Occam’s Razor

Desperately seeking Reagan

Wanted: Republican presidential candidate. Must be tall and have gravitas in his voice. Must convince Americans that it is Morning in America again. Dyed, slicked back hair optional but highly preferred. Former actors and governors preferred. Must be a rich white Republican male. Apply at Republican National Committee.

Good news for disgruntled Republicans: Former senator and Law & Order actor Fred Thompson has decided it is not too late to run for President. Fred belatedly but officially kicked off his campaign last week, spurning a debate with fellow candidates in New Hampshire for a folksy chat with Jay Leno instead. Fred is now hitting the Iowa and New Hampshire campaign trails hard. Desperate Republicans are rushing to check Fred out. They are all wondering the same thing: is Fred our next Ronald Reagan?

Sadly for Republicans, it appears not. To this Democrat, listening and watching Fred last week revealed that he sounds and behaves a lot more like George W. Bush than Ronald Reagan. It is not that Fred does not know how to act. He proved that on Law & Order. What he is missing is the ability to articulate. When handed a script and coached by competent directors, Fred made a convincing district attorney. However, on the stump he comes across as bumbling. He struggles to articulate a coherent message and often reverts to platitudes. His grasp of the facts often is appalling. If he is to be the next Reagan, Republicans will be forced to project a lot more into him than is actually there. His Southern accent and rambling style also reminds me of George W. Bush. After eight years of Bush, I doubt most Republican want to replace Bush with someone who looks and acts a lot like him.

Better to go for someone without the muddled southern drawl, someone more handsome and with better hair. In other words, maybe it is time for Republicans to hold their nose and vote for someone from the liberal northeast, i.e. Mitt Romney. In addition to being handsome, he is also tall and articulate. His Mormon faith is still viewed with suspicion by many Republicans, but at least he is a faithful family man. He has also walked away from conservative principles from time to time, but perhaps these instances can be forgiven. After all, he had to work with a Democratic legislature. Mitt has been through Republican hell and back. At least he has been battle tested.

Although blessed with a huge personal fortune, Mitt may be missing a bit in the style department. This may explain why former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani leads among Republicans in nationwide polls. Unfortunately, he is missing the needed Reagan hair. Perhaps he can talk with William Shatner, who can point him to a place that will give him a good price on a toupee. Among all the candidates, Rudy at least sounds the most like Ronald Reagan. He can swagger without it looking insincere. He may lack Reagan’s self-deprecating style, but he sure knows how to sound sure of himself. If only he were, well, better at being faithful. Maybe it does not matter anymore, since the Republican candidates are rife with questionable moral character issues. Unfortunately, in Rudy’s case there are moral red flags everywhere. Stepping around on the missus can perhaps be forgiven provided it is done with some discretion, but when done so flagrantly it is hard to excuse. Giuliani can at least be given credit for having nerve. Stepping around with another woman and inviting the press to witness it all at least showed he had nothing to hide. Moreover, that gay couple he lived with for a while, well, perhaps they were Log Cabin Republicans. Anyhow, the image of Rudy standing by the ruins of the World Trade Center six years ago with a bullhorn in hand is indelible. He sure looked and sounded commanding at the time. If he became president, clearly Giuliani would not be a limp-wristed Jimmy Carter type who might agonize over tough decisions. Above all a Republican president must charge decisively forward. This apparently is what leadership means to Republicans.

Sam Brownback has great hair but suffers from being in the back of the pack with little in the way of accomplishments. John McCain is reliable but too old and has taken too many controversial positions. Campaign finance reform? How the heck are Republicans supposed to win if they cannot have an uneven playing field?

Then there are all these congressmen running. You know the Republican Party is in deep doo doo if three of their candidates are congressmen. These include Duncan Hunter, Tam Tancredo and Ron Paul. Ron Paul at least is enough of a gadfly to liven up their otherwise dreary presidential debates.

This leaves only Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. Here is a word of advice for Republicans: if you want a chance of actually winning the presidential contest next year, nominate Huckabee. You can also have a good time with it because he will probably run against Hillary Clinton, and you loath both Bill and Hillary anyhow. It would be karmic justice to nominate him. He followed Bill Clinton as governor of Arkansas and like him was born in Hope, Arkansas. Huckabee also has the advantage (how to put this nicely) of being the only Republican candidate who comes across as mainstream rather than extreme.

Sadly, although he has nice hair he neither looks nor sounds much like Reagan. So Republicans need to give the Reagan thing a rest. Perhaps by applying enough voltage to Reagan’s grave he will emerge in a zombified state to lead the free world again. Perhaps he could even run for president again. I am sure our newly conservative Supreme Court that they could issue an appropriate ruling.

Jesus came back from the dead but Ronald Reagan does not appear to have his powers. Therefore, Republicans will just need to accept the sad fact that there is no new Ronald Reagan waiting in the wings out there. Even if there were, America is not the same country it was in 1980. Cherish his memory. Overlook his mistakes. Perhaps you can carve his image on Mount Rushmore. Reagan can perhaps be impersonated, but he cannot be equaled. It is time to give up the foolish Reagan fantasies and to make your best pitch from the candidates you have.

September 11th, 2007 at 02:21pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | one comment

No silver bullet

Those of us of a certain age remember the presidency of Jimmy Carter. While Carter’s post presidency was far more successful than his actual presidency, Carter also had a bad habit of not telling us what we wanted to hear. In the midst of rampant high inflation, oil shocks and other systemic problems most of which were decades in the making he asked Americans to sacrifice. He told us we needed to change ingrained habits to ensure a brighter tomorrow. He talked about the urgent need for our country to establishing energy independence from the Middle East. He told us to turn down the thermostats in the winter and turn them up in the summer.

Americans did not cope well with these suggestions. I cannot remember a time when my fellow citizens were in a sourer mood. It was no wonder then that when Ronald Reagan proclaimed that it was Morning in America, his message fell on receptive years. Living with the reality of the energy crisis and the fundamental changes underway in our economy at that time was no fun at all. Our politicians were convenient targets at whom we could vent our rage. Out went Jimmy, in came Ronnie. Out went fiscal discipline, in came Voodoo Economics. We would grow our way to prosperity by charging it to the U.S. Treasury. We would delude ourselves that we were prosperous the same way that Blondie deluded herself that she could afford all those shoes because there were still checks in the checkbook.

Reagan exploited a fundamental truth about Americans: in peacetime, the electorate can tolerate a few servings of spinach only. For the eight years of his administration, the spinach diet disappeared and was replaced by the jellybean diet. (Ronnie loved those jellybeans.) To ensure we would not be eating spinach, he strengthened our relationship with Middle East oil suppliers, i.e. Saudi Arabia. All that cheap oil did help grow our economy, which in time perked up the national mood. The Saudis seemed very happy with their new fleet of American fighter jets, not to mention our growing military presence in the region, even though we were technically infidels. It is now clear that this strategy to keep America growing through access to cheap oil had a downside. It tied us intimately to the intractable problems in the Middle East.

In case you have not noticed, the Middle East, never a calm region of the world, is hardly a more secure place than it was twenty-five years ago. In fact, it is arguably in more turmoil than it has ever been. The umbilical cord between the Middle East and us, driven by our insistence on its oil, is now so big and so thick that cutting it is unthinkable. Moreover, the fundamental issues in the Middle East have not been resolved either. In fact, we have exacerbated the Middle East’s problems. We have given oppressive and authoritarian states (Egypt and Saudi Arabia in particular) the means to keep their people oppressed. I strongly suspect that there is a direct connection between the continued oppression in these states and the rise of Islamic Jihadist movements. Osama bin Laden, after all, is a Saudi who had no sanctioned outlet for his grievances. He was told to stuff it or go to prison or possibly be executed.

And so we get in higher and deeper, to the point where we make ghastly half trillion dollar mistakes in hellholes like Iraq trying to undo our mistakes. As if the carnage in the Middle East were not enough to distract us, there are these other problems that make issues like terrorism seem rather trivial. Global warming and its consequence, overpopulation and a ravaged environment, is probably the biggest problem that humanity will ever face. We recognize the need to do something serious to address it, but we are not sure what should be done. Whatever solutions are required, what we have done so far clearly has not worked. It looks like we need a long-term strategy to really address global warming, we need it now, and it must be dramatic. In many ways, these issues are the same issues we tried to address a quarter century ago. Only now having spent twenty five years ignoring the problem, the cost and pain involved in fixing the problem has mushroomed, much like the costs of occupying Iraq.

Americans are beginning to understand, grudgingly, that it is time to eat the spinach again. Since Republicans seem incapable of it, the Democrats will have the unenviable task of leading on these issues. It remains to be seen though whether Americans are willing to accept the pain and sacrifice necessary for genuine energy independence and real solutions to global warming. Thinking back to the Carter years, I am not hopeful. In fact, in our SUV addicted nation, I think we will give up our guns before we will give up our Hummers. Instead, we will look feverishly for that silver bullet that will allow us to live our first world lifestyles without actually having to pay for it.

In today’s USA Today, I read that Honda will release a limited edition hydrogen powered car next year. Great news: it will not pollute the air at all! You will refill your tank at special gas stations equipped with hydrogen pumps. While hydrogen powered cars will not emit any pollution, all that hydrogen is going to have to be manufactured and transported from somewhere. Ideally, it would come from a nonpolluting sources such as hydroelectric plants and wind farms. To make a long story short, hydrogen powered cars probably are not a silver bullet either. At least in the short term producing the hydrogen to run them would probably contribute to global warming. If we use renewable sources of energy, like feedstocks, to produce hydrogen, we may drive up the cost of food, and cause people to starve. We are already seeing the effect from using corn for energy. Corn is being used to create ethanol. As more corn is used, demand for corn increased, and prices rise. As a direct result, rising corn flour prices in Mexico are deepening the poverty of many Mexicans and causing more Mexicans to go hungry. With hydrogen powered cars, our urban skies may eventually be cleaner, but it will not solve the global warming problem. Instead, trying to solve one problem will likely cause additional unforeseen problems. Someone will probably pay a price for every clever strategy we concoct to solve these problems.

There are unlikely to be any silver bullets for us on the global warming issue. Technologies like hydrogen-powered cars, while better than doing nothing, are merely tinkering around the edges. Real solutions are likely to be too painful to adopt. To address it we must consume much less energy than we do now. We must stop our population growth and eventually reduce our population to levels that the earth can handle. We must live in denser neighborhoods. In short, a few servings of spinach will not suffice just like a couple week on the Atkins Diet won’t make you a thin person for life.

I expect that Democrats have learned from the Carter years. I think they will give these issues attention, but not enough to alter the dynamics between the needs of people and the needs of the planet. Instead, they will choose a middle ground. Arguably, it may be the better of two bad choices. Turn the screws too tightly, and the Republicans get back in charge, which if their history holds true suggests we will go back to giving lip service to the global warming problem. That will be toxic to our species and to our planet.

Hillary Clinton epitomizes this middle ground. She is expressing hope and optimism that we can address global warming, energy independence and all the other issues our nation is grappling with. To me it sounds like a new version of Morning in America. Hope is a necessary ingredient to drive change, but more than hope is needed. These actions, however much hope they may inspire, are doomed and fall short of what is needed.

What is needed is massive and painful societal change. I have some ideas that are unlikely to go anywhere. However, if they were enacted they would demonstrate to the world that we are serious about global warming. Mind you that these are only first steps. How many of these would you personally commit to in order to address global warming?

• Limit tax deductions for dependents to two dependents per household.
• Tax homes that exceed a reasonable square footage, say 2000 square feet.
• Limit trash collection to once a week.
• Prohibit the use of power mowers. If we must have power mowers, ensure they use catalytic converters like our cars use.
• Require all houses to undergo annual energy audits. Fine those that do not meet strict efficiency standards.
• Limit power consumption from carbon producing sources to a given number of kilowatt-hours per household per month. Exempt households that receive their energy from clean power sources.
• Put a surcharge on energy use to be used for the development of more clean forms of power.
• Prohibit new development on undeveloped land.
• Limit the number of automobiles to one per household.
• Pay per pound of garbage collected.
• Provide tax credits for households that have certified systems that keeps temperatures at 65 or below in the winter and 80 or above in the summer.

Yeah, I know. Most if not all of these ideas are dead on arrival in Congress, even if my party, the Democratic Party wins control of all branches of government. As President Carter found out, this will be too much spinach for the national stomach to digest. While other actions show good intent, only actions like these will lead to meaningful change.

The reality is that our golden era of energy gluttony has passed. This new era in which we will arrive either sooner or later will not be as comfortable, but we and/or our grandchildren will have to get used to it. It is either that, or as is suggested in the movie The Last Mimzy, the future of the human race and of the planet looks unimaginably bleak.

May 11th, 2007 at 10:07pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | no comments

Our Greatest 20th Century Republican President

Sorry, he was not Ronald Reagan. I will give you a hint.

If attitude were more important than actual accomplishments then perhaps Ronald Reagan’s effigy should be chiseled into Mount Rushmore. However, Reagan had many faults. Partisans tend to excuse his gross misjudgments, of which Reagan had plenty. These included:

• The bombing of our Marines barracks in Lebanon and his subsequent decision to cut and run from Lebanon entirely
• Support for terrorists (which we renamed freedom fighters) in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua that killed hundreds of thousands. His obsession led to the Iran Contra scandal, wherein we deliberately broke the law by selling arms to our avowed enemy Iran to fund terrorists in Central America.
• An executive branch lead by so many people with no moral compass that the his administration was arguably the most corrupt presidency in modern history
• A savings and loan fiasco that cost the treasury more than $120 billion
• The largest peacetime deficits in American history

Nor was it the general who won the Second World War our greatest 20th Century Republican President. President Dwight D. Eisenhower also cut and ran, in this case from the Korean War. He “ended” the violence by threatening to use nuclear weapons on North Korea if they did not agree to a truce. If you are wondering why North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-il is so anxious to build a nuclear arsenal and lob missiles at the United States, now you know why. In fact, North and South Korea are still technically a war. Both sides essentially agreed to stop fighting but never agreed to a peace. To this day, fifty years later, we keep tens of thousands of troops in South Korea on a hair trigger alert.

Eisenhower had many noteworthy accomplishments as president. The one I give him the most credit for was the creation of the interstate highway system. In addition, he was very savvy about the consequences of the emerging military industrial complex. On the other hand, during his presidency, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and we did not lift a finger. In 1953, he sent the CIA into Iran to kill its elected prime minister, and then helped put a Shah in his place against the wishes of Iranians. This resentment set up the conditions for the Iranian Hostage Crisis some twenty-five years later. It is one of the main reasons the state of Iran still hates us today. If it is part of an “axis of evil” we were instrumental in its creation. Eisenhower was also the first American president to send our troops into Vietnam. It would take more than fifteen years before we would get them out. Tens of thousands of American soldiers would die in the fiasco along with millions of Vietnamese. Perhaps most shameful of all, while Senator Joseph McCarthy terrorized the nation with anticommunist hysteria, the same general that fought tyranny in Europe turned a blind eye. In addition, he oversaw three recessions while in office.

Most of the other Republican presidents I can dismiss for obvious reasons. William Howard Taft would not be seen as a true Republican today, since he introduced the first federal income tax. However his time in office was both short and undistinguished. Warren Harding’s name is synonymous with the Teapot Dome Scandal, not to mention his moral misgivings. Harding had at least two long-term affairs while in office, including a documented fifteen-year affair with a woman named Carrie Fulton Phillips. Calvin Coolidge was too boring to be noteworthy. Herbert Hoover oversaw the start of the Great Depression. Richard Nixon: nuff said. Gerald Ford: an aberration of a president who was never actually elected, nor was he in office long enough to accomplish much.

Which leaves George H. W. Bush and Teddy Roosevelt.

I was tempted to give the nod to our current president’s father. Granted, of all the Republican presidents in the 20th century, I do not think any of them reached the stature of a man like Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, George H. W. generally did what needed to be done, even though it was not popular. In response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, he showed the sort of leadership and wise judgment at which his son floundered. He organized an international coalition of forces to oust the Iraq army from Kuwait. He did it at minimal cost to the United States taxpayer and without pushing into Iraq itself. He even agreed to a modest tax increase, which was necessary, but which earned him the external scorn of the Republican Party.

However, his four years were not without other major controversies. Like Reagan, he was not amiss to a little gunboat diplomacy. He used our military to illegally invade Panama and put its dictator Manuel Noriega into a Florida prison. While he was instrumental in NAFTA, a treaty that became law under his successor, he failed to staunch a severe recession. Perhaps most troubling is that he left office by granting pardons to many who clearly broke the law, including his Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger along with five others implicated in the Iran Contra scandal.

Consequently, I give the nod to Teddy Roosevelt, who was also the first president of the 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt would be seen today as a Democrat. Indeed, he coined the word “progressive”, which is a label many liberals like me now prefer. He was the original trustbuster. His obsession with reigning in the power of corporate interests and the powerful in general would horrify most Republicans today. He coined the term “square deal” to describe a mutually beneficial relationship between business and labor. He passed the Pure Food and Drug Act along with its companion, the Meat Inspection Act to address problems in our food safety system that today would seem unfathomable. Perhaps most startlingly, he was our nation’s premier conservationist. He set aside more land for national parks than all other presidents before him did. In addition, with much arm-twisting he was able to create the Panama Canal. To do it though he had to break a few eggs. It took some gunboat diplomacy to convince Columbia to allow us to “create” the state of Panama.

He was a man that in retrospect did have some faults. He believed in active United States imperialism. In addition to the “state” of Panama, which was largely our invention, he also invaded the Philippines. His reasoning would seem familiar to our current president. He wanted to “uplift” these poor souls toward “Christianity” and “democracy”. Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam became U.S. protectorates, but it is hardly clear that the natives welcomed our protection. Teddy though was hardly atypical for his time. Manifest Destiny seemed hardwired into our national consciousness in the early 20th century. It would take more than fifty years before we would fully appreciate the downsides of imperialism.

Still, among all our 20th century presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, not Ronald Reagan, stands out as our best Republican president. Perhaps he blazed a trail for his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was inarguably the best president of the 20th century, yet who has only belatedly gotten the recognition he deserves.

Not coincidentally, Teddy Roosevelt’s graven image is already on Mount Rushmore, as it should be. If anyone deserves to be added to that modern American pantheon though, it should be Teddy’s distant cousin Franklin, not our 40th president.

December 17th, 2006 at 12:09pm Posted by Mark | History | no comments

George W. Bush: No Ronald Reagan

Although I have railed about Ronald Reagan’s policies in the past I was still not untouched by the Reagan charm. Even though I was very upset by what he did to my country I found I could not hate the man. So although this may not sound sincere, I do send my condolences to his family and friends upon his passing yesterday. If you ask me slowly dying from Alzheimer’s disease is a horrible way to go. I hope my fate is kinder and my death much quicker.

Of course the media is filled nearly to saturation with Reagan perspectives and flashbacks. I’ve been watching and listening to many of them. I remember during the 1988 Vice Presidential debates Dan Quayle compared himself to Jack Kennedy. I guess he did have the hair and the youth. But as Lloyd Bentsen pointed out with devastating effectiveness during the debate: “I knew Jack Kennedy. I served with him. He was my friend. Senator you are no Jack Kennedy.” This telling remark caused the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory to remark, “Bentsen bags a Quayle”.

George W. Bush has spent his three plus years trying to pretend he is Ronald Reagan. He has lifted most of his script from Ronald Reagan. He says all the right words. But no one is fooled. He is no Ronald Reagan. He’s not even a pale imitation. He’d be doing himself a service to stop even trying to fill those shoes.

I must say nice things about Ronald Reagan at this time. So today I will concentrate on what I liked and admired about Ronald Reagan. For one thing even to a liberal Democrat like myself, Reagan fully earned the title of “Great Communicator”. He was articulate. When he spoke you could feel the authority in his voice. He was both an actor on stage and a man wholly at peace with himself. He was if nothing else entirely sincere. I remember when he testified about the Iran Contra scandal and said that he couldn’t remember authorizing the policy. Even I gave him the benefit of the doubt. The early stages of his Alzheimer’s disease could be seen from time to time during his second term. But Reagan could not lie. It was not in his nature to be duplicitous.

Bush has already lied numerous times as I’ve pointed out in entries like these. I sometimes wonder if Bush is also suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. He seems to get more and more inarticulate every day. But one can roll back video clips of him ten or more years and you can see public speaking was never one of his strong points. Moreover Bush both looks and feels shifty. He doesn’t feel genuine. In that sense he is very much like both Clinton and Nixon. Reagan though was the honest real deal.

Reagan also knew how to lead. What he did to reinvigorate the Republican Party, which was near death’s door in 1964, was nothing short of remarkable. While I quarreled with his methods he was absolutely sincere and forceful in his position: only by acknowledging that government was the problem could the Republicans have a platform that would let them take back Congress and the White House. He proved that he, at least, could make a convincing emotional case that overwhelmed the logical case and we could follow. That was Reagan’s genius. He could make many of us believe the ridiculous.

Not many presidents could do that. Roosevelt made us believe that things were getting better during the Depression and that prosperity was just around the corner. He did manage to put a lot of people on the public dole and give many some feelings of self worth again. But it was faux prosperity that didn’t really return until World War Two. Reagan also had that most rare of gifts. It was shared by only a handful of Presidents. Bill Clinton was one of the most articulate and compelling public speakers I have ever heard. But he couldn’t make us believe the unreasonable. And I think that was because Clinton in his heart understood the complexity of the issues he was advocating. He could see both points of view and could acknowledge he might be wrong, even when he led. Reagan never had this problem. He knew what he believed and he projected it all with his disarming smile and utter sincerity. We trusted him and even when he badly abused our trust time and time again we just couldn’t fault him; he was too nice and too sincere to hate. With Clinton or Bush though we can smell the duplicity.

Reagan was also a true family values man. He lived his values. While his son Ron might disagree about how effective he was as a father, he was a terrific husband. I am envious of his marriage and devotion to Nancy. I would bet not one marriage in a hundred is so tightly integrated and so truly loving. I don’t get that feeling at all about George and Laura. It seems like Bush can’t articulate a sincere thought. When we see George and Laura together that sense of intimacy is wholly absent.

Reagan also had a simple but sincere reckless courage. That was apparent when he was shot by John Hinckley and even joked on his way to the hospital. Like Bush he never fought in a war but unlike Bush he was not afraid to admit his mistakes. When things went wrong, like the Beirut bombing, he accepted responsibility. The buck stopped at his desk.

Sorry, George W. Bush is a Reagan wannabee. He’s hardly unique in that respect. Many have tried to emulate Reagan. But his utter and honest sincerity was impossible to grok in a city full of politicians who quickly learn the art of doublespeak. (It is curious though that Carter had this same “problem” but it worked against him.) John McCain has some of his attributes. He certainly has Reagan’s sincerity and sense of conviction. But he lacks Reagan’s charm and transparency.

It remains to be seen how the Republican Party will fare in a sans-Reagan America. Even if he has remained out of public view for the past ten years Reagan was still the party’s source of inspiration. I hope since the lessons of Reagan and Bush we have learned that while we can admire a man of principle and conviction the real world is far more complex. It’s not a good idea to put people like this in a position of such power. Reagan saw and Bush sees the world in terms of black and white. This approach has proven very costly. Reagan’s decision to bring down communism at all costs meant that we funded terrorists in Central America. Our tax money was used to kill tens of thousands of people in places like Nicaragua and El Salvador. Reagan also provided intelligence and supplies to Saddam Hussein. He gave shoulder-launched missiles to people who would eventually become the Taliban. Bush too has shown that not factoring in the complexity of the world is costly and counterproductive. His approach to the war on terrorism only feeds the very forces that want to kill us.

It is my hope that we will appreciate Ronald Reagan the man. But we must learn the lesson that leadership requires more than the force of personality and the assurance of conviction. It also requires a firm grounding in reality. I hope America now understands that pragmatic people like Bill Clinton, for all their faults in the White House, tend to truly serve our public interest better.

June 6th, 2004 at 09:26pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2004 | one comment

Racing toward environmental disaster

What an irony. There was a time when the Republican Party was known as the environmental party. Teddy Roosevelt alone created five national parks during his tenure. More recently it was Richard Nixon that created the Environmental Protection Agency. But these days it is getting hard to find Republican environmentalists.

Oh sure there are plenty of Republicans who say they are for the environment. But most of them are liars. Try to find a Republican in Congress that is for the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming. Know of any? Despite polls like this that say 61% of Americans are in favor of the United States abiding by the Kyoto Treaty Republicans in the Senate will let it come up for a vote, well, when hell freezes over. The new carpet was hardly tacked into place in the Oval Office after Bush’s inauguration when Bush yanked U.S. support for the treaty. Instead Bush advocated a voluntary plan that he said would lower the amount of carbon dioxide emissions produced in our country. Not surprisingly this voluntary plan is working about as well as Governor Bush’s wonderful plan for saving the state of Texas’s air quality. Instead of making the air 20% cleaner in Texas the laws Bush advocated actually made it easier for polluters to pollute and to hide the evidence from the law. As a result of this insightful plan in 1999 Houston’s air quality actually was worse than Los Angeles’s.

Kyoto of course is just a small part of a much larger attitude of contempt toward the environment. Republicans stopped giving much of a damn about the environment during the Reagan Administration. It started with a slap in the face to environmentalists when Anne Burford Gorsuch was appointed to the EPA. She had no experience in protecting the environment. But she had worked hard as a member of the Colorado legislature to fight the EPA that was insisting that Denver comply with the clean air laws. (No lie, she was part of a clique of state legislative representatives self named “the crazies”.) For such a sterling accomplishment this chain smoking 38-year-old woman became EPA administrator. There she spent most of her time making sure it did everything but protect the environment. When not trying to cut the EPA’s budget and coming up with an enemies lists of civil servants she managed to suspend a ban on the disposal of hazardous liquid waste in landfills. Outraged Democrats eventually forced her out under pressure. William Ruckelshaus, the first EPA Administrator, replaced her. EPA employees were so grateful to have her gone they cheered Ruckelshaus’s return.

Throughout the Reagan years the environment was always on the back burner. It was much more important to have cheap gas. Although Bush 41 was relatively kind to the environment his son was not. Bush 43’s attitude seemed to be to beat Anne Burford Gorsuch at her own miserable record. Just a few samples of the Bush 43 environmental wreckage to date:

- Bush delayed until 2015 rules that would reduce soot and smog levels, likely leading to 60,000 premature deaths a year.
- He opened waters off the states of California, Florida and Texas to oil drilling despite protests from the governors of these states, including his own brother.
- He allowed the corporate superfund taxes expire, thereby shifting the burden to the taxpayer instead of the polluters.
- He cut the EPA’s enforcement budget, leading to 13% fewer inspections in 2002 alone.
- He allowed the return noisy, smoke spewing snowmobiles to the pristine Yellowstone National Park.
- He allowed new coal fired power plants to be built around national parks, thereby decreasing visibility in the parks.
- He consistently under funded budgets for the maintenance of the national parks.
- He sought sweeping changes to the Endangered Species Act that has reduced the number of protected species.
- He allowed logging in some of the few remaining old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.

For over twenty years we have seen a consistent and reckless pattern of antipathy and even hostility toward the environment. Since Bush 43 the gloves seem to be off. A recent EPA decision that will require off road diesel vehicles to comply with Clean Air Standards is the one major exception to a legacy of environmental wreckage.

Most Americans understand the connection between their living choices and the environment. But Republicans are living in denial. That so many species become endangered or extinct annually doesn’t seem to bother them in the least. Never mind the fact that we may need this biodiversity to ensure our own survival as a species. Some of our most promising pharmaceuticals have come from biologically diverse places like pristine tropical forests. When given a choice between growth and the environment growth wins every time. If it looks politically costly to diss the environment, they’ll invent a proposal like the badly named “clear skies” initiative that gives the appearance of doing something but exacerbates the problem. All recommendations that don’t conform to their mental model of how the world should work are the result of bias and bad science.

The fragility of our environment and the interdependence of all living things slide off them like water off the back of a duck. In their minds growth can be sustained forever. Cheap land will always be available. Wetlands are never as important as property rights.

It’s not like we have another planet readily available we can inhabit after we consume this one. Earth is our only possible home. If it becomes our toxic playground we will be the cause of our own extinction. The earth deserves our respect and our survival instinct should require that we provide it. If Republicans were as concerned about family values as they claim to be they would realize that leaving a vibrant ecosystem is the best present they can give their posterity. Instead they pass along values of wanton and reckless selfishness that may kill us all.

May 24th, 2004 at 09:23pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2004 | no comments

The Reagan Wreckage

I hope it is not just me who thinks the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is going too far. This group has taken upon itself the ambitious task of naming at least one notable landmark in every state for the ailing former president. But that’s not all. No, they want more. Much more. They also want one notable landmark in every county in the country too. Advocates are already pressing for a Reagan Memorial on the Mall. Can’t the man die first?

In the eyes of Republicans of course Reagan is their hero. Consequently he must be our hero too. One reason he perhaps looms so large in the imagination of Republicans is that really there weren’t that many great Republican presidents, so beggars can’t be choosers. It is unlikely any Republican president will ever match Lincoln’s legacy. But since Lincoln, the pickings for Republicans have been slim. The Great Depression occurred on Hoover’s watch. (Hoover and Jimmy Carter have a lot in common: presidents who were in power in troubled times that were largely beyond their control, but who managed to excel as leaders and statesmen more after they left office than when they were in it.) Eisenhower is the best of the bunch since Lincoln; he knew how to balance a budget and run a country. Nixon of course, was the biggest embarrassment of all time for the Republican Party. Ford was a transition president. One term presidents don’t qualify as legacy material, as Bush I found out although he was one of the better ones.

Clearly the current Bush is running hard to meet and exceed the Reagan legacy and, unfortunately, he is doing a great job. He’s created deficits far larger than Reagan achieved, and Reagan created deficits on a magnitude never seen before.

I wonder if the people supporting this project were asleep during the 1980s. I certainly wasn’t. I was a newly minted civil servant. Although I had no exposure before the bizarre workings of government, things quickly went beyond comical to ludicrous. I worked at the Defense Mapping Agency at the time and remember being just astounded by the amount of money being thrown at our agency. When it came to defense spending, Star Wars was just the tip of the iceberg . We literally couldn’t find enough places to spend the money. Much of it went to create systems way beyond their time to move maps produced on paper to digital maps. I was part of a massive reengineering effort at the time. I remember business trips for hush hush requirements sessions with defense contractors as they tried to automate our enterprise business processes. I’m not sure whatever happened to these systems, or even if they got off the ground. I do know when I left in1987 they weren’t operational. But there was no let up in the defense money pouring in. I am sure we did our best to prop up the share prices of bloated and wasteful defense contractors. (The Meese Commission, which was charged to look into waste and fraud in federal agencies, gave our agency high marks. This was a source of considerable amusement to us at the time, and another sign that the Reagan Administration had lost touch with reality.)

The downsizing of the federal work force was another constant started when Reagan took office and has continued ever since. Early in my career I was fortunate in the sense that I was working in the Defense Department, and that put us largely off limits. But by the 1990s, downsizing had hit DoD too. About the time I left the Air Force my office was being looked at to be A-76′ed (referring here to Circular A-76, otherwise known as the “let’s fire feds and replace them with overpaid contractors” Executive Order.)

We seem to have forgotten just what a wreck Reagan made of the government. Defense money was squandered for bombers costing billions of dollars and for laser satellite systems that were supposed to shoot down enemy missiles from space (but never did). The Savings and Loan fiasco also happened on the Reagan watch. In an attempt to make banks compete, the Reagan Administration let S&L’s invest in all sort of murky investments that caused S&L’s and banks to fail all across the country. The U.S. taxpayers bailed out these mistakes to the tune of over $100B.

And then there were the cast of bizarre characters populating the top ranks of government. As one example, we had Anne Burford Gorsuch, at the EPA, whose idea of improving the environment was to decimate the agency, and who set the sterling example of chain smoking in her office. And of course who can forget Energy Secretary James Watt, who showed his sterling political skills by saying he had the perfect staff because “I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple”.

Meanwhile, we had Reagan involving the CIA and our military in all sorts of banana republics. We invaded Grenada because a few Marxists were running around. We funded what amounted to government terrorists in a civil war in El Salvador that killed and terrorized thousand of people for more than a decade. We did similar operations in places like Guatemala and Costa Rica. Reagan approved a brilliant strategy of providing “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan with shoulder-launched Stinger missiles. These same freedom fighters, of course, are today’s Taliban and many of the weapons we supplied are now being turned against our forces. Reagan also cozied up to Saddam Hussein and sent no less than current Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld to Baghdad to make nice and to offer U.S. military aid. And then there was the plainly illegal but under the table shenanigans that Oliver North directed from his office at the National Security Council in the White House. Lets also not forget the hundreds of marines killed by a terrorist bombing in Lebanon for which Reagan assumed “full responsibility” but naturally didn’t pay a political price.

Arguably Reagan did change the shape of government. Before he took office most of us thought of the government as an institution by and for the people. Reagan portrayed the government as a somewhat evil institution not to be trusted. His “legacy” continues today to portray the government this way. He embraced supply side economics that led to the largest deficits in the history of our country, during either peace or war.

Is this the stuff of legacy? Apparently. Because here in Washington the Reagan Legacy Project has been very busy. First National Airport was renamed to Ronald Reagan National Airport. Those of us who remember Reagan were very puzzled by this. He hated Washington and couldn’t wait to get away from it for extended vacations in California. Why name an airport after him next to a city he loathed? But there was also the Ronald Reagan Building at Federal Triangle, which has the dubious honor of being the most expensive federal building every constructed, busting its budget numerous times (all that marble gets expensive!) The Reagan Building may well be a fitting landmark to the man. As a president who gave us the largest deficits of all time, it is fitting to name the most costly and badly managed federal construction project after him.

Will Ronald Reagan make it on Mount Rushmore? Rest assured the Reagan Legacy Project is working hard on this endeavor too. But also be confident of this: history will judge Reagan as a lesser president, not a great president. Naming so many things after him and putting him on Mount Rushmore won’t change the facts. He was a nice guy but a disaster of a president. Fifty years from now his name will only evoke snickers.

November 12th, 2003 at 10:50am Posted by Mark | Politics 2003 | one comment