Barack will save us
From unemployment malaise
With clever taxing.

Barack will save us
From global warming danger -
He’ll lower the seas.

Barack will save us
From free market ravages
And give us free drugs.

Barack will saves us
From national default shame -
Call our Chinese friends.

Barack will save us
From Middle Eastern warfare -
Give them all the Jews.

Barack will save us
From judicial activists -
Send Prof Kagan in.

Barack will save us
From fat and lazy children
If Michelle has say.

Barack will save us
From Islamic terror threats
Trying Navy SEALS.

Barack will save us
From global low opinion
Bowing to despots.

Barack will save us
From Europe’s collapse sending
Them borrowed money.

Barack will save us
Ev’rybody sing along,
He’s the Chosen One.

All that being said,
Who will save us from Barack
And his Hope and Change?

One particular meme that I’ve seen cropping up among the Tea Party circles is those signs with pics of Bush and Cheney, along with the line “Miss Me Yet?” This is something that never fails to send the vomit shooting up the back of my throat. I won’t recount, yet again, the multitude of sins against limited government and fiscal sanity that have been promulgated by the Bush-bots and their neoconservative counselors. Sure, as Karl pointed out to me this weekend, for all his wretchedness, McCain probably wouldn’t have been foisting socialized (or cartelized) healthcare on us, at least this year (although it’s not inconceivable). Nevertheless the prominence of these die-hard Bushie fanboys among the supposedly revolutionary Tea Partiers is the number-one piece of evidence that the movement has been co-opted by amoral GOP set and its talk-radio enablers.

Depressingly, Ron Paul types and associated libertoids, apparently, were completely non-existent among this crowd. In fact, I would guess that, say, a Ron Paul Revolution t-shirt would get some hostile attention from these guys. That’s too bad, because the hard-libertarian forces are younger, more geographically diverse, and are much more serious about pushing back at against the growth of the state. This is not to criticize the undoubtedly fine and dedicated middle-American family men who seemed to make up the bulk of the Partiers, but a broad-based coalition is becoming increasingly essential.

Now, maybe it isn’t fair to pick on the Tea Partiers when after all, they, and indeed the GOP, were at the forefront of the opposition to this monstrous healthcare bill, as Karl pointed out in his post. So on that front, good for them, and I mean that, and I proudly stand with them.

But you get the idea if you ask these guys what they really want, it would boil down to a recitation of stale Heritage Foundation website copy. Let’s see, how about a reduction in marginal tax rates? Invade Iran! Support Israel! And we don’t like the welfare state, but we’re happy to ignore it, for the most part. Basically, Bush/Cheney. Miss ‘em yet?

Worse yet, the fringier of the Tea Partiers seem wont to eschew serious thought in favor of garbage like the birther movement or the “Barack is a Muslim” nonsense. Less stupid, but still stupid, is the tendency to characterize Obama as some kind of a hardline Leninist. Chatting with Karl that evening over some beers I characterized this tendency as, basically, rightwing mental masturbation. (To those who would characterize Conservative Donnybrook similarly: you’re wrong!) Fixating on these obsessions is a good way to push an already disfavored movement into total irrelevance.

If these Tea Party guys really want to keep what’s left of this country from disappearing down the shitter, the answer isn’t Marco Rubio or Scott Brown, and, for God’s sake, it’s not installing some sort of Bush/Cheney 2.0. It isn’t fiddling with marginal tax rates and, emphatically, it is not raining bunker-busters on Iran or expanding NATO or amping up bloodthirsty rhetoric towards China. It isn’t about kicking out DC Scumbag Team A and replacing it with DC Scumbag Team B, which will make comforting noises about its “conservatism” while advancing its own National Review-endorsed assaults on our liberty. And it certainly won’t come from joining the personality cult of the vapid, narcissistic and stupid Sarah Palin, an ardent fan of state power when it benefits her personally, whom we love anyway because she shoots guns and has lots of babies, and exudes family-friendly MILFey sultriness that sends middle-aged white dudes’ pulses racing.

What’s needed to counter the loss of freedom and the growth of centralized power in every sphere of life is nothing short of a rollback of the state on all fronts. Will the Tea Party crowd commit to this? Do they even want it?

How many of these “middle-American radicals” would vote today to repeal Social Security? Heck, ten years from now will these same “Kill the Bill” tea-partiers, as they load up on their government-provided diabetes and blood pressure meds, even be willing to repeal universal healthcare? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I’m guessing I wouldn’t like them.

UPDATE: If you still refuse to become depressed about the Tea Party movement, read Derbyshire.

This morning we awake to a brave new world. By sleight of hand, trickery, and lies, the House Democrats have passed the Senate health care reform bill by inducing those who were inclined to vote against the measure with empty promises. Astoundingly, Pelosi was able to convince otherwise sensible Democrats to switch their votes by making promises that she has absolutely no ability to deliver and which everyone should have known have little chance of being delivered.

What Pelosi and company did was to load up an amendment bill with all sorts of goodies specifically targeted toward those Democrats who were maintaining no votes on the Senate bill. The problem is the bill that goes to the President’s desk is the Senate bill – not the amendment bill. That bill still has to go to the Senate to be voted on by the Senate. This is where it becomes obvious that those who changed their votes because of measures placed in the amendment bill have been duped – in some cases probably willingly. Most of those measures have absolutely no chance of passage in the Senate. Indeed, the Senate Republicans have made quite clear that they do not intend to pass any of the measures and that they will publicize the individual bribes which induced each of the former no-voting Democrats to change their votes.

Of course one presumes that the members of the House know the rules and that the promises being made were unlikely to be kept. Therefore, the only conclusion that one can draw from this is that these members are full-blown cynics who believe they can go back to their constituents and claim that they only changed their votes because of the promises made to them without ever mentioning that they knew full well that those promises were illusory. In other words, the amendment bill was simply cover to allow those Dems who were afraid of their constituents to flout the desires of the folks back home. Indeed, Nancy Pelosi, who had considered using the “deem and pass” rules of House procedure for this landmark legislation, spoke to liberal bloggers on Monday saying, “Nobody wanted to vote for the Senate bill….It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know, but I like it because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.” While they ended up voting anyway, the amendment bill is designed to give Democrats with cranky constituents cover. Each knew that it was the Senate bill that would go to the President’s desk.

Probably the most astounding reversal came from Bart Stupak, whose amendment banning federal expenditures on abortion caused problems during the initial round of passage. Indeed, the Stupak Amendment was one of the major differences between the House version and the Senate version of health care reform. The Senate version contains no limitations on federal spending to kill babies. Now Stupak has aligned himself with those who urge American women to kill babies for convenience sake. He must know that a presidential executive order is entirely worthless as the President cannot, by executive order, repeal a bill passed through Congress. The President has no power to prevent the operation of the Senate mandate that abortion be covered by the new health care plan. Yet Stupak willfully allowed himself to be duped into compromising whatever principles he may have once had.

This morning, the Change™ promised by our savior, Barack Obama, is headed to his desk. That change will be fundamental and, I fear, irrevocable. I was speaking to a friend who has a two-year-old daughter. His daughter will grow up in a country where every time she has a sniffle, she will run to the government to take care of her. Her individual relationship with government will be substantially different from the traditional one in which Americans viewed the federal government as a threat to liberty. Instead, she will see the government as the source of her rights and welfare, the font from which all good things come. After an entire generation or two of this new relationship, it is impossible to imagine a true conservatism taking root in the psyche of the American people again. We will never again be independent from the care of, and control by, an all-encompassing government. And once that impulse to individual responsibility for our lives has been quashed there is no impediment to despotic rule or even outright dictatorship, which will be instituted for our good.

Karl and Willmoore protesting the health care bill

It was with this thought that I drove to Washington D.C. this weekend to join in the protest against the end of our American experiment. The photo above shows that there were thousands of like-minded people who also made the same trip. I met with fellow Conservative Donnybrook contributor Willmoore. Willmoore and I took the Metro to the Capitol and were greeted at the top of the steps by an operative from the Republican National Committee who was passing out signs that read, “Listen to me!” The West lawn of the Capitol was packed with people who rejected the notion of a government large enough to give us everything. While we listened to House members and ordinary citizens take turns at the microphone, someone reported that the Park Service had estimated the crowd at 25,000 people. And, even as that announcement was made, more continued to join the throng.

I had attended a local Tea Party rally in Indianapolis last summer and Willmoore had attended the Rally for the Republic back in 2008. While outwardly the basic format of the Tea Party protests where ordinary citizens addressed the crowds alternating with Tea Party-friendly politicians was followed at this rally, the overall tenor seemed to have shifted ever so slightly to the mainstream Party line. Indeed, the Tea Party has been crashed. On the other hand, not a single Republican voted for the health care overhaul bill so it appears that at least they heard the voice of the people. It remains to be seen if the Senate follows through with its promise to obstruct the overhaul. At this point, we are left to hope that the Supreme Court will read the Constitution and realize that nothing in Article I, Section 8 authorizes the Congress to mandate health care for all and strike down the bill. The only other hope is that after November 2, the Republicans will find a way to repeal the law before it goes into effect, at which point it will never be repealed. Indeed, if universal health care goes into effect, it will only ever be expanded, like all entitlements.

Upon my return after twenty hours’ round trip in the car, my wife asked me if I thought the trip was worth it. Did the presence of thousands of people outside the Capitol mean anything? In the short run, it appears that our exertions were wasted. After all, the Democrats passed the health care bill and the Senate bill will now go to the President’s desk. But, had there been no one outside the House chambers, the decision for the Dems who caved would have been easier. They could have argued that nobody cared. This way at least they know that there is an angry mob ready to take their seats from them. The same goes for the Republicans. It is good (and perhaps a little surprising) that not a single Republican voted for the bill. Had there been no crowds outside, one wonders if that would have been the case. In the long run, it will be interesting to see if the coherence that we have seen among the Republicans in this fight will remain once the amendment package goes to the Senate. Let us see if the Senate Republicans can show the same mettle that their brothers and sisters on the other end of the Capitol have shown. If they have, I believe, it will be in part because of the crowds that gathered in Washington this weekend. That may be the true measure of whether all the driving was worth it.

27                As the boys grew up, Esau became a Democrat, a man who loved big government; whereas Jacob was a simple man, who kept to his tents.

28                The people loved Esau, because they were fond of largesse; but the founding fathers preferred Jacob.

29                Once, when Jacob was treating a wounded sheep, Esau came in from the open, with a hangnail.

30                He said to Jacob, “Give me some of that medical treatment, I am uncomfortable.” (That is why he was called America.)

31                But Jacob replied, “First give me your birthright in exchange for it.”

32                “Look,” said Esau, “I’m on the point of dying. What good will my freedoms and liberties do me?”

33                But Jacob insisted, “Swear to me first!” So he sold Jacob his birthright under oath.

34                Jacob then treated his hangnail, and Esau sighed in relief, got up, and went his way. Esau cared little for his birthright.

Tortoise: I trust you will take a check from me, my friend?

Achilles: Of course, Tortoise. You and I go way back. Into antiquity you might even say. In any case, I could really use the money.

Tortoise: Are you still looking for work?

Achilles: Yes. It seems there is very little call for heroic Greek warriors in today’s economy. If only we would declare war on Turkey. I could probably round up any number of Greek warrior heroes for that war.

Tortoise: Maybe you could get Norman Podhoretz to put a bug in Obama’s ear. Just remind him the Turks are Muslim. That should be reason enough for him to advocate for a war. And, at the same time, think of all the jobs that would be created for idled Hellenistic soldiers.

Achilles: I wish I knew what went wrong. I thought for sure the government stimulus would lead to prosperity. I kept hearing that every dollar of deficit spending would create $1.50 of expansion in the economy. Maybe we should have spent more.

Tortoise: That is one way. Or, we could learn from our failure and try something different. Can I ask you a question, Achilles?

Achilles: Of course.

Tortoise: Where does all of the money that the government spends come from?

Achilles: Why, it comes from taxpayers. You should know that.

Tortoise: And who does the government give the money to?

Achilles: Other taxpayers who will spend the money. That’s how jobs are created.

Tortoise: What you are saying then is that the government takes the money from one taxpayer and gives it to another to spend. This seems to be a recipe in spinning one’s wheels. Why would we do that?

Achilles: Well, Tortoise, the people from whom the government takes the money are those who are savers and the people who they give to are spenders. The government just wants to make sure that the money is being used. That way, new money is injected into the economy. It is really quite elementary, Tortoise.

Tortoise: Let me see if I understand. It is your position that saving money is unproductive whereas spending it is a productive use of capital.

Achilles: Precisely! And that is why I am having such a hard time understanding why the economy hasn’t come roaring back and why there are not jobs for everyone.

Tortoise: Well, Achilles, let me propose to you another way of thinking about the problem. Suppose you are one of those savers that are destroying our economy. What will you do with that check I just handed you?

Achilles: Easy. I’ll put it in the bank for a rainy day.

Tortoise: Wouldn’t you want to at least draw some interest on the money?

Achilles: Oh sure. Maybe I’ll buy a CD or something like that.

Tortoise: And do you suppose the bank will take your money and put it in the vault until the day you come back to retrieve it?

Achilles: I never really thought about that. I suppose so.

Tortoise: Well then, let me ask you this. How does a bank make money?

Achilles: They write loans to people.

Tortoise: Loans to open businesses, buy cars, houses and such, right?

Achilles: Exactly.

Tortoise: And whose money do you suppose they use to write these loans?

Achilles: Ah, I see where you’re going. They use the money I placed in their vault.

Tortoise: Precisely. They use yours and all the other depositors’ money to make loans on which they then charge interest.

Achilles: What did you expect? Even a greedy evil bank has to make money, Tortoise.

Tortoise: The people who take those loans out of the bank, they buy things with the money and open businesses, right?

Achilles: Yes. Probably all of those things.

Tortoise: And I think you alluded to it before, but those people who take the loans, the spenders as I think you called them, are putting that money to productive use. Are they not?

Achilles: Yes, I suppose they are.

Tortoise: Just so we’re clear. The spenders are taking the money that you saved and making it productive. In other words, saving is not unproductive, is it?

Achilles: I see what you mean. But, surely with the saving and the government money, that is all to the good.

Tortoise: Ah, but didn’t you say a few minutes ago that the government takes that money from the savers to give to the spenders?

Achilles: Well, yes. I did say that.

Tortoise: Doesn’t that seem to mean that if you take money from the savers and give it to the spenders, the only people you’ve hurt is the banks who no longer get to charge interest on the money. But, in the end, the same amount of money is available to the spenders?

Achilles: Now you put it that way, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Tortoise: Why is that, Achilles?

Achilles: Well, from what you’ve said, taxing people can never result in injecting new money into the economy.

Tortoise: That’s true.

Achilles: But, what if the government were to just print the money and spend it?

Tortoise: Well, they could do that. I purposely left out the Federal Reserve – that is who would do such a thing. If the Fed were to print money, they would simultaneously be forced to raise interest rates to stave off inflation. In the end, spenders would be more reluctant to borrow money at the higher interest rates and the economy would slow down.

Achilles: So printing money wouldn’t even work.

Tortoise: I’m afraid not, Achilles.

Achilles: I’ll never get a job at this rate. It seems that every time I get halfway to a job, I still have to traverse half the remaining distance and so forth, so that I never actually arrive at my job.

Tortoise: I agree it seems to be a paradox.

Achilles: Is there no way to inject new money into the economy and spur job growth?

Tortoise: There is no way to do it with government spending because there is no such thing as idle savings. However, let us discuss what would happen if government spent less. Suppose the government decided to collect less money from taxpayers. What would be the result?

Achilles: Well, as we discussed before, the spenders would spend it. And the savers would save more of it. And, as we saw earlier would make even more money available to the spenders through loans.

Tortoise: That is part of the story. Government would spend less money though. In the end, government would have to let some of its workers go. It is difficult to say that less government workers would lose their jobs than the private economy gains.

Achilles: It seems there are no good options.

Tortoise: I’m not saying that cutting taxes is a bad option. I’m just pointing out that the good comes with some bad – if you count less government workers as bad. I suppose if you were a government worker…But, I digress. In fact, cutting marginal tax rates and slashing regulation has worked before and it has the added benefit of promoting work, saving, and investing. If one receives more of the value of his labor for every hour that he works, he is likely to work more. And, as he rakes in more money through more work, he will have more money to save and invest.

Achilles: Well that seems all to the good.

Tortoise: In the end the only thing government can do is move money from one person to another – it can redistribute the wealth. It cannot create new wealth. Only increasing productivity and an expanding work force can do that.

Achilles: I must have gotten sucked in by the slogan.

Tortoise: Which slogan is that?

Achilles: “Yes, we Keynes.”

Tortoise: No, you Keynte and you shouldn’t even try.

With apologies to Homer, Carroll, Hofstadter, and Riedl (from whose article this month in NR I drew heavily).

The article to which you linked, when read through the lenses of one conversant with history (which one would expect a self-described historian to do), demonstrated far better than I could of the bankruptcy of your side. Kagan starts out by mentioning the Great Depression. He failed to note any of the actual causes of that depression. He failed to take into consideration the “adventurism,” to borrow one of your words from a recent comment, of the United States leading up to that crisis. The economic decisions in the midst and wake of the Civil War (National banking acts of 1863 and 1864 which consolidated currency to fund the Union’s war; Federal Reserve creation in 1913; Aldrich-Vreeland in 1908, etc.) and the domestic and foreign policy decisions in the wake of the war (Reconstruction; almost immediate attempts at imperialism in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Liberia – all of which came about due to slavery and its end; westward expansion, Indian wars, Alaskan purchase; Roosevelt’s splitting of the Republicans, his appointments to the Supreme Court, etc.; financial, monetary, and fiscal management and mismanagement), not to mention World War I, all contributed directly to the spreading thin of the American military and building resentment throughout the world.

Kagan goes on to insinuate that, because the United States seemed to somehow ignore foreign policy, Japan militarized and Germany fell under Hitler’s sway. This is howlingly funny. What we are required to do if we are to accept Kagan’s hypothesis is to absolutely and unequivocally deny that black is black, that water is wet, or that fire is hot. Aside from the fact that it was American “adventurism” (e.g., with the Great White Fleet, which further fueled a zealous desire to militarize in newly-nationalist Japan) which thrust Japan on its path toward imperialism (read about Perry’s Black Ships and the cracking of isolationist Japan, the Meiji Restoration, the Manchurian, Korean, and Russian campaigns of Japan), we can hardly be faulted for “ignoring” Germany: we had shipped thousands of American boys there to fight, bleed, die, and kill, and had established a new world-political body to deal with the German problem only 20 years before the 1933 Nazification. One could be excused for refusing to read any of the rest of Kagan’s ludicrous bombast after realizing this, but, intrepid soul that I am, I trudged on.

Kagan engaged in your least-favorite pasttime. He had the balls to criticize Ronald Reagan (gasp! the horror!) in practically the same breath as he criticized Jimmy Carter. Calling Reagan’s policy decisions about Lebanon “failed” and asserting that these policies led to the bombing of the Marine barracks is hardly what one would expect to hear you lauding. Implicit in this is the recognition that we should not have been there to get bombed. Reagan quickly and wisely realized this and did exactly the right thing: he got out and left Israel to what it was perfectly, demonstrably capable of doing: defending itself and letting Beirut and the Lebanese tend to their own damned affairs. No more Marines were killed there after that. No Al-Aqsa,  ”Quds Force,” or Hezbollah started trouble by killing Americans there. What a concept.  What were “Reagan’s failed policies” in Lebanon? Assisting a “multinational force” along with French troops and others to “keep the peace” in a sectarian civil war. What spawned the Muslim hatred and subsequent suicide bombings? Perceived American preference for Maronite Catholics and the shelling of Druze areas which inadvertantly killed civilians.

Kagan touches tangentially and seemingly accidentally upon one truth: things now are probably more dangerous for the U.S., but because of our huge overseas presence and constant “spreading of democracy” or “war on terror” or “search for WNDs” (we really do need to find those nasty World Net Dailies) or whatever they’re calling it these days, not because we are letting our guard down.

People are growing weary of the wars, growing weary of the constant misequation of the United States of America with Israel by the radical Zionists, and people are growing weary of the stubborn economic hardships put upon them by constant imperialism. Bring Americans home to defend America. Root out radical Islam here and deport it. If the resistance starts here, put it down swiftly and with no remorse. But there is no way we need to be defending South Korea from a tinpot near-dead in charge of a run-down non-entity. There is no justification for making all those “security guarantees” to states in the Russian sphere of influence. There is no way you could possibly believe that Kagan essay if you know and understand history. There is no way you can continue to call yourself a conservative and defend such Wilsonianism. It is definitionally schizophrenic, or alternatively simply mendacious, to claim to be conservative and yet espouse this baseless, historically-illiterate, radical Ledeenishness while at the same time believing it makes us safer. Your apologists split their time between appealing to how much safer we are and how dangerous it’s getting. Your side constantly purports to support “democracy” and “freedom” while working overtime - often in cahoots with outright radical socialist would-be totalitarians – to quash them through Patriot Acts, occupations of foreign countries, propped-up banking cartels and outdated unionized auto companies (remember which President started those great things?). Your side is trying to cling desperately to relevance, which is understandable. But for whom are you striving?

Just a quick note to mention, since secession is a topic that crops up here every now and then, that Daniel McCarthy has a thoughtful post up on the subject, in effect a paleo word of ambivalence on the subject.

In particular, on the issue of constitutionality in the case of the US, he writes:

The answer is that the Constitution neither allows nor forbids secession — the Constitution’s answer, in effect, is “don’t ask that question.” That’s the correct answer because responding to the question of secession in any other way would destroy the Constitution: even if only a few states secede, once the principle is granted, any state may leave whenever it pleases, weakening the Constitution to nothing. But if secession is not possible at all, the states may not leave even when the central government becomes overbearing, and if this principle is established in fact — as it has been — the result is the destruction of the federal system, rendering the Constitution a dead letter. The only way to have kept the Constitution intact was not to press the question in the first place.

Sounds about right to me; the arguments on the subject that I’ve heard, pro and con, have a certain legalistic character, a tendency to take some disparate historical and legal threads and try to weave an airtight case when it can’t really be done. The subject is left unaddressed in the Constitution for a reason. But granting McCarthy’s take on the subject, is a stable, decentralized, federalist system possible at all over the long run?

Yes. Very committed. Seeing the level of the president’s commitment, I am left only with Hope™ that government will somehow be reformed and spending truly cut. Right now the cuts seem to amount to chump Change™.