BeldarBlog

Best of the Ford tributes

Of all the various tributes and remembrances I've read since President Ford's passing, Quang X. Pham's in today's WaPo is only one that taught me something about him that I didn't know, and I think overall it's the best. The by-line informs us that Mr. Pham "was born in Saigon [and] served as a Marine pilot in the Persian Gulf War." He was 10 in April 1975, when the last helicopters left the American embassy in the city and country of his birth, and he and his family were among the 130,000 "blessed South Vietnamese" (less than 1% of its population) whom the United States was able to relocate into "refugee camps across the United States."

Key graphs (italics mine; bracketed portions and second ellipsis in original):

In the end, after two decades of flailing diplomacy in that tiny peninsula, Gerald Ford dealt with the aftermath: empty guarantees made to an ally, promises he could not keep and a "peace with honor" that the congressional Watergate class would not enforce....

In a May 1975 article in the New York Times, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) commented that "barmaids, prostitutes and criminals" should be screened out as "excludable categories." Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) "charged that the [Ford] Administration had not informed Congress adequately about the number of refugees" — as if anyone actually knew during the chaotic evacuation. "I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam," sniffed George McGovern in Newsweek.

At the time, unemployment in the United States hovered near double digits. Perhaps this had something to do with the anti-refugee emotion. In Larry Engelmann's "Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam," Julia Vadala Taft, head of the interagency task force for refugee resettlement, recalled such opposition. "The new governor of California, Jerry Brown, was very concerned about refugees settling in his state. Brown even attempted to prevent planes carrying refugees from landing at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento.... The secretary of health and welfare, Mario Obledo, felt that this addition of a large minority group would be unwelcome in California. And he said that they already had a large population of Hispanics, Filipinos, blacks, and other minorities."

The refugees were extremely fortunate. Our biggest supporter, outside of Julia Taft, was the president of the United States. Even though he had described the Vietnam conflict as "a war that is finished as far as America is concerned," Ford's attention was now focused on the refugees. In May 1975 he visited the camps, and soon after refugees began leaving to start new lives across America. The government wanted to disperse the refugees to spread the cost among many states and communities. By Christmas of that year, all refugee camps had been closed, and the refugees were resettled in every state.

I am not aware of any other politicians, antiwar protesters, esteemed journalists or celebrities visiting Fort Chaffee, Ark., where my family was temporarily housed for two months. But Gerald Ford did.

The same supposedly compassionate doves, in other words, who'd opposed America's efforts on behalf of the South Vietnamese people wore their compassion on their sleeves, but quickly replaced that with armbands of bigotry and racism — while Jerry Ford, stymied and forced by Congress to watch as our nation broke its promises and abandoned an American ally, nevertheless did his own best to mitigate the harsh effects of that betrayal.

Mr. Pham doesn't use the phrase "cut and run." But see if you can read his op-ed without thinking of that phrase — and its likely consequences, and the parallels from Mr. Pham's history lesson and Jerry Ford's life — in the context of today's Iraq.

Ought John Edwards' career as a plaintiffs' personal injury lawyer disqualify him from being elected President?

My blogospheric friend and fellow legal professional Stephen Bainbridge writes (much more concisely than I'm about to) about John Edwards' formal announcement of his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination (links in original):

Back in 2004, I wrote that Edwards policies on corporate governance were "demonstrably wrong." I also criticized Edwards' impact on the economy as a trial lawyer. Given the deleterious effects the trial lawyer industry has had on the American economy, as ably demonstrated by the Manhattan Institute's Trial Lawyers Inc. project, I remain unconvinced that a trial lawyer ought to have much authority over the economy.

I would be loath to gainsay Professor Bainbridge on anything involving corporate governance, and this essay only addresses the remaining points in his post. And we agree, certainly, that neither of us would ever be able to support Edwards for high political office. But I get to that conclusion via a different logical path, and I respectfully disagree, albeit only in part, with that followed by Prof. B.

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I certainly agree with Prof. B that Edwards' specific career history as a lawyer is relevant to his fitness for public office. If he were shown to have been either incompetent or unethical as a lawyer, that would certainly be probative of his unfitness as a matter of personal character. But that would be true whether Edwards was a deal lawyer or a courtroom lawyer or any other kind of lawyer. (I argued in the 2004 election, for example, that John Kerry's comparatively dismal academic career and showing as a prosecutor before he turned to politics were among the many reasons to doubt his fitness for high office.)

And as always, I must voice my quibble over terminology: I believe what Prof. B objects to is not that Edwards is a lawyer who has frequently gone to trial (a category that includes, for example, prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, personal injury defense lawyers, both sides in business litigation, and me), but rather, that Edwards is a lawyer who primarily represented plaintiffs in personal injury cases.

But that quibble aside, I also agree in general, at least on a macroscopic level and specifically at the margins, with most of Prof. B's and the Manhattan Institute's concerns about what the plaintiff's personal injury bar (many of whose members in fact do not frequently go to trial) may collectively have done, or be doing, or be likely to do, to our economy and our society. (I also think that it's dangerous and misleading to over-generalize on that topic. One of the reasons I like the writing of Walter Olson, Ted Frank, and their colleagues is that I believe they conscientiously try to avoid overgeneralizing, or at least to be very specific in their complaints — and they mostly succeed.)

I'm also at least somewhat inclined to think that because of the mode of most of our legal training, and for many of us the nature of our law practices, lawyers in general — not just plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers — may be more prone than those in other occupations to split hairs, play devil's advocate, rationalize, indulge in post hoc justifications, and fall prey to the perils of cultural relativity. All of which is to say, there are things about this profession that can often make it hard to maintain a principled, moral personal compass. Indeed, that may have proven true for some of the law school professors with whom Prof. B is familiar (although I'm confident that all of his own compasses are steadfast and true).

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So there is much upon which I think we probably agree. Where I part company with Prof. B, however, is over whether Edwards' career as a lawyer who primarily represented plaintiffs in personal injury cases is, by itself, a factor that ought to cut against his being President.

It's perfectly possible, for example, for a lawyer to be polite, honest, and ethical; literate and well-educated; a fiscal conservative; a hawk on national defense and foreign policy; a libertarian on most issues involving personal liberty; a federalist; a textualist in statutory interpretation, an originalist in constitutional interpretation, and a proponent of judicial restraint; an opponent of both racism and racial preferences; a God-fearing Christian who nevertheless believes in evolution and the death penalty, but is horribly conflicted on the subject of abortion; and a lifelong Republican — and yet to have also represented plaintiffs in personal injury cases with some regularity. I know a few of those, and although plaintiffs' personal injury work has never been the bulk of my practice, I have from time to time been among that small but still significantly significant number. (That a huge portion of Angry Left Democratic candidates' funding comes from members of the plaintiffs' personal injury bar does not mean that all plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers support those candidates, no more than all members of the mainstream media do.)

And I'm not sure it's fair to use Edwards' membership in a subgroup of lawyers who may, in the aggregate, be bad for society or the economy, as a basis to extrapolate the kinds of national or international economic decisions he'd be likely to make as President. Lawyers who work on a contingent fee basis may indeed be keenly motivated by the prospect of sharing in their clients' recovery — again, that would describe me, from time to time, and it's the entire premise of the contingent fee system. But I don't think Edwards' decision-making as President would likely be motivated by personal greed for money, whatever his motivations have been during his career as a plaintiff's personal injury lawyer.

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Instead, I think John Edwards would be likely to make presidential decisions less through principle of any sort than through constant focus-grouping and opinion polling. He would be a weather-vane President — always acting with an eye toward satisfying his Angry Left base, yet usually also trying to fool the moderates in order to thereby ensure his re-election. His greed would be not for money — he has plenty — but instead for power, and for the means for obtaining and retaining it.

I'm not sure there is a genuine center to John Edwards: I'm confident that he can certainly be a persuasive advocate, but I'm not at all sure that he's capable of being a strong-willed principal.

I believe, in other words, that if elected, Edward would likely be a lot like a former President, William Jefferson Clinton, or another Presidential wannabe, Hillary Rodham Clinton — neither of whom have ever been plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers, but both of whom are lawyers, or were until Bubba had to surrender his license. Indeed, both Clintons have been law professors. And they're both capable of debating what the meaning of "is" is, or of rationalizing methods by which small change has become a small fortune in futures trading.

Abe Lincoln was, by all accounts, a first-rate trial lawyer whose cases included representation of plaintiffs suing to recover for personal injuries, and who often worked on a contingent-fee basis. But that doesn't mean that he had much in common with John Edwards, or with Bill or Hillary Clinton, in terms of any of their fitness to be President.

NYT blames Bush's Iraq policies for muting the "joy" over Saddam's execution

I'm sure that Dubya and his press office are long since used to their Catch-22 problems in dealing with mainstream media organizations like the New York Times, which will include in tomorrow's edition the following remarkable paragraphs (boldface mine) in a "news analysis" piece headlined "Joy of Capture Muted at End":

CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 29 — The capture of Saddam Hussein three years ago was a jubilant moment for the White House, hailed by President Bush in a televised address from the Cabinet Room. The execution of Mr. Hussein, though, seemed hardly to inspire the same sentiment.

Since his arrest on Dec. 13, 2003, Mr. Hussein has gradually faded from view, save for his courtroom outbursts and writings from prison. The growing chaos and violence in Iraq has steadily overshadowed the torturous rule of Mr. Hussein, who for more than two decades held a unique place in the politics and psyche of the United States, a symbol of the manifestation of evil in the Middle East.

Now, what could have been a triumphal bookend to the American invasion of Iraq has instead been dampened by the grim reality of conditions on the ground there....

A "triumphal bookend"? But for the "growing chaos and violence in Iraq" that the NYT would attribute to Dubya, we'd feel "joy" at this execution — "joy" that now must be muted?

When he was the governor of Texas, Dubya didn't have to worry about his press statements on the many, many executions he was asked to stay causing regional or sectarian violence between, say, Episcopalians in Austin and Baptists in Dallas. But he still knew how to behave in a dignified and solemn fashion with respect to solemn events that require dignity. That's exactly what he's done here, with a short and simple statement marking the occasion, but containing no "triumph" nor "joy" nor celebration of any sort.

As for the Catch-22: Can you imagine what the MSM and their favorites from the Angry Left would have done had Dubya, for example, high-fived Dick Cheney in public to celebrate Saddam's execution? Had the President invited a few key friends and generals over to watch the TV coverage? Or even had Mr. Bush called a simple press conference specifically occasioned by this event? "Ghoulish!" the NYT would have cried. "Unbefitting of an American president, but entirely in keeping with his record as one who presided over so many executions in Texas and then presided over the wanton slaughter of so many innocent civilians in Iraq!" we'd have heard from Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.

With respect to those whose hatred of the Bush-43 Administration drives and shapes their reaction to every current event, it's indeed true that no good deed by this President goes unpunished.

Meanwhile, the same NYT story contains a quote from a world-class ass-hat blow-hard:

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who ran against Mr. Bush in 2004 and has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the war, said executing Mr. Hussein was hardly worth the cost.

"To go to war to kill one guy? Please," said Mr. Kerry, who recently returned from a visit to Iraq....

Thus does the former prosecutor who bragged during the 2004 presidential campaign that he'd created "a victim's rights unit that was the first of its kind in Massachusetts and one of the first in the nation" honor the memory of hundreds of thousands of innocents slain by this monster.

Class and the absence thereof with respect to the late Pres. Gerald R. Ford

The first vote I ever cast in a presidential election was for Gerald R. Ford in 1976. He'll be remembered as an honest and decent man — a class act whose presidential skills, if not equal to those of Ronald Reagan, at least looked considerably better by the end of Jimmy Carter's disastrous presidency.

It's ironic, then, that Bob Woodward and the Washington Post, who played such a substantial part in the political demise of President Ford's predecessor, have chosen the occasion of his death to publish a remarkably classless front-page "news report" breathlessly entitled "Ford Disagreed with Bush About Invading Iraq."

Explains Woodward: "The [July 2004] Ford interview — and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 — took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published at any time after his death." One wonders if Woodward got that permission through a candid and honest request, which would have gone like this:

"Hey, Mr. President, I know that to induce your cooperation, I told you these interviews were intended for a reflective and in-depth book I'm planning to write some years from now. But actually, within hours of your death and before you've even been laid to rest, my newspaper and I plan to quote selectively and sensationally from anything you tell me for the deliberate purpose of trying to make the incumbent president look bad — since after all, you won't be around to refute my spin then. With respect to anything remotely critical or negative that you say about Dubya or Cheney or Rumsfield, I'm going to make out like this was you entrusting me to deliver on your behalf some important posthumous political message — maybe even a warning from beyond the grave! — to the whole American public. We'll pick that time to 'break' this 'news story' because that will be the moment of maximum good feeling toward you in the public's sentiments, and thus your comments as spun by us will do the maximum amount of damage to the current administration. Oh, sure, we've talked here for several hours over the course of two separate interviews over two years. But I'm going to pick out the seven sentences I like best, edit out anything and everything else that might have provided any context, and then put up a transcript and audio recordings of just those seven sentences on the Washington Post website as 'support' for my 'revelation.' Is that plan okay with you?"

Woodward shows that he can also selectively ignore major elements of history:

In the end, though, it was Vietnam and the legacy of the retreat he presided over that troubled Ford. After Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States evacuated from Vietnam, Ford was often labeled the only American president to lose a war. The label always rankled.

"Well," he said, "I was mad as hell, to be honest with you, but I never publicly admitted it."

Why would President Ford have been "mad as hell"? That's obvious to anyone who knows that the proximate cause of the fall of the South Vietnamese government in April 1975 was the refusal of the post-Watergate radical-dove Congress to continue the economic and indirect military aid that President Ford had urgently requested. That refusal led directly to what was, in my view, not America losing a war, but America's most shameful betrayal ever of an ally — but however it's characterized, the blame for it cannot be laid at President Ford's feet.

I'd wager that Woodward knows those facts, and that he knows that most Americans of this era don't. But is Woodward's disingenuous misreading of history important? Only if you expect, as I do, that the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will begin trying to run American foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere through similar hyper-management of the military's purse-strings.

I'd make a wish that someone, someday, would selectively spin-quote Woodward to promote some politically nasty purpose within hours of his death, whenever that happens. But that would accord Woodward a degree of implied respect that he's long since forfeited. Gerald Ford was a dedicated and noble public servant who deserves to be honored and mourned. Bob Woodward is a worm who would begin gnawing his corpse before it's even in the ground.

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UPDATE (Thu Dec 28 @ 6pm): Bill Bennett posted a very, very different reaction to the Woodward article over on The Corner (ellipsis in original):

[J]ust how decent, how courageous, is what Jerry Ford did with Bob Woodward? He slams Bush & Cheney to Woodward in 2004, but asks Woodward not to print the interview until he's dead. If he felt so strongly about his words having a derogatory affect, how about telling Woodward not to run the interview until after Bush & Cheney are out of office? The effect of what Ford did is to protect himself, ensuring he can't be asked by others about his critiques, ensuring that there can be no dialogue. The way Ford does it with Woodward, he doesn't have to defend himself ... he simply drops it into Bob Woodward's tape recorder and lets the bomb go off when fully out of range himself.

It's hard for me to imagine that Mr. Bennett would reflexively assume that Bob Woodward's participation in this was benign, altruistic, and unspun, but that President Ford's intent was to throw bombs, via Woodward, at the Bush-43 administration after President Ford's death. I believe that peddling that notion was precisely Woodward's and the WaPo's intention, but I'm surprised that Mr. Bennett would be so completely fooled by it.

NRO's Jonah Goldberg, meanwhile, posted a link to a Thomas DeFrank piece in today's New York Daily News that, as Mr. Goldberg points out, is "a good deal more nuanced than the Woodward version." It includes this (first bracketed portion and boldface mine, second bracketed portion in original):

Ford was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted [during a May 2006 interview] for about 45 minutes. He'd been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he'd told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.

"Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him," he observed, "but we shouldn't have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?"

I suppose I'm one of the most consistent supporters of the Bush-43 administration left in America. I'm the sort of person who'd respond to the late President Ford's question, for example, by pointing out that concerns over WMD were legitimate, but in any event they were only one out of a long list of justifications offered by the Bush administration and the Congress for overturning Saddam's regime.

But if a newspaper reporter were, for some odd reason, to spend two hours interviewing me about events since January 2001, I'm quite certain that at the end of the interview, that reporter could — if he were unscrupulous — extract at least seven sentences that he could post in partial-transcript form, and on the basis of which he could run a story breathlessly headlined: "Beldar Bashes Bush!" That, of course, would not be a newsworthy headline, and the deception not worth the reporter's or his newspaper's efforts. Unfortunately for President Ford's posthumous reputation with people like Mr. Bennett, however, that sort of ghoulish spin apparently was considered worthwhile by Woodward and the WaPo.

Gasped from Mass: "Et tu, Teddy?"

"I have no plans of supporting anyone else at this juncture. I'm also not going to just wait indefinitely until he's made a judgment or a decision."

Thus, as quoted in the Boston Globe (hat-tip K-Lo), did the senior Senator from Massachusetts land a torpedo below the waterline of the junior Senator from Massachusetts' swift boat. According to the Globe, "Kennedy said he has informed Kerry that he may get behind another Democrat for president," but of course, Teddy also reserves the right to vote for the latter-day JFK, even if he's now voting against him:

Later in the day, Kennedy's office issued a statement clarifying that Kennedy will support Kerry if he declares his presidential candidacy "in the near term," though Kennedy aides declined to define that schedule.

Such comments from aides sound a lot like lesser Roman senators offering Julius Caesar their soiled hankies as he bleeds out on the stone floor, don't they? Meanwhile, back to Brutus' remarks while the dagger was still fresh in hand (bracketed portion by the Globe, ellipsis mine):

Kennedy's praise for Obama and Clinton adds to the growing perception that the two are distinct front-runners for the Democrats' 2008 presidential nomination, with Kerry trailing along with a cluster of lesser-known governors and senators. If Kerry runs again, he'd have to break through a crowded field of emerging contenders, Kennedy said.

"You'd have to say that there's a number of people who are out there — Barack and Hillary, if Barack runs and Hillary runs — they're obviously very formidable figures," said Kennedy....

"They're obviously having a good deal of appeal, because I think that's what people want to hear about," he added. "They are ringing the bells, because they're talking about what people were, I think, concerned about during the course of the [congressional] election."

But surely, Senator Kennedy — consistent with the spin your aides are going to try to put on your comments later today — you'll be urging Sen. Kerry to jump into the race right away, won't you?

Quoth the Leviathan on that topic:

Kennedy acknowledged that Kerry has more flexibility to decide than some of the other candidates, because he has wide name recognition and a campaign war chest of $13 million. But Kennedy, a presidential contender himself in 1980, demurred when asked his advice for Kerry.

"I've known John long enough and been with him enough and he's a good enough friend — this is going to be something he's going to, you know, make up his own mind about," he said.

"A good enough friend." R.I.P., Kerry '08 Campaign — for there (if I may be allowed to switch my character allusions and revise their dialog just a bit) is your political epitaph, from one who came not to praise, but clearly to bury you.

Tom DeLay's blogroll

I think I'll eventually be able to overcome my disappointment at not being on Tom DeLay's blogroll (hat-tip OTB). Let's see: I learned he had a blogroll at 5:01 pm today. And I now (5:04 pm) seem to be over it. Yup.

As a believer in the two-party system, I've always been appreciative of Mr. DeLay's mostly behind-the-scenes effectiveness in enforcing party discipline. I thought his involvement in the Texas redistricting battles was an example of brutal but long-precedented hardball politics — and ultimately something that was driven by small-d democracy. (Red-state Texas was not going to retain a majority of Democratic Congressmen for much longer whether Tom DeLay had been involved or not.) I don't think he's been a productive public face for the Republican Party, though, nor an appropriately parsimonious steward of the public piggy-bank. We'll see how he turns out as a blogger.

I'm wondering if one or another of his less renowned co-bloggers actually compiled that blogroll, though. Somehow I have a fairly hard time picturing former Congressman DeLay actually reading Frank J at IMAO on a regular basis.

On the other hand — that could explain a lot.

Questions not to be read while imbibing fizzy drinks

Let's hope John Fund's readers aren't mid-swallow when they read the title of his essay in today's OpinionJournal: "Pelosi's Promise: Will the next speaker live up to her word and clean House?" The droll Mr. Fund had an answer already in mind when he, or someone, wrote that title, but read the whole thing.

I'm one of the five

Over on The Corner, John Derbyshire writes that

[i]f anyone deserves th[e] title [of "uberwonk"], it is surely NR's publisher Jack Fowler. At an editorial meeting this morning we were discussing the House of Representatives. The issue of cloture came up. Jack, briskly: "The House doesn't have a cloture rule."

I don't know about you, but I found this sensationally impressive. I mean, how many people — people not employed on Capitol Hill — know that? Five?

I don't doubt that Mr. Fowler and Mr. Derbyshire are both extremely knowledgeable, but the reason that the House of Representatives doesn't need a cloture rule is because it doesn't have rules that otherwise permit unlimited debate. Mr. Fowler probably was able to be particularly "brisk" on this topic because he knows that House leaders have long been able to make their members siddown and shaddup, but that that's not so in the Senate. Indeed, that's one of the fundamental historical differences between the two chambers, and a very large part of the reason why minorities in the Senate have been able to block legislation when comparable minorities in the House haven't.

I'm pretty sure that considerably more than five of my readers knew that, wonks or not.

Spitzer smile freezes as sharp-tongued Schumer slaps Rangel

If ever there were a photograph that deserves a caption contest, it's this one from a NYT story headlined "Spitzer Visits Capitol Hill With Long List." (The subhead should, I believe, say something about "naughty and nice" and "checking it twice.")

The NYT's actual caption is much, much more boring than the photo: "Eliot Spitzer, New York's governor-elect, middle, met with Representative Charles Rangel, right, and Senator Charles Schumer, at a breakfast with the New York congressional delegation."

I'm sure you can do better. Comments are open.

One small step for a man ...

After a giant leap on July 20, 1969, mankind has mostly stood pretty still, looking around and even backtracking.

(And yes, Neil Armstrong actually did say "one small step for a man," which makes vastly more sense in context. Armstrong is a pragmatic, in some ways enigmatic fellow, but he's no dummy, and fully appreciated the significance of the moment. Modern voice-analysis software has confirmed that his "a" was indeed spoken, although inaudible over the moon-to-earth radio link.)

The space shuttle has certainly added lots to our scientific knowledge. The space station was a great idea that's been only poorly realized for the most part. But even the most enthusiastic supporters of those programs must concede that nothing has remotely matched the drama and excitement and enthusiasm that attended the first moon landing.

I was about to start the sixth grade, and I can remember that day vividly. As I watched on television with my family, I was surrounded by plastic scale models of the Eagle and the Columbia and the Saturn V, and I could describe for you in detail every stage of the Apollo 11 mission. Those men, and their predecessors in the space program, were the heroes of my childhood. I was a Sputnik baby, born a month after the space race began in 1957, and I could name every Mercury astronaut, and every Gemini astronaut too.

I cried for days over Apollo One. I was in the midst of a jury trial when the Challenger blew up on January 28, 1986. I heard about it over my lunch break, as I was eating a stale tuna-fish sandwich at the courthouse while preparing my closing argument, and wondered if I could manage to hold down that lunch and get through the day. And I was blogging on the morning of February 1, 2003, when the shuttle Columbia was destroyed during re-entry. Each of those setbacks hurt. But it never once seemed to me that they were good reasons, or any reasons at all, to give up on manned exploration of space.

My own four kids, by contrast, have only the vaguest of appreciation for our astronauts of today — notwithstanding having grown up in "Space City USA," home of NASA and Mission Control, the city whose name was the first word spoken from the surface of the moon, the city where John Kennedy first announced (in a speech that still reads awfully well today) that we would go to the moon in that decade, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. My kids read a fair amount of science fiction. But to them, it's little different from reading fantasy. Dragons, trolls, faster-than-light spaceships — all sort of alike in the category of speculative fiction, something entertaining but not something to which they directly relate. My kids have never tediously assembled plastic models of the shuttle or the space station, not because they lack imagination, but because our society hasn't sufficiently challenged and tantalized their imagination with tangible, current adventures in space.

Sure, there are lots of other things for governments, including ours, to spend money on. There always will be. But what kind of penny-pinching, short-sighted fool has such a limited imagination that he can't see the opportunities, the destiny here? I have no patience with such people, and I cannot identify with them at all.

So I'm pretty gung-ho about the newly announced NASA plans for a permanent moon colony and its eventual role as a way-station to Mars and beyond. In my "topics" choice for this post, I've included "politics" along with "current affairs" — but this ain't about politics, and it's really not even about what's current. I don't have a category set up for blog posts about "really important stuff connected with the destiny of our race," but this is all about the future, and it's really, really important — not so much for me or my own kids, but for theirs and their grandkids and their grandkids' grandkids.