Libertarian Leanings

Progressives Deplore The Rhetoric of Violence

Except for those times when they think it's appropriate.

The Rhetoric Of Violence

Our progressive friends deplore the vitriol in today's political discourse.  In fact Joan Walsh, for one, is so distressed by it that she has admirably promised to set an example by swearing off the rhetoric of violence.

Sadly, to my knowledge, no conservative leader has yet called for dialing back the rage on the right in the wake of the Giffords shooting. Sarah Palin sent condolences to Giffords' family, but said nothing about her unconscionable SarahPAC map putting 20 House members, including Giffords, in actual crosshairs for supporting healthcare reform, or her infamous Tweet telling conservatives "don't retreat, reload." Giffords' 2010 Tea Party challenger, Jesse Kelly, hasn't apologized for inviting supporters to "shoot a fully automatic M16" to "get on target for victory" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords from office." Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle hasn't yet recanted her statement about the need to pursue "Second Amendment remedies" if political change lags behind the Tea Party's dreams.

Although there's no evidence Tea Party rhetoric had anything to do with Giffords' shooting, it can be no surprise that her father, when asked if his daughter had enemies, told the New York Post tearfully, "Yeah, the whole Tea Party."

Oops.  My bad.  I should have read past the headline.  I thought Walsh was eschewing the violent rhetoric, but I can see now that she just wants the other side to do it.

But seriously, nobody expects the lefties to tone it down in the least.  As Glenn Reynolds points out, progressives exuberantly leap to any pretext for calling Tea Partiers accomplices to murder. 

As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"

Set aside as inconvenient, apparently.There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.

Aren't those casual accusations themselves the rhetoric of violence?

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

I think I get it, though.  Progressives are good.  Ask any of them.  They'll all assure you, progressives are good.  Anything said by any progressive, anywhere, is for the greater good, and therefore, is not and cannot be considered the rhetoric of violence.  That would be a contradiction in terms.  An impossibility.

They remind me of the English Chaplain in George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan.

'WARWICK. I am a soldier, not a churchman. As a pilgrim I saw something of the Mahometans. They were not so ill-bred as I had been led to believe. In some respects their conduct compared favorably with ours.

CAUCHON [displeased] I have noticed this before. Men go to the East to convert the infidels. And the infidels pervert them. The Crusader comes back more than half a Saracen. Not to mention that all Englishmen are born heretics.

THE CHAPLAIN. Englishmen heretics!!! [Appealing to Warwick] My lord: must we endure this? His lordship is beside himself. How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.

CAUCHON. I absolve you, Messire de Stogumber, on the ground of invincible ignorance. The thick air of your country does not breed theologians.'

It's simply not possible for progressive rhetoric to be considered violent.

Update:  From Power Line,

Something like mass hysteria has broken out among liberals in the mainstream media. Among the victims are Joe Klein, Paul Krugman, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and CNN.

The hysteria is occasioned by the attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords. It manifests in the condemnation of Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement, and conservatives in the media. They are all none too subtly held responsible for the attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords by virtue of their resistance to the Democratic agenda.

According to lefty pundits, if you resist the Democratic agenda, doesn't it follow that you would be capable of murder?  Progressive logic from paragons of towering progressive intellect.

Representative Thad McCotter On Health Care Supply And Demand

Finally, somebody is talking about the actual cost of health care instead of the cost of insurance.  It's about time.

Here's an article I wrote on the subject for Pajamas Media.

Lefties And The Constitution

Libs are suffering the vapors over the GOP's reading of the US Constitution from the floor of the House yesterday.  The most important parts were left out, Dahlia Lithwick complains in her most recent Slate column.

Constitutional Whitewash

What House Republicans left out when they read (parts of) America's founding document.

The House's public reading of the Constitution today opened with a brief but meaningful hiccup. When it became clear that the Constitution would be read in its "most modern, amended form" (i.e., without references to portions that had been superseded by later amendments, including the explicit language in Article 1 that classified slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of congressional apportionment and taxation), several House Democrats raised objections to what was—quite literally—a constitutional whitewash.

Can you imagine!  The brass of those Republicans to leave out parts of the Constitution that are no longer in force!  Libs would like you to know what rotten bastards the founding fathers really were!  What better way than the tried and true liberal strategy for attacking people and ideas they don't like.  Call them racist! 

This is not the first time Lithwick voiced her complaints about Republicans reading the Constitution from the floor of the House.

The problem with the Tea Party's new Constitution fetish is that it's hopelessly selective. As Robert Parry notes, the folks who will be reading the Constitution aloud this week can't read the parts permitting slavery or prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment using only their inside voices, while shouting their support for the 10th Amendment. They don't get to support Madison and renounce Jefferson, then claim to be restoring the vision of "the Framers."

The fact is, libs really don't like the Constitution.  They find it way too constraining on federal power, which is exactly the point Republicans hope to make by reading it.  The federal government needs to be constrained.  If not, our freedoms are not just in jeopardy, they're gone.  What happens if health care reform's individual mandate is allowed to take effect.  What limit will there be on the power of the federal government, if the act of doing nothing -- not buying health insurance -- can be punishable?  What limits federal power if an individual can be forced to buy a product -- in this case health insurance -- from a private company?

But that's what progressives want.  In fact that's the purpose of health care reform.  Expand federal power.  Our liberal leadership in congress didn't do such a red hot job of disguising that fact.  Why else would they claim health care reform would reduce the federal deficit, then instruct the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the impact by counting ten years of revenue against six years of entitlement costs. 

It's smoke and mirrors.  Democrats don't care how much health care reform costs any more than they care about the deficit.  After bitterly complaining about deficits supposedly caused by the Bush tax cuts, Democrats went ahead with tripling the largest deficit incurred during the Bush administration, and they did it two years in a row.  This past year they didn't even bother to pass a budget.  Couldn't be shackled by a budget.

They refused to be bound.  Crises in financial and housing markets were opportunities they seized upon to grab more power.  And to hell with the deficit.  Lefties, liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever we want to call them, want more power for themselves and will fight tooth and nail against anything that would place limits on it.  The Constitution would place those limits.

So we get a chorus of their complaints and with it the race card.  Here's Alex Altman of Time magazine piling on, likening Republicans to a cult and pointing out how flawed a document the Constitution really is.

Which brings us to today's reading. Is there anything wrong with starting a new session of Congress by reviewing one of America's seminal texts? Not as far as it goes, though as Vanity Fair notes, you could argue it's an expensive use of time: more than $1 million in opportunity cost, by one reckoning. The Constitution is a remarkable document, and eminently worthy of the reverence heaped on it, but it's also flawed. Despite their genius, the framers were fallible. Law professor Sanford Levinson wrote a book called "Our Undemocratic Constitution" which points out some of these flaws-including its treatment of slavery, which the House papered over today.

Altman then proceeds to argue that flawed and undemocratic is just the way Republicans like their Constitution. 

Consider one example of how the Constitution gets hauled out for partisan arguments. At Commentary Magazine today, Pete Wehner, a former Bush Administration and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes:  "For many modern-day liberals, the Constitution is, at best, a piece of quaint, even irrelevant, parchment." In the context of his argument, this swipe follows from a discussion of how liberals' dismissal of the today's reading as a "gimmick" shows they don't take the document seriously. It eventually leads to a defense of the orginalism, the theory which holds the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of its framers, as best we can surmise them. Its most famous proponent, Justice Antonin Scalia, has argued -- as Wehner points out -- that the problem with treating the Constitution like a living document is that there will never be agreement about how it should evolve, and because it's too messy to make those determinations, it must stay static.

The reality is that the Constitution will not be static, and Republicans don't want it to be.  Republicans are quite happy with changing the Constitution as long as it's done in the way the Constitution itself prescribes.  America has been changing its Constitution for centuries, according to the Constitution. 

But guess what!  When we follow constitutional prescriptions, it's not so easy to change the Constitution, nor should it be.  But that's a big problem for our liberal friends.  Changing it that way just isn't fast enough to suit our lefty friends.  They want what they want right now!  That's why they like progressive activist judges --lefties would call them fair-minded judges -- because they can effect constitutional changes instantaneously.

There's another reason lefties favor consitutional change by judicial activism.  Their ideas and their policies generally suck.  The majority of Americans didn't want the kind of health care reform that has been forced on us by the left.  They've said so, often and loudly.  The majority of Americans are not receptive to the practice of income redistribution that is so dear to leftist hearts.  The majority of Americans favor free markets over a government controlled economy.  How does the progressive minority overrule the majority of Amerians.  Their solution is to attack what would constrain them. 

They attack the Tea Party.  They attack Republicans.  They attack talk radio.  They attack Fox News. 

The Constitution constrains them, so progressives attack it, discredit it, and seek ways around it.  They remind us that the original Constitution said a slave was equal to three-fifths of a free person when adding up the population.  They call Republicans "originalists" implying that in their hearts Republicans are racist, and that there is some hidden nefarious yearning for a return to days when African-Americans were considered less.

But it's all so confusing and contradictory.  They say Republicans are originalists.  But House Republicans chose not to read the original text.  Well, are they or aren't they?  Liberal Democrats don't really care.  They want power.  A stricter reading of the Constitution might put limits on power -- power that progressives believe should rightly be theirs. 

And so today lefty pundits are out in droves professing that no one can possibly know what Constitution means.  For them the Constitution should mean whatever some progressive judge says it means.  Or it should be ignored.  Ignoring it has certainly been the Obama approach.

A Progressive Constitution

Dahlia Lithwick joins the lefty chorus jeering at House Republicans over their plan to read the U.S. Constitution at the start of the new session.

The problem with the Tea Party's new Constitution fetish is that it's hopelessly selective. As Robert Parry notes, the folks who will be reading the Constitution aloud this week can't read the parts permitting slavery or prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment using only their inside voices, while shouting their support for the 10th Amendment. They don't get to support Madison and renounce Jefferson, then claim to be restoring the vision of "the Framers."

I wonder if Ms. Lithwick thinks amending the constitution is unconstitutional.  Progressives like to remind us that slavery was condoned in the constitution before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished it.  It's their way to discredit the document and anybody that thinks we should be governed according to it.  Besides, in the progressive view the constitution was meant to be interpreted not amended, and congress, especially with a Republican majority, doesn't have the authority or the brains to interpret. 

Even Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute—its popular pocket version of the Constitution is only $4.95!—agrees that these are largely symbolic measures, noting in the Wall Street Journal that as a legal matter, "at least since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the Supreme Court has had the last word on what the Constitution authorizes Congress to do." Nobody has suggested that legislators don't have an independent duty to uphold the Constitution as they understand it. But that doesn't change the fact that the courts, not Tea Party Republicans—even those with the benefit of extra-credit classes from Justice Antonin Scalia—get to make the final call.

Recently progressives have come up with a new argument in support of constitutional interpretation by qualified judges:  Nobody else knows for certain what it says.  After all, it's more than 100 years old, and who could possibly understand what anybody back then might have been talking about when they concocted the thing?  Ms. Lithwick expands:

The wonderful Garrett Epps writes today that if Tea Party Republicans really listen to the Constitution, they will quickly realize that "the document they are hearing is nationalistic, not state-oriented; concerned with giving Congress power, not taking it away; forward-looking, not nostalgic for the past; aimed [at] creating a new government that can solve new problems, not freezing in place an old one that must fold its hands while the nation declines." So long as there are fair-minded judges on the bench, the Constitution will be read for what it actually says, and not what any one results-oriented group or faction wants it to be.

When Ms. Lithwick specifically mentions "fair-minded judges" who should be the final arbiters, it's not hard to imagine the kind of judges she has in mind.  But the more interesting point is her agreement that the constitution does not limit congressional power.  Garret Epps is her authority on it.  Though Epps is equally befuddled, he worries that "others may not read the Constitution precisely as I do."  He says:

The intention to limit Congress is, to me at least, pretty hard to actually find in the Constitution itself.

Really?  The words, "Congress shall make no law..." don't leap out at him?  Hmmm.  His must be a very liberal interpretation of the phrase.  After all, it's his crowd that always said the Second Amendment, which establishes "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" really meant that the states have the right to establish their own militias.  Fortunately, the Supreme court has since ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right.  I can't help but doubt that Ms. Lithwick thinks the Supremes are fair-minded judges.

In any event, Ms. Lithwick sees no point in reading the constitution on the floor of the House.  Says she, "...it doesn't get less nuanced or complicated just because you've read it aloud."  And the more liberal you are the more complicated it gets.  To a progressive, it means whatever aligns it with the latest progressive fad, which means it could say different things on different days. 

All the more reason to remind our representatives what's in it. 

And so starting at 10:30 this morning this morning Republican members will take turns until the entire constitution has been read from the floor of the U.S House of Representatives.

"This historic and symbolic reading is long overdue and shows that the new majority in the House truly is dedicated to our Constitution and the principles for which it stands," said Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia.

"As the written expression of the consent the American people gave to their government -- a consent with restrictions and boundaries -- the public reading of the Constitution will set the tone for the 112th Congress."

Progressives may ponder what that means, "consent of the governed."  Progressive don't agree that government needs consent, certainly not when it does what it deems right for the little people.  Besides, the phrase "consent of the governed" comes from the Declaration of Independence.  And wasn't that written even earier than the constitution?  Who could possibly understand what that meant?

A Nice Ring To It

Today is the day that Nancy Pelosi becomes Minority Leader Pelosi.  Doesn't that have a nice ring to it.

Merely in taking the gavel, Mr. Boehner will fulfill his most important mandate, which is stopping the damage done by the two Pelosi Congresses. To adapt the Hippocratic Oath, first there will be no more economic harm. The GOP has already achieved a major victory on this score by preventing the tax increase that had been scheduled for this week.

That success alone seems to have had a cheering effect on the country's economic mood, with businesses talking about new investment and investors bidding up stocks. Minority Leader Pelosi are three of the happiest words in the capitalist language.

Resurgent Republicans

House Republicans say they plan to schedule a vote on the repeal of ObamaCare. 

Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for incoming House Republican leader Eric Cantor, said the House plans to vote on legislation to repeal the healthcare law on Jan. 12.

"It will pass the House," Dayspring said.

Although Republicans will control the House, 242-193, Obama's Democrats retain control of the Senate by 53-47 and are likely to block any repeal of the healthcare law.

"Obamacare is a job killer for businesses small and large, and the top priority for House Republicans is going to be to cut spending and grow the economy and jobs," Dayspring said.

OK, but how is this talk of repeal going over with the voters?

The number of American adults calling themselves Republicans in December increased by one percentage point from November to 37.0%.

Also in December, the number calling themselves Democrats fell by a point to 33.7%.

Those figures reflect the largest number of Republicans in the nation since December 2004 and the lowest number of Democrats ever recorded in tracking since November 2002.

The generic ballot shows the Republican lead widening again.  Right after the November election voters seemed poised for a display of buyers remores.  Yes, they wanted the Democrats out, but were they happy that Republicans were in?   An 11-point lead the week before the election shrunk to 5 in the weeks after. 

Republicans hold a 10-point lead over Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot for the week ending January 2, 2011.  That’s a five-point jump from last week, but it's far from clear if the findings mark a real upswing in GOP support as the new Congress convenes or are just statistical noise. 

[...]

Republicans lead by 13 points among men and by seven points among women. They hold a 23-point lead among voters not affiliated with either major political party.

Right now Republicans are taking the right steps, voting to repeal ObamaCare being one of them, and voters are responding with their support.  So far, so good, but that support will evaporate if it's all for show.  Americans are not looking for congress to go on a diet until the excitement dies down.  We need a change in the way Washington conducts business, not an empty congressional New Years resolution. 

Politically Sensitive Rose Bowl Coverage?

I couldn't help but notice.  Not only did blue states lose on the 2010 Census, they also got their butts handed to them in the Bowl Games.  It was pretty one-sided with northern schools getting clobbered by southern schools, especially the Michigan teams.  Michigan State got positively hammered by Alabama, 49-7, and Michigan's loss to Mississippi State was nearly as bad at 52-14. 

And then there was the Rose Bowl.  TCU defeated Wisconsin, and I, for one, was surprised that TCU was even there.  It's the first time I can recall that a PAC-10 school didn't play.  For the longest time, the Rose Bowl was a matchup between PAC-10 and Big-10 conference champions.  Earlier on it was PAC-10 against other notable football schools, but always, it was PAC-10.

The other really interesting thing to me was listening to the Rose Bowl commentators and never once hearing any of them mention the word "Christian" when TCU stands for Texas Christian University.  None of the analysts or play by play people ever said its full name.  I suppose it's possible that I just happened to walk out of the room at the moment they did, maybe when I would get up to keep the beer glasses full or to throw another log on the fire.  But I never heard the word "Christian" and I rarely heard anybody say "Texas" except to say where a player hailed from.  Texas Christian University was called "TCU," or "the Frogs," or "the Horned Frogs," but never Texas Christian.

I suppose I'm being unfair, but I couldn't help but imagine a sense of embarrassment out there on the left coast at the presence of one of those "Christian right" schools in their premier college football pageant.  To make matters worse, didn't the school just have to be from same the state that gave us Bush!  And to add further injury to insult, they won.  Ugh.  Better not to remind everybody.  Don't say "Texas."  Don't say "Christian."