Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Phyllis Schlafly: Texas Kicks Out Liberal Bias From Textbooks
Jonah Goldberg: Our Political Leaders Believe in Two Different Americas
Andrew Cohen: The Revival of the Extreme Anti-Government Right
Nicholas D. Kristof: Health Care Opponents are on the Wrong Side of History
Michael B. Oren: For Israel and America, a Disagreement, Not a Crisis
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Kevin Kosar: Susan Jacoby Bungles Education Reform
Source: Kevin R. Kosar at his website (3-19-10)
On March 14, 2010, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Susan Jacoby on education and federalism. Jacoby has written widely and smartly on many subjects, but why the Times felt she should handle this subject is a mystery to me. Plenty of other thinkers could have done a bang-up job, like Patrick McGuinn, Paul Manna, Rick Hess, or…
But, the editors chose to go with Jacoby, and to disastrous effect. Her op-ed is a classic example of someone clever writing about a topic that they know little about and utterly bollixing it up. That the Times should run it is lamentable, and it is one more piece of evidence of the long slide of the editorial page. (Don’t even get me started on Judith Warner and her mischief-making.)
In “One School from Sea to Shining Sea,” Jacoby accurately observes that federalism is partially to blame for the mediocrity of U.S. public schools. This is indisputable, and certainly not news. If 50 different states and thousands of sub-state governments all create their own schools, well, not surprisingly some are going to be good and many are going to be bad. Different locales, different tax bases, different human capital, etc. It also follows that this fragmentation makes it hard for the federal government to do much to improve the schools. (The same, of course, can be said for other state and local services, like policing.)...
Friday, March 19, 2010
Phyllis Schlafly: Texas Kicks Out Liberal Bias From Textbooks
Source: Eagle Forum (3-19-10)
[Ms. Schlafy is a noted conservative activist.]
"Don't Mess with Texas" is a popular slogan in our most prosperous state. By a 10-to-5 margin, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) just told liberals to stop "messing" with social studies textbooks.
For years, liberals have imposed their revisionist history on our nation's public school students, expunging important facts and historic figures while loading the textbooks with liberal propaganda, distortions and cliches. It's easy to get a quick lesson in the virulent leftwing bias by checking the index and noting how textbooks treat President Ronald Reagan and Senator Joseph McCarthy....
In most states, the liberal education establishment enjoys total control over the state's board of education, department of education, and curriculum committees. Texas is different; the Texas State Board of Education is elected, and the people (even including parents!) have a voice....
The review of social studies curriculum (covering U.S. Government, American History, World History and Economics) comes up every ten years, and 2010 is one of those years. The unelected education "experts" proposed their history revisions such as eliminating Independence Day, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone and Neil Armstrong, and replacing Christmas with Diwali....
Liberals don't like the concept of American Exceptionalism. The liberals want to teach what's wrong with America (masquerading under the code word "social justice") instead of what's right and successful. The SBOE voted to include describing how American Exceptionalism is based on values that are unique and different from those of other nations....
History textbooks that deal with Joseph McCarthy will now be required to explain "how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of Communist infiltration in U.S. government." The Venona papers are authentic transcripts of some 3,000 messages between the Soviet Union and its secret agents in the United States.
Discussions of economics will not be limited to the theories of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Adam Smith. Textbooks must also include Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market theory....
It's no secret that the people who control public schools are at war with our nation's history, culture and achievements. Since taxpayers foot the bill, it is long overdue for a state board of education to correct many textbooks myths and lies about our magnificent national heritage and achievements....
Susan Jacoby: One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea
Source: NYT (3-18-10)
[Susan Jacoby is the author of “The Age of American Unreason.”]
AMERICAN public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation’s schools.
Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas City, Mo., officials voted to close nearly half the public schools there to save money. And the Texas Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum playing down the separation of church and state and even eliminating Thomas Jefferson — the author of that malignant phrase, “wall of separation” — from a list of revolutionary writers.
Each of these seemingly unrelated developments is part of a crazy quilt created by one of America’s most cherished and unexamined traditions: local and state control of public education. Schooling had been naturally decentralized in the Colonial era — with Puritan New England having a huge head start on the other colonies by the late 1600s — and, in deference to the de facto system of community control already in place, the Constitution made no mention of education. No one in either party today has the courage to say it, but what made sense for a sparsely settled continent at the dawn of the Republic is ill suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy....
Our lack of a national curriculum, national teacher training standards and federal financial support to attract smart young people to the teaching profession all contribute mightily to the mediocre-to-poor performance of American students, year in and year out, on international education assessments....
...[T]he Texas board’s social studies revision forms a blueprint for bad educational decision-making. Chosen in partisan elections, the board members — most lacking any expertise in the academic subjects upon which they are passing judgment — had already watered down the teaching of evolution in science classes when they turned their attention to American and world history. Thus was Jefferson cut from a list of those whose writings inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions, and replaced by Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. This is certainly the first time I’ve ever heard the “Summa Theologica” described as a spur to any revolution....
That is exactly why local control of schools is often an enemy of high-quality public education. The real question is whether anything, in the current polarized political climate, can be done about educational disparities that are inseparable from our fragmented system of public schooling....
Daniel Webster, eulogizing Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both died on July 4, 1826, spoke of “an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry ... and a diffusion of knowledge throughout the community” as two of the fundamental requirements of American democracy. He predicted, “If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have upholden them.” These great principles cannot be upheld if the quality of our public schooling continues to depend more on where a student lives than on a national commitment to excellence.
Jonah Goldberg: Our Political Leaders Believe in Two Different Americas
Source: National Review Online (3-19-10)
[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.]
John Edwards, when he wasn’t fixing his hair or cheating on his wife, liked to talk about “two Americas.” In one America, things were pretty bad, somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath and Thunderdome. In the other America, where Edwards himself lived in a McMansion, things were going swimmingly.
Edwards was hardly the only one to use this two-Americas formulation. It’s been a popular talking point for years. Socialist intellectual Michael Harrington helped to inspire the Great Society with his book The Other America....
The notion that health care is a right is an old one with deep roots in socialist and progressive thought. It achieved its highest expression in FDR’s 1944 address to Congress. The president insisted that the old Bill of Rights had run its course and the new industrial age required new rights. These rights included a guaranteed good job, a good home, and, naturally, good medical care....
Roosevelt said that opposition to this sweeping transformation of America made you a fascist. If “history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”...
What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and that it is the government’s job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, and homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to “punish” the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed — “fascism!”...
he other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn’t have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit....
But the leaders of one America don’t see it that way, and probably never will. Which is why, whatever happens in Congress in the coming days and weeks, it will be “two Americas” for a very long time.
Conrad Black: Don’t Give Up on Europe
Source: National Review Online (3-19-10)
[Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.]
As with so many other foreign-policy matters, there is room and reason for the United States to reassess its policy toward Europe. That policy was stable throughout the Cold War: support of anything that assisted the Western Europeans in being better Cold Warriors. The destruction of World War II and related conflicts such as the Spanish, Yugoslav, and Greek civil wars left all Europe from Castile to Leningrad and Stalingrad — except for Switzerland, parts of France, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and pockets around Prague and Vienna — largely smashed to rubble and depopulated of young men. Tens of millions of people had been displaced. In such desolation and chaos, the advance of Western Europe’s Communist parties was a real danger. So was the proximity of Stalin’s mighty Red Army, only 100 miles from the Rhine, after he had violated every clause of the Yalta agreement, especially the guarantees of democracy and autonomy in Poland and “Liberated Europe.”...
For 40 years, the United States was engaged in trying to impart courage to the Europeans. There were constant temptations to and from the leftist parties throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, France, and Italy (in the last two, the local Communist parties routinely polled over 20 percent of the vote, and waffly socialists another 10 or 15 percent, until the Eighties). These could always be easily distracted by Soviet pitches for “neutrality.” The Americans carried most of the defense commitment and steadily complained of uneven “burden-sharing.” The European reply was a specious improvisation that because Western Europe was closer to the Soviet bloc, it was at greater risk, so the Americans should compensate by providing most of the manpower and hardware. American strength, which much of Europe resented, enabled Europe to be weak and yet to remain free....
Only periodic bursts of exceptional European leadership and great dexterity in Washington kept the alliance functioning. In the 1948 Italian elections, Pope Pius XII’s announcement of the automatic excommunication of any Communist voter, coupled to President Truman’s statement that a Communist victory would cause the immediate end of all Marshall Plan assistance, probably saved the pro-Western De Gasperi government. In 1951 and 1952, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer may have scored the greatest feat of statesmanship of the entire Cold War when he declined Stalin’s offer of German reunification in exchange for Cold War neutrality, and carried German public opinion with him. The same gambit from the Kremlin 20 years later would probably have succeeded. And in the 1980s, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher uniquely supported the American retaliatory air attack on Libya, and led the deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles in Western Europe. When the Left clamored for a nuclear-free Europe, she expressed her preference for a “war-free Europe.”...
Max Boot: Obama's Actions No Way to Treat Israel
Source: LA Times (3-19-10)
[Max Boot is a contributing editor to Opinion, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today."]
It is nice to see a real display of emotion from the normally dispassionate Obama administration. Unfortunately, if predictably, its ire is directed not against America's enemies but against one of our closest friends.
Vice President Joe Biden, in Israel on March 9, publicly "condemned" the announcement by the Israeli government that another 1,600 homes would be built in East Jerusalem. He claimed the decision undermined "the trust that we need right now in order to . . . have profitable negotiations." Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton piled on, phoning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to personally chew him out about this "deeply negative signal." Even the White House politico, David Axelrod, joined in, calling what happened "an affront" and "an insult."...
Why is the administration so hard on Israel -- the most liberal and pro-American country in the region -- when it's so soft on its despotic neighbors?...
Two press leaks may illuminate administration thinking. First, in July 2009, President Obama reportedly told Jewish leaders at the White House that it was important to put some "space" between the U.S. and Israel to "change the way the Arabs see us." Then an Israeli newspaper claimed that in a private meeting, Biden told Netanyahu that Israeli settlements were "dangerous for us": "What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace."...
Suicide bombers are not going to be converted into McDonald's franchisees by an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Even if a deal were reached with the Palestinian Authority, it would be denounced as illegitimate by radical Muslims. They can only be defeated by changing the poisonous dynamic of the societies that breed them. That is what President Bush began to do, however clumsily, in Afghanistan and Iraq. If Obama is serious about reducing the threat against the U.S., he should do more to support peaceful opposition groups in Syria and Iran -- states that actually help to kill American troops. Instead, he's picking on the only state in the region that's consistently on our side.
David Brooks: Our Broken Society Needs to Be Transformed
Source: NYT (3-18-10)
[David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.]
The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.
...[T]here is [a] way to respond to these problems that is... communitarian... This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond....
Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.
Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered....
In a much-discussed essay in Prospect magazine in February 2009, Blond wrote, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” In a separate essay, he added, “The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.”
The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”...
Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations. His ideas have made a big splash in Britain over the past year. His think tank, ResPublica, is influential with the Conservative Party. His book, “Red Tory,” is coming out soon. He’s on a small U.S. speaking tour, appearing at Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum Friday and at Villanova on Monday.
Britain is always going to be more hospitable to communitarian politics than the more libertarian U.S. But people are social creatures here, too. American society has been atomized by the twin revolutions here, too. This country, too, needs a fresh political wind. America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority. The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.
Christine M. Flowers: A Textbook Case of Hysteria
Source: Philadelphia Daily News (3-19-10)
[Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer. Listen to her Thursdays on WPHT/1210 AM, 10-midnight.]
FOR YEARS, liberal activists and historians have engaged in an all-out effort to redefine our country's narrative by attacking the so-called "white and patriarchal" interpretation of history found in most pre-1960s textbooks....
Nothing wrong with that, in theory. The more information a student is exposed to, the better.
Assuming, that is, that there's balance in the mix. Unfortunately, for decades, there's been a concerted move to replace the original three "R's" of much of the traditional curriculum - "readin', 'ritin' and 'rithmatic" - with something more along the lines of "racism, reproductive rights and revolution."...
It's not that I have a problem with classes like "Cross-Cultural Narratives of Desire," "Witchcraft in Colonial America," "Mythology and Community in Twentieth Century Queer Literature," "Spike Lee" and "New York Mambo: Microcosm of Black Creativity." If Yale University thinks these are valuable topics, far be it for me to question the Ivies....
But I do question the wisdom of adopting that "anything goes" philosophy for elementary- and secondary-school curriculums.
Trying to convince teens and tweens that the magnificent Constitution crafted by our Founding Fathers is simply a footnote to the greater fact that they were slaveholders might make us feel all righteous. But it's counterproductive....
Liberals are up in arms about what they perceive to be the hijacking of American education. As Mavis Knight, a Democratic member of the school board, noted when her proposal emphasizing the absolute separation of church and state was defeated, "the social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda."
That's a nice rhetorical flourish, even though "accurate" is often in the eye of the specific academic. As noted by Jon Meacham in "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation," while the Founders didn't intend for us to be a strictly Christian nation, they clearly didn't envision the Secular Nirvana pushed on us by those who think the "wall" between church and state is as long and steep as the one in China....
For example, it's OK to have Black History Month and inform school kids that it encompasses a lot more than Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King Jr....
But if you advance an agenda that tears down conservative values in order to empower the traditionally ignored, you get what happened in Texas: special-interest education.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Thomas Frank: Don't Mess With the Texas Board of Ed
Source: WSJ (3-17-10)
[Thomas Frank is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.]
At some point during the deliberations of the Texas State Board of Education last week, that august body decided that when public school students came to study the era of the Great Society and affirmative action they should henceforth be required to "analyze any unintended consequences" of those 1960s reforms.
I do not know what "consequences" board members had in mind when they approved that measure. Texas's social studies guidelines are immensely influential with the publishers of the nation's textbooks, and for the past few months the liberal world has watched in horror as the board's dominant conservative faction has edited its guidelines to better reflect its views of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and just about everything else. Still, the "unintended consequences" change was voted in without further discussion or explanation....
I have no desire to excuse academia's failings. Its peer-review system sometimes encourages fads and self-reinforcing groupthink. But at least it demands fairness and careful research.
The state's board of education, by contrast, feels entitled to enforce its homemade party line with a rigidity that no comp-lit pinko would dare to dream of. Back in January, for instance, it struck the author of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" from a list of people for third-graders to study because it got him confused with the similarly named author of "Ethical Marxism," a book that, according to board member Pat Hardy, makes "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system." And, as we all know, those who criticize capitalism deserve to have no place in public life, especially in this age of affluence and financial probity. (The board later discovered its error and reinstated the "Brown Bear" author.)...
Joe Conason: Right Wing Gone Wild, Just Like the 1950s
Source: Truthdig (3-17-10)
[Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.]
Demagogues often prosper under the rules of democracy, intimidating the moderate and preying on the weak-minded. But in a healthy society, such figures cannot cross a final threshold of decency without jeopardizing their own status—and today’s right-wing nihilists seem to be on the verge of doing just that.
When Elizabeth Cheney, a daughter of the former vice president, questions the loyalty of anyone who stands up for the human rights of prisoners in the “war on terror,” she is treading very close to that line....
When Glenn Beck vilifies “social justice” as a “perversion of the Gospel” and slanders churches and pastors as “Nazis” for pursuing it, he too is trespassing a bright line. The Fox News personality—who rants and weeps like the late Joseph McCarthy, a fellow alcoholic—urges his listeners to run away from any congregation where social justice is preached. He instructs them to denounce any pastor who even mentions the term. He even held up pictures of a swastika and a hammer and sickle to somehow demonstrate that “social justice” is a code phrase whose hidden meaning is identical to Nazism and communism....
The best historical parallel to these extremist trespasses can be found back in the 1950s, when McCarthy, the John Birch Society and other elements of the far right were riding high. What brought them down were their excesses: in McCarthy’s case, when he and his staff sought to implicate the United States Army in the communist conspiracy; and in the case of the Birchers, when they proclaimed that President Dwight Eisenhower and the Supreme Court, among other august persons and institutions, were wittingly aiding the communists.
Our current crop of crazies is approaching that point of no return—and if we are fortunate, they will keep going.
Ray McGovern: Yoo Besmirches Legacy of Jefferson
Source: Truthout (3-16-10)
[Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of VIPS.]
Initially I was shocked at the thought of the University of Virginia (UVA) welcoming former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo to the "Academical Village" founded by Thomas Jefferson.
There was something very wrong about that picture. Was it not Jefferson who condemned tyrannical acts - including ones that fell far short of waterboarding-in the Declaration of Independence?
But I have come around to the view that Yoo's visit on Friday could present a rich teaching moment for those of us Virginians who believe passionately in the highest ideals that Jefferson articulated so eloquently.
Yoo's visit presents a unique opportunity for my own children - four of them UVA alumni - to convey the essence of the university to those of our eight grandchildren who already aspire to study there.
A teaching moment like this does require us to look through the eyes and the spectacles of Jefferson and our country's other gutsy founders who pledged to each other "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor" to rid tyranny from America's shores. We tend to forget that the outcome of that brazen battle for liberty was far from assured when that vow was attached as the closing line of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776.
To King George III, the words and deeds of the founders spelled treason, and it was altogether predictable that he would order his formidable Army to pursue and hang those upstart insurgents if his troops could get hold of them.
I will admit that I still get goose bumps reflecting on their commitment, their courage and the responsibility we share as their successors.
After eight long years of war, the insurgents led by George Washington finally defeated the Army of the English king and secured independence for the 13 colonies. Then, other Virginians, together with statesmen from sister colonies, succeeded in replacing one man's dictates with a Constitution that divided power among three co-equal branches of government and made the rule of law supreme.
That is the historical background against which, 225 years later, John Yoo and other government lawyers of easy conscience decided they would "opinion away" the checks and balances etched into the Constitution by the blood of early patriots.
Virginia Roots
We Virginians take understandable pride in Jefferson and the university in Charlottesville that he considered his single achievement. Equally deserving of praise, though, are two other Virginia patriots hailing from nearer to where I live - George Mason of Fairfax and Patrick Henry of Hanover County.
"Of the first order of greatness," that's the way Jefferson described Mason. And small wonder. For it is largely thanks to him that all - including Yoo, you and me - enjoy a constitutional right to "freedom of speech."
Together with fellow Virginian James Madison, Mason had drafted the Constitution, which defined the relationships among the three branches of government. But Mason then shocked Madison and shattered their friendship, when Mason announced in 1787 that he would not support ratification as the document stood.
Mason, one of the most self-effacing persons ever to serve the American people, put his reasoning succinctly: "There is no Declaration of Rights."
That being the case, it was not an option to give up. Together with Henry, Mason launched a relentless political campaign, and in 1791 won approval of a Bill of Rights - the first ten amendments to the Constitution - which immediately became a model for other countries concerned with protecting individual freedoms.
Hence, Yoo's First Amendment right to speak and be heard is beyond dispute. At the same time, I believe we would betray the founders were we to leave him unchallenged by glossing over his gymnastic twisting of logic and law - not only in places like Iraq and Guantanamo, but closer to home as well.
Sadly, the guarantees embodied in five of those first ten amendments - and in the Constitution itself - have been eroded by dubious theories promoted by Yoo, like his concept of an all-powerful "unitary executive," who can do whatever he wants to anyone unlucky enough to be judged an "enemy" by the leader during "wartime," even an open-ended, ill-defined conflict like the "war on terror."
Not even the Great Writ of habeas corpus escaped Yoo's sophistry - the fundamental right, wrested from King John of England in 1215, to seek judicial relief from unlawful detention. Even King George III was constrained by habeas corpus, and Madison and Mason were careful to include that basic guarantee in the Constitution itself (Article One, Section 9).
But Yoo and some fellow lawyers saw the ancient legal right as impinging on President George W. Bush's unlimited powers.
Fred Barnes: The Health-Care Wars Are Only Beginning
Source: WSJ (3-18-10)
[Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel.]
On Dec. 7, 1941, an announcement was made during the football game between the hometown Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles. All the generals and admirals at Griffith Stadium were instructed to report to their duty stations. Little did they know their lives would be changed forever and America would be at war, or on war footing, for the next half-century. Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
America will be in a constant health-care war if ObamaCare is enacted. Passage wouldn't end the health-care debate. Rather, it would perpetuate ObamaCare as the dominant issue for decades to come, reshape politics, create an annual funding crisis in Congress, and generate a spate of angry lawsuits. Yet few in Washington seem aware of what lies ahead.
We only have to look at Great Britain to get a glimpse of the future. The National Health Service—socialized medicine—was created in 1946 and touted as the envy of the world. It's been a contentious issue ever since. Its cost and coverage are perennial subjects of debate. The press, especially England's most popular newspaper, The Daily Mail, feasts on reports of long waiting periods, dirty hospitals, botched care and denied access to treatments.
A Conservative member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, last year in an interview on Fox News denounced the NHS as a "60-year mistake," declaring he "wouldn't wish it on anybody." As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher bravely cut NHS spending in the 1980s, but current Tory leaders regard criticism of the NHS as too risky. "The Conservative Party stands four square behind the NHS," its leader, David Cameron, said in response to Mr. Hannan....
Enacting ObamaCare would be only the beginning. The controversy surrounding its passage and how it might work would preoccupy the president, Congress and millions of average Americans for the foreseeable future—and then some.
Andrew Cohen: The Revival of the Extreme Anti-Government Right
Source: The Atlantic (3-18-10)
[Andrew Cohen - Andrew Cohen has served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.]
Among other items of evidence seized from Timothy McVeigh's car when he was arrested 15 years ago next month outside of Oklahoma City was a papered quote from Samuel Adams. "When the government fears the people, there is liberty," the quote read. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Lest anyone remain unsure about McVeigh's motivations for the cold-blooded murder of 168 innocents at the Alfred P. Murrah federal building on April 19, 1995, the self-styled "patriot" wore to the attack a t-shirt with the Latin inscription: "Sic Semper Tyrannis" and the Thomas Jefferson line: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."...
That was then. This is now. Today, loose, dangerous talk about "government tyranny" is back in vogue (evidently its sinister design appears regularly during middling Democrat administrations but never during power-grabbing Republican ones) and on a political amptitude far beyond where it was during the Age of McVeigh a generation ago. Twenty-first century tyrants abound in the hearts of little old ladies at tea parties, in the minds of erstwhile government officials (who evidently aren't tyrants themselves) and on the lips of at least one outspoken spouse of at least one underspoken justice of the United States Supreme Court.
In other words, what the nation rejected as superheated lunacy and dangerous incitement out of McVeigh's mouth in 1995, tens of millions of Americans now praise as patriotism from popular figures. What the militia movement lost in support following McVeigh's attack it has gained a thousand times over by the current devolution in the language of dissent. Now, the nation's mainstream conservative forces routinely employ the overcharged language of "tyranny" and "tyrants," mongered as righteous fear and loathing by mainstream media outlets, in a way unthinkable back in the McVeigh's day....
Fifteen years ago, the face of that frustration was McVeigh. Today, the face looks very much different indeed, don't you think?
Nicholas D. Kristof: Health Care Opponents are on the Wrong Side of History
Source: NYT (3-17-10)
[Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for the New York Times.]
First, a question: When in American history did life expectancy improve the most?
Was it the late 1800s, when anesthesia made surgery easier and far more common? Was it the 1930s, when antibacterial medicines became available? Or recent decades, when CAT scans and heart bypasses proliferated?
The correct answer is: none of the above. While data differ and the statistics aren’t fully reliable, a good bet is that the best answer is the 1940s. In that period, life expectancy increased about seven years.
Indeed, American life expectancy appears to have been longer in 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945 — even as hundreds of thousands of young Americans were being killed in World War II — than it had been when America was at peace in 1940.
A prime reason is that with the war mobilization, Americans got much better access to medical care. Farmers and workers who had rarely seen doctors now found themselves with medical coverage through the military, jobs in industry or New Deal programs.
In short, great health care is often less about breakthrough technologies than it is about access. And for all the disagreements about President Obama’s health care proposal, let’s focus on this: it unquestionably would increase access, while its defeat would diminish access....
The tide of history has taken us and other Western countries toward steadily greater access to medical coverage — until recent reversals in the United States. Put aside quarrels over the mechanisms used to pass the bill, and focus on the central question of Americans’ access to decent medical care. On that issue, those trying to kill this health care reform proposal are simply on the wrong side of history.
Michael B. Oren: For Israel and America, a Disagreement, Not a Crisis
Source: NYT (3-17-10)
[Michael B. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.]
Israel and America enjoy a deep and multi-layered friendship, but even the closest allies can sometimes disagree. Such a disagreement began last week during Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit to Israel, when a mid-level official in the Interior Ministry announced an interim planning phase in the expansion of Ramat Shlomo, a northern Jerusalem neighborhood. While this discord was unfortunate, it was not a historic low point in United States-Israel relations; nor did I ever say that it was, contrary to some reports.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no desire during a vice presidential visit to highlight longstanding differences between the United States and Israel on building on the other side of the 1949 armistice line that once divided Jerusalem. The prime minister repeatedly apologized for the timing of the announcement and pledged to prevent such embarrassing incidents from recurring. In reply, the Obama administration asked Israel to reaffirm its commitment to the peace process and to its bilateral relations with the United States. Israel is dedicated to both.
We should not, however, allow peace efforts, or the America-Israel alliance, to be compromised by Israel’s policy on Jerusalem. That policy is not Mr. Netanyahu’s alone but was also that of former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Golda Meir — in fact of every Israeli government going back to the city’s reunification in 1967. Consistently, Israel has held that Jerusalem should remain its undivided capital and that both Jews and Arabs have the right to build anywhere in the city.
This policy certainly applies to neighborhoods like Ramat Shlomo, which, though on land incorporated into Israel in 1967, are home to nearly half of the city’s Jewish population. Isolated from Arab neighborhoods and within a couple of miles of downtown Jerusalem, these Jewish neighborhoods will surely remain a part of Israel after any peace agreement with the Palestinians. Israelis across the political spectrum are opposed to restrictions on building in these neighborhoods, and even more opposed to the idea of uprooting hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens....
Israel appreciates President Obama’s commitment to a comprehensive peace that guarantees Israel’s security and Jewish identity, and provides for a Palestinian state. To ensure that such a state is peaceful, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that it must be demilitarized and that Palestinians must recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, just as Israel is asked to recognize a future Palestinian state as the nation-state of the Palestinians.
Though we may disagree with the White House at certain stages of the peace process, we must never allow such differences to obscure the purpose we share or to raise doubts about the unbreakable bonds between us.
During his visit, Vice President Biden declared that support for Israel is “a fundamental national self-interest on the part of the United States” and that America “has no better friend in the community of nations than Israel.” The people of Israel, in turn, view the strengthening of their relations with the United States as a paramount national objective. Because we share fundamental values — democracy, respect for individual rights and the rule of law — our friendship can sustain occasional disagreements, and remain unassailably solid.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Gregory Rodriguez: The White Anxiety Crisis
Source: Time.com (3-11-10)
[Gregory Rodriguez is the author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America/]
Two competing narratives dominate our debate about the ongoing ethnic and demographic transformation of America. The first holds that non-European immigrants — O.K., let's be honest, Mexicans — will rip apart the nation's social fabric. The second has it that the diversity of younger generations of Americans will inevitably lead to a more integrated, postracial era.
But both of these narratives are off the mark. With some minor differences, today's immigrants are assimilating into U.S. society in ways not terribly unlike those of millions before them. At the same time, it's likely that decades from now, Americans will still invest a lot of meaning in group distinctions.
The most profound changes in American race relations, however, will revolve around the other side of the equation: native-born white Americans. As much as Americans pride themselves on the notion that their national identity is premised on a set of ideals rather than a single race, ethnicity or religion, we all know that for most of our history, white supremacy was the law of the land. In every naturalization act from 1790 to 1952, Congress included language stating that the aspiring citizen should be a "white person."....
Way back in 1991, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote the best-selling book The Disuniting of America, in which he argued that identity-based multiculturalism threatened the integrity of the nation. "The cult of ethnicity," he wrote, culminated in an "attack" on a shared American identity. He decried the "separatist impulses" of nonwhites, "or at least their self-appointed spokesmen." Nearly two decades later, one can hear evidence of white grievance in many corners of the country. And it's not coming just from fringe bloggers. In the spring of 2008, candidate Hillary Clinton appealed to "hardworking white Americans" to help her campaign against an ascendant Barack Obama. Last March, conservative commentator Glenn Beck suggested that the white man responsible for the worst workplace massacre in Alabama history was "pushed to the wall" because he felt "silenced" and "disenfranchised" by "political correctness."...
This means race will continue to be a defining feature of our politics, but the dynamic will be the precise opposite of what it was a generation ago, when angry nonwhite activists were a centrifugal force in America. Instead, with the election of Obama, blacks are polling as more optimistic than they were before. Having pretty much abandoned their counter-cultural stance, Latino activists are not fighting against U.S. power but are instead demanding that immigrants be allowed to become part of it. Meanwhile, even though they are still the majority and collectively maintain more access to wealth and political influence than other groups, whites are acting more and more like an aggrieved minority. Schlesinger would be turning in his grave.
Andres Martinez: The Next American Century
Source: Time.com (3-17-10)
[Andres Martinez is the director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.]
In 1941, prior to the U.S.'s entry into World War II, the co-founder of this magazine, Henry Luce, penned an essay in LIFE that exhorted "unhappy" Americans, "[distracted] with lifeless arguments about isolationism," to "create the first great American century" — the first, mind you, not the last. We are now entering the second decade of what will be an even more markedly American century; in fact, the Americanization of the world will characterize the foreseeable future far more than the past.
It's true that Brand America took a hit this decade. The global superpower botched an election at home and an occupation overseas. Its vaunted financial markets were roiled by sketchy accounting early in the decade, then triggered a global economic crisis later on, thanks to Wall Street's leveraged gamble that it had conquered risk once and for all. All these missteps dented the U.S.'s credibility but were also a reminder that, fairly or not, the U.S. retains an enviably large margin of error. And times of economic dislocation only accentuate America's competitive advantage — its nimbleness and adaptability....
And yet doomsayers continue to decry America's decline. This isn't new. As far back as 1988, when Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was a best seller, the commentariat latched onto his (more hedged than remembered) warning that America ran the risk of "imperial overstretch" — "the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend all simultaneously."
So, what happened next? Well, the Berlin Wall collapsed, much of the world embraced market capitalism, and the U.S. shrank the globe and took it online with a revolutionary new technology that strengthens its cultural dominance. Meanwhile, the cost of keeping the Pax Americana has become far lighter. Despite the nation's two long-running commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 288,000 American service members posted or deployed overseas and a defense budget of 4.6% of GDP are near post–World War II lows (in 1987 the corresponding figures were 524,000 service members overseas and a defense budget in excess of 6% of GDP). And this historically modest investment dwarfs the military spending of the next nine powers combined....
There are two ways of measuring American power and influence at a given point. If you measure them merely in terms of how much richer the U.S. is than the rest of the world, then 1945, when much of the rest of the world lay in ruins, would definitely be our heyday. At the end of World War II, the U.S. was responsible for a third of the world's manufacturing exports. And under that yardstick, the Marshall Plan, aimed at rehabilitating Europe's lost prowess, would have been a mistake, as it was bound to eat into U.S. global market share.
But a more appropriate measure of American influence and power is the combination of the country's wealth and its sway in the world. Back in 1941, Luce noted that "American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common." He had no idea: at a time when there are as many people studying English in China (or playing basketball, for that matter) as there are people in the U.S., seven of the 10 most watched TV shows around the world are American, Avatar is the top-grossing film of all time in China, and the world is as fixated on U.S. brands as ever, which is why U.S. multinationals from McDonald's to Nike book more than half their revenue overseas. If you bring together teenagers from Nigeria, Sweden, South Korea and Argentina — to pick a random foursome — what binds these kids together in some kind of community is American culture: the music, the Hollywood fare, the electronic games, Google, American consumer brands. The only thing they will likely have in common that doesn't revolve around the U.S. is an interest in soccer. The fact that the rest of the world is becoming more like us — in ways good and bad — underscores the extent to which we are living in an American century, even as it erodes, by definition, the notion of American exceptionalism....
So stay anxious, and alarmed, about the fate of the country. That's the best way to ensure that this century, like its predecessor, will be an American one.
Ellen Ratner: What Would Nixon Do On Health Care?
Source: FOX News (3-17-10)
[Ellen Ratner is Washington bureau chief for Talk Radio News Service and a Fox News contributor.]
No one thought that President Nixon was a liberal in fact I spent much of my youthful years demonizing him and remember exactly where I was the day he resigned. I was cheering.
However, like most of us humans, Nixon was a mixed bag. A crook perhaps but a brilliant one who had some very good legislation and visions for America.
One of these visions was his health care plan and if he were alive today he would be run out of the Republican party for being too liberal. Spoken like a liberal, President Richard Nixon said in February 1974, "Without adequate health care, no one can make full use of his or her talents and opportunities. It is thus just as important that economic, racial and social barriers not stand in the way of good health care as it is to eliminate those barriers to a good education and a good job."...
Given this history of Republicans wanting true reform of health care, this week when the heath care vote comes up in the House, I would recommend that the GOP, the party of NO, take a look at some of their previous Yes men -- Nixon, and even Reagan, and vote YES.
Jonah Goldberg: The Truth About the Tea Party
Source: LA Times (3-16-10)
[Jonah Goldberg writes a column for the LA Times.]
If you read the Op-Ed pages these days, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the GOP and the conservative movement have been taken over by know-nothing mobs, anti-intellectual demagogues and pitchfork-wielding bigots. There's no omnibus label for this argument, but it's a giveaway that a person subscribes to it if he or she describes the "tea party" movement as "tea baggers," an awfully telling bit of condescension from the camp that affects the pose of being more high-minded.
The case against the tea party movement is constantly evolving. Initially, they were written off as "astroturfers," faux populists paid by K Street lobbyists to provide damaging footage for Fox News' Obama coverage. Then, they were deemed racists who couldn't handle having a black president.
But now that the movement or, more broadly, the Obama backlash is so widespread, it's chalked up to populist anti-elitism. New York Times columnist David Brooks and others argue that the tea party movement is kith and kin of the 1960s New Left, because they share a "radically anti-conservative" hatred of "the system" and a desire to start over....
It's all so much nonsense. The Boston Tea Party would make a strange lodestar for an anti-American movement. The tea partyers certainly aren't "dropping out" of the system; if they were, we wouldn't be talking about them. And they aren't reading Marxist tracts in a desire to "tear down the system" either. They're reading Thomas Paine, the founders and Friedrich Hayek in the perhaps naive hope that they'll be able to restore the principles that are supposed to be guiding the system (to the extent they're reading radicals such as Saul Alinsky, it's because they've been told that's the best way to understand his disciple in the White House)....
The "elite" the restorationists dislike is better understood as a "new class" (to borrow a phrase from the late Irving Kristol). The legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted in 1942 that capitalism couldn't survive because capitalist prosperity would feed a new intellectual caste that would declare war on the bourgeois values and institutions that generate prosperity in the first place. When you hear that conservatives are anti-elitist, you should think they're really anti-new class....
Thomas Cahill: How the Irish Saved Literacy
Source: NYT (3-16-10)
Why should we celebrate the Irish?
No doubt, several reasons could be proffered. But for me one answer stands out. Long, long ago the Irish pulled off a remarkable feat: They saved the books of the Western world and left them as gifts for all humanity....
The glories of Christianity — particularly its books — fascinated the Irish. They came to love the Roman alphabet that Patrick and his successors taught them, as well the precious illuminated manuscripts that he presented to them. There was indeed nothing in their intellectual heritage to block their receptivity to the Christian faith.
There was also nothing in their heritage to draw them to master the intricacies of the Greco-Roman tradition. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, for the ancient Irish never embraced classical cynicism or the gloomy Greco-Roman sense of fatedness.
Instead, they remained in many ways remarkably unjaded, full of wonder at the unexpectedness of human life. “Well, the heart’s a wonder,” says Pegeen Mike in John Millington Synge’s comedy “The Playboy of the Western World.” It was a sentiment first articulated by Patrick’s converts, who put down their weapons and took up their pens. They copied out the great Greco-Roman books, many of which they didn’t really understand, thus saving in its purest form most of the classical library.
The Irish fanned out across Europe, salvaging books wherever they could, making copies, reassembling libraries and teaching the newly settled barbarians of the continent to read and write....
But they did more than this: they managed to infuse the emerging medieval world with a playfulness previously unknown. In the margins of the books they copied, the Irish scribes drew little pictures, thickets of plants, flowers, birds and animals. Human faces occasionally peek through the tangle, faces of childlike delight and awe. If you were a scribe copying out some especially ponderous philosophical Greek, the margin in which you could reflect on your own world served as a source of “refreshment, light and peace,” to quote the ancient Latin liturgy. These scribal doodles eventually became elaborate design elements, leading the way to Irish masterpieces like the Book of Kells....
We have many reasons to be grateful to St. Patrick and his fierce and playful Irishmen and Irishwomen. So on this St. Patrick’s Day, remember them as they would wish to be remembered. Read a book....
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