US Politics

Does Privacy Exist? Yes, But Only For Our Leaders At Bilderberg 2014

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Bilderberg 2014 Copenhagen 3

 

If 100 of the world’s top celebrities – from Angelina Jolie to Will Smith – suddenly dropped what they were doing and hunkered down together in a luxury hotel to debate the future of the entertainment industry in complete seclusion from the world, and then emerged three days later as though nothing happened, people would be rightly curious to know what they were up to.

Actually, curious is an understatement. There would be wall-to-wall media coverage, the TMZ drone would hover above the scene capturing aerial footage, pundits would offer endless speculation and real-time ‘analysis’ of what they thought might be taking place inside – in short, the world’s press would make a presidential election look like local newspaper reports about a lost kitten.

Isn’t it odd then, that when 100 of the most wealthy and influential people from outside of Hollywood – powerful establishment politicians, new rising stars, corporate CEOs, high-tech moguls and royalty – meet in secret every year to do the very same thing, nobody gives it a second thought?

The Bilderberg 2014 conference is now under way in Copenhagen, where a star-studded cast of characters from civilian, business and military-intelligence backgrounds are gathering to debate this year’s agenda of topics including sustainable economic recovery, the future of democracy, the Middle East, the Ukraine crisis and whether or not the basic concept of privacy still exists.

And no, you didn’t miss the hype. There has been scarcely any coverage of this year’s confab in the British or American press. Outfits such as the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph do not see fit to mention the meeting to their readers (in contrast to their coverage of the annual World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, Switzerland), and the BBC’s only acknowledgement of Bilderberg this year has been a Daily Politics segment which discussed conspiracy theories in general, and laughingly recalled the occasion last year when the show mocked and denigrated American radio host Alex Jones, one of the few activists to cover the 2013 Bilderberg meeting in Watford, England.

If Bilderberg was just another place for the wealthy and well-connected to hang out, there would be no issue – the world is awash with exclusive places and events for the elite to hobnob with each other. The same cast of characters also meet up at Davos for the World Economic Forum (the red carpet event of the year for people of lesser beauty and charisma), but if twelve months is simply too long to wait between encounters then nobody should begrudge them another opportunity to awkwardly flirt with one another while putting the world to rights.

The problem is not that successful and powerful people are meeting in secret in Copenhagen. The problem is the particularly volatile, toxic blend of people that assemble. Why are serving heads of government and state on the invite list to what is in part a giant, closed-door lobbying event? And how do attendees from the military and intelligence communities such as the secretary general of NATO, the head of MI6 and the former head of the NSA have common cause with corporate leaders including the Chairmen or CEOs of Shell, Barclays, BP, HSBC, Nokia, LinkedIn and Google?

And one more question – when the press are neither invited to the meeting nor briefed on its outcomes, why do the editors of media outlets including The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde and Italy’s RAI-TV sanction Bilderberg with their attendance?

In short, the answer is this: Bilderberg is the closest that western democratic societies come these days to openly, flat-out declaring that well-connected, wealthy people have an inherent right to rule and influence national and international policy, and to have their opinions taken more seriously than regular folk. From supposedly meritocratic “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” New York through the Scandinavian poster-children of equality and back to post-Citizens United Washington DC it holds true; but most of the time we try to convince ourselves that it is otherwise, that our voices still count and that we are all equal before the law. For those who pay attention, the yearly Bilderberg conference serves to disenthrall us, briefly lifting the curtain on the truth.

That truth is the fact that money talks, and exorbitant wealth carries the loudest megaphone of all. It’s hardly a revelation, but the only time when the rest of us have it shoved in our faces quite so explicitly is at the yearly Bilderberg meeting – ironically the one time when almost none of us, led by the press, pay any attention.

Venue for the 2014 Bilderberg conference
Marriott Copenhagen – venue for the 2014 Bilderberg conference

 

On the agenda for Bilderberg 2014 is the subject of privacy – very topical given the ongoing fallout and scandal resulting from the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations and consequent exposure of the real extent of government surveillance in and by the United States, United Kingdom and other Five Eyes group countries.

Meeting with John Sawers, General Petraeus and others who are intimately involved in the conducting of government surveillance activities will be many high-profile people of vast wealth and influence. Many of these people are likely to hold quite forceful opinions on the issue of privacy, but they are more likely to be interested in protecting their own privacy from the journalists who would make their activities and indiscretions known to the public than altruistically pressuring governments to cease collecting everyone’s private data in their indiscriminate dragnet.

Given the rare opportunity to hold face-to-face meetings with the people who run the surveillance programmes and formulate the policies which underpin them, which aspects of the privacy question – and whose personal  interests, those of the elite or those of society as a whole – are the privileged attendees most likely to discuss?

Charlie Skelton at the Guardian, one of few mainstream journalists to cover Bilderberg every year, also picks up on the irony of an organisation as secretive as Bilderberg holding a discussion about the existence of privacy:

That’s an exquisite irony: the world’s most secretive conference discussing whether privacy exists. Certainly for some it does. It’s not just birthday bunting that’s gone up in Copenhagen: there’s also a double ring of three-metre (10ft) high security fencing … There’s something distinctly chilling about the existence of privacy being debated, in extreme privacy, by people such as the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, and the board member of Facebook Peter Thiel: exactly the people who know how radically transparent the general public has become.

Precisely. The average person might care about privacy issues because they don’t like being treated as automatic suspects in the intelligence services’ surveillance dragnet, or because they don’t want risk-averse insurance companies from searching out deeply private facts from our lives in order to increase their premiums. The privacy concerns of an oil company CEO or the queen of Spain (attendees all) are likely to be of a different order altogether, more focused on keeping potentially explosive or embarrassing information out of the public domain, and creating a legal framework that punishes those who reveal the truth while empowering those who seek to operate in the dark.

And you can bet that the Bilderberg attendees do want to affect change – they do not assemble for purely social reasons, but to leverage one another’s influence for their own ends – sometimes quite noble ends, but equally possibly very selfish ones. This leads to another sharp observation from Skelton:

The Bilderberg Group says the conference has no desired outcome. But for private equity giants, and the heads of banks, arms manufacturers and oil companies, there’s always a desired outcome. Try telling the shareholders of Shell that there’s “no desired outcome” of their chairman and chief executive spending three days in conference with politicians and policy makers.

If people want to shoot the breeze or have long, meandering yet inconclusive conversations about the state of the world, they go to Starbucks or sneak off to the pub with their friends. Influential and high net worth individuals – whose time is supposedly so valuable – don’t check out for three days and traverse continents unless there’s something significant in it for them, or the causes that they promote.

As Bilderberg 2013 drew to a close in the Hertfordshire countryside, Semi-Partisan Sam had this to say (among other things) about the motivations and biases of the people who get together once a year to decide what’s best for the rest of us:

The reason so many of the actions taken by [Bilderberg members] over the years have been so harmful to ‘normal people’ is because the membership is comprised entirely of the successful. None of the protesters were allowed to remonstrate with the Great Ones within. No refugees from the middle east Arab Spring. No malnourished people from Africa. No failed small business owners from the town of Watford itself, which has struggled in the recession.

If every year you and your chums reassemble at the next Bilderberg meeting and find yourselves even more spectacularly successful and wealthy than the last time you met, “more of the same” could start to seem like a pretty good prescription.

A year later, and this ‘confirmation bias’ explanation is starting to look rather too charitable toward the Bilderbergers. Since the Watford meeting we have learned of more government overreach in the realm of surveillance, more incursions on privacy, more intimidation of the media and the further undermining of national democracy from overturned limits on corporate political spending in the United States to the growing concentration of powers at super-national level in the European Union.

It really would be helpful if the organisers would consent to publishing minutes from their meetings, because at the moment it looks suspiciously as though the 2013 attendees listened to public opinion, then got together and resolved to do the polar opposite.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of Bilderberg 2014 is this: not one week ago, the voters of Europe delivered a stinging rebuke to the political establishment for their growing disconnect with the people and their tendency to talk amongst themselves and prescribe universal solutions from on high without a democratic mandate for their actions. And now today, at a Copenhagen hotel in the heart of Europe, they’re at it once again as though the European elections never happened.

Unfortunately for us, our political elites are seemingly the only ones still able to assert a right to privacy, conducting their business with Bilderberg behind closed doors. But it’s just as much our fault – by not paying any attention, we let them get away with it.

The ‘Tolerant’ Millennials Who Hate Free Speech

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

commencement protest

 

When is it okay to invite a controversial current or former public office holder to speak at a college commencement (graduation) ceremony, and when does issuing such an invitation imply acceptance and endorsement of that person’s every action and decision whilst in office?

This question is coming up a lot, primarily in the United States, as the ‘old guard’ of politicians and appointed officials who held the reigns of power during the post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who were at the helm during the financial crisis and great recession, approach retirement and seek to secure an income in retirement while simultaneously shaping their legacies.

Earlier this month it was former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the headlines, pressured to withdraw from her engagement giving the commencement speech at the Rutgers University commencement ceremony after extensive student pushback at her selection, culminating in a sit-in protest. Her offence was to have been a member of the second Bush administration, and her public advocacy for the Iraq war. But now the forces of retroactive censorship have claimed a new victim – Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF.

Olivia Nuzzi at The Daily Beast reports:

Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, has decided not to serve as commencement speaker for Smith College’s May 18, 2014 graduation, after students started a petition protesting her selection.

The petition—which boasts 483 signatures (less than half of their goal of 1,000)—states that although they “do not wish to disregard all of Ms. Lagarde’s accomplishments” and they “recognize that she is just a good person working in a corrupt system” they do not want to “encourage the values and ideals that the IMF fosters.” 

While falling over themselves to add caveats and backhanded praise for Lagarde, the activists make clear that her particular views had become unpopular and were not to be heard at their institution. Never mind the prestige of hosting a high-profile guest and never mind those students who were perfectly happy to hear from her – the vocal, outraged activists successfully manage to parry away a threatened intrusion from the nasty world of realpolitik.

These developments – and the two mentioned here are only the most recent – raise some important questions about the polarising of America along political and cultural lines, academic censorship and the ability of the current generation to listen to alternative viewpoints.

In the case of Condoleezza Rice, her viewpoint – in favour of war, supportive of the Bush administration – was commonplace in America for the majority of the Bush presidency. Are all those who once thought as Rice thought now persona non grata at Rutgers University? Or perhaps it is just those who could be considered ‘thought leaders’, those who influenced and shaped the public debate at the time who are to be singled out. In which case, how far removed does one have to be from the centre of decision-making to avoid being rendered untouchable by America’s universities?

The case of Christine Lagarde is even more perplexing. As head of the International Monetary Fund, she clearly represents the ideals and goals of that organisation. But so do a solid majority of mainstream politicians from both parties, including some very popular ones in academic circles – such as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama – who would be welcomed with open arms and festooned with honorary degrees.

MassLive adds some detail about the petition-signers:

“Utterly disgusted that Smith has chosen to host someone from the IMF, an organization that has proven itself to be nothing but imperialistic, ineffective, and oppressive,” wrote one woman who signed the online petition.

Another woman who identified herself as a graduating senior wrote: “It was in a Smith classroom that I first learned about the problems that the IMF has wrought on the Global South, and how those problems have affected women’s lives for the worse.”

And here’s the problem. The activists disagree – strongly and sincerely – with the policies and worldview of the speaker. Fair enough. But somewhere along the way they have been led to believe that they have the right to filter out any views or opinions that they find objectionable, causing them to turn their displeasure into calls for the speakers to be banished.

At one time, student activists would have relished the opportunity to see their nemeses take the stage at a high profile event on their campus, perhaps taking the opportunity to hold an inventive protest or at least to offer up a choice heckle or two. Are today’s millennials really so precious and coddled that they cannot even tolerate the presence of dissenting opinion, devoid of the ability or drive to engage with contradictory viewpoints when they appear?

This attitude – and the howls of the “how dare you invite someone who disagrees with me politically to speak at my graduation” – resembles nothing less than the Facebook-isation of academia and the real world, where people with different or troublesome views can simply be blocked, defriended or “disliked” until they fall off the collective radar and cease being a nuisance on our newsfeeds.

But what is possible in the world of social media is not necessarily desirable in the real world of bricks-and-mortar educational establishments. Academia requires debate and argument in order to thrive, and by so publicly banning many of the past decade’s movers and shakers, the student bodies and faculties concerned are cutting themselves off from the possibility of benefiting from the insight of these recent historical figures. Simultaneously, they are doing nothing to help counter accusations from the American right that elite universities are inherently hostile to conservatives and conservative thinking.

Sometimes the arguments against hearing from the big beasts of the past are more persuasive and complex. Take the case of former Vice President Dick Cheney, desperate to cement his hawkish neo-conservative legacy in a positive light and willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. The always-astute Andrew Sullivan keeps a close watch on Cheney’s continued public and media briefings since leaving office and is convinced that the likes of Cheney are engaged in a deliberate effort to recast their horrific actions and decisions in a positive light. In such cases, an argument could be made that it is best to invite such people to speak only in the context of debates (where other participants with opposing views could question and challenge the speaker, and vice versa) rather than bestowing the prestige and carte blanche of a commencement address invitation.

Ultimately, when considering whether to invite a controversial figure from the past – whether it’s a peddler of discredited economic theories, a proud and unapologetic torturer and warmonger or anything else in between – a balance has to be struck between ensuring that the purpose of the event will not be disrupted, that something of interest will be said, and that issuing the invitation will not play into the hands of any ulterior motive that the invitee may have. This type of sober and reasoned discussion does not lend itself to an emotionally manipulative e-petition or Facebook campaign.

No one is asking Condoleezza Rice or Christine Lagarde to hand out the best picture statuette at the next Academy Awards. If, through their own actions, politicians and public figures make themselves pariahs at the hip parties of Hollywood or the parlours of Washington D.C., that is their unfortunate lot and they can take it up with George Clooney.

But it is worrying that many of our students and academic institutions are so eager to impose their own layer of self-administered moral censorship on top.

Spot The Bully – Journalism or Government?

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

SPS Polis 2014 journalism conference

The POLIS 2014 Journalism Conference, held on the campus of the London School of Economics, played host to a number of luminaries from the British media establishment and debated some important issues. But among the various items on the agenda – including riveting discussions on the methods and ethics of investigative journalism, an interview with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and a forum on the use of social media in the newsroom – was a slightly incongruous, strangely titled session.

In the second session of the day, the panel – comprised of chair Anne McElvoy (BBC and The Economist), Annette Dittert (German broadcaster ARD), Michael Crick (Channel 4 News) and Ed Lucas (The Economist) debated the following topic:

Journalism after Snowden: Watchdog or thug?

In the wake of the Snowden story and the Leveson Inquiry into the press, we ask whether British journalism is to supine or too aggressive? Was the publication of state secrets justified?

SPS_Polis2014_01

Semi-Partisan Sam, attending the POLIS Journalism Conference for the first time, took the opportunity to ask the following question of the panel:

QUESTION – Given the facts: that Reporters Without Borders downgraded the UK from 29th to 33rd in the World Press Freedoms rankings for 2014;  that the British government now assumes the right to stop and detain partners and relatives of journalists at Heathrow airport under grossly misapplied anti-terror laws; that the Prime Minister last year saw fit to dispatch his Cabinet Secretary to the offices of a major national newspaper in order to threaten it with closure unless they desisted with the publication of materials embarrassing to the government; and that the government forced that same newspaper to destroy their privately owned computers and hard drives under the watchful presence of intelligence and GCHQ officers – why are we sitting here having an introspective debate about whether or not journalists are behaving like thugs when the real thug is clearly the bullying, heavy-handed British government?

The question was extremely well received among the attendees in the hall, prompting a significant round of applause from delegates. Sadly, this did not translate into a a full or robust answer from the panel, who at times had been happier to wander off-topic and waste time debating side issues such as America’s merits as a country and the proper role of the intelligence services.

The panel’s complete answer – such as it was – to the question can be seen in the video below (Semi-Partisan Sam is “the gentleman” referred to by Anne McElvoy):

The Economist’s Ed Lucas, an enthusiastic apologist for anything and everything that the government decides to do in the name of ‘security’, was obviously unsympathetic to the idea that the British government has displayed thuggish behaviour. But since even Lucas was unable to justify what the government has been caught doing without public knowledge or consent, he instead diverted attention by building up and then destroying a straw-man argument of his own creation – namely that those who speak out against government persecution of journalists who expose overreach by the security services are somehow naive pacifists who want to abolish the military and the intelligence services entirely.

Lucas said: “If you want to have a country which has no intelligence and security services, where there are no state secrets or no penalty for stealing state secrets, then fine – I guess that may be the world that the Green Party would like. I suspect it’s a minority point of view.”

This is a patently false and absurd proposition. No serious critic of the British or American governments as pertaining to their secretly allowing their security services to infringe on citizen privacy is suggestion that GCHQ, MI6, the CIA or NSA be disbanded, and Lucas insults our intelligence to cast this aspersion. The issue is not whether we have security and intelligence services, but the lengths to which we as a society are prepared to let them act in our interest.

The other fatuous argument sometimes made by apologists – and indeed by Ed Lucas himself during this same session – goes along the lines of: “Why are people so surprised that we have spies, and that they are involved in acts of spying?” Again, this is a deliberate and misleading attempt to change the terms of the debate. Citizens fully understand the need for foreign and domestic intelligence, but they also have the right to expect that the technology and bureaucracy of surveillance will not be turned inwards upon themselves. While no one expects (or demands) a list of current surveillance targets to be posted and regularly updated on the  internet, the public should have input as to the criteria for targeting through the democratic process.

It is a rather sad statement on the current status of British journalism that the only panellist to seriously engage with the question and agree that it is government – not the press – who have been acting the bully, was Annette Dittert from German broadcaster ARD.

Even the panel chair, Anne McElvoy, felt the need to reframe the question and make the unsubstantiated claim that Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, had been carrying “shedloads of secrets with him” when he was detained at Heathrow airport, and that rather than being an outrage, this was just one of the “more difficult areas” where the public “might begin to have some doubts” and feel that the government has a case to answer.

In her response, Dittert correctly identified the apathy of the British people as being partly responsible for the lack of public outcry at the Edward Snowden revelations, saying that Britain has an “almost romantic relationship with the security services” – our experiences of the fictional James Bond being somewhat different to the German experience of the Stasi.

Responding to the question, Dittert said: “I thought it was really concerning – the Prime Minister threatening in the House of Commons a newspaper and journalists … in case they go on publishing is something that shouldn’t happen in a democracy.”

Dittert then went on to describe the way that The Guardian newspaper was treated as being “entirely wrong”.

It is profoundly worrying that even at a prestigious journalism conference such as POLIS 2014, so few of the attendees (and only one of the panellists – a German television correspondent) felt able to push back against the notion that it is the journalistic profession that has become the bully and the thug rather than the British government, whose track record on secrecy, paranoia and intimidation speaks for itself.

And while the POLIS 2014 conference was excellent, the fact that the whole day passed with virtually no observance or mention of the harrassment and intimidation of the British press by the goverment will only reinforce the belief that the establishment media with their well-connected sources and comfortable positions within the Westminster bubble are, at times, quite incapable of holding to account the government that they simultaneously both depend on and fear.

ObamaCare, Four Years After Signing

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

obamacare

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – otherwise known as the ACA or ObamaCare – was signed into law four years ago this week after tortuous rounds of planning, posturing, arm-twisting and televised negotiating in Washington.

And while many of the features (to say either ‘benefits’ or ‘drawbacks’ immediately displays one’s political bias) of ObamaCare are only now taking effect, this is a good moment to take stock, step back from the thrust and parry of partisan bickering and reflect on what has actually happened since America decided – with the GOP kicking and screaming defiance to the bitter end – that as a country they would no longer tolerate the spectacle of millions of people without health insurance or reliable access to preventive medicine.

Tea Party darling Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas – who fancies himself an intellectual heavyweight and a man of deep principle – took the opportunity to reflect by posing a question to the public on his Facebook page:

tedcruz1

 

Perhaps surprisingly, given the likely political leanings of a Ted Cruz facebook follower, the majority – the real, undeniable, vast majority – of responses to Cruz’s question are unabashedly, overwhelmingly in favour of ObamaCare.

The following responses are the most recent as of the time of writing, and are entirely representative of the rest:

tedcruz2

 

The warmth of these responses to the effect of ObamaCare – some from staunch Republicans – is quite arresting, and really reveals the gap between the GOP rhetoric on healthcare reform and the way it is perceived by many of those directly impacted.

This is not to say that there are not dissenters among those who answered Ted Cruz’s question on facebook – there are plenty. But the fact that they are in such a minority (and that they often failed to directly answer the question in terms of impact on their finances or lives) again exposes a fundamental weakness in the Republican party’s full-throated opposition to the bill.

While there are certainly – as with any major legislation – those who have lost out as a result of ObamaCare, either through having to change their healthcare plan, pay a higher premium or lose some other benefit – for every one of these cases, there seem to be other people being rescued from catastrophic personal and financial ruin or uninsurability. It is quite telling that when Ted Cruz opened the floor to the public to make their voices heard – without the controlling hand of opinion pollsters or leading questions in focus groups – the message painted was overwhelmingly positive.

The GOP has long tried to paint the passing of ObamaCare as the sudden imposition of socialism on America (conveniently forgetting huge programs such as MediCare for seniors, which are real, tangible socialism in action) against the will of the people and the founding values of the nation. In GOP-world, everyone is a small business owner or unspecified “wealth creator” being taxed to death in order to fund this extravagant giveaway by the “takers”. The real world, as glimpsed through the windows of Ted Cruz’s Facebook page, appears to contradict this worldview.

With ObamaCare, as with most big policies, there is merit in the arguments of both supporters and detractors. President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement is not without multiple flaws, but those who oppose it undermine themselves by the fact that they made no effort to tackle the glaring problems in America’s healthcare system – sometimes laughably called the “greatest in the world” by ignorant people who have never set foot outside the United States – before Obama took office, and then decided to adopt a position of total, unwavering obstruction once reform efforts got underway – even denying and repudiating policies and ideas once favoured by their own side as conservative reforms.

The Republicans could very well win total control of Congress at the midterms this November, and then go on to win back the presidency in 2016. If they do so, they will have to decide – and admit to the world – how much of their opposition to ObamaCare is real and principled, and how much was political posturing and pandering to the base. And the measure of this will be the provisions that they seek to repeal and those which they keep.

If the Republicans want to be a serious party of government again – and sadly, there is currently very little sign that they do, even though America sorely needs a sane right-wing voice as part of her political discourse again – they will have to confront people like those who shared their positive stories of ObamaCare on Ted Cruz’s Facebook wall, and tell them precisely which of their newfound securities will be ripped away, and why.

Over 7 million Americans have now signed up for health insurance through the various ObamaCare exchanges. If the Republican Party is to regain power, it must face a political day of reckoning with each and every one of them.

Who Is To Blame For The Left’s Stalled Agenda?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
The masterminds
The masterminds

 

If you were wondering exactly how deep goes the rot in the American conservative commentariat in the Age of Obama, you need look no further than the editorial and letters pages of the Wall Street Journal.

When these pages are not screeching warnings of an imagined upcoming Kristalnacht for wealthy Americans to be carried out by the seething, envious masses, they have taken to publishing seemingly highbrow retrospectives on the Obama presidency, paying particular attention to America’s failures and shortcomings under President Obama, whilst brazenly whitewashing the conservative or Republican part in those failures.

Danniel Henninger has the honour of writing the latest of these historically revisionist editorials on the WSJ’s aptly named “Wonder Land” blog – apt because what is written there bears so little resemblance to fact, or reality. In this piece, Henninger asks “The left can win elections. Why can’t it run a government?”

The editorial gets off to a bad start, attempting to link three quite ideologically disparate politicians and use their waning fortunes as evidence of a socialist malaise:

Surveying the fall in support for the governments of Barack Obama, New York City’s progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio and France’s Socialist President François Hollande, a diagnosis of the current crisis begins to emerge: The political left can win elections but it’s unable to govern.

It may have become what now passes for a fact by some on the American right, but in truth – if you look up the dictionary definition or compare his policies to those of previous Democratic presidents – Barack Obama is not a socialist. Therefore, Obama’s troubles have little to do with the travails and setbacks experienced by President Hollande of France, a legitimate socialist whose actual, socialist policies continue to do damage to that country.

Henninger then spends the rest of the article expanding on his cheeky proposition that the political left can win elections, but are unable to govern once in power. He fastidiously examines every possible reason for Obama’s failure to advance his agenda, save the most glaring one – the fact that the Republican opposition have consistently been more interested in token opposition, nihilism, public posturing and pandering to their base than they have bothered to engage in the processes of government while in opposition.

But Henninger is less interested in any kind of introspective analysis of the rights own complicity in America’s current difficulties than in spewing misleading half-truths:

Once in office, the left stumbles from fiasco to fiasco. ObamaCare, enacted without a single vote from the opposition party, is an impossible labyrinth of endless complexity.

The merits and drawbacks of ObamaCare aside, the blanket Republican opposition was more a strategic move to damage the Obama presidency than a principled stance (Republicans having long been content to leave “the best healthcare system in the world” and all it’s flaws untouched and unaddressed), and Henninger conveniently forgets that Anh Joseph Cao of Louisiana provided a solitary GOP vote for the draft version of the health bill.

Henninger’s next exhibit is the world’s response to climate change, an issue which he says has more political support than any other in our time:

No idea in our time has had deeper political support. Al Gore and John Kerry have described disbelievers in global warming as basically idiots—”shoddy scientists” in Mr. Kerry’s words. But somehow, an idea with which “no serious scientist disagrees” has gone nowhere as policy. The collapse of the U.N.’s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was a meltdown for the ages.

It may or may not be correct to state that global warming is the greatest area of consensus in world politics at the moment, but what is truly laughable is Henninger’s neglect to admit that all of the opposition to taking any action on climate change comes from his own side. In doing so, he really answers his own question, except that it is not so much the left who are terrible at governing, but more that the ideologically inflexible American right are brilliant when it comes to using whatever political power they still wield to throw a spanner in the works and thwart the majority.

Sometimes it may be right to use opposition power in this way, in order to prevent abuse of power by that majority – but using that same tactic over and over in response to every initiative from the governing party is overkill, and the opposite of good governance.

Henninger sums up:

Making the unworkable work by executive decree or court-ordered obedience is one way to rule, and maybe they like it that way. But it isn’t governing.

True – and Henninger can rightly point to numerous cases where the left has taken these shortcuts to governance, especially recently. But he fails to take the next step and ask why President Obama and the Democratic party are behaving as they are, showing a complete unwillingness or inability to examine the GOP’s own role in creating the acrimonious partisan deadlock for which executive orders and court judgements have been the only pressure release valve.

Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the Republican Party had a tight grip on the reigns of power, holding the executive branch and both houses of Congress for a time. And in this time meaningful legislation was passed, sometimes in the face of vociferous opposition from the left and from libertarians. Significant legislation such as the PATRIOT Act, Sarbanes-Oxley and the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act were all shepherded through Congress without Democratic Party histrionics or threat of filibuster.

One can argue that the Republicans’ willingness to remain united as a single block in order to successfully oppose legislation is a sign of strength, and that the Democrats’ tendency to fracture and allow members of their caucus to be picked off in order to garner support for conservative proposals is a sign of weakness. But in that weakness is also the flexibility and willingness to compromise – hell, to acknowledge that some people in America hold a different point of view – that is so utterly lacking in today’s GOP and in much modern conservative thinking.

The American left may sometimes be catastrophically bad at advancing their agenda, framing the debate and winning the now all-important war of words (death panels, death taxes, job-creators) when courting public opinion, but the American right plays a daily role in the left’s emasculation. In many ways, even in opposition the Republicans have seemed like the playground bully who grabs hold of his prey’s wrist and turns his fist against him, all the while asking why the hapless victim likes punching himself so much.

Blanket, unthinking opposition to everything that the governing party tries to do has been effective for the GOP of late. They have successfully stopped President Obama’s legislative agenda in its tracks. The conservative strategy has been proven to work very well, but good responsible governance it is most certainly not.