Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 30

More on Obama, Abortion and Infanticide

In addition to what I just posted about the facts that were already known about Obama's abortion extremism before the 2008 election, here are two other essays worth reading from October 2008 -- both by our friend Robby George, both available at the Public Discourse website from The Witherspoon Institute. The first is "Obama's Abortion Extremism." The second, which Robby wrote with Yuval, is "Obama and Infanticide."

When Obama Voted For Infanticide

Peter has beaten me to the punch. What I personally find most offensive about the HHS mandate is the shock with which it has been met. Why? This is who Barack Obama is. There is no reason to be surprised by this. He is not being pulled to extremes by his base -- he is the one doing the pulling.

Obama's abortion extremism is such that, as a state legislator, he opposed protection for -- I'll use his words here -- "that fetus, or child -- however way you want to say describe it" when, contrary to the wishes of the women involved and their abortionists, there was "movement or some indication that, in fact, they're not just coming out limp and dead." Babies were inconveniently being born alive, self-styled health-care providers carted them off to utility rooms where they would be left to die. That is infanticide, plain and simple. In Illinois, people tried to stop this barbarism by supporting "born alive" legislation. Barack Obama fought them all the way.

That is not a secret. The Obamedia, of course, refused to cover it while they were running down Sarah Palin's third-grade report card. The clueless John McCain failed to bring any attention to it. But it was far from unknown. I wrote about it in August 2008, and I was far from alone -- at least among conservatives. My column was called, "Why Obama Really Voted For Infanticide: More important to protect abortion doctors than 'that fetus, or child -- however way you want to describe it'":

There wasn’t any question about what was happening. The abortions were going wrong. The babies weren’t cooperating. They wouldn’t die as planned. Or, as Illinois state senator Barack Obama so touchingly put it, there was “movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.”

No, Senator. They wouldn’t go along with the program. They wouldn’t just come out limp and dead.

They were coming out alive. Born alive. Babies. Vulnerable human beings Obama, in his detached pomposity, might otherwise include among “the least of my brothers.” But of course, an abortion extremist can’t very well be invoking Saint Matthew, can he? So, for Obama, the shunning of these least of our brothers and sisters — millions of them — is somehow not among America’s greatest moral failings.

No. In Obama’s hardball, hard-Left world, these least become “that fetus, or child — however you want to describe it.”

Most of us, of course, opt for “child,” particularly when the “it” is born and living and breathing and in need of our help. Particularly when the “it” is clinging not to guns or religion but to life.

But not Barack Obama. As an Illinois state senator, he voted to permit infanticide. And now, running for president, he banks on media adulation to insulate him from his past.

The record, however, doesn’t lie.

Infanticide is a bracing word. But in this context, it’s the only word that fits. Obama heard the testimony of a nurse, Jill Stanek. She recounted how she’d spent 45 minutes holding a living baby left to die.

The child had lacked the good grace to expire as planned in an induced-labor abortion — one in which an abortionist artificially induces labor with the expectation that the underdeveloped “fetus, or child — however you want to describe it” will not survive the delivery.

Stanek encountered another nurse carrying the child to a “soiled utility room” where it would be left to die. It wasn’t that unusual. The induced-labor method was used for late-term abortions. Many of the babies were strong enough to survive the delivery. At least for a time.

So something had to be done with them. They couldn’t be left out in the open, struggling in the presence of fellow human beings. After all, those fellow human beings — health-care providers— would then be forced to confront the inconvenient question of why they were standing idly by. That would hold a mirror up to the whole grisly business.

Better the utility room. Alone, out of sight and out of mind. Next case.

Stanek’s account enraged the public and shamed into silence most of the country’s staunchest pro-abortion activists. Most, not all. Not Barack Obama.

My friend Hadley Arkes ingeniously argued that legislatures, including Congress, should take up “Born Alive” legislation: laws making explicit what decency already made undeniable: that from the moment of birth — from the moment one is expelled or extracted alive from the birth canal — a human being is entitled to all the protections the law accords to living persons.

Such laws were enacted by overwhelming margins. In the United States Congress, even such pro-abortion activists as Sen. Barbara Boxer went along.

But not Barack Obama. In the Illinois senate, he opposed Born-Alive tooth and nail.

The shocking extremism of that position — giving infanticide the nod over compassion and life — is profoundly embarrassing to him now. So he has lied about what he did. He has offered various conflicting explanations . . .

There is more here, including the relevant portion of the legislative record, in which Obama makes his position, and his extremism, crystal clear.

Again, this is not new news. The transcript is from ten years ago. He has done nothing since but confirm -- by his positions, speeches, associations, and presidential appointments -- that he is still exactly the same guy. Obama's horrifying stance in favor not only of abortion but of infanticide was known when 54 percent of Catholics and 53 percent of Protestants supported him for election in 2008, and when such leading Catholic institutions as Notre Dame and Georgetown welcomed him with open arms.

That is what we ought to find shocking. Obama, by contrast, should no longer shock anyone. Obama is simply doing what he came to do; what he said he was going to do when he promised to "fundamentally transform the United States"; and what anyone with a shred of common sense would have predicted he'd do upon scrutinizing his record.

The Mythical 'Koranic Injunction Against Compulsion in Islam'

The persecution of Christians, particularly in Islamic countries, and the indifference of Western elites (particularly the Obama administration which, as Ed Whelan observes, cavalierly adopts the rhetoric of war in its campaign against believing Christians), are outrages that must not be allowed to stand. It is great comfort today to find Conrad Black and Nina Shea shedding light on NRO. Nevertheless, I hope my friend Nina does not mind if I rail for a moment at her allusion to the mythical "Koranic injunction against compulsion in Islam," which she suggests is transgressed by the fact that "Christians held in Saudi prisons for practicing their faith can be pressured to convert to Islam."

I admit this is a bugbear of mine, but it is worth hammering because it is the very core of our failure to grasp classical Islamic doctrine. As I relate in The Grand Jihad, the Koranic verse in question is sura 2:256, which states in pertinent part, "Let there be no compulsion in religion." We should know it by heart at this point, so often does it roll off the tongues of Islamist charlatans and their Western echo chambers -- I'd be surprised if Georgetown hasn't yet draped the passage over the Christian inscription it compliantly concealed at the Obama administration's urging in 2009.

Do you seriously believe that we have a firmer grasp of this injunction the Saudis do?

The passage means that Islam forbids coercive conversion. But Islam most certainly does not prohibit coercing conformance with sharia. It is sharia (Islamic law), not the desire that everyone become a Muslim, that catalyzes both jihadist terror and the stealthier "dawa" campaign to infiltrate Islamic legal principles into our law and institutions. This should be obvious: Sharia contemplates that there will be non-Muslims -- they are a source of revenue because they are taxed for the privilege of living under the protection of the Islamic authority.

The point of sharia, the reason for its palpable elevation of Muslims and reduction of non-Muslims to a lower caste (dhimmitude), is to persuade non-Muslims of the good sense of becoming a Muslim. The idea is that once Allah's law has been implemented, there will be no need for compulsion in religion (i.e., compulsion to convert to Islam) because it will be crystal clear that Islam is the highest form of life.

If we look around at the evidence of sense, at the pervasive violence and intimidation, it couldn't be more clear that Islam is not against compulsion. But it is compulsion to accept the Islamic legal structure, which is not a set of religious guidelines but a full-scale social system, regulating everything from economics to hygiene. It is true, no one will make you become a Muslim, and for sound financial reasons a sharia state will let you remain an infidel as long as you pay the freight and meekly accept second-class status ("feel [yourselves] subdued" as sura 9:29 puts it). But we really must stop repeating the canard that Islam is a "religion of peace" that forbids compulsion. The Saudis are not violating scripture; they are enforcing it.

Leno Spin on Clint Eastwood

Last night, Jay Leno observed that it may be "half time in in America, but China's got the ball and we're down by 15 trillion!"  

The Grand Jihad in less than 4 minutes

My book goes back to the drawing board. I'm grateful -- really well done, I think.

I'm also grateful to Karen Lugo for this fabulous review at The American Thinker.

In case I hadn't mentioned this (ahem ...) The Grand Jihad is now out in paperback, with a new foreword.

Did the Labor Force Drop By 1.2 Million in January?

I'm not enough of a wonk to understand who is right on this one. As widely reported here and elsewhere, the unemployment rate fell to 8.3% -- still unacceptably high, but undeniably a positive trend ... if the number is legit.

A number of administration detractors, however, say the books are being cooked. They say if you look closely at the numbers, millions of unemployed are no longer being counted because they're statistically considered to be no longer in the workforce -- no longer looking for employment. Specifically on that score, it is said that the labor participation rate (the number of people employed as against the total population) just fell by by 0.3%, and that just last month, the labor force declined by a staggering 1.2 million people.

At The American Spectator's blog, the excellent Ross Kaminsky -- who is no Obama fan -- cautions against making too much of these numbers. Reading the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, he says the decline in the labor force is mostly explained by a once-a-decade statistical adjustment, upward, in the size of the population, based on the 2010 census.

Hopefully, the many Cornerites who follow this stuff closer than I do can shed some light. If the books are being cooked, that's a big deal and we should be screaming about it. But Mr. Kaminsky is surely right that we should also not be trying to make something out of nothing -- if, indeed, it is nothing. 

See Mitt Pander

Add class warfare to the list of contemporary political skills that Mitt Romney hasn’t quite mastered.

In a mere 18 hours, he managed first to step on his big Florida primary win with a lollapalooza of gaffes, declaring that he “was not concerned about the very poor.” Then, in the classic GOP style of doubling down on stupid to overcompensate for any hint of a compassion deficit, he called for raising the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. Gee, Mitt, just for inflation? Why not double or maybe even quintuple the minimum wage?

Such are the perils for a pandering pol, paddling the swirls of the welfare state without a constitutional compass. It should go without saying -- although it won’t -- that Mitt didn’t really mean to blow off the poor. In the now-notorious CNN interview, he was quick to explain that the poor are not a priority only because we already “have a safety net.” Perfect: While arming the Left with a luscious sound bite with which to caricature him as a callous vulture capitalist, Romney simultaneously stokes the Right’s fear that he is really a man of the Left -- or, at least, a man without a core, who doesn’t get that the welfare state is not the solution but the problem.

#ad#Romney being Romney, the first problem panicked him, while the second probably hasn’t even occurred to him -- and won’t, unless Gingrich or Santorum surges and a little Tea Party stroking is suddenly in order. So, within hours of the CNN fiasco, Mitt shifted into “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” mode and got jiggy with the minimum wage.

Beloved of the Democrat-academe-media axis, and thus impressed on the craven Republican establishment, the minimum wage is the safety net in small compass. Whatever wage Romney would nominally make the minimum, the actual minimum wage will remain zero. As the Club for Growth’s Chris Chocola countered, the minimum wage is “an absolute job killer.” To appreciate why, read Kevin D. Williamson’s powerful essay, “Keeping Blacks Poor” (NR, February 2010 – linked here): In one fell swoop, this exhibition in government compassion not only prices low-productivity workers out of the labor market but stokes a crisis of permanent joblessness in some of America’s poorest areas.

It is, of course, impossible that a businessman as savvy as Mitt Romney does not grasp the wages of the minimum wage. He is pandering. He is the GOP establishment candidate. The establishment does not believe electoral success lies in winning voters over with the strength of conservative ideas. Elections, such Republicans believe, are won by batting your eyes at conservatives while planting your feet in the regnant progressive consensus. They are won by saying, “I care.”

Mitt does care. Really. The eye-popping $7 million he has given away to charity in the last two years dwarfs what most of the “rich,” as defined by President Obama, will gross over a decade or three. It certainly compares quite favorably to the beneficence of Senator John Kerry, the well-heeled 2004 nominee of the Poor People’s Party, whose tax returns tended to show a big fat zero on the charitable-donation line. But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? We are a compassionate society because of what ordinary Americans, whatever their means, can be relied on to give of themselves. “Compassion” is not what politicians do with other people’s money.

Where he most craves it, Romney will get no credit for his good works and no acknowledgement of the true intent behind his clumsy words. Progressive operatives are interested only in an edge, not a discussion. The rest of the “social justice” crowd figures that if you’re going to vote feelings rather than economics, then you might as well go with the other guys -- they’re the pros. So unfortunately for Mitt, he’s stuck with us Regressives. Yes, we’ll put his faux pas in context and give his good intentions their due. But we’ll also tell you that Mitt Romney, the would-be president, could learn a lot from Mitt Romney, the virtuous citizen -- that is, the typically American citizen.

We’ve now had 19 Republican debates, exploring the contestants’ views on everything from Gardasil vaccines to deep-dish pizza. Yet not a single journalist has thought to ask the most important question for a presidential candidate in a constitutional-republic-turned-welfare-state teetering on the brink of financial ruin: “What exactly does the Constitution authorize the federal government to do in order to ‘provide for the#...#general Welfare of the United States’”?

This clause appears in the preamble of Article I, Section 8. Its meaning was fraught with controversy until seemingly settled when FDR, threatening to pack the Supreme Court, cowed the justices into signing off on the New Deal. Progressives insisted the General Welfare Clause was a sweeping grant, citing Hamilton as their champion of omnipotent, centralized government. Though this distorted Hamilton’s notion of general welfare (which was not robbing Peter to pay Paul), the Left maintains that Leviathan is empowered to tax and spend for any ostensibly humanitarian purpose.

Not so. As James Madison explained, the Constitution was designed to limit government. The General Welfare Clause is not an open-ended license to enact someone’s transient notion of humanitarian good -- particularly at someone else’s expense. Were that the case, the federal government would gradually eviscerate state sovereignty and usurp the liberties of the people. (See, e.g., the last 70 years.)

The General Welfare Clause, like its companion summons to “provide for the common Defense,” is merely the preamble’s framing of the high purpose behind Section 8’s carefully enumerated powers, which follow. The central government may provide for the general welfare only by those powers: to regulate commerce, see to the integrity of the currency, establish standards for naturalization, raise and equip the armed forces, and so on. If it is not spelled out in Section 8, it is not the federal government’s job -- and there is nothing in there about Uncle Sam insuring our retirements, socializing medical care, or dictating a minimum wage.

It is not that Madison was “not concerned about the very poor.” He and the framers were simply possessed of a basic bit of wisdom that eludes us sophisticated moderns: The strength and genius of America lie in its people, not its government. Government, though necessary, tends to corruption, factional self-dealing, and sloth -- especially as it gets more distant from the lives it affects.

In a country virtuous enough to produce citizens as civic-minded as Mitt Romney, caring for the very poor -- like setting fair wages, educating the young, treating the sick, providing for the aged, achieving “the dream of home ownership,” deciding whether to have the salad or the fries, and the rest of life’s limitless desiderata -- is best left to the people. They won’t need a government for most things because they and their private institutions will do a better job; and on those matters where government intervention makes sense, keeping it local is much more likely to keep it responsive, accountable, and affordable.

A few debates ago, Governor Romney wisely said he was proud of the taxes he’d paid because he’d surrendered only what was “legally required and not a dollar more. I don’t think you want someone as a candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.” Mitt the citizen knew the millions he’d given to charity, despite not being legally required, did far more for the general welfare than the millions confiscated by Washington. Hopefully, Mitt the candidate will figure that out, too. Then, to prove his concern for the very poor, he’ll explain that dismantling the welfare state is the start of compassion, not the end.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Big-Government Republicans

Forget the fratricidal warfare between two establishment soldiers so harmonious on substance that their contest, inevitably, has descended into a poisonous, personal food-fight. The problem is not the GOP infighting. The problem is the GOP. Republicans are simply not interested in limiting government or addressing our death spiral of spending.

My weekend column was about the dog-and-pony show that congressional Republicans just put on to snow you into thinking they oppose the $2.4 trillion debt-ceiling increase they actually approved only six months ago. Now, get ready for House Republicans to unveil their $260 billion transportation bill.

#ad#The federal government should not be in the transportation business at all. A federal role was rationalized in the mid-Fifties to finance the construction of interstate highways. As National Review’s editors observed in 2005, that project was completed in the early Eighties, at which time the fuel tax that funded it should have been repealed and the upkeep of highways left to the states. “Instead,” they wrote, “Congress morphed the program into a slush fund for some of its most indefensible pork-barrel spending.”

The cover story for this permanent spendathon is that we now have a national highway “system” that ought to be financed by its main users. “Systems” is the abracadabra chanted by the progressives who run both parties when they’re about to pick your pocket. We don’t have a highway “system.” We have 50 states, whose widely varying transit needs are best known, and can be best addressed, by the affected local communities.

Plus, see how easily a “highway system” morphs into a “transportation system.” The taxes that Leviathan confiscates from drivers, purportedly for road construction and maintenance, are actually redistributed to subsidize other forms of transit preferred by progressives -- including walking. For that, you can thank Republicans. With a compassionate wink from President Bush, the Republican Congress enacted an obscene $286.5 billion transportation bill in 2005, assigning the act one of those precious Washington acronyms -- SAFETEA-LU (who cares what it stands for?). The editors accurately described it as a “monstrosity of wasteful spending.” 

SAFETEA-LU featured all the uglies that outraged voters into telling the GOP to take a hike in the 2006 and 2008 elections. These included Alaska’s infamous $250 million “Bridge to Nowhere,” one of the bill’s 6,376 earmarks totaling $24 billion -- you know, the sorts of budget-busting recklessness Republicans promised us they’d sworn off in order to get elected in 2010.

One of SAFETEA-LU’s worst aspects -- and that’s saying something -- was that it blew to smithereens the premise that federal transportation spending must be limited to the federal fuel-tax receipts collected to pay for it. As Red State’s Ross Vought explains, the Republican Congress increased expenditures on transportation by a whopping 31 percent. As the pols well knew, that was leaps and bounds beyond what the fuel tax would generate, especially given that collections flag when spiking gas prices reduce driving.

#page#For households, less money coming in means less spending -- you mere mortals must make grown-up choices about what is essential and what must be deferred. That, of course, is not how it works for Congress, regardless of which party is minding the store. Control over other people’s money is power. So once transportation spending broke out of its fuel-tax moorings, there was no going back. Since 2008, as our national debt has zoomed from $10 trillion toward $17 trillion, Vought calculates that Congress has taken an astounding $34.5 billion from general taxpayer funds to maintain the unsustainable SAFETEA-LU spending levels.

#ad#And now that the “Pledge to America” crowd that promised to stop the madness is back in charge, what do you suppose the plan is? Why, to persist in the madness. Team Boehner, whose “pledge” to voters explicitly promised “to stop out-of-control spending and reduce the size of government,” proposes to continue funding transportation at “current levels” for the next five years, which translates to an additional budget shortfall of about $60 billion dollars. So much for decrying “Washington Democrats [who] refuse to listen to the American people and eliminate, restrain, or even budget for their out-of-control spending spree.” So much for warning that, unless Republicans are returned to the helm, “Washington will try to get away with continuing to spend at current ‘stimulus’ levels. We cannot allow that to happen.”

It’s happening. Naturally, conservatives who expected Republicans to do what they promised are apt to go ballistic. So, just as in the debt-ceiling fiasco, the establishment’s plan is to dazzle the rubes with some smoke-and-mirrors. On the debt ceiling, it was phantom cuts that would occur, um, someday. This time around it is a commitment to ramp up oil and gas production, the additional revenues from which, we’re told, will alleviate the transportation burden.

It is a cynical joke, the sort you’d expect from the folks who brought you last week’s debt ceiling “disapproval” charade. Michael Needham, who heads up the Heritage Foundation’s activist arm, Heritage Action for America, put it well: “One of the problems you have in Washington is you take really bad legislation, which the highway bill is, and you put a sweetener in it. That’s what’s going on here.”

Of course we want more energy production -- “Drill, baby, drill!” and all that. But energy production is imperative on its own economic and national-security merits. Like federal transportation spending, moreover, it is the kind of “major legislation” that Boehner, Cantor & Co. pledged during the 2010 campaign to “advance#...#one issue at a time.” Yet here they come again, same old GOP, telling us we cannot have what is good and essential unless we simultaneously swallow what is bad and profligate -- exactly the practice they promised to end.

Washington should not be involved in transportation at all, but at least there was some sense to the original rationale that tied highway spending to gas taxes. There is no such connection between transportation and energy taxes. And let’s remember Republicans’ fabulous debt-ceiling formula: Obama gets his trillions to spend right away, and we get our billions in spending cuts maybe ten years from now, maybe never. They’re running transportation off the same page in the playbook: Transportation spending pours out by the tens of billions, right on schedule, but the energy revenues, if they materialize at all, are speculative and comparatively paltry -- maybe a little over $5 billion, likely a lot less.

That’s a drop in a new $60 billion debt bucket. The rest would have to be made up by more taxes and/or spending offsets. Besides cruising us more rapidly toward Mark Steyn’s Armageddon, the Republican proposal would ensnare transportation more tightly in Washington’s budget web. It is pure fantasy to believe these guys would ever return it to state control.

The brute fact is that today’s Republican establishment does not believe in limited government. “Limited government” is a slogan reserved for campaigns and fund-raising drives. The idea is not to rein in big government; it’s to hold the reins of big government.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

A Matter of Principle

In the latest edition of The New Criterion, I reviewed A Matter of Principle, which I described as Conrad Black's "often gripping memoir of his nightmarish trek through America's justice system and business governance culture -- a system that can work grave injustice, a culture that is all government and no business." It is up on the TNC website, here.

65:1

I'm with Jonah. Newt is wont to say insane things every now and again because he is bombastic by nature and you get the sense that he is trying (often much too hard) to fulfill the "Big Ideas" image he has crafted over the years. Mitt, however, says dumb things -- not grandiose, but dumb -- in an off-handed way that makes you think he is just not attuned to how they will strike the average listener. You can get away with this trait when you have a 65:1 advantage in the ad war against underfunded, disorganized opposition. [Hat tip Erick Erickson.] But Romney is not going to have that against Obama. And while the president's own gaffes are many, he's going to have the media suppressing them while they play Romney's to the hilt. It may be the hand we're dealt, and it's very worrisome.