The New York Times has a front-page story today on the growing momentum on Capitol Hill to cut defense spending. It is not surprising that in an age when the Democrats are showering money on almost every domestic initiative known to man, the one area they would seek spending cuts is the defense budget.
Mr. Gates is calling for the Pentagon’s budget to keep growing in the long run at 1 percent a year after inflation, plus the costs of the war. It has averaged an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 7 percent a year over the last decade (nearly 12 percent a year without adjusting for inflation), including the costs of the wars. So far, Mr. Obama has asked Congress for an increase in total spending next year of 2.2 percent, to $708 billion — 6.1 percent higher than the peak under the Bush administration.
Get that: The Pentagon budget isn't going down. It's just not going to go up much, much faster than the rate of inflation. Instead, if the president and Robert Gates have their way, the budget will grow only slightly faster than the rate of inflation. That's still growth. And given that the United States is still spending as much as the rest of the world, combined, on its military -- well, that hardly represents a shirking of the "common defense" that Thiessen makes it out to be.
Four years ago today, we got married. In some ways it was a mere formality -- an excuse for getting dishes and coffee makers -- because we'd already been each other's family since, well, less than a month after we'd met. But this is a good date for remembering, and for letting the rest of you know what she means to me.
Coincidentally -- at least, I think coincidentally -- the last four years have been the most tulmutuous of my life. Jobs have changed, cities have changed, we became parents and, well, almost none of it has been easy.
But she has made it easier. She's been unwavering in her support, determined and optimistic when my confidence failed, a cheerleader -- but also completely willing to challenge me when I say something stupid. She likes watching silly Asian action flicks with me, and we enjoy going to art exhibits and the orchestra together. She's my friend, but she really is -- in ways I never dreamed -- a real partner.
She's also an amazing mother. It delights me to watch my wife and my son play with each other, and if I'm occasionally jealous that she gets far more of his affectionate moments than I do, well, I know she deserves them: She's worked much harder than I have at parenting.
I'll never forget the morning I woke up after Tobias was born. He'd arrived after midnight, and after processing and various other requirements, we didn't get to fall asleep in the hospital room until some hours later. I woke to hear Jo talking to our son -- and her voice was so cheerful, so loving, that I almost cried. I already knew I loved my wife; to hear her loving our child revealed to me that there was an extra chamber in my heart that I'd previously never known about.
I've also been privileged to become part of her family. They have been remarkably supportive and optimistic on my behalf, too, when times were rough. I've been humbled by the love they've extended to me. And I confess I don't always understand it.
Nor, frankly, do I understand why she loves me. But it seems she does, and shows it to me all the time. I often wonder what she gets out of our relationship. But I try not to ask the question as often as I think it. I'll have to live with the mystery. All I know is this: She does love me. It humbles me, and it emboldens me, and it makes my life better.
If "Die Hard: With A Vengeance" had been a standalone movie, instead of the third installment in a franchise...
...and if it had been made in 1975 instead of 1995...
...and if its second-half hadn't been overstuffed with the cliched tropes of 1990s overstuffed action movies...
...then the movie might be fondly remembered as a great heist movie instead of a middling entry in the Bruce Willis/Samuel Jackson oeuvre, one that's not all-that-remembered and even less-watched today.
But it's shocking how close the movie comes to a kind of "Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (the original) Hollywood greatness. (Here's a synopsis if you need a refresher.) In some respects, it's the best of the "Die Hard" bunch.
Why?
* For one thing, the movie stands alone in its real-world texturing. Whereas the first installment took place in a generic LA office building and the second in a generic airport, much of DHWAV is identifiably set on the streets -- and parks, in a somewhat famous race-against-the-clock scene -- in New York City. I'm a sucker for on-location shooting with a minimum of green-screen or CGI; I like my gritty cop movies to be, well, gritty. When the fourth installment came around a few years ago, it had ballooned into CGI ludicrousness -- Bruce Willis on the back of a Harrier jump jet? Really?* -- but this installment was firmly planted in a recognizable reality.
(*No, not really. That's a similar scene in "True Lies." In the last "Die Hard" film, though, Willis does take out a jump jet that's after him. And it's still ludicrous.)
* Before he meets John McClane, Samuel L. Jackson's character -- Zeus -- is established about as deftly as Hollywood can in the span of 90 seconds to two minutes. Two young boys bring a stolen stereo into Zeus' pawn shop and we quickly learn that A) he's no dummy, B) he keeps a watchful eye out in the community, C) he's a strong advocate of education as empowerment and D) he's got a little black power thing going on. Here, in exactly 20 lines, is the exchange that tells us everything we need to know about Zeus:
Zeus: Now, where you goin'?
Dexter: School.
Zeus: Why?
Raymond: To get educated.
Zeus: *Why*?
Dexter: So we can go to college.
Zeus: And why is that important?
Dexter: To get es-pect.
Zeus: RE-spect. Now, who's the bad guys?
Dexter: Guys who sell drugs.
Raymond: Guys who have guns.
Zeus: And who's the good guys?
Dexter: We're the good guys.
Zeus: Who's gonna help you?
Raymond: Nobody.
Zeus: *So who's gonna help you*?
Dexter: We're gonna help ourselves.
Zeus: And who do we not want to help us?
Dexter, Raymond: White people.
Zeus: That's right. Now get on outta here. Go to school.
Is that an archetype? Sure. But it's an expertly drawn archetype.
* If the movie had been made in 1975, too, the racial interaction between McClane and Zeus would maybe go down a little better. Both because, oddly, that era would've treated the subject with a little more frankness -- and it's "we all get along when we work together" ending wouldn't have seemed quite as suspect as it did 20 years later. As it is, there are too many scenes like this:
John McClane: I'll put my foot up your ass, you dumb, mother...
Zeus: Say it! Say it!
John McClane: What?
Zeus: You were gonna call me a nigger, weren't you?
John McClane: No I wasn't!
Zeus: Yes you were! What were you gonna call me?
John McClane: Asshole! How's that, asshole!
It's weird, too, that the movie makes racism seem to be, well, almost entirely Samuel L. Jackson's problem. The white people are all cool! It's the black people who just don't want to get along with their constant prickliness! Maybe the screenwriters felt they needed to get the mismatched-buddy-cop-movie tension going on -- say like "Lethal Weapon." This wasn't an effective way to do it.
* And like I said earlier, the movie -- full of riddles and puns and a heist for McClane and Zeus to solve -- is great fun until it's time to wrap things up. Things get generic: We see run-of-the-mill action, and our first shots of obvious green screen and CGI. A potentially great movie goes off track. And the ending ends up being an noisy bit of violence with some dumb macho wordplay. Unmemorable.
The shame of it is, this was almost the ending:
It's imperfect. Sure, there's a bit of "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!" going on here. But a quiet ending to a big Bruce Willis action flick goes against the grain, no? And the game-playing more neatly fits the riddles-and-quizzes action that dominated the rest of the movie.
One more note: It's impossible to watch a movie made before 2001 lightly. There are bombs going off in Manhattan, and scared people fleeing explosions -- and the World Trade Center in the background. It's difficult not to feel an ache.
Oh well. "Die Hard: With A Vengeance" had it within its grasp to be great. It got halfway there. And because of that, it's a better movie than you remember.
More than most American leaders who might run for president someday, Sarah Palin has made a career of dividing "us" and "them." Most famously, she spent parts of the 2008 dismissing her opponents and their allies as residing somewhere outside the "real America" -- and while she apologized for it, her constant grievance-mongering suggests she sees the world, and this country, mostly in terms of its divisions.
Don't get me wrong: Other leaders can be "divisive." Palin is different: The divisions animate her.
I mention all of this because of a recent posting to her Facebook page, which features this title: "An Intolerable Mistake on Hallowed Ground." She is, of course, talking about the proposed mosque to be located 600 feet or so from Ground Zero in New York.
I agree with the sister of one of the 9/11 victims (and a New York resident) who said: “This is a place which is 600 feet from where almost 3,000 people were torn to pieces by Islamic extremists. I think that it is incredibly insensitive and audacious really for them to build a mosque, not only on that site, but to do it specifically so that they could be in proximity to where that atrocity happened.”
Palin cites a specific person associated with the proposed mosque whose statements about 9/11, she judges, are insufficiently sympathetic to the victims. But her concerns aren't quite so nuanced or specific -- witness this Tweet which asked all "peace-seeking Muslims" to avoid the provocation.
But it wasn't "peace-seeking Muslims" who flew the planes into the World Trade Center. It was 19 extremists -- people whose ideology unfortunately has broader support than we'd like, but whose views do not represent the vast majority of American Muslims. The truth is that more Muslims died on 9/11 as victims of the attack than as the aggressors. By implicitly lumping them in with criminals and vile murderers, Sarah Palin is suggesting that American Muslims cannot be full citizens of this country -- that they should have the "decency" to accept a "lesser-than" status that denies them the right to practice their religion as fully as their Christian neighbors.
American Muslims, in this view, aren't part of the community of Americans who mourned 9/11 -- they are more closely related to and allied with the transgressors. Not to put too fine a point on it: This isn't dissimilar from the "blood libel" that anti-Semites use to smear all Jews as killers of Jesus Christ. All bear a measure of guilt, regardless of their actions.
This is why Sarah Palin should never be our president. She simply cannot be the president of all Americans. Maybe few presidents ever are -- but they at least have the good sense to attempt it. Even George W. Bush recognized his duty in this regard.
Palin's statements on the mosque issue also point to another reason she should never be president: She cannot distinguish America's friends from its enemies. Her divisiveness would make her a poor president; her inability to make the right kinds of distinctions would make her a dangerous one.
So Spencer Ackerman, Michael Tomasky, Joe Conason, Chris Hayes, Katha Pollitt, Mark Schmitt and Kevin Drum are liberals who, in 2008, wanted to see Barack Obama elected president? Shocked! I am very very shocked!
Actually, I'll go ahead and say that Tucker Carlson -- the guy behind the Daily Caller -- is a liar. His headline -- "Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright" -- is wrong on two counts, and Carlson must know it: It wasn't the "media" having a discussion about the Rev. Wright story, but a group of liberal journalists who write from openly liberal perspectives. This wasn't the "straight" reporters from mainstream media outlets, it was the people who get paid to do opinionated journalism. Furthermore, from the Daily Caller's own reporting a good chunk of the people involved in the conversation argued against a response proposed by one or two members of the group. So it wasn't the "media" and they weren't "plotting."
But it's the headline, not the details, that will burn their way into the public consciousness on this story.
Maybe the least-defensible person in the story is Ackerman, who proposed going after Republicans as a bunch of racists for trying to make the Jeremiah Wright story into a brouhaha. But even he's defensible: The Daily Caller's own reporting shows that Ackerman said some Republicans -- the "non-racist" ones -- shouldn't be tarred with that brush. Whether you agree with him or not, he was being intellectually honest: He was proposing going after "racist" Republicans because he really believed they were racist.
Honestly, to these liberal eyes, there did seem to be a whiff of racism about the Jeremiah Wright scandal. Obama's opponents had failed to find a way to depict him as an angry black man, so they generated controversy out of the next best thing: He knew an angry black man. I'm not defending Wright, who has long proved himself untrustworthy, but it seemed to me at the time the point of the controversy was to render unelectable any person -- like Obama -- who had been immersed in "black culture." In retrospect, it still seems that way.
There's a conservative narrative of the last 100 years or so that goes something like this: America started to become a little less free -- a little less tethered to its Constitution -- about the time that Franklin D. Roosevelt took power during the Great Depression and started creating the welfare state. Every new entitlement -- "ObamaCare," say -- and every slight tax increase represents a near-tyrannical intrusion of the state into realms that should be private. Every time a Medicare check goes out, then, freedom dies a little more and somewhere in the great beyond, Friedrich Hayek sheds a tear. Or maybe Ayn Rand.
There's an alternative narrative -- one that doesn't get as much attention -- and in the last year it's been most famously advanced by onetime conservative author Garry Wills. In this reading of history, it was indeed Franklin D. Roosevelt who expanded the state at the expense of the individual -- but it wasn't Social Security that represented tyranny: It was the explosive growth of the national security state, which since World War II has granted the president ever greater -- and, seemingly, ever-more-uncheckable -- power, all in the name of protecting America from her enemies.
Which brings us back to 200 years ago, and the adoption of the Constitution. Its passage, it seems, was no sure thing, and the central issue in the debate between Federalists and Antifederalists, it seems, was freedom: What form of government would be effective, yet still allow men -- and it was men who had the freedom -- the latitude to live their lives as they pleased?
There's not much in either the Federalist or the Antifederalist papers to suggest that the welfare state was a concern in the debate over freedom. To be fair, partisans on both sides probably hadn't conceived of it. Instead, they clashed over a controversial power of the new goverment: The power to raise a standing army.
. . . . Standing armies are dangerous to the liberties of a people. . . . [If] necessary, the truth of the position might be confirmed by the history of almost every nation in the world. A cloud of the most illustrious patriots of every age and country, where freedom has been enjoyed, might be adduced as witnesses in support of the sentiment. But I presume it would be useless, to enter into a labored argument, to prove to the people of America, a position which has so long and so generally been received by them as a kind of axiom.
This, it seems, was an argument the Federalists took seriously. Alexander Hamilton spent all of Federalist 23 through 29 defending the government's prerogative to raise a standing army. And he made some decent arguments -- pointing out, not unreasonably, that most state governments at the time were empowered to raise armies, and that furthermore the "Western frontier" of the United States, still confined to those early 13 coast-hugging colonies, was in need of defense. If an invasion came,it would already be too late to form an army to repel the attack. And in Federalist 25, he even makes the odd argument that it's safe to let the federal government raise a standing army precisely because Americans would be suspicious of infringement on their liberties:
As far as an army may be considered as a dangerous weapon of power, it had better be in those hands of which the people are most likely to be jealous than in those of which they are least likely to be jealous. For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.
Hamilton's strongest argument against a standing army being used to usurp American liberties, though, comes from the structure of the government itself. The chief executive might be willing to use the army for nefarious purposes, he says, but then he'd have to contend with Congress!
Federalist 24:
the whole power of raising armies was lodged in the legislature, not in the executive; that this legislature was to be a popular body, consisting of the representatives of the people periodically elected; and that instead of the provision he had supposed in favor of standing armies, there was to be found, in respect to this object, an important qualification even of the legislative discretion, in that clause which forbids the appropriation of money for the support of an army for any longer period than two years a precaution which, upon a nearer view of it, will appear to be a great and real security against the keeping up of troops without evident necessity.
* Then again, none of the folks involved really foresaw the explosive growth of a national security state that involves hundreds of thousands of people collecting snooping and spying on, well, pretty much all electronic communication on Planet Earth. Concerns about a "standing army" seem almost quaint, don't they.
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
There are reasons for all of this, of course. We want to be kept safe from the threats the world aims at us. The result is that we have a huge -- and, because it is so huge, virtually unchecked -- national security establishment that operates in the shadows, out of the public's sight. Alexander Hamilton promised us that Congress would keep the leviathan in check. It hasn't. Do you feel any more free?
Via Twitter, Peter Suderman points out that Republicans plan on campaigning this fall against the federal deficit, but have no plans to actually do anything about it if they take Congress. See Sunday's "Meet The Press" for confirmation. In response to such complaints, National Review's Robert Costa points to Eric Cantor's YouCut website, which he describes:
Cantor debuted YouCut [in May]. Its premise is simple: Each week, Americans can vote for their favorite of five potential spending cuts on the web (or via text message to 68398). Cantor works to bring the winner to the House floor. With one click, you can help to shape the House GOP agenda.
“It allows us to focus on out-of-control federal spending, the number-one issue for millions of Americans,” Cantor says. “For us, it is an unprecedented online project.”
* Eliminating unnecessary Congressional spending: Potential savings of $35 million over 10 years.
* Eliminate the "Dodd Earmark" from "ObamaCare:" Savings of $100 million over 10 years.
* Prohibiting first class subsidies on Amtrak: Potential savings of $1.2 billion over 10 years.
* Reform the Energy Star program: $655 million over 10 years.
* Prevent energy assistance payments to dead people: "Hundreds of millions of dollars" over 10 years.
Notice a common attribute? All these options are piddly rounding errors in the gargantuan federal budget, eliminating -- at most -- $120 million a year out of a $3.55 trillion budget! It's simply not a serious attempt to address budget fears; it looks a lot more like feeble, ineffective pandering. Real austerity is going to force people to give up stuff they want or like getting from government. And not just the poor, "unproductive" people. Hard, politically unpopular choices will have to be made. Republicans have never shown the ability to make those choices. Eric Cantor's "unprecedented" web site proves the point.
