I'm back

To share my wisdom with the masses.

Or at least the half dozen people who showed some interest in my brain droppings last time around.

On two Johns, Galt and Thain

Michelle Malkin is mad. She's tired of the "redistributionist thieves" taking her money. She's ready to go on strike, to withdraw her wealth-creating power from the rest of us, the collectivist masses.

She's ready to Go Galt.

Apparently this Going Galt notion is gaining some currency in right-wing circles. Witness Rick Santelli's famous rant, made even more famous by Jon Stewart's subsequent smackdown of CNBC.

For conservatives, the appeal of the John Galt myth is obvious. According to Rand, our collective success depends on the efforts of a few elites, motivated by rational self-interest. And if we don't let them reap the full benefits of that success (read: lower their taxes), then they might just retire from society, and leave us to our poverty and collective worthlessness.

I've always thought Galt's approach was a bit idiosyncratic. Rich people seem to keep on wanting to make money, even in places where the taxman check-jacks them for more than he does here. London has become the financial capital of the world, and the UK's higher tax rates and national health care hasn't caused anyone to Go Galt there.

I could go on with other pat criticisms of Rand's view; in the end, it's been well-discredited as simplistic. But it does hold some important insights, albeit not the ones Malkin sees.

John Galt created wealth for himself and others. He invented things. The people who feel under attack right now, the ones who've withdrawn, the John Thains of the world, may of may have not created much actual wealth. They may have done little more than build a now-collapsing house of cards. And I'm not sure we need them.

But we need more John Galts. And this is where Rand and her acolytes fall short: they fail to realize the conditions necessary for such people to emerge, to realize their potential.

For all we know, the next great American inventor is being born right now on the South Side of Chicago. She's her mother's seventh child. She does not have access to adequate health care. Her schools are in shambles. She's not thinking about curing cancer. She doesn't even see going to college as a realistic goal.

Poverty squanders talent. Racism squanders talent. Sexism squanders talent. And you have to think, over the past years, that we've squandered a hell of a lot of it.

Rand fans don't want to fight actual liberals. American liberals don't embrace the kind of Marxist dogma ("from each according to his ability" etc.) Rand attacks. Nothing happening today suggests that we're heading for some collectivist dystopia.

But there are plenty of things happening today to suggest that more of tomorrow's John Galts are going to come from outside the US. And, with our economy sinking, we can no longer afford to eat our young.

Our rational self-interest depends on it.

(Hat-tip to JPT for putting me in mind of these issues)

They still don't get it

On Tavis Smiley's radio show, conservative pundit Deroy Murdock just said that Michale Steele and the GOP must "exorcise" the legacy of George W. Bush. I perked up. I had no idea who Murdock was, and I thought he might be close to saying something interesting. And he did say something interesting, although not in the way I had hoped.

Murdock laid out the parts of the Bush 43 legacy the GOP should embrace, and the parts it should reject. In summary:

Good: wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tax cuts.

Bad: spending 2008 bringing "socialism" to the US.

This is the same sort of nonsense Rush has been peddling lately. These people seem to think that the GOP needs to get more conservative, get back to its roots. And I hope they do just that. I hope they circle the wagons and start shooting inward, and their obstructionism on the stimulus makes me think they might.

Whoa there, tiger

Here's Drudge's headline for the past day or so:

And here's the article at Politico the headline links to. An excerpt:

President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the White House press corps Thursday night, but got agitated when he was faced with a substantive question.

Asked how he could reconcile a strict ban on lobbyists in his administration with a deputy defense secretary nominee who lobbied for Raytheon, Obama interrupted with a knowing smile on his face.

"Ahh, see," he said, "I came down here to visit. See this is what happens. I can't end up visiting with you guys and shaking hands if I'm going to get grilled every time I come down here."

I knew that conservatives, closet and otherwise, would try to burnish the cred early by taking shots at Obama. But these people need to learn how to keep their powder dry.

Obama is a pretty disciplined guy. And he has to be doubly careful: as much as he represents a repudiation of the Bush years, Obama still lives in their shadow, with all the cynicism they bred. But, in spite of that discipline and caution, he'll still screw up eventually. Or, events will conspire to make him look bad, even if there's nothing he could have done.

His opponents should wait for those opportunities. Because right now, with articles criticizing Obama for doing a meet and greet with reporters where he didn't want to answer big questions, well, this just looks a bit silly. It looks like a desperate play by people who are afraid that if they don't do something to knock him off this pedestal, Obama's popularity will never wane.

Of course, people like me are afraid that Obama won't find a way to turn this impossible economic situation around, and that he will eventually be pilloried, regardless of what he does.

Edited to add: The portion of the picture you can't see above, at the end of the first line of the headline, says "The Time." I can't find a way to get it all in there, but if you click on the picture, you can see the whole thing. I apologize for my technological incompetence.

Transparency vs. access

Back in April 2007, Michael Wolff wrote an excellent piece about Scooter Libby's fall. Here's part of Wolff's account of why Scooter got into trouble:

The one constant I’ve observed, in 27 years as an on-again, off-again political reporter, is that Republicans return reporters’ calls and Democrats don’t. To a great extent, this is what got Scooter Libby into trouble, calling back The New York Times’s Judy Miller and Time’s Matt Cooper. Libby is a superb example of the much-vaunted Republican Party message discipline—he’s got tenacious follow-through. He’s one of the people who helped give the Bush administration its reputation—intact as recently as 24 months ago—as the most masterful iteration of Republican media management, a leviathan of political marketing.

Republican shills never had any trouble giving people access. The right reporters got the access they needed to print their stories, their big scoops, replete with quotations from unnamed administration sources.

No, the problem wasn't a lack of access. It was a lack of transparency. Sure, Judy Miller got fed all kinds of juicy tidbits about our upcoming invasion of Iraq. Then, in exchange for that access, she printed those lies as facts and helped the administration sell the war. And nobody ever knew exactly where the information was coming from or how they might verify it.

This was a pretty standard MO for the Bush people. Print our nonsense (but not our names), and we'll give you the access.

In any case, in the early days of the Obama Administration, some people have gotten these two concepts confused:

"The young Obama administration has talked often about transparency, but that, as the Constitution makes clear, means more than the government creating Web sites to send messages to supporters," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington.

"It means allowing the press, an independent institution, to see what's going on," Rosenstiel said. "It remains to be seen exactly what the Obama team means, with its love of control, when it talks about an open government."

So, what exactly is Mr. Rosenstiel talking about? Some key new policy that the press is not being told about? Perhaps a closed door meeting with energy executives where they tell Vice President Biden what our energy policy should be?

No, Roesenstiel is actually talking about this silly second swearing-in Obama did because some whackjobs on Fox News started to crow about whether the first, botched oath actually meant that Obama was not our president.

Now, maybe Obama should have let more press in for this thing. I don't see how it would've hurt. But not letting more press in doesn't say anything about whether the Obama Administration will be transparent or whether we'll have "an open government" for the next four years.

I'm all for transparency, and I'd love to see a robust Fourth Estate in the next four years and beyond. But let's not confuse transparency and openness with some reporters' insatiable hunger for access.

The weight and the gap

President Bush took flak for much of what he said in the final days of his presidency as he went on his Legacy Rehabilitation Tour. Most of it was deserved. But one of the things he said was entirely reasonable:

Even in the darkest moments of Iraq, you know, there was -- and every day when I was reading the reports about soldiers losing their lives, no question there was a lot of emotion, but also there was times where we could be light-hearted and support each other.

I have no love for this man. But we should all hope that Bush could find ways to stay "light-hearted."

Last night, a friend told me that he thought all the parties surrounding the inauguration were too much. In times like these, what is President Obama doing dancing at ten parties, basking in the glow of so much adulation?

I think this is an apt time to reflect on the weight we place on our presidents. Many criticized Bush for not attending military funerals and not seeming to mourn military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. And perhaps, as a leader, he ought to have made more public displays of sorrow. But this belies a different question: how bad should he have actually felt?

I don't know why anybody wants to be president. I don't know why anybody wants to carry that weight. Because yes, you have to seem as if you care a great deal, when you make decisions and people die.

But presidents need the fortitude to make those decisions, decisions that spell death on a horrific scale. And after they make those decisions, they need the fortitude to make them again and again, without stumbling, without stopping to take a breath, without blinking.

So, let's be clear about what we ask of these people. We ask them to stand on the right side of the narrow gap between heroes and monsters. So, we shouldn't be surprised if they find ways to stay "light-hearted" or throw themselves a few big parties in difficult times. Better a party than a pogrom.

Better a light heart than one made of stone.

Something old, something new

On Hardball's inauguration coverage, Pat Buchanan called himself a "traditional conservative." That's how he prefaced a comment where he complemented President Obama's inaugural address.

I would have liked his comment more if he would have prefaced it by calling himself a "real whackjob." That's the kind of self-knowledge that would have won a bit of my love.

But, in other news, how nice are those two words that appear above: "President Obama." Still sinking in, still awesome, still the first step in a journey that hopefully will end with us moving in the right direction.