Just a short note for today, again on Afghanistan.

Since I wrote last on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, I have read at least half a dozen pieces arguing against the minimalist approach--the idea that the Administration is doing more and promising less in order to bring capabilities into lines with a pessimistic assessment of achievable outcomes. The arguments insist that a real counterinsurgeny strategy can win the war. We are warned, at the same time, that victory will cost plenty and take many years, but indeed we can win. They plead for money, time and patience from the American people. I'm an American people, and here's how that sounds to me.

Well OK, Senators Lieberman and McCain, Max Boot, and the other nine people I've heard this from lately, let me ask you this.  Suppose I grant the thesis that we can in fact win: But what are the opportunity costs of spending resources, lives and time in Afghanistan against wherever else they may be needed?  Tilt as you will against real decreases in defense spending, they are here and they will stay for a while whether we like it or not. Are you sure Afghanistan is where we should be spending so much?  

Another question: Suppose we win -- how secure will victory be?  It's a nasty neighborhood, and Afghanistan has never been a normal conventional state. Another question: What will winning in Afghanistan mean for Pakistan, arguably a more important stake -- a much more populous country, with nuclear weapons. How do you win in Afghanistan without doing things that risk destabilizing Pakistan further?  If you don't have an answer to this one, you need to go back to start, do not pass go and do not collect anything expect history books and aspirin. 

In short, a lot of commentators seem to me to be looking very shortsightedly at this problem despite claiming they are looking out 10, 12 years.  They are looking out, but they are doing so as through a tunnel: no sense of what's outside, or what the other side of the journey really looks like. I'm skeptical we can ever win in Afghanistan as I define "win", but even if we can I am even more skeptical that the result will be stable enough to justify the costs. The vision in my mind is the kid on the seashore who spends the whole afternoon building the most amazing sand castle ever, besting his own expectation and wowing the spectators. Cool; great; wonderful; amazing. Hey, but then the tide rolls in.

Maybe I'm wrong, but at least I am starting my analysis with all the factors on the table. Those who say we can win, it seems to me, are not.

Today's news registers in a major and a minor key and a still more minor key, maybe a minor 7th.  The major key concerns the Geithner bank rescue plan. That's the one that has garnered all the big headlines and attracted the star journalists.  The minor key concerns the EPA "finding", so to speak, that it has the authority to use the Clean Air Act to enforce "global warming" policy. Hardly anyone will even read this news. The minor 7th concerns the President's remarks on energy. 

I am no financial expert, so I am not in a position to judge what Geithner has rolled out.  A lot of experts say it won't work, despite Wall Street's enthusiastic response to its details. That just makes me think, however, that in fact it won't work. We have an essay coming up in the magazine, one of our toolboxes, arguing for Limited Purpose Banking. When I first read it and sort of understood it, it struck me as a very radical, but still quite logical and sensible a proposal. None of the criticisms to the Geithner approach, so far anyway, for all the alternative approaches they propose, come close to Limited Purpose Banking. But the reason I'm prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the LPB approach is that, unlike almost all the alternatives I've heard of, it proposes changing the incentive structure of banks and bankers. Right now, banks gamble with other people's money, but bankers do well from commissions and bonuses whether their gambles pay off or not. Their gambles, moreover, are all more or less variations on a single theme: arrange things so you borrow short and safe but lend long and risky.  That way you'll make enough from high-yield loans to more than cover your obligations, even if a fair number of your loans come a cropper. But when too many loans come a cropper, the whole edifice fails, and the losers are other people, not oneself. That being the case, there's not much incentive against irrational behavior, particularly when other bankers are mainly doing the same thing. This just means that individually rational behaviors don't necessarily add up to collectively rational behavior. But every social science PhD already knows that.

Anyway, LPB would change what banks do.  It would prevent them from gambling with other people's money. It would limit them to intermediating between depositors and borrowers, between those who offer investments and those who purchase them. It would earn a fee for its service, and its own money the bank could invest.  But not other people's money. That changes the incentive structure. It has always seemed to me -- but what do I know? -- that if we keep giving banks money, from TARP reservoirs or from some public-private scheme like Geithner's, but we don't change what bankers can do and how they think, then eventually we'll end up with another crisis.  It's true, sure, that we haven't had a whole lot of banking crises since the FDIC was created, and the S&L crisis was not exactly the same thing. But the system we have ensures that when we do have a crisis it's a real doozy. 

Maybe the practical thing is to reliquify the system as it is, and stabilize it--and then change it radically so this can't happen again. But that'll never happen, because it takes a crisis to get real change in this country -- always has. Solve the crisis, or the sense of it, and the motivating force for real reform will evaporate overnight.

I am tempted, while I am on this subject, to refer back to a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week in which Senator Chris Dodd mused that, well, maybe we should not get ourselves into a "too big to fail" situation in the first place. Dodd is no philosopher. But better he and his colleagues wake up later than not at all. Gigantism in American society is the problem, and at many levels. It's nothing new, however; go back to W.J. Byran, TR, Woodrow Wilson, and all the Populists, Progressives, Bull Moosers, Mugwumps and the rest, and you see it all fresh and clean a century ago. Go back and read William Allen White.  Kirkpatrick Sale and his 1970 book Human Scale had nothing on WAW. The problem here, from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1888 forward, is that if you let corporate scale get very large, you will have to also let countervailing forces in society--unions but especially government--get very large to balance against potential abuses. This is what J.K. Galbraith understood in the 1950s -- that grand scale qualitatively changes the dynamics of "invisible hand" competition in a market economy.  This is what C. Wright Mills understood (though he got a lot wrong, too) when he wrote about The Power Elite. This is what Murray Bookchin and dozens of other intellectual anarchists (as opposed to the old-fashioned bomb-throwing type) have been trying to tell us for 50 years. If you depersonalize economic relations--all kinds, production, owner-worker interactions, marketing, banking, you name it--you hollow out the stickiness of ethical considerations in keeping everyone honest.  To return to the point, most bankers will not gamble with just any other people's money, just other people they don't know. So if we let banks and investment houses and insurance companies get as big as Lehman Brothers and Citibank and Bank of America and AIG, then we enable a too-big-to-fail problem to form,  we have only ourselves to blame for it. It would be one thing if there were real and widely shared economies of scale from such gigantism, but there are not. Instead there are usually diseconomies related to large transaction costs, as can be seen clearly in the whole medical insurance racket. 

Now for the minor key news, which could end up being a lot more important than the major. If EPA uses the Clean Air Act to regulate hydrocarbon emissions, the U.S. economy may never recover. Carol Browner and the rest of the new crowd at EPA are true-believing pantheists, as best I can tell. They approach "global warming" as though it were a surrogate religion, and as such their catechism has become impervious to actual facts. They don't care about the economic and political costs of "saving the world", as they see it. Because they are, after all, "saving the world."

OK, so let me say it, flat out--say what has almost become unspeakable in many polite quarters these days: I don't believe that global warming is mostly anthropogenic, and I don't think it's a crisis. I also don't believe that acute weather events are driven by warming trends, though I am open-minded about what the science has to say here, once we have enough of it to reach a reasonable conclusion. 

Speaking of facts, most of the global warming pantheists who claim facts are on their side wouldn't know how to evaluate genuine scientific evidence if their lives depended on it. It is true that global temperature rise and energy use increases track upward together generally from around 1850 to the present, but they do not track exactly. For example, according to data no one disputes, from 1850 to 1880 energy consumption increased little but temperatures increased a lot. Between 1880 and 1910 the data show that energy use doubled, but temperatures actually declined!  Again, if you measure from 1935 to 1965, fossil fuel consumption doubled, but global temperatures remained essentially flat. 

This means either that there is no lock-step relationship between energy use and temperature increases; that the measurement techniques have been wrong; and/or that something else is driving temperature patterns. One of those things may be the rotation and wobble of the earth and how it affects ocean currents and weather. We have had global warming before. We had it, for example, in and around the 6th-7th century CE, and again in the 14th-15th century. Scandinavian types were able to grow grapes in Greenland, after all, long before the Industrial Revolution. (We also had great plagues in temperate zones during those warming trends, so the CDC is right to be concerned about tracking diseases and pests.)

Add to that the fact--yes, the fact--that we rarely if ever measure actual particulates in the atmosphere, but only extrapolate what's going on up there from measuring emissions down here, and any reasonable, scientifically literate person would pause before rushing to alarmist conclusions. And as many observers have pointed out, to behave as though a long-term trend is a crisis is to cripple rationality in public policy. For what it would cost to stop and reverse global warming, we could do lots of other praiseworthy things. But the religious attitude typically taken toward the problem makes the idea that propositions ought to be examined on the merits a form of heresy.

I am all for reducing emissions, for a smaller societal carbon footprint, and I am all for cleaner energy. I am for these things because it is, in the end, more efficient and healthy. I am for them too, as in President Obama's energy plan also rolled out in more detail in today's news, because this is indeed a major source of new productive jobs. We have underinvested by orders of magnitude in energy R&D in the past thirty years--the fault of Congress and the K-Street lobby mafia, once again. (It's everywhere rotting out public policy.)  I am not for these things because I fear global warming. And I hate to think that only an irrational, scientifically specious fear is powerful enough to get us to do what we should want to do anyway.  It's enough to drive a person crazy.

Final comment for now, about what the President had to say yesterday about energy policy. He spoke, as so many have, about energy independence, about not being dependent on foreign oil. This isn't completely stupid, but it mainly is. 

We chose, as a nation, to become more dependent on international commerce in oil because it was a whole lot cheaper to import than to use domestic sources. We did it, starting in the Eisenhower Administration, for economic advantage: the cheaper our energy inputs, the more efficient our economy all else equal. We do this in general, as do other countries. It's called comparative advantage; that's why there is international trade, and international trade is in the main good. So why do so many people think oil is an exception?

These days there are really two reasons. The first, which is valid, is that the money we pay to buy foreign oil (which is no longer as cheap on a regular basis as it was before) helps nasty regimes and sometimes trickles down to nasty terrorists. This is true, but if we don't buy Saudi oil, say, someone else will. So we don't eliminate the problem by not being dependent on foreign oil; we only loose ourselves from moral responsibility for it. 

The other is that we can't depend on the supply; it might get embargoed for political reasons or interdicted. This is pretty much nonsense nowadays. The vertically integrated nature of the industry makes embargoes very hard to pull off. The Arab embargo of 1974 failed, in point of fact. As for interdiction, that was a worry we planned for during the Cold War; it is not a serious worry anymore. (I have detailed all this in a Harvard Middle East Paper recently, which can be found, if you look around long enough, at MESH.org.) Middle Eastern and other oil producers have to sell their oil; they want to sell it at least as much as we and others want to buy it, or it becomes worthless to them in fact. We should not rue our "dependence"on foreign oil really any more than we should rue our dependence on imports of kiwi fruit, yak hides or copper ore.  We should not rush to pay a lot more for domestic sources of energy over foreign any more than we should want to pay a lot more for domestic sources over foreign of anything else.

Ah, but here is the rub. As I said, oil isn't so cheap anymore--at least it hasn't been fairly recently and, after economic recovery, could go quite high again and pretty much stay high. So if we can figure out how to produce domestic energy that is lots cheaper than oil, whether foreign or domestic, we'll be in pretty fine shape, which is why all kinds of efforts, public and private, should be devoted to and incentivized toward that end. 

Can we do this?  Yes, I am sure we can, and I am sure we can do it a lot faster than many people think. Some guy in Japan last month unveiled a car that runs on water.  That's right, plain old water. It has a hydrogen-gas producing mechanism that has to run on something else, so I don't know the devices' thermodynamic balance sheet, but whatever it is, it promises to be non-carbon and possibly pretty damned cheap compared to $200/barrel sweet crude. And that's just one thing, out of dozens we can put to use. We can do this.  What's stopping us, or slowing us down?  Just the K-Street-Congressional circus, as usual.  

So, taking all this into consideration, will the President please stop talking nonsense about our dependence on foreign oil? It's just the wrong way to think about these things. We should not be thinking about oil at all. We should be thinking about calories, or about energy packets, if you like. We should be asking how much does it cost us to produce (and clean up after) enough energy to do some arbitrary amount of work, defined scientifically, not casually: How many calories to push a ten-kilo weight two meters, say. We should work to develop and use the cheapest net source (net meaning after clean-up and taking into account all externalities) we can devise. If that turns out still to be imported oil, fine.  Except that it won't.  If that turns out to be food to feed a human or an animal who then pushes that ten-kilo weight two meters, fine. That also used to be the case, a long time ago; but it won't be in the future. 

Science really is useful, folks. It really does help us to see clearly and to solve problems. It can't make critical value judgments, but it is still the best bet on the block for a problem like energy. So can we please stop nattering about climate crises and energy dependencies that are either figments of addled imaginations or entirely besides the point? No, we probably can't.....

Let's talk just a little about Afghanistan (because I am speechless about the trillion dollar headlines......). The papers say the Obama Administrations wants to dramatically expand the size of the Afghan Army and police, and is prepared to pay a huge amount of money to do it. Everyone from General Barno to Senator Levin are on board with the idea, as are many other analysts whose opinions I have come to respect. So why does the idea make me nervous?

Well, first, I confess that I have to agree that the alternatives to a larger force are not appealing. We can't or at any rate should not do it ourselves, even in coalition with other outsiders. Afghans don't like outsiders in their midst telling them what to do. And it's not a good idea to just let the Taliban 2.0 take over, although it does not necessarily follow that a Taliban 2.0 government would do the same stupid and terrible things the Taliban 1.0 government did--i.e., provide welcome and save haven for al-Qaeda. 

Still. And the "still" comes down to three things. First, and most important, I am not soothed by General Barno's assurances that the army will remain loyal to civilian authority. That depends on whether the civilian authority remains worthy of their loyalty. I have a lot less animosity toward Hamid Karzai than the Obama Administration seems to have.  As I have said before, I don't think they appreciate sufficiently the cultural relativity of corruption. Karzai, or whomever tries to run the country from Kabul, has to be tough, flexible and lucky to make a go of it. He can't act like a Philadelphia lawyer or a boy scout and expect to get anywhere. So the key is whether the government can persuade the army that any cruelty, double-dealing and corruption it deploys it deploys on behalf of the national interest rather than its own pocketbooks. It's not what it does that matters as such; it's the perception of on whose behalf it is done. If Kabul becomes selfish and narrow, we'll end up with a military government there. Karzai will end up either dead or back in India, most likely.  

That, of course, is not the end of the world as far as I am concerned. But it will look like a colossal U.S. policy failure if it happens.  It will look especially heinous because the Obama Administration has dropped the 4th "D" from its vocabulary--the "democracy" D. So a lot of people, no doubt, will conclude that these Democratic Machiavellian realists actually plotted all along that there be a military coup and a military dictatorship in Kabul. It won't be true, but so what?

Second, it is very important how this larger army and police force are recruited and balanced.  If the Pashtun tribal leaders see either one as a front, basically, for the Tajiks or for de-tribalized Pashtuns in league with foreigners, a larger army will just set the stage for the next iteration of civil war.  That would be much worse than a military government in Kabul. In other words, not all larger armies and police forces are created equal.

Third, on a rather different level, I find it sort of amazing that the New York Times can report, and here is how today's article starts, "President Obama and his advisers have decided to significantly expand Afghanistan's security forces. . . ."  Like what, like Afghanistan is Ohio or something?  Like it is normal for one sovereign government to decide how large the security forces of another nominally sovereign government should be?  We fall into this language without even being aware of how weird it is.  We should listen to how we talk sometimes; we might learn a thing or two. 

Obviously, the reason for the seamless obliviousness in the way we talk about these things is that the Afghans themselves cannot afford to build up their own army and police themselves. Still, there appears to be no mention in the article of what the elected Afghan government thinks about this idea. Did we ask them? We're not told.  How can we boast about the Afghan election and Afghanistan's new budding democracy, and then go and make critical decisions about that country's future as if the presidential palace and the parliament were about as relevant to the policy discussion as a day-care center?  If you don't find this attention-arresting, well, what do you find attention-arresting?

 

I've been even more delinquent since my last post, I know. I have an excuse, however: getting both a book and a magazine to press.  This is time-consuming stuff; don't try it at home. 

A lot has happened since March 12, a fair bit of it strange.  The strangest thing of all, seems to me, is the decision of the Obama Administration to turn all bubbly, warm and fuzzy about the economy. The buzz this past weekend and into Monday, or the spin rather, was that things are looking up.  Recovery in `09 even, not just 2010, they're now saying.  I am skeptical. But I think I understand the reason for this.  These guys understand herd instinct. They understand the psychology of fear. So there're trying to use the media, which has been harmful to the economy for a year, to turn the spin around.  I doubt this will work, and it amounts to a huge political wager. Indeed, I think it is likely to turn out a calamitous wager come the mid-term elections. We'll see. 

I promised last time to comment on education and science. Let me do that now, very briefly.

When the President reversed Bush Administration  policy on stem cells last week, he didn't literally do much.  This was always mainly a symbolic issue, since the ban only applied to U.S. government funding, and that was never the major source of funding.  But it was a good thing to do all the same; the "Catholic/Evangelical" opposition to stem cell research is not frivolous, but on balance it is mistaken. So good.

The President's broader remarks about science regaining its "rightful place", however--a line from the Inaugural you will remember--were both mistaken and, intellectually speaking, quite frivolous.  Does the President really think that decisions scientists make about the life sciences are value free?  Yuval Levin said it all in a Washington Post column the next day, in which he wisely quoted an abominable speech John Kennedy made in 1962 in Ann Arbor, the one in which he said that all the moral questions were answered, and that all that was left to do was of a technical nature. In the Skinnerian climate of that time, one can perhaps forgive Kennedy's naivete. But to say such things now?!  Has Obama never read a book on the sociology of science?  Did he miss that class in high school?  Sheesh. The idea that only right-wing religious types politicize science is about the the most outrageous thing, again, intellectually speaking, that Obama has ever said (at least that I know of). Someone should clue him in before he embarrasses himself further.  This is my way of doing what George W. Bush says -- that we should all help the President. (Bush is already a better ex-President than he was a President.)

As to education, well, the headlines last week said the NEA might get mad at Obama for proposing merit pay for excellent teachers. Anything that pisses off the NEA, the most hidebound pseudo-liberal union in town, is OK by me. But all this misses the point, and is so small bore as to bring one to tears. 

Do these guys have any real ideas?  They propose stringing up nicer wires for the electrical/communications grid, instead of burying the lines like anyone with a brain would do. And so in education, the President talks about merit pay for good teachers and a longer school year. Folks, this is embarrassing, too. How does anyone know who is really a good teacher?  Can a really good teacher be isolated from the overall quality of a school or from the socio-economic echelon sending its children there?  All else equal, a teacher is going to be successful if the school is well-funded, well-managed, and if the kids coming to it are from a hearth culture that cares about and encourages high achievement in education. The teacher who will be best for kids at West Philly high is not the same teacher who will be best for kids in Scarsdale, where the median family income is ten-times higher and the schools many times better funded, and where the kids' parents have been reading to them and having coherent conversations with them since they were 2. So by what universally applicable criteria does one reward a very good teacher?  And who chooses--parents, administrators, other teachers, the union!?  All this is fraught with potential abuse and misuse. It's a stupid idea, and not just because the NEA doesn't like it -- because it dislikes it for all the wrong reasons.

And it's not how long kids are in school that matters, it's what they do when they're there. Like, duh.  Our schools for the most part still resemble the 19th century model upon which they were built. Here's just one example out of about 50 I can name. 

Why do we teach math separate from natural science?  This is dumb. Math and science, at least once kids get past about 3rd grade, should always be team-taught.  The science should come first -- the concepts explained and illustrated. Then, once basics are done with, the math that allows the science to be used should be taught. Then the next science unit, and then the math that goes with it, and so on up to advanced physics and the calculus you need to do it. This is how math developed anyway, for the most part--cf Leibnitz and Newton. It's the natural sequence. Very few students can understand math in its rarified form because they just don't care about it, they don't see what it's good for. There are some students who happen to be fascinated with abstract logic, because that is what pure math is, but they are a tiny minority. If math is taught as a practical joined-at-the-hip adjunct to science, which is inherently fascinating and obviously purposeful, we'll end up with students who're better at both math and science. That would be a good thing.

This is so obvious once you think about it that you could just shit for how dense we've been. Just think of how many millions of hours of student time we've wasted trying to get kids to see what math is for. What's stopping us from restructuring the science/math curricula to make better sense? Well, NEA for one......

And finally for today, I will mainly resist the urge to comment on AIG and Sect. Geithner and so on....except to say the following.  I once travelled to Russia and back with former AIG chairman Hank (Maurice) Greenberg.  I did not like him. Now that I know what AIG was really up to all those years, I sort of see why my instincts acted as they did. I can't say that old Hank ought to be in jail, like another old magazine benefactor of mine, Conrad Black. (I know him, too, yes.) I don't know that Hank technically broke any laws, anymore than the assholes who directed and received these AIG bonuses with TARP money actually broke any laws. But legalities aside, I can't help how I feel about it, and hey, that's right, you don't have to be a card-carrying Democrat right now to be plenty pissed off at these plutocrats. 

Just one caveat: this is nothing new. Rich people have been using jerkwads in Congress to tilt the playing field in their favor since before Mark Twain was born. From time to time we get rid of them: think Andrew Jackson, think W. J. Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt (and William Allen White) and, well, it's time again, isn't it?  Norm Ornstein and a buddy did a book not too long ago called The Broken Branch, in which they tried to show what's wrong with Congress. It's a good book, but it doesn't tell the whole sordid story. It all goes back to money, to the TV ad syndrome and to the basic sleaze associated with lobbying. As I have said before, unless the Obama Administration changes the transactional culture of this town and gets rid of the human filth that keeps it going, he's not only not going to accomplish anything lasting, he is going to blow the opportunity of a lifetime.

Yes, yes, I've been a delinquent blogger lately, and it's not because nothing has happened worth writing about. I've simply been too busy with preparing the May-June issue of The American Interest, and with getting my Jewcentricity book finally to Wiley & Sons to press. And then there was Purim, and a presentation I had to prepare for my neighborhood civic association group's pre-Purim party, which we hosted. I am a board member of the association (I believe in local community and local government, you know -- my insistence on metis and subsidiarity), and later, sometime or other, I will explain the reasons for having a Purim party in the first place. But not now. 

Now I want to comment briefly on three things: the Chas Freeman affair; the POTUS comments on science in the context of the stem-call research ban removal; and his pre-proposals concerning education. Today I'll do the first, the second tomorrow and the third, well, after that.

On the Chas affair, it is, to me at least, amazing how much ink got spilled on this little business in so short a time--most of it unfortunately splashed about. I have no intention of wading through it all, or dragging you with me even were I to do it in private (which I more or less have done). So I will be relatively brief. 

NDI Denny Blair made a bad choice in picking Chas Freeman for the job of Director of the National Intelligence Council, what everyone in this town who knows the govenment calls the NIC ("nick"). That job is important, and because of its nature requires someone who is buttoned down, someone who keeps his personal opinions to him or herself, someone who can attend an official function and, like a skilled referee in a basketball game, manage to become more or less invisible. It is not a job for someone who likes to make headlines, likes to talk to the press, or carries even an impression of having sub rosa dealings with other countries. Chas, for those who do not know him, is a born contrarian, a provocateur (mainly in a good way), a guy who is a pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. Not the right personality for the NIC, not even close.

So why did Blair do this?  I don't know; I only know him slightly. But several people have suggested to me that this is just something admirals tend to do.  Anyone who has ever commanded a large ship inherently becomes a kind of autocrat, and begins to imagine that context is what he says it is. Maybe this is so. I have no better explanation for this mistake.

However it came to be, how it ended reflects poorly on the overall personnel vetting problem in what still appears to me to be a highly sub-adult administration, at least when it comes to internal management. How could the White House personnel people let a man who has made comments about China and human rights like Chas Freeman has be appointed to a post like that without first clearing it with Nancy Pelosi and others?  This is just too clumsy for words. Did Blair do this entirely on his own, with no White House vetting process?  We don't know, or at least I don't know. If that's the case, it's a helluva way to run the show. If it's not the case, then someone screwed up, and Rahm Emanuel should by now have his or her balls in his pocket (assuming it wasn't Rahm Emanuel who is the one who screwed up). Either way, a real mess.

Now, a lot of nasty things have been said about Chas Freeman in the past few weeks. Many of them could only have been said by people who do not know the man, who've never had a single face-to-face conversation with him.  One blog, by my friend Rod Radosh, even claimed he is a Jew, if I read it right. This is, I think, not possible. Not only was Chas born in Rhode Island, and not only does he give every appearance of being a dyed-in-the-wool WASP, but he was, after all, Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.  The Saudis would never have accepted, and we would not have dared appoint, a Jew to that position--not, anyway, if we wanted a useful ambassador there. 

Opposition to Freeman arose on two separate grounds: one his views on China and Tiananman Square, and the other his views on Israel and the Middle East. It was, pretty clearly I think, his views on China that got him cashiered. His views have been widely quoted and there is no reason for me to repeat them here, but basically, Chas is a realist--both self-styled and really. His observation that Tiananman would never have happened if the Chinese leadership had not been so irresolute at the beginning is not a value judgment; it is an analytical judgment. And I think it is inarguable. His contention that China will become liberal and even democratic in due course is arguable, but it is not reprehensible. Again, it is an analytical judgment, not an indication that Chas dislikes democracy or admires Asian authoritarianism. What it shows, I think, is that Chas dislikes those who wear democracy promotion and human rights on their sleeves to make themselves feel noble, even when doing so often has counterproductive consequences on the ground. Well, I agree with Chas on this. That is a separate matter from whether someone so outspoken on the subject should be at the NIC. 

As for Israel, Chas's views, as best I can make them out, are not much different from the standard State Department realist view. He has referred to Israel's settlements policies as a form of colonization, and as taking land from Arabs. This wounds a lot of pro-Israeli Jews, I know. But it is factually wrong?  Has the State of Israel expropriated privately owned Arab land for settlements?  Sometimes it has. It is incendiary to call this colonization?  Maybe, but it's not literally false according to a dictionary definition of the term, which many Israelis will have no qualms about telling you. 

But has Chas ever called for Israel's destruction? Has he ever said that Zionism is racism? Has he ever whitewashed Palestinian or Arab terrorism?  Not that I have ever heard. To some people, like Steven Walt, Chas's criticisms of Israeli policy are "mild." To blood-on-the-saddle American supporters of Israel there are neo-genocidal, to judge by some of the comments. I'd say his comments are slightly beyond mild as criticisms, but there are nowhere in the vicinity of hateful or extreme. It is the critics who are more often extreme. 

Certainly, those critics who exaggerated his views are blameworthy. Certainly, too, those critics who insinuated, without evidence, that Chas has acted as an agent for a foreign government are way out of line. That is slander. It's not wrong to wonder, given Chas's apparent vulnerability to forms of localitis. But it is wrong, very wrong, to make accusations without evidence. These people should be ashamed of themselves. 

Unfortunately, Chas has failed to understand the reasons for his nomination's collapse. In a parting shot, he blamed the Israel Lobby for what happened to him. This is really unfortunate, and makes me sad. Here is what he said, not in part, but in full, with the key parts, for my purposes, in italics: 

"To all who supported me or gave me words of encouragement during the controversy of the past two weeks, you have my gratitude and respect. You will by now have seen the statement by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reporting that I have withdrawn my previous acceptance of his invitation to chair the National Intelligence Council.

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.

As those who know me are well aware, I have greatly enjoyed life since retiring from government. Nothing was further from my mind than a return to public service. When Admiral Blair asked me to chair the NIC I responded that I understood he was “asking me to give my freedom of speech, my leisure, the greater part of my income, subject myself to the mental colonoscopy of a polygraph, and resume a daily commute to a job with long working hours and a daily ration of political abuse.” I added that I wondered “whether there wasn’t some sort of downside to this offer.” I was mindful that no one is indispensable; I am not an exception. It took weeks of reflection for me to conclude that, given the unprecedentedly challenging circumstances in which our country now finds itself abroad and at home, I had no choice but accept the call to return to public service. I thereupon resigned from all positions that I had held and all activities in which I was engaged. I now look forward to returning to private life, freed of all previous obligations.

I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality of analysis available to President Obama and his administration. Still, I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.

In the court of public opinion, unlike a court of law, one is guilty until proven innocent. The speeches from which quotations have been lifted from their context are available for anyone interested in the truth to read. The injustice of the accusations made against me has been obvious to those with open minds. Those who have sought to impugn my character are uninterested in any rebuttal that I or anyone else might make.

Still, for the record: I have never sought to be paid or accepted payment from any foreign government, including Saudi Arabia or China, for any service, nor have I ever spoken on behalf of a foreign government, its interests, or its policies. I have never lobbied any branch of our government for any cause, foreign or domestic. I am my own man, no one else’s, and with my return to private life, I will once again – to my pleasure – serve no master other than myself. I will continue to speak out as I choose on issues of concern to me and other Americans.

I retain my respect and confidence in President Obama and DNI Blair. Our country now faces terrible challenges abroad as well as at home. Like all patriotic Americans, I continue to pray that our president can successfully lead us in surmounting them."

Chas is right and justified to defend himself against slander. But his comments about the Israel Lobby are manifestly false. Rather than say so in my own words, let me instead quote from today's Washington Post editorial on the matter, which is spot on: 

"For the record, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee says that it took no formal position on Mr. Freeman's appointment and undertook no lobbying against him. If there was a campaign, its leaders didn't bother to contact the Post editorial board. According to a report by Newsweek, Mr. Freeman's most formidable critic -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- was incensed by his position on dissent in China.

But let's consider the ambassador's broader charge: He describes `an inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics.' That will certainly be news to Israel's `ruling faction,' which in the past few years alone has seen the U.S. government promote a Palestinian election that it opposed; refuse it weapons it might have used for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities; and adopt a policy of direct negotiations with a regime that denies the Holocaust and that promises to wipe Israel off the map. Two Israeli governments have been forced from office since the early 1990s after open clashes with Washington over matters such as settlement construction in the occupied territories.

What's striking about the charges by Mr. Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists is their blatant disregard for such established facts. Mr. Freeman darkly claims that 'it is not permitted for anyone in the United States' to describe Israel's nefarious influence. But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges -- and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world. The real question is why an administration that says it aims to depoliticize U.S. intelligence estimates would have chosen such a man to oversee them."

As I say, this is spot on. Freeman does the same as Mearsheimer and Walt. He imagines all supporters of Israel to be a monolith--the hallmark of a conspiracy theory. By claiming that those opposed to it are not allowed to speak, he utters not only obvious bullshit, but in fact does precisely what he accuses the Lobby of doing -- preemptively muzzling or trying to discredit any other view. 

It is true, however, that even if AIPAC did not take a formal position on the nomination, there was a campaign, informal but widespread, to scuttle it. This was, in the main, a stupid thing to do. The China stuff would have sunk him anyway, so why add fuel to the imaginary fires stoked by the Mearsheimer/Walt camp?  There really are, unfortunately, Israel partisans in the United States who are so blind to other points of view, so ignorant even of what most Israelis think and worry about, that they make claims and use such shrill language that only do their own cause harm.  But you can never tell a zealot that; they just think you're part of a conspiracy against them for they, too -- and this is the shocking truth -- are conspiracy mongers. Chas Freeman isn't part of any anti-Israel conspiracy. He is not pro-Arab either; he is pro-U.S. as he sees it. He may be mistaken about some of this matters -- I think he is -- but he's neither hateful nor disingenuous. He is also, not that it much matters, a lot smarter and vastly more experienced than most of his critics. 

Even though I disagree with Chas on a lot of things, I still admire him in some ways. When he was Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he tried to assemble all the regional U.S. ambassadors in Riyadh to talk stuff over.  Logical and wise, you may say? Well, sure, but totally against State Department policy. That kind of thing can only be ordered from 22nd and C Streets by the Assistant Secretary of State for that region, except that it wasn't happening. So Chas took the initiative, knowing that he could get canned for it. Others may hail the kind of Foreign Service Officer who never raises his head above the trench, who never has an idea to express, a criticism to make in public, who just waits until it's time to collect the pension and go make silly speeches to senior citizen groups. Chas was not like that. He broke some China (and that's not a pun). He made some useful trouble for people who needed it made. It's a damn shame, as I see it, that his public service has been marred by Denny Blair's poor judgment and by Chas's own unfortunate reaction to it.

My Theory

I know this blog is supposed to be about politics, about the Obama Administration and its times. Mostly it has been, though, I admit, I do tend to wander away from the solid geometry now and then, and go skating out on a tangent that captures my fancy.  (This is a constant problem I have, but please don't tell anyone.) Well, this is one of those times, although I don't rule out ending up with a moral of the story that links back to the political. 

Anyway this is always likely, since politics is composed, roughly speaking, of two kinds of questions: "How" questions and "why" or "what for" questions. How questions are not trivial. How to run a free and fair election. How to write a constitution. How to organize governmental services. How to generate a revenue flow to pay for them. If we screw up the "how" questions, we screw ourselves real good. Still, the "why" or "what for" questions matter even more. These are the questions about what constitutes legitimate authority, what virtues leadership should exemplify and promote, how wealth and woes are rightly distributed among people, stuff like that, which have no objective, empirical answers, but which come down to moral reasoning in the end. And that is why baseball, automobiles and pinball machines are so important.

I have this theory. It is a theory about the decline of American culture. For all of the unattractive features of American culture (though it comes down to a matter of taste what any given observer thinks these are), there are others I genuinely cherish. One is America's inclination to the future, its tendency to smile in the face of change, to expect that things are more likely to get better than to get worse. That's worth a lot over time. An old boss of mine used to say that optimism is a force-multiplier, and surely it is. But a positive disposition to change needs to be disciplined, needs to be sagacious, needs to be cultivated carefully, needs to be applied selectively and kept within judicious bounds. Otherwise, a positive trait in a mature person or society looks like irrational exuberance, hubris, heedlessness, recklessness, a failure to plan in an adolescent. Around the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, that is what happened to American culture. We allowed one of our best traits to erode into one of our worse ones. We let a general inflation of appetites and expectations carry us away.  

Case in point, baseball. Baseball has evolved as a game, we all know that. If you read the wonderful baseball time-travel books by Darryl Brock, If I Ever Get Home and Two in the Field, you'll get a fine idea of the many rule changes to the game between 1869 and the establishment of the National and American Leagues thirty some years later. But the designated hitter rule, introduced by the American League in the 1973 season, was a desecration of the game. It was introduced as part of a multifacted effort to produce more runs. Along with lowering the mound, shortening the fences, making less foul territory and juicing up the ball, the idea was that nine bonafied hitters in a line-up would score more runs than eight. It did work, but oh what a horrible cost it exacted. It transformed the very concept of what a manager is. It created a specialty, just hitting, that should not exist and that violates the very multirole soul of the game, the idea that everyone has to play both offense and defense, even if they're better at one than the other. It also eliminated, from the American League, one of the most exciting phenomenon in the game--a pitcher getting an unlikely extra-base hit, even a home run. And it diminished the importance of bunting, the art of the "small game", which is one of baseball's joys for the true aficionado. 

So damn the designated hitter rule, damn artificial turf and damn domed stadiums, too. But damned especially be commercial television, for enabling the free-agency market that undermines fan loyalty by disrupting team character, that makes prima donas out of nouveau riche players, that causes the World Series to be played late for the sake of maximizing advertising revenues, so that kids can't readily watch the games, and a hundred others sins against the national pastime as well. Damn television, and in time I'll get to still more reasons for so doing.

Run inflation in baseball is shameful. Instead of trying to attract fans with a lot of scoring and a lot of home runs (which, by the way, is part of the reason for the steriods scandal in baseball),the right thing to have done was to educate people as to the finer points of the game. Baseball is the most philosophically enlightened sport ever; indeed, it is infinite in both time and space. A game can go on literally forever if no side is ahead at the end of an inning. And a fair ball can roll all the way to the Andromeda galaxy and beyond and still be a fair ball. That is why, to bring the subject back to politics, I was so disappointed in George W. Bush. He was a baseball man. A man who played, understood and appreciated baseball. And yet he never applied the philosophy of baseball, never saw the lessons of its subtlety, its genius for indirection, to his sacred office. Instead he picked dime-store Evangelical self-therapy as a religion. Baseball was the right religion to have used, as Susan Sarandon's immortal baseball church of God from Bull Durham should have taught him.  Oh well; that's done and behind us.

Now Condi Rice is a football fan. She doesn't particularly care for baseball. She is such a football fanatic that she once interrupted a speech meeting in her cabin on Air Force II to watch a replay of a particular play from the just-played Superbowl. (I was there, in the cabin, so I know.) That's why I never expected great things from Condi as Secretary of State. She didn't appreciate baseball.  So, was I wrong?

And same with cars. Now, it happens that I own and, yes, occasionally drive a 1952 Cadillac. A Fleetwood, in fact--a four-door, two-tone deep blue with a cream top. The 60-S model for those who appreciate these things. Now, this Cadillac gets better road mileage than Cadillacs of the same engine power from 1959 or 1969 or certainly 1979. The car is heavy. It has metal. It is heavy metal before "heavy metal" existed. It is heavier than the 1979 model, but gets better mileage. Pound for pound, the 1952 is more fuel efficient than the 1972 or 1979. The reason, very generally, is that General Motors increasingly substituted power for engineering. It didn't matter that the 1972 or 1979 was less efficient. It could have a bigger motor, use higher octane fuel, go even faster. That's what people wanted, evidently, so that's what Cadillac built. Don't educate the consumer, advertise his mind into chocolate fudge and then pander to him. Same as the designated hitter rule, see? 

Moreover, the `52 Caddy does not have air-conditioning. It had not been invented for cars yet, as far as I know. But the `52 has both front and rear-transom windows which, when opened at the proper angles, obviate the need for air-conditioning. Again, engineering skill was subsequently displaced by power. New cars don't have transom windows. If you're hot, you have to hit the AC and use up fuel. This is progress?

The `52 has power windows, and they can be operated whether the engine is running or not. There is an electric motor attached to the battery; that's how it works, and in the `52 it still worked off a 6-volt electrical system. (Cadillac went to 12-volt in 1953.) In a modern car, you can't raise and lower the automatic windows unless the engine is running. Again:  This is progress? No, this is substituting power for engineering skill.   

I could go on, but I won't, in singing the praises of 1950s' era Cadillacs. Let me just note that right around the same time as the designated hitter rule came mandatory emission control devices in cars.  I think it was 1972. I don't want to get into the justification for them, though I'd be prepared on most days to argue that while they have reduced the volume of particulates shot out into the air, they have changed the mix in an unhelpful way. Cars with emission control devices produce more sulfur dioxide, I think, than the old cars. This is not good. But these damned things made it really hard to work on your own car. It reduced the independence of the owner and driver. It made you depend more on mechanics with lots of expensive machines. This was un-American, and I won't even mention the whole business about seatbelts (except that I just did). 

I mentioned pinball machines. You are probably wondering what pinball machines could possible have to do with any of this. Well, if you'd been paying any serious attention between, say, 1956 and 1976, you'd have noticed that the average score you needed to pop the machine shot way, way up. On some of the old electro-mechanicals you could win a free game for maybe 5,000 points. By 1976 you needed maybe 500,000. Disaster. Run inflation, power inflation, score inflation. All the same, you see? It's a pattern, a trend. And what did this produce? Real inflation. That's right, inflation in the economy did not lead to the designated hitter rule, fuel-pig cars and bizarre pinball machines; it was the other way around.

You will notice, too, if you are clever, that run inflation in baseball, power inflation in cars, score inflation in pinball machines all track with the war in Vietnam. The government cared about high enemy body counts (run inflation), not winning hearts and minds. It substituted power for skill, failing to pay attention to those arguing for subtle counterinsurgency tactics and instead following William Westmoreland's "search and destroy" firepower approach. How does pinball score inflation fit in with Vietnam?  I don't exactly know yet, but it just does.

All these terrible things reached a kind of critical mass in the early 1970s--1972 for the cars, 1973 for baseball, 1974 I'd say for pinball. And in 1975 (drum roll, please), we lost the Vietnam War. Coincidence?  I think not.....

I want to devote my post today to David Brooks's column from yesterday's New York Times, called "A Moderate Manifesto." As I have mentioned before, Brooks is my favorite columnist these days, and he is also someone I have known for some years now. But he'd be a favorite even had I never met him because we are mostly on the same wavelength with regard to practically everything, not least our appreciation of Edmund Burke. 

So it is relatively rare when I do differ with him. But I do differ with him over yesterday's column in one minor and one perhaps not so minor way. 

First of all, yesterday's column is noteworthy for the pivot the author has made, from being a conditional admirer and tentative supporter of the President to one who now seems to have broken with him fairly sharply. Barack Obama, says Brooks, presuming to speak for moderates of all stripes, "is not who we thought he was." That's fighting language. 

We thought, presumably, that he was thoughtful; understood tradeoffs; accepted moral realism a la Neibuhr; recognized the need to set priorities; meant it when he spoke of his fear of deficit spending; and so on and on. The rhetoric was right. But, says Brooks, the ten-year-plan budget shows him to be a transformationalist liberal fronting "a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new", a man who thinks he can solve all problems at once, who is for the first time ever using class war as a motif of political mobilization, and so on. For David, this is not just a moderate's manifesto, it's a declaration of political warfare against the Administration.

The minor error in this, I think, is the contention that Obama is using class warfare tropes for the first time. Not so; it's been done before and Democrats have attempted it in recent memory, as well -- Al Gore in his desperate 2000 campaign, and John Edwards always. That said, I did not like it during the campaign and I don't like it now. It is divisive and hypocritical coming from a man who swore to overcome destructive partisanship in Washington. How do you speak bipartisanship out of one side of your mouth and wage class war out of the other?  A lamentable sight. 

But it cuts both ways. One aspect of the budget proposal I like very much is the intention of ripping agribusiness off of the public teat. But then why did Obama vote for the farm bill, while McCain had the courage to call a corporate welfare program what it was and vote against it?  Cuts both ways, as I said.

The major difference I have with the column, and the reason I am not ready to join Brooks's Raiders just yet, is that I think David might be missing a seemingly minor, pedestrian, but perhaps powerfully explanatory fact. Maybe the gap is not between Obama's rhetoric and his policies, as expressed so far mainly in the budget proposal, but between his objectives and the lack of foot-soldiers, warm bodies, he has with which to accomplish them. As many, including Brooks, have earlier argued, Obama has ceded a great deal of operational authority for putting legislation together to the Democrats in Congress and their staffs. If Obama, or Rahm Emanuel, or anyone else thinks that Pelosi, Reid and company are really Obama's allies in any but a superficial way, they need to think again. They will not join the President at the barricades when he fights K Street and their smarmy lobbyists. They'll be on the other side. If you were in any doubt about this before yesterday, note how Pelosi, Reid and Steny Hoyer responded to the President's entirely reasonable plea that they rethink the whole idea of earmarks. They told him, pretty much, to go to hell, that it was none of his business. I hope Obama isn't surprised.

Brooks himself already made this general point in discussing healthcare reform a few days ago, and ended with an observation that once you sound the trumpet you have to actually charge. Well, charge with who by his side exactly? Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and, well, er.....you see the problem. This is a one-term Senator who never put together a crew of staff or supporters, who was never a governor like Carter and Clinton who could bring a shell administration of loyalists to Washington with him. He has a very thin bench. I think what we're seeing so far is not, or not necessarily, evidence of a leftist having used centrist moderate language to get elected and fool everyone, but rather evidence of a guy who doesn't have many specific programmatic ideas of his own and who doesn't yet have a serious professional staff loyal to him who can devise many such ideas and shove them effectively forward -- at least not as long as he is spending most of his day with Summers ad Geithner worried sick over the economy, and as long as more than have his appointments have not been nominated or confirmed.  

Of course, time will tell who is right.

How can Obama acquire the foot soldiers I think be needs? Here's one way.  Really screw up and look bad so that the GOP makes a major comeback in the 2010 mid-term election, after which the GOP will fail because its main ranks have no ideas, after which a new crop of Democrats beholden to the Obama White House will come in in 2012, so that all the hard stuff will then get done early in the second term. You heard it here first......

Just one more possibly useful if somewhat random remark. I went to what I call the Zbiginar yesterday--that's Zbigniew Brzezinski's bimonthly seminar on the 8th floor of SAIS's Rome Building. I've been a regular now for more than a decade. Anyway, the speaker yesterday was a Dutch-born economist named Peter Bottelier--an expert on China's economy, and that's what he spoke about. I won't go into the particulars, but I want to mention only one piece of phraseology he used in passing that reminded me of something important I once learned years ago--I think maybe from a book either by Ernst Gellner or Robert MacIver, I can't remember, alas--but had forgotten to my regret.  It's a simple distinction, but simple in the way of all things profound.

Bottelier distinguished between upward accountability and downward accountability as being the most important way to understand the difference between autocratic and democratic political systems. Upward accountability in autocratic system is where at every level functionaries care about pleasing those above them, not those below them. Those above are the ones who have power, who can make or break, and the system accumulates a bias toward conformity if it is a system of upward accountability. (This is my adumbration of the idea, you will forgive me.) Downward accountability is when at every level functionaries care as much or more about those below them, because they are the ones, with their opinions, tax monies and votes, who can make or break. This too accumulates from level to level into a genuinely participatory system that rewards a bias toward diversity, debate, openness, transparency. 

The distinction is useful because it allows one to apply a powerful sociological lens on political labels and facades. Look at Iran. Iran has elections, and the semblance of democratic procedures. But it is overwhelmingly characterized by upward accountability. Look at Japan.  It's an interesting mix; lots of deference upward, far more than in Europe or the U.S., but also a fair bit downward. Japan is thus a more autocratically feeling democratic political system, a more patriarchical one, than other modern democracies.  (I wonder about South Korea in this regard, but I have only been there once and don't now enough about Korean culture to venture a view.) 

On the other hand, and I am not trying to be facetious here, look at al-Qaeda. It's hardly democratic in any technical or literal sense, but at least the charismatic figures who make up the mid-level hubs of its spoke-and-hub system are downward accountability inclined, because if they don't take care of their charges, they won't keep them for long. This contrasts very sharply with patriarchal Arab regimes in general (note here Hisham Sharabi's theory of neo-patriarchy to explain Arab politics, which I think has a lot to commend it), which are among the most upward accountable regimes on the planet. Given the contrast, it's not so hard to see why so many ordinary Arabs are torn between al-Qaeda's more open internal culture and a set of religious views few really agree with.

It strikes me that if we think of these two forms of accountability not as a dichotomous variable--like and on/off switch--but as a continuum, then it could be used to make some interesting observations, and perhaps produce some useful counterintuitive insights.

It occurred to me that when  you write a normal piece of writing with more than one part, readers read in the same order the writer wrote. But when readers read a blog, they do so in the opposite direction, from newest back to oldest.  This means, among other things, that any references made in older writing get carried along in normal writing, but do on in blogs. What this means, maybe, worth pondering. 

But what does this have to do with the Obama Administration? Only that, maybe, at a time when our society is imbecilizing itself with technical marvels that segment our time into increasingly smaller and more useless segments, fewer people seem able to actually read or understand issues in any kind of context. I thought of this the other day for two reasons. First, Sven Birkerts has agreed to write an autoretroview of his 1995 book The Gutenberg Elegies. He is perhaps the first person to see some of the implications of the Internet and related matters. Second was an offhanded remark in an email from Leslie Gelb, an associate of some dozen years plus, who mentioned in passing how hard it is to succeed at editing a magazine these days when so few people read anything. By anything, he meant actual books and essays, not blog posts. So excuse me, I have to go read and work on actual books and essays.