Carpe per diem

The Wall Street Journal this morning has a followup on its March expose of Congressional chiseling on per diem travel allowances. In an era of trillion-dollar deficits, the money isn't even a rounding error, but the reactions of the Congressfolk are worth reading. My favorite is Texas representative Solomon Ortiz: if not for the chance to pocket a few extra dollars, he says, "you could never get many members traveling." A paid vacation, transportation in Air Force planes, and concierge service provided by the military: they pale beside the $25 a day in pocket money that one can collect by touring Kabul. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On the matter of the mosque

Mark Helprin writes:

The plan to erect a mosque of major proportions in what would have been the shadow of the World Trade Center involves not just the indisputable constitutional rights that sanction it, but, providentially, others that may frustrate it. 

Mosques have commemoratively been established upon the ruins or in the shells of the sacred buildings of other religions—most notably but not exclusively in Cordoba, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and India. When sited in this fashion they are monuments to victory, and the chief objection to this one is not to its existence but that it would be near the site of atrocities—not just one—closely associated with mosques because they were planned and at times celebrated in them.

Read it here. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Time passes for Odysseus

"As he walked up the road to  his house for the first time in decades he promised himself that he would have nothing more to do with the affairs of gods or men, would go back to his woods and the stasis of unvarying afternoons. But it seemed that the tears of reunion had scarcely dried before the house was filled with wailing and he stood before his father's high funeral pyre with a torch in his hand. Soon thereafter he held his first grandchild, and under all the weight of birth and death a dam somewhere gave way and time flooded over  him. Soon his grandson was tall and strong, as was the tree over his father's grave, and well before he was ready he could neither string his great strong bow, nor remember the names of the men who had died for him at Troy, nor speak." -- Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Good grief

Says Reuters this morning:

(Reuters) - The Muslim center planned near the site of the World Trade Center attack could qualify for tax-free financing, a spokesman for City Comptroller John Liu said on Friday, and Liu is willing to consider approving the public subsidy.

If this seems reasonable to you, try this thought experiment: It is December 1950, and a city official in Honolulu suggests that the taxpayers subsidize a Shinto shrine overlooking Pearl Harbor. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

In from the cold

Oh, spit! I was so sure that the Russians spies recently traded back to Moscow would end up in a modified version of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago--perhaps one that supplied Big Macs instead of that notoriously thin potato soup. Not so. The slinky Anna Chapman is not only still in Moscow; she's done a mild cheesecake photo shoot with the Kremlin in the background. Predictably, it all ended in a kerfluffle. Ms. Chapman is being sued by the magazine for which she posed--and which didn't even pay her for the shoot! It's a wonder the Cold War lasted as long as it did. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Shut up! he explained

Stephen Walt, whose name is best known as half of the Walt-Mearshimer duo that has done so much to bring respectability to American anti-Semitism, has weighed in on the issue of the mosque near Ground Zero:

Apart from a brief post praising New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's forthright stance on the Muslim community center controversy, I haven't said much about this issue. I had naively assumed that Bloomberg's eloquent remarks defending the project -- and reaffirming the indispensable principle of religious freedom -- would pretty much end the controversy, but I underestimated willingness of various right-wing politicians to exploit our worst xenophobic instincts, and some key Democrats' congenital inability to fight for the principles in which they claim to believe. Silly me. 

This man is  the (are you ready?) Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International relations at Harvard University. Yet his argument can best be summarized as "'Shut up!' he explained." Mayor Bloomberg has spoken! How can you various right-wing politicians exploit our worst xenophobic instincts?

To be sure, there's a bit more to his blog than that. It's not really a mosque, he argues. It's not really at Ground Zero. Etc. But that "silly me" really says it all. It's a display of intellectual arrogance on a level with--well, with Mr. Bloomberg's. We command and you obey, over the hills and far away. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Eichmann, the takeaway

Some memorable moments from Eichmann in Jerusalem:

For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everyone's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. (p. 233)

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and repent. (p. 251)

For the truth of the matter was that by the end of the Second World War everybody knew that technical developments in the instruments of violence had made the adoption of "criminal" warfare inevitable.... Hence, it was felt that under these new conditions war crimes were only those outside all military necessities, where a deliberate inhuman purpose could be demonstrated. (p. 256)

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied ... that this new type of criminal ... commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. (p. 276)

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mission almost accomplished!

The NYT is fretting this morning about how the president can claim credit for "delivering on his vow" to pull the combat troops out of Iraq, without risking the same premature jactation that bothered his predecessor.

Gosh, it will be a terrible waste of a war if Mr. Obama isn't able to claim credit for winning it! After all, he bucked the conventional wisdom and surged thousands of fresh troops into Iraq, thus snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat.... Or--wait a minute, wasn't that Mr. Bush? You'd never know, if the New York Times were your only source of news. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On the clash of civilizations

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is my favorite former member of the Dutch parliament, had a splendid op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. She writes in part:

What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.

(And Sam Huntington is my favorite late Harvard professor, not only for The Clash of Civilizations but even more for his magnificent analysis of the American experiment, Who Are We?)

Ms. Ali concludes with this bit of advice:

We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Harry Reid's mind clears

"Depend upon it, sir," as Samuel Johnson said, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces the election of his life in November, and it has concentrated his mind wonderfully, as CNN reports:

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid is breaking ranks with President Obama over the issue of the proposed construction of a controversial Islamic center and mosque just blocks away from Ground Zero.

"The First Amendment protects freedom of religion," spokesman Jim Manley said in a statement. "Sen. Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else."

I agree with the Senator: the mosque should be built somewhere else. That's not a matter of the First Amendment; it's a matter of common sense, and of respect for the feelings of the country. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On respecting the process

The NYT headline said: 'As Parents Protest, Chancellor and Panel Leave'. That seemed very promising, so I read the story, and behold! The chancellor and his "panel" didn't leave their jobs; they just walked out on the meeting and left the parents shouting at one another.

It seems that tests were tightened up, the kids' scores dropped, and the parents were upset. They wanted to speak; a motion to allow them to do so was denied. (There's public "input" at the end of the session.) They got rambunctious. Chancellor Klein and his educrats walked out. Said a departmental spokesman afterward: “It’s extremely unfortunate that parents who came to voice their opinions before the panel could not be heard tonight because a small, unruly group refused to respect the process and wait for the public comment period to begin."

Baad parents! They just don't seem to get it, like those bigots who don't want to see a mosque overlooking Ground Zero. Mayor Bloomberg says the the mosqueteers "ought to be ashamed of themselves." What do they think this is, anyhow--a democracy? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On graceful exits

“The president didn’t send me over here to seek a graceful exit,” David Petraeus tells the New York Times. “My marching orders are to do all that is humanly possible to help us achieve our objectives.”

But, General, are you really sure? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

War in the shadows

Fine article in the NYT this morning about clandestine military and CIA operations being carried out by the Obama administration. I think the takeaway is supposed to be twofold: for the left, gasp! that a leftist president would actually defend the United States; and for the right, reassurance that Mr. Obama isn't quite the doofus that he sometimes seems. (Is it entirely a coincidence that this long article about our covert warrior-president follows hard upon his Friday defense of the Ground Zero mosque?)

I found the article both reassuring and comical, as when the authors fret that using soldiers in clandestine ops might deprive the U.S. military of its Geneva Convention rights. Yeah, sure: when was the last time were American soldiers in enemy hands treated according to Geneva? Most of you aren't old enough to remember, so I'll answer the question: April 1945, and even then only if you were fighting against German forces, didn't fall first into the hands of the Gestapo, weren't a Jew, and best of all qualified for a Luftwaffe camp. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

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Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

When Hannah met Martin

I earlier mentioned my fascination with Stranger From Abroad, in which Daniel Maier-Katkin tells the story of the long love (not a love affair, though it began that way) between the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Jewish "public intellectual" Hannah Arendt, most famous for her study of Eichmann in Jerusalem. I've finished the book now, and I'm still enchanted. What a great read! It might help if you were a sometime philosophy student, as I was in the 1960s, though to tell the truth I don't remember much of what was fed into me at the time. Perhaps what I needed was Professor Maier-Katkin at the lectern.

In Hannah's typewriter, on the last day of her life, was a sheet of paper from the book she was writing, with a quote from the Roman statesman Cato: "The gods love those who are victorious, but Cato loves the vanquished." From that, Maier-Katkin spins this splendid riff: "The gods bestow immortality on the victorious who get to write history and celebratory poems, but Cato, recognizing that the vanquished may have been every bit as brave and heroic as those who defeated them, and that their cause may have been as good or better, loves them, because he is human and his heart goes out to them in response to all they have lost."

It was the same, he suggests, with Hannah. While Martin Heidegger tacked with the times, joining the Nazis when they were on the rise, and repudiating them when they were defeated, his onetime student and lover kept to the true course throughout her life. It helped, of course, that she was Jewish: had she stayed in Germany, she would have been killed. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Welcome home, 39 years on

That's Warrant Office Don Wann in 1968, posting with a Huey with some damage to its windscreen. Three years later he went missing in action along with Lieutenant Paul Magers when their Cobra helicopter was shot down during a rescue mission in Quang Tri province, South Vietnam. Their remains were found a couple years ago but only now identified and repatriated. Welcome home, guys. It was indeed a long war. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Let's all be happy for the city manager

I earlier celebrated Hugo Tassone, the Yonkers policeman who retired at age 44 with a pension of $101,000, having never earned more than $74,000 a year. Now we can cast a prayerful glance toward Robert Rizzo, the city manager of Bell, California (pop. 40,000) who resigned recently when it came out that he was earning $800,000 a year, along with other benefits including 26 weeks (!) of vacation and sick time that brought his annual compensation to an estimated $1,500,000. Forced out or not, Mr. Rizzo stands to collect a pension of at least $600,000 a year.

Even so, his good fortune pales beside that of Bruce Malkenhorst, who is retired from his post as city manager of Vernon, California. His pension is a relatively slender $510,000 a year, but here's the thing: Vernon's population, as of the 2000 Census, was 91. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Working on the OODA Loop

I knew there was an OODA Loop at Maxwell Air Force Base, named in honor of the late Colonel John Boyd, about whom I wrote my King's College dissertation. (Now a small book titled A Vision So Noble.) But I've never been to Maxwell, so I've never seen the street sign until today, when some kind soul posted it on the internet. He asks the question: Who works on OODA Loop? Hat tip: the Armchair Generalist. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Stranger From Abroad

Despite its straightlaced title and its rather difficult subject matter, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness is a very fine book. I picked it up at the library yesterday, and today I substitute it for Matterhorn as my current reading. (In fact, I haven't read the first paragraph of Matterhorn. I foolishly bought it for a lower price from a "Marketplace" seller on Amazon.com, and two full weeks have passed without its appearing in my mailbox. Sheez.)

Martin Heidegger was a German existentialist philosopher who celebrated the notion that life is "a clearing in dark woods; one comes out of darkness and recedes into darkness." Hannah Arendt was a young Jew  who became his student, his mistress, and his intellectual heir. That was in the 1920s. Heidegger went on to become a devoted Nazi, while Arendt became a philosopher of the Holocaust. An incredible journey of two great minds, wonderfully well told by Daniel Maier-Katkin of Florida State University. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The glass is two-fifths full

Peggy Noonan is always worth reading. This weekend she writes about what we might call the New Pessimism, or whatever happened to the American dream that the kids would always have it better than we did?

Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too.... But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won't be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up....

Optimists think that if we manage to turn a few things around, their kids may have it . . . almost as good. The country they inherit may be . . . almost as good. And it's kind of a shock to think like this; pessimism isn't in our DNA. But it isn't pessimism, really, it's a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don't act as if they do.

Sure, part of this is just growing old: the world doesn't look as bright at sixty as it did at thirty. (Ms. Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.) But every once in a while I look at my red Irish passport and I think: I'm glad I've got that. Just in case!  And I'm glad that my granddaughters carry red passports (British, in their case) as well as the green ones. Americans didn't used to think that way. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

'It is without similiarity whatsoever'

The New York Times has done a great service in sussing out nearly a dozen more lawmakers (some now happily retired) who have set up memorials to themselves along the lines of Charles Rangel. Among them:

* The Daniel Inouye chair at the University of Hawaii, subsidized by a shipping line

* The James Clyburn program at South Carolina State University, subsidized by builders of nuclear power plants

* The Mitch McConnell fund at the University of Louisville, subsidized by a military contractor

The way this works: instead of soliciting a bribe, or even a campaign donation, I set up the Daniel Ford Institute of Warbird Studies at the University of New Hampshire, and watch the money roll in, as the NYT explains:

Education officials involved in creating these centers said they had been amazed at how quickly they had been able to raise money for programs named for a sitting member of Congress. At the University of Hawaii, $1.6 million was donated in the first month of fund-raising for the endowed chair honoring Mr. Inouye and his wife, a record for the university. More than 25 of the donors — government contractors, banks, insurance and telecommunications companies — gave at least $25,000, far more than would be permitted in a single year of campaign contributions. An aide to Mr. Inouye said the donations had no influence on his legislative positions.

Of course I will never let $100,000 from Boeing influence my vote on the acquisition of tankers for the U.S. Air Force, nosirree bob! As a spokesman for Mitch McConnell told the NYT: "It is without similarity whatsoever" to the Charlie Rangel situation.... Well, here's a clue for the next senator or congressman who wants to build an endowed monument to himself and is pondering the similarities: you aren't worth it. None of you are worth it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Mosque at Ground Zero

Dorothy Rabinowitz, who ostensibly is a TV reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, is also one of the most brilliant writers on the follies of contemporary life. Yesterday she weighed in on The Mosque at Ground Zero.

Nine years after the Twin Towers fell into the street, and took three thousand people with them, we still don't have a replacement to fill that great hole in the ground. The political-legal process just can't handle it. (During the Great Depression, the Empire State Building went from ground breaking to first visitor in eleven months.) So it looks like the first new building to rise in the area, and to look down into that hole, will be--a thirteen-story mosque!

Read Ms. Rabinowitz's take on this. No summary of mine can do it justice. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Ecological catastro - oh, never mind!

When I look at the New York Times online this morning, I see the pretty photo above (taken yesterday off the Louisiana coast) side by side with an alarmist ad: an oiled bird with the headline Offshore drilling is dirty and dangerous. So which is it? More the former than the latter, evidently. The NYT story begins: 'The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.'

The story gets less cheery as you read on, but still, it's obvious that it was mostly hype and manufactured horror that we've been engorging on Good Morning America for the past three months. All that remains now is to finish plugging that hole, clean up the beaches--and send the bill to BP! Poor BP. Poor Tony Hayward. Do you think that in Russia they'll allow him to have his life back? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Um, make that $40,000,000,000!

BP's presidentially mandated $20 billion cleanup fund may be only the half of it. Now that a rough figure has been put on the oil spill--something approaching 5 million barrels--the New York Times is having fun calculating the fines that could be levied, anything from $4.5 billion to $21 billion, depending on whether the spill is defined as an accident or the result of negligence, and whether the company gets credit for the 800,000 barrels skimmed off before it could spread through the Gulf of Mexico.

BP's market value yesterday was $123 billion, though it will no doubt drop a bit today. Perhaps it would be easier just to let the White House run the company through Chapter 11, split it into Good BP and Bad BP, and give the stock in the former to the workers. Mr. Obama claims a great success in having applied that formula to GM. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Goodbye, Farmer Tuttle!

It is with some trepidation that I say this, because the media have been announcing the demise of the Tuttle Farm for thirty years or more. Invariably, it was the media outlet (Life magazine was a notable fatality) that went belly up, while the Tuttles kept on farming. But the Boston Globe, Foster's Dover Democrat, and CCN all agree: the Tuttle Farm is for sale after nearly four centuries. Eleven generations of Tuttles--man and wife, brother and sister--have farmed these gorgeous acres between the Spaulding Turnpike and the Piscataqua River in Dover, New Hampshire. The asking price is $3.5 million. And there's a catch: apparently there's a conservation easement on the place. No housing development or shopping mall need apply. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford