I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
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“It’s all right in politics to be clever,” said George F. Will last week, “but you don’t want to look like you’re trying to be clever, because that looks tricky and sneaky.”
Will, who has recently jumped ship from ABC to Fox News, was identifying the autocratic nature of current national politics. He did this on his premiere appearance on Fox’s The Kelly File, starring Megyn Kelly.
“And, in fact, as the president continues to waive this and suspend that in the exercise of what he calls ‘enforcement discretion,’ the American people are beginning to feel that the law is in constant flux. And if the law is in constant flux . . . there is no law. . . .”
In a Washington Post column earlier in the week, Will identified the president’s personal flaw at the heart of the tragedy. Obama has always thought of himself as an extremely clever fellow, and as a result of his (perhaps undue) self-esteem, has often been bored. Bored, even, with competence.
For Ms. Kelly’s audience, Will painted the problem in the broader context of Democratic Progressivism. It’s been a hundred years since the disastrous reign of Woodrow Wilson, another clever fellow hailing from the Ivy Leage. Obama’s parallels with Wilson are apparent, and it’s no wonder that “Obamacare is collapsing under the weight of accumulated cleverness,” Will states, perceptively — well, at least echoing what I wrote a few weekends ago on Townhall.com.
America doesn’t need super-clever (much less faux-clever) leaders. The country, on the brink of insolvency, needs wise ones.
But Barack Obama, self-diagnosed clever person, seems more interested in appearance than reality, and is, in the end, merely tricky and sneaky.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Sarah Grimké
I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.
During the Soviet era, there was a joke going around about how Soviet citizens expressed their feelings about life under Communist rule.
Whatever a citizen is asked about, he shrugs and says, “I can’t complain.” Finally the exasperated interviewer asks, “Well, is there anything about life in the Soviet Union that you do dislike?” Of course the answer is “I CAN’T COMPLAIN!!!”
In certain societies, persons who complain too pointedly or publicly are subject to arrest and imprisonment, if not worse. Luckily, being arrested for complaining, especially in a civil, peaceful, non-rights-violating way, would never happen in the U.S., right?
Don’t tell it to Jim Howe, the Tennessee parent arrested by a splenetic officer, Avery Aytes (“Officer Absolute Obedience” as Cory Doctorow dubs him), for calmly articulating disagreement with a new school policy on how his kids were to be picked up from school. The policy created traffic jams, so Howe walked to the school to get his kids. When he continues to calmly express his viewpoint despite being told to zip it, Aytes slaps on the cuffs.
The crime: talking.
County Sheriff Butch Burgess says he doesn’t even need to look at the starkly unambiguous video of the incident to know that the arrest was justified, Aytes was just doing his job. This means that all arrests by law enforcement officers are per se justified because they are arrests by law enforcement officers. Which is a prescription for cowed submission to tyranny.
That’s not common sense.
I’m Paul Jacob.
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George Eliot
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
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Townhall: Who Is Eric O’Keefe?
The big story in resistance to tyranny — and tyranny’s resistance to resistance — is the Wisconsin John Doe sweep.
I touched on it last week, but now offer the story up for Townhall readers. Click on over. Come back here. And, as always, tell your friends. And comment. The struggle matters.
- Wall Street Journal: Wisconsin Political Speech Raid
- Wisconsin Reporter: Will Wisconsin’s own ‘Miserable’ inspector jail conservative activist for speaking out about Dem probe?
- Wisconsin Reporter: ‘Dangerous’ game: Former FEC official blasts Democrats’ secret investigation of conservative groups
- Wikipedia: Eric O’Keefe
Judge Napolitano says NO to the president:
And so does Charles Krauthammer, who refers the president’s characteristic “lawlessness.”
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Scandal Not Going Away
We’re past Day 195 of the IRS scandal.
I mean the one about how IRS agents processing applications for tax-exempt status gave an especially hard time to Tea Party and similar groups, asking endless intrusive questions and delaying legitimate tax-exempt status for years or never granting it at all.
The botches and disillusionment occasioned by the Obamacare non-rollout have pushed other Obama scandals off the front pages. But as Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice argues, the IRS scandal won’t be fading from memory any time soon.
First, details of the agency’s wrongdoing, initially said to be confined to a few renegade overworked Cincinnati agents, are still being revealed and at higher levels.
Second, the IRS is still being sued by Sekulow’s organization.
Third, the scandal reminds us of how mean, incompetent, and corrupt the IRS is in so many ways.
Fourth, the fish rots from the head. Even if President Obama didn’t call IRS and say, “Start targeting Tea Partier types,” his many condemnations of such groups all but explicitly invited the targeting.
Fifth, Obamacare and the IRS are joined at the hip, with the rogue agency charged with enforcing Obama-mandates. This is like treating food poisoning by clubbing the sufferer’s kneecaps. If you’re the guy getting your knees smashed, are you going to forget about the role and nature of the perpetrator any time soon?
Well, there are millions of people now with bruised kneecaps.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
To solve our problems, we need the freedom — to plan, to create, to market and profit. We need the freedom to use the capital we gain by solving problems — whether the capital comes in the form of money, knowledge, or reputation — to solve other problems.
That’s as true in medical industry as in any other productive endeavor. But medical freedom is shrinking thanks to taxes and regulations imposed by Obamacare and numerous previous interventions.
Consider the many life-saving gadgets and drugs that we now take for granted. Medical doctor Paul Hsieh observes that creating these does not happen automatically. Even slightly higher taxes or tighter regulations “can mean the difference between a product coming to market— or being abandoned as not worth the effort.” We know how existing devices save lives. What we don’t know is what lives will by lost for lack of inventions that never maker it to market but, in a freer political environment, would have. It is the difference between what Bastiat called “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.”
How can we ensure the largest possible field for the invention and propagation of life-saving technology, like genetically cased medicine or 3D-printed body parts? For starters, get rid of new taxes on medical devices and eliminate FDA regulations. Chuck the whole apparatus of Obamacare. Then enact ever-more fundamental market reforms until patients, doctors, drug and device companies use their judgment completely unimpeded.
The debate about freedom in medicine shouldn’t be just about whether you will be allowed (!) to “keep your doctor.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.