The Weekly Standard

Perhaps the least surprising headline in the aftermath of the tax deal last week was the one in Politicodeclaring that congressional Democrats are planning to run against “chaos” in the 2014 midterm elections. It’s unsurprising because Democrats have been working, with considerable success, to establish the proposition that Washington is dysfunctional because of the GOP.

Republicans, for their part, have contributed to the storyline through their own internal divisions. But political parties always have internal divisions. This is mainly a media-driven phenomenon, and not just the “mainstream” media. The interests of the liberal media and hard-core conservative media, especially talk radio, converge in propagating the view that the GOP is divided, feckless, and incapable of governing​—​though of course they disagree over whether Tea Party Republicanism is the source of the problem or the solution. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

The U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, and NATO’s top military commander, U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, took to the pages of the latest Foreign Affairs for an unusual but deserved victory lap over the campaign that led to the fall of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. It was, the two argued, “a model intervention.”

They are right, it was. But with the carnage continuing in Homs and elsewhere as the Bashar al-Assad regime tries to crush the popular uprising threatening his hold on Syria, it seems that U.S. policy toward Syria has become a prisoner of our “model intervention” in Libya. If the purpose of U.S. policy in Syria is to prevent more slaughter of civilians, to give Assad a push out the door, and incidentally to deal Iran a major strategic setback, it’s time to put aside the Libya “model.” The political and diplomatic conditions under which the Libya intervention unfolded were all but uniquely favorable—the only other contender for the title would be that in which George H. W. Bush organized the intervention to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990-91. If we insist on duplicating the Libya model for intervention in Syria, Assad will have all the time he needs to wipe out the rebellion, at who knows what human cost. Continue reading →

Question: Why would GOP candidates vying to establish themselves as the “conservative alternative” to Mitt Romney attack the one-time financier for his robust practice of free-market economics, layoffs included, during his years at Bain Capital? Answer: Well, because he is vulnerable on that point.

Let us put aside high principle and deep conviction long enough to observe that running for president usually entails an ambitious disposition. Although people occasionally run for some other reason​—​increased notoriety, book sales, the way-station to the vice presidential nomination​—​the most common motivation is raw desire for the nation’s highest office. And on the GOP side, Mitt Romney is the biggest obstacle in every other candidate’s way in a year in which GOP chances look very good.

If you can take Romney down, you take him down; you can make it up to the capitalists later. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

n the mid-19th century, the Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle coined the term “Hero-worship,” by which he meant the high regard, entirely proper in his view, that ordinary people have for the great figures of their history. His project in Lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History(1841) was to restore greatness to dignity in an age he believed had come to belittle the very possibility of exceptional human achievement. Carlyle claimed, on the contrary, “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. .  .  . All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world.”

Each of the Lectures takes up one of the “six classes of heroes” Carlyle identifies: the hero as divinity, prophet, poet, priest, man of letters, and king. He suggests that the times in which one lives have some bearing on the type of hero who steps forward: the hero-divinity seems to be a figure belonging to the pagan past and is unlikely to resurface. Nevertheless, Carlyle argues vehemently against the proposition that the times make the man. He asks: What about the numerous manifest historical instances in which a people were in desperate need of a hero and didn’t get one—to their ruin? Heroes appear on their own schedule. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Without doubt, the center ring under the big top in Libya is the act of deposing a brutal dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, whose long record of depredation includes the deaths of hundreds of Americans in acts of terrorism great and small. There is a sideshow not to be missed, however. It concerns the fate of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted terrorist released to Libya from a Scottish prison two years ago supposedly on the “compassionate” grounds that his terminal prostate cancer left him with less than three months to live.

At this writing, Megrahi’s whereabouts are unknown. But he was last seen in public on Libyan state television at the end of July, at a rally in Tripoli in support of Qaddafi. That’s fitting. The Libyan government lobbied the U.K. government of Gordon Brown hard and heavy for his release. He received a hero’s welcome at the airport upon his return to Libya in August 2009. And Qaddafi himself purportedly bought him the two-story Tripoli villa in which he has been living since then. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Whether he wins the nomination or not, Rick Perry’s August charge into the top echelon of GOP presidential hopefuls marks at least this turning point: In national Republican politics, Texas is the new California.

Back in the day—say, the 1960s through the 1990s—California was the jumping-off point par excellence in making a bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

The reasons were both obvious and subtle: With a population topping 37 million, the state is the nation’s largest. Since the 1970s, California’s huge economy has ranked no lower than eighth and as high as fourth against the nations of the world. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Let’s assume that it was not President Obama’s intention for the final section of his big Mideast speech, in which he took up the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to entirely overwhelm everything he had just said in support of democratization and the “universal rights” of those living in the region.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened when the fateful words “1967 lines” passed his lips. Nor is it inconceivable that Obama​—​after taking a large (if unacknowledged) step in the direction of the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush in the rest of the speech​—​wanted to end on a somewhat emphatic note of vive la différence.

But the more likely explanation is simply that Obama sees the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in the context of the full panoply of repression in the Middle East—that is, as contrary to “the broader aspirations of ordinary people” throughout the region. In this light, one can’t really talk about what has been happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere without also mentioning the plight of the Palestinians, who have been “suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own.” Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

There’s a truism of budgeting that goes: The player who makes the first move always loses. That’s because the player with the second move has the opportunity to focus on the drawbacks of what the first player proposed. It’s one reason why some Republicans were nervous about House GOP budget chairman Paul Ryan’s determination to release a detailed, long-range proposal to curb spending, including cost-cutting reforms to major entitlement programs. Here was an opening for Obama to counter—as he did last week, to the evident delight of his liberal base.

In this case, however, budgetary game theory is being wrongly applied. The Ryan proposal was not, in fact, the first move. The first move was Obama’s February budget submission—the one that portrayed trillion-dollar deficits dancing toward an infinite horizon to the tune of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

For those who care about “international legitimacy,” the gold standard is a United Nations Security Council resolution. The Obama foreign policy team as a whole has been obsessed with legitimacy since the White House was merely a gleam in the eye of the junior senator from Illinois. Indeed, the administration’s sense of amour propre is grounded in no small measure in feelings of superiority about its care for and cultivation of legitimacy, especially in contrast with its cowboy-unilateralist predecessor. So it is that Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 form the backdrop for our current adventures in Libya. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Much of the loyal opposition’s response to President Obama’s new position in favor of gay marriage centered on the back-and-forth in which he has indulged over the years getting to it. He was for it; he was against it; now he’s for it again (not that he apparently proposes to do anything to advance the cause beyond his “historic” expression of personal support). In short, the “evolved” presidential view is of the genus “political cynicism”: On the eve of a major Hollywood fundraiser (and, hmm, a Washington Post exposé on Mitt Romney’s prep school bully-boy days), Obama chose to pander to a group that was feeling under-pandered-to.

One reason for this line of attack on Obama was surely a level of GOP discomfort with the issue. In politics, if you can tag somebody for hypocrisy or flip-flopping, you are relieved of the responsibility of taking a substantive stand. On this issue, it’s mainly only religious conservatives who are willing to give voice to the viewpoint underlying, for example, the North Carolina ballot proposition defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which was approved 61-39 the day before the president’s announcement. Others are wary, and increasingly so, of implying that gay or lesbian coupledom is deficient. Continue reading →