Counterpoint

In Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer, Miron makes a point that has worried me about this bail-out: If it's the good-faith best guess estimate that the junk loans should be buyable for 25 cents on the dollar, rest assured that the government will be lobbied strenuously on a whole raft of reasons (jobs, the children, etc.) why it should to pay 75 cents instead. Or 90 cents. Once that happens, this $700 billion will turn out to be merely Round One, especially as Democrats turn the focus to making sure that people are allowed to keep the homes they couldn't afford. They are the hapless victims of predatory lenders, you see, so it's only fair and compassionate. This will come at high cost to the rest of us, and it will badly and permanently distort the housing market. And, naturally, the bills to fund every new round of new government will be larded up and bloated with God knows what else. The likely context, remember, is Democrats in control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, so the floodgates will be open.

This would not be socialism creeping in through a crack, it would be socialism breaking down the door. Yes, home ownership is associated with improved neighborhoods, but that's because the sort of people who normally can qualify to buy a home tend to be more responsible in all ways. By eliminating that correlation, we will create high-turnover neighborhoods where homes are occupied by owners who are constantly behind in their mortgage payments, and who cannot or will not spend for the upkeep it requires to maintain a home.

We will have engineered a new social phenomenon: crime-ridden, derelict slums of owner-occupied dwellings. Congratulations all around. These areas would have the potential to be even worse than public housing, if such a thing can be imagined, because private property rights will make intervention by authorities more problematic. Neighborhoods like this will be bottomless pits for taxpayer money, a prospect that I'm sure has "community organizers" chomping at the bit. In honor, they might be known as Sharptontowns. And their occupants across the USA collectively known as the Obamanation. Another solid Democrat voting block arises. It's all good.

Byron

Term Limits & Cults

Sen. Ted Stevens goes on trial for corruption today, and Charlie Rangel is finally under the gun (see WAGING WAR ON CHARLIE). What else is new? This is not, I think, a matter of crooks seeking to be elected so they can scam their way to personal wealth. More likely it's that the US Congress, operating as it does on Other People's Money, is an irreducibly corrupting institution. Its temptations would eventually make a sinner of the most devout saint -- which none of these guys are to begin with, anyway. Term limits would safeguard these folks from moral peril, and the rest of us from them.

Then we could begin to tackle the problem of limiting the power of career staffers, who hold their jobs because of their special expertise and who never stand for election. They are the true Permanent Establishment, the final, untouchable bulwark against change in Washington, no matter who wins at the ballot box. Administrations come and go, but the bureaucrats do not. This is a much more difficult problem than term limits, and one that extends through every department and agency of government. Term limits will make it worse, because power will naturally flow from new and inexperienced members of Congress into the hands of staffers who know the ropes.

This problem of limiting the power of expert staff is one that to my knowledge has never been solved in any large organization, public or private. My guess is that any solution will require us to recognize that in a great many instances, expertise turns out to be a much over-rated commodity. Any such idea will always be fiercely resisted by those, such as academics, who are heavily invested in the Cult of Expertise because their livelihoods depend on it. I am not arguing that there are not better and worse ways of doing things, but only that Experts are about as successful as a coin flip when it comes to judging which is which. When it comes to large systems, like societies (or climates), things get too complicated and hard to measure for expert knowledge to offer much more than the pretense of understanding. If there is such a thing as wisdom at that level, it isn't revealed by the paltry calculations of Experts, but instead emerges only as a sort of first derivative of a great blind, churning mass of trial and error.

That wisdom should consist in that stands as an outrageous affront to Experts and their pretensions; it's a model they must reject in favor of what they believe to be a more rational ideal. It's why, for example, they dislike markets and always seek to replace them with economic planning. Markets are impossible to comprehend in their full chaotic complexity, while economic plans are elegantly rational constructions. Problem is, though, that markets work and the plans never do. Socialist experiments from the French Revolution forward have ended in debacle, almost always horrifically bloody ones, and every one of those experiments originated from a naive faith in the power of Experts to envision, plan, and implement the Good Society. Having spent most of my life in universities, I think William Buckley had it exactly right: "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

Byron

Obama & Iraq

It's not that Obama remains innocently clueless about Iraq; it's that he willfully maintains the appearance of being clueless, and there's nothing innocent about that. He can't admit the obvious progress of the US effort there, because a large chunk of his base will not hear of anything that smacks of success by the hated Chimpy McBushitler, and would not forgive him if he voiced it. So, he continues trot out the soft-left line, that we should have been in Afghanistan all along, that any military intervention should have been limited to hunting down Osama bin Laden, that the whole Iraq effort has been a distraction and a mistake. He has delicately steered clear of the hard-left narrative, that the effort was based on lies about WMD and is nothing but an oil-fueled, genocidal crime against humanity for which Bush and his henchmen must eventually be tried in a court of law. But it's a balancing act, so Obama has not condemned that sort of sewage, either.

This whole problem would have been solved for Obama if only the Congressional Democrats had been successful in forcing a US defeat in Iraq; Pelosi-Reid tried their best, but ultimately failed at that task. This leaves Obama now forced to talk in terms of a defeatist scenario that bears a steadily diminishing relationship to reality. That requires some bizarre gymnastics, such as finally and reluctantly being compelled to admit that the Surge has had some success -- but then giving the credit to Sunni sheiks instead of the American military! Question is, who you gonna believe, Obama or your own lying eyes? Obama true believers seem to have no problem going with the former. The result is what we see, a pas de deux of dishonesty about Iraq that is nearly astonishing in its cynicism.

CHeck out Al Qaeda’s Defeat In Iraq by Michael Totten, who unlike Obama has spent a lot of time in Iraq observing the course of events there.

Byron

Bush Doctrine

The Bush Doctrine is not, and never was, rocket science. Name That Doctrine by By Michael Gerson summarizes it as presented in Bush's 2006 State of the Union address. But it had been eloquently set out in his speech at the Air Force Academy in June of 2004, where the rationale for the Iraq War was presented clearly and in detail. I find that AF Academy commencement address to be easily the greatest foreign policy speech by a president in my lifetime. (See: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040602.html )

No credible alternative to that strategic vision has ever been proposed for dealing with the long-term problem of Islamic terrorism. In comparison, arguments that our efforts should have focused on capturing Osama bin Laden, or that the Iraq War was primarily about Saddam's WMD, badly miss the point; neither of those things are, or ever were, what the effort in Iraq is about. For all his failings, Bush saw and understood the longer-term meaning of September 11th, and what would be required to avoid the future that it portended. The problem going forward was not Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, it was the failed, oppressive backwardness of Arab societies that spawned such people, regimes, and ideologies in the first place. Without fundamental structural reform of those societies, there would be no end of bin Ladens and September Elevenths. In recognizing that, Bush got the One Big Thing right.

But the subsequent tragedy of the Bush years was the mind-numbing failure to mount a serious and prolonged effort to make the strategic case clear to the American public. Once understood, it is overwhelmingly persuasive; but it has to be understood. The fact that military pre-emption still gets identified as the entirety of the Bush Doctrine, or even as its key component, only demonstrates how completely the administration failed in its responsibility to describe what it was trying to do, and why.

Byron

Trouble for Obama

Video: Born-alive survivor scolds Obama on vote protecting infanticide

I'm strongly pro-choice myself, and I've always thought that Bill Clinton had it exactly right: The goal should be abortion that is safe, legal, and rare. But it is a mystery to me how it can possibly be legal to withhold care for an infant born alive as the result of a botched abortion procedure. One thing this problem points to, obviously, is abortions that are occurring too damned late. There is a threshold of repugnance that's crossed somewhere, and I thought Roe v. Wade originally demarcated that about as well as it can be done.

Politically, Obama's voting record on this matter has become a back-and-forth about what constitutes infanticide. This is obviously trouble for him, because no one is going to be elected who supports something with that name. Of course, infanticide has been practiced in most human societies, but at least with the excuse of the unavailability of effective contraception and safe methods of abortion. We can hardly claim those excuses. In ancient Greece, unwanted babies were disposed of by "exposure," meaning that they were left on a hillside to die from the elements. By any reasonable definition, that surely qualifies as infanticide. The tragedy of Oedipus begins with him being rescued after his father had left him to die in that way.

If there is a distinction between the Greek practice of infanticide by exposure and the hospital procedure of deliberately neglecting an infant who survives a botched abortion until it dies of dehydration, then someone needs to explain it to me, because I don't see it. If anything, the Greek way could be seen as morally superior because it was faster, and because it allowed for the possibility of rescue.

Obama has a problem here.

Byron

Nasty Politics

FWIW:

Many people are turned off by the personal nature of the attacks going back and forth in the current campaign and wish for a greater emphasis on the discussion of policy differences. That's a pious wish, but I think there are good reasons why political campaigns take the form they do. I also think that policy discussions are not quite what they appear to be.

Politics, like almost everything that human beings engage in, is about 80% emotion. That's probably an under-estimate. You will have noticed that policy discussions almost never, ever change anyone's mind. Well, of course they don't, because such discussions are nothing but rather thin camouflage for a clash of competing emotional commitments. The arguments trotted out are merely rationalizations for those commitments; defeat one argument, and the opponent simply comes up with a different one.

Now, if emotional commitments are highly resistant to evidence and logic -- and I think that's demonstrably the case -- then how are such commitments ever changed, or created in the first place? The answer, of course, is by direct emotional appeals. During the Viet Nam War, that single picture of naked, napalm-burned kids running screaming toward the camera was worth a metric ton of policy papers. What do you imagine the broadcast of an explicit video of a partial birth abortion would do to that "policy debate"? The point is this: political discourse is what it is for good reason. If genuine policy discussion was the more effective way to change opinions, then political discourse would have evolved in that direction a long time ago.

Most arguments against democracy build upon these facts, and on paper those arguments can be very seductive. It really is somewhat of a mystery how the whole mess can work at all. It shouldn't, but it does. Maybe it's mostly a matter of mutually canceling stupidities. That doesn't have a very admirable sound, but it's not a bad arrangement if you think about it. The aggregate effect is to keep change mostly incremental and policies within reasonable distance of the middle. The alternatives to that have proven to be uniformly hideous.

So, let the brickbats fly, I say, and let's don't pretend to a phony ideal that never obtained, never will, and for all we know, never should. Fortunately, for reasons not fully understood, it all comes out in the wash, and we end up doing OK. Policy discussions are fine, of course, and we should have lots of those for people who enjoy them. They can go home feeling morally elevated and intellectually responsible. But let's not be naive about what's going on there: it's the same emotional Cheez Whiz parading as camembert.

Byron

It's over.

All the polls have swung to McCain. USA Today has McCain up 10% among likely voters, and he has has passed the 50% mark. The Obama campaign has lost its momentum and is now playing defense. Unless something weird happens over the next 57 days, I'd say this election is effectively over. I don't think it will be close, nor should it be.

Obama's biggest mistake was selecting Biden as his running mate, which instantly made a mockery of the "Change" mantra. If you want to shake things up, then a living stereotype of the Washington lifer like Slow Joe is the last person you should be running with. And if Biden plans to use the role of "experienced statesman" to run over Palin in their debate, he needs to do a couple of things. First, he needs to read the account below of Palin's debate performance two years ago. Second, he needs to pray for mass amnesia so nobody will remember his defeatist plan to carve up Iraq, an absurdly wrong-headed idea that sounded dandy to Slow Joe, the innovative foreign policy expert. He can hope that mess is safely down the memory hole, but it will be coming out from under the rug soon, like the smell of a dead mouse.

Byron