Saul Alinsky and The Resignation of Sarah Palin

Bill Whittle talks about the Destruction of Sarah Palin, with a warning that it could happen to other decent people in politics, on Afterburner. Lots of ideas stuffed into 13 minutes. Including why false accusations against an innocent person are often more damaging than true accusations against a guilty person.

Available in print here:

. . . One of the Rules for Radicals is Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules. Think about the genius of that. Just let that sink in. When a Republican has an ethics scandal, it’s “hypocrisy” and “double standards” and all the rest. But when a Clinton or a Pelosi or a Charley Rangel or a Chris Dodd or a Barney Frank or a William Jefferson has an ethics scandal, no one bats an eye. Why? Because of course they’re immoral! They’re Democrats.

Alinski could see that moral people have to be held to moral standards when immoral people do not. We’d better learn a lesson from this, right quick. . . .

. . . . And if we do lose to these kind of tactics, there will be no more decent people left in politics. As of today, we’re one short already.

Worth your time and thought.

Update: Sissy Willis reminds us that maybe Sarah Palin understood the Alinsky crowd better than they thought. And maybe "The Beltway media can't understand someone not consumed with presidential ambition,"

VDH from almost a year ago:

Palin in empirical fashion bucked the Republican establishment and the old-boy network when she thought it was unreasonable; Obama never figured out or at least never questioned Tony Rezko or the Chicago machine, Trinity Church or the Pelosi-Kennedy liberal mantra — unless it proved advantageous. Palin draws on everything from position papers on ANWR to how to keep four screaming kids fed and bathed; Obama on Harvard Law Review and dispensing more public money to more Chicago interest groups.

That’s a simplification, but also an answer to the old Euripidean question “What is wisdom?”

Delay in Health Care Bill is not "Obama's Waterloo"

Seems odd for Congressional Republicans to take on President Obama instead of the Democratic Congress over healthcare. The President made good use of Jim DeMint's imprudent statement that healthcare could be Obama's Waterloo. From President Obama's Twitter feed, July 21:

Health care reform opponents scale up attacks, playing politics w/ our lives & livelihood. Fight back

Listen to the audio at the link.

Ann Althouse (who voted for Obama because she had more confidence in him than in McCain concerning the economy) comments, "The Democrats have dumped a drastic, complicated health care bill on us and they are ramming it through before we can even figure it out. That's what matters, not the fact that the party out of power is squawking about it."

Wretchard presents another analogy. Probably closer to reality than the "Waterloo" analogy, though still not perfect:

I think DeMint’s analogy is wrong and Obama nearer the mark when he expressed a fear of “delay and defeat”.  Health care is not Obama’s Waterloo. Waterloo was Napoleon’s last gasp.  Obama is still moving forward, albeit much more slowly than just a few months ago. 2009 is not yet Obama’s 1815. A better analogy is 1812: the year of Napoleon’s arrival in Moscow, when his army seized the capital he long desired only to find he could not loot it of enough to sustain his men.

If Obama’s victories — the stimulus, bailouts, cap and trade and now health care — are from another point of view, a kind of looting, then he may have arrived at the point where there is nothing more to loot. Like Napoleon, the capital is his, but it lies in ashes, unable even to sustain his victories. If DeMint is looking for an analogy, it is that twilight moment when Napoleon looked out over the burning city, given over to frenzy and first realized he had thrust his hand into a monkey trap. It is doubtful that Obama, like Napoleon, will be defeated by his bumbling opponents. They are too inept. What crushed the Grande Armee was the vanity of its commander. At first his men did not drop the silks, silver, jewels and fine fabrics willingly. Yet as Grande Armee trod its dolorous road back to Western Europe the wayside became littered by discarded heaps of treasure that but a few weeks before they would have killed for.

Read the whole thing. Watch the video at the last link.

Just as Europe was stunned by Napoleon's conquering army, many Americans have been stunned by this administration's "Shock and Awe Statism". Consider that "It took Obama six months to pick a dog, but he wants a Health Care Bill by next week?" The frenzied rush to push this health care bill through is Beyond Parody. And we've seen some of the results of similar fierce urgency to pass a bill. Not hopeful.

The Administration and Democratic Congress have now met considerable push-back. The President's approval ratings are way down. But they are gearing up for a new fight after the August recess. Napoleon wasn't finished after Moscow. And the decision not to push any longer for signing before the August recess is probably just a tactical retreat.

A little music for contemplation: Bonaparte's Retreat with Bass Fiddle and Dobro standing in for bagpipes. Wretchard's post has some interesting history concerning Napoleon's Moscow campaign.

Wildly Inaccurate Reporting about Honduras

The AFP (Agence France-Presse) numbers this protest at "hundreds". Scroll down. It sort of looks closer to "hundreds of thousands".

Why is the media furthering the interests of a leftist who is trying to become leader-for-life in his country, apparently in violation of its constitution? Why does President Obama reflexively side with Zelaya instead of others in the government who by many accounts legally removed him from office on orders of the Honduran Supreme Court? In the absence of other information, it seems that procedures specified in their constitution were followed. Where was that "wait and see who wins" attitude President Obama took toward Iranian protesters? Is he in favor of an invasion from Nicaragua? Who's reporting can we trust?

ObamaCare - Rhetoric meets Reality

Charles Krauthammer :

. . . As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health-care nirvana: more coverage, less cost. . .

President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn -- surprise! -- that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats' health-care plans, says the CBO, increase costs on the order of $1 trillion plus.

In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he sign be revenue-neutral. But that's classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health-care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable. , , ,

This is not about politics? Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health-care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system? . . .

But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuits. . .

Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health-care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.

Read the whole thing.

Obama sets up a strawman when he suggests that Republicans want to do nothing. Though Congressional Republicans have not been particulary good at presenting comprehensive alternative plans. They're acting like a party with no power, which is true in Washington. But the Republican Obama is sending to China as ambassador introduced a better plan for Utah.

Kathleen Parker:

Compared to what's being trotted around the Asylum on the Hill, Utah's bipartisan reform project sounds downright dreamy. Simple and geared toward the consumer, it was designed under the operating principle that Americans are capable of making their own decisions, whereas the Obama plan presumes that only government can solve the problem.

Government has a place, to be sure. But as Huntsman and his team have demonstrated, government's best role is in creating mechanisms for people to help themselves.

Personally, I like the idea of Medical Savings Accounts, tax deferred, along with catastrophic insurance. If people keep themselves healthy, they are rewarded by having a little extra money for retirement. Even with traditional insurance, individuals and groups outside the workplace should be able to get the same tax breaks on health care costs as are available with employer-provided health care coverage. Tort reform and other changes can help a lot, too.

Update Mark Steyn on President Obama's recent media over-exposure: "Stars don't shine in sunlight."

On the Other Hand: President Obama still seems to retain some magic, mostly among people who have very noble intentions. Angry libertarian rant here concerning those who would help Congress to rush through a bill that nobody has read and analyzed throughly, which will dramatically affect everyone in the country, and eventually the world. Principle involved: Government compassion toward one group (i.e., the uninsured) leads to less compassion toward other groups (i.e., those with chronic diseases). You have to read a lot of rant to get to that principle, though. Perhaps not the best way to change hearts and minds.

The Obama Administration's "Organizing for Health Care Blog" quotes the Washington Post:

...The all-out ground and air war is broadly understood as a fight for the hearts and minds of the American public but is more rightly seen as a battle for the votes of the 100 members of the Senate. (These two strands are interrelated; public opinions does tend to sway political positioning -- particularly on issues as controversial as this health care plan.)

So much for a new administration "bringing America together".

Group-think, Scientific Fraud and Big Mistakes

John Derbyshire reviews a book detailing elaborate scientific fraud by a scientist at Bell Labs. I've done quite a bit of reading over the years about scientific fraud and the way not only managers but also entire university faculties can close ranks to protect a person accused of fraud. Meanwhile, the person who uncovers fraud become the target of virulent attacks. This also happens in organizations with no connection to scientific research when someone reports malfeasance. We have personal experience.

In the case described in the book, an internal investigation was done and there is no mention of serious retaliation against those reporting misgivings or fraud. Particularly in organizations dependent upon certain research for income (including government grant money), those who find evidence of fraud need to be very careful in order to avoid having their careers destroyed and their lives ruined. A few rules of thumb from advocates for whistelblowers:

1. An accusation against a superior almost always fails.
2. Leave the organization and get another job before reporting fraud.
3. Warn family and friends that you intend to report fraud, and enlist their support beforehand.
4. Go directly to the media or outside authorities. Do not risk an internal report.
5. You must have hard proof before reporting fraud.
6. Your own actions must be completely above reproach and meticulously documented.

It is also important to understand the organizational culture to get an idea concerning how safe it is to report fraud, malfeasance or even mistakes. How have others fared after uncovering malfeasance? Do fears that outsiders will eventually discover fraud or mistakes make discovery inside the organization welcome?

There are psychological reasons why people will do unethical things at work which they would never do in their personal lives. Included among these are pressures to conform, the tendency to trust authority figures before trusting people with less authority, and reluctance to believe that scientific fraud or even big, dumb mistakes could actually take place in "our" organization. There's also a kind of group wishful thinking that can sometimes take hold.

Fraud can be minimized within an organization by an atmosphere of openness. When I worked at a pharmaceutical company, when a new clinical trial was finished, a group of about 40 people from several departments would sit around a huge table going over the final report line by line, asking questions of the trial coordinators and the statisticians. Everyone in the company with a job connected in any way with science (including those with only general scientific background to the highest medical and scientific degrees) also participated in reviews of raw data. These types of procedures send a signal that it would be difficult to slip fraud through the system. They also lessen the risks that "group-think" among those in a single department will lead everyone to unconsciously overlook a glaring problem. Sometimes someone with less specialized knowledge looks at the data from a different perspective and can ask a "dumb" question which reveals a potential problem.

I was at the table once when this happened, after a study was completed, when someone asked about a deficiency in the design of the trial. The expensive study was much less useful than it could have been. Depressing, but it was better that we found it before the FDA did. If it had been fraud, it would have been even more critical to uncover in "in-house".

Not all organizations engage in such rigorous reviews of scientific data. There are reasons to distrust scientific data beyond Post-Normal Science. However, the acceptance of "Post-Normal Science" as a "legitimate" way to approach scientific data reinforces the tendency to "overlook" fraud or mistakes in study designs or execution. It also confers legitimacy on those who punish scientists who don't go along with the consensus. In the case of global warming, suppressing data which didn't fit the desired political result was widely accepted as a good thing. Still is in some places, like the EPA. Dissenting scientists were demonized unmercifully a few years ago. This punishing atmosphere has recently started to turn around. It has been more than ten years since the hottest year in recent history, 1998. It's getting harder to justify sensationalizing worst-case scenarios in order to push political changes. Finally, some dissenting scientists are being taken seriously.

Related: The powerful psychological drives favoring consensus and group-think can lead to disastrous mistakes with very serious consequences. There is a theory that the New York Times hired John Tierney to write the practical TierneyLab column in preparation for the changing "consensus" on global warming. Already, "global warming" has become "climate change" in information produced by advocates of controlling carbon emissions through government action. But the column covers other issues, too.

Concerning the way one researcher censored himself in order not to stray too far from consensus concerning the possibility of the housing bubble which recently burst, Nicholas Wade writes in the TierneyLab column:

If the brightest minds on Wall Street got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall, what other policies founded on consensus wisdom could be waiting to come unraveled? Global warming, you say? You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not – how could so many climatologists be wrong?

What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics. “We still have whole domains we can’t talk about,” Dr. Bouchard said, referring to the psychology of differences between races and sexes.

Update: Still fighting to keep temperature data and climate study methodology secret from those who might find some problems.

Good Examples: Obama's Surgeon General Nominee

Conservatives Support Obama's Nominee for Surgeon General, bucking opposition to her confirmation because she is overweight. Jay Nordlinger and others think it's more important that she sets up medical clinics for the poor and demonstrates fine personal attributes.

An interesting commentary about our times, when for some people good vs. evil (or worthy vs. unworthy) are often thought of in terms of "healthy" vs. "non-healthy". Thus, cigarettes, whose effects are mostly on personal health, get much worse press than alcohol, which not infrequently "helps" people kill someone, abuse family members, etc.

Another note on the Surgeon General Nominee: "Hope our praise doesn't do her any harm."

Who Killed the California Economy?

We live in Central California, a "red" part of a very "blue" state. All is not well in the Blue States.

On the surface this should be the moment the Blue Man basks in glory. The most urbane president since John Kennedy sits in the White House. A San Francisco liberal runs the House of Representatives while the key committees are controlled by representatives of Boston, Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Bay Area—bastions of the gentry.

Despite his famous no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States statement, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states carried last year by President Obama. The inner cabinet—the key officials—hail almost entirely from a handful of cities, starting with Chicago but also including New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area. . .

Yet despite all this, the blue states appear to be continuing their decades-long meltdown. “Hope” may still sell among media pundits and café society, but the bad economy, increasingly now Obama’s, is causing serious pain to millions of ordinary people who happen to live in the left-leaning part of America. . . . .

. . . hopes that Obama would emphasize . . . basic infrastructure now have been dashed. Instead, the stimulus has been largely steered to social service providers, “green” industries, and academic research. One reason, as we now know, is that feminists saw such an approach as too favorable to “burly men” who might not have been among the president’s core fan base.

Sadly, many of those “burly men,” particularly the unemployed, still reside in the blue states. They might not be in the places inhabited by the post-industrial elites but they do live in the hardscrabble neighborhoods, industrial suburbs, and small towns from Michigan and upstate New York to California’s vast interior. . . .

Here, Joel Kotkin gets more specific, talking with Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) about what happened to California's economy, and what California's experience means for the rest of the nation. Registration for PJTV is free.

Mr. Kotkin wrote a book years ago correctly predicting the prospects for American resurgence at a time when Asia was moving forward quickly. He was once on the staff of the Washington Post. His primary emphasis in writing now appears to be economic and political geography. His viewpoint is intriguing.

He has also written a short list of 5 answers to the question, Who Killed California's Economy. You may be able to guess a few of them:

Right now California's economy is moribund, and the prospects for a quick turnaround are not good. Unable to pay its bills, the state is issuing IOUs; its once strong credit rating has collapsed. The state that once boasted the seventh-largest gross domestic product in the world is looking less like a celebrated global innovator and more like a fiscal basket case along the lines of Argentina or Latvia.

It took some amazing incompetence to toss this best-endowed of places down into the dustbin of history. . . .

Worth your time, whether you read his articles, watch the video, or both.

Update: To add insult to injury, looks like lots of California's stimulus money went to Texas.

Hitler and the U.S. Advertising Industry

When Hitler first started to transform Germany, the U.S. advertising industry was proud that he was using their methods of simple slogans repeated often. Apparently, because of language differences, there was no difference to Hitler between "advertising" and "propaganda".

Now, in the Age of Twitter, our willingness to stick with a subject long enough to learn details may be even less than in the time of Hitler. Gift suggestion for students here.Found through Instapundit.

Forty years ago, men landed on the moon

I was at Keira's house, eyes glued to the television like everyone else. We had a friend who was near Yellowstone and missed it. Hard to believe that an American would have missed this exciting, tense event. A giant leap for mankind.

This morning, they started showing old movies pre-dating the moon landing, about people going to the moon. Some of the fantasies were similar to those in the movies now. Though, of course, today the special effects are much slicker. I guess it took until evening to get around to covering the actual event.

NASA doesn't seem as exciting as it used to. Interesting piece from the WSJ about Celebrity Culture vs. The Right Stuff:

. . . Not enough has been written about the Apollo astronauts and, in particular, about their place in the history of American character. That’s a pity: What they have, or had, is something Americans could use.

That something is “The Right Stuff,” which in the movie version means fearlessness, ambition, unblinking patriotism and a penchant for understated irony. Most of us would probably think of the Right Stuff as some combination of piloting skills and a barrelful of guts.

But the really essential ingredient is personal modesty, if not in private then certainly in public. “One day you’re just Gene Cernan, young naval aviator, whatever,” recalls the commander of Apollo 17 in the documentary, “In the Shadow of the Moon.” “And the next day you’re an American hero. Literally. And you have done nothing.”

Mr. Cernan is the last man to have walked on the moon. Nobody can accuse him of lacking for courage. He is simply expressing the very human bewilderment of a sentient person caught in the blandishments of modern celebrity culture. Does America make men like Gene Cernan anymore?

Then again, Mr. Cernan is positively boastful compared to Mr. Armstrong. . . . . Modern parlance allows us the term “private person” to describe people like Mr. Armstrong. Closer to the mark, I suspect, is that he abides by a private code of conduct. He understands that fate has assigned him a historic, if somewhat fortuitous role, and he means to honor the terms of the bargain.

That this should seem at all peculiar tells us something about the age. Codes of personal conduct were once what Americans—great ones, at least—were all about . . .

Read the whole thing.

Update: Hoe did they do it without today's computers? Interesting retrospective here, with videos, photos and contemporaneous comments.

Plus, WD-40.