home  |  book  |

The Politics of the Social Safety Net Cupcakes in Greenwich Schools

print view

Not Another Bipartisan Betrayal

by Christopher Chantrill
August 19, 2008 at 6:44 pm

|

IN THE WEEK that the last of the climate-change “hockey stick” finally disappeared into Steve McIntyre’s wood-chipper, it makes complete sense that a gang of five Republican United States Senators would form a cabal with five Democratic senators to betray the Republican base on energy. It makes sense that they’d hand Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) a get-out-of-jail card on oil drilling that is short on drilling and long on alternative energy subsidies. And it makes complete sense that they would be completely shocked when Mr. Conservative, Rush Limbaugh, went ballistic on them.

Actually, Rush didn’t go ballistic. He felt, as all of us must feel, a kind of numbness. That is what usually happens when you have been betrayed: a deadening numbness.

It’s a pity that our Republican Senators don’t act more like Radames, the hero of Verdi’s Aïda. When he realizes that he’s betrayed Egypt by revealing vital military secrets to the Ethiopians he just hands himself over to the Egyptian G-men, singing, at the top of his voice, that he has dishonored himself.

In due course, the dishonored Radames submits humbly to the verdict of ancient Egyptian law: to die by asphyxiation in the Tomb of the Unknown Traitor.

What happened to good old-fashioned American honor, senators?

How could they do it?

Like Radames, I doubt if they realized what they were doing. In Radames’ case, he was too consumed with his obsession for the lovely Aïda to think clearly about public policy. This is not the first time that such a thing has happened, and it won’t be the last, as former Senator John Edwards can testify.

No, I suspect that they were just doing what any decent politician does instinctively. They were acting to save their political skins.

Whatever we stalwarts in the conservative base may think, your average senator understands that he can’t afford to get too far away from the “consensus” position on energy, environment, and global warming.

It doesn’t matter to a United States Senator that Steve McIntyre has finally got hold of the Supplementary Information in that well-known climate-change paper Wahl and Amman (2007), after a year of demanding it. It doesn’t matter that he has now analyzed the methodology that Caspar Amman used to validate the tree-ring temperature proxy series that formed the shaft of the hockey stick. And it doesn’t matter that Amman’s methodology seems to amount to the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, where you fire a bunch of shots at the side of a barn and then decide where to draw the target.

You and I, committed members of the climate denial community, understand that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chaps are now playing on a very sticky wicket, and that their confident claims that the science is settled on global warming are going to come in for some significant revision in the months and years ahead.

But our elected solons live in a different reality. They cannot take out long-term speculative positions on climate science. They must deal in the spot market of today’s MSM “consensus” position. They can lean a little one way or another. But if they stray too far from the “conventional wisdom” they risk being made into a laughingstock by the political-activist community. They risk the obloquy that attaches to Sen. James Inhofe (D-OK).

Republican senators are worried about political risks beyond energy and global warming, of course. They are bound to be worried by the gloating of lefty Greg Anrig In the Washington Post. It’s all over for conservatives, Anrig sneered in the August 4 edition.

[Conservatives] advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes...

But in practice, those ideas have all failed to deliver on the promises the conservatives made[.]

You can just look at Hurricane Katrina, Anrig writes, to see just how badly conservatives failed to deliver.

Any elected politician can see which way the wind blows on all this. The prudent thing to do is to hedge your bets.

But conservatives should take courage, even in the numbness of betrayal. Ultimately the senatorial tap-dancing and the WaPo gloating don’t matter. It is the slow, careful analysis of people like Steve McIntyre and the underlying value of conservative ideas that matter. If they are right, then they will probably prevail over the long haul. If they are wrong, then they deserve to fail and be forgotten.

As for Radames, don’t forget that when he was thrown into the sealed tomb he quickly found that he wasn’t going to die alone in there. The lovely Aïda had slipped into the tomb unobserved during his trial. No need to feel sorry for him.

As for the Faithless Five—Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), John Thune (R-SD), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), and Bob Corker (R-TN)—I suppose we’ll forgive them. According to Arthur C. Brooks, you have to be “very liberal” to be really angry these days.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact