Right Wing Nut House

Exactly 100 years ago in Tampico, IL - not far from where I am sitting writing this - Ronald Reagan was born. I realize that all Americans lay claim to Reagan’s legacy, but I hope you’ll forgive a little Heartland chauvinism and allow me to say that we here in the Midwest - perhaps more than others - can claim him as a favorite son.

Heartland values defined his life. The simplicity and decency of his character were forged on the prairie. His optimism and sunny disposition came to him naturally, a product of small town Americana.

I’m sure you’ve read a lot this week about Reagan. Even from the vengeful, hateful left, there has been a grudging acknowledgment of his gifts. On the right, however, there has been too much over the top Reagan worship for my tastes. Reagan was an imperfect man whose presidency had its flaws. He accomplished great things and failed greatly in others. Looking at only his warts, or his successes is superficial, however, and does not give us a complete picture of either Reagan, the person, or Reagan, the world-historical figure. That job is left to some future biographer who will be far enough removed so that the emotion people feel toward Ronald Reagan has been wrung out of the record. Right now, we are still far too close to the man and his times to make a competent judgment about his ultimate place in history.

The French academy used to have a rule that historians couldn’t write about any subject newer than 100 years old. This 19th century dictum was based on the idea that it took about 100 years for all correspondence, diaries, papers, and private recollections about a person or an event to come to light. From this distance, it seems a little silly. But the idea is not without merit. How can we judge someone without absorbing the totality of their impact on the world? This is especially true of Reagan who inspired such passion for and against him while he was on the national stage. That passion interferes with analysis and tempts the historian to ignore some facts in order to highlight others in service to ideology or bias.

It should also be noted that Reagan’s influence is still relevant today. Decisions made during his presidency are still effecting events in the Middle East, Europe, Russia and elsewhere. A final judgment of whether his impact was positive or negative in many areas, both foreign and domestic, has yet to be written.

It is in GOP politics that Reagan’s impact is still felt at the gut level. Candidates try to claim his mantle. Activists demand we follow his philosophy. Politicians invoke his name and legacy to win votes. But there is no “next Reagan” or even “Reaganesque” politicians. You don’t duplicate great men whose like is seen so rarely. By definition, the facsimile pales in comparison and ultimately disappoints. In this sense, it is better for Republicans if they were to wrap Reagan’s memory and set it in a special place where we can cherish it, admire it, but recognize the limitations that myth can have on policy choices.

It is not 1980. Our problems are different. The first decade of the 21st century demands different answers. The questions that faced Ronald Reagan when he took office were different than the ones we are asking today. It would be like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole if we attempted to force a Reagan template over our current dilemma. Surely we can demand allegiance to his principles. And copying his virtues would be a capitol idea. But his solutions, which were fine for his times, would find little success today.

Therein lies the danger of taking Reagan hagiography too far. By celebrating a mythic past, we mire ourselves in solutions that have no relevance to our present problems. The truth about Reagan is grand enough, without need to embellish it. Nor does it necessarily mean that by pointing out Reagan’s flaws that you are trying to give the statue feet of clay. Ronald Reagan - the good, the bad, the indifferent - has to be taken as he was, living in the times he did, with all his accomplishments and failures in order to glean the essence of the lessons we can draw from his time in office.

The idea that Obama wants to embrace the Reagan personae and claim it for his own says something profound about the Gipper. I don’t recall any Republicans attempting to claim such from FDR or even Kennedy. It is a mark of his originality and still momentous impact on our national life that a liberal like Obama wants to capture something of the Reagan magic to this day.

Nobody will be fooled by it, that’s for sure.

My own memories of the 1980’s is less positive than many on the right would like. There were many conservatives who worried about the structural deficits being created by the tax cuts. Failure by the administration at that time to demand spending cuts from the Democratic congress to offset the huge loss in revenue doomed us to years of big budget deficits. Placing the blame for this solely on Democrats isn’t really fair. Certainly, they bear some responsibility. But Reagan never proposed a balanced budget - or anything close - in his 8 years in office.

Let’s not forget the massive increase in the size of government during the Reagan years, either. This from the Mises Institute:

In 1980, Jimmy Carter’s last year as president, the federal government spent a whopping 27.9% of “national income” (an obnoxious term for the private wealth produced by the American people). Reagan assaulted the free-spending Carter administration throughout his campaign in 1980. So how did the Reagan administration do? At the end of the first quarter of 1988, federal spending accounted for 28.7% of “national income.”

Reagan could talk a good conservative game, but when push came to shove, the pragmatism in his style of government emerged to offset his ideologicial inclinations.

This is especially true when it came to the evangelical right and social issues. His commitment to the GOP’s social agenda was a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, when his primal thrust for tax reform was being debated in Congress, President Reagan called or visited with more than 300 members of Congress.  But when constitutional amendments banning abortion and allowing school prayer came to a vote, he didn’t make a single call or visit with any members of Congress. He was not about to expend his personal capital to satisfy the agenda of the social cons. Of course, he was not above using them to win elections. But charges that he catered to them just doesn’t hold water.

Reagan’s commitment to conservative virtues was also selective. How anyone could call his 2,000 page tax reform proposal “prudent” is beyond me. It was sickening to watch the lobbyists gang up and make a perfectly rational piece of tax legislation light up like a Christmas tree with all those amendments, special exemptions (sometimes for one company), and other add ons that made a mockery of good government. As for probity, I give you Iran-Contra - the most unbelievably stupid government policy since World War II. Reagan lied about it, and then proclaimed it “a good idea.” No it wasn’t, and it condemned 3 more Americans to captivity by Hezballah, who simply kidnapped other Americans after the arms for hostages deal freed some of them.

Was Reagan responsible for the growing gap in income between rich and poor? This is a common assertion by the left, but it ignores the forces of history that contributed to the slow destruction of the middle class in America.

Our middle class was built as a result of our absolute economic hegemony in the industrialized world following the end of World War II. There was hardly a stick or a stone left standing in 1945 in Germany, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Japan, and much of eastern and western Europe. The US was the only nation to escape the near total destruction of the industrial base of the leading economies in the world. Because of that, our own industrial economy supplied most of the world with steel, rubber, autos, machine tools, and a thousand other products.

But such dominance couldn’t last forever. By the mid 1960’s, Japan and Germany especially were challenging us all over the map. As the rest of the world caught up, our shortsighted industries failed to invest in new plant, new equipment, and new techniques that would have allowed us to be more competitive in a changing world. Such was not to be, and the plants that employed our workers began their long slide into oblivion.

When the 1980’s arrived, wages for factory workers were already declining precipitously. Our economy had begun the long, slow, painful transition from being industrial based to service based. Jobs were disappearing at an astonishing rate in the old labor intensive industries of the midwest. The jobs that these workers eventually succeeded in getting paid far less than their old factory jobs, thus skewing the income gap toward the rich.

All of this occurred before Ronald Reagan even took the oath of office. Did the tax cuts accelerate the gap in incomes? That might be a fair criticism, although the question that is better asked is why not more targeted tax breaks for industry so that modernization might have saved a few jobs. Reagan and conservatives eschewed an “industrial policy” which might have been ideologically satisfying but the result was anything but sublime. The income gap and resulting destruction of the American middle class may have been mostly the result of long term trends, but no president, party, or administration ever addressed the problem of our shrinking manufacturing base that might have made the situation better.

If one were to subscribe to the “Great Man” theory of history that points to the intervention of a Lincoln, a Washington, or a Napoleon for that matter, as an essential component of historical change, Reagan certainly belongs in any top tier list of best American presidents.

But Reagan benefited hugely by the lucky accident of a rare convergence of historical forces that saw the earth shattering conclusion to the Soviet Union’s hegemony of eastern Europe, as well as the final, inevitable collapse of the unsustainable Soviet system. In this respect, Reagan can be credited with riding the whirlwind successfully and initiating challenges that led directly to the fall of the Soviet empire. What might have been a period of extreme hazard for the world, ended with the successful, largely peaceful transition out of the Soviet model and into a still uncertain future for Russia.

The mixed success of Reagan’s economic policies and uneven results in his foreign policy will probably drop Reagan out of the top 10 list of best US presidents. If it is results that ranks presidents, that will be true even after all that were alive during his presidency pass on and the strong emotions associated with his time on the national stage is replaced by the cold, black and white facts and figures that historians will mull over to glean Reagan’s impact on history.

But will these investigations capture Reagan’s innate optimism? His dominant personality? The ease with which power sat on his shoulders? His undeniable connection to the overwhelming majority of Americans? His ability to speak a language that touched something deep within the American psyche? Or the iconic status in which he will be held by conservatives?

I hope so. No understanding of the Reagan presidency, or Reagan the man, will be complete without acknowledging the fact that that his greatest gifts and most telling legacy will be in the way he saw America and the way Americans saw him.

Part of this blog post was first published at The American Thinker

I am going to start putting up some of my PJ Tatler postings. This one got some attention this morning:

Earth’s Magnetic Pole Flipping?

If this article by Terrence Aym in the Salem-News is to be believed, global warming will be the absolute least of our worries:

NASA has been warning about it…scientific papers have been written about it…geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples…

Now “it” is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world’s weather.

Forget about global warming—man-made or natural—what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun’s magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet’s own magnetic field.

When the field shifts, when it fluctuates, when it goes into flux and begins to become unstable anything can happen. And what normally happens is that all hell breaks loose.

Magnetic polar shifts have occurred many times in Earth’s history. It’s happening again now to every planet in the solar system including Earth.

The magnetic field drives weather to a significant degree and when that field starts migrating superstorms start erupting.

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that there appears to be absolutely nothing we can do to affect what is happening. In other words, there won’t be any “mangnetic credits” or “geo-magneto swap” schemes to enrich the Al Gores of the world. I’m pretty sure magnets won’t be outlawed nor will magnetism be declared hazardous to our health.

The bad news is Jesus is coming and he’s taking names and kicking butt.

Clio, the muse of history, can be a bitch of a mistress. Just when you think the world has settled into a nice, ordered regimen with the “March of Progress” proceeding at a stately pace, along comes the Countess of Chaos, the Mistress of Mayhem to throw all of our pretensions about controlling events into a cocked hat and teach us a lesson in humility, if not in respect for the gods.

Egypt; Land of the Pharaohs, cradle of civilization, crossroads of empire, and more recently, a linchpin in the strategic position of the US in the Middle East, has had enough. Enough of oppression, enough of dictatorship, enough of grinding, endless poverty, enough of being beaten down and ground to powder by a pitiless state.

In short, they’ve had enough of Hosni Mubarak and want him out.

Americans are of two minds regarding Clio’s intervention in Egypt. The idealists are swooning with joy over what appears as of this writing to be the possible exit of President Mubarak and the historic chance for democracy to flower in the ancient Nile valley. The realists are sounding the alarm about the probable participation in a post-Mubarak government of the Nazi-inspired, anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood. The push-pull of these two forces on American policy has always been part of our national life, so it’s not surprising that when historic events explode across our TV screens and computer monitors, that an acrimonious discussion would break out about what the US should do now, and how we should handle what comes next.

Clio is silent in this debate. She doesn’t do the future. She’ll occasionally lift her skirt and slyly reveal the broadest of hints about what is to come based on what we know of the past and what we can see of the present. But our vision is a clouded one; so much that is unseen, unperceived, and just unknowable.

Our hearts our with the protestors, urging them on, praying for their safety, and marveling at their otherworldy courage. This is the patrimony given to us by the Founders that every generation of Americans is charged with keeping safe; the belief that liberty must eventually spread across the world and that anything we can do to aid in that sacred mission must be done. We have spilled an ocean of blood and spent a king’s ransom a thousand times over to advance this cause. It is in our DNA and there’s no use fighting it.

But prudence dictates that we also be mindful of the future and the catastrophe that is possible if Islamists were to take a leading role in the formation of any “Unity Government” that emerges following a collapse of the old regime. Clio gives us hints about the outcome of any such folly. Before there was Lenin, there was a Karensky; before Hitler, Von Papen; before the Sandinistas, there was a “Junta of National Reconstruction” with the Sandinistas a minority; and before there was a radical Islamist state in Iran, there was the “moderate” government of President Banisadr. In each case, the hopes and dreams of the people were shattered when ruthless men with guns blew up the moderate intent of those whose earnestness and good hearts were no less than we find in Egypt today.

So it is with a mixture of awe and trepidation we watch as Clio pulls back the curtain on events in Egypt. As for the future, the Greeks believed that the threads of our life were spun by the Fates and everything that happens to us has been preordained. We can’t afford to be such fatalists. We are not helpless as the movement of peoples and ideas rolls forward, flattening the past and changing the landscape to reflect a new reality. In the case of Egypt, however, it might be true that our ability to effect events to our advantage will occur after President Mubarak is gone, rather than having us standing in the way of the juggernaut as it steamrolls the dictator and the remnants of his odious rule.

Titanic historical forces are now loose in the Middle East. Other nations - Jordan, Yemen, Syria. Qatar - are trying to forestall the wave by changing personnel, making symbolic liberalizing gestures, and overusing the word “reform.” I doubt whether their own citizens are buying it. As the spirit Dave Bowman keeps telling us toward the end of the movie 2010, “Something wonderful is about to happen.”That “something” is the awakening of a long oppressed people who have finally realized that the power to be free resided in the strangest of all places - within their own hearts and minds. The revelation itself is as liberating for the Arabs today as it was for English colonists 235 years ago who threw off the shackles of their own tyranny to begin the world anew.

There will probably be much disappointment across the Arab world when the wave recedes and the hard, slogging, grinding, work of creating a civil society where none existed before is undertaken. The kinds of governments thrown up by these protests will have a hard time meeting the stratospheric expectations of the citizens who braved the worst their oppressors could throw at them to will themselves to freedom. There will be triumphs and setbacks. Some governments will no doubt be freer than others. More blood will need to be spilled before the hopes and aspirations of so many can be fulfilled, and the liberty - however they perceive that term - so hard fought is to be fairly won. That is the way of the world, though we wish it were not so.

Many in Egypt have lived a lifetime this past week. But that mischievous minx Clio is just getting started.

He was hanging by his fingernails on Tuesday of this week when 2 million Egyptians poured into the streets to protest his odious rule.

But you don’t last for 30 years as dictator unless you acquire some survival skills along the way. Hosni Mubarak has put those skills to good use over the last couple of days, and by doing so, has firmed up a tenuous hold on power. Talk of his imminent demise has ceased except in the most idealistic and optimistic circles of the Egyptian revolt.

In short, Mubarak may have pulled a rabbit out of a hat and guaranteed his survival until his announced retirement in September. And he did it by granting the most niggardly of concessions to the opposition, and without compromising the all-important position of the military in the Egyptian government and society.

The New York Times is reporting that the administration is “negotiating” with elements of the Egyptian government to ease Mubarak’s leaving. This would be great news if the Egyptians cared a whit what we or any other western nation thought:

They cautioned that the outcome depended on several factors, not least Egypt’s own constitutional protocols and the mood of the protesters on the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities.

Some officials said there was not yet any indication that either Mr. Suleiman or the Egyptian military was willing to abandon Mr. Mubarak.

Even as the Obama administration is coalescing around a Mubarak-must-go-now posture in private conversations with Egyptian officials, Mr. Mubarak himself remains determined to stay until the election in September, American and Egyptian officials said. His backers forcibly pushed back on Thursday against what they viewed as American interference in Egypt’s internal affairs.

[...]

“What they’re asking cannot be done,” one senior Egyptian official said, citing clauses in the Egyptian Constitution that bar the vice president from assuming power. Under the Constitution, the speaker of Parliament would succeed the president. “That’s my technical answer,” the official added. “My political answer is they should mind their own business.”

Talks between Secretary Gates and the Egyptian military aren’t even concerned with a handover of power. Gates wants to make sure the Egyptian army doesn’t start a slaughter in Tahrir Square. Given the current efforts by the government to silence, intimidate, arrest, and coerce foreign and domestic media, anything is possible, including the kind of crackdown that would have probably saved the Shah in 1979, and did save the Chinese Communist government in 1989.

Mubarak’s rent-a-thug gambit has worked. The goons he sent into the streets on Wednesday to attack the opposition frightened ordinary Egyptians who might welcome a more democratic society but are opposed to the violence and bloodshed that exploded across their TV screens. Mubarak’s announcement the previous evening that he would not seek re-election placated many Egyptians who now wonder why the president has to leave immediately. In this context, the demands of the protestors seem petulant, rather than revolutionary.

The key, as it always has been, is the military. As Egypt slowly slipped into anarchy, the army was strangely quiescent - not moving to break up the demonstrations but not making much effort to stop the looting and pillaging by gangs either.

Then, when Mubarak’s goons went into the streets on Wednesday, they finally took a stand, coming down on the side of the pro-Mubarak forces. They didn’t take an active role in the battle for Tahrir Square but they proved invaluable allies to the street bullies. The army allowed their vehicles to be used as shelter against the rock throwing anti-Mubarak demonstrators, while also sealing off most of the exits from the Square, forcing confrontations between the two factions. The violent imagery did the cause of the anti-Mubarak demonstrators no good. The momentum of the protest seemed to ebb as fewer demonstrators had the physical courage to stand up to the state-sponsored violence being orchestrated by the government.

Mubarak’s concessions to the opposition were not designed to satisfy them, but rather satisfy the vast majority of Egyptians who want change but not bloody revolution. The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamad ElBaradei spurned Mubarak’s offers of dialogue is immaterial. The western press has made far more of ElBaradei’s influence than is recognized by the average Egyptian. And while no one is sure of the Brotherhood’s strength on the street, there is no argument that a majority of Egyptians are opposed to their fundamentalist view of religion and political society. In other words, their refusal to negotiate with Mubarak is not an important gesture.

Other opposition groups may participate in talks.Haaretz reports that “some opposition groups had agreed to [Prime Minister] Shafiq’s invitation, including the liberal, nationalist Wafd party, which is a legal party.” If true, Mubarak would have successfully split the opposition and strengthened his position.

With his abandonment of the plan to elevate his son Gamal to the presidency, and the ascension of General Omar Suleiman to the position of vice president and putative successor, Mubarak cleverly removed one of the causes of opposition to his rule; the “inheritance of power” issue with his son. It has never been confirmed, but Gamal may have fled to London in the first hours of the revolt on January 26th. Suleiman’s elevation almost certainly took the younger Mubarak out of play where the September elections are concerned.

Some analysts, including the Naval Post Graduate School’s Robert Springborg, see the abandonment of Gamal as evidence that the military, long a power behind the throne in Egypt, is taking a more active role in political affairs. Writing in Foreign Policy, Springborg believes the Egyptian military high command “under no circumstances would submit to rule by civilians rooted in a representative system,” which is one reason why Gamal has either gone into hiding or exile. Either way, word that Gamal has resigned his membership in the National Democratic Party would indicate that his budding political career has ended.

The advantage of Mubarak’s rent-a-thug gambit is two fold; it keeps the military’s hands clean in any bloody crackdown while giving the regime an excuse to break up the protests in order to restore “peace.” It’s a nice trick; foment the violence and then get credit for restoring order.

The army can now safely move between the pro and anti-Mubarak groups and be seen as Egypt’s protectors rather than as the instrument of state control that they truly are. Washington, London, Paris, and the rest can jawbone all they want about “democracy” but restoring order in the streets of Cairo is now the number one priority. Businesses, including banks and food shops, have been closed for more than a week. Civil order must be restored or people will start rioting for food rather than freedom.

All this strengthens Mubarak and his hold on power. Unless there is a stunning turn of events, it is hard to see how he can be forced out now. He has cemented the loyalty of the army by choosing Suleiman as his successor while tossing out the technocrats in government ministries who never served in the military and were bringing western style capitalist methods to the Egyptian economy. He has not given in to the Brotherhood and their demands made by the fop ElBaradei. And while protestors are still in the streets, and may be there for a few more days, the bulk of the Egyptian people appear ready to return to normalcy.

It also appears that Mubarak has blunted any move toward real reform. When the government does negotiate with the opposition, it won’t be with ElBaradei or the Brotherhood. Those parties the government deigns to talk to will settle for scraps thrown to them by the army. Thus, any reforms will be window dressing rather than substantive change.

It is tempting to wonder if President Obama had done something differently that the outcome of the January 25 revolution in Egypt would have been different. Frankly, it’s hard to see how anything America could have done would have changed the conclusion. The clash of idealism and realism will always bring about unsatisfactory results, even if our actions or words could have had a material impact on the final outcome. We were torn between rooting for the protestors and recognizing the vital need for stability in the region. Our confusing, halting rhetoric and actions reflected that reality and Mubarak took advantage.

Mubarak’s recovery has been remarkable as it has been unexpected. We will see what events bring over the next few days, but whatever happens, there is a good chance that the president will be able to weather the storm and serve out his remaining term.

In the time honored tradition of dictators who have reached the end of their rope, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has decided to crack down on the demonstrations that have brought his regime to its knees.

Rather than use his army or uniformed police to do the dirty work, Mubarak has instituted a jobs program for thugs. He has hired several hundred - perhaps thousands - of bully boys to mix with pro-Mubarak demonstrators and beat the opposition senseless while being given free reign by the army to cavort through the streets tossing Molotov cocktails into the thickest concentration of protestors.

I guess that’s one way to address unemployment.

And from our “Only in Egypt” file, the street bullies used a novel method of, er, debating the anti-Mubarak forces. A company of light horse rode into Tahrir Square wielding clubs and sticks, beating and whipping the opposition while their mounts tried to do their part by trampling bystanders. Joining the war horses were battle camels - the one hump variety - whose ungainly gait might have been humorous but whose size and disregard for the lives and health of anyone who got in their way was decidedly not.

This Charge of the Rent-a-Thugs was not the high point of the day. As the battle raged during the afternoon, the pro-Mubarak forces began to lob dozens and dozens of Molotov cocktails into the opposition. Numerous fires were started and there were an unknown number of casualties. All the while, the army stood passively by, watching with apparent disinterest.

CNN is reporting that the pro-Mubarak demonstrators have been bought as well. Apparently, government workers couldn’t pick up their end of the month paychecks unless they went down to the square to protest a while. Judging by the sour looks on the faces of many, they didn’t much appreciate having to brave tear gas and the stray incendiary device in order to feed their families. It didn’t put them in the best of moods, which I’m sure was part of the psychology of the gambit.

The Guardian live blog of today’s events includes this description of what sounds like a quaisi-military operation, as the thugs and pro-Mubarak demonstrators worked to surround the opposition protestors and then attacked them:

They came into the square and we blocked them peacefully, forming a human line and peacefully pushing them back . A number of thugs had infiltrated behind our human line and all of a sudden 70 people from behind us started running towards us from behind the line and started throwing rocks and stones and picking up pieces of wood from their side. This was the signal for other ‘Pro-Mubarak’ side to start reponding by throwing rocks. Our people retreated, they came forward - the point of stopping was where the army tanks were [next to the Egyptian Museum] and as we came forward people started throwing stones at us from the side of those tanks. This is significant because the only way you can get there is with the permission of the army.

Stone throwing was happening - then suddenly someone gets up on the tank shouting “People, stop stop stop, we can’t behave like this! ‘ - and immediately another guy comes straight up holding a picture of Mubarak and the tank is swarmed with Mubarak supporters as if they’re trying to stop violence! That was clearly a photo op. Once that photo opportunity had happened the ‘Mubarak Protesters’ got down from top of the tanks all of a sudden.

Sounds like a perfectly spontaneous outpouring of love and devotion for Mubarak, eh?

We’ve seen this tactic a dozen times in the last few decades. Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez has perfected it. Other banana republic dictators are experts at it. Mix the hired thugs in with less violently inclined government workers or others who benefit from the regime’s largess and all the deaths and injuries are blamed on the riots, not on a coordinated campaign by the regime to terrorize the opposition. The tactic has the advantage of keeping the army and police hands clean, which blunts international condemnation and might even fool a few naive citizens that it’s actually the opposition who is the cause of the violence.

None of this is likely to work in Egypt. The people don’t care who starts the violence at this point. And judging by how the opposition reacted to the thugs and their tactics, if it is war they want, it is war they are going to get.

This blog post originally appears on The Moderate Voice

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

Tonight, I welcome Rich Baehr of the American Thinker, Vodkapundit and PJTV star Stephen Green, and our favorite Yid Jeff Dunetz. We’ll discuss events in Egypt as well as the Obamacare decision in Florida from yesterday.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 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.

The administration is torn between two competing visions put forward by the foreign policy establishment in Washington of what the US should do and say about the crisis in Egypt, and as is typical, they have chosen to split the difference.

This Washington Post editorial represents what might be termed the idealistic faction:

The United States should be using all of its influence - including the more than $1 billion in aid it supplies annually to the Egyptian military - to ensure the latter [regime change] outcome. Yet, as so often has happened during the Arab uprising of the past several weeks, the Obama administration on Friday appeared to be behind events. It called for an end to the violence against demonstrators and for a lifting of the regime’s shutdown of the Internet and other communications. Encouragingly, the White House press secretary said that the administration “will review our assistance posture based on events that take place in the coming days.”

But U.S. statements assumed that the 30-year-long rule of the 82-year-old Mr. Mubarak would continue. After speaking to Mr. Mubarak, President Obama said Friday night that he would continue to work with the Egyptian president; he did not mention elections. Instead, in an apparent attempt to straddle the two sides, the administration suggested that the solution to the crisis would come through “engagement” between the regime and the protesters.

Representing the realists, Rep.Thaddeus McCotter issued a statement published in Human Events to the effect that we should stand behind Mubarak:

Though many will be tempted to superficially interpret the Egyptian demonstrations as an uprising for populist democracy, they must recall how such similar initial views of the 1979 Iranian Revolution were belied by the mullahs’ radical jackbooted murderers, who remain bent upon grasping regional hegemony and nuclear weaponry.

In this crisis, the American people deserve candor and action from President Obama, and President Hosni Mubarak and General Tantwai.

This is not a nostalgic “anti-colonial uprising” from within, of all places, the land of Nassar. Right now, freedom’s radicalized enemies are subverting Egypt and other our allies.

There are good arguments that can be made for both positions - with very large caveats. Standing behind Mubarak and stability might be the desired goal but is it realistic at this point? Preventing radical Islamists from ascending to power might be beneficial to the US and Israel, but at what cost? Is any cost worth what it will now take to beat down the protests?

Of course, WaPo’s suggestion invites the worst case scenario. We have the Iranian revolution as a guide in this respect and to imagine jihadists in charge of the largest Arab country in the world with the largest military - a nation that would then be at odds with Israel - would cause any president to lose a considerable amount of sleep.

It should be remembered that the situation in which we find ourselves was not created overnight. Thirty two years of backing this thug by Democratic and Republican presidents alike while giving his military tens of billions of dollars seemed a good tradeoff at the time but, as a famous scholar once opined, “the chickens have come home to roost.” It’s too late for either scenario above. We can’t pull the rug from underneath Mubarak and expect the demonstrators to love us. Nor can we continue to support the Egyptian president and not expect whatever government the mob throws up to view us with anything but contempt.

The world is about to change and the administration is unable to decide what to do to help shape the future to the benefit of US interests. Is it the nature of the crisis that this is so? Or is it that Obama and his State Department are like a deer in the headlights when it comes to proposing options?

I tend to believe the former; any response, any action we take will not materially affect events to our advantage. It may be emotionally satisfying if the president were to come out four-square in favor of “democracy” and the demonstrators. But like the Iranian uprising, to what end would the rhetoric be directed? Would it be to save Mubarak? Save lives? Save the Camp David Accords that Caroline Glick makes a good case for it being all but dead now?

And as we now see, all of its possible secular and Islamist successors either reject outright Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel or will owe their political power to the support of those who reject the peace with the Jewish state. So whether the Egyptian regime falls next week or next year or five years from now, the peace treaty is doomed.

Is this scenario overblown? Heather Hurlburt thinks so:

Some American commentators have argued that Al Jazeera is somehow fanning Islamism and anti-Americanism with its coverage. But as Marc Lynch has pointed out, Egyptian citizens, like Tunisians before them, are so—justifiably—angry at their governments that it’s hard to imagine what new provocations the station could come up with. Similarly, concern about the relative strength of the Muslim Brotherhood, which espouses a fundamentalist strain of Islam and has championed and employed violence in the past, should be balanced against three other facts: (1) The Brotherhood has renounced violence and it has been active in Egyptian politics, transformed by an internal debate about whether and how to participate, for some time now; (2) Thus far, observers on the ground report that it is young, secular Egyptians who are leading this revolt; (3) The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition organization in Egypt, is a first-rank enemy of Al Qaeda, and has been for decades. (A chapter in the recent “Self-Inflicted Wounds” from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center lays out the feud, and how it has played out in Egypt, South Asia and elsewhere, in detail. Briefly, the Brotherhood’s goals have been more political and focused on individual governments—and thus less focused on what Bin Laden refers to as the “far enemy”—the United States homeland.) Meanwhile, it is reasonable to be concerned about the future role of radical extremists where other forces are weak, but this kind of scaremongering is actually quite ignorant; it’s also disheartening and potentially damaging to the true democrats—some of whom organize around Islam, and some of whom don’t—that are doing the struggling and dying right now. Americans, like others around the world, are instinctively cheering for them. They are right to do so.

Just because “secular oriented” young Egyptians appear to be in the forefront now, what are the chances that they will be a force in the new government? That kind of muddled, idealistic thinking is not helping. Blithely ignoring the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Semitism while downplaying their radical agenda (Hey! They hate al-Qaeda!) is more a demonstration of myopia than thoughtful analysis. Who cares if they hate Bin Laden? Is al-Qaeda the only Islamist group who wants to damage American interests or destroy Israel? I don’t want to make this an ideological critique but this kind of nonsense appears on the left far more than on the right. We are at war with radical Islam in all its forms.

Also, Hurlburt exhibits far too much faith in the wisdom of the mob. No one knows what might happen in a free and fair election, but if history is any guide, when given the choice, it is not unknown for Middle Eastern voters to choose the Islamists voluntarily. In Egypts case, where even Hurburt admits the Muslim Brotherhood is the most powerful and best organized opposition group, a victory by the Islamists, although not assured, would certainly be more than a possibility.

Hardly “scaremongering” or “ignorant” to point out he obvious.

I don’t know what the Obama administration could be doing that it isn’t doing right now. They might have tied the Vice President and gagged him. Biden’s statement about Mubarak not being a dictator was reminiscent of Carter’s New Year’s toast to the Shah, congratulating him for running a country that was an “island of stability” in the region. Within weeks, Carter was made to look like an idiot.

The State Department has ordered US diplomats out of the country. If Carter had done that, he may very well have won a second term - a counterfactual not lost on Obama. Their statements on the crisis reflect a divided establishment, which isn’t surprising given our 32 year support for Mubarak and the mix of rationalists and idealists.

Sometimes, you just have to get out of the way when history is rolling forward and pick up the pieces afterward. It is unsatisfying to contemplate doing nothing, but in this case, it may be the best way to do no further harm to our interests than has already been inflicted.

Parts of this blog post originally appeared at The American Thinker

My latest article is up at FrontPage.com and it is about the curious disconnect both parties exhibited between reality and politics.

Neither side made much mention at all of our entitlement crisis.

And a crisis it is.

Cosmetic gambits like “spending freezes” and “doc fixes” can’t even begin to address the danger. This is political gamesmanship and it should anger us that the politicians know it but do it anyway. It’s not that the crisis is hidden, or has come upon us suddenly. We’ve known for decades where we were headed, but Washington chose the easy way: the politicians ignored the problem, kicking the can down the road, assuming they would be well into retirement — living off their extravagant congressional pensions — before history forced our hand.

The can has now been kicked into a cul de sac and there’s no way we can start kicking it back down the road. It may not be our fault, but we’re the ones who are going to have to pay for all of these promises so recklessly made by previous generations. One way or another, a solution will be found — or imposed — on us. Those are the only alternatives. Either the politicians will find the political courage (that they won’t get credit for) to start cutting and slashing at the monster or the monster will solve our problem for us by devouring us.

A few bare bones numbers are needed to prove that this is not hyperbole or political exaggeration. If we were to fulfill the promises made to every American from those born as I write this to the oldest citizen regarding Social Security and Medicare, it will cost us at least $130 trillion. Long before then, the entitlement crunch will have destroyed our economy. By 2016, 71% of the federal budget will be dedicated to paying entitlements of one form or another, the vast percentage of that being Social Security and Medicare.

There are 78 million baby boomers set to retire over the next 30 years, all expecting that monthly Social Security check for the rest of their lives. The significance of this is a matter of demographics. The number of workers paying into Social Security was 5.1 per retiree in 1960; this declined to 3.3 in 2007 and is projected to decline to 2.1 by 2035. We are currently in hock to the Social Security Trust Fund to the tune of $2.5 trillion. This number is expected to rise to $3.8 trillion by 2019. But by 2015, payments to Social Security beneficiaries will begin to exceed tax receipts. And by 2037, payments to recipients would start declining automatically – whether we wanted them to or not. The Trust Fund would be exhausted and Congress would be unable to tap any other revenue streams from the government to pay for it.

I erred in the year that Social Security’s payments to beneficiaries would exceed tax receipts. It’s not 2015. It’s this year.

Ain’t that lovely?

There are only two ways this is going to end and neither is without massive pain. The first is, we find the courage to confront the crisis and make the painful adjustments necessary to salvage our future. Or, we do nothing and get rid of the problem when the economy collapses.

Matt Welch writes that we “don’t do big things” anymore.

Here’s a reality check: We will not have high-speed rail within Segwaying distance of 80 percent of the country, ever. We will not get 80 percent of our electricity from “clean energy sources” by 2035, unless someone far outside the halls of government invents a snail that eats trash and poops hydrogen. Obama won’t veto every bill that arrives on his desk with earmarks–re-watch that part of the speech last night; no one believed him.

Why won’t these things happen? Because, as Rep. Paul Ryan rightly emphasized last night, the only real policy issue in America right now is that we are on the verge of fiscal catastrophe because cannot afford the government we’re paying for today, let alone the one we’re promising for tomorrow. And the president, though he is much more serious on this issue than a huge swath of his political party, is nonetheless not remotely serious about this issue. Vowing to cut $400 billion over 10 years (a plan that, judging by the two people clapping when he proposed it, will likely be cut to ribbons if it survives through Congress), at a moment when the deficit for this year is more than three times that, indicates that Democrats (and a helluva lot of Republicans as well) are hunkering down in our awful status quo–half-heartedly tinkering around the edges of spending, making incremental changes this way and that, then launching new moonshots and redoubling old impotent efforts. Politicians have put us on the precipice of financial ruin, and they show no indication of doing a damned thing about it.

[...]

There are more than a quarter million people working at the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security combined nearly pass the half-million mark. And at a moment of grave fiscal peril, we continue to spend half the planet’s money on defense, with Obama et al expecting thunderous applause for snipping out “tens of billions” from future defense spending growth. We continue to arrest 800,000-plus people a year for smoking or trading a plant that makes you want to eat Pop Tarts.

No, these people are not serious about the task at hand. The state of our union, as measured by the competence of people in power, is a f***ing disgrace.

It would be the biggest thing America has done since Apollo if we could attack the entitlement problem successfully. It will require the same amount of effort, despite the obvious fact that it isn’t very sexy, nor will it excite the American people.

In fact, it will have the opposite effect. In order to tackle Medicare and Social Security unfunded liabilities, no less than a drastic alteration in the way Americans think about government will have to take place. Old people will be scared and angry. Younger people might feel betrayed. The only ones who will be grateful are those yet unborn or in their infancy who will have vestiges of these programs to help them when they get older.

One big adjustment Americans are going to have to make is they are going to be paying more for their own health care. Hopefully, this will make everyone realize that there is no free lunch and that a kind of self-rationing protocol where people will only use the health care system when they truly need it will gradually take hold. The “fee for service” model will have to go and other ways to reimburse doctors and hospitals for their work will have to be found.

As for Social Security, there will probably never be a political consensus to privatize it - no matter how bad it gets. The program is much easier to deal with, however, simply by raising taxes and/or increasing the retirement age. That might buy us a few decades. Eventually, even that bandaid won’t be enough and we’ll be back to where we are today. Why some kind of means test, where those who are tapping another pension, or whose income without Social Security is above a certain level could receive less is a mystery. We have means tests for all kinds of entitlements and Social Security should be similarly administered.

Every year we delay adds a few trillion to our unfunded liabilities - now standing at $130 trillion. Here’s Bruce Bartlett on what we have to look forward to:

To summarize, we see that taxpayers are on the hook for Social Security and Medicare by these amounts: Social Security, 1.3% of GDP; Medicare part A, 2.8% of GDP; Medicare part B, 2.8% of GDP; and Medicare part D, 1.2% of GDP. This adds up to 8.1% of GDP. Thus federal income taxes for every taxpayer would have to rise by roughly 81% to pay all of the benefits promised by these programs under current law over and above the payroll tax.

Times’s up, Congress, Mr. President.

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

Tonight, I welcome Rich Baehr of the American Thinker, Tony Badran of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, and Tom Harb of the World Council of the Cedar Revolution. We’ll discuss the Hezballah takeover of the Lebanese government and what it means for US policy and the Middle East.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 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.

A handpicked candidate for prime minister by Hezb’allah will likely win parliamentary approval today. Thus ends the independence of the Lebanese state.

Even the New York Times sees the writing on the wall with their headline, “Hezbollah Chooses Lebanon’s Next Prime Minister:”

A prime minister chosen by Hezbollah and its allies won enough support on Monday to form Lebanon’s government, unleashing angry protests, realigning politics and culminating the generation-long ascent of the Shiite Muslim movement from shadowy militant group to the country’s pre-eminent political and military force.

Hezbollah’s success served as a stark measure of the shifting constellation of power in this part of the Middle East, where the influence of the United States and its Arab allies - Egypt and Saudi Arabia - is seen by politicians and diplomats as receding, while Iran and Syria have become more assertive.

American diplomats tried to forestall the triumph of Hezbollah’s candidate, Najib Miqati. Although the final votes will be cast Tuesday, Mr. Miqati won the decisive vote from a politician who said he had to deal “with the reality on the ground.”

The government that Mr. Miqati, a billionaire and former prime minister, forms may in the end look much like past cabinets in this small Mediterranean country. Indeed, Mr. Miqati struck a conciliatory tone, calling himself a consensus candidate.

Mr. Miqati is hardly a “consensus” candidate. His “Glory Movement” party has precisely 2 seats in the parliament. In contrast, fallen PM Saad Hariri’s Future party has 71 seats. He was also seen as a “consensus” choice when he assumed the prime minister’s post in the immediate aftermath of the Syrian withdrawal in the spring of 2005. The problem was the same back then; suspected of having divided loyalties. He was chosen by Syria’s Assad to fill the post of interim prime minister. It would have been impossible to choose a candidate who did not meet with the Syrian president’s approval at the time.

Daniel Larison points out Miqati’s placement on Hariri’s list of allied candidates in the 2009 elections which, I suppose, ties him to the former PM in Larison’s eyes. Miqati was running for office from a district in Tripoli - a Suinni stronghold dominated by the Future party and, at the time, was the site of unrest as clashes between Sunnis and Shias were taking place. It was political expediency that forced Miqati to run as an Hariri ally and not any kind of ideological affinity for Hariri’s politics. This is not unknown in Lebanese politics, of course. But trying to put lipstick on a pig by saying that Miqati ran on Hariri’s list and inferring that this is somehow acceptable to the bulk of Sunnis or that he is not a danger to an independent Lebanon is too much of a stretch. He will do Hezb’allah’s bidding - especially as it relates to the Special Tribunal Lebanon (STL).

The STL, a UN sponsored tribunal looking into the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri (as well as the dozen or so other political murders in Lebanon since that date), was the cause of the fall of Hariri’s government in the first place. Their secret indictments, handed down last week, almost certainly name prominent Hezb’allah members as the guilty parties in carrying out the crime. Hezb’allah demanded that Hariri denounce the STL and make a statement to the effect that it is a US-Israeli plot to tarnish the squeaky clean reputation of the terrorist group/political party. Hariri refused, the Hez withdrew their cabinet ministers, and have now named the next prime minister.

Miqati’s first order of business will be to cut the cord between Lebanon and the STL. That would be a minimum demand from Hezb’allah for their support. Those indictments carry no weight now, and there will be no trials of the accused in Lebanon or elsewhere.

There are some observers who see Iran ascendant in Lebanon - perhaps even able to exert some kind of control over the tiny country. That may be true to some extent with regard to Lebanon’s relations with Israel, Iran, and Syria. But it is a little more complicated than Iran telling Miqati, or even Hezb’allah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah what to do.

Nasrallah has his own agenda in Lebanon that at times, will work at cross purposes with his paymasters in Iran. It may even be true that Supreme Leader Khamenie would have preferred to see Hezb’allah remain in the background and not take such a prominent role in forming a government. It was reported that Khamenei was angry at Nasrallah for instigating the 2006 war with Israel, knowing full well that the militia could not go toe to toe with the IDF for any length of time. There was much grumbling by the Iranian people and leadership when they were forced to resupply Hezb’allah following the end of hostilities. Clearly, Nasrallah is far from being Iran’s puppet, although there are several areas where their vital interests intersect - most especially as those interests relate to Israel and its destruction.

It is Syrian president Bashar Assad who now holds the whip hand in Lebanon; not so much because he controls Nasrallah but because he has outsized influence on many prominent individuals in Nasrallah’s March 8 movement. Death threats and cash payoffs by Syria to key factions in Lebanon has cemented loyalty to Assad’s regime and means that the Syrian president has virtual control of much of the Lebanese parliament - at least enough to affect votes as they relate to Syria and their considerable economic interests in Lebanon.

What killed the Cedar Revolution? In the end, a lack of courage was March 14th’s downfall. It’s not really a criticism in that standing up to Syria, Iran, and Hezb’allah was more than likely to get you and your family killed. Few possess such otherworldly physical courage and to deride the Lebanese democrats for their failure in this regard isn’t fair unless you place yourself in their shoes and ask yourself how you would act.

But it would have taken more than courage to wrest Hezb’allah’s guns from their possession, or risk civil war in order to stand up to Hezb’allah and their political blackmail. At bottom, it came down to the same formula for power it always does; those with the guns and the demonstrated ability to use them usually win out in the end.

This post originally appears on The American Thinker