The calm before the storms

The New Neo Posted on by

The Obama administration appears to be in a slight—a very slight—resting phase.

For a while the pace of change was so fast and furious that it seemed that each day there were about fifty pressing topics vying frantically for contention and discussion. Now there are only a few, and they are not so very pressing; not yet, that is. Now and then we even have what you might call a slow news day.

But there is no sense of being able to take a breather. Rather, there is the ominous feeling one gets as a storm approaches. The pressure builds and our joints ache. We look at the threatening sky and wonder just how bad it will be, and what form it will take. One huge domestic dark cloud looming at the moment is financial reform, with immigration reform and a climate change/energy bill waiting on the not-at-all-distant horizon, jostling for the privilege of being next on the agenda.

Why do I liken them to clouds and storms? After all, aren’t these issues that need tackling, problems that call out for solution (except, perhaps, for climate change—although proponents of the bill are managing to act as though Climategate has not happened and/or is irrelevant)? Is it not clear, for example, that financial reform is needed to prevent another meltdown like the one that occurred in fall of 2008? And that illegal immigration is a problem that has gotten out of hand, and has been ignored way too long?

Yes, and yes.

The problem is that most Americans’ trust in the ability of Congress to solve such things, or even to tackle them in a way that will not make them worse, is nonexistent. The idea that our representatives would listen to our concerns, be responsive to our needs, and then have the intelligence to craft solutions based on common sense and/or intelligent thought or even well-meaning effort has been waning over the years but has finally evaporated. If there had been any lingering faith in Congress, HCR erased it.

We have come to expect lies, so that now when we hear “we have the votes” or “we lack the votes,” one means about the same as the other and neither can be trusted. For the most part, our press is no more help to us than Pravda was to the Soviets. We have come to understand that the idea of bipartisan compromise has died a lingering and painful death (unless the term happens to refer to Lindsay Graham, who for a while kept the “bi” in “bipartisan,” appearing to have previously been—at least as far as I can ascertain—the sole Republican on board with both the immigration and climate change bills. He has since threatened to bail on the latter because he says it is being ignored at the expense of the former.)

We assume that the cure will be worse than the disease. We expect that the bills will be rushed through without proper debate and enacted at the stroke of midnight, like evil spells in a fairy tale. We are no longer surprised at the depth and breadth of the corrupt and shady behind-the-scenes deals involved. We know the legislations will be lengthy and complex. We do not think our representatives possess the intelligence to even understand the bills they pass—that is, if they bother to read them at all—and either do not appreciate their negative consequences or actually intend them to do us harm. We know that, just when we think we’ve driven a fatal stake into the heart of an unpopular bill, it rises and staggers forward to attack us.

We do not know what the outcome of the election of 2010 will be, except that it is likely to involve an increase in the number of Republicans in Congress, and that it cannot possibly come fast enough to stop the multiple storms that are part of this increasingly threatening weather pattern. And these are not passing storms, either—we predict that they are likely to do permanent and perhaps irreparable damage to important structures that have remained in place for centuries.

We scan the skies, and we wait.

[NOTE: I’ve dealt mainly with domestic policies in this post. That’s not to say that there aren’t major international storms looming as well. But Congress isn’t a big part of the mix on most of the latter—although Obama and his advisers are.]

[ADDENDUM: The Anchoress adds her reflections.]

Let’s see: an Obama national security adviser and a Jew walk into a bar…

The New Neo Posted on by

When is an ethnic joke not funny? Just for starters, when when it’s told by someone not a member of that group.

You be the judge:

As for the question that immediately sprang to my mind—“are there Jews in Afghanistan?”—the answer is: there used to be, but now there’s only one.

But perhaps he owns both the store and the restaurant. Ha ha.

Boycott Arizona! (on second thought…)

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Yaki calls on the readers of the San Francisco Chronicle to boycott the state of Arizona to show just how naughty it’s been in passing its recent law making it a state crime to commit the federal crime [sic] of coming here illegally.

Only thing is—the Chronicle seems to have been taken over by those who say they’re more inclined to visit Arizona (or even move there) in response to its commonsense efforts than to boycott it. Have Californians—and San Franciscans, no less—suddenly jumped off the PC bus and decided that what’s good for Arizona might be good for California too?

Unhappy anniversary to Operation Eagle Claw

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Yesterday and today represent the 30th anniversary of the Carter administration’s ill-fated Iranian hostage rescue attempt. Four years ago I wrote the following post about it. It feels appropriate for a variety of reasons—and not just the anniversary—to revisit the story now.]

This piece from the Atlantic Monthly Online, “The Desert One Debacle,” about the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue the embassy hostages in Iran in 1980, is a sobering read.

I vaguely remember the incident—just one in a long line of frustrations connected with that sorry spectacle. But the details–which I’d never read before—are a case of “whatever could go wrong, did go wrong;” from vicious sandstorms, to the utterly improbable coincidence of the planes’ initially encountering a truck and a civilian passenger bus as they landed in the desert, to a fatal airplane crash. Debacle, indeed; the planes never even came near Tehran.

Perhaps it’s a good thing they didn’t. From the evidence in the piece, the loss of life would likely have been even greater had they done so. It’s very difficult to believe that this mission ever had any chance of succeeding. Not only was the weather problem in the desert underestimated, and the assault force relatively small (one hundred thirty two men maximum, with some planes expected to encounter technical difficulties and drop out), but here was the game plan for controlling crowds around the embassy:

Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot-control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent riot control during the revolution was now Exhibit A in Iran’s human-rights case against the former regime and America, Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss considered this ridiculous. He and his men were going to assault a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than 5 million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would not get home alive. Wade Ishmoto, a Delta captain who worked with the unit’s intelligence division, had joked, “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.”

At any rate, it didn’t come to that. After flying through vicious sandstorms, landing in the desert, and encountering a Mercedes passenger bus filled with ordinary Iranians (who were promptly searched by the Americans and prepared to be flown out of Iran for the duration of the mission), the rescue attempt was aborted because too many aircraft had been rendered inoperative.

Then, as the evacuation of the planes was underway, one of the helicopters crashed into a transport plane on the ground, causing a conflagration and the death of eight members of the assault force. From the description of the scene, it’s a wonder the death toll wasn’t higher.

Reading about the hostage crisis brings back gut-wrenchingly bad memories: the endless negotiating, the arrogant posturing of the hostage-takers, the seeming impotence of our government. It’s easy to recall that it was long; at the time, it seemed nearly endless, but the actual length was astounding: 444 days. The incident was one of the reasons Carter lost the Presidency (and rightly so), suffering the final ignominy of the hostages’ release on Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day.

In retrospect—and perhaps even at the time—the entire hostage crisis was a debacle, not just the rescue attempt. The consensus is that Carter’s mishandling of the situation caused the US to be perceived as weak and vulnerable.

This recent Salon article contains a telling vignette on the subject, from the Iran of 2004:

So it was that I stood impatiently before the window to check out while the [hotel] receptionist took his sweet time to retrieve my American passport from the cubby behind him. He held it for a long, strange moment before he slid it my way. Wistfully, he said: “How I wish I had a passport like that.” Off we were, talking about the election. The receptionist hoped President George W. Bush would defeat Sen. John Kerry. He hated the Democrats, he professed. It wasn’t my first encounter with this Iranian enthusiasm for the Republican Party, as unfathomable as it was widespread. Under the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, after all, the United States toppled Iran’s popular nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, consolidating power in the hands of the brutal and despised shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the Democratic President Bill Clinton, the United States finally apologized for engineering those events. I asked the receptionist to explain. “Jimmy Carter,” he replied with disgust. “He could have stopped this Islamic Revolution, and he didn’t.” When it comes to Iran, where revolutionaries identified Carter with every bad turn the United States had ever visited on their or any other third-world country, and where Americans would come to associate him with haplessness and defeat, somehow everything the president from Plains, Ga., did would always be wrong. His presidency, already a fragile vessel, shattered on the shoals of the Iranian hostage crisis — those 444 days at the end of his single term when the staff of the American embassy in Tehran was held captive by militant students. From then on, he would forever be linked in the American mind with the humiliation of seeing one’s countrymen blindfolded, helpless, surrounded by angry mobs of Shiites — believers in a religion most Americans only dimly apprehended, revolutionaries who hated the United States for having supported a regime most Americans were barely conscious existed. And now, 26 years later, this Iranian hotel worker in a single gesture renounced his country’s revolution and laid it at the feet of the very president whose likeness Iranian revolutionaries burned in effigy as they massed outside the seized embassy compound.

Good for Governor Brewer

The New Neo Posted on by

The Arizona illegal immigration law has been has been signed by Governor Brewer:

The law, which will take effect in 90 days, will make it a state crime to be in the country illegally. The measure would require migrants to produce papers verifying their status when asked to do so by a police officer, according to a story in The Arizona Republic.

It’s already a federal crime (supposedly), but the state had to take over before the feds don’t care to enforce it. That such a law as Arizona’s is now considered very controversial is a sign of our PC times. President Obama has said, from his Olympian heights, that it is “misguided.” But Governor Brewer said:

Respect for the rule of law means respect for every law…People across America are watching Arizona.

What happens next should be “interesting.” Washington is contemplating passing its own illegal immigration law. It is virtually guaranteed to not resemble Arizona’s—or anything else the majority of Americans would support.

[NOTE: Here’s my previous post on the subject of the Arizona law.]

Life and death: it’s a thin line

The New Neo Posted on by

A few days ago I was visiting New York for my brother’s birthday—a big one, but I’ll not reveal the exact number. The official celebration was at a wonderful restaurant in a private room, featuring one of those tasting menus where all the ordering is done for you, and all you have to do is sit back and eat each beautiful and tasty morsel as it’s brought in and placed in front of you.

I don’t even recall half of what we ate. But everything was delicate and wonderful and a lot of it was green, in honor of spring. Although I’m not a drinking person, the wine was so fabulous that even I could tell it was something special, and I drank about three tablespoon’s worth rather than my usual one.

Asparagus. Avocado. Hearts of palm. A small piece of salmon that was more meltingly delicious than any I’d ever eaten before. A pasta with tips of rhubarb (or buds of rhubarb? I have no idea which). And on and on in a succession of very light and succulent tiny dishes.

My grown nieces and nephew were there with significant others, as well as the woman who’s been my sister-in-law for over forty years. There were joke gifts and serious gifts, funny cards and touching cards. I had prepared my usual bit, which is to write a multi-verse poem for the occasion. I’d practiced my delivery and figured out the best way to recite the lines I thought might draw laughs, and my plan was to wait until the pause just before dessert and coffee to read it.

The last course prior to that was a supremely tender steak with some wonderful sauce and morels. Till then, all the courses had been very small. But this one seemed more daunting. I was mulling over whether I might not just take it home in the upscale equivalent of a doggie bag when I noticed a commotion to my left, where my sister-in-law sat at the foot of the table.

It wasn’t clear at first what was happening. But she appeared to be ill, perhaps nauseated. A slender woman, she ordinarily has a very small appetite and usually eats quite sparingly, and she had certainly not overeaten that evening, although she probably was the only one there who could have made that claim.

After just a few seconds it became apparent that she was not sick to her stomach; she was choking and could not breathe.

“Choking” is actually a misleading term, because our common conception of such things is that the person undergoing the process would be making a great many sputtering and strangling noises. But, like all true choking victims, my sister-in-law was quite silent—in fact, shockingly silent. Her son sprung to action and performed the Heimlich maneuver several times, but (and this is where the merely frightening turned to the terrifying) it did not work.

The only previous place I’d ever seen the Heimlich maneuver done was in the movies, where it seems to work perfectly. A few heaves, and out would pop a chunk of meat. But my usually-stoic sister-in-law remained disturbingly silent, and her eyes widened in fear as various people took turns working on her and then some of the staff came in and said they were calling 9/11.

My brother went white as a sheet. One of my nieces turned away, put her head in her hands and could not watch. The other started shaking and looked stricken. I wondered whether I was going to stand and observe my sister-in-law expire in front of the whole family.

And then the head chef began to do the Heimlich on her and I heard the blessed sound of stricken wheezing. It was slight but unmistakable; there was now some air exchange. After a few more Heimlich thrusts from the chef she was breathing well enough for him to stop, and then she managed a few words—the first of which were apologies for having caused such a fuss.

And just like that, the evening became a normal celebration again. Except it was not. For one thing, instead of eating more, we packed up most of the rest of the meal to take home. For another, everyone had become pretty emotional. We took turns giving my sister-in-law a hug.

She was relieved and embarrassed and exhausted. We—well, we were just relieved and exhausted. We invited the hero chef in for a glass of wine and chatted with him about his life—including the fact that he had once been a park ranger and had gotten first aid training in connection with that job. I finally read my poem, which was very anticlimactic but good for some comic relief.

And we went home thankful that we had not made the pages of the Times, but aware of how thin a line divides life from death and celebration from tragedy.

Why Gardner wants the firing squad

The New Neo Posted on by

Most of the coverage of Utah’s convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner’s choice of the firing squad for his execution misses an important point: why Utah offered the firing squad option and why Gardner may have chosen it. This article is one of the few that mentions the salient fact that Gardner is a Mormon, and quotes him as saying “”I guess it’s my Mormon heritage…I like the firing squad. It’s so much easier ”¦ and there’s no mistakes.” But there’s no further explanation of why his Mormonism might be relevant,

Here’s the possible answer:

In Utah they had a policy that followed the concept of blood atonement, where in Mormonism, people must spill their blood upon the ground as a sacrifice to God if they have committed a heinous sin such as murder.

I remembered this from an extraordinary biography about another famous Utah murderer, Gary Gilmore, written by his brother Mikal. It’s called Shot in the Heart, the title referring to Gilmore’s insistence on such a method of execution for that very reason. A sad and terrible tale.

Obama and Niebuhr

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s post on Obama’s reading habits, I requested that if anyone knew of an interview in which Obama was asked to talk in depth about a book or author he’s read, I’d like to be alerted to it. Commenter “dw53” obliged by pointing out that David Brooks once described a discussion he’d had with Obama about his fondness for the works of religious philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr.

Brooks was mighty impressed with what Obama had to say on the subject:

I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, “Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?” And he says, “Yeah.” So I say, “What did Niebuhr mean to you?” For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

It’s hard to know exactly what Obama said that was so dazzling. But since David Brooks has never written anything that indicates he’s any sort of deep thinker himself, perhaps the mere fact that Obama was familiar with the name “Reinhold Niebuhr” was enough to do the trick. Remember also that Brooks was the guy who fell in love with Obama at first sight (or first interview), on account of the latter’s sartorial splendor:

I remember distinctly an image of—we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

The whole thing reminds me of Daisy’s veneration for Jay Gatsby’s beautiful shirts—although even Daisy wasn’t silly enough to think that his lovely shirts qualified Gatsby to be president, much less a “very good” one. But this is the sort of thing that passes for thought in the MSM these days.

At any rate, it seems clear that Obama at least knows something about Niebuhr and has read at least some portion of his works. You might recognize certain commonalities from this description of Niebuhr’s philosophy by Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intellectual history:

Obama’s not the first American president to declare his fondness for Niebuhr. Jimmy Carter notably did, both before and after his election. Some people think that the famous “malaise” speech had some Niebuhrian input…

Niebuhr remained a man of the left always. Maybe not enough left to suit some people, but he certainly was never a conservative. And he believed Christians were obligated to work actively for progressive social causes, for the realization of justice and righteousness, but they had to do this in a way that abandoned their illusions, not least in the way they thought about themselves. The pursuit of social justice would involve them in acts of sin and imperfection. Even the most surgical action, one might say, involves collateral damage…

Nobody can top Niebuhr for his anticommunism, but he also believed the United States resembled its antagonists more than it cared to imagine. He criticizes the communists for their philosophical materialism, but then points out that Americans are guilty of the same thing in practice…

[Its] tendency towards materialism was not even the greatest of America’s dangers. Even more perilous, he thought, was one of our principal points of pride, the entrenched idea that America has a providential mission in the world and [that] our nation is rendered uniquely virtuous and innocent by the blessings of history, locating the beginnings of it in the Calvinist Puritan tradition, and then the Jeffersonian tradition, which saw America’s as nature’s nation, free from the encumbrances of the old world…

I’m no expert on Niebuhr (haven’t read him myself). I’m not contending that he and Obama see exactly eye to eye on everything. And Niebuhr is known for holding views that allow both “progressives” and conservatives to claim him for their own. But there are enough resonances between Obama’s thinking and Niebuhr’s for me to believe that Obama has indeed actually read the guy (at least some of his works, anyway) and thinks highly of him. Obama’s staunch position against American exceptionalism has many philosophical influences—another noted theologian, Reverend Wright, being one of them. But Niebuhr is clearly another.

When Niebuhr indicated that people who want to do good must accept that “pursuit of social justice would involve them in acts of sin and imperfection” he may have merely meant that the perfect is the enemy of the good. But it’s a very slippery slope. For Obama, it seems to have been translated into the idea that the ends justify the means.

Full speed ahead on immigration reform?

The New Neo Posted on by

Our rogue Congress is readying its next attack on the American public, as “the overbearing majority” marches on.

This time, we have no illusions that anything as mundane as public opinion or the bill’s unpopularity will stop them. If they want to pass immigration “reform” badly enough, they will find a way, even if they have to break (or change) every rule in the book to do so.

Another jello interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple was arrested and charged with tampering with Jello pudding packages, replacing the contents with sand and salt, and returning them for a refund. Larceny doesn’t get much more petit than this.

The question is: why Jello pudding? It does not seem to be a very cost-effective crime. When last I checked, the price of each box was under a dollar. Surely there must be a more efficient way to make crime pay.