Obama The Sphinx

What a puzzle this man Obama can be.

While reading a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute last week, the President of the United States quotes the Declaration of Independance, but -- avoids? refuses? forgets? -- to include three seconds-worth of text... the image above captures the pose he wore as a visual ellipsis rather than admit that his fellow Americans hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.





Is there nothing to the timing of this long pause? Did he simply lose his place while reading from the teleprompter? Or is there something about that particular part of the quote that Obama finds... troubling?

[Hat Tip to Guy Benson]

Twilight of the old party system?

Belmont Club » That’s the Way You Do It

The situation in which Britain finds itself is so dire that the Governor of the Bank of England told an American economist that whichever party won the current general election it would be “out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be.” David Cameron may find, immediately after taking control of the ship of state that he has been promoted to the captaincy of the Titanic.

That makes me feel a bit better about watching the UK election results tomorrow.

In the meantime, you might be interested in Adam K's analysis of how, in an America where the political center has all but been abandoned, politics is becoming a fight in which each of the two major parties seeks to destroy its rival in order to institute some new kind of political center and debate on new terms. However, the more a party is expressly aware of and publicly vocal about its desire to destroy the other party, the less successful it can be. Adam thus looks for the political issues that, if fought seriously, may nonetheless have the pragmatic effect of destroying the "criminal cult" that is today's Democratic Party.

America, where art thou?

The greatest problem with Obama may be that he is more interested in a certain image of himself and of his politics than with many aspects of human reality out there in America and the world that he little knows yet hopes to move with endless campaign speeches. In the weeks he has been in office, wealth built up over generations of hard work is being destroyed with frightening speed, and Obama seems disconnected, not talking about how he is going to help instill confidence to help stem the flow in the markets but rather about how he is going to spend money the nation doesn't yet have to save the nation. And yet he shows little interest in insuring his "stimulus" or bailout spending will actually create economically productive industries that can continue in future without constant inflows of government debt-financed money. John Hawkins at Pajamas Media » Overcoming the Recession: An Interview with Thomas Sowell asks economist Sowell

JH: Now, we’ve heard people say that this is a uniquely bad economic situation — that it could be as bad as the Depression, etc. However, looking at GDP and job loss numbers, it doesn’t look as bad as, say, the recession in the early 80s. So how bad is this really and if you were advising the president, what would you tell him to do?

Thomas Sowell: Resign.

[...]
because he is determined to interfere in the market. How did we get out of the recession in the early 80s? Reagan did nothing. The economy adjusted and we’ve had 20 years of growth, low inflation, and low unemployment.
[...]
JH: Now, I’d like you to elaborate on something you wrote in National Review back in 2007:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Thomas Sowell: That’s true, unfortunately. I just noticed this morning that … I am getting more and more emails from people who are simply despairing. They are saying that we may have reached the point of no return. We have had dumbed down education for enough generations that people don’t even realize that it’s dumbed down education. We have propaganda against all the institutions of this society, literally from the elementary school to the universities. You can’t raise a whole generation of people who don’t know how to think but are taught to resent anything that they don’t understand, and expect that you are going to survive in the long run.

I though this was a good way of putting our real problem, the ethical problem that is, ultimately, the real driver of history including its economic phenomena. Americans and Canadians today are often taught to resent, and not to understand the economic or political systems of which they are part so that they might freely and humbly make a realistic contribution to renewing these systems. Survival demands not only personal self-understanding, but knowledge that personal self-understanding is empty if it is not distilled from a greater human self-understanding. If you don't know how human ethical systems are generated in history, you can't know much about anything, including yourself. And who today is educated to have a good grasp of history, perhaps the most difficult of intellectual disciplines?

This leads to my second observation on today's posts at Pajamas Media. In one - Pajamas Media » Could Americans’ Discontent Turn Violent? - there are over a 100 comments from people who seem to think violent civil unrest is quite likely in America in the near future. One commenter, MikeD offers some observations on the thread, including these:

7. This comment thread would never have happened at any other time during the last 100 years–whether there was an internet or not. That indicates a revolutionary change in thinking, if nothing else.

8. America and Americans today are very different than other peoples in other places in other times. Historical parallels from our own past, Europe or any other culture/time do not apply.

Now I think that's an interesting question for further discussion: is he really right that the current unrest is of a scope and scale that no real parallel can be found in the last 100 years of conservative anger at the rise of "progressive" government in America? As for his second point, that historical parallels do not apply, I think this may only be correct if the question is will, how or when will the present system fall apart. By the nature of history, that sort of question is indeed unpredictable and ultimately not worth investing a lot of time and energy in worrying about. If there is something that you can save, find a way to save it, but it can only really be saved over time if you have some way to reinvest it. Where historical parallels do apply is when you start investing time and energy in asking how the system can be renewed. People not educated in history and some kind of anthropological/religious/ethical self-understanding of how we humans make history, will have a very hard time finding the courage or knowledge for how to work themselves out of a mess.

Thomas Sowell has two quick answers for how to move forward, but these are questions on which we need all to do a lot more talking: in economics, let disrupted markets find their bottom without a constant government intervention that makes business and individual investment decisions about the real value of present assets and future economic prospects into a crap shoot dependent on knowing which way the political winds will be blowing through Obama's ears, the day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after that. But having the patience and wisdom to let millions of people collectively make decisions through market interactions, instead of letting the wise man in Washington lead us, can only happen when and if there is a respect for individual and business freedom within the political sphere. While there is a lot of interaction back and forth between politics and economics, the bottom line, which becomes visible in crises like the present, is that ultimately the economic market is limited or framed by the political market, and not vice versa as dogmatic Marxists like to argue in giving an implicit license to politicians like Obama to take revenge on what they see as the usually ascendant economic forces, in the name of the people. But Obama is no David vs. Goliath. The people, or in other words, politics, with the violent potential to keep any market open or closed, are/is always ultimately sovereign as they always have been, at least in a latent or implicit state; pointing out the supremacy of politics over economics is only the starting point for hoping we can do something creative with a little self-knowledge about how the freest societies have been built up in the past and can hope to renew themselves and grow in future.

Such an observation should not be a license for political hubris at the top but a recognition that it is only the political and economic interactions and conversations of people far away from the centres of media attention that can ultimately determine whether a nation and economy gets up off its feet and finds it worthwhile working through massive problems again, or whether stagnation will grip the land and bring trouble into the streets. If Obama is only talking to those who resent the American system, he can really achieve nothing. Vague promises of change tied to interventionist policies premised on some reworking of the New Deal might get people collecting government pay cheques, until the ability of government to borrow or tax slowly diminishes those cheques (as the value of the government buck diminishes through inflation) but it cannot really get them working again in building what only free people learning from their own mistakes in pursuit of their own dreams and realities can do. Don't try to save the people from their mistakes. Don't let them starve or freeze, but make sure you leave room for the personal salvation that can only come, not from Daddy Obama promising to buy you a new tv or status symbol, but from actually learning what it means to belong to human history and the freedom that is implicit in the sharing of language, and hence politics. A president who talks but doesn't listen denies that freedom and denies reality in favor of some fantasy vision of a Gnostic leader, with special insight, redeeming a fallen world.

The Messiah has landed in Canada, but I'm still praying for Obama

J.L. Granatstein: It's all about Canada

What is striking, however, is that the public debate in the U.S., viciously partisan as it always is, ordinarily seems to hinge around great issues, around national interests. Americans know their nation has interests, and they can and do discuss how best to achieve them.

That does not seem to be the case in Canada.

None of our political parties talk of national interests, not even the Bloc Québécois, which purports to advance what it imagines to be Quebec's national interests. (We'll fight them on the Plains of Abraham or in the Elysée!)

No party even thinks of national interests. Programs always take priority, and special interests inevitably prevail. This is not healthy, and Canadians, especially Canadian leaders, need to face up to the reality that Canada's most important long-term needs are not being considered seriously.


And those realities?

We are not a great power and we will not become one. We cannot pretend any longer that we are even a moral superpower. We are a First World nation-state that makes its living by trading with the United States.

We truly cannot play any longer at petulant, childish anti-Americanism, something that seems even more foolish with Mr. Obama in office.

We are protected by Washington now and will be in the future (in the U.S. interest, not because we are such pleasant fellows), and we must stop our strong tendency to yearn for blue beret peacekeeping as the automatic and only role for our military. Simply because the U.S. goes to war does not mean the Americans are wrong. They sometimes are, but they might also be correct, and our government needs to shape our course carefully.

Those who see only American decline may be right, but they are far more likely to be wrong. What needs to be said loudly and clearly is that, if the U.S. falls into the pit, we will be one of the nations dragged down with it. It will take decades to diversify our trade, our economy and our security will be in serious jeopardy, and Canada will be forced to assume vast new financial burdens to re-establish its economic welfare and military security.

We had better pray for Mr. Obama to get America's act together – in our own national interests.