The Name, Please if You Will; Just the Name

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Who gave the order? That’s a four-word question, one part, answerable with two words: first name and last name. Why is it so difficult to answer this one question? We had the resources in the air to take out the attackers’ heavy weapons. We had a firing solution on those weapons. Someone made the decision not to stop them from shelling the compound where four Americans asked repeatedly over the course of a seven-hour attack for help. Someone. Who was that someone? Why is this question not on the front page of every newspaper, above the fold, every day, until we get a simple answer to who gave the damned order?

In 2005 we got to know everything in the world about the head of FEMA, fer cryin’ out loud, who bungled sending help to New Orleans when the governor of the state had refused to ask for it. We got his full employment history; we got to find out where he went to school; about the only thing I don’t recall us getting was whether he’s a boxers or briefs kind of guy.  We got weeks and weeks and weeks of breathless reports of every water-cooler conversation in every penny-ante federal bureaucracy about who made what decision and when.  We got in-depth interviews with every corrupt New Orleans ward tool crying about how Geo. Bush wasn’t down on his street corner personally shovelling mud.

Why is it now seven weeks to the day after those attacks and we can’t get one simple, two-word answer?

To say that we oughtn’t be reporting the Benghazi attack because of the presidential election is logically indistinguishable from saying we shouldn’t have reported World War II in 1940 because it might impact the presidential election.  Yes, we weren’t in it then, but which of the two candidates was the more likely better to deal with a conquered France — and not unlikely a conquered England — and a German jack-boot across the neck of a whole continent was just that tiny bit relevant to the voters’ choice.  Wouldn’t anyone agree?

So why is it not equally relevant as to which of two candidates is more likely better to deal with a threat that is actual, immediate, and presently attacking us at every opportunity?  Hitler in 1940 was still going out of his way not to shoot at identifiable Americans who weren’t under actual military convoy, however much he may have wanted to.  These savages today have killed an ambassador.  Not the guy who filled the Coke machine, or the fellow who ran the motor pool.  But the actual, letters-in-his-hand ambassador to the country whose citizens killed him.

A Time for Choosing

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Forty-eight years ago today, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater.  The speech has become known as “A Time for Choosing.”

 Listen to the speech.  Listen to all of it.  Speeches which have any sort of historical legs all seem to share one attribute:  You can listen to them, or read them, decades, generations later, in some cases centuries, and they still read fresh.  The ideas and the concerns and the hopes they capture transcend the verities of the moment.  From Washington’s Farewell to Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne to the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, through to Churchill’s Beaches and Finest Hour:  They are all immediate to us now.

We still struggle with the problems brought by entangling foreign alliances; we watch what happens when men who deny any God higher than themselves assume the helm of state.  The fact of union, from out of many lands and peoples, and what that means for the hope of the world, is at the very center of gravity of civilization.  We forever exhort ourselves to grant this last, best hope of the earth a new birth of freedom, and highly resolve that our honored dead shall not have died in vain.  As we struggle over whether to depose blood-soaked tyrants half a world away, and as we fondly hope and fervently pray that the scourge of war may quickly pass from us, we still try to balance a heart bearing malice towards none and charity for all against that necessary firmness in the right, as (we hope) God gives us to see the right, that will permit us to finish the great work we are in.  And when we are attacked, we vow that we shall fight our enemies every step of the way, from behind every fence, every shop building, in every ditch and at every creek and river crossing.  We hope that when our remote descendants examine us under the cold, unforgiving light of history, knowing then what we cannot know now, they will say of us that ours was the finest hour (although we’d be mighty proud if we never are asked to prove it up).

I don’t mean to suggest that Reagan achieved the towering heights of Lincoln or Churchill.  I am no student of rhetoric, but I do question whether snippets of his will still be part of our civil DNA 100 years hence.  What I do mean to suggest is that in much the same matter-of-fact voice of Washington, he outlined for us the choices presenting themselves to us, and that his foresight of these choices and his description of them and their portent is in its own way every bit as prescient as Washington’s in 1796.  Here then, is Ronald Reagan in 1964, almost twenty years before he dared Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall: 

Have You no Decency, Mr. Vice President? None at All?

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He said this at a memorial service. To the father. He said it to the father who still can’t get a straight answer about why, with a drone overhead streaming real-time video of the seven hours of the attack, nothing, not one thing, was done to save his son’s life.  Genl Petraeus, through the CIA spokesman, made this statement:   “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ”  “Those in need,” by the way, included Tyrone Woods, to whom our Vice Dear Leader was speaking.

Exactly how bereft of basic human sympathy do you have to be, to say something like this to someone in the father’s position, at a time when the administration in which you are No. 2 is tenaciously defending the stone walls from which you deny him the truth about what happened on September 11, and why?  How lacking in the ability to imagine oneself into the shoes of another person must you be not to understand how taunting, how demeaning this is to the father?  How disrespectful to the son?  At least Biden didn’t just come right out and give him the ol’ “neener, neener, neener.” 

Those at the tops of gargantuan power structures are necessarily insulated from most human contact with most humans.  They are surrounded by sycophants, flunkies, turf-defenders, and would-be Machiavellis.  This is true of American presidents, British prime ministers, totalitarian dictators, and monarchs alike.  In order to have any chance at success they must therefore have if anything a heightened empathetic capacity.  They must be especially adept at imagining the lives, concerns, and aspirations of their fellow humans because they are denied nearly all direct or unmediated knowledge of it.  On the plus side of that ledger Queen Victoria had that capacity; I forget which of her ministers it was who observed how astounding it was that with no exposure at all to the average Englishman, she had a nearly infallible ability to sense and internalize what they were thinking.  Ronald Reagan also had that ability; we called him the “Great Communicator,” when what he really was, was the Great Receptor.  On the negative side we have the Hitlers and Stalins of the world, who played their people like so many fiddles pick-axes.

From Dear Leader’s bland assertion that “the private sector is doing fine,” to his sneering, “You didn’t build that,” and now to Biden’s comments about a dead, abandoned son’s reproductive organs, we may have two of the deadest receptors in recent memory.  And on the other side, we have a fellow who took his entire company to general quarters to go search for the missing daughter of an employee.

As you read the quotation, just keep murmuring to yourself, “Mr. Vice President; Mr. Vice President; Mr. Vice President.”

And are Their Dead no Less Dead?

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. . . That is, the Sinti and Roma, which we English-speakers describe as “Gypsies”?

The horror of the Holocaust sometimes burns so blazingly bright that it destroys our ability to understand that the Jews were not the only group consigned to death by the Nazis.  The homosexuals of course were done to death as and when caught (OK, it’s impossible not to note that the fellow who composed “Des Großen Kurfürsten Reitermarsch,” Graf Cuno von Moltke, came from the same family which provided the commander who defeated France in 1870, and also the same fellow who dropped dead before the kaiser while wearing a ballerina’s costume), and of course the mentally handicapped were dispatched as “useless feeders.”

When one thinks of Nazis, one thinks of Jews.  Properly, by the way.

But the Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi genocide.  So also were the Gypsies, like the Jews the Eternal Other, the People Who Do Not Belong.  The people who wherever their camps were pitched were to that extent convenient objects to load up with blame for whatever misfortune happened to plague the neighborhood that year.  They died, but unlike the Jews they have had no wealthy, influential kinsmen in other lands to rub our noses in their degradation and death. 

Jewry’s dispersal, the Diaspora, was not only their curse but also their salvation.  To kill them all one must first lay hands upon them, and when they have sunk roots deep in the soil of the United States, which is quite capable and willing to dole out such ass-whippings as may be necessary to warn off the aspirations of ambitious princes (to borrow, imperfectly, from Gibbon), their complete eradication is not possible.  But the Gypsies didn’t come to the U.S.  They stayed in Europe.  Where Hitler found them.

Mourn them, as well as the other victims.  Promise their survivors that we will not stand aside once again.

Nigel Farage Tells It Straight

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Zero Hedge has an excellent video of Nigel Farage, a British MEP, tearing off yet another strip from his fellow members.

While it’s an inherent weak point of parliamentary systems that their executives are also members of their legislatures, and thus power is not divided but rather concentrated, and their governments made less stable by reason of being subject to machinations of parliamentary nose-counting, it’s also a strong point that the executive must come down to the floor and take it on the chin.  Periodic doses of getting-it-with-the-bark-still-on make a good palliative for the kind of personality cults that the U.S. presidency has degenerated into.  It is a human failing to believe one’s own nonsense, to drink one’s own Kool-Aid.  All this “Hail to the Chief” business does nothing to tamp down that inclination.

I wonder if ol’ Nigel might be interested in moving to America.  We could stand to hear from him in Congress.  His “Who the hell do you think you are?” speech remains a classic.

Meet the New Boss &c. &c. &c.

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True to his Chekist personal heritage, Putin arranges for contact with foreign NGOs to be punished as high treason and/or espionage, if those organizations “endanger the security of Russia.”  The existing law makes reference to the “external security” of the country; the new law ominously omits the foreign security nexus.

Russian politicians who are neither in Putin’s pocket nor frustrated latter-day Stalinists agree that the omission of the foreign security criterion will enable contact with foreign organizations which cause purely internal political problems to be classified as high treason and espionage.

Don’t think it will happen?  It has, already.  Most of the Red Army purges of 1937-38 were on the nominal basis of collaboration with foreign intelligence networks.  The Harbinisty, those Russians who had gone to live in China to work on the China branch line of the trans-Siberian railroad, were lured back home, only to be slaughtered almost to a man.  Their “crime”?  Acting as Japanese spies.  And on.  And on.  And on.  The allegation of foreign intelligence collaboration/agency was one of the NKVD’s top three charges to paste on an arrestee, right up there with “counter-revolutionary activity” and “counter-revolutionary agitation.”  Of course, the latter two also came with the “Trostkyite” sub-flavor.  And so forth.

And this is the fellow to whom Dear Leader has promised “more flexibility” after the November elections.

And Here You Thought Hooters Was Tacky

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Dear Leader’s signature campaign tactic:  Go rooting through someone else’s divorce files, and splash them across the front pages.  It is, in fact, how he got to be a U.S. senator.

Unless you’re a lawyer representing one of the parties, there is just something irredeemably tacky about sifting through the legal fall-out of others’ domestic problems.  It’s the sort of thing indulged in by “oppo researchers” and others who wear hats indoors.  They probably drink their beer from a can in a sack, too.

And here we’ve got one of them in the Oval Office, where he can put his feet up on the Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to the American people.  Kindly spare me any assertion that the campaign is not behind this maneuver.  I’m not the brightest bulb in the fixture, but to ask me to believe at face value that Gloria Allred just happens to have hooked up with a woman whose divorce lies buried under decades’ worth of archival dust, and who doesn’t appear to have done too shabbily out of the thing in the first place — that’s insulting to the meanest of intelligence.

A few things strike me about the people I’ve heard this Allred (how appropriate) woman “representing.”  The initial thing is that the client is never, ever the sole interest benefitted by Allred’s actions on behalf of her client, or in fact the chief interest benefitted.  There’s someone or something else behind the scenes, never mentioned of course in the news reports, who stands to benefit from her doings much, much more than her nominal client.  Like the illegal alien whom she “represented” against Meg Whitman.  Allred exposed her nominal client to a risk of deportation (or maybe she’d already been assured by the INS that that flank was covered?  maybe?) in order to embarrass a political opponent of her . . . well, let’s just call them the people who benefitted most from what she did.  Ditto this new “client.”  What purpose, exactly, is being served for her by unsealing divorce records from years ago?  She went through an ugly divorce.  OK, that only happens several hundred thousand times a year.  Is she going to experience some great epiphany of healing by seeing it all played out on national television?  We can’t say; maybe she really craves her few moments of fame.

Maybe she also craves being one more exploited woman, one more time.  Because that’s another thing that’s struck me about the people “represented” by Gloria Allred:  the ones we hear about are all women, who are all transparently allowing themselves, their lives, their misfortunes, to be used by strangers, invariably men it seems, and then put back on the curb, precisely as one would do with a street-walker one had picked up.  I mean, seriously, has anyone done any follow-up story on Whitman’s poor o-pressed illegal alien housekeeper (or whatever it was she did)?  Anyone check to see if she’s got a green card (or for that matter, how soon after she allowed Allred to “represent” her she had one miraculously issued) or health insurance, or where she lives?  Is anyone going to check on this newest “client” five years from now to see how she’s doing after having what we must assume to be intimate details about a decades-in-the-past existence spelled out in nice, gentle, legalistic language for 300+ million people’s salacious gratification?

Maybe I really am just a stoopid country lawyer.  OK; I very likely am just such and no more.  But a lawyer has no ethical duty I am aware of to participate in a course of action obviously contrary to the client’s actual interests, especially where that client is being used by other clients of the lawyer.  May a lawyer ethically do so, after full disclosure of all <ahem!> conflicts of interest the lawyer may have?  Yes, she can.  Ought she do so, as someone supposedly practicing a learned and noble profession?  Well, she’s the one who’s got to brush her own teeth in the morning.

At Least Bismarck Labelled it Correctly

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When he called his attempts to suppress the Catholic Church and its related organizations a “Kulturkampf.”  Nowadays we simply require the Roman Church, through its affiliate entities, to underwrite abortion, abortifacients, and birth control, and we call its opposition to being required to vomit up its beliefs a “war on women.”

This op-ed’s references to 1870-80s Imperial Germany is very timely, and the connection between that time and today is one that is not nearly adequately appreciated. Progressivism’s — in fact, “liberalism’s” — roots in fact do lie in a time and place which is most popularly understood as representing the very antithesis of those ideologies’ guiding principles.

Yet it is even so.  As Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 for a British audience, the British public conversations about “planning,” by which everyone understood centralized planning of as much of the economy as could be comprehended by government mandate, eerily mirrored the precise conversations that were current in Germany a generation and more before.  Hayek wrote, so he pointed out, precisely to warn the British public against the dangers of following down the German path.

Closer to home here, in Liberal Fascism, a book which remains interesting today, the introductory chapters, especially on Woodrow Wilson’s actual articulated ideas of government and its proper role in life, are filled with citations to his works and papers and their German antecedents.  Wilson has been sanctified in American history teaching largely for his 14 Points, and for his League of Nations idea.  His 14 Points turned out to be at best pious hogwash and at worst ticking time-bombs (remember it was his principle of “self-determination” that allowed the British and French to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 with a smirk of rationalization).  His League of Nations foundered, we are told, because the U.S. didn’t join.  Forgive me but I can’t see that the U.N. has done much to gloat over.  What has kept the the world from immolating itself for the past 70 years has not been a bunch of guys in New York who won’t pay a parking ticket; it’s been the U.S. military.  But it’s when you move past the Wilson hagiography that you get to some positions that are just well beyond the pale.  A vigorous support for governmental eugenics is only one.  His totalitarian vision of the state and his frustrations with that nasty ol’ Constitution are even more sobering.

[As an aside, Liberal Fascism remains a quaint artifact because it was so obviously written against Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, at a time when everyone just assumed she was the nominee.  I can’t recall that Dear Leader got much more than a collateral mention.]

Bismarck cynically used then-current theorizing about the state, its role, and the citizen’s role, combined with a ruthless divide-and-conquer strategy, for what seems to have been no greater ambition than to retain himself in power.  He threw bones to the socialists, in the form of social security, enacted in 1881, a full half-century-plus before the U.S.  He threw bones to the saber rattlers and imperialists in the form of huffing and shouting until Britain and France allowed Germany to take over a few thousand square miles of God-forsaken territory at the fringe of nowhere.  He threw bones to the officer class in the form of ever-increasing army appropriations.  He threw bones to the industrialists like Krupp in the form of buying up their armaments as fast as they could be produced.  But from a recent biography of him, the conclusion is pretty strong that for Bismarck it was about little more than fracturing the opposition to his personal dominance of European politics.

Bismarck even wrote the Imperial constitution to suit himself.  It was perfectly tailored for himself as Reichskanzler and the aged Wilhelm I, the soldier-king, as Kaiser.  In fact it worked, about as well as anything, while the two of them remained in place.  But it was precisely that point in which Bismarck revealed himself to be no statesman, but rather a megalomaniacal politician.  His constitution overlooked that one day he would no longer be Reichskanzler, and Wilhelm I no longer kaiser.  And sure enough, when his little puppy of a crown prince (whose warped view of the world and his place in it Bismarck had studiously fostered, back when it appeared that his father would be kaiser for a lengthy reign) ascended the throne, it wasn’t a decade before the system began to go off the rails.  Bismarck’s failure is in marked contrast to the wisdom of the men who sweated out the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia.  They wrote for the ages.  Over 225 years later their work endures, for exactly the reason that its strengths do not depend upon the strengths of any particular player, but rather are designed to check the failings of all potential players.

Back in the 1870s they called it an “Obrigkeitsstaat” — an authoritarian state.  Now we call it “hope” and “change.”  But the understanding of where we and our government fit into each other’s existence is vintage 1870s.  All of which highlights how close to the truth came the speaker (don’t have the book in front of me now and so I can’t give the name) who observed that America speaks in English, but it thinks in German.  It is no accident, no accident at all, that the same Dear Leader who on the one hand laments that America’s Founding Fathers didn’t draft a charter for expropriation and re-distribution also wholly accepts, so far as can be told from his actions and pronouncements, the Imperial German notions of the centrality of the state in society.

The Successful Applicant Will Have Made Payroll

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. . . from his own money.

If the true test of responsible adulthood is the ability to alter one’s thinking and positions based upon the facts one actually finds on the ground, then George McGovern, dead this past weekend, passed that test.  Americans’ memory of him is frozen in the amber of the 1972 presidential election, when he rode the crest of what for the time was a tidal wave of whacked-out lefties (ignore that most of McGovern’s most outrageous positions of 1972 became . . . well, almost tame over the 40 years since) to one of the biggest whippings ever.  That’s how we remember him: paragon of far-left causes.

McGovern lived, however, not quite exactly another 32 years after losing office, and this is Bloomberg’s final take on him:  Libertarian Hero.

There is an educational aspect to the process of paying the bills out of your own money which is just impossible fully to replicate when you’re paying with someone’s else’s money.  Even if the money is “private” money, say, and you’re the CEO of some gargantuan company, it’s still not really your money.  The money you’re paying out is just not coming from the same funds out of which you propose to pay next month’s light bill.

Dr. Johnson observed that nothing will focus a man’s mind like the knowledge that he is to be hanged in a fortnight.  I will suggest that nothing will bring home the economic realities of government intrusion into business pursuits like signing checks each one of which measurably reduces the money one has available to put food in front of one’s children.

George McGovern, bless his heart (you see, in the South you can say anything, absolutely anything, about someone if you only preface it with or append to it “bless his/her heart”) made a first career advocating for giving away others’ money.  Then he got to fit that shoe on the other foot.  Seems it pinched.  He sunk most of his post-Congressional savings into a motel in Connecticut that went belly up.  McGovern gave his erstwhile supporters a fit of the vapors with a 1992 letter to the Wall Street Journal (read into the Congressional Record here) detailing the effect on his venture of government regulation, including specifically some things that he personally had supported.  What I also find interesting is a 2008 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (link is to Reason, which has excerpts, the actual op-ed being behind a paywall), in which he defended subprime lending.  That was 28 years after he lost office in 1980.  He’d been first elected to Congressional office in 1963, which was 17 years before being beat.  So by the time he let loose with his 2008 eructation, he’d been paying the bills from his own pocket for quite a bit longer than he’d been paying them from others’.  Bless his heart, he’d learned.

Did McGovern “flip-flop” on the issues?  Lincoln once explicitly allowed that he did not claim to have guided events so much as to have been guided by them, and that he held his positions until he was shown they were incorrect, at which point he changed his position.  McGovern found out, the hard way, the actual consequences of his earlier causes.  He found them out with his own money.  And he changed his position.

I accept that government decision makers should have some degree of background and experience in government work.  You can’t run a government like a business; you also can’t make business run like a government.  When a business runs short of money, it can’t just decree that it’s going to take more from its customers, or require that they buy more of whatever is being sold, or refuse permission to its competitors to operate.  The rest of the world is not going to put its plans on hold to wait for any business, however huge (ask GM about that).  Similarly, government decision-making is constrained by things not applicable to private enterprise.  Things like the 5th and 14th Amendments, for example, or the vastly-increased scope for play of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  So you don’t necessarily want “a businessman” to try running the government.  On the other hand, complete absence of private, personal business experience is or ought to be as close to an absolute disqualifier as anything this side of being convicted of a felony.

Man Alive! (pun intended) I’m Glad It Can’t Happen Here

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Here’s a little report on the British end-of-life cost-savings program.  It’s called, innocuously enough, the “Liverpool Pathway.”  See?  Doesn’t that just sound so . . . gentle, so dignified, so . . . DMV-like?

I’m sure we in the U.S. don’t need to worry about any of this happening here, because the Law of Supply and Demand works differently on this side of the water, right? And all our bureaucrats are and will always be (even the ones who haven’t been born yet) moral paragons. So we don’t need to worry about some desk jockey looking over the last three quarters’ numbers and realizing that if he can just get “participation” in this one li’l ol’ program up by, say, 20%, he can free up enough beds &c. &c. &c. Or he can show enough — how was it sold? — “bending of the cost curve” to justify his request for incentive bonuses for the coming budget cycle. And since his program will be operating on an accrual basis, he’ll be able to book the “savings” immediately he “enrolls” the patients in this “pathway” program. Anyone want to bet what’s going to come up at the next management staff meeting?

OK, let’s just assume that our present bureaucrats are moral paragons.  Let’s assume that all our present doctors and nurses are likewise so.  Let’s assume that they in fact do have the moral fiber to recoil at any or all of the above suggestions.  Let’s assume that, over the hundreds of thousands of currently active administrators, doctors, and nurses, the law of supply and demand (the dynamics of which obey the laws of very large numbers, by the way, and operates at the margins of behavior) will be ignored.  Our current crop of those folks has been raised in what will become a completely and utterly foreign moral frame of reference from that which will be the only thing the next generations of administrators, doctors, and nurses will know.  Their mother’s milk will not be the Hippocratic Oath; they will suckle at the teat of budget justification, of turf wars, of internecine agency power struggles.

I don’t make the above observations as an indictment of government workers.  They, like all humans, merely respond to the incentives which are presented to them.  Incentives work, even perverse incentives.  So when we present the thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats (and let’s be perfectly clear with ourselves and acknowledge that once you socialize medicine, your doctor is no longer the independent practitioner of a noble profession; he’s a government functionary who answers, ultimately, not to you or his conscience but to a chain of command the players in which he probably will never even know) with these incentives, over millions upon millions of distinct healthcare decision points, what is the likelihood that, at the margin, where change occurs, we will get more outcomes like those in Britain described, or fewer?

Once upon a time, I’ll bet, even mooting the suggestion of decision trees like those of the Liverpool Pathway would have been excoriated by every man jack of the British medical professions.  It’s taken them roughly 60 years to get from that point to this.  Sixty years is not quite two full generations of medical providers (if you figure that, allowing for training and other pipeline activities, you’ll get 30-40 years of practice per generation).  Given that morality also seems to follow a path of entropy, what are the chances of the British medical professions finding their way back?

But gee whiz, I’m sure glad that human nature, the law of supply and demand, and everything else works here so radically differently than it does in Britain that we don’t have to worry.  I’ll just take my soma and put my nose back to the grindstone.