Barack Obama, Bob Woodward, and the War in Afghanistan

Our Scripps Howard column this week is about Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's Wars." My take:

Bob Woodward's new book reminds us of an important proposition: American democracy and long-term war are a bad mix.

It's certainly bad for democracy. One of the most disturbing revelations is the lengths that President Obama went to in order to ensure the military obeyed his orders in Afghanistan -- dictating a six-page single-spaced document dictating the terms of 2009's surge of 40,000 troops to that country. Why the detail? Because the president felt sure his generals and admirals would find "wiggle room" to violate the spirit of the order setting a 2011 deadline to begin drawing down troops there.

The American Constitution is clear: The president is the commander-in-chief. He makes the country's big decisions about how we fight war. Generals and admirals give their best military advice, and then execute the decisions the president has made. But top military officials clearly see themselves as political players in the process, lobbying the president and circumventing his orders. Woodward reports Gen. David Petraeus told his staff Obama was "(messing) with the wrong man." Such reports should concern anybody concerned with Constitutional order.

But if war is bad for democracy, democracy can also be bad for war. If it goes on too long, the politicians in charge can take their eyes off the bottom line -- what can be done to enhance American security -- and start factoring partisan politics into the mix. Obama tells Woodward in the book that he set the 2011 withdrawal deadline because "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party." That is, even from a liberal viewpoint, a chilling admission.

"Obama's War" affirms that at this point, there's little America can gain -- and a whole lot it can lose -- from continued large-scale fighting in Afghanistan. We can't fix that country. The longer we stay there, though, the more we might find our own democracy in need of repair.

Mr. Mom Chronicles: The Playground

Daddy was trying to work. Tobias didn't care.

I hate taking Tobias to the playground.

Step back: It's not that I don't enjoy giving the boy a chance to enjoy himself -- and I'm really not opposed to him wearing himself out by running around. What's more, I'm not one of those parents who hovers over my kid: We get there, I sit on a bench and keep an eye on him, but I don't really follow him from toy-to-toy, adventure-to-adventure.

No, what I don't like is ... all the other kids.

I'm not a monster: I obviously like my kid. And I'm not one of those fussy adults who wants to ban the under-10 set from restaurants or movie theaters or other public places. Kids are necessary. But I don't much like childhood: It's all id, no ego, too much trying to hog toys, too much possibility of sudden and minor violence, too much willingness to inflict hurt feelings if the physical hurt can't be gotten away with. Kids are assholes.

Sartre said that "hell is other people." Me? I say that hell is other people's children. And I'm certain other people think the same thing about my kid; I can't say that I'd blame them.

So I feel an abnormal amount of anxiety when I take Tobias to the playground, because it is the place where lots of kids are, and where they are at their most kidlike. Maybe I just didn't have the right kind of childhood, because it looks like a battleground to me. I see only the negative possibilities.

While I was the office worker and my wife the stay-at-home parent, I didn't have to worry about any of this. She took the boy out to play; I hung with him at bathtime. Even after I lost my job, most of the playground duties fell to her. Trips to play just made me itch. Why oh why couldn't my son have been born a 30-year-old slacker with a penchant for reading novels in coffee shops?

Tobias, of course, gets none of this. At least, I hope that's the case. He ambles around the playground -- adventurous, but not too adventurous. He'll climb ladders that surprise me, given that he's just turned two. But he won't go anywhere near a slide without a hand to hold onto.

He's similarly middle-of-the-road when it comes to interactions with the other kids. I don't want to pass my anxieties onto him: I want him to make friends, to learn to share, to have fun. Often, he floats along the edge of a group; if the other kids start to include him, he jumps in and participates wholeheartedly. If they ignore him, he moves onto the next thing. And it's no big deal: my emotional life is far more concerned with these interactions, it seems, than his is.

Last week, a kid slugged him in the chest. I saw it. Tobias went up to play with the young, curly-headed boy -- and the boy wanted nothing of it. So he hit Tobias. Tobias smiled -- smiled! -- and moved on to the next group. He's social, but he doesn't stay where he's not wanted, and he doesn't particularly care that he's not wanted. I love this! I hope this attitude sticks with him the rest of his life! Oh, God be merciful!

Me? I swooped him into his stroller and marched home.Wrong reaction, probably.

It's already begun. I want to protect my kid from all the crap that's sure to come. I want his feelings and his body to stay as innocent and unmarked as they are right now. But the only way he's going to really learn to play nice with others is if he gets out and plays nice with others. The best way for me to be a good daddy is to swallow my neuroses and walk him down to the playground.

But I'll still keep an eye on him.

DADT and the GOP's Faux Populism

Back in the spring, when Democrats -- after a decades-long odyssey -- were preparing to pass a comprehensive health insurance bill, Republicans expressed outrage their opponents would do something the public didn't want them to do: the polls, they said, showed a clear majority of Americans opposed the bill. A CNN poll in March showed that 59 percent of respondents didn't like it. Passing the bill in the face of such opposition, the GOP said, was profoundly undemocratic.

Fast-forward to yesterday, when the GOP blocked progress of a bill that would repeal "Don't Ask Don't Tell," the law that lets the armed forces boot gay members. What's funny about this? Well, polls show that around 57-58 percent of Americans favor the DADT repeal -- almost exactly the same percentage that opposed the health care bill. The same Republican Party members who stood for the perogatives of majority-according-to-polling ignored the polling when it conflicted with their stances.

Why? Easy enough to guess. Some Republican senators presumably do believe -- without merit, I think -- that letting gays serve openly will disrupt the armed forces. Others were pandering to their anti-gay base, or just signing on for party unity. Whatever. I'm sure there are some other principled reasons for opposing the bill, but the fact is this: the GOP is staunchly for what the majority of Americans want, unless it isn't.

Our Ungrateful Elites

Kevin Drum doesn't think much of America's modern elites:

To a dispiriting extent, the top stratum in America no longer really seems to care about America. They care about themselves, and their money, and keeping themselves safe from the huddled masses, but for all too many of them that's about it. I'm not sure I have quite the rose-colored view of the ancien regime that Mike does, but he's certainly right about today's millionaires. No class, no gratefulness for their success, and no sense of bond to the broader society they live in. This is not a winning combination for a country that aims to lead the world.

There's been some talk lately, on the right, about how the rise of American meritocracy -- the best students get into Harvard these days, for example, instead of just the sons of the richest families -- has created a "ruling class" enamored of its own expertise and disconnected from American values. I'm not sure I buy the critique, entirely, but there's something about the word "gratitude" here that strikes a chord with me.

It seems to me that the prevailing ideology among the upper crust discourages gratitude more specific than generalized "proud to be an American" thinking. We're a nation of rugged individualists, the thinking goes, and people who end up with the successful Harvard applications and good jobs and well-appointed friends have come to believe that they have entirely earned their success. They don't consider how the institutions and foundations created by government -- and in the culture -- have made their success possible. What they're told, instead, is that they've been "free" to pursue that success. That's right, of course, but only partly.

I don't pine for aristocracy, but I can see how noblesse oblige might've developed. If you're the third- or fourth-generation of a wealthy or influential family, you might naturally believe that you're in your rightful place in life -- but it would probably be difficult for you to believe you had created your "success." Gratitude might be a more easily accessible emotion in such circumstances. Today's elites believe they're entirely self-made; they're not entirely right, but such attitudes create arrogance and a distance from the broader citizenry.

Surveillance State Update: The FBI Spies On PETA

Washington Post:

The FBI improperly opened and extended investigations of some U.S. activist groups and put members of an environmental advocacy organization on a terrorist watch list, even though they were planning nonviolent civil disobedience, the Justice Department said Monday.

A report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine absolved the FBI of the most serious allegation against it: that agents targeted domestic groups based on their exercise of First Amendment rights. Civil liberties groups and congressional Democrats had suggested that the FBI employed such tactics during the George W. Bush administration, which triggered Fine's review.

But the report cited what it called other "troubling" FBI practices in its monitoring of domestic groups in the years between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and 2006. In some cases, Fine said, agents began investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for "factually weak" reasons.

In others, the report said, the FBI extended probes "without adequate basis" and improperly kept information about activist groups in its files. Among the groups monitored were the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh peace group; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; and Greenpeace USA. Activists affiliated with Greenpeace were improperly put on a terrorist watch list, the report said.

Any folks on the right who want to dismiss the seriousness of the surveillance because it's aimed at lefty fringe groups might want to pause and think about how, say, Tea Party activities might be viewed by the FBI. The surveillance state doesn't tend to be that discriminating.

Mr. Mom Chronicles: Day One

This morning, my lovely wife woke shortly before 6 am. She eased her way into the day with some sort of apple juice concoction, then showered, blow-dried her hair (!), made lunch, then departed to catch a bus. It is her first day of work.

Tobias at the playground
this morning. His daddy was the
only daddy there.

Me? I drank some coffee, read the papers and waited for my son to wake up. This is also my first day on the job, this one as a full-time stay-at-home dad.

This is not where I expected to be. Oh, I've always said I was willing to be the at-home parent if it came to that, something easy to say to prove my feminist bona fides. But honestly, we moved to Philadelphia a month before Tobias was born -- not exactly prime job-hunting time for my wife, particularly as a recession was starting to bare its ugly fangs. The birth happened, she stayed home with our kid, I went off to the office every morning, and that was it. I never expected to actually have to back up my words with, you know, action.

When I lost my job six months ago, though, my wife drew a line: "It's my turn," she told me. Repeatedly. And then a few more times, for good measure, just in case I hadn't gotten the point: She was ready not to be home with the kid all day. It's not that she doesn't love Tobias; she adores him. She just wanted the chance to miss him now and again.

I suggested that we should probably both of us race to get a job -- that producing an income was the most important thing -- and we could figure out the way forward from there. And, well, she won the race.

Step back: She mostly won the race. I've been picking up some freelance work in recent months, and for us to survive on her full-time job, I'll have to basically make our rent money and she'll get all the other bills. But: Taking care of our two-year-old son is going to be a heavy, maybe the heaviest, part of my responsibilities during the day.

There will be getting him up. And feeding him. Making sure he gets play time. Making sure he gets enough of my attention. And feeding him. And changing his diaper. And feeding him. The reporting and writing I need to do to make my nut? That'll come in the in-between places. Parenting, in a way it's never been before, is my job now.

And that's great: The glory of losing my job when my son was 18 months old is that I've been around quite a lot while he really evolved from babyhood into being a real person with his own real personality. I've been grateful -- grateful as one can be for being unemployed and worried about the future -- to get to be around my son during this time.

However...

It didn't escape my notice this morning that I was the only dad in a sea of moms and nannies at the playground. A quarter-century has passed since Michael Keaton played "Mr. Mom," but gender roles and expectations and actions haven't changed that much. What we're doing -- what I'm doing -- is ... kind of weird. I get that. I'm OK with that. But it will probably involve negotiating my way through some unwritten protocols.

So I'll be writing about that. And I'll most likely be asking your help. I'm not sure how this is going to work, or frankly how long it can last. What I do know is this: We love Philadelphia and want to stay here. Right now, this is the best shot we've got.

War Always Leads to Irrational, Overreacting Prejudice

Reading Peter Beinart's "The Icarus Syndrome," a passage leaps out to me as perhaps having some modern relevance. It's about the public reaction to German-Americans during World War I:

Cincinnati outlawed the sale of pretzels; Iowa's governor made publicly speaking German a crime. When a Wyoming man was overheard saying "Hoch der kaiser" ("Up with the kiser"), a group of townspeople hanged him, cut him down while still alive, and made him kneel and kiss the American flag. In April 1918, a St. Louis mob abducted a young German-American, stripped him, dragged him through the streets, and then lynched him, while a crowd of five hundred cheered. At trial, the defense attorney called the murder patriotic, and it took a jury twenty-five minutes to acquit.

Luckily, the United States seems to be more or less in a post-lynching phase of its history. But we're appalled today at the last century's irrational prejudice. I suspect our descendants will look at us -- our debates about mosque locations the the intrinsic ability of Muslims to be good Americans -- and have similar feelings.