Check out the book our President is reading! It says it all!
OBAMA!
One
Big
Ass
Mistake
America!
2010-08-16
2010-08-15
Paul Ryan's Got It Exactly Right!
Washington vs. Paul Ryan
August 12, 2010
The Wall Street Journal, Review and Outlook
What happens when a politician is more honest than his critics?
The immune system of the modern body politic is nothing if not resilient, and this summer all of its antibodies seem to be trained on heretofore little known Congressman Paul Ryan. That makes this a particularly instructive moment, because the attacks on the Wisconsin Republican show how deeply his radical honesty is subverting Washington's flim-flam—to borrow a phrase.
"The flim-flam man" is what Paul Krugman called Mr. Ryan in a New York Times column last week that set a spleen-to-substance record even for him. Amid drive-by attacks on the Congressman's ethics and integrity, Mr. Krugman savaged Mr. Ryan's "roadmap"—his detailed, long-range proposal to equalize taxes and the size of government—as "a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America's fiscal future."
This might be dismissed as a familiar primal scream, except it perfectly echoes the Democratic Party's emerging election strategy. The bills for decades of unsustainable social commitments are now coming due, especially Medicare, even as Democrats have created a vast new liability in ObamaCare. Mr. Ryan has one of the few credible plans for rationalizing the federal fisc, and his critics are so vicious because his candor exposes Washington's illusions about the entitlement state while offering a genuine alternative. Democrats hope that demagoguing his proposals will allow them to hang on to their majorities this fall.
Thus Peter Orszag, until last week the White House budget director, devoted much of his farewell lecture at the Brookings Institution to Mr. Ryan's plan "to replace Medicare as we know it." Having presided over record deficits of $1.4 trillion in 2009—or 9.9% of GDP—and an expected $1.5 trillion in 2010, Mr. Orszag no doubt finds it easier to change the subject than defend his own record and agenda.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recently attacked "NINE REPUBLICAN SENATE CANDIDATES WHO WANT TO END MEDICARE AS WE KNOW IT." Most of the "facts" in this missive consist of lukewarm-to-friendly comments these heretics had at one time or another made about Mr. Ryan.
The main liberal policy objection, to the extent a serious one exists, is that the roadmap would "cut working folks loose so they've got to fend for themselves," as President Obama described the supposed Republican economic philosophy at a Chicago fundraiser last week.
Mr. Ryan wants to remodel Medicare by giving seniors a modified voucher to buy private insurance. Mr. Orszag, et al., concede that the roadmap would make the entitlement permanently solvent, as confirmed in an analysis by their icon the Congressional Budget Office, but they claim that the amount of the voucher would not keep pace with rising health-care costs.
This is an odd complaint for an economist like Mr. Orszag, given that more market discipline and consumer choice in health care would drive down costs as it does in all other dynamic sectors of the economy. To take one example, recent research by Michael Chernew of Harvard shows that a one percentage point increase in seniors insured by Medicare Advantage HMOs—the Ryan-like program that offers private options—reduces traditional fee-for-service Medicare spending by 0.9%, despite its price controls.
In other words, cost-conscious competition changes how doctors and hospitals provide care to all patients. A larger transition to market-based medicine could turn out to be as smooth as the private-sector shift to 401(k)s from defined-benefit pensions, and a similar reform was even suggested in 1999 by Bill Clinton's Medicare commission, which was led by Louisiana Democrat John Breaux.
This model is a threat to the ideology of those like Mr. Krugman who believe that government can and should decide how all patients are treated. But technocratic central planning won't reform the system, as its sad 45-year history in Medicare shows, and nothing is more likely to finish off Medicare "as we know it" than to continue the current trajectory as it swallows the federal fisc and crowds out all other priorities. (See editorial below.)
In that sense, Mr. Ryan is really presenting Washington with a philosophical choice between the status quo of an ever-larger and ever-more indebted government and a plan to pay for the promises we've made while still preserving free markets and economic growth. The fire hose of invective pointed at Mr. Ryan is in part an attempt to scare voters and in part an effort to prevent voters from understanding that there is in fact a choice.
***
Mr. Ryan's roadmap is much broader than health care and ambitious enough that it would require a Presidential-level debate to have any chance of passing. We'd need to inspect the details before endorsing them ourselves. But its immediate virtue is that it gives leaders in both parties heartburn because it applies the fiscal honesty that everyone claims to favor. Taxpayers need someone like Mr. Ryan to expose the emperor's naked budget.
Liberals Are Just Flat-Out Wrong! Again!
Gerard Alexander: Why are liberals so condescending?
By Gerard Alexander
Sunday, February 7, 2010: The Washington Post
Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.
It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).
This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.
Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind."
This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.
The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.
This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science" argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.
This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the decision will "open the floodgates for special interests" to influence American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union address. In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends.
It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugmanpondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years' worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: "What do these people really believe? I mean, they're not stupid -- life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?"
In Krugman's world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of "these people" -- only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.
But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. This is the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank argued that working-class voters were so distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on "guns, God and gays" instead of economic redistribution.
And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama backed away from their tenor but insisted that "I said something that everybody knows is true."
In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters' underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or "tea party" gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen.
The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister. In his 2008 book, "Nixonland," progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others. Similarly, in their 1992 book, "Chain Reaction," Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.
Race doubtless played a significant role in the shift of Deep South whites to the Republican Party during and after the 1960s. But the liberal narrative has gone essentially unchanged since then -- recall former president Carter's recent assertion that opposition to Obama reflects racism -- even though survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades. Moreover, the candidates and agendas of both parties demonstrate an unfortunate willingness to play on prejudices, whether based on race, region, class, income, or other factors.
Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety -- including fear of change -- whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. Former vice president Al Gore made this case in his 2007 book, "The Assault on Reason," in which he expressed fear that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed to "any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals." This right-wing politics involves a gradual "abandonment of concern for reason or evidence" and relies on propaganda to maintain public support, he wrote.
Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs. George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, "still believe in Enlightenment reason," while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. "They like to read and think," Westen wrote. "They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right."
Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs -- including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are "divorced from reality" and that the results show why "it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country." His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, "Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?"
I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats. Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to conservatives for his "Jaywalking" interviews?
These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant -- they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.
"There may be other ideas that you guys have," Obama said. "I am happy to look at them, and I'm happy to embrace them. . . . But the question I think we're going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what's good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November, we're able to say, 'The other party, it's their fault'?"
Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior. But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues). A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.
In contrast, an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators and leaders -- from Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" to Obama's White House, with many stops in between -- have developed or articulated narratives that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times.
To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.
Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades -- until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited -- until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.
Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush's aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin's college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.
Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals.
Even liberals should think twice about the prospect of decisions on innovative surgeries, light bulbs and carbon quotas being directed by legislators grandstanding for the cameras. Of course, thinking twice would be easier if more of them were listening to conservatives at all.
Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. He will be online to chat with readers on Monday, February 8, at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion. On Monday, he will also deliver the American Enterprise Institute's Bradley Lecture, "Do Liberals Know Best? Intellectual Self-Confidence and the Claim to a Monopoly on Knowledge."
Democrats ARE The Problem!
John Lott
FoxNews.com
August 12, 2010
News headlines worryingly point to "US jobless claims hit six-month high, " "Wall Street Slides Further on More Signs of Slowdown," or "Latest US Jobless Claims are a Bad Omen." Quite a contrast from news headlines just a month ago touting:"New jobless claims fall to near two-year low."What could happen in just a month? Has there really been that much of a worsening in the fundamental jobs picture in that short of time?
There is actually a very simple answer for the change. While a month ago those who filed for unemployment insurance would only get 26 weeks of benefits, over the last few weeks people can get at least 95 weeks of benefits. The result is something that I predicted in a piece that I wrote for Fox News on July 20th.
When unemployment insurance extension ended, new filings fell from around 472,000 to 429,000. Now that they have been reinstated, new filings for the last two weeks have been 482,000 and 484,000.
You subsidize something and you get more of it. Unemployment insurance not only causes people to stay unemployed longer, but it also has an impact on people's decision to become unemployed in the first place. If Americans are unemployed solely because they were having trouble finding a job, the number of new people becoming unemployed and filing for benefits should be the same whether they are eligible for 26 weeks of benefits or at least 95 weeks, right? The impact of the number of new people who becomeunemployed because of large unemployment insurance has been completely ignored in the debate over the economy.
If you offered people $100,000 to become unemployed for six months, everyone would expect a lot of people to take up the offer and go on vacation for six months. The unemployment insurance benefits are no where as generous, but there are still a lot of people who are apparently willing to become unemployed to get them. In addition to the unprecedented long length of unemployment insurance benefits, the unemployed also get their health insurance subsidized and this week the Obama administration announced new plans to cover the unemployed's mortgage payments.
Of course, besides encouraging more people to be unemployed and be unemployed for longer, the mortgagepayments subsidy also discourages people from making wise decisions on their house. For example, without the subsidy, if you can't afford your house, you can rent it out and get a smaller, cheaper apartment. But the mortgage subsidies prevent that because you only get the subsidy as long as you live in a house that you can't afford to live in.
There are real problems with the economy caused by everything from the disastrous stimulus package tomortgage and financial regulations that created the financial crisis to all the new regulations out of Washington that are creating chaos. It is time for Washington, DC to stop causing problems and get out of the way.
John R. Lott, Jr. is a FOXNews.com contributor. He is an economist and author of "More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2010)."
Visualize World Peace - Through Firepower!
James P. Pinkerton
FoxNews.com
August 12, 2010
If we really want peace, we must prepare for war. A new conservative group aims to remind America that we need to do just that.
A new conservative group, the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, is reviving the stern wisdom of the ancients: If you want peace, prepare for war.
More recently, that same wisdom guided Ronald Reagan, who, as president in the 1980s, ordered a major defense buildup, as part of an overall strategy for subduing the Soviet Union. As commander in chief, Reagan prepared for war so well, in fact, that he won a great victory over the Soviets without firing a shot.
We need that sort of vision today, and while the Gipper himself is gone, we are seeing the same wisdom in the work of some old Reagan hands. But first, a little history.
In the mid-70s, two well-meaning presidents, Republican Gerald Ford and then Democrat Jimmy Carter, were both optimistic that the Cold War with the Soviet Union could be managed into something like permanent co-existence.
As Carter said in a 1977 commencement speech at Notre Dame University, “We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism.” And so he set about preparing for peace, while the Soviets not only prepared for war, but made war--in Angola, in Ethiopia, and, most notably, in Afghanistan, which the Red Army invaded in 1979.
The result of this Soviet aggression was a political revolt in America. If Carter couldn’t deal with the Russians--and with new threats, such as Iran--Americans would find someone who could: Reagan.
The 40th President didn’t fear communism--he hated communism. He had seen it up close in Hollywood in the 40s and 50s, when, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he dealt with communist-front labor unions.
All through the Cold War, Reagan was a consistent advocate of “peace through strength,” supporting presidents of both parties who were willing to stand strong.
When he reached the White House in 1981, Reagan didn’t hesitate to describe the Soviet Union for what it was: “the focus of evil in the modern world.” He zeroed in on those who claimed to see moral equivalence between the free world and the Soviet bloc, jibing at “the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
That was Reagan--calling ‘em as he saw ‘em. But of course, he did much more than that. Behind the scenes, he was working closely with fellow anti-communists around the world, from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to Pope John Paul II to a shipyard worker in Gdansk, Poland, by the name of Lech Walesa.
The result of this peace through strength policy can be summed up in one word: victory. In 1987, Reagan spoke in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, standing in the shadow of Soviet concrete and barbed wire, declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And two years later, that’s what happened. Two years after that, the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
Peace through strength works. It requires patience and fortitude, but peace is better than war, and strength is better than weakness.
Today, one of the great leaders of the Reagan-era, Edwin Meese III, who loyally served Reagan for more than two decades--in California as a gubernatorial aide, then in Washington as White House Counsellor and as Attorney General--is now spearheading an effort to revive those powerful Reaganite words: “peace through strength.”
Meese is the lead signatory on the Peace Through Strength Platform, along with many others, including such Reagan defense officials as Frank Gaffney, of the Center for Security Policy, and Elaine Donnelly, of the Center for Military Readiness. Even more encouragingly, a growing number of incumbent politicians and political candidates, too, have signed on to the Peace Through Strength Platform.
10-Point Freedom Manifesto
1. Renewed adherence to the national security philosophy of President Ronald Reagan: “Peace Through Strength.”American security is most reliably assured by having military forces that are fully trained, equipped and ready to deter or defeat the nation’s adversaries.
2. A robust defense posture including: A safe, reliable effective nuclear deterrent, which requires its modernization and testing; the deployment of comprehensive defenses against missile attack; and national protection against unconventional forms of warfare – including biological, electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) and cyber attacks.
3. Preservation of U.S. sovereignty against international treaties, judicial rulings and other measures that would have the effect of supplanting or otherwise diminishing the U.S. Constitution and the representative, accountable form of government it guarantees.
4. A nation free of Shariah, the brutally repressive and anti-Constitutional totalitarian program that governs in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Islamic states and that terrorists are fighting to impose worldwide.
5. Protection from unlawful enemy combatants. Enemies who refuse to wear uniforms, use civilians as shields and employ terrorism as weapons are not entitled to U.S. constitutional rights or trials in our civilian courts. Those captured overseas should be incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, which should remain open, or in other prisons outside the United States.
6. Energy security, realized by exploiting to the fullest the natural resources and technologies available in this country. We Americans must reduce our dependence for energy upon – and transfers of national wealth to – enemies of this country.
7. Borders secure against penetration by terrorists, narco-traffickers or others seeking to enter the United States illegally. Aliens who have violated immigration laws should not be rewarded with the privileges of citizenship.
8. High standards that protect the military culture essential to the All-Volunteer Force. The Pentagon should implement sound priorities, policies and laws that strengthen recruiting, retention, and readiness.
9. A foreign policy that supports our allies and opposes our adversaries. It should be clearly preferable to be a friend of the United States, not its enemy.
10. Judicial and educational institutions that uphold the constitutional responsibility of elected officials to make policy for our military and convey to future generations accurate portrayals of American history, including the necessity of defending freedom.
That’s an expansive agenda, covering much more than ships and missiles, important as military hardware might be. And while the Platform is a strong rebuke to President Obama--whose Carter-ish administration acts as if it agrees only vaguely, at best, with these ten points--the document could raise hackles on the right, too.
Border security, for example, is not welcomed by every libertarian. Similarly, energy independence is also controversial in some free-market circles, because the goal of energy independence presupposes government activism to achieve that end.
However, it seems clear that if America is at war, then we must take prudent steps to defend ourselves: We need to police the frontier of our homeland, and we should pull back from funding our enemies through oil and gas imports.
Moreover, the Peace Through Strength Platform is also notable for its omissions: The document makes no mention of the “liberty century” that President George W. Bush declared in his 2005 inaugural address, when the 43rd president emphasized the importance of internationalizing freedom and democracy.
Similarly, the words “Islam is peace,” spoken by Bush just days after 9/11, do not appear. Instead, the document focuses on Muslim extremism and jihadism, labeling such “isms,” quite rightly, as a mortal threat to America and its allies.
The critical issue facing America is not whether we can make friends with Muslims and bring them around to our democratic values; the issue, instead, is the survival of freedom for Americans and for their allies. One is reminded of the motto of the U.S. Army: “This we’ll defend.”
And that’s what the Peace Through Strength Platform does: It calls for the energetic and comprehensive defense of America, which Ronald Reagan described as “the last best hope for mankind.” That should be a cause to rally all Americans--although we will need an election or two before we get back on the right track.
James P. Pinkerton is a writer, Fox News contributor and the editor/founder of SeriousMedicineStrategy.
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