosexual. Jack Ruby, homosexual.”

“Ruby was a homosexual?”

“Sure, we dug that out,” Garrison said. “His homosexual nickname was Pinkie. That’s three. Then there was Lee Harvey Oswald.”

But Oswald was married and had two children, I pointed out.

“A switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife,” Garrison said. “That’s all in the Warren Report.” He named two more “key figures” whom he labeled homosexual.

“That’s six homosexuals in the plot,” Garrison said. “One or maybe two, okay. But all six homosexual? How far can you stretch the arm of coincidence?”

And then there was Garrison’s Section 8 discharge from the army:

In 1952, Jim Garrison was relieved of duty in the National Guard. Doctors at the Brooke Army Hospital in Texas diagnosed him as suffering from a “severe and disabling psychoneurosis” which “interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a marked degree.” The evaluation further said that Garrison “is considered totally incapacitated from the standpoint of military duty and moderately incapacitated in civilian adaptability,” and recommended long-term psychotherapy.

Garrison has been quoted as saying that the information was placed in his file by the government in order to discredit him.

And this is the man that Oliver Stone made a hero of in JFK? Clay Shaw’s life was ruined - being outed as a homosexual at that time was the kiss of death. He died a broken man a few years after his quick (45 minute) acquittal by the jury. Perhaps Garrison’s abuse of power was best summed up by former New Orleans District Attorney during the 1990’s Harry Connick (father of musician/actor Harry Connick, Jr.) who tells investigator Gerald Posner (Case Closed) what he told Oliver Stone when the film maker asked his opinion of the Shaw Trial:

“I said I thought it was one of the grossest, most extreme miscarriages of justice in the annals of American judicial history. And Stone said, ‘Well, we are going to do the movie anyway,’ as if I was suggesting he shouldn’t do it. I said: ‘Well, do whatever you want to do. I have nothing to say about that. You were asking and I was telling you that it was just a miscarriage of justice. An innocent man was plucked out of somebody’s mind and made a defendant in a criminal case.’ “

Both Garrison and Guerra have proven the adage that, if he tries hard enough, a prosecutor can get a ham sandwich indicted. But a ham sandwich doesn’t have a reputation nor does the deli specialty have a family, friends, and loved ones who are affected by the crazies who sometimes end up dispensing justice in our system. Such men — including the Duke rape case prosecutor Mike Nifong — deserve as much disapprobation as can be heaped upon their heads as they are ushered off the stage into an infamous retirement.

It’s not a done deal yet - apparently there are concerns about some of Billy’s more creative billing procedures connected to his globe trotting - but if Obama thinks her confirmation wouldn’t be too bruising an affair, there’s a good chance that Hillary Clinton will take the job of Secretary of State in the new Administratiion:

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

Obama’s advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton’s foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.

Clinton would be well placed to become the country’s dominant voice in foreign affairs, replacing Condoleezza Rice. Since being elected senator for New York, she has specialised in foreign affairs and defence. Although she supported the war in Iraq, she and Obama basically agree on a withdrawal of American troops.

I wrote a few days ago that Obama would be crazy to offer it to her and she would be nuts to take it. And there is still a chance she could turn it down or that Bill Clinton’s finances will turn out to be too problematic to pass muster with the Foreign Relations Committee.

But apparently, the offer is serious and she wants to take the job. Why? What do both principles have to gain?

Obama is in an extremely strong position - perhaps the strongest of any incoming president since Reagan. To say he has a blank check to do what he wants is perhaps an overstatement but ask yourself, who is going to stop him. The press? His own party? His supporters?

It certainly won’t be Republicans stopping him - not with their numbers and their attitude. So Obama doesn’t need anyone to make his administration. He can choose who he pleases and not have to expend the political capitol to get  them confirmed.

For Hillary, her place is secure in the Senate as would be her position as leader - if not in name than certainly as a result of her enormous visibility and influence. From the senate, she could wait to see if Obama falls on his face and mount a challenge in 2012 if the opportunity were to arise.

But she would also be just one of many senators who would take center stage over the next few years as Obama’s initiatives worked their way through Congress. She would be visible but she might consider an option that would not only give her TV face time whenever she wanted it but add to her resume some tangible accomplishments that would cement her status as frontrunner for either 2012 or 2016. Hence, the idea of Hillary for Secretary of State.

Obama will apparently be concentrating on domestic policies for the first several months - perhaps a year of his term. He needs someone who doesn’t need (and wouldn’t accept) much supervision. Setting broad goals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, Hillary would be tasked to achieve those goals - how would be pretty much up to her. She would be the most independent Secretary of State since Kissinger - and easily the most visible.

But this arrangement would almost certainly cause trouble for both principles. Obama may figure that having her in the cabinet will short circuit any plans she has to challenge him in 2012. If the economy really goes south and despite the efforts of the Obamamedia and the Democrats his policies are seen as the cause, it won’t matter where Hillary is, she will make a run. I can’t see her having the patience to wait until 2016 unless Obama is a smashing success. Unless we can believe that she has given up her desire to be president, 2012 looms large in both her and Obama’s plans.

For Obama then, he would get Hillary’s (and Bill’s) prestige and extensive contacts around the world - for maybe two years. That’s how long I give this marriage. Eventually, Obama will tire of the drama, the backbiting, the blame casting, the whispers that build the Clinton’s up at his expense, and either fire her or she will resign on her own. If the climate is right, she would pick up where she left off and make a run. If not, she can always run for the senate (or governor) and use that position as a power base for 2016.

Obama and the country could do worse than Hillary Clinton at State. I think she proved during the campaign that she has a much more realistic outlook on the world than the naive Obama and would probably be one of the only Obama foreign policy advisors who would advocate or support military action against Iran as a last resort. She is a steady friend of Israel, a more practical advocate for an Iraq drawdown, would support a surge of forces in Afghanistan, and generally has a more real politik outlook than the Obama crew. We could have done a lot worse if you consider the gaggle of far left liberals Obama tapped as his advisors during the campaign.

A bold move by Obama - one that I think he is going to come to regret.

With all this free money floating around and every CEO worth his salt lining up at the government trough ready to bury their faces and feed heartily on the taxpayer’s generosity, I think it’s time we began to look around and see what other companies - past and present - we should also claim to be “Too Big To Fail!”

For instance, a prime candidate for a government bailout would have to be John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Sure it’s been bankrupt for 160 years but I didn’t see any limitation attached to that bailout bill, did you? Hell, if the Medici’s had an American subsidiary we could probably bail out that Renaissance era company too.

The fact is, the American Fur Company failed and it’s your fault. Tell the truth now, when was the last time you bought a beaver hat? Don’t you realize that thousands of fur trappers have been thrown out of work because you selfishly decided to be a slave to fashion rather than thinking of those trappers, trading post managers, export facilitators, dock workers, and ship captains who lost their jobs as a result of the switch from beaver pelts to silk in hat making?

And, of course, you know where that silk is coming from, right? This may have been the first instance of a Chinese attack on our economy. Haberdashers, seduced by cheap imports of silk, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The American Fur Company must be saved else we will lose our competitive edge in the world’s fur trade. Then there are the national security implications which are just too horrible to contemplate.

So we should give some of that $700 billion in bailout money to the descendants of John Jacob Astor and power up the fur trading business again so we can all buy a stinky, misshapen, butt-ugly hat made from the skin of cute little beavers who are trapped in steel jaws that, when sprung, clamp down on their leg, forcing the helpless creatures to either gnaw off their own limb or die a slow death by starvation. But if it will save American jobs, it will be worth it, right?

Similarly, we could save the “Big Three” American automobile manufacturers who have run into a skein of bad luck recently. Of course, that streak of bad luck has lasted 35 years and for all practical (and aesthetic) purposes, the US auto industry has been dead since then. But if we’re going to save The American Fur Company, we might as well try and pump some life into the moribund car manufacturing sector, right?

Actually, this might prove to be a bigger trick than trying to make beaver hats all the rage again. This is because there is a reason that Detroit has lost its positions as the Mecca of car manufacturing; they make sucky cars that no one wants to buy.

The Big Three can complain all they want to about the high cost of union benefits, unfair competition (Translation: It is unfair the Japanese are smarter, more innovative, and more quality conscious than we are.), and “green” regulations that add cost to their products. They are basically calling the American consumer stupid for actually wanting nice looking, trouble free, fully functional, safe, and adequately serviced autos. The gargantuan salaries paid to auto execs have not produced one single model that can outsell the Toyota Corolla.

For all their redesign, retooling, rethinking, and re-inventing the “corporate cultures” in Detroit, they have accomplished nothing in their efforts to compete with Japanese manufacturers. The excuse used to be that their plants were so much newer than ours. That is no longer the case as the average American auto assembly plant is almost just as recently built as the average Japanese plant. It’s not the age of the plant that matters anyway. It’s how the cars are built. And the Japanese have embraced new techniques, new technologies that give them a leg up in the competition.

Then it was the excuse that Japanese workers make much less than American unionized workers. That may have been true at one time but today, it is very close and getting closer all the time. The difference today is almost entirely due to health and pension benefits. But instead of losing market share because of this, the Japanese have been steadily increasing their sales numbers.

Face it. Detroit is in a fix of its own making. Shortsighted managers, unions who still believe that benefit packages should reflect 1970’s realities, a stubborn resistance to higher CAFE standards that would allow them to compete with the fuel efficient Japanese cars, and an inability to figure out how to make a decent profit on smaller cars. The fact that the enormous falloff in sales of SUV’s and other big car, high profit models was entirely predictable, the Big Three got caught with their pants down when gas prices got so high, people were paying a third of their weekly paycheck to fill up.

Despite all - failure at every level including executive, manufacturing, marketing, and labor - we are now supposed to rally around the cry “Too Big to Fail!” and hand these incompetents $25 billion (for now - more later, I promise you).

I say no way.

President-elect Obama wants to nationalize the auto industry:

Top advisers to President-elect Barack Obama are helping to draft an auto industry rescue plan that would bring new government oversight, including the possibility of an auto czar who could ensure the money was being used wisely.

Aides said Obama is also open to an oversight board that would perform the same function as one individual. The proposals come as the estimates of the cost to fix Detroit’s three largest automakers continue to mount.

“Certainly he wouldn’t believe in it being a blank check,” said an Obama adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to speak publicly on the topic. “He wants oversight to be making sure the auto companies have figured out how to become viable, ongoing concerns.”

Let’s be clear here. This would not be a “temporary” solution. Government “ensuring the money is spent wisely” sounds an awful lot like being able to approve or veto business decisions. If that’s the case, why shouldn’t the government be able to fire the boobs who are currently in charge and replace them with people they think could do a better job?

The point isn’t how much money they need or how much government control would be involved. The fact is that these companies are as dead as John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company and for similar reasons; an inability to adapt to changing market conditions and create a product that enough people want to buy in order to make the companies profitable. There’s a reason no one buys beaver hats anymore. And its the same reason that no one wants an underpowered, ugly, cramped Chevrolet Aveo.

I feel sorry for the thousands of workers who would lose their jobs if these companies went belly up. But the fault does not lie with the American taxpayer who those representing the workers and executives of failed companies want to saddle with their inadequacies.

We aren’t going to start the fur trading industry again by asking taxpayers to fund a rebirth. Neither should we try and restart the American automotive industry by asking taxpayers to save something that’s already dead.

First, they tried it in Russia. Bread lines, sausage lines, blue jean lines, lines for toilet paper, lines to ask what line to get in so that you could get on a waiting list to stand in another line to get a place of your own and be able to leave the 1 room apartment you were sharing at age 30 with your wife, two kids, mommy and daddy, your no good brother in law, your gramma, and crazy uncle Ivan who liked to re-enact the Battle of Stalingrad at the most inopportune times.

The only things you didn’t have to stand in line for were lard and vodka. This is why they couldn’t make socialism work in Russia; fat, drunk people who were told “If you think you’ve got it bad, you should see how awful it is in the west.”

There were no more surprised people in the history of civilization than the Russian proletariat once satellites began beaming shows like Dallas and Falconcrest through the Iron Curtain. At the time, TASS was still showing film of race riots from the 1960’s and calling it “breaking news.” The big drawback, of course, is that the image that replaced greedy capitalists oppressing workers was that of greedy capitalists playing around on their wives with gorgeous women half their age while trying to cheat their family. A good question could be asked whether it was better to be thought of as Babbitt or J.R. Ewing?

They couldn’t make socialism work in Russia - something in the water probably. Neither could socialism find its legs in Poland, Hungary, and a half dozen other European countries that don’t even exist any more. Shared scarcity does not, it turns out, bring people together in a spirit of socialist brotherhood and comity. In fact, it sets people at each other’s throats, as the battle cry “I will get mine before you get yours and failing that, I will prevent you from enjoying what you get” was heard throughout Mittel Europa.

Making its way eastward, they then tried to impose socialism on a civilization that nearly invented, well, civilization. There are no more practical people on the planet than the Chinese, having gotten that way by outlasting every attempt to govern them effectively over a 3,000 year period. True libertarians, them. Unfortunately, the busybodies of the Chinese nanny state wouldn’t leave the peasants alone who after all, were perfectly happy using an ox to plow their fields and plant their rice by hand rather than do the modernization thing. Some village commissars were surprised to return to farms where they had delivered a shiny new tractor only to discover the peasants having turned the mechanical beast into a distillery.

(What is it about socialism that turns people into raging alcoholics?)

A few years ago, the Chicom thugs gave into the inevitable and decided to go with the flow, acknowledging that the underground capitalist economy was far outperforming the official socialist one which, as usual, was causing the government to rethink their “Five Year Plans” every 6 months or so. The only stipulation the government imposed on would be entrepreneurs was that they pay protection money to the government (both over and under the table).

Even the Chinese People’s Army dove in to the capitalist craze that hit China. They found it efficacious to contribute to certain Democratic presidential candidates in order to get access to technology that could, in a pinch, be used to destroy the very people who were selling the secrets. No doubt the generals who were growing fabulously rich selling stuff to their own government thought that this was a pretty good tradeoff. It’s not everyday you get to make money off your enemy’s foolhardiness.

Western capitalists swarmed the ancient cities with Euro-signs in their eyes. If we thought that a few thousand American and European businessmen bringing ideas like “Free Labor, Free Markets, Free Men” would change a civilization that was inventing block printing when Europeans were still living in dirt hovels, we had another thing coming. The magic of western capitalism and the obscenity of Mao’s socialism did not impress nor did it disturb the rhythms of life that had kept time for several milenia.

The people, having seen it all for 3,000 years shrugged and went back to using ox dung to fertilize their fields and wooden hoes to tend the crops. They’ve learned to use the tractor but last I heard, it still doubles as a still.

One would think that having failed in two of the most populous nations on earth that socialism would have died of natural causes - or been executed for crimes against common sense and humanity. Ah, but you underestimate its adherents. You see, it wasn’t socialism that failed. It was the people who tried to implement it! They are at fault, not the crazy quilt logic, the jaw dropping contradictions, the counterintuitive view of human nature, or the contrived diktats of bureaucrats who think a “market” is some place you go to stand in line for moldy beets.

That is why our friends across the pond in what we used to call western industrialized civilization - now not very western, less industrial, and an open question whether it is still “civilized” in any meaningful sense - decided to dip their toe into the socialist pool and see if they couldn’t make a go of it.

Listening to our own homegrown socialists here talking about how it is over there, you would think that the Europeans had discovered the secret to immortality or at least found the Fountain of Youth so gushy they are about how good the Euros have it. Cradle to grave care, a 36 hour workweek, nearly impossible to get fired, real nice trains, and a list of social services that would make an American’s head swim.

Of course, they also have high suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism, and divorce rates. They don’t have children either because they hate them or think them an impediment to their lifestyle. The vast majority of them live drab, colorless lives with little opportunity to better themselves. And who would want to considering that governments frown on anyone getting too far ahead of their neighbors. They import the colored peoples of the world to do their scut work and then do everything they can to prevent their assimilation by sticking them in immigrant ghettos where hate and resentment against their lovable hosts will almost certainly explode into uncontrollable violence one day.

Other than that - paradise.

The question being asked openly for the first time in my lifetime is can socialism work in America?

Answer: Yes we can!

I say we should ignore what socialism (or the faux variety of the disease that afflicts Europe) has done elsewhere and approach the Bush/Obama socialist takeover of our industries as Americans should - with hope, optimism, a “can-do” attitude, and the desire to make a buck off of it.

I mean, if we can hack a civilization out of a wilderness, defeat the largest army and most powerful military in the world at the time to win our independence, fight a gigantic, continent sized civil war, tame the Spanish, spank the Kaiser, roll over Hitler and Tojo, and make the Soviet Union a memory, we can make socialism work! Yes we can perfect it!

First of all, we have to do something about the inevitable lines that we will be forced to queue up for in order to get any goods or services. Socialism is all about lines, about the orderly distribution of scarcity. Now I don’t know about you but if there is one thing liable to get my dander up it is standing in line - at the grocery store, at the bank, at Madame Crystal’s Pool Hall and Massage Parlor - anywhere.

Why not get the geniuses at Microsoft to work on this problem right away? Put the guys who came up with Vista on it, that would do the trick. Better yet, this sounds more like a marketing challenge to me. We should get in touch with the Coca-Cola Company immediately and find the guys who signed off on the campaign for Coke Zero. Their judgment is exactly what we need to solve this little problem.

You see, it is my contention that by getting utter failures to work on solving our line problem, we can’t go wrong. They are bound to come up with the worst solution imaginable. Hence, by making matters 10 times worse, we realize the full potential of socialism to really screw up our lives.

Next up, planning the economy. For this problem, we must look long and hard for the perfect combination of corruption and ignorance. Congress is too busy so we’ll have to go to the private sector.

We could commute the sentences of those Enron guys. And maybe a few others like the fellows who did such a great job driving Worldcom into the ground. These are the sorts we need to do a really 1st class job of taking the most vibrant, creative, productive economy in the history of the human race and flushing it down the toilet.

The one other area we could perfect that is not necessarily native to socialism but no good socialistic country should be without is the stifling of dissent and the imposition of group-think that would kill independent thought.

Face it, we wouldn’t be very good at this. Americans are just too cranky, too much in love with contrariness, too admiring of the guy who marches to a different drummer that anyone we put in charge of of making this an unquestioning, obedient, robotic thinking society would have their hands full.

As in other nations that have tried this - Soviet Union and China come instantly to mind - it just wouldn’t do to put those who believe in antiquated and outmoded ideas like free markets in jail. They must be shown the error of their ways. They must be given a new vision of the brotherhood of man. They must be led to the idea that forced altruism, insipid do-gooderism, and hectoring moralistic clap trap is the best way to approach life.

They must be beaten over the head early and often in order to show them the error of their ways.

This cannot be done, obviously, in the middle of the street or even in what used to be the privacy of their homes (as you know, it wouldn’t be “their” home anymore, but everybody’s). All that screaming would be bad for socialist morale not to mention dirtying our streets with blood and stuff. Street cleaners are our brothers too and we should only ask them to do what each according to their abilities etc.

I think either Michael Moore or blogger John Avarosis would be good candidates for the top job in our Department of Ideological Reform. Glenn Greenwald would make a good deputy for either man. They all hate conservatives sufficiently that either would be able to adequately carry out the purge of such thought from our national consciousness.

One thing is for sure, we Americans are going to give it our best shot. Once we are resolved to completing a task be it defeating Hitler or perfecting the idiocy that is socialism, I am convinced that we cannot be stopped.

George Bush has made an excellent start and I’m sure Barack Obama is eager to see what he can do to bring about this change that will remake America. What have we got to lose? Let’s get behind our new president and make socialism as synonymous with America as baseball, apple pie, and corrupt Congressmen.

Remember the children…