Yesterday I had lunch over at my parents’ house, mostly to commune with their dog.  My father was watching CNN.  They were reporting on the recent revelations that some official in the Christie administration seems to have induced the Port Authority (which has jurisdiction over the George Washington Bridge between Manhattan and New Jersey) to close several lanes of east-bound traffic back in September.  The result, as anyone who’s ever driven across that bridge can understand, was utter chaos on the New Jersey end of the bridge.  Massive traffic jams for three days.

It seems the lane closures had nothing at all to do with any operational or maintenance requirements of the bridge.  Rather, it appears that the closures were politically motivated and were intended to cause exactly what they did cause.  E-mails and text messages have come to light that show this.  Some of those e-mails and messages, which dealt with official government business, went out over private e-mail accounts and cell phones, which is a no-no.  It’s such a no-no, in fact, that Lisa Jackson, the former head of Dear Leader’s EPA, felt obliged to set up an entirely fictitious e-mail persona under the surname “Windsor” to conduct official business that she wanted to screen from Freedom of Information Act requests.  Several of her underlings did the same thing and for the same reason.  All highly, highly illegal under federal law.

A few days ago the assertion was made that Chris Christie as governor approved of or at least knew back in September, at the time, what was being done and why.  Yesterday he holds a press conference, nearly an hour and a half long, in which he announced that no, he had no knowledge at the time, and not only that, but he’d been mislead by his senior staff about the status and revelations coming to light in the New Jersey after-the-fact investigation.  He’s already fired his deputy chief of staff who, he says, lied to his face about matters.  Other heads either have rolled or are in the process of rolling.  Christie’s line was much like Reagan’s after the Beirut bombing:  It happened on my watch; I’m responsible.  I am in the process of holding accountable those who have done wrong.

You’d think that would be about the long and short of the matter.  The point has already been made that shutting down lanes of traffic to cause massive traffic snarls as an act of political revenge is remarkably similar to shutting down national parks as an act of political retaliation.

I mentioned that CNN was covering this “story.”  What I didn’t mention is that’s all they were covering, during the whole 45 minutes or so I was at my folks’ house.  As in:  They talked about nothing else.  They dragged Congressmen out, they had lawyers on there talking about potential criminal prosecution of . . . whom?  They had video of some shmuck at a legislative hearing pleading his Fifth Amendment privilege repeatedly.  On and on it went.

The contrast was too great.  I wondered how much time CNN had devoted to this non-story (unless you’re one of the people who actually got caught in the traffic jams) relative to how much time they’d devoted to the ooze seeping out of the IRS over the past 200-plus days.  You know, the revelations that someone from very, extremely high up in Dear Leader’s administration directed the IRS to use its investigatory and regulatory powers to shut down an entire segment of the U.S. political spectrum in the run-up to the 2012 elections.  Here we’ve got the IRS senior counsel — one of the exactly two political appointees in the entire organization — spending huge amounts of time visiting the White House.  Huh?  Why does anyone in the White House need to meet with the IRS’s lawyer?  I can see meeting with the commissioner; that makes sense and there’s a huge amount that could legitimately be discussed that a president would want to hear directly from that person.  But the lawyer?  We’ve had revelations of conduct with is flagrantly criminal: Lois Lerner, a senior IRS official, turning over taxpayer information to the FEC.  The division of which she was head turning over taxpayer information to private political organizations known to be hostile to the taxpayer(s) in question.  And those are just the things that have come to light in the past three or four months.  How much air time has been devoted to those crimes?

At any rate, we now have a partial answer to my question.  Alas it does not relate to CNN but to its broadcast competition.  Comparing the networks’ coverage within 24 hours to their total coverage of the IRS scandal over the six months since July 1 reveals . . . the story of someone setting out unnecessary traffic cones got 17 times the amount of coverage in one day that criminal conduct which threatens the entire American polity got in 6 months.  Seventeen times the amount of coverage in one day.  Update:  It’s not as if everyone is asleep at the switch, of course.  Right over here, at TaxProf Blog, Prof. Paul L. Caron remains on watch, daily compiling coverage of a scandal which in its implications cuts at the very heart of the American experiment in self-government.  So you see, Lamestream Media, it can be done.

Now here’s another compare-and-contrast question:  How much time have the broadcast media devoted to Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi scandal in the past sixteen months, relative to those horrible traffic cones?

Stand by to stand by.  The 2016 presidential campaign has started.

It’s a truism in the world of power politics and big money nothing ever happens by coincidence.

So here we find two newspaper articles, many miles apart, yet which are (dare one speak it?) closely related to each other.  The first is from The Globe and Mail, and reports an interview with one of the most powerful men in the world.  No; it’s not President Mom-Jeans but rather a Saudi prince who is worth several billion dollars not only by senior membership in the kleptocratic Saudi ruling house, but also through his successes in investment in the Real World (you know: the world the Saudi government actively subverts through subsidizing the most extreme forms of West-hating, Jewish-blood-craving Islamofascism).  He makes the mistake of honesty.  “The missive [a letter he sent to his kinsman the Saudi oil minister] warned that the American shale oil boom would soon threaten demand for crude from members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.  New shale oil discoveries ‘are threats to any oil-producing country in the world,’ he says. * * *  ‘It is a pivot moment for any oil-producing country that has not diversified,’ he says. ‘Ninety-two per cent of Saudi Arabia’s annual budget comes from oil. Definitely it is a worry and a concern.’”

Why is a Saudi prince, who just bought a five-star hotel in Toronto, sitting there talking about shale oil, fracking, and similar matters?  Well, you see, even though the U.S. now produces domestically 89% of the oil it uses — up from 70% just a few years ago and all thanks to the fracking boom — it’s Canada that is our largest source of imported oil.  Not only is Canada the U.S.’s largest foreign supplier, but now that Dear Leader has, in part to accommodate Warren Buffett’s railroad interests in hauling North Dakota’s production via inefficient rail car rather than efficient pipeline, scuppered construction of a south-bound Keystone XL pipeline, the Canadians are just going to build it westward to their coast and sell their oil to Red China.  So Canada has an enormous economic interest in continued production from its oil sands.  And if anything, its political stake is even higher.  At the risk of understatement, the U.S. has taken its neighbor much too much for granted for far too long.  Establishing a highly lucrative relationship with countries other than the U.S. will enable Canada to act with much less looking southward over its shoulder.

Canada’s drive for economic and political leeway beyond the U.S. orbit is Major Super Dooper Bad News for the oil tyrannies because it renders everyone to whom they ship that much less dependent on the Islamofascist regimes.  Which is why the Saudis have been funding, very quietly, a huge amount of the “green” opposition to the Canadian oil sands.  One would like to know how much of the U.S. “green” opposition to Keystone XL and fracking in general is being funded from Saudi and similar sources.  Recall that the major players in the “green” racket aren’t exactly forthright about their funding sources.  Recall also that Geo. Soros has an enormous financial stake in that super-deepwater Petrobras field off the coast of South America.  A field that will never be economically viable at $90 a barrel.  Recall that Soros was among those pushing very hard to keep Gulf oil production shut down in the aftermath of the BP spill.

And how do the Saudis, Soros, and their ilk fight against U.S. energy independence?  By funding every “green” opposition group they can find to engage in lawfare, fear-mongering, and disinformation campaigns.  Don’t get me wrong:  I’m not suggesting that they’re not entitled to their opinion or to attempt to influence public opinion in their favor (spoiler:  I think Citizens United was spot-on accurately decided).  I do object, however, to their vilification of every attempt to wean the Western world from subsidizing the continuing rise of Islamofascism through petrodollars as being just toadying to “Big Oil” and those favorite bogeymen, the Koch boys.

And that gets me to the other newspaper article.  From AP (via ABC News) we have this article on how four states have confirmed contamination in wells.  AP went to the four states and asked for years’ worth of public records relating to well complaints, contamination confirmations, and so forth.  A good part of the article is about the patch-work response they got, and the active push-back from some of the states (apparently Pennsylvania was like pulling teeth, whereas Texas — you know, them mouth-breathing rednecks — immediately coughed up a 90-plus page spreadsheet with extremely detailed information).  The core of the article, however, is about insinuating that all them eeeevvilllll Big Oil shills have been Proven Wrong About Fracking, and that accordingly . . . well, you’ve heard the rest.

The lead sentence, in good newspaper practice fashion, sets the tone for the rest:  “In at least four states that have nurtured the nation’s energy boom, hundreds of complaints have been made about well-water contamination from oil or gas drilling, and pollution was confirmed in a number of them, according to a review that casts doubt on industry suggestions that such problems rarely happen” (my emphasis).  And how much doubt is cast?  Well, there’s this:  “And while the confirmed problems represent only a tiny portion of the thousands of oil and gas wells drilled each year in the U.S. . . .”  A “tiny portion” of the thousands of wells drilled each year seem associated with contamination.

In the next few paragraphs, the AP gets even more specific, using Pennsylvania’s data.  In 2012, a total of 499 complaints of water well contamination was made; in 2013 the number was 398.  And how many turned out actually to be contaminated?  Well, let’s quietly move the goalposts a bit by expanding our field of vision.  “More than 100” cases confirmed contamination.  Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  Yes it does . . . unless you read the rest of the sentence, which (using words, not numbers, so the eye that has been caught by numbers like “499” and “398” is going to have to re-calibrate) reveals that those “more than 100” (actually 106, a number which you have to keep reading substantially into the article further to find) confirmed contaminations were spread over five (5) years.  The actual 2011 and 2012 numbers were five in the first two-thirds of 2012, a total of 18 in all of 2011, and 29 in 2010.  So the number of complaints concerns a “tiny portion” of the thousands of new wells drilled each year (over 5,000 new wells in Pennsylvania during those five years) and even among the complaints that are actually made, only just over 2% of the complaints turn out to be actual contamination.

And by the by, most of the contamination involves methane, a gas which at atmospheric pressure will not remain in solution in water (according to a friend of mine who happens to enjoy a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and has spent over ten years in water treatment and related fields).  In other words, if you want to get the methane out of your water, it’s scarcely rocket science to remove it.

The more you read, the more diluted becomes the suggestion that the AP’s research legitimately “casts doubt” on “industry suggestions” that such problems “rarely” occur.  Fracking isn’t the only kind of drilling occurring, you see, and “some conventional oil and gas wells are still drilled, so the complaints about water contamination can come from them, too.”  So we really don’t know how many of that 2.12% (max) of confirmed contamination is even actually associated with a fracking well.  Over in Ohio, out of a mountain of six — count ’em — confirmed cases of contamination, the state department of natural resources allowed that, “None of the six confirmed cases of contamination was related to fracking.”  In West Virginia over four years, 122 complaints were made, of which all of four were genuine enough that the driller had to take action.  In Texas, out of “over 2,000 complaints,” only 62 even alleged drilling-related contamination, and of those, they were able to confirm . . . exactly zero, over the course of 10 years.

If you keep slogging through the article all the way down, you get to this nugget:  “Experts and regulators agree that investigating complaints of water-well contamination is particularly difficult, in part because some regions also have natural methane gas pollution or other problems unrelated to drilling. A 2011 Penn State study found that about 40 percent of water wells tested prior to gas drilling failed at least one federal drinking water standard.”

All of which is to say that the AP article’s author wrote a lead paragraph for an entirely different article than the one he actually wrote.  Here, let’s try to help him out and match the introduction with the substance:

“A survey by AP of four states shows that well-water contamination associated with hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” in common parlance — is in fact extremely rare, as oil and gas industry companies and organizations claim.  Just how rare remains difficult to determine, because even confirmed contamination in water wells may be traceable to conventional oil or gas wells or even to entirely naturally occurring sources.  AP surveyed up to five years’ data about complaints of alleged well contamination, confirmed cases of well contamination, and determination of source of contamination in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Texas.  The data show that of the complaints of contaminated wells — up to 499 in Pennsylvania in 2012 — only a minuscule proportion reveal actual contamination — a total of five in the first nine months of 2012, or almost exactly 1%.  In Texas, despite hundreds of complaints over the years, not a single case of driling-related contamination has been confirmed in the past ten years. In comparison to actual or potential drilling-related contamination, natural contamination is a much more serious problem.  Over 40% of Pennsylvania wells tested pre-drilling failed at least one federal drinking water standard.”

That’s my effort.  Let’s see how ThinkProgress re-writes the article.  Actually, they do a better job, I think, in summarizing the data than the AP.  And they do come on out and say, “It’s unknown what sort of pollution caused the complaints that were confirmed to have been due to fracking,” and in the lead sentence of its paragraph no less.

Further on in the ThinkProgress article they mention a study which is alleged to shed some light on the overall effects of oil and gas drilling.  The study, yet to be published by some organization of economists, is represented to have found that “living close to a fracking operation increases the risk of low birth weight in a newborn baby by more than half, and doubles the baby’s risk of a low Apgar score, a scale that summarizes of the health of newborns.”  Here the reader is asked to confuse the concept of actuarial “risk” with causal “risk.”  The economists are plainly talking about the former, as (again, to their credit) ThinkProgress makes clear:  “However, water contamination wasn’t the likely culprit in the study: the mothers in the study who had access to monitored public water had babies that were of similar health as mothers who relied on private wells, which are more likely to be affected by fracking.”

In other words, about all you can truthfully say about oil and gas drilling is that people who live near them tend to have babies with low birth weights and Apgar scores.  Was any multivariate regression done to account for other known correlates of those measured outcomes?  Like smoking, female-headed single-parent household, failure to complete high school, or so forth?  Because oil and gas extraction is heavy industry, and people who can afford not to live near to heavy industry tend not to live next to heavy industry.  And curiously enough, they tend to experience lower rates of low birth weight and/or Apgar scores.

[Update 31 Jan 14:  For a further item on the don’t-jump-to-conclusions list, here (note: at the website of what appears to be some energy-industry organization) we see a response to a study from Colorado which alleges to find positive correlation between natural gas fracking and sundry birth defects.  This study is apparently popularly cited by opponents of fracking.  The Colorado Department of Health is not impressed with the study’s design, however.  Among its other shortcomings (like failing to distinguish between active or inactive wells, conventional vertical or fracking wells, or even oil and gas wells), the Colorado health department’s chief medical officer pointed out:

“For birth outcomes with very few cases, such as neural tube defects, the authors  did not consider the effect that other risk factors may have played (examples: smoking, drinking, mother’s folic acid intake during pregnancy, access to prenatal care, etc).  For these rare outcomes, such as neural tube defects, they only considered the effect of elevation. The personal behaviors of the mothers are very important risk factors for all birth defects. Without considering the effect of these personal risk factors, as well as the role of genetic factors, it is very difficult to draw conclusions from this study.

As the authors noted, they don’t necessarily know where the mother lived at the time of conception or during the first trimester of pregnancy, when most birth defects occur.  This makes interpretation of their study difficult.”

Ask whether momma was doing crank or popping pills?  Confirm whether momma actually had, you know, any sort of proximity to an oil or gas well when the defects are most likely to have occurred (seriously, check out the paper’s title; it contains the expression “maternal residential proximity”)?  Nah; that might cloud the issue, and the issue is to defeat the Koch brothers, rights?  The full text of the statement is at the link.]

To illustrate that last point a bit further:  Let’s say that you do a study on people who wear bicycle helmets and neck injuries.  You find that lo! people who wear bicycle helmets while riding experience a high number of neck injuries.  So you conclude that wearing a helmet increases the “risk” of neck injuries.  Well . . . no, it doesn’t.  Helmet-wearing correlates very strongly with (a) youth, whose parents make them wear helmets, and (b) sport bicycling, which involves high speeds and low tolerance for mistakes.  Young riders make more mistakes; mistakes made by competitive or sport riders occur at higher speeds, on rougher terrain, and produce more severe injuries.

I seem to have wandered from my original point:  Fracking is held up as a bogeyman.  The people who are holding it up as a bogeyman are receiving funding from people who have a very important — in some cases, life-or-death — financial and/or political stake in maximizing the dependence of the U.S. on imported oil.  The truth is that while it is true that “fracking can cause contamination of water wells,” that’s not really the appropriate question, is it?  That question is, “Given the rarity of contamination of water wells by fracking, is the U.S. — and for that matter, are other countries as well — better or worse off starving the Islamofascists of petrodollars by promoting an extraction technology that in a tiny number of cases may be causing a remediable problem?”

Ask yourself:  Who benefits from each of the answers that can be given to that question?

Update [27 Jan 2015]:  This just in.  Seems the Russians have been bank-rolling the anti-fracking movement here in the United States.  This is obviously because their environmental concerns are so acute.  After all, oil and gas extraction in Russia is done so much more cleanly than it is here.

For quite a few years, some time ago, I subscribed to The Economist.  I liked several things about the newspaper (they describe themselves as a “newspaper,” which I also find charmingly old-fashioned).  I liked that they don’t have bylines, so while I have to assume their writers are no more immune to pride and vainglory than anyone else, at least they don’t indulge in the kind of fashionable byline that, for example, The New York Times does (I mean, seriously: would anyone with more than just bare walking-around sense pay attention to a column written by Paul Krugman if it didn’t have his name on it, trying desperately to steal the credibility that comes with a Nobel?).  I liked that they weren’t afraid to stake out a clear position, and didn’t hide behind a false façade of impartiality (like most of the lamestream media); I still recall their cover back in the late 1990s when Clinton got caught committing perjury.  It was a picture of him, and the legend, “If It’s True, Go”.  Mostly I liked that they still held to the basic outlines of their founding world view from 1834: classical liberalism.  Their reportage, their opinion leaders, their whole package seemed to take a presumption in favor of human liberty and the ability of private persons, voluntarily organized as they see fit, working through the mechanisms of the free market wherever possible, to address the restrictions and failings of the human condition.

And then things seemed to change.  Looking back I can no longer recall just when I first noticed it.  It might have been when they decided that George W. Bush really was as stupid as all the Deep Thinkers made him out to be.  Or when Bush refused to apologize for wanting to win the West’s war on terrorists (notice I did not say “terror”; you cannot wage a war against an ideology; you can only exterminate as many of its exponents as you can lay hands on).  All I distinctly recall is that by the time ol’ Hopenchange came along, The Economist had truly drunk the Kool Aid.

One of my partners now subscribes, and so the gents has a healthy supply of back issues for reading.  I predictably get to read about how wonderful socialized medicine in the U.S. will be (presumably because it’s worked out so damned well in the U.K.), or how U.S. politics is now “polarized” and both sides are at fault (although curiously acts of polarization are only mentioned in any detail if it’s just the one side going partisan) as if it’s unreasonable for a huge slice of the American population to react badly to years’ worth of being slimed as stupid, racist, parasitic leeches by the other party and its adherents. 

Islam comes in for a healthy dose of kowtowing.  A socio-economic system that — and here I’ll go out on a limb — has Absolutely Bugger All to offer the West in terms of advancing either the moral stature of mankind or his physical circumstances of existence is routinely presented as something that we here in the West are just going to have to understand and get along with.  Those few who are willing to characterize them by their actions, as opposed to their activists’ words, are painted as beetle-browed would-be SA thugs who just don’t like people with darker skin (ignoring that the African slave trade is still alive and well, with Muslim lands a principal destination for the captives).  A recent low point was reached in their opinion leader on how wonderful it was that Dear Leader has effectively blessed Iran’s race to acquire nuclear weapons.  No, seriously; as the Blogfather would say, Read the Whole Thing.  The Economist thinks it’s wonderful because, if you assume that the theocracy of Iran, which has as its stated public policy objective to “wipe off the map” the nation of Israel, suddenly makes nice, then . . . well, nice will be made.  “But the deal matters mostly for what it heralds. If Iran shows restraint and the world rewards it, the negotiators might generate sufficient goodwill to reach a more durable and comprehensive agreement.  And that would open up the possibility of America and Iran co-operating more, or at least feuding less, in the world’s most troubled region.”  And so forth.  Transpose a few names and dates, and it might have been an opinion leader ghost-written by Neville Chamberlain in early October, 1938.  If Hitler is satisfied with the Sudetenland, and he says he is, then this might open the door to more comprehensive agreement on re-armament in Central Europe.  Pathetic.

But mostly I get to read, with the regularity of one of the magnificent wristwatches they advertise, about how “climate change” is right up there at the top of what ought to be Everyone’s Agenda.  Really; it’s as though they can’t let an issue get out the doors without shoving something in on how vitally important it is that we hand unparalleled powers over to multinational bureaucrats (you know, because they’ve done such a bang-up jobs running the EU and — in their free time from running drugs, narcotics, and sexual slavery rings — as “peace-keepers” all around the world) in order to stave off “climate change.”

One reads, well nigh week in and week out, the mantra that “the science is settled” (I’d also remind them that at one time the theories of Gobineau were “settled science”) that the world is warming up and it’s pretty much all humans’ fault and what we really need is to siphon trillions of dollars away from productive uses (you know, the stuff that’s got to keep 6-plus billion humans housed, clothed, and fed for the foreseeable future) in order to stave off something that computer models say will happen 100 or more years out.  These would be the same computer models that cannot explain the last fifteen years of minimal if any “global warming.”  The writers there also don’t seem to bear down much on the extent to which the “science” being “settled” was the result of a highly orchestrated effort among the one side to suppress publication of any contrary views or evidence.  By the way, this was after having so thoroughly cooked the evidence that their own computer guru, after something like three years’ effort, eventually threw up his hands and stated, in precisely so many words, that the raw numbers had been so manipulated and compromised that there was no way to reconstruct what the data had originally been.

Here we’ve got their leader for the 2013 holiday double-issue.  This year is the centenary of World War I’s outbreak.  The Great War happens to be a fetish of mine, and so for the next four-plus years I’m going to have a great number of anniversaries to contemplate, both on their own merits and for what they have to suggest to us today.  And what does The Economist have to say to tee it up?

“The most troubling similarity between 1914 and now is complacency. Businesspeople today are like businesspeople then: too busy making money to notice the serpents flickering at the bottom of their trading screens. Politicians are playing with nationalism just as they did 100 years ago. China’s leaders whip up Japanophobia, using it as cover for economic reforms, while Shinzo Abe stirs Japanese nationalism for similar reasons. India may next year elect Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who refuses to atone for a pogrom against Muslims in the state he runs and who would have his finger on the button of a potential nuclear conflict with his Muslim neighbours in Pakistan. Vladimir Putin has been content to watch Syria rip itself apart. And the European Union, which came together in reaction to the bloodshed of the 20th century, is looking more fractious and riven by incipient nationalism than at any point since its formation.”

The only place the Religion of Peace even gets a mention is that some Hindu politician has refused to apologize to them, and might get into a nuclear exchange with a Muslim state that — of course it’s not mentioned — is among the most unrepentant sponsors of violent religious-based warfare out there.  Really.  Apparently a nation that sits atop a vast fund of fossil-fuel wealth and has for its stated objective killing every Jew it can lay hands on, and has now been given the go-ahead to pursue its nuclear ambitions is not sufficiently disturbing to enumerate among the things about which people ought not be complacent.  The Economist isn’t complacent about it, after all: they’re whole-heartedly for it (q.v.)

Not to worry, though.  There are two things suggested that will head us off from going over the cliff like the grandparents and great-grandparents of The Economist’s writers and editors.  “One is a system for minimising the threat from potential dangers.”  The two specific instances that are mentioned are (i) China and the U.S. figuring out how to address North Korea’s eventual collapse, and (ii) figuring out how to defuze China’s regional aggressions.  Dealing with a nuclear war of extermination against Israel (and the Sunni peoples) again doesn’t make it onto the radar screen.

“The second precaution that would make the world safer is a more active American foreign policy. Despite forging an interim nuclear agreement with Iran, Barack Obama has pulled back in the Middle East—witness his unwillingness to use force in Syria. He has also done little to bring the new emerging giants—India, Indonesia, Brazil and, above all, China—into the global system. This betrays both a lack of ambition and an ignorance of history. Thanks to its military, economic and soft power, America is still indispensable, particularly in dealing with threats like climate change and terror, which cross borders. But unless America behaves as a leader and the guarantor of the world order, it will be inviting regional powers to test their strength by bullying neighbouring countries.”

It’s hard to know where to begin unpacking this nonsense.  It was a “more active” foreign policy, of going after the Islamofascists where they live and breed, rather than sweeping up the wreckage and burying the bodies after attacks on our home soil, that turned The Economist against the U.S. and freedom.  Dear Leader’s “interim agreement” with Iran is going to turn out pretty much precisely as well as Chamberlain’s “interim agreement” on the Sudetenland.  And precisely what about illegally bombing Libya and then abandoning it to the Islamofascists, hectoring a U.S. ally from office and then rejoicing when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, and then gratuitously mixing himself into Syria (only to get his mom-jeans-wearing ass handed to him by a leader — Putin — who knows how to play hard-ball beyond the kind of bullshit ward-heeler politics of Chicago) is “pulling back”?  No, he’s getting in, in over his head.  He’s “done little” to bring China into the global system?  Really?  China?  The joint which has pretty much bought out the U.S. economy?  The place which is eagerly buying up every drop of oil from whatever kleptocracies and anti-U.S. Islamofascist dictatorship it can?  The ones who just launched an aircraft carrier?  Short of having the Politburo over for a fish-fry on the South Lawn, exactly what more needs China to become part of the “global system”?  Or India, the world’s largest democracy and one which is bursting at the seams with human capital and entrepreneurial spirit, all of which it gleefully either exports to the far reaches of the free world or brings in-house to its own educated class?  I have an idea:  Why don’t The Economist’s writers call up the technical support lines for their laptops and see what sort of English they hear on the other end of the line?

But Cato saves his tired exhortation for last.  Yep, the U.S. needs to squander what little influence is left after five years of insulting our allies, accommodating our enemies, making a pig’s breakfast of pretty much everything we try overseas, and taking dead aim on blowing up our own economy . . . on fighting “climate change.” 

He’s just phoning it in at this point.

A couple of months ago (October 20, in fact), a post appeared on Thought Catalog, authored by someone identifying herself as Rachael Sacks. Miss Sacks describes herself as being a 20-year-old college student fortunate enough to have been born to fairly well-off parents, and even more so to parents who like to keep the girl who is the apple of their collective eye in a manner to which most of us would like to become accustomed. I have to assume that her self-description is accurate.

Miss Sacks lives in New York City, in the West Village. Comfortably, we are given to understand. She enjoys shopping at swanky clothing stores, but will admit to enough humanity to let on that she also enjoys getting a deal at such places (at least to the extent that paying only several hundred instead of many hundreds of dollars for – just by way of example – a hand-bag can be called a “deal” by any reasonable standard). So far, so good. 

The subject of her post was a brief encounter she experienced in the check-out line of a store near where she lives. As she approached check-out, the cashier (also a young-ish female) was chatting with an acquaintance (ditto), and one of them observed to the other that she had gone to college in-state in order to save money. The other agreed that was a good idea. Miss Sacks interrupted the chat with her purchase. Let’s roll audio and hear (so to speak) Miss Sacks tell it like it was:

“I get to the checkout and there’s this girl in front of me probably a little older than I am talking to the cashier. The girl says to the cashier, ‘I went in-state to save my parents money for school.’ The Cashier then replies, ‘That’s smart.’ They then both glare at me with my shopping bag and my Coco Lite snack cakes and Diet Coke as if to say here’s daddy’s little princess wasting money, that little piece of shit. They exchange words and then the girl leaves. I try to be chipper and ask the cashier how her day is and she doesn’t answer me. She just looks down and scans my items not saying a word or even glancing in my direction. I say have a great day, as happily as I can and walk out feeling like a turd.” 

At this point in her essay Miss Sacks begins to sin. And also to dole up what is very likely a heaping plateful of unintended irony. I use the expressions “sin” and “very likely” carefully, because my irony sensors went off so spectacularly in response to what is after all an assumption about Our Author. You see, unless Miss Stacks is among the fewer than one-in-five of her age, sex, marital status, and socio-economic stratum who voted for Romney this last time out (I just typed and then deleted “McCain”; Miss Sacks at 20 is too young to have voted for the grumpy old guy), then she proudly pasted Hopenchange slogans about the place, pouted up her (attractive, from the pictures that have since appeared online) face in disgust at the very thought that someone could be so [insert term of derision] as not to be heart and soul for Dear Leader, and generally wore herself a callous on her own shoulder congratulating herself on her own Intelligence, Tolerance, Enlightenment, Sophistication, and Moral Superiority, all just by virtue of rooting for a political candidate. Who knows? She might even have “liked” him on Facebook, re-tweeted the most current Soros-sponsored talking points, and have proudly held up a union-printed sign demanding that the low-skilled unemployed be kept out of work by artificially high wages for those with jobs. Or something like that. I could be completely out to lunch on my supposition, but just by random selection there’s something like an 80% chance I’m right about her political preferences. 

And that’s what makes (assuming I’m correct) her essay ironic. Because she tilts her shapely chin back and emits what can only be described as an enormous belch in chapel (or temple, in the event she happens to be Jewish . . . which of course has even less to do with the merits of her thoughts or how she expresses them than how she chooses to get her jollies (q.v.); I just don’t want to place her out of her element, f’rinstance at a stock-car race). She doesn’t think she ought to have to pretend to be poor in order to be thought well of by people like the cashier and her friend. She thinks that people ought to be able to spend their money as they please, without being judged by the world around them. “People shouldn’t make others feel bad about their own personal finances. How people spend their money is their own choice.”  She bristles at what she perceives as hatred, contempt, and/or envy welling up against her solely by virtue of the fact that she’s carrying a shopping bag from some swanky retail store. She goes so far as to suggest (O! the horror, the humanity of it all!!) that people ought not be judged by the thickness of their wallet.  “It should not be made to define who people are, even though we do it all the time.”

Well, y’know what, Miss Sacks? You are absolutely, 100% correct. Seriously. You have now the experience of having been spot-judged by purely superficial criteria, and you find that it rankles. [N.b. I’m the last person to read body language and non-verbal cues correctly, but there’s always the outside chance you mis-read Cashier’s and friend’s.] You may well be the kindest, most personable, biggest-hearted, most inquisitive, even-tempered person we all could hope to meet. But because you don’t choose to hide one aspect of your existence – the relative freedom from financial worry and the relative ability to choose the objects with which you surround yourself – you perceive yourself to have been damned for all time by people who do not share that one characteristic with you. You are in their eyes unredeemable. You are for them The Eternal Other. 

If my hypothesis about your political leanings is correct, then what makes your essay deliciously ironic is that this cashier’s attitude towards you is the very essence of your own politics. You think people ought to be able to spend their money as they choose? Guess what? At its most stripped-down, the politics of today’s elite – including the bulk of the people you share your island home with, who just voted overwhelmingly for ACORN’s knight in shining armor – come down to the assertion that they may tell you what you may or must spend your money on (individual mandate, anyone? illegality of catastrophic coverage insurance policies? someone else’s birth control? compact fluorescent lightbulbs? trans fat bans?  magazines that allow you fourteen chances to defend your life against a violent criminal rather than only six?  vast amounts of wasteful “biofuels” subsidized by artificially high gasoline prices? intentionally bankrupted coal industry?). What’s more, they assert the right to tell you when you have enough money for any purpose at all, and to expropriate from you the “excess.” The fellow behind whom you choose to march (again, if I’m wrong about your politics, please forgive me) has done little more than preach the doctrine of hate and envy you felt washing about your knees in that check-out line. You’re buckled firmly by your own petard; stand by to hoist away. 

Don’t feel badly about your situation, though. You’re far from the first to have sensed that things aren’t working out for you quite as you’d thought they would. The Russian aristocracy that had supplied the Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries for all those years with money, guns, safe houses, and social respectability probably went through most of the feelings you have. Only they were waiting for their turn in the Cheka’s execution cellars as they pondered how anyone could hate them for having too large a house. All you had to endure was a snotty interlude from someone who feels herself no more superior to you for her poverty (relative to yours, of course; if you want to see truly grinding poverty, take a spin through southern McDowell County, West Virginia) than you likely do to those slopey-headed in-bred mouth-breathers in fly-over country by virtue of your political enlightenment.

It gets better. Miss Sacks’s essay is not useful just for its own substance and its merits. What’s every bit as delightful (at least for the cynic) is the hateful tenor of the comments she smoked out. She’s excoriated for poor writing (guys: it’s an internet post, fer cryin’ out loud). She’s damned for being “arrogant.” She’s damned for being rich in the first place. And so on. I’ll just go on record and state that I didn’t find her reaction to her experience to be arrogant at all (assuming she “read” the cashier’s reactions correctly; if she read those reactions into the situation, that might be different, but then of all the people who’ve weighed in on this subject, exactly one of them – Rachael Sacks – was present that day). Oh sure, she might have expressed her experience and her own reactions to it more artfully or gracefully. But hell’s bells; she’s 20 years old and admits that she’s got growing yet to do. That degree of self-knowledge alone sets her apart from the run of humanity at that or any other age. 

Miss Sacks might have spent her creative energy pondering the implications of class hatred for the future of America. Twenty-four years ago, when Paul Fussell led off Class: A Guide Through the American Status System with a chapter entitled “A Dirty Little Secret,” you could still joke about it. [Per Fussell, when asked and he confessed that he was writing a book about class in America, people looked at him as if he had just said, “I’m writing a book advocating beating baby whales to death with the dead bodies of baby seals.” That’s still one of my all-time favorite lines, anywhere.] For decades European socialists fretted about the relative impermeability of American politics to class hatred as a organizing principle. If Miss Sacks’s cashier is a bellwether, their dreams might be close to realization. But the essay wasn’t set up as a disquisition on such things. It was her relation of her own experience in a specific time and place. 

All in all, the blistering Miss Sacks has taken from her commenters and the media puts me in mind of a retort a friend of mine gives under such circumstances: “Thank you for making my point for me.” 

Not only has Miss Sacks got to see up close the street-level application of politics which may well be her own, but she’s also got to experience the special sort of viciousness she maybe laughed off, five years ago, when directed at this guy known to history as Joe the Plumber. Remember him? He made the mistake of asking the Anointed One an awkward question on camera. And the next thing you know, within hours nearly, non-public financial information about him, available only to people with access to official records and computer systems, had been fed to the press. Or consider for a moment a certain former governor of a northern state. She got to have someone literally move in next door and peer into her back yard (again, literally), hoping to see something titillating, or prurient, or embarrassing. Did Miss Sacks cackle with glee at the hectoring of those stupid knuckle-dragging Tea Partiers? How about when the union thugs come to demonstrate in front of the homes of corporate CEOs? Did she puff up and sniff, “Serves ‘em right!” when she read about how the IRS targeted groups so retro-grade as to suggest that only people lawfully entitled to vote be permitted to do so, and then only once?  Did she vote for Bill DeBlasio for mayor?  Did she? Whether she did or not, what’s happened to her since October of last year is just a tiny little slice of how the present administration and its allies conduct business. Someone dug up pictures of Miss Sacks on Facebook (which is how I can state that she appears fairly attractive); they hunted up her childhood home and put pictures of that up on the net. Reporters began to moon about the front door of her apartment building in the city. 

To her credit, she doesn’t back down on the basics of her original essay. Which is good. To borrow another favorite quotation from history, she has done no more than “make a plain statement of an obvious truth,” and no apology is called for. And as mentioned, she admits her comparative lack of life experience and perspective, and that her acquisition of same is likely to change how she perceives and thinks about things. Again all to the good.

After another few months of getting the Full Treatment from the thought police, Rachael weighs back in.  This time what annoys her is that no one mentions how she gets her jollies. You see, Miss Sacks identifies herself as homosexual. As if that had a damned thing at all to do either with the merits of her original arguments, the vitriol hurled at her from the sidelines, or the inappropriateness of the invasion of her privacy. I have to say I fail to understand her objection. Her original essay and the points she makes in it have nothing to do with how she disports herself in her bedroom (and she points that out). I didn’t notice in any of the excoriation she took anything substantive that relates at all to whom she prefers as a bedmate.

What’s interesting, and where Miss Sacks sort of gives away the game, is precisely by pointing out how the mention of her preferences would have politicized the public reception of her essay. The lamestream media would have leapt to her support, because the homosexual lobby is so influential. And the troglodytes would have emptied their magazines (metaphorically speaking) of every cacophemism they have, precisely because of those same preferences. It would have become a sliming match based on what she does with her genitals, instead of a pissing contest about her comparative wealth, how Us Proles react to her not feeling obliged to hide it, and what those reactions have to say about us individually and as a society (which is to say, about the substantive merits of her essay). Miss Sacks sure gives the impression of being disappointed in the missed chance to drag her amorous predilections into an argument where they had no place. 

Rachael objects to the media making hay of her background, her family, and the physical circumstances of her existence, but of omitting to mention her homosexuality. Errmmm . . . Rachael, those sorts of reference points people have dug up are precisely illustrative of the central point of your essay: People judge you (negatively) because of the financial circumstances of your birth and your parents’ willingness that you should at age 20 reap the tangible benefits of that. Yes, it was tacky (and by the way I’m proud you used that word correctly in your follow-on essay; so few of y’all Yankees know how to) of everyone to jump all over your personal circumstances. But it wasn’t so because they were personal but rather because they didn’t affect the validity of your argument one way or the other. Put differently, suppose you’d been, not the girl with the swanky shopping bag, but the next cashier over, making your rent on damn-near-nothing-net-of-taxes-per-hour, watching the girl with the swanky shopping bag and how your colleague treated her, and describing what you saw. What exactly about your observations would have been either more or less valid? What about the discussion we could have about what you saw would be more or less pertinent to life in today’s United States? 

Not good enough for Miss Sacks. “While my sexuality is irrelevant to the topic of my article, it is still part of who I am and should not be ignored.” If, she bemoans, they could delve into where she grew up and where she lives, why can’t they trot out her sexual habits? She thereby goes a long way towards giving up match point: She wants the personal to be political, as and when she wants it to be so, on her terms, not the cashier’s. Which gets us right back around to the irony of the first essay. People should mention that I’m homosexual, because then some would be more frightened to attack me, others would more readily leap to my defense, and in any event I could deflect criticism by pasting the label “homophobic” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean) on my detractors. But people should be able to spend their money as they choose (which of course necessarily presupposes that they should have their money as they choose in the first place). People should not think badly of me because I’m rich; rather they should consider me sacrosanct because I like to sleep with other women. Either the personal is political or it’s not, Rachael. You can’t have it both ways. You chose to put up an article about something that is extremely important, and you are disappointed that a triviality – and by your own statement, an irrelevant one at that – was not made part of the centerpiece of the controversy. 

In closing, let’s hear it one more time for the Decalogue: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.

[Updated 14 Jan 13 to correct some stoopid typos.]

We got yer War on Women, right here. Back in October, in eastern India, a 16-year-old girl complained of a gang rape. The perps were actually arrested, have been charged, and were to go to trial.

Enter on the scene another group (six of them, according to the article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) of men. They threatened the girl, to get her to retract her accusations. Nothing doing.  So they raped her again. 

Among the second group of rapists was the family’s landlord. She appears to have complained; they were arrested.  So two of their friends doused her in kerosene and set her alight. She has now died. 

This, Sandra Fluke, is what a war on women looks like. It’s not people’s objecting to subsidizing the intimate amusements of able-bodied adult women who have the wherewithal to enroll in Georgetown University’s law school.

[Update:  English-language (and a bit more extensive) coverage here.]

You know what annoys, when one is reading a book that is otherwise enjoyable? Say you’re reading a book about some subject you have a fair degree of knowledge about, but as with anything you can and want still to learn more. The book you’re reading really seems to throw different light on things you already know a good deal about, and of course also has a great deal of material you haven’t yet known. And then there it is: A statement of fact that you know to be wildly incorrect. About something that even a modest familiarity with the subject matter would indicate to be off the reservation. Something like getting the date of a battle in the wrong month and year, or putting the wrong general in command, or getting major historical events in reverse order.

Ick! It’s like finding half a worm in something you’re eating. Never pleasant, but the more you were enjoying your meal the more alarming is the discovery. And just like that half-worm destroys your ability to take another bite of your lunch, even that part that you have no reason to suspect of housing further vermin, that botched fact ruins your ability to enjoy any part of the rest of your book. If the author and his editor(s) couldn’t be troubled to get right something so basic as when the Battle of Chancellorsville was fought relative to Gettysburg, something that you know if only from not having slumbered your way through 8^th grade American history, how in the world can you trust them to get right the statements about the complicated things, the fresh analysis, you bought the book in order to read in the first place? How can you accept anything written in it as true? 

The same dynamic operates with the commentariat. You always, if you’re the least sentient, take everything you read with a grain of salt. People make mistakes, after all; they weigh evidence poorly; they guess the wrong door, the wrong shell as hiding the pea. But — at least as to the ones you choose to pay close attention to — you still have to extend a certain degree of trust to them, to identify themes and stories that are significant, to explain correctly why they’re significant, to report accurately the factual material on which they base their statements, not to quote people or sources inaccurately or out of context or so incompletely as to give a false sense of their statements, to give the other side a fair shake, conceding its meritorious points or just the points on which people of good faith may disagree. When the commentariat and the news reporter meld, when the same author or publication undertakes both functions, the importance of being able to extend that trust becomes of critical importance. 

The ability to trust becomes make-or-break when the author or publication is ostensibly non-partisan, in the sense of not unabashedly representing the interests or the positions of an organized political force. Just by way of example, no one in his right mind thinks of The New York Times or Time magazine, or Salon or the Puffington Host or MSNBC as being anything other than Democrat Party operatives with bylines (confession: that last expression is not my own, and if I weren’t so lazy I’d track it down to its origin and footnote it . . . but Gentle Reader will have to forgive me). And let’s not forget that JournoList, an organization that was formed for the explicit purpose of surreptitiously assisting the candidacy of one party’s man for the presidency by discussing, vetting, coordinating, and managing in advance not only how things were to be reported but also the most basic decision of what to report in the first place, was run from a computer in the offices of The Washington Post. By like token no one reads Alternet to get a reasonably good-faith analysis of any particular issue. If you want to find out what the current White House-approved talking points are, they’re your huckleberry. 

There are, or have been from time to time, news and commentary sources that genuinely have been more or less even-handed in whom and what they excoriate. PorkBusters was one of them. They called bullshit as and when they saw it, and to them it made no difference if the pork came from a Republican, a Democrat, or more commonly, from both. If it came from the Bush White House, they called it out. If it came from the Republican Senate (pre-2007, of course), they called it. Ditto if it oozed out of Nancy Pelosi’s racketeering House. There are others, of course, some of them focused on the national scene and others on state or local scenes. 

Which gets me to the origins of this post. A number of weeks ago, I ran across a link to a story run by some self-proclaimed watchdog site. In fact if I recall it even has that word in its name. You’ve seen them and their kind before: They report the stupid stuff government – especially the hidden bureaucracies – does, the wasteful stuff, the undoing-with-one-hand-what-the-other’s-just-paid-for programs and initiatives. The monumentally dumb.  The outright crooked and venal. And in so doing they perform a vital function. We need people like that to watch for us, because the lamestream media sure as billy hell has no interest in it any more. 

Remember the name Eason Jordan? He was the CNN guy who got caught sliming the American forces in the Middle East (his specific lie was that American troops were intentionally shooting at reporters; he lost his job over that one) during the second Gulf War and afterwards. He was also the fellow who publicly spilled the beans that his employer, CNN, knew, all the way from 1990 up to the 2003 invasion, of Saddam Hussein’s grisly human rights violations but that its people had gone soft on reporting what he was up to, in order to protect their “access.” In other words, CNN intentionally down-played the depredations of a blood-thirsty tyrant so that he would keep returning their phone calls. Way to take a stand, guys. 

If that’s how CNN handles events of world-wide significance, what in the world makes you think your local newspaper doesn’t play the same shuck-n-jive game when it comes to deciding which bureaucrats to out? Bust the state director of X and there went your last off-the-record conversation with anyone in that department. Point out how internally incoherent Program Y is and no one involved in it will ever return another phone call of yours. Point out that the wife of a prominent local politician is being paid the equivalent of a nearly full-time salary to read kiddie books to the little dears two afternoons a week at the library, and see who lines up against you. So we need the mavericks, the self-proclaimed watchdogs, the ones who’ll report whatever comes to light and damn the torpedoes. 

But you’ve got to be able to trust them. 

If they set themselves up as sniffing out what’s important for Us Proles to know and explaining to us why it’s objectionable, then what if they’re lying to us? What if they’re twisting facts and mangling people’s statements? What if they’re parading a bunch of stuff that’s really all much ado about nothing while sitting on the volcanically explosive revelations?

It matters, in other words, how they conduct themselves.

Several weeks ago, as I mentioned, I ran across this post on this particular website. It reported, in a breathless-but-snarky tone, an e-mail that was sent by a senior state bureaucrat to staff. The department had just moved into a new building the physical characteristics of which were quite different from their old digs. This particular missive dealt with the new building’s plumbing system, and the theme was please be careful what you flush down the toilets (short version: it matters a great deal, and not just to the plumbing inside your building). I might mention that this particular organization is in charge of supervising and regulating every public wastewater system in the state. So the concern was not coming out of left field. Among the specific injunctions was not to believe the packages of allegedly “flushable” wipes; apparently they in fact do trash wastewater treatment plants because they can’t be treated. But the e-mail’s writer slipped up and used a little humor to make the point. Among the laundry list of things not to flush were “old shoes.” Well. From this website’s reporting you’d have thought that the state’s senior executive branch was earnestly advising its staff to wear wolfsbane about the neck, carry nosegays to ward off evil vapors, and always to propitiate the gods by sacrificing the correct number of puppies on their backyard altars. Jesus Christ and General Jackson!! I hate it when people pretend not to understand. When they pretend to be outraged by something that any drooling imbecile can see was done or said in jest. When people treat as serious what is obviously light-hearted. I hate it because it is fundamentally dishonest.

The e-mail of course was “leaked” (if that’s even the right term; the Pentagon papers were “leaked,” as have been Snowden’s documents; this kind of pippy-poo tattle-taling scarcely deserves the verb) by a discontented underling, of whom there appear to be several in that organization. Since I happen to know the writer of the e-mail, I dropped a brief note to offer my encouragement, and remind of General Stilwell’s motto: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I also suggested that, when in the future departing from mind-numbing bureau-speak, the following statement be included using Outlook’s signature block feature:　

[Warning:  Contains humor.  Also may contain metaphor, analogy, poetic license, assonance, consonance, alliteration, and/or dramatic comparison-and-contrast.  Prepared in a facility that also processes irony and skepticism.  If you experience literalism or other Inability to Get the Point Without Someone Drawing You a Picture that lasts for more than thirty minutes, contact your fourth-grade English teacher or any literate person of your choosing at once.]

So in the future, if whichever school-playground Deep Throat wants to provide this outfit with any more juicy examples of bureaucratic silliness for them to swell up and take seriously for the safety of the common weal, they’ll have to do it over a point-blank call-out of their nonsense.

In all, a trivial sequence of event. What is important, however, and what annoys me, is that now and forevermore, when I see something reported by this “watchdog” site, I will have to wonder what the story really is. Whether they just happen to be leaving something out. Something necessary to understand the substance of the story. Something that, if I knew it, would reveal the whole thing to be a great big So What with a side of fries. I will have to wonder whether they’re trying to inflate a penny-ante non-event for the purpose of distracting me from something genuinely of lasting importance. I will never be able to take their reporting or their commentary at face value.

Dealing with a liar is tiring. It consumes so much energy to have to filter everything one hears through a meta-algorithm that really has nothing to do with the specifics of what’s being said: Why might this person want to lie to me, and how might he be doing it? Dare I rely on what he is saying and if I do what are my risks? Why is this person telling me this? Why now? Who else has been told, what have they been told, and in what order? Why that group of people?  What information is being kept back and when will that be disclosed to me? All this is true whether or not the person I know to be dishonest is or is not in fact lying in this particular instance. Instead of navigating my way through a world of confusing facts I have to navigate my way first through a welter of deception before I can even confront the confusing facts.

At least when I find half a worm in my food, I can order another plate of a different item. But a watchdog that tries to bullshit me is good for nothing but shooting.

[Update 30 Dec 13:]  They’ve done it again.  For Christmas I got The War That Ended Peace, which The Economist, among others, included in its Best Books of 2013 list.  The author has her Ph.D. from Oxford, grew up in Canada, and both her grandfathers fought in the mess.  I’m just wading into it, but it’s really a history of the pre-war era and expressly asks the question not of why did the war start but why did the peace stop.  The actual war is broad-brushed in the epilogue.  In reading that part first (it’s not cheating; I know how the war ended), sure enough there it was:  She’s been and went and gone and done it:  According to the author, the British lost 57,000 men on July 2, 1916, the “first day” of the Somme.  For nearly a century July 1 has been a quasi-national day of mourning in Britain, because it was on that day that Kitchener’s armies went over the top to their slaughter.  Not the next day.  It’s like delving into a book that promises to look at Gettysburg from a novel angle, and finding a casual mention of the symbolism of the Iron Brigade being decimated on Easter Sunday.  The head explodes.

We have this offering over at Slate.com from someone rejoicing in the name Allison Benedikt:  “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person“.  No, seriously, that’s the actual, honest-injun title of her piece.  And if you read it, you realize she genuinely means it.

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal does a very good job of pointing out the alarming implications of her logic.  I will say that I disagree with his opening observation that Benedikt “presumably” uses the expression “bad person” facetiously.  I think she’s entirely serious; in fact it’s the only conclusion that’s consistent with her argument and how she sets it up.  Taranto points out (I wish I could say that I immediately phrased it to myself in the same fashion, because his critique of her reasoning is so important, but I was spun up by entirely different aspects of the article, on which more below) that the core of Benedikt’s argument is the sinister conflation of what is good for a government institution with what is good for the public.  Or, as he phrases it, “The biggest problem with Benedikt’s argument is the fallacy of composition–of mistaking the part for the whole. We are willing to stipulate that improvements to the public schools are a common good–that all else being equal, better public schools would make everyone better off (although the benefit would be far from equally distributed).  But a common good is not the common good. . . . Benedikt’s view of what constitutes ‘the common good’ seems to be limited to the institutions of government.”

Benedikt faults parents who send their children to private school for any reason — any reason at all.  Because I could not make this quotation up if I tried, I’ll just let ol’ Allison call it like she sees it:  “But many others go private for religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so hot. None of these are compelling reasons. Or, rather, the compelling ones (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out.”  OK; well enough, but what’s the purpose of opting in?  “But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. . . .  So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment.”

[Here Gentle Reader might well ask what is the color of the sun on Allison Benedikt’s planet.  It’s as if she never served, or knew someone who served, on a school board.  As if she never read or heard an interview with some school “administrator” whose response to some report of egregious misconduct or incompetence or perverse policy boils down to, “Shut up,” he explained.  It’s as if she has paid no attention to what the NEA has been up to for decades now, as it has fought tooth-and-nail against any public disclosure of what goes on inside the public classrooms of America.  You really, truly, genuinely think, in a world in which the overwhelming portion of public school funding for all but the very largest systems comes from state and federal sources, that a bunch of parents are going to be able to turn the ship through the eye of the wind and onto a different tack?  Has Allison Benedikt ever even volunteered for any school function more substantive than running the concession stand at a basketball game?  Does she really think that’s how public schools work on the ground?]

I like that word, investment.  It sounds good; it’s got a really good name, and we all know how important Having a Very Good Name is, right?  It makes the speaker sound . . . weighty, as if generously endowed with what the English know as “bottom.”  But the real beauty is that it can mean so much, so many different things.  For example, handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to the bankrupt companies owned by one’s political supporters becomes “investing in renewable energy.”  Handing out billions of dollars to fund construction projects of questionable utility is “investing in our infrastructure.”  Shovelling hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of non-dischargeable debt to students so that they can troop off to “college” and “major” in grievance studies and support a burgeoning class of “administrators” becomes “investing in the future.”  And so forth.  You see the point.

What Benedikt understands (notwithstanding she admits to being ill-educated) is that inherent in the notion of an “investment” is the prospect of losing what one has invested.  This is to give her her due a level of comprehension in which she distinguishes herself from so many of those on the left.  It’s why it’s called an “investment” and not “a sure thing.”  It is, in short, a wager.  Benedikt advocates using one’s own children as poker chips, and she very expressly is willing to accept the loss of the “investment,” perhaps even for generations.  Cue Allison:  “Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”

She omits to explain how two or three consecutive generations of badly-educated adults are — magically! — going to know what a good school looks like or have the intelligence and drive to see to it that one is created and continued.  But let us pass onwards.

One of the slogans current for roughly twelve years in a country then (and still, come to think of it) among the most highly literate, educated to the point of over-doing it, societies in the entire world was “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz.”  The common good above the individual good.  One had an affirmative duty to do that which brought one’s own misfortune if only it advanced the common good, the Volk.  This attitude was not confined to purely materialistic considerations.  It also expressed itself in the moral sphere. 

The July 20 conspirators tried to recruit Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.  By this point in the war the senior command and in fact the senior civil service as well knew the war was lost and they knew that it was Hitler’s personal decision-making that had lost it.  They also labored under exactly zero illusions about the nature of the crimes taking place behind the front.  Let’s compare and contrast for a moment.  Here’s Manstein’s explanation of why he did not join the opposition:  “Prussian field marshals do not mutiny.”  He in fact, just like every other German military officer, had sworn a personal oath of loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler.  He was unwilling to violate the duty of that oath.  For an alternative take, let’s cut to Adam von Trott zu Solz, a diplomat later hanged for his part in the plot, as he tries (successfully) to recruit a co-conspirator: 

“I am also a Christian, as are those who are with me. We have prayed before the crucifix and have agreed that since we are Christians, we cannot violate the allegiance we owe God. We must therefore break our word given to him who has broken so many agreements and still is doing it. If only you knew what I know Goldmann! There is no other way! Since we are Germans and Christians we must act, and if not soon, then it will be too late. Think it over till tonight.”

You see, there is no room for Solz in Allison Benedikt’s (O! the irony of that name) cosmology.  Your child has learning or personality disorders and won’t — simply can’t — get the adequate remedial attention he needs in a public school?  Too bad.  Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz, old sport.

And this is where I saw red while reading Benedikt’s little piece.  I have three sons.  The older two of them, and especially the oldest, have developmental issues.  Not stupid, by any means; the oldest taught himself to read before he was six.  But he is “on the spectrum,” as a generation of parents has now been taught to say.  On the very mild end of it (an unearned blessing for which I am profoundly grateful, especially given how easily it could have been otherwise), but still there.  He would have been absolutely lost in the chaos that is a modern public school classroom, bombarded with all manner of aural and visual stimuli that he just did not have the resources to process.  He would have drowned on dry ground.  The middle child is phenomenally creative.  He has an intuitive grasp of how things fit together and work together, in three dimensions.  I only hope to God he learns to master math well enough that he is not deprived of an outlet for his natural genius, as I was.  He, too, but for different reasons, would have been at sea in a public school classroom.

I must emphasize that I do not fault the public school system for its inability to be what my children need in a classroom.  It cannot be otherwise.  That pesky li’l ol 14th Amendment really does mean the government has to treat people the same.  It cannot offer opportunities to one child that it does not offer to all similarly situated.  And short of herding us onto collective farms and confiscating all the food produced (ask the Ukrainians how that worked out; even the SovNarKom admitted in its internal deliberations that the collectivization program was neither more nor less than a tax on the peasantry to subsidize the industrialization of the cities) there is just no way in a world of finite resources that any governmental agency will ever have the wherewithal to offer those attentions to every child who needs them.  Who deserves them.  And in government life (at least outside the caprice of an absolutist state) what not everyone can have, no one gets.  Unless you’re wired in with the political class, unless you’re an apparatchik. 

So for no fault of its own, the government-run school system could not and cannot offer to children such as mine those things which they need not to be the best they can be, but just to survive.  Here’s Allison, once again:  “I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all.”  Not to get too personal about it, Allison, but you’re full of shit.  A child who goes into emotional and sensory lock-down when a classroom full of children do what classrooms full of children have done since they were first hustled into them, several millenia ago is most emphatically not going to “do fine” when he’s shoved into the regimented chaos of a public school.  He will never get to your Promised Land of AP calculus at all.  If he is to have a shot at all of acquiring the skill sets needed to exist as an independent adult in the world that actually does await him when his birth certificate says he’s grown up, he has one window to do so.

Benedikt describes her friends who send their children to private school as “morally bankrupt.”  Here I’ll say that I have zero interest in any system of morality or ethics which cannot distinguish between on the one hand the sacred duty I owe to a child, whose very presence in this world is a result of decisions I made and who just by virtue of how his brain is wired is utterly, utterly defenseless against the storms in which he finds himself, and on the other the interest in continued monopoly by a self-interested government bureaucracy which has nothing more than a vague, diluted, hypothetical, perhaps-in-twenty-years stake in my child’s future, and even then not as an institution but purely on the personal level of that bureaucracy’s members.  Taken at face value, Allison Benedikt not only announces an affirmative duty to serve the interests of a government agency as such, she places that duty in the same kind as that I owe my child, and then ranks the former above the latter.  No, Allison, we’re discussing a distinction in fundamental kind here, not talking a difference of degree.  We are not debating whether to pump money into public schools because everyone has an interest in a literate, numerate, educated public at large, or instead into roads and bridges, because a population that cannot get to work (or school either, for that matter) quickly and efficiently, that cannot move people and goods cheaply from Point A to Point B, is going to resemble sub-Saharan Africa a helluva lot more closely than it will a place that has “AP calculus for all.” 

[Among her other ignorances Allison doubtless cherishes a profound ignorance of the sources of wealth which make, inter alia, AP calculus available even to a tiny privileged minority.  I’ll give you a hint, sugar britches:  No society ever got rich because it had flashy courthouses, multi-media capable schools, free libraries, or well-staffed DMVs.  The only way anyone — let alone everyone or even any appreciable subset of everyone — got out of deep, grinding, perpetual poverty was through commerce and trade, neither of which is possible on any significant scale without cheap transportation.  Just as a mental exercise, compare the number, direction, and density of navigable rivers in Central and Western Europe with the same in Russia and sub-Saharan Africa.  Notice a pattern?  Since the days of the Roman empire someone in Western Europe could load his crop, or the produce of his forge, loom, or mill, onto a boat and cheaply move it hundreds of miles towards where others were willing to trade with him.  The Russian peasant and the tribesman in what later became Namibia couldn’t.]

Oliver Stone is what they call around here a piece of work, by any reasonable standard.  In his Full Metal Jacket there’s a scene, set at Christmas on Parris Island.  The gunnery sergeant explains it thus:  “God was here before the Marine Corps.  So you can give your heart to Jesus, but your ASS belongs to the Corps.”  My ass does not belong to the NEA, Allison.  It does not belong to the army of famine-breeders (fave Mark Twain expression) that batten and multiply in the “administrative” offices of the nation’s public school systems.  It does not belong to the bottom quintile of SAT scores that is extruded year by year from the nation’s schools of “education,” its heads packed full of wonderful theories and notions and experiments to carry out on children.  And none of my children’s asses belong to them either, Allison. 

On the other hand, I have a duty to my sons that is sacred.  It does not arise from constitutional or legislative mandate.  It predates the common law.  No pettifogging bureaucrat can enlarge or diminish it by the slightest.  It is as inherent as my blood relationship with them, and theirs with me.  It is sublime, eternal, ineffable.  It transcends every tie of obligation I owe to the fleeting construct of “the state” or “society.”  Rome rose and fell.  The duty of parent to child does not.  Only a duty to humanity itself, to the cause of human liberty, can even cast a shadow across its edifice, and even then my duty would be to take my son’s place if I could.

My boys have one, exactly one, shot at equipping themselves for the fight ahead of them.  The world they are growing up in is by several orders of magnitude less forgiving than the one I was privileged to know.  The consequences of wrong turns taken, or opportunities squandered, are graver now, and at an earlier age, than ever since men first struck out from the stone walls of their sheltering caves.  As God and my genes have made them, they will forever struggle with things that come to others if not perfectly naturally then at least much more easily.  It may come to pass that things will so arrange themselves that I am unable to continue to offer them an atmosphere where they can have just that little extra room, that little extra accommodation, that little extra chance, that might, just might make the difference in their becoming emotionally and mentally healthy adults, able to stand on their own and face down the Allison Benedikts of this world, able to follow the path of an Adam von Trott zu Solz rather than a Field Marshal von Manstein.  If that happens, it happens, and my duty will then be to help them find what footholds they can.  In the interim, though, what right have I to sacrifice them to a system of morality so abhorrent that it places as its highest duty the call to subservience?

Fuck you, Allison Benedikt.  People like you are why there are thousands upon thousands of stark white crosses dotting the fields of Normandy.  Those men died so your like would not triumph.  In addition to whatever my sons learn in private school, I will teach my sons this:  Whenever they come across you or your kind in life, they are to strike you dead if at all possible, and if not physically destroy you, then at least shove you into such a tiny crevice in a forgotten rock somewhere that you will never extricate yourself and inflict your abominable, slavish sense of morality on any future generation of free humans.