An inadvertently hilarious story in the New York Times this morning illustrates one advantage Republicans and conservatives have going into 2012: The difficulty liberals have in understanding the conservative message and conservative appeal. Note the major quoted GOP source:

“If Republicans push too far and overreach their mandate, they will be punished by independent voters, just as they were in 1996,” said Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist…

Who is Mark McKinnon? He’s a Texas Democrat who switched gears for a decade because he liked George W. Bush before effectively endoring Barack Obama in 2008. He isn’t exactly the go-to “Republican strategist” of the moment, considering that he’s one of the founders of No Labels. Given that McKinnon is the only “Republican” voice in the piece to endorse the article’s theory, this hardly supports the notion that “officials from both major political parties” are worried that Republican behavior over the past week will harm the GOP.

The article by Adam Nagourney and David Herszenhorn argues that the GOP efforts over the past week in Washington and in the states—to fulfill a 2010 campaign promise to cut spending in D.C. and to get state budgets under control—represent the same kind of “overreach” that got Barack Obama and the Democrats in trouble and led to the largest turnover of House seats since 1928.

The thing is, it will be very helpful for Republicans if Democrats genuinely come to believe this is true. Read More

I certainly agree with David Hazony that Presidents’ Day strips away much of the significance that lay behind the celebration of the lives of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Their impact on the history of this country, wholly for the good, could hardly be exaggerated.  And their personal conduct is a model for the world.

When King George III learned that Washington had resigned command of the Continental Army rather than use it to make himself king, he supposedly said, “If that is true, then he must be the greatest man in the world.” But aside from diminishing the significance of Washington and Lincoln, Presidents’ Day also, by implication, increases the significance of the likes of James Buchanan, Warren Harding, and Jimmy Carter, who are to Washington  and Lincoln as pebbles are to Everest.

Lincoln’s birthday was never a federal holiday, however, having been celebrated in many northern states but not in Southern ones (for obvious reasons), or in most states that were not in the Union during the Civil War. It is today a state holiday only in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, California, and Indiana. But Indiana celebrates Lincoln’s Birthday not on February 12th but on the day following Thanksgiving, for reasons, I suspect, only a Hoosier could grasp.

I wonder if the idea for Presidents’ Day would ever have come up but for the coincidence that Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays are only ten days apart on the calendar. Had Lincoln been born in August, we might still have Washington’s Birthday. But since it did come up and was enacted, giving us an opportunity to reflect upon the greatness of Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur, perhaps Congress’s Day should be added to the list of American holidays as well. Then we could reflect on the greatness of . . . . Well, maybe not.

At 4:40 a.m. on Saturday morning the House, by a vote of 235-189, passed a bill to cut $61.5 billion from this year’s budget. This level of cuts, which would be significantly higher if annualized, constitutes the largest reduction in non-security discretionary spending in history (the cuts are compressed into seven months rather than 12 because the fiscal year starts in October). It fulfills the pledge by House Republicans to cut domestic discretionary spending levels to 2008 levels (pre-stimulus and pre-bailouts). The GOP plan eliminates dozens of programs, cuts some agency budgets by as much as 40 percent, would end funding for AmeriCorps and PBS, and would strip funding for Planned Parenthood for the remainder of the year. It also blocks money for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – aka ObamaCare.

To put things within a proper context, the level of cuts we’re talking about are beyond anything Newt Gingrich or even Ronald Reagan seriously contemplated (Reagan made a serious run at budget cuts in 1981 but eventually backed away from them, in part because he had so little support from Congressional Republicans).

Still, domestic discretionary spending is to entitlements what a pellet gun is to a cannon – and last week Republicans committed to entitlement reform. This level of commitment is unprecedented for any Congress and matched by only one president, George W. Bush, who in 2005 spent considerable political capital on reforming Social Security, only to lose (Congressional Republicans never even voted on a reform plan).

I realize that significantly cutting or eliminating funding for programs like PBS, Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Legal Services Corporation light up conservative regions of the brain that entitlement programs simply do not. There is a cultural component to those programs that are missing from entitlement programs. But in the larger scheme of things, cutting entitlements matters a whole lot more. And what happened this weekend constitutes just a warm up act to what Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will present this spring.

The level of cuts the GOP is advocating, of course, won’t become law. But the House can only control what the House can control. And in less than a week it has shown a level of fiscal seriousness and fidelity to limited government that is unmatched in our time. In the process it has shamed the president and his party, whose level of fiscal irresponsibility is also unmatched in our time.

Recently, a George Soros-funded group called Jewish Funds for Justice issued a public letter from 400 Rabbis denouncing Fox News and Glenn Beck for using Nazi imagery to characterize ideological adversaries during broadcasts.

Will the same group now speak out against Soros’s new allegations that Fox News is using Nazi tactics?

Here’s an excerpt from Soros’s tirade against Fox News on CNN Sunday morning:

“Well, look, Fox News makes a habit — it has imported the methods of George Orwell, you know, newspeak, where you can tell the people falsehoods and deceive them,” Soros said. “And you wouldn’t believe that an open society and a democracy, these methods can succeed. But, actually, they did succeed.  They succeeded in — in Germany, where the Weimar Republic collapsed and you had a Nazi regime follow it.  So this is a very, very dangerous way of deceiving people.”

In the Jewish Funds for Justice letter repudiating Glenn Beck – which was published in the Forward and the Wall Street Journal – the group unequivocally criticized the use of Nazi and Holocaust comparisons to smear political opponents.

“In the charged political climate in the current civic debate, much is tolerated, and much is ignored or dismissed,” the organization wrote. “But you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks, and it is not only ‘left-wing rabbis’ who think so.”

In the aftermath of the anti-Beck letter, several Jewish leaders suggested that the Jewish Funds for Justice campaign was politically motivated because it only targeted conservatives. A Jewish Funds for Justice communications official told me she was aware of Soros’s remarks, but was unable to provide comment on them as of the time of this posting.

Life is fluid: Anything you don’t fight to keep, you risk losing. Over the past generation two crucial holidays in the American calendar—Washington’s and Lincoln’s Birthdays—have merged and morphed into a single anemic Monday known widely as “Presidents’ Day.”

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, we had separate special days for each of them. A clear logic drove both observance and education: We learned about the life of Washington, about his successes and failures, about his humility, about his incredible perseverance and tactical genius; we learned of Valley Forge, of his efforts to keep the revolution going, about his running out of the chamber in shame when chosen to be the first president.

The same was true for Lincoln: Giving him a day meant focusing on him as a real human being, with humble Kentucky origins, inheriting a nation on the brink of civil war. He was a leader who decided to choose a side rather than unify, who placed the nation’s moral character over its stability, and who led a brutal war to re-establish the Union on tolerable moral foundations.

The lessons of heroism are made clear only when you can really focus on the hero. And so, we were given riveting narrative lessons about two irreplaceable individuals: Washington gave us America; Lincoln gave us our America. Separate days made each of them live in our moral imagination. Read More

For the past two years the hottest debate in the pro-Israel community has been over how to assess the Obama administration. Despite the tense relationship with the Israeli government, the fights picked over building in Jerusalem and the pressure for a settlement freeze, there has been a considerable body of opinion that still insisted that Obama had basically changed nothing in the Israel-U.S. relationship.

Even most of those who took this position would concede that the atmospherics between Washington and Jerusalem were considerably worse than they were during the Bush administration. But they argued that when one looked coldly at the facts about the alliance, nothing had been altered. At the very least, they would contend, Obama was no worse than Bush or any other president, since no American leader had ever fully accepted Israel’s positions on territory, settlements or borders.

Their strongest argument consisted of citing the strong cooperation that has continued to exist between the U.S. Defense Department and the Israel Defense Forces. And on this point they are right, though for that to change it would have taken an overt and gratuitous effort by the White House that Obama has not made. So while he deserves credit for maintaining the close defense ties between the two allies, it is mainly for having the sense (both strategic and political) to have not tried to mess it up.

On the surface, the veto cast by the United States in the UN Security Council on Friday ought to be considered more proof of Obama’s steadfastness as a friend of Israel. When all was said and done, he followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and refused to allow the UN body to brand Israel a criminal lawbreaker. That this veto took place after an American effort to head off a vote by proposing a “statement” by the president of Security Council, rather than a formal resolution, was rejected by the Palestinians was testimony to the latter’s intransigence and not to Obama’s loyalty to his Israeli ally. And the unnecessary explanation given after the vote that branded the Jewish state’s position on the issue of settlements as “illegitimate” and went on to claim that they “threatened” peace and “devastate” trust undermined any notion of U.S. support for Israel.

Read More

The death toll in Libya has reportedly risen above 200. In Benghazi, where Qaddafi’s sons Khamis and Saadi are charged with crushing the uprising, police and army forces are picking off demonstrators with sniper and artillery fire. The State Department has gone so far as to express “grave concern,” while the EU is “very worried.” That’s how bad things are.

So this is probably as good a time as any to revisit the sagacity of Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson, who in 2009 was granted access to Libya and duly announced the unfolding of a “Tripoli Spring.” HRW had just spent a year in relative silence as Qaddafi’s thugs neglected to death long-imprisoned dissident Fathi al-Jahmi. In the aftermath they neither called for an independent investigation nor held the Libyan regime directly responsible for the death. But lest you think they were totally unmoved by al-Jahmi’s plight, Whitson did namecheck him in the first paragraph of her gushing report on Libya’s burgeoning civil society:

What Fathi al-Jahmi died for is starting to spread in the country. For the first time in memory, change is in the air in Libya. The brittle atmosphere of repression has started to fracture, giving way to expanded space for discussion and debate [and] proposals for legislative reform… I left more than one meeting stunned at the sudden openness of ordinary citizens, who criticized the government and challenged the status quo with newfound frankness. A group of journalists we met with in Tripoli complained about censorship… [b]ut that hadn’t stopped their newspapers… Quryna, one of two new semi private newspapers in Tripoli, features page after page of editorials criticizing bureaucratic misconduct and corruption… The spirit of reform, however slowly, has spread to the bureaucracy as well… the real impetus for the transformation rests squarely with a quasi-governmental organization, the Qaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development.

Of course the entire article was written in a tone of “liberal changes are oh-so fragile” equivocation, the increasingly frayed rhetorical insulation with which Middle East experts coat their apologias for repressive Arab and Muslim regimes. But given the choice between emphasizing the Libyan government’s irredeemably autocratic character or its potential for reform, Whitson emphasized the latter. If Qaddafi falls in an insurrection after murdering hundreds of Libyan citizens, it won’t be because some kind of vaunted public sphere liberalized exploited legislative reforms. It’ll be because the suffocating choke of government control — which Whitson and her ilk insisted was loosening — finally became unbearable, and was met with violence to overthrow entrenched thugs.

Whitson actually made the same move a few months later when she applauded Hamas for promising to investigate its Cast Lead war crimes. Sure the eliminationist Iranian proxies were only lying so they could could enable Western apologists to highlight the Goldstone Report, but at least they were helpfully lying. So they got supportive praise and a gold star.

Unrelatedly, HRW released their libelous White Phosphorous report a few months after Whitson’s article. In any case, this is usually where it’d be appropriate to remind readers that Whitson cut her teeth as an intifada-era pro-Palestinian activist and as an apologist for terrorism, and to gesture toward Alana’s comprehensive roundup of how HRW spent 2010 ignoring terrorist crimes and rogue regimes while demonizing Israel. But insofar as the organization is now hiring actual senior Palestinian terrorists to help campaign against the Jewish State, previous HRW terrorist enabling seems almost quaint.

Bad Rachel, the neocon id, adapts Auden’s “Funeral Blues” as an Obama peroration:

Stop all the cock-ups, send home the cicerone,

Prevent the lapdog tweeting on his new iPhone,

Silence Arianna, and with muffled Christiane,

Bring out the coffers, let the donors come.

Read the all of it, and not because she’s my sister, but because she’s brilliant.

For nearly five months, Liu Xia, wife of imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has suffered under house arrest in China. But last week, she somehow managed to access the Internet and reach out to a friend through an online chat service, the Washington Post is reporting:

“I’m crazy,” Liu Xia wrote in her first known communication since she disappeared from public view more than four months ago. …

I don’t know how I managed to get online,” Liu Xia wrote to the friend in her post. “Don’t go online. Otherwise my whole family is in danger.”

The friend asked, “Are you at home?”

“Yes,” Liu Xia responded, writing in Pinyin, the Chinese transliteration system. She said she was using an old computer and apparently could not type Chinese characters.

“Can’t go out. My whole family are hostages,” Liu Xia said. Later she wrote, “I only saw him once,” apparently referring to her husband, Liu Xiaobo.

“So miserable,” she wrote. “Don’t talk.”

“I’m crying,” she added. “Nobody can help me.”

The friend sent the transcript of the conversation to the Washington Post, which was unable to independently verify its authenticity. However, the Post says that another friend of Liu Xiaobo’s “saw Liu Xia online at the same time, although he was not able to chat with her.”

It’s unclear how she was able to access an online chat service. The Chinese government has been increasing its crackdown on the Internet and known activists recently, out of concern that the uprisings in the Arab world could inspire similar demonstrations in China. On Saturday, a couple of hundred dissidents gathered in Beijing, but were met by a strong police presence that prevented any acts of protest from taking place.