The Bureaucracy Did It

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank expresses doubts about the claim that the president didn’t know until recently about NSA spying activities involving other countries’ leaders.  “It strains credulity to think that the U.S. was spying on world leaders without the president’s knowledge,” Milbank wrote.  He is not alone in his skepticism.  I, on the other hand – given the size, power, complexity, and self-preservation instincts of your average government bureaucracy, particularly those involved in any way with national security – would be amazed if the president did know what was going on.  This president or any president.

The NSA wasn’t tapping into Angela Merkel’s cell phone chats because it was trying to gather intelligence that would help defend the United States.  It was tapping into her phone because it could.  What spy organizations are capable of doing, they do.  And they may or may not tell anyone about it.  Imagine NSA operatives (or whatever you call them) upon discovering, as the technology evolved, that they could listen in on the conversations of the world’s heads of state, including those of our allies:  “It’s so cool that we can do that, but it wouldn’t be right and there’s nothing to be gained from it.  So even though we can, we won’t.”

Um, no.

Given the bazillion things the NSA watches, listens to, and otherwise monitors, and given the fact that it’s a vast bureaucracy whose job is (a) spying, and (b) keeping secrets, it is entirely plausible that it was listening to plenty of people, heads of state included, without telling the president or anybody else.  Milbank quotes an AP reporter asking the question, “Was the president kept out of the loop about what the NSA was doing?” The answer is yes, in a manner of speaking. But I would suggest that there is no loop; that NSA people decide what the president, and, for that matter, the congress and even their own bosses need to know when it comes to the multitude of spying activities the organization indulges in.  They don’t do this in a seditious way.  They do it in more of a this-is-nobody-else’s-business  way.

Deciding who’s going to know what is something the NSA has in common with all Washington mega-bureaucracies which all have, in effect, a life of their own.  They know that they are permanent and that politicians are, for the most part – particularly those in the executive branch – transitory.  The bureaucrats know that long after the president and his minions have departed the scene and turned their attention to foundations and libraries, they and their impenetrable machinery will still be there.  They listen and smile as politicians vow to end waste, fraud, and abuse, and then they get back to business.  Job One for them is not serving the needs of the American people, but self preservation and perpetuation. Just as an example of how big, powerful, and immovable these agencies are, the smallest of the cabinet-level departments, Education, has 5,000 employees and a budget of about $70-billion.  The president doesn’t spend his evenings going over DOE’s contracts.  The idea that the congress and/or the executive branch are on top of everything the bureaucracies are doing is an illusion.  (They tend to be on top of those matters only insofar as they can influence spending that benefits their friends, relatives, contributors, and, ultimately, themselves.)

Republicans and other irrational Obama-haters aren’t sure which rap to try to pin on Obama to get the most political mileage out of this spying affair: Spying on friends? Spying on friends but not knowing about it?  Spying on friends, knowing about it, but lying about knowing about it.  You can pick only one.  The likely reality, though, is that friends were pointlessly spied on but it wasn’t the president’s fault.  The bureaucracy did it.  Meanwhile, what we’re all pretty sure of is that everybody spies on everybody else and that foreign politicians, allies of the U.S. or not, whether they're tapping the U.S. president's phone or not, know they’ll never lose any votes by vowing to their constituents that they won’t stand still for being pushed around by America.

Redskins

The existence of team mascot names in sports is, of course, a little silly.  When we watch a game, we can plainly see that the participants are people and not big jungles cats, little red songbirds, or venomous snakes. But we cut the whole idea some slack because it’s been that way in competitive team sports for a long time and, even though we know it’s a bit goofy to linguistically convert ordinary people into birds and bad-ass animals, we take it with a grain of salt.

But there are some names we need to give more careful consideration to.

For those who consider the controversy surrounding Washington’s NFL team to have been manufactured by the excessively politically correct  – just another cause fueled by liberal hypersensitivity and not worth worrying about-- imagine your 5-year-old coming home from school and announcing that he’s made a new friend.

“Great!  What’s his name?”

“Jimmy Jones.  He sits right behind me.  He’s a redskin!”

Some may see this usage as being not quite as poisonous as an announcement by your kid that his new friend was a nigger or a spic or a kike, but it certainly shares the coarse and degrading spirit of those snarlingly ugly labels.  Unless you’re a member of that thankfully small segment of society that uses this sort of language routinely and means it, you would be at least taken aback by this use of the word redskin.

 

You would chalk it up to innocence and ignorance and you would set the lad straight regarding the use of perjorative racial terminology.  And you would do that not because you’re excessively touchy about such things but because you are a decent member of a society that finds those sorts of usages ignorant, impolite, uncivil, and possibly dangerous.  In short, you would not be accused of being overly sensitive should you gasp at your child’s use of the word redskin to identify and describe a fellow human being.

And so it is with the controversy over the Washington Redskins name.  It seems fair to say that people are not being overly sensitive when they question the use of an appellation for a football team that would immediately be deemed an unacceptable racial slur when it came out of the mouth of a kid. 

Washington fans who want to keep the name because they're just really, really attached to it need to get a life.  Do they really, truly care what animal, vegetable, or mineral the team is called? Or are they going to seriously argue, as the team’s owner has, that to renounce an ugly and pointless racial insult is something that shouldn’t be done because it would defile a venerated tradition? 

This is, really, a no-brainer  -- not number one on the world problem list, but a fix that is simple to do and simple to understand why.

Somewhat more subtle considerations surround the names Braves and Indians, but they would seem to have at least one foot on the same slippery slope, if only because they seem intended to convey ferocity and aggressiveness in the same way that animal names do – Tigers, Lions, Bears, Wildcats, Bulldogs, etc.  As team names, they are less overtly perjorative than Redskins, but they are still tone-deaf, in the same way that names like the San Francisco Jews or the Dallas African-Americans would be. We will see what, if anything, happens in Cleveland and Atlanta. 

Here is a discussion in Wikipedia on the use of Native American names as team mascots, including a short history of organizations that have changed their name.

Figuring Out What Republicans Want

A reliable source says the following conversation has been taking place behind closed doors in recent weeks:

Boehner/McConnell:  We want you to shoot your dog, and if you don’t shoot your dog we’re going to shut down the government and destroy the economy.

Obama:  My dog!?  What does my dog have to do with it?

Boehner/McConnell:  We don’t like your dog.  We want him dead.  And there’s a group of crazy people in the House, representing an equally crazy constituency, maybe even crazier, whom we have succeeded in convincing that your dog is the devil’s spawn.  Maybe convincing them of that wasn’t such a great idea, but it’s done now and we can’t really do anything about it.

Obama:  My dog is not the devil’s spawn  He’s a perfectly good dog.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, these people think he is the devil’s spawn and, in fact, they are completely obsessed with him.  They are absolutely willing to bring about the end of civilization as we know it to get rid of him…to destroy the village in order to save it, you might say.  So, you need to shoot your dog.

Obama:  Well, I’m not shooting my dog.

Boehner/McConnell:  Okay, then, cut off his tail and one leg.  Maybe we can convince the gang of 40 that he will then be incapacitated enough to not be able to ruin the country like he was going to.  He's a job killer and he's not fair to the American people.  We're not sure what that means, but it's our talking point with regard to your dog.  It's what we say.

Obama:  I’m not shooting my dog or cutting off any of his parts.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, can’t we at least have a conversation about this?

Obama:  No, we can’t have a conversation about killing or maiming my dog in exchange for not destroying the U.S. economy.

Boehner/McConnell:  Okay, then we’ll have to tell the country that the president refuses to negotiate.  Country, the president refuses to negotiate!

Obama:  That’s not negotiation.  That’s blackmail.  It’s like saying give us what we want and no one gets hurt.  You can’t threaten to bring the economy to its knees if you don’t get your way, and call that negotiating.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, you know what – this whole business of default causing dire economic consequences is overblown anyway. Rep.Ted Yoho has said default would actually bring stability to the world markets, and a lot of our wing-nuts agree with him. True, Ted isn't an economist.  He's actually a veterinarian. But anyway, that's the story we're going with now, or at least one of them...that a default would be no big deal. 

Obama: So what about the dog? 

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, our crazy people are every bit as obsessed with government spending as they are your dog, so now we’re threatening to cause a default if government spending isn’t cut.  And default would be a very bad thing.  Except that it wouldn’t be.  But don’t think we’ve forgotten about your dog.  We still want you to shoot him – or we want somebody to shoot him.  But maybe we’ll take care of that later.

Obama:  So what exactly do you want in exchange for re-opening the government and not destroying the economy – which, by the way, every reputable thinker from the Wall Street Journal to Warren Buffett says might well be the result of a default.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, we’re not exactly sure what we want.As our esteemed colleague Marlin Stutzman so eluquently put it: "We're not going to be disrespected.  We have to get something out of this.  And I don't know what that even is."  In other words, if you disrespect us we'll ruin the world. But we definitely plan on getting that dog of yours shot.  Our wacko-birds want that, and they’ll can us if we don’t get it done.  And that’s the most important thing -- that we don’t get canned.

Gingrich:  Boy, you just can’t deal with that Obama guy like you could with Clinton.  We made a perfectly reasonable offer – shoot your dog and we won’t shut down the government and bring down the economy – and what does he say?  He says no!  You just can’t work with a guy like that.

Guns and the Mentally Ill

Without getting into the ins and outs of firearms legislation and the entrenched positions of the ideologues that come at this from left and right, can there be any doubt that we have to find a way to keep the unhinged and guns separate? It’s not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons involving the difficulty of determining the mental health status of a given individual, the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there.  

But on that relatively limited objective – keeping guns out of the hands of the delusional – is where the focus needs to be if the depressingly regular front page appearance of mass shooting news is ever going to stop.  The quixotic efforts of the left to rid society of guns altogether, or at the very least, guns whose appearance they disapprove of – viz., so-called “assault” weapons -- are politically impossible and doomed to failure.  Worse, they drain energy and focus away from gun control efforts that might actually do some good and that there is some possibility of getting all parties to agree on – the more narrow but reachable objective of stopping mentally unbalanced people from playing out their revenge fantasies with bullets.

Every bit as futile (and nonsensical) as the left’s obsession with the impossible or the irrelevant is the insistence by the right, as personified by the National Rifle Association, that a gun in every American hand is a constitutional imperative, and that any effort whatsoever to regulate guns, including keeping them away from felons, insane people, and small children, is the camel’s nose under the tent.  (In this connection, it’s worth mentioning that we already have a considerable amount of gun control legislation on the books: Automatic weapons – machine guns – are heavily regulated, and you can’t have bazookas, hand grenades, or surface-to-air missiles, to name just a few.  No one – okay, hardly anyone -- considers these prohibitions violations of the right to bear arms.)

It can be argued that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, et. al. is by definition mentally ill.  At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire. Which is to say, these events are virtually always connected to mental illness of some type and/or severity. And so like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows the shootings.  And there is never any shortage of flags, nor is there any shortage of theories about why they were ignored or misunderstood or went unseen – why the dots weren’t connected.

Heeding the flags and connecting the dots -- identifying people who shouldn’t have access to guns and then denying them that access – seems like the most productive area of concentration in this effort, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible.  It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment. True believers on the left and the right should quit worrying about unserious ideas like no guns or more guns and put their efforts behind something that can actually happen and that can do some good.