Category: POLITICS

    
     We live in a time of great political passion and emotional people regarding the critical issues of our time. But I mean, really people, is THIS the best we can do? Christian Schneider in National Review Online documents the “duel” between recently re-elected Justice David Proesser and his foil on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley as tempers arose regarding the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision last week to reject a district judge’s sloppy opinion to hold up the Wisconsin legislature’s pending law on collective bargaining for government employees.

     Putting aside the merits of asking government employees to share some burden in funding their pensions or health insurance and the constitutional issue as to whether the judiciary somehow has veto power over legislative process, the fundamental issue in the duel appears to have been the two justices inconsolable disdain for each other. Now that’s the kind of thing that in the old days would have led to a good ol’ fashioned duel. In this case, however, as is inferred by reports, Justice Bradley is accusing Justice Proesser of putting her in “a choke hold” as she apparently rushed him to physically force him out of her office. Justice Proesser is suggested by other witnesses to have put his hands on her shoulders to repel her as she charged him. The extent of the behavior appears to have been at the level of, “Oh yeah? …So’s yur old man!” The infantile denouement has perfectly captured the character of debate of this spring in the state of Wisconsin over the ‘outrage’ of a state legislature performing their elected and constitutional responsibility of balancing the state budget. The reaction of a segment of the state populous to duly elected officials performing their duty? – that would be sit-downs, threats of violence, massed demonstrations, death threats, legislator out of state flight, and recall elections. God forbid that the legislature or governor seek to improve the state in any other way. All hell is likely to break loose.

     Thankfully we can count on the dignity of judicial tradition to evaluate issues based on their merits in law and in constitutional precedent, and not be swayed by the unstable passions of emotion and political avarice.  Actually that would be..No.  The disease of political tactics, smear campaigns, and power grabs has invaded the judicial class as intensely as it has the political class, and the result is a generation of ill-considered politically stained judicial decisions and a lowest common denominator judges.  We’ve come to a time where Justice is not only blind, but deaf and dumb as well.

     Well., it could be worse. The paddycake shoving match between the Justices pales in comparison to the charged political emotions of the 19th century, when a threat or an insult, or worse yet a pattern of verbal abuse, could get a politician challenged to a duel.  On July 11th, 1804 the third Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr shot and killed the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel on the New Jersey banks of the Hudson within view of New York City.  The two men hated each other but the real gasoline for the duel was Hamilton’s persistent efforts to suppress Mr. Burr’s overarching political ambitions.  Locked in a verbal death match long before the actual firing of the dueling pistols, the two opponents simply could not envision a world where both their political views could be justified. They sought to enforce their will rather than develop their alternative arguments for this nation’s future. 

     I’m not saying that the push and shove silliness that just occurred between a cranky old conservative and witchy liberal intransigent is at that the level of an event that cost us one of our most brilliant founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton.  But the reality is that the dangerous fanning of emotions that rise above civil discourse and legal prudence  can overwhelm and distort any rational debate, and put the opponents on a course of accepting no less than complete triumph, or experiencing inconsolable defeat.

     Alexander Hamilton on the morning of July 11th, 1804, shot first, and into the air, to preserve his dignity, and prove his point of view.  Aaron Burr shot into Alexander Hamilton’s abdomen to preserve his dignity, and to prove the demise of  Alexander Hamilton’s point of view – forever.

     The state of Wisconsin is but a laboratory for the process that will soon envelop of national debate as we try to arrest our exploding fiscal crisis. The emotions of the paddycake duel in Madison are trivial to what this debate nationally will involve.  We best get our emotional acts together or, 19th century may again seem all too real.

     Newt Gingrich is currently a candidate for the Republican nomination to the presidency of the United States, but he has a much chance of gaining the nomination as Ron Paul, a candidate from the fringes of the fringe.  Michael Barone of National Review Online has a sage article lamenting the sad state of affairs Mr. Gingrich’s candidacy currently finds itself, and recalls the times when the Gingrich flame shone much more brightly.  The augering in of Newt’s campaign is not a process of bad luck, but rather enigmatic of Newt’s whole public life – full of grand ideas, potential, and ultimately self inflicted wounds.  Mr. Gingrich may be the only candidate currently soldiering on without a single candidacy staff member, as his entire team mutinied last week and left him for greener pastures. He may be the only person left who believes that the brilliance of his ideas will overwhelm any voter’s hesitancy about  the “Newt package” that promotes them.  But that’s typical of the pilot who augers in his plane, refusing to jump out of a hopelessly out of control aircraft in the innate belief that at the last second, he will regain control.  What appears clear to just about everybody but Newt, the jig is up, and his time as a defining force in American politics has come and gone.

     A trip down memory road to a much younger version of Gingrich revealed all the talents of an intellectual dervish.  He came into American politics in 1978 and flew in the face of the treasured myth of American media that conservatives were stupid and neanderthalish, and therefore not to be taken seriously in matters of governmental philosophy.  Winning a seat prior to the Reagan revolution was no small feat for a conservative, but Gingrich was an unabashed southern conservative Republican when the terms southern, conservative, and democrat were synonymous.  He set about immediately to build the disheveled and dysfunctional republican backbenchers into a force, to the the dismay of party leadership who long felt that the demographics of the country were such that they could never again hope to be a majority party in the House of Representatives and therefore should simply work toward the best possible relationship with the eternally dominant Democrats.  Gingrich would have none of it, and discovered a heretofore unknown weapon, the first television broadcasts from the House floor broadcast on C-SPAN.  Standing alone on the floor at night Gingrich spoke to no one but the camera, initiating a blistering and continuous attack on Democrat leadership and a creative and intellectually diverse lecture on the America’s problems, proposing in-depth solutions.  Both Republican and Democratic leadership hoped and assumed no one was watching, but a steadily growing number of people were, and the rest of the backbenchers began to frame their arguments in similar fashion. 

      To the horror of leadership, Gingrich opened his sights on the House Speaker himself, Jim Wright, regarding Wright’s classic back room shenanigans to use a book deal for a ghost written biography to circumvent campaign finance laws and a secondary assault on the House Post Office and Bank  for similar kickbacks to congressmen.  To the amazement of the Republicans, Gingrich the general proved brilliant and victorious, taking down the reigning Speaker, and exposing the soft underbelly of a  House made moribund over 40 years of consecutive democrat rule.  Young conservatives like Judd Gregg, John Kasich, Connie Mack, and Dick Armey began to work with Newt to present an alternative based on ideas and intellectual honesty, and by 1994, the American population was primed to listen to the alternative to a government  without limit or direction.  Gingrich devised the revolutionary Contract with America, a ten step agreement with the American people to say what they would do, and do what they would say, if elected.  In a stunning electoral outcome, Gingrich led a second Republican revolution and took the House of Representatives for the first time in 42 years. The Outlaw had become amazingly Speaker of the House, and for a time Speaker Gingrich, so different than the shallow political hacks before him,  amazed the country by passing every one of the planks in the Contract, leading eventually to welfare reform, and serious legislation regarding term limits, electoral reform, congressional ethics, and a balanced budget.  For a year or more, Gingrich stood at the zenith of American political royalty, becoming the only speaker in history to have given a nationally televised policy speech, and so outshining the President, that President Clinton had to declare that he was still “relevant” to a Gingrich enraptured press, and declare in a State of the Union address that the “era of Big Government was over”.

     Gingrich’s fall came upon his own outsized ego, and  assuming his political skills and likeability were a match to those of the crafty Arkansan in the White House. Gingrich’s ultimate prize was to achieve a balanced budget, and he cornered the president into accepting a balanced budget through cuts or experience and unheard of  shut down of government.  Sounds eerily familiar to the present circumstances.  Clinton recognized he could achieve the veneer of both a fiscally responsible executive and make Gingrich appear heartless at the same time, and the  shutdown backfired. Clinton got to take credit for the subsequent years of progressively balanced budgets, built on Republican budgetary discipline and a republican inspired Capital Gains Tax cut,  and bask in the progressive attack on Gingrich from all comers for his authoritarian style, ethical vulnerabilities, and frankly loose cannon of a mouth.  The result of the Gingrich years, electoral reform, welfare reform, freezing of governmental growth, capital gains tax cuts, budgetary surpluses, and tough but fair crime laws. For all that, check mate and match to the president with worse personal ethics, but better likeability and much more acutely honed personal political skills.  By 1997, Gingrich was vulnerable, a victim of his own party’s mutiny against him for his authoritarian ways and ethical lapses, led by John Boehner, the current Speaker of the House, and Bill Paxson of New York.  By 1998, the weakened Gingrich had lost his Speaker role, and determined not to run again for Congress.  The bright light that had changed American political direction so profoundly was left to teach college courses and plot a comeback someday.

     The someday was this year, with his decision to run for President, but Gingrich proved his pulse on the voter was no longer precise, and his habit of throwing fireballs at windmills just as out of control as ever.  A ridiculous attack on Paul Ryan, the modern day intellectual version of Gingrich in the width and breath of his ideas, was petty and ill considered, and left him back tracking on the very weekend of his announcement.  His additional decision to have his current wife act as his chief of staff left the professionals in his campaign aghast, and soon left Newt without a campaign staff.  His current ideas seem scattered and disorganized, and worse, dated.

     Gingrich is in my mind done as a political figure, but his contribution to the storied period of time when the Congress showed itself to be fiscally responsible in the 1990’s to the great benefit of America, is a shining example of what is possible if you combine intelligence, energy, and vision to the framework  allowed by our founding fathers – for a brief time, the best and most creative governmental function in history.  Newt, sorry you had to find out how we have moved on, but for what you brought to the table before and the table you helped set, is now just waiting for the right chef to feed a country hungry for real, workable leadership.  It just won’t be you, compadre.

      The founding Charter of the United Nations in 1945 contained in its first article the right of self determination of a people declaring “all peoples have a right to self determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status, and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” The assumption might be, if you were to absorb the direct interpretation of such lofty language and principle, that a self contained set of lonely islands inhabited by 3000 people, recognizing their inability to provide for the overarching themes of government, such as the capacity for a currency and means of defense, would have such a right of self determination, and the capacity to choose their government of administration. Furthermore, if 99% of the stated inhabitants were absolutely committed to one common future, it would seem rational that the international arbiters of the Charter would make strong efforts to see the people achieve their goals of peaceful co-existence under the flag of their choice.

      No such luck, when it comes to the Falkland Islands.

   The Falkland Islands, a collection of two main and 776 lesser islands 250 miles off the coast of the southern tip of Argentina, have found themselves increasingly isolated in their efforts to retain their British ties and thoroughly British way of life. An uninhabitated cluster of islands first landed by the British explorer Captain John Strong in 1690 by accident, the islands for the next 150 years were under the continual tug of multiple nations and influences until coming under permanent British control as a formal colony in 1841. This included a brief period of several attempts at Argentinian colonization from 1828 to 1833. The restoration of British sovereignty has continued unabated from 1833 until the present and its continuance is the overwhelming desire of the local inhabitants, who want no part of would-be overlords from the surrounding neighborhood.
      The issue of sovereignty suddenly became a hot one in 1982 when Argentina declared it would enforce its rule over the inhabitants, invading the islands, and the inhabitants called to Britain to provide their defense. In the short but bloody conflict known as the Falklands War in Britain and the War of the Malvinas in Argentina, nearly a thousand soldiers lost their lives, and Britain rested control back from the Argentinians. The islanders on multiple occasions have noted their overwhelming support for the outcome, and are as proudly British as the girls from Cornwall and the boys from Bristol.
      The world we live in however has always struggled to do the right thing, particularly in international bodies, where the politics of power and convenience have often raised an ugly flag. The latest is the Organization of American States were Argentina has found common cause with such supporters of individual rights as Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. In a direct challenge to Great Britain and a threat to the people of the Falklands, a Declaration has put forth describing the Falklands under the Argentina label “Malvinas” and demanding that Great Britian and Argentina immediately enter into direct negotiations as to the “Malvinas” future sovereignity. The desires of the actual inhabitants of the islands – not an issue for clarification. The issue has becoming particularly acute lately with the identification of the Falklands as a potential source of vast oil deposits lying outside Argentina’s official 200 mile continental shelf claim. The impoverished government of Argentina would love to get their hands on the Falklander’s bounty, whether the locals wish their help or not.

     Great Britain obviously has absolutely no interest in discussing the future of part of their commonwealth with a government that has a tenuous claim to any postion regarding the islands and one they defeated in a war. For the British at least, they have been always able to count on the backing of their closest ally, the United States of America – until now. The Obama administration, in another of its recent schizophrenic policy efforts to side with tyrants and ignore free will and determination, has signed on to the declaration. Britain, who has backed the United States time and time again as allies and spilled the blood of her sons in defense of United States national interests, is understandably miffed at Obama’s fair weather bonds of friendship. President Obama, in another calculated effort to side with those issues the United States traditionally opposed on the basis of freedom and democracy, has once again thrown its principles under the bus, in hopes of gaining “street cred” with those states that could care less as to common interests with the US. This nieve policy continues unabated despite one calamity and mis-step after another. The British are rapidly learning what others have found out in Poland, the Czech Republic, and on the streets of Tehran and Cairo. This President’s support will be a mile away and an inch deep at most. The Falklands are just one more step in the destruction of a framework of trust built up over many years, that in issues of freedom, rights, and social responsibility, the United States would always be in your corner. That, my friends, is one painful introduction to our modern reality- with this particular President, you are going to be on your own.