| Morning Jolt – March 6, 2013 By Jim Geraghty Here's your Wednesday Morning Jolt. Enjoy! Jim Hugo to Hell This just handed to me: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is still dead. Rep. Jose Serrano, Democrat of New York: "Hugo Chavez was a leader that understood the needs of the poor. He was committed to empowering the powerless. R.I.P. Mr. President." Human Rights Watch doesn't see him in quite the same light: Hugo Chávez's presidency (1999-2013) was characterized by a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees. After enacting a new constitution with ample human rights protections in 1999 – and surviving a short-lived coup d'état in 2002 – Chávez and his followers moved to concentrate power. They seized control of the Supreme Court and undercut the ability of journalists, human rights defenders, and other Venezuelans to exercise fundamental rights.
By his second full term in office, the concentration of power and erosion of human rights protections had given the government free rein to intimidate, censor, and prosecute Venezuelans who criticized the president or thwarted his political agenda. The American Enterprise Institute's Roger Noriega, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Organziation of American States and assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, sees an opportunity: Alas, Hugo Chávez will not live long enough to atone for his abuse of millions of Venezuelans nor to correct the corrupt and destructive policies that have wrecked the country he leaves behind. Moreover, although his cronies and their Cuban handlers are maneuvering to hold on to power, a Chavista succession is neither stable nor sustainable. With more audacious leadership among Venezuela's democrats and intelligent solidarity from abroad, Chávez's legacy might be buried with him. The foundations of Chavismo are being shaken by an impending socioeconomic meltdown, a faltering oil sector, bitter in-fighting in his own movement, complicity with drug-trafficking and terrorism, rampant street crime, the inept performance by Chávez's anointed successor, and growing popular rejection of Cuban interference, corrupt institutions, and rigged elections. Beset by these challenges and with Chávez no longer at the top of the ballot, the regime will use every advantage to engineer a victory in a special election to choose a new president. I'm curious about where his stupid little parrot sidekick ranks in the line of succession: 
Okay, CPAC, Joke's Over. Where's the Real Speaker List? Oh, what the hell, CPAC? I mean, what the hell? You want to not invite Governor Bob McDonnell because of his recent awful tax-hiking transpiration bill, fine. (I'd prefer to invite him, get him up on a stage for a Q & A, and then ask, "What were you thinking?") You want to not invite Governor Chris Christie because you think he's been too clubby with the media lately, and because he bashed the House GOP for fighting pork in the Sandy bill? Fine. He probably wouldn't come, because appearing at CPAC would probably hurt him in his reelection bid anyway. I think disinviting GOProud after you've invited them in the past creates more headaches than it solves, but hey, it's your conference. But this? THIS? Business and reality show star Donald Trump will speak at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, according to press release from the event's organizer that was distributed by Trump's spokesman Tuesday. In the release, the American Conservative Union's president Al Cardenas called Trump "an American patriot and success story with a massive following among small government conservatives." It's easy to get wrapped up in debates about who's a conservative and who isn't, but . . . come on. Our Katrina Trinko: "Are you kidding me? Trump, who donated to Dems & supported universal health care, is good enough for CPAC? In 2010, Trump donated to Weiner. He also donated to Schumer and Reid in 09." Dave Weigel notices, "The irony is that Trump appeared at CPAC in 2011 after being invited by the now-banned GOProud." Sean Hackbarth: "BREAKING: CPAC announced Kim Kardashian to moderate chastity panel." John Podhoretz: "I hope Donald Trump is introduced at CPAC by his apprentice, Piers Morgan." Ben Howe: "Man. Maybe I'm not a conservative after all." Jim Antle: "I won't believe this announcement until I've seen the real, long-form CPAC agenda." Our Big Challenge: Do We on the Right Still Trust the People? My fellow conservatives . . . the state of our movement is not strong. Let's face it. We're depressed. We feel betrayed by the American electorate. We feel betrayed by inner-city African Americans, who can see the abysmal results of decades of Democratic governance all around them and who suffer the most from those failed policies, yet somehow keep sending the same crooks and losers back into office. Put aside Obama and these voters' obvious pride in electing and reelecting the first African-American president; why is there no functioning alternative party in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Newark, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and barely one in New York or Los Angeles? We feel betrayed that anyone, let alone a significant chunk of the electorate, could believe that our belief that this country should control its borders is driven by racism, xenophobia, and a hatred of immigrants. We feel betrayed by young people, who also have suffered greatly from these failed policies. They've been told that a college education was the ticket to a good life, and they've taken on crushing debt for jobs that don't exist and may never exist. Their professors failed to teach them the skills to thrive in a competitive job market and overcome adversity, and yet they haven't yet seemed to turn on them in outrage. No, instead, they turn to government, enticed by the promise of free birth control. Anyway, since the election, we've been marinating in this very grim story: We, a bunch of Americans who love freedom and believe that we can live happy lives if the government will just get out of the way, got swamped by a growing swarm of voters who believe that government -- the very same government who had disappointed them and failed them time and again -- will solve their problems. So . . . what's our story to come back? I don't quite mean our policies, although that's part of it. What is our story? You get stories from Obama all the time. The story is pretty simple, deliberately so, and large chunks of it are hogwash. But it's believable enough for enough people: In the beginning, there was Bush, and Bush was bad. There was war, and it was bad; the war created the deficits, and so did Bush's tax cuts for the rich. Because all the money went to tax cuts and wars, the government didn't make necessary "investments" in "roads and bridges" and "green energy." People couldn't get health care. The oceans were rising. Then we elected Obama, and it started getting better immediately! Okay, not everywhere, and maybe the progress and improvement was really hard to measure, but Obama inherited the worst crises of any president ever. Nobody could have generated better results than he did. The arc of history bent more toward justice, and better days are ahead, just you wait and see . . . Now, you can come up with dozens of objections to those few sentences, but for the average Obama voter, that's the gist of the state of the country from 2001 to today. It's not all that different from your usual religious narrative. You have a fall of paradise (the election of Bush) the Devil (Bush), the messiah figure (Obama), the coming of a new kingdom and ultimate utopia. The purpose of the believer is to continue to believe in the redeeming messiah figure in the face of skepticism and doubt, because belief in him makes you one of the special and enlightened ones, and so on. So . . . keeping in mind that we want to avoid all the creepy messianic vibes . . . what's our story? It's going to be written by minds wiser than me, but I think we all know some of the key elements: The American people have the tools they need to succeed and thrive. Now, when you look around you and see Snooki and the marching phalanx of idiotic reality stars, you may begin to wonder about this. But a core element of a philosophy built around individual rights is the notion that the vast majority of individuals are doing just fine as they are. Grown adults don't need some sort of robed master or political or cultural elite to tell us what to do, how to think, how to live. If we do seek out teachers, mentors, wise men and women to help us make better decisions, it is best to find them outside of the coercive and inherently corrupting power of the state. We don't need some massive social engineering or reeducation to cure us of backwards ways. In fact . . . We are right to be wary of the powerful, because most of the folks who are supposed to be better than us, smarter than us, more wise than us, and more virtuous than us have failed us miserably. Where shall we start, the Wall Street Wizards who thought it was a good idea to start making six-figure loans to just about anybody, wrecking the old-fashioned virtue of credit? How about the government that takes in record tax revenue and still has trouble keeping this year's deficit below $900 billion? The media botches stories regularly, our political leaders get caught in scandals like clockwork, epic mismanagement turns beautiful parts of the country like California into places nobody wants to live, or can afford to live . . . We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. While diplomacy will always have a role in our foreign policy, the world is always going to have hostile states and hostile forces, who can only be deterred through military force. Foreign populations do not care if our leader lived abroad as a child, nor do they oppose us because our leader is too much like a cowboy. No amount of self-proclaimed "empathy" or "smart diplomacy" can overrule geopolitical realities. If we intervene in the world's trouble spots, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign leaders will demonize us and blame us for everything that goes wrong. If we do not intervene, horrific bloodshed on a grand scale follows (see Syria). Perhaps we need some variation of "speak softly, and carry a big stick." Right now, there's a conundrum at the heart of the conservative movement. Our entire philosophy is about trusting the people, in faith that they know what's best for themselves, can spend their own money more wisely than the government can, and find the solutions that work best for their communities . . . and right now, we don't really trust the people. Hey, Is That an Armed Drone Behind You? Can the U.S. government use a drone to kill you on U.S. soil if they've determined that you're a terrorist threat -- without a trial or review of the accusation by someone outside the executive branch? They hope they don't have to do that, but yes, they assert they can: "It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States." Just dandy, huh? They're making Dick Cheney look like Gandhi over there. Oh, and how does MSNBC's golden boy Chris Hayes assess this statement? "Like a kind of nothingburger." "The U.S. Attorney General's refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening -- it is an affront the Constitutional due process rights of all Americans," Senator Rand Paul said. The Reason-Rupe poll found last week that 57 percent of Americans think assassinating Americans is unconstitutional. ADDENDUM: Kim Jong Number Un: "All I want is Obama to call me on the phone. Also, I would like a phone." Get all the latest news, 24/7, at www.NationalReview.com Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives. Conservatives – stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.NRCruise.com for complete information. National Review, Inc. | 
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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