They do have nice suits.

I'm a Liberal. This is well known. But I have always respected the conservative movement.

First, I am also a Libra, which if you believe any of that stuff means I'm keen to see both sides of everything. I believe that if you're someone who loves this country and are interested in developing policies to help it, then we have more in common than not. And I can respect a well-thought-out line of reasoning even if I still disagree with it in the end because I believe in different goals. (The fact that you and I are interested in discussing "the role of government in the modern age and the meaning of its social contract with its citizens" has already set us apart from the masses, who are more interested in who's running for American Idol than American President.)

Second, I once worked for the Republican Party, as an open Democrat. Some of them were indeed crazy. But I worked for two men and one woman who were kind, smart, decent, and conservative, and they enjoyed talking to me. (Again, we had more in common simply because we wanted to talk about it.) They patiently explained their point of view without slandering the left, and I learned a lot. I came to really respect the point of view of fiscal conservatives. I kept my own beliefs about the nature of the relationship between government and its people, but I have no trouble seeing the other side.

Third, my high school friend's dad was a conservative state senator in Florida, and he went to our church. I know that a lot of people have a pretty low opinion of politicians, and many on my side would dock points for him being on the right, but he was a nice and honest man, and this formed many of my feelings about politicians at a young age.

All of this is to say, after 8 years of "my President" (I think everyone has one, the first one they felt passionate about) and with a pretty bland candidate in Gore, I was willing to let the other side have a shot for a while. I confess I never liked Bush. He reminded me of men I knew, men I knew to stay away from. In fact, he reminded me a lot of a man who came up to me at closing time at the bar I worked-- drunk, vomit on his shirt, knees under his frat-boy cargo shorts skinned and freely bleeding-- who hit on me. Ick. So yes, Bush has always made me queasy.

But the country seemed to be humming along so well, I didn't think anything too bad could happen. And Clinton had championed some fiscally conservative causes, like Welfare Reform and NAFTA, so the parties didn't seem all that different. I thought we'd see a continuing paring down of government services, which can be painful but not necessarily bad. (Like I said, I can see why they would want smaller government, I can see how they could logically justify and execute it, even though I respectfully disagree on many points.)

I knew that they wanted to "bring the grownups back into the White House". I knew that Clinton's administration was seen as an overgrown dorm party. Keep in mind, this was the 1990s, when all over the business community, a radical "youth movement" was changing the face of the workplace. Dress codes went from suits to jeans, foozball tables went into break rooms, and bean bag chairs went into amorphous "team work areas". At the same time, this young band of pols moved into the White House with their backpacks instead of briefcases (an icon of which was on Josh's shoulder through all 8 years of The West Wing), meetings over open pizza boxes in the Oval Office, and a First Lady who dared to actually get involved in policy. The Old Guard, the "suits", were incensed. It didn't help that at the end of a long investigation there was found to be sex too. And so one of the promises of the Bush II Administration was to bring back the suits, literally and figuratively. Surely all of this casual behavior wasn't good for the country, they thought. I think it drove them crazy that despite all of this, the Clinton Administration was actually effective. So they promised, and I don't blame people for wanting this after the scandal, to "restore dignity", or "bring the grownups back". And I was interested to see what the "grownups" would do with it.

I knew they valued secrecy, but with the Freedom of Information Act, I didn't think they could hide that much from us.

I knew that they were oil men, I just thought these energy men would want to be in on the ground floor of the next phase of energy development.

I knew they had co-opted (or were allowing themselves to be co-opted by) the extreme religious right (ERR), but I thought honestly that the joke would be on the ERR (which it's turning out to be).

I knew there were neocons sharpening their knives in think tanks, but I didn't think they'd get the chance to remake the world they way they wanted. Think tanks are not real life, and it's often easier to imagine how you would do something in politics than to actually do it, when you have opposing ideas pressing back against you, and a planet of real nations to deal with.

I knew they were hawks, but I thought that since we had developed and cherished the Powell Doctrine, if we were forced into a war it would be swift and with a clear mission and exit strategy. And they installed Powell himself as the Secretary of State, so I thought that would keep us in check.

And I knew that they desperately wanted to go back into Iraq. For 8 years they listened to their base complain that the one failing of the Bush I years was that they "didn't finish the job" in Iraq by taking out Hussein. (Remember, I worked for them in the first few Clinton years, and I listened to them complain about this.) I knew that they wanted to "right" that "wrong", but I didn't really think they'd get the chance. I mean, the only way they could justify going back was if Hussein attacked someone else (for which he didn't have the capability) or, you know, something crazy like Arabs attacking the US. Oops.

What I'm trying to say is that I was willing to give them a shot, to see what their policies would do. I was even willing to see them get the Congress too-- for decades there had been gridlock blamed on having an Executive of one party and a Legislature of another, what would happen if they got it all and could really show us what kind of country their policies, unhindered, would bring us? What if they could remake the country for the better? That's all I want for my beloved country.

So while part of me, the part that cringed while Clinton slipped the noose around his own neck for his lynching, the part of me that wants to throw rotten tomatoes at the gerry-mandering hack Tom DeLay, is happy to be dancing on the grave of the GOP, there is a much bigger part of me that weeps for the destruction of our country and the collapse of the promise of a new vision.

Sydney Blumenthal has a new article in Salon ("The GOP Begins to Implode") in which he delineates all the factions that are splintering apart, and how the immigration issue is adding to the quake. The GOP is finding out what it means to have a big tent-- all the circus animals eventually start to eat each other. Here are some of his salient points:

• The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community.

• The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate.

• The evangelical religious right is paralyzed while the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as a mobilizing force behind the mass demonstrations of millions of Hispanic immigrants.

• Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been discredited, a virulent form of isolationist nationalism, always lurking beneath the surface, has filled the vacuum.

• Fear of the Other is being displaced onto the traditional nativist target: immigrants.

The "grownups" have been terrible stewards of this country. It turns out that the alternative to being young and idealistic is being old and corrupt. They have lied, leaked, evaded, spied on us, and put dangerously under-qualified cronies in critical positions in the government. They have very nice suits, but they won't roll up their sleeves. In this culture of lawlessness, which included the "K Street Project" (forcing all lobbying firms to hire only Republicans), some of them took bribes in cash and goods.

They insisted that conservation was against the national interest (QUE???) and that drilling in Alaska and "buying" our own "gas station" in Iraq would solve our oil problems-- until it didn't, and now they are singing a false note in trying to take back everything they've ever said without sounding like liars.

They even lied to the ERR, making such hay out of the "threat" of gay marriage (rumor has it, this election cycle it will be the spectre of "gay adoption" that looms), taking their "free milk" of votes and walking away without buying the cow. (Ironic, isn't it, since abstinence is their sole sex ed, that they didn't see that one coming?)

Turns out that neoconservativism regarding domestic issues is actually for big government and domestic spending. (Well, duh, it has to financially support its militaristic foreign policy somehow.) I think this was a shock to many fiscal conservatives that didn't know some of their best friends were working to cross purposes. George Will still hasn't gotten that look of shock off his face. Wikipedia in its definition says, neocons "sympathized with a non-traditional foreign policy agenda that was less deferential to traditional conceptions of diplomacy and international law and less inclined to compromise principles even if that meant unilateral action." Turns out, that means pissing everyone off. I would go farther to say that it specifically involved remaking the entire Middle East into "people we could deal with"-- without noticing that the people who lived there didn't want to be remade and would virulently hate us for meddling in the wrong places while not meddling enough in the Palestian/Israeli conflict, making them even more impossible to deal with. (Now even the more rational states can't be seen with us for fear of attracting that hate.)

Making Colin Powell the Secretary of State, it turns out, was an effort to marginalize him. Under a plan in which one is "less deferential to traditional concepts of diplomacy and international law", the Secretary of State is a joke. The real power in a neocon administration is the Secretary of Defense, in which position they installed the neo-est, hawkest member of their cabal, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is one of those smarmy, arrogant people that make you feel like they are the only ones with the answers, and you're an idiot. (Not just the kind who think you are an idiot, but the kind that really makes you feel like you must be.) And when he's working in the vacuum of not being in power, I'm sure he convinced everyone (and apparently still has the President convinced) that he really did have the answers and they were idiots (because this kind of guy is really persuasive). But reality has borne out that he's just a blowhard. His arrogant, dismissive speaking has devolved into defensive whining, which oddly matches the President's defensive whining ("This is haa-ard!") Cheney has a similar intimidating veneer-- he's the quintessential stoic father, the leader of the "grownups", who makes you feel like he's the adult who understands better than you do but, it turns out, he's just feeling his way through life like anyone else.

Lastly, it's surprising to learn that the hawks are terrible at war! It's like having a group on the school fundraising committee insist on a dance-off with the rival school-- but it turns out they can't dance. We all assumed, including the right, that these men (and women, Ms. Rice) who were planning for years to go back into Iraq, who were planning for years to remake the Middle East without "traditional diplomacy" and with "unilateral [military] action" were good military strategists. It turns out the good military strategists (the best kind being the kind that try to keep us out of military action, and then only with a clear mission and exit strategy) were in the State Department being ignored. So while it's possible that the neocon vision of remaking the Middle East might (and I stress might) have worked with good military planning, we will never know because they bungled it from start to finish.

I should point out that I am referring only to the civilian military planners. The military strategists within the military are quite good at their jobs and have done an amazing job on the day-to-day planning (the small picture) while being hobbled by civilian idiots on major planning (the big picture).

You might notice that I haven't mentioned the bungling of the Katrina disaster. While this is the most blatant example of incompetence on the most basic governmental level (we might argue about health care or public education, but this is the kind of thing we all expect a government to handle for us), and it stems directly from failures in the Administration-- namely cronyism and the dismantling of Clinton's shiny revamped FEMA into a shell of its former glory, just in time for the worst disaster in 50 years or more)-- I never dreamed this could happen. The point of this essay is to say, "I was willing to give them a shot, but it turns out their ideas and the execution of those ideas were really, really bad." But I never in my life gave one thought to an organization like FEMA as a political football, or even a topic of reasoned debate. I thought that at least, our government would protect and serve in the time of a natural disaster. Turns out I was wrong.

I was wrong about a lot of things. I was a young adult not that much younger than most of the Clinton Administration. While the pizza boxes in the Oval Office didn't bother me, the sex scandal did. While I wanted another Democrat administration, I was willing to let the "grownups" back in, because if the "kids" could do this well, maybe the "grownups" could do even better. I was wrong. We all were.

One thing you can say about them, though, they do have very nice suits.

NSA Scandal UPDATE:

In a recent post, I postulated that the NSA data-mining of every phone call made in the US was b-ll-sh-t.

Tonight on Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN, LD interviewed the former Director of the NSA and former Deputy Director of the CIA, Bobby Inman, who had helped develop the FISA laws in 1978.

LD: "Before we let you go, the issue of the NSA databank, the USA Today report--we've had disavowals of two of the telecommunications companies, Verizon and BellSouth saying that they had nothing to do with it, what's your reaction?"

Inman: "Lou, the direct answer is, I don't believe that such a database exists. I started thinking, what's the purpose of it? NSA has no access to driver's license information, financial information, the things that if you were trying to do an analytical job. They are collectors. What they need to know are telephone numbers from which calls are being made to foreign countries, where you might expect a return call. I don't believe a database exists. The country has been whipped into great excitement, and candidly, I think this is going to turn out to be for USA Today to be their version of WMD in Iraq."

LD: "And I think you've just put the burden on me to make sure that we get USA Today's response by tomorrow."

As I said, my DB2 roommate was insistent that such a database was possible and usable, no matter how much I argued it didn't exist, but I feel a little more vindicated now.

UPDATE: Not only was this not mentioned on Lou Dobbs Tonight the next day, it hasn't ever been mentioned again. So much for investigative reporting.

Where does campaign $$ go?

One thing I have always wanted to see reported is, what happens to all those campaign contributions?

I'm always flummoxed when a candidate can raise $2M in one night to get into office so they can fight a bill that spends $500,000. Seems like if you can just throw a dinner and raise that kind of money, then we shouldn't really have money problems in our government, should we? Why can't we throw a dinner for Medicaid?

I suppose that the donors consider it money well spent if they only have to pay it once rather than face a permanent tax. Or perhaps it's because, on principle, government forces you to spend your money via tax dollars on whatever they want, but at least with a candidate you have your choice of where to put your $2K.

During an election cycle (when are we not in an election cycle?) we hear a lot about the funds being raised in the millions of dollars, and the cost of running a campaign, which is vast, mostly because of TV ads. (Which is why you won't hear this story on CNN.)

What I've always wondered is, what happens to our economy when millions, perhaps billions when it's all added together, gets sucked out and siphoned into campaigns? If there is all this discretionary income lying around in American pocketbooks, what happens when it gets taken out of regular circulation (from your vacation money, your home improvement projects, your trips to the mall) and funneled into a campaign? Does this hurt the economy in general, or is the money from a campaign "trickling down" (as they say) back into the economy?

For instance, is it possible that election-cycles every 2 years are the thing that keeps printers of yard signs and posters, makers of buttons, bumper-sticker companies, tee-shirt companies, caterers, event halls, and for-hire telemarketing banks afloat? Is it possible that certain sectors of the economy get a shot in the arm each time, similar to the yearly Christmas-season retail boom, that keep them in business?

We all know that most of the money raised for a candidate goes to TV ads. TV ads are extraordinarily expensive, and there is no discount for "the good of the country". Personally, here's where I think there should be some real reform. Cut those costs. Force TV networks to adhere to a pre-approved pay schedule for political ads sponsored by the candidate's campaign (not the 527s) and watch the costs of a campaign drop significantly. This I believe would promote more honest campaigns, more honest politicians, and allow more room for the proverbial "little guy" to run. But I digress.

Back to those TV ads, and more specifically, those TV networks who are raking in the big bucks. I'm no economist, so I don't know what this means. It might mean that the networks are able to produce their content, making TV "free", or at least affordable (it might be that many major TV networks would be crippled without this periodic influx of cash). Or maybe it's more "trickle-y" than that, maybe it goes to high salaries for management and returns for stockholders, so that they can then go on those vacations and do the home improvements that the rest of us had forgone to send in our campaign contributions. (Hey, wait a minute...)

But Walter Shapiro at Salon.com is reporting that whatever the answers to these questions, a disgustingly enormous amount of money, and a serious percentage of campaign dollars, is going to media consultants.

For more than a quarter-century, media consultants have been paid not in fixed dollar terms, but as a percentage of the campaign's television buy. The more often a candidate goes on television, the more the media consultant makes...

These days, in a typical hotly contested House race, the media consulting firm will get between 10 percent and 15 percent of the total television ad buy, full reimbursement of production costs, maybe a post-election "victory bonus" and sometimes a $3,000-a-month consulting fee. ...The consultant's percentage fee is calculated based on the TV stations' posted ad rates (the inflated gross) rather than the actual charges (the net)...

As outlined in Joe Klein's new book, "Politics Lost," Shrum and his firm ended up receiving between between 4.5 percent and roughly 6 percent of the money Kerry spent on TV ads from the end of the primaries until Election Day. While precise figures are unavailable, it is a conservative guess that Shrum and his partners made more than $6 million (plus reimbursement for production costs) from the effort to oust George W. Bush from the White House.

Do you know what it takes to raise $6 million in politics? Picture a political gala in the largest hotel ballroom in the country -- an event so crammed with tables that there is risk of a fire hazard, with everyone in the room giving the maximum legal contribution ($2,000 in 2004). Now imagine the outrage if everyone at that dinner had been told that their money was not going to elect John Kerry president, but to pay the fees of his media consulting firm.

We're not picking on Democrats here, although in the interests of modesty it's good to use your own party as an example. But there has been a movement afoot, and for this the author again uses a Democratic example, to negotiate contracts without these huge fees, thereby greatly reducing the cost of the campaign:

In sharp contrast, the Democratic National Committee, which independently spent about $100 million on TV ads in 2004, insisted that its media firms work for a flat fee rather than a percentage of the ad buy...Unlike the Kerry campaign, the DNC paid a rock-bottom 1.7 percent of the TV buy for consulting services and ad placement...Leading figures in the party such as Sens. Hillary Clinton and Mark Warner have, with Kerman's assistance, championed flat-fee and reduced-fee arrangements with their consultants.

Another interesting quote regards the FEC:

While the Federal Election Commission requires campaigns to laboriously detail every contribution of $200 or more, the government is far more cavalier about expenditures. The FEC acts as if the only possible corruption comes from the getting rather than the spending.

But it seems to me that if we make some effort to control the costs of the campaign, by discounting TV ads or capping salaries of consultants or other means, then the candidates wouldn't be so desperate for contributions, and the corruption in "the getting" would naturally decrease.

This is a topic that I have always wanted to see reported, but that never is. Shapiro mentions this dilemma as well:

Given the reluctance of virtually everyone in politics to talk on-the-record about this taboo topic, I sometimes felt as if I would have to resort to meeting my sources in underground parking garages at 2 in morning.

So I guess I have as many of my old questions answered as I'm going to get. But now I have a new one: What are we going to do about it?

UPDATE: Bob Shrum has published a book called "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner". I haven't read it but I've heard some interviews about it, and I haven't heard him explain or lament or rejoice in the vast sums he was paid.

Really? The NSA is tracking us? Really?

News Item: The NSA is in the process of trying to gather the phone records (that is, the number called & called from, the time and duration of the call, but not its contents) of EVERYONE.

Do I think this is a good idea? Well, it sounds ultra-creepy but then I think of that show NUMB3RS and I think, "Wow, Charlie could do a lot of statistical analysis with that." And when I picture that, I see it as waves of data with grand patterns in it, patterns that involve millions of calls. I can't see Charlie looking at any specific number and saying, "Oh-hoh! Mrs. Jones has been calling the mailman every night at ten! I wonder if her husband knows!" So IF the NSA is doing what it says it's doing, then we probably don't have that much to worry about.

And then I think, "Are they really?" My doubt isn't the same as those at War Room on Salon-- they and probably most people are concerned about that the FBI or local law enforcement can't legally get a subpoena of your records, they could go get them from the NSA, circumventing the law. A reasonable fear in this age with no checks or balances.

But my question is: "Are they really getting this data? And if so, are they really making a usable database with it?"

This and the warrantless wiretapping of "every" call with one foot outside the US-- don't these smack of a competence that the intelligence community has blatantly shown they don't possess? Especially when using the terms "EVERY call" and "ALL records"?

My favorite joke after 9/11 was that the CIA had shown itself to be so incomptent that even the crazy people took off their tinfoil hats. And we're really worried that they could track our every communication? Really?

I have two conspiracy theories for this.

1. They are getting funding and are shuttling it somewhere, and to justify it they are claiming to be working on massive projects that they don't really have.

2. They are trying to trick the terrorists. We can't possibly analyze every call (after the first scandal the intelligence community-- I'll find the quote-- said that this program was going to cause an enormous backlog and they couldn't handle it), but maybe if we CLAIM we are, it will have a similar effect.

Both plans involve getting the current administration in hot water, but I'm not sure they care. They can't be re-elected, for one thing, and the rest of the Republicans are drawing strength from having concrete issues on which to separate themselves from the President. So that makes it pretty much a win-win.

Now there is a little niggling thought-- the kind that proves I'm no expert-- that says, what good is it to make the terrorists more careful? If you've spooked them into thinking that their phone calls are possibly montiored but certainly tracked, then you make them go farther underground. I can't tell if this is a problem, or if it helps by hindering their open operations, just making it more difficult to communicate. (My training in this area is limited to 4 seasons of "24".)

My roommate is a DB2 database administrator, which for the layman is the Really Really Big Databases, like for the IRS. He says that it is perfectly possible and relatively easy to collect this data and maintain it, as well as use it. So if he thinks he could do it, it could probably be done and maybe I'm just talking out of my proverbial derriere. But I have very little faith in the NSA and CIA, and more and more faith in the nefarious and sneaky dealings of this administration, and I just wonder...

In the meantime, a Tip of the Hat (as our beloved Colbert would say) to Qwest Communications. I'm going to quote Tim Grieve at Salon because he said it so well:

USA Today says that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth are turning call data over to the NSA; Qwest has refused. At one point in discussions with the government, USA Today says, lawyers for Qwest said that, if the NSA wanted the call data so badly, it should go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to have its monitoring program approved. The NSA refused, the paper says, quoting "one person" who says that the NSA's lawyers said that the court might not agree with the agency's plan.

Ya think?

Support Our Troops... Bring Them Home

This post is long overdue, and consequently I might only be pointing out the obvious. It's been obvious to me all along, so it's hard to tell.

I was born in 1969, so I'm not an expert in Vietnam War-era politics. But as I understand it...

There was a radical revolution underway in the mid-60s to mid-70s, in which all the previous social mores were being challenged. For every point of conventional wisdom, there was someone standing up and saying, "Why? Says who?" This made a huge mess in some areas, while changing the world for the better in others. I can't fault anyone who was looking at something in a new way, not only because I respect such questioning, but also because once one starts questioning one thing, it's hard to stop. Why should one thing be set in stone when other stones are being overturned? How does one know which stones are right and which need turning until you turn them?

In this environment, there were many, many movements trying to reconceive preconceptions and work towards their own agendas. One person might identify with several movements-- that is, "I'm against segregation, for women's rights, and against the war,"-- but that is not to say that all radical movements identified with each other, or that any radical person shared all the radical beliefs. One might be a feminist for the war, or an integrationist who doesn't like "treehuggers". But it is very easy, in 40 years of hindsight, to look back and lump them all together. Many people even see a hippie on the street today and assume that they know all of his/her politics. But that is a misconception.

And in this Vietnam War-era, there was a "perfect storm" that led to soldiers coming home from the war and being spit on.

1. The peace movement (or, to avoid generalization, some parts of the peace movement) was saying that war and killing is always wrong. After 30 years of wars, this was radical-- and like many radical statements, people tried to paint it with a broad brush. It might be true that war is bad and killing is wrong, but I think we know today that sometimes it's justified and sometimes it's not. Back then it was being perceived as much more black-and-white. And again, this makes sense to me. How are you reconceiving something if you are compromising with it? Sometimes the first new thoughts on a subject have to be wild and strident. Following that can be debate and consensus.

2. There was a draft. This meant that people were being called up to fight regardless of their feelings on the subject, rather than the volunteer army that we have today. Today people join the army the way others join the police force-- because of an honorable desire to protect and serve. In a draft, it's almost like kidnapping your children and making them fight.

And in this era of radical thinking, there were some who stood up and said, "Why?" Why should you allow yourself to be drafted just because "your parents" (i.e., the establishment) said so? Why not burn your draft card and run off to Canada? These people were really thinking outside the box, and again, I can't blame them. They were questioning so many other things, and some of those radical ideas were really panning out, why wouldn't they question this and come up with a radical solution?

But the flip side of this was that if you didn't burn your draft card, if you went ahead and showed up to be a soldier, then you were branded as someone who lacked the courage to stand up against The Man, someone who was colluding with the Murdering War Machine. And though now that things have calmed down over the course of 40 years, we can look back and say that leap of logic was faulty, I don't think it seemed that way at the time. At the time, it was "You could have been a radical, but you became a sheep. Shame on you!" And really, in the context of the day, I think that made a certain amount of sense to people, and I can't fault them for thinking that way. This is the "first straw", if you will, the first step that led to the spitting, this idea made famous so many years later by our President, "You're either with us or against us." So if you were a soldier, then you have thrown in with the Evil Ones who were pushing and manhandling the war, so you are just as much at fault as they are.

3. The war was a mess. It wasn't being fought properly or won. And so the voices of those who said, "Hang on a minute! Can we think about this?" joined those who were saying, "War is evil!" and as I mentioned before, the chorus began to sound like one voice, instead of the choir of many voices each with their own take on things.

4. There was a lot of weirdness going on in Viet Nam. I'm not trying to color all soldiers the same, but one of the problems with the draft was that it was taking everyone, including the less honorable, and those who were forced to go and didn't want to be there were "acting out" as we might say now. There were rapes, senseless killing of civilians, extensive drug use, etc. It was a broad and long war, and statistically I guess some things are bound to happen if the war is broad enough and long enough. And you'll notice we haven't had a draft since, so I think that the Pentagon saw what the cost could be if you take everyone. But this was another straw, the perception that soldiers back from Viet Nam were suspect in some way. Who knew what the vet sitting next to you on the bus was up to just a few months ago? And the public was one step closer to spitting.

5. There was no ticker-tape parade, probably because we got our asses handed to us, and who wants to throw a parade for that? The war ended with a whimper, the whimpering of our military limping home to lick their wounds. This is often touted as the fault of the Left, as if the Right wanted to throw a parade but the Left put its foot down and said, "No! No parades! We want to spit on them instead!" Again, hindsight is lumping together two separate things as one--"how we treated the troops when they came home"-- which might better be described as, "One side spat, the other didn't throw you a parade."

6. And on the subject of "with us or against us", the public was polarizing into those who were "radical" and those who were "establishment". So if you spoke out against the war you were labelled as a spitting-on-soldiers radical, even if you weren't one (maybe you just thought we weren't handling it right). So while the eventual "spitting" (that is to say, disgust with soldiers) was coalescing into a concept, so was the generalization of the Left, so that they were all treated as "spitters". I don't even know if there was that much spitting (proverbial or otherwise) going on. Perhaps that's a leftover perception painted by conservatives and cemented in the public mind during the Reagan years. It is certainly a polarizing idea-- "The Left" spitting on solidiers, who because of the draft were everywhere and everyone's children. I don't have anything to back this up, but "They are spitting on your children!" would be a brilliant slogan for conservatives of the day to scare people away from Democrats.


Perhaps there were other factors too that I'm not considering at the moment. But I hope that I have shown you how spitting on soldiers was really a product of its time, not necessarily a product of questioning war.

Intelligence and the Lack Thereof

First of all when you're trying to assess what an enemy is up to you pay your military and your intelligence people to prepare for the worst case. So intelligence by definition is supposed to be an ultimate example of worst-case thinking. The trouble with worst-case thinking is you begin to project threats and imagine threats as if they're real, and you begin to create responses based on those. Pretty soon you forget that you've imagined the threat.

--James Carroll, author of House of War

Mr. Carroll has written an interesting history of the Pentagon. A review of the book as well as an interview with the author is at Salon.com, here. (Note, if you're not a paying member of Salon.com, you'll have to watch a short ad before accessing their site.)

He also talks about the current looming crisis with Iran:

American tactical bombers are practicing the kind of maneuvers that are only used to drop a nuclear weapon. Well, even to pretend is wrong, because it violates the most important things put in place by Harry Truman, which is the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable, and we'll never threaten a non-nuclear state with nuclear use. Well, we're threatening nuclear use, and we're apparently engaging in war games.

What do we expect the Iranians to do? Obviously they're going to dig in and accelerate their strategy. This is profoundly destructive. It's a profound betrayal of the government's obligation to protect us. It makes us more vulnerable to nuclear weapons than we were five or 10 years ago...

The Bush administration has already given Iran and North Korea every reason to get a nuclear weapon...