And speaking of “gambits,” how about the latest in Obama’s “bipartisanship”?  This time it’s about “health care ‘reform.’”  He wasn’t able to Rahm it through without any Republican support, so now he he is offering to have a special televised spectacle in which he allows Republicans to be honorary Democrats for the day.

He doesn’t put it quite like that, but that’s what it amounts to. As Bruce Kesler puts it over at Maggie’s Farm, Obama never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Kesler cites a story in The New York Times in which Republican Senator Mitch McConnell says terrific, let’s do, and let’s start “by shelving the current health spending bill.”

Whoa, hold on there pardner! When we say “bipartisan,” we don’t mean, you know, “bipartisan.”  We mean that you can come over to our ranch and play with us for the afternoon.  You just sidle up here and put your John Hancock on the dotted line and we’ll say that this piece of Democratic legislation is a bipartisan document. The American people will see how post-partisan we are because we’re going to televise your acquiescence in our bill and let you say that it’s yours, too. See how it works?

As Kesler notes, Obama’s gambit is a lot like the Palestinians’ gambit with respect to Israel. The Israelis make all the concessions, the Palestinians never stop complaining or trying to destroy “the Zionist entity.” For Obama, it’s government-run health care or bust. (Actually, it’s government-run health care and bust.)  But if the two issues facing us are 1) widening coverage for medical insurance and 2) containing costs, why not take an incremental approach? Doing that, Kesler notes, doesn’t “require thousands of tiny type pages of imposed, centralized, statist regulations like the Democrats’ schemes.”  But as I’ve said in this space before, the administration’s effort to bring us “health care reform” is only incidentally about health care. Really, it’s about government taking over another sixth of the American economy and insinuating itself ever further into the lives of American citizens. That’s why Obama, having failed to ram through his health care legislation unilaterally, is turning not to genuine bipartisanship but “a campaign-mode, one-sided event, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Anyway, notwithstanding the veracity of the story, I find myself often reminded of it. Just today, for example, when a friend sent me a piece on Sarah Palin from the Huffing and Puffing Post, sometimes known as the Huffington Post. It’s by Stefan Sirucek, “independent journalist and foreign correspondent,” and bears the arresting title “EXCLUSIVE (Update): Palin’s Tea Party Crib Notes.”

So what startling revelation does Stefan Sirucek, International Man of Mystery, impart?  Why, that Sarah Palin, when she delivered her speech to the National Tea Party Conference last night had actually scribbled a few words on her left palm.

Stop the presses!  What a scandal. According to HufPo’s  intrepid reporter, Palin’s notes to herself are ominous, ominous:

Closer inspection of a photo of Sarah Palin, during a speech in which she mocked President Obama for his use of a teleprompter, reveals several notes written on her left hand. The words “Energy”, “Tax” and “Lift American Spirits” are clearly visible. There’s also what appears to read as “Budget cuts” with the word Budget crossed out.

As a citizen, I feel I should be conversant with the rudiments of the tax system. But time is precious. I do not have scores of hours to devote to filling out tax forms. So I do what many people do. Every year, I repair to my accountant who produces an impressively thick document full of complicated depreciation schedules, etc. I haven’t the foggiest idea what it’s all about, but I reckon it must be valuable since after handing me this opus he also send me a hefty bill.  Why should this be?  Why not follow Will’s advice? Under his scheme, “Masochists would be permitted to continue paying income taxes under the current system.” I might go further an denominate all Democrats honorary masochists. But that is a detail. The meat of his proposal is this:

Others could use a radically simplified code, filing a form that fits on a postcard. It would have just two rates: 10 percent on incomes up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers; 25 percent on higher incomes. There would be no deductions, credits or exclusions, other than the health care tax credit [“$2,300 for individuals, $5,700 for families”].

Will has a few other ideas. After simplifying the income tax code, he suggests we go on to

eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death. The corporate income tax, the world’s second highest, would be replaced by an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive — and more able and eager to hire.

What’s not to like?  Well, how do you spell “vested interests”? What do you know about perpetuating dependency under a banner called “Compassion”?

This is where Will’s arresting notion of “sadists who were trying to be nice” comes in again.  The sadists in question are not only the creatures who devised the tax code. They are also the liberals who believe they have a monopoly on virtue. The people look upon their fellow man as an opportunity for moral calisthenics. They are “trying to be nice.” They want to boost us all up to what they perceive as their own level of moral excellence on issues from race and education to international relations and “the environment.”  (It is curious, isn’t it, how “the environment” has become a repository for moral aspiration. At what other period could Al Gore, apostle of global warming, have garnered serious attention?)

Yuck, yuck. What a card! It’s nice to see another Democratic politician do his utmost to combat “the erosion of civility” that President Obama lamented the other day in a speech.

Congressman Weiner’s appearance on The Daily Show provided ample grounds for an elevated supercilium, but his acquiescence in Stewart’s juvenile vulgarism wasn’t the most objectionable part if his performance. That came a bit later (at about 2.40 in this clip) when Weiner dilated on the merits of the Democratic efforts at “health care reform.”

“We’ve had this experiment for the last 45 years,” Weiner said, “we’ve had Medicare, a single-payer government run health care plan that’s really worked well.”  The Congressman went on to assert that medicare operates with a one percent overhead while private health care insurances companies operate with “about a 30 percent overhead” and it is they, the private insurances companies “are the ones that are causing all the problems.”

Your eyebrow should now be up around the middle of your scalp.  Leave aside the contention that Medicare “has really worked well.” Focus instead on the lie, the damned lie, the statistic that Congressman Weiner proffered to viewers of The Daily Show: that Medicare operates with 1 percent overhead while private insurance companies operate with “about a 30 percent overhead.”

The supposed discrepancy between administrative cost for Medicare and private health insurance has long been a canard among those who think you are incapable of looking after yourself and wish to hand the federal government another large slice of the economy. Usually, though, the  discrepancy is said the be from 3-8 percent overhead for Medicare as compared with 14 to 22 percent for private insurance.

I have read some of Rand’s essays on art and philosophy.  They struck me, as I said in a review of a book about her philosophy of art (reprinted in my book Art’s Prospect), as pretty thin gruel. I never made it through either of  Rand’s two big novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. To enjoy either, I suspect, you had to have encountered Rand in adolescence,  when so many of life’s lasting enthusiasms are forged.  In recent years, a few friends have urged Rand on me, and I dutifully tried both novels more than once. Each time, I found myself oscillating between fits of the giggles, at the awful prose, and irritation, at the jejune philosophy. Among the many reasons I am thankful to Whittaker Chambers, his having rescued me from making further attempts to scale the Everest of Atlas Shrugged comes high on my list.  His review of the book in an early issue of National Review is a masterpiece of literary demolition and moral interment.

Brutal though Chambers is — his review precipitated Rand’s break with National Review — it nonetheless acknowledges a pertinent fact about Rand: that “a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does.” That fact disposes “us” — i.e., us conservatives who share Rand’s belief in self-reliance and who dislike big government and the nanny state just as much as she did — to endorse some of what Rand advocates. Hence, for example, widespread popularity of Rand’s character John Galt and sympathy for “going Galt,” i.e., Just Saying No to the many violations of personal liberty perpetrated by an omnivorous, socialistically inclined state.

But to say that one is wary of statism or that one is a champion of capitalism and limited government is not to say that one is a follower of Ayn Rand. This is a something that some of Rand’s disciples find difficult to acknowledge. I was reminded of this the last few days as I contemplated the large outpouring of calumnious rage directed at Anthony Daniels, who writes about a new biography of Rand in the February issue of the magazine I edit, The New Criterion.

The piece has been available on our website for only a few days, but already it has generated more than 160 comments. The response started modestly enough, but by the time # 4 from “Peter M” rolled in, I knew we were in for substantial hilarity. “Wow,” he writes, “this hit job comes close to matching the most dishonest review probably ever written of any book — Whittaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged.” A nice Bre’r Rabbit moment, that: having someone insult you by comparing you to Whittaker Chambers!

Here’s a question: was it the Anglo-Saxon prefix or the substantive “retarded” that gave offense?  Maybe it was the combination of the two. In any event, if the Department of Justice guidelines are anything to go by, being retarded is a positive plus when it comes to earning a place on Eric holder’s staff. (“I already knew that,” you say?  Well, maybe I did, too.)

Don’t believe me, eh?  Here’s the relevant bit from their posting about want “up to 10 experienced attorneys for the position of Trial Attorney in the Voting Section in Washington, D.C.”

The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine.

They don’t actually print the bit about being differently-abled from a cognitive perspective in bold face: that’s just part of my service to readers. I think it explains a lot—for example, the really moronic idea of trying terrorists in a civilian court.

The government, as Glenn Reynolds has been wont to point out, is in the very best of hands. (H/T to Andy McCarthy for sending me this little sign of the way we live now.)

The outpouring of sentimental pap that Zinn’s passing occasioned was as large as it was nauseating. Typical was Bob Herbert’s emetic eulogy in The New York Times. According to Herbert, Zinn was “a radical treasure” an “inspiration, “ etc. In fact, as my PJM colleague  Ron Radosh pointed out, Zinn was chiefly a “propagandist” not an historian. That is, Zinn systematically subordinated historical truth to  ideology. Radosh quotes  Michael Kazin, an historian at Georgetown University, who noted that  Zinn “”educes the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. History: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?”

My answer to is that Zinn didn’t care about “most Americans.” When it came to contempt, he was an equal-opportunity purveyor. I wrote about this aspect of Zinn’s legacy in a piece for National Review.

During his disreputable tenure as a professor at Boston University, Howard Zinn did everything in his power to subvert the university, partly by subordinating its intellectual mandate to trendy political causes, partly by short-circuiting with malicious levity the high seriousness of a liberal-arts education. He would, for example, pass around his classes a bag containing bits of paper imprinted with the letters “A” or “B.” Whichever token a student picked denominated his grade, no matter what work he did or didn’t do.

The point? It wasn’t merely grade inflation. More insidiously, it was an expression of contempt for the entire enterprise of which he was a privileged beneficiary. Contempt, in fact, was Howard Zinn’s leading characteristic. Its primary focus was America, because that was the biggest game in town. But he had plenty left over for the rest of the world. As Oscar Handlin observed in his review, “It would be a mistake . . . to regard Zinn as merely anti-American. Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn’s book. No other modern country receives a favorable mention. He speaks well of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but not of the states they created. He lavishes indiscriminate condemnation upon all the works of man — that is, upon civilization, a word he usually encloses in quotation marks.” Howard Zinn has left us. But his repellent ideas — and even more, the contemptuous nihilism that stands behind and fires those ideas — live on.

Read the whole thing here.

I thought about the Contract while digesting the news of Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget.  That’s the president’s extra lean, no frills, cut-to-the-bone budget. It projects a deficit of $1.6 trillion dollars next year, something close to that the year after, and who knows how much in the years following.

Has the penny dropped yet? “Wealthy Face Tax Increases” warns an article in The Wall Street Journal. But it’s not just the wealthy. It’s also the middle-class, folks struggling to pay their mortgage and educate their children. In fact, just about everybody who pays income tax (all 50-odd percent of us) will see their taxes rise, and rise substantially. There have been many stories about “back door” and “stealth” taxes. Hope and small change.  Get used to it: you will be poorer.

Is it all part of Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform the United States of America”? (Don’t forget: that was his promise—his warning?—just a few days before his election in 2008.”) Even The New York Times is getting worried:

“His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.”

And it’s not just money. Or rather, the money isn’t only about money. It is also about some of the things money represents: national security, for example. “Deficit Balloons Into National-Security Threat,” reads a headline today.  You’ll be reading that headline often in the months and years to come. Not only will you be poorer because of Barack Obama and his spendthrift allies in Congress, you and your children will be less secure.   Here’s Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations: “We’ve reached a point now where there’s an intimate link between our solvency and our national security. What’s so discouraging is that our domestic politics don’t seem to be up to the challenge. And the whole world is watching.”

It is easy to be alarmed by what’s happening around us. Alarm, if it issues in appropriate action, is a good. What’s not good is a fatalistic acceptance of our national impoverishment and eclipse.  Too many conservatives, I believe, have embraced a Paul-Kennedyesque spirit of declinism. They accept as a given what is only a possibility. A more valuable response is enshrined in the spirit of the “tea parties” that are sweeping the country. Can they make a difference? Ask yourself this: Can a Republican win a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states? (How do you spell “Scott Brown”?)

The phrase “shock-and-awe statism,” by the way, comes to us courtesy of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. He coined it early on in the reign of Obama to describe the blitzkrieg-like way the administration was pushing its socialist agenda in that dim distant past, i.e., last year.

How breathtaking it seemed! The paint was hardly dry on the Obama romper room at the White House when the president unveiled his  nearly $800 billion non-stimulating “stimulus bill” that assured the United States would be entering the Guinness Book of  World Records as the most profligate nation in history. Then there was the “cash for dunderheads” program that was such a gift to foreign car makers and such a boondoggle for American ones. What about the cap-’n-tax fantasy that would finally have driven the nail in the coffin of American industry if only the business community had shared the administration’s taste for economic suicide? Or just last month the fiasco of Copenhagen  and the bitter chilliness that is “global warming”? And of course “health care reform”: always and everywhere health care “reform” — a stupefyingly expensive mechanism for assuring that the federal government would expropriate a sixth of the U.S. economy while eviscerating the medical profession and sharply degrading the quality and timeliness of health care in this country. What bliss it was to be alive, and to be Left was very heaven!

When did it all start going south? It’s hard to say with any exactness. I think the great C-SPAN fiasco was a kind of turning point. Some public-spirited individual — I think it was Andrew Breitbart — assembled a little medley of  candidate Obama saying  on seven or eight separate occasions that he would broadcast the negotiations over  health-care “reform” on CSPAN “so that the American people can see what the choices are.” But in general I think more and more people have come to understand that Obama is not the Moses who was going the lead us through the sea of red ink by which we are surrounded. The victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts last week set the Good Housekeeping Seal of Disapproval on the whole enterprise: notwithstanding the feeble protest from the New York Times that the Massachusetts election was “not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform,” everyone knew it was.

So now what? Well, last week Obama played his populist card by going after Wall Street; result, the stock market promptly tanks by more than 500 points. So long, farewell, adieu, auf wiedersehen!  Way to go, Barack: all those old folks nearing retirement or parents approaching a stretch of college tuition: too bad! Thanks for your masterly leadership!

In this eye-popping Broadside, Andrew C. McCarthy shows that the biggest beneficiaries have been jihadists. For the past eight years, a group of lawyers volunteered their services to America’s enemies. Now, the Justice Department is rife with some of those same lawyers as it enhances due process for terrorists and feeds the international Left’s call for war-crimes charges against President Obama’s political adversaries. Just consider how the administration has disclosed national defense secrets during wartime or granted the 9/11 mass murderers a civilian trial. The department, moreover, is working to tighten the Democratic Party’s grip on power, ignoring the Constitution and green-lighting election fraud and abuse.

ENCOUNTER BROADSIDES: a new series of critical pamphlets from Encounter Books. Uniting an 18th-century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit (think The Federalist Papers, Common Sense) with 21st-century technology and channels of distribution, Encounter Broadsides offer indispensable ammunition for intelligent debate on the critical issues of our time. Written with passion by some of our most authoritative authors, Encounter Broadsides make the case for liberty and the institutions of democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.