AlsanBlog

It’s hard to figure how liberals can criticize the foreign policy experience of anyone in view of the foreign policy background of Obama/Biden. Jonathan Bernstein admits that Obama had little foreign policy experience in 2008, and since then, his record as president has been no great shakes; inaction and appeasement have been par for the course.  And, as Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of every major foreign policy issue over the last 30 years, including more recently when Biden actually advised Obama not to kill Osama Bin Laden (given Biden’s latest antics, people should be very, very afraid that this guy is only a heartbeat away from the presidency). It’s really not possible for any Republican candidates to be any worse than what we’ve seen over the last three and a half years.

*Another attack on Romney/Ryan’s foreign policy experience, this time in Slate.

So Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise recounts how he and some other sports writers choked up and wept after hearing the story of Tahmina Kohistani, the female sprinter from Afghanistan. They admire her courage in overcoming the misogynists in her country to participate in the Olympics, but these liberals can’t seem to bring themselves to do anything other than weep and write about their weeping. Not so much as a single discouraging word against the misogynists; another pathetic liberal display.

Matthew Yglesias is incoherent when he claims that Ryan’s selection as VP means we’ll ignore the biggest issue of the campaign (i.e., the terrible economic performance since 2009). At one point, he claims that politicians “will still talk about this,” but then later claims that the issue will fade into obscurity. Admittedly, I’m not as smart as Yglesias, but he seems to be contradicting himself.

By the way, I really get a kick out of how Yglesias and liberals delude themselves into thinking that Obama has some sort of long-term “vision.”  This so-called vision is nothing more than a desire for highly centralized authoritarian government, which isn’t a vision, but more like the default condition throughout most of human history. It is only during the last couple of centuries that some societies have been able to broaden their horizons and move toward liberty, self-determination, and self-government.

As the result of this latter approach, the U.S. has generated the greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people in the history of the world. Of course, the left-wingers can’t stand it; for them, there are too many people out there accomplishing things, providing goods and services to millions of others, and all this occurring without the prior written approval of the left-wingers (poor babies). Hopefully, there will be enough rational voters in November to send the Obama vision packing.

Slate writer Marcelle Friedman proclaims that “justice prevails” as the International Judo Federation agreed to allow a Saudi Arabian female athlete to compete in the Olympics while wearing a headscarf. A better description would have been “misogyny prevails.” If Friedman and Slate had been around in the 1850s, no doubt they would have proclaimed “justice prevails” every time that an escaped slave was returned to his master.

Fareed Zakaria takes offense to Romney’s recent comment about culture making the difference in a country’s economic vitality. Zakaria claims that China, Japan, and India, whose economies had been stagnant for centuries, “miraculously” took off not because of any change in these countries’ cultures, but because of the “adoption of capitalism and its related institutions and policies.” There’s no doubt that Japan’s success and the economic growth of China and India corresponds with the adoption of capitalism and democracy (or at least a significant movement from societies that are more authoritarian to those that are less). But these institutional changes are cultural in so far as capitalism and democracy are a way of life, not merely policies. Zakaria himself defines culture as the “shared historical experience that is reflected in institutions and practices,” yet refuses to credit culture and the change in culture (i.e., adopting capitalism) in these instances. Perhaps he is more interested simply in attacking Romney than in paying attention to what he is writing.

A reader of the Washington Post recently took offense at the use of the term “authoritarian” when referring to Hugo Chavez and his imitators in Latin America.  Much better, in the opinion of the reader, to call Chavez a “radical, majoritarian democrat” who is only looking out for the interest of the poor majority, albeit at the expense of minority factions. Well.  It sounds like the reader is describing nothing more than a version of mob rule, and even seems to be cheering the mob on.  It’s amazing how liberals today are less astute politically than those Americans who, over 200 years ago, ratified the U.S. Constitution, a primary goal of which was to minimize mob rule.  Will liberals never learn?

The government indeed causes a lot of problems, but contrary to Matthew Yglesias’s implication, most everyone would agree that government is beneficial.  Even Friedrich Hayek himself rejected a laissez-faire approach to the economy, believing instead that government is necessary to create the infrastructure and legal framework within which firms would compete in markets.  Any liberals who claim differently are simply setting up a straw man in their campaign to distract voters from the real issue in the upcoming election.  The question to be settled is whether we continue the movement toward centralized authoritarian government or go back to an approach where economic and political power are relatively decentralized.  Hopefully there are still enough rational people around to move us in the latter direction.