Thank you, George

A Life Athwart History

It will be easy for liberals and others less inspired by the life of Bill Buckley to try to dismiss his legacy. But it will not be honest. The honest fact is that people like Bill Buckley and Milton Friedman dramatically changed the discussion about government in the 1950's and 1960's and uniquely, at the time, challenged a Keynesian economic model that has since fallen into disrepute.

The legacy of Bill Buckley and Milton Friedman and other fellowtravelers is one long refuation of any self-righteous notion that any liberal or anyone else in America "knew what was right all along."

They didn't. Noone does. And some people have ideas so powerful and so generally looking in the right direction that they deserve a moment on our part to pause and reflect on the humility of the contributions that each of us has to offer to the world and why none of us should take our opinions so seriously as to think them unchallengeable, despite our vainest attempts to make them indestructable.

Freedom is a mightily indestructable idea, I must say. But the freedom that matters most is that which allows and makes us responsible for engaging a neverending debate about the role of everything in life, government among those things.

There is no end to that debate. And there is no ruling consensus in favor of forcing our way about things that will bring it to some artifical close.

It just goes on.

And thank goodness that Bill Buckley was there to add a verse.

Life is full of irony

Ironically, it is Larry Kudlow's obituary that touched me most.

I hope the National Review will forgive me for reposting it in toto:

"Wednesday, February 27, 2008

I Am Blessed to Have Known Him [Larry Kudlow]

When Rich Lowry called me a while ago to report the passing of Bill Buckley, I had to work hard to catch my breath and swallow this news. He was a great man. I am privileged and honored to have shared a part of his wonderful life over the past fifteen years.

I am very sad right now, and so is my wife Judy. She became a great friend of Bill’s and Pat’s, often sitting down with Bill at the piano at dinners in Stamford, or at our place in Redding. They talked a lot about art and classical music. When I phoned Judy this morning with the news she too was brokenhearted.

In the early to mid-1990s when I was on staff at NR — during the worst period in my personal life — Bill and Pat were like surrogate parents. Later on things got better for me and I grew even closer to them. It was wonderful.

At Pat’s memorial service in New York I cried with Bill as we embraced each other. So I am crying again right now at Bill’s passing.

He encouraged me to become a Catholic. He encouraged me to stay sober. He encouraged me to keep writing columns. He encouraged me stick with my new career in broadcasting. Sometimes he would call, out of the blue, and tell me I was making good progress and that he was proud.

Can you imagine? I’m the one who was proud — proud to be his friend and that he would take a moment of his time to call.

There are so many things I could say about our conversations and discussions and debates — about politics and the economy and so forth. But all of that will come later for me.

Right now my biggest thought — apart from the sadness — is how blessed I am to have been a small part of his remarkable life. His influence on me was enormous.

My deep condolence to Christopher and Priscilla and the rest of the family. I prayed earlier that the Lord Jesus Christ would take good care of Bill and Pat, who are now back together."

I think that's the most genuine thing I've ever read Larry write. I still can't believe he's gone. I'll be looking for Buckley titles the next time I'm out.

Sutherland's maxims

Maxim #1: Don't exceed your limit.

Maxim #2: If someone tells you not to exceed your limit, the tendency of most people is to see whether the've got a point or not.

Maxim #3: If you exceed your limit, and life goes to shit as a consequence, it's better to admit you're a fuckup, pick yourself up, and learn the lesson than it is to pretend that you don't know how to apply the brakes. Your bullshit will catch up with you sooner or later. Put on the brakes sooner rather than later.

Maxim #4: Threatening or in fact making someone's life a living hell for exceeding a limit generally just makes matters worse. It's makes cowards of the rule-breakers and cowards out of all us to admit that we may, in fact, be part of the problem.

Maxim #5: The only solution to this eternal paradox is that the lesson just had to be learned. It cannot be learned by anyone else. And it can't be learned by force. It just has to be learned. It is learned best by giving people and ourselves the space to fuck it up freely, to pick up, and to move on. Absent that, people often end up fucking it up for much longer than necessary, and sometimes to their grave. Somehow, despite our tendency to keep fucking up into perpetuity, we inch forward, with a little help from our failures and the lessons learned.

Maxim #6: If you're still not convinced, just keep fucking it up. You'll figure it out sooner or later. Repeat as necessary.

Maxim #7: If I turn out to be wrong, you are forewarned that I am full of shit, in which case Sutherland's single maxim becomes: Sutherland is full of shit. Which is most definitely true, completely independent, of the rest said here. So it's probably the safest bet for the gambling man.

If I'm wrong, there really is no hope for people. Either that, or this generation has miraculously figured out how to force goodness upon the world in a way that every past generation has failed. Somehow I think that's a enormous load of bullshit, pardon my French.

If I'm wrong, I'll find out soon enough. And if I'm right, you will too. One of us will keep fucking it up. And we'll figure out who's who sooner or later.

Some of life's best lessons are from our fuckups rather than from our successes. But when everyone's too busy trying to defend their honor, it's get kind of hazy trying to figure out which is which. Successes always get magnified. And the failures are probably mine. God knows I'm responsible for a huge number of them. And I've no honor left to defend. So either that makes me a wise man or an ass. And if you haven't seen my photo, I don't look terribly wise these days.

That's what I'm talking about

Finally, some goddamn substantive debate.

McCain, Obama tilt over al-Queda in Iraq

That's what I've been waiting for, motherfuckers.

"'I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq. It's called `al-Qaida in Iraq,'' McCain told a crowd in Tyler, Texas, drawing laughter at Obama's expense. He said Obama's statement was 'pretty remarkable,'

Obama quickly answered back while campaigning in Ohio. 'I do know that al-Qaida is in Iraq and that's why I have said we should continue to strike al-Qaida targets,' he told a rally at Ohio State University in Columbus.

'But I have some news for John McCain,' Obama added. 'There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq. ... They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 and that would be al-Qaida in Afghanistan, that is stronger now than at any time since 2001.'"

Ah, the smell of honest debate. It's like hickory smoke on Kansas plain. Makes the mouth water.

And the debate goes on:

"Obama said he intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq 'so we actually start going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan and in the hills of Pakistan like we should have been doing in the first place.'

While he praised McCain as a war hero and saluted his service to the country, Obama said the Arizona Republican was 'tied to the politics of the past. We are about policies of the future.'

Noting that McCain likes to tell audiences that he'd follow Osama bin Laden to the 'gates of hell' to catch him, Obama taunted: 'All he (McCain) has done is to follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq.'

McCain said he had not watched Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate but was told of Obama's response when asked if as president he would reserve the right to send U.S. troops back into Iraq to quell an insurrection or civil war.

Obama did not say whether he'd send troops but responded: 'As commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad.'

On Wednesday, Obama expanded slightly that he 'would always reserve the right to go in and strike al-Qaida if they were in Iraq' without detailing what kind of strike that might be — air, ground or both.

Throughout the primary season, McCain has repeatedly attacked Obama and Clinton for saying they would withdraw troops from Iraq.

'And my friends, if we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn't be establishing a base,' McCain said Wednesday. 'They'd be taking a country, and I'm not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.'

He said that withdrawing troops would be 'waving the white flag.'"

And if you needed any clearer indication that Hillary Clinton, if she only had the n'oyve, would not add much to this discussion, here's a reminder:

"In the debate, Clinton did not answer the question about re-invasion of Iraq on grounds it contained 'lots of different hypothetical assessments.'"

Does Hillary Clinton every know what she fuckin' thinks about anything in this war? Or is she always merely a dupe and an agnostic?

Do you really want such a person to be your President?

If you do, you fuckin' deserve her.

I have to say that if Obama keeps talking the way he does and he can't begin to acknowledge the need to support the Iraqis until they give the clear signal that they do not need our help anymore or else give a stronger argument for why we should leave than I have heard to date, I will be voting for John McCain, at this point, in the election.

Obama better start putting that big thinking cap of his on and either convince me that staying is wrong - which he is far from doing, at this point - or figuring out how to break it to Democrats that he's going to stay until the Iraqis say they are ready for us to leave or I will be making my most confident vote for a Republican Presidential candidate in my lifetime.

Put that Havard education to use, Barack. You too, John.

The country is fuckin' counting on you.

Andrew Sullivan on Bill Buckley

Andrew Sullivan has an excellent obituary for William F. Buckley that I think does a nice job of summing up some of the best of Bill Buckley's contributions to conservativism and to the world.

"I cannot pretend to have been much influenced by William F. Buckley Jr. Nonetheless, even for those of us who were not in America the 1960s and 1970s, when his most remarkable work was done, he still existed as an emblem of a thinking, rational, non-doctrinaire conservatism. He helped many understand more deeply that left-liberalism is a profoundly unsatisfying account of human nature and human history. He helped remind us that communism was as evil as socialism was mistaken. By legitimizing the concept of a conservative intellectual, he helped deepen and broaden conservative thought.

He lived long enough to see this precious inheritance grotesquely squandered by the conservative establishment he helped build. Like many of us, he came to see the administration of George W. Bush as in some ways the deepest, darkest betrayal of conservative values, and the hideous hateful movement that sustained it unthinkingly as part of the problem rather than the solution. But he was surely not surprised. A skeptical, thinking conservative knows that in time, great, abiding ideas can ossify into ideology and ideology can become propaganda and propaganda can degenerate into toxic factionalism. It is part of human nature and human history. There is no reason why conservatism as a political movement should be immune from its own critique of all such movements. He was polite about this, of course - much politer than many of us. But he had enough intellectual integrity not to disguise it either.

What did he know? That there will never be heaven on earth; that there will never be an end to poverty or bigotry or discontent. That there is more wisdom in tradition than we might first believe, and freedom is indispensable for tradition to shift and adapt and move responsively to changing human needs and wants. That ideology is always and everywhere a lie. That government is best when small and adept and aware of its own limits. That a society that seeks to extirpate transcendent religious truths is as doomed as one that regiments itself according to divine will.

These truths were once unspeakable heresies. That they have survived at all in mass democracy is a small miracle. But Buckley knew that all that conservatism needs to survive is the freedom to think and a willingness to rethink and an eagerness to debate. These virtues he exemplified. May we all try to recapture them in his vast, choppy wake."

And he adds this video of an old Buckley, Chomsky debate, discussion which is really just fascinating only being introduced to both of these men well into their old age.



Though I do admire Dr. Chomsky's brilliance in this discussion, I must say that I find Noam Chomsky clever by half, much of the time, and quite wrong on many issues of international outlook, especially in his assessments of imperialism and terrorism, much too sympathetic to the claims of left wing oppressors and would-be oppressors and much too unsympathetic to the aims of democratic peoples and governemnts.

I am much more sympathetic to Bill Buckley's argument in this discussion that democratic governments, and the American government, in particular, have made a imperfect but well-intentioned and forgivable efforts to use their power for good purpose (even when Americans legislate who may have puppies, I must add, though I certainly do not approve of them doing so). But it is brilliant to watch these two engage in this level of engaged, thoughtful discussion.

If Presidential campaigns operated like this, the world would be a much better place.

Goodbye, Bill

Conservative author Buckley dies at 82

It's ironic.

In college, I mocked Bill Buckley as the supreme stereotype of picksniffian conservativism, a right-wing that looked down its nose at the rest of the uncivilized world.

It was not until long after that I recognized that, for all of my disagreements with him, William F. Buckley was one of the strongest minds of his time.

There are many Bill Buckley columns I enjoyed. One of the columns that finally secured my confidence in him was his piece giving his reluctant approval to Lawrence v. Texas, ruling sodomy laws unconstitutional. There are many issues of federalism and original intent, and other reasons, I'm sure, that a conservative could make to object to that ruling, some of which might find some sympathetic audience with me.

But, Bill recognized, as did I, that the fundamental issue of the liberty of what people do in their own private life was, when all is said and done, their own business.

And that is when I knew that Bill Buckley had a conservativism that I could respect.

Goodbye, Bill. You will be missed.

I will pick up books with your name on them, I'm sure, and remember when I could look forward to reading some new thought on any number of important issues that you had to offer.

Godspeed.

Have these people not heard of fundraising?

This is what always strikes me about political activists. Their total lack of imagination.

Pet sterilization becomes law in L.A.

It is completely clear to me, now, how nutty ideas like eugenics and forced sterilization became so popular at the beginning of the 20th century.

Because if you can find a cause, you can find an voter base which will impose on someone, whether they fuckin' like it or not.

My question is, where do all the little kitties and puppies come from if none of them are allowed to keep their genitals in tact? Oh, I mean, except those for exclusive breeding. I guess it's good that at least all the rich boy and girls get to know the joy of having a litter of puppies or kittens. Cause the poor kids get to give up their health insurance money if they don't spay or neuter or can't afford the same.

We're assholes because we care. We take away all your money to show you we love you. And the animals who no longer have sex organs.

Is there no fuckin' end to this madness?

And can someone explain to me how Bob Barker, the one fuckin' dog of daytime television who apparently most needed his wee-wee detached, found time away from hounding the The Price is Right models to spearhead this legislation.

I'm pretty sure, at this rate, my children will grow up and read John Stuart Mill and Mark Twain, if they read them at all, since I'm pretty sure they are becoming less relevant to a society that takes liberty so lightly, and say, "Daddy, what do they mean by freedom?"

OK. I'm a little over the top. But I'm getting sick of this shit. Is there not a goddamn thing that a person can do on this earth that is not regulated, anymore?

What a fuckin' joke the free world is these days.

It can only get better, I hope.

Michael Kinsley made me piss my pants

Holy shit.

McCain and the Times: The Real Questions

From that column:

"I have come under some criticism for my criticism of the New York Times for its criticism of Sen. John McCain. Many readers of last week's New York Times article about McCain, including me, read that article as suggesting that Sen. McCain may have had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago. The Times, however, has made clear that its story was not about an affair with a lobbyist. Its story was about the possibility that eight years ago, aides to McCain had held meetings with McCain to warn him about the appearance that he might be having an affair with the lobbyist.

This is obviously a much more important question. To be absolutely clear: the Times itself was not suggesting that there had been an affair, or even that there had been the appearance of an affair. The Times was reporting that there was a time eight years ago when some people felt there might be the appearance of an affair, although others, apparently including Sen. McCain himself, apparently felt that there was no such appearance.

Similarly, I am not accusing the New York Times of screwing up again by publishing an insufficiently sourced article then defending itself with a preposterous assertion that it wasn't trying to imply what it obviously was trying to imply. I am merely reporting that some people worry that other people might be concerned that the New York Times has created the appearance of screwing up once again.

What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion -- about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever -- that McCain was having an affair.

I have no evidence to suggest that the New York Times suggested with no evidence that Sen. McCain was having an affair. I was merely pointing out that by running an article that goes on at great length about some meeting eight years ago, and that seems to have no point except to imply that Sen. McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist, the newspaper may have created for some people (not me, of course) an appearance of suggesting that Sen. McCain had enjoyed an affair with a lobbyist.

Rejecting all opportunities to fudge, McCain's campaign has called the story "phony" and the candidate himself has said bluntly that he did not have any such affair. But that is not the question. The question is whether he has created the possibility of an appearance of having such an affair. After all, McCain knows how to make things clear when he wants to."

The whole thing is this goddamn funny.

Washington politics is so dirty, people forget how much filth they swim in.

Oh, and, by the way, these are the people whose judgment you are supposed to trust.

And if you don't, watch them force you.

Why Hillary Clinton would be a poor President

What bothers me most about Hillary Clinton is that she can't even consider that she might be wrong.

And neither she nor anyone who reasons in such a way should ever have that much power.

Andrew Sullivan mocks, well, the whining of the Clinton divas. And gives us this little tidbit to boot.

Education in America

The major problem with politicians and education in America and everywhere is that political leaders never seem to accept that great teaching and great schools never have and never will depend on their wisdom, or the lack thereof.

Democrats' K-12 views differ, subtly

McCain emphasizes school choice, accountability, but lacks specifics

The argument on this matter is simple, as far as I am concerned, at this point. If you are interested in what I think are the best arguments on improving schools, I highly recommend Terry Moe's and John Chubb's Politics, Markets, and America's Schools - Rick Cochran does a nice review of the essential arguments of the book - and Milton Friedman's writings on the matter. Paul Peterson, of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance and Christopher Jencks, of Harvard's Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, are two liberal scholars who first persuaded me of the benefits of school choice for children and families in poverty. But Terry Moe and John Chubb and Milton Friedman make the best arguments for school choice and education markets, I believe.

There is no single dynamic enterprise in America, other than law enforcement and military defense, which are natural and necessary monopolies of force as a function of governance, which has its core operations and outcomes controlled by the Federal government and is successful. Any other enterprise would consider such a proposal laughable and ludicrous. In America, it is law.

The most successful form of education in the United States and, quite likely, the world, is American higher education. And as Friedman wisely observes, what makes universities and higher education so successful in the United States is their freedom, their independence, and the healthier versions of competition in its ranks which run on and provide much of the fodder for a marketplace of ideas in America and in the world.

American public education, especially special education rather an as exception, is, as Moe and Chubb argue, one long string of unintended consequences from well-meaning people who can never seem to get straight that it is the fact that government protects us, all of us, including children, from our failures and the failures of the multiply-governed bureaucracies in public education that account for its larger failures of American children.

American public education is power and good intentions overwhelming better ideas and better choices in its most poignant form.

If we really care about children and not leaving them behind and not just about our pious notions of how to do that codified into law, this No Child Left Behind Act needs to be repealed, not improved.

The future of education reform efforts is, as Milton Friedman believed up until his death and was the legacy he cherished most, in giving parents, students, teachers, administrators, and others the freedom to choose which schools they will attend, how they will organize those schools, and, more importantly and fundamentally, whether education matters to them and whether they are willing to take it seriously to improve their and all of our lives.

The fact that many people are skeptical of school choice and markets as the best means to improve education for all students, given that many of the people most in need of stronger educations are those experiencing the most problems in the market, is understandable. It is also quite independent of the plain fact and much evidence that school choice and educational markets - in the form of universal voucher systems, private school scholarships, means-tested voucher programs, failing schools, failing students voucher programs, special needs voucher programs, pre-kindergarten voucher programs, town tuitioning programs, tax-credit scholarship programs, personal tax credits and deductions, charter schools, public school choice, and magnet schools - offer stronger opportunities for children to have better quality educations.

The most fundamental choice at stake is whether children and parents will take seriously education and intelligence as a smarter and more effective means of succeeding in the larger marketplace and in their own lives and contributing to the lives of others or whether they will fail to do so.

School choice makes it more likely that kids and parents will choose to take education and the intelligent learning it offers more seriously in their lives.

And that is something that the Federal Government, state governments, nor local school districts - nor schools, administrators, teachers, or parents, for that matter - could ever mandate if they wanted to.

Schools, as Friedman observed, are the most basic institution for anyone to make choices about and within. And taking education and intelligent thought seriously is the most basic commitment that a person can make in their lives. It is best facilitated, as any liberal education is best facilitated, by making choices within the marketplace of ideas and about its role in our lives.

If we take liberal values seriously, which are the foundation of a quality liberal education, we must take the liberty that is the core of those liberal values seriously, as well.

And no Federal mandate could ever replace that.

History of Evil

In case you missed this in school, kids.

This is why I don't trust chattering class liberals

Remember the War on Drugs?

This is how desperate they have gotten.

"The good news is that Mexico and the United States finally recognize that they are on the same side in this battle. It is a vast improvement over Washington’s perennial finger-wagging. Mexico’s resolve to take on drug trafficking, rather than dismissing it as an unsolvable problem, is also welcome. But it is only a start."

The New York Times editorial page is arguing for an emboldened drug war.

You know that people are kind of fucked in the head with power obsession when they make this kind of argument when the writing is so clearly on the wall.

I will paste this editorial in my scrapbook for when this ugly, bullshit drug war is finally behind us and to remind my children why conscience and independent judgment should always trump ideology, party politics, or other forms of groupthink.

I knew there was a reason I didn't read the New York Times anymore.

Courage

We are so cowardly. The whole lot of us. Our one saving grace is that cowardice maintains all the bullshit and the ugliness that we want so badly to escape.

The sad, cynical facts of modern life

The saddest part of my job and just life, generally, I think, is not just having to listen to all the self-fulfilling cynicism that animates too much of life. It is watching people deal with the ugly consequences of that cynicism.

Today, I read one such story.

The Bride of Wildenstein

In a world that is as cynical about love and the role we take for granted that it plays in our lives as it is about liberty and a similar and comparable value it offers us, this story is one of the saddest miniature tragedies of the consequences of that sad, deluded cynicism.

I've never understood why people were so cynical about love. And then wondered why they didn't find the kind of love they wanted in their lives. I've also never understood the cynicism that people have about freedom and then wonder why their aspirations and their willingness to do the work to live their dreams fell through.

It's all so clearly self-fulfilling prophecy to someone who has experienced a lot of love and achieved a lot of the things I have cared about in life and still aspires for more of both.

Most people are both sad and foolish on this count and so many counts, I think, where it matters. Most people want love, but don't really take it seriously enough to offer it and thus receive it. So they start to rationalize more cynical motives for marriage. Like money. Or power. Or sex and beauty. Whatever stupid, foolish flavor of cynicism appeals to them.

It is the most difficult part of teaching the kids I teach.

It is not the kids, though they are quite the handful. It's not the pay, which of course we always wish was more.

It's the cynicism. It's everyone betting against what they know they should be betting for, no matter how clever you may feel each time that you might be right.

Children, no matter how shitty they are, need people to love them and be in their corner. Love, no matter how much we want to give up hope on it, needs people to nurture it and take it more seriously than our cowardice to face ourselves and how we sabotage it. And freedom is the only context in which we will ever be able to take responsibility for the fact that the reason that love does not always work out and the reason why our children don't always turn out the way we want them to turn out is, generally, our own fault, no matter how many which ways we want to spin it. And the most hopeful fact of our existence is our ability to face up to that fact, to take responsibility, and to build a life on something more real and honest.

Cynicism is our cover for why we never took our most serious responsibilities in life seriously. It is our cowardice to face ourselves and our own failures, especially our failure to own up and do what we need to do to turn things around.

And the face of Jocelyn Wildenstein is what it looks like to live that cynicism and cowardice without reconsideration.

She, like the rest of humanity that daily affirms her cynicism, deserves our compassion.

Because how tragically and needlessly people suffer when they just can't find the courage to love and live a life they love, for real, and settle for cynicism and cowardice instead.

"Aggressive and desperate"

Which nominee is the Economist describing? You make the call.

Barack Obama Rolls On

"Mr Obama has confirmed his status as the front-runner whereas Mrs Clinton, to have any chance, must somehow engineer sizeable victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4th. They once looked very favourable to her and she still leads in opinion polls. But Mr Obama’s big win in Wisconsin bodes well for him in nearby Ohio, which shares a big white working class. Texas’s unusual hybrid primary-and-caucus vote makes it hard to win a big delegate advantage even with a hefty win among voters. And Mr Obama, carrying the aura of a winner, has narrowed Mrs Clinton's lead in both states and has two weeks to focus his campaign on them.

Mrs Clinton has two strategies left to her. One is to sharpen her attacks on her rival. Before Wisconsin her campaign staff had pushed a story that Mr Obama used speech lines lifted from Deval Patrick, his friend and the governor of Massachusetts. Mr Obama and Mr Patrick shrugged this off, voters were unbothered. Instead Mrs Clinton is likely to stress her theme of greater experience, while ramping up her economic populism. She did both in a speech after polls closed on Tuesday. She said she would lead “without on-the-job training”. She also argued, more substantively, about his health-care proposal. Hers would require every American to have insurance. His would lack such a mandate, which, she said, would leave 15m people uninsured. Expect this number to crop up repeatedly in the next few weeks.

The other path for Mrs Clinton is the inside politics of getting the delegate count more favourable to her. She and her husband are leaning hard on Democratic bigwigs and politicians known as superdelegates, who may vote for anyone they wish at the nominating convention. Having closer connections with the party leaders, they hope superdelegates might help her pull out a win even if she loses to Mr Obama in “pledged” delegates chosen by the primaries.

And she continues her fight to seat the delegations from Michigan and Florida. Both states had their delegates stripped for holding contests earlier than Democratic rules allowed. And all campaigns agreed not to run there. But Mrs Clinton’s name alone remained on the Michigan ballot, meaning she won it by a big margin. And as no one campaigned in Florida she won handily, mainly on the strength of her greater name recognition.

The risk for Mrs Clinton is that she gets stuck with a reputation for being willing to do anything to get the nomination, even if that were to mean stealing away Mr Obama’s electoral victory. With the fight against Mr McCain looming, she runs the risk of looking both aggressive and desperate, hardly the person the Democrats would want taking on the Republicans’ genial and confident war hero."

Will Americans ever learn?

I am becoming increasingly clear that the contemporary efforts to leverage for political change will be studied as a pervasive failure of power in the coming generations.

The case of U.S. sanctions to leverage for democratic change in Cuba is perhaps one of the best examples of that failure.

Our Failed, Punitive Policy

Many strong proposals in this article. The final passage is a nice collection of these proposals:

"Dialogue on these security issues could yield direct results and also build contacts and confidence that might put the next U.S. administration in a position to more effectively advance other pressing interests. These include political, labor and human rights in Cuba, settlement of U.S. claims there, and, eventually, negotiation of trade and regulatory regimes that will put American business interests in Cuba back on an equal footing with foreign competitors.

U.S. restrictions on travel to the island have failed to tangibly weaken the Cuban government, even as they have contributed to the increased isolation of the Cuban people. Contact between our societies ought to be encouraged. At a minimum, the next president should permit the kind of people-to-people exchanges -- involving artists, musicians, academics, students, religious groups and others -- that President Ronald Reagan embraced with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Programs of this kind flourished with Cuba until 2003, allowing Cubans from all walks of life to exchange ideas and information with American counterparts.

The Bush administration's 2004 sanctions targeting visits and remittances by Cuban Americans should also be reversed. The contacts and the financial help are important lifelines to Cubans, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet.

The next U.S. administration should also consider talks on loosening the restrictions that keep U.S. and Cuban diplomats confined, for the most part, to the capitals in which they are posted. An agreement in this area would allow our diplomats to gain the insights and influence in Cuba that current policy denies them.

America's next president should harbor no illusions that modest policy adjustments will lead directly to the political and economic outcomes we seek in Cuba. But they would serve American interests and, if pragmatism eventually prevails in Cuba, help advance the interests of the Cuban people as well."

I don't know if I share the author's priorities of stopping drug runners and illegal immigration, both which seem like kind of petty priorities in the big scheme of things, and perhaps counterproductive to the larger purposes of helping to facilitate democracy, freedom, and prosperity for Americans and Cubans rather than narrower concerns about drugs and stopping illegals from crossing the American border.

But the benefits of lifting the embargo on Cuba and dialogue generated around a whole host of common concerns seem undeniable to me. Robert Kagan suggests using the embargo as leverage for democratic reform in the same Washington Post, apparently oblivious to the fact that what Cubans resent most about America, and hence our limited influence inside of Cuba as much as with its government, is its tendency to want to tell Cubans how to run their own affairs. American imperialism and all of that. Very much like the problem we're having in Iraq.

Americans will never learn.

Or will they?

The future of forced progress

Georgia school district separates the boys from the girls

One parent in this video really hits the nail on the head.

"We have no choice. We have to send our children to school. It's this way or no way."

If parents want to send their kids to schools that do this out of their own free will (though I would seriously suggest that you consult your children), I would not take the kind of issue with it that I take with this proposal.

The issue I take with it is not only that it condescends parents who disagree (and I happen to be someone who thinks it is a bad idea on its merits, completely independent of whether parents are forced to do it or not, even as I understand the reasons that lead parents, teachers, administrators, and others to consider this route). The issue I have with this proposal is that it offers people no other option. And this case illustrates the problem with this foolish trend of "forced progress" more than most, because it also happens to be a foolish and regressive policy, completely independent of whether it is forced on people or not, I think.

I know. There's a lot in such an idea for parents to think about. Our teachers kicked it around last year while we were trying to figure out what to do to improve scores and improve schools. I didn't. I thought it was foolish. I had thoroughly come to terms with the fact that boys and girls have to learn to relate with one another, and as equals, in this generation as they have needed to do in every generation. And I had no illusions that a proposal like this one actually removes that need or that issue that they will face at some point in their lives, regardless. It delays it. And that is what parents want. But I think it's a better idea to teach kids to be responsible for themselves and for their choices in a world where temptations to not be responsible for our choices abound, have always abounded, will always abound for the course of humanity.

If parents and kids decide that they want children to go to schools that segregate the sexes, I say good luck and so be it and hopefully your choice turns out to be a better choice than mine and I will have something to learn from it.

But forcing an entire district to do what I very much doubt that such a move will do for growing up and academic learning that these parents want such schooling to do for their children is assinine and arrogant in the extreme.

Those dissenting parents are right on this matter, completely independent of the merits of this decision. They deserve a right to choose what happens with the lives of children who are not the primary responsibility of the state. Those children are the primary responsibility of their parents and themselves. The school district responsibility comes after those responsibilities and the rights of those parents and students to govern and determine their own lives.

Had this decision been made by a school district 40 years ago, there would be no doubt how progressives at the time would have argued this position. It is only now that baby-boomer progressives have absorbed the fears and anxieties of their parents' generation and responsibilities for raising children that they or we would even consider such a move a "step forward."

It is amazing how propaganda and our own bullshit color our view of the world, isn't it?

If you want to send your kids to segregated schools, I say so be it. I think it's a bad choice. I think it's sexist, even as I understand the concerns. I hope I'm wrong and I hope you're right and I have something to learn from your better choice.

But there is no reason that you or anyone else should be able to force me or other parents to make what I regard as an understandable but foolish choice with you just because you are so cock-sure that you are right.

That is exactly what is wrong with this political era. And what I love about it is that it pops the bubble of self-righteous liberals (like myself, back in the day) who have always been sure that they have all the right answers about everything, that is why they have been so confident that they could force their way to progress and the world would look back in unfettered celebration of their efforts (except for their critics, of course, especially those evil conservatives, who wouldn't know what progress looked like if it was forced down their throats or not).

What I always find ironic about this kind of proposal for schools is that those who make it clearly did not really study the ideas around liberty, in school and in their history classes, that are abundant in the history of Enlightenment thinkers who are the basis for every modern, liberal democratic thought and institution that we take for granted today. Even the fact that these school district leaders would be elected to the positions they hold is predicated on a commitment to liberty and democracy that was not even possible before people like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron von Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wolstonecraft and later and significantly, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, John Dewey, Jane Addams, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Betty Friedan, and many, many other fine thinkers set and kept us on a course for such a liberal democratic world. The ideas of "liberal" and "democratic" were not even serious options before these and earlier thinkers seriously considered the course of human civilization in deeper ways than the more repressive governments of their times.

George Orwell would have a good ol' time with this era. Too bad he's not here to enjoy it with us. Mark Twain would laugh his head off at what goddamn fools we still are.

And we are stuck dealing with the consequences of all our foolishness.

I think Mr. Twain had a point.

The state of intelligence and the world

Susan Jacoby and Howard Gardner write two fascinating columns on the state of intelligence and literacy in contemporary culture, in today's Washington Post, which illustrate the conundrums and the opportunities for education in America, liberal democracies, and the contemporary world.

Susan Jacoby - The Dumbing of America

Howard Gardner - The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading

Both are smart and interesting reads on the state of intelligence in the world and contemporary democracies. Jacoby is rightly concerned with the perenial question, with its contemporary manifestations, of the celebration of ignorance and anti-intellectualism in contemporary society. Gardiner argues, also correctly, I believe, that most modern technologies signal greater opportunities for reading and thinking rather than fewer and that conventional intelligence - an interesting focus for Gardner, given that the bulk of his work is dedicated to a more diversified view of intelligence; if you have not read Gardner's Frames of Mind about his conception of multiple intelligences (eight that Garner has identified, at this point) I highly recommend it - has a long future in store for it.

Fundamentally, I think this discussion is important as a long-standing, timeless, and enduring discussion of how of the importance of wise and intelligent thought and how to open up that circle as broadly, as usefully, and with as much intellectual honesty and integrity as possible.

I think what we are witnessing with the digital age is an opening up of society to help us see, better, the world, more, as it is, and the opportunities as well as the immediate limits in cultivating a commitment and understanding of the importance of conventional intelligence.

H.L. Mencken recognized the problems with perpetually too few people in the world taking intelligent thought seriously. But his older and distant mentor, Mark Twain recognized the greater importance of including more of those people, as much as possible, in the mix of wisdom and intelligent reflection.

There are always too few people who take serious thought seriously enough. It has been an important fact of human existence since the recognition of this unique capacity for survival and thriving for the human species long before there were universities, newspapers, and an internet to contemplate such facts of existence.

And it is for that reason - and the tendency of the uneducated and educated, alike, to undermine the capacity for intelligent engagement and reflection with their rationalization of our base instincts for aggression to somehow compensate for both our ignorance, our lack of thought, and our insecurities in the face of a world that necessitates such thought by virtue of the problems it offers us to solve - that it has been so important to, unendingly and in as many different directions as possible, expand the opportunities for reason, science, creativity, information-gathering, expermimentation, thoughtful reflection, and the long, long list of various forms of intellectual activity to reach as many people as possible, to inform their lives and to bridge the existences, values, and understandings of those who take thinking more seriously and those who do not.

It's an effort that will never end. But it's an effort that reaps value for each successive generation that engages in its labors. It builds and nurtures our humanity and our capacity for mutual learning, growth, and development in a world where still too many people die, suffer, are repressed, imprisoned and restrained, all in the name of aggression attempting, fruitlessly, to compensate for our ignorance.

And every opportunity for us to recognize the edges of intelligent thought, and the liberal values, ideas, technologies and opportunities that nurture and expand that terrain, are valuable for our individual and general welfare.

As most intelligent people know, intelligence, especially its deepest, wisest, most profound versions and permutations, matters. Enormously. The question that individuals and all of humanity has always faced is how seriously we are going to take serious thought and how seriously are we going to engage all of those around us in that enterprise.

And the truth is that though Jacoby is right that the opportunities for modern peoples to revel in the pride that often accompanies stupidity and ignorance are growing and so many signs about the willingness of individuals in contempoary societies to take intelligent thought seriously look somewhat discouraging, in many areas of culture, the fact, I think, is that the horizon looks very bright for intelligent thought and those who take it seriously, and for those who don't take it seriously, and for the opportunities and likely outcomes of much greater proportions of people taking education, intelligence, creativity and thoughtful reflection seriously, even as people take plenty advantage with modern technology and society to avoid what many regard as boring and labor intensive efforts.

Because the truth, eventually, is hard to escape. Intelligence does matter. Learning facilitates opportunities in life. And occassions to develop thought benefit everyone, especially those not quite sold on its value.

And every chance to expand those circumstances - whether through books, movies, music, the internet, business and financial dealings, discussion, debate, creative outlets of all kinds, and every which way that intelligent thought can be cultivated - ups the likelihood and yield of the harvest of better consequences that intelligent thought sows.

Things are looking good even as fear of an uncertain world endlessly plagues the minds of the more and less thoughtful among humanity. That fear will never leave us completely as long as the risk of failure of our efforts and thought are always with us. But it dissipates the greater faith we put in our capacity to discuss, debate, think through and solve our problems despite and as the only real alternative to that fear and its byproducts.

Things look good for intelligent thought because they have always looked good for intelligent thought. Because it is the only real opportunity for anything to look good for the longer term of our lives.

It is our fear and its correlates that always betray us. All of us. Me too.

Ideas and the thinking that renders them have always been the light that shines our way through the darkness. And it is that light that uniquely advances human civilization in the face of a world that is now and forever beyond our total grasp. No matter how smart or not we are or think we are.

Michael Gerson is a pimp (I hope I don't get fired for saying that)

I have to say that while I have thoroughly enjoyed many of Michael Gerson's columns, I was not enamoured of his idea of "Heroic Conservativism" and have been a little skeptical of his thinking since his recent book publication.

But Michael Gerson knocks one out of the park, today, with his column on Hillary Clinton.

Hillary's Unappealing Path

An extended series of gems from that column:

"Hillary Clinton's attempt to define a narrative of her own has been hobbled because her campaign is defined by the rejection of rhetoric. Obama's eloquence and idealism are dismissed as "abstract" and a "fairy tale" in contrast to Clinton's experience and policy substance. It is difficult for a campaign to inspire while using "inspiration" as an epithet.

This theory has other drawbacks. As a lawyer, first lady and senator, Clinton has had little actual experience running anything -- except for a White House health-care policy process that was a spectacle of arrogance and ineffectiveness. And on a purely political level, this argument for experience comes at an odd time, when Americans are generally disillusioned with both Democrats and Republicans in Washington.

The challenge for Clinton is that her other options -- the other narratives for her campaign -- are equally flawed:

First, there is Hillary the Fighter. In recent interviews, Clinton has come out swinging with negative attacks -- what she once referred to as "the fun part" of politics. Obama has "questions to answer about his dealings with . . . a big nuclear power company" as well as with "Mr. Rezko." But it is hard to imagine American voters thinking: "If only the Clintons were a little more ruthless, I'd finally support them." It is this very trait -- after a series of racially charged attacks -- that many Americans, including many liberals, found more repulsive than "fun."

Second, there is Hillary the Comeback Kid. One campaign official commented, "We're taking a long-term approach to the campaign and look at it as a delegate game. This is not like the playoffs, where if you don't win you don't advance." No -- my mistake -- that was not a Clinton official, it was Rudy Giuliani's campaign manager speaking last year. Giuliani tried -- as Clinton is trying -- to disprove an iron rule of politics: When you lose a lot, you eventually look like a loser.

Third, there is Hillary the Tested. "I've been examined one side up and the other side down," argues Clinton, while Obama has not. Well, it is true that the Clintons have been endlessly vetted -- but mainly because their shared career has been an endless string of scandals. Stuart Taylor of the National Journal recently took a depressing stroll back through the derelict funfair of the Clinton years: the deceptions about Gennifer and Monica, the Travelgate firings, the prosperous trade in cattle futures, the questionable transactions of Castle Grande, the strange case of the misplaced billing records. In the midst of these colorful controversies, Taylor observes, Clinton has developed "a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity."

It is not enough to be vetted. The goal is to be vetted and found clean.

Though it is increasingly unlikely, Clinton may still have a path to the nomination -- and what a path it is. She merely has to puncture the balloon of Democratic idealism; sully the character of a good man; feed racial tensions within her party; then eke out a win with the support of unelected superdelegates, thwarting the hopes of millions of new voters who would see an inspiring young man defeated by backroom arm-twisting and arcane party rules.

Unlikely -- but it would be a fitting contribution to the Clinton legacy of monumental selfishness."

Wow. How fuckin' more dead on can one evangelical get?

Michael and I have many disagreements. He is a conservatives who is, ironically, more enamoured of big government than I am. And while I respect his pro-life and anti-gay marriage social conservativism, I'm a big believer in letting people run their own lives and make their own choices as the best path to people learning to do good in the world.

But one thing that Michael and I have in common that I think helps explain both of our aversions to Ms. Clinton is that for all of my disagreements with Michael, he is a really decent guy. He's a nice guy. A good guy. Charles Krauthammer is smart as all shit. But as his "see only evil" column on Barack Obama demonstrates today, Charles is a serious prick, much of the time. And what Michael and I both don't like in Hillary Clinton - along with our policy differences with her - is that Hillary Clinton is kind of a prick, too, of a quasi-feminine variety. She is a vindictive and nasty bitch. And God knows why anyone would think that such people are safe people with which to invest power.

And Michael Gerson is a serious pimp for calling out Hillary Clinton on her bullshit.

As an aside, is it wrong to say that Chelsea Clinton looks about 100 times better now that she has been publicly compared to a prostitute?

OK, now I know I'm getting fired.

Honesty and politics

Andrew Sullivan gets to the heart, for me, of what is so disgusting about the current political era.

Obama, Clinton, and the war

What disgusts me in how the politics of this war have played out is the dishonesty. How so many in Washington who supported this war without enough thought to its consequences, who cheerlead policies that are clearly failing, and who stick by their policy of pressure, force, and aggression as some kind of engine for democratic progress, how all of these people cannot give it up, will make tragedy of as many peoples' lives as necessary to maintain it, all because of an intellectually and otherwise dishonest resistance to admit when they are wrong.

It is wrong to use power and to explicitly advocate the use of power as a smokescreen for one's mistakes and failures. It is wrong to make tragedy of the lives of others because you cannot face up to those failures. It is human to ignore the evidence contrary to your sacred notions as a means of avoiding your mistakes of judgment and failures of policy. But it wrong to do so when it means ruining, ending, or otherwise seriously fucking with the lives of others because you are too stubborn to face the greatest pride of people in politics: that they might be wrong, about anything.

And every excuse that I have ever heard on this one is one long self-fulfilling prophecy of why pressure made me do it and pressure is the wave of the future and pressure is the force for democratic change and pressure is why I am not responsible for my votes or my policies or whatever the political case may be.

Force is power. Force is freedom. Force is honesty. Force is progress.

Force is everything but me having to admit that I'm wrong. Because that may reduce my power, my ability to use force. And without me having the capacity to force change, where would this world be?

Put this political period on fast forward for 70 years and you might understand the depth of the deception that was Soviet Communism. Put it on fast forward for almost 40, 50, 60 years and you might understand the depths of the deception of Saddam Hussein's Baathism, Fidel Castro's Cuban Communism, the North Korean Communism of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong Il, or Mao Tse Tung's and subsequent generations of Chinese Communism.

It's dishonest is what it is. Intellectually and otherwise. It is the essence of what people like George Orwell, Lord Acton and the like warned us about power. And there is no opportunity for us to shed its ugly legacy until enough people call it out for what it is.

As someone who doesn't covet power, I seriously underestimated what people will do to have and keep it.

I only hope that I haven't underestimated the ability of more honest folks to see through it.

Madeleine Albright is on a roll

Toward a true dialouge

"First, it is a mistake to conceive of this region or the world as divided between people who do no wrong and those who do no right; between moderates and extremists, secular and religious, evil and good.

A simplistic and triumphal mind-set cannot guide us through a complicated reality. Blame for past mistakes and current disputes must be widely shared; and answers will not be found unless the interests of all are taken into account.

Second, America's enemy is not Islam, nor any subset of Islam. Nor is it Islamic terrorism, for terrorism is by its nature un-Islamic. In the fight against Al Qaeda, Americans of every faith and faithful Muslims of every description are on the same side.

Third, neither America nor any other country can be considered above the law. Every nation is obliged to respect human rights, observe global conventions, and abide by UN Security Council resolutions. Power unhinged from law lacks legitimacy and will inevitably be opposed.

Finally, America must pursue peace in a determined and even-handed way. No U.S. president will waver in supporting the survival and security of Israel. Every U.S. president should respect the dignity and legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.

Together, we must strive for agreements that enable all who desire peace to live as neighbors. For that to happen, we must not only talk of the need for security and justice; we must move toward a common definition of what those terms mean.

As an observer of world affairs, I readily acknowledge that the United States must think more deeply than it has in the past about why its intentions have been misunderstood.

True dialogue is incompatible with ignorance, hypocrisy, and condescension, nor can it be based on the premise that one people or civilization is superior to another. America has a responsibility to learn more and lecture less."

I can't say that I will ever have much faith or confidence in a law that treats Roger Clemens the way he is being treated today. But I'm fairly convinced, at this point, that many of those who make or enforce or interpret the law could care less if they earn that kind of confidence from people like me or not. They certainly behave as if they could care less. Which will always breed contempt for the law from otherwise decent people.

And that will be a problem for them, for America, and for the liberal democratic and not-so-liberal-and-democratic world, at large, until we face it honestly.

Until then, some very nice wisdom from Madeleine Albright.

History's million dollar question

Howler, Whoops, and Miracles: Which Party is More Strange?

Great line.

"Democrats, who consider equality the value before which the virtuous genuflect, worry that their nomination might be settled by "superdelegates," who are more equal than others. These are august people (officeholders, party officials, former luminaries) who, although no one voted to give them the job, get to vote at the nominating convention because liberals believe that if they fine-tune the world's rules with this or that wrinkle, everything will come out just right."

So true, so true.

"Many Republicans," he continues, "think that, come what may, things will come out the way Providence intends. Daniel Webster said 'miracles do not cluster,' but Webster did not anticipate Mike Huckabee, whose campaign manager is, evidently, God. Two months ago, Huckabee said he rose in Iowa because of divine intervention (the power that propelled him there was not 'human' but the one that fed the multitudes with two fish and five loaves). On Saturday, as he was winning the caucuses in Kansas, where many Republicans think Darwin should go back to Missouri where he came from, Huckabee said that the arithmetic is daunting (he must win almost all the remaining delegates to stop McCain) but he shall persevere:

'I know people say that the math doesn't work out. Folks, I didn't major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in those, too.'

Although some of his supporters defend him against the accusation of sincerity, it is not unfair to assume that Huckabee, who has made his piety integral to his politics, means what he says. There is appealing clarity, but also a whiff of lunacy or charlatanry, in the theory that the Author of the Universe is writing his campaign story. 'The world,' wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'is charged with the grandeur of God." The world, perhaps, but the Republican delegate scramble?'"

It's an equal-opportunity mocking. And well deserved.

At some point, people acting this dumb have to ask themselves why they take themselves so seriously.

Then, again, that's history's million dollar question, now isn't it?

Love and liberty (and their alternatives)

Gaza notes forbidden Valentine's Day

I love this passage:

"Al-Wakid, a policeman who's stayed off the job since the Hamas takeover, said he began buying flowers for Valentine's Day four years ago, when he was engaged. Since then, his wife has come to expect the gesture, he said.

Across the street at the Rose Flower Shop, two young women, one dressed in a black Islamic robe and head scarf, bought a bouquet of roses, a rare sight in Gaza. The shop had managed to bring in 500 roses from Israel, using Gaza medical patients treated in the Jewish state as "mules," and had about 50 roses left.

Salesman Mohammed Sussi, 30, said he hadn't received any complaints about his business. "They didn't tell us anything, whether from the government or anyone else, that it is 'haram'," he said.

But at a third flower shop, a TV crew earned angry glares from salespeople, and shoppers adamantly refused to be interviewed on camera. Asked why the reluctance, one salesman said his customers didn't want to be filmed doing something "haram."

Even in the most repressive regimes, people break the law for a good cause. Always have. Always will.

"Hamas police spokesman Islam Shahwan said Valentine's Day might go against Gaza's traditions, but Hamas is not trying to replace civil with Islamic law. 'We are by nature a religious people and hate and reject all strange things," he said. "(But) we don't kill adulterers or gays or cut off the hands of thieves.'"

What a relief. I guess everyone congratulates themselves for why someone else is a bigger dick than they are.

But it's nice to know that some celebrations still bring out the best in us.

Love and liberty. We perpetually take them both for granted. And, yet, it is within both of them that we learn the lessons we need to learn to live better lives together.

Doubt that? Consider moving somewhere like Gaza where neither of them are taken as seriously as their alternatives.

Love

And we wonder why so many people have marriages and relationships they are unhappy with.

In Romance, Looks Matter Most to the Beautiful

Because we are so goddamn foolish.

If you marry someone for any other reason than because you're in love with them and they seem like a really stellar person, expect to be disappointed. Looks fade, money comes and goes, and none of it is real love.

And when it doesn't work out, you can come whine to me, but I'll tell you the same goddamn thing. Especially if you whine to me on Valentines.

Find someone you love. And love them.

The single biggest reason that people are unhappy in relationships, I think, is because so many people look for someone to love them rather than someone they can love and give more of themselves than they expect in return.

Love is not that complicated. Like everything else, we just expect too little of ourselves and expect of our partners things they can't give us. Love yourself and find a partner who loves themself and then share everything you have to give.

And ignore bullshit research like this.

Happy Valentine's Day.

The consequence of not taking responsibility for our choices

I get so upset, I know. I'm very passionate about what I do.

See, I love these children like they were my own. And a lot of them do not have nearly enough people in their corner. They have plenty of people talking them down. They can be shitty. But they have all also often lived very tough lives by this age. They're resilient. I expect that of them.

But one thing that no child should have to live through is people constantly telling them what they can't do. What they'll never do. What they can't achieve. What they'll never amount to.

That is much of the reason why many of the kids who are in trouble are in trouble. They have had plenty of that message. Far too much. Because they have too many adults in their lives who have given up on themselves. And so they give up on their kids, too.

The whole thing is just so stupidly and needlessly tragic.

But I love these kids like they were my own. And if you talked about my child like they had no chance because you never gave them a chance, I would forgive you. But I could never look my child in the eye and tell them that they should ever take you or anyone who thinks or talks like you seriously. Because you wouldn't deserve it. Not until you could cut that shit out.

And in the meantime, I would feel like fuckin' knockin' your fuckin' clock off.

Children should not have to listen to adults talking them down. Adults should not have to listen to adults talking children down. Noone should have to listen to anyone talking a child or anyone else, for that matter, down.

And if you did that about my child, I would want to fuckin' clock you. Just so you know.

My experience is that the most cowardly people in life, especially those who work with children, have one really serious consequence that they have to deal with when they won't take responsibility for their choices with children, or anyone, for that matter: they won't listen to you.

The long term consequence of avoiding responsibility is that nooone gives a shit what you think. They won't follow your example or your advice. Noone gives a shit about what you think.

And I can't think of a worse consequence to face with my children or with anyone, for that matter, than having a life that is irrelevant.

Cowardice

Why can't people who have given up just shut up?

If you have given up on people or the world or, say, if you're a teacher and you've given up on your kids, why do you have to spend the rest of your fucking life rationalizing why you're such a shithead?

Why is it so tough for, say, a teacher, to say, "I've given up on my kids, even though it's my single most important responsibility. And I'm kind of an asshole for that. And there really isn't any excuse for why I'm such a shithead."

I am so much more down with someone who can be honest and say, "I'm really just kind of a shithead and there really isn't any excuse for it" than "I'm a shithead and the reason is because the world really is rotten, not because of shitheads like me, but because of all of the other shitheads in the world."

That latter excuse is the most common, most cowardly, and most bullshit excuse that people have for what assholes they are than any other excuse in the book.

And when you hold onto that excuse as a teacher, you really do become somewhat worthless.

Because what kid can count on a teacher or a parent or an adult in their life who says, "The reason why I've quit on you is not because I'm an asshole, but because I can see that you're going to be like every other asshole who has ever hurt me (except for me, of course).

It's so fuckin' lame and weak and small-minded and ugly.

It's the smallest kind of person to be.

And, so, if you're going to be that kind of person, why can't you just shut the fuck up and stop pretending like what you say means anything beyond your own tortured bitterness and miserable choices in life?

You want to be bitter, be bitter. But stop acting like the the people you hurt along the way all had it coming because you just had no other choice other than being an asshole. You were forced to be an asshole. It's not that you are a coward. You had to turn in those Jews. You were forced to turn in those slaves. It's not you. It's the system.

And that's why you've given up on the kids who depend upon you to believe in them.

Because you're just too cowardly to face what a shithead you have become.

I am learning that some people know no depths to their cowardice, cruelty, and pettiness. Because they are too cowardly to face their cowardice.

Cowardice is a beautiful thing. Because it always gives you somewhere to hide.

Ultimately, cowardice allows us to hide anywhere, but from ourselves.

Learning to deal with the many faces of terrorism

This is both why the Economist, in my view, is the best news source in the world, and an affirmation of my belief in strong argument and understanding rather than ideology or sanctimonious policy prescriptions to resolve our most critical and difficult issues.

Hamas won't go away

This is a very solid analysis, I believe, borne of much good experience that the British government has had with a similar situation of entrenched terrorism with claims of self-determination at stake, in the case of both Palestine and Northern Ireland, and of the persistent failures of Israel to root out terrorism - particularly in the Gaza Strip, home of Hamas, their most deadly enemy - by military force.

I just read yet another article in the Jerusalem Post, last night, about the discussions by Defense Minister Ehud Barak to carry out yet another military operation in the Gaza Strip to seal up the border and destabilize the Hamas government there. It is indescribably frustrating to watch a government and a people perpetually rationalize a policy strategy that has and continues to result in many unnecessary deaths that lead in no particular positive direction.

Too many Israelis are so wrapped up in their anguish at being the lone liberal democracy of any salt in the Middle East and the number of their civilians who have died in her name that they just cannot imagine that there might be a more constructive route, one that the British government and representatives of Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists - with the help of Bill Clinton, you will remember - that might finally put Israel and Palestine on a path of self-determination and mutual respect.

The Economist points the way, here, in a way that is refreshing amidst a time of rationalization of aggression and force, by whatever means necessary, as Minister Malcolm here in the States use to preach, to end this and every bitter struggle.

But it will not ever end that way. More than 80 years of violence, bloodshed, and escalating hostilities and animus should convince any objective observer of that fact.

But politics is not only played out in the objective world of fact, unfortunately. It is also played out in the hearts of those who cannot forgive the bitter struggles and deaths of loved ones.

And it is that unresolved grief, and the hostility it animates, which is responsible for the failure to achieve what to any other and objective observer would seem to be a much more realistic and sustainable peace and relationship between Israel and her Arab neighbors, especially her Palestinian neighbors.

If there were ever a history that bore out the failures of force as a governing philosophy, it may be the history of Israel and Palestine (although the history of Nazism and Communism should do).

Let's hope that particular history finds an end, sooner rather than later, in a decent and sustainable peace.

Wow

Obama narrowly leads McCain in AP Poll

"The AP-Ipsos poll, released Monday, is an initial look at voter sentiment since the Super Tuesday contests last week. In the poll, Illinois senator Obama leads McCain 48percent to 42 percent. New York senator Clinton gets 46 percent to 45 percent for McCain.

The poll shows Obama leads Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, 46 percent to 41 percent."

Talk about soft power. It's actually also pretty clear, if you believe in soft power, which two of the candidates are more skilled in using it. I'll give you a clue. Their names don't rhyme with hintin'.

The question is what purposes they use that soft power for. And that is why substantive debate about public policy matters, no matter how much cynicism of about that debate permeates the political classes. So we are all a part of the discussion about when, how, and for what purposes power should be used.

And that is why the quality of the discussion, and the quality of ideas, listening, engagement, decency and open-mindedness of the candidates matters. Because otherwise it doesn't mean a goddamn thing that ideology didn't stamp into the soul of the candidates long before. And what a foolish and arrogant democracy that would be.

Things are looking good for those concerned about a wiser and humbler democracy.

Yes we can

I just want to remind Joe Nye that he and Ann Coulter are now on the same team.

Have fun kids.

On the other hand...



I just want some honest discussion. Is that so much to ask for?

I don't think so.

But what I do know is that Barack Obama and John McCain would make for a pretty interesting and a far more honest discussion and debate about where the country might go that I, for one, would be interested in hearing. I don't pretend to have more answers than I do. And I like that these guys, better than the other Democratic candidate, pretend less than most of their party faithful they have have better answers than they do.

I don't think that's too much to ask for.

Colin Powell doesn't seem to think so either.

Can you imagine how exciting it must be for black folks in America to know that they may elect their first black President this election on his merits and completely independent of his skin color. Barack Obama and I may not agree on everything. But fulfilling the legacy of Martin Luther King, to have my country be a nation where a man is judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character, is certainly appealing to me.

Yes we can.

Why freedom?

Because if you don't do it, who will?

Thank you, Mr. Twain

Mark Twain is on the brain this weekend. My very sweet colleague, Donna Foster, got me a complete and unabridged copy of five novels by Mark Twain, and I have not thoroughly enjoyed reading a novel the way I have enjoyed reading Huck Finn, this weekend, in a very long time. Benjamin Graham was my Friday night investment and money-management reading. But Mark Twain was reading for the soul.

Much of the world, I think, is consumed and fucked up by status anxiety. That's what I love about Twain. Like me, and Benjamin Graham, he comes from a background where you can't afford status anxiety, because you couldn't afford much of anything else, anyway. Although I have dealt with my share of it, too, as I'm quite sure Mark Twain did as well.

Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, most people consumed with power and wealth - although, interestingly enough, one of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffet, has built his wealth by not being consumed by the stuff he owns, ironically - struggle, privately, with status anxiety. So do poor people. And middle class people. And educated people. And uneducated people.

It's probably the most common anxiety that all of us feel, at some level. Noone likes it when someone thinks they're better than them. Especially to their faces. Noone.

And, so, sadly, so many people end up living their lives revolved, too much, around this anxiety. Always afraid that someone, somewhere is laughing at them, and thinking they are better than them.

It's kind of sad. And all too true of the human race. And all too responsible for too many, perhaps most, of the problems between us.

How senselessly tragic. And kind of funny, all at once.

Makes reading Huckleberry Finn all the more poignant, while also being a fun ride.

Thanks, Mark. It's nice to know that someone gives a shit that we cut the nonsense out, even as we don't act like we give a shit enough ourselves. Me too. And I'm sure you too. All of us, hopefully, with a commitment to giving it up.

Knowing is half the battle

As G.I. Joe told me hundreds of times as a young squirt during after school television cartoon sessions.

The International Herald Tribune runs an editorial, today, that tells me that some people are beginning to get things figured out.

Are sanctions the answer?

From that column:

"After a decade of experience, it's clear: economic sanctions on Myanmar may feel right, but they have helped produce the wrong results. Encouraging Western investment, trade and tourism may feel wrong, but maybe - just maybe - could produce better results.

That might be politically incorrect, but at least it wouldn't be politically futile."

That really is the essence of it. The same could be said of Iran. And the same could have been said of North Korea until first South Korea, then China, America and the West recognized that diplomacy and incentives got more results.

That's the problem with politics. Too often people don't look at it as a matter of getting the job done and doing good by people and they look at it, far too often as a matter of rooting for the home team, validating their own notions of the world, and doing what feels right while calling it something else. Universities often work the same way, which is what confuses those discussions more than it should.

But, eventually, you gotta come clean about the effectiveness and/or decency of your efforts. You can't bullshit forever. Because it gets you nowhere. I could tell you that I know more about fixing your car than I know. But, eventually, you'd have to catch on that when your car still isn't running, maybe I don't.

And knowing that propensity about ourselves - our propensity to want to be right even when we aren't, out of our foolish and all-too-common anxiety that if we aren't, especially in politics, that must mean we're less capable of knowing what to do and helping out and, if you have such aspirations, leading, than we do; all of which can and should be said about all of us, rightly, and it's really ok that such is so - as G.I. Joe would say, is half the battle.

It's foolish to engage in politics in such ways. Because it just doesn't get us anywhere. And that, when we're not bullshitting ourselves and others, really is the whole point.

Bullshit (a dissertation on politics, empirical reality, and engine repair)

I just want to take a minute, here, because I actually have a ton to do this weekend. But I wanted to take a sec to deal with a subject that I think gets to the heart of a lot of my thinking and our problem in politics and life.

There is a lot of bullshit in life. It is all over the place. It is in the marketplace and in the academy. It is in schools and in churches and in books and in TV and on the radio and in movies and on the internet.

It's the one constant in life, outside of the very constant and decent impulse on humanity's part to get things right or make things better.

We are surrounded by bullshit. Constantly. It is as if not much more perennial as is truth or understanding or any other such pretensions and more solid understandings on our part.

It is everywhere because we are everywhere. And we are full of it. Constantly. All of us. No exceptions. Me especially.

It's why Mark Twain is so close to my heart. Because he did such a fine job of holding a mirror up to us to help us see better that we are all full of bullshit. And he was right. And he loved us anyway. Which is what we deserve. Because we'd all be in seriously deep shit if the criteria for being loved required that we not be full of shit. There would be very little love in the world. And there is already far too little love in the world, thank you very fucking much.

Bullshit is the rule, not the exception. It is the firmest, most rigid, most unmovable, biggest-boss-on-the-fucking-planet rule that our puny, foolish little species has ever conjured up. We are so familiar with bullshit because we eat, shit, fuck, and sleep with it every goddamn day of our goddamn lives. It is, far too often, the essence of too much of our thinking, our relationships, our loves, our hates, our professions, our personal lives, and everything that that we do. It makes up far too much of who we are, and that just is, as a matter of fact. And we all need a little patience with that because not only is it a fact of our lives, but it is a fact that we spend an enormous amount of time bullshitting ourselves about, not wanting to face up to our clear and present need for more humility in the face of our frequent lapsing honesty with ourselves and others about who and what we really are and what we really know.

Me especially. I'm just reporting the facts.

Having said all of that.

There is life outside of our bullshit. There is reality. A lot of it. So much so that we have built institutions of learning where people do their damndest, themselves full of much bullshit and growing our annual crop of such bullshit at an exponential rate, to sort through all of the bullshit. Presumably they do so just to make sure that this year's crop is consistent with last year's yield and so not to embarrass the plowfolk of last year's harvest into reconsidering their planting methods. But the God's-honest-truth-of-the-matter is that those folks in those schools and universities - those scientists and anthropologists and agronomists and dieticians and economists and astronomers and geologists and historians and political scientists and biologists and chemists and medical professional and literary men and women and lawyers and journalists and all such truth-seeking folks - are all trying, clumsily, often failing, too often disagreeing and villifying than recognizing their own errors - a prediction about humanity that none other than Jesus Christ himself made about our foolish, clumsy efforts on this here earth - to figure out what the hell is really going on.

There really is a reality about the world, including about the people who inhabit it, independent of all that jabbering. And we are all just trying to understand our little piece of it and maybe work with some other folks to see if all our little pieces might add up to something that make the mare go.

People have to figure shit out to make things happen. It's our bread and butter. It's what separates us from the birds and the bees those ill-fated dodos and dinosaurs. For the human species, it's what makes the mare go.

When it comes to figuring out what makes the people go, there's a study broadly called social sciences that is our lumbering, bungling, butter-fingered attempt to get a grasp on The Way Things Are among people and their kind.

And the premise of these there social sciences and the empirical notions that undergird them is that things are independent of our opinions about how things are. And they happen to be right about that, I think, after much experience seeing things as they are not and fucking things up and generally looking like a damned fool believing that the whole enterprise didn't matter, or not treating it like it mattered nearly enough.

At some level, then, politics, economics, history - the whole lot - is like getting a car to move. At some level, you either know what the problem is or you don't. And if you don't, noone gives two shits if you scream it from the rafters or you get a bunch of your goonish friends to pressure the mechanic to say you're right or you argue your eloquent and convincing case till your blue in the face. At some level, either you're right or you're not. Either it's the head-gasket or it's the temperature gage. Either it's the gas pedal or it's the clutch. Either it's the exhaust system or it's the carburetor. And either you're right or you're not. It's not personal. We're just not always right.

And the trick about politics, especially, since the whole nature of that godforesaken ordeal is that it is where we have the most conflict and are, therefore, the most pissed off at one another, is that we never seem to be able to admit when we're wrong for fear that that means that the other group of goons will pounce on our ignorance like Winston Churchill on a cheeseburger.

It's goddamn ridiculous is what it is.

Have you ever seen a group of dumbasses stand around a hood and argue till the cows come home about whether the engine trouble is in the throttle body or the intake manifold? Yeah, me neither. But I can just imagine it, can't you?

Now, obviously, it matters to figure out where the problem is so you can solve it. But the truth is that either you've found the problem or you haven't and either you've solved it or you haven't. The trick with politics and economics, like religion and the weather before them, and the rest of them there social sciences, is that they are often about problems you can't solve as much as about problems you can.

But the fact is that either you have a solution that will work every time or most times and then it's got to finally get the mare to go or the engine to run or whatever other damned fool analogy you've opted for in the moment. And if it only works sometimes or most of the time you can't really ever claim to have some final solution, unless you're Adolph Hitler, and we all know what happened with that fellow.

And, fundamentally, either you understand how that goddamn engines, runs, generally, or you don't. I am of the breed that doesn't, apparent to anyone who does who might be pondering the purpose of these ramblings.

We make politics and economics and psychology and history and the whole goddamn lot too complicated is the truth. As simple as possible and no simpler, as some fancy German scientist once spoke. Either that or we sit around on our brains and pretend like all that knowledge doesn't mean a goddamn thing anyway because we wasted all that time in Ms. Johnson's 4th grade Mockingbirds reading group figuring out how far we could rock back in our chairs without falling and missed the whole goddamn point of the experience.

Either way, the mare's gotta go, the car's gotta run, and we gotta figure out, for real, how to deal with problems that often have to show up as Jesus-on-a-burning-cross in our own front yards before we're man or woman enough to admit we were wrong. Generally things get better the more we treat one another like human beings. Which makes sense since that's the correct species. And we need to understand how life is as it is and not as we persistently wish it to be without some kind of plan or idea to make it so. And it is those blasted ideas that make the big bucks for those well-paid, tenured professors and scientists in their lofty ivory towers making the big money trying to figure out if Pluto is a planet or just a great big rock.

That's the bottom line, though, for anything we have to do in life. And politics is no different. Either we know what we're doing and it gets the job done and it does so while respecting people and principles and priorities that are important to them, generally, or we don't.

Everything else is just the same old bullshit. And even much of what we think is not bullshit is the same old bullshit.

That's why we got logic and reason and science and all that fancy thinkin'. To sort through this mess that humanity has always made for itself, wading waste-deep in our own yackety-yak and pretending that we know more than we do.

We prattle on and on or we avoid conflicts that are seeming to get too heated by saying that we believe this and we believe that and that that's all there is to it. But, at the end of the day, what we believe doesnt mean shit, except to ourselves, unless it makes sense in the world that we live in and maybe in a world that might do it a little better.

We fight about this and we fight about that in politics. But at the end of the day, none of it amounts to a hill of beans without that it actually means something useful that understands better what's under the hood and gets the car moving again. And it does so in a way that treats with respect everyone involved.

Otherwise, it's just a bunch of fools sitting around an engine not knowing what will make the damn thing work. And there isn't much use in that. Except for the company, perhaps.

Why we need a presumption against aggression

Al Queda seeks softer approach

Joe Nye's ideas around soft power are excellent. They are the basis for my own work. His insights into the need to look at the broader picture of values and culture to understand power are very important, I think, and unique enough to have his work stand out for me as some of the most important in international policy and security.

Having said that, there is something missing in Joe's analysis. And it is something that has consequence.

Soft power is a good idea. Except when it is used to rationalize manipulating others for ends that are not their own. Meaning, soft power is a good idea except when it is used to circumvent the very liberal democratic principles and liberal values - namely self-determination and self-governance - that are the basis for its strength.

As I argued for Joe on his blog, soft power, without a presumption against aggression, force, and the use of power, is illiberal in both theory and practice unless there is an understanding that aggression, force, and power are to be presumed against.

Gangsters, terrorists, and despots all use some combination of hard and soft power to seek their ends, as this article on the changing tactics of Al Queda demonstrates. Gangsters pay off allies as well as kill their enemies. Terrorists persuade their followers - and, most recently, terrorist groups like Hamas and Al Queda have been explicitly using manipulation around concepts of forgiveness, just as too many in the West have done the same in popular political arguments - as well and as a means of continuing their efforts to murder innocent civilians. Dictators like Saddam Hussein and terrorist groups like Hezbollah or violent groups like the Black Panthers provide social services as well as killing and intimidating.

Decent liberal democratic peoples need to create and carry a presumption in their thinking against such barbarism and rationalization if we are to honestly account for distinctions between the aims and values of liberal democracies and the aims and values of gangsters, terrorists, and despots. Otherwise such groups have a much easier time persuading civilian populations to join or support their ranks.

It is what made pursuing and prosecuting the ugly and power-hungry practices of the Mafia in the early 20th century so difficult, as prohibition against alcohol made heroes of murderers and thugs for citizens fed up with laws against a favorite pasttime. And it is what fuels the violence in both that trade and in the contemporary drug trade, where a favorite, if often foolish, recreation of so many citizens is made illegal and therefore underground and enforced by the arbitrary use of weapons and mayhem by gang leaders rather than openly consumed with an expectation of responsibility for its use and decency and rough law-abidance in the trade, a fact that is undermined by the laws against its use as much if not more than by those who use it and break the law doing so.

But much more important than the folly of the drug war, an absense of a presumption against aggression, force, and power as a means in a liberal democratic society for resolving problems, and a presumption for conscience, thought, engagement, debate, discussion, and committed efforts for doing the same, means that other actors who also carry no such presumption, like Hezbollah, Hamas, Chinese Communists and the Myanmar military junta, dictators like Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe, and groups like Al Queda, featured in this article, simply switch tactics, become softer in their approaches to win support, and never face the clear need to take liberal values and liberal democracy more seriously.

And neither do we.

The liberal democratic world, and Americans as members of that community, needs to presume against aggression, force, and power, as a general principle, if they are going to make the distinctions between liberal values and the tactics of gangsters, terrorists, and despots clear enough, and to make the choice more clear between liberal and illiberal values and instititutions.

Otherwise, people in liberal societies and institutions really do begin to look much more like their illiberal brethren. And the harder it is to make the distinction, the more support organized crime figures like the mafia and violent gangs leaders and members, terrorists like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Queda, and dictators and despots like Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, and Robert Mugabe and less despotic yet still illiberal leaders like Vladimir Putin and Wen Jiaboa, and all of the less liberal practices and their practicioners in liberal and illiberal corners of the world and those who take seriously, practice, and elaborate on more genuinely liberal values. And that does not even mention the poor governance practices in liberal governments that romanticize power and fail to account for its failure to address, and often exacerbate, serious problems in their societies.

I have a lot more to argue about this to make it clearer, I know.

But we need a presumption against aggression, force, and power in our dealings with one another if reason and conscience are to have any of the breathing space they need to do for us what it has clearly done for the length of liberal history - help us solve problems that aggression, force, and power cannot solve and which they often make worse because of their propensity to crowd out the very reason and discussion that is needed to solve them.

There is no way to force our way out of this one or to fake progress by force, aggression, or power. These just aren't more genuine means for progress. They are, at best, artificial compromises that have often created as much trouble as they have resolved our problems, and, at worst, rationalizations for the ugliest crimes against humanity that have ever been committed.

It is time we ended that rationalization. And understood, more humbly, liberty and the limits of power.