Nate Fick

Last night I watched the sixth episode of the hugely enjoyable Generation Kill mini-series. For the first time (I think), the sympathetic lieutenant's full name was spoken--previously it's been "Nate" or "Lieutenant Fick"--and I was sure I'd heard it before. So like a good child of the internet, I Googled the name, and sure enough: he's the author of One Bullet Away, which some of my classmates in War in the Modern World called the best of the 21st century accounts of warfare. I haven't read it but will soon be doing so. Meanwhile, I hope to catch the final episode of "Generation Kill" before heading off to Aspen for the annual ski week. It's a great show; pity about the title. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On cowing a nation

Roger Cohen, in a Thanksgiving Day op-ed in the New York Times, gives an apocalyptic view of the new security regimen at American (and other) airports. The U.S., he writes, "has empowered zealous bureaucrats to trample on the liberties for which Americans give thanks this week." Our security system, he argues, is "stupid," relying as it does on "dubious gropes" and "daily humiliations." And that's just the warmup:

Whether or not these explosive devices [liquids, shoes, underwear] were ever actually operable remains a matter of dispute, just as it remains a mystery that the enemy — if as powerful as portrayed — has not contrived a single terrorist act on U.S. soil since 9/11. What is not in doubt is an old rule: Give a bureaucrat a big stick and a big budget, allow said bureaucrat to trade in the limitless currency of human anxiety, and the masses will soon be intimidated by the Department of Fear....

Anyone who has watched T.S.A. agents spending 10 minutes patting down 80-year-old grandmothers, or seen dismayed youths being ordered back into the scanner booth by agents connected wirelessly to other invisible agents gazing at images of these people in a state of near-nakedness, has to ask: What form of group madness is it that forsakes judgment and discernment for process run amok?....

The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the T.S.A. represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.

America is a nation of openness, boldness and risk-taking. Close this nation, cow it, constrict it and you unravel its magic.

Happy Holidays. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

One gets used to it

On October 2 and 3, 1941, German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries shot 2,273 men, women, and children in the city of Mahileu, in Soviet Belarus. One of the policemen--an Austrian, as it happened, not himself a German national--wrote his wife about what it was like to kill people on the edge of a pit that was to be their grave:

"During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU [Russian secret police]. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water."

Quoted in Timothy Snyder's magnificent history, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, pages 205-206. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Bubble Boy

The estimable Peggy Noonan does a delightful take on President Obama's trip to Indiana to "get out of the presidential bubble," as one reporter put it. It's an impossibility, of course: when the president travels, he takes the bubble with him. Ms. Noonan suggests that instead of traveling to Indiana in his special plane, with his entourage and his special cars, Mr. Obama should appoint a Reality Adviser. She then segues into an amusing conversation between the two--on the subject of airport security.

Actually, it's a lot easier. All Mr. Obama need do is call up the clueless John Pistole at TSA and tell him to bring a full-body scanner, a couple of overweight TSA types with their uniforms and rubber gloves, and to set up a conga line in front of Air Force One. Let Mr. Obama spread his legs, raise his arms in the worldwide posture of surrender, and expose his genitals to an anonymous technician in another room. Let him board Air Force One. Then let him get off the plane, this time opting out of the scanner and getting his gonads stroked by a surly stranger with bad breath in a private room. The whole charade would take about half an hour and cost maybe a thousand dollars--a tiny fraction of what's involved in a trip to Indiana.

If Bubble Boy did that, just once, what do you think the odds are that the scanners and the pat-downs would be standard practice for the Christmas travel season? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Light dawns over Times Square

By golly, the New York Times is catching on! In his Political Times column, Matt Bai ruminates on the larger meaning of America's roiling anger about body scanners, pat-downs, and bullying bureaucrats in general:

...the “Don’t touch my junk” fiasco raises, yet again, what has become the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work. From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled — blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry.

Good grief! This could have been a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Mr. Bai goes on to speculate that perhaps the Democrats were misled by their electoral triumphs in 2006 and 2008. (You think?) He holds up the Cash for Clunkers boondoggle as just such an over-reaching, though I suspect it was mostly forgotten by November 2: ObamaCare was the clunker on most of our minds by that time.

White House aides expressed shock this week at how controversial the T.S.A. has now become. They seem to regard this latest argument as a distraction from the security issues that matter more.... But this is just the latest iteration of a larger debate that surrounds much of what Mr. Obama does. And, just as with the health care protests and the reaction to the BP oil spill, the administration’s surprise seems to indicate that it still doesn’t quite get what that debate is really about.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Well, why doesn't the government pay for it?

In the long ago and far away, it was considered very amusing when a child said of a project whose finances were uncertain: "Well, why doesn't the government pay for it?" That stopped being funny in the Johnson administration, if not before. But there are still a few who haven't gotten the word, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The last is the gent to wants to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center next door to Ground Zero. He thinks it would be a dandy idea if we (that is, the American taxpayer) not only agreed that it's a dandy idea, but helped pay for it as well. Toward that end, he has applied for $5 million from a U.S. government fund established for the purpose of--are you ready?--rebuilding lower Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist strike. Yes. In the immortal words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Green Card lottery

Here's a lottery no one has ever heard about, except for 15 million people who have entered it: you can get a Green Card (think of it as an American visa on steroids) by the luck of the draw. Fifty thousand are issued every year, so the odds are actually fairly good--one out of 300. The Wall Street Journal has the story. Be sure to read the comments: they'll make your blood run cold.

Personally, I'm all in favor of the Green Card lottery: it proves that 15 million people still love us, in spite of Iraq, Afghanistan, the bellicose George W. Bush, and and the bumbling Barack Obama. (The participants have tripled in the past five years.) Besides, half the applicants are from Bangladesh, which means that they won't be agitating for more signs in Spanish. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

And now--the Maserati Grand Cherokee!

The alliance of Chrysler and Fiat was always a source of amusement, but nothing comes close to the latest bit of hilarity out of Detroit, to wit: Chrysler will build a Maserati SUV on the underpinnings of the Jeep Grand Cherokee!

This follows hard on the heels of other hybrids from CEO Sergio Marcchione, including a rebranded Chrysler 200 to be sold abroad under the Lancia marque, and an Alfa Romeo to be sold in the U.S. by Chrysler dealers.

Pricing will be something to watch. The Jeep Grand Cherokee starts at $30,000, while the cheapest Masarati goes for $118,000. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Palin v. Obama

Frank Rich in the New York Times does his baffled best to analyze the phenomenon of Sarah Palin:

What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

What particularly astonishes Mr. Rich is that the premiere of Sarah Palin's Alaska on the telly got twice the number of viewer's as the season finale of Mad Men! (Since we don't ordinarily watch the telly, hence don't have any of the specialty channels, Sally and I crouch in front of the computer monitor to watch Mad Men, which I buy off Amazon at $1.99 the episode, the day after it airs ... or creeps through the cable, or whatever it does to get to more sophisticated homes.)

But here's the thing: if you take away the snark, everything Mr. Rich says about Ms. Palin applies equally to Barack Obama. They are, in my judgment, two empty suits, each with his or her besotted demographic. If they are candidates in 2012, then as far as I'm concerned it will be a reprise of 1968. That was the year I voted for the Farmer-Labor candidate. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

That was the old fine!

The obese ladies and gentlemen of the Transportation Security Administration have created a new American folk hero in John Tyner. Rather like President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who'd like to fire the American electorate for not appreciating them sufficiently, the TSA is really upset with the "traveling public" and its reaction to full body scanners and the deliberately intimate pat-down given to those who opt out of it. To make their point, they have opened an investigation into Mr. Tyner and threatened him with an $11,000 fine.

It seems that Mr. Tyner warned an agent, "Touch my junk and I'll have you arrested," when the TSA began to explore his "crotchal area," as one agent felicitously called it. He was forcibly ejected from the airport, with a warning that he could be fined $10,000 for lèse majesté. Though the Federal Reserve Board assures us that the consumer price index these days is flat, the TSA evidently hasn't gotten the word: $10,000, explained a representative, was the old fine for injuring the pride of its employees; Mr. Tyner may now have to come up with eleven big ones.

A conservative famously is a liberal who's been mugged. Just so, a libertarian is a conservative who's been groped by TSA. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Can ye spare a Euro, mister?

 

The Irish government evidently capitulated to the European Community yesterday, agreeing to take the bailout that it has been resisting for a week. The price, as everyone knows, is that Ireland must raise its taxes to European Community levels, thus ending the run of the Celtic Tiger. What a pity. (The gent on the left is Ajai Chopra of the International Monetary Fund. Though ready to bail out the nation with other people's money, he doesn't seem to have dropped anything into the beggar's cup.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Selling off Governmental Motors

Two cheers for Presidents Bush and Obama (and one apiece for CEOs Rick Wagoner and Dan Akerson) for starting us on the re-privatization of GM. We taxpayers paid $50 billion for our shares; we are now on track to get about 80 percent of that returned to us--or, more likely, spent on something else. Assuming the net cost is a mere $10 billion, that comes to $87 per American household. God knows, we've made worse investments in the past. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Honorable man

Sgt Salvatore Guinta is that anomaly, at least in recent years: a living recipient of the Medal of Honor. President Obama will hang the Medal around Sgt Guinta's neck this afternoon in the East Wing of the White House. I would give a lot to know what's going through the minds of each man at that moment! What does the soldier think when he stands face to face with the commander in chief? What does the politician think when he stands face to face with a hero--and not just any hero, but one who nearly gave his life to carry out the presidential strategy?

Sgt Guinta's difficult night is brilliantly related (though at second hand) in Sebastian Junger's War, in my estimation one of the best books ever written about combat.  If you haven't read it, you should. It's The Iliad, except that the heroes are the enlisted men. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being a Pole during World War II

Many years ago, I hitchhiked from Paris to Perugia with this young woman. She was Polish--born in Lwow in the southeast, her father likely murdered in the Katyn Forest massacre, herself sent to Siberia with her mother and sister. They were among the minority of deportees who were rescued after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and Stalin was persuaded to scratch up a Polish army to fight on the western front. They were sent first to Iran, then the women and children were scattered all over the world, an experience that left Basia fluent in Russian, Arabic, French, and English, and Polish of course; in the spring of 1955, when I took this photo, she was heading to Perugia to perfect her Italian.

This all came alive to me again while reading the magnificent Bloodlands, an account of central Europe's agony from the 1930s to the 1950s. This in turn led me to borrow The Polish Deportees of World War II, containing first-hand accounts of this great hegira and the suffering it entailed. (Roughly ten percent of the Poles died in Iran or en route to it, of disease and malnutrition from their Russian exile--and these, remember, were from the select groups that actually got out of the Gulag, and those in turn were the hardiest of the deportees, who survived weeks in cattle cars or horse-drawn sleighs en route to the Russian outback.)

Lots of those Polish young men died in the Italian campaign, at Monte Cassino and elsewhere. I wonder if Basia knew that? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bowing to foreign opinion II

Bernard Shaw said there are two tragedies in life: one being not to get your heart's desire, and the other, to get it. Barack Obama entered office with a heart full of desires, including an end to what the historians call the myth of American exceptionalism. He went around the world, apologizing for his predecessors. We have sinned, he admitted! We are a nation like any other! Well, of course the world took him at his word. As a result, he went to the G-20 summit and got sand kicked in his face. He couldn't even get the Koreans to sign the trade agreement that the Bush administration negotiated three years ago, and that was blocked in the Congress by Nancy Pelosi!

This is very popular in the faculty lounge, but it will cost us dearly over the years, as European automobiles enter South Korea at more favorable terms than those from Ford and General Motors.... Oh, and did you catch the news that a Chinese automaker hopes to take 16 percent of those GM shares soon to go on the market, heavily subsidized by your taxes? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We are all Greeks now!

Thirty-five arrests and fourteen injured, half of them police officers, when university students rioted in London the other day. The window belongs to the Conservative Party, which in the metaphor of President Obama is trying to get the British economic vehicle out of the ditch. In the US, according to our eloquent president, the naysayers stand around with their Slurpies and watch. Prime Minister Cameron must wish he could be so lucky. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On maintaining the nation

I've always thought of the United States as a man on a bicycle (well, better make that a person on a bicycle). He does great as long as he keeps moving. Stopping, however, is an awkward business, especially as one gets older.

Lately I get the impression that the American bicycle is finally coming to a stop. (Perhaps that's why we favor long-legged presidents?) The reasons are many, but one of them is entirely self-inflicted: we're jettisoning the culture that got us this far. The other day in the Wall Street Journal, Tony Blair expressed it beautifully. Muslims were on his mind, but they are or ought to be on our minds as well, and anyhow muslims are a fair stand-in for the entire multi-culti stew:

But there has to be a shared acceptance that some things we believe in and we do together: obedience to certain values like democracy, rule of law, equality between men and women; respect for national institutions; and speaking the national language. This common space cannot be left to chance or individual decision. It has to be accepted as mandatory.

Amen. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Dignity restored

I love this photo, not least because the president of the United States is wearing a tie! Thank goodness. It's high time we had some dignity in the Oval Office, after a dismal season of hearing about "folks" and "Slurpies." (Incidentally, if it's remarkable that a Kenyan-American should be president of the United States, it's also pretty impressive that a Sikh should be prime minister of India.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A fate worse than debt

My goodness, at long last the Gray Lady has taken notice! Writes Landon Thomas in his prominent story in the NYT this morning:

LONDON — When interest rates soared last week on Irish government bonds, it served as a grim warning to other indebted nations of how difficult and even politically ruinous it could be to roll back decades of public sector largess.

Mr. Thomas has mostly European governments in mind, of course, but he does have a sense that it's not just Ireland, Greece, Spain, and California--that we are all Europeans now:

International concerns about the high budget deficit in the United States, and Washington’s seeming willingness to print money rather than tackle tough debt-cutting measures, help partly explain the recent anti-American criticism from countries as diverse as Brazil, China and Germany. Countering those critics may be one of the biggest tasks for President Obama in Seoul, South Korea, this week at the Group of 20 meeting of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies.

I'm not sure that Trillion Dollar Barack is the best man we could deploy for this task. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Gray Lady meets Facebook

The media is suffering from its biennial bout of post-election depression, to the extent that the New York Times has done a think-piece on the Facebook Problem. It seems that some of our candidates had earlier posted dubious photos of themselves on the internet. I particularly admired Krystal Ball, who in addition to her marvelous name once had herself photographed mouthing what the Gray Lady delicately calls a "sex toy."

Krystal Ball lost, but Aaron Shock (another marvelous name!) is a newly minted Congressman despite or perhaps because of the photo above, in which he poses with a woman in wide-stance bra. (Don't you just love it that the New York Times obscures her face?) Well, of course he won! The women all voted for him because they admired his pecs, and the guys because they yearned to have that cleavage bracketing them at the pool. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

All aboard the QE2!

Not the Cunard cruise ship, alas, but the second round of Ben Bernanke's "quantitative easing," which is a fancy term for turning dollars into dimes by way of an extended bout of inflation such as we enjoyed in the 1970s. No longer do central banks actually crank up the printing presses in order to debase the currency; instead they buy U.S. government bonds with money they don't have. Presto! The dollar falls and prices rise. How else did you think we were going to pay off those trillion-dollars deficits of the past two years? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We're the ones we've been waiting for

Give Barack Obama his due: he nailed it with that prediction, though we had to wait two years for it to be fulfilled. Was there ever such a rebuke of a sitting president and his party? (Perhaps more the party than the president.) Even New Hampshire, once a totem of the GOP but in recent years a bastion of Good Thinking as refugees poured in from Massachusetts, has returned to the Republican fold--for its Washington delegation. We returned a Democrat to the state house, and my home district returned six Democrats to the thundering herd of our state legislature. There's a message in that: not yet does the United States have a two-party system with the Tea Party on the right and the Republicans on the left. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

All you mosques look alike to me

According to CNN:

While there were "no identifiable or specific threats," an FBI official in Chicago said suspicious packages addressed to U.S. destinations found on cargo planes abroad warranted the precautions.

"Since two of the suspicious packages that were intercepted were addressed to religious institutions in Chicago, all churches, synagogues and mosques in the Chicago area should be vigilant for any unsolicited or unexpected packages, especially those originating from overseas locations," said FBI Special Agent Ross Rice.

CNN had the sense to headline the story, "Chicago synagogues warned to watch for suspicious packages," which might spare the local imams, ministers, and priests from rummaging too deeply through the junk mail. But it's scary to think that Agent Rice seens to believe that, even though the bombs came from Yemen, were put together by al Qaeda, and were addresses to synagogues, all "religious institutions" are equally endangered. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Tuesday's child is full of grace

But ah, Wednesday's child is full of woe, and so it seems it will be for the Democratic party on November 3. My favorite pollster says that the next Speaker of the House will be a Republican, while the Senate Majority Leader will probably be a Democrat--though he may not be Harry Reid! Perhaps more important, because this is a Census year and many Congressional districts will be redrawn, a lot of states will have newly minted Republican governors.

Great news for the GOP? Not really, because they'll probably overreach, just as Messrs Obama and Reid have done over the past two years, and Mme Pelosi for four. Scott Rasmussen goes on to say: "But none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power."

The Rasmussen pollsters report that 51 percent of likely voters think that the Democrats are the party of big government, while 51 percent view Republicans as the party of big business. Who does that leave to be the party of the people--the Tea Party? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford