ShrinkWrapped

Letter to my Congressman

On several occasions I have tried to send an e-mail to my Congressman, John Hall.  For some reason the e-mail never goes through.  I am not conspiracy minded and would never imagine he would not want to hear from one of his constituents, but it does raise questions.  I decided to post my e-mail here:

Dear Congressman:

In re: your e-mail about all the wonders of the healthcare bill.  You have no idea how many unexpected and bad consequences will flow from this bill.  No government program ever saves money (we already can see that a Senator has inserted the requirement that Christian Scientist healing be covered in their version of the bill; what else is there in the thousands of pages of arcana that no Congressman has read?)  The government option will crowd out private insurance, the bill has provisions that will damage innovation, and there will a Doctor shortage as smart young people realize that their incomes will be significantly limited and they will have terrible trouble paying off their $200,000 in Medical School loans.  For what its worth, I am a Physician in my 50s and my daughter is in her last year of Medical School.  The Medical profession will be devastated by provisions in this bill, starting with the cuts in Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement that are required to try to keep the cost manageable.  Of course the cuts will probably be overturned, which means the cost will far exceed current projections.

And one more thing:  I am a life long Democrat.  Voters just tossed Andy Spano (and John Corzine) and if you continue to push a bill the voters do not want, I will donate to your opponent in 2010 and do everything I can to retire you from your job.

I decided to call his office this morning and told the nice young man who answered the contents of my e-mail; perhaps John hall will listen, though I am doubtful.

More Vapidity from the Paper of Record

Vapidity: Synonyms:
1. lifeless, flavorless. 2. spiritless, unanimated, tiresome, prosaic.

It may be possible for the New York Times to become even more devoid of meaningful content than it has already, but columns like yesterday's from Gail Collins suggests they are already working hard to find the bottom.  The various healthcare bills making the rounds in Congress are 2000 plus pages long, aim to impose a top down approach to remaking American healthcare (1/6th of the American economy), are loaded with policies which will distort incentives, damage innovation, and cause significant numbers of Physicians to flee the system, and will cost amounts of money not yet imagined ($1.8 trillioin?  $2 trillion?  $3trillion?  Its a governemnt porogrma so who knows?), yet all Collins can comment upon is some foolishness at the Washington rally against the bill.  

(As an aside, her attack on Michele Bachmann, a rather attractive and well spoken Republican woman suggests she sees Bachmann as a significant threat; watch for Bachmann to become "Pallinized" as time goes by.)    

I have long since given up any hope that columnists at the "paper of record" will offer substantive and thoughtful commentary (though my last faint vestiges of hope explain why I continue to read them from time to time) but becoming a cheerleader for a plan that I am willing to wager a large sum she has never read is the height of those twin monstrosities, ignorance and arrogance, that have become an unacknowledged and unrecognized reason why the hoi polloi no long are willing to defer to their betters.  Collins' op-ed is titled Weekend Sports Lineup and she apparently aims to criticize those silly teabaggers who are protesting against the bill and cheering for "their side" at the rally.  Nowhere does she acknowledge that she is doing exactly what she scoffs that the rabble are doing.   

Psychological Aspects of the "Lone, Psychiatrically Deranged" Terrorist

There is a conventional wisdom promulgated by the MSM and our leadership that is reliably trotted out whenever an atrocity (NOT a tragedy) like Fort Hood occurs.  The New York Times does its usual minimalist job of obfuscation in its reporting:

Suspect Was ‘Mortified’ About Deployment

He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.

“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”

In addition, efforts to present a sympathetic picture of the killer include reports that he was harassed because he was Muslim.  Phyllis Chesler summarizes the basics of the story, now old and familiar:

The Jihadist Is Always the Victim

According to Hasan’s cousin, he had been “picked on,” harassed by other soldiers because he was of “Middle Eastern origin.” This may be true—and if true, terrible—but so what?

Let’s assume it’s true: I know many people, including soldiers, including female soldiers, who have been brutally harassed. They do not shoot 44 people down in cold blood.

Who does? And why? The only answer most people want to hear is that a lone, psychiatrically deranged shooter did it. All by himself, on his own.

Phyllis Chesler, a Psychiatrist, suggests that looking for Psychiatric explanations to this behavior is an error:

Sudden Jihad Syndrome, Personal Jihad Syndrome, call it what you will—these terrible acts should not be psychiatrically diagnosed and excused. At the risk of being called a racist, allow me to suggest that we must connect the dots before it is too late. Islam now=jihad=hate propaganda=9/11=the tragedy at Ft. Hood.

That means Islam now, and its followers of all colors and ethnicities, is at war with the entire world, is dreaming of a Caliphate to be achieved through violent jihad. I doubt that Major Hasan is a Sufi Muslim.

Just think: Islam as violent jihad trumped Major Hasan’s Americanization and more important, trumped his training as both a soldier and as a psychiatrist! He is a Trauma expert, specialized to help people who have faced disasters. (Or so I’ve been told). All the brakes failed, no dam could withhold a Jihadist whose time had come.

Between the Media/government spin that these kinds of atrocities are the result of a "lone, psychiatrically deranged" individual's psychopathology and the supposition that these attacks are the result of Jihadi ideology is the more complex explanation of the ways in which the zeitgeist or weltanschauung shape the behavior of troubled individuals.  Understanding how the culture interacts with the mind of the lone terrorist can help us improve our efforts to protect innocents, increase our vigilance, and begin to lessen the tendency for such individuals to express their psychopathology as murderous terror.

Some brief history may be helpful:

Victor Tausk was an early Psychoanalyst who worked with Freud in Vienna and made his single great contribution to understanding psychosis in a seminal paper, On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia, in 1919.  [The link is not to the actual paper, which is unavailable to non-subscribers, but to the wikipedia recap of its important points.]

[Tausk committed suicide shortly thereafter, a complicated response to his disturbed relationship with Freud and Tausk's analyst, Helene Deutsch.  Tausk's suicide was a blot on Freud's legacy.]

Tausk worked with Schizophrenic (psychotic) patients and noted that many Paranoid Schizophrenics has a common delusion, of an influencing machine that (attempted to or actually) controlled their actions or their minds; an excerpt of the original article:

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

[Psychodynamically, Paranoid patients have an internal persecutor, an ambivalently held parental object representation, which is projected onto the external world.  This is often enough to supply the paranoid with his delusional persecutors and remove responsibility for his actions and failures.  Now it is the externalized, projected enemy who contains the unacceptable/disowned thoughts and impulses of the paranoid.  When the disease progresses, the object/persecutor can be re-internalized or (re)introjected, at which point it often takes the form of an influencing machine.]

Note that Tausk's patients described their influencing machine using concepts related to available technology.  Where once the usual description for the source of tormenting thoughts might have been demons, imps, djinns, or the devil, the modern patient uses quasi-rational technology.  In 1919 the machines contained cranks and levers, running on electricity.  In 2009, the "persecutors" take the form of available technology.  Thus, the modern day psychotic may believe that secret rays are being directed at his brain, or tiny computer chips have been implanted in him to cause him to have terrible thoughts and impulses.  Whether the persecutor is internalized or remains externalized the salient point is that the cultural surround supplies the elements around which the psychosis coalesces. 

How does this relate to our "lone, deranged" attacker?  Current versions of fundamentalist Islam, which depend on externalizing all the faults of the Ummah, which project all the negative attributes of the Ummah, and which not only support but idealize those who act on such paranoid constructs, directs and reinforces the very projective, externalizing tendencies of the paranoid which lead to aggression.

The problem for our society is that every time an opinion leader reinforces the notion (insists) that Islam is a "religion of peace", they are supporting the very psychodynamics that facilitate and direct the "lone, psychiatrically deranged" individual to attack those identified by radical Islam as their persecutors, ie Americans, the American military, Jews, and Israelis especially.

When the immediate reaction of Islamic spokesmen is to warn everyone of Islamophobia, they too are supporting the projection and externalization that is the hallmark of radical Islam and the "lone, psychiatrically deranged" paranoid.

Every effort should be made to resolutely maintain a posture that specifically and emphatically denies the use of projection and externalization to the radical Islamists.  Groups like CAIR should be confronted by our MSM and government on a regular basis to expose their use of such psychological processes for all to see.  Whenever a "lone, psychiatrically deranged"  individual commits an atrocity, we must be alert to attempts to shift the psychological impetus for the attack from the attacker to the surround.  It is an unhappy reality that confronting a paranoid's projection and externalization does not work in a therapeutic context.  It either convinces the paranoid that you are part of the persecutory conspiracy or, if accepted and internalized, leads to significant depression.  However, we cannot treat terror as a therapeutic situation.  When Muslims support, in their speech and writing, convictions that reflect the use of projection and externalization, they must be considered potential dangers to the community.  This requires a form of "racial profiling" but the alternative is to wait for an atrocity of such significant proportions that  "lone, psychiatrically deranged" non-Muslims begin to take things into their own hands.

Note that Dr. Helen asks the relevant question, Why wasn't Hasan Investigated?

This man was being entrusted with the mental health of soldiers, and no one could be bothered to take the time to find out if he was mentally stable himself? After a poor review, remarks that make you wonder which side this guy was on, and possible writings on a web posting that are troubling, he was not investigated?

Was it political correctness and concern for his Muslim heritage that kept officials from looking further into his mental health? Was the army so desperate for a psychiatrist (there is always a shortage) they didn't dare do anything?

The public deserves an explanation.

Welcome Hugh Hewitt readers.

All Politics are Local ... and National

One of the small election results that has been relatively ignored by the national media was the election for County Supervisor in Westchester, New York, where I reside.  Westchester is the perfect Democratic demographic.  The major voting blocs in Westchester are wealthy/upper middle class liberals, especially Jewish liberals, poor minorities, and an increasingly stressed and marginalized middle class, often white ethnic, squeezed between the two.  Democrat Andy Spano has been the County Supervisor for 12 years and was running for a fourth term against a little known Republican challenger named Rob Astorino.  The results were stunning:

The smart people are speaking of a genuine tremble in the Democratic ranks after the election results from the down ticket races in the states of Virginia, New Jersey and even New York. A stunning reversal of fortune to be found in most plush, liberal, Democratic Hillary Clinton country of Westchester County, New York. The roles have over 500k registered voters, all of them devoted to HRC, the Yankees and Mets, the Jets and Giants, and the Democrats, and generally split 3 to 2 or 2 to 1 for the Democrats -- until last eve. A low turnout saw the long time County Executive Andy Spano, 73, tossed out by an unknown Rob Astorino, 42, (right in debate with Spano) who inherits a patronage system so reverentially crony Democrat that it will be years cleaning out the cousins and nephews of the Spano posse. Perhaps it was low turnout. The Democratic House can stare at the results in the gubernatorial Virginia and New Jersey and shrug, but Westchester stolen by the GOP?  Stolen by a landslide of 58% to 42%??  No explaining it other than anti-incumbent rage that brought out the negatives and kept the regulars home. It was a vote against the Democrats, not a vote for the GOP, which doesn't much exist in Westchester. This is where Hollywood East and the UN elite and the Wall Street bankers live.  Bill and Hillary Clinton vote here.   To vote for a Republican youth? Ground movement.  But what if it's not about the helter-skelter pace of healthcare reform (above)?  What if it's the deficit and all those trillion dollar packages and the dead certainty that taxes must rise to pay for the debt?  What if the general disdain for government and this leap into turmoil and anarchy has transformed itself into a tax revolt?  Perhaps Mrs. Pelosi can get the subject of healthcare reform back on the table, perhaps Harry Reid can deliver the United States of Olympia Snowe; however both would be ignoring what Westchester represents, a complete negation of business as usual.  It was a tax revolt.  The Democrats stayed home. What will bring them out next year? Healthcare? No. Deficit? No. Joblessness at 9.5 projected? No. Taxes?  No.  Will there be a credible challenger with muscle to long time liberal Democrat Nita Lowey for the House?

Westchester's Astorino Landslide Close-Up Tax Revolt.

Examining the campaign promises of the newly elected Astorino, there may be a template for the coming assault on incumbency.  Astorino is young, wiry, sympathetic, engaged, schoolmaster-like, but his promises are aggressive austerity to counteract what he claims has been 12 years of Spano spending (doubled the country spending) and taxes (raised taxes 60%.)  Astorino claims that Westchester is "the highest taxed country in America."  His brochure announces, "It's time for tax relief."  Astorino promotes a library of cost-cutting that starts from the top.  No more county executive car and driver and bodyguard.  "Rob will drive himself to work."  Cut the county executive's staff size by 10% on "Day One."   Also, "Require all managers and appointed employees to contribute to their health care costs."  Also "End travel junkets disguised as county 'business.'"  And "Post online all County contracts, key documents, invoices, etc."   Does look like a genuine tax and spend revolt.  How does this fit into the healthcare debate and the cap'n'trade bill?  Both bills are higher taxes for the people of Westchester.

Astorino basically ran on a platform promising government austerity and no new taxes.  He vowed to get the county finances back onto some kind of reasonable shape.  If the people of Westchester are finally fed up with the size and cost of government this is an earthquake threatening the big government Democratic party.  It is impossible to underestimate the power of this result.  As noted in the local paper:

Astorino's win over an entrenched Democrat who served 12 years as executive is the first time in the 71-year history of the county executive's office that an incumbent has been defeated.

In Westchester an average "middle class" home in a community with good schools starts in the mid-$600,000 range (even with the recent fall in home values, people are slow to lower their asking price; it is likely that the new normal for a middle class house is in the $500,000s but time will tell where prices stabilize.)   People accept high taxes as the cost of assuaging white liberal guilt and taking care of the less fortunate.  One of the "dirty little secrets" of Westchester is the degree of segregation that is an inextricable aspect of the price of housing.  The poor are effectively kept out of sight, but the high taxes keep them in mind.  It may finally be dawning on people that even if the Republican prescription of lower taxes is harmful to the poor (a liberal shibboleth that the recent City Journal article, The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm, comparing California and Texas, may finally be bringing into question) Westchester taxation has now breached the threshold and become actively damaging to the Upper Middle Class.   But this was not only about taxes:  [All Emphases mine-SW]

Revolt in Westchester

Other issues, especially taxes, no doubt ranked high in the minds of Westchester County voters, who last night in a stunning upset threw out incumbent county executive Andy Spano in favor of Republican challenger Rob Astorino by an impressive 58–42 margin. But it didn’t help that county residents felt strong-armed by the federal government and private litigants into a controversial lawsuit settlement on low-income housing that cuts deeply into the county’s tradition of suburban home rule on development issues—or that Spano reacted to voter discontent by suggesting that critics of his housing plans were racist.

Announced in August, the settlement calls for the county over seven years to override local zoning and other rules to force the construction of at least 750 low-income housing units, most to be located in relatively affluent towns. The intention is to increase the number of poorer minorities living in these areas. A federal judge had sided with plaintiffs’ complaints that the county had accepted federal funds but had not lived up to its talk of combating purported “segregation” based on income. (Affluent blacks and other minorities have long been welcome in many of the communities under scrutiny; as the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock points out, blacks are at most slightly underrepresented in towns like Scarsdale, Harrison, and Pound Ridge compared with their overall presence in the affluent income brackets typical of those towns.) The Obama administration took credit for arm-twisting the county into going along: “This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire,” said HUD deputy secretary Ron Sims, who added: “It’s time to remove zip codes as a factor in the quality of life in America.”

Read that last line again: it’s pretty startling. To remove zip codes “as a factor in the quality of life” in a nation—so that 10455 (South Bronx), 91731 (El Monte, California), and 48210 (Detroit’s west side) have exactly the same implications for quality of life as 10021 (New York’s Upper East Side), 90210 (Beverly Hills), and 48009 (Birmingham, Michigan)—would require extreme, indeed utopian, ventures into social engineering. It’s certainly a result unachieved by Scandinavian social democracy (in which cities like Stockholm and Copenhagen include both chic, desirable neighborhoods and neighborhoods that are neither), or for that matter by the harder tyrannies of the Left. Even 50 years after Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba, Wikipedia describes the Miramar neighborhood as “an upscale district . . . one of the better parts of Havana.”

What kind of social engineering might be called for to remove zip code as a quality-of-life factor differentiating gritty Yonkers from leafy Yorktown, or crime-plagued Mount Vernon from calm Mamaroneck? The New York Times lays it out:

Go to City Journal to read more about the social engineering the Obama administration has forced down the throats of Westchester's wealthy.  We can all trade snarky comments about liberals loving minorities "as long as you don't let 'em in our school" in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer's National Brotherhood Week, but the sad fact is that when "diversity" is forced, no one ends up happy. 

If there is an American ethos it is the firm conviction that we have the right to be left alone by our government.  Social engineering is the antithesis of the right to be left alone.  The healthcare abomination and cap-and-trade are not only tax bills but are efforts to engineer the behavior of the American people, to force us to behave in ways which our betters believe are proper, even as they leave themselves immune to their own legislation. 

Between intrusive and coercive government and the confiscatory taxes required to support that poorly responsive government, the Democrats are risking a perfect storm of insults which, if they persist, will mean that the Westchester revolt is only the beginning.

Election 2009

Last night the Republicans who touted a message of fiscal conservatism won big while the Conservative whose message included a strongly socially conservative message (especially viz opposition to gay marriage) lost.

Roger Simon pretty much nails it:

Well… I might as well say it… social conservatism. America is a fiscally conservative country – now perhaps more than ever, and with much justification – but not a socially conservative one. No, I don’t mean to say it’s socially liberal. It’s not. It’s socially laissez-faire (just as its mostly fiscally laissez-faire). Whether we’re pro-choice, pro-life or whatever we are, most of us want the government out of our bedrooms, just as we want it out of our wallets.

I suspect there remain as a majority opposed to gay marriage but here's the important point: Only a small portion of that majority has passionate feelings about it.  Most Americans do not care who you love or who you sleep with (unless it can be fodder for a media fueled scandal, of course.)  In time gay marriage will probably win at the ballot box simply because those in favor have the more compelling arguments and it is far more important to them than to the average American.  It seems to me that the electorate took a fairly mature approach (ie, not a regressive approach, which would have involved demonizing the opponent.)

In short, the message to the Democrats is that becoming identified as the party of corruption, high taxes, and profligate spending is a losing proposition.

The message to the Republicans should be that identifying (and behaving) as the party of fiscal sanity is a winning proposition.  Diluting the message with extraneous and extreme sounding appeals to the core will lose more votes than it will win. 

Most of us don't want the government telling us what to do, whether in financial matters or in personal matters.  One hopes the politicians are paying attention.

Societal Regression Watch

It is clear to most of us that we are living in perilous times.  There is a sense, amplified by the behavior of the "experts", that we are in uncharted territory when it comes to our economic straits.  (Is this a period of structural change in the economy?  Is our understanding of how the economy works no longer operative?  Does anyone understand how to get out of this depression/recession?)  A recent poll suggests Americans believe we are now losing the war on terror, which is now another source of heightened anxiety.  We are told daily that the war in Afghanistan (the "good war") is not going well, that our military has developed a strategy for winning that requires more troops and that our President must decide on a new strategy, yet he has time to meet with the head of the SEIU over 20 times but no time to come to a decision about Afghanistan.  There appears to be a drift in foreign affairs (and in foreign affairs, vacuums of leadership do not last for long) and a drift on the economic front.  The Stimulus was too small (according to Paul Krugman) yet we see little evidence we have gotten anything from the $787 billion we have had to borrow.  All of this is a prescription for Societal Anxiety and its evil twin, Societal Regression.

Yesterday Nouriel Roubini suggested that the reason the Stock Market has risen so high (along with commodities) is that we are in a bubble fueled by a weakening dollar:

Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust

Since March there has been a massive rally in all sorts of risky assets – equities, oil, energy and commodity prices – a narrowing of high-yield and high-grade credit spreads, and an even bigger rally in emerging market asset classes (their stocks, bonds and currencies). At the same time, the dollar has weakened sharply , while government bond yields have gently increased but stayed low and stable.

This recovery in risky assets is in part driven by better economic fundamentals. We avoided a near depression and financial sector meltdown with a massive monetary, fiscal stimulus and bank bail-outs. Whether the recovery is V-shaped, as consensus believes, or U-shaped and anaemic as I have argued, asset prices should be moving gradually higher.

But while the US and global economy have begun a modest recovery, asset prices have gone through the roof since March in a major and synchronised rally. While asset prices were falling sharply in 2008, when the dollar was rallying, they have recovered sharply since March while the dollar is tanking. Risky asset prices have risen too much, too soon and too fast compared with macroeconomic fundamentals.

John Crudele takes a different angle on the problem but arrives at a similar conclusion:

The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee will meet this Tuesday and Wednesday and it will issue the usual communiqué afterwards -- growth picked up some places, not in others, inflation low -- blah, blah and blah.

But even though most of the wording will be ordinary, you should pay very close attention to two things.

First, will Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke change the wording on his interest rate intentions?

If Bernanke doesn't say he plans to keep rates low for an extended period of time, the financial markets could get very bothered.

Longer-term interest rates could go up without the approval of the Fed. And they have been.

But the words Bernanke utters on this matter are still important.

Second, the Fed has supposedly ended one portion of its quantitative easing program -- meaning the program under which it was printing money so it could act as its own shill in buying Treasury securities.

It's still buying mortgage-backed securities in this way, but the ending of quantitative easing will make both the stock and bond markets tense.

Nobody knows why stock prices declined so much last Friday when the Dow fell 249 points.

But the bubble in stocks that started last March is largely being caused by liquidity, not valuation. Translation: It wasn't that stocks were such a great value.

The bubble inflated because the Fed has been pumping so much money that people had to put it to work.

When the Fed stops printing money that could be a big problem for Wall Street.

Bubbles always pop and bills always come due.  John Crudele adds:

Here's how the economy is broken, and why.

Yesterday President Obama said the US economy is "back from the brink" But he added that the US must "get serious" about reducing debt.

Problem one: The more the president says that the economy was near the brink, the more he reminds people how scared they should have been. Not good for confidence.

Problem two: Under normal circumstances, it's much too early to talk about reducing the US debt level.

But Washington has to do it because we are borrowing so much from very nervous foreigners and that's causing the value of the US dollar to collapse.

Problem three: it's hard for President Obama to be a budget cutter when he's trying to spend a lot of money on health care reform.

Spending on something new just doesn't seem like reducing spending to most rational adults.

It sounds to me as if our only way out of this is to thread the needle between precipitating a deeper abyss by tightening already tight credit or terrifying everyone with cheap money as far as the eye can see, which will cause the dollar to collapse.  We are not getting out of this pain-free.

I have quoted more than is my wont on economics; there is a reason for my focus on the economy today.  Economic distress has historically been the most powerful generator of Societal Regression and there are many reasons to believe it is driving some of the regressed behavior of our elites.  On Sunday Frank Rich wrote a column that would be risible if it did not reflex some part of elite conventional wisdom. Peter Wehner summarizes:

Frank Rich’s Paranoid Style

Here’s a stunning development: the New York Times’s theater-critic-turned-political-columnist Frank Rich is foot-stompin’ mad. The cause for Mr. Rich’s latest outburst is the race in New York’s 23rd District, in which the liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava was challenged by the Conservative party’s Doug Hoffman, forcing Scozzafava to withdraw. (She subsequently endorsed the Democrat Bill Owens.) For most people, this is an interesting intra-party skirmish with some potentially important political ramifications. But for Mr. Rich, it’s so much more than that. It’s going to set off a “riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war.” The northern district in New York “could become a G.O.P. killing field.” What’s going on there is evidence that “the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama.” And conservatives are “Jacobins” who are “re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.” And in case that was too subtle, they are “the Stalinists of the right.”

This is what passes for stylish and temperate discourse on the Left — references to the Civil War and to Cambodian genocide, to the French Revolution and to one of the greatest mass murders in history – all in the context of a congressional race in New York’s 23rd District, mind you.

This also comes from a man who in August wrote a column — without irony — warning about the rise of what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and who earlier this summer castigated conservatives for their “toxic” rhetoric that is “getting louder each day of the Obama presidency.” It could lead, Rich has warned several times, to political violence. Conservatives, you see, are so terribly uncivil and so terribly indecent in their rhetoric. Coming from Rich, it is all rather comical.

Again, this is comical only in proportion to its irrelevance; there are enough in the MSM and in the leadership of the Democratic party who  in extremis believe this nonsense, which in and of itself is not grounds for concern.  The concerns depend upon the leader of the Democratic party; consider these elements of large group regression, from Terror and Societal Regression:

1) Rallying around the leader.

12) The narcissism of minor differences.

14) Heightened importance of the leader's personality.  When a large group is regressed, the personality organization of the leader becomes extremely influential, as he or she can tame or inflame the regression.  Contrast Slobodan Milosevic's use of violence and terror with Nelson Mandela's use of nonviolent means.

With his ideas under fire, there is a natural tendency for Democrats to rally around Barack Obama.  There is nothing sinister about this but it is worth watching since there is often a tendency among the most fervent, and less intact, supporters to see fantasied dangers where none exist and to believe they need to take actions to support their leader which can go over the border toward violence.  We have seen this in the Union thug who assaulted the older black tea party protester some months ago.  Again, isolated incidents do not speak to Societal Regression, but a pattern of incidents would raise concerns.

The narcissism of minor differences is an important point here because it does reflect concerns about Obama's style of leadership.  He has acted, since becoming President as if the gravest dangers to our country arose from his domestic political opponents rather than from foreign societies inimical to our interests.  This can just as well be the result of his inculcation in the "Chicago way" as to any deeply held political ideology or character traits.  His difficulty in recognizing that the most Conservative Republican has more in common with the most fervent liberal than with either has in common with Islamic radicals or "Soviet" commissars is deeply troubling.  By elevating the smaller distinctions between Republicans and Democrats to a greater level than they deserve he has emphasized the narcissism of small differences.  It is important to keep in mind that when such small differences become exaggerated the easy path to devaluation of the opponent (No. 3) and dehumanization (No. 10) often follow.

Finally, the President is in an unique position.  By recognizing the danger of Societal Regression, he can avoid behavior that worsens the downward spiral.  By reminding his supporters that his opponents are not evil or racist but merely disagree he could do much to defuse some of the tension int he current political debates.  When he joins in the easy demagoguery (by demonizing Fox news, for example) he fans the flames and risks unleashing forces that he would have difficulty controlling.

Since I believe we are living through dangerous times and there are significant risks of Societal Regression (though I continue to believe that Americans' native good sense will prevent us from descending too far down the road; I am less sanguine about Europe and other at-risk societies)  I plan on starting a Societal Regression Watch.  I plan on scanning for evidence of regression and will periodically discuss such evidence here.  Clearly I am much more likely to notice signs of Societal Regression that occur on the left side of the political divide, but it should be obvious that the left has no monopoly on regressive tendencies.  (The fact that the Democrats control the Executive and both houses of Congress measn that their regressive tendencies are more dangerous than any such tendecnies among Republicans and this is an additional reason for greater concentration ont he left.)  Since there are many liberals who read my blog I would ask that if they see an item that suggests conservative or right wing regression to please send it to me for inclusion.  We all have an interest in maintaining rationality in the face of danger. 

Elites versus Bloggers: Who "Owns" the Zeitgeist

Herewith two articles from charter members of the elite MSM and one from a female blogger:

First, Tom Friedman, who always has his pulse on the interests and opinions of his liberal, moneyed friends:

More Poetry, Please

More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?

I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.

He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

...

“You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.” 

You can be forgiven if Tom Friedman's article seems somewhat incoherent.  After all, his point is that the details of policy (more troops to Afghanistan, more trillions in borrowing for poorly specified programs, more than 1900 pages for healthcare "reform")  don't matter.  what matters is the mellifluous sound of Barack Obama's voice as he entices Americans to get on board with his plans to expand the government (and the debt) to a size never seen before.

E. J. Dionne gets a little more specific:

Hearts, Minds and Health Care

The next health care fight has already started. It's the battle to define the bill that President Obama will eventually sign as a victory for consumers, taxpayers and the common good.

You might say this view is premature. Legislation has yet to pass the House or the Senate, there are differences between the two bodies, and some moderates still have doubts.

But barring astoundingly self-defeating behavior by Democrats, a decent bill will get to Obama's desk. He and his party will then own the most sweeping reform of the American social safety net since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s and, arguably, Social Security in the 1930s.

Both parties know this. That's why much of the rhetoric you'll hear in the coming weeks will not really be about whether to pass a bill. It will be designed to shape how the voters who will decide the 2010 elections -- and, ultimately, the fate of health care reform itself -- come to view the new system.

Republicans will try hard to minimize the benefits that will flow from the reform and set themselves up to claim that anything bad that happens to anyone's health care in the next few years is Obama's fault. It will be a bit like those New York City taxi drivers during the late 1960s and early '70s who despised Mayor John V. Lindsay so much that they were prepared to blame him for bad weather.

And since most of the changes don't become effective until 2013, the next few years will be a time of uncertainties and unknowns. Citizens typically want to know what's in this for them, and what they'll get right now.

That's why the most important document House Democrats released last week when they unveiled their bill was a list of 14 benefits that will be created immediately.

Dionne is correct to say that most Americans would be supportive of (many of) the 14 benefits listed.  At the same time, a great many Americans must be wondering why it requires 1980 pages of arcana to describe these 14 benefits.  And here is the fundamental difference between bloggers, who know nothing and typically sit around in their pajamas pontificating all day </sarcasm> and elite opinion writers shows up.  I would wager that neither Tom Friedman nor E. J. Dionne have actually read the healthcare bill(s) that meet with such approval from their wise and lofty position.  In this they are no different from the vast majority of democratic Senators and Congressmen who have never shown any inclination to actually read and understand the legislation they propose.

Lofty sentiments are fine but when you are proposing to vastly expand the size sand scope of government, the devil is in the details.  And that is the "on the other hand."

On the other hand, there are bloggers who have the intellectual abilities and the curiosity to read the legislation and, not surprisingly, they note that the built-in "unexpected" consequences of the legislation are dramatic.  (The consequences are unexpected because of the limitations of curiosity and intellectual ability of our Representatives as well as because many of the unintended consequences are probably fully intended but hidden and obfuscated.)

Consider the difference between the approach of our elite sophisticates and our own over-burdened Southern gal:

House Medical Plan

I had a bunch of stuff to post on, but I am not feeling well at all, probably due to taking off the flat, putting on doughnut, getting tire fixed, and putting on tire in the cold wet. Most of the time I do pretty well, but either the flu blew something loose internally or this is my old trouble back again, because this morning my muscles had stiffened so badly that I was nearly immobile.

So I decided that since I was in pain anyway, I'd do some research on that 1,990 page health care bill. I didn't get too far even with the summary before I cracked up laughing and did myself further damage. I think I tore something loose in my rib cartilage. So be warned - you might want to exit to safety before reading on. Here is the summary and it is only 11 pages. This has many awesome features worthy of Dilbert, but the one that did me an injury is on top of page 2. The bill contains a mandate to provide coverage for businesses, and if they don't, they have to pay 8% of wages to the exchange. For a lot companies currently, that would be a good deal, so I have always seen this as a severe problem that will shift coverage to the subsidized exchanges.. But this - this takes it a step further:

Small business protections. Small businesses with annual payrolls below $500,000 are exempt from requirements to offer or contribute to coverage, including the 8 percent payroll contribution for failure to provide health benefits to their workers. As a result of this exemption, 86 percent of America’s businesses are exempt from any requirement to provide coverage to their employees. The 8 percent requirement is phased in for small businesses with an annual payroll between $500,000 and $750,000.

Well, there are many ways to structure businesses and employment, and I suspect that within three or four years after passage, it will be more than 86 percent. For example, there is employee leasing - the legal structure of which is that your employees work for another business. It would not be difficult for some large employee leasing firm to set up a franchise system in which most employees worked for small units that basically were shell firms below the 500K which would then contract employees to much larger firms for a percentage cut of payroll - say 2%. How much do these DC bozos think the average employee earns? Since one person can own any number of these luscious little profit centers, I think I'll plan to own about 20. It takes paratisization to a new level, but hey, in the land of the crooked only the honest are slaves.

Needless to say, this is going to be like a dagger to the heart of large businesses in the US, because smaller low wage competitors just got handed an 8% of payroll price advantage. The natural result would be to force all businesses to the lowest level of wages, shift employment structures massively, and throw most employees on the exchange.

Roaring with laughter as the light dawned, I shot over to Coyote, who sees the writing on his wall in the form of "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin".

The implications for my business is staggering. I have already mentioned in the previous post that it imposes an 8% tax on wages on my business — a business where 50% of revenues go to wages and margins are in the 6-7% range. You do the math.

Worse for us is that nearly all our competitors are ma and pa companies with less than $500,000 in wages a year, meaning that our competitors will be exempt from these taxes, giving them an automatic 4% cost advantage over our company. Great.

Twelve seconds after this thing passes, I will be on my phone to my attorney to figure out if it is possible to break my company into multiple corporations that all fall under the 500,000 wage limit. The paperwork and administration for this would be a huge hassle, but it can’t be as high as 4% of sales.

Well, the other option is employee leasing, Coyote. I may have just found my next million-dollar idea. Because damn straight, it's going to be easier and cheaper for you to lease them from multiple businesses that provide a unified type of service than split up your whole company. Call me. We'll go into business together. We'll make millions the first year. That is, we will if I can keep my rib cartilage whole.

It just goes on and on like this; the incentives in this bill are for all large companies to fire most of their employees and shfit their workforce to part-timers and leased employees. Thus, and I was already in pain from convulsive laughing when I reached the top of page three where what to my wondering eyes appeared but:

I will leave tit here and suggest you get on over to M_O_M's post-haste because she has lots more, the kind of detail that can only be gleaned and understood by actually reading the damn bill, something our betters would never deign to stoop to.  The level of detail in M_O_M's post (in fact, in all of her posts) which so often includes the kinds of quantitative analysis rarely seen in the MSM, should shame the efforts of the Dionnes and Friedmans, who wouldn't recognize a quantitative analysis if it bit them on the nose.  Perhaps if they were willing to read more bloggers' posts they might not be quite so dismissive of our concerns about the size and scope of government.

Our elites, and the technocrats and/or ideologues writing these abominations they call legislation, have come to depend upon a docile population with neither the time, energy, ability, nor inclination to actually watch what they do.  Once upon a time it was the business of the elite media to keep an eye on our leaders and bring their excesses and foibles to light.  The MSM long ago signed onto the liberal maximalist government agenda (now going so far as to ask to be put officially on the payroll since their business model is crashing and burning around them)  and it is only the advent of the internet that has allowed we, the people, the opportunity to see what our leaders have been up to.  We, the people, do not like what we have been seeing.

The elections tomorrow will be understood as many things, a confirmation or repudiation of Obama's policies, perhaps, or a signal of whether Conservatives can win running essentially as disguised libertarians (ie, socially liberal, fiscally conservative; in the three most prominent races, the Conservatives have not run on a social Conservative platform and have tried to minimize the impact of social issues); in addition, I would suggest that the results, if the Republicans win, will confirm that an irritated peopel are better served by those who wish to inform us rather than those who wish to tell us what to think. 

Signs of Large Group Regression

Since our society is composed of "large groups" (ie, Liberals, Progressives, Conservatives, Republicans, etc) it is useful to think about American societal regression as a progression from large group regression to larger and/or multiple large group regression. 

One of the signs of large group regression, number 6 on the list established by the American Psychoanalytic association panel on symptoms of large group regression, discussed in Terror and Societal Regression is

Magical thinking, blurring of reality, and new or modified societal patterns.

Magical thinking is ubiquitous.  There remain considerable numbers of Americans who do not believe we ever went to the moon; there are significant numbers of Americans who believe that HIV was developed by government scientists in order to kill minorities; there are significant numbers of Americans who believe the Bush administration engineered the attacks on 9/11.  What matters is how such paranoid and magical thinking spreads, or is encapsulated, by the body politic.  Like an infection, if such thinking spreads to the larger society, ie multiple large groups become infected or a threshold number of individuals become recruited into the conspiracy of fear, it can be both a symptom and a cause of societal regression.

Consider the fate of two different magical ideas.

Anthropogenic Global Warming hysteria is clearly based on magical thinking.  There is quite simply no evidence in the paleogeologic record of a runaway green house effect on the planet Earth.  (If such had occurred the planet would have been cleansed of all life long, long ago.)  Further, we know that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have been significantly higher during past epochs.  Yet, many people became convinced that we were headed for catastrophe based on the possibility of a rise in ambient temperature of a few degrees. Even if human activity generated enough CO2 to effect climate change, our ability to adjust is more than adequate to handle a few degrees; the hysteria reflected in such silliness as The Day After Tomorrow, a movie in which the scientific pretensions were simply laughable, was the result of irrational thinking.  The UN approach to climate (to beggar the developed world in order to save the planet) and such lunacy as Cap-and-Trade reflects the magical thought that if only we treat Gaea well, she will not harm us. 

Contrast the fate of AGW with another potential danger that has claimed the attention of a different large group, the threat of an EMP attack (the subject of One Second After, which I discussed here.)  The potential danger of an EMP attack is significant yet it has not become the subject of widespread hysteria.  Because it has not become part of a media campaign, the ability of those concerned to address the question in more rational terms has been enhanced.  Robert Farley, at Information Dissemination does an excellent job offering some perspective:

I think it would be fair to say that there is no clear scientific consensus on a) the amount of damage that a concerted EMP attack could cause to the United States, or b) the size of the nuclear warhead(s) needed to cause a substantial EMP effect. One key reason for this uncertainty is simply that there are hard limits on what can be learned about the effect of EMP in the absence of an actual EMP attack, and certainly in the absence of atmospheric nuclear weapon testing.

Because of the limitations of the science, I'd like to focus on the strategic question. EMP awareness advocates argue that an EMP attack provides the perfect opportunity for China, a rogue state, or a terrorist organization to strike a devastating blow against the United States. Rather than simply destroying one city, the story goes, an EMP attack could wipe out the entire US economy, and even (according to the wildest estimate) lead to the deaths of 90% of the US population within a year. The EMP attack probably wouldn't eliminate the ability of the United States to respond, but because of the initial lack of lethality, the story goes, it would be difficult to launch a devastating nuclear counterstrike. While the US could respond with its own EMP attack, China and the various rogue states have economies less dependent on modern technology than that of the United States, and accordingly could weather a counterattack.

Alright, deep breath. Here are the parts of the story that I find strategically implausible:

Robert Farley points out that the science is not yet fully informed on the question (which is similar to AGW) and that the risk of an adversary obtaining the ability to attempt an EMP attack in a situation of such uncertainty must be considered lower than many other more pressing concerns.  Read the entire post for his reasoning, which I find persuasive.  (Be sure to read the comments as well for some plausible explanations for why this issue continues to find some expression.)

The obvious point of departure between the two stories is how they have been approached by the MSM.  Reporters generally have minimal scientific expertise; they do know how to create stories, however.  They work, more than any other large group in our society, as a force multiplier for magical thinking.  A scientifically illiterate population is particularly susceptible to hysteria generated by a press in thrall to magical thinking that supports their industry and their political inclinations (for the government to "save us.")  It requires firm determination to maintain or return to a rational stance in the face of the hysterical regression to magical thinking, but the ability of the American people to retain and/or regain their rationality (consider the polling on cap and trade and AGW) is heartening.

Learning From Reality

Victor Davis Hanson writes today about another inexperienced politician who was suddenly thrust into the Presidency armed primarily with a Wilsonian Utopian view of the world:

Upon entering office, Barack Obama knew little about foreign policy. But then neither did Vice President Harry S. Truman when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945.

President Obama often invokes the supposed mess abroad—especially in Iraq and Afghanistan—left to him by George W. Bush. But Mr. Obama's inheritance is mild compared to the myriad crises that nearly overwhelmed the rookie President Truman.

All at once Truman had to finish the struggle against Hitler, occupy Europe, and deal with a nominally allied but increasingly bellicose and ascendant Soviet Union. Within months of taking office he had to make the awful decision to drop atomic bombs on Imperial Japan.

At war's end, Truman was faced with a global propaganda nightmare. Stalin's victorious Soviet Union—soon to be nuclear—cynically posed as the egalitarian leader for millions of war-impoverished and newly liberated colonial peoples. In contrast, America accepted the difficult responsibility and expense of rebuilding the destitute former European colonial powers and rehabilitating ex-Axis Japan and Germany.

Some of Truman's initial military decisions proved nearly disastrous. After the atomic bombs forced Japan's surrender, he was stubbornly convinced that a nuclear air force could ensure American security on the cheap.

The result was that between 1946 and 1949 Truman tried to emasculate the Marine Corps. He mothballed much of the Navy and slashed the Army. Only the Communist invasion of South Korea in the summer of 1950 finally woke him to the reality that there would still be plenty of limited conventional threats in the Cold War, and that he'd better rearm if the U.S. was going to protect its interests and allies.

...

No matter: Truman constantly learned from his mistakes. Gradually, the president shed his Wilsonian trust that there would be a postwar global consensus under the aegis of the new United Nations. Instead, he came to believe that too many trans-Atlantic diplomatic elites had been terribly naïve about Stalin's murderous agenda.

Against the advice of his angry State Department, Truman supported the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. The Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, the salvation of Greece and Turkey, and success pushing the Communists north of the 38th parallel in Korea all established the parameters of the next half-century of bipartisan American foreign policy. To craft a strategy of communist containment, Truman brought in conservative advisers like Paul Nitze, while working closely with Republican Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg.

Truman's no-nonsense Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed up the president's doctrines: "Released from the acceptance of a dogma that builders and wreckers of a new world order could and should work happily and successfully together, he was free to combine our power and coordinate our action with those who did have a common purpose."

Harry S. Truman was derided by contemporaries as a machine Democrat with no special qualifications or abilities, yet he is now a highly respected President to whom history has been very kind (despite the recent efforts of left wing revisionists who have never forgiven him for using American power to advance American interests.)

In many ways the current discontent being evoked by Barack Obama depends upon the related questions of how he understands America's interests, especially as distinct from the interests of others, and whether or not he can learn from reality, which requires he undertake the effort of questioning his assumptions.

Thus far, learning from experience and questioning his weltanschauung have not been conspicuous elements  of Obama's behavioral repertoire.  His ability to accept/tolerate criticism is very limited and his intellectual modesty is relatively minimal. 

If Obama is a typical politician, ie cynical about power and its workings, then altering course in the service of personal success (re-election) can be expected.  If he truly believes and is committed to his weltanschauung, he will have trouble altering his course and all of us will suffer his growing pains.

While We Sleep

One of the great motivating forces in human events is inertia.  In the geopolitical realm this is a most powerful force that causes nations to slide inexorably into disasters that hindsight predicts 100% of the time. 

In 1980 the USSR was expected to be a rival for the foreseeable future and Ronald Reagan was derided as a cowboy likely to lead us to disaster.  Instead, within a decade the Berlin Wall crumbled and the monolith shattered in short order, to the surprise of all the Solon and commentators.  Once the USSR fell, its disintegration, in retrospect, was noted to be inevitable.

The Executive can only focus on a limited number of problems at a time.  If Obamacare is the primary concern of the administration, there is less energy and attention available for other problems, such as the war in Afghanistan.  Less pressing troubles fall off the radar completely.

There is little doubt that unless there is an intervention Iran will soon have a nuclear weapon.  This will certainly empower and embolden Islamists everywhere, yet there are a couple of brewing crises that may yet make our troubles with Islamic expansionism exponentially worse. 

The first bit of bad news for the West is that the model of a moderate Muslim state is no longer  operative, from Daniel Pipes: 

Lion's Den: Turkey: An ally no more

"There is no doubt he is our friend," Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey's government - for six decades the West's closest Muslim ally - since Erdogan's AK party came to power in 2002.

Read the whole thing, and try to imagine the near future when Turkey has become, more overtly, an Islamist state.  Too many "sophisticated, enlightened" Westerners, sadly over-represented in the diplomatic corps, simply cannot believe that another nation can be motivated by deep religious beliefs which are in conflict with their (assumed) rational national interests.  Why would Turkey go down the Islamist pathway when we see in every instance that it causes a decrease in freedom and economic vitality?  Since our elites assume that only primitives believe in irrationalities like religion, the assumption is that the Turks, who after all wear business suits to meetings, are just like them; ie, they imagine the Turkish leadership uses religion to acquire legitimacy among their constituents, but don't really believe in that nonsense.

Barry Rubin gets it just right in his depiction of the fecklessness and provincialism of our leadership: [All emphases mine-SW]

Turkey's Islamist Regime: Who Will Stop the Reign?

As for foreign policy, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gone out of his way to make it clear he stands with Tehran, not Washington, on the nuclear issue. He called Iran’s nuclear program a peaceful one and said that the country has a right to have nuclear weapons. This statement was cheered by Iran’s client, Hizballah, and shocked European Union diplomats who called the Turkish leader clearly pro-Iran.

This is not the Turkey we have known for decades. The dissidents—people who were in the mainstream for many decades and now find themselves marginalized--are desperate to find some way out. The democratic margin is steadily narrowing. Ideally, the opposition parties would forget their differences, unite, make a broad appeal to the nation and stop the slide toward a Turkish version of Islamism.

In fact, though, the Turkish opposition politicians are among the world’s most incompetent. The social democratic party is led by an arrogant buffoon—every time his party loses an election he blames the voters—while the nationalist right is narrow and unimaginative. There is no international lobbying effort against the AKP regime to inform the West what’s going on in Turkey.

The traditional hope is that the army would step in to preserve the secular republic but it has been too weakened (ironically, in large part due to European Union pressure to get it out of politics) and knows it wouldn’t enjoy Western support. The AKP is also popular enough to make the prospect of a coup seem like the road to civil war. And as time goes on, perhaps the army will not be able to depend on its own troops and officers.

What about decisive U.S. action? ...

... one of the underappreciated aspects of the contemporary world scene is the extent to which there are many people like this Turkish liberal who are feeling deeply concerned or even abandoned by current U.S. policy.

While a lot—too much, actually—of focus has been put on Israel, the same thing can be said to an even greater extent of Central Europeans and Caucasus people (Azerbaijan, Georgia) who , fear being appetizers for the Russian bear, pro-democratic Arabs, freedom-seeking Iranians, desperate Turks, and many others. There are also Arab rulers and regime supporters who wonder if they can depend on America to defend them from Iran.

Even in British, French, and German ruling circles there is more concern than is being generally appreciated. True, they saw President George W. Bush as a cowboy, but now they see Obama as a cowed man.

Then there are those who are neutral or antagonistic who just can’t quite believe what they are seeing. I was told by a good source that a non-government person who works for Obama a lot showed up in Pakistan and gave the Pakistanis a lecture about how they should give up nuclear weapons and everyone in the world also wouldn't have them any more.

Can you imagine how Pakistanis thought of this proposal when they see nuclear weapons as their trump card against India, and don’t necessarily trust Iran or China that much either? Such people either think, the Americans are engaged in some incredible conspiracy or are so naive that it defies belief.

Americans are used to the idea that others may see them as irresponsible, overbearing imperialist bullies. Yet just as powerful a stereotype is that idea of Americans as sweet, well-meaning childlike creatures who are too nice to survive and have no idea what the real world is like.

Few understand that when Graeme Greene wrote a book entitled The Quiet American about why Americans are so often held in contempt it was the latter stereotype, not the former, he presented. The main character an American who is well-intentioned but makes a mess out of things holds the philosophy that the United States encourage underdeveloped countries to pursue a third way, different from capitalism or communism and based on local traditions. He sounds more like Obama than George W. Bush.

Barack Obama and those who surround him grew up during an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.  They came of intellectual age in an environment where it was simply assumed that most of the world's problems were caused by American imperialism and over-reach.  There was rarely a challenge to such naivety in academia, that place where 1 + 1 = precisely whatever you want it to equal, and cause and effect are routinely deconstructed.

Losing Turkey to Islamism will have reverberations.  It is possible that out of the Turkish dialectic will evolve a new form of liberal, tolerant Islam, but there is no evidence of such a development on the horizon.  Much more likely is that as freedoms are curtailed in the new Turkey, the economy will suffer, and Turkish society will regress further.  This is not a happy thought.

Finally, John Robb notes that it is often only the stupidity of our enemies that prevents them from attaining their goals:

Pakistan.  Attacks on government/military personnel continue while ignoring the fact that Pakistani infrastructure is past the breaking point (which makes it easier to disrupt).  If the "Taliban's" current level of effort at blood and guts terrorism were redirected against urban infrastructure -- all Pakistani cities would be inoperative, the national economy would be in free fall, and social fragmentation would be inevitable.  Unlike blood and guts terrorism, system disruption would minimize backlash/opposition (both at the national and global levels) and likely manufacture a plethora of open source allies rather than foes.

Consider, if the Taliban were smart, they could easily destabilize Pakistan by attacking its infrastructure yet they insist on terrifying people by murdering women and children, the surest way to mobilize opposition to their advance. 

As our President dithers on Afghanistan, desperate for a way to "square the circle" there, consider that as we race to abandon the fight against expansionist, radical Islam, there are trends appearing that do not bode well for the West.  We can only rely on the stupidity of our enemies for so long; at some point we need to get smarter.

Inertia in international affairs works as a guiding principle right up until the time it no longer works.