On hearing that American soldiers had burned some Korans, Afghans erupted into randomly murderous rage. In the ensuing stone-throwing, tire- and flag-burning and infidel-denouncing by Friday some 14 people had been killed, mostly Muslim Afghans. What’s that about? Click here to read the rest.

Perhaps blogging about blogs seems a bit self-absorbed, self-referential, derivative or too many steps removed from real life, too cyber-unreal. Nevertheless I want to point to Mark Steyn's comment on National Review Online's "The Corner" yesterday, in which he discusses a significant story about yet another Obama administration staffing misadventure. He highlights that this story has been working its way through cyber-space while being scrupulously ignored by most of the mainstream media. As he pointedly notes, the technological woes of modern newspapers are very real, but there could certainly be more attention paid to relevant, important content even if it is about things liberals would rather not discuss.

Is it not curious that Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, should have a series of cabinet appointees in trouble over laws they didn't bother to obey? It seems paradoxical that those most eager to make rules for other people should be so casual about following rules themselves, especially when the new President campaigned so aggressively on improving ethics in Washington... unless of course they think they're a genuinely superior type of person liberated by their awesome responsibilities and talents from the tiresome, mundane moral standards that apply to ordinary folks.

Good luck to President Barack Obama. He will need it, not only because of the enormous challenges of the office he assumes today but also because of the highly unrealistic expectations of many of his supporters.

Barack Obama's "stimulus" plan now includes, "advisers said", $300 billion in tax cuts because he seemed too focused on making government bigger to help the economy. Which means it's not really a "plan" because sudden kluges on this scale would undermine its structural integrity if it had any. But as long as politicians keep hurling hundreds of billions of dollars about in a weirdly self-satisfied panic, market participants are unlikely to recover their confidence. Would you?

Is that scandal stalking Barack Obama before he is even sworn in? Senate seats for sale in Illinois; a federal grand jury investigating political donations to his choice for commerce secretary... Is he already tarnished? Hardly. First, there is nothing scandalous about staff of a Democratic president-elect holding discussions with the Democratic governor who will fill the Senate seat he just vacated. It would be surprising if they had not. And while we do not know the content of those discussions, and an internal Obama check clearing everyone tells us little, we do know the governor of Illinois directed a string of unimaginative expletives at Mr. Obama and his advisors which suggests they were not receptive to his schemes.

Decency compels us all to admit here that many honest people have unwittingly spoken to a crook at some time in their lives. Especially if they are in politics in Illinois, where three of the last seven governors have done time and dozens of Chicago city councillors have been convicted of corruption since 1971. (As John Barber recently wrote in the Globe and Mail, the vigour with which Illinois prosecutes political corruption makes its perpetrators look stupid as well as crooked.)

History shows that a person can emerge from such a milieu not only smelling but actually being clean. For instance Paul Douglas, a distinguished economics professor who enlisted in the Marines at age 50 in 1942, got himself assigned to combat and won a bronze star and two purple hearts at Peleilu and Okinawa, and represented Illinois for three blameless Senate terms ending in 1967. And Harry Truman rose in Missouri politics with the backing of the Prendergast machine in Kansas City, yet was a man of unimpeachable personal honesty although, it turned out, in the White House he lacked judgement about the integrity of those to whom he felt loyalty.

Such blindness to the flaws of friends may not be directly scandalous. But it fulfils all its essential functions, as it did for Ulysses S. Grant and Warren Harding, neither of whom entered office with visible warning signs of scandal ahead. But if Barack Obama has issues respecting associates they concern not corruption but the disquieting radicalism of men like pastor Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers.

That is not to say that having friends, political associates or views that upset partisan opponents is inherently scandalous. While few elections have equalled in vitriol that of 1800, plenty of presidents have entered the White House to a chorus of abuse about their alleged extremism, including Ronald Reagan, who scandalized opinion but was not scandalous because he actually thought the West could win the Cold War.

Nor is it scandalous to face specific accusations, however serious or widely believed, that aren’t true. During the 1828 campaign at least one newspaper called Andrew Jackson the mulatto son of a British soldier’s whore, scandalous only to those who printed it. Charges that “Old Hickory” was occasionally criminally violent had better foundation, but where he was from such conduct was normal.

Even when charges have some factual basis it is important to distinguish between personal and political scandal. In 1884, Republicans taunted Grover Cleveland with “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” because he confessed to fathering an illegitimate child, possibly to protect a married friend who was sleeping with the same woman. In any event he won (prompting the counter-chant “Off to the White House ha ha ha”), then sustained as president the reputation for clean government he acquired as mayor of Buffalo. Philandering may be morally repulsive but it did not seem to diminish the political effectiveness of, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

There is a blurry line between the personal and political when it comes to another popular vice. In 1853 Whigs ridiculed Democratic candidate and former General Franklin Pierce, as “the victor of many a hard-fought bottle” and alcoholism did diminish his already feeble performance in the White House, while one shudders to think of Richard Nixon answering the hot line while pickled. But fondness for strong drink has marked many successful incumbents as well, while some notably abstemious presidents were duds, so opinion is legitimately divided on the relevance of such personal vices to politics.

You wouldn’t expect it to be when someone enters the White House dragging the chains of legitimate political scandal. For instance when Bill Clinton, dangling Whitewater, his wife’s futures trading foray, and enough sexual and other escapades to tag him as “Slick Willy”. But ahead of him stand two presidents whose entry into the White House was obviously and instructively tainted.

First, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes notoriously won the 1876 election on the basis of brazenly false returns from three former Confederate states, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, leading to an ugly bargain that Democrats would accept his election in return for the end of Reconstruction and federal pork for the south. His reward was one undistinguished term as “Rutherfraud” Hayes. More ominously, though rarely mentioned in polite company, every single Democrat elected to Congress from the south and every Democrat who became president with southern electoral votes from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s is contaminated by the flagrant violent racist exclusion of blacks and Republicans from the polls secured by the bargain of 1876. This includes Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

The second relevant example, prominently featuring Illinois, is John F. Kennedy. In his memoir With No Apologies, Barry Goldwater insists he gathered enough affidavits to prove JFK stole the West Virginia Democratic primary but the attorney general failed to follow up. In any event Kennedy definitely won the close election of 1960 through electoral fraud by Richard Daley Sr.’s machine in Cook County and Lyndon Johnson’s in Texas (where Johnson also clearly won his first, narrow Senate victory in 1948 by out-cheating his adversary). Yet no taint attached to Kennedy, then or later, possibly through widespread elite feeling Richard Nixon was the sort of man who needed to have elections stolen from him. If you want real scandal, look no further.

In any case don’t look at Barack Obama. Unless surprising new facts emerge, he enters the White House untainted, directly or indirectly, by the fact that a lot of other politicians including ones from his home state are dumb crooks.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

If Barack Obama were elected Prime Minister of Canada, how would he fix health care? It is not an idle question. American politics is necessarily interesting to Canadians for several reasons. It's inherently fascinating, even horrifying, because it's so exuberant. In American politics things actually happen, whereas here you get the feeling that if Christ were to return in glory, commentators would assess its impact on Tory prospects in Quebec.

Also, American politics affects what the hyperpower might do next, interesting to everyone but especially its largest trading partner and closest neighbour. And finally, while in many ways unique, the U.S. also shares many traits and some public policy problems with Canada. Including the crippling stress of public health care on the government budget.

I know, I know, people say the U.S. doesn't have a public health care system. It's time to wonder what else such commentators don't know, since Medicare and Medicaid already consume 20 per cent of the American federal budget, with much worse to come.

Don't take my word for it. I'm cribbing here from a Nov. 4 talk by Dr. Cindy Williams, sponsored by the University of Ottawa's Centre for International Policy Studies. She's a senior research scientist in the MIT security studies program and former Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office with a PhD in mathematics, so my guess is she got the numbers right.

By comparison, under the heading "Federal transfers in support of health and other programs," the Canadian federal government only spends about $33 billion out of $240 billion, or around 13 per cent, which includes support for higher education as well. On the other hand, American states are better off than Canadian provinces: Comparing the two most populous, in California "Health and Human Services" takes around $40 billion of $144 billion in spending or 28 per cent whereas in Ontario it's around $40 billion out of $96 billion or 42 per cent. But put the two levels together in either country and the result is alarming in a strangely familiar way.

Especially as Ms. Williams, who I suppose I need to add was not there to shill for the Republican party, went on to show us a very scary projection by the Congressional Budget Office of what would happen to the U.S. federal budget if current trends continued and program eligibility conditions were maintained. (You can see for yourself, at www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8877/12-13-LTBO.pdf.) Compare that to recent Fraser Institute projections of our provincial budgets, and weep.

Ms. Williams went on to point out that the United States has managed its fiscal affairs in the last quarter-century, to the extent that it has managed them, primarily by steadily reducing defence spending from nearly 10 per cent of GDP in 1968 to under five now. Despite another Canadian myth, defence only gets 22 per cent of the American national government budget, one percentage point more than Social Security, while "Other Mandatory" (mostly food stamps, unemployment insurance and public pensions) gets another 13 per cent of federal spending and interest a further seven. But as health care grows, the U.S. will among other things have to surrender any ambition to be the guardian of world order to keep funding middle class entitlements. It seems a high price to pay.

I asked at the outset what Barack Obama would do about Canadian health care. In fact I don't even know what he'll do about the American stuff since during the election he promised a massive expansion of a system already threatening the federal government with insolvency and abdication of its core responsibilities. Yes, he also said he'd go through the budget line-by-line eliminating waste. But I downloaded the detailed "Appendix" to the "Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2009" and it's 1,314 pages long. If Mr. Obama can get through one page an hour deciphering the items and making intelligent judgments about what to cut, by how much and how, and devotes 10 hours a day to it seven days a week despite a few other duties attendant on the presidency, he'll be at it from Inauguration Day until late on the morning of June 1, so after lunch he can start trying to get Congress to go along with his cuts. Which will either come from the 54 per cent of the budget that's entitlements or won't make much difference. And either way won't alter the lethal long-term trends.

If he were in charge in Canada, he'd have a remarkably similar problem and dismal lack of solutions. Which surely tells you something about the sustainability of public health care. And politicians who promise to save it by expanding it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

So that was a decent night for the Democrats. Sort of. I know, I know, Barack Obama "will electrify the world."

He's a "supernova." Of course now the press are also saying he faces difficult challenges and is something of an unknown and we'd all better lower our expectations. But hey, when change has come to America, who wants to quibble?

Me, actually. I agree that the election of a black president is a historic triumph of America's open society and Americans' fundamental decency. I'm too right-wing to support John McCain and I think it's amazingly great that such a thing could happen. Only in America, folks. At least, it hasn't happened in Canada, Germany, France or Britain where they like to sneer at American prejudice.

Some people claim a substantial hidden bigoted vote reduced Barack Obama's vote total. In fact he got more of the white vote (around 43 per cent) than the Democratic average in the previous 10 elections (39 per cent). But in any event, if some voters secretly voted against Mr. Obama because of his race, millions openly voted for him because of it, so it doesn't explain the narrowness of his victory.

Yes, narrowness. And here I must poke many journalists in the eye for covering what they wanted to happen, not what did. The Globe and Mail declared Barack Obama the victor "in a landslide triumph, winning more than 335 of the 538 Electoral College votes, in striking contrast to the wafer-thin victories that sent George W. Bush to Washington in 2000 and again four years later." Pfui. A landslide is Reagan in 1984, with 525 of 535 Electoral College votes and 58.8 per cent of the popular vote, or Nixon in 1972 (520 and 60.7), LBJ in 1964 (486 and 61), or FDR in 1936 (523 and 61).

I don't care how much you hate Republicans. Three-sixty-four and 52.5 is not a landslide. Statistically this election resembles 1968 or 1992 ... except both those campaigns featured strong third-party candidates.

It's also hard to argue that John McCain, or Sarah Palin, alienated moderates. If final turnout is around 125 million, Barack Obama gets seven million more votes than John Kerry in 2004 including 70 per cent of new voters, a galvanized Democratic base and working Joes and Janes concerned about the economy. If it's much higher, John McCain approaches George Bush's 2004 total despite losing the Joes and Janes and core Republicans who never trusted him. Either way there's no room for a wave of defecting moderates. You don't have to approve of it. It's still true.

One normally sensible Canadian pundit warned the GOP that "many of its remaining moderates ... were brought down, leaving the party weakened and prey to the radical evangelicals and talk show hosts who dominate its right wing. If the GOP clings to that base, perhaps with Ms. Palin as its champion, the party has no future." Yeah. They'll end up running right-wing losers like Reagan instead of moderate winners like Bush Sr. and John McCain.

Margaret Wente, also normally sensible, wrote on election day that Mr. Obama "has made me proud of America again" because Americans "are turning out in record numbers to repudiate the leaders who disgraced and failed them." A fine explanation of the record turnout Obama landslide ... if it had happened.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]