Common Sense Conservative

May 11, 2009

 Tough Liberal Obama is No Jimmy Carter - #2

Barack Obama continues to surprise and please by demonstrating that in foreign affairs he’s no pushover.  He’s no Jimmy Carter, cripplingly fearful of using American power to protect America and advance our interests. Back in the dim Carter days, it was not far from the truth when it was said that U.S. diplomats were walking around with a “Kick Me” sign pinned to their backs.  No one can say that about us today.

Latest example of the muscular Obama: Swatting away Afghan complaints that intensified American military action in Afghanistan is killing civilians. Declared Obama National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones on ABC’s May 10 edition of  “This Week with George Stephanopoulos:” We are not going “to tie the hands of our commanders and say we're not going to conduct air strikes, it would be imprudent… we can't fight with one hand tied behind our back. "

No longer bleeding hearts. Three conservative cheers for Jones. He sounds like Harry Truman or Jack Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey or, dare we say it, Ronald Reagan and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Typically, in recent decades we’ve learned to expect American liberals to wring their hands, bleed their hearts and blame America at the slightest accusation that U.S. military operations may be hurting someone or something. Ronald Reagan’s defense and foreign policies repeatedly were a punching bag for these liberals.

Is that now changing?  With one of their own in the Oval Office, liberals have been silent on the accusations of Afghan civilian casualties.  Does this mean that Obama is resurrecting the tough Cold War model of American liberalism, when Truman, Kennedy, Humphrey and legions of other card-carrying liberals stood side-by-side with conservatives (at times, actually acting tougher than conservatives) to protect American interests?

Consensus? If so, then the Obama presidency is doing the nation a great great service. It could be recreating the American foreign policy consensus, absent since the Viet Nam war’s divisiveness. Obama repeatedly says, again echoing what could be Truman or could be Reagan, that the sole reason for American military actions abroad is to protect America.  That’s no Jimmy Carter.  That’s old-fashioned tough American liberalism.  Welcome home.

[See Commonsenseconservative.net/blog for: “Obama is No Jimmy Carter,” posted April 9, 2009]

May 10, 2009

The Death Penalty & Conservatives

Efforts this week to repeal Colorado’s death penalty seem to be faltering.  That should not please conservatives.  A fundamental conservative principle should make any conservative a strong death penalty opponent.  Indeed, conservatives should be in the vanguard of efforts to roll back death penalties. Yet, of course, that’s far from the case; most conservatives surely enthusiastically support capital punishment. They should rethink their unconservative position.

Frustrating. It’s boring to rehash the arguments over the death penalty.  The pro folks and the con folks each mobilize equally persuasive and data-rich briefs.  Take “deterrence,” for instance.  Does the prospect of facing a death sentence deter a criminal from murdering? Frustratingly, the answer is “yes” and “no,” with the solid evidence on both sides of this on full display in the Colorado legislature’s debates this week – and in every death penalty debate for decades.  Or, what about “cost?”  Wouldn’t the money spent on the death penalty ($1 million annually in Colorado) be better used for other law enforcement activities, ask penalty opponents?  That cost is tiny, rejoin penalty advocates, compared, they say, to what would be the ongoing outlays of life-sentences for those now being executed.

Then what about the state’s important moral commitment to the sanctity of life? The state must not create a structure that kills, insist death penalty opponents, who then accuse conservatives of inconsistency (if not hypocrisy) in using the “sanctity of life” argument to oppose abortions but ignoring it when it comes to the death penalty.  Nonsense, is the retort.  Conservatives long have recognized that in a few carefully controlled instances (requiring, in each case, legislative approval), the state indeed can take life – by dispatching, for instance, GIs onto a battlefield to kill an enemy.

One irrefutable principle. Piling up evidence about deterrence, cost, sanctity of life and such thus all typically fail to persuade in the death penalty argument.  There’s just too much counter evidence. 

There remains, however, one irrefutable principle, the principle at the core of conservative belief: Recognition of human fallibility.  It is this, perhaps, that most distinguishes conservatives from the well-meaning liberal.  As I note in the “About Us” section of this blog, liberals believe that a bunch of smart people using the right kinds of methods and analyses, pursuing the right goals, can find answers and processes that solve human and societal problems.  Liberals have great faith in tapping and mobilizing the Best and the Brightest.

To be sure, conservatives agree that the Best and the Brightest are (usually) a better bet than the Worst and the Dumbest.  But a better bet is not a sure thing.  Human judgment and wisdom are fallible.  If there’s any lesson taught by several millennia of history, it is that lesson. Over and over, we and our leaders and elected representatives and experts get things wrong.  Over and over. And while good intentions are admirable, they haven’t guaranteed good results.

The saving grace is that when we make mistakes, we can correct them. There may be mess and high cost and even pain, but mistakes can be remedied.  A Ronald Reagan can sweep in after a Jimmy Carter and right the listing ship of state. A Steve Jobs can return to a faltering Apple and reignite the firm’s innovation and growth.  A sinner, no matter how profligate, can mend his (or her) ways and join the righteous.

Can't correct mistakes. The horrible truth about capital punishment is that a mistake is a mistake forever.  It cannot be remedied.  Ever.  An innocent man or woman executed cannot be returned to life.  How extensive court mistakes have been we are just learning, as DNA and other evolving scientific tools reveal the alarming numbers of innocent who have been judged guilty.

This inability to correct a mistake is what should turn every conservative against the death penalty.  We conservatives deeply believe that human fallibility reaps constant mistakes.  Our entire suspicion of (and, indeed, hostility to) government and government programs rests on our knowledge of that fallibility.  How, then, can we assume, in the sole instance of those sitting in judgment in capital cases, that fallibility is suspended?

Content TK