Right Wing Nut House

This article originally appears at Frum Forum.

In an excellent article in The New Republic, Sean Wilentz takes to task those who wish to resurrect the pernicious doctrine of “nullification” to thumb their nose at the federal government on health care reform.  Unfortunately, Wilentz conflates nullification with the idea of “states’ rights” in general:

Although not currently concerned with racial supremacy, the consequence of their doctrine would uphold an interpretation of the constitutional division of powers that would permit the majority of any state to reinstate racial segregation and inequality up to the point of enslavement, if it so chose.

Is opposition to health care reform at the state level leading to a resurrection of slavery? Really?

That much has been done in the last 100 years to undermine the 10th Amendment is not debatable. That the cause for this was considered just is equally true.

At the same time, in our zeal to improve the lives of American citizens, we have allowed the very concept of federalism to atrophy. Even debating the idea that the 10th Amendment can be redefined so that it can be made relevant in a 21st century industrialized democracy is seen as an exercise in futility.

Clearly, there are many functions of government that do not lend themselves to the concept of federalism. We can’t have 50 different air quality or water quality standards. Nor does the prospect of 50 OSHA’s or MSHA’s, or FDA’s, or any number of federal agencies responsible for our health and safety make any sense.

But is it possible to take a hard look at these agencies and discover a few responsibilities they currently enjoy that might be better performed by states? If it can be done without gutting them, why not try? Shouldn’t states have a lot more to say about how federal lands are used within their boundaries? Those lands are enormously valuable in many respects and yet the states have little say in the leasing and development schemes of the federal government. And it is long past time we take a very hard look at the Department of Education (with a $63 billion budget) and find a way to turn that department into an adjunct to local efforts at teaching our children rather than as a repository for bureaucrats to carve out their petty empires. With educational achievement at historic lows, it is evident that at least some of that money might be better given to states and local school districts to use as they see fit.

The concept of federalism today is a far cry from what the Founders envisioned. But that’s how it should be, and it’s perfectly in keeping with what those men imagined for the future. They may have written the Constitution for a small coastal republic of 7 million citizens, but were prescient enough to give their creation the revolutionary ability to change with a changing country.

Now that we are a continental nation of 300 million – as diverse and vibrant a society that has ever existed -it is time to re-examine and reinvigorate the founding notion that power shared and dispersed among many is the bulwark against which no force can threaten our liberties. Resurrecting the ghosts of the past to discredit this notion should be met with the contempt it deserves.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

When 24’s Jack Bauer first burst into the American consciousness back in 2001, a few short weeks after the attacks on 9/11, it was as if, as the New York Times said at the time, that there had been a “deadly convergence between real life and Hollywood fantasy.” Little did the Times know, nor could any of us have guessed, how 24 would reflect and define that convergence for 8 thrilling seasons, while acting as catalyst for discussing the most controversial issues of the decade.

Fox Network announced on Friday that this season would be the last for action series, which gives us the opportunity to look back and examine 24 and especially, the character who defined the War on Terror for the 8 years the show existed. (Note: The writer’s strike of 2008 forced cancellation of the series for that season.)

Jack Bauer may be the first fictional character in history who has been accused of inciting war crimes. During the shooting of Season 6, a group of real-life interrogators from the FBI, CIA, and the Army paid a visit to the set to make their case that the depiction of torture on 24 was not only unrealistic, but was also inspiring Cadets at West Point, and soldiers in the field to ape Bauer’s methods of extracting information. The professionals pointed out that, in their experience, torture never works and that the “ticking bomb scenario” itself is a fantasy that has never happened and would never occur.

Following that meeting, the casual, constant use of torture by Bauer was cut back, although, much to the chagrin of the Human Rights movement, the series continued to depict torture as being a successful method in extracting vital information.

More importantly perhaps, the issue of torture was discussed not only by inside the beltway types, but Americans everywhere debated whether or not what we were doing in real life with prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was right or wrong. Not since the issue of slavery had so many Americans become intellectually engaged on the practical ramifications of a moral issue.

The phenomenon of Bauer and the show itself has been nothing short of astonishing. Intellectual debates at think tanks have been inspired by Bauer’s tactics. Scholarly papers have examined the social, political, and national security aspects of the show. Law and Humanities classes at prestigious Universities have been taught using 24 as a template. Magazines from The New Yorker to Time have looked at the show from every possible angle, dissecting its relevance and impact on American society.

Not bad for a TV show. But the basis of 24’s success was the revolutionary nature of the “real time” presentation. In recent years, the writers have flubbed a few instances where one could question how a character made it from Point A to Point B in the time allotted on the show. But since every minute onscreen reflected a minute passed in the 24 universe, the tension - expertly crafted by a stable of fine writers - could be ratcheted up and deliciously sustained to the point that when the dam burst (usually with some fantastic twist to the plot), viewer satisfaction was assured.

It didn’t hurt that the show’s production values were among the best on network television. With a budget on average that was nearly twice that of any other dramatic show, 24 wowed its loyal viewers with realistic pyrotechnics, gee-whiz electronics, and dizzying camera work that put the viewer right in the heart of the action. Original producers Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon proved that a weekly action TV series need not skimp when it came to special effects and other high end details that gave 24 the feel of a blockbuster movie at times.

Still, it was always Jack Bauer that 24 fans came back year after year to see. Despite the convoluted plots, threads in the script that petered out and went nowhere, characters that came and went inexplicably, and the the final capitulation to political correctness that we are witnessing this year, it is the character of Jack Bauer who has cemented the personal loyalties of the show’s fans and kept the series near the top of the heap for so many years.

Bauer is the “Perfect Post 9/11 Hero.” In the first few seasons of the show’s incarnation, he possessed exactly the qualities we wanted in a hero who battled terrorism. He was loyal, patriotic, devoted to duty, solicitous of his friends, and a terror to his enemies. But what attracted us most to Bauer was the moral certitude he possessed that allowed him to fight the good fight with the absolute, unbending conviction that he was right. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys, and there was no in between. If it sounds like Bauer echoed the Bush administration warning to the world that if you weren’t with us, you were against us, you would be correct.

There was no hand wringing by Jack when he was confronted with a moral question regarding torture, or other extra-Constitutional measures he found it necessary to use. There were no angst-ridden soliloquies where Bauer went back and forth between doing what was legal and what he knew had to be done to save America. There was Jack, the terrorist, the threat, and that ticking clock and that was it. No ACLU standing off to the side whispering in his ear that he was as bad as the terrorists. No human rights lawyers got in the way - save one memorable, and short lived appearance in Season 6 where the terrorist’s lawyer whined about “rights” only to be summarily tossed out of the Counterterrorism Unit headquarters.

In those early years, Bauer followed Davey Crockett’s motto: “Be always sure you’re right. Then go ahead.” But something began to change in the character the last three seasons - a reflection of real life changes in America regarding the War in Iraq, the War on Terror, and the faith Americans place in their government.

Bauer began to grow more cynical about how higher ups were using him and whether what he was doing was really worth it. The enemies he had been fighting changed as well. From fanatical Muslims to American turncoats who used terror for their own nefarious ends, the change in the American people’s attitude toward the Bush Administration, and the ongoing debate over our methods in fighting international terrorism caused Bauer to rethink his role as super-patriot and the sharp end of the stick for American counterterrorism policy.

One catalyst for this change in Jack occurred when the love of his life, Audrey Raines, was captured by the Chinese and tortured to the point that she became catatonic. While blaming himself for this turn of events, Bauer also blamed those men in high places who had cynically used him to advance their own agendas. “The only thing I have ever done is what you and people like you have asked of me,” Bauer told Audrey’s father, the former Secretary of Defense. This is as telling a statement about who Jack Bauer really is that had ever been uttered on the show.

Indeed, Jack Bauer the fictional character was as much a creation of our own fears, our own hopes as he was created by the American government in the fictional series to fill a need; that of “The Fixer” character that occasionally shows himself in spy fiction. The Fixer is an off the books, jack of all trades intel asset who operates in the shadows and, if caught, is eminently deniable. Half thug, half patriot, The Fixer employed his own methods to get the job done at any cost. His nominal superiors never want to know what he’s doing, just that the job is getting done.

This is what Jack Bauer has become the last few seasons of the show. His agenda has gotten more personal. He has been willing to act as judge, jury, and executioner, especially against those who have harmed him personally by killing his friends. He has made the apprehension of culprits more of a vendetta than a means to bring the perpetrators to justice. He has descended into a dark place where his only release will be in a meaningful death.

I liked the early Jack Bauer immensely more than this later incarnation. But I also recognize that America has changed over the past 9 years and that this new Bauer reflects those changes in attitude. In 2008, we elected a man who, for good or ill, promised to fight the war on terror differently. No longer a war, we now rely on international police forces to carry much of the burden in counterterrorism. Even in hot spots like Pakistan and Yemen, there doesn’t seem to be any room for a Jack Bauer to ride in and kill the bad guys before they have a chance to kill us.

It is a fascinating exercise to watch the evolution of Bauer through the years and note the time capsule that each season represents. That self-assuredness we felt in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 is gone, as is Jack Bauer’s moral certainty. What was once an unshakable faith in the government devolved into suspicion and loathing of the treacherous traitors who used Bauer to advance their own idea of “patriotism.”

There is one feature film of 24 in the works so Jack Bauer will not disappear entirely from the culture when the show ends its series run on May 24. But it seems clear that Jack Bauer’s run as a conservative icon and modern day American mythical hero are over. Will they kill him off in one, spectacular, dramatic, America-saving moment?

Get real. Jack Bauer can’t die because Death has a Jack Bauer complex.

This post originally appears at Frum Forum.

You have to feel a little sorry for liberals today. It’s been so long since they could claim a world-historical figure as their very own, that their gushing encomiums over President Barack Obama’s triumph in passing national health insurance reform have become just a touch too mawkish.

For example, Matthew Yglesias has placed Mr. Obama into the pantheon of liberal lions exactly one year and two months into his presidency:

Now that it’s done, Barack Obama will go down in history as one of America’s finest presidents. It’s always possible of course that, like LBJ, he’ll get involved in some unrelated fiasco that mars his reputation. But fundamentally, he’s reshaped the policy landscape in a way that no progressive politician has done in decades.

Not to be outdone, The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait makes virtually the same point:

Let me offer a ludicrously premature opinion: Barack Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import. We don’t know what will follow in his presidency, and it’s quite possible that some future event–a war, a scandal–will define his presidency. But we do know that he has put his imprint on the structure of American government in a way that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has.

So eager are our liberal friends to anoint the president as the inheritor of Franklin Roosevelt’s mantle that Chait goes the extra mile in homage and writes that the bill is not only good — it’s great!

Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation. Obama and the Democrats managed to bring together most of the stakeholders and every single Senator in their party. The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place.

I’m sure it will come as a surprise to you that this cut-and-paste, deal-laden, haphazardly thrown together, mish-mash of an entitlement bill was “masterfully crafted.” Perhaps Chait means it the same way that a Da-Daist painter “masterfully crafts” a surreal portrait — you don’t have a clue who it is or what it means but it’s expensive and nobody really wants one hanging in their living room.

Pre-sanctifying Obama before the president has even started his second season on the golf course is sort of pathetic. It’s like consecrating a baseball rookie as a Hall of Fame candidate in April when he’s hitting over .300. Let’s revisit the rookie’s stats at the All Star break and tell me then if we should send his uniform to Cooperstown.

Similarly, the real damage Obamacare will do won’t kick in until 2014, when the individual mandate forcing everyone to buy insurance kicks in. That’s when those 10,000 extra IRS agents that are being hired will find something to do with their time besides annoying citizens about their taxes. Our IRS overlords will be on the job, making a list and checking it twice for insurance scofflaws. Beyond making sure you have insurance, these 10,000 extra pairs of eyes will also determine whether or not you have the right kind of coverage that have been dictated by the bureaucrats.

I see the potential for a situation comedy in this, as intimidated citizens are forced to argue with the Revenuers that A, B, and C in their policies puts them in compliance with the law while the infallible Treasury Agents don’t quite see it that way. Hilarity ensues when the poor schmuck gets caught in the wheels of IRS administrative justice and is ground to powder — outlasted by the well meaning, but bumbling bureaucrats. Perhaps we could call it 2 ½ Feds.

Then there’s the deficit. A great deal was made by proponents of the bill that the preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office gave the House bill with reconciliation fixes a passing grade when it came to cost versus savings. The $940 billion price tag over the first ten years of the bill was accompanied by $138 billion in deficit reduction. The fact that the total budget deficit over that same span of time is predicted to be $7.12 trillion wasn’t mentioned by supporters of Obamacare for obvious reasons; the $138 billion reduction in that number is an obscene joke and Congress is, after all, a family show.

To be sure, history is not on the side of Obamacare supporters. Every single health care entitlement has far exceeded budgetary expectations. In the case of Medicare, it is particularly telling.

In 1965, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that the hospital insurance program of Medicare — the federal health care program for the elderly and disabled — would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual cost that year was $67 billion.

In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee said the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $98 billion.

In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid — the joint federal-state health care program for the poor — would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. Actual cost: $17 billion.

Nick Gillespie at Reason.com, quoting from a study done by the Joint Economic Committee,

It seems there is a kind of Murphy’s Law of health care legislation: “If it can cost more than the highest available official estimate, it probably will.”

All of this begs the question; aren’t liberals being a little premature in granting President Obama mythic hero status among presidents? If Obamacare bankrupts us 10 or 15 years down the road, or sooner, will that take the sheen off of his reputation?

Probably not. They’ll just blame it all on Bush.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Dan Riehl, Charlie Martin, and the triumphal return of Jazz Shaw from the Dart Wars to talk about the aftermath of the Healthcare debate and what’s in the future for Obamacare.

The show will air from 7:00 - 9:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

It isn’t necessarily true in historical circles, but the Pacific campaign during World War II has mostly received short shrift from popular culture, as well as popular histories.

Now HBO is going to remedy that shortcoming with a gigantic 10 part miniseries entitled The Pacific. By most reports, it is a winner - a worthy companion piece to the best miniseries in TV history, Band of Brothers. (Sorry Roots fans but as gripping as that miniseries was, it failed on several levels in its portrayal of history.)

While it is a subjective accolade I give to BoB, the sheer ambition of the project made it tops in my book. That, and the extraordinary characters who made up Easy Company, drawn with loving care, and so far above the usual miniseries one dimensional fare that few other projects have come close. Not coincidentally, another HBO series, John Adams, makes a run at BoB for character development. But despite a strict adherence to historical facts, it never rose above a rather parochial and ordinary view of Adams as an American original rather than the world historical figure he was.

The Pacific promises to fill in some very large, very obvious blanks in our cultural understanding of what happened on those battlefields. First and foremost, the Pacific war was a naval war - “A gut bustin’, mother lovin’ naval war,” as Kirk Douglas playing Commander Paul Eddington opined after Pearl Harbor in Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way. The island hopping strategy of McArthur meant that not only ships were required to ferry his forces from hot spot to hot spot, but that American carriers supplied the air power that supported troop landings as well as keeping the supply lines free of Japanese interference.

And Admiral Halsey’s northern Pacific strategy also relied on carriers to get the job done. Ironically, our massive losses at Pearl Harbor forced us to rely on carriers for advancing across the Pacific, despite the fact that until well into 1944, it was still thought by both sides that the decisive naval engagement of the war would occur when the battleships of both sides squared off for one, gigantic Super-Trafalgar, or Jutland. Such never occurred, while our emphasis on sea-air power allowed us to push the Japanese back to their perimeter defenses.

While this was happening at sea, what was occurring on the ground in places like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, and other seemingly insignificant piles of volcanic rock, turned out to be a nightmare every bit as terrifying and bloody as any combat Americans have fought anywhere in the world before or since.

Apparently, The Pacific will not stint on showing this:

Modern war movies don’t hold back on the bloodier aspects of combat, a trend unofficially cemented with Steven Spielberg‘s 1998 epic Saving Private Ryan.

The Pacific continues in that vein without feeling exploitative or cheap. The carnage underscores the constant danger Marines faced as they poured onto battlefields already teeming with enemy soldiers.

Viewers will feel the concussive force of every mortar shell and sniper round, a visceral torrent nearly unmatched in modern war pictures.

And, of course, what can never be truly caught on film, the abject terror of the unsettling Japanese tactic of mounting suicide attacks at night, where desperate fighting became hand to hand and the war telescoped down to American soldiers trying to stop a fanatic from skewering him with a bayonet.

No book tells this story better than William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness, that opens with a frank, brutal, searing recounting of how Manchester killed a Japanese soldier up close and personal. That’s the kind of war it was and it had American fighting men having to make a choice; they could despair over the fact that the Japanese were so willing to sacrifice themselves just to get close enough to kill them. Or, they could adopt an absolutely heartless attitude that allowed them to shoot down Japanese soldiers even if they were surrendering.

This grim job was necessary because, as Ronald Spector points out in Eagle Against the Sun, the Japanese military creed of bushido made surrender not only something that would dishonor the individual soldier, but his family as well. So when all was lost, the Japanese soldier was more than likely to pretend to surrender while killing any American who came close enough. Similar instances of Japanese wounded who waited for an American to get close and see if they were dead before trying to kill their enemy were very common as well. The fact that our boys didn’t wait around to see if a Japanese soldier was really surrendering or really dead means that very few POW’s were taken and even fewer wounded POW’s. If you wanted to stay alive, you killed anything with a Japanese uniform on it.

This was the nature of the war. But there are those who have deliberately - or ignorantly - tried to push the notion that the real reason for our brutality was that we were racists and that the entire war in the Pacific - up to and including Hiroshima - could be explained because we saw the Japanese as less than human.

Tom Hanks in Time Magazine:

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Hanks is by no means the first or only revisionist to ignore Pearl Harbor, and the nature of Pacific warfare, to point to our behavior and cry “racism.”

Here’s James Carroll writing in the Boston Herald:

The Iwo Jima image is sacred precisely because the men lifting up the fallen flag are all but unable to do so. The extremity of their exhaustion, their nearness to defeat, the horrors of what they have been through and of what awaits them are all implied in the painful stretch of limbs, in the rough gear of armored clothing, in the absolute investment each has made in a symbol of something better than himself. Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war. To raise the flag at Iwo Jima was to lift the transcendent symbol out of the total hell that the war had become. Few if any men who survived it came home speaking of virtue.

Historical accuracy note: the famous flag raising pic on Iwo Jima was actually a picture of the raising of a second, much larger flag. The first flag raising was done by a recon patrol who managed to reach the top of Mt. Suribachi and raise a smaller standard. This overheated, hysterical description is a crock.

A “vengeful refusal” to take prisoners? More like a common sense precaution. And what is war anywhere except a “generalized brutality?” The question isn’t so much was racism a factor in the war. One need only examine our detention policy for American citizens of Japanese descent to agree with that statement. But was it the dominant motivation for the savage combat in the Pacific? Ask the Japanese who saw Americans as sub-humans and treated them that way in POW camps and most especially, on the Bataan Death March.

Hanks, Carroll, and their fellow travelers must ignore, forget, or otherwise subsume certain historical facts in order to arrive at their nonsensical notions of racism being a dominant motivation for our Marines and GI’s in the Pacific war. It doesn’t stand up to the facts.

Hopefully, The Pacific will rise above such idiocies and give the participants in that campaign long overdue homage. There simply hasn’t been the kind of attention paid to these warriors as has been given to participants in the European theater. There have been some excellent books on the Pacific War. I mentioned Spector’s excellent tome. And Barbara Tuchman’s Stillwell and the American Experience in China
offers a compelling and cautionary look at that much misunderstood theater. For sheer beauty of prose, Manchester’s book is one of the best. Alexander’s Utmost Savagery: The Three Days at Tarawa might be the best book on any single battle I’ve ever read. And another good memoir by a real hard case - Eugene Sledge - With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa describes what he went through on Okinawa in a way that makes Truman’s use of the atom bomb totally justifiable.

These and a few other popular histories nothwithstanding, there simply is no comparison with the volume of books written about D-Day, or The Bulge, or most other important battles in the European Theater. It could be that there just weren’t the number of troops involved, or the unbalanced coverage in the press at the time contributed to the illusion that what was happening in the Pacific was a “sideshow” to the war being fought against Hitler.

More books, more movies, more TV shows, more plays - the European theater seems to have embedded itself in our national consciousness in a far greater way than what happened in the Pacific. I sincerely hope that The Pacific begins an evening up process that is long overdue.

Here we go again, conservatives blowing something way, way out of proportion that when smart people think about it, doesn’t deserve all this hand wringing and angst-ridden diatribes on the right. When are conservatives ever going to learn that all this talk about the Constitution is just a distraction? What everyone should be looking at is making sure that everyone has their own set of dentures by passing Obamacare.

I’m talking, of course, about the “Slaughter Rule” where Democrats in the House - in what is really a brilliantly conceived and incredibly ballsy move even though Pelosi is gonadless - won’t even vote on the original health care reform bill passed by the senate and instead, simply “deem” the bill as passed. This will allow the president to sign into law a health care reform bill that will then be amended using reconciliation.

Stick in the mud conservatives are screaming foul. They point to this obscure part of the Constitution to make their case:

U.S Constitution, Article I, Section VII, Clause II.

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively…

How quaint. Basing your objections on a 231 year old document is just a little bizarre, don’t you think? How seriously can we take this thing if it doesn’t even mention health care, or global warming, or even amnesty for illegal immigrants?

Oh sure, it’s ok as a sort of guide for government. And there are some really, really neat parts in there, like the First Amendment that says you can’t have any religion anywhere, at any time. And the Fifth Amendment that protects terrorists from incriminating themselves. Those are fine.

But remember, the Constitution is a racist document. It counted slaves as only 3/5 of a person. If that were true, then conservatives would count as about 1/3 of a person. Obviously, if conservatives are going to argue anything based on this document, they are closet Kluxers.

Besides, what’s the big deal about not voting for health care reform? Sure, a lot of people are opposed to it now, but just you wait until all the good stuff that’s in there kicks in. Yeah, it will take a few years but eventually, all you rich people out there - the ones with jobs anyway - will be subsidizing those who, through no fault of their own, didn’t buy insurance when they had the chance. This time, no excuse for you. You will buy insurance or the IRS is going to make sure you pay big time.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why conservatives insist on getting a vote for the original senate bill? This voting thing can be very hard when you’re trying to make history and not enough congressman want to do what our great, great, grandchildren will see as the completion of the welfare state:

A larger question any member of congress reading the op-ed ought to ask himself is “so what?” If reform passes and is signed into law, then immediately Barack Obama’s position in history is secured. When people look back from 2060 on the creation of the American welfare state, they’ll say that FDR, LBJ, and BHO were its main architects, with Roosevelt enshrining the principle of universal social insurance into law and Obama completing the initial promise of the New Deal. Members of congress who helped him do that will have a place in history. Nobody’s going to be very interested in a story like “Mike Ross served a bunch of years in Congress and people were impressed with his ability to win a relatively conservative district; he didn’t achieve very much and one day he wasn’t in Congress anymore.”

Which is just to say that nobody lasts in office forever, no congressional majority lasts forever, and no party controls the White House forever. But the measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved.

This is very smart stuff from Mr. Ygelsias. “Go for it boys - I’m right behind you! Nothing will happen to me if I cheer you on mindlessly while your political career ends up in the toilet. After all, it’s not ME who will get pummeled in the next election.”

Brave Sir Matt with some sound advice for politicians whose “achievement” may end up sending us into sovereign default, but at least we’ll have stuck it to the rich (and the near rich…and the wannabe rich…and those not rich at all but dream of being rich), while creating a health care paradise where waiting for routine procedures won’t be much longer than a year or so, and old folks will be put in their place and denied treatment better given to a more productive member of society, and thus ushering them off to hospice lickety split where they’ll have a cot and three hots until they croak.

Surely conservatives can see the beauty, the efficiency, the fairness of a system like this. Why muck up the works by throwing up a Constitutional smokescreen when this historical bill will make schoolkids in America forever after repeat the name of Barack Obama in the same hushed, reverent tones they use when uttering the name “Eugene Debs?”

It’s a distraction, I say! A distraction! Concentrate on what’s important - the passage of health care reform that may not do much of anything that Democrats are claiming it will do, but by God, it will be historical.

And that’s what’s important. The libs haven’t had much of a chance to make history lately. They miss the delicious feeling they get when they are immortalized through government action. Of course, they’d never dream of actually, you know, creating something that would immortalize them. That’s so bourgeoisie. Better to be immortalized by ramming government run health care down the throats of the American people so that future generations will, in their minds eye, look back in awe - AWE I tell you — at the lengths to which they went to bring them this…this…achievement!

If we’re lucky, those future school kids won’t even have to worry about a racist, sexist, homophobic, document like the Constitution. It will be long gone and we’ll be well rid of it.

Just when you think you’ve seen just about everything in politics, one party or the other bites you in the ass to let you know that authoritarian tactics fit easily and comfortably over the democratic template laid down by the Founders.

It really is seamless at times. Witness the Tom DeLay move to keep the vote on the Medicare drug benefit open for hours (the rules say 15 minutes) while he and Hastert twisted arms, legs, and probably some more private parts of the bodies of GOP members in order to get the votes necessary for passage.

True, a minor glitch in the democratic process - just a little authoritarianism where rules are broken willy nilly for the sake of the momentary goal. There are other examples from the time the GOP ruled the roost in the House and DeLay was a power unto himself. A junior Mussolini that one, complete with the strutting kind of arrogance so beloved of Il Duce.

But nothing in my more than 30 years of observing politics could prepare me for what the Democrats may end up doing in order to pass health care reform:

The twisted scheme by which Democratic leaders plan to bend the rules to ram President Obama’s massive health care legislation through Congress now has a name: the Slaughter Solution.

The Slaughter Solution is a plan by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the Democratic chair of the powerful House Rules Committee and a key ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), to get the health care legislation through the House without an actual vote on the Senate-passed health care bill. You see, Democratic leaders currently lack the votes needed to pass the Senate health care bill through the House. Under Slaughter’s scheme, Democratic leaders will overcome this problem by simply “deeming” the Senate bill passed in the House - without an actual vote by members of the House.

So is this just a partisan take on the matter? They can’t really be serious about passing health care reform by waving a magic gavel, could they?

There is a serious lack of reaction to this story on the left. Perhaps their email list hasn’t been able to reach a consensus on how to respond yet. Maybe they’re as taken aback by the breathtaking, undemocratic nature of the ploy as most of the rest of the planet. John Dickerson of Slate - no flaming liberal but hardly a man of the right - matter of factly lays out the scheme, appearing to applaud its utilitarian nature:

One method for accommodating the situation (first reported in CongressDaily) would allow the House to vote on the Bill B and, after doing so, simply consider the Senate health care bill (Bill A) as passed. There would be no actual up-or-down vote on the underlying bill. This would be the legislative equivalent of the economist’s old trick of assuming a can opener.

Actually, it’s an economist’s old joke, John, not a trick - which I suppose is quite revealing of how seriously you take the idea of the Democrats passing a bill that will affect 300 million Americans and fundamentally alter the relationship between the citizen and the government, and not allow members to express their preference in an up or down vote.

But, of course, that’s the point of this little whiff of Politburo politics; it’s to allow Democratic members to lie through their teeth to their constituents:

This approach would serve two purposes. First, Democrats who think the Senate bill doesn’t sufficiently limit abortion rights would never have to be on record as having voted for it. (Because the Senate abortion language can’t be fixed in Bill B for procedural reasons, some Democratic aides say there is talk about a later bill that would handle these issues.) Second, if the Senate didn’t fulfill its end of the bargain by voting on Bill B—remember, it’s already passed Bill A—then House Democrats would be able to say: I never voted for that crummy Bill A. In fact, I only voted for that nifty Bill B to fix it.

I mentioned this is Politburo politics, which is actually an insult to the commies. At least they have a rigged vote. We don’t even get that on Obamacare.

I think it fairly obvious that Nancy Pelosi does not have the votes, and likely will never get the votes, to pass the senate bill as is. Firedoglake has the latest whip count (based on publicly stated positions) at 191-195 meaning Pelosi needs a near miracle. She needs 24 votes of the remaining 40 “persuadables” to win. And they wouldn’t be talking about “deeming” a bill as passed if she thought there was any hope of achieving 216.

The real sticking point, ironically, is that House Democrats don’t trust their colleagues in the senate to follow through and take them off the hook by ramming House Obamacare amendments through via reconciliation. In fact, the GOP is talking about a weird ploy of their own; they may vote with pro-choice Democrats in the senate to kill any change in the abortion language wanted by Stupak and his gang of 12. If they’re serious, that alone might trigger a revolt among House members who don’t think the senate is serious about reconciliation.

I’m actually excited to see the Democrats try this. What are all those good government liberals going to say? How is the White House going to spin this as a victory for the people when the people’s representatives haven’t even been consulted on the final product?

What are the voters going to think? I don’t think much at all. This is far too arcane a topic to interest anyone but process junkies. By November, the Democrats will have dressed this pig up in a nice prom dress, smeared some lipstick on the porker, and presented it to the American people as a triumph. Many will shrug their shoulders, accept what government is giving them, and move on with their lives.

Voters are going to be a lot more upset with Democrats about jobs and the economy than they will ever get upset with them about how they managed to move this monstrosity through Congress and get it signed into law. But those who might take a dimmer view of this tactic will lament the loss of the fundamental fairness to the minority it represents. We now officially have a tyranny of the majority.

I hope the Democrats don’t complain too much when Republicans pull crap like this on them when they’re back in power.

Greg Sargent touting President Obama’s speech in Philly as he tries to “close the sale” on health care reform:

One striking thing about the speech Obama just gave at the big health care rally in Pennsylvania is how many times he stressed that if reform passes, voters will begin enjoying the benefits this year.

Though he didn’t say it directly, it’s an obvious effort to put some spine in wavering Congressional Dems by urging them to understand that they’ll have something to run on this year if they vote for reform. Here’s the key part:

Within the first year of signing health care reform, thousands of uninsured Americans with preexisting conditions would suddenly be able to purchase health insurance for the very first time in their lives.

This year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions.

This year, they will be banned from dropping your coverage when you get sick. And they will no longer able to arbitrarily and massively hike your premiums. Those practices will end.

If this reform becomes law, all the new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care to customers starting this year. Free checkups so we can catch preventable diseases.

Starting this year, there will be no more lifetime restricive annual limits on the amount of care you can receive from your insurance companies…

It would change fast: Insurance companies would finally be held accountable to the American people

Before examining the reality, let’s look at the rhetoric. Is it true that those with pre-existing conditions will be able to purchase health insurance “for the very first time in their lives?” Only if the condition existed for their entire lives or came upon them in adolescence before they had the ability to buy insurance. In fact, most pre-existing conditions occur after someone enters adulthood which means the idea that they never had the opportunity to purchase insurance is a crock.

And how about that “free” preventive care? And you wonder why we’re running a $1.4 trillion deficit? Of course, there is nothing “free” about nationalizing insurance or ordering insurance companies to offer a specific coverage. The bottom line is that those who don’t use the health care system will be paying for those who do. I predict this crazy idea hitting the auto insurance industry soon, where those with multiple drunk driving convictions demand the same rate of insurance and coverage as a teetotaler.

It would be more accurate to say that the preventive care coverage is mandated as part of the insurance plan that companies must offer. It is hardly “free” since we’re all paying for it. In short, the customer is paying for preventive care whether he wants to or not. We get a lot of this already from state insurance boards who demand insurance companies cover many procedures the overwhelming majority of policy holders will never use.

But what is the reality of all those goodies we are going to get the first year of Obamacare? An interesting development occurs when sick people pay exactly the same amount for insurance as healthy people; “insurance” is no longer insurance and becomes a government entitlement whose management and cost is farmed out to private industry.

For some reason, insurance companies have an aversion to going bankrupt. Don’t ask me why. They must be old fashioned or something to believe that they aren’t in business to get Democrats re-elected but rather to make a little money for their shareholders. Since that won’t be possible even in the first year under Obamacare, look for insurance companies to be screaming for rate increases in everybody’s premiums which will cause enough heart attacks in customers that Obama will be forced to activate the Death Panels 3 years early just to handle drain on health care resources.

This entire debate has taken a topsy-turvy turn. I’ve got history on my side when I say what Matt Welch says here:

The Senate promised more than $300 billion in such cuts. Furthermore, the CBO scores bills in 10-year windows. So the Senate delayed more than 99 percent of the reform package’s spending until 2014, thus allowing the decade of 2010–2019 to clock in under the magic $1 trillion number. Add to all that chicanery the fact that every major health care entitlement expansion in U.S. history has vastly exceeded initial cost projections, and you have ample reasons for why Americans believed, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, that health care reform would exacerbate rather than improve the deficit.

It should be up to the proponents of health care reform to prove that their schemes will not meet the fate of past entitlements - every single one of them - that exceeded spending projections by laughable margins.

And when I say laughable, I mean real loony toons, cross-eyed Mary, monkey wanking, impossibly incorrect margins:

Congress has a long history of dramatically underestimating Medicare costs. “At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion,” wrote Steven Hayward and Erik Peterson in a 1993 Reason article. “The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was supposedly a ‘conservative’ estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.”

Why, I say to reform advocates with as much sincerity and passion as I can muster, should things be different this time? What evidence do you have that history won’t repeat itself and we will be embarking on an insane fiscal course that will lead to the actual ruin of the United States? The burden of proof, as I said is on you. History has taken the measure of other entitlements and shown projections of costs to be ludicrous and silly.

With Democrats poised to prevent their labor allies from paying a tax for their gold plated health care plans, their extraordinary nebulous disingenuousness on “waste and fraud” savings to be found in Medicare, and the non-existent “doc fix” that is supposed to save $500 billion over 10 years - how in God’s name can you stand in front of the American people and make a case that this reform bill won’t add to an already out of sight deficit?

You can’t, which means you are either deluding yourselves or Obama and the Democrats are lying outright.

Welch thinks its the latter:

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

In his speech yesterday, Obama picked a familiar target; insurance companies who he thinks the government should hold accountable to their customers:

President Obama struck a populist tone, setting up the health insurance industry as his main target.

“We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people,” he said.

Citing big rate increases for buyers of individual insurance policies in some states — 40 percent, 60 percent, even 100 percent — Mr. Obama sought to focus attention on provisions in the legislation that he said would protect consumers from the worst excesses of insurers, give people more choice among insurance policies, insure most people who do not have coverage, and put downward pressure on health care costs.

Boiling down his proposal to a few sentences, Mr. Obama asked, “How many people would like a proposal that holds insurance companies more accountable? How many people would like to give Americans the same insurance choices that members of Congress get? And how many would like a proposal that brings down costs for everyone?

Obama missed his calling. He should have been an insurance company Customer Service Rep.

Holding insurance companies more accountable might make people feel better when Obama sticks it to them but how does it improve the situation if it drives them out of the business of insuring all but the wealthy in 5 years? Also, the idea that Joe Blow will get the same health care coverage as a Member of Congress is snicker-worthy. If that were true, Members of Congress would be opting in, not passing laws to exclude themselves from the plan. And only a real Pollyanna - or the village idiot - believes that this reform package will “bring costs down for everyone.”

I would like to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt and say that they are actually kidding themselves about what reform will actually do when the rubber meets the road and the plan is being enacted. But I can’t. They know there are horrendous, unsolvable problems, with this bill. They know their cost cutting provisions are bullsh*t. They know it will substantially increase the deficit. They know it will mean less health care for most of us. They know it will mean less innovation in the pharma, bio tech, and other industries. They know it won’t put any downward pressure on the costs of health care. And they know that this massive thrust to control an unbelievable 1/6 of the economy - never before seen in peacetime - is beyond a riverboat gamble that it will work and enters the realm of a wing and a prayer.

They can’t actually believe what they are saying about it, can they? Of course not.

I first became aware of blogger Al Weisel (AKA “Jon Swift”) when I started my “Carnival of the Clueless” linkfest back in 2005. Al submitted a post each week almost from the beginning.

I have to admit to being had by the Jon Swift character. I never read his submissions closely, scanning them for the essence of what he was writing about, and thus was totally unaware for a couple of months that he was skewering conservatives. It wasn’t until I read on some other blog that he was a satirist that I actually began to read what he wrote with that in mind.

I don’t necessarily feel bad or stupid about it. I apparently wasn’t the only conservative unable to divine the author’s intent. In truth, what Al and others on the left sometimes see as right wing nonsense is occasionally anything but. However, his unerring eye for absurdities on the right, and a pitch perfect ear that regurgitated conservative talking points to make them sound ridiculous, placed him in a class all his own as a satirist.

Al Weisel died on February 27. 2010. The tragedy of his death at age 46 was compounded by the circumstances; he suffered “2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis,” according to his mother who posted the news on his long defunct blog. And he was stricken on the way to his father’s funeral in West Virginia.

Good satire needs to be subtle enough to sound plausible while giving broad hints that lets the reader in on the fun. It is a tightrope few are creative enough, disciplined enough, and talented enough to walk. Al managed it with apparent ease. At all times, he maintained a sincerity so believable, you occasionally did double takes on what he wrote to make sure he was poking fun at you.

I was an occasional target of his saucy barbs, to which I responded with my usual good humor. The fact that Al was amenable to correcting some of the stuff I complained about always impressed me.

Eventually, we struck up a sort of odd email relationship. Whenever I was a subject of one of his satirical lances, he would email me - usually including a pithy comment. I would banter back in kind (although with less joie de vivre and not half as much talent). I was pleased that he invited me to participate in his “Best Blogs of 2007″ roundup. Not too many conservatives could say that.

Eventually, he mostly stopped linking because we were usually on the same wavelength when it came to criticizing conservative lunacy; me screaming about it and he parodying it. I can’t say I missed being the target of his razor sharp wit and poison pen. But he was a joy to read if only to marvel at the elegance and clarity of his writing.

As with many such email relationships over the years, we fell out of touch. The news of his passing has opened the floodgates to memories from my early days of blogging and has helped me recall how every day seemed a challenge to be joyfully faced.

Can’t say that anymore. Age and burnout eventually take their toll on a blogger’s constitution. Al doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. And I have no doubt that he’s already skewered St. Peter in The Heavenly Times for something he said when Al talked his way past him and through the pearly gates.

UPDATE

Ed Morrissey has an old Blog Talk Radio show of his that featured me on the first half hour and Jon Swift the last half hour.

Ten billion dollars. Ten lousy billion dollars held up by Jim Bunning and Washington explodes in tears, hand wringing, and vituperative finger pointing at the retiring senator, the author of all this pain. (Evidently, Bunning did a little finger pointing of his own, but it was the middle digit and was directed at an ABC News producer - not necessarily a bad target but I question the timing.)

Welcome to the future. This is how it will be when even minimal, nonsensical, irrelevant, and paltry cuts in federal spending are attempted. It can be argued - and I am happy to do so - that Bunning chose the wrong time, the wrong place, and the wrong bill to fight for fiscal sanity.

But ten lousy, fricking, billion dollars engendering an explosion of hate and angst directed toward Bunning? What in God’s name is wrong with this country?

By the reaction, you would think that Bunning was trying to throw poor people out into the street, force grandma and grandpa to eat Meow Mix, strip soldiers naked and send them into battle, while singlehandedly increasing his carbon footprint to the point that the ocean drowns Los Angeles in a wave of melting arctic ice due to global warming.

The reality is, that what Bunning is asking is impossible; that the Congress find $10 billion dollars to cut at the same time they want to spend $10 billion on all these worthy, and necessary programs.

That’s $10 billion out of a budget of $3.6 trillion that the Congress can’t find. Are you getting the sense that Washington has turned into some bad Dadaist dream - a surreal nightmare with rabbits in top hats, chameleons sitting on park benches that change colors in rapid succession, while toothless hags wander among the ruins cackling uncontrollably? (That’s MY surreal nightmare, thank you. Butt out.)

Harry Reid farts and the EPA spends $10 billion on air purification. Nancy Pelosi sneezes and NIH gets a $10 billion grant to study allergic reactions by west coast society matrons. Max Blumenthal picks his nose and Democrats spend $10 billion to memorialize it.

Washington spends $10 billion - and ten times ten billion - without breaking a sweat. The spend $10 billion on their lunch breaks.

“But it’s an emergency!” scream the Democrats and liberals. Fine. If you don’t think a trillion dollar deficit is an “emergency” get the hell out town. When are we going to have the same zeal to cut spending as we do in increasing it? Are you trying to tell me that a couple of committee chairmen from the House and Senate couldn’t sit down for an hour and come up with $10 billion to cut? Are we that far gone where three trillion plus in federal spending has generated such powerful lobbies that Congress fears for its political life if they vote to cut less than 0.003% of the budget? What is going to happen when we are forced to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in order to deal with the deficit crisis?

Emergency? Absolutely. Let’s treat it like one. If you’re so all fired eager to spend $10 billion then by God, you should be equally glad to cut the same amount. We’ve reached the point in Washington where cutting a measly $10 billion in order to pay for necessary expenditures causes a reaction more in keeping with a threat to the stability of the republic rather than a simple exercise in minimal - minimal fiscal discipline.

Robert Samuelson presciently describes the mindset in Washington:

There is a make-believe quality to modern American politics: People — and this applies across the political spectrum — say things that are stupid, misleading or unattainable and think (or pretend) that these very same things are desirable, candid and realistic. A disconnect between the language of politics and the nation’s actual problems is growing. The politics of the budget offer a splendid example.

On the right, we have conservatives clamoring for tax cuts when, as a practical matter, today’s massive budget deficits preclude permanent new tax cuts. With present policies and a decent economic recovery, the federal government could easily spend $12 trillion more than it collects in taxes from 2009 to 2020, reckons the Congressional Budget Office. So before reducing taxes, the tax-cut advocates need to identify hundreds of billions of annual spending reductions — or accept huge and hazardous annual deficits. Naturally, a comprehensive list of spending cuts is nowhere in sight.

On the left, President Obama and Democrats have spent the past year arguing that, despite the government’s massive deficits and overspending, they can responsibly propose even more spending. Future deficits are to be ignored (present deficits, to be sure, partially reflect the economic slump). The proposal is “responsible” because it’s “paid for” through new taxes and spending cuts. Even if these financing sources were completely believable (they aren’t), the logic is that the government can undertake new spending before dealing with the consequences of old spending. Of course, most households and businesses can’t do this.

Politicians can, because it’s all make-believe. They pretend to deal with budget deficits when they aren’t.

Certainly part of this “make-believe” is denial. Another aspect of fantasyland on the budget is an adherence to the old procrastinator’s maxim, updated to reflect reality in Washington; “Never cut today what someone else will be forced to cut tomorrow.”

Finally, simple politics is at play. It is more popular to spend money than to cut it out of the budget, more popular to cut taxes than to raise them. I mentioned the lobbies that have sprung up to protect their share of the $3.6 trillion budget. Every program, every proposed purchase that is cut affects real people. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not just the poor who benefits from federal spending. It’s the rich, the super rich, the middle class, and everybody in between and above and below. The government has burrowed so far into our lives in the last half century that removing it will be literally like operating without anesthetic.

America has been on a binge since the end of World War II and purging what we’ve gorged on will be worse than any emetic on the market. The problem has been that we - and through us, our elected representatives - have refused to make choices regarding what we want our government to do for us. Some need it to do more than others. Some desire it to do more than most. A few want it to do more than can be accepted in a democratic republic and maintain individual liberty.

Because we refuse to make choices - except that we don’t want to pay for whatever Washington does for us - we are staring upwards at a mountain of debt that will bury us sooner rather than later. And into this charged atmosphere comes retiring Jim Bunning like a bull in a china shop trying to bend the Congress to his will. He has made his point. It is time to relent.

As I said, wrong war, wrong time, wrong battlefield. But Bunning’s piquancy should be a cautionary tale. Samuelson again:

The common denominator is a triumph of electioneering over governing. Every campaign is an exercise in make-believe. All the good ideas and good people lie on one side. All the “special interests,” barbarians and dangerous ideas lie on the other. There’s no room for the real world’s messy ambiguities, discomforting contradictions and unpopular choices. But to govern successfully, leaders must confront precisely those ambiguities, contradictions and choices.

The make-believe of campaigns increasingly shapes the process of governing. Whether this reflects cable TV and the Internet — which reward the harsh hostility of extreme partisanship — or the precarious balance between the two parties or something else is hard to say. But the disconnect between policy and the real world is harmful. Proposals tend to be constructed more for their public relations effects than for their capacity to solve actual problems.

The result is a paradox. This electioneering style of governing strives to bolster politicians’ popularity. But it does the opposite. Because partisan rhetoric creates exaggerated expectations of what government can do, people across the ideological spectrum are routinely disillusioned. Because actual problems fester — and people see that — public trust of political leaders erodes.

When our chickens come home to roost, and the unsustainable debt and deficit has had its way with our economy, our budget, and our way of life, two partisans will be seen standing in the rubble tossing bricks at each other, screaming vile epithets back and forth, blaming each other for the collapse. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be sitting in the smoking ruins of a once dynamic, liberty loving country wondering pitifully what the hell happened.