Today in 1960, Roy Orbison had his first number one single:
Today in 1962, the number one single in the U.S. was a song banned by the BBC:
The number one single today in 1973:
Today in 1977, four members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and two others were killed when their plane crashed near McComb, Miss.:
Someone on Facebook said everyone has to watch Ken Burns’ latest documentary on the Vietnam War.
That would be reason number one to not watch, of course. Reason number two is that I remember enough of it from watching TV and from living in the People’s Republic of Madison, where Vietnam protests (including one fatal protest, the 1970 UW–Madison Sterling Hall bombing), without actually being there.
(For what it’s worth, I was told by a Vietnam veteran that the movie “Full Metal Jacket” was in his opinion the most accurate portrayal of Vietnam up to 1988, better than “Platoon,” “Casualties of War” and “The Boys in Company C.” He didn’t mention “Apocalypse Now,” which weirdly has gone from being an antiwar film to being, in some eyes, a pro-war film, perhaps because “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”)
Indeed, it was literally impossible to avoid the Vietnam War in Madison even 20 years after the war ended. Every potential and actual conflict (Grenada, Panama, Iraq) was always labeled as the next Vietnam. Protesting a war that was already finished by 1975 included libels of American soldiers who had nothing to do with policy formulated in Washington, and who, as we should have been able to figure out, mostly came back from Vietnam no worse off than soldiers of previous American wars.
Vietnam War veteran Phillip Jenkins writes things that will make liberal Madison (but I repeat myself) readers scream, which is why I am posting this:
The arguments Mr. Burns presents are weak, biased, and insulting. The documentary is scripted to evoke sorrow and moral indignation over what was presented as American error, ineptness, and lack of moral purpose.
The narrative counterposes happy and earnest winners (the communists) with sad and angst-ridden losers (America and the South Vietnamese). It deemed only such perspectives worthy of inclusion. Mr. Burns fails to find even one American or South Vietnamese veteran who wholly supported the war, was proud to have appeared in arms, and sickened by the United States’ abandonment its freedom-seeking ally.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of us.
No doubt, too, there were North Vietnamese who are critical of the brutality of the communist conduct of the war, but Mr. Burns can’t find them either. We have no way of knowing whether the happy and earnest communist veterans who did appear in the documentary participated in the war crimes — the execution of thousands of civilians — in Hue or any of the countless acts of North Vietnamese-sponsored terrorism.
The Burns documentary accepts without question five pillars of the liberal view of the war:
- There was moral equivalency between the U.S. and Communist forces, and the goals and objectives of the respective governments.
No there wasn’t. Communist North Vietnam invaded a South Vietnam striving for democracy. The South Vietnamese posed no threat to the North other than by their example. The North had no inherent right to conquer South Vietnam, and the South Vietnamese had no obligation to “vote themselves communist” in 1955. The aberration of My Lai was not “morally equivalent” to the slaughter of civilians carried out by the communists, as a matter of policy, throughout the war. That Americans are better than communists is a point that the left just cannot accept.
- President Johnson and General Westmoreland accomplished nothing.
American strategy in the first half of the war might not have been perfect. Our strategy of limited war was ill-advised. In the context of the Cold War fears of nuclear war and Communist Chinese intervention a la Korea in 1950, though, it was not without a rationale. By 1968, moreover, the communists were so weakened and desperate they initiated a suicidal attack against the South — the Tet Offensive — and were obliterated. After Tet, the military outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. President Nixon was able to use the favorable facts on the ground that Westmoreland achieved to withdraw all U.S. combat units from the theater and, by unleashing our air power, to bring the communists to their knees.
- The wars waged in Laos and Cambodia are irrelevant and were just part of the “civil war” in South Vietnam.
When liberals scoff at the “domino theory” it is another reminder of how America-bashing bias obviates reality. North Vietnamese forces — and by extension the Soviets and Chinese communists — were involved in all the region. Both Laos and Cambodia fell to communist domination after America abandoned its ally, with dreadful results.
- South Vietnam was so corrupt that the North was a viable alternative.
Is there anyone who witnessed communism in the 20th century who believes that? Countless millions have died for the sin of being ruled by reds. Ho Chi Minh slaughtered at least 50,000 of his citizens within weeks of his self-appointment to be ruler of North Vietnam. Their sin? They were educated. They were doctors, lawyers, professionals. They had expressed doubt in the communist government. Every communist leader begins his reign much the same way.
It is typical liberal paternalism — bordering on racism — to attribute to the South Vietnamese people so little intelligence and so much indifference that they are deemed not worthy of wanting and deserving freedom. This viewpoint takes it for granted that the democratically elected Diem administration in Saigon was so evil that rule by Ho Chi Minh would have to be an improvement. The communists called Diem an American puppet, and the Washington establishment was annoyed that he wouldn’t do what he was told. In fact Diem was the elected leader of a free republic. Once America was complicit in his murder in 1963, we assumed a moral duty to see to it that South Vietnam remained free.
- America was not and has never been exceptional.
Ultimately this is what Mr. Burns would have one believe. That America never does anything based on Judeo-Christian principles. That Americans are never willing to sacrifice anything to give someone else something. That it would be silly to believe that thousands of young Americans sacrificed their lives simply doing the right, the moral thing, by going to the defense of a people trying to govern themselves. That since our founding the American people have never been animated by our founding documents. And that President Kennedy didn’t believe in the imperative to defend freedom and stop communism.
Mr. Burns is wrong in every instance.
Nor is the war hard to understand. The French asked for our help to save their Indochina colony after their 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu. We refused. Ho Chi Minh erected a typical communist dictatorship. He was the kind of a nationalist who slaughters his own people and governs with force. So about a million North Vietnamese fled south to Free Vietnam before America became involved in the war. Yet never during the next bloody 20 years did anyone from South Vietnam flee to the north. Never. None.
The U.S. sent advisors. The communists received arms from China and Russia. The war escalated. We sent tens of thousands of combat troops, beginning with the Marines in 1965. The war dragged on, but the communists could not win a significant battle. The Chinese and Russian “uncles” began to tire of the cost and loss of face and pressured the North to open peace talks. Hanoi begged for and received a last ditch supply (enough to outfit multiple battalions of communist troops).
Convincing themselves that the southerners would rally to their side when they overwhelmed the cities and villages in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese launched a suicidal attack on 100 towns. They were soundly defeated in every one of them in under a week, save Hue (the royal capital) where they held off the South Vietnamese and U.S. Marines long enough to slaughter thousands of the Hue citizens before being beaten back into the jungle. The Viet Cong, more or less the local boys and comprising most of the 50,000 communist troops lost in Tet, were decimated.
Management of the war changed after Tet. Although the American press decided we were losing and began lobbying the public to get out of the war, the military began a four-year pummeling of communist troops. Nixon, elected to stop the war, pulled American combat units out of South Vietnam and simultaneously unleashed U.S. air power, including bombing sanctuaries in Cambodia and the Hai Phong harbor in North Vietnam.
By the fall of 1972, the communists were depleted of morale and arms. Agreeing to a peace conference, they nevertheless tested Nixon by attacking South Vietnamese villages in contradiction of the peace process. Nixon responded with the Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam. Ridiculously referred to as a criminal act akin to the Holocaust and Hiroshima (it killed less than half the number of people killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11), the bombing of the north convinced the communists that they were helpless against the full strength of the American military.
A month later, in January 1973, the North Vietnamese signed the Paris Peace Treaty. At that time, South Vietnam enjoyed a democratically elected government. American combat forces were gone. American POWs were set free. America promised South Vietnam that we would come to its aid if North Vietnam violated the agreement. It looked a lot like victory.
However, the North Vietnamese had not one particle, not one gluon of an intention of adhering to the treaty. They staged increasingly strong attacks in South Vietnam and, while the United States did nothing, were re-armed by Moscow and attacked and overran South Vietnam. The American Congress, controlled by Nixon’s opponents in the Democratic Party, which had driven him from the White House, voted to renege on our treaty obligations and cut aid to our South Vietnamese allies.
They forfeited outright the peace for which almost 60,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fought and died. They accepted no responsibility for the atrocities that followed.
It is the raison d’être of Mr. Burns’ film to justify the cowardly and morally bankrupt left that supported the communist invasion of South Vietnam and turned its back on the murder, imprisonment, and misery of our former allies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. One cannot be against the South Vietnamese without being for the communists who conquered and enslaved 17 million people. Only by painting the war as immoral, illegal, and un-winnable, and the South Vietnamese government as evil and inept, can the American left hope to rest in peace. It shouldn’t bet the farm on that.
Jenkins’ fourth and fifth points are kind of the core of the anti-Vietnam War protesters’ arguments.
Investors.com begins with the good news:
Nine months after President Trump promised to defeat ISIS “quickly and effectively,” U.S.-backed forces captured Raqqa, which until Tuesday had served as the ISIS capital. The battle now is over who deserves credit: Trump or President Obama.
Trump, not surprisingly, claims it for himself: “It had to do with the people I put in and it had to do with rules of engagement,” Trump said in a radio interview.
Before dismissing this as typical Trump self-aggrandizement, consider that for several years Obama insisted that a quick and decisive victory against ISIS was all but impossible.
After belittling ISIS as a “JV” team and then being surprised by its advances, Obama finally got around to announcing a strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militant Islamic group.
As his strategy dragged on and seemed to go nowhere, Obama kept telling the country that this was just the nature of the beast.
“It will take time to eradicate a cancer like (ISIS). It will take time to root them out.”
“This is a long-term and extremely complex challenge.”
“This will not be quick.”
“There will be setbacks and there will be successes.”
“We must be patient and flexible in our efforts; this is a multiyear fight and there will be challenges along the way.”
And he kept insisting that winning the war against ISIS has as much to do with public relations as it did weapons. “This broader challenge of countering extremism is not simply a military effort. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas.”
What Obama didn’t say is that reason defeating ISIS was taking so long was of how he was fighting it.
A former senior military commander in the region told the Washington Examiner that the Obama White House was micromanaging the war “to the degree that it was just as bad, if not worse, than during the Johnson administration.” Johnson, you will recall, once bragged that “they can’t bomb an outhouse in Vietnam without my permission.”
Contrast this with Trump. Rather than talk endlessly about how long and hard the fight would be, Trump said during his campaign that, if elected, he would convene his “top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.”
Once in office, Trump made several changes in the way the war was fought, the most important of which were to loosen the rules of engagement and give more decision-making authority to battlefield commanders.
Joshua Keating, writing in the liberal commentary site Slate, noted that Trump had “instructed the Pentagon to loosen the rules of engagement for airstrikes to the minimum required by international law, eliminated White House oversight procedures meant to protect civilians, and ordered the CIA to resume covert targeted killing missions.” (He meant it as a criticism.)
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who can hardly be called a Trump lap dog, praised what he said was “a dramatic shift in a very positive way — away from the political micromanaging of the Obama years to freeing up generals and troops to destroy ISIS.”
The result of this shift seems pretty obvious. In July, ISIS was booted from Mosul, and this week Raqqa was liberated. For all intents and purposes, ISIS has been defeated. Trump did in nine months what Obama couldn’t in the previous three years.
Trump’s critics will insist that victory was inevitable, given that Obama had severely degraded ISIS over the previous years, and that all Trump did was continue Obama’s strategy.
But the bottom line is that while Obama preached patience, Trump promised a swift end to ISIS, and then delivered on it.
The “yeah, but” comes from the Associated Press:
Over several nights in September, some 10,000 men, women and children fled areas under Islamic State control, hurrying through fields in northern Syria and risking fire from government troops to reach a province held by an al Qaeda-linked group.
For an untold number of battle-hardened jihadis fleeing with the civilians, the escape to Idlib province marked a homecoming of sorts, an opportunity to continue waging war alongside an extremist group that shares much of the Islamic State’s ideology — and has benefited from its prolonged downfall.
While the US-led coalition and Russian-backed Syrian troops have been focused on driving IS from the country’s east, an al Qaeda-linked insurgent coalition known as the Levant Liberation Committee has consolidated its control over Idlib, and may be looking to return to Osama bin Laden’s strategy of attacking the West.
Syrian activists with contacts in the area say members of the Levant Liberation Committee vouched for fleeing IS fighters they had known before the two groups split four years ago and allowed them to join, while others were sent to jail. The activists spoke on condition of anonymity because they still visit the area and fear reprisals from the jihadis.
IS has lost nearly all the territory it once controlled in Syria and Iraq, including the northern Iraqi city of Mosul — the largest it ever held — and the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, which once served as its de facto capital. Tens of thousands of its fighters have been killed on the battlefield, but an untold number have escaped. As it gradually disintegrates, theological splits have also emerged within the organization, including the rise of a faction that blames its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for the setbacks. …
“Al Qaeda will welcome ISIS members with open arms, those are battled-hardened with potent field experience,” said Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and the author of “ISIS: A History.” …Two Iraqi intelligence officials told The Associated Press in Baghdad that bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahri, sent an envoy to Syria to convince IS fighters to defect and join his group. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters, said this might have been the reason behind an audiotape released by IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Sept. 28, in which he ordered his fighters not to “retreat, run away, negotiate or surrender.”
Benny Avni has more bad news:
On Monday, Iraqi forces trounced Kurdish fighters and emerged victorious in a short fight for control of the oil-rich northern Iraqi town of Kirkuk.
And they couldn’t have done it without us. …
Problem is, the Iraqi army wasn’t alone in defeating the Kurds. Much of the fighting was done by Iraqi Shiite militias — many of which swear allegiance to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran’s vanguard, even as they, too, get American arms. …
And now Kirkuk, a key regional asset, is about to be dominated by militias that answer to [Qassem] Suleimani, the IRGC general charged with exporting Iran’s Shiite Islamist revolution to the world.
The easy victory over Kirkuk and America’s indifference could encourage a further Iranian-led push into Kurdish areas. If so, expect fighting to become increasingly bloody. And the longer the crisis remains unresolved, the more Iran gets involved — and the deeper its influence over the Abadi government becomes.
[Prime Minister Haider al] Abadi has long juggled alliances, hoping to keep ties with both Washington and Tehran. But only Americans can force him to face reality and acknowledge Kurdish aspirations. Only America can facilitate a negotiated agreement to prevent a long, bloody war between Baghdad and Erbil — which will force Abadi into Tehran’s arms.
America has spent too much blood and fortune in Iraq to allow Iran to take over now that ISIS is on the verge of extinction.
From National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster on down, Trump is surrounded by advisers well-versed in the nuanced realities of Iraq. They need to take charge ASAP and get Erbil and Baghdad talking.
Otherwise, Soleimani will do it his way.
We begin with one of the stranger episodes of live radio, Arthur Godfrey’s on-air firing of one of his singers today in 1953:
The number one song today in 1959 was customized for sales in 28 markets, including Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Pittsburgh and San Francisco:
The number one British album today in 1967 was not the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; it was the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” two years after the movie was released, on the soundtracks’ 137th week on the charts:
The presidential candidate I voted for one year ago, Evan McMullin:
During a September rally in Alabama for Roy Moore, the controversial Republican senate candidate, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon declared, “This populist, nationalist, conservative movement is on the rise!”
Bannon is correct: Populism is resurgent in America (and Europe), and he is leading an effort to recruit 2018 candidates to its cause. But while people like Bannon herald this movement as embodying the will of the people, in reality populism — on either ideological side — corrodes the foundations of democracy and destabilizes nations.
For those of us accustomed to democracy, the term “populism” might at first seem attractive. This is how populist ideologues have wormed their way into American hearts and minds. We revere majority rule as superior to the tyranny of the few, which our founders cast off nearly 250 years ago. At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln called for “government of the people, by the people, for the people” — a message that continues to resonate now, when most Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country.
The irony, however, is that populism is regularly employed by demagogues, not champions of freedom. Academics still debate its definition (because of its lack of doctrine) and some consider it no more than political strategy, since it often depends on symbiotic relationships with nationalism or socialism. Its practitioners seek to create the illusion of universal popularity, but actually rely on dividing people to mask or discredit their opposition.
This is why populist leaders often pit their supporters against groups such as immigrants, minorities or so-called elites — anyone they can frame as disloyal, inferior or otherwise undesirable.
At its core, populism is the fallacious and dangerous idea that the people’s will is absolute, and that what’s “popular” must also be good or true. In reality, societies’ popular perceptions regularly change and can be manipulated by charismatic leaders.
We need not look far to find such leaders in America. The president and Vice President Mike Pence have gone out of their way to fan racial and other tensions, both in their campaign and their tenure in the White House. Pence provided the latest example this past weekend when he attended an NFL game with the apparent intention of walking out in response to players’ protesting racial injustice.
Ultimately, this comes down to an issue of truth. Without the recognition of truth’s existence, neither our liberty nor equality — each truths unto themselves — are realized. For if their recognition were subject to the fickle impulses of the masses or the ruling few, they would have no recognition at all.
The rule of law is also a casualty of populism — and chaos a victor — as might makes right in the absence of truth, and whoever has power at any given moment sets the rules.
The populist leader thrives by harnessing fear. Good governance and popular appeal need not be mutually exclusive, but complex problems tend to require complex solutions, which is the opposite of what the populist leader offers. When cornered, populists have no choice but to offer more conspiracy theories, more dog whistles. He may try to find new ways to divide people against one another in order to distract them from his failures and excesses, which further erode public confidence, exacerbate divisions and amplify extremism.
Throughout the presidential campaign and continuing today, Trump has provided a coarse, nationalist example of populism. But a similar political tactic is also rising on the left, as Democrats seek a competitive edge against Republicans.
In August, for instance, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tore a page from Trump’s playbook and engaged in incendiary anti-trade talk, even though research shows that automation is much more to blame for manufacturing job losses than trade. Unfortunately, actual solutions for the future of work in the U.S. (in the context of rapidly expanding automation, e-commerce and artificial intelligence) make much less effective fodder for political mobilization.
Populists on the left, like their conservative counterparts, appeal to bitter sentiments of fear and resentment to rouse and consolidate public support. The self-described “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, who earned the votes of millions of Americans in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, is the left’s leading example of this phenomenon.
His campaign promise to make “public colleges and universities tuition free” was superficially appealing, but oversimplified a critical policy challenge with a massive, generic government response. While popular, this solution was based on scant funding plans and provided little justification for diverting resources away from the poor to equally benefit the affluent.
But populists like Sanders know that carefully designed policy prescriptions don’t attract the support of frustrated voters as quickly as instant-gratification proposals. Nor do they generate the same useful anger as Sander’s (and Trump’s) attacks on “liberal elites.”
Populist leaders of both parties are purveyors of snake oil, their remedies and rhetoric as substantively deficient as their espoused commitment to liberty, equality and truth. If politicians’ proposals seem too good to be true, overly simplistic and aimed at exploiting our fears or frustrations, they probably are.
Instead of indulging in fantasy, we must demand that our leaders find common ground with their sensible opponents, while competing on the merits of their ideas. For if we leave good governance to populist misadventures, then we may soon find there are no good leaders left.
The Trump era has shown us the salience of populism’s threat to our nation. May it also give us the sense to reject its false promises and unify in defense of our foundational principles.
This is, after all, a republic, not a democracy. If it were a democracy, the majority who voted for a certain presidential candidate could vote to jail all those who didn’t.
Here’s a headline you probably never expected to read, for a theme F.H. Buckley argues:
Do you remember how glum Barak Obama looked after last year’s election? It wasn’t because he liked Hillary Clinton. Instead, he was mourning for the last four years of his administration. He was looking at all his unconstitutional executive orders going down the tube.
Obama kept the Affordable Care Act looking healthy via an extra-constitutional grant of $1 trillion to health-insurance companies. That required congressional approval, and Obama’s decision to bypass Congress was held unconstitutional by a federal court. President Trump’s decision Thursday to halt the bailout makes the litigation moot and represents a return to constitutional government.
The same can be said of Trump’s Friday decision to throw the Iran deal back to Congress, by refusing to certify that Iran is in compliance with the deal.
Recall that this was a treaty that should never have been adopted without two-thirds approval in the Senate, as required by the Constitution. That didn’t happen — because a compliant Republican Congress passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which provided that the president certify to Congress every 90 days that the suspension of sanctions against the regime is “appropriate and proportionate” with respect to its illicit nuclear program.
And that’s what Trump didn’t do. He didn’t tear up the treaty, or even decertify anything. Rather, he failed to certify, and simply told the truth. Iran isn’t permitting the nuclear inspections the treaty contemplates, and the Revolutionary Guard, which controls much of the government, is a terrorist organization.
The regime is building missiles that threaten us and our allies, and its infractions don’t justify our continued suspension of sanctions.
Now it’s Congress that has to act. Or dodge its duty, as it did when it passed INARA in 2015.
We’ve seen a lot of congressional Republicans chafing at the president, and Trump’s decision not to certify that Iran is in compliance amounts to a message to them. “OK, guys, you don’t like what I’m doing? Let’s see what you come up with.”
Trump’s decision is also a special message to Sen. Bob Corker. He’s been Trump’s biggest critic in Congress lately, and his name is on the INARA legislation.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Corker was the one who should have insisted that the treaty be submitted for formal approval by two-thirds of the Senate. He knew that that would never happen, and became Obama’s willing accomplice in the end run around the Constitution.
He was the guy who could have stopped the Iran treaty from going through, and he failed to do so. And now we’re supposed to pay attention to what he thinks of Trump’s foreign-policy decisions?
What Obama and Corker gave us was one of the worst deals America has ever made. We gave Iran $1.7 billion in upfront cash, which it doubtless used to support terrorism and develop weapons that could be used against us. The deal legitimized Iran as the dominant power in the region.
It signaled that we were weak, that Iran could defy us with impunity, that it could proceed to develop a nuclear arsenal and a delivery system that could destroy its hated enemy in Israel and threaten us, that it could roll all over us.
The administration also announced that the Treasury would designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, which will serve to restrict its access to funds. The Guard has armed Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and controls the levers of power in that country. Its fingerprints are on every one of Assad’s atrocities. Its support for terrorism extends to Yemen and Lebanon, and it has even plotted assassinations in the United States.
The terms of the Iran deal specified that the regime was supposed to contribute to “regional and international peace and security,” and it has done the exact opposite.
The administration’s new policies on Iran were adopted in close consultation with our allies in the region and also with the European co-signatories to the treaty (even though the Europeans don’t like the US actions). Trump has also signaled his desire to work with Congress to address the treaty’s serious flaws, and to amend INARA to prevent Iran from threatening us with nuclear weapons.
From 2013 to 2017 we experienced a period of monarchical government under good King Obama and his executive diktats. Under Trump we’re seeing a return to constitutional government. Sometimes that means that things don’t happen, and don’t get passed. But if so, it’s as the Framers intended.
I could also have written the headline “Right things for wrong reasons” or “Right things in the wrong ways.” The Iran treaty was also a bad deal, which is why it deserves to be killed. Trump’s executive order on ObamaCare subsidies undid an Obama executive order, and the same thing has happened on the so-called clean power program. That also supplies to Obama’s “Dreamers” executive order, which should have been submitted to Congress instead, since that is how the legislative process works.
The number one song today in 1969:
Britain’s number one single today in 1979 probably would have gotten no American notice had it not been for the beginning of MTV a year later:
The number one album today in 1986 was Huey Lewis and the News’ “Fore”:
The City of Los Angeles declared today in 1990 “Rocky Horror Picture Show Day” in honor of the movie’s 15th anniversary, so …
Grover Norquist provides a history lesson:
It is hard to screw up a tax cut.
But we’ve done it before. The Reagan tax cut of 1981 was supposed to be a 33 percent across-the-board tax cut. The Democratic Party held a majority in the House, so that rate reduction was reduced to 25 percent. Not good, but understandable. A compromise. But the real damage was that the 25 percent cut was delayed. There was a 5 percent rate reduction in 1981, a 10 percent rate reduction in 1982, and then a final 10 percent rate reduction in 1983.
Why did this matter? The economic growth driven by a 25 percent rate reduction began in Jan. 1983. Four million jobs were created that year, 1 million in Oct. 1983 alone. In 1984, Reagan won a smashing victory in 49 states – missing only Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota.
But.
But there was an election in 1982, and the GOP got clobbered. Why?
Because by delaying the full tax cut, the economy was not growing in 1982 – oddly enough the 1982 election was held in November 1982.
Now, we have an election scheduled for Nov. 2018. There is careless talk among some staffers drafting the tax reform bill in the House that they might “phase in” (read: delay) the full reduction of the burdensome corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.
Tax cuts taking effect immediately would supercharge the economy. If businesses know that by delaying recognizing earnings for a year or two (or three) they will face lower tax rates, they will react accordingly and delay new investment, jobs, and earnings.
Sure, strong growth three years from now would be nice. But strong growth in early 2018 so that even MSNBC “reporters” will have to mention new and additional jobs before the Nov. 2018 election would be more than nice.
If you cannot fit all the tax cuts you want into 10 years, then frontload them. That is what Republicans announced they will do with full and immediate expensing. It is to last five years, but start immediately so that we get the strong growth before the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. By then, it will be obvious to everyone – except experts at the Joint Tax Committee – that expensing should be made permanent. That is what happened with the research and development tax credit.
Frontload tax cuts. Speed up recovery and growth. Win the next election. Cut taxes.
Repeat.
I think some of Norquist’s history is faulty. The 1982 election didn’t go well for House of Representatives Republicans, but Democrats gained exactly one previously-independent Senate seat, keeping the GOP with 54 Senate seats. The 26 House of Representatives seats the GOP lost reduced their minority in, remember, the dictatorship of the majority that is the House. Several of the Senate seats the GOP failed to capture — for instance, Wisconsin — were senators elected, or reelected in Wisconsin’s case, on Jimmy Carter’s coattails in 1976. That was about the point political observers started to notice that the party in power in the White House often would have a bad midterm election.
This year, the Senate margin is just 52–48. The economy is not in recession, though the extent to which economic growth is noticeably better is arguable.
The number one song today in 1960:
The number one song today in 1964:
The number one song today in 1970:
I suppose we should not be surprised that private citizen Donald Trump, famous for suing or threatening to sue those who wrote things he didn’t like about himself, shows as much disrespect for the First Amendment as president.
Last week Trump threatened to pull the broadcast lucense of NBC, something presidents would have no authority to do even if network licenses existed. (Neither networks nor cable channels have licenses. Radio and TV stations, some of the latter of which are owned by the networks, are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, over which the president has no authority except to appoint commissioners.)
Trump’s fans defend his off-the-wall statements by claiming that Trump has a right to say such things under the First Amendment.
Eric Boehm suggests otherwise:
One of the truly great things about the First Amendment is that it applies to everyone. Well, almost everyone.
With very few exceptions, the free speech protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution give Americans the right to say pretty much whatever we want, whenever we want. And the courts have carefully protected that right for a long time—even that silly thing about not being allowed to shout fire in a crowded theater was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court—guided by the wisdom that free speech is vital for a vibrant, democratic, pluralist society to function.
You can talk, yell, tweet, post, and publish pretty much anything you want. You can even say that you want to stop other people from having free speech rights—which would be a bad thing to do, but hey, man, free speech!
Unless, of course, you happen to be the President of the United States, or another public official. Then the First Amendment works a little bit differently.
This is important because the current occupant of the White House, a certain Donald Trump, is in the midst of a slap-fight with NBC over what the president views as “fake news” about his administration. Twice on Wednesday, Trump tweeted that “network news” could have licenses revoked over reporting “distorted” and “partisan” information.
Reason’s Matt Welch has already covered the reasons why Trump is very wrong about this—in fact, Trump’s own FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, gave a speech last month where he sounded the warning that “free speech in practice seems to be under siege in this country.”
But, somewhat ironically, Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment may themselves be a violation of the First Amendment. And not in the philosophical sense—they are that too, of course—but in the very real sense of actual law regarding the First Amendment.
As Trever Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Association, writes in the Columbia Journalism Review today, Trump doesn’t even need to act on his threats against NBC to be violating the constitution. “There’s a compelling argument Trump is in violation of Constitution right now—after he crossed the line from criticism of protected speech to openly threatening government action,” Timm writes.
Timm cites quite a bit of case law to support his claim. Perhaps the most important bit comes from Judge Richard Posner, who wrote the Seventh Circuit ruling in BackPage LLC v. Thomas Dart, Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois. In that case, law enforcement officials were trying to threaten credit card companies, processors, financial institutions, or other third parties with sanctions intended to ban credit card or other financial services from being provided to Backpage.com (here’s Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s take on the case and ruling). Dart wasn’t taking direct legal action against Visa and Mastercard, but he did send threatening letters to their offices, pressuring them to cut off services with Backpage.com.
That’s not something government officials are allowed to do, said Posner, citing earlier case law on the matter.
“A public official who tries to shut down an avenue of expression of ideas and opinions through ‘actual or threatened imposition of government power or sanction’ is violating the First Amendment,” the judge wrote.
As Timm points out, some Trump defenders—including Vice President Mike Pence—have said that Trump is merely exercising his own First Amendment rights to say what he wants to say about NBC and the media in general. But are threats to use government force part of the First Amendment? Posner suggests otherwise:
“A government entity, including therefore the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, is entitled to say what it wants to say—but only within limits. It is not permitted to employ threats to squelch the free speech of private citizens. “[A] government’s ability to express itself is [not] without restriction. … [T]he Free Speech Clause itself may constrain the government’s speech.”
This makes sense. Like the other rights protected by the Constitution, the right to free speech is a right that resides with the people, not the state. Enumerating those rights, as the Founders well knew, was important to protect them from infringement by the state. The government does not have the same right to free speech because that speech can always be backed up with coercive force. Allowing government officials to make threats like the ones made by Trump or Dart would strip away free speech from their respective targets who would have to live in fear of government action.
And it doesn’t matter that Trump does not have direct authority to revoke NBC’s license. As Timm points out, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that public officials free speech can be curtailed when it “attempts to coerce,” rather than attempting to convince. There is little doubt that Trump’s tweets—and, don’t forget, those tweets count as official statements from the White House—are a form of coercion.
Trump is no longer a private citizen. As the head of Trump, Inc., he could threaten to revoke NBC’s licenses as many times as he wanted. Someday, when he returns to being a private citizen, he can do that too.
As long as he sits in the Oval Office, though, Trump’s free speech rights are necessarily curtailed.
Presidents and other elected officials (and members of the Armed Services) swear to, in the words of the presidential oath of office, “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Presidents and other politicians must respect your First Amendment rights; you are not required respect theirs.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 