The Outrage Game

As a follow-up to last week's post, Joe Klein has a fine column on the AIG bonus outrage:

There is a real crisis out there. It has existed for a while. It has been spreading slowly as factory after factory has shut down, as the gap between rich and poor ballooned, as the rich found ways to get richer betting on exotic financial instruments with all the economic substance of a roulette wheel, as the middle class found it harder to pay for college, for health care, for gasoline.

But most of the anger we see and hear comes from people who are paid to be angry, on cue, on cable television--as opposed to people with actual grievances. Suddenly, the White House press corps goes barking mad over the AIG Bonuses. It is said that the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that the "public" can understand; in truth, the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that reporters can understand. Suddenly, the Obama Administration has a "crisis." The President has to go on television and act as if he's angry, even though he knows these bonuses are the tiniest outcropping of outrageousness.

A bunch of people on Wall Street engaged in high-stakes gambling with a lot of other people's money and the reputations and stability of financial institutions that had endured for many decades. They amassed personal fortunes that the rest of us could scarcely imagine while burning down their firms and taking the entire global economy down with them. That's outrageous. That is un-fucking-believably outrageous. That a CEO at AIG who had been installed by the federal government to clean up the mess (along with some folks in the Treasury Department) decided it wasn't worth fighting in court over $150m in bonuses that the company was contractually obligated to pay--that's not outrageous.

SecDef on the Defensive?

You may recall some discussion here back in July on possible fissures opening up in the previously air-tight front presented by the Bush administration. As the situation in Iraq continues to deterioration, it appears that the press (particularly the liberal press) is starting to pick up the scent of blood and are letting the dogs off the leash. In the past few days I've run across this article in Asia Times, a Joe Klein column in Time Magazine, and this Time Magazine article (to answer the title question, he's certainly lost this Mojo). All three of these tend to fix on Rumsfeld. It'll be interesting to see how much longer he can keep his head above water. Not only does he piss off liberals to no end, his operating style tends to upset congresspeople of all types, the press, and the military. He would make an altogether ideal scapegoat for Iraq, if it comes to that.

Editorial: 5 9's and Fighting Terrorism

Reading Joe Klein's piece in the recent Time Magazine regarding the Democratic hopefuls for 2004 election I was quite disappointed with the position he advocated on national security issues. He seems to feel that the Democrats should simply appear as a somewhat weaker version of Bush, supporting the same basic positions, but not taking such an aggressive stance. According to Klein, they simply need to meet a certain threshold of credibility on security, which they can do by supporting the security measures advocated by the administration.

I disagree. Security will obviously be a major issue in this election. More so than it deserves to be, but such is life. Being a weak-sister to Bush's hawkish, paternalistic self-assured position will be a serious liability. There is no threshold which will magically level the playing field on this issue. The people in love with the aggressive Bush approach will still vote for him even if the Democrats act like a kinder, gentler version of the same thing. But there are many people across the political spectrum who want an alternative. Parroting Bush is not the only way to appear strong on security. Instead there is a very credible position that can be taken to promote security that points out weaknesses of the Bush administration. This comes in two parts,prevention and recovery.

To prevent terrorism, aggressive unilateralism surely can't be the only viable approach. Promoting the value of diplomacy and strengthening international relationships both to weaken the popular elements of anti-Americanism and to build partnerships for investigating and dismantling terrorist organizations would be a welcome alternative for the American people. The Bush administration has been broadly criticized on this account, even within their own party. To agree with the Bush administration on their anti-terror policy and raise this issue as an aside would be a mistake. This failure should be kept front and center in any discussion of national security. Fostering strong diplomatic relations, boosting our international image, and launching a massive multilateral operation to seek and destroy terrorist organizations will do far more to combat terrorism than any war in Iraq ever could.

On the home front, recovery needs to be the name of the game. When creating systems that are expected to be 99.999% effective, as is a major focus for us in telecommunications, recovery is as important as fault prevention, and in many ways more important. The closer one gets to the 5 9's standard the more difficult it is to predict where the next fault may occur, and thus more difficult to anticipate it and prevent it. Terrorism falls very much into this case. It would be sheer foolishness to believe we can secure this nation from every avenue of attack. It is simply not possible. We can take action to prevent the obvious attacks, but it will be trivial for terrorists to find unanticipated means to attack us. Herein lies another major weakness of the Bush administration.

With recovery, the challenges are known. We don't need to know the exact method that would be used for the attacks, but rather the broad areas where we're vulnerable. We can measure how long it takes for the authorities to respond to various types of crises. We can figure out how to mitigate the impact of attacks before they occur. We can plan it out, we can drill it, we can measure the improvements. With recovery, we can be guaranteed tangible results.

For the purpose of prevention, sweeping and invasive laws have been passed and many tens of billions of dollars committed. But to recovery? Lip service and hardly a penny of funding. Dictates are given to state and local governments demanding their preparedness to respond to attacks, even as federal funding to those government organizations is slashed to fuel questionable tax cuts, and even as those governments are facing their most severe budget crises in decades. The focus of the Bush administration on prevention within the US is both futile and damaging to civil rights and the freedom and liberty they claim to hold sacred. The funding and focus from the federal government would be better applied to responding to and containing terrorist attacks should they occur.

There is an opportunity for the issue of national security to be a strength for Democratic candidates, rather than a weakness for them to try to gloss over. On this issue, as on many others, they need to find a way to be leaders rather than a cheap knock-off. There is a huge window of opportunity for them to do so, but the writing is already on the wall that this will be just one more failure for the Democratic party and their inept strategists. They seem to be stuck in the same state of denial that led them to authorize the war on Iraq with the belief that doing so would make national security a non-issue for the mid-term elections. Instead they merely strengthened the administration's position on what was the key issue in those elections and what will again, unfortunately, be the key issue in 2004. And I will again be stuck with the feeling that as much as the administration disgusts me, the Democrats deserve to lose.