Blogito, Ergo Sum - 31 March 2008

Maureen Dowd unwittingly points out two of the dangers of an Obama presidency:

He wants to make government “cool” again. He wants to banish the red-blue culture of conflict on TV and in Washington. And he wants to make the country healthier, thinner and smarter. “I want our students learning art and music and science and poetry,” he says, in a crowd-pleasing line.

I don't know what a "cool" government is, but what we need is a smaller and more-invisible government, with much less interference in the daily lives of the individual peaceful citizen and more in the lives of the law-breakers. And it sounds like the 'science' is a throwaway, given the nature of the other three, and the problem is that we have too many students learning things that won't earn a living or create a useful product. America is falling behind technologically, not musically, not in art and poetry.

Politics is always good for a laugh, as the NYT reports on an early attempt for Obama and McCain to work together:

Instead, what began as a promising collaboration between two men bent on burnishing their reformist credentials collapsed after barely a week. The McCain-Obama relationship came undone amid charges and countercharges, all aired publicly two years ago in an exchange of stark and angry letters. Obama questioned whether McCain sided with GOP leaders rather than searching for a bipartisan solution; McCain accused Obama of "typical rhetorical gloss" and "self interested partisan posturing" by a newcomer seeking to ingratiate himself with party leaders.

"Please be assured I won't make the same mistake again," McCain wrote Obama on Feb. 6, 2006.

Obama wondering if McCain was siding with the GOP leaders smacks of almost terminal stupidity, considering McCain's biggest knock among conservative Republicans is that he shows too little interest in working with GOP leaders. Dumb, Obama.

McCain, on the other hand, seems to have put his finger on the Obama that I see...rhetorical gloss and self-interest are what he has displayed the most of on the trail.

Murdoch is "clearly interested in challenging the journalistic establishment," says Robert Thomson, the former editor of Murdoch's Times of London, in his first public comments as Journal publisher. "I think American journalism has some soul-searching to do. American newspapers generally have kept up poorly with change. . . . If there's a presumption that what you might call New York Times journalism is the pinnacle of our profession, the profession is in some difficulty."

The swipe at the Times is no accident. Murdoch and his lieutenants, who have made clear they want to challenge the paper for national supremacy, are not above a little trash-talking toward that end.

And is the NYT staff really held in such high repute these days, by all but the Journal staff? I don't think so.

My four morning reads are the NYT, to get the journalistic spin; the Washington Post, to get the political angle as well as some good Op-eds; the Washington Times, to get a bit more world news, if a bit lightly-reported; and the WSJ on-line edition to get what I consider the most rational and well-reasoned opinion journalism. Definitely the calmest, and much more adult than Dowd and Rich, although those can be amusing.

Oh, and of course I read the Post for Media Notes. I didn't pattern Blogito after Media Notes, but we do much the same thing only his net is cast far wider than mine, I barely have time for what little I read now.

At Just One Minute, Tom Maguire begins with an Obama comment and wonders if he dozed off and missed something:

" ' Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church,' Obama said Thursday during a taping of the ABC talk show, 'The View.' . . .

"So, when did Wright acknowledge that what he had said was deeply offensive and inappropriate? The AP story recounts some of Wright's controversial comments but oddly omits to mention his apology, as does all other news coverage with which I am familiar. And I am strangely certain that a Wright apology would have made the news -- unless he never made it publicly."

A little sleight-of-hand, perhaps?

Funny how the MSM didn't seem to notice but were focused on Bosnia, instead.

Why am I not reassured by Zbigniew Brzezinski's breezy assurance in Sunday's Outlook section that "forecasts of regional catastrophe" after an American pullout from Iraq are as overblown as similar predictions made prior to our pullout from South Vietnam? Perhaps because the fall of Saigon in 1975 really was a catastrophe. Another domino fell at virtually the same time -- Cambodia. ...

... It took us more than a decade to recover from the worst military defeat in our history.

In a sense, however, we have never been able to shed its baleful legacy. Thirty years later, Ayman al Zawahiri acknowledged that he was still inspired by "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."

What is shameful is the way that the media spun the Vietnam story to the point where Zawahiri could come to that conclusion.

On January 15, 1973, President Nixon announced the end of the US military offensive. On January 27 the Paris Peace Accords were signed, officially--and also in practice--ending American participation in the Vietnam War. The final remaining American military forces left Vietnam and went home.

Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, to invading North Korean regular army forces. That is 2 years and a bit more than 3 months later.

For some reason, we have allowed this to be perceived as cutting and running. But we had 536,100 troops in Vietnam in 1968; 475,200 in 1969; 334,600 in 1970; 156,800 in 1971; 24,200 in 1972; and 50 in 1973, by the time we officially ended our participation in the war with the signing of the peace accords. That's a 5-year-long cut-and-run.

Now, it is true that we shamefully abandoned our agents in South Vietnam two years later, there's no doubt about that part. We promised them air support and financial support, but reneged on both promises, too cheap to even send money.

Interestingly enough, it might have been bin Laden's belief in the cut-and-ran story which led him to be so surprised when 9/11 found him cutting and running from his Tora Bora sanctuary, instead. By the accounts I've read, he had an extensive fortified complex there in which he felt completely safe and protected, and free to show his face occasionally. Now, if he sees the light of day at all, he has to be covered up to the eyebrows and as anonymous as possible, so a drone won't spot him, and apparently not staying very long in any one spot.

Zawahiri was certainly misled, we know that, even after the results at Tora Bora, which goes to show the power of myth.

Boot makes one important point which is often overlooked, but fails to follow up on it:

An early American departure is the last thing that most Iraqis or their elected representatives want. (In a recent ABC/BBC poll only 38 percent of Iraqis said that coalition forces should leave at once.) It would be cheered, however, by our enemies in al-Qaeda, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere. Just as Islamist militants were emboldened by the Soviet Union's retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, so they would be encouraged by our premature departure from Iraq. Once we were out of Iraq (which Gen. David Petraeus has called "the central front of al-Qaeda's global war of terror"), they would be able to devote more resources to other battlefields such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is often said that American forces are stretched too thin trying to fight a war in Iraq and Iran simultaneously. Surely the same thing must hold true for al-Qaeda, too, mustn't it? If our pulling out of Iraq will allow our military to rest and recuperate, won't that also apply to the fighters of al-Qaeda?

I'd like to see more emphasis put on this point, and I certainly wish that someone--maybe McCain, although that's undoubtedly wishful thinking--would straighten people out about our running away from a military defeat in Vietnam in either 1973 OR 1975.

Belief in that myth might even now be causing some other mistaken jihadist to start planning his own version of 9/11.

The Pew writers lament the fact that this country imprisons a higher fraction of its population than any other nation in the world, including Russia. But what they ignore is what the United States gets in return for its high rate of incarceration. For instance, in 1976, Britain had a lower robbery rate than did California. But then California got tough on crime as judges began handing out more prison sentences, and Britain became soft as laws were passed encouraging judges to avoid prison sentences. As a result, the size of the state's prison population went up while Britain's went down. By 1996, Britain's robbery rate was one-quarter higher than California's. Compared with those of the U.S. overall, Britain's burglary and assault rates are twice as high, according to a comparative study done by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

These differences in crime rates involve many countries with low imprisonment rates. The robbery rate in the U.S. is not only lower than that in Britain but also that in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Scotlandand Spain, according to the same study. The imprisonment rate in these countries is one-fifth to one-tenth that in the United States.

...even with prevention programs, there will always be many people in prison. A major challenge for scholars today is to discover better ways of placing ex-inmates back into the community. If such methods can be devised, we can reduce the large number of parolees who are sent back to prison for violating the terms of their release.

But we should not suppose that, except for some minor drug offenders, we imprison too many people. There are still people who ought to be in prison and are not. There are more than 1 million felons on probation, in many cases because prisons are overcrowded, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There are violent gang members who are hard to arrest and convict because their neighbors are afraid to go to the police or testify against them.

It is discouraging to read a report by an important private organization that can do no better than say we incarcerate too many people, get nothing from it and are stealing money from higher education.