Keep It Pithy (4 page)

In other words, the political climate in the USA has changed in favor of the crooks and incompetents. How can you guarantee yourself a future in public service? Be willing to sell out for campaign money. And if you’re an especially talented liar, you can go very far. Both major parties would be happy to have you join the hustle. (But get in line quick.
It’s only the first few who will be allowed on board. Any more than that, and the bandits get nervous.)

Am I being too harsh?

Simple answer to that: no
.

(
photo credit 1.3
)

But there are, and have been, exceptions
.

The politician I most admire is Abraham Lincoln. The reason is simple: He was kind. He showed his concern for everyday Americans while trying to lead this country through its greatest crisis so far. Failure to act wisely and courageously at the height of the Civil War would have destroyed the nation, which was founded at such risk barely a hundred years before.

Even so, Lincoln devoted one day a week to reading mail from the people and answering with notes on the reverse side of the page. Not surprisingly, many letters were written to seek jobs or other favors. The president often tried to help these ordinary people, even though they were strangers to the corridors of power and influence.…

I have seen a number of these letters from mothers who wanted to visit their wounded sons, from older men who needed work to support their families after all the young relatives had gone to war, and from children worried about their fathers in uniform. Lincoln’s replies are amazingly compassionate. He reveals himself as a great man who used determination and humility to save the Union. Neither vain nor vengeful, he had no spin guys or bagmen and took no money. Because he loved his country, he suffered greatly at the loss of life on both sides of the conflict. Despite the tremendous personal stress and the nationwide chaos, Lincoln still helped individuals while working to keep the country whole.

Where are today’s Honest Abes?

Dunno, but we should keep an eye out. Might happen again
.

The above sketch was written years before I wrote my recent bestseller
,
Killing Lincoln
.
Good in the world is too often matched by evil, as in the person of the assassin John Wilkes Booth
.

Am I serious about that observation?

Yes
.

Evil is a constant presence throughout the world. I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with
bombs, and heroin addicts with AIDS knowingly share needles with other addicts without telling them about the infection. Evil.

Once, I stood in the cellar of an abandoned Italian church that had been used by Satanists in rituals that included murder. The feeling of evil permeated this room. I had never felt anything like it.

But then I felt it again in Africa at Victoria Falls in Zambia. I stood where human sacrifice was practiced years before by tribes native to the area. Victims were tossed off the cliff into the thundering falls. I got out of there quick.

So I know that true, unrepentant evil exists. And I firmly believe it will be punished, just as good will be rewarded. That is part of the order of the universe, if we only take the time to recognize it.

TWO

I’VE QUESTIONED EUROPEAN SOCIALISM FROM THE BEGINNING

Hello France, Next Stop—God Forbid—Greece!

Europe is on such an economic roller coaster that no one, certainly not your humble servant, could reliably predict what will be going on when this book comes off the presses
.

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photo credit 2.1
)

Chaos? Collapse?

Don’t point your finger at any one or two countries alone. The whole European way of thinking about social and economic matters has been a shared lunacy and a dangerous misreading of human reality
.

You only have to travel to Europe to see the difference that an entitlement culture makes. While the United States is a vibrant, creative, and exciting place, Europe today is largely stagnant. Workers there have little incentive to move ahead, because the rate of taxation is punishing and the governments guarantee a certain standard of living. In France, young people demonstrated for weeks because the government wanted a new law that would allow employers to actually fire them during the first two years of employment if they screwed up on a regular basis. But nooooo, we can’t have that! The French sense of entitlement basically says, “You owe me prosperity, government. You owe me.”

Yes, this was written before 2008
.

All the more reason why Europe is in such deep trouble even as President Obama seems to be taking us exactly in its direction
.

Is it inevitable that America must head down this road? Not by a long shot. Keep in mind this discussion I had with the good Dr. Charles Krauthammer on
The Factor
after some college students at UC Davis went wild over a tuition increase:

       
O
’
REILLY
: The irony here is that some of those students want America to be an entitlement society, but when
the money runs out as [it has] in California, they run amok.… Charles, how bad do you think the entitlement society in America is right now, and is gonna get?

       
KRAUTHAMMER
: Well, judging from those young people, who appear rather agitated that they are not having their college education subsidized enough, I say it’s getting out of control. Because remember, who pays the taxes that support their college education? Three quarters of Americans have no college degree. I think the answer to your question is a little bit complex. I think the majority of Americans don’t want to give up the entitlements they already have, but I think the majority of Americans don’t want to add onto it, and to become like a European social democratic society.

       
O
’
REILLY
: Now why is that? Because the taxes then rise so high that individual achievement is robbed and that the American dream shrinks because you just don’t have the cash to do it because you’re giving the government the cash. Is that the reason?

       
KRAUTHAMMER
: That is the reason, and what we had was a spontaneous uprising, if you like. A peaceful one, of course, in the United States. The Tea Parties, the town hall meetings … all said very loud and clear, “Yes, we like our Social Security but we are not going to add onto it with a new healthcare entitlement. We know we’re going over a cliff with taxes and debt, and as a result
we want to stay where we are, stay Americans with some protections. We’re not going to get rid of the New Deal, or even the Great Society or Medicare, but no new stuff.” And that’s what the fight over healthcare is all about.

       
O
’
REILLY
: It is. It is about that and about smaller versus larger government. However, the younger people that we saw out in California, they have a different view when you look at the polling about healthcare. The younger the American is, the more likely they are to support it. So that tells me that the new generation wants the government to be a nanny state.

       
KRAUTHAMMER
: Except that the new generation is going to get older. And they’re going to have a family, and they’re going to have kids, they’re going to have payments, they’re going to have a mortgage and they’re going to pay taxes. And they won’t like the taxes. Those kids out there aren’t paying a lot of taxes. And as they become adults, they are not going to have the same political attitudes as they had at eighteen, when you’re wild, you’re free, and subsidized.

       
O
’
REILLY
: Why do you think people in Scandinavia, who are just about the same as Americans—Scandinavians come here, there’s no difference basically—why do you think they want the nanny state in places like Sweden? Not Norway so much, but Denmark, Sweden, France—France
isn’t in Scandinavia—what is the mentality that Western Europeans have that they want to be taken care of?

       
KRAUTHAMMER
: Well, remember they’re not the same as us because it was the more independent ones, the ones who didn’t like the strictures of government, the regulations, the religious oppression, who came here. This spirit of being independent and not wanting to be controlled by the government is something that is intrinsic in America, it’s the essence of America, it’s what distinguishes Americans who are essentially refugees of the old society in Europe. That’s why it’s always been harder to make Americans break to the yoke of government as happened in Europe. Once you get accustomed to the kinds of entitlements that you have in Sweden, England, France, elsewhere, it doesn’t get undone. And America is different—it’s resisting the imposition of new yokes. And that’s what’s happening today.