Harold Kildow writes:
Readers of this blog will want to know, if they haven't already heard, of Christopher Hitchens' dust up in Lebanon with the brown shirts of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, on a trip there with independent journalist Michael Totten. Totten's first person account gives a view of the seamy underbelly of life in a place overshadowed by these throwbacks of the 1930's fascist era.

Well, at least now we know where not to place our hopes for a GOP answer to Barack Obama in 2012. After President Obama's speech before the joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal stepped into the bright and unflattering light of national public scrutiny and made it helpfully clear that he is nowhere near ready for the highest office, and perhaps never will be.



Here is David Brooks's take.



Nicole Gelinas at City Journal has this to say in "Jindal's Missed Opportunity."

Harold adds:

Hold on there partner. Way too early to scratch Jindal. Nicole Gelinas's experise, and it truly is expert, is financial and economic. David Brooks went over to the dark side many moons ago, and is only correct as often, and for the same reason, as a stopped clock. To listen to these two--and a host of other progressive "conservatives" who so want to be included by the cool kids in DC, is to buy into the prevailing sentiment that the way something is said is far more important than what is said. Obama delivered a soothing imitation of a rationally prudent and pragmatic leader offering a program to address the "crisis". (I submit the main crisis is the wholesale government takeover of American life, establishing soul-killing socialism for generations if not forever.) But his words belie his intent--he is not going to waste this "crisis", and his cool rhetoric is like the spoonful of sugar helping the socialist medicine to go down. If Jindal stumbled a bit on his freshman outing, so what? Are we mistaking speech for action? Remember how Clinton used to announce some policy goal, and then act as if the work were done, problem solved? Jindal is only 37; in his remaining time as governor (which is likely to run two terms) he will make Louisiana one of the bright spots in the nation with his tax cuts and regulatory reforms. Standing in an empty hall in front of a camera crew responding to the One in the conspicuous splendor of the House of Representatives and in front of a partisan audience is a gauranteed second place finish, especially when the MSM can be counted on to discount the Republican response no matter what--even before the fact. The "we want to be cool too" Republicans are not helping by assuming the whole of the Democrat critique and taking it on as their own, albeit in a slightly modified form. If style is the only or even the main criteria, we are vulnerable to demagoguery in a way we have not previously seen. Jindal will get better--in fact has been better many times--and will be around as a leading voice for conservatism for decades. I am not dismayed by his bobbling the ball on this play--the game is not over.

David adds in turn:

Harold, after I read your helpful post on Beirut (and, with the news of Hitchens getting a beating, a concerning one), I wondered if I would also find a rejoinder from you to my Jindal post. You did not disappoint.

I can't say you're wrong. I can only say that I'm skeptical.

If he's a learner with uncultivated native ability, I'll be thrilled. But what he needs to learn is the art of rhetoric. Of course you are right that the way something is said is not more important than the way it is said. But what a political leader says gets lost and even distorted if he doesn't master the art of presentation. That includes prudently applying his principles in view of his particular circumstances and audience so that his audience--those he wants to elect him--will embrace the wisdom of those principles. I think he missed on both scores. But we are agreed in hoping that he will grow in office.

(Dr. Harold Kildow is associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.)

The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it. …

Most often, however, the law of unintended consequences illuminates the perverse unanticipated effects of legislation and regulation. In 1692 the English philosopher John Locke, a forerunner of modern
economists, urged the defeat of a parliamentary bill designed to cut the maximum permissible rate of interest from 6 percent to 4 percent. Locke argued that instead of benefiting borrowers, as intended, it would hurt them. People would find ways to circumvent the law, with the costs of circumvention borne by borrowers. To the extent the law was obeyed, Locke concluded, the chief results would be less available credit and a redistribution of income away from “widows, orphans and all those who have their estates in money.” (Concise Encyclopedia of Economics)

Iowahawk's adaptation of Margaret Bourke-White's 1937 original

It's the poor who pay the price for ill-advised government "help"

A "must read" on this subject is The Economist's View of the World by Steven Rhoads (Cambridge, 1985). This University of Virginia professor explains what basic economic concepts people people need to understand in order to be effective public servants in the modern world. He then brings political wisdom to economics, explaining how a fuller, political perspective needs to supplement the economist's understanding of human affairs.

In this video clip, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) admits that we may have to nationalize the banks, and my own Congressman, Pete King (R-NY), is open to the idea. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who is as far off in left field as anyone in Congress, says with great satisfaction, "We've come a long way!" Yes, Congresswoman, but it's not progress. It's plummeting.



Actually, when Pete King is seriously entertaining the notion of nationalizing banks, it makes me wonder what they know that I don't know.

The Economist is also talking along those lines.

Here is an excerpt from this week's cover story, "The Obama Rescue," which it calls "a huge wasted opportunity in the economic crisis."

America cannot rescue the world economy alone. But this double offensive [the stimulus bill and Geithner's proposed fix for the financial system] by its biggest economy could potentially have broken the spiral of uncertainty and gloom that is gripping investors, producers and consumers across the globe.

Alas, that opportunity was squandered. Mr Obama ceded control of the stimulus to the fractious congressional Democrats, allowing a plan that should have had broad support from both parties to become a divisive partisan battle. More serious still was Mr Geithner’s financial-rescue blueprint which, though touted as a bold departure from the incrementalism and uncertainty that had plagued the Bush administration’s Wall Street fixes, in fact looked depressingly like his predecessors’ efforts: timid, incomplete and short on detail. Despite talk of trillion-dollar sums, stockmarkets tumbled. Far from boosting confidence, Mr Obama seems at sea.

They explain that a fiscal stimulus without fixing the financial system cannot bring lasting economic recovery. But the bad news is: "The scale of troubled loans and the estimates of likely losses—which are now routinely put at over $2 trillion—suggest many of the country’s biggest banks may be insolvent."

The Economist proposes "some form of 'bad bank' for toxic loans (with temporary nationalisation part of that cleansing process, if necessary) and guarantees to cover catastrophic losses in the “good” banks that remain." Of course, nothing is temporary in a Democrat power grab. The scary thing is, sadly, there may be no choice.

Harold Kildow shows us how a national book retailer has legitimized the new civil piety:


Well, I guess it's official then. Barack Obama is in fact the new messiah, as the employees of this Border's Books store in Dallas, no doubt enthusiastic worshippers of the One, seek to do homage to him in their own small way. Think of the little drummer boy's gift to the old messiah; you know, the one whose name must not be mentioned in any public place. h/t RedState

But all seriousness aside, notice that "Religion" is centered between the "Historical Studies" and the "America" sections. I'm not sure this is what Lincoln was thinking of when he was promoting America's "civil religion". Looks like the twenty-somethings running the store think so. Welcome to Obama's America, where the ACLU's vaunted freedom from religion frees us to worship the One. Truth is heresy, heresy truth.

-- Harold Kildow, associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.

Harold Kildow writes:

These words are good to hear coming from a Democratic President. At the most recent National Prayer breakfast, President Obama said,

No matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone. There is a force for good greater than government ("Obama Expands Faith-based Programs," New York Times, Feb. 5, 2009).

Before you start thinking that you had the guy all wrong, however, consider these questions.

Will religious groups be forced to hire homosexuals? “No matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate,” he said. In Democratese, those words have a very limited range of meaning.

Will Christian groups be forced to hire people from outside their faith? Will this disciple of Jeremiah Wright corral Evangelical groups into the social gospel step by step with the allure of "free money for good work?" Likely both. Last July, during the campaign, he spoke from what seemed to be firmly held principles, saying,

“If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion.”

Here is an interesting footnote, however. He also said, “There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.” Nonetheless, his religious conscience is clear in his support for partial birth abortion.

I'm feeling all "United-States-of-Obama" at the moment, all sweetly in agreement with others who have moved beyond the old disputes. I just read Michael Kinsley who, in the previous age of darkness, we would have called a "liberal." But whether he has changed or I have changed, or maybe we've all changed (or been changed), he makes a lot of sense in his recent TIME essay, "Entitlement Myths" (Feb. 9, 2009).

His point is essentially that whereas Social Security was established to protect the aged against poverty and suffering in their years of disability or retirement, it has become a way of saving money to pass along to your children.

Meanwhile, though, families--middle-class families, not just rich ones--are passing hundreds of thousands of dollars on to the next generation in their wills. Fair enough, if they worked for the money and saved it. In fact, wonderful. But much of this generosity, it turns out, is made possible by Social Security and Medicare. How much? Hard to say. What is easier to say with certainty is that most people today and in the future will get more back from these entitlement programs in retirement than they put in during their working lives.

Medicare and Social Security are supposed to be insurance against the perils of old age: poverty and illness. They are not supposed to be gifts or subsidies to the children of retirees. Yet that is what, in large part, they have become. The reason for insurance is that you can't predict the future. If an elderly woman has diabetes and her husband needs heart surgery, then dies anyway, leaving her impoverished, Medicare and Social Security should be there for her. And if it all costs far more than she ever put into the system, that's O.K. too.

But if our elderly woman dies with $691,000 in the bank, it's evident that she didn't need the government money to pay for her health care or to avoid plunging into poverty. She wasn't lying or cheating--she might have been legitimately worried--but her worries turned out to be unnecessary. And society, having kept its promise to her, should get at least part of that money back. Oh, yes, designing a system to achieve this would be a nightmare--maybe impossible. The incentive for old folks to squander their savings would be enormous. Maybe it can't work.

Social Security is childrens' inheritance security at the expense of national economic security.

When George W. Bush won the 2004 election he began spending his political capital attempting to reform Social Security. He utterly failed and sent his capital down a political rat hole. Kinsley challenges President Obama to keep this question in mind as we enter what the President has called a "new age" of "hard choices."

Glen Beck wonders "why not go all the way?"





When you take government money, you have to submit to government regulation. So now we see the government telling companies how much they can pay their executives, whether they should have private jets or even fly first class (or even fly at all!), where they can have their executive retreats (it's Wisconsin Dells this year, boys; enjoy the waterslide), and how much they can pay for a toilet stool. Yet businesses and industries are lining up to get in on this "free money."


George Bailey, in It's a Wonderful Life, learned to resist the allure such an offer of help. Like Mr Potter's seemingly kind offer to help the Savings and Loan survive their liquidity crisis, it's not a bailout, but a buyout. And he who pays the piper calls the tune.

But what's our problem with this? Who are we to question the Dear Leader? The government runs everything so cost efficiently and with such people-friendly service, perhaps it's better that they take charge of everything that's important.

But seriously, perhaps we all need to read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

(I thank my associate blogger Harold Kildow for the Glen Beck clip.)

Harold Kildow writes: What is it about evil that attracts human beings? It is the opposite of good, destructive of everything human beings hold dear, and find necessary for survival individually and as a species. All our large sociological constructs are ordered toward mitigating its destructive tendencies—religion and politics to be sure, social manners and mores, but even society itself, and civilization, can be said to be arrayed against evil and in favor of moral norms that favor not just human survival but human flourishing. The protection of women and children, of marriage and family, of trustworthiness and honest dealing, truth telling, are universally central to human societies. So, the question again—if evil is so easily recognized as an existential threat, why is it so pervasive? The dogmatic answer (and I cast no aspersions on the word or the concept of dogma) is that Original Sin corrupts us so thoroughly that evil is second nature—actually, according to the Bible, it is our first nature. In this light, the question becomes, how is it that any good exists in the world? And again, the dogmatic response is “greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” We are made in His image, and not even the god of this world can completely efface that image, try as he might. Yet evil seems to be the reigning characteristic of this world.

Judea Pearl, the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, writes in today’s WSJ (Feb 3, 09) on the seventh anniversary of his murder, of the acceptance of evil by the academic and journalist elite.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

The “gift” of being able to be disgusted by evil has been a long time in being sloughed off. Perhaps the point marking the serious turn toward evil was the advent of the “new journalism” of Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Norman Mailer, (The Executioner’s Song) both of whom made the cool, dispassionate observation and depiction of murder by cool dispassionate murderers seem like the setting of a new baseline for analysis. Drawing on the wired-in impulse toward the grotesque and the evil, first pointed out by Plato—he has Leontius in the Republic unable to look away from the floating corpses at the seaport of Athens—journalism, philosophy, and literary criticism have, as Dr Pearl titles his piece, “normalized” evil, even made it respectable as a response by the “Other” to the pc litany of charges against the West. Philosophy trickles down—what is germinated in seminars, conferences, and books takes root and spreads across society, taking in an ever larger expanse of society. Thus, it was not long after Foucault’s celebration of the Marquis de Sade (Discipline and Punish) before the bloodiest, most hideous, graphic, and pornographic murder thrillers were on offer from Hollywood, soon becoming campy, ironic parodies of themselves, offered up as little more than cartoons for social touch-points for knowing teens.

Roger Shattuck analyses evil into four categories: natural evil—weather catastrophes, plagues, and the like; and three sub-types of human evil:

Moral evil refers to actions undertaken knowingly to harm or exploit others in contravention of accepted moral principles or statutes within a society.

Radical evil applies to immoral behavior so pervasive in a person or a society that scruples and constraints have been utterly abandoned;…evil so extreme that it can no longer recognize its own atrocity. Lenin stated it forcefully: "The dictatorship means -- learn this once and for all -- unrestrained power based on force, not on law."

Metaphysical evil designates an attitude of assent and approval toward moral and radical evil, as evidence of superior human will and power. Thus forms of evil arising from human agency are given a status as inevitable -- effectively a reversion to natural evil.

Shattuck argues that the postmodern philosophical obsession with overturning truth and all objectively recognized standards, arising in the first instance from its worship of the thought of Frederich Nietzsche, is what has led to what Judea Pearl calls the normalization of evil. In academic parlance, it is the elevation and valorization of “transgression.” It is in this atmosphere that evil has gotten for itself the name of the good, or at least the “cool.” Thus, all the university courses featuring masturbation, pole dancing, prostitution, and pornography offered in our most prestigious institutions; the long since established argot of “cool”, where “bad”, “wicked”, and even “evil” are descriptors not just socially acceptable, but indicative of one’s cultural bone fides. (The reductio in my mind is “Bad Girls of the Bible”, an attempt to appropriate the current cultural nomenclature for use in a bible study for church ladies). All of pop culture seems to have been given over to evil and all its works: heavy metal music (note the allusion is to poison), and even “death metal”; rap music’s glorification of every pathology in existence; most of Hollywood’s production for the past thirty years; comic books, and on and on—dozens of other examples have no doubt come to your mind already. The continuous struggle between good and evil is of course the central element in all of literature and poetry, from the dawn of civilization; but the viewpoint has changed—compare Quenton Tarantino’s ironic distance and coolness in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, etc, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, or Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for a not untypical contrast.

We seem to be at a point in our civilization where we have succumbed to evil in its metaphysical sense—where forms of evil arising from human agency are given a status as inevitable -- effectively a reversion to natural evil. “People are evil—get used to it”, would be a slogan capturing the zeitgeist. Or, as this fellow’s T-shirt states) watch the whole video) , “Nice day to rob people.” In fact, as the video shows, many people actually prefer evil, as both Paul and James, following Jesus, aver.

Acceptance of evil is a characteristic of decadence, and Western societies are nothing if not decadent; thus evil is celebrated, goodness is denigrated and mocked.

Perhaps it has always been so. But never with so much cool.

-- Harold Kildow, associate blogger at Principalities and Powers.