Columnist.
As if policy "experts" were not growing almost daily in disrepute, along came the Environmental Protection Agency Monday to fortify, in a backward way, the case for just plain old, you know, common sense in public policy. No 2,000-page congressional bills; no international conferences; just homely intuition, leading to the conclusion that, Pa, this whole thing don't sound right.
Yes, yes, says White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Congress has the power to make everyone buy health insurance. "I don't believe there's a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity" of comments to the contrary. Thank you, Mr. Justice Gibbs. We'll see about all that when -- if -- the matter of Congress' power over private commercial judgments of this nature gets to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile the knock-down, drag-out over health insurance "reform" shouldn't be allowed to fuzz up another immensely vital question; to wit, how in James Madison's name have we reached the point that Congress can so much as contemplate telling you, and you, and you, and all of us that we'll buy health insurance, like it or not, Buster? Why do we have to? Because the government says so, isn't that reason enough?
Plutarch tells us that, back in the fifth-century B.C., when the citizens of Athens were voting on whether to ostracize -- i.e., throw out -- Aristides the Just, one sourpuss explained his emphatic yes vote: "I am tired of hearing him called 'the Just.'" I hesitate to introduce the comparison. It introduces the possibility -- assuming Jon Stewart and Robert Gibbs know there was a fifth-century Greece -- of saying, see, these people who stick out their tongues at Obama, they're just doing the usual envious bit. Big deal.
The Institute for American Values gives us the news that -- all right, they don't say it in so many words, but two and two are easy to add, and there seems no way not to understand that David Letterman didn't inadvertently become a cad and a bounder and Roman Polanski a rapist on the run. Our culture's grasp of the right relationship between men and women --founded on a proper understanding of marriage -- is in sorry shape.
George W. Bush got banged up badly for his foreign policy choices: Iraq, Guantanamo, "torture," a certain tonal disdain for critics foreign and domestic. It will be interesting to see, in a matter of weeks or possibly days, how his successor, Barack Obama, fares with the critics.
You know -- you must -- you can't help it -- aren't you alive?! -- that the marketplace isn't perfect. Haven't we all been told often enough, amid the political chatter concerning how to crack down on Wall Street? Bad, bad bankers whose pay should be regulated and selfish brokers -- not to mention negligent directors of corporations -- are among the current targets. John Maynard Keynes is the new op-ed page superhero. Michael Moore has another documentary out about the ills of capitalism. The agitprop director Oliver Stone is springing Gordon Gekko from prison, where his escapades in Stone's 1987 movie "Wall Street" landed him. In the new Gekko movie, we'll relearn that capitalism and human values are a mismatch. Not much is new here. Americans have been banging bankers around as long as there have been things such as banks. Any letdown in the functioning of the economy ignites reproaches and calls for enhanced oversight by those who understand keenly that the marketplace isn't perfect.
It helps to read history. We know, or should, that American life shows us nothing like the social and political conniptions that Germany experienced in the 1920s, France in the 1790s and the United States in the 1850s. But something is cooking. Indignant people -- I'm sidestepping the adjective "angry" so as to avoid connotations -- don't mysteriously materialize in the capital city to fulminate and castigate on their own nickels. They have to want to. What might make them want to? I would venture, the sense that something's badly, seriously, woefully out of joint in their beloved homeland.
They're all over him -- swarms, flocks, flights of critics taking apart President Obama: his style, his motives, his modus operandi, assuming he has one. Charles Krauthammer, in a dead-on column, called him "Obama the Mortal." Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, sought to close the deal: "Obama has grown boring . He always has the same stance. There is no humor or humility in it . He is cold ." Cries of alarm escaped the mouth of Time Magazine's Joe Klein: "He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting now." How's he going to restore his sagging popularity and procure enactment of health care reform? Well, we'll see. There's a lot more out there to look at, even so. What we see, when we really look hard, are the consequences of celebrity politics. In naming Obama their chief magistrate, American voters handed over their credit cards for a pig in a poke -- as, by the way, they had been warned along the way to avoid doing. They no more knew how Obama would perform, than they knew why real estate prices were collapsing.
The end of Ted Kennedy's long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it's time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back. The late senator's eulogists -- in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral -- tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas and projects of the senator's legacy for the sake of justice and the future. It was time to get wealth controlled, poverty vanquished and health care extended to all. The latter we had to do (so West Virginia's Sen. Robert Byrd assured us) as a memorial to the senator, who made universal health care the cause of causes.
