Commentary Magazine

Posts For: December 31, 2012

Obama Sets Stage for Conflict

| @alanagoodman 12.31.2012 - 4:40 PM

Just as it looked like a fiscal cliff deal was coming together, President Obama gave a partisan, sarcastic speech this afternoon that seemed intended to set back the entire process. As Jonathan wrote, Republicans have good reason to think the president’s goal is to go over the cliff. But they also suspect the White House is preparing to push for further tax increases, in addition to the hikes on individuals making over $400,000 (and families making over $450,000) a year.

“What they’re telegraphing to me is that when Republicans ask for spending cuts, [Democrats are] gonna say ‘You’re not getting those unless we get more tax hikes’,” said one Republican Senate aide after the speech.

Read More

Topics: , ,
8
Leave a comment

Call Us Blessed

| @Peter_Wehner 12.31.2012 - 4:20 PM

This year marked the 150th anniversary of what David Von Drehle calls the most perilous year in our country’s history. As 1862 dawned, Von Drehle writes in his marvelous book Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, America was at death’s door. The federal government appeared overwhelmed. The Treasury Department was broke. The War Department was a corrupt shambles. The Union’s top general, George McClellan, was gravely ill. And Lincoln was viewed as weak and overmatched by events. “It is in the highest Degree likely that the North will not be able to subdue the South,” the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, counseled his Foreign Office.

By the end of the year, the tide had turned. The South had been dealt major battlefield losses. The Union had developed a military strategy that would eventually prevail. “The twelve tumultuous months of 1862 were the hinge of American history,” according to Von Drehle, “the decisive moment at which the unsustainable compromises of the founding generations were ripped up in favor of a blueprint for a much stronger nation.” And it was the year in which Lincoln rose to greatness. 

Read More

Topics: ,
6
Leave a comment

Obama’s Crisis Demagoguery

| @tobincommentary 12.31.2012 - 2:40 PM

There may be a last-minute compromise reached today in the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, but not if President Obama has anything to say about it. Even as Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were believed to have led the effort to have the structure of a deal in place for the two houses of Congress to vote on later today, the president emerged to make a statement that seemed geared to scuttling the negotiations.

In a campaign-style event, the president spoke of a possible accord between the two parties that would avert the immediate effects of the fiscal cliff being reached. But the bulk of his remarks were devoted to goading the Republicans into backing away from any deal. Not only did he gratuitously insult the GOP about their stands on the budget to the great amusement of the hand-picked audience of supporters, he also made it clear that the tax increases in any compromise would just be the start of what he hoped to accomplish. Even worse, he implied that spending cuts, especially the entitlement reform that is necessary for any long-term solution to the nation’s problems, are not really on the table as far as he is concerned.

Given the tone of his comments and the timing, Republicans should be forgiven for suspecting that his real purpose was to send the country over the cliff in the belief that only the GOP would be blamed for the disaster.

Read More

Topics: , , ,
21
Leave a comment

How the Right Can Reclaim its Edge on Foreign Policy

| @SethAMandel 12.31.2012 - 1:15 PM

Aside from the prospect of automatic cuts in near-term defense spending, the ongoing drama over the so-called fiscal cliff continues to sideline the issue of foreign policy. But as the Republican Party recovers from the November election and finds its issue compass going forward, foreign policy should never be far behind—not least because of what Dan Drezner writes in a new Foreign Affairs essay on the GOP: Republicans finally saw the end of their dominance of public opinion on foreign policy they have held since the era of the Vietnam War.

Conservatives may already be tired of what they perceive to be lectures on their party’s ills from those who don’t share their ideological preferences. I don’t blame them. But Drezner’s essay is worth reading because Drezner generally eschews ad hominem attacks and his writing is tonally free of partisan hostility. Additionally, conservatives reading the essay will find that in addition to what they are accused of getting wrong, they will discover that an honest assessment of the GOP’s recent foreign policy gets a fair amount right.

Read More

Topics: , , , ,
Leave a comment

Why Both Parties Failed

| @tobincommentary 12.31.2012 - 12:30 PM

It almost goes without saying that even if a deal is somehow reached today that would prevent a massive tax increase and defense cuts, the disgust of the public at the fiscal cliff hijinks that have gone on in Washington the last few weeks will outweigh the relief they feel. If the last-second talks between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell succeed in crafting a short-term compromise that enough Democrats and Republicans can live with, the country will be spared the disaster that would ensue should the scheduled across-the-board tax increases and devastating sequestration of funds for national defense be implemented. But as much as both sides have spent more time casting aspersions at each other’s motives than negotiating in good faith, there needs to be a full accounting of why this happened in the way that it did.

To say that both Republicans and Democrats have failed in this episode is stating the obvious. But each failed in different ways and an analysis of their shortcomings tells us a lot about the direction in which the country is heading.

Read More

Topics: , , ,
8
Leave a comment

Happy New Year, America

| @steelegordon 12.31.2012 - 12:05 PM

If you’d like to have your New Year’s Eve thoroughly ruined, I’d suggest taking a look today at Mortimer Zuckerman’s piece over at USNews.com, “Brace for an Avalanche of Unfunded Debt.”

It’s so depressing because it’s true. The federal government keeps its books not in ways that most clearly reveal the true financial picture, but in ways designed, quite deliberately, to obscure that picture. This is for the short-term benefit of politicians and nothing else, the country be damned. And, as Zuckerman notes, unless something is done about this, and soon, that is exactly what the country will be.

Read More

Topics: , , ,
Leave a comment

ObamaCare, 2013, and the Start of the GOP Comeback

| @Peter_Wehner 12.31.2012 - 11:05 AM

Right now the political landscape is grim for Republicans–and in the short term, thanks to the so-called fiscal cliff, things may get grimmer still. But moments like these can pass, often quicker than we think. And next year may turn out to be one in which the pernicious effects of the Affordable Care Act–aka ObamaCare–really begin to kick in, from higher premiums to the loss of employer-based health insurance to the start of enrollment in insurance exchanges. It will become more and more clear to the public what a nightmarish law the Affordable Care Act actually is.

“The administration is well behind schedule,” my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague James Capretta told Byron York of the Washington Examiner. “It’s going to be a train wreck in a lot of places.”

Read More

Topics: 
3
Leave a comment

May 2013

Articles

Fiction

Politics & Ideas

Culture & Civilization

John Podhoretz

Threat Assessment

Letters

Enter Laughing

Phone Cards
International Phone Cards
DIY Awards - Personalized Crystal Awards & Plaques