Right Wing Nut House

If this were April 1, I might be inclined to think it a media joke. Or that the White House press office is pulling our leg.

But it is not and it makes me worry for the sanity of President Obama that he could actually believe that cutting  1/3,700 of the federal budget will make a dent in the $1.75 (at least) TRILLION debt he’s running up this year.

And the way the Obamapress is reporting this is hysterically funny - as if he is actually trying to cut the deficit. Here’s one of the major Obama rags in the country, the LA Times:

President Obama, whose healthcare and economic stimulus initiatives threaten to dramatically inflate the federal budget deficit, heralded a new push Saturday to cut wasteful spending in Washington.The president said that in coming weeks he would announce the elimination of “dozens of government programs.” And he said he would ask his Cabinet secretaries on Monday for specific proposals to slash their departments’ budgets, promising there would be “no sacred cows and no pet projects.”

The president singled out a move by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to end consulting contracts to create seals and logos that he said had cost the department $3 million since 2003.

In case you are unaware, it wouldn’t surprise me if DHS spends $3 million on exercise bikes for higher grade bureaucrats. They may spend that much on Kleenex for DHS offices. Hell, they might spend $3 mill on Napolitano’s dog biscuits - for her dog, of course.

And by the way, just what the hell was DHS doing spending millions of dollars on logos anyway? I know everyone in America wants a DHS T-shirt ’cause they’re so kewl but can’t they settle for a coffee mug with the Homeland Security seal on it?

Economist Greg Mankiw can’t believe it either:

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had be cut? By $3 over the course of the year–approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

Is the president that out of touch that he doesn’t know there are far riper trees to prune if he wants to go after government waste? The Pentagon always has a lot of bloat as do entitlement programs. Don’t need a pair of pruning shears there, an ax will do just fine. Just keep hacking away until someone starts screaming - and then hack some more.

And aren’t you proud of our president who is seeking to eliminate “dozens of programs” from the budget?  There may be thousands of programs that could safely be eliminated from corporate welfare to to some of the grants that are going to groups like ACORN, Operation PUSH, and other stick-up operations. Either Obama doesn’t have much of an imagination or he is making all the jokes about liberals never being able to cut the budget for fear of offending an interest group. To be sure, the American Society of Logo and Seal Designers will no doubt be up in arms over the DHS cuts. But then, they didn’t contribute to his campaign so Obama could care less what they think.

Energy, Transportation, HHS, Commerce, Education - the whole jiggling, fat laden, porky pig of a budget could stand a once over by those Department secretaries. Instead, what will be cut won’t even count as being superficial. More like a bad PR joke or Obama’s idea of responsible government - which, when you think about it, is pretty much the same thing.

Talking trillions and cutting billions would at least be in the ballpark. But saving $100 million dollars out of a budget of $3.6 trillion is a slap in the face to the taxpayer - a cynical public relations blitz. I hope it is not indicative of the way the president will approach deficit cutting in the future.

At the rate he’s going, the sun will burn out before the deficit is reduced to a manageable level.

Our founders were very suspicious of the presidency. There were many who believed - Thomas Jefferson among them - that all that was needed to govern a free country was a Congress elected by the people at suitably short intervals so that if a representative proved untrustworthy or unresponsive, the people could put someone else in his stead. Many of Jefferson’s ilk saw the presidency as an invitation to monarchy. And the very idea of a Supreme Court who might be able to overturn laws passed by Congress gave the Jeffersonians the vapors.

Thankfully for history’s sake, a more realistic and hard-headed approach to designing a system of government for the United States prevailed in Philadelphia during that God-awful hot summer of 1787. As the delegates sweated through the debates over big state-small state issues, it became clear that there should be some kind of federal office charged with making sure the laws were “faithfully executed.” Not a king or emperor supreme to Congress but an executive who would enforce the laws passed by the legislature as well as act as a representative of American sovereignty as Head of State and Commander in Chief of the military.

Several plans regarding the executive were presented and tossed aside including an idea to make the president little more than errand boy for Congress. Clearly, there were grave misgivings about granting a single individual so much power in a republic.

What turned the tide toward a strong executive branch was the certainty that George Washington would be our first president. While debating the limits and scope of the presidency, delegates would glance at Washington and be reassured that the office would start out in good hands at least. They knew that Washington would defend the United States with honor - something he did several times during his two terms when he responded to various calumnies advanced by the French who accused the US of favoring Great Britain in their war against Napoleon.

The Founders imbued the office of President with a dignity that few presidents have besmirched in our history. We have endured fools, knaves, stumblebums, party hacks, and political generals. But each of them tried honestly to defend the United States when she was attacked.

The president is ultimately responsible for the maintenance of American honor. And defending that honor is perhaps the greatest privilege - and challenge - of the office.

President Barack Obama either doesn’t understand this aspect of the presidency or, just as likely, doesn’t believe that safeguarding American honor is his job. Or even that it is worth his time.This became apparent as a result of what happened at the Summit of the Americas that the president is attending along with the heads of state from most of Latin America.

Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista Marxist thug who is currently President of Nicaragua, used his opening remarks at the summit to skewer the United States in a rant that lasted more than 50 minutes. The dripping irony of this communist lout decrying the actions of America over the last century (and longer) is a titanic joke. Ortega’s actions in support of the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador as well as his attempts to undermine governments elsewhere in Latin America during his first term as “president” back in the 1980’s makes anything he says regarding American interference ring hollow.

Ortega and the Sandinistas, along with a coalition of middle class and small businessmen deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The first thing the Sandinistas did - as any good little Communist would do - was to kick out the more moderate political partners who played a big role in the largely bloodless revolution, jailing some, and establishing a Marxist dictatorship. No other political parties were allowed to operate freely. Their rallies were broken up by black shirted thugs. They were denied air time on government controlled TV. Opposition leaders were routinely arrested, harassed, and beaten.

Almost immediately, he was opposed by former National Guard members who began an armed revolution that eventually - with the help of the US - forced Ortega to hold elections in 1990. Every lefty in America worth their salt traveled to Nicaragua to help Danny Ortega defeat the evil designs of the Americans. Ortega did his part by trying even harder to suppress the opposition, using his bully boys to intimidate and beat down - literally and figuratively - his opponents, led by Violetta Chamorro, publisher of La Prensa and leader of the National Opposition Union.

In the end, when given the choice between freedom and Communist tyranny, the people chose Chamorro. But before Ortega left office, he had his Sandanista legislature pass a law granting he and several of his cronies deeds to vast estates that were confiscated during his presidency. The theft made him fabulously wealthy.

In the intervening years he ran for the presidency twice and lost badly. Then, in 1998, his daughter shocked the world when she accused her father of sexually abusing her from the time she was 11 until 1990. Denied the opportunity to prove her case in Nicaragua, she took it to the Inter American Human Rights Commission which ruled the charges admissible. A settlement was reached with the government but Ortega’s daughter has never recanted the charges.

This is the man who stood in front of our president and railed against American interference in Latin America. Fond of pointing out American hypocrisy, our friends on the left are silent about both the Ortega diatribe and Obama’s “Grip and Grin” with that other paragon of democratic virtue and non-interference, Hugo Chavez. Instead, they have chosen to attack conservatives who are criticizing Obama for his being a bump on a log while Ortega skewers the country he supposedly leads and Chavez presents him with a book that is such a laughably, over the top, exaggerated, Marxist critique of American policy in the region that one wonders what planet it fell from. The author himself, Eduardo Galeano, admits he is not an historian nor does he write history but rather a combination of “fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history.”

I will be the first to admit that the United States has behaved very badly in Latin America over the years; there has been resource grabbing, commercial exploitation, support for thugs like Somoza, and CIA shenanigans in countries too numerous to count. Most of our military interventions were to keep pro-American governments in power or help stamp out leftist guerrillas. Some of our interventions were to prevent the expropriation of American companies so that commercial monopolies could be maintained. There’s worse and it’s all true.

What is also true is that for the last few decades, no nation has done more for Latin American democracy than the United States - and that includes leftists in Latin America who prove that when they get a chance to lead are as brutal and thuggish as any right wing dictator who ever ruled in the region. Galeano apparently has the honesty at least to point out that Latin America’s problems are largely the result of their own making - their own view of themselves.

Of course, he also makes it clear that Euro-American “colonialism” is the major cause of this but there is something more fundamental at work. Very few Latin American countries have established the rule of law as a basis for governance. This is not the fault of colonialism, or America, or the CIA but rather the fault of the people themselves. It is not blaming the victim to point out the numerous opportunities that Latin American nations have had to rectify this situation and have chosen instead the path of corruption, oppression, and tyranny. The ruling class in most Latin American countries is besotted with crony capitalists, confiscatory leftists, and ambitious generals. And it’s time to stop blaming America, colonialism, the CIA, United Fruit, and all the other scapegoats presented to their long suffering citizens as excuses for their poverty and hopelessness and place the blame where it belongs; in the face looking back at them in the mirror.

Ortega presented the classic Latin American leftist case for why when they get in power, they muck things up so badly and continue the cycle of extreme poverty; it’s America’s fault:

Ortega, meanwhile, droned on about the offenses of the past, dredging up U.S. support of the Somoza regime and the “illegal” war against the Sandinista regime he once led by U.S.-backed Contra rebels in the 1980s. Ortega was a member of the revolutionary junta that drove Anastasio Somoza from power in 1979 and was elected president in 1985. He was defeated in 1990 by Violeta Chamorro and ran unsuccessfully twice for the presidency before winning in 2006.

Of the 19th and 20th centuries, Ortega said: “Nicaragua central America, we haven’t been shaken since the past century by what have been the expansionist policies, war policies, that even led us in the 1850s, 1855, 1856 to bring Central American people together. We united, with Costa Ricans, with people from Honduras, the people from Guatemala, El Salvador. We all got together, united so we could defeat the expansionist policy of the United States. And after that, after interventions that extended since 1912, all the way up to 1932 and that left, as a result the imposition of that tyranny of the Samoas. Armed, funded, defended by the American leaders.”

Ortega denounced the U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s new Communist government in Cuba in 1961, a history of US racism and what he called suffocating U.S. economic policies in the region.

Ortega droned on for the better part of an hour and what was our president doing while a tin pot thug was running down his country, spreading exaggerated claims and outright lies?

Obama sat mostly unmoved during the speech but at times jotted notes.

He could have gotten up and walked out. That would have been the headline for the day as well as being the right thing to do. There should be a limit in the international arena of how much calumny can be heaped upon your country before honor requires a president to remove himself in protest. We can take a little intelligent criticism. But when the United States is savagely attacked, its honor impugned by a lying, child molesting, thieving, hypocritical Marxist gangster, I question the president’s judgment in sitting there and calmly “taking notes.”

Later, the president failed again to defend the United States when he gave a milquetoast response:

“To move forward, we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements. I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old. Too often, an opportunity to build a fresh partnership of the Americas has been undermined by stale debates. We’ve all heard these arguments before.”

Has a president ever tried to distance themselves from the history of their own country in such a shocking and narcissistic way? Obama makes absolutely no attempt to answer Ortega or call him the liar that he is. Instead, he shows incredible weakness by, in effect, validating Ortega’s critique while attempting to wash his hands of the history of his own country.

But this is patriotic, of course as I have written about before. Recognizing the faults of America, trying to outdo our foreign critics in trashing one’s own country is leftist dogma. I don’t doubt the president’s patriotism (according to his lights) nor do I mind Obama going around the world apologizing for what he perceives are our mistakes. I expect no better from a liberal. But this is different. The honor of the United States demanded a ringing defense of the many good things we have done and are doing for Latin America. The scales may not balance but to quit the ring without throwing a punch smacks of either cowardice or ignorance.

Obama is no longer a leftist senator projecting his ideological slant and accepting criticism of the US from foreigners as just and necessary. He is now head of state and thus charged with defending the US from attacks like Ortega’s. Someone has to stand up for the United States in forums like the summit. In this, the president has failed his first big test as chief executive. The State Department can’t be counted on to defend America from such attacks (Secretary Clinton wouldn’t even talk about the Ortega rant.) Only one person is charged by history and tradition to call out the lying thugs who besmirch the name of the US and thus, deliver a slap in the face not just to the government but the people of America as well.

The president’s meek acceptance of Ortega’s largely unjustified criticism may play well among his ideological soul mates but for the rest of us, it causes one to wonder if there is any calumny, any lie, any exaggerated falsehood that Obama would balk at accepting.

Judging by what happened at the summit, I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.

UPDATE

Most of my critics so far think it childish or just not a good idea for Obama to have walked out on Ortega when he was railing against America.

Here are some folks who walked out on Ahmadinejad at Durban II in Geneva when he went into his anti-Israeli speil.

And it wasn’t even their country the Evil Elf was ranting against.

I was a johnny-come-lately to the idea that the severe interrogation techniques being employed against some prisoners held by the US crossed the line of legality and constituted illegal torture. Chalk it up to excessive partisanship. Or ignorance. Or perhaps fear of going against the grain of conservative opinion in the blogosphere.

The fact is, for more than a year after I began blogging, I either excused or ignored evidence that proved the Bush Administration was guilty of sacrificing our most cherished values in order to protect us. It wasn’t until early November of 2005 that I offered a somewhat rambling discourse on why torturing prisoners besmirched our nation’s good name and made the Bush Administration complicit in violations of American and international law. Despite being troubled by the evidence previous to that, I said nothing, wrote nothing, except the usual talking points still found, it pains me to say, in most conservative and Republican internet salons today.

What changed my mind? I tried to reconstruct my thought process by going through my archives and it turns out that there were two people whose writing finally opened my eyes to the illegalities being practiced by the Bush Administration - two writers who I rarely read today for reasons not related to the torture issues but who I must give credit for forcing me to look at the horror and reach the same conclusion they had; John Cole and Andrew Sullivan.

To those who are now nodding their heads with a knowing smirk on their face I will only say this; outright dismissal of views based solely on a writer’s ideological or even political leanings is the mark of the incurious and the ignorant. A grain of salt or two is helpful to be sure. Skepticism, the philosopher/educator Thomas Dewey remarked, is “the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.” And I am no doubt as guilty as the next blogger of being too quick with the snark when it comes to evaluating the case being made by an ideological opponent rather than using reason and logic to demolish an odious point of view.

Be that as it may, those two gentlemen’s writings were seminal in changing my opinion about what the Bush Administration was doing in our name. The fact that they believed sincerely they were doing it to protect us is not a valid excuse or justification. The idea that American military trainees also are forced to endure some of the “enahanced interrogation techniques” is the reasoning of a sophist. The trainees are not in United States custody and therefore, the officers responsible for these exercises are not subject to the same laws that military and intelligence professionals were required to follow with detainees - as were all officals in the Bush Administration. And whether you believe the Geneva Convention applied in the case of “enemy combatants” is also beside the point; no one repealed American law under which the Bush Administration was required to operate. As the Bybee memo proves beyond any reasonable doubt, the Administration was seeking a legal fig leaf in order to skirt that law as well as international treaties of which we are a signatory that clearly defines torture.

Tom MaGuire:

IN OUR NAME: The newly released torture memos are cold-blooded and clearly client-driven - the lawyers knew the answers they wanted and reasoned backwards.

The same could be said of the Yoo memos when the Bush Administration was seeking legal justification for their torture. Yoo knew full well what the Administration wanted - a sort of “Get out of jail free” card that would cover their behinds if anyone ever found out what they were doing. While this is true, there is another dynamic at work that seems to get short shrift by Bush Administration critics -a dynamic that, in some ways, makes the lawbreaking even more chilling.

Sure, they wished above all else to protect America from another attack. The sincerity of their beliefs must be granted them else one wanders off into territory reserved for kooks who believe Bush was a sadist and enjoyed torturing people. That they displayed enormous hubris in giving the middle finger to the law and proceeding marks them as cynics of the highest order.

Again, Maguire:

The US concern about actually harming someone comes through on every page. In fact, at one point (p. 36 of .pdf) the legal team wonders whether it would be illegal for the interrogators to threaten or imply that conditions for the prisoner could get even worse unless they cooperate. I suppose these memos will provide welcome reassurance of our underlying civility to both the world community and the terrorists in it.

The same holds true when discussing the “insect war” being fought on the internet today. The news that the Administration considered using one detainee’s fear of insects to extract information by locking him in a small box and telling him a stinging bug was in there with him is being derided on the right and used as proof that Bush was inhuman on the left. Both sides are wrong on this one. Using the threat of a stinging insect on someone with a phobia knowing it will terrorize him is clearly psychological torture and violates both US law and the Geneva Convention. But please, let’s not exaggerate or use wild hyperbole to make this any more than it is; one more example of the law being tossed aside - and not a particularly egregious example at that. The technique was never used.

Andrew Sullivan, who ridiculously complained yesterday when, a couple of hours after the memos had been released, some conservative writers had not commented on them, nevertheless reaches into the past to get to the heart of what the airing of this chapter in American history means:

Perhaps you are reading these documents alongside me. I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true.

Sullivan and many on the left have raised the specter of the Gestapo and Nazi Germany when discussing the techniques used on detainees but I think that misses the point. As Maguire points out, the Administration seemed torn about actually injuring even the worst of the terrorists they wished to single out for this treatment. Rather, it is the chilling, cold blooded legalese used by Bybee and the others that Andrew correctly judges as “the banality of evil.” It is reminiscent of the minutes that were found after World War II from the Wannsee Conference - the meeting of high level SS officers and Nazi party officials that developed “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” The bureaucratic language of murder far surpasses in evil what the Bybee memo reveals. But the tone is the same - a detatched, unemotional accounting of various torture regimes, whether they would hurt too much, whether the subject would be in any danger, how much psychological damage would be done by employing these techniques, and what kind of legal exposure interrogators would have. (Another, less apropos parallel but still relevant, would be some of the memos from I.G. Farban to the extermination camp commandants where the mass gassing of human beings using Zyklon-B was touted in language that must be read to be believed.)

No, Bush is not like Hitler nor is his Administration or Bybee fascist or Nazi. But when reading the Bybee memo (I have read only one of the Bradbury memos), you feel unclean - as if you were reading something that might be contagious. What in God’s name got into these people? You wonder what the hell the gentleman was thinking when he wrote it. Did he grasp the fact that he was in the process of justifying the deliberate infliction of pain on another human being? I suppose lawyers can do just about anything - defending Bin Laden in an American court if it comes to that - but Bybee, like a good little bureaucrat, followed orders issued by his superiors and what emerged from his mind and pen puts a terrible coda on Bush era policies that broke American and international law.

President Obama, required by law, released these memos and then appropriately gave a pass to the men and women who operated under their legal guidelines. Overall, he is showing a sensitivity to the issues that most of us on the right are not giving him much credit for. He has not recommended prosection of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other high level Administration officials - yet. It could be he is waiting to see which way the political wind blows. It could be he is reluctant to distract the country from what he considers more important business. It could even be that he may wish to employ some of the same techniques against high value targets in the future and doesn’t want to close down any of his options. I believe, like myself, he really doesn’t know how to proceed. Will there be war crimes trials? A special prosecutor? A blue ribbon, “non-partisan” truth commission? I doubt whether he even wants to make that decision which means he will leave it to the Democratic Congress. If so, I have little hope that anything useful will emerge from anything the rabid Bush haters, who spent 8 years undermining the policies of a Republican president, can come up with.

I am done writing trying to convince conservatives that I am right by arguing nits. I came to the conclusion that despite what I see as clear evidence of lawbreaking, others on the right sincerely believe otherwise. But if there are any conservatives out there reading this who are continuing to defend these actions by President Bush and his people but nevertheless feel troubled and unsure, I urge you to take a fresh look at the issues - if only to buttress your own defense. There is no shame in changing your opinion if you expose yourself to new facts, new insights and look at the issue from a new perspective.

What is it about paying taxes that make liberals coo and gurgle like a newborn making satisfied noises after soiling its diaper?

Last year, it was Matt Stoller who wrote:

I just paid my taxes, and I have to say, I always take pride when I do so. I don’t like having less money to spend, of course, and the complexity of the process is really upsetting. But I am proud to pay for democracy, and I feel when I do send money to the DC Treasurer and the US Treasury that that is what I am doing. The right-wing likes to pretend as if taxes are a burden instead of the price of democracy. And I suppose, if you hate democracy, as the right-wing does, then taxes are the price for paying for something you really don’t want. Personally, I find banking fees, high cable and internet charges, health care costs, and credit card hidden charges much more abrasive than taxes, because with those I’m just being ripped off to pay for someone’s summer home.

With that kind of carrying on for paying taxes, you can imagine the party Stoller throws when he makes a complete stop at a stop sign.

Not to be outdone this year, former Bill Clinton aide Paul Begala absolutely gushes about about tax day, calling it “Patriot’s Day” and slobbering over the fact that government gets to reach into his pocket and take his property:

Happy Patriots’ Day. April 15 is the one day a year when our country asks something of us — or at least the vast majority of us.

For those who wear a military uniform, those who serve the rest of us as policemen and firefighters and teachers and other public servants, every day is patriots’ day. They work hard for our country; many risk their lives — and some lose their lives.

But for the rest of us, the civilian majority, our government asks very little. Except for April 15. On this day, our government asks that we pay our fair share of taxes to keep our beloved country strong and safe.

Freedom isn’t free. That’s what the courageous World War II veterans of the American Legion taught me back in Texas Boys State decades ago. That phrase had special meaning for them. Those guys had seen buddies blown apart at Anzio or Guadalcanal.

grew up in a different era. There was no draft, and while I have friends and family members who joined the military, most of my peers, like me, opted for the security and prosperity of the private sector.

This country has showered me with the blessings of liberty. So what do I owe my country in return? Paying my fair share of taxes, it seems, is the least I can do. Thanks to President Obama and the Democratic Congress, 95 percent of Americans will get a tax cut this year. No one — not even the wealthiest 1 percent — will have to pay higher income taxes until 2011.

Begala uses this lilting tribute to our IRS overlords as a segue into attacking the tea parties:

That a bunch of overpaid media millionaires would lead a faux-populist revolt is comical. They somehow held their populist instincts in check as George W. Bush and the Republicans cut taxes on the idle rich and put the screws to the working stiffs.
Bush’s tax policies were a godsend to the Paris Hilton class, but they sent the country on the road to bankruptcy and helped ruin the economy. But now that we the people have decided to set things right, now that we’ve hired Obama to fix the mess conservatives created, now they’re protesting?

What kind of government do we get when so many kowtow to the authority of the state and achieve rapture through the simple, utilitarian act of obeying the law?

Government is not a living entity to be worshipped. It is, at best, a utility - and would that it were run as well as Verizon or AT&T. Of course, everyone realizes that government is a necessary part of living in America and that those who toil for it - for the most part - are deserving of our admiration and respect.

But in America, it is the people - in the aggregate - who deserve Begala and Stoller’s ecominums. We who created government, who require it to bend to our will (ideally), are far more important in the scheme of things than the force of nature that government has become and that liberals wish to use as a club to shape their utopia. It is unseemly in a republic for citizens to actually get excited about obeying the law and paying one’s taxes. In fact, it’s goofy. Gleefully handing over one’s property to an entity that is just as likely as build a bridge to nowhere as build something much more useful like an F-22 reveals a worldview that doesn’t respect the value of their neighbor’s property, that what belongs to the citizen also belongs to the government.

Stoller and Begala’s hymns of praise to government nauseate me. The reason is simple; you cannot value freedom if you value government above all else. April 15 is not a day of celebration. It is just another day that we can thank our stars that we live in the United States and people like Begala and Stoller haven’t won - yet.

I wonder if the FBI is going to have enough agents to cover all the tea parties scheduled for tomorrow?

It was easier to keep track of us crazy right-wing (or is it rightwing?) fanatics in the old days. I can recall going to several demonstrations at the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C. back in early 1980 to protest against the Iranians holding our diplomats (they wouldn’t let us any closer to the shuttered Iranian embassy). Working the outskirts of the crowd with their cameras were two or three guys whose clothing and demeanor screamed “Feds!.” They took pictures of everyone in the crowd of about 200 and then got in their dark sedans and left. No doubt, on some old fashioned microfiche somewhere in the bowels of FBI headquarters, there are images of a young me, face twisted in anger, shaking a fist at a burning effigy of Ayatollah Khomenei. (In fact, there is an inset picture of me doing exactly that on the contents page of a Newsweek from that period.)

Today, technology has married with Big Brother to make it possible for the FBI, Homeland Security, ATF, and all the police apparatus of the state to determine whether I’m a threat before I even leave my house. The science of security has advanced far beyond our wildest dreams in the 1980’s as the tools to spy on American citizens become ever more intrusive and problematic. In addition to the technology available to today’s internal security agencies, huge advances in the science of psychology aid the state in profiling who might be a threat.

During the Bush years, anarchists and far left anti-war activists (and some who were ludicrously innocent) became targets of interest for the FBI and other agencies. Then of course, there’s the whole NSA program/Terrorist Surveillance matter that President Obama continues in some form to this day. Many on the left and right believe that these programs have broken the law, going too far in seeking to protect the United States from another terrorist attack. If they haven’t broken the law, they have certainly walked right up to the line of legality and pushed the envelope.

You may recall the Republican Convention of 2008 where activists, planning to disrupt the proceedings, were taken into custody as a preemptive measure against what the authorities considered to be the threat of violence.

There is more, of course, Without much fanfare, government has expanded its powers to evaluate the threats that ordinary citizens pose to security. We on the right apparently didn’t mind very much as long as the left was being targeted, although agencies like the FBI and ATF have had a long standing interest in keeping track of the various militias, skin head groups, radical Christian racists, and other right wing fanatics who have been a concern for a couple of decades.

I say that conservatives “apparently” didn’t care because for the last 8 years it was never a big issue on the right except when the occasional court case would be decided or some nugget of information about the Bush administration’s internal security efforts would be leaked. And then it a was a four square defense of Bush and attempts to justify what the administration was doing. Why that is true I can only speculate but I have to go back to the fact that the targets of these programs were not people loyal to George Bush and the Republicans and hence, the cocooning that is part of both the left and right blogosphere allowed most conservatives to ignore the problem or excuse it.

Judging by this report from Homeland Security entitled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” it would appear that the shoe is about to be placed on the other foot and it is now the turn of conservatives to become targets of interest for the internal security forces of the United States. But instead of targeting the usual suspects like the Kluxers and Skin Heads, DHS apparently believes that you may be a threat if you are anti-abortion or anti-immigration reform:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

And our returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan will bear close watching, according to DHS:

Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

Now it should be said that most of this document deals with the threat posed by the kooks. But there are troubling references throughout that make it clear that not toeing the administration’s line on some issues is enough to warrant attention:

Over the past five years, various rightwing extremists, including militias and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.

If you are passionate about enforcing the law against illegal immigrants and protecting our borders, you may become a target. If nothing else, this kind of thing may have a chilling effect on internet free speech. If you’ve read as many pro-enforcement rants as I have, you know that hyperbole and exaggeration are sometimes used to make the author’s point. Such rhetoric now could easily be construed as “right wing extremism” and make the writer a person of interest.

Anti-gun control advocates may also become targets:

(U//FOUO) Open source reporting of wartime ammunition shortages has likely spurred rightwing extremists—as well as law-abiding Americans—to make bulk purchases of ammunition. These shortages have increased the cost of ammunition, further exacerbating rightwing extremist paranoia and leading to further stockpiling activity. Both rightwing extremists and law-abiding citizens share a belief that rising crime rates attributed to a slumping economy make the purchase of legitimate firearms a wise move at this time.

(U//FOUO) Weapons rights and gun-control legislation are likely to be hotly contested subjects of political debate in light of the 2008 Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller in which the Court reaffirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but left open to debate the precise contours of that right. Because debates over constitutional rights are intense, and parties on all sides have deeply held, sincere, but vastly divergent beliefs, violent extremists may attempt to co-opt the debate and use the controversy as a radicalization tool.

By lumping legitimate concerns about draconian gun control measures by second amendment advocates - who can be just as passionate as pro-enforcement writers - with right wing extremists, it is an open invitation to treat just about anyone as a potential threat.

Understand there is no particular animus on the part of the national security apparatus toward the right (or left for that matter) but rather the simple, dumb brute bureaucratic mindset that will always seek to expand the scope of their little universe to include as many groups and individuals as possible just through sheer momentum. Bureaucrats believe they are doing a good job if their departmental budgets increase every year and in order to do that, they must justify their request for additional funds by making work for themselves. If you are borderline in your advocacy (by their lights) chances are, you will become part of their little digital dragnet if for no other reason than bureaucratic “progress” is measured in how many more kooks your department is keeping track of this year than last.

I think Michelle Malkin - no doubt on someone’s list somewhere - nails it pretty good here:

They were very defensive — preemptively so — in asserting that it was not a politicized document and that DHS had done reports on “leftwing extremism” in the past. I have covered DHS for many years and am quite familiar with past assessments they and the FBI have done on animal rights terrorists and environmental terrorists. But those past reports have always been very specific in identifying the exact groups, causes, and targets of domestic terrorism, i.e., the ALF, ELF, and Stop Huntingdon wackos who have engaged in physical harassment, arson, vandalism, and worse against pharmaceutical companies, farms, labs, and university researchers.

By contrast, the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives. And the intent is clear. As the two spokespeople I talked with on the phone today made clear: They both pinpointed the recent “economic downturn” and the “general state of the economy” for stoking “rightwing extremism.” One of the spokespeople said he was told that the report has been in the works for a year. My b.s. detector went off the chart, and yours will, too, if you read through the entire report — which asserts with no evidence that an unquantified “resurgence in rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalizations activity” is due to home foreclosures, job losses, and…the historical presidential election.

In Obama land, there are no coincidences. It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party-bashing left-wing blogs (check this one out comparing the Tea Party movement to the Weather Underground!) and demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party.

Without any evidence, DHS has decided that the current recession has so unhinged conservatives that many are likely to go from advocacy to violence after hearing the Siren song of extremists. As Malkin points out, past assessments of potential left wing extremism have focused on specific groups. This report - offering very little in the way of statistical support for its findings - paints a frightening picture of armed militias and “lone wolf” extremists posing a threat to our security. One might assume that militia membership has increased. But is that enough to justify targeting conservatives in an expanded government effort against legitimate targets like Kluxers and Skin heads?

There is no evidence presented in the document that militia recruitment has spiked or is an imminent threat. In fact, they say as much in their conclusion:

DHS/I&A assesses that the combination of environmental factors that echo the 1990s, including heightened interest in legislation for tighter firearms restrictions and returning military veterans, as well as several new trends, including an uncertain economy and a perceived rising influence of other countries, may be invigorating rightwing extremist activity, specifically the white supremacist and militia movements. To the extent that these factors persist, rightwing extremism is likely to grow in strength. (emphasis mine)

Pardon me, but the fact is, DHS doesn’t know squat and is only guessing. And it appears to me they are using the possible increased threat from extremists to target those whose only sin appears to be having strong disagreements with the administration over political issues.

So as I wondered at the top of this piece, will the FBI have enough agents to cover all the tea parties tomorrow? And if you’re at a tea party and you see some nondescript individual at the edges of the crowd snapping pictures or taking movies, don’t accost them. Offer them a cup of coffee. They’re just doing a job they were sent to do by others whose agenda - at least as it appears from reading the DHS report - is inimicable to liberty and antagonistic toward legitimate political debate.

In the futuristic movie Soylent Green, life is so bad due to overpopulation that people are encouraged to go to suicide centers where they can end their lives comfortably. The catch is that the dead bodies are then recylced into food - “Soylent” Green, Red, and other rainbow colors all to feed the hungry billions.

Suicide has an interesting history in the west where some societies actually thought it an honorable exit. Since most who took advantage of lax societal standards on taking one’s own life were in trouble with the government in one way or another and destined for execution, the alternative to how the government was going to kill you seemed a much less painful way to go.

But the troubling aspect of Soylent Green was that it was so horrifying a thought to believe that government would ever go so far as encouraging people to end their lives in order to save precious resources for the living. It could never happen in a million years, right? Just a dumb movie, eh?

Art imitates life:

The founder of the Swiss assistedsuicide clinic Dignitas was criticised yesterday after revealing plans to help a healthy woman to die alongside her terminally ill husband.

Ludwig Minelli described suicide as a “marvellous opportunity” that should not be restricted to the terminally ill or people with severe disabilities. Critics said that the plans highlighted the risks of proposals to legalise assisted suicides in Britain for people in the final stages of a terminal illness.

The Dignitas clinic in Zurich claims to have assisted in the deaths of more than 100 Britons. The Zurich University Clinic found that more than a fifth of people who had died at Dignitas did not have a terminal condition.

Mr Minelli said that anyone who has “mental capacity” should be allowed to have an assisted suicide, claiming that it would save money for the NHS.

Did you get that? Suicide would “save money” for the national health care boondoggle in Great Britain. And that’s a reason to allow suicide for healthy people? 

By definition, someone who seriously contemplates suicide who is healthy otherwise is mentally ill. The short circuiting of the brain’s survival mechanism occurs in deep depressions brought on by disease. Clinically depressed people cannot choose suicide because they are not responsible.  A depression that so debilitates someone that they care not whether they live or die and thus allows them to see death as a way out of their psychic pain can be treated with the proper drugs and within a few months, the individual will look back on that dark period and wonder how they could have contemplated ending their own lives. With death having such a hard finality to it, it is up to government to protect, not encourage those whose mental condition prevents them from making a rational choice. 

Since our culture has forbidden suicide, the argument that “the Romans did it” doesn’t hold much water. What one society finds acceptable, another may outlaw. The Romans also allowed gladiator games for a time where participants fought to the death. Should be emulate them in that activity also? 

And yet, here’s this guy pushing people who aren’t terminally ill to take the needle and end it all. I would like to point out that assisted suicide opponents have been making this argument for years and been ridiculed for doing so - that helping terminally ill patients end their lives was only the first step down a slippery slope that would one day include healthy people being encouraged to end their lives and even government some day deciding who stays and who goes.

That last seems a bit of a stretch today. But back in the 1970’s when Soylent Green was playing in theaters, how weird was it to see healthy people going to a designated place to end their lives?  In short, anything can happen once you take a walk on a road where possibilities are only as remote as the limits we place upon ourselves.

What about that slippery slope now?

My friend Jennifer Rubin, true to her kindly and expansively beneficent nature, is  being generous to a fault when she says of the GOP’s overly generalized spending proposals released yesterday that it proves there is life in the Grand Old Party:

While they have yet to spell out exact figures or provide the comprehensive budget itself, the “Republican Road to Recovery” does preview their plan and goes some distance toward shooting down the Democrats’ spin that Republicans have “no ideas.”

Calling the document a “preview” is like going to a PG-13 rated movie to watch the sex scenes: There isn’t much to see and what’s there is usually shrouded in darkness or hidden by the sheets.

It’s nonsense, of course, as Ezra Klein rightly points out:

If you’re having a bad day, I highly encourage you to spend some quality time with the Republican budget proposal. It’s reads like what would happen if The Onion put together a budget. “Area Man Releases Proposal for 2010 Federal Spending Priorities.” (Though, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, it turns out that I’d prefer a federal budget written by an area man than the first six names on the House Republican Leadership roster.)

Ezra, unlike Jennifer, can be wickedly ungenerous and downright mean when he wants to be. In this case, however, he may be on to something. He highlights the fact that this “plan” is something akin to the million monkey theory of government - and the monkeys never were able to figure out arithmetic:

There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “budget” as “an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time.” This is not a budget. It talks about balancing the budget but doesn’t explain how. It advocates tax cuts but doesn’t estimate their costs. It promises to cut programs but doesn’t name them. The threat going around the Capitol is that some impish Democratic chairman will ask the CBO to try and score the Republican proposal.

In fact, the backstory on this idiocy is even more entertaining than a budget with no numbers. There is, in the works, a Republican budget alternative that will apparently be offered by ranking minority member on the Budget Committee Paul Ryan next week and whose staff has been slaving for weeks pulling together credible numbers and receiving input from many sources. It is designed to be a detailed and realistic alternative to what the Democrats have put out there so far.

But the Ryan amendment was being crafted on a parallel track with the “Road to Recovery” document which is nothing more than political pablum - and rancid oatmeal at that. The R to R was apparently a GOP leadership project pushed by Mike Pence who is pushing something else as well - his own personal presidential ambitions:

Ryan, the ranking Republican on the budget committee, plans to introduce a detailed substitute amendment for the Democrats’ spending plan next Wednesday — and still intends to do so.

But he and Cantor were reportedly told by Boehner and Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) they needed to move more quickly to counter Democrats’ charge they were becoming the “Party of No,” according to House GOP staffers.

The 19-page document, prepared by Pence’s office, was distributed two days after  President Obama criticized Republicans for trashing his detail-crammed 142-page budget outline without producing a credible alternative.

“In his egocentric rush to get on camera, Mike Pence threw the rest of the Conference under the bus, specifically Paul Ryan, whose staff has been working night and day for weeks to develop a substantive budget plan,” said a GOP aide heavily involved in budget strategy.

“I hope his camera time was gratifying enough to justify erasing the weeks of hard work by dozens of Republicans to put forth serious ideas,” the person added.

Tellingly, Eric Cantor is also objecting to Pence’s vapid effort at “blueprinting” what Ryan’s staffers are getting eyestrain trying to make into a serious legislative document.

Cantor and Ryan were reportedly “embarrassed” by the document — believing it was better to absorb a week of hits from Democrats than to be slammed for failing to produce a thoughtful and detailed alternative.

The goal, aides say, was to make Obama’s team eat their words by producing a “killer” alternative with far less spending and greater tax cuts.

I’m not even a real Republican anymore and I’m embarrassed too. By releasing this empty suit of a budget proposal, the GOP has cut the legs from underneath Ryan and doomed his alternative by making it irrelevant.  Not that it would have passed. But given the times, I daresay it would have at least gotten some kind of a hearing by the media who would have been forced to report on GOP projections for spending and revenue as a serious counter to the Obama plan.

But thanks to Pence and the leadership nervously jumping the gun by wrongly believing that getting something out there - anything - was better than waiting for Ryan’s staff to finish their work, they have condemned the amendment to little more than a cursory inspection by the media and hence the public. Ryan’s amendment will be old news next week since the outline of what will probably be in there (since the two sides didn’t coordinate their efforts, God knows what differences there might be) has already been released and laughed at.

What a pathetic exercise. And these guys think they’re going to waltz to victory in 2010 on the ruins of an Obama economy?

They don’t deserve anything except a seat on the back bench.

Sometime in the next 20 years, there is a better than average chance that I will develop Alzheimer’s disease. By better than average, I mean that the average American male has a 9% chance that he will get the disease in his 3 score and 15 year life span - a percentage that rises the longer you live. Thanks to the courage of my brother Terry, who took a DNA test to discover whether he had any of the genetic markers that would make him more likely to develop Alzheimer’s and discovered the increased risk to himself, I am reasonably certain that this risk is also present in my 9 brothers and sisters.

Terry took the test for his own, personal reasons and chose to share the results with Nightline viewers last night. (you can watch the two part video here and here). Allow me to brag a bit about my little brother and say that I believe his report is one of the most extraordinary pieces of TV journalism you will see on any subject in recent memory. Informative, interesting, emotional, affecting, and very personal, his 10 minute report covers a wide range of issues from exciting scientific advances to the journey of one Alzheimer’s activist whose husband and mother suffers from the disease.

For those not familiar with Terry’s work, I would point you to his interviews with both candidate and President Obama, his trips to Iraq and Afghanistan where he became one of the few reporters to venture beyond the Green Zone to get the story, and earlier in his career, a trip to the Balkans where he told the searing story of the Serbian rape camps among other horrors. To say I am proud of what he has accomplished doesn’t describe the feelings of love and admiration I have for him and his family.

Terry also wrote a companion piece on the ABC News website that goes into excruciating detail about my mother’s battle with the disease:

My mom, Margaret Louise Moran, had 10 children and lots of grandchildren and she led a joyful and active life until she was stricken by Alzheimer’s in her mid-60s. I saw her descend, in fear and rage, into the hell of forgetting and confusion and the total loss of identity the disease brings.

The worst thing for me, I think, was that I could tell my mother knew what was happening to her; she had watched it happen to her mother. She was terrified as the disease tore apart her mind. I remember sitting with her one morning, for hours, as she said over and over to me, “I want to kill myself. I am going to kill myself. I wish I could kill myself.” For hours. My mom.

So I know the heartbreak. And I know the fear — the fear that what happened to my mom might someday happen to me. Or worse, to my daughter.

That story is repeated millions of times across America as Alzheimer’s turns from being a tragedy into an epidemic. It is estimated that the number of people who will be afflicted with the disease will increase by 50% in a few years as the baby boom generation reaches the at risk age of 65. Those who live to be 85 have a 50% chance of being diagnosed with the disease.

These figures are grim. But they simply cannot reveal the quiet desperation of Alzheimer’s caregivers, trapped in their own hellish world where a parent, or spouse, or grandparent is, for all intents and purposes, a walking corpse with no memory of the love and laughter shared over a lifetime - not a flicker of recognition, a familiar touch, a meaningful look. Instead, a blank, uncomprehending stare or, toward the end, constant, agonizing screams. Is she in terrible pain? Or are there flashes of self awareness somewhere deep in her consciousness where she recognizes her condition and wishes her ordeal to end?

This, repeated millions of times every day across the land. The pain that this disease inflicts on families is heightened by the stigma attached to it - incomprehensible while looking at it from a distance -and the wrenching decisions faced every day by loved ones who must deal with the rising economic and psychic costs of Alzheimer.

My brother Jay took care of my mother during her long goodbye. We were lucky there. Many families simply cannot afford or endure the nightmare. Jay would sit with her for hours on end, listening to her regress back to childhood, saying the same things over and over again, telling the same stories. She spoke a lot about her late husband, about World War II, about childhood friends.

Then came the anger, the lashing out, the gradual deterioration of all memory until there was nothing left; no joy, no humanity, no hope. You fight to maintain her dignity but it is a losing battle. Eventually even that is gone.

All that’s left is the screaming in the dark.

We were additionally fortunate to have found 3 angels to help care for her the last few years of her life. Three Philipino nurses who combined professional efficiency with hearts of gold and who helped relieve some of the crushing burden. Needless to say, few families are able to afford this kind of care which makes the work of the scientists to discover a cure or, more likely, develop preventative drugs all the more vital.

Terry’s report featured a couple of these scientific warriors who hold out hope for a breakthrough in the near future. So much has been discovered about the disease in the last 5 years that pharma companies and other researchers now have some specific targets to direct their efforts. This extraordinary study of 678 nuns and the effects on the brain of aging that has been going on for more than 20 years has led to many insights for Alzheimer researchers to concentrate. New tools have also been developed to peer into the brain and unlock some of its secrets.

These efforts are taking place at a time when the federal government is considering a cut in spending on Alzheimer’s research. This study (PDF) that was just released by the Alzheimer’s Association predicts that as many as 10 million baby boomers - 1 in 8 - will develop the disease in their lifetime. This presents monumental problems for our health care industry although there appears to be some hope down the road:

Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, worries that there won’t be enough trained medical professionals to deal with the projected rise in Alzheimer’s patients.

“We are not training enough generalists or specialists in geriatrics, whether it’s medicine, psychiatry, family medicine, nursing or social work in the numbers we need to deal with people with dementia,” he said.

However, Kennedy also thinks the projected number of Alzheimer’s patients contained in the new report may be too high. Baby boomers are healthier, more active, better educated and wealthier than their parents, he noted, and this may help delay the development of the disease until the end of their natural lifespan.

Also, new medications may make Alzheimer’s manageable by slowing its progression, Kennedy said.

“Probably within the next five years we’re going to have medications that alter the course of the illness,” he said. “When that happens, you’re going to see pushing back of the disability of the illness even further. So we don’t have to cure Alzheimer’s disease, we just have to find interventions that are going to delay the disability.”

And this draft report (PDF) released by the Alzheimer’s Study Group during a Congressional hearing last week calls for a massive government research effort to increase funding for Alzheimer’s research which now stands at $640 million. Considering the fact that we spend 8 times that amount on cancer research and 5 times more on research into heart disease, an increase and not a cut in funds dedicated to wiping out this scourge should be in the offing.

What can be done? Terry has some ideas:

I believe the only way we are going to defeat Alzheimer’s is through passionate political advocacy — that’s what works in this country to mobilize public support and public resources to fight diseases. Think of the courage and commitment of those who have led the struggles against HIV/AIDS or breast cancer or other afflictions. They raised their voices, they made us listen.

But the victims of Alzheimer’s cannot speak for themselves as the disease takes them from us. They cannot march or testify or write books. And there is a sorrowful stigma attached to Alzheimer’s; it is a private ordeal, spoken of in hushed tones, shunted away in care facilities or behind closed doors where exhausted family members keep silent about the deepest indignities and worst horrors they witness and endure. And so the advocacy suffers.

There is simply too much defeatism around this disease. It is time to stand up and fight. There have been tremendous scientific advances in understanding Alzheimer’s in recent years, and there are now scores of drugs being tested to treat and even cure it. After so many years of despair, there is hope on the horizon.

Readers of this site know that making the personal the political is hardly my style. I am constantly complaining when the left does it and further, I believe that making politics into a personal quest to be detrimental to the political culture generally speaking. Personalizing politics has done a lot of damage to the national polity because it injects emotion into political debate where logic and reason should suffice.

But perhaps that has been a shortsighted attitude on my part. I suppose if I were being discriminated against because of my race, or gender, or sexual orientation, I might take that personally and my politics would almost certainly reflect that. Similarly, I take it personally that the government wishes to cut funding for Alzheimer’s research and the disease itself is not getting the attention it deserves. Considering what our family went through with my mother’s ordeal, I can hardly see it otherwise.

So in this case, the very personal is very political. And I thank Terry for showing us the way.

An interesting discussion piece in today’s Washington Times by Big Hollywood’s Andrew Breitbart that tries and make the case that Americans today, compared to the “Greatest Generation” that fought World War II, are a bunch of weak willed wimps, enamored of wealth and privilege while being frightened of our own shadow. In short, we are a bunch of self-indulgent philistines who lack the capacity to deal with the numerous crisis in our midst.

We’ve all heard this rant before - as I’m sure the “Greatest Generation” heard it from their elders back in the 1930’s and the generation before them, and on backwards to the founding of the republic where as early as Washington’s administration, ministers were bemoaning the loss of the “revolutionary spirit” and the desire by a majority of the populace for “material possessions” rather than seeking spiritual uplift. I guess it goes without saying that the more things change, the more likely the previous generation sees a danger that American values are threatened.

The question: Is it truer today than it was in the past? Has something “gone out” of America in the last decade or two?

Breitbart cites 9/11 as clear evidence that something has:

Signs of our collective weakness emerged after 9/11 when only part of the American population took seriously that we were at war with an evil and motivated enemy determined to destroy our way of life. Since then, al Qaeda has refused to quit despite debilitating losses.

Clearly, our national will is wilting away.

Following the tragic lead of Europe, too many Americans no longer want to engage our external threats head-on. And on the domestic front, we are confronting the economic crisis of our lifetime with the same full-steam-ahead spending-spree mind-set that got us into the mess to begin with.

We say: Let’s create more government dependency, reward the incompetent and print more money.

That’s doubling down on stupidity.

We are a trust-fund nation (picture Tori Spelling in the Lifetime Channel role of her career) whose BMW has run out of gas in the middle of the Mojave Desert after a pointless 115-miles-per-hour joy ride. The credit cards are maxed out. We’re out of cell phone range. And dad, who just got taken by Uncle Bernie Madoff, wouldn’t take the call anyway.

I would say that Mr. Breitbart is off base. Much more than a “part” of the population wants to confront al-Qaeda. The question up for debate - and still being debated - is what is the best way to go about doing that? There are those of us who believe that we must hit them militarily and keep hitting them no matter where they hide. Many others believe that this strategy “creates more terrorists” and wants to see a more studied approach to the threat that would rely almost exclusively on intelligence and law enforcement actions to break up terrorist cells before they can strike.

Is one approach “wimpier” than the other? Is the law enforcement path less in tune with our values and national character? I have been struggling with this question since 9/11 and I still don’t have an answer as far as which path would keep us safer although the biggest drawback to the law enforcement/intelligence argument is that it isn’t proactive enough, that it presupposes we will be hit and that the response to terrorism should be grounded in bringing the perpetrators to “justice.” In the nuclear age, this is myopic in the extreme which is why I come down on attacking al-Qaeda and keeping them constantly off balance and unable to mount a serious attack.

But that’s not the question. Breitbart is positing the notion that people who oppose this kind of war lack intestinal fortitude and other qualities that made the World War II generation the “Greatest.” I reject that idea as silly - turning a political/policy argument into a litmus test for who better represents the “real America.” (Liberals and others who support the police/law enforcement approach are equally silly when they accuse those of us who support a more proactive approach as being “warmongers.”) Ideally, a combination of the two policies would probably work best although it is never that simple.

But the argument over how to confront terrorism after 9/11 is symptomatic of something much deeper and Breitbart continuously misses the boat when he lays out arguments like this in describing the Baby Boom generation:

We are a trust-fund nation (picture Tori Spelling in the Lifetime Channel role of her career) whose BMW has run out of gas in the middle of the Mojave Desert after a pointless 115-miles-per-hour joy ride. The credit cards are maxed out. We’re out of cell phone range. And dad, who just got taken by Uncle Bernie Madoff, wouldn’t take the call anyway.

The silent generation, which learned valuable lessons from the Depression and World War II, is not here to guide us through these difficult times. The narcissistic baby boomers, who probably think this song is about them, are now firmly in charge. And that’s the rub.

It’s a clever metaphor but hardly the point. Mr. Breitbart hasn’t been paying attention because what he is describing is nothing new. Since the mid 1980’s, Americans have been in hock up to their eyeballs and the economy has been wholly dependent on how willing consumers have been to pile on personal debt. There is nothing new in Americans buying more house than they need or can afford nor is there anything earth shattering in the extraordinary number of citizens who try and escape their bad personal financial decisions by declaring bankruptcy which has been on the rise for a quarter century. It’s not just the boomers who have become irresponsible but their children and now grandchildren.

We are coming up on the 64th anniversary of the end of World War II. In those 64 years America has seen the rise of democratic socialism in the form of a very large and intrusive welfare state that has destroyed the notion of “self reliance” and substituted dependency for the underclass. What of the rest of us? Are we, as Breitbart suggests, a “trust fund nation?” Andrew must lead a very sheltered life. I look around me and see my neighbors struggling - in good times and bad - to make their way through life, raising their children, finding happiness wherever they can, and still believing in an America that he and I would definitely recognize.

These and tens of millions of other families outside of Andrew’s Hollywood bubble have not abandoned the ideals of prudence, independence, self-reliance, and the American way of life. They have not given up on helping their neighbor. They refuse to yield on moral questions about which they feel passionately. They haven’t completely lost faith in our institutions although the last several years has tested that faith.

There is a small percentage of irresponsibles who do not share these values and have totally abandoned them. And yet Mr. Breitbart sees fit to lump the rest of us in with these profligates? Is it because so many voted for Obama?

When the going gets tough, the weak go on Leno.

I can’t get out of my head that the leader of the free world gave the British prime minister 25 films on DVD that don’t even work in U.K. machines.

I can’t wrap my head around the fact that the commander in chief tried (for a minute anyway) to require injured warriors to pay to have private insurers take care of their treatment.

I can’t believe the president would allow the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to dictate the terms of his budget - and Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd, the symbols of government kowtowing to Wall Street - to be spokesmen for his financial bailout.

And did President Obama really produce a YouTube video to appease President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs of Iran?

Yes, he did.

These aren’t beginner’s mistakes. These are his core incompetencies.

So because we voted an incompetent into office, this proves that our “national will is wilting away?” Pardon me if I am completely unimpressed.

What Mr. Breitbart is really railing against are our elites. Many of them have indeed become overly cynical, hypocritical, greedy, grasping and acquisitive. There has been a massive failure of leadership in America - both parties, the business world, in organized labor, the intelligentsia, and most especially, the political class that includes politicians, bureaucrats, big media, and the loosely defined gaggle of academic intellectuals, policy wonks, and think tankers who play such a large role in actually governing the country. To say that they have all let us down is an understatement. Be as partisan as you like but no one can escape blame for our current mess.

It seems our elites have got it in their head that once they reach a certain level of achievement in America, they have a license to rob, cheat, and steal everything that isn’t nailed down. This sense of entitlement is perhaps the most damaging aspect of modern America. And I would say to Mr. Breitbart that this is a cross-generational phenomenon and not confined to the boomers. The president of the United States is making the argument that it is “greed” that is to blame. Such simple minded idiocy we might expect from a sophomore in high school (or a liberal). Greed is a symptom of the much larger problem that we refuse to face; a loss of faith in our institutions and, more directly, in each other.

At bottom, we don’t know who we are anymore. The old verities - as comforting as an pair of old shoes - don’t describe what we have become the last 50 years; a modern, industrialized nation, wired from one end of the continent to the other, that has destroyed regional differences (which played such a huge role in our development) and united us as we have never been united before. What does “self reliance” mean when we depend so much on government for such mundane things as making sure we have clean water to drink or safe highways, or bridges that won’t collapse, or prevent us from buying products that might kill or injure our children? You can claim “self reliance” all you want but how meaningful is it when you can’t even turn on the faucet without the help of government?

We have yet to translate these American values into modern nomenclature. The values aren’t anachronistic, only the way we define them. This is something I have been preaching for many months as I have struggled to redefine conservatism for my own aggrandizement. I’m not sure how to go about doing it, only that it needs to be done. We are, most of us, looking at an America through a spyglass that is giving us a view of the past, not an America is it exists today. And the biggest rub is we wouldn’t know how to describe it even if we could see it. There are no touchstones, no signposts that can aid us in coming to grips with this brave new world.

The practical effect of this is it has unmoored so many and set adrift the idea of a shared American experience so that morals and values become meaningless. This leads to excesses in our culture, hedonism, a catering to our own pleasures, and a destructive selfishness that goes beyond simple minded ideas of “greed” and warps the fabric of our national polity.

All of this, for lack of leadership.

Breitbart believes he has the “answer:”

The last time I felt this hopeless was when the Democratic Party and its cohorts in the media sold us on the false premise that we lost the war in Iraq. In the process, they also sought to demonize the very man that led us out of our peril.

His name is Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Less than two months into the Obama presidency, which appears to be lost somewhere in the Mojave Desert, I have decided to try to soothe my anxieties by placing my hope in a political surge.

In the election of 2010, Republicans should run heroic veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom who exhibited the will and fortitude to defeat the enemy and to rebuild a torn nation, even while too many of their fellow countrymen wrote them off.

And in 2012, the man President Obama’s staunchest allies called “General Betray Us” should come in with guns blazing and defeat the man whose only weapon to lead us to victory is a teleprompter.

Generals make lousy presidents, generally speaking and politically inexperienced generals have been disasters. The exception is Eisenhower who lived and breathed politics for 3 years as Supreme Allied Commander, working the miracle of keeping a coalition together that featured ultra-capitalist and ultra-marxist states, not to mention maintaining a good relationship with some of the prickliest, most outsized personalities in world history including FDR, Churchill, Stalin, and DeGaulle. Ike was born to be president and made a damn fine one.

But Petreaus? He may in fact be an improvement as far as leadership is concerned over the current occupant of the White House (whose interview on 60 Minutes was almost surreal in the way he giggled about economic disaster), but it is ridiculous to believe the good general is the answer to a prayer. General Petreaus would almost certainly be just as dependent on a teleprompter as President Obama given his extraordinary lack of experience in the political arena. And the fact that Obama depends on the device isn’t the problem; it’s that we were sold a bill of goods on how articulate he was without one. How Petreaus would be an improvement in that regard is immaterial to whether he could do a better job with the economy. Since we don’t have a clue what the General thinks on that issue, the whole idea of him running for president is moot.

None of this deals with the core problem I mentioned above - of an America that is in the midst of a gigantic upheaval of which we have yet to come to grips. I imagine time will be the balm that soothes our distress. This is generally true of all big historical changes. But in the meantime, we are apparently in for a very rough ride, being led by a president with his own ideas of what values and traditions are important in America. He will decide which are important enough to save and which should be tossed under the bus.

I will no doubt be accused of damning with faint praise by Obama supporters and God knows what adjective that describes “traitor” by the president’s detractors but after looking at this AIG matter carefully, I think some of my friends on the right have gone too far in their criticism of the Administration.

The higher echelons of the Obama Administration have demonstrated a tone deafness regarding public sensibilities not seen since perhaps the Carter Administration. It’s not just the AIG matter but also their incomprehensible plan to force military personnel to have private insurers pay for their disabilities and war wounds and now, this idea to let loose upon the populace people who have been accused of supporting terrorism and who have spent the last several years in the Guantanamo prison camp. There have been plenty of other examples of what amounts to either arrogance or ignorance of how their public pronouncements and actions will play with the average American and one begins to worry if Obama and his advisors aren’t cocooning themselves — closeting themselves in the White House, unable to accurately gauge the perception of the public on matters large and small.

But beyond this curious disconnect, the Obama White House is experiencing what every single modern American president has had to endure; the mistakes inherent in trying to get initial control of the executive branch.

There are approximately 3 million employees in the executive branch (plus 1 million active duty military). All of them answer to the president. But the tentacles of power that snake from the White House, to the departments, and out into the field where offices dot the countryside are highly dependent on a cadre of about 2500 appointed positions. No president takes office on January 20 with very many of these vital positions filled. I believe an argument can be made that Obama’s personnel operation has been by far the worst of any modern president’s and at the rate he’s going, it will be well into the second year of his term before these slots are filled.

But even if he was ahead of the game, the nature of the presidency and the chief executive’s initial ability to effectively grasp the levers of power and control his own government are limited by the sheer greeness of his appointees as well as a lack of meshing by his top aides who are busy themselves trying to figure out where they fit in. It is easy to see how the left hand of any new administration wouldn’t know what the right hand was doing or would fail to grasp the significance of a particular issue.

Yes, there have been troubling indications that these folks aren’t the geniuses everyone thought they were and that the president himself has demonstrated a lack of sure handedness on numerous issues. But the AIG bonuses matter (as well as the far more serious lapse regarding AIG paying counterparties in full) appears to have been mishandled as a result of a combination of Timothy Geithner’s incompetence and miscommunication between the Treasury and the Oval Office.

Exhibit 1: This article in WaPo that details Geithner’s stupidity and the White House being in the dark about the bonsues:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, a central figure in the decision to bail out AIG last fall as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview yesterday that he had not been aware of the size of the bonuses and the timing of the payments.

“I was stunned when I learned how bad this was on Tuesday [March 10],” Geithner said. “I shouldn’t have been in that position, but it’s my responsibility and I accept that.”

Two days later, Geithner told the White House. The last-minute disclosure irked some of the president’s senior advisers, but they refuse to point fingers now, saying the timing had little impact on the outcome or the president’s public statements this week.

“Would I have liked an earlier warning system on this? Yeah,” said David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser. “Would it have markedly changed things? Probably not. The legal constraints are the legal constraints.”

One source familiar with the discussions said the company had provided details about the bonuses to senior Treasury officials at least a month ago. A Treasury spokesman said last night that was not true.

I think it entirely possible that AIG informed someone at Treasury last month about the bonuses and it is even possible that Geithner himself was made aware of them at that time but failed to realize or anticipate public anger. If Geithner has lied, he must go — plain and simple. In fact, given what we know already about the Treasury Department’s utter failure to negotiate with AIG regarding their 100% payouts to counterparties, Geithner should probably be canned. He has lost the confidence of investors, of troubled banks, of many if not most in Congress, and the American people. It’s hard to see how he lasts through the weekend except the president just recenty expressed “full confidence” in his leadership at Treasury. As the drip, drip, drip of revelations continue over the next few days about what Geithner knew and when he knew it, that attitude by Obama may very well change and Geithner could be thrown under the bus.

But that doesn’t solve the president’s problem with regards to a lack of communication especially with the Federal Reserve as CEO Liddy testified yesterday before Congress:

“What we’ve assumed is that, in our discussions with the Federal Reserve, that they were properly communicating with others,” Liddy said. “It appears that we need to improve upon that process.”

While declining to answer questions about the AIG bonuses, Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith said in a statement: “The Fed and Treasury officials have coordinated closely on all aspects of the U.S. government’s support for AIG during this extraordinary period.”

The Fed officials did not anticipate the political firestorm that would erupt over the bonuses, a senior government official said. “They clearly underestimated the matter,” the source said.

AIG executives say the Fed had been intimately involved in reviewing the contracts before the first dime was paid. The payments, which were due by March 15, were ready to be distributed last Tuesday, a senior AIG executive said. But the firm didn’t get the go-ahead from government officials to make the payments until late last week.

“We weren’t authorized until Thursday night,” the AIG executive said. “We were negotiating with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Treasury indicated that they needed it cleared by the White House, as well. We hit the go button for the payments on Friday.”

I would love to say that the Obama Administration “should have known” about this or that but frankly, it is unrealistic to expect the Administration to have focused on the bonus problem given that both the Fed and the Treasury Department had already signed off on them. They can be faulted for not realizing and not being prepared for the political firestorm that erupted but to expect them to have stopped the bonuses presupposes a level of control that they apparently lack at the moment. Is this incompetence or the growing pains felt by all new administrations? More evidence is needed to make a definitive judgement.

Barack Obama is the 8th president I have seen take the oath of office where I was old enough and interested enough to follow politics. I have also read numerous biographies and non-fiction accounts by insiders that detail these early months of struggle with riding the rough off of the president’s management style, discovering lines of communication, chains of command, who reports to who through whom, and building trust among top level executive branch employees who are, after all, strangers for the most part and must get used to each other’s personal idiosyncracies and habits.

I believe that many of Obama’s early problems can be chalked up to this shakedown period. His problem is that he doesn’t have the luxury of making mistakes — especially in the economic sphere. The crisis confronting the nation — not of his making — requires much more than he has shown so far. I believe his concentration on the economy has been poor, his execution, abysmal, and the fact that he keeps pushing his “remaking America” schemes at the expense and in lieu of focusing like a laser on economic recovery calls into question his basic leadership skills.

But in the AIG matter, I think many of his problems (some of them self-inflicted) can be chalked up to bugs in the system. How he overcomes these initial bumps in the road will tell the tale of his presidency — and whether we have a strong and vibrant economic recovery.