Tag Archives: criticism

Self-criticism at its best

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Wow… Kudos to Camille Pagilla.  This is some of the most intelligent Democrat analysis in recent memory.  I’m still stunned… I can’t believe I’m reading this!

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills).  Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy…

How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.)…

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

WOW.  Read the whole thing @ Salon .

Letter to the Editor

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To the Editors at the New York Times:

I was entirely shocked to find that Thomas Friedman’s recent editorial on American Democracy was not only read by your editors… but thought good enough to publish. To borrow a bit of modern vernacular, WTF.

Friedman is, of course, entitled to his opinion — as are your editors. This does not, however, entitle them to their own facts, their own version of history, or their own logic.

In order to accept Friedman’s argument, one must conclude that there is some great difference from one-party rule in China… and one-party rule in America — as if the Chinese leadership never had a difference of opinion. He goes on to praise the expediency of the Chinese political system while neglecting to point out just how quickly congress can pass a 2+ trillion dollar ‘stimulus’ bill… or just how damaging political expedience can be for future generations. Embarrassing omissions if you ask me.

And if these gross omissions were not enough, Friedman had the audacity to blame Republicans for the legislative sluggishness–even though Obama doesn’t need one Republican vote to pass anything. Supposedly its twice as hard to pass bills with your political allies than with your adversaries (who knew!?). And I guess republicans are the bad guy for saying ‘no’ even though Obama was the one who shut them down originally by saying “I won”.

Friedman simultaneously says the GOP “used to be the party of business” and then hails Obama for stealing all their latest ideas (after campaigning against each and every one of them). He cries foul when Republicans “scream socialism” even while admitting that health care will be transferred from private businesses to government control. (I suppose it is the opposition to socialism Friedman finds so problematic — not the accuracy of the criticism). He imagines that Globalization has neutered the Republican party even though Republicans championed free trade and are now enjoying its benefits.

Oh, and I guess Republicans are hypocrites to vote against a socialistic health care bill if it in any way incorporates some abstract tax balancing notion they once championed.  McCain’s plan to tax both public and private insurance equally was contingent on the encouragement of private plans… not the expansion of a federal one… (a nuance lost of Friedman).  If Republicans were ever hypocrites, it was passing the prescription drug bill for seniors under the Bush administration, not standing up to massive government programs on this occasion.

And then there was the gratuitous dig on Sarah Palin’s “Drill Baby Drill” comment.  Mr. Friedman, please do us all a favor and grow up already.  I expect this sort of vacuous disparagement from insecure teens needing personal validation, not respected editorialists (oh wait…)

Next time you write or publish an op-ed piece in your paper, make sure it doesn’t insult the intelligence of your readers.  Hey, it might even help you sell a few more copies!

stimulus as a political exercise

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Robert J. Samuelson isn’t a right-winger… which makes his criticisms of the stimulus all the more useful (politically).  It has FAILED its original purpose… there is NO DENYING IT at this point.

It’s not surprising that the much-ballyhooed “economic stimulus” hasn’t done much stimulating… The program crafted by Obama and the Democratic Congress wasn’t engineered to maximize its economic impact. It was mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes.

There are growing demands for another Obama “stimulus” on the grounds that the first was too small. Wrong. The problem with the first stimulus was more its composition than its size. With budget deficits for 2009 and 2010 estimated by the CBO at $1.8 trillion and $1.4 trillion (respectively, 13 and 9.9 percent of gross domestic product), it’s hard to argue they’re too tiny. Obama and congressional Democrats sacrificed real economic stimulus to promote parochial political interests. Any new “stimulus” should be financed by culling some of the old.

Here, as elsewhere, there’s a gap between Obama’s high-minded rhetoric and his performance. In February, Obama denounced “politics as usual” in constructing the stimulus. But that’s what we got, and Obama likes the result. Interviewed recently by ABC’s Jake Tapper, he was asked whether he would change anything. Obama seemed to invoke a doctrine of presidential infallibility. “There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he said.

via washingtonpost.com.

“Popular Democracy and Judicial Review”

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I just finished listening to a really great podast compliments of the official Stanford podcast (side note: I highly recommend adding this to your itunes podcast selection for the content quality and variety alone).

The speaker was Larry D. Kramer and he was speaking about his new book, “Popular Constitutionalism“. The basic thrust of his book is that the constitution’s interpretation should be left to the legislative and executive branches–or, at the very least, not so dependent on the unquestionable “final say” of the judicial branch.

In fact, he makes some great points:

1) The Revolutionary War (and, more broadly, the reason for America’s division from Great Britian was actually a dispute about the failure of the British government to uphold the BRITISH constitution–one that guarenteed rights of representation which the colonists were not able to exercise.

2) After having a war fought for the right of self-determination, would the founding fathers suddenly be willing to give up that right to a handful of unaccountable, unelected judges?

3) The Supreme Court was never intended to be the final arbitrar of CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS… it was not until Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme court took on this role. On a broader level, the courts were only to be one voice in a loud chorus of voices that debated the constitutionality of laws.

After listening to his speech, I must admit I felt challenged in my “originalist” tendencies. It seems that originalism isn’t necessary a very “originalist” method of constitutional interpretation. Nevertheless, we can’t pretend that ‘populist’ interpretation can co-exist with an entrenched judiciary that still commands absolute fealty when determining constitutionality.

I don’t have hours to touch-up this post and fully develop many of these thoughts… but hey, that’s what the comments section is for!