Laundry-Listing Government Folly

The current season of Republican discontent is an ideal time for political potboilers. With President Bush’s ratings in the dumps, Iraq festering, and a torrent of lobbying scandals, the big guys can tell us what went wrong, why, and how to fix it in a few handsome inches for as little as $24.95.With “America Back on Track” (Viking, 210 pages, $24.95), Senator Kennedy offers his first book-length contribution since the Samuel Alito hearings, a companion to “My Senator and Me: A Dog’s Eye View of Washington, D.C.,” due out next month from Mr. Kennedy’s dog, Splash. Mr. Kennedy smells blood, and with good reason: In addition to Iraq and lobbying, the Republicans have botched Social Security reform, immigration, the Katrina response, and asbestos litigation reform, as well as indulging in a spending orgy on earmarks and expensive entitlements. There’s no shortage of targets.Not that Mr. Kennedy dwells on those failures very much. His thunderbolts are mostly reserved for left-liberal bugaboos like National Security Agency eavesdropping, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, and the Republican Congress’s propensity to roll over and obey Mr. Bush. The Bush administration is “dangerous,” “unchecked,” and “extravagant,” displays “arrogance” and suffers from “a culture of corruption,” he writes, phrases sure to thrill in Cambridge, Mass., and Manhattan.Gracefully – maybe even in cognizance of his shameful performance during the Supreme Court hearings this winter – Mr. Kennedy mostly omits tirades against conservative judges, instead focusing on “judicial independence,” which seems to consist of getting the court to avoid overturning the laws Mr. Kennedy likes.Once he’s finished with the thunderbolts, a kinder, gentler Ted emerges to give solutions to the nation’s woes. They are the conventionally liberal ones: Repeal the tax cuts, preserve Social Security, tax the rich, spend more federal money on health care and education, hike the minimum wage, and play nice in good, multilateral ways with our allies.Mr. Kennedy also makes an unsolicited defense of big government: It was government that built the highways, passed the GI bill, and invented the Internet (apologies to Al Gore). Big government is good for you, Mr. Kennedy argues: “The conventional wisdom that large government and high taxes are harmful to rapid [economic] growth does not withstand careful and objective scrutiny.”But it’s the platitudes, half-truths, and prevarications that make Mr. Kennedy’s book truly amusing. For instance: Social Security is “remarkably efficient.” “Death due to lack of health insurance is the seventh-largest killer in the nation.” And “[e]ven the most hard-hearted would agree that child poverty is no fault of the children.” Thanks for clearing that up, Senator. At least we don’t blame the children.“Getting America Right” (Crown Forum, 231 pages, $26.95) by Heritage Foundation don Edwin Feulner and Townhall.com founder Doug Wilson, is red meat for the base in the way Mr. Kennedy’s book is, but it’s more entertainingly written, better researched, and less ethereal. The book’s defining feature, though, is its dozens of pages amounting to a veritable porno stash of big-government boondoggles and bridges to nowhere, all presented to make average Joe conservatives’ eyes pop.There is the $2 million for the Augustine, Fla., First Tee Program for young multicultural golfers; $439 billion for Irish economic development; the Pentagon’s 270,000 wasted airline tickets; $73,950 on government credit cards for strip clubs visits; $210,520 in “farm aid” for former Chicago Bulls star Scottie Pippen; and the list goes on, literally, for pages.The great irony of this, of course, is that such programs – illustrative of big government’s follies as they are – aren’t the real problem if government spending is what we’re truly worried about. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid overwhelmingly dominate federal spending and will only worsen. To the authors’ credit, they cover those subjects at length and offer solutions. It’s surely true, though, as I heard the budget hawk Rep. Mike Pence admit last week in an editorial meeting, that bridges to nowhere are what the people understand. They’re vivid. By contrast, treatises on Social Security don’t sell the political titles at Barnes & Noble.If the book has a serious flaw, it’s undue soft-pedaling on Mr. Bush, which the arguments don’t require. A bold introduction asks, “Where did things go wrong?” and suggests that 200 pages of criticism await. In the authors’ defense, they do flay the Bushies repeatedly, especially for their profligacy. But they’re too easy on the administration. The utter mess that is the Department of Homeland Security appears three times in 217 pages. FEMA gets nary a mention. The hurricanes are mentioned twice.Then there is Iraq. “Not everything has gone according to plan” in the war on terror, the authors write, and the Iraq war, an “ambitious” move, “remains unresolved.” The closest the authors come to slamming the terrible post-invasion planning effort: “Shamefully, our troops were sent into battle without enough body armor,” Messrs. Feulner and Wilson write. But the villain they identify is Congress.The Iraq conflagration is ultimately the Republicans’ greatest vulnerability this November. It belongs first and foremost to the Bush administration. That’s something even a political potboiler should admit.Mr. Conway is an editorial writer at the Washington Times.

Laundry-Listing Government Folly

Laundry-Listing Government Folly

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