NEW FEATURE!

What Are They Smoking? National Review's downhill tumble has been painful to watch.      By J. Woodruff

A couple of years ago, NR's Jonah Goldberg denounced the Westminster dog show because he believed dog breeding was based on Nazi ideology. He wasn't kidding. And today, NR's latest policy recommendation reads more like something you'd find in the pages of Mother Jones, the New York Times, or memos floating around some of Theresa Heinz-Kerry's left-wing foundations.

In his October 21 contribution to NR's online edition, neo-con David Frum says Congress should impose a federal sales tax to alter U.S. eating habits. The target of his social engineering tax is "calorific" soft drinks. He says the Feds should tax soft drinks for the purpose of reducing Americans' obesity. He got the idea from a recent visit to his native Canada where he noticed that Canadians seem to be slimmer than their fat southern neighbors. "What accounts for this difference?" he wondered. He decided the difference must be the size of "food portions." Because of higher taxes, says Frum, Canadian food vendors offer "smaller sizes in order to hold prices down." And that, he figures, is why in Canada, "It is an [sic] unusual to see an adult who is more than 10 or 15 pounds overweight, exceedingly rare to see one who is more than 50 pounds, and freakish to see an! overweight child." Frum argues that "conservatives who favor (as almost all conservatives do favor) Medicare and Medicaid need to ask themselves whether their easy libertarian attitudes to the worst practices of the fast food industry retains its [sic] relevance. Big Gulp drinks and super-sized fries are making America sick - and you are paying the bill."

That's what passes for conservatism at National Review - the view that it is the proper business of the federal government to manipulate food prices through taxes to influence eating habits; that those eating habits are properly the focus of federal attention; and that raising the price of soft drinks will lower the body weight of consumers. Frum's logic is the logic of the soft-headed Left and the total state: Because the government pays for our healthcare, the government is entitled to regulate individual behavior to contain those healthcare costs.

Contrary to Frum's assertion, Medicare was stiffly opposed by American conservatives when it was proposed by the liberal Kennedy-Johnson administration in the 1960's. Barry Goldwater, the American Medical Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a host of right-of-center groups and politicians sought to defeat it. One of Medicare's early incarnations was defeated by a 49-44 Senate vote in 1964 after a protracted battle. Sen. Goldwater, the GOP's presidential nominee, made a special trip to Washington, D.C. from Arizona just to cast his "no" vote. Arrayed in favor of Medicare were the usual left-wing suspects, such as the AFL-CIO, the National Council of Churches and noted left-wingers like Dr. Benjamin Spock, Abraham Ribicoff, and liberal Republicans Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and Sen. Jacob Javits. (Today, although Medicare provides valuable health services to seniors, it is one of the government's most heavi! ly abused programs, losing $23 billion to $30 billion a year through waste, fraud and abuse, according to the inspector general of Health and Human Services.)

Frum's banalities expose not only his own ignorance of conservative history and philosophy, but NR's unfocused political meandering as well. If genuine traditionalist American conservatism is alive anywhere in the U.S. today, it's not at National Review.