The Wall Street Journal weighs in with an opinon piece on how calls for tax increases to address the bridge collapse are political theater, not public policy debate.
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The Left: Character Assassins
Unless you have been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably heard that Vice President Dick Cheney’s friend and advisor “Scooter” Libby has been convicted and faces jail time for…what, exactly?
Officially the charges were perjury and obstructing an investigation. But most of us have the sense that what Libby was accused of was leaking the name of a covert CIA agent in order to discredit her husband’s charges. In other words, Libby stands convicted in the court of public opinion of the kind of skullduggery that we associate with the Nixon White House.
That’s the Party line from Democrats when they comment on this case: “This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear,” said Sen. John Kerry (Ma.), leading the charge; Senator Harry Reid added “It’s about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics.”
But that’s not what happened at all, and the fact that the Democrats have been pushing this line for years now demonstrates how hollow their protestations against the “politics of personal destruction” really are. The Democrats, in fact, are the masters of that art, and Scooter Libby is simply the latest in a long line of Republican victims of their character assassination.
The fact first: Scooter Libby did not ever leak CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the media as part of a White House scheme to discredit war critic; in fact, it was a liberal war critic and notorious gossip who dropped the name with intentions no worse than to puff up his image as being “in the know.” There never was a nefarious scheme to discredit war critics in this manner. By now the White House should be regretting their failure to come up with a good conspiracy to discredit their opponents, given how vicious the Democrats have been in going after them.
In fact, the biggest liars in this whole affair have been Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. Time and again, they have lied and distorted in order to hurt the White House, and of course turn themselves into liberal heroes. For their willingness to do so, they have been awarded rock star status in Democrat circles, and Plame has inked a $2.5 million book contract.
So if Libby didn’t mastermind a “vast right wing conspiracy” to slime Valerie Plame and her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson, just what did he do? Well, he didn’t leak the name, because Richard Armitage did that. In fact, what he did do according to the jury was try to cover up the fact that he may have confirmed to reporters what they already had gleaned from other sources, that Plame was at the CIA.
Confirming Plame’s CIA employment itself was not a crime; but covering up that he did so was perjury and obstruction of justice.
Just to be clear: Scooter Libby faces jail time for trying to cover up the fact that he did not commit a crime. In fact, at no time does the Special Prosecutor ever allege that the underlying crime he was investigating ever took place. It never happened.
Now I am not a lawyer, and I recoil at the idea of justifying Perjury and obstruction of justice by anybody for any reason. It sets a bad precedent to do so, which is why I was shocked by the Democrats’ defense of Bill Clinton’s perjury in the Monica Lewinski case. I personally think that Libby should not have been prosecuted, but I can understand why a Special Prosecutor might think differently.
Whatever the Special Prosecutor’s motives, though, one thing is perfectly clear: Scooter Libby is the victim of a well planned and well coordinated smear campaign by the Democrats—and the mainstream media—in order to discredit the Bush White House. The investigation was begun to find the perpetrator of a crime that never took place; throughout the investigation leading Democrats lied about what happened, what the investigation was about, and they are still lying about what the verdict means.
Democrats have become masters of the vile art of destroying individuals in order to further their designs for power, but they couldn’t achieve their goals without the active compliance of key members of the media. It was Tim Russert who hammered the nails into Libby’s coffin, and it is the New York Times which has relentlessly and shamelessly promotes the conspiracy theory that underlies the smear campaign.
The only reason why leading Democrats continue lying about this case is that the media doesn’t just let them get away with it, they actively encourage it. Saying or doing anything is apparently just fine as long as it might undermine a Republican administration. And threatening Republicans with jail is as a good a way as any to keep them away from political careers.
Leftists have been losing in the court of public opinion. In fact, one of the key factors in many Democrats’ victories last fall was the implicit promise that they wouldn’t act like liberals, raising taxes and sending spending through the roof. For decades the Democrats’ response to this is to pursue their agenda through the Courts.
First it was using the courts to get policy victories. Today, it is using the criminal courts to harass their opponents.
It’s time to stop this madness. Bush should Pardon Scooter Libby today.
Originally posted Wednesday, March 7, 2007 on Townhall.com.
category: Blog Posts, David Strom
The Growth of a 21st Century Fascism
A new fascist movement is on the rise, and proponents of individual liberty are losing ground.
Left-wingers often accuse conservatives of being fascists, but the reality is that fascism is simply another form of collectivism, like socialism and communism. The differences, such as they exist, are marginal between these collectivist ideologies when viewed from the perspective of Liberalism. Fascism idolizes the state, socialists idolize “society” and communists idolize “humanity” as a whole.
What holds these ideologies together is much stronger than what divides them: they are all dedicated to the proposition that the rights and desires of individuals are properly subsumed by the needs of the whole. Individualism is selfishness, rights are collective, and the “good” of the whole is the true measure of society.
Collectivism has been like a chronic disease in the body politic ever since the birth of Liberal Individualism in the 18th Century. For Locke, there was Rousseau. The American Revolution contrasted with the French Revolution and its guillotine. America had George Washington and Europe had Napoleon. Lincoln saved the Union as Marx was promoting Communism in Europe. For the last 300 years we in the Western world have been living in the midst of a struggle between the forces of Liberal individualism and the forces of collectivism.
Communism and fascism dominated much of 20th Century history as the alternative to Liberal individualism and free markets. Democratic socialism is still eating away at European societies, which grow poorer and more sclerotic every year as they continue to declare the superiority of their model to American individualism.
Even here in America, the home of Liberal individualism, there is a constant assault on individual liberty. The steady growth of economic regulations, income redistribution, speech codes (New York just banned the use of a racial slur in public!), the ever growing tax code, and ridiculous limits to what we can eat, drink, or smoke.
Still, compared to most of the developed world, American is remarkably free for the moment. And that’s a nagging problem for the believers in collectivism.
So today we are witnessing the rise of a new version of the same old collectivist ideal; instead of the State or Humanity being elevated above individualism, it’s an idealized version of the environment or the “Earth.” Call it Nature, call it Gaia, or even call it Climate, the ideologists of collectivism are just trying to sell us a new reason to subsume our individual liberty to a collectivist whole.
The “crisis” of global climate change is a ridiculous on its face. The very concept is bizarre and illogical, if for no other reason than simply because there is not a default “standard” climate to compare any particular momentary climate state to. Compared to what, exactly?
Today’s climate is quite different from that of even a few hundred years ago, and once you go back a few thousand years—a blink of the eye in the lifespan of the earth—much of the earth that is farmland and cities was buried under thousands of feet of ice. If you could run the history of earth’s climate as a movie, it would be a constantly changing before your eyes. No one minute looking much like the next. Different climate, different species, even different arrangements of continents and oceans would dominate at any given moment.
Simply put, there is no permanent “state of Nature.” Nature, Climate, the Earth, or “climate”—whatever you want to call it—is not some permanent unchanging ideal. It’s so dynamic that even in the span of a few years or decades changes can render a landscape unrecognizable, fundamentally altered.
“Climate change” is not something induced by human beings or a “crisis” to be avoided; it is simply the reality of living on earth. To the extent that human activities may contribute to climate variability, the same can be said of termites, trees, and even the slow action of plate tectonics. It’s true, but what’s your point? Literally everything changes the state of the earth, all the time. Fighting change is like fighting gravity; good luck! Call me when you succeed.
The steady drumbeat of fear mongering has nothing to do with a “crisis” of climate change, because climate change is not a crisis. It was reality before human beings existed, and will be long after we are all buried.
However, it has everything to do with promoting the solution to the crisis of climate change: the demotion of individualism and liberty and the promotion of collective solutions and collectivism in general.
The “solution” to the climate change “crisis” is exactly the same “solution” that was proposed to solve the “population bomb” crisis in the 70’s. It’s the same solution that was proposed to solve the “crisis” of capitalist “exploitation.” It’s always the same collectivist solution, whatever the “crisis:” the relinquishing of individual rights in order to promote the greater good.
We are told that combating the “crisis” of global climate change will require a wholesale revision of how we live. We will need to live “sustainable” lifestyles, as if there could be such a thing in a constantly changing world. (Imagine trying to sustain any lifestyle for more than a few decades; we call such sustainability “stagnation.”)
In reality “sustainable” is just another word for “controlled.” And controlled by whom? Not by you. In a “sustainable” economy everything would be controlled by the same elite who pushed collectivism on you in the first place. The people who warned you about the crisis are the very people who you need to follow in order to solve it.
In today’s rebirth of fascism the leaders of tomorrow are the academic-media-political elite who run the major Universities, the government bureaucracies, and of course the all important media.
The elite is those who know better than you what is good for you.
It may sound alarmist to decry a new birth of fascism. After all, we are hardly talking about an impending coup or anything like that.
But actually I am worried that it is already too late to start fighting back.
The ranks of academia are already being scrubbed of global warming “skeptics,” who are derided as “deniers.” The American Meteorological Society is already being encouraged to decertify meteorologists who don’t believe in global warming. Nuremberg-style trials for global warming “deniers” have already been proposed. And US Senators from both the Republican and Democratic Party have actively campaigned—successfully I might add—to prevent some private enterprises from contributing to organizations which oppose global warming alarmism.
The campaign to suppress debate on the global climate “crisis” is well on its way to succeeding. The “consensus” that a crisis exists is being built right now.
And once there is “consensus” that a crisis is upon us, how can we effectively defend individual liberty? Individual liberty is being portrayed as simply a right to destroy the environment. Can anybody have a “right” to destroy the environment? Goodbye liberty.
No, it’s not too early to worry about the creeping 21st Century fascism; instead, I worry it is already too late to beat it back.
Originally posted Thursday, March 1, 2007 on Townhall.com.