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On 10-27- 2009, in a piece titled, “Legislative Malpractice, the Whores’ Rule”, I introduced the notion that the Congress is guilty of massive malpractice.  That piece, which focused on the Health Care debacle, is reproduced it in its entirety below with an additional comment at the very end of today’s piece.

The Congress of the United State consists of professional politicians.  Here, in outline, are just two of several hypothetical malpractice charges:

Politically motivated coercion was exerted by Respondents via allied legislative and regulatory measures on large US lending institutions to make residential mortgage loans to borrowers who were otherwise unqualified for those loans, and unlikely to be able to pay them back.  Two quasi-public lending institutions, commonly known as Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, were systematically underfunded, then taken over by the federal government at taxpayer expense when, inevitably, they failed.    

“Taxpayer money continues to flow to ailing mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Despite having already spent $160 billion bailing out Fannie and Freddie, we are on the hook for much, much more; some current estimates of our total exposure relating to Fannie and Freddie run as high as $1 trillion.”

“The Federal government will provide an unlimited guarantee to the troubled firms through 2012, and all this without requiring Congress to pass any further embarrassing bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“The very concept of an unlimited guarantee from the Federal government, without a vote by Congress, is shocking and unwise. But that explains the timing: It’s an old Washington trick to drop news you’d like to see buried on the Friday before a three-day weekend or a day when few people are paying attention--like Christmas Eve.”

Forbes July 10, 2010

The foregoing policies caused the entire US Banking system to be infected with over-valued residential real estate, leading to a liquidity crisis and default cascade in 2007-2008, that in turn triggered massive federal government bailouts and takeovers.  While the overvalued US real estate inventory was partly the result of private market decisions, incompetent federal policies and negligent oversight amplified the severity of that problem ten fold. Government negligence turned what could have been a temporary, but manageable correction into a massive economic crisis, an intractable recession and the expenditure of at least two trillion dollars in public funds.

In March 2010, President Barak Obama insisted on rushing through a massive heath care reform package, hereafter Health Care Reform.  The Democratic Congressional leaders chose to bypass the public hearing and review process, then employed parliamentary maneuvers to truncate and even shut down robust debate. When Congress delivered Health Care Reform to the White House for the President’s signature, the bill had not been fully evaluated by the Congressional budge Office, let alone studied in appropriate detail by members of Congress or the President, yet it set in motion a truly massive set of changes representing the most complete and detailed restructuring of the US Heath Care delivery system in history. 

Neither the President of the United States nor the overwhelming majority of House and Senate members who voted for this reform package had actually read this document.

This legislation was presented to the public (Petitioners) by making false representations; these false misrepresentations by Congressional leaders and the President included assertions that:

• No one would be forced to his or her current physician,
• nor health case provider,
• nor insurance provider.
• That health insurance costs would not be increased;
• that the measure would not raise taxes nor increase the deficit;
• and that access to needed medical treatment would not be impaired. 

In spite of the dereliction of duty by Congress in failing to study, let alone carefully read the legislation, all of the key leaders who supported it knew that case for enactment just outlined was not based in fact. Moreover, the leading members of congress and the President knew that it was false and deliberately misleading.  The evidence will show that the President, the congressional leadership and many democratic members clearly understood that the measure was designed to drive private health case providers out of business, leaving a government-run, single payer model the only remaining option. 

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In 2004 I posted several articles about the ongoing threat to Western democracy. 

Six years later, under a different and less sure-footed administration, each of the problems that I identified have grown more acute.  Now, in the middle of a potentially crippling economic crisis, we are beginning to hear isolationist sounds from the right, grumblings that eerily echo the opportunistic pacifism of the British conservatives who were seeking to ride that lame horse against Labor’s Tony Blair, sounds that echo the Lafollette-Lindberg isolationists of the pre-WW II GOP.

I began my 2004 essay with a reference to Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”, an important book that naively made a respectable case that democracy is the next, new thing that will follow the discredited bloody-authoritarian models of governance of the 20^th century. I use the term naïve here because professor Fukuyama was naively confident that democracy would succeed because it was the better system, as secure in its right to succession as the dawn follows the night. 

But professor Fukuyama later reversed his support for the Bush administration’s war to liberate Iraq. He thus demonstrated a sad aspect of recent intellectual history: American liberal academics are all too quick to abandon their principled positions whenever their other liberal colleagues gang up on them in sufficient numbers.

One thing has long been clear to me, as it was to intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and scores of others (men and women of moral integrity and wisdom were later to be maligned as the dreaded neocons): The enemy that was belatedly recognized as an existential, large scale threat in the fire, dust and death of September 11, 2001 was a new, virulent ideology. 

That threat remains as I described it then,

“...a huge interlinked terrorist network with covert and overt state support whose overriding purpose was to create a pan-Arab Islamist empire, a proto-state governing the entire Middle Eastern region, armed with nuclear weapons, standing triumphantly over the smoking cinders of the hated Israel and in control of most of the world’s petroleum supply. They also saw that the pattern of terrorist attacks was designed and intended to disable all forces that stand in the way of the Islamist proto-state. We know the list: the U.S., Israel, the non-compliant Arab States, and Europe.” 

As I reread my 2004 essay I asked myself:  have we lost the nerve to survive?

Here is part of what I wrote, unedited.

We (this is the large “we” consisting of the US and of all the other targets of the current jihad whether they have awakened to their peril or not) are in two decade struggle. This is nothing less a battle for the survival of Western democratic civilization.  It is a struggle that fully qualifies as a “World War”[1] and one that we, as a civilization, must not even seem to be losing, nor is it one in which we should even think of writing off some of  the jihad’s targets, just because their nations are foolish, intractable, remote, or all three.  We democracies may eventually all stand together.  For now, it appears that the US, Great Britain, and a handful of smaller countries must lead out.

Given our reduced military resources, downsized since the end of the Cold War (cut 2 and ½ divisions following Gulf War, Phase1) and the limitations of domestic politics, this president has moved more boldly, forcefully and effectively to respond to the threat than any plausible alternative in either party.  Only when the next president is elected, (presumably when Mr. Bush is reelected), can we expect further action of the kind the situation calls for.  The furor surrounding Mr. Bush’s first election was just one more of the ongoing challenges to existing democratic systems of governance in the world.  There was, in effect, a second, de facto election for president in the immediate wake of 9-11, during which the questions surrounding W’s legitimacy were effectively forgotten. Mr. Bush moved as forthrightly as any president with a mandate.  But a democratic leader at war needs the particular legitimacy that the democratic process itself confers.  The country needs a much more decisive election outcome this time, more secure presidential authority as a result, and an even stronger response to the challenge we face from radical Islam.

The genesis of the struggle is an awakened pan-nationalist fervor among an atavistic, dysfunctional and largely mentally disturbed population centered in the Middle East. There are other such populations in the world, of course – after all this is a description of normal life of an earlier period.  But local conditions have isolated these other peoples and societies to a degree that has permitted the West to “allow time to do its thing”.  This mindset might be described as evolutionary isolationism, the general notion that primitive civilizations will eventually progress “at their own pace”, and that the wisest policy of the more developed nations is benign non-interference.  Leaving aside the dubious wisdom of this form of isolationism when the world is ever more tightly bound by the technologies of transport and communications, the Middle East is a manifestly different case.

Geography, economic realities and the fungibility of deadly technologies have conspired to force the West out of its isolationism. 

We did not take this growing threat seriously in its earlier stages for several reasons, all of which are founded in our collective complacency, lack of foresight, and stubborn failure to grasp the magnitude of the unique danger posed when a truly atavistic fanaticism is coupled with large scale 21^st century weapons technology.

The West has been complacent on more than the narrowly materialistic level. The creature comforts that are the gift of modernity are less disabling than the modernist notion that we Westerners have arrived at the apex of a natural progression of thought, and that the primitive world, suffused as it is with superstition and outmoded religious beliefs, will simply fall like rotten fruit when exposed to our scientist, materialist “values”.  Ironically, the post-modern reality is spreading the notion that no values are worth risking comfort much less life itself to preserve.  Hence, a profound weakening of value commitment more accurately defines the current Western ethos. Populations seduced by the current level of comfort and complacency are very difficult to rouse to self defense, particularly when the threat is striking elsewhere or can somehow be temporarily contained, or (when all else fails) can simply be denied. The modern jihad architects of the current war were not blind to this weakness.

As long as the restive Middle East population was divided and ruled by tribal leaders whose regimes we in the West could “tame” via mutually beneficial economic relationships, the potential threat was ignored. This space is far too limited to chronicle the last 100 years of Middle Eastern history, but suffice it to say that the emergence of a virulent pan Arab nationalism fueled and ignited by a fascistic ideology based on Islam should not have been surprising.

Even now, the biggest obstacle to a truly pan-Arab force remains the Arab inter-tribal rivalries (recalling the “religious” differences among major Arab groups are tribal at root and that religions function as tribal ideologies).  But the developments of the last few years are troubling. 

It is essential that any American administration continue to act from a core understanding of the true nature and scope of the threat.  The credibility of the isolationist mindset collapsed overnight when the WTC Towers fell, the Pentagon was struck, and the White house (or Congress or FBI Headquarters – we my never know which) were narrowly spared.  Reasonable observers soon grasped that we faced a huge interlinked terrorist network with covert and overt state support whose overriding purpose was to create a pan-Arab Islamist empire, a proto-state governing the entire Middle Eastern region, armed with nuclear weapons, standing triumphantly over the smoking cinders of the hated Israel and in control of most of the world’s petroleum supply.

They also saw that the pattern of terrorist attacks was designed and intended to disable all forces that stand in the way of the Islamist proto-state. We know the list: the U.S., Israel, the non-compliant Arab States, and Europe.

The following course appears to be essential to our survival as the world’s preeminent functioning democratic power:

1.      Hardening our domestic defenses.  This is a work in progress, at best, and is beset with bureaucratic inertia, civil liberties lawsuits, and the seeming political inability to take strong measures to control our borders and to limit immigration. 

2.      Forcing other regimes to deny all aid and comfort to terrorist efforts.  Both Afghanistan and Iraq are fully justified uses of military force on this count alone, even if nation building falters.  The demonstration of American power in support of the “Bush doctrine” has had a salutary effect.

3.      Preventing overtly hostile regimes (Iran & Korea) from acquiring a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.  Another work in progress. 

4.      Establishing a semi-permanent US military base in the region not beholden to the Saudis or any other unreliable regime. This is a stated Pentagon goal and awaits developments in Iraq.

5.      Planting the democratic seeds of the counter-jihad in the region.  This single effort, with all the attendant problems, contains the key to averting the Islamist proto-state.  It may be the single most astute choice this administration has made, provided the resources needed to guide Iraq along the proto-democracy course are not denied.

To imagine that any democratic power could rationally use its raw capacity to “solve” the jihad problem with nuclear weapons is a video game fantasy. The “country sized glass parking lot” solution (only half seriously proposed by a friend) will not be a realistic option, either in moral or practical terms. Only a comparable Cold War threat to our own cities could possibly justify such a massive scale of threat response. In the real world, the infliction of casualties in the millions, risking collateral catastrophic economic damage to the world’s economy, could only come about as a necessary and proportional response to a massive threat of similar scope under profound emergency conditions. In my judgment, that simply isn’t going to happen.

For example, the time will come that we, a peaceful democracy, will consider employing tactical nuclear weapons, including neutron bombs, to neutralize a nuclear threat that can’t reasonably be safely eliminated by other means.  The North Koreans have most of Seoul within artillery and rocket range.  Possible friendly casualties following a North Korean response to a US attack might exceed one million.  Any military action against the North would necessarily have a preemption component for these batteries north of Seoul. This logic might well justify the use of tactical nuclear bombs.

As a democracy, we are probably unable to reinstitute the draft in the absence of another 9-11 scale attack. Fortunately, the modern military has traded technology for soldiers, amplifying the effective destructive power on the ground of 1,000 soldiers a thousand fold.  But the stark truth is that we lack the field strength to simultaneously occupy two countries the size of Iraq and Iran, yet we have the power to utterly destroy the military capability of every nation in the region.  And this is a step we may yet be forced to take.

Under these complex circumstances, we should proceed with care while remaining visibly willing and able to utilize the kinds of serious military action that will probably be needed.

A reading of Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, reveals an untried, unprepared president who is uncomfortable in his role as commander in chief, and unrealistic about the gravity and scope of the threat. 

Yet for now at least, Mr. Obama has reluctantly rejected the “cut and run” option that he and his core leftist supporters would really prefer.  He will probably muddle through until the 2012 elections, avoiding outright defeat, deferring the day of actual victory. 

Absent a repeat of the 911 attacks, the main danger is that the conservative core will “go all wobbly” (to quote PM Margaret Thatcher’s admonition to President Bush I). 

In 2013 we may well find ourselves in the position of an aging, weakened superhero, no longer capable of a prolonged fight, but still capable of calling in an air strike. 

We are in the World War IV that was named and described by Norman Podhoretz in his trenchant 2007 book of the same title.  It is to be a long slog, but one that poses a smaller burden in proportion terms (by any reasonable measurement of casualties and treasure) than the Greatest Generation endured before us.

The weaker and more ambivalent our response to this challenge, the longer the war will last.  Because this adversary wants our total subjugation, we are effectively fighting in a corner until the jihad has been disarmed, discredited and dissolved.   This is the hand that history has dealt us. 

As a great man said,

“We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

 [Abe Lincoln 12-1-62, to Congress].

“I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.”

John Dean, speaking of Richard Nixon 

There appear to be at least four versions of Mr. Obama, each of which is competing for our collective sense of reality, for the dominant media narrative, possibly for Obama's soul, and – ultimately - for the verdict of history. 

We have to cut our new president a little slack here, of course.  It is not remarkable when any new president loses ground in the polls.  The mere transition from the poetry of the campaign to the prose of governance[1] is enough to erode popular support.   Of course, that didn’t happen with Eisenhower, but then he never sold himself as a poet in the first place.

Certainly, no president is likely to hold an adulatory electorate in thrall while facing a global financial crisis, a major and seemingly intractable recession, new terrorist probings of our homeland, an environmental calamity perilously close to our shores and a floundering war against the Taliban in Afghanistan - the former state sponsors of the 911 attacks, now resurgent. 

The truly great presidents can call on a reservoir of trust, an earned respect for general competence and real-world savvy.  

It is painfully clear that something entirely different is at work here.  In some ways, this is the strangest president in living memory.  Moreover, the enigma surrounding Mr. Obama’s persona only increases, as do the essential doubts about his deeper character.

Who is this man in the White House, really? We can fill the blanks with our personal impressions, but a difficult thing needs to be acknowledged:

The trust question has started to gnaw at the electorate.  That gnawing sound in the background is the Presidential Virus. 

As we acknowledge the collapse of the notion that we have elected the messiah, four “versions” of this president remain in play.

[1]

Obama, as the decent liberal-minded young man, with some moderate instincts:  This is the character that fate has surrounded - it appears - with naive, left-minded advisors, who currently have his ear.

[2]

Obama, as the ambitious, narcissistic chameleon, enthralled with the grandiose gesture:  This character is surrounded by sycophantic advisors, a man addicted to praise and greatly irritated when the mirror of Narcissus reveals something unpleasant about himself or his agenda.

[3]

Obama, as the closet arch-leftist (as distinguished from a humanitarian liberal, like, say, Hubert Humphrey):  This is a man whose political world-view was formed by unreconstructed 60’s radicals and hip, anti-Semitic blacks. This is Obama as the dangerous political genius whose ideological commitment may lead him to be content with a consequential first term & damn the majority of voters who “just don’t get it.” This is the picture of someone bright and manipulative enough to feint to the center when necessary to “get things done”, then reverts to form.

[4]

Obama, as the political lightweight:  This is the minor, first term Illinois senator whose ascent to power was a surprise even to him, whose un-preparedness for the supreme national executive position was revealed by lengthy and tortured decision times, by a growing gap between glib rhetoric and results.  This is a leader who – when pressed by events and critics – often becomes prickly, pedantic and professorial.    

Am I really being unfair here?  There is still no definitive answer to the “Who is this man?” question.  Because of that lacunae, contrasting, say, with the larger-than-life characters of FDR and Reagan, Mr. Obama’s image remains in flux...even (dare we acknowledge it?) turmoil.  More troubling to his early supporters and eager coattailers, the trend is relentlessly down.  And even more troubling, the trend is driven by growing disillusionment and increasing distrust.

In conversations with liberal friends, I’ve often advanced the first view of Obama (as the decent idealist, needing more practical advisors), in order to point out that Mr. Obama’s presidency now hinges on the benign effects of an emerging strong counter-force.  After all, Bill Clinton’s second term actually benefited from “triangulation” (accommodation with the center), made necessary after the GOP took the congress.

But in my most realistic moments, the third version (Obama as a closet arch-leftist) has proved almost perfectly predictive.   Moreover, in those moments of crisis that require decisive presidential leadership, the Obama 4.0 (out-of-depth lightweight) is spot on.  Whenever this president is placed on the defensive, especially in his immediate reaction to political challenges, Obama 2.0 (the grandiose narcissist) emerges.  Could it be that the real Obama is a shifting amalgam of all four?  

But the important pending question is this:  Just how much on-the-job growth can we reasonably expect of this president?  Jimmie Carter clung to his received wisdom with a stubborn righteousness bordering on folly.  JFK was chagrined by his mistakes, learned from them and regained his balance.  Harry Truman, having been ill prepared by FDR, was thrust into a series of grave crises, but drew on his tough prairie character, his keen instincts for negotiations, a humble awe for the magnitude of the office he had not sought, and became the tough, indefatigable student who grew stronger and smarter with each challenge.

From my distance, I can see nothing of these leaders in our new president.  Our best hope lies in the emergence of Obama 5.0 or 6.0: