Right Wing Nut House

I’ll say this much for the Democratic candidates for President: At least they’re trying to address the health care issue.

And to give you an idea of why the Republicans will probably lose the presidency in 2008, I perused the sites of the top 3 contenders for the nomination to ascertain what their thoughts about the health care crisis might be.

Rudy doesn’t mention it. Not. One. Word.

Neither does McCain.

Only Mitt Romney has a blurb on his issues page about health care:

The health of our nation can be improved by extending health insurance to all Americans, not through a government program or new taxes, but through market reforms.

Governor Romney: “We can’t have as a nation 40 million people — or, in my state, half a million — saying, ‘I don’t have insurance, and if I get sick, I want someone else to pay.”
(USA Today, July 5, 2005)

Governor Romney: “It’s a conservative idea,” says Romney, “insisting that individuals have responsibility for their own health care. I think it appeals to people on both sides of the aisle: insurance for everyone without a tax increase.”
(USA Today, July 5, 2005)

As for the others, Fred Thompson has no official campaign site yet and doesn’t mention his position on any issues.

Duncan Hunter apparently has no position on the health care problem.

Jim Gilmore is for “preserving traditional values” but evidently doesn’t give much thought to health care.

Those Republicans who have given the issue some thought include Senator Brownback:

Our healthcare system will thrive with increased consumer choice, consumer control and real competition. I believe it is important that we have price transparency within our health care system. This offers consumers, who are either enrolled in high deductible health plans or who pay out-of-pocket, the ability to shop around for the best prices and plan for health care expenditures. Also, the existing health insurance market forces consumers to pay for extra benefits in their premiums, such as aromatherapy and acupuncture, which tends to increase the cost of coverage. Instead, consumers should be able to choose the from health care coverage plans that are tailored to fit their families’ needs and values. Accordingly, individuals should be allowed to purchase health insurance across state lines. Finally, I believe that consumers should have control over the use of their personal health records. I have a proposal that would offer consumers a means to create a lifetime electronic medical record, while, at the same time, ensuring that the privacy of their personal health information is secured and protected.

Over time, the socialized medicine model has shown to deprive consumers of access to life-saving treatments and is downright inconsistent with the spirit of the American people to be free from unwanted government intervention. I will continue to work at the forefront to create a consumer-centered, not government-centered, healthcare model that offer both affordable coverage choices and put the consumer in the driver’s seat.

There are some sensible elements to Brownback’s position, most notably in consumers being able to choose specifics of their coverage - choice is always better than having something rammed down your throat by the state. But sadly, from what I can see, Brownback barely scratches the surface of the systemic problems in the health care industry - insurance companies and their resistance to meaningful reform.

Tommy Thompson actually has some good market solutions to the health care crisis and has given the issue a lot of thought:

Governor Thompson believes America must strengthen its health care system if it is to remain the best in the world. He would accomplish this by 1. moving the focus to preventive from curative care; 2. accelerating the adoption of health information technology to save money and lives; 3. placing the uninsured in state-by-state insurable pools, allowing private insurers to bid on their coverage; 4. strengthening the nation’s long-term care system that robs too many Americans of their life savings; and 5. strengthening the Medicare and Medicaid programs to ensure the programs are there in the future for the millions of Americans who depend on them. Details on his proposal can be found here.

And Mike Huckabee should probably have left any mention of health care off of his site. His bullet point talking points are worse than useless.

In summary, most of the Republican candidates either have no announced position yet on healthcare reform or have offered a pastiche of options that include a heavy reliance on so-called “preventive” health care.

Ezra Klein shows why that’s a chimerical idea:

First, the impacts of preventive medicine are often overstated. It’s not that cleaning up the air or putting everyone on a gym regimen would greatly improve health — but people don’t follow gym regimens, and business doesn’t let you clean air. Furthermore, not all interventions are created equal. Better parenting might be beneficial, but it’s unlikely to be more effective — either on economic or biological grounds — than the use of statins, or hypertensive drugs, or daily tablets of aspirin. There are a lot of highly effective medical interventions which are very, very cheap. But our system is very poor at incentivizing their use.

Meanwhile, the reason doctors are constantly prescribing statins along with admonitions to exercise and eat better is because using public policy to change diet and exercise habits is really, really, hard, unless you’re prepared to be very heavy-handed (i.e, outlawing trans fats in restaurants, setting portion limits, etc). Indeed, part of the problem with preventive health measures is that, rather often, they don’t work very well. Like with traditional health care, some things really succeed (stripping lead out of gasoline, giving people antibiotics), and lots of things…don’t. And that’s to sidestep the weird reality that what drives health care politics is concern over money which, in fact, is quite rational: Folks don’t want to go bankrupt, and smart politicians don’t want the government to lose all space for spending on other priorities.

To my Republican friends, let me just say that the quickest way to warm the cockles of the American voter is to address the health care crisis. Not so much coming up with ever more expensive schemes to cover the estimated 40 million Americans who don’t have coverage. People are rightly concerned that so many are uninsured. But the problem is one of under insurance or poor insurance coverage. This is what worries most Americans and addressing this problem - along with supplying coverage to those who need it - would go a long way toward improving the quality of life for ordinary Americans.

The Democrats insist on getting in a bidding war, coming up with ever more expensive schemes to address both the uninsured and under insured while trying not to bust the bank. The latest entry in the health care sweepstakes is Barak Obama:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) on Tuesday offered a sweeping health care plan that would provide every citizen a means for coverage and calls on government, businesses and consumers to share the costs of the program.

Obama said his plan could save the average consumer $2,500 a year and bring health care to all. Campaign aides estimated the cost of the program at $50 billion to $65 billion a year, financed largely by eliminating tax cuts for the wealthy that are scheduled to expire. President Bush wants to make those cuts permanent.

“The time has come for universal, affordable health care in America,” Obama said in a speech in Iowa City, at the University of Iowa’s medical school.

So $50-65 billion a year, financed by soaking “the rich,” would make coverage more affordable and insure those who currently have none? Good news indeed - if it were possible. The Devil, dear reader, as always, is in the details:

Obama’s plan retains the private insurance system but injects additional money to pay for expanding coverage. It would also create a National Health Insurance Exchange to monitor insurance companies in offering the coverage.

Those who can’t afford coverage would get a subsidy on a sliding scale depending on their income, and virtually all businesses would have to share in the cost of coverage for their workers. The plan is similar to the one covering members of Congress.

Obama’s package would prohibit insurance companies from refusing coverage because of pre-existing conditions…

My plan begins by covering every American. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is that the amount of money you will spend on premiums will be less,” Obama said. “If you are one of 45 million Americans who don’t have health insurance, you will after this plan becomes law.”

Obama also called for a series of steps to overhaul the current health care system. He would spend more money boosting technology in the health industry such as electronic record-keeping, put in place better management for chronic diseases and create a reinsurance pool for catastrophic illnesses to take the burden of their costs off of other premium payers.

His plan also envisions savings from ending the expensive care for the uninsured when they get sick. That care now is often provided at emergency rooms. The plan also would put a heavy focus on preventing disease through lifestyle changes.

Obama conceded that the overall cost of the program would be high.

“To help pay for this, we will ask all but the smallest businesses who don’t make a meaningful contribution to the health coverage of their workers to do so to support this plan,” said Obama. “And we also will repeal the temporary Bush tax cut for the wealthiest taxpayers.”

There are some good ideas in this plan. I don’t know how a “National Health Insurance Exchange” would work but in theory, any expansion of coverage via private companies is a good thing - even if they would be “monitored” closely. And “subsidized” health insurance makes sense to me. We subsidize housing and families. Why not health insurance?

The biggest question I have are the uninsured and their responsibility to the rest of us. Since many of the uninsured appear to be younger, employed Americans who simply don’t want to pay for coverage, how do we include them in the insurance pool? Edwards plan would mandate that everyone have health insurance. Obama is silent on the issue and I would be interested to see how the millions of uninsured Americans who fall into that category would be forced into the system.

Unfortunately, I think the bad outweighs the good in this proposal. McQ at Q & O takes a stab at critiquing what we know of the plan so far:

So instead of really doing something which would actually make insurance more affordable and easier to get - like removing it from being provided by business and letting a real insurance market (a private insurance market) develop, Obama plans on keeping these plans under employers and making all of them share the cost. Additionally, not a word about all the mandates by various state governments on minimum coverage. And all of this will somehow make insurance cheaper.

Secondly, why not, if the purpose is simply to ensure that all uninsured have access to insurance, why not fix that problem and leave everyone else alone? Instead he wants to mess with the insurance 300 million vs. the 40 or so million purported not to have insurance. Taking care of the 40 million actually might make insurance for the remaining 260 million cheaper.

Mac has a good point, although the quality of coverage among the 260 million remaining Americans varies wildly. Simply leaving that market alone won’t fix much of anything.

But Mac hits a home run here:

Again, having government “overhaul” anything is fraught with problems, the primary being cost and efficiency. It doesn’t have a good track record with either. And someone is going to pay for this overhaul. Additionally you’re looking at a mandate when you see things like “better management for chronic illnesses” and a cost increase (despite the promise of a cost decrease) when talking about government managing a “reinsurance pool for catastrophic illness”, because again, someone has to pay for that pool.

Rather than the $50-65 billion mentioned in the article it appears that the cost would be considerably higher. But most Americans would be willing to foot the bill if they thought it would actually do some good. Health care in America is a gigantic brute of a system, a trillion dollar monster that affects every man, woman, and child in America. To confidently say that even the federal government is going to “control” it in any but the grossest sense seems to me to be a flight of fancy. The only forces to my mind that would be powerful enough to affect it in any significant way would be market forces - bringing the cost down while competition improves the choices for consumers.

Now clearly, market forces alone won’t work to insure the uninsured or bring better health care options to those whose current plans are inadequate. In this case, government can act as a combination guide, referee, and burr under the saddle. Subsidizing some people will probably be inevitable as will mandating some kind of minimum coverage by large and small business. The very nature of the problems in health care means that government will have some kind of role to play. But the challenge will be to reform the system while keeping the best of the current regime in place.

And that’s a challenge that so far, not many Republicans have risen to address.

***BREAKING NEWS ***BREAKING NEWS ***BREAKING NEWS ***

MUST CREDIT RIGHT WING NUTHOUSE.

Actually, you should probably give a Hat Tip to The Prowler:

“We knew the political affiliation of every lawyer and political appointee we hired at the Department of Justice from January 1993 to the end of the Administration,” says a former Clinton Department of Justice political appointee. “We kept charts and used them when it came time for new U.S. Attorney nominations, detailee assignments, and other hiring decisions. If you didn’t vote Democrat, you weren’t going anywhere with us. It was that simple.”

In fact, according to this source, at least 25 career DOJ lawyers who were identified as Republicans were shifted away from jobs in offices they held prior to January 1993 and were given new “assignments” which were deemed “noncritical” or “nonpolitically influential.” When these jobs shifts came to light in 1993, neither the House nor Senate Judiciary committees chose to pursue an investigation.

“The difference between then and now, is that they [Department of Justice] didn’t coordinate so openly with the White House,” says a former Clinton White House staffer. “Remember, we had our own separate database that we could cross check if we had names. Everybody today forgets about the databases we created inside the White House. It’s funny no one talks about that anymore. We were doing stuff far more aggressively than this White House or the Department of Justice did.”

“The difference between then and now, is that they [Department of Justice] didn’t coordinate so openly with the White House…” and that one Administration was a Democratic Administration and this one is Republican. There’s that difference, too. And another difference is that the Clinton Administration was much more competent - at least in covering up its abuses of power. We never heard about “renditions,” begun by the Clinton Administration, until poor KSM was in the evil clutches of the CIA and being whisked around the world, staying at something less than 1st class accommodations and treated worse than a customer at a Montreal restaurant being served by a French speaking waiter.

It doesn’t matter, of course. Why, in the comments of this very post, you will have at least a dozen Clinton apologists telling us HOW DIFFERENT WHAT BUSH IS DOING COMPARED TO WHAT CLINTON DID. After all, there was no one named Monica in the Clinton Administration…Er, at least no one named Monica who worked at DOJ. And no one in the Clinton Administration paid a bedside visit to a dying AG to seek his approval on continuing a top secret anti-terrorist program. All they did was use political criteria to hire, fire, promote, and demote employees.

Will the New York Times write scathing editorials about this? Will the Washington Post give the story front page coverage? Will the netnuts come down hard on Clinton for doing the same thing the Bush Administration is accused of doing, i.e. politicizing the Department of Justice?

Don’t hold your breath…

News out of Iraq today from the Los Angeles Times, a fierce critic of the war, quotes several anonymous military sources they say are close to General Petreaus, that the government of Prime Minister Maliki will fail to achieve any of the major political goals set by the Administration when the troop surge began:

U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.

In September, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, is scheduled to present Congress with an assessment of progress in Iraq. Military officers in Baghdad and outside advisors working with Petraeus doubt that the three major goals set by U.S. officials for the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki will be achieved by then.

Enactment of a new law to share Iraq’s oil revenue among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions is the only goal they think might be achieved in time, and even that is considered a long shot. The two other key benchmarks are provincial elections and a deal to allow more Sunni Arabs into government jobs.

With overhauls by the central government stalled and with security in Baghdad still a distant goal, Petraeus’ advisors hope to focus on smaller achievements that they see as signs of progress, including local deals among Iraq’s rival factions to establish areas of peace in some provincial cities.

The political realities facing the Iraqi government are no secret and it doesn’t take high ranking aides to Petreaus to tell us what has been obvious at least since the beginning of April; that Maliki is unable to bring most of the Shia parties along with him (if he himself is even committed to many of these political goals) in an effort to reconcile the country’s factions and bring peace to Iraq.

The fact is, we can point to our great successes in Anbar province and elsewhere in defeating the insurgency and al-Qaeda but if Baghdad continues to bleed the way it does today, there is no way the surge will be seen as a success in any way, shape, or form. Of course, most of the press, the Democrats, and the left have already declared the surge a failure which makes subduing Baghdad even more important. And in this case, we are bedeviled by the fact that the terrorists only have to succeed once and a while in setting off huge bombs that kill dozens of people for the perception to kick in that the surge has been useless.

Couple the continued bloodshed in Baghdad with the inability (or outright refusal) of the Maliki government to deal with sharing oil revenue, de-Baathication, and constitutional changes and you can see where Petreaus aides are coming from. The surge is next to useless without the Iraqi government using any reduction in violence and the subsequent increase in confidence by the people that this would inspire to reach out to the Sunnis who are cooperating with us in Anbar and other provinces and make them partners in rebuilding the country.

What’s the answer then? Apparently, we are beginning to shift the playing field, bypassing the empty suit of a prime minister, and dealing with the problem of reconciliation Anbar-style; by making deals with the Sheiks and their tribes at the local level:

Military officers said they understood that any report that key goals had not been met would add to congressional Democrats’ skepticism. But some counterinsurgency advisors to Petraeus have said it was never realistic to expect that Iraqis would reach agreement on some of their most divisive issues after just a few months of the American troop buildup.

The advisors and military officers say the local deals and advances they see are not insignificant and can be building blocks of wider sectarian reconciliation.

Military officers in Iraq said the efforts included recruiting Sunni Arab nationalists into security forces, forging agreements among neighborhoods of rival sects, establishing new businesses in once-violent areas and shifting local attitudes.

Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and early advocate of the troop buildup, said the military would have few major political accomplishments to report by September. “I think the political progress will be mostly of this local variety,” said Kagan, who recently visited Iraq and met with American commanders.

This is an intriguing approach and once again I weep because we waited 4 years to try it. But the sad fact is, the sands in the hour glass are draining fast and all the signs point to a dramatic political change in September if Petreaus can’t convince lawmakers - and through them the American people - that the progress being made at the local level is worth the expenditure in lives and treasure this war has cost us already.

It is still unclear to me how this progress at the local level will translate into putting the pieces of Iraqi society back together. In some ways, it sounds as if it could actually work to further separate the factions:

The push for smaller, local deals represents a significant shift for the Bush administration, which has emphasized that security in Baghdad has to be the top priority to allow the central government to make progress toward national political reconciliation. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have pressured Iraqi political leaders to reach key agreements by the end of summer.

But Gates said last week that U.S. officials may have over-emphasized the importance of Iraq’s central government.

“One of the concerns that I’ve had,” Gates said, “was whether we had focused too much on central government construction in both Iraq and Afghanistan and not enough on the cultural and historical, provincial, tribal and other entities that have played an important role in the history of both countries.”

The new command has realized that there will be no quick national-level deal on the key issues, said the senior military officer in Baghdad.

“You are talking about Sunnis who had power and Shiites who have power forgetting about what happened over the last 30 years,” the officer said. “How easy is that going to be?”

In Iraq, local leaders have doubts about the central government’s abilities to make a meaningful deal.

“The sheiks are not waiting to see if the law is passed or not,” Kagan said. “The Iraqi local leaders clearly don’t see reconciliation as something that has to come from the top or necessarily should come from the top.”

There is good reason that local leaders don’t trust the central government. They have promised much and delivered nothing. And the fact that it is generally recognized in the country that the writ of Baghdad law does not run much outside of Baghdad itself makes the Sheiks wonder how the central government could enforce any agreements it makes with other factions like the Mahdi Army or the Badr Organization who Sunnis see as largely responsible for the sectarian killings. Perhaps they consider it suicide to trust the national government to rein in the militias through any agreements signed with them.

Frankly, I just don’t think our progress in Anbar and other provinces will be enough to convince the Congress to grant the Administration the time it needs to assist the Iraqis in pacifying their country and leave behind a viable state. The Democrats will return with a vengeance hawking their timetables and advocating a cut off in funds on some date certain. They will be driven by their base of rabid netnuts who are already livid with most Democratic lawmakers for what they see as caving in to the President this last go around on Iraq funding.

And not surprisingly, they will be joined by a substantial number of Republicans who fear for their electoral lives. Just over the horizon, it is easy to discern the political disaster for the GOP if they stick with a lame duck Commander in Chief at less than 30% in the polls who refuses to budge on doing what a majority of Americans want him to do; start bringing the troops home.

It should also not come as a surprise that when both Democrats and Republicans are driven by fear, the chances of something less than desirable for the national interest coming out of this mess are considerably increased. What is needed is rationality and a compromise both sides can live with. What we will probably end up getting is political panic and bitter recriminations over who to blame for our situation.

Meanwhile, Iran continues its winning streak, Syria may very well feel emboldened in its campaign to bring chaos to Lebanon, and our friends in the Middle East wonder about the future.

For Cindy Sheehan, it was only a matter of time.

The self-proclaimed “Face of the Anti-War Movement” - such as it is - has decided to retire from the fray and try and find some peace in her own life:

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Her reasons? They are many and varied but basically, she wants to quit because no one is listening to her anymore. She has been used up and spit out by a news media that demands drama, pathos, conflict, and above all, something new every day out of its media heroes. And Sheehan, at first portrayed as noble, then single minded, then weird, and now pathetic has seen her time on the national stage run out like a coin operated peep show that goes dark because we’ve stopped putting money into the slot.

I wasn’t the only one who predicted her ultimate fate. But when I wrote this a year and a half ago, the writing was on the wall already:

And Sheehan, once hailed as the Madonna of the American anti-war movement among the more mainstream Democrats finds almost all of her erstwhile supporters tip-toeing away hoping no one will notice or remember that they and their allies in the media made her such into such a heroic figure. No peacenik Joan of Arc she…

Sophocles rightly said “Only the dead are free from pain.” For Cindy Sheehan, there will come a time when she prays for the playwright’s wisdom to overtake her folly.

Most of the reaction on the left has been sympathetic with angry words for Democratic lawmakers who won’t commit political suicide and jump over the cut and run cliff with the rest of the netnuts and support either an immediate end to the war - as Sheehan and the hard left advocate - or try and defund the troops via the chimerical solution of timetables.

But in trying to assess Sheehan’s impact on the anti-war “movement” - which despite the polls showing Americans disgusted with Bush and the war, to this day still looks more like a disorganized rabble of anarchists, greenies, anti-globalists, conspiracy nuts, and Bush hating bloggers - one needs to look at how her crusade morphed from a vigil held outside of Bush’s Texas ranch in an effort manufacture a “Chief Brody slap” moment into a global crusade that included cozying up to anti-American fascists like Hugo Chavez and associations with anti-Semitic groups like the “Crawford Peace House” who posits outrageous conspiracy theories about Jews.

Sheehan was captured wholly and truly by a subset of the left that is not interested in ending the war as much as they are determined to bring down the established order in the United States through any means necessary. They are not mainstream in any sense of the word. The list of groups allied to her cause read like a Who’s Who of anti-American zealotry. And while she tried to disavow some of these supporters - including several openly racist and anti-Semitic neo-Nazi organizations - the stench of their nauseating ideologies became too much for most mainstream Democrats as well as the press who eventually let her slide into obscurity.

As far as more mainstream opposition to the war, Sheehan’s sins were either forgiven or ignored. All this group ever saw was the motherly visage, the genuine tears of sorrow at her tragic loss, and her over the top, exaggerated anti-Bush rhetoric that was quoted lovingly on lefty websites with the explanation that she was “speaking truth to power.” How calling New Orleans an “occupied city” and advocating the looting of stores because, after all, it’s just “stuff,” can be considered anything except the wild rantings of a disturbed woman is beyond me.

Tammy Bruce deconstructs Sheehan’s blog post that I linked above, pointing out the cloying self pity and self-serving nature of the screed. Here, she translates a few of Sheehan’s ravings:

6. I wasted all my money and ignored my family to try to prove to myself I am not the attention whore that apparently I am. (”I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an “attention whore” then I really need to be committed.”)

7. America is an ungrateful bitch. (”I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither.”)

8. I’m in debt and won’t pay my bills because America is evil. (”my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings.”)

9. Americans are stupid and vapid and don’t care. (”Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months.”)

10. Everyone is jealous of me because I get all the attention. (”This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway?”)

11. Everyone is doomed, so I’m getting out while I can. (”Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death …I am going to take whatever I have left and go home.”)

12. I need money. (”Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford , Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer.”)

A strange mixture of sincere, grief stricken mom and shameless anti-war huckster, she. And I can’t help reflecting on the fact that the adversity faced by other boat rockers in American history - Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, Al Lowenstein, and Frederick Douglas to name a few - make Sheehan’s “ordeal” look like a walk in the park. All of those worthies had much higher mountains to climb and extremely powerful forces arrayed against them. They never quit. They all kept fighting to their dying breath for what they believed in. It makes Sheehan’s pathetic blatherings and whiny, self-absorbed musings seem wretchedly shallow and insincere by comparison.

The left may find cause to congratulate her and wish her well. My hope is that she returns home and seeks out a competent mental health professional to help her overcome the devastating loss of her son. I don’t expect her to recant her radicalism. But I think a little perspective gained would ease her suffering and perhaps bring a bit of peace into her tumultuous and ultimately tragic life.

My latest article for Pajamas Media is up. It’s about Ernie Banks, former Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame baseball player who is going to be honored by having a statue erected at Wrigley Field.

A sample appears below the picture.

Ernie Banks - “Mr. Cub” - doing what he loved so much.

It was the hands that drew your immediate attention. The huge 42 ounce bat being held perpendicular to the ground was motionless as was the rest of his lithe 6′ 1″, 180 lb frame. But the hands were busy. The way they nervously gripped and re-gripped the bat was mesmerizing, the fingers in constant motion. And then the pitch, and the graceful ripple of a swing, and the ball would take flight.

And then, the trot around the bases, the long legs effortlessly stretching out, covering the distance to home plate with such ease and grace that tens of thousands of kids all over Chicagoland tried to imitate it. In suburban parks and city streets, youngsters could be seen gripping the bat the way he did, moving like he did. They wanted a baseball glove just like his. To possess his baseball card was to make the lucky kid a celebrity for blocks around.

A week before the battle of Bull Run Sullivan Ballou, a Major in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers, wrote home to his wife in Smithfield. The letter, made famous on Ken Burn’s landmark documentary Civil War, should really be read while listening to the haunting Ashokan Farewell that accompanied the reading on the show. Such timeless love and heartfelt patriotism makes this letter so American in form and meaning that it should not only move you to tears but make you proud of your heritage.

Such men as this fought to save the union. And they fight to save us today.

My very dear Sarah:

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again . . .

Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the first Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861.

This article in the New York Times got my blood boiling and my heart pumping today.

There is a new book out that answers a riddle the elites have been asking for 7 years now. Why did the American people elect George Bush President?

Answer? They’re as dumb as posts and irrational to boot:

Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.

Caplan’s idiotic notions regarding the irrationality and ignorance of voters is so far off the mark as to why people vote the way they do it is beyond belief. The elites ensconced in ivory towers in academia don’t have a clue about people like you and me. We may as well be from another planet as far as their understanding as to what motivates us to vote for one candidate or another. Trying to qualify our reasons is an exercise in brainless futility.

Voting is the ultimate exercise of personal freedom. To social scientists trying to examine the reasons for why people make the political choices they do, it becomes necessary to ignore the competing interests and yearnings of the voter and settle on seeing this tug of war between altruism and selfishness as “irrationality.”

People want to vote for the “right” candidate. They are as earnest in their “ignorance” in choosing the best person for the job as any lickspittle professor with advanced degrees up the wazoo. But they are moved in mysterious ways - likability of the candidate, thematic presentations of a candidate’s program, and always fear of the consequences of voting for the other guy.

And so far, the American electorate has done pretty well. In the nuclear age, when the choice of President could literally have meant life and death, the people have chosen like, well…college professors with advanced degrees out of the wazoo. A Truman as opposed to an isolationist Dewey. An Eisenhower twice as opposed to a cerebral and statist Stevenson. A Kennedy as opposed to a Nixon. (Picture Nixon during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Would a young Nixon have backed down so expertly?) Perhaps the Johnson-Goldwater race was more about a martyred President so chalk that one up to irrationality. But Nixon - putting aside his dark proclivities - in ‘68 was the answer to lawlessness in the streets and the Viet Nam quagmire while Humphrey promised more of the same - disaster.

Carter/Ford was a toss up - the people lost. Carter/Reagan was a no brainer. Ditto Reagan/Mondale. Ditto Dukakis/Bush. I would even say that Clinton circa 1992 was a better choice than a fatally damaged Bush who broke his promise not to raise taxes. And were the American people really going to elect Bob Dole President?

This brings us to 2000 and the idea that the American people made a mistake:

Of all the people who deserve some blame for the debacle in Iraq, don’t forget the American public. Today, about two-thirds of Americans oppose the war. But back in March 2003, when United States troops stormed into Iraq, nearly three out of four Americans supported the invasion. Doves say that the public was suckered into war by a deceitful White House, and hawks say that the press has since led the public to lose its nerve — but the two sides implicitly agree that the public has been dangerously unsure, or easily propagandized, or ignorant.

In 2003, Bush had the credibility to lay out a case for war that the public found logical and thus supported. It is not the voter’s fault that Bush and his Administration mucked it up. And if you’re trying to blame the voters for electing Bush in the first place, one might want to ask what the alternative was.

Al Gore was part of an Administration that virtually enabled al-Qaeda to attack America whenever it chose. It is difficult to know what Gore would have done after 9/11 but I think it more than possible that he would have lobbed a few cruise missiles at Afghanistan trying to take out Bin Laden and gone the United Nations route.; sanctions, resolutions, and words of solidarity couched in the usual apologetic tones of “So sorry we can’t do anymore.” Regime change would have been off the table. And Bin Laden would not only have been free and on the loose, but hugely emboldened and the biggest hero in the Arab world since Saladin.

No Iraq War but instead of hiding in a cave somewhere, Bin Laden would still be operating openly. To be fair, it’s pretty clear that if a Gore Administration listened to people like Richard Clark, a serious effort would have gotten underway to attack the terrorist group financially and via law enforcement by rolling up their cells. But smashing their infrastructure and destroying their safe haven in Afghanistan would probably not have occurred.

Would we have been better off? No one knows which makes this whole idea of voter irrationality an elitist fantasy. People like Caplan prefer to see their carefully thought out political choices as superior to the emotional, inspired, and intrinsically personal choice made by the rest of us.

There may be another reason Caplan sees the rest of us as idiots. Ann Althouse:

I’m picking up a bit of the old: if only people thought clearly, they’d agree with me. I’m never surprised when a professor discovers that democracy is defective because Americans aren’t more left-wing. But unlike Althaus, Caplan thinks voters are incompetent because they aren’t libertarian enough.

Voters are moved by so many different stimuli that it is silly to think that because they don’t agree with you that there is something wrong with them. I believe it shows the professor’s ignorance of not only politics, but human behavior as well to expect voters to make choices based on his “learned” criteria. People choose a candidate for many reasons - some good, some bad. But given the track record of the American voter over 219 years, they get it right a helluva more than they get it wrong.

In case you haven’t noticed recently, we are at war.

You are forgiven if it slipped your mind. The Bush Administration, now that it has its funding for the troops through September, will probably go back to its curiously quiescent attitude about informing the American people of the stakes and warning of the consequences of failure in Iraq. It is one of the great mysteries of this conflict, this on again, off again, start and stop effort by the President to remind us of the fact that 150,000 of our fellow citizens are engaged in a vital conflict that as I write this, is deciding much about our future.

The blockheads at the White House have never gotten it. They’ve never understood that their long, unbroken silences on the war have allowed their political opponents to define every aspect of it - why we invaded, what’s at stake, even what is really going on in Iraq. (It would have helped when bothering to inform us of what was going on there that they had actually been realistic and honest about what was transpiring rather than childishly optimistic and myopic.) And by allowing the Democrats to accuse them of all sorts of perfidy in the lead up to the conflict without constant, detailed, and passionate rebuttals, the President and his people have shattered any hope that the American public would stand by the Administration when the going got tough. The people have bought into the “Bush lied, people died” meme - or some variation - almost universally which has helped sap the will of the electorate to stay with the President on the war.

Of course, other matters also helped sap the will of the people. Blunders on the battle field that turned much of the population against us, misreading the situation on the ground, not changing strategies fast enough to reflect the true nature of the enemy we are fighting all contributed to the people’s sense that the folks running the war are either incompetent or had no workable plan for victory. The tremendous support given the President by the American people in the first few months after the invasion has been pissed away thanks to a political leadership that has not only failed to anticipate what the enemy in Iraq was going to do but also failed to realize the political threat here at home. They underestimated the desire and ability of the left to undermine the war effort by promulgating conspiracy theories, ascribing false motives to their actions, and even twisting the facts to paint a false picture to the American people of the war. The left is very good at storytelling. And the narrative they have so lovingly developed on the war has taken hold with the public thanks to the inexplicable and deplorable refusal of the Administration to defend itself in any useful way.

But as it becomes more and more apparent that our adventure in Iraq will sputter to an unsatisfying and potentially dangerous conclusion, my thoughts turn to those who have given so much in a cause that while good and noble, was mismanaged by their political and military leaders. The abilities, the courage, and the dedication of our military people in Iraq has been horribly misused. And I can’t escape the feeling that many of them will hold resentments when this is all over - resentment towards people like me who stopped being a cheerleader and became a critic (the reasons aren’t important) or perhaps even resentment at a government that gave them a job to do and then lost its way as well as losing the support of the people.

But they are not alone. They are brothers with those who for 230 years have bled out on battlefields all over the world. We like to think of ourselves as a peaceful people but I’m afraid history has a different take on the United States. We have fought wars for independence, for self defense, and to make the words in the Declaration and Constitution mean something. But we have also fought wars of belligerence, for conquest, for empire, and even for spite. And since the end of World War II, we have been at war almost constantly. And that’s not even including the “dirty wars” fought by our intelligence agencies in corners of the world where it seemed a good idea at the time to fight for dominance or for a change in government, or even for commercial interests.

But why we have fought doesn’t really matter. History’s judgement in these matters is, after all, seen through the prism of time with little thought to what kind of nation we have become as a result of those wars. We were a different nation 150, 100, even 50 years ago. We have grown up. We have responsibilities no nation has ever had - not Rome, nor Spain, or England or France when those nations dominated the planet. When a Tsunami devastates the South Pacific, no one thinks of calling in the French or Germans or even the Russians for assistance. They call upon the United States not only because we have the capability but because they know we can’t say no. There is no other nation in the history of human civilization who has had this kind of responsibility.

And that responsibility extends into the military sphere as well. Despite the public criticism, there is an almost universal recognition among the nations of the world that deposing the dictator Saddam was a good thing, a noble cause. What has happened in Iraq since then has been an occasion for much posturing and anti-American domestic politicking by many nations who should know better. They don’t speak German in France because American boys bled and died driving Hitler’s army from that sacred soil. And Soviet troops aren’t occupying Mittel Europa anymore because generations of American boys stood watch in places like Alaska, Germany, Greece, and Great Britain.

Yes, the world forgets. And they hate being reminded of it. It is a debt they will never be able to repay, especially to those sentinels of freedom who faced down the Russians for 45 long years. Or the 100,000 men who sacrificed their lives in Korea and Viet Nam to make Asia the economic dynamo it is today, at peace for the first time in 100 years. Or the Rangers who scaled the cliffs at Point du Hoc on D-Day. Or the Dough boys who rolled up the Kaiser’s armies after the French and British exhausted themselves almost to the point of defeat.

But as we approach another Memorial Day, I am struck by the connection between today’s American soldier and those of 100, even 200 years ago and all the years in between. Whether fighting for land, for empire, or to defend ourselves from an external enemy, the courage and skill with which the American fighting man has fought has been the envy of the world. European military observers from the 19th century marveled at it. And the 20th centuries dictators came to fear it. A combination of discipline and individual initiative that has been the hallmark of the American fighting man for 230 years is unprecedented. Other nations have tried to copy it and failed. It has proven to be an unbeatable combination on the battlefield.

But for all their skill. For all their sacrifices, the American soldier ultimately is only as successful as those who set policy and strategy and point him towards the enemy. In every war America has fought - from the Revolution to Iraq - the ineffable qualities in the American fighting man have been wasted by poor leadership. The Revolution had, among other disasters, General Charles Lee, an incompetent fop of a general. And there was the Congress who insisted Washington attempt to keep New York out of British hands - a disaster that almost ended the war before it started.

The Civil War had a veritable cornucopia of bad generals, stupid mistakes by Lincoln, and a Congress who stuck its nose constantly into the army’s business. The list goes on through World Wars I and II, Korea, Viet Nam and beyond. The fact is, our fighting men have been constantly ill served by those who ask them to die. I suppose war is fraught with this kind of peril. But it doesn’t make it any easier for the men who must suffer the consequences of others mistakes.

On Memorial Day, none of this matters. We don’t think much on why they died or even how they died. All we know and care about is that they died for us. We, the people, asked them to go in harm’s way and they responded courageously, giving that “last full measure of devotion” as Lincoln called it at Gettysburg. Sometimes we may have been wrong. Sometimes the conflict couldn’t be avoided. And sometimes, we were right. Circumstances, blurred by time and softened by memories of loved ones lost, are of secondary consideration. When the political leadership, freely elected by the people, decides to take the United States to war we are duty bound to support our fighting men - even if we disagree with the decision to fight. For in the end, it is their sacrifices that define us as a people.

Andrew Sullivan went and saw Obama yesterday and reports that this “agent of change” may be the liberal’s answer to Ronald Reagan:

I’m still absorbing the many impressions I got. But one thing stays in my head. This guy is a liberal. Make no mistake about that. He may, in fact, be the most effective liberal advocate I’ve heard in my lifetime. As a conservative, I think he could be absolutely lethal to what’s left of the tradition of individualism, self-reliance, and small government that I find myself quixotically attached to. And as a simple observer, I really don’t see what’s stopping him from becoming the next president. The overwhelming first impression that you get - from the exhausted but vibrant stump speech, the diverse nature of the crowd, the swell of the various applause lines - is that this is the candidate for real change. He has what Reagan had in 1980 and Clinton had in 1992: the wind at his back. Sometimes, elections really do come down to a simple choice: change or more of the same?

Look at the polls and forget ideology for a moment. What do Americans really want right now? Change. Who best offers them a chance to turn the page cleanly on an era most want to forget? It isn’t Clinton, God help us. Edwards is so 2004. McCain is a throwback. Romney makes plastic look real. Rudy does offer something new for Republicans - the abortion-friendly, cross-dressing Jack Bauer. But no one captures the sheer, pent-up desire for a new start more effectively than Obama.

Sully may be on to something here. Last Saturday, in one of my more depressing posts, I said that “It smelled like 1979″ all over again and that all the political stars seemed to be positioning themselves for an historic re-alignment. This isn’t news to people who follow politics, of course. But in the course of explaining why I thought the prognosticators may be right about the possibility of overturning the established order, I said this:

Of course, the big difference is that the Democrats don’t have a Ronald Reagan to take advantage of the situation. Nobody will ever confuse Hilliary’s shrill denunciations with the twinkle in the Gipper’s eye when he zinged an opponent. Nor will anyone fail to see the difference between the inspirational yet empty platitudes of Obama with Reagan’s soaring rhetoric that touched something so American in people’s souls.

Sullivan thinks that Obama may be the most effective liberal advocate in his lifetime. I’m not sure how old Andrew is but those of us of a certain age clearly remember Hubert Humphrey, who could orate rings around the Senator from Illinois. And Ted Kennedy can still wow a Democratic audience with more liberal red meat than Obama tosses to his audiences.

Having said that, I see where Sully is going with this. In fact, he comes very close to what is surely going to be the biggest issue for Republicans going into the general election; how far and how fast can you run away from George Bush?

I fear he could do to conservatism what Reagan did to liberalism. And just as liberals deserved a shellacking in 1980, so do “conservatives” today. In the Bush era, they have shown their own contempt for their own tradition. Who can blame Obama for exploiting the big government arguments Bush has already conceded?

And just as Carter branded liberalism in a bad way for a generation, so Bush and his acolytes have poisoned the brand of conservatism for the foreseeable future. When you take a few steps back and look closely, you realize that Bush has managed both to betray conservatism and stigmatize it all at once. That’s some achievement.

The Democrats of 1980 were stuck with Carter, an incumbent running for re-election. Not so Republicans in 2008 with Bush. Unfortunately, there is precious little a Republican nominee can do to separate himself from this tar baby. He’s going to be a presence in the campaign - the Democrats will see to that little detail. And the party is going to have to give him one of the prime time slots during convention week. (Not doing so would make more news than anything Bush will say.) But other than that, Bush will be forced into the background as Republicans will desperately try and talk about the future, trying to ignore the last 8 years of just plain bad government - bad ideas, bad management, and bad execution.

But is Obama in the best position to take advantage of this desire for change? I have seen his basic stump speech 3 times and after each presentation, I am left with the impression that there really isn’t much there. “Liberal pablum” understates what Obama substitutes for any serious fleshing out of ideas or themes. It is feel good rhetoric taken to its extreme and logical conclusion; everybody wins if you vote for me.

Forget the silly gaffes of recent weeks - although Andrew points out something that I also have noticed and is extremely troubling. That is, the “fatigue factor.” A younger man such as Obama cannot be on a schedule this far out from the primaries where he is being asked to campaign 20 hours a day. His “fatigue” must be attributed to the atrocious mismanagement of his time by his staff. And when he uses fatigue as an excuse to explain his misstatement of the number of deaths that occurred in the tornadoes in Kansas, something is definitely amiss and needs to be rectified quickly.

As far as other similarities with Reagan, there is no denying the soaring notes of optimism present in his speeches. Sully noticed too:

At a couple of points in his speech, he used the phrase: “This is not who we are.” I was struck by the power of those words. He was reasserting that America is much more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and Katrina and fear and obstinacy and isolation. And so he makes an argument for change in the language of restoration. The temperamental conservatives in America hear a form of patriotism; and the ideological liberals hear a note of radicalism. It’s a powerful, unifying theme. He’d be smart to deepen and broaden it.

This is no “blame America first” liberal. Conservatives should note that this line of attack will fall flat as Obama clearly sees America as a force for good in the world. But Andrew points up the most dramatic difference between Obama and Reagan; “restoration” vs. redemption.

The Reagan campaign of 1980 had elements of both a political campaign and crusade. It was a quasi-religious movement with its overarching theme being redeeming America from 50 years of liberalism. The idea that America had sinned and needed to recant its apostasy was a powerful force in bringing Reagan the political re-alignment he sought.

Can Obama capture some of that magic? Right track/wrong track poll numbers over the last few years have been historically high as far as America being on “the wrong track” under Bush. But those numbers were high in 2004 also and Kerry failed to break through. There must be something else afoot among the electorate that would act as a catalyst to propel someone as liberal as Obama all the way to the White House. A loss of faith in America itself would fill the bill, but I don’t see that anywhere at the moment. People have simply lost faith in Bush and the Republicans - a not inconsequential development but something the Republicans could rectify relatively quickly. A Guiliani or Romney candidacy would alter the face of the party at least temporarily and give hope to some of the more moderate elements in the GOP.

Andrew is no doubt in thrall of Obama’s delivery and magnetism. I was too when I first heard him. But rather than grow on you, the more you listen to what the Senator has to say, the more you realize how little there is to recommend him as far as concrete ideas and even definitive themes attached to his candidacy. Not quite an empty suit but certainly a lot more style than substance.

It is still an uphill battle for Obama to capture the Democratic nomination. Comparisons to Reagan notwithstanding, it appears that even with “the wind at his back,” as Sully says, he will have to sharpen his message and flesh out his programs and themes if he is to overtake Hillary Clinton and have a shot at the White House.

A twofer today as I neglected to post for the last couple of weeks.

Results W/E 5/11

Council

1st Place: Does America Elect Defeatists? by Big Lizards

2nd Place: “The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time” by Cheat Seeking Missiles

3rd Place (Tie): Zawahiri Posts an Important New Video — and Reveals al-Qaeda’s Jihad Strategy by Joshuapundit; and

3rd Place: The Quietest Hero by Soccer Dad

Non Council

1st Place: “Better a Thousand Israeli Invasions…” by Michael J. Totten

2nd Place: Two Words by Cup of Love

Results W/E 5/18

Council

1st Place: Cheney’s Chess Moves in the Middle East by Joshuapundit

2nd Place (Tie): Positive Thinking Vs. The Greenies by Cheat Seeking Missiles; and

2nd Place: Gone Across Peterson by The Glittering Eye

Non Council

1st Place: Don’t Bury Your Heads in the Sand. by Iraq the Model

2nd Place: A Communism for the 21st Century by Gates of Vienna

3rd Place: The New Anti-Blasphemy Rules, Again by The Volokh Conspiracy

If you’d like to participate in the weekly Watchers Vote, go here and follow instructions.