Cato's Domain

In an email this morning Dano comments:

“We are one step from complete tyranny … The number of people showing up that have had multiple audits, searches, and aircraft ramp checks is increasing and the fact that the Department of Homeland Absurdity bought billions of rounds of ammunition and armored vehicles is an indication that Obama is making good on his desire for his own domestic militia. I believe that our paranoia is justified.”

I reply:

We aren’t exempt from the politics that dominate the rest of the world.  By which I mean we aren’t exempt from an attempt to create a one-party state, nor from an armed rebellion in reply to that attempt.  Paranoia = paramilitary for a lot of people.  In light of the news of the last two weeks or so, the billion rounds of ammunition and 2600 ‘urban tanks’ purchased by The Department of Homeland Security strike many of us as steps too far “to insure domestic tranquility” … way across the bright line between order and repression.

Presidents don’t run government day to day.  That would be a ridiculous thing to expect one man to do.  The US government spends, allocates, distributes, regulates, oversees, inspects, judges and analyzes enterprises equal to 25% of the nation’s GDP.  For this reason, I have never had much respect for partisans on either side who immediately hold a president, any of them, directly and personally responsible for the actions or omissions of millions of government bureaucrats, ranging from the merely stupid to the blatantly criminal.  This is not to say, however, that I don’t hold presidents accountable at all.  I do, but in a more subtle way.  The US presidency is a subtle job.

No one who has experienced the last eight presidents (Nixon through Obama) would say the tone of their administrations … the atmosphere, the moral and ethical feel, the strengths and weaknesses … was not unique.  Presidents do put a stamp on their time in office.  Their personality and convictions and values infuse the government’s actions and the nation’s mood.

What presidents do, for good or ill, is set objectives, create agendas, establish priorities, choose cabinet officers and other Senate-reviewed executives of the state.  But most importantly of all, Presidents advocate for, accredit, affirm and set by their personal example with every word they utter and every action they take the moral, political and ethical “zeitgeist” that will underpin all that administration thinks, says and does.

I measure a President, in the end, by how high a bar he sets both in word and deed.  I measure him by his integrity; his ability to inspire integrity in the entire government.  I trust or distrust him by the width of the gap between his statements and his actions.  It’s that old ”judge a man not by what he says but by what he does” business.  And I don’t think I’m alone in the way I judge the man in the Oval Office.  I think all Americans, consciously or unconsciously, spoken or not, do the same.

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I despised Richard Milhous Nixon.  I thought he was a crabbed, paranoid, crumpled little man with a Napoleon complex, and I thought he was dangerous to the rule of law.  He destroyed the trust that feeds the roots of American democracy.

Leslie Lynch King, Jr. … renamed Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. when his mother remarried … was a cypher, a bookmark.

I felt sorry for James Earl Carter, I really did, as I’ve never seen a man more totally over-matched by his responsibilities; he simply drowned in the Oval Office.  He may not have been the worst president ever but he was the most pathetic.

Ronald Wilson Reagan is one of only four men who ever held the office (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt being the other three) who truly understood what the US presidency actually is and how to use the unique powers of the office.  Neither all-powerful dictator nor powerless figurehead, the power Constitutionally vested in the president is precisely that subtle moral force that springs from a deep well of intrinsic personal integrity, blended with a true love of country, I mentioned above.  A true leader in the Oval Office can bring to focus a power no dictator, no monarch has ever known: the power to both rouse and lead the nation; to both generate and harvest an irresistible force called “the will of the people” simply by the skillful and honest use of moral integrity.  That is the common key to what made all four of our greatest presidents great.  It is for all their differences what they all shared.

George Herbert Walker Bush, like Carter, seemed to me to be lost and adrift.  Good at the foreign policy and intelligence areas in which he had experience, he floundered domestically, never “connecting” with Americans.

William Jefferson Clinton I liked, though I knew he was just a surfer on a wave; a lottery winner through no fault of his own upon whom fate smiled again and again.  He is the finest retail politician of the post-WW2 era and a Madison Avenue huckster.  He flowed with the political tide, a surfer as I said.  I expected nothing great from him and he produced nothing great, but I feared him not.  100 years from now he will be thought a third tier president.  His co-president Hillary Rodham Clinton, however, scared me to death.  A more ruthless, partisan, ideological political animal I’d never seen outside the USSR and China.  Hill was the very first of the hyper-partisans who now populate both sides of the American landscape.  She was the template, and the one person I’d deem most likely to declare herself, once elected, as ‘President for Life.’

George Walker Bush was a throwback to another era.  A man of great heart, he was a classic centrist stuck in an increasingly hyper-partisan age.  He would have made a fine president in the early 1900s or in the 1950s, as “Bush43″ resembled in my mind no one so much as Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Dwight David Eisenhower.  Bush43 was a Republican Harry S. Truman, who like Truman in his day was hated by the Loud Left and maligned as a RINO by the Raging Right.  He was a man who could partner with Ted Kennedy on “No Child”  while tactically destroying the Democrats in the 2006 Congressional midterm elections.

Then there’s Barack Hussein Obama, a man I think it easiest to comprehend by comparison to the eight men who occupied the presidency before him.

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Unlike Bush43, Obama is a dogmatic, hyper-partisan ideologue.  The vast majority of his legislative agenda was passed with Democrat input and votes alone.  The GOP was shut out of the conversation, closed out of debate, locked out of the process almost completely.  Obama is incapable of compromise with the GOP because he is willing to give nothing in return.  The “zeitgeist” of his administration is “win totally or do nothing and blame the GOP”.

Like Bill Clinton, Obama is an excellent retail politician.  But where Bill truly connected with Jane and Joe American, Obama finds us a bit comical and mildly repulsive, and for this reason seems cold and aloof.  And unlike every previous president, Obama has no close allies among international leaders.  Obama is much more like co-president Hillary than President Bill.  Obama is completely, utterly politicized.  There is no other guiding principle to his disingenuously centrist campaign rhetoric and autocratic, hyper-partisan legislative agenda.

This cynical political calculus is used to value everything: the death of four men in Benghazi; the cost in lives of running guns in Mexico; the cost in jobs from Keystone Pipeline delays and many more issues … the calculus focuses solely on getting and holding power.  How many votes.  How much in campaign contributions gained or lost.  The impact on the next election.  Winning the House.  Holding the Senate. The human impact is irrelevant.  Yes, the words are mournful when necessary but the actions are invariably cold.

In this regard Obama is totally the opposite of the overly emotional Bush41.  Obama shares Bush41′s lack of connection with the heartland of America but also lacks the compensation of Bush41′s command of foreign policy and intelligence expertise.

Comparing Obama to Reagan creates an interesting paradox, because Reagan is the “transformative” president President Obama has openly stated is his model.  This wasn’t just empty centrist rhetoric.  There are startling similarities.  Both rode in on waves of economic and national distress.  Both won significant victories, legislatively, in their first terms … although Reagan’s leadership and command of the “voice of the people” was such that he won his victories compromising with a Democrat-ruled Congress, while Obama had total control of both Houses, simply dictating law.  Both men fostered revolutionary ideas and won great ideological victories.  There are startling dissimilarities as well.

Reagan was direct with words, consistent with ideals between his campaign rhetoric and legislative agenda; clear with desires and willing to compromise on details and conditions, earning trust from Democrats and Republicans alike.  Reagan’s legendary drinking buddy was Thomas Philip “Tip” O’Neill, as tough a Democrat House Speaker as ever slammed a gavel.  Obama is manipulative with words.  His campaign rhetoric bears little resemblance to his actions and decisions.  He is unwilling to compromise on anything, has no friends in the House or Senate, and has earned the distrust of even his strongest progressive supporters on many issues.

In the 2002, 2004 and 2006 elections Democrats ran toward Reagan, seeking to link themselves with this great man in order to get re-elected.  In the 2010 and 2012 elections Democrats ran away from Obama and the signature legislation of his first term, ObamaCare, disclaiming even the votes they cast to pass it.  Joe Manchin (D, PA) went so far as to shoot bullet holes in the massive law to portray his opposition.

Some differences reflect love of country.  Where Reagan loved and embraced the US Constitution, Obama has routinely ignored it or “reinterpreted” it.  Reagan thought the Oval Office hallowed ground, demanding coat and tie from any man entering it.  Obama routinely abuses the furniture.

Where Reagan came to represent all the American people hoped and dreamed for themselves and their children, Obama has come to represent the sum of all their fears.

Carter and Obama are routinely compared, but frankly I think this is lame.  Carter was clueless, lost in the weeds.  Obama has been anything but lost and knows exactly what he’s doing.  To think of Obama as Carter’s clone is a huge mistake.  Nor has Obama been a cypher as was Ford.  Obama, on the contrary, has had a massive impact on the nation.

Which brings me to the president I think most resembles, explains, and illuminates Obama: Richard Milhous Nixon.  Both men thought of the law as more of a guideline than an obligation, more of an option than a requirement … both being willing to do whatever was necessary to acquire a desired end.  For Nixon and Obama, much more than for any other president, ”the ends justify the means.”  Nixon had no calculus save politics and Obama clearly shares this trait.  Nixon never really cared about the human tragedies that surrounded him unless it impacted him personally or politically … nor does Obama.  Both quickly stonewalled any political liability or embarrassment and “moved on”.

To the point I made way up at the top of this rant about the “zeitgeist” of a presidency, both men fostered and abetted and rewarded that mindset that famously found voice in Nixon’s ”I am not a crook” and in Hillary Clinton’s “What difference does it make at this point?”, a statement I think perfectly characterizes the central tenet of both Nixon’s and Obama’s presidencies.  The politically inconvenient deaths of four men six months prior to Hill’s infamous rant draws “what difference does it make” from the same Obama administration mindset that still routinely blames its failures on the Bush43 administration now five years gone.  That same mindset that had Nixon using the IRS to attack his “enemies” is evident in the politically motivated IRS assaults on Tea Party organizations last year.

President Obama has transformed America, using Reagan as his model, of that there is no question.  But to achieve that he’s used not the compromising approach and healing tools of Ronald Reagan but the dictatorial mentality and vindictive tools of Richard Nixon.

In my mind, to call this president “Barack Hussein Nixon” would perfectly locate him in the annals of American presidential history.

(Postscript: since I wrote this May 8th the MSM has suddenly exploded with “BHO as RMN” stories and blogs, including this Sunday cartoon by Michael Ramirez, which makes me look like a “me too”.  But I swear on my Mother’s grave I got there first … LMAO!!!!)

Unemployment and underemployment among the young has been much in the news.  None of the pundits get to the root of the problem, however.  They blame global trends.  Diseases.  Affirmative action.  Sexism.  Single parent families.  Every sociological condition you can think of.  None blame the young, the so-called teachers who pamper them and the schools that grind out illiterates and incompetents.

This is a very personal rant.  It’s about grade inflation K-12 and at university.  It may not hold a lot of value for many of you, especially if you are: 1) old enough that you never experienced it, that is, old enough to remember Ds and Fs being routinely affixed to inferior and non-existent academic work, respectively or 2) young enough that a grade range of ‘A to B’ was (or is) the standard in your academic career, with ‘incomplete’ being the only politically correct alternative.  No apology, however, if you just tuned out and clicked away to something more “visually stimulating” or more emotionally inciting.

Grade inflation is at the root of our jobs problem.  Not “sociological conditions.”  There is a cyclical component to having 20-25% of the young unemployed or underemployed, of course.  Cyclical simply means temporary, and this set of problems will eventually fade as economies improve.  But there is also a deep, systemic component … a set of issues that are not created solely by the economic mess our western governments are in and that will not fade away as “things improve”.  The systemic issues have to do with the skills the young actually possess relative to the skills the world increasingly demands for personal and professional success.  The two skill sets do not match.

This systemic mismatch is also referred to as being “structural” by some economists and analysts.  Call it systemic or structural, the meaning is the same: we are spitting functionally and personally incompetent young people out of our schools in droves.  They are all supremely self-confident and most are supremely ill-equipped.  Worse, the ill-equipped do not wish to be retrained to any degree of functional expertise because they have become convinced by years of false praise and unwarranted As and Bs that they do not need retraining.  They routinely become insulted when confronted with their failures, cop an arrogant attitude and blame the messenger.

“Corporations aren’t hiring” is the phrase I most often hear from the young themselves and defensive parents alike.  “Corporations aren’t hiring arrogant incompetents” with Summa Cum Laude degrees in Gender Studies and Psychology and Environmental Policy is closer to the truth.

I spent over 30 years in university classrooms, entirely at the junior, senior and MBA levels (full disclosure, I always taught ‘adjunct’, part-time).  My area was investments, finance, and economics.  In the 1970s and early 1980s it was not uncommon for me to be impressed with the routine depth of knowledge, real world insight and obvious talent of my classes.  My superiors expected me to award grades on merit; to reflect their high personal standards.  Not once prior to the late 1990s did I ever get ‘push back’ or ‘guidance’ about grading to any sort of “norm”.

By the time I left university teaching in 2001 such ‘grading guidance’ had become routine.  A certain percentage of students had to be As, Bs, an occasional C.  Ds and Fs were routinely migrated to ’incomplete’ and students were encouraged to make up the work the next semester.  Inferior work by an individual student was considered as being half my fault.  I was expected to tutor and accommodate them.

In the 1970s I could give essay tests and expect reasonably competent, cogent essays in return.  In the 1980s I could still expect organized, focused paragraphs.  In the early 1990s I was delighted with well written sentences.  By the late 1990s I stopped giving essay tests altogether.  I love the classroom and I love teaching, a passion and a lifelong hobby and something I was pretty good at, but I don’t miss walking the boards at university.

If you want to know why vast numbers of under-30s are unemployed and underemployed, working at Starbucks instead of DuPont and Xilinx, still living in Mom and Dad’s basement … while thousands of corporations, like Texas Instruments for example, are begging for talent in just about every area of their business … if you wonder why companies like Google and Cisco are screaming for more HB-1 working visas allowing talented foreign-born technologists and managers into the US … look no further than the grade inflation that has corroded our schools in the last 15-20 years.

When the cyclical problems fade away, as eventually they always do, the systemic/structural problems, problems of basic individual competence, will still remain.  Grade inflation drives performance deflation, and it’s to the point now where that incompetence has become a generational hallmark and a threat to the economic health of the country.

I haven’t written anything for a week.  I usually get ginned up about something, start digging for data and just go from there to wherever the data leads me.  I usually have posts in the queue for the Domain a week ahead … partly because I’m the world’s worst proof-reader and partly because I need that week to get the stupidity edited out.  But it’s Friday the 3d as I write this, for posting Monday the 6th.  Typos and stupidity and all.  You are warned.

Writer’s block comes along occasionally.  One never knows when it will hit.  Sometimes you’re just too comfortable to write.  You watch the Rangers beat the Red Sox 7-0, have a good wine with a great dinner and just smile.  Sometimes, OTOH, the contradictions of the world just leave me, and perhaps you as well, with the sense that there is no “system” worth writing about; no consistency and no reason and no rational thinking underlying anything: markets, politics, religion, social conventions … anything.  That for all our vaunted intelligence the world is just noise and scrambling around and rationalized chaos.  The last couple weeks have been exemplary for being totally senseless.

I’m a materialist and a scientist at heart.  Senselessness is the ultimate frustration to one like me who seeks rationality in the world.  It’s left me sort of emotionally and intellectually numb.  I mean, what’s the use of being ‘data driven’ when the data’s contrived and mutilated for political purposes; what truth can be dug out of propaganda?  What’s the point if the actions of my fellow humans are irrational and the policies that guide governments are so disconnected from reality as to be the stuff of daydreams?

The Boston Marathon bombing, of course, is the headline.  The entire framework of “jihad”, of terrorist bombings and killings, is as deeply ignorant, as fully dysfunctional and as totally inexplicable as anything humankind has ever embraced.  I’ve listened to moderate ”Islamists” and western progressives and conservatives and politicians and apologists of all emotional stripes try to explain what drives and motivates random maiming and killing by jihadists, and it’s all unadulterated crap.

It’s either logic twisted or cowardice verbalized or sympathy rationalized or Quran-thumping or a combination of the four, but in the end it’s all crap.  One individual randomly killing another … a total stranger or a dozen total strangers … is not a “statement” of any kind.  It means nothing.  It’s never “understandable”.  It isn’t “justified” by historic grudges.  It doesn’t point to some larger truth, isn’t valid on any possible legal grounds and is not “culturally intelligible” on sociopolitical level.

That western progressives who rail against war in all its forms are precisely the ones quickest to deflect or defend acts of terror as being somehow culturally justified … saying that somehow western society is getting what it deserves, is guilty of causing Jihadi bombing and killing as an understandable cultural retribution … just makes my brain explode!

The only cause of terrorist acts is the profound ignorance and murderous emotional instability of the Jihadi mind.  There is a sect within Islam that is a megalomaniacal death cult, a sect the kin of which does not exist within any other major world religion.  Death cultists don’t have “causes”, as Eric Hoffer famously pointed out 70-odd years ago in “The True Believer“.  Death cultists kill mindlessly in order to be initiated into the death cult.

There is, therefore, no rationale and no excuse for these random, lethal actions.  Zero.  None.  Nada.  We expose our own damaged psyches when we try to invent rational explanations for them and this is doubly so for western progressives arguing the ruins of war on the one hand and culturally justified jihad on the other.

President Obama’s and the progressive left’s reluctance to finger Islamists as the central core of terrorism … not just in Boston but more generally … Obama’s initial statement that the bombers were probably domestic rightwing tax or abortion protesters, and progressives instant embrace of one or more of my crap explanations above in trying to shift blame for the murderous attack of Islamists in Benghazi away from their mindlessly homicidal dogma and onto an obscure American’s video … reflects the emotional contradictions and ironic ideological ignorance the President and all progressives harbor.

Then there’s the total insanity of the markets, which just leaves me sitting here gape-jawed and fascinated.  Deliberate self-imposed ignorance always leaves me a bit stunned. There is no reasonable explanation for why so many millions of otherwise intelligent investors are willing to suspend disbelief … forget 200 years of market history and the truisms that bear and bull markets have taught … and just pile mindlessly into stocks and bonds.  I’ve listened to the justifications of the market gurus and pundits on CNBC and Fox Business Channel, read them in the WSJ and IBD.  They are all crap.  They aren’t new and it isn’t different this time.

In 1999, for instance, during the “technology bubble” I heard all the last generation of crap-spewing experts saying “earnings don’t matter; positive cash flow doesn’t matter; what matters is “eyeballs” and “burn rate”.”  As long as clicks were growing 400% a year and revenues 200% a year it didn’t matter that expenses were rising 600% a year and cash was being “burned though”.  That, of course, was incomparably stupid crap.  I sold tech stocks heavily in 1999 and 2000, funding a 15 year bond ladder with zero coupon bonds.  I was a laughingstock in many circles at the time.  Nobody wants to talk about that anymore.

Today what I’m hearing is “fundamentals don’t matter; falling revenues don’t matter; massive unemployment doesn’t matter; Europe’s zombie economies don’t matter; American deficits don’t matter; what matters is central banks pumping trillions of newly minted $ and € and ¥ and £ into the atmosphere; what matters is printing enough money to paper over necessary stimulus spending.”

As long as fiat money is flooding into the aether reality can be suspended, common sense abandoned and reason ignored.  We can all live happily ever after cradled in the loving arms of the Federal Reserve and its global cabal of central banks.  This, of course, is total, utter, complete, financially deadly crap.  It requires a willful, deliberate, conscious decision to reject reality, of which I am incapable.  Until someone is able to explain to me how we as a nation and a world can mint our way to prosperity, how real wealth arises out of the process of converting paper and ink into increasingly more worthless currency, I will continue to call it crap and marvel at what existential fear makes humans capable of doing and believing.

So over the last week this is all I’ve written.  Not data driven.  If you expected more, tough.  No apologies.  We’ve walked ourselves into a world Orwell would instantly recognize, where if we are to survive all truths must be declared vile lies and all vile lies held firmly as the unquestionable truth.  If George was around right now he might write something like this.