America's Families Hurting

America’s problem getting black men involved in family life is the most extreme example of a general trend—the breakdown of the American family. Mort Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, discusses the problem in a recent column:

 the American family has lost its place. Households of unmarried couples and households without children outnumber "American family" households. In the 1950s, 80% of adults were married; today, roughly 50% are.

 births to unmarried mothers, white and black, have risen from 5% in 1960 to about 35% today.

 the stable family of two biological parents is the best vessel for molding character, for nurturing, for inculcating values, and for planning for a child's future. Lack of marriage is the best single predictor of poverty, greater than race or unemployment. Children in mother-only families are more likely to be suspended from school, to have emotional problems, to become delinquent, to suffer from abuse, to take drugs, and to perform poorly on virtually every measure.

 there is a serious divide in our society between the children of poorer, less educated, single parents and those of richer, better educated, and married parents. Married parents typically earn more than $75,000; in only 20% of cases do married parents with children earn less than $15,000.

 parental time with children has dropped from about 30 hours a week to around 17.

America’s Need for Involved Black Men

“Meet the Press” did a special show with Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint, authors of the just-published Come on People. The book presents some startling facts:

In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Now, roughly 70% of black babies are born each year to single mothers. . . Some black women simply don’t want to marry the fathers of their babies because these men appear to have little else to offer beyond the sperm. . . Currently, in college and professional schools, black women outnumber black men two to one. . . In poor communities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school. . . By 2004, the unemployed share of black male high school dropouts in their twenties had increased to a preposterous 72%, almost four times more than among Hispanic dropouts. . . Society keeps laying the problem on the “unwed mother.” You never hear anything about the “unwed father.” We have to talk more about these men and to these men if we are ever to see them assume their responsibilities as men.

Enough young black males behave badly at an early age that they set the norm for other black boys. Check the numbers:

 Homicide is the number one cause of death for black men between fifteen and twenty-nine years of age and has been for decades.
 Of the roughly 16,000 homicides in this country each year, more than half are committed by black men. A black man is seven times more likely to commit a murder (excluding military actions) than a white man, and six times more likely to be murdered. (Black mothers live with these numbers. We don’t know how they sleep at night.)
 94% of all black people who are murdered are murdered by other black people.
 Although black people make up just 12% of the general population, they make up nearly 44% of the prison population.
 At any given time, as many as one in four of all young black men are in the criminal justice system—in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole.
 By the time they reach their midthirties, six out of ten black high school dropouts have spent time in prison.
 About one-third of the homeless are black men.

The Last Liberal

National Review's Rich Lowry discusses Jim Piereson’s new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution.

 the assassination of President Kennedy represented the descent of liberalism from an optimistic creed focused on pragmatic improvements in the American condition to a darker philosophy obsessed with America's sins—echoes that can still be heard in the querulous tones of contemporary liberalism.

 the real John F. Kennedy, though a liberal, did not want anyone to tag him as such. He was also vigorously anti-communist, a tax-cutter and a cautious supporter of civil rights.

 the nation's opinion elite made the "tough and realistic" Kennedy—liberal in the tradition of FDR and Truman—into a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Thus, the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society. Until that point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress.

 Kennedy’s assassination turned American history into a twisted story of rapine and oppression. "With such a bill of indictment," Piereson writes, "the new liberals now held that Americans had no good reason to feel pride in their country's past or optimism about its future."

 the left developed ambivalence about national power, in which the old liberal reformers had placed such faith. The Vietnam War was seen through the prism of American malignancy established by the Kennedy assassination. That makes Kennedy, in Piereson's words, "the last articulate spokesman for the now lost world of American liberalism."

GOP Suffers Through Good Economy

Last night, ABC News’ Charles Gibson briefly mentioned the big news that both the Dow Jones and the S&P had on the same day each reached all-time record highs. Gibson’s announcement followed the ABC News opening story, complete with reporter and interviewees, about how the high cost of heating oil is going to hammer much of the country this winter, hurting people in their pocket books. Out with the old. In with Clinton. [For this blog, the media’s spinning to boost Clinton’s election will go under the initials “SOS”, for “same old story.”]

The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore [picture] provides reasons why Republicans get so little lift from good economic news:

 according to top Republican pollsters and pundits, independents are not much attracted to what the GOP is saying about taxes. A top strategist said, "Our tax message has worn thin."

 the Republican message that the Bush tax cuts were a resounding success “crashes like the Hindenburg," because politicians who boast about the rosy economy seem delusional, given the rising costs of gasoline, health insurance and college tuition.

 also, because local property and school taxes have been skyrocketing, many independent voters scratch their heads and wonder: What tax cuts?

 voters are unattracted to talk of new tax cuts, which they think are pie-in-the-sky, given the current war costs and budget-deficit. And they favor raising taxes on "the wealthy," a group they are persuaded is taking advantage of tax loopholes to avoid paying their fair share.

Some silver linings for Republicans:

 roughly half of voters are convinced that when politicians say they are only going to soak the rich, it means the voters' own tax bills will go up. As Arizona’s Jon Kyl said, "an overriding concern of economically anxious voters today is that they don't see their own taxes rise." 65% believe now isn't the time to raise taxes, while only 31% believe it is.

 says pollster Tony Fabrizio, "There's no question that for seven out of 10 American voters, wasteful government spending is one of the largest problems in Washington." Polling finds voters believe about 40 cents of every dollar spent by Washington is wasted. According to pollster Winston, 75% of respondents agreed that, "Taxes should not be increased as long as Congress continues to waste the tax money it already receives." Only 23% did not.

 when Winston's poll asked, "Which approach is more likely to increase federal revenues?" 81% said "increasing economic growth" while only 13% said "increasing taxes."

In-Your-Face Media Bias

Howard Kurtz is doing his job. The host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” has exposed the media’s bias on Iraq, noting that when casualty figures dropped last month, “the media paid little attention. A couple of sentences on the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, The New York Times ran it on page 10, The Washington Post, page 14, USA Today page 16. The L.A. Times, a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of a page 4 story.”

Kurtz then got the Post’s Robin Wright to flash her bias when she said, “it's not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq." Oh Ms. Wright? And those numbers were a problem when casualties were higher?

Finally, Kurtz turns to CNN’s military correspondent Barbara Starr and remarks, “let's say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.” Starr candidly responds, “Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that's certainly -- that, by any definition, is news.”

OK, so we have the truth. The media is out to—let’s cut to the chase folks; we've only got 13 months—elect Hillary Clinton. “News” is anything that supports Clinton’s run for the White House: bad stuff from Iraq or on the economy. Good stuff from Iraq or on the economy is “no news”.

Carrying Democracy to the World

The world must be made safe for democracy.

--Woodrow Wilson’s Declaration of War
April 2, 1917

This blog is about the world's best hope: expanding democracy and capitalism to achieve peace. Mandelbaum published The Ideas that Conquered the World in the aftermath of 9.11, a time when “every significant government” (p. 4) had rallied behind the U.S., and we had just achieved our quick victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Mandelbaum is an overt Wilsonian. He credits Wilson with bringing democracy, free enterprise, and peace together in what he calls the “Wilsonian Triad” (p. 6). When Mandelbam's book came out in 2002, it seemed we had indeed made the world “safe for democracy.”

That was then. Now it’s late 2007. After our struggles in Iraq, making even just one other nation (never mind the world) “safe for democracy” is out of fashion everywhere.

Yet the Muslim extremist threat that destroyed the World Trade Center—the heart of global capitalism—remains the chief obstacle to world peace. Muslim extremists are absolutely opposed to capitalism, democracy, and peace, and will die to destroy the modern world these concepts have built.

Our world is very much smaller than it was in Wilson’s time—even flat, in Tom Friedman’s terms. So those unhappy Muslim extremists truly do threaten us all. Hard as it may be to do so, we must take them on, as Wilson took on evil in 1917, when he said:

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

Democracy Means Isolationism

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger has written a sentence that gets to the heart of America’s security policy divide. Henninger is discussing the how anti-Bush forces in Europe and the U.S. are uninterested in promoting democracy anywhere, not just in Iraq. In today’s atmosphere, Henninger explains, the Burmese people don’t have a chance of gathering meaningful Western support. He contrasts Democrats’ current attitude with Democratic President Kennedy, who pushed for democracy abroad as vital to America’s interest.

Then Henniger delivers his fateful sentence:

“The argument for democratic government in places such as Iran is in fact crudely pragmatic: nations with freely operating political parties are likely to be centripetal; their energies bend inward, fighting with each other.”

Bingo!

Henninger, without meaning to, describes the U.S. today, and develops the major argument against his position. America has “freely operating political parties.” Our politics is “centripetal.” Our “energies bend inward, fighting with each other.” We are, in fact, a democracy, and therefore uninterested in going abroad to convert others to democracy. We have our own struggles.

As England fought the Nazis alone, Roosevelt pushed against the natural American tendency to fix on what’s happening here. Bush is only the latest in a long line of presidents who seek to pull Americans together at home to support democracy abroad. But Americans, like Brits, French, Germans, Canadians, Italians, and other democratic people, have “energies” that “bend inward,” toward “each other.” Bush is pushing against the normal state of politics in a democracy.

From World War I to Vietnam, Democratic presidents did most of the pushing. Now Democrats are content to leave the pushing to Republicans, and to reap the political rewards of supporting isolationism. “Return to normalcy,” as GOP President Harding [picture] put it in 1920.

Religion is Source of Evil

With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

--Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg

The quote is from an article by Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford [picture]. It comes from a Washington Post-Newsweek website called, “On Faith,” which encourages discussion of religion because, as Homer said 3000 years ago, "All men need the gods." For the new elite, faith is a curious phenomenon worthy of study. For believers like me, the elite’s difficulty with faith is a curious phenomenon worthy of study.

Dawkins has more to say about religion:

 Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women. . . [It’s just that] religion might . . . make them more likely to exhibit [those tendencies].

 humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. . . [S]ome religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. The actions of the Taliban. . . seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people.

 There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. . . it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women. . .

So there you have it. The Taliban are religious, and by association, all religious people are capable of progressing from “religious faith to evil deeds,” a path no true atheist would follow.

Remarkably inverted logic. Evil stems from religion. What times we live in!

Are People Deserting Republicans?

The Wall Street Journal has a longish article on how business is deserting the Republican Party. Much of it relates to Bush’s failure to balance the budget, understandable to me since we are at war, and anyway, our strong economy is reducing the annual deficit’s size every month. But the article does point out that Republicans seem to be on the wrong side of some popular positions. According to the article:

 Schwarzenegger at last month’s state Republicans convention sounded the alarm. Noting that California Republicans have lost 370,000 registered voters since 2005, the former actor said, "We are dying at the box office." The voters that Republicans need, Mr. Schwarzenegger argued, "often hold conservative views on fiscal policy and law-and-order issues, while taking more liberal stands on social and environmental issues."

 [In a recent poll, ] Pew found that between 1987 and this year, support for "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" had dropped 11%. Those who said gay teachers should be fired dropped 23%. But 75% of the population is worried about growing income inequality, Pew found, while two-thirds favor government-funded health care for all [emphasis added]. Support for a government safety net for the poor is at its highest level since 1987.

An Excellent Month in Iraq

Here’s our latest monthly, highly abbreviated version of the Iraq Index, published and updated twice a week by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution:



Americans Killed in Action, Iraq (monthly average)
2003: 32
2004: 59
2005: 56
2006: 58
2007: 75
September: 38

Americans Killed in Action, Vietnam (monthly average)
1965: 128*
1966: 420
1967: 767
1968: 1140
1969: 785
____
* = First U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam, 5.3.65
Vietnam table compiled by Galen Fox using Defense Department sources.

Crude Oil Production (m. bbls./day)

Prewar Peak: 2.50
Goal: 2.10 (Revised downward, 1/07)
actual: 2.33 (9/07)

Electricity (megawatts)

Prewar: 3,958
Goal: 6,000
actual: 4,975 (9/07)

Since our last monthly report, the American KIA total dropped from August's 52 down to 38. That KIA total is the lowest since March 2006, which was just after al Qaeda's destruction of the Samarra mosque triggered the sharp upturn in sectarian violence from which we are only now recovering. [Please note: the number of KIA is almost always lower than the media-reported total of American deaths, which covers all causes, including non-hostile. Our Iraq and Vietnam figures are KIA only.] We are a long way down from May's total of 117 KIA, concrete evidence the surge is working.

Oil output is up sharply to its highest daily output in a year, well above the target level of 2.1 million barrels a day. And the figure for electricity output is even better--4,975 megawatts is the highest monthly average the Iraq Index has ever recorded.

In the 18 months we have been summarizing O'Hanlon's report, there has never been a month anywhere near as good as September 2007. Let's hope the good news continues to build, and that it affects Iraq's political situation as well.

The Secular Believers

Capitalists dominated the victorious North and the U.S. after the Civil War, industrializing the nation and filling out the West. America was Protestant and supportive of business. Though still confident through the Roaring Twenties (the business of America is business), business-led Protestantism was humbled by the Great Depression. Starting in 1933, from FDR to LBJ through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, progressive presidents carried America through a social revolution, until it all came undone with Vietnam. By then, America had a new elite based upon the power of government that included those who benefited from government’s countervailing power to the business-led elite.

The Democratic presidency was in tatters by 1968. At that point, a new force stood astride America. The media in 1968 not only helped prevent Johnson’s re-election, in 1974 they literally drove Nixon from office. Watergate showed us the president no longer ran the nation. Instead, it was the national media led by The New York Times, The Washington Post/Newsweek [Kay Graham, pictured], CBS, NBC, ABC, TIME, and the Los Angeles Times—David Haberstam’s The Powers That Be (1979). When Jimmy Carter didn’t measure up in 1979-80, the media helped reduce his presidency to powerlessness as well.

Reagan in 1980 ushered in a populist counter-revolution to new elite rule. But in the aftermath of Bush’s Iraq failure, the Katrina disaster, the Republican congress’ corruption problems and its 2006 election defeat, the new elite are again setting America’s agenda. What makes our elite run?

1. Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. “The comfortable” are wealthy businesspeople and their friends in the Republican Party, including Christian conservatives who reject the new elite's secular values. “The afflicted” are the working class as represented by organized labor, and special classes of victims, including women, children, the elderly, those in poverty, minorities, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans-gender individuals. “Comforting” means employing the resources of government to help, and “afflicting” means employing taxes, laws, regulations, and the courts to re-balance the scales toward equality.

2. Celebrating life, protecting the living, and punishing the forces of death. The elite have moved past belief in eternal life, and related codes that restrict personal freedom. The elite want to make the world better within their short lifetime, here and now. They support freedom of expression, except when it's used against the weak. They oppose killing and wars, profit- making activities that harm the environment, and actions that hurt anything living. They take on those who consciously hurt people, animals, trees, air, water, and glaciers.

3. Preserving rule by the enlightened. Members of the elite act on behalf of those less able to defend themselves. So it is vital that the elite retain their power to do good. Americans (the new elite does not fear foreigners) who would take away the new elite’s power are fighting on behalf of selfishness and death. They must be defeated. The new elite rule on our behalf. In that sense, they are as old as temple priests at the dawn of civilization.

Men: The New Special Class

According to the Census Bureau, women earned 58.5% of the nation’s bachelors’ degrees in 2006. And according to the College Board, the advantages college graduates—3/5ths of them women—enjoy over their high-school graduate peers include:

 college graduates earn 61% more over their lifetimes than workers with high-school diplomas.

 67% of college graduates enjoy health insurance through work, compared to 51% of employees with only a high-school diploma.

 69% of college graduates have access to retirement plans on the job, vs. 53% of workers who stopped their education after high school.

 only 9% percent of college grads smoke, compared to 26% percent of those with a high-school diploma.

 college grads are less likely to be unemployed, live in poverty or require public assistance.

This means every male who didn’t graduate from college--when his female counterpart did--adds to an ever-growing disadvantaged minority.

What Makes the Masses Different?

In his book Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality, Jeffrey Bell gets at the gap between the elite and the people. Politics—the fight for power—has historically involved battles within the elite. The masses, when separated from their elite “vanguard”, have been outside the power arena.

It's true that Franklin Roosevelt, using the power of radio, successfully made the masses a part of his New Deal. But Roosevelt also built a new elite, one that dominates the country today. Republicans are still the party of small business, an elite group. But government, government-supported academia and non-profits, the constitutionally-protected elite of media, arts and entertainment, along with the lawyers who turned constitutional protections into dollars--all are growing, and all are linked to Democrats. By now, this new elite is large enough to be the elite.

As the elite recolored from Republican to Democrat, Reagan developed the first truly effective response to the New Deal's government-led legacy. Like Roosevelt, Reagan drew on his ability to communicate (via television) to the masses, and thereby mobilize them.

Bell chronicles Reagan's relationship to populism/anti-elitism. The elite care about character. Being in the elite club means getting things done through personality; helping someone who helps you in return. Your credentials are important, doing things right is important, and any faux pas is devastating. You must be there to play in tomorrow’s big move. We now know that people who rise to the top feel an endorphin rush as significant as any drug provides. Members of the right club, the elite focus on personalities, not issues.

Reagan and populism encompassed the different way common people view politics. They care much less about character. For the people, it’s not about who you know, and they don’t mind if some leader, like themselves, screws up from time to time. The public does, however, care about issues. They care because issues affect their daily lives—war, jobs, health, crime, money, values. Reagan instinctively understood popular concern with issues, while the elite missed that change in American politics.

The elite see issues as a means to a desirable end—power. They select a leader based upon character. For the masses, issues are the end. Vote for somebody who will make your own life more bearable.

America Blessed with Great Fed Chairs

Last night, ABC News failed to report the second day of stock price increases, the biggest two-day gain since Spring 2003. So what’s new? Though he has little good to say about 2007, Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson does use publication of Alan Greenspan’s book to glow over good economic news of the past, even the recent past (Greenspan’s been gone since January 2006). We are talking about good news the media has scrupulously ignored since Bush’s 2000 election.

Samuelson notes that during Greenspan’s two decades, which began in August 1987:

-- The economy (gross domestic product) grew 70 percent from 1987 through 2005.

-- The number of nonfarm jobs increased 31.4 million, or 31 percent, with average unemployment of 5.6 percent.

-- Annual inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index averaged 3.1 percent.

-- Pretax corporate profits jumped from $369 billion to $1.33 trillion.

-- The stock market quadrupled, with the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index rising from 287 (the 1987 average) to 1,207 (the 2005 average).

Truth is, we’ve had three fine fed chairs helping the U.S. economy grow for nearly three decades. Greenspan followed Paul Volcker [picture]. Through a severe recession, Volker cut inflation from 13.3 percent in 1979 to 4.4 percent by 1987. The Volcker-launched disinflation triggered a virtuous chain reaction of lower interest rates, higher stock prices, greater wealth and strong consumer and business spending. In the 1990s under Greenspan, productivity growth—old-fashioned efficiency—increased, probably reflecting the impact of computers. And then came globalization. From 1989 to 2005, the number of workers worldwide engaged in export-oriented industries rose from 300 million to 800 million -- a reflection of the entry of China and India into the global economy.

Now we have a new Fed Chair—Princeton’s Ben Bernanke [picture]. Bernanke has just surprised economists by cutting the prime interest rate by 0.5%, when the expected cut was the usual 0.25%. He also cut the discount rate by the same amount. His aggressive response to the threat bad sub-prime loans pose for the U.S. economy sent the stock market soaring. It’s too early to say how good Bernanke is, but CNBC’s Larry Kudlow certainly likes what he saw Wednesday. According to Kudlow, “Ben Bernanke‘s shock and awe, frontloading action to slash the fed funds rate [0.5%] . . . is just what the doctor ordered.”

For Media, Economy is always Bad

Edwin Feulner is head of the conservative Heritage Foundation. He has observed the media buries good economic news, and features bad news, something this blog has previously noted. Feulner’s example involves U.S. worker pay. He quotes an August 21 New York Times story that said, "While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation."

Here’s what the Times’ bad-news article misses, according to Feulner:

 employees are actually paid quite a bit more than the amount shown on their paycheck. The Heritage Foundation’s average benefit ratio was 26 percent. Nationwide, it's 30 percent. That's a lot of compensation that never shows up in a bank account.

 because lawmakers choose not to tax benefits while taxing regular pay at high rates (often 40 percent or more), employers are encouraged to shift more and more of their compensation into benefits. The good news is that total compensation is better -- and the economy stronger -- than the media would have us believe.

Feulner leaves out that Bush tax cuts also give workers more take-home pay. But the media are apoplectic about the possibility that a strong economy will keep Republicans in power. After all, it was economic failure that doomed Carter in 1980 and Bush 41 in 1992, and success that sustained Reagan in 1984 and Clinton 42 in 1996. Republicans must be denied the issue in 2008.

Media Slip: Doesn’t Everybody Know We Help Democrats?

Blake Dvorak, a RealClearPolitics.com blogger, caught this confession from liberal MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann that his network helps Democrats, and expects Democrats know the obvious. Olbermann let his bias show in a discussion of a John Edwards paid commercial that aired during Olbermann’s hosting segment.

Here, without further comment, Olbermann’s exact words:

I don't want to be diverted by talking about commercials in the middle of the show but, Rachel, why on earth did he buy that commercial? I don't think I'm saying anything unknown to the audience, I don't think he would have gotten a hard time from this particular network. Why on earth did we do it that way?

A Too-Divided America

Owen West, a trader at Goldman Sachs who served two tours in Iraq with the Marines (and son of Bing West), wrote this important commentary for the Wall Street Journal. West is concerned, as am I, that America is too sharply divided today to spare either side blame. We have to change the way we do politics in America.

West’s argument:

 In the United States, the chasm that separates combatants in Iraq is too rarely discussed. Disillusion with the entire effort has obscured and in some cases mutated the truth that small numbers of evil men tilt entire populations. Nearly six years into the war on terror--which is being fought by less than 30% of the military and less than one-half of 1% of the nation—the stark irony of America in modern war has emerged.

 Our professional warriors who take the most risk believe the nation must commit to a long-term fight that includes Iraq in some form. Overall support for the endeavor wanes with distance. In past wars, the nation was tied to its soldiers and had a familial barometer. Today most Americans have never met a Gold Star family, let alone shaken the hand of a fallen soldier. The military community is increasingly insulated even as the burden of global war swells.

 [Many] assert the nation's most precious resource is our children. But during wartime our greatest asset may be our guardians. We are off to a terrible start in the long war, having allowed the Iraqi battlefield to embitter and weaken the country. [Yet] The public recognizes [the blessing the military offers us]. In July's Gallup Poll on America's most trusted institutions, the military ranked highest with a 69% confidence rating. Congress ranked last (below HMOs), with a 14% confidence rating.

 So it’s surprising that, according to an August CNN poll, 68% of Americans said Gen. David Petraeus's congressional testimony on Iraq this week would not sway their personal view one way or the other. Worse, 53% of Americans do not trust him to report what's really going on in Iraq, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll. This wrenching inconsistency indicates a deeper problem—the poisonous partisan climate in Washington has seeped beyond the Beltway and is now harming the public's trust in the [military].

 Extremists from both political parties have used Iraq as a zero-sum emotional battle for votes instead of putting the battlefield in proper context. First, the Republicans declared the enemy in Iraq defeated before we started fighting, later employing invective to attack rational critics of the order of battle. Then Democrats declared the war lost just as we employed a new strategy. According to the Pew Research Center, 76% of Republicans expressed confidence in the military to give an "accurate picture of the war," but only 36% of Democrats did.

 Stepping back from the froth, this week will strengthen the country if political leaders recognize that a bipartisan course of action must be chosen in the context of [the] larger war on terror. If the politicians continue pulling the country apart, this game of chicken will end badly and imperil both Iraq and the U.S. If America were hit tomorrow there would be more finger-pointing than ranks closing. That must change.

9.11 sure didn’t unite us, did it?

Norman Podhoretz of Commentary is upset about the left. It seems so much like the left we grew to dislike in the ‘60s. Podhoretz quotes Todd Gitlin, a leading '60s New Left figure and now a professor at Columbia, who currently questions the "negative faith in America the ugly" that his comrades tenaciously held onto for so long.

Podhoretz’s points:

 in the ‘60s, the ideas and attitudes of the left would turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out. By 1972, only 11 years after President John F. Kennedy had promised that we would "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty," Democrat George McGovern was campaigning for president on the antiwar slogan, "Come home, America."

 as the Vietnam War ground on, the institutions that shape our culture converted to "faith in America the ugly." By 2007, in the world of the arts, in the universities, in the major media of news and entertainment, and even in some of the mainstream churches, that faith had become the regnant orthodoxy.

 bureaucrats and administrators tend to be the slaves of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists. These "practical men" read the New York Times, switch on their television sets, go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their nervous systems.

 the new antiwar movement already is where it took years for its Vietnam era ancestors to reach. Like the McGovernites with Vietnam, the Democrats want America out of Iraq, and the sooner and the better. Sept. 11 did not do to the Vietnam syndrome what Pearl Harbor did to the old isolationism. The Vietnam syndrome is back and it means to have its way, even though we still face the long struggle against Islamofascism in Iraq and elsewhere into which we were blasted six years ago.

AP Cooks the Books on Iraq

Dafydd ab Hugh has done the spade work needed to expose bad statistics AP used to counter recent Iraq success. The media’s story line is “Iraq’s a failure.” The media embrace numbers supporting their story line, ignore other numbers, and counter positive numbers when, in spite of media efforts to control, good numbers get through. AP’s bad civilian death numbers are one example of the ongoing anti-Iraq effort that plays fast and loose with facts.

Here’s the original AP story:

• “Civilian deaths rose in August to their second-highest monthly level this year, according to figures compiled Saturday by The Associated Press. That raises questions about whether U.S. strategy is working [emphasis added] days before Congress receives landmark reports that will decide the course of the war.”

Here’s ab Hugh’s deconstruction of AP’s figures:

• AP said civilian deaths rose from 1,760 in July to 1,809 in August. But they embargo a critical fact until later in the article: the August total includes the huge triple-bombing on August 14th that killed 520 Yazidis (AP's count). The attack occurred far away from the counterinsurgency forces, up in Kurdistan. [Without the Yazidi incident,] the civilian death toll would have dropped to 1,289, by far the lowest level this year. So what looks . . . like bad news is, in fact, very good news. . .

• [The Yazidi incident] was an anomalous attack: Nothing like it had been done before, and it's not likely to be repeated anytime soon. [And as to the overall] Iraq death toll, even the 1,809 figure is well below the deaths in November (1,967) and December (2,172), as is the worst month this year, May (1,901).

ABC’s Raddatz Cues Up Reid on How to Blacken Petraeus

ABC’s Martha Raddatz is successfully briefing Senate Democrat leader Reid. In her September 5 report, Raddatz used clips from past interviews with Gen. David Petraeus to make her point that Petraeus, who has a reputation for telling it like it is, actually (in Raddatz’s words) “always manages to paint a hopeful picture.” She has him saying in 2004—when Petraeus was in Kirkuk—that he sees “the Kurdish governor and the Arab governor going out together," and in 2005, when he was training Iraqi forces, that “it’s great to see the determination of so many who were good partners when they were here.”

Raddatz was twisting Petraeus’ very innocent comments into words suggesting the war itself is going well. But Raddatz didn’t actually cross the line to falsehood, since all she actually said, with her flimsy evidence, was that Petraeus “always manages to paint a hopeful picture.”

Reid obviously watched Raddatz’s report. And, just as obviously, he decided to embellish it. Today, he said of Petraeus, “he’s made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual.” That’s quite a leap from what Raddatz said, but “close enough for politics,” I guess.