Category Archives: Barack Obama

Ammo!

It was either late 2008 or the start of 2009 when a co-worker at The State mentioned that he’d had trouble laying his hands on buckshot, and that the shopkeepers he’d talked to said this started to happen at about the time of the election. It’s been so long that I forget whether he said that it was just before the election or just after that the run on ammunition started. But I do remember he said you could get birdshot; the problem was with the deadlier stuff that you’d need to take down a deer — or a man.

It was sometime after that that I noticed at a local Wal-Mart that the case where ammunition of all kinds was locked behind glass was mostly empty. Looking more closely, I saw none of the usual pistol stuff (.38-cal., 9 mm). In fact, all I saw was shotgun shells with the smaller sort of shot.

I filed this away as interesting, even ominous. And I figured I would write something about it once it became better documented and the fact was established. I assumed I’d see news stories about it soon. (As you know, in my former position I had nothing to do with news or decisions on what to cover; I was kept as separate from that as I was from advertising. Like you, I saw things in the paper when I saw them.) Then I forgot about it. I was pretty busy in those days.

So when I saw it on the front page of The State today, I sort of went “Wow,” on a couple of levels. First, that it took this long to make news, and second, that there was still a shortage.

Back when I first heard about it, I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it. Some things popped into my head, of course. One of the first was my memory of being in South Carolina when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. I remember knowing at least one very nice white person who had never owned a gun before going out and buying one, because of fear of what might happen next. And I heard of others. I didn’t want to think this was related to that, but it did pop into my head.

Another was that Barack Obama had inspired some fairly weird Internet conspiracy theories. You know, like the one that he’s not really a citizen. I hadn’t attached importance to that — after all, the man was elected — but it popped into my head that there was something going on in the dank underbelly of the American psyche. Everything might be fine on the conscious level, but maybe some things were brewing down in the more reptilian parts of our collective brain.

But I set it aside. We had lots of other stuff to think about, what with the economy collapsing around us, and all the debates over what to do about it. The stimulus, for instance, was about as unemotional and bloodless, colorless subject as you were likely to find; it was not something to inspire dark dreams of violence.

Now that the ammunition story is documented and verified and duly reported, it comes at a time when we have additional information, and this colors our perception. We’ve seen that a lot of people are really, REALLY emotional about this president and his policies. I mean, we’ve had a lot of heated debates about health care in this country in the past, but even when it involved the polarizing figure of Hillary Clinton, people didn’t get THIS stirred up. Harry and Louise and the rest of the insurance industry’s allies simply deep-sixed reform, and it went away for 15 years.

But the last couple of months have been … weird. You might expect a guy like me, who has griped for years about our health care situation and finds himself paying $600 a month for COBRA, with the prospect of it going up to $1,200 or even $1,500 very soon) would be emotional about it, but I’m Lake Placid compared to the people who DON’T WANT reform. “Death panels.” Old folks absurdly Obama Joker Poster Popping Up In Los Angeles demanding that the gummint stay out of their Medicare. People showing up in crowds with automatic weapons. An otherwise mild-mannered congressman yelling “You lie!” at the president during what I thought was a fairly ho-hum speech. Then there’s the truly disturbing “Joker” posters. (I thought Democrats really went overboard with hating Bush, but this plumbed new depths.)

Against that background, a run on ammunition sounds really ominous.

The sunniest interpretation you can put on this phenomenon is that when the economy is collapsing, people naturally fear our devolving into a state of nature, and naturally want to arm themselves. Under that interpretation, we’d have run out of ammo whether Obama or McCain had been elected.

But there’s this other thing going on, and it has to do with some fairly unpleasant things rattling around in our collective subconscious. Some people have tried to give it a simple name, saying it’s about race. But it’s more complicated than that. Just as scary and ugly perhaps, and entangled somehow with race, but more complicated.

And frankly, I’m still not sure what to think of it.

Let’s see if we can help the Souper Bowl go viral

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Y’all hear enough from me. Now, for a message from the “Good Brad” — Brad Smith, the founder of the Souper Bowl of Caring.

That Brad spoke to Rotary today. Although he’s now the senior pastor at Eastminster Presbyterian in Columbia, he still believes strongly in the organization he founded, and headed up full-time for seven years. (To remind you of the story, it all started with a line from a prayer that Brad said on Super Bowl Sunday in 1990: “Lord, even as we enjoy the Super Bowl football game, help us be mindful of those who are without a bowl of soup to eat.” Some kids at his church — Spring Valley Pres at the time — stood outside after services with a cookpot asking folks to give a buck. Then kids at lots of other churches started doing it…)

And he’s got this dream about it. Even though it has grown far beyond anything he could have imagined at the beginning — the Souper Bowl has raised $60 million for charity, and on the most recent Super Bowl Sunday involved 200,000 kids in its good work, and now has the backing of two former presidents (and their First Ladies) and seven NFL team owners — he has a vision of it being even bigger.

His vision is a two-parter: That the president of the United States would decide to highlight the Souper Bowl (as one of the inspiring stories of volunteerism that presidents are always citing in such speeches) in his State of the Union address. And that would inspire enough people to give that during the Super Bowl itself, the Souper Bowl would be mentioned, and the announcer would say that X hundred thousand kids participated, and an amount equal to a dollar for each person (the standard “ask” for Souper Bowl is a dollar) watching the game had been raised.

That would be over a hundred million dollars, which would eclipse what the program has raised in total thus far.

Yes, it’s a reach, but it’s possible, given the right conditions. As Brad (the other one) said today, “Somebody here knows someone who can make that vision come to pass…”

Well, maybe. And if not, then maybe somebody reading this knows somebody who knows somebody who can make it happen.

It’s worth a try, anyway.

Let me tell you about Joe Wilson…

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A lot of folks are presuming to explain Joe Wilson, based on the impression he made last week in his Tourette’s Moment (or the far worse impression he’s made since then trying to leverage the moment to his political advantage). Some, such as bloggers from the left, are explaining it as just the sort of thing you expect from those idiot Republicans. Voices on the right, meanwhile, hail Joe as the guy who was saying What Real Americans Think (which you know has gotta be making Sarah Palin jealous, because what else has she got now that she’s not governor any more?). Maureen Dowd, after saying she was “loath” to resort to such oversimplification, chalked it up to racism, asserting that what Joe really meant was “You lie, boy!”

Well now, there’s something to that if you’re making a general statement about the Republican Party in the South. There was a time when to be a Republican in the South meant you were either a reformer who couldn’t bring himself to join the Old Boy network that was the Democratic Party, or black. But then Strom Thurmond, inspired by Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights, defected to the GOP in 1964. It took awhile for a lot of white voters to follow him. But then some of the folks who followed George Wallace in his independent run in 1968 just didn’t go back. Some considered themselves independents for awhile, but they eventually drifted into the GOP, and after awhile a certain dynamic was in place whereby more and more white folks got the impression that all the other white folks were going over there, and joined them.

The process wouldn’t be complete in South Carolina until Republican lawmakers persuaded some black Democrats to join forces with them in a reapportionment battle in the 90s. Here’s where things get more complicated than the Dowd explanation. You see, after a certain point (the point to which white Democrats were willing to go), the only way you can create another black-majority district (which will presumably, according to conventional wisdom, elect black candidates) is by creating several surrounding districts that have been bleached free of black voters. Such districts are FAR more likely to elect a white Republican than a Democrat of any color. Anyway, that reapportionment deal led to the election of a few more black members and a LOT more white Republicans, which is how the GOP took over the Legislature.

So yeah, the dynamics that produce a Joe Wilson — or a Jim Clyburn — are just shot through with racial considerations. So you can always say that race is part of the equation in any confrontation such as we saw last week. I haven’t examined the list of people who contributed to Joe Wilson’s campaign coffers last week because he made an ass of himself, but I’m thinking it’s pretty safe to say that it’s somewhat whiter than South Carolina as a whole — and most likely whiter even than the 2nd District.

Does that mean Joe Wilson is a racist? No. The idea would shock him. He would sputter and protest in that out-of-breath way he has when he’s excited, and he would be absolutely sincere. I know Joe Wilson; I’ve known him for more than two decades, and I know that he’d mean it when he said that he’d never judge the president or anyone else by the color of his skin. Joe Wilson is a guy who goes out of his way to be nice to everybody.

No, there’s another explanation for why a guy like Joe Wilson gets elected, and why huge numbers of white folks will flock to his side when the Nancy Pelosis of the world are looking daggers at him. It’s a phenomenon that runs in parallel to the narrative of race in our state’s history, one that is so interwoven with it that whenever it appears, people look right past it and see only the racial aspect, black and white being less subtle than what I’m talking about.

White South Carolinians, as a group, exhibit a trait that is not at all unusual in this nation, but which has shown some of its most extreme expressions in the Palmetto State. It’s the thing that makes a guy put his foot down and declare that no government is going to tell him what to do. This manifests itself in lots of ways. It was surging through the veins of those Citadel cadets firing on Fort Sumter. Yes, you can say that the Civil War (conceived and launched right here in South Carolina) was about race. You can say it was about a minority of wealthy whites wanting to keep black people as their property, and the majority of whites being dumb enough to go along with them on it, even though it was not it their economic interests (or any other kind of interest) to do so. But ask yourself, HOW did the ruling elites get all those other whites to go along with them? By selling them on the idea that the federal government was trying to run their lives. It worked like a charm, and we’ve been reaping the evil result of that madness ever since.

It’s no accident that we have twice elected a governor who has NO accomplishments to point to and who distinguished himself by being the last governor in the union to accept stimulus funds that S.C. taxpayers were (like taxpayers everywhere, if they live long enough) going to have to pay for. Standing against gummint involvement, especially federal gummint involvement, plays well among a significant swath of the electorate here.

But defiance is not a necessary ingredient. If it were, Joe Wilson would not have gotten as far as he has. He’s no stump-thumper (the shouting incident was truly anomalous); you wouldn’t mistake him for Ben Tillman, or even Strom Thurmond. But Joe Wilson is the natural heir of another political phenomenon that Thurmond embodied (and Sanford has raised to an art form): the do-nothing officeholder.

It’s a twist on the Jeffersonian notion that one is safest when the government governs least, a play on the old joke that we’re all safe now because the Legislature’s gone home, etc.

We all know about the highlights, or lowlights, of Strom Thurmond’s career — his Dixiecrat campaign, his infamous filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, his later mellowing on race, etc. Less noticed by the popular imagination is that for most of his multi-generational career, he didn’t do much of anything. In fact, the only legislation I can remember bearing his mark in the years that I was responsible for The State‘s coverage of him was those little health warnings on beer cans and wine bottles. That’s about it. I mean, that’s something, but it’s not much to show for half a century in the Senate.

What Strom Thurmond did was constituent service. He perfected the technique of staying in office by being the voters’ (black voters or white voters, he didn’t care) own personal Godfather in Washington. You got a problem with that big, bad government up there? Talk to your Godfather. Doing personal favors for people was far more important than lawmaking. And this made him politically invulnerable.

Over in the House, the member who best embodied the Thurmond Method — minimum lawmaking, maximum constituent service — was Floyd Spence. Joe Wilson became Spence’s acolyte, his squire, his sincere imitator. It was perfectly natural that he became his successor. Floyd was a nice guy who loved being a congressman but didn’t want to accomplish much in Washington beyond constituent service and a strong military, and Joe fits that description to a T.

The 2nd District has come to expect, even more than any other district in the state, elected representation that Does Nothing on the national scene (beyond fiercely supporting a muscular national defense, of course).

The representative of that district, who is very much the product of that non-governing philosophy, is bound to be at odds with a president who is the product of the Do Something philosophy of government. And you can see how he might get a little carried away with himself in trying to stop the Biggest Thing Barack Obama has tried to get the government to Do.

And yes, you can describe this dichotomy in racial terms. The folks who keep re-electing Jim Clyburn want government to Do As Much As Possible (at least, that’s how he interprets his mandate, and I don’t think he’s wrong), while Joe Wilson’s constituents tend to want the opposite. And those districts were drawn to put as many black voters in Clyburn’s 6th District as possible, thereby leaving the 2nd (and the 3rd and the 4th the 1st, and to some extent the 5th) far whiter than they would be if you drew the lines without regard to race.

I’m just saying there’s a lot more at work than that.

Compromising photographs

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You know how back in the day, people would say they didn’t smoke dope, but if a joint was going around they’d take a toke “to be polite?” Doonesbury once made fun of it, with Zonker speaking the punch line, “I’m VERY polite.”

Well, I’m sort of that way about getting my picture taken with the guest of honor at rubber chicken dinners, receptions, etc. When somebody (usually some enthusiastic lady who has worked hard to put on the event) tugs my elbow and says, “Come have your picture taken with …” whomever, I may grumble a bit, but then shrug and make the best of it.

That explains why there are photographs of me with a wide variety of people, from our latest political persona non grata Joe Wilson (see the new header on my home page) to people I actually feel a little intimidated and unworthy standing next to, such as Elie Wiesel (below). You can see the awkwardness in my face on that one.

But in the Wilson pic, I’m perfectly at ease. You can probably even see a bit of amusement. This was taken at a reception for Joe at the Republican National Convention in New York. This was the last time the newspaper ever paid for me to travel out of state to do journalism, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. At this point, I’m grinning both to be a good sport, and because all week, I had been watching Joe really, REALLY enjoying being at the convention. Joe just has to pinch himself all the time, he SO enjoys being in Congress, and being a Republican, and being around other Republicans, to the point that he just wants to be friends with everybody. He was definitely not saying “You lie!” to anyone that week.

I don’t get enthusiastic like that, and people who do make me smile. Different strokes.

The Obama picture is slightly more complicated. In this case, I was amused not by the candidate, but by the excitement among some of the other people in the room. This was immediately following our editorial endorsement meeting. And while there were no member of the editorial board asking to have their pictures taken with the candidate (Warren, Mike and Cindi are too cool and professional for that) this was one of those meetings that people from around the building who had nothing to do with our editorial decisions asked if they could sit in, and I always said yes to such requests, as long as there was room and no one was disruptive.

And some of them were lining up eagerly to have their pictures taken with Obama. If you’ll recall, this is the kind of excitement his candidacy engendered. The candidate was anxious to get downstairs and put on some longjohns in the men’s room before going to sit in the freezing cold at the MLK Day rally at the State House, but he was a good sport about it.

And after several of these pictures were taken, I said — with an ironic tone, making a joke of it — well, why don’t I get MY picture with the senator, too!? Of course, it wasn’t entirely a joke. On some level, I was thinking that someday my grandchildren will want proof that I met all these famous people, and for the most part I don’t have any photographic proof. Here was my chance to get some, as long as everybody was camera-happy. I was also thinking, it’s all very well to be cool and professional but isn’t it a fool who plays it cool by making the world a little colder? Or something. Anyway, I like to do things that other more staid professionals turn their noses up at. It’s why I started a blog, while my colleagues didn’t. It’s why I do http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2007/10/the-colbert-end.html”>silly stuff like this. You enjoy life more this way…

My regret that I have looking back is that I didn’t get my picture taken with John McCain, Joe Biden, George W. Bush, John Kerry, Al Gore, Ralph Nader, Ted Sorensen, Benazhir Bhutto, Jesse Jackson, or hosts of others. Mainly because I was too cool at the time when I was around them (especially back in the days when I spent a lot of time with Al Gore — in my early career I would have been WAY too self-righteous to pose for any such thing). I never even got my picture taken with Strom Thurmond. You know what? Next time I see Fritz Hollings, I’m going to ask somebody to take our picture…

Lindsey Graham’s delicate position

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I found Lindsey Graham’s townhall meeting very interesting. While I disagree with him substantively about the subject at hand — health care reform — it’s always interesting to listen to him because he’s a smart guy who has a lot to offer to any policy question. In other words, while he clings loyally to support of Joe Wilson as a fellow Republican, he’s not a guy who’ll ever reduce his objections to a shouted “You Lie!”

Let’s dispense with the disagreement first — Sen. Graham fails to persuade when he says his crowd-pleasing things (Republican voters got calls at home asking them to come) about how we don’t want the gummint taking over any more of our lives. The argument that we can’t have a public option because the private sector can’t compete only condemns the private sector in my mind. The senator’s replies to the student who objected that private companies compete quite successfully with the Postal Service were weak. He got the crowd to cheer by mentioning the huge public subsidy the Postal Service needs to keep going, which to ME argues that its private competitors do just fine. He then argued that competition doesn’t work the same way in health care, which is true, which is why we can’t expect the market to solve our problems. (Lindsey agrees at least with that. He’s for regulation, not a new government entitlement program.)

But the senator repeatedly stressed how we should find things on which we agree and work from there — he talked about areas of agreement between him and Russ Feingold (who agrees with me that the way to go is single-payer) — and I know he means it, so I listen all the harder to what he has to say.

And I was fascinated with his central argument. It was this: It would cost too much. And he doesn’t trust the American people, including all the anti-gummint types in that room, to prevent the program’s costs from going out of control. He kept doing an interesting thing… he kept getting the crowd to cheer with assertions about how inept the gummint is, and how we don’t want it intruding any more into our lives, and then he’d ask how many people there were on Medicare (quite a few) and how many would voluntarily give it up (no one).

So basically, he repeatedly demonstrated that this crowd that was so willing to moan at the awful gummint and laugh ironically when Lindsey referred to Obama’s promises to control costs LOVES its gummint-provided health care — at least, those who have it do. He even said it fairly direction once: “Everybody clapping (at one of his shots against government), half of them are in a government plan.”

And the costs of that government plan, Medicare, are so out of control that he doesn’t want to create another program that would be JUST as popular, even among people who THINK they don’t like government programs, and that therefore would be just as costly, if not more so.

That’s what I heard, and it was interesting.

As he alluded more than once, Lindsey Graham walks a fine line, trying to be a moderate as a Republican from a beet-red state. Another time he said many who were applauding had tried to rip him a new one over immigration reform. He referred to having voted to confirm Justice Sotomayor. So it was fascinating to see him use populist techniques to get a crowd to support him on something where his position is that essentially, he doesn’t trust them, the people, not to support a program that would bankrupt us.

This, by the way, is why I won’t jump to run for office. I’m not sure I could maintain that balance between stroking people and leveling with them that you’re taking a position they may not love. I think I’d get fed up with it pretty fast.

Lindsey Graham doesn’t. And while I can see the contradictions inherent in what he’s doing, I can also respect him for being willing to wrestle with those contradictions — even when I believe that, substantively, he’s wrong on the issue.

Clowning around with health care

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Maybe you can help me out with something. I was driving down Sunset Blvd. in West Columbia this morning, and sorta kinda saw something for a fraction of a second, and I’m not sure I know what I saw. If you saw it, maybe you can clear this up.

I was driving past Joe Wilson’s office, and as I whiffed by, happened to glance at a clump of three people (at least I think there were three) loitering on the sidewalk at the corner. One was sitting on a bicycle. I don’t remember what the second person was doing. The third was holding up a sign that said “Stop Clowning around with our Health Care.” I think. We’re talking split-second here, and I turned away before any of it registered on my mind.

The person holding the sign was wearing a blue outfit with white designs on it from neck to toe. It may have been a clown outfit, but I’m infering that from the sign. He or she may also have been wearing clown makeup, but I have no idea at all about that, because his/her face was blocked by the sign during that tenth of a second or whatever it was.

As I drove on, a number of questions occurred to me:

Did I read the sign right?
Was the person dressed as a clown? Possibly not. The power of suggestion from what I think the sign said overwhelmed what other information was available to me.
Were the other people involved in the demonstration, or just curious passersby?
Was this person working for Joe Wilson, and saying President Obama was “clowning” with our health care? (If so, hasn’t Joe called enough attention to himself?)
Was this person protesting that Joe Wilson was the one “clowning around with our health care?” (I’ve noticed that one of the favorite epithets hurled at Joe from leftist bloggers is “ass clown,” for some reason) If so, he or she was going to a lot of trouble to send a confused message. You’d have to stop and talk to find out, which not many are in a position to do at that stretch of road at that time.

I was in a hurry to get downtown just then, but I went back that way later to check. No one there. No clown. No guy on a bike. No third person who barely registered. All gone. Must have been a drive-time thing. Or my imagination. I wonder what I saw, and what it was supposed to mean?

Anyway, right after I saw them, as those questions were going through my mind, I reached a stretch where orange roadwork cones were jamming the traffic into one lane. I found myself behind a big white pickup truck. It had a bumper sticker on it with a message that there was no mistaking:

OBAMA

SUCKS

Such is the state of political discourse these days in the 2nd District…

Eight years ago today

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What is there to say on the 8th anniversary of the attacks on America? I suppose I could say the same things I said on the 7th, and add what I said a couple of days before that.

Or I can quote what President Obama said today:

“Let us renew our resolve against those who perpetrated this barbaric act and who plot against us still,” Mr. Obama said. “In defense of our nation, we will never waver.”

And add what he said back in August, to a VFW gathering in Phoenix:

The insurgency in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight and we won’t defeat it overnight, but we must never forget: This is not a war of choice; it is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda could plot to kill more Americans.

With more than a few out there faltering, I thought it would be good to bring those words to the fore.

Graham hits the wrong note

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I was surprised, and disappointed, by this release this morning:

Statement from Senator Lindsey Graham on President Obama’s Health Care Address to the Nation

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) made this statement tonight after the presidential address.

“I was incredibly disappointed in the tone of his speech. At times I found his tone to be overly combative and believe he behaved in a manner beneath the dignity of the office. I fear his speech tonight has made it more difficult — not less — to find common ground.

“He appeared to be angry at his critics and disappointed the American people were not buying the proposals he has been selling. The president’s confrontational demeanor increased the emotional and political divide. I hope the President will learn that true bipartisanship begins with mutual respect. Criticism of a public official is to be expected and not all criticism is demagoguery.

“When it comes to the public option, the President is either being disingenuous or misinformed. The public option, contrary to the president’s claims, will eventually lead to a government takeover of our health care system.

“One could easily be led to believe tonight’s speech is the beginning of a ‘go it alone’ strategy. If the Obama Administration and congressional Democrats go down this path and push a bill on the American people they do not want, it could be the beginning of the end of the Obama presidency.”

On a Member of Congress Accusing the President of Telling a ‘Lie’:

“The president’s combative tone did not justify a Member of Congress shouting out ’you lie.’ Our nation’s president deserves to be treated with respect It was inappropriate remark and I am glad an apology has been made.”

#####

I’m proud of Sen. Graham, and of John McCain, for so clearly and unequivocally calling Joe Wilson down for his insupportable behavior. But given that Joe DID what he did, and any commentary on the president’s speech is unfortunately bound to be considered within that context, Lindsey’s release this morning just seems way off-base.

You’re “incredibly disappointed” by the president’s tone? The president was “overly combative?” He behaved in “a manner beneath the dignity of the office?” The president’s demeanor “increased the emotional and political divide?” He’s the one who needs to learn a lesson about “mutual respect?”

Say what?

This was definitely not the morning to release a statement like that.

Such is my respect for Sen. Graham that whenever I find myself disagreeing with him (or Joe Lieberman, or John McCain, or Joe Riley), I stop and think again: Could I be wrong on this? So I analyze my own reaction. I think, Maybe the president was too combative. Maybe I didn’t notice it because I’m so completely fed up with the lies and obstructionism that are threatening to kill our hopes for a decent health care system in this country yet again. Maybe that’s what makes me think the president was, if anything, overly deferential to those who don’t give a damn about our health care, but want to see this issue be Obama’s “Waterloo,” because partisan advantage is more important to them than the good of the nation…

So I run those thoughts through my head, and then I think, Nah, this time Lindsey’s just wrong. That can happen, you know…

What got into Joe Wilson tonight?

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In the hour or so after the president’s speech, my Blackberry wouldn’t stop buzzing. The Tweets came fast and furious as everyone discussed Joe Wilson’s outrageous behavior tonight. He was the guy who shouted, “You lie!” to the president of the United States during a joint address to Congress.

Which was, let’s face it, a new low in the annals of partisanship in America.

My wife was startled to hear it, saying, “I thought he was more mild-mannered than that.”

He is. But he was under the influence of a particularly insidious drug. It’s the same one that Jim DeMint was on when he spoke hopefully of the health care debate being Obama’s “Waterloo.”

Politicians in Washington, and increasingly right here at home, are so high on the frisson of perpetual partisan warfare that they find themselves thinking things, saying things and doing things that they wouldn’t think, say, and do otherwise. The positive reinforcement they get for it is considerable. Even as Democrats were beside themselves with indignation over Joe’s outburst, some of the more extreme Red Staters were ready to canonize Joe for his moment of irrationality.

So Joe had to choose. As it happens, he chose to apologize (ironically, he did so BEFORE I got the press release from the S.C. Democratic Party demanding that he do so):

“This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the President’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility.”

Good. That’s something. But I’m afraid the standards for political disagreement just got ratcheted down another notch tonight, and I’m sorry that my congressman did the ratcheting. He’s sorry. Well, so am I.

Hoping the president does well tonight

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Getting ready to watch the president’s address, and hoping he does well — because the country needs for him to do well. I know my family does, but so does the whole country. Not just the uninsured, but the insured who increasingly find their insurance unaffordable and a constant battle to get the private insurance companies to pay up. And especially for American business, which really doesn’t need this financial millstone around its neck any more.

One thing that gets me is that the advance hype is that the president will advocate a “public option.” Well, duh. A “public option” is health care reform. Without a public element there is no health care reform. The “private option” is what we have now, and it ain’t working.

Anyway, it’s going to start in a few moments. Your impressions will be welcome here as comments….

I’m going to try watching it on the NYT site. One nice thing about watching it on a newspaper’s Web site is that you don’t have to listen to all that superfluous commentary you get on TV…

Don’t give up on Afghanistan, Mr. President

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So when did we start speaking of Afghanistan as though it were Iraq?

I seem to recall that the people who wanted us out of Iraq, until very recently were saying:

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is the must-win war.
Afghanistan is the place that harbored Osama bin Laden and others responsible for 9/11.
It’s horrible the way we have neglected our commitments there (to spend resources on Iraq).

I mean, Barack Obama, who during the campaign would tell anyone who would listen how HE was the guy who had been against our involvement in Iraq from the beginning, was also one of the most aggressively belligerent U.S. politicians when it came to Afghanistan, and to the al Qaeda hideouts across the border in Pakistan.

And when he came into office, it looked like he was going to follow through. Not only that, it appeared that he was going to be sensible about our Iraq commitments, which was very reassuring.

Now, I read with horror this piece today in The State:

On Monday, McChrystal sent his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan to the Pentagon, the U.S. Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and NATO. Although the assessment didn’t include any request for more troops, senior military officials said they expect McChrystal later in September to seek between 21,000 and 45,000 more troops. There currently are 62,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

However, administration officials said that amid rising violence and casualties, polls that show a majority of Americans now think the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting. With tough battles ahead on health care, the budget and other issues, Vice President Joe Biden and other officials are increasingly anxious about how the American public would respond to sending additional troops…

Say what? We’ve got our finger in the wind on Afghanistan now? We’re checking the polls to see if we’re going to fight the freaking Taliban, the guys who coddled Osama while he was dreaming up the Big One?

What is wrong with this country? And does a country that would let things come to this pass deserve to survive, in evolutionary terms? Apart from standing up and fighting for what is right and against what is demonstrably not only wrong but horrifically so, are we truly not willing to fight against those who would like to see us dead? What sort of organism, or social structure, gives up to that extent?

Picturing DeMint in a powdered wig

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Tim Cameron, formerly of The Shot, wrote on Twitter today:

It appears DeMint’s reelection in 2010 will be much more like the Battle of Yorktown than Waterloo http://tinyurl.com/ncs6j3

… to which I had to respond:

Yorktown? So who’s DeMint gonna be? Cornwallis?

Tim came back with:

I was referring to ease of victory for JD. But Obama hasn’t even meet w/ Graham & McCain on HC. How bi-partisan is he being?

And being a last-word kind of guy, I said:

Well, in fairness — he had promised to do that on national security issues. I don’t remember him saying he’d [be] consulting them on domestic…

I’m not even sure how we got onto Obama. Oh, I guess because of the Waterloo thing….

So I guess Tim was casting Jim as Washington. Hey, whether Washington or Cornwallis, I’m having trouble picturing him in a powdered wig. Now if he were Bonaparte or Wellington, that wouldn’t be a problem, since the wigs had gone out of style by 1815.

I’ll bet Obama asked him not to shave, either

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First and foremost, I want to congratulate fellow South Carolinian Ben Bernanke for keeping his job under trying circumstances. I’m glad he doesn’t have to go back to working at South of the Border.

Any time any South Carolinian can keep his job in this economy, considering the total cock-up the folks in charge have made of it, it’s good news… Oh, wait, Ben Bernanke IS one of the people in charge of the economy…

Seriously, though, I have no complaints about Bernanke’s performance. And maybe he has even helped us avoid things getting worse, as the president suggested today in reappointing him.

At the same time, I’m not sure how much difference it makes. The president wanted to signal stability — was in such a hurry to do so that neither he nor Ben could take a moment to put on a tie — and he did that with this action. Fine. And I love it when Democrats appoint Republicans, and vice versa (in fact, about the only Republicans I can stand are those who would appoint or be appointed by Democrats, and again vice versa).

And that might be as far as substance goes. It would be unsettling to change horses at this point, so the president interrupted his vacation to tell the markets he’s not going to shake them up that way. Fine.

And while it wasn’t mentioned, I’ll bet part of the president’s private conversation with Bernanke involved begging the Fed chair to not even consider ever shaving his beard. You don’t think that’s important? Huh. Shows what you know. Just as Ben Bernanke is an expert on the Great Depression, I happen to be an expert on the subject of the economic impact of Ben Bernanke’s beard. I was quoted by The Wall Street Journal on the subject, no less. Do you know anyone else who’s been quoted by the Journal on that subject? I didn’t think so. So all right, then: That makes me the world’s leading authority.

And speaking ex cathedra from my considerable store of expertise, I can assure you that the president reappointed the Dillon Countian for the same reason why Bernanke doesn’t get up one morning and decide to shave (even though I sort of suggested he should last year, but the situation was more desperate then): Because the markets couldn’t handle the change. They’re too fragile.

Is that a promise, Sen. DeMint?

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My attention was drawn to this SCBiz headline:

DeMint says public option would destroy nation’s health care system

… to which I automatically responded, “Is that a promise? Are you sure? You’re not just teasing? All right! When do we get started?”

We’ve heard a lot of silly back-and-forth about health care in recent weeks, but this is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest the one thing that makes the most sense to me: Blow up what we’ve got entirely and start over.

As my long-time readers will know, even back when I HAD good conventional health care coverage, I was agitating for this. Why? Because as I documented in this column and this one and elsewhere on the old blog, most folks who discuss the health care problem in this country focus on the wrong thing. They focus on the people like me who no longer have private employer-provided health care (although for a limited time I have access to the same care via COBRA thank God, at just under $600 a month — to go up over $1,500 after December, if I’m lucky).

But the real problem is that (note the numbers in my parenthetical above), medical coverage has gotten way too expensive even for the lucky ones who have it — and certainly far too expensive for the businesses that try to provide it.

My problem with Obamacare all along has been that the president is too timid on this subject, and this is not a situation for tiptoeing. This nation desperately needs a do-over on the way it pays for health care, because we are paying too much for results that just aren’t good enough for an advanced nation.

So thank you, Sen. DeMint, for getting the conversation started in a more productive direction. Even if you didn’t mean to…

A cold one at the White House

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Not a lot to say about the president’s beer call with Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley at the White House — except that when I saw that they included the veep, I wondered how anybody else got a word in. (And I mean that in a nice way. I like Joe. I enjoy listening to him talk just as much as he does. I’d enjoy a beer with him. Or two, if he was buying.)

Sgt. Crowley didn’t have much to say about it, according to the NYT:

Crowley’s News Conference | 7:30 p.m.

During his short opening remarks, Sgt. Crowley said that he had a “cordial and productive discussion” with President Obama, Mr. Biden and Mr. Gates. He also said that he and Mr. Gates planned to have a telephone conversation in the future.

Afterwards, Sgt. Crowley took several questions from reporters. He declined to go into specifics of what was discussed during the event but did say that there was “no tension” between him and Mr. Gates.

And with that, we are wrapping up this blog post. Thanks, as always, for reading and commenting.

And neither do I.

So do you have a better phone than Obama?

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You know how I mentioned that I’ll be driving back from Pennsylvania on Monday?

Well, because of that I called the local Employment Security office. They sent me a letter a while back saying that they would call me at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 3, and that it was really important. I just realized that was when I would be traveling, so I called today to see if we could set another time.

I was told no, if I couldn’t be available then, it would be at least September before anybody could talk to me. I think the lady on the phone wanted to be helpful, but she didn’t quite understand why I was worried about the call — it’s a cell phone, right? So why would it matter where I was?

Well, yeah, but — here’s why I’m worried:

On a previous occasion driving this route — I want to say it was summer 2007 — Barack Obama tried to call me. It was a previously arranged call, set up Kevin Griffis of the Obama campaign. I had read some briefing papers to be ready for it, and I got my son to take the wheel at the appointed time.

But we had just entered the mountains in Virginia, and the call kept breaking up. I kept hearing Sen. Obama say, “Sir?… Sir?” (He’s very polite.) But he couldn’t hear me. He called back a couple of times, and then just gave up.

No, he wasn’t the president yet — not even the nominee. But hey, if not even he could get through…

So that’s why I’m concerned. But I didn’t think I should tell the lady at the unemployment office that story. She might think I was topping it the nob, putting on airs, and so forth. So I just let it drop…

As usual, Kulturkampf gets us nowhere

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The Henry Louis Gates contretemps last week was a classic case of the kind of thing I studiously ignore — the kind of thing that ideological partisans love to shout at each other about, and which make it all that much harder to constructively discuss subjects that really matter.

But I will pass on this column on the subject in the WSJ, which I thought was good. Of course, I thought it was good; its point is the same one I just made — that this was a destructive distraction. Headlined, “The Gates of Political Distraction: Obama’s mistake was falling for a culture war diversion,” it is written by the Journal‘s iconoclastic house liberal, Thomas Frank. An excerpt:

Liberals, by and large, immediately plugged the event into their unfair-racial-profiling template, and proceeded to call for blacks and whites to “listen to each other’s narratives” and other such anodyne niceties even after it started to seem that police racism was probably not what caused the incident.

Conservatives, meanwhile, were following their own “narrative,” the one in which racism is often exaggerated and the real victim is the unassuming common man scorned by the deference-demanding “liberal elite.” Commentators on the right zeroed in on the fact that Mr. Gates is an “Ivy League big shot,” a “limousine liberal,” and a star professor at Harvard, an institution they regard with special loathing. They pointed out that Mr. Gates allegedly addressed the cop with that deathless snob phrase, “you don’t know who you’re messing with”; they reminded us that Cambridge, Mass., is home to a particularly obnoxious combination of left-wing orthodoxy and upper-class entitlement; and they boiled over Mr. Gates’s demand that the officer “beg my forgiveness.”

“Don’t you just love a rich guy who summers on the Vineyard asking a working-class cop to ‘beg’? How perfectly Cambridge,” wrote the right-wing radio talker Michael Graham in the Boston Herald.

Conservatives won this round in the culture wars, not merely because most of the facts broke their way, but because their grievance is one that a certain species of liberal never seems to grasp. Whether the issue is abortion, evolution or recycling, these liberal patricians are forever astonished to discover that the professions and institutions and attitudes that they revere are seen by others as arrogance and affectation.

Frank got that right.

Indeed, the very idea that the president would waste political capital on this at a time when the country needs him to be strong on health care reform is obscene, and a tragic waste.

DeMint vs. Obama: Health care debate takes downward turn

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Until today, the titanic battle over the future of health care in America was at least based in good grammar. Then I received this deeply troubling communication:

Thursday July 23, 2009

Dear Friends –

By now you’ve probably heard about the ongoing debate Senator DeMint has been having with President Obama on health care. Up until last night this debate, while spirited, was based on the issues.

Unfortunately, President Obama decided to turn the debate away from the issues by having the Democrat National Committee produce a patently false television ad accusing Senator DeMint of having “no plan” for health care.

We hope you will take a minute to watch our factual response in this short web video. Afterward please click here and give us your thoughts on health care reform. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Team DeMint

PS. Please click here to watch the response!

Being a trained observer who gets right to the heart of the matter without delay, I immediately responded to the e-mail thusly:

Actually, it’s the DemocratIC National Committee. You can look it up; you’ll see I’m right.

You see, “Democrat” is a noun, while “Democratic” is the adjective form. Since it’s being used to modify “committee” here, you want the adjective form.

I expect to get a note of thanks momentarily…

Seriously, folks, I feel really bad because I haven’t kept up with the back and forth on this issue. About all I know is that it must be going badly, because it seems Jim DeMint is getting a lot of ink, and from what little I can tell, the senator’s goal is to make sure the president is unsuccessful in reforming our insane health care system. Correct me if I’m wrong on that, but that seems to be the main point — to make sure the president suffers a defeat (“Waterloo” was mentioned, I believe) on this issue of critical importance to the nation.

Y’all know that I’m not a detail man on this stuff, which drives detail-oriented folks like bud and Doug (from their differing perspectives) nuts. But this doesn’t seem to be turning on the details. More and more, it seems to be about “my side up, your side down.” If you’ll recall, Obama ran against that sort of garbage. And if he can’t overcome it on this issue, then you can pretty much say goodbye to his accomplishing much of anything. His adversaries know this. And they care far more about him failing than they do about details.

So it is that in the few moments I’ve had to think about the issue, I find myself rooting for Obama. Back during the election, I was critical that he didn’t want to do enough on health care. But he at least wants to do something, other that rely on the DeMint/Sanford formula of praying to the almighty market.

But set that issue aside. Folks, I supported John McCain in the recent election. But I know our country desperately needs an effective president. It needs leadership. So even if I were neutral on the health care issue, which I’m not (I may not have kept up with the details, but I can see which parties are at least trying to do some good), I’d be rooting for the president on this. The country needs for him to succeed.

If GOP serious about Sanford, Palin, Obama 2nd term a lock

If GOP seriously considers Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin, as we so often see blithely asserted as though it well might, then Obama has a rock-solid lock on a second term, maybe a third.

A third? Hey, the constitution can always be amended again, if the threat to the nation is sufficient…

Nothing, but nothing you can set forth as examples of how feckless the GOP is these days comes even close to the bizarre fact that those two are mentioned, without a hint of irony, as contenders. It was crazy enough, bordering on obscene, when people spoke of Sanford for the 2nd spot last year. But this…

Wednesday’s top stories

So where was my virtual front page Tuesday? Hey, I’m not getting paid to do this, so get offa my back! Be grateful for what I give you.

Harrumph. You may now join me in harrumphing. Harrumph, harrumph. (I didn’t get a ‘harrumph’ outta that guy…”)

Where was I? Oh, yes, today’s virtual front page:

National/International

Lede: Obama Would Take Bigger Role in Markets — OK, this is not a perfect “Buzz” lede because it didn’t quite HAPPEN, but the event was the president proposing it. And it’s more important than the gay benefits thing, and more new than the continuing Iran story. And nothing local or state was really lede-worthy.
Iran Regime Cracking Down — Continued post-election strife in Iran. Look for a sidebar to go with it. Lots to inform readers about here.
U.S. to Extend Gay Benefits — Just another turn in the screw of the Kulturkampf, but a fairly significant one.

Local/State

Handcuffed Tax Study Commission Created — OK, so I threw in an editorial modifier there. The thing is, you sort of need that to see why what happened is important. Two things were essential to making it possible for comprehensive tax reform to happen: There must be no sacred cows, and the Legislature must have a straight up-or-down vote on the final result — no tinkering. That’s the only way anything could pass that would really clean up the tax code. So what did they do? They passed a bill that walled off as sacred the biggest, baddest immediate problem in our tax system — the 2006 property/sales tax swap. (This demonstrates why a commission is needed, because the Legislature itself is too invested in bad policies it created.) Whether they required an up-or-down vote, I could not learn from the coverage I saw.
Vetoes sidebar — The XGR (that’s wire-service jargon for “legislature,” by the way) overrode all 10 of the governor’s vetoes. But that’s pretty much a dog-bites-man story now, isn’t it?
Tenenbaum Draws Bipartisan Praise — This good-news story (anytime you can document bipartisan consensus, it’s good news) is one where local and national intersect.

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