Here we go again. Israel responds to terrorism and they’re criticized for it, usually under the misnomer that their response is disproportionate. This misses the point completely, opines Scott Hindraker of Powerlineblog:

As he leaves office, President Bush stands alone among the quoted leaders. He alone issued a statement declining to equate the parties or call on them both to cease. The statement nevertheless is couched in its own kind of stupidity. Through spokesman Gordon Johnroe, the White House statement provides:

Hamas’ continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop. Hamas must end its terrorist activities if it wishes to play a role in the future of the Palestinian people.

The United States urges Israel to avoid civilian casualties as it targets Hamas in Gaza.

Contrary to the implication of the White House statement, however, Hamas’s reason for being among “the Palestinian people” is terrorist. The linked AP story quotes a Hamas spokesman speaking on a Gaza radio station. The Hamas spokesman pungently states that “Hamas will continue the resistance until the last drop of blood.” Is anybody listening?

And like all the terrorist groups in the region, Hamas embeds itself among civilians, using them as shelds against a humane enemy. The Israelis go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Hamas intentionally makes it difficult for the Israelis to avoid civilian casualties. It would be nice if the White House noted this aspect of the evil perpetrated by Hamas or acknowledged the traditional Israeli restraint in this regard.

True. There’s another story floating around on Drudge, etc., about self-flagellating liberal Israelis calling their government’s retaliation “genocide.” Given Israeli’s military strength, can there be any doubt that if Israel really wanted to line up a tank side by side and kill every Palestinian they could? And, conversely, if that technology balance was reversed and Palestine had all the power would there still be an Israeli left alive? Indeed, in terms of territory or casualties, no other country would show the patience and proportional response that Israel has. In an example of the former, the White House and State Department should recall that we took California, New Mexico and Arizona for a heck of a lot less provocation in the Mexican-American War. And, the latter – casualties – history is replete with examples of true disproportion, such as Syria’s liquidation of the people of Hama in 1982, a state that today condemns Israel for much less.

Another point: So long as Hamas can lob rockets into Israel they needn’t worry about actually running a government. Were they to stop their terrorism and accept a two-state solution, in other words, their people would begin to focus on the ineptitude of Hamas’ government rather than the Zionist bogeyman next door to them. Similarly, the neighboring states, from Jordan to Lebanon to Egypt to Syria (and although not a neighbor, Iran), will continue to promote terrorism and war by proxy against Israel because they profit from it.

Mark Steyn notes that “My Grown-Up Christmas List” song isn’t grown up at all (and whether intended prescience or not, a good reminder while Israel responds to Hamas’ perpetual terrorism):

“No more lives torn apart,
That wars would never start…”

Whether wars start depends on the intended target’s ability to deter. As to “lives torn apart,” that, too, is a matter of being on the receiving end. If you’re in an African dictatorship, your life can be torn apart. If you’re in a society that values individual liberty, you’ll at least get a shot at tearing your own life apart — you’ll make bad choices, marry a ne’er-do-well, blow your savings, lose your job — but these are ultimately within your power to correct. The passivity of the lyric — the “lives” that get “torn apart” is very revealing. A state in which lives aren’t torn apart will be, by definition, totalitarian: As in The Stepford Wives or The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers, we’ll all be wandering around in glassy-eyed conformity. “Lives” will no longer be “torn apart” because they’re no longer lives, but simply the husks of a centrally controlled tyranny. To live is messy but liberating: Free societies enable the citizenry to fulfill their potential — to innovate, to create, to accumulate — while recognizing that some of their number will fail. But to attempt to insulate free peoples from moral hazard is debilitating and ultimately fatal. To Martin Wolf’s list of a Europe “too inert, too complacent, too weak,” we might add “too old”: Healthy societies recharge their batteries by the aged and wealthy lending their savings to the young and eager. But Germany is a population of prosperous seniors with no grandchildren to lend to. Japan is a society of great invention with insufficient youth to provide a domestic market. That’s why if you’re Sony or Ikea or any other great global brand, you want access to America for your product. That’s why economic recovery will be driven by the U.S., and not by Euro-Japanese entities long marinated in Obamanomics.

Ron Prestritto reminds fellow conservatives that Teddy Roosevelt, who eventually left the Republican Party to run in the Progressive Party, was hardly a fellow conservative:

Progressives of both parties, including Roosevelt, were the original big-government liberals. They understood full well that the greatest obstacle to their schemes of social justice and equality of material condition was the U.S. Constitution as it was originally written and understood: as creating a national government of limited, enumerated powers that was dedicated to securing the individual natural rights of its citizens, especially liberty of contract and private property.

It was the Republican TR, who insisted in his 1910 speech on the “New Nationalism” that there was a “general right of the community to regulate” the earning of income and use of private property “to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” He was at one here with Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who had in 1885 condemned Americans’ respect for their Constitution as “blind worship,” and suggested that his countrymen dedicate themselves to the Declaration of Independence by leaving out its “preface” — i.e., the part of it that establishes the protection of equal natural rights as the permanent task of government.

In his “Autobiography,” Roosevelt wrote that he “declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it.” The national government, in TR’s view, was not one of enumerated powers but of general powers, and the purpose of the Constitution was merely to state the narrow exceptions to that rule.

This is a view of government directly opposed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 84. Hamilton explains there that the fundamental difference between a republican constitution and a monarchic one is that the latter reserves some liberty for the people by stating specific exceptions to the assumed general power of the crown, whereas the former assumes from the beginning that the power of the people is the general rule, and the power of the government the exception.

TR turns this on its head.

Read the whole thing. T.R. was certainly an appealing fellow and with his men’s man mistique — Rough Riders and all — it’s easy to see how conservatives would get caught up in it. But T.R. and Woodrow Wilson really did establish modern liberalism as we know it. Indeed, what I never realized until I read it in Jonah Goldberg’s book, was that Benito Mussolini learned and borrowed heavily from Wilson in establishing Italian fascism, which far from being a right-wing ideology, established the national workers movement which both Hitler and Stalin would in turn mimic. Nazi is, after all, shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

No additional comment necessary:

LOS ANGELES — Actor and one-time Phoenix resident David Spade has donated $100,000 to the Phoenix Police Department. The department will use the much needed funds to buy high-powered rifles to defend the city from the growing influence of Mexican drug cartels.

He gave $25k to the family of a fallen Arizona officer last year too. Nice dude.

Wall Street Journal again:

Mr. Wilson’s 2003 op-ed claiming that “the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat” was the supposed animus for the Administration’s leak of the identity of Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. As the leaking whodunit became a media frenzy and others ducked for cover, Mr. Libby was nearly alone in defending the Administration for being honest (if wrong) about prewar intelligence, an act that landed him in the net of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Mr. Libby didn’t leak Ms. Plame’s name to journalist Robert Novak; Mr. Armitage did that deed, though neither he nor his close friend, Mr. Powell, bothered to tell Mr. Bush or the world. Based on the trial record and our own long experience with Mr. Libby, we also don’t think Mr. Libby lied. As Mr. Fitzgerald’s prosecution circled back again and again, Mr. Libby’s defense that his memory faltered in recalling the details of long ago conversations is entirely plausible for a busy White House aide.

The case against him was based on conflicting accounts of a single conversation Mr. Libby had in July 2003 with each of three journalists. The judge threw out the count concerning his talk with Judith Miller, and the jury found him not guilty on the count involving Matthew Cooper. His conviction on four other counts comes down essentially to a dispute over Mr. Libby’s claim that Tim Russert had told him about Ms. Plame. Russert, the NBC journalist who has since died, initially told the FBI it was possible he told Mr. Libby, but by the time of the trial Russert said he was sure he had not done so. Neither man had notes from their call, and it is possible that Russert’s memory was as faulty as Mr. Libby’s.

Prosecutors claimed Mr. Libby was motivated to lie about what he’d heard from Russert on July 11 to protect himself against what he told Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper a day later. But if Mr. Libby didn’t lie about those conversations, as the case proved, his motive to lie about Russert vanishes. The trial also showed that Mr. Libby had spoken that same week with journalists Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, both of whom were asking questions about Ms. Plame and could have also become confused with Russert in Mr. Libby’s recollections.

Mr. Libby’s lawyers attempted to call an expert on memory as a witness at the trial, but the judge refused on the remarkable grounds that everyone knows about memory. The trial itself took place in early 2007 amid the passions of Mr. Bush’s decision to “surge” troops in Iraq, and there were protests on the Washington Mall. The judgment by a Washington, D.C. jury was more a verdict on the Bush Administration than it was about the confusing facts of Mr. Libby’s alleged deceit. The Plame affair was a proxy for the larger political dispute over Iraq, and Mr. Libby became the Beltway sacrifice. By trumpeting his guilt, critics were able to impugn Mr. Bush’s policies by insisting the President had “lied us into war.”

President-elect Obama’s transition team is promising that its $700 billion, or $850 billion, or $1 trillion, or whatever it now is “stimulus” won’t include pork-barrel spending. They must not have talked to the nation’s mayors, who recently responded to Mr. Obama’s request to compile their priority list of “shovel-ready” projects.

By all accounts, the $73 billion wish list may be the largest collection of parochial spending projects in American history. Strolling through the 800 pages, we found such beauties as: $1 million to upgrade the Los Angeles County Convention Center elevated “catwalk” for cameras and lighting; $350,000 for an Albuquerque, N.M., fitness center; $94 million for a parking garage at the Orange Bowl in Miami; $4.5 million for Gretna, Florida, to bottle water with recyclable bottles; a $35 million music hall of fame in Florissant, Missouri, and $3.1 million for a swimming pool in Tulsa.
Related

Oh, and desperate Santa Barbara, Calif., respectfully requests $80,000 for a tennis facility; Savannah, Georgia, would like to build a children’s museum; Ventura, Calif., wants $6 million to renovate the beach at Surfers Point, and Durham, N.C., home of the Durham Bulls, wants to construct the first Minor League Baseball Hall of Fame. Dayton, Ohio, wants $1.5 million to reduce prostitution with education programs, and Ponce, Puerto Rico wants $5.7 million to improve its cruise ship terminal (which will create all of 60 jobs). We could go on.

No doubt some of these proposals would enhance urban life, but then why can’t the cities build them with their own money? Perhaps because the projects don’t really measure up against more urgent local priorities. But when the federal taxpayer does the financing, everything suddenly becomes affordable. If Durham wants a tourist destination, how about hitting up Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, who did so well by the film “Bull Durham”?

The other truth about most of these projects is that they don’t come close to representing an economic “stimulus.” They may put a few people to work for a while, albeit while taking money out of the private economy to pay for them.

– Wall Street Journal.

Courtesy of the New York Times, the sheer scale of their “Bush caused the mortgage crisis” lie is staggering. That the New York Times engages in purposeful amnesia over the 1970s to the 1990s, the Clinton Administration, the Community Reinvestment Act, or that Democrats in Congress blocked every attempt to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac leaves me speechless. To paraphrase the Nazis, if you’re going to lie, lie big… I guess.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

“There are plenty of culprits,” but we’ll blame Bush. The loan policies were intended to help minorities, but since we had planned a series of stories calling him a racist had he not tried to expand the program we’ll just blame the crisis on him instead. Congress refused to oversee Fannie and Freddie, but we’ll blame Bush.

Un-Bel-ievable. The notion that everybody should own a home didn’t start with Bush, it started with Jimmy Carter, was radically expanded under Clinton, and bipartisanly in Congress throughout the 1990s.

To propagate that “how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making” is a stinking lie, wrapped in manure, stuck inside a land fill.

But like I said below, when you betray your own base it encourages your enemies to grandiose proportions.

WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush says he’s offering $17.4 billion in loans to the auto industry because letting them collapse is “not a responsible course of action.”

Actually, rewarding inept CEOs with taxpayer money is what’s “not a responsible course of action.” Chapter 11 bankruptcy would be the responsible cure for their ills, even strenghtening the industry, but as George Mason’s Prof. Todd Zywicki explained last week, “Those Washington politicians who repeat the mantra that ‘bankruptcy is not an option’ probably do so because they want to use free taxpayer money to bribe Detroit into manufacturing the green cars favored by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, rather than those cars American consumers want to buy. A Chapter 11 filing would remove these politicians’ leverage, thus explaining their desperation to avoid a bankruptcy.”

Chapter 11 has the added benefit of curbing compensation for management (those CEOs who ran Detroit into the ground) and forcing the United Auto Workers union to end the ridiculous clause where laid off workers receive up to 95% of their salary for several years. Chapter 11 allows the business to continue operations as long as it is restructuring — restructuring is exactly what the CEOs and UAW wants to avoid. They instead gladly suck on the teet of taxpayer money.

But folks, Bush’s failure to stand for free market principles is exactly how one goes from an expected partisan 45-50% approval rating to just 29% by the end of his term. It wasn’t Iraq, it wasn’t Guantanamo, etc., as the mainstream media and antiwar conglomerate would preach, rather it was Bush’s failure to champion those things near and dear to conservatives.

How can conservatives back a president whose end results appear no different than a President Obama’s?

The hard left is angry about Barack Obama’s decision to let Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren perform his inaugeration. But Charles Krauthammer is not fooled by Barack Obama’s apparant centrist manuvers.

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector “partner.” The first hint came yesterday, when Obama claimed, “If we want to overcome our economic challenges, we must also finally address our health care challenge” — the perfect non sequitur that gives carte blanche to whatever health-care reform and spending the Obama team dreams up. It is the community organizer’s ultimate dream.

Ironically, when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.

On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president — who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in — to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don’t be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn’t get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the proposed auto bailout:

But here’s a point nearly everyone understands from personal experience: It is not a good idea to make big, life-altering decisions when you’re freaking out.

Everyone’s had moments when everything appears to be falling apart. (If you haven’t, here’s a heads-up: You’re long overdue.) And these are precisely the moments when we should take a walk around the block. After all, we adopt healthy habits and strong principles because we trust that they will minimize chaos and misery in our lives. The inevitable crises don’t call for trading that course for eternal panic.

The same holds true with public policy. George W. Bush’s harshest critics certainly understood this point when it came to 9/11. Their narrative holds that the Bush administration and its enablers, driven mad by 9/11, made wholesale changes to our constitutional order in the name of an elusive “security” that were unwarranted, counterproductive, and immoral. I think that story is itself a kind of freakout — for instance, I don’t think the Patriot Act was overkill — but anyone who has dealt with the absurdities of air travel in recent years knows the drawbacks of policy by freakout.

But now that we have the equivalent of an economic 9/11, much of the same crowd sees its chance to lock in ideas that would be unthinkable during saner times, this time in the name of “economic security.” As Rahm Emanuel, President-Elect Barack Obama’s incoming chief of staff, said last month, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”

So much for “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”