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pathology_doc... but here are two interesting morsels for the information of US voters.
1.
November 1, 2008
The End of Journalism
In 2008, journalism died and advocacy media took its place.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnible. Dan Rather’s career imploded when he knowingly promulgated a forged document that impugned the service record of George W. Bush. We’ve known for a long time — from various polling, and records of political donations of journalists themselves, as well as surveys of public perceptions — that the vast majority of journalists identify themselves as Democratic, and liberal in particular.
Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people. Here were four areas of national interest that were largely ignored.
Campaign Financing
For years an axiom of the liberal establishment was the need for public campaign financing — and the corrosive role of private money in poisoning the election process. The most prominent Republican who crossed party lines to ensure the passage of national public campaign financing was John McCain — a maverick stance that cost him dearly among conservatives who resented bitterly federal interference in political expression.
In contrast, Barack Obama, remember, promised that he would accept both public funding and the limitations that went along with it, and would “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” Then in June 2008, Obama abruptly reneged, bowing out entirely from government financing, the first presidential nominee in the general election to do that since the system was created in 1976.
Obama has now raised over $600 million, by far the largest campaign chest in American political history. In many states he enjoys a four-to-one advantage in campaign funding — most telling in his scheduled eleventh-hour, 30-minute specials that will not be answered by the publicly financed and poorer McCain campaign.
The story that the media chose to ignore was not merely the Obama about-face on public financing, or even the enormous amounts of money that he has raised — some of it under dubious circumstances involving foreign donors, prepaid credit cards, and false names. Instead, they were absolutely quiet about a historic end to liberal support for public financing.
For all practical purposes, public financing of the presidential general election is now dead. No Republican will ever agree to it again. No Democrat can ever again dare to defend a system destroyed by Obama. All future worries about the dangers of big money and big politics will fall on deaf ears.
Surely, there will come a time when the Democratic Party, whether for ethical or practical reasons, will sorely regret dismantling the very safeguards that for over three decades it had insisted were critical for the survival of the republic.
Imagine the reaction of the New York Times or the Washington Post had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign.
The VP Candidates
We know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin’s pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses — indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.
Yet the American public knows almost nothing of what it should about the extraordinary career of Joe Biden, the 36-year veteran of the Senate. In unprecedented fashion, Biden has simply avoided the press for most of the last two months, confident that the media instead would deconstruct almost every word of “good looking” Sarah Palin’s numerous interviews with mostly hostile interrogators.
By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character — plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don’t know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad. In response, the media reported that the very public Sarah Palin was avoiding the press while the very private Joe Biden shunned interviews and was chained to the teleprompter.
For two months now, the media reaction to Biden’s inanity has been simply “that’s just ol’ Joe, now let’s turn to Palin,” who, in the space of two months, has been reduced from a popular successful governor to a backwoods creationist, who will ban books and champion white secessionist causes. The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.
So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else — and nothing at all why exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.
Imagine the reaction of Newsweek or Time had moose-hunting mom Sarah Palin claimed FDR went on television to address the nation as President in 1929, or warned America that our enemies abroad would test John McCain and that his response would result in a radical loss of his popularity at home.
The Past as Present
In 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media’s feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.
Each Obama metamorphosis in itself might be attributed to the normal evolution to the middle, as a candidate shifts from the primary to the general election. But in the case of Obama, we witnessed not a shift, but a complete transformation to an entirely new persona — in almost every imaginable sense of the word. Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama’s position today is not that of just a year ago.
Until 2005, Obama was in communication with Bill Ayers by e-mail and phone, despite Ayers reprehensible braggadocio in 2001 that he remained an unrepentant terrorist. Rev. Wright was an invaluable spiritual advisor — until spring of 2008. Father Pfleger was praised as an intimate friend in 2004 — and vanished off the radar in 2008. The media might have asked not just why these rather dubious figures were once so close to, and then so distant from, Obama; but why were there so many people like Rashid Khalidi and Tony Rezko in Obama’s past in the first place?
Behind the Olympian calm of Obama, there was always a rather disturbing record of extra-electoral politics completely ignored by the media. If one were disturbed by the present shenanigans of ACORN or the bizarre national call for Americans simply to skip work on election day to help elect Obama (who would pay for that?), one would only have to remember that in 1996 Obama took the extraordinary step of suing to eliminate all his primary rivals by challenging their petition signatures of mostly African-American voters.
In 2004, there was an even more remarkable chain of events in which the sealed divorce records of both his principle primary rival Blair Hull and general election foe, Jack Ryan, were mysteriously leaked, effectively ensuring Obama a Senate seat without serious opposition. These were not artifacts of a typical political career, but extraordinary events in themselves that might well have shed light on present campaign tactics — and yet largely remain unknown to the American people.
Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain’s pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.
Socialism
The eleventh-hour McCain allegations of Obama’s advocacy for a share-the-wealth socialism were generally ignored by the media, or if covered, written off as neo-McCarthyism. But there were two legitimate, but again neglected, issues.
The first was the nature of the Obama tax plan. The problem was not merely upping the income tax rates on those who made $250,000 (or was it $200,000, or was it $150,000, or both, or none?), but its aggregate effect in combination with lifting the FICA ceilings on high incomes on top of existing Medicare contributions and often high state income taxes.
In other words, Americans who live in high-tax, expensive states like a New York or California could in theory face collective confiscatory tax rates of 65 percent or so on much of their income. And, depending on the nature of Obama’s proposed tax exemptions, on the other end of the spectrum we might well see almost half the nation’s wage earners pay no federal income tax at all.
Questions arise, but were again not explored: How wise is it to exempt one out of every two income earners from any worry over how the nation gathers its federal income tax revenue? And when credits are added to the plan, are we now essentially not cutting or raising taxes, but simply diverting wealth from those who pay into the system to those who do not?
A practical effect of socialism is often defined as curbing productive incentives by ensuring the poorer need not endanger their exemptions and credits by seeking greater income; and discouraging the wealthy from seeking greater income, given that nearly two-thirds of additional wealth would be lost to taxes. Surely that discussion might have been of interest to the American people.
Second, the real story was not John McCain’s characterization of such plans, but both inadvertent, and serial descriptions of them, past and present, by Barack Obama himself. “Spreading the wealth around” gains currency when collated to past interviews in which Obama talked at length about, and in regret at, judicial impracticalities in accomplishing his own desire to redistribute income. “Tragedy” is frequent in the Obama vocabulary, but largely confined to two contexts: the tragic history of the United States (e.g., deemed analogous to that of Nazi Germany during World War II), and the tragic unwillingness or inability to use judicial means to correct economic inequality in non-democratic fashion.
In this regard, remember Obama’s revealing comment that he was interested only in “fairness” in increasing capital-gains taxes, despite the bothersome fact that past moderate reductions in rates had, in fact, brought in greater revenue to government. Again, fossilized ideology trumps empiricism.
Imagine the reaction of NPR and PBS had John McCain advocated something like abolishing all capital gains taxes, or repealing incomes taxes in favor of a national retail sales tax.
The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.
Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
and 2.
A Blank Slate
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com
Attention, Little Knowledge
Obama himself at various times in his memoirs — never have presidential autobiographies sold so many copies, and yet have been so little read by the press — talked about people seeing in him what they wished. And now on the eve of the election, I confess I have no idea about who he is or what he stands for. If he is elected, I can only hope for the best, and pray a few sober old Clintonites like Paul Volcker or Robert Rubin will step forward.
What is a “Huge Sum”?
Does Obama really, as Joe Biden promised, wish to shut down coal-generated electricity plants?
He denied it, of course. But then on the eve of the election we see a recording just released of what he recently boasted about on the topic: “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
Note again the boastful Obama’s usage of “bankrupt” them — as if the destruction of an entire industry that currently warms the water, cooks the food, and keeps the lights on for 150 million Americans can simply fold, without consequences to the industry’s workers and to us, the consumers of their electricity. Are we to use our stoves for five or six hours a day as the wind and sun allow, in order to prove that we are ‘green” and no longer ‘selfish’?
So, are the selfish rich making $300,000, $250,000, $200,000, $150,000 or $120,000?
Who knows, we’ve heard all of these figures as benchmarks for the next gargantuan tax bite. Is ‘socialism’ an unfair indictment of Obama’s policies (perhaps mandated ‘equality of result’ is more polite)? I think not, since he regrets the inability to use the Supreme Court to redistribute capital, or what he later dubbed ‘spread the wealth around’. Is the term ‘socialist’ antithetical to, or suggestive of, his agenda that would raise income-based taxation in many states (state, federal, FICA, Medicare) to 65% of the incomes of those who now pay over 60% of the nation’s aggregate taxes, while upping the number of those exempt from federal income tax obligation to nearly half of the nation’s wage earners?
What does one call that? Fairness — when one proceeds to give cash credits to many of those who are not paying any federal income taxes at all? That will be a pretty large political constituency — half the nation’s wage-earners — who will be appreciative that someone exempted them from all concern about where and how much of their government’s revenues derive.
More Therapeutic Studies?
I worry about education, since at various times Obama has called for reparations (in deed, not word), more oppression studies, and praised ethnic magnet schools. Clearly to address the underclass we need instead a more traditional curriculum and back to basics emphasis on reading, literatures, math, and science, and less on the therapeutic “they” who did this to us. I wrote an article in the current issue of City Journal on this, and worry that much of our most critical problems derive from a substandard school system, that needs radical reform and competition, not more money.
Yes, No — or Present?
I don’t know what Obama feels about drilling, nuclear power, FISA, NAFTA, capital punishment, abortion, guns, Iran, the surge, Jerusalem, campaign financing, etc. But I do get the impression that he is more or less cognizant that most of his views around 2006 were at odds with the American people’s, and so he had to change or drop them (and most of his social circle) to get elected, or at least mention them only at small private gatherings in San Francisco.
The mystery? Will he revert back to the constant Obama of the last 30 years who waged dirty 1996 and 2004 campaigns, and shared apparently ideologies with Ayers, Khalidi, Pfleger, and Wright and others in his Chicago extremist cadre? Or will he govern as a center-leftist, corralling a Frank, Pelosi, and Reed and the most fringe beyond them?
Truman or Carter?
Will Obama really, at a time of near recession, create a trillion dollars of new spending programs, when many of the existing ones don’t work and contribute to a half-trillion dollar current deficit? Note in almost every speech, Obama lists a new federal bromide to address our malaise, rarely if ever advice to curb our own extravagant spending and borrowing, honor our debts, live lives that lessen our reliance on a burdened federal government, or seek personal responsibility to curtail illegitimacy, drug use, high school drop-out rates, and illegality that do so much to impoverish the nation. Surely some of the things that got us into the current mess were self-induced and not entirely the fault of the greedy “they” on Wall Street and in Washington?
A Minor Morality Tale
His aunt Zeitunie is a minor road bump and familiar to everyone who has an embarrassing relative. But Auntie Z. is also emblematic nevertheless of many of the concerns one has about the blank Obama slate. Let me state first that no one is completely responsible for one’s immediate family, but we need at least a statement on that from Obama that his aunt’s illegality is a worry to him, and he will take as much care to see her comply with American law as he did to write of her in the past. Some minor concerns:
1) Charity Begins at Home? She appeared in cameo fashion in his memoirs as proof of his strong family ties (and attended, I think, his swearing in as a US Senator); but then was subsequently languishing as an illegal alien, in violation of a deportation order, in a public housing project a mere hour’s flight from Chicago. I am skeptical of someone like Obama who dubs others “selfish” for worrying that upping federal tax by 20% on those who currently pay the most in taxes (5% income tax hike, 15.3 FICA self-employment tax exposure), all for dubious expenditures, and cannot even take care of someone he cited in his memoir as “family.”
2) An Objective Press? The press story is somehow now about who ‘leaked’ information that his aunt had defied a deportation order and was in the country illegally. This is yet another sign that U.S. immigration law is made laughable, and its enforcement a joke to the rather limited extent the law is even applied. One not only can overstay a visa, ignore a court order, ignore campaign laws, ignore public housing requirements, but do so in such a context that revelation of such serial lawbreaking, not the serial lawbreaking itself, is proof of wrong.
3) Mr. Axlerod of recent Chicago Fame. More of the double standard. David Axlerod, the Chicago master of leaking information to destroy adversaries, is suddenly worried about supposed leaks of government documents? Aside from Joe the Plumber, he should ask why and how the sealed divorce records of both Obama’s Democratic primary rival and his general election Republican opponent were leaked, imploding both campaigns and ensuring the election of Obama in 2004 to the Senate. If the aunt story was improperly leaked by a right-wing immigration official, can’t Axlerod at least say “Damnit, I was Axleroded!”
4) If You Can’t Trust Your Aunt, Who Can You Trust? Obama said that his historical rejection of campaign finance (after a promise to abide by the statutes), and his subsequent creation of $600 million war-chest, should not cause worry because so many of the donors were “small”.
Thus any questions about fake names, addresses, lack of compliance with identifying donors by name, foreign contributors, and prepaid credit cards were essentially McCarthyite — given the historical lift Obama had given the American electoral process.
But if the Obama campaign cannot even guarantee that his own aunt followed the law (it is illegal for foreigners to contribute to U.S. presidential campaigns), what does that say about the millions of others we are supposed to believe, on the assurance of Obama himself, were supposedly legitimate and lawful donors? How ethical is it for someone who is in violation of the law, and receiving some sort of public subsidy to then donate money, illegally again, to a campaign?
5) Do as I Say, not as I Do! The media, rather than enlightening us about Obama’s background, consistency in thought, past behavior, and character, instead turns on anyone and anything that stands in the way of his ascension. So Auntie Zeitunie is a distraction, yes. But also no: perhaps the next President of the United States, who promises to tax to increase the social safety net, and demonizes those as selfish who disagree, can at least help a little in taking care of his own aunt, and ensure that she changes her mind about her defiance of deportation orders, her violation of Boston public housing guidelines, and her rather brazen disregard of campaign financing laws.
6) It’s the Law, Stupid! That is the issue here. The law really does matter. I can’t think of any aunt of any President who violated so many statutes to so little consternation — or someone who so authoritatively lectured the nation on the responsibilities of social welfare and their moral obligations to give to the state purse, who in turn proved so unaware of the impoverished and illegal conditions of his own family.
A minor point, but indicative that Obama remains a blank slate on the eve of the election. We had two years of hope and change, and not a day of hope for what? and change this or that?
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
I just hope that Hanson is wrong, and that Mr Obama has substance to him. We have seen in Australia what happens when spin wins over substance, and it isn't pretty (in any sense of the word).
1.
November 1, 2008
The End of Journalism
In 2008, journalism died and advocacy media took its place.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnible. Dan Rather’s career imploded when he knowingly promulgated a forged document that impugned the service record of George W. Bush. We’ve known for a long time — from various polling, and records of political donations of journalists themselves, as well as surveys of public perceptions — that the vast majority of journalists identify themselves as Democratic, and liberal in particular.
Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people. Here were four areas of national interest that were largely ignored.
Campaign Financing
For years an axiom of the liberal establishment was the need for public campaign financing — and the corrosive role of private money in poisoning the election process. The most prominent Republican who crossed party lines to ensure the passage of national public campaign financing was John McCain — a maverick stance that cost him dearly among conservatives who resented bitterly federal interference in political expression.
In contrast, Barack Obama, remember, promised that he would accept both public funding and the limitations that went along with it, and would “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” Then in June 2008, Obama abruptly reneged, bowing out entirely from government financing, the first presidential nominee in the general election to do that since the system was created in 1976.
Obama has now raised over $600 million, by far the largest campaign chest in American political history. In many states he enjoys a four-to-one advantage in campaign funding — most telling in his scheduled eleventh-hour, 30-minute specials that will not be answered by the publicly financed and poorer McCain campaign.
The story that the media chose to ignore was not merely the Obama about-face on public financing, or even the enormous amounts of money that he has raised — some of it under dubious circumstances involving foreign donors, prepaid credit cards, and false names. Instead, they were absolutely quiet about a historic end to liberal support for public financing.
For all practical purposes, public financing of the presidential general election is now dead. No Republican will ever agree to it again. No Democrat can ever again dare to defend a system destroyed by Obama. All future worries about the dangers of big money and big politics will fall on deaf ears.
Surely, there will come a time when the Democratic Party, whether for ethical or practical reasons, will sorely regret dismantling the very safeguards that for over three decades it had insisted were critical for the survival of the republic.
Imagine the reaction of the New York Times or the Washington Post had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign.
The VP Candidates
We know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin’s pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses — indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.
Yet the American public knows almost nothing of what it should about the extraordinary career of Joe Biden, the 36-year veteran of the Senate. In unprecedented fashion, Biden has simply avoided the press for most of the last two months, confident that the media instead would deconstruct almost every word of “good looking” Sarah Palin’s numerous interviews with mostly hostile interrogators.
By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character — plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don’t know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad. In response, the media reported that the very public Sarah Palin was avoiding the press while the very private Joe Biden shunned interviews and was chained to the teleprompter.
For two months now, the media reaction to Biden’s inanity has been simply “that’s just ol’ Joe, now let’s turn to Palin,” who, in the space of two months, has been reduced from a popular successful governor to a backwoods creationist, who will ban books and champion white secessionist causes. The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.
So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else — and nothing at all why exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.
Imagine the reaction of Newsweek or Time had moose-hunting mom Sarah Palin claimed FDR went on television to address the nation as President in 1929, or warned America that our enemies abroad would test John McCain and that his response would result in a radical loss of his popularity at home.
The Past as Present
In 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media’s feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.
Each Obama metamorphosis in itself might be attributed to the normal evolution to the middle, as a candidate shifts from the primary to the general election. But in the case of Obama, we witnessed not a shift, but a complete transformation to an entirely new persona — in almost every imaginable sense of the word. Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama’s position today is not that of just a year ago.
Until 2005, Obama was in communication with Bill Ayers by e-mail and phone, despite Ayers reprehensible braggadocio in 2001 that he remained an unrepentant terrorist. Rev. Wright was an invaluable spiritual advisor — until spring of 2008. Father Pfleger was praised as an intimate friend in 2004 — and vanished off the radar in 2008. The media might have asked not just why these rather dubious figures were once so close to, and then so distant from, Obama; but why were there so many people like Rashid Khalidi and Tony Rezko in Obama’s past in the first place?
Behind the Olympian calm of Obama, there was always a rather disturbing record of extra-electoral politics completely ignored by the media. If one were disturbed by the present shenanigans of ACORN or the bizarre national call for Americans simply to skip work on election day to help elect Obama (who would pay for that?), one would only have to remember that in 1996 Obama took the extraordinary step of suing to eliminate all his primary rivals by challenging their petition signatures of mostly African-American voters.
In 2004, there was an even more remarkable chain of events in which the sealed divorce records of both his principle primary rival Blair Hull and general election foe, Jack Ryan, were mysteriously leaked, effectively ensuring Obama a Senate seat without serious opposition. These were not artifacts of a typical political career, but extraordinary events in themselves that might well have shed light on present campaign tactics — and yet largely remain unknown to the American people.
Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain’s pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.
Socialism
The eleventh-hour McCain allegations of Obama’s advocacy for a share-the-wealth socialism were generally ignored by the media, or if covered, written off as neo-McCarthyism. But there were two legitimate, but again neglected, issues.
The first was the nature of the Obama tax plan. The problem was not merely upping the income tax rates on those who made $250,000 (or was it $200,000, or was it $150,000, or both, or none?), but its aggregate effect in combination with lifting the FICA ceilings on high incomes on top of existing Medicare contributions and often high state income taxes.
In other words, Americans who live in high-tax, expensive states like a New York or California could in theory face collective confiscatory tax rates of 65 percent or so on much of their income. And, depending on the nature of Obama’s proposed tax exemptions, on the other end of the spectrum we might well see almost half the nation’s wage earners pay no federal income tax at all.
Questions arise, but were again not explored: How wise is it to exempt one out of every two income earners from any worry over how the nation gathers its federal income tax revenue? And when credits are added to the plan, are we now essentially not cutting or raising taxes, but simply diverting wealth from those who pay into the system to those who do not?
A practical effect of socialism is often defined as curbing productive incentives by ensuring the poorer need not endanger their exemptions and credits by seeking greater income; and discouraging the wealthy from seeking greater income, given that nearly two-thirds of additional wealth would be lost to taxes. Surely that discussion might have been of interest to the American people.
Second, the real story was not John McCain’s characterization of such plans, but both inadvertent, and serial descriptions of them, past and present, by Barack Obama himself. “Spreading the wealth around” gains currency when collated to past interviews in which Obama talked at length about, and in regret at, judicial impracticalities in accomplishing his own desire to redistribute income. “Tragedy” is frequent in the Obama vocabulary, but largely confined to two contexts: the tragic history of the United States (e.g., deemed analogous to that of Nazi Germany during World War II), and the tragic unwillingness or inability to use judicial means to correct economic inequality in non-democratic fashion.
In this regard, remember Obama’s revealing comment that he was interested only in “fairness” in increasing capital-gains taxes, despite the bothersome fact that past moderate reductions in rates had, in fact, brought in greater revenue to government. Again, fossilized ideology trumps empiricism.
Imagine the reaction of NPR and PBS had John McCain advocated something like abolishing all capital gains taxes, or repealing incomes taxes in favor of a national retail sales tax.
The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.
Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
and 2.
A Blank Slate
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com
Attention, Little Knowledge
Obama himself at various times in his memoirs — never have presidential autobiographies sold so many copies, and yet have been so little read by the press — talked about people seeing in him what they wished. And now on the eve of the election, I confess I have no idea about who he is or what he stands for. If he is elected, I can only hope for the best, and pray a few sober old Clintonites like Paul Volcker or Robert Rubin will step forward.
What is a “Huge Sum”?
Does Obama really, as Joe Biden promised, wish to shut down coal-generated electricity plants?
He denied it, of course. But then on the eve of the election we see a recording just released of what he recently boasted about on the topic: “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
Note again the boastful Obama’s usage of “bankrupt” them — as if the destruction of an entire industry that currently warms the water, cooks the food, and keeps the lights on for 150 million Americans can simply fold, without consequences to the industry’s workers and to us, the consumers of their electricity. Are we to use our stoves for five or six hours a day as the wind and sun allow, in order to prove that we are ‘green” and no longer ‘selfish’?
So, are the selfish rich making $300,000, $250,000, $200,000, $150,000 or $120,000?
Who knows, we’ve heard all of these figures as benchmarks for the next gargantuan tax bite. Is ‘socialism’ an unfair indictment of Obama’s policies (perhaps mandated ‘equality of result’ is more polite)? I think not, since he regrets the inability to use the Supreme Court to redistribute capital, or what he later dubbed ‘spread the wealth around’. Is the term ‘socialist’ antithetical to, or suggestive of, his agenda that would raise income-based taxation in many states (state, federal, FICA, Medicare) to 65% of the incomes of those who now pay over 60% of the nation’s aggregate taxes, while upping the number of those exempt from federal income tax obligation to nearly half of the nation’s wage earners?
What does one call that? Fairness — when one proceeds to give cash credits to many of those who are not paying any federal income taxes at all? That will be a pretty large political constituency — half the nation’s wage-earners — who will be appreciative that someone exempted them from all concern about where and how much of their government’s revenues derive.
More Therapeutic Studies?
I worry about education, since at various times Obama has called for reparations (in deed, not word), more oppression studies, and praised ethnic magnet schools. Clearly to address the underclass we need instead a more traditional curriculum and back to basics emphasis on reading, literatures, math, and science, and less on the therapeutic “they” who did this to us. I wrote an article in the current issue of City Journal on this, and worry that much of our most critical problems derive from a substandard school system, that needs radical reform and competition, not more money.
Yes, No — or Present?
I don’t know what Obama feels about drilling, nuclear power, FISA, NAFTA, capital punishment, abortion, guns, Iran, the surge, Jerusalem, campaign financing, etc. But I do get the impression that he is more or less cognizant that most of his views around 2006 were at odds with the American people’s, and so he had to change or drop them (and most of his social circle) to get elected, or at least mention them only at small private gatherings in San Francisco.
The mystery? Will he revert back to the constant Obama of the last 30 years who waged dirty 1996 and 2004 campaigns, and shared apparently ideologies with Ayers, Khalidi, Pfleger, and Wright and others in his Chicago extremist cadre? Or will he govern as a center-leftist, corralling a Frank, Pelosi, and Reed and the most fringe beyond them?
Truman or Carter?
Will Obama really, at a time of near recession, create a trillion dollars of new spending programs, when many of the existing ones don’t work and contribute to a half-trillion dollar current deficit? Note in almost every speech, Obama lists a new federal bromide to address our malaise, rarely if ever advice to curb our own extravagant spending and borrowing, honor our debts, live lives that lessen our reliance on a burdened federal government, or seek personal responsibility to curtail illegitimacy, drug use, high school drop-out rates, and illegality that do so much to impoverish the nation. Surely some of the things that got us into the current mess were self-induced and not entirely the fault of the greedy “they” on Wall Street and in Washington?
A Minor Morality Tale
His aunt Zeitunie is a minor road bump and familiar to everyone who has an embarrassing relative. But Auntie Z. is also emblematic nevertheless of many of the concerns one has about the blank Obama slate. Let me state first that no one is completely responsible for one’s immediate family, but we need at least a statement on that from Obama that his aunt’s illegality is a worry to him, and he will take as much care to see her comply with American law as he did to write of her in the past. Some minor concerns:
1) Charity Begins at Home? She appeared in cameo fashion in his memoirs as proof of his strong family ties (and attended, I think, his swearing in as a US Senator); but then was subsequently languishing as an illegal alien, in violation of a deportation order, in a public housing project a mere hour’s flight from Chicago. I am skeptical of someone like Obama who dubs others “selfish” for worrying that upping federal tax by 20% on those who currently pay the most in taxes (5% income tax hike, 15.3 FICA self-employment tax exposure), all for dubious expenditures, and cannot even take care of someone he cited in his memoir as “family.”
2) An Objective Press? The press story is somehow now about who ‘leaked’ information that his aunt had defied a deportation order and was in the country illegally. This is yet another sign that U.S. immigration law is made laughable, and its enforcement a joke to the rather limited extent the law is even applied. One not only can overstay a visa, ignore a court order, ignore campaign laws, ignore public housing requirements, but do so in such a context that revelation of such serial lawbreaking, not the serial lawbreaking itself, is proof of wrong.
3) Mr. Axlerod of recent Chicago Fame. More of the double standard. David Axlerod, the Chicago master of leaking information to destroy adversaries, is suddenly worried about supposed leaks of government documents? Aside from Joe the Plumber, he should ask why and how the sealed divorce records of both Obama’s Democratic primary rival and his general election Republican opponent were leaked, imploding both campaigns and ensuring the election of Obama in 2004 to the Senate. If the aunt story was improperly leaked by a right-wing immigration official, can’t Axlerod at least say “Damnit, I was Axleroded!”
4) If You Can’t Trust Your Aunt, Who Can You Trust? Obama said that his historical rejection of campaign finance (after a promise to abide by the statutes), and his subsequent creation of $600 million war-chest, should not cause worry because so many of the donors were “small”.
Thus any questions about fake names, addresses, lack of compliance with identifying donors by name, foreign contributors, and prepaid credit cards were essentially McCarthyite — given the historical lift Obama had given the American electoral process.
But if the Obama campaign cannot even guarantee that his own aunt followed the law (it is illegal for foreigners to contribute to U.S. presidential campaigns), what does that say about the millions of others we are supposed to believe, on the assurance of Obama himself, were supposedly legitimate and lawful donors? How ethical is it for someone who is in violation of the law, and receiving some sort of public subsidy to then donate money, illegally again, to a campaign?
5) Do as I Say, not as I Do! The media, rather than enlightening us about Obama’s background, consistency in thought, past behavior, and character, instead turns on anyone and anything that stands in the way of his ascension. So Auntie Zeitunie is a distraction, yes. But also no: perhaps the next President of the United States, who promises to tax to increase the social safety net, and demonizes those as selfish who disagree, can at least help a little in taking care of his own aunt, and ensure that she changes her mind about her defiance of deportation orders, her violation of Boston public housing guidelines, and her rather brazen disregard of campaign financing laws.
6) It’s the Law, Stupid! That is the issue here. The law really does matter. I can’t think of any aunt of any President who violated so many statutes to so little consternation — or someone who so authoritatively lectured the nation on the responsibilities of social welfare and their moral obligations to give to the state purse, who in turn proved so unaware of the impoverished and illegal conditions of his own family.
A minor point, but indicative that Obama remains a blank slate on the eve of the election. We had two years of hope and change, and not a day of hope for what? and change this or that?
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
I just hope that Hanson is wrong, and that Mr Obama has substance to him. We have seen in Australia what happens when spin wins over substance, and it isn't pretty (in any sense of the word).