Notes on the Way to Armageddon

Best headline of the day: “Congress lives up to its 10% approval rating.”

I suppose you can’t expect a bunch of venal vote whores –Republican and Democrat-- to act on their consciences so close to Election Day.

On the other hand the people oppose the bailout. I have great faith in the vox populi, but they are being educated on the subject of the credit crisis by the vox vapuli, the mainstream press and the politicians.

The press certainly is not qualified to either explain the crisis or to advise the public on the best solution. The press is made up today of J-majors: persons who majored in journalism.

Rather than immersing in subjects that might allow insight into current affairs; such as political science, economics, business, science or history; J-majors learn the newspaper and broadcast news business. This is why the press gullibly repeats the talking points of the political parties, makes horrible errors of fact, succumbs to bias and speaks and writes such terrible English.

So the people are without a clue as to the best course to follow and simply repeat what they have heard about not bailing out Wall Street “Fat cats” with taxpayer money and eliminating “golden parachute” severance pay for failed executives. This winds up in constituent letters, emails and phone calls sent to our representatives and is why Congressmen fear voting for the credit relief act.

A cheerier scenario might be the failure of Congress to act and the adjustment of the economy by market forces. Let me take another sip of Kool Aid and explain.

If the credit markets freeze up, it will not be permanent. Smaller and more solvent banks will get lending back on its feet after a few months on a limited basis and on a regional scope.

There was a time when smaller hometown banks administered most credit cards and mortgages were written almost exclusively by local financial institutions. The smaller banks are in a great position to fill that niche, as are corporations and individuals with capital to lend who are willing to take only reasonable credit risks when writing mortgages and business loans.Meanwhile one of the main contributors to our misery, the OPEC nations, can be expected to bring down the price of oil substantially as dollars dry up and oil purchasers are affected by the credit crunch. $30 a barrel oil will put the roses back in the cheeks of the economy.

Eventually new investment banks will rise to take the place of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, et al. If they loan money wisely and resist excessive greed, they will finance the recovery of the economy.

While we wait for this miracle to happen we will have to tighten our belts. At the last debate, when asked what he might cut in such an economic crisis, Senator Obama listed several programs he would ADD, including aid to education, national health care and a drive to alternative energy solutions, which would cost us an additional trillion dollars. He was unable to tell Jim Lehrer the name of a single area in which he might make cuts.

I give Obama credit for his sincerity, because these are the programs represent why he is running for President in the first place. But if he does implement these programs, we will have to bankrupt the general population with massive new taxes. Barack Obama just does not understand the mess we are in.

Democracy Fails a Test

Nancy Pelosi couldn’t resist the partisan attack just before the House of Representatives voted on the rescue of the American credit system.

She had to place the blame for the crisis on Bush, his cabinet, the Republican Party, the conservative philosophy and deregulation before the house acted. Enough Republicans took offense to kill the bill in the subsequent vote.

Why? Not because their feelings had been hurt, as Rep. Barney Frank so flippantly suggested, but because to vote aye would have been tantamount to endorsing Pelosi’s remarks about their own party, people and ideals. If it had been a Republican speaker making those remarks, he would have lost Democratic votes just as surely.

And thus the measure went down in defeat and 777 points were lost off the Dow Jones Index. Pelosi scored political points and God knows how many people on the cusp of retirement found their investments cruelly devalued and are now looking at one or two or five or ten more years of work before their retirement. So casually do our elected leaders play with the lives of the people.

The people, I am sure, blame the Republicans and the Democrats and the greedy Wall Street investment bankers for this crisis. The people, as usual, are right.

Personally, I am hugely disappointed that my faith in American democracy has been so misplaced. I honestly thought that working together as patriots, the Congress could craft legislation to solve this crisis quickly and move it to adoption in true bipartisan fashion.

Instead, our leaders have given us political theater. Somewhere in this mess may lie 20 years of power for a political party able to pin the blame on its rival. That has been the overriding mission on both sides. The disgust of the American people at these antics is pervasive.

If the credit system shuts down, it means a lot of short-term suffering for everyone until bankers, relying on the tried and true principles of lending and financing, find some capital they are willing to lend. Hopefully, that will happen before the economy is wrecked and we go into a depression that lasts decades and not just a few years.

Froofraw

Although this election is by no means a sure thing for either side, the left is already coming up with excuses why Barack Obama lost. I guess they never heard of the Power of Positive Thinking…

Right now the most popular theory is simple racial bigotry –that Obama will have lost because he is black. Curiously that is the one reason for an Obama loss that doesn’t make sense.

Let us assume for a moment that about half the voters are conservative. Given that three of the last four presidents were named either Bush or Reagan, it’s not such a stretch to imagine. Would they vote for a very liberal Democrat under any circumstances? Color doesn’t even enter into it. These voters, who are excited by Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, will always pick the conservative in the race.

Then let us assume that the other half of the voting public is liberal. You’ll get no argument from Al Gore on that proposition; he got a majority of the popular votes in 2000. If he had also gotten the votes Ralph Nader won that year he would have (a) taken 51 percent and (b) be finishing up his second term right about now.

Does anyone mean to argue that this 50 percent of the population –the most liberal 50 percent— would allow bigotry to dictate their votes? There may be racist liberals our there but I imagine they would be harder to find than rocking horse manure.

Thus, it would appear to be impossible, mathematically, for racial bigotry to determine the outcome of the election. There may be a few liberal hypocrites who are turned off by Obama’s color, but I doubt you could fill an auditorium with them. As for the authentic bigots, they would never have voted for a liberal anyway.

To his infinite credit, Obama has already rejected the notion that he could be defeated by racial prejudice. In saying this Obama emphasizes the very positive things his nomination says about America and proves, once again, that he is substantially brighter than many of his “friends.”

History is my hobby and my profession. Imagine he pleasure I got this week from Professor Joseph Biden (D-MBNA) when he described for CBS’ Katie Couric how the President broke the news of the Great Stock Market Crash to his countrymen in 1929:

When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'

Where to begin! To his credit, Biden got the year right: It was 1929 when Wall Street tanked. The president, however, was Herbert Hoover. Biden should know this because the Democrats ran against Hoover and the Depression right through the 1960 elections. FDR was president from 1933 until his death in April 1945.

In 1929 there were no television networks in existence. If I am not mistaken, Philo T. Farnsworth hadn’t invented the electronic television until 1927. He was probably still tinkering with it when the stock market crashed. I don’t believe that Hoover made any radio statements at the time. The Crash was shocking, but it was some weeks before the full meaning of the catastrophe began to dawn on people.

Just imagine if Sarah Palin had uttered this quote instead of Biden…

Naomi Wolf, who crafted a new, less tree-like image for Al Gore in 2000, is afraid of Sarah Palin, by the way. In a recent piece in the Huffington Post she claims that Palin and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney plan to establish a fascist government if McCain wins the election. She also claims that the government –or Palin or someone—has been stealing and/or opening her mail:

Most disturbingly to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says, "That's impossible." Horrifyingly to me is the impact on my family. My children’s' report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughter’s many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived.

Perhaps they were harboring a moose that needed shooting in that “camp?” –or they possessed a library book that should be banned? Is there no villainy to which the Governor of Alaska will not stoop? Someone tell Sarah Palin to stop hanging around Naomi Wolf’s mailbox!

The Girls Next Door are no more. The E! Network show about Hugh Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends will have to be replaced since two of the three appear to be splitting off from the harem.

Kendra Wilkinson, the sports-obsessed member of the blond trio, is apparently seeing Philadelphia Eagle Hank Baskett, who is roughly 50 years younger than the 82-year-old Hefner.

Meanwhile Holly Madison, who has said many times that she wants to be the mother of Hefner’s baby, is moving out of the master bedroom. Besides being 82, Hefner is still married to his next-door neighbor, Kimberly Conrad and says he does not want to father any more children. Madison told Us magazine she intends to leave the mansion and has been seen in company with illusionist Criss Angel. When Holly disappears that leaves Bridget Marquardt in Bedroom Number 2 –and she’s married to some guy in Ohio –Chad Christopher Marquardt.

Just your typical American family.

Defining Life

Let’s abandon economics, that dismal science, for a day and contemplate something simpler, like the nature of life.

Sarah Palin was challenged the other day on a strictly logical basis ( a refreshing change of pace) by an editorial writer who wondered why her Down syndrome baby Trig’s life was considered too precious to be aborted while, at the same time, Mrs. Palin supports capital punishment. How does she reconcile the two views as a Christian?

Good question. This has come to be called “the seamless garment” argument, recalling the seamless cloak Jesus wore and which the soldiers gambled for as capital punishment was being administered to Him.

Flipping through Bible pages back to the original Torah, the five books of Moses, we find the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 1- 13), the literal translation of one of them being “Do not commit murder.” When King James the First’s scholars were translating Exodus, no doubt cribbing from Tyndale, they rendered it in the now obsolescent second person as “Thou shalt not kill.”

For me, “kill” and “murder” are absolutely interchangeable so far as connotation is concerned. Both verbs refer to an unjust ending of a human life, such as a slaying for profit or out of anger. Elsewhere in the Torah, as crimes against God and man are enumerated by the Lord and the punishments prescribed, we find the death penalty. The point of noticing that is not because I propose that we “shall not suffer a witch to live,” but to demonstrate that the taking of life is permitted in a judicial setting. A crime is committed, a guilty party is named and suffers the penalty prescribed by the Law.

Here then is the difference between Trig Palin and, say, man on Alaska’s death row for murdering a convenience store clerk. Trig is innocent. Baby Palin was accused of no crime other than having a disability his family will find inconvenient. Death Row guy, on the other hand, took a human life for profit. He is actually guilty of something for which death is an appropriate punishment. Thus, Sarah Palin –and the rest of us morally opposed to abortion but favoring capital punishment-- wears a seamless garment, if the criterion for preserving life it its innocence.

As an unobservant Catholic I suppose I should be the last person in the world to stick up for the Magisterium, the teaching authority, of the Church. But the last two elections have been made interesting by candidates who seek to substitute their wisdom for the theology the Church has been struggling to evolve over the past 2,000 years.

We’ve had, in the most recent cycle, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Senator Joe Biden weighing in –as Catholics— on when they think that a fetus becomes a human being. The two of them got bogged down in Augustinian and Thomist arguments as to when the soul first inhabits the body –while ignoring the teaching of the Church that abortion is illicit at any time during a pregnancy –the status of the soul notwithstanding. They both got sharp raps on the knuckles from the Catholic bishops for that.

Most pro-choice Catholic politicians subscribe to the Mario Cuomo doctrine, which he enunciated at a speech at Notre Dame University some years ago. Briefly, Cuomo said that although on a personal level he accepts the Church’s teaching on abortion, as a public servant he cannot impose that personal, religious viewpoint on the general public, which may not share his faith.

It makes you wonder what he believes. If he believes –as a Catholic-- that abortion is the non-judicial taking of a life (remember “Do not commit murder?”), which is what the Church teaches, then as a pro-choice politician, he believes that a species of murder is allowable.

So how does a Catholic politician resolve this conflict? The answer is that he doesn’t.

Catholicism is not a buffet from which we might sample some dishes and leave others alone. It is in his acceptance of the Church’s teachings by which a Catholic is defined. If, especially in matters of life and death, a politician cannot accept church teachings, he or she should not identify himself as a “Catholic.” This leaves the Catholic politician with the stark choices of getting out of politics or changing one’s views at the risk of alienating the voting public.

There is the argument is that the Church has no business imposing its morality on the secular state. My answer is that it has already. What we consider to be right and wrong traces back, inevitably, to religious beliefs, be they pagan or Judaeo-Christian.

Certain acts, by their intrinsic injustice, were set apart as crimes by the earliest human societies. Not even a cannibal in a lost valley in New Guinea is free to steal what he wants or to kill without paying some form of compensation. Even in the most remote reaches of the Amazon, honesty is honored and liars execrated. From this most basic, instinctual understanding of justice have come our laws, sometimes defined in religious terms along the way, but always recognizably founded on an instinctual, visceral notion of what is right.

When we begin to redefine justice to suit our convenience or to evade responsibility, we open a Pandora’s box of troubles.

Setting Limits on the New President

I don’t envy the next president, whomever he may be. His job will be to administer a government of limitations and dreams deferred, thanks to the financial crisis that has washed over our country like a tsunami.

The evolving plan of the government to buy up the “toxic” real estate investments and holdings of the banking community is not a cure for the credit crisis. It is more like emergency surgery –a radical mastectomy that must be done that removes the palpable cancer --that also disfigures the patient without guaranteeing permanent remission.

The cost will fall somewhere between $700 billion and $1 trillion dollars –as if we bought an extra army, navy, air force, marines and coast guard –twice! My poor math works it out to be $3,322 more or less for every human being in the country.

How we are going to come up with the money and what we will have to give up to do so will be the big issues for the next president. He will be in the same spot that you or I would be in if we had living expenses of $3,000 per month and a net income of $2,900. A budget like that does not leave any room for anything but survival –and hard choices. Food, water, rent and electricity make the cut. Your cell phone does not. Neither does Internet access, movie tickets, cable TV or owning a car if a bus line is handy.

In terms of running a country, we will have to decide what is essential –what we need to live-- and how we hope to pay for it. Should the government invest billions in alternative energy or should private industry? What about global warming? What about our proverbial crumbling infrastructure? How much of a defense establishment do we need? What about health care for the uninsured?

I infer nothing by way of an answer to these questions, but I do point out that they are among the issues that will be discussed. We have a lot of items on our national agenda: Some of them may be deferred and others cancelled outright.

One thing is for certain: We cannot have everything we want whenever we want it. We are going to have to set limits on ourselves and not take it out on our representatives in government when they have to say “No.”

I remain a believer in supply-side economics. A dollar that remains in the private sector is vastly more likely to generate a dollar in taxable wealth than the same dollar turned over to the government in taxes. When Kennedy lowered taxes, revenues went up. When Reagan lowered taxes, revenues went up. It even worked, though more modestly, for George W. Bush. We must raise taxes, but let us keep them affordable. Let’s not tax ourselves out of business.

Let us slash spending across the board. Assuming our budget is about $3.1 trillion for 2009, first we leave untouched $1.9 trillion. That is mandated spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the national debt (about $270 billion) and unemployment insurance.

This leaves us $1.2 trillion where we can make cuts. These programs include the Department of Defense, the War on Terror, Health and Human Services, the Dept. of Education, Veterans’ Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, the Department of State, Homeland Security, the Dept. of Energy, the Justice Department/FBI, Agriculture, NASA, Transportation, the Treasury, the Department of Labor, the Department of the Interior, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Small Business Administration, Congress, the Federal Courts, the Executive Branch, the EPA, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Public Broadcasting, and all other discretionary spending.

No cuts can be made in any of those departments without howls that “essential programs” are being sacrificed. Everyone’s ox will be gored. Everyone’s taxes will go up.

But the world will not come to an end. If there is even the least up-tick in property values or in investor confidence, the government may actually make a profit on the distressed real estate investments it is buying. And maybe…just maybe…we will have come together as a nation to solve a crisis. It’s a long shot, I admit, but worth hoping for.

One Week That Shook The World

This was a week to remember. Students a hundred years from now will be writing doctoral theses on what happened in the last seven days (and in the week to come), and scholars will still be arguing over what precisely happened. This is History with a capital “H,” a turning point in the affairs of the nation and of mankind so fundamental that not a single man, woman or child on this planet will be able to avoid its effects.

For the great industrial nations, especially the United States, the course of history has been drastically altered. Even our dreams will have to adapt to the new financial and economic realities.

By Thursday of this week it had become apparent that the U.S. Treasury bailout of American International Group had bandaged one major wound to the system of credit in this country, but a $89.2 billion run on mutual funds (long considered one of the safest investments this side of a savings account) was threatening to dry up most of the available investment capital available in the United States and the Free World.

Making matters worse, the fall of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Freddie Mac, Fanny Mae and the inability of Washington Mutual to find any bidders for their assets had dealt confidence in the banks a seeming deathblow. People were wondering aloud by Thursday afternoon if Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were next to go. The financial underpinnings of the real estate industry were crumbling.

Within days, perhaps even hours, the deluge would come. The last great investment banks would close, the stock market would crash, mutual funds (and thus the world’s investment capital) would be drained dry by panicked investors and the developed world, including all of the Americas, Europe, Russia, India and the Pacific Rim nations would be thrust into a protracted and catastrophic economic depression that made no distinction between capitalist or socialist systems. All would suffer deeply.

The United States Government, the only entity on the planet big enough and powerful enough to have a chance at avoiding this global catastrophe, has decided to effect a revolution in the relationship between Government and the private sector every bit as profound as the New Deal. The United States is becoming the real estate owner of last resort. Only instead of phasing these massive changes in over six or seven years, we intend to write the program this weekend and enact it as law next week.

The United States is undertaking to acquire the “toxic assets” of the banking system –the home loans, especially, that are in danger of foreclosure, the exotic derivatives based on real estate and so forth…to the tune of as much as one trillion dollars ($1,000bn). This will free up the resources of the banks needed to fund economic expansion.

The alternative, which was to let the banks fold, would have meant a freeze or a collapse of credit in this country, bringing the economy to a screeching halt and negatively impacting every American family.

Since the great banks of the world are so intimately interconnected, it is also likely that the misery would not have been limited to the United States –a notion appreciated by investors world wide in the past week.

Government is also coming to the rescue of the mutual funds industry. President Bush announced that the United States will extend dollar-for-dollar insurance to mutual fund investors.

So far so good. The details are being hashed out even as I write these words by Federal Reserve Bank officials, Treasury Department representatives and congressional leaders. The final product, if it is not a horn of plenty including every goodie that well connected congressmen and senators could wish for, it will be passed by Congress and signed into law in the next few days.

If it works, like the government’s Resolution Trust Corporation, it will be one of the great achievements in this history of the Republic. But it will come at a price.

Where do we get the $1,000,000,000,000? We can’t borrow that much from the Chinese. We can’t print it because the dollar has already lost too much of its value. It will have to come from taxes. And if it does, we will not have a lot of money left over for national health care, global warming, alternative energy, an expanded military, college for all, and the other items on the Democratic and Republican wish lists.

This may also mean the end of Reaganomics, which had a lovely run from 1983 to date under four presidents. One of the central props of the system, de-regulation, is doomed. Not that regulation would have prevented the bad banking and management practices that got us into this mess, but the people and the politicians will definitely re-burden the private sector with tons of paperwork after this.

The other prop of Reaganomics, affordable taxes, may also go by the boards. My math may be faulty but if we need one trillion dollars that means every man woman and child in the United States will have to kick in an additional $3,322 in taxes to obtain the money.

We may not be ready to exhale just yet, but we have more hope this evening than we have seen in months.

Doomed!

We avoided The Perfect S**tstorm just in the nick of time this week, thanks to the government bailout of American International Group (AIG). That is not to say that the worst of the liquidity/credit crisis is over, just that we’ve avoided a sudden and terrible climax to it. We may yet see the credit system in the United States come crashing down, taking with it financial institutions from across the globe and initiating a universal economic depression.

To figure out what happened let’s climb into the Wayback Machine and set the dial for 2005. We arrive in, for the sake of argument, Scottsdale Arizona, a prosperous suburb of Phoenix and one of the most desirable mixed residential and commercial communities in the United States.

A glance at the Arizona Republic or Craig’s List tells us that housing costs, which have always been moderate for this area (since incomes are moderate, at best) are starting to soar. Property owners are being told by real estate agents and mortgage lenders that their homes could list for double and triple what they would have brought a mere five years ago. Homes bought at $300,000 are now worth $700,000. Why not sell now, make a killer profit, and buy some more houses, flip them and make even more profit?

The real estate in the desert at the edges of town is becoming hot property in ways other than temperature as well. Take a parcel of land, develop it for condominiums and sell 2,500 square foot units for $600,000 and $800,000! Construction costs are holding steady, so this looks like a wonderful way to get rich quick.

Now whether you want to buy houses to flip them, or to live in, or if you want to build luxury condos in the middle of the jumping cactus fields as an investment, you will need capital, i.e. money. This means establishing credit and obtaining a loan…a mortgage.

Nothing surprising there, but home values have outpaced earnings drastically. Where real estate values have jumped by 100 and 200 percent, wages and earnings have increased, oh, maybe 10 percent in the same period of time. These wage earners still need places to live and many want to make money in the real estate boom.

The banking industry makes a substantial portion of its earnings by writing loans for residential and commercial properties. With a real estate boom on there is a lot of business to be had. Soon the airwaves are buzzing with countless ads from banks, credit unions and acceptance corporations telling you that if you want credit, you can not only get it, but that banks will fight for the chance to lend you the money!

To attract business the stringent risk assessment process by which your ability to pay was measured is being relaxed. For some categories of borrowers special interest rates below prime are being made available. Banks are writing loans that are not secured by anticipated future earnings of the borrowers, and which rely on the current rising values of real estate during the boom.

It seems risky, but isn’t it a truism that real estate prices only go up? Even if a borrower defaults the foreclosure value of the property, given the current rate of growth of property values insures the lenders are not going to lose money. What is more likely is that everyone gets rich.

Back on Wall Street great corporations are buying investment portfolios based on this massive wave of mortgage lending. In fact, they are going “all in,” putting all their chips on exotic investment instruments --derivatives-- based, ultimately, on poorly secured residential mortgages. A measure of solace for the stockholders of these corporations is provided by AIG, which is doing a land office business writing insurance for these investments.

Back in our own time, it is obvious something has gone unexpectedly and dreadfully wrong.

The people who have been renovating houses to flip them are now unable to find buyers for their properties. The condos out on the desert the edge of Scottsdale are standing vacant. All signs of a real estate boom are missing.

Except it wasn’t a real estate boom; it was a bubble, and it has burst.

Without a buyer for the house he renovated the would-be Bob Vila cannot make the payments on the mortgage he got when banks fought for his business. During his struggles he probably got equity lines of credit on the house he wants to flip and his own residence which he has maxxed out. His credit card revolving debt is probably in the low five figures. There’s no way he can make the payments. He goes to foreclosure and the value of the properties do not make good the loss to the bank. The investors who built the condominiums are losing money on property taxes and defaulting on their mortgages.

AIG offered insurance on derivatives built on other derivatives built on mortgages. When real estate prices declined by 10 to 20 percent, these derivates in some cases declined in value by 100 percent! The people holding these exotic investment instruments based on mortgage lending are now flooding AIG with claims. AIG essentially insures the entire credit industry of the United States. The claims have exhausted AIG's liquidity...there's no more money to pay claims.

If they cannot meet their obligations then a credit blackout effecting every kind of borrowing from bank credit cards at the supermarket through mortgages will paralyze the economy. With no one to insure credit, no one will risk extending credit.

Now other factors enter into play, making this The Perfect Economic S**tstorm. The big one is energy costs. With the cost of light, heat and transportation increasing exponentially for American business, belt-tightening is in order –especially if the business in question has had failed investments in real estate! Belt-tightening means firings, layoffs and work reductions. Aside from more foreclosures, this means less consumer spending which means, in turn, layoffs and business failures in a wide range of industries supplying consumer goods, and fast-rising unemployment.

The federal bailout of AIG has postponed, maybe prevented, a credit collapse. Is that the happy end of the story? I doubt it.

Who Is Cool To Rule?

David Brooks has made a final stab at disqualifying Sarah Palin on the basis of experience in his infuriatingly patronizing N.Y. Times column today.

Brooks considers it a given that Palin’s lacks experience and prudence. Brooks makes the curious statement, “She seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness,” an assertion he fails to back up with examples.

Exactly how is Palin brash? Webster’s defines “brash” as, “heedless of the consequences, audacious, done in haste without regard for consequences, rash, full of fresh raw vitality, uninhibitedly energetic or demonstrative, lacking restraint and discernment, tactless, aggressively self-assertive, impudent.

Sarah Palin is “audacious,” having taken on Big Oil and the Republican establishment in Alaska and beaten them. Those actions may have seemed to have been made “heedlessly of consequences,” but she evidently knew what she was doing, because she squeezed a windfall tax out of Big Oil and won the governorship despite the enmity of the state GOP.

Was she rash? She would have been if she were incapable of winning the battles she took on. But she was talented enough to win. Working to the limit of your talents is not being rash.

Is she “full of fresh raw vitality?” So much so that it irritates her liberal foes to the point of derangement.

Therefore, if Sarah Palin is “brash,” as Brooks claims, it is the good kind of brash: audacious, daring, vital, fresh and energetic.

More curious is Brooks’ charge that Palin is “excessively decisive.” Decision is generally considered a positive quality in a leader. In a world where nuclear weapons are on a hair trigger and national leaders may not have the luxury of enough time to blink, the ability to come to a decision and stick to it is a positive good.

Take the recent Russia-Georgian War, for example. Barack Obama’s initial response was to call on both sides to act with restraint and to submit the dispute to the UN Security Council –where one of the belligerent countries has a veto. Where is the decision in this mealy-mouthed manifesto? All that Obama succeeds in doing is to draw a moral equivalence between the aggressor (Russia) and the victim (Georgia) and propose an inherently impotent forum for solving the crisis. McCain’s first response was an outraged demand that Russia remove her troops from Georgia –a decisive, unambiguous statement that lays the blame for the war where it belongs.

Decisiveness is absolutely essential to leadership. If Brooks wanted to criticize Palin for impulsiveness or rash decision-making, he should have done so explicitly. On the other hand, there is no evidence in the public record of Palin making rash decisions as a mayor or governor…

Brooks falls back on the experience issue to disqualify Palin. Only education and experience, he says, endows the ruler with the required prudence and wisdom for governance.

Says who?

Let’s look at experience from the perspective of presidential history. Some of our most qualified leaders, in terms of education and experience, have made our worst presidents.

Among the worst are John Adams, the Harvard-educated co-signer of the Declaration of Independence who, as President, attempted to criminalize criticism of the government and embroiled us in an undeclared naval war with France. U.S. Grant was West Point-educated, commanded the largest American army up to that time and, as president, was unable to control rampant corruption in his administration.

Franklin Pierce (Bowdoin College) allowed himself to be used as a tool by the south to expand slavery into the Territories. Woodrow Wilson (President, Princeton University –Governor of New Jersey) was unable to convince his own country to participate in the League of Nations. Herbert Hoover (Stanford) presided impotently over the Great Depression. John F. Kennedy (Harvard –service in the U.S. Senate and House) and Lyndon B. Johnson (Texas State University-San Marcos, Senate Majority Leader) embroiled us in the quagmire of Vietnam.

Richard M. Nixon (Whittier College – U.S. Senate, Vice President) subverted the Constitution. Jimmy Carter (US Naval Academy-Georgia State Senate, Governor of Georgia) presided over the hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and an economic meltdown. George W. Bush (Yale, Harvard Law--CEO, Texas Rangers, Governor of Texas) mishandled the Iraq War and relief operations after Hurricane Katrina.

What a talented, well-educated group of executives! But where are the benefits of experience and prudence? Obviously, a great education and extensive experience are no guarantee that a leader will be just, prudent or even minimally competent.

Among our worst qualified presidents we find Abraham Lincoln (nine months elementary school –Illinois legislature, US House of Representatives) who preserved the Union and freed the slaves. Harry S. Truman (Independence High School –failed haberdasher, local judge, one term U.S. Senate, one month Vice President) ended World War II with the atomic bombings of Japan, used an airlift to save besieged Berlin, founded NATO, rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and reasserted civilian control over the military by firing MacArthur. George Washington (no formal schooling – military general) established the modern presidency, helped write the Constitution, established tradition of giving up power after two terms, declined a monarchy over America and asserted national sovereignty against local challenges to Federal authority (Whiskey Rebellion).

Evidently, lack of schooling or experience is not a reliable predictor of performance as President either.

Neither is membership in the governing elite. Mr. Brooks’ protestations to the contrary, George W. Bush was and is a member of the elite political class –which proved to be no guarantee of great performance.

In the end, Mr. Brooks’ big objection to Sarah Palin is that she is not “one of us,” a member of the governing class. “Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared,” Brooks says.

So who are the “best prepared?” Who gets to define that? The editorial board of The New York Times? I submit the definition belongs to the people, not to academics, not to party bosses, and certainly not to opinion writers like David Brooks. Let the people choose their leaders from among themselves. No one should be entitled to rule (or disqualified) by virtue of their education, experience or membership in a cultural elite.

Democracy is the people selecting their leaders from among themselves –not from a list of “approved candidates” submitted by the press or the parties.

Blundering Into War

Wars usually begin because someone miscalculated the resolve of the other side.

Having successfully faced down England and France over the Sudetenland, Hitler thought that threats of war against Germany if he invaded Poland were simply bluffs. Hitler invaded and France and England declared war.

When Argentine dictator General Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands he refused to believe that a pacifist Britain would insist on taking back control of its colony by force. He expected Margaret Thatcher to accept the Argentine occupation as a fait accompli. Instead, she sent the Royal Navy.

Saddam Hussein was one of the great “misestimators.” When the I5anian Revolution purged the officer corps of the army he expected to be able to seize a tidy parcel of Iranian coast for himself. What he got was a decade-long stalemated war that won him precisely nothing.

So Saddam followed up that blunder with a bigger one. Figuring the West was too effete, too decadent to resist, Saddam invaded Kuwait, a nation friendly to the United States and a key oil-producing country. This time even France joined the U.S.-led coalition of nations that, under the command of General Norman Schwartzkopf, destroyed the Iraqi military and tossed the invaders ignominiously out of Kuwait.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the potential of eclipsing the late great Saddam as the worst judge of another country’s intentions.

If he gets the Jerusalem Post he may have noticed an item this weekend headlined, “Israel slated to buy U.S. smart bombs.” The bombs in question are 1,000 GBU-39s, a GPS-guided munition that can penetrate 90 centimeters of steel-reinforced concrete to deliver a 22.7-kilogram package of high-yield explosives from a launch point 110 kilometers from the target.

This is not the weapon of choice to burrow into a target like the Natanz underground uranium enrichment facility in Iran. Israel has plenty of 900-kilo bunker-buster missiles for that particular job.

What the GBU-39 purchase demonstrates is that Israel is thinking ahead to the post-strike environment. Iran will surely unleash Hizbulla against Israel if Natanz is taken out. The GBU-39 will allow the Israeli air force to engage hardened enemy targets in Lebanon and Syria without having to overfly enemy-held territory. Ordering the bombs now is also a hedge against a possibly unsympathetic administration in Washington, should Barack Obama be elected.

The bottom line is that Israel is taking Ahmadinejad’s threats of extinction quite seriously. Even if Europe and the United States do nothing, Israel will not allow Iran to threaten its existence. Ahmadinejad needs to believe this.

Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself...

Who is the scariest person in America?

According to the Sunday papers, Sharon Osbourne, Ed Koch, Matt Damon and Mary Mitchell, it’s Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the GOP candidate for Vice President.

Mrs. Palin is the target of a renewed round of invective from the media and political elites this weekend. In the past two weeks the Left has been spraying manure at the woman in hopes something will stick. All this has served to do is to improve the McCain-Palin poll numbers and to move the discussion away from Barack Obama’s programs to his qualifications for high office verses hers.

And yet, although Americans increasingly see the Left as a bunch of bullies ganging up on Sarah Palin, and even though Obama would dearly love to talk about economics, his “friends” insist on trying to drive a stake through Mrs. Palin’s heart. Thus the effort for Obama mires down in precisely the kind of slimy politics that Obama had vowed to avoid.

We are now at the point where the hatred of Sarah Palin on the left lapses into actual derangement as her enemies wish for her to be obliterated, jailed, destroyed, execrated. Let’s tiptoe through some of the verbal nosegays her enemies are offering:

“She hates women,” – Pink

“I think there's a really good chance Sarah Palin could be president, and I think that's a really scary thing, because I don't know anything about her,” –Matt Damon. What better reason for fear than ignorance?

"Palin should be [a] laughingstock to all feminists"—Mary Mitchell

“Sarah Palin named two of her children after witches.” --The New Republic

“She's friends with all the teenage boys. You have to say no when your kids say, 'can we sleep over at the Palin’s? No! NO!'” –Randi Rhodes, who also claimed this week that McCain was “well-treated” by the North Vietnamese while a POW….

“A cocky wacko.” –Senator Lincoln Chaffee

"Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman." –Wendy Doniger, Newsweek.

“After four years of sex and treachery in Desperate Housewives, I thought I was a perfect pick for vice president.” --Eva Longoria

"I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." -- Bob Herbert, New York Times

“[Her] primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.” –Carol Fowler, South Carolina Democratic Chairwoman.

“Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right.” –Cintra Wilson, Salon magazine.

"In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them ... “ –Ann Friedman, The American Prospect

“[Palin’s values] more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers…What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.” --Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan.

“Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.” –Cintra Wilson, Salon.

“…Night after night, [Palin] appears in my dreams, always as a scolding, ominous figure.” –David Plotz, Slate.

‘Tis said that insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. The Left expects that one of these days someone is going to say something about Palin so apt that people will turn massively against her in ridicule and scorn. That’s not going to happen.

What is happening is that Barack Obama and the campaign are diminishing themselves by fighting over the qualifications of the GOP voice presidential candidate, which only serves to bring Obama’s wafer-thin resume into sharper focus. What is happening is that the people who should be talking about the economy –the GOP’s weakest issue—are talking about Palin instead. The Left is revealing its snobbery, its elitism, its scorn for ordinary Americans and their culture, its hatred of religion, and, yes, its sexism when a female dares to disagree with revealed leftist wisdom.

Obama can still win this election, but he and his side are beginning to deserve to lose.

Obama, Charlie Gibson and Mr. Kim

What I like about Barack Obama: Being a Republican, I like the fact that when he is accused of something, he tends to repeat the accusation over and over –until everyone has it memorized.

It’s very important for Barack to have the last word and to be right. That’s why he repeats things like the “lipstick” remark –to prove he was right all along.

I also like his arrogant treatment of the truth. It betrays, I think, an assumption that either the press is going to shield him or that the average voter isn’t very bright. He claims he never voted against a bill to preserve the lives of babies surviving abortions. But as a State Senator in Illinois he did just that, including a bill modeled after federal legislation written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Obama cites as proof of his superior judgment his opposition to the War in Iraq (while he was still a state senator). He notes, with disapproval, John McCain’s inferior judgment for voting for the war. Then what does Obama do? He names Joe Biden –another vote for the war—to be his running mate!

If nothing else, the Obama candidacy has settled the question of which is more dangerous –drug use or Christianity. Obama’s admitted cocaine use as a young man, we are told, is nothing to be concerned with. The same people who dismiss his past with drugs, however, seem to be getting quite upset with Sarah Palin’s onetime affiliation with a speaking-in-tongues Pentecostal church.

* * *

Did you catch part one of Charles Gibson’s interview with Gov. Palin last night? This is a subjective call on my part, but I got the feeling he could not stand her. He was all closed in on himself and he spoke to her in an unnaturally quiet tone of voice, as if he were forcing himself to talk.

One could make the case that he was marginally rude to Gov. Palin. He asked her if, when McCain offered her the nomination, she had had a moment of doubt as to her qualifications. She said she did not, prompting the frankly disbelieving Gibson to put the same question to her again! When she repeated that she felt no hesitancy, he accused her of “hubris.”

* * *

Kim Jong Il is apparently in worse shape than anyone thought. He missed a major military parade but, we are told, his absence was hidden by “production values.” The speculation is that he may be physically and intellectually impaired by the cerebral accident.

None of his three sons are suitable to take over the country and his generals all look under fed. …which brings us to the reason Mr. Kim had a stroke. For one thing he was a chain smoker most of his life, though he quit a few years ago.

Secondly --and this is an important distinction-- he was arguably the only fat man in North Korea. The destruction of agriculture in North Korea has been pretty thorough, even by Stalinist standards. There have been years under the late Kim Il Sung (“The Glorious Leader”) and Kim Jong Il (“The Beloved Leader”) when as many as a million North Koreans have died of starvation. Only Kim Jong Il has been able to stay pleasingly plump.

Kim Jong Il, by the way, loves shark caviar and dishes made of shark fin and fresh conch. If he is partially paralyzed he probably won’t be dining so royally in the future, though, and the Joy Brigades may have to be disbanded.

The Joy Brigades, for those unaware, are groups of junior high-aged maidens conscripted into State service by Mr. Kim, to provide highly specialized entertainment for his elderly generals and, of course, to satisfy his own pedophilic inclinations.

If Mr. Kim has been sidelined, it is very likely that the Chinese, with the full approval of the United States, will try to set up some kind of satellite government in North Korea. Perhaps the Koreans can be persuaded to let a couple million Chinese “volunteers” come in to run the country –and very gently disarm it of their atom bombs and million-man army. It would make for a surprise happy ending for that country’s sorry saga, and it would mean that pretty 13-year-old Korean girls would have a chance of making it to 14 as virgins.

Pigs 'n' Putts

Lenny Bruce once did a very funny bit about being on trial for using an obscenity in one of his nightclub comedy routines. The word, though shocking, isn’t all that shocking; the objection was mostly that Mr., Bruce had dared to use it in a night club full of undercover police.

In the bit, the word had to be used in the courtroom over and over so that the judge and jury would fully appreciate the gravity –and depravity—of the offense.

DA: “Mr. Bruce, did you say the word **** in your act?”

Bruce: “I said, ‘****.’

Court Reporter: “Could you repeat that?”

Bruce: “Certainly. ****.”

Judge: “Let the record show that Mr. Bruce said the word ‘****.’”

Court Reporter: “Could you spell that please?”

Bruce: “Of course. ****…* - *- *- *. ****.”

...And so on, with the reporters and spectators all muttering “He said, ‘****!’”

I am reminded of that story when I see the coverage of Barack Obama’s observation on the persistence of swinishness of certain animals despite the application of lip cosmetics.

Of course Obama was NOT saying Sarah Palin is a pig. Although I reject his politics, I still believe that the man himself is a thorough gentleman with admirable manners and a genuine desire to do good in the world. He seems to be a nice guy, in short, the kind who would not stoop to childish name-calling.

The trouble is that for such an eloquent man, Barack Obama has a tin ear. After her pit bull joke at the convention, Sarah Palin owns the word “lipstick.” If someone or something in this campaign is said to be adorned with lipstick, that someone is going to be assumed to be Governor Sarah Palin.

There is no great truth to be learned from this incident except that everything a candidate says from this point of the campaign onward is going to be scrutinized by the press and opposition party with scanning electron microscopes. Obama’s innocent crack about GOP policy has already generated tens of thousands of vehement words in print and on the air. Imagine if he had actually said something!

Reports that Kim Jong Il might be dead or seriously handicapped after suffering a massive stroke has dozens of people around the world saying, “Gee, that’s a shame.”

Doubly tragic is the fact, duly reported by the official DPRK news agency that not only is the world losing the services of a great statesman, but a great golfer as well. A few years ago, on his first-ever golf outing, the press agency informs us, Mr. Kim sank an astounding eleven holes-in-one! Not bad for the man who, as any North Korean schoolchild will tell you, has his hands full making the sun rise every morning.

George Bush Finds a General

I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but Bob Woodward’s The War Within paints a scene of George W. Bush’s wartime White House I find very recognizable as a Civil War scholar.

Lincoln’s big mistake was to be too deferential to his generals in the opening years of the war. Lincoln had commanded a company of volunteers during the Black Hawk War, never saw action and finished his service as a private. The generals in his Union Army –not including the men who won their stars thanks to their political connections—were professional soldiers, many of them schooled at West Point or VMI. Deference to their professional opinion came easily.

Better equipped, better fed and better armed than their enemies, however, the Union Army (at least in the Virginia Theater) took one beating after another as each illustrious commander, in his turn, was humiliated by the irrepressible Confederates. Bull Run was the ruination of Irwin McDowell. George McClellan got his comeuppance from a much smaller Rebel army outside the gates of Richmond in the Seven Days’ battles and failed to pursue a defeated enemy after Antietam. General John Pope was disgraced at second Bull Run.

Ambrose E. Burnside reorganized the army and then broke it to pieces charging up Marye’s Hill at Fredericksburg. Fighting Joe Hooker marched into the enemy’s country at Chancellorsville with victory in his grasp and stood stunned, like a deer in candlelight, as Stonewall Jackson flanked him and then routed him. The summer ended with a big Union victory at Gettysburg that was squandered when General George Gordon Meade smashed an entire corps of Robert E. Lee’s army and then failed to pursue it closely enough to finish off the Rebels.

Lincoln sometimes wondered if his generals were fighting for a win, or just for a tie, where the states came back together –with slavery. Undoubtedly some of the generals felt just that way. Some of his generals were heartsick at the slaughter of the battlefield. Improvements in arms and ammunition, especially the range and accuracy of the Minie ball rifle round meant that any big battle was going to produce a bloodbath. At Shiloh (1862) more soldiers died during the two days of fighting than in all the wars and Indian wars America had fought from 1775 onward.

It opened the eyes of Major General Ulysses S. Grant. Until Shiloh, he thought the Confederates would collapse after a few losses. Now he knew that only long and bitter fighting involving the dismantling of the south’s military and industrial war-making capabilities, the destruction of enemy’s will to resist –and the loss of tens of thousands of Union soldiers in the process-- would have to happen if the war was to be won. This became a school of thought in the army, attracting such men as Phil Sheridan, George Thomas and, of course, William Tecumseh Sherman.

Lincoln had been looking for a general who wanted to seize the initiative and never let it go. Grant’s plan that all Union forces attack at pretty much the same time in 1864 had been Lincoln’s thinking for a long time…though his generals didn’t buy into it. Now the Union had a coordinated strategy for the entire war. Every Confederate army was to be attacked, allowing none of them to send troops in aid to another.

In 2007 matters looked just as grim at the White House. Bush’s generals were espousing the astounding notion that by drawing down forces in Iraq the war would be won more quickly because the Iraqi government would be forces to train up an army for its self-defense that much sooner. This was astoundingly illogical to Bush, who saw it as a way to turn Baghdad 2007 into Saigon 1975.

Bush cast about for new leadership, and came up with his own U.S. Grant in the form of General David Petraeus. Petraeus wanted five more brigades –about 30,000 men including 4,000 Marines to implement a plan whereby the U.S. would stay in the neighborhoods it fought for, rather than fight and go home to Camp Liberty. Petraeus went after Al Qaeda in Iraq and enlisted the help of our former Sunni adversaries in Anbar Province. He let the Shiite militias know he meant business, convincing Muqtada Al Sadr to call off his Mahdi Army and to personally exile himself to Iran.

Bush gave Petraeus the cover he needed to do all this, shielding him from the jealousy and intrigues of fellow officers in the Pentagon –much in the same way that Lincoln upheld Grant through the horribly bloody summer of 1864. Lincoln’s instincts proved to be accurate. Grant’s plan eventually dismantled the Confederacy. Bush’s instinct to go outside the box to find Petraeus and trust in the Surge has been rewarded with a war that is virtually won.

History may yet be kind to George W. Bush.

Ordinary Women and Sarah

“I Am Sarah Palin. Her Story is My Story”

T-shirts with that slogan are beginning to show up on websites and on the backs of women at political rallies. Women and men are excited by Sarah Palin because she is so recognizably one of us. More than that she represents a practical feminism that many women and thinking men have been yearning for and not finding.

Because she is pro-life, Sarah is ipso facto not a feminist…at least if you subscribe to the Gloria Steinem-Patricia Ireland definitions. Abortion is the cutting issue for the official women’s movement. Causes like withdrawal from Iraq, support of the Democratic Party and dedication to “racial justice” are also litmus tests of the true feminist.

When men and women watch discussion shows or read magazine articles about feminist ideals, the conversation is often about career (not job) issues verses home life and ways in which the sexual dynamic between men and women is changing. It is not about the ordinary problems of ordinary women.

Most of the women I know do not have glamorous careers or sophisticated sex lives. Quite a few are waitresses or coffee shop barristas. They include hospital orderlies who have to do nasty cleanup work. They are behind the counter at convenience stores. They are checkout clerks and stock clerks at the supermarket. They operate farm machinery.

They sell tickets at the multiplex, or they are behind the refreshments counter. Some are dispatchers and some drive cabs. Some wash dishes at the diner. Some answer the phone at the office. Some of them are young and attractive, some of them are old and, frankly, kind of tired. Some make good money; most don’t. And some work a second job –in addition to raising one or more children. Often, this is done without a father in the house, living one or two desperate paychecks away from ruin.

The feminist movement isn’t talking about women like these when it talks about “having it all.” These women have it all dumped on them. Work and a family aren’t even a choice for these women, but matters of necessity.

The feminists don’t even know who these women are. Waitresses, maids, janitors, farmers, cops, cabbies, and orderlies --they may or may not be from “flyover country” but to the feminist elite they are “flyover people.” The left elites reason that powerless and poorly educated, these women can only be led. They cannot lead.

Then, improbably, from the Republican Party, emerges a woman who demonstrates the universality of true feminism and proves that respect and equality for women are deeply conservative values.

Sarah Palin has earned her bread through hard physical labor alongside her husband. She has a decent education but not a fancy one. She is articulate but not glib. Her accent is a northwestern drawl. Her clothing is unfashionable but respectable. And she is prickly.

She has that same prickly quality the women we know ourselves get when the school defaults on a promise to their kids, or they plan to locate something hazardous in our neighborhood, or the town refuses to put up stop signs at that dangerous corner. Sarah gets her back up and speaks up.

Sarah does as she likes. If she wants to hunt, she hunts. If she wants to go snowmachining, she’s off! And if she wants to run for office, she gathers a bunch of her friends together and gives it a shot. Her husband is there to pick up the slack with childrearing and housework –when Sarah is not attending to those items personally. They make a good team as she makes the most of the choices that life in Alaska gives her.

The issues that preoccupy the women we know so well, the Wal Mart Moms, these Hockey and Soccer Moms who try to do the right thing for their families, are the issues Sarah Palin has lived with all her life. How are we going to pay for groceries? Where is the rent/mortgage money coming from? Do I like those kids my daughter is hanging out with lately? Should I get a third job on the weekends?

With enormous talent and energy Sarah Palin has answered the big issues in her life through enterprise and hard work. This ability to solve life problems in the same way men have always been able to in a free society, by using all her God-given talents, earning respect and recognition for deeds rather than sexual characteristics, ought to be the ultimate expression of the feminist ideal.

Well, it’s not. The left has defined in very specific terms what feminism is and what a feminist must believe in if she would call herself “feminist.” Sarah Palin, does not have a fancy degree, has no show business talents, is not a part of the L.A.-D.C.-NYC cocktail circuit, has no bonafides as a member of the permanent political class, dresses unstylishly, prays in church and is a breeder.

She is, talents aside, common and ordinary. Modern feminism has no use for common women and their issues. But thanks to Sarah Palin, the Republican Party has discovered that these women we know so well are a natural constituency.