Tom, recently, on Obamacare’s death panels:

[T]here are no frickin’ death panels of disembodied voices in metallic rooms eager to pronounce Trig Palin ‘not worthy’ so the Cylon Centurions can drag him off. There’s a hint of truth to the whole thing in that some kind of government imposed rationing is likely, but it’s still a dishonest, fear mongering claim.

Nat Hentoff, recently, on Obamacare’s death panels:

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive.

The death panels will not be anything so monstrous as what Tom described. But under Obamacare, there will be well meaning government bureaucrats who will be forced to allocate scarce resources to those under their control, and they will make those decisions based on considerations like quality of life, length of life lived, and liklihood of recovery. These decisions, abstractly speaking, will be completely rational. Indeed, if any of us were put in the same positions as those well-meaning bureaucrats, we’d probably make the same decisions.

Hannah Arrendt, writing about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, marveled at the “banality of evil” under a modern regime. Most of the decisions that brought about the Final Solution were made by men in offices who never personally killed a Jew. Many, if not most of them, were well-meaning bureaucrats. They pushed papers and allocated scarce resources to those under their control. They did their jobs, earned their salaries, and went home to their wives and children at night without a drop of blood on their hands. It’s a strange definition of “monster” that includes them.

Given the state of rhetoric on this matter, I think it’s incumbent upon me to point out now that the evil of Obamacare will in no meaningful way approach the evil of the Final Solution. But we may use the past as a guide to the future in this regard: that life and death decisions are made in a banal manner by well-meaning bureaucrats in suits does not in any way alter the life and death results of those decisions. If you only define “death panel” in the caricatured way that Tom does, then I suppose there probably aren’t death panels in Obamacare. But if you’re willing to define “death panel” as meaning “a group of well-meaning bureaucrats who will decided whether or not your life is worth saving,” then death panels are at the heart of the plan.*

*Let me say here that there has been much equivocation between health insurance companies denying coverage and Obamacare bureaucrats denying coverage. There’s some equivalence there, but the nature of their calculations is completely different. An insurance company will weigh the cost of a treatment versus its chance of success. So far as I can tell, they don’t weigh in things like your quality of life; particularly, Medicare certainly does not factor in quality of life. Under Obamacare, a treatment may not cost a lot, and it may have a pretty high chance of success, but if you’re not worth saving, you wont’ get it. Just ask the lady with the 105 year-old mother who had a pacemaker put in when she was 100, and Obama said it would have been better to just give her some pain killers. Watch that video, please. Note that he doesn’t say pills – which might possibly have described something that could have helped her. He said “pain killers.” He just said that we should have eased her mother’s death. That he said so in a casual, banal manner does not change by one whit what he said: an Obamacare death panel would have decided she wasn’t worth saving.

Apollo posted this at 2:06 AM EDT on Monday, August 24th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Ex Pede Herculem, Health Care

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Back when he was president, Jimmy Carter ensured that his various staffers would need his permission to use the White House Tennis Courts:

Carter came into office determined to set a rational plan for his time, but soon showed in practice that he was still the detail-man used to running his own warehouse, the perfectionist accustomed to thinking that to do a job right you must do it yourself. He would leave for a weekend at Camp David laden with thick briefing books, would pore over budget tables to check the arithmetic, and, during his first six months in office, would personally review all requests to use the White House tennis court. (Although he flatly denied to Bill Moyers in his November 1978 interview that he had ever stooped to such labors, the in-house tennis enthusiasts, of whom I was perhaps the most shameless, dispatched brief notes through his secretary asking to use the court on Tuesday afternoons while he was at a congressional briefing, or a Saturday morning, while he was away. I always provided spaces where he could check Yes or No; Carter would make his decision and send the note back, initialed J.)

This sort of micromanaging has now met its match: President Obama will host a meeting over beers with Professor Gates and Officer Crowley.  Where to begin?

1) Obama blundered initially by getting involved in the first place.

2) By staying involved, he compounds the blunder.   If he leans to far one way or the other in this meeting over beers, he’ll be accused of bullying by one party or the other.  He opens himself up to more needless criticism.

3) The president might want to acquaint himself with a La Rochefoucauld maxim: “Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things.”

Hubbard posted this at 4:12 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Ex Pede Herculem

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Marty Perez on the president’s self-congratulatory, manipulative style:

[H]istory has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom. And, sometimes, in an American president’s mind.

The truth is that Barack Obama has a penchant for these narratives and yet an inclination to rise above them. Two grand but antithetical stories about the same problem, awaiting him and his Olympian skill for the discovery of “common ground”: That is Obama’s favorite script. He regards himself as a kind of unprecedented referee between histories and philosophies. He likes to think that he can see what others cannot see and that, therefore, they must come to him if they wish to live in peace and with meaning. He did this with race in the Philadelphia speech, articulating what blacks see from their end of the periscope and what whites see from theirs. (Until, that is, he had to dump his minister from the campaign truck as a matter of survival. “Common ground” is sometimes not discovered so much as invented, or imposed.) A man of not especially discriminate empathy, he sees himself in the Whitmanesque sense of containing multitudes.

In addressing American intelligence and security professionals at the National Archives, the president again aimed at bridging differences by showing that apparent contradictions are not contradictions at all and that everything will go together, if only for as long as he is speaking.  National security that never compromises national values? No problem. National values that guarantee national security? Say it and it will be done. Yes, we have values that elevate and restrict us at once, the ideal of free men and women that procedurally protects also the guilty and the wicked–and never mind that, absent energetic domestic and international defenses, these principles would be outmaneuvered and outclassed on both fronts. And again at Notre Dame, the same above-it-all structure of rhetorical conciliation was applied by Obama to the subject of abortion. “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.” Nice enough. But the debate on abortion will not be so tidily retired. All of this is rising above but not really reconciling.

One of the surest signs that someone is being intellectually dishonest is when they refuse to acknowledge flaws, contradictions, or trade-offs to their policy proposals or philosophies.  If we do things my way, everything will be self-reinforcing and beneficial.  There is no acknowledgment either that the world is messy or that people are messy, and that ideas and feelings are sometimes irreconcilable.  To paraphrase Madison, such problems may not exist among the angels, but they do among us humans.

Though I’d argue that this kind of thinking is more pronounced on the political left, it’s hardly foreign to the political right.  Here’s David Frum on Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny:

What should conservatives think or do about this [the financial] crisis? Levin offers a couple of pages of argument that the whole thing was brought about by overweening government. That’s partially true, but only partially. (Indeed among the actions for which Levin blames the government is the failure to raise interest rates in 2005 and 2006 to prick the housing bubble as it inflated. Then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan refrained from doing so because his libertarian instincts recoiled from the suggestion that he as a government official should decide that asset prices had risen “too high.”)

It’s also true however that manias and bubbles do occur in marketplaces even absent government. They occurred much more often in the less-governed 19th century than in the heavily governed mid-20th. New Deal financial reforms – disclosure requirements, margin limits, and regulation of securities exchanges – have contributed to the greater stability of modern finance, a lesson we have all painfully relearned from the disasters unleashed by the unregulated derivatives market…

None of this interests conservatives very much right now, and it interests Mark Levin not at all. Levin thinks there is nothing to learn from the present crisis, and indeed seems to regard the whole enterprise of learning as ideologically suspect. It’s very striking that nowhere in this book does he ever engage the ideas of intelligent people on the other side. He quotes stupid statements from a fringe group like Earth First! But he flinches from any encounter with any more substantial opponent. He lives in a sealed mental universe, into which nothing new or unsettling can ever penetrate.

I want to give Mark Levin some credit for Liberty and Tyranny. It is in its way an ambitious book, an attempt to offer a major political statement. Levin is not a stupid man, and Liberty and Tyranny is not a stupid book. What it is, unfortunately, is an airless and isolated book, an exercise in pure ideology radically quarantined from the life around it.

Tom posted this at 1:45 PM EDT on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 as Conservatism, Ex Pede Herculem, Philosophy

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Using my head as a prop, an old teacher gave some good advice to a young teacher.  The older one said, “Be careful what you put in here [tapping my forehead] because you’ll never get it out again.”  What we teach children lasts, and sometimes the little things—like a teacher using you as an example—can make an impression decades later.

What, then, are the children of Palestine learning when the youth orchestra is disbanded for playing to Shoah survivors?  [Emphasis added below.]

Palestinian authorities disbanded a youth orchestra from a West Bank refugee camp after it played for a group of Holocaust survivors in Israel, a local official said on Sunday.

Adnan Hindi of the Jenin camp called the Holocaust a political issue and accused conductor Wafa Younis of unknowingly dragging the children into a political dispute.

He added that Younis has been barred from the camp and the apartment where she taught the 13-member Strings of Freedom orchestra has been boarded up.

“She exploited the children,” said Hindi, the head of the camp’s popular committee, which takes on municipal duties. “She will be forbidden from doing any activities…. We have to protect our children and our community.”

(H/T)

When learning history and music and paying tribute to survivors takes second place to propaganda, there’s no real hope for the future.  Is there an Arabic word for doublespeak—how does preventing an orchestra from playing “protect our children”?

Hubbard posted this at 9:15 AM EDT on Monday, March 30th, 2009 as Arafatistan, Ex Pede Herculem, We're all DOOMED

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