What If They're Not Planning to Run as Republicans?

Ross Douthat doesn't believe that Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin represent the future of the Republican Party... although he apparently likes them better than anything else he sees.

This means that there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism. It probably won’t be Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin.

Probably? What potential does Douthat see that either Palin or Huckabee is suddenly going to become intellectually curious?

If Republicans are lucky, though, it will be somebody who shares their charisma — but who prefers the responsibilities of leadership to the pleasures of celebrity.

No, if Republicans are lucky they won't be looking at a Palin/Huckabee ticket on a Conservative Party ticket, Douthat himself having all-but-blessed abandoning the Republican Party in the name of ideological purity, even when the third party candidate offers nothing of substance.

Huckabee chooses celebrity because that's the only way he can remain relevant. If you listen to him speak, he's clearly thinking about running for President, trying to stir up anti-incumbent sentiments with talk of "flushing the toilet" (no party reference attached), and making a case that people should quit their day jobs before running for President. Palin seems content to rake in the bucks, literally capitalizing on the fact that you can fool some of the people all of the time. Her habit of quitting whenever the going gets tough probably does disqualify her as a presidential candidate, but what if she throws her weight behind Huckabee? If necessary, on a "flush 'em all" Conservative party ticket?

I know Douthat sees no benefit in trying to enforce ideological purity at the Presidential level, but he just might get his wish for a "scapegoat-priest-king" in the form of Pastor Mike. And really, if the first three potential Republican Party leaders that come to his mind are "Huckabee, Palin, and... I got nothing", his party has a problem.

Update: While Palin wouldn't rule out running with Glenn Beck, Beck has scoffed at the notion of a Palin/Beck ticket as opposed to Beck/Palin. How could Palin not have seen that coming?

What Does Samuelson Think Insurance Is For?

Robert Samuelson feigns concern for the pocketbooks of our nation's youth - concern belied by his "blank check for wars he likes" - on the ground that an insurance mandate will cause healthier people to subsidize people who are less healthy. Specifically young people, who are a statistically healthier group, will effectively subsidize older people who are not yet on Medicare, a statistically less healthy group.

It's difficult in light of his history to view Samuelson's positions as genuine, as opposed to wedge politics - Samuelson has been a consistent opponent of reform while not once endorsing a viable alternative. He pretends to care about universality and cost control, yet rejects out of hand the tried and proved programs from other nations that do both, instead preferring a status quo even he appears to know is not sustainable - at least when he's talking about Medicare.

It should go without saying that insurance provides a subsidy to claimants, at the expense of people who don't pay claims. My auto insurance payments subsidize careless drivers. My homeowner's policy subsidizes people who don't feel the need to use smoke detectors, or who live in higher crime neighborhoods. It should go without saying - if you break the pool down into two groups, one that makes few claims and one that makes many, you'll find that the former "subsidizes" the latter. Samuelson would respond,

Auto insurance premiums vary by age; younger drivers pay higher rates because they have more accidents. Homeowners' policies for similar houses cost more in high-crime areas. This is not "discrimination"; it's a reflection of risk and cost differences. Insurers that ignored these differences would soon vanish because they'd suffer heavy losses and lose customers.

Yet still, insurance companies shift the cost of risk to safer neighborhoods and drivers. When they don't, state regulators often compel them to surcharge one set of customers in order to subsidize another, or to write policies for home and car owners in neighborhoods they would prefer not to touch. Maybe in the name of consistency Samuelson would argue that insurance companies should be free to refuse to insure inner city homes and drivers, or refuse to participate in state pools that insure high risk drivers, but that's not the country in which we live.

In Samuelson's mind, a healthy fifty-year-old would pay four or five times as much for health insurance as would a twenty-five-year-old with a costly chronic illness, just by virtue of his age. Why is that fair? It's still the healthy subsidizing the sick. Yet if you look at it that way, doesn't it reveal the absurdity of Samuelson's position? If premiums are to be tied to how much a person is expected to consume in health care services, why shouldn't that sickly person pay ten, twenty times what a healthy person would pay, consistent with her level of consumption?

On health insurance, we may choose to override some risk adjustments (say, for preexisting medical conditions) for public policy reasons. But the case for making age one of these exceptions is weak.

And yet... Samuelson can't articulate it. It's to be assumed. It's simply posited as "unfair" that younger people should, as a class, subsidize older people. A public policy analysis would look at costs and benefits, return on investment, etc. - or, accepting Samuelson's thesis, would propose alternative forms of funding that would not render health insurance unaffordable to people once they hit forty-five or fifty simply by virtue of their age. As policy analysts go, Samuelson drinks not from a deep well, but from a puddle.

Working Americans -- the young and middle-aged -- already pay a huge part of the health costs of the elderly through Medicare and Medicaid. These will grow with an aging population and surging health spending. Either taxes will rise or other public services will fall. Already, all governments spend 2.4 times as much per capita on the elderly as on children, reports Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution. Why increase the imbalance?

Leaving aside for a moment that we're not talking about the elderly, there's an obvious answer: we all get older. There are obvious rejoinders: people who don't have school aged children, or who send their kids to private schools, still pay taxes that support public schools. We fund police and fire services from broad taxes, as opposed to billing the person who utilizes emergency services.

Further, what's wrong with raising taxes to pay for health care? People above the age of forty typically earn a lot more than younger workers, so if you passed a tax to subsidize healthcare premiums you could shift some of that burden back onto older workers. Or implement a tax to recoup some of the cost of the wars Samuelson endorses, and give ourselves more latitude to pay for the social programs he supposedly opposes on the basis of their cost. A tax would also have the added benefit of minimizing or eliminating the disincentive for young people to enroll, based upon the difference between the cost of insurance and the penalty for not enrolling. Oh... but we have to pass reform without new taxes because, even if the net effect is the same or better, people like Samuelson insist upon it.

Do you think for a moment that "elderly", almost sixty-five-year-old Samuelson, who could easily pay his own way, has ever turned down a subsidy for the sake of the younger generation? Do you think he personally rejects Medicare? Or do you think he's in that special class of people who takes everything he can get - "sacrifice is for other people". I don't believe for a minute that he actually cares about deficit spending (he's admitted as much), the young subsidizing the old, the poor subsidizing the rich.... Is there somewhere I can find evidence to the contrary?

The Public Option

Josh Marshall's a smart guy, but I think he's about as wrong as wrong can be on the public option.

Now, there are many people who look at this and say that the bill(s) under discussion are so anemic that they're maybe not worth fighting for at all. And that's certainly a legitimate opinion. But I think there's another question. Considering how down to the wire this is, is it really worth holding up everything else contained in the bill when the point of contention, the public option, is as measly as it is?

The same thing probably could have been argued about the first version of Social Security or the first version of Medicare - "It's measly, so what's the big deal if it doesn't pass." Well, whether you like or hate the current version of those programs, I don't think you're apt to argue that they're "no big deal". People like David Frum and Martin Feldstein wouldn't be telling us that any public option, no matter how "measly", will inexorably bring about the end of private health insurance if the opponents of the public option shared Marshall's perspective. It's easy to hobble the public option, version 1, but it's very difficult to stop the public option from later being made viable.

Marshall follows up with a valid point about "up and down" votes, but I think he's jumping the gun:

If you go back to the earlier part of this decade when the cloture/filibuster issue became a big deal, largely on the Supreme Court nominations front, the right made a big push on the outside about the issue of allowing up or down votes (i.e., 51 vote majorities) simply as a matter of principle

So why not do that right now? Because the bill is advancing without that type of push. The best time to call for an "up or down vote", and to press people to "allow an up or down vote" is when the bill's up for final passage. Do that too soon and not only do you give opponents of the bill time to prepare and rehearse rebuttals, you risk inspiring a yawn from the media on the fourth, fifth or sixth round of voting when you want the headline to be, "Health reform opponents block up or down vote."

Homework

It's worth noting that research is being done on the usefulness of homework and, with the appropriate caveat that this is a newspaper article and not the actual research, here's a brief summary.

There's little evidence to show that homework is effective among primary-school-aged children – except for those who are performing below their peers.

Many homework experts live by the “10-minute rule”: Kids shouldn't do more than 10 minutes of homework for each grade they're in. That means a student in Grade 1 would do no more than 10 minutes, while a student in Grade 4 would do no more than 40 minutes. High-school students could do up to two hours a night. Spending more than two hours is not associated with higher academic achievement, concluded a 2006 Duke University study led by Harris Cooper, a homework expert and professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience.

Homework should reinforce what a child has already learned, be presented in a clear, manageable way and be engaging.

The question is, do politicians who impose "mandatory homework" policies on the early grades care if it actually helps, or do they want to diminish kids' home lives for the sake of looking like they're "doing something", even if it's not productive and potentially counter-productive?

Jobs, Jobs and More Jobs?

The government's response to periods of high unemployment traditionally involves extending unemployment benefits. Currently, with maximum extensions, an unemployed person can qualify for up to 99 weeks of benefits. Needless to say, this strains the notion of unemployment insurance as any sort of (compulsory) premium-based insurance.

The structure of unemployment insurance, consistent with the larger structure of our society, is predicated upon a job being something that you get from somebody else. Our nation gives great lip service to entrepreneurship, but very little support for entrepreneurs. One of the benefits of meaningful health reform is that entrepreneurs would be able to obtain affordable insurance, something that ties a lot of workers to their jobs particularly after the age of forty. Entrepreneurs are blessed with the full burden of government regulations and the tax system - self-employment taxes to take the place of the employer's matching taxes. They don't get the tax breaks, credits, etc., handed out like candy to big businesses for "creating jobs". Health insurance comes into play again if they try to add employees, as they attempt to attract workers who want the same quality of coverage they can obtain through group plans offered by larger or governmental employers. It's tough.

Meanwhile, your unemployment benefits may be reduced or terminated if you attempt to start your own business, meaning that for most unemployed workers there's a disincentive to try to make their own work.

Is this sane? Somehow we transformed from a nation where "anybody can get rich" by starting a business to a nation where "everybody expects to get rich" by punching a clock. Pretty much anybody in the nation can recite the bromide, "You don't get rich working for somebody else," er, unless you're a professional athlete or banker, but it doesn't appear to have been internalized. A great many people truly seem to believe that they can work a $10/hour job year after year, and then one day, magically, they'll become multi-millionaires.

At the same time, we're in an era where it's relatively cheap and easy to market a new business through the Internet - if you still keep a copy, take a look at the Yellow Pages, to get a sense of how many businesses have dramatically reduced their investment or abandoned that expensive, traditional medium in favor of websites and online marketing. There are numerous programs available that make it possible to make money through online ventures, and numerous online ventures that help you market products to a national audience. Why aren't we teaching people how to take full advantage of these new opportunities?

If we're facing additional years of prolonged unemployment perhaps, rather than perpetuating the status quo, we should examine how we might boost entrepreneurship, lift the burdens on entrepreneurs as their businesses take off, and try to invigorate the economy from the bottom up. At a bare minimum, don't take away a would-be entrepreneur's modest unemployment benefits (or COBRA subsidy) if she dares to start a business that actually generates revenue. I can't imagine the equation where it's better to keep a prospective entrepreneur idle for up to 99 weeks because there aren't enough jobs, than it is to encourage them to get started with their own business ideas on day one.

Artisanal Kraft Foods Products?

A chocolate connoisseur lays out his hope that, should Kraft foods take over Cadbury, they won't lay waste to an artisanal chocolate maker, in the manner that Hershey's buyout has affected Scharffen Berger:

But luckily, long before this year’s announcement by Hershey that it was closing the Berkeley plant and consolidating Scharffen Berger production in Illinois, I discovered an alternative [to the discontinued 82 percent bar]. Green & Black’s, an English brand, was readily available in New York, and if its 85 percent bar didn’t have quite the flavor bouquet that Scharffen Berger 82 packed back in its heyday, it came very close, and the mouth feel was arguably better.

Interestingly, Green & Black’s had also been started by small entrepreneurs and then acquired in 2005 by a giant firm. But its new parent, Cadbury, vowed to let it operate as a stand-alone unit. Judging from my research, which has been basically confined to unwrapping the foil of countless bars and plunging in, Cadbury has been true to its word.

Here's the deal. Quite some time ago Kraft purchased another British sweets manufacturer, Callard & Bowsers. Then they killed off Callard & Bowser's dessert nougat - too complicated to make, too small a market... not worth it, right? Ultimately they killed off the remaining traditional products, such as treacle and liquorice toffee... and now, no longer in Kraft's hands, all the brand is really known for is Altoids.

If the sale goes through, my suggestion to connoisseurs: Stock up on your favorites.

David Frum's Slippery Slope

People who are knowledgeable about the world's various national healthcare plans are aware that private insurance plays a significant role in any number of them. Even in Canada, the land from which Frum emigrated, people use supplemental insurance policies - often provided by their employers - to supplement Medicare. And yet....

The Dems are willing to accept that the plan won’t be offered in all states. They are willing to allow private insurance to coexist alongside the government-plan for many years to come. They are willing for the government-plan to retain many features of private insurance – premiums will be based on the allowed risk factors, not on “ability to pay.” They know that all those concessions will gradually erode. The key thing: establish the government-run plan now. Drive private insurers out of the market gradually. Shift only slowly from insurance-like finance to tax finance.

What is it that Frum sees as so special - so especially bad - about the U.S. health insurance system that if the government gets so much as a toe in the door everybody in the nation will recognize the superiority of a national plan and press their legislators to expand the program to allow them to enroll?

Next, he breaks out the crack pipe, arguing that Obama could have easily passed a modest healthcare bill:

“I continue to support the public option personally and will work for it to be established later. For now, my priorities are (1) insurance reform, to outlaw the practices that most offend Americans, and (2) to create exchanges like those created by Gov. Romney in Massachusetts so that individuals and small businesses can buy insurance at the same favorable prices paid by large employers. We’re going to have an individual mandate to buy insurance – and subsidies to help those who can’t. We’re going to shift regulation of health insurance from the states to the federal government, so that we can write a single, predictable set of rules, rather than 50 different rules that allow lobbyists in places like New Jersey to push insurance prices up and up and up.”

Republicans could never have said no to that. He would have pushed his program through in a week.

Okay, let's set aside for the moment the fact that numerous high-ranking Republicans have announced that they want to defeat health reform to hurt President Obama. Let's look instead at what the Republicans call a health reform bill. Let's look first for the biggest of the insurance company "practices that most offend Americans" - denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, and revoking people's policies when they get sick. Their "plan" creates "high risk pools" but doesn't require that insurance companies insure the sick. For revocation, they offer a nebulous, undefined third party review process.¹ Will the review process be an insurance industry rubber stamp? My cynical side says that if it were intended to be anything but, Boehner would have included some specifics.

The Republicans claim, "The GOP plan prohibits an insurer from canceling a policy unless a person commits fraud or conceals material facts about a health condition." Which is great, except that those are the exact grounds insurance companies assert even when they wrongfully terminate people's health insurance coverage. The Republicans think that the termination letters insurers send out say, "We've decided you cost too much, so we're walking away from our legally binding contract of insurance"?

The Republicans also include their standard "race to the bottom" proposal for "buying insurance across state lines". That's the opposite of Frum's notion of a national set of regulations. As I've previously noted,

There is, of course, no reason that insurance companies cannot enter additional states, offering plans in those states, right now. The impediment is that to set up health coverage you need to create a network of participating doctors, clinics and hospitals who accept your plan.

The Republican proposal isn't about an out-of-state insurer writing new plans in your state - it's about insurers from your state relocating to the states with the least regulation so that they can strip away benefits required by your state's laws and work out of states with minimal regulatory oversight. What does the CBO have to say about the GOP proposal?

By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 3 million relative to current law, leaving about 52 million nonelderly residents uninsured. The share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage in 2019 would be about 83 percent, roughly in line with the current share.

Further, "in the large group market, which represents nearly 80 percent of total private premiums, the amendment would lower average insurance premiums in 2016 by zero to 3 percent compared with amounts under current law, according to CBO's estimates." Wow. Almost nobody gets insured, and the cost savings are at best near zero. Did Frum fail to notice that Boehner's bill has no mandate? That it bears no resemblance to Frum's dream bill?

I mean, seriously, if the Republicans could back a sensible set of reforms and pass them within a week, why haven't they written up the Frum Bill (or something similar) instead of Boehner's bill, seemingly designed to reform next to nothing? Further, contrary to Frum's suggestion, Obama has effectively said that he'll sign any healthcare reform bill that gets through Congress, even if it doesn't include a public option. The Republicans can still write up that Frum bill that could supposedly pass in a week - why are they instead declaring a "holy war" against healthcare reform?

Frum appears to live in an alternate universe where he's still a prominent member of the Republican Party. Instead he's shouting from a soapbox, "The Republicans truly are reasonable - and if given a chance they'll agree with me" even as he's been marginalized and excluded. Yet he still hasn't quite embraced honest debate, such that he might gain credibility with anybody else.

A Misguided Prosecution Comes To An End

The government has thrown in the towel and abandoned its appeal of the Lori Drew conviction. As I wrote a year ago,

If the verdict does not stand, and there's a good chance that it will not, the shameless grandstanding by U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien will have expanded the injustice. It will have given Megan Meier's family the false sense that Lori Drew would go to prison for crimes that should never have been charged. Oh, probably O'Brien will harrumph about how he was right, about how Drew is evil incarnate, and how either the trial court or appellate court has unreasonably second-guessed the good men and women of the jury. Such a reaction would be consistent with what this prosecution is about - the furtherance of Mr. O'Brien's personal and political goals.

So now I await commentary from Mr. O'Brien.

His Master's Voice

Yesterday I commented on the irresponsible "leaders" of the Republican Party. Today, Michael Gerson regurgitates the party memo that, as a commenter in that thread and the Daily Show point out, have transformed Geraldo Rivera into the voice of reason, reinforcing my impression of him as a dim-witted water carrier, slavishly providing an echo chamber for whatever anti-Obama insanity his "leaders" care to spew.

I am so sorry to hear that George W. Bush, Gerson's former lord and master, put the country in peril through the trials of John Walker Lindh, José Padilla, Richard Reid, Zacharias Moussaui.... It's fortunate for us that they made up for it by capturing Osama Bin Laden and the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, so we could all be safe.

Update: The NonSequitur had me wondering if Gerson deserved a more substantial response to his blather - one that at least pretends he's a serious columnist. Gerson answers for himself with today's regurgitation of the (previously discussed) Republican Party talking points on "dithering" - no, he does not.

Calling Obama the "Undecider"... as contrasted with G.W. whose self-appellation as "a decider" made him the punch line of countless jokes? Telling Obama he's the opposite to the lousy President who put Afghanistan on a back burner so he could pursue a war of choice in Iraq, let things deteriorate until Obama took over and brought marked improvements in the situation, and created a context for the "urgency" - or, more accurately, the possibility of stabilizing the situation - Gerson didn't feel during any of the seven years of Bush Administration neglect? Gerson intends that as an insult?

"As an analogy," says David Kilcullen, an expert on counterinsurgency strategy, "you have a building on fire, and it's got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave.

The effing place has been on fire for eight years, seven of which passed under the malign neglect of his former lord and master, and Gerson only just noticed? The only thing I can say in Gerson's favor is that he may be the first regurgitator of the memo to use a synonym for "dither", rather than being "that obvious".

The Perils of Democracy

When I watch the Obama Administration forming its policy on Afghanistan, I'm reminded of the Bush Administration (and, well, every administration I've seen in my lifetime) - Push back the date for decisions that may cause blowback such that any negative consequence, that is anything that might hurt the incumbent President in the polls, occurs after reelection (or after his successor takes office).

I suspect that Obama will order an approach that he believes will improve the situation in Afghanistan, but with the idea of wrapping up major military operations by mid-2011. At that time he can begin withdrawing troops without fear of a Najibullah-type collapse of the Karzai government before the election. His Republican opponent will have to decide if he wants to run on a platform of re-escalating and perpetuating the war, or effectively endorsing Obama's policies - and I suspect that in a national election there's a lot more danger to a politician who does the former.

This is hardly unique to the U.S. - there are issues around the globe that could be resolved if elected leaders spent less time worrying about getting reelected and more time worrying about what's truly in the best interest of their country and countrymen. And no, I'm not calling for the abolition of democracy - a cure far worse than the disease. And I would probably be arguing against human nature if I were to ask politicians to treat the public as if it has the knowledge, respect and maturity to accept that it can take years to see the benefits of good policy choices, and that a significant short-term price tag (figurative or literal) can be a small price to pay for those benefits.

Alas, I'm dreaming of a world without lobbyists, and in which people would treat the notion of "Sarah Palin, 2012" as a joke, and where it would be laughable to conceive of people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as thought or opinion leaders. I don't mean to single out the political right, but it's difficult to think of a current "thought leader" or "political leader" on the left who offers so little substance yet is taken seriously by the media and the majority of the members of a major political party. People are people, and history tells us that the political left is far from immune from the dubious charms of similar "leaders".

In the Washington Post's tepid "America's Next Great Pundit" contest, a Nobel Prize winning scientist asked why our nation doesn't make an effort to separate science from partisanship, recreating the Office of Technology Assessment to try to "help Congress arrive at a common starting point for complicated legislation". Why not? Because the facts, or scientific consensus, frequently aren't politically convenient. Consider, for example, the British Government's decision to appoint a genuine scientist to advise it on drug issues, only to be embarrassed when he pointed out that much of the hysteria surrounding ecstasy and marijuana were exactly that. So he was fired.

Armed conflicts pose a similar problem, with proponents of war eagerly declaring any action with which they disagree to be a sign of weakness, empowering the enemy. We of course see that in pretty much every pro-war analysis of the War in Afghanistan. And, as Roger Cohen's column on Israel-Palestine implies, it's an argument that can lead to self-destructive behaviors that drag out a problem to the point that the best and easiest solutions may no longer be viable. When things are going well, the politicians respond to the popular sentiment that "Things are going well so why do we need to make any sacrifice," and when things aren't going well they respond to the sentiment, "Why do they deserve anything?" And the problem drags on for years, decades, potentially even for centuries.

As the experience of Britain in the Republic of Ireland indicates, the form of government can change dramatically without any significant impact on how the government responds to a serious issue, problem or conflict. Perhaps it's true that we get the government that we deserve - small-minded, foolish, vengeful, irrational, selfish, short-sighted... just like all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time.

Once Again, Robert Samuelson's Part of the Problem

A while back I commented on Robert Samuelson's mendacity on healthcare reform. No surprise, he's at it again. He is again insisting that reform - the only form of reform he will support - would make the system more expensive. No, once again that doesn't mean he advocates reforms along the lines of those imposed by pretty much every other industrialized nation, which would unquestionably reduce the cost of medical care. It means that he supports the broken status quo, with the highest cost, highest inflation, and a performance record that is on the whole surprisingly poor (even if it's pretty darn good for people with health insurance plans as good as Samuelson's).

He also takes the rather childish tack of branding the House bill, that Obama did not author, as "Obamacare",¹ and insisting that this is "Obama's health-care plan". Last I checked, the Senate hadn't yet ruined the healthcare reform bill passed its own version of the bill, and we were a long way from voting on a bill post-reconciliation. Yet apparently Samuelson was visited by a time traveler who is privy to that final piece of legislation, and who passed along the secret that Obama will personally author it.

Typical of one of Fred Hiatt's crew, Samuelson whines (seemingly endlessly) about how providing healthcare to Americans is a luxury we can't afford - it's better that people be denied care than that we enact a sensible tax policy, reconsider Fred Hiatt's endorsement for endless wars, etc. - the only portion of the budget that can be cut, after all, is that for social services. Never mind that the status quo is failing, and that its failure is accelerating with employers increasingly reducing the health benefits they offer, passing along a greater share of costs to employees, or both. There are endless wars to fight, darnit, and something's gotta give.

But then, remember, this is the same Robert Samuelson who once argued that people only hate Bush because his policies are so darn successful. He doesn't exactly have a track record of sound, objective judgment.

Update: The NonSequitur reminds us of another gem from Samuelson:

A possible war with Iraq raises many unknowns, but “can we afford it?” is not one of them. People inevitably ask that question, forgetting that the United States has become so wealthy it can wage war almost with pocket change. A war with Iraq would probably cost less than 1 percent of national income (gross domestic product). Americans have grown accustomed to fighting with little economic upset and sacrifice.

and, at a later date,

But I am certain — now as then — that budget consequences should occupy a minor spot in our debates. It’s not that the costs are unimportant; it’s simply that they’re overshadowed by other considerations that are so much more important.

----------
1. I recognize that some supporters of healthcare reform also use the term "Obamacare"... and perhaps the label can be coopted from the propaganda machine that created it, but I personally don't think it's a good term for supporters to use.

Okay, So Where Are The Good Arguments?

I keep reading editorials on Afghanistan, hoping to come across a good argument for why the war should continue. The closest I've come is, "We should stick it out a bit longer so we can truly say we gave it our best shot". Not very compelling. More often, it's a regurgitation of silly, tired arguments like this:

• "The Taliban cannot rely on the support of a nationalist mass-movement.... The locals are wary and weary. They feel as if they have been at war for ever, and they only wish that it would stop.... Most locals are ready to rally to the support of any side which looked as if it could win and thus bring the bloodshed to an end. If it seemed that whatever the cost, Nato was on for the long game, the West would gain a cautious and growing respect. But every time there is a rumour that we might pull out, the locals rush to reinsure themselves with the Taliban."

  All we have to do to "win" is let a population completely weary of war know that we'll stay and perpetuate the war forever, then they'll support us. (Got a problem with that?) Moreover, given a choice between the Taliban, some sort of Sharia-based Islamic government, or the corrupt, western-backed Karzai regime, who says they prefer our version of the end game?

• "Nato tactics are also evolving. There is still a need for more helicopters, better equipment and above all, more men."

  No sh..., er, kidding. And you know what? Next year we will truthfully be able to say the same thing. And the year after, and the year after, and... every year for as long as the war continues.

• "It is part of a wider civilising mission. The Karzai government's difficulties are well-publicised. Corruption is bad; so is ballot-stuffing. But neither is unknown, even in supposedly more advanced countries: think Illinois in 1960."

  If you think that "Illinois in 1960" is a fair comparison to "Afghanistan in 2009", you've pretty much given up any pretense that you're arguing from fact or logic. The author's notion that Karzai's government is the best in Afghanistan's history raises the question, what was the second-best? Najibullah's? Isn't this called "daming Karzai with faint praise"?

  Also, that part about civilizing... is it just Afghanistan? What does that mean? Teaching them that their interpretation of Islam and Sharia law is backward, that they need to treat women as equals, that... seriously? And should we tell them that - "We're here until you behave like civilized people, by our definition"? Because that type of condescension is sure to help our cause....

• "[Soldiers fighting this war] have also made an essential contribution to all our safety. It is not necessary to believe in a relentless clash of civilisations to recognise that there is a problem with Islam. By no means all 1.3 billion Muslims hate the West and they do not all live in failed states. But there is a lot of anger and a lot of failure, especially in Pakistan. Although the West needs effective diplomacy in order to build up alliances with the Muslim world, diplomacy is not enough. The West cannot afford to display weakness. If we let Afghanistan slip through nerveless fingers, we would not only lose it to the terrorists. Pakistan would be in jeopardy and so would our standing throughout the region. The West will only be seen as a reliable friend if it is also a reliable foe."

  That's a jumbled mishmash of thoughts, concluding with a platitudinous attempt at a bon mot. ("You gotta be cruel to be kind, in the right measure, cruel to be kind, it's a very good sign...."

  I don't think we can doubt that the war in Afghanistan has disrupted al-Qaeda activity in Afghanistan, but it can hardly be said that al-Qaeda was defeated in Afghanistan, can't survive without Afghanistan, or can't recruit and flourish in other parts of the region and world. It's also fair to say that they're using the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as recruiting tools. So once al-Qaeda was displaced from Afghanistan, what part of the war has made us safer? For that matter, were their training camps to return, and for some reason the West decided not to blast them to smithereens, would we in fact be less safe than we are with their present activities in Pakistan or Somalia?

  Who in their right mind thinks that our activities in the region, dating back to our support for ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan, have stabilized that country or warmed its people to the U.S.? Does the author believe that U.S.-Pakistan relations are headed in the right direction?

  Further, hasn't the overblown argument that "our enemy won't respect us unless we fight forever" proved wrong in... pretty much every context? What makes this one special, even if you pretend that ending the war in Afghanistan would mean ending military operations in the region, which of course it does not. Other than staying involved in a permanent war and occupation, the author sees no way to earn respect from Arabs and Muslims?

• "The soldiers I talk to who have served in Afghanistan all know about the cost. They have seen it. But they are unanimous in their belief that it is a price worth paying. The rest of us can make our contribution by demanding that they are given the tools they need to finish the job."

  Let's flash back to something this yutz said earlier in his commentary.... "A majority of the public wants to withdraw from Afghanistan. A majority of the public is wrong.... thank God that we are a representative democracy, not a plebiscitary one" - Unless you take the plebiscite from a subsample, assumed to support your view, in which case how dare you question their wisdom?

Is there anyone presenting a good case for staying in Afghanistan? To me that means (a) a clear statement of what we're capable of achieving, and (b) an explanation of how it will be achieved. Wishful thinking is great, but my mind keeps going back to Burgess Meredith.

A Raw Diehl?

Again cheerleading a significant, long-term escalation of the war in Afghanistan, Jackson Diehl asks,

All that time, no one accused George W. Bush of dithering. So why does Barack Obama keep hearing the taunt as he deliberates about Afghanistan -- and why do even some who sympathize with his dilemma find it hard to shake the feeling that this commander in chief lacks resolve?

If you look at the people who are accusing President Obama of dithering, the answer is self-evident. Is there one among them who is not a staunch advocate of endless war in Afghanistan? They hope that their silly, hypocritical accusations of "dithering" (think Dick Cheney) will somehow embarrass him into doing what they want, and making Obama less likely to impose reasonable demands on Karzai's administration or have a clear end-game in mind before escalating the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

Diehl shows his cards with this claim,

One part of the answer is easy: Bush was renowned for summoning plenty of resolve, and not enough critical thinking. No one questioned that Bush's heart was in his bid for "victory" in Iraq.

He defines "resolve" as the willingness to make a war last forever if it means avoiding admitting a mistake, but (at least in relation to Bush) not as the resolve to commit the troops or forces necessary to win. Which leads us back to the real Diehl: he wants more troops not because there's a plan for victory, or a reasonable likelihood of victory, but because he favors the perpetuation of the war until his unarticulated fantasy version of "victory" is achieved.

(It would be interesting to read an analysis of how all of the pro-war pundits and commentators miraculously settled on a somewhat unusual word, "dithering", to describe Obama's failure to immediately dispatch tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan upon the request of General McChrystal, despite the vast improvement his administration has already brought about in Afghanistan following seven years of malignant neglect by Bush and Cheney.)

Human Rights and Withdrawal from Afghanistan

A contrarian view of the human rights impact of continuing the war in Afghanistan, but given the author it's not one to easily dismiss: a woman who "was elected to Afghanistan"s parliament in 2005 and kicked out in 2007 by the warlords".

Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.

In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.

The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.

I wish the ideas were better developed, rather than fitting within the @800 word limit of an op/ed column, but if I were to infer why she favors withdrawal it's likely because U.S. policy seems likely to cement in place a corrupt, misogynistic government.

Should We Withdraw from Afghanistan

The Guardian offers essays on continuation of the war in Afghanistan, arguing both sides of the question (from a British perspective). The argument to stay first observes the effect of seven years of the Bush Administration's neglect and incompetence:

By 2008, the situation had deteriorated so far that, with the Taliban established in outlying districts of the city, friends in Kabul who had returned in 2002 were wondering where to go if forced to flee again.

Things have since improved:

Now, finally, with Barack Obama in the White House and an American military which, for all its faults, has shown an impressive ability to learn (or relearn), we have in place the strategy that we should have had years ago. It depends on restricting the air strikes and the indiscriminate firepower, deploying troops to protect the population rather than treating them as a neutral terrain on which to hunt insurgents, training local troops, creating secure physical space for commerce, political space for some kind of process potentially leading to the eventual creation of a broadly legitimate government structure linked to broader regional initiatives.

That sounds good, right?

But will this strategy work?

Probably not.

To put it mildly, ouch. (Read the editorial for a list of everything that has gone wrong, that we're unlikely to be able to right.)

The human rights argument is weak, too. It is almost certain that any stable Afghanistan is going to be much more conservative, much more anti-western and much more authoritarian than we would like. Better than a Taliban-run state perhaps but more like Saudi Arabia than Sweden. A continued commitment will not guarantee girls the right to go to school across the entire country.

So why fight then? Why send more young men to their deaths? Why spend more money that could be used for hospitals, schools or saving banks?

For the simple reason that we owe it to the Afghans to try to make the new strategy work. Every death is a tragedy, but the price in lives and money is not an exorbitant one given the size, wealth and military history of the UK. After years of errors, we finally have a chance to do something right. In two or three years, we will know if there is a chance that the strategy can succeed. If it does, we can be proud. If it doesn't, at least we are unlikely to have made things worse. More important, we can at least honestly say to the Afghan people that we did our best.

Within the context of a strategy that does not depend upon Hamad Karzai (or his successor) being honest, competent or helpful, with the moderate goal of creating a society that's "merely" extremely oppressive to women as opposed to extraordinarily oppressive... conceding the narrow scope of what we're likely to achieve is a bitter pill. I don't think that argument is likely to persuade anybody who doesn't have a sense of how atrocious life became for women under the Taliban, but I can understand why the author, familiar with that history, wants to give it one more honest effort before we give up.

No More Subsidies?

Thomas Friedman, in a shallow analysis of the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, concludes,

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore.

No more subsidies? To either side?

"Independents"

David Brooks offers his own special insight into what independents want, coincidentally what Brooks himself wants:

If I were a politician trying to win back independents, I’d say something like this: When I was a kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. Each state was a piece, and on it there was a drawing showing what people made there. California might have movies; Washington State, apples; New York, fashion or publishing. That puzzle represented an economy that was diverse and deeply rooted.

We’ve lost that. First Wall Street got disproportionately big, then Washington. It’s time to return to fundamentals. No short-term fixes. Government should do what it’s supposed to do: schools, roads, basic research. It should not be picking C.E.O.’s or setting pay or fizzing up the economy with more debt. It should give people the tools to compete, not rig the competition. Lines of restraint have dissolved, and they need to be restored.

But here's the thing: independents aren't a monolith. Like the supporters of the major political parties, you'll find independents who self-describe as liberal, conservative and moderate. You'll find people who choose a libertarian candidate, a Conservative Party candidate, vote Green, or fervently pray that Pat Buchanan will make another run for President. It's inaccurate to assume that independents hover between the two major political parties and that either could score their votes. Among other factions you have:

• People who for a variety of reasons don't want to associate themselves with a specific political party, but nonetheless always (or almost always) vote for a specific political party;

• People who either don't have the time or inclination to follow politics - the type of people who argued with sincerity back in 2000 that there was "no difference between Gore and Bush".

• People who want the Republican Party to move further to the right, or the Democratic Party to move sharply to the left.

• People who think both parties are corrupt and/or incompetent, even if they have slightly different approaches to paving the road to hell.

But let's play Brooks' game, and assume that independents are looking for... an authoritative parent?

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

That does help explain the level of hysteria that the Republican Parties have been trying to whip up over everything President Obama does. "OMG - he sneezed; he wants everybody to catch Swine Flu! While he takes away your health insurance! That's proof that he supports death panels!" Less sarcastically, as Dan Larison points out in the context of Obama's absence from ceremonies commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, the attack machine is nothing more than that:

If people are tired of hearing from Obama and tired of him inserting himself into so many things, as we hear so often from the GOP, his absence from Berlin this week should be a welcome sign that Obama is learning that he needs to have priorities in how he uses his time. Just a few weeks ago, we were hearing how outrageous it was for Obama to shirk his duties and go to Copenhagen, and now it is supposed to be outrageous that he is not going on yet another foreign trip.

If Brooks sees the future of the Republican Party as making platitudinous statements about childhood jigsaw puzzles - a cute image, but essentially a false argument that we can somehow return to the simple days before globalization - and the notion that the government shouldn't exercise oversight even over the companies it bails out, and shouldn't be concerned about the executives of the industry that almost brought down the world economy even as regular, hard-working Americans can't find work - or do, but at a fraction of what they previously earned - all the more power to him. Seriously, "Wall Street got too big, so let's bail it out at taxpayer expense but not regulate it or its pay structure"? Not that the Republican Party has done badly in the past by following the Brooks/Barnum approach of never overestimating the intelligence of the American People.

Whether it's the latest party memo, or the inevitable post-election spin, there are any number of editorials about "the center" and how the only way for Obama to win the next election is to stop governing as a centrist and to start running as a Republican. Brooks' entry may not be particularly impressive, but compared to, say, Krauthammer's latest screed or Gerson's drooling on his keyboard.... But still, aren't we really just revisiting Brooks' "lunch period poli sci",

The only real shift between school and adult politics is that the jocks realize they need conservative intellectuals, who are geeks who have decided their fellow intellectuals should never be allowed to run anything and have learned to speak slowly so the jocks will understand them.

With "conservative intellectuals" still meaning "David Brooks, but with the term "independent voters" substituted for "jocks"?

Afghanistan: In or Out?

George Will is so convinced that the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, that he comes close to complimenting President Obama:¹

On July 24, 2008, in Berlin, Obama stressed the need to "defeat the Taliban." Then, however, he spoke as a "citizen of the world," not as president. Now he is being presidential by reconsidering some implications of the politically calculated rhetoric that helped make him president. He is rightly ignoring those who cannot distinguish thinking from dithering....

Whatever strategy Obama adopts, its success cannot depend on America teaching Afghans to [elect good men]. If he is looking for a strategy that depends on legitimacy in Kabul, he is looking for a unicorn.

Here, Will is correct - Karzai's removed any doubt about how he is going to run Afghanistan, or at least those portions under which he (backed by the U.S. military) actually exercises control, and his priorities are quite different from ours. We cannot afford to hope that Karzai and Afghanistan's government somehow magically reform themselves, and a strategy that depends upon that hope is doomed to fail. (One wonders why it took some people seven years to figure that out, but there you go.)

Remember, back in the day, when the neocons were describing themselves as wanting to move away from realpolitik? How they wanted to build real nations, with real, functional, honest governments, and not simply replace one tyrant with another who was more willing to bend to the will of the U.S.? Is anybody still trying to advance that argument? If so, where can I find an example of their putting that into practice? Isn't it the paleocons who have more consistently advocated against military adventurism, the notion that governments can be magically replaced with U.S.-friendly regimes that are also competent, ethical and democratic? Sneering that the paleocons would install somebody like, you know, Karzai doesn't work so well when it's the neocons who most want U.S. soldiers to shed blood to keep him in power. And when it comes to backing traditional U.S. values, such as the ethical treatment of prisoners captured by the military, once again don't the paleocons have the moral high ground?

Turn the page and see exactly what I mean. Yet another unsigned editorial from Fred Hiatt's editorial board, insisting that we back Karzai:

As President Obama pointedly noted in recognizing Mr. Karzai's reelection a day earlier, "the proof is not going to be in words. It's going to be in deeds." True enough -- but it's also the case that the direction of Mr. Karzai's deeds is going to depend to a large degree on whether he believes he can depend on the United States, its forces and especially its president to back him up.

That's true, but not in the sense the editorial intends. Backed in the manner the Post demands, Karzai will continue to be corrupt and self-dealing, unconcerned with establishing a competent, stable government, and unconcerned with the consequences of electoral corruption that demolish our effort to nudge his nation toward democracy. Isn't that the lesson of the past seven years?

Senior envoys such as Vice President Biden have quarreled with him in private, even as Mr. Obama has held Karzai at arm's length in public. This might have made some sense if there were an alternative to Mr. Karzai. But there is none.

Well, um, yeah, there are alternatives. Sure, Bush and Cheney squandered most of the good ones, and even toyed around with a bad one, but no question there are alternatives.

A fair question, what does Karzai actually bring to the table? He undermines our effort to democratize Afghanistan. He undermines our effort to establish good governance. He happily enriches himself at the expense of his people, aligns himself with warlords and Taliban leaders... Is it enough that he looks good on camera? That he presumably pledged his pliance to the Bush Administration? Karzai depends upon useful idiots like Hiatt, always willing to give him "another chance" because "there aren't any alternatives", rather than insisting that he demonstrate that he's worthy of another chance.

But more to the point, how can Hiatt's and his crew, or any neocon, argue in support of the perpetual, unquestioning support of Karzai without admitting that their concerns about establishing good governance in troubled or lawless nations were a fiction? Because here's the rub: If you truly want an Afghanistan that is less tribal, less radical, less fundamentalist, at least tolerant of women's rights, you need to do a lot better than Karzai. Hoping that he'll change, or not even hoping but insisting that he's our Obi-Wan Kenobi,² is unlikely to turn out any better than Russia's experiment with Mohammad Najibullah.

I hate to harp on this, but if the best strategy we can come up with for Afghanistan is to prop up Karzai and significantly expand our military presence in order to just tread water, with no strategy for success or even a concept of what success will look like,³ we're not doing favors to anyone... Well, except Karzai. I would detest a future for Afghanistan that involved a resurgent Taliban, but it's unrealistic to expect that the U.S. will tread water indefinitely.
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1. Ever since Clinton's election, Will's had something of a pathological need to insult Democrats; even, or perhaps especially, when he criticizes Republicans, he traditionally makes sure to suggest that the Democrats are nonetheless worse.

2. "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're our only hope."

3. The "Groundhog Day" approach.

Another Stimulus Bill?

Paul Krugman interprets President Obama's comments on budget deficits, "that now is the time to 'get serious' about reducing debt", as "an unfortunate tendency to echo 'centrist' conventional wisdom". While I grant that if employment is on a significant upswing a year from now, the size of the deficit won't much affect the election, I think Krugman is missing a couple of important factors.

First, Obama is not merely echoing "centrist convential wisdom". If you take him at his word, he's likely in the same boat as a majority of Americans, and is concerned about the ramifications of Bush's financial recklessness, the cost of two wars, the financial industry collapse, and stimulus spending, on top of the rest of the federal budget. Clearly Obama isn't obsessed with balancing the budget - take a look at the numbers - but he's right to be concerned.

Second, let's assume that Obama doesn't believe that reducing the budget deficit should be a priority within the context of the current economy. He still has to deal with a Congress that does, at least when domestic spending is involved. No matter how compelling the argument, I would expect Congress to reject a new stimulus bill in the current fiscal year.

President Obama is already testing the waters for a second stimulus bill - for now that means sticking a toe in the water and pulling back when the sharks start to bite. If the political climate becomes more friendly to additional stimulus spending, and the bill passes on next year's budget such that Obama can still claim an overall deficit decrease (even if the total deficit remains very high), I think it's quite possible Obama will push additional stimulus spending.

I think that when Krugman and Robert Reich advocate for additional stimulus spending, they help lay the groundwork that could help Obama advance a new stimulus bill. Yet it's not lip service to centrism, but acknowledgment of reality, that unless things get suddenly and drastically worse it's not happening in the current fiscal year. (I'll buy you a cookie if I'm wrong - but you'll have to come here to collect.)

Brooks on Dating

Poor David Brooks seems to think his children's romantic lives will be ruined by 'texting'. For the most part he's unintentionally funny, but then there's this:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

You know why we think of that as a "Happy Days" era? Because it's a history of dating that can best be gleaned from "Happy Days" reruns. Seriously. Most charitably, the "Happy Days" version of dating represents a brief moment, not particularly representative of what came before or what has come since.

The "decline" of "Happy Days" dating has more traditionally been blamed on birth control. Except in the televised world of Richie Cunningham, it was largely accepted that "boys will be boys" - that "delaying sex" was the role of a "good girl". In reality, sex wasn't always delayed - a lot of young women took unexpected, extended "vacations" that coincidentally were just long enough to cover up a pregnancy and childbirth. A lot of others got married. Does Brooks truly not know the prevalence of teen pregnancy in the 1950's?

The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000....

Further, other than that "fairy tale" moment found principally on TV sitcoms, the "script" for dating has looked more like this: The parents arrange the marriage of a young girl to and older male. She's expected to be a virgin, but he's not. The couple was "guided" to long-term commitment by fault-based divorce laws (or the unavailability of divorce) and, for much of history, the fact that the children were the husband's property so the price of divorce to the mother would be that she would have to leave her children. How... idyllic. It's a darn shame that texting has come along.

Our Corrupt Allies

Pat Buchanan is upset that the media is paying so much attention to the corruption and ineptitude of Hamad Karzai. He argues that when we're involved in military action in a state or region, and depict a leader as corrupt, it means we're about to abandon our support for him.

When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.

We did not lose China. He did.

Let's take a look at that allegation:

Mao Zedong’s communists eventually came to power in 1949. A year earlier, in June 1948, Chiang wrote in his diary that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within.

You see, sometimes when a foreign leader or his administration is depicted as corrupt and incompetent, the depiction is accurate.

Buchanan similarly complains that South Vietnam's President Diem was depicted as "a dictator... who had lost touch with his people", something he fails to demonstrate is in any way false. He similarly whines that Cambodia's Lon Nol "got the same treatment", again failing to demonstrate that the treatment was undeserved. For some reason, he neglects to mention such illustrious leaders once supported by the United States, including the Shah of Iran, Manuel Noriega... the laundry list of thugs and despots the U.S. has at times supported in South and Central America.... Should we include Saddam Hussein?

Yes, when it's convenient we have historically dropped support for such "allies", and it's no coincidence that the public narrative goes from their being "important allies to the U.S." to "corrupt and incompetent, an impediment to our goals in the region", but the convenient timing of the admission of corruption doesn't make it any less true. It instead highlights how we care more about advancing our interests in a given region than we do about whether that region enjoys honest, scrupulous governance. Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon - yet he claims to know nothing of realpolitik?

Buchanan's memory cannot be so short that he has forgotten his time in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps he remembers a guy named Pol Pot - an incompetent, genocidal leader responsible for the deaths of probably millions of Cambodians. What did Ronald Reagan do after Vietnam toppled Pot's regime?

Rollback was the American end of the proxy war fought between the two superpowers for power and influence in the developing world. The basis was childishly simple: my enemy's enemy is my friend.

To that end the Reagan administration insisted on recognising the deposed Khmer Rouge government in exile at the UN, mostly because it was the pro-Soviet Vietnamese that had done the deposing. This recognition helped maintain a civil war in which many Cambodians were killed and many thousands of landmines were laid.

What defense does Buchanan now offer for Rios Montt, whom Reagan described as "a man of great personal integrity"? Reagan's high praise for Jonas Savimbi? Is it problematic that those leaders are now judged based upon the facts, not upon Reagan's (I would hope knowingly) fabricated songs of praise?

No, fundamentally, Buchanan knows the charges are true. The problem is that the truth is becoming known:

That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.

That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America’s war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.

But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.

I'm sorry, but I don't feel any great sympathy for people who "cast their lot with us", enrich themselves, their families and their clans at the expense of their countries and countrymen, undermine U.S. political goals and military efforts, and ultimately lose our support due to true allegations of their greed, corruption and incompetence. I can't feel sorry for somebody who thought that "casting his lot" with the U.S. meant "winning the lottery", and who if deposed will most likely live out his life in a billionaire's exile, supported by the money he has stolen from his (and our) country.

Does Buchanan really believe it's too much to ask of somebody like Karzai to steal a little bit less, or to accept a small risk of losing an election he probably could have won honestly, in order to help us achieve our goals of improving and stabilizing the country he claims to lead? Well, yeah, I guess he does. Because they "trusted us", apparently, to not care if they demolished the foundation of our efforts.

The Washington Post Wants Us Out of Afghanistan?

Of course not. Hiatt and his boys serve up a typically insipid, unsigned editorial suggesting the opposite. But their image of us standing on the edge of a slippery slope, with their hands at our back ready to push us down, is in may ways a compelling argument to bring our experiment to an end:

One of the rhetorical questions frequently tossed out in the debate over Afghanistan concerns the brewing trouble in Somalia and Yemen, both of which are known to host al-Qaeda cadres and training camps. If it's necessary to pacify Afghanistan to protect U.S. security, goes the taunt, must we also intervene in Somalia and Yemen?

The presumed answer is: "Of course not -- and therefore why bother with Afghanistan?" The more sensible response is: If something is not done soon about these lawless places, one or the other may well become the next Afghanistan -- a place where U.S. military intervention was compelled by a devastating attack on the homeland.

In other words, although it (as usual) has no concept of what a victory would look like or how it would be achieved, and no explanation of how it would improve U.S. security, the Post wants us to invade every nation that could become "the next Afghanistan". When Hiatt and friends pose the rhetorical question, "If it's necessary to pacify Afghanistan to protect U.S. security, goes the taunt, must we also intervene in Somalia and Yemen?" they have already rejected the answer, "Well, maybe it's not necessary to pacify Afghanistan." The only "solution" they can conceive involves spending additional trillions to invade additional nations that we can't realistically pacify, forcing the al-Qaeda camps into other "lawless nations" or across the border into "friendly" states that become de facto safe havens, and in turn become increasingly radicalized and destabilized.

Even if we assume that we have the money and troops to fund unlimited war, how is that a recipe for the long-term security of the United States? What is the actual danger to U.S. interests posed by these training camps? Could it be that it's U.S. military action that's causing al-Qaeda to metastasize, inspiring it to extend into other nations where anti-U.S. sentiment is high and new recruits are easy to find? Where those camps, and associated military action, destabilize neighboring countries? Might we not be more secure if the camps were concentrated in Afghanistan? For that matter, how much direct danger do these camps pose to U.S. interests? The training that put us most at risk wasn't that learned in Afghan camps - it was the training terrorists obtained at U.S. flight schools.

Where can we find even slight evidence that al-Qaeda is any more tied to Somalia than it was to Afghanistan... fighting them "there" so we don't have to fight them "here" doesn't work so well if they leave, let us fight the locals, and carry on business as usual from other nations, and can easily return to fill any void we leave behind. Hiatt doesn't seem honest enough to admit it, but his board's editorial boils down to "Everything we've tried so far has failed, so let's double down!"

"Third Parties Can Fix Everything!"

In keeping with his penchant to prove how little he knows about... pretty much everything, Ross Douthat argues today in favor of third parties:

Regional parties often start out as ideological enforcers. New York’s Conservative Party, for instance, exists to punish Republicans for drifting too far left — a part it played to perfection by supporting Hoffmann’s candidacy.

But there’s more that such parties could accomplish. They could provide a counterweight to the corruption associated with one-party rule, whether in solidly red states or deep-blue cities. They could get unorthodox candidates elected, and win hearings for unorthodox ideas. And they could help fulfill the promise of federalism, by organizing themselves around local particularities, rather than the national political divide.

Were Douthat to think before he typed, it might have occurred to him that a region "associated with one-party rule" doesn't actually need a third party - it needs an effective second party. I also have to wonder, does Douthat picture the leader of a third party in the role of Two-Face from Batman, flipping a coin to decide whether to be an ideological enforcer or to be a more responsible version of the party in control of government? Really, Douthat wants it both ways.

Let's step back for a minute, and consider what a true third party might do to a state like California, in which supermajority requirements already enable a minority party can already wreak havoc with the budgeting process. Douthat's responsible party could insist upon taxes or spending cuts that neither major party wants to pass, rendering it impossible to pass a budget. (And yes, we're assuming that this third party would in fact be responsible, and not out to enrich special interests by using its minority presence to extort huge concessions just to keep the government running.) Douthat's "ideologically pure" party would refuse to let one side or the other compromise to pass a budget, insisting upon whatever form of purity they're presumed to advocate. Sounds like... heaven.

Really, look at nations that have strong third parties. Occasionally there will be a realignment, with parties merging or with the long-standing third party switching places with one of the others; but you almost never see a strong fourth party, and elections are almost always functionally between the two major parties. A minority government or coalition government is in constant jeopardy of failing, with minority parties often able to extort disproportionate reward for remaining inside the coalition. In countries that offer strong protections to third parties and their role in government, the net result result seems to be gridlock and often what seems like an increase in corruption. At least in parliamentary systems, a government can call an election at its convenience and try to capture more seats. In our system, structured around the two party system with elections at fixed intervals, a proliferation of successful third parties would likely leave us stuck with gridlock until the next scheduled election.

Douthat personifies the problem he pretends to identify. Speaking of Doug Hoffman's role in the race (formerly) between Dede Scozzafava and Bill Owens, Douthat scoffs that Scozzafava "is arguably more liberal than her Democratic opponent" (although he doesn't even try to make the argument), and

Hoffmann has irritated liberals. Scozzafava was their kind of Republican, and by derailing her candidacy — which she suspended over the weekend after polls showed her slipping to third place — he’s turned a sleepy contest between two left-of-center politicians into an ideologically-charged election.

So for all of his lip service to the various contributions a third party can make, Douthat's biggest concern is ideological purity. He sees it as better for Republicans to backstab a member of their own party for not being ideologically pure than for their to worry about such things during the nomination process or to draw lessons of moderation from inside the tent as opposed to from a third party candidate. He also overlooks the fact that the Conservative Party (and other parties) run candidates in a lot of elections around the nation - the difference this time is not that Hoffman is somehow more compelling, but that Republican leaders are so willing to "eat their own" in the name of ideological purity.

Were Douthat honest, he would admit also that in calling Scozzafava a liberal he's really speaking of her views on social issues - she doesn't share his anti-choice views or his contempt for gay rights. When he argues that Hoffman "injected real substance into their races, and they’ve given voters a much more interesting choice than they would have otherwise enjoyed", he's admitting that he actually knows nothing about Hoffman... or elections. As is the case in many Congressional districts around the nation, having a Conservative Party candidate (or other third party candidate) on the ballot is anything but unusual. In 2008, five parties were on the ballot for NY23. It's not the presence of a third party candidate that is making this race more "interesting" - it's the fact that so many Republican ideologues have aligned their endorsements and their money machines behind the third party candidate.

Moreover, Hoffman offers nothing of substance:

I'm running for Congress because I sense the America I love is being taken away from us. I want to tell Washington: No more bailouts. No more taxes. No more trillion dollar deficits. That's what I'm fighting for.

I've searched for a link that leads to a deeper take on the issues, but no... that's all Hoffman has to offer. But he'll bring back the... love?¹

Particularly at the local level, it often seems that the better approach is to go nonpartisan. That may satisfy Douthat's "counterweight to corruption" or "bringing in unorthodox views" argument, but as he makes plain he doesn't actually care about that side of things. Is he concerned that Scozzafava is corrupt and is not being honest about her views? That she didn't intend to serve her district to the best of her ability? That she was too orthodox? No, to the contrary, those are the things that bothered him about her. His preference for Hoffman is predicated upon a two-pronged ideological litmus test that has nothing to do with what's best for his party, the district, or the nation.

It's also telling that Douthat doesn't want third parties to run for President - "part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat — that chief executives need to represent the broadest possible coalition to have any chance of success". Sure, a third party candidate might highlight problems with the status quo, shed light on corruption, and... oh, yeah. He might force the Republican candidate away from Douthat's ideological litmus test. Besides, who needs a philosopher king, when we can have a scapegoat-priest-king.
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1. Hoffman also states,

In 1980, I helped Lake Placid with our Olympics when the US beat the Russians in hockey...

Um... did he cheer loudly, or something?

Priorities

Robert Reich, who to date has been arguing that a healthcare bill must be passed before a limited window of opportunity closes, today argues that it's the wrong priority - that instead Obama should be trying to pass additional stimulus measures. Perhaps this isn't the "loss of discipline" Reich warned us about, but results from Reich's concern that the legislation that is likely to pass gives up too much to pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. But Reich doesn't offer much of an explanation.

The problem I have with this type of argument, whether from Reich or anybody else, is that it presupposes that the government is capable of only doing one thing at a time, and also that the government's priorities should change along with their own. Obama has largely deferred the healthcare reform debate to Congress, so who's to say he hasn't been working on other issues? More to the point, there's reason to believe that a healthcare reform bill, even if flawed, will pass, but there's no compelling reason to believe the same of another stimulus bill. I suspect that if Obama were to follow Reich's advice, abandoning healthcare reform while advocating for a @$trillion stimulus bill, he would look silly - and he would fail.

The optimist in me says Obama can pivot off a health-care victory and launch some new initiatives that palpably and quickly spur job growth. The realist says there aren't any such initiatives -- at least none that can work fast enough to reverse the tide of unemployment before the midterm elections.

Is the concern the long-term welfare of the nation, getting people back to work, or the next election? If a job-creating stimulus bill is good policy, it remains good policy even if its effects aren't felt for two years. With due respect to Reich's concern that "getting the nation back to work" is more important than healthcare reform, I can't help but feel that a failure to pass a healthcare bill combined with what now appears to be an unavoidably slow recovery would be worse.

Reich argues that, by focusing on the economy,

Clinton avoided Carter's failure and won re-election handily. But the Clinton years produced few if any major social reforms. Clinton spent so much of his initial political capital, as well as his time and energy, on deficit reduction that he didn't have enough left to enact health care in 1994.

So when he cautions Obama,

If Obama and the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it will be because the president learned only the most superficial lesson of the Clinton years. Health-care reform is critically important. But when one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, getting the nation back to work is more so.

I can't help but wonder if it's Reich who learned the superficial lesson of Clinton. Taking an "it's the economy, stupid," approach seems likely to similarly deprive Obama of the political capital necessary to enact healthcare or other reforms. And while Clinton did win reelection, it seems fair to observe that his inability to deliver on issues such as healthcare first cost the Democrats their Congressional majority, and later contributed to the election of G.W. Bush.

Something Always Changes

While Robert Samuelson offers his softball argument against stimulus spending, Paul Krugman continues to advocate for greater stimulus spending.

Without the recovery act, the free fall would probably have continued, as unemployed workers slashed their spending, cash-strapped state and local governments engaged in mass layoffs, and more.

The stimulus didn’t completely eliminate these effects, but it was enough to break the vicious circle of economic decline. Aid to the unemployed and help for state and local governments were probably the most important factors. If you want to see the recovery act in action, visit a classroom: your local school probably would have had to fire a lot of teachers if the stimulus hadn’t been enacted.

That seems accurate, and highlights the unfortunate effect of the losses of tax revenue by state and local government - rather than having a stimulus boost infrastructure spending, it seems to have largely allowed governments to tread water. It would not be a good thing if more teachers were laid off and more schools closed, and its reasonable to recognize the benefits of the stimulus, but it's no surprise that stimulus spending to date hasn't done much to improve (as opposed to maintain) employment.

Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment.

Krugman alludes to economic growth under Clinton, but recall that the growth was driven by something people didn't anticipate - the rise of the Internet, followed by the Internet bubble. We bounced out of the post-bubble recession thanks to the real estate bubble, and... well, I'm not arguing in favor of building an economy based on bubbles, but I think it's fair to observe that things happen - sometimes good things, like the burst of innovation that grew out of the Internet. While I'm not going to argue that we should build public policy based upon wishful thinking, and on the whole it's responsible to look to general economic trends when advocating tax and spending policy, the (largely¹) unexpected is going to happen.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

My concerns are a bit different than those of Washington. I find it unlikely that additional stimulus spending will truly be directed at expenditures that qualify as investment in the future. I am troubled by the concept of bailing out struggling state and local governments to the extent that it enables those governments to avoid revisiting tax and spending policies that contribute to their plight. There seems to be little political will to actually invest in infrastructure improvement, or to invest in schools and colleges to ensure their continued quality and affordability.

I think we're past the point of emergency. To the extent that people advocate for additional stimulus spending, I think it's fair to move out of the bank bailout mode - throw buckets of money on the flames and hope to smother out the fire - and to spell out how much money is being allocated to any particular stimulus goal, along with a responsible argument as to how the spending will bring about a return for the economy.
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1. The real estate bubble was predicted, but the voices of doubt were largely drowned out by those who believed that you really could have perpetual, 20% increases in housing prices and that this should be viewed as a "good thing", not wildly out-of-control housing inflation.

Stating the Obvious Isn't Necessarily Helpful

Robert Samuelson lectures us about debt and taxes:

Despite huge deficits, interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds have hovered around 3.5 percent. In time of financial crisis, investors have sought the apparent sanctuary of government bonds. But the correct conclusion to draw is not that major governments (such as Japan and the United States) can easily borrow as much as they want. It is that they can easily borrow as much as they want until confidence that they can do so evaporates - and we don't know when, how or whether that may happen.

So we get a conclusion that's both obvious (how many people aren't aware that there are limits on how much a nation can successfully borrow) and useless (if we borrow too much, however much that happens to be, bad things of one sort or another will happen at some point in the future). With due respect to Samuelson's talk of the difficulty of balancing the budget by cutting spending or increasing taxes,¹ and the possibility that taking those steps could also cause bad things of one sort or another at some point in the future, he's tossing out marshmallows. He concludes,

The arguments over whether we need more "stimulus" (and debt) obscure the larger reality that past debt increasingly constricts governments' economic maneuvering room.

To a degree, that observation is as obvious (and useless) as everything else Samuelson has to say. The argument against any stimulus, let alone a larger one, has been that "we can't afford it".

The countervailing argument is that we can't afford not to have a stimulus, even if it means significant short-term borrowing, as without significant stimulus spending our economy will continue to sputter and stall. Samuelson's concern that short-term spending might tie the government's hands in the future reminds me of the concerns of his other friends at the Post, who at best offer lip service to out-of-control spending that goes to things they support (such as wars in the Middle East) but switch from chicken hawk to deficit hawk mode the second we're talking about domestic spending. Samuelson's version of political "truth", similarly, involves slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but makes no mention of military spending.

Perhaps Samuelson hasn't noticed that tax revenues have plummeted in this recession. A stimulus that hastens an economic recovery, a rebound in employment, and improved tax revenues could in fact be much better for the country than wringing our hands and doing nothing out of concerns for nebulous, theoretical economic consequences that... we know wouldn't result from a stimulus even two, three or four times as large as the one the government passed. Unless you're from the "If you can't pay for it in cash, you can't afford it" school of economics, you should recognize that sometimes you borrow not just to spend but to invest.
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1. Samuelson's argument on taxes seems to hold a mirror to GW's. While GW argued that tax cuts were the solution for every economic situation (the economy's strong - let's cut taxes; the economy's faltering - we must save it by cutting taxes; we're in a recession - we must cut taxes), Samuelson seems to be arguing that no matter how strong or weak the economy it's a huge gamble to increase taxes to cover government expenditures. His preference for deficit spending over responsible budgeting is evidenced by his slippery slope argument leading to default, not to a realization that taxes must go up in order to prevent default, even though (with due respect to the timing of tax increases) our nation can afford higher taxes.