Democrat contempt for the traditional family bubbles to the surface

Marx taught that the family was the chief obstacle to socialism

The Obama campaign is engaged in a frantic damage limitation exercise after a top Democratic strategist prompted a wave of indignation by claiming that Mitt Romney’s wife Ann had ‘never really worked a day in her life’.

Hilary Rosen, a lobbyist and party operative whose firm advises the Democratic National Committee, took aim at the mother of five and multiple sclerosis survivor during a discussion about the economy on CNN.

'What you have is, Mitt Romney running around the country saying, 'Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues,’ she said. ‘And when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing.

'Guess what: his wife has never really worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kind of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future.'

She continued: 'There's something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney. 'He seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women, and I think that comes across, and I think that that's going to hurt him over the long term. He just doesn't really see us as equal.'

The comments were a gift for the Romney campaign, which is struggling to close a sizeable gender gap and has been accused by Democrats of waging a ‘war on women’ by advocating de-funding of Planned Parenthood and restricting contraception rights.

Mrs Romney immediately entered the debate by joining twitter and sending out her first tweet, using the handle @AnnDRomney: ‘'I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.’

Rosen responded via Twitter: 'I am raising children too,' Rosen replied. 'But u do know that most young american women have to earn a living AND raise their kids don't u?'

But Obama campaign realised immediately that Rosen’s comments were politically disastrous because they fuelled a narrative that elitist liberal women have disdain for mothers who choose to look after their children.

Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, tweeted: ‘I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly. Her comments were wrong and family should be off limits. She should apologize.’

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, also took to twitter to brand Rosen's comments 'inappropriate and offensive'.

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Bruce Hall comments:

[The Romney family] represent old thinking as far as the left is concerned... the notion of a nuclear family where the father earns an income and the mother is present to guide the development of their children. Much too 1950s and earlier. And definitely racist.

Now a family is any two people plus children. Or maybe it is just any one unwed mother and children. And if they are not the traditional family, then that is even better because they will be tied to the left who is giving them protection and validation.

This has nothing to do with the people who join together and who have children through adoption or artificial insemination. They can be wonderful people, too. This has everything to do with the what constitutes a loyal party member... a loyal voting block of victims.

If the left-controlled government offers perceived social validation and even funding for those outside of the million or so year notion of a family, then there are loyal party voters created. On the other hand, the Ward and June Cleaver prototypical family represents the outdated conservative values and responsibilities of marriage that stand in the way of "the government will make it all better" philosophy.

So, the Romneys are especially to be vilified because they not only have a decades long strong marriage despite Ann's serious illnesses, children who have grown to be responsible and productive adults, a strong faith and morals with a commitment to charity, and the individualism to make their own way in life without looking to the government for a handout in return for fealty to the emperor.

Why do you suppose Ann Romney was so vilified as someone who supposedly didn't understand how Americans had to struggle because she stayed home to raise five children? Why isn't the unwed mother of five children born outside of marriage condemned for not understanding how taxpayers have to struggle to pay their taxes that go to support her irresponsibility? No, it is the traditional mother who is to blame for society's ills. She doesn't understand work. She doesn't understand struggle. She just sits around the house watching soap operas.

Now, Ann Romney is certainly not the poster child for the struggling mother working two jobs to keep food on the table for her children. But neither is Rosen.

Rosen, a Washington power player and partner in a major communications firm, is the former chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. The truth is, neither Ann Romney nor Hillary Rosen have lives that would look remotely familiar to 99 percent of the world’s women.

The idea that “women’s work” is indeed valuable to society has long been a contention of feminists, so it’s strange to see a prominent Democrat lash out a stay-at-home mother and wife in this fashion. Feminists have agitated for as long as I can remember for society to value and respect the “unpaid work” that women do in the home and society. The fact that Ann Romney doesn’t struggle financially doesn’t make what she does any less valuable. I suspect there is a lot about how she has contributed to her community that we don’t know.

Rosen, by the way, happens to be a lesbian feminist who adopted two children with her former partner before they chose to go in opposite directions. Perhaps she simply feels threatened by what Ann Romney represents... everything Rosen isn't.

Why did Rosen treat her "partnership" so cavalierly? Did her career come first? Well, that's to be admired! Mitt and Ann's faithfulness? That's simply beyond understanding. It's unreasonable in today's world.

But that's the problem with generalizing the way Rosen did. Sure Ann Romney enjoys a financial lifestyle that most people don't have. So, does Michelle Obama. Golly, gosh, gee whiz... so does Hilary Rosen. Well, then they all can't understand, eh?

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An Adult Fairy Tale

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal by economist DON BOUDREAUX

Leon Mitrani believes that Canada’s recent sound economic performance is chiefly the result of that country’s “universal, single-payer, government-run health-care system” (Letters, April 12). According to Mr. Mitrani, that system “frees up Canadian corporations from paying that employee expense and boosts their profits and economy.”

Splendid! But if Canada’s economy is boosted by government relieving Canadian employers from having to pay a portion of their workers’ earnings (that is, the portion that would otherwise be paid as employer-provided health-insurance premiums), wouldn’t Canada’s economy be boosted even further if Ottawa relieved Canadian employers also from having to pay wages and salaries? With government picking up employers’ entire tab for hiring workers, the economic boost would be stupendous.

And why stop there? If Mr. Mitrani is correct, Canada’s economy would get a bigger boost yet if the government picked up not only the tab for hiring workers, but also the tab for any and all capital expenses. With government relieving Canadian companies of the need to pay for their own workers, factories, machines, IT, and all other costs of doing business, Canada’s economy would become the envy of the world!

Who knew that the secret of economic success is so simple?

And as my GMU colleague Tom Hazlett points out to me by e-mail,

And, of course, there seems to be about a 4-decade lag in Mr. Mitrani’s model. The Canadian economy underperformed the US regularly and substantially until the 1990s, when Conservative reforms were put in place. The correlations are interesting, including the lags.

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President of the Twilight Zone

Deconstructing one of President Obama’s speeches can be a bit like taking a trip to an alternate universe. Take his remarks last week to the Associated Press, contrasting his budget vision with that of Paul Ryan and Republicans. All that was missing was a Rod Serling voice-over announcing, “You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”

For instance, the president denounces the Ryan budget as “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.” One would think that Social Darwinism would mean actually cutting the budget. But in reality, Ryan’s budget increases federal spending by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

Ryan does spend roughly $352 billion less over 10 years on domestic discretionary spending than would the president. The president suggests that this means that children could no longer go to college, the weather service would be abolished, and roads and bridges would crumble into dust. In reality, the largest gap between the president’s spending plans and Ryan’s would occur in 2016, when Ryan would spend $43 billion less on domestic discretionary programs than the president. That amounts to roughly 1.1 percent of projected total federal spending that year. Ryan would, in fact, slightly increase discretionary domestic spending from $1.170 trillion in 2013 to $1.212 trillion in 2022. Social Darwinism should be made of sterner stuff.

And, of course, what presidential speech would be complete without a denunciation of Ryan for wanting to “end Medicare as we know it.” The president’s rhetoric raises the specter of seniors being wheeled out of their hospital beds tomorrow morning. But Ryan has not proposed any changes to the program for current recipients. It is true, of course, that Ryan would restructure Medicare for those under age 55 to give recipients a choice between the traditional program and a voucher that would allow them to purchase private insurance. But, his plan, drafted together with Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, hardly slashed Medicare spending — in 2022, it would spend just $21 billion less than the president’s budget.

The president manages to leave out his own proposal for Medicare, which is to have an unelected 15-member board further reduce payments to physicians. Even Medicare’s own actuaries warn that those cutbacks could lead to hospital closures and reductions in access to care or the quality of care.

Given that estimates of Medicare’s unfunded liabilities run from a low of $25 trillion to as much as $90 trillion, the program is clearly going to have to change. The president may believe his changes are better than Ryan’s, but to pretend that he would leave the program exactly as it is while Ryan would leave sick seniors in the streets to die is simply unstuck from reality.

All this is not to say that the president is not committed to deficit reduction — at least rhetorically. For instance, the president claims, “I’ve eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t working.” Well, maybe. But the total savings from those cuts amounts to less than $100 million. That’s million with an “M,” out of a $3.7 trillion budget. That’s trillion with a “T.”

Back here in the real world, President Obama’s proposed budget never actually achieves balance. The closest he would get is in 2018, when he projects a deficit of only $575 billion. After that, they begin rising again, reaching $704 billion by 2022. Overall, the president’s budget would add an additional $6.7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. And, this is despite the president’s call for $1.5 trillion in tax hikes.

Of course, taxes are another area where the president has difficulty squaring rhetoric with reality. For example, the president continues to sell his proposed tax hikes as being about people like him or Warren Buffet paying a little bit more. In reality, his proposed tax increases fall on families and small businesses earning as little as $250,000 per year. In fact, according to economists Kevin Hassett and Alan Viard, “fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations” would be subject to the president’s tax hike.”

At the same time, the president latest big idea for deficit reduction is the so-called Buffett Rule, a new 30 percent minimum tax on the rich, based on the misleading claim that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Actually, the Buffett Rule would raise less than $3.2 billion per year on average according to the Congressional Budget Office, enough to pay for eight hours of federal spending. Alternatively, the revenue from the Buffett Rule could lower the budget for this month from $196 billion to just $193 billion. Obama truly is a deficit hawk.

Cue Mr. Serling: “We’ve moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. We’ve just crossed over into the Obama Zone.”

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ELSEWHERE

Widespread stimulus fraud? Say it ain’t so!: "I know this will likely come as a huge surprise, but it appears that the almost trillion dollar stimulus bill, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama, has seen widespread fraud."

The cure for humanity’s natural state of abject poverty: "Humanity’s natural state is abject poverty. So how did some portion of the human race manage to escape this natural state? A remarkably insightful new book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard University economist James Robinson provides an answer to that pressing question."

Barack Obama is no centrist: "President Obama chastised the media last week. ... [He] also claimed that he holds positions that 20 or 15 years ago 'would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What's changed is the center of the Republican Party.' ... Yet many in the media don't ask: Where are the moderate Democrats?"

One bit of loony bureaucracy defeated: "One of the more absurd legal consequences of the new rules is that Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space tourism venture, had to consider non-U.S. nationals who flew to the edge of space from the American west as exports requiring a license from the State Department for each and every foreign passenger (presumably including Sir Richard himself, who is a British). But recently, in a rare fit of regulatory sanity, Virgin Galactic’s U.S. flight operations were removed from ITAR control ..."

US Catholic bishops plea against obeying “unjust laws”: "A panel of the nation’s Catholic bishops said Thursday that their flock 'must have the courage not to obey unjust laws' and called for Catholic political leaders, clergy and laity to pray, fast and speak out for religious liberty during a two-week period that ends on Independence Day."

Jury selection begins in Edwards trial: "Two-time U.S. presidential candidate and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards is about to learn his fate on charges he violated campaign finance rules to hide a mistress as the process to select a jury begins. ... The process of choosing a 12-member jury and four alternates is scheduled to be completed on April 23 followed by opening arguments in the case, according to court documents"

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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