Canadian Cincinnatus

Barack Obama is the Chauncey Gardiner President

Several years ago, in an article on these pages I compared Barack Obama to Chauncey Gardiner, the Peter Sellers character in the 1979 film, Being There. In that film, Peter Sellers’ character is a half-wit gardener who gets propelled by events beyond his control into the Washington power circle. His empty-headed thoughts are interpreted by the movers and shakers as enigmatic Buddha-like fonts of wisdom. No one who speaks to Chauncey Gardiner even considers the possibility that there is no there there.

Recently, distinguished commentator Michael Barone draws the same analogy:

“As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, ‘As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden.’ ‘First comes the spring and summer,’ he explains, ‘but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.’ The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, ‘There will be growth in the spring.’

Kind of reminds you of Obama's approach to the federal budget, doesn't it?”

Many of the President’s critics have called him the second coming of Jimmy Carter. In a way, this is an unfair comparison – to Jimmy Carter. This because, for all his faults, Carter was never disengaged. As well, when things didn’t turn out as planned, he was willing to do some free market things: airline deregulation and trucking deregulation were Carter not Reagan initiatives. And Carter also appointed the great Paul Volcker to be head of the Federal Reserve. As you may recall, it was Volcker’s courageous and controversial interest rate policy that finally broke the back of stagflation. 

I just can’t imagine Obama reversing course like that. He’s living too much in the faculty lounge alternate reality to ever change his tune.

51 year old actor marries 16 year old girl

From all quarters, the betrothal of actor Doug Hutchison (age 51) and Courtney Stodden (age 16) has received much reproval. However, I note this pop culture event for another reason: to contrast it with the lack of similar criticism on homosexual marriage. Even when a gay couple subsequently adopt a child, concerns about the negative effect this might have on the child or society is almost nonexistent.

Of course, this is partly because the freedom of a 51-year-old man to marry a 16-year-old girl is not subject to the same level of protection from the commissars of political correctness that homosexuality is, making the criticism of the latter activities more risky. 

It seems to me that if we are ever going to upend the topsy-turvy moral order we find ourselves in, the terms of the debate must be changed. Aside from enforcement concerns, the underlying reason why gay marriage and gay adoption are more socially acceptable than certain heterosexual pairings is because gay activists have wisely framed the political debate over these issues in terms of freedom (a good thing) and protecting victims (also a good thing). Using these standards, the values of the new morality win by a country mile.

The task for social conservatives is to reframe the debate in terms of tow competing moral codes, that are mutually incompatible. Which is better for society? Phrased this way, the decisive factors are not necessarily freedom issues or victimology any more. What ultimately counts is which moral code – taken as a whole - is healthier for society to adopt in the long term. To determine that, one must weigh the positive and negative aspects of each. With one set of standards, there is more personal freedom: a good thing. With the other, there is less freedom for individual action (a bad thing, in and of itself), but the basic building block of society, and the principal mechanism by which society replicates itself – the family unit – is strengthened. Add the pluses and minuses of each set of rules and take it from there.

In reading about the marriage of Mr. Hutchison and Miss Stodden, it occurs to me that the best way to begin reframing the debate is to point out the contradictions of the new morality as they unfold. Which is what I just did.

The Galliano trial in France is an outrageous assault on free speech

Let me be clear about one thing: I find John Galliano to be a disgusting person - on many different levels. But that is no reason to take away his right to free speech. Currently in Paris, he is being tried for making an anti-Semitic rant in a restaurant. If guilty, he can be fined or thrown in jail. This is an abomination. 

If the plaintiffs found what he said to be offensive, they could have asked the restaurant to throw him out for rudeness. And that would be fine. Just because you have a right to free speech doesn’t mean that there is an onus on others to put up with your behaviour. And if the restaurant had chosen to ignore the matter, that should have been OK from a legal perspective because, at the end of the day, it was a private matter.

Free speech is one of the most sacred rights in a free country because it allows ideas and thoughts to be debated – and officials in the government, media and academia to be criticized. When this right is proscribed, then it means some government entity or commission has to be put in charge of classifying what speech is permissible and which isn’t. And when you have that, society is no longer free.

Of course, in his rant, Galliano also said things like, “I will kill you.” As it is widely understood by legal theory and precedent, threats of violence are not considered protected speech. For this reason, if the authorities had prosecuted Galliano on the criminal charge of uttering death threats, I would have had no problem with that. There would have been no free speech issue because political speech was not being imperilled. To remain a free society, it is precisely political speech that must be protected (which, incidentally, is why campaign finance laws are a bad thing). 

On a positive side, Geert Wilders was acquitted of hate speech. At least, freedom is winning somewhere.

Ordering the Posties back to work is not a free market solution to the postal strike

Most conservatives do not like unions in general - and postal unions in particular - because they believe unions are an enemy of productivity. And to a significant extent they are right. Unions very often stand in the way of productivity-enhancing innovations. Nevertheless, this does not mean that legislation aimed at ending the postal strike is the right thing to do from a free market perspective simply because you are opposing the unions.

I believe that the best thing parliament could do to counter the postal strike is to remove Canada Post’s monopoly on door-to-door mail delivery. Because it would take a while for competitors to step up and do the job Canada Post won’t do, this legislation wouldn’t provide quick relief. But it would result in much needed, long-term changes to mail delivery in Canada. The door-to-door mail delivery industry would then experience the sort of creativity that free market competition unleashes, becoming both more efficient and providing unique and previously unthought-of solutions and services.

While a back-to-work law will cause mail service to return faster, what we will get when it does resume is just more of the same-old-same-old. 

 

Barrack Obama, Karl Rove’s secret agent?

According to Hillsdale College’s history professor, Paul Rahe:

“There are those who have nightmares about Barack Obama. He was not, they suspect, born in the United States. He was not and could never be eligible to be elected President of the United States, and behind his candidacy lay a great conspiracy to impose upon an unwitting populace the agent of a foreign power profoundly hostile to our country.

I am not in their number. I admit to lunacy, but my fantasies run in another direction. Every once in a while I lie awake – or am I then awake? I know not – pinching myself (or so I think).

“Could it be true?” I ask myself. “Has everything that we have seen in the course of the last twenty-seven months been engineered by the supreme Machiavel of our age – that evil genius Karl Rove?”

“So, I suggest that this must all be the result of machinations on the part of Karl Rove. Rush Limbaugh failed with Operation Chaos, but Karl has succeeded with Operation Annihilation. Think about it. After the events of this week, what are the chances that Barack Obama will take Wisconsin in the general election scheduled to be held a bit more than eighteen months from now?”

Of course, Rahe’s suggestion is tongue-in-cheek, but it does bring out a factor in Barack Obama’s life that I have pondered several times: At the point of his inauguration on Jan 20, 2009, it can fairly be said that Barack Obama was the luckiest man alive. With very little effort on his part, he lazily buoyed upwards on a path from complete obscurity to the very pinnacle of power. Yet from Jan 21, 2009 until today, his luck, which had hitherto been bountiful, has completely deserted him.

As President, he has had the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to crap. The left-wing progressives thought that with one of their own in the White House, they would experience victory. Instead, all of their program – Keynesian stimulus, ownership of means of production (think GM and Chrysler), government regulation, government-run health care, open borders, climate change, deficit spending – is now completely discredited and widely unpopular. A grass-roots, small-government movement – the Tea Party - rose up under Obama to become the driving force in American politics today, at the same time that Obama’s own AstroTurf group, ACORN, was discredited for aiding and abetting underage prostitution. When he tried to negotiate with Iran, a popular pro-democracy, anti-Islamist revolution took place in the streets of Teheran – making his engagement strategy (which the mullahs in Iran contemptuously brushed aside) look stupid.

From the perspective of the left, Barack Obama is exactly the right man at exactly the wrong time. If he had been President in the palmy days of the 1990’s, he might have been able to get somewhere, but by expanding entitlement programs, growing government debt and imposing costly regulations right after a major financial meltdown he precipitated an unmitigated disaster.

It will be a very long time before another radical progressive is given the keys to the US Federal Government again.

Amen to that!

Iceland shows the way out of a financial meltdown: the government should do nothing

Iceland was one of the countries that was hit hardest by the Great Recession but since then, it seems to have recovered well. What did it do? Let's find out…

"Iceland didn’t rescue its banks.  It couldn’t afford to do it.  So, they went bust. Iceland looked like it was going down a path of permanent financial armageddon. However, Iceland is in better financial shape than the rest of Europe today.

'Europe’s bailout path has only diverted ever-more resources to failing enterprises, postponing and deepening the problem. Iceland’s restructuring was both painful and costly for the population, but the government did not throw good money after bad, and the taxpayers were spared a nationalization of private debts. Is it any wonder that forward-looking financial markets are now betting on the Icelandic recovery?'

No Dodd-Frank. No super heroics. Just a level headed, clear eyed administration of bankruptcy law."

This reminds me of the depression of 1920, which many say was more severe than the Great Depression, even though it lasted barely a year. The President at that time, Warren Harding (the one professional historians always place near the bottom of great President rankings), approached that crisis with the same laissez faire policy of today’s Icelanders. As a result, the depression ended just as quickly.

The lesson for Obama here is that if you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat it.

 

Organic farming causes yet another E. coli outbreak

A friend once told me of an apple he forgot on the counter. After a couple of days in the sun, it still hadn’t rotted. He concluded that there is something wrong with that. The problem being that the apple was so full of preservatives that he didn’t consider it a real apple any more. The implication being that there is something wrong with preservatives.

One of the negative consequences of the modern world is that our mastery of biology and chemistry has so effectively shielded us from the bad effects of the natural world that we have become complacent. In our complacency, we sometimes indulge in Rousseauian romantic fantasies about nature. In this make-believe world, the words ‘natural’ and ‘good’ are synonyms.

This is of course not true but it is self-defeating, as the latest E. coli outbreak in Europe illustrates. We now have proof that the E. coli originated from an organic farm. Many civilized people today, particularly those who live in the big city, assume that nature is benign. It is not. The universe is indifferent, and it requires real work and constant vigilance to keep us safe and sound. Most farmers and other people who work the land are aware of nature’s dark side because they see nature up close every day. Urban hipsters - cocooned downtown - never experience Mother Nature’s cruelty. As a result of their antiseptic environment, they are scarcely aware of all the technical processes that must work around the clock to keep them healthy. This creates within them the kind of arrogance that the ignorant sometimes exhibit.

One thing is for sure though, with the current popularity of romantic illusions about nature, we can expect more of these completely avoidable outbreaks of disease in the future.

 

An ode to hypocrisy

Even though I have enjoyed the long, protracted self-destruction of Anthony Weiner as much as any red-blooded conservative, I must say that I am a bit disturbed by the logic used by many conservative commentators to condemn him. Specifically, I am not convinced that Weiner’s sexual indiscretions by themselves make him unfit to hold public office.

Before you accuse me of hedonism, let me say that I am not. I am a strong defender of the old morality – the one that was in effect before the 1960’s. And there is no question that this moral code was much harsher on sexual indiscretion than the present day, post-60’s, whatever-floats-your-boat sensibilities.

Nevertheless, I believe it is wrong to conflate personal and public morality. One of the most odious principles of the left is the idea that the personal is political, which has led to the noxious rule of Political Correctness today. The right should not go down that road. We do not need religious leaders probing into our personal thoughts any more than we need human rights commissars probing into whether we have ever had racist thoughts.

Have I ever had a racist (or impure) thought? Of course I have and I defy anybody to tell me with a straight face that he has not. Human beings are made from a very crooked timber. We are not angels, and our moral code must take that into account.

So how did the old morality deal with human imperfection? That is a good question with a simple answer: hypocrisy.

While the old morality was indeed much harsher in what it condemned in the abstract, it was often more tolerant when it came to specific individual failures. There is no doubt that the old morality would roundly condemn the actions of Anthony Weiner, but there is also no doubt that the old morality would have tried to sweep things under the rug first. The fangs would only come out if the matter blew out into the open.

Look at how the press corps protected America’s politicians in the past. And I am not just talking about Democrat icon JFK and his bevy of girlfriends. They looked the other way too when it came to Dwight Eisenhower and his comely English driver, Kay Somersby. The old morality protected America’s leaders because the people implicitly realized that human beings are inherently flawed but that America, nevertheless, still needs effective leaders. And for a leader to be effective, he needs a modicum of dignity. We must keep in mind that dignity is a virtue primarily about appearances and surface. What determines your outward dignity is not what you are on the inside but what your fellow man thinks of you.

All of which gets me to the public crime committed by Representative Anthony Weiner: he turned himself into a joke. As a Congressman, Anthony Weiner is a man who wields power. To be effective at wielding power, the people must be able to look up to you with respect. If Weiner had been able to keep his indiscretions under wraps, his followers and his constituents would still have been able to do this. But he wasn’t able to do this because he transmitted text messages and compromising photos of himself to women he barely knew in a medium where the retransmission of information is very easy. His reckless behaviour made what happened to him a foregone conclusion. As of right now, nobody can take him seriously. No constituent can say, “Anthony Weiner is my representative” without feeling a sense of embarrassment. As a result, he can no longer wield power effectively. This makes him weak. And that makes him despised. And this is the real reason why he must go.

 

Anthony Weiner is not a bad man; he’s a silly man - with a silly name

Personally, I don’t really care about Anthony Weiner’s sex life one way or the other. And I don’t care if what he did hurt his wife. She had to have known he was an overbearing, preening narcissist when she married him. Heck, those were probably the qualities that attracted her to him in the first place. Well, this is what you get when you marry someone like that. What did she expect – a dutiful provider? Furthermore, unlike some of Ted Kennedy’s wilder escapades, Representative Weiner didn’t break the law or kill anybody.

However, to represent his constituents in Washington and to conduct the business of the state, a Congressman needs to maintain a certain level of honour and dignity. But as of this Monday, Representative Anthony Weiner couldn’t be any less dignified if he had a red nose and a seltzer bottle.

 

Andrew Breitbart’s fabulous Weiner roast

Yesterday, over at Breitbart’s Big Government website, more compromising Twitter pics were released, and this time with the identity of Democrat Representative Anthony Weiner clearly visible. With a promise of many more pics to come (drip, drip, drip), Weiner had no choice but to call a press conference and fess up.

Well… as Breitbart happened to be in town on another matter, he attended the press conference as an observer. But because Weiner was late to his own meeting, Andrew Breitbart was called to the podium by the journalists present. He energetically complied, demanding an apology from Weiner for smearing him in his shoot-the-messenger, damage control strategy. When Anthony Weiner did finally show up, he was so flustered that he told Breitbart he was sorry - in addition to confessing to sending the offending pictures.

Hammering Weiner with compromising picture and then getting him to apologize to his tormentor! Brilliant! That’s the take-no-prisoners fighting spirit Republicans need more of.

And less of the pandering, bipartisan backscratching and go-along-to-get-along surrenderism of Mitt Romney, John McCain and John Boehner.