Neptunus Lex » Politics and Culture

The Komen Thing

lex — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:17:40 +0000

I suspect that most bloggers, and many of those who read blogs, start their morning off with a quick scan of Memeorandum.com. If only to see what everyone else is talking about. I don’t use much of their information during the political season, because so very much of it is transient noise and lightless heat.

But over the last couple of days, I’ve been a bit bewildered about the attention being paid to the Susan G. Komen organization, of which I had not heard. They’re the folks who are involved in all of those pink ribbon campaigns, and their sole focus is on breast cancer, screenings and cures. Which I think I’m not alone in saying, bravo, well done, push on.

But then they decided, for reasons of their own – reasons admittedly opaque – to stop funding Planned Parenthood, which in a slightly less Orwellian world would be more accurately labeled, “Unplanned Abortion” since that appears to be what they’re mostly on about. You can be pro-choice or pro-life, but when a private charity gets a harrowing for deciding who will get their hard won money, and decides to exclude from further consideration an organization whose efforts are at best tangential to the donor’s goals, you’ve got to wonder what all of the angst is about. I mean, no one has a right to charity. That’s why they call it “charity” vice welfare, or what have you.

James Taranto agrees with me, as he so often does:

Komen was under no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood. Its decision not to do so was not punitive and did not even appear to be. The episode is reminiscent of George Orwell far more than Joe McCarthy. Komen’s actual aim was to extricate itself from the divisive national battle over abortion by severing its connection with a leading combatant.

The conservative Media Research Center notes that CNN “aired a pretty one-sided piece including statements from Planned Parenthood’s president Cecile Richards, evidence supporting her claims of right-wing ‘bullying,’ and even vitriolic Facebook posts decrying the de-funding.” No supporter of Komen’s position or critic of Planned Parenthood was included. Even more appalling than that lack of balance, though, was CNN’s echoing the charge of “right-wing ‘bullying,’ ” while the network was participating in Planned Parenthood’s effort to bully Komen.

Datechguy thinks this is part of a broader trend, wherein the political left in this country will do whatever it takes to smear or attack even those on the side of angels, so long as it protects the circular flows of money to and from favored causes and politicians.

It’s all just a little screechy, and I do so loathe a screecher.

The Secretary’s Meaning

lex — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:16:07 +0000

I have been generally favorably disposed to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. While at CIA, his bureaucracy’s intelligence gathering apparatus drove the military operations which finally put postage paid to Osama bin Laden, not to mention Hellfire warheads on the foreheads of hundreds of mid-level AQ and Taliban seeking refuge in the Pakistani badlands. As DoD secretary he has been keen to put the brakes on the wilder enthusiasms of his party’s defense defunders, accurately asserting that the budget gap cannot plausibly be closed using DoD accounts alone.

But he has left the issue of coalition operations in Afghanistan as something of a dog’s breakfast during a recent NATO summit in Brussels:

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said there was a consensus among NATO leaders that the fledgling Afghan army “will be ready to take the combat lead in all of Afghanistan” next year, with U.S. and NATO forces shifting to an advisory and training mission. British and French officials said they backed that idea, but other NATO officials were less definitive.

At a news conference at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said “we don’t know yet” when newly trained but inexperienced Afghan forces — who now number more than 300,000 — will take charge of the combat mission in the war. He predicted that NATO would resolve the issue at its summit in Chicago in May.

Rasmussen said that NATO forces would remain actively engaged in combat until the end of 2014, when most allied troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan. “Let me stress,” he said, “we will conduct combat operations throughout that period.”

On Wednesday, while en route to Brussels, Panetta surprised some allies by saying that the Obama administration wanted to shift from “a combat role to a training, advise and assist role . . . hopefully by mid- to the latter part of 2013.”

That timeline would represent an acceleration in NATO’s plans.

On Wednesday, Panetta acknowledged that U.S. troops could still be involved in combat after 2013 but indicated that they would fight only to protect themselves.

On Thursday, however, he modified that characterization, saying U.S. forces would still regularly engage in combat but in a “support role.”

“It’s basically, the Afghans themselves will be in charge of combat operations,” he told reporters. “Again, we’ll be there for support; we’ll be there for guidance. But they’re the ones that are going to be in the lead and conduct the operations.”

It was unclear what those changes would mean on the battlefield.

Indeed.

The Brussels announcement was probably intended for a domestic US audience, and intended to bolster President Obama’s political standing in his own base, not to mention a broad portion of those with no clear party preference and quite a few on the political right, all of whom have wearied of the word “Afghanistan”, not to mention the vast sums of blood and treasure expended there for no clear gain. Panetta was the right man to carry the water on this, since the president is no doubt eager to distance himself from charges by the right that he is soft on national security, charges Mr. Obama apparently intends to blunt in part by the high profile exposure of tactics, techniques and procedures used by low-key special operations forces. And while White House officials are keen to analogize the Afghan pull-out with the redeployment of US forces from Iraq, the realities on the ground are starkly different.

Surprising our NATO allies in Brussels was a misstep, however, and the assertion that Afghan National Security forces might be able to operate largely independent of coalition assistance by 2014 is illusory to the point of being hallucinatory.

This is, I suppose, what happens when a man of quiet competence is forced to subvert his better vision in favor of potential political rewards to his patron. Reason enough for men of quiet competence to avoid the political theater altogether, much to our country’s loss.

Exactly Backwards

lex — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:11:48 +0000

The Politico is running an article of either breathless naivete or conscious dissimulation:

The national debate over gay marriage is threatening to spill over into the military, as activists from both sides of the volatile issue work to influence the Pentagon’s policy toward gay and lesbian service members and their families.

Gay activists who succeeded last year in repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that barred gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military are now pushing for full benefits for their partners. And that’s creating a backlash from conservatives in Congress who opposed repealing the ban and had feared it might lead to the military’s recognition of gay marriage.

The national debate over gay marriage is not “spilling over” into the military – this is no accident. The repeal of DADT had much less to do with any open right to serve than it did with federalizing the national debate over gay marriage, thereby taking it out of the hands of state legislatures. The military will, by logical steps and measures, be required to treat all formalized partnerships as equal under military law. Military law is federal law, and it will be used as controlling federal precedent in civil law.

Paeans to the patriotism of those who would serve if only they could chat about their private proclivities in the workplace was never anything much more than smoke and mirrors. The real prize has always been the tax code, shared benefits, etc. In fact, “there are 1,138 federal benefits, rights and responsibilities associated with marriage.”

To pretend otherwise was a momentary tactical necessity for the gay rights movement, but for the news media to portray this as anything other than an ultimate, even if incrementalist destination is mere puffery.

The barricades of the culture wars were not battered down. They were bypassed.

Inside Scoop

lex — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:56:04 +0000

It’s been interesting hearing the details of the SEAL’s latest mission in Somalia. And it must have been fun for the White House to share them with us.

But not everyone is so pleased, according to an operator who has recently left the service:

Adm. William H. McRaven, America’s top special-operations commander, wrote in his 1996 book “Spec Ops” that there are six key principles of success in special operations. Of paramount importance—especially given the risk and sensitivity of the missions and the small units involved—is what the military calls “operational security,” or maintaining secrecy. If the enemy learns details and can anticipate the manner and timing of an attack, the likelihood of success is significantly reduced and the risk to our forces is significantly increased.

This is why much of what our special-operators do is highly classified, and why military personnel cannot legally divulge it to the public. Yet virtually every detail of the bin Laden raid has appeared in news outlets across the globe—from the name of the highly classified unit to how the U.S. gathered intelligence, how many raiders were involved, how they entered the grounds, what aircraft they used, and how they moved through the compound. Such details were highly contained within the military and not shared even through classified channels. Yet now they are available to anyone with the click of a mouse.

It’s difficult for military leaders to enforce strict standards of operational security on their personnel while the most senior political leadership is flooding the airwaves with secrets. The release of classified information has also opened a Pandora’s box of former and retired SEALs, special operators, and military personnel who have chosen to violate their non-disclosure agreements and discuss intricate details of how such operations are planned and executed…

Do the president and his top political advisers understand what’s at stake for the special-operations forces who carry out these dangerous operations, or the long-term strategic consequences of divulging information about our most highly classified military assets and intelligence capabilities? It is infuriating to see political gain put above the safety and security of our brave warriors and our long-term strategic goals. Loose lips sink ships.

Yes, but they are ships that belong to the little people. No real harm done.

Motes and Beams

lex — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:48:24 +0000

Returning to a subject we have discussed before, David Brooks takes on the great social divide of our age, as illuminated by Charles Murray:

(Murray’s) story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.

More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage. The rates were similar, upper class and lower class.

Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

Berkeley’s Brad DeLong will have none:

How can a book that explicitly leaves out Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Amerindians, African-Americans, people of mixed race, and Arab-Americans possibly describe “the most important trends in American society”?

How can the New York Times editors publish a piece without asking David Brooks why he does not dare mention the subtitle of the book he is puffing? (ed. “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010“)

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

But Brooks had an answer, if DeLong had bothered to read his article:

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Controlling for race and “other complicating factors” is a customary way to gain clarity in research, whether that be in the field of medicine, social science or – I would imagine – economics. Control for what you can, and extrapolate as you are able. If Murray had included Asian-Americans, Hispanic-American, African-Americans and people of mixed race but omitted Amerindians and Arab-Americans, would we be acceptably close to describing “the most important trends in American society”? Or have we left anyone else out?

Or are the institutions of marriage and family – society’s fundamental, and I would argue, irreducible building blocks – so very different between white Americans and all the rest of us that to exclude the latter in this research necessarily invalidates it? Does a black family, for one example, wake up and think of themselves as a black family, or do they think of themselves only as “family.” Because that’s what both Murray and Brooks are on about.

I suppose you could make those arguments, but Professor DeLong doesn’t bother to. He may have an alternate theory of what the most important trend in American society might be, but he declines to submit it for scrutiny in this post. He may even have something substantive to say about David Brooks, the press corps or even Charles Murray, and just hasn’t gotten around to saying it yet.

With the audience he’s pitching to, he may not think it’s even necessary. Or perhaps it’s just a bit of attack casuistry, thrown out as red meat to the masses before turning to matters of greater or more proximate import.

There’s a lot of that going around, but you’d hope for more from a professor at Cal.

Sole Executive Agreement

lex — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:39:06 +0000

A quick status update to the “most transparent administration” evar meme, in which President Obama’s executive emissaries are alleged to be circumventing Congress, the U.S. Constitution and the EU parliament in order to protect the interests of Hollywood.