Reader discretion advised, book contains explicit content of a disturbing nature.

This little book does not carry a warning label, but it should. Its diminutive 5” x 7” format and 43 pages of large print belie the universe of disturbing information within. Martin previously reviewed another book in the excellent Encounter series.  This one is Broadside 28.

Whatever doubts anyone has about the origin and efficacy of the welfare state are substantiated in this powerful little book. To trace the dependency agenda, the author begins with the hijacking of the Democrat Party by the far left in the 1960s.

The short version is that the left valued the toleration of revolutionary socialism abroad and the piecemeal implementation of the welfare state at home over the civil rights of African Americans, and it therefore made common cause with the segregationist Johnson Democrats over the anti- segregationist Eisenhower Republicans …

A more detailed account of that event can be found in Political Woman, (reviewed here) the biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick who witnessed it.

Williamson explains how the party, led by Lyndon Johnson, did “red-in-tooth-and–claw battle against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and again against the Civil Rights  Act of 1960.” The latter by a record-breaking filibuster.

The Democrat left (redundant) habitually smears Republicans with the mud of racism. Considering Democrat history this is chutzpah. Martin H. Quitt details the racist origins of the Democrat Party in his book about Stephen Douglas (reviewed here).   Williamson exposes the party’s more recent record and that of Lyndon Johnson. The parent of  the Great Society “not only opposed civil rights legislation but also Republican–backed anti-lynching legislation and had done so consistently.”

The author points out that the New Deal was enacted during a time of national and global emergency. As such its primary focus was not cultivation of economic dependency for political gain. The same is not true of Johnson’s Great Society. The social-welfare and wealth-transfer aspects of the Great Society were “a tool for building a permanent Democrat majority under which the interests of the state would be made identical to the interests of the Democratic Party.” Johnson, for example,  is quoted as having said: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for 200 years.”

When Medicare was adopted, the elderly were the single wealthiest group of Americans, as they are today. The first Job Corp  office was opened when the employment  rate was under 5%. The poverty rate had been declining steeply for years before the War on Poverty was announced. It was nearly halved before the Great Society began to be implemented in earnest, falling from nearly 19% in 1959 to less than 10% in 1968. After the first skirmishes in the  War on Poverty, the rate began to climb: War was declared and poverty won…

The War on Poverty was not designed to help the poor.

The author explains how the poor, the middle class and the rich were hooked into dependence. He provides a step-by-step guide of how key pieces of social-welfare legislation were amended to expand dependency.

The 1962 amendments made it possible for departments of public welfare to purchase specified social services for eligible clients from other public agencies. The 1967 amendments  expanded this to nonprofit and proprietary agencies.

The missions of these organizations were distorted to provide menus of services that  matched the availability of public funds. What followed was an explosion in social welfare spending and welfare-dependency rolls. The displacement of private philanthropy by government contracting “had the double result of making government dependents of both welfare recipients and the workers of the agencies that provide contracted services to them.”

At the apex of the dependency food chain are the highest-ranking members of a political machine ultimately dependent upon the dependency.

Senator Jeff Sessions in a 2012 news release provided an example of the reciprocity between dependency and political power. He revealed that states receive bonuses from Washington for registering bumper crops of applicants for food stamps.

A recent column in the WSJ is also germane to Williamson’s thesis. George Melloan writing about IRS harassment of conservative organizations offered his  insights about how government grows.  “Government workers only have to find a ’problem’ that needs their attention, publicize it with the help of the press, and marshal special interests to help them get a budget. Even if they were not specifically instructed to do so, it wouldn’t be hard for IRS employees to persuade themselves to stiff-arm activists who want to cut the size and power of government.”

Melloan  summarizes Obama’s trajectory:

He (Barack Obama) has achieved the top job in government by catering to the career interests of government employees. He and fellow progressives in Congress have created powerful new bureaucracies in health insurance and financial regulation. They have sharply expanded the government share of GDP.

Lyndon Johnson contributed to the expansion of dependency by broadening the definition of eligibility for government funded but privately administered social services.  Where formerly Individuals had to satisfy certain requirements to qualify for benefits, the qualification standard was changed to membership in a designated group. Thus children from middle class families attending schools serving mostly poor students qualify for benefits.  So do affluent families living in a neighborhood designated as poor.

All of which contributed to turning federal welfare programs into tools for building political constituencies.

Williamson concludes:

The dependency agenda must be revered and the federal welfare state dissolved not only because we cannot afford it but because failure to do so ensures that our politics will remain warped by perverse incentives, by unconstitutional seizures of power and by what amounts to looting of the disc by the parasitic political class.

Read all about it in The Dependency Agenda by Kevin D. Williamson, and in  tomorrow’s newspaper.

Bonhoeffer was a deeply religious man from an incredibly intellectual and refined family.  The Bonhoeffer family exemplified class and dignity as members of Germany’s aristocracy.  Thus Bonhoeffer’s choices are, at the same time, explicable in terms of his education and character, and incredible given his situation.  Bonhoeffer could have kept silent,  done nothing and survived the war.  In fact, he also had the opportunity to escape his fate, and sit out the war in America.  He did neither of these things, instead choosing to return to Germany, on the brink of the war, knowing that it was likely he would be imprisoned or worse.

So, who was this man Bonhoeffer, and why should we care?  Unfortunately most people today have never heard his name and know nothing of him.  This reviewer was among their number until someone passed him this book.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was part of a proud family with a rich heritage and place of distinction in German society.  His father was a famous and much respected psychiatrist and his mother’s family had many connections with the Weimar government and military.  (Many of these people were involved in plots to assassinate Hitler along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.) It is a testament to Bonhoeffer’s father that, although he himself was a “man of science” and not religious, he could respect and discuss his son’s philosophical pursuits.  When as a young man Bonhoeffer decided to study religion, his family, (other than his mother), may have thought it was a waste of his gifts, for Bonhoeffer was a brilliant intellect and talented musician.  Nevertheless, initially it seemed that perhaps he was pursuing an interest in a philosophical, academic career, rather than in becoming a member of the clergy.

However, while much interested in the intellectual and philosophical side of religious studies, Bonhoeffer was equally, and ultimately more fascinated with the practical aspects of serving God.  After making a name for himself with some brilliant doctoral and post-doctoral works, Bonhoeffer spent a year in Spain as an assistant pastor.  He was too young to be ordained and too young to receive a position at the University.  And he was torn between a career in academia and life in service to the church.

It was about this time that Bonhoeffer became involved in a major split within the German Lutheran church.  Bonhoeffer argued on ecumenical basis for a real relationship with God, rather than for lukewarm Christianity.  The “Confessing Church” in Germany came into being.  Confessing did not mean confessional in the Catholic sense, but rather in the sense of bearing witness to the world as an evangelical movement.  He saw how Hitler’s Reich was perverting and subverting Christianity for its own ends.

Thus, Bonhoeffer was on right side of history, but at cross purposes with Hitler’s Reich Bishop Müller.  Müller believed that any member who had Jewish ancestry should be expelled from the church.  In 1936 the Reich Church was created. Its symbol was the swastika, not the Christian cross.

The Confessional Church, on the other hand, while opposed to Hitler’s plans, initially tried to go along and get along, for fear of persecution and loss of membership.  Not everyone was as outspoken as Bonhoeffer.  After all, many of Hitler’s activities were not well known by most people in Germany.  While they may have thought him a little crazy, they saw that he was restoring national pride and getting Germany out from under the odious terms imposed upon them after the first world war.  Hitler had made no bones about his plans for the Jews and his ideas for shaping German society in his screed, Mein Kampf.  But, either people didn’t take him seriously, or simply didn’t realize the depths of his depravity.  However, once the war began in earnest, Hitler dropped all pretense and began implementing his policies in earnest.  He had consolidated his power to such an extent that there was no one who could challenge him openly.

Bonhoeffer and a few others in the “Confessing Church” did speak out.  One of these was the head of the Confessing Church, Martin Niemoller. He was famous in Germany for his services as a U-boat captain in World War I. This made him an embarrassing and potent foe to the Nazis. In spite of his prominence, the Gestapo arrested him for opposing Hitler. He was sent to a concentration camp for 7 years and kept in solitary confinement. He was not alone in suffering this fate.  Ultimately, Bonhoeffer was also arrested and executed on Hitler’s explicit orders, a mere 13 days before Hitler killed himself.  Bonhoeffer was part of the failed plot to assassinate the Fuehrer.

So, how does a man of God justify being part of an assassination plot?   Hitler was as close to pure evil as anything that Germany had ever seen.  Bonhoeffer recognized this and actively worked on at least two plots to kill Hitler with a bomb.  He also tried to use his ecumenical contacts in other countries, in particular in England, to get assistance.  Unfortunately once the war began, Churchill and others turned a deaf ear to those seeking to oust Hitler.  Initially some of those involved in early plots against Hitler were trying to ensure that if they were successful, Germany would receive an amicable peace and transition to a new government.  In the end, they realized that none of that mattered.  Patriotism counted for little in the face of such overwhelming evil. Bonhoeffer never faltered in this belief.

In 1939, life was becoming very difficult for Bonhoeffer and some well intentioned friends in England and the United States arranged for him to take an academic position in New York.  Against his inclinations, he agreed to sneak out of Germany.  Amazingly enough, he made it to New York.  However, no sooner had he arrived than he decided that he had made a mistake and given in to fear.  He realized that his place was in Germany doing what he could to work against Hitler.  He returned almost immediately, much to the dismay of those who had worked so hard to get him to safety.

It wasn’t safety that motivated Bonhoeffer, it was obedience to God’s will, regardless of the consequences.  Bonhoeffer had done a lot of thinking about this and explained his view of the Christian life in his seminal book, The Cost of Discipleship.

Metaxas does not review this book in his own, but instead shows how Bonhoeffer exemplified what he wrote about, avoiding “cheap grace,” and instead opting for the hard road.  In Bonhoeffer’s view, a man’s salvation is worth only the value that he himself puts upon it.  It is either important or it isn’t.  While he did not dispute the Lutheran view of being saved by grace rather than works, he argued for a deeper and personal relationship with God that would cause an honest Christian to value the gift of salvation by striving to follow God’s leading, whatever the cost to himself.

Cheap grace, on the other hand, is compartmentalized religion and leaves one without the basis to stand when things get tough.  If you don’t value your faith, you will be less inclined to rely upon it when you need it most.

Bonhoeffer realized that many Christians in Germany (and elsewhere) may have tried to live according to Christian principles, but were only willing to do so internally or privately in a guarded sense.  In one of his more interesting observations, Metaxas points out that Bonhoeffer was willing to make mistakes, and even sin, in his efforts to be obedient to God’s will.  For Bonhoeffer, many Christians were too caught up in legalistic righteousness and allowed the German government to set the terms of the debate in consequence.

In one poignant section of the book Bonhoeffer gives the example of a teacher who interrogates a young child about his father’s drinking.  In Bonhoeffer’s view, the child in this situation who lies to protect his father is justified in doing so … because the child owes the teacher no honesty.   In like vein, Bonhoeffer realized that he was willing to lie and deceive Hitler’s Gestapo if necessary, because he owed evil no morality.

This and many other things in this book made this reader want to read some of Bonhoeffer’s writings.   In the end, the story of Bonhoeffer’s life is both melancholy, and inspirational.     Metaxas’ book is one that this reviewer will think about for a long time to come.

As we now know, the IRS has been on a mission to target conservative groups. As IRS official, Lois Lerner, famously remarked last week, she is not good at math. Nor, it appears, is the IRS very good at that whole Constitution thing. Just as math skills are no impediment for employment with the IRS, it seems neither is following the law. In the good old days of the Bush era dissent, according to Nancy Pelosi, was the highest form of patriotism. (Oh, there’s one of those words.) In the Obama era, dissent is the highest probability of an IRS audit. And there could be even more bad news on the horizon. With the IRS adding thousands of new agents to meet the needs of Obamacare, they will know more about us medically than we do. Don’t be surprised if an IRS agent performs your next colonoscopy, but only if you’re a conservative, of course.

The Left often mocks conservatives for being paranoid about government. I disagree. Paranoia suggests an irrational fear. If we have learned anything in recent days, we ought to at least understand that a healthy skepticism of big government is, well, healthy. And rational! A “centrist” think tank recently stated that the government is a gargantuan enterprise that does stupid things every day. Great! It does stupid things, so let’s have more of it.

New Slogan: Smaller Government = Less Stupid Things.

On Wednesday Eric Holder testified before Congress about the Justice Department’s wiretapping of Associated Press reporters’ phones. I’m not sure “testify” is the proper term. Holder showed up, didn’t say anything for four hours and called it a day. He has recused himself from any further involvement in the whole wiretapping business. Not that he actually has that whole recusing business in writing or anything, or if he does, the document is in the same place his Fast and Furious records are kept. And those are locked up tighter than the maker of that crummy Islamic video. This from “The Most Transparent Administration in History.” Yes, as transparent as a milkshake.

To say these are not the finest days for Team Obama is an understatement. There is a term for the current state of the Obama administration. The first word is “cluster” and it ends with a word that is a slang term for an act that often includes contraception.

Two questions come to mind: First, should we start referring to Eric Holder as a Recuse-nik? Secondly, how many Obama administration clowns are going to keep coming out of that Volkswagen? It’s a great gag for Ringling Brothers, the Greatest Show on Earth, but not so much for Barack Obama, leader of the Greatest Country on Earth.

Curtice Mang is the author of the new book, The Constitution – I’m Not Kidding and Other Tales of Liberal Folly. He can be contacted at www.mangwrites.com, where one can also purchase his book; or contact Curtice at mangwrites at cox.net.

First They Came

When the Obama Administration labeled veterans as potential terrorists,
The Associated Press remained silent;
The AP were not fans of the military.

When they went after Gibson Guitar,
The AP remained silent;
AP reporters can buy Martin Guitars.

When they came for the home schoolers,
The Associated Press did not speak out;
Their kids attend private school

When they sicced the IRS on the Tea Party,
The Associated Press remained silent;
 They didn’t like the Tea Party.

When his administration came for the Associated Press,
there was no one left to speak out.

Up to now the MSM apparently thought it was acceptable for federal agencies to be guided by political motives so long as they were the correct political motives. The ones favored by the MSM.

The EPA’s harassment of the Gibson Guitar Company: no worry. The U.S. Energy Department provides loan guarantee to financially shaky Solyndra. It was in a good cause.  Obama’s recess appointments when the Senate wasn’t in recess: legal nitpicking. Former employees of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division report political bias: unimportant. The New Black Panther party gets a pass on voter intimidation: old news.

And that was before the Obama administration misled the public about Benghazi. Even then the MSM dismissed it as Republican mud slinging. After all, Hillary Clinton didn’t know why it mattered. But then testimony before Congress revealed “the rest of the story.” And it is such an ugly story that even some MSM columnists have said so.

On the heals of that scandal came revelations that the IRS used its power to delay approval of conservative groups applications for 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) status; used its audit process to target conservatives, especially those who were outspoken in criticism of the Obama administration. And, maybe most shocking, the IRS leaked confidential financial information to antagonistic leftist groups. The president, as usual, professed to know nothing about anything.

But now the MSM is shocked …shocked I tell you …to learn that the Obama administration is capable of both deceit and betrayal. This late acquaintance with reality is the result of still another scandal; this one about the Obama Justice Department secretly obtaining Associated Press phone records from 20 different cellular, office and home phones for over two months. The subpoened phone records included personal and office lines for reporters, editors, and AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery. The purpose was to determine responsibility for the disclosure of classified information about a failed al-Qaeda plot last year.  AP’s president called Justice Department’s actions a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering activities.

In an unusually coordinated voice, ABC, CNN and NBC called the administration’s Benghazi bluff. They demanded the release of the Benghazi emails regarding the bogus “the video made them do it” talking points. Their message being that if the president had told the truth there was no reason to withhold them. The emails were reluctantly provided late this afternoon. Early reports indicate that, contrary to previous denials, the White House and the State Department were heavily involved in constructing the Benghazi cover story.

It was bound to happen. Progressives, an appellation the president embraces, believe that the Constitution is an outdated encumbrance to the necessary exercise of power. Officials who do not respect the rule of law are free to do whatever they perceive as necessary in a given situation. This time that involved, in the words of Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, “an astonishing assault on the core values of our society.”

This administration, before which members of the MSM had faithfully genuflected, is now revealed to have bitten them in their exposed posteriors.

Such wounds, while never fatal, do puncture inflated egos.  They may also lead to such instant conversions as turning sycophants into journalists.

Let us hope.

As adequately demonstrated throughout history, impinging on individual freedoms for the common good eventually requires the use of force. But it’s not necessary to look to history. In Germany homeschooling is verboten and violating that dictat can result in forcible removal of children and jailing of parents.

Which brings us to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, evangelical Christians who fled to the United States to continue schooling their five children at home. The parents said their children were being taught things that were against the family’s religious beliefs. They were awarded asylum by federal immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman in 2010. The judge ruled:

The rights violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate. Home schoolers are a particular group that the German government is trying to suppress. The family has a well-founded fear of persecution.

The judge further characterized the German persecution as “repellent to everything we believe as Americans.”

The German government justifies the ban, originally instituted by the Nazis in 1938, by stating that its purpose is to “counteract the development of religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies.” This is political correctness on steroids! No one is to be allowed to deviate from government-approved groupthink.

When Judge Lawrence O. Burman called the German persecution “repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” he obviously forgot about Attorney General Eric  Holder.

Holder wants the Romeikes deported, whatever the consequences.

The Justice Department argument is embarrassingly lacking in logic or constitutional standing. According to Holder, such policies do not constitute a violation of fundamental human rights so long as everybody’s rights are infringed upon equally. In other words, even a total ban on homeschooling does not violate fundamental rights. Holder also claimed that there was no religious persecution involved because not all homeschoolers are religious and not all Christians choose to educate their children at home.  The case, Romeike v. Holder, is before the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.  To this writer’s knowledge a decision is pending.

Readers may recall that on March 14, 2013 the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement admitted that his agency released 2,228 people from immigration detention centers across the country for “budgetary” reasons. Some are felons and others are guilty of multiple drunken driving and misdemeanor crimes. The backlog of immigration cases is so large that immigration judges are closing cases that have no hope of being heard. But the Holder administration has sufficient time and resources to pursue the Romeikes?

A possible answer to that question hasn’t much to do with the Romeikes, who are targets of convenience, but a great deal to do with the Obama administration’s education agenda. Consider that 45 states have signed on to Common Core Standards and its Statewide Longitudinal Data System. According to the National Data Collection Model, the information to be collected includes health-care history, family income and family voting status, among other items. These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data to track students from preschool to workforce entry. By regulatory means, the Obama administration altered the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to be able to make that data available to third parties.

The Department of Education, of course, denies it will develop a nationwide database of information on every student. However, there is reason for doubting the denial. As the New York Post explained:

“The department says this won’t happen. If the states choose to link their data systems, it says, that’s their business, but “the federal government would not play a role” in operating the resulting megadatabase.

This denial is, to say the least, disingenuous. The department would have access to the data systems of each of the 50 states and would be allowed to share that data with anyone it chooses, as long as it uses the right language to justify the disclosure.”

By Bob Mack of Crocketlives

Could it be that the Obama administration wants to close the home school escape hatch? According to EdNews.org:

Since 1999, the number of children who are being homeschooled has increased by 75%. Although currently only 4% of all school children nationwide are educated at home, the number of primary school kids whose parents choose to forgo traditional education is growing seven times faster than the number of kids enrolling in K-12 every year.

The article further reveals  “consistently high placement of home-schooled kids on standardized assessment exams.” Home-schooled children “typically score between 65th and 89th percentile on such exams, while those attending traditional schools average on the 50th percentile.”

It appears the development of such “religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies” is not to be tolerated. The fate of charter schools is uncertain.  District-run charters will probably have to abide by the Common Core and provide the required student data. Privately run charters may escape, at least temporarily. Though one wonders about recent efforts to discredit charters that have been appearing in the MSM.

Those who dismiss these concerns as overblown might want to consider that this is the government in which the Internal Revenue Service, having first denied,  now admits targeting and harassing conservative organizations and even sharing confidential information with liberal groups. And, of course, it is the same government that consistently misled the public about Benghazi.

We can hope, but change seems unlikely.

According to the Pew Research Center:

As Barack Obama begins his second term in office, trust in the federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high. And for the first time, a majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.

Parents’ rights to control their children’s education have been challenged before.  Most notably in 1922 when Oregon passed an initiative requiring all children to attend public schools. It was challenged by the Society of Sisters to defend parents’ right to choose a parochial education. Lawyers for the state argued that the state had an overriding interest to oversee and control education providers in Oregon. One even went so far as to call Oregonian students “the State’s children.” Hillary Clinton and Professor Harris-Perry would have been pleased.

Associate Justice James Clark McReynolds wrote the opinion of the Court.  He stated that children were not “the mere creature[s] of the state” (268 U.S. 510, 535), and that, by its very nature, the traditional American understanding of the term liberty prevented the state from forcing students to accept instruction only from public schools. He stated that this responsibility belonged to the child’s parents or guardians, and that the ability to make such a choice was a “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Take that Eric Holder!

This book is part biography and part social and political history. Quitt draws on previously untapped sources to try to do justice to a complex man now little more than a footnote to history. The irony is that, in his time, Douglas was widely admired and thought much more likely to ascend to the presidency than the man whose election relegated him to the shadows. If Douglas is remembered at all, it is for debating Lincoln in 1858 when Lincoln ran for Douglas’s Senate seat. Lincoln is reputed to have won the debates, but Douglas won the election.

By turns Douglas was prodigy, opportunist, pragmatist, patriot and more. Regarding the prodigy, the author draws on three different versions of Douglas’s early years in Vermont. Predictably, Douglas’s autobiography (written when he was 25) is more flattering to its author than his older sister’s memories of the same period.

The facts, if not the motivations behind them, are that Douglas was a gifted boy, unwilling at 14 to pursue further schooling, despite his mother’s wish that he do so. Instead, he apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker in a neighboring town. The apprenticeship lasted less than a year because, according to Douglas’s account, he refused the cabinet-maker’s request to perform “some menial service in the house.” Another apprenticeship, this one cut short by illness, resulted in a physician’s advice that Douglas was “too feeble” to be a cabinetmaker and should seek another vocation. At that point Douglas returned to school.

His biographers agree on one fact. Douglas lacked the physical stamina for carpentry. He was only 5 ft 4 inches tall and weighed perhaps 100 pounds, but his ambition was king-sized. He decided to become a lawyer but lacked the patience to pursue a law degree in the conventional manner. After two more years of schooling in New York, where the family had moved after his widowed mother’s remarriage, he joined the Hubbell law firm. After 6 months he despaired of another four years before he could qualify as an attorney. He determined that it was much easier to become a full-fledged legal practitioner in “the great west ” where the requirements were much less demanding.

He would settle where he could become a lawyer the fastest and where he would not have to compete with the credential of his legal mentor in Canandaigua, Walter Hubbell, who graduated from Union college.

Douglas moved to Cleveland and began a year of legal study with a local attorney to satisfy the Ohio requirement. However, illness intervened again and, when recovered, he moved on, finally settling in Jacksonville, Illinois. There attorney Murray McConnel advised him that obtaining a law “license was a matter of no consequence, that I could practice before a justice of the peace without one, and could get one at any time I desire to do so.”

His lack of constancy seems anything but admirable. Yet, as the author points out, Douglas had a prodigious intellect when sufficiently motivated to employ it. He undertook a self-study regimen that encompassed reading “congressional debates reported in newspapers and a number of political books.”

Before he was old enough to vote, Douglas had immersed himself in all of the available printed records surrounding the ratification of the Constitution and the constitutionality of the national bank, the great issue of Andrew Jackson’s second term.

Samuel Lockwood, justice on the Illinois Supreme Court, licensed the 20-year-old   Douglas as a lawyer in 1834, despite commenting, “Douglas was not as prepared as he should have been.” The new lawyer then opened his law office.

Douglas’s political career commenced on March 29, 1834. That was the day he delivered a one-hour speech at the Jacksonville Courthouse to defend Jackson’s war on the national bank. The speech gained him notoriety in the anti-Jackson press and the attention of fellow Democrats. Within months he was a mover and shaker within the new Democratic Party of Illinois.

He was appointed as one of the state’s attorneys in 1835 but did not finish his term. In 1836 he ran and won election to the state legislature where he served along with Abraham Lincoln.  Again he did not complete his term but resigned to accept President Van Buren’s appointment as register of the Federal Land Office in Springfield. Eight months later he was (an unsuccessful) candidate for Congress.

Explaining this meteoric rise the author writes that Douglas was both  “charismatic” and calculating. By his own admission, Douglas did not have time for “personal friends” only for “political friends” whose solicitation for votes he credited with pushing him ahead. Similar to a Democrat politician in our time, Douglas “bathed in the adoration of the crowd, which gave him what he did not get from private relationships.”

The similarity goes even further.

Douglas was shrewd. Taking the time at age 25 to fashion a compelling life narrative itself is evidence of his strategic thinking….He undertook the writing of his biography in order both to preserve his story and to connect it with the electorate. Those two ends were not inconsistent for someone whose very identity was now intimately tied to the people he needed.

In addition to charisma, Douglas displayed a physicality with his audiences that is difficult to imagine even in today’s permissiveness culture. “He would “sit on the laps of men” and  “clap them on their backs.” The author explains this behavior was not sexual but “within the context of the egalitarian ethos of his times…It signified that the ‘Little Giant’ did not think himself so high and mighty that he could not repose on a man’s knees. It figuratively brought him down to the level of his peers.” It was part of his public performance.

Douglas was named to the Illinois Supreme Court in 1841 but did not serve out his term, although thereafter he preferred to be addressed as Judge Douglas. He was elected to US House of Representatives in1843 and became a U.S Senator in 1846 where he served until his death at age 48.

Antebellum lawmakers at the state and federal levels needed to know the written constitution applicable to their jurisdiction. This was the great legacy of the founders of the Republic: congressmen were obliged to justify their positions in terms of the Constitution.

The author writes, “His legislative record over seventeen years in Congress was anchored in constitutionalism.” The difference between the Democrat party then and now could not be more stark.

Douglas was rooted in his conviction that the federal government should respect the diversity of states and territories and the slavery issue should be democratically decided in those locales. He was a member of the powerful Committee on the Territories in the US Senate where he moved major legislation involving the new western territories. He helped pass the Compromise of 1850 and was the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, dealing with slavery in the new territories.

Historians, writing from the vantage point of more enlightened times, have condemned Douglas for his belief in the inferiority of the black race. However, it was a belief shared by most of the antebellum generation and, as Thomas Fleming points out in his book ”A Disease in the Public Mind” by Thomas Jefferson.

The morality of slavery did not concern Douglas. Lincoln, who was pressed during the debates to deny the charge that he believed in equality of the races, was convinced that slavery was morally wrong. He challenged Douglas to declare himself on the moral issue. Douglas refused to do so.

’Lincoln tells you that I will not argue the question whether slavery is right or wrong. I tell you I will not do it. I hold under the Constitution of the United States, each state of the Union has a right to do as it pleases on the subject of slavery.’

Which was the greater sin, secession or slavery? To Douglas the answer was clear. He denounced the proposition to dissolve the American Union as ‘moral treason.’ For more than a decade he foresaw civil war if the question of slavery in the territories was controlled by the ultras on either side. He wanted to remove the issue from Washington politics because it endangered national coherence. He believed the overriding purpose of the Constitution had been to achieve the Union; therefore, its preservation was the highest constitutional value.

Douglas’s vaunted ambition peaked with his desire to be president. Having won the candidacy of a splintered Democratic Party he undertook the first overtly political presidential campaign. The custom against personal campaigning by presidential candidates dated from George Washington who considered it improper to openly pursue election and detrimental to the dignity of the office. Douglas’s decision to ignore it was risky. The conventional wisdom was that “talking and touring could only hurt the candidate.”

Douglas campaigned openly and energetically in both the North and South, the latter at considerable personal risk. When in the North he attacked abolitionism and in the South he spoke against disunion. But his consistent message, regardless of audience, was that the people in the states and territories should decide the slavery issue without federal interference. He visited 24 states, drawing enormous crowds. It was a remarkable feat in an age lacking today’s communication technology and transportation options.

But for all his energy and effort, Quitt’s analysis shows ”little correlation between Douglas’s personal campaigning and his performance Election Day.” This lack of connection “reveals an important fact of antebellum democracy – the widespread acceptance of the president as a leader who did not subject himself to screening by the people.” The crowds that flocked to Douglas sought entertainment, not political enlightenment.

After losing to Lincoln, Douglas declared his support for the president and attempted to find compromises that would stop secession. But, as the author points out, the patriotic Douglas did not eclipse the shrewd politician.

Douglas was eager to make visible his rapport with the new administration and at the same time make clear that he remained an important player.

Lincoln, however, was no novice at the political game.

Each was ready to use the other: Douglas wanted to be in the president’s inner circle; Lincoln wanted the Democratic standard bearer to broaden support for succession.

Quitt extracts Douglas from Lincoln’s shadow and succeeds in illuminating both the man and his time. This is a compelling book that challenges each reader to decide Stephen Douglas’s proper place in history.

One thing Carney and the White House have been clear about concerns the Benghazi talking points following the attack on the Libyan consulate.  From the beginning Carney has said that we should wait (it was the video) for all of the facts (it was the video) before passing judgment (it was really, really the video).  As we now know, it wasn’t the video.  The talking points that United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice trotted out for all of the Sunday talk shows following the Benghazi attack had as much to do with reality as Michael Bloomberg has to do with individual liberty.  What started out in the talking points (as well as in, coincidently, real life) as a coordinated attack carried out by al Qaeda-linked terrorists turned into an out of control protest over a You Tube video that was so bad Jim Carrey was looking at starring in the remake.

Yet, through the whole talking points metamorphosis, Carney claimed only one “stylistic” change was made. Really?   That’s like John Lennon telling Paul McCartney he was going to make one stylistic change to Hey Jude and the result turned into four and a half minutes of Yoko Ono warbling.  Stylistic, indeed.

With the recent congressional testimony from three Benghazi survivors, even the Obama compliant media had to pay at least some attention to the Benghazi story.  As a matter of fact, just this week many news outlets learned that Benghazi was not the name of the actor that played Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski.* Sensing the awaking of the news media, the left went into full discredit mode, looking to link the Benghazi whistle blowers to everything from the Kennedy assassination to fluoridated tap water to the Manti Te’o fake girlfriend scandal.

Why, the press wondered, would the Obama administration want to mislead the American public by pushing the video generated a protest which led to a riot story?  Well, there was that matter of the 2012 presidential election, just weeks after the Benghazi attack.  You may have heard something about it – it was in some of the papers.  Certainly blaming the whole thing on that lousy film maker for a while helped the administration’s narrative that al Qaeda was a shell of its former self.  And there was also the matter of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential aspirations.  The Democratic alternative to Hillary in 2016 is Joe Biden. (I know, it makes me giggle too.) Besides, Hillary has her campaign slogan for 2016 already prepared: Hillary 2016 – Because, well, what difference does it make? She couldn’t let that gem go to waste.

Many questions still remain unanswered, including this one: Where was Barack Obama (remember him?) during the attack on the Libyan consulate?  Perhaps he just doesn’t understand his role as president.  I wonder if he thinks he is Commander in Chef – and if he had a soufflé in the oven at the time, well, those things just can’t be rushed. Fortunately, of Benghazi President Obama has said, “I am ultimately responsible.”  Of course, by that he didn’t mean “responsible, responsible.”  He meant the kind of Washington responsible whereby it’s clearly somebody else’s fault.

Round up the usual suspects.

*For those unfamiliar with The Big Lebowski; A) How could that be?, and; B) The actor was Ben Gazarra.

Curtice Mang is the author of the new book, The Constitution – I’m Not Kidding and Other Tales of Liberal Folly. He can be contacted at www.mangwrites.com, where one can also purchase his book; or contact Curtice at mangwrites at cox.net.

And so Hillary’s shop “fixed’ what the CIA told them by deleting a few items. For example, the reference to “Islamic extremists,” reminders of agency warnings about al Qaeda in Libya, reference to “jihadists” in Cairo, and the possible surveillance of the facility in Benghazi.

Versions of Administration Talking Points

Gregory Hicks, assistant to slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, in his testimony before Congress, provided an explanation of why it took the FBI team so long to get to Benghazi. He explained that Libyan President Magariaf was insulted by having his credibility challenged before his people and before the world by Susan Rice. He was furious at being contradicted by the Obama administration narrative of  “the video was the trigger for the attack.” Hicks said the diplomatic gaffe contributed to the FBI team being stuck in Tripoli for about 17 days. He said the U.S. could not even get the Libyans to secure the crime scene during this time. “I definitely believe that It (the Obama administration’s video ruse) negatively affected our ability to get the FBI team quickly to Benghazi.”

Not publicly contradicting another head of state would seem to be diplomacy 101, but Barack and Hillary must have cut class that day.

Mark Thompson, former Marine and a member of the State Department’s Counterterrorism, Bureau, was asked why more military assets were not deployed during the Benghazi attack. He stated that the White House rebuffed him when he asked for a specialized team to be deployed. So much for the president’s claim that all available resources were deployed and no one was ordered to stand down.

So now we know, if we didn’t before, that the so-called Accountability Review Board was mostly a whitewash. Hicks also testified that a team of Special Forces was prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks but was told to stand down by U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa. Who, if not the president, or someone acting with his authority, could shut down a mission to help besieged Americans?

The congressional inquiry into Benghazi is going to stain more than Hilary Clinton’s pantsuit. President Harry Truman had a sign on desk that read, “The buck stops here.” In his farewell address to the American people in 1953, he elaborated: “The President–whoever he is–has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”

A president cannot vote “present,” “lead from behind,” or absent himself during a crisis as Obama reportedly did on September 11, 2012.

Truman would have been appalled. The Main Stream Media ought to be.

Today, there is sadly little room in most newspapers for this kind of expository writing.  It’s hard to imagine something as weighty as Madison’s Federalist No. 10 being published in the comic-book like sheets of the USA Today.  For all their pretensions, the NYT or the WSJ aren’t much better.  However, even granting that the Gray Lady and The Journal occasionally feature some intellectual content. Well-reasoned, serious arguments don’t find widespread readership.  The Federalist was widely printed and discussed.  Tom Paine’s Common Sense and Crisis Papers were as well.

This is not to say that the “broadsides” being published by Encounter Books are hugely intellectual (at least judging by this one).  However, the apparent aim is to “arm” thoughtful people with some facts about the important issues of today.  (Perhaps that’s another reason for their being called “broadsides.”)

The K-12 Implosion deals with the problem of an increasingly expensive and poorly performing American educational system.  It is a brief collation of facts and analysis about the state of American Education.   It is only 38 pages of clear prose, written in large type.  The K-12 implosion doesn’t necessarily provide answers to the problems facing the nation’s schools, but does document why things are the way they are and offers a range of ideas which will undoubtedly be tried to resolve the issues.

Reynolds makes it clear that there is no one-size-fits-all answer, and indeed asserts that trying to force American students into such a system is a big reason why American education is in such dismal shape.

Reynolds quotes entrepreneur and thinker Seth Godin:

Large scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars.  It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.  Scale was more important than quality, just as it was for most industrialists.

Of course it worked.  Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed.  What now?

….

Every year, we churn out millions of workers who are trained to do 1925-style labor.

It is an interesting premise.  Whether it is true or not, one thing is undeniable, the current system is no longer working.  In fact it’s getting worse faster.  And money is not the issue.  It seems the more we spend, the worse it gets.   Outmoded methods are not the only reason that Reynolds cites.  There is plenty of blame to go around.  The educational establishment certainly deserves its share of the credit for the mess things are in.

… Today’s schools, however, aren’t even successfully teaching the basics.

What’s more, as we’ve increased the amount of money going in, there’s been no corresponding increase in learning.  One reason for that is that a disproportionate amount of money has gone into administration, rather than to teaching.  According to a report in The Education Gadfly describing a study by Benjamin Scafidi called The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools, “between 1950 and 2009, the number of K-12 public school students increased by 96%.  During that same period, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew by 386%.  Of those personnel, the number of teachers increased by 252%, while the ranks of administrators and other staff grew by 702%–more than seven times the increase in students.”

These education administrators don’t teach; if anything, they create paperwork for the people who do.  Some of them, of course, are required to by federal regulations, but that hardly improves the situation on the ground.  There is one reason more money hasn’t improved things: it’s not going to teaching but to paper pushing.  As Robert Barranco and Michael McShane write, “in constant dollars, education spending rose from $1214 in 1945 to just under $10,500 in 2008.  The St. Louis Public schools, for example, spend more than $14,000 per student per year, so if it has problems, money is not one of them.

And what better personifies the educational establishment than the teacher’s unions?

Adding teachers and administrators has benefited unions (more members) and politicians who draw support from those unions (more voters beholden to them), and it costs a lot of money.  What it hasn’t done is conferred any measurable benefit on students, who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of public education.  And now people have started to notice.

The result is that parents and taxpayers are losing faith in public education.  And that portends a potential implosion.

And with this sentence Reynolds begins his explanation of yet another cause of the decline in American Education.  The more disgusted and disheartened people become with an abysmal system, the more they seek alternatives.  The more they seek alternatives, the less children there are to enroll in public schools.  And since parents who give a damn tend to be self-selecting, what’s left for the public schools is disproportionately skewed to lower performing students of parents who either don’t know, don’t care, don’t have a choice because of their economic circumstances, or who simply view school as state-funded day care.

Parents are leaving the school districts because they want better educations for their children.  But the consequences for the districts can be devastating.

First, the students who are leaving are probably better than average because their parents care so much about their educations.  That means that when they leave, the overall quality of the remaining students, and thus the schools, will drop.

Second, funding is often based on the number of pupils in schools, so when the students leave, the schools have less money.  Since it’s hard to get rid of teachers, they probably cut “plus” programs like music, art, etc.–But losing those will make the schools less appealing to students who are thinking of leaving, probably accelerating the trend.

Third, parents–that is, taxpayers–who are sending their kids elsewhere (especially those who are homeschooling or sending their kids to private or online schools) will probably be less willing to support taxes for the benefit of public schools they are not using and probably don’t think highly of.  And, for that matter, once public schools are no longer seen as a near universal institution, taxpayer support in general is likely to fall off.  That, of course, means schools will be less funded, which will probably encourage still more students to depart and cause more parents to resent paying taxes for public schools their kids don’t use, in a vicious circle that produces shrinkage year after year.

Options

After chronicling (and supporting with facts) these and other causes for the decline in American education, Reynolds offers some hope for the future.  He argues that the current system is not only bad, it’s unsustainable — it’s simply too expensive to continue.  There will be a change whether the education establishment wants it or not.  Reynolds quotes economist Herbert Stein who famously said, “Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.”

Reynolds admits that there is no single or perfect solution, and indeed advocates for a variety of different approaches, tailored to the specific needs of the student.  The one he focuses on most is online study (for the student capable, and disciplined enough to take advantage of it.)  Reynolds uses the example of his own daughter who was able to get  a jump start on college, quit wasting time in a high-school with a curriculum far beneath her capabilities, and gain valuable work experience to boot.  Reynolds admits that this won’t work for everyone, but can work for some.   He is a big advocate for exploiting advances in educational technology in use by organizations like the online Khan Academy.

Is. online school for everyone?  Absolutely not.  Some kids don’t have the discipline to sit down at a computer every day and do school work with no one looking over their shoulder .…  But for the right kids, the online approach offers benefits the traditional school doesn’t.

Some children benefit from a Montessori approach that allows kids to follow their own interests and work at their own pace.  Other kids benefit from a more rigidly structured traditional approach.  Still others do best with homeschooling, which seems to be enormously beneficial for many kids when their parents are willing and able to invest in the effort.  (Look at how many home schoolers win the National Spelling Bee).

Although the end of the broadside reads a little like an advertisement for the Khan Academy, it’s hard to fault Reynold’s thinking.  Overall, he doesn’t focus much on the reasons for decline in American Education, other than to provide a few obvious ones.  (He doesn’t get into the core of liberal thinking and the inculcation of Progressive agendas in textbooks and teacher education.) Instead, in a  limited amount of space, he tries to get people thinking about reasonable alternatives and to realize that maybe there are viable solutions.

Gitmo as a recruiting tool is a subject I discuss in my book, The Constitution – I’m Not Kidding and Other Tales of Liberal Folly. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6, where I outline a possible scenario – an al Qaeda recruiter meeting with a potential recruit:

Recruiter: I’ve been watching you pray.
Recruit: I wasn’t praying. I just lost my contact lens.
Recruiter: Sorry, but you looked convincing.
Recruit: It’s not that I don’t pray, but, well, you know, my insurance doesn’t cover replacements.
Recruiter: I understand. But when you pray, do you do it like that?
Recruit: I don’t know. I guess so.
Recruiter: We are always looking for true believers. Are you a true believer?
Recruit: In what?
Recruiter: Jihad, of course.
Recruit: Um, sure. But I usually have breakfast first. I think jihad is much better after some oatmeal and coffee.
Recruiter: I think we could use you. Do you like virgins?
Recruit: That’s rather personal. I’ve never actually…..
Recruiter: If a jihadist dies for the cause he will be met by 72 virgins in heaven.
Recruit: That’s a lot of virgins. I’m not sure I’ve got the stamina, shouldn’t I practice some on earth first?
Recruiter: There is no time. Do you hate the American infidels?
Recruit: Um, well, sure. Except Justin Beiber. I call him J Beib. I follow him on Twitter.
Recruiter: I think he’s actually Canadian.
Recruit: Really? Then down with the American infidels!
Recruiter: What about Gitmo? Do you despise it?
Recruit: Isn’t that a gas station?
Recruiter: No, not CITGO. Gitmo. Guantanamo Bay. The American prison in Cuba. They already have many of your brother jihadists there.
Recruit: The Americans have a prison in Cuba? I thought the whole country was a prison?
Recruiter: Well, yes, but the Americans have a military prison there. They send all of your brother jihadists they capture there.
Recruit? How are they treated there? Do they get to pray?
Recruiter: Yes.
Recruit: Do they feed them?
Recruiter: Yes. Pretty well, I hear.
Recruit: How is the medical care?
Recruiter: Much better than in Havana.
Recruit: And the weather?
Recruiter: Tropical.
Recruit: I’m in!

Obama is right; Gitmo is still used as a recruiting tool. They can’t wait to get in.

Curtice Mang is the author of the new book, The Constitution – I’m Not Kidding and Other Tales of Liberal Folly. He can be contacted at www.mangwrites.com, where one can also purchase his book; or contact Curtice at mangwrites at cox.net.