Unlike Any Other, Thankfully

Kevin Williamson, prompted by comments from actress Eva Longoria, muses about the Left's reflexive assumption that American Exceptionalism is a bad thing.

"The actress and Democratic activist Eva Longoria, who apparently has never heard of France, was ruthlessly mocked this week for her claim that the United States “is the only country that promotes monolingualism.” Both of the assumptions behind that statement are false: The United States does not promote monolingualism, and some other countries, and would-be countries such as Quebec, do. Ms. Longoria is a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, where state standards at the time of her high-school education generally required two years of the same foreign language, and where neither the University of Texas nor Texas A&M, which Ms. Longoria attended, will admit students without two years of the same foreign language. Ms. Longoria currently is a resident of California, a state in which official business is conducted in more than 30 languages. As for other countries, suffice it to say that neither China nor Mexico is offering driver’s-license exams in Farsi. Spain has one language with national official status — guess which."

(snip)

"So, another dopey celebrity heard from — who cares?

Ms. Longoria’s error is interesting to me because it is an example of anti-American Exceptionalism, i.e. the common belief among progressives that the United States is uniquely backward and knuckle-dragging in various critical ways."

(snip)

"The entire American political model is based on codifying policies that were in effect practically nowhere else in the world in the late 18th century. The supposition that people could get along without a king or a state-run church or a national censor, that they could choose their own faiths, speak their own minds, print their own newspapers, carry their own guns, and choose their own leaders without oversight from a hereditary aristocracy — at the time of the American founding, those ideas were considered more or less bonkers in most of the civilized world.
That’s a real fault line between conservatives and progressives: The Right tends to see those policies and institutions unique to the United States as markers of our liberty and excellence, while the Left sees policies and institutions unique to the United States as indicators that we are simply a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder behind Finland. It’s American Exceptionalism vs. anti-American Exceptionalism, and the latter tendency is by no means limited to such lightly informed Democratic emissaries as Eva Longoria."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390065/anti-american-exceptionalism-kevin-d-williamson

Obama's Only Thing

To paraphrase former UCLA football coach Henry Russell Sanders, (the quote later made famous by Vince Lombardi) - For Barack Obama, politics isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing.

From Jonah Goldberg's weekly G-File column on National Review Online --

"One can debate almost every foreign-policy decision Obama has made with regard to the merits, but if you take a step back it becomes clear that the real driver of Obama’s decisions is Beltway chatter and the domestic politics that feed it. And it’s not just on foreign policy. Whenever a scandal erupts, he says whatever words he has to make the media firestorm go away. And because the media doesn’t like to dwell on bad news for Obama, it usually works.

But here’s a different way to think about it. Let’s imagine that America’s national interest is completely disconnected from the domestic news cycle. It’s not a difficult thing to imagine, given that it is so often true. But let’s imagine that the disconnect is even more total. The press never covered the Islamic State. Never reported on the slaughter in Iraq and Syria. Never raised any concerns about what the rise of a terrorist army says about Obama’s foreign policy or our long-term interests in the region. The press focused instead on George Clooney’s wedding, events in Ferguson, Mo., and how awesome Lena Dunham is. Again, this isn’t a hugely difficult mental exercise.

In short, imagine the rise of the Islamic State over the summer presented all of the same national-security and humanitarian problems, but no political problems for Obama. Now ask yourself, would Obama have done anything about it?

Remember: The Islamic State took Fallujah and Mosul months ago and he kept calling it the “jayvee team.” As recently as August, he was telling Tom Friedman that it was ridiculous to arm the Syrian rebels. In September, he was wistfully complaining that the Islamic State made a mistake in beheading those Americans because it aroused U.S. public opinion for war. In other words, doing nothing about the Islamic State was Obama’s foreign policy until the domestic political situation made his foreign policy untenable. Chess Masters think many moves ahead, novices respond to whatever their opponent’s latest move is. Total amateurs just move pieces based on shouts from the crowd watching the game. Obama’s like a kid looking for approval every time he touches a piece.

And that’s why I have no confidence that Obama will stick with his war on the Islamic State one minute longer than the polls and political expediency require."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390062/culture-wars-all-way-down-jonah-goldberg

Conservatism - Protecting The Good

Today's "Notable and Quotable" feature in the Wall Street Journal.

From philosopher Roger Scruton’s new book “How to Be a Conservative”:

"Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

Because of this rhetorical disadvantage, conservatives often present their case in the language of mourning. Lamentations can sweep everything before them, like the Lamentations of Jeremiah, in just the way that the literature of revolution sweeps away the world of our frail achievements. And mourning is sometimes necessary; without ‘the work of mourning’, as Freud described it, the heart cannot move on from the thing that is lost to the thing that will replace it. Nevertheless, the case for conservatism does not have to be presented in elegiac accents. It is not about what we have lost, but about what we have retained, and how to hold onto it."

Obama Legacy: Inequality, Civilian Casualties, Losing Iraq

A trio of worthwhile items from today's Wall Street Journal editorial pages.

The Editors detail the results of Democrats' politically driven and counterproductive focus on "equality" as the basis of economic policy.



"One trick some liberals use to obscure the uniquely bad performance of the Obama years is to go back to the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999 when real income peaked at $56,895 and compare it to 2013. But this conveniently ignores that real median household income rebounded smartly in the middle of the last decade. That rebound occurred after the Bush tax cuts on capital income and marginal income-tax rates became law in 2003.

(snip) All of this is especially notable because it follows the most sustained policy focus on reducing inequality in decades. President Obama's stimulus spending in 2009-2010 was devoted mainly to transfer payments like Medicaid and jobless benefits. Expanding the number of Americans on food stamps and disability payments have been explicit policy goals. ObamaCare is designed to provide "free" health care to millions of Americans by taxing the wealthy and those who already have insurance.

Mr. Obama has also focused on income redistribution to punish the affluent while financing income transfers. So he cornered Republicans in the 2013 fiscal cliff and succeeded in raising the top income tax rate as well as levies on capital gains, dividends and small-business income.

On CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday Mr. Obama answered a question about economic anxiety by offering another increase in the minimum wage. But the Nancy Pelosi Democrats raised the minimum wage in three stages to $7.25 an hour in 2009 from $5.15 in 2007. If mandated wages are so beneficial to the American worker, where is the evidence?

The Census data show that every income group that was supposed to benefit from the higher wages is worse off than before the minimum wage was increased. This is because the benefits of mandated wage increases for some workers are dwarfed by the overall negative economic trends of slower growth and reduced opportunity."

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-president-of-inequality-1412292383

Reality again intrudes upon Obama's naïve, ignorant, and foolish view of the world. Alan Dershowitz explains.

"Last year the Obama administration issued, with considerable fanfare, a new military policy designed to reduce civilian casualties when U.S. forces are attacking enemy targets. This policy required "near certainty" that there will be no civilian casualties before an air attack is permitted.

When Israel acted in self-defense this summer against Hamas rocket and tunnel attacks, the Obama administration criticized the Israeli army for "not doing enough" to reduce civilian casualties. When pressed about what more Israel could do—especially when Hamas fired its rockets and dug its terror tunnels in densely populated areas, deliberately using humans as shields—the Obama administration declined to provide specifics.

Now the Obama administration has exempted itself from its own "near certainty" standard in its attacks against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In a statement on Sept. 30 responding to questions by Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News, the administration said that in fighting Islamic State, also known as ISIS, the U.S. military can no longer comply with Mr. Obama's vow last year to observe "the highest standard we can meet."

The statement came after a Tomahawk missile last week struck the village Kafr Daryan in Syria, reportedly killing and injuring numerous civilians including children and women. The missile was directed at al Qaeda terrorists that the White House calls the Khorasan Group, but apparently the Tomahawk hit a home for displaced civilians. The Pentagon says it is investigating the incident, but YouTube video of injured children and the appearance by angry Free Syria Army rebel commanders at a congressional hearing about the attack—an attack that prompted protests in several Syrian villages—left little doubt about what happened.

If this sounds familiar, it is because in every attack on terrorists who operate from civilian areas, there will be civilian casualties. This is especially so when terrorists employ a policy of hiding behind civilian human shields in order to confront their enemies with a terrible choice: not attack a legitimate military target; or attack it and likely cause civilian casualties, which the terrorists can then exploit in the war of public opinion.

Hamas has employed this approach effectively in its periodic wars against Israel. Hamas fighters fire rockets at Israeli civilian targets from densely populated areas near United Nations facilities, mosques, hospitals and private homes. These areas, rather than the less densely populated open areas between the cities of Gaza, are intentionally selected. Hamas urges civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings that are used to store rockets and that serve as command-and-control shelters.

The fighters dare Israel to attack these shielded military targets. Israel responds by issuing warnings—by leaflets, telephone and noise bombs—to the civilians, urging them to leave. When civilians try to leave, Hamas fighters sometimes force them back at gunpoint. The fighters launch their missiles using a time delay, giving themselves the opportunity to hide in tunnels where only they are allowed to seek shelter; civilians are left exposed to Israel's efforts to destroy the rockets.

When Israel does attack military targets such as a rocket launcher or a tunnel entrance, and kills or injures civilians, Hamas operatives stand ready to exploit the dead for the international media, who are ever ready to show the victims without mentioning that they died because Hamas was using them as human shields.

Now ISIS and other jihadists in Iraq and Syria are beginning to emulate the Hamas strategy, embedding fighters in towns and villages, thus making military strikes difficult without risking civilian casualties. That is why the Obama administration has exempted itself from its theoretical "near certainty" policy, which has proved to be unworkable and unrealistic in actual battle conditions involving human shields and enemy fighters embedded in densely populated areas.

For the U.S., the fight against ISIS is a war of choice. Islamic State fighters pose no immediate and direct threat to the American homeland. For Israel, by contrast, Hamas poses an immediate and direct threat. Both the U.S. and Israel seek to minimize civilian casualties. Neither can do so under an unrealistic principle of "near certainty."

Israel has come closer to this high theoretical standard than have the United States and its various coalition partners—for instance, only Israel would employ small rooftop "knock-knock" explosives to warn civilians of a coming missile strike. Yet Israel is the only nation that is routinely condemned by the United Nations, the international community, the media, the academy and even the U.S. for "not doing enough," in Mr. Obama's words, to reduce civilian casualties. As the president is learning, war is hell. The possibility of waging it with "near certainty" of anything is a chimera."

http://online.wsj.com/articles/alan-m-dershowitz-the-education-of-a-wartime-president-1412293013

Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta disputes his former boss on exactly how and why the U.S. abandoned Iraq to the terrorists.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/who-really-lost-iraq-1412292534