Although trust is a virtue, in the hands of politicians it has a short shelf life.  It’s not that their intentions are inherently mischievous but rather that as their policy agenda evolves they start to confuse the fervency of their aspirations with credibility in the eyes of the electorate. 

Unlike what President Obama is peddling in Washington, this is a foible that’s clearly bipartisan, although he's raised it to something of an art form.  The politically engineered sense of false urgency that’s informed nearly every Obama initiative renders them suspect from the outset and blurs any positive outcome they might otherwise contain. 

Moreover, using economic suffering as a means to hard-wire liberal programs into a budget, which Obama did in the so-called stimulus package earlier this year makes average Americans distrust him when he tells them that our health insurance system must urgently be reformed.

Not unlike an overly complex battle plan whose seeds of defeat are effectively written into the blue print, political strategies predicated on an arrogant assumption of flawless handicapping are doomed to failure.  It’s akin to the perfect crime or the ability to think ten moves ahead in chess—your passion for victory increases linearly with your inability to control outcomes.

As a politician such as Obama builds the platform for his agenda he promptly loses sight of the foundation as he ambitiously gazes skyward.  Early successes inevitably lead to more expansive plans which are erroneously premised on a projected elasticity in the electorate. 

That’s where Obama is at this moment, perched as he is on the left edge of the political spectrum, with the preponderance of the nation becoming more alarmed with his every pronouncement, most prominently, his favored health insurance reform proposals. 

On the foreign policy front, Iran flouted U.S. and ally demands to allow inspections of its suspected nuclear programs by firing several test missiles which could easily reach Israel and even parts of Europe.  Instead of using the tested Bush policy of refusing direct talks with Iran, Obama is providing its rogue leaders with a kind of moral equivalence by countenancing what every analyst knows will be a sham negotiation.

It may take some time, but history will show that Bush’s foreign policy, maligned by liberals who were convinced their erudite State Department-speak would win the day, was founded on a common sense approach to belligerents.  Indeed, whether it’s the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 AD, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Great Britain in the late 4th^h century, the Nazis or Iran's fanatical leaders, their goal is the same:  the annihilation of their enemies and regional—or global—supremacy.

Obama may not be intending to appease our enemies, but that is the inevitable outcome of his current strategy.  He may not appreciate that now, but he will one day.

Although trust is a virtue, in the hands of politicians it has a short shelf life.  It’s not that their intentions are inherently mischievous but rather that as their policy agenda evolves they start to confuse the fervency of their aspirations with credibility in the eyes of the electorate. 

Unlike what President Obama is peddling in Washington, this is a foible that’s clearly bipartisan.  The politically engineered sense of false urgency that’s informed nearly every Obama initiative renders them suspect from the outset and blurs any positive outcome they might otherwise contain. 

Moreover, using economic suffering as a means to hard-wire liberal programs into a budget, which Obama did in the so-called stimulus package earlier this year makes average Americans distrust him when he tells them that our health insurance system must urgently be reformed.

Not unlike an overly complex battle plan whose seeds of defeat are effectively written into the blue print, political strategies predicated on an arrogant assumption of flawless handicapping are doomed to failure.  It’s akin to the perfect crime or the ability to think ten moves ahead in chess—your passion for victory increases linearly with your inability to control outcomes.

As a politician such as Obama builds the platform for his agenda he promptly loses sight of the foundation as he ambitiously gazes skyward.  Early successes inevitably lead to more expansive plans which are erroneously premised on a projected elasticity in the electorate. 

That’s where Obama is at this moment, perched as he is on the left edge of the political spectrum, with the preponderance of the nation becoming more alarmed with his every pronouncement, most prominently, his favored health insurance reform proposals. 

On the foreign policy front, Iran flouted U.S. and ally demands to allow inspections of its suspected nuclear programs by firing several test missiles which could easily reach Israel and even parts of Europe.  Instead of using the tested Bush policy of refusing direct talks with Iran, Obama is providing its rogue leaders with a kind of moral equivalence by countenancing what every analyst knows will be a sham negotiation.

It may take some time, but history will show that Bush’s foreign policy, maligned by liberals who were convinced their erudite State Department-speak would win the day, was founded on a common sense approach to belligerents.  Indeed, whether it’s the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 AD, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Great Britain in the late 4th^h century, the Nazis or Iran's fanatical leaders, their goal is the same:  the annihilation of their enemies and regional—or global—supremacy.

Obama may not be intending to appease our enemies, but that is the inevitable outcome of his current strategy.  He may not appreciate that now, but he will one day.

Although trust is a virtue, in the hands of politicians it has a short shelf life.  It’s not that their intentions are inherently mischievous but rather that as their policy agenda evolves they start to confuse the fervency of their aspirations with credibility in the eyes of the electorate. 

Unlike what President Obama is peddling in Washington, this is a foible that’s clearly bipartisan.  The politically engineered sense of false urgency that’s informed nearly every Obama initiative renders them suspect from the outset and blurs any positive outcome they might otherwise contain. 

Moreover, using economic suffering as a means to hard-wire liberal programs into a budget, which Obama did in the so-called stimulus package earlier this year makes average Americans distrust him when he tells them that our health insurance system must urgently be reformed.

Not unlike an overly complex battle plan whose seeds of defeat are effectively written into the blue print, political strategies predicated on an arrogant assumption of flawless handicapping are doomed to failure.  It’s akin to the perfect crime or the ability to think ten moves ahead in chess—your passion for victory increases linearly with your inability to control outcomes.

As a politician such as Obama builds the platform for his agenda he promptly loses sight of the foundation as he ambitiously gazes skyward.  Early successes inevitably lead to more expansive plans which are erroneously premised on a projected elasticity in the electorate. 

That’s where Obama is at this moment, perched as he is on the left edge of the political spectrum, with the preponderance of the nation becoming more alarmed with his every pronouncement, most prominently, his favored health insurance reform proposals. 

On the foreign policy front, Iran flouted U.S. and ally demands to allow inspections of its suspected nuclear programs by firing several test missiles which could easily reach Israel and even parts of Europe.  Instead of using the tested Bush policy of refusing direct talks with Iran, Obama is providing its rogue leaders with a kind of moral equivalence by countenancing what every analyst knows will be a sham negotiation.

It may take some time, but history will show that Bush’s foreign policy, maligned by liberals who were convinced their erudite State Department-speak would win the day, was founded on a common sense approach to belligerents.  Indeed, whether it’s the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 AD, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Great Britain in the late 4th^h century, the Nazis or Iran's fanatical leaders, their goal is the same:  the annihilation of their enemies and regional—or global—supremacy.

Obama may not be intending to appease our enemies, but that is the inevitable outcome of his current strategy.  He may not appreciate that now, but he will one day.

Although trust is a virtue, in the hands of politicians it has a short shelf life.  It’s not that their intentions are inherently mischievous but rather that as their policy agenda evolves they start to confuse the fervency of their aspirations with credibility in the eyes of the electorate. 

Unlike what President Obama is peddling in Washington, this is a foible that’s clearly bipartisan.  The politically engineered sense of false urgency that’s informed nearly every Obama initiative renders them suspect from the outset and blurs any positive outcome they might otherwise contain. 

Moreover, using economic suffering as a means to hard-wire liberal programs into a budget, which Obama did in the so-called stimulus package earlier this year makes average Americans distrust him when he tells them that our health insurance system must urgently be reformed.

Not unlike an overly complex battle plan whose seeds of defeat are effectively written into the blue print, political strategies predicated on an arrogant assumption of flawless handicapping are doomed to failure.  It’s akin to the perfect crime or the ability to think ten moves ahead in chess—your passion for victory increases linearly with your inability to control outcomes.

As a politician such as Obama builds the platform for his agenda he promptly loses sight of the foundation as he ambitiously gazes skyward.  Early successes inevitably lead to more expansive plans which are erroneously premised on a projected elasticity in the electorate. 

That’s where Obama is at this moment, perched as he is on the left edge of the political spectrum, with the preponderance of the nation becoming more alarmed with his every pronouncement, most prominently, his favored health insurance reform proposals. 

On the foreign policy front, Iran flouted U.S. and ally demands to allow inspections of its suspected nuclear programs by firing several test missiles which could easily reach Israel and even parts of Europe.  Instead of using the tested Bush policy of refusing direct talks with Iran, Obama is providing its rogue leaders with a kind of moral equivalence by countenancing what every analyst knows will be a sham negotiation.

It may take some time, but history will show that Bush’s foreign policy, maligned by liberals who were convinced their erudite State Department-speak would win the day, was founded on a common sense approach to belligerents.  Indeed, whether it’s the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 AD, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Great Britain in the late 4th^h century, the Nazis or Iran's fanatical leaders, their goal is the same:  the annihilation of their enemies and regional—or global—supremacy.

Obama may not be intending to appease our enemies, but that is the inevitable outcome of his current strategy.  He may not appreciate that now, but he will one day.

Although trust is a virtue, in the hands of politicians it has a short shelf life.  It’s not that their intentions are inherently mischievous but rather that as their policy agenda evolves they start to confuse the fervency of their aspirations with credibility in the eyes of the electorate. 

Unlike what President Obama is peddling in Washington, this is a foible that’s clearly bipartisan.  The politically engineered sense of false urgency that’s informed nearly every Obama initiative renders them suspect from the outset and blurs any positive outcome they might otherwise contain. 

Moreover, using economic suffering as a means to hard-wire liberal programs into a budget, which Obama did in the so-called stimulus package earlier this year makes average Americans distrust him when he tells them that our health insurance system must urgently be reformed.

Not unlike an overly complex battle plan whose seeds of defeat are effectively written into the blue print, political strategies predicated on an arrogant assumption of flawless handicapping are doomed to failure.  It’s akin to the perfect crime or the ability to think ten moves ahead in chess—your passion for victory increases linearly with your inability to control outcomes.

As a politician such as Obama builds the platform for his agenda he promptly loses sight of the foundation as he ambitiously gazes skyward.  Early successes inevitably lead to more expansive plans which are erroneously premised on a projected elasticity in the electorate. 

That’s where Obama is at this moment, perched as he is on the left edge of the political spectrum, with the preponderance of the nation becoming more alarmed with his every pronouncement, most prominently, his favored health insurance reform proposals. 

On the foreign policy front, Iran flouted U.S. and ally demands to allow inspections of its suspected nuclear programs by firing several test missiles which could easily reach Israel and even parts of Europe.  Instead of using the tested Bush policy of refusing direct talks with Iran, Obama is providing its rogue leaders with a kind of moral equivalence by countenancing what every analyst knows will be a sham negotiation.

It may take some time, but history will show that Bush’s foreign policy, maligned by liberals who were convinced their erudite State Department-speak would win the day, was founded on a common sense approach to belligerents.  Indeed, whether it’s the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 AD, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Great Britain in the late 4th^h century, the Nazis or Iran's fanatical leaders, their goal is the same:  the annihilation of their enemies and regional—or global—supremacy.

Obama may not be intending to appease our enemies, but that is the inevitable outcome of his current strategy.  He may not appreciate that now, but he will one day.

Beyond broadly outlining their foreign policy goals, all presidents have used their speeches at the United Nations to defend American values and principles.  Paramount among them is our freedom, and its close civic relative, our liberty, which we far too often take for granted.  Yet President Obama’s 5,200 word speech yesterday at the U.N. never mentions the word “liberty,” and never uses the word “freedom” as a cherished value.

If you read the speech several times, the picture that inevitably emerges is one where America anonymously assumes its place among all nations, and where her timeless values of freedom and liberty fall into a passive, silent relief.  In its place, Mr. Obama makes tangentially deprecating references to America’s historical greatness:

No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.  No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.

His transparent presupposition is that regardless of two hundred plus years of supporting evidence, the American values of democracy and the rule of law aren’t, in fact, universal principles worthy of exporting to nations suffering under the iron boot of despots. 

Given the millions of people that the United States has emancipated over the past two centuries, you might have thought our founding democratic principles of individual freedom were our most powerful weapons against tyranny.  However, in Mr. Obama’s world view, you would be wrong:

For the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the hope of human beings -- the belief that the future belongs to those who would build and not destroy; the confidence that conflicts can end and a new day can begin.

There’s an unavoidable civic blandness in the argument that “hope” is our most powerful weapon, and the collateral notion that the future is somehow predestined to belong to those who “build,” not to mention that conflicts can mysteriously “end and a new day can begin.” 

Despite the fact that the answer clearly lies in American exceptionalism, the president’s reticence to invoke it is both an affront to the millions who gave their lives in freedom’s defense and a despicable deference to belligerents flout it by denying their citizens’ fundamental human rights.

A final assault on American sensibilities is Mr. Obama’s statement that “the  interests of nations and peoples are shared.”  It’s a wholly misguided idea and examples abound of oppositional nations whose disparate interests have led to protracted conflict.  Indeed, the interests of the Soviet satellites versus Russia come instantly to mind, but also China whose hegemonic designs on East Asia are at odds with Japan’s interest.

An emerging pattern of nebulous consequences for rogue nations has developed with respect to Obama’s plans for dealing with the palpable threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and the unpredictable, impenetrable regime of Kim Jong Il.  To wit, our president can never be charged with saber rattling with an empty scabbard:

But if the governments of Iran and North Korea choose to ignore international standards; if they put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability and the security and opportunity of their own people; if they are oblivious to the dangers of escalating nuclear arms races in both East Asia and the Middle East -- then they must be held accountable.

With France and Russia standing to lose the most from a harsh regimen of sanctions, it’s clear that any U.S. led effort to impose them will be for naught.  Of course, Iran’s Ahmadinejad fully understand this, which is why the upcoming talks will signal yet another interminable chapter of Iranian dilatory tactics to ensure its acquisition of a nuclear weapon.

As I argued yesterday, Mr. Obama’s naïve approach to obdurate, renegade regimes seems peculiarly predicated on his solipsistic fantasy that he’s the first leader in history to confront such challenges.  In truth, there’s a lengthy—and growing—list of examples that persuasively demonstrates that the only way to deal with barbaric nations is with the very real threat of military action. 

However, for the exquisitely refined moral compass of the modern liberal, that, of course, is anathema.

Although President Obama is a champion of the fashionable notion that deferential diplomacy is the touchstone of real leadership, history has more than amply demonstrated the naïveté of that approach. 

Leaders of powerful nations who are preoccupied with their standing on the world stage typically use the goal of consensus to justify it. This is little more than diplomatic grandstanding because our true allies will support our broad foreign policy initiatives regardless of U.S. popularity, and those such as China and Russia will exercise their veto in the Security Council despite Obama’s efforts to preen in front of the thugocracy known as the United Nations.

Ever since he announced his candidacy, Obama has emphasized the virtue of a chastised America, that its historical pre-eminence was a myth spun from imperialist and hegemonic dreams, and that his administration would be marked by an apologetic foreign policy. If he hasn’t been faithful to U.S. principles of exceptionalism he has certainly hewed closely to his script of American self-loathing, which has played well among the world’s rogue regimes such as Venezuela and Cuba as well as autocracies such as Russia and China.

Obama’s urbane, cognoscenti parlance, which features a tedious focus on America’s foibles, combined with his fawning gestures of good will towards belligerents, only encourages leaders such as Iran’s Ahmadinejad to conclude that he’s weak. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s decision to abandon the Bush administration’s plan for missile defense in Eastern Europe not only undermines U.S. credibility in the eyes of our allies, it sends the message to our enemies that Russian approval is more important than standing up to Iran.

But, more critically, and as I noted at the outset, this kind of foreign policy has a poor track record of success. It’s clear that the political and strategic weaknesses that evolved over time in the Roman Empire led to its demise. The Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 for the same reason. Although the Thirty Years War led to the Peace of Westphalia—whose major influence was to establish the inviolability of state sovereignty—its origins can be traced to leadership fissures in the Holy Roman Empire as well as the continued Bourbon-Habsburg rivalry, itself a study in perceived strategic vulnerabilities.

Those familiar with Napoleon’s exploits recognize this theme as evidenced by the six coalitions it took to defeat him; and, in the 19^th century, from Crimean War to the Franco-Prussian War, real or perceived opportunities for strategic or geopolitical advantage motivated aggressors. The more familiar 20^th century is a veritable encyclopedia of evidence that the tensions that can spark conflagrations are best kept in check by strong, multilateral treaties backed with the credible threat of military action.

The excerpts made public in advance of Mr. Obama’s U.N. speech today provide compelling evidence that his understanding of history is filtered through a post-modern lens, one that obtusely apologies for American exceptionalism while naively believing that deft diplomacy alone can prevail against our enemies.

It’s never worked, and it never will.

However, this apparently benign development is, in fact, cause for concern, for two reasons. First, Mr. Obama has deftly eliminated the phrase “war on terrorism” from his administration’s lexicon, preferring a euphemism to garner the affection of our allies and not offend our enemies, which is a prototypical preoccupation of liberals. That’s why in the president’s 9/11 remarks you didn’t hear anything about the importance of maintaining our vigilance against the threat of the radical Islamists; instead he emphasized his new national service programs.

That provides the segue to the second point, which is the president’s initiative to fundamentally change the tax deductibility of charitable contributions. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s goal is to significantly reduce the deductibility of charitable contributions, which perfectly dovetails with a commensurate expansion of in national service programs.

To those attentive to the liberal agenda, which is to centralize control within strictly controlled bureaucracies, this move is as predictable as it is hostile to the common good. When charitable donations voluntarily made by individuals are reduced and effectively shifted into control by the government, the president and his liberal friends can target pre-selected groups and services based on a calculus of political worthiness.

One of the major differences between modern liberalism and its ancestors in more distant decades is the distrust of individuals and the correlated need to establish government fiefdoms to ensure that programs are properly funded and are supporting the left’s broader agenda. 

That motivation is clearly evident in President Obama’s dream of nationalized health care, where government bureaucrats would define benefit plans and authorize services based on relative merit, which, of course, is code for rationing.

So as this liberal administration shifts the focus from aggressively defending America against future attacks by Islamic terrorists and seeks to centralize the levers of power, we should be keenly aware of the implications. From a reduction in individual freedoms to an increased risk of another attack on our soil to hobbling our economic recovery, the modern liberal agenda is unambiguously hostile to our nation’s economic and national security.

Since it’s not news that seems to be overwhelming the mainstream media, you might not be aware that Iran has responded to the G-8’s July demand that it begin negotiations over its nuclear program. It has issued a five page document that predictably addresses a variety of extraneous issues while categorically avoiding any discussion of nuclear disarmament.

The premise of President Obama’s approach to dealing with Iran is an effective denial of three decades of diplomatic efforts by the United States and its allies, which has produced nothing beyond frustration and a heightened understanding that Iran is a practiced broker of the art of deception. Indeed, his subsequent attempts to parse his naïve pronouncements concerning direct talks with the leaders of rogue nations notwithstanding, this is a man thoroughly convinced that eloquence and charm will thaw Iran’s decades old intransigence.

Diplomacy, when properly integrated into a broader strategy, one with transparent and credible consequences, can be an effective tool, in particular with nations with a history of willingness to discuss a meaningful reconfiguration of their key relationships. However, the much vaunted strengths of diplomacy have been overplayed in the last century, and its many failures are conveniently overlooked.

Basic diplomatic strategies employ skills and methods designed to leverage oppositional nations to fundamentally realign their understanding of what’s truly in their own self-interest. In the process, so the argument goes, they discover heretofore unrealized incentives proffered by a unified group of nations to modify or eliminate certain undesirable behaviors. 

However, the history of diplomacy confirms that its modest success rate is predicated on a rudimentary set of shared values which, in a prioritized list, must begin with a desire for survival. Unfortunately, in the case of Iran, there’s no evidence that its leaders fear their demise more than their goal of a nuclear weapon. Based on its experience of the last thirty years, that an astute calculus.

Integral to the diplomatic process is a coalition of consensus among the world’s most powerful nations. If the recent demonstrations in Iran clarified anything it’s that those nations are divided on the challenge of confronting Iran’s leaders on the seminal issue of nuclear armament. Indeed, tough talk by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aside, any regimen of sanctions capable of surviving a negotiation in the UN Security Council wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on.

Most analysts believe Iran will have a viable nuclear weapon within twelve calendar months. As Bret Stephens reports in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Bipartisan Policy Center just published a report signed by Sens. Robb and Coats and retired Gen. Charles Ward, stating that Iran could have a weapon within two months. Moreover, Russia has agreed to furnish Iran with a number of S-300 anti-missile batteries which will only hasten any plan by Israel for a pre-emptive strike.

For the first time, the United States will participate in the upcoming talks concerning Iran’s nuclear program, sponsored by the United Nations. This will be Mr. Obama’s first attempt at high-stakes diplomacy with a rogue nation, in stark contrast to former President Bush’s policy of refusing to meet at all. Beyond elevating a barbaric regime in the eyes of the civilized world, there’s only one outcome we can be assured of, and that is an absence of agreement among participants that will plot a trajectory for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Those who have studied history understand why there wasn’t just one Punic War, but rather three, and how there could ever have been a Hundred Years War (which, in fact, lasted 116 years). The same reasoning can be applied to WWII, which, in contrast to prevailing historical wisdom, was the unnecessary war—not WWI. Indeed, the Treaty of Versailles, which, it should be remembered, the U.S. Senate never ratified, made a repeat of the Great War inevitable.

Iran’s vision of regional dominance is merely a different species in the same genus as the ideological nationalism that underwrote those wars, which is why Mr. Obama’s efforts will be for naught. That, in conjunction with the fact that Iran’s nuclear development time table is working against him, makes his predicament uniquely challenging—and dangerous.

As our nation reflects on the horrific, unprovoked attack eight years ago today, a common theme is the incremental attenuation of our vigilance. For all of his domestic policy foibles, and regardless of our success in degrading the threat of radical Islam, former President Bush never failed to appreciate that al-Qaeda was a sleepless and lethal malice.

With a liberal now in the White House, one who ignorantly championed a premature withdrawal from Iraq, and who firmly—and naively—subscribes to the State Department approach to dealing with belligerents, it’s clear that America’s history of periodic appeasement of tyranny has become reanimated.

Our nation’s foes have historically been state-based and our battlefields have been conventional. With the advent of radical Islam in the past three decades, America has been slow to comprehend the depth and resilience of this evil and its response to its nascent threats in the 90s was to treat it as a criminal justice matter. 

Although 9/11 clarified that America specifically and the West generally has been targeted for a decades-long war, the memories of that savage morning have faded and the absence of further attacks on our soil has convinced many among us, in particular Democrats, that the threat has abated. 

Below is a quote from a little known, much less read, speech by a well known American president. Those familiar with history will probably recognize it, but it demonstrates the civic and cultural disparity that has developed over the decades between those who understand that evil is timeless and those who willfully refuse to recognize the gathering storm.

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance…we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.  To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, every thing that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

This was President Wilson’s war address to Congress on April 2, 1917 and although it may lack the eloquence of a Lincoln or a Washington, it nonetheless acquits the values and principles of America as a beacon for freedom and democracy, and her willingness to project those values to other nations.

Because this jihad against us comes in the form of a stateless and shadowy presence, one manifest in over sixty countries, and because many on the left are reticent to call an ideological aggressor with religious underpinnings an enemy, we’ve unwittingly abetted its capacity to strike again. Indeed, Mr. Obama has redacted the phrase “war on terrorism” from his administration’s lexicon and replaced it with a euphemism, in a wholly obtuse effort to win approval in the court of global opinion.

In the interbellum years after WWI, America and her allies were blinded to the possibility that a revanchist Germany could rekindle its military and unleash the horrors that engulfed Europe. In early 1938, in a letter to his sister, Neville Chamberlain wrote that he would contact Hitler to tell him

The best thing you [Hitler] can do is tell us exactly what you want for your Sudeten Germans.  If it is reasonable we will urge the Czechs to accept and if they do, you must give assurances that you will let them alone in the future. 

The problem, of course, is that Hitler was using the issue of the Sudetenland as a pretext for war, and Chamberlain as a predicate for peace.

For reasons that will only become clear with the passage of time, America has moved back into a cycle of appeasement, where interminable diplomacy with Iran will doubtless lead to its acquisition of a nuclear weapon, and where a deliberative hobbling of our intelligence agencies to aggressively pursue their mission will create vulnerabilities that the Islamic extremists will gladly exploit.

As we pray for the three thousand Americans who perished eight years ago today, it’s vital that we understand that permitting the slow degradation of our defenses against this enemy is the gravest disservice we can do to their memories and to the future security of our Republic.

Whether it’s health care or the auto industry, the most fundamental objection to government intervention is that its reputation precedes it.  Indeed,  with the notable exception of military interventions, one would be hard pressed to name a significant crisis that demonstrates government’s efficacy in resolving it.

If you raise the stimulus bill as evidence of targeted and timely intervention you’ll have to do better.  The vast majority of those funds haven’t been released and of those that have been, the lion’s share went to ailing state Medicaid budgets, hardly a touchstone of economic stimulus.

However, the problem is more subtle than might meet the eye.  It’s not merely the fact that a targeted government intervention is something of an oxymoron, it’s also the case that the politicians who advocate for such interventions, regardless of party, have an institutional conflict of interest—i.e., the innate allure of re-election—which is invariably hostile to the common civic good.

Underlying their mixed motives is a confusion concerning the rightful role of government versus the private sector.  The former has incrementally expanded over the past several decades such that no area of our lives is immune from what’s considered the legitimate role of government.  Integrally related is the fact that whether it’s the politicians who champion robust government influence or the bureaucrats—the foot soldiers who salute smartly and then never fail to meet our expectations of suboptimal performance—we can be assured that their intervention will be untimely, misguided, unproductive, over-budget, and will overstay its welcome.

But when it comes to health care we can blame ourselves for the fact that President Obama’s plan for a government run system is being seriously considered.  Americans have demanded inexpensive access to health care services and politicians have been predictably behind the curve in not mitigating the systemic problems with enhanced inter-state competitiveness, innovative refundable tax credits for those who can’t afford insurance, and expanded Health Savings Accounts plans. 

So, although most Americans are satisfied with their health insurance, it’s definitely a system in need of a tune up—but not a transformation.  And, therein lies Mr. Obama’s conundrum:  He’s ginned up the very real, but solvable problems to create a national panic with the goal of making his draconian remedies more plausible; that, in turn, diminishes his credibility with all but the hard left, and the result is that after being taken to the wood shed in August,  that exquisitely deliberative body, the U.S. Senate, won’t pass a bill with the so-called public option.

Although politicians have always been highly responsible to their constituents, ours today seem tuned at the level of the Cesium atomic clock, which means we can be assured we get the legislation we deserve.  Maybe we should ask less of government and more of the private sector.

Imagine the succinct clarity that would arise if presidents had to write their own speeches.  They would be obligated to actually think about what they want us to hear, and tailor the message with the kind of precision and intellectual ingenuity that presidents such as Lincoln employed.

Peruse, for instance, Mr. Lincoln’s seminal speech at Cooper Union, which took months of preparation and which was an ingeniously cogent apologia for the abolition of slavery.  Given our age of electronic communication and a news cycle best measured in nanoseconds, we effectively encourage our presidents to express every passing thought on virtually every subject, quite regardless of its relevance, much less whether it’s something a president should comment on in the first place.

Although all presidents have been prone to this, it seems as though Mr. Obama has a natural gift for excessive communication, apparently convinced of the timeless wisdom of his ideas, such that he can’t tolerate having an unexpressed thought.  But, since he hasn’t seriously considered the novelty of writing his own speeches, such ideas must be run through the speechwriter’s mill which only abets the desire to opine on an ever-greater array of subjects.

Underlying this trend is a far more complex, if somewhat mundane phenomenon.  Our own conversations, be they at work or home, are littered with eminently forgettable ideas and comments that range from self-inflated expressions concerning (thankfully) passing fashions to outright banal and petty gossip.  To think that our presidents should somehow be immune to this is at best naïve. That’s why our modern times have produced so few memorable presidential speeches, and, in that regard, Mr. Obama is right on track to achieving a kind of unseemly overindulgence in the inartful expression prosaic ideas.

Somehow, in the years since Kennedy’s inaugural address, in which he warned Americans that this remains a dangerous world, and Reagan’s stern admonition to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall, our national conversation has degraded, thanks, ironically, to such oxymoronic technologies as ‘instant messaging.’  Indeed, it seems as though we’ve established an inverse relationship between the speed with which messages are crafted and their intellectual caliber, not to mention their shelf life.

We would all benefit from less talk and messaging and more thought and reflection, and President Obama would be providing a laudable public service—while elevating his presidency—by putting himself in the vanguard of such a movement.  However, that’s unlikely, because, as history demonstrates, the more lethal the cultural illness the scarcer are its antidotes, which is why these self-wrought diseases only die by temporal attrition.

In the meantime, we'll be forced to hear insufferably common speeches from Mr. Obama, because he mistakenly believes that presidential ideas only succeed in convincing the electorate when they employ mass marketing techniques, making up in their droll repetitiveness what they lack in originality.

One of the seminal debates of our time is whether America leans left or right of center.  However, the polling that has consistently shown it’s the latter may be misleading because the terms that inform the question have changed over the years. 

When we contemplate this issue we tend to focus on whether we believe in an activist government, one that attempts to correct perceived inequities, does more to protect consumers, and uses the tax code for goals such as ‘social justice.’ 

Although those are, indeed, key to where people fall on the political continuum, there’s a variable that runs through all of them that’s typically overlooked.  To wit,  from the perspective of our collective civic health, by which I mean the preservation of individual freedoms, the right to play on a relatively level economic playing field, and the right to succeed or fail based on one’s own talents and efforts, are we better off with more government intrusion or less?

That aspect of the debate between conservatism and liberalism is crucial because if a more robust government influence has actually improved our civic conditions, people would generally agree with President Obama’s agenda.  But, eight months into his presidency his support is dropping precipitously.

For background, let’s examine the left’s gold standard for government intervention, which, in modern times, is the Great Society.  By any measure this demonstration project in the presumed benefits of a powerful role for government has been a colossal failure.  It not only economically manacled inner-city minorities by providing a tiered system of financial rewards without any work requirement, it also established the gravely injurious inter-generational transfer of poverty.

Indeed, from minimum wage laws, which merely ensure the least qualified among us won’t have a chance at finding a low-skilled job, to providing tax “rebates” for those who pay no taxes, to implicitly sanctioning out-of-wedlock births with welfare laws that effectively encourage sexual activity out of marriage, the left has been wrong every time.

It’s as though they are arrogantly convinced that ours is the first generation that’s had to deal with questions of economic freedoms, morality, and the rightful role of government.  That’s led them to fundamentally rewrite the rules of civic engagement, which has excised religion from the public square, enacted laws that allow teens to have an abortion without parental notification, and, on the foreign policy front, has led to a lethal conflation of dictators with freedom fighters.

With respect to taxation, apparently no rate is high enough for liberals.  Currently, the top one percent of income earners pays 40 percent of federal taxes; the top five percent pays 55 percent, and the bottom fifty percent pays just 4.6 percent.  Yet President Obama and his liberal taxaholics in Congress want to raise marginal rates on the “rich” and they want to increase the capital gains tax. 

All of these issues have yet another thread that runs through them, and that is the lust for power.  The most profound difference between contemporary conservatives and liberals is that the former want to reduce government’s stranglehold on us because they intuitively understand that as freedom rises our prospects for economic success rise with them.  And, when we fail, which we all do at one time or another, we learn otherwise unattainable lessons which helps us as we inch our way up the income ladder.

Contrast that with the left’s dream of heaven on earth, a cradle-to-grave regimen where decisions are made on our behalf by people presumed to know better than us how to live our lives and spend our own money.  It’s a vision categorically indifferent to how our Founding Fathers contemplated life in America, one that’s also at odds with an even rudimentary understanding that people excel when expectations are high and the field before them is open.

In this context it’s unequivocally clear that the majority of Americans are instinctively right-of center, that is, conservative in the finest sense of the word.