Avdat

Just what am I not supposed to forget this week?

It's going to be a long week of 9/11 retrospectives. Some will be thoughtful, moving and/or eloquent. Others will be sentimental and/or jingoistic.

I'm puzzled by how many remembrances admonish us to "Never forget," as if that terrible day weren't seared into our brains forever. Absent a diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease, how could any of us who are old enough to remember 9/11 ever forget it?

I suspect that some of the calls to "Never forget" are more about justifying everything that's happened since 9/11. Well, I don't buy that.

9/11 doesn't justify torture. 9/11 didn't justify the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 didn't justify the orgy of consumption in the 2000s which we are paying for now. 9/11 didn't justify the maligning of Islam, a noble religion practiced by a billion people. 9/11 doesn't justify continuing to fight in Afghanistan, propping up a corrupt government long after the architect of 9/11 has gone onto his eternal reward--such as it is.

What I will remember about 9/11, aside from the sheer horror of the day, is how badly we handled it. When we looked to our leaders to rally us in the face of evil, all they could come up with was, "Go shopping." Living well is the best revenge, they say, so living large must be so much the sweeter!

Like sheep we obeyed. The 2000s were the decade of the McMansion and the Hummer, conspicuous consumption on a truly baroque scale. Why, we made the Greed Is Good 80s look like an era of Puritan restraint.

And that's partly why we're in the mess we're in. Take away easy credit and cheap energy, and McMansions and Hummers will put you in the poor house. People have talked about bin Laden's goal of bankrupting America. He's come close, but indirectly, not by miring us in a land war in Asia, but by miring us in second homes in Vegas that we could never afford.

I'll also remember this decade's unique cast of incompetent and immoral public servants. The boomers have MacNamara and Nixon and Kissinger; the Gulf of Tonkin and My Lai. Gen Xers have Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld; WMDs in Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

Young men join the military for a variety of reasons--love of country, hatred of the enemy, a scholarship, a paycheck, to see the world or test oneself in extremis. Some of these reasons are valid, others less so. But what we must never forget is that old men start wars for a variety of reasons--national security, fears real or imagined, vanity, ignorance, vengeance, meanness, lies. This seems to hold whether the cause is just or unjust. And every young man or woman needs to consider that before joining the military. I will not forget to tell my sons that unpleasant truth once they come of age.

I will also tell my sons that patriotism cannot be reduced to military service, for that would call into question the patriotism of the overwhelming majority of Americans who've never donned a military uniform--a strange proposition. I will tell them what the World War II vet John F. Kennedy said, "War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."

We owe members of the military love and respect as human beings created in God's image and capable of extraordinary courage. We also owe it to them that we do not send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. We owe them adequate health care to heal their injured bodies and minds. We owe to ourselves and to them the work of making the society they've pledged to defend more just and equitable. On all these counts, we failed them over the past ten years. We shouldn't forget that.

We shouldn't forget that the evil of the terrorists rubbed off on us. There's no consensus on torture in our society today, thanks to the illegal acts and fearmongering of our elected leaders, aided and abetted by the media. The Viet Cong water-boarded our POWs. If we'd won that war, we'd have convicted their leaders and generals for war crimes that ex-Bush administration officials brag about in their memoirs.

History won't forget. History will judge them harshly, and judge us all the more because we failed to hold them accountable. After all, it's not as if America at the turn of the 21st century is a feudal state, lacking the institutions and mentalities to protect human rights and due process. We're without excuse.

I also will remember how inadequate "our" religion has been in the face of "their" evil. We Christians seem to have had three choices this past decade:

1. The crusader mentality of the religious right.
2. The shrill hectoring of liberal Protestantism.
3. The "I'm so over politics" pose of the communitarians.

Roman Catholics have been on the sidelines, first paying lawyers to strong-arm victims of abuse and their families and then paying out to the same.

The religious right is quite wrong about bin Laden representing Islam. They're quite wrong to want to dish out in the name of Christ the same type of treatment Christ received in their favorite snuff film The Passion. Liberals are right about consumerism and militarism, but no one's listening. Blame it on the low Christology, I suppose.

Communitarians are right that that church needs to re-group before it re-engages, lest it lose its soul, but they never get around to engagement. In fact they poo-poo it. It's no accident that thoughtful young Evangelicals flock to Hauerwas. Evangelicalism careens between Theocracy and Quietism. Hauerwas's ouvre is really a "thick Quietism" that gives young Evangelicals a way to choose the path not taken by  their Moral Majority parents without succumbing to a "Just Me and Jesus" sentimentality. But it doesn't give them a way to tell obvious truths like, "Election results matter."

Christians are ill-equipped to humanize politics these days.

Finally, we should remember the dead and their loved ones and friends. Remembering the dead is one thing that makes us human. And as the scripture says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep." But that should go without saying, shouldn't it?

If I sound bitter it's because I am. And yet, what right have I to be bitter? As Matt Yglesias is fond of pointing out, ours are the best times in human history. Is bitterness a conceit of the privileged?

I don't think so. Lamenting mistakes, missed opportunities and unnecessary death is appropriate, even given our relative comfort and affluence.

But despite all the stupidity and nefariousness of the past decade, some good things have happened. Americans put aside their age-old prejudices and elected a black man President. Quite apart from our bombs, Arabs are demanding democracy and reshaping their societies. Who knows how it will turn out? For the best, I pray.

Providence has its own tale to tell apart from the depressingly familiar narratives in the headlines and history books. We shouldn't forget that, either.

The GOP jobs market

For you, is Labor Day 2011 a well-deserved day off from work? Or is it another tedious day of puttering about the house, sending out resumes and hoping that one day you'll rejoin the workforce? Either way, it's a good day to look back at how we got in this mess and take stock of what may get us out of it.

To make things easy we can compare two very different approaches to job creation, lying almost side by side in time and place. There's the liberal approach, which would have the government prop up the labor market with deficit spending, either by hiring people directly or by letting bids for all sorts of government-funded projects. We tried that in 2009.

And then there's the conservative approach, which favors cutting taxes, regulations and government spending in order to create a friendly environment for private sector job creation. Conservatives distrust fiscal stimulus because they believe that deficits and bureaucracies crowd out private investment. This is the approach we're trying right now.

And to make things even easier we have charts! From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here's the unemployment rate from January, 2008 to June of this year:

From the Lehman Brothers collapse in September, 2008 to President Obama's inauguration the next  January, the unemployment rate jumped nearly two percentage points. Remember, unemployment was already an intolerably high 8% the day he set foot in the White House.

Then came a series of typically liberal moves: the stimulus bill in February, Cash for Clunkers and the GM takeover in the spring. Allowing a bit of time for the pig to move through the python, when the full force of Obama's plan hit, the unemployment rate was flirting with 10%. And there it leveled off and began to dip a bit.

Then the Republicans won control of the House, and forced a more conservative approach. In late 2010 Congress extended the Bush tax cuts and cut the payroll tax. This year Republicans have forced budget cuts at the federal level. And what has the unemployment rate done? It's edging back up again.

Here's another chart that's useful for evaluating conservative economic policy. It compares private and public sector job creation so far this year:

As the stimulus money petered out, state and local governments began laying off people. But the private sector has failed to add enough jobs to keep up with population expansion, much less reduce unemployment . Not to put too fine a point on it, but the lousy job market is a job market designed by conservatives. Shrinking the bureaucracy hasn't kicked off a surge in private sector hiring. 

But we knew that, didn't we? This is what John Maynard Keynes taught us: markets are not self-correcting. At times they need government intervention to get them back on track.

On the other hand, the best we can say about the liberal approach was that it was a kind of triage for an critically wounded economy, but by no means a cure. This is because the stimulus was not big enough. We now know that in late 2008 the economy contracted far more than economists or politicians were aware of at the time.

We don't need more tax cuts, because people will just save the extra money or pay off their debts. Indeed this is what they ought to do, but that won't put people back to work. Since neither consumption nor private investment is resulting in new hiring, the government needs to put people to work. In a big way.

And there's a big need. Our nation's roads and bridges are in terrible shape. Our schools are crumbling. We need a new electrical grid that will transport clean energy to homes and workplaces.

And we can afford it. On Friday, the real interest rate on the ten year bond fell to 0%. Bond purchasers are basically giving the U.S. an interest free loan. We've heard Republicans say so often, If the nation's households have to tighten their belts, so should the government. Well, if the nation's households were offered interest free loans they'd take them, wouldn't they? So should the gubmunt. Spend. Put people back to work.

And that's exactly what President Obama needs to tell Congress this week. Normally, he would have benefited from this clear contrast between two very different plans, but since he's acquiesced to GOP demands, he's on the hook for the economy, without the option of running against a do-nothing Congress. That can change, if he wants it to.

Jobs speech kabuki

I know I'm late to this game, but about that jobs speech kerfuffle: so the President wanted to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night. And the speaker says, No you can't because you'd upstage my party's presidential debate. And they go back and forth about it. And then the President says, Fine. I'll address the Congress on Thursday night. And that's that.

So the Speaker gets to diss the President, which plays well with his caucus. And the President gets to look accommodating, which is how he perceives himself and wants to be perceived. Everybody wins!

Now that's some bipartisanship for ya.

Media hype

I'm ambivalent about Howard Kurtz's Hurricane of Hype article which slams the media for fearmongering before Irene's landfall.

Yes, the media outlets do seize on the crisis of the moment like a pit bull on a mailman's cuff. And yes, this crowds out badly needed coverage of other important events (cough, cough; Fall of Tripoli; cough, cough).

Furthermore, it's entirely questionable whether stationing reporters on beaches is an exercise in good journalism or good entertainment. When the reporter screams into the mic, "It's too dangerous to be out here!" the message is, "Do as I say and not as I do," which amounts to waving a red cape in the face of jackasses everywhere (as this NSFW video shows).

All that said, Kurtz seems to argue that the media hyped the storm because it was forecast to hit New York, and since New York wasn't destroyed, the hype amounted to over-hype. Kurtz:

The fact that New York, home to the nation’s top news outlets, was directly in the storm’s path clearly fed this story-on-steroids. Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?

And:

As the storm weakened, a tone of reality crept into the live reports. After heading to Battery Park, on the low-lying southern tip of Manhattan, CNN’s Anderson Cooper said: “There has been some flooding—not a huge amount of flooding, and some of the water is already starting to recede … It’s actually not bad at all.”

But there is always the prospect that something bad might happen soon. “Is Wall Street going to open tomorrow?” business correspondent Bob Pisani asked on MSNBC, the towers of the financial district behind him.

Well yes, New York is the media capital of the U.S., but it's also the biggest city in the U.S. When a natural disaster threatens the biggest city in the country, doesn't the shear number of people involved, to say nothing about the threat to the nation's financial infrastructure, demand a lot of media attention?

And the threat was real. Just two days before Irene made landfall in New York as a tropical storm she was a category three hurricane off the coast of Florida. The forecast called for a near direct hit on New York (which was accurate), and not much weakening (which turned out to be inaccurate). It takes time to evacuate highly populated, low-lying regions. They didn't have the time to wait to see whether or not their forecast would hold. I think they acted appropriately given what they knew.

All this ignores the fact that things have turned out to be quite bad outside of New York. Irene's death toll has climbed to 45. She racked up damages in the tens of billions of dollars. The flood waters have yet to recede. By any metric Irene was one of the worst storms in recent U.S. history. This is what Katrina has done--it's ruined us for A- and B+ disasters.

By their very nature the 24-hour cable news networks focus attention on "breaking news," have a regrettable tendency to gin up "breaking news" when there is none, and tend to ignore the larger context and the less dramatic, more chronic problems people face. A good example is last week's other natural disaster, the earthquake in Virginia. Media types freaked out big time over that, then promptly moved onto the next crisis.

It turns out that the earthquake needed less attention at the time, but needs more attention now. Although tens of millions of people experienced a highly unusual event, it didn't amount to a natural "disaster" for the vast majority.

And yet it is turning out to be a disaster for the locality of the epicenter and perhaps for the state of Virginia. Two schools in Louisa County were heavily damaged, perhaps beyond repair. And the nuclear power plant in Louisa was not built to withstand an earthquake of this magnitude, which raises questions about its present safety and the design of a third reactor proposed for the site. Rather than sending a reporter out for the inane "Man on the street" interview which features startling insights such as, "Wow! Everything was shaking!" media outlets need to be reporting on what's happening in Louisa and the implications for other communities.

Long story short: I'd like to see wall-to-wall coverage when its warranted, but more discernment about when its warranted. And some interest in the chronic not just acute crises we face.

Obligatory post on Bachmann's natural disaster comments

A lot of what I post here is about politics or religion. So when Representative Michelle Bachmann labeled the earthquake and the hurricane a shot across the bow from God, that's just begging for comment, right? For the record, this is what she told a crowd in Florida last week:

I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.

Now, there's at least two things wrong with this kind of statement. For one, when people identify some calamity as a warning from God, it seems like it's always somebody else who's getting warned. I'd be more inclined to accept anyone's reading of the signs of the times when they discern that it's their own ox that's being gored.

Second, and closely related to the first, Augustine said somewhere that the only nation's history that's utterly transparent to God's providence is Israel in its biblical theocratic phase. But for every other nation things are just a lot more murky.

We are told, in clear and unambiguous language, that God favored the House of David over the House of Saul. Also no locust plague in the Bible is ever just a locust plague. But we have no such clear instructions about partisan politics, public policy or the meaning of crop failures elsewhere, be they delivered by prophetic voice or act of God.

That doesn't mean that God's providence is invisible, but there is margin for error in one's discernment of the signs of the times. In very extreme cases it becomes abundantly clear which side God is on, but most of the time, as Abraham Lincoln told a group of clergy visiting the White House, we ought to be asking whether we're on the Lord's side, not glibly assuming that God is on our side.

That said, Bachmann is only articulating what a lot of average religious Americans think. They're reading the same Bible she is, and reading it as naively as she is, and are likely to conclude (contra Augustine) that the newspaper is as transparent to God's providence as Holy Writ. So the takeaway lesson here is for religious teachers to educate their people on how to read the scriptures in a pious but more sophisticated way.

Finally, Bachmann has departed from the script in such matters. What politicians are supposed to say in times like these is, "First responders are awesome; we're working with X, Y and Z to address the situation; we've seen the inherent bravery and generosity of the American people at work here, and with God's help we will persevere." 

Either Bachmann doesn't know this script, or she's consciously departing from it. Either way, she's showing her political naivete here, not just her hermeneutical naivete. Voters don't want politicians to be their preachers. They want them to be believers (I think I've seen an opinion poll somewhere showing that atheists have a harder time getting elected than Muslims in our society), but not outwardly pious and mainly pragmatic.

Bachmann (and Republicans in general) are channeling Jimmy Carter here, our last Scold-In-Chief. Carter diagnosed the problem of his day as malaise--the existential emptiness of consumerism. Republicans have diagnosed our problems as the evils of debt, incurred by deadbeat homeowners or the government on behalf of selfish, lazy citizens. Both approaches tell people, You're only getting what you deserve.

I imagine we are to blame for the mess we're in, not just the banks or the politicians or our neighbor who got foreclosed upon. But most people don't want their Presidents saying such things, either because they doubt his/her competence in that arena or they'd rather not be held accountable. And that's why Bachmann isn't a viable general election candidate, even if Obama can't or won't do anything to revive the economy by next year.

A body that TSA screeners would love to pat down

In today's Times-Dispatch, Barton Hinkle tells the story of Aaron Tobey, arrested at the Richmond airport last December for disorderly conduct. When TSA staff directed him to enter one of those see-through screening machines, Tobey yanked his shirt off revealing the text of the fourth amendment penned across his bare chest. This act may or may not be illegal.

Let's set aside the security and civil liberties issues for a moment. It strikes me that both Tobey and his more famous partner in TSA resistance, John "Don't touch my junk" Tyner, are fairly young men and fairly touchy about being touched. Could there be a demographic or cultural issue lurking here?

Maybe. The issue would be Male Insecurity About Body Image.

Of course women have been made to feel insecure about their bodies for a long time. "Your boobs are too small; your hips are too wide; your butt is too big," are just some of the insults, spoken or implied by Barbie dolls, super models and jerk husbands and boyfriends.

But in these more egalitarian times, men too can be made to feel physically inadequate. Just read Men's Health, or it's soft-porn partner Maxim. Listen to the ads on sports talk radio, or play a video game. The not-so-subtle message that these media outlets pitch to young adult men is that even a healthy body will no longer do. You need a washboard stomach. Your chest needs to be large enough to merit its own zip code. Male pattern baldness is a capital offense.

Even the notoriously high young adult male sex drive isn't high enough. You've got to push it into the stratosphere. Here's a Cialis. Now chase it with a red bull and vodka. You need the stamina of a porn star because that's what the ladies expect, don't they?

Only a miniscule few are able to sculpt their bodies and jack up their libidos to meet the new and impossibly high standard. Which leaves the ones who accept the standard as gospel feeling woefully inadequate.

And I wonder if that's not behind some of the pat-down backlash. The bravado in the face of so-called "unreasonable searches and seizures," or "sexual assault" by TSA screeners may be over-compensation for massive insecurity about one's own body.

Young adult heterosexual males need their own version of the It Gets Better campaign. Call it, It Can Get Better: work out less; work at being a better person more; fall in love with someone who's committed to being a better person, and you know what? They won't love your body because it looks like it was chiseled out of granite. They'll love your body because it's yours. And that brings a security that makes the occasional indignities that the human body has to bear--like colonoscopies and airport pat-downs--a bit more bearable.

You can do this even if you never fall in love and mate for life. Seek truth and goodness, and beauty will take care of itself.

Finally, to return to the security and civil liberties issues, we do live in a world where people try to do bad things on airplanes like blow them up, hijack them, and/or crash them. It would appear as though we need security that's equal to the threat.

Now just what is that? I read here and there that a lot of what you experience in an airport is public relations. It's there to make you feel better. Leave it to the government to annoy people in an attempt to make them feel better.

Are see-through imaging machines and aggressive pat downs necessary? As to the latter, the Israelis have been doing it for some time now. Aside from my wife and my doctor, no one has touched me more intimately than a security guard at the Frankfurt, Germany airport before I boarded a flight to Tel Aviv. If I had objected, their attitude would have been, "Fine. If your junk is that precious, don't go to Israel!" And you know what? Terrorists don't do bad things to jets that fly in and out of Tel Aviv.

Long story short, I'd rather get felt up than blown up. Provided that feeling people up is a legitimate technique for keeping bad guys off of airplanes.

Wanted: a better negotiator in the White House

Kevin Drum is chagrined:

Honest to God, Republicans must all be sitting in their back rooms and just cackling like hell right now. Think about it. They developed a strategy to hamstring the president completely — a strategy that's bulletproof thanks to our country's Constitution — knowing that it would rally their base but also hoping that it would cause moderates and lefties alike to become disgusted with Obama's weakness even though we all know who's really responsible for what's going on. And it worked! In fact, it's worked better than they could possibly have imagined. They can probably barely keep from spitting up their beers right now.

We are such chumps.

I think this is mistaken. Obama does bear some blame for the post-debt ceiling mess we're in, and the left would be wrong to keep silent about it, even though complaining does run the risk of devolving into a circular firing squad.

Obama seems to have made the classic negotiating mistake that the Ashermans document in their Negotiation Sourcebook. Obama is a cooperative negotiator who makes fair, objective statements of the facts, tries to behave reasonably, makes unilateral concessions, and ignores bluffing or intimidation from the other side.

On the other hand, the Tea Party rump that's calling the shots in the House negotiate aggressively. Aggressive negotiators make high demands, play a bit loose with the facts, want not just to win but to humiliate the other party, and freely use intimidation as a tactic (agree to our terms or we will destroy the full faith and credit of the US government).

According to the Ashermans, when cooperative types are confronted by aggressive tactics, the classic mistake they make is to double down on cooperation. But the aggressive negotiator interprets this as weakness and presses his/her claims even harder. The result is either capitulation or no deal, the latter case due to the aggressive negotiator's attitude of "Stop me if you can" abetted by the cooperative negotiator's unwillingness to do just that.

So as soon as it became clear that the GOP caucus really was committed to default, Obama's proper response should not have been going to the public to beg them to beg the Tea Party Congressmen to be reasonable. He should have responded in a tit-for-tat fashion.

Here, tit-for-tat would have amounted to meeting brinksmanship with brinksmanship. "If you won't raise the debt ceiling I will do it myself based on an esoteric interpretation of 14th Amendment that some liberal pundit wrote about the other day." Or, "If you won't raise the debt ceiling I will order the Treasury Secretary to mint two, one trillion dollar platinum coins and write checks off of those coins."

The first option would have precipitated a constitutional crisis. The second option just sounds crazy but is apparently legal. Either are nauseating for cooperative, reasonable people. But for the sake of a fair deal that doesn't amount to capitulation, something like that needed to be laid on the table.

But Obama didn't play tit-for-tat. Because that's not his style. So what he did instead was capitulate:

We got short term cuts to discretionary spending--a fresh wound to an already traumatized economy. We did not get any tax increases or entitlement reform--which we do need to address the nation's long term debt. And we got some super-duper Congressional committee who's supposed to come up with extra cuts by year's end, lest a sword of Damocles fall on the Pentagon and Medicare. The upshot is that we'll keep talking about debt over the next few months, not job creation. All this plus the European debt crisis is a recipe for a double dip recession, which adversely affects Obama's re-election chances.

Obama's defenders need to ponder that last point. Yes, Obama has advanced the progressive agenda more than any President since LBJ. And yes, in the aftermath of this debt debacle, the polls do seem to favor him over Congressional Republicans. But come next year Obama won't be running against "Tea Party House Republicans." He'll be running against a Republican, possibly Mitt Romney, who's handsome, who has a track record of accomplishments, and can say, "It's time for a change." And voters in a double dip recession are likely to give him a chance, and that means the undoing of Obama's legacy.

Obama has won a public relations fight but lost a policy fight and demoralized his base in the process. That's bad. Are liberals wrong to say so?

The year that nothing happened

Ethan turned 14 last Friday. As we were celebrating his birthday it occurred to me that his arrival is about all that I remember of the year 1997. I scratched my head, but all I could recall was that the comet Hale-Bopp appeared in 1997--that plus the accompanying cult mass-suicide. And I'm sure that the only reason I remember the comet is because of something personal--in this case, work-related. I had to attend an Easter sunrise service at 6:00 AM that year, and the comet in the eastern sky was breathtaking.

Was 1997 really such a forgettable year? Or do memories of my petite wife's swelling belly crowd out all other memories? I've looked up 1997 on Wikipedia and it turns out that yes indeed, it was the year that nothing happened.

True, there was a plane crash, but there always is. Gianni Versace was gunned down, but somebody always gets murdered. Bill Clinton attended his second inaugural, but someone always gets inaugurated every four years.

Ah! How could I have forgotten? That was the year that Princess Diana died! (I'm scanning the Wikipedia article while I write this post). I know. That was 26 days after Ethan was born. I must have been sleep-deprived.

We need another year like 1997. 2011 is barely half-over, and look at the toll it's taken:

• Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan.
• U.S. credit rating downgraded.
• Eurozone on the edge of collapse.
• No jobs, no jobs, no jobs.
• Partisan paralysis in Washington.
• Tornadoes destroy Joplin, Missouri, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and plenty of other places.
• War in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Iraq.
• Mass shooting of teenagers in Norway.

On the other hand, if the Arab Spring and the death of Bin Laden put Arab despotism and militant Islam to bed, perhaps 2011 will look better in retrospect than close up.

Nevertheless, 1997 can not possibly be "the year that nothing happened." Why, that's the year we procreated! The advent of our firstborn! A year of magic and portent!

Everybody's getting left at the altar

Since I'm not above quoting myself, here's what I put on Facebook this morning:

Classmate: Marvin, if you were taken hostage, would you want Obama negotiating your release?

Me: That depends. Who's holding me hostage, Bin Laden or the Tea Party?

What I mean by this is that President Obama is far more likely to adopt a high-risk, high-reward strategy in foreign affairs than in domestic affairs. This continuially astounds me, but I'm not sure why.

After all, candidate Obama promised to focus the fighting on Afghanistan, and even stated he'd be willing to cross the border into Pakistan to get Bin Laden, an idea which John McCain called crazy.

But as for the home front, didn't Obama color us purple in that electrifying speech at the Democratic Convention? Didn't he say that we've got some gay friends in red states, and we worship an awesome God in blue states?

I guess Obama believes that every Gadsden flag waving Tea Partier also has a rainbow flag somewhere up in the attic. In that case, let's give 'em what they want. If they're happy; I'm happy.

This is very disappointing deal on many levels. It's disappointing that Obama didn't get the grand bargain he was looking for. Our welfare state is unsustainable, and it will take a mixture of tax increases and benefit cuts to shore up the solvency of Medicare and Social Security. Boo on the Republicans for choosing fealty to Grover Norquist over good governance.

But once it became clear that the Republican leadership couldn't control a fringe element within its ranks that actually wanted to destroy the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, Obama should have walked away from the table. He didn't need this deal to avoid default. He had other options. Boo on Obama for choosing fealty to his carefully cultivated post-partisan aura over good governance.

Now we have a deal that cuts government spending in the short term, but doesn't really do anything about the long term debt. All this will do is weaken our already fragile economy, which will simply balloon the deficit. Sheesh.

And Boo on Obama for cutting off his supporters at the knees. In 2009 he emailed us, asking us to contact our Congressman and demand a public option in the health care reform bill. So I did. And then he took the public option off the table, in exchange for nothing from the Republicans.

This past week it was wash, rinse and repeat. He asked us twice to contact our Congressman and demand a balanced approach to debt reduction. So I did. And then he agreed to a plan with no new revenues.

Obama said he felt like he'd been left at the altar by the GOP leadership. Well, he's left his own supporters at the altar. This is not the kind of leadership that rallies the troops. Sure, I'll vote for him next year, but why should I work for him (donating, volunteering, canvassing) when he's not working for us?

I need a break from politics. Too much drama. It's still summer. There's weeds to be pulled, and beaches to visit.

Suicide bombing the economy

It's almost worthless blogging about the debt ceiling crisis. No sooner does someone propose a plan than it's shot down. Your brilliant thoughts on Plan X are already obsolete.

I will say this: until last week it seemed inevitable that the Republicans would cave. After all, the President's a Democrat; he has a veto pen, and he's demanded new revenues. But this week it seems inevitable that Democrats will cave.

What changed? Until last week I assumed that the Republicans were only using the threat of a default as a bargaining chip. But now it looks like a lot of them in the House really do want a default.

This is madness.

And yet, as somebody somewhere on the internet said, If you're negotiating with somebody and you say, "If you do that you will destroy the world," and they say, "So what?" Guess who's in the stronger bargaining position?

I heard a GOP Congressman from South Carolina on the radio saying that default was no big deal because the government would continue to collect a whole lot of revenue. No. Not by a long shot.

Megan McArdle, no socialist, has composed a list of all the stuff that we can't pay for next month if we prioritize Social Security, combat pay, and Medicare--as the Tea Party would have us. It's like, everything. No salaries for federal prison guards or border patrol agents, no bullets for the troops, no disaster assistance and no FDIC insurance for your bank account. For starters.

I expect a certain amount of venality and corruption from Congressmen, but I don't expect them to be dumb as a bag of hammers. What can you do with such willed ignorance combined with a suicide bomber's negotiating mentality?

You probably cave.

I think that the best that Democrats and the progressive movement can hope for now is that the Republicans, flush with victory, will nominate an extremist like Bachmann, Perry or Palin. Obama can beat any of those three, but he'll have to abandon his post-partisan persona and run a brass knuckles campaign that makes the election all about the challenger, rather than the incumbent. That's the way Harry Reid beat Sharon Angle last year.

He can't let it be a referendum on his record because the economy will certainly be in the toilet next year--precisely because of whatever cuts he agrees to in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Boehner's plan (and Reid's is much the same) try to address our long term debt by cutting programs in the short term. All that will do is deliver the coup de grâce to this jobless, anemic recovery. Do people realize that cutting government spending means laying off government workers and ending programs that help needy people? Is that what we need right now?