The American Conservative

An excerpt from President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning:

When I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone. And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.

But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.” It mirrors the Islamic belief that those who’ve been blessed have an obligation to use those blessings to help others, or the Jewish doctrine of moderation and consideration for others.

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Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical. It is God who is infallible, not us.

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And as important as government policy may be in shaping our world, we are reminded that it’s the cumulative acts of kindness and courage and charity and love, it’s the respect we show each other and the generosity that we share with each other that in our everyday lives will somehow sustain us during these challenging times. John tells us that, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”

Recognizing that the context is very, very different, his pitch reminds me of a line from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, “strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” Of course, Lincoln also imposed the first income tax, so he probably wouldn’t have seen any irony in it.

My support for the National Prayer Breakfast has always been qualified; on the one hand, I think it’s valuable to affirm a common spiritual grounding, mercurial though that may be, among the nation’s leaders. On the other hand–and this is probably nothing new–using the forum of a power-obsessed civil religion group to push religious justifications for raising taxes (while a newer civil religion group glomms on for publicity) makes the whole thing seem like an opportunistic sham, on all sides.

(A small aside: The Fellowship is famous for the fact that they don’t refer to themselves as Christians, preferring to describe themselves as “of Jesus.” Endless expansion of government power is entirely congruent with their strategy of targeting the rich and powerful who will in turn lead the rest of us toward a bright and virtuous dawn. So the anti-institutional stance–one I’ve always understood Jesus to have–supposed in their avoidance of the term “Christian,” is belied by the way they go about recruiting and retaining members and the way they seek to redirect power in the world. In other words, this is like modern-day liberals calling themselves “of liberty.”)

For more on the subject of bringing the Heavenly Kingdom to Earth be sure to check out Gene Callahan on Eric Voegelin in this month’s issue, in which he sees gnostic impulses in both progressivism and neoconservatism’s tendency to “immanentize the eschaton.”

Reading Ed Warner’s “Border Battleground: Mexico’s drug violence is state-sponsored – by the U.S,” (.pdf)  in TAC’s most current issue,  is both a frustrating and sad exercise. Throughout, one can’t help but lament the tragic shortsightedness of our politicians, our government – our citizenry — which when moved, has been pretty effective in forcing several periods of critical change and transformation in this country: the end of slavery, voting rights, ending the war in Vietnam. And so we think, shaking our heads once again – why don’t we just end the War on Drugs?

Warner winds through a troubling analysis of today’s illegal immigration problem, which he contends is increasingly about illegal drugs rather than people (in fact he seems rather open, or at least sympathetic, to allowing productive undocumented families living here to stay here rather than forcing them back to the horrors across the border: 40,000 dead to cartels in the last few years). Disagree on how he gets there, but what he finally concludes is that our first priority should be ending the violent trade that is driving both drugs and illegal persons across that border in the first place.

 

“That means doing something about our unquenchable drug consumption that drives the crime in Mexico and increasingly in the United States. Either we cut back which seems unlikely, or we stop paying the cartels for it, which can be done.”

 

Sadly, each day we wait to address this fork in the road, the bloodier and more powerful the cartels are becoming. According to Wired  magazine last week, Los Zetas, which has become the largest and most brutal cartel in Mexico, has overwhelmed authorities in the state of Tamaulipas on the other side of the Texas border to the point that the central government has been forced to set up military bases and has sent some 13,000 Mexican soldiers (30 percent of the Army’s counter-cartel troops) to try to wrest back control.

The Zetas, which were initially formed by ex-Army Commandos akin to our Special Forces, operate with virtual impunity in no less than 17 Mexican states and beyond. Last year, Mexican lawmakers acknowledged that some 71 percent of municipal governments in Mexico were under the influence of one of the major criminal organizations in the country today.

Los Zetas has emerged as the most violent, committing crimes only imagined in hell, not distinguishing between civilians and criminal associates, adults and children, clean and dirty government officials. Journalists and bloggers have been slaughtered, as has anyone else who’s gotten in the way. The gang has pushed beyond Mexico’s borders, as the now-infamous drug corridors have exploded with new opportunities, and weak and corrupt governments fall prey to their well-armed and fearsome presence. A particularly horrific story last spring has become the norm in places like Guatemala today:

One of Guatemala’s worst massacres since the end of the country’s decades-long civil war was the work of the brutal Mexican drug cartel the Zetas, Guatemalan officials said Monday.

The gang’s violent signature could be seen in the manner and style in which the 29 bodies were found: bound, beheaded and strewn across a grassy field near their cut-off heads, said Guatemalan Interior Minister Carlos Menocal.

Two children and two women were among the dead, most of whom worked on the dairy ranch where the bodies were found, according to Luis Armando Garcia, 23, a survivor of the bloodbath, who talked to The Associated Press in the hospital in San Benito….

A message written in blood on one of the ranch building’s walls said the killers were looking for ranch owner Otto Salguero. Menocal said authorities were trying to find out more about Salguero, whose whereabouts were unknown.

Heartbreaking are the stories that writer Warner says signal this transformation on the landscape of illegal immigration today. Read More…

One of the peculiar tensions in quote-unquote indie music is the notion of authenticity, which stems from the fact that the genre of music is defined by a production ethic rather than any of its inherent musical characteristics. The wariness of co-optation by the unseen forces of commercialization and mass culture was a product of its time; in the 1980s a slew of new record labels like DC’s Dischord and Seattle’s Sub Pop sprung up across the country releasing music with no chance of mainstream acceptance, catering to a small but growing demographic of idealistic young white people. What they all shared was the conviction that their music stood apart from the hit machine, and the implication that the territory folk music had ceded to pop culture since the beginning of the era of recorded music had begun to rebalance.

Alongside the music itself, a critical ethos developed that paradoxically centered on perfecting one’s consumption habits, as memorably caricatured in the movie High Fidelity. But the market remained fragmented, with a variety of regional styles and the average consumer largely unaware of what and how much music was actually out there. Then two important things changed. First, the authenticity conceit on which indie music depends came crashing down in 1991 with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the success of which proved that the new music was mass-marketable. Second, file-sharing specifically and the internet more generally democratized the consumption process; for every stolen Metallica album cutting into Warner Music Group’s profits, people were downloading music in greater diversity and volume than ever before, which sometimes but not always translated into seeing an unfamiliar band live or purchasing higher-fidelity recording media like records or CDs.

Which brings us to Lana Del Rey, the subject of absurd amounts of spilled digital ink whose debut album was finally released three days ago after months of hair-splitting critical anxiety. To authenticity obsessives Del Rey is a product of cynical marketing, no less so because her initial buzz came from a homemade YouTube video that went viral. Her defenders couldn’t see what the big deal was, the songs were reasonably pretty and Del Rey deserves a break as much as anyone else. (Spin Magazine points out the chimerical nature of authenticity by noting that Bob Dylan was never his real name. They’re right, but it’s kind of beside the point.)

Most of the critical response now that the album is out warns of the perils of the hype machine, or blames her for not rising to meet the stratospheric expectations with which Born To Die had only recently been freighted. Whether the album sells despite the critical backlash is an interesting question, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. The latest attempt by major labels to latch on to trends in indie music in the form of bucolic, diet folk groups like Mumford and Sons or The Head and The Heart generally fared poorly among critics but whose albums have sold like hotcakes.

Tiny Mix Tapes, a webzine to which I also contribute, has a review out today ascribing a combative 0/5 rating to her new album. I recoiled initially at the rating because I’ve always felt critics need to be aware that they occupy a position of power that can in a very real sense make or break musicians (granted, TMT not so much). But critics also have an obligation to be honest, and no matter the proddings of Interscope and various public relations men who prompted her name change and various other focus-grouped alterations, Del Rey is responsible for her album in the same way Ron Paul is responsible for his newsletters. Writer Nathan Shaffer applies an unusual format for critical writing, creating an index of various references in her album that reveal its flimsy construction. None of them are surprising, it’s a melange of postwar style and 60s solipsism, spoken through wan string-drenched arrangements; a lot of talk about cars and cities and the American Dream, sensitive music for Mad Men watchers. Shaffer also took the unusual step of soliciting the thoughts of other TMT writers, and quotes Jeff Rovinelli thusly:

“We all acknowledge that it’s a shtick, but then presume that we can intuit whatever’s under the shtick — we assume she’s dumb, we assume she’s inauthentic in a way that is somehow reprehensible vs. other inauthenticities that are somehow commendable (ignoring capitalism’s role on either end), but we always refuse to acknowledge the shtick on [its] own, as shtick (especially in her case). Let the shtick stand, address it on those merits.”

The emerging critical consensus seems to be that Born To Die is just, well, kind of boring. Along with the rest of TMT, that’s what I’ve thought from the beginning. Born To Die gambles on the assumption that an album will be successful if you simply assemble the right combination of cultural signifiers; high-waisted jeans, James Dean, etc. In that way it embodies both the shrewd marketing tactics of the music business and the prevailing consumption ethos of this generation, a congruence that makes those of us raised on notions of authentic music very uncomfortable. Both are symptoms of a doomed culture, the former’s undoing lies in the fact that the scarcity on which the music business depended doesn’t exist anymore. The music listeners themselves are caught in a strange contradiction in which music is still viewed as a consumption good but its marginal value is practically worthless. And I notice these habits in myself too, the rapaciousness with which young people perfect their personal cultural assemblages borders on maniacal.

It’s this latter part that Del Rey’s masters at Warner Music Group have underestimated. If the fragmentation and micro-specificity of musical genres says anything, it’s that people’s tastes are getting more specific. In that context, Born to Die reads more like a desperate paean to a unified demographic that is never coming back, especially in its generic appeals to masculinity in the form of one-dimensional fidelity (“This is what makes us girls/ We don’t stick together ’cause we put our love first”). Authentic or not, it is shrewd. In the face of an upended music industry, I have to believe Del Rey’s 50s-throwback profile has as much to do with the reactionary impulses of the music industry as it does with retromania.

Despite their normally divergent  ideological dispositions, the nine justices of the U.S Supreme Court took a decidedly conservative position this week, putting into place what we hope will be the first of many curbs against the escalating use of invasive satellite tracking technology as a replacement for old fashioned detective work.

Phew.

While it was (pleasantly) surprising to hear the court invoke George Orwell’s 1984 no less than six times during oral arguments, it’s even more extraordinary that it ruled unanimously to reverse the conviction of a drug dealer. The Fourth Amendment, after a couple of decades of getting kicked around and stomped on in the zealous spirit of “zero tolerance” and “homeland security,” has been given a fresh blast of adrenaline, emerging invigorated and relevant again.

At issue is whether the police had the right to secretly affix a GPS unit to the undercarriage of a car owned and driven by Antoine Jones, a suspected drug kingpin in the sights of the FBI and local District of Columbia police detectives, without a valid warrant. Investigators had been granted a warrant to track Jones with the device, but it expired. A month of this surveillance led to his arrest, however, and he was eventually sentenced to life in prison, convicted in January 2008 of one count of conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute five or more kilograms of cocaine and 50 or more grams of cocaine (you see, we are winning the War on Drugs!)

His lawyers appealed, arguing that his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure was violated because the warrant wasn’t valid.  The U.S federal court of appeals in DC granted his appeal and reversed Jones’ conviction. The government, arguing that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy driving down the street in his vehicle, and that police tracking him with a GPS is no different than following him in their own cars, or walking behind him on the street, insisted the police didn’t need the warrant in the first place.

Not so, said conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the majority opinion (.pdf):

The Fourth Amendment provides in relevant part that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” It is beyond dispute that a vehicle is an “effect” as that term is used in the Amendment. …

We hold that the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a “search.” …

It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case: The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.

By focusing on personal property and trespass, however, Scalia and four other justices (Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Sotomayor) limited the scope of the ruling, declining (as stated in the majority opinion, and in Sotomayor’s separate opinion) to address the issue of “reasonable expectation of privacy,” which would have called into question law enforcement’s warrantless use of any GPS tracking technology, not just a physical GPS device secretly attached to cars, for long-term surveillance.

Not everyone agreed with them. The four remaining justices  (Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan), although holding together on the ruling, signed their own concurring Minority opinion, stating that it was Jones’  “reasonable expectation of privacy” that was violated, that it was the month-long monitoring of his every move that constituted “the search,” not the surreptitious placement of the device on his car. By making this a clear privacy issue, they suggested, the court might have thrown up new legal hurdles against the use of other long-term electronic surveillance that does not involve tampering with personal property.

Instead,  wrote Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Minority’s concurring opinion, police might shift to GPS surveillance that involves “non-trespassory” techniques in order to avoid legal trouble. “If long-term monitoring can be accomplished without committing a technical trespass—suppose, for example, that the Federal Government required or persuaded auto manufacturers to include a GPS tracking device in every car—the Court’s theory would provide no protection.” Read More…

Newt Gingrich’s surge to success in South Carolina has surely brought joy to the Obama White House.

For his 12-point victory ensures the fight for the GOP nomination will not end soon and will get nastier. Indeed, it already has. Whether Newt or Mitt Romney emerges victorious, the candidate who comes out of the Republican convention will be bruised and bloodied.

Consider, first, Newt.

According to a Fox News poll, 56 percent of the American people have an unfavorable opinion of the former speaker. Only 27 percent hold a favorable opinion. By two to one, the nation has a negative view of Newt. And as Newt has been a national figure for two decades, to reverse the impression he has left on the country would require an immense volume of positive media, free and bought.

And Newt is getting neither.

Now, in Florida, Romney has decided to tear the scab off, and 24 hours after his South Carolina defeat, he is busy at it.

Newt, said Mitt, “was a leader for four years as speaker of the House. … And at the end of four years … he was a failed leader, and he had to resign in disgrace. … He was investigated (by) an ethics panel and had to make a payment associated with that, and then … 88 percent of his (fellow) Republicans voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich.”

“What’s (Newt) been doing for 15 years?” Mitt asked. “He’s been working as a lobbyist … and selling influence around Washington.”

Mitt did not bring up Newt’s three wives and the tawdry tale told by second wife Marianne to ABC. Yet the super PACs of the Democratic Party will make sure the women of America know how Newt treated his first two wives, should he become the nominee.

Yet Mitt has his own problems, after his worst week in South Carolina.

By going negative on Newt, he will drive Newt’s negatives higher. But attack politics polarizes a party and drives up the negatives of the attacker, as well. The Eagle Scout image of Mitt will suffer — both from what Newt is doing to him and from what he feels he must do to Newt.

Rep. Dick Gephardt decided he had to take down Howard Dean, who was riding high in Iowa in 2004. Gephardt ended up taking both of them down. John Kerry evaded the bloodletting, won the caucuses and cruised to the nomination. Read More…

In the wake of the killing of four of its soldiers by an Afghan soldier, France has suspended all military operations in Afghanistan.

Today’s New York Times features an article entitled “Afghan Soldiers Step Up Killing of Allied Forces” that begins “American and other coalition forces here are being killed in increasing numbers by the very Afghan soldiers they fight alongside and train, in attacks motivated by deep-seated animosity between the supposedly allied forces, according to American and Afghan officers and a classified coalition report obtained by The New York Times. A decade into the war in Afghanistan, the report makes clear that these killings have become the most visible symptom of a far deeper ailment plaguing the war effort: the contempt each side holds for the other…”

How can anyone read the above and still maintain that there is a good reason for staying in Afghanistan?  Who wants to be the last family in America to lose a son or daughter fighting in such a cause?  Cut a deal with the Taliban and get out.

 

For years the writers, editors and readers of The American Conservative have had to endure the undeserving charge that its paleo-conservative-libertarian roots are racist. I’ll never forget the former Washington Times writer who told me to my face, quite smugly as we were sharing a cab during the 2008 Republican National Convention, that I write for a racist rag.

In part, these charges are old, lobbed and maintained by founding editor Pat Buchanan’s more adamant longtime detractors. But the slander endures, most vociferously it would seem, by unreconstructed liberals who never read the magazine and neoconservatives like my arrogant cabmate, who especially abhor the magazine’s founding manifesto:  that the Bush Administration’s war policy was a mistake, and that the political and tactical reaction to 9/11 was and is not only stunningly wrongheaded, but dangerous and motivated by venal special interests that hew not to the U.S constitution nor to the morals and values of an American republic.

Couldn’t one as easily say their own advocacy of endless war against “brown people” in the Middle East and Central Asia – not to mention North and East Africa – is racism on a Global scale? Writers at The Weekly Standard, National Review, The Washington Times and Commentary have been ruthless non-apologists for the indiscriminate killing of non-whites as a means to their ends, from the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq and the flattening of Fallujah to the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, today’s drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and all of the wars’ human repercussions (death, disease, displacement). In their world, these are always treated as time-wasting, politically motivated afterthoughts that merely muddy their own paper-white narrative.

On a micro-level, how can calling what happened at Abu Ghraib (dragging Arab men by leashes, stacking them up naked in a pyramid, beating and turning dogs loose on them) “a small prison scandal” over which the American public got unduly “hysterical,” not be considered racist in some way? Those were among the many remarks Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol made on the air and in writing that urged Americans to recalibrate their outrage downward in the wake of the 2004 revelations.

His cohort at Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, agreed,  downplaying what happened at Abu Ghraib while making it a political issue, accusing the Democrats of going off  “the intellectual and moral rails as to compare the harassment and humiliation of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib—none of whom, so far as anyone then knew, was even maimed, let alone killed—to the horrendous torturing and murdering that had gone on in that same prison under Saddam Hussein or, even more outlandishly, to the Soviet gulag in which many millions of prisoners died.”

Now, Kristol, in an effort, again, to downplay what many are already calling a war crime, has declared U.S Marines urinating on (desecrating) Afghan corpses part of an American military tradition.

But it’s also worth noting that pissing has a distinguished place in American military history. Most famously, General George S. Patton relieved himself in the Rhine on March 24, 1945—and made sure he was photographed doing so. …

It wasn’t just American generals who seemed preoccupied with pissing back in 1945. Three weeks earlier, Winston Churchill had visited the front lines near Jülich. Churchill had long dreamed of urinating on Hitler’s much-vaunted Siegfried Line to show his contempt for Hitler and Nazism…

So perhaps, as Rep. Allen West, once a battalion commander in Iraq, put it last week, all the sanctimonious Obama administration bigwigs “need to chill.” Did Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta really need to speak up at all?

Does Kristol realize he is comparing dead men to a river or a territorial boundary, suggesting these corpses were never human at all?

Kristol and his ilk don’t think much of the Geneva Conventions, so it is almost not worth the breath to remind them that desecrating corpses is in violation of international treaty, but it is also against military law, which means the Marines already recognize such desecration is not heroic, funny, eye-for-an-eye, nor proof of battlefield supremacy. It’s wrong.

Funny how even suggesting such behavior was happening in World War II or even Vietnam is taboo, but today Kristol and his more deranged ideological offspring like Pamela Geller of the popular Atlas Shrugs website, now appear to be cheering it on, even questioning the loyalty and politics of those who don’t.

“I love these Marines,” wrote Geller after the story broke last week. “Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.”

What a hoot! Even scarier are the comments, some of which suggest that if al Qaeda wants to field an army of bloodthirsty psychos, beheading and dismembering their enemies and desecrating the dead, then our Marines have every right to do it too. Read More…

Perhaps out of fear of a grassroots insurrection, six conservative senators sent a letter to Harry Reid today expressing a newfound concern about the PROTECT IP Act.

Via Lachlan Markay at The Foundry:

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Tom Coburn (R-OK), sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Friday expressing their concerns.

The letter, whose signatories include the ranking Republicans on the Budget, Finance, and Judiciary Committees, warns of “breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights” could result from passage of the hotly-contested PROTECT IP Act.

Still, the Senators didn’t go so far as to actually condemn the legislation, they just say it deserves further scrutiny. They do, however, explicitly mention the “large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about the potential unintended consequences of the proposed legislation.”

Sens. Rand Paul and Jerry Moran have voiced opposition to the bill in the past, but these six heavyweights voicing their reservations represents a horse of another color. The floor debate on this one should be really interesting (it comes up on Jan. 24th, for the C-SPAN crowd), and there’s definitely a conservative case to be made against the bill – it could force companies to stop doing business without due process, it’s anti-competitive and blatantly violates free speech. But opposition to the bill isn’t just principled, it’s also good politics – grassroots opponents to SOPA and PROTECT IP are proving to be numerous and extremely vocal, especially among the Tea Party. Not only that, but with all the Hollywood money being funneled into the Democratic Party, Harry Reid can’t afford to look less than solicitous of their interests.

As Matt Lewis noted today, important philosophical battles are going on on the right today, especially compared to the left.

While Democrats are essentially falling lockstep behind President Obama, Republicans are engaging in some very important philosophical debates. For example, the rise of Ron Paul demonstrates that the GOP includes both hawks and a large number of non-interventionists. The schism over Bain Capital demonstrates the cleavage between the big business wing of the Republican Party and the more populist conservative strain.

I suppose the SOPA/PROTECT IP debate falls roughly within the latter. But in this case the populist conservatives are aligned with some of the biggest and most innovative tech companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter. Passing SOPA wouldn’t be a victory for free markets, it would be a victory for the narrow special interests that pushed for it.

Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer have been sort of doleful in their appearances on FOX News lately, looking like their hearts are just not in it. Not hard to see why: it looks like cardboard cut-out and moderate Republican Mitt Romney will be their party’s presidential nominee. On the national security front, it’s been difficult to stake a strident position against a president who has put the former administration’s drone program to shame, bombed more countries and killed more Pakistanis in the last three years than they probably thought possible. Gitmo’s still open for business and it could be expanding its capacity, thanks to new detention provisions in the NDAA.

Meanwhile, the exit from Afghanistan looks like it’s going to be a really slow one, and Iraq … well, all Krauthammer’s fulminations about President Obama “losing” the war have largely fallen on deaf ears. Americans have heard enough — most everyone wanted to come home, even the troops, who Kristol and Krauthammer and the rest of the American Enterprise Institute brain trust claimed they were speaking for all along. As for Iran, it seems it’s going to take a lot more than puffed-up rhetoric to drag the people behind yet another war.

But it’s obvious these two soldiers of truth were keeping their powder dry for the next fight. Maybe too dry. When President Obama announced yesterday that he wants to cut some $480 billion from the Pentagon budget over the next decade, it cast a spark that immediately set their collective hair aflame.

“It would decimate the country. It would weaken the United States of America,” charged Kristol, who looked personally offended by the president on FOX News Special Report last night.

Krauthammer enjoined with his ever lugubrious intonations, “It is a road map to America’s decline.”

According to reports, Obama proposes most of the cuts in three broad areas: non-retirement personnel benefits that haven’t been reformed in decades, cutting ground forces eventually back to 1990′s levels, pulling back from overseas bases and putting the brakes  on expensive and controversial programs, like the F-35 joint strike fighter. The budget strategy would instead focus on perceived future interests, involving more Special Forces, counter-terrorism capabilities, cyber-warfare, missile defense and beefing up Navy and Air Force platforms.

Krauthammer and Kristol, who have no military backgrounds, seemed particularly perturbed that Army and Marine forces would be cut, which is not surprising since the two men have been advocating invasions and regime changes since the 1990′s.

“Sometimes a Pearl Harbor happens or a south Korea or a 9/11, where a ground war is thrust upon you — you have no choice,” strained Krauthammer. The editors of National Review added their own knee-jerky response this morning.

Funny, the folks over at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) — a think tank that is so well-connected to the military it is practically a civilian appendage — didn’t take it so hard. That’s probably because when it was weighing the worst case scenarios for budget cuts back in October, $500 billon was considered all right. Read More…

As someone who was born in Iowa, I’m pleased to see many Iowans flocking to support Ron Paul.

The Washington Post has a tut-tutting front-page story today complaining that Paul’s 45-minute stump speech “outlines a view of the world so bleak it would make Chicken Little sound like an optimist.”

It is not surprising that a Washington reporter would be aghast at someone who spoke honestly about U.S. government policy. But hopefully Iowa voters will be far more realistic than Washington Post editorial writers. It is encouraging to see so many people enthusiastic about a politician who is not promising them handouts.

Ron Paul’s support is a gauge of how many Americans have caught onto to the prevailing doggerel from Washington. Many, if not most, of these folks will never “return to the fold” to docilely support whoever the Republican Party coronates as a presidential candidate later this year. Ron Paul is toppling political idols – and many Americans will never bow to those idols again.

The New York Times had an excellent piece last week on Republican candidates’ views on executive power. Ron Paul was the only candidate who declared that the President does not have a right to order the killing of American citizens on his own authority. The other Republican candidates sounded like Obama – who signed a bill on Saturday that gives the federal government dire new powers. The superb poster below features Obama – but it could just as well have included the Republican presidential candidates – except for Ron Paul.

[If anyone knows the author of this poster, shoot me an email and I will credit the creator.]