Letters from Lemuel

It's been a long day of angrily retweeting disparate items about the failure of the U.S. Senate to vote in favor of debating expanding background checks on gun purchases.

That's right. Today's measure, which has been variously described in news outlets as background checks being "defeated" or "failing," wasn't even a vote on background checks: it was a vote to have a [expletive] vote.

Of course, the measure had 54 votes in the affirmative (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would make 55, but he voted no for procedural reasons—basically, so that he could reintroduce the measure at a later time if so desired). Fifty four [expletive] votes, and it lost. Fifty four! As in, four more than fifty!

I'll not spend a thousand words ranting about how the Senate is a broken institution, and that our government makes a mockery of the notion of representative [expletive] government, let alone actual [expletive] democracy. Let that simply be stated as fact: our government institutions are too old, too anachronistic and too [expletive] corrupt to operate a modern state in the 21st century.

So it's broken. Not working. Everyone—and I mean this, everyone—in Washington knows it (well, at least those who aren't so invested in the shitshow as to be blind to its utter disgrace). Many common people refrain with, "Throw the bums out!" But that's wholly inadequate—the people in Washington are just placeholders for the next generation to come along and run the mess even further into the [expletive] ground.

Hey, I don't blame people with actual, daily concerns for not memorizing the arcane [expletive] processes that produce the daily Washington filth. But this is the truth: your government doesn't just [expletive] suck, it's dead.

Now, to the insiders—journalists, think tankers, staffers, whatever—who know this: What is there to do? Because really, a slow, gradual, incomplete, failing process on things that 90 percent of the American people support—90 percent for [expletive's] sake!—and might stop a few dozen kids from being massacred in their [expletive] schoolbuilding isn't good enough. It's just not.

How do we fix our broken institutions?

Start asking the [expletive] questions, already.

My darkhorse pick for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination has stumbled, early:

When they wrote “Immigration Wars” last year, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick were pushing the boundaries of the GOP’s internal policy debate. The book is a tight, effective brief for comprehensive reform, making the case that a humane, orderly immigration system would increase the American stock of human capital, add to economic growth, address declining fertility and affirm our national character. A Republican presidential candidate making those arguments during a primary debate last season would have risked being hooted off the stage.

Since the election there's been a vocal shift among the Republicans still sane enough to realize what a permanently hostile Hispanic-political bloc would mean for the future of the GOP. Unfortunately, Bush's book, well, went to the publisher before that shift:

“It is really not surprising,” Bush told me. “The book was written last year in a certain environment. The goal was to persuade people against immigration reform to be for it. Since that time, eight of 100 senators have moved, and not much in the House. . . . When we were working on this, Marco Rubio wasn’t for a path to citizenship.”

Nakedly positioning yourself for a 2016 presidential primary campaign by publicly disavowing one of your policy positions that made people think you weren't totally insane and/or a hack is nothing less than a disaster. But why stop at that?

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday that he would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants “if you can craft that in law where you can have a path to citizenship where there isn’t an incentive for people to come illegally” — a position that puts him at odds with his new book, out today from Simon & Schuster.

Surely, refuting your own book only hours after its release in an even more obvious bit of political hackery is even worse.

I suppose when Jeb was touted as the smart one, it was in relative terms.

Because we've accomplished so much in the last 11.5 years:

WASHINGTON — The American commander in the Middle East said on Tuesday that he had recommended that 13,600 United States troops remain in Afghanistan after the combat mission ends in 2014, a number slightly higher than the one being considered by NATO and Pentagon officials.

I suppose we can always hope that the Afghan government declines to extend our stay, as Iraq did.

What could we do with a total of 20,000 troops (including NATO allies)? ISAF has failed to make any headway on basically any goal in the last decade other than capturing and killing a lot of terrorists and militants. Seriously, why do we want to keep hanging around?

The winding down of our military operations is akin to an addict seeking "one last high" before they (never, in fact) get clean. Just rip the band aid off already.

Dave Gilson at Mother Jones spots a funny little quirk:

Raw data from a new survey of Americans' food preferences shows that age-based unwillingness to put delicious uncooked fish in your mouth correlates nearly perfectly with existing data about who disapproves of marriage equality.

(Emphasis mine.)

This seems weird, no? It's not merely that they don't like sushi, which of course is no guarantee—just the other day I was told by friends they don't enjoy the light, right delight—but a strict refusal to even try. Who is so offended by sushi that they won't even try eating some?

I guess those who don't like gay people or believe in equal rights.

Two more interesting tidbits from Public Policy Polling's release made me smile:

34% of white people choose Taco Bell as their favorite Mexican chain while Hispanics prefer Chipotle over Taco Bell by a 33-23 margin. In fact more Hispanics list Taco Bell as their least favorite Mexican chain (33%) than their favorite...

Good news for craft brews and microbreweries – more voters (24%) prefer microbrews or regional breweries to larger national brands of beer (21%). There’s a partisan divide on this issue – Democrats prefer microbrews over national beers by a 29-15 margin while Republicans take national brews over micros 27-19.

The story about the boilerplate letters sent from Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake in response to a grieving father’s message on his late-son, killed in the Aurora movie theater massacre, is a very good demonstration of how ignorant politicians are to their constituents’ concerns. But it’s also a little unfair on McCain and Flake, since I have a very hard time believing that the scenario couldn’t happen to any member of Congress.

It’s no secret that our politicians are totally unaware of how basically everyone in the country actually lives. And the media, of course, is no better on this regard: hence why only six percent of the country knows the deficit is shrinking.

Social programs don’t help politicians, their financial sponsors (and really, our system of campaign finance is basically legalized, institutionalized corruption and an abscess on the Republic) or media cheerleaders, so OF COURSE they’re on the chopping block in any discussions on how to “shrink the deficit.” (Here’s an idea: don’t cut government spending that helps people actually live and thus work and thus give the government tax revenue! Morons.)

And OF COURSE the tax revenues that would come out of any deficit bargain can only be “modest” and involve raising taxes on all Americans, not just the people who’s grotesquely excessive economic wealth does absolutely nothing to improve the country’s financial state or corporations raking in record profits. God forbid that Washington actually realize the “fair share” of rich people would start with high-end tax brackets above 50 percent, a massively expanded estate tax and a financial transactions tax.

If Washington wanted to actually cut government spending, rather than just hurt middle class and poor people, we could always take a little (read: big) chunk out of a defense budget that spends essentially as much on the rest of the world combined on shiny planes and drones and bombs to accidently kill Pakistani kids. Or, instead of benefit cuts to Medicare or Medicaid, giving the government the power to negotiate prescription drug prices—the horror!—or lowering the age to qualify for Medicare, thus bringing in younger (read: healthier) people to lower the average premium.

But our politicians and pundits are rich, so these simple solutions—and really, let’s not overcomplicate it, if given the political will and ability these really would be easy fixes, but of course neither Washington’s will nor ability to serve their citizens exists—aren’t even imagined, let alone debated.

The United States doesn’t have a fiscal crisis; it has a political crisis. And only wholesale institutional reform will start clawing back our government away from its actual leeches: its greedy, malicious operators.

Remember, kids, to always write in Word.

Ta-Nehisi Coates ponders the nature of infinite war:

Can any of us imagine a time when we are not firing weapons into foreign countries; when we are not stripping down to our socks for travel; when we are not sending agents into mosques to foment plots; when we are not spying on Muslim students? What reason is there to view this moment when we do not torture as anything more than a brief interlude? Is this just who we are, now?

It is, in fact, who we are now.

The most ubiquitous and obvious example of the infinite war is the U.S. drone campaign over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen ... Somalia ... Mali ... etc, etc. I do think there's an incomparable difference between invasions (read: Iraq) and drone strikes. I would rather strongly prefer neither, but that's not currently an option apparently.

Power projection since the end of World War II / the Colonial Era has been wrought with constant, ever worsening unintended (perhaps unforeseen is the better word) consequences. Yes, drones have a "light footprint"—that is, they don't require masses of boots on the ground. But that is also what makes drones perhaps the greatest symbol of power projection: what is more powerful than the ability to kill either individuals or large groups of people by remote control from thousands of miles away? If I'm an insurgent/terrorist/whatever somewhere in South Asia, I like to think that I have a shot of fighting opposing infantry. But being blown up without ever seeing or hearing your killer—and without even a chance of combating them—is really frightening. Drones are, ironically, a weapon of great terror.

In fact, we don't really know the best way to evaporate/integrate these movements (though plenty of people in the Beltway think they have that insight), but it's been proven time and again—despite the natural proclivity of Tough foreign policy types to think it's possible—that it sure as hell isn't trying to kill all of them. Indeed, trying to kill our way out of a whole mess of boneheaded historical actions and dumb current policy is insane.

But committing thousands of ground troops to the task is even worse.

Consistent, encompassing efforts should be made to shift U.S. foreign policy away from neo-liberal adventures abroad. I don't, however, think that will change anytime soon—maybe not even in our lifetimes. The entrenched interests have successfully embedded themselves in our corrupted institutions, and removing that abscess is basically impossible without massive institutional reform (i.e., a new founding document of government). If we must choose, we should always choose drones—simply, and bluntly, because they cost less and kill fewer (of both "us" and "them").

Noooooooo:

General Allen offered Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta three plans with different troop levels: 6,000, 10,000 and 20,000, each with a risk factor probably attached to it, a senior military official said. An option of 6,000 troops would probably pose a higher risk of failure for the American effort in Afghanistan, 10,000 would be medium risk and 20,000 would be lower risk, the official said.

I just don't get it. Now that the Afghan surge has proven to be largely a pointless exercise (wait, you're telling me that trying to protect population centers in a country that's 75 percent rural ISN'T a good strategy???) I had hoped we could finally just concede the inevitable: we'll get nothing more (though, did we ever?) from keeping whatever sized residual force on the ground, and here's why:

But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the options, said that a more important factor in the success of any post-2014 American mission was how well — or whether — an Afghan government known for corruption could deliver basic services to the population.

Since we know that's impossible — even if the horrifically corrupt Karzai government (or any successor) was somehow efficient, honest and transparent, the level of internal development needed in Afghanistan is well beyond its immediate capability. For that, we have to Soviet Union to thank — though allowing in billions of Saudi money and influence certainly didn't help.

We have a ridiculously hard time of cutting the cord on wars that have long ago already run their course. The only solution (well, aside from civil war, but that's not really a solution) is to integrate willing Taliban and other insurgents into a open and fair political process. No amount of U.S. troops will change that fact.

Look, military officials are the supreme government welfare recipients. They always want more, more, more, even when everything they've been previously given has proven totally ineffective in achieving their wanted goals:

The help is sorely needed, according to the most recent Pentagon report on the state of the 11-year-old war. In an assessment released last month that covers April through September 2012, the Pentagon found that only one of the Afghan Army’s 23 brigades was able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States or its NATO partners.

OK, so you've been fighting a FAILED war for 11 years now. All our billions of dollars and years of boots on the ground have TOTALLY FAILED in creating a working Afghan Army. Why the hell should we give you a day more? Because all of a sudden we'll succeed where we've been FAILING for 11 years now?

Just end it.

Brian Beutler sees a debt ceiling trap laid by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:

Not only are Republicans closing the door on more tax revenues than they already provided Obama. And not only are they demanding unpopular spending cuts as their price for raising the debt limit. If you read between the lines, they’re actually insisting that Democrats put together the spending cuts themselves.

So how do Democrats get out of this mess?
Beutler:

They don’t want their prints on any specific entitlement cuts until Democrats have proposed them first. In that sense this is just like the fiscal cliff fight. Except the consequences of blowing through the other side of the debt limit are much more grim.

It seems to me that the best option for Democrats is to simply take Republicans at their word and offer a slew of cuts that would help get the country on a clearer fiscal track (or whatever nonsense Serious language you prefer). You see, there's this big, shiny object that the government spends a lot of money on that pretty much does nothing to benefit the populace — unlike, say, providing health care. And conveniently, the United States spends 40 percent of the entire world's total on things that go boom, so there's plenty of money to hack off!

Washington loves to complicate things because if you throw enough at voters they tend to turn off pretty fast. This is why the most dense regulations are frequently the most porous — pages after pages after pages after hundreds and thousands of pages of exceptions to rules. We could do with a little quintessentially American simplicity in our politics.

Do I think Republicans will acquiesce? No, of course they won't — initially, at least. But as we've seen now multiple times, when it comes to apocalyptic standoffs between the president and congressional Democrats versus Republicans, it's the GOP that consistently blinks first. Oh, it also doesn't hurt that the American public clearly and unequivocally prefers cutting military spending than actual useful things.

(Of course, this is all conditional on whether Democrats want to make large cuts in the War Department budget.)

Um ... yikes:

A Hungarian far-right politician urged the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a "national security risk", stirring outrage among Jewish leaders who saw echoes of fascist policies that led to the Holocaust.

The Wannsee Conference was only 70 years ago.

"Whose 4-year-old get killed?"

With just six words, Joe Klein demonstrated the truest consensus piece of U.S. foreign policy: an overwhelming reliance on force. Last month, in a discussion about U.S. drone policy on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," with host Joe Scarborough (himself a former conservative Republican congressman), Klein invoked some Seriousness (h/t Glenn Greenwald for the Guardian):

SCARBOROUGH: "What we're doing with drones is remarkable: the fact that over the past eight years during the Bush years - when a lot of people brought up some legitimate questions about international law - my God, those lines have been completely eradicated by a drone policy that says: if you're between 17 and 30, and within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up, and that's exactly what's happening . . . . They are focused on killing the bad guys, but it is indiscriminate as to other people who are around them at the same time . . . . it is something that will cause us problems in the coming years" . . . .

KLEIN: "I completely disagree with you. . . . It has been remarkably successful" --

SCARBOROUGH: "at killing people" --

KLEIN: "At decimating bad people, taking out a lot of bad people - and saving Americans lives as well, because our troops don't have to do this . . . You don't need pilots any more because you do it with a joystick in California."

SCARBOROUGH: "This is offensive to me, though. Because you do it with a joystick in California - and it seems so antiseptic - it seems so clean - and yet you have 4-year-old girls being blown to bits because we have a policy that now says: 'you know what? Instead of trying to go in and take the risk and get the terrorists out of hiding in a Karachi suburb, we're just going to blow up everyone around them.'

"This is what bothers me. . . . We don't detain people any more: we kill them, and we kill everyone around them. . . . I hate to sound like a Code Pink guy here. I'm telling you this quote 'collateral damage' - it seems so clean with a joystick from California - this is going to cause the US problems in the future."

KLEIN: "If it is misused, and there is a really major possibility of abuse if you have the wrong people running the government. But: the bottom line in the end is - whose 4-year-old get killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror."

No, seriously, read that again:

Whose 4-year-old get killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.

What Klein doesn't seem to realize is that within the space of minutes, he has effectively defined 4-year-olds as "bad people," and that "indiscriminate acts of terror" that kill 4-year-olds are only bad if they happen to a certain people. Do I think President Barack Obama shares this abhorrent view of Klein's? Absolutely not: there's nothing in his prior career to suggest that he believes one group of people to be superior to another. But he's still presiding over a government that has fostered a status quo in which Klein's comments are, if blunter than most would say, consensus. The president has ramped up drone strikes as an apparent alternative to "boots on the ground" counter-insurgency. Many in Washington—myself included—have claimed this is "less bad" than wholesale invasions of countries, which the prior administration was so keen for. This is true—but even if they're "less bad," drone strikes are still condemnable.

Sure, we get to view drone strikes as targeted, and not "indiscriminate": we're not the victims. But to those maimed and killed in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa or wherever else, what are drone strikes if not indiscriminate? Drones are piloted by men and women thousands of miles away and are invisible to the victims until the explosion. It's a secretive, "hands-off" method of killing; nobody knows the process by which we determine who deserves to die and who doesn't. As Scarborough noted, "if you're between 17 and 30, and within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up, and that's exactly what's happening."

There's no way around it: Indiscriminate attacks that kill 4-year-olds—even if they are not the intended target—are evil. What's more, if these attacks do not qualify as terrorism, then there's no utility in the word. We can't rely on intent to determine what is terrorism and what is not, yet that is the scenario we've constructed. "I killed your 4-year-old, but for a good reason," is no better than "I killed your 4-year-old." And if you're thinking, "But what if we got X number of terrorists with the same strike that killed the 4-year-old?," please recognize that you are willingly whitewashing the murder of a 4-year-old.

A 4-year-old.

The latest outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflagration is another instructive example of how Beltway thinking is dominated by this subjective view of violence. For the moment, let's view the situation without context: Hamas and other Islamic militant groups in the Gaza Strip are indiscriminately firing hundreds of rockets into Israel. Obama is right, then, in saying that "there’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders." Thus, the Israeli Air Force's continuous pounding of Gaza is justified in defense of their country.

Here's a fun little ditty, courtesy of Gilad Sharon in the Jerusalem Post:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.

Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.

Total destruction of a territory and a huge amount of deaths is not unpleasant. Unpleasant is when Metro is running 15 minutes late for the morning commute; unpleasant is when my sports team loses a game; unpleasant is when my cat has a hair ball. Killing many, many people is not unpleasant.*

The Palestinian territories have been occupied by Israel for 45 years. Sure, everyone knows about the Israeli occupation. But what it really entails is so much more than bland rhetoric: a country-wide suppression of legitimate national and civil rights. The elimination of freedom of speech, assembly and movement. Widespread use of mundane tactics such as checkpoints and roadblocks to deliberately make daily life more difficult and less dignified. The constant threat of imprisonment without charge, often for years and decades at a time.

No people on earth would face such attacks on their rights and stand idle. (I will not entertain arguments ala, "They hate the Jews," or "They're irrational, and its impossible to cooperate with them." Such rhetoric is best confined to the racists who are so eager to believe fellow humans come from inferior stock.)

Often we hide behind labels so as to negate the possibility of non-violent diplomacy. Yes, it is without question that Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have committed innumerable acts of terrorism against Israelis—witness today's heinous bus bombing in Tel Aviv. Suicide bombings—abhorrent and undoubtedly a war crime—are the most infamous attacks. But the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings largely dried up by 2005. These attacks are in the past tense.

Now, do I think Palestinian rocket attacks are a war crime? Yes. Are they designed to terror opposing civilians? Yes. Are they indiscriminate? Yes. Moreover, militant rocket campaigns are absurdly counter-productive: their actual effect, in terms of casualties, is minimal, and their range severely limited (though in this conflict we've seen an isolated expansion of that range) and cause nothing more than sympathy for Israeli attacks. But do I think they're worse than the Israeli bombing of Gaza? No.

So, why is it impossible to dialogue with Hamas? Way back when they won Palestinian general elections in January 2006, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was interviewed by the Washington Post, during which he explained his group's position:

What agreements will you honor?

The ones that will guarantee the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital with 1967 borders -- as well as agreements that would release prisoners.

Would Hamas recognize Israel if it were to withdraw to the '67 borders?

If Israel withdraws to the '67 borders, then we will establish a peace in stages.

What does that mean?

Number one: We will establish a situation of stability and calm which will bring safety for our people -- what Sheikh [Ahmed] Yassin [a Hamas founder] called a long-term hudna.

Does a peace in stages means the ultimate obliteration of the Jewish people?

We do not have any feelings of animosity toward Jews. We do not wish to throw them into the sea. All we seek is to be given our land back, not to harm anybody.

Do you recognize Israel's right to exist?

The answer is to let Israel say it will recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, release the prisoners and recognize the rights of the refugees to return to Israel. Hamas will have a position if this occurs.

Does this read like the ravings of a mad man hellbent on destruction, driven by a hatred of Jews?

In Washington it appears commonly accepted that states inherently cannot commit terrorism—the definition of terrorism requires that its user be a non-state actor. But say Palestine were an actual, functioning state, and Hamas ran its government. Change nothing else—rocket fire is ongoing from Gaza into Israel—other than Palestine's statehood. How then can a state's use of force in what it believes to be the defense of its people be labeled terrorism? Terrorism is thus defined not by the act itself, but merely any action from a group we deem to be illegitimate.

The commonly heard "right to defend itself" is another canard. What we've done is pick a certain point in a cycle of violence that goes back decades—and, remember, began as a result of Israeli occupation—and thus determine who is the aggressor and who is the defender. If Israel is defending itself, so is Hamas. If Hamas is committing wanton acts of aggression, so is Israel. (Please recognize that the argument is largely the same for those who claim Israel is the aggressor in any one flare-up: in this situation, nobody gets to pick and choose who shot first. It's not cut-and-dry—it's not "Han shot first.")

But if what is bad in this situation is not terrorism, but violence itself—leading to the deaths of many people, combatants and (mostly) non-combatants—then we should rethink our mindset. According to the Israeli non-profit B'Tselem, one side has killed at least 6,600 people since 2000; the other has killed almost 1,100 during the same timespan. How, other than the subjective definitions we've constructed and adhere to so religiously, do we determine that the side—the same side that is occupying by force the other's territory—that has killed six times as many people is the one we should support?

If our understanding of terrorism is defined merely as "political violence we don't like" then it has ceased to have any value in our discourse. Its purpose is to obfuscate, not reveal. We're at the top of the pyramid, but this doesn't mean that we should follow debased, destructive policy. We can and must hold ourselves to higher standards. The imperative is not to determine which 4-year-old gets killed; it's to prevent 4-year-olds from being killed.

*Though at least the Israeli political calibration makes at least some sense. The Jerusalem Post is clearly a right-of-center paper; Gilad Sharon is the son of a former right-wing prime minister. But in Washington, Time and Joe Klein are viewed as center-left. Arguing that it is OK to kill 4-year-olds so that our 4-year-olds don't hypothetically die is not center-left—it's appalling.

Centerfielder Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels* received only 6 of 28 first place votes for the American League's Most Valuable Player Award.

How far we've come.

I've shouted from the rooftops (and on Twitter) for months that Trout was clearly the most deserving player of the MVP, not Tigers third baseman Miguel Cabrera. I'm by no means the only disciple of the cause—virtually all baseball media with even the slimmest recognition of advanced statistics have championed Trout. Even ESPN's crew of panelists—which by no means has universally accepted Sabermetrics—gave Trout 21 first-place votes to Cabrera's 7.

Those who follow political news closely will see a lot of familiarity with the collective work of many baseball writers: it's absolute garbage. There's also one more similarity to make: both political analysis and baseball writing is becoming more informed, helpful and relevant. Maybe the BBWAA crew still controls award voting (and while we're at it, how did Buck Showalter not win AL Manager of the Year?), but I can guarantee you that young baseball fans like myself don't even bother reading their work. Their days are numbered, because we'd rather read Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs—publications that rely not on "gut" and "grit" but facts. And when I want political news, I turn to Nate Silver or a whole slew of logic-based pundits, not blithering nonsense offered by Wolf Blitzer and his ilk.

Trout should have won the MVP. Even conceding that his offense was not as impressive as Cabrera's—not a universal opinion —Trout's contributions in defense and baserunning are simply stratospheric compared to Cabrera's faults in these areas. Let's (briefly) run down the biggest arguments in Cabrera's favor:

• He won the Triple Crown: Yes, he did win the first Triple Crown in 45 years. But everything we know about baseball now is that batting average and especially RBIs are insufficient indicators of a player's offensive worth. For one, batting average is simply a worse stat than on-base percentage (which Trout bettered Cabrera in). There is no legitimate argument to the contrary. The job of a hitter is to not make an out, i.e., get on base. Penalizing walks at the expense of hits is preposterous. RBIs are even worse: a stat massively skewed by team strength and position in the lineup should not be a determinant on who was the best player in the league in any given season. And what if Trout had three more hits , or Curtis Granderson or Josh Hamilton had hit two more home runs —depriving Cabrera of the Triple Crown? Why is the performance of other players relevant to the greatness of another player's individual season?
• Cabrera's team made the playoffs, whereas Trout's team didn't: True. But also true is that the Angels won one more regular-season game than the Tigers, in a division that was infinitely stronger than the abysmal AL Central (and I would know, since the Indians are my cursedly-beloved favorite team). The AL West's collective winning percentage versus the rest of the AL was 55.5 percent, compared to the AL Central's 42.7 percent. Moreover, the teams in the AL Central (beside the Tigers) had the 9th, 10th, 13th and 14th best team ERAs in the league, while the other teams in the AL West had the 2nd, 4th, and 7th best team ERAs.
• Trout slumped when it counted: No. Just, no, no, no, no. Cabrera boosters point at Trout's .257 batting average in September as proof he collapsed, and thus the Angels didn't make the playoffs. Unfortunately for their case, Trout's OPS was .900 in September/October—and a top-shelf defensive centerfielder with a career OPS of .900 who is also an excellent baserunner would be a first-tier Hall of Famer, easily.

This is not to say that Cabrera's season was not an MVP-caliber season. Far from it, in fact. For really, really egregious examples of MVP winners, we should look at statistics from four glaring cases in the last 16 years (using Baseball Reference WAR, instead of FanGraphs or Baseball Prospectus, for simplicity.):

• 1996: Juan Gonzalez: Finished 7th in OPS, 11th in OPS+ and 17th in WAR.
• 1998: Juan Gonzalez: Finished 2nd in OPS, 9th in OPS+ and 15th in WAR.
• 1999: Ivan Rodriguez: Finished 13th in OPS, 24th in OPS+ and 7th in WAR. Note that this is a special year since no offensive player should have won, since Pedro Martinez had one of the greatest pitcher seasons of all time—though his 2000 season was even better!
• 2006: Justin Morneau: Finished 8th in OPS, 8th in OPS+ and 19th in WAR (well behind two of his own teammates).

Thankfully advanced statistics have become popular enough that decisions like those four above will never happen again. (And yes, perception really has changed that much since 2006.)

Mitch Albom** presented today a stellar flat-earth case for why we should be happy decisions like the four listed above are becoming less frequent. For the Detroit Free Press he wrote:

Statistics geeks insisted Cabrera was less worthy than Angels rookie centerfielder Mike Trout. Not because Trout's traditional baseball numbers were better. They weren't. Cabrera had more home runs (44), more runs batted in (139) and a better batting average (.330) than Trout and everyone else in the American League. It gave him the sport's first Triple Crown in 45 years.

But Trout excelled in the kind of numbers that weren't even considered a few years ago, mostly because A) They were impossible to measure, and B) Nobody gave a hoot.

Today, every stat matters. There is no end to the appetite for categories -- from OBP to OPS to WAR. I mean, OMG! The number of triples hit while wearing a certain-colored underwear is probably being measured as we speak.

So in areas such as "how many Cabrera home runs would have gone out in Angel Stadium of Anaheim" or "batting average when leading off an inning" or "Win Probability Added," Trout had the edge. At least this is what we were told.

I mean, did you do the math? I didn't. I like to actually see the sun once in a while.

...

How about the fact that Cabrera's team made the playoffs and Trout's did not? ("Yes," countered Team Trout, "but the Angels actually won more games.") How about the fact that Cabrera played the whole season while Trout started his in the minors? ("Yes," said the Trout Shouters, "but the Angels won a greater percentage with Trout than Detroit did with Cabrera.")

Disregard Albom's obvious trolling. Here's what I really don't understand: Albom countered his own arguments and showed how wrong they are. And yet he thinks he's helping his case?

More:

Which, by the way, speaks to a larger issue about baseball. It is simply being saturated with situational statistics. What other sport keeps coming up with new categories to watch the same game? A box score now reads like an annual report. And this WAR statistic -- which measures the number of wins a player gives his team versus a replacement player of minor league/bench talent (honestly, who comes up with this stuff?) -- is another way of declaring, "Nerds win!"

We need to slow down the shoveling of raw data into the "what can we come up with next?" machine. It is actually creating a divide between those who like to watch the game of baseball and those who want to reduce it to binary code.

To that end, Cabrera's winning was actually a bell ring for the old school. There is also an element of tradition here. The last three Triple Crown winners were also voted as MVP.

Yes, and yet since voting for the MVP began in 1931, nine players have won the Triple Crown. Only five of them won the MVP. Albom, whose entire article is one long screed against statistics, cherry-picks his own—deliberately incomplete—to use.

There's no doubt I'm weird about this: If given the choice between watching a random baseball game (that is, teams I have no interest in) or looking at stats online for three hours, I will choose the stats. Does this mean I not like baseball, that my fandom is any less serious than someone who voraciously watches hundreds of games a year? No, of course not (and I do, of course, pay very close attention to my preferred teams***). If anything, my appreciation of advanced statistics gives me greater overall interest in the game than I would otherwise have, since it has largely been pointless to follow the Indians past-July since 2007. Is a traditionalist who watches many more games a year a bigger baseball fan than someone who spends—literally—dozens of hours per year scouring minor league statistics?****

Mitch Albom reads more like a raving Romney supporter, swearing the polls are wrong and that everything he believes is right, than a sound, rational, informed person. Thankfully, his kind are fading, fast.

*Also, it should be mentioned that Trout's team name literally translates to, "The Angels Angels."
**Totally unrelated side note, but Mitch Albom was a speaker while I was a member of the University of Iowa Lecture Committee, and it was universally acknowledged among committee members that he was a complete ass.
***It feels very, very odd for me to make that plural, but I'd be lying to myself if I said I didn't honestly like the Nationals (though not nearly as much) as well as my Indians.
****And my friends can attest to this, given my incessant praise of, for example, Rays pitcher Matt Moore's strikeout rates in the Minors ("No, seriously, look at his K rates!").

Surely now even the most ardent Palestinian supporters can see the absurdity of Hamas rocket fire :

GAZA, Nov 16 (Reuters) - The armed wing of Islamist group Hamas said it fired a Qassam rocket towards Jerusalem, minutes after air raid sirens sounded around the holy city.

It's well known that the accuracy of Hamas' crude rockets is entirely non-existent (frequently used to downplay their relevance vis-a-vis Israeli bombings), making this attack even more ludicrous. The fact that the rocket apparently hit Gush Etzion, an Israeli settlement bloc in the West Bank, demonstrates the very real possibility that this missile could have well struck and killed Palestinians. Why Hamas would consider that a successful result is entirely beyond my comprehension.

It's not hard to imagine how this news will be covered in U.S. media: "Hamas shoots rocket at Jerusalem." End of story. "But, but, it actually landed in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, well south of Jerusalem, so it hit a legitimate target" is not an argument that will work with U.S. media or public: Americans don't know the geography of the West Bank (and that Gush Etzion is actually significantly closer to Bethlehem than Jerusalem is not going to make anyone feel better). This solitary missile may do as much damage as every other rocket fired by Palestinian armed groups

The idiocy blows my mind, it really does.

It's lonely out here.

The third and final presidential debate last night was a lesson in Washington Seriousness. Debates are farcical shows even when at their most relevant, but the stilted range of questions this year has been a stunning exercise in irrelevancy.

I initially supported then-Senator Barack Obama in late 2006 for one reason, and one reason only: his unequivocal, consistent and early opposition to the Iraq War. I've written about the follies of Iraq in these pages before, but it's worth remembering that the Iraq fiasco was the most pointless, self-damaging U.S. campaign of destruction toward another country ever. Trillions of dollars were spent and tens of thousands Americans died or were maimed for the removal of Saddam Hussein. The stated reasons for invasion — weapons of mass destruction, links to terrorism — were either sexed up or deliberately falsified by a Bush administration interested only in the removal of Hussein from power. In addition to Hussein's defeat, we received the collective enmity of the world, bottled an actually pressing war in Afghanistan and ended up with an Iraqi government infinitely more friendly to Iran (our other great MENA Boogeyman) than its predecessor.

(This of course also neglects the wanton terror dropped on the Iraqi people, with hundreds of thousands dead or wounded and millions displaced. But we're talking U.S. foreign policy here, and such human considerations don't matter.)

The debate last night was somehow even more platitudinal than our dumb domestic policy discussions. There was little more than a Beltway-centric theme of Israel praising, Iran bashing and how to explain away our ongoing calamitous adventure in Afghanistan. And the responses from both candidates were neutered, dull and thoroughly washed down enough to avoid any actual discussion of policy.

For some reason the U.S. foreign policy community has zeroed in on 2014 as the year to leave Afghanistan. Why we plan on spending billions more dollars and waste even more lives in South Asia is entirely beyond my comprehension. It has been clear for at least three full years now that we are literally achieving nothing of note. And yet we are planning on staying for at least two more years. Why?

What, will the hopelessly corrupt and vicious Afghan government suddenly see the light? Will the Afghan Taliban decide to put down their guns? Given U.S. media and political culture, a possible political understanding with the Taliban is an unthinkable proposition: "Obama lost Afghanistan!" No, it wouldn't be pretty, and the uneven progress made on women's rights would probably (but not certainly, and it's not like conditions are great now either) evaporate. But it's been obvious for some time that the Afghan Taliban have no desire to harbor wanted international terrorists, which would be the only conceivably justifiable reason for a continued U.S. military presence in the country.

Sure, logistics take time. But instead of doubling down on a pointless Afghan surge in 2009, the president I hoped for would have recognized that no military solution is present — a transition to a stable, democratic Afghanistan is not merely another two or three Friedman Units around the corner. No amount of "resolve" will magically alter conditions on the ground to benefit either the United States or the Afghan people. Really, what good will come of staying in Afghanistan until the end of 2014 rather than six months from now (or indeed for the last four years)? What would be the effective difference of our current Afghan policy and a light-footprint, drone heavy (for Afghanistan operations — cross-border attacks are a different story) strategy?

At least we're in a war in Afghanistan: obviously it's worth debating, there's just no debate in Washington. But nowhere is the new Consensus more lockstep than toward Israel.

Obviously, no one is going to criticize Israel in a presidential debate. But the problem isn't that we lacked criticism of Israel last night: the problem is that we lacked even a cursory mention of Palestinians, the occupation or settlements. Not only do those three things exist (no matter how much right-wingers like to call Palestinians "invented" ), they're the most important related issues to the U.S.-Israel relationship!

We long ago reached the point when U.S. policy toward Israel became harmful for both countries. Long, long ago. Long, long, long, long ago. As far as I can tell, the U.S.-Israel friendship is based solely on its prior existence. Think of an old childhood friend who went to a different university from you. When you grow up, your interests are no longer the same, and while your interactions may be enjoyable, it's clear you're headed in different directions. This is the trajectory of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Yes, Israel was a valuable Cold War ally. Read that again: valuable Cold War ally. But what do we get from our alliance now? Enmity from the rest of the world and our ally's temerity that we dare suggest they follow international law and agreements they signed. What does Israel get? An increasingly isolated global and regional position, and a false sense of security. (Oh, and billions in military aid.)

There is no longer a practical foreign policy purpose for a close U.S.-Israel partnership. There just isn't. It's become nothing more than a tautology: it exists because it exists.

(And let's be clear, Palestine is not much better. We've gone from legitimately free and fair democratic elections six years ago, which could have opened up space for dialogue to include Hamas in the peace process, to a divided Palestine run by an unelected, corrupt and unloved government in the West Bank and an isolated, thuggish Hamas regime in Gaza.)

Perhaps most disheartening was when Obama bragged about our "crippling" economic sanctions on Iran:

We then organized the strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it is crippling their economy. Their currency has dropped 80 percent. Their oil production has plunged to the lowest level since they were fighting a war with Iraq 20 years ago. So their economy is in a shambles.

Sinking a country's entire economy — destroying the livelihoods of tens of millions of people — is not just mere collateral damage in an attempt to stop Iran's nuclear program. No, ruining the lives of tens of millions of people is something to cheer about. And this is coming from our ostensibly left-of-center political party!

These other topics were not mentioned last night (or indeed, in any of the debates):

• Climate change
• Drug War's effect on Latin America (60,000 dead now due to our wonderfully inept prohibition)
• Eurozone crisis
• Civil liberties
• Global poverty and economic inequality
• Strategic alignment in East Asia

I guess they're just not important.

This new Washington Consensus on foreign policy is a frightening, groupthink mixture of military force, grey legality and diplomatic stasis. I'm of course going to vote for the president's reelection — Obama's domestic record is truly impressive, and the opposition is a terrifying alternative. But there's a tinge of wistful nostalgia to my vote: I just wish I could vote for him based on the reasons I wanted to in the first place.

Less than three weeks out from the presidential election, it's helpful to keep in mind what's at stake:

Holed up in windowless hotel conference rooms near Washington, D.C., scientists have been busy rewriting the bible of American mental illness.

It is the first revision of the nearly 1,000-page tome in 15 years, and one of the top priorities of the insular conclave is to rethink some children's disorders, particularly bipolar disorder. The fear is that too many treatable children are slipping between the cracks, either because of misdiagnosis or—more controversially—because they suffer from a disease that hasn't even been defined yet.

So why does this matter? Well, Mitt Romney has vowed to repeal all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which at least goes to some effort to ensure continuous health care coverage for all Americans. And were the law to be voided, all those suffering from "pre-existing conditions" (which mental illnesses are by definition) are back to the rosy world of being told a corporate bottom line is more important than treating their disease.

Yes, the PPACA was a big victory for health care rights, and undoubtedly any expansion of the meager and inadequate U.S. health care regime is positive. But mental health issues poke a big hole in the central tenet of American health care: health insurance tied to employment. Lose your job for whatever reason, and suddenly your coverage evaporates (or becomes so expensive to be effectively eliminated), and hey, you know what's the worst possible thing for people with mental illnesses? Gaps in coverage!

Lose job ---> Lose insurance ---> Unable to afford (super) expensive medications ---> fall further into mental malaise ---> become long-term unemployed ---> suffer a permanent decline in quality of life compared to a scenario in which you had continuous coverage.

Great setup. Just peachy.

The Affordable Care Act plugs a few leaks, but is by no means comprehensive. Not until health care is totally, completely, unequivocally delinked from employment will the U.S. health care system actually boast universal access. And the elimination of the law — an eminent possibility — only a few months from now will create a scenario where today's kids suffering from known and unknown mental afflictions will struggle their whole lives to be treated by insurance bureaucrats with the dignity afforded other human beings. Read: people are eternally punished for having illnesses that have not even been "defined" — but as soon as they are, you can bet that faceless insurance drones will figure out a way to avoid covering them:

"I'm sorry, you were born with chemical imbalances in your brain, which causes you untold anguish and difficulty. We don't even know how — can't, in fact — to accurately describe your condition. And that's not all! It means we won't pay for you to have a fair chance at a normal life. Go f*** yourself."

What's more important — kids suffering from mental illnesses being permanently handicapped not just because of their illness, but additionally because we constructed rules to further punish them — or more tax breaks for extremely wealthy people?

Is this really even a choice?

I overheard a colleague the other day explaining that his political beliefs are socially liberal, but fiscally conservative.

This phrasing is an example of the perverse Seriousness permeating through Washington. As long as you utter these meaningless words, you're inside the lines. But god forbid if you advocate for assistance to beleaguered Americans, or a fairer tax code (by which I mean actually fair, not just fair for rich people) or greater workers' rights, or the worst of all — even the slightest hint of protectionism.

As noted above, the conception is so vague it's basically pointless. Here's what I assume they meant: they support abortion, women's rights and gay rights, but also are worried about the deficit and "jobs" (not unemployment — "jobs"). Presumably they are pro-free trade (another deliberately vague idea — hmm, maybe this is a trend) and like low taxes and do not like unions.

This is of course a fun way to perceive a world that's hugely interconnected. That many, many issues connect is too complicated for the socially liberal, fiscally conservative mind. But, but, but it's fun to pigeonhole big ideas into platitudes! It's not like there could be any social implications to lower tax revenue, and of course family planning doesn't require any economic considerations.

If you hate abortion, you don't get to love the death penalty and wars and torture, too. Otherwise you're just an ass (or an elephant, I guess).

The idea that we can isolate parts of our sociopolitical reality is preposterous and this ubiquitous blather points, again, to our institutional failure to examine and tackle big problems (climate change, sustainable economic and development patterns, revenue imbalances in baseball.) Our political solution to hard problems mirrors standardized test strategies — answer the easy questions first, and then go back to the more challenging ones. But Washington keeps running out of time to finish the test.

In case you didn't hear, there's recently been massive movement by conservatives and Republicans to claim that favorable poll numbers for President Barack Obama are manipulated to benefit his campaign. (Because deliberately getting things wrong is a great business model for pollsters.) Now, this is preposterous, but again, we're talking about a party so beyond the bend that 50 percent of its voters think the president is not American, so really it's not that shocking.

The theory is that nearly all pollsters include too many democrats in their samples, and that only Rasmussen — a pollster with a notorious Republican lean, who frequently appears on Fox News — accurately weights party identification numbers. Thus, the only polls that should be trusted are Rasmussen polls, leading to the creation of the UnSkewed Polls website (for which I will not provide a link) that "fixes" all other polls to have Rasmussen's party id numbers.

Mitt Romney is, surprise surprise, doing much better on UnSkewed Polls than in reality.

The September jobs report released today shows that unemployment slipped below 8 percent for the first time since the president's inauguration, and conservatives are, well:

Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers

— Jack Welch (@jack_welch) October 5, 2012

No, there's nothing at all curious about the last jobs report diving to 7.8% unemployment before the election.

— Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) October 5, 2012

I don't think BLS cooked numbers. I think a bunch of Dems lied about getting jobs. That would have same effect.

— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) October 5, 2012

Sigh.

I like craft beer quite a bit (even though my intake has massively diminished). And I relish every individual beer season, during which brewers across the United States concoct a whole medley of styles: stouts and porters for winter, pale ales and IPAs for early spring, wheats and wits for summer and ESPECIALLY HOLIDAY BEERS WHICH ARE AWESOME FULL STOP

Yes, I am one of those rare few who usually insist on imbibing seasonal beer (though of course many span multiple seasons). There are exceptions, of course, for otherwise contextual beers — for example, most any craft is acceptable at a baseball game, or if you have a lucky beer for certain sporting events or teams.

Every season, that is, except one.

Why, why, why do people insist on making and drinking pumpkin beers!?! Maybe I just haven't had the right one (I'm open to recommendations!), but every batch I've tried so far has been either very bland or extremely bland. Down with the pumpkin!

Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil famously said, "All politics is local." But since our identities are varied and not entirely defined by place, perhaps a better formulation is, "All politics is personal."

Due to a labor dispute with officials, the NFL has been using replacement crews for the first few weeks of the season — with overwhelmingly negative results. Turns out that adjudging a very-fast moving and violent sport with complicated rules is not easy.

Monday's game between the Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks was decided by an apparently incorrect call (I do not watch much football, especially professional, and have not seen the video evidence — but the condemnation has been basically universal.) And last night's game and the overall labor dispute, as a reader of Talking Points Memo noted to Josh Marshall, may bring to light some fundamental truths for a "predominantly non-liberal crowd of football enthusiasts":

Now consider this: last night, we got to see firsthand that union refs are FAR better than non-union refs. We got to see over and over AND OVER again that the unsung heroes of the NFL are not the savvy and entreprenuerial (sic) business-owners, but the officiating crews...

You see, no one believes for a second that the NFL is on the verge of bankruptcy. We know it’s a cash cow for the owners. And last night, it suddenly became clear that the choice is not between self-important union refs and cash-strapped NFL owners, but rather, between obviously well-trained and experienced NFL Officials and a commissioner who apparently cares more about profits (at the expense of these officials’ wages and benefits) than he does about the integrity of the game he’s supposed to be running. One comment I read put it this way (not sure if it was stolen. ha): “Goodell needs to pay those refs. It’s a million dollar problem in a Billion dollar industry.

Read the whole thing.

That unions — even entertainment ones like NFL officials — are acknowledged as a positive force is always a good thing. (Anti-union sentiments are a hallmark of a Serious Person, and many, many otherwise good liberals in media and Washington politics have decided to use those feelings to establish their maverickness.) This is a very brief and nowhere near encompassing list of the things unions have provided Americans:

• Child labor laws
• 40 hour workweek (and thus weekends)
• Minimum wage
• Pensions

These rights did not come from goodwill on the part of employers and politicians, but literally the blood of millions of individuals organizing for shreds of dignity. Unions were and are and will be good things.

There are two moments I vividly recall that are central to my early political and foreign policy awareness — one of which holds the dubious honor of the most important event in my personal political development.

I sat in chemistry class, as a 16-year-old high school sophomore, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

We had a late-notice substitute teacher that day, Mr. Desmarais, so the hour was mostly an impromptu study hall of sorts.

Then Aaron Kolander, a senior in my chemistry class, abruptly burst into the classroom and said, "Turn on the TV."

It was just before 8:00 a.m., central daylight time.

A plane had just crashed into the North tower of the World Trade Center, setting it aflame. What a terrible tragedy.

And then another plane shot through the wide-angle camera, striking the South Tower while we watched, live. After the initial shocked exclamations, no one spoke for minutes. We would never forget that image for the rest of our lives.

Innocence over.

The rest of the day is no less familiar. My geometry teacher left the TV on, only to turn it off after no one paid attention. (I hate geometry — still can't use a protractor.) At lunch I sat outside at a long table with friends asking me, what will happen next? I was known to be unusually interested in the world, even at 16, and I had recently begun to follow the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, so among high school sophomores I was a semi-authoritative voice. I still remember claiming, in the face of much opposition, that the United States would launch a few airstrikes aimed at the perpetrators but that "nothing had changed." (I was well-accustomed to airstrikes, after a decade of Allied bombings of Iraq.)

If only.

But 9/11 isn't my aforementioned central event: That belongs to an even more ignominious day 18 months later. A little over twelve hours after the "shock and awe" (how distant that phrase now sounds) campaign began on the (U.S. time) late evening of March 19, 2003, I stood in my former-AP European History classroom, feet from the corner-mounted TV, and watched — well, not much in honesty other than darkness and occasional bright flashes of explosion. I remember the conflicted feelings of a near-18 year old: the adrenaline of a hyped, broadcast, modern war with the unending belief that everything had gone terribly wrong.

In fairness I only realized in hindsight that would become a day that would really, really matter to my generation. I was 17 when the ramp-up to war began, and nearly 18 when the bombs dropped over Baghdad. Yes, I opposed the war (not a popular position among classmates, I assure you) — since 9/11 I had voraciously read books and articles on the Middle East and was now very much aligned with leftist political beliefs. But I had no idea of the scale of deception, nor could imagine the coming horrors and carnage: Abu Ghraib, death squads, suicide bombings and more.

Nor could I imagine how little the horrors and carnage would impact Washington. The purveyors and planners of the war have received only minimal blowback. They merely transitioned from government offices to Washington think tanks; they still write their regular columns in first-rate newspapers; and the honest-to-God war criminals among them face no prosecution. (Torture isn't torture as long as you call it something differently — come to think of it, their party recently tried to redefine rape, too.) Their careers are fine, their lives intact and even enriched by their propaganda peddling.

• Depending on which estimates you believe, anywhere from 100,000 to over 1,000,000 Iraqis were killed.
• According to the Congressional Research Service, 2,000,000 Iraqis became refugees and another 2,700,000 were internally displaced.
• 4,488 U.S. soldiers (including 13 Defense Department civilians) died.
• Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were injured, many seriously, including those suffering from mental illness like PTSD.

That people like Bill Kristol or Don Rumsfeld can wake up in the morning and not care about the destruction their writings and words help wrought speaks to a pathological lack of humanity, and the going-alongs of most Democrats and centrists speaks to their total cravenness. But all of official Washington's lack of caring speaks to its callous refusal to acknowledge what actually matters.

The story of the Iraq War shows how little getting things wrong, even the biggest things possible wrong, matters to the Serious Club of the Beltway. Breaking U.S. and international law isn't a crime — it's merely an inconvenience. We must move forward and not live in the past, because there is no longer desire nor capability in Washington to follow the rule of law.

9/11 and the Iraq War are unfortunately linked. Not because al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq were in league together, because we know (and for those with even a shred of common sense, knew) they weren't. But the cultural and political zeitgeist following that infamous September day encouraged monstrous reactions from a public all too eager to see the mass killings of others, consistently stoked by some political actors to path a way toward an unnecessary and unjustified war.

I for one will not forget.

Every so often now I plan on highlighting stories that are particularly depressing, horrifying or sickening. Why? Because we should always be aware of the great evils in the world.

This gives me the sad:

GARAMBA NATIONAL PARK, Democratic Republic of Congo — In 30 years of fighting poachers, Paul Onyango had never seen anything like this. Twenty-two dead elephants, including several very young ones, clumped together on the open savanna, many killed by a single bullet to the top of the head.
...
Several days later, in early April, the Garamba National Park guards spotted a Ugandan military helicopter flying very low over the park, on an unauthorized flight, but they said it abruptly turned around after being detected. Park officials, scientists and the Congolese authorities now believe that the Ugandan military — one of the Pentagon’s closest partners in Africa — killed the 22 elephants from a helicopter and spirited away more than a million dollars’ worth of ivory.

“They were good shots, very good shots,” said Mr. Onyango, Garamba’s chief ranger. “They even shot the babies. Why? It was like they came here to destroy everything.”

Africa is in the midst of an epic elephant slaughter. Conservation groups say poachers are wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year, more than at any time in the previous two decades, with the underground ivory trade becoming increasingly militarized.

And what a wonderful and happy tradition this slaughter comes from:

Foreigners have been decimating African elephants for generations. “White gold” was one of the primary reasons King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into his own personal fief in the late 19th century, leading to the brutal excesses of the upriver ivory stations thinly fictionalized in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” and planting the seeds for Congo’s free fall today.
...
Mr. Onyango said the strange way the elephant carcasses were found, clumped in circles, with the calves in the middle for protection, was yet another sign that a helicopter had corralled them together because elephants usually scatter at the first shot.
...
John Sidle, an American from Nebraska who works as a pilot at Garamba, said, “What bothers me is that it’s probably American taxpayer money paying for the jet fuel for the helicopter.”

Go read the whole thing.

I don't get why humans can so cruelly and wantonly disregard their co-inhabitants of the planet. There's little better evidence of mankind's corruption and baseness.

It is a rare day when I offer a word of (admittedly, half-hearted and indirect) support to the GOP presidential candidate, but an unfortunate trend in the last week has forced my hand.

When Mitt Romney gave his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he neglected to mention the war in Afghanistan, and additionally, horror of horrors, failed to herald "the troops." Conservatives and liberals ranging from Bill Kristol and Ramesh Ponnuru to John Kerry and Tammy Duckworth all blasted Romney's oversight.

Now, Romney's failure to mention the Afghanistan war, which so perfectly encapsulates so much wrong with U.S. foreign and security policy, is pretty poor. But it's the lambasting he's received for not trumpeting the troops that grates me. Yes, the men and women that serve in the U.S. military deserve some credit for their choice to enlist — risking your life for a greater cause is admirable — but it doesn't make them vastly more worthy of praise than teachers, or police officers, or social workers or any other profession that helps enrich our civil society and democratic government. It would be different if the U.S. mainland were ever under threat of invasion — then, they'd be protecting the country. But that's not the case.

Iran doesn't threaten America's freedom. Al-Qaeda didn't threaten America's freedom. The Soviet Union threatened America's existence, but not really its freedom. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan didn't threaten America's freedom. In fact the last country that threatened American freedom was, ironically, the Confederate States of America.

Pundits and politicians take as a given that the troops defend our freedom, but this is simply not the case. In fact the greatest defenses the United States has — only breached once in our entire history, and that only 30 years after independence was won — are geographical features: the two oceans separating us from any other major power. Not since the War of 1812 have foreign troops landed on U.S. soil, for the simple reason that it's really, really hard (in fact nearly impossible) to launch a mass-scale continental invasion. The one notable exception, the Normandy landings in June 1944, was an extremely complicated, intensely planned operation — but the Allies had only to cross a few dozen miles of water, with total air and naval supremacy. An Atlantic Ocean crossing from Brest, France to New York City is nearly 3,350 miles — and the U.S. Navy has been one of the few strongest or single strongest navies for basically the entire history of modern navies.

If we really wanted to venerate what keeps the United States free, we'd give praises to the oceans, not the soldiers that fight wars entirely on foreign soil thousands of miles away.

(I'll have more to say on the Democratic Party's embrace of aggressive U.S. defense policy in the coming days.)

Can someone give me examples of Democrats or left-of-center types saying things even 1/100th as ridiculous and offensive as things Republicans and conservatives regularly spout? Yesterday, Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett ... well, just read (courtesy of the Washington Post):

“I want to know how you feel about the government issuing student loans. Is that something that you’re for?” asked an audience member who identified herself as an instructor at the college.

“I’m for student loans. I want kids to have an education,” Bartlett responded. But he explained that he had read through the Constitution carefully and could find no evidence “that the federal government should be involved in education.” Then Bartlett expanded on that point (at the 3:35 mark in the clip above, which was passed along by a Democrat).

“Not that it’s not a good idea to give students loans, it certainly is a good idea to give them loans,” Bartlett said. “But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope.”

A 10-term U.S. congressman, comparing federal student loan programs to Nazi Germany. The head ... hurts ...

Special mention should go to Charles Krauthammer for yesterday's whopper on weather and the DNC (video from Talking Points Memo):

Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer claimed Wednesday that there was no way officials moved President Barack Obama's speech indoors due to concerns about the weather, saying Democrats have known what Thursday's weather will be for "months."

"It wasn't the weather, they knew what the weather was going to be months ago. This was clearly a response to the fear of a sea of empty seats, and that's why this is being done," Krauthammer said.

(By the way, it's been pouring most of the day in Charlotte.)

In case you didn't see Bill Clinton's speech last night, stop what you're doing, allow yourself an hour, and watch this:

I think often these days about the discovery of the "post-truth" presidential campaign, and then I read this by Brendan Nyhan for the Columbia Journalism Review:

The Romney crew has heavily featured the welfare ad, which strategist Ashley O’Connor called the campaign’s “most effective,” despite criticism from all three major fact-checkers.* (Interestingly, Romney has previously cited these institutions’ work when it serves his purposes.) As of August 23, the welfare ad had run nearly 6,000 times. The chutzpah Ryan showed last night suggests that Romney’s campaign remains unbowed by the criticism it has faced.

This brazen disregard of pushback from journalists has brought on the latest episode in a recurring crisis of confidence among media types.

"Latest episode in a recurring crisis."

When something is merely the normal state of affairs, it's not a crisis. It's the status quo. So while consternation and handwringing is well and good, it's inadequate to combat our failed political culture.

Who knew that climate change had such a dark sense of humor?

(p.s. I hope everyone in Isaac's path stays safe.)

I see this mistake constantly and it annoys me to no end.

Uninterested: Not interested in something; having no opinion.
Disinterested: Neutral party, frequently from a legal perspective.

Thank you.

Why are Americans' views as expressed to pollsters and researchers so contradictory to their political beliefs? Dan Ariely for the BBC:

So, we took the American society and we asked people to imagine it divided into five buckets, the wealthiest 20%, the next 20%, the next, the next and the poorest 20%.

First of all, we asked people: how much wealth do you think is concentrated in each of those buckets?

It turns out people get it very wrong.

The reality is that the bottom two buckets together, the bottom 40% of Americans, own 0.3% of the wealth; 0.3%, almost nothing, whereas the top 20% own about 84% of the wealth.

And people don't understand it. They don't understand how much wealth the top have and in particular, they don't understand how little the bottom has.

...

In fact, when we did this experiment another way and we showed people two distributions of wealth, one based on the wealth distribution in the US and the other based on the wealth distribution that is more equal than Sweden, 92% of Americans picked the improved Swedish distribution.

So this suggests to me that when people take a step away from their own position and their own current state, and when people look at society in general terms, in abstract terms, Americans want a much more equal society.

There is one more interesting thing to this: 93% of Democrats picked the improved Swedish model, compared with 90.5% of Republicans. Different, but not very different.

And all this makes me wonder, how can it be that in our studies people seem to want such equal society but when you look at the political ideology, people don't seem to want that?

Read the whole thing.

Heated debate engulfs Washington. Partisans on both sides trade vitriolic arguments. But this fall there is only one right course.

Stephen Strasburg must be shut down.

In case you don’t follow baseball, the Washington Nationals are good. Really good. Best record in the majors good. It is, shall we say, abnormal for a Washington baseball team (save the Grays, and they didn’t even play all their home games here) to be anything but terrible. From 1972-2004 there was no team playing the national pastime in the nation’s capital; the original Washington Senators — a charter member of the American League — having first moved to Minneapolis in 1960, and the reborn Senators to Arlington, Texas only a decade later.

It wasn’t until the Montreal Expos sought a new destination that baseball returned to the District. The Nats had no trouble fitting in with Washington’s dismal baseball history. These were the Nationals place in the NL East standings for their first six years: 5th, 5th, 4th, 5th, 5th, 5th. It wasn’t until last year that the team managed 3rd place, even then finishing with a sub-.500 record.

And now they’re the best team in baseball.

Those who followed the team — author included — believed the club would contend coming into this season. They boast impressive pitching depth, a solid bullpen (if erratic, as bullpens are wont to do) and a potentially dangerous lineup. The Nationals also boast one of the strongest farm systems in baseball. But most importantly the team’s major assets are both young and under club control for a number of years, thus creating a large “window” in which the Nats can expect regular postseason play.

In a 2003 article, Nate Silver and Will Carroll, both then of Baseball Prospectus, defined the idea of an “injury nexus” for young pitchers. They posit that hurlers under the age of 25 are significantly more likely to face career-ending or altering injuries than those over the age threshold. This idea is further backed by an acronym coined by Baseball Prospectus founder Gary Huckaby in the 1990s, and expanded upon in 2003 by Joe Sheehan, also then of BP: There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect, or TINSTAAPP. Young pitchers — even those hyped as the next big thing — are more than likely destined to flame out, either through injury or general ineffectiveness.

Luckily Strasburg has proven he has no lack of talent. But he has undergone one Tommy John surgery, the reconstructive elbow procedure named after the former Chicago White Sox pitcher. Dr. James Andrews, the preeminent sports doctor in the country, told the Atlantic’s Jake Simpson that pitchers who have one Tommy John surgeryhave an 85-90 percent chance to recapture their former gifts — but that number drops all the way to 25-30 percent for pitchers who undergo TJ twice.

Those who argue Strasburg must keep pitching often point to two compromises: either shut him down now, and reactivate him for the playoffs, or skip his turn in the rotation a few times in order to keep his total number of innings down before October. Both of these arguments neglect a little-known truth. It is not the number of innings pitched that puts pitchers most at risk; it is the number of pitches thrown that most impacts arm strain. With every additional pitch, the risk of injury increases substantially. This is especially true with pitch counts over 120, but most teams like to keep their starters right around a maximum of 100 pitches per start. Strasburg has thrown over 100 pitches in 10 of his 25 starts this season. Moreover the number of times a pitcher throws a high number of pitches in successive outings raises the injury risk. As expected of an ace in a pennant race, Strasburg’s workload has ascended as the season wears on: he has exceeded 100 pitches in 5 of his last 9 starts.

As a long-suffering Cleveland Indians fan one might expect me to support the “win now” strategy. The only problem is that there is no guaranteed, or even probable, “win now” strategy. Baseball playoffs, unlike the other major sports, are heavily influenced by luck: in a small sample size, odd occurrences happen. (“This is the baseball,” goes a melancholy mantra adopted by in the know fans of the Indians.)

The best chance to win a World Series is to have a number of chances. Making the playoffs is a lottery ticket to the crapshoot of the postseason — the more years you enter the lottery, the better chance you have of snaring the jackpot.

The Nationals are devoid of neither significant core talent nor financial resources. Furthermore their division is a shambles: the hapless and hopeless Mets, the aging and overpriced Phillies and the ineptly constructed Marlins pose little threat. Only the Atlanta Braves appear serious challengers for dominance of the NL East in the near future. The Nats look destined for a number of lottery tickets in coming years.

Baseball’s great lie is that there are teams who are better in the playoffs than others; they play the game the right way and thus are rewarded. The narratives that baseball announcers and writers give to fill postseason air space and column inches are just that — narratives. But not only is it the great lie, it’s also baseball’s strongest grapple onto the hearts of so many. The sport is so story-driven that it resembles the nationalistic constructions of various peoples around the world — steeped in imagined shared history and lore, often exaggerated and occasionally downright fabricated.

Baseball is no doubt the thinking man’s game — and the Sabermetrics revolution has only reinforced that idea. But it also harbors a great, often depressingly poetic Romanticism (an Indians fan like myself can't help but embrace this feeling). Risking Strasburg’s career in the pursuit of immortal glory is no doubt a Romantic proposition. But it’s also a dumb one.

The Strasburg issue is currently dominating Washington’s sports culture, which boasts so little else of interest. It does seem on face value antithetical to common sense: don’t voluntarily withdraw your best players when they’re needed most — and yet we've learned in the last decade that so many things baseball people fervently believed were nothing more than idiot constructions.

Save Strasburg. Sit him.

U.S. electoral cycles are rife with utterly inane distractions and false controversies, and this cycle has produced its fair share. And yet one that I see regularly scoffed at by various D.C. media types really, really matters to me.

I don't think there's any predictive value to the issue — I doubt a significant amount of voters will be swayed by this one story. (Perhaps as part of a larger pattern, but nonetheless.) And certainly it isn't a concrete policy issue, something that will actively impact the lives of millions.

Owning a pet is no small responsibility. Dogs, cats, birds, fish, turtles or whatever else are living, breathing creatures. They are alive. And when a person decides to adopt a pet they are taking it as part of their own family. While we don't expect people to treat them on the same level as their children (though some do), owners are responsible for the welfare of their pets. Moreover, domesticated animals have no agency — they are entirely at the whim of their owners. Without adequate grooming and visits to the vet, they will become ill. Without food and water they will starve. Without opportunities for play or mock hunting, they will develop damaging behavioral patterns.

If you don't care for them, they will die.

Thus it takes a special sort of character deficiency to witness an obviously distressed pet and do nothing. There is a level of basic empathy that we expect of people, especially so when they are dealing with one of their own charges. And owners that deliberately put their own animal into a harmful situation and later pretend — or perhaps honestly think — the animal was enjoying itself have lost both common and reasoned sense.

Why does the story of Seamus matter? If Romney had admitted his mistake anytime in the last 20 years, it wouldn't. Had he accepted he put a living being he was responsible for in harms way, and learned from his error, fine. But the denial is so telling. It is obvious Seamus was completely terrified, to the point of involuntarily shitting itself all over the car. You know when people involuntarily shit themselves? When they think they're going to die. And what did Romney do when faced with this obvious prospect? He washed down the dog and car and continued down the road without alleviating the animal's suffering.

I do not know a single pet owner who would put their animal in such a position, let alone fail to recognize that their pet was in distress. According to Hunter Walker of Politicker, two of Romney's sons "revealed the dog ran away when they reached their destination on that infamous journey in 1983." Seamus was so mentally wrought that he reportedly fled and never returned — and quite possibly, given the hosing off, died of hypothermia shortly thereafter. How could any person with a beating heart not feel intense shame over this episode? And yet when asked this year by Diane Sawyer if he would do it again, Romney responded, "certainly not with the attention it’s received." He was sorry he got caught — not that he thought he had done anything wrong.

Throughout much of the Republican primary campaign I touted Rick Santorum as the alternative to Romney. Certainly it's not because his personal or political views are better — they're beyond abhorrent and (relatively) medieval. Nor did I assume, as most others did, that Santorum would be an easier opponent for President Obama. I really do think Santorum, views and all, would give Obama a better race. Because unlike Mitt Romney, Santorum showed that he was a human being. The particular example that sticks in my mind — perhaps because I'd been to that location myself — was when Santorum tasted beers at Millstream Brewery in the Amana Colonies, Iowa, and looked like he was actually engaged with his surroundings on a human level.

Did his paeans to the downtrodden middle class Americas line up with his voting record? Of course not. I wouldn't expect any Republican to have a positive voting record. But I at least got the sense that he could care about other people — maybe in the same way that George W. Bush cared about them, even if his policies were actively making their lives worse. (And no, I don't doubt Bush's authenticity.)

There are tomes of psychology that make the connection between caring for animals and caring for fellow humans. If you show a callous disregard for some living things, the chances are very good that you will show callous disregard for other living things. And this lines up perfectly with a man who has said he "likes being able to fire people" and whose economic policy would impoverish hundreds of millions of Americans for the benefit of a tiny few.

Santorum spokeswoman Alice Stewart told MSNBC on March 19, "Well, you know, the family dog is one [that] resonates with some people ... If you can’t be nice to your dog, who are you going to be nice to?"