The 2015 General Election stood the conventional wisdom on its head. The polls pointed to a stalemate, with neither major party commanding a majority and prospects for a coalition government uncertain at best. There was much chatter about the possibility of a deal between the Labour Party and the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and this, ironically, may have played a role in the ultimate outcome (see below). Instead, the Tories swept to victory with an outright majority, winning 329 seats. Prime Minister David Cameron can now discard his erstwhile coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats—who, incidentally, suffered a debacle of their own, losing 48 of their 56 seats.

But the big loser was the Labour Party which was wiped out in Scotland, losing all but one of its seats there to the SNP. And this disaster will echo down the years, for it represents a fundamental revision of the calculus of British politics. Every Labour majority since 1945 has been built on a foundation of some 40-50 Scottish seats and without them a Labour majority is hard to envision. England has always been more conservative than Scotland, i.e. more congenial to the Tories, and to make matters worse for Labour in England the SNP and Scottish nationalism are widely detested. The prospect of a Labour-SNP coalition government was exceedingly odious to many voters south of the Border and this undoubtedly hurt Labour in England. However that may be, with the loss of its position in Scotland the Labour Party faces a long stretch in the political wilderness.

After the triumphant Tories the SNP is the election’s second big winner—supposedly. Yesterday’s electoral outcome is said to have revived both the party and the cause of Scottish nationalism after the disappointment of last year’s referendum on independence. Well, maybe so, but it’s hard to see what leverage the SNP now possesses in Whitehall, with a Conservative government in power that has no need of the SNP’s support. The party may agitate for another independence referendum but David Cameron is unlikely to bow to any such demand. It would cause outrage in England and one must ask why the Tories would risk alienating their base to please Scottish nationalists. So the Cross of St. Andrew may wave on high and the bagpipes may wail but Scotland won’t be leaving the Union any time soon.

Finally there’s the populist, anti-immigration, anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). It actually came in third behind the Tories and Labour in terms of the popular vote but thanks to the peculiarities of the British electoral system this translated into only one parliamentary seat. Still, David Cameron will not be free to ignore the current of public opinion that the UKIP represents. He has promised to hold a national referendum on British membership in the European Union and is no doubt well aware of the political perils of breaking that promise.

So there you have it: Tories 1, Conventional Wisdom 0. American political pundits and prognosticators—take note!

Posted by tmg110 at 10:15 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 8 May 2015 10:18 AM EDT

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One of the lamer laments of the Left is its claim that poor Barack Obama has been subjected to a level of criticism, opposition and hatred unprecedented in the annals of American politics.

Really?

When one recalls the respect—reverence, even!—with which Obama’s candidacy was received, the hosannas that greeted his election, the heady predictions of greatness that garlanded his inauguration, the eager excuse-making with which every gaffe, goof and failure has been minimized or dismissed, well, this particular complaint suffers from a lack of credibility.

Nor does history bear it out. Even before he became the quasi-fascist Chimpy McBushitler, George W. Bush was bitterly reviled in the crudest terms by liberals, progressives and lefties. So was his father and so was Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the scorn and hatred directed against Reagan was relentless, vicious and vile. (No doubt the fact that it never seemed to bother RWR in the slightest increased his enemies’ fury.) Compared with them—compared, even with Bill Clinton—Barack Obama has had it easy.

If he appears that he comes in for a lot of criticism, that’s only because the President has provided his opponents with plenty to criticize. Nor has he helped himself by the ill-mannered petulance with which he receives even the mildest suggestion that maybe, just maybe, he might have made a mistake. Right from the beginning Obama treated his opponents with scorn. Now, finally, he’s being paid back in the same coin. And the increasingly pointed criticisms being voiced by Republicans and conservatives clearly get under Obama's thin skin.

As the chorus of criticism swells, the counterblasts of the presidential claque grow ever more hysterical. Sobs, wails and the sound of rending garments fill the air. Charges of racism fly from left to right—because you know, why else would anybody criticize He of the Perfect Trouser Creases? This would all be very amusing were it not accompanied by the demolition of US foreign policy, the US economy and the Constitution of the United States by one of the most irresponsible, feckless administrations in American political history.

When Barack Obama’s finally gone I won’t miss him much. But I will miss him a little, because his tenure in office has demonstrated with crystal clarity the depths of intellectual and moral squalor to which liberalism/progressivism/the Left have sunk.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:48 AM EDT

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Hillary R. Clinton is rich, entitled, connected, pampered, coddled—and the dauntless defender and champion of “everyday Americans.” Such was the embroidery around her announcement that, by gosh, she’s running for president!

Let’s get one minor detail out of the way first. Just what the hell is an “everyday American”? Is that different from a “special-occasions American” or a “weekends-only American”? The Clinton campaign’s chosen appellation for the American people is not only gibberish but condescending. One envisions Hillary reaching down from on high to pat Mr. & Ms. Everyday American on the head while handing them their government checks.

But that’s a minor gaffe compared with Hillary’s denunciations of CEO pay and income inequality. Of all the issues she might have raised on the day of her campaign launch, none could have struck more jarring a note. This is a woman who receives $300,000 per speech—considerably in excess of the compensation of the average CEO, 75% of whom get $270,000 or less for an entire year of work. And this is not to mention other sources of Clinton income, such as the multimillion-dollar advance she received for her recent autobiography, Hard Choices. And a woman with a financial profile like that has some nerve bloviating about income inequality.

It’s not only laughable but puzzling that Clinton would take this approach. Besides her personal wealth there’s the sticky issue of the Clinton Foundation’s questionable financial practices. In view of all this, talking about lavish CEO pay and the scourge of income inequality invites a devastating counterblast. But perhaps Clinton is so convinced of her inevitability that she just doesn’t care.

Or it may be that she has no reason for running besides personal ambition. In the wake of the Bush-Obama years there is an obvious line to take with the American people: competence, pragmatism, moderation, seriousness. The voters have good reason to think that the United States federal government has become dysfunctional and above all they want someone who can, so to speak, refunctionalize it and get things moving again. Who would care about the scourge of income inequality or the compensation of CEOs if the economy was growing and generating decent jobs? When people feel that they’re doing all right and have a chance of getting ahead, resentment over inequality tends to fade away. And there’s a whole laundry list of additional issues—immigration, education, social policy—on which to base a grown-up campaign for the presidency. Chris Christie may be a GOP long shot but compare his recent comments with Clinton’s campaign launch. The other day Christie not only touched by gripped the lethal third rail of American politics: Social Security. He said that the current system is not only unsustainable but a mechanism by which the young are plundered for the benefit of the old. He proposed raising the retirement age and means-testing the program. You may agree or disagree with him on the substance of his analysis and proposals but at least he tackled a real issue.

Maybe Clinton is gearing up for such a campaign but so far it certainly doesn’t look that way. It looks, rather as if she’s playing rope-a-dope, protecting her lead, relying on the star-struck mainstream media and her loyal claque to deflect criticisms and zingers. That’s fine as far as it goes but it raises a trenchant question that’s already being asked: Why Hillary? What are her qualifications for the presidency? If she’s elected president just what will she do? I doubt that the fairy-dust approach employed by the Obama campaign in 2008 will work for Clinton. Say what you will about him as president but Barack Obama was a very effective candidate, adept at the deployment of smoke and mirrors. Hillary Clinton is a lousy candidate—tin-eared, gaffe prone, glaringly inauthentic. But a lousy candidate with a good campaign organization and a good platform can win. On the evidence so far, the Pants-Suited One possesses neither.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:19 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 16 April 2015 9:25 AM EDT

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As a perusal of answers to relevant question on Quora will make clear, the abject collapse of US foreign policy on the Obama Administration’s watch has only fueled Bush Derangement Syndrome. In face of the obvious fact that President Obama is a light-minded self-deceiver whose view of the world is seriously at odds with reality his supporters comfort themselves with the cry that Bush was worse!

Admittedly the Bush Administration made some serious errors in its time but the charges leveled against the former president and his team soon part company with reality, rising to a pitch of ungoverned hysteria. We are told for example that thanks to the 9/11 attacks America enjoyed “the good will of the world,” a precious commodity that the oafish Bush and his sinister neocon puppet masters recklessly squandered. Exactly what this “good will” consisted of and how it was supposed to have enhanced the country’s security is never specified. Anyhow, the bash-Bush litany is boringly familiar and it would be pointless to rehash it here.

What is worth noting is a fact that’s amusing to contemplate if, like me, you’re not exactly a fan of Barack Obama. Defending the Community Organizer-in-Chief by arguing that, well, he’s not as bad as Chimpy McBushitler is not exactly a rave review. One sees, though, why it’s the Obama claque’s default argument: Changing the subject to Bush diverts attention from Obama’s almost perfect record of failure.

Who was it, I wonder, who came up with the idea of the relations with Russia reset button that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton carried with her to Russia in the early days of the Obama Administration? I’m certain that she rues the day she agreed to present it to her Russian opposite number. Barry and Hillary boasted to all who would listen that after the horrors of the Bush years they would repair relations with Russia and usher in a new era of cooperation.

 Tell that to the Ukrainians.

The stupid Russian reset button was an early indicator of the adolescent, frivolous attitude that Barack Obama brought to the management of US foreign policy. He believed—and his inner circle encouraged him in that belief—that the force of his personality and the sound of his voice would change the world, ending wars, converting enemies into friends, persuading the lion to lie down with the lamb. That belief has proved tenacious. The desperation with which Obama pursues détente with Iran despite a barrage of slights, jeers, insults, mockery and contempt from the ayatollahs is sufficient proof of the President’s invincible resistance to reality.

It’s this dismal spectacle that the members of Obama’s fan club cannot abide, hence their endless harping on the supposedly atrocious Bush. It’s sad and pathetic besides being an unflattering commentary on the sad decline of the secular messiah of 2008-09.

Posted by tmg110 at 4:57 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 13 April 2015 4:59 PM EDT

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Once upon a time I used to read the New Republic but that was when it was a journal of thoughtful liberal opinion. Bit by bit, however, the magazine retreated toward the fever swamps where dwells the Flying Monkey Left. Bush Derangement Syndrome overcame the New Republic in the first decade of this century and when it published an article by Jonathan Chait titled “Why I Hate George W. Bush,” well, that was it for me. Finally last year the magazine simply imploded and now it’s just a sad little left-wing monthly with a website. And if this article by Naomi Shavin is anything to go by, the New Republic has yet to plumb the depths of idiocy and frivolity. But it’s trying.

Ms. Shavin’s lame little screed, “Sarah Palin 2.0,” sets forth the thesis that former Hewitt Packard CEO and unsuccessful GOP Senate candidate and possible 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Carley Fiorina is the Republican Party’s new “Queen Bee.” This, she reminds us, was the moniker slapped on Palin by Maureen Down in 2008. So Shavin starts by borrowing a concept from someone else and adapting it to her own needs. The ensuing paragraphs seek to show how Palin and Fiorina are more or less the same person, because, you see:

Fiorina does have some obvious similarities to the former vice-presidential candidate. Both favor words like “outsider” and “tough,” and allow themselves to be cast as a woman who does it all: They’re breadwinner moms with business savvy and enough charisma to make their raw ambition palatable. Similarly, both women’s careers have been marred by major professional failures: Fiorina’s firing from Hewlett-Packard and Palin’s “bridge to nowhere” (which, ironically, Fiorina initially defended).

Hmmm, so Palin and Fiorina have used some of the same words. They both “allow themselves to be cast as a woman who does it all”—which seems an odd way of putting it. Who’s doing the casting? They’re both ambitious working women. They’ve both have professional failures. (For the record, Shavin’s characterization of the Gravina Island Bridge fiasco as a major Palin failure is misleading to put it mildly. As a candidate she voiced support for the project—which was cooked up by Alaska’s congressional delegation—but as governor she had second thoughts and pulled state funding.) Oh, and they’ve both attacked Hillary Clinton.

Not much meat on that bone!

Shavin scarcely bothers to examine the two women’s political views to determine how similar their thinking might be. I did take the trouble to research Fiorina’s position on various issues and found they while she hews to the conservative line on most of them, there are some significant differences between her and Sarah Palin on illegal immigration, climate change and abortion. On the other hand the issues on which she is in agreement with Palin, e.g. the Second Amendment and gun rights, are issues on which virtually all Republicans agree. In short there’s nothing much to Shavin’s “Queen Bee” thesis—if that’s not too dignified a word for her lame little hit piece.

But it is sad to see how stupid and trivial the New Republic has allowed itself to become. Back in the day a sophomoric piece of crap like “Sarah Palin 2.0” would have been consigned to the round file. I used to disagree with much of what I read in this once-distinguished magazine. Nowadays there’s not much to disagree with—but plenty to wince at.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:47 AM EDT

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The collapse of Rolling Stone magazine’s University of Virginia rape expose provides an occasion to comment one of the great and glaring myths of our time. There’s a word—several words, come to think of it—for the claim that one in five female college students are sexually assaulted on campus: balderdash, malarkey, rubbish, stuff and nonsense, twaddle. Like the fantasies of anti-Semites and 9/11 truthers, this one has been conjured out of thin air and is buoyed up by a kind of postmodern hysteria. The studies (there are always studies) that support this alarming claim engage in all sorts of chicanery— conflating rape with sexual assault and defining the latter down to includes such minor annoyances as an unwanted touch on the arm, an annoyingly persistent come-on, etc. And the traditional standards of evidence associated with such a serious charge as rape have simply been thrown out the window.

We saw this happen at Duke University, where all the right people seized upon a charge of gang rape to convict in the court of campus opinion a group of male students who had the audacity to be white, the sons of well-to-do-families and members of the lacrosse team. What need was there for a trial? The team’s remaining schedule was cancelled, the coach was fired and the accused were viciously denounced by fellow students and, shamefully, many faculty members. Then it turned out that the charge (made in this instance by a hooker who’d been hired to dance at a team party) was utterly false. The legal case against the students collapsed and the ambitious prosecutor who’d pursued it was fired and later disbarred. But on campus, apologies were grudging and tardy—because, you see, sexual assault is a real problem even if the charge in this case was utterly false.

If the Duke case were an isolate incident it could be shrugged off as just one of those things. Justice did prevail in the end, after all. But it was anything but an isolated case. And it did nothing to deter the purveyors of the one-in-five myth or the bearers of false witness. The real epidemic on campus today isn’t sexual assault. It’s a moral cancer. It’s the self-righteous conviction that the cause is more important than the facts, that the demand for proof is a tactic of the patriarchy, that every accusation of rape by a female student not only can but must be unquestioningly accepted.

The mechanisms put in place by university administrations to deal with this made-up crisis faithfully reflect the mind-set descried above. Unencumbered by the checks and balances that constrain the criminal justice system, university panels dealing with sexual assault cases follow two basic principles: (1) women never lie about rape, (2) the accused male student is presumed guilty. And things are arranged in such a way that the accused has very little hope of proving his innocence. Usually he is denied legal representation, denied the opportunity to be confront his accuser, denied the opportunity to present evidence and testimony.

Denunciations, purges, show trials—people familiar with the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s will recognize the technique.

The body of law—if one can so characterize it—that regulates this system of injustice is that characteristic product of contemporary higher education, the university code of sexual conduct. These revealing documents vary from school to school but typically they spell out with bureaucratic pedantry the dos and don’ts of relations between the sexes—or perhaps I should say among the genders. But its main target is of course the white male student, who is more or less openly characterized as a potential rapist.

Given this background it’s easy to see how the Rolling Stone fiasco happened. Every assumption supporting the claim of a campus rape crisis was present. One-in-five: check. Women never lie about rape: check. Accuser’s story uncritically accepted: check. Accused presumed guilty: check. Bonus factor: Accused not only white males but members of a fraternity. Very probably the writer had the outline of her story in hand before she ever set foot on the University of Virginia campus. All she needed was some local color.

When it began to appear that the magazine’s story might be doubtful, people wrung their hands. Would not the blowback from a false charge of rape deter other women from coming forward? These anxieties intensified as piece by piece the story fell apart. No one that I know of suggested that deterring false charges of rape might be a good thing. And very little thought was spared for the real victims in the case: the group of young men whose names were dragged through the mud. (Yes, I know, those names didn’t appear in the story but everyone on campus came to know who they were.) Just one of those things, you know!

Now of course rape is a serious crime, on or off campus. As defined by law rather than by Orwellian university sexual conduct policies, however, campus rape and sexual assault are uncommon crimes. In fact, women on campus are less likely to fall victim to them than women in general. But the facts do not deter the monster-shouters nor moderate the orgies of hate and hysteria that arise on campus with every charge of rape. And you will not be surprised to learn that the US Department of Justice is egging the whole business on, threatening universities with legal action if they don’t take action to eliminate higher education’s (fictional) “rape culture.”

So there’s your real campus crisis: an epidemic of false accusations that derail the academic careers, blacken the reputations and blight the lives of dozens of students, almost all of the male and white, year after year. Usually the accusers in these cases decline to involve the authorities, thus the accused have no hope that an appeals process will exonerate them. The injustice is galling and it’s depressing to reflect that even a debacle like the Rolling Stone meltdown won’t stop the destructive progress of this neo-Stalinist terror. After all, the victims aren’t females, gays, blacks, Muslims, illegal immigrants or any combination thereof. They’re just a bunch of privileged heterosexual white boys…

Posted by tmg110 at 12:41 PM EDT

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There’s nothing surprising about Barack Obama’s hostility toward Israel: It derives, after all, from his ideological pedigree. Nor is the adolescent petulance with which he expresses it very surprising: Barack Obama, as we’ve come to learn, is a man devoid of class. What does surprise me, though, is the President’s detachment from reality. He seems to think that by his actions he’s changing US foreign policy forever—that the fissure he’s opened between America and the Jewish state will endure long after he’s gone. But the striking thing about the Obama Administration’s policy on relations with Israel is that it has no real support in Congress or the country. Yes, sure, the usual suspects—parts of the Democratic Party’s progressive base, the Congressional Black Caucus, J Street, a scattering of leftie pundits—are cheering Obama on. American public opinion, though, continues to regard Israel favorably, a view accurately reflected in Congress where bipartisan support for Israel remains strong.

The political punditocracy hasn’t grasped it yet but the next president, whoever that may be, will have the task of restoring relations with Israel, i.e. of undoing Obama’s destructive policy. I call it destructive because while undermining the US-Israeli relationship it has yielded no compensating benefits. Contrary to the President’s rosy projections in earlier times, his policies have made a settlement of the long-running dispute between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs even less likely than it looked in 2009. Nor has it improved relations with other Arab countries. Thanks to his increasingly desperate pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran, in which process he has systematically capitulated to one Iranian demand after another, Obama is viewed with distrust and scorn in Arab capitals. In short, nothing in the area of Mideast policy has worked out as he expected and promised, most particularly the project of distancing the US from Israel.

Assuming that the next president is a Republican, we can expect a more or less complete reversal of Obama’s Mideast policies. Assuming it’s a Democrat we can expect much the same thing, albeit conducted with some stealth. Obama’s policies have failed—resoundingly so. His successor will have the unenviable task of sweeping up the bits and crafting a policy more in line with the realities of the Mideast—and more in line with American public opinion. Bismarck could make foreign policy at his desk with very little reference to public opinion. No American president can do that and our Community Organizer-in-Chief has proved it.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:43 AM EDT

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“Economic justice” is one of those expressions that dance trippingly on the tongue. It’s a favorite with certain progressive thinkers—for example, those who greeted the Occupy Wall Street movement with hosannas and waving palm branches. But like so much contemporary political terminology there’s rather less to it than meets the ear—nothing, in fact. “Economic justice” is a term that cannot be swallowed by anybody with an understanding of (a) economics and (b) justice. Let’s take (a) first.

What is the function of an economic system? Whether it’s capitalist or socialist, hunter-gatherer or post-industrial, an economic system has but one function: the allocation of resources. As we know (but often forget) resources are finite and have alternate uses. Take the labor of human hands. There’s only so much of it available and it can be allocated to any number of uses. Labor can be used to build houses or hospitals, boats or baseball bats. It can be used to drill for oil, dig for gold, grow wheat or raise cattle. And the more labor that’s devoted to one task, the less there is for other tasks. The same is true of material resources like coal, oil, iron ore, wood, etc. The process by which these things are allocated is what we call economics. In a pure market economy the so-called invisible hand allocates resources; in a pure socialist economy the Ministry of Centralized Economic Planning does it. In reality most economies are an amalgam, purposeful or not, of the market and the ministry. Here the market predominates, there the ministry has the major say—but somehow, in some way, resources have got to be allocated.

And what is (b) justice? We think we know but when it comes to a precise definition things get vague. Is it fairness? Impartiality? Does it demand that virtue be rewarded while evil is punished? It implies all of these things, sure. But is justice in the natural order of things? Is it a solid, inescapable principle, akin to the economic principle that resources are finite and have alternate uses? Not even close.

Justice is a pure product of the human intellect that has no reality outside the human mind. Its existence depends on a societal consensus, e.g. that a person accused of a crime should be deemed innocent until found guilty by a jury of his peers. Now of course there are people who will claim that human beings are entitled to justice because they’re made in the image of God, possess natural rights as human beings, etc. These claims may or may not be true but as a practical matter justice cannot exist independently of societal consensus. If society gives up on the idea of innocence until guilt is proved, if the law ceases to embody that idea—out it goes.

Nor is justice cosmic, by which I mean all-embracing either in principle or in fact. Certainly the natural world operates on no principle of justice. Nor does humanity embrace a single standard of justice. We in the West think we have it figured out. But elsewhere in the world there are societies that not only ignore Western standards of justice in practice but reject them in principle. At the point of delivery justice is merely a package of defined benefits, e.g. the civil liberties spelled out in the American Bill of Rights.

Economics, then, is part of the natural order of things: an integral component of human society. Whatever its form an economic system has just one function: the allocation of finite resources. It does not embody and cannot produce justice. Whatever we define as “economic justice”—the minimum wage, the right to a job, the guarantee of a basic standard of living—is really just a package of defined benefits. It is what we say it is, nothing more and nothing less.

So for all the sonorous nobility with which it's sounded, the term “economic justice” always comes down to a case of special pleading: that my wages should be raised, that my student loans should be forgiven, that my health insurance should be provided free and so on and so forth. That such demands imply tradeoffs—that more economic justice for me means less for thee—is an inescapable fact of life that is usually ignored or denied. Because they are neither fair nor impartial, measures of economic justice violate our understanding of what is just. That we ignore the violation is a sad commentary on human nature. But you know something? It’s a just commentary…

Posted by tmg110 at 11:16 AM EDT

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Here’s an amusingly headlined story from the Washington Post: “Will Clinton’s experience be a liability?” That’s the Pants-Suited One’s experience as Secretary of State that the Post is referencing, presumably in a fit of angst over Hillary’s current troubles with State Department email regulations.

Of course it’s too soon to tell whether this little scandal will derail the PSO’s presidential bid. It does provide a reminder, though, that her decades of close association with one of America’s most naturally gifted politicians hasn’t done much to hone her own skills. Politically, Hillary Clinton has two left feet and a tin ear. The Post headline reminded me of one of Frederick the Great’s characteristic bon mots: “If experience were all that is needed to make a great general, the greatest of all would be the mules of my own army.” One observes the PSO…and one sees what old Fritz meant…

Posted by tmg110 at 5:46 PM EDT

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