Power and a side of crazy

George Will hits a home run with this line, today. One of my heroes, Mark McGwire, would be proud.

Faux contrition: Obama blames the public

"Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. Talk about a divided brain."

It is the matching insanity of the progressive agenda to the parallel incoherence of the neoconservative effort to liberate the world only to dominate it.

Bottom-line: We distrust power as much as everyone else does. Except when we wield it. In which case, why won't everyone get out of our way?

This is the heart of the matter for both the left and the right and almost every person who has ever come across any portion of power. And the reason why the Baron de Montesquieu, James Madison, Lord Acton and all the rest warned us about power and those who wield it.

Because, usually, they can't be trusted. Not any more than anyone else. Which is exactly why they should wield as little power as possible. And why our job should be to check their attempts to assert otherwise.

No matter how thick the bullshit gets.

Thanks Ms. Taggart

Rest in peace, Mr. Salinger. May you finally find some.

'Catcher in the Rye' author J.D. Salinger dies

Gotta love this sidenote.

"'The Catcher in the Rye' became both required and restricted reading, periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.

'I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of `The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for "20th Century Authors.'

'It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach,' he added."

Any book that's restricted reading has got to be good. Any book that goes from restricted to required is a sign of a people that don't know what they think about anything of any great importance. Certainly about great literature, which, even when I'm feeling lazy, I know is more important than most.

I read Catcher in the Rye on my dinner breaks working at Pizza Hut my junior year of high school, I believe. One of the great reading experiences, any kind of experience, of my life.

Thanks, Ms. Taggart. For introducing me to some of the great loves of my life. And for everything, really.

And thank you, Mr. Salinger. For the interesting ride.

Assholes and opinions, or why believing you can't be wrong means you most assuredly are

The older I get, the less I care how various partisans of any persuasion justify their self-centered circular self-glorifying, except insofar as they have the stronger reasoning to support their thoughts.

Outside of that, people are, generally, assholes with opinions. And on the biggest questions, the weaker the opinion, the bigger the asshole, generally.

If you're wondering why some friends of yours are such unshakeable assholes on this or that question it might have something to do with the fact that they lack real confidence in their own thoughts. People with honest confidence engage people who disagree with them humbly. Like they might be wrong. Because anyone honest knows that's the only honest assessment of anyone and what they know and what they don't.

Assholes with unshakeable opinions are assholes because they just can't even consider that might be wrong. And the reason why they can't consider it, generally, is because it's never even occurred to them that it might be a possibility.

Meaning, they're arrogants sons a' bitches. Arrogant meaning scared. And leaning on ego to compensate.

The Greeks call it hubris. But arrogant sons a' bitches will do just fine by me.

I know. I've been one too many times to count. Wonder if I can do anything else, sometimes.

But if there is one thing I've learned it's that to spend one's life trying to prove to the world that you are right, all the time, and that you couldn't possibly be wrong, about anything, no less, is a sad waste of life.

Because it's the surest sign that you're wrong. And about substantially more than just that, too, likely.

Passionate conviction in anything is not the same thing as being right. And noone cares how stridently you assert otherwise. It's not personal. It just ain't. And the truth just doesn't give a shit how strongly you assert something else.

Neither do I. I never really have. But the more I watch so many of the damn fools that make up this fine world - the ones who run it, the ones who wish they did, and then all the rest of us, too - the less seriously I take peoples' opinions. About anything, really. Except as yet one more possibility in a world of possibilities. And a world that just is and doesn't care what any of us think on the matter.

This damn fool race and it's propensity to call it's chauvinism and cruelty and its general wrongheadedness something better than it is. I just got no patience for it anymore.

Except when people really are trying to learn something new, that is.

That's why young people look so full of hope and promise to their elder, stubborn, bitter, meaner fellowtravelers in this world.

Because, luckily, so many of them are still willing to learn a thing or two in this world. Rather than foolishly hitch their wagon to an ego going nowhere.

It's the only honest way to live. Everything else is one long excuse for why we lack the courage to ever admit we might be wrong about anything in this world.

And what a sad fear that is. The fear that I might be wrong.

Because in the end, the one guarantee we have in life is that we most assuredly are. Wrong, that is. On many more questions than we are right.

And that's the beauty. That we have still have so much to learn in this world.

And what a wasted life it is to stop learning in the vain attempt to futily make that fear go away.

And what foolish tragedy is wasted on such stupid pride.

That's the reason why it's the deadliest sin. For those of us obsessed with the ravages of sin on this world. Pride. It's the deadliest sin because it kills so many of us. For no good goddamned reason, to boot.

Perhaps we can work up something better. Because, with certainty, if we don't, we deserve whatever else we choose.

Why partisanship makes fools of us

Can this guy get anymore hysterical and foolish?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here's a test I bet Keith could handle.

How about you stake your credibility on, 5 years out, checking up on how many of those predictions actually come true. And then be willing to give up policy commitments that flow from that logic.

I got a better challenge for you, Keith.

I'll put my own record against yours and you pay me the proportion of your salary comparable to the difference between the proportion of my predictions that come to pass and the proportion of your predictions that come to pass.

Something tells me your salary would take a serious hit, Keith. I bet I'd take the majority of your salary, Keith.

And it has not a bit to do with what party I vote for or even when.

It has to do with having a more honest heart and mind and knowing what you are doing better.

Partisanship leaves its proponents perpetually defending outlooks that are either wrong, unrealistic, counterproductive, base, mean-spirited, or bad policy, without ever having to be accountable to whether they are ever even right. Because of course they always are. Even when they aren't. Always. Without exception. No matter how much they get it wrong.

Partisanship is foolish, is the truth. It's one long assertion that I'm right every time because all my buddies agree. It's the worst distortion of honest reasoning. And it means literally zero. Any more than any religious partisan claim of spiritual superiority.

It's one long excuse for bullying for a political cause. And, thankfully, it is on the ropes.

What is the alternative?

Thinking for ourselves. And engaging honestly the consciences of those who agree and disagree.

That is the essence of liberal values, liberal education, and liberal democracy. Everything else is distortion. And we are very, very slowly working our way out of that distortion of our most honest values and our humanity.

Liberty is valued in liberal democracies for a reason. Because it best respects the consciences of its citizens.

And political partisanship, like religious partisanship, is one long excuse for why we confuse our ugliest impulses with our strongest values and pretend that they are what we want them to be so we can get our way.

The last 10 years has been one long experiment in illiberalism in the name of liberalism. And it is, thankfully, beginning to unravel itself. Despite ourselves. Exactly how so much of our growth and learning happen, much of the time.

And it is the love and the learning that is the heart of liberal values and liberal education. And what makes liberal democracies more genuinely strong.

Give us this day

Bill Maxwell has an excellent reflection on the King holiday and what it means for blacks and whites and the future of all Americans. It is a similar feeling I have about the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth and so many of my great heroes, and a sentiment that would serve us when honoring any man or woman of greatness.

To honor King, live up to him

Too often people of all backgrounds and beliefs, myself included, prefer the easy way to the harder but better way. And, every time, it has consequences. King stood for something different during a time of great injustice in this country. Our words in his memory or in the memory of any of our great leaders mean little if they are not backed by deeds that take their legacies seriously.

The challenge of humanity is to live up to those legacies that show us a better way to improve ourselves and our lot together. There is and never will be any amount of force or power that will compensate for our failures, in this regard. At best, aggression and force are necessary to defend ourselves or others when no other options really do exist. At worst, aggression is the product of lazy and self-centered impulses at moments when we are unwilling to be better and more genuinely responsible to one another, as someone who has given way to those impulses more times than I can remember.

The challenge of humanity is to be bigger than our more rash, impatient, and self-centered impulses might otherwise offer. Dr. King called on all Americans and all people, black, white, and every other hue that humanity has to offer, to be bigger than our bitterness might call us to be. It was the same message of Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddha, Mohandas Gandhi, and so many of our greatest men and women. Love in the face of hate. Self-sacrafice in the face of avarice and greed. And thoughtful reflection in the face of recklessness and easy answers.

It is the sage advice of those who have paved paths of success and opportunity as much as decency and justice for humanity.

Those who follow it reap its rewards. Those who fail to miss its opportunities.

And no amount of force will ever make that not so.

And, more than most, this man's legacy reminds us of how an important wrong was righted by that wisdom.

Even as our self-centered impulses suggest otherwise.

May we have the wisdom to know the difference.

The legacy of Dr. King

Is is possible, I wonder, that we can spend one day, this year, not pretending that vengeance, spite, pettiness, and the like are our best, our most liberal or our most conservative, our greatest, our strongest of values and legacies?

Is it possible that we could honor this man who committed his life to the love of his fellow man without pretending that our lesser commitments are somehow as good as this good man?

Is is possible for us to be honest, if only for just one day?

And maybe then we could learn to be honest about what constitutes our strongest values as a matter of our lives.

Perhaps, then, we can, in fact, be better, for which pretending can be no substitute.

In service to all, in servitude to none

Ideas, like ideologies and governments, should serve people. Not the other way around.

Anyone who tells you different is seeking to master you. Not serve you.

And any idea, or ideology, or government, or person, or anything, for that matter, that does not serve you is in no position to expect your loyalty or your trust.

No matter how much they demand it.

There's the rub

David Boaz alerts me to Bart Hinkle's column at the Richmond Times-Dispatch which gets underneath many of the troubling contradictions of contemporary progressive politics that make their agenda, as well as the neoconservatives they so loathe, largely incomprehensible.

Neocons, Progressives, and the Impulse to Bully

How About a Little Domestic Soft Power

"There are few things as mystifying as the dissonance of modern American progressivism. And nowhere is that dissonance more apparent than on the bright line dividing foreign and domestic policy.

For the past eight years, the dominant strain of progressive thought railed against neoconservative foreign interventionism. It abhorred the use of coercive hard power -- military might -- to achieve ostensibly desirable goals such as the spread of democracy. Progressives found the promotion of American values through brute force arrogant and even cruel.

Throughout the Bush years, America-the-bully was a leitmotif. 'American Bully Strikes Back,' was the headline on an October 2001 piece in Salon about the war in Afghanistan. 'Leaders who can persuade and convince fare better than those who bully and abuse," wrote H.D.S. Greenway in a 2005 review of Taming American Power, in which he denounced "neoconservative theories of social engineering.' Likewise, The New York Times denounced 'threat and brute force' in the 2007editorial, 'Bullying Iran.'

In a 2008 piece in The Nation about candidate Barack Obama's foreign policy, Robert Dreyfuss observed that 'U.S. involvement abroad, even when well-intentioned, is perceived on the receiving end as heavy-handed meddling.' He even found cause for alarm in the fact that some of Obama's advisers 'are strong advocates of using U.S. military force to intervene in cases of severe violations of human rights, including genocide.'

The progressive notion that American power projection is problematic on moral grounds and dubious on empirical ones remains strong today. In a pre-Christmas piece on The Huffington Post, Tom Englehardt recalls that in 2001 the Bush administration 'had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans. The neocons were 'desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do.' Alas, 'in the biggest dreams' we find 'the largest miscalculations.' In a same-day piece for The American Prospect, Ann Friedman despairs at the idea that American firepower can be a force for good in the world: 'To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn't matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won't become one.'

Beyond American shores, progressives much prefer Joseph Nye's doctrine of 'soft power' -- which Foreign Affairs recently summed up as "one country's ability to get other countries to do want what it wants, in contrast to ordering or forcing others to do what it wants.'

Yet turn the subject to domestic policy, and what happens? Progressives eagerly embrace the use of coercive hard power to achieve their aims. Force industry to adopt a cumbersome cap-and-trade policy to reduce carbon emissions? Check. Force the country to adopt a health care 'public option'? Check. Threaten people with fines and even prison to impose an individual mandate? Check.

So much for the concern about 'social engineering' and well-intentioned but 'heavy-handed meddling.' When it comes to domestic policy, progressives are just as eager as neocons are to embrace 'expansive dreams' and 'gargantuan plans.' Just as hopelessly romantic about what the threat of force can achieve. And just as arrogant about the rightness of wielding it. (Writing on the Web site Open Left, for example, Adam Bink defends the individual insurance mandate thusly: 'I don't care if people don't want health insurance . . . .Pay up, folks.')...

...Of course, everything that has just been said about progressives could be turned with equal validity against conservatives of the talk-radio right -- many of whom think Americans should push the rest of the world around, but leave one another the heck alone.

Good luck trying to figure them out, too.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow"

Hinkle, of course, is right. Good luck getting progressives, or neoconservatives, who have their own troubling dissonances to account for, to own up to the contradiction.

Most people, I've come to conclude, will do almost anything to justify their uses and abuses of power. No matter the depths of hypocrisy they must go to to justify them.

Except for people over whom power is exercised.

And there, as always, is the rub that makes the difference.