Avdat

No drama Obama

This very strange Charles Krauthammer column ran in today's Times-Dispatch. Krauthammer naturally has problems with the Obama administration's intent to close the Gitmo prison and try the underpants bomber in a civilian court, but his bigger beef with the administration seems to be that they aren't freaking out more. If you aren't speaking loudly, you must not be carrying a big stick.

I'm not a big fan of bureaucrateze, but re-naming terrorism a "man-made disaster" seems a lot less troublesome than the collective conspiracy of the media and the Bush administration to christen torture "enhanced interrogation techniques." Using language to minimize one's own perfidy is a far more egregious sin than using it to minimize your enemy's.

I'm not even that sure that Obama has minimized anything by not cutting short his vacation, John McCain style, and addressing a joint session of Congress on the dangers of exploding jihadist underwear. This Krauthammer mockery:

More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." You can hear the echo of FDR: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor."

is clever, but it completely misses the point. 100 or so guys living in caves simply don't pose the threat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany posed to the United States. Just look at the body count. We suffered a 9/11 a day between 1941 and 1945.

Terrorism is a threat, but it is not an existential threat, and will be best dealt with some combination of military force, law enforcement and diplomacy. The last two factors are most important. We cannot invade and occupy every failed state in the world, much less our allies or ourselves where the terrorists also live. The existential threat is the terrorists getting a hold of a nuke, but as we've seen in Iraq, military force as a non-proliferation strategy is problematic.

Following the money, foiling plots before they hatch and enacting verifiable nuclear disarmament is a lot less sexy than throwing a hissy fit on cable news, or sending troops into battle, but that's what it will take to deal with this situation. And the daily grind of good governance calls for sober tones, not fire and brimstone. That will never satisfy people like Krauthammer and his allies, who seem to have a pathological need to hate an enemy, but I for one am glad that the administration isn't trying to re-ignite the smoldering embers of the World Trade Center with overheated rhetoric.

Making the perfect the enemy of the good

Fire Dog Lake asked me to sign an online petition calling for the death of the Senate health care reform bill. Instead I filled out their unsubscribe form. I'd just as soon the Tea Bagging Right hold a monopoly on political purity. I myself am a recovering purist. Back in the day, I thought that a vote for Nader was worth it, even if it meant handing the White House to the Republicans. I was tired of compromise.

We see how well that worked out. 

Yes, it is infuriating that you need 60 votes to do routine business in the Senate. Yes, Joe Lieberman is insufferable. And Yes, maybe a bill more to liberals' liking would have emerged from the Senate had pieces of the bill been shoved through using the budget reconciliation process.

Nevertheless, the Senate bill would cover an additional 30 million people; end the denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions; end the equally pernicious practice of capping benefits; and most importantly, begin to compensate health care providers for good outcomes, not sheer number of procedures, thus reigning in skyrocketing medical inflation.

What's not to like?

I did get a useful email from MoveOn contrasting the House and Senate bills. The former does have a public option, and pays for the plan with a tax increase on wealthy Americans rather than taxing so-called Cadillac plans, which is how the Senate pays for the bill. I have no idea which is the better policy. The House plan is probably the better politics for Democrats,given that rich people don't vote for Democrats anyway, unless they're movie stars, and given that a lot of these Cadillac plans were negotiated by labor unions. If the conference committee opts for the House tax rather than the Senate tax, that's fine with me.

But I'm not into tilting at the public option windmill. It's dead. There aren't the votes in the Senate for it. I hate it that Democrats would filibuster their own party's signature piece of domestic legislation over the public option, but unless Fire Dog Lake can cast an Imperius Curse on Lieberman, Lincoln, Landrieu and Nelson, going to the wall on this point means no health care reform at all. I don't want to be in the position of saying to uninsured Americans, You'll have to wait until we take Joe Lieberman to the woodshed.

Instead of cutting off your nose to spite your face, why don't liberals take what they can get today, and work like the devil to elect liberal Senators and minimize losses in the House next year, so that progressive legislation doesn't need smokin' Joe's vote?

Surging in Afghanistan

Some reactions to Obama's speech:

1. At the beginning of the speech, as he summed up how we got into this jam and the nature of it, he looked alternately angry and disgusted. There's nothing like having to clean up someone else's pile of poo, but then again, he asked for this job, and he got what he asked for.
2. I thought that his attempt to put the best face on a possibly stolen election in Afghanistan fell flat. And doesn't that call into serious question this counter-insurgency strategy? Doesn't a successful counter-insurgency depend on the government that you're trying to prop up having legitimacy in the eyes of its people?
3. I was very glad to hear him set a deadline. A high school graduate who enlisted in the Army this summer was ten years old when this war started. Our fifth graders on 9/11 are now fighting in Afghanistan. Enough is enough.
4. I was also very glad to hear him say in effect, "We can't afford this war." Because we can't. A trillion dollars in "supplemental appropriations" for two wars is why we are broke. It's not the stimulus, and its not even the bank bailouts. For people wringing their hands about all the debt we're running up this year, the takeaway lesson is, Don't borrow money in good times to fight a war of choice, not of necessity, because when the bad times return, they'll bite you in the butt.
5. I was most pleased to hear the President commit to moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons. A Jack Bauer guided fantasy on torturing a terrorist who knows where the suitcase containing the loose nuke is great, but you know what would be even greater? Living "under your own vines and fig frees, unafraid" and untroubled by certain apocalyptic anxieties because nuclear weapons no longer exist. And what we've learned in this decade is that preventive war is a lousy way to work toward a nuclear free world. The more mundane work of negotiating treaties, verifying them, and vigorous law enforcement is what will get the job done.
6. As I said in the previous post,I don't think any President would have enough political capital to walk away from a war in which the enemy is ascendant. And because the enemy is on the march, the status quo is unacceptable. One last effort to pacify the country before we get out is thus our only viable option. It seems to have worked in Iraq, much better than I thought it would in late 2006. 
7. But given the corruption in #2, and the failure of the Iraqis thus far to take advantage of the improved security and forge a political reconciliation, doesn't this mean that both surges are more about finding a face-saving way to get out than victory?
8. It was sobering to see an audience full of pimply guys in gray cadet uniforms. Some of them will surely be killed before they live long enough to clear up their acne.That's not right.
9. If it's not right then why aren't you more vigorously opposed to this escalation, Marvin? I suppose the answer is, I think that some mixture of sin, history and even Providence have brought us to this ugly point of no good alternatives and no real alternatives at all other than the path outlined last night, and "opposing" the policy makes as much sense as opposing the tide coming in. I think a better question is, Are we learning anything from this slow motion disaster?
10. In Advent we dare to hope for peace on earth and good will toward men, but we also hear John the Baptist's contempt for pious hopes that aren't backed by repentance. Beating swords into plowshares isn't a mandate only for the bad guys.

Turns out Obama's not the messiah after all

I understand that people on the left are deeply disappointed in the Obama administration, especially on the eve of this Afghan troop surge announcement, but they have only themselves to blame. Barack Obama campaigned on shifting the war focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, and that is what he is doing. You didn't really think that you'd elected a peacenik, did you?

Even if Obama were a true peacenik, I'm not sure that he could stop an escalation in Afghanistan if he wanted to. The military wants this. Between Republicans and moderate Democrats, there's probably a majority in Congress who want this. The elite journalists think that peace is an unserious proposition. Can one man, even if he is President of the United States, withstand the sustained pressure of the federal bureaucracy and its allies in the fourth estate?

We're talking about principalities and powers here. We're talking about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Obama, and any President, has a tiger by the tail. They all wind up getting eaten eventually.

Ditto on domestic issues. Liberals are furious with the excruciatingly slow pace of health care reform, and frustrated that Obama hasn't brought the hammer down on recalcitrant members of his own caucus, but Obama didn't campaign as the Dick Cheney of the left. He pledged to be a post-partisan President. And post-partisanship means tolerating a meandering legislative process and a certain amount of showboating by people who aren't where you are politically.

I get frustrated too, but I don't really think I'd want my own man stifling dissent the way that the Bush administration stuffed a sock in John Dilulio, assassinated the character of Richard Clarke and won a spurious criminal conviction against Don Siegelman. Do you? Do you want to move along health care reform by having friendly state attorneys general opening campaign finance investigations against Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman? 

To paraphrase Dennis Green, the Obama administration is who we thought they were. Moderate by temperment and constrained by forces they aren't fully in control of, Obama is doing about as well as I thought he could.

Much better than the alternative.

Your Monday morning irony alert

Obama to escalate war this week, receive Peace Prize next week.

Sexy and not-so-sexy health care reform

Ron Brownstein has written a long and somewhat wonkish assessment of the health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate. Long story short, the bill's chief purpose is to cut skyrocketing health care costs by moving the system away from a fee-for-service template and toward a fee-for-outcomes template.

Republicans outside elected office like the bill, but wish it had as many sticks as carrots to encourage better coordination of care among providers. And malpractice reform. But since Republicans have decided to not play ball with the White House and the Democratic majority, there's no one at the table lobbying for the latter.

Like a lot of liberals, I've tended to view the success or failure of the bill almost solely in terms of the survival of the public option, but the article points out that a state-sponsored insurance plan "would affect who writes the checks in the medical system, but not what the checks are written to pay for." It raises the question of the relationship between universal coverage and cost containment, and the priorities of the two.

Apparently, President Obama is rather smitten with the article, and Rahm Emanuel has made it required reading for the White House staff. 

Campaigning for universal coverage is sexy in that social justice kind of way. But the HCR bill detailed by Brownstein's article isn't a bit sexy. It's the government using its regulatory and reimbursement power to encourage a set of best practices that are designed to make health care less expensive and the nation's citizens healthier.

And that's OK. In fact, that's probably the best we can expect from people at the pinnacle of power in 21st century America.

It's the difference between Amos's passion and Joseph's prudence. So long as the prudent are seeking to achieve the aims of the passionate, we ought not denigrate reform just for lacking sex appeal.

Getting to yes on health care reform

Even though health care reform leaped yet another hurdle yesterday, I'm less buoyed than before. With Blanche Lincoln joining Joe Lieberman in threatening to filibuster a final bill that contains a public option, it seems like the prospects for a public option are now rather dim. And without a public option, will Congress wind up passing a bill that forces people to buy health insurance they can't afford? That's neither a policy nor an electoral winner.

Lincoln's is a frustrating case. One might hope that she's posturing, but apparently she spoke in such categorical terms that there's no way she could walk away from her threat without a loss of face. Even stranger, Lincoln's web page still shows her supporting a public option. I definitely expected more party discipline than this.

Then again, it may be that the last two elections are masking the real ideological balance of power in Congress. The Democrats built large majorities in Congress running against the Bush administration's manifold incompetence, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Congress or the nation as a whole has moved as far to the left as those numbers indicate. Under more normal circumstances, we might have watched Democrats negotiating with moderate Republicans to overhaul the health care system this year, but since there are no moderate Republicans left, Democrats are negotiating with Democrats. The result is starting to look like a centrist compromise, rather than the more progressive bill that 60 Democratic Senators could theoretically enact.

Then again, as Yglesias is so fond of pointing out, we wouldn't being having this discussion if the Senate ran according to majority rule, or, even better, if we didn't have a legislative body in which Wyoming, population 532,688, has the same representation as California, population 37,756,666. So we have the Founding Fathers to thank. Even now they are saving the Republic from the mob rule of the uninsured and the price gouged.

UPDATE: Here's Robert Reich on the slow withering of the public option.

Don't tread on me and all that yada yada

I watched some history made last night. No, not the Bama-LSU game, the House vote on health care reform. I did catch some of the football game too, but for sheer entertainment purposes, watching the House debate won hands down. My nine-year-old would watched a bit with me, and he could always identify the Republican members of Congress because they sounded so angry. In a sense I can't begrudge them anger. Having preached for 14 years I know what it's like to be condemned to making arguments that you are sure will fall on deaf ears.

What I can begrudge them are the sheer incoherence of their arguments:

"This is a government takeover of our health care system!"

• Um, no, it's not. If you have private insurance and you like it, you get to keep it.

"This plan cuts Medicare!"

• Well now, Medicare IS a takeover of the health care system, at least for Senior Citizens. If you're against "gubmunt run health care," then you shouldn't be fighting Medicare cuts. You should be fighting to kill Medicare.

"This plans FORCES you to buy health insurance whether you want it or not!"

• Pardon me if I don't pick up my pitchfork and march on Washington about this one. The government already forces me to buy auto insurance if I want to drive. My seminary forces me to buy health insurance as a condition of my enrollment. People should carry health insurance instead of parachuting into an ER when they get sick and letting me pick up the tab with higher premiums on my policy. It's a matter of personal responsibility. And if you can't afford it, you'll be subsidized, which is more efficient than the current system.

"This plan fosters government dependency. Why, I used to be a judge and I had to send away too many boys born to welfare queens who got paid by the gubmunt to have babies."

• Not a direct quote, but pretty close. Some Congressman from Texas. Please see the above comments about personal responsibility.

"We're going broke!"

• Ahem, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House bill will reduce the deficit over the next ten years.

"Pelosi bill, Pelosi bill, Pelosi bill!"

• Yes, some people don't like strong women from the Left Coast, but really, can't we do better than ad hominem attacks? Besides, the House-approved bill is a bi-partisan bill. That's right. One GOP lawmaker voted for it. Only one, but it counts.

I think that when all is said and done, the Republicans were opposed to this bill, not because it might fail, but because it might succeed. Tactically, they want to deny the President a legislative victory. Strategically, even if the government can solve problems, they don't want it to. You see this dynamic in spades with global warming. That kind of ideological rigidity gives birth to the kind of angry, non-sensical ranting we saw on the House floor yesterday. I have no use for it, nor do most people. It's taking longer than we thought, but the reform movement continues to jump every legislative hurdle. I remain confident that it'll happen, and years from now, everybody will wonder what all the pitchfork-brandishing was about.

Irritated

Reading this Ross Douthat column on Rome's latest overture to disaffected Anglicans makes me wanna go all Barthian-existentialist on the man. "No, Sir! Christianity's most enduring and impressive foe is Christ. Not Islam."

Baroque rhetoric

In the context of discussing Fox News' abandoning all pretense of journalistic objectivity, a Talking Points Memo reader asks, "[W]ould someone ask the Fox news spokesperson why Fox's news anchors continue to refer to suicide bombers by the Bush administration's favored term "homicide bomber?"

Good question, but for me, "homicide bomber" is a sign of another odious aspect of recent American history. In both words and deeds, the Bush administration set the volume at 10. Anything less was considered weakness. So we got terms like "homicide bombers" because--I'm assuming--that while the word "suicide" immediately poses the question "Why?" and a willingness to understand, "homicide" or "homicidal" signifies meanness, and while there is an interest in ascertaining motive in murder cases, there's no pity there like there is in some cases of suicide. In short, homicide is a meaner word than suicide.

But in fact, "homicide bomber" conceals more than it reveals. All people who plant bombs are homicidal; but not all bombers are suicidal. IRA operatives didn't strap explosives to their chests. Ku Klux Klansman didn't crash truck bombs into black churches. Timothy McVeigh parked his Ryder truck full of combustible fertilizer in front of the federal building, and walked away.

Calling somebody a suicide bomber doesn't betray feelings of sympathy that one might feel when one gets the news that a friend or loved one has killed themselves. But it does narrow down the form of violence to a particular MO that signals a particular context, set of grievances, aims, etc.

This particular right wing tic is a symptom of a broader cultural disease in turn-of-the-century America, it's, shall we say, baroque tendencies. Everything has to be larger than life. McMansions. Hummers. Supersized fries. And in the realm of public policy, we can't just dismantle an organization that's part religious cult, part paramilitary organization, and part organized crime racket with a variety of military and law enforcement means. We have to call it a "War on Terror" to signify our toughness. Even if "Terror" is a tactic, not a belligerent state whose officials we can drag onto the deck of the battleship Missouri to sign unconditional surrender papers.