BeldarBlog

R.I.P. Dr. Michael DeBakey and Tony Snow

I've heard this morning already news of the deaths of two Americans, one prematurely and the other after a full life, but both remarkable men.

Dr. Michael DeBakey was a legend who forever changed both cardiovascular medicine and the City of Houston. Exactly three years ago this week, I was in the cardiac care unit at The Methodist Hospital, and as such I was the very direct beneficiary of the legacy he built there and at its affiliated medical school, Baylor College of Medicine. And he died there last night, of natural causes, at age 99 — after a full life of singular professional distinction. I doubt any single physician or scientist is likely to have so phenomenal an impact on medical science in the 21st Century as he did in the 20th.

Tony Snow, by contrast, died far too young, struck down at age 53 at the peak of his career. I cannot help but think that his death to cancer was a tragic loss not just to his family and friends, but to our entire country. But for his illness, I wonder how much more effective the Bush Administration's second-term communications with its constituents might have been.

Gramm's right, McCain's wrong, but Gramm and I will both vote for the grumpy old man anyway

Okay. I understand why it's politically expedient to throw Phil Gramm under the bus.

But Gramm — who has a PhD in economics, who taught that subject at Texas A&M for many years before entering the U.S. Senate, and who knows damn well what the definition of a "recession" is, and that under that definition we still haven't been established to be in one (except according to pseudo-economists who are eager to throw long-established bright-line definitions overboard in order to get press interviews) — is exactly right.

So this, by McCain, is a disgraceful act of disloyalty by a man who should know better.

What McCain ought to have said:

Sen. Phil Gramm is a professional economist, and under the classical definitions of that academic discipline that define the term "recession," he's unquestionably correct. I've known him personally as a close friend for many years, and I value him as an advisor, in large part because he also understands how broad economic measurements taken for the country at large can still be dramatically at odds with what jumps out at us in our everyday lives. In our everyday lives, paying more than $4 per gallon of gas makes us feel poor, even though hundreds of millions of over-taxed Europeans would think that's a bargain. In our everyday lives, someone whose spouse has just lost his job because the company he worked for has moved its manufacturing plant to China feels like her family isn't just in a recession, but a depression, regardless of what the nation-wide statistics say.

I've said over and over again that I'm not satisfied with how our economy is doing, and I intend to make serious changes when I'm president, starting with our energy policies. I need the American public to rally behind me, to whip this do-nothing and always-say-no Congress into shape. Phil Gramm's been taken out of context here, but I count on him to continue giving me economic advice. Regardless of what the press may say, I know he knows both the theory of economics and the practical reality of hard times. And I'm going to rely on his expertise and challenge him to provide every bit of his creativity in returning our economy to its peak performing condition, which has been and will again be the envy of the entire world.

McCain is a grumpy old man. I would bet good money some handler told him he needed to denounce Gramm's remarks, and maybe even Gramm, and McCain gave in when in his heart, he probably knew he ought not. I'm going to vote for McCain, but if I spent a week in his company, while I suspect at the end of it we'd end up good friends, we'd likely have also had at least two shouting matches en route thereto, because I lack the patience and good judgment of someone like John Cornyn. Neither of us would have changed our minds.

I hope McCain is elected, but if he is, I fully expect to harbor these same feelings at the end of his presidency.

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UPDATE (Fri Jul 11 @ 11:10pm): Several of my commenters have pointed out, and I agree, that Gramm was off base in referring to Americans as "whiners." I suspect he was trying to say something to the effect that many Americans have absorbed the mainstream media's consistent overly-pessimistic portrayal of the economy, and are therefore more pessimistic than either the national statistics or their own circumstances and experience would justify. This is emphatically true with respect to the Laurie Davids of the world, who bash Bush for ruining the American economy while they continue using the ample proceeds from record-setting premium cable TV programming to fly Gulfstreams to Davos. And nationally, from the top of the economic pyramid to the bottom, we're more acutely aware of some economic changes than others: Most of us wince at the $4+/gallon pump prices for gasoline, yet we don't feel a corresponding and offsetting amount joy from being able to buy an incredibly advanced DVD player at Walmart for less than $70.

So yeah, there's a kernel of truth even to the impolitic "whining" comment. Yet McCain's pronouncements on the economy are almost indistinguishable from Laurie David's or, for that matter, Barack Obama's. That's a capitulation to an over-reaction, and it does the American public a disservice.

I'm not at all suggesting that McCain run as Herbert Hoover. But neither should he let Obama run as FDR. For pete's sake, it's not 1929 (which my father still remembers), nor even 1979 (which I still keenly remember!). Our economy is still, quite literally, the envy of the world, the standard to which all others aspire but none has matched.

Instead, my advice to him is this: "Man up, McCain, on economic issues like you have on national security and foreign policy issues. You're a warrior, seeking to lead a nation of strivers. Quit buying into Obama's victimology vibe. (And quit being a jerk to your friends like Gramm. To use a metaphoric example that will make sense to those who've read your book, McCain: You just stole Gramm's washcloth, and you should be ashamed.)"

McCain should say: "I shall go to Alaska! (And I will take along the press!)"

I tend to agree with Hugh Hewitt's characterization of Richard Baehr's opinion piece entitled How McCain Could Win as "best column of the day." In particular, regular readers will recognize some of these same arguments as having previously appeared on this blog, among other places, but Baehr stitches them cogently and concisely (boldface mine):

So who would help the ticket most as a VP selection? One interesting choice would be Alaska's very popular Governor, Sarah Palin. She would be an immediate media sensation and rob the Obama campaign of its monopoly of saturation media infatuation. Given the way the media was perceived to have ganged up on Hillary Clinton, there might be much greater care about avoiding doing it again with Palin. Of course Palin would be challenged for her youth and inexperience in foreign policy matters. But the reality is that Palin, unlike almost all US Senators (including Barack Obama), has actually run something, and with 84% approval for her job as Governor, seems to be running it well. Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton all ran for President directly from service as Governor. Raising the experience issue with Palin would be a risky strategy for the Obama campaign. After all, Palin would only be running for the #2 spot, and Obama, with arguably less of a track record, is running for the top spot. Palin would also be very effective in helping focus the energy issue, and the need to explore and drill for what we have in this country. [Gov. Palin] could take McCain to ANWR and give him reason to shift on that issue.

I want to re-emphasize and expand quite a bit on that last point. (Included is a map, and another picture of the photogenic Gov. Palin.)

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Remember that in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower's entirely successful campaign position on the then-raging Korean War, and indeed on Cold War foreign policy generally, boiled down to one sentence in one famous speech: "I shall go to Korea."

So campaign travel, or even campaign promises to travel, can be awfully important. Now, of course, Sen. McCain has already been to Iraq many times since the 2003 toppling of Saddam's regime. But there's speculation that Barack Obama will use his upcoming trip to Iraq as a basis for pivoting, or at least swiveling somewhat, on his previous hard-line "out of Iraq in 16 months" campaign promises. He'll say that he's returned to the U.S. with a better appreciation for the "situation on the ground" in Iraq, by which he'll really mean he's finally paid attention to experts like Gen. Petraeus (whose presentations and evaluations he's previously scorned when given in their Senate testimony here).

I believe Sen. McCain should likewise travel to Alaska, where he can not only be tutored by experts like Gov. Palin, but he can also assess both the "situation on the ground" and the actual, literal ground.

*******

Now, I don't know how much time, if any, Sen. McCain has spent in Alaska. Simply getting anywhere there by air from anywhere in the Lower 48 will impress upon the traveler how remote it our 49th state actually is, and how vast. Once across the state line, however, surely he'd want to be hosted by the state's governor, so he and his press entourage should naturally stop in Juneau or Anchorage to pick up Gov. Palin.

To travel from either of those cities to the southern border of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (pictured right: click to enlarge, because the to-scale red rectangle that represents the proposed development area is comparatively tiny), Sen. McCain, Gov. Palin, and the press corps would still have to cross even vaster territory that is still mostly unpopulated and undeveloped. En route, Gov. Palin could help Sen. McCain and the press corps acquire an education about, and overfly examples of, environmentally sensitive energy development already being done in other parts of Alaska. They certainly could see plenty of Alaska's still undeveloped and magnificent natural beauty.

And even after they crossed into ANWR, they'd still have to travel quite a long way to get to the northern coastal areas that are under discussion for potential energy development. And when they finally get there (probably having switched to much smaller aircraft en route), John McCain and the press will have had a first-hand chance to compare those almost lifeless and mosquito-infested mudflats to the rest of the magnificent Alaskan wilderness they'd seen previously.

At that point, Sen. McCain, and perhaps members of the press, may be suddenly struck with an epiphany (as was Jonah Goldberg when he also went there; check out his photos, too): Just because something is "pristine" doesn't mean that it's "precious" or "delicate," and these particular mudflats are neither.

Let Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin then hold a joint, televised press conference — during the Continental 48's prime time, because it will still be nice and bright there in July near the Arctic Circle, with no TV lights needed. Then and there from the ANWR mud flats, let Sen. McCain announce himself as Convert No. 1 in new GOP Vice Presidential Nominee Palin's campaign to explain to Americans how we can choose not be victims in the present-day energy market. Let him promise that among her other roles, she'll be the energy czar in a McCain-Palin Administration.

Then let him sit down, and let Sarah talk.

Let her explain to the public — in the simple, vivid language of a smart, practical hockey-mom turned state governor — how we can help solve our future and our current energy problems by making intelligent, prudent decisions to expand onshore and offshore drilling in and around the U.S., including in Alaska and ANWR. Let her explain how that's only part of the solution; you also have to clear away unnecessary and unreasonable barriers to transportation of existing types of energy, and to encourage research into new types of alternative energy sources so the market can work there too.

Let her explain how, by contrast, the Obama campaign's energy "program," such as it is, is all about victimology. (Obama's energy themes: We're victims of the bad oil companies, who need to be taxed; we're victims of global warming, so we need to cap our lifestyles and tax ourselves more heavily; we were victims of reckless resource exploitation in the past, so we must be frugal victims, falling behind growing economies like China's and India's, as we prohibit even responsible development today.)

Let her explain how, as a life-long hiker, camper, hunter, and fisher in Alaska, she rejects the false choice between being a good steward of the environment and making responsible use of the resources contained in our own vast, rich nation.

And then let the Obama campaign spin in small, sputtering circles, wondering how they lost their mojo and why the number of hyperventilation cases at his rock concerts campaign appearances is dropping so rapidly.

Funniest thing I've heard this month

Fox News reports that lots of blog posters on my-obama-dot-whatever have written there that, based on Obama's policy reversals on such things as FISA telecom immunity, they've been calling his party headquarters demanding refunds of their campaign contributions.

Refunds. From the campaign. Seriously.

(They'd have much better chances calling their telecoms to ask for refunds for something, anything.)

Brilliant idiocy on energy from Democratic über-policymaker Robert Reich

A short piece entitled "Short Straw Economics" in today's NYT Magazine (h/t Althouse) contains questions to and answers from Robert Reich. Reich was Secretary of Labor for the Clinton Administration. He's currently in exile from government as a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. And the odds are good that he'd show up as a cabinet member again in an Obama Administration. Here's what Reich has to say on the most timely topics of public energy policy today (boldface in this blockquote, as in the original, indicates the NYT reporter's questions):

What do you make of the argument that the only way to lessen our dependence on foreign oil is to tap more oil wells here — in Alaska and off the coasts of Florida and California? When you consider that the oil we pump goes into a global oil market, offshore drilling makes no sense. We take the environmental risk, but we’d have to share the negligible price gains with Chinese consumers and every other user around the world.

Then why do you think President Bush asked Congress last month to lift the longtime ban on offshore oil drilling? If I had to guess, I would say that President Bush is very close to the oil companies and wants whatever they want.

And what they want is license to drill? I think they would like as many licenses and permits as possible granted during the Bush administration. They know they would have a harder time with a Democratic White House.

That first answer tickles the hell out of me.

He's correct that because of the world-wide energy market, in which barrels of oil are fungible as long as the market is operating with a reasonable degree of freedom, Americans would indeed share  with the rest of the consuming world the lower resulting costs from decisions made now to drill ASAP onshore and offshore in America. In other words, Americans would become to the rest of the world the way that Texans and Louisianans are now to Californians and Floridians — i.e., exploited. ¡Qué lástima!

(We Texans and Louisianans try to use that word "exploited" in a good way, though: offshore drilling, done responsibly, brings not only energy to America but jobs and economic benefits to the adjacent onshore states, which is one reason the Texas economy right now looks a hell of a lot better than the California economy. We invite Californians and Floridians to join us in the responsible exploitation of all our coastlines, which is only fair, instead of continuing to get a free ride at our expense.)

What this very smart man is ignoring in his first very glib answer, though, is something so huge that he can't have just forgotten about it. And only by ignoring it can he so cheerfully lie to you through his teeth in his second and third answers.

Short of invading and occupying all or at least most of the nations in OPEC by military force, we can't dictate their production and pricing decisions. And OPEC is a cartel whose existence confirms its member countries' fervent desires to control the supply, and therefore the price, of oil to the extent they can get away with it. It has not, historically, been a totally successful cartel, however, precisely because there are non-OPEC sources of oil — among which is, and always has been, the United States of America.

Reich's policy — and all of the Democrats' policy, including their presidential nominee Barack Obama — will continue to restrict American competition to OPEC. In their preferred future world, as our existing resources dwindle, OPEC's market share will grow. With that growing market share will also grow OPEC's power to be a successful cartel.

And as we saw in the early 1970s, the foreign policies of OPEC members (and for that matter, non-OPEC producing countries that are as friendly to us as Canada and Mexico right now) emphatically does not track our own. If there's a sudden political crisis that again turns today's merely painful energy prices into an actual international energy unavailability, the degree to which we're hosed (and forced to compromise our national sovereignty as a result) will be inversely proportional to the amount of domestic onshore and offshore production then available from the United States and its territorial waters.

Until Reich and his comrades actually succeed in vesting power in the People's Republic of Berkeley and then the Sovereign Soviet Republic of California, however, the State of California, at least in theory, doesn't have a foreign policy that deviates from the United States' own. And until then, domestic production from offshore California would translate directly into domestic security from those who might suddenly wish us (or our friends like Israel) ill.

Our energy policy isn't, or ought not be, just about prices at the pump. It's about, or should be about, national security as well.

Reich knows all this. Indeed, he cleverly reinterpreted the question, which asked about "dependence on foreign oil," into being a question about lowering prices at the pump. Only with the question thus recast could he ignore the "dependence on foreign [countries]" aspect.

He relies upon his readers being either too stupid or (more likely) too partisan to figure this out, though. And for many of Reich's and the NYT's readers, unfortunately, he's right. They'll blithely buy into his song and dance about corrupt Dubya and the evil American oil companies (he'll be intentionally blurry about companies like BP and Shell). They'll rejoice with him when the Democrats ride to the rescue on America's energy problems by driving evil Dubya and the Rethuglicans out of the White House. In fact, Reich and the Dems — who have no actual energy policy except taxation and suffering — are counting on short, stupid sound bites like these to soothe Americans' energy worries and get Obama into 1600 Pennsylvania, whence all other Democratic Party jobs will then flow like mana from heaven, even if domestic oil and gas production more and more flows like cement during those years.

Being, metaphorically, a self-created and -preferred urban eunuch himself, Robert Reich will cheerfully counsel his Democratic masters to put my testicles or yours (or your other sensitive metaphorical bits, if you're not testicularly fortitudinous like me and Hillary Clinton) into OPEC's vise. His ideal population is docile, and they ride on mass transit anyway, where their movements can be monitored and controlled by people like him, who know best. Not that Reich or his buddies still have a complex about being short, by the way. Not at all.

(I can't resist a final comment: In any kind of public debate, Sarah Palin could eat Robert Reich's lunch on these issues. Hell, she could take away the little twerp's lunch money and drink his milkshake to boot.)

The important point that Kennedy v. Louisiana proves about Boumediene v. Bush

This is a post in which I attempt to connect some dots between two awful Supreme Court decisions. As usual, I meander a bit en route. You can skip to the numbered paragraphs and the bold-faced stuff near the end if you grow impatient.

*******

Friday night, on the anniversary of our nation's independence, I much enjoyed the televised presentation from Washington of the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps and the National Symphony playing a series of John Phillip Sousa marches. Some of them — "The Washington Post" and "Semper Fidelis," and of course "The Stars and Stripes Forever" — I still have (mostly) memorized from my trumpet-playing days in the Longhorn Band during college and law school. Thus, the fingers on my right hand twitched as I listened, and in my imagination at least, I could still hit and hold all the high notes, and my double- and triple-tonguing was immaculate. I'm a fan of many, many types of music, and that includes marches like Sousa's written for the classic military band.

Inevitably, I was reminded of the old cliché: "Military justice is to justice as military music is to music." Military music and military justice are splendid indeed, and their learned practitioners are certainly worthy  of respect. But they aren't to everyone's taste, and (to pick another artistic metaphor) they tend to be rendered on a more limited shape and size of canvas, using a more limited palette of colors. Sousa isn't famous for emotional violin solos or jammin' electric lead guitar riffs.

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I'm reasonably certain that I never heard a single professor do much more than briefly mention the Uniform Code of Military Justice while I was at law school or taking my bar review course. I've never been in the military, and I lack the special legal training that military lawyers receive when they join any service's Judge Advocate General's corps. The bits and pieces I know come from a couple of real-life cases back in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s that required me to dip a civilian toe, as consulting civilian counsel, into the edges of those waters (to switch metaphors once again). One of those cases involved allegations that a male Army officer had raped a female Army officer, and the other involved a homicide among enlisted personnel that may or may not have been criminally culpable. Both cases potentially involved capital charges — indeed, the alleged rape case also involved allegations of oral sex, which was treated as "sodomy" under the UCMJ at the time and was also potentially a capital crime. Even all these years later, taste and privilege issues still prevent me from going into more detail about either case, even though each was among the most fascinating I've ever seen. But regarding military law in general and the UCMJ in particular, I'm perhaps a step ahead of the average American civilian courtroom lawyer or judge in that I'm quite confident about how little I know that I would indeed need to know to be an effective JAG lawyer on a regular basis.

I'm therefore completely unsurprised that in connection with the Supreme Court's decision late last month in Kennedy v. Louisiana, both sides, all the amicus briefs, and all nine Justices and their respective law clerks missed the 2006 passage of an amendment to the UCMJ which made child rape potentially a capital offense. Probably none of those lawyers themselves had been JAG lawyers, nor had they dealt with UCMJ capital cases, and they just didn't think to look at that unique and slightly obscure subset of American jurisprudence through which Congress directs our military forces how to maintain their own system of justice in parallel to the civilian justice system. Yes, someone should have thought of it; yes, it's embarrassing to them all that nobody did.

No less than the editorial board of the Washington Post now urges the SCOTUS to rehear the case (h/t InstaPundit):

The Supreme Court's legitimacy depends not only on the substance of its rulings but also on the quality of its deliberations. That's why we think the court needs to reopen this case — even though we supported its decision. The losing party, Louisiana, still has time to seek a rehearing, which the court could grant with the approval of five justices, including at least one from the majority. The court could limit reargument to briefs on the significance of the UCMJ provision. We doubt the case will come out much differently; we certainly hope not. But this is an opportunity for the court to show a little judicial humility. Before the court declares its final view on national opinion about the death penalty, it should accurately assess the view of the national legislature.

There assuredly will be a motion for rehearing filed, and even if there's not, the Court could consider reconsidering the case on its own, sua sponte. But only a naïve wanker would expect the Emperor of America, Mr. Justice Anthony Kennedy, or any of the other four Justices who joined his opinion for the majority, to actually change their votes. At most, those five will permit limited supplemental briefing by both sides. There won't be additional oral argument. And in short order, Justice Kennedy will write a short supplemental opinion. It will announce the denial of rehearing. It will try to explain why the laws that America, through its Congress and president, has chosen to apply to its own uniformed sons and daughters are nevertheless absolutely meaningless data points in the SCOTUS' determination of America's "evolving standards of decency."

Regular readers will know that I'm a strong proponent of the death penalty for appropriate cases. Were I a state legislator, however, I probably would not support its imposition for any sort of rape case. But nobody's elected me to a state legislature, and a majority of the state legislators of Louisiana, along with its then-governor, came down in favor of giving juries the option of imposing the death penalty for the most egregious child rapes. I condemn this Supreme Court ruling, as I have all of the Supreme Court's recent Eighth Amendment decisions that purport to be based on "evolving standards of decency." That entire line of cases is a transparent lie, and an example of the most pernicious sophistry that lawyers can create: How else but through double-talk and evil magic could the least representative branch of either the federal or state governments strip the most representative branches of their intrinsic power to weigh, and then determine, what community standards are to be, and whether and how they ought to "evolve"? (Insert obligatory references to Orwell and Goebbels here.)

In his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts talked repeatedly of the importance of "judicial modesty." In this ruling, as in several others in the past few years, Anthony Kennedy has not only joined but led the liberal wing of the Court down paths of gross judicial immodesty. What was Roberts talking about? He was talking about the exact opposite of what Kennedy's busy doing.

The abundantly plain truth is that rulings like this one come from nothing more or less than Anthony Kennedy's sense of how things ought, in general, to be. He's acting as an emperor, not a judge. And the fig leaves of judicial reasoning in which he's surrounding his decrees become increasingly transparent with each such ruling.

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Kennedy v. Louisiana is a clear example of the imperious judiciary, but in the big picture, it's not nearly as important as Justice Kennedy's travesty of a majority opinion this Term in Boumediene v. Bush. In that decison, with no directly supporting precedent and a trampling of such close precedent as was on point, Justices Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer extended American constitutional rights to foreigners held by the American military on foreign soil who are alleged to have engaged in illegal warfare against America entirely from abroad. But even though it lacks international or national security significance in and of itself, Kennedy v. Louisiana does indeed prove an important point about Boumediene and the Justices who decided it — a point that I haven't seen anyone else note yet:

1. It is impossible to dispute that during the course of this Term, Justice Kennedy and all eight of the other members of the SCOTUS were obliged, by the necessity of making a ruling in Boumediene, to consider the ins and outs, the nuts and bolts, and all of the pros and cons of the comprehensive statutory system — passed by majorities of both houses of Congress and then signed by the president — for the express purpose of providing both substantive and procedural justice to the detainees held at Gitmo and elsewhere during our nation's waging of the Global War on Terror.

2. That system was expressly modeled upon, and in most of its substantive and procedural complexities it adheres to, the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

3. Every member of the Court, and every one of their law clerks and staff members — including each of the five Justices in the Boumediene majority — have now been conclusively proven by their screw-up in Kennedy v. Louisiana to be utterly ignorant of even such important details about the UCMJ as what crimes under it are punishable by death.

Friends and neighbors, the same Justice Kennedy who's been shown a fool on UCMJ matters in the civilian Kennedy v. Louisiana case could not help but be equally a fool on remarkably similar matters in Boumediene v. Bush. Five of the same Justices who didn't know enough about the UCMJ to know that it currently allows for capital punishment for child rapes nevertheless felt righteously, omnipotently competent to plunge themselves and the rest of the civilian federal courts into overturning — and then taking over, via their habeas corpus powers — the UCMJ-based system for determining the fates of these military prisoners.

The emperor is not only naked — he's now shown himself to be capable of stupid and ugly acts, too.