RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/why-obama-failed/

In a revealing interview, Obama tried to burnish his image for progressive posterity — but he still doesn’t understand his fundamental errors.

B arack Obama rose to political stardom in the wake of his 2004 convention speech, during which he made an implicit promise that he could transcend party divisions in Washington, bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats, and make the federal government functional again. I’ll confess that I really thought he wanted to do this when he ascended to the presidency. It took the first volume of his memoirs and a recent interview he gave to Ezra Klein of the New York Times to fully and finally disabuse me of that notion.

During his 2008 campaign, Obama seemed to display a certain capaciousness of intellect and imagination that would allow him to get inside his opponents’ heads, understand their position in good faith, and address it in a perspicacious way, creating an illusion of rapport. He also knew how to do this with journalists. The conservative columnist David Brooks, for instance, was caught off guard during an interview with Obama when it became apparent that the then-senator had a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, of whom he could speak learnedly and with enthusiasm — a pleasant surprise for a conservative admirer of Niebuhr like Brooks. This circumspection is clearly a part of the Obama mythos that the man himself values, because he restates it at the beginning of his interview with Klein:

I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said, look, the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. And for me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview. And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs.

After reading this quotation, many conservatives will likely wonder if they have gone through the looking glass. Close observers of American politics over the last decade will be aware that President Obama made very little effort to understand the worldview of his Republican colleagues in Washington. In fact, an interesting companion piece to Klein’s interview is this reported essay by Alex Thompson, written last summer for Politico, on the Obama-Biden relationship. Thompson’s sources indicate that Obama was exceedingly bad at persuading his Republican colleagues to back his proposals:

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.” A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

In a criminal act, some person (or persons) at the IRS leaked confidential information on some of the nation’s wealthiest people. It was given to ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom based in New York City, which reported that they had “obtained” a “vast cache of IRS information” on “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people,” which they then published.

In the report dated June 8th, Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel wrote: “ProPublica is not disclosing how it obtained the data, which was given to us in raw form, with no conditions or conclusions.” They claimed to have “verified” the information by “comparing elements of it” with dozens of already public tax details. They claim all people mentioned in the article were asked to comment. Those who responded, unsurprisingly, said they had paid whatever taxes were legitimately owed.

The incident raises questions: It is illegal to pass on confidential IRS data. Will the guilty party be exposed and punished? If unrealized capital gains should be taxed, as the report infers, would it be a recurring tax? And if unrealized gains can be taxed, what about unrealized losses? Could they be deducted against ordinary income? After all, there are years when stocks decline. Would future investment be inhibited by taxing unrealized gains? After all, expanding economies rely on capital investments, be it from a pension plan, the savings of an individual, or a business. But there is a broader question. What is the purpose of the IRS? Is it to levy and collect taxes so to fund the federal bureaucracy, or is its mission to redistribute income? ProPublica claims to investigate “abuses of power,” but the abuse they highlight is not the IRS, which a few years ago during the Obama Administration targeted conservative non-profits. Nor will they identify the unnamed leaker who abused his position by disclosing confidential information. No, they highlighted the assets of four wealthy individuals who had taken advantage of legitimate loopholes, all laid out in the 6,550-page Internal Revenue Code, which was passed by Congress.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/558050-supreme-court-confounding-its-partisan-critics

The Supreme Court this week continued to disappoint congressional Democrats and activists with a long line of embarrassingly unanimous, nonideological rulings. After all, the court is supposedly (to use President Biden’s words) “out of whack” due to its irreconcilable ideological divisions. Indeed, the court is allegedly so dysfunctionally divided that many, including Democratic leaders, have called for sweeping changes — from packing the court with new justices to changing its voting rules or even creating an alternative court.

That is why these weeks have so frustrated those who insist the court is a hopeless case of rigid ideologues. While next week could well bring some welcomed ideological divisions, the court is not making it easy on its critics.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer recently chafed at the claim that the court is “conservative” and condemned the calls to pack it with a liberal majority. A liberal group, “Demand Justice,” responded with billboard ads calling for Breyer’s resignation and warned him that he was risking his legacy. However, Breyer appears undeterred in ruling with his conservative colleagues when he considers that to be appropriate.

In the latest decision, Borden v. United States, the lineup of justices was strikingly nonideological. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for Justices Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, with a concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas — three liberal justices and two conservatives agreeing to limit the meaning of a “violent felony” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Last week, the decision in Van Buren v. United States was a majority of three liberals and three conservatives. In that case, the most senior justice was Breyer; he assigned it to his conservative colleague Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote for Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh. Although he was on the other side in Van Buren, Justice Thomas joined his liberal colleagues in Borden.

These decisions follow a litany of unanimous decisions from the court, which seems to be sending a message in the timing of the release of its opinions: The justices do not rule on cases to send messages to Congress, but they do control what cases are accepted and when those decisions are released. It is hard not to view the last few weeks as a type of judicial “harrumph” to the continuing calls for court packing. While we expect more ideological splits in a few upcoming cases, these cases reaffirm that they are not so rigid or “hopelessly divided” as Democratic leaders and other critics have suggested. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/13/civic_action_civil_discourse__the_dogma_of_systemic_racism_145919.html

In a classic example of civic action, conservatives have undertaken a variety of initiatives to counter the upsurge in progressive efforts to enlist American schools, U.S. corporations, and all levels of government in the promotion of the doctrine that the United States is systemically racist. Progressives, who generally favor civic action, have responded with indignation, derision, and calumny. The vituperation they direct at conservatives suggests that progressives either think the campaign to entrench systemic racism as the conventional wisdom stands above all criticism or suspect that it is fatally vulnerable to scrutiny.

Progressives greet the conservative defense of old-fashioned liberal ideas like toleration, individual merit, and equal treatment for all with ad hominin attacks. They reproach conservatives for daring to question the tenets of critical race theory, Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism” catechism, and Robin DiAngelo’s pronouncements on “white fragility” — a body of controversial opinions that many progressives believe prove racism is latent in the American spirit and woven into nation’s institutions. And, as is common on both sides of the political spectrum these days, they divide the world into Us and Them, seeing theirs as the party of compassion and benevolence while casting conservatives as the party of the benighted and the bigoted.

Consider New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb’s recent denunciation of South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

On April 28, Scott gave a forceful but measured response to President Biden’s address to Congress earlier that evening. Scott said that Biden “seems like a good man,” and “[h]is speech was full of good words.” Scott commended the president’s goals: “He promised to unite a nation. To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted.” But the senator criticized the president and the Democrats he leads for betraying that promise. Instead of adopting “policies and progress that bring us closer together,” according to Scott, “the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.”

Scott noted that in 2020 “under Republican leadership, we passed five bipartisan COVID packages.” But under the Biden administration, the senator lamented, the Democrats eschewed cooperation: “They spent almost $2 trillion on a partisan bill that the White House bragged was the most liberal bill in American history!”