Could the long-icy relationship between President Obama and his 2008 presidential opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), be thawing?
McCain took a significant step toward reconciling with the president in a graceful op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post. If that article marks a genuine fresh beginning, it would be one positive thing to come out of the horrific shooting spree in Tucson eight days ago.
McCain and Obama will never be comrades in arms. They have too much history, too much mutual ill will and too many philosophical differences for that. In the two years since McCain went down in defeat against Obama, the tension between them has been evident in almost every public setting in which they've appeared.
But in praising the president's speech at Wednesday's memorial service in Tucson, McCain has reached out to Obama with an open hand. Not since his gracious concession speech on the night of the election has McCain spoken so generously of his rival. Obama should not let the opportunity pass to reach out to McCain in return.
McCain said much more than just that the president gave, as he put it, "a terrific speech." He offered a character reference for a politician whom many conservatives in McCain's party see as un-American. "I disagree with many of the president's policies," he wrote, "but I believe he is a patriot sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country's cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals."
This is not the first time he has said something like that about the president. In the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign, the Republican nominee came to Obama's defense, rebuking some of those who had spoken out most stridently at his rallies, including people who claimed Obama was un-American.
That moment proved fleeting. McCain had concluded early on that Obama's talk of bipartisanship and unity was longer on words than on deeds. He privately questioned whether Obama had the courage to challenge members of his own party, as he would need to do to bring about real bipartisanship - and as McCain had done so often with his fellow Republicans. McCain often let his lack of respect for Obama show through on the campaign trail.
He also had other grievances about Obama and his allies, most notably over something said by Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement and someone McCain long had regarded with respect.
As the McCain rallies grew more raucous, Lewis suggested that the Republican nominee was condoning the most vitriolic attacks against Obama and that doing so could create an atmosphere conducive to violence - much as George Wallace's behavior did during the civil rights era. McCain was as deeply hurt by that as anything said of him in public life, his advisers said at the time.
During the campaign, Obama registered McCain's disrespect and returned it in kind. For two years, their mutual resentment has been at the surface of their relationship, to the detriment of the country. Both have seemed more interested in scoring points against the other than in putting the 2008 campaign behind them.
When the president convened his health-care summit last winter, McCain jabbed at Obama for having failed to live up to his promise to conduct health-care negotiations on C-SPAN.
Obama interjected: "We're not campaigning anymore. The election is over."
"I'm reminded of that every day," McCain responded.
It's possible that Tucson will let the two leaders turn the page. The McCain who comes through in the Post op-ed is the McCain many have known for a long time. Only the puckish sense of humor is absent, appropriately so given the article's subject matter.
The Arizona senator has moved to the right, along with his party, in the past four years. That makes true partnership with the president more difficult, given Obama's policies and leanings and the posture of the Democratic base. But both men have often preferred to look for ways to operate closer to the political center. Whether it is on immigration, energy or Afghanistan, the possibilities for greater cooperation between them seems to exist if the will is there to find some common ground.
No less obvious in McCain's article is his strong defense of Sarah Palin, his vice presidential running mate. Palin drew instant criticism after the shootings for a map she had published that included cross hairs on the districts of 20 members of Congress whom she had singled out for defeat. She was accused of contributing to a climate that led to the Tucson massacre, though there was no evidence to support such a connection.
When she finally spoke in her defense Wednesday, she drew more criticism for invoking the phrase "blood libel," heavily freighted words, to characterize the trespass of those who blamed the shootings on conservative rhetoric - or anything she had done.
McCain noted that people should not expect a political leader to be indifferent to unfair assaults on her character. "Imagine how it must feel," he wrote, "to have watched one week ago the incomprehensible massacre of innocents committed by someone who had lost some essential part of his humanity, to have shared in the heartache for its victims and in the admiration for those who acted heroically to save the lives of others - and to have heard in the coverage of that tragedy voices accusing you of complicity in it."
Obama said the same thing, using different words, in Tucson. "Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together," he said.
Obama and McCain have spoken as leaders in the aftermath of Tucson in an attempt to elevate the public dialogue. Perhaps they can begin to speak to each other in the way they have asked everyone to do.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Melting in Andes Reveals Remains and Wreckage By SIMON ROMERO
LA PAZ, Bolivia — In the haunts of this city where climbers gather over plates of grilled llama and bottles of Paceña beer to swap tales of mountaineering derring-do, they feign boredom when talk turns to the 19,974-foot-high Huayna Potosí, a jagged Andean peak that looms over La Paz.
“A training climb,” scoffs Julio Choque Alaña, 32, who guides foreigners up the mountains of Bolivia, which boasts peaks higher than the Alps and the Rockies.
But such bravado fades when talk shifts to what climbers are discovering on Huayna Potosí’s glacier: crumpled fuselage, decades-old pieces of wings and propellers, and, in November, the frozen body of Rafael Benjamín Pabón, a 27-year-old pilot whose Douglas DC-6 crashed into the mountain’s north face in 1990.
“When I found the pilot, he was still strapped into his seat, crunched over like he was sleeping, some black hair falling from his skull,” said Eulalio González, 49, the climber who carried Mr. Pabón’s mummified body down the mountain. “There are more ice mummies in the peaks above us,” he said. “Melting glaciers will bring them to us.”
The discovery of Mr. Pabón’s partially preserved remains was one of a growing number of finds pulled from the world’s glaciers and snow fields in recent years as warmer temperatures cause the ice and snow to melt, exposing their long-held secrets. The bodies that have emerged were mummified naturally, with extreme cold and dry air performing the work that resins and oils did for ancient Egyptians and other cultures.
Up and down the spine of the Andes, long plagued by airplane crashes and climbing mishaps, the discoveries are helping to solve decades-old mysteries.
In one such find, in the late ’90s, climbers on Mount Tupungato in Argentina discovered parts the wreckage of the Star Dust, a fabled British aircraft rumored to have disappeared in 1947 with a cargo of gold.
The climbers found no treasure at the crash site of the Avro Lancastrian plane flown by British South American Airways. But they did discover a preserved torso and a hand with pointed, manicured fingernails, an eerie fashion relic of 1940s London that served as testament to the fate of the plane’s passengers and crew.
Scientists say the retreat of the ice is an unexpected boon for those yearning to peer back in time.
“It looks like the warming trend seen in many regions is continuing,” said Gerald Holdsworth, a glaciologist at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta. “There are still some large snowbanks left in promising places, and many glaciers of all different shapes, orientations and sizes, so the finds could go on for a long time yet.”
Some discoveries are personal, allowing families closure after years of mourning loved ones who appeared to have vanished. Others have added alluring clues into the history of human migration, diet, health and ethnic origins, said María Victoria Monsalve, a pathologist at the University of British Columbia who studies ice mummies.
She said some of the most valuable discoveries in recent years include three Inca child mummies found on the summit of Mount Llullaillaco in northern Argentina and a 550-year-old iceman discovered by sheep hunters in northern British Columbia.
Younger mummies can also add to the historical record. In 2004, three well-preserved soldiers were found in a scene of high-altitude fighting from World War I in the Italian Alps. And in 2006, a military lab in Hawaii pieced together the story of a World War II airman found on Darwin Glacier in California. Identified as Leo M. Mustonen, he was buried in his hometown, Brainerd, Minn.
Even Mr. Holdsworth, who as a glaciologist is generally more interested in the ice itself, has been closely monitoring the Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska, in part because he says he believes that it holds a plane that crashed near the Yukon border in 1951.
For the family of Rafael Pabón, the pilot found high in the Andes in November, the discovery was a relief of sorts. For two decades, his mother, Yolanda Galindo de Pabón, 69, had been tortured by thoughts of what had happened to him. She said she nurtured a theory that he might be wandering Bolivia’s provinces as a result of an accident. She wondered whether his plane could have been hijacked and flown across the border into Brazil.
The discovery of his body — still clad in the same white shirt and gray pants he wore when he lifted off with a cargo of beef carcasses from Bolivia’s eastern lowlands on Oct. 19, 1990 — at least put an end to the doubts.
“It took me a very long time to acknowledge he might be dead,” Ms. Pabón said. “Now we have a body. I can visit my son at his burial site and grieve like any mother has a right to do.”
The frozen corpse of Mr. Pabón’s co-pilot was discovered on Huayna Potosí in 1997. The cargo plane’s only other crew member, a mechanic named Walter Flores, has not been found.
Climbers here say they expect to find more remains as the country’s glaciers, like Chacaltaya — once said to be the site of the world’s highest ski resort — retreat. They speak with a certain reverence of glaciers guarding plane wrecks stretching back decades, including a Hercules military cargo plane from the 1970s and smaller planes that crashed into mountains after encountering storms and poor visibility.
In at least one case, the mystery is unfolding in chapters, as layers of ice slowly reveal an old tragedy.
In 2006, a climbing team on Mount Illimani, Bolivia’s second-highest peak, rediscovered the wreckage of a Boeing 727 operated by Eastern Air Lines that crashed into the mountain shortly after takeoff on Jan. 1, 1985, killing all 29 people aboard.
No bodies were found at the time of the crash or during the 2006 ascent. But Roberto Gómez, 28, a climber who retrieved part of the Boeing’s fuselage, said it was only a matter of time before they surface as the glacier on Illimani melts. He has already found photographs, children’s clothing and, strangely, what seemed to be crocodile hides from the cargo hold at the crash site.
“The bodies and the black box are still somewhere in the ice,” he said.
On another ascent, he found what he believes are the remains of a dead Austrian climber: a preserved foot still clad in a Salewa hiking boot.
Aware of the fate which has often met those who dare challenge Bolivia’s peaks, some climbing guides here respectfully refer to the mountains as “achachila,” a word from the indigenous Aymara language that roughly translates as “earth spirit” or “uncle.” Before each ascent, they make offerings of coca leaves to the peaks they depend on for their livelihood.
“The uncles guard many secrets,” said Mr. González, who found the body of Mr. Pabón, “just like the graveyards in their shadow.”
“A training climb,” scoffs Julio Choque Alaña, 32, who guides foreigners up the mountains of Bolivia, which boasts peaks higher than the Alps and the Rockies.
But such bravado fades when talk shifts to what climbers are discovering on Huayna Potosí’s glacier: crumpled fuselage, decades-old pieces of wings and propellers, and, in November, the frozen body of Rafael Benjamín Pabón, a 27-year-old pilot whose Douglas DC-6 crashed into the mountain’s north face in 1990.
“When I found the pilot, he was still strapped into his seat, crunched over like he was sleeping, some black hair falling from his skull,” said Eulalio González, 49, the climber who carried Mr. Pabón’s mummified body down the mountain. “There are more ice mummies in the peaks above us,” he said. “Melting glaciers will bring them to us.”
The discovery of Mr. Pabón’s partially preserved remains was one of a growing number of finds pulled from the world’s glaciers and snow fields in recent years as warmer temperatures cause the ice and snow to melt, exposing their long-held secrets. The bodies that have emerged were mummified naturally, with extreme cold and dry air performing the work that resins and oils did for ancient Egyptians and other cultures.
Up and down the spine of the Andes, long plagued by airplane crashes and climbing mishaps, the discoveries are helping to solve decades-old mysteries.
In one such find, in the late ’90s, climbers on Mount Tupungato in Argentina discovered parts the wreckage of the Star Dust, a fabled British aircraft rumored to have disappeared in 1947 with a cargo of gold.
The climbers found no treasure at the crash site of the Avro Lancastrian plane flown by British South American Airways. But they did discover a preserved torso and a hand with pointed, manicured fingernails, an eerie fashion relic of 1940s London that served as testament to the fate of the plane’s passengers and crew.
Scientists say the retreat of the ice is an unexpected boon for those yearning to peer back in time.
“It looks like the warming trend seen in many regions is continuing,” said Gerald Holdsworth, a glaciologist at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta. “There are still some large snowbanks left in promising places, and many glaciers of all different shapes, orientations and sizes, so the finds could go on for a long time yet.”
Some discoveries are personal, allowing families closure after years of mourning loved ones who appeared to have vanished. Others have added alluring clues into the history of human migration, diet, health and ethnic origins, said María Victoria Monsalve, a pathologist at the University of British Columbia who studies ice mummies.
She said some of the most valuable discoveries in recent years include three Inca child mummies found on the summit of Mount Llullaillaco in northern Argentina and a 550-year-old iceman discovered by sheep hunters in northern British Columbia.
Younger mummies can also add to the historical record. In 2004, three well-preserved soldiers were found in a scene of high-altitude fighting from World War I in the Italian Alps. And in 2006, a military lab in Hawaii pieced together the story of a World War II airman found on Darwin Glacier in California. Identified as Leo M. Mustonen, he was buried in his hometown, Brainerd, Minn.
Even Mr. Holdsworth, who as a glaciologist is generally more interested in the ice itself, has been closely monitoring the Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska, in part because he says he believes that it holds a plane that crashed near the Yukon border in 1951.
For the family of Rafael Pabón, the pilot found high in the Andes in November, the discovery was a relief of sorts. For two decades, his mother, Yolanda Galindo de Pabón, 69, had been tortured by thoughts of what had happened to him. She said she nurtured a theory that he might be wandering Bolivia’s provinces as a result of an accident. She wondered whether his plane could have been hijacked and flown across the border into Brazil.
The discovery of his body — still clad in the same white shirt and gray pants he wore when he lifted off with a cargo of beef carcasses from Bolivia’s eastern lowlands on Oct. 19, 1990 — at least put an end to the doubts.
“It took me a very long time to acknowledge he might be dead,” Ms. Pabón said. “Now we have a body. I can visit my son at his burial site and grieve like any mother has a right to do.”
The frozen corpse of Mr. Pabón’s co-pilot was discovered on Huayna Potosí in 1997. The cargo plane’s only other crew member, a mechanic named Walter Flores, has not been found.
Climbers here say they expect to find more remains as the country’s glaciers, like Chacaltaya — once said to be the site of the world’s highest ski resort — retreat. They speak with a certain reverence of glaciers guarding plane wrecks stretching back decades, including a Hercules military cargo plane from the 1970s and smaller planes that crashed into mountains after encountering storms and poor visibility.
In at least one case, the mystery is unfolding in chapters, as layers of ice slowly reveal an old tragedy.
In 2006, a climbing team on Mount Illimani, Bolivia’s second-highest peak, rediscovered the wreckage of a Boeing 727 operated by Eastern Air Lines that crashed into the mountain shortly after takeoff on Jan. 1, 1985, killing all 29 people aboard.
No bodies were found at the time of the crash or during the 2006 ascent. But Roberto Gómez, 28, a climber who retrieved part of the Boeing’s fuselage, said it was only a matter of time before they surface as the glacier on Illimani melts. He has already found photographs, children’s clothing and, strangely, what seemed to be crocodile hides from the cargo hold at the crash site.
“The bodies and the black box are still somewhere in the ice,” he said.
On another ascent, he found what he believes are the remains of a dead Austrian climber: a preserved foot still clad in a Salewa hiking boot.
Aware of the fate which has often met those who dare challenge Bolivia’s peaks, some climbing guides here respectfully refer to the mountains as “achachila,” a word from the indigenous Aymara language that roughly translates as “earth spirit” or “uncle.” Before each ascent, they make offerings of coca leaves to the peaks they depend on for their livelihood.
“The uncles guard many secrets,” said Mr. González, who found the body of Mr. Pabón, “just like the graveyards in their shadow.”
The Truth and Consequences of Repeal of health care (It's time for MEDICARE for all!)
The Truth and Consequences of RepealGet ready for more theater on Capitol Hill.
House Republicans plan to push through legislation this week to repeal the health care reform law.
In deference to the new vows of civility, the tone of the debate may be a bit more restrained. But Republicans have already said that they will not strip the word “killing” from the bill — which is titled, “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” Civility apparently goes only so far.
While repeal will certainly pass the House, it has no chance in the Senate. So House Republicans are already planning other ways to undermine the reforms, like denying agencies enough money to hire personnel to carry out the program.
Americans will pay a high price if opponents get their way. Reform means that tens of millions of uninsured people will get a chance at security; and many millions more who have coverage can be sure they can keep or replace it, even if they get sick or lose their jobs.
Repeal would also take away the best chance for reining in rising health care costs — and the government’s relentlessly rising Medicare burden.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that repealing the reform law would drive up the deficit by $230 billion over the first decade and much more in later years.
For all his claims of fiscal rectitude, John Boehner, the House speaker, immediately dismissed the budget experts’ report as “their opinion.” In a particularly cynical move, Mr. Boehner and his new team have exempted the repeal bill from their own rule that any increase in spending be offset by cuts in other programs.
Many individuals and businesses are already benefiting from reform, and they will benefit even more once it goes into full effect in 2014.
Thanks to reform, it is now illegal for insurance companies to deny children coverage because they have pre-existing medical conditions, or to rescind a policy after a person becomes sick, or to cap the amount that insurers will pay for medical care over a lifetime. After 2014, it will be illegal for insurers to set annual limits on the amount they will pay for medical care or deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions.
Young people are now allowed to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26. And insurers are now required to cover preventive care in new policies without cost-sharing, and to spend at least 80 percent of their premium income on medical care and quality improvements, not profits or administrative costs. Repeal would eliminate all of these new protections.
Repeal would also eliminate federal tax credits that are helping small businesses provide coverage to employees as well as a reinsurance program that is helping more than 4,700 employers, large and small, provide health coverage to early retirees.
Republicans are getting considerable traction with their claims that the reform law will drive up the price of insurance, and some are blaming the law for recent premium increases primarily caused by medical inflation. Once again, the official analysts and other experts disagree.
In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that repeal would cause premiums for coverage obtained through large employers to rise by a bit in future years, while premiums at small employers, on average, would be little affected. Projected premiums for people who buy their own policies would come down somewhat with repeal, mostly because the policies would provide skimpier coverage than required under reform. Many people in this group would end up paying more out of their own pockets for health insurance, because they would not get the subsidies provided under the reform law.
Until now, the Republicans have dominated this debate with scare tactics and posturing. Democratic political leaders say they are finally ready to mount a vigorous campaign arguing the case for reform. They should be prepared for a long fight.
House Republicans plan to push through legislation this week to repeal the health care reform law.
In deference to the new vows of civility, the tone of the debate may be a bit more restrained. But Republicans have already said that they will not strip the word “killing” from the bill — which is titled, “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” Civility apparently goes only so far.
While repeal will certainly pass the House, it has no chance in the Senate. So House Republicans are already planning other ways to undermine the reforms, like denying agencies enough money to hire personnel to carry out the program.
Americans will pay a high price if opponents get their way. Reform means that tens of millions of uninsured people will get a chance at security; and many millions more who have coverage can be sure they can keep or replace it, even if they get sick or lose their jobs.
Repeal would also take away the best chance for reining in rising health care costs — and the government’s relentlessly rising Medicare burden.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that repealing the reform law would drive up the deficit by $230 billion over the first decade and much more in later years.
For all his claims of fiscal rectitude, John Boehner, the House speaker, immediately dismissed the budget experts’ report as “their opinion.” In a particularly cynical move, Mr. Boehner and his new team have exempted the repeal bill from their own rule that any increase in spending be offset by cuts in other programs.
Many individuals and businesses are already benefiting from reform, and they will benefit even more once it goes into full effect in 2014.
Thanks to reform, it is now illegal for insurance companies to deny children coverage because they have pre-existing medical conditions, or to rescind a policy after a person becomes sick, or to cap the amount that insurers will pay for medical care over a lifetime. After 2014, it will be illegal for insurers to set annual limits on the amount they will pay for medical care or deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions.
Young people are now allowed to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26. And insurers are now required to cover preventive care in new policies without cost-sharing, and to spend at least 80 percent of their premium income on medical care and quality improvements, not profits or administrative costs. Repeal would eliminate all of these new protections.
Repeal would also eliminate federal tax credits that are helping small businesses provide coverage to employees as well as a reinsurance program that is helping more than 4,700 employers, large and small, provide health coverage to early retirees.
Republicans are getting considerable traction with their claims that the reform law will drive up the price of insurance, and some are blaming the law for recent premium increases primarily caused by medical inflation. Once again, the official analysts and other experts disagree.
In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that repeal would cause premiums for coverage obtained through large employers to rise by a bit in future years, while premiums at small employers, on average, would be little affected. Projected premiums for people who buy their own policies would come down somewhat with repeal, mostly because the policies would provide skimpier coverage than required under reform. Many people in this group would end up paying more out of their own pockets for health insurance, because they would not get the subsidies provided under the reform law.
Until now, the Republicans have dominated this debate with scare tactics and posturing. Democratic political leaders say they are finally ready to mount a vigorous campaign arguing the case for reform. They should be prepared for a long fight.
Tree of Failure DAVID BROOKS NYTimes
President Obama gave a wonderful speech in Tucson on Wednesday night. He didn’t try to explain the rampage that occurred there. Instead, he used the occasion as a national Sabbath — as a chance to step out of the torrent of events and reflect. He did it with an uplifting spirit. He not only expressed the country’s sense of loss but also celebrated the lives of the victims and the possibility for renewal.
Of course, even a great speech won’t usher in a period of civility. Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary. Meanwhile, those who are inclined to intellectual thuggery and partisan one-sidedness will temporarily resolve to do better but then slip back to old habits the next time their pride feels threatened.
Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.
Every sensible person involved in politics and public life knows that their work is laced with failure. Every column, every speech, every piece of legislation and every executive decision has its own humiliating shortcomings. There are always arguments you should have made better, implications you should have anticipated, other points of view you should have taken on board.
Moreover, even if you are at your best, your efforts will still be laced with failure. The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend.
But every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward.
Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in succession they make the social organism better.
As a result, every sensible person feels a sense of gratitude for this process. We all get to live lives better than we deserve because our individual shortcomings are transmuted into communal improvement. We find meaning — and can only find meaning — in the role we play in that larger social enterprise.
So this is where civility comes from — from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.
The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves. The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters. They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves. They admired George Washington because of the way he kept himself in check.
But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness. Children are raised amid a chorus of applause. Politics has become less about institutional restraint and more about giving voters whatever they want at that second. Joe DiMaggio didn’t ostentatiously admire his own home runs, but now athletes routinely celebrate themselves as part of the self-branding process.
So, of course, you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth. Of course you get people who prefer monologue to dialogue. Of course you get people who detest politics because it frustrates their ability to get 100 percent of what they want. Of course you get people who gravitate toward the like-minded and loathe their political opponents. They feel no need for balance and correction.
Beneath all the other things that have contributed to polarization and the loss of civility, the most important is this: The roots of modesty have been carved away.
President Obama’s speech in Tucson was a good step, but there will have to be a bipartisan project like comprehensive tax reform to get people conversing again. Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty.
In a famous passage, Reinhold Niebuhr put it best: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. ... Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
Of course, even a great speech won’t usher in a period of civility. Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary. Meanwhile, those who are inclined to intellectual thuggery and partisan one-sidedness will temporarily resolve to do better but then slip back to old habits the next time their pride feels threatened.
Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.
Every sensible person involved in politics and public life knows that their work is laced with failure. Every column, every speech, every piece of legislation and every executive decision has its own humiliating shortcomings. There are always arguments you should have made better, implications you should have anticipated, other points of view you should have taken on board.
Moreover, even if you are at your best, your efforts will still be laced with failure. The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend.
But every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward.
Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in succession they make the social organism better.
As a result, every sensible person feels a sense of gratitude for this process. We all get to live lives better than we deserve because our individual shortcomings are transmuted into communal improvement. We find meaning — and can only find meaning — in the role we play in that larger social enterprise.
So this is where civility comes from — from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.
The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves. The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters. They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves. They admired George Washington because of the way he kept himself in check.
But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness. Children are raised amid a chorus of applause. Politics has become less about institutional restraint and more about giving voters whatever they want at that second. Joe DiMaggio didn’t ostentatiously admire his own home runs, but now athletes routinely celebrate themselves as part of the self-branding process.
So, of course, you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth. Of course you get people who prefer monologue to dialogue. Of course you get people who detest politics because it frustrates their ability to get 100 percent of what they want. Of course you get people who gravitate toward the like-minded and loathe their political opponents. They feel no need for balance and correction.
Beneath all the other things that have contributed to polarization and the loss of civility, the most important is this: The roots of modesty have been carved away.
President Obama’s speech in Tucson was a good step, but there will have to be a bipartisan project like comprehensive tax reform to get people conversing again. Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty.
In a famous passage, Reinhold Niebuhr put it best: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. ... Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
A Tale of Two Moralities PAUL KRUGMAN NYTimes
A Tale of Two MoralitiesBy PAUL KRUGMAN
On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.
But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.
And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
What are the differences I’m talking about?
One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.
Regular readers know which side of that divide I’m on. In future columns I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the right to keep it” crowd. And I’ll also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own efforts.
But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.
In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.
Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.
What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.
Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.
It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.
On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.
But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.
And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
What are the differences I’m talking about?
One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.
Regular readers know which side of that divide I’m on. In future columns I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the right to keep it” crowd. And I’ll also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own efforts.
But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.
In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.
Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.
What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.
Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.
It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.
Friday, January 14, 2011
President Reagan suffered from Alzheimer's while in office
Ronald Reagan was showing signs of Alzheimer’s while still in office, according to his son Ron Reagan.
In his memoir “My Father at 100,” Reagan writes:
“Today we are aware that the psychological and neurological changes associated with Alzheimer’s can be in evidence years, even decades, before identifiable symptoms arise.
The question, then, of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s while in office more of less answers itself.”
Ron Reagan recounts having concerns as far back as 1984.
"Watching the first of his two debates with 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, I began to experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true. At 73, Ronald Reagan would be the oldest president ever reelected...[M]y father now seemed to be giving them legitimate reason for concern.
My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered."
Two years later the president expressed his own concern about his failing memory:
“My father might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be. As far back as August 1986 he had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names.”
Ron Reagan writes that there is “no evidence that my father (or anyone else) was aware of his medical condition while he was in office.”
“Had the diagnosis been made in, say, 1987, would he have stepped down? I believe he would have.”
In 1994, President Reagan revealed to the nation that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But earlier, in 1989, doctors operating on Reagan expressed their belief he was suffering from the degenerative disease.
Ron Reagan writes that in July 1989, his father was thrown off a horse while visiting friends in Mexico. He received medical attention at a hospital in San Diego.
When surgeons opened the president’s skull to relieve pressure they “detected what they took to be probable signs of Alzheimer’s disease.” But no formal diagnosis was given.
Ron Reagan says the doctors gossiped about the likelihood his father was suffering from Alzheimer's.
“I have since learned from a doctor who happened to be interning at the hospital when my father was brought in that surgeons involved in his care, in what my informant characterized as ‘shameful’ behavior, violated my father’s right to medical privacy by subsequently gossiping about his condition.”
President Reagan was taken to the Mayo Clinic the following year, where it was confirmed he was suffering from the disease. He died at the age of 93 in 2004.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.
In his memoir “My Father at 100,” Reagan writes:
“Today we are aware that the psychological and neurological changes associated with Alzheimer’s can be in evidence years, even decades, before identifiable symptoms arise.
The question, then, of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s while in office more of less answers itself.”
Ron Reagan recounts having concerns as far back as 1984.
"Watching the first of his two debates with 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, I began to experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true. At 73, Ronald Reagan would be the oldest president ever reelected...[M]y father now seemed to be giving them legitimate reason for concern.
My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered."
Two years later the president expressed his own concern about his failing memory:
“My father might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be. As far back as August 1986 he had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names.”
Ron Reagan writes that there is “no evidence that my father (or anyone else) was aware of his medical condition while he was in office.”
“Had the diagnosis been made in, say, 1987, would he have stepped down? I believe he would have.”
In 1994, President Reagan revealed to the nation that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But earlier, in 1989, doctors operating on Reagan expressed their belief he was suffering from the degenerative disease.
Ron Reagan writes that in July 1989, his father was thrown off a horse while visiting friends in Mexico. He received medical attention at a hospital in San Diego.
When surgeons opened the president’s skull to relieve pressure they “detected what they took to be probable signs of Alzheimer’s disease.” But no formal diagnosis was given.
Ron Reagan says the doctors gossiped about the likelihood his father was suffering from Alzheimer's.
“I have since learned from a doctor who happened to be interning at the hospital when my father was brought in that surgeons involved in his care, in what my informant characterized as ‘shameful’ behavior, violated my father’s right to medical privacy by subsequently gossiping about his condition.”
President Reagan was taken to the Mayo Clinic the following year, where it was confirmed he was suffering from the disease. He died at the age of 93 in 2004.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Changing The Tone, Or Changing Our Understanding? MEDIA MATTERS updater
Before the full scope of the tragedy at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' (D-AZ) event in Tucson this weekend had been realized, the media were buzzing about what was to be done. The debate quickly landed on issues of tone and violent language and maps with crosshairs and who's to blame and who isn't.
Loud and angry confrontations broke out over whether the tone of our national discourse motivated a lone gunman. Such things are difficult to determine with any sort of accuracy. Regardless, the occasion of a brutal attack on a politician and her constituents is as good a reason as any to reexamine how we discuss politics in America.
It's easy to get wrapped up in your own cynicism, to hear the impassioned calls to curtail the talk radio bomb-throwing and Fox News scare-mongering that for years have provided the background noise to our national discourse, and be utterly and justifiably unsurprised when the volume is instead turned up.
Or you can feel frustrated for harboring the hope that if any good could possibly be leached from a horrific act of violence it would perhaps be that the pundits and partisans might tone it down a bit, and then seeing that hope dashed by the immediate resumption of scathing vitriol.
I can confess to experiencing both of these contradictory emotions in the past week. But after watching President Obama's speech at the memorial service in Tucson and seeing the right-wing reaction to it, it has become clear that calls for changing the tone of our political discourse invariably fail because they place the responsibility on the same hyperpartisan actors who are paid quite well to debase it.
And let's not fool ourselves with the forced symmetry of "both sides do it," which is all too often employed in the media's overriding quest for "balance" at the expense of accuracy. On Monday, the New Yorker's George Packer observed:
In fact, there is no balance -- none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats.
Only one side's activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods.
Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can't stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.
Consider, briefly, Rush Limbaugh, who can make a legitimate claim to being the most influential pundit in America. In response to the pleas for civility that arose in the aftermath of the shooting, Limbaugh went on a deliberate crusade to make AM radio as ugly as possible.
He said the alleged shooter has the support of the Democratic Party, intimated that the health care reform bill was intended to foment violence of the sort we saw in Arizona, brashly declared "we don't need to heal," and attacked the president for delivering hopeful news about Rep. Giffords' recovery.
Sentiments such as these are ineffably crass and are antithetical to calls for "more civility" -- but what else should we expect from Rush Limbaugh? As if to reaffirm that his existence is dedicated to poisoning public dialogue, he even revisited this week one of his low watermarks from years past, defending his attacks on Michael J. Fox's struggle with Parkinson's Disease.
So no, we can not expect right-wing pundits to police their own rhetoric. But if the punditry won't change on its own, what's to be done? The hope lies instead in drawing contrasts and hopefully, by doing so, changing how people come to view political dialogue.
A good example can be found in the right's longstanding efforts to impugn President Obama's patriotism. The idea of "American exceptionalism" has been used as a cudgel against the president since before his election, and it's had some effect -- a poll from late 2009 found that 26 percent of Americans (including 48 percent of Republicans) did not believe that Obama "loves America."
The issue of Obama's patriotic bona fides has promised to be the major talking point of the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Before this week, it was commonplace for conservative pundits and politicians to blithely assert Obama's anti-American leanings and not face any scrutiny for the allegation.
But the shock of Saturday's shootings left America looking to the president for guidance, and his speech urged the country to find solace in the greatness of American strength and decency. That message made the churlish attacks on Obama's patriotism look even pettier and more divorced from reality than they already are. The desperate, false attacks on Obama's speech from his determinedly partisan detractors were aggressively debunked by the mainstream press and even denounced by right-wing bloggers. It was one of those rare moments in politics in which reality scored a crushing defeat over caricature.
That's where the power to affect positive change in the discourse lies. This week America saw the overheated rhetoric of the right for what it is: misleading, incendiary, and false. But the conservative media aren't going to pack up their chalkboards and golden microphones anytime soon, so it's up to the mainstream press to continue being as aggressive in challenging those distortions as the right is in promulgating them.
Of course, it's entirely likely that this moment of clarity will remain just that -- a moment. And it's certainly not encouraging that the media have, to date, been as (if not more) likely to adopt false right-wing narratives as debunk them. But that's no reason to give up hope, and it's certainly no reason to stop telling the truth.
Loud and angry confrontations broke out over whether the tone of our national discourse motivated a lone gunman. Such things are difficult to determine with any sort of accuracy. Regardless, the occasion of a brutal attack on a politician and her constituents is as good a reason as any to reexamine how we discuss politics in America.
It's easy to get wrapped up in your own cynicism, to hear the impassioned calls to curtail the talk radio bomb-throwing and Fox News scare-mongering that for years have provided the background noise to our national discourse, and be utterly and justifiably unsurprised when the volume is instead turned up.
Or you can feel frustrated for harboring the hope that if any good could possibly be leached from a horrific act of violence it would perhaps be that the pundits and partisans might tone it down a bit, and then seeing that hope dashed by the immediate resumption of scathing vitriol.
I can confess to experiencing both of these contradictory emotions in the past week. But after watching President Obama's speech at the memorial service in Tucson and seeing the right-wing reaction to it, it has become clear that calls for changing the tone of our political discourse invariably fail because they place the responsibility on the same hyperpartisan actors who are paid quite well to debase it.
And let's not fool ourselves with the forced symmetry of "both sides do it," which is all too often employed in the media's overriding quest for "balance" at the expense of accuracy. On Monday, the New Yorker's George Packer observed:
In fact, there is no balance -- none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats.
Only one side's activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods.
Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can't stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.
Consider, briefly, Rush Limbaugh, who can make a legitimate claim to being the most influential pundit in America. In response to the pleas for civility that arose in the aftermath of the shooting, Limbaugh went on a deliberate crusade to make AM radio as ugly as possible.
He said the alleged shooter has the support of the Democratic Party, intimated that the health care reform bill was intended to foment violence of the sort we saw in Arizona, brashly declared "we don't need to heal," and attacked the president for delivering hopeful news about Rep. Giffords' recovery.
Sentiments such as these are ineffably crass and are antithetical to calls for "more civility" -- but what else should we expect from Rush Limbaugh? As if to reaffirm that his existence is dedicated to poisoning public dialogue, he even revisited this week one of his low watermarks from years past, defending his attacks on Michael J. Fox's struggle with Parkinson's Disease.
So no, we can not expect right-wing pundits to police their own rhetoric. But if the punditry won't change on its own, what's to be done? The hope lies instead in drawing contrasts and hopefully, by doing so, changing how people come to view political dialogue.
A good example can be found in the right's longstanding efforts to impugn President Obama's patriotism. The idea of "American exceptionalism" has been used as a cudgel against the president since before his election, and it's had some effect -- a poll from late 2009 found that 26 percent of Americans (including 48 percent of Republicans) did not believe that Obama "loves America."
The issue of Obama's patriotic bona fides has promised to be the major talking point of the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Before this week, it was commonplace for conservative pundits and politicians to blithely assert Obama's anti-American leanings and not face any scrutiny for the allegation.
But the shock of Saturday's shootings left America looking to the president for guidance, and his speech urged the country to find solace in the greatness of American strength and decency. That message made the churlish attacks on Obama's patriotism look even pettier and more divorced from reality than they already are. The desperate, false attacks on Obama's speech from his determinedly partisan detractors were aggressively debunked by the mainstream press and even denounced by right-wing bloggers. It was one of those rare moments in politics in which reality scored a crushing defeat over caricature.
That's where the power to affect positive change in the discourse lies. This week America saw the overheated rhetoric of the right for what it is: misleading, incendiary, and false. But the conservative media aren't going to pack up their chalkboards and golden microphones anytime soon, so it's up to the mainstream press to continue being as aggressive in challenging those distortions as the right is in promulgating them.
Of course, it's entirely likely that this moment of clarity will remain just that -- a moment. And it's certainly not encouraging that the media have, to date, been as (if not more) likely to adopt false right-wing narratives as debunk them. But that's no reason to give up hope, and it's certainly no reason to stop telling the truth.
PALIN Made Such A Fool Of Herself
INSIDE THE PALIN BUBBLE: Here's Why The 2012 Republican Front-Runner Just Made Such A Fool Of Herself
Could the contrast have been more stark?
President Obama was, to borrow John Podhoretz's phrase, "pitch perfect" in his speech at the Memorial "service" in Tucson, Arizona. He focused on those whose lives were cut short, those whose lives were shattered, what we might learn from this searing atrocity and why it's important that we do so. The President rose to the moment with dignity and grace.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, chose to respond to the atrocity by proclaiming that she was the victim of a "blood libel," attacked by evil meanies on the television set, when there was no evidence that her actions had anything to do with the actions of the loon who committed the atrocity. Factually true enough, I would say. But who cares? And why bother even mentioning it? It couldn't be less important. It couldn't be more self-absorbed.
All presidents and all presidential candidates (announced and unannounced) live in what Richard Ben Cramer called "the bubble." It's an hermetically sealed environment which allows very few "outsiders" in and goes to great lengths to keep the number of "insiders" to a minimum. This is why such great emphasis is placed on the people around the President (who they are, what they think, what their skill sets are, etc) by the political community as a whole (including political journalists and opinion makers). The insiders "protect" the president from the hundreds and thousands of bothersome people who are clamoring to give him their ideas. The insiders control what the president reads, what he sees, who he sees. They make sure that very few people get inside the bubble for very good reason(s) and for reasons that are sometimes not so pure.
It is what it is. Once you're the president, you go with what you've got: your emotional intelligence, your political intelligence, your ability to think outside the box that the bubble people construct around you. When something terrible happens, the bubble is momentarily shattered and voters get a true glimpse of what the president is all about. Last night's glimpse of President Obama was reassuring.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, made a fool of herself. She didn't rise to the moment, she missed it completely. She used it as an occasion for self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement. She dominated the news cycle until the president spoke. She was, I suspect to her everlasting regret, "part of the story."
One suspects that the principal reason for Mrs. Palin's disastrous performance is that the people who seal her bubble are inexperienced and insular; ignorant of what national politics requires and rather too proud of that ignorance. They gave her very bad advice. That she took it reflects badly on her. It says what George Will and many others have been saying privately and publicly since she was tapped by Senator John McCain to be his running mate: she doesn't have what it takes.
This is not to say that Mrs. Palin is no longer a force in GOP politics or a player in the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination campaign. She has a strong base. In many ways, she remains the candidate of the Republican base, a formidable starting point for anyone who seeks to be the GOP standard-bearer.
But what was made clear in the last 48 hours is that Mrs. Palin will not be elected President of the United States in 2012. Out of nowhere, an atrocity focused attention on two people. The incumbent passed the test. The pretender failed, miserably
Could the contrast have been more stark?
President Obama was, to borrow John Podhoretz's phrase, "pitch perfect" in his speech at the Memorial "service" in Tucson, Arizona. He focused on those whose lives were cut short, those whose lives were shattered, what we might learn from this searing atrocity and why it's important that we do so. The President rose to the moment with dignity and grace.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, chose to respond to the atrocity by proclaiming that she was the victim of a "blood libel," attacked by evil meanies on the television set, when there was no evidence that her actions had anything to do with the actions of the loon who committed the atrocity. Factually true enough, I would say. But who cares? And why bother even mentioning it? It couldn't be less important. It couldn't be more self-absorbed.
All presidents and all presidential candidates (announced and unannounced) live in what Richard Ben Cramer called "the bubble." It's an hermetically sealed environment which allows very few "outsiders" in and goes to great lengths to keep the number of "insiders" to a minimum. This is why such great emphasis is placed on the people around the President (who they are, what they think, what their skill sets are, etc) by the political community as a whole (including political journalists and opinion makers). The insiders "protect" the president from the hundreds and thousands of bothersome people who are clamoring to give him their ideas. The insiders control what the president reads, what he sees, who he sees. They make sure that very few people get inside the bubble for very good reason(s) and for reasons that are sometimes not so pure.
It is what it is. Once you're the president, you go with what you've got: your emotional intelligence, your political intelligence, your ability to think outside the box that the bubble people construct around you. When something terrible happens, the bubble is momentarily shattered and voters get a true glimpse of what the president is all about. Last night's glimpse of President Obama was reassuring.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, made a fool of herself. She didn't rise to the moment, she missed it completely. She used it as an occasion for self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement. She dominated the news cycle until the president spoke. She was, I suspect to her everlasting regret, "part of the story."
One suspects that the principal reason for Mrs. Palin's disastrous performance is that the people who seal her bubble are inexperienced and insular; ignorant of what national politics requires and rather too proud of that ignorance. They gave her very bad advice. That she took it reflects badly on her. It says what George Will and many others have been saying privately and publicly since she was tapped by Senator John McCain to be his running mate: she doesn't have what it takes.
This is not to say that Mrs. Palin is no longer a force in GOP politics or a player in the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination campaign. She has a strong base. In many ways, she remains the candidate of the Republican base, a formidable starting point for anyone who seeks to be the GOP standard-bearer.
But what was made clear in the last 48 hours is that Mrs. Palin will not be elected President of the United States in 2012. Out of nowhere, an atrocity focused attention on two people. The incumbent passed the test. The pretender failed, miserably
GOP Courts Latinos Stung by Immigration Rhetoric
The Republican Party, it seems, has a Latino problem.
Latinos are the fastest-growing population in America - they are estimated to make up 30 percent of the U.S. population by the middle of this century. So for the GOP to remain competitive, the party will need to win over more Latinos, who broke for Democrats by a nearly 2-1 margin in the 2010 elections.
Yet the issue of immigration had made that task enormously difficult. Many in the Republican base vehemently oppose "amnesty" for illegal immigrants, and last year many GOP primaries doubled as contests over which candidate can be most forceful in their opposition to illegal immigration.
A GOP-led effort in Arizona culminated in the controversial immigration legislation known as SB 1070, and Republicans in other states are now seeking to pass similar legislation in their states. The DREAM Act, which would have opened the door to a path to citizenship to many young people who were brought to America as children, was blocked by Senate Republicans at the end of last year. GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa introduced a bill last week to end the practice of birthright citizenship.
The rhetoric coming out of the GOP has alienated many Latinos and, in turn, left Republican leaders fretting about the long-term prospects of their party. In an effort to bridge the divide between Latinos and Republicans, Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and others in the party are holding a conference in Florida this week called the Hispanic Leadership Network.
"This is not about politics, this is about the conservative cause," he said in kicking off the conference, as CNN reports. "And if you look over the horizon over the next 10 to 20 years...without the active involvement of Hispanics, we will not be the governing philosophy of our country."
Bush, who speaks Spanish and is married to a woman born in Mexico, is one of the Republicans to have found favor with Latino voters. Another is his brother George W. Bush, who won more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in the 2004 presidential election and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. (His party has shifted to the right on immigration since then.) It's also important to note the success of Latino Republicans, who won two governorships, a Senate seat and seven House seats in the midterm elections.
Yet many Republicans have an uneasy relationship with Latino voters - as evidenced by the fact that just one of the GOP's likely 2012 presidential candidates accepted an invitation to speak at the conference. That would be former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who, somewhat surprisingly, avoided the proverbial elephant in the room until the end of his speech on Friday. When he did address immigration, he merely echoed the GOP talking point on the issue: the border must be secured before a conversation about immigration reform can begin.
"We need to start the discussion with the notion that the rule of law is a cornerstone tenant of our nation," Pawlenty said.
Republicans like Pawlenty argue that Latinos are naturally conservative and shouldn't get hung up on the issue of immigration.
"When we go to voters in the Latino community, guess what? They want to know about jobs," he told Politico, adding: "Yes, they're concerned about the immigration issue. But to say that's all they care about is not accurate."
Alfonso Aguilar, another conference participant and the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, put it this way to NPR: ""Latinos are inherently conservative: They're socially conservative; they are entrepreneurial; they're pro-business. Immigration ... is that one issue that prevents us from winning the support of Latino voters."
Those Latinos looking for signs that the GOP was moving in what they consider the right direction were heartened by the fact that King, the Iowa Republican pushing the birthright citizenship bill, was kept from the chair of the House Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee in the new Congress. They saw it as a small sign that Republicans are pulling back from some of their most alienating positions on immigration.
But that won't be enough to deal with the larger problem, one that saw Latinos support the Democratic nominee for president in 2006 by a 67 percent - 31 percent margin. Many Republicans worry their party is pushing away Latinos in much the same way they formerly turned off African-Americans, many of whom became alienated from the party over its rhetoric during the civil rights movement.
"Republicans think that they have an image problem but they really actually have a policy problem," University of Southern California professor Manuel Pastor told Bloomberg. "It's hard to convince someone to vote for you when you are threatening to deport their grandmother."
Latinos are the fastest-growing population in America - they are estimated to make up 30 percent of the U.S. population by the middle of this century. So for the GOP to remain competitive, the party will need to win over more Latinos, who broke for Democrats by a nearly 2-1 margin in the 2010 elections.
Yet the issue of immigration had made that task enormously difficult. Many in the Republican base vehemently oppose "amnesty" for illegal immigrants, and last year many GOP primaries doubled as contests over which candidate can be most forceful in their opposition to illegal immigration.
A GOP-led effort in Arizona culminated in the controversial immigration legislation known as SB 1070, and Republicans in other states are now seeking to pass similar legislation in their states. The DREAM Act, which would have opened the door to a path to citizenship to many young people who were brought to America as children, was blocked by Senate Republicans at the end of last year. GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa introduced a bill last week to end the practice of birthright citizenship.
The rhetoric coming out of the GOP has alienated many Latinos and, in turn, left Republican leaders fretting about the long-term prospects of their party. In an effort to bridge the divide between Latinos and Republicans, Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and others in the party are holding a conference in Florida this week called the Hispanic Leadership Network.
"This is not about politics, this is about the conservative cause," he said in kicking off the conference, as CNN reports. "And if you look over the horizon over the next 10 to 20 years...without the active involvement of Hispanics, we will not be the governing philosophy of our country."
Bush, who speaks Spanish and is married to a woman born in Mexico, is one of the Republicans to have found favor with Latino voters. Another is his brother George W. Bush, who won more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in the 2004 presidential election and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. (His party has shifted to the right on immigration since then.) It's also important to note the success of Latino Republicans, who won two governorships, a Senate seat and seven House seats in the midterm elections.
Yet many Republicans have an uneasy relationship with Latino voters - as evidenced by the fact that just one of the GOP's likely 2012 presidential candidates accepted an invitation to speak at the conference. That would be former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who, somewhat surprisingly, avoided the proverbial elephant in the room until the end of his speech on Friday. When he did address immigration, he merely echoed the GOP talking point on the issue: the border must be secured before a conversation about immigration reform can begin.
"We need to start the discussion with the notion that the rule of law is a cornerstone tenant of our nation," Pawlenty said.
Republicans like Pawlenty argue that Latinos are naturally conservative and shouldn't get hung up on the issue of immigration.
"When we go to voters in the Latino community, guess what? They want to know about jobs," he told Politico, adding: "Yes, they're concerned about the immigration issue. But to say that's all they care about is not accurate."
Alfonso Aguilar, another conference participant and the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, put it this way to NPR: ""Latinos are inherently conservative: They're socially conservative; they are entrepreneurial; they're pro-business. Immigration ... is that one issue that prevents us from winning the support of Latino voters."
Those Latinos looking for signs that the GOP was moving in what they consider the right direction were heartened by the fact that King, the Iowa Republican pushing the birthright citizenship bill, was kept from the chair of the House Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee in the new Congress. They saw it as a small sign that Republicans are pulling back from some of their most alienating positions on immigration.
But that won't be enough to deal with the larger problem, one that saw Latinos support the Democratic nominee for president in 2006 by a 67 percent - 31 percent margin. Many Republicans worry their party is pushing away Latinos in much the same way they formerly turned off African-Americans, many of whom became alienated from the party over its rhetoric during the civil rights movement.
"Republicans think that they have an image problem but they really actually have a policy problem," University of Southern California professor Manuel Pastor told Bloomberg. "It's hard to convince someone to vote for you when you are threatening to deport their grandmother."
New Zodiac sign dates: Don't switch horoscopes yet
So, you've spent your whole life happily smug in your star sign. You're a fish! Swimming in two directions! You're intuitive, imaginative, unworldly!
And then today's Web is aflame with the news: You are not a Pisces. You are an Aquarius. Your star sign has been wrong your whole life. All along, you've been a freaking water carrier. This is not cool.
According to Parke Kunkle, a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society, cool or not, it's written in the stars. Star signs were created some 2,000 years ago by tracking where the sun was in the sky each month.
However, the moon's gravitational pull has slowly moved the Earth in its axis, creating about a one-month bump in the stars' alignment, reports the Minnesota Star Tribune. Now, during what we think as the month of Pisces, the sun is actually in the sign of Aries.
The new dates would therefore be:
Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11
Pisces: March 11-April 18
Aries: April 18-May 13
Taurus: May 13-June 21
Gemini: June 21-July 20
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23
Scorpio: Nov. 23-Dec. 17
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20
Is this the dawning of a new age of Aquarius? Well, Kunkle is an astronomer who is not too keen on the practice of astrology.
When asked by telephone if the new star locations now require us all to switch our loyalty to a new sign, he demurred. "I can tell you what the science is, but I'm not going to tell you what your personality is based on the location of things."
Commentators have also responded to the initial article, saying the new location of the earth does not matter. One wrote, "Oh for heaven's sake (oops), how can people with Ph.D.s be so ignorant? Of course astrologers know about precession -- they've known since about 200 BC. Horoscopes always take it into account... Sheesh."
The commentator is correct that this is not new information. Live Science reported on the role of "precession" on astrology in 2007. Precession is the phenomenon of the moon causing the earth to "wobble" on its axis.
Other astrologists say the ancient system was merely a practice used as a helpful hint for diviners. Blogger Jamie on Darkstar Astrology writes, "It is the planets moving across the backdrop of the stars which influence our lives, not the planets moving through imagined 30 degree divisions on a piece of paper."
So all those hapless men and women who rushed out in college to get a scorpion tattooed on their back don't need to now rush to sign up for laser removal.
If you're going to believe that all the people born on your birthday are imbued with certain traits similar to your own in some mystical, ancient manner, you might as well believe it does not matter where the stars are in the sky to begin with. On the flip side, if you've never liked your sign, here's your chance to switch.
Update: Well, strike that, you don't get to switch your sign. At least reader StarJack says so: "The stars are markers that drift, but our main points of reference are not directly the stars.
They are the equinoxes (both spring and vernal) and the solstices which altogether make the four cardinal points of the zodiac which in turn determine the signs.
The stars help us locate those points which define the SIGNS of the Zodiac which remain constant in relation to the equinox point. The CONSTELLATIONS do move about and we take that into consideration when locating planets."
Update take 2: To address a couple issues readers have brought up: the purported "new" sign of Ophiuchus is not a new sign. According to the original constellation chart, Ophiuchus made the list.
People born between Nov. 29-Dec. 17 now fall under the Ophiuchus sign, also known as the Serpent Holder sign (according to Time, you'd therefore be an interpreter of dreams and vivid premonitions and envied by your peers and favored by your father and authority figures).
However, the Babylonians discarded the 13th sign, to make for an even 12 signs two millennia ago. Which brings us to our next point: in case you don't know the O.G. star chart, here's what constellation your sign fell under 2,000 years ago:
Aries: March 21 - April 19
Taurus: April 20 - May 20
Gemini: May 21 - June 20
Cancer: June 21 - July 22
Leo: July 23 - August 22
Virgo: August 23 - September 22
Libra: September 23 - October 22
Scorpio: October 23 - November 21
Sagittarius: November 22 - December 21
Capricorn: December 22 - January 19
Aquarius: January 20 - February 18
Pisces: February 19 - March 20
And if all this talk has put you in need of a horoscope reading, here's the Washington Post daily astrology fix.
Update III:
A big part of the whole debate comes from a divide in the astrological world: tropical vs. sidereal zodiac.
From Eric Francis of Planet Wave writes: "Kunkle is describing what is called the sidereal zodiac: the backdrop of the stars. It's not the zodiac used by most Western astrologers; it's the one used by Vedic astrologers, the kind in India, and a few in our part of the world. Here in the West, we use a zodiac that follows the seasons.
It's called the tropical zodiac. It's based on the position of the Sun's rays and the tropics -- that's why it's called tropical."
And then today's Web is aflame with the news: You are not a Pisces. You are an Aquarius. Your star sign has been wrong your whole life. All along, you've been a freaking water carrier. This is not cool.
According to Parke Kunkle, a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society, cool or not, it's written in the stars. Star signs were created some 2,000 years ago by tracking where the sun was in the sky each month.
However, the moon's gravitational pull has slowly moved the Earth in its axis, creating about a one-month bump in the stars' alignment, reports the Minnesota Star Tribune. Now, during what we think as the month of Pisces, the sun is actually in the sign of Aries.
The new dates would therefore be:
Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11
Pisces: March 11-April 18
Aries: April 18-May 13
Taurus: May 13-June 21
Gemini: June 21-July 20
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23
Scorpio: Nov. 23-Dec. 17
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20
Is this the dawning of a new age of Aquarius? Well, Kunkle is an astronomer who is not too keen on the practice of astrology.
When asked by telephone if the new star locations now require us all to switch our loyalty to a new sign, he demurred. "I can tell you what the science is, but I'm not going to tell you what your personality is based on the location of things."
Commentators have also responded to the initial article, saying the new location of the earth does not matter. One wrote, "Oh for heaven's sake (oops), how can people with Ph.D.s be so ignorant? Of course astrologers know about precession -- they've known since about 200 BC. Horoscopes always take it into account... Sheesh."
The commentator is correct that this is not new information. Live Science reported on the role of "precession" on astrology in 2007. Precession is the phenomenon of the moon causing the earth to "wobble" on its axis.
Other astrologists say the ancient system was merely a practice used as a helpful hint for diviners. Blogger Jamie on Darkstar Astrology writes, "It is the planets moving across the backdrop of the stars which influence our lives, not the planets moving through imagined 30 degree divisions on a piece of paper."
So all those hapless men and women who rushed out in college to get a scorpion tattooed on their back don't need to now rush to sign up for laser removal.
If you're going to believe that all the people born on your birthday are imbued with certain traits similar to your own in some mystical, ancient manner, you might as well believe it does not matter where the stars are in the sky to begin with. On the flip side, if you've never liked your sign, here's your chance to switch.
Update: Well, strike that, you don't get to switch your sign. At least reader StarJack says so: "The stars are markers that drift, but our main points of reference are not directly the stars.
They are the equinoxes (both spring and vernal) and the solstices which altogether make the four cardinal points of the zodiac which in turn determine the signs.
The stars help us locate those points which define the SIGNS of the Zodiac which remain constant in relation to the equinox point. The CONSTELLATIONS do move about and we take that into consideration when locating planets."
Update take 2: To address a couple issues readers have brought up: the purported "new" sign of Ophiuchus is not a new sign. According to the original constellation chart, Ophiuchus made the list.
People born between Nov. 29-Dec. 17 now fall under the Ophiuchus sign, also known as the Serpent Holder sign (according to Time, you'd therefore be an interpreter of dreams and vivid premonitions and envied by your peers and favored by your father and authority figures).
However, the Babylonians discarded the 13th sign, to make for an even 12 signs two millennia ago. Which brings us to our next point: in case you don't know the O.G. star chart, here's what constellation your sign fell under 2,000 years ago:
Aries: March 21 - April 19
Taurus: April 20 - May 20
Gemini: May 21 - June 20
Cancer: June 21 - July 22
Leo: July 23 - August 22
Virgo: August 23 - September 22
Libra: September 23 - October 22
Scorpio: October 23 - November 21
Sagittarius: November 22 - December 21
Capricorn: December 22 - January 19
Aquarius: January 20 - February 18
Pisces: February 19 - March 20
And if all this talk has put you in need of a horoscope reading, here's the Washington Post daily astrology fix.
Update III:
A big part of the whole debate comes from a divide in the astrological world: tropical vs. sidereal zodiac.
From Eric Francis of Planet Wave writes: "Kunkle is describing what is called the sidereal zodiac: the backdrop of the stars. It's not the zodiac used by most Western astrologers; it's the one used by Vedic astrologers, the kind in India, and a few in our part of the world. Here in the West, we use a zodiac that follows the seasons.
It's called the tropical zodiac. It's based on the position of the Sun's rays and the tropics -- that's why it's called tropical."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)