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

Good Riddance

Victor Davis Hanson sums up the tenure of the execrable Attorney General Eric Holder.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-moral-failure-of-eric-holder/?singlepage=true

(Added 9/30) -- VDH also nicely details the origins and outcome of the Iraq War and contrasts the actions taken by G.W. Bush and Barack Obama concerning the broader Middle East region.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389094/iraq-was-then-syria-now-victor-davis-hanson

The Sublime And The Ridiculous

Kevin Williamson takes aim at Lena Dunham and her adherents, a target rich environment --

"A people mature enough to manage the relationship between procreative input and procreative output without recourse to the surgical dismemberment of living human organisms probably would not find much of interest in the work of Miss Dunham.

... It’s not for nothing that, on the precipice of 30, Miss Dunham is famous for a television series called Girls rather than one called Women. She might have gone one better and called it Thumbsuckers. (The more appropriate title Diapers would terrify her demographic.)

...Miss Dunham’s “all about me!” attitude toward the process of voting inevitably extends to the content of what she votes for, which is, in her telling, mostly about her sex life. Hammering down hard on the Caps Lock key, she writes: “The crazy and depressing truth is that there are people running for office right now who could actually affect your life. PARTICULARLY your sex life. PARTICULARLY if you’re a woman. Yup.”

Yup? Nope.

Those of us who have been working against various mandates imposed by the Affordable Care Act are as a matter of fact attempting to extricate ourselves from involvement in Lena Dunham’s sex life, the details of which we would gratefully leave to her own idiosyncratic management. It is the so-called Affordable Care Act that has involved us in subsidizing birth control, abortifacients, surgical abortions, and who knows what else, for the strong, powerful, self-actualized American woman who cannot figure out how to walk into Walgreens, lay down the price of a latte, and walk out with her own birth-control pills, no federal intervention necessary. The very conservative editors of this magazine (National Review) are in fact trying to make it easier for them to do so with over-the-counter birth control. I suspect that Miss Dunham does not know very many conservatives, so allow me to pass along the message: We really, truly, sincerely do not wish to be involved in your sex life.

I would like to suggest, as gently as I can, that if you are voting as an act of self-gratification, if you do not understand the role that voting in fact plays in a constitutional republic, and if you need Lena Dunham to tell you why and how you should be voting — you should not vote. If you get your politics from actors and your news from television comedians — you should not vote. There’s no shame in it, your vote is statistically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and there are many much more meaningful ways to serve your country and your fellow man: Volunteer at a homeless shelter; join the Marine Corps; become a nun; start a business.

And maybe think about acting like men and women rather than boys and Girls."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/388945/five-reasons-why-youre-too-dumb-vote-kevin-d-Williamson

On a related note --

No Joke

Kyle Smith (NY Post), using the example of "Saturday Night Live", illustrates how the main stream popular culture protects Barack Obama from criticism.

We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime “Saturday Night Live” specialist in political japery. “If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10,’” the writer says in the expanded new edition of the “SNL” oral history book, “Live from New York.”
“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature. [Al] Gore had these ‘handles,’ so did Bush, and Sarah Palin, and even Hillary had them. But with Obama, it was the phenomenon — less about him and more about the effect he had on other people and the way he changed their behavior. So that’s the way I wrote him.”

Got that? The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is “Austrian,” that you pronounce the p in “corpsman” and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time “behind enemy lines.” The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. The guy who shared a middle name with one of the most hated dictators on earth.

Nope, nothing there to mock. No way to get a grip on this polished, oiled obsidian. So comedy writers didn’t and mostly still don’t. Jim Downey isn’t in dereliction of his comedy duty to take down the high and the mighty, or so he begs you to think. He’s just too obtuse to see Scrooge McDuck quantities of comedy gold when they’re sitting right in front of him. Did Sarah Palin lack for material to lampoon when she blasted away at Obama in her 2008 convention speech?

http://nypost.com/2014/08/24/why-comedians-and-snl-are-shielding-president-obama/

My own attempt at Obama-based humor can be seen here. If I may say so, it's wittier than that lame SNL skit accompanying Smith's column and I'm paid quite a bit less than SNL writers and actors.

Wherefore Inequality

Kevin Williamson uses the occasion of the Ferguson affair to recite the admittedly well-worn, (though spot-on), conservative indictment of urban progressivism.

The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican redoubt in Texas but in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive city in which half of all black households make do with less than $25,000 a year. Blacks in San Francisco are arrested on drug felonies at ten times their share of the general population. At 6 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of those arrested for homicides. Whether you believe that that is the result of a racially biased criminal-justice system or the result of higher crime incidence related to socioeconomic conditions within black communities (or some combination of those factors) what is undeniable is that results for black Americans are far worse in our most progressive, Democrat-dominated cities than they are elsewhere. The progressives have had the run of things for a generation in these cities, and the results are precisely what you see.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/385518/who-lost-cities-kevin-d-Williamson

This And That

Catch that headline in the Times a few days ago? No?

MUSLIMS TARGETED AS PEACE PRIZE WINNER OBAMA BOMBS IRAQ; CAMPAIGN PLEDGE TO "END THE WAR" IS BROKEN; ISIS PROMOTED FROM JV TO VARSITY STATUS

Miscellaneous commentary --

WSJ Editors --

The Obama Administration was so preoccupied with a grand political solution in Baghdad that for weeks it refused to arm the Kurds for fear of offending Mr. Maliki, even as it was urging Mr. Maliki to resign. How's that for consistent logic?

Victor Davis Hanson --

Did a law contribute to Obama’s concept of social justice, and did it further the progressive political cause? If the answer was no to either, the statute was largely unenforced. No president since World War II has done more to harm the U.S. Constitution — by ordering the executive branch not to enforce particular laws, by creating by fiat laws never enacted by Congress, by monitoring the communications of journalists and average Americans, by making appointments contrary to law — to the apparent yawns of the people.

It may turn out that Democracy was a noble idea doomed to failure because of an inherent human need to be ruled. A few more elections empowering a small group of elitist despots and there may be no turning back on the road to serfdom. Andrew Klavan comments on the ideology responsible for the turn towards tyranny.

Progressivism stinks so badly of past prejudices and hatreds because progressivism is inherently a regressive philosophy. Everywhere and always, the left supports one thing: rule by force. Taking an individual’s property by force, overriding an individual’s conscience by force, silencing individual dissent by force. It’s the oldest form of government there is, and the left wants to bring it back. No wonder they sound so old fashioned. For them, tomorrow is yesterday.

Jeff Jacoby, commenting on the sharp leftward turn Democrats have taken just over the past two decades --

The law (The Religious Freedom Restoration Act) that Hillary Clinton and the others find so disturbing now was, of course, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Congress had passed the measure with overwhelming bipartisan support; Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch were the lead Senate sponsors. "Let us never believe that the freedom of religion imposes on any of us some responsibility to run from our convictions," Clinton said at the signing ceremony. "Let us instead respect one another's faiths, fight to the death to preserve the rights of every American to practice [their] convictions." Most Democrats then, like most Republicans, shared that view.
Bill Clinton's religious freedom law isn't the only one that liberal Democrats today look upon with disdain.
It was Clinton who signed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in 1993 and the Defense of Marriage Act three years later. He and Vice President Al Gore fought hard for passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Clinton enacted the Helms-Burton Act, which extended and codified US economic sanctions against Cuba. And he signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, making it the policy of the United States "to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power." Two months later, Clinton ordered a major bombing campaign against Iraqi targets, saying Saddam "must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world" with weapons of mass destruction. 
The last Democratic president signed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and followed it up with four years of federal budget surpluses the first in three decades. He signed tax relief that reduced the top capital-gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent. But his most important domestic legislative achievement was unquestionably welfare reform. In his first State of the Union address, Clinton had promised to "end welfare as we know it," and through a blend of work requirements and benefit limits, the welfare-reform law he endorsed in August 1996 did so. The nation's welfare caseload plummeted by 54 percent over the next decade, and as millions of mothers went to work, child poverty rates plunged too.

Kyle Smith, NY Post --

One of these words is not like the others (or maybe they're all pretty much the same — you make the call): Loon, nutjob, crank, wingnut, whackjob, cuckoo, crackpot, dingbat, wacko, conservative.
Can't spot the outlier? You might be a liberal. Because even among the Very Serious and Highly Respected voices on the left, "conservative" and "crazy" are synonyms.
A recent example: A highly acclaimed book that examines the conservative movement in the 1970s, Rick Perlstein's "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan." The book is the kind of thing that liberals praise as an evenhanded portrait of the Right. You know, kinda like how "Super Size Me" was totally fair about McDonald's.
What about the liberal writers who make no pretense whatsoever of understanding their ideological opposites? Here's a partial list of the hundreds of conservatives who have been labeled "wingnut" by Salon.com alone: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Jonah Goldberg, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (and his predecessor Eric Cantor), the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Chris Christie.
If these people and institutions are cuckoo, then conservatism itself is crazy. And that is exactly what liberals think. (Sometimes this tendency takes eccentric form, as when liberals argue that it's "crazy" not to panic about climate change.)
Liberals hope to tag completely mainstream conservative thought as outside the boundaries of polite discourse, but the electorate keeps refusing to comply by, for instance, electing a Congress designed to serve as a stalwart check on progressivism for 16 of the last 20 years. This is baffling to liberals.

 

Mark Steyn --

 

...getting your pension fund to divest from Israel, ...is the 21st century equivalent of getting your country club to nix the Jews.

Kevin Williamson --

The Israeli Jews, practically alone among the world’s living things, are expected to make allowances for the well-being of those who are trying to exterminate them.

Ideological Crutch

In the July 7 issue of National Review, Kevin Williamson writes of the exploitation of science, or rather, the exploitation of the reputation of certain scientists, in attempts to settle issues of morality. When reading Williamson's stuff, I sometimes feel as Salieri did (in the movie anyway) listening to Mozart's music. Am I the only one aware of his genius?