A somber farewell to General Shinseki

A somber farewell to General Shinseki

Mike walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

Regardless of his failures as head of the Veterans Administration, General Shinseki is a great American.

He was an average guy who, many times over, led from the front in extraordinary circumstances.

When he had a goodly piece of his foot ripped away in an explosion in combat in Vietnam, he could have taken the easy road.

Poor, poor, pitiful me! Where is my government handout?  I WANT others to pay my way, today and forever. I am a victim.

Instead, he sucked up who knows how much pain and suffering and carried on for our country. In a business that demands physical as well as mental excellence, General Shinseki gutted out the hurt of a crippled foot and led the way.

People criticized the Veterans of Foreign Wars for not condemning the General. That is because they knew the full measure of the man. Their decision was an example of courage under fire.

Why did he fail?

He was a fish out of water.

At its worse, the VA is a narrow-minded management-union shop with the usual corporate culture that believes it exists for the employees, not those it serves.

General Shinseki never grasped that reality.

He never understood that selfish organizational interests were not distractions to be overcome, but a cancer that could kill when threatened.

After all, the vast majority of VA employees served unselfishly. Regardless of political outrages, VA employees really do care. We cannot lose that truth.

And given that truth, how could General Shinseki have seen through the fawning “leaders” who said everything was fine (and out of earshot muttered: where is my pay raise/bonus)?

That was his failing. That is why he lost his job.

He saw the good and was blind to the bad. He gave too much weight to the employees and not enough to the veterans.

And sadly, too many senior VA mangers and union leaders, like the greedy everywhere, live for power, money and self-aggrandizement. They sold him down the river.

General Shinseki lived his adult life in the U.S. Army, in a culture that always put mission before self, that prized the values of duty, honor and service.

He proved incapable of grasping the self-serving mind-set of giant governmental bureaucracy and the technocrats “ate his lunch,” tarnished his honor, and most painfully of all, betrayed his trust.

He is gone and his reputation in ruins but this Marine salutes the General and to says hell with the VA mangers and union leaders who betrayed him.

Semper Fi,

Mike Walker

Weak...

Charles Krauthammer said Wednesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier”that President Obama’s attempt to lay out his foreign policy vision during his commencement address at West Point was “literally pointless. It didn't have a point, it was a defensive speech.”

One day after he declared that all U.S. troops will be out of Afghanistan by 2016, Obama told the graduating cadets that "the landscape has changed" with the end of the war in Iraq. The president said that Wednesday’s graduating class would be the first class in nearly a decade that likely will not be deployed to a war zone.

“(While) I was worried about critics who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak," he said, "just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail."

Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor, said the president’s speech was misguided.

“It was an answer to the chorus of criticism, even from his side of the aisle, that it's been a weak, leaderless, rudderless foreign policy, which it has been," he said. "I spoke to a member of Congress who was in the armed forces and he said there was a real pettiness and a personalization of this."

“This is a graduation speech for West Point," he said. "It was not a place where you -- you know, you want to be inspiring the future officers of America, it isn't a place to answer your critics or to go point by point against all the attacks on him. And he set out this ridiculous contrast between extreme isolationism on the one hand, and extreme, almost a caricature of intervention, on the other hand.”

In his speech, Obama also said there are those “interventionists from the left and right” who argue that “America's failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations… invites escalating aggression in the future.”

Obama said he believed there was no military solution to the ongoing civil war in Syria, but he vowed that the United States would continue to support the Syrian people.

Krauthammer said that characterization missed the mark.

“There's not a person in America who's asking for boots on the ground in Syria or in Ukraine. In those places, people said show some rhetorical support, show some serious economic sanctions on Ukraine, give these people, all they're asking for is the weapons to defend themselves, which Obama has denied them, and in Syria it's led to 160,000 dead," he said. "So, I mean, he sets up straw man, he makes the argument and I think it was a very weak and defensive speech.”

The Power and Limits of Indoctrination

The Power and Limits of Indoctrination
Steven Hayward, Powerline

Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory “czar” and one of the smartest and most devious thinkers on the left, has a highly revealing Bloomberg column out this week reporting on the results of a study of the way China has attempted indoctrination in its school system.  This column and the underlying study (it’s an NBER paper, behind a paywall unless you have academic access) are useful as background reading for everyone who is rightly concerned about how Common Core standards will likely become the means of nationalizing a liberal school curriculum.  (What?  You mean you aren’t reassured by the promises from Washington that if you like your local curriculum, you can keep your local curriculum?  Why ever not?)

Sunstein reports that

recent curricular reforms in China, explicitly designed to transform students’ political views, have mostly worked. The findings offer remarkable evidence about the potential influence of the high school curriculum on what students end up thinking. . .
The crucial finding from the study is that the new curriculum greatly affected students’ thinking. They became more likely to count the Chinese political system as democratic. They displayed a higher level of trust in public officials. They were more skeptical of free markets, and more likely to reject the view that a market economy is preferable to any other economic system. . .

Sunstein, a leading advocate for increased government power across the board, is likely envious of China’s prowess at indoctrination.  There was, however, an interesting area where China’s indoctrination failed to work, and it is a highly curious exception:

Students didn’t become more favorably disposed toward environmental protection. They were not more likely to give the environment priority over economic growth, and they were not more willing to give up some of their income to protect the environment. . .
It is reasonable to speculate that in recent years, Chinese students have been concerned above all about economic growth and therefore were less willing to want to focus their attention on environmental protection.

“Reasonable to speculate”?  This tracks closely with a large body of literature on the “Environmental Kuznets Curve” that you won’t have social and political support for expensive environmental protection until you achieve a middle class standard of living for a nation.  And China is still a long way away from that point, with several hundred million people still living in deep poverty, with many millions more insecure about their rising but still fragile prosperity.  This is why China and India are unlikely ever to agree to the U.S.-Euro climate agenda.  Interesting that the Chinese can’t manage what seems to be easy to accomplish in American schools.

But you really don’t need to consult the economists on this one.  Just take in Aldo Leopold, who put it this way in A Sand County Almanac, “These wild things had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast.”

It’s tempting to give Sunstein a Green Weenie Award for this.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

DOWN MEMORY LANE: Remember when liberals said the VA was proof that socialism works?
John Hinderaker, Powerline

At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto pulls together liberals’ endorsements of Veterans Administration health care. It goes beyond just claiming that VA medicine was top notch; liberals often claimed that the supposed success of the VA is proof that government is superior to the private sector. Taranto titles his post “Socialist Supermodel.” You should read it all, but here are a few highlights:

In January 2006, … former Enron adviser Paul Krugman wrote this:

I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system’s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn’t just pay the bills in this system–it runs the hospitals and clinics.
No, I’m not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.

The “secret” of the VA’s “success,” Krugman argued, “is the fact that it’s a universal, integrated system.”
***


Timothy Noah, then with Slate.com, proclaimed in 2005: “Socialized medicine has been tried in the United States, and it has proven superior to health care supplied by the private sector. . . . The socialized medicine to which I refer is the complex of hospitals managed by the Veterans Administration.” His post, “The Triumph of Socialized Medicine,” was based on a Washington Monthly article by Phillip Longman, which carried the slightly more modest headline “The Best Care Anywhere.” And in 2009, Ezra Klein revealed that “one of my favorite ideas” is “expanding the Veterans Health Administration to non-veterans.”

Do you suppose these liberals, and others, will acknowledge how wrong they were about the VA, and consider what the implications might be for their government-knows-best philosophy?

Just kidding.

What Drives Vladimir Putin?

What Drives Vladimir Putin? 
Aggressors often attack weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. 

By Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a disaster of a declining population, corruption, authoritarianism, a warped economy, and a high rate of alcoholism.

Why, then, would Putin want to ruin additional territory in Crimea and Ukraine the way that he has wrecked most of Russia?

Doesn’t Russia have enough land for its diminishing population? Are there not enough minerals, timber, gas, and oil for Putin’s kleptocrats?

In the modern age, especially since Karl Marx, we rationalize the causes of wars as understandable fights over real things, like access to ports, oil fields, good farmland, and the like. Yet in the last 2,500 years of Western history, nations have just as often invaded and attacked each other for intangibles. The historian Thucydides wrote that the classical Athenians had won and kept their empire mostly out of “fear, honor, and self-interest.”

Maybe that was why most battles in ancient Greece broke out over rocky and mountainous borderlands. Possession of these largely worthless corridors did not add to the material riches of the Spartans, Thebans, or Athenians. But dying for such victories did wonders for their national pride and collective sense of self.

Why did the Argentine dictatorship invade the British Falkland Islands in 1982? The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges dismissed the entire Argentine–British dispute over the isolated, windswept rocks as a pathetic fight between “two bald men over a comb.”

Taking the “Malvinas” apparently was critical to restoring the Argentine dictatorship’s lost pride. In contrast, the descendants of Lord Nelson were not about to allow a few peacock generals to insult the honor of the British Royal Navy.

Doesn’t China have enough land without starting a beef with Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands? While there may be some oil in the vicinity, apparently both sides see these desolate mountainous islets as symbols of more important issues of national prestige and will. Lose the Senkaku Islands and what larger island goes next?

Saddam Hussein had enough land without invading Iran in 1980. But his impoverished Iraqis grew terrified of revolutionary Shiite Iran and he lashed out. Iraq also had enough oil without taking Kuwait in 1990. But occupying it made Iraqis proud at home and feared in the Middle East neighborhood.

The Obama administration has tried to psychoanalyze Putin as lashing out because of weakness. Or he is supposedly an unruly kid cutting up at the back of the classroom. Or he is acting out a tough-guy “shtick,” as President Obama put it.

Maybe. But it would be wiser to review the historical causes of war, especially why conflicts break out. Aggressors often attack their weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. They calibrate self-interest not so much in getting more stuff as winning greater honor, feeling safer, and instilling more fear.

Bullies such as imperial Persia, Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, Hitler’s Third Reich, and Stalin’s Soviet Union did not really believe that their peoples would starve without annexing someone else’s lands. Despite their pretexts, these empires all privately knew that they had sufficient living space.

These autocracies acted out emotionally satisfying ideas such as crushing an upstart weak Greece, or extending French culture across Europe, or reminding European states that the proud German Volk was as superior as it was underappreciated, or reassuring Russians that the New Soviet Man was at last safe, respected, and feared abroad.

Just as important, history’s aggressors embraced their fears and sense of honor because they thought they could get away with doing so scot-free — given the perceived loss of deterrence.

Putin, like Hitler in 1939, may be weak in geostrategic terms. But as long as he does not provoke an American and European collective response, he can assume that Russia is far stronger than any one of his next targets.

Like Hitler, Putin does not know exactly which future aggressive act will prompt an American and European reaction. But until then, he is willing to continue gambling that he can restore some more of the lost empire of the czars and commissars — and with it more Russian honor, influence, and pride — without consequences.

If history is any guide, these emotions are driving Putin to grab things that are not his. Putin acts now because in the era of failed reset diplomacy and recent empty American deadlines, red lines, and step-over lines, he feels the old U.S. deterrent is absent or dormant. And he will keep up his aggression until he senses that the increasing risks no longer warrant the diminishing returns of absorbing his neighbors.

We should stop trying to psychoanalyze Putin, arguing that he is really weak or is an adolescent showing off his machismo — much less that he has legitimate grievances.

Instead, Putin believes that the more he grabs from others, the prouder his otherwise-downtrodden citizens will become, the more respect they will earn abroad, and the less likely others will fool with him.

Until that is no longer true, Putin will continue.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

THE FAILURE OF OBAMANOMICS IN THREE CHARTS

THE FAILURE OF OBAMANOMICS IN THREE CHARTS

John Hinderaker, Powerline

Democrats are spinning April’s relatively good jobs numbers as a victory for the administration. The reality, however, is that the current recovery is the weakest of modern times, as economic growth, after more than five years of Democratic Party policies, stands at near zero. The Senate Budget Committee offers the following three charts, which show how the Obama administration’s government-centric policies stack up against the Reagan administration’s free enterprise approach, which brought the United States out of a similar recession, but one that also included runaway inflation.

This one shows how slowly jobs have bounced back under Obamanomics. Click to enlarge:

This one shows how slowly gross domestic product has rebounded, compared to the Reagan years:

This one is perhaps the most devastating of all. It tracks labor force participation under Reagan and under Obama. Has anyone in history driven as many people out of work as Barack Obama? Certainly not in the United States:

If you are a partner in Goldman Sachs or a Washington lobbyist, the Obama administration has been a bonanza. But you probably aren’t. In all likelihood, if you need to work for a living, Obama’s presidency has been a tough time for you, if not a disaster.

The Truth Drips Out

Not that anyone was trying to be transparent...

The Truth Drips Out

By Victor Davis Hanson

For over a year and a half the White House successfully withheld communications between public servants, apparently in hopes that the death of four Americans in Benghazi would not become an issue in the 2012 election (at the eleventh hour CNN’s Candy Crowley did her best to ensure that goal by unethically becoming both moderator and advocate of Barack Obama in the second debate).

Even with the heavily censored and redacted recent releases of White House e-mails, one of the many messaging “goals” of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes (“To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy”) is the evidence that proves exactly what the White House so far has denied: the highest White House officials were in a pre-election frenzy to pressure almost everyone from the White House staffers to the CIA to massage the truth of how four Americans died in Benghazi in order to keep up a campaign-driven facade of a spontaneous video-driven riot, one that trumped the truth of a pre-planned terrorist attack, the possibility of which intelligence officers had on prior occasions warned about and were ignored. 

These heavily redacted talking points reveal three truths that won’t go away: 1) the administration has lied about the reasons they promulgated false information that they knew at the time to be false; 2) the false, campaign-driven narrative that it was not a terrorist attack reflected prior laxity that they knew at the time increased risk, (and hampered proper focus on the true perpetrators, whose prompt arrest and capture might have negated their false narratives); and 3) they jailed a minor parole violator while falsely alleging that a video he had made had led to the deaths of Americans from an impromptu riot.

Rhodes’s now-released memo also went out to some of those who have denied that there was any effort to peddle a false narrative, including press secretary Jay Carney. There is a creepy incestuousness to the entire debacle (Rhodes is a brother to the CBS president, the CBS that later hired Mike Morell, the CIA appointee who earlier “went over” the talking points with the White House staff, the CBS that pressured CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson on the content and choice of her reporting on Benghazi; Mr. Morell was later hired both by CBS and by a security firm, Beacon Global Strategies, involved with officials closely connected with Hillary Clinton, who was knee-deep in the Benghazi mess, and on and on).

Because untruth was at the heart of not just the cover-up, but also of the lax security and response that led to the deaths of the four Americans, this scandal, despite the collusion of the  White House, the CIA, and CBS, won’t go away.

At the very least, Mr. Rhodes should step down; he has been not been truthful and his immediate reaction to the disaster in Benghazi did not reflect his responsibilities to ensure national security, but rather a role as a political operative to suppress the truth. He was the coordinator of the White House messaging effort to prep official spokespeople—Jay Carney especially—and institutionalized a lie.

How in current and future crises, could he ever be trusted to coordinate a national-security response based on unpleasant realities on the ground rather than domestic political calculations?

Even with stonewalling, groupthink, legal maneuvering, media collusion, and lack of an independent prosecutor, more of the truth will drip out.

Just a little bit more….

regret

Vermont's Single-Payer Dream Is Taxpayer Nightmare

Where are those that earn their degrees from vaunted university systems that build lucerative careers to study, project and establish outcomes in projects like this? Or, is it all a crap shoot, ideology over reason… scary, I guess all the adults are on vacation.

Vermont's Single-Payer Dream Is Taxpayer Nightmare

By Megan McArdle

Of the plans that states have hatched for the Affordable Care Act, none has been bolder than that of Vermont, which wants to implement a single-payer health-care system, along the lines of what you might find in Britain or Canada. One government-operated system will cover all 620,000 of Vermont’s citizens. The hope is that such a system will allow Vermont to get costs down closer to Canada’s, as well as improve health by coordinating care and ensuring universal coverage.

Just two small issues need to be resolved before the state gets to all systems go: First, it needs the federal government to grant waivers allowing Vermont to divert Medicaid and other health-care funding into the single-payer system. And second, Vermont needs to find some way to pay for it.

Although Act 48 required Vermont to create a single-payer system by 2017, the state hasn’t drafted a bill spelling out how to raise the additional $1.6 billion a year (based on the state's estimate) the system needs. The state collected only $2.7 billion in tax revenue in fiscal year 2012, so that's a vexingly large sum to scrape together.

Vermont is a middling-tax state, as states go. And that’s not an accident; its population consists of longtime Vermonters, some of whom vote Republican (at least for governor) and are not super-tax-friendly, and transplants from Massachusetts and New York state, who, last time I looked, had moved to Vermont partly because the taxes were lower. Paying for this program would likely make Vermont the highest-taxed state in the nation, by quite a lot.

Now, you can argue that people should be glad to make this trade-off, not just for peace of mind, but because they will trade higher taxes for lower (no) insurance premiums. You can also argue that poor people in America should be laughing and dancing and singing all day because every one of them is economically better off than starving farmers in drought-ridden regions of Africa. Neither argument will do you much good, however, because that’s not how people think.

Especially when you consider that estimates for this plan's cost are likely to err on the optimistic side, because, well, people drawing up proposed budgets for their pet ideas tend to be a little optimistic. Yes, yes, there may be fabulous cost savings from using the government’s monopoly buying power to bargain prices down with providers. But Vermont is already the beneficiary of significant monopoly buying power: One insurer has 74 percent of the state’s small-group business. It’s a Blue Cross/Blue Shield, so don’t count on fabulous savings from squeezing out profits. The large group market is even more concentrated, though on a for-profit insurer.

Nor can you get much administrative saving at the provider level, because they still have to deal with out-of-state insurers quite a bit. And the once-vaunted fabulous savings from preventative care have mostly turned out not to exist.

So this is going to be expensive. So expensive that I doubt Vermont is actually going to go forward with it.

This should be instructive for those who hope -- or fear -- that Obamacare has all been an elaborate preliminary to a nationwide single-payer system. It isn’t. The politics are impossible, and even if they weren’t, the financing would be unthinkable.

To contact the writer of this article: 
Megan McArdle at mmcardle3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: 
James Gibney at +1-202-624-1863 or jgibney5@bloomberg.net.

Reflections on Obamacare, w/Mike Walker

Reflections on Obamacare

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

Being dismayed by TV reporting is becoming a chronic condition, whether the source is NBC News or Fox News or CNN.

Political ideology has nothing to do with it and Obamacare is an excellent case in point.

The software malfunction – in and of itself – was only a passing embarrassment.

The “seven million” figure is also of limited importance.

After spending nine years on the board of directors for a non-profit health care provider, I can tell you that what is important is the make up the patient pool – not how many people are in it.

Is the pool healthy or sick and if sick then how sick? That is crucial information.

And that leads us to the source of my dismay: Why the TV media obsession about the outer edges of Obamacare while ignoring what really matters?

First, it is impossible for either detractors or supporters to declare Obamacare a success or failure.

No one in America has ever seen Obamacare in operation. NO ONE. We are like the blind guy feeling the elephant.

There are provisions originally not intended to go into effect until next year or later. Since the ugly rollout, no less than two dozen additional provisions (I lost count), some minor, some significant, have been either suspended or modified.

Here is the reality: 2014’s version of Obamacare bears little resemblance to the law passed in 2009. The jury on this one will be out for years.

Second (and far more important), the ONLY BIG STORY is determining how many previously uninsured Americans now have health care.

THAT WAS THE REASON FOR THE LAW.

That is the only thing that matters!

That is why tens of millions of us supported the idea of Obamacare.

Its Republican critics have to face the reality that when they held power they did NOTHING to get the 10% of uninsured Americans covered.

Taking care of the most vulnerable Americans is a just and noble deed and President Obama deserves a lot of credit for taking action.

But things are not so rosy for the Democrats either.

Trying doesn't cut it in America. We demand success and that is a good thing.

Aye, there’s rub!

Obamacare changed the entirety of the health care system. It now touches everyone from Washington to Wall Street to Main Street. 

It touches babies and seniors, it changed how 20-somethings get insurance to 80-somethings using Medicare Advantage. It is pervasive in its reach.

And that gets to the big fear of the Democrats.

If the Republicans are guilty of the sin of omission on this issue then the Democrats are facing the sin of commission.

One lasting lesson of the website rollout, both at the Federal and State level, was a painful demonstration of just how inefficient government can be compared to the private sector.

What will happen to the champions of “Washington-centric solutions” if, when Obamacare is in full force in a few years, we find out that the law imperfectly messed with health care of the whole 100% while failing to address the needs of the most vulnerable 10%?

One thing is for sure: It will be ugly.

A political goal of Obamacare was to gain the attention of the entire country and it succeeded.

Good luck with that in the years to come.

Mike

The Grandfather, The autumn of patriarch Harry Reid

The Grandfather

The autumn of patriarch Harry Reid

Matthew Continetti, Free Beacon

Another man might have assumed, correctly, that launching a campaign of insult and insinuation against two billionaires would result in renewed attention to his own finances. Not Harry Reid. The Senate Democratic leader since 2005, and the Senate majority leader since 2007, is not one to reflect before speaking. His mouth runs far ahead of his brain.

In recent years Reid has declared an American war “lost” while our troops still fought overseas; praised President Obama for his “light” skin and “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”; asserted falsely and without evidence that Mitt Romney had not paid any taxes for a decade; and said “Why would we want to do that?” when asked if he would fund cancer research during the government shutdown.

Now, with his majority in danger, his president unpopular, his floor agenda obstructed by members of his own caucus, Reid thrashes about uncontrollably. He calls Obamacare horror stories “untrue.” He says Obamacare numbers are not as high as projected because Americans “are not educated on how to use the Internet.” His Senate Majority PAC launches a $3 million ad campaign tying Republican candidates to two men most Americans have never heard of, two men who, funnily enough, are more popular than Reid.

From the floor of the Senate Reid says these two men, Charles and David Koch, are “un-American,” are trying “to buy America.” Without the terrible specter of the Koch brothers Harry Reid would be disarmed. He has no issue for his Democratic Senators to run on; the minimum wage and climate change are not enough. Nor has he another means of inspiring donors to open their checkbooks. He only has fear, fear of the Kochs, fear of extractive industry, fear of the portion of the elite that favors economic freedom. The Koch brothers, Reid says, “rig the system to benefit themselves.” He should know.

The fact that Harry Reid’s political and influence operation includes his five children has been established for some time. A few weeks ago, when I first heard Reid accuse private citizens of being un-American, I dredged up a Los Angeles Times article from 2003 with the headline, “In Nevada, the Name to Know Is Reid.” Chuck Neubauer and Richard T. Cooper’s meticulously researched and reported article begins with the story of the “Clark County Conservation of Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002,” a land bill of the sort that puts people to sleep. “What Reid did not explain” when he introduced the bill in the Senate, Neubauer and Cooper wrote, “was that the bill promised a cavalcade of benefits to real estate developers, corporations, and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to his sons’ and son-in-law’s firms.” I wonder why he left that part out.

Firms tied to the Reid family, the Los Angeles Times reported, earned more than $2 million from 1998 to 2002 “from special interests that were represented by the kids and helped by the senator in Washington.” How much more have they earned in the 11 years since this article was published? Land, energy, water, gaming, and mining—the Reids manage a diversified portfolio. They are not financial investors but political ones. Reid’s four sons are lawyers, as is his son-in-law. They make their money furthering the interests of paying clients, clients operating businesses in the state represented by Reid.

Those businesses are not necessarily American. After a 2011 trip to China Harry Reid began touting the virtues of ENN Energy Group, a Chinese firm that sought to build a $5 billion solar farm in Nevada. Reid’s son Rory represented ENN, though Rory claimed in a 2012 Bloomberg article never to have discussed “the project with my father or his staff.” Somehow, though, commissioners friendly with the Reid family agreed to sell property to ENN for one-sixth of the land’s appraised value.

The senator repeatedly expressed his support for the project. But ENN could not find a customer for its energy, and dropped its plans last June. In another instance Reid pressured Homeland Security officials to approve the visas of Chinese casino investors represented by Rory Reid. Rory’s brothers should not feel left out, however. Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer says Papa Reid has “sponsored at least $47 million in earmarks that directly benefited organizations that one of his sons, Key Reid, either lobbies for or is affiliated with.”

Who could have been surprised, then, when the Washington Post in 2012 “uncovered nearly 50 members who helped direct millions of dollars in earmarks to projects that either held the potential to enhance the surroundings of a lawmaker’s own property, or aided entities connected to their immediate family,” and one of those members was Reid. The Post zeroed in on an almost $22 million earmark, passed close to a decade ago, that financed a bridge over the Colorado River. The bridge connects the gambling resorts of Laughlin, Nev., to Bullhead City, Arizona. Harry Reid owns 160 acres in Bullhead.

Reid and his family appear to work within the confines of the law, which should not be surprising, because Reid writes that law, and illegal activity hurts the bottom line. Others are not so careful. Last year one of Reid’s longtime donors, Nevada lobbyist Harvey Whittemore, was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of violating campaign finance laws. Whittemore used associates as “straw donors” to run around donation limits, giving more than $130,000 in dirty money to Reid’s campaign. His sentence is delayed pending appeal.

This week we learned that Reid’s willingness to funnel other people’s money to members of his family extends to a third generation. On Wednesday the veteran Nevada journalist Jon Ralston reported that Harry Reid had used $31,000 in campaign funds to buy “gifts for my staff and supporters” from his granddaughter, Rory Reid’s daughter, Ryan Elisabeth Reid, a “performing arts professional” living in Brooklyn.

Ryan Reid is the artistic director of the Sprat Theatre Company, which says it receives donations from the likes of the Caesars Foundation, the NV Energy Foundation, the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Keep Memory Alive, one Peter Palivos, and the Clinton Global Initiative. The Caesars Foundation is the charitable arm of Caesars Entertainment in Las Vegas, a Harry Reid contributor. A Caesars spokesman told Real Clear Politics that the Caesars Foundation had funded a proposal from Keep Memory Alive to bring Ryan Reid’s play to Vegas, because she needs the help. Keep Memory Alive and the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health are philanthropies founded by Larry Ruvo, general manager of Southern Wine and Spirits of Nevada, member of the American Gaming Association board of directors, and donor to Harry Reid’s Searchlight Leadership Fund PAC. Peter Palivos is a Las Vegas developer, Reid donor, onetime client of Rory Reid, and convicted felon. NV Energy is another Reid donor; a spokesman for that company told Real Clear Politics, and should probably tell the Sprat Theatre, that the theatre’s grant proposal is still under consideration. You have heard of the Clintons.

I have not seen the Sprat Theatre’s new piece, “One Day in the Life of Henri Shnuffle,” which concerns “moments of the title character’s life, from youth to old age, to demonstrate a fuller understanding of aging, Alzheimer’s, and the way others live,” but I do not doubt for a moment that it is so innovative, so compassionate, so compelling and cathartic that the numerous corporate and private sponsors who are financing its Vegas stint this coming October are writing their checks based totally on merit, without a moment’s thought to who Ryan Reid’s father and granddad are. There can be no other way: We all know the motives of liberal Democrats are pure, their hearts true, their lives guiltless of the favoritism and nepotism and self-interest and ideological blindness of Republicans and conservatives. Harry Reid is willing to go the extra step. He did nothing wrong in handing $31,000 of his donors’ money to his granddaughter, he told reporters, but he plans to reimburse his campaign anyway. What a saint.

“I must study politics and war,” John Adams said, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” In Harry Reid’s America a man must win political office so that his sons may have the liberty to practice law and register as lobbyists, engage in rent-seeking and government relations and crisis management and communications, in order to give their children a right to live in Brooklyn, to enroll in the New School, to visit the Vermont Studio Center, to have cronies finance their off-off-off-Broadway shows, to enjoy their allowance from grandpa. This is the arrangement put before the voters this coming Election Day; this is the “system” rigged to benefit the family Reid; this is the configuration of power that Charles and David Koch want to disrupt. How awful of them. How “un-American.”