"Limited Lives" of Media Professionals

How can we best understand the Scott Thomas mess?  Why did the editors at The New Republic not realize that the “Baghdad Diaries” of Scott Thomas Beauchamp didn’t pass the smell test?

It’s because they only “saw it in a movie,” writes Peggy Noonan.  You remember, the great anti-war movies of “Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone.” 

Shall we say that those movies were a little too focused on sending a message?

What we are seeing here is the naivete of the modern media.  Says Noonan:

It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business.

Noonan was lucky, she realizes.  She came up through CBS News—she used to write Dan Rather’s radio commentaries—and in those days the network was still under “the influence of the Murrow boys.”  Those guys had lived a little, and they had a nose for “a bunch of hooey.”

But our modern media boys and girls do not.

What is the Difference Between Kerry and Beauchamp?

What’s the difference between John Kerry and his Winter Soldier accusations and Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his Baghdad Diarist (cached) accusations?

Both of them were shown to be false.

Yet John Kerry went on to become a United States Senator and a nominee for the office of President of the United States.  It looks like Pvt. Beauchamp will just serve out his term in the army and then disappear. 

I’ll tell you the difference.  John Kerry is an elite liberal.  Beauchamp is just a slacker liberal. 

John Kerry went to Yale, met with Hubert Humphrey and went from strength to strength.  He knew how to play politics and how to keep his nerve when peddling utterly false propaganda about US atrocities in Vietnam.

Scott Thomas Beauchamp was just a kid from St. Louis with a fantasy about being the next Hemingway.  He just didn’t know how to play the game of liberal politics.

Anyway, while the New Republic is obviously in full coverup mode, it looks like the Army is looking after its own.  Michael Yon happened to meet Beauchamp’s commanding officer, LTC George Glaze, in Iraq.

LTC Glaze seemed protective of Beauchamp, despite how the young soldier had maligned his fellow soldiers. In fact, the commander said Beauchamp, having learned his lesson, was given the chance to leave or stay.
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But to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it.

Almost brings a tear to your eye.  We can hope, after it’s all over, that Scott Thomas Beauchamp won’t be a liberal.  He deserves better.

Government Worsens Hard Times

Remember the story of the Great Depression.  Michael Medved does.  It goes something like this:

Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in “The Roaring Twenties,” leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while the Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation.

But soon enough, Happy Days Were Here Again.

Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and a flurry of radical reform in his first hundred days in office. While conservatives squealed, this “new deal for the American people” improved the lives of everyone and got the economy humming again — just in time to face the challenges of World War II.

Only it wasn’t like that.  President Hoover was very busy expanding government to beat the Depression, and Roosevelt expanded his policies.  The unemployment rate hit 17 percent in 1931 and stayed high for the rest of the decade. “At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14%.”

So what went wrong.  Plenty.  And most of it was caused by government.  Medved tells the tale.

1. The New Deal prolonged the depression.
2. Recessions end quicker without government intervention.
3. In the old days, the advocates for the poor called for less government, not more.
4. There was more economic mobility when government was smaller.
5. The Great Society programs of the 1960s worsened the plight of the poor.
6. Government programs crowd out private charity.
7. “Nostalgia and political correctness cloud consciousness of the recent past.”

Go ahead.  Check out Medved’s article and read the whole thing.

The End of Socialized Medicine?

Just as Hillary Clinton is about to get her hands on the nation’s health-care system, Peter W. Huber reckons it’s too late.

Universal health care is a “superstructure,” to use the Marxian term, built upon germ theory medicine.  You can eradicate cholera and neo-natal deaths with a universal one-size-fits-all program.  The problem is fairly simple and the solution is within the capabilities of government bureaucracy.

But the new medicine is life-style related.  If you eat too many Cherry Garcias, Huber writes, and you have a propensity for high cholesterol levels, then you are headed for trouble.

You can cure your cholesterol risk with a drug like Lipitor or you can fix it with healthy eating.

The government can’t really solve the problem of elevated cholesterol levels with one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.

For the government is in a bind. It subsidizes the health care of the feckless.  It the old days, this made sense because a universal program to eradicate tuberculosis really did benefit everyone.

But health care to correct poor life-style choices is different.  The healthy pay for the fecklessness of the feckless, and it ain’t cheap.

The passive, clueless, and feckless must get ruinously expensive, last-ditch care because they don’t show up until it’s too late for anything else, and universal means what it says.

That means that, sooner or later, universal health care will start to lose political support.

The pocketbook-healthy eventually tired of paying for welfare that persistently failed to end poverty; the health-healthy will tire of paying for health care that persistently fails to improve health. However selfless and generous people may be, responsible types eventually despair of trying to cure self-destructive behavior from a distance.

It’s an interesting theory.  But I think it is way out on the bleeding edge.  I’d say it will be a generation before we get real reform of health care.

There are just too many slacker liberal votes out there in favor of it. 

Not By Age, But Life Expectancy

The government’s entitlements like Social Security are based on age entitlements.  At age 62 you can get early retirement on Social Security.  At age 65 you start Medicare.  But government researchers are looking at another approach, writes Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. 

The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth, both in common practice and in the law, rather than alternative measures reflecting a person’s stage in the lifecycle distorts important behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency ratios.

Get the idea?  Change the entitlement for Social Security from age 62 to the age at which you have a 15 year life expectancy. 

The chaps at Marginal Revolution seem to think this is a great idea.  But I wonder.

As a 61 year-old, I really don’t want to be forced to work until 70 or something before I get my Social Security.  The fact is that most people, once they have raised their children, start to slow down.  And our brains, as well as our bodies, slow down too.  We get ready to get out of the rat race.  If only we could.

Of course, with a judicious combination of work and savings, I can adjust my work effort and income to suit myself.  But with a mechanical government program, that’s not possible.  Somebody else sets the rules.  And the rules are not necessarily in anyone’s best interest.

In fact, the trouble with the government’s entitlement programs is that they respond only too readily to the universal human willingness to live at the expense of others.

Hey!  I’ve worked hard for ___ (fill in the blank) years.  I deserve it.  The folks in Europe certainly do.

And once you have the government program in place then you are reduced to arguing over whether to juggle the benefits this way or that way, or change the eligibility upwards or downwards.  Individuals and families are not longer in control.  But the monster stays.

The entitlement problem will not be solved by mechanical means, juggling this or that parameter.  It will be solved by raw political power.

That may not be a pretty sight.

Will The Atheists' Plan Work?

What with Governor-elect Bobby Jindal’s win in Louisiana (yes, they are celebrating back at his village in India) and Dinesh D’Souza’s new book out his month, race manipulators may start to wonder if South Asians are becoming overrepresented somehow or other. 

That’s what happened about a century ago when the immigrant Jews started becoming too eminent too quickly and turning up at the gates of Harvard.

But never mind about that. Let’s talk about D’Souza’s book instead.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book is called What’s So Great About Christianity.  In an excerpt he wonders about the atheists’ grand plan to convert the masses. 

The strategy can be described simply: let the religious people breed them, and we will educate them to despise their parents’ beliefs.

This is not new, of course.  Schools and universities have been indoctrinating children in the wonders of the nation state for at least a couple of centuries.  The Germans were a dab hand at that, creating a national school system in Prussia during the Napoleonic wars in order to rebuilt the German nation and beat back the French.

The question is: will it work?  It’s all very well for the atheists to write all their books and prove that transcendental religion is a crock.  What do they have to replace it, and can they learn from Chesterton’s warning that people who do not believe in God will believe in anything?

Elite atheism works rather well for people ensconced in prestigious university chairs.  Secure financially and spiritually in the comfortable groves of academe their belief system need not extend further than the glory of reason and the divine, er, universal truth of academic tenure and freedom.

But ordinary people in the real world face terrors that the university professor can only begin to imagine.  They need something a little more robust and a little more powerful than university secularism.

I went to Gluck’s opera Iphigenie in Tauris over the weekend.  It’s a story about the revenge of the gods and the awful fate of princes of the blood—in this case Iphigenie and Orestes, the surviving children of Agamemnon. 

The king of Tauris turns up at the temple of Diana (run by Iphigenie) in a terror lest the gods take revenge on him for his crimes—much like Al Gore runs around today warning of climate change if we don’t repent of our environmental crimes. 

The solution to the king’s problem, he reckons, is sacrifice, preferably the sacrifice of any strangers turning up in Tauris, and he gives the job to Iphigenie.  That should appease the gods—just like hybrid cars and low-energy light bulbs are recommended for saving the planet today.

Of course his grand plan gets ditched because the first stranger who turns up in Tauris is Orestes, Iphigenie’s brother.  Iphigenie finds that she just can’t quite bring herself to sacrifice her own brother, especially since she hasn’t seen him for fifteen years.

Christianity has a rather different strategy.  It turns the tables.  Instead of human sisters sacrificing their human brothers, God does all the sacrificing instead, once for all, by sacrificing his Son.

And in this blood sacrifice. the greatest blood sacrifice of all time, God says that he forgives us humans for all our wicked ways.

It’s a truly remarkable concept, you’ll have to admit.  God sacrifices his Son so we don’t have to sacrifice our own sons.

There’s an interesting corollary to God’s offer that will be obvious to all sensitive souls.  If God forgives us, shouldn’t we forgive, in return, the mother-in-law and the others in our life who torment us?

I don’t know if the atheists have thought of this, but I would recommend that they gin up something similar.  Otherwise their ingenious plan to indoctrinate our children might not work out.

People might start asking: What’s So Great About Atheism?

A Tale of the Times

As we battle on in the culture wars, trading barbs and op-eds back at headquarters, it is good to pause and find out what is going on at the front lines.  

I was struck recently by this report on a cohabiting couple by Sandra Parsons.  She writes about the experience of a thirtysomething woman of her acquaintance. 

I’ll call her Anna, who for the past ten years has lived with her partner, who I’ll call Harry. They have two young children. For years, Anna said to Harry she thought that they should get married, for the sake of the children if nothing else. Harry refused.

Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?  This is the twenty-first century, after all and women are free from the necessity of  depending on a man. 

Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.  Let’s go on.

Anna had a job when they first got together but gave up work when she had her first child. This suited her; she wanted to be at home.

And it suited Harry too.  He gave his er, partner, $160 per week to cover the groceries and every other expense she might incur.

You might ask why Anna accepted this situation. The answer is because she is a gentle, fragile soul with no stomach for a fight. She pretended to herself for a long time that everything was all right, and then she went to see her GP, who gave her antidepressants.

Shall I go on?  Fueled by something, maybe the antidepressants,

Anna has now decided she has had enough. She wants to leave Harry. When she told him, his response was that it was his house, his money and his children.

Oh, and by the way, Harry would fight for custody, “using her depression as his weapon.”  Nice chap that Harry.

One of the things we are learning, in this age of independent, liberated women, is what the point of that silly little piece of paper, the marriage certificate, is all about.

It is to protect women—many of whom are gentle souls without the killer instinct—from their own gentle, loving instincts.

You can see that if society sets up a rule—say, no sex without marriage—then it protects a lot of gentle souls who just want to love and have a baby.

Because if a gentle soul cohabits with a man and has his children and settles down to raise them then she is not going to be in a very good situation when it’s time to trade her in for a newer model.  Especially if she is depressed because of his continual low-level cruelty.

The bottom line is that there is no such thing as an “independent woman,” any more than there is such a thing as an independent man.  When a woman gets in the family way, she needs help.  And not just help, but safety.  The safest thing for her and the kiddies, studies show, is to be married to the biological father of the children.

You could look it up.