;)
The Commentariat -- Nov. 4, 2013
Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "A major test of how carefully Republicans can navigate the perilous intraparty politics of sexuality will come on Monday, when the Senate holds a crucial vote on a bill to outlaw workplace discrimination against gay men, lesbians and transgender people."
Reed Abelson & Katie Thomas of the New York Times: "Millions of people could qualify for federal subsidies that will pay the entire monthly cost of some health care plans being offered in the online marketplaces set up under President Obama's health care law, a surprising figure that has not garnered much attention, in part because the zero-premium plans come with serious trade-offs.... The bulk of these plans are so-called bronze policies, the least expensive available. They require people to pay the most in out-of-pocket costs, for doctor visits and other benefits like hospital stays." ...
Ariana Cha & Lena Sun of the Washington Post: Americans who face higher insurance costs under President Obama's health-care law are angrily complaining about 'sticker shock,' threatening to become a new political force opposing the law.... The growing backlash involves people whose plans are being discontinued because the policies don't meet the law's more-stringent standards.... If the poor, sick and uninsured are the winners under the Affordable Care Act, the losers appear to include some relatively healthy middle-income small-business owners, consultants, lawyers and other self-employed workers who buy their own insurance. Many make too much to qualify for new federal subsidies provided by the law but not enough to absorb the rising costs without hardship. Some are too old to go without insurance because they have children or have minor health issues, but they are too young for Medicare. Others are upset because they don't want coverage for services they'll never need or their doctors don't participate in any of their new insurance options." ...
People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies who will exploit their fear and end up overcharging them. -- Donna, an individual policyholder whose insurance company substantially raised her premium & didn't tell her about the healthcare exchange ...
... Dylan Scott of TPM: "Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies' own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces -- which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended.... The extreme lengths to which some insurance companies are going to hold on to existing customers at higher price, as the Affordable Care Act fundamentally re-orders the individual insurance market, has caught the attention of state insurance regulators." ...
... Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic talked to Dianne Barrette, the Florida woman who was the media's favorite ObamaCare "victim" until Greta Van Susteren & others checked out a few facts. Barrette's current plan is a hope-you-don't-get-sick plan that doesn't even cover hospitalization & pays $50 for an MRI (which costs $1,000 or more here in Florida). Cohn examined Barrette's options -- she's eligible for a hefty tax credit -- & shared his findings with her. Now Barrette thinks "losing" her junk plan just might be "a blessing in disguise." ...
All of that is well and good, but if the Web site doesn't work, nothing else matters. -- President Obama, often, after staff meetings on the progress of ACA implementation ...
... Amy Goldstein & Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post on why Healthcare.gov is such a collossal failure: "... the project was hampered by the White House's political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law -- sensitivity so intense that the president's aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition. Inside the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the main agency responsible for the exchanges, there was no single administrator whose full-time job was to manage the project. Republicans also made clear they would block funding, while some outside IT companies that were hired to build the Web site, HealthCare.gov, performed poorly." CW: Goldstein & Eilperin dig deep; an interesting report. ...
... Hunter Schwartz of BuzzFeed: "The Oregon healthcare exchange website, CoverOregon.org, was 'built and tested for use with Internet Explorer,' and may 'not work properly' if used on other browsers, according to the site.... Internet Explorer ... was discontinued on the Mac platform a decade ago." ...
... E. J. Dionne: "The administration has never adequately defended the law or explained why government will inevitably have to play a larger role in guaranteeing health insurance to all our citizens -- as the public sector does in every other wealthy democracy. Now, everyone is paying attention. The way to still the noise is to challenge opponents of Obamacare. Can they really make the case that the country would be better off without it? And what would they do instead?" ...
... CW: The current brouhaha is a result of unforced errors. (1) The most technologically-savvy administration ever did not know how to develop a complicated Website, & (2) the President repeatedly made a false claim: "If you like your current insurance, you can keep it." Incompetence & false presidential bromides undermine Americans' confidence in government nearly as much as any Tea Party yahoo does. ...
... Martin Pengelly of the Guardian: "... [Mitt] Romney said the Affordable Care Act, and the immediately troubled rollout of its federal exchange website, had 'undermined the president's credibility in the hearts of the American people'." CW: Sadly, Romney is right. ...
... AP: "Mitt Romney isn't including tea party favorite Ted Cruz among the Republicans' most electable potential presidential candidates in 2016. Who does the 2012 GOP nominee put on his list of 'very capable people?' His ex-running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But Romney says New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie 'stands out as one of the very strongest lights.'" CW: You heard it here first. My pick would be Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Besides being governor of the swing state, he was a member of the House for 18 years, where he was something of a pragmatist. AND he's a Fox "News" alum, so he might be able to pull in the crazy vote. His recent criticism of the GOP for not caring about the poor is a sure sign he's running for something & maybe not just re-election.
... Digby: Bullyboy Chris Christie likes to abuse teachers. "He did it again, just this weekend."
The Plagiarist, Ctd. Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed: "A speech on Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's website has been updated to include footnotes linking to Wikipedia following reports by BuzzFeed, Politico, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow the senator had plagiarized several speeches from the Internet encyclopedia."
Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker profiles SEC Chair Mary Jo White.
Brendan Sasso of the Hill: "Senior military officials are leaning towards removing the National Security Agency director's authority over U.S. Cyber Command, according to a former high-ranking administration official familiar with internal discussions. Keith Alexander, a four star general who leads both NSA and Cyber Command, plans to step down in the spring."
Michelle Martin of Reuters: "In 'A Manifesto for the Truth' published in German news magazine Der Spiegel on Sunday, [Edward] Snowden said current debates about mass surveillance in many countries showed his revelations were helping to bring about change." ...
... Brian Knowlton of the New York Times: "If Edward J. Snowden believes he deserves clemency for his disclosures of classified government documents because they provoked an important public debate about the reach of American spying, he has failed to sway the White House and at least two key members of Congress," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) & Mike Rogers (R-Michigan). ...
... Andrew Osborne of Reuters: "The British government's response to leaks of intelligence information by former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden has eroded human rights and press freedoms, rights groups said on Sunday. In an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron published in Britain's Guardian newspaper, 70 different press advocacy and rights groups from 40 countries said they were alarmed at the way his government had reacted, saying it had invoked national security legislation to try to suppress information of public interest." The letter is here.
Paul Krugman: "German officials are furious at America, and not just because of the business about Angela Merkel's cellphone. What has them enraged now is one (long) paragraph in a U.S. Treasury report on foreign economic and currency policies. In that paragraph Treasury argues that Germany's huge surplus on current account -- a broad measure of the trade balance -- is harmful, creating 'a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy.'... Treasury was right, and the German reaction was disturbing." CW: In case you are of the impression that the interests of the U.S. & our ally Germany are exactly the same, look no further than Krugman's column.
Tom Kutsch of Al Jazeera: "Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. government agencies have weakened traditional ethical injunctions against the infliction of intentional harm by medical professionals in its policies of holding detainees as a part of the war on terror, a new report argues. The assessment came from The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers, a team of experts from legal, medical, military and ethical backgrounds with funding from the Open Society Foundations and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession." The Guardian report, by Sarah Boseley, is here.
Gubernatorial Races
Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling: "PPP's final Virginia poll finds Democrats leading in all three statewide races. In the Governor's race Terry McAuliffe has the advantage with 50% to 43% for Ken Cuccinelli and 4% for Libertarian Robert Sarvis." CW: Based on previous polling, it appears Cuccinelli scraped off half of Sarvis's vote. Cooch & I agree on this: if voter turnout is really low, he could still win.
Philip Elliott & Josh Lederman of the AP: "President Barack Obama cast Republican Ken Cuccinelli on Sunday as part of an extreme tea party faction that shut down the government, throwing the political weight of the White House behind Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the final days of a bitter race for governor." Here's a clip:
Presidential Race 2012
Peter Hamby of CNN reviews Double Down for the Washington Post. The review is filled with fun dirt. ...
... New York has an excerpt from Double Down. It's about Obama's debate prep & is pretty interesting -- if you can stomach the purple prose. ...
... Rick Hertzberg has a short, funny piece about Double Down. With a quiz!
Local News
** Terry Evans & Anna Tinsley of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "Former House Speaker Jim Wright was denied a voter ID card Saturday at a Texas Department of Public Safety office.... The legendary Texas political figure says that he has worked things out with DPS and that he will get a state-issued personal identification card in time for him to vote Tuesday in the state and local elections. But after the difficulty he had this weekend getting a proper ID card, Wright, 90, expressed concern that such problems could deter others from voting and stifle turnout. After spending much of his life fighting to make it easier to vote, the Democratic Party icon said he is troubled by what he's seeing happen under the state's new voter ID law." ...
... Missed this one. AND HaHaHaHaHa. Aviva Shen of Think Progress: "As early voting begins in Texas, the state's new, strict voter ID law has thus far flagged a judge, gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, and another state senator as potentially illegitimate voters. Attorney General Greg Abbott (R), voter ID's most strident defender, was also flagged as a suspicious voter under his own law's strict criteria. Abbott was flagged because his license lists his name as 'Gregory Wayne Abbott' while his voter registration record simply calls him 'Greg Abbott.' ... Thanks to an amendment added by Wendy Davis, voters who clearly have 'substantially similar' names can still cast a regular ballot by signing an affidavit affirming their identity. If the law had gone through unmodified as Abbott originally supported, he would have disenfranchised himself." ...
... CW: The determination of "substantially similar names" is subjective. The dumb-as-doornails partisans who man polling places are almost certainly going to "suspicion" that "Willie Brown" and "William Brown" (D) are not the same guy whereas "Gregory Wayne Abbott" & "Greg Abbott" (R) are one & the same. Brown won't be able to cast a regular vote; Abbott will.
Gubernatorial Race
Yeah, So? Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed: "Rep. Mike Michaud, a Maine Democrat, told residents of the state he is hoping to govern that he is gay on Monday in op-eds running in newspapers across the state":
... I wasn't surprised to learn about the whisper campaigns, insinuations and push-polls some of the people opposed to my candidacy have been using to raise questions about my personal life. They want people to question whether I am gay. Allow me to save them the trouble with a simple, honest answer: 'Yes I am. But why should it matter?' -- Mike Michaud
News Ledes
New York Times: "... on Monday, federal prosecutors announced that ... SAC Capital Advisors, had agreed to plead guilty to insider trading violations and pay a record $1.2 billion penalty, becoming the first large Wall Street firm in a generation to confess to criminal conduct. The government has also forced SAC to terminate its business of managing money for outside investors."
New York Times: "As Egypt's new military-led government consolidates its power, Mohamed Morsi, the deposed president, went on trial on Monday in a makeshift courtroom, facing charges of inciting the murder of protesters. But soon after the trial opened, news reports said..., state television said the case was adjourned until Jan. 8."
New York Daily News: "A high-powered U.S. Navy officer faces charges he traded secrets for prostitutes, luxury travel arrangements and tickets to a Lady Gaga concert. Commander Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz is accused of running the alleged pay-to-play scheme along with a Navy investigations special agent and the CEO of a private defense company who was milking hundreds of millions of dollars from military contracts."
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Reader Comments (25)
@James Singer wrote in yesterday's Comments, "Reality check: For all of Snowden's naiveté and other problems, we wouldn't be having this conversation about N[S]A snooping without him."
Singer is half-right.
Sen. Ron Wyden had been hinting at the NSA's likely unconstitutional spying on Americans for years, & nobody was talking about it. The initial stories based on Snowden's leaks changed that. That's the part Singer got right.
But my reality check is this: there is little justification for most of Snowden's other leaks, & there is plenty of evidence and reason to believe that some of the leaks have had a negative impact on U.S. national security.
In my eyes, Snowden moved from conscientious patriot to traitor right about the time he was sitting in his Hong Kong hotel doling out info. about U.S. spying on the Chinese. He's still at it. As contributor @Diane implied in yesterday's thread, requesting clemency & more respect from the U.S. while simultaneously volunteering to help the Germans get a handle on U.S. spying is "like the Victoria Secret underwear models wearing push up bras and little else in VS's endless print and TV advertisement requesting that people stop staring at their boobs."
To evaluate the rectitude of Snowden's acts, judgment is required. One can't just conclude that Snowden did a good thing while ignoring the shitstorm swirling around that one good thing.
Marie
Thomas Wolfe said "You can't go home again" Sure, Snowden can go home IF he's wiilling to stand trial. We've known that the Chinese have been hacking into our networks for some time. In effect, Snowden made it easier for them. How that is patriotism is beyond me.
He may find that he's a modern day Philip Nolan, condemned to wander the globe.
Hopefully Snowden will spend the rest of his life in Russia, a situation which is similar to prison.
The Goldstein & Eilperin piece... yeah, yeah, yeah and I bet implementing Medicare (without the technology we have today) was a piece of cake. And who can blame Obama for being sensitive to the Republicans hatred of the law? Jesus, we have all got to relax and quit being so hard on this man. I'll hold Obama's feet closer to the fire when I see Bush and Cheney in prison.
Lordy. "purple prose" was a generous description Marie. Heilemann and Halperin have a solid career writing bodice rippers for junior high students. Probably accidentally, I do think this gets it right about the President:
"They knew that he detested televised debates. That he disdained political theater in every guise. That, on some level, he distrusted political performance itself, with its attendant emotional manipulations."
Wow, imagine that, Obama knows he's not actually in an overproduced reality show. The reference to the President as Michelle Obama's "Maximus" took me over the edge though.
I think Hertzberg got it right. That's all the review that Heilemann and Halperin really merit.
I wouldn't want anyone to overlook the incremental creep of Kochism; here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/04/us/politics/koch-group-has-ambitions-in-small-races.html?google_editors_picks=true
Re: The dishy "Double Down" : My favorite lines are "Obama is brilliant but peevish" (thank goodness) and Clinton saying re: Obama: "He's luckier than a dog with two dicks." The latter reminded me of the mini series "Political Animals" which was based on the Clintons (I throughly enjoyed this romp) but was amused by several critics that complained that the actor who played Bill was too over the top with his colorful vocabulary––too old Southern good old boy and at the same time complained that the script wasn't an accurate description of the Clintons. They were right about the latter, but wrong about the former: Clinton has a mouth on him that could make a hot tamale shiver as they used to say down in Hope.
And from what I've seen and heard from the two H's I wouldn't pay a nickel for their book nor pay much attention to their commentary.
Re: The Sneaky Peek Snowden saga: The image of this guy roaming the globe trying to find a safe place to plant his tuckus is as sad as it is gratifying. If he really believed his mission was to save us from ourselves he should have stuck around for the results or at least fought like hell to make his case––teamed up with Wyden who as Marie pointed out has been on this case for years.
"We do disagreeable things, but we are DEFENSIVE...We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things."
From "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold"
Sent my son in Germany Krugman's piece on those depressing Germans and received this response:
"All that money is sewn into mattresses awaiting the resurgence of investor confidence. When that moment comes, money will flow to those poor (read “cheap”) countries like flies to manure. If the Germans were not so risk averse, they would be investing already."
"... [Mitt] Romney said the Affordable Care Act, and the immediately troubled rollout of its federal exchange website, had 'undermined the president's credibility in the hearts of the American people'." CW: Sadly, Romney is right. ..."
No, it's because the media keeps beating that drum. And since when does anyone with a brain listen to Mitt Romney? Oh, right. The media.
@Diane:
Axelrod: potus kissed wife after debate – Halperin interview note
The Obamans were pumped up, ready to celebrate the President's triumphal debate performance with the First Couple. But Barack had eyes only for Michelle. He moved with force and grace toward the red jersey dress clinging to a body whose beauty only Barack could know. Her eyes were limpid, fixed on him, her radiant smile only for him. Axelrod and Plouffe were in the room, but the First Couple saw only each other. Michelle's arms opened to accept Barack. He slid his own lean, muscular arms around her, his long hands finding their place below the waist of the red jersey. Their dark, lithe bodies felt each other in an embrace that was at once familiar and thrillingly new. Michelle had her Maximus. “Four more years,” she breathed before Barack's sensuous lips closed in on hers. The future could wait. This moment belonged to Barack and Michelle. – Halperin draft
Delete “dark” – Heilemann edit
This day in history. And other stuff.
Every now and then, I like to check back to see what sort of fateful events, notable births and deaths, and just weird things have taken place on a particular day. Today is one of those days.
There’s a tendency to find some larger import in the collection of events on a certain day, but for me, it’s largely curiosity and maybe a tiny nod to whatever Karmic forces might be abroad in the universe.
One contemporary hornet’s nest of controversy was first kicked on November 4th, 1952, when the NSA was founded to correct the intelligence failures of a previous spook operation, the Armed Forces Security Agency. I think the Joint Chiefs felt the AFSA wasn’t successful enough at their job (too many phones untapped, I guess) so the NSA was created. How’d that work out for them?
When it first started, the NSA didn’t even have an official seal. I guess they were super, extra secret. But when they got one they used an eagle (really? yawn) carrying a key. When you combine spying with key imagery, one might reasonably expect it to represent some kind of encryption key. But nooooo. According to Rand Paul, ah, er, I mean, Wikipedia, the keys are purloined from symbolism related to Saint Peter, who is often depicted holding the keys to heaven. I guess that would work too, if you’re one of Keith Alexander’s crack black-hat operators. You know, like Ed Snowden.
A pivotal event, or rather a sort of comeuppance event in US history, also took place on November 4th when a group of students and “students” climbed over the fence at the US Embassy in Tehran. I guess they wanted to say “thanks a bunch” for years of our good buddy Reza (rat fuck) Pahlavi.
The Shah and his goons in SAVAK (I think it means “Welcome Wagon” in Farsi) and their CIA enablers had had a trying relationship with the Iranian people who, I suppose, were a tad peeved at years of western manipulation. Hey, they could have just asked us to stop, right?
It’s funny how so many right-wing “historians” and “students” of foreign policy remember with crystal clarity the storming of the embassy, the hostage taking, and the "students", but not our storming of the country, the overthrow of a democratically elected leader, and installation of an evil piece of shit friendly to western oil interests. Selective history is still a vital broken cog in the right-wing Way-Back Machine.
Will Rogers was born on this day, as was Walter Cronkite. One can only imagine what Cronkite would make of Fox. The changes in the media that have been wrought since his death beggar the imagination. Actually, I think they take the imagination out back and beat it with a lead pipe.
November 4th also heralds an curious throwback event in Delaware, a statewide event called Returns Day. No, it’s not the day everyone goes to Target to return faulty merchandise manufactured by slave labor on some third world dung heap (or what is increasingly becoming slave-wage labor in the US). Nope, it’s a celebration of the democratic process, something the right is going at hammer and tong, trying to wear down to the size at which it can be drowned in Grover Norquist’s bathtub (speculations regarding all the depraved goings-on in Grover Norquist’s bathtub being my first nauseous moment of the day).
It’s one of those old style Americana events that De Tocqueville would have written of admiringly as part of the flamboyant political theater of the young country and its inventive and unique social customs. Part of the event, and one that must irk teabaggers no end, they of the “no compromise with anyone displaying more intellectual acuity than a slug” (but hey, for all I know, slugs could be the PhD’s of the gastropod universe), is a ceremonial burying of the hatchet by opposing candidates, the winner and the loser in each election, in a display of comity for the good of the electorate.
I realize that American politics has never been the most collegial enterprise, but there simply cannot have been many eras to match the outsized hatred and congealed absolutism of today’s ‘bagger badgers. The only place they’d want to bury a hatchet would be in the head of one of their many enemies. They remind me of one of the middle east tribal chieftains in a Rudyard Kipling story complaining about “Many enemies. All around! Always pissing downstream on our heads.”
Can’t imagine what DeTocqueville would have to say about ‘baggers. He’d probably have hopped the first boat home declaring that element of America to be unsalvageable, insane, and entirely without redeeming virtue.
But the face of the enemy, to those same ‘baggers, the wingnut media and nearly all Republicans, came into dramatic focus on this day in 2008. On that day Barack Obama was elected president.
Then all hell broke loose on the right and it’s still breaking out.
So, you see, plenty of good things have happened on November 4th.
Very likely plenty of other great things have occurred on this day in history. And for those good things, we can all be thankful.
Happy 4th of November.
Dazzling! (@CW to Diane.) Haven't read such bosom-heaving, bodice-ripping, purpley prose since (the late, late) Frank Yerby made Best Seller lists!
PD,
Great quote from le Carré. His "Spy" was (and still is) a great book and a finely honed look at the spooky side of realpolitik. Smiley, the handler, knew that his career required many dastardly things of him. He does what he feels is required without ever wrapping himself in the prophylactic of prêt-à-porter patriotism. Le Carré drags the dark rivers of that world in ways that pious flag wavers have not the mettle to do properly.
Barbarossa,
I thought about Philip Nolan when I heard about Snowden's plea for clemency. Unlike Nolan, he can get as much information on his former country as his hosts allow him. But it's likely he'll still be buried "at sea".
Re: Double Downer. Are they kidding with this crap? The excerpt above is atrocious writing. It's just embarrassing. Halperin is a hack. He's always been a hack. I wonder how difficult (I'd say "hard"...but) it was for him to refrain from references to the president's dick since he appears to have a thing for connecting "Obama" and "dick".
Some years ago, when I first heard about it, I subscribed to The Note, advertised to be some kind of daily, political insider palimpsest, overseen by Halperin. After a short while, I realized that it was nothing but the overwrought yearnings of a loser who wanted to be considered one of the cool kids. There were breathless notes about who showed up at a restaurant with the co-chair of the appropriations committee and where so and so would be speaking that day and who was dishing the dirt about whom. You got more substantive writing in Mad Magazine.
Dreck. Useless navel gazing and backroom wanking.
That's Halperin.
And Heilemann, who used to be a reporter, should have paid more attention to his history and creative writing classes at Harvard and less to reading Penthouse letters and Cosmo articles.
Just appalling stuff. And where the hell were their editors? Jerking off? Figuratively and literally?
But hacks rule in today's crowded media air space of crackpot balsa wood planes and lightweight pilots. Worse yet, after its stay on the best seller lists, this turkey will be gobbling for years in remainder bins.
@MAG: Now, now, don't dis old Frank whose books I read avidly when I was in high school..
We can't bring up Frank Yerby to today's wingers--he was BLACK after all. You know, one of THOSE people. Frank's prose was a bit purple, but he did know how to tell a story
Add Shakuntala Devi's birthday (and Google Doodle) to @Ak's list. And during Diwali, too.
Just checked yesterday's RC.
Man, oh man. Did I read that right? Rand Paul wants to challenge people to a duel? Like a "pistols at thirty paces" kind of duel? So he was caught with his quill in someone else's ink well. But he doesn't think that's any big thing. And now he wants to kill the people who are calling him out on being a slimy little weasel when he is, in fact, a slimy little weasel?
But the media still treat this guy as if he's more reliable than mad dogs and Englishmen in the noon day sun.
I suppose if he threatens to kill someone, he thinks that people might think he's a bad ass and leave him alone. Take another toke, Buddha Boy.
How many times does it have to be demonstrated what an idiot this guy is before people stop thinking of him as a serious person?
@ Marie. You are truly scary......in an admirable way. I'm pretty sure your passage will show up in the 2nd edition, maybe even without the Heilemann edit just to underscore how post-racial they are.
Le Carre, more than any living writer, has done more to capture the paranoia that drives much of world government. His work truly transcends his genre and will be looked back on as being more honestly reflective of the zeitgeist than other literature, even more so than non-fiction accounts of our time.
His work is a constant reminder that there is very little in this world that can be seen as a moral certainty, and much of what we do in defense of those few things often drags us down to the level of the immoral. The quote PD Pepe cited is a perfect illustration.
Into this picture enters Edward Snowden. He makes us confront the question Le Carre poses: Is that too romantic? Especially when we occasionally do some very wicked things? And unlike most of those posting here, I have to come to the conclusion that, yes, it is too romantic.
You see, nobody ever asked me if I was willing to make the trade these people tell me I have to make in order to sleep safely in my bed at night. I never once gave the people who are spying on us the authority to do so, and neither does our constitution. And even if most of us agree that the trade was worth it, the decision to make it was not arrived at as part of a rational, informed conversation (or even a conversation we were allowed to take part in, wherever it falls on a rationality scale). It's the paranoid response to an attack we have refused to put behind us. It's part of a response that has damaged us far more than the attack itself.
@Noodge. Precisely.
For all you le Carré fans here's a fascinating review of his new book "A Delicate Truth" which is shorn of moral ambiguities finding him standing on firm ground. "His old traitors betray the state because they are by nature, deceitful. These new ones betray it because they are by nature, honest."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/john-le-carre-real-men-england/
@Noodge and James Singer:
I accept your opinions and envy your certainty, but would suggest that if being asked and encouraged to contribute to a civilized discussion of an issue is fundamental to the freedom of choice you hold dear (as do I, BTW), there's a lot more than the NSA/Snowden business out there that ought to concern us.
I for one was never asked if I wanted a world in which Exxon has more in yearly profits than the state of CA's annual budget or if I thought Walmart ought to pay many of its workers so little they qualify for food stamps of if the Federal Reserve should single-handedly (with minimum or absent oversight) dictate so much of our nation's economy. And I have not heard from the White House yet on what I think of the secret TPP trade negotiations.
I'm sure we could all list more major decisions that affect all our lives about which we had no choice.
Some of the issues that horrify me result from the gradual growth of habits and behaviors over time that no one planned; they just grew and are frightening to me precisely because no one was ever in charge of their development, which means no one and no entity can ever be held accountable. In many respects, I wake each morning in a place I never intended to be.
Other practices, of course, are planned, often by those who have no desire to improve my life, who in fact care nothing for me at all. Wall Street comes immediately to mind, and while we might have the illusion of exerting some control over the nation's economic behavior through our elected representatives, it would be hard to say that hope is in any way realistic.
So...I do not mind the NSA discussion; like you I think it important and I welcome it. But I would hope we do not lose sight of how little free discussion and informed choice have about many aspects of the way we currently live.
Not to trivialize any of this, but the other day, I couldn't even find an old two-wire circuit tester, a simple tester of the kind that has long served my needs. I checked two hardware/building supply stores. They don't make them any more, I was told, and no one ever asked me.
Ken: Tomorrow I vote in local elections and will be one in a million that will sway it one way or another. Small potatoes, but I am given that choice. Last year I got my Stop and Shop to carry tinned tea just for me or so the manager alluded. Small winnings, but a win nevertheless. Everything you mentioned in your post I can relate to except the waking up in the morning part. I know exactly where I am and try to make my world a serene retreat from that place "I never intended to be." At this point in my life and in this state of affairs I take whatever pleasures I can, try and change what I can, all the while realizing what cards we have been dealt here.
And that old two-wire circuit tester––have you tried the internet?
@ Mr. Winkes: I would suggest that losing your fundamental rights is a thing apart from the inability to purchase an item nobody cares to manufacture. May I suggest Ebay?
I am every bit as upset by the things you mention as I am the NSA, but holding people accountable for the current state of affairs is not nearly as important as correcting the problems.
I don't care too much whether Jamie Dimon goes to jail. I do care whether we fix the system that allowed him to become incredibly wealthy as a reward for crashing the economy. I wouldn't care about the members of the Walton family at all if we weren't subsidizing their poverty-level wages with food stamps and health insurance subsidies. The fate of the Koch brothers is of no importance to me; their ability to use their money to sway elections in anti-democratic fashion is.
But at least we know enough about those goings on to be able to have this conversation. Until Snowden came along we had no clue about the NSA and the amount of information they're gathering about each and every one of us. When we say Snowden should be punished for what he did we're saying that we should trust those in power to invade our privacy and to exercise discretion in what they do with knowledge of our most intimate affairs, and by granting them this trust we'll all be able to sleep safely. Worse, we're saying we're all better off not even knowing that the government has insinuated itself into our lives in this fashion.
"The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals."
Glenn Greenwald