Katrina: The Real Story

Lou Dolinar has an amazing story about what really happened at the Superdome during Katrina. Doliner’s story, certainly worth reading in its entirety,varies remarkably from that told in the media. Here are excerpts:

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not the back-pedaling.

Here's another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopters landing at the Superdome as soon as Katrina passed, dropping off tens of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H, carrying the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? About how the operation, which also included the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local first responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best an occasional, parenthetical mention in the national media. The National Guard had its headquarters for Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest places to be in New Orleans, smelly as it was. The situation was always under control, not surprisingly because the people in control were always there.

From the Dome, the Louisiana Guard's main command ran at least 2,500 troops who rode out the storm inside the city, a dozen emergency shelters, 200-plus boats, dozens of high-water vehicles, 150 helicopters, and a triage and medical center that handled up to 5,000 patients (and delivered 7 babies). The Guard command headquarters also coordinated efforts of the police, firefighters and scores of volunteers after the storm knocked out local radio, as well as other regular military and other state Guard units. . .

the national media imposed a near total blackout on the nerve center of what may have been the largest, most successful aerial search and rescue operation in history. . .

"TV of the Superdome was perplexing to most folks," [State Democratic Rep. Francis] Thompson said. "You had them playing the tapes of the same incidents over and over, it tends to bias your thinking some, you tend to think it's worse than it really is." Official estimates at this point suggest the Guard, working from the Dome, saved 17,000 by air and uncounted thousands more by boat. . .

Fifty thousand New Orleans residents were in danger of death from drowning, heatstroke, dehydration and disease. . . critical role the Superdome headquarters played. . .

when the Superdome was established as a shelter of last resort on the weekend before Katrina hit, the Louisiana National Guard sent several hundred soldiers there who were trained in policing and crowd control. They also, as rarely noted, stocked huge quantities of combat rations, also known as Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), and water, both of which were never in short supply. . .

late Monday, Louisiana National Guard HQ moved its high tech "unified command suite" and tents to the upper parking deck of the Superdome. . . satellite dishes for phone and Internet connections to the outside world, Wi-fi, plus radios . . . About fifty men and women, black and white, worked per shift, equipped with maps, laptops, phone and radios to coordinate the rescue operation. The rescuers called it the "eagles' nest".

The operation was impossible to hide or ignore . . . Tuesday morning: helicopters landing every minute; big ones, like the National Guard Chinooks, literally shaking the decking of the rooftop parking lot; little ones like the ubiquitous Coast Guard Dolphins; Black Hawks everywhere, many with their regular seats torn out so they could accommodate more passengers, standing. Private air ambulance services evacuating patients from flood-threatened hospitals. . . Overhead, helicopters stacked in a holding pattern. . .

This is at the Superdome, remember, supposedly Ground Zero for bad behavior and the scene of massive governmental incompetence. . .

Thousands of survivors came to the Dome by boat, thanks to police and firefighters and the rest of the rescue flotilla. Between the radios and first-hand reports from pilots and boat crews coming in, the comm center at the Dome had a good feel for what was going on in their city -- something the media utterly lacked.

. . . another big story at the Dome was the medical center. Like a Chinook helicopter landing on your roof, that sure was hard to miss. Fifteen doctors and a total of 65 medical personnel set up at the New Orleans Arena, within spitting distance of the Dome. It was primarily for survivors brought in by air and boat, but also for people in the Superdome with medical problems. There was never any shortage of medical care. . . Those in the worst shape were evacuated to the New Orleans airport and out of the region, those in good shape hydrated and sent to the Superdome. The success of the makeshift medical center was such that there were just six deaths at the entire Superdome complex: four of natural causes, one drug overdose, and one suicide during the week of supposedly rampant anarchy and death. . .

In all this time, [Maj. John T.] Dressler said, "We didn't see a single camera crew or reporter on the scene. Maybe someone was there with a cell phone or a digital camera but I didn't see anyone." This was in the headquarters area. Maj. Ed Bush, meanwhile, did start seeing reporters on Tuesday and Wednesday, but inside the Dome, most were interested in confirming the stacks of bodies in the freezers, interviews with rape victims, he said, and other mayhem that never happened. . .

Neither Maj. Bush nor Dressler saw TV until the end of the week. They were aghast. Apart from sporadic mentions, the most significant note taken of this gigantic operation was widespread reporting of the rumor that a sniper had fired on a helicopter. What were termed evacuations in some cases, rescue operations in others, were said to have been halted as a result. "I never knew how badly we were being killed in the media," Maj. Ed Bush says. . .

The majority of trapped survivors . . . weren't happy campers. Besides the smelly but safe Superdome, which was not a pleasant place, many had been dropped off on the nearest high ground, primarily Interstate overpasses, in the rush to clear rooftops and attics. There were genuine shortages of food and water at these locations, especially at the Convention Center, another drop-off point. They were stuck, as search and rescue and lifesaving continued. . .

The priorities were search, rescue and lifesaving, not the comfort level of survivors they rescued who they knew would survive somehow if they sorted out the sick from the healthy. It looked brutal on TV, but it was effective, giving a whole new meaning to that venerable military cliché "quick and dirty." . .

The rescuers . . . knew they saved a lot of lives, but feared how many thousands, or even ten of thousands, may have been left behind to fill the 25,000 body bags on hand. With Mayor Nagin predicting up to 10,000 dead, no one was in any mood to crow. . .

By [the following week], the view of Katrina as a massive governmental screw-up had been set in concrete, and it wasn't until Oct. 5 that the intense official search for bodies ended, with a toll of 972 in Louisiana, a number that has since crept slowly upward to about 1,300.

Iraq: Almost There

Iraq’s elected parliament approved the country’s new cabinet, a historic milestone toward building democracy in the Arab world. Cabinet installation follows the earlier agreement, nearly a month ago, on Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister. The mainstream media (MSM), which virtually ignored the earlier event, covered the cabinet announcement, while uniformly focusing on the problems that still face Iraq and pointing out, correctly, that al-Maliki has yet to name permanent interior and defense ministers, the key cabinet appointments.

The pattern in politics is first, try to ignore the opposition, and then, if that doesn’t work, attack. The MSM first tried to ignore the progress coming out of Iraq, and when that could no longer be avoided, it went on the attack. Here is an example from Chicago Tribune reporter Liz Sly:

Four governments have come and gone since the fall of Saddam Hussein, starting with the U.S. administration of Paul Bremer. Each one arrived with promises of a better future. Each left the country in a state of worse violence than the one before, with a more ragged infrastructure, more deeply entrenched corruption and fewer hours of electricity each day.

Sly’s “fact”, as opposed to her opinions about violence, infrastructure, and corruption, is the drop in electricity production as each new government came on board. Here, the true facts are readily available by checking the Brookings’ Iraq Index (p. 31) for Iraq’s daily hours of electricity in the month when each administration began:

Bremer (6/03): N/A
Al-Allawi (6/04): 10 hours
Al-Jaafari (5/05): 8 hours
Al-Maliki (4/06): 11 hours

Score another point for MSM opinion trumping the facts.

Values are for Everybody

George Will has written a column attacking the idea that “values voters” are conservatives who oppose abortion and gay marriage, and support crosses in public places. The term gains acceptance because both the right and the right's opponents are happy to link conservatives with "values."

Yet as Will notes:

Today's liberal agenda includes preservation, even expansion, of the welfare state in its current configuration in order to strengthen an egalitarian ethic of common provision. Liberals favor taxes and other measures to produce a more equal distribution of income. They may value equality indiscriminately, but they vote their values.

Why would liberals be willing to forego an association with “values”? Will doesn’t ask, but it’s worth considering.

I share Will’s view that everybody has values. Liberals view social conservatives' opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and their flaunting of their Christian faith, as throwbacks to an earlier era. To educated liberals, religion is a protective shield employed by those unable to accept the lessons of science, a rigid belief system that flies in the face of facts.

For the generation of liberals that lived through the 1960s—baby boomers who are now the dominant group in America—moving past religion was part of their life experience. They identify with scientific education, not ignorant religion; with tolerance, not rigidity. They don't want to be tied to any “values” straitjacket, because it seems too "religious".

But as Will suggests, it’s not whether you have values, it's what your values are.

Surprise: TIME's Favorite Governors are Democrats

TIME offers up another revealing exposure of its political bias, even worse than its attempt to identify best and worst senators.

This one (11.21.05) is on governors. TIME picks the five best and three worst. Since nearly three out of every five U.S. governors is a Republican, TIME’s best five—naturally—are three Democrats and two Republicans. The article’s coverage is even more biased: 68.4% of the picture/text is of Democrats, beginning with the first two governors mentioned. Of course, two of the three “worst” governors are Republicans, providing a net best-minus-worst margin of Democrats +2 (3-1=2), GOP 0 (2-2=0).

The only “worst” Democrat TIME identified is Kathleen Blanco. She’s hard to ignore even though TIME’s overwhelming coverage of the Katrina disaster mainly blamed the Bush administration.

Economic Sunshine: Can You See It?

Today, Karl Rove spoke to the American Enterprise Institute about the successful American economy (full text here):

The American economy has created more jobs than all the countries in the Euro zone and Japan combined, and our economy is growing today faster than that of any major industrialized nation in the world. . .It grew at an annual rate of 4.8 percent in the first quarter. It added more than 5.2 million jobs in the last two and a half years.

Employment is at near all-time high. Claims for unemployment insurance are at a five-year low. The unemployment rate is 4.7 percent; well below the average for each of the last three decades.

Core inflation remains low: just over 2.1 percent for the past 12 months. . . Real disposable income has risen almost 14 percent since President Bush took office. The Dow Jones industrial average is near its all-time high. And since the 2003 tax cuts have been passed, asset values, including homes and stocks, have grown by $13 trillion. . .

Under this president, federal spending as a percentage of the economy is lower than that under four of the last five presidents.

Socialism Lives

Brad Carson is a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma. In the May 10 Real Clear Politics he said, “it is equality and social justice—the essential progressive values—that define what the common good really is”. Carson’s sentence lays out the difference between progressives and classic liberals. The Jeffersonian liberal wants “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty.” The progressive, in the tradition of the French Revolution, seeks equality and justice even at the expense of “negative liberty.”

Socialism is the once-respectable, now somewhat discredited, term for a political system that used class warfare to secure economic equality and social justice. Today, one sees the old socialist left still alive in the fight against “Globalism,” corporate domination of the world economy. And in the Latin America of Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, socialism is even more openly operating once again.

In his article “Why Isn't Socialism Dead?”, Lee Harris attempts to explain how socialism survives in the face of so much evidence that state-run economies don’t work. To do so, Harris goes back a century to the French socialist Georges Sorel, who indicated that socialism is a myth, a religion, not subject to scientific proof:

why did Sorel, trained as an engineer and knowledgeable about science, reject scientific socialism? The answer[:] Sorel suspected that socialism, in practice, simply might not ever really work. . .Sorel himself was skeptical. . . about the possibility of socialism as a viable economic system.

For example, in the introduction to Reflections on Violence, Sorel says that the French thinker Renan "was very surprised to discover that Socialists are beyond discouragement." He then quotes Renan's comment about the indefatigable perseverance of socialists: "After each abortive experiment they recommence their work: the solution is not yet found, but it will be. The idea that no solution exists never occurs to them, and in this lies their strength." (Italics mine.)

Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations.

The shrewd and realistic Florentine statesman and thinker, Guicciardini, once advised: "Never fight against religion...this concept has too much empire over the minds of men." And to the extent that socialism is a religion, then those who wish to fight it with mere reason and argument may well be in for a losing battle. Furthermore, as populism spreads, it is inevitable that the myth of socialism will gain in strength among the people who have the least cause to be happy with their place in the capitalist world-order, and who will naturally be overjoyed to put their faith in those who promise them a quick fix to their poverty and an end to their suffering.

Stop the Destruction: School Choice NOW!

Michael Strong, CEO of FLOW, has spent 15 years running innovative schools. He has a powerful message about “School Choice and Adolescence in America” (go here to read in full):

William Damon, Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, [has found] that many children thrive in the face of adversity, [displaying] "persistence, hardiness, achievement motivation, hopefulness, a sense of purpose, and more." Damon goes on to say that

"Research in the [positive youth] developmental tradition has taken seriously the role of moral and religious beliefs in shaping children's identities and perspectives on the future, and research has demonstrated a strong relationship between religious faith and at-risk children staying out of trouble." . .

[T]hat "moral and religious beliefs" are relevant to adolescent well-being, most parents knew . . .fifty years ago. . .

By the 1980s Brookings Institution researchers John Chubb and Terry Moe were coming to the conclusion that the decline in test scores despite doubling our expenditures in education was not an accident. . . the private sector was more efficient and innovative than the bureaucratic government-managed sector. Despite their liberal Brookings base, they broke ranks with the Democrats and advocated school vouchers in their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. . .

Adolescence in America is largely a disaster. Bill McKibben, the environmentalist writer and advocate of natural living, is as vocal in his critique as any fundamentalist Christian: "If one had set out to create a culture purposefully damaging to children, you couldn't do much better than America at the end of the 20th century." Patricia Hersch, in a book titled A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, states: "All parents feel an ominous sense - like distant rumbles of thunder moving closer and closer - that even their child could be caught in the deluge of adolescent dysfunction sweeping the nation." . .

Does anyone doubt that if parents had been given school vouchers in 1960 they would have gravitated towards schools that encouraged virtues and a sense of purpose? Both common sense and Damon's research suggest that generations of students educated in such schools would have been and can be far less likely to suffer the "health effects stemming from social causes" that have harmed adolescents over the last four decades.

Consider Latter Day Saints (Mormon) public health: Utah, where 70% of the population are Mormon, has the lowest, or near the lowest, rates of smoking, lung cancer, heart disease, alcohol consumption, abortions, out-of-wedlock births, work-days missed due to illness, and the lowest child poverty rate in the country. Utah ranks highest in the nation in number of AP tests taken, number of AP tests passed, scientists produced per capita, percentage of households with personal computers, and proportion of income given to charity. . . No public health initiative is remotely as effective as Mormon culture.

. . . if an education market were allowed to function freely, parental interest in their children's well-being would drive an ever-more sophisticated market in happiness and well-being. . . Adolescent well-being cannot be developed using a character education curriculum taught by faculty who are cultural relativists. The faculty must believe in something, they must themselves be united by a common moral vision, and the school's leader must be free to organize the school around the core moral purposes of that community.

It is possible to create safer, better, happier, healthier, schools, and many parents would send their children to such schools if they had the option. . . Parents, choosing among educational entrepreneurs, could solve the problem of adolescent health far more quickly and more effectively than can academics trying to guide public policy.

After the fall of communism, many people acknowledged . . . that governments cannot meet people's needs as effectively as markets can. . . Government cannot provide lives with purpose; only individual human beings, organized in communities with a common purpose, can provide young people what they need.

School choice is, of course, politically incorrect. [Still, it’s wrong to wait for academics] to acknowledge that government can't solve these problems, but that free people can. Competition is a discovery procedure, and we can discover right now how to solve the problem of adolescent health. Let us do it.

Final Thoughts on "Two Liberties"

Isiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958):

Pluralism, with the measure of “negative” liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of “positive” self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind.

Berlin wrote when the consensus pushed toward the middle, in a time of post-war horror over what totalitarian Fascism had accomplished, and of Cold War worry about the Soviet Union's lead in space and Communist China's unsettling “Great Leap Forward.” As a Jew who had escaped Stalinist Communism, Berlin had good reason to be wary of those who believed some humans knew better than others how to organize civilization.

This blog’s five-post discussion of Berlin’s philosophy began with a
current defense of his teachings. It’s necessary. Well-considered, intellectually-framed attacks are out of fashion when aimed at those who advocate technical, therapeutic, “social health” approaches to helping fellow humans free themselves from their baser impulses. And as Oxford's Cherniss notes, even Berlin (after all, a fan of the New Deal) wouldn’t defend negative freedom that meant government refusing--just because it interfered with someone’s liberty--to tax the rich to help the poor.

As a supporter of pluralism, Berlin didn’t find it necessary to be tied to the purity of his argument. Let each individual find his or her way, and let government strive to guarantee that freedom to everyone.

There is little evidence of such modesty in today's U.S. The broad elite that dominates Democrats, the media, entertainment and the arts, the government bureaucracies, academia, and the Third Sector is a large echo chamber quite sure it knows what’s best for the other 80%. And our confident elite has spawned a Republican counterforce equally sure of its contrasting worldview.

In this partisan, polarized atmosphere, it's worth noting that Friedman has just proposed creation of a third party, the American Renewal Party (New York Times, 5.4.06).

"Positive Liberty" Plagues Both Parties

Isaiah Berlin argued that “positive liberty” can lead to totalitarianism. The two previous posts, Meyer’s attack on religious people who believe there is “One Way,” and Gelernter’s preference for a “morality of duties” over a liberal Democrat “morality of rights which focuses not on your duty but on what is coming to you,” associate Bush’s effort in Iraq with “positive liberty.” But Meyer’s defense of “negative liberty” is hardly an endorsement of current Democratic thinking, which he rips into for its “know it all” flavor (CBSNews.com, 4.26.06):

My hunch is that Democrats will capture House and Senate seats but not the House or Senate. And if they do, the victory will be fleeting and they will do poorly in 2008.

That's a hunch, no more, and I admit it. But I felt it as a certainty when I read a column by The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne this week. Dionne was arguing with a fellow liberal who wrote what the Democrats need to do is destroy today's "radical individualism" and replace it with "a politics" of a "common good." That's fine, Dionne said, but we need to hear "more about self-interest, rightly understood."

That phrase made me cringe. It still does.

"Self-interest, rightly understood" is a fancy-pants way of saying, "I know what is in your interest better than you do." It is, in my view, a politically stupid and morally diseased position. Democrats, by temperament, are slightly more susceptible to it than Republicans.

I do not mean to condemn Dionne for a phrase. But I will. It reminded me of something written on the very first page of a book that lots of Democrats think is absolutely brilliant, What's the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank.

In the third paragraph of his book, Frank writes: "People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about." That, too, is a fancy-pants way of saying: "I know what is in your interest better than you do."

Frank spends the rest of his book explaining why the people of Kansas go against their obvious self-interest and vote for Republicans and not Democrats. His explanations are fascinating and interesting. His premise is intellectually totalitarian.

That may strike you as a rather extreme denunciation. It is, so I'll explain why, in my view, thinking that you know what is in other people's best interests is perhaps the worst political impulse that good people commonly have.

Actually, that is an easy task because it has already been done for the ages and to perfection by the British historian and essayist Isaiah Berlin.

Or is It "Positive Liberty"?

Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay on “Two Concepts of Liberty” may or may not make the case for “negative liberty” (see previous posts). Perhaps without realizing it, David Gelernter’s commentary “No More Vietnams” (Weekly Standard, 5.8.06) implicitly argues for “positive liberty” in its defense of what Gelernter calls the “morality of duties”:

One of the central disputes of modern times [is] between a traditional "morality of duties" and a modern "morality of rights." Philosophers like to argue that these two worldviews are complementary. In fact they are contradictory. Each of these two worldviews yields an all-inclusive blueprint for society, with no room for further contributions.

Granted, it's convenient to speak of one's "duty" to help the poor and one's "right" of self-defense. No contradiction there. But think it over and you will see that, by laying out everyone's duties explicitly, you lay out everyone's rights implicitly; and vice versa. You have a right to self-defense--or, to put it differently, a duty to use no violence except (among other cases) in self-defense. Both formulas reach the same destination by different routes. By means of the "morality of duty," you shape society the way a sculptor carves stone; by the "morality of rights," you shape it the way a sculptor models clay. Two different, contradictory techniques.

The morality of duties originated in Judeo-Christianity, the morality of rights in Roman jurisprudence. The Hebrew tradition knows about rights--but only in the context of covenants, where two parties each acquire rights and responsibilities simultaneously. America's Founders and Framers spoke of rights, but might well have had this Judeo- Christian idea in mind.

But the modern preference for rights over duties has nothing to do with religion or covenants. And your choice between these two worldviews is important. Morality deals, after all, with how to conduct yourself--whereas a right ordinarily confers an advantageous position, to put it formally; having a right means that your will is favored over someone else's. It's therefore conceivable that the morality of duties is the one and only kind of morality; that a morality of rights is a contradiction in terms.

It's conceivable that a "morality of rights" actually rejects morality in favor of some other way to organize society--I'll call it "rights- liberalism." Rights-liberalism might be better than traditional Judeo-Christian morality, or worse, or neither, but in any case I believe it is not morality. In fact, proponents of rights-liberalism seem to believe (though they rarely say so point blank) that it is the next step beyond morality.

Even if you don't care about religion, you might still choose the morality of duty, with its focus on an individual's obligations, over rights-liberalism--which focuses not on your duty but on what is coming to you. Many Republicans and conservatives do prefer to discuss duties; many Democrats and liberals would rather talk about rights.

Is It "Negative Liberty" We Value Most?

CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer has more today (5.4.06) on the Isaiah Berlin "Two Concepts of Liberty" lecture Meyer calls one of 20th century’s “most influential essays” (see previous post, "Two Concepts of Liberty”).

Meyer is a strong proponent of “negative liberty,” and believes Berlin was as well:

"[P]ositive liberty" [is] the notion that liberty is empty unless it includes a positive capability to do something specific – e.g., work without exploitation, or, get an education, just to name two random examples.

Negative liberty is simpler; it is being free "from" things; it is being left alone, having a zone of individual liberty. . .

[Positive liberty means] believers in the great "ism's" of history. . .[that] there is One Way. Many deeply religious people believe there is One Way.

True advocates of the arguments and attitudes that give negative liberty an exalted position in the competition of political values believe there are Many Ways. They believe that the most human and most vital activity is picking Your Way, which entails lots of freedom to be left alone.

If you believe in Many Ways, you cannot believe in grandiose theories. You cannot believe there is a single system that explains it all.

That's because [people] constantly develop and cherish ultimate values and virtues that are simply not consistent with each other, and that is what liberty protects.

Often our values are not comparable or compatible. Liberty, in the classic example, collides with equality: if taxes are increased to help make poor people more equal, someone's liberty is being compromised. . .

Pluralism, tolerance and skepticism are the intellectual and attitudinal virtues that nourish an appreciation of Berlin's negative liberty deep enough to vanquish the need for . . . a Big Theory.

Iraq: Good News is No News

Here’s my latest highly abbreviated form 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: 45
April: 61

Americans Killed in Action, Vietnam (weekly average)

1965:* 30
1966: 97
1967: 177
1968: 263
____
• = First U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam, 5.3.65
Vietnam table compiled by Galen Fox using Defense Department sources.

Note please—the Vietnam KIAs are weekly, not monthly, averages.

Crude Oil Production (m. bbls./day)

Prewar: 2.50
Goal: 2.50
actual: 2.14 (4/06)

Electricity (megawatts)

Prewar: 3,958
Goal: 6,000
actual: 3,600 (4/06)

Iraq finally has a duly elected prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. This is big news, even though al-Maliki has yet to name his cabinet. Certainly the failure to select a prime minister during the four previous months constituted bad news, and overlay all other bad news coming out of the country. With al-Maliki's taking office, Iraq can truly start to function as a democracy—big news and good news.

NBC failed to give al-Maliki a headline the night the story broke (April 21), and the following night made Parliament’s formal approval of al-Maliki only its fourth headline of four. Partly because al-Maliki received so little coverage, Bush sent Rice and Rumsfeld to Iraq April 26 to meet with him and highlight Iraq’s good news yet again. It didn’t work. NBC responded to the Rice-Rumsfeld visit with even less coverage: a 23-second item read by Brian Williams. The network provided no correspondent, no direct feed from Baghdad, certainly no headline.

Political progress in Iraq, however, did attract Zarquari's attention. As usual, he responded with increased violence against American forces. So it’s no surprise that the total number of American troops killed in action in April rose sharply to 61 from its March low of 25. Still, the monthly average for 2006 remains below the two previous years' monthly average.

"Two Concepts of Liberty"

CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer (4.26.06) noted that British historian and essayist Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 talk entitled "Two Concepts of Liberty" became “one of the most influential essays in political philosophy written in English in the 20th century.”

Meyer’s statement grabbed my attention. It drew me to Joshua Cherniss’ recent defense of Berlin’s thinking, which centered on the concepts of “negative” and “positive liberty” as developed in the famous 1958 Berlin essay (Oxonian Review of Books, Spring 2006):

Berlin’s championing of ‘negative’ liberty—liberty as freedom from interference—and critique of ‘positive’ freedom, which was central to many defences of welfare legislation, led many to perceive him as a proponent of classical liberalism or libertarianism. This, combined with his attacks on ‘scientism’—the application of the model of science to human problems—has made him seem to some indistinguishable from such conservative or classical-liberal thinkers as Hayek . . .

Despite the appearance of libertarianism, Berlin enthusiastically admired the New Deal, and less enthusiastically supported the British Welfare State. Given this, it is not surprising that he is distrusted or resented on the Right[, which] disregards two obvious facts: that opposition to Communism played at least as large a part in Berlin’s political thought as support for the Welfare State, and that Berlin was deeply worried by trends towards collectivism in Western society.

These opposed perceptions—of Berlin as mild-mannered libertarian, and as apologist for state intervention—reflect a more general tendency to misunderstand his position on liberty. Berlin described ‘negative’ freedom as closer to the ‘basic’ or ‘essential’ meaning of freedom: ‘the ability to choose as you wish to choose’ without being coerced or bullied. ‘Positive’ liberty, on the other hand, was prone to perversion. This was, first, because one variant of positive liberty identified liberty with fulfillment, and so with the attainment of goals other than, and possibly conflicting with, liberty. Another variant of positive liberty defined freedom as self-mastery.

This meant that the nature of freedom depended on conceptions of the self. If the self were identified, not with the actual wishes of individuals, but with what individuals ‘really’ desired—that is, what they should desire—or with entities other than individuals (such as races, classes, or nations), the idea of self-mastery became an alibi for coercion.

This has led many to see Berlin as a simple advocate of ‘negative’ liberty and opponent of ‘positive’ liberty. But his position was more complex. He acknowledged the dangers of negative liberty, whereby certain exercises of this liberty could lead to drastic deprivations and inequalities, making the enjoyment of liberty impossible. And he held that positive liberty was a genuine and valuable version of liberty, so long as it was identified with the autonomy of individuals rather than the achievement of goals that individuals ‘should’ desire.

Berlin also recognised what dogmatic adherents of laissez-faire ignore—that certain interventionist economic policies could be (and often were) justified on morally individualist, rather than collectivist, grounds. He was able to differentiate between moral individualism and economic individualism. He acknowledged the importance of values such as equality and social justice that could conflict with and, in some cases, should take precedent over, liberty.

Yet he was no uncritical proponent of the welfare state. He was deeply worried by a repressive conception of society and social service, which viewed political and moral problems in technical and therapeutic terms, aimed at promoting ‘social health’ through regulation and conditioning. This concern reflected his opposition to paternalism and elitism, which was at the centre of his thought.

Mending Wall

Sonia Nazario is a Pulitzer-winning LA Times staff writer. From her vantage point, that of an expert on the motives of Latin American illegal immigrants, Nazario is convinced that legislative “solutions,” including green card rules and wall heights, “won’t make a difference” (Los Angeles Times, 4.2.06). Nazario says that only improved conditions in Mexico and Central America will stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

Really?

People often attack any fence along the southern U.S. border as a proposed “Berlin Wall,” as if it’s the same thing to keep people from coming in as it is to keep them from going out. But here’s the thing. The Berlin Wall worked. For 28 years, it hemmed in the East German people and kept the Soviet empire alive. Because it worked, the Wall lowered the temperature of the Cold War. Pre-wall, Communism was hemorrhaging people and talent through Berlin; post-wall, a stabilized Central Europe avoided world war.

To restrict illegal immigration, the U.S. can’t just build a fence. It also needs some kind of biometric identity card and tough treatment of employers who hire undocumented workers. And it should do as Nazario suggests; put more into helping Mexico and Central America develop their economies. But success requires the fence as well as trade assistance.

Another place a wall is making a difference is Israel. Again, it’s a wall to keep people out. We hope for a peace agreement involving Palestine, and we hope for Israeli cooperation in developing the Palestinian economy. But the Israelis, helped by their fence, are able to bring about peace themselves, at least in the short term. They no longer have to have Palestinian cooperation.

Breaking the Vicious Cycle

It’s a month since the Israeli elections, and Ehud Olmert is still working to put his cabinet together. Coalition building takes time.

Israel is at the center of the Middle East problem, and has been throughout its 58-year existence. Each generation brings new “Saladins” seeking—by liberating Jerusalem from the infidel—to become a hero to the region. First there was Egypt’s Nasser, then Libya’s Qaddaffi, then Iraq’s Saddam, and now Al Qaeda’s bin Laden and Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

These “heroes” have shaped the region's politics. They are threats to the U.S. as well as Israel, not only because they gain popularity on the “Arab street” by seeking to do Israel in, but also because they threaten to control the region’s oil.

The region needs economic development that puts young people to work. That alone will undermine anti-Israeli militancy. And economic development comes from governments that respond to popular needs. But the Middle East never gets to good government, because Israel begets Muslim “Saladins” who beget the U.S. counter action of protecting reactionary regimes in the name of “stability.” And reactionary regimes beget new despotic “heroes.”

Bush is trying to break this vicious cycle by supporting democracy, not despots. He knows that in the long run, it’s jobs for young people that will move the region forward.

Democracy + capitalism = peace.

It's Iraq, Stupid

Bush’s poll ratings are extremely low now. His friends are giving him a lot of free advice. From Dick Morris, who used to work for Clinton, but is a well-known Hillary antagonist (New York Post, 4.17.06):

Really focus on energy issues: Come out for massive investment in ethanol production, delivery and vehicles, and more: retrofitting all gas stations for ethanol and hydrogen; a new push for nuclear power; heavy investment in clean coal technology, burying the carbon dioxide. Truly lead the nation away from petroleum.

Admit that global warming is happening, and launch major new programs to curb it: . . . mandatory upgrading of power plants to cut emissions and major investment in solar and bio-mass energy.

Build a wall, but let guest workers in: Right-wingers want a wall on our southern border; . . . Latinos would accept a wall if there were a . . . path to citizenship.

Put the drug fight front and center: Demand drug testing in schools with parental consent, and tax incentives for workplace drug testing. Link cocaine to terrorism, [adopt] tough measures to cut demand.

From conservative commentator Fred Barnes (Weekly Standard, 5.1.06):

. . . passage of a federal budget with at least minimal restraints on spending. . . stress the "culture of life" by noisily opposing abortion, cloning, and expanded federal subsidies for embryonic stem cell research. . . push to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and propose serious health care legislation.

Here’s the point these guys miss—Bush's presidency will rise or fall based upon what happens in Iraq. That's it. I would instead listen to former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, now in Israel (Wall Street Journal, 4.24.06):

Now that President Bush is increasingly alone in pushing for freedom, I can only hope that his dissident spirit will continue to persevere. For should that spirit break, evil will indeed triumph, and the consequences for our world would be disastrous.

Bush has low poll ratings, maybe because he is fighting the right battle.

Surprise: TIME's "Ten Best Senators" Boosts Liberals

Do I trust TIME to profile the “10 Best Senators” (4.24.06)? Would you? (If you do, see post on TIME’s coverage of the environment, “Global Warming: How Worried?”)

Well, not only are Republicans six of the ten best senators, Republicans are only three of the five worst. Pretty fair, huh?

No, not fair, in fact. TIME has a cute second category called “Up and Comers,” where it squeezes in three more Democrats (including Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, the Democrats’ politically-correct 2008 “Dream Team”) against just two Republicans. Though Democrats’ numbers in the Senate are at their lowest since 1930, the result of honoring 15 top senators, minus 5 bottom senators, is a net plus 5 for Democrats (7-2) and plus 5 for Republicans (8-3).

But that’s not all. The two Democrat “losers” don’t figure in any future Senate: Mark Dayton is retiring, and if Dan Akaka's primary opponent beats Akaka because of TIME, he will keep the seat Democratic anyway. So just set aside the two worst Democrats. The article now honors seven Democrats and five (net) Republicans.

The five (net) Republicans are all moderates, to TIME, the best kind of Republican. That’s because the three conservative Republicans TIME recognizes are offset by the three “worst” Republicans, all conservatives (including one, Montana’s Conrad Burns, whom TIME’s treatment may help knock off this Fall).

And of the seven honored Democrats, six are liberal, including one liberal, Kent Conrad, who faces a tough fight in a Red State (North Dakota), and will use TIME’s favorable rating in his campaign. The only moderate Democrat TIME honors is Arkansas’ Mark Pryor, who would have to be moderate anyway to hold his Deep South seat.

So to summarize, the best senators include six liberal Democrats, five (net) moderate Republicans, and one moderate Democrat from an old Dixie state. For 2006, the article tries to help one liberal Democrat and hurt one conservative Republican, a net gain of two for liberal Democrats. Good going, TIME.

Agronsky and Company (1974)

If the House goes Democrat in November, Bush will almost certainly be impeached. Wasn’t Clinton, for so much less?

In an earlier era, presidents were impeached for true criminal acts like subverting the constitution and bribing witnesses. Not only the House, but the Senate as well, was safely Democratic in 1974. Still, it wasn’t easy for any of those legislators to take on a sitting president. It was all serious, solemn, and bi-partisan at base, because the point wasn’t just to impeach a president, it was to convict him, and that required two-thirds of the Senate, including many Republicans.

In those serious times in Washington, in the aftermath of a failed war and with a failing presidency, journalists emerged for the first time as players, giving their opinions on television and by so doing, shaping day-to-day events in the nation’s capital. The time was 1974, the place was a local public television show called “Agronsky and Company,” and the stars were host Martin Agronsky, TIME’s chief Washington correspondent Hugh Sidey, a moderate, the moderately liberal Elizabeth Drew, the moderately conservative but pro-impeachment George Will, the conservative James J. Kilpatrick, and the liberal Carl Rowan.

These people had clout. The show had clout. The cast was serious, balanced (taken as a whole), and polite. As with Woodward and Bernstein, who were serious journalists who did their homework guided by first-rate editors, Agronsky and Company were pioneers, and they were careful enough to get it right.

Journalists today long for the day-to-day influence over events that Agronsky and Company journalists had in the mid-1970s. Journalists think today's problem is that Republicans run everything and don’t listen to Democrats. So they are doing what they can to oust the Republicans, and bring in Democrats who will listen.

But is more partisanship the answer to a too-much-partisanship problem? In the long run, influence comes through persuasion, through the hard work of listening, gathering facts, and winning over, the kind of work the Agronsky and Company players understood.

Global Warming: How Worried?

I know global warming is real. But how much does the MSM distort facts in order to frighten us into leaving Iraq and shifting resources into an Al Gore-led, global climate control regime?

I read the TIME cover story, “Be Worried, Be Very Worried” (4.3.06). I quickly ran into two alarmist-leaning factual distortions that, for me, put the whole enterprise into question.

From TIME:

just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft.

Here’s the source summarized at the EPA website:

Two new climate modeling studies reported in the journal Science (24 March 2006, pp. 1747-53) suggest that global sea level could rise faster than previously thought. . .[T]eams of researchers used evidence gathered from corals and sediments of sea level changes during the last interglacial period (approximately 130,000 years ago) to reconstruct and model how sea levels might respond to a warming climate over the next 140 years. Their simulations suggest that the climate in Greenland could become as warm by 2100 as it was during the last interglacial. . . lock[ing] in conditions leading to an eventual sea level rise of as much as 20 feet in the coming centuries. . .

The researchers emphasize that without a more complete understanding of the mechanisms behind the recent increase in glacial flow, predictions of future sea level rise rates are uncertain. But current trends do suggest that ice sheets may be more sensitive to a warming climate than previously thought, and that sea level rise could proceed at rates up to 3 feet per century.

Comment: 20 foot sea rise by 2100 or 3 foot? TIME’s carefully worded misimpression boosts the near-term danger by 17 feet!

From TIME:

in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%.

Here’s the source summarized at the EPA website:

The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has increased by 80 percent worldwide during the past 35 years, according to a study in the 16 September 2005 issue of Science (vol. 309, pp. 1844-1846). Hurricanes in these two highest storm categories, with winds of 135 miles per hour or greater, now account for roughly 35 percent of all hurricanes, up from around 20 percent in the 1970s. . . But the researchers found no global long-term trend in the overall number of hurricanes, and the total number of hurricanes per year has actually declined in most of the world since the 1990s, at a time when sea-surface temperatures have risen the most. Furthermore there was no increase in the intensity of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, just an increase in their number.

Comment: “Doubled” or 80% more? And TIME fails to mention, even though the world’s sea-surface temperatures are rising, that the total number of hurricanes is declining and that Category 4 and 5 hurricanes have failed to increase in intensity.

Kerry's Secretary of State Rewrites History

In today’s Washington Post, Richard Holbrooke decided to revise U.S. history. His action is perhaps not surprising. Holbrooke would have been Secretary of State if Kerry had won, and probably if Gore had won as well. He doesn’t have much use for Bush’s foreign policy. It’s unfortunate he has to be dishonest about history as well, however.

Holbrooke wrote:

The major reason the nation needs a new defense secretary is . . .the failed strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be fixed as long as Rumsfeld remains at the epicenter of the chain of command. Rumsfeld's famous "long screwdriver," with which he sometimes micromanages policy, now thwarts the top-to-bottom reexamination of strategy that is absolutely essential in both war zones. Lyndon Johnson understood this in 1968 when he eased another micromanaging secretary of defense, McNamara, out of the Pentagon and replaced him with Clark M. Clifford.

Cute, the little thing about a "failed" strategy in Afghanistan, but let's not digress.

Johnson “eased. . .McNamara out of the Pentagon” not to change policy, but because he feared McNamara was about to resign because of his opposition to Johnson's Vietnam strategy, a strategy Holbrooke supported. McNamara was tortured to the point of distraction by the agony of Vietnam and his role in it. Johnson didn't want McNamara resigning during the President's campaign for re-election. When McNamara left, he in fact did contribute to the very political crisis Johnson sought to avoid--McNamara's departure helped push Robert F. Kennedy to run for president, and Kennedy's action lead Johnson to give up on his failed presidency. Clifford's appointment, however Holbrooke chooses to spin it, ended up as a footnote to Johnson's "cut and run" exit from Washington.

McNamara, true to his deeply-held concept of loyalty, left without giving a reason, but not a soul in what Holbrooke calls “Washington” (an arrogant, elitist word for Holbrooke's own Washington establishment) had any doubt that McNamara had simply had enough. He was a tortured, spent man.

Most important, Holbrooke flips the fact that McNamara, not Clifford, commissioned the "Pentagon Papers," the complete and thorough "top-to-bottom reexamination of strategy" regarding Vietnam, the failed Vietnam strategy Johnson and Holbrooke supported, the way Rumsfeld supports the flawed Iraq strategy.

Thank goodness Holbrooke isn’t Secretary of State, and thank goodness the Secretary we have treats history with more respect.

To Win, You Need 50%

It’s still Holy Week. I was struck by an item on the "NBC Nightly News" last week (April 7). It said Christians had just had to absorb three (nasty) surprises: 1) The Da Vinci Code’s soaring popularity and its author’s triumph in a London court, 2) the fossil discovery of a “missing link” between sea- and land-based reptiles, and 3) discovery of a 2nd Century “Gospel of Judas” that painted Jesus’ betrayer in a favorable light. For some reason, the story editor decided to leave out publication of a fourth “surprise”—a scientific finding that prayer had no healing effect on heart disease victims.

I have three comments: 1) negative MSM stories on Christianity usually come out during Holy Week, not the week before, 2) the “missing link” story is way too much of an inside joke, since it has to relate, literally, to the “Darwin” fish-with-legs metal symbol anti-Fundamentalists often affix to the rear of their Volvos, and 3) MSM separation from American religious faith is going to cost Democrats.

One who wouldn’t agree is Kevin Phillips, well-known political commentator and author of American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking), now #2 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list. And one I agree with is Betsy Newmark, an AP history and government teacher in Raleigh, NC, who blogs at “Betsy’s Page”. She wrote the following about Phillips:

I happen to be one conservative who is not religious in the slightest, but I have the deepest respect for those who have a strong faith. I think Phillips' whole premise is hogwash.

If Phillips is so worried about the Republican Party becoming the religious party, perhaps the problem is not that religious people are becoming Republicans, but that they are not feeling welcome in the Democratic Party. This is a point that Hugh Hewitt makes very powerfully in his new book, Painting the Map Red. Let me just quote from page 94:

"The attempt to scare America into voting against Republicans because of the absurd charge that their followers want a 'theocracy' may be the biggest electoral mistake of the past fifty years. It is simply impossible to persuade majorities of Americans that they and their neighbors want mullah-style government because they and those neighbors oppose gay marriage or think that devout Catholics can make great great judges. The deep offense given to people of faith upon being charged with extremism and kinship with the Taliban and the Iranian mullahs is sinking deeper and deeper into the consciousness of the American electorate.

"It is a slander with few parallels, and the rote denials of religious bigotry when confronted with the record cannot undo the deserved reputation of the left, and especially leading pundits of the left, for religious bigotry."

Hugh could have read Kevin Phillips' mind.

Rumsfeld Screwed Up. Long live Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld shares major blame for U.S. military errors in Iraq. But the screw-up was a joint effort that involved several at the Pentagon, plus Bush and Chaney. Retired generals are fingering Rumsfeld because they believe someone should take a fall, and they know it’s not going to be the elected President and Vice President.

So Rumsfeld stays. And why not? Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, a veteran of insurgencies in Kosovo and Iraq who could have been promoted but instead retired last November, is perhaps the most effective voice calling for Rumsfeld’s ouster. But Batiste says it would be a disaster for the U.S. to “cut and run” from Iraq. So as far as the military is concerned, we’re not “bugging out,” Rumsfeld or no Rumsfeld.

Batiste believes the war would go better with a new leader and a fresh start. For sure. The fresh start we need, though, is a unified Iraq government—an Iraqi political, not U.S. military, challenge.

Politics messed up the Iraqi effort from the start. Bush wanted a victory in Iraq in 2003, not war in election year 2004. So we had to start liberating Iraq before the 2003 desert hot season, way before the U.S. could have managed any Colin-Powell- type army build-up. And anyway, how were we to build the big army Shinseki and others wanted? A draft? Even more “weekend warrior” call-ups? A super-expensive recruitment effort? It would have been nice had Turkey or other allies added troops, but they didn’t.

Rumsfeld told Bush what he wanted to hear—we could win in Iraq without a big army. He was wrong. Let’s win anyway.

4.7% Unemployment is Good News

Unemployment is at 4.7%. While we are at war now, the U.S. still enjoys a peacetime economy, without the manpower shortages war in Korea and Vietnam produced.

Republicans are in charge of congress now, as they were from October 1997 to July 2001, America’s last period of sustained low peacetime unemployment. In peacetime, unemployment hasn't been this low with Democrats running congress since one month in 1973, October, just before the Yom Kippur War. That conflict between Israel and Arab countries generated the first oil crisis, which damaged the U.S. economy and drove unemployment up the next month. To find any sustained period of low peacetime unemployment when Democrats controlled congress, one has to go back 48 years to October 1957, on the eve of the 1958 recession.

There is a reason to associate Republican congresses with low unemployment— taxes. Whatever they might do about the deficit, Republicans favor low taxes, which help businesses hire more workers. Economic studies of tax policies at the state level, and of nations outside the U.S., correlate low taxes and job creation, just as the European variety of high taxes drives up unemployment.

It’s new business activity that generates new jobs, and low taxes help business invest in the future.

Christianity and Freedom

It’s Holy Week, so some reflections on the relationship between Christianity, capitalism, and democracy.

This blog is developing a picture of the dominant American elite—liberal, well-to-do, roughly 1/5th of the population, in control of the Democratic party, the media, the public bureaucracies, entertainment and the arts, academia, the Third Sector, and influential in big business and liberal, “mainstream” religion. Yet while religion can be liberal, liberals, by and large, aren’t practicing Christians. Liberals live comfortably in our increasingly secular world, often finding life's meaning in a New Age spirituality separated from life’s daily struggles.

The Greco-Roman gods were human in form but capable of extraordinary achievements. TIME typically honors one modern god a week on its cover. The liberal elite, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, takes seriously its responsibility to do God’s work on Earth (think Bono in Africa) in contrast, most particularly, to profit-seeking capitalists and bigoted Christian fundamentalists.

Christianity, in my eyes, is about faith, a personal relationship between each believer and God. We are humbled by the knowledge that God’s grace—knowledge brought to us through Christ, a poor Jewish carpenter—frees us to move beyond ourselves into a larger community of believers that puts faith into action. A personal relationship with God is important because it places every individual on an equal footing, encouraging each to contribute to the community’s political, economic, and/or spiritual development.

Christianity, in its early years, in the 16th Century of Martin Luther (see post, “Martin Luther at 500”), and today, isn't top-down, but is instead about equality before God leading to free will. By honoring each person as a unique creature of God, and emphasizing each person's direct, private relationship to God, Christianity encourages free individuals to lead productive lives. And it's freedom that makes capitalism and democracy work.

This Blog Remains Modest

Here’s confirmation that this blog can be on target. As my post “The MSM (Part I)” earlier suggested, Fox’s conservative bias is freeing the MSM to go more blatantly to the left, at least according to former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal, 4.6.06):

Is the appointment of [well-known liberal] Katie [Couric] an acknowledgement by CBS that it doesn't feel it has to care anymore about political preferences, that the existence of Fox News Channel has in effect freed up the network broadcasts to be what you and I might call more politically tendentious and they might call edgy? . . . After all, if America is one big niche market, liberals make up a big niche.

And Tom Friedman, as I did (“A Good Fence, More Good Neighbors”), played his comments on immigration reform directly off Robert Frost’s line from “Mending Walls” that “Good fences make good neighbors” (New York Times, 4.6.06):

Good fences make good immigration policy. Fences make people more secure and able to think through this issue more calmly.

Friedman is probably also aware of the irony in so quoting Frost, whose poem is really about the sadness of building walls between people. In the case of Mexico though, strengthening the walls will help immigrants.

Friedman, bless him, in the same article becomes the first MSM commentator I've seen to view with alarm the non-stop demagogic filth daily pumped out by CNN’s Lou Dobbs. Dobbs already claims credit for killing the Dubai port deal, and is now going after illegal immigrants, in the name of protecting “middle class Americans.” Friedman alludes to Dobbs' sorry show when he writes:

Porous borders empower only anti-immigrant demagogues, like the shameful CNN, which dumbs down the whole debate.

Reportedly, Dobbs’ ratings are up since he began his demagoguery.

"Aspirational" v. "Euro-American" Cities

Joel Kotkin is author of The City: A Global History. In his articles “American Cities of Aspiration,” Kotkin divides America between said “aspiration” cities and “Euro-America.” (Weekly Standard, 2.14-2.21.05). “Cities of aspiration” embrace growth and new opportunity, care less about zoning, have a permissive business climate, and perhaps most important, have affordable housing.

Cities of aspiration include Atlanta, Phoenix, Charlotte, Las Vegas, and Florida along the Gulf Coast. Because housing is cheap and business easy to start, such cities have no trouble attracting good people—the numbers of college graduates moving to these cities is mushrooming.

“Euro-America” means Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia; all of which—like Paris, Milan, Rome, and Amsterdam—are either stagnant or losing population. Boston is losing college graduates, especially those over 30. New York has fewer private-sector positions than it had in 1969. San Francisco is the city with the highest percentage of income stemming from dividends, rent, and interest. In the Bay Area, barely one in ten households can afford to buy a median-priced home—which takes an income of $125,000. Seattle has half as many children as it had with the same overall population in 1960.

European cities are great places to live, if you can afford it, and so is Euro-America. Those who own homes in these cities are the modern landed gentry, happy to keep things as they are, even if it means slow growth, poor public schools, and high taxes financing a ponderous bureaucracy.

Kotkin, who lives in Los Angeles, sees the evolution of that city from “aspirational” to “Euro-American” as a trend favorable for the latter group. L.A. is troubled by lost open space and neglected schools and roads, which has led to the lock environmentalists and public sector unions have on that city's politics. Still, he believes companies, entrepreneurs, and individuals will seek out cities where they don’t have to pay for inefficient public-sector bureaucracies, and where they are free to pursue happiness privately.

Iraq: Stability or Democracy?

Here’s my latest highly abbreviated form 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: 40
March: 25

Americans Killed in Action, Vietnam (weekly average)

1965:* 30
1966: 97
1967: 177
1968: 263
____
• = First U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam, 5.3.65
Vietnam table compiled by Galen Fox using Defense Department sources.

Note please—the Vietnam KIAs are weekly, not monthly, averages.

Crude Oil Production (m. bbls./day)

Prewar: 2.50
Goal: 2.50
actual: 2.00 (3/06)

Electricity (megawatts)

Prewar: 3,958
Goal: 6,000
actual: 4,100 (3/06)

Asked of Iraqis (1.31.06): “Do you think that Iraq is generally headed in the right direction, or the wrong direction?”

“Right direction”: 64%

Gen. Anthony Zinni, who headed the military’s Central Command (which has direct authority over Iraq) at the end of the Clinton administration, has written a book about Iraq, Battle for Peace. He was on “Meet the Press” yesterday. A good Army man, Zinni strongly and effectively made the case for firing Rumsfeld because he wouldn’t put the recommended high number of troops into Iraq the Army knew were needed to combat any insurgency that grew up in the aftermath of Saddam’s overthrow. Had we established and maintained order, Zinni said, we could have headed off the current Sunni-based insurgency.

Zinni also argued that we should be pursuing stability in Iraq, not the democracy the (second) Bush administration seeks to establish. Here Zinni lost my sympathy, as he talked about the need to have an “educated electorate,” to have government first and democracy later instead of the reverse, and as he ridiculed an Iraqi voter who asked a poll worker who she should vote for. When the official responded by reading the names on the ballot and had reached the seventh of 160 parties, she said, “That’s the one!” Presumably Zinni preferred she listen to all 160 names before voting.

Zinni said it takes time, and investment from the “stable world,” to build a democracy. Guess Zinni somehow never visited India, the world's largest democracy, while running his Central Command.

The Beginning of History

Throughout history, most people have been uninvolved in the storyline. There was history, and there were the nasty, brutish, short lives led by most everybody else.

Athens was the first democracy. But in the 6th Century BCE, at most one-tenth of Athenians participated, even though Athens didn't use property qualifications to limit the franchise. Half its people were slaves, and of course Athens excluded its many foreigners and all women. As noted here earlier (see post "Moving Forward"), 24 centuries after Athens in 1900, only 8% of the people voted in Britain’s parliamentary elections. True democracy is very new indeed.

We must also consider the world’s population, which was less than 900 million during the French Revolution--the first time the masses truly seized and held power anywhere. The world now hosts 6.5 billion people. History before 1789 was about elites in a world with few who could read, small armies, and lots of trees.

Napoleon nearly conquered Europe because he was able to draw on the full resources of France’s population. The 19th Century was about trying to get the French-released genie back in the bottle, using reform to fight revolution. But then came world war. Both world wars were total wars involving entire nations and each war profoundly expanded democracy. It would have been impossible to deny power to people who had themselves sacrificed so much.

And people don’t want war. So there is a close identity between democracy and peace.

Capitalism is the system that decentralizes economic decisionmaking, the same way democracy decentralizes political power. Capitalism empowers the masses to make money on their own. With the rise of China and India in this century, we truly realize what an economic asset each person represents—the more, the better.

Hitler was the horror of the 20th Century. He rose to power within a democracy, and drew his support from a city-dwelling, educated population. His ideology was psudo-science; a warped version of genetic selection. The technologically superior war machine he constructed in Germany helped inspire similarly totalitarian state structures in the U.S.S.R., Japan, China, and elsewhere, and gave us the most destructive war the world has ever seen.

As a population becomes conscious of the power it holds in its hands, things can go wrong. And militant Islam is a bigger threat than nationalism (National Socialism) gone haywire—the militants have a religion, inhabit a large region, draw on a history of humiliation, and are close by two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves. We are in the fight of our lives at the dawn of real history, the history of entire engaged populations either clashing or somehow working toward a common purpose.

How Pew Divides the American Vote

Democracy is really working when two coalitions of nearly equal strength compete in a way that improves each side, and the country itself. And the competition should be about helping the voters, making their lives better, more secure.

America is closely divided today partly because each party efficiently gathers its resources and gets its voters to the polls. In 2004, the Democrats did well, the Republicans slightly better.

Working from Pew Research Center data, David Brooks wrote about how America divided itself in the aftermath of that election (New York Times, 5.15.05). The affluent top of the scale are pretty well set in their ways. Liberal Democrats are well-educated, antiwar, pro-choice, anti-tax cuts, and Pew says are 19% of voters. The balance of the upper 30%--11% of the total--are conservative: pro-war, pro-life, pro-tax cut business class Republicans.

The bottom 70% are more conflicted. About 10% are pro-government conservatives, poor Republicans who want government programs, but are foreign policy hawks and social conservatives. Another 11% are strongly socially conservative, but want government to check business power and protect the environment. This group is also anti-immigrant. Both groups of lower class Republicans are strongly individualistic, believing one can make it with hard work and good character. They oppose government handouts.

Pew divides lower income Democrats between conservative Democrats (15%), mostly older, more religious, socially conservative, and moderate on foreign policy issues, including many blacks and Hispanics, and disadvantaged Democrats (10%), many minorities, financially insecure, poorly educated, pessimistic, mistrustful of business and government, but want government help for the needy. Pew notes, “most Liberals live in a world apart from Disadvantaged Democrats and Conservative Democrats.” http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=242

The middle ground (23%) is divided between upbeats (13%), who are well-educated and positive about their own situation, business, government, and the nation in general, and much less affluent disaffecteds (10%), financially insecure, cynical about government, and less likely to vote. Both these groups, so different in their attitudes, went heavily for Bush in 2004.

A Good Fence, More Good Neighbors

Dick Morris has advice on “How the GOP can survive the immigration debate” (The Hill, 3.29.06):

In 1964, . . . when Goldwater ran for president rejecting civil rights legislation, it doomed GOP chances among black voters for at least the next 40 years. Will the Republican need to appease its anti-immigration base similarly vitiate President Bush’s efforts to appeal to Hispanic voters?

Hispanics, . . having voted for Al Gore by 30 points in 2000, . . . sufficiently trusted Bush to back Sen. John Kerry by only an eight-point margin. If the Republican Party now turns its back on these newly swing Latino voters, it may permanently lose its ability to win America’s fastest-growing voter group, perhaps dooming the party altogether.

But the demands of the GOP base must also be accommodated. Here’s how:

. . .The GOP base wants a fence. It is vital to the entire concept of whether or not we can control our borders. All efforts to beef up manpower on the border have failed to stem the daily flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico. A fence is the only way to do it. By backing a fence and demonstrably taking control of our southern border, the Republican Party will appease the demands of its base.

But to prevent disaster among Latino voters, it must accompany the fence with a more liberal policy on guest workers and criminalization. . .

The GOP base, happy with the fence, will probably go along with it. Whatever the Congress needs to do to differentiate the guest-worker program from amnesty it should do, but it must pass a generous guest-worker program. . . With a border fence to enforce the difference, a guest-worker program will work politically.

And it is also important for the Republicans to avoid symbolic acts like making it a felony to be here illegally or to employ someone who is. . . Deportation is and will be the answer to those we catch — and deportation has new meaning with a fence in place.

Yes to the fence, yes to guest workers and no to greater criminalization.

The Middle East: Turning the Corner?

Finally, a break in the stream of bad news datelined the Middle East. Kadima's leader, Ehud Olmert, will become prime minister of Israel, after his party won the most seats, 28, in Israel’s election, Labor won another 20, and the Pensioners Party, which seeks better rights for the elderly and will probably support Olmert’s withdrawal agenda, won 7 seats, for a total of 55, with 61 needed to form a government. Olmert should be able to find the final 6 seats he needs to become prime minister.

Middle East peace prospects took a turn for the worse in January with Ariel Sharon’s incapacitating stroke, followed by Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian elections. Now Olmert has not only prevailed, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejectionist Likud party totally routed, but he has also already issued an appeal to the Palestinians to move toward peace—not an easy gesture the day after the Palestinian parliament installed into office a Hamas-dominated cabinet.

Good for Olmert. Good for Israel. Peace is closer today.

The Courage to Fight for Democracy

Here are excerpts from “Cultivating the Seeds of Democracy,” by Anwar Ibrahim, former finance minister and deputy prime minister of Malaysia and visiting professor at Georgetown (Los Angeles Times, 3.25.06):

Emboldened by a hard-won ideological victory over the regimes in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the U.S. once again has sought to foment democracy abroad to ensure security at home. . .

Although it cannot be denied that U.S. initiatives for reform have contributed significantly to developments in the Middle East, fear is growing that radicals may hijack democracy. Recent Islamist electoral successes in Iran, Egypt and the Palestinian territories have given rise to questions about the ability of liberal forces to prevail against fundamentalism.

. . . there are some who say that "stability" not liberty is what the U.S. should be promoting throughout the Islamic world. . .These views on democracy and stability in the Muslim world are not only wrong but carry grave consequences.

In a way, Washington's strategy may be viewed as expiation for past sins, when the U.S. was a stumbling block to democracy in the Middle East. Iran was a democracy in 1953 when the CIA engineered the coup that transformed it into an absolute monarchy. The U.S. also has supported other tyrants in the region, including, of course, Saddam Hussein. All of this in the name of stability and security in the decades-long confrontation with the communist bloc.

The best answers to the question of whether America should reassess its strategy lie in Indonesia and Turkey, refreshing examples of Muslim democratic self-assertion. . .

The press in Indonesia is free, and the elections are fair. Fundamental liberties are enshrined in the constitution and fully recognized and respected by the powers that be. . . Arbitrary arrests and political detentions are unheard of.

. . . In Turkey, the containment of an unrestricted military establishment has aided in that country's European Union ascension. [Indonesia and Turkey] now stand as beacons, both for Muslim nations and for those who seek to help them. . .

To be successful in its efforts to spread freedom, the U.S. must remember that constitutional democracy cannot take root in a society, whether secular or Islamic, without the firm commitment of the politically empowered to protect the fundamental rights to liberty, equality and freedom of all.

WMD: Absence Fooled Saddam Too

Jonathan Gurwitz wrote the following yesterday about the 2003 Iraqi WMD threat [San Antonio Express-News, 3.22.06]:

The media and the public are only now gaining access to a trove of official U.S. and Iraqi documents and tapes, much of it seized during the early days of the invasion. These sources make clear the reasons most major intelligence services [thought] Saddam continued to possess proscribed weapons of mass destruction and why U.N. weapons inspectors would never be able to locate them. . .

The U.S. military's Joint Forces Command engaged in a two-year project to analyze hundreds of thousands of documents and the transcripts of interviews with dozens of Iraq's political and military leaders.

. . . Researchers Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray provide the first in-depth analysis of the USJFC findings in an article for the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, now available online.

"Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside" makes abundantly clear why the Bush administration believed Saddam had WMD and could use them again — because Saddam's own regime believed it had WMD and could use them again:

"When it came to [WMD], Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. Coming clean about WMD and using full compliance with inspections to escape from sanctions would have been his best course of action for the long run. Saddam, however, found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having WMD."

Fearful of the consequences of delivering bad news to Saddam, Baathist leaders gave false assessments to their dictator and to one another about weapons programs. A footnote to "Saddam's Delusions" suggests that in the months following the fall of Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials in coalition custody continued to believe that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability.

. . . the blame for the tragedy in Iraq falls on a single person: the homicidal dictator who used WMD in the past and wanted the world to believe that he could do so again.

The MSM Determined to Win (Part IV)

No institution is monolithic, and that includes the media. But American democracy is polarized into two roughly equal camps, now battling for power every day. That polarization pulls the components of each camp more closely together.

The Democrats are the beneficiaries of the government Roosevelt built to fix and control capitalism. The camp includes bureaucrats plus institutions that need government’s help to further their agenda—entertainment and the arts, academe, the Third Sector, and the media. The media joined the Democratic camp by the 1960s, as working reporters who want government to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” took over the media’s top jobs.

The media’s power over the Democrats stems from its success in bringing down Johnson and Nixon, and in ending the Vietnam War. These successes shape the MSM today. The MSM has two related goals: 1) get the U.S. out of Iraq, and 2) end Republican government.

Iraq, to the MSM, is a Vietnam-sized mistake. We didn’t belong in Vietnam, and we don’t belong in Iraq. We don’t need the combat deaths (instant combat footage, smiling pictures of now-dead Americans, weekly body counts). We don’t need the American-inflicted horror (pictures of Abu Ghraib/My Lai). We don’t need to be where people are fighting among themselves instead of the enemy. The media ended one war; the MSM is determined to end another.

And the MSM objects to Republican rule. The media once indiscriminately worked over presidents on both sides (“you spin, we expose”); they were too political, too deceptive, too secretive, too incompetent, too corrupt. After taking down Johnson and Nixon, media helped assure Ford couldn’t get elected and that Carter and Bush 41 would fail after one term. Only “Teflon President” Reagan survived their treatment.

The MSM even gave Clinton a rough time, and low poll numbers, until Republicans took over Congress and tried to shut down the government in 1995. That crisis thrust the MSM into the unfamiliar role of defending a president, which it did for the balance of Clinton’s presidency. Clinton’s second term Gallup Poll approval rating never went below 54%.

Confronted by Bush 43, a non-“Teflon President” who stole one election, smeared a war hero to take a second, elected and retained a Republican congress, and threw the country into an unnecessary war, the MSM is super-determined to cripple his effectiveness and end Republican control ASAP. Of course, Bush’s disinterest in the MSM’s agenda makes it all worse. Bush challenges the MSM like no president before, and the MSM aches to win.

The MSM Contained (Part III)

The media has proven its independence by going after Democratic as well as Republican presidents. Carter had been president for two years in 1979, when his former speechwriter, 29 year-old Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar James Fallows, published a searing inside look at Carter’s failing management style (“The Passionless Presidency,” Atlantic Monthly, May-June 1979). Fallows’ articles knocked Carter so off balance he retreated to Camp David for ten days in early July, where he developed a nationally-televised address delivered July 15 that blamed the American people, not himself, for a “crisis of confidence” marked by “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” Carter’s presidency never recovered.

Reagan, an ex-actor highly skilled at using television to reach his audience, was able to bypass the media establishment and run the country from 1981 to 1987, supported by Congressional conservatives. After Democrats re-captured the Senate in 1986, the media's party once again controlled Congress, and held on there even as Bush replaced Reagan in 1988. In contrast to Reagan, Bush was unable to bypass the media, which showed its strength during the 1990 budget battle by forcing Bush to break his pledge not to raise taxes.

In 1992, a poll of top journalists found that 91% supported Clinton over Bush. [www.mrc.org/biasbasics/biasbasics3.asp] Nirvana for such types arrived with Clinton’s 1992 election, since Democrats still retained Congress. But nirvana lasted just two years.

Americans showed their dissatisfaction with Democrats in 1994 by putting Republicans in charge of Congress, ending Democratic control of the House that had lasted 40 straight years. The Gingrich revolution was a blow to the media, especially after Clinton moved right in 1995 to cater to this new power. Fortunately for the media, Gingrich both over-reached with the battle to impeach Clinton and proved to lack the skills Reagan had used to bypass the press.

But with Bush 43’s win in the “stolen” election of 2000, a Republican became president for the 5th time since Vietnam, against just 2 Democrats. From 1968 to 2006, a span of 38 years, Republicans had held at least a piece of power for 32 years. The MSM clearly wasn’t all-powerful.

The MSM Triumphant (Part II)

Democrats dominated the U.S. political scene from 1932 until the party fractured over Vietnam in 1968. And the electronic media (radio, then TV) largely aided Democratic presidents’ efforts through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War (“politics stops at the water’s edge”) until around 1965. While many leading regional newspapers, and the influential Luce publications TIME and LIFE, leaned Republican, Henry Luce backed Kennedy in 1960—making a difference that year.

During the Vietnam War, the media became a powerful, separate political force in America. New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, a Harvard graduate whose reporting from Vietnam was so on-target (he won a Pulitzer in 1964) Kennedy asked the Times to transfer him out, inspired a generation of journalists covering the war. Halberstam published his Vietnam book The Making of a Quagmire in 1965, just as American combat troops were entering Vietnam for the first time. Halberstam had it right from the beginning.

Television news helped turn the country against the Vietnam War with its same-day “living color” combat footage that came into American homes nightly. The near-realtime TV shots of Vietcong invading the U.S. Embassy grounds, along with other close-fire reporting during Tet 1968, led the impartial CBS anchor Walter Cronkite to editorialize on air that the U.S. should leave Vietnam. LIFE generated another key turning point against the war when it published pictures of the 242 men killed in Vietnam in one typical week, May 28-June 3, 1969. And LIFE did it again with its graphic November 1969 report on the My Lai Massacre.

Republican Nixon was president by 1969, having benefited from the media’s drive to end Democrat Johnson’s Vietnam War. Nixon nevertheless deeply distrusted the media, especially the three he placed at the top of his “enemies” list: the New York Times, The Washington Post, and CBS News. Nixon’s mistrust proved founded. In 1972, the Post unfolded an historic investigation of the “Watergate caper” that helped force Nixon from office within two years.

Thus by the mid-1970s, the MSM had aided the 1960s civil rights struggle, pushed forward the feminist revolution, ended the Vietnam War, toppled a president, and become America’s dominant agenda-setting institution, more powerful than the Democratic Party itself.

The MSM (Part I)

David Brooks said last night on “The Lehrer Report” that polls reflect people who reflect the cluster of beliefs that best honors them. In other words, people validate themselves by associating with the values system that tells them they are worth something.

We have two general clusters of beliefs in America today, those reflected by the Democrats and those reflected by the Republicans. Fox News and talk radio have given Republicans somewhere to go besides churches to validate their beliefs.

The Democrats, who during the Roosevelt years built the modern-day intelligentsia that now dominates five of America’s nine major institutions, have long had the media—now called the “mainstream media” (MSM) to distinguish it from Fox and talk radio—to validate and amplify their beliefs, along with the resources of government bureaucracies, entertainment and the arts, academe, and philanthropy/nonprofits (the “Third Sector”).

Religion is divided, recognizing that Judaism, mainline Protestantism, and Catholic support for welfare and peace lean Democratic. So is big business divided (think John Corzine, Robert Rubin, Warren Buffett, Felix Rohatyn, George Soros, Maria Cantwell, etc.). The only Republican institutions in the big nine are the military and small business. (My thanks to John Glassman, American Enterprise Institute, for this analysis [Scripps Howard News Service, 1.18.05]).

While Fox News plays a vital role for Republicans, it can’t match the MSM’s domination of our national dialog. And Fox has freed the MSM to be more openly partisan; with Fox around, other media have less reason to be “fair and balanced.”

Bush and Iraq: For Better, For Worse

Bush is doing badly in the polls, because of Iraq. His Gallup Poll approval rating of 36% is the lowest of his presidency.
[Poll at: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/archive/?poll_id=19]

Iraq is what Bush will be most remembered for, according to 64% of responders. And 61% of those polled said Iraq would play the “most important” or a “very important” role in deciding how they vote in the upcoming Congressional elections, not good for Bush since 60% think things in Iraq are going badly.

Only 42% say going into Iraq wasn’t a mistake, the running poll's lowest percentage ever. In Vietnam, the Gallup Poll didn’t find that little support for the war until after Tet in February 1968, a month before Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for re-election.

Yet hidden in these, for Bush, dismal numbers were signs of rising confidence in the economy:

"Rate Economy Today"
Date: Good/Poor
3/06: 59%/41%
9/05: 53%/47%
4/05: 50%/49%
12/04: 53%/47%

"Rate Economy A Year from Now"
Date: Good/Poor
3/06: 60%/37%
9/05: 49%/50%
4/05: 51%/48%
12/04: 60%/39%

Saving Lives or Spinning Facts?

Improvised Explosive Devices—IEDs—are responsible for killing over 60% of the Americans lost in action in Iraq over the past year. Appropriately, the U.S. has made a top priority out of combating this dangerous threat to American troops.

David Gregory of NBC News, however, in his March 13 story from the White House, oddly treated the President’s interest in countering IEDs as a public relations gambit. Here’s Gregory’s full report (emphasis added):

Today, Mr. Bush boasted of new technology he claims has reduced the threat of roadside bombs, known as IEDs, responsible for so much carnage.

[Clip of President speaking:] “Today nearly half the IEDs in Iraq are found and disabled before they can be detonated.”

IEDs are a major source of the violent images Americans see on their television screens so often. That’s why the White House hopes highlighting the battle against that threat may actually move opinion on the war. David Gregory, NBC News, the White House.

Time to Get Serious about Protectionism

It is ever more clear that Democrats will ride the protectionist horse to return to power in Washington. This blog is about the importance of free markets. Protectionism is the enemy of free markets. If we interfere with free trade in the name of protecting jobs, we interfere with capitalism’s ability to grow jobs abroad and at home.

Here's why the protectionist threat is real. Mark Shields, the liberal half of Jim Lehrer’s weekly look at Washington politics, warned that outsourcing would hit America’s service sector hard in the coming years, costing us up to 42 million jobs. He didn’t say so, but his figure comes from an important March Foreign Affairs article by Princeton Economics Professor Alan Blinder, who used to be on Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors.

Clive Crook, in his National Journal piece titled, “A Third Industrial Revolution” (3.10.06), called Blinder’s article “fascinating,” because it makes offshoring “potentially a very big deal.” Blinder:

believes that what we have seen so far is just the timid beginning of a third Industrial Revolution [electronics, following manufacturing, then services].

. . . he envisages enormous economic disruption, and urges policy makers to think hard, and urgently, about how to prepare for this.

. . . Blinder concludes that "the total number of U.S. service-sector jobs that will be susceptible to offshoring in the electronic future is two to three times the total number of current manufacturing jobs" -- in other words, between 28 million and 42 million jobs.

[Blinder says for those remaining behind:] "People skills may become more valuable than computer skills. The geeks may not inherit the earth after all -- at least not the highly paid geeks in the rich countries."

Broder Wrestles with Ethnocentrism, Racism

David Broder used to be a thoughtful journalist. So I wonder about these two statements from his column, “Nativist sentiment helped kill the Dubai ports deal,” (Washington Post, 3.9.06):

[Bush’s national security] reputation . . . has been damaged by the continuing strife in Iraq, a nation which — according to this week's Washington Post-ABC News Poll — 80 percent of Americans now believe is headed for civil war.

Mr. Broder, what difference can it make what Americans, even 80 percent of them, think about the prospects for civil war in Iraq? It’s Iraqis, not Americans, who will or won’t civil war.

Then on the Dubai port ownership fiasco, Broder writes:

Some portion of the antagonism stemmed directly from the fact that this is an Arab-based company.

“Some portion”?! Broder may be uncomfortable Democrats turned racist on this issue along with (more predictably) Republicans, but how can he suggest that anything but racism was involved?

Martin Luther at 500

Five centuries ago this year, Martin Luther became a monk. No person has had a bigger impact on the 500 years since.

The title of John M. Fontana’s book about Johann Gutenberg, Mankind’s Greatest Invention, makes the valid point about Gutenberg’s printing press. Printing gave reading—hence power— to the common person.

Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455. But it took Luther to make the invention world-transforming, just as Henry Ford, not Gottlieb Daimler, transformed the 20th Century with automobile mass production.

Luther taught that we are justified by faith, not works. We don’t earn our way into heaven, we believe our way. It is between us and God. Justification by faith makes each individual equal before God, a radical concept to the early 16th Century's Pope and kings ("Dieu et mon droit"), and one still unfamiliar to much of today’s world.

As the printed Bible empowered Luther, he used it to empower each individual. Knowledge makes us free. Luther specifically denied a priesthood the right to get between the individual and God, denied the Pope’s role as the final interpreter of scripture, translated the Bible into German, encouraged individual study of the scriptures, and actively worked for a competent education system.

To Luther, piety meant someone who was free in conscience by virtue of faith, and charged with the duty of proper conduct within a community of similarly-committed individuals. A community of free and equal individuals. An emerging democracy.

China-bashing Chuck

The Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby (3/6) has a warning about the next target of American protectionists: President Hu Jintao of China. Hu is coming to the U.S. in April.

To get ready for the visit, Sen. Chuck Schumer, whom Mallaby calls “one of the chief brewers of the Dubai storm,” is pushing a bill that will impose a 27.5% tariff on all Chinese goods unless China revalues its currency. His bill can’t become law, but it can identify the Democrats with strong, nativist sentiment against a country that is running a massive trade surplus with us, supposedly taking away American jobs (think WalMart), challenging American scientific supremacy, violating human rights, and is building the world’s most powerful military challenge to the U.S. Did you really think Schumer would let Hu’s visit go well?

Too bad. There is no way China will cave like Dubai is doing in the face of Schumer’s demagoguery. China needs a devalued currency to protect its agricultural sector. Farmers are losing out to the coastal cities in China, are restless, and pose a political problem for Hu. He isn’t going to revalue China’s currency in a way that makes foreign food products cheaper for coastal Chinese than food produced in China’s interior.

Schumer could care less.

Iraq on Tenterhooks

Here is a highly abbreviated form of the Iraq Index, published and updated twice a week by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution:

Americans Killed in Action (monthly average)

2003: 32
2004: 59
2005: 56
2006: 47

Crude Oil Production (m. bbls./day)

Prewar: 2.50
Goal: 2.50
actual: 1.84 (2/06)

Electricity (megawatts)

Prewar: 3,958
Goal: 6,000
actual: 3,600 (2/06)

American combat deaths are down this year, though not dramatically. Crude oil production, which the U.S. optimistically believed would start paying for Iraq’s recovery soon after Saddam was removed, has yet to recover to prewar levels. And the best single measure of basic quality of life in Iraq, electricity production, was lower in February than it was when Saddam was in power. Not good.

Then, there is the current delay in forming a government to run Iraq. Yet Iraq is up from its low points, and has so far averted civil war, though Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has done his darndest to get one going. It feels like the future of Iraq hangs in the balance right now.

The Consumer is King

Last year, the Economist ran a special section on how the consumer has become king (4.2.05). It seems that things happen first in the world of private sector sales. Politics and culture catch up and/or mount resistance later. When Eisenhower ran 60-second commercials on TV in 1952, many commentators were horrified that the General of the Armies would try to sell himself as one would sell a box of soap. The rest is, as they say, history. Capitalism teaches democracy how to sell.

Here is some of what the Economist had to say:

• “The days of mass marketing are over.”—Larry Light, McDonald’s.
• Consumers do not trust ads.
• Network TV and newspapers in decline.
• 92% of the ads recorded on DVRs are skipped.
• Consumer attention is becoming a scarce resource.
• Advertisers have to be able to measure results of advertising.
• “Below the line advertising”—new media, direct mail, public relations, promotions, sponsorship, product placement—is worth more than 2x that paid for traditional display ads.
• Top ad agencies now include interactive ads, direct marketing, public relations. PR is the runway for the ad plane.
• Ad agencies have to put all the pieces together for a client.
• Brands belong to the people who use them.
• Brands help people navigate through complex markets.
• To build a brand, 1) have deep insight, well beyond traditional research, into what consumers want, 2) relentlessly attend to their needs, 3) make consumers part of marketing.
• People “cross shop”—for the very expensive and very cheap.
• Chinese consumers want brands they can trust and afford. China may become P&G’s number two market.
• Nestle provides Japanese consumers recipes on their cells so that they know what to buy on the way home.
• South Koreans consider e-mail “so last week”; it’s all TXT.
• Mobile phone marketing must respect users’ time.
• 30% of those who built their Mini Coopers on line bought the car they "built".
• A website typically holds a browser for 2-5 minutes.
• Internet ads work because the advertiser pays only for clicks.
• Online sales are rising fast, with mobile phones the new platform.
• “The market will get more fragmented, customers’ needs will get more diverse, and sophistication and empowerment will continue to grow.”—Mike George, Dell.