June 2013 Archives

Dear America,

On Wednesday morning I sat with my nearly ninety year old mother as she lay unconscious in her hospital bed.  At 5:00 a.m. she died in a relatively peaceful state because of a morphine drip that had been feeding her that ultimate analgesic for about twenty four hours.  She suffered from osteoporosis and her spine was bent and stooped to the point that she could sleep only on her side.  She was in pain every time she moved in her bed, and had been for a week since she had been hospitalized for a blocked bile duct.  The blockage had caused her gallbladder to engorge with fluid resulting in pressure that had made it painful for her to walk, or even to get out of her bed when she was still at home, and by the time she died, she had had a permanent drain in her gallbladder for two days.  You should know that my mother...health failing to the point that living each day was a trial for her...had wanted to die for some time.  She had told us all many times that she felt that way, and while we all tried to encourage her to go on, it had become increasingly obvious that nothing was going to change, and I for one had begun to hope that she would get her wish, just to relieve her pain.  At that moment early in the morning on Wednesday when the night was just about behind us and the day was beginning to come in through the window, she quietly took three shallow breaths and then stopped breathing at all.  Twenty or thirty seconds later she took one more shallow breath and then it was over.  She was finally where she wanted to be.

Of course, my mother's death was a loss to everyone left in my family, but we all had known it was coming, and for a week that it was imminent.  We had been there--all together at first and then in shifts at the end--for a week and we were exhausted, but not just by our death watch.  There had been the problem of dealing with the medical establishment at the hospital as well.  The doctors seemed concerned that allowing my mother to progress too quickly toward death was unethical, illegal, imprudent or something else...or maybe all of those things.  So the movement toward making her comfortable was at a snail's pace.  Initially she was put on increased doses of oxycodone, which was the pain medication she had been taking for months after being on vicodin for years.  In fact, it was the pain medications in general to which I attribute the painful quality of her life in that the body becomes inured to its effects, requiring ever increasing use of the drugs with lesser and lesser effects.  It's paradoxical, but we just don't know enough about pain to obviate the ever-increasing reliance on pharmaceuticals in chronic pain cases.  And in the hospital, the treating doctor we saw last made it plain that the increasing use of the pain medications was adverse to any chance of recovery for her, but he also made it clear that the chance of such recovery was extremely small, and there would perhaps never be any possibility of relieving her pain...even with surgery for her back...because her heart would not tolerate surgery.  She had had a small heart attack a month or so earlier and she had been in heart failure for some time.  So the end was ineluctable and imminent, and as a family--in consultation with a doctor in the hospital whose specialty was "palliative care"--we agreed that the best course was to make her comfortable and wait for events to take their course.  That was on Sunday.  From there, the doctors only allowed progress toward full sedation...taking small steps one at a time...and I understand why, but I can't help but regret that my mother had to suffer more than necessary in order to satisfy the aversion to the relief of death that our fundamentalist constituency has forced us all to live with...at least in New York State.  Mind you, I am not even suggesting that my mother would have been better off if we had euthanized her, though I must admit that I was open to the idea by the end, but the fear of providing too much pain relief in such an imminently terminal case resulted in unnecessary suffering.

For the last 36 hours of her life, she was on the morphine pump with an attachment that allowed an extra dose twice an hour if the pain made it necessary.  The morphine kept her asleep for the most part, but she would occasionally stir and grimace and groan as she tried to move.  Some of the nurses were attuned to her suffering and they took the affirmative step of checking with us on the half hour...giving her the extra dose if we thought she needed it.  But other nurses were reluctant and resisted, citing the fact that such powerful analgesics also suppress breathing, implying that doing so might hasten death in a way that they either felt prohibited or immoral.  Of course, it was only the less experienced nurses...even on the oncology ward to which she was moved because it was the closest thing the hospital had to a hospice unit...who resisted providing the relief that our poor mother needed, and I believe they were sincere in their reservations.  But the result was unnecessary pain in what we all knew was a futile effort to avoid imminent death that would finally relieve my mother's earthly suffering.  And it is not unworthy of mention that the constant struggle to get some of the nurses to give our mother the only thing that could help her was traumatic and taxing for all of us who loved her, though our mother's well being was paramount to all of us.

My point is not to vilify those who have an aversion to the decision by human beings as to when life should end.  I have my opinion, but I respect the right of everyone else to have his.  However, the timorous doling out of relief to the dieing who are beyond other help seems unconscionable to me, and the only way to prevent it is to fashion something in the law that is between permission for euthanasia and an outright prohibition.  We need to infuse the law that relates to the final days and moments of life with some compassion and realism such that the medical profession can provide relief without fear of prosecution.  When a loving, concerned family decides in accord with a loved one's previously expressed desires to allow life to end, it shouldn't be necessary for them to watch, nor should it be necessary for their loved one to suffer, a painful end that could have been avoided with compassionate ministrations of one kind or another.  My mother's death was caused by time, not by her morphine use.  The morphine helped, but it could have helped much more if it had been administered unstintingly.  The only reason it couldn't be was that our law has not yet evolved to allow us to make the distinction between technical murder and compassionate relief of pain.  There ought to be a law.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Though the six-gun is associated with the wild west, Colt, the manufacturer of the most famous of them started here in Connecticut.  As everyone knows by now, the Newtown Massacre also occurred here; it has led to a stolid gun control constituency and legislation to match in this state.  One of the results is that Colt Firearms is supposedly getting pressure from the gun lobby and its customer base to relocate its Hartford facilities in protest, and now Texas governor Rick Perry is here trying to facilitate a move to his home state.  You may remember Perry from the Republican presidential primaries as the dumbest of the candidates, and one of the shorter lived candidates as well.  But he is appearing on television inviting gun manufacturers to relocate to Texas, and in the case of Colt, such a move would represent a loss of about 1,000 jobs in this state.  In a state of four million residents, a thousand jobs lost is not a catastrophe, but any job losses are significant in this time of relatively high unemployment, so the Perry initiative vis-à-vis Colt is of interest here.  Presumably, he is trying to entice Colt executives with offers of tax breaks and planning and zoning advocacy that would make building a plant in Texas a more inviting prospect.  In fact, that is how the management in the town in which I live has tried to induce business and industry to locate here, but this was an agricultural town twenty years ago.  In the spring, you could smell manure in some parts of town, and you could still see corn growing and even a few cows grazing back then.  Now, all you see is traffic, new stores, and the vacancies in previously occupied buildings into which now-relocated businesses were induced to locate, and where they stayed only as long as their tax advantages lasted and until better ones were offered elsewhere.

A case in point was a group of high-tech labs that built things like laboratory measuring equipment here.  They moved to New Jersey after ten years in a building built on what used to be farm land, and now the building sits mostly empty, and it has been empty for almost as long as it was occupied by Gerber.  Just down the street from that building is a little strip mall that used to have seven or eight stores in it.  Now it has only two: a local grocery chain store and the liquor store next to it that survives on the walk-in traffic that the grocery store generates.  The rest of the store fronts are empty and decaying.  In fact, there are several other such sites in town, and they have turned what used to be open land into urbanesque blight, and that is what the Colt building in Hartford will be if Colt moves after a century or two in town.  But what Perry and those who employ his tactics to bring business to their states don't realize is that what they are doing to others today will be done to them tomorrow.  They will have to give away more and more just to get old businesses to stay, never mind getting new ones to relocate.  And the peregrinations of business will continue...yielding nothing in the end but more profits while the workers who populate their buildings all day and night gain nothing despite their ever increasing productivity as documented by many studies over the past ten years or so.  And the Rick Perry's of the country will never stop to contemplate the cost to the other tax payers of giving business a free ride in some cases and a cheap one in others, nor will they consider the blighting of their states and towns because the conservative theory is that if it's good for business, it's good for everyone else.

My theory is different.  I believe that such tactics as this are in effect catering, if not pandering to a predator, and the only ones getting a benefit are those who already have more than they can use.  It is another way in which our society is straining itself so that the wealthy can get more of what they already have and do so at the expense of the ordinary working person whose only real asset is the house he owns...with the bank...in the town where all the abandoned factories will stand until...and only if...someone decides to occupy them in the future with some new inducement from state and town that will have to be paid for either with higher rates for residents or a blighted landscape by the people who live there.  It is the internecine working of a form of capitalism that is cannibalistic, and unnecessarily so.  We need new business in this country, not the business of our neighbors a state away.  We need a business community that shares the responsibility that comes with great wealth and opportunity rather than one that will go where the money is, loyalty be damned.  As a nation, we gain nothing from the machinations of people like Rick Perry.  They tend to lend momentum to the creaming of our economy by the select few and they ensure the stagnation of the weal of the rest of us, and this guy claims that God is on his side, and he wants to be president.  God forbid.

Your friend,

Mike

 

Dear America,

Very seldom do we have a controlled test of foreign policy in the real world; the consequences are too great for experimentation.  But over the past decade and a little bit more, we have been involved in three wars...all in the same region--the middle east--and all in a period of relative tumult, culminating most recently in the "Arab Spring."  And American foreign policy regarding those three wars was a function of two presidential administrations and two legislative administrations as well, beginning with the Bush administration and a fully Republican congress and ending now with the second Obama administration with a Democratic senate, which does all the advising and consenting that is necessary in such situations.  Because the power of foreign policy reposed in two nearly diametrically opposed political camps during the course of these three wars, the hawkish policy of conservatives was tested against the more moderate policy of liberals as a matter of course, not scientific manipulation, so the results are both palpable and predictive in that each had the opportunity to run its course.  The Obama administration continued almost unaltered the policies of the Bush administration in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and it took its own course in Libya.  Simultaneously, American policy in Iran regarding its nuclear program has progressed through ever increasing economic sanctioning of Iran, having started in the Carter administration on account of Iran's radical international and domestic political policies, including its countenancing of terrorism.  In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States engaged in full-blown military intervention to remove autocratic governments: the theocracy in Afghanistan and the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  And in Libya, the goal was the same but the United States took a part in an international effort and never committed troops to combat.  So now, we have two divergent foreign policies entailing military intervention that have run their courses and we have imminent results that we can compare with non-military intervention like that in the case of Iran.  Unfortunately, the lesson we should learn is not the one we no doubt will.

In the final analysis, neither military intervention policy yielded anything on which we will be able to rely for the purpose of ensuring domestic security or geo-political stability.  Starting with Iraq and Afghanistan--the two cases of direct American military intervention--we have managed to install civil governments in both countries, but the internecine religious schism that afflicts each has led to continuing violence, fractious politics, political and financial corruption and something far short of a promise of peace for the future.  Between the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, the two countries' governments are in the hands of aspiring plutocrats who have enriched themselves, their kith and kin and cling to power tenuously in the historical sense as the forces that operated to create the fractiousness responsible for the emergence of their brutal predecessor governors are unabated, if not exacerbated by the ersatz democratic forms that their new governments have assumed.  Iraq is now essentially demilitarized as far as American troops are concerned, and Afghanistan soon will be, but I haven't heard anyone predict where either country will be in ten years.  The fact is that both societies are torn by religious sectarianism, which is an intractable problem under the best of circumstances, and the best of circumstances doesn't exist in either place.

Then, of course, there is Libya--regarded by many to have been a policy success in that the thirty year incumbent dictator there, Muammar Gaddafi, is dead and gone--in which we took a leadership role to some extent, but we were never more than a participant in an international effort run by a centralized authority other than an American general, and in which American troops were never involved.  Through implementation of a "no-fly zone" by the international consortium that aided the Libyan rebels, the rebels were ultimately able to prevail, but since then we have had the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, which was inspired by al Qaeda's affiliate in Libya, and the militia's that formed during the revolution against Gaddafi have been transmogrified from the hope of Libya into its central problem in that they all strive not just for their own pre-eminence but for the pre-eminence of their respective creeds as well.  In all three places, it is still Muslim against Muslim, and in each place that factionalism is manifested in blood with bombs, bullets and other forms of violence, not to mention political uncertainty, if not tumult.  And each is a cauldron in which anti-American sentiment boils.  So what does that teach us that we can use to guide our policies regarding Syria.

In my opinion, it should lead to the conclusion that we cannot fix every problem from without, nor can we expect every nation to revere the principles on which our nation is founded, but that isn't what we have learned as a democratically governed nation.  Our politicians are now trying to our-righteous one another with demands for intervention in one form or another or claims that we could have done something awhile ago, but it is too late now.  But the fact is that the weapons we gave to the Afghan mujahedin--the rebels in the war against the Russian puppet state in Afghanistan in the nineties in that case--wound up in the hands of al Qaeda reactionaries who believe that God's way is the seventh century way, and the Taliban ascended to the power to cut off hands and heads in town squares as a mode of government in that country.  That is what we arranged to replace a relatively benign Russian surrogate government with.  As to Iraq, the tyrant, Saddam Hussein, was defeated, captured, convicted of war crimes and executed, but the chaos that he may have been responsible for suppressing reemerged immediately after he was removed from power, and it persists today in that same old form of blood born of guns and bombs combined to create political uncertainty.  So, the Obama administration may be taking the prudent course relative to Syria--waiting for an international movement against Bashar al-Assad to form--but the outcome is not going to be any more to our advantage than it was in any of the three prior wars in which we played a role.  Thus, one way or another, we will be faced with an immutable truth.  Much as we would like to, we do not control the world.  The lesson we should learn is that the best we can do is what we did in Iran: apply exogenous pressure that the people feel and wait for them to force internal political change in their own countries.  Iran now has a more moderate president, at least partially in consequence of such a policy, who may or may not be a beard for the reactionary "Supreme Leader," but the people have made their will clear, and there is now a better chance than ever that a moderate Iran is somewhere in the not-too-distant future.  But will we learn that lesson?  Have we ever?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I am perplexed by the political tumult caused by the new revelations about NSA (National Security Agency) subpoenas for general phone and other data records.  And I am just as nonplused by the reactions of corporations like Google and Microsoft, both of which are seeking permission from the federal government to disclose what they have provided under those subpoenas.  The reason for my bewilderment is that, with regard to those corporations and others involved, no one is concerned about the fact that they collect such data as would be of interest to the NSA, or more importantly, that they use it...and even sell it to whoever will pay enough...for the purpose of tracking not just our habits, but our whereabouts as well.  Google knows where you are when you are on your computer, but the public hue and cry over that fact never seems to emerge.  More importantly, our politicians--all of whom are now making a great show of hand wringing and self-examination over what they have allowed the federal government to do so far and the sanctity of our constitutional right to privacy--never even mention the fact that corporations are by far more adept, more willing and in fact, more eager to accumulate information about us and to store it for their own use...to control us.  We are being watched, and the government...federal, state and local...is doing so.  But so is Microsoft...so is Google.  And they answer to no one.  At least we can fire the politicians who brook the intrusions into our lives of the security agencies that purport to protect us from our real and dangerous enemies.  As to Microsoft, Bill Gates answers to no one.  And that kid Zuckerberg never even considers explaining himself.  Why doesn't anyone care?

Recently, whenever I did a search on Google Chrome--Chrome is Google's browser competition for Microsoft's Explorer--there was a note in the margin asking if I wanted to know more about what was available to me in the town in which I live.  I never gave that information...where I live...to Google, and I was chagrinned that Google knew it anyway.  In the settings I had entered when I installed Google Chrome, I had checked the box that supposedly blocked the location capacity of the browser, but as they were locating me anyway I read the information available to me from Google about that setting.  It said in essence that they blocked others from getting that location information--and by the way, they don't do a very good job of that either--but there was no commitment from Google that it wouldn't locate me.  Over the course of the next few weeks, I looked for the opportunity to block location information wherever I could find it, including on my non-Microsoft web security firewall software, and now, Google can't find me anymore...or at least they aren't admitting it in the margins of my searches as they did before.  And it must be noted that they seem to be trying to regain the capacity to locate me--despite my expressed preference not to be located--if the information my firewall program gives me is any indication.  I get a warning from the firewall program every time my computer tries to use a program to access the internet, and every time a web site tries to access my computer.  Among those warnings is one for "Google Installer," which is continually trying to "install" something, and who knows what that might be.  And then there's the frequent warning that "Microsoft Host" is trying to access the internet.  I don't want Microsoft hosting anything from my computer, nor do I want to allow Microsoft Host or any other Microsoft program to know, much less convey, anything it finds on my computer.  There is even a regular notice that my automotive GPS device's manufacturer wants to access the internet from my computer, which is possible because in order to keep my GPS maps up to date I had to install the necessary software on my computer so that I could plug the device in and get it updated through the internet.  Incidentally, the device was working fine until I updated the first time, and now it regularly goes dark showing a small picture of a desk top computer instead of the maps I need...presumably to indicate that it is doing something on the internet, or at least trying to.  Of course, the GPS requires my location in order to guide me, so if I want to use it, I have no choice, but who else is it telling when it accesses the internet, I wonder...the price I have to pay, I guess.

In the final analysis, I am concerned about our society's cavalier attitude toward personal information being gathered by business and industry just as much I am about the government's routine intelligence gathering for security's sake.  With regard to the government, at least it is ostensibly for my protection, but Microsoft, Google, Yahoo?  I don't have confidence that such is the case when it comes to them.  There's no constitutional protection from them.  There was a saying in New York when I was a kid: "Does Macy's tell Gimbels?"  They were the two biggest department stores in The City, and later everywhere else as well.  But eventually, they were both bought by Federated Department Stores and no one asks about what Macy's tells Gimbels anymore.  The question that plagues me now isn't about the two department stores.  The question is, does Microsoft tell Uncle Sam...and who, in the end, is going to buy whom?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

My children have recently graduated from college, both with bachelor's degrees.  They are now engaged in employment that is gainful to one degree or another, but neither of them is employed in a way that is reflective of their academic achievements.  It takes time and assiduous application of one's resources to accomplish a college education, as everyone who has gotten one knows, and it should be useful in terms of employability, but in this day and age, it isn't really.  My son works as a lineman for one of those independent companies who repair utility infrastructure on contract, and while he makes a good bit of money, he could have done that work without his degree, and his degree in philosophy may well never qualify him for anything else.  Apparently more medical students majored in their undergraduate years in philosophy than in any other discipline, but they probably didn't have any lost years during their college careers as my son did, and they probably have grade point averages that are unblemished rather than reflective of the kind of social mania that afflicts some young people when they realize that once outside the range of their parents' gaze they can get away with it.  Combine those factors with the fact that my son doesn't want to be a doctor and the value of his philosophy degree begins to look almost nil.  My daughter has a degree in marketing, though I must confess that I don't know what that means.  And given the fact that she has two jobs--one as an "administrative assistant in a civil engineering firm and the other waiting on customers at a snooty clothier for women whose husbands make too much money--apparently those in business aren't too impressed with a marketing major either.  In short, it seems that, like many of their peers, my two young-twenties children are being told by a business community that is making more profit now than at any time in history that they are lucky to have their jobs, and they should thank those in charge for breaking their backs with undesirable tasks that they must perform at odd and inconvenient hours for low wages.  The days when a college degree were a ticket to a white collar life are over.

The experience my children are having is not unique by all accounts.  The generation now entering the job market is more likely than any predecessor to experience a quality of life lesser than that of their parents, yet the advent of more and more means of acquiring artificial wealth...that is wealth that is not a function of any socially useful enterprise...has created more undeserved riches than ever before as well.  Areas of human economic activity that have been nothing more than lucrative backwaters are now college majors that pass for career preparation.  At the same time, business and industry, which used to train workers for a future with a single company, now want to rely on public educational institutions to prepare students to be workers for low wages on the pretext that those institutions have thus far been providing the wrong kind of education for the jobs of the future.  Unfortunately, those jobs don't pay much and as a result, wages have stagnated while the wages of management have gone, in the case of CEO's, from 40 times those of the average worker to 400 times those low wage levels.  Wealth is being concentrated at the top of the economy while it is being diluted at the bottom; a recipe for disaster of historic proportions in my opinion.  When the worker cannot afford the goods he produces, the economy fails, and that is what is happening.  The mechanism is the export of jobs to low wage countries, which then produce cheaper, lower quality goods that American workers can afford until their jobs get exported to those lower wage countries, and all the while management thrives and the "financiers" get ever fatter by producing nothing but taking a cut off the top of our economy for the sole reason that they have access to financial markets that the common man cannot hope to access.  We are headed for a depression...a the decline of American hegemony in the world economy from which we will never recover.  It may take a hundred years, but unless American labor puts a stop to it, it is inevitable.  Simply put, we need a resurgence of "the Wobblies" and maybe that is already happening.

On ABC's This Week this past Sunday, there was a discussion about the economy, and naturally the issue of the jobs report of last week came up.  It was pointed out by Representative Keith Ellison of the Congressional Progressive Caucus that while the number of jobs created was adequate, it wasn't remarkable, and Matthew Dowd had already brought up the fact that real wages haven't increased in fifteen years...the consensus is more like thirty.  Ellison then mentioned that minimum wage food handlers in Minnesota, his state, were on strike in some places to get raises over and above minimum wage rates and that their efforts denoted a positive trend in labor directed toward addressing the lack of economic progress among the bottom 50% of earners, some of whom are considered to be the working-poor...people who are gainfully employed but not making enough to raise them out of poverty.  The Wobblies, or the Industrial Workers of the World, were formed in 1905 and effectively became an ad hoc union that took up labor causes where extant unions were weak or non-existent.  It was a politically radical organization leaning toward socialism or even farther left, which led to government interest in the organization and some suppression of its efforts.  But it still exists, albeit on a very limited scale, and what it offers is still the same: an ethos that is labor oriented and advocacy for consistent labor efforts.  There are many other unions, some with millions of members while the Wobblies are only about 5,000 in number today, but maybe that should change.  Perhaps what we need now is an organization with a broader agenda than organizing for higher wages.  Maybe we need an organization that will promote the realization that, while capital may be necessary, it is useless without labor.  At any rate, something has to change or our children will be the first in recent history whose lives will be of lesser quality than their parents' were.  That's a distinction that we baby boomers don't want...nor should anyone else.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I happened upon C-Span late last night as I searched for something to watch, and there, as usual lately, was the House Oversight Committee inquiring of some poor IRS supervisor who had been involved in the decision making for a conference that is in the news lately.  The conference was in Anaheim, California even though it was for 2600 supervisors from around the country.  It was for a legitimate purpose it seems, but it cost $4.1 million...better than $1,500 a head.  Of course the Republicans on the committee are trying to spin this into some partisan scandal--after all, the current president is a democrat and the employee of 32 years is his responsibility by some Republican axiom--but that isn't what caught my interest last night.  You probably saw the film of IRS personnel dancing on the news, especially if you watch Fox, but try as they would to make that look like high times, it turned out to be just an exercise directed at team work or some such thing.  And the rooms they stayed in were $135 per night, at least for the witness testifying, and they seemed to want to make that an issue, but the question of how much congressmen's rooms cost when they go on "fact finding missions" is bound to come up, and I have no doubt that the IRS got a very good deal by comparison; I do, however, doubt that Darrell Issa stays at the Motel 8 when he travels on business.  Once again, the Republicans are trying to make a big one out of a little one, though the price of this conference doesn't seem so outlandish to me, so the point of interest was for me wasn't the issue itself.  It was the involvement of the usual suspects.

I had never seen Jason Chaffetz before, but I did see him last night.  What is interesting about him is the first and last time I had heard his name.  You may remember the testimony on Benghazi given before the committee by a disgruntled State Department employee named Greg Hicks.  He was billed as some kind of whistle blower, but his testimony turned out to be more about the failure of the military to respond to the assault on the Benghazi mission by radicals and his personal displeasure about the statements of Susan Rice about the reasons for the attack.  We all know by now that the attack was not a function of the Cairo protest over an anti-Muslim film as Rice erroneously said it was on Meet the Press and other Sunday talk shows, but was rather an enterprise of the local Al Qaeda affiliate, and we also know that the Republicans have failed to roil up any frenzy over the CIA's mistake in reporting that for a few days...especially since the Republicans have failed to find any significance to the misbelief involved and their attempts to roil up anti-Democrat sentiment have fallen flat.  The American public has largely had Hillary Clinton's reaction...what difference does it make?  But you may also recall that they tried to make something of the fact that his superiors told Mr. Hicks not to meet with Congressman Chaffetz without the presence of a State Department lawyer.  At first they wanted to make it into an attempt to silence Hicks, but even he said that he later did meet with some committee without a lawyer because security issues were implicated and the lawyer didn't have security clearance.  And as to Chaffetz, even Hicks, who was obviously trying to precipitate pressure to neutralize the dissatisfaction of his State Department superiors with his performance during the crisis, had to admit that no one told him he couldn't meet with Chaffetz; they just said he had to have a lawyer present.  The reason for the lawyer was sheer speculation, but it seemed logical to believe that the State Department wanted to be aware of everything said so as to avoid attempts to twist Hicks' words...a reasonable precaution, but I didn't know what had precipitated it until I saw Chaffetz in action last night.

He is one of those guys in congress who was probably a prosecutor or a personal injury defense lawyer before he got himself promoted to the national stage.  The truth isn't what is important to those guys.  All they want is to win the argument, even if the only way they can do it is to prevent the opposing voice from being heard.  That was Chaffetz's strategy with Mr. Fink, the IRS supervisor he was upbraiding at the committee hearing yesterday.  He would ask a question like this: "When did you decide that something was wrong with the conference in Anaheim?"  Fink would look at him with a combination of dismay and confusion, and then, before he could give an answer, Chaffetz would ask the same question in a different form: "Were you aware of the cost of the conference?"  And before Fink could answer that question, the next one, also laced with Chaffetz's highly indignant tone and expression, would be let fly.  And now I know why the State Department wanted a competent witness with Hicks when he met with Chaffetz after Benghazi.  This guy doesn't care about the truth or what happened.  He is a political hack looking for a partisan advantage so that he can get reelected.  This is a man without scruples who pretends that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth...a prerequisite for election to congress as a Republican these days.  If it weren't so dangerous in that there are many Fox News watchers who buy that kind of stuff, it would be laughable.  Chaffetz is an amateur witch hunter, and he is becoming a Republican star along with that McCarthy epigone from the Texas Tea Party in The Senate.

I'd love to say that I can't wait for the 2014 elections so that these guys can be purged from both houses of congress, but I can't help remembering the last mid-term elections in 2010.  Mitch McConnell and John Boehner made gains, not losses, and we wound up with a paralyzed congress for the past three years, soon to be four.  It all makes me wonder who was right.  Was it whoever said that no one ever went broke underestimating the American public or was it Alexander Hamilton who thought that The Senate was necessary because it would prevent the popular majority from having its way...or was it both of them.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

For a few years, it was my ritualistic habit to read the Op-Ed page of the New York Times every Friday for the columns of David Brooks and Paul Krugman.  Over time, Krugman's focus on the economy became nothing more than a litany in which the same problem, the domination of conservative thinking among those who control this country's economic policy, was repeated endlessly.  Brooks, on the other hand, allowed his column to become more anecdotal and personal, ostensibly eschewing politics and focusing on what he had read recently that he considered a reification of his ever-more-conservative philosophical bent.  So about a year ago, my Friday ritual became an occasional indulgence, and then when my subscription to The Times ran out, I didn't renew, thus allowing my subscription to Brooks and Krugman to lapse too.  But even during those times when the two men were languishing in philosophical self-indulgence, there were Fridays on which there was an interesting de facto dialectic between the two thinkers.  On those occasions, Brooks' conservatism was focused on a subject that, while perhaps not identical to that of Krugman, was sufficiently germane to it that a stark comparison of not just philosophy, but of ethos was achieved.  Last Friday, while my wife and I were on vacation, I treated myself to the Friday Times, and after reading the news I turned to the Op-Ed page to read Brooks and Krugman again...and there it was: that stark comparison of the ethics of conservatism and those of progressivism.  

Brooks wrote about China's progress toward achieving the dubious distinction of having the biggest economy in the world...no longer second to that of the United States.  He opined that it would never happen until the Chinese abandoned conformity and began to generate rebellious thinkers and doers like those in the United States.   He vaunted branding that personalizes products for those in our fragmented countercultures of the past, claiming that the practice of advertising to people's values rather than to their actual needs is what made this country great economically.  In other words, we are a great economic force because we know how to sell, not because we know how to create, and the Chinese can't match us in that form of disingenuous manipulation, which is peculiarly admirable in his mind.  The Chinese must develop countercultures so that they can co-opt them with creature comfort if they want to be our rivals, says Brooks.  On the other hand, Krugman--whose column ironically appears on the right side of the page while Brooks' appears on the left--complained about the conservative effort to first diminish the food stamps program and then ultimately to eliminate it.  He vaunted not commerce but loyalty to our less fortunate countrymen who worry not about what car to drive, but about when they will next eat.  After extolling the economic benefits of food stamps--the return of $1.70 to the economy for every $1.00 spent for example--he took the humanistic approach to defending the program and in the end, stated point blank that what conservatives lack is compassion, not to mention the wisdom to recognize when it's good not just for those in need but for everyone else as well.

It was just like the good old days when the New York Times Op-Ed page was an exhibition of critical thinking by both those on the left and those on the right, which displayed the virtues of each political camp in the larger, moral sense.  It was a clarion call to those on both sides of the political spectrum, which of late had the liberals and progressives on the left prevailing over the meretricious Ayn Randianism of the supply-side right.  It was clear and pointed...invoking moralism in political thinking among those who read The Times, and among those who quote The Times in other media as well.  The thinking of each side was crystallized for all to see, and thus the obscurity of any baser motives was on display to either be explained away or acknowledged and rethought.  All of us should read or hear something like that every day because if we did, we could not help but debate our national creed, and in doing so define ourselves in a way that is clear to everyone.  There should be no way to shield our eyes from who we are as a nation; the rest of the world sees us and is largely critical, and we should at least consider the merits of what we do in order to know whether they are right.

Last night I saw Rudy Giuliani, the erstwhile mayor of New York turned multi-millionaire advisor to the rich, talking to Greta Van Susteren on Fox about Eric Holder and Daryl Issa of the House Oversight Committee.  There is a political war going on between them; Issa has been after Holder for the purpose of discrediting his boss, President Obama, since before the 2012 election.  Van Susteren thinks that Issa's vitriolic pursuit of Holder is a vindictive effort to redeem himself in the eyes of conservatives after failing to nail Holder on that failed gun-running program meant to trap Mexican drug cartels in the illegal trade, but while the program may have been ill-conceived, no one did anything improper or illegal, and the would-be-scandal faded away.  So now there is Issa's desire to indict Holder for perjury in the public consciousness if nowhere else, but there was no perjury.  There was just un-lawyerly imprecision on Holder's part, both in signing an affidavit in furtherance of a warrant claiming to be in service of a fake criminal investigation of a reporter in order to get his phone records, and then in stating on the record that he has never been involved in prosecuting a reporter, and doesn't think it would be good idea to start now.  Giuliani...a conservative party soldier from way back...saw it that way too, and he said so during a conversation that had started off to be about Issa's petulance in name calling directed toward the administration.  (He called the White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, a "paid liar.")  Giuliani's point was that, despite Holder's arguable lack of candor, conservatives aren't doing themselves any favors by looking for a self-serving scandal behind every bush, and the candor was refreshing.  First there was the dialectic between Holder and Issa over what is moral, and then there was honest criticism, albeit from the conservative perspective only.  It was like Brooks and Krugman, and I have to hand it to Fox for facing the conservatives' music.  It isn't like them...but if Fox wants to be the conservative electorate's New York Times, it should be.

Your friend,

Mike