Of course, the reality over there, as here at home, is that political posturing is a 24/7 proposition—relentless and unmerciful. But just the idea that an actual election can be set for a single month cycle is (pardon the pun) a foreign concept to us. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his leftist Labor party have been gaining ground on David Cameron’s Conservatives, closing what was once a 20-point gap to single digits—lately around 7 per cent—so the timing seemed right.

And while America is being dragged kicking and screaming to the statist left, our increasingly distant cousins could possibly be on the verge of an ironic power-shift. One that has been described “as potentially the most pivotal since the one in 1979 that brought the conservative Margaret Thatcher to power and recast the fundamentals of British politics and society.”

In other words, the culture that gave us Lloyd George, Churchill, and Lady Thatcher, could soon witness “the fundamental transformation” of their nation. Some are calling the campaign of the Tories a “back to the future” effort. Indeed.

Of course, conservatives in the United Kingdom are nowhere near clones of their nomenclature counterparts in the United States. Tories there would barely qualify as “moderate” Republicans here. But the trend is unmistakable and it is not being sufficiently noticed in our neck of the political woods.

Emerging as the hot button issue in the British election is a Labor-backed planned 1% increase in the National Insurance Tax. The Tories oppose this and have countered with an “efficiency saving” program that would address the chronic financial hemorrhage situation in the National Health Service. The NHS, by the way, remains an object of envy to many in our government. Go figure.

Most Americans—especially the nearly half who will pay no income tax this year—haven’t a clue as to how a single payer system works in places like Great Britain. Over and above already oppressive income tax rates, workers must pay a National Insurance Tax, with exemptions only for those who earn, say around 105 pounds per week, then it increases immediately to 11% of income up to 770 pounds per week. Over that, it costs an additional 1% of each worker’s income. So under the new Labor proposal most British workers would be paying a minimum of 12% of their income to fund their single payer system—in addition to already high income taxes.

Even a cursory examination reveals that this is a tax burden that falls squarely on the middle class—something the Brits have been more honest about than some in the current administration in Washington. Of course, the “official” position of the powers that be here is that a single-payer system is not on the table. But for anyone willing to think this political chess match through a few moves ahead, it is clear that there is gleeful hope in many quarters that the recent “reforms” will so stress our current system as to bring it and the country to its knees, paving the way for our own European-style set up.

What Americans need to note is that for a government to operate here as it does in other places will eventually require a great sacrifice on the part of the middle class. We are being sold a bill of good these days, one that some Americans seem all-too-willing to accept. The big lie du jour is that we can have all the purported “benefits” of socialism without the burdens.

Tax cuts for low and middle income families were expanded when Obama signed the massive economic recovery package last year. As a result, nearly half the country will benefit from everything the government does without paying a dime for it! And it is not just the poorest of the poor. There will be people who made $50,000 or more in 2009 paying no income taxes. In fact, 47% of workers in America will pay nothing.

And this is, in many ways, a cancer eating away at our national character. We are almost at the place of critical mass where those who derive a benefit from the government outnumber those who pay the bills. And as the old saying goes: “If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul!”

The irony is that this house of cards will ultimately collapse. Americans who think it’s all a pretty cool deal today—the idea of getting a free ride paid for by someone else—need to look closely at places like Great Britain. Yes, they have exemptions for some in their tax system, but you have to earn less than 6,000 pounds to qualify (roughly 12K in U.S. dollars, give or take). Everybody else pays. In fact, that family making the equivalent of 50K in U.S. dollars over there will pay heavy income taxes plus an 11% National Health Insurance tax for all that “free” stuff.

The other day, the New York Times wrote about the “growing power of the state in British life” noting that “more than half of all those in employment have government jobs, and just over half of the economy is accounted for by government activity.” Is this really what we want for America?

The truth of the matter is that the programs being touted today as to be paid for by the very rich will soon start costing all of us. In fact, it will be a rude awakening one day—if current trends persist—when a worker making an income that had long kept him below a tax-paying threshold sees a big chunk of change taken out of his paycheck.

Yes, they plan to soak the rich right now. But one day, they’ll come for everyone else needing dollars to feed the big entitlement machine. Saul Alinsky, in “Rules For Radicals” talked about the struggle between the “haves” and the “have nots.” And this became the basis for the kind of political energy that brought Barack Obama to the White House. People were trying to get their perceived “fair share.” Social Justice is now all the rage—let’s reshuffle the deck and give everyone a New Deal.

But the problem is that eventually the “have nots” will get all they can extort from the “haves.” Then the “pay nots”—those who have grown accustomed to someone else paying the tab—will have to become “pays.”

The other day, I was listening to BBC America on satellite radio and I heard a round table discussion bemoaning the fact that America has so much more entrepreneurial activity per capita than the U.K. These bright bulbs pondered the reasons and never seemed to have an “A-Ha!” moment. They talked about how maybe if the government gave more “grants” to those who wanted to start businesses.

Clueless.

Years ago, I heard a quote, I don’t remember where—or from whom—to the effect that if you want to see what the U.S. will be like in 40 years, look at the UK now.

Come to think of it, I heard that said just about 40 years ago.

The venerable British journal The Economist has a new article assessing the reasons for the Nixon surcharge (which was to a great degree the brainchild of then-Treasury Secretary John Connally) and showing why its purpose, and the effects it had on the world economy at the time, do not necessary show that a tariff on Chinese goods would benefit the American economy now:

China’s foreign-exchange reserves now total $2.4 trillion, of which about 70% are thought to be in dollars. In 1971 the central banks of America’s trading partners had amassed a rather smaller hoard, of about $40 billion. But that was enough to buy the gold in Fort Knox three times over, if America upheld its commitment to sell the metal at $35 an ounce. Britain’s request to exchange dollars for gold on August 13th 1971 was the last straw. “Although the US government attached no great importance to the gold as such, a run on this gold would have been a sorry spectacle,” wrote George Shultz and Kenneth Dam, two prominent economic officials in the Nixon administration, in their book “Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines”. On August 15th Nixon, in effect, announced that America was now unwilling to do what it would soon be incapable of doing—converting dollars into gold at the agreed exchange rate.

Messrs Shultz and Dam argue that the import surcharge was intended as “an attention-getter and a bargaining chip”. It allowed John Connally, Nixon’s treasury secretary and a Texan, to stride down the corridors of international finance “with both guns blazing”. In the face of this bravado America’s trading partners duly backed down. By December they agreed to let the dollar fall (by a trade-weighted average of 6.5%) and the surcharge was removed. Nixon was able to present the humbling of the dollar as a political victory. But were Barack Obama to emulate him, would he really enjoy the same result?

The obvious difference is that in 1971 America was locked into a system of fixed parities. By pegging to the dollar, a currency was automatically fixed to everything else. Since July 2008 China has pegged the yuan to the greenback. But over that period its currency has swung up and down against those of its trading partners and competitors. On a trade-weighted basis the yuan is back to where it was when the financial crisis started. Indeed, compared with China’s emerging-market competitors in its big export markets, the yuan is about 12% more expensive today than it was before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, according to a measure (the “third-country” effective exchange rate) calculated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. By this indicator China’s currency is about 25% above its level in 2005.

The second difference is related to the first. Because everybody was pegged to the dollar in 1971, everybody had to pay the surcharge. Nixon dismayed everyone but discriminated against no one. China’s critics today, on the other hand, urge Mr Obama to slap a tariff on Chinese goods alone. This will reduce the demand for Chinese imports, which constitute about 15% of America’s total. But there is no guarantee that customers will switch from Chinese goods to American ones instead. They are more likely to buy from China’s rivals in Asia. The surcharge may change the composition of America’s trade deficit, without necessarily changing its size.

In fact, there is a very special day coming up. It’s called Census Day 2010. And, are you ready for this—it’s scheduled for April 1ST. That’s right, the moment we honor fools and play tricks on everybody is the official day to recognize, if not return, our Census forms. Census Day started out in 1790 as the first Monday in August. It was moved to June in 1830, then to April 15 in 1910, and by 1940 to the first day of April.

Obviously, most Americans are well aware of this decennial process of counting everyone. After all, we’ve been seeing all those very cool commercials. I saw one the other day, having made the mistake of watching a show that hadn’t been dvr’d, that mentioned how important it was to fill out the form and send it back. The spokesperson warned: “You won’t get your fair share, if you don’t send it back.”

Fair share? Fair share of what?

If I read my history correctly—and I do—the whole idea of a census from the beginning had to do with having our fair say. When the U.S. Constitution was ratified and became the ever-since law of the land, it specified in Article 1, Section 2, that a census, or “enumeration” should be scheduled within three years of the first meeting of the Congress, and then every ten years, thereafter. The first such census was conducted in 1790 and it has been repeated every decade since.

Even in its early days the idea of a national head count was not without controversy. There was something at least a little disconcerting about individuals ceding personal information to government, no matter how small or general that data might have been. The purpose of all of this had purely to do with the apportionment of representation in Congress, the various districts being determined by population.

That remains one purpose of the every-decade-nose-count in America, and it is a vitally important one. If an area has lost population, districts are redrawn and Congressional representation adjusted accordingly—and vice versa for growing areas. So the political stakes are real—and high.

But as government has grown over the course of our nation’s history, both in its size and scope, the Census has morphed into the basis for many other things having to do with government programs and federal dollars. And this is where that mention of “fair share” comes in. There are these days various federal initiatives funding programs in states and communities for education, infrastructure, and even health care. Of course, all the money comes from us in the first place. Around the time our nation was in the middle of its fourth census, Alexis De Tocqueville suggested, “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” Indeed.

Beyond this, Census data is used by the government in a variety of ways for “policy purposes”—economic and otherwise. This brings to mind another Census 2010 campaign mantra—in fact, it’s the official slogan this time around: “We can’t move forward until you mail it back?”

Forward to where? Forward to what?

I will fill mine out and send it in. I will answer every question truthfully and I won’t waste my time being clever or creative in my responses. But this doesn’t mean that I don’t wonder what all the fuss is about this year. After all, we get a package from the federal government around the first of January each year reminding us of incoming taxes. I never saw a funny commercial about that, largely because most Americans can figure out that this means we have to send something back or be in trouble.

Why then the song and dance about the Census?

Is it because those in charge these days have cool ideas (cool to them) about what they can make of America with new demographic tea leaves to examine? I don’t think one has to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder. Last year, a few eyebrows were raised when the administration announced that it wanted to, in effect, take the Census away from the to-do-list of the Commerce Department, signaling that they wanted command-central for the big count to be in the West Wing. Then there was the issue with ACORN being contracted to work on the big detail-dig. We all know how good they are with numbers, muscle, and the truth.

Questions were raised last year—reasonable ones, in my opinion—about the fact that nowhere on the Census form does it ask about the citizenship of residents. This suggests the possibility that some areas—with large blocs of non-U.S. citizens (legal or otherwise) would have their population and therefore congressional representation impacted by some who have do not have the full rights of American citizenship.

Personally, I am not concerned about getting my fair share based on the Census this year. I am solely concerned with continuing to have my fair say and that the voices heard in our country are those described by “We the People”—in other words, actual citizens.

Furthermore, I’d just as soon keep more of my fair share in the first place, thank you. And “move forward” by myself.

It was 38 years ago this week that President Richard Nixon played the historic China Card—a geopolitical masterstroke during the Cold War. It was all part of a strategic view of the world and effectuated from a position of strength. We were powerful; they were backward—technologically, culturally, and with obvious political deficiencies. That moment remains a high water mark in Nixon’s presidency—a moment in time that even the most determined critics concede positively to his legacy.

But what would Mr. Nixon think now?

These days, admittedly, the whole issue of U.S.-China relations is a sticky one for our current President. It is one of many examples of how different things are when you are governing as opposed to campaigning for office—although it is hard to tell which is which in Washington these days. Mario Cuomo famously talked years ago about politics being “poetry” and governing “prose.”

Dealing with potential adversaries—and even some friends—is always best when you do so from a position of strength. It’s true in military and national defense (“peace through strength”) and it’s true in economics, as well. The scriptures remind us, “The borrower is servant to the lender.” And when one party is deep in financial debt to another a certain measure of leverage is ceded to the lender.

How this dynamic will play out in the immediate future is anyone’s guess, but owing nearly $800 billion to the Chinese should raise a flag—a red one. And it should come as no surprise if and when those to whom we owe such copious amounts of money begin to squeeze us on the international stage.

President Obama has been making great pains to try to change our image before the world, one that he believes George W. Bush perpetuated and that has led to our virtual “blackball” by many nations. But in fact, what he really should be concerned about is not “blackball,” but rather “blackmail.” The Chinese dumped $45 billion of T-bills a couple of months ago—wave of the future? And why shouldn’t one nation operating out of its own interests use such leverage? We would.

In fact, we have.

In 1956, there were two hot spots with the potential of blowing up into World War III, a revolution in Hungary—and a crisis in the Middle East involving the Suez Canal. Seen now in hindsight against the backdrop of the Cold War and as the moment when the last vestiges of old world colonialism gave wave to complete bi-polar hegemony pitting the United States against the Soviets, the Suez Crisis was as much about the exercise of economic clout as it was a diplomatic-military affair.

Gamal Abdel Nassar had emerged as a leader in Egypt as part of a 1952 coup overthrowing King Farouk and by 1954 he was firmly in place as that nation’s maximum leader. He immediately undertook a complete transformation of his country with massive public works and the progressive nationalization of industry. He was enamored of the Soviet system and soon it became clear that his nation would be taking that side in the Cold War. One project near and dear to his heart was the building of the Aswan Dam, which America at first agreed to help fund. But when Nassar sold arms to Soviet satellite Czechoslovakia and then recognized the People’s Republic of China, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles withdrew our dam dollars.

In reaction to this, Nassar announced on July 26, 1956 a Nationalization Law freezing all the assets of the Suez Canal—in effect, a seizure of that vital passageway.

Opened in 1869, this 119-mile long man-made waterway connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Originally financed by the Egyptians and French, Britain became a major stakeholder and stockholder in 1875, and eventually the canal became part of the United Kingdom’s imperial portfolio in the region. Following World War II, and with the decline of the U.K.’s empire, the canal gradually became a diplomatic football—not to mention thorn. And the creation of the nation of Israel in 1948 caused tensions about the vital waterway to further increase.

In the aftermath of Nassar’s July 26 speech, Britain—led by Prime Minister Anthony Eden—and France, represented by Eden’s counterpart, Guy Mollet, began to plot how to ensure their access to the Suez Canal. Eventually, and in an alliance with Israel (a nation with the most to lose if the canal was closed to them), military action was planned and initiated.

Follow the money.

Meanwhile, the American President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the midst of a reelection bid, had already had a rough year in 1956—physically and politically. And shortly following election to a second term in the White House, he played some power politics of his own. Now, I should state here that I am not of the number in agreement with what he did in the Suez matter, anymore than I am about how we abandoned the freedom fighters in Budapest earlier that summer. I am simply using this story to describe a reality in all of life and politics—like it or not.

There is a golden rule in geo-politics: He who has the gold makes the rule.

Mr. Eisenhower did not want Britain, France, and Israel—all stated allies of the United States—creating a situation that might not play well with the Soviets and that had the potential to instigate a larger war. Here was the hero of Normandy putting the pressure on British Prime Minister Eden—a man who had worked closely with Ike while serving in Churchill’s War Cabinet.

“The borrower is servant to the lender.”

To apply pressure on Eden’s government to cease and desist, Eisenhower instructed U.S. Treasury Secretary, George M. Humphrey, to begin to sell off some of our government’s British bonds. Some of these bonds were holdovers from the U.K.’s World War II debt; others had been sold to us to help that nation’s economy rebound after the war. Eden’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, future P.M. Harold Macmillan, told him that the results would be devastating to the British economy.

Checkmate.

Anthony Eden was a broken man. He fled to a vacation-exile in Jamaica, spending time at Ian Fleming’s (of James Bond literary fame) estate there, but his health quickly deteriorated. He was taking amphetamines—had been for years under doctor’s orders after a botched gall bladder operation—and the drugs magnified his problems with insomnia and unraveling mental health. Soon, Mr. Macmillan took over at 10 Downing Street, but by then the Suez episode had hastened the sunset on the British Empire—and the Cold War morphed from a multi-national tag-team match into a virtual two-nation standoff.

Follow the money.

We are potentially in big trouble as a nation. Our security is threatened not only by Islamist terrorism—but also by some who have a lien on our title deed. Certainly, throughout our history we have dealt with nations and regimes in pragmatic and realpolitik ways, even having to hold our collective noses because of the stench of tyranny and oppression on the part of some of our momentary allies in a larger cause. But we have managed, for the most part, to deal with it—ugliness and all—because of the ability to approach everything from a position of strength: morally, militarily, and economically.

Now though, we not only depend on others for much of our energy, but we also owe an astronomical amount of money (the interest alone is unfathomable) to powerful entities. We should not be surprised that other nations no longer dance on cue—nor should we ever be surprised if and when some big bills come due with humiliating strings attached.

Or worse.

RN’s work mediating a steel workers strike was reported in the Los Angeles Times 50 years ago this week.

The quintessential Whig, legendary statesman, and long reigning House Speaker from Kentucky Henry Clay earned the title of “Great Compromiser” for his decades of bringing sparring parties to the table, but it can be said that RN achieved similar feats during his decades of public service, most notably his peace journey to China and the reduction of tensions with the Soviet Union in 1972.

But this Great Compromiser got started early on. As Larry Harnisch points out in the Los Angeles Times, while President Eisenhower was on a trip to South America in January 1960, Vice President Nixon was solving a nationwide steel strike,  a “Herculean chore” which the Times also called “the biggest domestic headache at that very moment.” Ever the pragmatist, RN was able to get big labor to assuage their work rule stand in return for a larger pay package from their employers:

And then there’s the granddaddy of all recent rhetorical absurdities when Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey uttered the incredibly clueless thought: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

Can someone explain to me how the death of 14 (one of the victims was pregnant) can be trumped by the importance of a particular political agenda? The General should include a very real apology in his resignation letter.

It would be funny if not for the fact that it is all so dangerously sad. As I take it all in, it’s like the ghost of Groucho Marx is sitting on one of my shoulders making me smile at the outrageousness of such comments with his famous, “Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your own eyes?” This is all balanced by the difficult to ignore presence of the ghost of Gen. George S. Patton, who sits on the other shoulder and regularly fills that ear (this would be the right ear, by the way – in every sense of that word) with words I am not completely able to translate in this column.

Psychologists use the term “denial” to describe a way some people interpret reality. This manifests itself in denying something ever actually happened, or that it happened but it wasn’t to big of a deal (the “isolated event” approach), or even in something called “projection” which admits that something has indeed happened, but deflects blame and responsibility. We are a nation in official and pervasive denial.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis (c. 1962), if an American soldier would have opened fire on his comrades while wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt and yelling, “Long Live Lenin, Khruschev, and Castro,” it is doubtful that the guy’s communist sympathies would have been dismissed as irrelevant and peripheral. The commies were the enemy. And, if an investigation into his background would have yielded clues to his political feelings and fanaticism, there is no doubt that the case would have been a slam-dunk. And those who should have picked up on his radicalism before the awful fact would have been held accountable.

In fact, if some white-hooded fool were to open fire on a group today in the name of a fiery cross and a virulent racist perversion of certain passages in the Christian Bible, it is unlikely that such a terrorist would have any apologists reluctant to tie what he did to what he believed. Religious violence, be it of the cross or crescent, is always worthy of condemnation and contempt.

But when it comes to Islamism, the various contortions some use to distance what a Jihadist did from the ideology that so-obviously informed his actions are very difficult to watch.

Of course, I very much understand the complexities of this issue. We are a free society and among the most precious of those freedoms is that of religion. But as with another vital right – the freedom of speech – there are clear limits. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. And religious liberty notwithstanding, you cannot advocate the violent overturning of our constitutional way of life in this country in the name of any God.

Anyone, therefore, who embraces Sharia law and believes that it should become the code of a new America, should be disqualified from serving in the military. At any rate – how can they really take the required oath? Clearly one day long ago, the Fort Hood terrorist said:

I, Nidal Malik Hasan, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

We are told “officially” that there are 3,572 Muslims in our military ranks. Although it’s interesting to note that The American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council has that number much higher, in fact, four times higher – at more than 15,000. What do they know that those in the barracks don’t?

Some might want to counter that bad things have been done – violently so – in this country and the world throughout history, in the name of my religion – Christianity. And, sadly, I must confess that this has been the case, on occasion. But it has never been the norm. And those who do such stuff certainly don’t get their instructions from Christian doctrine.

To get from the teachings of Jesus to murderous evil requires a tortured, twisted, ignorant, and monumentally long journey. Yes, people have done bad things in Christ’s name – but in doing so they have, in effect, denied him.

Some ideologies, however, are much more friendly to the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. For example, when it comes to economic theory, you are hard pressed to find any possible pathway from Milton Friedman’s monetary ideas to killing a bunch of people. On the other hand, when you take a look at the writings of Karl Marx (no relation to Groucho), history has shown that the distance from theory to bloodshed is not all that far. In fact, Marxism and violence are close cousins because you really have to force people to turn from self-interest – all for their own good, of course.

The thing that too many in our nation are simply ignoring is that when it comes to Islam, as opposed to any other religious idea extant, the journey from ideology to what happened at Fort Hood is also not a very long one. For any Christian to become so radicalized as to open fire people in the name of his or her religion would require a virtual repudiation of the faith. Could it happen? Sure – anything can happen. And if it did, the mainstream media in this country would have no qualms about wrapping the deed around the doctrine.

But the quantifiable fact is that such things really don’t happen with Christians the way they do with Muslims. And even when certain violent acts by professed Christians, such as the killing of a doctor who has performed abortions, make the news, usually among the first and loudest expressions of condemnation and outrage are from Christians.

Does anyone hear all that many Muslim voices condemning Hasan?

Much has been made of the fact that the Fort Hood Jihadist/Terrorist was harassed for his beliefs. First, let me be clear – I think it is wrong, un-American, and certainly un-Christian to at all persecute someone for what is believed and practiced in the context of our Constitutional freedoms. And when it comes to Christians – who have known the pain of persecution throughout the centuries – there is no Biblical mandate for a follower of Jesus to ever persecute another human being. If fact, in our way of thinking, and from the wonderful Jewish scriptures that inform our faith, we are ever admonished to love neighbor as self.

The Christian response to persecution is never to be that of reactive violence. The Apostle Peter gave instruction near the end of his life on this matter:

Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. ‘Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened.’ But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. – I Peter 3:13-16 (NIV)

Gentleness, respect, hope, and love – these are the watchwords of the follower of Jesus. But there is no “turn the other cheek” stuff in Islam. And at some point people in this country need to stop ignoring the obvious.

So I respect my Muslim neighbors and want them to be treated justly. This means, when there is peace, community, love of law, love of country, all will be well. And when these values are violently violated there must be justice of another kind – to punish evil, especially the egregious wickedness of terrorist murder.

But I also, taking another cue from Jesus, must be “wise as a serpent,” and this means I need to be aware that certain ideologies are more fertile when it comes to hate and violence. And, like it or not, they – and those who espouse such teachings – need to be watched very carefully.

Too many people have been looking the other way in America. It’s time to focus.

The first Social Security check was mailed in 1940 to Ida May Fuller, a retired legal secretary in Ludlow, Vt. It was for $22.54. Every month for the next 10 years, Ms. Fuller received a check for that same amount.

The original Social Security legislation had not included an inflation adjustment, which meant benefits did not keep up with the cost of living. A decade later, Ms. Fuller’s checks were worth about 40 percent less in real terms than when she started receiving them.

Congress finally increased benefits in 1950 and then continued to do so in fits and starts, sometimes faster than inflation, sometimes slower and usually in an election year. President Richard M. Nixon and a Democratic Congress brought some order to this process in 1972, by automatically tying benefits to the movement of an inflation index in the previous year.

The changes were part of the transformation, during the middle decades of the 20th century, in how this country treated the elderly. In the 1930s, they had little safety net and frequently struggled to meet their basic needs. Four decades later, they were the only group of Americans with guaranteed health care and a guaranteed income. All in all, it was certainly for the good.

But by the 1970s, you could start to see the early signs of excess. In their bill, Mr. Nixon and Congress included a little bonus: Social Security payments could never decline, even if prices did. If prices went up, benefits matched the increase. If prices went down, benefits would be held constant – and their purchasing power would actually grow. Heads, it’s a tie; tails, Social Security recipients win.

This year, the coin finally came up tails.

With oil prices plunging and other prices falling, last year’s high inflation (which led to the 5.8 percent increase in Social Security payments) has turned into deflation. Overall prices have dropped 2.1 percent in the last year, according to the relevant price index.

His name is David Cameron and the moment described is his appearance and speech at the Tory (Conservative) Party Conference in Manchester, England yesterday. Most polls in the U.K. indicate a trend toward the Tories as the realm moves toward its next national election, which will most likely be held by the first week of June 2010.

The Conservatives have been out of power since 1997, when Tony Blair and the Labour Party gained control. These have been wilderness years. But the party is now re-energized and poised to pull off an electoral repudiation of many of the big-government trends of the past decade.

Ironic, huh?

Consider these nuggets from Cameron’s Manchester speech – and see if you don’t find yourself scratching your head and wishing America had a singular conservative voice to articulate a compelling vision for the future:

We will need to confront Britain’s culture of irresponsibility and that will be hard to take for many people. And we will have to tear down Labour’s big government bureaucracy, ripping up its time-wasting, money-draining, responsibility-sapping nonsense.

“It is government that has gotten us into this mess. Why is our economy broken?” he asked, “Because government got too big, spent too much and doubled the national debt.”

“Why is our society broken? Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility. Why are our politics broken? Because government got too big, promised too much and pretended it had all the answers.”

He ridiculed “this idea that for every problem there’s a government solution for every issue, for every situation a czar…”

And – my favorite line of all:

Do you know the worst thing about their big government? It’s not the cost, though that’s bad enough. It’s the steady erosion of responsibility…we are not going to solve our problems with bigger government. We are going to solve our problems with a stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger country. All by building responsibility.

Oh – and, “Complicated taxes, excessive regulations – they make life impossible for entrepreneurs. What are you doing to make it easier to start a business? Easier to take people on? What are you doing to make regulation less complicated? To make locating a business more attractive?”

OK – one more passage, then some comments:

The truth is, it’s not just that big government has failed to solve these problems. Big government has all too often helped cause them by undermining the personal and social responsibility that should be the lifeblood of a strong society. Just think of the signals we send out. To the family struggling to raise children, pay a mortgage, hold down a job. Stay together and we’ll give you less; split up and we give you more.

After a dozen years of Labour administration in the United Kingdom, one child in six is in a family where no-one works – the highest such rate in Europe. This is not due to job scarcity. These are cases where readily available welfare provisions have undermined the need and desire to work, even when jobs have been available.

Basically, Mr. Cameron was challenging his party – and the nation – with a logic that could only be missed by the clueless or members of the Nobel prize committee (pardon the redundancy), that “the more we as a society do, the less we will need government to do.” He is championing an idea whose time has come once again: personal responsibility.

I am not sure what the Tories plan to do for a slogan in the upcoming election (and campaign cycles in Britain are mercifully shorter than those here in the U.S.), but I might suggest either, “Yes, We Should,” or “It’s The Responsibility, Stupid!”

David Cameron is what might be called over there a “liberal conservative.” And if that seems similar to what was once here called “compassionate conservatism,” there is actually only a partial connection. The conservatism of Cameron and company actually combines elements of limited government (British style, of course) and social libertarianism. In other words, the total Cameron package would not resonate with many American social conservatives, myself included. But much of this is a reflection of the state of culture at large in the U.K., as well as across Europe. Church attendance patterns are far different than those in America. And evangelicals in particular do not make up a large percentage of the population; merely a fraction of what we see here at home.

The same is true in Germany, where Angela Merkel was recently re-elected Chancellor, presiding over a government that is described as “center-right.” She is referred to, at least by some detractors, as a Margaret Thatcher-like “Iron Lady.” The trend is away from liberal-socialist economics and back toward greater fiscal conservatism. Again, as is the case in Britain, being more conservative in Germany has little to do with American-style social conservative issues, and for the same reason: The larger culture is secular, less religious, and therefore more “libertarian” when it comes to personal behavior.

Then there is France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy leans more center-right than anyone in recent memory. Again, it’s quite obvious that any form of cultural or social conservatism is not a big deal there, either.

Now, curiously, in Canada – which seems to have elements of European and American political dynamics – Prime Minister Steven Harper is an evangelical Christian (his background is with the Christian and Missionary Alliance). He has been described as “inspired by two British Christian thinkers: C. S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge,” and has strong ties to social conservatives in the realm.

This analytical detour now complete, I come to my point. Conservatism is resurgent in many Western democracies. Sure, in some places it looks a little different than its American counterpart, particularly on social/cultural issues. But that has more to do with the fact that in those nations there is no strong evangelical church itself to speak of.

On the other hand, here in the United States evangelicals are somewhat stronger. Therefore, resonant issues (such as abortion) are always either on the table, or scrambling for a rightful place. It’s a voting bloc that may make some uncomfortable, but an important bloc, nonetheless.

Some dismiss the conservative trend in Europe as irrelevant to American politics at this time because of the absence there of any social conservative agenda. But those who do so are missing the obvious. There would be a relationship (awkward, or otherwise) between economic conservatism and cultural conservatism in those nations, as well, if there were more resident evangelicals. They are not a factor in Europe because it’s been a very long time since there was any statistically significant evangelical-type movement or revival.

The lesson for all conservatives is that the ideas of limited government, personal responsibility, and strong families resonate across the board.

The lesson for evangelicals is to cultivate and maintain a commitment to see that the spiritual condition of our churches and communities never becomes European. The fact is that any movement can fall from foothold to footnote in one generation.

We should now be saying that he’s the leader of the world, period.

Until now, the various elements of a particular president’s philosophy and methodology have usually been categorized dichotomously: domestic policy and foreign policy. And since they both involve issues that seldom fly that close to each other – except for matters of trade – the occupants of the Oval Office have generally been analyzed and graded on them separately by historians.

The prevailing wisdom is that a particular president may have been strong on one and weak on the other. Rare was the leader who got high marks for what he did here as well as his approach to things abroad. Sometimes it had to do with passion. Richard Nixon was fascinated with foreign policy, seeing it as the premier role for a president. And in spite of a solid domestic record (which was impressive in some areas), the 37th President is largely rated highly for his achievements on the international stage.

Even for those who seemed to be effective both domestically and diplomatically, there were few similarities in philosophy and methodology between the two vastly different arenas. That is, until now.

Mr. Obama has a philosophy that runs as a common thread between his approaches to everything he touches from the U.S. economy, to national security, and even, yes, foreign policy. What is this important piece of the puzzle? Simple. Though he pays lip service to one of the most basic issues of human nature and how people relate to and interact with each other on a micro or macro scale, his actions actually minimize – or at least, marginalize – a fundamental instinct common to every person, group, community, and nation on the earth.

Self-interest.

The call du jour from the mountaintop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is for all of us to rise above, or in new age parlance “transcend,” mere mortal self-interest. On the domestic level this means that capitalism – a mean, primal, greedy, and materialistic approach to economics that steals from the poor to give to the rich – must be replaced (slowly, but surely) with a more enlightened approach; one that emphasizes social justice and the equitable distribution of wealth.

This is all the rage these days. It may be called “progressive,” but it’s really a barely-if-at-all disguised form of socialism. If it walks like a duck, it’s a duck. If it digests food like a goose, it’s…well.

Never mind that this naïve experiment has never really worked well anywhere, and instead of practicing “to each according to need; from each according to ability,” it actually devolves into “to each according to need; from each according to lack thereof.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

You also start running out of freedom. Planned economies involve a construct where the individual trades (wittingly, or not) liberty for some perceived value – all supposedly accomplished on the wings of so-called better angels. The bigger the wings and more aggressive the planners, the greater is the loss of freedom. Capitalism, on the other hand, though often accused of being selfish and cynical, recognizes man’s inbred propensity for selfishness and taps into it.

The father of capitalism, Adam Smith, who wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, referred to this as a “system of natural liberty.” And flaws, cycles, weaknesses aside, it has worked pretty well here in our country. This approach to economics is, in fact, woven into the national fabric.

Everyone gets free healthcare in Cuba. But it’s a good thing there, because the average wage earner in that nation makes less than $30.00 per month, including the doctors. And three out of four workers in that country – where a little more than 50 years ago economic development was the highest in Latin America and advanced even by European standards – now work for the public sector (read: the government tab).

But don’t hold your breath while waiting for Michael Moore to make a movie entitled, “Cuba: A Sad Story.” His current movie, a rant about the evils of capitalism, will be released next week in theaters. Of course, Moore wouldn’t make a movie, or do anything for that matter, out of self-interest. Would he?

It’s no secret if you want a high standard of living in countries with planned economies (the collective version of fixed incomes) you go to work for the government. As you climb the ladder you get better Dachas. This was only true here in the U.S. during the days of the Great Depression and New Deal.

Of course, in fairness, the anti-capitalists are just getting started.

On the international front, lip service may be paid here and there to the concept of national self-interest, as when Mr. Obama told the good old boys and girls at the United Nations the other day: “Now, like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests.” However, one just knows that a big fat conjunction is coming signaling the real point: “But,” (see, I told you) “it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 – more than at any point in human history – the interests of nations and peoples are shared.”

Really?

The president’s hyperbolic assignation of this year notwithstanding, is it even remotely true that China or Russia share our interests? And even leaving the roguish states out of the discussion, is it at all realistic to ask any nation to act against, or in any way minimize, its own interest – no matter how compelling or romantic the call? And is it even just a little bit ironic that in a speech with the line, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” our president calls everyone to follow the magnanimous lead of America, now that the Bush administration has been replaced with a collection of more responsible political gnostics?

President Obama does not have separate principles for his domestic and foreign policy approaches. There is one common thread. It’s out with the old and presumably outdated self-interest and in with a brand new era of quasi-utopian-top-down-we-know-best-because-we-are-enlightened peace and prosperity.

Let bells all over the world ring as empathy breaks out all over.

“The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments, are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people,” President Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. But as ambitious and idealistic – even resonant to some – as such a statement is, the fact is that our fundamental nature as human beings has not changed throughout the course of history. Technology has changed, knowledge has increased, landscapes have morphed, and kingdoms and nations have come and gone, but as the Shakespeare of the prophets recorded six centuries before Christ:

All flesh is grass, and the goodliness there of is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth… – Isaiah 40:6-7

The simple, resilient, and undeniable fact is that self-interest is here to stay as long as the world turns. And any philosophy or vision, utopian or otherwise, that fails to take this fact into account, is doomed to failure.

In the waning days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, he would sometimes lie awake at night worrying about things; the war, his Great Society dreams, and even his own health (his father died relatively young, and Johnson feared the same fate). Occasionally he’d wander the halls finding his way to a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, a man who had been at the pinnacle of power and influence, only to be eventually devastated emotionally and physically by events and the pressures of his office.

LBJ wondered if he’d wind up the same way. After all, didn’t he just want something better for everyone – a higher standard of living and a world safe and at peace? And, hadn’t he been described as a colossus and the most powerful president since FDR, just a few years earlier?

Mark Twain used to say that “history never repeats itself, but it rhymes.” He was right. The cycles of history are not exact, but one time can resemble another and often does.

And one of history’s most enduring lessons is that if anyone begins a visionary journey with dreams and even ideals that fail to take into account the simple fact that people, businesses, communities (organized or otherwise), nations, and groupings of nations all share a passion for themselves, it is like starting with the premise that 2+2=5. This may only seem to be a small error, but when carried out exponentially it becomes a monstrosity.

Later, the general found out that Rommel himself had not actually been present for the confrontation, but he is comforted by an aid: “If you defeat Rommel’s plan, then you defeat Rommel.”

It is a fascinating thing when an adversary ironically uses a methodology that was previously owned by an opponent – especially when he does so with surprising effectiveness. When a football team known for its excellent running game throws the bomb on the first play from scrimmage, when a home run hitter bunts, and when a political adversary takes a page from the book of the other guy, well – you gotta love it.

Under any credible definition of the phrase “dazed and confused” there now appears the look on Nancy Pelosi’s face. Yes, that one. That, “we are the good guys, why are people giving us a hard time, they must be Nazis, or just nuts” look. Surely you’ve seen it. I have had a persistent “where-have-I-seen-that-look-before?” feeling when seeing the speaker’s visage on the screen, but it took me a while to make the connection.

The date is December 21, 1989 – the place Bucharest, Romania. Nicolae Ceauşescu, the man who had ruled his country with an iron first for a couple of decades, was on his balcony trying to address an increasingly unruly crowd. It was a moment of truth for the dictator. The look on his face – one of complete incomprehension – was one of the Kodak moments capturing the scene at the end of the Cold War.

That look might be described by my grandkids as: “clueless.” Others might simply say that it is a facial expression that begs the question, “what the?” But it is a look that is botoxed in place for Ms. Pelosi. And that same expression has recently been found on the faces of many members of the House and Senate as they have gone home to meet with constituents.

Sadly, the time has come in America where recess is no longer any fun.

What Nancy Pelosi is seeing is her side being on the receiving end of some of the kind of methodological medicine the left has been forcing down the country’s throat for quite a long time. I recently got around to reading Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. Yes, I know I should have done so long ago, but I thought I had a good enough grasp on what the man said back in 1971 via the thorough treatment his musings have received from the conservative punditry.

I was wrong. My bad. Every American should read it. It’s chilling.

I believe what we are now witnessing is a case of people being, as the saying goes (and as is actually used in Alinsky’s book) “hoisted with their own petard.” Fire is being fought with fire. The reflexive dismissal of angry citizens showing up at town hall meetings these days to give Washington insiders a piece of their mind as somehow orchestrated, notwithstanding.

This is not a top-down campaign with a few sinister puppeteers pulling the strings. The opposition to liberal health care machinations and other stuff is very real. What they see as orchestration is actually mobilization. And it is only the beginning. We are, I think, on the verge of seeing one of the great collapses of political popularity and good will in American history. The nation is on the verge of a Network moment, where “Yes, we can” is being drowned out with cries of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

George Washington died because of misguided notions about how getting the bad blood out via leeches would cure his ailment. It was a case of a cure that killed. Sure, his cold was gone, but so was he. In a sense, the draconian measures some would use to remake our nation’s fabric, from health care, to national security, to the economy itself, are somewhat akin to bleeding the nation en route to restoration. All this will do is make us weaker. Or dead.

I shared a sermon last Sunday at my church based on a haunting passage from the writings of the prophet Jeremiah called, A Dying Nation At A Crossroads. The prophet was a patriot, but he knew that sometimes patriotism involves even more than waving a flag – a stand must be taken. His message was:

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16 (New International Version)

Jeremiah was speaking to a nation at a pivotal moment – a time that called for clear thinking and action. They had been on a slippery slope for a long time and the clock was running out. Nothing short of a return to what made them strong – even great – in the first place would correct the problem.

The week Winston Churchill traveled to diminutive Fulton, Missouri to deliver his most famous speech – the one that talked about a sinister iron curtain born of Soviet expansionism – Time Magazine published a review of two recently publish books. One was a work by Frederick L. Schuman, the Woodrow Wilson professor of government at Williams College, called Soviet Politics. It was basically a defense of the Soviet system. The other was by Saul Alinsky, who had written Reveille For Radicals, the spiritual ancestor of his 1971 work. The title of the review was: Problem Of The Century.

The reviewer suggested that, “the dominant problem of the 20th century is the reconciliation of economic liberty with political liberty.” He saw this issue resolved in Schuman’s book by simply “liquidating political liberty.” He saw Alinsky’s ideas in a little more favorable light, suggesting that it was written with a “burning honesty” and that the author had “glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms.”

In other words, the review for Time saw something constructive in what Alinsky was saying in those days immediately following World War II and as the Cold War was just barely being noised about. But he indicated that only time would really tell.

In fact, that reviewer did not live long enough to see the fruit of Saul Alinsky’s attempt to put his vision into those “practical terms” in Rules For Radicals. He died 10 years before that. His name was Whitaker Chambers.

He never got to write a review of that book, but he did write one of his own and it became a classic called simply, Witness. It was his treatise as a man who had once been a communist, even an agent. Then he had seen the light and spent the rest of his days fighting, at a great personal price, his former faith. Along the way, he exposed a traitor or two, gaining him the wrath of the liberal elite in America, though he has long since been vindicated as a truth-teller by many infallible proofs.

He began his book with a letter to his children, letting them know the nature of the struggle and the craftiness of the enemy:

Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world.

The Communist vision has a mighty agitator and a mighty propagandist. They are the crisis. The agitator needs no soapbox. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where desperation lurks. The propagandist writes no Communist gibberish. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where man’s hope and man’s energy fuse to fierceness. The vision inspires. The crisis impels.

Too bad Mr. Chambers didn’t live to see the demise of such thinking. But then again…

These arguments never seem to go anywhere. When a pope criticizes legalized abortion, liberal Catholics nod and say that yes, they agree, it’s a terrible tragedy … but of course they can’t impose their religious values on a secular society. When a pope endorses the redistribution of wealth, conservative Catholics stroke their chins and say that yes, they agree, society needs a safety net … but of course they’re duty-bound to oppose the tyranny of big government. And when the debate isn’t going their way, left and right both fall back on flaccid rhetoric about how the papal message “transcends politics,” and shouldn’t be turned to any partisan purpose.

“Caritas in Veritate” has been no exception. It’s a “social” encyclical, in the church’s parlance, covering issues ranging from globalization and the environment to unions and the welfare state. Inevitably, liberal Catholics spent the past week touting its relevance to the Democratic Party’s policy positions. (A representative blast e-mail: “Pope’s Encyclical on Global Economy Supports the Principles of the Employee Free Choice Act.”) Just as inevitably, conservative Catholics hastened to explain that the encyclical “is not a political document” — to quote a statement co-authored by the House minority leader, John Boehner — and shouldn’t be read as “an endorsement of any political or economic agenda.”

Boehner is half right. The pope is not a Democrat or a Republican, and his vision doesn’t fit the normal categories of American politics.

But Benedict’s encyclical is nothing if not political. “Caritas in Veritate” promotes a vision of economic solidarity rooted in moral conservatism. It links the dignity of labor to the sanctity of marriage. It praises the redistribution of wealth while emphasizing the importance of decentralized governance. It connects the despoiling of the environment to the mass destruction of human embryos.

Almost four months after his inauguration, President Barack Obama is still riding high in the polls. According to Gallup, 66 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing. But I expect that Obama’s popularity will begin to fall, even plummet, as the leaves turn brown. That’s not to say he is doing a bad job, but that the tasks he faces in fixing the economy remain daunting, and beyond resolution in his first year or, perhaps, even first term.

History suggests that Judis is right about the general trajectory of the president’s popularity.  Political scientists speak of the “decay curve,”  the tendency of presidential approval ratings to decline after the first few months of a new administration. The reason for the decay is straightforward:  the more decisions that a president makes, the more chances there are of alienating people.

For instance, RN’s first Gallup numbers in 1969 were 59 percent approve, 5 percent disapprove.  (That is not a typo: only five percent disapproved of his performance during his first days in office.)  By late June of 1971, the approve/disapprove ratio was a much closer 48-39 percent.

Economic conditions have a great deal to do with approval ratings.  In good times, they tend to stay high.  The boom of the 1990s buoyed Clinton’s numbers and helped him survive impeachment.  In bad times, presidential popularity plummets.  The recession of Ronald Reagan’s early presidency drove his approve/disapprove ratio to a dismal 35-56 percent in January 1983.

Obama still enjoys the benefit of the doubt and can still blame the current economic turmoil on his predecessor.  But as Judis suggests, the public will eventually hold him accountable for the results of his policies.  In that respect, he might ponder what RN wrote about his own bold experiment with big-government economics:

What did America reap from its brief fling with economic controls?  The August 15, 1971 decision to impose them was politically necessary and immensely popular in the short run.  But in the long run I believe that it was wrong.  The piper must always be paid, and there was an unquestionably high price for tampering with the orthodox economic mechanisms.

“These hearings are titled ‘follow the money’ after the character in the movie – and the book – ‘All the President’s Men,’ ” Mr. Miller said. “The Deep Throat character, he told [reporters Carl] Bernstein and [Bob] Woodward to trace the money back to find out where the corruption began.

“We hope this will not end up as anything as sordid as that was,” he joked.

Mark Felt, the real Deep Throat, never said “Follow the money.” In 1997, Daniel Schorr wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times about his search for the phrase’s origin. When he could not find it in book version of All the President’s Men, he spoke to William Goldman, who wrote the script of the movie version. “I can’t believe I made it up,” said Goldman. “I was in constant contact with [Bob] Woodward while writing the screenplay. I guess he made it up.” Woodward thought that Goldman had made it up. Whoever wrote the line, concluded Schorr, “it was an invention.”

According to NRO’s Mark Hemingway, it’s Ayn Rand.

Hemingway writes that BB&T CEO John Allison “navigated through the overheated mortgage market and the ensuing banking crisis by relying, in large part, on a philosophy that many others are now turning to” — Rand’s self-titled Objectivist creed, which endorses unregulated capitalism as the sole moral system of economic and, indeed, societal organization. Objectivism is best understood on the pragmatic level as a sort of mishmash of libertarianism and vociferous atheism, leavened with a cultic devotion to the woman who thought it all up. (Typical of the convinced Objectivist devotee is the high-school English teacher who challenged me to find a single factual or grammatical error in any of her works.) Rand hated the association with libertarianism, less because of any meaningful policy differentiation than her intolerance for variation on what she considered her themes: like the religious “mystics” she claimed to hate, she expended far more vitriol on perceived heretics than actual unbelievers.

This conflation of rigid social ideology with individual virtue was married to a belief that both expressed themselves in the most minute preference of the total person. With Ayn Rand the arbiter of rectitude, one must love the things Ayn Rand loved: a petty megalomania satirized by Murray Rothbard in Mozart Was a Red, from which comes this essay’s title. (For a more wrenching and appalling tale of Rand’s inability to separate ideology — or as she would have it, philosophy — from herself, see the appealingly soap-opera-ish The Passion of Ayn Rand.) This exclusionary vision easily elides into an exterminating one, as Whittaker Chambers noted in his famous review of Atlas Shrugged:

Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”

Here, it is useful to turn to a major essay by the man whom Ayn Rand designated her “intellectual heir” — a formalism unique outside cultic structures, which perhaps this is not — Leonard Peikoff. (I’ve written about him before.) In casting out a “heretical” movement which held that Rand did not, in fact, discover the whole of truth, and that disagreement with Rand was not an inherent moral failing (details from the putative heretics may be found here), Peikoff wrote the following:

Now take the case of Ayn Rand, who discovered true ideas on a virtually unprecedented scale. Do any of you who agree with her philosophy respond to it by saying “Yeah, it’s true”—without evaluation, emotion, passion? Not if you are moral. A moral person … greets the discovery of this kind of truth with admiration, awe, even love; he makes a heartfelt positive moral evaluation. He says: Objectivism is not only true, it is great! Why? Because of the volitional work a mind must have performed to reach for the first time so exalted a level of truth—and because of all the glorious effects such knowledge will have on man’s life, all the possibilities of action it opens up for the future.

The arrogance of assumption that one who differs is either evil or stupid may be a hallmark of the political blogosphere and frustrated corners of academia, but it does not commend those who purport to defend and embody a putative holistic philosophy.

All this brings us full circle to John Allison, BB&T, and Mark Hemingway’s assertion that Objectivism has saved the company from (comparative) financial ruin. Allison is a longtime and public supporter of Randian ideas, and has given a great deal of money to promulgate them. All this is perfectly fine, and a matter for Allison, the BB&T board, and the recipients of their largesse. Where the narrative becomes problematic is in the place Hemingway takes it: to an assertion that Ayn Rand and her ideology have, via Allison, “saved” BB&T.

The evidence for this, as presented by Hemingway, is thin. Allison credits his Objectivist beliefs with three things that benefitted BB&T in the past year: he believes in capitalism; he was wary of exotic mortgages; and he is against altruism, which he identifies as the flaw “that got us into the current financial crisis.” The first two items have no necessary connection with Randian teaching whatsoever. An overwhelming majority of Americans endorse capitalism, despite an underwhelming minority adhering to Objectivism; and unease over the strange financial instruments that helped precipitate this crisis is a familiar theme to anyone who followed the financial press (or Paul Krugman) in the past few years. As for Allison’s denunciation of “altruism,” he is certainly right that well-intentioned (by conventional, not Objectivist, lights) government interventions aggravated and perhaps even helped cause the market crash: but what Hemingway does not bother to explore is what the term means in Objectivist thought. Again, it’s instructive here to turn to Peikoff, who serves a useful purpose in illustrating the deeply strange moral turn that Randian ideology demands:

Q: During the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech College, there was a professor, a holocaust survivor, who blocked a door against the shooter so that his students could escape safely. And although he died in the process, the students did escape. Is this an act of altruism that Objectivism classifies as immoral?

A: No. As you present it, it was a heroic act in defense of the professor’s values.

Assuming a professor does not have reason to despise his students, then they are a value to him…

By contrast, and assuming no special personal attachments among the students, if one student decided to risk his life to save the others, I would regard that as highly dubious morally; in fact, I would think him weird. (Emphasis added.) If he has no grounds, personal or professional, to value the lives of these students so highly as to risk self-destruction, then, according to Objectivism, his action is altruistic and, as such, immoral.

In Hemingway’s piece, Allison says that in place of “altruism,” “[w]hat you really need to do is run your life in relationship to other people in context to what [Rand] calls the trader principle.” This sounds reasonable till, instead of doing something noble, you find that Objectivism demands you abandon your terrified classmates — who have nothing to trade in that moment — to their deaths. What Hemingway allows his subject to present as a jewel of enlightened self-interest is, upon what should be ordinary journalistic examination, a chilling and dumb bit of moral juvenilia.

Finally, Hemingway errs in presenting BB&T as a uniquely good and noteworthy bank in these troubled times. Indeed, the entire piece could be a commissioned bit of puff-PR from BB&T corporate communications. The truth is that BB&T, though markedly better off than many of its institutional peers, is nonetheless enduring the loss about a third of its market capitalization — and Wells Fargo is doing almost exactly as well as BB&T is, without recourse to Objectivist corporate leadership. Hemingway intones that the example of BB&T and the crisis of capitalism together mean that “Rand’s perspective is suddenly so valuable.” But it’s not. It’s as valuable as it’s always been, in good times and bad: as a personal validator of businessmen, and a moral fantasy for teenagers. A pity that National Review, which once printed apt condemnations of this enduring absurdity, now issues de facto press releases on its behalf.

GM, per Drudge, now stands for Government Motors.

Prexy Robin Wagner (he who had his wings clipped when he used the company jet to come abegging) has agreed to step down at the request of the White House.  There will also be changes in the company’s Board of Directors.

But it has taken two not to do the Detroit tango that could have led to the production of efficient and competitive automobiles.

So maybe Mr. Obama is really about to make some news —and real a difference— by also addressing the labor side of the labor-management equation.

There’s another shoe that needs to drop.

But don’t hold your breath waiting to hear that another President —the UAW’s ever intransigent Ron Gettelfinger— is suddenly going to have a lot of time to work on his golf game.  Ninety-two percent of the $74 million raised by unions in 2008 when to Democrats, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do that math.

One can agree or disagree with Mr. Obama’s decision.  But unless and until he puts some teeth into it, it isn’t really a decision at all — it’s just a way to distract the angry torch-bearing populist mob with another villain now that we’re once again making nice with AIG.

Well begun is only half done.  But any way you look at it, half done is half assed.

Part of the problem is that he speaks very fast and rushes his words.  Now, this could be the result of the problem that many smart people have (and there is no question about the man’s smarts) — their brains move faster than their tongues can keep up with.

But that raises another of the Secretary’s communications problems: Much of what he says doesn’t sound very smart.  Many of his answers are patently off-topic and therefore sound (whether or not they are, and I suspect they are) canned.  (His responses to David Gregory’s MTP questions about the AIG bonuses were of the kind to give obtuseness a bad name.)

He also has a nervous habit of repeating and repeating and repeating his interlocutor’s name.   If there were any doubts at the outset that he was being questioned by George Stephanopoulos —on This Week with George Stephanopoulos— they had been put to rest by the time the umpteenth answer had begun with “George,”.  The first couple of times it’s a handy way of personalizing and establishing the immediacy of the moment.  After that it’s the kind of tic that gives rise to drinking games.

But the Secretary’s biggest problem communicationswise is his not infrequent slips into what is semi-officially known as the High Rising Terminal, but which also goes by many differently descriptive names, including “questioning intonation,” “late rising,” and “Sorority Speak.”

This linguistic phenomenon has its own Wikipedia page.

The High Rising Terminal (HRT), also known as uptalk, upspeak or High Rising Intonation (HRI), is a feature of some accents of English where statements have a rising intonation pattern in the final syllable or syllables of the utterance. Empirically, Ladd (1996, pg 123) proposes that HRT in American English and Australian English is marked by a high tone (high pitch or high fundamental frequency) beginning on the final accented syllable near the end of the statement (the terminal), and continuing to increase in frequency (up to 40%) to the end of the intonational phrase. New research such as that conducted by Warren (2005) suggests that the actual rise can occur one or more syllables after the last accented syllable of the phrase, and its range is much more variable than previously thought.
   

“Uptalk” was the subject of a poem by Taylor Mali, which begins:

In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)’s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? You know?

HRT was formerly seen as a function of female speech, and especially young female speech (and not just because of Clueless and Heathers), because it is considered to be non-threatening while discouraging interruption.  But it is now acknowledged as a trait that knows no gender or age.  President Bush43 seems to have  increasingly indulged in uptalk — but he was a notoriously hopeless communicator, so there’s cold comfort for Mr. Geithner in that precedent.

For purely Geithnerian purposes, allow me to cut through all the jargon and poetry and lay down the bottom line.  And the bottom line is this: Mr. Geithner’s HIgh Rising Terminal makes him sound like a Valley Girl. If I had a little more time and even less of a life than I do now, I would lay the Treasury Secretary’s voice pattern over that of Jillian, Brian’s Valley girlfriend on Family Guy — and, although I’m not a betting man, I’m betting that there would be many points of similarity.

This kind of locution is increasingly common — particularly among the young uns who are being raised and taught that, in a world where there are no absolutes and nothing is certain, tentativity is the best policy.  But at least here on the East Coast, and at least to people raised in the old school where declarative sentences ended decisively, it still sounds odd and conveys dumb.  

Maybe he was just having a bad day.  Maybe Secretary Geither is like foreigners —  if you wake him up in the middle of the night he will speak without any HRTs.  Otherwise, perhaps he should consider hiring some new communications consultants and a voice coach.  At least they won’t have to be confirmed. 

He had a 9:00 meeting with reporters in his office that morning. Before fielding a few questions, he told those gathered: “If the conference will return at 12:00, I may have a further statement to make.” Curious, but compliant, in those long-since-gone days of semi-civility between presidents and the press, the journalists found their way back at noon.

An hour or so before that conference encore, Coolidge took a pencil and wrote a message on a piece of paper. He handed it to his secretary with the instruction to take it to his stenographer and have him make several copies – enough for the newsmen who would be at the 12:00 meeting. Ever the frugal man, he suggested that the brief statement could be copied several times on the same sheet, thus only using a few sheets of paper. He told the secretary not to give the note to the stenographer, though, until about 11:50 a.m.

He really wanted to manage this story.

He asked for the pages to be brought to him uncut and before the reporters were admitted to the office, he took a pair of scissors and cut the paper into smaller slips. When he was just about ready, he told his secretary:

“I am going to hand these out myself; I am going to give them to the newspapermen, without comment, from this side of the desk. I want you to stand at the door and not permit anyone to leave until each of them has a slip, so that they may have an even chance.”

An “even chance” at a big scoop, that is.

The handwritten note from the president said: “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty-eight.” Though the now classic Broadway play (made into several film versions), The Front Page, was yet a year away from being published and produced, it comes to mind with the image of dozens of reporters rushing to find telephones.

Calvin Coolidge could have been re-elected if he had wanted the job for another term. His anointed successor, Herbert Hoover, won big in 1928, though it is clear that Coolidge was less-than-enthusiastic about the “Great Engineer.” It is one of those curious “what ifs” of history – would Coolidge have dealt with the coming of the Great Depression better than his successor?

Historians tend to bunch the three Republican presidents of the 1920s – Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover – together in a way suggesting they were identical triplets separated at birth. But there were many differences – some subtle, some not so much.

Herbert Hoover, all of his speechifying about “individualism” notwithstanding, was not the fiscal conservative many today make him out to be. As Amity Shlaes has pointed out in her often-quoted-these-days book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Mr. Hoover had a strong interventionist streak in his personality. He “could not control his own sense of agency,” and “liked to jump in, and find some moral justification for doing so later.” So, in many ways, he helped to turn a recession into the Great Depression “by intervening in business, by signing into law a destructive tariff, and by assailing the stock market.”

Ironically, when closely examined, Herbert Hoover’s approach to economics had more in common with his successor than it did with the two men preceding him in the White House.

Warren G. Harding generally ranks in the bottom five when studies are done about the effectiveness of our chief executives. In fact, Hoover fares better than the man from Marion, Ohio. This is largely due to the scandals that came to light after his untimely death in San Francisco in 1923 – the affair known as Teapot Dome. Also, some of Mr. Harding’s personal behavior was less-than-presidential. That said, he might have been a saint on that front compared to president’s 35 and 42.

What is usually missed about Harding, though, is how effective he was on the issue of the economy. When he assumed the presidency in March of 1921, he inherited a mess. Woodrow Wilson had expanded the role and size of government dramatically, incurred a $25 billion dollar debt, and cracked down on political opponents – even imprisoning some (socialist activist Eugene V. Debs, etc.).

In fact, the economic problems in the 1920-1921 depression were actually worse in many ways than the Great Depression a decade later. But that downturn didn’t last as long – thankfully. Warren Harding cut federal spending and lowered taxes. And in less than two years the number of unemployed in the country fell from 4.9 million to 2.8 million, en route to a rate of 1.8 per cent by 1926 under his successor, Mr. Coolidge.

Oh – and Harding set the political prisoners free, even inviting Debs to the White House. He was a classier act than many now remember.

By the time Calvin Coolidge became president upon the death of Harding in August of 1923, the country was on its way to enjoying some great years of prosperity. He was a fiscal conservative who tried his best to stay out of the way. He knew that the government functioned best as a referee – not as a participant in the economic game – or as a team owner.

After he was elected in his own right, he told the nation in his March 4, 1925 inaugural address:

I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very distinct curtailment of our liberty.

His decision not to run in 1928 – at the height of his popularity – puzzled many. But Coolidge understood the nature of leadership, and its seductions. He explained it this way:

It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation, which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless or arrogant.

Of course, it can never been proven, but I suspect that had Calvin Coolidge decided to run again in 1928, he might have responded to the initial shockwaves of 1929-1930 differently than Hoover. And maybe, just maybe, the Great Depression would not have lasted so long. And maybe, just maybe, people who should know better these days would stop trying the same old failed “interventionist” tactics that never really worked backed then.

At any rate, Mr. Coolidge died suddenly on January 5, 1933, after Hoover had been badly beaten by Franklin Roosevelt. He did not live to see what a prolonged depression looked like, but one suspects that he would have ventured an opinion or two.

His words would have been brief and directly on point.

But then what’s new about that?  Why was this Sunday different from any other Sunday?  

Truth to tell, it was only different in degree rather than in kind.  But then, Mr. Rich’s job description is to attract attention and provoke controversy — and he does his job very well.

Sunday’s thesis was that the current economic collapse has allowed President Obama to accomplish in a couple of months what it took FDR several years to achieve following the Great Depression: The eradication of religion from, and the erasure of its baleful influence on, American public life.

On today’s Daily Beast, Lee Siegel calls out Mr. Rich on his phony historiography and his convenient ideology.

Imagine that you’ve been bravely pounding your breast for the past eight years over the religious right’s brutal domination of American public life, and suddenly, 50 days into a new administration, you realize that the religious right has disappeared.

Just five years ago, in a typical outburst of alarm, Frank Rich saw Mel Gibson’s The Passion, came back home, and hysterically worried in a column that “America is 82 percent Christian, and 60 percent of the population believes the Bible is historical fact. (The Jewish population is 2 percent.)” These terrifying statistics, combined with the fatal catalyst of Gibson’s blockbuster, actually made Rich “feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before.”

But now Rich has some great news: Everything has changed! It’s safe to be a Jew in Manhattan once again.

Mr. Siegel isn’t having any of it.  Neither the idea that religion was driven from American life between the 1920s and the 1950s; nor that we’re in for at least another forty years’ renaissance after the intervening Dark Ages when the Catholics and the Christers were in charge.

Rich exemplifies the smug liberal belief that behind every conservative belief is a nihilistic opportunism. In this view, all it takes to dispel the gloom of religious sentiment in public life is a burst of happy rationalist sunlight. The enemy is deluded; we are authentic and real. Rich and his ilk refuse to entertain the idea that along with the usual political gamesmanship, there is such a thing as decent and principled opposition to issues like abortion and stem-cell research. They refuse to accept the fact that the “culture wars” are anchored in competing outlooks on life.

For Rich, trends are an all-or-nothing proposition. He cannot accept the idea that at a time of economic crisis, economics will be uppermost in people’s minds, but that this does not mean that the same people will abandon values and beliefs embedded their hearts and minds. No, for Rich, economic issues are in, cultural issues are out. Everything changes in an instant. Limbaugh is a buffoon, and the GOP is a mess.

Cultural “trends” come and go, the news cycle spins and dries and spins again—but cultural attitudes are, if not forever, stubborn and persistent. So is the power of belief, even–imagine!—among people we don’t agree with, or even like.

Stewart’s response was to have Cramer on his show last Thursday. The host grilled his guest for over 20 brutal minutes, in a performance many have since compared with Mike Wallace in his heyday. Clips from the show have been flooding Youtube and other sites ever since, and Stewart’s skewering of CNBC’s hosts has been getting more media attention by the hour. Here are two representative examples from Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz and David Bauder of the Associated Press. The AP story includes two rather telling quotes:

[...] Don Hodges, chairman of Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, said he doesn’t fault CNBC for not seeing the bust coming.

“I’m not sure that anybody had seen it coming,” he said. “I’ve listened to all of the so-called experts, and it’s obvious that everybody is very confused.”

You don’t say. And:

“Stewart’s a comedian and Cramer is a showman,” said Robert Howell, professor at Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business. “If anybody takes seriously anything that (Cramer) says, they’re stupid.”

This might be a worthwhile question for opinion polls: what percentage of Americans made their investments in the last few years based on what Jim Cramer said? Or Maria Bartiromo or Carl Quintanilla, the other targets of Stewart’s wrath? Or, Heaven forfend, Suze Orman?