Clem,
Thank you for your phone call. Since you desire to carry on our correspondence by phone, and not by e-mail I wanted to let you know that you can contact me at ***-***-****. I have your phone number on your business card you gave me so I will take advantage of contacting you when I want to toss some ideas around.
I want to clear up my actions as to why I have posted these exchanges publicly. I have posted these publicly because like many Americans I am completely exasperated with our political process. All attempts, by historic Americans like myself, to be taken seriously by their elected officials are completely pleonastic as revealed in the phoniness of form letters received back or as revealed in the patronizing that occurs when one phones the respective Congress offices. I realize that this is not your fault and that my publicly posting these exchanges likely means that I forfeit whatever input I may have had with you, but frankly I am at the point, as a citizen of this great country, of being exasperated beyond my ability to articulate with what our Federal Government and its representatives are doing.
You mentioned that you thought that the second Sowell article,
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/274020/pyrrhic-victory-thomas-sowell#
did not contend, as I believe, that Dr. Sowell had reversed himself on his initial support on the debt ceiling bill as put forth at this link,
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell072911.php3
I promised I would go back and re-examine the article and I have. Allow me to pull snippets from the second Sowell article that reveal that Dr. Sowell did indeed reverse himself on his support of the Bill that Congressman Walberg egregiously supported.
First, Dr. Sowell starts by titling the article, “Pyrrhic Victory.”
Now we both realize that a Pyrrhic victory is by definition, a victory that is won by incurring terrible losses. Should we believe that Dr. Sowell in his first article was advocating supporting something he knew ahead of time would be a victory that is won by incurring terrible losses only to turn around in the subsequent column and lament the Pyrrhic victory, and that without having changed his mind? To think so stretches credulity.
Second, the subtitle of Sowell’s article is,
“The budget deal turns out to have been a defeat for Republicans.”
Notice that Dr. Sowell uses the phrase, “turns out,” which clearly suggests that it turned out differently than he had hoped unless one believes that Dr. Sowell would have been supporting, in his first column, a bill that he knew beforehand would be a “defeat for Republicans.” Why would Dr. Sowell have supported a bill that he knew beforehand would be a defeat for Republicans? Clearly, this concession on the part of Dr. Sowell’s that “the budget deal turns out to have been a defeat for Republicans,” is an admission that his initial support for the bill that the Republicans supported was errant.
As the article unfolds we read,
“To a remarkable extent, he (Obama) has succeeded, with the help of his friends in the media and the Republicans’ failure to articulate their case.”
Here we see Dr. Sowell faulting Republicans (including Congressman Walberg?), once again. Are we to believe that Sowell, in his first column was supporting the Republicans’ failure to articulate their case or is this yet another example of Sowell conceding that his support in his previous column was a mistake in light of the Republican failure to articulate their case? We need to ask here if Dr. Sowell would have supported the Republican position if he knew in advance that the Republicans would fail to articulate their case.
Sowell closes with these two paragraphs
“Since neither side can afford to be blamed for a disaster like that, this virtually guarantees that the Republicans will have to either go along with whatever new spending and taxing the Democrats demand or risk losing the 2012 election by sharing the blame for another financial disaster.
In short, the Republicans have now been maneuvered into being held responsible for the spending orgy that Democrats alone had the votes to create. Republicans have been had — and so has the country. The recent, short-lived budget deal turns out to be not even a Pyrrhic victory for the Republicans. It has the earmarks of a Pyrrhic defeat.”
These last two paragraphs seals that my reading of Sowell is correct and that Sowell really is giving a mea culpa for his earlier support for the Republican deal that Congressman Walberg supported. I don’t know how any other reading of Sowell’s article except my reading could be considered a fair reading of Dr. Sowell’s words.
Sowell is lamenting that the Republicans were maneuvered into this Politburo Super Congress with the consequence that they are now going to either go along “with whatever new spending and taxing the Democrats demand or risk losing the 2012 election by sharing the blame for another financial disaster.” Now, again Clem, we have to ask ourselves if Dr. Sowell would have been supporting the Republican deal, as he did in the first column under question, if he had knew in advance that this maneuvering, that he laments in this column, was going to be the result of the first deal he now regrets supporting. Again, it stretches credulity to read this column as anything but a regret for earlier support of the Republicans voting to raise the debt ceiling.
Now that I’ve revisited the article under question as I promised, I’m open to your phoning me with your insistence of how I am misreading Dr. Sowell. In the end, Republican support for the deal that was passed was a colossal mistake as Dr. Sowell makes clear in his article. I can only hope that Congressman Walberg will reverse himself just as Dr. Sowell has.
Thank you for your continued collegiality.
Bret L. McAtee
Pastor — Charlotte Christian Reformed Church
