Finding our courage

The more time I spend living in America, the more I like Americans.

And George Will illustrates why.

Progressives and the Growing Dependency Agenda

I actually disagree with George's argument about Federally-funded school vouchers. While I agree that government money that is spent on education is best put in the hands of parents and children to choose schools that best fit their children's needs - a learning curve that would be valuable and that government paternalism cannot possibly replace - I agree with progressives that school vouchers, if they are going to be funded consisent with the ideas that inspire them and if they are going to be better funded, need to come from private donors. Federal funding of education is and always will be a disaster, with No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act demonstrating George's concerns about dependency and quality in public education.

George is right that if we are going to spend Federal money on schools, private vouchers are more consistent with the liberal values and liberal education that better schools would provide. But I think this is the dead end, ultimately, except as a redirection of already codified Federal funding that, like Medicare and Social Security, should, ideally, be transitioned into efforts that fund and administer help for people who need it into private non-profit, and, when appropriate, for-profit hands.

Having said that, George's criticism of progressive ideology as one that, too often, foolishly and counterproductively - for everyone involved - promotes dependency of citizens on government is on-target.

And this line sums up what contemporary progressive ideology has reduced itself to when it does not take more honest and consistent liberal values seriously.

"A century ago, Herbert Croly published 'The Promise of American Life,' a book -- still in print -- that was prophetic about today's progressives. Contemplating with distaste America's 'unregenerate citizens,' he said 'the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities.' Therefore, Croly said, national life should be a 'school' taught by the government: 'The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?' Unregenerate Americans would be "saved many costly perversions" if 'the official schoolmasters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate.'

Subordination is dependency seen from above. Today, it is seen approvingly by progressives imposing, from above, their dependency agenda."

The heart of liberal values and the strongest liberal education - the heart of what makes liberal democracies stronger than their illiberal brethren - is teaching people, kids and adults, to be good people of their own accord and the folly of every other path.

The problem with our schools, like the problem with our culture and society, is that we are not liberal enough, in this sense. We lack confidence in the strength of our liberal values.

And George's criticism gets right to the heart of those fears we harbor. And their counterproductive consequences.

As it turns out, it is the American people who will correct this problem. Not her leaders or her intellectual, media, or other elites. It is each of us. And all of us. Despite our insecurities.

That's how courage works. Courage is not the absense of fear. Courage is doing what is good and what we fear despite our insecurities.

And the truth is that Americans would rather do the courageous thing, even when they are afraid of it. Including taking responsibility for their own lives.

It just takes time for them to work up the courage, I think.

Me too. And I like folks like me. Folks working at doin' the right thing, even when the wrong thing is sometimes too tempting to pass up.

The truth is this describes all of us. Every one of us. Some people just have more courage to admit it, to themselves and to the world, which makes it easier for all of us to find the courage to be honest, as well.

Yeah, I think I like these people. These Americans. And the whole lot of us homo sapiens. And I like them more the more honest they get about who they really are underneath all that fear, that fear of what others might think if they knew, and honestly aspire to be better, to the best of their ability.

Like every generation, it will take courage to do that.

Luckily, it's our strong suit. Even when it takes time for us to find it.

Happy Valentine's Day

Since Valentine's is my holiday - the kids will tell you that, by far, the great majority of music I play, in class, are love songs, of one sort or another, because "Mr. Sutherland is a little bitch" is the most popular explanation, I believe - I thought I'd share some all-time favorites.

And, of course, what Valentine's Day would be complete without a wedding dance?



Happy Valentine's, everyone. Be sure to tell people how much you love them.

Speaking of which. I love you, too. For reals, homey.

Valentine's Day, or how the rules keep us pure

It's been so strange and sad watching free peoples of the world pretend, these last 10 or so years, that it is their might and not their freedom that makes them great.

And the almighty Kingdom of Saudi Arabia offers a story to give us perspective on that ugly and foolish belief.

Saudi Valentine's Day: Authorities Crack Down on Anywhere Selling Red

"The Saudi religious police launched Thursday a nationwide crackdown on stores selling items that are red or in any other way allude to the banned celebrations of Valentine's Day, a Saudi official said.

Members of the feared religious police were inspecting shops for red roses, heart-shaped products or gifts wrapped in red, and ordering storeowners to get rid of them, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

Red-colored or heart-shaped items are legal at other times of the year, but as Feb. 14 nears they become contraband in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom bans celebration of Western holidays such as Valentine's Day, named after a Christian saint said to have been martyred by the Romans in the 3rd Century.

Most shops in Riyadh's upscale neighborhoods have removed all red items from their shelves. A statement by the religious police, informally known as the muttawa, was published in Saudi newspapers, warning shop owners against any violations.

'Those who don't comply will be punished,' the statement said, without spelling out what measures would befall the offenders.

The Valentine's Day prohibition is in line with Saudi's strict Wahhabi school of Islam that the kingdom has followed for more than a century. The birthplace of Islam also bans several Muslim holidays except the two most important ones because it considers them 'religious innovations' that Islam doesn't sanction.

Even birthdays and Mother's Day are frowned on by the religious establishment, although people almost never get punished for celebrating them.

Many Saudis, who still want to mark the popular Valentine's, do their shopping weeks before the holiday.

Each year, the religious police mobilize ahead of Feb. 14 and descend on gift and flower shops, confiscating all red items, including flowers.

Attitudes toward Valentine's Day vary across the Arab world, with devout Muslims opposing the holiday as a Western celebration of romantic love that corrupts Muslim youth."

Repression is the long history of humanity. The presumption that it will make us good and make all the bad go away, or too afraid to raise it's unholy head, has been with us since the evolution of moral codes to organize human behavior in every grouping of homo sapiens since the beginning of humanity.

It just happens to be wrong.

And it is responsible for the great bulk of the history of human tragedy.

And led to reversals of real human progress in every generation.

The Rennaisance and the Enlightenment, in early European history, marked a break from the long history of repression of Medieval Europe.

And their central theme was freedom. Freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. And the freedom and responsibility to challenge repressive governments that had chilled the development of thought, art, and science for hundreds of years.

Does it not seem strange to anyone that the last 10 years, the first sustained liberal democracy in the history of the world has seen it's public debate and discussion shy from embracing the very value that was the original purpose for its existence, at all?

Valentine's Day in Saudi Arabia should be a reminder to those of us in less repressive countries of what that kind of repression looked like in our own history. And why there is no future in that past.

It does not matter for what purpose repression is used. Those who are a genuine threat to others need to be contained until they are no longer a threat. And confusing fear with likely probability of real threat is not an honest substitute for better governance or real safety. But freedom to follow our conscience on all other matters is central to what nurtures all that is great, including real security, in liberal democracies and for all peoples who are more honest about the consequences of repression.

It is the scared and the weak who must bully those who disagree with them.

Courage, greatness, comes from respecting the value of the freedom and conscience that make us great. And it is with that courage that we become better, for real. Not a means of pretending that we are better than we are.

Perhaps we are a species that cannot live up to its highest ideals. Because we lack the courage.

And if so, we should at least have the decency and honesty to acknowledge that we are frauds and cowards. And stop pretending to be anything better.

The Saudi Kingdom has taken this approach. Without all the honesty or courage.

Perhaps we will pride ourselves that we are not quite as bad as them.

Perhaps that is all we have to offer.

If so, we will most assuredly get the lives that we deserve.

Choose wisely.

Happy Valentines.

Attention assholes

What class looks like.



You can't fake it. So stop trying.

Or nice guys will just keep kicking your ass all over the park.

Learning to listen for real (from someone who's learned the hard way)

Gerard Alexander, associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has an excellent, if one-sided, criticism of everything that is wrong with politics in America and the world, in today's Washington Post.

Why are liberals so condescending?

"Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a 'Bolshevik plot' -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. 'We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,' the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not 'express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.' During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.'

This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere."

Be on the lookout for Harvard Professor Paul Peterson's forthcoming column, "Why do conservatives act like such morally self-righteous jackasses?"

It's a strange tendency in the human race. Fueled by insecurity, and the everpresent joys of self-righteous indignation, I think.

Christ says love thy neighbor. So Christians interpret that for centuries as, "Kill thy neighbor you suspect doesn't love thy neighbor."

Jews bring us the wisdom thou shalt not kill. And then modify it in the early 20th century to mean, "unless you're Arab and we don't want you around."

And Muslims. Don't even get me started.

It is a strange tendency. This tendency to confuse self-righteousness with being right. Passion with reason. And the damned foolish and without exception literally impossible notion that any person or any group can have all the answers in the world and thus know without having to listen and thoughtfully consider alternatives. And willfully ignore how the strong-arming undermines the more honest discussion.

Why has it caused so much death and destruction and insanity in the world?

Fear. And power. And the ways that we make excuses for our unending use of the latter to unfailingly fail to conquer the former.

Outside of disease, we are our worst predator and source of insecurity. And, thankfully, today, our wisest fellowtravelers have developed ideas and clarified our thinking to assure that our worst problem is that we just don't get along very well.

But it's all the same ball of wax, in the end.

It humanity's most foolish fault, by far. And it is isolated to no group or individual.

And the tendency to turn to power to resolve it and all of our problems once and for all, and to pretend that this tendency is our strength rather than our deadliest weakness, is the long and failed history of humanity. Until more genuinely liberal pathes were paved. Liberal meaning liberty. Especially our liberty of conscience.

And our choice to use that conscience to either listen, genuinely, honestly, to one another. And to humble ourselves in a world where what we know is far surpassed, without exception, by what we do not.

Or to keeping pretending that this more aggressive, less reasoned and reasoning path has taken us forward rather than backward.

It should be obvious to anyone who is still not defending this strange journey that we have taken in the last 10 years that it is a path to nowhere. And that it is hardly the path of our highest values at play. And that it is anything, really, other than one long manipulation in the name of the arrogant notion that anyone, anywhere can use power unerringly to resolve our woes.

If there is any one insight that would more genuinely move humanity forward, I think, it is recognizing this folly. From there, many other problems find resolution. And many more people live and thrive. And many more people learn to seek out answers with less false assurances that they or anyone has more right answers than they really do. And thus more real answers can be found.

We talk plenty. We need to listen more. A lot more. For real. Not faking it. And stop pretending that our aggression, and not our minds and hearts, are the source of our progress. It's in that listening where everything else gets tackled more honestly.

Everything else is the story of my life. Plenty of failure. Plenty more stupidity.

On a personal note. Thanks, Brandi. You were right. And I was wrong. About a lot of things. Namely about how unerringly full of it I am. About everything. Especially about what really matters in this life.

Looking to ourselves

Jacob Weisberg introduces some needed honesty into the debate about challenges facing politicians and Americans, alike, and their general reluctance - both of those groups, really - to take them on squarely.

Blame the childish, ignorant American people

"Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves."

The first line is wrong, except as it reflects America's waning ability to get its way on any issue on the global stage (a positive development, even for Americans, who, believe it or not, do not have all the answers). On every other matter, America's future lies bigger and better ahead of her. But only after she learns about the limits of her use of power and manipulation to get her way.

But the last line is dead on. It's also what Jesus said, by the way, if anyone's keeping count.

And it is that advice - looking to ourselves - that offers the only real option for being better and improving our lives on every issue we face. Including the few that only government can be responsible for, really. And if we're not sure about which ones those are, how about we stick to government's original purpose - matters of security, domestic and international - and assume that the rest are our responsibility. Because they are and must be, for any real good to be done, no matter what government does or does not do.

That vision for the world, and America as a far humbler contributor, is one that offers much real possibility for improving life for humanity. After everything else has failed, I suppose. And the one that we will need to be responsible for, regardless, if we want our challenges successfully resolved.

Because liberal values serve us better

A really impressive analysis of the unfolding events inside of Iran, events far more important than anything Washington has up its sleeve.

Iran's leaders are worried about history's forward march

"The greatest difference between 2009 and 1979 was created by the revolution itself. Revolutions give birth to a new political class, and Iran’s Islamic revolution was no exception.

The Iranian leadership formed after the revolution consisted of a narrow ruling stratum and a much broader supporting group that was given charge of administration and political mobilization.

In the 20 years since Khomeini’s death, the composition of this political class has changed drastically. The clerical elite has gradually lost power to the military-security groups, from whose ranks the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, emerged. Bureaucratic and security services dominated by the Revolutionary Guards and its militia, the Basij (the Mobilization Corps), are now firmly in command.

The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blessed the Revolutionary Guards’ decision to steal the presidential election. By identifying squarely with the military-security apparatus headed by Ahmadinejad, Khamenei has alienated an important segment of the ruling clerical elite. He has also reduced his own status as the ultimate arbiter in Iranian society, a role that was central to Khomeini’s dominance of the system. As a result, he has produced a rupture between the two pillars of the revolutionary regime: the clerical elite and the military-security structure.

The growth of Khamenei’s personal, extra-constitutional power introduces a strong element of uncertainty into Iran’s future. Political regimes that rely on personal power – commonly known as dictatorships – prove to be fragile in crisis. This was the weakness of the shah’s regime, which collapsed as he became paralyzed in his decision-making. There was nothing behind him supporting the system.

Khamenei’s backing of the June 2009 putsch now appears to have been a costly mistake. With this single error, he has undermined what had appeared to be a robust post-revolutionary course for the first and only theocracy in modern history. The cries of “God is great!” have now been overtaken by chants of “Death to the dictator!” in recent demonstrations in Tehran, Tabriz, Shiraz and other Iranian cities.

The Iranian regime is now critically dependent on decisions made by one man, the supreme leader, Khamenei. For that reason, it is demonstrating a degree of fragility that is comparable to the shah’s regime in the latter part of the 1970s.

Most spokespersons of the Green protest movement advocate civil disobedience instead of revolution. Earlier this month, Ezattolah Sahabi, who was a member of the revolutionary provisional government in 1979, issued a statement in Tehran stating categorically that 'a revolution in today’s Iran is neither possible nor desirable.' At roughly the same time, five prominent opposition intellectuals living in exile released a reformist, not revolutionary, manifesto directed against the 'despotic guardians.'

But there is little chance that these children of the Islamic revolution – who have become graying reformists – will remain in control of the Green movement, which now reflects the aspirations of a post-revolutionary generation of young women and men and students.

The ayatollah-dictator and the Revolutionary Guards have tried their best to discredit their opponents by concocting, through forced confessions at show trials, a conspiracy of regime change based on a 'velvet revolution' produced by 'Western social sciences.'

Deep down, they know there is no conspiracy. Their fear is grounded in what they see in front of them: the forward march of history."

Whether people know it or not, the 21st century will be a vindication of the same principle that the 20th century vindicated: the end of force as a governing philosophy. And it doesn't matter who is taking up that banner. They will all fall. Every single one of them. One strong man at a time.

Because liberal values serve us better. All cynical calculations to the contrary.

Tough guys and real courage

You know what the most impressive part of this period of tough guy politics is?

The courage of all the tough guys to admit when they're wrong.

You hear it all the time, don't you? I was wrong. Things went badly because I screwed up. It's my responsibility.

It's amazing. All this courage.

It's so sad, this little period in our history.

Everyone wants the power. Everyone wants the money. Everyone wants exactly what they want. And not one person will admit that maybe things aren't going well because their screwing up. And, from there, all the lying and bullshit proceeds.

The antidote to all that?

More real freedom to admit when we are screwing up.

And, if all else fails, find someone else who will take more honest responsibility.

That's the beauty of political and economic freedom that most free peoples take completely for granted. It is the reason why the world was so stagnant in so many real ways before liberal democracies and liberal values were taken seriously. Because people lacked both the freedom and the real courage and wisdom to just choose differently when they disagreed rather than seek power that, more often than not, was and is abused and defended at all costs, even when that means avoiding any honest responsibility for choices made.

And no matter how we spin it, not taking honest responsibility for our lives and electing leaders for the most powerful nation in the world who will not take responsibility for their failures is weak. No matter how tough we try to appear.

Real strength is found in more real responsibility for our lives. And better understanding. And the courage and integrity to act on that understanding. Period. Everything else is one long lie.

What stands before us is the choice between real strength or the fake kind.

May we choose wisely.

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?

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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.

All I want for Christmas (is for us to be better, for real)

With so much animus animating the world, not to mention the greed, the envy, the vanity, the wrath, and especially the pride, I have to wonder, sometimes, who the good guys really are.

They are each of us, I hope. And they can only be those among us who can find it within themselves to forgive such a wretched little species. Who else, after all, will help us pick ourselves up after we've torn one another apart?

So self-important, this sad little breed. So full of its own bitterness for the world that, for the most part, it alone has wrought.

Hatred and piety are the strange old standbies of our important differences. But, surely, they are not all that we have to offer. And, just as surely, they are not some blind path we will take for good. Or confuse, for long, as some wave of the future.

I guess I'm disappointed with the world today. A world a significant portion of which will celebrate in a few days the birth and life of a man who offered us a better example.

Even if we do not follow it. And even, thus, if his life and death occurred in vain.

Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps we can't be better. Because the world is such a dark and dangerous place and we find it just too tempting to use it as an excuse to be as ugly as we see fit, as well.

What a sad and hopeless punctuation mark that would be to our existence. And, perhaps, if that is the path we are choosing we should get about the business of choosing it and be done with it. No sense in lolligagging on our way to self-righteous self-immolation and mutually assured self-destruction.

Seems like such a stupid path for us to take. Given how little good is done. And how many people have and will always be destroyed in its wake.

But maybe that's all we have to offer.

Because it's so much easier than living with an open heart. And the last thing we could expect ourselves to do is the hard thing. Even if it happens to be the only thing that will ever do any real good.

I don't think that's true, personally. And history is both one long record of our inhumanity and serious failures and our propensity towards greater humanity and to be better over time.

I don't know why, exactly, we have this tendency to celebrate our worst impulses before we give way to our better angels. Why empires defend their bloodshed. Why slaveowners defend their holdings. Why Nazis and Communists indulge their power to destroy. Why all of us mock the compassion and decency that recognizes the evil in all of these. Other than the defense we feel for our own touch of evil.

I'm not sure why, exactly, humanity perpetually defends its inhumanity as wiser counsel. Other than to defend itself from honest challenge we feel too weak to accept.

All I know is that it is human. And that respecting and accepting, better, our humanity is more honest than pretending that its frailties only affect those few who failed in this moment.

And all I know is that I am tired of wondering who the good guys are because their animus and destructiveness looks so much like the bad guys.

It's time we put this ugly legacy behind us. So we can all learn to be better. For real. Just like the man said.

Keeping us honest

The most honest and even-handed coverage of the climate debate I've read to date.

When Science Becomes a Casuality of Politics

Be nice if we could learn to stop being such dicks when there are important matters to attend to.

In the meantime, someone's got to keep us honest, at least.

Change you can believe in (or else)

As good a description of the health care bill as I have seen.

Change Nobody Believes In

"And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new 'manager's amendment' that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.

The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that 'reform' has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.

***
Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. 'Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills,' Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.

The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.

These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare—above and far beyond the status quo—because its strict restrictions on underwriting and risk-pooling would distort insurance markets. All but a handful of states have rejected regulations like 'community rating' because they encourage younger and healthier buyers to wait until they need expensive care, increasing costs for everyone. Benefits and pricing will now be determined by politics.

As for the White House's line about cutting costs by eliminating supposed 'waste,' even Victor Fuchs, an eminent economist generally supportive of ObamaCare, warned last week that these political theories are overly simplistic. 'The oft-heard promise 'we will find out what works and what does not' scarcely does justice to the complexity of medical practice,' the Stanford professor wrote."

And in case you're concerned this is all a right-wing conspiracy, Robert Samuelson from the Washington Post adds his two cents.

Yes, it's all about Obama

"Despite Obama's eloquence and command of the airwaves, public suspicions are rising. In April, 57 percent of Americans approved of his 'handling of health care' and 29 percent disapproved, reports the Post-ABC News poll; in the latest survey, 44 percent approved and 53 percent disapproved. About half worried that their care would deteriorate and that health costs would rise.

These fears are well-grounded. The various health-care proposals represent atrocious legislation. To be sure, they would provide insurance to 30 million or more Americans by 2019. People would enjoy more security. But even these gains must be qualified. Some of the newly insured will get healthier, but how many and by how much is unclear. The uninsured now receive 50 to 70 percent as much care as the insured. The administration argues that today's system has massive waste. If so, greater participation in the waste by the newly insured may not make them much better off.

The remaining uninsured may also exceed estimates. Under the Senate bill, they would total 24 million in 2019, reckons Richard Foster, chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. But a wild card is immigration. From 1999 to 2008, about 60 percent of the increase in the uninsured occurred among Hispanics. That was related to immigrants and their children (many American-born). Most illegal immigrants aren't covered by Obama's proposal. If we don't curb immigration of the poor and unskilled -- people who can't afford insurance -- Obama's program will be less effective and more expensive than estimated. Hardly anyone mentions immigrants' impact, because it seems insensitive.

Meanwhile, the health-care proposals would impose substantial costs. Remember: The country already faces huge increases in federal spending and taxes or deficits because an aging population will receive more Social Security and Medicare. Projections the Congressional Budget Office made in 2007 suggested that federal spending might rise almost 50 percent by 2030 as a share of the economy (gross domestic product). Since that estimate, the recession and massive deficits have further bloated the national debt.

Obama's plan might add almost an additional $1 trillion in spending over a decade -- and more later. Even if this is fully covered, as Obama contends, by higher taxes and cuts in Medicare reimbursements, this revenue could have been used to cut the existing deficits. But the odds are that the new spending isn't fully covered, because Congress might reverse some Medicare reductions before they take effect. Projected savings seem 'unrealistic,' says Foster. Similarly, the legislation creates a voluntary long-term care insurance program that's supposedly paid by private premiums. Foster suspects it's 'unsustainable,' suggesting a need for big federal subsidies.

Obama's overhaul would also change how private firms insure workers. Perhaps 18 million workers could lose coverage and 16 million gain it, as companies adapt to new regulations and subsidies, estimates the Lewin Group, a consulting firm. Private insurers argue that premiums in the individual and small-group markets, where many workers would end up, might rise an extra 25 to 50 percent over a decade. The administration and the CBO disagree. The dispute underlines the bills' immense uncertainties. As for cost control, even generous estimates have health spending growing faster than the economy. Changing that is the first imperative of sensible policy.

So Obama's plan amounts to this: partial coverage of the uninsured; modest improvements (possibly) in their health; sizable budgetary costs worsening a bleak outlook; significant, unpredictable changes in insurance markets; weak spending control. This is a bad bargain. Health benefits are overstated, long-term economic costs understated. The country would be the worse for this legislation's passage. What it's become is an exercise in political symbolism: Obama's self-indulgent crusade to seize the liberal holy grail of 'universal coverage.' What it's not is leadership."

There's more in both pieces worth reading. But the most important problem, frankly, with the bill is Democrats' attempt to force Americans to trust legislation that they don't trust to resolve our problems with health care. Without even really listening to the concerns.

The advantage for opponents by this manner of governing is that it makes it all the easier to just kill this thing entirely with a new majority and start completely fresh.

Like Republicans before them, Democrats are about to learn a very serious lesson in governance. If you think that assertions of overwhelming power can trump substantive concerns in a democratic discussion and debate with voters who can elect otherwise, you got another think coming. And voters will throw your asses right out of office until your party gets the message.

Republicans got their message, in part. It will take several cycles.

But illiberal forces who think they can turn the clock backwards on genuine liberal progress, meaning progress that promotes greater liberty and responsibility, are in for a very rude awakening.

Because, as it turns out, Americans like their freedom. When they can finally see more up close and personal what the alternative looks like.

And they like it for good reason. Because for all of our bumbling and failures and, frankly, their creation of most of the problems in the current health care system, Americans are in a better position to make better choices about their health care and how to correct them than the Federal government ever was. And, ultimately, most of the problems in the system will need the kind of changes that only individual Americans can offer for their own lives, and not ones that can be coerced by anyone else.

Americans may not know what will work. But they can get a sense of what won't work. And Americans are right, by my lights, with so many variations of market distortion in this legislation, that this bill will make our health care woes worse, not better.

And what Democrats need to get clear about, right now, is that change you are forced to believe in is not change you will ever really believe in at all.

Big America

Matt Welch says the obvious when he calls out Paul Krugman for the open, unabashed, inconsistently reasoning hypocrit that he is and just happens to make the most promising suggestion for health care reform I have heard to date.

Paul Krugman's Selective Effigies

First on Paul:

"The New York Times columnist on Aug. 7:

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there's no comparison. I've gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can't find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds. [...]

So this is something new and ugly.

Krugman today:

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy."

In debate, that's called a double-turn. In life it's called "you really don't know what the fuck you think, do you, except for who you hate?"

Then on the substance of the health care bill:

"Here's a cost-saving reform I've heard of, that's not in there, because the president rejected it at the very beginning of this process: Place individuals on equal tax footing as employers when it comes to purchasing health insurance plans, so that we can transition from the post-WWII Company Man artifact of health-insurance-as-reward-for-employment, to a competition-spurring, cost-reducing model of individuals owning and shopping around for their own policies. In other words, markets, not mandates.

As Peter Suderman keeps pointing out, this plan doubles down on most everything that's bad with the current system. Pretending in the face of mounting evidence that this limping husk of a bill contains every bold reform idea there is might just be one reason why it's not very popular. At some point, people just stop believing you."

That last part is what hits home. It's the part that progressives just can't seem to get clear about, yet. Everyone knows that this bill has no bold new ideas and noone believes that it will fix the problems in the system. Because it is the same old New Deal-era ideas that voters grew skeptical of a long time ago when America first started unraveling the legacy of unintended consequences from both that era of legislation and the experiments of the Great Society back in the 80's and 90's.

And because Americans know in their hearts, for good reason, that it is more freedom, and the responsibility that comes with it, and not more government that are America's most enduring values.

What the political class is having a hard time accepting, right now, is that Americans have confidence in themselves even when their politicians do not.

For good reason. Because it really is the American people and not the American political class that are the source of America's and all liberal democratic peoples' most honest and sustaining progress. Always has been. Always will be.

And no amount of bullshit out of Washington will ever undermine that confidence.

And that's a good thing. Not something to be forced out of existence.

The only people who think different are those who lack the confidence necessary for America to tackle it's difficult health care problems most effectively and honestly.

And who in the world would want those people in charge of the process?

Not Americans, as it turns out. To the chagrin of leftists everywhere. And that is a damned shame.

When it's not a sign of an America bigger than the smaller visions of its political masters.

And I'll take a bigger America over smaller would-be-masters any day of the week.

Making a difference

Had a kid request this Cranberries song, the other day. An era when songs like this one really did make a difference in the world.



This kid's going through a serious Cranberries phase, right now. Can't tell you how much that touches me given how much I loved the Cranberries growing up. Songs like this one and U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday helped create the political climate necessary to end the violence in Northern Ireland. And it moves me, a lot, actually, that a kid at a school for kids not terribly moved by much, except for their own egos, too often, was moved by Dolores and her motley crew on this song and all of their gorgeous music.

And after a long conversation with this kid, I felt like maybe I was making a difference in this job that I haven't felt in quite awhile, actually.

Maybe I am the sum of more than just all my mistakes. Which have been plentiful in my life. And felt mighty weighty this semester.

Perhaps I have something to offer. Perhaps he does. Perhaps we all do.

We shall see.

Maybe we really can do better

How refreshing. Journalism that is moving and big-hearted, rather than petty and small-minded.

Chris Henry, dead at 26, could have been a role model

Be a downright shame, wouldn't it, if everyone aspired to be bigger, like this? World just be a damned mess of violence and mean-spiritedness, pettiness, and narrow-mindedness, and general hard-heartedness if everyone was this soft and compassionate. This decent.

It's a good thing that this generation has finally transcended humanity's long history of indecency and inhumanity. And finally put the compassionate amongst us in their place.

Because the last thing we need is more kids like Chris Henry, and everyone else, for that matter, when we're honest, turning things around. No matter what the cynics, including ourselves, when that's the case, have to say on the matter.

The most important question history offers

When all is said and done, the problem with most of human history is pretty straightforward.

A lot of petty, small-minded people having a hard time facing honestly that it is their smallness and pettiness that has so unhaltingly torn down so many of even their own best intentions. Not to mention their own straightforward self-interest. And, most importantly, everyone else around them.

There is a reason why we study enlightened self-interest in history classes. Looking after others' interests does tend to do good for the person doing the helping as much as for the person being helped.

And much of human history is watching folks who have not figured that out fucking things up for everyone else, including themselves.

And for much of human history that means us, as much as anyone else.

Am I one of those people? Are you?

The most important questions history has to offer that I know of.

The way I am

My second favorite look. Right out of bed. No makeup. Just being herself.



Having an unbelievable voice doesn't hurt either.

Second only to that look of total vulnerability. Love unconditional.

Random reflections on public education and life

I must say, at this point, that there is literally nothing that makes sense to me in public education as it exists today.

So many people making so many decisions for everyone else for so little purpose except to exaggerate their already exaggerated sense of self-importance.

It's strange to me, sometimes, that education, for me, was an opportunity to develop my own sense of independent and critical thought. And that both are so thoroughly discouraged at all levels of education except when it conforms with the predispositions, often ideological and rarely any-other-logical-at-all, of those who have the power to enforce them.

Life, like education, often doesn't make much sense, I think, at this point. Except when the bullshit begins to unravel.

And, then, finally, some real progress can be made.

What progress sounds like

Whether folks know it or not, this is the future.



There are plenty of places in life where we will need to use blunt force because no alternatives really do exist.

But the notion that more force, more recriminiation, more vengeance, more punitiveness, the notion that treating people worse really is the path to progress is just kind of silly and not very serious as a path to genuine progress.

Progress means people getting treated better. Always. Always been so. Will always be so.

And no amount of rationalization otherwise will ever trump that. Ever.

Why? Because treating people like shit has consequences. Consequences we are all dealing with, right now, when we're not bullshitting otherwise.

Political parties, like private citizens, will have to deal with some hard knocks until they get that figured out. But we will definitely be learning those lessons, over time. Why? Because things won't get better until we do.

And, bottom-line, progress means things getting better.

And no amount of the world turning into a shitheap will ever successfully bullshit itself otherwise.

No matter who's shoveling the bullshit.

Progress is people getting treated better. It's people getting more compassionate. Not less. It's people getting more understanding. Not less. It's the world getting better. Not worse.

No matter who bullshits otherwise.

We will be treating one another better. And more responsibility for that and the good things that come with it. Believe that.

Because that's what progress look like.

And this is what progress sounds like.

It's a beautiful future, ain't it?

Yeah, I know. Goddamn gorgeous.

The future is intimidation and fear

The tell-tale line in E.J. Dionne's sloppy and less than honest attempt to synthesize a foreign policy in the Washington Post today.

A Foreign Policy Based on Moral Balance

"But these are the days of European second thoughts: Obama is still interesting, he's still not George W. Bush, but what can he show for his efforts? His Israeli-Palestinian initiative has gone nowhere. The fruits of his new overtures to Iran, Russia and North Korea are far from obvious. Where is the climate change legislation that was supposed to get through Congress?

And why did Obama skip the anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall's fall? OK, Europeans say, we understand he sees that the future lies in Asia, but did he have to rub it in? And can't he find at least one European leader to bond with?

In the midst of such complaints and questions, I sat with a group of Americans and Europeans to listen to a live broadcast of Obama's Oslo speech before the opening of a conference organized by the French Institute of International Relations. For me, the address was Obama's answer to his critics, both American and European.

To begin with, the president reminded us why he had seized the imaginations of so many in the first place. The speech was commonly described as a defense of "just war," and it was -- a rigorous, unblinking argument for why violence and the threat of violence can be necessary on behalf of the right and the good."

First of all, if the President thinks that the future lies in Asia, I certainly hope he's referring to Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and the other genuinely strong economies and liberal democracies in the region. If leftists really think that the future lies in China, they have another think coming. And the world will not only watch that situation unravel until China goes democratic. The world will remember what self-indulgent, self-righteous shitheads in the West rationalized that brutal regime for their own ideological purposes for the rest of our liberal history. If there is anything that leftists could do, right now, to undermine confidence in their ideology, rationalizing the totalitarian impulses of their ideological brethren ranks right up with the list of "what bonehead moves put left-wing ideology in the trash bin of history."

Secondly, and most importantly, if E.J. thinks that violence and the threat of violence are the wave the future, he has a lot of history that he might consult on where that thinking leads us. Because it's been responsible for more bad than good, on balance, by far. And rationalizing that bad in the name of good is exactly what has fucked humanity since it's inception. Might makes right is a line to caution against such thinking, not to reinforce it.

And if E.J. thinks that he has done an endrun around such wisdom because he found the right cause, history will undoubtedly offer a cold shower dose of reality for that kind of arrogance.

In fact, it has.

The unfailingly failing agenda the Obama Administration is exactly the kind of cold shower leftists could use, right now. If they could get honest with themselves, that is.

And the fact that they can't is exactly what Acton meant.

This is why Orwell wrote those books. To help us see through this bullshit.

And we will continue to get the governments we deserve until we do exactly that.

Power and responsibility

If there is anything I have come to realize, sadly, from this period, it is that power, far too often, is an explicit exercise in escaping responsibility, much of the time. It is about blaming someone else for the mistakes of those who have it. It is about the absence of integrity, far too often.

Not always. But too often to count.

That is why Lord Acton was so skeptical of it and those who have it. And he was right. And that kind of corruption does not discriminate based on ideology or party or any other factor other than the independent integrity of those involved. And even that is not too difficult to compromise with enough muscle. Which is why people do it. No matter how much it builds dishonesty - dishonesty, especially, about the effectiveness of governing efforts - into government.

It doesn't have to be that way. But we'd have to get more honest for it to change. And the most important bit of honesty would be admitting the limits of power to improve our lives.

One day, perhaps. Until then. We get the government we vote for.

And thank our lucky stars that we have opposition parties, checks and balances, and all the ways that we can check and challenge power in liberal democracies to make them more liberal and more genuinely democratic, as we move forward more honestly.

In the meantime, we live with the consequences of the lies we tell ourselves and one another in lieu of something more honest.

And we move, hopefully, toward a day when we can be more honest and compassionate, and everything that is entailed with more genuine progress.

Coming to terms

I'm coming to terms, today. With failure. And tragedy.

In my case, it's a bigger picture failure and tragedy. Not mine, personally, necessarily. Although there's plenty of that to face, as well. Just coming to terms with the limits of my efforts.

If there is one overriding concern in my life it is helping people understand just how much people are capable of in their lives. Just how capable humanity is, if we were decide to fulfill that potential.

Most people can have great lives, is the truth. Lives they love. Lives with lots of love and deep fulfillment, and plenty of everything they might need or want.

There are people whose destinies are more genuinely limited by circumstances beyond their control. Iranians or North Koreans who cannot escape the prisons that are their respective countries. People who suffer any multitude of tragedies - AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, cancer - that they have limited ability to halt. People who have life experiences that they cannot predict or control - murder or murder of a family member, accidental death or disease, and losses of every conceivable source - that they are unable, for various reasons to prevent.

There are people who experience tragedy that they cannot do anything about.

But most of us don't.

Most of us have circumstances that can be changed, knowledge that can be discovered, and relationships that can be improved.

Most misery in the world, truth be told, is foolish drama borne of people all too limited in their understanding, of the world and of themselves, and all too prone to aggression and control and any number of all too human, mistaken, foolish reactions to their circumstances that often have unintendended consequences. More often than not, sometimes.

I am one of those people. Too many times to count, in fact. I will be tomorrow, too. And the day after that. And the day after that, as well. All of us are. All of us will be. From here until our funny, tragic little species ends its run on this earth.

Most of our conflicts have reasonable and honest resolutions. If we decide to resolve them, that is. Most of our problems have reasonable and honest solutions. If we decide to seek them out.

Our problem, humanity's problem, generally, is that, far too often, we decide we are too frustrated and impatient, too angry and disillusioned, too self-involved, frankly, to seek such resolutions. That they are unworthy of our effort or commitment or whatever excuse we have today for why we just choose not to do anything real about our concerns and instead opt for momentary feelings of self-satisfaction over real and honest resolution of important concerns over time.

Our most foolish problems, frankly, as far as I'm concerned, are the the ones that involve conflicts between one another that can only be resolved with more understanding, of the people as much as of the problems, that we instead choose to engage in any variation of aggression, manipulation, or attempts to dominate and control of one another so accustomed we are to our more aggressive and less thoughtful natures.

I've come to terms with the fact that there are any number of people in the world that could be more genuinely happy, have their needs more honestly met, even have many of their wants more satisfied while having their deepest needs fulfilled, if only they would learn to treat themselves and one another better and learn more about the world and one another than fight and overpower one another.

But, in the meantime, there is much pointless tragedy. And failure.

We can and likely will get this turned around, at some point. It will take much time. Much failure. Much useless tragedy. Just as it always has. Enough failure eventually creates opportunity for learning, if we will take up that opportunity.

Who knows. We shall see.

In the meantime. Much avoidable failure and tragedy. My own as much as anyone else's.

And so our story goes. Human history. A story of failure and tragedy that finally yields, for some, to learning and progress. And the freedom to translate that learning into real progress.

But, for now. Failure and tragedy. My own included.

Same as it ever was.

Let's hope it leads somewhere more hopeful.

In the meantime, enjoy some Ingrid.

Force as a governing philosophy, the death throws

It's ironic, isn't it?

That it is ordinary students and ordinary people in Iran, a country that really believes in force as a governing philosophy and practices it more brutally and without conscience than most governments and countries in the world that are making the most courageous and open challenges to this ugliness?

Iran cracks down on dissent in universities

That it is Americans and activists, political leaders, and other citizens of freer and more comfortable liberal democracies who are rationalizing force as a governing philosophy most publicly, right now?

Goes to show.

Progress has not a damn thing to do with power. To the contrary, progress is when people find the courage to stand up to overwhelming shows of force for the cause of freedom.

This philosophy needs to die for good. The 20th century, and really most of world history, is one long indictment of this philosophy in all of its variants.

And it is people thousands of miles away in a country unfamiliar with the ways of freedom and more honest democracy who are demonstrating for the rest of us what courage really looks like.

And if we aren't going to lead, the least we can do is have the decency to follow. Or get out of the way.

And offer support to those with that kind of courage, even if we struggle to find it within ourselves.

My favorite look

Am I the only man who thinks that women look most attractive when they feel genuinely loved?



And when they have genuine love to offer?

When they can trust that love? And when they can trust the men who offer it?

I want a woman who can trust me enough to have that look for the rest of her life.

I love seeing a woman at ease with herself and with life.



My number one job in life is to make it real.

For everyone in my life. As much as humanly possible. But especially for the woman in my life.

Because I love that look.

When a woman loves without hesitation.

Because she can trust the man she loves.

And trusts her own heart enough to love him back unconditionally.

My favorite look.

Final sign of the impending apocalypse

It's official. We're all going to hell.



Hope everyone brought their sunscreen.

In political news today

So much ego. So little to show for it.

Story at 11.

Why cynicism is for losers

Why not marry an asshole, if they're pretty or rich enough?

Because who wants to be around an asshole all the time?

Other assholes, that's who.

Enjoy assholes.

It's all yours.

What kind of nation are we gonna be?

A nation of thugs? Or a nation of decent people?

Reading the coverage of the President Obama's commitment to Afghanistan, I am struck by what dicks populate this great country of ours.

At a moment when Afghanis and American soldiers need us to stand behind the brave efforts of folks risking their lives to challenge an Afghan future dominated by Islamist thugs, all Americans can do is snipe.

Why? Because the effort is unworthy? Because President Obama is a socialist determined to make America weak? Because conservatives are warmongers who want more Afghanis dead to appease their lust for American imperial power?

Obviously not. To everyone except the most self-centered and self-righteous.

The reason why we are sniping, the reason why so much of our politics is poisoned and dysfunctional right now is pretty straightforward.

It's because we're a nation of assholes.

Or maybe we're a nation pretending to be assholes. It's hard to keep track, these days. And instead of being honest about that, we've decided to pretend that not giving a shit and indulging our pettiest, ugliest, most self-centered impules really is the future of America and the world.

Simple question.

Since we started down this road - this road of who can be the biggest asshole to make all our problems go way - what's gotten better?

Where? Can you name one place where things have gotten better being a bigger asshole?

I can't. We've become a bunch of sniping, petty, small-minded dicks, is what we've done.

All while pretending that being sniping, petty, small-minded dicks really is the best that humanity has to offer.

It's fuckin' sad is what it is. A bunch of tough characters whining about how the world doesn't share my particular brand of sanctimony. It's goddamn embarrassing, is what it is.

Weak, I believe is the term for it.

Because being an asshole is weak. It's cowardly. It's one long excuse for why someone can't face up to why they're being a dick. And that being a dick in the name of a cause is still being a dick. Largely because it's one long excuse for why I don't have to listen or engage people who disagree with me because I'm right all the time. Caring about others and what they think just weakens my resolve to make them do my bidding whether they fuckin' like it or not. Not because I'm a dick, mind you. Just because I know better than you and everyone else.

In other words, because I'm a dick. Because I'm too weak to admit that none of the above is, ever has been, or ever will be true of anyone. Ever. Not ever. Never has been and never will be. No matter my protestations meant to make it look like I'm that guy or gal to the contrary.

So far, America and the world has been pretending that being a nation or a world of assholes really was what the brighter future held.

It's kind of stupid, really, when you step away and stop defending it. But that's the road we took. To defend our own brand of assholes, obviously. To take down the other guys' assholes. Who defend their assholes, of course, to take down our assholes. And round and round we go.

It's a fucking' joke, is what it is.

Real courage doesn't operate this way.

Real courage defends against aggression, for real. It doesn't rationalize it for ourselves. Real courage gets more compassionate and loving. Including for our tendencies to become bigger assholes. It doesn't adopt assholedom as a philosophy of life or politics.

The only people who do that are assholes.

So the question in front of us is: Are we going be go on being a nation of assholes? Or are we going to be a nation of decent people? Are we going to keep taking up for the assholes? Or are we going to get more honest about what consequences this attitude has had in the world?

I care about assholes, is the truth. As much as anything, because I've been one enough times in my life. And most people I know have been one at one point in their lives. Without exception, really.

But I'm not going to go around pretending that this is the way things are supposed to be.

And I can't feel anything but damned disappointed and embarrassed by a country that would behave otherwise.

So while we choose whether we are going to help Afghanis defend themselves against Islamist goons or not, and defend ourselves against their buddies, in the process, we also need to make another choice.

We're doing this all in the name of what?

So we can look more like them?

Or less like them?

And more like our best selves?

That is the fundamental choice America faces right now.

And I have some confidence, that we have the courage to choose the path of greater understanding, compassion, and decency. And respect for the consciences of those around us. Where real strength lies. And what distinguishes us from the murderous thugs we're fighting.

Because everything else looks fuckin' weak to me.

Little children with big sticks

Constantly fucking up. But never, ever wrong.

The perils of being commander in chief

"In an open letter to Obama on his Web site Monday, liberal activist Michael Moore wrote that by increasing troops in Afghanistan, 'you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you.'

'With just one speech tomorrow night,' Moore continued, 'you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike.'"

Or perhaps some leftists might rethink the idea that they are never wrong ever. About anything, no less.

We are such a stupid and goofy species, most of the time. Little children with big sticks. We beat enough people with them, we begin to believe that our sticks make everything right. And everything is right because of our sticks. And round and round we go with such foolishness like kids in angry bumper cars.

It's so funny to watch my favorite species of special people shirk off greater wisdom for the immediate gratification of egos in desperate need of attention. Might makes right. Revenge best served cold. And my personal favorite.

I always have the right answers.

Well. Thank goodness for that. I suppose we can all sleep well, now, that every single one of us, all in contradiction, to boot, have all the right answers. And the sticks to prove it.

What a bunch of dumbasses we all are. Lovable little dumbasses.

Constantly fucking up.

But never, ever wrong.

Come to think of it. Story of my life.