On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by John Yoo, former Department of Justice official under President George W. Bush to discuss how enhanced interrogation techniques lead to Osama bin Laden’s death, how Bush administration policies have helped the war on terror, and what missteps lie ahead for Obama.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Robert Gates on America’s Role in the World
Robert Gates: ‘If America Declines to Lead in the World, Others Will Not’
John Yoo: Tough interrogations worked
From Guantanamo to Abbottabad
Libya and the War Powers Abdication
John Yoo’s Book – Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush
John Yoo at AEI

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Elizabeth Blackney to debate whether or not Obama should have intervened in Libya, what the real reasons for our involvement are, and who’s to blame when the operation goes awry.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Remember That Timely Debate About Libya Policy That We Never Had?
Between Sudan and Libya, Critics See U.S. Inconsistency
How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy

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Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

Here are its major components:

• Reducing spending: This budget proposes to bring spending on domestic government agencies to below 2008 levels, and it freezes this category of spending for five years. The savings proposals are numerous, and include reforming agricultural subsidies, shrinking the federal work force through a sensible attrition policy, and accepting Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s plan to target inefficiencies at the Pentagon.

• Welfare reform: This budget will build upon the historic welfare reforms of the late 1990s by converting the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant that lets states create a range of options and gives Medicaid patients access to better care. It proposes similar reforms to the food-stamp program, ending the flawed incentive structure that rewards states for adding to the rolls. Finally, this budget recognizes that the best welfare program is one that ends with a job—it consolidates dozens of duplicative job-training programs into more accessible, accountable career scholarships that will better serve people looking for work.

As we strengthen and improve welfare programs for those who need them, we eliminate welfare for those who don’t. Our budget targets corporate welfare, starting by ending the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that is costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. It gets rid of the permanent Wall Street bailout authority that Congress created last year. And it rolls back expensive handouts for uncompetitive sources of energy, calling instead for a free and open marketplace for energy development, innovation and exploration.

• Health and retirement security: This budget’s reforms will protect health and retirement security. This starts with saving Medicare. The open-ended, blank-check nature of the Medicare subsidy threatens the solvency of this critical program and creates inexcusable levels of waste. This budget takes action where others have ducked. But because government should not force people to reorganize their lives, its reforms will not affect those in or near retirement in any way.

Starting in 2022, new Medicare beneficiaries will be enrolled in the same kind of health-care program that members of Congress enjoy. Future Medicare recipients will be able to choose a plan that works best for them from a list of guaranteed coverage options. This is not a voucher program but rather a premium-support model. A Medicare premium-support payment would be paid, by Medicare, to the plan chosen by the beneficiary, subsidizing its cost.

Read the whole thing here. It will take one or two more election cycles before anything close to this has a chance of passing. I mean, the Democrats are squealing over a few billion in cuts from this year’s budget. Still, it is important to lay down a marker. Unless, of course, this is just a diversion meant to distract from the GOP’s near-certain vote to increase the nation’s debt ceiling. As they say, time will tell.

In his comedy routine last week at the Gridiron Club, the President reportedly delivered remarks that had a certain edge. “I’ve dispatched Hillary to the Middle East to talk about how these countries can transition to new leaders – though, I’ve got to be honest, she’s gotten a little passionate about the subject,” he is said to have remarked. “These past few weeks it’s been tough falling asleep with Hillary out there on Pennsylvania Avenue shouting, throwing rocks at the window.” And in an interview yesterday with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, when Mrs. Clinton was asked four times whether she would agree to serve in any post under Barack Obama if he were re-elected in 2012, she responded on each occasion in the negative and refused further comment.

Here is what The Daily Caller reports: “Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”

He went on, “If you take a look at what’s on her plate as compared with what’s on the plates of previous Secretary of States — there’s more going on now at this particular moment, and it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.”

Clinton is said to be especially peeved with the president’s waffling over how to encourage the kinds of Arab uprisings that have recently toppled regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and in particular his refusal to back a no-fly zone over Libya.

Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly expressed a disinclination to serve as President Obama’s running mate, and she has more than once said that she will not herself run for the Presidency and that the office the she currently holds will be her “last position” in the United States government. This may simply be true, but I have my doubts – and I have not in the past been slow to express them. It is hard to believe that the engine of ambition has fallen silent within the wife of William Jefferson Clinton. She certainly has no reason to be loyal to Mr. Obama. Nor does her husband.

Some time ago, I suggested that Mrs. Clinton would find an occasion to resign her position as Secretary of State on a matter of principle and then, after a decent interval, announce that she is a candidate for her party’s presidential nomination. By refusing to do his job as President – by remaining silent with regard to the crisis in Japan, by twiddling his fingers while Libya burns, by concentrating instead on the prospects of the various teams competing in the upcoming basketball tournament, and by ostentatiously preparing for his upcoming jaunt in Rio – Mr. Obama has given Mrs. Clinton an opening. If she has any ambition left and any self-respect, she will seize this opportunity. “There is,” as Brutus said to Cassius, “a tide in the affairs of men.”

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

This is Hillary’s moment – and I, for one, hope that she lays hold of it. In such a circumstance, I would not expect her to win the nomination. I suspect that President Obama has not been behindhand in that particular matter and that the fix is already in. What I have in mind is the future of the Democratic Party.

There is – or, at least, there once was – an adult wing in the Democratic Party. Their presence meant that the election of a Kennedy or a Johnson or a Carter or a Clinton was not apt to be fatal to our well-being. The new President might be wrong-headed; he might to some degree neglect the public interest in order to grease the palms of members of one or another of the constituencies in his party. But he would not be utterly irresponsible; he would not sell us out entirely. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid do not come from this wing of the party, and they are doing everything in their power to remake the Democratic Party in their own image. Yesterday’s fringe is now mainstream – and the long-term consequences are grim. Hillary Clinton is now in a position to do some good – for her party and ultimately for the country as well – by staking out a position within the Democratic Party more or less consistent with the national interest and arguing forcefully for it.

The blunders that we are now making are by no means unprecedented. The first example that comes to mind is England under William III, which was arguably the first fully modern, fully commercial polity in human history. As Winston Churchill points out in his Marlborough: His Life and Times, England’s Dutch king fought vigorously to maintain in England in the wake of  the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) a standing army as a deterrent, but he was thwarted by a Parliament weary of war, unfriendly to taxation, and intent on harvesting a peace dividend. In the absence of an England capable of deploying on the continent of Europe an expeditionary force at a moment’s notice, when the last Hapsburg monarch of Spain died without issue, Louis ignored the terms of his marriage with a Spanish Infanta and connived in installing on the Spanish throne his grandson Philip, who was in line to inherit the French throne as well. Given their immense wealth and their holdings in the New World, the unity of France and Spain would have had as its practical consequence the establishment of a universal monarchy dominant over Europe. This was the very eventuality that the War of the League of Augsburg had been fought to prevent, and in response the English, the Dutch, and the Hapsburgs in central Europe launched the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13), which the first two of these states were initially – thanks to the natural propensity of liberal, commercial polities – ill-equipped to fight.

Churchill – who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in part as a recognition of his remarkable accomplishment in Marlborough: His Life and Times – composed this magisterial study in the 1930s, and one cannot read it without realizing that writing this work was a central part of his intellectual preparation for becoming a wartime Prime Minister. Britain was caught in the toils of the Great Depression at the time, and he watched in horror and raised his voice in protest as Germany under Hitler rearmed and as Britain and France succumbed to wishful thinking and repeatedly chose butter over guns. The Second World War – and the casualties accompanying it – were the price that was paid for the improvident stewardship of the political leaders of Britain and France.

I mention these disgraceful examples because I suspect that we are following in their wake.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, we cut back dramatically on the size of our military establishment. We had the men and equipment to fight the first Gulf War with ease. We barely had enough to manage the second Gulf War, and we stretched our resources to the limits in fighting the insurrections that took place in its aftermath and in the aftermath of our intervention in Afghanistan. To his discredit. George W. Bush failed to face up to our inadequacies, and Barack Obama, in his eagerness to reallocate resources to the entitlement state, has made things much, much worse. It says much about him – but it also says much about the propensities of liberal democracies – that he is now intent on making further cuts and that he is likely to get his way.

It is exceedingly difficult to defend large peacetime military budgets. If our preparations for war are adequate, they are nearly always made to seem unnecessary. If they are adequate, they tend to deter aggression, and we find ourselves in possession of a plethora of military resources that we have no pressing need to use. It is always tempting in such circumstances to suppose that the expenditures incurred were a colossal waste, and we are then inclined to sacrifice military preparedness for cuts in taxation and expenditures on social welfare programs. All that it takes to justify such a shift in resources is wishful thinking, and wishful thinking is something that human beings are exceptionally good at – especially when there is some darling domestic outcome that they have their hearts set upon.

In the Pacific, we are witnessing a dramatic shift in the balance of power. Earlier this year, the Chinese fielded missile forces capable of annihilating in a matter of minutes all but one of our bases in Asia. The handwriting is on the wall. In a few years, they will have missiles capable of eliminating the last of these. This year, they also fielded missile systems capable of finding and sinking our aircraft carriers in the western Pacific. In 2009, when Robert Gates cut back radically on the budget for acquiring in great numbers F-22 stealth fighters, he reportedly did so on the presumption that the Chinese would not be able to produce stealth fighters in any number before 2020. He was dead wrong.

What the Chinese military did on Tuesday was intended as a humiliation for and a warning to us. To all appearances, it was also a stab at the Chinese civilian leadership. Hu Jintao was apparently unaware of what was going on. It is impossible to be certain about the meaning of the Chinese military build-up and of the tone of belligerence that has accompanied it. In their public statements, our leaders and opinion-makers tend to dismiss both as unimportant. It is only natural, they say, that an emerging power should flex its muscles and bully its neighbors. Ignore their belligerence, they say. Defer to them, treat them with the respect due a great power, and that belligerence will dissipate.

These observers may be correct, and I certainly hope they are. But I have my doubts. China is not a liberal democracy and has never been one. It is culturally distinct from the West. For the most part, in the last four decades, it has played by the international rules gradually worked out in the West in the three and a half centuries years that have passed since the Treaty of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years War to an end. But it is by no means clear that, as China gains in economic heft and military power, it will continue to play by those rules. I would not be surprised at all if the Chinese were to renounce the international system and follow in the wake of the Japanese by attempting to establish military hegemony in the western Pacific and to set up on mercantilist lines a new Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

It is perfectly possible that, when the history of our times comes to be written, it will barely mention 9/11, the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts, the recession of 2007, Obamacare, the Tea-Party Movement, and the crisis of the entitlement state. It is perfectly possible that it will focus instead on the improvident stewardship of Barack Obama and the wishful thinking to which the American people fell prone. We can only hope that what happened in China on Tuesday turns out to be a wake-up call for the Republicans. As Vegetius put it long ago, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

Carville and Rendell have this in common. They are Democrats; they are fiercely partisan; and they were strong supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries back in 2008. Their maneuvers should perhaps be read in light of an op-ed piece that Leslie Gelb published in The Wall Street Journal back in the middle of June, suggesting that, when Robert Gates retires, Hillary be made the first female Secretary of Defense; that, in 2012, she be put on the ticket in place of Joe Biden; and that Biden be awarded the booby prize and be named Secretary of State.

I have no idea whether Gelb ran his piece past the Clintons before publishing it. But I would not be surprised. He, too, is a restless, frustrated, critical Democrat on the outs, and the scenario that he paints is by no means ridiculous. Joe Biden is not an asset, and Barack Obama views him with obvious disdain. Bill Clinton is a talented campaigner and a master in the art of staging comebacks, and in 2012 Hillary might be able to turn out a host of white women to vote for Obama who would otherwise sit on their hands.

As it happens, on Saturday, President Obama will have a priceless opportunity that he would be ill-advised to pass up. On that fateful day, in Rhinebeck, New York, on the estate of John Jacob Astor IV, if the rumors are borne out, Chelsea Clinton will marry Marc Mezvinsky in the presence of 400 of their parents’ best friends. And, although Bill Clinton is not a Sicilian, he would certainly be hard-pressed on so auspicious a day to deny anyone who asked of him a favor – least of all a sitting President of the United States who came to him, saying, May their first child be a masculine child!

For such an interchange, the circumstances should be ideal. Apart from former Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee John Edwards and former Democratic Presidential nominee Al Gore – who are, not to put too fine a point on it, indisposed, and whose recent difficulties might have the unfortunate effect of reminding attendees and the general public of past indiscretions on the part of the father of the bride – virtually everybody who is anybody in the Democratic establishment is likely to be in attendance.

The atmosphere should be just right. Chelsea’s intended is also connected. His mother, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinksy, represented Pennsylvania in Congress from 1993 to 1995 and was the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor there in 1998. His father, Ed Mezvinsky, represented Iowa in Congress from 1973 to 1977, chaired the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee, and was the Democratic nominee for Attorney General in that state in 1988. Moreover, shortly after the beginning of the new millennium, the groom’s father, who is known in law-enforcement circles as Fast-Talkin’ Eddie, was convicted on 31 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud, and two years ago he was released from prison. Upon request, I am sure that Fast-Talkin’ Eddie would be willing to arrange a meeting with the goodfella affectionately known to one and all as Slick Willie.

Of former President Clinton could we not say something like what Mario Puzo once wrote concerning another powerful individual?

Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you, you yourself, proclaim your friendship. And then, no matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution of that man’s woe. His reward? Friendship, the respectful title of ‘Don,’ and sometimes the more affectionate salutation of ‘God father.’ And perhaps, to show respect only, never for profit, some humble gift – a gallon of homemade wine or a basket of peppered taralles specially baked to grace his Christmas table. It was understood, it was mere good manners, to proclaim that you were in his debt and that he had the right to call upon you at any time to redeem your debt by some small service.

I should think that Marc Rich and many another figure in debt to Barack Obama’s prospective benefactor could testify to the truth of such a claim. William Jefferson Clinton is known to everybody as a generous man, and he, too, has a taste for peppered taralles . . . of one sort or another.

Of course, in these propitious circumstances, should President Obama come hat in hand to speak with former President Clinton in the library at the Astor estate in Rhinebeck, one could easily imagine the latter asking the former, Why didn’t you come to me at the beginning of this affair? One can even imagine him speaking in a voice like cold death and saying something like the following: We have known each other many years, you and I, but until this day you never came to me for counsel or help. I can’t remember the last time you invited me to your house for coffee though my wife is your Secretary of State. Let us be frank. You spurned my friendship.  You feared to be in my debt. The Democratic Party’s capo di tutti capi might even bring the conversation to a temporary halt with a single question: Why do you fear giving your first allegiance to me?

I cannot imagine Barack Obama enjoying such an exchange any more than the appropriately named Amerigo Bonasera enjoyed the interview with Don Corleone depicted in the opening scene to Godfather I. But to something of the sort he may soon have to submit. He might have saved himself a great deal of trouble had he taken the advice I offered him in a post on this site back in January and consulted the Comeback Kid at that time. Of course, even then, as I made clear, it was doubtful whether our President could have saved many of his associates in Congress. But neither he nor his predecessor cares one whit for the Democratic Party.

In any case, by now, both surely have their eyes on 2012, and in the two years that follow the thumping that the Democrats are going to get this November Bill Clinton and his minions could do a great deal for Barack Obama if they were willing. To start with, were our current President to give his first allegiance to his predecessor, I am confident that Carville, Rendell, and Gelb would start singing a different tune.

And who knows? On Monday, Dick Morris might get a call.

UPDATE: Something more ominous seems to be in the offing. Michael Barone reports that President Obama has not even been invited to the wedding. Could this mean that Slick Willie, Fast-Talkin’ Eddie, and the Ragin’ Cajun are planning to go to the mattresses?

The acquisition process related to the defense industry is a place where both Members of Congress and industry lobbyists have made a pretty good living by sending pork home and enriching the underbelly of the nation’s capital in the process.

Exhibit A: C-17

The facts are that the C-5 transport plane is being modernized to supplant the C-17 transport plane at a reduced cost.  The Air Force has repeatedly stated that it does not want any more C-17s, yet Congress continues to fund new ones adding $1.5 billion to this year’s budget for five more, after it added $2.5 billion to last year’s budget for 10 more.

But what’s $4 billion among friends when your country has a long-term deficit over 10 trillion dollars?

Secretary Gates has openly campaigned against any new C-17s, stating emphatically that he will recommend a Presidential veto of any appropriations bill that includes new ones.  Gates has said, “The leadership of the Air Force is clear: they do not need and cannot afford more C-17s.”  Any questions?

And here comes the kicker.  Just the other day, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Inouye was covered in a defense industry publication stating more money would be appropriated for the C-17.  Inouye said, “Asked if he is trying to fund more C-17s in the fiscal year 2011 defense appropriations bill, Inouye replied: ‘I think the House will do so.’  Senators, he added, ‘usually go along with’ such action by the House.”

At a time when the deficit is exploding and we are mortgaging our children’s future, powerful Members of Congress continue to support defense systems that serve as nothing more than pork-barrel projects that even the military brass say we don’t need or want.

At what point do we ask, when is enough enough?