Redstate

Posted at 4:57pm on Jan. 26, 2007 The Surge or the Cauldron

By SunTzu

Here's where I am. Like many here I lived in a better world on 9/10/2001. I was a very successful investor in internet and biotech stocks, who like many others had been roughed up by the collapse of the so-called tech bubble. I lived in such a beautiful world that on 9/10/2001 I thought a market correction was the worst thing that would ever happen to me.

I lost friends and colleagues on 9/11. I also lost my innocence. Now, I live in a world where I understand that people are trying to kill me, people I've never met nor will ever meet. Still they want to kill me. Sometimes I wish I could return to that world of innocence. But I would not want to live there as I did before, an innocent or, as too many of our fellow citizens seem to want to live, in a state of self-delusion. No, the real loss of innocence comes when you realize that the safe world was an illusion. The killers were already here, planning.

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Posted at 12:46pm on May 18, 2006 Debate, rancor, agitprop: heat vs. light

By SunTzu

Conservatives and Republicans, however you may choose to draw or not draw the distinctions, are involved in a whole series of important debates about the goals and direction of the movement, the party as well as policy and governance objectives. The timing, in the run up to an important mid-term election, may be unfortunate, but the substance of the debates makes it necessary to have them now regardless of tactical infelicities.

Unfortunately, the debates can too often be characterized by the heat of take-no-prisoners-steel-cage-death-matches repleat with shocking rancor and personal attack rather than the light of reasoned debate between reasonable people who as conservatives should and most often do stand for civility and respect, both in principle and in practice.

Let me offer two paired-examples of unworthly agitprop and worthy efforts to provide light instead of heat.

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Posted at 3:01pm on Nov. 18, 2005 Murtha's political role

By SunTzu

To Democrats, Jack Murtha is a moderate, if not conservative, congressman who is hawkish and strongly supportive of the military. Again, this is from the Democrats' perspective. Hold those flamethrowers for another paragraph at least. :)

My sense of his call for bringing the troops home is that the poll-addicted Democrats have decided that the war's statistical unpopularity is here to stay making it safe and politically opportune to come out of their spider holes and now start opposing the war directly.

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Posted at 9:12pm on Nov. 13, 2005 Santorum comes out against ID

By SunTzu

Science leads you where it leads you. -- Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, 11/12/2005

Easy to dismiss as political opportunism given the election results in Dover. Still--better late than never. Santorum is a serious player among social conservatives and his views will carry some weight.

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Posted at 11:08am on Nov. 13, 2005 When you say BushLied you reinforce the MSM

By SunTzu

Tom Delay spent a week or so saying "We're witnessing the criminalization of conservative politics" before he figured out that associating criminalization and conservatism was not in his interest. Bill Kristol has apparently thought better of this approach as well.

David Brooks spent the week after the Libby indictment saying that it was good news because the Fitzgerald had found that "there is not a cancer on the Presidency." Apparently at some point it dawned on him that raising the issue of a cancer of the Presidency and Watergate was not a good idea.

Now we're making the same mistake with BushLied.

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Posted at 8:10am on Nov. 9, 2005 Citizens of Dover, PA say "No" to Intelligent Design

By SunTzu

Well, I can't say I'm surprized, but I am bittersweet about the victory for sense over non-sense in the great Commonwealth State. The citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania have chosen to remove the entire school board and to replace it with members opposed to teaching the "theory" of intelligent design in public schools. This is why democracy matters and it reaffirms that Americans, despite our often lackluster approach to our duty to vote, are paying attention.

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Posted at 4:56pm on Oct. 21, 2005 We're all Harriet Miers now

By SunTzu

We worked hard for him. We looked up to him as a great leader dedicated to bringing to fruition the ideals and aspirations of our robust party and political movement. We worked side by side with him, we served him, we wrote encomia to his genius. Together we broke the glass ceiling of liberal orthodoxy.

Then a moment arrived; not a once-in-a-lifetime, this-is-everything-we've-ever-worked-for moment--those don't exist in the real world and ours is a rational, mature movement that understands the struggle to make the world in our own image is on-going and always will be---but, nonetheless, a signal moment.

The Miers nomination was an important moment because it was the moment to lay claim proudly to the goals and aspirations for which conservatives have carefully prepared the way by changing, or so it sometimes seemed, one mind at a time. Now conversative Republican leadership is in place everywhere that matters because we worked for it and we won it fair and square in the marketplace of ideas and the battlefields of bureaucracy. Because of this we expected a nomination that would echo across the roof tops that we have arrived and our vision of our nation's greatness is here to stay.

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Posted at 8:07am on Oct. 20, 2005 Bork on Miers

By SunTzu

Robert Bork has an opinion piece on the Miers nomination in the Wall Street Journal. He's not happy with the nomination or the nominee. The link is to a citation at the WaPo blogs since the WSJ stuff is subscription only.

With a single stroke -- the nomination of Harriet Miers -- the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work -- for liberals.

There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no "ability to write clearly and argue incisively."

The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty.

There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe.

Emphasis added. Link to Brooks column is to reprint at Austin American-Statesman to by-pass the NY Times subscription wall.

When does this nightmare end?

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Posted at 8:04am on Oct. 20, 2005 Miers writing betrays pedestrian mind

By SunTzu

From David Brooks'column last week. Link is to reprint in Austin American-Statesman to by-pass NY Times subscription wall.

Of all the words written about Harriet Miers, none are more disturbing than the ones she wrote herself. In the early '90s, while she was president of the Texas bar association, Miers wrote a column called "President's Opinion" for The Texas Bar Journal. It is the largest body of public writing we have from her, and sad to say, the quality of thought and writing doesn't even rise to the level of pedestrian.

Of course, we have to make allowances for the fact that the first job of any association president is to not offend her members. Still, nothing excuses sentences like this:

"More and more, the intractable problems in our society have one answer: broad-based intolerance of unacceptable conditions and a commitment by many to fix problems."

Or this: "We must end collective acceptance of inappropriate conduct and increase education in professionalism."

Or this: "An organization must also implement programs to fulfill strategies established through its goals and mission. Methods for evaluation of these strategies are a necessity. With the framework of mission, goals, strategies, programs, and methods for evaluation in place, a meaningful budgeting process can begin."

Or, finally, this: "We have to understand and appreciate that achieving justice for all is in jeopardy before a call to arms to assist in obtaining support for the justice system will be effective. Achieving the necessary understanding and appreciation of why the challenge is so important, we can then turn to the task of providing the much needed support."

I don't know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers' prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It's not that Miers didn't attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the underrepresentation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.

Or as she puts it, "There is always a necessity to tend to a myriad of responsibilities on a number of cases as well as matters not directly related to the practice of law." And yet, "Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority."

Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers' columns provide no evidence of that.

Emphasis added.

Please, somebody, anybody, make this go away.

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Posted at 11:14am on Sep. 25, 2005 What can Tom Delay tell us about pork?

By SunTzu

No one in the Republican caucus and broader GOP community would question Majority Leader Tom Delay's conservative bona fides. Yet, Mr. Delay responded to calls for cuts to earmarks in the recently enacted transportation bill by preemptively stating that "My earmarks are pretty important to building the economy". What does it mean when an avowed fiscal conservative and leader of the conservative small government movement makes such a remark?

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Posted at 6:01pm on Sep. 18, 2005 What smaller government means

By SunTzu

Last week there was some discussion at Redstate of Majority Leader Delay's comments regarding budget cuts (offsets) to pay for Katrina relief. Some commenters thought the Leader's remarks were a challenge to Democrats while others (myself included) felt that Delay (and indeed the GOP generally) needs to be more proactive in demonstrating leadership on fiscal responsibility.

To help out, The Cato Institute offers the following offsets: (with apologies for the lame formatting)

Proposed Budget Cuts to Offset Katrina Spending


Annual savings in $billions


Farm subsidies: cut in half -- $10.6: Wasteful and have negative environmental and trade effects


NASA: cut in half -- $7.9: NASA is obsolete with the arrival of private manned space flight


Energy research and subsidies -- $6.2: Private sector responsibility


Subsidies to airports -- $5.8: Airports should be privatized as in dozens of major foreign cities


Community development grants -- $5.4: Projects such as parking lots and sidewalks are a local responsibility


USAID (foreign aid) -- $4.7: Duplicates Bush Millennium Challenge Corporation foreign aid agency


Army Corps of Engineers -- $4.6: Civilian activities should be privatized or devolved to the states


Homeland security grants -- $4.2: Homeland security grants to states have been mired in scandal


Foreign economic aid -- $2.7: Foreign economic aid does not work


Rural subsidies -- $2.5: Wasteful and unfair to urban taxpayers


Bureau of Indian Affairs -- $2.4: BIA is scandal-plagued. Tribes earn $19 billion annually from gambling


Davis-Bacon Act: repeal -- $2.0: Repeal Davis-Bacon and the Service Contract Act to cut federal costs


Air traffic control -- $1.6: "Privatize air traffic control as in Canada and Britain"


Trade adjustment assistance -- $1.0: Unneeded giveaway that is in addition to unemployment insurance


Amtrak -- $0.4: Privatize the rail system


   Total $62  



Source: Chris Edwards and Stephen Slivinski, Cato Institute, based on Budget of the U.S. Government, FY2006

Until Katrina I had been a lukewarm supporter of the "starve the beast" strategy for reducing the size of government. I say lukewarm because to the best of my knowledge there is no plan or analysis of how this would really work. Following the PR blow the GOP/conservative movement has taken because the nanny state was not on the scene with a bottle for 3 days following Katrina's landfall, I have come to think that "starve the beast" must be balanced with clear and accurate messaging about the trade-offs.

What does less government mean? How will more local control improve each citizen's experience of government, etc.

I believe the basic premise of STB is workable; i.e., that people are loath to give back to the government the revenues the GOP has liberated over the last 25 years. However, the transition to smaller government must be thought through and communicated so that impacts like Katrina will not be blamed on the failure of a model of the state that in fact no longer exists.

Immediately following Katrina I wrote this diary which held the kernel of these thoughts however unformed. I hope to have time to write these thoughts up in a more discursive fashion in coming weeks. Until such time, I thought I could at least contribute this.

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Posted at 1:53pm on Sep. 2, 2005 When Natural Disasters are not Federal issues

By SunTzu

This is my first diary. I think I am expressing some controversial ideas. I look forward to comments.

The core value of the conservative movement since the New Deal turned America on its head has been the call to return to government restraint--known in the vernacular as "small government". Our philosophies, strategies and tactics have developed and changed over time to meet better understandings of the challenge but the principle has never changed.

This is as true of social values as it is of fiscal values. Take abortion: true conservatives do not seek to outlaw the procedure, they seek to overthrow the Federal government's arrogation of the states' power by guaranteeing an "abortion right".

With the election of Ronald Reagan this core conservative value began to be woven into the government at the Federal level. Hard work and struggle at the local, state and national levels yielded in 2002 what many may have never thought would come to pass: conservative Republican majorities in the 3 principal branches of the Federal government.

These majorities were won because the American people agreed with our core value--a small, much less powerful and intrusive Federal government will best serve America's values, hopes and aspirations for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness--what we've come to call "The American Dream".

So much for the easy part.

When the history of this period is written, I believe the story of the development of the conservative governing majority will be seen as a crucial but relatively small preamble to the true achievements of our movement. For our goals have been from the beginning to dismantle the New Deal and return American government and the government's power to its rightful heirs--the American people.

Changing 50 plus years of New Deal policies upon which our nation has come to depend and to a large measure take for granted is going to be much harder than winning a conservative majority. While Americans have been supporting Republican ideas in ever larger numbers we continue to live in a New Deal world. Moving from ideas to reality is a monumental and long-term task and all of us will be affected by these changes in direct and often disruptive ways.

Like the Reagan Administration before them the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress have begun to change existing policies and implement new policies that reflect our conservative principles. And we have seen that there are powerful forces fighting against these efforts at every step. This was to be expected and should not be misconstrued as some evil malignancy but rather as a predictable human response to change. Change is never easy and change of the scope envisioned by our core value is enormous. We have had a modest success in passing the Bush tax cuts but these have yet to be made permanent and have not been matched with counter balancing successes in cutting Federal spending--which of course is a euphemism for dismantling New Deal entitlement programs. In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Because of the war on terrorism and home land security, budgets deficits have ballooned under Bush much to the chagrin of fiscal conservatives. There are three reasons for this state of affairs:

1. Overcoming an entrenched bureaucracy is a monumental undertaking
2. Ending existing programs that people and state and local governments have come to depend on and take for granted is a monumental task
3. Costs associated with the post-9/11 world were unexpected, immediate and necessary

So far so good I hope. Now for the controversy.

I believe that Hurricane Katrina is an historic and critical turning point in our struggle to downsize government and upsize freedom. And, unfortunately, at first glance the hurricane is against us.

In the New Deal world of big government Hurricane Katrina is a "national disaster". In fact and from the conservative point of view Katrina is a local phenomenon. Dennis Hastert has been taking heat for what I believe are http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Pic... ">quite rational and, need it be said, quite brave questions about the wisdom and means of rebuilding New Orleans.

There will be enormous pressure to bring to bear on this disaster all the remediative power of the New Deal state. Indeed who among even the most hardened small government conservatives doesn't want to see no effort spared to put things right. But we are at an historical turning point. We cannot have both New Deal entitlement program spending and conservative small government revenues. We cannot have both New Deal nanny state values and conservative individual responsibility values. We cannot have both New Deal government intrusiveness and conservative local government autonomy.

In spite of all this, I think in the matter of Katrina's near annihilation of New Orleans that the New Deal values will prevail. New Orleans will be rebuilt. Indeed, President Bush has already stated that he believes New Orleans will be rebuilt. This is just a testament to how far we have yet to travel as a movement. Hastert to his credit is not saying New Orleans should not be rebuilt, he is saying the Federal government should not rebuild New Orleans.

Nevertheless, I call on conservatives of all stripes to come together and use Katrina as a teaching moment about how small government conservativism can work in the future. Let me give two examples of how I think this might work.

1. Hurricane disaster preparedness and remediation.

Why does the Federal bureaucracy in the form of FEMA or the DHS need to be involved? One could argue that expertise and resources are centrally managed and distributed more efficiently. I agree. However, I think a coalition of eastern seaboard and gulf coast states from, say, Virginia to Texas could do the same and do it better. They are the ones who really have their skin in the game.

2. The port of New Orleans serves many upriver communities.

Again, the Federally funded levee maintenance program is seen as more efficient and at the service of economies that rely on the Port of New Orleans from St. Louis, to Pittsburgh, to Omaha and beyond. Yet, a coalition of Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio river states and localities that have a direct interest in keeping the port open and in developing levees not just in New Orleans but throughout the great American flood plain could do the same and do it better. They are the ones who really have their skin in the game.

The percieved lackluster performance of the Federal government in the relief of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina will take the measure of New Deal values and conservatives values for many of our fellow citizens. Conservatives must be ready to explain that state and local government holds the promise of better, safer and less expensive responses to future natural disasters.

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