Ross Mackenzie: Europe shows America's future

I have heard many, many people talking about the financial fall of Greece, the problems of Britain's health care industry, the socialism of Europe ... and they shake their heads at the bull-headed (or perhaps dim-witted?) liberals leading America down that path.

Freight train roaring toward America's living room? That's what Ross Mackenzie writes about today in his Richmond Times-Dispatch column.

Mr. Mackenzie gives one pause as he begins:

In precisely the Europe for which Barack Obama and his cronies hunger here, America may be able to see glimpses of its future in 3D.

Greece is one of the poorest kids on the European bloc. It also is one of the most carelessly socialistic, which largely explains why it is so poor.

The birthplace of democracy, today it is a model of socialistic excess: deficit spending, confiscatory taxation, Marxist public-sector unions, government ownership, nationalized health care, excessive federal intrusion into private lives. Greece's debt obligations exceed its gross domestic product (GDP) by a factor heading fast toward 2. In today's jargon, the place is a paradigmatic entitlement society.

His conclusion is that Americans are not quite accepting of socialism ... yet ... providing evidence in the recent elections that turned out Democrats:

Despite what Obama wants for them, Americans are not yet so socialized as most Europeans -- not so accepting of the socialism that describes the European continent.
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Here, in for instance California and Minnesota, Republican governors cannot get significant budget-balancing measures through their legislatures. And the times, they may be a-changin'. Think Jon Corzine (New Jersey), Martha Coakley (Massachusetts), Charlie Crist (Florida), Robert Bennett (Utah), and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania). What's more, last weekend Maine's Republicans adopted a wholly new platform -- committing it to the principles espoused in the U.S. and Maine constitutions. Both documents, by the way, mention rights to such things as life and liberty. Neither mentions any entitlement to government cash.

In Greece and the American states, are we seeing at last an end to welfarist, socialistic, entitlement societies? Maybe. Or maybe we are getting 3D glimpses of our own chaotic entitlement future. In Europe and here, the light on the freight train heading toward the living room now is clearly in view and growing bigger. Some, here in the States anyway, are doing what they can to scramble into the engine house and pull the brake. Yet the more predictive scene may play out on the barricades in the Athenian streets where representative democracy began.

Read his entire column here. (Sunday is not complete until I've read Ross Mackenzie, the common sense retired opinion editor from the TD.)

Ross Mackenzie: "How do you know when you are part of a revolutionary movement?"

In today's Richmond Times-Dispatch, retired opinion editor Ross Mackenzie asked the question, "How do you know when you are part of a revolutionary movement?" He goes on to respond:

A possible partial answer: When they -- critics, opponents, the nameless they who seem to rule -- start trying to define you, as opposed to letting you define yourself.

They -- leftists, Democrats, mainline pressies -- have sought variously to define Tea Partiers as racist, fake (faux grass-roots, "Astro-Turf"), extremist (Nancy Pelosi), irrelevant, and prone to violence (could Bill Clinton have had Tea Partiers in mind when he recently recalled the horror wrought by Timothy McVeigh?).

Mr. Mackenzie added that none of the above were seen at the Tax Day Richmond Tea Party:

The several thousand attendees defined themselves broadly as middle-class and definitely not "privileged." They presented not as violent, not as extremists, and not as racists. They were polite and calm. The rally had an almost Fourth of July sense to it.

With the mainstream media and lefty liberals trying to define the tea party movement, it is obvious most have never been to one of their rallies.

The March on Washington that took place September 12, 2009, was an example of hundreds of thousands of conservatives -- the most accurate count is 1.2 million -- protesting the policies of the government ... but not as militants. They were hard-working, responsible Americans concerned about the direction of their country and, after years of apathy, were finally standing up and speaking out and exercising their First Amendment rights.

Feeling as if they had elected representatives who were not listening, tea party patriots decided to represent themselves ... in person ... and that's exactly what they have done on more than one trip to DC as well as in localities around the country. Overreaching government programs, takeover of private industry, tax-and-spend, government health care reform ... all have alarmed everyday Americans who do not preach hate, as Mr. Mackenzie explains:

... nearly every local Tea Party embraces five basic principles: fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, limited government, the rule of law, and national sovereignty. Of course, many Tea Party members are social conservatives, but economic issues remain the unifying principle."

Long simmering, their fury has been fired by stimulus bills and ObamaCare, and now is building toward November's congressional elections that may prove the boiling point. And this is what gives the screaming meemies to them -- the theys who see Tea Partiers as potentially genuine revolutionaries potentially capable of ending their reign, and so seek to describe them in malignant terms they do not deserve.

Are "tea party patriots" -- who encompases conservatives from many groups -- part of a revolutionary movement? Going by Mr. Mackenzie's definition, I would say, "Yes."

Read his entire article.

Ross Mackenzie on the Massachusetts Earthquake ... McDonnell in the wings?

My favorite newspaper guy hits the nail on the head again while he opines on Republican Scott Brown's win in the Massachusetts special election on January 19:

... voters in Massachusetts, more liberal perhaps than voters in any other state, said they have had enough of the same ol' Washington same ol'. Obama took office a year ago promising transparency, a post-partisan presidency, history's most open administration. He pledged to put the final negotiations regarding Obamacare on C-SPAN.

Yet things didn't work out that way. We were introduced to a Chicago-ized national politics. Notably on his signature legislative initiative, with public support for it collapsing, he has sought to muscle it through. Secrecy, arm-twisting, and back-room deals have been the norm. His message to the people has been -- as it is even now: We are going to give the people government-mandated health care, and never mind what the people think. And so the divide, the disconnect, so eloquently described Tuesday in Massachusetts, between the people and an administration -- and a national Democratic Party -- out of touch. -- Ross Mackenzie, Richmond Times-Dispatch

Mr. Mackenzie chides condescending Democrats who take it as a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will win a second term as President because Republicans have no one to go up against him. He reminds them there is new blood coming up through the ranks:

Hey, here are two new possibilities: Bob McDonnell, Virginia's just-installed governor who won a starkly lopsided victory (his predecessor, lest we forget, is Obama's handpicked national Democratic chairman who couldn't deliver for his party his own state). Or, a name hardly heard until the Massachusetts earthquake -- pickup-driving Scott Brown.

Hear, hear.

Ross Mackenzie: Gratitude for President Bush's leadership

Ross Mackenzie, former Editorial Page editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reflects on the Bush years in today's op-ed piece titled, "Most Consequential President Since Reagan." He begins:

The left and the media and the ever-expanding blogosphere, and of course the Democrats, never permitted George Bush to recover from the circumstances of his 2000 election.

They deemed him unacceptable, accidental, illegitimate, likely a conniver in the national outcome -- and so took to lobbing their hateful commentaries one after another without end.

Even when President Bush reached out to the other side, pulling in Sen. Ted Kennedy for education and asking for bipartisanship leadership for the good of the country, he was rejected. Mr. Mackenzie recalls President Bush's 2004 victory speech:

"Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it . . . .We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America."

He was rebuffed over and over, scathingly mocked and ridiculed by a vocal left that could not just disagree but had to be vicious in their disagreement. Indeed, Mr. Mackenzie says the leftists have maligned Mr. Bush:

Malign is too harsh? Consider:

Television, blogospheric, and newspaper commentaries slammed President Bush 24/7. Nicholson Baker wrote Checkpoint, whose protagonists weigh whether to assassinate him. Twelve thousand San Franciscans signed a petition to rename an Oceanside sewage plant for him.

Hollywood went apoplectic, with Oliver Stone -- director of the detestable October-released flick "W" -- declaring: "We are a poorer and less secure nation for having elected [Bush] as our president . . . .America finds itself fighting unnecessary and costly wars and engaging in dangerous and counterproductive efforts to fight extremism. Even more significant and troubling, I believe, is his legacy of immorality."

DESPITE this vicious stream, George Bush persevered and prevailed. 9/11 changed him. Mistakes abounded, but no subsequent domestic jihadist strike ensued. As he noted at the Army War College last month, this staggering security success was "not a matter of luck." Against Islamofascism pre-emption (described by the all-knowing as naIve, idealistic, and wrong) was -- as it remains -- the right policy for spreading liberty and democracy, particularly in a Middle East that boasts so little of either.

The enterprise in Iraq, following the surge, now approaches victory -- the great Osama himself having declared Iraq "the central front" in his war against the United States. Barack Obama repeatedly pronounced Iraq a distraction and -- from beginning to end -- a mistake. Yet a resolute Bush was true to his values, to his nation, and to mankind's ultimate cause. Last month he told The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel that liberty can be extended beyond Iraq as long as America continues to believe "in the universality of freedom."

Read the rest of the article for more of Mr. Mackenzie's common sense remarks.

Ross Mackenzie is the retired editor of the Editorial Pages. Contact him at rmackenzie@tribune.com.

Ross Mackenzie with post-election thoughts

Ross Mackenzie, retired editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch Editorial Pages, has a hodge-podge of thoughts today about Election 2008.

In "A Post-Election Potpourri," he reflects on how Barack Obama will govern now that he has been voted into office:

And so Obama, with increased Democratic congressional majorities, has nearly a free hand to ideologize and radicalize. To bridge the gap between his record and his rhetoric. To redistribute by giving away buckets of money the government doesn't possess. To let the Bush temporary tax cuts expire. To abandon the secret ballot in union organizing elections. To deal with anti-American petro-dictatorships in Caracas, Moscow, and Tehran. To confront Islamofascist terror.

A strong John McCain supporter, Mr. Mackenzie defended Sarah Palin from the attacks that have come from McCain staffers and the media:

She has 80-plus favorable ratings in Alaska, compared with just 9 percent favorable nationwide for a Congress boasting a House led by San Fran Nan Pelosi. Yet Palin gave -- and gives -- the left the screaming meemies. Gloria Steinem rode eagerly in the anti-Palin posse -- saying: "This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need."

He reflects on what the American people want, on the financial situation that helped lead to the outcome, and ponders on the founding of America ... noting that American has always survived.

Ross Mackenzie's column can be found here.

Ross Mackenzie: "Choice of Obama could make country stronger"

[Ross Mackenzie is the retired editor of my hometown Richmond Times-Dispatch. He is my favorte newspaper person ever, someone I grew up reading, someone whose use of the English language has always inspired me. A John McCain supporter, he offers introspect on an Obama win.]

By ROSS MACKENZIE
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

What does not destroy me makes me stronger. --Nietzsche

And so it is to be President Barack Obama.

His seminal victory marks a major moment in the nation's history. It is fundamentally his accomplishment -- for minorities and multi-ethnics, for the meek and humble, for the nation. He merits the highest commendation and praise. Only in the continuing experiment that is America, the great good land, could his victory in such proportion have been even imagined let alone achieved.

A stream of election-related observations . . .

Many factors contributed to Obama's win: Iraq, President Bush's unpopularity (though at a favorable level well above the pitiful 9 percent of the Democratic Congress), an economy circling the drain; Republican ethical, intellectual, and political failures that left Republicans hard-pressed to present as better than Democrats. Republicans proved unable to offer a credible, coherent strategic message. The campaign of John McCain found itself insufficient and tactically overmatched.

YET PROBABLY no other Republican could have done better -- neither Giuliani nor Romney nor Thompson nor Huckabee. In part, Republican internal division brought the party to this juncture. But given that Hillary Clinton with her high negatives likely could not have prevailed against any of the above, including John McCain, there had to have been another decisive factor.

Partly it was the economic implosion. The record shows that McCain was ahead in mid-September -- helped by the home-run, the political gold, named Sarah Palin. The financial-credit tsunami was the principal non-election event of the ensuing month, and it dramatically hurt McCain.

But clearly the most decisive factor was Barack Obama -- a political phenomenon rarely seen, an orator of the first order, a disciplined man at the head of a disciplined campaign. There was about him -- and is -- a sense of destiny. No matter how much McCain tried to make Obama the issue, a majority of the voters found him likable, appealing, and not a grievance candidate a la Jesse Jackson, but a transitional, crossover candidate.

How else explain his decisive victory in the face of a USA Today poll published just before the election wherein 48 percent of the electorate found him unqualified to be president? How else explain his strong performance practically across the board -- from new voters and the young and the old, to African-Americans and Hispanics and whites, to women and self-styled moderates/independents? Obama may well have carried the electorate across the threshold to a new post-racial paradigm.

McCain (a) sought to show that Obama's history -- his judgment as measured by his associations and his voting record -- belies his rhetoric; (b) pointed out that Obama is the Senate's most liberal member (as designated by the nonpartisan National Journal) who ran hard to the center; (c) noted the disconnect between Obama as the Senate's fourth most partisan member mouthing platitudes about vaunted bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle.

Still, little of it resonated with the majority of an electorate that -- attracted to Obama's idealism -- overlooked his past and concluded his history didn't matter. Viewing him not as the liberal divider of his record but the uniter of his rhetoric, vast numbers of voters now have elevated to the presidency perhaps the most unknown and untested nominee in our history, giving him a larger percentage of votes than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson -- indeed the largest percentage of any non-incumbent since Dwight Eisenhower.

Maybe Obama will move to the middle, counterintuitive as that would be, particularly with a Congress less Republican and more Democratic -- and emphatically more leftist -- than the departing one. It is difficult to imagine a President Obama acting as a blocker rather than an enabler of the ambitions of Democrats Pelosi, Frank, Reid, Dodd, & Co.

DOES OBAMA'S very big win mean a seismic shift in the nation's ideological alignment -- from center/right to center/left? Probably not. This election verified the long-standing breakdown: Self-described conservatives outnumber self-described liberals 2-1. In addition, both Obama and McCain ran as tax-cutters -- tax cuts hardly ranking high on the liberal agenda.

What's more, McCain's 163 electoral-vote tally slightly topped Bob Dole's four years before the incumbent Bush swept into office -- and ranked well more than Fritz Mondale's 13 and Michael Dukakis' 111. Possibly in national politics, so as in the stock market: We are arrived at a moment of vastly more volatile swings. McCain's and Dole's electoral-vote numbers may connote an irreducible Republican base.

Going forward, the fundamental fears are two: (1) that Obama will prove the redistributionist of his rhetoric, further destabilizing the economy, and (2) that he will not match President Bush's resolve in combating an Islamofascist terrorism with the United States in its crosshairs.

If reality vindicates those fears, then President Obama and his new Congress may well lead America into its twilight years -- and the end of the American experiment. If reality proves those fears unfounded and we are not destroyed (Nietzsche's word), then the election of Barack Obama may in fact make us stronger.

That must be our abiding hope.

Ross Mackenzie is the retired editor of the Editorial Pages. Contact him at rmackenzie@tribune.com.

Ross Mackenzie: "We are at war ... the jihadists seek to kill us"

"The irreducible facts: We are at war. The jihadists hate us, want to destroy our freedoms and rights, seek to kill us. And we dare not flag until they are defeated and victory is ours." -- Ross Mackenzie, former Richmond Times-Dispatch Editor, September 14, 2006

Sunday with Ross Mackenzie: "Reflections on Murdoch's Purchase of The Journal"

After taking last week off for Labor Day, Ross Mackenzie, retired editor of the RTD Editorial Pages, is back in today's Richmond Times Dispatch with his response to the recent hand-wringing from liberal outlets in response to Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of The Wall Street Journal. He gives a recap of some of the more obvious groanings, such as MSNBC's columnist David Sweet bemoaning, "Murdoch will tarnish a journalistic jewel," and then takes them to task because of their hypocrisy:

Murdoch may know what too many in and out of the news business smugly refuse to concede -- that a public fed up with the obsessive liberalism of the mainline media yearns for conservative outlets and expression. How else to explain the popularity of talk radio, Fox News -- and, nota bene, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal? So, yes, Murdoch may understand very well the success a healthy dose of conservatism -- or not-liberalism -- may bring.

He concludes his reflections with this:

In the view of those hostile to Murdoch's purchase of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, what's bad for "American journalism" and "our democracy" is not their definition of "fair and balanced" that has so contributed to driving journalism down -- but Murdoch's definition that has demonstrated so much success."

Indeed. I pray that Ross Mackenzie and his common sense stay around for a long time ... because a Sunday without him is just another Sunday. And the Times-Dispatch without him is just another newspaper.

Ross Mackenzie, retired from RTD, best editor out there....

Ross Mackenzie, who retired earlier this year from the Richmond Times Dispatch, is my favorite newspaper editor, as I've stated before. He speaks plain truth and common sense in a sea of media liberalism and, therefore, comes under attack from the lefties. He is the best part of the TD's Sunday edition ... I go immediately to his column before reading anything else.

Yesterday was another common sense column about the war, the libs, their outrage, the facts, their ignoring of the facts, and how we can and will win this war with no help from the anti-war protesters. He wrote:

The September debate over Iraq, more likely to resemble a raging, primal scream on the part of the left than a lilting September song, could lead to loss of the war - just as, not on the battlefield but in Washington, we lost the war in Vietnam.

You can't possibly mean that.

Oh, but I do. We had it won, even with the Communists operating from their privileged sanctuaries in Cambodia and the North. We won it in the Tet offensive, written by the media elite (too many of them hotel barflies trying to sound like Socrates) as a defeat for our side and sold as such in D.C. and - via television - in the nation's living rooms.

Read the entire article here.

I hope Mr. Mackenzie is around for a long, long time....