Squaring the Culture

With a hat tip to reader John Cooper, here is the letter sent by Rep John Boehner (R, OH) and Rep Eric Cantor (R, VA) to Rahm Emmanuel in response to President Obama’s invitation to televised, bipartisan talks regarding the health care bill:

We welcome President Obama’s announcement of forthcoming bipartisan health care talks. In fact, you may remember that last May, Republicans asked President Obama to hold bipartisan discussions on health care in an attempt to find common ground on health care, but he declined and instead chose to work with only Democrats. Since then, the President has given dozens of speeches on health care reform, operating under the premise that the more the American people learn about his plan, the more they will come to like it. Just the opposite has occurred: a majority of Americans oppose the House and Senate health care bills and want them scrapped so we can start over with a step-by-step approach focused on lowering costs for families and small businesses.

Just as important, scrapping the House and Senate health care bills would help end the uncertainty they are creating for workers and businesses and thus strengthen our shared commitment to focusing on creating jobs. Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over so that we can develop a bill that is truly worthy of the support and confidence of the American people? Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said today that the President is “absolutely not” resetting the legislative process for health care.

If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate. Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward in a bipartisan way, does that mean he has taken off the table the idea of relying solely on Democratic votes and jamming through health care reform by way of reconciliation? As the President has noted recently, Democrats continue to hold large majorities in the House and Senate, which means they can attempt to pass a health care bill at any time through the reconciliation process.

Eliminating the possibility of reconciliation would represent an important show of good faith to Republicans and the American people.If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand? Our ability to move forward in a bipartisan way through this discussion rests on openness and transparency. Will the President include in this discussion congressional Democrats who have opposed the House and Senate health care bills? This bipartisan discussion should reflect the bipartisan opposition to both the House bill and the kickbacks and sweetheart deals in the Senate bill. Will the President be inviting officials and lawmakers from the states to participate in this discussion?

As you may know, legislation has been introduced in at least 36 state legislatures, similar to the proposal just passed by the Democratic-controlled Virginia State Senate, providing that no individual may be compelled to purchase health insurance. Additionally, governors of both parties have raised concerns about the additional costs that will be passed along to states under both the House and Senate bills. The President has also mentioned his commitment to have “experts” participate in health care discussions.

Will the Feb. 25 discussion involve such “experts?” Will those experts include the actuaries at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who have determined that the both the House and Senate health care bill raise costs – just the opposite of their intended effect – and jeopardize seniors’ access to high-quality care by imposing massive Medicare cuts? Will those experts include the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which has stated that the GOP alternative would reduce premiums by up to 10 percent? Also, will Republicans be permitted to invite health care experts to participate? Finally, as you know, this is the first televised White House health care meeting involving the President since last March.

Many health care meetings of the closed-door variety have been held at the White House since then, including one where a sweetheart deal was worked out with union leaders. Will the special interest groups that the Obama Administration has cut deals with be included in this televised discussion?Of course, Americans have been dismayed by the fact that the President has broken his own pledge to hold televised health care talks. We can only hope this televised discussion is the beginning, not the end, of attempting to correct that mistake. Will the President require that any and all future health care discussions, including those held on Capitol Hill, meet this common-sense standard of transparency and openness?

Your answers to these critical questions will help determine whether this will be a truly open, bipartisan discussion or merely an intramural exercise before Democrats attempt to jam through a job-killing health care bill that the American people can’t afford and don’t support. ‘Bipartisanship’ is not writing proposals of your own behind closed doors, then unveiling them and demanding Republican support. Bipartisan ends require bipartisan means.These questions are also designed to try and make sense of the widening gap between the President’s rhetoric on bipartisanship and the reality. We cannot help but notice that each of the President’s recent bipartisan overtures has been coupled with harsh, misleading partisan attacks. For instance, the President decries Republican ‘obstruction’ when it was Republicans who first proposed bipartisan health care talks last May.

The President says Republicans are ‘sitting on the sidelines’ just days after holding up our health care alternative and reading from it word for word. The President has every right to use his bully pulpit as he sees fit, but this is the kind of credibility gap that has the American people so fed up with business as usual in Washington.We look forward to receiving your answers and continuing to discuss ways we can move forward in a bipartisan manner to address the challenges facing the American people.

Sincerely,

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH)

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)

Not bad. It’s got the recognition that “bipartisan” requires a bipartisan process, not just talks after the fact. It also has the recognition that Obama has spoken disingenuously, accusing the Republicans of having no plan just days after reading their plan. And, it has the recognition that the proposed plan does not address the alleged core justification of reducing costs, while the Republican counter-proposal does. But the core of the response seems to be “Why are you still trying to resurrect a bill that nearly everybody has said they don’t want?”

Me, I hope there’s no bipartisan bill, because the Democrats don’t really want to solve health care, they want government domination of the economy, and I don’t think there’s any valid compromise with that. Health care was not on anybody’s “most pressing issues” list before the Democrats ratcheted up the spin machine for their pet government takeover wedge issue; there is no health care crisis, and there never was. Improving American health care pretty much consists of fixing what Democrats have broken. Two of the chief reasons for high medical costs are government price-fixing and rampant fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, two of Democrats’ Great Society failures (and also the leading cause of our very real fiscal crisis.) Democrats financed by tort lawyers have been the chief impediment to tort reform, which is required in order to fix another main component in our outlandish medical costs, namely frivolous lawsuits. The remaining major cost-inflater is government regulation of insurance, also favored by Democrats. It appears to me that if the Democrats really want to fix health care in America, their best move would be to vanish.

But if the Democrats really want to fix health care using their favorite bludgeon, an oversized Nanny State, they could do it without a complete takeover. A comment I read at Blue Crab Boulevard yesterday pointed out that food stamps solved the food problem for the poor without disturbing the food industry, and health stamps could likewise solve the health insurance problem for the mythical 30 million uninsured in America without disturbing the medical industry. The bill to accomplish this would be about 30 pages long, and the cost would be less than 1/3 of the cost of the Democrats’ current monstrosity. There are sound reasons why this is not a good plan, but it’s far, far better than the Democrats’ current plan, and it’s been mentioned by lots of Democrats. That they’re not pursuing it is the proof that their goal is not solving health care, nor caring for the poor, but extending the reach of government.

Well, good for them. The New Orleans Saints finally won the Superbowl. They deserved it, too, for an excellent season and a game well played. Enjoy it, fellas.

A few comments, particularly about the commercials:

I saw, what, five commercials in a row in which the theme was “men don’t wear pants these days?” Hellooooooo!!! This has been true for decades. Are advertisers suddenly starting to wake up and smell the reverse sexism? They’ve decided that they want men’s dollars after all, and are not satisfied getting women’s dollars? Hilarious.

Audi’s “Green police.” Not funny. Not even a little. Don’t they know that that’s precisely what is planned for America? They positioned their car as Vichy French in the wake of a Gestapo-like Green Fist. What do they think we are, Europeans?

Go Daddy and their big hooters: yawn.

Most effective commercial by far: Google’s little French romance. I hate Google for their progressive activism, but doggone it, they’re competent. They’ve got good products and they know how to advertise them.

Funniest commercial by far: Punxutawney Polamalu. But I thought all the Bud Light commercials were well-conceived and well-executed, especially the Observatory Party.

The Who, like most aging rockers making good money by attempting to revisit the youth of their audiences, were sad, Pete Townsend especially. He looked like Grandpa Geahry, my ex-father-in-law. Great light show, though, and they can still play, esp the drummer. He was good.

This was the first game I watched in its entirety all season long. It was entertaining, but I don’t miss regular football. I did try to watch the Eagles take on the Cowboys at the end of the season (I’m from Philly recently, remember?) but it was too painful. I may watch the Eagles again after McNabb retires. He’s a far better athlete than I’ll ever be, he’s probably my brother in Christ, and he deserves to be playing in the NFL, but the Eagles will never be more than “kinda good” so long as he’s there. I hate to admit it, but that Bad Boy Terrell Owens wasn’t far wrong about him, and Rush Limbaugh was right on the frikkin’ money.

Barack Obama wants to host a televised meeting with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders to discuss health care reform. He made it clear that he does not intend to start over from scratch as the Republicans demanded. This means that he intends to correct the public relations train wreck this bill has become by embarrassing the Republicans, making them appear backwards and obstructionist in front of a television audience.

The title of this post comes from a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson entitled “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” recalling a famous massacre of British soldiers sent to make a gallant but impossible assault on an entrenched position during the Crimean War, in 1854. I used it because it would be suicide for the Republicans to attend this meeting, which is being called solely for the purpose of embarrassing them. The boys over at Blue Crab Boulevard used “The Little Big Horn,” a reference more accessible to 21st century Americans, but we’re saying the same thing.

This is clearly a follow-up on the strategy pursued last week, when the President brazenly accused Republicans at their retreat of creating the impasse that he, himself created by bullying, extremism, and Chicago-style politics. Democrats have been uniformly coached to proclaim total victory, and their echo chamber is in full throat.

I’m certain the Republicans know they’re being invited to an ambush. I’m not certain they’ll discover what they consider an acceptable strategy to avoid it.

It would be good if they could simply refuse to act in a bipartisan manner, but they can’t. The problem is that bipartisanship is like Mom: in politics, there’s no such thing as a bad one.

But bipartisanship is not going to fix what’s wrong with the health care bill. The dollar is in crisis because of grotesquely irresponsible spending; spending a single, red cent on any new program at this moment, no matter how good the program is, is criminal. Subsuming health care into a government program is not a good program, no matter how well crafted. This particular bill is not well crafted. Three strikes.

If I were among the Republican delegation, I might refuse the meeting with a statement like this:

“Though they promised cooperation and transparency, the Democrats crafted this bill themselves, in secluded rooms behind closed doors, in the dark of night. This is The Secret Bill. Now that they wrote it in the dark, they want to discuss The Secret Bill openly with us, and they want to call this bipartisanship. Bipartisanship would be allowing us to participate in the construction of a bill from the start. We’re not going to come to discuss The Secret One, in which we had no part. Mr. President, if you really want to reach across the aisle, prove it by allowing us to participate in writing a new bill.”

Pray, and hold your breath. This is the President’s last gasp at saving the health care bill, a bill that very badly needs to die, be buried, and be forgotten. If the Republicans handle it correctly, it’s dead. If they don’t, God help us.

My, my, the things that excite Democrats…

Remember when it was grotesquely irresponsible that the President had spent 7 minutes reading My Pet Goat to an elementary school classroom? Remember when it was the destruction of the republic that some ordinary citizens got angry at their US Representative at a rigged town hall meeting?

Know what it is tonight? That huge block of articles in the Memorandum.com display on the right is leftists screeching like agitated monkeys over … drum roll, please… Sarah Palin scratching crib notes in pen in the palm of her hand.

Let me repeat that. Democrats believe it constitutes a huge embarrassment to the Republican party and to conservatives generally that at a Tea Party convention, the keynote speaker reminded herself which talking points to emphasize during the question-and-answer session by writing them on her hand.

Meanwhile, the Democratic President, the Democratic Speaker of the House, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, the Democratic Attorney General, and the Democratic Treasury Secretary all made Judicial Watch’s Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians list for 2009. And we’re supposed to be embarrassed over crib notes.

What’s interesting is the reason we’re supposed to be embarrassed. To Democrats, appearance is everything. These are people to whom life consists of appearing to be good, appearing to be intelligent, appearing to be hip, appearing to be professional, and so forth. They prop up their egos by laughing at those who don’t look as sophisticated, intellectual, or moral as they look, like frightened 7th graders scrambling for validation. They have no notion of real value, only of appearance. Thus, when a Republican politician does something so pedestrian as to write notes on her hand, and especially if it’s the incompetent and incurious Sarah Palin, they collapse into paroxysms of forced hilarity, back-slapping each other over how dorky those Republicans are. It proves to these Democrats how sophisticated and in they are. Because none of their politicians write notes on their hands, you see. They’re not dumm like Republicans.

And in order to sound like something other than vicious, frightened 7th graders, they make up important-sounding reasons why this is really important, and why they were not similarly derisive when candidate Obama wouldn’t leave the teleprompter behind when talking to 1st graders, or avoided questions for 9 months so he wouldn’t embarrass himself. Listen to Stefan Serucek at Huffington Post:

The takeaway is that this presidential contender apparently can’t remember her supposed core principles and needs a cheat-sheet when simply asked about her beliefs.

Um… no. Those are not core principles, boys, those are talking points. Oh, right, Democrats’ core principles are talking points. Sorry. I guess there’s no point trying to explain the difference.

Ann Althouse has the right idea: she’s calling for photoshopped palm notes to highlight the sheer stupidity of making an issue out of this. I’d make one of Joe Biden’s hand with the notes “breathe in” and “breathe out” on his palm if I had the skills.

I wrote at length about the danger of vanity that tempts the intellectual elite in America back in October of 2008. If you want my serious examination, go ahead and look backwards. Over this current flap, though… I genuinely feel sad for the Democrats.

One of my readers posted several reviews of Avatar in response to my posting RedLetterMedia’s slasher review yesterday (thanks, dullhammer), and one of them struck me as crucial to the cultural debate. In it, Jonah Goldberg finally, finally articulates something that I knew but could not prove — that at its core, what we incorrectly call “liberalism” in America is actually anti-Christianity. The culture war is a religious war.

The central thesis of Goldberg’s review was the starkly religious tone of the culturally-normal “noble savage” message of the film:

…the most relevant point was raised by John Podhoretz in the Weekly Standard. Cameron wrote “Avatar,” says Podhoretz, “not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people.”

What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.

Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.

I’m certainly one of those cranky right-wingers, though I probably enjoyed the movie as cinematic escapism as much as the next guy.

But what I find interesting about the film is how what is “pleasing to the most people” is so unapologetically religious.

He then proceeds, unfortunately, to base his opinion on a recent book by one Nicholas Wade entitled The Faith Instinct, in which the author posits that human beings are hard-wired to believe religiously, because believing confers real survival value to a social group that natural selection preserves. I find Wade’s thesis half-right, but silly and insulting. Yes, religion is universal human behavior, and yes, it confers survival value, but approaching religion as a purely sociological thing implies that it’s not truly important, merely a social characteristic of the animal. Furthermore, it seems singularly unlikely that real survival value might be conferred by an imaginary belief; if religion does confer survival value (and it clearly does,) that would suggest that its core assertions conform better than atheism’s to the universe that is. Reviews of the book over at Amazon.com confirm that it’s mostly cultural socio-babble not really rooted in any sort of genuine research.

However, Wade’s half-baked explanation is peripheral to Goldberg’s core argument. The point is that the core of the culture war is a centuries-long wrestling match between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Martin Luther. This explains the clearly religious nature of so much of what leftists say as well as their stubborn refusal to allow facts to sway their preconceptions; they behave like True Believers because they are True Believers. It also explains why it is that so many leftist initiatives seem aimed at the heart of some core, Christian concept, like the modern effort to unmake the nuclear family, to regard human beings as something far less than the Crown of Creation, to make Caucasian, Christian Europe into The Devil, or to selectively sequester Christianity from the public square.

This point sits at the core of Goldberg’s interesting book, Liberal Fascism. It’s not the greatest book ever written, but it does lay out the religious roots and branches of American progressivism pretty clearly. Liberal Fascism actually accomplishes what I had hoped that Ann Coulter’s Godless would do — explore the religion of progressivism. I recommend the book, not as a means of calling leftists Hitlerian (Goldberg becomes almost tiresome in the book in his repeated efforts to prevent people from doing this,) but as a means to understanding how modern liberalism is the direct descendant of religious social meddling like Prohibition. His history is robust and sound.

It’s true that many conservatives are not religious, and that some liberals are. That’s incidental; the ideas that lie at the root of both conservatism and liberalism are religious ideas, whether the current adherents recognize them or not. Modern conservatism represents the historical stream of Protestant thought. Modern progressivism represents the historical stream of Rousseauian thought, which is why we’re still watching films touting the myth of the Noble Savage.

It’s also true that Rousseau and his stepchildren mostly don’t believe in God, and many of them would insist that that means they’re not religious, but rather anti-religious. That’s like saying that when they say it’s sunny outside, they’re not talking about the weather, but about the absence of weather. Progressives hold deeply-felt presumptions about the nature of the universe in a dogmatic manner, and those notions inform their reasoning in systematic ways regarding how humans should live. If it waddles like religion, and quacks like religion, it’s religion.

Here’s a review of James Cameron’s film, Avatar, that’s more worthwhile than the film itself in my humble opinion. It’s 10 minutes long, and it’s just part 1 of 2, but seriously, this is entertaining. Content warning, though; R-rated for language and a few, grisly references to the reviewer’s own, psychopathic crimes. It’s his schtick.

The best spot in the entire review starts at 1:22, with “my answering machine.”

Here’s the link to Part 2.

If you have not discovered RedLetterMedia yet, consider this a long-overdue introduction. This guy postures as some old, creepy, half-educated psychopath who happens to like sci-fi-ish films, but he’s actually a guy who knows the film industry pretty doggone well, and his video editing skills are first-rate. His 7-installment review of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace was a primer on story and plot construction. If you haven’t seen that yet, I do recommend that you treat yourself, so here’s a link to the first installment. But I’ll warn you: 7 10-minute sessions = 70 minutes of film, and it’s R-rated like this is, for the same reasons. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As to Avatar, I think I’ll pass. I don’t care how sweet the special effects are, if I listen to one more ball-numbing recitation of how awful white men, industrial society, and greedy corporations are, I may have to go Rambo on Massachusetts. I think my IQ drops 1.3% every time I watch that drivel from another neo-Marxist Hollywood capitalist (how do they manage being both?) Doesn’t it tell these self-righteous Church Ladies something that in order to get a society to swallow their “truth,” they have to de-educate people to the point of not being able to follow the directions on a frakkin’ can of soup????

The title of this post comes from a comment at the end of part 2 of the review that I regard as particularly appropriate: if you’re one of those who are distressed because Pandora is not a real place and you can’t go there, please — take your Prozac, get back to your toll booth, and stop giving those Hollywood snake-oil salesmen your money. I promise you’ll be happier.

I’ve been a bit heavy lately, so here’s something positive.

Trekkies recall Chief Engineer Scott altering history by revealing the formula for transparent aluminum to a 20th-century engineer. But real, modern innovation has produced something even better for certain applications: spray-on glass, about 30 molecules thick. That’s 1/500 of the thickness of a human hair, according to the UK Telegraph.

No, you can’t build a whale aquarium in a Klingon starship with it. But it promises to revolutionize institutional sterilization and other cleaning-related applications.

You see, when glass is that thin, it’s flexible, and it breathes, but it still retains the slickness and water resistance of glass. Also, bacteria don’t grow on it; according to the manufacturer, microbes have difficulty dividing on the surface. So, you can spray it onto a food preparation surface — butcher block or hard metal — and you have a surface that remains bacteria-free. Tests have shown that such a surface with this nano-thin, glass coating is more sanitary after merely being flushed with hot water than a comparable, non-treated surface that’s been scrubbed with bleach. And since it breathes, it can be sprayed on seeds or growing plants, making them resistant to mildew and fungus; it’s been tested in vineyards.

It’s stable and non-toxic, being made out of almost pure silicon dioxide — quartz sand. A little water or alcohol gets added as a carrier, so it can be sprayed on. Quantum forces cause the nano-glass to adhere to whatever it’s sprayed on, so you only have to treat surfaces once a year.

Applications abound. Bathroom surfaces. Kitchen surfaces. Medical equipment. Catheters, bandages, and medical implants. Construction materials; termites won’t eat wood treated with this stuff. Seeds. Cutting boards. Monuments; a thin coat slows down natural weathering. Even clothing; since glass is flexible at this thickness, you can treat a silk blouse, and then pour wine over it, and the wine will wipe right off.

The product was invented in Turkey, but a privately-owned German company named Nanopool holds the patent. We can expect these folks to get rich, as it’s clear that you’ll soon be seeing… er, not seeing… this product everywhere.

I’m officially creating a new political term today: Debt Reduction.

Yeah, I know it’s not original. But we need to start saying it, and meaning it.

The President is calling for a Spending Freeze, in a manner that nearly everybody recognizes as a meaningless facade. Rasmussen’s latest poll indicates that fewer than 10% of Americans believe that the spending freeze called for in the President’s State of the Union address will actually reduce the deficit a significant amount. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a poll showing greater disbelief from the American people on any topic.

But the act of actually calling for the freeze indicates that the President’s focus group watchers know that the people want somehow to reduce these deficits dramatically.

Notice that last phrase: “reduce these deficits.” The Obama administration claims to be pursuing the goal of reducing the deficits to only 3% of Gross Domestic Product by 2015. Is that a suitable goal? Not at all: with the US GDP hovering a bit over $14 trillion, what it means is that when the administration reaches its goal, we’ll only be adding another $420 billion in new debt every year. I’ll repeat that: when Obama reaches the place where he considers the US to be acting responsibly, we will be adding another $420 billion to the national debt — every year.

Meanwhile, the current budget, assuming the President is not being overly optimistic about tax revenues (which we all know he is,) calls for a deficit equal to 10.6% of GDP. Again, let me repeat that: the amount that the government will be spending beyond what the government will receive in revenue is greater than 10% of what the entire nation will produce this year.

Who says spending is out of control?

It’s time to revisit the difference between a deficit and a debt. Because we can’t afford to aim at deficit reduction sometime in the future. If the US economy is to survive as a first world economy, we have to aim for debt reduction, and that right soon.

A deficit occurs when you spend more money than you make in a given year. I earn $50,000 a year (hypothetically): I actually spend $52,000 in that year. Where does the extra $2,000 come from? Well, I put it on a credit card. At the end of the year, I owe the credit card company $2,000. The deficit is $2,000, the debt is also $2,000.

Then I do it again: the next year, I earn $50,000, but spend $52,000. I borrow another $2,000 from the same credit card company. The deficit is $2,000, but now (because I have not paid off the debt from last year) the total debt is $4,000. “Deficit” refers to yearly budget figures; “debt” refers to what we owe overall.

Every year I do this again, I maintain a deficit of $2,000, but my debt keeps getting deeper and deeper. And because we all know from experience that debt is not free, the amount of my $50,000 that I have to spend just to keep the credit card company from hounding me with collection calls keeps getting larger.

This is the current state of the US federal government, the reason why the Chinese are starting to bail on Treasury bills, and why interest rates are starting to climb. I wrote about it back in December, noting that we’re quickly approaching the point where the interest to service the national debt will exceed all discretionary, non-military spending. That’s the built-in, annual deficit. Meanwhile, the Senate has just raised the debt ceiling for the US another $2 trillion, to $14.3 trillion. Our total debt is approaching the nation’s total production, and we’re now adding nearly $2 trillion in new debt every year.

If my hypothetical family had been spending so irresponsibly that I was approaching credit card debt equal to my annual income, the solution would be plain and dramatic: I would need to stop spending immediately, and go into a radical program of debt reduction. I would have to set up a budget on which I was living on considerably less than my $50,000 annual income — making lifestyle choices that made that possible, like cutting out all entertainment expenditures, eating beans and rice instead of steak and shrimp, and patching clothes when they wore out — and aggressively pay down the credit card debt until it reached zero.

To speak of shaving the size of the federal deficit at this moment would be like my hypothetical family agreeing to put only $1,750 dollars onto the credit card this year, instead of $2,000 . (To speak of subsuming 1/7 of the US economy for health care at this moment is like that family trying to purchase a five-million-dollar yacht. It’s criminal.) We do not need to gradually reduce the deficit. We need to dramatically and immediately move to reduce the debt.

This means moving immediately to solve Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and federal pensions in such a way as to move all four onto actuarially sound financial footing. This means cutting benefits. Sorry, that’s a fact.

I detested President Clinton for his routine flouting of the law and his narcissism; but the greatest crime of the Clinton administration was not undermining citizens’ legitimate lawsuits, nor was it putting US policy up for sale. His greatest crime was squandering an opportunity to solve the approaching fiscal bomb of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He had a good economy, and he was popular; the political times were ripe for making Social Security partly private (as all European socialist nations have done) and trimming Medicare and Medicaid to conform to the real world. Instead, he chose to play accounting tricks to make the good economic times seem better than they were and secure his legacy in the history books.

But the problem is not just Clinton’s: Medicare and Medicaid date from Johnson’s Great Society, Social Security from the New Deal, and no administration since, Democrat or Republican, has addressed the obvious actuarial imbalance in those programs. It was plain that these programs could not continue as they were, but nobody did anything about them. George W. Bush made a half-hearted wave in the direction of solving Social Security, but surrendered without a fight in the face of a Democratic party public relations onslaught, even though he was a second-term President with nothing to lose. And today, with the Democrats playing Russian Roulette with $2 trillion annual deficits, Republicans are merely squawking about possible tax increases.

I’ve got bad news: if the US is ever going to return to fiscal sanity, some tax increases will have to happen. I’m sorry, but it’s a fact.

But saying so is not enough, not by 1/10. The first, second, third, sixteenth, and three hundredth steps have to be hard, unyielding, persistent cutting of federal spending — and that means persistent reduction in federal power. We must declare full-out war against government spending. Everything has to be cut. Everything. Every program you like has to be reduced. Unnecessary departments have to be eliminated. Mandates have to be dismantled. Projects spanning multiple presidential administrations need to be established to seek out, examine, and ultimate eliminate 9/10 of the nonsense currently performed by the federal government. We have to agree to give up the big items. Including reductions in the military. There, I said it.

Beans and rice instead of steak and shrimp — for the rest of our lives, and then some. We’ve got $12 trillion to pay back. That’s reality. There is no other way.

And fellow Boomers, we’ve had a nice run, but it’s time to pay the piper. Our ancestors paid hard prices to rescue the nation from danger in the past, fought wars and suffered depressions and so forth. It’s our turn. If the Obama administration forced us to accept health care rationing while pretending to serve us, that would be tyranny. But we can choose to cut our own benefits willingly, for the benefit of our children. Maybe we didn’t break it, but we enjoyed it, it’s our job to fix it — and if we do it willingly, it’s not tyranny.

If the Tea Party movement, currently more popular than either Democrats or Republicans, is to produce anything of value, it will have to be this: elect one Representative after another, and one Senator after another, who pledges to cut into government spending enough to reduce the debt, not just the deficit. And then, hold them accountable for doing so, and — this part is crucial — not go berserk and hand the government over to tax-and-spend Democrats every time a Congress acts responsibly and cuts some program we like. Let’s be adults.

It’s either that, or get used to living in Argentina. ‘Cause that’s what the US is going to become if we don’t start reducing the debt.

From the Politico:

President Barack Obama’s new $3.83 trillion budget paints a bleak landscape of record deficits aggravated by the economy and wars overseas and now threatening to pull down his top legislative domestic priority—health care reform

Released to Congress Monday morning, the president’s spending plan anticipates $5.08 trillion in deficits over the next five years and seems almost a cry for help in the face of what he sees as intransigent Republican opposition.

Recite with me the lesson we all learned in 7th grade civics: “Congress holds the purse strings.” The President proposes, but it’s Congress that ultimately spends the money. The Democrats, who took over Congress in January of 2007, have been spending without restraint ever since, without the slightest mention of where the money would come from. They produced record deficits during the last two years of the Bush administration, and then, with a Democratic President who loved spending even more, quadrupled the largest Bush deficit in a single month, and have been burning through cash at an earth-record-shattering rate.

In this setting, for the President and Congress to be proposing absorbing 1/7 of the US economy while pretending that it would be revenue-neutral to do it, constitutes criminal negligence. For the President to be taking over huge business enterprises and infusing them with cash, constitutes criminal negligence. They should be impeached. I’m not kidding.

Ratcheting up spending was Phase One. Now get a load of Phase Two, from today’s New York Times:

[The President] said that his proposal to freeze many domestic programs for three years as a down payment involves “hard choices and painful tradeoffs not seen in Washington for many years.” Yet with the debt accumulated from the deficits of the past decade, he acknowledged, “our fiscal situation remains unacceptable.”

So he will ask a yet-to-be-named bipartisan commission to recommend by December a plan to balance the operating budget by fiscal year 2015, not counting the growing payments on the country’s amassed debt. Congressional leaders have committed to hold a vote on whatever plan such a commission produces.

Having forced spending dramatically upward, they now propose to call themselves “responsible” for freezing domestic spending at the newer, higher level. They will proceed to tell us that taxes have to rise dramatically, and that that is the only responsible approach to restoring fiscal sanity. Welcome to the new, European-style socialist America.

We refuse to learn the lesson: however genteel and caring programs like Medicaid and Social Security sound, even the richest nation in the history of the planet cannot ultimately afford them. Life is hard, and requires of us measures to provide for ourselves. Attempts by the government to shield citizens from the ordinary hardships of life and produce Utopia will always founder on the rocks of reality: there is not enough money in the world to buy complete protection. Ultimately. to balance the budget and save the dollar, taxes will have to be raised — but ultimately, benefits will have to be cut, and government be reduced to manageable size. Obama and the Democrats hope we never think of the latter, but that’s the only avenue that will restore fiscal sanity. Big government was the cause; little government is therefore the cure.

All I can say is, invest in hard currency, and learn to garden. There is no way that the dollar can sustain this sort of irresponsible spending; the collapse is coming very soon. And buy firearms and ammunition, because you’re probably going to have to defend your garden from thieves. Welcome to the inevitable outcome of socialist policies.

Prominent on the web today is this instance of “gotcha” played by Arianna Huffington at the expense of Roger Ailes, in which Huffington gets caught in her own trap by a well-prepared Ailes. Huffington was pretending to be serious when reciting one of the left’s favorite slurs, the silly imagination that when a conservative offers analysis of the danger posed by a leftist policy, it’s “inciting the nation” and engaging in “the politics of paranoia.” Of course, far more vicious assaults from the left are completely reasonable. Ailes deftly posits the comparison, leaving Arianna scrambling for lost legitimacy. Listen:

It’s got enough punch that Huffington Post today is featuring attempts to prove that Ailes was mistaken, focusing on a bit of hyperbole in one of Beck’s diatribes. Absent from their analysis is any mention of similar hyperbole regularly enjoyed by Huffington’s readers but aimed in the other direction.

That such hyperbole is common has been established long ago, and is hardly debatable. Media Research Center gathered a few instances together back in 2007: guests at Huffpo, largely well-known actors and politicians, calling the Vice President a “terrorist” and a “lying, thieving whore,” calling the President “human scum” and his followers “flag-sucking half-wits,” accusing Americans of “loving hate” and failing the test of humanity for buying Ann Coulter’s books. Camera.org (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) produced a report last year documenting widespread anti-Semitism among Huffpo’s commenters and authors. And then, there’s the instance Ailes quoted regarding himself: San Francisco Examiner columnist Bill Mann saying Ailes had “a face like a clenched fist,” that Ailes has “done more to spread fear and hatred in this country than anyone since Joe McCarthy,” and that Fox News “is a tumor on the body politic.” Huffington, who hosts what is arguably the least fervid of leftist talk sites, is nonetheless hurling stones from a glass house when she accuses another commentator of “inciting Americans” with “politics of paranoia.”

Arianna’s spur-of-the-moment defense for this was that HuffPo does not employ the people who are saying such things. As is invariably the case when leftists attempt to draw distinctions to defend their rampaging hypocrisies, it’s a distinction without substance: it’s all vicious paranoia, and she publishes it. Apparently Ms. Huffington thinks that “politics of paranoia” is perfectly acceptable so long as one’s business model includes invited guests rather than paid employees. Fine: I’ll gladly go onto Fox for free and tell the world what Glen Beck is getting paid so handsomely to tell it. I’m sure that would satisfy Arianna.

What Huffington is doing is simply extending the left’s ongoing war against conservative media. The end result of it will be laws outlawing conservative talk if the left ever gets its way. But it’s “paranoia” of me to say so, right? Only leftist warnings against the outcomes of conservative policies are permitted. We have to silence Glen Beck. For the children. To save the planet. To protect civil discourse. Because leftists are the very apex of civil discourse. Arianna says so.