Transition: Sauce for Obama is Sauce for Trump
Over at the Murdoch kids’ blog the bribed apologists of the ruling class are in a tizzy over Trump’s foreign policy “forays” during the presidential transition.
President-elect Donald Trump is upending the modern convention that the U.S. speaks with one voice on foreign affairs…
No! Who knew that there was a convention about this? Somehow I had completely missed it. I must live in a bubble, thinking with Hillary Clinton that dissent from the government’s one voice was the highest form of patriotism. In addition, I am confused. I hadn’t noticed liberals ever worrying about America speaking with one voice on anything when Republicans were in office. And I notice that Senate opponents of president-elect Trump’s nominees for cabinet appointments are calling themselves the “resistance.” So cool, so edgy, so very Sixties, when ruling class septuagenarians call themselves the resistance during the Trump transition. And never, oh never, speak with one voice.
There are exceptions to the rule about resistance. During the last eight years it was understood that anyone that disagreed with President Obama was a racist. Or a white supremacist. So Americans knew to speak with one voice if they knew what was good for them.
The slashing article in the Murdoch kids’ Wall Street Journal said that “Mr Obama on Friday brushed back pressure from Mr Trump to block a United Nations Security Council proposal…” Yes, but isn’t Mr. Obama the president? Wouldn’t his team be coordinating with Trump’s transition team? Wouldn’t he want the U.S. to speak with one voice on foreign policy during the transition? Wouldn’t he talk to Trump about his approach to Israeli settlements and negotiate some compromise between his BDS policy on Israel and Trump’s more mainstream support of Israel?
So who is really doing the straining and the forays here?
I’m old enough to remember when President Bush handed off the nation’s government to president-elect Obama in 2009. A decent man, Bush had done all the heavy lifting on rescuing the credit system from collapse and getting the Federal Reserve System to do its job of acting as Lender of Last Resort before Obama’s inauguration. (How come the Fed always falls down on this, as in 1929-33 and September 2008? Doesn’t the Fed know how to speak with one voice?)
The main Bush-Obama handoff was the auto bailout. Bush had loaned GM and Chrysler enough money to keep them in operation for a few months, and so gave the incoming Obama administration lots of options to finish the job. The Obama guys promptly stiffed the stockholders and the bondholders, but ladled lots of money at the auto labor unions. It worked well enough to win the Rust Belt in November 2012 one last time.
You’d think that a man like Barack Obama, sensitive to the beautiful symmetry of the arc of history, would return the favor he got from Bush and would set up an elegant arc of transition for president-elect Trump. But no. Instead he is phoning and penning every last ounce of liberal partisan agenda, decreeing the oceans off-limits to oil exploration and letting the United Nations shove Israel into the penalty box. And very likely more.
If Obama is doing his liberal thing, which is to push left as hard as the judiciary and the administrative state will let him, and be damned to consensus and bipartisanship and live-and-let-live, then it makes complete sense for Trump to do his alpha male thing.
Here is how that alpha male thing works. It is all about honor, as in Honor: A History by James Bowman. Honor in men is the reputation for standing firm in line with your brother soldiers and never breaking and running. That’s why Alexander Hamilton fought a rap-musical duel with low-life Aaron Burr: he believed that he might be called upon to resume his military rank as general if there were another war. He would not risk his reputation for bravery.
Honor in liberals is the courage to join a “peaceful protest” and break a few windows when you know that the cops don’t dare make you follow the rules and obey the law.
With Trump the old world has ended, the shameful days of servitude when conservatives bowed and scraped before liberals, afraid that Pajama Boy would call them a racist. Now we are going to be in the liberals’ faces, and Donald Trump is going to show us how.
Here is how they described the end of the Obama world on Instapundit this holiday weekend: The whole Obama era was “conceived in delusion, executed in incompetence and spite.”
I’d say that the delusion part is the left’s world view. The incompetence part is the well-born graduates of Ivy League finishing schools. The spite part is the special Obama transition sauce.
Delusion, incompetence, and spite: all in one liberal voice.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.