A good statement of the situation, which I'm happy to spread

Ben Stein wrote an article for The American Spectator dated September 17, which says a lot worth thinking about. First, he describes the events of recent days:

Let's start with a few facts.

A man made a cheesy movie about the being that Muslims call the Prophet Mohammed. That man has a criminal record and seems to be a marginal character, at best.

But that man is an American. He is operating in America. He has the full protection of the Constitution, including freedom of expression. So he is supposed to be allowed to say whatever he likes barring libel of living persons and exposure of state secrets. The man made the movie some months ago and nothing happened about it.

Now, Muslim radicals have gotten their marching orders from al Qaeda or whomever. They are rioting all over the Muslim world. As we all know, a super well-armed group of them murdered the U.S. Ambassador to Libya a few days ago, using that old movie as an excuse.

So, here we have it in a nutshell: murdering innocent people is a crime as we view it in this country. Making a movie is not a crime. We start with that.

When the rioting and craziness overseas began, Mr. Obama said nothing about it for many hours. He went to fund-raisers with his Hollywood pals and declined an intelligence briefing on the events (so Fox News reports).

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department apologizes for the movie via the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Many hours later, Mr. Obama says he's sorry the diplomats and security people were murdered. (They "died in attacks," as the NY Times said, as if they had heart attacks instead of being shot.)

At the same time, the tides are moving rapidly towards war in the Middle East, between Israel and Iran. Iran is racing towards getting nuclear weapons. Iran has promised to use these horrific weapons to have a second Holocaust by "...wiping Israel off the map." Naturally, Israel does not want Iran to murder all the Israelis.

Israel is pleading with the USA to help it bomb Iran and slow down Iran's weapons program.

Mr. Obama says he's way too busy to have a meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu about this. He has to be on TV and at fundraisers.

Then, we have the description of Romney's response, and its reception by the White House and the media:

Then comes word from Mitt Romney that Mr. Obama is not acting Presidential. Mr. Obama should have condemned the killings right away, says Mr. Romney. We should not be apologizing to terrorists, says Mr. Romney. And Mr. Obama should be striving night and day to keep peace and security in the Middle East.

That's it. That flips the "panic" switch in the mainstream media. Now, the terrorists who shot our diplomats and security personnel are no longer the issue. It is all Mr. Romney's incompetence. If only he had the temperament of an Obama — to apologize to terrorists instead of condemning them… Romney is a dangerous man.

The media goes berserk, on the attack against Mr. Romney. This is what they have been waiting for. The dogs of MSM warfare are let slip. Nothing else matters except mission number one: destroy Romney.

But, Stein reminds us, this is not the first time the media have shown a disturbing partiality toward the Left and the Democratic Party:

In a way, it's just what the media did to his father when they went crazy because he said he had been brainwashed in Vietnam — which was completely true. In a way, it's exactly like what the media did to Gerald Ford when he praised the Polish people and said they never would be slaves. It is precisely what they did to Richard Nixon when he did a series of trivial wrongs and they burned him at the stake for it, while the war maker and womanizer, JFK, was elevated to sainthood.

Stein continues:

No candidate can beat the combination of 95 percent of the African-American vote and 99 per cent of the MSM vote. So, Obama's in.

But think of what we have lost: I am writing this on Sunday night, September 16, 2012. The Obama administration is still apologizing to the Muslims worldwide, even in Libya even as the President of Libya says the killings there were not spontaneous but were long premeditated and the nutty movie was only a smokescreen. Our government is still saying, "Sorry," to violent mobs because an American citizen exercised his first Amendment rights. Incredibly, Jay Carney, White House spokesman, is spinning a complete fairy tale that the Islamists really like America and Mr. Obama. The murderers are just upset about a movie trailer that came out months ago. How stupid do they think we Americans are? If Mr. Obama really believes, he belongs in a straitjacket. If not, his spokesman is the biggest fantasist of all time.

Look, maybe sweet talk and apologies have a place somewhere. Maybe this should be said in private, between diplomats. But to apologize publicly to killers and arsonists over free speech in America… this isn't done… and of course the first amendment protects people outside the mainstream. Tom Paine, Samuel Adams, John Adams — these were considered nuts by the British. The whole idea is to protect all speech.

And in Barack Obama's America, the man who made the movie is brought in for law enforcement questioning. This really happened just yesterday.

And Mr. Barack Obama will be President for four more years and then quite possibly Mrs. Clinton, arch apologist for American values, for years afterwards.

When republics fall, it's not always slow. It can be like slamming a door.

It is later than any dare think.

This really summarizes the events of the past few days, and the nature of Obama's (and his supporters') responses, about as well as anyone could. I also like the analysis of the media's treatment of past presidents like Ford, Nixon, and JFK, all of which are more accurately described than anything else I've ever seen about them. So I'm happy to have echoed his posting.

1976, 1980, ... or 1964?

Rick Santorum has a pretty weird view of history. He looks back at the 1976 election, in which the GOP nominated Gerald R. Ford over the more extreme conservative Ronald Reagan, and seems to think that the reason the Republicans lost that year was Ford's moderation. He said recently:

“Let’s not make the mistake of 1976 again. Let’s bypass that era, and move straight to 1980, and let’s defeat a Democratic incumbent.”

In fact, after Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign and Ford pardoned him, the public disaffection for Nixon, more than anything else, was responsible for Ford's loss. And in any case, this is not 1976, and Santorum, in any case, is certainly no Ronald Reagan. Reagan was certainly a far more open man to the moderate wing of his party than Santorum has demonstrated himself to be. In 1976, Reagan had indicated that, if nominated, his vice-presidential candidate would be Richard Schweiker, about whom Santorum must have heard — he was a Senator from Pennsylvania, a post that Santorum himself has held. But Schweiker, unlike Santorum, was a moderate — and one well known as such. Reagan, in putting forth Schweiker's name, signaled that he wanted to include the moderate wing of the party in his vision of a Republican government. And in 1980, he did the same. Moderates in the party had favored George H. W. Bush, and Reagan named him as the vice-presidential candidate.

For that matter, Barack Obama is hardly a Jimmy Carter. Carter was, in 1976, a fairly obscure Governor of Georgia, whose record if anything was relatively conservative as Democrats go. Obama, by contrast, has pushed a hard left agenda for four years in the White House, with a clear record.

Ronald Reagan also embraced the ideas of libertarianism, which Santorum disdains. (Santorum was quoted as saying “I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.” You can't get more hostile to libertarianism than that! Reagan, on the other hand, said “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism” in 1975.)

The biggest analogy to a 2012 in which the GOP might nominate Santorum is 1964, in which Barry Goldwater read the moderates out of the party in his acceptance speech: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” (Though, in fact, unlike Santorum, Goldwater's conservatism was very close to libertarianism.)

And we know what happened in 1964.

My own rating of Presidents

Although the recent poll which I cited in yesterday's post covered the ten most recent Presidents, my own preference is to rate the last twelve. My reason is that these are the ones whose terms have been within my lifetime. (Oh, FDR lived for a couple of years after I was born, but I can't say I remember his Presidency, as he died before my third birthday. So Truman is the first President whose service was really within my lifetime, I would say.)

Harry Truman is one President I think better of than I did when he was in office. His management of the quarrel with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, when I was yet a child, is one factor: as a child I thought Truman was wrong, but as I said in another post, by now I've come to a different conclusion: insubordination is not to be tolerated. Truman did some bad things, like trying to nationalize the steel industry, but considering his handling the issue of the atomic bomb (it's hard to believe that, in those days, vice-presidents were so out-of-the-loop that when he succeeded to the Presidency he knew nothing about it!) and the aforementioned MacArthur incident, Truman showed more competence than I gave him credit for at the time. I'd not call him a great President, but actually he was better than average.

Dwight Eisenhower became president when I was ten. By the time his term ended, I was eighteen. So he was really the President I came to political maturity under. (In those days, you had to be twenty-one to vote. But I think I really reached political maturity at about age fourteen. I have changed a little since then, but not much.) I think he was by far a better President than many historian-types make him out to be, because rather than a flashy Kennedy-type he preferred to work in more subtle ways. It is partly because of Eisenhower's Presidency that I am a Republican; the Governorship of New York State by Nelson A. Rockefeller was the only other important influence that made me what I am politically. So need I say that my opinion of Eisenhower as President is extremely high?

On the other hand, everyone else seems to give a high rating to John Kennedy. Yet I can't see why. As I said in yesterday's post, he botched the Bay of Pigs invasion, and he couldn't get a thing through Congress that he wanted to, though his Democratic Party controlled that Congress. The fact that, like the current President, he had a glamorous wife and was himself photogenic seems to have meant a lot, and his assassination made him a martyr, I suppose. But objectively, what did he accomplish as President?

Lyndon B. Johnson was a powerful President. Because of him, many of Kennedy's ideas did get passed, including his civil rights proposals. So LBJ gets high marks in the department of getting things done. He was, however, one President with no integrity. As a Senator from Texas, he was a typical Southern segregationist; as a President, he did more for civil rights than just about any other President. Obviously, civil rights was an issue he'd take either side on, based on how it would affect his election prospects. In my first Presidential election vote, in 1964, I abstained: Goldwater was someone too extreme, I thought (though later I found that his ideas weren't nearly as bizarre as the newspaper I read made them out to be!) and Johnson was too unscrupulous. If I could do it over again, my vote would have been given to Goldwater (though, of course, it wouldn't have done much good!)

Then came Richard M. Nixon. Just about the most hated President, yet I believe in fact the best in my lifetime. (No, I'm not putting him in the category of a Lincoln. Note the "in my lifetime" qualification.) I could spend so much time on Nixon, but I will keep this paragraph short. I may post some more on him. But as far as I can see, he had only one flaw, as I said in yesterday's post: he was too loyal to underlings who violated the law to help re-elect him. But is loyalty to one's political supporters really that bad? One thing I dislike about Barack Obama is his stabbing Alice Palmer in the back. I think perhaps Nixon's loyalty was not entirely a bad thing.

When Nixon was forced to resign, the Presidency fell upon Gerald Ford, a genuinely nice person who never wanted more than the Speakership of the House. I cannot say much about him; he didn't serve long enough to accomplish much, but he didn't discredit the office.

Ford was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, the most incompetent President of my lifetime. He actually appointed a man in charge of his drug program that had been censured for improperly prescribing drugs, and his attempts to get our hostages out of the Middle East were laughable. He also turned Nixon's accomplishments in getting honorably out of Vietnam and establishing contact with China into defeats. (We no longer have an embassy in Taipei, because of Carter!)

After Carter, anyone would have been an improvement, and obviously Ronald Reagan was. I might have preferred someone a bit more moderate, but, again as I said in yeaterday's post, he recognized the need for moderates in the GOP to have some of their goals as well. I don't rank Reagan as high as Nixon or Eisenhower, but not far below them.

Reagan had offered his Vice-Presidency to one of his moderate opponents, George H. W. Bush. And on reaching the end of the two terms that the Twenty-Second Amendment permitted Reagan, Bush moved into the Presidency. Though Bush and Reagan had come from different factions of the GOP, there was a lot of continuity, but unfortunately, a Democratic Congress got in his way. He had promised "no new taxes," but he couldn't get the budget he wanted through Congress, and taxes did go up. I don't blame him for going back on his promise. It was politically necessary. But it cost him re-election, and set the stage for Bill Clinton.

Carter may have been the most incompetent President of my lifetime, but Clinton was, except for the current occupant of the office, the most unscrupulous. It seems he wanted to emulate JFK, and at least emulated one of JFK's worse traits, a skirt-chasing proclivity that Kennedy could keep more secret than Clinton could. But between Whitewater and his trying to cover up the sexual harassment of his subordinates, I consider him the worst, bar none, of the Presidents. He should have been removed from office by impeachment, but politics in the Congress saved his neck.

George W. Bush, the next President, got the country behind him in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But he let anti-war sentiment undermine his Iraq policy. I preferred his father's moderation to his more right-wing orientation, but I consider that again he is one who I rate higher than many other people. I'd have voted for him again if there hadn't been a Twenty-Second Amendment.

This takes us to the current President, Barack Obama. Our worst? No, that title I reserve for Bill Clinton. But only because his Presidency hasn't been corrupt. He's gone against the wishes of the people on health care, and tried to do so on other things, and generally violated the idea that this is a government by the consent of the governed.

That's all for now. But I may expand on some of these at a later date.

The New York State gubernatorial race

Yesterday, on a trip to the drug store to have a prescription filled, I saw among the newspapers on display, the New York Post. And in big letters on page 1 was the headline announcing the Post's support for Andrew Cuomo for Governor of New York.

When I was growing up, in New York City, my parents' favorite paper was the Post, and it certainly would not have been unusual in those days to see it endorsing the Democratic candidate for any major office. In those days, the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, and the editor, James A. Wechsler, were far-left liberal Democrats, and generally if they did not endorse the Democrat for some office, it would be the Liberal Party candidate that got their endorsement (an example was Rudolph Halley who ran as a Liberal for Mayor of New York City.) The one exception I can think of was a gubernatorial election in the 1950s where publisher Schiff endorsed Nelson Rockefeller, and this led to an open split between editor and publisher, where Wechsler put in an editorial, signed with his name (a very unusual practice!) where he stated that he could not go along with the publisher's position.

But Dorothy Schiff sold the Post long ago. And it is now Rupert Murdoch who runs the Post, and Murdoch is known for being rather conservative. (Actually, this, in a way, returns the Post to its roots; the paper was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, known in his day as a leader of conservative politics!) So the Post's endorsement of Cuomo in 2010 is not the usual thing. And this implies one thing: Carl Paladino is so far off-base that he even repels normally-Republican conservatives.

If I were living in New York State, I certainly could not endorse Cuomo. But Paladino — with his misguided anti-gay remarks and his rather coarse threats to take a baseball bat to Albany — is not a great alternative. So if I were still living in New York I would do what I actually did in 1974, when I did live (at least officially) in the state — vote for a third-party candidate (in that year, Jerome Tuccille, the candidate of the Free Libertarian party, which is what the libertarians in New York State called themselves in 1974). (In 1974 I had actually considered voting for the Democrat, Hugh Carey, because when President Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller to the Vice-Presidency, Malcolm Wilson, who succeeded from the Lieutenant Governorship to the Governorship as a result, had been a singularly ineffective Governor, even with a Republican Legislature. What turned me off Carey was that he, in turn, campaigned as if the worst thing that could be said about Wilson was his support for Richard M. Nixon, who I then considered, and now still consider, a much better President than the reputation he has gotten.)

I don't know who is on the ballot in New York State besides Cuomo and Paladino, but if there is anyone else even vaguely acceptable, and you live in that state, that's the one you should vote for!