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Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Corinth, Miss.
In short, there is simply not It was already South Georgia hot in the early morning when we buried my mother in her hometown of Colquitt last week. We fought back tears and fought off gnats as a man with a low, sweet voice picked and sang “Farther Along,” the old hymn she used to hum when she rocked my baby brother. Colquitt was Camelot to Mother, as seen through the organdy lens of time and distance. Spring Creek was crystal-clear and full of bream. Oak Rheta Grove Church was Freewill Johnson Baptist, the brand most likely to get you to heaven. The peoColumnist ple were all honest, the fields greener, the wind mills higher. Mother taught school a few years in Colquitt, ’til she had her first child, my older sister. Then I was born and Daddy took a job with a grocery company and we moved to Florida. But all her life she talked about her short teaching stint in Colquitt, as if it had lasted 50 years, not five. I’ve heard her say she wished we had never left this town of peanut farms and raised sidewalks and small-place gossip. “I’ve moved 17 times,” she would complain, then imagine aloud how she would have had a “real” home in Colquitt. I loved the place, too, and summers with my grandparents were a highlight of childhood. We swam at Williams’ Mill and shopped in Wyatt’s Grocery and made daily invasions of a dime store called the E-Z Shoppe. It was a kind of glorified camp. My grandfather taught me to drive at age 10 on roads with no traffic, and we climbed the fire tower at the edge of town. We balance-walked utility spools through pastures and played “Let the Old Cat Die” on the porch swing. But it was deeper with Mother. She loved the way the dirt smelled after a summer shower, and the accents, which are as different from Montgomery or Memphis as French from German. She liked knowing the people, and being known, and remembering for whose wedding my grandmother had crocheted the edges of pink pillowcases. She was of this place and knew it. I saw it through her blue eyes last week. The preacher who spoke didn’t know her, but knew they were distant kin. She would have liked his graciousness, his humility, the way he did his homework and got it just right. The man who sang didn’t know her, either, but he searched till he found the song she loved in an old shaped-note hymnal. Then he nailed it. If you make it to nearly 90 and aren’t a former president, there won’t be many people at your funeral service. But the ones who are there will have a deep and abiding love for you, or at the least a history with you. They will know your people. They will be your people. And so it was with Mother. In a graveyard where the church is missing since a tornado moved it from its foundation, we told her goodbye. It is a strikingly beautiful cemetery. On one grave there are 19th-century, life-sized statues of a couple sitting in Italian marble chairs. On another, a granite silhouette of Elvis. Most of the markers are more ordinary. But it is the setting, not the decoration, that makes it beautiful. The fields around it are lush and forever, and no concrete or billboards or parking lots mark the decade or even the century. Nobody lingered long. The heat was bearing down on us like an enemy army. But I looked around at the simplicity of the place, the purity, if you will. And I understood, at last, why she wanted to come home. (To find out more about Daily Corinthian columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)
Prayer for today Great God, may I begin this day bearing in mind that the things which I think and do are my life. I pray that thou wilt keep me from making great efforts for that which is valueless, and thus waste my life. May I watch my pride and indolence that they may not cause me to lose the best. Amen.
A verse to share “O LORD, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name; for thou hast done wonderful things; thy counsels of old are faithfulness and truth.” — Isaiah 25:1
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Hillary’s economics: Suddenly it’s 1947 Like it or not, Hillary Clinton is the single individual most likely to be elected the next president. So it’s worthwhile looking closely at and behind her words when she deigns to speak on public policy, as she did in her July 14 speech on economics. It contained quite a bit of chaff as well as some wheat. There were laments about the nation’s current economic woes, without mention that they come in the seventh year of a Democratic administration; a few policies first advocated by Republicans (Jack Kemp’s enterprise zones); and proposals that she admits are “time-tested and more than a little battle-scarred.” But laced throughout the sterile verbiage is an assumption that was more widely shared by policy elites and ordinary American voters in 1947, the year Hillary Clinton was born, than it is today, 68 years later. That is the assumption that government is capable of solving just about every problem. “We must drive steady income growth,” Clinton said, as if that were as simple as popping those new automatic transmission shift levers into D. “Let’s build those faster broadband networks,” which private firms were doing until Barack
Obama demanded an FCC network neutrality ruling. We must provide “quality, Michael a f f o r d a b l e Barone c h i l d c a r e , ” as if governColumnist ment were good at this. “Other trends need to change,” Clinton said, including “quarterly capitalism,” stock buybacks and “cut and run shareholders who act more like old-school corporate raiders.” This sounds like a call to return to the behavior of dominant big businesses in the early postwar years, when they worked in tandem with big government and big labor – and faced little foreign competition or market discipline. As for new growing businesses, Clinton hailed the “on-demand or so-called gig economy,” but said it raises “hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.” She endorsed the Obama extension of overtime to $50,000-plus employees and said, “We have to get serious about supporting union workers.” In other words, let’s try to slam the growing flexible economy into the straitjack-
et of the rigid regulations and the union contracts of half a century ago. Everybody should punch a time clock and work the same number of hours, in accordance with thousands of pages of detailed work rules. That template hasn’t produced much economic growth since the two postwar decades. But it would siphon a lot of money via union dues from the private sector to the Democratic Party. On top of that, Clinton would expand paid family days, mandate more sick leave, increase overtime pay and raise the minimum wage even higher – measures that would tend to subsidize or produce non-work in an economy that has the lowest work force participation in nearly 40 years. Clinton concluded by asking some interesting questions. “How do we respond to technological change in a way that creates more good jobs than it displaces or destroys?” And “what are the best ways to nurture startups outside the successful corridors, like Silicon Valley?” “We” presumably means government, with the assumption that centralized experts can guide others to maximize production and innovation. There was some reason to believe that in 1947, when government had spurred technical innovation
(the atom bomb). There’s little reason to believe it if you look at the recent performance of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Office of Personnel Management or healthcare.gov. The problem with Clinton’s “paleoliberalism” (columnist David Brooks’ term) is that centralized planning just doesn’t work. Government is increasingly (to use political scientist Steven Teles’ term) a “kludgeocracy.” Clinton’s policies can’t tell us precisely where growth will occur, leading many Republicans to believe that her proposals, including higher tax rates and everincreasing regulation, will discourage growth. We are a more fragmented and personally, economically and culturally diverse country than the culturally conformist America of 1947 in which most adult men had just been mobilized in the military. Policies and approaches that worked then are not likely to work so well now. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.)
The GOP’s Iran dilemma From first reactions, it appears that Hill Republicans will be near unanimous in voting a resolution of rejection of the Iran nuclear deal. They will then vote to override President Obama’s veto of their resolution. And if the GOP fails there, Gov. Scott Walker says his first act as president would be to kill the deal. But before the party commits to abrogating the Iran deal in 2017, the GOP should consider whether it would be committing suicide in 2016. For even if Congress votes to deny Obama authority to lift U.S. sanctions on Iran, the U.S. will vote to lift sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. And Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, all parties to the deal, will also lift sanctions. A congressional vote to kill the Iran deal would thus leave the U.S. isolated, its government humiliated, unable to comply with the pledges its own secretary of state negotiated. Would Americans cheer the GOP for leaving the United States with egg all over its face? And if Congress refuses to honor the agreement, but Iran complies with all its terms, who among our friends and allies would stand with an obdurate America then?
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
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Would the party campaign in 2016 on a pledge to get tough and impose new sancPat tions? “CoerBuchanan cive diplomacy,” The Wall Columnist Street Journal calls it. If so, what more would they demand that Iran do? And what would they threaten Iran with, if she replied: We signed a deal. We will honor it. But we will make no new concessions under U.S. threat. Would we bomb Iran? Would we go to war? Not only would Americans divide on any such action, the world would unite – against us. And would a Republican president really bomb an Iran that was scrupulously honoring the terms of the John Kerry deal? What would we bomb? All the known Iran nuclear facilities will be crawling with U.N. inspectors. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapons is resolved diplomatically through negotiation or it’s resolved through force,” said the president, “Those are the options.” Is that not pretty much where we are at, even if the GOP does not like it?
Republicans seem to be unable to grasp the changes that have taken place in this century. With the Arab Spring, the fall of half a dozen regimes, the rise of al-Qaida and ISIS, civil wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, we have a new Middle East. Our principal enemies are now al-Qaida and ISIS. And while both have been aided by our old allies, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, both are being resisted by Iran. Bibi Netanyahu and AIPAC, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs, will demand that Congress kill the Iran deal that Lindsey Graham says is a “death sentence for the State of Israel.” But one trusts that, this time, the GOP will add a dose of salt to what the hysterics are bellowing. After all, it was Bibi’s rants – Iran is hellbent on getting a bomb, is only months away, and military action is needed now to smash the whirling centrifuges – that teed up the talks for Tehran. All Iran had to do was prove it had no bomb program, which was not difficult, as U.S. intelligence had repeatedly said Iran had no bomb program. Then the Iranians proved it. They agreed to cut their centrifuges by two-thirds, to eliminate 98 percent of their uranium, to halt pro-
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duction of 20 percent uranium at Fordow, to convert the heavy-water reactor at Arak that produces plutonium to a light water reactor that produces one kilogram a year, and to let cameras in and give U.N. inspectors the run of their nuclear facilities. And how is Israel, with hundreds of atom bombs, mortally imperiled by a deal that leaves Iran with not a single ounce of bomb-grade uranium? What does Iran get? What Iran always wanted. Not a bomb which would make Iran a pariah like North Korea and could bring down upon her the same firestorm America delivered to Iraq, but a path to become again the hegemon of the Persian Gulf. Remarkable. Iran agrees not to build a bomb it had already decided not to build, and we agree to lift all sanctions. And they pulled it off. What is one or two atom bombs you can’t use, without committing national suicide, compared to $100 billion in freed assets and a welcome mat back to the community of nations. (Daily Corinthian columnist Pat Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.)
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