May 8, 2013

Liberal Opinion Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Week

Vol. 24 NO. 19 May 8, 2013

John Young

Government Isn’t Evil, Until...

It’s easy to deride U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s double standard. In fact, he is only observing a tradition of great duration.

Former Sen. Phil Gramm was truly a mythical bird, decrying federal spending at every stop, then racing at the speed of an arclight to the nearest microphone to take credit for any federal dollars trickling Texas’ way.

Such a phenom was he that the tactic earned its own term: Grammstanding.

Now, a new term of similar feather: hypocruzy.

Cruze is a tea party darlin’, he who in one of his first votes in Washington opposed federal emergency aid after Hurricane Sandy.

Now he stands before you now as Sen. Two-Face, saying he’ll pursue: “all available resources” to assist after the explosion that struck the Texas town of West.

Was Cruz careful not to mention the word “federal” when speaking of said resources? One angry observer from New York presumed so. He said Cruz and his Texas fiscal disservatives “should ask the NRA” for disaster funds.

(Won’t happen, of course. NRA funds are committed to keeping an obstructionist bloc in Congress.

That investment grows pricier each year when 10 times more Americans die from gun violence than perished on 9/11.)

This commentary could be all

about the two faces of Cruz, and the principle it takes to toss one’s principles out the limo window.

Actually, it’s about the thing that he and fellow tea partiers assail daily: that evil thing called government.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a fine fiddler to that tune. Just the other day he was in Chicago beckoning businesses to Texas, where the regulatory climate is as barren as a gila monster’s habitat.

But let’s be honest, because Perry won’t be: While many companies would be drawn to “less government,” more are interested in good schools for employees and effective public services, like highways that work. Each of those involves government.

Texas lawmakers have dedicated themselves to less of that.

As a presidential hopeful, Perry said he would eliminate up to three federal agencies, one of which he could not name. That comment makes him the embodiment of fiscal disservatism — making sport of cutting government first, and figuring out how it affects people later.

Perry says that a lack of regulation didn’t contribute to the West explosion. So, we can assume he and “anti-gummint’’” Texas policymakers will do nothing to prevent the next disaster.

were to assume it to be an indictment of bungling government. In fact, it was an indictment of bunglers who didn’t believe in government.

Katrina was a test-run, for instance, of a wholly privatized Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Talk about system failure. A chain of featherbedding good ol’ boys assigned to be responsive to human needs turned over in bed and hit “snooze” when the alarm sounded.

Now we have the disaster in West, at a fertilizer plant that, reports the Houston Chronicle, c o n t a i n e d substances that would have brought federal inspectors if state agencies had notified them.

In the aftermath, Republican Congressman Bill Flores, in whose district the disaster occurred, has asked for federal help. Like Cruz, to earn his own tea party merit badge, Flores also opposed Hurricane Sandy relief.

So Texas’ junior senator isn’t the only one guilty of hypocruzy.

Without question, the taxpayers of Texas and West deserve the help. They pay federal taxes.

Unfortunately, they are represented by a breed of posers and posturers who denounce and despise government, until they need it.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado.

Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

To that end, let’s think of another disaster that affected the region in many ways, Hurricane Katrina.

When almost nothing went right with the response to Katrina we 4-23-13

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Albert Hunt

Senate Friendship Born of Tragedy Beats Partisanship These days, most dispatches from Washington focus on petty partisanship, posturing, impasses and a political culture that rewards confrontation.

Here’s a respite: a story of kindness, comity, generosity reaching across the political divide.

It’s about the two senators from Illinois, Dick Durbin, a 30-year veteran of Congress, and Mark Kirk, a freshman. Durbin is the Senate Democratic whip; Kirk represents the bluest, or most Democratic, state of any Republican senator.

Fifteen months ago, at age 52, Kirk suffered a sudden ischemic stroke while in Illinois; it was serious, and he was in a coma for a week.

After regaining consciousness, he believed he was in danger of dying and doubted he would return to the Senate. He endured three operations and strenuous rehabilitation to learn to walk and function.

Immediately after the stroke, one of the first visitors to Kirk’s stunned Washington office was Durbin.

“It was such a shock,” the Democratic lawmaker recalls. “We just wanted to pitch in and help any way we could.”

Durbin “came with his chief of staff and told us they would do anything to work with us - legislation, constituent mail - to call anytime we needed him,” says Kate Dickens, who runs Kirk’s Senate office. “He

said, ‘I’m your acting senator.’ It was very comforting.”

Durbin later visited the recovering senator at home, and they had a lengthy one-on-one conversation.

Every commitment was fulfilled.

Press releases were issued jointly; they co-sponsored legislation and undertook collaborative projects in their state. Their offices worked together closely. The Republican staffers recall that when questions persisted about whether Kirk would return to the Senate, it was Durbin who insisted that he would.

Their collaboration got results.

Despite the logjam of judicial appointments, Durbin made sure that a Kirk appointee, John Tharp, was confirmed as a judge on the U.S. District Court in Northern Illinois.

They also worked together on what Kirk calls the “crown jewel” of Illinois appointments: the replacement of the U.S. attorney in Chicago. Patrick Fitzgerald, who resigned from the post last year, indicted and convicted the previous two Illinois governors, a Republican and Democrat. It is, to put it mildly, a politically sensitive post.

Durbin and Kirk, with the help of a bipartisan group of advisers, submitted four names that were acceptable to both senators. The president is expected to make his choice soon.

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Their relationship had been cordial before. Durbin was chairman of the campaign of Kirk’s 2010 opponent.

After the election, they agreed to wipe the slate clean.

The trauma of the stroke deepened their professional and personal bonds, both men said in interviews.

“We now have a close relationship, which I value very much,” Durbin says.

“We put our state ahead of party,” Kirk says.

Displays of personal compassion in politics aren’t entirely uncommon.

Vice President Joe Biden has written about the kindness he was shown by some colleagues when, shortly after he was elected to the Senate, his wife and young child were killed in an automobile accident. In 2003, when the son of Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon committed suicide, one of the first people to come to his office to console him and talk about loss was Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy.

Yet with comity so rare in Washington these days, the DurbinKirk experience is noteworthy. There were others who rose to support the afflicted senator.

The lawmakers Kirk cites include his “best friend” in the Senate, Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, and Rep. John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican.

Kirk appreciates

the special support from Durbin because they’re from the same state and because, as a party leader, the Democrat has clout.

Durbin, 68, is one of the few confidants of President Barack Obama in Congress and one of the most liberal lawmakers, a staunch supporter of progressive and labor causes.

Yet, unlike many other politicians, he cultivates ties on the other side of the aisle; politics, he believes, is about relationships. He persuaded the conservative Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio to join the group that was trying to craft an overhaul of immigration policies.

They unveiled their proposal last week; prospects for eventual Senate passage are good.

And, to the dismay of some on the political left, he joined the bipartisan majority on the Bowles-Simpson deficit panel in supporting a longrange deficit-reduction plan that included cuts in entitlements and tax increases.

Kirk’s recovery has been slow but steady. He walks with a cane and is regaining other abilities. He missed all of last year’s congressional session. He’s back full time now, and fully engaged. During a recent all-night Senate “vote-a-rama,” there were 42 roll calls until 5 a.m.;

Hunt continued on page 3

Reference Guide Government

Government

National

National

1 Young 2 Hunt 3 Gadebusch

12 Estrich 13 Dowd 14 Witcover 14 Petri

19 Brasch

28 Friedman 29 Bruni

Congress

ATF

4 Horwitz/Finn

Economy

Bush Legacy

4 Dionne 5 Marcus

15 Thom Hartmann Blog

6 Klein

16-17 Liberal Delineations

Medicare Bush Legacy 9 Goff 10 Witcover 10 Press 11 Petri 12 Robinson

International Russia

18 Keller

Boy Scouts

Gun Control 20 Hiatt 20 Dionne 21 Page

Boston Attack 22 Robinson 22 Harrop 23 Marcus 24 Carlson 24 Lyons 25 Estrich 26 Dionne 26 Kaul 27 Page 28 Witcover

Boston Attack Internet

30 Dowd 30 Oremus

Press

31 Meyerson

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Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Ruth Gadebusch

Through The Back Door In my day in the South one often heard, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” Actually, it was intended to inspire one who wasn’t accomplishing an assignment. If one way did not work it was always worth trying another.

Alas, that has been adopted by the political world but minus the good intentions. It is being used to sneakily accomplish what cannot be done on top of the table.

We are accustomed to all the ways of attempting to negate Roe vs. Wade but somewhat nonplussed at the speed in which the anti-immigration reform people managed to kidnap the Boston Marathon tragedy. No doubt there are a few who can only handle one big issue at a time, so genuinely did not feel they could deal with two big things on the agenda; however, it seems to me that the biggest call for postponement came from those who did not like the way the wind seemed to be blowing. Don’t bother them with the facts, humaneness, practicality or anything else. Just does any other group, native born send all of them “home.” or otherwise. We are speaking of Haven’t we had immigration people who have lived productive reform before us long enough? lives contributing to the society we Isn’t it time to quit talking and all share. take action? Of course there are no It is time for Congress to act. What easy solutions but how long can we happened in Boston is no excuse continue to deny justice to all those for postponement. It has little, or no, bearing on the immigration whose status is in question?

I concede that many came by concerns of this nation. less than honest routes. On the other hand haven’t they paid just In a whole other matter is the by living in fear of deportation threatening of the post office. Yes, all these years. Then there are the postal service may not hold the innocents brought here as children. place of absolute necessity it once We are not talking about the criminal held in the country but it is still a element for which these illegal service dear to many of us. UPS, immigrants have their share just as FedEx and others may have taken over much of the function and, in Hunt continued from page 2 some cases may be able to perform he made them all. more efficiently, but they do no During rehabilitation, he set a cover all the bases of this venerable goal: When the Senate convened old institution. this year, he was going to walk up Part of their success is that they the steps to the Capitol. He told are unencumbered by the burden Durbin he would be “thrilled” if Congress has placed on the postal he would join him. service. That is especially true of On Jan. 3, Kirk, accompanied the pension funding requirement by the vice president, Manchin demanded for the Post Office but and Durbin, walked up those 45 not on other government agencies. steps.

The postal service is expected to be Albert R. Hunt is a Bloomberg self sustaining yet it is not allowed View columnist. to operate freely as do the private (c) 2013, Bloomberg News competitors. The playing field is 4-22-13 not level.

The legislators who want to eliminate the service would do well to be honest about it, just to place the issue on top of the table. Too bad the postal workers don’t have the same financial resources to contribute to political campaigns as do the private corporations. Oh, am I being too cynical?

it as a way to ring the death knell of the health plan that they could not get even from this Supreme Court.

The approach through the back door has almost become the preferred way. It suits their fun and games method so well that good old honest debate is seldom allowed.

Just look at the proposed gun law that the Senate would not allow to be considered, much less enacted.

Whatever happened to legislating by the Congress? Whatever happened to the idea that once voted on by the majority and signed by the President that it was to be accepted as the law of the land? Once we had a nation that knew when to come together. Compromise remains a good idea. Respect for other opinions is still valid.

Then, there is the abortion issue. At this writing I believe there are 13 states unable to get around the Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade ruling of 1973 that have proposals in their legislatures to make “the right” of a woman to make her own private decision regarding an abortion inoperable. Countless other proposals have come and gone in recent years since the issue became one that so many think they 4-24-13 should be allowed to decide for others. Fortunately the court has thus far protected us from the holier Online Subscription than thou. Still they try.

The back door is also in full Beat The Postal Delay, swing on the Affordable Care Act Subscribe Online Today!

(Obama-care). On this, more than one governor has gone so far as to figuratively cut off his nose to spite www.liberalopinion.com his face by refusing to set up the Or call Toll Free mechanism to operate in the state.

1-800-338-9335 Never mind that it is funded by Washington, not the state. They see

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Sari Horwitz and Peter Finn

Often Unloved, ATF Critical To Solving Major Crimes Like Boston Bombing

It’s the agency that Congress and the National Rifle Association love to hate.

But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which hasn’t had a director in seven years, has been at the heart of two searing events over the past two weeks - the investigations into the Boston Marathon bombing and the explosion that leveled a fertilizer plant and part of a town in central Texas.

In the hours after the coordinated blasts near the finish line of the April 15 marathon, ATF agents were on their hands and knees on Boylston Street.

They were scouring the debris for remnants of the bomb, the first excruciating steps in reconstructing the devices.

Two days later, there was a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. Since then, dozens of ATF investigators, along with local and state agents, have been sifting through a deep crater that was once a factory and the vast expanse of charred ground that spreads out from the center of the blast.

In the hunt for the suspected bombers in Boston, attention has focused on the FBI and the Boston Police Department, but investigators said that ATF, with its expertise in explosives, has played a critical role behind the scenes.

“The ATF brings an institutional knowledge of previous bomb incidents around the country and around the world,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.

“In Boston, they tried to reconstruct the device, looking at the component parts and feeding that information into their bomb data center to see what may be similar to other devices used around the world.”

One of ATF’s most experienced explosives technicians was coincidentally a few blocks from the blasts because he works out of the Boston office, said Assistant ATF Director Richard Marianos. The agent rushed to the scene and began to help secure evidence, figure out what explosive was used and determine how the bombs were detonated.

The agency soon had more than 100 people in Boston, along with bomb-sniffing dogs, called “explosives-detection canines,” and their handlers.

It is the same role that ATF played in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and in New York after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

ATF also will try to trace a gun allegedly used

by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspected bomber who was killed in a shootout with police. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, is recovering from multiple gunshot wounds in a Boston hospital and has been charged in the attack.

“In an investigation like this, the ATF is the Marines to the FBI’s Army,” said Jim Cavanaugh, a former senior ATF agent. “The Army is a million soldiers in charge of the battle and the Marines are 300,000, but the Marines are critical to the fight because of their special skills and the way they

operate.”

Despite its expertise, ATF has long gotten short shrift in Washington. In January, President Obama nominated B. Todd Jones, the acting, part-time director, to be permanent head of ATF. But the Senate has not scheduled a confirmation hearing.

Since the ATF director has needed Senate approval, in 2006, the gun lobby has blocked nominees, according to law enforcement officials.

and what chemicals were stored at the facility. The explosion killed 14 people, injured 200 and caused widespread damage.

“A fire scene is complicated in itself, but you compound that with an explosion and it really complicates the issue,” ATF Special Agent in Charge Robert Champion told reporters at the scene.

A day after the Texas explosion, more than 100 ATF agents and intelligence officers were sent to Warren, Ohio, for the kind of operation the agency works every week. After an investigation of a drug trafficking group, 55 people were charged in federal court and state charges were brought against an additional 42. At the same time, 22 people on the agency’s national response team were working on a large serial-arson case in California.

“We don’t get a lot of accolades, but we go out there with the resources we have and we try to accomplish the mission,” Marianos said.

Despite its $1.1 billion budget, ATF has fewer agents than it did nearly four decades ago, about 2,360. For the past several years, the agency has been buffeted by criticism on Capitol Hill over a botched operation to track guns from U.S. dealers to Mexican drug traffickers.

For all the political turmoil, ATF has remained central to major investigations of bombings and explosions in the United States.

About 50 ATF personnel were dispatched to the Texas fertilizer plant, where they are central in (c) 2013, The Washington Post determining what caused a fire before the explosion 4-25-13

E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Economy Whodunit

The policy mystery of our time is why politicians in the United States and across much of the democratic world are so obsessed with deficits when their primary mission ought to be bringing down high and debilitating rates of unemployment.

And since last week saw a cross-party celebration of the opening of George W. Bush’s presidential library, I’d add a second mystery: Why is it that conservative Republicans who freely cut taxes while backing two wars in the Bush years started preaching fire on deficits only after a Democrat entered the White House?

Here is a clue that helps unravel this whodunit: Many of the same conservatives who now say we have to cut Social Security to deal with the deficit supported Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security -- even though the transition would have added another $1 trillion to the deficit. The one thing the two positions have in common is that Bush’s proposal would also have reduced guaranteed Social Security benefits.

In other words, deficits don’t really matter to many of the ideological conservatives shouting so loud about them now. Their central goal is to hack away at government.

This goes to the larger argument about jobs and deficits. For a brief time after the Great Recession hit, governments around the world, including President Obama’s administration, agreed that the immediate priority was restoring growth.

Through deficit spending and other measures, the 20 leading economies agreed to pump about $5 trillion into the global economy.

Obama and Democrats in Congress enacted a substantial stimulus. The package should have been bigger, but Obama -- thinking he would have another shot later at boosting the economy -- kept its size down to win enough votes to get it through Congress.

The second chance didn’t come because conservatives stoked anti-government deficit mania -- and never mind that the deficit ballooned because of the downturn itself, the stimulus needed to reverse it, and those fiscally improvident Bushera decisions.

Then along came academic economists to bless the anti-deficit fever with the authority of spreadsheets. In a 2010 paper cited over and over by pro-austerity politicians, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argued that when countries reached a debt level above 90 percent of their GDP, they almost always fell into slow growth or contraction.

Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens compactly takes the story from there: “The implication was that deep retrenchment was the only route back to prosperity. Now, economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say the results reflected a data ‘coding error’ and some questionable aggregation. The assumption that high debt always equals low growth is not sustained by the evidence.”

While Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged their error, they dismissed the controversy in

Dionne continued on page 5

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Ruth Marcus

A Gimmick To Cure Sequester Pain How predictable was that?

Sequestration starts to pinch - and pinch the middle class -- so the restrictions are loosened. Why cure the disease when treating the symptom is so much easier? Why lose weight when you can let out the pants?

Air travel was a nightmare this week. My husband spent hours trapped on tarmacs in New York and Washington. I fared a bit better on a trip to the Midwest.

When the sequester was first triggered, the Obama administration was accused of exaggerating its impact. This week wasn’t sky-isfalling rhetoric, it was the-skiesaren’t-moving reality.

So it’s no wonder that Congress responded to the mess by, as The Washington Post put it in a magnificently Latinate phrase, circumventing sequestration. When constituents howl, Washington listens -- at least when the constituents are well-connected.

You might point out -- and you’d be right -- that lawmakers have not been nearly as responsive to other victims

Dionne continued from page 4

a New York Times op-ed as an “academic kerfuffle” and insisted that their findings had often been “exaggerated or misrepresented” by, among others, politicians.

(They also complained about the “hate-filled, even threatening, email messages” they received. I’d be happy to share my email with them. Friends, if you have the good fortune to be engaged in public debates, you get a lot of angry missives these days.)

The two economists would have added to their credibility by showing a bit more humility about their data problem. But the damage was done. Europe and the United States moved prematurely to austerity. Tens of millions of people have suffered from joblessness or lower real incomes. Reinhart and Rogoff didn’t force these decisions, but they abetted them.

Now, through the sequester cuts, we are compounding the problem. It’s outrageous that Congress and the administration are moving quickly to reduce the inconvenience to travelers -- people fortunate enough to be able to buy

of the sequester’s mindlessness: kids who lost Head Start slots, criminal defendants whose public defenders have been furloughed, unemployed workers with benefits curtailed, Indian reservations unable to hire teachers.

Other sequester cuts take a silent, uncertain toll. The Food and Drug Administration will have to cut food inspections by nearly one-fifth, Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told USA Today. If we luck out, we will never know the impact. Officials at the National Institutes of Health warn of budding scientists lured to other careers -- or other countries -- because of the uncertainty and difficulty of securing federal grants.

The only real division between Republican and Democratic lawmakers concerned which direction to point the finger: whether the air traffic controller crisis was the unavoidable result of allowing the sequester to take effect (Democrats) or whether it was manufactured by the administration and Democrats looking to maximize the sequester’s pain. plane tickets -- by easing cuts in air traffic control while leaving the rest of the sequester in place. What about the harm being done to the economy as a whole? What about the sequester’s injuries to those who face lower unemployment benefits, who need Meals on Wheels, or who attend Head Start programs?

Instead, we should be using this period of low interest rates to invest in our infrastructure. This would help relieve current unemployment while laying a foundation for longterm growth. But anti-government slogans trump smart-government policies. For reasons rooted in both ideology and the system’s bias against the less privileged, we hear nothing but “deficits, deficits, deficits” and “cuts, cuts, cuts.”

To paraphrase a French statesman from long ago, this is worse than a crime. This is a mistake. Its costs are being borne by good people who ask only for the chance to do productive work.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group 4-29-13

So Washington did what Washington does best: it blinked.

The administration, having warned repeatedly about the horrors of the sequester, flinched when those horrors started to enrage the public and scare lawmakers. It agreed to apply, as White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “a Band-Aid.” The point of the sequester, of course, was never to happen. The automatic cuts, or so the theory had it, were so unthinkable that Congress would never permit them to take place. Then the unthinkable became the inevitable. To undo the sequester, or unravel part of it, Congress would have to come up with equivalent “savings.”

In air quotes, because the “savings” it has produced are not -surprise! -- savings at all. Part of the fiscal cliff deal involved averting a few months of the sequester, thanks in part to a retirement tax savings dodge. This neat little trick produced revenue in the short term but will end up costing the Treasury money over time.

Such is Washington’s version of prudence, and because it behooved neither side to blow the whistle, complaints were muted.

For this round, lawmakers - before they, yes, flew home to face angry constituents -- gave the Transportation Department added flexibility to shift around funds to avoid furloughing air traffic controllers. Talk about rearranging the deck chairs.

And if you think the air traffic furloughs are the last case of special pleading to which lawmakers will respond -- or cave -- you don’t know Washington.

There are responsible alternatives to mindless cuts or dishonest restorations. They involve, and you’ve heard this before, a balanced blend of spending cuts and increased tax revenue.

Because, as David Wessel usefully noted in The Wall Street Journal, so much of federal spending is conducted through the tax code - through deductions and credits for favored activities -- the notion of raising revenue this way ought not to be automatic anathema to Republicans. Except it is, at least so far.

President Obama, in his 2014 budget, offered one such responsible alternative combining increased tax revenues with entitlement reforms.

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the dogged deficit duo, have just proposed an updated version of their plan, which would reduce the debt even further than the president’s -- to disappointingly little public notice and even less prospect for serious action.

Instead, responsible governing seems forever stuck on the tarmac, waiting for the gridlock to lift.

Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com. (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group 4-26-13

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Ezra Klein

The Solution Medicare Is Shutting Down When Ken Coburn has visitors to the cramped offices of Health Quality Partners in Doylestown, Pa., he likes to show them a graph. It’s not his graph, he’s quick to say. Coburn is not the sort to take credit for other’s work. But it’s a graph that explains why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s a graph he particularly wishes the folks who run Medicare would see, because if they did, then there’s no way they’d be threatening to shut down his program.

The graph shows the U.S. death rate for infectious diseases between 1900 and 1996. The line starts all the way at the top. In 1900, 800 of every 100,000 Americans died from infectious diseases. The top killers were pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea.

But the line quickly begins falling. By 1920, fewer than 400 of every 100,000 Americans died from infectious diseases. By 1940, it was less than 200.

By 1960, it’s below 100. When’s the last time you heard of an American dying from diarrhea?

“For all the millennia before this in human history,” Coburn says, “it was all about tuberculosis and diarrheal diseases and all the other infectious disease. The idea that anybody lived long enough to be confronting chronic diseases is a new invention. Average life expectancy was 45 years old at the turn of the century. You didn’t have 85year-olds with chronic diseases.”

With chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease you don’t get better, or at least not quickly.

They don’t require cures so much as management.

Their existence is often proof of medicine’s successes. Three decades ago, cancer typically killed you. Today, many cancers can be fought off for years or even indefinitely. The same is true for AIDS, and acute heart failure and so much else. This, to Coburn, is the core truth, and core problem, of today’s medical system: Its successes have changed the problems, but the health-care system hasn’t kept up.

Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of the health policy and management school at Emory University, estimates that 95 percent of spending in Medicare goes to patients with one or more chronic conditions - with enrollees suffering five or more chronic conditions accounting for 78 percent of its spending. “This is the Willie Sutton rule,” he says.

“If 80 percent of the spending is going to patients with five or more conditions, that’s where our health-care system needs to go.”

Health Quality Partners is all about going there.

The program enrolls Medicare patients with at least one chronic illness and one hospitalization in the past year. It then sends a trained nurse to see them every week, or every month, whether they’re healthy or sick. It sounds simple and, in a way, it is. But simple things can be revolutionary.

Most care-management systems rely on nurses sitting in call centers, checking up on patients over the phone. That model has mostly been a failure. And while many health systems send a nurse regularly in the weeks or months after a serious hospitalization, few send one regularly to even seemingly healthy patients. This a radical

redefinition of the health-care system’s role in the lives of the elderly. It redefines being old and chronically ill as a condition requiring professional medical management.

Health Quality Partners’ results have been extraordinary. According to an independent analysis by the consulting firm Mathematica, HQP has reduced hospitalizations by 33 percent and cut Medicare costs by 22 percent.

Others in the profession have taken notice.

“It’s like they’ve discovered the fountain of youth in Doylestown, Pa.,” marvels Jeffrey Brenner, founder of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.

Now Medicare is thinking of shutting it off.

The origin of Doylestown’s fountain of youth is not particularly mysterious or mythic. It can be found on Page 93 of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. Under “Subchapter D - Other Projects,” there are two pages of dull legislative language authorizing Medicare “to conduct demonstration projects for the purpose of evaluating methods, such as case management and other models of coordinated care, that (A) improve the quality of items and services provided to target individuals; and (B) reduce expenditures.”

In the health-care world, however, these yawninducing paragraphs sounded like the beginning of a revolution - or, perhaps, a gold rush.

The project was remarkable in two ways. First, it used the gold standard of experimental design: Randomized-controlled trials. Each of the 15 programs - of which HQP was one - would see some seniors enrolled in the program and some left out. The assignment would be random, and the groups similar - that would let the researchers be certain that whatever differences they saw between the groups were attributable to the care they received rather than, say, the company’s success at signing up healthier seniors. “We did it that way so nobody would ever question the validity of the findings,” says Randall Brown, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, the outside evaluator Medicare hired to judge the programs.

The second unusual feature was that the secretary of Health and Human Services had the authority to scale it up. Typically, Congress keeps tight hold of the reins on these kinds of experiments. But not this time. As long as the programs were increasing quality without increasing costs, the secretary could “continue the existing demonstration,” “expand the number of demonstration projects,” or even “issue regulations to implement, on a permanent basis, the components of the demonstration project that are beneficial to the Medicare program.” It was, for an experiment of this type, an extraordinary, and extraordinarily rare, amount of authority.

That made it potentially very, very lucrative. A midsize care-management company that proved itself in this demo could, theoretically, get the green light to provide services to every chronically ill Medicare patient. Everyone understood the

implications immediately: There were billions of dollars on the table. And there were plenty of forprofit companies who were certain they’d be able to get them.

“I was at conferences when this was all getting underway,” Brenner says. “These huge vendors from these really big companies had gotten into this. I remember all these really well-dressed people strutting on the stage. They thought they were going to get access to the gold mine of health care. I remember seeing them speak and thinking, ‘I can’t be this dumb.’ I couldn’t understand how their models would work. I’ve never seen a telephone call change behavior.”

Their models - and their telephone calls - didn’t work. Program after program either failed to help patients, save money or both. “You’ll see some disease management programs out there led by MBAs or people who used to be doctors and are now businessmen,” Brown says. “They’re totally different kettles of fish. They tend to be telephonic, and the telephone centers might be in California or Missouri. They don’t work. We’ve shown it time and time again.”

But Health Quality Partners, with its emphasis on continuous nurse-to-patient contact, did work. Of the 15 programs, four improved patient outcomes without increasing costs. Only HQP improved patient outcomes while cutting costs.

So Medicare extended it again and again - now it’s the only program still running under the demo.

But Medicare has notified Coburn that it intends to end HQP’s funding in June.

Medicare’s official explanation is carefully bureaucratic. “The authority that CMS had to conduct this specific demonstration, which predated the health care law, did not allow us to make the program permanent and limited our ability to expand it further,” says Emma Sandoe, a spokeswoman for Medicare. “As we design new models and demonstrations, we are integrating lessons from this experience into those designs.”

Every expert I spoke to - as well as a plain reading of the law - disagrees. If they wanted to make HQP permanent, or scale it up in a big way, Medicare has the power to do so. Then there’s this: “Thanks to the health care law, we can now test new, innovative models for delivering health care and expanding models that show promise,” Sandoe continues. “With this new authority, we can take best practices to scale and provide more incentives to deliver high-quality health care at lower costs.”

Medicare is referring to the newly created Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which gives the program power to create and expand projects without congressional authorization. This authority could also be used to create projects based on HQP’s lessons. It’s not. Instead, Medicare has created a raft of projects and experiments meant to move the system from fee-for-service toward pay-for-quality - with the hope that if they can get the payment incentives right, then the market will

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Continued From Page 6 have reason to support programs like HQP. To Health Quality Partners and its defenders, Medicare’s decision is ludicrous. “We’re spending tens of billions of dollars now on Medicare innovation where Medicare already discovered something amazing and now they’re forgetting what they discovered?” Brenner says. “It’s an amazing government moment.”

But to Medicare, it’s not so much forgetting as being realistic. After all, HQP worked, but most of the programs in the demonstration didn’t.

It notes that HQP is a relatively small program that only ever treated a couple of thousand people. For a program the size of Medicare, working to scale up a small operation like HQP seems less likely to deliver a big return than working to change the payment structure that governs the entire system.

This drives Coburn crazy. “People always ask if what we do is scalable.

Well, define scalable. It’s less difficult than open-heart surgery, which is one of the most common surgeries in the country, and it’s more difficult than giving a vaccine. There’s this amazing double standard in medicine. For the kind of thing we do, if it’s more difficult than making a phone call once in awhile, then it’s not scalable.

But you provide enough economic incentives and all of a sudden every hospital has an open-heart surgery program.”

Brenner puts it more vividly.

“There is a bias in medicine against talking to people and for cutting, scanning and chopping into them. If this was a pill or or a machine with these results it would be front-page news in the Wall Street Journal. If we could get these results for your grandmother, you’d say, ‘Of course I want that.’ But then you’d say, what are the risks? Does she need to have chemotherapy? Does she need to be put in a scanner? Is it a surgery? And you’d say, no, you just have to have a nurse come visit her every week.”

Here’s what I thought would happen when I went with Patty Graefe, a Health Quality Partners’ nurse, on her daily rounds: I thought I would see a highly skilled medical professional showing off her success stories. I thought I would meet seniors who were overwhelmed by their illnesses a few years back, but

since signing up for the program, were now carefully protecting their health. Nothing else, I figured, could possibly justify the numbers HQP seemed to be producing.

Instead, I met Paul and Betty Bradfield.

Getting to the Bradfield’s house is harrowing. You drive over a stone bridge that looks neither wide enough nor structurally sound enough to support a car. You nose up a curving road that has been cut into a steep hill. You walk past a giant pile of wood into the sort of old, rickety farmhouse that quickens the step of kids on Halloween. It’s a place I might be scared to live. It’s a place I’m definitely scared to find Paul and Betty living.

Paul, at 83, suffers from serious heart failure and mild cognitive impairment. A year ago, he climbed a ladder to change a birdfeeder at 10 o’clock at night. He fell, breaking his neck. Betty, at 80, is legally blind and has diabetes.

The Bradfields are warm hosts, and clearly glad to see Patty. But their situation isn’t good. “I messed up on my medication this week,” Paul says, shortly after we walk in the door. He’s not sure how. It’s possible he took a double dose. Or it’s possible that he skipped a dose. And he’s already thrown away the evidence. “I’m not worried about the mess-up,” Graefe says kindly. “I just need to figure out if you took a double dose.” She makes a note to call Paul’s doctor.

Graefe has been a nurse for 28 years. She has worked in cardiac wards and with patients in rehab. She has been in hospitals, in call centers, and now on home visits. “This is the best nursing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says. “And that’s because it’s really all about nursing.”

As a hospital nurse, Graefe worried she wasn’t able to build the trust she needed with her patients. “I dealt with a lot of heart failure,” she says.

“A patient would come in, filled with fluid. You’d ask them whether they were taking their medicine. Or if they were eating right. The patient gets almost defensive because we always assume they’re doing something wrong. I found that the hospital setting wasn’t the best place for these conversations.”

I asked a half-dozen seniors what difference Health Quality Partners made in their lives. Every one of them

Big gains in fighting infectious diseases

Forty states have health departments and the top two causes of death are pneumonia and tuberculosis.

Medicine has made great strides in treating infectious disease over

Flu pandemic.

1,000

tackling chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease. Such ailments account for a great portion of spending on patient care.

800

600

Last human-to-human transmission of plague.

First use of penicillin.

400

First continuous municipal use of chlorine in water.

Salk vaccine introduced.

200

0 1900

1910

Crude death rate for infectious diseases in the United States Per 100,000 population, from 1900 to 1996

1920

1930

1940

1950

Source: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

began the same way: They could ask their nurse questions, they said with evident relief. They could get help understanding and navigating their doctor’s orders. They didn’t feel like they were being a burden if they needed to ask one more thing, or have their medications explained to them again.

Physicians are brusque, and harried, and they talk quickly and confidently, and chronically ill seniors often leave with complicated instructions and a hazy understanding of how to follow them. “In a doctor’s office, a lot of people, especially older people, feel pressure to get out because they know the doctor is busy and they’re a bit intimidated,” says Bill Allen, a friendly 78-yearold who is also a patient of Graefe’s.

“Because she’s here in our home, you can feel more free to ask her anything. It’s great.”

As a nurse, Graefe’s style is practical and nonjudgmental. It seems obvious that chronically ill seniors should take their medicine.

But Graefe doesn’t see the situation as quite so black-and-white. “You have to find out why a patient isn’t taking their medicine,” she says. “In the case of heart failure, the water pill has a lot of side effects. Imagine losing control of your bladder. Not being able to go out because you always need a bathroom. We’re talking about adults here.”

This is, to me, the surprise of accompanying Graefe on her rounds.

Despite the years-long relationships, she’s not turned her patients into highly effective self-caregivers.

Everyone we see admits to missing their medicine or making bad diet

Passage of Vaccination Assistance Act.

1960

1970

1980

Top two causes of death are heart disease and cancer.

1990

2000

THE WASHINGTON POST

decisions or slacking on exercise routines. Graefe just laboriously pushes them to make slightly better decisions on the margins. The Bradfields, for instance, are, after years of cajoling, finally readying themselves to enter assisted living - something that might not have happened at all without Graefe’s nudging.

Because she has been to patients’ homes so many times before, she can see when something has changed and things are about to go very wrong. And she’s got the personal relationship to intervene. Allen, who suffers from lung problems but hates to take medicine, recalls a bad cold he had a few weeks ago. “Because of Patty’s insistence, I ended up using the - what do you call it? - the nebulizer. I probably wouldn’t have done it without her. And I probably would have ended up with pneumonia again. I’m sure that’s what got me through.” It also saved Medicare money, and perhaps saved Allen’s life.

We think of the hospital as a place people go to get better. At Health Quality Partners, the view is that a hospital is a place where seniors get worse. “Being in the hospital for three days or five days sets them back to a point where they’ll never regain what they were,” says Sherry Marcantonio, chief program architect of HQP. “That’s where the scales tip.

That’s where people end up needing a nursing home.” Keeping seniors out of the hospital, which is a core focus of its program, cuts costs and saves lives, but it also preserves quality of life - a measure often ignored in these discussions. There’s

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Continued From Page 7 a good argument to be made that if a program like HQP cost slightly more than traditional Medicare but cut hospitalizations by a third, it would still be worth it. The point of health care, after all, is to keep people healthy. But HQP saves money - and lots of it.

If there is a secret to the success of Health Quality Partners at preventing hospitalizations, it’s this: No one else is checking in with the Bradfields or the Allens every week. Medical technology - from pills to devices to surgical procedures is so advanced and so competitive that making further gains requires enormous investment and rarely brings high returns. But the exciting field of knocking-on-the-Bradfield’s-farmhouse-door is almost totally empty. Medicine has been so focused on what doctors can do in the hospital that it has barely even begun to figure out what can be done in the home. But the home is where elderly patients spend most of their time. It’s where they take their medicine and eat their meals, and it’s where they fall into funks and trip over the corner of the carpet. It’s where a trained medical professional can see a bad turn before it turns into a catastrophe. Medicine, however, has been reluctant to intrude into homes.

For the most part, the medical system treats the old very much like it treats the young. It cares for them when they’re sick and ignores them when they’re well. Coburn’s basic insight is a discomfiting one. He doesn’t really believe in “better,” at least not for elderly, chronically ill patients. He wants someone going over frequently to see if they’re depressed, if their color is good, if they understand their medications, if there’s anything they need. This isn’t medicine so much as it’s supervision.

At another time, these functions would have been filled by the family, who would be right in the other room, and who would know if their mother looked different than she had a few weeks ago.

But few of today’s elderly live with their children.

Many don’t even live in the same state, or they don’t have any contact with their children, or they don’t have children.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that after adjusting for demographic factors and underlying health, social isolation increased the likelihood of death among the elderly by a stunning 26 percent. “People with few social contacts may not have people around them who can give them advice, recommend that they go to a doctor with symptoms, ensure that they maintain healthy lifestyles, or perhaps they don’t have anyone around when they experience acute symptoms,” says Andrew Steptoe, the lead author on the study.

We’ve been conditioned by “Grey’s Anatomy” and hospital rooms to believe that saving lives is a complicated, heroic business. And it is - after people get very sick. But keeping them from getting very sick doesn’t necessarily require the discovery of new molecules. It requires someone

who has a relationship with them to stop by once demo. That was the basis for the ACOs. It was the a week to see how they’re doing. The problem is, model adopted into law in the Affordable Care it’s hard to make money off it.

Act. It was these 10 multispecialty groups, and the idea was we’ll pay you fee-for-service and if your If you go into the hospital for heart surgery total spending comes in under the control group’s and you end up getting a central-line infection, costs, you get to share the savings. Everybody you’d hope that the hospital would be penalized thought it was a great success, but when the results for it. The opposite, in fact, is true. According to a came in, it didn’t save any money at all. The one new study in the Journal of the American Medical exception was a plan called Marshfield, perhaps Association, surgical complications increase the because it wasn’t based in a hospital and so could margin the hospital makes on the patient by 330 keep people out of hospitals.” percent for the privately insured and 190 percent for Medicare patients.

This is a tough truth of the health-care This, too, is a legacy of a health system built for system: It’s got a lot of incumbents, and a lot of acute care. Hospitals make money when they do fixed costs, and reforming the way care is delivered more to patients. They lose money when their beds will mean creating a lot of losers. “This is about are empty. Put simply, Health Quality Partners power and money,” Brenner says. “The largest makes hospitals lose money. “There’s no doubt group in the top one percent of income in America that it’s a hit to the bottom line,” says Rich Reiss, are physicians.” the former CEO of Doylestown Hospital, which The chronic-care focused system that Coburn is worked with HQP. pioneering is more about nurses than doctors, more Reiss’ answer for why he worked with a group about home visits than hospitals, and more about that cost him money is simple: His hospital was human interaction than high-tech intervention. unusual. In 1895, 14 women came together to form A system based on managing chronic care is Doylestown’s “Village Improvement Association,” a truly different system from the one we have which was dedicated to “the health and beauty” of today. Health Quality Partners was lucky to find the community. The association actually owned a hospital that wanted to work with it. But many Doylestown Hospital, and its mission was the hospitals wouldn’t want to work with a program hospital’s mission. “I did get some heat from my dedicated to sharply reducing their revenue stream. senior management team,” Reiss says. “When And without cooperation from the hospital and a you’re doing annual budgets you see reduction in patient’s doctors, the HQP model would fail. revenue. But I could always come back and say, The only payer with the size and the incentives ‘Wasn’t that our responsibility?’ “ to push something like HQP is Medicare. “For But not all hospitals are run by the local Village them to say it’s not their responsibility to scale Improvement Association. Many seek to turn a program like this is ridiculous,” Brenner says. a profit. That makes models like Health Quality “They send market signals all the time. One day Partners something of a threat. “If we scaled what it’s an experimental oncology procedure and the Ken is doing,” Brenner says, “you would probably next day everyone is using biologicals. That’s shut down a third of the hospitals in the country. because of them and what they pay. They’re the It’s a disruptive innovation. It just guts the current ones who scale this stuff. It feels to me like they’re business model.” scared to pull a lever on a very clear market signal.

This is where Medicare’s focus on changing that But if they said here’s Ken Coburn’s model, here’s payment model could help programs like HQP. It’s the code for it, here’s how much we’ll pay for it, pushing providers to band together into accountable and, by the way, we’ll overpay for it, because we care organizations, or ACO, that get a flat fee for think it’s important, the marketplace would drive all care related to a patient. If they spent less, they that.” could keep the difference. In theory, this should They could stop far short of that, of course. They push them to partner with tested organizations like could begin another demonstration project that HQP that have a proven ability to help them spend took the lessons of HQP and used them to seed 15 less. But many experts are skeptical that ACOs more programs. There is, after all, a flip-side to the will be the game changer Medicare hopes. skepticism over whether the program can scale.

“I don’t have a lot of confidence in the ACOs It’s possible Coburn’s model, which has been run working out,” Mathematica’s Brown says. “None on a shoestring budget, could, with real resources, of the ACOs you talk to are willing to say which be improved. Coburn is quick to agree. “I really hospital they’ll close. And the only way to save big think we’re just at base camp. There are so many money in a system is to reduce hospitalizations. contributors to health the system isn’t addressing That means you need fewer hospital beds. You right now. As proud as I am of what we’re doing, can’t make money off of an empty hospital. So until I think we’re just scratching the surface of this they’re talking about closing some local hospitals stuff.” to realize the gains from reducing hospitalization, It wouldn’t cost Medicare very much to find they’re not going to be saving much money.” out. Quests for the fountain of youth have been Robert Berenson, a Medicare expert at the Urban launched from far flimsier maps.

Institute, is also skeptical. “To understand ACOs, (c) 2013, The Washington Post you have to go back to the physician group practice 4-27-13

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Kali Goff

Do We Need Any More Clintons Or Bushes?

Largely overlooked amid the wall-to-wall coverage of the Boston terror attacks was some intriguing and potentially important political news.

Former President George W. Bush weighed in on speculation regarding his brother former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s presidential prospects, saying that he hopes his sibling runs for the nation’s highest office in 2016.

If Bush runs, it is unlikely that he will be the only familiar name on the ballot. It is widely believed that former first lady-turned-Senatorturned-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will also run. This means that regardless of political party, the White House could soon be occupied by a familiar name and family. 2016 might just end up feeling a bit like a flashback from A Christmas Carol - except, instead of all of us taking a stroll down memory lane to revisit Christmases past, we’ll be visiting elections past.

Here’s a question for American voters: Are political dynasties actually good for America?

One of the core principles that are supposed to distinguish America from monarchy-ruled countries in Europe is that in America, political power is supposed to be earned, not inherited. Yet from the earliest days of our country’s existence, political power has been concentrated among already powerful families. The earliest example is the Adams family.

John Adams served as the country’s first vice president and second president, while his son John Quincy Adams served as the country’s sixth president.

It would be more than a century before this feat would be repeated, with George H.W. Bush serving as the nation’s 41st president and his son George H.W. Bush becoming the nation’s 43rd president. But throughout history, there have been countless sons, daughters and spouses succeeding their mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts into state legislatures and Congress.

son George Pierce Bush is running for office in Texas.

The most comparable Democratic counterpart to the Bushes is the Kennedy family. The Kennedys count one president (John F. Kennedy), one attorney general (Robert F. Kennedy), three senators (John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward Kennedy) and three congressmen (Patrick Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy II and his son Joseph Kennedy III), one lieutenant governor (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend) and two ambassadors (family patriarch Joseph Kennedy, who served as ambassador to England in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and his daughter Jean, who was an ambassador to Ireland during the Clinton administration).

According to reports, the family could soon count another. It is rumored that the Obama administration is considering nominating John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, ambassador to Japan. The family also includes one mayor: John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, President Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, who served as mayor of Boston and is the earliest prominent political figure in the family’s history.

worldwide that such elections and appointments have a term: widow’s succession.

Although children of privilege cannot help the circumstances into which they are born -- any more than those of us who are not born into privilege can -- and therefore deserve to be considered on their merits just like the rest of us, the fact that they are so overrepresented in government means that they probably aren’t being judged on their merits like the rest of us. But that’s not the greatest A few of America’s other travesty. notable political dynasties include the Landrieus of Louisiana (who The fact that our political system include two New Orleans mayors is dominated by so many people and one senator), the Hutchinsons of of privilege is cause for concern Arkansas (one congressman and one because it means that even if our senator), the Pryors of Arkansas (two elected officials represent racial and senators), the Meeks of Florida (two gender diversity, they still aren’t members of Congress), the Kilpatricks really that diverse. Ultimately, people of Michigan (one congresswoman of privilege and power have plenty in and one mayor), the Carnahans common -- certainly more in common of Missouri (two congressmen, a with one another than with those of governor and a senator), the Gores us who don’t enjoy much privilege or (two senators, one who became vice power. president) and the Udall family, I’ve often wondered what would which includes multiple members of have happened in a presidential the Senate, the House, city councils debate between John Kerry and and various other offices spanning George W. Bush or George W. Bush both major political parties over more and Al Gore if the moderator had than a century. presented a FAFSA form (the form And let’s not forget the Romneys. families fill out to obtain college 2012 Republican presidential financial aid) and asked any of the Within the Bush family, Prescott nominee Mitt Romney is the son men to identify it. Considering that Bush, the first President Bush’s of former Michigan Gov. George all three men were from families father, served in the U.S. Senate. Romney and Senate candidate Lenore who didn’t require financial aid to Barbara Bush, the former first lady Romney. subsidize their educations -- and and mother of the second President In addition, at least 18 American hadn’t for a generation or two -- I Bush, is descended from Franklin women have been elected to the House doubt that any of them would have Pierce, the 14th president of the or the Senate to fill seats left vacant been able to identify the form. And United States. In addition to Jeb by the deaths of their husbands. This that’s the problem.

Bush’s possible presidential run, his is such a common political practice Both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush

have the academic and political smarts to be effective candidates and competent presidents. (Whether you actually agree with them on the issues is another matter.) What is debatable is whether or not both of them possess something that Barack Obama did when he ran for office: the knowledge of what it’s like to make career decisions based on whether or not you will be able to pay off your student-loan debt someday, or knowing what it’s like to lose a parent because of substandard health care, and because your family couldn’t afford anything better.

This kind of firsthand knowledge of what life is like for average Americans is something you can’t pick up by reading a briefing book or just talking to voters on the campaign trail. So does this mean that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be allowed to run? No. They both have plenty of respectable experience that would legitimately qualify them for the presidency. But it might be nice if they publicly acknowledged that no one should consider voting for their children until those children demonstrated some actual experience and qualifications, too, experience that extends beyond simply having the right last name.

Otherwise, we might as well brace ourselves for “Bush vs. Clinton: the Rematch” in 2028. In addition to George Pierce Bush’s foray into politics, in a recent interview, Chelsea Clinton hinted that she might run for office someday.

Keli Goff is The Root’s political correspondent. (c) 2013, The Root 4-23-13

10

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Jules Witcover

Dubya’s Library Opens Debate About Presidential Record

The other three living former American Presidents -- Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton -- are all scheduled to show up tomorrow (Thursday) at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It will be another of those mandatory gatherings at which genuine sentiments and observations will be suppressed or set aside for the sake of the appearance of national comity.

It will take place as the public debate continues as to whether the man conveniently if unkindly referred to as Duyba was the worst of all American presidents, just one of the worst, or not as bad as he is generally said to have been. That broad blanket seems to cover the consensus of many academic scholars who have looked back at his disastrous misadventure in Iraq, his failure to end the wars there and in Afghanistan, his botching of the economy and of the national response to Hurricane Katrina and other shortcomings.

One dissenting voice has come from a professor at the U.S. Naval College named Stephen F. Knott, who has written that the junior Bush has been a victim of a “rush to judgment” by prominent historians and scholars including Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Robert Dallek and Douglas Brinkley. These and others, Knott has suggested, have “revealed partisan bias and abandoned any pretense of objectivity” in their gallop to condemn the Dubya presidency.

It’s an axiom of scholarship, and of writing history in particularly, that wisdom and prudence require the passage of a decent period of time to assess properly the ramifications of the decisions and actions of public figures. But in the 12-plus years since the junior Bush took office, and the decade since he launched his war of choice in Iraq, which set American foreign policy of multilateral engagement on its head, there has been time enough to render the judgment.

The wreckage of that policy, and of Bush’s neglect of the domestic economy as well, have been sufficiently clear, occupying the bulk of his White House’s successor’s time and energies to right the leaking ship. They have emphatically made the case that the George W. Bush who will be honored at his library’s dedication was no Lincoln, FDR or even Jimmy Carter, who at least sustained little lasting damage in his four unheralded years as president.

Nevertheless, Carter and Clinton, along with loving father George H.W., will offer the usual gentle salutes to the office they once held in tribute to the honoree. President Obama showed the way when Dubya’s official White House portrait was unveiled last year. He said diplomatically that “we may have our differences politically, but the presidency transcends the differences. ...

We all love this country; we all want America to succeed.”

Such occasions call for checking partisanship and candor at the door in favor of mealy-mouthed pap. One cannot but recall Bill Clinton’s observation at the funeral of Richard Nixon, apparently with Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate cover-up in mind, that a man should not be judged by a single event but by his entire public life. One could also say to that, in Nixon’s case especially: Amen.

In this forthcoming gathering, one is also reminded of the comment of Senate Republican stalwart Bob Dole when President Ronald Reagan sent three former presidents -- Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Nixon -- to represent him at the state funeral of assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981. The trio reminded him, the famously acid-tongued Dole said in the

jocular setting of a Gridiron Dinner, of the three monkey of the famous statue: “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and --- Evil.”

Time, however, often softens harsh judgments and personal relations. Clinton and the senior Bush, the man Clinton ousted from the Oval Office, became constructive partners later in tsunami relief and other humanitarian causes. So look only for at least sympathetic understanding tomorrow from Dubya’s predecessors at his library dedication.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption” (William Morrow).

You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@ comcast.net. (c) 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 4-23-13

Bill Press

New Bush Library, Same Old Bush Record

It was inspiring to see them side by side at Southern Methodist University in Dallas: Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. For their service to this country, we are indebted to each one of them.

It’s just too bad they got together for such an inauspicious occasion: dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. I hate to be a partypooper, but there are two things wrong with that.

One, we don’t need another presidential library.

The landscape’s already cluttered with 13 of them.

There’s no George Washington Library. No John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison Library. Yet, ever since FDR, we’ve bought into the rule that every president, good, bad, or blah, has to have his own egocentric, brick-andmortar building -- instead of building one new Smithsonian Presidential Library housing the papers of every former president.

Second thing wrong: for the next week or so, everybody’s going to feel obliged to say nice things about President Bush. On his arrival in Texas, even President Obama, who repeatedly blasted “the failed policies of George W. Bush” and his “dumb” war in Iraq during his 2012 reelection campaign, praised him as someone “concerned about all people in America, not just those who voted Republican.” The Wall Street Journal trumpeted that Bush’s approval rating is up since he left office. In the National Journal, Ron Fournier challenged all Americans: “Go Ahead, Admit It: “George W. Bush is a Good Man.” Well, I’ll make a deal with Mr. Fournier: I’ll admit that George Bush is a good man -- if he’ll admit that George Bush was a lousy president!

I met President Bush a couple of times. He was always kind to me. He liked to joke around. He

would have been fun to have a beer with, if only he’d have a beer. But that doesn’t change the fact that his presidency was a disaster.

Yes, as WSJ reports, Bush’s image has improved since 2008: from 31 percent favorable when he left office to 35 percent today. Hardly a cause for celebration. And the reason it’s not higher is because Americans have not forgotten his record. It’s too recent and too painful.

We’ve not forgotten that George Bush inherited a $236 billion surplus from Bill Clinton, but immediately squandered it with two rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans that put us back to deficit spending. We’ve not forgotten the ban on embryonic stem cell research. We’ve not forgotten the fact that George Bush launched two deficit-financed wars -- a justified war in Afghanistan and an illegal war in Iraq, based on lies about weapons of mass destruction -- which, together with the tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, will account for almost half of the $20 trillion debt the nation will owe by 2019.

We’ve not forgotten the wave of illegal phone taps at home and illegal water-boarding abroad that followed September 11. Indeed, how could we forget? A two-year, nonpartisan review by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, published this week concluded that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” in the years immediately following September 11. Not only that, they also reported “no firm or persuasive evidence” that torture provided any information that could not have been obtained more readily by other, legal, methods.

We’ve not forgotten the slow and inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, a direct result of

Press continued on page 11

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

11

Alexandra Petri

Bush’s Absence Makes Heart Grow Fonder For Him It used to take decades to get up a really good head of nostalgia.

There was so much to forget.

You needed someone like Ray Bradbury to murmur poignantly about decanting summer into a jar of dandelion wine as locusts hummed. “Aw, but what about polio?” someone would whisper, and it would set the whole process back 20 years.

Now we get it faster than I can turn around a Netflix delivery.

“Remember Mapquest?” we say.

“Remember MySpace? Remember the days before Blu-Ray?” We had these things not even a decade ago.

These days, nostalgia is just as fastacting and immediately available as everything else.

That has made this week of George W. Bush retrospectives especially odd. Five years seems about right for a retrospective. Any longer, and we would have had no idea who we were talking about.

And if he’d reminded us, it would have undone all his efforts.

So far, Bush has pursued the brilliant PR strategy of saying nothing and never appearing in Major National News. It has worked remarkably well. It is the only surefire way to avoid gaffes.

Now the people who decried him as the Worst Blank in History include small caveats in those epithets. Some cling to their guns, doubling down on the cries of infamy. Five years is not as long as all that. But a not-unsubstantial percentage of Americans have

difficulty staying mad for that long.

At a certain point, you have to take the BUSH LIED: PEOPLE DIED bumper sticker off your car or you start to seem like the weird one.

Don’t hold grudges. Keep moving.

That’s the Bush Resurgence in a nutshell.

Bush budget cuts to FEMA. Nor have we forgotten the crash of 2008, which brought this nation to the brink of financial disaster and resulted in the loss of 8 million jobs. In fact, we’re still trying to recover from it.

vice president, President Bush has set a model for former occupants of the Oval Office by staying on the sidelines and out of the headlines.

For this, we give him due credit.

But that doesn’t change the facts: George Bush is a nice man, but he was still a mediocre president.

Bill Press is host of a nationallysyndicated radio show, the host of “Full Court Press” on Current TV and the author of a new book, “The Obama Hate Machine,” which is available in bookstores now. You can hear “The Bill Press Show” at his website: billpressshow.com. His email address is: bill@billpress. com.

Press continued from page 10

These days, a lot of nostalgia consists of the remembrance of minor inconvenience in comfort. Cassette tapes. Tamagotchis. Records. Life before air-conditioning.

How wonderful, how simple things were then! If only we could go back and jog around barefoot and not bother with all this Twitter nonsense. Let’s all try the paleo diet!

But the run-up to the dedication of the Bush presidential library was bizarre. Hey, people said. He was Smarter than you thought. He was Greater than you thought. Nothing was quite as Bad as you thought.

“History is not what you thought,” W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman wrote in the introduction to “1066 and All That.” “It’s what you can remember.”

Compared with the present, which everyone acknowledges is a shambling mess where no one makes the money he or she deserves, the future looks awful and something weird is perpetually on the verge of happening to all the trees, the Bush era seems positively rosy.

We all had more hair, more energy and our jeans fit better. There were no hipsters. The Internet wasn’t as fast, but Amanda Bynes had her life

Of course, George W. Bush also did some good things. He tried to soften the image of the Republican Party by steering it toward a policy of “compassionate conservatism.”

He was the first to put forth a plan for comprehensive immigration reform, a plan almost identical to the one President Obama proposes today, and a plan Bush’s fellow Republicans rejected to their own (c) 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc. misfortune. And, unlike his former 4-25-13

much more together.

This is our new fast-acting nostalgia at work. “Ah, the Bush years,” we say. “Those halcyon, distant days - five years ago.”

Possibly the pace of change has increased and this kind of rapidfire longing for the past is a logical development. The world in our pockets is vastly different from five years ago.

the other, there’s the stream of posts that constitute any self-made shrine where we post our Best Angles and Pithiest Thoughts.

Posterity is more efficient than ever at passing its judgments.

Time heals most wounds. The polls grow rosier, the compilations of Bushisms disappear from bookstores, the bookstores themselves disappear. One hopes history will not misunderestimate him.

“What will History say?” asks one character in George Bernard Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple.”

“History, sir, will tell lies as usual,” his companion responds.

As forgetfulness increases, fondness increases. At least this seems the rule with Bush. If the present trajectory continues, we will all agree that Bush’s presidency was perfect the instant we have forgotten him entirely. But maybe not before.

The trouble with the Bush Resurgence is that so far, the former president’s popularity seems largely premised on his disappearance from public view. Absence has made the heart grow fonder. But the instant he pops back up - well, we are reminded. After the dedication of the Bush center on Thursday, Moses remains the only person impressed

by Bush’s speaking ability. He keeps saying that he is waiting for history’s verdict.

History is what comes after the (c) 2013, The Washington Post bumper stickers have worn off.

Soon we will put Bush back in 4-26-13 the vault and leave History to decide what becomes of him, whatever History turns out to be.

Join And it can’t come fast enough.

The biography comes out when Liberal Opinion the president is still in office. You Week get to build your own monument, display your own papers, pose for on Facebook. statues. At one end of the spectrum there’s the presidential library; on

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Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Eugene Robinson

Stains On A Legacy In retrospect, George W. Bush’s legacy doesn’t look as bad as it did when he left office. It looks worse.

I join the nation in congratulating Bush on the opening of his presidential library in Dallas.

Like many people, I find it much easier to honor, respect and even like the man -- now that he’s no longer in the White House.

But anyone tempted to get sentimental should remember the actual record of the man who called himself The Decider. Begin with the indelible stain that one of his worst decisions left on our country’s honor: torture.

Hiding behind the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Bush made torture official U.S. policy. Just about every objective observer has agreed with this stark conclusion.

The most recent assessment came earlier this month in a 576-page report from a task force of the bipartisan Constitution Project, which states that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.”

We knew about the torture before Bush left office -- at least, we knew about the waterboarding of three “high-value” detainees involved in planning the 9/11 attacks. But the Constitution Project task force -- which included such respected eminences as Asa Hutchinson, who served in high-ranking posts in the Bush administration, and William Sessions, who was FBI director under three presidents -- concluded that other forms of torture were used “in many instances” in a manner that was “directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.”

Bush administration apologists argue that even waterboarding does not necessarily constitute torture and that other coercive -- and excruciatingly painful -- interrogation methods, such as putting subjects in “stress positions” or exposing them to extreme temperatures, certainly do not. The Constitution Project task force strongly disagrees, citing U.S. laws and court rulings, international treaties and common decency.

The Senate intelligence committee has produced, but refuses to make public, a 6,000page report on the CIA’s use of torture and the network of clandestine “black site” prisons the agency established under Bush. One of President Obama’s worst decisions on taking office in 2009, in my view, was to decline to convene some kind of blue-ribbon “truth commission” panel that would bring all the abuses to light.

It may be years before all the facts are known.

But the decision to commit torture looks ever more shameful with the passage of time.

Bush’s decision to invade and conquer Iraq also looks, in hindsight, like an even bigger strategic error. Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found, of course; nearly 5,000 Americans -- and untold Iraqis -sacrificed their lives to eliminate a threat that did not exist. We knew this, of course, when Obama took office. It’s one of the main reasons he was

elected.

what options Obama might have -- if we had not squandered so much blood and treasure in Iraq.

Bush didn’t pay for his wars. The bills he racked up for military adventures, prescriptiondrug benefits, the bank bailout and other impulse purchases helped create the fiscal and financial crises he bequeathed to Obama. His profligacy also robbed the Republican Party establishment of small-government credibility, thus helping give birth to the tea party movement. Thanks a lot for that.

As I’ve written before, Bush did an enormous amount of good by making it possible for AIDS sufferers in Africa to receive antiretroviral drug therapy. This literally saved millions of lives, and should weigh heavily on one side of the scale when we assess The Decider’s presidency. But the pile on the other side just keeps getting bigger.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

We knew, too, that Bush’s decision to turn to Iraq diverted focus and resources from Afghanistan. But I don’t think anyone fully grasped that giving the Taliban a long, healing respite would eventually make Afghanistan this country’s longest or second-longest war, depending on what date you choose as the beginning of hostilities in Vietnam.

And it’s clear that the Bush administration did not foresee how the Iraq experience would constrain future presidents in their use of military force. Syria is a good example. Like Saddam, Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless dictator who does not hesitate to massacre his own people. But unlike Saddam, Assad does have weapons of mass destruction. And unlike Saddam, Assad has alliances with the terrorist group Hezbollah and the nuclear-mad mullahs in Iran.

I do not advocate U.S. intervention, because (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group I fear we might make things worse rather than 4-26-13 better. But I wonder how I might feel -- and

Susan Estrich

The Minor Miracles of Democracy

Thursday was a critical day in our democracy. Five presidents of the United States gathered in Houston for the dedication of the George W. Bush library. One was his father, 89 years old and in a wheelchair. The other three were men of the opposite political party.

They gathered together to celebrate a man who had put in place programs they disagreed with, waged a war they opposed, appointed officials they criticized. They gathered together to pay respects to a man who has a very different view of many of the issues facing this country.

They gathered together out of respect for the presidency of the United States.

They paid tribute to a patriot.

It’s always stunning to see the presidents assembled. There are comments about how they look (older), what they said (President Clinton was the funniest) and even who stood with whom.

But that’s not the big stuff. The big stuff is about respect. The big stuff is about love of country. The big stuff is about the ties that bind us together -- so much more powerful than our disagreements.

Years ago, in the early years of the Clinton presidency, I was asked to participate in a program at the Reagan Library. The truth is, I was there as a last-minute favor to the library’s gracious director. There had been a cancellation, the Reagan Library is an hour’s drive away, they needed a voice from my perspective, and I was happy to oblige.

I went out of my way to be gracious to a former president I had vigorously campaigned against,

in both 1980 and 1984. I spoke, as one does on such occasions, about my respect for his courage and determination, his commitment to his ideals, his service to the country. Polite applause. I then went on to say how important these values are in a democracy, more important than the disagreements we may have -- that many in the room no doubt had -- with the current president.

With the C-SPAN cameras whirring and Nancy Reagan in the front row visibly horrified, the crowd booed me. Loudly. By the time I got home, a beautiful bouquet of flowers was waiting for me, with apologies from Mrs. Reagan.

I remembered that day as I watched the video of the former presidents and the gracious applause of the crowd.

How easy it is to forget -- with the screama-thon among often ignorant pontificators that has come to dominate our political debate -- that mutual respect and decency are what make our democracy work.

How easy it is to forget -- in the battle to see who can destroy the other side first, fastest and most viciously -- that we are all, ultimately, on the same side.

I’m not a Pollyanna. I believe in fighting for what I believe in, and I have tried to do so my entire adult life. But I don’t hate Republicans.

I never hated either President Bush. Disagreed with? Often. Vigorously? To be sure. But hate?

No. Gratuitous personal assaults? No. Of course, there are days when, as must happen in a democracy, we divide into our

Estrich continued on page 13

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

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Maureen Dowd

Silver Fox’s Pink Slip Barbara Bush is a word that rhymes with fright.

She’s right.

Asked on the “Today” show whether she thought her son Jeb should run for president in 2016, as W. has urged, the famously candid and caustic Silver Fox offered the most honest assessment of her oldest son’s legacy.

Aside from the cascading disasters that the country is still struggling to recover from, a key W. legacy is derailing the path of the son Poppy and Barbara Bush dearly wanted to be president: Jeb. For the first time, the 87-yearold former first lady acknowledged, in essence, that W. had worn out the family’s welcome in the White House. “He’s by far the best qualified man, but no, I really don’t,” she said when asked if her second son should aim to be the third Bush in chief. “I think it’s a great country. There are a lot of great families, and it’s not just four families or whatever. There are other people out there that are very qualified and we’ve had enough Bushes.”

Jenna Bush Hager, a “Today” show correspondent who was a participant in the Thursday interview with her grandmother, mother and sister, blurted “Surpri-i-ise!” and threw up her arms. CNN emailed Jeb to find out what he thought of his mother’s “priceless” comment and Jeb emailed back: “Priceless indeed!”

But Bar, who was also giving the back of the hand to the Clintons, spit out the truth. It is wearying that America, a country that broke away from aristocratic England in a burst of rugged individualism, has

Estrich continued from page 12

separate corners, pushing our separate agendas. But we are better than those who scream for the sake of seeing themselves on television. In the horrors of the past week, my home city came together as “One Boston,” and Americans everywhere showed their generosity. As the presidents demonstrated on Thursday, it is possible to maintain our differences while saluting what unites us.

It’s too bad it takes a presidential library dedication to do that.

Copyright 2013 Creators.com 4-26-13

spawned so many of its own royal political families, dynasties that feel entitled to inhabit the White House, generation after generation, letting their family competitions and tensions shape policy and history to an alarming degree.

Why does a George P., Chelsea, Beau Biden, Joe Kennedy III presidential sweepstakes feel so inevitable?

dedication had to cherry-pick their topics, focusing mostly on W.’s good work on AIDS in Africa.

Though he presents himself as the Batman of anti-terrorism, W. ignored the warning that Osama was going to strike and didn’t catch him dead or alive. He failed to fix the egregious problems of agencies coordinating watch lists and dropping the ball on information about terrorist suspects, which flared again in the Boston bombings.

W. and other Bush officials continue to say they could not possibly have known that Saddam had no WMD. But I’m now told that Saddam sent word through the Saudis to the Bushies over and over that he had no WMD and was only blustering to keep his nemesis in the neighborhood, Iran, at bay.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld weren’t looking for the truth, and they weren’t hitting the pause button the way President Obama is with Syria right now, sensitive to the quicksand nature of the region. They simply wanted to blast some Arabs and Saddam was a weak target, just as W. was a weak president, easily led wherever Cheney and his coconspirator Rummy, along with their bellicose band of neocons, wanted to take him.

There were plenty of other, less perspicacious assessments of the Bush legacy on the occasion of W.’s presidential library opening in Dallas. Josh Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff in the second term, defended 43’s economic record - two off-thebooks, badly managed wars and more of the deregulation that led to toxic derivatives, government bailouts and a near collapse of the whole economy - saying it “really wasn’t so bad.”

Former Bush staffers and some on the right defended 43 in the usual debates: Was he the Decider or the Dupe? Was he smart or simplistic?

The latter question is really beside the point in Washington, the capital of smart people doing dumb things.

W.’s presidency will go down in infamy because he ignored Katrina and the Constitution and cherrypicked intelligence with Tony Blair to build up a faux case for invading Iraq. That is why the three Democratic Obama and others praised 43 presidents who talked at his library’s last week as “comfortable in his own

skin.” That’s absurd. People who are comfortable in their own skin don’t shape their lives and actions so self-consciously, and often selfdestructively, on another. W. veered between aping his father and doing the opposite of his father.

Pressed by Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning,” W. reiterated the unfathomable fact that he went to war with the same dictator that his father did, without ever seeking his dad’s counsel. “He knows,” W. said of his father, “that each presidential decision requires advice from people who have studied an issue.” That’s quite a rationalization. Who, after all, has studied the issue more closely than another president who decided against invading Baghdad?

Sadly, no one in W.’s inner circle studied the issue. As Colin Powell has noted, there was no proper debate or meeting of the National Security Council before the invasion. W. went to war on body language, manipulated by the war-mongering gargoyles who would also bring us torture, domestic spying and secret prisons.

“I can’t remember a specific incident where I called up and said, ‘What do I do?”’ W. said about getting advice from his level-headed dad.

And that’s the shame of it. c.2013 New York Times News Service 4-27-13

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Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Jules Witcover

Honoring the 43rd President To nobody’s surprise, all four living former presidents were on their best behavior the other day at the dedication of the library and museum named for the latest of them, George W. Bush, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The honoree’s father, George H.W., along with Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, dutifully latched on to the positive about the junior Bush’s eight years in the Oval Office, eliminated the negative and, as in Johnny Mercer’s old song, didn’t mess with Mr. In Between.

Never was heard a discouraging word about the war in Iraq nor the economic morass the honoree left behind. The former presidents took the microphone in turn to praise Dubya not as a great national leader but as a well-meaning guy whose heart, despite all the brickbats thrown on other occasions, was in the right place.

Subjects of controversy were left to exhibits at the new presidential complex library that consider key decisions he made in office. They present his reasons and give visitors an opportunity to say what they would have done. Clinton for one lauded the junior Bush’s openness in inviting their views.

President Obama praised his predecessor for his “incredible strength and resolve” in responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that were the centerpiece of the second Bush’s administration.

In a personal assessment that probably rankled many of the honoree’s critics, Obama called him “a good man” who was “comfortable in his own skin.” The description is one many say about the incumbent himself, at least the second part.

The 43rd president was given due credit for his focus on fighting the deadly scourge of HIV/ Aids and attempting education and immigrations reforms. In the spirit of the occasion, he joked of America’s hallowed right to disagree with its leader: “I created plenty of opportunities to exercise that right.”

But on the whole the celebration was an exercise in the suspension of disbelief -- over his major decisions in foreign policy, including treatment of war detainees, and in dealing with a domestic economy that hung on the ropes as he departed office.

On this, his best day since then, George W. Bush maintained the same composure he has shown throughout his return to private life -- silent and immune to the public criticism that has followed his tenure. His major contribution to his party has been in keeping a low public profile, steering clear of defending his tenure and of criticizing Obama’s presidency.

By choice or party decision, he was absent from the 2012 Republican National Convention and played little if any role in the campaign of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in which party divisions and an uncertain trumpet contributed to its defeat.

After the 9/11 attacks, the argument that Bush’s mobilization of homeland security kept America

safe thereafter sustained him politically through two full terms. But his inability to finish the job in Afghanistan was a major element in Obama’s election in 2008.

Poignancy was added to the celebration by the appearance in a wheelchair of the 41st president, the 88-year-old and recently hospitalized father of the honoree, displaying his customary good nature and obvious pride in his eldest son. For all his own shortcomings in his single presidential term, the country generally has retained a softer spot for him than for his eldest offspring.

At this time, a minor debate has broken out over how history will appraise the son.

One lesser-known academic has argued that prominent historians and presidential scholars have engaged in a rush to judgment in casting George W. as the worst American president to date.

The most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates, however, that his approval rating has climbed from 30 percent in 2008 to 47 percent now, and his disapproval has dropped from 68 percent then to 50 percent.

But he still he has a way to go to enjoy the kind of opinion turnaround that another once-

dismissed president, Harry Truman, experienced after leaving office in 1953. From a low of 22 percent approval, he rose steadily until he is now often listed among the 10 most highly regarded presidents. That seems a height the man known as Dubya is unlikely ever to attain.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption” (William Morrow).

You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@ comcast.net. (c) 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 4-28-13

Alexandra Petri

Yeah, It’s His Real Number

In a full-page newspaper ad Sunday, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford described what a tough week it had been for his campaign for Congress and defended himself against the recent leak of court documents showing that his ex-wife had accused him of trespassing. “I did, indeed, watch the second half of the Super Bowl at the beach house with our 14-year-old son because, as a father, I didn’t think he should sit alone and watch it,” his long letter explained.

Especially not the commercials or that halftime show.

He also described “huge liberal special interests” opposing him and said “the only way I can now win this is for you to run your own campaign against them. I’d ask that you copy this letter and send it to ten friends or call ten friends every time you see one of their ads.”

That will work.

“The Democrats’ ads will tell you none of this, so if you have further questions call me at the campaign office . . . or even on my cell,” the letter continued, providing both numbers.

If you still couldn’t guess that the campaign was not going well, the letter concludes with an Alamo comparison - possibly not the most encouraging message a campaign could send.

I said as much to Sanford over the phone Monday. (It turns out that really is his cellphone number.)

This is some strange courage. I try not to give out my cellphone number. If pressed, I will give out my college roommate’s. (Sorry about those 2 a.m. calls!) Sanford said he realizes it is “unusual by most standards,” which describes his campaign in a nutshell.

When I asked him to unpack the Alamo metaphor a little, he laughed heartily. “A number of folks have said, ‘Hey, Mark, you realize, everybody died,’ “ he admitted. “I guess there was a bigger point I was trying to make there. That guy and those men were ultimately committed to their cause.” His phone has been ringing off the hook, he says.

“I leave you with one last thought,” his open letter ends. “In March of 1863, there was similarly little time. [The efforts of] a South Carolinian by the name of William Travis . . . and of those who died with him there at the Alamo, ultimately inspired Texans to . . . defeat Santa Anna’s army though they were outnumbered at the onset by six to one. I’m outnumbered right now, but will fight to the end toward freedom and financial sanity in Washington so important to sustaining it.”

By the way, the fight at the Alamo was in 1836. (c) 2013, The Washington Post 4-24-13

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

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Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann Blog We can’t give in to the Republican list of demands.

After years of complaining that Democrats haven’t passed a budget, now Republicans are refusing to negotiate at all on the Senate’s recently passed spending plan. Under regular order, the two chambers should come together to find a compromise between the Democratic budget in the Senate and the Republican austerity plan in the House.

However, in typical GOP fashion, Republicans won’t come to the negotiating table unless they get a socalled “framework,” that they say would make a compromise more likely. But, that “framework” is just a demand that all new tax revenues are off the table. That is not compromise. That is not negotiation. That is not how Congress is supposed to operate. That is Republican economic terrorism.

In an attempt to secure a budget, President Obama and Democratic leaders offered cuts to some of our most sacred social programs – angering many on the left. And a total $2.5 trillion in spending cuts have already been imposed on our nation.

But that’s not enough for Republicans. Their idea of compromise is getting everything they want... and they’ll continue to act like petulant children until they do.

We can’t let President Obama and the Democrats be held hostage any more. This is our nation. If anyone gets to have a list of demands – we do. We can demand that President Obama takes Medicare and Social Security off the table. We can demand that Republicans stop their economic terrorism. And we must demand that this broken Congress starts serving the people who put them in office.

Republicans don’t want to give up corporate cash!

Republicans want to stop the Securities and Exchange Commission from adopting rule 4-637, which would require corporations to disclose their political contributions.

A group of shareholder activists, pension fund representatives, and Democratic lawmakers are pushing the S.E.C. to require corporations to report their political spending to investors. And according to the New York Times the agency is preparing for fierce opposition from corpora-

tions and lawmakers alike.

As the S.E.C. could propose this new disclosure rule by the end of this month, House Republicans are already trying to introduce legislation that would make requiring disclosure illegal. Despite nearly half a million comments on the proposed rule, the vast majority in favor of its adoption, Republicans think shareholders don’t have the right to know how their investment money is being spent.

Even in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision - which opened the flood gates of corporate political spending – public disclosure was considered the proper check against abuse. Some of our nation’s most powerful corporate lobbying groups – like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – have spoken out against disclosing how much they’re spending to buy off our elected leaders. They don’t want Americans to know how much corporate money is flooding into Congress, or who these bought-andpaid-for lawmakers are really working for.

As we continue our fight to say that money isn’t speech, and corporations are not people, we should also

support the S.E.C.’s effort to make corporations disclose their political contributions. Let’s attack this problem from every side. Tell the Securities and Exchange Commission you support the public disclosure rule at SEC.gov, and join the fight against corporate power at MoveToAmend. org.

The dirty secret behind right-wing austerity.

The motivation behind the worldwide economic con of austerity has been discovered. And, the source is none other than Pete Peterson – the debt-obsessed billionaire who stands to make billions off the privatization of our social safety net. Just days ago we told you how a 28-year-old grad student debunked the ReinhartRogoff study used to push austerity throughout the world. Well, now we know why Republican “fuzzy math” was used in the first place. Pete Peterson’s organizations bankrolled that study.

Kenneth Rogoff, one of the study’s leading authors, is a member of the Advisory Board at the Peterson Institute, which published the pro-austerity study. And, Carmen Reinhart is a regular participant of

Peterson Institute functions, along with the likes of Paul Ryan and Alan Simpson. While the now-debunked study’s math might have been written off as a mere error by the authors, the link to Peterson indicates that ideology, rather than incompetence, is the cause.

The austerity-induced human suffering and economic destruction should have been evidence enough for democrats to stop believing in budget-cut myths. But, the link to Peterson proves that “high debt causes slow growth” theory is nothing more than right-wing manufactured hysteria. Peterson and the corporatist machine have created this problem, and the so-called solution, to perpetuate the myth that government spending – not historically low tax revenue – is the real problem.

And they have even gotten democrats to believe it.

It’s time for President Obama and Democratic leaders to see the writing on the wall and take a formal stand against austerity. No nation, in the history of the world, has ever cut it’s way to prosperity, and no fabricated economic study can change that.

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May 8, 2013

LIBERAL DELINEATIONS

Liberal Opinion Week

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

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Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Bill Keller

A Blogger On Trial If you set out to design a political nemesis who would give Vladimir Putin the shivers, you might well come up with Alexei Navalny. That is why the trial of the popular Russian activist on Wednesday is the most important political trial in Russia in decades.

Navalny, a lawyer, anti-corruption crusader and blogger, has been likened to every political insurgent from Julian Assange to Nelson Mandela.

As a potential political leader he long ago surpassed Assange and hasn’t quite caught up to Mandela, but he keeps getting better. He is young (36), thoughtful, politically astute, crowd-pleasing and apparently unafraid. He has command of the Internet and the skills of an investigative reporter. (He buys stock in state-owned oil companies and banks and uses his status as a minority shareholder to air their dirty laundry on his LiveJournal blog.)

He is an ethnic Russian who has incorporated a mild dose of nationalist sloganeering into his patter.

This has dismayed some of his liberal friends, but it is shrewd. It inoculates him somewhat against Putin’s favorite line of attack, that critics are Western stooges, and, more important, helps broaden Navalny’s appeal beyond the young, social-mediasavvy cubicle workers who are his base.

His platform combines free-market libertarianism, which appeals to Russia’s growing bourgeoisie, and a relentless campaign against corruption, which resonates widely in a nation where it seems every transaction entails a bribe. (Russia ranks a humiliating 133rd on the Transparency International index of countries where businesses can invest with confidence.) The Moscow Times in 2011 called Navalny “the only electable” opposition figure. That might be true, although the best rabble-rousers don’t always make the best presidents - a lesson Russia should have learned from Boris Yeltsin.

This is hardly the first time the Putin regime has used law enforcement and the criminal courts (acquittal rate: 0.4 percent) to cull antagonists.

The hounding of the outspoken tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was an appalling and largely successful effort to warn Russia’s wealthiest not to kid themselves that money entitled them to free speech. The sham trial of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who dared take on tax fraud in high places and died in jail from mistreatment, sent a message not to meddle with the thievery of Putin’s cronies. And the trial of the sacrilegious punk trio Pussy Riot served notice that the president does not see the joke, not when it’s on him. None of these victims of Kremlin justice, though, could mobilize a serious political following. Navalny might, especially if he ever gets off a TV black list.

The main charge against Navalny is that, as an adviser to the regional government in Kirov, he embezzled money from a state-run timber company.

A review of the case by a Chicago law firm for a client sympathetic to Navalny’s plight concluded that the charges were laughably bogus, and the state has offered nothing to rebut that. In fact, local authorities conducted what seems to have

been a thorough investigation and concluded no crime was committed. But the federal Investigative Committee, a powerful agency that serves Putin, stepped in and - without adding any new evidence - charged Navalny with stealing timber worth more than $500,000.

the president of Belarus.”

Let’s hope this is all true, but Putin - especially in the last few years of his seemingly endless rule - has not been a clear-eyed calculator of Russian’s best interest, or a man in close touch with what the world thinks of him. He has become ever more weirdly narcissistic, a stuntman posing shirtless on horseback, hugging a tranquilized polar bear, piloting a motorized glider to lead a flock of migrating Siberian cranes. And he has become more petty and vindictive, signing a law ending the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans and obliging nonprofits to register as “foreign agents.” In the campaign to make an example of Navalny, the activist’s friends and supporters have been followed, searched, harassed and threatened. Authorities have filed charges against Navalny’s brother and leaked private emails that suggested tensions in Navalny’s marriage.

Navalny knows, as Putin does, that sometimes fear works. The blogger’s middle-class followers, unlike the threadbare Soviet throngs who backed Yeltsin against the Communists or the miserable armies of the Arab Spring, actually have something to lose.

“The majority of the elite or business elite,” Navalny told The Times’ Ellen Barry recently, “they are people with liberal views, but they are cowardly, they are simply afraid of everything, they are trembling all the time, so they will be quiet.”

“Man is weak,” he said. “I am not blaming anyone, but man is weak.”

For the United States, Navalny’s case calls for calibrated diplomacy. President Barack Obama and Putin have a bilateral summit scheduled in September, and the administration is busily trying to salvage a relationship on the rocks. It would be wrong to let the case impede cooperation in combating terrorism (as the Boston-Chechnya connection reminds us) or the downsizing of nuclear arsenals or possible Russian cooperation in resolving the crises of Syria and Iran, not that much cooperation has been forthcoming so far. But it would be wrong, too, to pretend Navalny’s case didn’t matter.

I hope Obama pays attention to the Navalny show trial. He will learn something about the man across the table, and about the man who, you never know, might someday take his place.

It’s probably no coincidence that one of the targets of Navalny’s recent muckraking was the head of the very same Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin. Navalny posted documents showing that Bastrykin secretly possessed a residence permit and real estate in the Czech Republic, raising questions about his faith in Russia’s future and, since the Czech Republic is a member of the NATO alliance, his vulnerability to blackmail.

The state’s obvious hope is that by convicting Navalny on charges of greed, it will diminish his credibility as a corruption-fighter and, not incidentally, head off his political ambitions.

(Conviction of a serious crime is a disqualification for public office.)

I suspect the Russian public knows exactly what is going on. That, in fact, is the point. The trial is a show, and the moral of this drama is, if you stick your head up too high, you could lose it. In an interview in Izvestia that reads like a relic of Soviet-era cynicism, Vladimir Markin, the oleaginous spokesman for the Investigative Committee, left no doubt about Navalny’s real crime. Why, the paper asked, was the case propelled to the front of the court docket?

The spokesman replied: “If a person tries with all his might to draw attention to himself, even, you might say, tries to taunt the authorities - says, `Look at me, you’re all covered in dirt and I’m so clean’ - well, then the interest in his past grows, and the process of exposing him naturally speeds up.”

Markin suggested that Navalny, who spent a semester at a Yale program for budding foreign leaders, is a kind of Ivy-League Manchurian candidate, set in motion by American mentors to provoke a conflict with the Kremlin that would end in his arrest and demonstrate that Russia persecutes truth-tellers.

The interviewer asked why, rather than threaten Navalny with jail, the state did not enlist his anticorruption expertise to help clean up the country.

“No one is hindering his public activities,” Markin smirked. “Even in prison many convicts write letters and statements, struggle against the shortcomings c.2013 New York Times News Service of the system.”

4-21-13 Friends of Navalny - and, you would think, common sense - say this case is a loser for Putin.

Change Of Address: He will further discredit a politicized justice system.

Please send your old mailing label and your new He risks making Navalny a martyr. He jeopardizes address three weeks prior to moving.

Russia’s respectful treatment at all those meetings of the G-8, the G-20 and the P5-plus-1, not to Liberal Opinion Week mention the Winter Olympics in Sochi next year.

P.O. Box 606 And at a time when Russia badly needs foreign Hampton, IA 50441-0606 capital, using economic laws for political repression Or call Toll Free spooks investors. “Putin doesn’t want Russia to become a pariah,” a close friend of Navalny told 1-800-338-9335 me, hopefully. “He doesn’t want to be treated like

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

19

Walter Brasch

Oh, That’s What The Boy Scouts Mean By Being ‘Morally Straight’

Harry Strausser III owns a successful small business with 25 employees in Bloomsburg, Pa. As an undergraduate, he was a national champion in several forensics categories, and represented the Boy Scouts of America in national competitions sponsored by the Reader’s Digest. As a graduate student, he coached a college forensics team. He has never been arrested or suspected of any crime.

Strausser is an Eagle Scout. He is also gay. The National Council of the Boy Scouts of America says he doesn’t have the right “core values” to be a Scout leader.

Denny Meyer, who lives in New York City, wasn’t a Scout, but often tagged along with his older brother to Scout meetings. During college, Meyer, the son of Holocaust refugees, enlisted in the Navy in 1968 “to pay my country back for my family’s freedom.” After four years, he had quickly advanced to Petty Officer Second Class (E-5), got a job as a civilian with the Department of the Army, and enlisted in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Sergeant First Class (E-7). He later worked in international sales and office administration.

Meyer had to pass rigorous background checks to serve in two branches of the Armed Forces, but he can’t pass the background checks become a Boy Scout leader because he’s gay.

Gregory Bourke is a mainframe computer programmer and analyst in Louisville, Ky. He had been a Scout for almost three years. His 15year-old son is a Life Scout who has finished most of his requirements to be an Eagle Scout. His 14-year-old daughter is a Girl Scout. He has been a leader in her troop for eight years; he had been an assistant Scoutmaster for five years. Last September, he received a special Legislative Citation from the Kentucky House of representatives honoring him for his community involvement and dedication to Scouting.

Bourke is no longer with the Boy Scouts. His local Council, against strong opposition from his troop and the Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church, which sponsors both the Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops, ordered him to resign because he’s

gay, and threatened to pull the church’s Scouting charter if Bourke didn’t resign. The Girl Scouts, like the 4H Club, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and numerous other organizations, has no discriminatory policies, and Bourke’s church is pleased he continues as Girl Scouts leader

In contrast, the Boy Scouts have a long history of allowing local councils to discriminate against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. It wasn’t until 1974 that the national organization finally ended racial discrimination. In 1991, with the emergence of a “family values” conservative movement, the Boy Scouts formalized a policy to exclude gays from membership and leadership positions. The existing position is that the BSA believes “homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirement in the Scout Oath that a Scout be morally straight and in the Scout Law that a Scout be clean in word and deed, and that homosexuals do not provide a desirable role model for Scouts.”

Nine years later, the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote largely along political lines, said that the Boy Scouts of America was a private organization and had every right to discriminate.

Several Fortune 500 corporations— including Alcoa, Caterpillar, CVS, Dow Chemical, General Electric, General Mills, Intel, Levi Strauss, 3M, UPS, and Verizon—have suspended funding to the BSA. Although local United Way agencies have the autonomy to decide whether or not to continue to provide funds to the BSA, the national organization has reaffirmed its principle that “embraces inclusiveness, diversity, and equal opportunity as part of our core values, Code of Ethics, and human resource policies.” Keri Albright, president of the Greater Susquehanna Valley United Sway (Pa.), like more than 50 other United Way local organizations, has suspended Boy Scout funding, and argues that “accepting gays is not in conflict with having good values.”

Faced by significant income loss, the Boy Scouts last Summer rethought their position about excluding gays from membership. A backlash by the right-wing, which also threatened

to pull funding and membership, Christ, United Methodist Church, slapped them back into their policy and the Unitarian Universalist of discrimination.

Association, among other religions that sponsor Scout packs and troops, A petition with 64,000 signatures demand the discriminatory policies opposing the Boy Scout policy of be eliminated. About two-thirds of exclusion was delivered to the United all Scout groups are sponsored by Way; several petitions, with about religious organizations.

1.4 million signatures opposing The 70-member executive the Scouts’ anti-gay policies, were committee is now recommending delivered to its national headquarters to the 1,400 voting members of the in Irving, Texas.

National Council that gay youth And so the flip-flopping Scouts under 18 be allowed to be Scouts, decided to survey its members and but to continue to exclude gay adults sponsors. From surveys filled out from becoming leaders. by more than 200,000 Scouts and This Swiss-hole plan, which their leaders, 50,000 alumni, 270 could be approved by the National councils, and about 100 religious and Council, May 20, perpetuates the community organizations, the surveys Scouts’ image as an organization that revealed, according to the National openly discriminates. It would allow Council, that “a majority of adults in a gay youth to pass the rigorous tests the Scouting community [about 61 to become an Eagle Scout, including percent] support the BSA’s current a requirement to “serve six months policy of excluding open and avowed in a troop leadership position,” yet homosexuals [but] younger parents not be allowed to become an adult and teens tend to oppose the policy.” leader. Such a decision perpetuates The Los Angeles Area Council, and stereotypes and shows that the several others in Southern California, national leadership is buried in a proposes to disregard National policy morass of homophobic fear. and to admit to membership and The proposed policy revision leadership roles anyone who meets implies that youth are still exploring Scouting standards, whether gay or their worldviews and beliefs, and that straight. being gay is a choice that gay youth Among those who oppose inclusion make, and one they can “outgrow” of gays as members or leaders are if they wish to have the BSA “core several churches. Franklin Page, values.” president of the Southern Baptist If there was a Pathfinder merit Convention, says he’s “gravely badge, the Scout leadership would distressed” that the Scouts are even be unable to earn it—they’ve been considering revising their policy, and wandering the wrong trail for many if they allow gays as members his years. churches are likely to sever ties with Dr. Brasch’s latest book is Fracking the Scouts. The Latter Day Saints Pennsylvania, a look at the impact and Roman Catholic churches also of fracking upon public health and oppose removing barriers to permit environment. Rosemary R. Brasch gays to become Scouts and leaders. assisted on this column.

In contrast, the United Church of 4-25-13

20

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Fred Hiatt

Divided We Stand In the week since modest gun control died in the Senate, those of us who don’t think guns make the country safer have been inclined to blame a few cowardly senators whose votes could have shifted the outcome.

Unfortunately, the problem is bigger than that.

Contrary to what then-Sen. Barack Obama told us in his inspiring breakout speech to the Democratic convention of 2004, there is a blue America and a red America. And the colors have been deepening over the decade since Obama spoke.

This isn’t an original thought. Journalist Bill Bishop coined the phrase “the big sort” in 2004 to describe the increasing political homogeneity of American living patterns. It comes as no surprise that some 60 percent of households in Montana own guns, compared with 13 percent in Rhode Island; or that, with similar populations, Missouri has six abortion providers and Maryland 34.

But the red-state/blue-state fissure seems to be turning into a chasm in the months since President Obama won reelection. After the Newtown massacre, Connecticut and Maryland enacted sweeping bans on assault weapons and other gun-control measures. South Dakota enacted a bill authorizing school employees to carry guns.

North Dakota enacted a bill that, if enforced, seems likely to ban most abortions, while Maryland became one of the nine states (plus the District of Columbia) that recognize samesex marriages. Meanwhile, such marriages remain illegal elsewhere and, in 30 states, unconstitutional.

As Ronald Brownstein and Stephanie Czekalinski point out in the National Journal, the chasm doesn’t run only through social issues.

Blue-state governors such as Jerry Brown in California and Martin O’Malley in Maryland have engineered tax and budget increases while red-state governors such as Sam Brownback in Kansas are cutting the income tax, the budget and the state workforce. The Kansas legislature is now so far to the right that conservative Brownback finds himself trying to moderate its enthusiasm for budget-slashing.

There are still a handful of purple states.

In a few (such as Virginia), the parties have compromised and made progress; in others (Wisconsin), they have gone to political war. But as The Washington Post’s Dan Balz pointed out recently, the number of states that are divided evenly enough for presidential candidates to fight over has been steadily dwindling. In 2012, only four (Florida, Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina) were decided by five percentage points or fewer.

The encouraging news, if there is any, is that these patterns aren’t as immutable as they were, say, with the division between slave and free states before the Civil War. Populations shift over time, attitudes change, political parties evolve. The migration of foreign-born families into the heartland, for example, may help make immigration reform more achievable than it

would be if immigrants were clustered only in traditional coastal cities. And, as Third Way’s Matt Bennett pointed out to me, polls show voters often are more moderate than their politicians, even in deep blue or bright red states.

But on many issues the country is sharply divided, as it was between Obama and Mitt Romney (Obama won just 51.1 percent of votes). And while congressional gerrymandering amplifies the effect of the division, even fair redistricting would not bridge the chasm, as Rob Richie explained in a Washington Post op-ed last fall. (Richie’s solution: Create multi-member House districts, so that the minority party in any given region could elect at least one out of three legislators.)

same-sex marriage and against California’s ban on same-sex marriage because it violates the U.S. Constitution.

On some issues, liberal and conservative policies may get a chance to compete. Will the well-funded schools of Maryland help attract business and maintain the state’s prosperity despite higher taxes, as O’Malley maintains?

Or will Brownback’s tax cuts more effectively drive growth? As red states resist Obamacare and blue states embrace it, where will people be healthier?

Unfortunately, across a range of issues state diversity won’t work very well. A ban on assault weapons in Maryland is of limited use if you can buy a gun in Virginia. A married gay couple with children could risk custody if they move from One result is that purported adherence Massachusetts to Mississippi. to states’ rights has become more situational But with Americans living in two separate than ever. Red-staters want to ignore Roe v. worlds, that may be the reality we face for some Wade while insisting that the most permissive time to come. state’s concealed-carry law be accepted across Hiatt is The Washington Post’s editorial page the country. Advocates of gay marriage find editor. themselves simultaneously against the federal (c) 2013, The Washington Post Defense of Marriage Act because it doesn’t 4-22-13 recognize Massachusetts’ primacy in allowing

E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Way Forward On Guns

Victories often contain the seeds of future defeats. So it is -- or at least should be -- with the Senate’s morally reprehensible rejection of expanded background checks for gun buyers.

The outcome is a test of both an invigorated gun safety movement and a gun lobby that decided to go for broke.

The National Rifle Association assumed that blocking new gun legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre would firmly establish its dominance. Advocates of sane gun regulations would scatter in despair and be torn apart by recriminations.

But there is a flaw in the gun lobbyists’ calculation: Their strategy leaves the initiative entirely in the hands of their opponents. The early evidence is that rage over the cowardly capitulation of so many senators to raw political power is pushing activists against gun violence to redouble their efforts.

What was striking about Wednesday’s vote is that many of the senators who had expressed support for universal background checks after the slaughter at Newtown meekly abandoned their position when the roll was called.

Proponents of the measure, including Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, spoke of private meetings in which senators offered no substantive objections to the compromise negotiated by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. The wobbling legislators simply hinted that politics would not

permit them to vote “yes.”

Giffords, the victim of the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona, founded Americans for Responsible Solutions to battle on behalf of gun reforms. She responded to the Senate vote with an op-ed in The New York Times that declared plainly: “I’m furious.” Senators, she said, “looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby - and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.”

Giffords’ frustration echoed sentiment all across her side of the debate. In the past, Democrats who support gun safety had reacted benignly to members of their party from rural states who opposed sensible gun measures for expediency’s sake. Not this time. The response to Democrats who opposed background checks -Sens. Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Heidi Heitkamp and Mark Pryor -- was indignation.

Begich invited scorn by insulting those who insisted that the Newtown massacre ought to be the last straw.

“It’s dangerous to do any type of policy in an emotional moment,” he said. “Because human emotions then drive the decision. Everyone’s all worked up. That’s not enough.” Describing the reaction to the death of so many children as “emotional” rather than rational should be electorally disqualifying.

But the vote also demonstrated for all to see

Dionne continued on page 21

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

21

Clarence Page

Give ‘Bomb Control’ A Chance He thought his wife was in love with another man, police say, so James L. McFillin of Baltimore decided to blow the other man up.

It was 1979 in Baltimore.

McFillin wired two sticks of an explosive called Tovex 220 into the electrical system of a truck belonging to Nathan A. Allen, Sr., killing Allen and injuring another man, prosecutors said.

What McFillin did not know was that his Tovex was “tagged,” as U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms would say. His two sticks were part of about 7 million pounds of explosives that manufacturers had laced with microscopic, color-coded plastic particles called “taggants” as part of a $5 million experiment to test the ability of taggants to identify explosives.

To McFillin’s dismay, the taggants worked. Federal agents traced his explosives back to him and he was convicted in 1980.

In that year Switzerland became the first and, so far, only country to require taggants in all explosives manufactured there or imported.

But taggants didn’t get far in this country until the late 1990s when President Clinton signed a bill to put “a detection agent,” the legal term for what taggants do, in plastic explosives, but not gunpowder.

Gunpowder was exempted under pressure from explosives manufactures and a larger and even more influential ally -- guess who -the National Rifle Association.

Dionne continued from page 20

a Republican Party walking in lockstep behind its commanders in the gun lobby. Only four Republicans bravely defied the NRA’s fanatical opposition to a very mild measure, including Toomey and Sens. Mark Kirk, John McCain, and Susan Collins.

This should send a message to all who keep looking for new signs of Republican moderation.

Republicans who cultivate a reputation for reasonableness -their ranks include, among others, Sens. Johnny Isakson, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker, Saxby Chambliss and Rob Portman -could not even vote for a watereddown proposal. This tells us that the GOP has become a coalition

Among their arguments: Taggants would add expense. They might make explosives less stable and thus less safe.

But most controversially, there is the classic NRA “slippery slope” worry: A program that requires keeping records on who buys explosives could ease the way to national gun registration. The gun lobby views gun registration as tantamount to confiscation, despite the many Supreme Court decisions that have upheld the constitutional right to bear arms.

After a 1980 study by the Office of Technology Assessment suggested several options, including further government testing and development, Congress chose the option the NRA preferred: They ordered the BATF to stop looking for ways to trace gunpowder.

This anti-science approach has become something to expect from the NRA. Gun violence research ground to a halt at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1996 after the NRA successfully lobbied Congress to ban research that “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” After the Sandy Hook school massacre, President Barack Obama lifted the ban by executive order, but funding remains in question.

Now, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Capitol Hill is talking about taggants again. Putting it in writing is another matter. It would

make a nice addition, in my view, to a bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced a week after the Boston bombing -- on behalf of ailing Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat and long-time gun control champion. The Explosive Materials Background Check Act would require just that, background checks for anyone purchasing explosive powders.

democracy doesn’t always work as it should in this Congress.

In a telephone chat, I asked William Kerns, president of Microtrace, the Minneapolis-based company that makes taggants, how he feels about the NRA’s concerns.

He drew a distinct line of difference between firearms and explosives.

“I’m a member of the NRA,” he said, noting that he was a retired captain in the Minneapolis Police Reserve, Can explosives control fare “and I don’t want to have to register better than gun control? After the my gun.” recent Senate defeat, despite its However, when I asked him about widespread popularity in polls, of concerns over the safety and stability a bill to require background checks of explosives to which taggants for firearms, we have seen how were added, he said, “They’ve been requiring it in Switzerland for about 30 years and I haven’t heard any of the fearful. In a pinch, the party’s keep organizing to build on the complaints.” extreme lobbies rule. unprecedented effort that went into More research needs to be done This vote also made clear that this fight -- or they can give up. in this country, a 1998 National the right wing is manipulating our They can challenge the senators Research Council study found. system, notably by abusing the who voted “no,” or they can leave Concerns “about cost, safety and filibuster, to impose a political them believing that the “safe” vote effectiveness must be addressed minority’s will on the American is always with the NRA. They before additives can be widely majority. Since when is 90 percent of can bolster senators who cast used,” the study concluded. the nation not “the Real America”? particularly courageous “yes” votes That’s fair, but that was 15 years Not only do Americans -- among them, Mary Landrieu and ago. Technology has advanced overwhelmingly endorse background Kay Hagan -- or they can leave quite a bit since then, yet no further checks; senators representing the them hanging. government research or even vast majority of our people do, too. The story of reform in America is serious talk about taggants and their The “yes” votes Wednesday came that it often takes defeats to inspire “cost, safety and effectiveness” from lawmakers representing 63 a movement to build up the strength has occurred. Lost time is lost percent of the population. How can required for victory. Which way opportunities. our democracy thrive when a willful this story goes is up to us.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@ minority can keep dictating to the E.J. Dionne’s email address is tribune.com. rest of the country? ejdionne@washpost.com. (c) 2013 Clarence Page But the next steps are up to the (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group 4-28-13 supporters of gun sanity. They can 4-22-13

22

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Eugene Robinson

Resolute, But With An Astrisk The nation demonstrated again last week how resolute it can be when threatened by murderous terrorists -- and how helpless when ordered to heel by smug lobbyists for the gun industry.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s deadly rampage through the Boston area provoked not fear but defiance. Even before one brother was killed and the other captured, the city was impatient to get back to normal -- eager to show the world that unspeakable violence might shock, sadden and enrage, but would never intimidate.

“Sweet Caroline,” the perennial eighth-inning singalong at Fenway Park, became an unlikely anthem of unity and resistance.

The Obama administration decided Monday to charge the younger Tsarnaev, in custody at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, under criminal statutes rather than as an “enemy combatant.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and some others will disapprove, but this is really an issue of semantics. No one has argued for kid gloves and leniency.

There is also the unanswered question of whether the Tsarnaev brothers had contact with some terrorist organization or acted alone.

I have no doubt that authorities will find out. No stone will be unturned, not just in Cambridge and Watertown but in the remote vastness of Chechnya and Dagestan as well. The brothers’ relatives and acquaintances will be interviewed, their movements traced, their Internet habits minutely examined for any possible clue.

Can the Tsarnaevs’ motive be described as “Islamist,” and would that be in a religious or cultural sense? When Russian security officials flagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev for scrutiny, did the FBI drop the ball? Are there telltale patterns of behavior that hint at dangerous self-radicalization?

Or is this tragedy more like Columbine, an unfathomable orgy of death?

It may be, in the end, that there simply was no way that authorities could have anticipated and prevented the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

But rest assured that we will move heaven and earth looking for answers. Since the 9/11 attacks, we have demonstrated that when alienated young men who are foreign-born and Muslim kill innocents, we will do anything in our power to keep such atrocities from happening again.

Shamefully, however, we have also shown that when alienated young men who are not foreignborn or Muslim do the same, we are powerless.

It is inescapably ironic that while Boston was under siege last week, the Senate was busy rejecting a measure that would have mandated near-universal background checks for gun purchases nationwide -- legislation prompted by the massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Gun violence costs 30,000 lives in this country each year. Other steps proposed after Newtown

-- such as reimposition of bans on military-style assault weapons and large-capacity magazines -were deemed too much to hope for. But expanded background checks once had the support of the powerful National Rifle Association, and experts considered them potentially the most effective way of keeping deadly weapons out of the wrong hands. They might not have prevented the last senseless mass shooting, but might prevent the next.

from the architecture of the Constitution, which gives Montana’s 1 million residents the same number of senators as California’s 38 million.

There are lots of explanations for the failure of legislation on background checks, but no good reasons.

Imagine what our laws would be like if the nation were losing 30,000 lives each year to Islamist terrorism. Do you think for one minute that a young man named, say, Abdullah or Hussein -- or Tsarnaev -- would be able to go to a gun show and buy a semiautomatic AR-15 knockoff with a 30-round clip, no questions asked? Would the NRA still argue, as it essentially does now, that those thousands of lives are the price we must pay for the Second Amendment?

When we say “never again” about terrorism, we really mean it. When we say those words about gun violence, obviously we really don’t.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

The NRA changed its position on background checks to “never” and dug in its heels, however, threatening to punish senators who voted in favor. And so, despite polls showing that up to 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could not muster the 60 votes needed to move the legislation forward.

Some critics say President Obama didn’t push hard enough for action on gun violence, didn’t twist enough arms or slap enough backs. Some (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group say Reid could have done more to keep red-state 4-22-13 Democrats in the fold. Some say the barrier arises

Froma Harrop

The Bombers and Who Gets In

The uncle of the accused Boston Marathon bombers got the boys right. They were unable to settle into American life, Ruslan Tsarni told reporters from his home in Maryland, “and thereby just hating everyone who did.” He called the two brothers “losers.” I prefer the term “weaklings.”

As the story thickens with detail, it would seem that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now dead, was the ringleader. So let’s concentrate on him.

Tamerlan would seem the model of the mentally unfit immigrant. Here was an accomplished boxer who couldn’t roll with the punches of American existence.

Fragile personalities often adopt grandiosity as a shield. Making peace with the kind of setbacks that ordinary Americans confront on a regular basis would have made Tamerlan ordinary.

Hence, he took the well-trod path of latching onto a radical cause, in his case religious, to inflate his importance.

It takes a whole lot of crossed wires to see blowing up a bunch of innocents as a remedy for what ails. And that’s why Tamerlan’s actual disappointments are so beside the point.

“Life in America Unraveled for Two Young Men,” reads a Wall Street Journal headline. But by the measuring stick of human suffering -- even at the higher American scale -- Tamerlan was doing OK. What were his unravelings? The boys’ father had a hard time in America making a living as an auto mechanic. The family lived for a while in subsidized housing. These were not unique

circumstances given the sorry state of the economy over the last few years.

Tamerlan reportedly dropped out of college for money reasons. Well, so did Steve Jobs.

Then there was his boxing. “He couldn’t get into the Olympics,” the family’s landlord told a Russian newspaper, “and that was the last thing he really worked hard at.” Many more boxers try to get onto the U.S. Olympic team than succeed.

By virtue of having become a Golden Gloves contender, Tamerlan would have been the envy of high-school boxers everywhere.

An assimilated American in his situation would have gone to the Small Business Administration for a loan, set up a boxing school in the neighborhood and continued from there. We can well believe Tamerlan’s statement about Americans, “I don’t understand them.” A courageous man would have simply returned to a culture he felt at home in. Many immigrants do.

This story bears strong resemblance to that of Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani in jail for trying to set off a bomb in Times Square. Like Tamerlan, he had obtained a green card. He had a wife, children and good jobs. But his real estate investments didn’t pan out, and he lost his house to foreclosure.

Had Shahzad made good money in real estate, we probably would have never heard of him. But he didn’t, and rather than try, try again, he turned to radical Islam. Radical Islam provides fragile male egos a class of inferiors to feel superior

Harrop continued on page 23

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

23

Ruth Marcus

The Terrorist Next Door The bomber went to prom.

OK, alleged bomber. As to those who believe the definite article is missing from the sentence above – the prom -- my teenaged daughters inform me that phrasing is irredeemably antiquated.

Which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev probably knew. Indeed, the intriguing -- the chilling -- aspect of this 19year-old is his seeming normalcy.

They are different crimes, spawned by different demons.

Yet the Boston bombing and the shootings -- at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech, the list goes on -- somehow meld together.

But with a difference. Look at the pictures of Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Lee Loughner, SeungHui Cho, and you can imagine the craziness, the disaffection, the justnot-rightness.

Look at Tsarnaev and you see ... a regular-looking kid, one who -- to outside appearances -- had, like generations of immigrants before him, assimilated quickly and seamlessly. If he smoked pot, he also volunteered with the Best Buddies program and earned a college scholarship.

He looks like the bad boy in a boy band. His version of wildness: driving his car backward down a oneway street at a prom party -- an eerie

Harrop continued from page 22

to. That would be women. One of Shahzad’s solutions included pressuring his soon-to-be-ex-wife into wearing a hijab, a modest Muslim head covering.

At his sentencing, Shahzad puffed himself up, invoking the name of a Muslim warrior from the Crusades. The federal district court judge dryly urged him to spend the time behind bars pondering “whether the Quran wants you to kill lots of people.”

It is not America’s duty to give such troubled individuals therapy and a pile of Lexapro. It is to keep them out of a country they can’t fit into.

The FBI had already talked to Tamerlan about his jihadist interests. We assume the bureau will not shrug at such cases in the future.

Copyright 2013 The Providence Journal Co. 4-23-13

foreshadowing of the Cambridge shootout in which a fleeing Dzhokhar reportedly drove a stolen SUV over his brother, Tamerlan.

“He was just this scrawny little kid who was always giggling and happy,” Juliette Terry, 20, an elementary school friend and part of a group with whom he attended prom, told The Wall Street Journal.

“I can’t remember him saying a mean word in his life.”

Larry Aaronson, a high school teacher at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, told The Boston Globe, “If someone were to ask me what this kid is like, I would say that he had a heart of gold. He was as gracious as possible.”

who took an algebra class with Loughner, wrote emails before the shooting about “a mentally unstable person in the class who scares the living crap out of me” and describing how she would “sit by the door with my purse handy,” in case he started shooting.

After the Boston bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went to the campus gym at UMass Dartmouth, partied with soccer friends, and chatted calmly about the bombing.

“He was saying ‘Yeah, you know, it’s really a tragedy it’s happening right now, it’s a sad thing,’” Zach Bettencourt, a fellow student, told NBC News.

So remote was the possibility that Tsarnaev was involved that Pamala Those are not the comments you Rolon, resident assistant in his dorm, would hear about the school shooters. told the Globe that, on looking at They had histories of psychiatric pictures of the suspect, “We made a problems, previous brushes with the joke like -- that could be Dzhokhar. law. Their teachers and classmates But then we thought it just couldn’t understood something was off. be him. Dzhokhar? Never.”

When the shootings occurred, those who knew them, or had encountered Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a less them, instantly suspected the surprising bomber, showing signs of culprit. alienation and radicalization. “I don’t At Virginia Tech, poet Nikki have a single American friend,” he Giovanni insisted that Cho be said at one point. “I don’t understand removed from her class after them.” He became increasingly exhibiting “menacing” behavior, observant and when the imam at the “intimidating” writing and a “mean Cambridge mosque praised Martin streak.” In Tucson, Lynda Sorenson, Luther King Jr. during a sermon,

Tamerlan interrupted, shouting “infidel.” His YouTube channel included a song, “I will dedicate my life to Jihad.”

And, as with other terrorists, there were earlier encounters with law enforcement and warning signs, from a domestic violence call to an FBI investigation, prompted by a request from the Russian security service, of Tamerlan’s interest in radical Islam.

Perhaps we will learn to better identify -- and, more important, better handle -- the violent mentally ill before they act. Perhaps we will improve at avoiding the dropped ball -- the Fort Hood shooter’s intercepted emails with Anwar alAwlaki, the failure to search Zacarias Moussaoui’s laptop before the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was uniquely in the thrall of his older brother.

But Islamic radicalism has gone global. You can learn to build a pressure cooker bomb on the Internet.

Sadly, as vigilant as we may be, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is probably not the last terrorist bomber who went to prom.

Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com. (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group 4-23-13

24

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Margaret Carlson

Drawing The Wrong Lessons From Boston Ordinary people, elected and unelected, behaved heroically last week. Unfortunately, it all happened hundreds of miles from Washington.

In Boston, strangers gave clothes and shelter to shivering runners. They comforted injured spectators. They saved lives and limbs. In New York, there wasn’t as much to do, so they sang “Sweet Caroline” at Yankee Stadium. Meanwhile, the people we love to hate - elected officials and government bureaucrats - performed admirably and collaboratively, sharing power and camera time.

For a glimpse of how ordinary civil servants do their jobs without fanfare or riches, watch this interview with Edward Deveau, the police chief of Watertown, Mass. Watch it alone so no one will see you crying. He’s just a small-town cop. He never thought he would find himself and six of his officers called upon to stop two bomb-throwing terrorists.

But they were, and they did. Deveau didn’t come close to spiking the ball. “Watertown’s men,” he said quietly. “They saved a lot of lives.”

Now come to the nation’s capital, so broken and filled with the wrong people that it can’t rise to the occasion even when the occasion is relatively low and brings no hail of gunfire, no lifeor-death decisions. There was no need to capture any terrorists on the run. Instead they ran their mouths.

Called upon this week to resume Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on immigration reform, they melted down. They’d gotten to a surprisingly good place thanks to a rare confluence of bipartisan interests: Republicans want to have a prayer of getting some of the Latino vote and to provide cheap labor to their business constituents.

Democrats would like to keep the Latino vote.

Passing an immigration bill is the Senate’s only chance to do something important this session, now that it has missed the chance to do something not very important about gun control.

But the Senate is like a game of kiddie soccer: Everyone just wants to go where the ball is. So the senators wanted to spout off about what happened last week in Boston and use it to justify whatever they wanted to do. The result was an unusual public outburst of childish bickering.

Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat, said it would be cruel to use Boston to delay immigration reform. His Democratic colleague Charles Schumer of New York, a member of the Gang of Eight that negotiated the immigration compromise, said his colleagues shouldn’t use Boston as an excuse to slow down the carefully crafted bill.

“I never said that!” shouted the usually amiable Charles Grassley of Iowa, turning to face Schumer. He yelled it again in case Schumer was secretly listening to his iPod. “I don’t mean you, Mr. Grassley,” Schumer said. He quickly blamed the misunderstanding on “lots of calls” he’d gotten from the unwashed masses dialing the switchboard. In fact, Grassley

had said just that - and his Republican colleague called for Congress to “just push it back a month Jeff Sessions of Alabama chimed in as backup. or two.”

Two months should just about do it, by which If Senate Democrats want immigration re- I mean kill immigration reform. Vice President form to move along, they might reconsider call- Joe Biden, God love him, was asked to study gun ing out their Republican colleagues. That’s not control, and that study is now being blamed for how the Senate works. If SpongeBob SquarePants sapping some of the momentum. (Although what were a senator, he would be referred to as “Mr. really killed gun control was the National Rifle SquarePants” or “my esteemed colleague from Association’s time-tested strategy of bullying Bikini Bottom.” No one would call him squishy cowardly members of Congress.) or spongy in public. Republicans have already This week’s hearing and last week’s bombings been quietly seething for months as Democrats brought home two truths. The first is that Washinvoked the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., ington doesn’t cope with tragedy so much as look to push gun-control measures Republicans didn’t for partisan advantage in it. Although Grassley want. never admitted using Boston to delay immigra Grassley isn’t the only Republican senator cit- tion reform, he did say that if he were to do so, ing the events in Boston as an excuse to delay he would be justified, given how Democrats had reform. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who was for used Newtown to push for greater gun control. reform before he was against it, might be for it The second is related to the first: In a crisis, again if the bill would have kept the Chechens we should be grateful that the U.S. Congress, or out (it wouldn’t have, although all the rules re- at least the Senate, isn’t in charge. For civility, quiring immigrants to register would help the competence and common sense, we’re better off government keep track of them). Marco Rubio of looking hundreds of miles away.

Florida, whose presidential hopes are riding on Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columthreading the immigration needle, wants to use nist. the Boston investigation to address any short- (c) 2013, Bloomberg News comings in the current bill. Dan Coats of Indiana 4-24-13

Gene Lyons

Nate Bell Doesn’t Know Boston

This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York Island From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.

-- Woody Guthrie, 1944 For what it’s worth, almost everybody in Arkansas who can find Massachusetts on a road map was appalled by state Rep. Nate Bell’s grotesquely inappropriate Twitter post. (Of course not everybody can, but that’s a different issue.) At the height of the manhunt for the Boston marathon bombers, the Mena Republican informed the world that, “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hicapacity magazine?”

Reaction from New England was swift, often witty and rarely polite. “Go put on a pair of shoes and fry me up some squirrel, Gomer,” my pal Charles Pierce wrote on his Esquire blog. In a post entitled “Bite Me,” he urged readers to remind Bell “that God loves him as he loves all mouthy hicks.” Joe Keohane, the Boston-bred columnist, was less circumspect: “Might want to take a flight up north and try saying that in person, you waterheaded, little-d**k hillbilly a**hole.”

Note to Nate: Anybody who thinks Boston’s a city of Perrier-sipping pantywaists has clearly spent no time there. It didn’t help that in photos Bell looks less like a Navy Seal than a guy who’s never personally assaulted anything more lethal

than the buffet table down at the Squat ‘n’ Gobble Barbecue Shack. Many Bostonians speculated that his fondness for big guns originated in less-than-robust manliness. Southerners are sometimes surprised to learn that when provoked, New Englanders remember the Civil War too -particularly the Irish.

Back home, Arkansans long sensitive to being caricatured as ignorant hayseeds urged Bell to resign. My sainted wife, a lifelong Arkansan (apart from our three long ago years in Massachusetts), summed things up wearily. “Oh my God,” she said. “He’s just pathetic.”

It’s merely ironic that “redneck” remains the last socially acceptable ethnic slur in American life. Fools like Rep. Bell help make it so. It’s a wonder the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce or the Parks and Tourism people didn’t have him kidnapped and transported to Mississippi.

Then, after the big dope said he was sorry for the unfortunate “timing” of his remarks, Davy Carter, the Speaker of the Arkansas House, and also a Republican, had the decency to post a proper apology: “On behalf of the Arkansas House of Representatives and the state of Arkansas, I want to extend my deepest apologies to the people of the City of Boston and the state of Massachusetts for the inappropriate and insensitive comment

Lyons continued on page 25

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

25

Susan Estrich

The Baby-Faced Bomber Sometimes a picture speaks volumes. Sometimes it’s outright deceptive. The picture of “Bomber No. 2” didn’t look a bit like a mass murderer. A sweet-faced college kid, the former lifeguard, the nice young man described by classmates and friends. It couldn’t be. There must be some outside organization calling the shots. An international conspiracy, perhaps. Brainwashing.

Or maybe it was just a deceptive picture of a cold-blooded murderer.

He and his brother put bombs next to children.

One of those children was murdered.

In a court of law, innocence is presumed. That is a rule of law, not a finding of fact. For those of us who watched, watched over and over, the proof appears to be nothing less than overwhelming. Others may have been involved. Further investigation is absolutely required.

But I for one have no doubt that the defendant is not a baby-faced college student, that he is no one’s victim, that he is responsible for heinous crimes. Responsibility is not an exacting standard in criminal law. Did he know what he was doing? Did he understand that there was a bomb in that backpack, and that bombs kill people and terrorize cities? Whatever other pressures

Lyons continued from page 24

made this morning by an Arkansas House member. I can assure the people of Boston and the people of Massachusetts that Arkansans have them in their thoughts and prayers during this tragic time.”

Of course they do.

Indeed, if there’s any good to come from evil acts like the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s to remind Americans that the things binding us together as a people far outweigh our differences. In all the rage and sorrow, the words that rang truest to me came from the bombers’ immigrant uncle Ruslan Tsarni and a baseball player from the Dominican Republic.

Uncle Ruslan spoke with rare passion. He urged his surviving nephew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to turn himself in and beg forgiveness.

Maybe he needn’t have said that his brother’s sons had shamed and embarrassed all Chechen

may have been at work, however influenced he was by religion or his brother or anyone else, if he knew what he was doing, if he understood the nature of his conduct, that is enough to make him responsible.

But that does not make him an enemy combatant.

The calls by politicians to treat him as one, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, a lawyer who should know better, demonstrate the triumph of politics over law. According to Graham, speaking on the Senate floor, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s “ties to radical Islamic thought” and his Chechen heritage should justify holding him as an “enemy combatant” subject to trial by a military tribunal.

Ties to “radical Islamic thought” do not make a person an enemy combatant. Ties to thought are, in fact, at the core of the protection afforded by the First Amendment.

Actions are another matter. But there is absolutely no evidence that this man was a member of al-Qaida or the Taliban, or that his acts were directed by foreign enemies. He is an American citizen who (allegedly) killed innocent people and would have (absent the brilliance of the Boston hospital trauma system) killed many more -- on American soil using devices made in America.

Indeed, even Graham acknowledges this. He just wants him to be treated as an enemy combatant until proved otherwise. Nothing in the law or the Constitution supports this. It is totally unnecessary.

that his statements might not be admissible in a criminal trial, which, frankly, won’t matter. Anyone who thinks a Boston jury will be unduly sympathetic (unlike military officers) is just plain wrong. Indeed, for my money, military officers - The evidence against Tsarnaev is who are more accustomed to seeing overwhelming. He wouldn’t need to death on the fields of battle than the say a word to government authorities rest of us are to seeing destruction to be convicted in an American and devastation in Copley Square court. The only consequence of - might have an easier time focusing not giving him Miranda rights is solely on the evidence admitted at trial.

In our ridiculously polarized immigrants, because we don’t do service. Gesturing to his chest, media and political culture, we -- or we’re not supposed to do -- Ortiz pointed out in Spanish- have a tendency to see everything collective racial and ethnic guilt here accented English that on that day in extremes, which means that more in America. But anybody who grew his uniform shirt didn’t say Red often than not we’re wrong. up with first- and second-generation Sox. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not a babyimmigrant families knows exactly “It say Boston,” he said. “This faced innocent, even if that is how he where he was coming from. Better is our f*****g city, and nobody is looks in the pictures that flashed on to hear it raw than listen to mealy- going to dictate our freedom. Stay the screen every minute. He placed mouthed apologetics on MSNBC. strong.” a bomb in the middle of hundreds of Uncle Ruslan allowed his Expletive and all, it said what innocent people, children included. nephews no excuses. He found their everybody felt. The crowd erupted He is also not an enemy combatant alleged religious motives fraudulent in a spontaneous roar. by any definition, nor do we need to and contemptible. More than Sitting halfway across the treat him as one in order to ensure that, he spoke in terms of bedrock country in front of a TV set at my that justice is done.

Americanism common to Boston, home on a gravel road in darkest Copyright 2013 Creators.com Little Rock and his Maryland home. Arkansas, I have to tell you, I damn 4-24-13 He said he teaches his own children near cried. that the United States is the best Arkansas Times columnist Gene country in the world. “I love this Lyons is a National Magazine Online Subscription country which gives (everybody) Award winner and co-author of Beat The Postal Delay, a chance to be treated as a human “The Hunting of the President” Subscribe Online Today! being,” he said.

(St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can And then came Big Papi, David email Lyons at eugenelyons2@ www.liberalopinion.com Ortiz, a beloved bear of a man who yahoo.com.

Or call Toll Free briefly addressed a Fenway Park Copyright 2013, Gene Lyons 1-800-338-9335 crowd after a pregame memorial 4-24-13

26

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Culture of Preconception The political response to the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that we live in an age of shrink-wrapped, prepackaged opinions.

When something new comes along, we hasten to squeeze it into whatever frameworks we were carrying around with us a day, a month or a year before.

When the ghastly news from Boylston Street first hit, there was an immediate divide between those who were sure the attack was a form of Islamic terrorism and those just as persuaded that it was organized by domestic, right-wing extremists. April 15 was Tax Day, after all.

Unless I’m missing some obscure website out there, absolutely no one imagined what turned out to be the case: that the violence was unleashed by two young immigrants with Chechen backgrounds.

Chechnya was not on anybody’s radar screen - and it does not appear that the conflict in that rebellious Russian republic actually had much to do with the actions of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that day.

We then moved, with dispatch and without pausing for more information, to show how the event proved that our side was right in any number of ongoing debates.

Opponents of immigration reform used the fact that the brothers are immigrants as a lever to derail the rapidly forming consensus in favor of broad repairs to the system. Supporters countered, defensively, that if there is any lesson here, it’s that our approach to immigration needs to be modernized. In truth, this horrifying episode has little to do with immigration reform one way or the other.

We fell back to other familiar ground. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said we should assume these brothers had to be linked with one of our international enemies and that Dzhokhar should therefore be tried by a military tribunal and not in a normal American court, the venue to which his status as an American citizen entitles him.

The Obama administration doesn’t get credit for much these days, so it deserves courage points for deciding that Dzhokhar be treated in a way that protects the rights of all other citizens.

And, of course, what I have just written means that I cannot claim to be immune from the very forces I’m describing. My own passion for saner gun laws similarly led me to ask why we have not focused more on how the brothers obtained their weapons or why it was so hard (because of the NRA’s opposition to chemical “taggants” in gunpowder) to trace where they got the material to build their bombs.

My faith in a tolerant, pluralistic America made me worry that hundreds of thousands of lawabiding Muslim citizens could become the victims of our anger -- much as Italian-Americans were stereotyped in the days of Sacco and Vanzetti.

I also found it disturbing that we have given scant attention to the April 17 explosion at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, that killed 15

people and injured more than 200.

As the labor writer Mike Elk pointed out in a Washington Post commentary, industrial accidents are far more common than acts of terror. We have more control over how we enforce worker safety laws than we do over random acts of violence.

Yet we have allowed the Texas story to be buried beneath all our speculation about the Tsarnaev brothers.

sped up the rush to (contradictory) judgments, a practice further accelerated by new technologies.

We have less patience than ever with the often painstaking task of gathering facts. We are better informed, yet seem more efficient than ever in manufacturing conspiracy theories.

I mistrust moralistic nostalgia for some nonexistent golden age of reason, and I have contentedly joined the bracing new media world.

The past had problems of its own.

Here again, since Elk and I share a concern Still, I’d insist that “crowdsourcing” is quite for labor rights, it’s not at all surprising that different from reasoning together, an art we seem we’d make this argument. You might ask if my to have forgotten. And at the risk of disrupting complicity in a culture of preconception should the productivity gains of the opinion-creation provoke a certain humility. industry in which I happily participate, I wish Well, it does. we were better at remembering three words: Stop I’d acknowledge that none of us can get through and think. the day without making a lot of assumptions. All E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@ of us have intellectual, ideological and moral washpost.com. commitments that we bring to bear upon what we (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group think about almost everything.

4-24-13 But the hyperpolarization of our moment has

Donald Kaul

Stopping The Senseless Carnage

It was a confusing week, dominated by the Boston Marathon bombing, the evil act of two young men who had been welcomed into this country and had repaid the kindness with unspeakable cruelty.

Then, for grim comic relief, letters believed to contain the deadly poison ricin were sent to President Barack Obama, a U.S. senator, and a local judge. The FBI immediately arrested a serial letter-writer in Mississippi who is an Elvis Presley impersonator.

From the very beginning, the Boston Marathon attack smelled like the work of international terrorists — maybe al-Qaeda — rather than a domestic nutjob. Homemade bombs that spew deadly shrapnel have the feel of Iraq and Afghanistan, not Oklahoma City.

But the Boston brothers who authorities believe carried out this outrage — one a U.S. citizen, one who was trying to be — didn’t really match the international terrorist profile. They seemed more like regular immigrants, ethnic Chechens who were struggling to be assimilated into our culture.

Until they weren’t. What made them turn so violently against a country that had treated them rather well?

Beats me, although they were not the first homegrown “international terrorists” — mainly Muslim extremists, who have killed or attempted to kill Americans in the name of jihad.

Some say the problem is the way we’ve allowed our “War on Terror” to become a war on Islam, at least in the eyes of many young Muslims who are taking up arms against us. Could be.

Maybe this was their version of giving us “a taste of our own medicine.” Why, after all, should

we be exempt from the senseless carnage that is all but universal?

Certainly the Boston attack, hideous as it was, wasn’t terribly exceptional. Only last week, for example, the news contained the story of at least 185 people dead in a Nigerian fishing village in the aftermath of a gunfight between the military and Islamic extremists.

Meanwhile, back in Syria, 80 people died during a government raid.

People in the Middle East, Asia Minor, and North Africa live in constant dread of an imminent attack by their enemies. Sometimes the toll is a few, sometimes a few dozen.

The other day the media showed the photos of a row of dead Afghan children lying on the ground.

Or were they Pakistani? They’d been killed in a drone attack. Ours.

There are those who’ve called the Boston bombers “cowards.” I don’t buy that. They were something, but cowardly wasn’t it. The eldest brother apparently launched a suicidal charge at the police who ultimately killed him. Crazy is more like it. There seems to be an epidemic of crazy these days.

Cowardly, it would seem to me, is much more descriptive of killing people with drones — a lethal robot that puts the killer at no risk at all. And when the wrong target is hit or the wrong person killed, it’s written off as “collateral damage.” If that’s not cowardly it’s at least a long way from heroic.

Does that mean I’m in favor of replacing our drones with troops who can go into enemy

Kaul continued on page 27

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

27

Clarence Page

When Profiling Becomes A Real Menace Some media found the possibility that foreign terrorists bombed the Boston Marathon to be too tantalizing an explanation to pass up, even when it snares the wrong suspects.

On the day of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example, the New York Post proudly presented a scoop that misidentified an injured “Saudi national” as a terror suspect. By the next day, authorities confirmed that the badly burned man actually was a witness, not a suspect. Sorry about that.

Online vigilantism ran so wild on the Reddit online link-sharing community that its general manager Erik Martin issued an apology this week. Before the brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and alleged co-conspirator Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, were identified as the bombing suspects, several innocent men whose photos and names were circulated through Reddit, including a 17-year-old high school student and a Brown University student who has been missing since March.

Sorry again.

The meteoric rise of new Internet media created a new and dangerous rise of send-before-you-think journalism, especially in do-ityourself media. That puts a greater

Kaul continued from page 26

territory and look our enemies in the eyes before they kill them?

By no means. I’m not in favor of putting American troops in harm’s way.

What then? I don’t know, but I think it would help if we didn’t get involved in so many wars. We call ourselves a peace-loving people, but we’ve been involved in wars, invasions, and attacks almost constantly for the past hundred years.

There have been one or two brief periods of relative peace in our recent history but not many more. I don’t suggest that we become a nation of pacifists or isolationists, but could we just cut back on warfare a little? Limiting ourselves to one war at a time would be a start.

OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

OtherWords.org 4-24-13

burden on news consumers to be to make about what she called “the skeptical about how and what they elephant in the room.” She was are being served. referring to the haunting concern by many in that hotel ballroom Unfortunately, it also can create that the marathon bombers, not real dangers to individual lives, yet identified, might turn out to be social dialogue and even national Arabic -- and rekindle post-Sept. 11 security prejudices and suspicions about all For example, in a New York Arabs.

Times essay a day after the Boston “How many of us feel this burden bombings, Haider Javed Warraich, of association and hope beyond a medical resident in Boston, gave hope that this doesn’t turn out to be this explanation for why he decided what it might be?” said Amanpour. against running into the action: As “No conclusions yet. ... Is it “a 20-something Pakistani male international? Is it domestic? But with dark stubble” owing to his like all of you -- I’m not Pakistani, hectic schedule in an intensive- and I’m not Arab, but I am part care unit, he wrote, “I look like Iranian. And I do understand the Hollywood’s favorite post-cold-war burden of association....” movie villain.”

That night CNN and ABC News As an African American I, too, journalist Christiane Amanpour read understand the burden of guilt by from Warraich’s op-ed at the Arab association. I took no consolation American Institute’s annual dinner when the focus of racial profiling in Washington, which I attended as discussions, a hot issue in the 2000 a guest. presidential primaries, suddenly Amanpour was receiving an shifted after Sept.11, 2001, from achievement award named for “driving while black” or Latino to Anthony Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize- anyone who looked as though they winning New York Times foreign might be Arab or Muslim. correspondent and Lebanese- That’s why I find it ironic to American who died while covering hear increasingly about how much Syria’s unrest last year. white conservatives don’t like to Amanpour used Warraich’s quote be profiled, either. Breitbart.com, to underscore a point she wanted among other conservative websites,

slammed NPR, for example, for a publicly funded “smear” in “the media’s never ending crusade to falsely blame the right for mass murder.”

Their complaint? They didn’t like NPR’s counterterrorism correspondent Dina TempleRaston’s report that officials were investigating possible connections between the marathon bombs and “anti-government, right-wing folks,” among other possible leads.

My response? Step back and take a breath, folks, unless you really want to be identified with the sort of nitwits who celebrate Hitler’s birthday.

As the facts unfold, the backgrounds of the Boston bombing’s brother suspects frustrate our usual narratives and stereotypes. They’re foreign born, but domestically raised without obvious ties to terror groups.

We need to get past everyone’s hurt feelings to have a serious conversation about how we deal with both forms of threats to our national security.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@ tribune.com. (c) 2013 Clarence Page 4-24-13

28

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Jules Witcover

Pollution In The News Stream In today’s ever-growing coagulation of fact, fiction and rumor from print, digital and social media, where is the news consumer to look with confidence for the truth?

The floor of instant accounts of the Boston marathon explosions and their alleged conspirators severely complicated the critical task of police and other law-enforcement officials in tracking down those responsible.

Meanwhile, the airwaves and television screens were filled with inflammatory chatter resulting in conflicting and often unfounded charges of culpability against a range of ethnic, religious and immigrant groups, inflaming an already incendiary public climate.

The first burst of confusion was followed with a hacking of the traditionally dependable Associated Press wire, spreading the falsehood that the White House had been attacked and President Obama injured. The report temporarily sent Wall Street into panic.

In all this, the onetime anchor of the newsgathering world, daily newspapers and other print journalism, continued to struggle against the inroads of economic woe that have shrunk trained reportorial and editorial staffs. Shortcuts and mistakes have become commonplace in print, and are compounded now by the bombardment from news “sources” driven by political bias or just plain mischief, tweeted anonymously via a largely unmonitored Internet.

The collective informational train wreck was bound to happen. Shattered in the process has been the once-sharp line between the conveying of verifiable fact, distributed to readers and listeners via trained dispensers of news, and the avalanche of propaganda and venom spewed by self-serving partisans of all stripes.

In this, old print reporters and columnists must acknowledge a share of personal and institutional responsibility for undeniable shortcomings in our daily news product. But the fault can be attributed as well to the severe reduction in the professional watchdogs of the business -- the trained copyeditors often derisively called “green eyeshades” -- who man copy desks in newsrooms across the country.

Another factor in the decline, perhaps the key one, is the explosion of technology in the delivery of all manner of conjecture, opinion, propagandizing, proselytizing and irresponsible tongue wagging encompassing the phenomenon of “the new media.”

For many years, it was comforting for older members of the newsgathering craft to have the megaphone essentially to ourselves, with criticism and general kibitzing of our product limited mainly to our internal editors. Their sharp black pencils obliterated many a carefully if ill-chosen adjective or phrase, but usually in the interest of fact and clarity. You knew the slashing came for cause and in the service of an improved report.

The old imperative “Get it first, but first get it right” was widely honored. That’s one reason why

it was so jarring that the Associated Press, notably in the successful assault on a Senate bill by the unbiased and supported by newspapers right, left and National Rifle Association and other well-heeled center, had fallen victim to journalistic sabotage. and politically intimidating elements of the gun industry. They distorted the proposed new controls But the informational hand grenades tossed on gun purchasing in the legislation as efforts to into the Boston marathon tragedy were more “take away your guns,” and they prevailed despite generally destructive, both to public safety and to the fact that 90 percent of Americans surveyed the civic function of the news media: to give citizens supported broader background checks on gun a factual and rational consensus of the significance buyers, a key element of the bill. of the event itself.

The challenge to all who deliver news, whatever We have suffered enough from the poisonous their medium, remains the same: to convey the facts and distorted blather dished out by partisan that voters need to make up their minds. Getting commentators and propagandists over the nation’s their legislators to listen to them, alas, is another airwaves. Another old adage, attributed to the late matter.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, remains valid: Jules Witcover’s latest book is Joe Biden: A “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his Life of Trial and Redemption” (William Morrow). own facts.” It should apply to tweets, blog posts and You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@ to “old media” reporting and commentary alike, as comcast.net. the new age of communication expands. (c) 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Yet we witnessed another national disgrace 4-25-13

Thomas Friedman

Judgment Not Included

As police investigators peel away the layers of the Boston Marathon bombing, there are two aspects of this unfolding story to which I want to react: the mindset of the alleged bombers and the role of the Internet in shaping it. Important news about both was contained in a single Washington Post article Tuesday.

“The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews,” The Post reported. The officials said, “Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev ... do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were `self-radicalized’ through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan.”

This is a popular meme among radical Muslim groups, and, to be sure, some Muslim youths were deeply angered by the U.S. interventions in the Middle East. The brothers Tsarnaev may have been among them.

But what in God’s name does that have to do with planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon and blowing up innocent people? It is amazing to me how we’ve come to accept this non sequitur and how easily we’ve allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.

A simple question: If you were upset with U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why didn’t you go out and build a school in Afghanistan to strengthen that community or get an advanced degree to strengthen yourself or become a math teacher in the Muslim world to help its people be less

vulnerable to foreign powers? Dzhokhar claims the Tsarnaev brothers were so upset by something America did in a third country that they just had to go to Boylston Street and blow up people who had nothing to do with it (some of whom could have been Muslims), and too often we just nod our heads rather than asking: What kind of sick madness is this?

It’s a double non sequitur when it comes from Muslim youths who lived and studied in America, where, if you’re upset about something, you have many ways to express your opposition and have an impact - from organizing demonstrations to publishing articles to running for office. In fact, an American guy named Barack, whose grandfather was a Muslim, did just that. And he’s now president of the U.S., a job he’s used to unwind the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Moreover, some 70,000 people, most of them Muslims, have been killed by other Muslims in the Syrian civil war, which the U.S. had nothing to do with - although many Muslims are now begging us to intervene to stop it. And every week innocent Muslims are blown up by Muslim suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq - every week. Thousands of them have been maimed and killed in attacks so nihilistic that the bombers don’t even bother to give their names or make demands. Yet this does not appear to have moved the brothers Tsarnaev one iota.

Why is that? We surely must not tar all of Islam in this. Having lived in the Muslim world, I know how unfair that would be. But we must ask a question only Muslims can answer: What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every U.S. military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a

Friedman continued on page 29

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

29

Frank Bruni

The Lesson of Boston If only it were as simple as the drones coming home to roost. That would be comforting somehow. In giving us a tidy cause, it would give us a clear remedy: rain less death in distant lands, and worry less about death in our own.

If only it could all be chalked up to immigration leniency or an FBI blunder. We could get tougher on both fronts, turning a warier eye toward anyone aspiring to come here, cracking the whip over at Quantico.

And maybe then we could vanquish the worry that blooms darkly inside many of us when we visit a thronged landmark or attend the kind of richly symbolic event, like the Boston Marathon, whose violent disruption carries all the extra horror its disrupters intend.

Last week was one of theories, of hobbyhorses, of political complaints and agendas being hitched like so many train cars to what happened on that brutal afternoon in Boston.

The assailants’ radicalization proved that we must scale back our military campaigns and take a humbler posture in the world. The assailants’ firepower (overstated, it turns out) made a case for gun control.

We had to be more expansive in our embrace of Muslims, who become agents of destruction because they’re targets of suspicion. We had to slough off political correctness and patrol mosques.

Oh, the pitfalls of the amnesty our country grants and the big heart it opens to determined pilgrims from the Third World! Oh, the peril of all our aimless, alienated young men!

(Are there many other kinds?)

But these broad-brush diagnoses,

many of them conveniently tethered to a proposed solution, weren’t entirely or even ultimately about policy, sociology or anything so concrete. They were about something much more nebulous and much less easily mastered.

They were about fear.And they were about the ardent, persistent, poignant hunger to believe that in a society of free information and free movement and clashing ideologies and gaudy dreams that don’t come true - in other words, in this splendid but difficult experiment known as the United States of America - we can somehow prevent disaster, somehow inoculate ourselves. With a sufficiently probing analysis of a suspect’s Twitter feed, with the designation of a broken 19year-old as an enemy combatant, we could unravel the riddle, then adjust to and obey the truths at its core.

Friedman continued from page 28

information and opinion every day from everywhere. As such, it is more important than ever that we build the internal software, the internal filters, into every citizen to sift out fact from fiction in this electronic torrent, which offers so much information that has never been touched by an editor, a censor or a libel lawyer.

That’s why, when the Internet first emerged and you had to connect via a modem, I used to urge that modems sold in America come with a warning label from the surgeon general, like cigarettes. It would read: “Attention: Judgment not included.”

And that’s why the faster, more accessible and ultramodern the

violent response, and everything Muslim extremists do to other Muslims is ignorable and calls for mostly silence?

As for the role that websites apparently played in the “selfradicalization” of the two Chechen brothers, it is yet another reminder that the Internet is a digital river that carries incredible sources of wisdom and hate along the same current. It’s all there together. And our kids and citizens usually interact with this flow nakedly, with no supervision.

So more people are more directly exposed to more raw

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” last weekend, Doris Kearns Goodwin described a celebration that erupted in the bar where she happened to have been when it was reported that the younger of the brothers Tsarnaev was captured: “Everybody was just screaming, `Thank God we got him alive,’ because they want the answer to the question, why?”

And over the days that followed they got - we got - many answers. We learned that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was easily swayed by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, a sibling dynamic of an utterly routine stripe.

We learned that the Internet and social media sped one or both of them to wicked influences and let them steep in anger and twisted thoughts, the way the Internet and social

media let anyone concentrate on a specific obsession, a single cluster of emotions.

We learned that they’d plucked bomb-making instructions from the Web, in much the way someone else might retrieve a guacamole recipe.

All in all we learned at least as much to amplify our anxieties as to quiet them, because the Tsarnaevs were seemingly inconspicuous, haphazard terrorists, and because the picture that emerged didn’t really yield a set of instructions for staving off the manner of mayhem they allegedly engineered from occurring again. It suggested how easily this can happen in a land of liberty, governed by a compact of trust.

The brothers had ample reason to love America. More reason, it would seem, than to hate it. When their family, of Chechen heritage, asked for refuge, America said yes.

It extended them opportunities, gave them hope. Dzhokhar went to the same high school that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had attended, and when he graduated, the city of Cambridge, Mass., awarded him a $2,500 scholarship for his future studies.

But college didn’t go well for him, just as Tamerlan’s boxing career - he’d once aspired to represent this country in the Olympics - didn’t pan out.

And the big promises of our country no doubt make its disappointments all the more crushing. But the big promises also make us who we are.

The brothers apparently objected to our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But do we know that they wouldn’t have had some other Internet becomes, the more all the old-fashioned stuff matters: good judgment, respect for others who are different and basic values of right and wrong. Those you can’t download. They have to be uploaded, the old-fashioned way, by parents around the dinner table, by caring but demanding teachers at school and by responsible spiritual leaders in a church, synagogue, temple or mosque. Somewhere, somehow, that did not happen, or stopped happening, with the brothers Tsarnaev. c.2013 New York Times News Service 4-27-13

plaint, some other prompt, if those interventions had never occurred?

They postdated 9/11, whose authors had a brimming portfolio of alternate grievances.

Where there’s a capacity for fury, justifications aren’t hard to come by.

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, cited the government’s raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, as one of his prods. He was neither Muslim nor immigrant, just unhinged, a characterization that also fits Anders Behring Breivik, who blamed Europe’s acquiescence to multiculturalism for his killing of 77 people in Norway in 2011. Terrorism isn’t a scourge we Americans alone endure, and it’s seldom about any one thing, or any two things.

Our insistence on patterns and commonalities and some kind of understanding assumes coherence to the massacres, rationality. But the difference between the aimless, alienated young men who do not plant bombs or open fire on unsuspecting crowds - which is the vast majority of them - and those who do is less likely to be some discrete radicalization process that we can diagram and eradicate than a dose, sometimes a heavy one, of pure madness. And there’s no easy antidote to that. No amulet against it.

There’s also a danger built into the American experiment, the very nature of which leaves us exposed.

Our rightly cherished diversity can make the challenge of belonging that much steeper. Our good fortune and leadership mean that we’ll be not just envied in the world, but also reviled.

The FBI averted its gaze from the older Tsarnaev brother after it couldn’t find any conclusive alarms because that’s what the government is supposed to do, absent better information. We don’t want it to go too far in spying on us. That means it will fail to notice things.

While we can and will figure out small ways to be safer, we have to come to terms with the reality that we’ll never be safe, not with unrestricted travel through cyberspace. Not with the Second Amendment. Not with the privacy we expect. Not with the liberty we demand.

That’s the bargain we’ve made. It’s imperfect, but it’s the right one. c.2013 New York Times News Service 4-27-13

30

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

Maureen Dowd

Lost In Space When James Gleick was my editor on the City Desk of The Times, he would often stare into space.

This was no mere daydreaming. Every time he stared, a clever idea bloomed. After leaving The Times, he founded one of the first Internet service providers. He made chaos theory so celebrated it inspired Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” He wrote science and technology books acclaimed for making the theoretical sexy, including “The Information,” a history from cuneiforms to coding about the thing we want most and have the most of, the thing that defines us, and the thing that brings pleasure and predicament in equal measure.

Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, emailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.

Jim is at work now on a book about the history of time travel, though he doesn’t believe in it. (Take that, H.G. Wells and Doctor Who.) I was taken with a piece he wrote this week for New York magazine about how the Boston Marathon bombings exposed a new phase in our experience of what David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective.”

The unfolding terror, Jim wrote, “found the ecosystem of information in a strange and unstable state: Twitter on the rise, cable TV in disarray, Internet vigilantes bleeding into the FBI’s staggeringly complex (and triumphant) crash program of forensic video analysis. If there ever was a dividing line between cyberspace and what we used to call ‘the real world,’ it vanished last week.” Crowdsourcing quickly turned into witchhunting, he noted, and bits of intelligence surfaced amid “new forms of banality.”

Jim asserted that embarrassing instances of jumping the gun on arrest bulletins at CNN and Fox News, and airwaves filled with hollow, incessant chatter and pseudoinformation, showed that “continuous real-time broadcast news is a failed experiment.”

Roger Ailes may not be quaking in his loafers.

But has the long-ingrained automatic impulse to turn on the TV when news happens run its course?

I asked Jim to elaborate over coffee.

“The TV audience used to be isolated and passive,” he said. “Now everybody is tweeting and texting to everybody else, and sometimes the viewers know more than the hapless microphonewielding faces on TV. “During the drama of the Boston manhunt and car chase, it never occurred to me to turn on the TV. The screen I needed was on my iPhone, where I followed the tweets of newspaper reporters running through the streets of Boston and Cambridge residents listening to gunfire in real-time. The Internet is messy, pointillist, noisy, often wrong.

But if you had a visceral need for instantaneity, TV

couldn’t compete.

“Reporters doing TV news in real-time are an oxymoron: You can’t gather news and present it at the same time. Part of newsgathering is the gathering part.

Syrian hackers took over The Associated Press’ Twitter account and falsely reported that there had been two explosions at the White House and that the president was injured - a hoax that sent the Dow into a tailspin for three minutes and wiped out $136 billion from the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.

“There’s no perfect trust in cyberspace,” Jim said.

“There are not only millions of voices, but millions of masks. You don’t know who’s who. There was a real Twitter account for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but, instantly, there was a fake Twitter account for him, too.

“We have all these new channels and tools to understand the world as it happens, but there’s no reliable algorithm for sorting through the morass.

It used to be to read the morning paper on the way to work and read the evening paper on the way home. Now we have to invent a new personal methodology every day. And if we’re waiting for things to settle down and become simple, that’s never going to happen.”

And then poor Jim, as confused as the rest of us, stared into space.

“People on Twitter were crowing about how superior Twitter is to old media. What they meant was, ‘See, we’re faster than TV.’ And I’m there.

But I’m also still an old-media guy, because the information that matters sometimes comes the next day or the next month, when there is time to digest and interpret. The best reporting in Boston last week was not in cyberspace. It was in the two great daily newspapers that were on the scene, The Boston Globe and The Times.

“The battle lines are being drawn between the crowds and the experts. The crowds are fast and can be smart, but sometimes they’re horribly wrong, like the Internet vigilantes on Reddit who thought they could do better than the FBI in looking at photographs and exposing the guilty. But crowdsourcing was also part of the newsgathering. In a very real way, we had eyes and ears everywhere.” c.2013 New York Times News Service I asked him about the episode on Tuesday, when 4-23-13

Will Oremus

Reddit’s Limp Apology For Boston ‘Witch Hunt’

A big reason for Reddit’s popularity is the site’s freewheeling spirit. Under cover of anonymity, its users can say and do what they like, even if it’s politically incorrect or might hurt someone’s feelings. Almost anything is inbounds, as long as no one gets doxed - i.e., has his or her personal information revealed. The prohibition against posting personal information is one of only five core rules of Reddit, and it’s the one that gives the site its character.

So what to make of a week in which wellmeaning Redditors rushed headlong into the hunt for the Boston bombers, only to focus the public’s attention and suspicion on one innocent bystander after another?

This week, the site’s general manager, Erik Martin, wrote a blog post titled “Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis.” After extolling all the ways in which the site’s users helped out during the tragedy and aftermath, Martin stated that, “though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties.” And he briefly explored the purpose and limitations of the site’s no-personal-information policy: A few years ago, reddit enacted a policy to not allow personal information on the site.

This was because “let’s find out who this is” events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives. We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information

would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt.

We were wrong....

This crisis has reminded all of us of the fragility of people’s lives and the importance of our communities, online as well as offline. These communities and lives are now interconnected in an unprecedented way. Especially when the stakes are high we must strive to show good judgement and solidarity. One of the greatest strengths of decentralized, self-organizing groups is the ability to quickly incorporate feedback and adapt. reddit was born in the Boston area (Medford, MA to be precise). After this week, which showed the best and worst of reddit’s potential, we hope that Boston will also be where reddit learns to be sensitive of its own power.

The first time I read this, I was nodding my head. Then I got to the end and thought, Wait - that’s it? The action verb in Martin’s final sentence is hope. He hopes the site “learns to be sensitive of its own power.” But what does that mean, exactly? Does it mean that the site’s users should get out of the amateur-detective business?

Does it mean that they should create special private forums for that purpose? What would a “sensitive” crowd-sourced investigation look like? Is such a thing even possible?

Oremus is the lead blogger for Future Tense, reporting on emerging technologies, tech policy and digital culture. (c) 2013, Slate 4-23-13

Liberal Opinion Week

May 8, 2013

31

Harold Meyerson

Koch Brothers Would Turn L.A. Times Into Right-Wing Mouthpiece

On May 21, Los Angeles voters will go to the polls to select a new mayor. Who will govern Los Angeles, however, is only the second-most important local question in the city today. The most important, by far, is who will buy the Los Angeles Times.

The Times is one of the eight daily newspapers now owned by the creditors who took control of the Tribune Co. after real estate wheeler-dealer Sam Zell drove it into bankruptcy. Others include the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant. The Tribune board members whom the creditors selected want to unload the papers in favor of more money-making ventures.

Fans of newspapers are a jumpy lot these days. And in the past couple of weeks, their apprehension has gone through the roof with word that right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch are looking to buy all eight papers.

The Koch boys, whose oil-andgas-based fortune places them just behind Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison as the wealthiest Americans, have been among the chief donors to the tea party wing of the Republican Party. Their political funding vehicle, Americans for Prosperity, ranked with casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson among the largest funders of right-wing causes and candidates in 2012. Their purchase offer won’t be buttressed by a record of involvement in or commitment to journalism on their part. But it will come complete with a commitment to journalism as a branch of right-wing ideology.

As The New York Times reported Sunday, the Koch brothers told a group of like-minded money men at a closed-door conclave in Aspen, Colo. three years ago that the right needed to invest more in grass-roots activism, politics and media. Given the nature of the Kochs’ investment in grass-roots activism and politics, that doesn’t bode well for the kind of fact-based journalism that most American newspapers strive to practice.

One indication of the Kochs’ goals was their effort last year to

take control of the board of the Washington-based Cato Institute, the nation’s leading libertarian think tank. Widely respected for their scholarly advocacy on behalf of economic, social and foreign-policy libertarian perspectives, Cato’s staff and leaders were alarmed when the Kochs sought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to turn the institute, in the words of its chairman, Robert Levy, into “a source of intellectual ammunition for Americans for Prosperity.”

would quickly turn into print versions of Fox News. A recent informal poll that one L.A. Times writer conducted of his colleagues showed that almost all planned to exit if the Kochs took control (and that included sportswriters and arts writers). Those who stayed would have to grapple with how to cover politics and elections in which their paper’s owners played a leading role. It’s also unclear who in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most liberal cities, would actually want to read such a paper, but then the Being human beings, all Kochs don’t appear to view this as a newspaper owners have politics of money-making venture. their own. Since the 19th century, however, most haven’t gone into Though slimmed down from its business primarily to advance glory days, the L.A. Times remains a a political perspective. Profit, great newspaper, as its recent stories professional and civic pride, and on increasing employer surveillance recognition have largely motivated of blue-collar workers illustrate. them. It’s hard to see how any But the paper that, under the reign of these factored into the Koch of publisher-owner Otis Chandler in the 1960s and ‘70s, moved to brothers’ calculations.

In their very brief no-comment the apex of American journalism on the sale rumors, the Kochs has suffered a string of indifferenttook care to note, “We respect the to-godawful owners, ranging from independence of the journalistic Chandler’s cousins to Zell - that institutions” owned by Tribune, rare journalism mogul who actively but the staffs at those papers fear hated journalism and journalists that, once Kochified, the papers to, now, the representatives of banks

and investment houses looking for the sweetest deal. A (bipartisan) team of Los Angeles investors, led by Eli Broad, who has funded close to half of the new university and museum construction in L.A. in recent years, is also bidding for the paper, and thousands of Times readers have signed petitions preemptively protesting a sale to the Kochs.

The bankers’ men on the Tribune board likely view the sale of the papers as a financial transaction, pure and simple. But Times readers (and the Koch brothers themselves) would view a sale to the Kochs as a political transaction first and foremost, turning L.A.’s metropolitan daily into a right-wing mouthpiece whose commitment to empirical journalism would be unproven at best. A newspaper isn’t just a business; it’s also a civic trust.

The money men who have been plunked down on the Tribune board should remember that as they sell off the civic chronicles of some of America’s great cities.

Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.

Special to The Washington Post 4-24-13

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