That’s just not, to borrow a word from the President Obama’s rhetorical lexicon, taking responsibility for the task at hand.  Instead it’s part of that old “pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.”

The President partially undermined the strong points in his Strasbourg speech by repeatedly criticizing his predecessor. This is not the first time he has blamed Bush.  Nor is it the only time he or his team has attacked Republicans.

In her column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Kimberley A. Strassel shows how, with a generous assist from the White House, Democrats are going after one of the GOP’s “up-and-coming talents,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor. They have run TV ads criticizing this thoughtful conservative. A Democratic front group even ran “robocalls in five districts” attacking his wife.

Strassel concludes that “the coordinated takedown attempt [of Cantor] is yet more proof that the Obama-led Democrats aren’t nearly as interested in changing the ‘tone’ as they are in holding on to power.”  No wonder polls show that in the first few months of this “post-partisan” Administration, Americans are becoming increasingly polarized.

In studying the digestive systems in mammals, Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov made an important discovery about canine reflexes:

. . . he struck a bell when the dogs were fed. If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling.

Just as these dogs respond by drooling to the mere sound of a bell, so do some on the left, particularly the gay left, respond to the mere sound of the descriptors, “gay conservative” or “gay Republicans.”  As soon as they hear these words, they shout “self-loathing,” “self-hating,” calling those defined by said descriptors the equivalent to “Jewish Nazis” or “black Klansman.”

So Pavlovian is their response, it’s almost like a comedy routine.

The other day Bruce alerted me to a comment on a blog linking my first piece on the Iowa marriage decision.  I laughed out loud when I read the latest left-wing response to our ideas.  While often claiming to be more intelligent than their conservative counterparts, many on the left insist on insulting conservatives rather than addressing our points.  (Please note that this does not apply to all of our critics as, in the comment thread to my post, a number offered thoughtful counterarguments in a civil tone.)

As I consider the Pavlovian response of all too many critics of gay conservatives, I better understand Barney Frank’s preference of insult to argument when addressing his adversaries.  It’s just part of the political culture in which he was brought up.

While in the campaign, Barack Obama defined himself as a new kind of poltician, it was the man whose legacy he’s trying to undo who embodied in his actions the ideals Obama promotes in his rhetoric.

Once elected in 1980, Ronald Reagan governed as he had campaigned.  He did not cast aspersions on her adversaries, blaming them for our nation’s problems.  He did not propose sweeping new federal programs at odds with his campaign rhetoric.  He sought to build bridges with his political opponents.  He did not push legislation merely to appease the various interest groups who formed his coalition.

And yet that’s what Obama and the Democrats are doing in their support of card check, legislation that would make it easier for union organizers to intimidate workers to join their ranks.  Democrats push their so-called “EFCA” bill even as polls show that overwhelming majorities of non-union workers are not interested in joining unions.

The primary support for this proposal comes not from workers clamoring for tools making it easier for them to organize, but from unions interested in swelling their ranks in order to increase their power — and that of their favored political party, the Democrats.

Jennifer Rubin sums it up:

But there is something more fundamental at stake. This is legislation for and by a  special interest group. There is no popular groundswell or demonstrable need for it. We don’t have tales of woe from employees unable to organize. We don’t hear about frustrated employees who, but for the secret ballot, would have union representation. Some may have a visceral reaction to losing the secret ballot or feel badly about the “plight of workers.” But they are not clammoring for any change in the law.

Emphasis added.

The president’s support of this legislation is yet another sign that his “new kind of politics” is mere rhetorical subterfuge.  It shows him pushing a policy not to promote the national interest but to appease an interest group.

And I had thought that kind of appeasement was something he had run against in his campaign.

While I found much to praise in the president’s speech in Strasbourg, one line stood out as defining the hypocrisy and hubris of his young Administration.  It shows his hypocrisy because he says one thing while governing in a different direction.  The hubris lies in his belief that his rhetoric defines the world’s reality, that if he says a noble quality defines his Administration, then it must be so.

That line, one which echoes the title of his budget, “We are ushering a new era of responsibility, and that is something we should all be proud of.”

How presumptuous of him to say we should be proud of era that has not yet begun, of something not yet achieved!

And to use the term responsibility to define his work is the height of hypocrisy.  In the third debate, he echoed a point he had made during the campaign, implicitly faulting the supposedly spendthrift policies of the Bush Administration:

But there is no doubt that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.

Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.

Instead of giving us a net spending cut, his self-described responsible budget gives us a severe spending explosion.  No wonder the tea party movement is burgeoning.

How can he, after contending we’ve been living beyond our means and campaigning on a “net spending cut,” offer a budget under which the government spends far, far beyond its means with deficits and treble those he decried under his predecessor’s Administration and call that an “era of responsibility”?

Does he understand that his very actions undermine his rhetoric?

I’m not sure I’ve seen a more succinct summary of why most Americans oppose the strategy, tactics and language used by the Gay Left in the marriage debate than this excellent comment by GP Reader Ashpenaz in Dan’s posting yesterday.

Here’s why—gay advocates want to undermine the traditional understanding of marriage as a lifelong, sexually exclusive relationship and change it to include multiple partners, open relationships, and serial monogamy. They are not trying to be included in the tradition—they are trying to warp the tradition because they believe they are victimized by a cruel patriarchy who uses marriage as a tool of oppression.  Attempting to justify their inclusion in an established tradition would be contrary to their desire to destroy that tradition.  It’s that simple. Now you know why.

As a gay American, it is hard to argue with those points.

And if you are a straight American, it is easy to see why you would recoil at judicially mandated gay marriage when anyone with honest intellectual capacities can figure out the real agenda.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Not Since Ulysses S. Grant has a president first elected in a year ending in “8″ served two full terms in the White House.

Sometimes when, on this blog, I fault the leading advocates of gay marriage for failing to make a case for the social change they’re trying to effect, a critic will wonder if I think same-sex couples seeking state recognition of their unions are similarly clueless about the meaning of their relationships.

And yet, more often than not, it is those very couples who understand what the more vocal proponents of state recognition of same-sex unions neglect or refuse to point out.  Indeed, it is largely because of such couples that I voted against Proposition 8 even as I couldn’t stand the mean-spirited rhetoric of many opponents of the proposition.

To be sure, there are notable exceptions to this practice, men and women like Jonathan Rauch who are able to articulate what marriage is for.

But, I’ve said this before.

So, let me wonder yet again at the refusal of all too many advocates of gay marriage to articulate the social benefits of extending the privilege of state recognition of marriage to same-sex couples, explaining why (to borrow from the subtitle to Jonathan’s book, gay marriage is “Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.“  I do believe that refusal is linked to their preference for turning to appointed judges rather than elected legislators (or those who elect them) to effect the change they seek.

In courts, they only need make a legal argument and not a social one.  Why then do they wish to reduce marriage to a “civil rights’ issue and downplay its social aspects?

At the very time they downplay these aspects, many of those who seek the privileges the state offers by recognizing their unions understand them very well.  And maybe, just maybe if the leading advocates of gay marriage could articulate in the public square what these individuals understand in their private lives, they might not need to push their agenda through the courts, but would find a more receptive audience among those elected to make our laws.

It seems to be the standard Democratic practice now to blame the economic crisis on George W. Bush as if Democrats’ hands were perfectly clean and they had done everything possible to prevent this from happening.  Last month, the President said he “inherited” the budget deficit at the same time he was making plans to leave his successor an even bigger deficit.

Now, his fellow Democrat Harry Reid has called the recent Senate passage of the president’s budget is “a critical step” in the direction of cleaning “up the mess we inherited.”  Well, it’s a mess Harry Reid inherited from himself given that he began his tenure as Senate Majority Leader well over two years ago.

Wonder what he did it that time to forestall the current crisis.  He held a leadership position in one of the three branches of the federal government, the branch with the power over the federal purse strings.  He was in a position to prevent this from happening.

In short, even before he took the reins in the Senate, Mr. Reid had the power to take action to avert this crisis.  Instead of using his position to effect reform, he used it to block it.

Indeed, in the two years prior to taking charge in the Senate, as the leader of the opposition, he did everything in his power to obstruct Republican reforms.  He didn’t want them to see any succees. He did nothing to discourage his Democratic colleagues, notably Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, from thwarting legislation then-President Bush and Republicans proposed to reform the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

He inherited a mess that he helped create.  This mess is as much his as it is the former President’s and the budget he and his Senate Democrats just approved will only serve to aggravate matters.

In writing about the president’s remarks in Strasbourg, most conservative bloggers have (with good reason) faulted him for labeling American “arrogant” and for apologizing for the liberation of Iraq. ( I too had fun with the first comment.) It’s clear he was taking shots at his predecessor, borrowing from the standard arsenal of liberal rhetoric and ideas to do so.

Indeed, it seemed there were a number of such cheap shots shattered throughout the speech, particularly his reference to emerging “from an era marked by irresponsibility.”*

Let’s hope his successor shows him greater deference four years hence.

Despite the pettiness of parts of his speech, there were some moments when he seemed to be using his popularity abroad to good effect.  He took on European anti-Americanism:

But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what’s bad.

I wish the president has built on this, addressing some of the points Jean-François Revel made in his book Anti-Americanism.  European anti-Americanism is a serious problem and it precedes George W. Bush.  (I lived there before he took office and experienced it firsthand.)

Still, it’s important that he said it.  Let’s hope Europeans take his words to heart and examine their attitudes.

It wasn’t just in addressing European anti-Americanism where the president made some strong points.  He underscored the importance of the war in Afghanistan:

I understand that there is doubt about this war in Europe. There’s doubt at times even in the United States. But know this: The United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan. We were attacked by an al Qaeda network that killed thousands on American soil, including French and Germans. Along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, those terrorists are still plotting today. And they’re — if there is another al Qaeda attack, it is just as likely, if not more, that it will be here in Europe in a European city.

The American President thus reminded his European audience of something many of them would rather forget: they face an ever increasing risk of a terror attack.

Despite the potshots at his predecessor, President Obama, in Strasbourg, did say some things which needed to be said to our European allies.  Let’s hope they listen.

* (more…)

So many topics, so little time.   Have at it today on the subjects of your choice. 

Just be civil and smart about it.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Kettle, meet pot.

Yesterday when “climbing” the Stairmaster, they had MSNBC on at my gym.  I had quite a laught watching Chris Matthews.  He was talking about the President’s European trip.  And while he didn’t quite get a thrill up his leg, I was wondering if they kept drool buckets on hand at MSNBC.

He reported the trip much as Soviet television must have reported a Brezhnev trip to North America back in Communism’s heyday.  Mathews just couldn’t praise him enough.  And then he brought on two panelists to discuss the speech, Richard Wolfe, the network’s political analyst and E. Steven Collins, a radio talk show host.

The primary difference between the two panelists was the words they used to praise the president’s trip and to distinguish him from his predecessor.  Contrast their shared political sentiments with those of most two-person panels on FoxNews (excluding Hannity’s show).  That news network almost always pairs ideological adversaries, Republican with Democrat, conservative with liberal, Bush-supporter with Bush-critic, Obama-critic with Obama-supporter.

It was in watching FoxNews that I grew to respect such Democrats as Bill Richardson, Susan Estrich and Geraldine Ferraro for their sober commentary and intelligent criticism of Republicans.  They eschewed ad hominem and often made thoughtful arguments for liberal candidates and ideas.

And yet, the left accuses that more balanced network of being biased.

As I laughed at Matthews’s sycophancy, I wondered at his fellow MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann’s anger, how each of us reacted differently to his political adversaries.  And struck me how frequently conservative media personalities (including bloggers) use humor to respond to liberals whereas our left-wing counterparts respond with wrath.  (This is not to say that there are not angry conservatives, there are.  It’s just that there’s a lot more humor on our side.)

This is another reason why I think Rachel Maddow will do very well.  From the times I’ve watched her, she strikes me as someone having fun while making fun of her adversaries.  She thus stands in marked contrast to the man who precedes her in the MSNBC lineup.

You know, if this were a map of, oh I don’t know…. anti-war protests against the Bush Administration in nearly every state in the USA…. there’d be national news coverage every day bordering on hysteria.

But since this is a map of ordinary Americans standing up spontaneously against the tyranny of Washington, DC spending — nary a peep. (h/t – Instapundit)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  About this map, the ever-insightful Jennifer Rubin offers:

You’d think a mass movement with hundreds of events in nearly every state would gain some more mainstream media attention. I wonder if the numbers attending will surpass the number of “pledges” (actual, not the triplicated copies) collected by the president’s perpetual campaign (Organizing America).

Perhaps one of the reasons gay activists prefer using the courts to advance their agenda is that it prevents them from having to consider conservative arguments and from appealing to conservative constituencies.  Instead of working to build a consensus on gay marriage, they only need make legal arguments to appeal to a narrow segment of the population.

But, if the leaders of the gay marriage movement reached out to gays on the right, they might better be able to appeal to the population at large.  While many of traditionally Democratic constituencies are averse to same-sex marriage, some Republicans, particularly those born after 1960, might, if better arguments were made, be persuaded to change their minds.

Gay men and women on the right (including many in the various chapters of Log Cabin) have worked with such individuals and understand their concerns.  We can help develop arguments to address those concerns and reach out to conservative leaders, like Ward Connerly, favorable to same-sex marriage, perhaps even persuading them to speak out on our behalf.

We would like to be part of the conversation on the direction of the gay movement.  If the leaders of the gay organizations continue to exclude us, as they did from LA’s “Townhall” earlier this week, they risk marginalizing themselves as left-wingers and making it easier for proponents of traditional marriage to present themselves as representing the mainstream of American society.

In short, the failure of the gay organizations to include gay conservatives increases the likelihood that they will fail to build a genuine societal consensus on gay marriage.

As I’ve written before, it’s a question of approach and attitude.  In approaching conservatives, the portion of the population to which we must appeal, many of us have gained a better idea of the attitude necessary to address them and their concerns.

Recalling how “BACK IN 2004, MOVEON MADE A POLITICAL SPOT about how Bush was saddling our kids with too much debt,” I got to wondering why that organization is helping Bush’s successor lobby for his budget which saddles our kids with much more debt that W’s budgets did.

Last night, before the Iowa Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was handed down, I scribbled a few notes outlining the things I wanted to blog on today. But, this medium being what it is, the news often gets in the way of the topics we might otherwise wish to address.

One thing which I did wish to consider, however, becomes particularly timely in the wake of the reaction of gay activists to the Hawkeye State decision. I had intended to write on the need for an overhaul of the leadership of the gay movement, replacing those with left-wing backgrounds with those who can appeal to more socially conservative citizens, those who still harbor a degree of animosity toward and/or ignorance of gay people.

They need to find people who can do what Mary Cheney did when she appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, provide an image of a normal gay American to those who do not readily have access to such imagery.

The Des Moines Register article includes this reaction from Richard Socarides, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay civil rights, to the decision:

I think it’s significant because Iowa is considered a Midwest state in the mainstream of American thought . . . Unlike states on the coasts, there’s nothing more American than Iowa. As they say during the presidential caucuses, ˜As Iowa goes, so goes the nation.’

So, is he saying that the decision of a court shows where the citizens of the state stand?

That same article cited a February 2008 poll which found that “62 percent of Iowans said they believed marriage should be only between a man and a woman.”

I might have greater understanding for tactic of using the courts to mandate state recognition of same-sex marriage if those pushing it had a parallel program to persuade the people of the merits of such an expansion of this ancient institution.

The problem remains that the leadership of the various gay organizations have few ideas about and little interest in appealing to most Americans. Instead of talking about marriage in the terms that most people use to debate the institution, they content themselves with making legal arguments to small groups of judges.

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Here we go again.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled today that a state law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman was unconstitutional and struck language saying as much from the Iowa code.

If the Hawkeye State has an initiative/referendum process for amending its constitution as does the Golden State, this represents yet another setback for gay marriage.  It will galvanize opponents of the institution.  My guess is that given the number of social conservatives in Iowa, they could succeed in gathering the requisite signatures within a month.

If more than 52% of Californians voted to overturn as similar decision, expect an even larger majority of Iowans to do the same.

As have all state supreme court decisions mandating the state to recognize same-sex marriages, this one will lead to a popular backlash.  When state supreme courts leave this matter to the states, support for popular initiative defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman increases.  When they mandate gay marriage, they galvanize the opposition leading to a backlash at the ballot box.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Pink Elephant writes:

Amendments to the iowa consittuion require the proposed language to pass both houses in two separate sessions before it even gets on the ballot. Although it will galvanize opponents to same-sex marraige elsewhere, same-sex marriage in Iowa is safe for a while.

Given the state’s constitution, that sounds about right.

Last night, I watched L.A. Confidential for the first time since I had since it over a decade ago in its initial release.  And while I agree that it’s a great movie which stands up, I still don’t get those who define it as one of the greatest movies, if not the greatest movie, of the last decade.

First, of all, the writing, acting and set direction were superb.  I wish I could write dialogue like that!  But, there was a bit too much violence.  The shoot-out at the end was way over the top.

That said, one thing struck me about this movie was that it had a character who has many counterparts in American cinema, the redeemed hooker.  It seems we Americans like films where our heroes fall for the whore and rescue her from her “fallen” life, redeeming her through romance.  (Note to self: would a gay twist on this work?  Or did Jim Fall already do that with the touching Trick?  Nah, not quite . . . )

In L.A. Confidential, Kim Basinger plays Lynn Bracken who earns a living as a Veronica Lake lookalike turning tricks for a high class clientele.  But, Russell Crowe‘s Bud White, ever sensitive to abused woman, takes a fancy to the striking pseudo-blonde.  And that fancy blossoms into romance.

Just as Richard Gere had fallen for Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and John Wayne for Claire Trevor in Stagecoach. Even Belle Watling (Ona Munson) achieves a certain redemption in Gone With the Wind.  Interesting, isn’t it that the prostitute in American movies is almost never the subject of reproach and always a candiate for redemption?

Maybe this is as much a commentary on Hollywood as it is on America:  we believe in second chances, that one’s youthful indiscretions do not prevent one from finding redemption and even romance.

No, not the one the president fired, the one who served during the Great Depression, you know that economic downturn which lingered long after the implementation of FDR’s New Deal.  This is from
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Chairman of the Board of GM from 1937 to 1956 and CEO from 1923 to 1946, written in 1940:

…..I begin to think about the situation that exists in business and industry in this great country of ours – a land of potential promise and opportunity – at least, so it always has been.  As I write, we have millions of people unemployed, who seek an opportunity to work.  Despite the fact that our government has been creating billions of dollars of indebtedness millions remain idle….We have hundreds of millions of dollars lying idle in our banks….  As a country, we are blessed, with out measure, with almost every essential natural resource.  We have the finest producing plants supported by the most progressive manufacturing technique that ever existed anywhere.  As a people, we are willing to work if given the chance.  Yet in a land of such abundance we live in a state of relative scarcity, for too many have much too little.

Some political leaders have tried to convince us that our idle money is a result of a static economy.  They even talk about the desirability of a tax to penalize efficiency, with the objective of reducing unemployment – incomprehensible to anyone familiar with the workings of our industrial system.  Then they develop a scheme of taxation, supposedly for revenue but actually resulting in penalizing business and industrial development, and so confiscatory in character as to prejudice the whole profit motive.  Then they preach the gospel that accomplishment is a crime – the greater the accomplishment, the greater the crime.  They teach the concept of something for nothing.  This, in one form or another, has influenced our national economic thinking for may years.

(H/t: Reader Ken)

The main reason I penned, er, pixeled, this post yesterday was that I had wanted to complete it before I met David Frum who spoke last night to the Republican Jewish Coalition here in Los Angeles.

I have to say that my criticism of his remarks on Rush Limbaugh notwithstanding, I pretty much agreed with everything he had to say before he took questions.  One of those questions was from me.  Since I spoke spontaneously (without a teleprompter as did Frum), I don’t have an accurate transcription of that question. I will rephrase it as best I can.

After introducing myself and identifying this blog, he said, “I know your site.”  Honored by the recognition, I continued:

Had I not been coming here tonight to hear you speak, I would not have read your Newsweek article in large part because of the title and the periodical where it was appearing.  When I did read it, I found I agreed with about 80% of what you said, particularly your point on health care.  But, I wonder what you felt it necessary to repeat Rahm Emanuel’s talking points on Rush Limbaugh.

He answered by repeating much of what he had said in the article linked above, highlighting that the talk show host was particularly unpopular among young people and women.  What impressed me about his response was the courtesy he showed me.  He allowed me to ask a followup, then gave me credit for not interrupting him and listening.

I thought it was a touch of grace because he could probably tell I was itching for a debate.  (We did continue this debate after the Q & A, but the exchange while spirited, was understandably interrupted by others who wanted to talk to him.)

The one fault I will make of him–and it’s a big one is that he seems to harbor a good deal of resentment for conservative talk show host on radio and television.  Perhaps, it’s because they’ve criticized him.

If, however, he wants them to hear his message he needs be more magnanimous and refrain from attacking them, reminding them that he’s on the side and shares some of the same goals they do.  Indeed, he talked about building a broad-based coalition, saying, “You can’t get anywhere by firing the base.”  He also said, “You can’t win by being anti-gay.”

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