Categories
Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

That’s What You Get For Trusting a WSJ Editorial

[digg-reddit-me]Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had an editorial that got passed around as if it were a news story, insisting that the decision of a board of doctors and scientists to recommend that biannual breast cancer screening only for those between the ages of 50 and 75 “is a sign of cost control to come.” The editorial cited this fact:

But the panel—which includes no oncologists and radiologists, who best know the medical literature—did decide to re-analyze the data with health-care spending as a core concern.

Yet this isn’t what news articles are reporting:

Panel members said politics and questions of cost were never part of their discussions of the risks and benefits of mammograms — in fact they are prohibited from considering costs when they make guidelines.

Or this:

In reaching its recommendations, the task force of doctors and scientists determined that early and frequent mammograms often lead to false-positive readings and unnecessary biopsies, without substantially improving the odds of survival for women under 50.

And it is not the rationale given by the report itself:

The harms resulting from screening for breast cancer include psychological harms, unnecessary imaging tests and biopsies in women without cancer, and inconvenience due to false-positive screening results. Furthermore, one must also consider the harms associated with treatment of cancer that would not become clinically apparent during a woman’s lifetime (overdiagnosis), as well as the harms of unnecessary earlier treatment of breast cancer that would have become clinically apparent but would not have shortened a woman’s life. Radiation exposure (from radiologic tests), although a minor concern, is also a consideration.

Adequate evidence suggests that the overall harms associated with mammography are moderate for every age group considered, although the main components of the harms shift over time. Although false-positive test results, overdiagnosis, and unnecessary earlier treatment are problems for all age groups, false-positive results are more common for women aged 40 to 49 years, whereas overdiagnosis is a greater concern for women in the older age groups.

There is adequate evidence that teaching BSE is associated with harms that are at least small. There is inadequate evidence concerning harms of CBE.

That hasn’t stopped this from becoming a right wing talking point nor from causing concerns among independents uncertain about whom to believe – the statements of the board itself, claiming they focused on science, or the speculating opinions of right wingers, playing into people’s worst fears.

I have some advice for those people on the fence: Read the damn report if you don’t trust the media. Don’t put your blind faith in the often discredited Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Emotional Logic of Trying KSM in Federal Court

[digg-reddit-me]This is the response of a friend of mine on her Facebook page to the news that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and 4 other detainees were going to be tried in federal court in New York.

When I heard the news, my first response was different: “Good. Finally we’re starting to deal with this mess,” the mess being the uncertain state of detainees and whether along with the many unresolved issues stemming from September 11. There was a kind of satisfaction – that we would finally be making progress, that decisions were being made, that the limbo that has been in place since September 11 would finally be resolved.

But I hadn’t anticipated the emotion it would stir up in many others, who reacted with a kind of visceral disgust. Most of the various reasons used to justify this disgust are manageable issues: the disclosure of classified information; the use of the trial as a platform for Al Qaeda propaganda; the security threat to New York City; the possibility of an acquittal; and whether terrorism should be treated as a crime or an act of war.

I don’t see any of these reasons as explaining the visceral reaction. They are the rational explanations we reach for after we reach our decision, rather than what compels us to come to the decision.

It is my opinion – and I want to make that clear as I am merely speculating as to what other people believe – that this issue has been such an emotional one because a trial of KSM would represent a kind of emotional closure to the trauma of September 11. Thus, the stakes are high. For 8 years, the Bush administration seemed unwilling or unable to move beyond the trauma of that day. They created an ad hoc legal structure to deal with terrorism that was often parallel and inferior to what was already in place. Surely compromised in their panic, they authorized the brutal torture of many guilty men and some innocent. Without in depth knowledge of the organization or the area of the world in which it operated, they simply decided to use their most valuable resource: money; they offered bounties to militias for each person they brought in, without any consistent way of evaluating whether these people brought in were guilty of anything or were knowledgeable about anything relevant. They were unwilling to let any person who had been captured free, on the chance that they might be wrong, and so held innocents as prisoners for years. In this climate of fear, a hunch of an investigator was enough to hold a man prisoner for years without any evidence and without any trial and without any accountability. While the Bush administration gradually scaled back the worst abuses, often due to court or rarely, Congressional, intervention, it never repudiated the precedents it set in the panic, precedents that if invoked would create an authoritarian executive.

This is what bothered most of the liberals, what they feared. They saw in Bush’s immediate response an understandable panic, but in the precedents he set by refusing to repudiate the measures he took, the seeds of the destruction of our republic.

On the other hand, what I believe underlies right wingers’ (and others’) defense of these precedents is a lack of faith in America’s system of justice. This lack of faith is evidenced by the right wing characterization of our courts as “liberal” or ‘left-wing” despite the fact that a sizable majority of judges have been appointed by Republican presidents. It is evidenced by the caricature of our criminal justice system and our tort system that the right wing promotes – a caricature in which hard-working, innocent corporations are persecuted by greedy trial lawyers and criminals are set free on technicalities. (See Footnote.) Those who already distrusted our justice system found in September 11 further proof of this – as they blamed our courts for releasing information to Al Qaeda, for letting terrorists free, and for undermining investigations into terrorism. An alternative justice system was created within the military to deal with those suspected of terrorism, one in which initially, suspects had few rights – whether to call witnesses in their defense, to question their accusers, to be presumed innocent, to see evidence held against them, or even to be released if despite all of this, they were found innocent. Not surprisingly, this unjust system caused a number of the military’s judge advocates and prosecutors (including the Chief Prosecutor) to resign in protest. Some of the worst flaws in this military commission system have been fixed, as courts and Congress intervened – but the system has been delegitimized in the view of much of the world. Most defenders of this system of military commissions opposed the fixes at the time as well.

This is where we stand today. There is an emotional logic to the decision and to the responses that informs the debate far more than the mere facts and policy issues.

The purpose of terrorism is to undermine the legitimacy of the state. The rule of law and our justice system is at the core of what makes a state legitimate, what allows a state to gain the informed consent of the governed. By creating an alternative justice system to deal with terrorism, we – to put the matter in the strongest terms – preemptively give up one of the core foundations of the state’s legitimacy. This only makes sense if our justice system itself is fundamentally corrupt and/or illegitimate, or if terrorism in some way invalidates it.

Trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in an open trial in federal court in a system with well-known precedents and rules demonstrates that the 3 successful attacks on September 11 failed to bring down our justice system along with the towers. He will be tried; given the evidence against him, he will almost certainly be found guilty; and then he will be executed. (Though I oppose the death penalty, but there are exceptions to every rule.) That will be the sternest measure of justice we can give him on earth. After that, we must trust to powers beyond our own to mete out the appropriate suffering.

Footnote: There are examples which demonstrate this caricature, and which refute it, and there are common sense reforms which could reduce the instances of abuse of the system.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Health Care Reform is the most significant effort at cost control in a generation, if not ever.

[digg-reddit-me]Once health care reform passes, the White House has signaled it will begin to focus more specifically on the deficit. (Also, on jobs, cap and trade, and financial regulation.)

But as the Obama administration presented it initially: Health care reform is deficit reduction. (Ezra Klein, health care policy wonk, blogger, and columnist for the Washington Post, has been making this case all along, as have many other technocratic types and policy wonks and health care experts.) That’s why Peter Orszag made the phrase, “bend the curve” into a buzzword, referring to the attempt to bring down the rate of growth of health care spending. Here for example is a graph of our projected budget deficit as a percentage of GDP based on current growth rates, lowering those growth rates, and adopting measures to have Britain-like growth rates:

While any bill that might get past Congress at this point won’t live up to the early wet dreams of policy wonks (It won’t even bring us to the level of the blue line in the above graph), it would – to quote Ezra – still “represent the most significant effort at cost control in a generation, if not ever.” (my emphasis.) (He specifically refers to three provisions in the Senate Finance Committee bill: the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans; the newly empowered Medicare Commission; and various delivery-system reforms.) In fact – again according to Ezra – the “health-care reform bills currently under consideration in both the Senate and the House actually cut money from the deficit.” Despite this, the same Republicans (often the exact same individuals) who 6 years ago cast “a vote to add about $400 billion to the deficit in the first 10 years, and trillions more in the decades after that,” with Medicare Part D are now criticizing the current bill which would decrease the deficit as “fiscally irresponsible.”  Ezra:

It’s like watching arsonists calling the fire department reckless.

This constant obstructionism by the Republicans – on both matters of fiscal stimulus and health care – is gradually eating away at the public will to act and is therefore undermining confidence in America’s economy and long-term fiscal situation, and by undermining this confidence, making a disaster more likely. Noam Scheiber of The New Republic describes how the struggle to enact meaningful health care reform is a concern for the largest holders of American debt, the Chinese:

To his surprise, when Orszag arrived at the site of the annual U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), the Chinese didn’t dwell on the Wall Street meltdown or the global recession. The bureaucrats at his table mostly wanted to know about health care reform, which Orszag has helped shepherd…”At some point, if you refuse to contain health care costs, you’ll go bankrupt,” says Andy Xie, a prominent Shanghai-based economist, formerly of Morgan Stanley.

The efforts at cost control proposed by the Democrats might fail, as Republicans suggest. But it is irresponsible not to try, and to obstruct any attempts to try. Republicans have begun to demagogue the bills before Congress both for cutting Medicare and for increasing the amount of health care spending. They are not willing to give the Democrats any political cover to take any fiscally responsible measures. This partisan refusal to work towards solving long-term problems has been the key to Republican successes from 1994 to the present. (Not so for the Democrats, many of whom joined George W. Bush in passing his No Child Left Behind act, his tax cuts, and his Medicare Part D bill, but undoubtedly, both sides bear some blame.) This has created a political culture in which Washington has two directives:  “spend money on things I like and don’t raise my taxes.” This isn’t solely a Republican problem. It is more that the Republicans, by remaining stubbornly united, have made these flaws evident. Klein again:

The issue isn’t that some storm will unexpectedly slam into the economy and there will be nothing anybody can do, but that the storm will hit and Congress will choose to do nothing

The biggest danger America faces is not rising health-care costs or global warming or the budget deficit. It’s the political system’s inability to act on these issues, even though the solutions are generally quite clear.

Take a moment and read the articles linked to – especially the three Ezra Klein posts from the past two days. (On the Senate Finance Bill’s cost control measures; On Medicare Part D; and On Our Political System’s Inability to Act.)

Keep in mind that Obama’s proposals are not “radical leftist” but essential and moderate tinkering that incorporates Republican as well as Democratic ideas. The Tea Party-ers may be outraged at the imaginary specters of death panels and government-mandated abortion. But it is the rest of us who should be outraged at the inability of our political system or our politics to address these long-term issues responsibly.

Categories
Barack Obama Humor

2parse.com Presents Exclusive Pictures of Obama Bowing to More Anti-American Groups

[digg-reddit-me]The right wing is aflutter with the news that Obama not only bowed to the Saudi king, but the Japanese emperor. Clearly, this man hates America and worships this foreign leaders. We all remember the pictures:

But 2parse.com has an exclusive look at Obama bowing to various other anti-American groups.

(Update: And it turns out George H. W. Bush was a secret, America-hating Commie too.)

Little anti-American kids:

America-hating Girl Scouts:

Joe Biden:

More below the fold.

Continue reading “2parse.com Presents Exclusive Pictures of Obama Bowing to More Anti-American Groups”
Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Deconstructing the Right Wing Appropriation of the Term “Appeasement”

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve tried hard to find something to respect about Victor Davis Hanson – as he takes himself seriously, and is taken seriously, including by people whom I take seriously – but for the most part, his pieces are just less hysterical attempts to push right wing memes. Only in a world of Sean Hannitys, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, Jonah Goldbergs, Kathryn Lopezes, Michelle Malins, and Ann Coulters, is he a moderate.

But he has an interesting post over at The Corner, making a good point in defense of George W. Bush (though in the service of a meme that so many of these independent, individualistic conservatives promote in a synchronized fashion: that Obama should stop blaming George W. Bush for what he inherited.) Hanson points out that Bush inherited some bad “stuff” from Bill Clinton – including a mild recession, simmering issues with Iraq and the Middle East, and Osama bin Laden on the loose – and left some improved areas to Barack Obama – including an Iraq much improved from its chaos earlier in Bush’s term, relationships with Europe much improved from earlier in Bush’s term, a Libya that had given up its nuclear program, and a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.  Obama inherited a more challenging set of issues than Bush though: Two wars, the worst economic conditions in 80 years, a deficit doubled in 8 years and having grown so large it threatens America’s fiscal solvency, America at its lowest standing in the world community in a generation, Osama Bin Laden still at large, an Iranian regime strengthened and emboldened as America took away every check on its power, etcetera, etcetera.

But even while making this valid point, Hanson resorts to propagandic measures – none of which actively undermine the point he is trying to make – but all of which together demonstrate that he is merely attempting to write propaganda rather than engage with the issues. He only cites those facts that prove his point, ignores the large amount of contradictory evidence, and makes a number of questionable assertions. (Is Kim Jong Il really on better terms with Obama than Bush? Ahmadinejad? Putin – into whose eyes Bush looked and got “a sense of his soul“?)

But perhaps most telling, is his use of the buzzword, “appease.” To quote George Orwell in his “Politics and the English Language,” propagandists organize their thoughts as collections of  “phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” Rather than choose words based on their meaning, they instead choose those which best serve their ideology. For example, Orwell, writes that some words, “now [have] no meaning except in so far as [they] signify[…] ‘something not desirable.’ ” He uses word “Fascism” as an example of this – and the word “democracy” as an example of a word that is used to mean merely “something good.” Hanson’s writing doesn’t always have that prefabricated henhouse feel – as some writers do (Kathryn Lopez, I’m looking at you!) – but he does misuse language in the manner Orwell discussed.

The most glaring issue is his use of a single word. Hanson writes:

George W. Bush inherited…a pattern of appeasing radical Islam after its serial attacks (on the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, U.S. embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole). [my emphasis]

Think about the use of the word “appease” in this context. The word means “to make peace with” often by “acceding to demands or granting concessions.” Bill Clinton’s response to these attacks – prosecuting the perpetrators, bombing locations we believed were related to Al Qaeda, and attempting to assassinate Osama bin Laden – doesn’t fit into what anyone would call “making peace with” or “acceding” to any demands. The word “appease” then was chosen not because of its meaning, but because of its place in Hanson’s ideology. The word “appease” – as used by right wingers – has evolved from its literal definition. They use it to call forth comparisons to the single historical moment that has defined neoconservative thinking: Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich. Chamberlain famously did seek to appease Hitler, offering him Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia in return for peace. And just as famously, it did not work.

Right wingers now though seem to see every national security issue as a binary choice between Appeasement and Confrontation. Obama wants to try terrorists in federal court instead of military commissions? Appeasement. Democrats oppose sending a surge of troops into Iraq? Appeasement. Iran wants to negotiate peace with the United States? If we even talk to them, it’s Appeasement, so we must choose Confrontation and ignore them. Only if every national security decision is seen as a binary choice between Appeasement and Confrontation does the disastrous first term decisions by Bush make sense. Orwell warned that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Language is corrupted in order to “defend the indefensible” and to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Thus, words such as “appease” are now used by right wingers to distract and obfuscate from the history that was and to suggest an enhanced and alternate view of the history that proves them correct.

[Image in the public domain.]

Categories
The Web and Technology

Brief Thoughts for the Week of 2009-11-13

  • If Pakistani terrorists had done to New Orleans what Bush’s hapless FEMA did after Katrina, he’d have invaded Iran. http://bit.ly/1vHwVL #
  • Wheelbarrow races never looked to good…Wait…WTF! (Thanks @reddit) http://bit.ly/3QZ2ij #
  • Today is the last day you can vote for Tess! So, you know, please do it! http://bit.ly/35nOos #
  • RT @karenhanretty Sure hope Job Summit results in a Blue Ribbon Commission. Or maybe a Task Force. At least a White Paper w/ Action Items. #
  • "We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes." http://2parse.com//?p=4265 #
  • "This generation has more than proved itself the equal of those who have come before." #
  • "But as we honor the many generations who have served, I think all of us…must acknowledge that…" #
  • "This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in a time of certain danger." #
  • A date late on my Veterans' Day tweets: "We are a nation that endures because of the courage of those who defend it." #
  • Fisking Camille Paglia on health care. Her column today rather pissed me off. http://2parse.com//?p=4261 #
  • This is exactly the sort of sensible criticism that – in my opinion – conservatives should be making. http://2parse.com//?p=4163 #
  • Yet another ad designed to be funny enough to go viral. http://bit.ly/G26CI #
  • Horoscope warning: Mistakes are normal but this many in 1 day can only mean 1 thing:people just don't understand you. Jokes will help, a lot #
  • Marijuana: Less Dangerous Than Aspirin http://bit.ly/33NpC5 #
  • Verizon pwns AT&T http://bit.ly/358EHp
    (H/t @gmoneil) #
  • "Oh, Michael Ledeen, to whom every Democrat is Chamberlain and every Republican is Churchill!" http://2parse.com//?p=4209 #
  • The video so awesome that it breaks YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/experiencere #
  • 95-Year-Old Yankees Fan Afraid He'll Never Get To See Team Win 27 More World Series. http://bit.ly/W8DZj #

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Categories
Barack Obama Catholicism China Criticism Economics Financial Crisis Gay Rights Politics The Bush Legacy The Media The Opinionsphere

Chinese Racism, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Power, Andrew Sullivan’s Catholicism, America’s Decline (?), and Megan Fox’s Savvy Self-Creation

Chinese Racism. Reiham Salam posits that China’s ethnocentrism will retard it’s development into a superpower – especially given the demographic obstacles it is facing thanks to it’s One Child Policy.

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Power. Gabriel Sherman describes the world of Andrew Ross Sorkin, star financial reporter for the New York Times, in New York magazine. He describes the unique amount of power Sorkin has accumulated in financial circles, all from the paper that was traditionally lagging behind the others in financial journalism. Attending a book party, Sherman observes the way Sorkin is treated by the many powerful titans of Wall Street:

“What you noticed when you went was how many powerful Wall Street people were there to kiss his ring,” adds The New Yorker‘s Ken Auletta, a party guest. “He’s a 32-yeard old guy, and there were all these titans of Wall Street crowding around to say hello and make nice to Andrew.”

That type of praise only makes your job harder of course.

Andrew Sullivan’s Catholicism. Andrew periodically writes these moving pieces about his Catholicism, and why he is still a Catholic. Yesterday, in an emotional response to a number of recent events, he writes:

Maybe I am too weak to leave and be done with it. But in my prayer life, I detect no vocation to do so. In fact, in so far as I can glean a vocation, it is to stay and bear witness, to be a thorn in the side, even if the thorn turns inward so often, and hurts and wounds me too.

I stay because I believe. And I stay because I hope. What I find hard is the third essential part: to love. So I stay away when the anger eclipses that. But the love for this church remains through the anger and despair: the goodness of so many in it, the truth of its sacraments, the knowledge that nothing is perfect and nothing is improved if you are not there to help it.

America’s Decline (?). John Plender writing in the Financial Times pokes several more holes in the growing consensus that China’s power will soon eclipse America’s. Rather, he sees China as returning to it’s historic position of economic power – increasing relative to America, but not eclipsing it given the various problems they are facing.


Megan Fox’s Savvy Self-Creation. When I saw the New York Times Magazine was writing a major article about Megan Fox I was intrigued. What about her might be interesting enough to hold up a feature? It turns out that there was quite enough. Lynn Hirschberg writes about a starlet whose main focus is her own image, the character she plays in the media. Fox deliberately holds herself apart from this character:

I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice. I’m not willing to give my true self up. It’s a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world. The reality is, I’m hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me.

As she studies Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, and other Hollywood icons, almost all of whom were overwhelmed by their characters, Fox seems to be searching for lessons she can take herself:

Monroe was her own brand before branding existed. “She lived her whole life as a character playing other characters,” Fox said. “And that was her defense mechanism. But Marilyn stumbled and lost her way. She became overwhelmed by the character she created. Hollywood is filled with women who have tried to cope. I like to study them. I like to see how they’ve succeeded. And how they’ve failed.”

Hirschberg didn’t seem to know whether Fox’s obsession with Monroe and other starlets would foreshadow Fox’s own decline, or whether it could be managed. The last lines Hirschberg leaves her readers with are plaintive:

In a few short weeks, she had gone from happily outrageous to virginal and controlled. It was, perhaps, a healthier attitude, but pale by comparison. “I have to pull back a little bit now,” Fox said. “I do live in a glass box. And I am on display for men to pay to look at me. And that bothers me. I don’t want to live that character.”

Categories
Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The perfect encapsulation of the liberal attacks on George W. Bush

Gene Lyons in Salon wrote the most awesome line. It is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the liberal attacks on George W. Bush – and as such, is also practically a caricature of those attacks. I read it, cringed a bit, and then thought, “Well…..I’m not sure which part I would disagree with.”

If Pakistani terrorists had done to New Orleans what Bush’s hapless FEMA appointees did after Katrina, he’d have invaded Iran…

Categories
Barack Obama Videos

Remembering Those Who Were Killed While the Pundits Glorify the Gunman

[digg-reddit-me]

Obama’s speech at Fort Hood on Tuesday didn’t get much coverage. It was lost amidst the constant churning of the news. In it, he said nothing “newsworthy.” But while it was not newsworthy, it was important. Obama focused on those who died that day, rather than the gunman. By his very approach, he made manifest the words of his erstwhile opponent, who in considering what America’s reaction to such threats should be said, “It is not about them; it is about us.” Marc Ambinder called the speech “The Best Speech Obama’s Given Since…Maybe Ever.” John Dickerson called it a “small masterpiece.”

While critics such as Charles Krauthammer may claim that Obama believes America should decline in power and Rush Limbaugh believes that Obama hates America so, Obama himself tells a different story of America:

[A]s we honor the many generations who have served, I think all of us – every single American – must acknowledge that this generation has more than proved itself the equal of those who have come before.

We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes.

This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in a time of certain danger. They are part of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known. They have served tour after tour of duty in distant, different and difficult places. They have stood watch in blinding deserts and on snowy mountains. They have extended the opportunity of self-government to peoples that have suffered tyranny and war. They are man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and stations – all Americans, serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life…

[W]hen today’s servicemen and women are veterans, and their children have grown – it will be said of this generation that they believed under the most trying of tests; that they persevered not just when it was easy, but when it was hard; and that they paid the price and bore the burden to secure this nation, and stood up for the values that live in the hearts of all free peoples.

Do yourself a favor – and as an antidote to the constant media circus of pundits bloviating and focusing their attention on the gunman and the other force that “killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did” (political correctness) – take a few minutes and pay attention to the story of us, and specifically to remember those who were killed on that day. It is, quite simply, the least we can do – to take a moment to pay attention to their lives instead of to glorify their killer and use their deaths as a cudgel against our domestic opponents.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Health care Politics The Media The Opinionsphere

Fisking Camille Paglia

[digg-reddit-me]Camille Paglia’s Salon weekly Salon column seems a product of a different time. One of the consequences of this is that she neglects to provide links sourcing some of the more bizarre claims she makes. At the same time, Paglia’s ideologically-applied contrarianism leads her to make quite a few of these bizarre statements. Her columns read like a caricature of media attempts to be “objective” and “independent” dreamed up by Glenn Greenwald rather than a sentient mind. Paglia seems determined to make sure neither Democrats nor Republicans, neither conservatives nor liberals feel comfortable with what she was to say. Thus, she endorses every criticism made by one side of the other, and credits no one with solutions. The defining element of her style is to take seriously the hypothetical or actual criticisms of various groups whom she then stereotypes in the crudest manner possible:

Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors’ offices. They’ll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

Paglia uses these stereotypes to demonstrate her disdain for and independence from those whose criticisms she is adopting. Her vaunted independence then serves only to mask an inability or unwillingness to differentiate between true claims and false ones as she navigates through policy issues without endorsing any coherent approach.

And today, she applies her mind to the health care debate. The result is predictable.

Paglia rather quickly demonstrates her complete ignorance of the basics of health care policy arguments by endorsing “portability of health insurance across state lines” as “the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices.” Paglia doesn’t see any reasons why Democrats might oppose this “common-sense” reform – so she presumes there must be some “covert business interests,” that Democrats are protecting. A simpler explanation might be that allowing the portability of health insurance across state lines would effectively deregulate the entire health insurance industry. Or at least, it would create a race to the bottom as health insurance companies would relocate to the state with the least regulation, after which states would compete to deregulate to attract this industry. Or maybe the Democrats are really in the pocket of some secret business that Paglia imagines.

Paglia goes on to ask “why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession?” She answers her own question without pausing: “liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.” The idea that this moderate bill – which resembles nothing so much as the Republican’s counter-offer to Bill Clinton in 1993 – is actually a liberal “utopian fantasy” is an easy straw man. Instead, this bill explicitly seeks to stabilize our status quo.

As to the question of, “Why now?” – Paglia might have taken the basic step of listening to any presidential address on this or read almost any liberal op-ed from before August. The presented explanation was that health care reform has to be the first step in entitlement reform. And entitlement reform is the first step towards fiscal solvency. And with the bond market and the Chinese government getting nervous about America’s solvency in the long-term, steps to bring the long-term deficit (which is almost entirely driven by the rising health care costs) into line were necessary. You couldn’t read a liberal op-ed on health care without seeing the Peter Orszag phrase “bend the curve” until this August when concerns about “death panels” and “killing Grandma” became paramount.

Speaking of which, Paglia makes sure to trot out these charges yet again – warning of imminent rationing and the “gutting” of Medicare:

How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable.

Truly, to brutally abandon individuals to live without health insurance is unconscionable. To forcibly ration by government fiat is certainly not anything most Americans would support. Perhaps because of this, neither of these is anywhere in any proposed health care legislation. The “slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion” was described slightly differently by Washington Post reporter T. R. Reid yesterday. He called it, a typical Washington spending “cut” – in that Medicare costs were budgeted to rise by $800 billion in the next 10 years, but now would be restrained to rise by half that. Medicare spending would still rise significantly. Washington is one of the few places where you can spend far more and still call something a “cut.” This reduction in the rate of spending would come from various places – one of which would be the Medicare Advantage program which would be subject to “a competitive bidding process that is designed to lower spending on the program.” What Paglia – along with most right wing critics – fail to understand is that health care reform is not about reducing spending, but about reducing the rate of growth of spending. If Paglia calls this “brutal abandonment,” one wonders how she might describe the state of the uninsured if she felt compelled to look to them!

Paglia’s other claims are similarly shallow – equal parts histronics and ignorance. The modest bill proposed does not “co-opt[…] and destroy[…] the entire U.S. medical infrastructure” nor create a “huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy.” In fact, because the bill makes great efforts not to co-opt or destroy the hybrid health insurance system we have that it creates a maze of small bureaucratic institutions to manage the maze of hybrid models that make up our system. They key innovation of the current bill is not any set of bureaucratic institutions but the creation of a managed marketplace, the health insurance exchange.

Paglia’s take on health care demonstrates a complete failure to differentiate between true claims and false ones, as she demonstrates independence not only from partisan forces but from any objective reality.

[Image by Ann Althouse licensed under Creative Commons.]