. . .what Ted Cruz is doing -- is signaling to the discontented that there really is another way. They can vote Republican in 2014; and, if they do so big time, there will be a correction of course.
The leadership of the Republican Party hates this. Like Jeb Bush in early 2009, they want "to get beyond Reagan." They want to surrender on immigration; they have designed a Republican healthcare bill that is little more than Romneycare writ large; and they desperately want to make nice with the Democrats. They do not really want a change of course. They merely want to take their turn as managers of the administrative entitlements state. They want to take advantage of discontent without having to commit themselves to a reduction in the size and scope of the government.

There is an unspoken sub-text at play here: what President Putin said in his column is pretty much what American liberals and leftists have been saying about the United States since the 1960s. From the standpoint of American liberals, there is nothing the least bit new or controversial in anything Mr. Putin wrote in his column. He is merely hoisting President Obama and his liberal friends by their own ideological petard.

The August jobs numbers are disappointing. The economy gained 169,000 non-farm payroll jobs, below the estimated figure of 175,000. Much worse, however, were the downward revisions for past months. Julyâ(TM)s job numbers went down 58,000. The total revision for June and July is 74,000 less than previously expected. Then there is the labor participation rate: It dropped to 63.2 percent. It hasnâ(TM)t been this low since 1978. Because so many people have left the work force, the percent of unemployed (i.e. those who havenâ(TM)t checked out of the job market) went down to 7.3 percent.
It is long since past the time that we can attribute feeble job growth to the financial collapse in 2008. The âoerecoveryâ started in the second half of 2009. What we see now is the Obama economy â" more people out of the job market, minimal growth and tepid job creation. The president is right â" we are no longer in a tailspin. The TARP and other financial measures that President George W. Bush put in place and Obama continued staunched the bleeding long ago. But we have a listless economy, a function of combined tax, regulatory and budget policies.

Whatever happens, this much is clear: We`re no longer talking about the IRS targeting tea party groups, the Justice Department tapping reporters` phone lines, the NSA`s surveillance programs, Benghazi. The president has smartly changed the subject to the most important decision a commander in chief makes: war.

Daladier, a classic leftist politician of the era, became Prime Minister three times. French politics were rough and tumble, with alliances made and dissolved, and little attention paid to foreign policy. There was a general refusal to acknowledge that Germany was re-arming and preparing for another round. Daladier was a voice in the wilderness. He saw the threat coming from Germany and became particularly alarmed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Unlike many others of his time, and today, he understood that Communists and Nazis comprised two sides of the same totalitarian coin. Daladier became PM for the last time in April 1938. By this time, the West's appeasement policies towards Hitler were firmly set. Daladier desperately tried to convince Britain's Neville Chamberlain to take a firmer stance against Hitler. Chamberlain would have none of it, and France's parlous military state prevented Daladier from striking out on his own. Chamberlain had decided to yield to Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland, and to the effective dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Daladier argued against this, but found himself helpless to do anything but go along. To his life-long shame, Daladier became a signer of the September 1938 Munich Agreement, the now universally recognized monument to appeasement. Heading back home from Munich, Daladier assumed angry French patriots would rip him to shreds. He, instead, got a hero's welcome. Enthusiastic crowds sang his praises, prompting him to turn to an aide, and utter the famous, bitter, and prophetic words, "Ah, the fools! Why are they cheering?"
. . .
I have written before about the Obama foreign policy (here, here, and here, for example). We are firmly in the grip of an appeaser, perhaps even worse. Other countries have begun to see that quite clearly.