| Dear Reader (and those of you who learned the contents of this "news"letter from the thumb drives in Glenn Greenwald's boyfriend's pants), There was a lot of big news yesterday, starting with the fact that I took my lovely bride out for our twelfth anniversary dinner, and, despite the lightening of my wallet, I still feel weighed down by what feels like a large sack of gin-soaked penguin feathers in my sinuses. I'm also feeling less than wholly jocular because I'm kind of ticked off by how badly Obama is screwing things up and because I'm very pressed for time (thanks to Labor Day weekend, I have to file Tuesday's column this morning -- after I finish this "news"letter. And then I am driving my daughter to Hershey Park for some relentless roller-coaster action -- which is exactly not what my headache needs right now. Face It World. You F'd Up; You Trusted Me For the first time since the Brits grew exhausted with the Hurricane of Fists they were getting from the 13 colonies, the British parliament voted against the government on an issue of war. Obviously, this was not directly Barack Obama's fault. But he's hardly blameless either. This mess is part of the larger mess he created. Obama follows polls and acts like it's courage. He mocks and belittles American leadership and then is shocked when no one wants to follow America. We were supposed to be in an era of renewed global cooperation and engagement. Instead, Obama can't hold the support of our closest ally -- because the British Left balked. Forget forging new alliances with "former" enemies -- as Obama promised would happen once it dawned on the Arab street that his middle name is "Hussein" and they realized he's black; Obama can't even maintain historic alliances with longstanding friends. Oh, and thank goodness Hillary Clinton gave the Russians a big toy button with the word "overcharge" on it. We're really reaping the payoff on that now. Part of the problem stems from the simple fact that Obama can't sell anything but himself. Even when he tried -- and he really tried -- he couldn't sell Obamacare to the American people. When it comes to the Syria intervention -- which, if done right, I am in favor of -- he's not even trying to sell. His body language in that PBS interview was that of a husband forced to explain to his wife how he got the clap. He talked like a teenager looking at the floor while telling his parents that he doesn't know how their car ended up in the neighbor's swimming pool. The only thing his "shot across the bow" talk did for him was convince everyone that he's not wagging the dog to boost his poll numbers. A war-mongering charlatan would at least fake commitment better. And that goes for his entire national-security team. To listen to this sorry bunch try to explain why they're doing everything right while doing everything they once criticized is painful, like watching Helen Keller give a whirl at karaoke. I am perfectly willing to concede that this is a very complicated situation with few clear right answers. But this crowd insisted that everything was simple if you were smart like them. And now that the smarty-pants brigade got us into this mess, they still talk like anyone who disagrees with them is a moron. I mean, as bad a salesman as Barack Obama is, Jay Carney is worse. If he ran a massage parlor he couldn't sell a happy ending to a drunk sailor during Fleet Week in Bangkok. Staggering Treason Also yesterday came the revelation that Edward Snowden & Co. have given the Washington Post the entire "black budget" of the United States of America. Normally, this would be seen as very bad news because it would mean that the Chinese, the Russians, and the rest of the Legion of Doom could learn crucial details about our clandestine security apparatus simply by reading American newspapers. The good news is that this probably isn't happening in this case. The bad news is that it isn't happening because the Russians and the Chinese almost surely got that data directly from Snowden already. And not just the Post's highlights. This isn't a leak. A leak suggests that the main body of liquid is intact and only a little bit has poured out. This is a flood. This is an emptying. This is a spill. And if you think it's okay for this stuff to be out in the open, you basically believe the government shouldn't have secrets of any kind. Last night my friend -- and the only man in Washington whose hair has gotten grayer than Obama's in the last five years -- Steve Hayes said that this was akin to a winning football team having its playbook fall into opponents' hands. I think this metaphor doesn't go far enough (and at this "news"letter if there's one thing we do it is stretch metaphors as far as they will go, like the gluteal tissue that makes up most of Nancy Pelosi's forehead). To me, it's more like Al Capone getting the budgets, deployments, personnel files, and health records of The Untouchables. Foreign spy agencies would have sacrificed blood and treasure for a few pages of this stuff; now the Russians and Chinese are bathing in the documents like a young Bill Clinton stumbling upon a trunk full of old Playboys. Two points come to mind here. The Snowden-as-a-heroic-whistleblower storyline is now dead. Whatever limited truth there ever was to that spin, it's over. This has nothing to do with abuse of domestic surveillance and everything to do with harming the U.S. Second, lots of people need to be fired. After Pearl Harbor, FDR wisely canned a bunch of generals for the simple reason that he needed fresh blood and accountability. This is the Pearl Harbor of "leaks," and heads should roll. Martin Luther King, One and Indivisible A few quotes for you: - "Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites," the socialist icon Sidney Webb wrote, "the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners."
- "Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind," argued Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and adviser to Woodrow Wilson.
- John R. Commons, who described himself as "a socialist, a single-taxer, a free-silverite, a greenbacker, a municipal-ownerist, a member of the Congressional Church," was one of the architects of the international labor movement. Commons believed that many poor whites could be saved by government intervention and that they should receive the bounty of a lavishly generous welfare state. But he conceded that, by his estimate, nearly 6 percent of the population was "defective" and 2 percent was irretrievably degenerate and in need of "segregation." These estimates didn't even include blacks and other "inferior" races, whom he considered irredeemable, save perhaps through intermarriage with Aryans. Black inferiority was the main reason this champion of the labor movement felt slavery was justified.
- Yale economist Henry Farnam co-founded with Commons the American Association for Labor Legislation, the landmark progressive organization whose work laid the foundation for most social insurance and labor laws today. He was one of the nation's foremost advocates of state socialism and a generous welfare state. But he feared the unfit races would be a drag on its efficacy and undermine its moral stature. That's why he favored an aggressive eugenic program for weeding out the unfit.
All of this will be familiar to you if you read my book Liberal Fascism, but I'm not bringing it up in order to nudge you into buying it (though you won't break my heart if that is an unintended consequence of this plug). And, if you've read Liberal Fascism, you know I could go on like this for quite a while. My personal boogeyman is Richard Ely, the Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman of the progressive era. He was the dean of the "Wisconsin school" of liberalism and was also an unrepentant racist and war monger. The reason I bring it up is that in the wake of this column I've been trying in vain to explain to a slew of liberals in my e-mail box and on Twitter that Martin Luther King's vision of race neutrality and "economic justice" are not inseparable. Nearly every "objective" journalist, never mind the hordes of liberal pundits, writing about King's vision this week have insisted that the other half of King's vision remains unfulfilled as if it goes hand-in-hand with his vision of a colorblind society. That was the philosophical and political heart of President Obama's remarks on Wednesday. Fulfilling King's economic vision, Obama said, "remains our great unfinished business." What these partisans -- wittingly or otherwise -- are trying to do is turn King into a talismanic icon. If you disagree with his potted economic ideas, you must also disagree with his civil-rights mission -- which means, deep down, you're a racist. Because, they argue, King's vision is unitary and indivisible. This is, to put it delicately, nonsense. Now I don't think for a moment that King had any sympathy for the racist and eugenic theories once held so dearly by the founders of American progressivism. But the fact that the founders of American progressivism once held those views while still advocating the sort of economic program King and Obama hold dear should at least serve to explode the mistaken view that they are indivisible. Indeed, contrary to a million unexamined myths, the economic vision of Nazism was to create a society where every German was guaranteed meaningful work, state-supported health care, and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. But you don't have to be a scholar of the field to know that the Nazis weren't big champions of race-neutrality. Heimlich Maneuvering Henry Heimlich had a great idea: the abdominal thrust (which is not the technical term for any of Miley Cyrus's dance moves). Until he came up with what was once called the Heimlich maneuver, thousands of people died needlessly from choking on some of our greatest food products -- hot dogs, steak, etc. But there was a problem. Unsatisfied with his brilliant discovery, he wanted to save even more lives. He started advising people to use the maneuver to save drowning victims and to halt asthma attacks. These are, simply, terrible ideas. He also had the idea that malaria could cure AIDS (an idea which seems to have a rich metaphorical similarity to Robert Reich's preferred economic policies). He went so far as to infect eight Chinese AIDS patients with the disease. Also not a great idea. The point here is that in science we can recognize that good ideas are not inseparable from bad ideas, even when they come out of the same head. Heimlich maneuver: Good. Giving people with AIDS malaria: Not good. Unfortunately, in the political and religious realms we tend to treat the ideas of famous dead people like an inviolable estate. But it doesn't work that way. Martin Luther King's vision of a colorblind society -- hardly his invention, we should acknowledge -- stands for itself. It lends no credence to what he thought about the gold standard or the Vietnam War or the minimum wage. That doesn't mean we should be incurious or unduly disrespectful of those views; they certainly help us understand a fascinating guy. But the connection between those ideas is only interesting to the degree it illuminates the man and his time. The same goes for every historical figure. All Your Children Belong To US Allison Benedikt, a woman who admits she went to a school so bad she only had to read one book in four years -- The Good Earth! -- has written a wonderfully self-parodying piece for Slate in which she argues that anyone who doesn't send her kids to public school is a "bad person": Not bad like murderer bad -- but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation's-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what's-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad. Edward Amsden, who follows me on Twitter, had a great response that I think gets at something more than just the air-sucking stupidity of this article. He writes, "You know a system has become unexamined dogma when its badness is somehow an argument for participation." In my moral universe, a good person is someone who does what is best for his kids within the bounds of conventional morality. (Let me give you an example of what I mean by the "bounds of conventional morality." The woman who murdered her daughter's cheerleader rival was not a good person. But the mother who takes two jobs or forgoes a new car or even career advancement so that her kids can get a good education is, all other things being equal, a good person.) In Benedikt's moral universe, a parent who knowingly subjects his or her kid to a wretched education in a potentially dangerous school is a good person. I don't mean a parent who has no choice because, say, President Obama -- whose kids go to one of the ritziest private schools in the country -- cancelled the voucher program that would have given them some hope. I mean she thinks parents with better choices should choose to subject their own children to a crappy education to make a political statement. Don't vote with your feet, vote with your kids' lives. This is, to borrow a term from hermeneutics, really f***ed up. What I like and appreciate about Benedikt's piece is that she's willing to say it out loud. It reminds me of that scene in Jerry Maguire where Jay Mohr explains to Tom Cruise why he's got to be fired. "You put it on paper!" Too many liberals refuse to acknowledge their true ideological positions openly, preferring to mask them under the veneer of social science and "optimal policies." I also like the fact that Benedikt is aiming her moral troll outrage at her fellow liberals. And here she has a point. Not sending your kids to crappy schools in no way makes you a bad person, but it just might make you a bad liberal. Benedikt does not argue that public school -- and only public school -- attendance should be mandatory. But that is the logical upshot of her position and there is absolutely nothing in what passes for contemporary liberalism today that would serve as a principled reason not to ban private, parochial, and home schooling. Indeed, there's a rich progressive history of advocating exactly that. Slate is probably just saving that Benediktat for a slower news week. Various & Sundry Again, my apologies for the relative lack of jocularity in today's "news"letter, though the irony is that the folks who cancelled their subscription last week because of too much jocularity now don't know what they're missing. I would say that the G-File is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you'll get. But I hate that expression because whenever I reach into a box of chocolates I pretty much know what I'll get: some kind of chocolate! The G-File is more like the contents of a huge wicker backpack of a guy dressed from the waist up like Abraham Lincoln and from the waist down like an angry clown. How do you tell a clown is angry from the waist down? Who knows? But I'm pretty sure you don't want to find out. Anyway, the G-File is like the contents of that wicker back pack spilling out onto the sidewalk after the security guards tackle the half-great-emancipator-half angry-pants clown while trying to escape with 30 pounds of stolen mackerel: You really don't know what you'll find, and it's not entirely clear you should even look. Hey, just for the record, if you don't get the G-File, remember to check my Twitter feed around 4:00 o'clock where I will announce the special phrase that will get me to e-mail it to you eventually. Also, please make sure your spam filters aren't the problem. ("You are aware that if these people are reading this, this advice is moot, right?" -- The Couch.) Here's a pretty cool map of America by ethnicity. Though calling it a map of "segregation" strikes me as either silly or disgusting, take your pick. So go here instead. But don't go here. Bashar Assad, you woke the bears! Why did you do that? Air-guitar championship! I'm more and more sympathetic to some form of real prison reform. One alternative punishment I think we could use more of: humiliation. 22 future-themed popular-science covers. And here's Asimov's predictions about life in 2014. While kittens are holding up progress, the Marines just promoted Chesty the 13th as the new Marine mascot. Remind me again, which branch of the military has a cat as a mascot? Oh right. This guy's girlfriend is a fox! 16 OED words that became obscure. Have a nice weekend. And if you're at Hershey Park, look for me. I'll be the guy running away from the clown with the angry pants. | 
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