What's Wrong With Our Nation's Political Commentary

David Brooks edition:

AUDIE CORNISH: So this is the lowest unemployment rate since the month after President Obama took office. David, let me start with you. At what point, does this downward trend actually make a difference to voters or scare Republican candidates?

DAVID BROOKS: I already think it has made a difference. If you look at the president's numbers, they've been up last couple months. I think that's largely the slowly growing economy. This will certainly help. And so I think it's tremendous news. It's especially good because it's not the result of any big stimulus spending by the government. It's the result of the business cycle finally beginning to turn around. And so it really should be heartening for the administration and really challenging for Romney or whoever the Republican is, that he can't just coast on a bad economy.

He just can't coast with a bunch of campaign events where he quotes "America the Beautiful." He actually has to get a little more substantive. And so it should be a prompt for Romney to be a little more aggressive on substance.

For a little bit of background here, again from David Brooks:

The extent to which a president is responsible for the economy under his watch -- we should emphasize this. It will help him politically, but it's completely bogus. Presidents do not control the economy under their watch. They can have a marginal impact in extraordinary circumstances. But it has to do with a lot more complicated things then they are responsible for.

And that is true with Obama. That's true with Bush. It's true probably with Herbert Hoover, that presidents do not correlate in the short term with economic quarterly-by-quarterly performance.

In other words, David Brooks sees it as good news for the President that he may be entering an election in which he can claim credit for an economic turnaround, even though Brooks gives him little to no credit for that turnaround. And Brooks sees it as bad news for Mitt Romney that he's likely to be campaigning in a rising economy, such that he has to address the actual issues of the day instead of engaging in demagoguery about how we would all be living in oceanfront mansions (at least, those of us he cares about) but for President Obama's failure to revive the economy. Bad news for Romney: Instead of coasting through the election season on an express or implied lie, he'll have to deal with reality.

Because if there's one thing we can count on, it's that commentators like David Brooks won't be pointing out the lies during the campaign. The horse race, embellishments and prevarications are more interesting than the facts.

As my comments above indicate, this is not a problem with an individual commentator - it's a problem with mass media political commentary and analysis in general. In terms of finding an example, David Brooks isn't necessarily better or worse than his average peer, but he represents the low hanging fruit.

David Brooks Takes On The Rebel Without a Cause

Taking Brooks out of context in a completely unfair manner,

My own theory revolves around a single bad idea.

Which of your theories doesn't, David?

Now to be more fair...

For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.

If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition.

Brooks' example is of a guy who railed against organized religion in the name of Jesus, then retreated when confronted with scripture showing that "In fact, Jesus preached a religious doctrine, prescribed rituals and worshiped in a temple." The fact that he retreated in the face of authority, it would seem, undermines Brooks' point. When confronted with authority this person didn't say, "I don't care what facts you have, I'm entitled to my own views and interpretations," he folded. Brooks also overestimates how completely we can divorce ourselves from the society in which we are raised - from the values imbued by our social institutions, parents and families, peers, role models.... It was only a few days ago that Brooks was claiming that there's some form of unified white culture, breaking down on economic lines, with the top twenty percent having a different value set than the bottom thirty - so much so that he used the term "tribe" to describe each group. Now he would have us believe that each and every person in those groups formed their values in a vacuum and that the similar outcomes are a matter of pure coincidence?

Brooks tells us a lot about himself when he lectures,

If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.

Brooks' conceit of the "young rebel", it would seem, is a college student who is expressing strong, unfocused opposition to the status quo but does not have an academic framework upon which he can hang his opinions. It's reasonable to say that if somebody who has that form of unfocused opposition doesn't find peers who share his views, a movement that shares his views, a credible history or movement that supports his views, he's unlikely to either persuade anybody to share his views or to create a movement. Why does this theoretical individual concern Brooks?

What I suspect Brooks is really trying to do here is to attack the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, to titter at them as a bunch of uninformed kids who don't really know anything other than that they're angry. "At least the Hippies¹ knew they opposed the draft, right?" Never mind that the Occupy movement wasn't driven by college students and had, at its core, a very clear impetus - "We don't know the means, but we need to reform a system that benefits the top 1% at the expense of pretty much everybody else." That inspiration is remarkably similar to the objections that brought about the Tea Party movement, a bail-out of wealthy bankers with taxpayer money. If anything, the rapidity with which the Tea Party movement was captured by corporate interests and channeled into a movement defending the status quo is much more deserving of Brooks rejection of "rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision" s "just a feeble spasm". Seriously - to go from vehemently objecting against the financial industry bailout to being a tool of the political party most wedded to Wall Street? How feeble is that.

Brooks continues his lecture to the theoretical "rebel without a cause" college student,

Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.

So the message is, unless you can find a way to replace existing authorities and institutions with something better, don't bother? It's not enough to advocate unless you identify a means? And as you'll inevitably fail in that endeavor, why trying? Instead ally yourself with the authorities and institutions that give your ideas "focus and a means to turn passion into change" - that is, support the status quo and try to change things from the inside?

Indeed, a core idea worthy of David Brooks.²
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1. Brooks' editorial is titled, "How to Fight the Man". What decades does he believe this is?

2. This is the story of how "Don't trust anybody over thirty" becomes "Don't trust anybody under thirty", a story not of social change or revolution but of assimilation.

The Biggest Threat to Facebook: Data Liberation

Facebook's strengths and weaknesses are summarized reasonably well on CNET, with the leading strengths being reach (the huge number of Facebook users), dwell (the huge number of hours a typical U.S. user spends on Facebook) and lock-in (you can't get the same social experience elsewhere). When I speak to people who use Facebook they emphasize that last point: they use Facebook not because they particularly like it, but because that's where their friends, kids, grandchildren, grandparents, and distant relatives... pretty much everybody in their lives, can be located. And when they comment on why they don't have Google Plus accounts, or why they don't use their Google Plus accounts, it boils down to "I don't want to check multiple sites and a lot of my friends and relatives are only on Facebook."

Google understood that and, in launching Google Plus, made obvious the benefit of porting their Facebook information over to your Google Plus account. Facebook panicked and slammed the door shut, twice. Work-arounds appear to remain, but they involve more work than the typical user is going to do. History suggests that if Facebook sees a significant uptick in the number of users exploiting a work-around, it will shut off that avenue as well.

Meanwhile, Google has taken to talking about how its users own their own data, and has coined the term "data liberation". They have a dedicated engineering team focused on mak[ing] it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.

At present, at least from a U.S. standpoint, pretty words, right? What are the odds that Congress is going to get in the way of Facebook's claiming to own your data. But then there's the E.U.

Key changes in the reform include:...

• People will have easier access to their own data and be able to transfer personal data from one service provider to another more easily (right to data portability). This will improve competition among services.

• A ‘right to be forgotten’ will help people better manage data protection risks online: people will be able to delete their data if there are no legitimate grounds for retaining it.

Google is, in a very real sense, using its present position of strength to its advantage. People are tied into Google for a range of functions that Facebook does not offer, and are unlikely to switch over even to one of Google's more direct rivals. But if they create an environment in which the users of other services (who, for the most part, already have Google accounts) can more easily break Facebook's lock and replicate their experience on Google Plus, over time Facebook's advantage will erode.

Facebook's cautious IPO suggests that they know their present weakness, and that investors understand it as well. There is no indication that Facebook needs the money it's going to raise through the IPO, unless "need" includes the desire of certain early investors to cash in. Facebook has managed to grow, support itself, acquire other companies, and sign up pretty much every easily attainable Internet user in the world without going public. Their $5 billion offer is "real money", but the odds seem pretty good that those shares will be snapped up by investors hoping that Facebook will become the next Apple or Google, investors who can afford to take the risk that they'll be more like MySpace or even pets.com. A larger offering would run the risk of quickly saturating that market, then establishing a void of demand for Facebook at its exceptionally high claimed valuation. There's a point at which investors start to weigh performance against potential, and the more weight you put on performance the less shiny Facebook looks.

I think it was pretty brilliant of Facebook to try to shift from being a social network to a platform, as evidenced by the fact that Zynga accounts for a huge percentage of its revenues - and an even larger portion, when you consider Facebook's profits from ads on Zynga pages. But for the platform aspect of Facebook, its present revenues would look pretty weak. But as people increasingly use portable devices, a platform in their own right, are they going to want to go through Facebook to access Zynga, or are they going to want to access Zynga games the way they access Angry Birds - through a standalone app? Zynga can as easily pay Apple a 30% commission on sales of virtual tractors (I'm sure Apple appreciates Facebook's setting that commission point), and can do even better through the Android platform - and Zynga's shareholders, no doubt, want to see it grow well beyond the walls of Facebook. Facebook's apps have been criticized as under-featured, but how do you create an app for use on a rival platform? If the app is good enough that people don't use your web interface, you're "just an app". And if you try to become a platform on a platform - "Load the Facebook app, then load additional apps through Facebook" - you're going to have difficulty replicating the experience of using a native app on the device in your user's hands.

Facebook has also done surprisingly well with advertising revenue, selling billions of dollars worth of ads to be viewed by people who aren't in consumer mode. But unless they can translate that into something along the lines of AdSense, such that their ads are placed on third party sites where people are in consumer mode, they seem to have a growth problem. Outside of China, pretty much everybody who is likely to be an active Facebook user is on Facebook, and Facebook is reluctant to try to enter China. Adding more nominal users doesn't generate revenue (or sell virtual tractors). How do you increase revenue per user without making your ads a huge money loser for advertisers?

What's the future of Facebook? Beyond noting that it's going to be around for many years to come - that if it fades it will face in the manner of MySpace or Yahoo, not in the manner of Pets.com - nobody knows. That's both a strength (as seen by its ability to hype up its valuation based on potential and the theory (echoing the first Internet bubble) that they'll find a way to generate huge revenues from their user base. If you have the money to gamble, and are in the investor class that is only looking for one in three of your investments to show significant returns, why not buy in? But if Facebook cannot hang onto the elements that lock people into its services, its being the only social service with your great aunt Marge and Farmville, the lock-in effect starts to fade. And with changes to its interface and privacy policy seemingly driven by a desire for profit, whatever its impact on the user experience, Facebook's drive to prove its exaggerated value could turn out to be what triggers its decline.

Gingrich Takes On Goldman Sachs.... Badly

You know, for a guy who is supposed to be smart....¹

Goldman Sachs is a company that has taken billions from the American taxpayer and they had a handpicked candidate in 2008 named Barack Obama. They have a handpicked candidate this year, named Mitt Romney.

This should give you considerable pause... about Goldman Sachs. Because last time I checked, Mitt Romney ran for the Republican nomination back in 2008. Why Does Gingrich imagine that Goldman Sachs would have been repulsed by Romney four years ago, but be eager to have him replace the candidate they hand-selected a mere four years ago?

Like any multi-billion dollar corporation, Goldman Sachs is going to use its money both to help advance political candidates that will support its agenda and to try to put that candidate in golden handcuffs - "You don't want to turn the financial industry against you, because then you won't get the benefit of our wealth in the next election." But they aren't pulling candidates out of obscurity. They're picking the candidates from both sides that they believe are likely to win and are trying to influence the policies of those candidates. If they were capable of "hand picking" a candidate, the present Republican campaign would already be over. Heck, if anybody had that type of control, could Gingrich really believe it would be he and Santorum who would remain the biggest obstacles to Romney's nomination?

To the extent that Gingrich is correct, that Goldman Sachs and the financial industry want Romney and reject Gingrich, given Gingrich's own history of selling out to anybody who will pay him money, the most likely explanation for this outburst is that he's jealous. Gingrich standing up to somebody with a checkbook? Has it ever happened?
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1. In fairness, he's lying. But we remain in an odd era in which it's more polite to treat a candidate as being sincere but stupid, as opposed to pointing out that he's a liar.

David Brooks and the Class Divide

David Brooks has been reading Charles Murray, so it's time for another of his another "tenth grade quality book book reports".... Call it an oversimplification if you will, but having built his reputation (so to speak) on a sloppily reasoned book suggesting that African Americans struggle because they have low IQ's, Murray has a new book contending that poor white people struggle for sociological reasons. Brooks, of course, makes no mention of Murray's history, instead lavishing his new book with praise.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today....

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Get that? Murray's limiting his data to white people allows him to be "at his best", lest "complicating factors" such as race and, um, "other" confuse his thesis. Perhaps by showing, for example, that The Bell Curve is every bit as bad as its critics contend.

Two things to note at this point: First, Murray's story is that of "white people", and second... why 1963? Did the world begin in 1963? Weren't there white people in American prior to 1963? Or did what Brooks describes as Murray's "incredible data" reveal to him that if he started his story in any other year it would be weaker or completely undermined. We could, for example, compare unemployment rates during the Great Depression to those of today, but that wouldn't work so well for Murray's thesis that white society has somehow grown apart. So, why not pick the peak year for the argument that America used to look somewhat like Ozzie and Harriet, and go from there.

Brooks, predictably, accepts Murray's arguments as proof of his own theories about the nation, and that social norms that emerge from a snapshot reflect the norm of human history up through the present era. Now... something is causing the country to "bifurcate[] into different social tribes" and the rich don't spend enough time associating with the poor. What's more, people tend to marry within their social and economic class. Shocking, really. Except that's the story of human history. To the extent that a couple of world wars flattened things out for a while, we've never lived in a country or world in which class and money didn't matter and didn't affect social relationships and behaviors.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

With the difference between now and the rest of history being the location of the enclaves? Does Brooks believe that "in the good old days" an Eton boy would go to Oxford, graduate, then marry a scullery maid and settle in Yorkshire? Does he believe that families with surnames like Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Delano, Carnegie and Astor are known for their humble abodes, modest lifestyles, and marriages with members of the working class?

Brooks overtly breaks from the right-wing dogma that "liberal elites" are ruining the country's morals.

Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

That assertion is consistent with my position that, on the whole, people who disfavor legislation of morality are better at moderating their own behaviors and impulses as compared to those who view it as a necessity, and don't want others peering into their bedrooms. The Republicans who want to legislate morality are speaking to a population that is more than happy to pretend that "liberals" are condescending to them, even when the opposite is at least as often the case, and feels, for whatever reason, that people cannot be trusted to behave in a socially acceptable manner unless they are placed at risk of serious consequence, most notably pregnancy or jail.

Brooks, as you might expect, overstates his case for the moral righteousness of the "cultural elite", as it's easier to get married, stay married, remarry after divorce, and remain within the confines of what Brooks would deem a "conservative, traditionalist" life if you are wealthy, or at least financially stable. Nonetheless, this is probably the most honest criticism I've seen Brooks offer of his party - that it's rhetoric about liberal elites is pure demagoguery.

In the name of false equivalence, what the left hand giveth the right hand must take away:

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent.

Funny, although you certainly do hear about the uppermost echelons of wealth these days, most economic analysis I see still looks at wealth quintiles. The "Occupy" movement gave additional attention to the top 1%, with the real story of being the 0.1%, but that's a different story than the one being spun by Brooks.

If Brooks wants to make the claim that "Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite", perhaps he could do us the favor of identifying the Democrats of whom he speaks. While there's definitely concern on the political left that tax policy favors the wealthiest Americans, that concern has the virtue of being true. While there's concern on the left that the last three decades have seen the wealthiest Americans siphon corporate profits for their own benefit while workers' wages have stagnated or declined, that also has the virtue of being true.

Perhaps Brooks believes what he is implying, that human nature has somehow changed such that economics are irrelevant, but it seems to me that he's offering a red herring. For most of human history there has been great disparity between the wealth of the rich and poor, and throughout that time there has been suggestion that many or most of the poor are undeserving, victims not of society but of their poor values. I suspect Brooks knows he's offering a canard, because he proceeds to acknowledge the role of economics in the present state of society:

The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

The central role being what? Brooks has already told us that the "cultural elites" stand as good role models for hard work and moral behavior. What's left but economics? The top 20% are faring quite well, thank you very much, even as other quintiles have struggled.

From this point, Brooks devolves into what might be called "claptrap":

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

But Brooks told us earlier,

In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

How can Brooks argue both that "members of the lower tribe" as a class are simultaneously dropping out of the workforce and working hard? Surely it's one or the other.

Really, it seems fair to say that most people work hard, particularly those in menial jobs in which their bosses view them as expendable and easily replaced, but that the fundamental problem is a lack of jobs, and more notably a lack of jobs that people with less education and academic inclination can use as a stepping stone to the middle class. Brooks may want to pretend that this is a matter of sociology - that all we need to do is imbue the poor with the proper values and they'll be working hard and forming stable families - but you cannot honestly compare 1963 to the present without admitting that you're comparing a period of boom times for blue collar workers with a modern era in which anti-union measures, automation and outsourcing have decimated the blue collar middle class.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years.

Yet another version of, “Even though I didn’t want to, didn’t have to, and personally did not do what I’m suggesting, in order for more people to grow up with my values I think all young people should have to spend years of their lives jumping through hoops I will now arbitrarily define.” Public service, national service, military service, menial jobs.

In other words, even though Brooks tells us that the problem is not an "underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites", the way to fix the problem is to force young people, rich and poor, to spend years of their lives performing some form of community service while living in some form of MTV-style "Real World" communal housing. That will surely fix everything.

Mitt Romney's Tin Ear on... This Time, Taxes

"I heard that I'm projected to easily win in Florida, so I thought I would say something really insulting to the intelligence of voters."

Mitt, you pay about 14% in federal taxes on your income, not 50%. No amount of prevarication will change that.

If you consider that the money that was paid to the corporations that paid Romney cycled through other businesses and entities that were taxed, and that some of the money may have come directly from the government - icky tax money - maybe Romney can make the case that his tax rate is 99%.

Thomas Friedman's 'Lake Wobegon' America

Thomas Friedman trips over his own words with his claim, "Average is Over". He skips over the easiest ways to join the wealthiest Americans - being born rich - and the second best way, his personal method, marrying an exceptionally wealthy heir or heiress.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

This is fair to a point. I do sense that unless you're firmly ensconced in the privileged class, a typical job of the future will demand a lot of you - continuously working to stay at the top of your field. Fewer and fewer jobs will let you coast, or allow you to be the person who knows the way things used to work.

But Friedman doesn't appear to understand the law of averages, or the joke of Lake Wobegon. Average is determined mathematically, so even if everybody improves there will remain an average. It's not possible for everybody in every field to find an "extra" that makes them above average. People who can distinguish themselves and prove their value will find it easier to earn a decent wage, and some will rise in wealth and position, but that won't eliminate either the average or the fact that our society includes a lot of dead-end jobs in which being above average simply means you work harder for the same or a slightly higher rate of pay.

Friedman is excited at the idea of going to a restaurant and ordering his food using a tablet rather than being served by a waiter. I expect he's excited for the rest of us, as it's difficult for me to imagine Friedman spending much time in a restaurant where his napkin is not recovered and folded neatly, awaiting his return from the restroom.¹ That is to say, Friedman is in a class of wealth that makes it unlikely that he wants to play with a tablet computer to learn what's on the menu, or where he would have to tap the equivalent of a call button to get his water glass refilled.

I think a tablet could be an effective tool at restaurants where people presently queue to place their orders. Rather than waiting in line, trying to decide what you want, you can sit down, take your time, and not have the person behind you sighing loudly at your lack of familiarity with the menu.

There's something else that Friedman is missing in his excitement over iWaiters. The fact that they're not actually a labor saving device - they're a labor shifting device. Perhaps that's why I see them falling into place in a restaurant that doesn't have waiters. In those restaurants you're already used to having what was once the restaurant's job shifted to you - collecting your food at the counter, carrying it to your table, filling your own drink, throwing away the trash at the end of your meal. Banks use ATMs and online banking, grocery stores have self-serve checkout, bag your own groceries. In most states it's rare to find a full-service gas pump. The need for labor hasn't disappeared - it has just been shifted from the provider to the customer.

Friedman is also excited at the idea that a Chinese factory can retool on a moment's notice, and can pull its thousands of workers out of their dormitories to be retrained for the new system. "Sorry for waking you up - here's a biscuit and a cup of tea." No American plant can match that? Well, yeah. But for those of us who don't fetishize China, it would not be such a big deal if workers were trained on a more human schedule when they came to work from their homes, where they live with their families. As excited as Friedman gets about the idea that China is turning all of its workers into highly educated high performers, his anecdote belies that idea - he's describing a society of drones. Where does the reward of not being average fit into that world? "Good for you, you were 3% more efficient than your peers in fitting screens into frames. You get another biscuit."

Friedman is also excited about Siri, the voice interface to the latest iPhone. He quotes an executive of the company that developed the software, gushing about how good it is.

“Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services.”

Well, yeah, I guess I can see how Siri and similar programs going to take over the world's voice mail systems, perhaps reducing the frustration of the absurd menus most companies impose on consumers by allowing you to have a "conversation" with a computer. But we're not even to that point of the revolution. And many people, particularly those with more complex problems, will still prefer to talk to a human being.

I can imagine the frustration, also, of having a computer keep redirecting you from real answers to your issues, a'la Comcast, because the last thing they want to do is actually help you resolve a problem that should involve their crediting your account. Siri may become smart enough to understand what you're asking, but I can see her being programmed to give you a partial or inaccurate answer, anyway.

Friedman states that, as we enter an era in which "average is officially over,... nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education." Friedman should take a hard look at China, or at least his perceptions of China, as if he thinks about what is happening in that country he should be able to see that they are not trying to turn everybody into an "above average" performer. They'll help the children of the wealthy and of party elites through special schools and opportunities, and will identify some students by talent and nurture that talent, but in large part they understand that they need a lot of drones and, ultimately, their system collapses if their drones become too few or too expensive.

By G.I. Bill, does Friedman actually mean a G.I. bill? Join the military, get a college education? It seems not - I think he means a "G.I. bill" that does not actually require being a G.I. I agree with the sentiment that every American should have access to college, and will take it a step further and state that they should also have access to a K-12 education that gives them a chance to succeed in college. But I think Friedman falls into the class of people who believe that school makes you smarter, and that everybody is or can be college material. We will do better for our society by recognizing that some people aren't cut out for college, or should do something else first, than by trying to push everybody into college without regard for interest or aptitude. We do our nation no favors by pretending that everybody can be above average, or that everybody needs to be. We're a long way from being a true meritocracy.
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1. In fairness, perhaps Friedman believes the iWaiter tablet will have an app that refolds his napkin.

Our Enemies Are Crazy... Our Allies?

One of the pretty constant lines of rhetorical attack you see, often from people who would prefer to shift from words to military action, is that the enemy state is "crazy". Its leaders are irrational, cannot be reasoned with, and will do terrible, apocalyptic things if we don't take dramatic action. Within this context, "crazy" often means "Behaves in pretty much the same manner as other despots and tyrants, but isn't on our team." The Shah of Iran treated his people terribly, reminiscent of Saddam Hussein, and lusted for western military weapons including nuclear weapons, and that was fine with us. Then Iran had a revolution, its new government was overtly hostile to the U.S., and Saddam Hussein seemed like somebody we could work with. Then the war he started with Iran came to an end, he invaded Kuwait, and... nutty as a fruitcake. Moammar Gadhafi was a terrible man, sponsoring terrorism, hostile to western interests, then he became a supposed "victory" in the "war on terror" by renouncing his "WMD programs", but after a few years of posing for pictures with world leaders who, no doubt, now regret the documentary evidence of their claims that he had reformed, he once again became a crazy enemy.

The point isn't that these tyrants aren't, to one extent or another, crazy. It's that "crazy" is rarely considered to be a significant issue until our nations' leaders decide it's a problem, and all of the quirks and bad acts that aren't worthy of notice or mention suddenly become evidence of irredeemable insanity. (Sort of irredeemable - as previously mentioned, Gadahfi, one of the nuttier despots of our time, did enjoy a few years of "redemption".)

One of the better aspects of democracy is that when elected leaders do prove to be nutty, they typically either don't rise to the highest offices or don't stay there for line. We may treat our Presidents and Prime Ministers as if they're monarchs, granting them mansions, gourmet personal chefs, personal jets, huge staffs... but we require an element of humility, the willingness for a peaceful transition at the end of the elected official's term of office. Some of our leaders do engage in over-the-top rhetoric about foreign states and leaders, but the leaders of "enemy states" generally take their anti-western rhetoric to a much higher level - volume, frequency and intensity all turned up to 11.

One of the over-the-top claims about Iran is that, if they are able to develop a nuclear weapon, they will immediately be itching to use it against another state. We're told that, unlike any other nuclear state in the world, Iran's leadership is so crazy that they won't be deterred by the fact that any nuclear attack that can be laid at their feet would trigger the annihilation of their nation. We don't talk that way about our allies. At least, most people don't.

Former Bush Administration official Bennett Ramberg is actually using an "Israel is nuts" argument to support... who knows? Invading Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons?

If Jerusalem really believes that a nuclear-armed Tehran poses an existential threat — and cannot be contained by a conventional military attack, sanctions, deterrence or regime change — there remains one option to end the threat that people fear to talk about: Israel’s use of nuclear weapons.

At any level, Ramberg's analysis would place Israel's government somewhere between "irrational" and "insane". I'll give him enough credit to assume that he's imagining a future in which Iran is not invaded, develops nuclear weapons, and can use small arsenal to deter any land-based invasion. Does Ramberg believe that Iran would keep all of its weapons and production facilities in one nice, consolidated, non-fortified location, far away from its civilian population such that Israel could swoop in with a nuke or two and eliminate the entire program? He couldn't possibly be that ignorant. So really, what he's proposing is that if Iran has any nuclear capacity, Israel will perceive as its only option a massive nuclear attack against Iran, devastating its urban centers and murdering tens of millions of civilians. There's an ugly word for that type of military action. And you know what? If Iran did have a few small nukes it could be counted on to try to launch them against Israel. So Ramberg is literally telling us that Israel's leadership is irrational, genocidal and willing to risk the annihilation of its own people in order to wipe an enemy off of the map. Which is pretty much exactly what other people in the "we must invade Iran" camp say about a nuclear Iran.

I disagree with Ramberg's analysis. They're at least as self-serving and prone to demagoguery as the leaders of any other nation and, yes, Israel's form of democracy results in some pretty extreme members within the Knesset. And like every other military power they tend to overestimate what they can accomplish through force and underestimate the benefits of resolving conflicts through negotiation - a peril of democracy: when times are good, voters don't want to change anything, and when times are bad, voters don't want to give anything to "the enemy". But they're not insane, they're not genocidal, and they're not going to kill tens of millions of people and send a cloud of radioactive fallout around the globe if Iran successfully tests a nuclear weapon, even if they believe the losses on their own side would be "acceptable".

I don't think Ramberg believes his own argument. If he actually believed that Israel, a nation that has shown past restraint with its nuclear weapons when faced with an actual land invasion, has joined the ranks of nations with "insane" leaders who can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, he should be advocating for the west to join Iran's proposal for a completely nuclear-free Middle East, backed up with thorough inspections of both Iran and Israel to ensure compliance. The most charitable explanation I can offer is that he's tossing this scenario out either as one more reason the west "has to" invade Iran and remove its leadership, or in the hope that over-the-top rhetoric about "crazy Israel" will somehow lead to a cowed and pliant Iran, and thus doesn't care that his argument is detached from reality.

The Romney-Gingrich Electability Conundrum

Perhaps the thinking behind present polls goes something like this:

If Mitt Romney is the most electable, and Newt Gingrich is unelectable, Mitt Romney should easily beat Newt Gingrich.

But Newt Gingrich just beat Mitt Romney in South Carolina, and may do so again in Florida.

So maybe it's Mitt Romney who's not electable, or less electable than Newt Gingrich? And maybe Newt's not so unelectable after all?

I recognize that the general election is a different ballgame, but it's difficult for me to see how a candidate who barely squeaks past Newt Gingrich will be inspiring either a great deal of confidence in or the robust support of the Republican base. But perhaps that is Romney's problem to begin with.

Mitt Romney's Love of Democracy

If you can't win an election, fair and square, what else can you do but rig the game?

You Can Choose to Be an Honorable Man

Or not.

You would think a man with a 0% chance of becoming President would be capable of showing the smallest amount of class during what's left of his campaign, but... no.

The Purpose of Sanctions Against Iran is.... What?

I know, I know. Sanctions are supposedly going to convince the Iranian government to give up a nuclear weapons program that it claims it's not pursuing. Nobody believes Iran, so I guess the theory is that if economic sanctions keep piling up Iran will eventually have to deal with corrupt individuals and nations to export its oil despite the sanctions give up its nuclear weapons program. And we'll know that the sanctions worked because of their long and consistent record of failure because Iran will announce that it will have given up its nuclear weapons program and, when that time comes, for some reason its denials will suddenly seem credible. Or something like that.

I'm reminded of another nation which, after many years of economic sanctions, a militarily imposed "no fly zone", and the like, was the subject of an invasion to end its quest for "weapons of mass destruction". For a number of reasons, some quite valid, the invading nations had discounted the nation's denials of having WMD's and engaged in demagoguery about the risk posed by their non-existent weapons and non-existent delivery vehicles. After invasion we learned that the nation had abandoned its programs to develop such weapons but, you know, why worry about a wasted $trillion or two and a decade of occupation, or whether eventual blowback might make the nation or region even more dangerous - we found out for sure.

That situation was, of course, completely different. The nation's name ended with a q.

Seriously, what is Iran to conclude from the behavior of western nations? The principal lesson seems to be that if they claim to have abandoned a nuclear weapons program they won't be believed, that if they allow massive inspections of their territory they will be accused of having secret sites that they have not disclosed, and that sanctions will continue to pile up until the western world announces that the burden of maintaining the sanctions is too high and it's time to invade. (If Iran has a nuclear weapons program, it's difficult to imagine that anything short of an invasion will give any amount of certainty that it has been eliminated.) Or they can act like North Korea - develop an actual nuclear weapon. You may not get rid of the sanctions but you will significantly reduce and eventually all-but-eliminate the threat of military action. (If there's a different lesson they are likely to draw, not from the theory of sanctions but from the past behavior of western nations, please feel free to share it in the comments.)

I guess I'm just not seeing the benefit of pushing Iran to the point that it has nothing to lose by building nuclear weapons and demonstrating that it is a nuclear power. That's not the purpose of the sanctions, and I'm sure the proponents of layering misery upon misery on the Iranian people have somehow convinced themselves that "this time truly is different" and that the sanctions will "work", but at a certain point Iran will be left with nothing to lose by becoming a nuclear power - and potentially a lot to gain if it can remove a military threat from the equation. And I'm not sure how far we presently are away from that point.