Gore Gets His Hawk On

Richard Clarke (former Clinton antiterror czar), in his "Against All Enemies" book, describes a surprisingly hawkish Al Gore, arriving late to a meeting with White House Special Counsel Lloyd Cutler and President Clinton on the subject of "extraordinary rendition" -- the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries to be interrogated. Mr. Cutler was strongly objecting to the rendition option, and, as Clarke recounts, had seemed to sway Clinton in his direction, when Gore arrived. According to Clarke, Clinton briefed Gore on the arguments presented in the meeting, and "Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'"

Gore's machiavellian moment raises interesting and obvious moral questions that I won't broach here. But his remark also underscores my own suspicion that, likely, "enhanced interrogation techniques" will continue to be practiced by the CIA whenever it's believed that such practices may reduce clear and present threats to national interest (such as, say, obtaining information from an Al-Queda operative about a planned attack). For all the hay making about the Bush administration's policies -- and I'll have more to say in another post about why it'll be virtually impossible to get a single prosecution if AG-designate Eric Holder ever proceeds with "torture investigations" -- covert techniques will likely continue, as I suspect they have for decades, and under Democratic or Republican administrations. As Mr. Gore puts it, of course it'll violate laws... that's why it's covert.

So I think the upshot here is that the Bush administration is guilty indeed, but of a political blunder, and a bad one: next time, don't brag about use of enhanced techniques as if it's scoring political points at home. It isn't. Just leave it covert, and we'll all be on our way.

Olbermann Email

The email I sent to MSNBC below. It's based on an exchange from a prior post. In this exchange, there was consistency. But I think Mr. Olbermann is in much more of a pickle, if he keeps on his present track:

"
I watch with interest Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I'm confused however about Mr. Olbermann's Special Comment on the eve of the inauguration of President Obama, where he makes an impassioned, forceful case that "Bush is guilty of torture" and ought to be investigated and perhaps tried and found guilty, in spite of President Obama's public statements to the contrary. President Obama, for his part, just wants to "move on". This profound disagreement between Mr. Olbermann and President Obama is particularly puzzling since, otherwise, Mr. Olbermann speaks quite positively and even glowingly about our new President.

So, my question to Mr. Olbermann is: If President Obama does not wish to investigate possible "war crimes" committed by the former Bush Administration, and if it's so clear cut that such acts were in fact committed, what does this say about President Obama?

We can assume that President Obama must have the relevant facts at his disposal. So, following simple logic, should Mr. Olbermann conclude that President Obama is just weak, or rather is he morally suspect? This question Mr. Olbermann ought to answer directly. Otherwise, he seems to be talking "out of both sides of his mouth" as they say, and his many viewers ought to call him on it.

Thanks,
Erik
"

The Haters

Rush Limbaugh says that he hopes President Obama will fail. Is he serious? Wow, this surprised me. His "reasoning" seems to be that, if Obama succeeds, he will have succeeded only in ushering in socialist solutions to our current economic woes. Ergo, he must fail.

What's interesting here is that Limbaugh isn't saying that socialist policies will fail (put aside, for now, what constitutes "socialist"), but rather that if socialist policy succeeds, this is itself a failure for us. This, of course, is a complete tangle. If an economic remedy worked -- if it succeeded -- by any measure of success I'm aware of, the country would be (somewhat definitionally) better off. Because the policy worked! And so, Limbaugh is apparently at war with "socialistic policies" regardless of outcome. Now that's an ideologue. Better that we plant both feet in traditional capitalism come hell or high water than try non-capitalist policies, because God forbid they might work (and then what?).

Of course I'm not a "socialist"; this not what I'm getting at. It's just so over the top to want a President to fail, just to preserve some view of the world. This is not my view of America or politics generally.

On the other side of things, right-of-center thinkers especially, please take time to watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann and immediately after The Rachel Maddow Show. They're so Rush Limbaugh. I get this perverse sense of superiority watching people with such a simple rubric, their whole raison d'etre predicated on the proposition that "the other side" is evil. It's really good viewing.

Mainly, lately, it's the simple idea with these shows that "Bush is evil". That's it. I've been watching. That's pretty much it. It's an almost religious calling to continually open wounds and fester them and spew forth venom at George Bush. Bush is an idiot, he should be accused of war crimes, he ruined the country, and on and on. I keep hoping, but there seems no possibility of acknowledging anything positive whatsoever about the Bush years. Nothing. There's just this Limbaugh-like failure to accept or to even grasp the context of the former Administration, and indeed the precarious place that we all occupied in the wake of September 11.

Nothing but hatred... that's easy enough. What's harder is to try to figure out what happened, why particular decisions were made, what effects they had (positive and negative), and what can and should be done better next time. A sober, thoughtful analysis. But you won't get this from Olbermann or Maddow.

In the same vein, Limbaugh ought to attempt a similar treatment of Obama's current plans. But he won't. And so you won't get it from him either. And on and on the haters go.

Inauguration Day 2009

President Barack Hussein Obama. Congratulations! My wife and I watched the inauguration with the unmistakeable sense of significance, that something significant was unfolding in front of us. Years from now, people will ask each other what they were doing on this inauguration day. It's a distinctively American moment, full of meaning and purpose and emotion that wells up out of our unique and sometimes painful and even at times tragic past. But always, in this continuing American narrative, there is an ineradicable optimism, a deep well of hope for a better tomorrow. This our President Obama expressed in words today, and symbolized in his person and in the office that he now holds. Congratulations.

Keith Olbermann's Really Special Comment

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Perhaps it's not NYT's Paul Krugman, as I suggested here, but rather media personality Keith Olbermann, who is most energetically expressing the anger from the wider-circulated Left about the Bush Administration's policies regarding fighting terrorism after September 11. His moral indignation cannot best be captured with just words, I don't think, and so (another first on this blog), here's the video.

These are Mr. Olbermann's concluding remarks, by the way, on Martin Luther King day and on the eve of the inauguration of President-Elect Obama. A little ironic, maybe, given that MLK did not strike a particularly litigious tone, and that Mr. Obama seems intent on moving forward and healing wounds -- bridging gaps -- between the Right and Left with his upcoming Presidency. If President-Elect Obama is watching Keith Olbermann's program at all, he's certainly getting confirmation from cable news media that the road ahead will be long, indeed.

(Incidentally, I'm sure there's a better way to embed the video, but I couldn't find it on blogspot from my brief perusal of the options. I'll look into it. Also, if time is an issue with viewing, the last 2 - 2.5 minutes are I think of most value, although the clip in toto is quite worth it as well.)

Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com) on FISA Ruling

More on warrantless wiretapping in the courts. The Wall Street Journal editorial (find it here with my initial commentary) made mention of the limited scope of the recent FISA ruling -- it applies only to the 2007 Congressional authorization of eavesdropping powers -- but perhaps a little too quickly. Greenwald makes it a bit more clear. However, as Greenwald himself admits, the ruling is still "significant". WSJ said as much or more when concluding that it "sets a precedent".

In general, I'm interested to see how Obama treats the terrorist fighting apparatus erected by the Bush administration after September 11: the warrantless wiretapping issue, Guantanamo, homeland security, and a host of other issues that, on the one side, are intended to keep us safer, and on the other, present challenges to our liberty. This double edged sword will be held in his hand soon enough.

The Tone in Washington

Two recent columns, from the New York Times and Washington Post, respectively, pretty much book-end the "Bush was evil, Bush was good" debate. On one end, Paul Krugman wants to charge Bush with war crimes. On the other, Charles Krauthammer asks us to acknowledge our debt to Bush.

Whether you're liberal or conservative minded, have a look. It's worth reading them back to back.

For my part, I always get a little uncomfortable when intelligent people reach such radically different conclusions from (one would assume) the same set of facts and observations. Feels a little nihilistic to me, like there's no real fact of the matter, only different and perhaps too firmly held opinions, determined by fundamentally different, and incompatible, ideologies. Yet, perhaps our problem is not so much our failure to find objective truths but rather the way that we find (or think we find) them, by constructing political ideologies -- broad, sweeping systems that purport to explain the political world around us and to determine how we ought to think and act. Perhaps.

To be sure, a scepticism of ideology is not new to America. It undergirds an intellectual movement -- pragmatism-- that emerged here in the 19th century with Constitutional scholars like Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr., as well as philosophers such as Charles Pierce, William James, Dewey and others. The emergence of American pragmatism in the 19th century is, like many intellectual movements, multifarious, but at least in part and perhaps centrally it can be seen as a response to the idealism that helped ignite a powder keg, the American Civil War. As Holmes, who fought bitterly in the Civil War as a young man and who nearly died there in battle, wondered: if all of our ideals led us to the carnage of the Civil War -- if our politicians and intellectuals couldn't save us from nearly tearing the Union apart -- of what moral and practical benefit were those ideals? His thought of course found its expression in monumental works like The Common Law. His contemporaries -- James, Pierce, and Dewey -- wrote the more theoretical underpinnings of political pragmatism and are still part of the philosophical canon (though perhaps, after World War II, less so).

President-Elect Obama may or may not be a pragmatist, in the grand tradition of Holmes and the great 19th century philosophers. He is fond of studying Lincoln, I hear (a good sign). At any rate, we will indeed need change in Washington. First on the list, I hope, will be a change in the often too partisan tone. I'm hopeful that Mr. Obama's eloquent words and to some early extent his first deeds as President-Elect signal just that.

Obama, Pragmatist?

President Elect Obama had dinner at conservative columnist George Will's house, where David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Paul Gigot of the WSJ, and other conservative luminaries accompanied him.

On the cable news yack-and-attack today, Obama's latest "post partisan" move seemed to prompt some crinkled brows from the likes of Hardball's Chris I'll-yell-until-you-answer-me Mathews, and Keith Olbermann from Countdown fame (also an occasional, but pretty good, sports analyst for ESPN).

Olbermann in particular made me chuckle a bit, covering this latest from Obama. I think he needed more time to digest, actually, because he seemed to be asking his viewers both "Why didn't Bush do this?" and "Why in the heck did Obama DO this?". (In other words, meeting with the opposition is good, and why meet with the opposition?)

Ahh, yes. I think people covering the Hill don't yet know what to make of Mr. Obama. Pragmatism and a willingness to get past petty partisan quibbles left Washington long ago. Certainly, President Bush's famous -- now notorious -- claim to be "a uniter, not a divider" has become the subject of jokes; Washington is more divided now than ever. I'm hopeful that our new President is quietly, pragmatically uniting the country with political skill and intelligence even as the partisans around him continue reading from yesterday's script. He just might pull it off.

More Outrage (or, how the Internet proves anything for anyone)

I may have to retract my prior claim that it's an outrage that people accuse Bush of knowing that Iraq had no WMD (at the time of the war, that is). I did some research, and it looks like maybe Bush knew about 9/11:

http://www.buzzflash.com/perspectives/911bush.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/16/attack/main509294.shtml

http://www.mikehersh.com/article_65.shtml

Further, Bush clearly authorized the torture in Abu Ghraib:

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1348

And the news of Bush authorizing military incursions into up to 20 countries is particularly troubling:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/oper-n11.shtml

Also, it seems that Bush knew about the devastation Katrina would bring, the day before it happened:

http://pol.moveon.org/katrina/bushknew.html

I have, however, found less evidence that Bush knows about the aliens in Roswell, although see this about his veep, setting up a shadow government in Area 51:

http://assimilatedpress.blogspot.com/2006/07/cheney-sets-up-shadow-government-in.html

What did Cheney know, and when did he know it?

More. I've found evidence of a shadow government set up by the Bush administration, the so-called COG:

http://shininglight.us/archives/2008/10/bush_administration_running_shadow_government.php

And what's up with the connection between Bush Republicans and Osama Bin Laden?:

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/09_18_01_bushbin.html


I'm pleased to report on this blog, however, that I've found no real evidence that Bush knows about the Lochness Monster, or Bigfoot. I'm trying to confirm talk of a Yeti cover up from those seething with hatred of the Bush administration who reside in remote areas of the Himalayas.

Will keep all posted.

He's Krugmaaan, The One Trick Ponyyy!

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner, Princeton economics professor, and New York Times luminary has a theme for writing columns lately in the NYT, and I would hope that most people with a reasonable IQ can ascertain it by now: make Obama's fiscal stimulus package larger. Yes, that's it. And today he re-iterated his reiterations by adding this "meat" on the thematic bone: drop the tax cuts, increase benefits for the unemployed, and ramp up the Keynesian "infastructure" projects. More, more, more. Otherwise, he warns, we might not get the benefit from the fiscal stimulus (just like FDR, he assures us, who didn't go far enough with the New Deal).

To my lights, Paul Krugman has the flavor of a guy who wants to see his academic work tested in the field of battle. He's an ideologue. And what Krugman wants, ideologically, is to see a really, really big Keynsian project make all the difference. He wants to be exonerated for being (more and more it seems) entrenched in his academic position, a position which it's fair to say is decidedly unlike the recent pragmatism shown by President-elect Obama. Krugman wants to see pure theory played out in practice. And the Credit Crisis is his BIG CHANCE. Well, he might after all be right. But I have to confess that I've been systematically unconvinced by his slew of same-sounding columns in the Times. It might behoove Mr. Krugman, even with that Nobel Prize, to dig a little deeper to help us understand why, exactly, spending trillions right now is exactly what we need to do. Convince us. I mean, don't assert it, give us reasons. Why, for instance, should we jettison Mr. Obama's proposal to cut taxes on small businesses and instead pump massive amounts of tax payer money into selected government projects? Why, for instance, should we crank out tax payer dollars for causes like "enhanced unemployment benefits" with the aim of getting the economy moving again? How does this happen?

To be sure, Mr. Krugman's assertions thus far all sound grand, from a "social justice" point of view. No argument here. But -- talking about stimulating the actual economy -- I'm a little less clear how the types of spending packages promulgated by Krugman translate into getting the Business Engine started again in America. Confusing, perhaps, since stimulating the economy is precisely what he claims to be discussing. Maybe Mr. Krugman's next column will reveal all. (On second thought, don't count on it. But do count on another column making exactly the same point.)

At any rate I won't stop reading Mr. Krugman, no way. It's a great deal: editorial after editorial with the same message, and hardly a detailed argument in any of them (suggests a little argumentum ad verecundiam perhaps), along with a full-stop endorsement of any and all government spending projects. Well, he makes me a True Believer, in a sceptical non-believing sort of way. The Nobel Prize must be worth something.

Sunday morning, 24 January 1965

I finished yesterday Roy Jenkins' biography of Winston Churchill, all 912 pages. I was planning on writing some summary thoughts but have completely run out of steam today. Most of the day, I've been (somewhat uncharacteristically) depressed. The transience of life, existential angst, that kind of thing.

I can offer at least this, for now: I was research assistant and (increasingly) caretaker for George Kozmetsky before his death in April 2003. I was with George the day before he died, when his face turned grey from his sickness and my eyes grew big like saucers, thinking he was dying (he was, it turns out). His eyes grew big too, looking at me. What a thing death is. The only other time my eyes grew big like this, looking at another person, was when my daughter Brooke was born. The nurses originally suggested that I perform the medical procedure of cutting the cord. It was too much, seeing her born like that. I wasn't ready. In either case I wasn't ready.

The Terrorists

Muslim militants are at it again. Shocker.

101 people dead and counting. Here we go again. And in America, the conspicuous disappearance of any public discussion about terrorism for some time now. As if, it's a Bush topic. Somehow, some way, in our domestic self-absorption, I think we've managed to connect the unpopular President Bush with the idea of terrorism, as if, ridding ourselves of the one, the other will somehow go away, or just be a non-factor. But of course it won't go away, as we've seen tonight.

I confess to shedding Oprah Tears (or, I mean, getting stricken with Obamamania). But now the hard realities. Politic campaigns, Democrats back in power, none of this represents a solution; we haven't solved anything yet. Obama hasn't solved anything yet. He doesn't even have the job yet (yet somehow the world has seemed a safer, better place, hasn't it?). And what a job he will have. The militants in Mumbai, apparently, checked passports to round up the Americans and Brits. Nice to confirm that we're still the evil ones. And I'm sure we'll retain the title for some time, whether our new President has a Southern drawl or not. They don't care. President Elect can sound like Albert Einstein (actually, that might be a tad too tutonic, but you get the picture). He's still representing the Evil Nation, as far as extremists are concerned.

So now the blood on the streets, and the fires, and the frantic shouts are with us once again. And we hear once again that they were targeting the U.S. and Great Britain. It's I think safe to reject the notion that the Mumbai attackers didn't tune in to CNN recently enough to know that Barack Obama is our President Elect. They don't care.

Addendum
Poor Rachel Maddow. She's been yuck yucking it up lately, feeling the Obamamania oh-so-much. And now to see her somber face, talking off of the teleprompter about terrorists targeting Americans, doing her level best to keep up the light-spirited Bush-is-a-dummy banter in the rest of her show. Damned breaking news. Yes, damned indeed. I do hope that I'm wrong. But those dark days of September 11 never left us. We just wished them away.

Keith Olbermann

... is about as far from an objective journalist as you can find in mainstream media. If an alien, completely unbiased, would observe the press long enough to understand... I'm sure he'd (she'd, it'd) classify Olbermann and Sean Hannity together. Two non-objective people talking at us, if we care to listen.

Case in point: Olbermann's bizarre declamation of a Sept. 11 tribute during the Republican National Convention. To the extent that I understand his decidedly non-journalistic dramatism, I guess the implication he'd like us to draw is that the Republicans are wrong-headed and somehow morally stained, in a way that disqualifies them from talking about events such as Sept. 11; certainly from paying any tribute to this event during their convention. If this isn't partisan whacky from the so-called press... what is? No wonder MSNBC yanked him from journalistic duties (rumours that Tom Brokaw had some part in this). Anyway, as I said, it's Hannity, MSNBC style. For those viewers out there who treat politics like a sports contest (may my side win, no matter what!), I'm sure Olbermann delivers.

So, what gave rise to this whole just before bed tirade is my unfortunate viewing tonight of a Olbermann's latest Countdown. Consistently, conspicuously, it's always "Mr. Bush" on this episode, never "President" Bush (even if he is?). So the language is, over and over, "President-elect Obama", meeting with "Mr. Bush". Excuse me, but isn't "Mr. Bush" our current President? And, if so, isn't "President Bush" the proper nomenclature? Apparently not. But to put a happy face on things, I'm sure President-elect Obama had a fine time with this Mr. Bush fellow (I hope Mr. Bush didn't talk too long, or waste President-elect Obam's time); perhaps they discussed how Mr. Bush could some day run for high office himself.

Okay, point made. Here's the deal. I've always downgraded hard-core partisan types, on the right or left. I suspect the 2000 presidential elections debacle still rankles with Olbermann types (those partisan talking heads, I mean). But there's nothing more we can ever do than let the process--judicial, local, Supreme--take its course. President Bush was elected by this American process. And he's not therefore illegitimate, unless so too was the process itself, and its final arbiter. Perhaps there were flaws, in the details, or perhaps not. But after the Supreme Court ended our hopes or fulfilled them, what actions were left to us? A new revolution? Very American. But mostly we're not much into real revolution these days; we prefer instead to grouse endlessly. And at any rate we don't have time for it. For Mr. Olbermann, for instance, it's got to be tricky to manage much more than partisan bickering when hosting a lucrative hate-Bush segment on MSNBC. (A point not lost on me, being a Capitalist.)

To whit, we all get behind our President-elects after due process; President-elect Obama's case was much easier, winning the popular and electoral vote. But in a much closer and frustrating election, so too was our current President sworn in by due process. Sorry that many didn't like the outcome. It's part of American politics that, every four years, predictably about half of the voting public doesn't either. So get over it. We can disagree without disrespect. It's President Bush, Mr. Olbermann. That's America.

Michael Crichton

In memoriam. This is a strangely emotional post. First, some facts. Of his works, I've read, in order: The Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man, Travels (an autobiographical sketch). After a long period of snooty academia, returned to Next, Airframe (read while I was taking flying lessons, still my favorite), Prey, State of Fear, Timeline, and started on Disclosure (but, I have to confess, my flame had begun to die out by then...).

Years ago, after graduating college, I purchased a used motorcycle, mapped out a (rough) course of thousands of miles from Spokane, to Seattle, down to Los Angeles, and then into the Rocky Mountains. I left by myself, and was gone for a sizable portion of that summer. Weeks later I was somewhere in Colorado, on the lawn of some roadside house near Craig, reading Crichton's Travels. Alone, and lonely and happy (travelers will know this paradox well enough). Broke down, waiting on the benevolence of a stranger; parts for my motorcycle.

Mr. Crichton was with me on this journey, through so many dark nights. I read his Travels, I picked it up and smelled it and put it back in my backpack, and picked it up again. He was there in the tent pitched in deserted campgrounds or just wind-swept BLM land, where I would travel down some unmarked dirt road looking for a place to pitch a tent for the night, racing against shadows that grew darker and stitched together until I had nothing but blackness. He was there when I made it, dehydrated and alone, to Lake Havasu from Los Angeles. I read him at 9,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies, and in the plains of Wyoming, and then Yellowstone, and Montana. After weeks of being alone, I would cry at night (in a manly way, of course...), and I would read... Crichton. It's all intermingled now, inextricably, in my memories and emotions.

And so I, like so many others, had a connection to Crichton's works, in the physical sense that I took his autobiography with me on my own travels those years ago. (I took also "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which was lost in a poorly fastened backpack on the second day of the trip. Someone from near Wenatchee, Wa actually mailed it back to me weeks later. It's still Travels--and not by happenstance, I don't think--that captures the sentiment of my own travels.)

I had also a connection to Michael Crichton years later, which is to say recently, in a more intellectual sense: I've been stimulated by his points about technology and science in his latest novels (for instance, when he cast a scientist's scepticism on catastrophic climate change in his 2002 "State of Fear").

Michael Crichton, I don't know why you died so young. I wish it were not. We're all, of course, just suddenly gone, and in memoriam for those who knew us too. But the past memories of my adventurous self, with my copy of your Travels to comfort me, literally, under the light of a lantern, lying by myself in wilderness thousands of miles from anyone I knew, or could count on; I was comforted by your presence. I'm sorry to see you go. Good bye, Mr. Crichton. And thank you.

Honeymoon over, already?

Hmm. Rhambo is not exactly a reach across the isle kind of guy. For those of us believing in the "not red and blue, but united states"... we're all crinkling our brows a little. We'll see.

Mr. President

Congrats, dude, congrats. I'm a white man who grew up in Spokane, Washington, and I recognize the special significance of your election. We're pulling for you. Let's get something done.

The Semantics of Change

The mantra on the campaign trail is change. Obama is the change candidate; McCain is the maverick. Neither want to be aligned with the last eight years. Change is a good message, and certainly is a part of the American psyche at this moment, but I think I think we're all using "change" in an idiosyncratic way; it's use on the campaign trail and among the American voters has a meaning much closer, it seems to me, to "stability", paradoxical as this may be.

The Credit Crisis hurt McCain so much because it steered discussion away from national defense, but it also hurt him because it connected, with voters, the current economic instability with the Republican administration. Who can make this unstable situation stable? This was the question posed to McCain, and one in which he needed, being an encumbent, a rabbit-out-of-the-hat response. He didn't provide any magic (far from it), and so sunk in the polls.

The reality is, the world is dangerous today on many fronts: we continue to persist in an assymetric war climate in which terrorist groups can exact massive damage to our people, our infrastructure, and our sense of self-confidence in spite of the large size of our military. We are immersed also in a global economy that has become increasingly complex, resistant to traditional "protectionist" close-the-doors solutions, and less and less controllable by the actions of central governments. Information was once disseminated in libraries; now we have the Web. Same shift I think with economies, and the shape of violent conflicts. Notwithstanding the wars we're fighting in quasi-conventional fashion, the assymetric nature of terror threats has never gone away. (It's morbid, but after Sept. 11 I've been inescapably impressed with the notion that we're on a countdown to the day when a suitcase sized nuclear device detonates in a major city.) The world is a scary place. But what we've discovered in the wake of the Credit Crisis is that it can be scary in many ways. A terrorist attack, or the collapse of the economy; it's all instability.

Part of what makes the modern world feel so perpetually unstable is that it's seemingly impervious to prediction, more now than ever. We're all bottom-up today, distributed, and not centrally controllable. It's not a recipe for prediction. In spite of the exhilarating progress of modern science, somehow we can't tell what's going to happen next. Forget the Enlightenment, we may as well be back in the Middle Ages, only with more differential equations (that don't apply to complex systems), and High Definition TVs. Arguably (and I think actually), our perpetual failure to predict what comes next is why true innovation is still possible (more on this in some other post). But no one can pretend to have their thumb over it anymore. It happens out there, apart from central government control. The 700 billion bail-out was a throw-back to such central control, but I suspect it will have less effect than we hoped, and at any rate, the increasing interdependence of the global economy will make such Hail Mary maneuvers less and less effective. It's a Scary New World. But we're all in it together.

So I think our current change candidates are really only succeeding with voters when they strike chords of stability, in spite of the continual use of the word change. The average voter, whatever he says outwardly, seems to be saying inwardly: The world is currently unstable; give me a President that will make it more stable. It's Obama's election to win, for sure. McCain has the Sisyphusian task of pushing the Rebublican rock back up the hill. He must be the "change" (read: return stability) candidate in spite of the fact that he's the encumbent. His folks have been in charge, and mostly we're not happy with the result.

Which is why, to descend into partisan politics, McCain shouldn't have chosen Palin. He chose her on "change", but apparently failed to recognize that "change" in this election really means "stability". Disasterous. She represents an unknown quantity in high office, whatever her appeal to the Republican base might be. McCain needed a stability veep, and one with the calming effect of a person of gravitas, good judgement, and experience. (I wanted Lieberman, personally, as we would get all of the above, as well as a strong case that McCain does indeed eschew party-line politics in favor of solving problems across the isle as needed.) Oh well. This election is all about stability, and as much as conservatives try to paper over the obvious problems, McCain's campaign has not instilled it.

I am rubber, you are glue

The tides have turned for Palin, even as the McCain campaign seems to be heading out to sea. She's gone from dunce to Diva. Even the likes of Salon.com's Joan Walsh has sudden sympathy.

What's amazing is that this woman has managed to steer a course, undeterred through it all, toward future rock star status in the Republical party. Personally, I think she's wrong for the party. But, geez, you sure have to admire the verve.

Trustworthynist

Is not a word, last time I checked. But I swear I just hear Palin say it. She said it, she did. To Sean Hannity (who sure as hell would let it pass). Listen, I don't envy Gov. Palin's hyper-in-the-spotlight position, and have empathy for someone doing their level best, but geez, could she get a better command of her native tongue? Play the tape again, maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so.

Diatribe

"I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." (Barack Obama, to enough-already "Joe the Plumber").

What, exactly, does this friggin' mean? I mean this in an entirely non-partisan sense. What the hell does he mean? Who is spreading it? The people who have it? Geez, if I'm languishing in luxury, eating grapes and drinking fine wine, and my neighbor is sitting in abject misery for lack of some crackers, I'll sure as hell "spread the wealth"... but who is the "you" that Obama is referring to?

This seems partisan, but really, there's a deeper point. He's saying that "I think that when government has the ability to take from some to give to others, it's good for everybody." In some limited sense it's true. But in some expansive sense it's sure as hell not. Spreading the friggin' wealth? It's not margarine for God sakes. What the comment reveals is failure to understand that it's not a zero sum game, as if "We all have some X, but some more than others, and we can't count on getting any more, so we'd better gosh darn share it...". What's next, rapping our knuckles with a ruler? This is manifestly... ahh crap forget it...