Hendrik Hertzberg Doesn't Think Much of the American Voter

I've written so much against Obamacare (177 posts, to be exact) that I'm not sure I have one more post in me about it; I ranted and railed against the bill and most of its provisions for months and then when it passed in March something in me just died.  I could not believe it.

My copy of The New Yorker arrived today which I only still take for the fiction and the cartoons; the political opinions I can do without.  I try to scan through "The Talk of the Town" section just to get a glimpse of the other side, but sometimes I can't get through it without screaming out in rage and throwing the rag into the wall.  Such was my experience with Hendrik Hertzberg's column, "Electoral Dissonance."

Hertzberg begins his piece as an analysis of the mid-term elections but wastes no time in taking swipes not only at Republicans but at the poor dumb American voter who was too stupid to realize that it was all the Republican's fault that we're in the mess we're in right now:

As for “the American people” themselves, it seems clear enough that their rejection of the Democrats was, above all, an expression of angry anxiety about the ongoing economic firestorm. Though ignited and fanned by an out-of-control financial industry and its (mostly) conservative political and intellectual enablers, the fire has burned hottest since the 2008 Democratic sweep. By the time the flames reached their height, the arsonists had slunk off, and only the firemen were left for people to take out their ire on.

Hertzberg's "fireman" analogy is somewhat akin, I guess, to Obama's earlier demand that conservatives just "get a mop" and help clean up the mess:

“I don’t mind cleaning up the mess that some other folks made, that’s what I signed up to do," Obama said. “But while I’m there mopping the floor I don’t want someone saying ‘You’re not mopping fast enough or you’re not holding the mop the right way.’ Grab a mop! Why don’t you help clean up?”

Mr. Hertzberg may have forgotten that George W. Bush tried to enact reform to stem the economic crisis, to reign in Fannie and Freddie, but the Democratic Congress wouldn't jump.  It's not exactly accurate for Mr. Hertzberg to put all of the blame in the laps of the Republicans.

Yet, it's the poor dumb American voter who just doesn't understand:

Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block.

I'll agree with Hertzberg on the fact that voters are "alarmed by a ballooning national debt."  Obamacare alone has added $917 billion in new entitlements, although Hertzberg doesn't seem to blame the Democrats for that.  In fact, he falls back on Obama's favorite explanation that the message just wasn't delivered clearly enough to the poor, dumb American voter. "Another part of the problem," he says "is public ignorance."

Hertzberg laments the misinformation and ignorance of the average American on several topics including:

The health-care law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says, will bring the deficit down.

This is pure misinformation.  This one statement is one that I have railed about for months.  This is as much a lie as Obama's statement that you can keep your health insurance.

By now it would seem that everyone (except Mr. Hertzberg, it appears) knows that the CBO score is skewed.  There are many problems with the way the CBO scored the bill, most of which include trickery by the Demorcrats just to get the score they wanted, such as the "doc fix."  Equally egregious is the evisceration of Medicare that is to come.  When Hertzberg and the Dems say that Obamacare will lower the deficit, what they are not saying is that  they've got to raise taxes, raze Medicare and deceive the CBO to get to that statement.

What you're left with is a new entitlement program that most Americans now realize we can't afford and which strips them of the freedom to manage their own health care decisions.

Hertzberg closes with this thought:

There will be no more transformative legislation; it will be all Obama can do simply to protect health-care reform from sabotage. The economy, like the climate, will be left to fend for itself. And the world will watch, wonder, and worry

All I can say is thank GOD there will be "no more transformative legislation."  I think the voters have spoken, and I don't think they're in the dark anymore.

The New Yorker

I got my New Yorker in the mail today. Dig the cover.

Review of The Pacific

The New Yorker has a review of HBO's The Pacific which begins tonight. Nancy Franklin is fairly critical of the series, calling it choppy and disorienting. She has trouble following the characters and the richness of gory detail is just too much:

There are nighttime battle scenes that last as long as ten minutes in “The Pacific”—an attempt to give viewers some sense of the unrelenting, terrifying reality of it all. This artistic decision echoes the one that Spielberg made in showing us almost half an hour of the Normandy invasion at the beginning of “Saving Private Ryan.” But authenticity in a war movie doesn’t depend exclusively on the accumulation of gory detail; it also requires emotional and psychological realism.

One thing I'll agree with Franklin on, however, is the mistake made by the directors in changing a scene from Sledge's book:

But the filmmakers seem not to have completely trusted the marines’ actual experiences. In a scene on Okinawa, Sledge encounters an old woman in a hut, dying of an infected wound that was probably caused by bomb fragments. At first, he is suspicious of her, and then he realizes that she wants him to shoot her in order to end her pain. Instead, he sits down and holds her, cradling her head, until she dies. In the book, Sledge leaves in search of medical help, while another marine goes into the hut. Sledge hears a shot and asks about it: the marine says that she was “just an old gook who wanted me to put her out of her misery, so I obliged her!”

Franklin says this just makes one assume they've taken other liberties and this may be true.

Overall, Franklin is critical of the series, preferring the History Channel's documentary of Peleliu or "YouTube has some remarkable videos" she says. She prefers The Thin Red Line for its portrayal of the "men's inner lives."

To each his own. I may find fault with The Pacific, too; I'll reserve judgment on that for now. But I'm pretty sure it's going to be better than some YouTube videos.

The New Yorker Joins the Abdulmutallab Cacophony

The conflicting stories about the handling of the Abudulmutallab affair are getting monotonous.

Tuesday I posted on the conflicting tales between Eric Holder and the testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee: Holder said at least four agencies were involved in the decision to charge Abdulmutallab as a common criminal rather than an enemy combatant, but the heads of those security divisions said they were never consulted. Who to believe?

NRO's The Corner also picked up on this same distortion today:

But in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael E. Leiter and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said they were not consulted about the charging decision.

Blair, Mueller, Leiter, and Napolitano all fall under one or both of the descriptions "partners in the intelligence community" and "senior members of [Obama's] national security team," and all four claim they were not consulted. Could they all be mistaken?

So who is correct? Holder? Or all four security honchos?

Now we can add The New Yorker to the distortion machine. In an article from their February 15 issue, Jane Mayer highlights Eric Holder and the KSM trial. She says of the Abdulmutallab affair (emphasis mine):

After the Christmas Day incident, conservative pundits lambasted the Justice Department’s handling of Abdulmutallab, who had concealed in his underwear a bomb that ignited but failed to explode. When the plane landed, Abdulmutallab was taken to a hospital for treatment; at Holder’s directive, he was arrested as a criminal suspect. (The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Pentagon signed off on Holder’s decision.)

Mayer goes further to say that we actually gained "time-sensitive information" from Abdulmutallab:

He divulged time-sensitive intelligence: he had been trained in Yemen, by affiliates of Al Qaeda, and had obtained explosives from them.

I'm no security expert but is that really time-sensitive? I don't think so. Didn't we already gather some of that from his father?

The bottom line is this. It does not matter if Abdulmutallab is cooperating now or not. It's good if he is but certainly genuine "time-sensitive" information has been lost. One of the first things Abdulmutallab reportedly said was that there were others like him that are coming. WHO? WHEN? HOW? That would be actionable, time-sensitive intelligence.

Meanwhile, is to too much to ask that everyone get on the same page?

Cover Art

Is Obama losing The New Yorker? The title of this week's cover: "First Anniversary."