Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Full engagement, the only viable, effective and moral stance for the U.S. to take toward the world

47 Replies

Posting that column last night — the one from 9/23/01 — I realized that I had forgotten to post something else a week earlier.

When I shared with you the hasty column I wrote for the “extra” we put out on 9/11, and the one I turned around immediately and wrote for the next day, I had fully intended also to share a more important piece from several days later — the editorial I wrote for that following Sunday. But the 16th of this month came and went, and I failed to do that.

So I share it now. Being an editorial (an institutional, rather than personal opinion) and being a Sunday piece (when newspapers take a step back from immediate events, and also when they tend to express the views they regard as being of greatest import), it’s different from the other pieces. Less of my voice and style, more formalized. But at the same time, for the purposes of this blog, it also has perhaps greater value as a clear expression of my own views of what the nation should do going forward.

In it, I expressed views I had long held, and still hold, but they were sharpened and set into relief by the events of that week.

Spoiler alert: Basically, this piece is about a couple of things. The first is the need for re-engagement in the world, after a growing isolationism that had worried me all through the 90s. With notable exceptions — our involvement in the Balkans, for instance — we had become more insular, more preoccupied with our own amusements as a fat, happy nation. Up to that point, I had objected on the basis that when you are the world’s richest and most powerful nation (indisputable after the fall of the USSR), it is morally wrong to turn your back on the world, like a rich man behind the walls of his gated community. What 9/11 did was add to that the fact that such disengagement was positively dangerous.

The other main point is something I later learned an interesting term for: DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic.” Actually, that’s not quite it, either. The DIME term refers to ways of exerting power, and that it certainly part of it, but not all of it. Another piece of the concept I was talking about was what you often hear referred to as “soft power.” Unfortunately, that is often mistakenly expressed as an alternative to “hard power.” But they complement each other. A unipolar power trying to achieve all of its goals through either alone is doomed to fail, ultimately.

No, I have to go back to the earlier, vaguer term: Engagement. On every level you can think of — diplomatic, cultural, mercantile, humanitarian, and yes, military.

Much of this piece, given the moment in which it was written, is occupied with the military part. That’s natural. That’s the hardest to persuade people of in our peaceful times (if you doubt we live in peaceful times, I plan a post after this one to address that). The rest, people just nod about and say, yes, of course we should do those things. (OK, perhaps I’m being a bit sanguine about that. I’ll just say that the people who need convincing on the military part are likely to say that — others are likely to say ‘Hell, no — let them fend for themselves.” And thus we have the two sides of isolationism.) They take more convincing on the tough stuff. (Some of you will object, “Not after 9/11! People’s blood was boiling!” But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about passions of the moment. I was talking about long-term policy. I’m talking about what happens after people calm down and say, Never mind; let’s just withdraw.)

Reading it now, I wish the piece had been longer, with far more explication of the other elements, and how they were integrated. The following years, we saw constant argument between two views, neither of which saw the value of the whole concept. On the one hand, you had the Bushian — really, more the Rumsfeldian — notion that all you had to do was topple a tyrant and things would be fine. On the other, there was the myopic view that soft power was the only kind that was moral and effective.

These ideas are as relevant now as ever. Now that we have employed hard power to topple a tyrant in Libya, will we engage fully on other fronts to help Libya have a better future, one in which it has a chance of being a long-term friend, ally and trading partner? Or will we turn our attention away now that the loud noises have stopped going off?

Anyway, I’ve explained it enough. Here it is:

IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, September 16, 2001

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words “missile defense shield” to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.

That’s about the only way it might have helped.

Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

Essentially, we have wasted a decade.

After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.

We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was “It’s the economy, stupid.” Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s “policeman.”

Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.

Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.

In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, “When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general.” That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.

At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.

Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.

We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call “humint” – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.

But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.

We must cease to regard “nation-building” as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.

We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

Why do you think all those people are out of work here in South Carolina?

7 Replies

I didn’t have much to say about South Carolina’s 11.1 percent unemployment rate, beyond these two thoughts: 1) I really hope this isn’t a double-dip recession (and if we actually got out of the first one, which I can’t tell; can you?), and 2) boyohboy am I sick of this stuff.

The disorienting thing for me about all this is that I can’t tell what’s happening. Outside of the newspaper business, I have trouble telling how things are going. I understood the economics of that, so I could tell as we went along: I can see things are bad. OK, now they’re worse. Now they’re WAY worse. Uh-oh, the PACE of getting worse just accelerated, dramatically. Whoa! The bottom just dropped out!

Not so much a roller-coaster ride as a fall down a well.

But out here in the world, where I’m immersed in the thing I was held away from, as a matter of policy — the thing called business — I’m disoriented, and have trouble telling what’s going on. Because it’s going on all around me, above me and below me and inside of me. It’s like… I read once that each man’s experience was totally different on Omaha Beach in the early hours, trapped on a limited scrap of sand that was all pre-sighted by the Germans, as death of various kinds rained down. You would experience one battle, and a guy 15 feet from you would experience something dramatically different.

This is like that, in the business world. Since I wasn’t supposed to touch business in the newspaper world, I could see it unfolding in front of me — like watching it on a screen. Now, I’m in it, and it’s much harder to see the real picture.

So some days I think things are going well, and the economy as a whole is picking up (based on what I see at ADCO and through the lenses of our various clients), and other days… not well at all. And it’s hard to make out the trend, the pattern.

Is it that way for you? Whether it is or not, I can tell that the unemployment rate climbing further is not one of the good signs. Not for any of us.

So that’s what I have to say about it. Someone writing in Salon decided to dig into the numbers, and this is what he had to say:

But a look inside the numbers, at the five worst and five best states, is unhappily revealing. The states with the five highest unemployment rates are Nevada (13.4 percent), California (12.1 percent), Michigan (11.2 percent), South Carolina (11.1 percent) and Florida (10.7 percent.) Nevada, California, Michigan and South Carolina all registered unemployment increases in August, compared to July. Florida held even.

The states with the lowest unemployment rates are North Dakota (3.5 percent), Nebraska (4.2 percent), South Dakota (4.7 percent), New Hampshire (5.3 percent) and Oklahoma (5.6 percent.)…

What does the geographical distribution of the hardest hit areas tell us? Again, not a whole lot that’s new. California, Florida and Nevada were among the three states hit hardest by the housing collapse, with Nevada getting the extra negative bonus of depressed Las Vegas tourism. Michigan, battered by globalization and the woes of the auto industry, has long been near the top of the unemployment charts. (Although the state had been improving quickly until about four months ago, when unemployment started rising again.) South Carolina’s high unemployment rate has been something of a mystery for years. Perhaps the most that can be said is that as a relatively low-tax state dominated by some of the most conservative Republican politicians in the country, it is certainly no advertisement for conservative orthodoxy, at least as far as boosting employment goes.

Of course, that’s about what you’d expect to read in Salon. Next time I see Salon saying anything positive about Republicans, it will be my first time.

They do have a point, though. We have pursued a certain course in South Carolina, in rather dramatic contrast to neighboring states such as Georgia and North Carolina, which decided to build up the kind of infrastructure — especially human infrastructure — that has made their economies stronger than ours.

I’ve lived all over in my life. And in my adult life, I’ve worked — and closely observed politics — in three states (the other two being Tennessee and Kansas). And I’ve never seen any place in this country more afflicted by self-destructive ideology than my home state of South Carolina.

So, you’ve heard what I think, and what some guy writing for Salon thinks. What do you think?

Let’s hear it for the Norwegian UnParty!

12 Replies

At Rotary today, Kathryn Fenner gave me the above bracelet, a souvenir from her visit to the Land of the Midnight Sun. She said it represented “the Norwegian UnParty.”

Naturally curious, I went to the website, and at first found absolutely nothing to argue with. On account of it being in, you know, Norwegian. But then I asked my browser to translate the site — which it did, into a sort of stilted version of English.

And you know what? I found a lot to like. Not that I agreed with everything, of course. Nor would I agree with everything that came out of a hypothetical UnParty convention. But it was not bad. The UnParty isn’t strictly a “Center Party,” which is how this translates, but a lot of the basic ideas are at least compatible. I don’t think any Senterpartiet member would get thrown out of an UnParty meeting (if only because we’re, like, way tolerant of differences, unlike some parties I could name). Here’s a sample, from the A’s:

Abortion

The Center will continue the current abortion laws. A fertilized egg is the seed of a new life. The community has a duty, through legislation and otherwise, to give the unborn child and the woman suitable protection. We will oppose the use and research on embryos, fetal tissues and aborted fetuses in humans.

Adoption

The Center will increase adoption support for 1G (70.256 million). Furthermore, we want to simplify the adoption process through, among other things, simpler regulations, and shorter processing times…

Alcohol

The Center aims to reduce alcohol consumption in the population. Besides a systematic public health with an emphasis on promoting healthy drinking habits, the controlled access and high taxes as the most active full measures to limit alcohol use and reduce alcohol related harm. Prevention among young people and raising the average age at onset of alcohol is of great value, so that alcohol use decreases. Minimum age for purchase is an important preventive measure.

Alternative Energy

Environment and climate change means we must invest heavily in developing new technologies and alternative energy sources. The Center’s goal for Norway to produce 23 TWh of renewable electricity by 2020. New energy in the form of district heating and goals for energy efficiency must be additional to this. The total hydropower resources to be used better. There should be more wind power on land and at sea, it will be extracted more heat and electricity from biomass, and energy production from the sea in the form of wave and sea heat should be increased….

Asylum

The Center will have an immigration and integration policies that put human life in focus and where the individual has clear rights and obligations. All who live in the country should have their rights and opportunities addressed regardless of the original national origin. Any individual applying for asylum and stay in Norway must have confidence that the legal rights protected and that have met their rights as individuals. Everyone should have equal opportunities and equal access to language training, education and work backgrounds and resources. New citizens must, on their own terms, contribute a great effort to be included in community life through learning the language, and through participation in key community venues such as work, organizations and education. Good integration policy is best for the community. The Center will have an immigration and integration policies that allow local knowledge and local involvement is bearing so that the integration is real…

I also sort of liked what they said was their basic ideology, as far as I can like any ideology:

Ideology

The ideology of the Centre builds on the ideas of responsibility, fellowship and a long-term and sustainable management of nature and the environment. A vibrant democracy and decentralization of ownership, power, capital and population are basic elements of the Centre’s policy.

You know, I need to get some of my UnParty ward heelers and lackeys to get organized and put together a proper manifesto for us. All we have so far is our basic “fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets:”

  • First, unwavering opposition to fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets. Within our party would be many ideas, and in each situation we would sift through them to find the smartest possible approach to the challenge at hand. Another day, a completely different approach might be best.
  • Respect for any good idea, even if it comes from Democrats or Republicans.
  • Contempt for any stupid idea, even if it comes from our own party leaders.
  • Utter freedom to vote however one’s conscience dictates, without condemnation or ostracism from fellow party members.

Perhaps I should elaborate. Or perhaps it’s perfect the way it is. I don’t know.

Anybody else think Jim DeMint, the Man Who Would Be Kingmaker, has gotten too big for his britches?

10 Replies

Or breeches, if you prefer to be proper. I just like using the colloquial version in this context.

I was not set off by the video above, but rather by this headline in the paper this morning:

DeMint mocks Obama in video, won’t attend speech

What I’m saying is that boycotting the speech is what gets me much more than the video, which is fairly run-of-the-mill, even tame. But the part where he won’t deign to listen to the president, after the president has already been dissed by the House, takes us to a new level.

Jim DeMint, between refusing to tolerate the presence of the president of the United States (perhaps our latter-day Wellington is frustrated not to have brought about Mr. Obama’s “Waterloo” yet) to his peremptorily summoning those who would replace the president before him, to be questioned one at a time like prisoners in the dock, seems to be trying to carve out a unique space for himself in American politics.

It seems to be a position something like that of a king (or something more powerful, a kingmaker). In any case, it’s nothing that our Framers envisioned in setting up this system of governance. It’s personal. It’s specific to him. And it answers to no one. We need to come up with a whole new system of political science (or at least, hark back to a very old one) even to come up with the terminology with which to explain what he is doing.

How does his pattern of behavior strike you?

And for more conventional analysis of the debate…

16 Replies

Having given you very fragmented impressions, I owe you some synthesis, some analysis. I generally endorse the thrust of this assessment by Politico:

Mitt, Perry bet big on GOP direction

By: Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith
September 8, 2011 04:43 AM EDT

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. – The two leading Republican presidential candidates made very different bets Wednesday night about the GOP primary electorate – dueling wagers that will set the contours of the race going forward.

Rick Perry’s debate debut here was hot and uncompromising. He threw elbows at Republicans from Ron Paul and Karl Rove on up. Offered an opportunity to retreat from his attacks on Social Security, he promised more “provocative” language about the program. Mitt Romney, by contrast, was measured and sober. He presented himself as a competent manager who can fix the economy and beat President Obama.

Perry’s bet is on a conservative, confrontational and mad-as-hell Republican Party. Romney’s is that GOP activists want, above all, to win and will come to recognize that nominating the Texas governor would be an act of political suicide.

The divide between the two men reflects an ongoing debate that’s splitting the Republican Party both on the campaign trail and beyond it. Some of its leaders, looking back at the 2010 midterm elections, believe that the party – and the nation – are ready to gorge on red meat as never before. The American people, goes this line of thinking, recognize that entitlements must be addressed and that old-style demagoguery over the issue has become less effective…

Every election — every partisan election, that is (municipal elections in SC, for instance, offer blessed exceptions to the dismal rule) — we face this problem. The primaries are all about appealing to extremes, and the general is about appealing to swing voters like me. Each time that happens, I can hardly wait for the primaries to be over. Unfortunately, too often the result is that we independents are left with two extremist yahoos yelling at each other in the general election, and no viable options. (The 2008 presidential election was a blessed exception from that, with both parties choosing to nominate their least partisan candidates.)

But this time, the contrast seems more stark in the GOP. You have a couple of candidates — Romney and Huntsman — with their eyes somewhat on what happens after the primary. But the rest of the field acts as though that day will never come — as indeed it won’t, for them, if the majority of Republicans agree with the Romney/Huntsman assessment. All of the others are about where they think the GOP electorate is, and nothing more.

(Ron Paul, of course, is in his own category. But strangely, he is acting like a guy who believes that he actually has a chance of winning. Why else would he be attacking Perry so relentlessly — unless, perhaps, he just thinks Perry would be worse for the country than the others. Normally, you’d expect a guy in Ron Paul’s position, outlier with a mission, to simply use the exposure to advance his ideas, hoping to influence the debate — which he has had success at doing. This “take down the other guy” behavior, coming from him, is interesting.)

It will be awhile before we know who is right. The first indication will occur here in South Carolina. I have little faith in Iowa or even New Hampshire as bellwethers.

Something I changed my mind about…

9 Replies

Occasionally, I get asked here whether I ever change my mind about anything. I don’t know why I get asked that; probably because of the very definite manner in which I present opinions that I have examined and tested over and over again. I have a certain tone, people tell me.

Well, yes — sometimes I do change my mind. Here’s something I changed my mind about some time ago…

On an earlier post, “Tim” changed the subject and brought up Trey Walker’s departure to become a lobbyist for USC:

Wasn’t one of [Gov. Haley’s] points in the State of the State to eliminate state employee lobbyists?
http://www.thestate.com/2011/09/02/1955609/haley-deputy-taking-usc-job.html

And that reminded me… Back when we I led the “Power Failure” project at The State in 1991, I was convinced that state agency lobbyists were a bad idea. And I described the badness of the idea in the same terms the libertarians use: It was wrong for the taxpayers to have to pay someone to lobby the Legislature to spend more tax money in their area. Of course, that was a gross oversimplification of what lobbyists do, but it seemed convincing at the time. In those days, I was occasionally guilty of thinking about issues not much more deeply than Nikki Haley does.

Speaking of which… most of the actual good ideas that Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley espouse — and they have advocated some good one — can be found in a reprint of the “Power Failure” project. In fact, in Sanford’s case, a lot of them seem to have come directly from just such a reprint that I sent him when he was first starting to run for governor. Then, for some time, I heard my own words out on the stump and then coming from the governor’s office (and some of you still wonder why I endorsed the guy in 2002).

Anyway, back to the topic…

Over time, I changed my mind about the state agency lobbyists. About lobbyists in general, but especially state agency ones. I changed my mind about a number of things after I moved from news to editorial. I thought I was a pretty thoughtful guy when I was in news. But after I had to write opinions every day that would be read by more than 100,000 people, people who would challenge every word, every concept, who would tear into any weakness in my thinking, I thought about things on a deeper level than I had before, taking more factors into consideration than I ever had before.

One of the factors was that, as I observed the Legislature more and more, I came to value more the input that only someone with intimate knowledge of an agency could offer to the legislative process. Let’s just say that the more I knew about our lawmakers, and the harder I looked into issues before taking a position, the less impressed I was with our solons’ understanding of what was going on. Having someone there who could say, “Here’s how this works” before they make a change affecting an agency is immensely valuable. And folks, it’s not always about spending. Often, it’s about whether the policies put into law help or hurt the agency’s ability to deliver its assigned service to the people of South Carolina.

Those guys over in the State House need all the relevant, well-informed input they can get. And if the lobbyists are any good, they are worth their salaries and then some.

Even Nikki Haley thinks so, since she said about Trey’s move, “He’s a talented, loyal and committed guy — and the University of South Carolina is lucky to have him.” Which I take to mean that she agrees with me that he’ll be worth his $135,000 salary there.

Once Trey gets on board, maybe when he makes his visits to the State House, he can drop by his former boss’s office and fill her in on what USC is all about, and how important it is to this state.

If he could do that, he’d be worth twice the pay.

You know what you know, you know?

19 Replies

People who reach conclusions rapidly, intuitively — the way I do — may have confidence in their conclusions. Which I generally do, because when the conclusions are testable, I’m wrong seldom enough that my confidence is preserved. But I know this faculty is (like all decision-making processes) fallible, and there is a certain insecurity caused by the perceptions of others, particularly the concrete thinkers, the materialists, the folks who test as an S on the Myers Briggs scale, as opposed to my extreme N. The people who view holistic, Gestalten perception with utter contempt.

This habit of thought is extremely useful in arriving at opinions on complex, controversial issues in time to write about them on deadline. It’s why I was extremely adept at being an editorial page editor, if at nothing else (something that didn’t matter in the end, since it all came down to money). Not only for the purposes of writing opinions myself, but (much more to the point, since I was the editor) for guiding the board quickly to a conclusion. We’d be arguing, and then I would say something that paid due consideration to everyone’s seemingly disparate views, but which was coherent and followed logically and made all the people who had been arguing nod and say Yes, that’s our position.

It sounds like I’m bragging about how brilliant I am, but not really. (In  fact, to doubters I’m confessing what an idiot I am.) Frankly, I suspect most people look at me and wonder whether I’m good at anything. Well, I am, and that’s the thing. The one thing that seems to impress people most when they witness it, and when they are disposed to be impressed. The rest of the time, I think they’re more inclined to wonder who let the incompetent doofus into the room.

Conveniently, it’s a talent that also occasionally comes in handy working as a Mad Man. Much of what we do at ADCO still bewilders me, but when it comes time to sum up a message that the client has been struggling to express, I am able to contribute.

This works great, when people are impressed — such as yesterday, when a client called some modest flicker of insight of mine “brilliant.” (Which it wasn’t — I later looked at it written and there was a glaring grammatical error in what I’d said. But fixable.)

It’s more of a problem when people don’t think I’m brilliant — in fact, quite the opposite — and challenge my conclusions. You know, the way Bud and Doug always do. With those guys, I get frustrated because most of my firm assertions cannot be supported by a mathematical proof that will satisfy them, so they conclude that I’m just making it all up or something. And they assert it with sufficient vehemence — being as confident in their conclusions as I am in mine — that sometimes, like a dust mote drifting into a gleaming clean room, a tiny bit of doubt surfaces in my own mind: If I’m so right, why can’t I prove it to everyone’s satisfaction? Which I knew I couldn’t do, even before meeting Bud and Doug. Anyone who thinks his beliefs are self-evident to all (however he arrives at them) will be quickly disabused by even a short stint as editorial page editor. (Yes, Virginia, before blogs and Twitter and email there was the telephone, and snail mail, and running into detractors at social occasions. All designed to take you down a notch.)

So, I find it reassuring to read something like this, in an article in Slate about the uncertainties entertained by identical twins about whether they are identical:

As science looked for more cost-effective ways to divine zygotic history, blood tests and other lab work gave way to surveys that combined objective measurements—height, weight, tone of voice, etc.—with questions about how the pairs were perceived. Were they confused for each other by teachers and friends? Parents? Strangers? But even that proved more in-depth than necessary. In a 1961 study by a Swedish scientist named Rune Cederlof, the whole exam hinged upon a single, probing question: “When growing up, were you and your twin ‘as like as two peas’ or of ordinary family likeness only?”

It turned out that whether twins thought they’d been “as like as two peas” could predict the results of every other available test with surprising accuracy. Cederlof found that the twins’ answers to this one item on the questionnaire matched overwhelmingly with five independent measures of blood type. After nearly 100 years, our finest scientists realized that discerning a man’s zygotic origin was about as easy as discerning whether he was ill by asking if he had a runny nose.

The examination of DNA, then, may be an entirely superfluous reassurance: like searching for witnesses to a murder when the act itself was caught on tape.

Yes! All right! Go, intuitive perception!

By the way, you may enjoy taking the quiz at the bottom of the first installment of that article. It will cause you to be skeptical about  your own skepticism. (Oops. Maybe I should have said “spoiler alert” first…)

I continue to believe Twin B and Twin A are identical, despite their pronounced differences. Such as the contrasting ways they habitually pose for pictures (one makes faces; the other instinctively goes for glamour). Don't be fooled by the fact that one has shorter hair.

Can you tell the sex of the writer?

6 Replies

I’ve given you nothing so far today, so perhaps even this, insubstantial as it is, will seem like something.

Among many things I did today instead of blogging was try to continue cleaning out my inbox, which a day or two ago was up to about 500. That happens because there are things that I don’t have time to deal with at a given moment, but that I want to do something with, so I leave them where I found them rather than filing them away, where I’ll never see them. And of course the next day another hundred and something come in, and I try to winnow those, but there are always a few more that end up staying there for the same reasons, and so on. Then, there are days I don’t really have time to cull at all, and things just get deeper and deeper.

No, it’s not a good system, but it is mine.

Anyway, I managed to dig today all the way down (I only have 211 left, mostly old stuff) to something I saved on June 3. It was this Tweet, which I had emailed to myself hoping to blog about:

Slate @Slate
Can you tell if this paragraph was written by a man or a woman? V.S. Naipaul says he can: http://slate.me/lWMWfg

Yes, I took the test provided by The Guardian — the one designed to determine whether I could do what Naipaul claimed HE could do, which was quickly tell whether something was written by a man or a woman.

And of course, I failed — I got 4 out of 10 right. Which is what the person who devised the test had intended. It’s easy enough to pick passages by men that sound like they are in the voice of a woman, and vice versa. To make it hard (or, in this case, to prove Naipaul is a sexist pig, which seemed to be the point — which he deserved, since he was being ungentlemanly).

Often, when I start out thinking, for whatever reason (say, an ambiguous byline such as “Pat,” or “Leslie”) that I’m reading something by a man or a woman and I’m wrong, at some point in the reading I go, “Wait a minute…” because something doesn’t seem right. And then I realize — the man is a woman, or vice-versa. Since, as an editor, I’ve had to critically read thousands of pieces from strangers, this has happened enough for me to note a trend.

Sometimes I’m wrong about my realization, though. I suspect, based on observations over the past thirty or forty years, that men and women (especially younger ones) are writing more and more like each other. Just as in other areas the genders are crossing paths. For instance… I’ve been driving for more than 40 years. For the last 25-30 years, I’ve noticed that young women are driving a lot more like young men than they did the first 10-15 — more aggressive, more likely to cut you off, more stupid in general, just like young guys.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed a number of trends among young guys that combine to make it harder to determine the presence of a Y chromosome in superficial behavior. OK, guys still do more stupid stuff than women do, since testosterone still exists in them, but it seems that some of them try harder and harder, and often succeed, to express themselves like women. I won’t go into detail because one of them might punch me. Not very hard, of course, the wussies, but I still would find it inconvenient.

Anyway, take the test if you like. I’ll bet you flunk it. I certainly did. I knew I would, so I played along. When I thought the deviser of the test was trying to lead me to answer a certain way, I did.

I think I could probably devise a test you could pass along these lines. (The way to do it would be to choose paragraphs that are characteristically masculine or feminine in tone. In other words, stack the deck toward being easy rather than hard. If you chose paragraphs at random, everyone would flunk that, too. Most paragraphs provide few clues.) But you know what? I think my not having time to do that is why this post idea has sat here for almost three months…

There’s a reason the smarter conservatives aren’t stepping forward

16 Replies

Just before I left the office last night, this Politico piece landed in my Inbox:

It’s a tough time to be a conservative intellectual.

From the Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal, on the pages of policy periodicals and opinion sections, the egghead right’s longing for a presidential candidate of ideas — first Mitch Daniels, then Paul Ryan – has been endless, intense, and unrequited.

Profoundly dissatisfied with the current field, that dull ache may only grow more acute after Ryan’s decision Monday to take himself out of the running.

The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke, and Mitt Romney is a fraud.

They don’t publicly express their judgments in such harsh terms but the low regard is obvious…

“It just does seem to be a little crazy in a year when you have a chance to win the presidency that a lot of leading lights aren’t putting themselves forward,” said William Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and indefatigable Ryan advocate who hopefully brandished a Ryan-Rubio button on Fox News Sunday…

There’s a reason for that, Bill. Actually, a couple of them.

Early on, when some of the smarter conservatives — I count Mike Huckabee among their number, for instance — decided not to run, I attributed it in part to the widely-held belief (and one I still hear smart Republicans express, sotto voce) that Obama was going to win re-election.

Since then, the president has suffered a number of setbacks, and retreated to Martha’s Vineyard to rest and recuperate. And he’s looking vulnerable.

So why don’t we see people the more intellectual conservatives could respect step forward? Because of what Rick Perry has realized: Anti-intellectualism sells, big-time. There’s nothing original about this. Anti-intellectualism is as American as blue jeans. And anyone willing to stoop to conquer is going to have a wild ride upward, at least for a time. And when you find a candidate who doesn’t have to stoop, who doesn’t dumb down because he or she truly doesn’t know  any better, well you’ve found electoral gold. For a time, at least. Because the voters love the real thing.

I’m not saying the voters are dumb. It’s just that, if you don’t hesitate to think, you can say things very forcefully, and without complicating caveats, you can charm a crowd — sometimes. This seems to be one of those times, at least for a portion of the electorate.

Unfortunately for those who would like to see a change in the executive branch, that portion numbers less than 50 percent of the overall. But within the Republican Party right now, it’s big enough to scare away the deep thinkers. I’ll be surprised if anyone who would have been to William F. Buckley’s liking emerges.

“Let them sue.” Amen to that, Warren

7 Replies

Meant to post this yesterday, before the city council’s action. But I’m going to post it anyway, because I agree so strongly with what Warren Bolton had to say in his column Tuesday morning:

Let them sue

By Warren Bolton – Associate Editor

WHILE SOME Columbia officials understandably are concerned about a possible legal challenge, that’s not reason enough for City Council to shun a permanent teen curfew in Five Points.

There’s too much at stake in terms of controlling violence and ensuring overall community safety, particularly the safety and welfare of our children. It would be disappointing for City Council to allow the temporary curfew that’s been in place for about two months to sunset as if all is well. It is not.

This community needs to make a clear, strong statement that it is not acceptable for youngsters to hang out late at night and into the wee hours in bar districts that cater to adults. Nothing good happens there — or anywhere else — for children out during those hours. Children out late at night are just as likely to be victims as perpetrators…

The NAACP and ACLU have threatened to sue if a curfew is enacted.

Let them sue.

… (A) lawsuit might be the best thing that could happen, because this community needs a curfew, and once and for all, we would get a definitive answer…

Amen to that, Warren. Yes, there are those who may sue. Let them bring it on.

If an elected official or administrator is to refrain from responsible action whenever the ACLU threatens to sue, then he or she should resign and let someone with some sand take over. That’s what the ACLU does (I’m not sure what the NAACP does these does other than pursue a boycott that seems designed to have the opposite of the stated effect). That’s what the ACLU will always do. You have to go ahead and govern responsibly anyway.

To extend this point a bit: I also get frustrated when legislative bodies shrink back from doing the right thing because someone may filibuster. Whenever that happens, I say, “Let them.” Allow the filibustering party to make a spectacle of itself. Allow the issues to be aired completely, openly. Let it become obvious who is obstructing effective action. And then, man up and invoke cloture (something senators tend to have a horror of). But if you can’t get the votes to do that, just let the spectacle continue, until either you eventually prevail or the opposing party has burned up every grain of public goodwill it may once have enjoyed. And then try again.

The obstructionists will always do what they do. When you’re trying to do the right and responsible thing, it is your job, your obligation, to overcome their opposition — not be intimidated by it.

Columbia’s “assault” on barbecue (Is nothing sacred?)

6 Replies

Consider this sort of an op-ed. Bryan Caskey writes to me to bring my attention to his own blog post about the city’s crackdown on food trucks, which I excerpt here:

Columbia Food Trucks Under Assault from City Council

Think that job-killing regulations are just a Federal problem? Think again. Columbia is just recently experiencing a food truck revival, which has brought great food and a wonderful sense of style to our little town. However, the City Council has passed a stupid regulation:

Starting in February, any vendor who wants to set up shop on private property to sell anything from puppies to produce must have written permission from the landowner. They also must provide city officials with drawings of the sites they frequent and must meet zoning requirements, especially having sufficient parking spaces.

This is ridiculous. If I, as a private property owner, want to invite a food truck to come to my business, I have to draft and execute a written agreement. Then, the food truck has to go down to the City of Columbia and provide a government clerk with a copy of that agreement, provide a drawing of the site, and must jump through other hoops, and probably fill out a couple forms…and probably pay some sort of fee. I would think that permission from the property owner should be sufficient….
Our City Government needs to focus on the serious problems facing Columbia. Food trucks selling me delicious BBQ are not one of them. The City is saying that this is an “unintended consequence”, and that they’re trying to get at other people, but what’s the deal with that? Are we having an epidemic of moving flea markets? Is that the biggest problem we have now as a City? This is just another example of the over-regulation that is running rampant at every level of government in America. Keep your regulations off my food truck!

For the rest of Bryan’s post, visit his blog, “Permanent Press.”

This ultimate libertarian fantasy could make super-gory Reality TV — IF they’d allow the cameras

14 Replies

I'm picturing sawed-off shotguns -- but no federal marshals like Sean Connery to stop you from using them as you like!

Bart had to know he was going to set me off on a laugh-fest when he shared this:

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

Wowee. If you want to read the whole story, here’s where Bart got it. And here’s where they got it.

the part that really cracked me up about this particular libertarian fantasy is where they envision “looser building codes.”

You’re going to be living on, essentially, an oil platform — an extremely physically limited space — in the middle of the ocean? You’d better have the strictest building codes in the history of the world. In fact, while you’ve got me going — “building”? Really? You’re saying that these Überflakes would be able to take it into their heads to build new structures, according to the whims of each Ayn Randian individual, in a shared space that exists on the oceanic equivalent of the head of a pin?!?!?

For the engineering even to be feasible, you’d have to design the whole sovereign city-state all in advance, on shore. I’m talking physics here, not political philosophy. Sure, you could allow for expansion, but only within the context of the original design, or the whole thing would become untenable. A desert island, maybe — if it’s really huge, so these cranky individualists can spread out and not get on each others’ nerves. But on one of these tiny things? Really? You mean, somebody thought about this for more than five seconds, and is still considering it? And this guy gave them a million and a quarter?

But yeah, let’s roll with this! Go ahead and eliminate building restrictions entirely! Stick planks out over the edge like on a pirate ship and put condominiums on them! Who’s to stop you?

Combine that with the “few restrictions on weapons,” and these few individuals should be able to make a lot of money in the Reality TV market by putting cameras in every nook and cranny (if they can suppress their strong libertarian prejudices against such things — which I think they could for enough moolah, which libertarians crave). As entertainment, it would rival anything the Roman Colosseum ever dreamed up. And it would be perfectly legal! No one could say thee nay?

Imagine it, those of you who have actually been paying attention to the way humans behave in reality. Surely we’ve all encountered the phenomenon of neighbors suing each other over minor infractions of the neighborhood covenant. The ill will gets to bad that people move away from their dream homes. Imagine the tensions in this super-tight space — no rolling lawns to act as a buffer — with “looser building codes” and everyone packing an arsenal!

Sawed-off shotguns. That would be my weapon of choice in such tight quarters.

Anybody ever see “Outland,” with Sean Connery? It’s “High Noon” transferred to a mining colony on one of the moons of Jupiter. No ray guns, but sawed-off shotguns. (That was the touch that made the movie.) Awesome.

That’s what a Seastead would be like, as envisioned. Only without the federal marshal, which was Sean Connery’s role (and don’t ask me how a Scot got to be a federal marshal — it’s the future!). I suspect Thiel knew all this when he gave them the money. It’s pocket change to him, and maybe he thinks it would be fun to watch.

Hurrah for the House Republicans — they reject recall

22 Replies

The SC Democratic Party is griping about this:

Columbia, SC — In a vote along party lines, House Republicans refused to take up an amendment that would allow a statewide Recall Bill to be taken up in the House today. The bill, sponsored by Reps. Boyd Brown, Todd Rutherford, Bakari Sellers, James Smith and Leon Stavrinakis, all Democrats, calls for a recall mechanism for all statewide office holders.

In the past weeks, since the Ken Ard scandal began, voters in South Carolina have been calling for recall legislation as a way to hold their elected officials accountable. Today, Lt. Governor Ard announced he would not step aside from his post, giving Democrats an even greater incentive to pass this bill onto the voters of South Carolina.

Rep. Boyd Brown, the author of the bill, release this quote about the legislation refusal.

“Ken Ard’s unwillingness to do what is right is a clear example as to why the people of South Carolina deserve a chance to recall elected officials.  If he does not step aside, he should be removed from office. It’s apparent now, that South Carolina Republicans want to protect their own, while they continue their pattern of neglect towards the people of our state.”

The maneuver was blocked by Rep. Philip Lowe, a Republican of Florence, Ard’s hometown.

-###-

For my part, I say “Hurrah for the House GOP,” assuming this report is accurate. Worst idea in a long time.

You need to be careful about your associations

33 Replies

This devil’s bargain that the GOP has made with the Tea Party since the GOP’s traumatic loss in 2008 — which seems to have driven the party half-mad with grief, and into the arms of the snake-flag crowd — just looks worse and worse. And not just from the perspective of UnPartisans like me. I would feel a lot worse about it were I a Republican. I mean a real one — of the Lincoln, Eisenhower, or Reagan variety.

Of course, the Democrats are eating it up; they think it’s great — the crazier their opponents get, the better they like it.

For the rest of us, watching these extremists drag down the GOP in the debt “debate,” and the GOP still clinging hard enough to drag the country and the world’s economy down with it, is pretty agonizing.

And if you’re a Republican, this has to be really uncomfortable. First, they helped people like Nikki Haley roll right over the actual conservatives like Henry McMaster (and Bob Inglis, and others).

And then, you have to watch stuff like this Kershaw County “when to shoot a cop” thing just getting worse and worse. It gets hard to disassociate yourself from a guy like Jeff Mattox, as much as you’d like to.

Last night, the picture above cropped up in two places — in an e-mail from the Democratic Party, and in a post by Will Folks. It purports to show Jeff Mattox, the Kershaw County GOP co-chair and member of Kershaw County Patriots (which, according to the Camden paper, he calls a Tea Party group) with you-know-who.

If you’re a mainstream Republican, you cringe in private at Nikki Haley being your governor, if you’re paying attention. Now you have to face the fact that all this anti-government stuff takes you to some pretty crazy places. It’s a matter of degrees, a series of steps.

  1. One step: Mere anti-government rhetoric, with a hint of menace. Gov. Haley likes to say people in government “are incredibly scared and it’s a beautiful thing.”
  2. Another step: This Mattox guy “likes” the cop-killing post, but says he doesn’t really want to kill cops: “No. It’s just kind of a conversation.” Eloquent defense, huh?
  3. Next step: “Basic logic dictates that you either have an obligation to LET ‘law enforcers’ have their way with you, or you have the right to STOP them from doing so, which will almost always require killing them.”

And then you have cops in Kershaw County going around wearing body armor.

It’s all connected. And it’s no wonder that Matt Moore and others over at party HQ are trying to cut themselves off from the more extreme end of the rope.

All right. OK. Here’s a post about the stupid debt “debate”

55 Replies

Kept hoping — against hope, of course — this debt thing would get resolved before I had to say something about it. I’ve had observations to make about it along the way, but just haven’t wanted to get into it. I hate the subject; it bores me to tears. But it also makes me angry. Part of the anger is over the substance, of course. But part of it is that they’re making me think about this stuff. This is why we have representative democracy, you see. We elect people to go off and handle this stuff and make sure they don’t drive the country onto the rocks — and NOT bother us with the excruciating details.

They’re not getting the job done. Part of the reason, of course, is that there are a bunch of people in the House — the Tea Party guys — who don’t get what the responsibility of public office is all about. They think their bumper stickers slogans, the things that got them elected, are reality, and don’t understand that the world is more complicated than the concepts that got them elected. Unfortunately, they also have a certain cognitive block from ever learning they are wrong. Most people go into elective office with all sorts of misconceptions and foolish ideas. Most, whether they are “liberal” or “conservative,” realize with experience that there are broader responsibilities to the country (and in this case, to the entire world, since the already-weakened worldwide economy is poised to go over the brink with us). It’s not just about how they and their constituents feel about things, and unfortunately they have very powerful resistance to learning, ever, how wrong they are.

Part of the problem is that a significant part of their ideology involves rejection of the idea that experience is valuable. This is a common populist fallacy, of course, but it’s particularly malignant in this case, in terms of its effect on the world. People who go to Washington — or Columbia, or wherever — and study issues and come to understandings different from the prejudices they had originally… are considered sellouts, under this ideology. Such people who embrace larger responsibilities are not wiser in this view; they are corrupted.

Another obstacle is that this ideology is particularly nihilistic toward what happens to the world at large, as long as the ideology is served.

This makes it very dangerous for people with such a worldview to hold office. Oh, it’s not so bad to have one or two of these anti-Mr. Smiths at the table (Mr. Smith went to Washington to make the world a better place; these guys go to Washington to tell the world to go to hell). Unfortunately, the party that now holds a momentary (and at my age, I consider two-year cycles to be “momentary”) majority in the House knows that it holds that tenuous power because of the knot of such people in its midst. And is held hostage by it.

Speaking of “hostage,” did you see that performance by Boehner last night? He was like the prisoner forced to recite the propaganda with an AK-47 pointed at his head just off-camera. The only think lacking in his performance was the blinked Morse code (or maybe it was there; I don’t read Morse) saying “I don’t really believe this stuff; I just have to say it.” But his tone and body language did that. The performance brought to mind all those meetings I read about in which Boehner was the Soviet commanding officer caught in the middle, trying to do the right thing, and Eric Cantor was the sneering zampolit, ready to report him to the Central Committee for the slightest lack of revolutionary zeal.

Obama, by contrast, was more convincing last night. Part of that was pure talent. I’m not accustomed to watching Boehner, but I doubt that he’s nearly the orator Obama is. Almost no one is, particularly at communicating sober conviction.

I heard some commentary on the radio (NPR) this morning that said neither man gave America what it wanted last night — a way out — but simply acted as apologist for his own side’s position.

I suppose that’s true. But Obama’s position is the defensible one. He wants cuts and revenue increases, which is what a rational person who is not blinded by ideology would choose. Neither is what said rational person would want. Until the economy is ticking along a lot more strongly, both spending cuts and tax increases could have a chilling effect.

But here’s the thing: NOT getting control of our mounting debt, under these circumstances, would have a much worse effect. It’s not just about raising the debt ceiling. If you do that, and don’t reduce the gap between spending and revenue, we’re still likely to have a devastating downgrade of the nation’s credit rating. And we can’t afford that.

To let one’s natural reluctance to cut spending or raise taxes get in the way of dealing with that would be unconscionable. And letting a narrow ideology (particularly one that holds that it is ALWAYS right to do one and NEVER right to do the other, regardless of circumstances, which is the height of foolishness — but I guess that’s a workable definition of ideology) get in the way is much, much worse.

A word from someone who knows PART of what the Norway killer was thinking

29 Replies

When I saw this headline this morning in the WSJ — “Inside the Mind of the Oslo Murderer” — I thought, “Here we go again, with someone presuming to know something he couldn’t really know.”

I was wrong. You might want to go read it. It’s written by a guy who apparently helped inspire the shooting suspect:

But I was stunned to discover on Saturday that Breivik was a reader of my own work, including my book “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within.” In comments posted in 2009 on a Norwegian blog, document.no, Breivik expressed admiration for my writings, but criticized me for not being a cultural conservative (although he was pleased that I was not a Marxist, either)….

In his manifesto, which is written in such good English that one wonders whether he had the assistance of a native speaker, Breivik quotes approvingly and at length from my work, mentioning my name 22 times. It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the past couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo.

It is also chilling to see the way he moves from a legitimate concern about genuine problems to an unspeakably evil “solution.”…

That’s gotta make a guy think twice about what he’s written.

It did not change the writer’s mind, however. And it would be facile to say that it should have. Of course, he may advocate many offensive ideas — I don’t know, not having read his books. But the fact is, Islamism does present a challenge to liberal societies. The main challenge being how to absorb large numbers of people whose cultural frame of reference is at odds with liberal values, without losing sight of those values.

Recall: The worst idea in SC politics in a long, long time

40 Replies

I have been SO busy today that I haven’t had a chance to properly excoriate the horrendous idea put forward yesterday, but here’s what I said about it this morning on Twitter:

This recall proposal is the worst idea SC Dems have come up with in many a day, so of course Nikki Haley is for  it: http://j.mp/nTdHqI

As for WHY it’s the worst idea… First, if you don’t know — if you don’t understand, on a fundamental level, why a republic is superior to direct democracy (which this would be a leap toward), then you’ll have to wait for a day when I have a lot more time than I have right now. I might not persuade you then, because this goes to essential values. But I’ll try, when I get time.

For now, I will say that there’s a simple reason why these two parties support it:

  • Democrats are out of power, so they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. This is the most desperate of desperate throws.
  • It’s a bad idea, so Nikki Haley’s for it.

OK, to elaborate on that second point… Nikki is always for anything that has populist appeal, that is to say, something that sounds good to someone who has never thought carefully about politics. She adores bumper-sticker sayings such as “I want to run government like a business,” which sounds great to the politically innocent, but betrays a lack of understanding of both government and business, why they are different, and why they should be different.

This is like that.

I’ll also throw at you a rushed note I sent a friend this morning who asked me what I thought about recalls:

They are evil. They are cousins to the evil initiative process.
Here’s one thought people should be able to relate to (aside from the obvious, emotional argument that this is why things are so screwed up in California — this is how they got Ah-nold as their gov): Already, we almost have a state of perpetual election. This would mean that, quite literally, we would be in a state of perpetual election, with every elected official constantly running to keep his seat. That’s completely unacceptable. There must come a time when officials can turn away from selling themselves to us and devote their attention to governing.
Of COURSE Nikki likes the idea — she has no notion of being a governor; she is all about the perpetual campaign. That’s why, instead of a chief of staff, she has a campaign manager.
It’s a tough argument to make, because the populist impulse is that voters ALWAYS want to be in the driver’s seat. But if you do this, you might as well have direct democracy — which, unfortunately, ALSO appeals to the unreflective mind.
To use a business analogy — in practically every line of work, there must come a time when, in order to be effective, you have to stop talking to the customers and clients and DO THE WORK for which they are paying you.
I could go on, but I’ve got to do other stuff.

As for the deeper reasons why it’s such a bad idea, those will have to wait. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves.

I don’t know what it’s saying, but I think I agree

2 Replies

You’ll never guess why I was looking at the above picture.

No, really.

Remember when I mentioned communitarianism back here? Well, I was looking for a link in connection with that, and I ran across Amitai Etzioni’s Twitter profile, and Twitter told me about some other guys who Tweet about similar topics. So I thought I’d check them out.

This guy’s profile led me to this magazine website, and I found this picture at the bottom of the page. I don’t know why it was there. It seemed to be a stand-alone, rather than illustrating some article. I don’t know what it was saying about the nation and the world and geopolitics, but I think it was very profound. Something about strength, combined with balance. Symmetry comes into it somewhere. Warm sunshine also. Water. Um, other stuff…

Nothing like esoteric, academic treatments of foreign policy, I always say….

Well said, Murray Kimber. See more of his stuff here. Buy something from him.

Things that would never occur to Jim DeMint

34 Replies

Cindi had a good column today on the subject of arbitrary caps and limits and pledges and the like. There are a number of good things to get out of it.

The first is the fact that Jon Huntsman is the only Republican presidential candidate who has refused to sign Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Whatever pledge — which apparently irritates our junior senator no end.

Jim is all like, “I won’t support any candidate who does not support balancing the budget. … So for me, he’s out.”

Which ignores reality, of course. It doesn’t occur to Jim (or at least, he lets on that it doesn’t occur to him, on account of amassing personal political power now being the most important thing to him, judging by his actions) that a guy could be for a balanced budget amendment (which Huntsman is) and not want to kowtow to him by signing his pledge. For that matter, just to go way deeper into territory that Jim DeMint would find impossible to imagine, one can be for, very passionately for, a balanced budget — and yet not favor a constitutional amendment mandating it.

Personally, I’m ambivalent about the amendment thing. A balanced budget should be standing operating procedure, except in times of full-mobilization war and other serious emergencies. But that should be an annual decision by Congress, not a mechanism. Whether we’ve reached the point that we have to throw out that process is not yet entirely clear to me. Maybe we have. I’m just not sure.

That aside, though, there’s a bigger point here — a point even bigger than the national debt. It goes to the heart of representative democracy:

But there’s an important principle involved as well: Pledging to do or not do anything important is an abdication of elected officials’ duty to examine the issues before them and make their own decisions on behalf of their constituents. And it makes it impossible for officials to govern in a changing world. Imagine the pledges some politicians might have signed before 9/11 — and how that could have prevented them from taking necessary actions to protect our nation after the attacks “changed everything.”

Yes! Yes! YESSSS!!! (Waiter, I’ll have what he’s having…) Continuing…

When you sign away your right to consider all your options, when you are bound by uninformed opinions, when you take directions from people whose primary purpose is to maintain power and defeat those who don’t think exactly as they do, rather than taking advantage of different points of view to come up with the best solutions, then you can’t even imagine the complex solutions to our state’s interwoven ills, much less enact them.

Sounds like Cindi was listening all those years, huh? Not that she couldn’t have come up with all those thoughts on her own. Come to think of it, maybe it was me listening to her…

You can’t really blame THAT part on the CIA

9 Replies

Meant to post this the other day, from an opinion piece in the WashPost:

The reaction from public health workers was understandably fierce when the Guardian reported last week that the CIA had staged a vaccination campaign in an attempt to confirm Osama bin Laden’s location by obtaining DNA from his family members. We recognize the importance of the mission to bring bin Laden to justice. But the CIA’s reckless tactics could have catastrophic consequences.

The CIA’s plot — recruiting a Pakistani doctor to distribute hepatitis vaccines in Abbottabad this spring — destroyed credibility that wasn’t its to erode. It was the very trust that communities worldwide have in immunization programs that made vaccinations an appealing ruse. But intelligence officials imprudently burned bridges that took years for health workers to build….

Uhhh… I don’t think the CIA is to blame for that. Sounds like you need to put the blame for that at The Guardian‘s doorstep.

Yell and holler, if you are so inclined, about the CIA using a phony deal to use bin Laden’s kids in order to get to him so we could kill him. That’s really, really cold. Creepy, even.

But the CIA’s action didn’t erode health workers’ credibility. If it had been kept secret — which I feel sure would have been the Agency’s preference — no damage would have been done. It was reporting it that did the eroding.

Oh, and note that I’m not criticizing The Guardian for reporting it. I’m just saying, let’s be clear about causes and effects here. Actions, even worthwhile actions, have consequences.