Boys with Toys That Are Just a Little Too Grown Up for Them

The GOP loves freedom, but not for Egypt

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Why don't conservatives love freedom?

Remember when Liberals said that questioning another party’s patriotism was beyond the pale? That took place amidst the war in Iraq, which actually did bring freedom to the Middle East.

Judging by last week's Conservative Political Action Conference, that's a fair question.

Thank you for adjudicating the fairness of your own questions to yourself. I was very worried that you were going to get railroaded by your own prosecutorial zeal.

As Egyptians overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak,

That dude is old like whoa.

politicians who spoke at the annual CPAC gabfest in Washington ranged from silent to grumpy on the subject.

There’s plenty to be grumpy about. Our President, head of the largest and best-funded intelligence apparatus in the world learned of Mubarak’s resignation on TV.

Mitt Romney, perhaps the leading Republican presidential contender,

Based on what?

gave a speech without once mentioning the upheaval in Cairo that may signal the most important geopolitical shift since the end of the Cold War.

Egypt is a minor regional power that fell to rabble. The USSR was a global counterbalance to the West and a flag-bearer for an entire ideology. 

You'd think that anyone who wanted to be president would be paying attention and might have an opinion or two.

We thought similarly of Barack Obama’s voting record in 2008, but he just kept voting “present.”

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, also believed to be considering a presidential run, likewise seemed not to have noticed that the world was changing.

The world is most certainly not changing—unless it’s in the IBM commercial type of “the world is changing” sort of way. Egypt is changing. Areas of the Middle East might be changing.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty confined himself to criticizing President Obama for somehow appeasing "Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood."

Objections that tame certainly are confining.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who won the CPAC presidential straw poll, was at least forthright: He said the United States has no "moral responsibility to spread our goodness around the world"

That’s because Paul is a libertarian, not a conservative. This is what we mean by a “big tent” in the GOP. Nowhere is the schism between libertarians and conservatives more broad than on foreign policy.

Also, he’s wrong.

and urged the administration "to do a lot less a lot sooner, not only in Egypt but around the world."

I’d have to ask a federal worker how to do a lot less than nothing.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was all over the map. At CPAC, he mentioned "what's happening in Egypt" without commenting further.

He made the very relevant point that political unrest in the Middle East impacts our energy policy. Why that’s downright sane!

On Saturday, he told the Associated Press that Mubarak's resignation was "good for the future"

Which is, of course, in direct contention with his previous “no comment.”

but criticized Obama for publicly supporting the dictator's ouster.

This has a lot more to do with President Obama being demonstrably clueless during the entire ordeal and his senior administration being actively wrong about the facts. It was embarrassing.

On Sunday, Gingrich explained on ABC's "This Week" that Obama was right to side with the freedom-loving protesters in Tahrir Square

There were six of them. The rest were Islamists.

but should have done so privately - as if whispered encouragement, of which there was plenty, had a prayer of making a difference.

Is this laying the groundwork for the claim that Obama in any way, shape, manner, or form played a role in Egypt? He didn’t. He bungled the whole thing.

Meanwhile, protests sparked by the Egypt uprising are raging across the Arab world - Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain.

Literally all of which are equally radical societies as Egypt. Scratch that. I know nothing about Bahrain, so refuse to comment one way or the other.

On Monday, the clamor for democracy surfaced in Iran with the first consequential street demonstrations against theocratic rule since 2009.

You mean the other major protests in the Arab world that the President woefully mismanaged? Isn’t it strange that he supported the protesters against an ally but undermined the protesters of an enemy?

House Speaker John Boehner, at least, has come out forcefully on the side of freedom. But why the ambivalence from so many prominent conservatives?

It’s not ambivalence; it’s tepid optimism. Free elections are a great thing for societies who understand and love freedom. Egypt has shown no indication that they value freedom above Islam or that they prefer liberty to Sharia. There is no developed opposition in Egypt, mostly because of the oppression of the Mubarak regime. That does not, however, mean that the leaders springing up right now are ready to govern a nation that controls one of the greatest thoroughfares for commodities in the world. Nor does it mean that they will yield their personal aspirations to the will of the people. Why aren’t conservatives celebrating? Because we know that in ten years, Egypt is more likely to be an enemy than an ally.

For one thing - and I think this applies to most of the tongue-tied potential candidates - there's the fact that all of this is happening on Obama's watch. If everything turns out well, heaven forbid that the president get any credit.

This is called projection. We saw this during the Iraq War. We as conservatives are not that petty. (Even me.) This is mostly because we love our country. If I recall, questioning the patriotism of dissent was a no-no when a Republican was in office. This whole line of snarky innuendo would be repellent if it weren’t so expected.

The administration's public comments as the Egyptian revolution unfolded seemed to take two steps forward and one step back,

There were steps forward?

but there was never any real question about Obama's sentiments.

Which is undoubtedly relevant because every effective foreign policy is built around sentiments. Sometimes, it’s also built around holding hands, watching Love Actually, and sharing your feelings.

The United States was by no means in control of events,

The United States government didn’t even know about certain events.

but the White House used whatever influence it had

[null set]

to push for a transition.

The conservative mantra has been: Obama Is Always Wrong.

Give us more credit than that; we aim high. The conservative mantra is “liberalism I always wrong.”

Therefore there must be something wrong with the way he handled Egypt –

Those blinders are for the horses, champ. Egypt was the quintessence of mismanaged foreign policy.

even if it appears, from what we've seen so far, that the result is a historic opening for democracy in the world's most troubled region.

No, that happened about six years ago in Iraq. Egypt is far more likely to start a nuclear program than to become a stable democracy. (Keep in mind, even Venezuela votes.)

The other possible explanation for the lukewarm conservative reaction is a lack of faith in our most cherished democratic values - at least where majority-Islam countries are concerned.

Democratic values are incompatible with religious law that includes unconscionable constraints on freedom. This refers not only to the marginalization of women in the Muslim world, but also the theocracy, the temperament for brutal punishments, and the relative comfort with death as a vehicle for change.

There is no democracy in voting for a choice between unconstrained tyrants. There is no merit to voting yourself the right to impinge the freedoms of others. There is no virtue in democracy without freedom.

I'm not talking about Glenn Beck's paranoid fantasy of a vast leftist-Islamist conspiracy for world domination;

Not a conspiracy. Our enemies say as much. Time and time again. To ignore their rhetoric is akin to claiming that anticommunists bought into the “conspiracy” of a worldwide proletarian revolution. It is demonstrably part of the core ideology of our enemy. It is their mission statement.

that's a job for a licensed professional with a prescription pad.

Good idea! He could teach you all about projection!

I'm talking about people such as former U.N. ambassador John Bolton,

Be fair. John Bolton is a spokesperson for his own mustache. Which is awesome.

who told CPAC that "democracy as we see it" in Egypt would be all right

Seriously, that’s how you’re going to paraphrase it? I can’t find the transcript, but I’m fairly certain that John Bolton wasn’t the rhetorical equivalent of a noncommittal emo kid that describes his malaise as “ennui.”

but grumbled that "a democratic election can produce illiberal results."

Excellent verbiage. See why I didn’t buy the inelegant paraphrasing above?

In other words, some Egyptians might vote for candidates put forth by the Muslim Brotherhood.

In other words, a terrorist-supporting organization could run the country’s future parliament and marshal Egypt’s resources towards financing terrorism against the United States and our allies.

It is unlikely that the group would win a majority in free and fair elections

Really? Based on what?

 - or even that a government headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, if it came to that, would necessarily be more dangerous or hostile than the Mubarak regime.

Really? Based on what? Is this guy getting his briefings from James Clapper?

But Bolton and some others seem to believe that only political parties of which the United States approves should be allowed to participate in Egyptian elections.

Bolton and I believe that before shucking a reliable American ally for a military junta bleeding into anarchy, we need reasonable assurances that the change has a reasonable chance of ending favorably for the United States. Failing to receive those assurances belies woeful impotence in the Obama Administration.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum, another presidential contender, used his CPAC speech to blast Obama's handling of Egypt; for weeks, Santorum has been claiming that elections there would lead straight to "sharia law."

Again, the paraphrasing is flagrantly disjointed, but even in this inelegant mangling, Santorum’s assertion is not an unreasonable conclusion.

Pam Geller, the conservative blogger who led opposition to the Lower Manhattan mosque, crashed the CPAC conference and told an interviewer from Mother Jones magazine that Mubarak's fall was "catastrophic" and would lead to sharia law throughout the Middle East.

Well, the parts that don’t already have it. You can’t simultaneously laud the revolution for being a watershed moment for democracy in the region and dismiss opponents who believe that it is equally likely to spread unfavorable politics throughout the region.

These conservatives are arguing that the world's 1.2 billion Muslims cannot be trusted to govern themselves.

True.

That's not what I call loving freedom.

That’s like saying that a father that refuses to give a Ferrari to a toddler doesn’t love sports cars—or toddlers for that matter. The point is that the child is going to hurt himself, and probably us too if he is allowed on the road. 

Redundancy

When Democracy Weakens

By BOB HERBERT

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States.

Yes. You could have helped wondering. And in all likelihood, you did. But you’ve got a deadline, and you’re trying to mask your utter incompetence in foreign affairs with your utter incompetence in domestic issues. Worst of all, I already know with absolute certainty that it’s going to be fucking stupid.

I think it’s on the ropes.

Says the mouthpiece for the party that’s losing.

We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.

We are a democracy in name only; the United States of America is a republic. Those who have successfully navigated 4^th grade civics are expected to understand this basic fact.

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living,

The existence of poverty does not indicate a failure of democracy. This isn’t even an A+B<>C thing. This is a pineapple + socket wrench <> feral cat.

the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite.

First, how is one vote per citizen an insufficient distribution of First. for this to indicate a weakening of democracy, I challenge Bob Herbert to name a time when the “levers of real power” were not wielded by the elite. Second, how is one vote per person insufficient

It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want.

Not when you, a member of the elite, insist on telling the “ordinary people” what they want.

The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

But the politicians are wealthy. This whole ballad of the impoverished is really falling apart on him.

So what we get in this democracy of ours

It’s a republic.

 are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest,

The wealthy, who still pay a higher effective income tax rate than anyone else.

while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them.

Has this guy even looked at the debt clock?

One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills.

With the exc eption of Texas, pretty much all of them have been Democrat-controlled for years. Illinois. California. New York. New Jersey.  

Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands.

In his last column, Herbert made the same asinine point last column. The public sector has shed a total of 2.05% of its jobs. For the most bloated bureaucracy on the planet, this is unacceptably low.

 Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force.

Without knowing the internal machinations of Camden, NJ, why should the same ineffectual police apparatus be kept in place when it is so clearly a failure?

Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

That’s because it’s obscenely expensive, and people should be able to provide their own healthcare.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from.

We have more avenues today to hear from the poor than ever before. Twitter. Facebook. Massively powerful political organizations like ACORN assert that they speak for the poor.

And here’s the important repudiation of Herbert’s central thesis that American “democracy” is somehow slipping away: they vote.

In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist.

You could say the same thing about Joe Biden.

The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.

Is Bob Herbert just now finding out that Democrats are the party of the rich? Check out the list of Obama’s top donors in 2008:

University of California                 $1,591,395

Goldman Sachs                               $994,795

Harvard University                         $854,747

Microsoft Corp                                $833,617

Google Inc                                        $803,436

Citigroup Inc                                    $701,290

JPMorgan Chase & Co                   $695,132

Time Warner                                    $590,084

Sidley Austin LLP                            $588,598

Stanford University                        $586,557

National Amusements Inc            $551,683

UBS AG                                              $543,219

Wilmerhale Llp                                $542,618

Skadden, Arps et al                        $530,839

IBM Corp                                          $528,822

Columbia University                      $528,302

Morgan Stanley                              $514,881

General Electric                               $499,130

US Government                              $494,820

Latham & Watkins                         $493,835

All the banks on this list from JP Morgan to Citi benefitted from Obama’s reckless devaluation of the dollar. Meanwhile, General Electric’s ex-CEO is now in the White House. The reasonable conclusion is that we need to take power and money away from the whims of indebted politicians. This is what the Tea Party is all about.

In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people

Oh, we’re back to Egypt again. I was wondering if the whole Egypt thing was even relevant.

 “have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities.”

First, John Kerry has no clue what he’s talking about. This thing in Egypt is more likely to turn out an Islamist coup than it is to turn out a genuine democracy movement.

Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale,

I don’t think he realizes it, but this is precisely why the United States is a republic instead of a democracy: to impede the tyranny of the majority. What was privatized never should have been nationalized in the first place.

and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.

I think there’s a clear moral to this story: get rich.

The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions

And Barack Obama.

 and high-priced lobbyists

And Barack Obama.

 and think tanks

And Barack Obama.

 and media buys

And Barack Obama.

and anything else they could think of.

Barack Obama.

They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.

Truly, I don’t disagree. This is why the government should have less power.

As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, “Winner-Take-All Politics”: “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many.”

At least someone on the left knows what a thesis statement is. It’s a little light on support, though. I’ll blame that on Bob Herbert’s inability to adequately select quotations.

As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision,

That damn Constitution! It’s always getting in the way of a democracy with its insistence on a republic.

which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics.

I can’t help but think this is just sour grapes because the left got smoked in ’10.

Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power,

Twitter. Facebook. Phone calls. Marches. Rallies. Petitions. Running for political office. Voting. Raising money—all points of access to the corridors of power.

 but you can bet your last Lotto ticket

Seriously? Has the Lotto ticket become the totem of the impoverished? If so, then it must be representative of poor financial decisions, because a lotto ticket holds an expected return somewhere around -70%. By the transitive property of electoral math, does this also mean that Democrats—who overwhelmingly represent the poor—make poor financial decisions?

 that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.

This also speaks to a good argument for term limits.

When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash,

Sitting on “mountains of cash” is extremely bad for a business. It means that investors are dissatisfied because a)that money being held by the company isn’t earning any significant rate of return and b) that money has not been distributed to them through dividends. I hate having to explain this to  Bob Herbert. It’s like he doesn’t even read my helpful comments!

the stock markets are up

Again, markets are up only compared to colossal losses. If you bought the S&P index and held from January 1, 2008 until now, you would be down a truly abysmal 8.2%.

 and all is well among the plutocrats.

Well, except the Tea Party has significantly undermined the traditional vehicles for power in the Republican Party. For all Bob Herbert rails against the extablishment, he really missed the boat on the anti-establishment Tea Party.

The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion.

Boy, that sounds like the sort of thing we should be celebrating. How many people do they employ?

 Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.

Answer:  ~80,000.

As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.”

This is a fairly bland overview of the libertarian position. This belief structure holds vastly more support than progressivism. Bob Herbert is really bad at picking quotes. It’s like he didn’t even read this article.

(A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)

I can guarantee that Bob Herbert didn’t take a good hard look at anything. He’s not that diligent.

It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little.

What? Is the argument here that we need to regulate society to equally distribute an unquantifiable intangible commodity? That’s not democratic. It’s totalitarian.

What the Kochs want is coming to pass.

Freedom?

Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?

Scaled-back regulations on existing industry, eliminated regulations on new business and business expansion, a financial climate that favors stability, a monetary policy that doesn’t debase the currency, and a tax code that doesn’t require millions of dollars spend on compliance.

The Egyptians

Jesus, back to the Egyptians? Haven’t you realized that they’re irrelevant to this article yet?

 want to establish a viable democracy,

There is a dearth of evidence that the Egyptians want a democracy.

and that’s a long, hard road.

 Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

After an entire article of self-congratulation defending the poor, there is absolutely no evidence of this.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn

What’s the opposite of name-dropping?

just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S.

Of course he was. He was a socialist/anarchist. Those are the type of people that that should be chagrined.

but not at all daunted.

There’s only one thing more deplorable than an old man who clings to a demonstrably failed ideology: an old man who actively recruits the ignorant to his own failed ideology.

“If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”

I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.