Beware the Sabato slant

Probably we've all seen Larry Sabato on TV during election season. The UVA political scientist is usually portrayed as an unbiased analyst, concerned mainly with the facts, especially statistics, and with political predictions. Well, in this world there is no such thing as "unbiased". In Larry's case, his writings reveal him to be a liberal through and through. The excerpts below from a recent essay of his illustrate this. (The entire text of his essay is linked here.)

Now Larry Sabato is a halfway reasonable guy, as liberals go. It isn't so much his political orientation that I object to, except in the sense that he's old enough to know better. What I object to mainly is the pretense that he's unbiased. That's also what I loathe and despise about most of the media, that they lie not only in the pictures they paint of the world, but even in what they themselves are all about.

Regarding the substance of Sabato's comments:

It is laughable to describe today's GOP as being "fiercely right-wing" and "harsh" in its conservativism. In fact, in the past dozen or so years the party has degenerated into confusion, so that today it doesn't know what it stands for. Conservatives, feeling betrayed, are among the harshest critics of this GOP, and many have advocated forming a third party. For a respected polical analyst to state the opposite of the clear facts is jaw-dropping.

Sabato says it is surprising that a conservative politician would advocate civil unions (as opposed to the oxymoronic "gay marriage") for homosexuals. Apparently whenever a conservative doesn't fit his mental model of "harsh", it is surprising to him.

My advice to liberals: When your preconceived model conflicts with the observed data, stop trying to change the data. It's your fundamental model that's wrong, so you should change it to match the data. However, if liberals did this, they would cease to be liberals.

Also, the stance he describes is not "moderate". As used today, a "moderate" is someone who doesn't know what he believes, and whose highest value is just to cave in to the lunatics and all get along.

Regarding the last point below, I asked David Yepsin whether the conventional wisdom was correct about Romney's Mormonism hurting him in Iowa. Yepsin replied that it both helped and hurt Romney among Iowa Republicans, and as far as he could tell the net effect was a wash. At least in Iowa, Yepsin clearly knows more about this than Sabato does. Sabato was just speculating from a liberal perspective, as if his mental model of the world were as good as actually knowing the facts.

Presidency 2012: The Invisible Primary BeginsA Commentary By Larry J. Sabato Friday, May 08, 2009

We at the Crystal Ball must beg your forgiveness. With fewer than 1,300 days left until the next general election for President, we have failed to offer a single analysis of this historic upcoming battle. With humility, and hoping for mercy, we submit this first update on 2012.

(snip)

Two moderate-conservative Republicans who are fresh faces could give the GOP more of a fighting chance in 2012. Two-term Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has found a way to win in a Democratic state without abandoning most traditional conservative positions. He is also in his 40s, with a blue collar background, possessing a pleasant demeanor and a sense of humor. (Having been on John McCain's short list for running-mate, he joked to this analyst after Palin was selected that he was "just one chromosome away from the vice presidency.") Whether Pawlenty intends to run for President is uncertain, and he has to decide about offering for a third term as Governor in 2010--always a risk in a Blue state. Will Republicans even accept a less harsh version of conservatism that isn't located in the Sunbelt?

An intriguing dark horse candidate is two-term Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. A proponent of gay civil unions and some other surprisingly moderate stances despite hailing from one of the nation's three or four most conservative states, Huntsman is openly testing the waters, and arguing that Republicans are headed for a long spell in the wilderness without a major ideological facelift. Wealthy and smooth in his public appearances, Huntsman makes a vital point, but undoubtedly he will strain the patience and tolerance of a fiercely right-wing party. His tiny base--Utah has but five electoral votes--doesn't help, and his Mormonism possibly will be a detrimental factor with many fundamentalist Christians, just as for Romney. (snip)

Larry J. Sabato is the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Presidential hectoring hurts economy

When Richard Nixon was in the process of damaging the American economy back in 1971 via wage and price controls, closing the gold window, etc., he used aggressive rhetoric to support his actions. I remember specifically his demonizing of financial "speculators". He virtually spat the word: Speculators! The epitome of evil, right? This week Obama was doing much the same thing to hedge fund managers and others, bullying them, calling for them to sacrifice, implying that they are unpatriotic, giving them the full load of overbearing denunciation. As if he had any clue what he was talking about.

Well, it turned out that the "speculators" were right and Nixon was wrong. And today, for the most part, the financial managers are right and Obama is wrong. When it comes to the economy, regardless of political party, the rule is: The politicians are always wrong. Regarding the economy, government has a reverse Midas touch: everything it touches turns to c**p. In recent years Congress touched the housing market via subprime loans, and we are now living with the result. Now the government is aggressively touching the financial markets in general, and the auto industry in particular. The results are predictable.

Republican leaders today, including the establishment wing of leaders on their "listening tour", tell us that the GOP must offer an affirmative alternative to Obama's massive taxing, spending and borrowing policies. They can't combat something with nothing, they say.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The correct approach is to educate the voters to the truth, rather than to compete with Democrats in pandering to their ignorance. The truth is that the free market, if allowed to operate, will ruthlessly correct the financial imbalances more quickly and more thoroughly than any government programs will. Government interference will just prolong the disease and the pain, and will mess up the economy for years. That's what FDR did in the 1930's, and that's what Obama is doing now.

Government has a legitimate role in enforcing contracts and in prosecuting fraud, insider trading, and other criminal activity, and in enabling a level playing field. But politicians have no ability to manage anything at all. When government attempts to override the market and to manage the economy on a large scale, the resulting economic system is called fascism. I recommend reading all about this in Jonah Goldberg's recent book, "Liberal Fascism".

Here are two informative rebuttals to Obama's hectoring of financial managers and his damaging actions in the financial markets. There's this one by Bill Frezza at Real Clear Markets. And this one by Cliff Asness at Business Insider.

If economics bores you or you think you can't understand it, please give these two articles a shot. The authors make the issues quite clear.

Lunacy or worse?

Rahm Emanuel is quoted today as saying that "thwarting Iran's nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians." Thus the Obama administration has adopted the Arab position as its own. Saudi Arabia and Egypt and other Sunni Arabs do regard Shiite Iran as a serious threat against them, but they are betting that the fools in our Western governments either don't understand that or are willing to play along in order to stab Israel in the back and gain some advantage with the oil-rich Arabs. Apparently they are correct.

Newt Gingrich and other sane commentators have wasted no time in condemning this position.

However, Gingrich and the other critics are emphasizing the wrong thing. They say that Obama is blackmailing our ally Israel, which of course is true. However, this is not the most glaring aspect of Obama's position. Emanuel is saying here that despite the hostile actions of Iran over the decades, and despite the haste it is making to develop nuclear weapons, the Obama administration does not regard a nuclear armed Iran as being a serious threat to the United States. That is completely preposterous and extremely dangerous to both the United States and Israel.

I fully expected that these Chicago politicians would be prepared to betray everyone, including our closest allies and even our own country. However, it is amazing that they have announced this fact so blatantly and so soon.

We must now face the fact that the voters have elected as our president an enemy of the United States.

Jack

'Suicide of West' imminent?

National Review listed James Burnham's "Suicide of the West" as one of the top 10 books that nudged America toward political conservatism in recent decades. (See rankings in their 50th anniversary edition.) Burnham was a young Trotskyite who turned against Communism and in his later years wrote for National Review. He wrote this book in 1964.

Burnham's thesis was that liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.

For a young person unschooled in political thought, such as I was, this thesis was difficult to believe. Both JFK and LBJ were aggressive in their Cold War liberalism, which in those days included a strong pro-American component. Even the true believers on the Left assured us that they were pro-American, despite appearances to the contrary. Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs and I.F. Stone were all leftist idealists, they never actually betrayed their country. Or so we were endlessly and emphatically told in the mass media and in our classrooms.

Well, it turned out that Burnham and his fellow conservatives were correct, and we had been lied to on virtually all fronts. We now know that Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Stone and many others on the American Left spied for the Soviet Union for years.

The leftists were not only for collectivism, they were against America and most of what it stood for. Their virulent assaults against the free market, against a strong military and against traditional American values were all of a piece. They regarded liberal journalists and liberal officials in all three branches of government as "useful idiots" and as loose allies in the steady drip of daily propaganda and assaults against America.

By now we are much further along in this process. Some of the most prominent liberal journalists and liberal Democratic leaders in government are no longer acting as merely useful idiots. Some of them are at last revealing themselves to be more malevolent than that.

This is most clearly seen in their move to prosecute those in the Bush admininistration who authorized the enhanced interrogation techniques (which they falsely call "torture") against a few of our top terrorist enemies.

We should recall at this point that the laws of war and the Geneva Convention clearly distinguish between (1) conventional soldiers and (2) nonuniformed terrorists who hide among civilians and attack from schools, mosques and civilian residences. Conventional soldiers, when captured, must be treated humanely. Nonuniformed terrorists, when captured, may be summarily shot.

Unfortunately, instead of shooting these vicious predators on the spot, our government unwisely treated most of them better than we have ever treated prisoners of war. They get better food in prison than our schoolchildren get in school cafeterias. There have been strict limits even on the interrogation techniques.

In three highly supervised cases waterboarding was employed to get vital information that saved many innocent lives. (Many of our own soldiers and sailors undergo waterboarding as part of their training, hence it is absurd to deem it "torture".)

But now many voices are telling us that this was unacceptable, that America's leaders must be punished, rather than thanked and honored, for this great so-called evil. They quote the Constitution much as Satan quotes Scripture, and they pretend to defend both America and the Constitution. However, this new thrust is clearly intended to demoralize those who are defending the country and to reduce or destroy America's future effectiveness in fighting our enemies.

Here at last the Left is taking a position that is so clearly anti-American that there is very little room at the margin for "useful idiots". Some Democrats on my "lunatic" list claim that foreign terrorists captured on the battlefield should be treated as if they were American citizens with Constitutional protections, but even for them that level of imbecility is not credible. Political maneuvering aside, their position can be seriously maintained for long only by the actual enemies of the United States.

For benefit of the lawyers and other confused citizens, let us apply the Left's argument in mirror image so that everyone can see just how bonkers it really is.

The FDR administration put more than one hundred thousand Japanese American citizens in concentration camps during World War II. This was clearly a much more heinous crime against humanity than waterboarding three Al-Qaeda terrorists. We should therefore prosecute all those Democrats still alive who had anything to do with perpetrating that great injustice. Correct?

The LBJ administration entered the Viet Nam conflict on the false and exaggerated claim of being attacked near the Gulf of Tonkin. This resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers and sailors and of millions of Asians. We should therefore prosecute all those Democrats who had anything to do with perpetrating and acting on that falsehood. Correct?

The Reagan administration's retributive attack across Libya's "line of death" in 1986 happened to kill Gaddafi's innocent young daughter. We should therefore prosecute all the Republicans who had anything to do with that attack. Correct?

The Obama administration's attacks on Taliban and Al-Qaeda terrorists using Predator drones and other means also produce collateral damage, killing innocent children and others, without benefit of legal hearing or trial by jury. Also the suspects are not even given their Miranda warnings. We should therefore (as Ted Olson has recommended in a recent thought experiment) prosecute everyone in the Obama administration who has anything to do with these attacks whenever they occur. Correct?

No, of course these assertions are clearly not correct. The concept is intended to be used only against the "evil" Bush administration, which in fact was trying with the best of intentions to protect America in a legally acceptable manner.

However, war is not police work, never has been, and never can be. The concept of prosecuting actions like this, if taken seriously, would degrade or destroy our ability to defend ourselves. But that is the whole idea. Our domestic enemies will now have another powerful new tool to weaken us, if we have become so confused and lacking in will as to allow it.

In summary, James Burnham was both correct and extremely prescient. Liberalism is indeed the ideology of Western suicide. We will see this in spades during the next four years.

Add Napolitano to lunatics list

Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary for Obama, was responsible for that silly report about the potential of veterans and single-issue voters to be recruited into right-wing extremism. She issued this hastily written document over objections by some of her advisors, and just before the Tea Parties, in an apparent attempt to intimidate conservative and other protesters. Then she made her infamous remarks about border security. She claimed falsely that the 9/11 terrorists got into the USA by crossing the Canadian border. She also implied falsely that there is no border security there. “The pattern at the Canadian border has been informality,” she went on to say. “The borders are going to be enabled with greater technology, but it’s not going to be going back and forth as if there’s no border anymore.” She knew nothing about the subject, but pretended that she did.

She even said that whatever is being done on our southern border should also be done on our northern border. So either we stop building a border security fence along the Mexican border, or else we build one along the Canadian border. (All 5000 kilometers of it? Another Great Wall of China?) Canadians are seeing and hearing these things and are wondering just how bonkers she really is.

Then she went on CNN and said, falsely, "And yes, when we find illegal workers, yes, appropriate action, some of which is criminal, most of that is civil, because crossing the border is not a crime per se. It is civil."

Last year, as governor of Arizona, she tried to cut off Sheriff Joe Arpaio's funding for cracking down on illegal immigration in Maricopa County. Apparently Obama thought that this made her the perfect candidate for heading up Homeland Security.

I hereby add Janet Napolitano to my list as Democrat Lunatic #8.

Note: Earlier entries on my Dem Lunatics List were Nancy Pelosi, RFK Jr., Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Harry Reid, Bill Clinton, and of course Barack Obama.