BEDFORD FALLS OR POTTERSVILLE?

BEDFORD FALLS OR POTTERSVILLE?
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

Novelist Anne Morse has written a sequel to Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Her novel is called Bedford Falls.

NRO has posted an interview with Morse. Like the classic film, her novel, she says, reminds us of our obligations to family and community — the “little platoons,” to borrow Edmund Burke’s phrase.

The Morse interview reminds me that nine years ago, I wrote a Weekly Standard column called “Bedford Falls or Pottersville? What kind of a country you think you live in can affect your eagerness to defend it.”

Since we’re in the midst of the “It’s a Wonderful Life” season, I thought I would republish the piece:

In his end-of-the-year column, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne included this message from an irate conservative reader: “Most liberals and some Democrats hate this president and will do anything to bring him down, including siding with terrorists against the president.” Noting that the same sentiment was expressed in different forms by many readers, Dionne lamented that “when big chunks of the country begin to view their political adversaries as something close to traitors, we have arrived at a very dangerous time.”

But is it baseless to suspect that the left-liberal ethos impels some adherents towards ambivalence about the struggle against terrorism? History suggests that the issue is worth investigating. After all, the old American left felt ambivalent–or worse–when it came to the foreign policy struggles of its day. 

Chunks of the left opposed American involvement in the struggle against fascism until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. And even after becoming disillusioned with Communism, elements of the old left failed to buy into the Cold War.

Many adopted the posture of the influential literary critic Edmund Wilson. As Joseph Epstein has pointed out, Wilson described our conduct towards the Soviet Union as “panicky pugnacity” borne not of our virtue but of “the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.”

The “new left” of the 1960s and 1970s rejected such world-weary moral equivalency and rooted openly for Communists. The standard chant of that era’s student left was “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win.”

These leftists now have a stake in our society, and neither they nor their children have to worry about being drafted. Moreover, bin Laden and Zarqawi may cut less appealing figures, both personally and ideologically, than Uncle Ho, Chairman Mao, and Fidel Castro.

Thus, there’s no reason to believe that very many leftists root for, or sympathize deeply with, the enemy. But we shouldn’t summarily dismiss the possibility that some leftists today feel ambivalent about the country they once considered criminal and that, always craving sophistication, they may have adopted something like Edmund Wilson’s cynical view of America’s latest conflict.

Consider the statements and actions of some of today’s left-liberals. The most obvious example is Michael Moore. As Michael Barone reminds us, Moore has hailed the Iraqi terrorist insurgents as “Minute Men” who deserve to win, and on his website has called Americans the stupidest people in the world.

By hitting the daily double of anti-Americanism–cheering for the enemy and denigrating his countrymen–Moore became a hero to the left and an ally of liberal Democratic politicians. According to Barone, about half of the Democratic senators attended the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s popular distillation of his views on the war against terror. And at their national convention, the Democrats honored Moore with a seat next to former president, and kindred spirit, Jimmy Carter.

But it is not just their fondness for Moore that suggests a deep ambivalence about this country on the part of many liberals. Isolated incidents of prisoner abuse caused Senate minority whip Richard Durbin to compare the United States to Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Recent revelations about warrant-less electronic surveillance of calls from foreign al Qaeda operatives to the United States have spurred comparisons to King George III.

Those who perceive America as being one New York Times story away from deserving comparison to some of history’s most odious regimes must believe that the country is teetering on the brink of evil. 

What if one were to take the left’s moral worldview seriously? If the country is on such tenuous moral ground, as they proclaim it to be, then the highest priority–more urgent than dealing with an enemy that successfully attacks us only once every several years–is to make sure that the country doesn’t spiral into something truly evil. 

Thus, while most Americans find it unobjectionable that we use water boarding, or electronic surveillance of calls to the United States, to obtain information about al Qaeda plans, those who consider America morally ambiguous cannot accept such tactics. To do so, the familiar protest goes, makes us too much like the enemy. This incarnation of moral-equivalency-think is as potentially debilitating in the war on terror as Edmund Wilson’s version was during the Cold War.

The other imperative for this crowd–also more urgent than the war on terror–is to move the country away from the brink of evil to higher moral ground. This means enacting the left-liberal agenda–government guaranteed healthcare for all, higher taxes on the rich, gay marriage, and so forth. 

But to advance down that road, Republicans must be vanquished. For some liberals, E.J. Dionne notwithstanding, it follows that they must do nearly anything to bring the Republicans and their president down, and that accomplishing this constitutes a higher priority than combating terrorism.

Many modern liberals seem unable to say what kind of country they live in. Most of the time, they speak as if they inhabit Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls–a dull, nosy, and somewhat puritanical, but basically decent place where George Bailey and the forces of good fight to a stalemate with Mr. Potter and the forces of evil.

Deep down, though, they fear they live in Pottersville, minus the fun. The defense of Bedford Falls, for all of its flaws, would be a top priority; the primacy of defending Pottersville is less apparent.

Nine years later, my only amendment to the column is that, disillusioned by the failed Obama presidency, many more liberals now think they live in Pottersville.

Cuba No-Gooding

Cuba No-Gooding

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Recognizing the radical socialist dictatorship in Cuba is not a big deal. After all, we recognized Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin's Communist Russia. Hitler, Stalin and Castro. Big whoop!  Maybe the Administration can retroactively recognize Pol Pots' Khmer Rouge regime as well? 

Is this a shameful decision? Yes, but that's reality. 

Will things get better in Cuba? Not a chance. Before the President leaves office, this thing will stink so bad that it will make the Putin "reset" that resulted in the invasions of Crimea and Ukraine look not all that bad.

As for human rights, this United States Marine will not forget nor forgive Castro's butchers. I will neither forget nor forgive what happened to Marine Captain Jeb Seagle. 

Who is Jeb Seagle, you ask? 

It is name you will never hear uttered by the "Hate America First" leftists but it is a name with an important story.

In 1983, as Fidel's minions moved to enslave Grenada and his local puppets ineptly and recklessly grabbed half a dozen American medical students as hostages, a rescue mission was launched and Captain Jeb Seagle was in the thick of it.

Below is part of the story, told in his citation for the Navy Cross, a medal for valor in combat second only to the Medal of Honor:

SEAGLE, JEB F. Captain, U.S. Marine Corps (Reserve) Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 261 (HMM-261), 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit Date of Action: October 25, 1983 Citation: The Navy Cross is presented to Jeb F. Seagle, Captain, U.S. Marine Corps (Reserve), for extraordinary heroism while serving as an AH-IT (TOW) Cobra Attack Helicopter Pilot with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron TWO HUNDRED SIXTY-ONE (HMM-261), Twenty-Second Marine Amphibious Unit, conducting combat operations on the Island of Grenada on 25 October 1983. While conducting an armed reconnaissance mission in support of ground forces, Captain Seagle's aircraft was hit by multiple anti-aircraft artillery projectiles and forced down behind enemy lines. Having been knocked out by the blast, Captain Seagle regained consciousness after his fellow pilot had flown the aircraft to impact and found that his aircraft was on fire and burning out of control. As Captain Seagle exited the front cockpit of the Cobra, he saw that the other pilot had been critically wounded and remained helplessly trapped in the aircraft. With complete disregard for his own safety, Captain Seagle courageously returned to the aircraft which was now engulfed in flames and pulled him out. As unexpended ordnance began to cook off all around them, Captain Seagle carried the severely wounded pilot well clear of the danger. Now exposed to heavy enemy small arms and machinegun fire and faced with certain death or capture, Captain Seagle ignored the danger and remained to attend the wounds of the injured pilot by wrapping a tourniquet around his severely bleeding arm. Realizing that enemy soldiers were approaching, Captain Seagle fearlessly distracted them away from the helpless pilot and ultimately sacrificed his own life in an effort to buy time for the rescue helicopter to arrive. By his extraordinary courage, uncommon valor, and loyal devotion to duty in the face of danger, Captain Seagle ensured his brother-in-arms was rescued; thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service. 

Here is the tragic rest: Shortly after saving the life of gravely wounded Captain Tim Howard (who subsequently lost arm), Captain Seagle was captured by Cuban soldiers.

Since the mid-1970s when Communist Cuban soldiers began serving in Africa, their savagery became a thing of horror stories. 

Captain Seagle fared no better. Within minutes after his capture, he was dragged down a dirt road, pushed down on his knees and executed by the Cubans.

We are now dubiously reproaching ourselves over the Geneva Convention* edicts regarding the treatment of prisoners but that does not matter south of Florida. There is no such uncertainty in Cuba as that document only has a purpose when it is set afire to light a cigar -- POW rights be damned.

Now we will recognize these bums. So be it. 

The "Hate America First" Club will celebrate but as for this Marine: To hell with the Castro dictatorship.

Semper Fi,

Mike

* News flash: KMZ and his fellow monsters have no legal Geneva Convention rights, those rights are reserved for combatants in war -- not terrorists who intentionally target the innocent for death.

Let a Hundred Coburns Bloom

Let a Hundred Coburns Bloom 

The retiring Oklahoma senator knew how to fix what’s wrong with America.

Mike Brake, NRO

Here in Oklahoma, the news that Senator Tom Coburn will be retiring early from his second term has still not entirely settled in with most folks. For ten years we awoke each day knowing that our state’s voice in Washington would be one of principled reason and absolute integrity.

It’s not that our other senator, Jim Inhofe, or our House members, like Tom Cole and Frank Lucas, are lacking. They are all solid conservatives, as is former congressman James Lankford, whom we elected in November to replace Coburn in the Senate. But as conservatives across the nation have recognized for years, there’s only one Tom Coburn.

Which raises the question: What would America look like if the United States Senate had contained 100 Tom Coburns for the past decade?

Well, none of them would be running for president. One of the most endearing things about Senator Coburn was and is his total lack of personal ambition. From his first election to the House in the GOP sweep of 1994 until the day he announced his retirement, he’s been about one thing: service.

A hundred Coburns, or even 51, would have long since passed a balanced-budget amendment and enforced it. The pork flowing out of Washington would have dried up years ago. The deficit, which mushroomed to some $16 trillion under the first Obama administration, would be closer to $10 trillion and falling.

Canadian oil would already be flowing south through the Keystone pipeline. That, coupled with more sensible federal regulatory policies, would probably have dropped gasoline prices to around a dollar a gallon. We could have told the OPEC thugs to go pound sand.

A Coburn Senate would have sustained and even expanded needed defense spending. And any report on the CIA’s work in the War on Terror would have said “Thank you!”

Taxes? They’d almost certainly be lower and much simpler. We might even have achieved that eternal dream of most Americans, a tax return on a postcard.

Russia would be less belligerent. Vladimir Putin would know not to mess with a strong and confident America, and so would the other bad actors, from North Korea to Iran. Yes, presidents set foreign policy, but a Coburn Senate would have added some spine to even a weak-kneed Obama administration.

The federal judiciary would be much more inclined to make rulings based on law and constitutional principle. It is unlikely that we’d have a “wise Latina” grinding liberal ideological axes.

A Senate of Coburn clones would waste a lot less time on resolutions designating Thursday as Earle T. Woonsocket Day and spend more time debating the issues that matter. The dead air on C-SPAN would be filled with substantive debates, with minimal grandstanding. Imagine what it was like for some senators to follow Tom Coburn on the floor for the past decade!

In short, a Coburn Senate for the past ten years would have made us a stronger, safer, more prosperous people.

I have been privileged to know Tom Coburn casually and to respect him entirely since he first blossomed as a new congressman two decades ago. When he was still undecided about seeking a second Senate term in 2010, I stood in line at a political function to tell him what everyone else there was clamoring to say: “We need you in Washington!”

Alas, we won’t have him there in 2015. Oklahoma, the Senate, and the nation will be poorer for his absence, as we were and are richer for his ennobling service.

— Mike Brake is a longtime journalist, writer, and editor in Oklahoma. He was a speechwriter for Governor Frank Keating.

“White Privilege” and the Destruction of the Democratic Majority

“White Privilege” and the Destruction of the Democratic Majority

Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Not all that long ago, the Democratic Party looked to have cobbled together a near permanent majority coalition (“near” as bad governance will do in anyone). 

Not so anymore.

Today there is not a single Democratic Senator, Governor or Democratically controlled legislature from Texas to North Carolina, the fastest growing region in the United States.

The respected and likeable two-term Democratic Senator from Louisiana just became the latest candidate to get shellacked in the 2014 Mid-Term Elections.

Why?

Like the Republican Party that shifted right with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, the Democrats are now shifting further left as seen in Elizabethan populism but perhaps best captured by the destructive extremism known as “White Privilege,” a reckless position held to not by truth but by a religious-like belief that is impervious to reason. 

The result is middle class flight from the Democrat establishment the likes of which has never been witnessed.

To understand just how out of touch the "Party of special interests" has become, read the 1995 editorial by former-Democratic Senator Jim Webb:

http://www.jameswebb.com/articles/economic-fairness-social-justice/in-defense-of-joe-six-pack

The Bill Clinton-Jim Webb mainstream wing of the Democratic Party is on life support and too many Democrat Party elites are more than willing to pull the plug.

Happy Holidays,

Mike

A Denver Doofus Political Dance

A reasonable kind of guy... education, a whole industry based on hate...

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Professor Charles Angeletti of Denver’s Metropolitan State University forced his class to take a “satirical” pledge demeaning the United States.

See: http://collegeinsurrection.com/2014/12/colorado-college-prof-forces-students-to-recite-anti-american-pledge-of-allegiance/

“Satirical” implies a sense of tolerant humor. Yeah Right. OK, Charlie, here’s a similar little chuckle:

“I refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America but only to the left-wing “Hate America First” ideology for which it really stands and what needs to be one statist authoritarian Nation under anti-religious know-it-all elites, endlessly divisible, with politically correct group-think and tolerance for all. *

*Except white males or individuals who believe that America has done right by them or anyone else – ever – and (in the immortal words of Professor Gruber), especially ignorant and too stupid to understand YOU!”

 

Can anyone imagine the Good Professor using that “satirical” version of the Pledge? 

Of course not! 

His "pledge" is not intended to be funny and thought provoking; it was done to shock and insult with the goal of proselyting his students.

Regards,

White Male Mike

Why I hate Obamacare

Why I hate Obamacare

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

It has nothing to do with Gruber or bad websites or false statements like: “If you like your health plan, you can keep your plan.” Those are correctable irritants.

I hate Obamacare on two counts.

The first was just addressed by Senator Schumer: Some 85% of Americans had health care from either their employer or the government BEFORE Obamacare.

The creators of Obamacare decided that it was time for BIG GOVERNMENT to fix what was not broken and tinker with EVERYONE’s health care.

That has proven a colossal failure.

It is the second failure, however, that really makes me hate Obamacare. 

What about the uncovered 15%?

While BIG GOVERNMENT in Washington was failing badly at “playing God” with the 85% that were covered, the 15% who needed health care got shoved under the bus.

Just to show how terribly misguided the Obamacare zealots are, many are now cheering and patting themselves on the back after announcing that only 4% got covered while 11% got nothing.

Really? You maroons goofed up 100% of the system in order to leave 11% uncovered. That is failure writ large.

The Republicans just took control of both chambers in the Capitol. They claim to have the answers to Obamacare's problems. Really?

Here is some sage advice: Help the 11% first and then save the rest of us.

Mike

Soviets Won the Second World War?

Soviets Won the Second World War?

Col Mike Walker, USMC, retired

All,

The “Soviets Won the Second World War” mythology is running around again.

We will put aside the cogent point that there never would have been a Second World War if Stalin had not allied himself with Hitler to invade Poland in September 1939 and move on the argument at hand.

Historian Norman Davies once wrote: 

“The Soviet war effort was so overwhelming that impartial historians of the future are unlikely to rate the British and American contribution to the European theatre as much more than a sound supporting role.”

That is over-the-top silliness. 

Indisputably, the Eastern Front was not just the largest and most dominant land campaign of the Second World War but in recorded history and was essential to the Allied victory.

However, the case is not at all clear that the war can be characterized as a “400 division clash” in the East versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the West as Davies further argued. That claim crumbles before serious and objective analysis.

A. The critic’s numbers do not add up

First, the war was global for the United States (US) and the British Commonwealth (UK) troops who made up of the bulk of the remaining anti-Axis combatants, save China.
  

The Soviets never had to build, equip, man and train the vast naval forces needed to defeat the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, battle the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific and simultaneously deploy and sustain large ground and air forces worldwide.
  

To put this in perspective, the U.S. Army comprised only 8.5 million of the 16 million Americans who served in uniform during the war.

Second, the “400 division clash in the east versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the west” argument is hard to follow.  The 400 division number is true enough when counting the total forces on the front but when the Nazi armies peaked in the east during the 1942-1943 period, their 200 plus divisions included approximately:

10 Italian divisions

18 Romanian divisions

9 Hungarian, divisions

15 Finnish divisions

Not an insignificant portion of the Nazi order of battle.

The Allied ground campaign in the West was more extensive than the critics are willing to admit.

On the Nazi side, the rough disposition of their forces (to include other Axis armies) in mid-1944 (before D-Day) shows that the Eastern Front was still dominant:

Approximately 200 divisions on the Eastern Front

28 divisions in the Balkans

17 divisions in Italy

8 divisions in Norway

61 divisions in the West

As the war progressed after D-Day, the number of Nazi divisions sent to the West continually increased and the number in the East continually declined.

By January 1945, the numbers were:

Approximately 145 divisions on the Eastern Front

15 divisions in the Balkans

28 divisions in Italy

15 divisions in Norway

79 divisions in the West

There was net decrease in the number of Nazi divisions during this period due to losses suffered on the war fronts. 

It would be wrong to down play the importance of the Western Allied onslaught during this period. Consider this statistic: After D-Day, the US Army alone captured on average the equivalent of one German division per week, every week throughout 1944. As the war on the Eastern front progressed, prisoners were often not taken which attributed to disparity in deaths and POWs taken.

When the Allies began the final 1945 offensive following the Battle of Bulge, Eisenhower had three Army Groups involved:

US 6th Army Group under Devers with 22 divisions

US 12th Army Group (main effort) under Bradley with 48 divisions

British 21st Army Group under Montgomery with 17 divisions

The 1^st Allied Airborne Army with 1 division was in strategic reserve

The US/UK forces also had the British 8th Army and US 5th Army in Italy that together totaled another 16 divisions. 

All in all, Eisenhower had 104 divisions in Europe by late 1944/early 1945. The “15 on 15” statement is nonsensical.

Fighting Japan, the US/UK ground forces had another 38 divisions deployed:

Six divisions with the British 14th Army in Burma plus 21 US Army, 6 US Marine and 5 Australian Divisions in the Pacific

B. Size Matters

Significantly, a US infantry division was manned at 13,700 soldiers compared with 10,400 for the Soviets and similar size difference existed for armored units (which had both more tanks and troops per unit) and Commonwealth units were larger still.

If we adjust for those differences, the Western Allies had the equivalent of 232 “Soviet size” divisions on the front lines by late 1944, extending from the Dutch-Belgian-French front to Italy to Burma and on to the Pacific.

C. Lend-Lease was vital to Red Army Success

Subtract out Lend-Lease and the power of the Red Army was significantly degraded.

The US provided over 7,000 tanks and the British another 5,000 as well as 11,000 US and 9,000 British aircraft. The overall amount of fuel and food supplies shipped to the Red Army was enough to keep 80 Russian divisions in the field.

Not surprisingly, putting in place the global logistics chain represented a major Allied commitment of resources and many Allied sailors lost their lives sailing through enemy laden artic waters to “deliver the goods.” 

D. The role of the USAAF-RAF strategic bombing campaign on the Soviet war effort has been undervalued 

After the failed German 1943 Kursk offensive, the Luftwaffe shifted the overwhelming majority of its fighter squadrons to Germany and other parts of Western Europe to battle RAF Bomber Command the emerging US Eighth Air Force. This eliminated the Luftwaffe as a major threat to the Red Army. 

Between 1939 and 1945, the Luftwaffe added slightly more than 13,000 88-mm flak guns for air defense duty. The army only received 3,500 such guns in the same period, but they were effective anti-tank guns of the war. 

Had those weapons been deployed in numbers to the Eastern Front, they would have turned Wehrmacht anti-tank defenses into vast killing fields for the Red Army’s armored forces. 

Finally, the strategic bombing of German oil production largely grounded the Luftwaffe and went far in making the Soviet 1945 breakout at the Baranov bridgehead on the Vistula River a success when the 1,200 German panzers massed there were rendered useless for lack of fuel.

There was never a case where a Red Army offensive defeated a mobile panzer force of that size while operating on ideal tank terrain. Allied strategic bombers first forced the removal of the Luftwaffe fighters, then removed thousands of deadly tank-killer "88s" from the battlefield and finally turned a huge panzer army into a mass of expensive and largely static pillboxes. Those factors were arguably decisive.

Western air power indirectly played a major role on the Eastern Front in 1944 and 1945.

E. Conclusions

The Eastern Front surely dominated the ground war, but when looking at the combined size and scope of the Western Allies ground, sea, air and material efforts, it could be argued that the West’s aggregate commitment of people, machines and resources was greater. 

Measuring war solely by buckets of blood spilt, however tragic, is a crude and misleading metric. No one played a “supporting role” in gaining the Allied victory. The real truth is that the Allies needed each other. All proved indispensable.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Meet the Snobocrats

Meet the Snobocrats

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud.

Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them.

Gruber apparently thinks such deception is okay because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage.

Unfortunately, Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses — he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees — is thematic of the last six years.

Another master-of-the-universe drafter of Obamacare was Ezekiel Emanuel. He scoffed on national television that the number of people covered by Obamacare at that point was “irrelevant.”

Emanuel also drew attention for his recent adolescent rant in a men’s magazine about the desirability of everyone dying at 75 to save society the expense of maintaining what he sees as the unproductive elderly.

Former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lectured of Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” The same elitist message reverberates: that government and academic elites are smarter than average Americans, and so need not explain what they are doing.

This is a pattern of Obama administration ruling elites who express disdain or lack of concern about the people they are supposed to serve. Former energy secretary Steven Chu made a series of astounding statements about energy use, the most inane being that America would be better off if gas costs soared to Europe’s sky-high prices.

Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador and current national-security adviser, has misled in chronic fashion. She was untruthful about the Benghazi killings on national television, claiming that the attacks on the American consulate were the result of a spontaneous riot over a video. Rice defended the administration’s surreal Sergeant Beau Bergdahl prisoner swap by claiming that the AWOL soldier had served with “honor and distinction.” She again prevaricated on national television when she boasted of a diplomatic breakthrough in getting Turkey to provide U.S. bases and support against the Islamic State.

The list of deceptions and untruths goes on. Remember IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner’s cute trick of planting a questioner at a conference to leak her own past targeting of conservative groups? The Veterans Administration hierarchy did not just cause the deaths of its own patients, but tried to cover up the scandal.

Do we recall how Attorney General Eric Holder contemptuously called Americans collective “cowards” because they did not necessarily share his identity-politics idea of race relations? Holder was the first attorney general in the nation’s history to be held in contempt of Congress.

President Obama habitually believes that his own superior talents make him immune from accountability.

He has referenced his own talent by bragging, “Just give me the ball,” or, “I’m LeBron, baby.” In 2008, he bragged to an interviewer, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

That same sense of superiority explains his campaign boast that, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

No wonder Obama believes that he can just give millions of foreign residents amnesty by executive order — against the will of Congress, the American people, the courts, and his own prior warnings that the president has no such power of fiat.

What explains the sense of entitlement of a few self-anointed grandees believing that they are somehow superhuman and not accountable to common notions of truth?

Progressivism has always assumed that the supposed noble ends of fairness and quality justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Influential Americans also have developed a sick idea about higher education, equating wisdom and character with a degree stamped from an Ivy League or exclusive university.

The media has abdicated its watchdog role. Barack Obama, Jonathan Gruber, Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, and Susan Rice are empowered by understandably assuming that they should be exempt from media criticism.

Wealth and status assure elites that their own lives are never affected by the laws they pass or by the concrete ramifications of their own ideology.

In the view of the snobocrats, the harm that follows from Obamacare, blanket amnesty, or out-of-control bureaucracies should always affect someone else — someone thought to be too stupid to figure out what hit them.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.  © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Good old boys...

The farther we get from this guy the more he is going to stink as his media filter evaporates. The left still believes that he is a natural leader. He has not led anything except fund raising.

The Gruber Confession

The Gruber Confession

By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” This was no open-mic gaffe. It was a clear, indeed enthusiastic, admission to an academic conference of the mendacity underlying Obamacare.

First, Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.

Worse was the pretense that Obamacare wouldn’t cost anyone anything. On the contrary, it’s a win-win, insisted President Obama, promising that the “typical family” would save $2,500 on premiums every year.

Skeptics like me pointed out the obvious: You can’t subsidize 30 million uninsured without someone paying something. Indeed, Gruber admits, Obamacare was a huge transfer of wealth — which had to be hidden from the American people, because “if you had a law which . . . made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

But of course you couldn’t, as millions discovered when they were kicked off their plans last year. Millions more were further shocked when they discovered major hikes in their premiums and deductibles. It was their wealth that was being redistributed.

As NBC News and others reported last year, the administration knew this all along. But White House political hands overrode those wary about the president’s phony promise. In fact, Obama knew the falsity of his claim as far back as February 2010, when, at a meeting with congressional leaders, he agreed that millions would lose their plans.

Now, it’s not unconstitutional to lie. Nor are laws enacted by means of deliberate deception thereby rendered invalid. But it is helpful for citizens to know the cynicism with which the massive federalization of their health care was crafted.

It gets even worse, thanks again to Gruber. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case claiming that the administration is violating its own health-care law, which clearly specifies that subsidies can be given only to insurance purchased on “exchanges established by the state.” Just 13 states have set up such exchanges. Yet the administration is giving tax credits to plans bought on the federal exchange — serving 37 states — despite what the law says.

If the plaintiffs prevail, the subsidy system collapses and, with it, Obamacare itself. Which is why the administration is frantically arguing that “exchanges established by the state” is merely sloppy drafting, a kind of legislative typo. And that the intent all along was to subsidize all plans on all exchanges.

Remember: The whole premise of Obamacare was that it would help the needy, but if you were not in need, if you liked what you had, you would be left alone. Which is why Obama kept repeating — PolitiFact counted 31 times — that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Re-enter Professor Gruber. On a separate video in a different speech, he explains what Obamacare intended: “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” The legislative idea was to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges by otherwise denying their citizens subsidies.

This may have been a stupid idea, but it was no slip. And it’s the law, as written, as enacted and as intended. It can be changed by Congress only, not by the executive. Which is precisely what the plaintiffs are saying. Q.E.D.

It’s refreshing that “the most transparent administration in history,” as this administration fancies itself, should finally display candor about its signature act of social change. Inadvertently, of course. But now we know what lay behind Obama’s smooth reassurances — the arrogance of an academic liberalism, so perfectly embodied in the Gruber Confession, that rules in the name of a citizenry it mocks, disdains and deliberately, contemptuously deceives.