Alan Simpson is playing that old Washington game "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that man behind the tree." The "you" in this case is military contractors and the American wealthy classes. Simpson represents them. The guy behind the tree is the workers of America. The workers are anyone who actually works and pays the FICA tax rather than living on investments and on executive salaries. (Executive salaries and bank fees on large investments in America are vastly more than the economic value the executives or bankers provide, but executives and bankers have the power to demand the unearned levels of payment. That's an issue for another time, though.) Back to the catfood commission and what it says about current politics and federal budgeting.

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Josh Marshall noted the way so many Republicans have become trapped in sexual, financial and other moral scandals and yet survived in politics. Steve Benen picked it up from there.

Republicans, in other words, have demanded higher moral standards of all of us, while failing to meet these standards themselves -- and failing to ostracize the guilty from their ranks.

Like many of us I, too, have found this to be a puzzle. The inherent hypocrisy seems to permeate the Republican Party and they think nothing of it. It occurs to me that the explanation for this strange behavior was provided by Sidney Blumenthal in his recent book, "Republican Gomorrah."

Sidney focuses on the way the evangelicals use individual's failures and sins to recruit them into the organization and then bind them there. James Dobson is an egregious example of those who use the technique, while the alcoholic George W. Bush is an example of how it works. Starting with the particular well-known case of Bush 43, let's look at this.

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The unexplained explosion that destroyed the British Petroleum off-shore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico is much worse that was reported even yesterday. The new leaks that have been learned of make this spill even worse the the Exxon Valdez - already. How much worse is not known yet. Remember, the Exxon Valdez was limited to the amount of oil in one super tanker. This spill comes directly from the geological oil pool underground, so no one can predict how much worse that the Exxon Valdez this is going to get.

Why is this oil spill so bad?

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The SEC lawsuit against Goldman Sachs is not all that complicated. The SEC is alleging that G/S worked with an investor, John Paulson, to design Collateral Debt Obligations (CDO's) that were designed to fail. Paulson then bought derivitaves on those CDOs that paid large sums if the CDOs failed. Goldman Sachs then went out and sold investors the CDOs telling them that the CDOs were solid, safe investments. The allegation made by the SEC is that Goldman Sachs committed fraud by failing to inform the investors that the individual who was betting the CDO's would fail had also selected many of the mortgages that were included in the CDO.

Here from Business Week.is a very readable explanation: 

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The national American media has changed, and it has changed American politics drastically. The Republicans, as the minority and less popular party, has adapted and changed along with the media. The Democrats, as the more popular party for most of the time since WW II, has just assumed they will stay the majority party. As the recent three decades have proven, that simply is not true.  The most important effect of the changes are that American politics have become national rather than an alliance of state parties battling for control of the various states, then meeting at a convention every four years to decide how to run the nation.

The states remain important, but now we have a unified and disciplined national Republican Party facing a disorganized and fractious Democratic Party and scrapping it out for control of the nation.  The Democrats are meeting this challenge blindly with no understanding of what is happening and no effective national leadership.

The Republicans failed spectacularly over the most recent decade and  a half, yet they seem to be recovering even as they offer the same failed nostrums. They are coming back in the face of Democratic Party weakness, not on the basis of Republican Party strength. They are offering leadership when the nation is demanding it. The Democrats do not offer anything like it. What has happened to American national politics? 

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Who cares about the Jay Leno - Conan O'Brien - NBC fiasco?

Let's just say that if it really matters to you it's time to get a life. But it's a symptom of a major cultural change that America is going through. It's not just a political argument between NBC, Leno and O'Brien. It's another step in the collapse of broadcast TV. Look at what has happened recently Writer's strike. Reality shows. Decline in quality scripted shows. Switch to the clearly inferior HD TV. There seems to be a sharp decline in total advertising revenue for broadcast TV. Broadcast TV is going the way of daily newspapers.

First though, consider the NBC - late night TV crisis from the Chinese point of view.

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Initially it was Saudis who attacked us nine years ago

This is a quote from dickday's blog "Butt Sects". My response got too long to just be a comment, so I am going to blog it separately.

Why was that the Saudis attacked America nine years ago? Because muslims are crazy? Shit. Forget that idiocy.

It was because a century ago the British and the Americans wanted the oil sitting under the sands of the Arabian desert, so they created the government of Saudi Arabia as a kingdom and gave it to the family of Saud who promptly got rich and oppressed the other 90% of the Bedouins there in the peninsula. The oil companies are proud of this operation.

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Time Magazine has chosen Ben Bernanke to be its "Man of the Year" this year. Frank Rich of the New York Times disagrees.. Rich is on to something, I think. Tiger is more representative of what America has become over the last half century than Ben Bernanke is. We live in a new, media-created America that has gotten out of control.

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Stan Greenberg, James Carville & Karl Agne conducted some very interesting focus group studies with groups of conservatives and independents. This is the Executive Summary of their report of findings:

The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, according to focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps. These base Republican voters dislike Barak Obama to be sure - which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush - but these voters identify themselves as part of a 'mocked' minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. They overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country's founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail

A major conclusion they drew from this study is that the press is focused on racist explanations for the voter's beliefs, but there are indications that racism is not the main driver of conservative attitudes and behavior. What they did find, though, is that conservative beliefs are very different from those of even the more conservative independents.

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There have been a lot of people who have questioned why, after only nine months in office, Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. No sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, making this a very unusual decision. Why did the Nobel Foundation make their surprising decision? Equally puzzling is why did the Republicans have reacted in such an extremely partisan way to that decision?

The answer to those puzzles is becoming clear. Consider first why Obama deserves the award, then what the reaction of the American right wing to the award shows about them. Finally, consider what the award of the Peace Prize to Obama has done to advance the cause of world peace.

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I really don't want to see universal care with regulation on insurance companies lost to a battle over the public option. Once universal health care is in place the public option can be fought over by itself. It's much smaller as an issue and not as easy to defeat by itself. Once true universal care is in place the real issue shifts to paying for it and controlling health care costs. We are very close to that right now. Is it reasonable to think that the public option could be traded off (for now) to get the rest?

The key is to get universal health coverage and community health pools. Add to that provisions that do not permit insurance companies to reject any applicant, or to increase the premiums for health condition or anything else. Add some effective form of regulation and monitoring that keeps close track of these things.

Once those things are in place they will begin to eliminate a lot of hospital cost-shifting that currently is needed because they provide care to the uninsured. Medically caused bankruptcies should also drop greatly.

A universal standard process for getting reimbursed would lower administrative costs to an amazing degree, both for health care providers and for the insurance companies, and it would aid in monitoring the effectiveness of the system. It would highlight the problems.

I'd also like to see a unified standard procedure and system for appealing denial of coverage. As it is, the insurance companies decide not to cover a procedure, then deal with the appeal themselves. The system for the appeal is different for every company and no one really knows what the decision is based on. That appeal process should be taken away from the insurance companies and standardized. It would fit in with the medical effectiveness studies.

Most of the advantages of size that allows one plan to currently dominate a region would also disappear, especially with a single standard system for getting reimbursed. So competitors could more easily take on the big regional monopolist health care companies.

The Medical effectiveness studies would put pressures on the pharmaceutical companies to sell medications that were more useful, not just me-too drugs that were patented and high priced. The practice recommendations would also quickly become a legal defense for physicians in malpractice claims. How does a lawyer justify a malpractice claim when the medical effectiveness studies suggest the treatment used? And if the physician deviated from the recommended treatment, careful documentation of the reasons for the deviation along with consultation would be a similar defense. Frankly more consultation would improve our health care a lot. Lawyers wouldn't take those cases on contingency, since they would be quite expensive and not likely to pay back anything. Right there the biggest cause of truly frivolous malpractice claims would be eliminated.

I'd like to see the government option as it would lower costs even more and more quickly. But with the above items included in a health care plan we could quickly get to a level of care similar to what the Swiss have.

After getting universal coverage we can focus on lowering cost. Politically that is less important than universal coverage, and probably easier to deal with.

Such a trade off is clearly dissatisfying considering how rotten the Republicans acted when in control of the federal government, but that's what governance is all about. Do the right thing, not the satisfying one. But do something. The Republicans failed when trying to govern because their first choice is always to do nothing, then try to force their agenda on the population, and finally to milk the government for as much money as they can. Health care is a massive and long-term problem both for the population and for the budget. Good governance demands that something be done, and not much has happened for over six decades. 

Something has to be done, and I think the core of that something is universal coverage and consolidated risk pools the insurance companies can't manipulate to skim the health individuals and abandon the rest. along with those community risk pools goes a single standard premium for everyone and a government agency to enforce those things and report to the people what is happening.  

I have long wondered at the apparent political shift that occurred during the twentieth century in which the conservative reactionary national Democratic Party battling the Progressive Republican Party each switched ideological identities. It's frankly puzzling. I'm no historian, so I am going to try to present a layman's view of what I think happened. It seems to revolve around the failure if the otherwise Progressive Republicans to deal with the Great Depression they created by ideologically based failure to use government to either prevent or cure the Great Depression which put the Democratic Party into power nationally until 1994.

The Republican Party of the early twentieth century was controlled by liberal Progressives, but part of older liberalism was the free market ideology.  The Progressive Republicans  were taken over by Wall Street, and Wall Street drove the total free market  ideology which both created the Great Depression and intensified it. That was what discredited the Republicans nationally and put the Democratic Party into power.  They essentially remained there until 1994. The Democratic leaders led  recovery from the Great Depression and then led the U.S. to win WW II. This set an all new set  of more realistic leaders into national office who were willing to use government to prevent economic disasters and to win wars.  The free market anti-government ideology was completely discredited with most of the crop of FDR era WW II leaders in both parties. Both parties took a largely pro-government Progressive public image.

One large element of that progressive message was that segregation was clearly not practical nor was it humane. The same leaders who came in on a message of using government to resolve the Depression and win WW II also took the realistic position that segregation had to end. Truman (not a flaming liberal, but a very practical man) integrated the military because he could. The Supreme Court recognized the impracticality and the Constitutional inconsistency of legal segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement grew. The practical Democratic leaders in office joined with the progressive Republicans to end segregation. After nearly two decades of internal battling over Civil Rights, the pro-Integration Democrats under LBJ were able to get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act passed. The Republicans, as the minority party then, acted as the opposition always does on major national issues when there is no clear outside enemy or threat.  They voted lockstep against the civil rights legislation.

The ideological shift between the two parties was almost complete, except that the solid Democratic South was firmly against Integration while the national Democratic Party and the Progressive Republicans favored it.  This was a real threat to the  Democratic Party  relative lock on national majority party status.  That's the first point to consider. The second is that  the apparent ideological homogeneity of the two  national parties we see today is quite new. It is largely a function of the ability of national TV to elect candidates.

Taking that second point first, let's look at American national politics and political parties.  Political parties in America  are not innately ideologically homogeneous. They tend to be made to look that way nationally, the power of TV to elect candidates to office.  The demand for ideological consistency nationally  is a development since the 1960 Presidential election when Nixon, to his great surprise, narrowly lost because of his poor performance in the Presidential debate. Since then the parties have been made to look more ideologically  homogeneous. It makes a better brand to sell to the public. Bill Buckley recognized this and pushed for an ideologically pure party in the National Review.

The current image of ideological homogeneity is a media creation to try to attract followers and funds, and the political leaders have spend the last five decades trying to manipulate their party to match the media image. That  manipulation by the party leaders  is an effort to  try to win favor with enough voters to gain or build power for the party. This is not an innate characteristic of a political party. It is something the top politicians and the party  leadership shape the party structure to be because it helps them get elected in the TV age.  It is their TV political brand name to be identified and used to attract voters.  Think about the structure and purposes of political parties.  

American national politics is structured around the government, with political leaders attempting to attract sufficient voting followers to gain power. Those leaders organize political party institutions to organized blocs of voters and get them to the polls. People who want the government to act for them organize into blocs to put politicians forward to achieve the government actions they want. Those politicians communicate with and direct the voting actions of those blocs through organizations such as churches, businesses, unions, clubs, etc.,  and since WW II, the politicians have also communicated directly with the voters through the mass media. The power of the media becomes greater as voting day gets nearer, but the older methods of voter organization still exist.

So what you have is voters and  public passions on one side, Party leaders and top party officials on the other, and the two are connected by the creation of party organizations.  Those party organizations are creations of and reflections of what those politicians think will get them elected.  The purpose of the party is to coordinate all the various ways politicians connect with voters and get them to vote for them.

The process of organizing public groups into voting blocs is played out inside organizations (churches, unions, big businesses, and others) and other media channels. When the time comes down towards the election the mass media become the key media channels, so that the elections themselves are played out most visibly in a mass media landscape. It's that mass media landscape that we are most familiar with because it is the most broadly visible. It is the political leaders and the party structures they create that coordinates all of the communications between politicians and voters other than direct personal contacts that occasionally occur. If the question is "why did the two political parties switch ideologies during the twentieth century ?", then the answer is that the switch was a series of steps, each taken by the party leaders, in order to win the next election.  The political party is the key tool used by the existing political leaders to work for reelection and expand their power over government.

Earlier I stopped the narrative to look at the structure of political parties. When I stopped, the Democrats had been the dominant national political party since the Depression and they had developed a crop of experienced realistic leaders who, along with using government to control the vagaries of the economy, also took the progressive steps to resolve America's largest and longest lasting social problem, Race.  This put the Democratic Party out of step with the Old South,  which had been the single most reliable bloc of national Democratic votes. The crop of Depression and WW II  era leaders were running out. Goldwater showed the first real national effort to replace the relatively progressive national leadership. The Goldwater movement failed, but then LBJ gave away the solid South, and as we now know, he knew what he was doing when it did it.

Nixon (another of the WW II era leaders, but always an outsider) took advantage of the Democratic weakness in the South with his "Southern Strategy." Nixon's resignation set up the situation for Jimmy Carter to come out of nowhere and take the Democratic nomination in a year that was going to be a dead-certain Democratic win, but Jimmy Carter thought like an engineer, not a politician. That set up the situation for Reagan - the conservative  candidate made for TV - to come out of the West and take the Presidency from the Democrats. I am told that Carter did not believe in Party Politics, and I believe it. The Conservative Republican Party machine ran over him, and he had done nothing to build the Democratic Party to deal with such opposition. Carter was an Engineer by training, not a politician. Thinking like an engineer, Carter solved problems and ignored the political power situation those problems existed in.  Where a politician would have strengthened the party for the Presidential battle, Carter solved problems in many ways that weakened the party (the Panama Canal giveaway, for example. That was handled in a totally non-political manner.)

Nixon's Southern Strategy solidified the identity of the Republican Party as the States Rights anti-integration party. The States Rights anti-government message worked well along with the Wall Street Republicans.  Nixon's Southern Strategy solidified the identity of the Republican Party as the States Rights anti-integration party, and the demand by Bill Buckley and his National Review conservatives to create an ideologically unified party worked to drive all the progressives in politics towards the Democrats. The political power of the TV media solidified the new ideological image. The constant demand by Bill Buckley and his National Review conservatives to create an ideologically unified party worked to drive all the progressives in politics out of the Republican Party structure and towards the Democrats.  

Nixon and Reagan were the last of the real WW II era Presidents.  Both were outsiders and represented a rebellion against the more progressive leadership of the Greatest Generation. Bush 41 was made a national politician by Nixon based on his blue-blood Republican credentials, and then was made President because Reagan could not run for reelection. That was the  transition to the younger generation. They were all a reaction to the progressive imposition of Civil Rights legislation on the nation along with the development of TV as a key element of winning national elections.

Unfortunately, the conservative movement that grew up to exploit TV images for political use carried with it a toxic ideology as its political brand. That toxic ideology carried the anti-modernist idea that unrestrained free markets could work and that government could not. The demand that slavish adherence to the Republican TV brand should control every action the party takes created a group of party politicians and leaders unable to govern a modern industrial nation. It has taken the multiple disasters  of the Bush 43 administration to prove to a majority of the voting public that the conservative ideology simply does not work.

The Republican anti-government message and behavior, reminiscent of Hoover's reaction to the Depression and again demonstrated in the failed reaction to Katrina, totally unsuits them to run a national government of a modern industrial nation. The Republican Party as it is currently organized and under the "conservative" marketing brand has been largely discredited to much of the public now.

I think this explains the reversal of ideology between the Republicans and the Democrats. The three key elements were the ideology-based failure of the Republicans to deal with the economy adequately after WW I, then the decision by the government leaders of the Greatest Generation to deal with the Civil Rights issue in a progressive manner. The backlash to LBJ's Civil Rights legislation lost the Old South to the Democrats and allowed the Republicans to for a while become the dominant national party, but the demand for ideological purity in the party to maintain the TV brand has made the Republicans unfit to govern.

Anyway, that's my best guess at the moment.

My next question is what happens to the two parties next. With the TV mandated conservative brand the Republicans may be left in the permanent minority as a national party. Can they elect new leaders without that toxic ideology? Bush proved that they cannot govern within the anti-government framework, but the constraints of the ideology means they cannot budget or govern effectively when facing real problems. (They do quite well at making up problems for TV and solving them using the ideology those problems were designed for.)  

On the other side of the isle, can the Democrats govern effectively long enough to dispel the notion that the problem is the government itself, and not the conservative ideology? The American Constitution creates a national government in which a significant minority can block all significant action on important issues.Will the Democrats handle that somehow?

 

 

 

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Why are conservatives acting so crazily these days? They are focused on preventing social change and they will do what it takes to achieve that outcome.

Conservatives dislike change because they are socialized to hate and avoid social change. This is the pre-modern way of thinking, and it still applies to most individuals and many complete cultures and subcultures. Conservatives belong to a subculture that values stability and tradition above rationality and change. Tradition and social stability are the most important things in their lives. Yet as is very clear, our society is undergoing rapid technological and economic change that affects everyone. Conservatives just want to stop that change any way possible, and they are looking for someone besides themselves to blame.

Their core values are rooted in tradition and religion. Cultural values like this are what each of us learn as we grow up, and it tells us what is right and wrong. They accept that tradition and social stability are right and good. They know deep down that change and people who advocate change are bad. Facts and rational thought processes are valued much less important than tradition, so when someone describes a social problem and proposes social changes they automatically recoil in fear and reject it. They 'know' in their hearts that such change is dangerous and wrong.

It is this mindset that makes conservatives focus on what they want to happen and to ignore the process of getting to that outcome. The outcome is what they value, and the rational process of getting to an outcome is not valued. In fact if the rational process prevents achieving the desired out, then the process will be rejected. In our liberal society the Constitution declares that using torture is an unacceptable way to get others to do what we demand, but if the conservatives want recalcitrant enemies to comply with their demands, then the demand for compliance means that the limitations on getting there will be rejected. There is no real use arguing rationally that torture is ineffective. The conservatives will use any means to get what they want.

Here are the steps that conservatives take that lead to irrational or crazy behavior.

(1) They know what they want society to do, and they look around for arguments that will get people to do it. The basis for their certainty of what is right is traditional authority. It is taught by family, religion and by the subculture they live and work in.
(2) Sometimes what they want to do has no rational argument that supports it. The outcome they want is what's important, though, so they still need to find a way to get it.
(3) Without facts and reason to base an action on, they find a lie to convince others. Remember, they know from traditional authority that what they want is best. In our modern media, only the lie is transmitted. There is no fact-checking unless it is so egregious as to be worth the effort.
(4) When fact-checking does occur and they are caught lying, they resort to every trick pulled by an addict or alcoholic to avoid or deflect blame.

Conservative thought processes and addictive thought are similar. Both are outcome oriented. The only thing that matters is that the result or outcome is satisfying, and if the rational steps to get to the outcome prevent the desired outcome from occurring, the steps to get to the outcome must be changed. That means convincing others to do things that achieve what the conservative or addict wants. Lies are as good as logic as long as the result is the desired result.

NobelCommentDecider presented a list of excuses that conservatives use when caught lying. Notice how similar it is to the excuses an addict or alcoholic uses when caught using.
(1) Democrats do it too
(2) whatever it is it isn't their fault, or George W.'s
(3) you just don't like free speech
(4) it's a slippery slope to taking their guns
(5) or Lalo35adm-'you say people are stupid just because they disagree'

Extreme behavior and lies to achieve a desired outcome is not universal among conservatives, although they all know in their hearts that change is inherently wrong. Some conservatives are, however, more prone to extreme behavior. The more extreme conservatives will say and do almost anything to defend against change. The less extreme conservatives will defend those who are speaking and acting for them. The result is that they all support the extremists.

Some commenters who have heard the crazy statements from Republicans who are fighting against health care reform have asked "Are they living in a different universe?" They are asking the right question. The fact is they are living in a pre-modern culture and they'll say anything to keep it.

[This analysis is based on Max Weber's description of traditional and modern culture. It is well-known in Sociology and in Organization Theory.]

Gen. David McKiernan was fired as American commander in Afghanistan and replaced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This is the first U.S. commander fired during war time since Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War. It was so far out of the ordinary way of treating American Generals during combat that eyebrows rose all over the place. What the Hell happened? Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post now explains.

In mid-March, as a White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan was nearing completion, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in a secure Pentagon room for their fortnightly video conference with Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Kabul.

There was no formal agenda. McKiernan, a silver-haired former armor officer, began with a brief battlefield update. Then Gates and Mullen began asking about reconstruction and counternarcotics operations. To Mullen, they were straightforward, relevant queries, but he thought McKiernan fumbled them.

Gates and Mullen had been having doubts about McKiernan since the beginning of the year. They regarded him as too languid, too old-school and too removed from Washington. He lacked the charisma and political savvy that Gen. David H. Petraeus brought to the Iraq war.

McKiernan's answers that day were the tipping point for Mullen. Soon after, he discussed the matter with Gates, who had come to the same conclusion.

Mullen traveled to Kabul in April to confront McKiernan. The chairman hoped the commander would opt to save face and retire, but he refused. Not only had he not disobeyed orders, he believed he was doing what Gates and Mullen wanted.

You're going to have to fire me, he told Mullen.

Two weeks later, Gates did. It was the first sacking of a wartime theater commander since President Harry S. Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for opposing his Korean War policy.

The humiliating removal of a four-star general for being too conventional reveals the ferocious intensity Gates and Mullen share over a growing war that will soon enter its ninth year. It also demonstrates their zeal to respond to President Obama's demand for rapid success in a place where foreign armies have failed for centuries.

McKiernan is an old school American general. You don't get more hard corps old line American than being an Armor Commander. Armor, Artillery and to a lesser extent, tactical air (close air support), are the epitome of conventional war.

What's so old line about being an Armor General? That's a logistics war, big army against big army. The commander who can bring the greatest numbers against the weak point of the enemy normally wins. And what are "the greatest numbers?"

The numbers that matter in conventional war are rounds of ammunition and tons of ordnance. A conventional commander coordinates the firepower of more weapons on the battlefield to greater effect than does the commander of the enemy forces. The ultimate weapon in conventional war is a nuclear weapon. The most important resources for the winning commander come from either the largest economy or the greatest population. The commander's most important skills are coordinating the use of these resources - logistics.

How do you defeat the army that posses an essentially unlimited number of rounds of ammunition and ordinance to drop on you? The Chinese tried overwhelming numbers of troops, which works as long as the opponent isn't losing so badly they resort to nuclear weapons and you have enough troops. Since many of the Chinese troops used in Korea were previously Kuo Ming Tang troops and as such politically unreliable, they were expendable and available. But human wave attacks were not the best solution. A few years after Korea, the Algerians adapted Leninist guerrilla techniques and applied what is now called asymmetric warfare against the French. You don't offer the dominating power an army for a target. The new strategy was effective. Algeria is no longer French dominated even though the French had both the police forces and the conventional army with the conventional power. The asymmetric warfare technique migrated to South Vietnam and defeated the U.S. military also.

Asymmetric warfare was a logical solution when the occupation following American conventional invasion of Iraq was so badly screwed up by the American conservatives from the Heritage Foundation and the Bush administration who sent them there. The attempt to impress a foreign political ideology will always fail with it does not match the existing culture the ideologues attempt to impress it on. Such an effort creates a perfect ground for asymmetric warfare. So how does it work?

Instead a conventional army, you place highly skilled and very political cadres into the population and convince the population that the conventional forces and police of the government are their enemy. That is done in several ways. First, make promises that, given power, the cadre will focus on and provide for the needs of the population. Whatever can be done to back these promises up makes them more credible, so the cadres have humanitarian needs organizations - with political brands. This is easier when the government has no similar humanitarian efforts.

Second, conduct guerrilla operations against the enemy military and police that cause them to attack the population as the source of those operations. The extreme version of this is terrorist operations in which the attackers are prepared to and plan to die in the attacks. The most effective of these cause a massive counter reaction by conventional forces against the general population. Such efforts also create martyrs who have died to benefit the population. "Collateral damage" of innocent civilians is inherently a loss on the battlefield. It really helps the insurgents when the government is inherently corrupt, since the population will always recognize this and act to reject it. How do you think the Iraqi population reacted to the corruption of Blackwater and Halliburton? Was there any doubt that these organizations represented the Bush administration? Since the conservative American philosophy of individualism with no government regulation encourages such corruption, the Conservative philosophy creates its own enemies.

Afghanistan is a political war. Where is the effective conventional warfare counter for these asymmetric techniques? Conventional warfare has only one solution to asymmetric warfare techniques - destroy every last member of the cadre of insurgents, and if they keep being recreated from the population (as they will be), conduct genocide on the population. This has been the Soviet reaction in Chechnya. It hasn't worked very well there, and with the most modern forms of journalism, works even less well. The media has become a major theater in such wars now. That's because the battleground is the minds of the population involved.The actual geography being fought over is now little more than a stage on which the real battle is played out for the minds of the onlookers.

LtC. John A. Nagl in his superb book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam describes the traditional U.S. military conventional war culture beautifully. It is a culture that permeates both the military forces and, more important, the American political culture. You can tell that Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Chrystal are violating it because they are accused of being "political generals." The American culture of war fighting looks down on "political generals", but that is the essence of fighting an asymmetric war successfully.

In the American political culture, Americans fight wars against other armies. When America is at peace, the military is subordinate to the political leaders, but when America is at war, the military leaders determine how the war will be fought. That includes the political effects, because modern wars are total wars in which both the military and the civilians are combatants. Let's not forget that both WW I and WW II were won in large part because the American economy was nationalized and directed by the government planners. That's the definition of total war. In total war, there is no essential difference between the civilian sector and the military sector. America fights modern wars in which scientific logic based on observable facts dominates the actions taken by both armies and civilians. West Point was created in 1803 and run by the Army Corps of Engineers to create an officer corps dominated by scientific thinking rather than the traditional thinking of European armies. West Point succeeded. It has been a major element in creating modern America.

By the way, buy a copy of colonel Nagl's book. Most intelligent and promotable U.S. officers already have.

As a company grade officer during the Vietnam War, I read Mao's writings on how to fight a war. His techniques were inherently political. They started with a dedicated political cadre and worked up to a conventional army, but only as each stage before it succeeded. Let me say it again. The stages were inherently political, not military. As one who firmly believed in logistics and the idea that the biggest battalions win, I was hard to convince. But I was thinking on the wrong battlefield. The conventional war battlefield is just that - armies, trenches and ordnance. The modern battlefield is men's minds. Thomas Kuhn would describe this as a paradigm shift. George Lakoff would describe it as "reframing the issue." Both are correct. But who would have thought that shifting the paradigm or reframing the issue would determine who might win a war? But it does.

Gen. David McKiernan was not able to make the shift or reframe the issue. That became obvious to Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen. The fact that McKiernan was unsuited to win that war was demonstrated by his refusal to accept a face-saving way out of his command. Afghanistan is simply not a war suitable for an armor general who sees war as a challenge for an engineer or logistician. It is a war for a politician.

I don't blame McKiernan. I don't trust political generals, either. I was a logistician. That's my generation. McKiernan was one of our very best. But then, so was General Westmoreland in Vietnam. Let's not forget that we didn't win that one, either.

Hey! Someone in the media has figured out the <i>real</i> significance of the Cambridge, Mass arrest of Professor Gates in his own home and why it matters to President Barack Obama.  That someone is Frank Rich  writing in the New York Times. ("http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/opinion/02rich.html?_r=2")
The answer is: it doesn't matter to the President in his role as President at all. But the media would rather run a story about Race than one about health care. That demonstrates that the news media system has failed to meet the needs of the American public as thoroughly as has the American health care lack-of-system. Wonder why?

Race is safe, sexy and increases viewers or readers for the media at a time when newer and less well-developed issues offer only the danger of feeding conflict. That conflict is more likely to lose readers/viewers than to increase them.  The media does not work to cover news. It works to increase media revenue and satisfy Wall Street.

So the editors emphasize the peripherally race-related issue the arrest of Professor Gates in his own home than the much more important policy debate about health care. The policy debate on health care is frankly boring.  Besides, the media has evolved now to cover race. Race has been a key American media topic since World War II, so the dangers to media revenue of covering it are well known. The newer and generally more contentious issue of national health care financing is a subject with unknown revenue risks at a time when the media is strapped for revenue. In addition, the media has few reporters or editors who understand government or policy well enough to write about it generally. They have even fewer people capable of understanding the issues involved in the disaster that is the current health care lack-of-system together with the parasites who use fear of illness and the lack of easy access to health care to get rich. But the biggest problem is that covering the true issues in the national health care financing debate will not increase media revenue at a time when the reliable revenue streams for TV and Newspaper organizations are under heavy attack by competitors.

That's not all. There is also the problem of failed journalistic standards. Whether these failed standards are a cause or a result of the general revenue stream problems for the media is not clear. But the fact is that the standard method of reporting political conflicts does not tell the public what they need to know about the issues. Here's what journalists today do. The sacred and unquestionable journalistic orthodoxy is that there are two and only two reportable sides to a political policy debate. Both sides are of equal importance, the job of the media is simply to give equal weight to each of the two sides. It is up to the readers to determine which of the two sides is accurate or more meaningful. The journalistic community rarely reports anything that would provide readers or reviewers some standards with which they could measure the relative importance of the two sides. The journalistic substitute for reporting on the standards the readers or viewers could use to evaluate the news is to get biased pundits to offer their opinions in a "he said - he said" conflict that is likely to increase ratings but provides no real information.

Finally, the media is supposed to cover only the political and entertainment aspects, never the boring policy aspects themselves and the reasons why the policy itself matters is irrelevant to the media buying public. The only thing that matters is what draws ratings that can be sold to the media advertisers.

The result is that the media generally tells the public little comprehensible about the health care debate since most of the people on both sides of the debate are already locked into fixed positions and do not appreciate it when the media actually tried to inform them of the real facts.

The real matter of importance to the American public right now is the extended health care crisis which the forces of status quo do not want corrected. The media itself is facing its own crisis of relevancy which this health care debate highlights. Both the big city newspapers and the TV networks have been centralizing and building local monopoly positions within larger national near monopolies for the last five decades as they have fought to make more money and show up well to Wall Street.

The technological challenges of removing the sunk cost of news distribution has knocked the pins from under the traditional model of news gathering, bundling and distribution as the Internet has replaced the need for local department story and classified advertisements and for the daily distribution of the news on dead trees or over limited TV air time at a few selected times of day.

The result is that what now passes for TV and big city news organizations are reduced to trying to pander to selected niche markets which demand entertainment or selected reporting that supports the market's political beliefs. The commercial market for entertainment "news" provides all the so-called news that is needed to fill the available TV airtime or the newspaper entertainment news holes. The political partisans provide the needed talking points to fill the political opinion pages and TV pundit air time.

This explains what is wrong with the misnamed "News" media. The media is shrinking the entire news gathering process to whatever pays for itself, and it does so without searching for new sources of news because there is no known business model that pays for that kind of journalism any more. That's why so few news organizations maintain foreign bureaus any more. It's also why the editorial decisions about what is important out of a Presidential News Conference is about a trivial and only peripherally racial incident rather than the crisis surrounding the failed methods America has developed to pay for health care for a lot of its citizens.

So why is the media no longer properly a "news" media? That's because it has become a "revenue generation" media and nothing else. Of course, if they were honest and renamed it the revenue generation media then they would lose more revenue. So they will try to maintain the fiction that they are still a "news" media.