A little comment(ary)...

The Audacity of Vanity
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post

Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush the elder -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/17/AR2008071701839.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Will boomers bust us? Don’t you believe it
The old saw that their looming retirement will crush the economy is wrong on a number of accounts.
By RUSSELL BELAND
Special to The Washington Post


Staff Art/Jeff Woodbury

The warnings have rumbled for decades: Just wait till the baby boomers retire. If you think there are strains on Social Security and Medicare now, brace yourselves for the implosion as the boomers start heading out to pasture. With the first of that generation now doing just that, we should be seeing the dust cloud soon, right?

Actually, if you’ve bought into the following myths about the bust the baby boom is supposed to usher in, you may be surprised.

* As boomers quit working and ease into their golden years, they could break the backs of the younger workers who will have to support them.

Not so. Even at the peak of boomer retirement, around 2030, most of the population will still be of prime working age, between 20 and 64. The percentage – about 55, according to the Social Security Administration – will be lower than it is today (59), but above the levels of the 1960s and ’70s, when it ranged between 51 and 54 percent. Not only will a larger portion of the population be of working age than in the past, but a much higher percentage of that group will be available to provide goods and services. Forty years ago, most women didn’t work outside the home; these days, about 60 percent do – and the number keeps going up. In addition, national defense employed more than 10 percent of the work force in 1968. Today, it uses less than 5 percent, freeing more workers for the general labor force.

Future labor markets are likely to be tighter than they are today, but there’s no danger of running out of workers.

* We’re running out of time to fix senior-citizen entitlement programs before a crisis strikes.

Actually, we’re out of time. If it was politically impossible to solve this problem when the number of retirees was comparatively small, there’s no chance for a major fix as the ranks of the elderly – and their political clout – grow. There may be some minor changes in the way benefits are taxed or adjusted for inflation, but it’s already too late for any big fix. Some older baby boomers are already retired, and many more are getting close. Social Security and Medicare benefits are part of their financial planning, and we can’t reduce them significantly now without a major breach of faith. If you think cuts in benefits are inevitable, remember that the only significant recent change to old-age entitlement programs was adding a prescription-drug benefit – which rang in a dramatic increase in government costs.

* Boomers’ retirement will be bad for the economy.

Not really. It’ll be bad for the federal budget, sure, but it will actually be good for the economy as a whole. As retirees, the boomers will continue to buy goods and services, but they won’t be competing for jobs. This will tend to push wages up, keep unemployment low and boost demand across the board. That’s good news for an economy generally characterized by excess capacity in retailing and manufacturing and persistent unemployment. The biggest impact will probably be felt in the personal services sector, on which retirees spend a disproportionate amount. Many service jobs require little formal training, and most can’t be moved offshore. The demand for drivers, cooks, gardeners and others will increase as the baby boomers age.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=199447&ac=PHedi

History repeating itself
The world we live in today – from politics to technology – got its start in 1978
By Kenneth S. Baer
For The Washington Post

Everyone seems to be telling us that if you want to understand 2008, you have to look back 40 years to 1968. “It’s the year that changed everything,” wrote Newsweek last November. Seen through tie-dye-tinted glasses, Iraq is the new Vietnam, Barack Obama is the new Bobby Kennedy, and bloggers are the new student activists.

But are we commemorating the right year? If we really want a time that defined the way we live now, we should look back not to the romance and trauma of the '60s but to the gloriously tacky '70s, to the year that made modern America – 1978. Look beyond the year’s bad disco and worse clothes; if you peer deeply into the polyester soul of 1978, you can see the beginnings of the world we live in today.

Start with politics. Two weeks into that year, on Jan. 13, former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey died, but it took six more months before the big-government liberalism that he embodied was buried. In June, California voters backed Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes and capped tax increases, thereby marking the start of conservatism’s rebirth – and the beginning of the long end of New Deal liberalism.

People had good reason to be irked at Washington, too. Voters were fed up with rising tax rates (heavily fueled by inflation) and an inefficient government that was seen as wasting their dollars. The Yankelovich poll found that 78 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “Government wastes a lot of money we pay in taxes,” an 18-point jump from 1968.

This anti-government sentiment propelled successful efforts to limit taxing and spending in 13 states and prompted 23 state legislatures to call for a constitutional convention to consider a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. The sour public mood, especially after the passage of Prop 13, triggered a stampede of elected officials to the right.

In fact, it was in November 1978 that the modern Republican Party – which had been on the verge of extinction after Watergate – was born. In the midterm elections, the GOP gained three Senate seats, 12 House seats and six governorships. The anti-tax, small-government worldview of its right wing was suddenly ascendant – and has dominated American politics until the present day. (Note that, even with President Bush and his party on the ropes, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Rodham Clinton was willing to back the sort of nationalized health care that every other industrialized democracy enjoys or mention raising taxes to get rid of the massive deficit that Bush is leaving behind.)

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=200566&ac=Insight&pg=1

Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked.
By Sophia A. Nelson
The Washington Post

There she is -- no, not Miss America, but the Angela-Davis-Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting, angry, unpatriotic Michelle Obama, greeting her husband with a fist bump instead of a kiss on the cheek.

It was supposed to be satire, but the caricature of Barack Obama and his wife that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker last week rightly caused a major flap. And among black professional women like me and many of my sisters in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, who happened to be gathered last week in Washington for our 100th anniversary celebration, the mischaracterization of Michelle hit the rawest of nerves.

Welcome to our world.

We've watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails -- being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: "angry black woman." And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated "makeover" to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.

Sad to say, but what Obama has undergone, though it's on a national stage and on a much more prominent scale, is nothing new to professional African American women. We endure this type of labeling all the time. We're endlessly familiar with the problem Michelle Obama is confronting -- being looked at, as black women, through a different lens from our white counterparts, who are portrayed as kinder, gentler souls who somehow deserve to be loved and valued more than we do. So many of us are hoping that Michelle -- as an elegant and elusive combination of successful career woman, supportive wife and loving mother -- can change that.

"Ain't I a woman?" Sojourner Truth famously asked 157 years ago. Her ringing question, demanding why black women weren't accorded the same privileges as their white counterparts, still sums up the African American woman's dilemma today: How are we viewed as women, and where do we fit into American life?

"Thanks to the hip-hop industry," one prominent black female journalist recently said to me, all black women are "deemed 'sexually promiscuous video vixens' not worthy of consideration. If other black women speak up, we're considered angry black women who complain. This society can't even see a woman like Michelle Obama. All it sees is a black woman and attaches stereotypes."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802557.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

A Torture Paper Trail
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post

I still find it hard to believe that George W. Bush, to his eternal shame and our nation's great discredit, made torture a matter of hair-splitting, legalistic debate at the highest levels of the U.S. government. But that's precisely what he did.

Three previously classified administration memos obtained last week by the American Civil Liberties Union add to our understanding of this disgraceful episode. The documents are attempts to justify the unjustifiable -- the use of brutal interrogation methods that international agreements define as torture -- and to keep those who ordered and carried out this dirty business from being prosecuted and jailed.

The memos don't call it torture, of course. Heavily redacted before being surrendered to the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the documents refer euphemistically to "enhanced techniques" of interrogation. Changing the name doesn't change the act, however. One memo, written in 2004, specifically makes clear the administration's view that "the waterboard" is an acceptable way to extract information.

Waterboarding, a technique of simulated drowning, is considered torture virtually everywhere on Earth except in the Bush administration's archive of self-exculpatory memos, directives and opinions.

The most stunning of the memos -- written in August 2002 by Jay Bybee, who was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- makes the incredible claim that unless a torturer has the "specific intent" to inflict severe pain or suffering, no violation of U.S. laws against torture has occurred. Bybee, since appointed to the federal bench, wrote that the torturer needed only the "honest belief" that he was not actually committing torture to avoid legal jeopardy. Oh, and Bybee added that it wasn't even necessary for that belief to be "reasonable."

The memo notes that U.S. torture statutes outlaw the infliction of severe mental pain as well as physical pain. It acknowledges that "the threat of imminent death" is one of the specific acts that can constitute torture. Somehow, though, the administration pretends not to understand that strapping a prisoner down and pouring water into his nose until he can't breathe constitutes a death threat -- regardless of whether the interrogator intended to stop before the prisoner actually drowned.

Perhaps that question was dealt with in the nine-tenths of the memo that was redacted before the administration handed it over to the ACLU. The memo never would have been released at all if the government hadn't been ordered to do so by a federal judge.

The whole thing would be laughable if it were not such a rank abomination. No government obeying the law needs a paper trail to absolve its interrogators of committing torture. Conversely, a government that produces such a paper trail has something monstrous to hide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/28/AR2008072802465.html?wpisrc=newsletter

The Tripping President
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

And he's off.

President Bush leaves this afternoon for a week-long trip to Asia, the highlight of which will be three languorous days watching the Olympics in Beijing with the whole Bush clan.

But, try as he may, he can't escape controversy.

Paul Alexander writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush's visit to Beijing almost looks like a vacation -- right down to a family reunion. But his three-nation Asian trip also takes him to the doorsteps of two troublesome regimes while forcing him to balance the Olympic spirit with the delicacies of diplomacy."

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post that Bush's trip "has the potential for fireworks at every stop.

"The prospect for controversy at the Olympics in Beijing, where Bush is to arrive Thursday, has already been well documented. But stops in Seoul and Bangkok -- aimed at celebrating ties with two of the United States' closest allies in Asia -- could also make Bush's ninth, and probably final, trip to the region something less than the triumphal tour the White House has been hoping for.

"Korean protesters angry about the resumption of U.S. beef imports are girding to hit the streets when Bush arrives in Seoul on Tuesday night. . . .

"Political repression in neighboring Burma will be high on Bush's agenda in Bangkok. He will meet with dissidents at the U.S. Embassy while Laura Bush tours refugee facilities on the Thailand-Burma border. Yet the Thai government is seen by many in the region as a major enabler of Burmese military strongman Than Shwe.

"Burma will be 'a tricky one' for Bush in Thailand, said Mike Green, a former Asia adviser to Bush who briefed reporters last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies."

The Associated Press has the itinerary. Reuters summarizes the key issues on the first stop, in Seoul.

China Watch

Howard LaFranchi writes in the Christian Science Monitor: "After coming into office with a confrontational stance toward a rising China and open belligerence toward North Korea, the Bush administration has developed an Asia policy that has lowered the temperature of some of the world's toughest security threats, experts in the region say. . . .

"But they also say that prickly issues remain -- some of which Bush will confront on his trip. Some experts contend that a looming issue of America's gradual eclipse by a roaring Asia has been exacerbated by America's poor domestic performance over the Bush years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/08/04/BL2008080400962.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Who's Raising Race?
The Messages Loaded Into a McCain Surrogate's Words
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post

I'm confident that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the rest of John McCain's front-line surrogates know full well what messages they're sending about Barack Obama and race. On the off chance that they -- or, more likely, some of the white voters they're trying to reach -- don't know text from subtext from context, here's a deconstruction.

On Sunday, the exceedingly thin-skinned Graham was still shocked, saddened and outraged over Obama's throwaway line, spoken days earlier, about not looking like previous presidents. Graham said on "Fox News Sunday" that "there's no doubt in my mind that what Senator Obama is trying to suggest -- that he's a victim of something." Graham later added: "We're not going to run a campaign like he did in the primary. Every time somebody brings up a challenge to who you are and what you believe, 'You're a racist.' That's not going to happen in this campaign."

The key words are "victim" and "racist" -- which Obama did not say. Graham puts them in Obama's mouth because of their power to alienate.

With the first loaded word, Graham is trying to tie Obama to a stereotype: the Great African American Victim. He's playing to the annoyance some whites feel at being reminded of racial sins committed long before they were born or even long before their families came to this country.

As Graham well knows, Obama has taken great pains to sanitize his campaign of even the faintest whiff of victimhood. Obama understands that in order to be elected president, he has to come off as the least-aggrieved black man in America.

Most of his supporters understand this, too. They know that he can't react with anger when his love of country is questioned over a flag pin. They see that he can't be seen to take offense when his self-confidence -- a quality shared by every U.S. senator I've ever met -- is portrayed as arrogance, as if he had somehow reached beyond his station by thinking he is worthy of being elected president.

As the kerfuffle of the past week indicates, it's apparently even problematic for Obama to attempt to describe the Republican Party's obvious game plan of defining him as different, exotic and risky.

Obama could note, however, that the tactic doesn't seem to be working. A new poll by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows him leading McCain by 10 points, 47 to 37 percent, among white low-income workers. These people have to be made to fear or distrust Obama, and in a hurry, or McCain loses.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/04/AR2008080401824.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Disaster Lessons
By John Holmes
The Washington Post

Three months have passed since Cyclone Nargis and an accompanying tidal surge swept across Myanmar's fertile Irrawaddy Delta region, claiming nearly 140,000 lives and devastating the livelihoods of many more people. All told, some 2.4 million people were seriously affected by Nargis, ranking it among the worst cyclones in Asia in the past 15 years and the worst in Myanmar's history.

I recently completed my second trip to Myanmar, where I was again sobered by the immensity of the tragedy but was also cautiously hopeful about relief efforts. In May, government reluctance to allow international aid workers into the affected region sparked a storm of international criticism.

We have made a lot of progress since then. Touring the delta by helicopter, I could see that many houses had been repaired one way or another. There was agricultural activity in the fields and commercial activity on the waterways. Schools are in session, in tents if not permanent classrooms. And hundreds of international aid staffers are now working in the delta. The promises about access made to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon when he saw Myanmar's head of state, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, in late May have essentially been kept.

Without question, the international response has helped save lives and reduce suffering. While it is impossible to be sure all survivors have been reached, I am confident that the overwhelming majority have received help, even if many still need a good deal more.

Crucially, a much-feared second wave of deaths from starvation or disease has not happened -- no small achievement, given that 75 percent of hospitals and clinics in the affected areas were destroyed. The people's resilience has been remarkable, as was the degree of help and solidarity from individual citizens and organizations in Myanmar.

Challenges remain, of course, including over issues such as aid exchange rates, and it would be unwise to gloss over them. But the main priority now is to help remote communities further and to ensure that assistance is continued systematically until all concerned can feed themselves and rebuild their lives.

So, what can we learn from this crisis?

First, no nation, rich or poor, can go it alone when confronted by a natural disaster of the magnitude of a Cyclone Nargis. It would have been much better, not least for the survivors, if the government of Myanmar had recognized the value of an international presence from the start. I encourage Myanmar's leaders to continue down the path of cooperation, including in response to other humanitarian challenges, based on the universal principle of the impartial provision of aid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/05/AR2008080502924.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Faith's Real Riches
By Michael Gerson
The Washington Post

In a recent investigative profile, the Associated Press tells the depressingly familiar story of televangelist Kenneth Copeland. His ministry's private jet and lakeside mansion. The complex web of ranching, oil and media interests that benefits his extended family. In this case, there is no taint of hypocrisy. Copeland practices what he preaches -- a doctrine that God wants his followers to prosper in very material ways.

This prosperity gospel combines two of the most powerful forces on Earth: the profit motive and the power of positive thinking. At its best, it inspires hard work, generosity and the avoidance of life-destroying vices. At its worst, it is religiously infantile.

"I believe God wants to give us nice things," says evangelist Joyce Meyer.

"I think God wants us to be prosperous," pastor Joel Osteen assures us. "I think He wants us to be happy."

Whatever ethical problems such leaders may or may not have, they face a large theological challenge. A religious system that promises happiness and "nice things" is difficult to reconcile with the faith whose founder had "no place to lay his head," urged his followers not to store up "treasures on earth," and called on them to deny themselves and take up a cross of suffering.

This has never made the best marketing message: What company would adopt the electric chair or the hangman's noose as its logo? Christianity has always dealt in hard truths -- that God is not a means to our own ends, and that suffering is unavoidable in lives bounded by mortality and often wrecked by failure.

Suffering for the sake of suffering is useless; it is merely masochism. But when suffering cannot be escaped as the health-and-wealth preachers promise -- or even nobly endured as the Stoics promise -- it may perhaps be transformed. "If you and I can share our pain," said the late theologian Henri Nouwen, "suddenly we find grace and joy coming in. In your tears and anguish and struggle, you suddenly discover community, you suddenly discover friendship, you suddenly discover affection, you suddenly discover forgiveness, you suddenly discover healing. All these things come through vulnerability."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/05/AR2008080502928.html?wpisrc=newsletter

No Will To Drill
The Democrats Resist Logic -- and Politics
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post

Let's see: housing meltdown, credit crunch, oil shock not seen since the 1970s. The economy is slowing, unemployment growing and inflation increasing. It's the sixth year of a highly unpopular war, and the president's approval rating is at 30 percent.

The Italian Communist Party could win this election. The American Democratic Party is trying its best to lose it.

Democrats have the advantage on just about every domestic issue from health care to education. However, Americans' greatest concern is the economy, and their greatest economic concern is energy (by a significant margin: 37 percent to 21 percent for inflation). Yet Democrats have gratuitously forfeited the issue of increased drilling for domestic oil and gas. By an overwhelming margin of 2 to 1, Americans want to lift the moratorium preventing drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, thus unlocking vast energy resources shut down for the past 27 years.

Democrats have been adamantly opposed. They say that we cannot drill our way out of the oil crisis. Of course not. But it is equally obvious that we cannot solar or wind or biomass our way out. Does this mean that because any one measure cannot solve a problem, it needs to be rejected?

Barack Obama remains opposed to new offshore drilling (although he now says he would accept a highly restricted version as part of a comprehensive package). Just last week, he claimed that if only Americans would inflate their tires properly and get regular tuneups, "we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling."

This is bizarre. By any reasonable calculation of annual tire-inflation and tuneup savings, the Outer Continental Shelf holds nearly a hundred times as much oil. As for oil shale, also under federal moratorium, after a thousand years of driving with Obama-inflated tires and Obama-tuned engines, we would still have saved an amount equal to only one-fifth the oil shale available in the United States.

But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who's against properly inflated tires? Let's start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. ("Inflate your tires. Victory or death!") Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702900.html?wpisrc=newsletter