After spending much of last year going off the deep-end over Bush, George Will has finally come back to doing what he does best – articulating the big thoughts.

The Case for Conservatism

Today, conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.

Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism’s goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market’s role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.

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Today’s proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes — a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living — that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenues in an aging society, requires.

This reasoning is congruent with conservatism’s argument that excessively benevolent government is not a benefactor, and that capitalism does not merely make people better off, it makes them better. Liberalism once argued that large corporate entities of industrial capitalism degraded individuals by breeding dependence, passivity and servility. Conservatism challenges liberalism’s blindness about the comparable dangers from the biggest social entity, government.

Comment: Anyone who thinks “Big Education” isn’t as corrupt as “Big Tobacco” isn’t paying attention.

Conservatism argues, as did the Founders, that self-interestedness is universal among individuals, but the dignity of individuals is bound up with the exercise of self-reliance and personal responsibility in pursuing one’s interests. Liberalism argues that equal dependence on government minimizes social conflicts. Conservatism’s rejoinder is that the entitlement culture subverts social peace by the proliferation of rival dependencies.

Comment: This is what is so foul about the left’s embrace of “Identity Politics.” They don’t care about the betterment of the people in any one group. To the ideological left, indentity politics is a Divide and Conquer strategy. Anything that would acutally help a black person succeed (access to better charter schools, a personal account for Social Security, a Health Savings Account that can be used to get to a local clinic) dismpowers the “race-baiting poverty pimps” (J.C. Watt’s phrase, not mine) who flog the victimhood-oriented, identity politics mule.

The entitlement mentality encouraged by the welfare state exacerbates social conflicts — between generations (the welfare state transfers wealth to the elderly), between racial and ethnic groups (through group preferences) and between all organized interests (from farmers to labor unions to recipients of corporate welfare) as government, not impersonal market forces, distributes scarce resources. This, conservatism insists, explains why as government has grown so has cynicism about it.

This gets filed in the “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss” section.

Do-Nothing Democrats – Quelle Surprise!

After 140 days, however, congressional Democrats left town with no significant accomplishments, one long-delayed bill finally enacted into law, and lots to make fun of. There was no increase in morality, no magically bipartisan era, no sweeping enactment of a coherent agenda for change, akin to what Republicans promised in their Contract With America in 1994. Instead, the 110th Congress has been a combination of “now I’ll get mine” and “now you’ll get yours!”

It hasn’t been pretty. And it isn’t likely to get better. Only those who were paying very careful attention last fall saw this coming.

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From the very start, things got off on the wrong foot. Nancy Pelosi’s first act as Speaker was to push anti-war activist and vocal critic of all things Republican, John Murtha, as her choice for House majority leader, despite serious issues respecting Murtha’s ethics. The Democratic Caucus helped Ms. Pelosi out by rejecting her choice, but Pelosi has made Murtha her caucus’ number one voice on war policy.

Another ethics problem for Democrats is William Jefferson of Louisiana, whose “frozen assets” consisted of $90,000 wrapped in foil in his freezer, marked bribe money demanded by Jefferson in exchange for helping a business secure government contracts. Jefferson was filmed taking the bribe, but his colleagues have not censured him, and the work of the House Ethics Committee on this matter stopped when Democrats took over last January.

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If the practice of earmarking hasn’t ended, it has changed a bit – for the worse. House Appropriations Chair David Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, says he has so many requests for earmarks to add to major legislation – over 30,000 in five months – that he has no choice but to tack them on after work on the bill is complete and won’t reveal them until after both Houses vote. The other real change is that not all earmarks are put in writing – now Democrats who don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing can simply phone in the instructions on where to send the money (a practice Washington insiders now call “phone-marking”), as Harry Reid did in a call to the Energy Department.

Far from draining the swamp, Democrats have been wallowing in it.

America can no longer afford the vileness of the elected officials in either party. The quality of people has to change, and if it doesn’t, the nation will slide into abyss of corruption.

A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal used the term “Liberal Plantation” to describe the misuse of blacks by liberal white elites. The term isn’t used any more, but the abuse still goes on.

(hat tip – Bros Judd)

Democrat presidential hopefuls shun Fox News debate

WASHINGTON — Four years ago, the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus began looking for a television outlet to co-sponsor and broadcast a presidential debate to address the concerns of minority voters.

Only one news channel made a proposal acceptable to the caucus, and an unlikely channel at that: Fox News, in what some Democrats viewed as an effort to associate itself with a group that could help it make good on its claim of presenting “fair and balanced” news coverage.

But now that relationship is being shaken by the decision of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina to shun the debate, a move that has exposed fault lines among two major constituencies of the Democratic Party. While the withdrawals frustrated members of the black caucus, it mollified liberals who had objected to the involvement of Fox News, whose programming includes some of the most conservative and pro-Republican commentary on the air.

Like the post below, which illustrates Illinois State Senator Meeks shilling for elite liberal teacher’s unions instead of promoting good policies for “his people,” the story above illustrates just how shallow the liberal elite truly is.

What better place to have “the unconverted” hear your message than to be able to preach in their venue? Fox viewers might learn a thing or two if this debate took place on their channel. But alas, the shallow and obtuse “liberal elite” want to “send a message” to the Evil Fox Empire. How infantile.

Here again, we see the so-called “black leadership” (Obama, Meeks, Jackson) marching to the tune of the Rich White Liberal Elites (Howard Dean comes to mind) of the Democratic Party. We can’t have blacks watching Fox, afterall.