I spend a great deal of time thinking about both the “vast right-wing conspiracy” and its oft-overlooked sibling the “vast left-wing conspiracy”. As we currently have a left-wing President and left-wing supermajority in the house (kinda’), it is the vast left-wing conspiracy that occupies my thoughts most these days.
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Commentary: Why we need an obesity tax – CNN.com.
Now is a good time to discuss taxation. You should read the above article first, its an interesting read.
The fundamental tyranny of taxation without representation is the reason this country exists in the first place. We can discuss freedom and democracy and all of the other wonderful things about the United States, but just as importantly freedom from tyranny is one of the cornerstones of this great nation.
Article 1 of the Constitution allows the legeslature to levy taxes, and there’s the 16th ammendment too, so for all the people out there expecting to read a post about how the government is wrong to tax us, look elsewhere. That said, the government is allowed to levy taxes to pay for the services it provides. We could argue about what services, exactly, it should be paying for, but not here, and not now.
Once again, I find myself wishing to distill the issue in front of me down to its root; to find the actual disease not argue about the symptoms. What I find is an almost instinctual anger at any tax that is used as a tool. Whether used to punish, reward, encourage or discourage, any active use of taxation is manipulative.
What makes it worse, I think, is that it seems to attemp to bypass the legeslative process. It would be near impossible to make toacco illegal (or in the case at hand, even crazier, to make cola illegal), so why not just tax it? Suppose they did in fact make cola illegal, and being caught with it would lead to a fine and some jail time. The only real difference between that and a tax is that there is no jail time, just a monetary punishment.
Beyond the tax issue, this also brings us one step closer to a true nanny-state. There is something fundamentally wrong with the government telling the people that they are too stupid or too lazy to take care of themselves and their children. Drinking a cola may not be enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but that doesn’t make this ok.
I’m not sure when it became accpetable to use taxes as a tool, but apparently the slippery slope was real, and we’re sliding all the way down it. There are a lot of reasons to think that David Paterson’s idea is idiotic at best and tyranical at worst, but the root of it is that taxes are not tools by which the government should exact its will upon the people.
…nor should it be.
I was in my car listening to the governor of a nearby state talking about trimming the budget (a campaign promise like most, not to be kept). What struck me was his statement that the reason he’d not be trimming the budget was his balance of a “constituional obligation” to bablance the budget with a “moral obligation” to provide services to the people.
Let us be clear that there is no moral obligation to be had here. This is something that has crept into politics over the last couple of decades on both sides, and it holds great peril.
Morality is subjective and contextual, which makes it difficult (perhaps impossible) to dictate explicitly. Were this not the case, philosphers and theologians would have been out of business long ago. Indeed the degree to which a person does a thing may decide to what degree a thing is good or evil, and that quantification of good or evil will be seen differently by different people. In the case where there is uncertainty (where there almost always is) there is relief, but that relief lies in a moral leader, and that moral leader will be different depending on faith or creed, and could in fact be the individual.
Constitutionality, on the other hand, strives to be objective and explicit. An action is either right, or it is wrong; written or not written. Where there is context to be had, there should be exception in writing (an example might be murder in one case and self-defense in another). To be sure, it is not a perfect system, but there is relief; The Supreme Court.
One of the better and stronger arguments made by The Left in recent decades has been for secularization. It has taken a decidedly strict and extreme turn, and I think has gone off the tracks, but it is a sound principal and one we should all take a cue from. The government ought not be in the business of religion, if for no other reason than its necessary link to morality. Pulling “In God We Trust” off our money isn’t going to solve anything, except for maybe the problem some people have with reading it. Removing the ascribed morality from government will remove uncertainty from its actions.
There are problems with going with a strict amoral government, but these problems are mostly with perception. Morality is often at the individual level, and the particular case. Where there is a very small minority in need, the government may not be right in acting, even though it may seem (or even be) morally good to act. That is the other part of government that is all too often lost; that it must always act for the good of the exceptional majority (understanding that the exceptional majority is aiming for the 99.9% and is not meant to be acted in favor of at the detriment of the slim minority).
The problem is the difference between “good or bad” and “right or wrong”. The latter is not always perfectly obvious, but it is, in most cases, much clearer and easier to define than the former.
We are in an interesting and powerful time for Republicans, yet somehow I doubt that the RNC realizes it, or will take advantage of the moment. It troubles me that some people in suits, locked away in a distant room, are deciding the fate of what should be a movement, but is instead just a cult of opinion. – that goes for both parties, not just the right.
As a nation, we will wake up in mid-January to a country that has no power of consequence being held by the Right. There are two ways to deal with that: The Right can sit back and sulk, or it can take advantage of a unique moment and define itself.
Note that I said “define” and not “re-define.” Re-definition implies that there is definition in the first place, and there really isn’t one, at least not a consistent one. There cannot be one monolithic definition for an entire party, I know that, but there can at least be a common thread; a set of core values, if you will.
That is why I propose a new conservative movement, The Neo-Neo-Con! (the name is a work in progress, I’m taking suggestions).
- I need a Time-Out here to make a point. Let us agree that a person is driven most often by emotion and desire, and rarely logic. Sometimes religion drives a person’s views, sometimes it is secularism. Often times, individual experience is a driving factor. This is, in my opinion, what causes there to be the greatest divide in our nation. Example: I say “abortion”, you say “PRO LIFE!” and the person behind you says “PRO CHOICE!”. We could argue about whether it is a 4th amendment or 14th amendment case until we are blue in the face, we both have facts on our side, we just view the issue through a different prism. What is missing in that example is the greater good; the ability to recognize only the facts, and apply them to the rule of law and the governing of a nation. A reasonable person, and political person, must be able to see past his or her own beliefs and govern for the people, according to the principles of the nation (i.e. The Constitution), else we might as well be a monarchy, or better yet mob-rule.
It is incumbent upon the intellectual to argue intellectually, even if to a crowd of fools. - Back to where we were…
There are three steps to this rebirth that need to be taken collectively, through open conversation: Cut all old ties to policy and platform, define core values (and it should be a really short list) and define the new agenda and new policies according to the aforementioned core values. That’s a tall order.
This movement needs to be cultural and intellectual. The cultural aspect is more about cultural ideals and philosophy than it is about fads, and that is a critical distinction. Renaming a political party “progressive” and making it the hipster choice is only going to grab and hold a small part of the population (and, by these standards, probably not the most desirable part of the population) , the same way being the party of old-white men does.
At their very core, I believe most Americans to be philosophically conservative with a twist of moderate social liberalism. People have not abandoned their core values. Most of their core values are just not being represented. Worse still, when their values are represented, they are often contorted into being “pro” or “anti” “controversy-dujour”. A new conservative movement (neo-neo-con?) is going to require some real introspection, and some hard choices. Old cornerstones may be lost forever, and new ideas that may seem antithetical because they are “owned” by the left may need to be adopted as well.
Concepts like abortion rights and gay marriage own the spotlight, and are almost never argued intellectually. Those ties need to be severed and only re-investigated after we decide what we truly believe in. Religious thought needs to be set aside and take a back seat to Constitutional thought as well (see time-out above). There is no excuse for allowing personal religious views to get in the way of choosing a government.
This post was going to be about the movement itself, what I believe the core values to be, and what policies and platforms are necessarily a part. Having thought about it, I think I will leave that to a future post, and just let the concept sink in.
Leon Panetta. The 100 Day Rule is Dead.
January 9th, 2009Obama announces intelligence team – CNN.com.
I’m going to violate my own rule, right now, openly and honestly. Criticism has been begged for, and I cannot resist. There is small comfort to be had in the fact that Obama did take action on someething, and therefor this is not empty blathery.
Leon Panetta is going to be named as Director of CIA. To say he is not qualified is to miss the point. It is difficult to know where to begin explaining why, so bear with me.
The intelligence community and by extension the work it does, is one of the most misunderstood and thankless jobs one can do. While the same can be said of other jobs, those jobs can usually be explained openly and publicly. This is the grand challenge of secracy, and it sticks its ugly head out in a number of ways that Leon Panetta is ill-equipped to deal with. We will return to that point, but now let us start with the obvious.
When a person joins the intelligence community, they are vetted (which is a nice way to describe a process that usually involves a microscope and your life). If the person is taken in, there is an indoctrination that occurs both explicitly and gradually over time. One gets used to handling classified material. One knows that it cannot be disseminated to anyone without access. One knows that doing so holds strict punishment, and hopefully, eventually, one recognizes that doing so holds unquantifieable damage to the security of the nation. That may sound overblown (”unquantifiable damage to the security of the nation”), mere release of certain information could not only comprimise the information itself, but how it was attained, who was involved and any future action based on that information. Leon Panetta is a political man, being Chief of Staff is an anti-qualification. This is a person who uses media outlets strategically to sway oppinion, and the last person on earth you want holding the combination to the safe. He has zero experience handling classified material (including his supposed high-level consumption of information, which is not the same thing).
Back to secracy and ambiguity. Organized intelligence didn’t exist in the United States until WWII, that makes CIA and all of the other agencies less than 70 years old. Prior to their existence, spying was considered truly unseemly and a dark uncivilized activity. Today, the perception is not quite as bad, but it is still bad. It is often said that you never hear of the success, only the failures, and that is true. Part of success is retaining secrecy. As a result, the things we hear about are torture (I’ll do that in another post), scandal and the infamous bad-intel. As a result, directors of these agencies often find themselves defending something they cannot fully disclose, and beign forced to do so in the open, where they know they cannot speak openly or freely.
Leon Panetta is a Clinton-era politician, and it seems almost wrong to declare him guilty by association, but at the same time it is inescapable to do so. Clinton had that view of intelligence as being uncivilized, evidenced by his outright assault on human-intelligence operators by making them unable to work with people guilty of criminal activity (imagine telling police they cannot use informants who have ever committed a crime). If Panetta has that same world-view, doesn’t it make sense that he might try to reform CIA into some more civilized organization? That would be truly destructive.
Tags: Intelligence Community, Leon Panetta, Politics, Presidential Appointments
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