White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Obama’s Energy Policy: A Labyrinth of Contradictions

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When it comes to energy, there is an incoherence to President Barack Obama’s policies.

This incoherence is embedded in his administration in the person of Carol Browner. She is largely regarded as the agent of a kind of reactionary environmentalism that once haunted the Democratic Party.

Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, is a special assistant to Obama for energy and environment. To a wide variety of industries, though, she is the agent of regressive, just-say-no environmentalism.

Browner’s background–from environmental jobs in Florida to working with Al Gore–dooms her to suspicion of zealotry, which is probably unjustified. Her defenders (just about all in the environmental movement), see her as a great public servant and standard-bearer.

But she is largely out of sight these days; her writ and her influence unknown.

To the energy industries, from the ever-embattled nuclear sector to the euphoric-for-now natural gas producers and the mostly happy wind farmers, Browner and her role remains a mystery. Why is she there? How much does she influence Obama? Or, for that matter, does he care more about the politics of energy and the environment than he does about the issues?

The answer, like so much that can be said of Obama, is some of this and some of that.

The administration is opening up the Atlantic coast and part of the Alaskan coast to oil drilling. But it is keeping the California shoreline free of new exploration. (There are a lot of environmental voters in California).

As for nuclear power, the actions of the administration are the most confusing. Obama looks like a host who having welcomed a guest to dine, snatches the guest’s chair away when the meal is brought in.

He has advocated nuclear power and has endorsed loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors. But in a piece of blatant political opportunism Obama has canceled all work, and even licensing, on the Yucca Mountain waste repository site in Nevada. Yet, Yucca Mountain was the cornerstone of the civilian nuclear revival.

To understand why Yucca Mountain has been abandoned, together with $10 billion of taxpayers money, look no further than the senior senator from Nevada, Harry Reid. And to understand Reid’s stubborn rejection of a national patriotic role for Nevada, look no further than the gaming tables and slot machines of Las Vegas. At least part of Obama’s energy policy is influenced by fruit machines.

Obama first declared against Yucca Mountain during the campaign. Many thought that his opposition would, in the way of campaign promises, melt in the sunshine of reality.

But the politics of the Senate triumphed. Obama’s need for Reid, the majority leader in the Senate, became utter dependence in the health-care debate. So the will of previous Congresses for a sophisticated and vital nuclear industry, was trumped by Reid. The Joker came out of the pack face up.

Good thing for energy policy that Nevada has no other big energy issues. Part of its previous attraction for nuclear was its small population and remote location. But the wheel of fortune spins in politics as well as roulette, and unpredictably Reid rose to be the most important Democrat in the Senate.

The offhand way the administration has junked Yucca Mountain should worry all in energy supply. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed the abandonment of Yucca Mountain as being done on “scientific grounds.” If you believe that, the tooth fairy is your sister.

So the administration has pushed nuclear in the full knowledge that California and other states by law cannot approve new plants without a viable repository for their spent fuel. In a stroke, the administration has converted certainty to limbo.

The squeezing of coal is similar. EPA is moving ahead with classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant, presumably in order to pressure Congress to pass the highly criticized cap-and-trade legislation.

This giving and taking away should give pause to those who think oil and natural gas drilling will proceed apace in the Atlantic and off Alaska. Browner and the president himself must know that a slew of lawsuits will be filed and will tie up action for years, if not decades.

One foot forward, 12 inches backward. That is the Obama energy quick-step.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Put the Kettle on, Sarah Palin

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Sarah m’dear, it’s not about the party. It’s about the tea.

For those of us of the British persuasion, tea is black tea. It was the tea on which the British built the empire.

It was also, I might add, the tea that Margaret Thatcher served at No. 10 Downing Street. I enjoyed some with her there. A Conservative traditionalist, she served it with milk for certain and sugar as an option.

Thatcher did not ask her guests, as bad hotels do now, what kind of tea they would like. Tea to Thatcher was black tea, sometimes known as Indian tea, though it might have been grown in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka. It was neither flavored nor some herbal muck masquerading as tea.

The former prime minister knew that good tea is made in the kitchen, where stove-boiled water is poured from a kettle onto tea in a pot, not tepid water poured from a pot on a table into a cup with a tea bag.

Boiling water in a kettle, or pot, on the stove is important in making good tea. In a microwave, the water doesn’t bubble. Tea needs the bubbles.

While the Chinese drank green tea hundreds of years before Christ, the British developed their tea-drinking habit in the 17th century. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted permission for the charter of the British East India Company, establishing the trade in spice and silk that lead to the formal annexation of India and the establishment of the Raj.

Initially, tea was a sideline but it became increasingly important and started to define the British. The coffee shops–like the one that launched the insurer Lloyds of London around 1688–continued, but at all levels of society tea was becoming the British obsession.

By the 18th century, tea drinking was classless in Britain. Duchesses and workmen enjoyed it alike.

Tea was the fuel of the empire: the war drink, the social drink, the comfort drink and the consolation drink. Coffee had an upmarket connotation. It wasn’t widely available and the British didn’t make it very well.

Also as coffee was well established on the continent, it had to be shunned. To this day the British are divided about continental Europe and what they see as the emblems of Euro-depravity: coffee, garlic, scents and bidets.

Although tea is standardized, the British play their class games over the tea packers. For three centuries, most tea has been shipped in bulk to various packing houses throughout the British Isles. But the posh prefer Twinings to Lipton.

Offering tea with fancy cakes, clotted cream and fine jams separates the workers from the ruling classes. One of Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting, Anna Maria Stanhope, known as the Duchess of Bedford, is credited as the creator of afternoon tea time; which the hotels turned into formal, expensive afternoon “teas.” The Ritz in London is famous for them.

The British believe that tea sustained them through many wars. “Let’s have a nice cup of tea. Things will get better.” I’ve always believed that America’s revenge against the British crown was to ice their beloved tea. Toss it into Boston Harbor, but don’t ice it. If you should have the good fortune to be asked to tea at No. 10, or at Buckingham Palace, don’t expect it to be iced.

Incidentally tea bags are fine, and it’s now just pretentious to serve loose tea with a strainer. Of course, if you want to read the political tea leaves you’ll have to use loose tea.

If you’re serving tea to the thousands at your tea parties, Sarah, remember that unlike politics, tea is very forgiving. It can be revived just with more boiling water.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Tea Parties: Add Sympathy

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Let’s pour the tea, and see who’s come to the party. More, let’s see why they came.

What binds these good citizens together in a ramshackle and loud fraternity known as the Tea Party movement? The focal point may be the Democratic health care legislation; but there is, as always with popular movements, a back story that is more complex and more compelling.

Could it be, to use Winston Churchill’s phrase, the sum of all their fears?

Indubitably. These are days of change, massive and irreversible change. Change that is undermining but difficult to characterize, and disturbing to experience.

The nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, is the symbol of that change more than he’s its author,

The Tea Party Patriots are people who feel that their lives and their nation is being swept forward to a place they don’t wish to go. They blame Obama and the Democrats for taking them there.

But the administration and the Democratic majorities in Congress have little to do with the buffeting the American image is taking.

Consider these facts:

 

✔ The United States has gone from the richest nation in the world to the biggest debtor.

✔ Our competitor, China, has grown rich in our market. Now China lends us money to cement the entanglement, while it becomes increasingly obstreperous.

✔ We have the largest and most lethal military machine on earth, but we can’t subdue insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, banish pirates in international waters, or prevail in sanctioning Iran.

✔ Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, crumbles. European trains hurtle at 220 miles an hour; ours crawl at less than a third of that speed.

✔ Broadband in the United States is many times slower than it is in Europe. This is cruel: We invent, they perfect.

✔ More than 10 percent, and possibly nearly double that, are out of work with no chance of employment for years. And new technology has made the skills of many of the unemployed obsolete.

✔ The United States is an English-speaking nation where a second language, Spanish, is creeping towards full recognition. Banks, phone companies and state governments have gone bilingual.

✔ Immigrants, legal and illegal, are changing the culture.

After 43 white, male presidents, there is a black man in the White House and a first family that reminds middle-class white tea partiers that huge changes are afoot.

A general anxiety has crystallized into a particular rage.

In memory, the 1950s have been sanctified as a time when all was well in America–if you were white and not serving in Korea. The United States was strong, the land was fertile and fear was concentrated on the Soviet threat.

As it had been in World War II, the good guys were us and the bad guys were them. The European empires were disappearing and we were the city upon a hill. Tea Party Patriots’ nostalgia for the 1950s is as pretty and disingenuous as a Saturday Evening Post cover.

The tea partiers may not be interested in the new demographics and new realities of the 21st century, but their anger won’t banish reality.

Trouble is the only political home these genuinely worried people can find is on the right: the overstated, overwrought and over-simplistic right. The right of Mark Levin and Glenn Beck.

These polemicists have concentrated the anxiety of tea partiers into a fear of socialism. It’s the undefined dark at the top of the stairs, the threat to liberty, to gun ownership and to private enterprise, according to the fear merchants of the right. Yet, there is precious little government left in the world that can be described as socialist.

The old socialism, with the nationalization of the means of production at its core is dead, sent to its eternal rest in Europe. Only a few leaders. like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, still espouse it.

Already extremists of the right–with death threats and property damage–are undoing the legitimacy of the entire Tea Party movement, and its unlikely members–the well-heeled, well-fed, well-insured but very sympathetic and very fearful activists.

Their fears deserve a hearing individually and in sum. Instead, they’re being exploited and in time they’ll be marginalized, discredited by the company they keep. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

There’s No Gold in Them Thar Years

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You don’t grow old gradually. It’s a sudden thing.

You probably haven’t even realized you’re in late middle age. Then, without warning, you’ve crossed the age meridian irrevocably.

You’re old.

It’s a sobering business. Chances are you won’t forget where you were when old age arrived, like the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

I was at the Amtrak ticket counter at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The woman ticket seller looked at me and said: You get the senior discount.

Senior discount? Never heard of it before then.

I glanced over my shoulder, thinking the clerk was addressing someone behind me. There was no one there.

I was the subject of her compassion. Damn!

It’s not so much about being old, it’s about privacy. Everyone knows from your face you’re old and treats you with toxic kindness: Would you like to sit? Why don’t you take the elevator? We won’t be late.

But the really awful patronage comes from doctors.

In particular, doctors who tell you what they think you’ll like to hear. Try these cheering words from the mavens of Medicare: Your knees aren’t bad for your age. You have an enlarged prostate, but that’s normal for a man of your age.

Man of your age. That’s hate speech in the ears of older patients.

Worse. It’s medical relativism. It makes you feel like you’re akin to the vehicles at Rent-A-Wreck: You’ll get down the road, but not out of state. Like most men, and the same goes for women, you’re clapped out, past your sell-by date, out of the prospect of medical miracles. Unlike the way Dylan Thomas dispatched his old dad, you’re going to go gentle into that good night.

One of Americas more interesting captains of industry is John Rowe. He’s chairman of Exelon, the giant utility company. When asked at the National Press Club which companies Exelon was lusting to acquire, Rowe responded as though the question was about something human: I’m 64, and lust is a big problem.

It was a crafty double entendre. Young reporters thought he was talking acquisitions, but the men of the age of hot type knew differently.

When you’re in the Medicare generation, you’re by definition in lust deficit. You can lust, but you’ll most likely lust alone.

For example, the old luster meets a young lustee at a party. The charm flows, the wine provokes, and then the awful remark that deflates: You’ve had such an interesting life. Words like that inter hope. They put you in your place with your prosthesis, dental implants and all those pills, which suddenly you need, or you’re told you need.

There are some delightful goodies in store for oldies. You pay half price on public transport in many places, younger people usually offer you their seats on trains and buses, doctors charge Medicare and not you for care, and the government sends you checks. You can jump the line at airports on geriatric grounds, and you can doze off anywhere when things get boring. You can wear a brown belt with black shoes, and you can question prices without shame: Does the soup come with the entree? Eccentricity gets new license.

Then there’s the capriciousness of memory. A friend in Hong Kong sent me a long e-mail about people we went to middle school with. I wrote back, congratulating him on his memory. He fired back: Thanks, but I wish I remembered where I parked my car? I haven’t seen it for two days.

Should he be allowed to drive? Have the authorities taken his car?

I, you understand, am a particularly boyish 70. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Limbaugh Wouldn’t Like Costa Rica

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One is stirred to thank Rush Limbaugh. He has told us that if health-care reform is passed, he is going to pack his prejudices and leave the country, presumably in five years when the provisions of the hated “Obamacare” begin to bite.

Limbaugh’s putative destination: Costa Rica. Bravo. The man has taste. Democratic for decades, Costa Rica is the jewel of Latin America. It is in its way a paradise. Straddling the Central American isthmus between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, Costa Rica offers the most extraordinary diversity of fauna and flora, mountain and valley. Even the beaches are diverse, from the white sands of the Caribbean to the black volcanic sands of the Pacific.

But is this the place for Limbaugh, as he escapes the creeping socialism he fears is around the corner, if the Democrats can get their act together and pass a health-care bill? Sadly for Limbaugh, he may have to find peace elsewhere. Costa Rica will be too full of jarring realities for the Loud One.

Consider, with one-tenth of the U.S. per-capita income, Costa Rica manages to provide adequate health care to most of its 4.5 million people, and they have, at 79 years, a longer life expectancy than do Americans.

Worse for Limbaugh, the government funds the health-care system — although he will be able to buy private insurance that he can use in one of two private hospitals. To see all those healthy, long-lived people enjoying freedom, despite a massive government option, could be injurious to Limbaugh’s health.

Limbaugh’s affection for drug companies may also be challenged, making his exile life a living hell. Drugs can cost up to 80 percent less than they do states-side.

But there other disquieting things that Limbaugh’s research overlooked. General Limbaugh was a staunch believer in the therapy of invasion, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a favorite of Dick Cheney; and while the latter was vice president and warmonger in chief.

So what is a man like Limbaugh to do in a country that has no army? Not one person with a rifle.

So what great service has Limbaugh’s possible defection done? It has forced us to look around the world for a new home for our greatest broadcaster and to see how far state medicine has gone in rotting the fiber of otherwise great nations.

Limbaugh made everyone look, from the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to La Prensa. Looking for a new home for Limbaugh is the pastime of the moment — and it is not easy.

Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Iceland are out, out, out, out. We cannot send a national treasure to these infamous places, struggling under the yoke of socialist medicine. Much of the rest of Latin America leans toward government provided medicine, even if delivery is spotty.

Our man needs a home of limited government, widespread gun ownership and medicine for those who can afford it. Limbaugh must turn his eyes from mamby-pamby nanny states like Costa Rica to robust lands, where people do not expect the government to provide answers and do not look to it.

Somalia quickly rises to the top of the heap. No government, no regulation, universal gun ownership and no socialized medicine.

Then, there is Iraq. Pasha Limbaugh might fit right in. He has done more than his bit for the Iraqis, bringing them the wonders of democracy and cruise missiles. He could report back to Dick Cheney regularly on what has been wrought there. A one-man truth squad, checking on the mainstream media and its penchant for negative news.

Nah. Limbaugh is a rich man with no known linguistic skills. He would be happier in London. There, he could handle the notorious National Health Service — which the Brits love to hate — by listing its failings in a blog. No need to mention that any politician who suggests repealing it would be thrown into outer darkness.

No worries. Limbaugh knows the power of a horrifying anecdote. Britain frowns on gun ownership, but then exiles must assimilate.

Breath easy, Costa Rica.

Anti-terrorism Industry Eyes Private Aviation

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A disturbed man, Joseph Andrew Stack, flies a single-engine Piper airplane into a Texas federal office building. He kills himself and an IRS worker. It is tragic and awful – and it points up vulnerability in our society that could be exploited by terrorists. But it is not a reason to impose new restrictions on private flying.

General aviation–the blanket term given to everything that is not a scheduled airline or cargo flight–has not to this point in time been subject to onerous security. Yet there are those calling for a security regime to be introduced after the Texas incident.

To apply even modest security on general aviation would be a daunting task because airplanes fly from small airports to big ones; and they fly 24 hours a day. Some are light aircraft like Stack’s and others are corporate jets and charter aircraft, all the way up to airline size.

Charter companies and corporations could take the hit from expensive security. But it would mortally wound private flying and not increase security at all. Elaborate evasions–such as flying from deserted roads, farms and abandoned airfields–might increase. What now happens in the light would happen in the dark.

Here I should declare that I have held a private pilot’s license for nearly 40 years, although I no longer take to the air as I once did (whenever possible).

The aviation community has always known that airplanes are easily used as weapons in the hands of suicidal pilots or if rigged with off-the-shelf technology. To turn a light aircraft into a crude missile you need purpose, know-how and access to a hobby shop or an electronics retailer in the local mall.

Over the years, I have heard many discussions on what you can cause an unmanned aircraft to do. No one was planning to do so, but it is a subject that used to come up from time to time in pilots’ lounges: airport facilities where pilots hang out, get weather briefings or just to tell stories of derring-do.

Pilots belong to a freemasonry that binds people of disparate backgrounds together in a common love of aviation and common bad experiences. Horseman and boaters enjoy something similar but not with the depth and passion that unites pilots, whether they are weekend stick jocks (their term for themselves) or former military pilots, who have done extraordinary things and now fly for the airlines or just fly privately.

Pilots tend to revere anything that leaves the ground and to know that part of the thrill is the high price that will be paid if things go wrong. As Walter Hinton wrote in 1926: “Recently, a man asked whether the business of flying ever could be regulated by rules and statutes. I doubt it. Not that flying men are lawless. No one realizes better than they the need for discipline. But they have learned discipline through constant contact with two of the oldest statutes in the universe–the law of gravity and the law of self-preservation. Ten feet off the ground these two laws supersede all others and there is little hope of their repeal.”

At Barron Hilton’s ranch in Yerington, Nev., I saw astronauts riding in gliders, hot air balloons, as happy as they were going into space. Every form of flight deserves the same respect as another. The price of failure is the same: death.

One of the great freedoms in America is that anyone can learn to fly and can fly from the smallest airport; really just a field that has been surveyed and leveled to JFK or LAX. You will need a reservation to land, but you can do it.

Aviation is truly one of the last egalitarian pursuits. You can put passengers through a metal detector at the general aviation terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport, but what about a farm in Kansas?

One of the many firms that is part of the anti-terrorism industry, STRATFOR, has been proselytizing about the dangers of private aviation. Sure there is a remote danger there, as there is with the availability guns or the vulnerability of city water supplies.

Flying is one of the great freedoms. And to those who are lucky enough to fly, it is the supreme achievement in the ascent of man. To curtail it is to make a terrorist somewhere chortle. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

In Nuclear, as in Other Things, the Past Was Glorious

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A train hurtles under the English Channel at 200 mph. In Japan, an even faster train levitates above the track. In France the largest passenger aircraft on earth, the Airbus A380, takes to the sky. Two Asian giants, China and India, are involved in a space race.

If you want to build a new nuclear plant you’d better order the largest component, the pressure vessel, from Japan. They aren’t made in America anymore; stagnation killed that business.

All is not lost to the United States, but there are warning signs that our global scientific and technological expertise is under attack. It is not yet vanquished, but we’re showing signs of vulnerability: Technological arrogance ia leading to the blunting our precious cutting edge.

That arrogance, in the way of arrogance, comes from past triumphs rather than present capabilities.

Once, the world waited for U.S. scientific and technological innovations. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was stuffed — and still is — with American inventions. But when it comes to applied science, the world no longer waits for us.

When Britain and France built the Concorde supersonic jet, they expected the United States to be right behind them. When the Senate killed the idea of a government-financed, supersonic civilian airliner, the Concorde was doomed.

Likewise with advanced nuclear reactors. When the Clinch River Breeder Reactor was terminated, it was a mortal blow for similar programs in Britain, France, and even Russia.

Those were the days. We were the pacesetter.

Nowhere was this truer than nuclear power. It was our technology, and the world almost demanded our leadership. So much so, it even copied our licensing procedure; and anti-nuclear activists were trained in the American ways. The German pebble bed reactors, British graphite-moderated reactors, and Canadian natural uranium reactors were squeezed in the market, because the Americans, who were known to know about these things, favored the light water reactors. That would make them the world standard. And so it was.

But as the United States faltered, the world went ahead. France built out its nuclear fleet, Japan forged forward, and today reactors are under construction in many places: 25 in China, five in South Korea, and two in tiny Finland.

With this in mind, there’s something sad about the Obama administration’s backing, with loan guarantees, just two new reactors. Gosh.

The industry has calculated that 65 new reactors are needed but two are welcome, even if they’re to be built by Westinghouse, once one of the great industrial names and now a subsidiary of Toshiba.

The master must now play the apprentice.

With sickening predictability, Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica was on the PBS NewsHour to decry the oh-so-modest Obama move. He stopped by the morgue on the way to the studio to get cadavers of arguments about subsidies and waste.

Those technologies favored by Pica, wind and solar, are only known to us because of government subsidies. But he went further and had more disingenuousness up his sleeve. He claimed hydroelectric production from dams built decades ago as part of the “green” bounty. He must know that many members of his own organization want those dams torn down.

Jim Riccio of Greenpeace said that splitting atoms is inherently dangerous and should be treated as such. There’s a vision of pusillanimous policy-making. Columbus, keep those ships in port. John Glenn, stay on Earth; space travel is, er, dangerous.

Worrying about what’s going to happen to nuclear waste in thousands of years is a conceit as well as a stupidity. There’s plenty of it around, which did not come from electric production but from making weapons and driving Navy ships and submarines.

Civilian electric production is the bonus, not the problem, and the solution lies in nuclear evolution — not in unilateral abandonment. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

In Congress, Party Loyalty Trumps Conscience

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All those people who treat politics like baseball may have to start again. All those statistics about what happened in off years down through our history, all those references to recurring political phenomena, like the impact of the weather on elections, are null and void.

What’s changed?

We’re moving from government as we have known it — a system of two parties modulated by bipartisanship on many issues, where factors other than ideology matter to members of Congress — to a new order in which party loyalty trumps conscience.

Congress is acting more like a parliament than a congress. People who have been clamoring for a Congress more like the British Parliament, with features like “Prime Minister’s Question Time,” have got more than they wanted. They’ve got something like the British party system, and it is not a step forward.

While watching the Brits go at it on C-SPAN is good sport, and certainly tests the mental acuity and verbal dexterity of the players, it is an inflexible way of governing.

Despite the jolly repartee and the openness of discussion, the House of Commons can be a sterile place. The individual member feels impotent and frustrated. Unless a member loves constituency work with a passion, they can feel very unloved by the parliamentary legislative process.

The former Conservative M.P. Matthew Parris has written brilliantly about the impotence of the backbenchers in his autobiography. He abandoned elective politics for journalism, where he felt he could be more effective in shaping public policy.

The dirty little secret about Britain in particular, and parliaments modeled on Westminster in general, is that they aren’t kind to mavericks and are institutionally structured to keep them down or out. Private consciences cannot be aired easily, if at all. A cri de coeur may have to be embedded in a question on an aside in a debate late at night. It won’t be reflected in a vote when “the whips are on” — party discipline in force. The rare exception is a free vote of the House of Commons on a matter like the death penalty.

Here in the U.S., despite the emasculation that goes with party discipline, the Republicans are well down that road. And one wonders, can the Democrats be far behind?

The dynamic across the aisle is becoming asymmetric, and the only Democratic response will have to be a closing of ranks. Something unique to the American system is being lost here.

The genius of Congress is its ability to hear minority voices and, on occasion, for the administration to make common cause with the opposition — as President Clinton did with the Republicans to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But the Republicans have given up one the great freedoms of our system of government. They have sacrificed on the altar of discipline the special freedom to vote as you see fit.

Sadly the move to party authoritarianism hasn’t come from within the party — although Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, and House Republican Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, are enjoying it — but from the forces that are shaping conservatism from without.

First among these forces is right-wing broadcasting. It’s a vicious and relentless goad to Republicans to move ever further to right, to embrace positions not of their own making.

Then there’s the party rump, characterized by the Tea Party movement. It’s implacably at odds not just with the administration of Barack Obama but with the times we live in. It yearns for another America in another time. It doesn’t want to face the cultural, demographic and political realities of today. But it’s in tune with the conservative broadcasting colossus, and it will have a large and negative affect on the Republican Party.

Arcing across the political sky, compounding all of this, is the phosphorous rocket of Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska may be in the 10th minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but for now she’s a bigger force in Republicanism than are its wiser leaders.

All of this has forced the Republicans in the Senate, and to a lesser extent in the House, to look more like the opposition in a parliament than the minority in Congress. Significantly, we’ve always favored “minority” to describe the other party rather than “opposition.” These words have described the uniqueness of Congress — its authenticity, if you will.

At least until history took a new course in 2010. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Perils of Palin on the Fox Box

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The great television event of this winter is not what happens with Jay Leno and the late-night crew at NBC. Rather it is Sarah Palin signing on as a contributor for the top-rated Fox News Channel.

In her maiden run on Fox, Palin delighted her admirers and confirmed the negative view of her by those who watched “The O’Reilly Factor” just to see if the former Alaska governor would make a spectacle of herself.

When Palin dismissed allegations about her shortcomings as John McCain’s 2008 running mate in the new book Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, as “crap,” both her followers and detractors got what they thought they wanted from the Woman Who Would Be President. Her followers saw a gutsy conservative and her detractors heard a woman who they believe to be ignorant and incapable of serious responses to serious charges.

For Palin, the real issue is what will television do for her? Will it hurt or hinder? Will it be the final nail in her political coffin as she becomes a talking head, an entertainment, a figure of fun?

To appear from time to time on television is essential for aspiring office seekers. To have a regular spot there is something else. It reveals the mind behind the face, and no politician has been able to survive or be enhanced by too much television.

If Palin doubts this, she look at her colleagues on the Fox box. Step forward Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Dick Morris. Or switch over to MSNBC, and see how things are going for two other former politicians: Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough.

Let us take them one at a time.

Newt Gingrich, once the fount of Republican ideas, is a somewhat reduced man on television, another pundit among many. It has not put him up in the polls as a potential Republican candidate for president.

Karl Rove, once thought to be the omnipotent brain behind President George W. Bush, has also been leveled by regular television appearances, with his insights no more compelling than those of a host of Washington commentators.

Watching Dick Morris’s lugubriousness on Fox, it is hard to believe that President Bill Clinton hung on his words, as did many other politicians. Many political reporters in Washington have as much insight.

Over at MSNBC, Pat Buchanan, some-time presidential candidate and longtime columnist, gets more air time than all the rest. This outpouring of Buchanan philosophy has not produced the slightest groundswell for him to run again.

Joe Scarborough, a former U.S. congressman, has done well as a morning television host, but nobody has suggested he should give this up and return to politics.

Television can be good for the ego but it is a career killer, unless that career is in television.

While television builds name recognition, it also breeds familiarity and robs politicians of their mystique. We do not want to know what politicians think about absolutely everything that happens every day. We want to believe they know things we do not know and think things above our understanding.

Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, alone has been enhanced by appearing on Fox. But he is hosting a variety show, not just showing the variety of his opinions. He is good on television — so good that he may never run for office again. Huckabee could offer himself to any network as an accomplished entertainer and host.

Palin comes to television with a fearsome following. She has reputedly sold 2 million copies of her book, Going Rogue, has 1.5 million friends on Facebook and half a million followers on Twitter. All of those numbers are in the stratosphere.

Has there ever been such devotion to a political woman, so much homage paid to the idea of an iconoclast as a leader? It is a lot to risk for jabbing at liberals on television, along with other women who jab at liberals like Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Britain and China: Echoes of the Opium Wars

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As though there had not been trouble enough in 2009, the year ended with a nasty spat between Britain and China. A spat that might portend more trouble ahead as the world comes to terms with China’s new assertiveness.

The proximate cause of rift was the execution in China of a Briton, Akmal Shaikh, for smuggling heroin into China. The family of the 53-year-old father of three say he was mentally unstable and was duped into carrying a suitcase stuffed with heroin.

According to Shaikh’s family, he traveled to China because he was told he could become a rock star there.

The British government pled for clemency; and made 27 representations to China, after it failed to have the man examined by psychiatrists. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the execution.

China responded by accusing Britain of interfering in its judicial affairs. The Chinese also referred to the two Opium Wars that Britain fought with China in the mid-19th century to protect the opium trade conducted by British merchants. The Chinese embassy in London said the Shaikh case brought back “bitter memories of history.”

The opium was grown and processed in India. Then it was shipped to China, where addiction was encouraged by British merchants. Those merchants included Jardine Matheson, which is still a power in Asian business.

The Chinese government tried to ban the opium from entering China. But the British would have none of it, and went to war in one of the most shameful of imperial adventures. The British argument was that the Chinese were willing buyers and opium was not illegal in Europe.

At the heart of this lethal trade was an imbalance as familiar now as it was then: There was high demand in Europe for Chinese goods– porcelain, tea and silk–and low demand in China for European goods. Although always technically illegal, the opium trade grew so large that it became an important source of revenue for the British administration of India.

The two wars, 1839-43 and 1856-60, humiliated the Chinese and undermined the Quin Dynasty. Now China says Britain is up to its old tricks: supporting illegal drug dealers and undermining Chinese law.

If China were not so self-confident in its new role as a world power, the latest dispute would have been papered over by China agreeing to the reasonable British demand that the executed man be examined for mental competence. But not so. And not so on many fronts.

Last year China consolidated its grip on Africa, where it signed scientific cooperative agreements with 47 countries and entered natural resource tie-ups with as many. It also has natural resources tie-ups in Latin America.

China is beginning to throw its considerable weight around–just enough to remind the world that it is too big and too important to be seriously challenged.

Consider that China refuses to revalue its currency; won’t sanction Iran; undermined the climate change conference in Copenhagen; and makes outlandish territorial claims on the South China Sea and the outer continental shelves of its neighbors. Also, China coddles pariah states North Korea and Sudan.

One cannot blame China for succeeding, but one can blame the international business community for fleeing to Chinese manufacturing. Americans can blame budget deficits for China’s holding of more than $2 trillion in U.S. debt. We put ourselves willingly in the noose. In criticizing, as it has done, the buildup in the U.S. deficit, China reminds that it can tighten the noose at any time.

It looks as though 2009 was the year when we began to pay the high price of cheap sneakers at Walmart.