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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (77876)	2/26/2010 3:57:01 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Going Off Senator Graham's Cliff By: Andrew C. McCarthy National Review Online Closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay is “the pragmatic thing to do.” So says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) in remarks reported by the Wall Street Journal. And why is that? “It’s an image problem for the United States.” Actually, Gitmo is not a problem at all for the United States. In fact, it’s a boon. It’s an image problem only for leftists, and an irrational one. There is no good reason to give in to their lingering Bush derangement -- especially at the cost of endangering the American people. Senator Graham has evidently been huddling with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, struggling to find a solution to this imaginary problem that Graham has managed to convince himself is a “practical problem.” And what makes it a practical problem? “Having a jail where presidents don’t want to send anyone,” says the senator. But a presidential hissy fit is not a “practical problem.” We have 200 trained alien terrorists who want to kill Americans, and there are many more where they came from. We need a safe place to put them, a place where they cannot threaten anyone. We just happen to have this first-rate, Geneva Convention-compliant detention center that the American people have spent about a quarter-billion dollars to make ultra-safe yet Islamo-friendly. But Barack Obama doesn’t want to send anyone there, because its existence has George Soros’s shorts in a knot? How very practical. When did it become “practical” to accommodate irrationality? Senator Graham has a name for this syndrome, too. It’s called “bipartisanship.” The “solution” to this imaginary problem, he claims, “has got to be bipartisan.” Near as I can tell, this means we must capitulate to the foolish for the sake of getting along with the senseless. “There’s no way the Democratic party is going to walk off a political cliff here without Republican support,” pronounced Graham, “nor should they.” No, of course not. By all means, let’s join hands and walk off the cliff together. After all, if we were to stand our firm ground over here while the Obama Democrats teeter on the edge of the cliff, they just might see they’ve got no place else to go. They just might be overcome by a temporary flash self-preservation instinct and say, “Okay, let’s keep the bad guys in the safe prison.” We wouldn’t want to do that, right? Standing your ground when you are walloping the other side is known as common sense. In most of the world, exhibiting such common sense in a debate over an important matter produces a winner and a loser. Among old Washington hands, though, this is regarded as “impractical,” and, instead, everyone walks off the cliff. Actually, I should say “among old Washington GOP hands.” When Democrats have the upper hand, they know how to close the deal. And when they’re getting their brains beat in at the edge of the cliff, they know to speed-dial Senator Graham. The practical advantages of Guantanamo Bay are incontestable. Because it is a military base from which escape is impossible, it is totally secure. Because the base is on a remote island outside the U.S., it is not as vulnerable to terrorist attack as military bases inside our country -- the likely choice for housing the detainees if Gitmo is shuttered. And because Gitmo is outside the sovereign territory of the United States, there remains a solid legal argument that prisoners held there do not have American constitutional rights, at least beyond the single one, habeas corpus, that the Supreme Court foolishly manufactured for them in the 2008 Boumediene case. JIHADISTS TARGET U.S. MILITARY BASES Being offshore is no small matter. Military bases are generally not just headquarters for military operations. In the United States, they are like small towns where members of our armed forces live with their families -- which is to say, where military families live while the troops are deployed fighting to defend us. Why does that matter? Because countless times in the last 30 years, jihadists have targeted military bases for attack. The most damning piece of evidence in my 1995 prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) was his instruction that, rather than bombing the United Nations, his underlings should target an American military base. Hezbollah, of course, famously bombed a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 of our military personnel. In 1996 Iran-backed terrorists -- probably in collusion with al-Qaeda -- bombed the Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen based there. To reel off just a few recent domestic plots, six jihadists conspired in 2007 to, in their words, “kill as many soldiers as possible” at the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey. Two others were apprehended later that year near a Navy brig in Goose Creek, S.C., plotting to attack U.S. military vehicles with explosives. Last year, seven other terrorists were arrested planning an attack on the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va. And let’s not forget the Fort Hood massacre only a few months back. That happened while we were still hearing the echoes of shots fired outside a Little Rock recruiting station by a gunman who murdered one soldier and gravely wounded another. Here’s a brute fact that folks at the edge of the cliff don’t want to hear: Islamic law deems American service personnel to be legitimate targets of violent jihad. That is not a fringe position held only by al-Qaeda. It is a mainstream interpretation of sharia in the Muslim world. It is held, for example, by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the renowned inspiration of the Muslim Brotherhood -- those nice fellas President Obama insisted on inviting to his sermon on the cliff in Cairo. And by the way, after Qaradawi issued a fatwa in 2004 urging attacks on American troops in Iraq, he was promptly seconded by authoritative scholars at al-Azhar University, the ancient seat of Sunni learning and the site chosen for said sermon. If Gitmo is closed, the nearly 200 remaining jihadists now housed there would probably be transferred to military bases. Those bases would have to be hardened for the purpose, at a cost of untold millions of dollars -- unjustifiable when it does not cost us an extra dime at this point to detain them at Gitmo. More significantly, such a base and its environs would become even more of a terror target than it is now. That would increase the danger and monumental inconvenience not only to the young men and women who are already bearing disproportionate burdens in this war, but also to the family members who accompany them from base to base, supporting their sacrifice for our country. What conceivable rationale can there be for that when we already have a perfectly suitable offshore detention center? SUPERMAX PRISONS But Senator Graham and the Obama people will tell us, maybe we don’t have to send the prisoners to military bases. We can hold them in supermax prisons. And how does that help? As I’ve argued before, even if the detainees can’t escape from the supermaxes, the prisons and the surrounding areas will still become terrorist targets. The Blind Sheikh has issued a fatwa commanding that Muslims make efforts to free imprisoned terrorists. The fact that these efforts won’t succeed hardly means jihadists won’t try, with lethal consequences. Moreover, why should we be convinced that supermaxes will remain safe? Jennifer Daskal, a tireless advocate for the Gitmo detainees who was brought in by Attorney General Holder to be a top adviser on detainee policy, argues that supermax confinement is a human-rights violation. When she was at Human Rights Watch in 2006, she wrote a scathing memorandum to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, pleading that action be taken against the United States for our alleged violations of international humanitarian law and failures to abide by treaty obligations. (What better preparation for service in the Obama administration?) Among this country’s purported abuses, she claimed, was our operation of supermax prison facilities: <<< The United States continues to confine more than twenty thousand prisoners in the United States, nearly two percent of the prison population, housed in special super-maximum security facilities or units. Prisoners in these facilities typically spend their waking and sleeping hours locked in small, sometimes windowless, cells sealed with solid steel doors. A few times a week they are let out for showers and solitary exercise in a small, enclosed space. Supermax prisoners have almost no access to educational or recreational activities or other sources of mental stimulation and are usually handcuffed, shackled and escorted by two or three correctional officers every time they leave their cells. Assignment to supermax housing is usually for an indefinite period that may continue for years.#...#HRW urges the committee to question the United States about its treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and its use of supermaximum prisons. >>> Before there was a Gitmo, the Left was saying supermax prisons were the great blight on our reputation in the world, a position to which they will revert the second Gitmo’s doors are closed. If that’s not enough for you, see Daskal’s 2008 report on how Gitmo, which is almost universally regarded as more Islamo-friendly than the supermaxes, is “inhumane.” Does Daskal have influence? You decide. Debra Burlingame has recounted that, even as Attorney General Holder was promising that he would impose supermax confinement and “special administrative measures” (SAMs) to ensure the secure detention of terrorist prisoners in stateside jails, the Justice Department was actually capitulating on these restrictions. “Shoe-bomber” Richard Reid complained that the SAMs violated his purported First Amendment rights. Rather than fight, Justice abandoned the SAMs, and the convicted terrorist is no longer subjected to them. THEN THERE ARE THE JUDGES This is exactly the sort of thing that would happen if the detainees were brought into this country. Except then, it won’t just be the Obama Justice Department failing to hold the line. It will be the federal courts striking prison restrictions and releasing detainees. Neither Senator Graham nor the Obama administration can refute this point. Once the terrorists are physically in the United States, they are undeniably within the jurisdiction of the federal courts for all purposes. Up until now, the Supreme Court has manufactured for the detainees only a single constitutional right to habeas corpus (i.e., judicial review of their designation as enemy combatants). The Left claims they should have all constitutional rights. Yet the Court, in the 2008 Boumediene case, went no further than habeas, because the justices in the razor-thin majority understood how radical it was to vest constitutional rights in aliens who were situated outside our country. In his Boumediene dissent, Justice Scalia stressed “the primacy of territorial sovereignty” in determining the rights of non-Americans. To underscore the point, Scalia quoted from the opinion of Justice Robert Jackson -- Holder’s claimed inspiration -- in the 1950 Eisentrager case: “The alien, to whom the United States has been traditionally hospitable, has been accorded a generous and ascending scale of rights as he increases his identity with our society.#...#But, in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien’s presence within its territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act.” Once the alien detainees are physically inside our country, all bets are off. Judges will conclude that they have the power to order the prisoners’ release, to endow them with the full gamut of U.S. constitutional rights, and to give them any privilege a judge would feel comfortable giving to an American prisoner. Maybe Senator Graham has convinced himself that he can head that problem off. He could propose a law that prohibits the courts from releasing former Gitmo detainees in the United States and from giving them rights beyond those prescribed by Congress. If that’s what he’s figuring, it’s a delusion. If the Supreme Court holds that any accommodations it orders for the detainees are rooted in the Constitution -- as the justices did in Boumediene -- Congress will be powerless to do anything about it. Unless you have political branches with the will to stand up to judicial usurpations of this kind (and we don’t), the Supreme Court’s claim that a ruling is based on the Constitution is final. Case closed. It is understandable why President Obama would be anxious to walk off this cliff. The Left loves surrendering to judicial control. The judges don’t have to answer to the voters. They are apt to endow the detainees with all the due-process rights the president would give our enemies if he thought he could get away with it. What is harder to understand is why Senator Graham appears willing to go along. He has already been burned, big time. He was one of the prime movers behind the 2006 Military Commissions Act. The MCA stripped the federal district courts of the power to hear challenges by the detainees to their detention and trial by military commission. With this provision, Graham naively thought he had handled the problem of judges' inflating the rights of terrorists beyond what Congress had prescribed. Wrong. The Boumediene majority ran roughshod over the MCA’s jurisdiction-stripping provisions. That’s why we now have federal judges hearing detainee cases, declaring detainees not to be enemy combatants, and, in some cases, trying to order detainees released inside the United States. And that’s what judges are doing while the detainees are in Cuba. Wait ’til you see what happens once we’ve all gone over Senator Graham’s cliff. — National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008). article.nationalreview.com

To: TimF who wrote (77876)	3/1/2010 2:58:35 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Who's Obsessed and Deranged? By John Power Line Frank Rich of the New York Times retired as a drama critic in order to take up his new role as the paper's full-time drama queen. As an op-ed columnist for the Times, his assignment, apparently, is to write in such a hysterical fashion that Paul Krugman seems rational by comparison. Currently, the most-recommended article on the Times web site is Rich's column, "The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged." The "axis," as described by Rich, includes 1) a murderer, 2) kooks, 3) Tea Partiers, and 4) Republican politicians and Presidential candidates. The point of Rich's column is to suggest, in his usual subtle fashion, that these groups are more or less interchangeable. Rich starts with "the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen." The last sentence is classic Rich. I'll hazard a guess that Stack's murder-suicide was not an omen of anything, and will not ignite a rash of intentional airplane crashes. Rich admits that "Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a 'Tea Party terrorist.'" No kidding: Stack had zero connection to the Tea Party movement. None. So why would it occur to anyone to refer to him as a "Tea Party terrorist"? This is not guilt by association, this is guilt despite a complete lack of association. Rich suggests that the answer lies in Stack's online political screed: <<< But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. >>> No, it doesn't. Stack's essay is left-wing, not right-wing; it ends with a denunciation of capitalism and a quote from the Communist Manifesto. The Tea Party is a highly diverse movement, but you will find very few Communists in it. Rich proceeds to try to tie conservatives and Republican politicians to this suicidal left-winger: <<< That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack's credo -- rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base. >>> I can't find any "shrines to [Stack's] martyrdom" on Facebook, although there are a number of anti-Stack groups. The only one that could be considered pro-Stack is called "His Name is Joseph Stack." It has a whopping 343 members. Since the Facebook page highlights Stack's quote from the Communist Manifesto, I assume most of the group's members are Communist sympathizers and likely are members of Rich's Democratic Party. The Facebook group was started by a kid who graduated from high school last June and works in a deli. I don't think we're seeing a noteworthy political movement here. Of course, Rich's real target isn't the deli guy. As always, it's the Republican Party, of which Joseph Stack was not a member and which had nothing to do with his murder-suicide. Thus the reference to Scott Brown's supposed "empathy" with Stack's credo. I was surprised to learn that Brown empathizes with the Communist Manifesto--even in Massachusetts, Republicans are rarely that liberal--so I looked up the comments Rich was referring to. Brown was interviewed on Neil Cavuto's television show on the day when Stack flew his airplane into the IRS building and was asked about the incident. You can watch the exchange here. Brown's comments were in no way controversial, and it is absurd to say that he "publicly empathiz[ed] with Stack's credo." To my knowledge, Brown has never in his life cited the Communist Manifesto with approval. Next, Rich takes on Congressman Steve King. Here as elsewhere, Rich picks up on a meme that comes from the far-left blogosphere; in fact, Rich's columns, like Krugman's, mostly parrot the left 'sphere. It's easier if you don't have to think for yourself: <<< Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack's crime. "It's sad the incident in Texas happened," he said, "but by the same token, it's an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it's going to be a happy day for America." No one in King's caucus condemned these remarks. >>> You can watch the King interview with someone from the far-left Think Progress web site here. What King wants to talk about is replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. Nowhere, not surprisingly, does he "rationalize" flying an airplane into an IRS building (or any other building). It's hard to imagine what anyone in King's Republican caucus could have found to condemn in the Think Progress interview. Now Rich returns to the Tea Partiers (logical connections in his columns tend to be rather loose): <<< Two days before Stack's suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow's chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias. >>> Barstow's article may have been "chilling," but it did not mention a single act of violence. Not one. So far, the only violent acts that have occurred in connection with either town hall meetings or Tea Party events have been perpetrated by union thugs representing the Democratic Party. There wasn't anything about white supremacism in Barstow's breathless, left-wing article, either, but Rich could hardly leave out that chestnut. Now, for the first time, Rich actually makes sense: <<< Equally significant is Barstow's finding that most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party's ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. ... The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. >>> That's an unusual accumulation of true statements for a Frank Rich column. It's hard to understand, however, how these admissions fit with the murderer=Tea Partier=Republican theme that is the main point of the column, and to which Rich shortly returns. Rich continues by identifying three Republicans who have an affinity with the Tea Party movement and who are not part of the despised "old Republican guard": <<< The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. >>> No kidding! At least two of the three aren't running--Beck is not a politician and has never sought elective office--and I don't think Sarah Palin is running, either. So, what's the point? Hard to say. Rich tries to explain: <<< But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. >>> This is the kind of slur you can get away with if you're only accountable to editors at the New York Times who share your paranoid liberal ideology. I dislike Ron Paul and am not a fan of Glenn Beck, but how do their ideas "play to the lock-and-load nutcases out there"? If either of these gentlemen has done something to encourage violence, as Rich unambiguously implies, you might think that he would tell us what it is. They haven't, of course, so he doesn't. That leaves Sarah Palin, whom I do like and whose utterances I have followed rather closely for a while now. Has she done something to incite violence or "play to lock-and-load nutcases"? Of course not. Like most of what Frank Rich writes, this is sheer fantasy. If he worked for a competent newspaper, its editors would not let him get away with this kind of partisan slander. Now Rich turns to CPAC. He notes that the John Birch Society was one of many sponsors; here I agree with him. Whoever runs CPAC should have turned down their contribution, just like the Democratic Party and its affiliates (MoveOn, etc.) should turn down contributions from George Soros. From there on, Rich's paranoia goes steadily over the top: <<< [J]ust one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office -- the heretofore milquetoast Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods's wife and "take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country." Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. >>> I criticized this part of Pawlenty's speech, but give me a break. Is Rich seriously trying to convince us that Pawlenty's ill-chosen joke constituted "violent imagery and invective"? Does he mean to suggest that Pawlenty intended to endorse Joe Stack's fatal airplane ride, or some other act of violence, or that his audience somehow took his joke that way? Frank Rich never argues--he only associates, almost always falsely or unfairly. He continues: <<< Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted "people in Minnesota armed and dangerous" to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. >>> Here, Rich is quoting from an interview that I did with Michelle on the radio last year. The point of the interview was to promote two public meetings that Michelle was holding in her Congressional district on the subject of global warming. In these meetings, experts on the topic gave talks and answered questions. Michelle said that she wanted her constituents to be armed with information, and therefore dangerous to the hoaxers in Washington who are trying to extend control over our economy with cap and trade, etc. Again, Rich is too lazy to do his own research, and instead channels morons in the liberal blogosphere who tried to portray Congresswoman Bachmann's support for rational debate on the issue of climate change as advocacy of political violence. Nothing could better illustrate the low standards of the New York Times. It is hard to imagine that the National Enquirer, say, would print anything this blatantly misleading. Rich's character assassination continues: <<< In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry -- no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." >>> Yes, well, that's a quote from Jefferson. It's not a sentiment that I agree with, but it comes, after all, from the founder of Rich's beloved Democratic Party. More: <<< In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. >>> Let's just stop there. What Republican politician has ever "endors[ed] groups preaching violent revolution"? I am not aware of any; we'll get to that in a moment. But many liberal Democratic politicians in the 1960s and 1970s--like, for example, George McGovern, the Democrats' 1972 Presidential nominee--proclaimed their sympathy with the views and objectives of violent groups, if not the tactics used by those groups, i.e., their opposition to the war in Vietnam and their desire to take the government of the United States in a more socialist direction. In fact, many of those very Democrats--John Kerry, Bill Clinton and others come immediately to mind--are now the leaders of their party. Rich now tries to support his slander of "the right": <<< In the months before McVeigh's mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions. >>> Rich links to a rather funny and typically paranoid Times piece on Congresswoman Chenoweth of Idaho, who served three terms in Congress and then retired consistent with her term limits pledge. But the Times article to which he links, while lengthy, makes no mention of Chenowith supporting any violent acts or "endorsing groups preaching violent revolution," which was the standard that Rich applied to his own Democratic Party. Likewise, Rich's link to a Times article on Steve Stockman, of whom I have no recollection, does not in any way support his claim that Stockman somehow supported violent political action. Rich winds up his pastiche with a swipe at Sarah Palin, who, for obvious reasons, is the bete noir of homosexual activists like Frank Rich and Andrew Sullivan: <<< In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck's 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that "another civil war" may be in the offing. "I don't see us being the ones to start it," she told Barstow, "but I would give up my life for my country." Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin's memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: "I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help." It's enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now. >>> Would any newspaper other than the New York Times publish anything this dumb? There is no apparent connection between Ms. Stout's declaration and Governor Palin's speech; it isn't even clear which came first. In any event, would Rich put anyone who expressed a willingness to give up his or her life for his country in the same suspect category? Was Nathan Hale the first Tea Partier? Have none of Rich's fellow Democrats expressed such a sentiment? Are we to assume that, from now on, anyone who says he or she would be willing to die for our country is "obsessed and deranged"? If not, what, exactly, is the point? Rich concludes with the suggestion that Sarah Palin is "palling around with terrorists." What on earth is he talking about? The only apparent reference was to Ms. Stout, a random woman in Idaho who is not a terrorist or anything like it. Is that what Rich had in mind? If so, Ms. Stout should sue him. Did Rich mean something else that would be completely opaque to any reader? If so, he is an incompetent columnist. You really shouldn't read the New York Times. It has lower editorial standards than any other newspaper in America, and if you read it enough, it could make you stupid. Like Frank Rich. powerlineblog.com

To: TimF who wrote (77876)	3/1/2010 4:02:00 AM
From: Sully-	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Our own Greek tragedy Mark Steyn The Washington Times While President Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18. What's happening in the developed world today isn't so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1, or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids - i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 "lowest-low" fertility - the point from which no society has ever recovered. And compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe. So you can't borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don't have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around? By the way, you don't have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian "public service" of California has been metaphorically face-down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my book "America Alone," I put the Social Security debate in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected public pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent. In other words, head for the hills, Armageddon, outta here, The End. Since then, the situation has worsened in both countries. And really the comparison is academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn't going to have a 2040 - not without a massive shot of Reality Juice. Is that likely to happen? At such moments, I like to modify Gerald Ford. When seeking to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, President Ford liked to say: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." Which is true enough. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people's response is: Nuts to that. Public sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months' work - for many of them the workday ends at 2:30 p.m. When they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak? We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap's enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest. He's got his, and to hell with everyone else. People's sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. The perfect spokesman for the entitlement mentality is the deputy prime minister of Greece. The European Union has concluded that the Greek government's austerity measures are insufficient and, as a condition of bailout, has demanded something more robust. Greece is no longer a sovereign state: It's General Motors, and the EU is Washington, and the Greek electorate is happy to play the part of the United Auto Workers - everything's on the table except anything that would actually make a difference. In practice, because Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland are also on the brink of the abyss, a "European" bailout will be paid for by Germany. So the aforementioned Greek deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, has denounced the conditions of the EU deal on the grounds that the Germans stole all the bullion from the Bank of Greece during the Second World War. Welfare always breeds contempt, in nations as much as inner-city housing projects. How dare you tell us how to live! Just give us your money and push off. Unfortunately, Germany is no longer an economic powerhouse. As Angela Merkel pointed out a year ago, for Germany, an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. Over 30 percent of German women are childless; among German university graduates, it's over 40 percent. And for the ever dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward, there's precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that's before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year for Greeks who retire at 58. Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still just about functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn't pay. You'll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of "the rich" to fund the entitlement state, because in the end, it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they've run out Greeks, so they'll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong? washingtontimes.com