Right Wing Nut House

My latest is up at FrontPage.com and its about what Micah Zenko at Foreign Policy.com, placing the major problem with our Libya intervention directly on the horns of the dilemma, writes “[E]veryone who supports this maximalist objective [regime change] has approved only minimalist tactics.”

A sample:

In fact, the only way to “protect civilians” in Libya will be to create a physical buffer between Gaddafi’s army and innocent civilians who may be targeted in any post-civil war crackdown. No-fly zones and bombing alone won’t be effective against the kind of brutality already shown by the Libyan leader, as his forces have moved back into towns and cities that were once occupied by the rebels.

Strategy Page reports that, as the army recaptures these areas, foreign mercenaries move in and begin a systematic cleansing of opposition to the regime. It is unknown how many Libyans have already been killed, but the promise from Gaddafi to “show no mercy” to residents in Benghazi who oppose him gives us a taste of what would be in store for the Libyan people unless the dictator is dethroned.

Zenko argues that the UN strategy is “playing directly into Gaddafi’s hands” because the Libyan dictator doesn’t need his air force to defeat the rebels in Benghazi and he needn’t worry about a UN-led ground force moving in and assisting the opposition. Early reports suggest that the coalition has had some success in halting the offensive of Gaddafi-loyalists on Benghazi, and the rebels have resumed an advance on a key junction 60 miles from the unofficial rebel capital.

But trouble is brewing within the rickety coalition of Western nations and Arab governments. Amr Moussa, former chairman of the Arab League, issued a statement decrying the deaths of civilians as a result of the bombing, saying, “What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians.” He has called for a meeting of the Arab League on Monday to discuss the matter.

The administration is apparently hanging its hopes on the idea that Gaddafi’s inner circle will become so terrified of what the UN will do to them that they will take it upon themselves to overthrow the dictator and surrender.

On what planet this notion was hatched, I have no idea but it was nowhere near our solar system.

Why should they take the chance of certain death if they fail when there is no chance that any UN troops will enter the country to depose the regime? Eventually, Obama is going to have to go it alone with France and Great Britain holding our horse as we threaten ground action. Same thing happened in Kosovo. There will be no UN resolution authorizing ground troops, and the Arabs will issue their own condemnation of any unilateral western action.  Obama will be faced with the stark choice of leaving Gaddafi in power to slaughter his own people (there’s no way any UN buffer force can protect the Libyan people), or going in and taking him out without international approval.

Will Obama risk the political fallout of failure? With an election year coming up, not a chance.

My latest at FrontPage.com is up and it’s about the UN action taken yesterday authorizing military action against Gaddafi.

A sample:

At a contentious G-8 meeting on Monday in Paris, Clinton was reduced to a sideline observer as diplomats tried to hash out a course of action on Libya. Repeated urgings from participants for a stronger U.S. response in the near term was met with silence from the U.S. Secretary of State. One diplomat told Foreign Policy Magazine, “Frankly we are just completely puzzled,” the diplomat said. “We are wondering if this is a priority for the United States.” Later, in a private meeting with President Sarkozy, Mrs. Clinton could only say repeatedly that “there are difficulties,” when queried about a stronger U.S. response. It is unclear whether she was referring to difficulties caused by Russia at the UN or difficulties at the White House with getting Obama to make a decision.

Indeed, a Clinton “insider” told Joshua Hersh of The Daily that Mrs. Clinton was “fed up” with “a president who couldn’t make up his mind,” and was looking for a way out. Clinton told Wolf Blitzer that she had no desire to serve in a second Obama administration, nor did she express interest in running for president again. The source described to Hersh the Obama foreign policy shop, saying, “It’s amateur night,” and that Clinton had grown tired of the administration’s waffling. She had opened the State Department to the former staff at the Libyan embassy, giving them an office and worked hard to get the Arab League to back the no-fly zone.

And yet, by Wednesday afternoon, the administration had completely abandoned its previous somnolent stance on Libya, and came out strongly at the United Nations for a no-fly zone and what is being referred to as a “no-drive zone” to prevent Gaddafi’s tanks and armored personnel carriers from attacking the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. Both actions will involve air strikes. And given the nature of the battle zone, only precision weapons and stealth technology will be effective against Gaddafi’s forces while sparing the civilian population as much as possible. That means that the burden for any military action will necessarily fall on America.

The obvious question is, what had happened in the 48 hours between the G-8 meeting on Monday and the administration’s flip-flop on Wednesday?

The answer is a massive counterattack by pro-Gaddafi forces over the past 10 days that now threatens the rebels’ hold on their unofficial capital city of Benghaizi.

Read the whole thing.

Reading commentary from liberals and Muslim groups like CAIR on the King hearings regarding the radicalization of Muslims in America, one is shocked by the over the top, exaggerated, hysterical rhetoric being used to describe it.

It’s “McCarthyism.” It’s “Islamophobia.” It’s Hitlerian, bigoted, racist - it’s every hand wringing, frothing at the mouth adjective you care to use to describe an effort to discover why young Muslim American men have traveled to Pakistan or other countries to receive terrorist training from al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups — and why some of them have turned to violent jihad.

Counter arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny, as I point out in my latest article at FrontPage.com:

In fact, the list of radicalized, home-grown terrorists is a long one. The question isn’t why we are looking at the problem, but why anyone in their right mind would oppose the effort in the first place?

The attacks on Rep. King are as vicious as they are unfair. The New York Times, in an editorial dripping with self-righteousness, blatantly calls him a bigot. Says the Times: ”His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.”

In fact, the Times won’t even grant King the benefit of the doubt regarding any radicalization of Muslims in America. It editorializes, “Mr. King, a Republican whose district is centered in Nassau County on Long Island, says the hearings will examine the supposed radicalization of American Muslims.”

The “supposed” radicalization of American Muslims? This is the CAIR position lock, stock, and barrel. The unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial promote the idea that Americans mistake extremists for devout Muslims and that preaching jihad against the West doesn’t necessarily mean that violence is being promoted. Any effort to say otherwise is met with cries of “Islamophobia” or “racism.”

In an article in the New York Daily News on February 28, CAIR accused King of all sorts of vile offenses, including “hold[ing] hearings on the alleged ‘radicalization’ of American Muslims” and lying about the lack of cooperation between the Muslim community and law enforcement when it comes to terrorism investigations.

Despite CAIR’s caterwauling, police and federal agents confirm King’s assertion. A New York Daily News article quoted local and federal law enforcement officials declaring that King was right about the lack of cooperation from Muslims in terror investigations, although they also point to similar attitudes toward tipping police from other ethnic communities. The point being, CAIR is wrong and they know it. Their goal is not to improve communication between Muslims and the FBI, but rather to stoke the flames of distrust so that their people see a greater need for a “Muslim civil rights group” to protect them from the police and the Feds.

What marks the rhetoric of the left as they seek to bury King (who has done himself no favors by playing fast and loose with some of the facts), is the blizzard of straw men they set up portraying King in the most unflattering ways, and then heroically knocking them down, cheering themselves all the way.

One day, I’d like to have an argument with a lefty where Eugene McCarthy and Adolf Hitler don’t make an appearance.

Another Tatler post for you, this time on the paralyzing thought that the Arab revolution is about to break out in Saudi Arabia:

I posted this at PJ Tatler:

Even the left is wondering about the president’s Libyan response. From Leon Wieseltier writing at TNR:

“This violence must stop.” So President Obama declared the other day about the depravity in Tripoli. This “must” is a strange mixture of stridency and passivity. It is the deontic locution familiar from the editorial pages of newspapers, where people who have no power to change the course of events demand that events change their course. This “must” denotes an order, or a permission, or an obligation, or a wish, or a will. It does not denote a plan. It includes no implication, no expectation, of action. It is the rhetoric of futility: this infection must stop, this blizzard must stop, this madness must stop. But this infection, this blizzard, this madness, like this violence, will not stop, because its logic is to grow. It will stop only if it is stopped. Must the murder of his own people by this madman stop, Mr. President? Then stop it.

Nothing is ever as easy as it looks, and one can appreciate — if not agree — with the president’s dilemma. He was late to the condemnation chorus, largely (we are told) out of fear of what the Libyan madman might do to American citizens. The hostage crisis that paralyzed Jimmy Carter and the United States for more than a year is never far from any president’s mind in situations where there is a breakdown in civilization. The argument has been advanced that the president acted prudently by waiting until almost all Americans were clear of Libyan territory before issuing a strong statement condemning the bloodletting. This is correct — as far as it goes. Other western countries had citizens at risk but that didn’t prevent their governments from laying into the Libyan dictator for his shocking behavior.

Wieseltier wonders why the president is reluctant to use our power in this situation as well as other crisis of his presidency:

Why is Obama so disinclined to use the power at his disposal? His diffidence about humanitarian emergencies is one of the most mystifying features of his presidency, and one of its salient characteristics. These crises—in Tehran two years ago, in Cairo last month, in Tripoli now—produce in him a lame sort of lawyerliness. He lists the relevant rights and principles and then turns to procedural questions, like those consultations. The official alibi for Obama’s patience with Qaddafi’s atrocity is his concern for the Americans who are still stranded within Qaddafi’s reach; I was amused to learn from a friend that the spin out of the White House includes the suggestion that Obama’s restraint is actually the wisdom of the hostage negotiator. But Obama’s statement about Libya suggests another explanation for his slow pace. This was its climax: “So let me be clear. The change that is taking place across the region is being driven by the people of the region. This change doesn’t represent the work of the United States or any foreign power. It represents the aspirations of people who are seeking a better life.”

They are fighting authoritarianism, but he is fighting imperialism. Who in their right mind believes that this change does represent the work of the United States or any foreign power? To be sure, there are conspiracy theorists in the region who are not in their right mind, and will hold such an anti-American view; but this anti-Americanism is not an empirical matter. They will hate us whatever we do.

Lara Logan probably agrees.

There are two possible explanations for the president’s hesitancy; the first is that he does not believe that the application of American power is a positive good in most cases and refrains from intervening because it is against his principles. The second is that he can’t make up his mind.

A good case can be made for both reasons.

I think the key is Wieseltier’s use of the term “Lawerly” to describe Obama’s thinking; logical, well ordered, systematic, even reasonable. This serves the president well when making a decision regarding domestic policy.

But this approach is an unmitigated disaster in a crisis. The president seems content to draw out the decision making process in a foreign crisis when events are moving so quickly that he always seems to be behind the curve. JFK believed that if you are constantly reacting to events in a crisis, you have already lost. Anticipating and making quick decisions allows a president to get on top of events which gives him a better shot at controlling them.

Obama seems incapable or unwilling to go that route. That’s why the body count continues to mount in Libya while the president tries to decide how to stop it.

There are many on the right who make the argument that clowns like Glenn Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and their ilk are, if not entertaining and usually right about Obama and the liberals, basically harmless. “No one believes they are ‘leaders” of the conservative movement,” goes part of the argument. The left wants to choose our leaders for us and define them while the MSM takes every nutty thing they say out of context. Besides, they “tell it like it is” about Obama — something the gutless GOP refuses to do.

There’s more along these lines but the gist is simple; these Cotton Candy Conservatives “tell the truth” about Obama and the liberals which is why the left is frantic to portray them as unbalanced lunatics, unhinged from objective reality, and dangerous to boot. If they weren’t effective, the left wouldn’t care about them.

As is common with the temper of the times, liberals do indeed exaggerate some of what these nincompoops utter on a daily basis. But to be honest, it’s a target rich environment. I’ve tried this myself so I know it can be done: I challenge anyone (with a reasonable hold on the real world) to click on Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Glenn Beck, Randy Savage, or a half dozen other talk show hosts anywhere in the middle of their programs - it doesn’t matter - and not be blown away by the rank stupidity, the exaggeration, the hyperbole, the laughable idiocy of what they are talking about.
These people couldn’t find reality if it were stapled to their ass.

They are so far removed from reasonable, logical analysis that it begs the question: If Obama and the liberals are as bad, as unholy, as evil as they say, what are they doing sitting in a sound studio spouting about it? If the United States of America is truly in as much danger as Beck and his buds tell us every day, why not “water the tree of liberty” with a little blood? Where’s the revolution, guys? And you call yourselves “patriots?” Your nation is slipping into socialism and all you can do is rant about it?

Get off you fat butt Rush, pick up a gun, and help save us from this fate! C’mon, Glenn! You gathered a couple of hundred thousand citizens to engage in a little spiritual renewal. Why not send out a call for a real march on Washington - armed to the teeth and ready for bear.

“Don’t retreat, reload” indeed. What a load of crap. It appears you would much rather perform the latter rather than the former. Those Founders you talk about incessantly “pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to give us a nation of liberty. What have you pledged except an increase in ad rates for your programs due to the phenomenal success you have in scaring the crap out of the bullet-headed cretins who listen every day to your unbalanced rants?

I’m calling you out for your cowardice. If things are truly as bad as you all say — if we are all doomed to a socialist/Marxist hell with government putting their foot on our necks, snatching our freedom from us, what in the name of our sainted ancestors are you doing sitting on the sidelines? The colonies went to war against the most powerful army and navy the world had seen to that point with a lot less provocation than you screech at your listeners every day, and the best you can do is ask people to get involved in a tea party?

If Obama is truly “trying to destroy America” you’re just going to sit there and do nothing while he does it? If you don’t have the stones to fight, why not use your celebrity and notoriety to call for revolution?

This is the exact same argument I used when loony lefties were screaming about “Bush the dictator.” If you truly believed that Bush was out to “shred the constitution,” what kind of American are you that you’d sit passively and do nothing to prevent it? The same over the top divorced from reality rhetoric, hyperbole, exaggerated warnings of danger, was coming from the left during the 8 years of the Bush administration that we now see transferred to the right with only changes in the principle’s names to differentiate this idiocy from what transpired previously.

More importantly, what are the real world consequences of this flight from objective reality? We get chilling crap like this:

A constituent at a town hall for Georgia Rep. Paul Broun drew laughter on Tuesday when asked, “Who is going to shoot Obama?” and the Republican didn’t come anywhere near condemning the question in his response.

“The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president,” Broun said, according to the Athens Banner-Herald. “We’re going to have an election next year. Hopefully, we’ll elect somebody that’s going to be a conservative, limited-government president … who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.”

The congressmen is also a couple of shakes short of a finished martini:

Last month, Broun live-tweeted Obama’s State of the Union address and drew criticism for one in particular. “Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution,” he wrote. “You believe in socialism.”

On the day after the speech, Broun told CBS News, “I stick by that tweet.”

“Everything he does is bigger government, more central control from Washington, D.C. That’s not what our founding fathers envisioned the government to be,” he said. “Mr. Obama believes in a big central government, where the federal government controls everything in our lives. That’s socialism. And so I stick by that tweet.”

You go ahead and “stick by that tweet,” Mr. Broun. It is a nice segue into explaining the danger that Beck et.al. represent to the republic generally, and conservatism particularly.

The nitwit who asked who was going to shoot Obama is only carrying the message being imparted by the Cotton Candy Conservatives to its logical extreme; things are so bad with the people in power that we must kill them or we are lost. It’s true that none of the talk show hosts or conservative celebrities have advocated committing acts of violence directly. They don’t have to. By painting such a bleak, hopeless, frightening picture of the near future under Obama and the Democrats, their listeners are programmed to feel helpless and small. The psychological impact is predictable. When the actions of Obama and the liberals are placed in such apocalyptic terms, the extreme solution begins to sound eminently practical and reasonable. Why not kill the bastard? If it will save America, that’s a small price to pay.

Peter Wehner on Beck specifically, but what he writes could apply to any of them:

It’s hard to tell how much of what Beck says is sincere and how much is for show. Whatever the case, and even taking into account the entire MSNBC lineup, Glenn Beck has become the most disturbing personality on cable television. One cannot watch him for any length of time without being struck by his affinity for conspiracies and for portraying himself as the great decoder of events. Political movements are not just wrong; they are infiltrated by a web of malevolent forces. Others see the shadows on the wall; Beck alone sees the men casting them. The danger when one paints the world in such conspiratorial terms is that it devalues the rational side of politics. It encourages a cast of mind that looks to expose enemies rather than to engage in arguments. Few things, after all, are as they appear.

Beyond that, of course, is the sense of impending doom, of the coming Apocalypse, of our world being on the edge of calamity. If taken seriously, this has the effect of creating fear, hopelessness, and feelings of helplessness.

It’s not the Cotton Candy Conservative’s “eliminationist rhetoric,” or goo-goo brained conspiracy mongering that’s a threat. It’s that people take their flights of fancy seriously enough that the fantastical can appear real; that what strikes normal people as balderdash is taken to heart by millions and millions of otherwise sane individuals.

That fellow who wondered who would shoot Obama is probably a nice guy, someone you’d never suspect of harboring such thoughts if you bumped into him at a party or other social situation. It’s that his view of objective reality has been so warped by the Becks of the world that they are willing to believe almost anything bad about anybody he is told to hate.

Asking a majority of conservatives to marginalize or denounce these purveyors of faux nightmares is futile. For many, it is a question of looking at the results of Obama’s policies and asking the simple minded question, “What else could it be but that he wants to destroy the country?” In other words, it’s not Obama’s wrongheaded policies that are the problem, but rather his obvious evil intent to inflict the results of those policies on the rest of us. From there, it’s a short distance to believing that the deliberate destruction of our economy and country have a dark and evil purpose; the president is a Marxist, or socialist, or a Mooooslim, and the horrible results we see of his policies are part of a nefarious plan to subjugate all of us.

For others, however, Beck and his cohorts cannot be denounced because they further careers, rouse the right to give money, volunteer for campaigns, and most importantly, vote. That ’s why so many GOP congressmen and senators refuse to say the Birthers are a bunch of loons, or that Limbaugh is a blowhard. The Cotton Candy Conservatives are just too valuable to the establishment to push too far away.

I don’t know what can be done. But I know that in perilous times, it doesn’t help conservatism to have such high profile fantasists purporting to give a conservative take on the world around them - especially when what they are promoting is a world view at odds with reality.

My latest offering is up at FrontPage.com and in it, I examine the incredible support being shown for Qaddafi by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and the relative silence of other Latin American leftists about the slaughter going on in Libya.

A sample:

The bloody horror being visited on his own country by Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi keeps getting more and more surreal as the days pass and the body count mounts. The dictator’s actions in so brutally cracking down on challenges to his 41-year rule have drawn the condemnation of almost the entire planet. Even President Obama finally bestirred himself to criticize the massacre of protesters. But there are those who just can’t bring themselves to side with unarmed demonstrators being mowed down by helicopter gunships and bombed into oblivion by modern jet fighters. While the rest of the civilized world are gagging at Qaddafi’s bloodlust, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega telephoned the Libyan leader to “express his solidarity” as this Washington Post article states.

The reason for the calls? Ortega says that Qadaffi, ‘”is again waging a great battle’ to defend the unity of his nation” and that ‘”it’s at difficult times that loyalty and resolve are put to the test.”‘ Ortega shouldn’t really worry about Qaddafi’s “resolve.” The despot’s thugs and mercenaries are demonstrating that quality every day when they break into homes armed with swords and hammers, hacking and bludgeoning people to death. And how much of a “battle” can it be if Qaddafi’s air force is bombing civilians in the streets? Ortega is unconcerned; he blames the Libyan people getting shot down in cold blood for their own predicament, saying “There is looting of businesses now, there is destruction. That is terrible.”

One can only marvel at Ortega’s train of logic that shows concern for looted businesses and destruction - caused at least partly by Libya’s own air force - but not for women and children jumping off of bridges to avoid African mercenaries who are massacring everyone in sight.

Ortega is not the only leftist Latin leader who has expressed, if not solidarity, then at least understanding of Qaddafi’s actions. The mummified Fidel Castro is taking a “wait and see” attitude toward events in Libya. In a column published Tuesday, Castro wrote, “You can agree or not with Gadhafi. The world has been invaded by all sorts of news … We have to wait the necessary time to know with rigor how much is fact or lie.”

Good advice from the master of propaganda and deceit. It appears that Castro is perfectly willing to wait and see if reports of mercenaries from Chad and Nigeria roaming the streets of Benghazi shooting unarmed people in the head are true or not. Evidently, video evidence is just not good enough.

Why is it leftist dictators and not right wing strongmen who sympathize outright or stay silent otherwise in the face of such extraordinary bloodletting? In the radical Marxist universe that these thugs live in, there is no moral framework of right and wrong, only what works. In that sense, they can dismiss 10,000 Libyans dying as long as the greater good is served by keeping Qaddafi in power.

Something a little different today. My latest is up at PJ Media and it’s pretty much of a full-throated rant against the Chicago Machine and its pretensions to democratic forms.

A sample:

I wouldn’t actually call it an “election.” That would suggest there was more than one side who would benefit by a victory.

The truth, as it usually is, was a little more prosaic: the city of Chicago chose another politician to head up the corrupt Machine that has dominated politics in the Windy City for nearly 80 years. Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel became the city’s 46th mayor and first Jewish leader. He succeeds Richard M. Daley who, together with his father Richard J. Daley, ruled the city, the county of Cook, and the state of Illinois for all but 14 of the last 55 years.

The Machine is also known as the “regular Democratic Party.” There is nothing “regular” about it. It is an obscene blight on the idea of representative government and republican principles. The 95% Democratic vote cast last night are the kind of numbers Soviet leaders used to get in their “elections.” Hugo Chavez doesn’t do as well in his rigged contests.

The fact of the matter is, Chicago is held in thrall to a one-party dictatorship as firmly ensconced in power as any banana republic dictator. The enforcement mechanism is not an army or secret police (although the Machine has been known to play rough on occasion), but rather a network of ward bosses, corrupt businessmen, the odd mobster, and those who owe their livelihood to the party in power. The uniting expedient behind the Machine is money — taxpayers’ money — that is fleeced in many ways, both old-fashioned and novel.

The current Machine replaced the fractured ethnic amalgam of rancorous factions from the 1920s that was not only corrupt, but under the thumb of brutal, murdering gangsters. At least the new Machine had the decency to keep the gangsters off of the city payroll — most of the time — while assigning them a lesser role in the city’s hierarchy. Today, “the Organization,” as the mob is called, stays quietly in the background, sticking their fingers in several legitimate pies while generally refraining from carrying out their wet work inside the city limits. Today, most Chicago gangsters die in their beds or in prison.

Once Emanuel has his hands on the levers of Machine power, he is, in effect and for all practical purposes, Mayor for Life. The Machine may not have quite the influence it once had in that the mayor will not be able to crack his whip and have 13 subservient congressmen doing the bidding of a Democratic president as Daley the Elder could claim. But when it comes to elections — local, state, or national — the Machine is supreme. A steady flow of patronage jobs, city contracts, and outright bribes maintains the loyalty of ward bosses and ward heelers alike.

It is fair to ask what are the consequences of this smothering of alternative ideas to address the challenges faced by the city? Failed schools, failed mass transit, failed crime prevention, failed economic opportunities, failed protection of neighborhoods, failed prudent use and protection of the taxpayer’s money…

Failed, failed, failed - a legacy of nearly 80 years of one party government. Citizens are cowed into submission. “Reformers” are co-opted or absorbed. The press - cynical to a pathological extreme - views the entire situation as a circus; entertainment, not a political tragedy. Reporters vie with each other to come up with the most amusing, the most shocking, the most world-weary tone to their stories and receive prizes for their abdication of media responsibility.

What saved Chicago in the past was a unique dynamism among its entrepreneur class. Starting a decent sized new business in Chicago is a minefield, requiring the services of a lawyer who can help the new business owner navigate through the labyrinthine maze of paperwork at city hall. Despite this, Chicago keeps re-inventing itself economically which has saved it from the fate suffered by Detroit and other dysfunctional cities.

But that energy is dissipating as most businesses are giving up and moving out of the city - and soon, the state - as taxes continue to skyrocket and the nuisances of activists and politicians make it near impossible to make a decent profit.

I am not given to ranting but watching the returns on Tuesday night made my blood boil. The Machine not only takes care of its own but actively seeks to keep opposing or alternative ideas from being discussed in an open electoral arena. The result is the continued steady decline of a once great city.

Democratic and Republican administrations over the years have failed to dislodge the Machine’s chokehold on democracy. In fact, the Machine could have just as easily been a Republican dominated outfit rather than the Democratic party apparatus it operates as today. Party labels are irrelevant when the democratic forms are short circuited as they are in Chicago.

It would be heartbreaking if it wasn’t so maddening.

Those who don’t believe we need unions anymore should take a turn working in a grocery store.

It doesn’t matter where - cashier, bagger, stock person, meat cutter. The temptation for management to take advantage of employees and run them into the ground usually proves to much to resist in non-union operations. I imagine the same holds true for meat processing, farm workers, and a few other labor intensive industries where there is large turnover and poor base pay.

For other industries? I’m not so sure. Marginally necessary perhaps for worker protection and decent benefits but unions like the UAW have lost sight of the true value of labor. I doubt whether their members would make half as much in wages and benefits in a true socialist economy. Negotiating with government is a lot different than negotiating with companies concerned about a bottom line and public image.

That said, is there any justification for public unions? At one time, perhaps yes. The reason for such outstanding benefits for public employees - at least it was justified to taxpayers this way - was that public workers made so much less than their counterparts in the private sector. This is decidedly not true at the federal level. Federal workers make comparable pay while enjoying 4 times the cash value of benefits.

But not all federal workers are unionized. Only around 30% belong to a union. Pay at the state level is considerably less, with one study showing state and local workers receiving 3.7% less than their counterparts in the private sector. State and local workers are also first in line for pay cuts during budget crisis and last to get a pay raise.

Is there really a necessity for a union to make up this difference? A public union is not bargaining with the government, but rather with the people of that state or locality. Government is a middle man, representing the interests of citizens. Perhaps, as Governor Johnson is doing, unions should be allowed to negotiate issues relating to their pay while leaving pension and health insurance to the legislature. Given the pension bomb that is about to go off across America, it’s probably going to happen anyway.

Public employees have been able to negotiate jaw-dropping pension plans and gold plated health insurance benefits in many states. This is not true in all states, nor is it true that all municipal employees everywhere enjoy undeserved bennies and high pay. Making generalizations about public unions is difficult because there are so many different ways that states and localities approach negotiating with them. Some unions are forbidden from going on strike. Some are statutorily limited in how much of an increase in pay they can ask for.

What has happened in Wisconsin is a clash of extremes. Exaggerated claims on both sides, egged on by outside forces, has created a crisis. Walker is not trying to break the unions (nor will his proposals prevent collective bargaining), while teachers have overreacted to reforms that as government workers, they are going to have to get used to. The calumny that has been directed at the protestors is well deserved in my opninion. Calling Walker and “dictator” or “Hitler” is beyond absurd. They are making themselves a laughingstock, convincing no one while radically harming their cause.

When taxpayers are footing the bill for pensions that are out of whack with those in the private sector, they have a right to ask why those workers can’t contribute more to bring their contributions inline with their own pensions. When workers enjoy tax-payer funded health insurance far beyond what the average citizen can afford, they have a perfect right to demand that those employees pay a little more into the insurance fund. These are hardly unreasonable demands for teachers whose average salary for nine months of work is $46,000 in a state with a very reasonable cost of living. Citizens who make a lot less pay a lot more in to pensions and health insurance plans.

What really bothers many is the sense of entitlement demonstrated by the teachers and other public employee unionists. They don’t like to be reminded who they’re working for. This points up what some are saying about the coming battle over budgets at every level of government. The divide will be between the producers and the dependents - between taxpayers and those who receive direct payments from government.

It will be a splendid little war that will probably determine the fate of the nation.

My PJ Media piece yesterday wasn’t linked by a single blog (except this one) and yet, it garnered more than 150 comments. My guesstimate would be that 95% were extremely negative — abusive, belittling, and dismissive. I fully expected this, have come to expect it, whenever I write anything for PJM or other conservative websites.

No one likes to be called a paranoid, but frankly, I can’t think of another word that describes the divorce from reality that has been finalized by so many on the internet right. Theirs is a unique world where logic and reason have gone on permanent vacation, and the fantastical has been substituted for rationality.

The question can be rightly asked; why do you do it if it breeds such contempt from readers to point out the error in their thinking? It certainly isn’t advancing my writing career which, despite claims that I am doing it because it garners praise from liberals, or will get me a job with a Beltway conservative publication, has tanked in the last year. I’d like to say I have bravely gone henceforth into the breach carrying the standard of reason on high, but the opposite is true. No one likes to be unpopular, but beyond that, no one takes my writing seriously anymore. This has made me a little gunshy in writing about anything, much less the mortal danger posed to conservatism by the paranoids.

I have also discovered that I am not a very persuasive writer, probably doing more harm than good to my cause by chastising the right for their blinkered view of reality. It is a fact that few like to be told they are wrong, much less crazy wrong. I should probably have recognized this early on and tried another tack, but would that really have mattered? Besides, crazy is as crazy does, to paraphrase Mr. Gump, and any attempt to minimize the distance between what many conservatives believe about Obama and liberals in general and the real world would probably have been met with similar resistance.

When I began to question cotton candy conservatives like Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin, I actually believed that applying a little logic to the irrational things they were saying might convince some on the right to abandon this shallow, unserious flirtation with pop conservatism. The ease with which these charlatans “explain” what Obama and the liberals are up to by ascribing the worst possible motives to them should be a tip off for any rational observer who values reason. Gleaning motives, or intent, from results is backasswards. It beggars belief that any thinking person would fall into this logic trap.

Allow me to explain: The entire basis for “Obama wants to destroy the country,” Cloward-Piven, and even Rules for Radicals as a gameplan for Obama rests on the results of policies enacted by the administration — unemployment, massive debt, government “takeovers,” etc. From there, the paranoids walk their assumptions backwards to a supposition, i.e. Obama wants to destroy the country. “What else could it be but that Obama is evil and deliberately wants to bring America down?” is the question they ask.

Well, you have offered as much evidence that aliens are telling Obama what to do as you have proven that Obama is evil and wants to destroy the country. In short - zero, nada, nil, nothing. Not one shred of evidence that Obama initiated these admittedly idiotic policies except that the results of those policies were bad. No evidence of meetings where Obama and his advisors mapped out the destruction of America. No paper trail that shows that this was the administration’s intent. No tape recordings of Obama or his advisors plotting America’s downfall. No insider tell all book detailing how the president and his men sought to destroy the United States.

How then, can anyone with an ounce of reason or logic draw the ridiculous, paranoid conclusion that because Obama’s policies have resulted in near economic ruin (a dubious supposition given the previous administration’s profligacy and nearly 30 years of continuous deficit spending with an expanding state), that the only possible explanation is that he is evil and trying to destroy us?

The problem for the paranoids is that they start, not with a supposition, but an assumption. By assuming evil intent, the only possible supposition is that Obama is trying to destroy us. But what is easier to believe? Occam’s razor would teach us that beginning with the supposition that Obama is incompetent would lead to the exact same results that the paranoids believe proves Obama is evil! Is it easier, more rational, more reasonable to believe that Obama is a horrible chief executive or a Machiavellian president who has been able to hide the proof of his intent to destroy us - except from the eyes of those chosen few who claim special knowledge not in evidence of the president’s intent?

When looking at Obama through this kind of paranoid prism, all manner of evils can be attributed to him. He doesn’t “love” America. He wants to weaken us so that the Mooooslims can establish Sharia law in America. He is conniving to turn our capitalist economy (such as it is) into a socialist, or even a Marxist one.

Obama’s words are twisted beyond any reasonable definition of intent in order to “convict” him out of his own mouth. The president’s redistributive rhetoric, naive liberal idiocies about America’s role in the world, his juvenile, Keyenesian view of economics, his dangerously expansive view of constitutional principles all point to Obama being a far left liberal, out of his depth, who is seeking to “remake” America into his vision of of what a “socially just” nation should be.

He is not the first American who has had these ideas. He’s just the first president who has been elected to try it. How’s it working out? Not very well and it’s getting worse.

Wrong not evil. A poor leader, not Satan. A misreading of the country, not an extra-constitutional authoritarian. Isn’t it more reasonable to believe the former and not the latter of all of those assumptions?

I am not a psychologist so getting to the bottom of many on the right’s paranoia about Obama and the liberals will have to be explained by someone else. In the meantime, I will continue, as best as I am able, to try and inject logic and reason into the debates of our time, while leaving the witless paranoids to stew in their own conspiratorial muck.