Heroes, Leaders and Public Morality: Values and a Healthy Public Square

8/14/2019 Heroes, Leaders and Public Morality: Values and a Healthy Public Square

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Iraq when it became clear that his earlier decisions were not working he had the moral courage to find alternativesand to implement them. Despite the criticisms or outright opposition of his own administration and the leadershipof the Pentagon.

Now we are faced with a whole host of difficult decisions to arrest, adapt and change the inherited consequencesof three decades of bad decisions and re-invent the Republic. For those changes to be conceived, invented andimplemented requires courage on the part of the citizenry and courage on the part of the leadership. Among allother things it requires a tolerance for the opposition, a willingness to engage in difficult debates and a ferventdedication to civil discourse.

Instead all too often what we are getting is pejorative appeals to the worst of our natures, the use of hindbrainlabeling, a lack of constructive contribution to the debate and abandonment, therefore, of the publicresponsibilities of office. The primary responsibility of leaders is to lead and, among many requirements, a primaryone is to present the facts as they are, reasonable and thought out recommendations on how to proceed,convincing explanations as to why those recommendations are the right ones and the establishment andmaintenance of civil discourse.

Politics can often be ugly, the sausage-making machine as Otto von Bismarck called it. But jaw-jaw is alwaysbetter than war-war, to paraphrase Churchill. Now, where are our leaders on all sides of the aisle? And where areour citizens who will hold them accountable for the highest standards of public morality? At the end of the day we

get the leadership we ask for and deserve. If we would like a civil, tolerant and productive Public Square thatswhat we need to demand.

As always each of the essays below is draw from PSSO and the URL address is provided so you can explore theextensive readings provided with each in the blog. To follow-up on any topic of special interest please see thoseresources.

Table of Contents

Reflections & Remembrances: Memorial Day, D-Day, Today 3

Frontline Lessons Brought Home: Others, Selves and Manners 5

Warm Hearts, Clear Heads, Hard Decisions: 2nd Star to the Right 8

McNamara's Legacies and Lessons: Beyond Simple Answers 11

Sausage Eating Lizards: Sonia, Spooks, Death Panels and the Pope 13

Lizard-brains vs the Public Good: Time to Embrace the Suck 17


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Reflections & Remembrances: Memorial Day, D-Day, Todayhttp://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/06/reflections_remembrances_memor.html Posted by dblwyo on June 16, 2009

Obviously Memorial Day was Memorial Day and we've passedit by without comment but with a lot of thought and reflection.The weekend after was the 65th Anniversary of D-Day inNormandy but we let that one slide as well. Now that waspartly due to poor discipline or lack of energy, technicalproblems (we've been offair for over a week with a fried DSLmodem) but mostly it was caused by a pause for reflection.That reflection was a search for something to share and saybeyond the obvious or trite - not that our gratitudes shouldn'tbe expressed and certainly not that they are not beyond welldeserved. But others said them last year and again this - asthey should for now and forever, amen - and we took our shotat last year as well. In fact we think this composite set of opedcartoons captures things as well as anything does. BtW - onthat last panel and courtesy of our friends at YouTube some of the color film from WW2 and Iwo is now beingshared. Here's a vidclip of the Iwo Flag Raising for real and in color.

If you haven't been in combat, and I haven't, it's impossible totruly grasp what it means to have your life at risk that way. Letalone constantly, under strains and pressures all the time andwhen somebody's not shooting at you to have no sleep, pooror non-existent food, worn out clothes, to live in the mud andrain. The old joke is that before you volunteer dig a hole in thebackyard, fill it with water, go spend a few days and hire theneighborhood maniac to take a shot at you now and again. Yetthese people do it and they do it our name. Interestingly

enough perhaps the best efforts to convey the chaos, fear,sudden death and general discomfort may be best captured bysome recent Hollywood movies (Saving Private Ryan, WeWere Soldiers, Band of Brothers, others). The scene onOmaha Beech from Private Ryan is one of the best, along withthe D-Day jumps from Band of Brothers. Take a minute and refresh your memory. I've been in situations wheremy life or well-being was at risk, and multiple times. But never multiple times a minute or over multiple days in arow. If you haven't been there it's almost impossible to imagine. To the extent it can be conveyed by re-telling thestory, and remembering that these calm and quiet recountings are in the hell here are some other heroes:

Corpman G.E. Whalen, MOH, Iwo; Tibor Rubin, concentration camp survivor and Korean infantryman

Sgt. Hoxie, wounded and crippled Iraq veteran; JamesLockhard, civilian engineer and posthumous honoree

Going in Harm's Way

These veterans pay a terrible price, though as they all pointout, not as high as the real heroes they left behind. Why dothey do it? Well for some it's an escape, for others anadventure or a chance to make something of themselves.Sometimes it's even from boredom...at least at the start. Butthat's really two questions - both of them deep and profound


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but very different. The first one is why do they sign up. And once they are in the game why do they fight? And forwhom? Every combat veteran we've ever heard doesn't talk about love of country, high ideals or principles oranything like that. They talk about their brothers, their family in and of arms.

We Were Soldiers is about a battalion of the 7th Calvary (yes, that 7th Calvary) that made the first helicopterassault in history and was cut off, surrounded and attacked by almost two divisions of North Vietnamese regularsin the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. When the landing zone got to hot Hal Moore, the CO, closed it with the obviousrisk that his battalion would suffer Custer's fate as well. What saved them was the pilots of the helicopter companywho returned, under fire and in the darkness to keep bringing in food, ammo, water and take out the wounded.More specifically it was Bruce (Snake) Crandall and Ed (Too Tall) Freeman. Both of whom were, years later,eventually awarded the MOH for going far beyond and beyond the call of duty. But let's let Snake and Too Tall tellthe stories - again in the laconic, laid-back fashion of the veteran. If you want to know what it was "really" like gowatch the movie.

They went, prepared to sacrifice their lives, to save their family. Greater love hath no man than a mother catprepared to die to protect her kittens. Greater love hath no man...

And if you want a little YT on how some folks think about it...Gary Owen: the 7th at Ia Drang or the 7th: Frontier toBaghdad.

Signing Up

Like we said, there's being there and going there. Whydo they go? You can list the reasons as we've doneand be as cynical as you like. And thruout history beinga soldier has often been a cynical thing to be for manyreasons. But still...and especially in our system peopledon't fight for loot or because the king said so or toransack a city. They fight because they see it as part oftheir duty to the nation. Time filmed the crew of theLincoln repeating the greatest words ever said aboutthe purposes of the nation.

When we fought the Civil War the survival of the USwas at stake but so to was the entire notion ofdemocracy. That a government of the people, by thepeople and for the people could survive, work andeventually prosper.[If the Time server is malfunctioningyou can either search for USS Lincoln or try this URL].

When the crew of the Lincoln goes to see (we mean see btw) they are putting themselves in harms' way for thesame principles that their forefathers spent three of the bloodiest days in American history fighting for, with theissue in doubt. The Republic almost died in those three days and it is a tribute to the courage, tenacity anddedication of all our veterans that we can watch our Memorial Day picnics. If you haven't read Lincoln'sGettysburg Address recently we urge you to; years ago we gave the Memorial Day recital in a role as CO of thelocal NJROTC unit (since Dad was a decorated veteran himself he set it up thru the Legion). One of my great

regrets in life is that then I didn't know what I was saying.

I and Thou: Love of the Other

One of the side-benefits of stopping to reflect on the real meaning of our veterans sacrifices was a chance to re-review Joseph Campbell's "Power of Myth". He makes the startling, but on contemplation, profoundly trueobservation that when a soldier sacrifices his life for his brothers and for his country he does it because it reflectshis deepest commitment to the welfare of the Other. They see the Other as Themselves, as a Thou. Bill Moyer's


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offers a great observation when he ads the story of an acquaintence who talks about taking the subway to workevery morning and dying a little bit every day.

It's not just soldiers in war touching the deepest andmost profound wellsprings of humanity. It's every onewho ever acted, in small or large ways, for thebetterment of someone else. When my neighbors goout of their way to host their annual Christmas party, atserious expense and an enormous amount of work,they do it to make the neighborhood a better place.When a policeman saves a suicide at risk of his own orthose firemen went back into the Towers they did it forthe best that's in us.

Each and every one of us can do the same. In waysthat are large or small.

It's what makes us human, makes the world a betterplace and let's us touch that small spark of Divinity that we each carry around with us. A spark that needsnurturing to flame up but is there, potentially, in every one.

Perhaps the best memorial to what our veterans have done for us is to do for our friends, family, neighbors,colleagues and fellow citizens the best we can for them. Not just for ourselves. And to remember what they havedone and are doing.

Frontline Lessons Brought Home: Others, Selves and Mannershttp://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/06/frontline_lessons_brought_home.html

Posted by dblwyo on June 23, 2009

This is another post that's taken, even required, somethought and our focus is on the fundamental question

we left on the table at the end of the last post(Reflections & Remembrances: Memorial Day, D-Day,Today). What lessons can we take from the sacrificesof the veterans and how can we bring it into our lives,private and public?

People join the service for many reasons but a majorone is in service of our core ideals: government of, byand for the people. Without exception that we know ofveterans endure what they endure for the sake of theirbrothers, and now, sisters. Major Dick Winter, the reallife hero of Band of Brothers, tells the story that hewasn't a hero himself but he served with a company of them. They all say the real heroes are the ones left behind.

A Hero is someone who sacrifices themselves, in whatever form, for the betterment of us all. Ultimately they aremotivated by COMPASSION, the ability to see the other as themselves. We argued that for those of us not therethe best we can imagine is from movies and TV but in some ways an even better source are the works of theartists who were there, as this drawing from the Navy's Combat Art Collection shows. If that's not the mostprofound love of one's fellow man on the faces of these Marines, watching their fallen comrade to see if theplasma will save him, we have no clue as to human nature.


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Hero's Virtues and Ordinary Lives

One of my favorite artists is Norman Rockwell, even if it's customary tosneer at him more often than not these days, because of the bedrock

virtues of ordinary life. A favorite Rockwell painting (to the best of myrecollection) is the umpire glowering down at the tiny batter arguing withhim about a call, "You're OUT ! Now PLAY BALL !!". Unfortunately wecouldn't find that one and have substituted another that still speaks to thesame message. I'm sure we've all been there, done that or seen it. But,especially when Rockwell drew them the chances that the umps had in factbeen veterans of one sort or another were pretty good, in fact so good as tobe likely. My dad flew C-47s in combat, my math teacher P-51s and thescience teacher was a ball turret gunner on a B-17 while both anotherteacher and a family friend had lost arms as infantrymen. Some of theprices were daily reminders for us then. Yet here is the man, who may havebeen to hell and back, arguing - if not calmly then civilly - about a callaccording the book of rules everybody had agreed to play by. Rami Khouri,

the editor of the Beirut Daily Star lived in this country and become abaseball nut. He tells the story during a Rose interview about one of thereasons he loves the game. It's because it didn't matter who you were, the rules were the rules and no matter whoyour father was you were out if the ump said so. That respect for playing by the rules of the game and thevoluntary support of a civil society is at the root of our society. In fact we argue, and have argued ( Peace, Stabilityand Prosperity: the Nature of Good Government), that it is the root of the long-term stability and success of allprosperous societies.

Welcome to Notre Dame

Which brings us to our core question - how do we take thewillingness to serve others into our normal lives and especially thepublic sphere ? Slighly over a month ago Pres. Obama gave the

commencement address at Notre Dame. The invitation and actualevent provoked outrage, debate and critiscism among a wide rangeof commentators. We can applaud his courage for stepping into thelion's den, but then that's his job just as on another day it was thejob of the Rangers to go up the cliffs of Pont du Hoc. Better that weapplaud the courage of Notre Dame for inviting him, even thoughthey clearly had disagreements. Most of the commentariatrecognized a (typical ?) great speech but didn't pay much attentionto the substance of the arguments. As for the demonstrators andobjectors, well....we suspect they are so trapped in their ownviewpoints that the issue didn't even come up. Shall we considerwhat he actually said ?

Every one of you should be proud of what you have achieved at this institution. One hundred and sixtythree classes of Notre Dame graduates have sat where you are today. Some were here during years thatsimply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare - periods of relative peace and prosperity thatrequired little by way of sacrifice or struggle. You, however, are not getting off that easy.

Your class has come of age at a moment of great consequence for our nation and the world - arare inflection point in history where the size and scope of the challenges before us require thatwe remake our world to renew its promise; that we align our deepest values and commitments tothe demands of a new age.


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It is a privilege and a responsibility afforded to few generations - and a task that you are now called tofulfill. This is the generation that must find a path back to prosperity and decide how we respond to aglobal economy that left millions behind even before this crisis hit - an economy where greed and short-term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness, and diligence, and an honest day'swork.... we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity - diversityof thought, of culture, and of belief. In short, we must find a way to live together as one human family.

I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor hadextended to me. Because when we do that - when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may notthink like we do or believe what we do - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.That's when we begin to say, "Maybe we won't agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.

So let's work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, andmaking adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let'shonor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make surethat all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equalityof women." Understand - I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matterhow much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject arecomplex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.Eachside will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so

without reducing those with differing views to caricature. Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.

Whatever your personal position on the specific issue the OTHER question on the table is do you respect yourfellow citizens enough to grant them the right to their own opinions, to respect the necessity for free and opendebate as each side tries to persuade the other and respect the foundations of our civil society that thoseveterans spent so much to sustain? Or are some issues so overridingly important that being right and winning,forcing compliance with your views is so critical, that you are willing to win at any cost? We remind you of theother side of coin of Rami Khouri's story, coming as he does from a society torn to pieces by sectarian strife fordecades.

Freedom Is Not Free

Another of my favorite Rockwell series if his paintingson the "Four Freedoms", which he did as a reaction toan FDR speech which were later turned into postersduring WW2. Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship,Freedom From Fear and Freedom From Want are notjust slogans or nice sentiments. They are both some ofour loftiest goals and the bedrock on which we've builtthis society. Let me quote from a recent e-mailexchange of mine:

Two small hopes and a big one though. I hope it's morethan a sentiment, or just a sentiment. We're all "moved",or at least give lip service to their sacrifices. I think it'sbecause we all recognize it's for us all and not self-serving. The same way we applaud the righteous who

risked their lives to stand for decency and help the Jewsduring the Holocaust. They act for the best that is in us.

My big hope is that we can all learn, in some small way,to learn that sacrifice for the other is not limited just towar but that we each can and do do it in small and largeways in every day of our lives.

And contrawise when we act out of narrow interests,


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hate or anger we do so for the worst of us. Especially when it's not just in the heat of the moment but a sustainedor deliberate act of damage. The answer to how we best honor the veterans sacrifices is not in laying flowers ontheir graves nor in applauding them as they walk by in the airport or during the Memorial Day parades. It lies inconducting our own lives according the values of honor, integrity and self-sacrifice that they showed in theirs.

As We Speak: the Posturing Inquisition

Last fall, literally, Western Civilization almost collapsed. Two menwere primarily responsible for saving it - Hank Paulsen and BenBernanke. If they had failed to arrest the collapse of the creditmarkets, restore order and get things moving again our chances ofhaving a Great Depression again were near certainty. Given thescope and magnitudes of the potential breakdowns the downsideswere so much worse that the GD might have looked like a walk in thepark. Yet despite being under enormous pressures 24 X 7, dealingwith unprecendented events that nobody had faced in years, if ever,they managed to right the ship and save us all from disaster. And theirrewards have been an almost un-ending stream of critiscisms from all

points of the compass.There behavior in the crisis was truly heroic. There is nothing sodifficult as keeping you head in a crisis, especially when everyone around you is loosing theirs. To do it day afterday under a drumbeat of one damm thing after another is extraordinary. To do when the answers aren't clear yetyou must remain calm, collected and decisive is more extraordinary. As Gen. Peter Pace pointed out in hiscommencement address to the cadets of VMI it often takes more moral courage to support an unpopular position,let alone carry it, in the meeting room than it does to command in combat. It's all to easy to give in to the commonwisdom, even when you know it'll lead to disaster.

To conduct yourself in such a manner subject to so much criticism is more difficult yet. When that criticisms isboth ignorant and largely motivated by narrow self-interest the challenges are beyond my imagination. Yet dayafter day during the crisis, and as I write, these guys were civil, calm, intelligent and right.

As the President pointed out at Notre Dame, and many times before and since, we face challenging and difficulttimes that call for new solutions. They do NOT call for the continued search for partisan advantage. To act in thatway, seeking a scapegoat to sacrifice to the political gods, is a violation of everything that we should have learnedfrom the veterans.

That calm face preparing to respond to yet another ill-informed, vituperative and critical attack, masquerading as aquestion, is the Chairmen listening as he is accused of perjury by the ranking Republican and ex-chairmen of thecommittee. You can listen to some of these attacks starting around minute 40 and continuing on and on.In my book we don't deserve such public servants, do everything we can to drive them away, and we can onlywonder that they do serve. Truly heroic in every sense of the word IOHO !

Warm Hearts, Clear Heads, Hard Decisions: 2nd Star to the Right

http://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/07/warm_hears_clear_heads_hard_de.html

Posted by dblwyo on July 6, 2009

We've sorta taken our time since the last post partly for laziness and partly for events. What a tumultuous monthit's been, too ! On the international front we started with the Cairo Speech (more planned for later) watched itsegue into a brief, noisy but dying "revolution" in Iran where we think all the commentators either got it wrong orwere playing to the home crowd instead of dealing with reality and had the worst economic news we've had in awhile. Nonetheless great progress has been made and the President's agenda continues to move forward (fivepoints for sourcing "hasten forward quickly there"). We also just celebrated the 4th. On that topic we think the last


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two posts (Reflections & Remembrances: Memorial Day, D-Day, Today,Frontline Lessons Brought Home: Others,Selfs and Manners) summarize everything we had and have to say but as our hattip to our great national holidaywe'll point you to this vidclip which adds, in its own way, what needs to be added: The Fife and Drum Corps of theOld Guard. Plus it's fun to watch ! Now that it's time to jump back into the fray we'll also argue that the last postset the table for our key focus here:

The answer to how we best honor the veterans sacrifices is not in laying flowers on their graves nor in

applauding them as they walk by in the airport or during the Memorial Day parades. It lies in conducting

our own lives according the values of honor, integrity and self-sacrifice that they showed in theirs.The question then is how are we doing ? And where are wegoing ? The answer is some good and some bad with thecentral theme being, "never waste a good crisis".

In our system we don't make deep and necessary changesunless the pain of change is clearly exceeded by the pain ofimplosion; and we're clearly there. The graphic shows howthis has cycled from "suck it up" to "building prosperity" to"grasshoppers at play" to "crap and OMG". Now theadministration has, IOHO, tabled all the right solutions for allthe major problems. The other news of the month is thatfundamental new initiatives on Healthcare and

Energy/Climate have been tabled. You may disagree butevery single thing that's been tabled since Jan20 is, by andlarge, in line with the best thinking of the beltway, academicsand real policy makers accumulated over the last thirty years.It may not be right but it's the best we know how to do at thistime.

Citizenship in a Republic: Creating Peace in theAgora

One of our all-time favorite essays is TR's, in which outlinesthe importance, role and responsibilities of good citizens for

the health of a republic. (Citizenship in a Republic) Thebottom line rule is that the health of the republic, more thanany other state, depends on the quality of its citizens, theirwillingness to work self-responsibly and act for not just theirown interests but to balance that off what's necessary for thegreater good. That extends far beyond the individual citizento each and every one of our large institutions andorganizations and their leaderships.

No institutions, ultimately, exists for its own sake. It existsbecause it provides a valuable service for society and it issociety's privilege to judge the value thereof. That meansthat it is incumbent on each to accept responsibility for thebroader welfare of society. Specifically each must 1) provide

value in its designed role and 2) act to make sure thatsociety is in good health. The latter has three aspects: a)make sure you do no harm, b) when you unavoidably do harm work with the other parts of society to mitigate andoffset that harm as best as can be managed and 3) where there are events and activities damaging the broadersociety, whether or not they are direct involved, act to help rectify those harms.

The obvious example of violation of this near-fiduciary trust is the Finance Industry but one could also put GM'sfailure to be a value-creating organization in the same category; at least the folks who's lives have beenirreparably damaged would think so. Another example would Healthcare Reform which the major players fought


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tooth and nail for decades, starting with the auto companies but including big business in general as well as thekey stakeholders. The good news there is that nobody is in denial - now we're debating the details.

Recently Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon and head of the Business Roundtable, was interviewed on CharlieRose and gave what we think is a succinct, accurate, workable and socially responsible assessment of whatneeds to be done. Naysayers beware. But it's another CEO, Jeff Immelt of GE, who truly talked the talk and iswalking the walk. His Rose interview is as heartfelt and cut-to-the-bone discussion of social responsibility as anywe've heard from the head of a large organization. We don't think your time would be wasted watching both ofthese; it'll certainly put things in context. The graphic is from an earlier post talking about creating peace in thepublic square, the Agora, and why it' so vital for the health and well-being of both the Republic and we, thecitizens. (Peace in the Public Square: the 100 Days and Re-emergence of Civitas). We picked up on that themewith a series of four major posts exploring what it takes in terms of specifics: Economic Policy, Internationally,Domestic Policy and Public Values (the URLs for all four are in the readings - you may want to review them).You'll find detailed examinations of the state of play and the backup evidence for our assertions on how things aregoing across the entire spectrum.

Mindsets, Naysayers and Concentrated Minds

Dr. Samuel Johnson is famous for many reasons and sayings but one that

echos after centuries is "nothing concentrates a man's mind so wonderfully asthe knowledge that he's to be hanged in a fortnight". Sadly there are plenty offolks who are both more fond of criticizing the people fighting in the arena thanin contributing to the fight themselves. And worse, they seem to be fightingmore for their own partisan advantage rather than providing constructivecriticism or workable alternatives. There's no more egregarious example thanthe Congressional hearings raking Ben Bernanke over the coals for saving,literally, Western Civilization. Worse he was actually publicly accused of perjuryyet stood there, took it and was constructive and civil himself. Where we getsuch public servants escapes me, let alone why they serve so ably and well.

Why they stay is beyond my comprehension but not my extreme gratitude. Ifanybody exemplifies the civic virtues that our veterans demonstrated it issomebody who works in crisis to the best of their abilities knowing that they willbe attacked for it by self-serving panderers.

When you're in the heat of the Arena all these nay-sayers seem to forget:

1) You have to have an answer right now,not later and you make the best decisionsyou can manage.2) Theoretical critiques that ignore thebarriers to implementation and willfullyneglect the operational details are not onlywrong-headed. They are fundamentallydangerous.3) Understanding how to make political

sausage is a valuable trait in a seniorpublic servant but forcing them to spend alltheir time in the sausage factory while the conflagration burns down the town serves no one'sbest interests.

Call it the battle of the mindsets and ask who' you prefer in charge. If you were to edit the mindset graphic toreflect that of the political and interest group opposition one wonders what you'd have. Nothing pretty orencouraging we'd suspect.


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McNamara's Legacies and Lessons: Beyond Simple Answershttp://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/07/mcnamaras_legacies_and_lessons.html

Posted by dblwyo on July 12, 2009

Robert McNamara died at home in his sleep this last week, prompting widespread commentary and reflections.Perhaps the most thoughtful was on PBS's Newshour, at least IOHO. After the break you'll find some reflectionsand ruminations from a wide spectrum of observers, commentators and participants. Reading them and reflectingon the lessons ourselves we were, and are, struck by several things. First everyone sees things thru their ownprism, naturally, but fails to some extent to broaden that prism to include the entire context. Second, McNamara'sLegacy is widely held to be a failed strategy that led to a failed war; and beyond that, a legacy of distrust withgovernment and divisions in society that persisted for years. It can be argued that in fact they persist until recentlyand we are only now beginning to move beyond them.

Of course Mr. McNamara wasn't alone in making the decisions that so shaped and warped our public discourse,attitudes and culture for the last 30+ years but he was and is a bit of a lightening rod. History will reach its ownconclusions in the fullness of time but the damage created and the difficulties in re-bounding seem to be clear.Nor is Vietnam the sole legacy of the '60s from legislation to civil changes, many of which suffered similar fates forsimilar reasons; and for which we are only now beginning to come to terms with and respond adequately to!

So what are those legacies ? We'll work thru that but we'll suggest (assert) three major ones for you to thinkabout. 1) It is fundamentally necessary to understand how things work in context and not impose simple modelson a complex universe. 2) It is equally necessary to adapt your understanding to new learnings and change yourstrategies and actions accordingly. 3) The core requirement of a public servant is to have the moral courage toadmit when things aren't working and take responsibility for finding alternatives. In other words see the world as itis, not as you fantasy it and then adapt yourself to reality to achieve your goals. And have the courage, discipline,persistence and old fashioned gumption to stick with it long enough to reach a conclusion.

Ugly Americans, Real Lessons of 'Nam and Responses

The majority of the commentators (though not the PBS guests who were biographers)failed to assess McNamara and American policy in the context of the times.Retrospective criticisms are all well and good as well as fun and entertaining but theycan't be taken seriously. Decision-makers have to act with situations as they are, with thetools they have and the information available, not operate in some ideal and theoreticalworld where infinite time and resources are available. So before we judge Caesar let usproperly bury him by making the real record clearer. In the readings we've collected areading list on Vietnam per se and on the history and context, e.g. John Lewis Gaddis'short history of the Cold War, which underpins this section. We've also collected a set ofRose interviews on 'Nam, Somalia/Balkans and Iraq that trace the arc of Americaninstitutional response to these sorts of crisis and challenges.

1. Cold War - we went into Vietnam at the height of the Cold War which, despiterevisionist popular history was both a real war and not something we were guaranteed to win. Rememberthat not only were the leaders veterans of WW2 but had watched the Soviet Union almost take over

Western Europe after conquering Eastern Europe, the success of the Communists in China, the attack onGreece, support for civil wars and rebellions in Latin America and Africa and massive worldwide efforts toundermine the West. Bottomline: this was the real deal and a real concern. It's not at all clear that theDomino Theory would not, in fact, have worked out as Eisenhower envisioned it without our intervention.

2. Nuclear War - this was a real, continuing threat that was as serious as it's possible to get. The #1 foreignpolicy objective of the US was to prevent an local conflict from escalating into total war. A risk that didn'tmove on to a move tractable path until Kissinger and Nixon's Detente.

3. Civil/Military Relations - the movie Thirteen Days gets it exactly right. The Chiefs of Staff were all WW2combat veterans. In fact at this time they included, or had recently, Gen. Curtis "Bomber" Lemay and


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Adm. Arleigh "31-kt" Burke. During the Cuban Crisis these guys wanted to go full bore (cf. #1) and wereintransigent in their advocacies. On top of which the DoD was a collection of feudal fiefdoms, large,cumbersome and inefficient. Both of which problems McNamara was brought in to fix but the attack onwhich led to the unwillingness of inability of the Military to "speak truth to power". Which was perhaps thesingle greatest failing institutionally after the original policy and strategic failures.

4. Operational Execution - there were three, perhaps four, prongs (or as the military now calls them)operational dimensions, to the Vietnam effort. Conventional military operations, unconventionaloperations, nation-building and civil affairs and socio-political development. Other than the first the otherthree, which were arguably both essential and more important, were under-emphasized and resourced.Despite participants and commentators at the time knowing better. Even on the great strength of USforces, conventional operations, we pursued a "heavy" approach instead of a more infantry and light, agileapproach (cf. David Hackworth's books especially). Yet when more agile infantry tactics were put in placeby skilled leaders with the right skills and experienced they worked and worked well. These problemswere made worse by several orders of magnitude by careerism on the part of the command hierarchy,officer rotation policies (ticket-punching) and limited tours, which ensured that unit cohesion was poor, thetroops ill-trained and ill-led and morale damaged and almost destroyed (cf. fragging; as an NJROTICstudent and CO my unit visited a naval base in the mid-'70s and had beer bottles thrown at us on thepublic streets. We almost had a riot between the sailors and the unit).

5. Forlorn Hope - the conventional wisdom now is that not only was Vietnam unwinnable but it was neverfeasible or workable nor worth the effort required to fail. In addition to all the other failures of leadership,

moral courage and political will the final straw was when, in a fit of political correctness and moral picque,the US Congress cut off all funding to South Vietnam. Up until that point Vietnamization was working, theSouth Vietnamese were holding their own and there was a clear but difficult chance to make things work.But when you design an armed force that requires fuel, ammo, intelligence and air support andcompletely cut it off it should come as no surprise that it fails. In other words we completely abandonedour allies and failed to honor our commitments (cf. Czech Uprising:1956, Prague Spring:1968,Somalia:1993, and Shia Uprising: Iraq 1991).

6. Reverberations (?): After all that it's not clear that it in fact didn't work. By essentially fighting a holdingaction while regimes changed in Russia and China, monolithic relationships broke up and the workabilityof the Communist system in the long-term was tested the sacrifices made by our forces on the ground -despite all we did to screw it up - probably bought us enough time to win the Cold War. Though certainlynot the only or even prime cause Vietnam was a major component.

Lessons Learned: a Long Time Coming

If you look at the arc of US foreign and nationalsecurity policy from Vietnam thru the '80s and'90s adaptation and response was a very long,hard time coming. If you look at US society thesame can be said. In fact we never came to termswith the legacies of Vietnam and how to learnfrom them and adapt ourselves in a mature andresponsible way. Instead in places like Somaliaand upto and including the current Iraq War from2004-2006 we basically repeated them.

It was at the end of 2006 if you'll recall that a blueribbon panel put together a series ofrecommendations essentially calling for us to cutand run again, though they sugar coated it. Yetsomehow or another the military, who had goneinto the fight with the wrong capabilities, managedto re-invent all the discarded lessons of counter-insurgency and nation-building while adapting it's conventionalforces, tactics and strategies into a cohesive framework that reversed that trend. And did so with little or nosupport form Washington and the country with the single and exemplary exception of the President. Yet, as the


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graphic shows, a complex, difficult and highly skilled strategy was developed, put in place and effectivelyexecuted. And it has been effective and successful to date.

Yet the military is not the only institution that failed to learn the lessons of hubris and mal-adaptation that shouldhave been taken from the '60s and '70s. Without going into great detail the last few weeks have seen thebankruptcy filings of both Crysler and GM for example (Detroitosaurus: Iconic Death vs. World Industry Futures ).Resilience and adaptation will be the sine qua non of the next decades in all spheres, whether it's business, thecivil or public policy. Right now we're in the midst of an economic crisis yet at the same time the administration istackling the issues of Healthcare, Energy and Education that have been known, neglected and ignored for threedecades. Our poor ability to respond under adaptive pressures in Vietnam is just one of many major examples ofinabilities and unwillingness to change. But we've come to the point where the alternatives are stark and theconsequences much clearer. We may not exactly know how to fix these things perfectly but we are movingforcefully with the best we know how to do to deal with issues too long neglect.

Principles for the Future

Like we said there are not simple answers to complex questions and you need to make courageous strategicdecisions but also balance that with learning and change as you go.And if there's one fundamental lesson to be learned from McNamara it's this:

You have to have the moral courage not just to admit you're wrong. You'vegot to do better than that and figure out how to stay in the game and get it

right. Mea culpa's don't count. Performance does.

Sausage Eating Lizards: Sonia, Spooks, Death Panels and thePopehttp://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/08/sausage_eating_lizards_sonia_s.html

Posted by dblwyo on August 18, 2009

Welcome to "Reset World" where we're having to face up to the last thirty nears of grasshopperian neglect of vitalissues and public policy. This is a post we've been holding in the pending file for too long because it's just beenone damn thing after another. The bad news is the delay and, perhaps, the amount of reading materials in theexcerpts section. The good news is that there's a bunch of stuff to point too. The worse news is that we're goingto be trying to weave together a bunch of different threads into a coherent fabric. The possible news is that if wedo this bear dance you may get something out of it. Just remember though the miracle of the Dancing Bear is thatit dances at all, not how well it dances.

Serendipitously this was the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock,you know the celebration of peace and love that set the tonefor the next 40 years! Yeah, right. Just not quite the way itwas intended. That clip was Woodstock then, for Woodstocknow try this vidclip of the old surviving hippies who are nowtour guides, and the museum, all selling the vision. As DavidClayton Thomas of Blood, Sweet and Tears reminds us in thisBNN interview it wasn't quite like that. For one thing KentState had just happened and people were angry, for anothernone of the headliners got paid so they aren't memorialized inthe historical videos. For another there was sure a lot ofviolence in other places and a lot of folks who didn't buy intothe "it's all different now" message. In fact the GreatestGeneration who had survived the GD, fought WW2 and built


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modern America that Woodstock was so against were just in their forties. Woodstock is now twice as far behindus as their adventures were behind them.

BUT...and this is the point...the decisions and divisions we createdthen have been reverberating every since. Have we done any better ?That's not an easy answer btw - the Boomers fought the Cold War,'Nam, dealt with the biggest social changes in our history andchanges in our society and economy that were phenomenal, to saythe least. How we wrestle with the consequences of those legaciesgoing forward is going to define America for the next forty years. Howwill we deal with our mental imps - rationally with a sense of decency,commonality and public interest? Or pursuing private agendas that putpartisan advantage ahead of the public good?One final clip, audio, this time from the historical archives of "This, IBelieve": Our Noble, Essential Decency. Scifi Master Robert A.Heinlein.

Inessential Indecencies: Sotomayor, Spy Kicking, and Bashing Ben

Like we said it's been one damn thing after another this whole month (part of the reason for our delay) where thepublic discourse started out partisan and got shriller, louder and antagonistic. Start with Sonia Sotomayor'sconfirmation hearings (which we listened to some and for which the PBS coverage is linked in below), thepossible threat to go back and charge members of the CIA with crimes for doing what they were asked to do toprotect the country, the partisan, bigoted and abysmally ignorant attacks on Ben Bernanke and the Fed bymembers of both parties and, the piece de resistance', the Death Panel Wars.

Sonia's Journey in the Inferno

These hearings and the public statements were amazing,not least because instead of making a decision on

qualifications and what's best for the country thedecisions appear to have been made by what was bestfor the party. First off we have 17 years of careful,reasoned, judicious, balanced and mainstream decisionmaking by Judge Sotomayor. Plus a few speeches talkingabout a "wise Latina women" being better able tounderstand the facts in some cases. All qualifiedobservers and reasonable ones, including David Brooksof the NYT, concluded that she was eminently qualified, agood judge and dedicated to the law and moderation. Infact she had been a prosecutor for years. Any time beforethe culture wars got out of hand she would have been a conservative candidate for the High Court.

But perhaps the most important point is that the Law is not some magisterial, magic set of machinery thatguarantees absolute outcomes. It is a combination of precedent, cases, experience and judgment and a judgeneeds to understand and allow for their own backgrounds and biases. A point Sotomayor made. To argueotherwise, that she was to biased and empathetic is to argue that a panel of old white men have no biases. But toimplicitly admit they do and don't control them.

On the other side, which we won't dive into deeply, we have the threat of legal actions against the staff of the CIA.Back in the mid'-70s the Church Commission passed legal reforms to control CIA abuses. Well intended butleading to perverse consequences, some of which include 911 and the intelligence failures in Iraq. Those so-called reforms put a premium on managing to the rules and not doing what was and is necessary to get good


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intelligence. To some extent they emasculated the CIA. We got away with it then because technical intelligence(satellites, etc.) could fill in. But in this day and age we need feet on the ground and they have to be qualified feet.A witch hunt against the agency doing what it was authorized to do in our name is going to re-emasculate ournational intelligence capabilities, put national security more at risk and when we can least afford it.

Bashing Uncle Ben

Interestingly enough the case that was potentially the mostdamaging for the public safety, and still could be, was thepublic bashing of Ben Bernanke, of the Federal Reserve.There was a recent survey asking what people thought ofmajor public institutions and even the IRS ranked wellahead of the Fed. But for decades, mysterious, arcane,complex and opaque as it's been, the Fed has managedour money supply...which is the lifeblood of the economy.Every time in history for almost ten millennia that politicaldecisions have controlled the money supply the result hasbeen chaos and collapse. It's only recently that we'velearned that we need an independent money manager. But

the Fed really paid its way over the last 18 months - in factwe were literally hours away last Fall from triggeringDepression 2.0 and the Fed and the Treasury saved us.

Don't take my word for it - here's a recent interview with David Wessel of the WSJ discussing the real world andnot Congress's fantasies. His reward - to be called in front of Congress, accused of every crime under the Sunand in the Spaceways by politicians on the Left and Right. All of whom were wrong, all of whom weregrandstanding, none of whom thanked him for his service or saving the country and, least of all, none of whomwere prepared to defend him.

Healther Skelter: HC Reform vs Death Panels

The one that really takes the case for out-of-control polemics

is healthcare reform. My favorite quote that's not hyperbolic isthe little 'old lady who, literally, called to yell at the Presidentabout socializing medicine and wanted to make sure hereMedicare wasn't touched. Now if you don't find that funny, sadand scary probably nothing we're saying here is going tomean much for you. Just in case you take the point, and forthe record, there's no proposal for death panels. Healthcare issomething that's been on our agenda for series of major postsfor a long time now and hopefully we'll get to it. In the short-run here's what you need to know for now (taken from an e-mail response of mine to David Axelrod):

Actually it's time for a better communications strategy. A

couple of months ago I called the President's Georgetownspeech the finest on economic policy I'd ever heard and didso in public several times on my blog. That wasn't entirely anamateur opinion either (Re-building On A Rock: Policy,Economy & Values).I mention that to give some credibility tothe following: your communications strategy on healthcareneeds work, quite a bit of it.


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Here's the central problem - people don't know how the current system impacts them, what the changes are norhow they'll be impacted. You need to fix that. You also need to get yourselves back on a higher plane in thediscourse....hard as it is if you can manage to continue turning the other check in the long-run it'll pay off.

Specifically:

1. Total per family healthcare costs are estimated at $15K/year/family and have grown from $8K in the last fewyears; this has stopped wage growth and harmed the direct well being of all the insured. We think that figure willdouble in the next 10-15 years. And coverage will get worse and worse..... BRING IT HOME to the average voter.

2. There are large-scale social consequences about which you've talked to much because it's top-down andinside Washington.

3. Everybody's unhappiness with the insurance industry is really a reflection of them trying to control costs whileeverybody else tries to maximize benefits. Need to face up to that.

4. We think, on the whole, that about 1/3 of current healthcare expenditures are wasted because of excess tests,treatments, etc. We also think admin costs absorb about a 1/3 of total expenditures in practices. Finally theuninsured get treated they just aren't covered; it'll be cheaper to cover them than not.

Those ARE your central arguments. KISS !

You can add a) the root cause is medical care provided on a piecework basis, b) that moving toward paying for ajob, i.e. I pay to have my house roofed not for each laborer's every shingle, c) that over time this moves us moretoward preventative medicine, d) that a public option in fact introduces local competition and e) can be made intowhat the Brits call a quango, i.e. a semi-private enterprise, and finally f) that a huge chunk of costs are incurred inheroic treatments at end of life. Which ought not to be covered by public monies. You can also mention that careis already rationed and that the gov't already dictates healthcare rates thru the Medicare reimbursement ratesettings.

Charity in Truth: Civil Discourse and a Healthy Agora

Lost in all this sturm und drang was Pope Benedict's socialencyclical "Caritas en Veritate", or "Charity in Truth" inwhich he called for a humane capitalism with respect forhuman dignity and social justice. If you go back and look atthe previous four posts in this series on values andcitizenship and the preceding five posts on a health publicsquare (the Agora series) you'll find our position is nearlyidentical to the Pope's. Free markets are the most efficientand effective method for organizing a prosperous,productive and progressive society. But they do NOT workby themselves but require a set of rules to govern theiroperations and protect their participants, a set of civic

institutions to support and protect them and a certain levelof support and civil responsibility by the citizenry.

We all do better when we each do better and we each do better when we all prosper, at least ideally.

Now of the cases we review which satisfies any of those tests ? Certainly Judge Sotomayor, the spooks at theCIA, the Fed and even the Administration are doing the best they know how, doing it well and acting in what theythink is the public interest. And, on the whole, being balanced and recognizing it's an imperfect world, they mustbe judged to be doing well. From the headlines, talking heads, pandering politicians, and demagogic buffoons and


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outraged gatecrashers you'd never know that of course. Good intentions are NOT a substitute for knowing how tooperate the saw when you working in a lumber mill and ideology is NOT a substitute for understanding how theworld works. A proposition we ran the largest field test in history on in the 20thC at the cost of hundreds ofmillions of lives and trillions in resources and the near death of Western Civilization.

But, in the spirit of charity and compassion, the last two years have under-mined, even destroyed, the certaintiesof the last forty. The ones where progress and prosperity were our natural right. So we come full circle back to theNew Woodstock. Will we choose to do what's right and workable or will we make our choices blindly out of fear,lack of understanding and demagogic leadership. On the record to date one would have to say we've nothing onthe Iranian leadership putting their own personal gain ahead of the welfare of society.

Of course the lumber mill is actually the political sausage factory and if you don't know that you probably shouldn'tbe trying to make sausage. But a few less mouse droppings and feline innards would sure help us all out as weface these major decisions.

Lizard-brains vs the Public Good: Time to Embrace the Suckhttp://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/09/lizardbrains_vs_the_public_goo.html Posted by dblwyo on September 1, 2009

Right now we're in the midst of an ugly, pejorativeand distortionate debate on Healthcare Reformthat's dominated by our lizard, or hind-, brains. Theoutcome of this debate is important, in many waysthe most important of this administration and not justfor its own sake but because it will define the contextof the rest of this term. It will also tell us a lot aboutwhether the American people are willing to face thehard decisions we've deferred for three decades inpursuit of debt-fueled hedonism.

Or whether we're willing to be told the truth about

the way things really are, facing the "brutal realities"as Jim Stockdale taught Jim Collins or whether wewant to continue to be lied to. It will also tell us a lotabout whether or not the political class will putstaying in office/power ahead of some attempt to dowhat's right for the country. Now we don't expect allpoliticians all the time to pursue the pure publicinterest, we expect and hope for them to strike aworkable balance. We also expect them to learn something about the issues, to engage in reasonable debate, totreat each other with some civility and respect for the other and to conduct themselves with Civitas (the pursuit ofthe public good). We particularly expect them to be constructively critical, which means presenting their ownproposals for fixing the mammoth problems we face. Most especially, importantly and critically we do NOT expectthem to pursue pure and purely obstructive opposition by appealing strictly to the worst nature of the voters. Whilethe Democrats have their Dimowackic factions on the whole they're passing these test and have passed themwith respect to all the other major pieces of legislation proposed or passed since Jan.20. On the other hand theRepublicans appear to be letting the darker angels of the Ripudiacan fringe dicate policy, strategy and tactics.

Fear, Shock, History and Change vs. the Lizard-brain

The US has its historical roots in a set of peoples and cultures that had good reason to distrust authority ( BornFighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb), which has been a strength and a weakness.These bedrock tendencies got super-charged at the end of the 19C when the sudden industrialization of thecountry made us a true continental nation-state of huge size and complexity dominated by large institutions in


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business, government and public service. (The Search for Order, 1877-1920 by Robert H. Wiebe) But with sizeand complexity comes a fundamental necessity for large mechanisms to keep the wheels on the track. It was the(real) Progressives invention over three or more decades of the modern administrative apparatus that allowed usto govern this country and grow to our present state of prosperity (take that how you like).

In the process though the distance between the citizen and the centers of power went from village scale tonational scale and people, rightly, felt themselves the fungible victims of forces beyond their control. The turmoilsof the '60s and the failures of large-scale social engineering iced that cake but what really turned it sour, IOHO,was the confirmation of all the worst conspiracy theories by the Enron/WCOM scandals and the malfeasant andself-serving behaviors of the Finance Industry and outright criminal behaviors in this last go-around.

The human brain is a funny thing. We like to thinkof ourselves as being led by our rational, matureand adult mind - the forebrain, or the thing thatmakes us Home Sapiens. Influenced by, ofcourse our trained in reflexes and emotions.Those emotions arise partly/largely out of ourmid-brain, the Monkey Brain, and all too oftenwhen we're looking for the next bright shiny thingit's the Monkey Brain which is in charge. But

when we react viscerally out of fear, anger,hunger, what have you we're reverting the oldestand most primitive part of us - the Hindbrain, orLizard-brain. That's all literally true and in manyways it's not entirely a bad thing.

The Weapons control officer on a British warshipwho fired his missiles saved it from attack byIranian missiles on a gut-call using experience,training and his lizard-brain. Since he was unableto explain the rationale he was relieved of dutyuntil investigations confirmed his judgment. Sothe LB is what evolution has given us to deal with

emergencies. And, as we've learned in the lastdecade, it is the LB and the MB that can controlus and actually tend to dominate, withoutsufficient training and discipline. You could evensay that the whole goal of Buddhist training is toput the Adult Brain in charge. The reason themilitary tries to stress people in training is to teachthem to keep their AB in charge duringemergencies and Jim Stockdale devotes the firstthird of his book of essays (Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot) showing why learning to function understress is necessary. But when the LB is strictly in charge and the AB under lock and key things get a little diceybecause it's that adult brain that helps us work our way thru problems. You can choose to use the forebrain torationalize the decisions the lizard has already made for you or you can use it to develop new insights and train

the LB to build them into your reflexes.

People tend to use the forebrain when they are calm and collected. Unfortunately all the hidden assumptionswe've based our lives on about how our society functions, how reliable things were and are and what the futuremight look like got swept away, literally, within a matter of weeks and the turmoil has continued for months. Thefact that much of that turmoil was the three-decade accumulation of previous LB-decisions is irrelevant. TheLizard decides, when panicked, on what it sees in front of right now. As it must. Sadly though our supposed publicleadership, or at least certain segments of it, has spent all its energies pandering to the Lizards and not enoughtime explaining to the Adults. Which just added nitro and an igniter to a fire already smoldering.


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Cage-match: Adult vs Lizardbrain and Change

To push any piece of legislation thru one has toanalyze the problem using the best data and

analysis available, develop workable, practicaland affordable solutions that can beimplemented and then one has to sell it and getit implemented. That means persuading theAdult on rational grounds, getting the Monkeyinterested because it's kind of neat andinteresting and CONVINCING the Lizard thatthis is a better thing to do than what itscomfortable and familiar with.

Did you ever stop to wonder why the teachingsof the great religious leaders have survived asliving, breathing guidance all these years? It's

because they were able to analyze the mostdifficult problems of humanity, boil thechallenges and complexities down to hardkernels of truth, arrive at workable guidelines, orrules-of-thumb, and present them as stories,parables and metaphors to the average personand convince the Lizard that following thoserules would help them live better lives.

There are many qualities that made Lincoln oneof our two greatest Presidents - an ability tomaster complexity, a deep understanding ofhuman nature, dedication to principles wrappedin enormous tactical political skills, the ability toexpress himself clearly, simply and directly but,perhaps at the end the most important, the ability to present his views using the simplest of stories that relatedthese huge problems to the every day lives of the citizens. Both TR and FDR had similar qualities.

Sadly the Rips have mastered the art of telling simple stories that are not grounded in fact while the President andhis administration as well as the Dems are struggling to explain, clearly and simply, the complexities of a verycomplex thing that they aren't clear on in the first place to a bunch of scared, apprehensive and angry Lizards whothink the world is out to get them because it has.

Lizard vs Adult: Selling Healthcare Reform

The man who invented social policy, insurance and

healthcare was, of all things, Otto, Furst vonBismarck. The Iron Chancellor of Germany. We'vestruggled with Healthcare Reform since the1930'sbut specifically under Truman, (another surprise)under Nixon and obviously under Clinton and neverbeen able to do as well relative to the times as Otto.

In a great and wonderful irony the HC deal thatNixon and Kennedy almost had in 1971 was actuallymore progressive than any of the proposals


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currently in Congress. In act the entire set of current proposals already took off the single-payor option that wouldhave resulted in "medicare for everyone". Not only aren't the current proposals socialism, a pejorative label thatthe Rips have been throwing at every initiative since Jan20 to appeal to the LB until something sticks, but theyactually are market-oriented and competition enhancing.

NB: just for the record the US spends more on healthcare, has the worst results on the whole, the fastestincrease in costs, the most uncovered (not just the 45+ million uninsured but the next 20-40 million who'sinsurance is gimmickry and doesn't do any good), has the fastest rising costs, does the most damage tothe competitive position of our businesses, the most damage to the incomes of most people and is theonly system in the developed world that exposes people to catastrophic financial risk. In the readingsyou'll find the URLs for several excellent PBS programs that go into all this in detail; before you object oursuggestion is you at least listen to them but for now we'll take the point as being proven.

Do you wonder what Otto was doing? He was trying to improve the overall health and well-being of his society forjust that set of reasons. The last time we tried this in '92 with Billarycare unfortunately a more "socialistic" (NB:most of the other major HC systems are not in fact socialism but market-based), massive, centrally controlledsingle-payor system. Worse yet it was put together by alleged technocrats in secret and rammed down the throatsof Congress.

Even more sadly a dialed back version could have been sold and passed, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

(Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy) but Hillary refused to budge. After campaigning on a morecentrist agenda this was the first, and last, major initiative of the Clintons, violated all that they'd politiced on(unlike Blair and Labor in Britain who did find a 3rd way forward), and angered the people and gave the Rips theirmajor opening. One which that tactical genius Next the Grinch brought lizardbrain-labeling as a key and abidingpolitical tactic that's metastasized into an enduring infection in general and become strategy and policy for theRips.

Teddy, Sausage-making and Prospects

This weekend saw the services and final celebration of TedKennedy's life. It's worth listening to the whole set of memorialservices and the Mass on C-Span. Or the discussions onRose. You learn more about the man and how he helpedpeople, hear some wonderful stories and heartfelt tributes(even from political opponents) and a lot of discussion of whatan influence he had. In fact he was a lead sponsor on some1,000 major pieces of legislation and the originator of some300, many of which fundamentally changed America.Something we were unaware of.

But over and over again you heard what a master of the legislative process he was, about his ability to workacross the aisle to get what he could get and his ability and dedication to stick with his goals and ideals for(literally) decades while still able to tack into the wind and adapt to the currents of the time (he was also adedicated and very good sailor). In other words he was a master sausage-maker who understood persuading theadult, selling the lizard and, as Joe Biden said, "at the end it was never about him, it was about you".

Now all this sturm und drang, as Otto would say, is not all bad. Americans want to lay everything out in some niceneat logical order and quickly reach a decision. The Japanese are notorious for slow moving consensus building.What you never hear though is the consequences. In rushing to judgment Americans never get all the difficultiesand naysayers uncovered so that when it comes time to make sausage lots of folk drag their feet and obstructthings. The Japanese on the other hand have gotten all the issues, stakeholders and special interests out on thetable and slowly arrive at a conclusion that may not in fact be a consensus but is the judgment of the seniorpeople as to the best path forward in a difficult time.


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Now we've had to rush thru major legislative agendii since Jan20 that just added to the shock, awe, fear andpitchfork sharpening. Including rescuing idiots from their own bad decisions when it turns everybody's stomachbecause the damage to us all would be worse. And, just for the record, the Treasury managed to arrest the nextround of a credit collapse in March and the early stimulus is in fact working. Credible and grounded estimates bynon-administration experts estimate that the economy was 4% better this last quarter than it would otherwisehave been. I'm tempted to say so there but that would be pejorative and LB of us.

What we're seeing in Congress though is the revolt of the Lizards. But they've all pretty much been uncovered.And the townhalls are, in a perverse way, a good thing as well. It's unlikely that anything worse than we've seenand heard - can you imagine bringing loaded weapons to a civil discourse in the public square to intimidate yourfellow citizens ? - will surface.

Nor is that to say, and this is important, that the Administration or Congress has handled this well. It would havebeen nice to have a clearer explanation that spoke to the average citizen (which is possible as we proved in ourlast post ) in their own terms. And make no mistake we will get a Healthcare Bill...the question is what kind ofhealthcare bill ? In the readings Steve Perlstein of the WaPo sketches a reasonable compromise that still leaves alot to be worked on but would nonetheless be a great improvement. None of the great pieces of social legislationof the past started in the state they're in now but went thru incremental evolution; including that paradigm of purelysocialized medicine the Medicare program (how ironic is that btw - listen to Michael Steel's interview on PBSRadio to hear someone contradict himself every thirty seconds in a 7 minute interview and strike a note of

terminal incoherence). And all this gyration doesn't have any technical impact - the actual details will be workedout this ball by a joint Senate and House reconciliation committee where the final legislation from both chamberswill be hammered into the final joint bill.

What we need from the Dems and Administration is a clearer explanation that combines appeals to the Adultsand the Lizards. What we need even more badly is responsible behavior from the Rips where they areconstructively critical. There are sensible conservative proposals floating around that they have not broughtforward while the concentrate on the politics of denial and lizardbrain posturing. Jim Stockdale saves his harshestcriticisms for the public servants who refused to accept responsibility for their decisions when it was their civicduty. No matter if they'd screwd up - their jobs, held in trust for the People, the Country and the Constitution is tofigure out how to fix it. To do otherwise is a failure of duty and irresponsible.

There is widespread agreement among the brighter lights of the Conservative (Brooks, Gerson, Frum) that the

Repulcans have lost their way, sold out to the extremists and need a new way forward. Gerson proposes apossible forward path by focusing on "Communitarianism" - but the heart of that is being a responsible citizen,acting with Civitas and acting cooperatively in the Public Square for the good of the Republic.

What really saddens us is that good, decent and honorable men like Hatch, Gregg, Grassley and McCain havenot chosen to step forward and be constructive critics. Instead they're letting the Juggernaut roll forward. We areat a complete loss to explain or understand.

Documents

Heroes, Leaders and Public Morality: Values and a Healthy Public Square