Canadian Cincinnatus

Obama keeps George Bush’s Defence Secretary

Obama keeps George Bush’s Defence Secretary

After the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress in 2006, the battle cry of the left was Iraq. Everybody, left and right, thought the 2008 Presidential election will be fought over the Iraq issue. The one prominent exception was Rush, who predicted that Iraq well fade as an election issue as the situation in Mesopotamia stabilizes.

I was sceptical at the time, but looking back, he sure was right! Not only did the economy totally eclipse Iraq as an issue (thanks to the surge and the collapse in the casualty rate for US troops there), but now Obama has decided to keep Robert Gates on as SecDef for at least a year into his first term. Now that’s the kind of “Change” I like (but I suspect, not exactly what the nutroots had in mind when they voted for Obama – heh, heh, heh...).

To give credit where credit is due, good on him! Robert Gates has been an exemplary (if colourless) Secretary of Defence, under whose tenure the situation in Iraq has completely reversed. This reappointment is a clue that the Obama administration might pursue sensible war policies.

As I have said before, the problem for us Obama-watchers is that we have so little to go on. Thanks to his thin resume and empty rhetoric, he comes to the White House as more of a cypher than any of his predecessors has in living memory. We have simply no idea whether he will be a dangerous radical (as is suggested by his acquaintances) or a cautious politician (as is suggested by his abstention from crucial votes in the legislatures where he has served). However, the reappointment of Gates is a data point for the latter proposition.

One cheer for Barack!

Capital gains taxes and the stock market.

In 1997, the Republican Congress pushed through the Taxpayer Relief Act which Bill Clinton signed (and subsequently took credit for, even though it was part of the Contract for America, which he opposed). Among other things it made drastic cuts to capital gains taxes. Its positive effect on the stock market was dramatic.

Just a thought, given today’s stock market gloom, why doesn’t somebody cut capital gains taxes now?

Granted not too much capital is gaining these days but that also is another way of saying that it would be an easy proposal to implement. We must remember that investors are people who look to the future. A cut in capital gains tax perhaps may be just the thing to perk up the stock market. Once the money starts flowing in, stock prices will start to go up again.

Can’t be any worse than throwing taxpayers money around like its confetti at every failed business in sight. 

US auto industry should be more like the US gun industry

One thing that the US gun industry has going for it is that it is too politically correct to ever receive a bailout from anybody. They know this, and as a result, the US civilian gun industry consists of a handful of medium sized companies, some profitable and some going bankrupt, and a whole slew of small, nimble gun companies hoping that their new product or manufacturing process will propel them into the ranks of the medium sized elites. In a nutshell – the US gun manufacturing industry is efficient. It possesses the ruthless efficiency of BMW and Toyota.

This efficiency is the by-product of the fact that American gun manufacturers are allowed to fail. The old legacy gun companies – Smith & Wesson, Colt and Winchester – have all gone bankrupt or come perilously close to it. This despite the fact these companies have more history than any of the big three car companies. For instance, Winchester was 140 years old when it went under.

Periodic bankruptcies are good for industry because man-made organizations, like organic bodies, have a natural life cycle to them – they are new and virile when they are young and growing, they are powerful and level-headed when they are mature, and they are frail and backwards looking when they are old. Take the big three auto firms for example. As layoffs progress, fewer and fewer workers support more and more retirees. This is a death spiral where productive assets are increasingly diverted from life-giving R&D to pay people who don’t work any more. Such companies no longer look to the future, but rather look warily over their shoulder at their past. According to Mitt Romney, $2,000 from the sale of every car Ford makes, goes towards benefits and payments that Japanese carmakers don’t have to make. The Japanese spend this money on quality and features instead – or just lower the price.

One of the strong points of the free market system is that old organizations are allowed to die a natural death, making way for new, vibrant, forward-looking companies that take their place. Bankruptcy is an essential part of the economic renewal process. It may be painful but it means that precious, finite capital is not being absorbed by unproductive bodies. It is part of the way capitalism constantly reinvents itself.

 When Winchester went bankrupt in 2006, it didn’t mean that its excellent Model 70 rifle would no longer be produced. All it meant was that it would no longer be manufactured at Winchester’s 140 year old plant in New Haven, Connecticut (by unionized workers). A new corporate arrangement ensured that it would henceforth be made at a modern facility in Columbia, SC (by nonunionised workers). Something similar happened when High Standard went belly up in the early 80’s due to quality control problems and the recession. A new company bought all the tooling and the name, and as a result, today, these great .22 target pistols are still for sale – great because they are almost as good as high-end European pistols for a fraction of the price.

Doubtlessly something similar would happen if Ford was allowed to fail. Who wouldn’t want to buy an F-150 pickup, if the only difference was that it was made by the F-150 Corporation (located in a Sunbelt state) instead of the Ford Motor Company? And, oh yes, the truck is now cheaper and comes with fewer defects. Presently, Detroit makes plenty of great cars: Camaros, Mustangs, Challengers, Corvettes, Chevy pickups, Crown Vics, etc. Just because the big three companies that make these vehicles depart the scene doesn’t mean these vehicles won’t be produced tomorrow. Once the tooling is sold to a new company, one unencumbered by legacy debt and union arrangements, all of these vehicles can be made again, only better and cheaper.

For years, Colt’s bread and butter was its Model 1911 .45 auto and its AR15 rifle. People loved these guns but, lets face it, Colt got sloppy over time and their quality went down. Then, when its patents expired, a whole host of new companies came along that made literally dozens of clones of both these venerable firearms. Some are cheaper, some are better, some are better and cheaper. Colt had a near death experience as a result and was only saved by defence department contracts, but the consumer couldn’t have been happier. What allowed this to happen was that small companies with new ideas about an old product were able to access enough capital to make a go of it. To prevent finite capital from being diverted to unproductive sinks is why bankruptcy is periodically necessary. 

This could happen to the American car industry. Right now there are dozens of craft car companies slowly incubating, waiting for the opportunity to take their place in the sun. Just think of what they could accomplish if the billions Congress wasn’t thinking of giving to the big three was instead loaned to the most deserving of these. For one thing they wouldn’t be emulating the 1930’s practices of the big three. But they wouldn’t be copying the 1960’s practices of the Japanese and the Germans. Instead they would be doing the 21^st century American way.

In other words, if GM, Ford and Chrysler go belly up, it might just be a renaissance for the American car. But this will only happen if we are prepared to make a decisive break with the past.

Royal Navy kills pirates off Somali coast

By  all accounts, maritime piracy is a serious and growing phenomenon and failed states such as Somalia are a great place for them. Nobody is going to bring them to justice there. Heck, they are probably treated like local celebrities.

The West’s response has been to patrol the Gulf of Aden with large naval vessels such as the HMS Cumberland. There are two problems with this approach. First, it is expensive. To adequately patrol the entire Somali coast, all the time requires a lot of vessels, and operating them ain’t cheap.

Second, these big ships can be seen a mile away. All the pirates have to do is to sit tight and wait for the ship to sail away before attacking a lone, unescorted freighter. Looking at this from a game theoretic perspective, unless the pirates are as stupid as the ones who chose to operate in the vicinity of the HMS Cumberland, they are in a no-lose situation. When naval ships aren’t around, they do what they want; when they are in view, the pirates take a professional development day; life is good. Which is why the navy can only secure that part of the sea where they are physically present in.

Directly after 9/11, it became fashionable to talk about thinking out-of-the-box. The idea was that without unconventional tactics, you couldn’t hope to defeat an asymmetrical opponent like Osama Bin Laden, who has the luxury to wait for you to drop your guard while you spend billions to secure every single vulnerable point.

I know all this war on terror stuff has gone out of fashion these days, with the election of sunny Obama, but still, I think this is one problem that would benefit from some out-of-the-box strategery.

In this spirit I have a suggestion: why don’t we defeat these pirates the same way Alexander the Great defeated the Scythian raiders north of the Syr Daria River (the Jaxartes) – you bait them. What I have in mind is this. You take a luxury yacht, sail it slowly up and down the Somali coast and wait for the pirates. When they get close and their intentions are obvious, a platoon of commandoes rushes up to the deck and opens fire with everything they got until all the pirates are dead.

Pretty soon the pirates will learn to stay away from luxury yachts. Then you start putting commando teams on small freighters. When the pirates become wary these, you move up to large freighters. It will not take long for incidents of piracy to dry up to a manageable trickle.

I know, I know, the lose-at-any-cost crowd will go nuts. But let them. This plan, while it sounds barbaric when presented in this way, is on much firmer legal ground than it appears. First, the law of the sea gives every ship the right to do whatever it takes to survive on the high seas. And ships are the sovereign territory of the nation under whose flag they fly. Attacking a ship is an act of war. Secondly, who says you aren’t trying to take prisoners? It can be reasonably argued that trying to do so would imperil the safety of your ship so you can’t try very hard.

Of course, this kind of thing is passé these days. And will remain so... until the next big terrorist attack.

gun totin’ John Wayne painted over in Toronto

After a shooting occurred outside the Duke of York tavern in Queen St E in Toronto, the reaction was as to paint over a long-time picture in front of the tavern of John Wayne with a rifle.

Never mind that in his movies John Wayne never played the villain and stood unambiguously for the good – unlike some of today’s morally ambiguous anti-heroes; and never mind that, thanks to the Hays code, good always triumphed over evil in his movies; all that matters is that John Wayne was carrying a gun (gasp) in that picture.

It has been said in politics, an issue will play out the way it has been framed. And in Toronto at least, the issue of violence has not been ‘framed’ in the perspective of morality, but rather in the perspective of an inanimate object.

As the Toronto Sun  reports, local “Councilor Paula Fletcher, who raised the ‘inappropriate’ nature of the image with the Duke’s owners last week, is pleased that they have taken action.

Paula Fletcher  current affiliation is with the NDP, but she used to be the leader of the “Communist Party of Canada – Manitoba”. Perhaps somebody in her riding should raise the ‘inappropriate nature’ of her one-time affiliation with a murderous ideology that killed 100 million people in the twentieth century.

But perhaps raising that ‘inappropriateness’ would itself be ‘inappropriate,’ so it’s best we just remains silent.

For more info, see also here.

Group Opposing Miller hamstrung by campaign finance laws

As Rob Granatstein  of the Toronto Sun reports:

“The encouraging news out of City Hall is the GOM (Group Opposing Miller) have come to the real world conclusion only one person can run against Mayor David Miller in the 2010 election. Then it gets interesting. How do you decide who has the best shot at knocking off the boss? The answer the GOM is working on may shock you -- a leadership convention.”

About time, I (and doubtlessly many others who are fed up with the incompetent left-wing ideologue David Miller) say. Unfortunately, GOM has run into a wee hitch – campaign finance laws:

“There are huge issues to resolve. How do you pay for it [the convention] when candidates can't spend any money on their campaigns until Jan. 1, 2010, and this would all have to happen in the fall of 2009 at the latest”

People think that campaign finance restrictions are generally a Good Thing, so much so that it has become a motherhood issue in politics. Who would be against them?

However, the problems facing GOM illustrate one of the negative consequences of campaign finance laws – they protect incumbents in particular and the establishment in general from outside challenges. In other words, campaign finance laws prop up the status quo.

People think that by limiting political contributions they are limiting the ability of a few individuals or corporations with a lot of money to have inordinate influence over a politician. And they are right. Campaign finance restrictions favour candidates and parties who are able to muster a large number of small donations over opponents who have to rely on a small number of large donations.

But these same people never stop to think, who is better able to get a large number of people to donate money to them? Answer: the establishment candidate. The dark horse, the new guy, the marginalized, they don’t have a chance in this contest. Even though the establishment is hurt by being cut off from large donations, because politics is a zero-sum game, the establishment gains if the alternative choice loses even more.

The fact of the matter is, if you are coming up from nowhere, you can’t afford to play by the usual rules (which campaign finance laws codify). You need to innovate, which you can’t because now it’s illegal.

The feverish mind of the conspiratorial left imagines that only evil right-wing reactionaries benefit from no campaign restrictions – scoring huge bags of money from equally evil multinational corporations. The facts however paint a more balanced picture. In 1968, left-wing Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy  ran for the Democrat nomination on an anti-war ticket against President Johnson (the establishment candidate, thanks to being the sitting President). Though McCarthy did eventually lose, his early success spooked Johnson enough that he quit the race. His run was made possible because of a handful of large donations from a few sympathetic rich liberals. If he tried that today, the post-Watergate finance laws would throw him into jail.

Fortunately, David Miller is now so unpopular that GOM may be able to rise above artificial campaign finance impediments. But the fact must be faced; campaign finance restrictions do help secure the establishment. 

Finally, somebody adhered to the first rule of political campaigning!

Too bad it was Barack Obama.

However, if we are to learn from our opponents, we have to give credit where credit is due. Obama’s execution of the first rule was excellent.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that the first rule of campaigning is that you must go positive first and negative second. These same readers will also know that I never tire of pointing this out whenever a political campaign transgresses this rule. The classic example I employ of an application of this rule is the Reagan campaign in 1980. However, after Nov 4 I think I will have to add another example – Barack Obama in 2008.

The whole idea of going positive before going negative is that you brand yourself so strongly with your positive image that you are not tarnished when you go negative against your opponent (which you must do, to be effective). That many people are even unaware that there was a negative aspect to Obama’s campaign is a testament to how well he succeeded in branding himself positively.

But make no mistake; the negative phase of his campaign was not only there but was absolutely brutal. The vicious attacks on Sarah Palin’s personal life, voters registered fraudulently en mass, goons turning away white voters from inner city precincts – it was all there for everyone to see, and it wasn’t pretty let alone positive. However, all this was done by Obama’s proxies. The campaign always maintained plausible deniability. You can point to any one of these things, and the campaign can plausibly say, hey, it wasn’t us; it is the MSM, the community organizers or some local yahoos who answer to no one. When Sarah Palin’s life was being trashed, Obama said nothing except present her with the odd compliment.^*

Of course, Obama had several big things going for him. The MSM was thoroughly in the tank for him and didn’t mind doing his dirty work. No Republican will ever have this luxury. Second, and even more importantly, many Americans had been pining for a ‘fresh, clean’ black presidential candidate (to borrow Joe Biden’s memorable phrase) ever since the sixties. America has a deep-seated guilt complex about racism and slavery that goes back to the writing of the constitution, which played right into Barack’s narrative. While this isn’t something that is available to anyone (and ever since Obama won, it is now available to no one: black president? Yawn...been there, done that), the point is that Obama’s campaign seized it with all their might and extracted every last ounce of advantage out of it they could. Say what you will, that’s good electioneering!

The McCain campaign provides a useful contrast in that it shows what happens when this rule is badly executed. The problem here is not that he got the order wrong (this is how most campaigns misapply the rule). He really did progress from positive to negative. Remember last summer, when he berated a few Republicans for criticising some aspect of Obama’s past? and contrast that with his attacks on Bill Ayers and ACORN in the last weeks of the election. His real problem was that he executed both phases poorly.

He executed the positive phase poorly because he failed to communicate his positive for the country. This is primarily because he couldn’t employ the three subjects he most cares about – Iraq, immigration reform and campaign finance reform. With Iraq, he was the victim of his own success. The surge he advocated worked so well that Iraq ceased to be a deciding issue among voters. And the other two themes he couldn’t employ because his core supporters are dead set against them.

He executed the negative phase poorly because he executed it himself instead of leaving it to surrogates. Because others not connected with his campaign trashed Sarah Palin, none of the sordidness stuck to Obama. As a result, he came out of it looking squeaky clean. When McCain personally confronted Obama with Bill Ayers and the Annenberg Challenge in the debates, he did raise valid questions about Obama - which helped him. Unfortunately, the side effect was to make him appear bitter, angry and desperate. He achieved the distinction of looking weak and evil simultaneously –qualities we all want in a leader!

 

^*Of course, I don’t advocate election fraud and intimidation. These things are wrong and the people responsible should be brought to justice (though, judging by who won the election, I won’t be holding my breath to see this happen). The point I am trying to make is that if a campaign is run properly, even sordid acts such as these won’t stick to the candidate.

With Obama’s victory, I fear for my homeland Estonia

Having an Estonian background, I sincerely worry at Obama’s foreign policy naiveté.

While I may be wrong (and sincerely hope I am), Obama has already hinted with the Georgia crisis that he is one of those dewy-eyed, peace-at-any-price types who make the perfect foil for an unprincipled predator like Vladimir Putin. When Putin tested the West with the invasion of Georgia on the opening day of the Beijing Olympics, Barack Obama’s first response was to talk about the need for both sides to get together to settle their misunderstandings. What a fool!

To the participants in this event, there were no misunderstandings. Russia wanted to get as much as it could from Georgia and Georgia wanted to keep as much as it could. The issue could not be more crystal clear to them. On a larger scale, Russia is testing the West to see what it can get away with. Putin has made perfectly clear his desire to restore the Russian Imperium. The only person who failed to understand what was going on was Barack Obama.

It was only when John McCain came to the spirited and uncompromising defence of Georgia that Obama was shamed into standing up for Georgia. In this crisis, Barack Obama’s conduct reminded me of nobody more than Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier in the Munich Crisis, who in their zeal to appease Hitler at the Munich Conference and so avoid war, treated the Czechoslovakian Prime Minster as almost more of a troublemaker than the Fuhrer. The same process of vilifying the victim (which Barack started out participating in) could be seen operating in the Georgia crisis.

Barack Obama clearly believes in the moral-equivalence theory, that is, that the use of violence is deplorable no matter who does it. In other words, his morality does not distinguish between the violence perpetrated by a victim defending himself and the violence of an aggressor attacking the victim. The only people who could believe something this silly are those who have grown up in such luxury that they have never been mugged by reality. There are many such people in North America and Western Europe. The conditions in places like Hawaii have been so good for so long that many people who grew up there simply cannot imagine anything bad happening to themselves.

The people of Eastern Europe have never had this luxury.

According to this  news item, the Soviet Union, er, I mean the Russian Federation, didn’t wait too long after Obama’s victory to act.

What the Republicans should do now

I think Mark Steyn  got it right on election night when he said:

“As for us losers, there's no point going down the right-wing version of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Any shrill vicious ad hominem invective would be much better directed at each other. The Republicans lost this election. ... We should have the fight about conservatism's future vigorously and openly — perhaps at Bud's Roadhouse out on Route 137 in lieu of All-Girl Mud-Wrestling Night.”

While I think Steyn is too pessimistic about America’s future (I doubt America really has any deep interest in joining Old Europe in the Land of the Lotus Eaters), he does make two salient points:

Doing “Bush Derangement Syndrome” in reverse is counterproductive. For the next four years, Bill Ayers, Rev Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s exact duties at ACORN 20 years ago don’t matter. From now on, Obama’s actual record does. Will he try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq, what will he do about Afghanistan, will he send the stock market even lower by doubling capital gains taxes, will he punish entrepreneurialism by raising taxes on the wealthy, will he try to silence dissent by resurrecting the fairness doctrine? – questions like this are now at the fore.

However Republicans have to wait and see what he does before they can react. In the meantime, this is the time of introspection for the GOP. As Rush pointed out the day after Election Day, if you don’t learn from your mistakes when you lose, you will not be able to win the next battle.

The first step in this process is to acknowledge what hasn’t worked for the Republicans in recent years. Compassionate conservatism doesn’t work, being a ‘maverick’ doesn’t work, appealing to ‘independents’ doesn’t work, bipartisanship doesn’t work, pork barrel spending doesn’t work, trying to appease Hispanics by keeping the Mexican border open doesn’t work. It must be forthrightly admitted that conservatism didn’t lose on Nov 4, John McCain and the Republican Party did. Where conservatism was tried on Nov 4, it won. To give one example, the proposition to ban gay marriage succeeded in Florida and California. California!

(This reminds me of an anecdote about Bob Dole. When he was running against Bill Clinton in 1996, there was a referendum in California making English the principal language in all public schools. Bob Dole stayed away from it thinking it will hurt his chances with Hispanics. The ballot initiative won by 65%. Dole lost the state achieving only 37% support. Though I am not positive about the exact numbers but I think there’s a lesson in here somewhere...)

However, as Steyn suspects, the ‘moderates’ in the GOP, just like the Red Tory losers of Canada, will rise up like a Phoenix from the ashes of their own self-inflicted disaster to proscribe yet even more compromise on basic principles as the key to victory.

Therefore, the next order of business for all true conservative Republicans is to march on down to Bud's Roadhouse on Route 137 and throw all the RINO’s and ‘mavericks’ out of the Jell-O pit.

Barack Obama – the blank cheque

The presidential aspirations of Barack Obama have led America to an unprecedented situation. The man America is likely to elect as President on Nov 4^th is a complete cypher.

All past Presidents had already established some kind of track record before they began to seek the Presidency. W was a state governor, as was Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter; Nixon and George HW Bush were former VP’s, and congressmen before that: and so on.

What about Obama?

While it is true that he was a State Senator and is a one-term US Senator, his legislative achievements to date have been meagre. Unlike Harry Truman, who was selected to be Vice President on the strength of his Truman Committee that uncovered waste and mismanagement in the US war effort, Barack has had no major legislative accomplishments to date. In the Illinois Senate, he voted present 130 times, and in the US Senate he was hardly there, spending most of his time furthering his ambitions.

Before the legislature, he was a community organizer (whatever that is), and before that he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. His behaviour in the latter role is particularly non-illuminating. One of his editorial perks was that he was allowed to write a column for every issue that came out under his tenure. He wrote nothing! – no articles at all. There are two plausible reasons for this. One, he had nothing to say; or two, even back then he had his eye on the White House and decided that it was best to play his cards close to his chest.

He also wrote two solipsistic autobiographies, neither of which is particularly illuminating about his intentions. His election mantra has been ‘hope and change’, whatever those terms mean. Never before in American history has the voter known so little about how the man they are about to elect will perform.

Dick Morris thinks Obama will run the most left-wing administration in US history. Certainly the company he keeps and the occasional hints he makes suggests this. But I contend that we really have no idea what he will be like as chief executive and, considering his lack of familiarity with the role of executive, neither does Obama.

For how somebody actually performs isn’t a deliberate choice on the part of the President but something that unfolds with time. For instance, I am sure that when he was taking the oath of office, Bill Clinton did not think that his substantive accomplishments as President would be eliminating welfare, cutting capital gains taxes, balancing the budget and leaving health care alone. But the pressures of the office plus his innate common sense fortuitously combined to override his left-wing principles.