So many topics demand attention right now, in the final three
weeks before what really is the most momentous election so far in
my adult lifetime. Americans have good reason to believe the very
existence of our country as we know it is at risk. Never in any of
our lifetimes has a gang in power threatened to so fundamentally
transform the very essence of the social compact, natural law, our
constitutional system of limited government, and civil society
itself. With so much at stake, and with so many outrages vying for
attention, it’s hard to know which subject to focus on.
Among them:
Libya is part of a bigger, scarier picture. The
simple reality is that the Obama administration has spent years
trying to deny the nature and reality of the Islamic-jihadist
terrorist threat, and has entertained the idea of cracking down
harder on those who “insult” Islam than on the radical Islamists
themselves. Administration figures
huddle with Islamists. They refuse
to rule out the idea of criminalizing speech the Islamists don’t
like. The FBI under Obama has
purged training manuals of information linking Islam to
terrorism. An Obamite former advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff
writes columns saying that the First Amendment does not protect
film such as the Innocence of Muslims idiocy the Obama
administration wrongly blamed for the attack in Libya. The
depressing drumbeat goes on, and on, and on.
Hillary Clinton always has been incompetent:
While it is clearly a dodge for the White House to foist all blame
for the Libyan tragedy on the State Department, it also is clear
that State, under HRC, screwed up badly. The question is, why does
that surprise anyone? Ms. Clinton has been one of the most
undistinguished Secretaries of State in history. She can claim no
recognizable major accomplishments. No diplomatic triumphs. Nothing
memorable at all — except for a lot of New Age blather. This is
entirely in keeping with Ms. Clinton’s lifelong record. She
actually did very little as a U.S. Senator. And in the White House,
she was a walking scandal: FBI files of political adversaries
rifled during her watch; a botched handling of the response to
Vince Foster’s tragic death; corruption so obvious with regard to
her husband’s exiting pardons that the New York Daily News
called her unfit for office; lost Rose Law Firm billing records
until two days after a key statute of limitations had expired; and,
of course, the utter fiasco that was HillaryCare, mangling the
issue so badly that it never even came up for a formal vote. Obama
should have known all this when he appointed her. Her failures are
therefore his failures, too.
Bill Clinton is a terrible authority on
economics: Speaking of Clintons, it is well beyond
annoying to see Obama benefit from the former president’s
imprimatur on Obama’s economic policies. The reality is that
Clinton did virtually nothing while president to lead the way to a
vibrant economy; instead, he was dragged kicking and screaming into
signing off on policies with which he disagreed, but which ended up
working like charms. The deficit? In January of 1995, he submitted
a budget calling for $200 billion deficits (then an outrageous sum)
as far as the eye could see. Balanced budgets? He vetoed several,
until finally being shamed into signing one. Welfare reform? He
vetoed it twice, until Dick Morris told him the only way he could
lose re-election would be if he issued another veto. (In fact,
Clinton cared so little for welfare reform that he ignored repeated
entreaties from Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to handle welfare
reform before unleashing the dogs of HillaryCare; Moynihan
complained bitterly about the decision.) Capital gains tax cuts? He
never wanted them. Meanwhile, his administration pushed through one
bit of deregulation that some blame for part of the
financial crisis a decade later, and fought against a wise
regulatory proposal whose absence was, according to many other wise
people, another major contributor to the crisis. (The deregulation
was the destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act keeping banks out of
insurance, etcetera. The regulation not taken was the refusal to
rein in derivatives and credit default swaps.) Meanwhile, he and
his cronies raped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and used pressure
tactics to lure or even force financial institutions into risky
mortgage loans the beneficiaries could not afford. Again, Clinton
therefore was responsible for yet a third major contributor to the
financial crisis of 2008.
Religious liberty. President Obama has led the
most sustained assault against religious liberty in this nation’s
history. Matthew Franck outlined a large part of the case in a
Sept. 11
speech at Hillsdale College. This is an issue that could use
some explaining. It is not enough for opponents of Obama policies
to mouth the words “religious freedom.” Instead, opponents should
work up a two-minute “connect-the-dots” description of what is/was
at stake not only with the
HHS mandate but also in the
Hosanna-Tabor case, and in a host of other
areas of dispute. It is important to explain, as I put it in an
earlier column, that “if a Jewish synagogue spent a great deal of
its time running a soup kitchen in a predominantly black and
Baptist inner-city neighborhood, its charitable impulses would
actually be punished by the government.” And, though it is almost a
cliché, the old warning about how “first they came for the
Jews/(Catholics/Socialists, etcetera)… until nobody was left to
speak up for me,” should be the explanation used as a clincher in
the final 20 seconds or so of the two-minute summary. People
understand that warning in a deep and personal way.
The medical device tax in Obamacare. How can
Barack Obama be truly compassionate if he insisted on passing a
bill with a devastating tax on devices that save or vastly improve
so many lives, such as pacemakers, insulin pumps, asthma inhalers,
prosthetic limbs, and blood-pressure monitors? As one of at least a
dozen
new taxes in Obamacare, including five major ones that will hit
in 2013, this tax explodes Obama’s promise never to raise taxes on
the middle class. So outrageous is it that even former
second-generation Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana
wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal blasting it
not only for its ill health effects but also because it is a major
job killer.
The Romney team must do a far better job explaining its
tax-reform plans. Look, we already know Romney wants to
negotiate the exact details with Congress. We get it, already. But
it shouldn’t be too hard to do a more persuasive job explaining the
idea of eliminating loopholes while cutting tax rates. As in:
“Here’s what my approach would be: First we put the commission
together to figure out how many upper-income special tax loopholes
we could close. One idea, not as one I definitely would accept, but
as an example, is just to put a total limit on all high-income tax
deductions with the exception of the one for charitable
giving, which still should be encouraged. Anyway, the plan is this:
Once we identify the total amount we can save by cutting loopholes,
then and only then would we figure out what the across-the-board
tax-rate cut would be, up to a maximum of 20 percent. We want to
cut the national deficit and debt, so we will ensure that tax
reform is revenue-neutral, period, end of story. Figure out the
loophole cuts first, and then cut the rates for middle-income
earners to match it. That’s as simple as can be.”
Energy costs. Repeat after me: A gallon of
gasoline costs twice what it did on the day Obama took office. A
gallon of gasoline costs twice what it did on the day Obama took
office. A gallon of gasoline costs twice what it did…. Then: Just
this week, Obama’s team ruled out more drilling in Alaska. Obama
reneged on a promise to develop natural gas off the coast of
Virginia. Obama slowed down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico so much
that he was officially found in contempt of court, a serious legal
violation. Obama blocked the Keystone Pipeline and cost us tens of
thousands of jobs. And Obama has been brutal against the mining of
coal even as we find ever-cleaner ways to use it. When you slow
energy production down, energy prices rise. Production down, prices
up. Production down, prices up. Gasoline was about a buck-eighty,
now it’s above three-sixty. It’s Obama’s fault.
There. That’s enough for now. If Romney wants to be really
tough, he’d throw in a blast at Obama’s
opposition to saving children who survive botched abortions.
But this isn’t just about Romney and Obama, so this isn’t really a
column just about campaign issues. This is about the very survival
of our country. These are debates every one of us should be
carrying, to all who have ears to hear.
