I've stated before that if forced to choose I'd take the excesses of a conservative agenda over the excesses of a liberal one because the liberal one leads to enfeeblement - I think it's much easier to step back from the problems arising from the exercise of strength than to pull oneself out of the mud of an encroaching weakness. I always believed history would come to judge Obama a worse president than Bush - but even I'm shocked at how quickly Obama is demonstrating the truth behind my hypothetical choice. A rise in debt and attending rise in taxes that will rationalize an ideologically driven redistribution of wealth that is entirely un-American, a phony arms control agreement with Russia that does nothing at all but serve Russia's interests at America's expense, a completely idiotic, delusional and astoundingly arrogant approach to Israel that is sowing the seeds for chaos down the road, and an almost incomprehensible lassitude when it comes to Iran that suggests that Obama is either completely uninterested in complex foreign policy issues, is incapable of understanding why Iran getting the bomb will almost certainly lead to bad things, or is so confounded by his governing ideology that that forest will not admit to its trees, if I may be allowed the beggaring an an old adage.

update: so of course Obama heads to Afghanistan. Should have seen that one coming - maybe just too obvious for comment: move the country way to the left and then go visit the troops and give meaningless speech as if that makes up for it. No doubt there are a lot of voters out there who fall for shit like this - his poll numbers are still mediocre but just jumped up 5% - I mean, who the fuck are these people? - is this the ADD demographic? Jesus. Sure, politicians are in the business of selling crap to gullible consumers - but I don't think someone using the presidency as if it's just another political sell job does anyone any favours - and that's all I get from Obama, he's in a constant self promotion mode for reasons which are all about his ego or his ideology, and often there's no light between those things - hell, the hagiography demonstrates that - possibly I'm just spewing bile from my own little ideologically jaundiced cloud - but I look at Obama's first year and all I see is failure on all the big issues - I don't understand what people are looking at who see something else - but of course according to Frank Rich at the Times that's because I'm a racist - and maybe that's what it's about, that such profound idiocy roused in defense of Obama is just so galling it's hard to not feel an abject cynicism - or maybe it's the thought that there's enough voters out there that will be so unwilling to think negative thoughts about the first black president that he's gonna get away with some real bad shit - and I don't know how anyone looks at that health care reform bills and doesn't see disaster - hell, Warren Buffet, who signed on at the beginning with Obama as an informal financial adviser said a month ago that we should scrap the bill, start over, make reasonable, incremental changes because the economy is just too weak to be fucking around with another sprawling, entirely unpredictable entitlement - but I guess Warren Buffet's a racist, right? That's gotta be it.

"... how China does and will continue to exploit our 'endeavors' and problematic commitments to 'vital interests' in the Mideast is certainly a challenging subject for debate, but for the nonce I'll just quibble with this tendentious sentence of yours:

That's not only because the U.S. government financed the war with borrowings from China, but also because while we were distracted, Beijing has been a busy bee diplomatically, especially in East Asia.

One, I hope you feel the same disgust for Obama's efforts to increase our indebtedness to the Middle Kingdom - his fondness for unfunded entitlements and the torpidity of the welfare state will do more to drive us into insolvency than Bush's 'freedom' agenda. And two, do you really believe China would be doing anything differently if we hadn't gone into Iraq? The Mideast is in play for China just as it was for the USSR - the only thing that would have altered that dynamic in a positive way for us is if the war had been prosecuted with more 'efficiency' - not going in may have shuffled the deck but the cards would remain largely the same, except that instead of dealing with political instability in Iraq we'd be caught up in the absurdist theater of Saddam and Sons - certainly Iran would still be pursuing the bomb.

And this whole notion of America being 'distracted' is nonsense - if America cannot juggle several balls at once then it's no longer a super power, and if one wants to have that argument, fine - but you don't seem to be arguing that. The charge of being 'distracted' has turned into another empty cliche the left likes to roll out when it's Bush bashing time..."

"... I've made this point before with you and will make it again: America can survive looking unjust, cruel, overly aggressive - indeed, these things can prove serviceable in wartime, certainly Lincoln seemed to think so, and FDR - our commitment to the rights of individuals and to freedom pulls us back from any abyss we find ourselves tempted by. What is much more injurious and worrisome for a great power is to appear weak - we cannot afford to look weak, the consequences of that will prove much more dire than Cheney's brief flirtation with putative torture. This liberal obsession with Bush era excesses does nothing but make us look weak, besotted by a whining angst and whimpers of conscience. I mean, I assume Mr Ricks, given your field of interest, you're a student of history - show me the great power that has prospered governed by such a cloying and sentimental display of sympathetic weakness. They don't exist, and for a very good reason.

Bush made a mistake - big surprise. Get over it..."

Rather startling the turn around - suddenly Obama has gone from lame duck to ushering in a liberal golden age with the cackling face-lifted Pelosi riding shot gun - all because of the passage of a deeply flawed health care bill by means of an unprecedented abuse of the legislative system and against the will of public opinion. People and pundits are predicting the end of the republican party and the end of America for that matter [well, righties are; lefties can't stop giggling so taken they are with themselves] - all a bit hysterical it seems, no?. True, if Americans do not send a stern message of disapproval to democrats in November that will probably be a bad thing - if only because campaigning against what has happened here should be so easy that if republicans can't pull it off that will be a clear indication that something is very wrong, either with the republican party in particular or the country in general. And granted, the democrats have pursued a far left agenda as if they literally disdained bipartisanship and that could poison the political waters for a generation leading to god knows what aberrations and abominations - the democrats have lowered the bar and pushed through lousy legislation against the public will, what's to stop them from doing it again if they don't pay a price in November? Or, on the other hand, you could see manifestation of the dreaded cascading ping pong effect of idealogical over reactions: Clinton leads to Bush leads to Obama leads to... Palin?

But maybe Sarah can be a new Reagan to Obama's Carter - hard to believe that, very hard, in fact nigh impossible - still, Ronnie too was underestimated, scorned by the left wing MSM and intelligentsia as a light weight - and like Sarah he had a humble way of connecting to a demographic that toils away far beyond the reaches of Obama's honeyed eloquence - and, again like Sarah, he had a simple message: big government weakens America. It's a message that sells, especially if, as with Carter, a foreign policy disaster lends credence to the impression.

"... to put things simply, it occurs to me that those who support and cheer Obama and his shrew familiar Pelosi's successful shoe-horning through congress of a bloated and ruinous health care bill do so because they lack the ability to place it in the proper historical context... these people seem to think it a noble cause for a great power to bankrupt itself by promoting egalitarianism and a sentimental concern for the poor and needy... but great powers are first and foremost about power, and that is always a reflection of economic vigour and military strength which themselves are a reflection or manifestation of an underlying culture that throughout the history of great powers has seldom, in fact never been about extolling the putative virtues of social welfareism, regardless of certain august states, namely the USSR and Maoist China, having claimed a motherly care for the people as a governing ethos... in short, liberals mistake the watery ideals they hold dear as the cause of indulgent circumstances rather than the mere byproduct of darker forces not nearly so forgiving or enlightened... they either fail to understand that America cannot be defined by an ill fitting emotional construct of sympathy and remain powerful or they do understand but feel so threatened and marginalized by this coarse reality that they long for its decline and are vain enough to believe that there are not after all more things in heaven and earth than be dreamt of in their philosophy..."

Stanford law professor McConnell makes this point, similar to query I made few days ago:

One thing is sure: To proceed in this way creates an unnecessary risk that the legislation will be invalidated for violation of Article I, Section 7. Will wavering House members want to use this procedure when there is a nontrivial probability that the courts will render their political sacrifice wasted effort? To hazard that risk, the House leadership must have a powerful motive to avoid a straightforward vote.

If passage of this bill is dependent on a dubious constitutionality [a reality borne out by fact that even left leaning academics have noticed the dark constitutional clouds hanging over it] then why risk it? Where's the logic to this? I take it McConnell is suggesting the bill is so flawed that even though democrats control congress the only way to get it passed is through less than honest means - I guess the logic being that Obama has invested so much in this nonsense that to not pass something now would drive his administration into lame duck status with three years still remaining in his term ergo, if his presidency is toast anyway, might as well fulfill, even if only partially, one long cherished liberal dream, the thinking being that once in place you'll never get rid of it and therefore it amounts to a crucial first step in the long march towards socialized medicine and the consequent decline [or transcendence as liberals would have it] of America into a passive, European styled tax heavy social welfare ladened bureaucracy. Or something like that.

If true it suggests that Washington is an even bigger mess than one was already quite willing to believe and that democrats are not only benighted ideologues, they're incompetent benighted ideologues - a characterization that can really work against you if you happen to be up for re-election. No doubt though they're sustained by the conviction, like all zealots and true believers, that they're on the right side of history and their efforts and sacrifices will eventually be deemed glorious. I'm sure Trotsky was thinking similar thoughts just before Stalin's axe came crashing through his brain.

[update: democrats abandon controversial 'deem and pass' tactic. So much for that. They just come to their senses? Classic bait and switch trickery? Or they feel they now have the votes so tricks are not necessary? And if that's the case, what happened to change things - in other words, whose been promised what?

From Yuval Levin over at National Review:

We are in the fiscal mess we’re in because again and again our leaders (Republicans and Democrats alike) have failed to find the political courage to fix our entitlement system. That won’t change with this bill. What will change is that the problem will be made much worse, and the means available to fix it in the future will be made fewer and more difficult and costly to employ.

This seems to me the one unassailable negative to the health care shite the democrats are pushing through: even if one gives the bill the benefit of the doubt and allows for all the highly improbable rosy scenarios to actually play out as promoted resulting in a 'deficit neutral' end product, you're still left with an expensive new entitlement that does nothing to improve the fiscal mess but rather makes it worse by sucking up tax increases that could have been used for debt reduction. In short, the very best you can say of this thing is it will produce a marginal increase in access to health care, possibly a marginal reduction in insurance premiums, possibly no dramatic change in quality of care but more likely a decline there, all bought at the expense of making it much, much more difficult to tackle the fiscal crisis sitting on the US balance sheet. And that's the best you can say about it - which is why I maintain [although I'm still the only one harping on this which makes me think maybe I've gone a bit silly] that Obama has no intention of running for a second term.

I see Peggy Noonan in the WSJ takes Obama to task for what she calls his growing tendency to be evasive to the point of dishonesty - that he disingenuously weaves his statements with a surplus of words that lead nowhere. But I believe it was I who pointed out two or three years ago to a callow group of nascent Obama acolytes during an interview he was meandering through that if you pay close attention you'll notice that when asked a probing question he'll circle it with a string of prolix, protracted, ponderous and putatively eloquent sentences that seem to promise much but never once come close to actually offering an answer. Glad to see the pundits are catching up to me.

Hmmn... in China American tech companies can staff themselves with qualified engineers for about 750/month and there's an unending stream of them pouring out of Chinese universities - compare that to what, 9, 10 thousand/month in the States where there's not enough of them so staffing depends on immigration? In China these companies are also favoured with huge tax breaks, subsidies for any number of things, low construction costs, long term leases on property at ridiculously low rates - and what do the Chinese want in return, aside from the obvious economic boon? The technology. Of course, these migrating companies resist, more or less, install anti-theft procedures and protocols etc etc - but, really, how long can that last? And twenty years from now China has the factories, the skilled work force, the technology - don't need the States anymore, except as consumers, but what is a consumer that spends its life working at Walmart really worth come the end of the day? Besides, China has a billion potential consumers of its own just roiling about out there so maybe not even that's true. So then what?

I really have a hard time seeing how this all works out - granted, the issues are complex and would probably take a gifted person replete with the necessary knowledge and wisdom to hazard a credible guess - but regardless - instincts count for something and I just don't see how this all works out. Thank god though that the Obama administration spent its first year in office mucking about with a health insurance reform bill that will make America less competitive and more indebted to the Chinese. Great work people. But hey, as long as Nancy Pelosi and the membership of SAG are happy, how can things possibly go wrong?

[to counter my despair, popular academic and apparent hopeless optimist Joel Kotkin has this to say: 

“The America of 2050 may not stride the world like a hegemonic giant, but it will evolve into the one truly transcendent superpower in terms of society, technology and culture,” Mr. Kotkin gushes. “Its greatest power will be its identification with notions of personal liberty, constitutional protections and universalism.”

Given the viral finger-pointing and hand-wringing over what’s seen as America’s decline these days, Mr. Kotkin’s book provides a timely and welcome — if sometimes Panglossian — antidote. He builds his case for the prevalence of American exceptionalism on the nation’s adaptability, ingenuity, vast land and other resources and religiosity (and also on a less convincing argument that the country has rebounded before).

Those singularly American virtues collectively endow the country with sokojikara — the Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya’s description of “a reserve power that allows it to overcome both the inadequacies of its leaders and the foibles of its citizens.”

If that remarkable reserve appears to be depleted these days, Mr. Kotkin, a distinguished presidential fellow at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and a columnist for Forbes magazine, projects a resurgence in the next four decades — if the nation can overcome its ennui. Meanwhile, he asserts, China is aging more rapidly and its population may begin to decline before mid-century, and India remains impoverished and divided...]

"... what exactly is it convinces us that Muslims don't think of democracy as simply another way of imposing a theocratic based autocracy? Our own history suggests democracy is the end product of a process of liberalization and a respect for the rights of man, not the source of it. If we go back to the beginning, although hardly a perfect illustration, but Athens was democratic, as far they understood it, before it was a democracy, as far as they understood it. And on an entirely unrelated but entirely related subject, surely it has occurred to someone who matters that Arabs want us involved, committed to peace between Israel and the Palestinians because they know these efforts can never succeed and therefore they always have some sin against the glories of Islam to hold over our infidel heads. This can't possibly be a novel idea... yet we continually act as if no one's thought of it before..."