The Washington Post chart above (H/T Cato) clearly lays out three key truths: 1. The United States government has a structural problem controlling it’s level of debt and spending 2. The growing size of the federal government and its debt has been a bipartisan affair 3. President Obama’s tenure has greatly exasperated America’s short and long term financial situation.

In 30 years the United States’ debt has increased from $1 trillion dollars to $14 trillion and if the chart continued into the projected future, well, you would have had to scroll even further down to read this. I may not be an economist or an expert on Congressional budgets, but I don’t have to be to know we are on the wrong track. The past few weeks we have constantly heard the President and numerous other political leaders strongly defend the status quo. Sure there is much talk about ‘cutting spending’, but where are the details?

We need much more than gimmicks and baseline budgeting tricks to solve our real problems. We need leaders to tackle the transparent challenge shown in the aforementioned chart and we just aren’t getting it from this White House and Senate. For gosh sakes, the US Senate has put a constitutionally mandated budget in over two years! Why haven’t they? It’s pretty simple: If you never take a stand, you never have to take responsibility. I’ll finish with the first and last entries on Congressman Paul Ryan’s (a man who put out a budget all by himself, are you listening US Senate?) timeline of the Obama administration’s financial stewardship:

January 20, 2009
President Obama sworn into office

• President tells the American people in his Inaugural Address: “Those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”
• Debt Held By Public = $6.31 trillion

……..

July 15, 2011
President Holds Press Conference: “We’re Running Out of Time” to Deal with Debt

• President Obama tells reporters: “I’ve got reams of paper and printouts and spreadsheets on my desk, and so we know how we can create a package that solves the deficits and debt for a significant period of time.  But in order to do that, we got to get started now.”
• The American people have still not seen any “paper” or “printouts” of what specific spending cuts the President supports.  The American people have still not seen any “spreadsheets” from the White House to corroborate their claims of having offered a deficit reduction plan.
• While it’s long past time for Washington “to get started now” on tackling our debt problems, President Obama has still not proposed a credible budget, and Senate Democrats have still not proposed any budget.
• Debt Held by Public = $9.75 trillion

Saturday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal poignantly identifies the problem with the President and the liberal elite’s mindset in today’s politics: let’s focus on new programs and bury any discussion of how we’re going to pay for them or the current ones we already can’t afford. The WSJ says it best:

“Maybe the most unknowing moment from President Obama’s debt-limit press conference the other day was when he said that, ‘I’d rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes, like new programs.’ Define everybody—and, please, let us know when the new programs are going to stop.”

Yes, Mr. President, please tell us when we can finally start addressing the record debt and deficits. Or the impending bankruptcy of Medicare. Or the several trillion dollar shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund. Or the rising interest that we have to pay to service our massive debt to foreigners (41 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed!). Or a handful of other disastrous budgetary issues we have ignored over the past several years (like pensions, for starters).

In light of this deep hole we are in as a country – and the very real display in Greece of what our future might look like if we stay on this current path – it is absolutely stunning to think we are still pondering new government programs. Just a cursory look at the several thousand federal programs and agencies that we have now should put to rest the thought that we need any more government or that the government we currently have is somehow cost-effective.

Yet this is the guiding light of modern day liberalism. As Thomas Sowell recently put it when discussing President Obama’s advocacy for a new high-speed rail program, “One of the most successful political ploys is to promise people things without having the money to pay for them. Then, when others want to cut back on the things that have been promised, blame them for lacking the compassion of those who wrote the checks without enough money in the bank to cover them.”

Nevertheless, with an ever increasing percent of the American population paying no federal income taxes, receiving government-run health care and cashing in on welfare programs (e.g., unemployment benefits, food stamps), the argument for a fiscally sane federal government is becoming a more difficult sell.

Sadly, it might take a default on the national debt before Americans realize we are on an unsustainable path. In the meantime, it appears the conductor (President Obama) will be sitting in the caboose figuring out how to add more cars to the train.

The United States has suffered through unserious leadership for years now. Besides a flawed, but well-intentioned effort to reform our faltering social security entitlement system, President George W. Bush did little to curb the relentless government spending that is putting our remarkable country in peril. In his three years so far in office, President Barack Obama has not only done absolutely nothing to contain our out of control deficits and spending, but actually put them on an even more unsustainable path.

The numbers don’t lie; the American financial system and economy is in deep trouble:

Obama’s ten year budget projections, which include optimistic GDP growth estimates, contain over a trillion dollars in debt annually. Our dire situation is not just for policy wonks or Chicken Littles. One only has to look to what is happening in Greece this very day to remind us how bad things can become. How did we get here?

Walter Russell Mead attempts to answer that question in a piece called ‘When Government Jumps the Shark‘. He brings his readers along the progressive path to a growing government with more and more responsibilities. The first few stages usually have gone well with small government programs providing services that the American people want and can use, but then comes trouble….

The fourth stage of life comes when the Great White Elephant morphs into a Great White Shark: a man-eating terror of the deep that ruthlessly attacks anyone who gets in its way.  At this stage the government program has moved beyond being wasteful and has become unsustainable.  Fannie Mae goes from providing mortgages to creditworthy households to providing vast numbers of mortgages to uncreditworthy households, poisoning the financial system with bad loans.  Medicare is unsustainable in the medium term and hugely expensive day to day — even as the procedures and regulations of Medicare warp investment decisions across the entire health care system.

But even as these programs become unsustainable, they have become so powerful — there are so many interests and industries that grow rich on these programs, and so many families for whom these programs have become the cornerstone of what little financial security they have — that they cannot be touched.  One way to tell when an elephant has morphed into a shark: when pundits and politicians start describing a government program as a ‘third rail’: you touch it, you die.

The Great White Shark is a menace that cannot be controlled.  The program has gone rogue: the Army Corps of Engineers isn’t just building pointless dams.  It is building bad dams.  The agricultural subsidies aren’t just encouraging farmers to plant wasteful crops; by subsidizing corn ethanol they are contributing to food price inflation that threatens political stability in countries like Egypt.  But just as the programs are most in need of reform, reform becomes impossible.  If you try to stop Fannie Mae from tempting poor urbanites into ruinous mortgages..

The problem today is that we are looking not just at one or two government programs that have succumbed to elephantiasis or turned into sharks; the progressive complex of social and economic policy as a whole has reached this point.  Today many of our New Deal and Great Society programs are either elephants or sharks.  They either lead us to misallocate scarce resources in ineffective ways or they threaten us with ruin by becoming politically untouchable budget busters.

Progressivism itself, and not simply the individual government programs it spawns, is moving through the same cycle of life.  The most urgent social problems that progressivism set out to solve have been dealt with.  Child labor and lynch mobs are no longer common in the United States.  The greatest natural and scenic treasures of the country are protected by the National Park system.  Food is much less dangerous, buildings are better built, cars are safer, the air and water is in better shape and the charismatic megafauna (big interesting animals) have been saved from extinction.  Many more people have much more access to education today than was true 100 years ago; ditto for lifesaving medical treatment.

The progressive vision morphed from Great White Hope and Great White Father into Great White Elephant over the years.  Early progressives picked the low-hanging fruit; they addressed the most important problems that were most susceptible to progressive interventions.  Increasingly they are left with more expensive, less effective approaches to big problems (like Obamacare) or the agenda moves from issues of great moral and political significance like equal rights for African-Americans to less consequential issues like wider social acceptance of the transgendered.  To raise the percentage of young Americans attending college from 2 percent to 20 percent is a significant achievement; to extend it from 40 percent to 60 percent will likely cost much more and accomplish much less in terms of raising social productivity.

We now see the progressive agenda dealing with issues like high speed rail, where the gains are so small and the rationale are so weak from the beginning that the program is a white elephant before it is fully set up.

If you aren’t already shaken, beware, as there’s one final stage and it isn’t pretty. Think Greece, but on a massive scale. Instead of jumping the shark we might be eaten by a whale.

(Chart: Courtesy of Keith Hennessey)

1. ‘Hard Times, Fewer Crimes‘, James Q. Wilson, Wall Street Journal/City Journal

Preeminent political and social scientist James Q. Wilson debunks the myth that crime is caused mainly by economic factors. So then, what causes crime to increase or decrease? Wilson has a few provocative proscriptions in this must read piece:

When the FBI announced last week that violent crime in the U.S. had
reached a 40-year low in 2010, many criminologists were perplexed. It
had been a dismal year economically, and the standard view in the
field, echoed for decades by the media, is that unemployment and poverty
are strongly linked to crime. The argument is straightforward: When
less legal work is available, more illegal “work” takes place.

The economist Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, a Nobel
laureate, gave the standard view its classic formulation in the 1960s..

Yet when the recent recession struck, that didn’t happen. As the
national unemployment rate doubled from around 5% to nearly 10%, the
property-crime rate, far from spiking, fell significantly. For 2009, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation reported an 8% drop in the nationwide
robbery rate and a 17% reduction in the auto-theft rate from the
previous year. Big-city reports show the same thing. Between 2008 and
2010, New York City experienced a 4% decline in the robbery rate and a
10% fall in the burglary rate. Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles witnessed
similar declines.

2. ‘Give Me That Old Gray Religion – If the New York Times says it, is it the “absolute truth”?‘ – James Taranto, Wall Street Journal

Taranto does here what he does best: offer a scathing critique of poor and dishonest journalism, this time with the New York Times as his target:

It may be the most revealing quote ever published in the New York Times. It appears in a story about the New York Times, and its source is a top editor of the New York Times: Jill Abramson, who will become the top editor of the New York Times in September, when Bill Keller steps down, the New York Times reports:

Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

The Times has of late acted a great deal like a corrupt religious institution. This column has chronicled its often vicious and dishonest attempts–both on the editorial page and in the news sections, which Abramson will head–to shore up its own authority by trying to tear down its competitors. Examples:

3. ‘Ike, D-Day and the Age of Accountable Leaders‘, Mark Salter, Real Clear Politics

On twitter (@gtpowerpolitics), I often finish my tweets with #whereareourleaders? after I post a link to an article about our sky rocketing debt and seeming inability to tackle major problems. It is in this light that I read this moving piece describing the quietly strong leadership of Dwight Eisenhower during the D-Day invasion of France in 1944:

The heavy burdens of his command were plainly evident in his behavior. Eisenhower drank 15 to 20 cups of coffee and smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. He had high blood pressure and migraines. He suffered from insomnia, so he often worked through the night.

Ike had a bad temper, but he never complained or gave the slightest impression he thought he deserved anyone’s sympathy. He disliked flattery and had no use for the perquisites of high command. He had been given a mansion as his quarters, and rejected it for a modest two-bedroom house in a London suburb. Only to his wife did he write of his loneliness and doubts. “No man can always be right,” he told her. “So the struggle is to do one’s best.”

His statement to his troops was broadcast at every embarkation point, ending confidently with an assurance of success:

“I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

In his shirt pocket, he carried another statement. He had written it alone, and informed no one of its contents:

“Our landings . . . have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

4. ‘Accusation That Voter ID Is Racist Demeans Blacks‘, Mark Prager, Real Clear Politics

In what George W. Bush called the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ there are many people out there, mostly on the Left, that view such policies as showing a photo ID at a polling both, racist toward African Americans. Prager takes those who promote this idea to task for either wallowing in ‘white guilt’ or for using it strictly for political opportunism:

Democrats and others on the left virtually unanimously condemned all Republican attempts in state legislatures to pass legislation requiring voters to show a photo ID. The Democrats labeled it a means of “disenfranchising” blacks. Many Democrats compared it to Jim Crow laws.

“Jim Crow, move over — the Wisconsin Republicans have taken your place,” charged Wisconsin Democratic State Sen. Bob Jauch, referring to his state’s new voter ID law.

It is hard to imagine a more demeaning statement about black America than labeling demands that all voters show a photo ID anti-black.

This is easily demonstrated. Imagine if some Democratic politician had announced that demanding a photo ID at the voting booth was an attempt to keep Jewish Americans from voting. No one would understand what the person was talking about. But why not? Jews vote almost as lopsidedly Democrat as do blacks. So why weren’t Jews included in liberal objections to voter ID laws?

5. ‘No, You Can’t Keep Your Health Insurance‘, Grace-Marie Turner, Wall Street Journal

Despite one President Obama’s major promises during the health care debate, that if you like your plan you can keep, a recent report the highly reputable McKinsey & Company shows a different story:

ObamaCare will lead to a dramatic decline in employer-provided health insurance—with as many as 78 million Americans forced to find other sources of coverage.

This disturbing finding is based on my calculations from a survey by McKinsey & Company. The survey, published this week in the McKinsey Quarterly, found that up to 50% of employers say they will definitely or probably pursue alternatives to their current health-insurance plan in the years after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act takes effect in 2014. An estimated 156 million non-elderly Americans get their coverage at work, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Before the health law passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that only nine million to 10 million people, or about 7% of employees who currently get health insurance at work, would switch to government-subsidized insurance. But the McKinsey survey of 1,300 employers across industries, geographies and employer sizes found “that reform will provoke a much greater response” and concludes that the health overhaul law will lead to a “radical restructuring” of job-based health coverage.

The mainstream media have finally started to catch on the President Obama may bear some responsibility for the sad present state of the United States economy. With the unemployment rate spiking back up to 9.1% after another disappointing jobs report and the 2012 election season kicking off, we have seen news or blog article titles like these below (H/T James Taranto, WSJ):

• “Obama’s Toughest Re-Election Challenge May Come From Economy”–headline, Bloomberg, June 4
• “Economy Will Force Shift in Barack Obama’s 2012 Strategy”–headline, Politico.com, June 4
• “What Can Barack Obama Do to Fix the Economy? Not Much”–headline, Politico.com, June 3
• “Bad economic numbers and a justified perception that Obama’s leadership is precipitating a decline of America’s fortunes may doom his chances of reelection. But they also may not.”–Jonathan Tobin, Commentary website, June 5

The US economy and American worker have an unparalleled track record of resiliency and I’m still confident that we will get out of this rut eventually, but as of right now, the numbers, trends, and personal outlook (that is how individual Americans view the economy and America’s future) are dismal. It’s hard to believe that the country would probably be thankful for an unemployment rate in 7%, but we are hundreds of thousands of jobs away from that right now. Americans are more pessimistic than ever it seems and this feeling is palpable in daily transactions. According to a Pew Charitable Trusts poll, 55% of Americans still rate the national economy as poor, with only 47% believing their kids will have a higher standard of living than they enjoy, down from 62% in 2009. I used the term rut above and it definitely seems apt.

Jay Cost details in a short paragraph some of the other economic factors that are dragging us down:

Have you noticed that the economy is slowing down once again? The data of late has been pretty unequivocal on that front. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen monthly reports from Fed regional banks that show local economic growth stalling. Industrial production for April was flat. The housing market is in a double dip, despite the fact that mortgage rates are at bargain basement levels. Weekly jobless claims have bounced back up. And while the top-line number of April’s unemployment report showed somewhat good news, though it also revealed clear signs that wages are not keeping pace with inflation, which is bad news, considering how dependent the economy of today is on consumer spending. Looking ahead, the major firms are already starting to cut their growth forecasts for Q2. Japan’s economy slowed more than expected last quarter, and the sovereign debt crisis of Europe is back with a vengeance. Belarus just devalued its currency, Greece remains in very real danger, and China’s now thinking of bailing out Portugal.

Cost sees a ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and who can blame him. Speaking of blame: How much should be laid at the Obama administration’s feet for our current economic malaise? This is an important question and will go along why in determining who will be America’s president in 2013. It is true that presidents are in many ways stuck with an economy, good or bad, that is largely out of their control. Barack Obama himself can largely thank the fiscal crisis of 2008 for the position he currently holds. Senator Obama absolutely went to town bashing Bush/McCain’s handling of the economy and fiscal crisis, riding this into the White House. The problem now is Obama’s now been in charge for three years with an economy that is not only still in the diaper bin, but doesn’t appear to coming up for air anytime soon.

Though it is true that macroeconomic sides of the US economy are mostly out of the executive branch’s hands, they still play can play a major role. For instance, President Obama said it was an absolute necessity for the federal government to pass and implement a massive stimulus plan to get the economy growing and people back to work. Here is the President in 2009:

“I hope that we can continue to strengthen this plan before it gets to my desk. But what we can’t do is drag our feet or allow the same partisan differences to get in our way. We must move swiftly and boldly to put Americans back to work, and that is exactly what this plan begins to do.”

Well, not exactly. The administration also released a chart showing how the Stimulus package (totally nearly $800 million dollars) would lower the unemployment rate. Here is that chart with something extra added on; the actual employment rate (H/T Cato Institute’s Daniel J. Mitchell):

There is no doubt that the Obama administration’s single greatest attempt to revive the economy was a huge failure. We’ve all heard the counterfactual’s (‘unemployment would be 12-13% without the Stimulus’), but we have the administration’s own statistics to judge it by. The administration needs to be held accountable for its policies and their outcomes. According to just released poll by Washington Post-ABC, they are starting to be:

Overall, about six in 10 of those surveyed give Obama negative marks on the economy and the deficit. Significantly, nearly half strongly disapprove of his performance in these two crucial areas. Nearly two-thirds of political independents disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, including — for the first time — a slim majority who do so strongly.

Ouch.

One more point: I came across this statement from President Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney on twitter:

“There is no issue that matters more to this president than the economic health of this country.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Carney, and more importantly for President Obama, is that I and most Americans have memories. Reading this quote, I immediately recalled another key legislative ‘victory’ for the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Before the Stimulus bill even had time to cool, let alone be implemented, Obama and the Democrats spent the next year attempting to pass one of the most controversial, ideological, and most importantly, economic damaging bills in American history. It was like they said; ‘Stimulus done, economy okay now, onto our liberal dream of government run health care’.

History now tells a different story: ‘Economy not okay, health reform still very unpopular, 2012 election up in the air’.

Founder and editor of National Review magazine, William Buckley, Jr. wrote his first book “God and Man at Yale” shortly after graduating from Yale University. The book was released in 1951, shortly after the Second World War ended and in the early years of the McCarthy-era. The divide between the East and West was hardening as their respective philosophies on man, capital and government duked it out.

In the United States, the East’s (e.g., U.S.S.R. most notably) biggest supporters had just enjoyed significant influence in government under FDR and his New Deal agenda. Many would find their way out of government and into academia. While many of their collectivist leanings were just as dangerous philosophically as the leaders in Moscow and Beijing, these individuals were treated as the best and brightest our country had to offer. Likely, this had a lot to do with where they were standing (here instead of Moscow).

But Yale was supposed to be different. It was a private college that had a long history of promoting individualism, critical thinking and of course, strong religious (predominantly Christian) values. These ideals were imprinted on its students and alumni, written into its charter and frequently used to embody the university and its faculty’s mission statement.

Buckley’s thesis was that, in fact, Yale had deviated from their mission statement and betrayed their founding ideals. By 1950, through faculty members, assigned textbooks and campus atmosphere, Yale was effectively preaching religious skepticism and political statism. Naturally, the reaction to Buckley’s book was unfriendly. He received enormous push back from Yale’s faculty who were under attack, an administration worried about their reputation and funding and also, the media that generally supported the teaching of collectivist/statist ideology. Indeed, one observer, Dwight MacDonald, amusingly commented that Yale’s authorities “reacted with all the grace and agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse.”

Over the first few chapters, Buckley lays out his case for why he believes atheism and collectivism have been granted a favored role in the Yale curriculum and among lectures given by the faculty. He goes in to significant detail to highlight the textbooks used and the dearth of faculty members who would consider themselves proponents of the private sector/capitalism and religion’s role in understanding the world.

Buckley’s case is quite persuasive as he discusses the range of classes and material that students would face as they go about meeting their pre-requisite courses. And while the education is delivered under a shroud of “academic freedom” – another subject that Buckley spends a good deal of time discussing – it is undeniable that the open hostility of the vast majority of faculty members toward capitalism/democracy and faith/piety greatly influence the impressionable minds of their students.

For Buckley, a stalwart of conservatism, individualism and Christian values, this is a travesty. Not merely because of the indoctrination of views contrary to his own but more importantly, because the views being taught are anathema to the founding principles and mission statement of the university and our country. Furthermore, this institution – likely representative of the education in many of the best schools around the country at that time – was producing the country’s future business leaders, judges, diplomats and political leaders.

Buckley’s fear was that the university was headed down a dangerous path that damaged the institution and failed its students. On a deeper level, though, I believe Buckley was expressing his concern for the academic direction our country was heading in as a whole.  For he thought, as goes the graduates of Yale, Harvard and Berkeley, so go – to an extent – the future of our country’s government and business leaders.

In my view, his concerns were quite prescient. The academic freedom movement quickly morphed into the cultural relativism and political correctness that has done such great damage to our educational institutions and broader culture in the last 50 years. (For more on this subject, Alan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” is a must read.)

Buckley was also right about the gradual upheaval of the individualist mindset among today’s faculties across the country.  Because although communism had been discredited utterly and completely after the fall of the USSR, its younger sibling, socialism remains alive and well. Now does socialism pose the same threat as communism? No. At least not in the short term. But does its fundamental objective rely on collectivist philosophy which also underpins communism? Absolutely. This philosophy posits that an imposing, well-funded government – a group of elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats – is necessary to protect regular citizens from the evils of the free market system. It is premised on the idea that the government is better suited to make decisions for the individual than is the individual. For the government can spend the individual’s money better than he is able to spend it himself. And on and on.

At its core, collectivism looks to the redistribution of wealth to accomplish its ends. Reminiscent of the famous Marxian slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” collectivism is the tie that binds socialism and communism together. Under socialism, though, its muted enough so it doesn’t offend the sensibilities of the average American as much. In this sense, it is allowed to exist and continue to permeate our culture and ideas.

As a close, I would highly endorse this book for readers interested in a thorough examination of the perilous road our academic institutions have taken us down by advocating for religious skepticism, collectivism and cultural relativism.

I just finished Paul Berman’s ‘Flight of the Intellectuals‘ and while not a tour de force like its prequel, ‘Terror and Liberalism’, was a phenomenal read. I will give a full length review after my vacation (warning GPP is going on a two week travel break), but right now I will highlight to key part of the book’s conclusion. This section features Berman building his theme of Western intellectuals failing to stand up to the Islamist’s ideology, which he clearly lays out was partly fathered by European fascism, while at the same time spitting venom at actual liberal people with Muslim backgrounds, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The following sections immediately follow a listing of Western intellectuals (some with Muslim backgrounds) who require bodyguards to protect them from Islamist violent radicals. The list is sadly long. Enough of me, here’s Berman:

‘And so, Salman Rushdie has metastasized into into an entire social class. It is a subset of the European intelligentsia-its Muslims free-thinking and liberal wing especially, but including other people, too, who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. Fear-mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip a bizarre ideology-has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life. And yet, if someone like Pascal Bruckner intones a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin-”Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?”- and onward to the litany about fascism. In the New York Times Magazine Ian Buruma held back from hinting even obliquely at the genuinely fascist influences on [Tariq] Ramadan’s grandfather, the founder of the modern cult of artistic death-Hassan al-Banna, who spoke highly of Adolf Hitler and helped the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem escape from getting tried at Nuremburg. Yet Pascal Bruckner, the liberal-here is somebody, Buruma would have us think, on the brink of fascism!’….[Pg. 296]

‘The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, contrasted unfavorably in the very best of magazines with Tariq Ramadan, who is celebrated as a bridge between cultures-Ramadan, an alumnus of the anti-Rushdie Islamic Foundation in Britain. Ramadan, who, even in 2009, managed to commend in a single sentence of his book Radical Reform both Sheikh Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb, and the Egyptian sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, who publicly defended the assassination of Foda. And yet, if there is a menace to society, nowadays it is said to come from Hirsi Ali or some other vocal and articulate opponent of the violent sheikhs-the European intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds who, in their unforgivable departure from the child-like image of how Muslims are supposed to behave, have arrogated to themselves the right to update a few ideas from John  Locke or John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. During the Rushdie affair, liberals who called for courage were applauded. Liberals from Muslim backgrounds were positively celebrated. But not today.’ [pg. 298]

Hopefully, you were able to follow Berman’s thinking in these paragraphs. If so, please give GPP your thoughts. If not, please give GPP your confused thoughts.