The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson in this op-ed makes the following interesting observations regarding the way in which our government tends to deal with problems:

One truth is that government often operates by crisis. People do hard things only when forced by events. A superb example is the aging of baby boomers. As is well known, the over-65 population will double between now and 2030. With Social Security, Medicare and other retiree programs representing about two-fifths of the federal budget, this aging threatens huge spending increases, big tax increases, larger deficits, or — to minimize those problems — significant cuts in retiree benefits or other spending. Faced with these realities, what have successive presidents and Congresses done? Absolutely nothing. Here’s the connection with terrorism: Even when problems are widely understood, pragmatic politicians avoid unpopular measures. In this they usually reflect public opinion. Everyone knows baby boomers will strain future budgets, yet there’s no clamor for corrective policies. We lapse into willful ignorance, hoping — against evidence and logic — that what we suspect must happen somehow won’t. So it was with terrorism, though with more excuses. The facts there weren’t well known (the terrorists weren’t telling us their plans). Ordinary Americans and foreign policy “experts” alike didn’t grasp the threat or what might be done to oppose it. Only Sept. 11 awakened us.
Until recently this common-sense appraisal seemed to describe the prevailing views of the public, the media and most politicians. Clarke changed that. The resulting controversy rests on the unstated notion that if the Bush administration had only taken his advice more seriously, it might somehow have prevented Sept. 11. This is a fiction, but it’s a fiction that must be maintained, because if it isn’t, then Clarke’s criticisms — and their political overtones — lose much of their practical relevance. So we get Hollywood-on-the-Potomac. Politicians and the media engage in sanctioned make-believe. They splice together memos and meetings and, by silence and innuendo, suggest that Sept. 11 was preventable. Therefore, someone’s to blame.

And what does this dilemma in American government portend for the future? Mr. Samuelson is not optimistic:

Whoever wins in November must face the larger dilemma of American democracy. Government can adopt painful policies only with public support. But that materializes only if most Americans believe that the problem being addressed is real and worth the requested sacrifices — in money, inconvenience or lives. Sadly, what it often takes to convince the public is suffering the very problem we’re trying to prevent. The solution to the dilemma proposed sanctimoniously by scholars and pundits is “leadership.” Politicians (particularly presidents) should convince the public of the need to act before it’s too late.
Sounds simple, but it’s risky in practice, as Bush has shown. In Iraq, he offered just such leadership. Believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — but not knowing for certain — he presented the strongest case possible to the public or (to critics) deliberately overstated the case. Now, he’s suffering a backlash because the weapons haven’t materialized and the war’s aftermath has proved obstinately messy.
Political hazards explain why presidents are usually unwilling to get too far ahead of public opinion or even to lead it. We think we control our destiny when we’ve often consigned it to chance and crisis. Clarke testified that before Sept. 11, a basic problem in strengthening anti-terrorism programs was that “we were not able to point to — and I hate to say this — body bags. You know, unfortunately, this country . . . requires body bags sometimes to make really tough decisions.”

Hat tip to Asymmetrical Information for the link to Mr. Samuelson’s piece. Also, check out Ms. Galt’s piece on Hindsight Bias on that blog. Very insightful.

It’s not every day that a GOP candidate for a House seat in Fort Worth has to explain pictures of himself in makeup and womens’ clothing.

This BusinessWeek Online article provides a good summary of the groups and individuals who are throwing big bucks at the Presidential candidates. It’s always good to have this information handy when evaluating the integrity of a politician’s position on a particular issue.

This NY Times article reports on author David Horowitz‘s efforts is spearheading a campaign to end what he calls discrimination against conservative faculty and students in America’s universities. Mr. Horowitz has written an “academic bill of rights” that asks universities, among other things, to include both conservative and liberal viewpoints in their selection of campus speakers and syllabuses for courses and to choose faculty members “with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.”
This strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. First, can you imagine the difficulty that universities would have in defining what are “conservative” and “liberal” viewpoints? For example, my various viewpoints are regularly categorized as either conservative or liberal to the point that it is virtually impossible for me to determine with any degree of reasonable precision what constitutes a conservative or liberal viewpoint.
Similarly, Mr. Horowitz’s latter recommendation sounds good in theory (“fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives”), but attempting to enforce such a guideline fails miserably in reality. Any speaker or teacher with good judgment who desires to persuade will necessarily incude different perspectives to his or her position. On the other hand, a speaker or teacher who does not have such good judgment may not. Should a university attempt to control the free flow of ideas within its community simply because the advocate of a certain position does not possess good judgment? Sometimes, even people who possess poor judgment have very good ideas.
Mr. Horowitz would be much better served in his efforts to begin an endowment program at various universities that would attract professors who would teach and perform research along the lines that he desires to promote. That would be putting his money where his mouth currently is. His “academic bill of rights” smacks of attempting to legislate good judgment, which is usually an abysmal failure.

That’s what it appears the Catholic Church is saying under its breadth.

After conceding that I have not had a chance to read Richard Clarke’s new book “Against All Enemies” yet, I nevertheless made the following observation regarding the Clarke affair in a post last week:

[T]o the extent that Mr. Clarke’s position is that the Bush Administration is more culpable for the 9/11 attacks than any one of the previous five (three Republican, two Democrat) administrations, his position is fundamentally flawed. America’s intelligence failures over the past generation have been the result of a litany of bipartisan mistakes. If Mr. Clarke is suggesting that the Bush Administration’s failures in this area are any more egregious than those of its predecessors, then he is doing his country a grave disservice and, in fact, is engaging in precisely the type of political posturing that has been so damaging to the intelligence community over the past 25 years.

In this Wall Street Journal ($) book review, Richard Miniter — author of “Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror” — echoes that thought and more:

A year ago, I thought Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton’s counterterror czar, was a hero. He and his small band of officials fought a long battle to focus the bureaucracy on stopping Osama bin Laden long before 9/11. For my own book, I interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively and found him to be blunt and forthright. He remembered whole conversations from inside the Situation Room.
So I looked forward to reading “Against All Enemies” (Free Press, 304 pages, $27). Yes, I expected him to put the wood to President Bush for not doing enough about terrorism — a continuation of his Clinton-era complaints — and I expected that he might be right. I assumed, of course, that he would not spare the Clinton team either, or the CIA and FBI. I expected, in short, something blunt and forthright — and, that rarest thing, nonpartisan in a principled way.
I was wrong on all counts. Forthright? One momentous Bush-era episode on which Mr. Clarke can shed some light is his decision to approve the flights of the bin Laden clan out of the U.S. in the days after 9/11, when all other flights were grounded. About this he doesn’t say a word. The whole premise of “Against All Enemies” is its value as an insider account. But Mr. Clarke was not a Bush insider. When he lost his right to brief the Cabinet, he also lost his ringside seat on presidential decision-making.

Mr. Miniter goes on to detail how Mr. Clarke’s book simply ignores the numerous known incidents of coordination between Iraq and al Qaeda:

He dismisses, as “raw,” reports that show meetings between al Qaeda and the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s intelligence service, going back to 1993. The documented meeting between the head of the Mukhabarat and bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1996 — a meeting that challenged all the CIA’s assumptions about “secular” Iraq’s distance from Islamist terrorism — should have set off alarm bells. It didn’t.
There is other evidence of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke should have felt obliged to address. Just days before Mr. Clarke resigned, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that bin Laden had met at least eight times with officers of Iraq’s Special Security Organization. In 1998, an aide to Saddam’s son Uday defected and repeatedly told reporters that Iraq funded al Qaeda. South of Baghdad, satellite photos pinpointed a Boeing 707 parked at a camp where terrorists learned to take over planes. When U.S. forces captured the camp, its commander confirmed that al Qaeda had trained there as early as 1997. Mr. Clarke does not take up any of this.

Mr. Miniter then notes Mr. Clarke’s failure to address the intelligence failures of the Clinton Administration, of which Mr. Clarke was a key player:

Curiously, about the Clinton years, where Mr. Clarke’s testimony would be authoritative, he is circumspect. When I interviewed him a year ago, he thundered at the political appointees who blocked his plan to destroy bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet in his book he glosses over them. He has little of his former vitriol for Clinton-era bureaucrats who tried to stop the deployment of the Predator spy plane over Afghanistan. (It spotted bin Laden three times.)
He fails to mention that President Clinton’s three “findings” on bin Laden, which would have allowed the U.S. to take action against him, were haggled over and lawyered to death. And he plays down the fact that the Treasury Department, worried about the effects on financial markets, obstructed efforts to cut off al Qaeda funding. He never notes that between 1993 and 1998 the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda. In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan, despite the links between Pakistan’s intelligence service and al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke excuses this decision — bin Laden managed to flee just before the strikes — as a diplomatic necessity.

To make matters worse, points out Mr. Miniter, Mr. Clarke’s book is just plain sloppy:

Or, better, “Against All Evidence.” Mr. Clarke misstates a range of checkable facts. The 1993 U.S. death toll in Somalia was 18, not 17. He writes that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed became al Qaeda’s “chief operational leader” in 1995; in fact, he took over in November 2001. He writes (correctly) that Abdul Yasim, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, fled to Iraq but adds the whopper that “he was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein’s regime.” An ABC News crew found Mr. Yasim working a government job in Iraq in 1997, and documents captured in 2003 revealed that the bomber had been on Saddam’s payroll for years.
Mr. Clarke gets the timing wrong of the plot to assassinate bin Laden in Sudan; it was 1994, not 1995, and was the work of Saudi intelligence, not Egypt. He dismisses Laurie Mylroie’s [author of “The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge“] argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn’t it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as “Rasheed the Iraqi”?

Finally, Mr. Miniter sums up Mr. Clarke’s book as follows:

In recent days we have been subjected to a great deal of Mr. Clarke, not least to replays of his fulsome apology for not doing enough to prevent 9/11. But he has nothing to apologize for: He was a relentless foe of al Qaeda for years. He should really apologize for the flaws in his book.

Richard Clarke’s book “Against All Enemies” that criticizes the Bush Administration’s role in the war on terror is already No. 1 on the Amazon.com bestseller list. Does that spell trouble for Mr. Bush’s re-election? Maybe not, says Alan Murray in this Wall Street Journal ($) column today:

The Amazon Web site says the Clarke book is being bought by the same readers who’ve already purchased titles like “Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth” by liberal journalist Joe Conason, and “The Lies of George W. Bush” by liberal journalist David Corn. Those books, in turn, are sold to folks who’ve already read Michael Moore’s “Dude, Where’s My Country?” and Al Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” This is a group that already believes George W. Bush is the nation’s prevaricator-in-chief, that he plundered working families to fatten the wallets of his CEO cronies, and that his major contribution to the war on terror was secretly shuttling bin Laden’s relatives out of the country. In comparison, Mr. Clarke’s charge — that the president didn’t pay enough attention to terrorism before Sept. 11 — is almost quaint.

Mr. Murray goes on to point out a disturbing trend in American political discourse:

To Mr. Hannity, all Democrats are “appeasers” and “moral relativists” — members of a political party that “has become unhinged.” Mr. Savage goes further, tagging Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean as the “modern-day descendants of Benedict Arnold.” Al Franken labels Republicans as “Chicken hawks” and racists, while Michael Moore blames President Bush himself — as well as those of us who drive SUVs — for fomenting terror.
Why write such tirades? Because they sell. . .

The bipolar bestseller list is just one more symptom of the disease that now infects American politics. The nation is becoming increasingly polarized. The left and the right view each other with distrust and disdain — even though their policy proposals often remain strikingly similar. Sane compromise in the center has become all but impossible.
The media — defined broadly — plays a big role in this unfortunate trend. The problem is not the power of “big media” — as some would have you believe. Rather, it is the unprecedented power of consumers to choose exactly what kind of media they wish to receive. Conservatives can get their news by watching Sean Hannity’s television show at night, listening to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show during the day, and creating a customized Internet newspaper that caters to all their biases — “The Daily Me,” as computer guru Nicholas Negroponte calls it. Liberals can do much the same — even more so after tomorrow, when Mr. Franken and friends launch Air America, a liberal radio network. Both sides have their prejudices constantly reinforced; neither has to confront the challenge of opposing views.
That leaves little tolerance for the kind of balanced, bipartisan inquiry that former Rep. Lee Hamilton and former Gov. Thomas Kean were trying to conduct last week. More power to them; they are members of a dying breed.

Lee Harris over at Tech Central Station has this interesting piece on Americans’ distaste for failure. Mr. Harris notes as follows:

If Americans have one collective shortcoming, it is that we have no use for failure. Success alone is what counts for us; and though we are apt to applaud those who have given their best to come in at second or third place, we all tend to shrink back from complete and abject failure.
That is why, whenever a President looks around for men to be by his side, to guide him and to give him counsel, he will look to those who have been successful at everything that they have put their hand to. It is one of our cherished mottos that success breeds success; and we are confident that if we appoint only successful men to positions of prominence, any project undertaken by these men is bound to be successful, too.
This is our form of paganism, since underlying the American myth of success is the primitive belief that some people are just plain lucky — just as certain numbers are, or certain days, or certain arrangements of the planets.

Mr. Harris goes on to discuss the Greek notion of hubris, which necessarily flows from success, and then recommends as follows:

Failure has lessons to teach us that are often far more valuable than those of success. Success all too often reassures us that we are right, and often with little reason. The man who sells everything he owes in order to buy lottery tickets, and who loses, becomes a little wiser. But the man who sells everything, and wins, will remain a fool forever.
Which is why I am hereby proposing a new department for the United States — the department of human failure, whose secretary should be appointed purely on the basis of his lack of worldly success. He will be required to attend every cabinet meeting, and at the end of each discussion, all the successful men around the table must listen in silence for the fiftieth time as the Secretary of Failure tells them how he lost his business, or how he gambled away a fortune, or how his summer vacation in Florida turned into the worst nightmare of his life.
True, it would not ascend to the lofty heights of Sophocles and Euripides; but it would help.

Thanks to my friend Bill Hesson for the link to Mr. Harris’ piece.

Texas senator John Cornyn and Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank spiced a Senate Judciary Committee hearing yesterday by getting into it on the issue of gay marriage.
For what it’s worth, I am not sold on gay marriage, but conclusory statements such as those made by Senator Cornyn yesterday do little to advance the political debate over gay marriage. What is his basis for the statement that gay marriage will undermine the institution of marriage? Statistical evidence? Scientific evidence? Or is his statement based on religious opposition to gay marriage? I do not know the basis for Senator Cornyn’s opposition to gay marriage, but the only way to have a productive political debate is to support one’s pronouncement on the issue with a persuasive (or even non-persuasive, if that is the case) basis for such pronouncement.
This related story deals with an issue that has the divorce lawyers salivating.

My buddy J.D. Walt of Asbury Seminary passes along this NY Times article regarding the just concluded Methodist Church trial in which a jury of 13 Methodist clergy members found that a fellow minister did not violate Methodist church law by being in a lesbian relationship.
The prosecution had argued that the case for conviction was cut and dried, because the law of the Methodist church as set forth in the Book of Discipline has included a passage that says homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The prosecution called only one witness. On the other hand, the defense team presented over 20 witnesses, including several Methodist legal scholars, who argued that the Book of Discipline and the Bible contain unclear and contradictory passages about homosexual relationships.
Although it appears that the prosecution may have thrown in the towel on this case before it ever started (one witness? no rebuttal witnesses?), the outcome nevertheless raises an interesting question on the related issue of gay marriage. That is, if Christian churches are allowing their leadership to be involved in gay relationships (note that the Episcopalians recently endorsed a gay bishop), and assuming that those same churches are not ready to endorse gay marriage, then are these churches going to support civil (i.e., non-religious) unions for gay couples?