His descent into the looney fringes of the Left is now complete. First he bashed Southern Baptists (what liberal isn’t intolerant of Christians who follow the Bible) in speeches; then he bashed Jews in his books; now he has appointed himself the spokesman for the terror group Hamas. Just goes to show why ex-Presidents are best advised to retire to Florida, play golf, and shut up.

Even when he was president, however, Jimmy Carter had a very diminished capacity to distinguish between friend and foe. His abject refusal to stand by our ally the Shah of Iran resulted in that country falling prey to a rogue regime that, to this day, terrorizes us. Similar was the case in Nicaragua and the Sudan; in both cases the Carter administration was so keen on trying to punish our allies for not being ‘democratic’ enough that our sworn enemies were able to topple friendly governments with rogue ones who didn’t even pay lip service to democracy. Carter never saw an American ally that he liked. And in the Near East, America has only two real allies: Turkey and Israel.

Hence it should come as little surprise to most prudent observers that now in his eighties,  Jimmy Carter has taken to becoming a front man for the radical terror group Hamas, an organization dedicated to destroying Israel to the last man, woman, and child. I cannot blame Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or any of the Israeli cabinet flatly refusing to meet Carter during the latter’s trip to the Gaza Strip. The peanut farmer from Georgia has learnt nothing from his years in the White House.

There was Ronald Reagan who boldly said to Middle Eastern terrorists ‘you can run but you cannot hide.’ Then there is Jimmy Carter whose actions sound more like ‘no need to run or hide, I will come over and have a cup of coffee with you anyway, Mr. Terrorist.’

Ominously, Carter’s lead in publicly snubbing America’s friends is being emulated well by the liberal Democrat controlled do-nothing 110^th Congress. Last fall, some Democratic committee chairmen went out of their way to insult Turkey for an incident that happened a hundred years ago. This year, Speaker Pelosi and her minions stopped the Colombia free trade agreement knowing full well that Colombia is one of the last US-friendly governments left in Latin America. And they want to control foreign policy??

On an entirely different note, here’s a funny website which claims to spoof stuff that ‘white people’ like though it is more accurately things that are the forte of the WASPs of the latte liberal, clueless, purposeless, East Coast variety. Specially telling is # 2 (scroll down a few pages to get to it).

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com

This is courtesy of friend whose Dutch relatives are wondering why is there even a debate about who should be our next president.

But these are different people, these Fundamentalist Latter Day folks. They live in closed off communal properties, dress simply and modestly, and maintain minimal contact with a world they consider wicked. Therefore, the elite thinking goes, they must be evil child abusers and wife beaters. Oh yes the polygamy. Please….adultery is illegal in 32 of the states too and we actually celebrate it, reward it, lionize it. Let us dispense with the ‘polygamy is illegal’ argument unless we can, with equal zeal, enforce the existing statutes against adultery, fornication, and homosexual conduct. Or is the ‘stay out of bedroom’ cry only legitimate when it is unusual sexual mores that the elites endorse rather than those that they find quite awful and ancient?

The only question that should have been investigated is whether there was any statutory rape in FLDS premises and, if so, the alleged perpetrators prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But then Texas is also the state where five years ago the victim of statutory rape was asked to pay child support for the baby born as a result of this heinous crime…while the perpetrator was given a six month probation. To date no statutory rape charges have been filed against anyone in the FLDS group in Texas as a result of the April 2008 raid. So far it just seems to be one of those “we are the elites and we know how to raise your children better than you do” deals.

Today they have gone after a religious sect whose tenets make most of us (including myself) groan in disgust. Tomorrow it may be another religious group which seems too ancient and retrograde. Next year, maybe the mainstream Mormons or Hasidic Jews…I mean, after all, they too believe in very old fashioned family roles. What about ten years from now? Who will be next? Missouri Synod Lutherans who don’t allow women at church altars? The Pentecostals, who think MTV and Cinemax is too filthy to be piped into the homes where children live?

It is well advised to recall what Pastor Martin Niemloller of Berlin said many, many years ago, “First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

The power to tax is the power to destroy, so opined the Founding Fathers. Every April 15 is a reminder of how much American initiative, social values, and sheer enterprise has been destroyed by the federal tax code favored by the liberal Democrats.

Self declared elites, especially around election time, bemoan how America has lagged so far behind Europe in decisively settling ‘ancient’ social questions. Wouldn’t it be so much nicer and civilized, they intone over their lattes and Merlot, not to have to have this silly debate over abortion? I mean couldn’t we Americans settle it like the sophisticated folks in Europe where it is no longer an issue, notwithstanding the historical presence of a strong Catholic Church?

To which I say, absolument.

Indeed had we Americans been allowed to settle the issue in the manner of the Europeans, abortion wouldn’t be the perpetually burning, ghastly, impolite political issue it has become today. The Germans, the French, the British and the Irish have all pretty serious internal divisions over the issue as we do. But each of them used the traditional mechanisms of representative democracies to craft imperfect but sustainable consensus on such a deeply divisive issue. Utilizing time honored democratic tools like compromise, public input, and legislative compromise, most European countries have crafted abortion laws that generally reflect the overwhelming prevailing consensus on the issue amongst their citizens. Were the genius of democracy allowed to work in the United States on this issue, chances are pretty strong that we too would have relegated abortion to a settled matter.

Unfortunately, democracy was hijacked in America when it came to abortion. In one fell swoop, the right and ability of the American people to legislate an abortion compromise was taken away from them by nine old men of the United States Supreme Court. Roe vs. Wade took away the right of the American people to have any meaningful discussion or policy debate about abortion. Whether at the state level or the federal, Americans were denied the right of their European counterparts to craft their consensus on abortion based on compromise and debate.

No wonder it is still a major issue in American politics. So it shall remain until such a time that our democratic rights are restored to us to craft compromises like democratic societies do. I don’t know what such a compromise may look like but suspect it will keep abortion legal on demand the first couple of months of fetal formation and for longer terms in cases of rape and incest. Such a consensus will likely also ban the procedure for sex selection purposes while requiring reasonable waiting periods and parental consent in the case of minors. I can bet that a democratic consensus crafted today will prohibit public funding, outlaw inhumane procedures like partial birth IDX, and limit late term procedures to those in which the life and physical health of the mother is at risk in the absence of an abortion. As someone who believes that the unborn child is a human being like you and I, that is a consensus that is repugnant to me. And yet, as distasteful as it may be, I would be respecting the fact that such a consensus was arrived at using the lofty tools of democratic self-governance of a free people. Unfortunately, and unlike the Europeans many liberals want to mimic, we were not given that chance by the nine old men who arrogated the right to decide the issue to themselves for perpetuity. That is as close to the Iranian system of governance as you can get in America.

What a difference a few decades-and decadence-makes. Today, actors like Sean Penn and Matt Damon and actresses like Glenn Close and Catherine Zeta Jones and Angelina Jolie are the norm, not the exception. Without class, without sense of wardrobe, and without a clue they act in movies that have little to portray but narcissism, vulgarity, and mockery of middle American values. Off screen these Hollywood denizens miss no opportunity to bash America, help our enemies, and hog the limelight with politically correct ‘causes’. Pimply faced heroes, feminism tinged lead actresses...such is the sum total of the casting galore in most of America’s film industry today. Hollywood today is a caricatured and conceited shadow of the political ideology of its radical producers guild. No longer does it ennoble America but rather debases it.

And with the death of Charlton Hesston, the last great link between us and the greatness of Hollywood is gone forever. My he find favor with the Lord whom he served so well with his talents and his time.

Nobody who reads this blog or otherwise knows me will remotely mistake me for being anything but unabashedly pro-free trade.  Philosophically as a matter of fundamental freedom, and practically as a matter of macro-economic health, I consider the liberty of commerce to be a sine qua non of the American way of life.

But then there is the impact at the micro level…both in economic and, more important, in social terms. Some of this impact is real, some is perceived, and all of it is glaring in some demographics and locales. There is hurt and pain in large swathes of the industrial Midwest and in Appalachia. Free trade has turned upside down, in the space of one generation, the social and economic axioms that have been the norm in these communities for almost a hundred years. A diploma from a public high school is no longer a path to lifetime job security, nice house, good marriage, and the brand new truck. Frankly, such a diploma hadn’t meant much of an accomplishment anyway for a couple of generations since the NEA backed labor unions started dumbing down American K-12 education. But until recently, the lack of mobility in capital and knowledge kept up the façade of an efficient blue collar middle class in the industrial Midwest. The breakdown of many trade barriers and the advent of the information superhighway knocked that façade down pretty rudely. A better educated, more productive, non-unionized workforce overseas is now providing the same services (thanks to the superhighway) and goods (thanks to freer trade) for much less. This has resulted in most middle class Americans being able to afford goods once the preserve of only the rich; at the same time shareholders of US based companies (and that includes all those of us with 401Ks, pension plans, and E-Trade accounts) are benefiting from the increased profitability of these stocks. An ancillary to the global liberal trade regime has been the billions in industrial investments by Japanese, German and, now, Indian automakers in the southern United States, creating tens of thousands of new jobs in Tennessee, Alabama, and the Carolinas.

Nonetheless, many in the industrial heartland don’t see the moderately optimistic picture of jobs, investments, and affordability. They see a world turned upside down, a new world that tells them that the drudgery of basic mathematics and science is far more important than high school football and cheerleading. Their phone bills are much lower but the person at the other end of the customer service line has an accent. People moving into the upscale suburbs are no longer union workers who made good but brown, yellow, or multi hued families that have graduate degrees and drive their kids to excel in school and expect them to do homework. What is the world coming to?

The dilemma is real and solutions tough. But left unaddressed, the downside of the new economy will only serve to fuel the latent fires of pessimism, localized unemployment, and xenophobia. First and foremost, there is a need to make our public schools competitive with the world so that their graduates matter in today’s world. That means emphasizing the uncool things like traditional mathematics, science, and homework and scaling back on ancillaries like football, piano, and self-esteem lessons (yep..sounds harsh but facts are facts). School reform also requires cleansing the public education system of the NEA mafia, lengthening the school year, and establishing minimum, concrete, standardized competencies (please, none of that nonsense of ‘tests aren’t everything’).

Secondly, the steady erosion of blue collar employment opportunities must be expanded. Not with a government program or even a bailout but with an approach quite the opposite. A cursory look at one industry-the core of the upper Midwest’s pride and woes-is sufficient to point to the right direction. While Detroit with its bulky Big Three has fallen farther and farther behind, the Deep South is growing with nimble Toyota, Audi, and Nissan plants. The secret? A friendly business environment, open shop labor (workers are free to choose to belong to a union or not), less intrusive state regulation, and stronger family structure (producing more stable and ethically sounder workers). Reducing sharply the regulatory burden, both state and federal, on manufacturing will go a long way in helping the industrial Midwest regain its economic footing.