Obama Finds Gulf Oil on His Cape

Slipping the phrase "Obama's Katrina" into Google yields about 1.8 million results. Such ought not surprise; if every President runs against his predecessor, the latter's follies serve to flail the former. But in Obama's case, the nature of the problem strikes at the heart of his presidency.

When Hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans, we wingnuts were quick to draw distinctions between acts of Nature and acts of Bush. I myself, at this very blog, put it thusly:

I'm not of the species that seems to want to blame the New Orleans Water Park on FEMA. I've yet to see anything from a source I trust that indicates that FEMA did anything different in regards to Katrina than they did with regard to any other natural disaster in living memory, and I'm pretty well convinced that the caterwauling to that end is a cynical manipulation by a bored press and a frustrated opposition upon discovering that the Cindy Sheehan and Hokum and Wailing Circus wasn't going to be the spark that lit the Bonfire of Bush's Vanities.

Conservatives do not believe that government exists to prevent bad things from happening, and they certainly don't expect the federal government to fill roles that belong to state and local governments. So we defended Bush during Katrina, because we were not surprised.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, came to the White House preaching the virtues of government as an agency of righteousness, a means for the general will to achieve its ends. His supporters likewise desire a government that acts, instantaneously, to do Good Things. And with every day that the crude continues flooding into the gulf, that vision becomes the weaker. Lo and behold, the President cannot fly below the surface of the earth and plug the leak with his eye-beams. He cannot, by virtue of his sonorous voice, make BP work any faster to plug the leak than they already are (you do realize that every drop of oil that ends up not in BP's tankers is lost money to them, right?). He's just a president; the waves do not, in fact, obey him.

And while this King-Canute moment is satisfying to conservatives, like Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer, it is gall and wormwood to progressives, who find themselves with nothing to do or say than "why can't somebody do something?" They do not appreciate being made to feel this way by a Democratic President with a Democratic Congress. They may not revenge themselves upon him for this, but their anger is palpable, and their hearts may not be his much longer.

The Essayist #20: The Right of Revolution

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
-Henry Clay

Every revolution contains within it something of evil.
-Edmund Burke

       With which of these two elegant quotations would the average person agree? The difficulty of the question becomes more apparent the longer it is considered. In the West, where the American and the French Revolutions constitute the birth-cries of the modern age, we feel an obligation to assent to the former. Yet any serious study of the French, Russian, or even the American Revolutions will compel us to give at least credence to the latter. We may shrug it off by retorting that revolutions are not made with rose-water, but this is the more persuasive with the understanding that whatever revolution we live under need not be repeated and will not be undone. In other words, we may ignore the blood of our birth so long as we need not be born again.
       But is revolution permanence? Have we established political structures so rooted in truth as to be past changing? To an extent, democracy is justified on answering, “yes” to this question: when the people rule, they need not revolt. But it is hardly a novelty to point out that majority rule can be tyrannical; James Madison pointed this out repeatedly. And if a majoritarian tyranny comes into existence, a revolution could surely be justified in destroying that democracy. Couldn’t it?
       Or could it?
       This essay will argue that every political system exists not for its own sake, but to protect a certain value that its framers held as essential to justice and order. This may seem obvious, but consider again its implications with regard to our current and beloved political ideal: democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to protect society. If it fails in that end, it may be reformed, altered, or even destroyed. No system of government is absolute; every state has an escape clause.

Music is the Devil's Tool

So Iran has banned Music, and Jay Nordlinger of NRO draws a parallel to Lenin, who apparently never touched the stuff, for fear that it would awaken human feeling, which was anathema to his work. He also makes mention of the oft-quoted fact that the Nazis were great lovers of art and music. How do this circle be squared?

For me, it bespeaks a difference between a totalitarianism of asceticism, and a totalitarianism of passion. Communism would be the paramount example of ascetic totalitarianism; one characterized by purification of the human spirit. The true Communist suffered for his ideology, was nailed to it like a cross, and was supposed to bear his ills with a martyr's patience. This may be one of the reasons why we tolerate Communists more than other shades of tyrant: Trotsky, Lenin, and Che were perfectly willing to share the misery they imposed on others.

Hitler, on the other hand, had no truck with self-denial. His Nietzsche-derived creed demanded just the opposite, that the desires of the self were holy, and to feast upon the weak was glorious and right. Hence, the Nazis devoured all that was good in every land they conquered, and took the pleasure of this enjoyment as proof of its truth.

Iran strikes me as being more in the ascetic vein, as Khomeni's condemnation of America as the Great Satan is of a kind with the denunciations of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. With all that in mind, the only question becomes "What took them so long?"