The View From 1776

One of liberal-progressive-socialism’s fundamental tenets was expounded in the mid-18th century by French Revolutionary philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau: people are naturally kind, benevolent, generous, and peaceful when they are not corrupted by a capitalist society that protects the rights of private property.

From this comes Senator Obama’s plan to levy higher taxes on the top earning and most innovative and productive members of society, as well as his eagerness to have tea parties, without preconditions, with the leaders of our foreign enemies.

The naivete of liberal-progressive-socialism has been tested on several occasions since the beginning of the 20th century.  It always has been found wanting.

Despite Senator Obama’s belief that rational discussion will solve every international conflict and Senator Kerry’s desire for sensitive relations with the putative community of nations, foreign policy is not a popularity contest.

For an excellent recap of the changing currents in foreign policy, read Power Play by Robert Kagan.

The nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today’s political realists say economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows otherwise…

The Wall Strteet Journal reports:

When Good Lizards Go Bad: Komodo Dragons Take Violent Turn

Villagers Blame Environmentalists
For Reptiles’ Mood; Ban on Goat Sacrifice
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
August 25, 2008; Page A1

KAMPUNG KOMODO, Indonesia—At least once a week, an unwelcome intruder crawls under a clapboard wall and, forked tongue darting, lumbers its way into Syarif Maulana’s classroom.

The intruder, a Komodo dragon, is the world’s largest lizard, an ancient, fierce carnivore found only on a handful of remote islands in eastern Indonesia. Reaching 10 feet in length, the dragons feed on buffaloes, deer and an occasional human. Just a year ago, a boy about Syarif’s age died in a dragon’s jaws, his bones smashed against rocks to facilitate reptilian digestion.

That killing, and a spate of other close encounters, has fanned a panic in the dragons’ main habitat, the Komodo National Park. Touted by Indonesia as its “Jurassic Park,” this rocky, barren archipelago is home to some 2,500 dragons and nearly 4,000 people, clustered in four fishing villages of wooden stilt houses.

These locals have long viewed the dragons as a reincarnation of fellow kinsfolk, to be treated with reverence. But now, villagers say, the once-friendly dragons have turned into vicious man-eaters. And they blame policies drafted by American-funded environmentalists for this frightening turn of events…

These locals have long viewed the dragons as a reincarnation of fellow kinsfolk, to be treated with reverence. But now, villagers say, the once-friendly dragons have turned into vicious man-eaters. And they blame policies drafted by American-funded environmentalists for this frightening turn of events.

“When I was growing up, I felt the dragons were my family,” says 55-year-old Hajji Faisal. “But today the dragons are angry with us, and see us as enemies.” The reason, he and many other villagers believe, is that environmentalists, in the name of preserving nature, have destroyed Komodo’s age-old symbiosis between dragon and man.

For centuries, local tradition required feeding the dragons—which live more than 50 years, can recognize individual humans and usually stick to fairly small areas. Locals say they always left deer parts for the dragons after a hunt, and often tied goats to a post as sacrifice. Island taboos strictly prohibited hurting the giant reptiles, a possible reason why the dragons have survived in the Komodo area despite becoming extinct everywhere else.

Indonesia invited the Nature Conservancy, a Virginia-based environment protection group, to help manage the park in 1995. An Indonesian subsidiary of the group, called Putri Naga Komodo, gained a tourism concession for the park in 2005 and is investing in the conservation effort some $10 million of its own money and matching financing from international donors.

With this funding and advice, park authorities put an end to villagers’ traditional deer hunting, enforcing a prohibition that had been widely disregarded. They declared canines an alien species, and outlawed the villagers’ dogs, which used to keep dragons away from homes. Park authorities banned the goat sacrifices, previously staged on Komodo for the benefit of picture-snapping tourists.

“We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance,” says Widodo Ramono, policy director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian branch and a former director of the country’s national park service. "We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings." [my emphasis added]

This will sound familiar to American ranchers who have been prohibited from protecting their livestock against the onslaught of gray wolves, or to ordinary citizens who are forbidden entry into our national forest preserves. 

Though of a less virulent nature, it is the same sort of mentality that enabled American liberal-progressives from the 1930s into the 1950s to overlook Stalin’s liquidation of more than 100 million people in the name of the future of humanity.

When it was unpopular, Senator McCain stood up for victory in Iraq and pushed for what later became known as the successful Surge.

Senator Obama, of course, put his finger to the wind and followed public opinion down the path of least resistance.  He famously campaigned on a pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq immediately.  He has since failed to acknowledge the effectiveness of the Surge, a denial that demeans the superior performance and valor of our troops.

He was joined in the demand for immediate withdrawal by defeatist Democrat/Socialists including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Congressman John Murtha, who declared Iraq a quagmire of defeat. 

The consequences of an immediate troop withdrawal would have been loss of credibility for the United States, emboldenment of Al Queda to strike us with terror attacks anywhere in the world, and an Iraq in feeble disarray, giving Iran the opportunity unopposed to move into the vacuum and make Iraq a client state.

With his support of immediate withdrawal of troops proven wrong, and implicitly admitting that he is a foreign policy novice, Senator Obama has endeavored to fill the yawning void by selecting as his running mate Senator Joseph Biden, long a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

What measure of solid foreign policy judgment does Senator Biden bring to the table?  With respect to Iraq and the struggle against Islamic jihad, what was the product of Senator Biden’s putative foreign policy expertise? 

In a May 1, 2006, op-ed article in the New York Times, Senator Biden and his foreign policy advisor Leslie H. Gelb wrote:

“It is increasingly clear that President Bush does not have a strategy for victory in Iraq. Rather, he hopes to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor.

“...The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab — room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests…

“Fourth, the president must direct the military to design a plan for withdrawing and redeploying our troops from Iraq by 2008...”

Bear in mind that the Democrat/Socialists have, since Senator John Kerry’s 2004 campaign for the presidency, advocated a more sensitive foreign policy.  In general they have viewed foreign policy as an international popularity contest, in which the sole objective is to have all nations like us and never to do anything without the permission of the UN, a policy which effectively precludes definitive military action to protect our national interests.

In that vein, Senator Obama campaigned on the promise to meet with any foreign leader, friend or foe, for discussions without preconditions.  Such an essay has only one pillar to lean upon: Senator Obama’s presumed superhuman ability to calm foreign aggression with honeyed words from his lips.

How well then does Senator Biden’s Iraq dismemberment plan measure up?  How effective a foreign policy advisor will he be as Vice President?

VP choice Biden unpopular in Iraq for autonomy plan
Reuters, Sat 23 Aug 2008

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq’s feuding Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.

Across racial and religious boundaries, Iraqi politicians on Saturday bemoaned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama’s choice of running mate, known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.

“This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq,” Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters.

“We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time.”

...[Ezzet al-Shabender, a member of parliament, said,] “Such a person, if he would assume the vice-presidency post, would not serve to improve Iraq-USA relations."

According to the Washington Post, "Biden has made his Iraq [dismemberment] plan the centerpiece of his 2008 candidacy."

The Iraq dismemberment plan is hardly Senator Biden’s only recent blunder, as reported in the New York Times:

Biden Unwraps ’08 Bid With an Oops!
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: February 1, 2007

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — In an era of meticulous political choreography, the staging of the kickoff for this presidential candidacy could hardly have gone worse.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who announced his candidacy on Wednesday with the hope that he could ride his foreign policy expertise into contention for the Democratic nomination, instead spent the day struggling to explain his description of Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for president, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

And, on the website for The Nation America’s oldest, radical left-wing journal:

Biden Blunders, Again
posted by JOHN NICHOLS on 02/02/2007

The remarkable thing about Joe Biden’s botched announcement of his second presidential run is not that he said something outrageously inappropriate and, if we are to assume that Democratic caucus and primary participants retain even minimal standards with regard to the competence of contenders, electorally lethal.

The senator from Delaware has a very long history of lodging metatarsals in his oral orifice. And his reference to a more attractive and articulate senator and presidential contender, Illinoisan Barack Obama, as a “clean” African American was, while spectacular in its senselessness, oddly Bidenesque. This is not to suggest that the senior senator is a racist, nor even that he’s some kind of neatness freak. (Biden says that, by “clean” he meant “fresh,” which seems about right.) Rather, this is to suggest that Joe Biden is still Joe Biden, the linguistically lumbering, intellectually inelegant Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman whose “plan” for solving the Iraq mess is so convoluted that even he has trouble explaining it.

So, no, there was nothing all that astounding about the fact that the politician who got himself kicked out of the 1988 Democratic contest for plagiarism would, with another two decades of practice, come up with an even more sensationally disqualifying gesture this time around.

Never lose sight of the fact that, had we followed the Democrat/Socialist plans for immediate troop withdrawal, Iran would have emerged as the dominant power in the Middle East, pulling all of the region’s oil producing nations - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, and Iraq - into their power bloc.  Iran could then have used threats of curtailing oil deliveries or raising oil prices to intimidate the Western world in order to isolate Israel and to forestall combatting Islamic jihad.

In other words, the Democrat/Socialists are prepared to have the United States suffer any loss in order to pander to ill-informed public opinion, if that is the price for winning an election.

The Democrat/Socialist Party wants you to believe that the already huge, unfunded entitlements under Social Security and MediCare are nothing we need worry about.

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus wrote (Krugman vs. Krugman, November 21, 2007):

In liberal Democratic circles, the debate over Social Security has taken a dangerous “don’t worry, be happy” turn.

The argument has two equally dishonest components. The first is to deny that Social Security faces a daunting financing problem—one that will be much easier to fix (and less onerous for the low-income retirees that the head-in-the-sanders purport to care about) sooner rather than later. The second is to mischaracterize the arguments of those who advocate responsible action, accusing them of hyping the system’s woes.

Senator Obama proposes to raise taxes to deal with Social Security, the smaller problem, but he doesn’t really know whether his proposed tax hikes will do the job. 

Donald L. Luskin wrote (Obama’s Social Security Fine Print):

Mr. Obama angered liberals last year when he admitted that there was a “Social Security crisis.” But at least Mr. Obama’s base should be appeased now that his solution to the “crisis” is to soak the rich. One liberal columnist actually noted with glee the fact that this would take us back to top tax rates not seen since the 1970s.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Obama’s new tax would siphon off 0.4% of gross domestic product annually. Combined with Mr. Obama’s other tax-hike initiatives, “the total tax on labor would be close to 60 percent. In high-tax states like California and New York, the top rate would be even higher.”

Would it help Social Security’s financing problems? Mr. Obama has no idea. One of his senior economic advisers admitted to me that no one on the campaign has run any detailed models or performed any rigorous analysis. When one proposes an enormous tax increase, shouldn’t there at least be a spreadsheet somewhere?

A Wall Street Journal op-ed article notes that Obama’s Tax Plan Is Really a Welfare Plan that adds to the deficit.

Should we be worried?  Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, has no doubt.  The problem of unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare is gigantic, any way you measure it.  Read Storms on the Horizon, his speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club of California on May 28, 2008.

The amount of money the Social Security system would need today to cover all unfunded liabilities from now on—what fiscal economists call the “infinite horizon discounted value” of what has already been promised recipients but has no funding mechanism currently in place—is $13.6 trillion, an amount slightly less than the annual gross domestic product of the United States…

Please sit tight while I walk you through the math of Medicare. As you may know, the program comes in three parts: Medicare Part A, which covers hospital stays; Medicare B, which covers doctor visits; and Medicare D, the drug benefit that went into effect just 29 months ago. The infinite-horizon present discounted value of the unfunded liability for Medicare A is $34.4 trillion. The unfunded liability of Medicare B is an additional $34 trillion. The shortfall for Medicare D adds another $17.2 trillion. The total? If you wanted to cover the unfunded liability of all three programs today, you would be stuck with an $85.6 trillion bill. That is more than six times as large as the bill for Social Security. It is more than six times the annual output of the entire U.S. economy…

Let’s say you and I and Bruce Ericson and every U.S. citizen who is alive today decided to fully address this unfunded liability through lump-sum payments from our own pocketbooks, so that all of us and all future generations could be secure in the knowledge that we and they would receive promised benefits in perpetuity. How much would we have to pay if we split the tab? Again, the math is painful. With a total population of 304 million, from infants to the elderly, the per-person payment to the federal treasury would come to $330,000. This comes to $1.3 million per family of four—over 25 times the average household’s income…

Suppose we decided to tackle the issue solely on the spending side. It turns out that total discretionary spending in the federal budget, if maintained at its current share of GDP in perpetuity, is 3 percent larger than the entitlement shortfall. So all we would have to do to fully fund our nation’s entitlement programs would be to cut discretionary spending by 97 percent. But hold on. That discretionary spending includes defense and national security, education, the environment and many other areas, not just those controversial earmarks that make the evening news. All of them would have to be cut—almost eliminated, really—to tackle this problem through discretionary spending.

Senator Obama wants to expand Federal spending.  Senator McCain wants to rein in porkbarreling.  You decide who’s on the right track.