The Bosque Boys

For years, Reagan detractors have tenaciously clung to a memory that portrays the "Great Communicator" not so subtly appealing to white racists by kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the infamous scene of the horrific murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

Last week in the New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert asserted that Reagan "was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon."

Herbert's analysis (in full here):

"Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

"He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about 'states’ rights' to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you."

In an op-ed piece in the Times today (Sunday), long-time Ronald Reagan chronicler, Lou Cannon, rejects "the notion that...Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters."

Cannon writes:

"The mythology of Neshoba is wrong in two distinct ways. First, Ronald Reagan was not a racist. Second, his Neshoba speech was not an effective symbolic appeal to white voters. Instead, it was a political misstep that cost him support."

The article (in full here) is worth the read. No one knew the real Ronald Reagan better than Cannon as a reporter and subsequent biographer. In addition to his testimony to Reagan's character, Cannon makes an important point that the appeal to race (such as it was) in Neshoba County played no positive role in the election. He also reminds us that the negative publicity surrounding the incident emanated from the Carter campaign, which quickly seized upon the embarrassing appearance immediately and spun the incident into a long-lasting negative Reagan myth. Cannon also reminds us that Reagan was not born a candidate with perfect political pitch; rather, the "Great Communicator" grew into the job.

An aside: Gordon Wood tells a story about George Washington in which his contemporaries imagined that he was born into this world fully clothed and, upon arrival, quickly executed a flawless gentlemanly bow before his audience. It is sometimes hard to keep in mind the human limitations of our heroes

Having said all that, Cannon does not completely exonerate Reagan in my mind. The question remains: ultimately unsuccessful or not, what message was the candidate attempting to convey with this clumsy stop so near to the tragic events of the summer of 1964?

Important Item: The well-argued defense of Reagan at Neshoba by David Brooks earlier in the month here.

Josef Pieper, the Thomist philospher and professor at the University of Munster, wrote

As we all know, under [the conditions of tyranny] no one dares to trust anyone else. Candid communication dries up; and there arises that special kind of unhealthy wordlessness which is not silence so much as muteness. This is what happens to human intercourse under the peculiar pressures of dictatorship. Under conditions of freedom, however, human beings speak uninhibitedly to one another. How illuminating this contrast is! For in the face of it, we suddenly become aware of the degree of human closeness, mutual affirmation, communion, that resides in the simple fact that people listen to each other.

Every healthy community puts some boundaries on free speech: no incitement to riot or shouting of fire where there is none. Such restrictions are not tyranny, rather they are the protection of liberty against anarchy. Similarly healthy communities have protections against libel, and requirements for truth, such as in court proceedings. Again, these are not hinderances but aids to ordered liberty. Communities may even hold some words and phrases to be slanderous in and of themselves, offensive to human dignity, and not to be used, such as the N word. Again, restrictions such as this are not tyrannical, but safeguards of true liberty, for their use historically has been to restrict the freedom of those so termed.

But, for healthy community to flourish, as Dr. Pieper points out, people must be free to speak and willing to listen. Conversely, an unhealthy muteness replaces genuine community when under tyranny people are afraid to speak. I think he here specifically refers to our own testimony to events, experiences, perceptions, and especially to ideas.

Of the many bad effects the tyranny of "political correctness" brings, I think the worst is the destruction of human community as we lapse into unhealthy wordlessness over certain issues. Farmer recently pointed out the Cost of Free Speech. What he meant, of course, were the consequences of raising forbidden perceptions and ideas: censure, career damage, labelling. Because of these consequences, most simply do not speak about certain things, becoming mute. And certainly those who are "enlightened" will not listen to another human being if forbidden perceptions or ideas are spoken. Human community is destroyed. Trust is lost.

I first called Mitch McConnell the "new master of the senate" on February 9, 2007. Ten days later, the headline atop a Fred Barnes piece in the Weekly Standard enshrined the moniker publicly. Of course, I am not looking for credit. We all borrowed the label from Robert Caro's LBJ biography, the third volume of which chronicled Johnson's Senate years.

My point: Mitch McConnell and his leadership brings something very special to the Republican Party (for review: this thread includes three of my earlier posts concerning the Minority Leader).

Listening to McConnell on Hugh Hewitt's show last night, I was reminded that the senior senator from Kentucky is in a real race for reelection in 2008. Democrats are going to run strong across the nation with plenty of money, enthusiasm, and momentum. Moreover, they are gunning for McConnell.

We lost three great Republican senators in 2006: Rick Santorum, Mike DeWine, and Jim Talent. Those were tragic, epic losses.

The GOP may not return to the majority in 2008, but we will someday. And when we do, we are going to need the leadership of Mitch McConnell.

Here is his campaign website: Team Mitch. Join Team Mitch today!

Some quick notes on the Democratic debate in Las Vegas (the rebroadcast of which I watched beginning at 5:35 this morning on C-SPAN2):

1. When Barack Obama finally had to answer the "driver's license for illegals" question, his position proved even more confusing and seemingly half-baked (even with two weeks to think about it) than Mrs. Clinton's now famous hiccup.

2. All candidates seem to agree that if we just get the federal government MORE involved in education, everything will be coming up roses. Most of them don't like "no child left behind," which up until now has been the most extensive federal intervention in education ever. Why? The current program is tainted by Bush fingerprints. No surprise there. One thing on which they all agree: the President has never done anything right. But they all promise to get a centrally managed national education infrastructure off the ground and correctly supervised, which will solve all current problems. By the way, they also agree that the teachers unions are doing a heckuva job.

3. Bill Richardson said (in essence, twice) "democracy and human rights" in foreign lands trumped vital national interests. Obama and a few others said we could do both. The adults (Hillary Clinton being one of them) explained that our hallowed American principles should drive foreign policy, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive with national interest--but, sometimes, they diverge. When this happens, a president takes an oath to protect national interests (not promote democracy and human rights abroad). It was a telling exchange.

4. Richardson, Kucinich, and Obama all called the "surge" a failed strategy and called for an immediate withdrawal of US troops in Iraq. Mercifully, Clinton was not asked to comment on the obvious success of the surge. I would have liked to hear her answer.

5. Hillary nailed the "gender card" response. Wolf Blitzer asked if anyone else wanted to follow her. Everyone but John Edwards wisely stayed mum. Edwards, the most feminine candidate on the stage, prattled on a bit about equality and fairness and then tailed off. Did I hear a niner in there?

6. Hillary is back. Obama and Edwards are where they have always been (number two and a distant third, respectively).

7. CNN was okay. Wolf Blitzer is not nearly as talented as Tim Russert or Brian Williams, but he is a pleasant fellow. The audience participation portion was worthless. Anyone want to talk about questions that are stiff and staged? They were all out of central casting in terms of what Democrats think Americans look like.

Nobody Knows Anything--but here goes nothing:

The Party of Jackson:

There are four people in this world who might possibly win the Democratic nomination for 2008. One is too fat physically, mentally, and socially. One is too green (the wrong color to be when up against a lean, mean, fighting machine). One is too light (if he were a Republican running for president in 2000, we would have said, "he lacked gravitas"). That leaves the most manly competitor of the Democratic field, Hillary Clinton.

FYI: I know nothing of the debate tonight. History is unfolding as I write, which may be making my predictions obsolete.

The Party of Lincoln:

Rudy is out. Forget about the polls. I love Rudy. I really do. But every passing day makes it clearer and clearer to me that Rudy is not the kind of fellow who takes the GOP nomination. He is too New York. He is too lawyerly. He is on his third marriage. His kids don't seem to like him. Bernie Kerik. Judith Regan. Gun Control. Pro Choice. Not going to happen. Rudy for AG. Rudy for DHS. But never on a GOP ticket.

John McCain is still out. He is a fighter. He would have been a great president. He is smart. He is tough. He understands the art of the deal. But he is a non-starter at this point.

Mike Huckabee is the fresh-faced wild card. He will make an impact--but he probably doesn't have the foundation for a legitimate run at the big time. He will be exciting, but, in the end, he probably falls well short.

Mitt Romney has a great strategy and a lot of money. Although he is nowhere in the polls right now, his campaign is the smartest and best funded. He could take off in Iowa and New Hampshire, gain momentum, and stampede the competition. The Mormon thing is a minor nuisance. I continue to believe his religion is a non-issue for most people. Would it come up eventually? Yes. If nominated, Democrats would make sure every evangelical in America knew Romney was Mormon--and we would find out more about Mormonism between Labor Day and Halloween than we had learned over a lifetime. Remember how John Kerry and John Edwards both took great pains to interject Mary Cheney's homosexuality into the national debates? We would see a plethora of Mormon stories from all angles, all the while bemoaning the fact that so many Americans were still so closed minded. Double prizes. Submarine the GOP candidate while spreading ugly stereotypes about GOP voters. But I don't think it gets that far. Romney is too Massachusetts. He has too many center-left skeletons in his closet. I can see how he wins the nomination--but my gut feeling is that he will not.

This leaves Fred. He has a horrible organization and he his currently running the worst campaign. But he is the best candidate. That is, he is the most convincing, most likable, most consistent conservative in the race. He very likely wins by default. After everybody else craters, Fred takes the part.

I hate to mention this--but things are so crazy this year, I think it is actually possible, for the first time since 1976, to have a convention in which the winner is not apparent going in. Things are so murky that several candidates might emerge and split votes in the front-loaded primaries, leaving several candidates with healthy delegate totals but not a majority. If that unlikely eventuality comes to pass, then the convention would be a throwback to something from the last century, and some other prominent Republican might likely emerge as the GOP standard bearer. But that's probably just wishful thinking from the historian in me.

Ohhhh yeah. Muscle cars. I know lust is wrong, but man oh man what beauties. And if I were a rich man, duh duh dee dee dee dee duh, I'd have this baby, a '56 T-Bird. Or, maybe this one, a Jaguar XJ12 (the 12 means 12 cylinders.) And I want this one too, a 1954 GMC pickup.

From the Washington Post:

House Approves Bill Linking War Funds, Troop Withdrawals

"The House yesterday approved a war funding bill that directs President Bush to withdraw most troops from Iraq by the end of next year, escalating a feud between the White House and congressional Democrats over spending priorities in wartime.

"The measure...passed 218 to 203...."

The Senate is likely to torpedo the bill this week. In the event something miraculous happens and the measure passes the Upper Chamber, the President will quickly veto and the process will restart.

Again?

Republican Mike Pence offered a succinct summary to this increasingly tiresome charade:

"With unambiguous evidence of progress on the ground in Iraq, the Democrats in Congress have seemed to add denial to the agenda of retreat and defeat."

Fifteen Democrats with good sense and an extra integrity chromosome decided NOT to participate in this latest Nancy, John, and Rahm tea party. Unfortunately, my congressman (George Bush's congressman), Chet Edwards, was not one of the stout-hearted few.

You would think Chet could throw us a bone on a vote this meaningless.

This session has proved incredibly disappointing (perhaps humiliating is a better word) for Chet's erstwhile Republican backers.

Here in Oklahoma we are celebrating our centennial. (Well, white Oklahoma is, but that's a different story.) As part of the festivities many towns are writing local histories, some even performing plays and pageants based on their stories. One such community is Ada, in south-central Oklahoma. Here is an excerpt from the Ada Evening News.

In 1909, Ada was a thriving little town of 5,000 that had the reputation of being one of the toughest places in the whole Southwest. The west end of Ada’s Main Street was lined with bootlegging dives, and the town had 36 murders during 1908. Crime went unpunished, for the most part. Moman Pruiett was a brilliant criminal lawyer in Pauls Valley who had defended 343 persons charged with murder and, with his flamboyant way of charming juries, had succeeded in gaining acquittals for 303 of them.

The town was full of gunfighters employed by one of two factions that had long been feuding. On one side was Gus Bobbitt and on the other side were Joe Allen and Jesse West. Constant warfare went on between the two sides. Ada was a frontier town trying to resolve itself into some semblance of law and order, and though there were some who were determined to have respectability prevail, they were in a tough spot.

Gus Bobbitt began to curry favor with the law-abiding element and was successful in gaining a better reputation. He had served as a U.S. Marshall during the Cleveland administration, and he was a Mason, a strong organization in Ada. Bobbitt’s wife, three sons and a daughter had the approval of the social set, which was a big point in Bobbitt’s favor.
. . . When Bobbitt was assassinated
Further investigation indicated that Bobbitt’s old enemies, Joe Allen and Jesse West, had hired Miller to kill Bobbitt. Miller was caught near Fort Worth and brought to Ada by George Culver, Ada’s police chief. Allen and West were arrested shortly thereafter along with a man named B.B. Burrell who had acted as an intermediary between Miller and his employers. They were all in the Pontotoc county jail.

Miller laughed at the nervousness of Allen and West who, knowing Ada, were concerned about their fate. Miller continued to dress well and to eat well, having food sent over from the Elite Café. He wanted all to know that they had hired the Pauls Valley lawyer, Moman Pruiett, and that they would be exonerated of charges.

On a Sunday night in April, Ada’s electricity and telephone service were cut off and a group of between 40 and 50 men came into the jail, overpowered and tied up the guards and took out the four men being held for the Bobbitt murder. They took these prisoners to the old Frisco barn about 30 feet from the jail and hanged them with ropes from the rafters in the barn. Then the group of nameless citizens who had their bellies full of lawlessness in Ada dispersed down an alley to their homes. No news ever leaked about their identity.

Vigilante Justice was common on the frontier, as ordinary means of law enforcement proved inadequate to the challenge. And this during the days before "criminal rights", when bounties sometimes were placed on the heads of wanted men, dead or alive. Perhaps the most famous example of the rewards put on outlaws was the $10,000 offered for Jesse James by Missouri governor Crittenden, which prompted a member of James' own gang to shoot him for the reward. After the Civil War violence plagued my home state of Missouri until bounties were placed on wanted men, dead or alive.(more below)

» Read More

Tom Friedman has a bizarre column in the NYT today:

"Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda"

He posits:

"On Sept. 11, 2001, the OPEC basket oil price was $25.50 a barrel. On Nov. 13, 2007, the OPEC basket price was around $90 a barrel."

Ouch. You have my attention.

More Friedman:

"In the wake of 9/11, some of us pleaded for a 'patriot tax' on gasoline of $1 or more a gallon to diminish the transfers of wealth we were making to the very countries who were indirectly financing the ideologies of intolerance that were killing Americans and in order to spur innovation in energy efficiency by U.S. manufacturers.

"But no, George Bush and Dick Cheney had a better idea. And the Democrats went along for the ride. They were all going to let the market work and not let our government shape that market — like OPEC does."

As Friedman notes, obviously the President's path proved rocky. But then Friedman makes this outlandish series of counter-factual claims based on the assertions of two economists:

If the feds had instituted a one-dollar per gallon tax on gasoline back in late 2001...

1. We could have replaced the current payroll tax with a gasoline tax. Middle-class consumers would have seen increased take-home pay of between six and nine percent, even though they would have had to pay more at the pump.

2. A stronger foundation for future economic growth would have been laid by keeping more oil revenue home, and we might not now be facing a recession.

3. As a higher gas tax discouraged oil consumption, the price of oil would fall in world markets. As a result, the price of gas to [U.S.] consumers would rise by less than the increase in the tax.

4. The U.S. consumers would have known that, with a higher gasoline tax locked in for good, pump prices would never be going back to the old days, so they would have a much stronger incentive to switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles and Detroit would have had to make more hybrids to survive. This would have put Detroit five years ahead of where it is now.

Run that by me again. I am no economist--but I want to know why a one-dollar tax increase would have initiated market forces, but a two-dollar increase in the actual price has not. Moreover, why would another dollar increase at this point stimulate us toward a wiser energy policy when the two-dollar increase we currently bemoan has made almost no impact on our culture or politics?

On the other hand, if we want to play the "what if" and "crystal ball" game, we might also speculate that a one-dollar tax increase in 2001 or 2002 very likely would have exacerbated the recession we were actually in back then. We might never have had a recovery to lose. We might also assume that China and other emerging economies would have continued to expand at the same rate of growth. We can safely assume that we would have faced the same impasse in Congress in re expanding refining capacity, and surely we would have suffered Katrina even with a tax increase. It is hard to see how a one-dollar per gallon tax increase would have been the magic elixir as advertised by Tom Friedman.

I am all for energy independence. But I'll pass on the snake oil.

Democrats claim that under the Bush administration America has lost standing with the rest of the world. I wonder who, exactly, they are talking about. Voters in Germany and France have elected leaders who support U.S. policy. Great Britain still does, though not as vocally as under Tony Blair. And now Denmark has re-elected pro-U.S. Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen. Story here on Gateway Pundit. Meanwhile several Eastern European nations would like U.S. NATO forces based in their countries.