Hewitt Blog

Guy Benson continues to fill in for Hugh this week while Hugh is cruising the Baltics and Russia. Joining Guy today will be the Republican candidate trying to unseat the very liberal Jan Schakowsky in Illinois, Joel Pollak. In case you forgot who Schakowsky is, here's a video from the Obamacare debate to remind you.



You can donate to Joel Pollak here.
 

"Republican candidates now hold a 10-point lead over Democrats on the generic Congressional ballot," according to the most recent Rasmussen Report survey of likely voters. 

The worst news for Democrats?  "Voters not affiliated with either party prefer the Republican candidate by a 44% to 23% margin," according to Rasmussen.

Against this backdrop the Democrats refuse to extend the Bush tax cuts, refuse to fix the death tax which will skyrocket at the end of the year without action, and refuse to address the wild spending which has driven the deficit to levels that risk a fiscal stroke.

What do the Congressional Democrats instead offer as the key legislative debate?  A manifestly unconstitutional attempt to advantage themselves in elections via the so-called "DISCLOSE Act," an absurdly partisan ploy to keep union campaign spending robust and concealed while crushing the ability of almost all other groups --except the NRA, the Sierra Club and a few other favored special interests-- from impacting elections.

Not one Republican will support this proposal in the Senate, thus dooming it.  But not before most if not all Senate Democrats will go on record supporting this obvious assault on the First Amendment three months before the conclusion of an election cycle where concern over the Constitution and worries over the imbalance of power in D.C. are driving the vote.  Liberal commentators are ignoring the transparent attempt by Chuck Schumer to protect the left's money machine at a cost of a carve out for the NRA, but new media has already shattered the attempt to pass this off as "campaign finance reform."  Every time the president or one of the union-dependant Democrats speaks up on behalf of the law, the majority of voters just laugh at the shamelessness of the ploy.  Democrats continue to think that voters are as dumb as rocks, but they aren't, and on this issue they know the score.

The Manhattan-Beltway media elite have fundamentally misunderstood or refused to believe what is happening in front of their eyes, and their blindness has apparently led the MSM-addicted Congressional Democrats to ignore the issues that do concern voters while pushing forward an agenda that deeply offends an already outraged electorate.  The president's deep-seated ideology similarly renders him incapable of understanding the depth of the rejection of his agenda that is sweeping the country.

Taken all together the Democrats are not merely headed towards a political cliff, they are sprinting towards it.

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Before I vanish beyond the internets for week two of vacation, I point you to my column in tomorrow's WashingtonExaminer.com, which returns to the "Ackerman Question."  Reason.com's Michael Moynihan has a great piece on JournoList as well.

And take a look at Patheos.com, which has spent a week focused on the future of the Roman Catholic Church in America and this week turns to the same question vis-a-vis the evangelical movement.  I contributed a piece to last week's forum but it could as easily have run this coming week, as the two subjects are so closely intertwined.

Patheos.com, btw, is a relatively new and very well constructed site devoted to faith.  It is now bookmarked along with Mark D. Roberts, Al Mohler and First Principlesas places where I can find first rate theology and faith-informed commentary on politics and public affairs. 

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Ken Follett has a new novel coming out in September, The Fall of Giants, which has proven to be the easiest, most enjoyable 984 pages I have read in a long time.



The Fall of Giants is the first installment in a trilogy about the 20th century, and it delivers a deeply interesting story about the lives and societies first shattered and then remade by the Great War.  More on the book in future weeks, but it will not disappoint anyone and will impress even long standing Follett fans. It even stands a chance of making the Russian revolution accessible and even engrossing to American readers who have not had AP history in high school.

Because I hope to conduct a lengthy interview with Follett when the new novel is published in September, I have spent the first half of my vacation preparing for it with a close reading of the book and a rereading of some of his other works, including The Eye of the Needle, The Key to Rebecca, The Pillars of the Earth --and On Wings of Eagles. 

Wings, for those who haven't read it, isn't a novel but a riveting, real life thriller of the still amazing story of the rescue of two American business executives from the chaos that was Iran in early 1979, a rescue organized by none other than Ross Perot.  The book reminds people not only why Perot was and remains an American original but also of how vast have been the changes that have swept the globe in the past 30 years, right down to the ease with which Americans could contemplate smuggling pistols on planes into Tehran for the purpose of providing firepower in a privately organized jailbreak.

Sadly what has not changed is the American foreign policy establishment's befuddlement at all things Iranian.  As Follett's story opens in late 1978 and early 1979, the senior ranks of the carter Administration are riven by struggles over how to treat the Shah and his enemies, including the Ayatollah Khomeini.  Almost every move undertaken by State Department "experts" was ill informed and turned out poorly, and their inability to anticipate the events that unfolded in rapid fashion would have been comical had the consequences for the world not been so dire.

Now we are living through the revival of the Carter Years, and at center stage is a replaying of all the ineptitude that marked that failed presidency's "Iran policy."  This time, though, the consequences involve nukes and the fanatics are not seeking power but seeking instead to preserve it while at the same time implementing their global messianic vision with a zeal that is, again, surprising the "experts" assembled by an idealistic but inexperienced American president.

Those who have never read On Wings of Eagles should carve some time for it this August, if only to relearn the lesson that the American foreign policy establishment's understanding of Iran has never been remotely close to correct.

That crucial and indisputable conclusion doesn't tell us much on what we should do, but it does help lay down some skepticism about those who are going to be offering assurances in the months ahead about what is possible and what must be accepted.

My bottom line: Trust the Israelis to figure out the nature of the threat and the best policy for the world vis-a-vis the mullahs, not this second-time's-a-charm replay of the Carter appeasement.

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the Cleveland Indians have won six in a row and the Browns signed Colt McCoy. 

Oh, and the JournoList scandal continues to seep into the awareness of the public at large.  The long-term impact of these revelations is going to be enormous, and some big brands are still paralyzed, refusing to recognize that the consequences of allowing their staffers to participate in the attempt to manage the news that JournoList clearly became represents a lasting scar for each of them. 

The term "JournoList" already exists as short-hand for deep seated biased in the MSM, but the longer term damage to the credibility of those news organizations that remain silent about the strategies and tactics of the lefty journalists' club will be immense. 

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Did any of the JournoList participants rebuke Spencer Ackerman's suggestion that Fred Barnes or Karl Rove be made a target of a manufactured "racist" charge?

Ackerman will be carrying the burden of that despicable suggestion for the rest of his "career" such as it is, but it may even be worse to have been a participant in the list and to have said nothing when such an assault was proposed.  Even if the "journalists" on the list hated Karl Rove as an extension of Bush and thus talked themselves into this repulsive group-think, many of them know for a fact that Fred is among the most decent and large-hearted of journalists.  To have said nothing when a colleague or far worse, a friend, was nominated for the worst sort of slander is an extraordinary personal failure.  Whether any of those who were party to it step forward to apologize will be interesting to watch.

As will the continued revelations about the individual participants, and the conclusions we will be drawing about MSM won't be surprising except that all these years we will have been understating the deep intellectual corruption of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite.

I am on vacation this week and next --and thanks to Ed Morrissey, Carol Platt Liebau, Guy Benson and Mary Katharine ham who are sitting in for me on the radio show-- and do not intend to post much during this time.  But the big story is the JournoList story, not the NAACP story, though not surprisingly it is not receiving anything like the attention it deserves, at least not yet.

When Andrew Breitbart posted the NAACP video, he did not know it had been edited. Journalists who commented on the story did not know of the editing either.

But everyone on JournoList knew that Ackerman was proposing a Big Lie in the service of a political agenda --Ackerman admitted that himself-- so they all stood by and said nothing. The only defense that any of them have is that Ackerman was an insignificant loon or that they missed his post, even though it appeared in the middle of the biggest story of the time period..

 

The Monday column from Clark Judge:

Distant Threats Closing Fast
By Clark S. Judge, managing director, White House Writers Group (www.whwg.com <http://www.whwg.com>  <http://www.whwg.com> <http://www.whwg.com>  ) and chairman, Pacific Research Institute (www.pacificresearch.org <http://www.pacificresearch.org>  <http://www.pacificresearch.org> <http://www.pacificresearch.org>  )
 
With late Thursday’s detonation of what Drudge on Sunday called a “’Hezbollah-like’ car bomb” in Ciudad Juarez, just across our southern border from El Paso, it is worth asking, are we preparing for the national security challenges ahead. (See Drudge-linked story here: http://tiny.cc/kiqgg <http://tiny.cc/kiqgg>  )
 
The border with Mexico is an obvious prize for anyone hoping to lower the U.S. profile in the world. When I served in the Reagan White House, it appeared to me likely that Soviet interest in Central America was aimed at ultimately destabilizing Mexico.  Severe unrest in Mexico would require the United States to position troops along the border, potentially compromising our ability to maintain a full-strength garrison in German or other Cold War focal points.  
 
Mexican authorities today are confronting the narco-terror challenge with a heroism that should command American admiration.  Mexico has evolved into two-party political system that, more nearly than ever before, is rooted in genuine popular sovereignty.  But this evolving system is being challenged, possibly by more than just the drug cartels.  Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and other global players who dislike an international system with the United States at its center have every reason look for ways to stoke Mexico’s chaos.  Reports are circulating that various combinations of them have already started to do just that.
 
Mexico is just one emerging challenge.  Another is rising across the Pacific in China.  Consider a recent Parliamentary debate on British national security strategy.  The UK’s new Secretary of Defense, Liam Fox, said that, despite today’s focus on terrorism, a major state-to-state conflict involving U.K. forces could not be ruled out a decade or more off.  Given the list of other challenges that preceded this jolting assertion, he surely had in mind at least China. (Debate is here: http://tiny.cc/z5hdj) <http://tiny.cc/z5hdj>   And given the nature of global relationships and security imperatives, he could at least as aptly have said the U.S. as the U.K.
 
China today is much like Germany before the First World War.  An opening economy and limited democratization have led to breathtaking growth.  But, as in late 19th and early 20 century Germany, democratization such as it is does not extend to international affairs, where the military has ambitions.
 
In the current Claremont Review of Books, novelist and national security writer, Mark Helprin, draws out the China scenario with particular brilliance  (see: http://tiny.cc/di6jq <http://tiny.cc/di6jq>  ).
 
As Helprin says, “in the Western Pacific … the United States and China are on a collision course.” He notes that a ten-fold increase in per capita GDP between 1988 and 2007 has produced a “twenty-one-fold purchasing power parity… increase in military expenditures.”
 
Helprin warns that the U.S. has let its carrier fleet decline by a third since 1987. Meanwhile, China is acquiring the ability to direct its 1,500 short-range missiles at our fleet in the event they decide to invade Taiwan.  He adds, “Had we built more carriers, provided them with sufficient missile defense, not neglected anti-submarine warfare, and dared consider suppression of enemy satellites and protection of our own” this challenge to our dominance of the western Pacific would not be possible.  
 
But as things stand, Helprin fears that the decade ahead will produce a “western Pacific cleared of American naval and air forces”, with a collapse of American alliances in the Pacific following.  Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and even Australia would adjust to the new reality of power: China in, America out.
 
In a particularly insightful anticipation of next steps, Helprin sees China then moving to establish bases for its emerging blue water navy in Central and South America. “What awaits us if we do not awake,” he concludes, “is potentially devastating, and those who think the subtle, indirect pressures of domination inconsequential might inquire of the Chinese their opinion of the experience.”
 
Military strength ultimately depends on economic and financial strength.  In the last two years, the weighting of resources has moved from national security to, oh, I don’t know, a crushingly expensive health care plan that the nation doesn’t want and a trillion dollar stimulus package that doesn’t work.  And we have moved towards spending levels and a debt burden that will soon dwarf anything before.
 
The Juarez bomb should be our wake up call.  New kinds of threats, new orders of hazard are coming our way.  If we are to meet and best them in the next decade, we must have both appropriate security assets and the financial strength to support them.  
 
The simple, obvious, and yet very much in doubt question is not just will we, but, given our profligacy, can we.

 

Friday's program is the summer book show.

In the first hour I am interviewing Daniel Silva about the tenth installment in the magnificent Gabriel Allon series, The Rembrandt Affair.



The transcript of my conversation with Silva will be posted here. 

And then follows in hour two a conversation with Eric Metaxas on his new biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy



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Today's program kicks off with an interview with Richard Redding. Associate Dean of Chapman University Law School, and co-editor and contributor to The Politically Correct University.



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Timothy Dalrymple concludes his three-part series for Patheos on the Tea Party movement.

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