Moving this blog

This will be my last post on blogger, and I will be posting exclusively to www.rondart.com. Come on over.

On the Value of Pundits

"Pundit" originally comes from the Hindi pandit, which means "learned," thus a learned man, a teacher. Only in the modern age has it come to mean "a person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media." I have come to see that not all pundits are pandits. Solomon observed "The fool takes no delight in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion." An awful lot of pundits fall in that category. Ann Coulter, on the other hand, is neither; she is a satirist, one who displays the absurdity in political affairs which by itself is a value. Treating absurdity as sanity is a disease in itself. Those pundits who fall in Solomon's description are often those who give advice to governors. If they are so smart, why aren't they running the show.

What brought this to mind this morning was a pair of columns by two learned Gentlemen, George Will and Tony Blankley. As I was reading George Will's column, I realized that these fellows are like watchmen on the wall. They are awake while the rest of us sleep, they watch while the rest of us get on with the art of living. In both cases, they look at history, near and far, and consider the lessons which, if learned, need not be repeated. I rarely miss either gentleman, and though I may not always agree, I always learn. They know stuff I don't know and don't have the time to pursue.

• Of conservatives' few victories this year, the most cherished came when the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller, held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Now, however, a distinguished conservative jurist argues that the court's ruling was mistaken and had the principal flaws of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion ruling that conservatives execrate as judicial overreaching. Both rulings, says J. Harvie Wilkinson, suddenly recognized a judicially enforceable right grounded in "an ambiguous constitutional text." ---George Will
• I have been on only one honeymoon, with my wife 24 years ago last week. It was very much voluntary, and I didn't need to fake my tender love and devotion.
  But whether as an opinion journalist or as a member of the opposition party, my attitude toward the president-elect is utterly dissimilar to what I experienced on my real honeymoon. I didn't choose him; I don't trust him (if he knows of me, he doubtlessly reciprocates such sentiments); and I don't look forward to a long relationship with him.
  What we all are really doing right now is biding our time. After all, when President-elect Obama hired Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff, it was not for the purpose of fluffing the pillows on Obama's and our matrimonial bed. To Emanuel, a pillow is more likely to be used for suffocating an enemy (figuratively, of course) than putting him at ease. ---Tony Blankley

The Weakness of Barack Obama

I have been wandering around for weeks trying to get a handle on what bothers me about Barack Obama, and now, Thomas Sowell puts a name to it and makes it clear in simple terms. I had gotten hints along the way, like the pundit who pointed out the incongruity of a man in his late forties who has written, not one, but two autobiographies. And, of course the man has been a senator, and it has long been noted that the temperament required of a good senator is a poor match for the temperament of a president. I also found his posture when speaking troubling, his exalted manner, his elevated brow which caused him to look down at his audience.

These were hints, but Thomas Sowell gave it a name: Intellectuals. President Elect Barack Obama was a faculty member at an University of Chicago Law School for 12 years. That should have given me a clue. I have known the type well enough. Sowell quoted Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times, who identifies Obama with a strain of intellectualism, and described Intellectuals as people who are "interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity," people who "read the classics." Sowell didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He went on to cite some examples that should give anyone pause. I remember Adlai Stevenson, who had the demeanor of an intellectual and the reputation to go with it. But later historians noted that Adlai could go for months or even years without picking up a book. But the examples that stopped me cold were these:

• "As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him. Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin."
• Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

Society should have a place for the true intellectual. They do indeed live in the world of ideas and are comfortable with complexities. The problem with governance is that it requires more than ideas and theories. A person can quietly think through the problems of health care and come up with solutions that, while fine in theory, would be disastrous in practice.

Having been something of an idealist myself, I have learned not to trust idealism. It needs to be tempered with experience, long experience, that knows what failure looks and feels like. What has worried me all along about Obama is his lack of experience, coupled with how little we know about him. And the reason we know so little is because he has done so little. People, especially intellectuals need time and room to make mistakes and grow from the experience. I just don't see why we all have to suffer along with him. Sowell concluded.

• How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable— or even expert— within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation. But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.
  

God help us. We are, I fear, about to repeat history because the incoming administration knows so little of it.

Understanding Iran

Understanding Iran

This speech by Michael Ledeen, author of The Iranian Time Bomb, is well worth the read. It opened up several lines of thought that I had not considered. It seems highly unlikely that people in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House are unaware of these facts, and it makes one wonder exactly what they are thinking and planning. The quote below is particularly disturbing, and underlines my conviction that hundreds of thousands of people are going to die in the next decade:

• The bottom line is that Iran is our principal enemy in the Middle East, and perhaps in the entire world. It is also a terribly vulnerable regime, and it knows that—which is why it makes up stories about airplanes and missiles that it doesn’t have. As for the question of nuclear weapons, it seems hard to imagine that Iran does not already have them. Iranians are not stupid, and they have been at this for a minimum of 20 years in a world where almost every major component needed for a nuclear weapon—not to mention old nuclear weapons—are for sale. A lot of these components are for sale nearby in Pakistan. And if the Iranians do have a weapon, it is impossible to imagine that, at a moment of crisis, they will not use it. The point is, we have an implacable enemy which has no intention of negotiating a settlement with us. They want us dead or dominated, just as our enemies did in the 1930s and ’40s. You can’t make deals with a regime like that.
  Our choices with regard to Iran are to challenge them directly and win this war now, to do so only after they kill a lot more of us in some kind of attack, or to surrender. There is no painless way out, and the longer we wait, the greater the pain is going to be.

How much must we pay for idealism?

Barack Obama, in an interview:

• I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.
  So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.

Audio is included, so it is there in his own words. What no one seems to realize is that energy policy will act like a regressive tax on the public. Everyone who uses electricity will pay for it. It will work just like windfall profits taxes on oil companies. They aren't in business as a charity. They have to make money. And because all oil companies will have to pay the tax, they will just pass it on to the rest of us. So the single mom getting by on 20,000 a year will pay the same price for her gas as T. Boone Pickens pays for his. Freeze gas prices? All that will do is create the gas lines we saw back in the 70s. Stuff costs money, and government should do nothing to make it cost more. But don't count on that.

Cocksure Confidence

One of the most insightful columns on Barack that I have read to date comes from Thomas Sowell this morning. The paragraph that made me laugh out loud:

• "Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else."

The "Spiral of Silence"

This is a new idea to me (and apparently to Big Media as well) but it has been around since 1970s. Wynton Hall wrote today of something called the spiral of silence:

• In the 1970s, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann introduced a provocative and startling theory of mass communication she called the “Spiral of Silence.” Noelle-Neumann argued that when mass media create an impression that the majority of society holds one view on a topic, those who hold minority opinions are cowed into a “spiral of silence” for fear of reprisal or isolation from those in the majority.
  Since Noelle-Neumann introduced the Spiral of Silence, many studies have confirmed her theory. In fact, some scholars have discovered that her theory seems even more accurate when applied to the Internet than television alone.

This campaign may prove to be a dramatic illustration of this phenomenon if someone is studying it, because there has never been such a dominating public affirmation of a candidate as that we are seeing today.The bad news is that it may well provide the provocation for race riots if Obama loses, and he just may.