Say what you want about graying conservative icon/irritant/pundit Pat Buchanan — about his going overboard on the ills of immigration (both legal and illegal), his shameless recycling of a great many GOP talking points against Barack Hussein Obama, his hideous fashion sense (ever watch “Morning Joe”?) — but give him credit for being just about the only high-profile conservative, aside from Ron Paul, to discredit the “they hate us for our freedoms” rhetoric. Exhibit A is his latest syndicated column:

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It’s my favorite conservative, Daniel Larison, in this brief post on criticisms of President Obama not going to Germany for yet another photo op:

Republicans object to so many irrelevant things that Obama does and they treat absolutely everything as some supreme, unpardonable error that it is impossible to take any of their criticism seriously.

Read it twice. Then reflect on the past few months. Then read it again, and see if you don’t agree.

This is why I’m commenting so little on politics these days — vanity, vanity!

If homeowner’s insurance worked like American health insurance, it would not only pay for fires but also cover utility bills, replacing broken appliances, baseballs hit into the window and all the food, drink and paper towels that pass through the kitchen. Certainly, a company could offer an insurance product that covered absolutely every expense of living in a home. But such insurance would be phenomenally expensive and full of ultra-complex rules; the insurer would also acquire an incentive to dream up excuses to deny payment. Just like American health care insurance!

— Gregg Easterbrook, “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”

Politicians seem to live in a two-dimensional world (think C.S. Lewis’ “flatlanders”), while the rest of us are out here in 3D, pleading with them to see features they simply aren’t built to recognize. Put another way, our representatives present us with black and white on health care — Bad Option A, and (totally different but just as) Bad Option B. Thus you have the “public option,” and the “leave it alone” camps battling for supremacy.

(You haven’t heard Republicans saying, explicitly, “leave it alone.” They talk about “sensible reforms” that are supposed to come if the Dems scrap all their current plans and go back to the drawing board. This is kind of like me saying, “Sure, I’ll exercise more, just as soon as I start getting enough sleep the nights before.” In other words, it ain’t gonna happen.)

Leave it to a football column to provide a far better alternative. In his “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” article at ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook takes a break from dissecting plays and mocking the punt — no, he says, it is NOT that risky to try on fourth down — to present a quite cogent and perfectly simple argument: Insurers should face price-controls, and providers should have to offer non-insured individuals the same pricing they offer insurance companies. (More quotes after the jump.) (more…)

…and it doesn’t include a new congresswoman named Krystal Ball.

Seriously! Check out her Facebook page, and tell me it’s not a parody! 1.) The name; 2.) The Obama-meets-Globetrotters logo; 3.) The “info” page (her favorite books include “The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business”??); 4.) And comments like this one: “Tell Krystal Ball you support her in being an openly psychic nominee for the Democratic party.”

I jumped into President Obama’s latest healthcare speech in the middle (wife gone, two rowdy boys causing all sorts of trouble), but what I heard was reassuring — assuming, of course, it’s anywhere near accurate. That’s the problem with presidential speeches about Congressional actions: they’re often more idealistic than realistic. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The things the president said he was looking for — greater competition among insurance providers, market-based cost controls, even some malpractice reform — are all things that conservatives (including moderate conservatives with a libertarian bent and liberal nuance, like myself) should applaud. Applaud they did, at least on that last, but something tells me that tomorrow they won’t take Obama’s words on the others at face value. (more…)

I’ll apologize up front for the overuse of quotation marks as indicators of sarcasm. That said, it has been disappointing to watch the level of “outrage” amongst “conservatives” these past few months on any number of “issues,” most recent of which is a back-to-school speech by President Obama that will be broadcast Tuesday across the country.

Our own local paper reported that school officials will provide alternate activities for students whose parents don’t want them watching Obama’s speech. Which is fine, so far as it goes — one wonders why schools don’t make it so easy for parents who don’t want their children immunized, for instance, or subjected to all manner of “tolerance” seminars — but what possible reason would one have for not wanting their child to see it? The same talking heads who are denouncing the speech are the ones who claim superiority on most issues of “patriotism”; since the presidency is set up by the Constitution, it would seem they’d at least let the guy tell their kids to do their homework and not play so many video games.

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My main criticism with “conservatives” (most who label themselves as such deserve the sarcastic quote marks), put most aptly by the always insightful (and actually conservative) Andrew Bacevich:

Only those who recognize the omnipresence of sin—recognizing first of all that they themselves number among the sinful—can possibly anticipate the moral snares inherent in the exercise of power. Righteousness induces blindness. The acknowledgment of guilt enables the blind to see. To press the point further, the statesman who assumes that “we” are good while “they” are evil—think George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11—will almost necessarily misinterpret the problem at hand and underestimate the complexity and costs entailed in trying to solve it. In this sense, an awareness of one’s own failings and foibles not only contributes to moral clarity but can help guard against strategic folly.

File this under “Things Known for Years by Those Paying Attention”:

Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.

Those are the words of Col. Timothy Reese, a U.S. adviser to the Iraqi military, in the rarest of communications — a soldier suggesting that he and his colleagues should actually withdraw.

Pundits like Larison and Bacevich have been saying this for years; the former a “paleoconservative” and the latter a military expert of the realist school. And their overarching premise has been this: American pols have never undertaken to understand Mesopotamia, have little if any understanding of what drives these people, and can never be a real agent of change there as long as the goal is something as romantic as “liberation” or “democracy.”

Iraq never attacked us, and in fact does not play any sort of strategic role in the region; all along its borders are our allies, places with no organized ill intent toward us or any real ability to mount an offensive. It’s time to leave, and in fact it was never time to arrive.

Jon Stewart makes fun of her, and a lot of people think she’s stuffy. But as a person whose politics are part paleoconservative, part libertarian (look those up on Wikipedia to be sure) — but who finds himself voting for Democrats because they’re less obnoxious than Republicans — Peggy Noonan’s reasonings usually strike me as dead-on. Consider her latest column, on the Big Mistake being debated on Capitol Hill:

President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood … His news conference the other night was bad. He was filibustery and spinny and gave long and largely unfollowable answers that seemed aimed at limiting the number of questions asked and running out the clock. You don’t do that when you’re fully confident. Far more seriously, he didn’t seem to be telling the truth. We need to create a new national health-care program in order to cut down on government spending? Who would believe that? Would anybody? [bold mine–R]

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My wife and I don’t go out to eat often, but when we do, we usually have no problem agreeing on a place to go. Yet oftentimes, the place we end up going isn’t the same place either of us individually thought of when we first decide to go out.

I am not interested in going to dinner with a great many people, and don’t feel the need to come to compromise with them on where I eat.

Had I been going by myself, I may have chosen Quiznos; had she, Thai Express may have been the destination. Instead, we discussed the issue until we agreed: Steak ‘n Shake.

What I’ve described is the essence of democracy: That a group of people discuss (whether explicitly or procedurally) issues and come to either consensus or compromise.

That doesn’t sound like our system, though. Take the current debates over health-care reform. Have a multitude of Americans been complaining about health-care costs for decades? Sure. And is our ratio of spending to results totally out of whack? Probably. But what’s going on in the halls of Congress isn’t limited to those questions… in fact, it may well be irrelevant to them.

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