Public-Private Partnerships with Other Nations? ???

What is the first lesson we learn from trying to work with any organization identified as a "public-private partnership"? These "partnerships" don't work. There's no clear system to hold anyone accountable for any part of the system. Sometimes, as with Washington's Metrorail, there can be enough genuine enthusiasm for the idea to launch a project that works for the first few years...but when it starts to break down, nobody wants to be responsible for fixing it, and it doesn't get fixed.

And now a president for whom some of you may actually have voted, Gentle Readers, is blathering about "public-private partnerships involving foreign nations." (Misquoted in the title to get the title to fit into its little frame.) Karen Bracken shares this report:

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/wh-adviser-explains-vision-public-private-partnerships-involving-foreign-nations

Er, uh...this is amidst breaking news reports that this administration is not good at working with foreign nations? Notably, not good at protecting peaceable U.S. citizens from being murdered?

Tiffany Gabbay shares more on this administration's likely failure, not only to protect us from murder, but to get out of the way and let us protect ourselves...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/following-obama-victory-u-s-backs-new-u-n-arms-treaty-talks/

Why do I even bother sharing these things? Not to cause panic--yet--but to say that, if you consider yourself moderate, liberal, independent, or even "not extreme right-wing," that may be your (our) problem these days. Those of us who aren't on the far left haven't been thinking of ourselves as an embattled minority; after all we're not trying to destroy everything and rebuild it, we're just trying to keep what we have. We need to be aware of ourselves as a minority. We need to be aware that it's not necessary to be noticeably closer to the "extreme right wing" than Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt were, in order to be in that embattled minority these days. We may not actually be a minority of the people in the United States, but we are, for sure and for certain, going to be treated like one.

The majority of people in my neighborhood are wa-a-ay to the right of me. I am the liberal. Okay, so I learned the word "liberal" (in chronological order) as meaning (1) nonracist, (2) generous, (3) interested in art, history, and literature, (4) the kind of Christian who believes God can save people who don't belong to one particular denomination, and only (5) believing that all political parties, even the Old Left, deserve their chance to be heard...but I am the one to whom a casual acquaintance can confide that she voted for Obama. I've lived in Washington; I've been seen with that scandalous relative who's lived in New York and I'm not the one telling him his soul is doomed; I'm not going to start screaming "You're destroying America!" at her either.

Not that I don't think the Undead Left Wing in this administration is capable of destroying America, if we let it. I do, however, understand a little about being part of an embattled minority. We need to keep our heads. As Southerners my neighbors ought to remember what happens when an embattled minority hollers "Well, we'll just take our marbles and go home and get out of this game." Our ancestors tried that, about 150 years ago, and the results were not anything anyone wants to reproduce. By and large our ancestors were not stupid people; they just hadn't learned that "fighting it out" merely proves who is stronger, that you have to reason and experiment it out if you want to prove who is right. They had not had the benefit of the opportunity we've had to learn from their unhappy experience.

Socialism has, during my lifetime, proved to be a disastrous failure. It destroyed the Soviet Union. It would have destroyed China if China hadn't had the good sense to restore a few basic economic freedoms to the people. It's kept some of the world's richest nations in "Third World" or "banana-republic" status for years as they keep trading one dictator for another and begging the democracies for handouts. It's in the process of relegating European nations to that "Third World" today.

So, many people of my generation have been taking it as read that the principles of socialism, especially anything pertaining to Marxism, have been disproved. We saw it. End of story. We've assumed that people who grew up with socialism as a religion would see what was happening and come around to our point of view. We've imagined that we could afford to jeer at Old Left holdouts with the sort of name-calling found on the covers of books by Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg. We have severely underestimated their emotional and financial commitment to their wrongheaded, destructive belief system.

It's time to regroup and rethink. We need to listen to these people, understand what they want and why they cling to socialist beliefs so desperately. We don't need to drift any further to the left, but we do need to focus more on networking and helping people rather than sitting on our money (if any) and laughing at them.