Morning Fog

Whistleblower Or Traitor?

Morning Fog noted yesterday that the U.S. government is being rather unrealistic in expecting the news media to avoid stories that show that leaker-of-NSA-secrets Edward Snowden in a sympathetic light.

Unrealistic, and probably a bit hypocritical too.  If Snowden's opposite number, a mid-level IT guy from Moscow or Beijing, had packed up a batch of Russian or Chinese intelligence reports and was making his way toward the U.S. by way of Canada, we would be doing just what Moscow and Hong Kong have done: ignoring, trying not to appear too gleeful, and hoping to score some secrets. 

That's the game of intelligence.

In Washington, center of the federal bureaucracy, there is some confusion about what term best describes Snowden.  Columns dedicated to the federal workforce are tending to call him a "whistleblower," and claiming whistleblower protections for him, even as they also admit he's a lawbreaker.  

But for me, Snowden doesn't fit the definition of "whistleblower."  That moniker implies a positive motivation to expose government (or sometimes corporate) misdeeds and illegal actions, but normally to call attention to the activity, not usually to benefit personally.   Snowden, on the other hand, is playing the media for fame, and who's to say that he won't reap a bit of fortune along the way for accidentally leaving behind at each of his stops one of those many laptops he's reportedly carrying.  Isn't it a bit odd that he found the need to spend several days in Hong Kong before moving on, and is now repeating the act at Moscow's airport? 

So if the choice is between "whistleblower" or "traitor" to describe this case, I unhesitatingly choose the latter.  The icing on the cake is that he fled, and the cherry on top of that is that his itinerary coincidentally took him to China and Russia, two places in the world that might value his wares most highly.  He had other options, if he was truly focused on protecting the privacy of average Americans -- to resign from his job, and go to the press right here in this country to blow his whistle, without needing to steal a lot of "merchandise" that would have a high value to various enemies. 

The whole Snowden affair is not very different from the famous 1970s episode of the "Pentagon Papers."  Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the "leaker" in that case, stayed in the country while still making documents public through the New York Times.  To me, it's a big difference.   Future whistleblowers, if they wish their motivation to be considered just a desire to reveal truth, should keep this mind: you can hide, but you shouldn't run.        

Earth To USG - Get Real About Snowden

I'm sure I've pointed out before how amusing the Saturday newspaper can be, in which are published the gripes and outrages (and only very rarely, the kudos) of "average readers."  This past weekend was no different:

• a career diplomat lamented that the Post, in criticizing the number of politically appointed ambassadors, had nevertheless written at length about those appointees, while not even mentioning the names of the career folks;
• somebody was offended at breakfast by a humor piece in which the writer had described how his dog tends to vomit (the content was obvious from the title);
• a woman complained that the paper had covered a burger-eating contest even though "there is an obesity epidemic;"
• another writer took the editors to task for publishing a story about two teenagers being shot, and a few pages later, a photo of two actors in a TV show, one pointing a handgun at the other;
• yet another reader took offense at the use of the term "pimped-out" to describe a cocktail, alleging the term glorifies sexual violence.

Every Saturday they continue.  The Post publishes a few representative (?) letters; I'm sure there are thousands more that go unpublished.  I'm afraid a lot of these comments just show the advanced average age of people who still read the "print" newspaper.  Be that as it may:  The common thread seems to be the expression of a wish that the world were a different or nicer place, and that since it isn't, the job of the media is to pretend that it is, sheltering us from unpleasant news, or at least prettying it up (dare I say,  "pimping it out"?).

Maybe the U.S. government should write in next Saturday.  Something along the lines of "we were disgusted [note: "disgusted" is a common word in these letters] that the Post reported Snowden as a sympathetic character, or a crusading whistleblower, when he's so obviously a traitor through and through."  Not so different, because here again, the writer (Uncle Sam) would be arguing that its fantasy world is the real world, and don't dash my illusions, please. 

The government should save its breath, because it's only normal that the media become more absorbed by the counterstory than the party line.  Snowden is what he is, but what, exactly, is that?  Stay tuned for the exciting sequel tomorrow, right here on Morning Fog.

Two Faced Tea-Drinkers

Right-side blogger Jennifer Rubin makes a valid point in noting that extremists in the Republican Party are not monolithic, but of different persuasions.  Beyond that, she sees the same dichotomy that most of us do.  Perhaps her best phrasing of it is that

"Only one side is truly “conservative” in the sense it wants to conserve what is good while recognizing the habits, morals and desires of 21st-century America. The other is reactionary (turn back the clock) or radical (remake America, shift from superpower or sideline observer internationally)."

Rubin concludes that the conservatives in the party will have to get tougher in the upcoming elections in order to win out; and that the radicals will have to avoid "scaring voters and blowing themselves up" when they come up against actual opponents.  She concludes that the conservatives have the easier job.  Let's hope she's correct.

 

Whipping Our Political System Into Shape

Almost anywhere you look in the past week or so, you can find commentators pointing out the "Republican problem," that is, the difficulty of effectively managing a party that has been taken over by its extremists. 

Consider, for example, the recent farm bill, full of subsidies near and dear to Republican hearts, which went down to defeat because not enough Republicans would vote for it -- the Tea Party folks thought it wasn't right-wing enough, and refused to support it.  [More on the farm bill later.]  Or see Michael Gerson's take on the internal politics of the GOP just a few days ago; or today's Washington Post piece by Paul Kane, pointing out the currently very difficult role of the majority "whip" in the House, who has very few political tools available, under current conditions, to bring about any real party discipline in the interest of making progress on anything. 

Pundits still seem uncertain about what this means for Republican candidates in the next elections.  Should they embrace progress and problem-solving and spurn pandering to extremists?  Sen. Marco Rubio has done so in a effort to bring about immigration reform, and has been roundly criticized by right-wingers in his party for doing so.  Or should they seek to guarantee their election/reelection, as many did in 2012, by edging ever further toward the right and refuse to compromise on anything, ever?

I believe the worm is beginning to turn.  I sense that voters generally are fed up with the do-nothing Congress and that middle-of-the-road Republicans in particular are tired of being cast as wild-eyed extremists.  I'd predict that there will be signs of this in the 2014 mid-term elections which - if interpreted correctly by the right people in the GOP - could put a pragmatic Republican in the White House after 2016. 

Might I be wrong? Of course.  Yet in the past, when extremist takeovers of one party or the other have occurred, they have succeeded for one election cycle before reality sets in.   For me, the spectacle of Democrats trying to work with Republicans in the House to pass a farm bill (misguided though the bill itself may be) and of Republicans cooperating with Democrats in the Senate to pass an immigration reform bill (even at the cost of spending unnecessary billions to further militarize our border with Mexico) suggests that we may be seeing the glimmerings of restoring bipartisan compromise as a way of political life.  

 

You Don't Need A Weatherman ...

ABC News reported the results of an interesting public opinion survey yesterday, finding among other things that 70% of all adults oppose affirmative action, while 57% support gay/lesbian marriage, and 63% are in favor of granting such couples the same federal benefits as other marrieds.  These results aren't particularly surprising, though I suspect they may be surprising to some who are on the opposite side of those questions.

Equally unsurprising, but more interesting, are the breakdowns provided by youth on the latter two questions, with younger people on the whole much more "in favor" than older folks, and all three race groups about equally opposed to affirmative action on university applications.   I find myself with the majority in all three cases.  Does that mean I'm an African-American 25-year-old?  It doesn't.

It might mean, though, that I'm really a child of the 1960s.  In my observation the liberalization of social attitudes in the U.S. has grown steadily since that decade of rebellion.  I wouldn't call myself a rebel, far from it, yet no doubt my own opinions have been shaped by that environment.  In the 60s the issues were broader:  Desegregation and racial equality then, vs. a sub-element of the same big cluster -- affirmative action -- now.  There have been bumps and setbacks in the trend, but it persists, and its future continuation seems assured when we look at the different views of young people versus older ones.

There are those in the country who still hope to reverse the trend, and return to the 1950s.  Evidently they are the ones who DO need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.

 

 

Privacy In The Contemporary World

Gee, another uproar over something the government's doing?  I guess we must be in the second term of some President or another.  It's become kind of a rule that things start to unravel, or appear to, in the second term.

I'm personally not too upset about the telephone records issue.  It's generic data and it's being gathered for reasons of national security, in an era where we face threats of terrorism and industrial espionage.  The same people who have their tidies in a twist over the Verizon-NSA furor still expect 100% security from being blown away by a terrorist bomb, but they fail to explain how the government can do that if modern avenues of intelligence gathering are to be closed to it.

Suspicion of government is quintessentially American.  But it skews our concept of privacy in very odd ways.  We don't begrudge providing all sorts of personal data online to big companies like GM, Prudential, J.C. Penney, and Google, which are collecting and using the same kind of generic, non-individual-specific information that's involved in the current telephone brouhaha.  Many of us, particularly the young and inexperienced, are happy to put every detail of our social life, health, feelings, and passions on FaceBook (with photos, no less) but think it's an invasion for the state to put our photo on a driver's license. 

The government, whose functionaries we elect, has a (largely undeserved) reputation for inefficiency; big business, over whose functionaries we have no control, has a (largely undeserved) reputation for extreme efficiency.  Both reputations are unreliable stereotypes but if they were true, which entity would be the greater danger to our collective well-being?

Perfect Reflection Won't Win Election

It was evident during last year's Presidential election campaign that neither Romney nor his party seemed to have much understanding of the changing attitudes of U.S. voters.  It was even clearer once the election results were known. Unfortunately, Republicans shied away from seeing the real reasons for the outcome.  Because the popular vote was relatively close, they persuaded themselves that they just hadn't got their message across to voters (or worse, that the voters were too dumb to figure it out).  They failed to acknowledge that Romney lost even with huge traditional political advantages; they never gave a thought to the idea that the voters understood and rejected that message.

That has changed only slightly in the intervening months.  A few Republicans have suggested that it's not the medium, but the message itself, that's the problem.  But by and large, the party remains mired in a refusal to see itself as others see it.  They look in a mirror, and see a reflection in which they can find no flaw.  They need someone else to look in the mirror for them.

 Blogger Alexandra Petri today makes one attempt to be that person. 

 

Double Double-Think

Doublethink and its bosom buddy doubletalk are common in politics.  Columnists aren't immune, either, though.

In "Get Rid of the Trust Funds" in today's Washington Post, economic columnist Robert Samuelson points out some double-talk when he argues that focusing public attention on the health of the social security and medicare "trust funds" is deceptive because it suggests these imaginary funds really exist and are funded separately from other spending. 

I credit him for making a darned good case, too, at least until he gets to the point of saying that "A dollar spent on Social Security or Medicare can’t be spent on border control, highways, school lunches, financial regulation, military readiness or the Forest Service." (emphasis added).  Samuelson's basic point is true, but the reference to military readiness is another instance of the same self-deceptive doublethink that he's complaining about, because such a large part of our defense budget consists of yet another "entitlement," one that lacks an imaginary trust fund, but nevertheless fails to  pay for itself as many assume it does.

Speaking of doublethink where military readiness is concerned, let's go back to politicians.  Right across the page from Samuelson's piece, a Congressman named Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, blames Obama for even thinking about reductions in defense funding, and sings his own version of the well-known tune "We Can't Ever Spend Too Much Mon-ee/On Our Beloved Darling Militar-ee."   Maybe getting carried away by his own rhetoric, Buck provides the perfect example of the doublethink affecting our deliberations on this topic:   "We have passed 51 straight annual defense bills, all with the express purpose of providing the American people the peace they deserve" (emphasis added).

Gee, Buck, really?  If so, we must conclude that our annual defense bills have miserably failed to achieve their purpose.  Peace?  From Vietnam to now, it's almost easier to enumerate the years when we were NOT at war, than those when we were. We deceive ourselves with the myth that our constant military engagement in foreign lands is necessary for our "defense," but it hasn't given us peace, and it's this kind of sloppy thinking that will cause us, some day, to "pay the price ...if we do not change course" (to use Buck's own words). 

Sacred Cow, Tip Of An Iceberg, Part 2

In my last post I promised to return to this topic to sketch in the iceberg of the title.

The rising costs of our titanic defense establishment, epitomized in miniature by the question of military commissaries, is a natural outcome of our decision to "professionalize" our armed forces after the Vietnam war.  The thinking at the time was that if people were fed up and disillusioned by our seemingly endless and fruitless engagement in Indochina, and couldn't be induced to service grounded in the concept of a citizen's duty, we would need to rely on mercenaries.  We would pay our soldiers more, and enhance benefits, so that the job would be economically attractive. 

This appeared to work for a while, and even today, I believe it's correct to say that our servicepeople are not motivated strictly by money.  They are attracted to the military because it meets their expectations and desires, in the same way that people who love kids and believe in education become teachers, or those of a certain objective mindset might become engineers or scientists.  

That's not a totally bad thing, but as I have argued before, it does have negative consequences in the sense that when everyone has a mutually-reinforcing way of approaching problems, there will probably be less questioning of decisions or policies - in a crucial element of our national being where different views should be represented.   If "everything looks like a nail, to a hammer," it won't be critical to the country if Target hires only hammers.  I'd say it's different, and more serious, if our armed forces are made up only of hammers.

With our commitment to a fully professional force, we committed also to continually, and probably exponentially, rising costs of the sort we see detailed in the Washington Post.  And as hammers talk among themselves (and to no one else) it's not at all hard for them to begin to view themselves as entitled to a higher level of pay and benefits.  

We haven't yet begun to hire foreigners to do our fighting for us (or have we? -- there are plenty of "aliens," both legal and illegal, serving honorably in our forces -- but the historically minded should, I think, take the lessons of other expansive world powers to heart - Rome's power waned when it couldn't meet the increasing demands of its military forces (and couldn't control them with the force of arms, since the legions had all the weapons).  The Ottomans had the same problem.  The British Empire, perhaps, had a gentler landing, seeing a rising and unaffordable cost, and acting in time (?) to slough some of its demands off -- some of them on us. 

There are dangers to the "professional" army.  We may be able to avoid them by controlling costs, but we've shown little taste for that where civilian entitlements are concerned, and even less where military ones are involved.  Is it too late to restore conscription? 

Sacred Cow, Tip Of An Iceberg - Part One

A piece this weekend focused initially on the status of one of the U.S. military's sacred cows, the base commissaries.  For the unititiated, these are in effect, taxpayer -subsidized supermarkets on military bases that sell groceries to military personnel - and only military personnel - at a discount. 

The commissary is really an anachronism, in two ways:  First, such stores date back to times when military bases were often located far from population centers.  That's still true of some bases today, but the civilian environment has changed:  Even pretty small towns have modern supermarkets these days.  Second, it's one of the many special military benefits that remained unchanged when conscription was abandoned in the 1970s and military pay was upped .. and upped some more .. to make it more competitive with the civilian labor market with which it was competing.  (According to this same article, for example, the average enlisted man/woman's compensation is higher than 90% of what his/her civilians peers with equivalent education and experience receive.)

The cost of commissaries is only the tip of an iceberg - the rising cost of military pay and benefits - which I hope to get to in another post.

As for the commissary issue itself, though, there are some pretty simple solutions available.  First, if private grocery chains shy away from opening stores on military bases on a non-profit basis (and who could blame them?), maybe the answer is a coop arrangement.

Further: a community needs test makes a lot of sense.  Some bases (like Joint Base Myer-Henderson near me in Arlington, Virginia) are vest-pocket size and offer dozens of choices of grocery stores within a mile or two of the front gate.  Really, there isn't much reason such bases should have commissaries.  Others are sprawling facilities that house populations of several tens of thousands, and it's only natural that our servicemen and -women would want a grocery store in their community, just like any suburban household in the civilian world has.  They should have it, but need it be operated on a subsidized basis?  

Ah yes, there's that discount issue.  Military folks are up in arms on the web this morning about the potential loss of this small part of their entitlements.  That's natural.  Civilians scream if the mortgage deduction is threatened, and oldsters get agitated if anyone even talks about changes to Medicare or Social Security.  In all three cases, however, change has to happen.   Clearly, in light of the anachronistic nature of the commissary system, we should be taking a good hard look at whether our military members really still need subsidized groceries.