Something to be Thankful For...

...the healthcare bill.

I don't know a single person that fully supports the current healthcare bill, in any of its forms. I'm certainly not one. It is, perhaps, the great compromise of the decade. Although it's not going to win much Republican support, it has incorporated some conservative principles, and removed many liberal ones from what one might expect a potentially filibuster-proof Democratic congress to produce.

Like any big compromise, this means that the bill contains several flaws that render it less effective than it might otherwise be. This is the curse of a democracy such as ours. By its nature, Congress is a mediocre institution. We're handicapped by our legislators competing with one another, representing 50 states and more than 300 million people, with the influence of special interests and the comfort of the status quo; but ultimately this is a good thing. If you want an efficient legislative process, move to China, where little attention will be paid to your rights. If you want an inefficient one that gets what you need, respects your rights, and you can live with, even if it doesn't give you exactly what you want, you're probably in the right place.

What we've ended up with is a hodgepodge of pretty good ideas. Few of them are great. Few of them are terrible. We're going to end up with an upgrade to a flawed system, and it's not going to fix it forever. We're taking one step back and two steps forward. In another thirty or forty years we'll likely have to do this all over again.

In the meantime, we'll all complain about the feds taking over our health, we'll hear crazy talk about death panels and bureaucracy, and we'll pay too much for our health care. But we'll also sign right up for that public plan when we lose our jobs or turn 65, we're not going to jump on flights to foreign countries to see better doctors (because they'll still be here), we sure won't complain if our premiums take a dip (they're not going up), and when all is said and done, I really don't believe that any of us are going to be worse off than we are today. When this bill passes, we'll all move on, and our lives aren't going to change much at all, and if it turns out to be a disaster, well we'll just have to pass a new bill fix it.


A nice overview is here:
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/obama_and_the_atlantic.php

What I'm Not Thankful For

Sarah's America:

Something to be Thankful For

That this lady is not our vice president...

Thinking about Terrorism

In today's NY Times, Robert Wright has a interesting take on terrorism:

[Liberals warn] that killing terrorists is counterproductive if in the process you create even more terrorists; the object of the game isn’t to wipe out every last Islamist radical but rather to contain the virus of Islamist radicalism.

This is a rather astute perception that I  haven't heard before. You can't use traditional medical warfare - antibiotics - on viruses, but too many people think that a prescription can fight back when we catch a cold or the flu. We want to attack the attackers. Likewise, when threatened by terrorism, we aim to defeat it head-on with traditional warfare. We might be smarter thinking about how to remove the conditions that make us susceptible to it in the first place, and how to immunize against it. Mr Wright continues, referring to the murders at Fort Hood:

It’s true that Major Hasan was unbalanced and alienated — and, by my lights, crazy. But what kind of people did conservatives think were susceptible to the terrorism meme? Like all viruses, terrorism infects people with low resistance. And surely Major Hasan isn’t the only American Muslim who, for reasons of personal history, has become unbalanced and thus vulnerable. Any religious or ethnic group includes people like that, and the post-9/11 environment hasn’t made it easier for American Muslims to keep their balance. That’s why the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy — a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims — is so dubious.

It's important to note that regardless of our counter-terrorism strategy, Major Hasan, and any criminal or terrorist, is ultimately responsible for his own actions. Understanding that our policies may influence him does not remove his own culpability or turn the blame on ourselves. His crime wasn't our government's, or our society's fault.

It is, however, something that we might be able to better fight off if we think about those that are most susceptible to the terrorism virus, and consider how we can both immunize them and keep them away from conditions that encourage its spread. This poses some big questions when it appears that our strongest antivirus - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - are also a core part of the conditions that encourage terrorism. In weakening the virus, we weaken ourselves and put those with a low resistance at risk. We have to strike a balance in this conflict (and maybe we're doing so), but we don't seem much closer to a victory in the war on terrorism than we did five years ago. So perhaps it's time for a rethink of our strategy. We cannot simply ask, "who are the terrorists?" so that we can hunt them down.

The question must be, who are the people with low-resistance to the terrorism virus, and how do we prevent them from getting it?

Rationing

“I mean, let the rationing begin. This is what happens when bureaucrats make your health care decisions,” said Representative David Camp, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Representative Camp is definitely on to something. Whatever happens, we do not want the government conducting any studies on whether current health practices actually do any good. Let this continue and soon you will not be able to get your hands on a good leech when you need one.

-Gail Collins

Fort Hood

After the Fort Hood shooting, there's a lot of news and speculation about whether this was a jihadist attack against American troops. Anytime there's a mass murder like this, we try to break it down into some simple explanation. The simplest, though, is that we live in a crazy world where lots of crazy stuff happens. For as long as we have the ability to destroy each other (which will be forever), people will always destroy each other, and there will never be a good reason. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic says this:

There is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this.  Gun control would not have stopped a commissioned officer from obtaining guns.  Barack Obama had no power to stop this.   Infectious PTSD is a lousy theory.  And nations certainly do not--and should not--shape their foreign policy around the possibility that a random psychopath will start shooting up a crowd.  Evil people do evil things.  That's all.

Perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration - i there probably are some political lessons; unfortunately they are unlikely to be the ones we actually learn. It's looking more likely that this man was motivated, at least in part, by an extreme and twisted of Islam. Does that tell us that we should be wary of Muslims in the military? Not really. It tells us that a certain type of person - extreme Muslims that are psychiatrists for PTSD veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan,  that hold and share extremist and anti-American beliefs (as has been reported about the Ft. Hood killer), and that are on the verge of being shipped off to war -those types of people should probably be booted from the military and monitored closely.

Was this just a "random psychopath", or do we have ways of identifying such people? Are more Muslims in the military likely to share his views? Are we at risk of non-Muslims conducting similar attacks? (Timothy McVeigh was an ex-military, anti-federalist type of extremist that would have found himself at home with the Tea Partiers of today). Are there ways that military bases can be made safer?

These are fair questions. Avoiding the Islam angle entirely is not the answer, as it almost certainly played a role. Overplaying it is not either, for this is more than just a crazy guy; he appears to have had concerning motivations, but it is almost certainly not part of an organized conspiracy. It's more likely someone that thought he was playing his part for a bigger cause, but doing so independently, and doing so out of a combination of extremism and desperation.

Two final thoughts:
A good post by a smart conservative: http://www.frumforum.com/the-shootings-at-fort-hood
A thoughtful reaction in the NYT takes us in a different direction, also reflecting on veterans as we approach Veterans Day: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08alexander.html?emc=eta1