From Paul Ryan here:

Simply brilliant!

From Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter of Michigan (the smartest man in Washington):

No matter how imperfect the health care system is right now, it cannot be fixed by the most broken entity in the world today, which is the United States government.

In my younger years (not that I’m all that old now), I was pretty liberal and had the potential to become a radical. I’ve often said that if I came of age in the sixties instead of the eighties I probably would have been fallen with real radicals and would have been lost forever. As it was, the most extreme phase I went through was my obsession with the Oliver Stone movie JFK. He convinced me that Kennedy was a peacenik who was ready to leave Vietnam and that our President had been killed by the CIA. Upon further learning and reflection, I now realize how silly all that was, but I still appreciate Stone’s movie as a brilliant work of art/propaganda.

That movie came to mind last night as I pondered Obamacare weekend. Specifically, in the middle of JFK there is a long scene where Donald Sutherland describes the conspiracy to Kevin Costner. At one point, he says, in effect, don’t get too caught up in the details of exactly what happened. Who shot from which rooftop is really just a distraction. The important thing is to ask who benefited from the whole thing. I don’t think Sutherland actually uses the Latin aphorism “Cui bono?”, but I’m a lawyer so I get paid extra whenever I can throw in some Latin gratuitously.

I suspect that Pelosi will find the votes and Obamacare will be passed this weekend. We will surely be distracted worrying about whip counts, “deem and pass,” parliamentary objections to reconciliation, etc. But as Sutherland explains to Costner in JFK, all that is just a parlor game to distract you and keep you guessing. What we should really be asking is: Cui bono? Who benefits?

Raise you hand if you believe that the Democratic caucus is a group of courageous altruists who are passing healthcare because of their compassion for the uninsured.

Anyone? Anyone?

That’s what I thought. Now, raise your hands if you think that the Democrats really believe that the country is going to take a second look at Obamacare, change its judgment, and rewards the Democrats in November.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

So why, then, are they engaging in this apparent act of political suicide? The best answer to that question, I believe, has been articulated by Mark Steyn:

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

In other words, the Democrats are willing to trade short term electoral losses in 2010 (and maybe even 2012) for the long-term “permanent left-of-center political culture” identified by Steyn.

That’s what is really at stake this weekend. Let’s not forget it.

I love Peggy Noonan. I have ever since I read What I Saw at the Revolution longer ago than I care to admit. She has an excellent article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the Bret Baier interview with President Obama earlier this week. I agree with most everything she says in the article, but there is one passage that sticks out like a sore thumb:

I’m speaking of the interview Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report With Bret Baier.” Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this newspaper, so one should probably take pains to demonstrate that one is attempting to speak with disinterest and impartiality, in pursuit of which let me note that Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane.

This is gratuitous, asinine and beneath Peggy. Assume, for the sake of argument, that Glenn Beck is insane. Is Peggy really so intellectually insecure that she feels the need to state that for the benefit of the Lefties in her audience rather than letting her argument stand on its own merits? For the record, she has no reason to be so insecure. She is a women of great intelligence, wit, and insight. What she says always deserves to be taken seriously.

But clearly Beck is not insane. He is, as he often describes himself, a “recovering alcoholic, college dropout, self-educated, ex-D.J., rodeo clown.” But he has something valuable to say. No one—left or right—should dismiss Beck and accept the pop culture caricature of him. Yes, he can be a bit goofy at times. But he also inspired millions of soccer moms and football dads to read important works like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and R.J. Pestritto’s American Progressivism. Indeed, here is Steven Hayward’s balanced appraisal of Beck:

The case of Glenn Beck, Time magazine’s “Mad Man,” is more interesting. His on-air weepiness is unmanly, his flirtation with conspiracy theories a debilitating dead-end, and his judgments sometimes loopy (McCain worse than Obama?) or just plain counterproductive (such as his convoluted charge that Obama is a racist). Yet Beck’s distinctiveness and his potential contribution to conservatism can be summed up with one name: R.J. Pestritto.

Pestritto is a young political scientist at Hillsdale College in Michigan whom Beck has had on his TV show several times, once for the entire hour discussing Woodrow Wilson and progressivism. He is among a handful of young conservative scholars, several of whom Beck has also featured, engaged in serious academic work critiquing the intellectual pedigree of modern liberalism. Their writing is often dense and difficult, but Beck not only reads it, he assigns it to his staff. “Beck asks me questions about Hegel, based on what he’s read in my books,” Pestritto told me. Pestritto is the kind of guest Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would never think of booking.

Okay, so Beck may lack Buckley’s urbanity, and his show will never be confused with “Firing Line.” But he’s on to something with his interest in serious analysis of liberalism’s patrimony. The left is enraged with Beck’s scandal-mongering over Van Jones and ACORN, but they have no idea that he poses a much bigger threat than that. If more conservative talkers took up the theme of challenging liberalism’s bedrock assumptions the way Beck does from time to time, liberals would have to defend their problematic premises more often.

Hayward is right. Noonan, however, felt the need to give a nod to the pop caricature in order to gain “street cred” with her audience (and, presumably, her friends on Morning Joe). She ought to be familiar with the way the Left attempts to trivialize conservatives who are a threat to the liberal establishment. She did, after all, work for Ronald Reagan.

By playing the “Beck is insane” card she is doing the same thing that the Left did to George W. Bush for eight years with “Bush is stupid” jokes. Such jokes were themselves pathetically unfunny and ungrounded (as the rank incompetence of that last 14 months surely demonstrates by comparison). But they were never meant to be funny or true. Rather, they were a cultural marker. Like a lawyer who wears a suit and tie in a courtroom, or an art student who wears a Che t-shirt around campus, or a Hollywood starlet who wears a Versace gown on the red carpet, the “jokes” were meant to send a signal about the speaker’s own place in the cultural milieu.

Rather than bowing to that cultural marker, Noonan would have been better served to do what Christopher Hitchens once did; namely, tell the emperors that they have no clothes:

I expect better things of Peggy Noonan, but that single, ill-advised paragraph about Glenn Beck will not keep me from eagerly awaiting her next writing.

Dan “He Couldn’t Sell Watermelons” Rather not being the least bit rude to George H.W. Bush in 1988:

And how about this one:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I am a fan of Mediaite, a relatively new web site from Dan Abrams. In fact, I’ve always liked Abrams. I’m sure he’s more liberal than I am, but he’s a fair-minded guy. He’s also a very smart lawyer, which is no surprise given that his father is one of the legal giants of our age. Luckily, his fair-mindedness has, until now, been reflected in the content at Mediaite, which criticizes both left and right legitimately and in fairly equal measure.

But is that changing? I’ve been very disturbed by a series of postings over the last few days by Glynnis MacNicol of Mediaite attacking Glenn Beck nastily and unfairly. I fear this may signal the decline of Abrams’ new venture.

By way of background, long before I went to law school I was a philosophy student with a concentration in jurisprudence (i.e., the philosophy of law). Thus, before I ever had any formal training in torts, contracts, or civil procedure, I studied subjects like natural law, positivism, and the Hart-Dworkin debate. So, I’ve been thinking about these issues for well-over twenty years.

Against this backdrop, enter Glenn Beck. On his Monday night show, Beck played a video of Senator Tom Harkin saying that passage of Obamacare would turn health care into an “inalienable” right (I think he meant “unalienable” right—one of my pet peeves). Beck responded by saying the following:

Tom, I don’t know if you’ve read the Declaration of Independence but you don’t have the power to grant people rights. You don’t create them, you don’t enhance them. They are not yours. In case you missed it: “All mean are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Who the hell do you think you are Congress? You are not God.

Whether you agree or disagree with him, Beck has a legitimate point. On the most basic level, Congress cannot, by definition, “create” an “unalienable” right because any “right” that Congress creates it can also destroy (i.e., alienate) by repeal.

Moreover, Beck is accurately describing the theory of “natural law” that was born with St. Thomas Aquinas, fueled the Enlightenment, was the intellectual foundation for our Founding Fathers, and was conventional wisdom in our country well into the 20th century. Indeed, as Beck correctly points out, this thinking is embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which says that we are “endowed by [our] Creator” with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are merely “instituted among Men” in order “to secure these rights.”

(more…)

Remember this?

Well, its looks like it’s come to this:

Since George Stephanopoulos left This Week, I’ve been pulling for the great Jake Tapper to get the job. He is a real journalist in the Tim Russert mold. But today Mediaite is reporting that CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has been offered the job.

Let me be the first to predict that this is going to be a disaster of New Coke proportions. I can only hope that when Amanpour implodes, the higher-ups at ABC will come to their senses and turn back to Tapper.

Seriously, do you want to watch this for an hour every Sunday?