How Much Is Your Principle Worth?
(Or How Laws are Really Made)

Regardless of your position on the War in Iraq (yep, that’s a google link so you can look around for yourself), by now you probably believe that the Republican Party is generally in favor of “completing the mission” and the Democratic Party are in favor of “a phased withdrawal” or “troop redeployment”.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives, while the media is distracted with the smoke and mirrors game of Alberto Gonzalez’s firing of 8 U.S. attorneys, will vote on bill that will ultimately require the President to withdraw troops from Iraq by August 31, 2008 (assuming everything goes swimmingly in Iraq between now and then. Otherwise, he will have to “redeploy” them earlier than that). Oh, and the bill will also do about $20 billion or so more to help sweeten the pot.

The Democrats are doing their level best to garner as much support for this bill as possible, tossing in everything but the kitchen sink to get Republicans and a few conservative Democrats to sign on. Surely our representatives can’t be bought off, right? They'll do what they think is the right thing, right? They'll stand on principle, right?

Right?

For Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), there is $25 million for spinach growers hurt by last year's E. coli scare. For three conservative Democrats in Georgia, there is $75 million for peanut storage. For lawmakers from the bone-dry West, there is $500
million for wildfire suppression. An additional $120 million is earmarked for shrimp and Atlantic menhaden fishermen.

For more than a year, Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R) has tried unsuccessfully to secure federal funds to prevent salt water from intruding on rice fields in his lowland Louisiana district. So it came as a surprise last week when Boustany found $15 million in the House's huge war spending bill for his rice farmers. He hadn't even asked that the bill include it.

Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), who is running for his state's governorship, has conspicuously refused to say whether he can vote against $2.9 billion for Gulf Coast hurricane recovery, including $1.3 billion for New Orleans levee repairs.

Rep. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), usually a reliable vote for the Republican leadership, is
undecided as he ponders how he can vote against drought relief he has worked for
months to secure. The same goes for Musgrave, whose district has been devastated
by drought.

Democrats who may well have turned solidly against the bill are still weighing their options. Last year, Rep. John Barrow (Ga.) circulated a petition trying to get Republican House leaders to schedule a vote on drought relief. This year, Barrow's advocacy has yielded $3.7 billion worth of agricultural disaster assistance in the war spending bill, which he bragged about last week in a statement to constituents. The
conservative Democrat, who narrowly escaped defeat in November, is now undecided on the Iraq bill.

Right.

For the record, President Bush is set to veto this bill. Yes, I know that he might have a hard time finding that veto pen of his in his desk, given how often he uses it, but he’s got people looking right now, I promise you. So what are principles worth? Apparently anywhere from a couple million to a few billion…

…of your dollars.

Priorities? What a concept!

A good friend sent me a link to TEDTalks: Bjorn Lomborg. She gave no hint as to what I would find so I clicked on the link, completely unprepared. The specific talk had me nodding my head and saying “exactly” to no one in particular, over and over again.

I’ve since explored the site (Technology Entertainment Design), signed up for alerts, and thought I’d share it with you.

If you never click on a link I provide, please click on that first one. I'd love to know what you all think.

What to do? Happy Fourth Anniversary!

The traditional 4th anniversary present is linen. What did we get?

In casual conversations with friends both online and in person; watching and reading the news. The message is largely the same—the invasion of Iraq was a tragic mistake. I’m inclined to agree. Prior to us beginning the war, I did my civic duty and called the White House to say as much (you can too). I thought then, as I do now, that a doctrine of preemptive warfare was a dark and dangerous road to tread, the long-term consequences of which would be hard to predict.

I had no illusions then that my phone call or the email that I sent later that same day would be given much thought. After all, by that point, there was near-unanimous support in Congress for invading Iraq.

Four years later, as the President points to progress and asks for patience, Americans look back on this day with regret. This was a bad marriage and a lot of people wish they could just annul it. Politicians scramble to deal with this turn of events. The ones running for the ’08 elections have all kinds of responses: “I told you so,” “My vote was a mistake,” “I won’t apologize for my vote, but when you elect me, I’ll end the war,” and “We have to prevail” are the basic answers you’ll get from the front runners. I'll give former Senator Edwards credit: his use of the "I must have been drunk when I married her" approach is certainly different.

I’ve never been a fan of the popular accusation that the Democrats are “Invested in defeat”—it sounds too much like a carefully crafted sound bite, not unlike “cut and run” that worked so successfully for so long, and it intentionally ignores the possibility that those who disagree with current strategies might actually think that they have a superior one. I also find the “stay the course” mantra that’s used like a whip to beat the Republicans with to be a bit simplistic, intentionally glossing over any change in strategy that doesn't involve troop withdrawals. That said, what to do about Iraq seems to be the number one political question of the day.

It’s a tough political nut to crack, that’s for sure. Opinion polls suggest that Americans think that the war was a mistake, but aren’t so sure about withdrawing troops. For example:

"Do you think the United States can win or cannot win the war in
Iraq?"

Can Win 46%
Cannot Win 46%
Unsure 8%

"Which of the following comes closest to your view? The U.S. should immediately begin to withdraw all its troops from Iraq. The U.S. should withdraw all its troops from Iraq within a year. The U.S. should keep its troops in Iraq as long as is needed to turn control over to the Iraqi government."

Withdraw Now 21%
Withdraw Within Year 37%
Stay as Long As Needed 39%
Unsure 4%

"Do you think Congress should allow the government to
spend money to send additional troops to Iraq, or do you think Congress should vote to block the government from spending money to send additional troops to Iraq?"

Allow 43%
Block 52%
Unsure 6%

What’s a politician supposed to do with that?

Then there’s the disturbing report that although Saddam’s statue slayer now thinks we’re worse than Saddam ever was, most Iraqi’s disagree, actually seeming to have hope for the future of their country, and don’t believe they’re embroiled in a civil war.

The polls seem to pointing in all kinds of directions. Who should the politician listen to? What should s/he do?

Well, there’s always the “right thing.” Then again, what “the right thing” is really is the question.
For me, I can only look at history. In the ‘80’s the U.S. supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during their struggle with the Soviets. When the Soviets gave up after 10 yrs of strife, they left Afghanistan in shambles. With our common enemy out of the way, the U.S. cut off support for the Mujahideen and left them to sort out their political problems on their own. A decade later, the Taliban had taken over the country and Al Qaeda had a powerful recruiting tool.

Will the same thing happen in Iraq if we cut off support there? Who knows?

Heck of an anniversary.

Just Cause: When Should the State Kill Someone?

I saw that John Couey was sentenced to death in Miami and it got me thinking. I have to admit that I’ve vacillated over the years on the death penalty.

When I was a teenager, a pair of muggers shot and killed someone on my block. I didn’t see it happen, but I remember the dead body. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life—right up there with watching the Twin Towers fall. I heard the shot. It wasn’t like in the movies. It sounded like one of those pretty weak firecrackers that went off in my neighborhood from time to time (Looking back, I was probably too naïve to realize that a lot of those “firecrackers” were really shots being fired, but I digress). I remember going outside in the night, completely oblivious to the possibility that I might get hurt and walking up and down the block to see what was going on.

And then I saw him.

Lying on the ground in the most awkward position I’d ever seen, was this…kid. He wasn’t much older than I was at the time—fifteen or so. It didn’t really register what had happened for a few minutes. I don’t remember walking or running up to him. I just remember seeing the small hole in his face, just below his right eye. His eyes were closed and a small trickle of blood ran down his cheek. It was only when I bent down to shake him, to see if he was all right that I noticed the mass of gore and grayish-white tissue that was where the back of his skull should have been.

My brother later told me that I screamed so loudly that he heard me from his room about half a block away. My brother’s prone to exaggeration, so I’ll never really be sure if that’s true.

The cops supposedly found the two people who did it. I never did find out what happened to them—a murder in Miami didn’t exactly make the evening news. I never even learned the name of the poor kid who got killed. I don’t remember much else about the whole thing, to be honest.

I just remember what I felt.

Rage.

I was pissed that this kid got killed for no good reason and no one really cared except maybe his family. There wasn’t a peep about it on the news or in the papers—I scoured them for days, looking. Nothing. I wanted those two murderers to pay.

I wanted justice.

For years after that, I was a strong proponent of the death penalty. Florida was pretty good about doing the deed when necessary and, when I could vote, a politician’s stance on the death penalty was often a deciding factor.

I’ve done a lot of thinking since then. Some growing up, perhaps. I’ve learned to recognize that what I felt was not really a desire for justice. What I had wanted was revenge. The more I studied the issue, the less appealing this whole death penalty thing became.

The numbers aren’t very encouraging. Minorities tend to see the needle (or gas chamber, or electric chair, as the case may be) at a disproportionate rate. People on death row have been later found to have been innocent of the charges. It costs more to execute a killer than it does to imprison them for life. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no justifiable reason for state-sponsored revenge.

I'm not one to pull out Bible quotes too often, but I do recall reading once "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."

I’m not one to tell anyone else what to think about a given issue, so I won’t start now. Instead, I’ll do what I always ask people to do on any issue. Read up on it. See what the opponents and the proponents have to say. Then decide for yourself.

It’s Getting Hot in Here!

Always politician and sometimes climatologist, Al Gore got a call to “cool the hype” on Global Warming in the NY times today. To be fair, the article really just reports on scientists who are perturbed by Al Gore's tendency to gloss over the science whenever it's inconvenient to him. Having done a fair amount of research on the issue myself, I’m inclined to agree. I don’t have the temerity to claim absolute knowledge on the issue, but I do believe it’s fair to say that Mr. Gore is, at a minimum, an alarmist if not an outright propagandist.

For those unfamiliar with the film, An Inconvenient Truth (you can buy it on DVD but it’s not legally available for download or anything), the gist is that man-made CO2 emissions are the cause of a rising global warming trend seen over the past three decades and is going to cause catastrophic climate changes unless we take drastic and immediate action to stop it.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, put together a slideshow presentation that tries to debunk much of Al Gore’s movie. I encourage you to digest both presentations and then draw your own conclusions. (Their presentation is available for download).

With that said, let me lay out the postulations of global warming, as I see them.

1. The earth is experiencing a warming trend, having increased in temperature by about 1oF over the last 100 yrs or so.
2. The driving force behind this warming trend is the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, which are at levels and are rising at a rate that has not been seen on the planet in 800,000 yrs.
3. The increased levels of CO2 are directly attributable to man’s influence due to the burning of fossil fuels in past century.
4. Failure to stabilize and/or reduce CO2 emissions to halt CO2 atmospheric concentrations will result in an unabated rise in global temperatures. These higher temperatures will eventually result in catastrophic climate change.

Read the article. Look at the presentations—both of them. If you’re so inspired, do what I did and go look at some of the studies that both presentations reference. Decide for yourself.

On Leadership in Politics

As I drove home today, I was listening to a Rush Limbaugh rant about the lack of leadership in the Republican Party. I try to avoid absolute statements of any kind, but I think I’ll risk it this time: Rush Limbaugh has got to be one of the most arrogant, self-centered, egotists to have ever been given a microphone to rant on a daily basis. Of course, I find myself agreeing with Mr. Limbaugh on his larger points on occasions, but I’ve never been fond of his delivery.

He went on his tirade for quite some time about how there was no conservative that really “revs [him] up as of now.” Mr. Limbaugh was reacting, in part, to an article in the New York Post by George Will about the folly of conservatives looking for the “perfect” candidate vice one that was “good.” It’s a good article. In any case, as the ranting went on, it occurred to me that Mr. Limbaugh was not talking about leadership at all.

He was talking about charisma.

There’s a big difference between charisma and leadership. True, a good leader needs to be charismatic, but charisma is not the defining quality of leadership.

But what is?

Businesses value it so much that teaching leadership is a multi-billion dollar industry in and of itself. People crave it so much that they blindly place their faith in anyone that possesses any of the qualities that look like leadership. Of course leadership is important—a bad quarterback can ruin an otherwise great team and a good one can make a bad team look better than it is. But what are the essential qualities of a great leader?

In my military career, I’ve seen my share of great leaders and horrible ones. Almost all of them had some semblance of charisma—the submarine force is no more immune to the illusion of the power of charisma than the rest of American culture. We all want that leader who will lead us into the bowels of hell and back.

To me, there are three essential characteristics of leadership. You can decide for yourself if, based on those traits, we lack leadership in the political arena:

Honor
Courage
Commitment

Oh, I know you’ve seen those before—I didn’t claim my thought was original. Simply because something is old doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant or outdated.

I really hate it when he's right.

Politics is War


One of the most effective weapons in the arsenal of the politician is also one of the great logical fallacies in debate. U. S. politicians of both political parties use it with reckless abandon and do so with such frequency that they’ve coined a phrase for it—“the politics of personal destruction.” When in the midst of an actual political race, the approach is taken to such an extreme that the weapon transforms into “attack ads.”

Of course, I’m referring to the ad hominem—the art of avoiding the issue altogether by focusing, instead, on the person doing the speaking. It’s become so prevalent that we often don’t even realize when it’s being done. There was a time when you didn’t have to quote the string of letters and abbreviations after your name to have credibility on a topic. You simply spoke your mind and people would evaluate the strength of your arguments at face value. Now, if a scientist stands up and says that she doesn’t accept the findings on global warming and presents arguments to support her position, the immediate reaction is to question her motives and/or her education, rather than address the ideas she presents.

It’s so commonplace now that when we see a political candidate that we find attractive, we all hold our collective breaths while the Ad hominem Attack Squad (AAS) begins its research. We know it’s only a matter of time (would public relations representatives even have a job were in not for the AAS?). One way or another, the first salvo will be fired and the test of our favorite political candidate is how much he can take and remain standing.

Every election cycle is filled with stories about attack ads and how “the American People” (I suppose that’s you and me, but rarely do these pundits seem to have any idea about what I'm thinking) are “outraged” by the “worst attack ads we’ve seen yet.” Apparently the AAS is getting better (or worse, depending on your point of view) at their jobs every year. But if we are so outraged by them, why do they continue?

Simple. They work.

Ad hominem attacks work. They are, in fact, a double-whammy of an attack. First, you manage to take the focus away from the arguments that the person is making, which is the important part. When you throw an ad hominem grenade at an issue, everyone scatters and the issue blows up. By the time everyone brushes themselves off, hopefully free of any shrapnel, they’re so busy thanking whatever deities they worship for having escaped relatively unscathed that the reason the AAS was sent after them in the first place is long forgotten. That’s the other benefit of the ad hominem. You don’t even have to make a counterargument. Simply by having that grenade thrown, your credibility goes through the roof. If the opposition thinks that gay marriage is wrong, but he had sex with a man, then clearly gay marriage is right. You might think it's silly, but just watch those poll numbers.

Notice that I said “having the grenade thrown”? That’s the slight of hand part. The key to any good AAS is that it leaves the attacking politician out of it—you have plausible deniability. No one wants to be known as someone who engages in the politics of personal destruction, after all.

That’s not to say you can’t use the ad hominem six-shooter. Every good politician carries one around on his holster and uses it to lay down a little cover fire while the AAS moves in for the kill. You’ve heard the shots—“the President is a liar [or evil]”; “the Democrats are invested in defeat”. Those shots are just enough to be annoying and normally don’t result in an all-out scatter from the issue, but if you get enough of your fellow politicians to start firing with you, you might not need the AAS at all.

So here’s your challenge for the day. Watch a news report or read a news article that includes comments by politicians on a major issue (the House Democrats’ plan to have troops out of Iraq by Fall ’08 is a good one). See if you can spot the six-shooters going. You won’t see the AAS, so don’t look for them. These are but skirmishes anyway, so the AAS won’t be needed until sometime around January ’08 when the Democrats declare war on each other.

Intellectual Laziness and the Pundit

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death -Albert Einstein

I’ve never been a fan of punditry and I resent the appeal of the mercenary analysts that saturate our media. I’m not about to go into a diatribe about the famed left-wing media bias many conservatives like to complain about (conservatives have Fox News and you don’t get more conservative than that). Instead, I’m focused on the very notion of having someone do your thinking for you. I’ve seen it quite a bit in recent discussions—real life and online—and it’s gotten to the point that I’m rapidly losing interest in discussion.

That is, after all, what punditry is all about—thinking about and analyzing a given issue or group of issues so thoroughly for you that there’s nothing more to discuss. Oh, occasionally MSNBC or FOX will play the game of putting up a pundit from “the other side” to be massacred by “the truth” (lower case “t”—more on that in a second), but the truth is that they are there for show. None of them—conservative or liberal—actually believe you’re smart enough to figure out the truth on your own given the information so they don’t waste your time with it. Instead, they tell you the results.

And then they do it again.

And again.

And again.

And they tell you so many times in so many ways that you stop questioning how they came to the conclusions they have come to. The results are obvious. Of course school violence is on the rise. Of course DDT does more harm than any possible good it could do. Of course we need to spend more money on public education. Of course global warming is a fact, humanity is the cause, and we must take immediate and decisive action to stop it. Of course Iraq has WMD. Of course the President lied about those WMDs so he could get us into a war for [insert reason here—revenge, oil, prime contracts for us golf buddies].

Huh? What?

I could get into an inordinately long discussion on any or all of those topics I said above. I’ll bet my next paycheck most of you are railing about at least one, if not all of those topics, having lined up on one side or another. I’ll bet you are currently waiting to see where I go with this, unsure if you want to cheer me or jeer me. With a few keystrokes, I could set off a firestorm of argument.

But I won’t. Not going to do it. Not interested.

Why? Simple. Every time I get into one of these arguments, I get a regurgitation of the words of the pundit on that topic for one side or another. Independent thought seems to have gone by the wayside. Even the idea that someone is capable of independent thought seems to have disappeared into the abyss of sound bites and witticisms.

When I started posting to message boards outside of my writing and ventured into discussing things like politics, science, and religion, I was stunned (and often amused) by how many people would immediately attack me as a “Conservative” (capital “c”, more on that when I discuss Truth) and that meant I only thought “what FOX News tells [me] to think.” I think many people don’t know what to make of me. I often wear the Libertarian title just to put them at ease because no one knows what to do with you in American culture if they don’t know which pundit is doing your thinking for you. Of course, the title means nothing, in the end.

The importance of the capital letter
Being a conservative or a liberal is not a label or a political affiliation; it’s a philosophical perspective.

A conservative tends to want to keep things close to the status quo, taking changes slowly and deliberately to minimize the impact of unintended consequences (conservatives believe that there are always untended consequences). As such, you’ll typically find conservatives in staunch opposition to new laws or changing old laws without some clear reasoning and/or a demonstrated need. When it comes to government, conservatives tend to think that government is inherently incapable of accomplishing anything but a few functions—killing people, breaking things, and building roads. Oh! And collecting taxes. It would be fair to say that conservatives are pessimists (they’d say they’re realists).

If conservatives are pessimists, then liberals are optimists. They believe in progression—moving forward; growth. Stagnation, a liberal would likely tell you, is the most dangerous thing any society can experience. The government, to the liberal, is the personification of the power of unified will. The liberal knows that it is only through the consent of the governed that those who govern have power. The liberal generally celebrates government as a monument to the success of discordant voices finding consensus through debate and compromise. The liberal also believes in fair play. The liberal generally worries about power being consolidated in the hands of a few because they know that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There are, of course, specifics about liberals and conservatives that are specific to different cultures. In America, for example, both liberals and conservatives acknowledge that mankind is inherently selfish. The American liberal would likely want to ensure that laws are in place to restrain that selfishness while the American conservative would likely want to let that selfishness loose upon the world and reap the benefits of that “enlightened self-interest.”

Now here’s the little-discussed Truth (yes, that’s truth with a capital “t”): liberalism and conservatism are both reasonable points of view. Two people can look at the same thing, see two different things, and both be right. There is nothing inherently wrong with the perspective of either philosophy and if people were intellectually honest with each other (or themselves, for that matter), we’d probably have a lot more people being able to “disagree without being disagreeable”, as Sen. Obama likes to say.

But it’s the Conservatives and the Liberals that are the problem. Conservatives and Liberals don’t care about the Truth. They don’t care about the philosophical differences. They don’t acknowledge each other’s positions, let alone allow for the possibility that one of them might be right. They attach themselves to political parties and candidates—Conservatives to the Republican Party and Liberals to the Democratic Party—like leeches on a hippopotamus’ rump. These are the intellectually lazy. When things go badly in their camp, they salivate for their pundit to come out and tell them what to say to fight back.

I’m always amused when I see Conservatives arguing about the war in Iraq because they’re really in a pickle—some Conservative pundits are calling for withdrawal, going where the tide is taking them, and others are saying we need to finish what we started. How are they supposed to support the party when they don’t know what to think?

I was equally amused when someone pointed out Al Gore’s hypocrisy in using 20 times more energy in a month than most Americans use in a year while traveling in his private jet to give lectures on reducing carbon emissions in our daily lives. For an entire news cycle, the Conservatives were having at the issue and no Liberal pundits were firing back (poor guys got caught off-guard. You need at least a news cycle to prepare your response and test it before you go public with it). Then, within a day, the prepackaged thought parcels were delivered and life could resume as normal—Mr. Gore buys carbon offsets and he’s consolidated his office into his home, etc.

In the end, punditry wins. Hired intellectual chefs, ready to cook you up a prepared thought at a moment’s notice, stand by patiently for your order. What should you think about welfare reform? Well, are you ordering from the Conservative or the Liberal side of the menu?

I think I’ll cook for myself, thank you very much.