You Have To Be Wrong To Be Right for the U.S. Presidency

To read my latest post head on over to Michael van der Galien's new blog PoliGazette, which just launched this week. Even though Mr. Van der Galien hails from "Old Europe" he knows more about American politics than many Americans do. I think you'll find that he and his co-bloggers have created a site that will soon become one of the must reads in the blogosphere. I was very touched that among the many luminaries he asked to guest post this week to celebrate the launch, he also asked this modest blogger. After reading my post, be sure to take a look around. Or read what I posted at his site below before taking a look at PoliGazette:

To a lot of Europeans, and Americans as well, U.S. presidential campaigns are a mystery. Perhaps three-time presidential loser Henry Clay explained the process best in 1839 when he said, "I had rather be right than President." In other words, you have to be wrong to be right for the U.S. presidency and that is just as true today as it was in 1839. The purpose of a presidential campaign is to give the candidates the chance to repudiate, back way from and explain away as many of their old positions and actions as possible in order to convince extremists and one-issue voters in their parties to nominate them. Then the candidates must run to the middle and regret a few more positions and actions they took in the past in order to get elected. Finally, once they are elected they must never change their minds or admit to any mistakes at all no matter what the situation. President Bush is a perfect example of how this strategy works. While running for President he regretted most of what he had done in his life, from his drinking to his performing badly in school and in business, which just made him more likeable. Now that he is President, he can't think of a single mistake he has made.

The main task of most of the Democrats running for President is to prove how wrong they were (as far as Democrats are concerned) about Iraq. Although New York Senator Hillary Clinton surged to the front of the Democrat candidates on the strength of being wrong about health care and all the other wrongs committed while her husband was President, her inability to completely regret her vote on Iraq, has given other candidates an opening. When it comes to being wrong on Iraq, Clinton can't seem to get it quite right. She says that she made the wrong decision for the right reasons and that if she knew then what she knows today, she would have made the right decision, which is at least better than being right for the wrong reasons, but not good enough for some people. Some Democrats are saying that she isn't the right candidate if she can't just say she was wrong. The early strength she got from admitting that her health care plan was all wrong, or, at least, that it was the wrong plan for the right reasons, has been jeopardized by her stance on Iraq. And now her husband has made things worse by saying he was right on Iraq from the beginning, which blurs Hillary's message that she was kind of wrong.


Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards became the favorite of many progressive Democrats by claiming that he was the most wrong of all on Iraq. Most of his supporters say that the main reason they are supporting him is because he began his mea culpa "The Right Way in Iraq" with these three little words: "I was wrong." But there are other things about him that seem just a little too perfect, from his hair to his marriage, and this has caused his campaign to falter.

The only major Democrat running for President who won't admit he was wrong about the war is Illinois Senator Barack Obama. He still obstinately clings to the position that he had before the war, that the war was wrong. In October 2002 he said, "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."

Obama's stubborn insistance that he was right on Iraq has led some to believe he doesn't have enough experience to be President. He hasn't had enough time to admit to any big mistakes. The fact that he has so few past positions to repudiate, misstatements to regret or scandals to apologize for has led some people to believe he lacks substance. Though he has made a few missteps during the campaign, none of them have gone far enough to convince voters that he is truly wrong enough to be President. Many worry that he may be saving all of his mistakes until after he is elected President.

By contrast, on the Republican side the candidates are falling all over each other trying to prove just how wrong they have been. Arizona Senator John McCain has had a years and years of experience of being disastrously wrong at the right times. Early in his career he got caught up in the Savings & Loan Scandal and was one of the Keating Five who received illegal campaign contributions from Charles Keating, the chairman of the corrupt Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. "It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do," he later said of the scandal. In the aftermath of this scandal he made up for his mistakes by becoming a staunch supporter of campaign finance reform and co-sponsoring the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. But to many Republicans his advocacy of campaign finance reform was even wronger still, so now he has been trying to make amends for that mistake by hiring as the co-chairman of his national finance committee A. Jerrold Perenchio, a man he once accused of trying to "evade and violate" the campaign finance law he sponsored.

Although McCain ran against President Bush in 2000 and has occasionally been a thorn in his side on such issues as torture, for the most part he has embraced the President, both figuratively and literally. As strongly as he appears to oppose torture, which is a big sticking point with many Republican voters who believe that being pro-torture is the most important issue in the campaign, he has reassured Republican voters by capitulating easily to the President when push comes to shove. Ironically, his support for the President's immigration plan, the one issue that most Republicans oppose the President on, has also been a huge problem for McCain. Somehow, he can't even seem to pick the right issues to support and oppose the President on. But if he just made a few pro-torture, anti-immigrant speeches, the nomination could be his.

McCain may ultimately decide he had rather be "right" on these issues, but he is making other efforts to appeal to the right-wing. McCain, who took the Straight Talk Express to Nowhere in 2000, is hoping that he can ride the Double Talk Express right to the White House this time, after taking one small detour to refuel. "Are you going into crazy base world?" Jon Stewart asked him about his efforts to cozy up to the late Jerry Falwell, a man he once denounced as one of America's "agents of intolerance." "I'm afraid so," McCain replied. Deep down McCain knows it's wrong to pander to the Christian Right, which he once attacked, but by admitting it, that makes it right. When the Christian Right was at the apex of their power, McCain took them on. Now that their power is beginning to wane, he is sucking up to them. His strategy seems to be to do everything exactly wrong, a strategy pioneered by George Costanza in the famous Seinfeld episode, "The Opposite." It just might be the key to victory.

But McCain has quite a bit of competition when it comes to being wrong from former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Romney and Giuliani are now in a battle to see who can repudiate more of the liberal stances they took on social issues in the past to appeal to the conservative wing of the Republican party. Both hail from liberal states, where they took liberal positions on such issues as abortion, gay rights and gun control. Now they are claiming that it was all just a ruse. By admitting their inauthenticity in the past they look more authentic now. "He tricked liberals into voting for him," Ann Coulter said when she endorsed Romney shortly before trying to sabotage his campaign by calling Edwards a "faggot." Having demonstrated their ability to fudge their positions once, while winking at conservative voters that they really believed something different all along, they aim to show that they can win by doing the exact same thing again in the general election. Like post-modern advertisements that mock the idea that they are selling you a bill of goods, even as they successfully sell you a bill goods, Romney and Giuliani hope to turn being double-talking politicians to their advantage.

Because McCain, Romney and Giuliani have not yet convinced voters that they truly regret most of what they said and did in the past, some voters are taking a look at former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Huckabee is a living embodiment of the "Before" and "After" ads for weight loss products that used to run in cheap magazines, having lost 110 pounds. His release of a serial rapist who went on to murder someone would seem to be a perfect mistake to regret, an opportunity to propose draconian measures against crime and perhaps connect these proposals somehow to torture and immigration to win over the base. Unfortunately, Huckabee has neglected to seize this opportunity, claiming he did nothing wrong and attempting to blame the criminal's release on his predecessors, Jim Guy Tucker and Bill Clinton. Is that any way to win an election?

Even worse, some people believe Huckabee might be too morally upright to be President. Paul Mirengoff of Powerline believes that while Huckabee supports the War in Iraq, he supports it for the wrong reasons. As if that weren't bad enough, Huckabee opposes waterboarding and would close Guantanamo because he believes they are morally wrong. Mirengoff argues that Huckabee's reluctance to compromise his moral values could undermine his ability to fight terrorism. "Waterboarding and long-term detention aren't very 'Christian,'" says Mirengoff. "They merely keep terrorists out of action and, in special circumstances enable us to find out where we're going to be attacked next and/or where we can find those who are planning the next attacks." And on immigration Huckabee has opposed denying state benefits to illegal immigrants, calling it "un-Christian." Most Republican voters prefer Christians who don't have such a highly developed sense of right and wrong.

Like Obama, Huckabee seems to have adopted an odd strategy that is puzzling pundits who believe that Americans are not ready for a President who will not turn his back on his principles to get elected. They worry that a candidate who is not willing to bend his principles to win an election won't be able to bend his principles to fight our enemies, who have no principles at all. Obama and Huckabee should remember that in 1964 Barry Goldwater ran for President with the campaign slogan "In Your Heart You Know He's Right," and he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American history. And yet, sometimes I wonder if maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to have a President who stuck to his principles throughout the campaign and didn't change his positions just to get elected. Maybe it would be a nice change of pace to vote for someone who was right about a few things instead of one who now says he was wrong about everything. But I suppose, as President Richard Nixon once said, "That would be wrong."

Please Don't Kill David Broder

There are many reasons not to elect Hillary Clinton President besides the fact that her election could result in the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. There is also a very important humanitarian consideration. Electing Hillary Clinton President could kill David Broder.

Washington Post columnist David Broder is 78 years old and I just don't think he could survive Hillary's being elected President. Broder hates the Clintons with a passion; in fact, it's the only thing he does do with a passion. "He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place," Broder once said of the way Bill Clinton treated Washington, which Broder bought years ago when real estate was cheap. But he was younger then and it didn't matter so much if he got himself all worked up and raised his blood pressure. Now it could be fatal.

Today, Broder wrote yet another column about the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, less than a week after he promised that he wouldn't in an online chat. "Will you and the media ever apply as much scrutiny to the Giuliani marriages as you have done to the single Clinton marriage?" someone had asked him during the chat and he replied, "I plan to leave both subjects alone." I know that old people can sometimes be a little forgetful so it's possible that he didn't remember saying that. But I think it's also possible that he just can't help it. I think for days he tried to resist discussing the Clintons' marriage in disparaging terms but in the end his hatred of them was too strong. Now, I'm very worried that Broder won't be able to make it through four years of yelling at Hillary to get off his lawn without hurting himself.

David Broder, the "dean of American journalism," built his reputation on his ability to be dispassionate and not take sides on issues or have any strong opinions at all. People in Washington think of him as a dependable old jalopy that is always in neutral. Even when President Kennedy was assassinated he didn't let emotion sway him, as he once explained once to a group of Chinese students: "On November 22, 1963, I was one of the journalists following President Kennedy's motorcade. You know what happened later -- the President was assassinated and I was right on the spot. As an ordinary man, I wanted leave the scene, hide somewhere, and weep. But I managed to calm myself and to report the event in the most objective way." While other reporters lost their heads, Broder refused to take sides after the President was killed. Was he for the assassination or against it? It was impossible to tell from his reporting. No matter what his personal feelings might have been, as a reporter he had to be objective when it came to the issue of whether killing Kennedy was a good thing or a bad thing.

But like Spock in the midst of Pon farr, every seven years or so Broder loses control over his emotions and his seething hatred for the Clintons resurfaces. Many pundits in Washington are afraid of what Clinton's candidacy might do to his carefully cultivated reputation for honesty and even-handedness. They are attempting to derail Clinton's campaign not so much because they think she would make a terrible President, but because they are so terribly worried about David Broder's health. They will stop at nothing to keep Hillary from being President in order to protect their friend from bursting a blood vessel. Every time Maureen Dowd, for example, writes an embarrassing column about Hillary, it is really just a desperate attempt to save David Broder from himself.

So if you are thinking of voting for Hillary, please take a moment and consider what you are doing. You are not just making America vulnerable to terrorists, immigrants and socialized medicine, you are killing David Broder. Every vote for Hillary is like a vote to disconnect David Broder from life support.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Hillary Clinton, David Broder, Washington Post, Maureen Dowd, Giuliani, Bill Clinton, Politics
Carnivals: Carnival of Political Punditry, Carnival of Education

Fair Game

In a recent poll of major conservative bloggers (which unaccountably left this conservative blogger out perhaps because I am entirely too reasonable), Rush Limbaugh was voted the Number 1 favorite conservative and Michelle Malkin, at Number 4, was the most popular blogger on the list. The results were no surprise because Limbaugh and Malkin (along with Ann Coulter, who was Number 2) represent the heart and soul of the conservative movement. There is perhaps no better example of the style and methods of these brave conservative warriors than the way they set out to destroy and humiliate a 12-year-old boy named Graeme Frost and his family. We are at war and these patriots will stop at nothing to defeat our enemies even if those enemies are children.

When 12-year-old Graeme Frost dared to criticize the President’s veto of the SCHIP program in the Democrats’ weekly radio address, he became “fair game,” as Mark Steyn (Number 3 on the list) put it. Conservative bloggers (spurred on, apparently, by an aide in Mitch McConnell’s office) began digging for dirt, poring over the Frost family’s financial information and splashing it over the Internet. They made harassing phone calls to the Frosts and sent them nasty emails all in an effort to send a message to others who might dare to speak out and participate in the political process on the wrong side. Never have I been so proud to be a conservative.

"The nastiness caught me by surprise," said Graeme Frosts's father and many liberal bloggers seemed taken aback by the intensity of the attacks on the Frost family. Unfortunately, these naïve liberals don’t understand that we are at war and that war calls for different rules, which is something that conservatives have known for long time. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh put it best when he compared this dangerous little boy to a suicide bomber, reusing a metaphor he also used to describe phony soldiers who don’t support the War in Iraq (like all conservatives Limbaugh hates rhetorical waste as much as he hates government waste so he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking up new metaphors when he can still squeeze something out of the old ones.) When confronted with a child suicide bomber with explosives strapped to his tiny body, a soldier doesn’t have time for sentimental thoughts about the terrorist’s youth. He just shoots on sight.

For conservatives the world is divided into us (patriotic Americans) and them (terrorists). There is no in-between. Liberal blogger Ezra Klein demonstrated how little he understood about conservatives when he comically challenged Michelle Malkin to a debate on the “issues.” Conservatives unlike liberals do not want to debate terrorists. Malkin not only refused his offer, she launched a vicious personal attack against Klein.

She accused him of being a poor reader for not understanding the nuances of her 2004 piece complaining about the bad choices she encountered for her own family’s health insurance. Macsmind, who also denounced the Frosts, pointed out similarly his difficulties with the health care system. "I have a wife who has survived cancer (twice) and has ongoing medical conditions," he wrote. "I make 40,000 a year and struggle to pay insurance but pay I do. I won’t even get into the outstanding medical bills. I don’t drive a fancy car or have a hope in prayer of buying a house such as theirs. Nevertheless, the Frosts have made crappy financial decisions and are wrong to expect the government to bail them out." What makes conservatives like Malkin and Macsmind different from liberals like Klein is that conservatives would rather struggle and be faced with terrible health care choices than to have no choice at all, which is what would happen under socialized medicine. Living in a free society means having the freedom to go into debt trying to pay for the cost of health care and having the choice to quit your job and take a job you hate because it offers health insurance or to sell your house and move into a homeless shelter to pay for medical costs. People who live in societies that have socialized medicine don’t have these kinds of choices; they have to take the health care the government gives them.

Malkin also accused Klein of libel, though I am sure that she is an opponent of the tort system, which is why she has declined to sue him. Klein had written about how Malkin published the contact information of traitorous students at UC Santa Cruz protesting the war in Iraq and of Chancellor Denise Denton, to pressure her to denounce them. The students received a host of nasty threats and the chancellor committed suicide a short time later. Not many bloggers are able to make such a real impact on the world and Malkin is very proud of what she accomplished, although she is too modest to take all of the credit for Denton's suicide. I’m not familiar with the intricacies of libel law but I think that while Klein published information that was true, it was written in bad faith and therefore is libel, whereas when Malkin or other conservative bloggers publish information that turns out not to be true (whoops!) it is with the best of intentions and therefore is not libel.

Although Malkin is not able to drive all of her enemies to suicide, she has had a number of other successes. She helped end the career and destroy the reputation of once-respected journalist Dan Rather. She got Jamil Hussein arrested and gagged. She helped silence Scott Beachamp. She rhetorically beheaded Jill Carroll when the terrorists who kidnapped her didn’t have the guts to do it. Of course, Malkin does not ruin the lives and sully the reputations of her enemies alone. Sometimes she acts as a megaphone for other conservatives who do the spade work and then others follow her cues. Even conservatives who sometimes recoil from her methods lend her support or aid and abet her if not by defending her then by remaining silent.

I would never attack Malkin because I know she is brave enough to say out loud what I am thinking and that if I ever denounced her, my reputation as a respected conservative blogger would be destroyed. And even if we are sometimes uncomfortable being on Malkin’s side, we certainly don’t want to be on the side of the terrorists. I’m sure many of my conservative friends in the blogosphere feel the same way. Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters, my favorite conservative blogger and someone I am proud to call a friend even though he usually believes in debating liberals on the issues and eschews personal attacks, defended splaying the Frost’s private financial information all over the Internet at first, but now seems to be having second thoughts on what he helped unleash with his tacit approval. “The response on the Right sometimes outstripped reason,” he wrote. “Rather than just argue the facts, some in the comments section here and elsewhere went too far in speculating about finances and motives of the Frost family.” But he still agrees that the Frosts were “fair game.” Rick Moran of Rightwing Nuthouse also seems to be backing away from the attacks on the Frosts, but he also excuses the behavior of the right-wing blogosphere by calling the Frosts “fair game.”

Oddly enough, the one conservative blogger who has denounced Malkin most vociferously is perhaps her greatest disciple, Chuck Adkins. Adkins is such an extreme conservative that he is sometimes mistaken for an extreme liberal. He is a Christian who calls himself “right-leaning.” He is against abortion and thinks homosexuality is “sick and repulsive” (“If you’re queer, you don’t belong here,” he says.) He is against neoconservatives (preferring the “paleoconservatism” of Pat Buchanan) and believes the Iraq War was a mistake but is opposed to pulling out now. In short, he is no liberal although he sometimes attacks conservatives for not being conservative enough. His rhetoric (such as his claim that students killed by a police deputy in Wisconsin "had it coming" because of their lack of respect for police and then reacting to criticism of his post by claiming he is a victim of people's intolerance of free speech) is almost indistinguishable from Malkin’s and when he published information about where Malkin lives (which he later retracted), he was taking a page right out of Malkin’s playbook. Of course, it’s one thing to post the personal information of traitors, as Malkin did, and quite another to post the personal information of a fellow conservative you disagree with. I have deleted attempts to post Malkin’s personal information in my comments and will continue to do so but I will also resist attempts to post liberals' personal information because like other conservative bloggers I want to preserve my own deniability for any responsibility of the consequences of such an action even if I give tacit support to Malkin and other respectable conservative bloggers who do so. In the same way, I would never call Glenn Greenwald a “faggot” the way Dan Collins of Protein Wisdom did, but instead prefer to sit back in silence while he does use such language the way other conservative bloggers did.

Even if some conservative bloggers do tepidly criticize Malkin and her ilk and although politicians like Mitch McConnell were prepared to join in the chorus of attacks on the Frost family but then decided to just let bloggers do it, no one should believe that we conservatives are not all Malkinites and Dittoheads at heart. The fact that few conservatives are willing to strongly denounce Malkin and Limbaugh and that her blog is the most popular conservative blog in the blogosphere and his radio show is the Number 1 conservative radio show should tell you all you need to know about our true feelings about them and their methods. And we will go to great lengths to defend them no matter how tortured our reasoning may seem.

If Democrats do manage to pass an expansion of the SCHIP program, I hope that conservative bloggers will investigate the eligibility of each and every family that applies and scare the rest into not applying. Of course, I won’t do it myself because it seems like an awful lot of work and I would hate it if some crazy blogger like Chuck Adkins did the same thing to me. But I will sit back and let others do the dirty work and defend them from liberal attacks even as I wash my hands from responsibility of any consequences of their actions. And I’m sure most conservative bloggers will do the same.

Being a conservative means never saying you’re sorry for what other conservatives do. It means justifying the means if you support the ends, whether that involves ruining people’s lives and reputations, invading people’s privacy, violating people’s constitutional rights or torturing them. It means seeing anyone who is not with you 100% as an enemy and seeing every issue as black and white. It means doing whatever is necessary to defeat the enemy even if you sometimes have to violate your own principles to do it and seem like a hypocrite. Being a conservative means scoring political points by going after easy enemies and racking up victories instead of wasting a lot of time with the much harder job of persuading people with the rightness of your cause. It means doing it to them before they do it to us. It means seeing everyone opposed to us, even a 12-year-old boy, as “fair game.” Yes, I am very proud to be a conservative.

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Jon Swift, Graeme Frost, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, SCHIP, Politics, Health Wonk Review

Bush to Kids: Grow Up!

Some people are upset that President Bush has vetoed the bill expanding State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Even Republicans are worried that the party will be seen as cruel and uncaring, an impression that was reinforced when William Kristol defended the veto by saying, "First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it's a good idea. I'm happy that the President's willing to do something bad for the kids." But I hope Republicans will back President Bush's get-tough policies and sustain his veto, even if the party is seen as anti-children. President Bush's father once said, "Message: I care." But his son is a different, bolder man. "Message: Grow up!" he is telling our nation's youth with his veto and it's about time someone did.

President Bush is always thinking about the future. He knows that however the War in Iraq and the War on Terror are viewed now, history will vindicate him after he is dead. But the President is deeply concerned about the future generations who will fight the wars he has bequeathed them. While our enemies are preparing their youth to fight future jihads, we are lagging behind, pampering our kids and conditioning them to depend on the government. With this veto the President has stood up to Congress' plans to turn more of our children into wards of the state by expanding SCHIP and started weaning them off of government dependence. Toughening up our children will make sure they are up to the task of fighting the wars of the future.

We can only hope it is not too late to save our spoiled little brats. The Children's Health Insurance Program is already just giving away health care for free to millions of children, but Congress and many states are trying to turn more of our kids into little welfare princes and princesses. Luckily, the Bush Administration has stepped in and not only resisted efforts to increase the program but has created a new set of stiff rules that will throw millions of children out of the government giveaway program. President Bush, who is a thinker, is opposed to the program on "philosophical grounds, " he says. "When you expand eligibility," Bush said, "you're really beginning to open up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to the government." If children really want health care so badly, the President has suggested, they can always go to hospital emergency rooms.

Sure, a few disease-ridden children whose parents can't afford to take them to the doctor will spread their illnesses to other children in school. But that's why we have home-schooling and expensive private schools that filter out those who cannot afford health care. Parents are free to decide if they want to make the extra effort or spend the extra money to keep their kids safe. With socialized medicine, parents wouldn't have any choice at all.

Liberals believe that if they recruit our children at a young age to the idea that health care should be free that will make it a lot easier to impose socialized medicine on us in the future. But President Bush wants children to learn that they cannot just run to the doctor every time they have a sore throat or runny nose or want plastic surgery because all their friends are doing it and not have to pay for it. It's better they learn now that the reason we have the best health care in the world is that we don't just give it away to anyone. Imagine how unprepared our children would be when they grow up and discover that many adults don't get to have any health care at all.

Health care is just one area where the President is trying to nip the prepubescent culture of dependence in the bud. He has also resisted efforts to tighten rules on imports from China, which would increase government red tape and threaten our market economy, but more importantly, would condition children to believe that they can depend on the government to protect them from all the bad stuff that's out there. "The overall philosophy is regulations are bad and they are too large a cost for industry, and the market will take care of it," explained Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy at OMBWatch. "That's been the philosophy of the Bush administration." The Bush Administration has resisted efforts to increase inspections of toys by hiring more inspectors and running up government deficits and to make businesses more unprofitable by subjecting them to more red tape.

The market, in fact, has done a fine job of taking care of recent glitches like the discovery that Mattel toys manufactured in China contained lead paint. Mattel responded exactly as a company should in a free-market economy. It listened to parents who complained that its toys could kill their children and after considering their objections, launched a massive recall of toys featuring Sesame Street characters like Thomas the Train and Dora the Explorer. That is the way capitalism works.

But advocates of government red tape claim Mattel's efforts are not enough. They want inefficient government bureaucrats to get involved instead of letting industries police themselves. They point out that 80% of toys are now made in China and that few of these toys are ever inspected. But how many parents want to be faced the prospect of telling their children that there will be no toys for Christmas because government red tape has made them too expensive or caused severe shortages?

We need to teach our children at a young age what it means to live in a free market economy, not turn them into budding little Marxists dependent on the nanny state. Of course, there will be some collateral damage, like the four-year-old boy who died of lead poisoning after swallowing a metal charm that came with Reebok shoes that contained 90% lead. That is the price we pay for being free. No one is too young to learn to take responsibility for their own well-being. This child was not forced by anyone to swallow his toy. It was a decision he made on his own and he paid the consequences for it. The silver lining in his tragic death is that other children will be a little bit more careful about swallowing their toys. Telling children that they can just swallow anything and not worry about the consequences because the government will protect them is a terrible lesson to teach. It will just turn them into drug addicts and overeaters later in life.

The lessons the President is teaching our children will last a lifetime. For example, some of our kids learned a valuable civics lesson when a group of them came to the White House pulling little red wagons and hauling mail bags full of petitions asking him not to veto the SCHIP legislation and were turned away at the gate. The fact that a majority of Americans support this legislation and it was passed by both houses of Congress made as little difference to the President as the fact that most Americans want us out of Iraq. Once a President has been elected by the people, the Constitution doesn't require him to listen to them. If voters who elected Democrats to get us out of the War in Iraq had learned this lesson sooner, they might not be so disappointed and disillusioned now.

Nevertheless, some nervous Republicans are worried that going after children may not be the best way to win the 2008 election. But children, of course, like many adults, don't vote. And when adults who do vote get the facts and compare the tough, highly disciplined children of the Middle East, who are being transformed into little jihadists and suicide bombers, with the caterwauling little monsters you can see in any American shopping center or urban liberal enclave, they will see that the President is right. Instead of running away from the President on this issue, I hope Republicans not only stick to their guns but make it the centerpiece of their campaign in 2008.

If the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the recalls of pet food have taught us anything it is that government cannot save us from ourselves. If people had not depended on FEMA to bail them out in New Orleans or believed that the FDA was making sure pet food was safe, then many lives might have been saved. By putting competent people in positions of power in government agencies, the Clinton Administration fooled people into thinking that government could look out for them. President Bush, however, has forced Americans to become more self-reliant. The people of New Orleans and many pet owners have already learned this important lesson. Now President Bush is bringing his message of tough love to our nation's children. Those children who have not perished from stupidly eating their toys or succumbed to preventable illnesses will be stronger because of his policies and they will thank him if they manage to become adults.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, SCHIP, Bush, Health Care, Mattel, China, William Kristol, Iraq, Politics

Is Abstinence-Only Sex Education Too Explicit?

According to surprising new federal report, which was released late on Friday so that no one would know about it, and only after Congress insisted, abstinence-only sex education classes have had "no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence." Apparently, kids who enrolled in these programs were just as likely to have sex as other kids. Unfortunately, this study comes at a bad time for abstinence-only advocates in the Bush Administration. Wade Horn, the unfortunately named point man for the administration on abstinence-only education, just resigned after overseeing a huge increase in funding for the program to over $200 million and already those who want to turn our kids into a generation of hos are bouyant. "After 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds these failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs will go down as an ideological boondoggle of historic proportions," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth. "The tragedy is not simply the waste of taxpayer dollars, it is the damage done to the young people who have been on the receiving end of distorted, inaccurate information about condoms and birth control. We have been promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS, and that's not just bad public health policy, its bad ethics."

But Robert Rector of the Abstinence Clearinghouse cautioned that we shouldn't be worried so much about whether the program is effective, calling that a "bogus issue." Instead we should focus on the importance of the "values being taught." He has a point. Just because the War on Drugs has been a failure, for example, that's no reason to stop it, so why should we care if abstinence-only sex education doesn't work as long as we are doing the right thing?

If these programs have in fact been a failure, I don't think it is because kids were being given too much inaccurate information. I think the real problem was that they were given any information at all. We need more ignorance about sex, not less. The word "abstinence" itself is probably too explicit. Once you tell kids to abstain from sex until marriage, you have already told them too much. When kids start experimenting with abstaining, it should be no surprise that things can get out of hand and that they will move on to actually having sex.

Kids who are told to abstain from something are naturally going to start wondering what they are abstaining from. Instead of then telling them what sex is in explicit detail, and then telling them not to do it, it might be better if teachers described sex using vague, confusing metaphors the way adults used to back when teens were not having sex. For example, instead of outlining the mechanics of sex, a teacher could say, "Are you familiar with the workings of the internal combustion engine?" After an hour of talking about pistons and carburetors and spark plugs and power strokes, the class would be over. Typical questions such as "Where do babies come from?" could easily be deflected by talking about storks illustrated by cartoons. Cute stories like this have worked for centuries.

Parents used to be the ones to teach their kids about sex even though they usually didn't know a lot about it themselves, and most waited until the day before their children got married. The idea that people should know anything at all about sex before they were married is a peculiarly modern one. In the past, for example, British mothers used to give their daughters very succinct advice before their wedding nights. "Lie back and think of England," they would say. Obviously, that wouldn't quite work here, but I see no reason why American mothers can't tell their daughters to lie back and think of America. Boys, meanwhile, will have already picked up enough information on the street and from the Internet porn to fill in any gaps.

Some people believe that kids need to learn about sex now to avoid diseases like AIDS. Many abstinence-only programs mistakenly gave lip service to this idea. For example, they would discuss condoms, though only in terms of their failure rates, telling kids that they don't always offer protection from AIDS, which is technically true. But perhaps it would be better not to tell kids about condoms at all. If a student asks what they are, the teacher could tell them that they are balloons and blow one up as a demonstration. A particularly creative teacher could make them into condom animals. If that doesn't work, the teacher could claim that condoms actually cause AIDS.

Of course, there is so much sexuality in our culture now that many kids already know too much about sex despite the valiant efforts of the Justice department and FCC to battle obscenity and of conservative groups to ban contraceptives. I'm afraid that the only way to fight all this information is with strategically released misinformation. Many young people (and some presidents) already believe that some sexual activities, such as oral and anal sex, don't even count as sex, an idea that may unfortunately have been reinforced by the fact that they are often unmentioned in abstinence-only sex education classes. To fight this dangerous tendency to define sexuality down, educators should instead define sexuality up. In some Muslim countries men and women are forbidden from shaking hands. So let's take a page from their book and tell young people that a handshake is sex. Let's tell kids that they could get pregnant from cybersex or get a sexually transmitted disease from a kissing. By redefining sex, we could fool kids into thinking they are having sex when they really aren't. Then perhaps that would be as much of a risk as they would be willing to take.

The less accurate information given in a sex education class, the better, because what kids don't know about sex can't hurt them. Since abstinence-only sex education classes usually don't even discuss homosexuality, many gay kids don't know enough about their feelings to act on them, so they usually channel them into excelling in high school musical performances or band, activities that bring delight to other students. Then when they are older they can enroll in ex-gay therapy or become priests. If more heterosexual students were kept in the dark about their hormonal urges, they would channel their frustrations into sports. Information-free sex education classes would be a boon for high school athletics.

Clearly, more needs to be done to frighten and guilt-trip kids and confuse them about sex. In the Bible when someone has carnal relations with someone the verb "know" is often used. Adam and Eve did not even have sex until they ate of the Tree of Knowledge. The lesson is obvious. If we really want our kids to stop having sex, we need to give them as little knowledge as possible. Abstinence-only sex education has been a good first step in reaching that goal, but we can do better.

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