Morning Fog

Of Open Conventions, And Primary Crossovers

It's not at all surprising that Republicans seem befuddled by the remaining two-and-a-half candidates for their Presidential nomination, and seem to be wishing there was someone else to be nominated who would somehow combine the best features of Romney and Santorum. 

Experts are saying there's no such chance.  It's true there hasn't been one of those "open" conventions in a long while, and things work a little differently these days, but some still seem to believe it's possible. 

The first question that pops into my head is, what good features would such a candidate need to have?   Romney seems doltish as he tries to convince us he's something he isn't (an Attila-the-Hun conservative).  But Santorum is even worse -- I don't swallow his ideas about issues like family, birth control, women's rights and such, but if accidentally I did, I'm sure they'd make me "throw up." 

Maybe what's needed is someone with a quality Mittrick doesn't have:  The ability to keep his foot out of his mouth for two days running.  Sarah Palin, who opines that an open convention might still be workable, and that she'd "do what [she] could to help" in such an eventuality, does already have name recognition, and having already been through the shoot-from-the-hip phase of running for office, might have the foot-in-mouth thing solved.

I believe the disenchantment that imbues many Republicans these days is the increasing recognition that their chances are ebbing day by day.  The economy's continuing gradual improvement, the GOP's irresponsible attitude in dealing with the country's problems over the past two years, and the nonsense their most likely candidates are espousing -- all these take their toll.  An Obama landslide looks increasingly likely, under the circumstances, and the Republican Party will have done it to itself.

Meanwhile, I believe Democrats in Arizona and Michigan today should think twice about playing the silly game Santorum wants them to play, i.e., crossover and vote for him in the Republican primary.  First, consider the source!  If that weren't enough reason to stay away, keep in mind the rule of unexpected consequences.   What if Michigan's results really did weaken Romney so much that Santorum went on to get the nomination?  What if by some quirk of fate (or godly intervention) he actually became President?  Or, what if his strength in these contests led to his being offered the Vice Presidency?   The odds are remote, but for me as a moderate, each of these scenarios is too horrid to imagine.  This man shouldn't be anywhere near so near to the Presidency of the United States.  

Furor In Afghanistan

The bad news from Afghanistan continues.   The seemingly minor accidental burning of a handful of Qurans is a serious setback to U.S. interests/goals, and to the Aghan people's hopes of breaking out of medievality.  (Incidentally those two are not necessarily related. I don't entertain the foolish notion that anything the U.S. is or has been doing in Afghanistan was going to make a real difference in modernizing or democratizing that country.)

As is often the case in such international incidents, there is fault everywhere you look. 

The Afghan brand of Islam:  The current eruption brings home the depth and breadth of ignorance and superstition in this benighted land -- a true illustration of how religion can be the opiate of the masses, especially when the masses have nothing else.  Riot and murder because of a plain old mistake/failure of understanding?  Islam is still a relatively young religion; I like to point out that when Christianity was roughly the age Islam is now, Christians were persecuting each other horrifically  (e.g. in the notorious Spanish inquisition) and persecuting other religions too (e.g. the Crusades).  Islam can grow up to be no less harmful than Roman Catholicism or Presbyterianism, as is shown by pockets of rational Islamists here and there in the U.S. and Europe; but in Afghanistan it has a long way to go.

U.S. Military:  OK, this was "just" a mistake, but it reflects a serious failure in the education of our troops; not so much at the grunt level as at the officer level; and also among State Department advisors (I assume there are some) at that location.  The thing about errors is that they can't be retrieved, and apologies go only so far.  The facility commander where this occurred ought to have been relieved; I haven't heard that that has happened.  Unfortunately the U.S. military seems to have backed away from the strict concept of the CO's credo that prevailed during my exposure to service: "The commander is responsible for everything his unit does or fails to do."  Absolutely.

Afghan Leadership:  While we might hope that there are adults in charge, there isn't much evidence.  President Karzai and others haven't been courageous enough to speak out strongly against the violence, because they're afraid of the Taliban, which in turn is helping to exacerbate and escalate the situation.  So he will likely continue to play to the extremes; it's a political tactic not unknown in our own country!

U.S. Strategy Planners:  Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his recent book Strategic Vision, makes some cogent points about the folly of the U.S. getting involved in military ground wars in Asia; a little bit of history - for example, Peter Hopkirk's classic book The Great Game, which reports uprisings against the British in the mid-nineteenth century that are eerily similar to what's happening right now - is also enlightening.  Here, the failure lies with the Bush administration.  If politically we did need to go in and bash the Taliban, we also needed an exit plan.  Not only didn't we have one but we just left our troops in place for several years with no real end game strategy.

U.S. Foreign Policy Planners:  Again with the history! Vietnam.  "Winning hearts and minds" is a game for idiots.  It's hopelessly idealistic to suppose that we will ever get away from it entirely, but we need to be far more careful in our assessments.  It works best when the target population already shares our core values (the French welcomed U.S. troops with open arms at the end of WWII).  It can work pretty well when values and cultures are different, too -- when we are a victorious occupying force (Japan) with carte blanche to reorganize a country.  Otherwise, winning hearts and minds too often turns into buying hearts and minds, with development projects or military assistance that often fails miserably because the cultural gap is too great - check out the interesting assessment of our efforts in Iraq offered by Peter VanBuren in We Meant Well.

Stolen Valor

Someone pretending to have a military decoration, or to have served in the armed forces, when they haven't? 

"Pshaw!  The very idea!"

That phrase in quotes there is about what the penalty should be, for the act described in the first sentence.  Sort of like what your grandmother might have said about some young lady wearing her skirts above the ankle, or if you had proposed waffles as a main course for dinner.  "It's just not done!" she might have added.

Now, some of the puniest legal minds in the country (that's our Congress, generally) have proposing to make such "stolen valor" a crime, a silly suggestion that seems likely only to waste the Supreme Court's time. 

There have always been pretenders.  Those who falsely say they earned a medal, or put a lie on a resume, or pretend to be someone they're not, will always exist but it's not automatically a crime.  It may be a crime, if it can be shown that someone has been damaged by the false claim.

Usually in these cases, however, it's simple enough to stop the lies.  Most, if not all, false claims can be checked; it's just that too many people don't want to take the trouble to do so.  If you hire someone for a job only because he says he's a veteran, you're probably an idiot and you may get what you deserve; but if that's one factor you'd like to consider, you just ask him/her to produce evidence of the claim.   If that same person applies for Veterans benefits, he'd be stopped dead in his tracks if he couldn't corroborate the claim.  Some politicians have been found to claim military service that didn't exist, but they are easily thwarted if the press just insists they prove it.    

So it's only when some evident malfeasance occurs that such false claims should be punishable -- e.g., someone who has no medical training but is posing as a doctor; or the person who obtains a social benefit like social security or cost-free treatment at a veterans hospital by falsely claiming eligibility.  My own favorite complaint on this score is people who obtain police uniforms and insignia (it's legal but it shouldn't be) and misuse them.   Such cases are clear violations of law; they can and should be prosecuted.

The "Stolen Valor" Act, as it's being called, is far more about political posturing than about law.  Elected representatives are seeking to curry favor with at least some groups of voters by helping make sacred cows more sacred.   It doesn't matter how "narrowly drawn" the proposed law is.  It shouldn't exist at all.

On a personal note, I would point out that when I mustered out of the army, some wise person suggested I have my discharge form recorded at my county registrar of deeds.  I did.  It's good advice.  As it turned out, I'm pretty sure my military records were among many destroyed by a fire in a St. Louis depository for government documents in the 1970s.  I do have a copy of my DD-214, but in a pinch, I would know where to find a legally valid certified copy.     

Even Museums Are Getting Divisive

It's satisfying when somebody says exactly what you might have written, and perhaps says it - perish the thought! - even better.  It saves the blogger (me) a lot of work!

I find that Steven Pearlstein is frequently such a writer.  So I ask that you consider his item ("Why Not A Museum for American Ingenuity?").  It was occasioned by this week's  groundbreaking for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington DC, but its subtext is what Congressman James Moran has called the "balkanization" of our national museums.  

Indeed, the idea of having different museums for different segments of our population screams out for correction (see Morning Fog, or public architecture critic Philip Kennicott - and the new Director of the NMAAHC proclaims, in the same newspaper, has a me-too moment -- says that he doesn't want to create a museum just for African-Americans.    It makes even less sense to infuse our national museum system with segregation just as our people vote with their feet and hearts to move toward integration -- latest reports indicate that the rate of marriages across racial lines is growing at an accelerated rate. 

Yet it's gone too far to stop, I fear.  The bandwagon of cultural particularism is rolling down the slope, out of control, and will inevitably lead to the splintering of museums' foci, just as our pop music, once a single broad category, got separated into country/western, r&b, soul, new age, hiphop and other niche-oriented categories. 

The only hope is that, with all these museums (except the Holocaust Museum) under the Smithsonian Institution, sense will prevail.  The SI powers-that-be will see the separation, the duplication, the failure of this cluster of museums as a whole to present a varied, coherent reflection on our history, and will reorganize to do something about it.

In about 100 years. 

Some Presidential Lore For Presidents' Day

Today is officially "Presidents Day," so it seems a perfect time to recommend a lengthy piece by James Fallows in The Atlantic entitled "Obama, Explained." 

It really isn't about Obama - not much anyway.  Fallows spends much more time examining how we tend to evaluate Presidents in a historical and political context - deciding, for example, who were our "greatest" Presidents.   It's a theme I visited only yesterday, by accident, in discussing Dwight Eisenhower, and Fallows has some useful insights on it.

One sample: Fallows suggests, correctly I think, that our evaluation of Presidents depends heavily on whether they are elected to a second term or not.  If they are, we will tend to view their accomplishments more favorably; reelection in itself suggests "success," and if there were missteps or false starts in the first term, they'll be seen as part of an overall long-term strategy.   A two-term President gets "credit."  On the other hand, the one-termer may be downplayed, and even his real achievements during his one term may be discounted.

If you're interested in politics, and in the historical assessments of our Presidents, this is for you. 

More Ike To Like

George Will has chosen today to address two different upcoming events related to former President Eisenhower.

First, he grouses about the memorial that's in the planning stages, with a design by renowned architect Frank Gehry.  In true conservative fashion, he dislikes it because the proposed design is not strictly representational à la Norman Rockwell.   I'm not too worried about the design of the memorial, so I find the main truth Will has to offer on this topic is a point he makes sarcastically: "cancel the memorial."

There are too many such memorials in Washington.  If our young country continues the me-too trend of a memorial for every President, we'll soon run out of places to put them.  We already have, in fact.  Besides, the current fever of memorialization has a strong political content, which began with Repubicans wanting to honor Reagan (with an airport and - rather ironically - with a huge federal government office building) as the guy who temporarily resuscitated their political fortunes.  (True, there was a similar fever for Kennedy; but Kennedy, I recall, was assassinated in office, so we went overboard although he was not one of our "great" Presidents.  Then we relaxed for a generation.)

On the other hand, I believe Will has a point in arguing that Eisenhower's accomplishments are not sufficiently appreciated.   That's why I have been hunting around on the internet lately, looking for a good one-volume biography covering Eisenhower's whole life.  I wasn't impressed by those that exist, so I'm hopeful that the new book being published this week, and touted by Will -- Eisenhower in War and Peace, by a prolific writer of biographies, Jean Edward Smith -- might fill the bill. I look forward to reading it.

("Eisenhower in War and Peace" can be ordered from amazon.com via the link in the right-hand margin, and Morning Fog will even get a little "cut" from it.)

Gerrymandering Alive And Well

We had some glimmer of hope, in Virginia last year, that the gerrymandering of state electoral districts might be modified, if not stopped entirely.  No such luck; the Governor's commission was designed to be weak, and its recommendations were ignored.  Another case where a state government seems bent on giving state government a bad name!  

In the new assembly that was seated last month, the state's upper house ended up evenly split, 20-20.  This situation has led to another glimmer of hope.  As the Washington Post correctly points out, gerrymandering safe districts not only subverts real democracy, but contributes significantly to the polarization that we see everywhere about us. 

Pity The Postal Service

As we all know by now, the U.S. Postal Service is beset by many problems - rising costs, falling volume, a difficult mandate, and ... the U.S. Congress.

I never really thought the 1971 transformation of the U.S. Post Office (a government entity) into USPS (a nominally private entity) made much sense.   Universal service is a valid - even necessary - goal for any country's mail.  And I submit that, even before we knew e-mail was coming down the pike, this model would not have stood up to a careful business feasibility study.  Nevertheless, Congress decided mail could flow cheaper and more effectively by changing "office" to "service" and making it more like a private business. 

The trouble was that it was only "more like" private, in other words, a halfway measure.  The new USPS was at best a quasi-private institution, with Congress still defining its mandate and approving its management decisions, including pricing and service standards.  At the same time, Congress opened package delivery to a host of  competitors, thereby presenting the new entity with an immediate challenge while stripping it of its most profitable and growing element, which could have provided a lot of flexibiilty to perform the mission. 

Now we are forced to consider cutbacks in service, increases in costs.  These aren't the end of the world.  In fact, my basic point here is that these changes could have come sooner, and losses over the years considerably curtailed, if USPS had been completely unfettered from the apron strings of Ma Congress.  Some studies have suggested that the USPS's current financial shortfalls could be resolved entirely if the basic rate for a letter were 65 cents.  This is not expensive by comparison to other countries' services, in fact, it's cheap.  Why doesn't a letter cost 65 cents today?  Because Congresspersons fear public backlash if the rate goes up more than a penny at a time.  If USPS were free to make its own decisions, we would probably also be without full universal service by now.  That may be regrettable, but it's a decision Congress really made for us in 1971, without realizing it.  I doubt we can correct it now.  Meanwhile, pity the postal service, stuck in a no-man's land with 535 CEOs calling the shots.

Incidentally, the Postal Service story is a clear case study that explains a great deal about the problems of privatizing government functions -- cases like Amtrak, as well as various new proposals now being floated in light of expressed concerns about the costs of government:  If we continue to think of privatizing government functions only when they show clear profit potential, we leave the government to handle the difficult and profitless aspects of the process (for example, the mandate for universal and six-day service).   And that's why government seems inefficient and expensive, no matter how well it does its job.

Compromise In Congress?

News from the halls of the U.S. Capitol lately is that Republican lawmakers have abandoned their resistance to extending both the reduction/suspension of the payroll tax and unemployment benefits. 

The looks like, and in the long run probably is, a positive step.  Not only is it something that we need to do in fairness to those hit hardest by the continuing recession, but politically speaking, any bipartisan measure passed by the Congress deserves a round of applause, simply because it so rarely occurs.

Unlike the media, I am not especially surprised by the news that the GOP is caving on this matter.  It's taken them far longer than anyone might have expected to realize that their constant snubbing of the most minimal relief for the jobless and poor could take a serious toll on their electoral appeal, especially in several industrial states that they desperately need to win.   Whether their shift on this is soon enough to make a difference remains to be seen.

An observer might wonder how the tantrum-throwing extremist right of the party has been persuaded to go along.  I think the answer is that Republican agreement on this measure  is a two-edged sword that may slash away at the underpinnings of other political arrangements and understandings that the far right hates more:

• Continuing the reduction of the payroll tax unequivocally robs social security; it becomes that much easier to argue, a year from now, that the only solution to social security is to abandon it, or "privatize" it.
• If the deficit is in fact to be made up by assessing federal employees an additional 1.5% for their retirement benefits, this too gives the GOP a leg up in its war on the federal workforce.   

The devil is in the election results.  If the Republican Party can maintain or even increase its predominance in Congress after this November's election, they will have come out ahead in three ways.  My assessment, based on polls, common sense, and the continuing signs of an improving economy, is that it won't work out that neatly for them.  

Kill My Phone. Please!

I was intrigued by this little report from Saturday's paper.  DC Police Chief Lanier points out how many of the crimes local cops deal with involve cell-phone thefts, and suggests a seemingly effective and easy solution:  Phone companies should immediately disable any cell phone that is reported stolen.

Cell phone companies' collective response, via their industry lobby CTIA:  Not interested.  The main argument they offer is that this step wouldn't stop international trade in stolen cell phones.  But that's not what Chief Lanier and other law enforcement officials are trying to stop; it's the frequent phone-focused robberies that are of concern.

I'm not sure why remotely disabling stolen phones would be an issue.  The following advice has been available on the internet for some time:

To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: *#06# . A 15-digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.  If your phone is stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

Does anyone know if this is true?  I've never needed to try it.  If it is, it's harder still to understand CTIA recalcitrance.  If people can disable their phones themselves by calling in, where is the problem?  The only difference is that most people probably won't write down their cell phone identifier beforehand; the phone company could provide it easily.

CTIA members may have some conflicts here:  All those robberies resut in people going out to buy replacements, and probably create a greater demand for cell phone insurance, which not coincidentally, most of the cell phone providers sell.  Meanwhile the stolen phones themselves may generate demand for replacement SIM cards and other parts to make them usable again in their new home.  But their ads claim that the wireless phone industry pretty much invented "freedom" (forget the Magna Carta, Thomas Jefferson and all that), so if enough customers make clear they don't necessarily want the freedom to have their phone stolen and their personal data compromised, they might make some headway.