Photos from the war in Iraq. Image via Wikipedia
UPDATED MARCH 21, 2011: After eight years of war in Iraq and 10 years in Afghanistan, the U.S. has decided that two wars in that part of the world are not enough.
On Saturday, French warplanes and U.S. and British missiles attacked Libya.
Forget a “no fly zone.” The Allies went to war. We aimed modern weapons of destruction at Libya, and pulled the trigger.
What has gone wrong with the world? Good grief, where did we fail? How did we fall so far?
If I’m going to blog, I may as well try to tell the truth. There’s oil gushing from a hole in the bottom of the ocean floor. It’s a horror movie come true.
The mob screamed for government to get out of the way, free corporate capitalism to give us unimagined wealth. Now, the mob screams for government to do something. How ironic that the same people who fumed that Obama’s health care reform put us on the road to socialized medicine are now furious because Obama won’t nationalize BP. Seems to me that Obama is doing a good job by keeping his head when all about him other people are losing their’s.
No oil in the water at my part of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet.
Oil keeps gushing, more and more every day. It’s washing up on the beaches. Government, save us. David Broder writes that the BP oil spill will be Barack Obama’s Iranian hostage crisis. The President! Why doesn’t the president do something? Why won’t he send in the military? “Give us Barrabas!” This could come straight from the Bible, or from “Lord of the Flies.” Get the president! He’s smart, he looks different, he doesn’t care. He won’t stop the oil leak! “Crucify him!”
The nuns used to say that trouble in the world is the result of sinfulness, the cumulative worldwide weight of our small sins of omission and commission. Maybe the nuns were on to something. If so, I would trace our predicament to all our cumulative sins of greed. Or perhaps worship of false idols.
Now, it is common to talk of corruption, not sin. Corruption in government, corruption in business, corruption in bureaucracy. Government, business and bureaucracy, of course, are made up of individual human beings. Right now, the blame police are examining every omission and commission associated with the oil spill, in an effort to name the sins, or to expose a culture of corruption in BP and government agencies.
(While we ponder corruption and sin, I think we should also remember that possibly it is not sin or corruption, but human mistakes, unintended errors of omission and commission. I would even suggest one last, unlikely possibility, that the oil spill is an accident or an act of nature that was unpreventable.)
In the case of government dysfunction, my neighbor at Lost On The Shore suggests we are all responsible:
“You see, we either want things that are opposite of each other, or things that are impossible or we don’t know what we want . . .
Our politicians can’t solve our problems for us because we want it both ways and we don’t want to compromise.”
I agree with his analysis. We want too much, or we want what we cannot have. I hope we repent and change. We can reform our values. We can change the way we live. We can, if we have the will, refuse to tolerate corruption. We should do it for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
— John Hayden
[picapp align=”center” wrap=”false” link=”term=BP+oil+spill&iid=8750386″ src=”6/6/0/c/Workers_continue_to_362e.JPG?adImageId=12806051&imageId=8750386″ width=”380″ height=”253″ /]
[picapp align=”center” wrap=”false” link=”term=BP+oil+spill&iid=8746904″ src=”7/4/b/f/Gulf_Oil_Spill_23de.jpg?adImageId=12806039&imageId=8746904″ width=”380″ height=”253″ /]
The mile-deep gusher at BP’s offshore oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has ended President Barack Obama’s proposal for new offshore oil drilling, just as surely as the collapse of the stock market, and the housing and credit bubbles, snuffed out President George W. Bush’s plan to invest Social Security funds in the stock market.
In the wake of the BP oil disaster, thousands of people chanting “Drill baby, drill,” would seem surreal.
Thus are presidential policy options narrowed by unpredictable forces. Leaders deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.
Events not only narrow a president’s choices; events can change the direction of a president’s attention, like a river cutting a new channel. Events can force a president’s hand, as war forces a choice between guns and butter.
It is left to great men to answer the question: “What do we do now?” And then to do it well.
Great men affect history by choosing wisely among limited options. Even more, perhaps, great men affect history by thoroughness of planning and excellence of implementation. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower became great because he thoroughly planned and successfully implemented the invasion of Normandy.
George W. Bush became a bungler because he made the wrong military decision, war in Iraq. Then he compounded the error by failing to plan and implement the war.
Abraham Lincoln made the right choices, but would he be considered a great president if he had lost the Civil War?
Now President Obama’s policy initiatives at home appear increasingly limited by political and economic realities. I hope that events do not force the president to turn his attention to war.
— John Hayden
The American cable news channels are in full parallel-universe mode today, Saturday.
MSNBC had President Barack Obama, campaigning for health care reform in Minnesota. MSNBC televised the president’s speech in its entirety to a crowd of thousands. MSNBC’s cameras showed wide-angle views of the packed arena, people cheering wildly.
When the president explained the problems facing health care in America, someone in the audience shouted, “We’ve got to do something!” Mr. Obama agreed, “We’ve got to do something.” It was a long way from Washington, where a congressman shouted at the president this week, “You lie.”
President Obama said he’s not going to waste any more time with cynical politicians who are clearly committed to defeating health care and destroying his presidency.
The crowd in Minnesota was “Fired up!” and “Ready to go!”
Meanwhile, over at FOX News, they were covering an anti-health care rally on the Mall back in Washington. The FOX News camera focused in tightly on a knot of demonstrators (two dozen? a hundred?) and one unknown speaker ranting about the First Amendment and “uniform taxation.” One thing you have to give the health-care opponents, they’re not a single-interest group. No indeed, they’ve got a gunny sack full of gripes. (Correction: Later in the day I learned that there were a lot more than a hundred demonstrators in Washington. There were thousands and thousands. See note from Lizzi in Comments below.)
FOX was in Texas, too, providing air time to some Texan who was complaining about health care for everyone. What an un-American concept! Health care for all, even the unemployed, even the poor, even people with pre-existing conditions.
The Texan said the government ought to stay out of health care, because the government has no experience running such a program. Umm . . . What about Medicare? Senior citizens seem quite fond of Medicare. Who do you think runs Medicare? What about Social Security, which has one-percent administrative costs? Who do you think runs Social Security?
And so it goes. MSNBC and FOX News, two professional cable news channels, reporting live from parallel universes.
Surfing back and forth between the cable news channels, FOX News and MSNBC, before President Barack Obama’s address to Congress on health care reform, a visitor from Mars would likely conclude that the Fox pundits and the MSNBC pundits reside in parallel universes, or perhaps on different planets.
No surprise if it sometimes seems that people are brain-washed by either the conservative pundits at FOX or the liberals at MSNBC.
The president attempted Wednesday evening to speak over the heads of FOX and MSNBC, to speak directly to the American people.
President Obama made his intentions and his resolve clear from the start of his address: “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”
The president refused to parrot the pundits on either political extreme. He attempted to position himself squarely in the center, saying he prefers “to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.”
Congress has been pecking at health care for months, in the unlikely hope of achieving a bipartisan agreement. Wednesday, the president finally made clear his own proposal.
President Obama proposed a “new insurance exchange” from which citizens could select and pay for the health insurance plan of their choice. He proposed that the insurance exchange “take effect in four years, which will give us time to get it right.”
Ending weeks of speculation, the president came down solidly for a “not-for-profit public option” to be available along with private health insurance choices in the insurance exchange.
To those who fear losing their present health insurance, the president said: “Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have,” and he declared, “I will protect Medicare.”
And to those who urged him to fight for health care reform, President Obama said, “I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans cannot find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice.”
He declared that the principles of social justice and the character of America are at stake in the health care decision.
Let’s not let cable news channels trivialize the issues.
— John Hayden
Living Simply And Still On The Grid 