…get a whole new meaning as loathsome columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall endorses Dean, and the official Dean blog is thrilled (as are his commenters).

If Dean takes this as a Sistah Souljah moment and bitch-slaps him tomorrow, it could be very good for his campaign. If not, buh-bye; if not in July 04, then in November.

(a tip of the Shoei to Instapundit)JK: Just got an email from reader Jake Ewing, with an update…

Anyone else find it curious that the Dean blog has…

1) Shut down comments on the Ted Rall post without explanation (I have *never* seen this happen on the Dean blog without it being announced)

2) Substantially changes the meaning of the intro statement, changing the word “explains” to “considers”: Ted Rall, in his Universal Press Syndicate column today, considers why so many third party voters are coming to Dean:

3) Deleted a key paragraph from Rall’s endorsement: “Maybe it’s premature to endorse Gov. Dean. But right now, given the information we have available, he’s the preferred candidate of us Anybody But Bushies.”

4) Summarily removed Rall’s name from the title.

The definitive original posts is archived by Prof. Volokh. In addition, here’s the Feedster capture of the post:

Rall: Howard Dean for President
From: Blog for America – hide – show: all images links rss

Ted Rall, in his Universal Press Syndicate column today, explains why so many third party voters are coming to Dean: Howard Dean has the best chance to beat Bush.Brilliant, aggressive and moneyed… Dr. Dean has a corner on the single…

http://blog.deanforamerica.com/archives/002368.html – 41 words
similar posts – cached – translate – published 10 hours, 41 minutes ago

Every so often, you read some stuff, see some connections and get a post that just writes itself. I’ve said in the past that one of the most serious issues we face (and are primarily ignoring) these days is what Neil Stephenson summarized so pithily:

Once the Invisible Hand has taken all the historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), and high-speed pizza delivery.

We face an outgoing tide, in which the prosperity which had once been concentrated here, and shared widely between the classes of capital and labor, is going out. Owners of capital can invest abroad, and can, if they are clever and lucky improve their situation. Owners of labor find themselves in increasingly direct competition with lower-cost labor abroad, or with less-skilled labor which can compete because machines and systems make their skills redundant.

Start here (note, intrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), with an article in this morning’s L.A. Times about WalMart:

The Wal-Mart Supercenter, a pink stucco box twice as big as a Home Depot, combines a full-scale supermarket with the usual discount mega-store. For the 26-year-old Ferguson, the draw is simple.

“You can’t beat the prices,” said the hotel cashier, who makes $400 a week. “I come here because it’s cheap.”

Across town, another mother also is familiar with the Supercenter’s low prices. Kelly Gray, the chief breadwinner for five children, lost her job as a Raley’s grocery clerk last December after Wal-Mart expanded into the supermarket business here. California-based Raley’s closed all 18 of its stores in the area, laying off 1,400 workers.

Gray earned $14.68 an hour with a pension and family health insurance. Wal-Mart grocery workers typically make less than $9 an hour.

Calpundit also links to this story, and last night, had a guest post up from a grocery clerk union leader about the current strike, which concludes (I think these words are Kevin’s):

Here’s the key question: Would you rather that these 70,000 middle class jobs become poverty level jobs filled by workers who have to turn to the taxpayer for healthcare and food stamps? That’s what the companies are proposing because that’s what Wal-Mart has. The CEOs of these three companies are just trying to keep up with the Waltons. Their combined operating profits have gone up 91% in the past five years…but Wal-Mart’s have gone up even more. Good lord — when is enough enough? At what price profits???

It’s not just about grocery clerks. In another LA Times story today, we’ve got this:

BURLINGTON, Iowa — America used to need this town tucked into a crook of the Mississippi River.

The assembly lines in Burlington and other factory towns nearby built the products that kept the nation moving — school buses, car batteries, backhoes, tractor-trailers. Workers put in 60- and 70-hour weeks to meet demand.

The backhoes are produced in Mexico now, the batteries in Canada. Men and women who once defined themselves by what they built now support their families with unemployment checks.

“There’s not a market anymore for a guy who shows up for work and does his job well,” said Devan Rhum, 37, a former factory worker. “All of a sudden, we’ve got our hands out. It’s degrading.”

What’s it about? The Times story on Wal Mart says:

“We have split brains,” said Robert Reich, U.S. secretary of Labor under President Clinton and now a professor of economic and social policy at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. “Most of the time, the half of our brain that wants the best deal prevails.”

The connection may be lost on many, Reich said, but consumers’ addiction to low prices is accelerating a shift toward a two-tiered U.S. economy, with a shrinking middle class and a growing pool of low-wage workers.

“Wal-Mart’s prices may be lower,” he said, “but that’s small consolation to a lot of people who end up with less money to spend.”

Others insist there is a net benefit whenever consumers can get more for less. “If you have lower real prices, you’re saving money,” said Arthur Laffer, a key advisor to President Reagan who is now an economic consultant in San Diego. “The prices’ falling, in effect, raises the wages of everyone who buys their products.”

Yes, but…that works well for the first few companies; the companies make more money, and lowering the price of goods improves the overall standard of living while only impacting a few workers. But there is a tipping point, where suddenly the number of workers who have gone from the middle-class downward begin to impact the overall economy – and we’re not better off then. Calpundit says it well when he says:

So which is the better and more sustainable model? Increasing the overall affordability of goods by creating a larger class of people who can afford them? Or increasing the overall affordability of goods by squeezing the blue collar workers who make them and thus lowering prices?

Both models work, but one works by building up the working class and the other works by tearing it down. I’ll take Door #1.

Along those lines, this week’s Business Week has a great article (subscribers only) on the decline of economic mobility. Because it’s protected, I’ll quote pretty extensively. (By the way, Business Week has taken over from Forbes as my favorite iconoclastic business magazine, and I’d encourage people to subscribe.)

The result has been an erosion of one of America’s most cherished values: giving its people the ability to move up the economic ladder over their lifetimes. Historically, most Americans, even low-skilled ones, were able to find poorly paid janitorial or factory jobs, then gradually climb into the middle class as they gained experience and moved up the wage curve. But the number of workers progressing upward began to slip in the 1970s, when the post-World War II productivity boom ran out of steam. Upward mobility diminished even more in the 1980s as globalization and technology slammed blue-collar wages.

MANY EXPERTS expected the trend to reverse as productivity rebounded during the heated economy of the 1990s. Certainly, there were plenty of gains. The long decline in pay rates turned around as supertight labor markets raised the wages of almost everyone. College enrollment boomed, too, and home ownership shot up, extending the American dream to more families. Low interest rates and higher wages allowed even those on the bottom to benefit. There was even a slight decline in the ranks of the very poorest families, as measured by asset wealth — those with a net worth of less than $5,000 — according to a study by New York University economics professor Edward N. Wolff.

But new research suggests that, surprisingly, the best economy in 30 years did little to get America’s vaunted upward mobility back on track. The new studies, which follow individuals and families over many years, paint a paradoxical picture: Even as the U.S. economy was bursting with wealth in the 1990s, minting dot-com millionaires by the thousands, conventional companies were cutting the middle out of career ladders, leaving fewer people able to better their economic position over the decade.

During the 1990s, relative mobility — that is, the share of Americans changing income quintiles in any direction, up or down — slipped by two percentage points, to 62%, according to an analysis of decade-long income trends through 2001 by Jonathan D. Fisher and David S. Johnson, two economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While two points may not sound like much, it’s bad news given how much progress might have been made amid explosive growth. Essentially, says University of Chicago economics professor and Nobel laureate James J. Heckman, “the big finding in recent years is that the notion of America being a highly mobile society isn’t as true as it used to be.”

In fact, according to a study by two Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists that analyzed families’ incomes over three decades, the number of people who stayed stuck in the same income bracket — be it at the bottom or at the top — over the course of a decade actually increased in the 1990s. So, though the boom lifted pay rates for janitors and clerks by as much as 5% to 10% in the late 1990s, more of them remained janitors or clerks; fewer worked their way into better-paying positions. Imelda Roman, for one, makes about $30,000 a year as a counselor at a Milwaukee nonprofit — barely more than the $27,000 or so, after inflation adjustments, that the 33-year-old single mom earned as a school-bus driver more than 10 years ago. Says Roman, who hopes to return to college to improve her prospects: “It’s hard to find a job with a career ladder these days, and a B.A. would be an edge.”

What Roman faces is an economy that is slowly stratifying along class lines. Today, upward mobility is determined increasingly by a college degree that’s attainable mostly by those whose parents already have money or education. “It’s clear that unless you go to college, you can’t achieve a high trajectory in life. Education is the key to success in America today,” says Aramark Corp. CEO Joseph Neubauer. He gives scholarship money to hundreds of disadvantaged kids every year through the Horatio Alger Assn., a group of successful Americans who try to help others make it, too.

…

In turn, the lack of mobility for those who don’t or can’t get a degree is putting a lid on the intergenerational progress that has long been a mainstay of the American experience. Last year, Wichita State University sociology professor David W. Wright and two colleagues updated a classic 1978 study that looked at how sons fared according to the social and economic class of their fathers. Defining class by a mix of education, income, and occupation, they found that sons from the bottom three-quarters of the socioeconomic scale were less likely to move up in the 1990s than in the 1960s. Just 10% of sons whose fathers were in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter by 1998, the authors found. By contrast, 23% of lower-class sons had done so by 1973, according to the earlier study. Similarly, only 51% of sons whose fathers belonged to the second-highest quarter equaled or surpassed the economic standing of their parents in the 1990s. In the 1960s, 63% did.

That’s the pattern Michael A. McLimans and his family follows. Now 33, with two young children, the New Holland (Pa.) resident has spent the past decade working at pizza chains such as Domino’s and Pizza Hut (YUM ). He made it to assistant manager but found that he could earn more, $9 to $12 an hour with tips, as a delivery driver. He and his wife, a hotel receptionist, pull down about $40,000 a year — far from the $60,000 Michael’s father, David I. McLimans, earns as a veteran steelworker. “I save every dime I can so my kids can go to college, which neither of us can afford to do,” says Michael.

This matters a lot. Social and economic mobility is the key to American success, politically, economically, and socially.

I cited this post in the Bellona Times a long time ago:

Midway through my much-aided private college education, the Reagan administration started making Academe a gated community. The results were apparent by the time I graduated, but I always figured, well, at least the state university systems are available.

Talking to younger folks, though, I’ve hit plenty of anecdotal evidence that even state universities are now available only to those lower-class compeers who are willing to assume crippling — I mean, legs-chainsawed-off crippling — debt while simultaneously working like a dog and trying to study full-time. And reports like “Losing Ground” and “Unequal Opportunity” provide the stats: college has become an impossible choice for many Americans, no matter how many sacrifices they’re willing to make.

In response, I said:

Social mobility. It is the magic glue that holds us together; it is the sense of possibility that each of us holds in our hearts, if not for ourselves, than for our children.

And one of the consequences of SkyBox Liberalism is not only the ossification of class…you in your courtside chair, Mr. Nicholson, and then the neat hierarchy of wealth and fame leading upward to the corporate SkyBoxes that make this all possible, and above them, the proles in the nosebleed seats, kept in their place by the minimum-wage guards who keep everyone in their appropriate section…but the obvious “flaunt it, baby” statement of your gracious wave to the fans sitting in the rafters.

Why should you care? You should care for a lot of reasons.

First, because the dynamic of Creative Destruction that keeps our economy strong is dying, replaced by Adam Bellow’s genteel world of nepotism and privilege. That’s not a good thing. Our economy is stronger than that of Europe and Japan because outsiders with energy and ideas can still build companies; that’s harder to do in an economically and socially stratified environment.

But most importantly, because it erodes the connections that tie us together as Americans.

The other [justification for managing the increasing concentration of wealth and power] is very practical and cold-hearted, and is something I hope to convince you to take seriously; to have the kind of political organization we have…where we grant legitimacy to an abstract body of laws and procedure…there needs to be a rough equality of power.

There will never be a true equality of power; every effort to make it so has collapsed into madness (The Terror, Pol Pot). But one unique feature of the American system – and one of the keys to it’s greatness is the ability of the small to stand up to the strong. This is important for many reasons; one of the most important is that it ties the small and powerless to the system with ties of legitimacy.

When I try and bring up these issues. I’m sometimes accused of trying to post-facto, justify the New Deal and Great Society and all of the baggage that came with them. I think that those who make those accusations operate from the mistaken assumption that the generalized prosperity and unity that we enjoyed from the 50’s to the 70’s was somehow a norm, and that we should take that as a baseline. It wasn’t, and we shouldn’t.

The New Deal was (rightly or not) conceived as a way to ameliorate conditions for the poor enough to stave off a possible socialist revolution (or a national socialist one…), and the Great Society was developed in response to Harrington’s “Other America” of malnourished kids.

We face new challenges today, and we need to try and imagine and build responses to them; some of those may look like large government programs and some may not. But we have to somehow face these challenges, or we’ll all wind up living in Neil Stephenson’s book.

JK Udate: This is funny – the next logical step in offshore outsourcing?

Calpundit busts Instapundit:

ANALOGIES….Just a note to my conservative brethren: any chance we can stop working our way through the microfilm archives of 1946 newspapers? If the analogy of Iraq to Vietnam is strained, the analogy to World War II is simply rubbish. There is literally nothing in common between the two.

OK?

Actually, Kevin, I’ve gotta disagree here. There is a core lesson that we can take from the WWII papers, that the kinds of things we need to accomplish in Iraq take time. Even in the far more Western and ‘organized’ environment of post-war Germany and France, things looked challenging for the first year or so. Even in the highly hierarchical society of Japan, there was violence and chaos for a period of time.

Those are important lessons, and we’re right to be confronted with what the news and commentary of the time were saying to help us put our current situation into perspective.

While I do think that Bush’s team booted the postwar planning (simply by not having the resources, propaganda, and staffing prepared), I also think that the anti-war crowd, once they didn’t get their way, have been far over the top in claiming ‘failure’ prematurely. And history exists exactly to help us make those kinds of judgments.

As noted below, I’ve been working on a critical commentary on George Soros’ Atlantic Article, ‘The Bubble of American Supremacy‘. But, as the old blogging phase goes, “You snooze, you lose,” and Matthew Stinson has written a better version of it already.

There are one or two points left open, and I’ll try and get to them today, but go read both Soros’ article and Matthews great commentary…

I meant to reply in kind to Julian Sanchez’ backhand of Rob Lyman for his defense of “communitarian patriotism,” but it slipped through the cracks. I was reminded tonight, because his post is at the top of our Technorati list.

Click on over and take a look; pay careful attention to the obvious respect and consideration with which he treats Rob. Then notice the giant mound of Swiss Cheese he erects as an argument.

Simply put, Julian made two gross errors in his argument, and caps it with an even more gross error in his behavior.
First, he makes claims about what Rob wrote that aren’t true.

Sanchez:

Step one: individuals in a democratic society bear responsibility for the actions (or failures to act) of their governments. This, as you may recall, is Osama bin Laden’s justification for killing American civilians. It’s asserted without argument. If it strikes you as plausible on face, notice that this is not the weaker claim that citizens are obligated to make a good faith effort to participate in the democratic process, vote for the best people given the information available to them, and so on. This is—and has to be for the purposes of this argument—a “strict liability” theory that looks at consequences. Bad policy enacted by the guy you voted against? Your fault. Some covert-op that only folks at the NSA knew about turns into a massive cock-up? You take your share of the blame as well.

Lyman:

Consider: Americans enjoy a democratic government which is, to a greater or lesser degree, responsive to our will. We are the authors of our government’s actions. If I vote for someone whose platform is opening up the prisons, I am partly to blame for the victimization of innocents which results when all those murderers and rapists get turned loose. If I vote for a politician whose platform is unilateral disarmament, I am partly to blame for whatever military catastrophe results. If Americans are killed by terrorists that my government failed to hunt down and kill, I am partly to blame.

Notice a few differences? Julian’s positions are two: either you buy into tribal blood-connection a la Bin Laden, or you have a procedural authorship that comes from your ‘good faith effort to participate.’ Rob isn’t making that point at all. he’s making the same point Schaar and I make, that we take on obligations by living in a society; some of the obligations are not of our choosing or making, but we bear them nonetheless.

Next he attempts to drive Rob’s argument off a cliff.

Sanchez:

Step three: Therefore (and I use the term loosely) each of us has a responsibility to be especially concerned with the welfare of our fellow Americans, rather than with people in general. This is my favorite. If you tilt your head and put your ear to the screen, you can almost hear these lines hollering: “Hi! I’m the fallacy of composition! You may remember me from such arguments as John Stuart Mill’s justification for utilitarianism, and Gladys the Groovy Mule.” If you’re bored and have some free time, see how many invalid arguments you can construct using this obviously incorrect form of inference. I’ll get you started: Corporations have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to be profit-maximizing. Therefore, shareholders must each act as profit maximizers in their own lives.

Gosh, Julian, I’m just not sure where to begin patching the holes in your argument. There’s a whole literature on obligation and citizenship; Waltzer and Schaar would be good places to start. And if theoretical arguments based on history and literature make one squirmy and uncomfortable, I’ll suggest a brief detour into emergent computation once he gets past the Introduction to Logic class.

I’ve got three problems with Julien’s post.

First, he carelessly misreads and misrepresents what Rob actually said.

Second, he ignorantly misapplies elementary logical propositions to a complex system, and ignores a whole raft of readily accessible literature both within the areas of logical analysis of complex systems, the limits of formal logic in modelling complex systems, and human history and politics – which was, after all, what we were talking about. I don’t know Sanchez’ writing well, so I can’t tell if he’s being willfully obtuse or just ignorant about the notions of obligation and citizenship, from a political theory perspective (note that I’ll make a careful distinction here between political philosophy and political theory. For a good primer, take a look at my post on it or at Chris Bertram’s, Russell Fox’s, or Matthew Yglesias.)

I have other philosophical issues with the ahistorical, atomistic individuality that his post infers, but I really don’t have enough data to know that’s where he’s coming from, so I’ll look around a bit before going there.

And finally, his dismissive and superior tone – particularly when combined with the intellectual failures set out above – set him up for the only appropriate response I can come to – which is to ask just exactly whose argument was it that is busted?

I don’t care whether you’re on the right or the left, Stalinist or Libertarian. There is no excuse for not treating your intellectual or political opponents with some modicum of decency and courtesy. When people don’t, I’ll certainly make it a point to nail them for it, as I’m nailing Julian (the fact that his arguments were such a wonderful example of pseudointellectual arrogance was a perk), and I hope that other people will as well.

The part of my brain that does the writing can be annoying; it is often difficult for to sit down and write about what I mean to write about – often the topics seem to select themselves, and I just come along for the ride.

In this case, I meant to finish a pretty unfavorable commentary I’m writing on George Soros’ article on Iraq in this month’s Atlantic. ‘The Bubble of American Supremacy,’ and instead started writing about the recent Massachusetts court decision on gay marriage.

As is typically the case with me, I have three responses which somewhat collide, so writing this is a chance for me to try and set them out and see what evolves (probably why I’d rather write this than comment on Soros’ article; I already know why that’s wrong).

The facts, law, and politics, are already well covered by others, so I’ll make a quick point of information, than start rolling. Here’s the news: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided this week that denying gay couples the right to marry was unconstitutional, and ordered the legislature and executive branch to come up with something in the next 180 days.

Here are the three perspectives: One is broadly social, and talks about why it is that I support gay marriage and think that it should be legal. One is moral, and talks about the thorny issues that are presented when rights collide with deep-seated beliefs. And the final one is deeply personal, and I hope will explain why it is that I will always personally support gay marriage.

On the social front, I’ll suggest that we spend all too much time focusing on the wrong part of the body – the crotch – and not enough on the part that matters – the heart – of those involved. This is a part of the broader issues I have with the way society deals with sex, and with the collapse of traditional sexual norms and the fact that nothing has stepped forward to replace them.

Look, it’s like this. What is marriage about? It’s about a deep commitment between two people who promise to care about and for each other. Historically, it has been tied to sex and procreation – which means heterosexual sex – but that tie is eroding, in the face of the increasing sexualization of society.

Eroding? It’s eroded, folks. Paris Hilton may be ‘deeply shamed’ by the release of her self-made video; but the next celebrity won’t be, and soon we’ll have migrated celebrity to something like Gibson’s character Tally Isham, whose entire life (especially the naughty bits) becomes the subject of a reality show. Soon we’ll be just a credit card away from the weekend cavorts of our media stars, whose stardom will be reinforced, not destroyed, by granting us this access.

Please don’t take me for some kind of neopuritan – I’m not, and my own history (two marriages and divorces, with a variety of relationships stacked around them) doesn’t exactly make me the poster boy for durable relationships. But hey, I’m trying…

The old models are broken, and we can do two things – we can fight a rearguard action to try and reclaim them, or we can look at them anew, try to see what it is that we saw of real value in them, and forge new models that include those things.

What it is that matters in a marriage? Commitment. Duration. Primacy. It is a commitment – which means that in the face of conflicting desires, you have to anyway. It has duration – meaning it gains in value over time. An old good relationship is better than a new one. My dream is to grow old with TG, and to have the span of our history together as a part of what we share. It means that I will take care of her, and be taken care of by her in turn, and that in the time where long shadows come over our lives, we won’t be alone in facing them. And it has primacy over your other relationships. The act of saying to this person “You are the most important person in my life. Not my children, not my boss, not my pastor or anyone else matters more to me than you do,” fundamentally changes both one’s life and one’s relationships to others.

These are good things. They are not only good for people, they are good for society. They bind people to each other, and bind them to a future. They create the kind of ‘units’ of people that can successfully build societies and raise children.

The kind of sexual equipment that the people involved have, and what they do with that sexual equipment, has nothing to do with these core values. You’d hope that they were sexually compatible and satisfied, since seeking out other sexual outlets tends to conflict with the core values. But for crying out loud, what difference does their sexual behavior make to what really matters?

The answer to that, of course, cuts to the second point.

At one of my first blogger events – Roger Simon’s book signing – someone asked how I felt about gay marriage, and I replied “For it, of course.” Cathy Seipp was a bit put out – and I think rightly so – and pointed out that reasonable people could well disagree on this, and that for some people, it might actually be a deeply moral issue.

There are people for whom homosexual sex is, literally, a sin. For their government to recognize homosexual marriage – and put it on a par with normal marriage – means that their government is caving in to sin.

I used to be frustrated with those people, who thought abortion was murder and homosexuality was sin.

Then we deliberately got pregnant (not me, exactly, but my first wife).And the nature of what was going on in doing abortions fundamentally and irrevocably changed for me. Do I stand outside clinics with pictures of bleeding fetuses? Not a chance. I’m still on the other side, and support abortion, but with a wince.

And I do understand how, legitimately, people might want to stand outside a clinic, or how legitimately, people might be uncomfortable with the acceptance of homosexuality, and I won’t condemn anyone for those views (I will freely condemn them for their behavior, however, should they choose to commit murder, arson, or simple rudeness in my presence).

To me, people may choose to live pretty much however they want to. I have friends who are ultra-Orthodox Jews, and friends who are devout Catholics; each operates their life around their principles, and wishes everyone else did as well. But I draw the line when someone restrains another from leaving – as some Muslim families violently do with their adult daughters, or Muslim men do their wives (note that this happens with Christian sects as well, and over issues other than religion; I’m wary about pointing to Muslims, but I’m more wary of ignoring the real stories in order to be inoffensive). And I draw an even bolder line when someone wants to change the laws of the state to make them congruent with their especial cultural choice.

So how do we resolve these things? Awkwardly and over time. We all operate in a mesh of invisible social norms, which change slowly – and inexorably. The tug-of-war that we are going through is the tension that drives that change, and while we all participate in it, we all ought to be understanding of it for what it is, as well.

Do I support gay marriage? Of course. Do I think that all right-thinking people do? Of course not.

But for those who don’t, I keep wanting to ask – given the array of horrible sexual behavior that we all see around us every day; given the fact that most of the specific sex acts homosexual couples commit are committed by heterosexual couples as well – shouldn’t we look more favorably on a gay couple that has made a lifetime commitment and is living it out, and willing to do so before the state, and maybe a bit less favorably on someone like me?

And finally, I support gay marriage because of the piece of paper on my desk. It’s a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care; TG and I are updating ours (since we’re not yet married), and I pulled this out of the file.

Back in the 80’s, I made a lot of money, and actually had investments (as opposed to bills). I hired a pretty good asset manager, and he became one of my closest friends. He ultimately became the godfather to my oldest sons. His name was Steve, and he was gay and died of AIDS in the early 90’s.

When he came out, he was fired by his parents from the family owned firm that he was a partner at; when he got AIDS, he was fired from his job at Drexel. As he got sicker, he couldn’t always manage his medical affairs, and his parents – who had fired and rejected him, became conservators of his estate over his objections. He didn’t want them to take control of his medical care, so he asked me to.

He’d been in a committed relationship for six years at this point, and his parents undid much the estate planning he’d done to ensure his partner’s financial security; his partner couldn’t do anything about it – after all, in the eyes of the law at the time, he was a nonentity. His partner couldn’t legally control Steve’s health care without a document; and because of the legal conflicts over the financial matters, Steve was concerned that it would be invalidated. So I took the legal responsibility. His partner made the decisions; I was the formal authority that the hospitals could use to validate it. Because his partner was, after all, a legal nonentity when it came to the legal authority over Steve’s care.

Ultimately his parents lawyered up and attempted to get me removed. We’d have won, and I’d have gladly spent the money to win, but at the very end, Steve did what he should have done in the beginning, and married.

He married a casual lesbian friend, who managed his care for the last six months of his life, and when he died, took the remaining assets and left Steve’s partner – the person who should have had them – destitute and alone.

You know, if you believe homosexuality is wrong, I can understand not doing business with Steve. I could understand not socializing with him, or even politely expressing your disapproval.

But I have a really hard goddamn time understanding why it is that his control of his dignity and assets should be stripped from him – and the man who he had lived with in a committed relationship for as long as I had been married to my first wife – because of it.

And so personally, I’ll support gay marriage until it becomes legal. If we need to do anything about marriage in this country, it ought to focus on we straight people who seem to be doing such a bad job of marriage on our own.

(in a personal note, TG is certainly working on that issue as far as I’m concerned.)

FEB/04 UPDATE: TG and I are taking the plunge and getting married ourselves!. There’s a good friend who we’d like to have at the wedding. Can you help?
–

One of the downsides of blogging under a pseudonym is that you can’t fully leverage the two parts of your life; I can’t use this blog to point out personal things in quite the ways non-pseudonymous bloggers can.

I’ll crack that a bit to publicly thank the various doctors, nurses, and staff at Torrance Memorial Hospital, where Littlest Guy, our 7-year old, wound up Saturday night with a bad enough case of viral enteritis that he spent the night getting fluids intravenously. TG and I were at dinner at Ann Salisbury’s, enjoying her great food and company along with Henry and Mr. and Mrs. Calpundit when Littlest Guy’s mother called and we unceremoniously bolted for the exit and the 405. Middle Guy stepped up, as we called him from the road to get much-needed clothes and cleanup supplies to the parents waiting at the hospital as we drove up from OC.

Littlest Guy is much, much better now, and planning on bragging to all his friends that he stayed up until 4:00 a.m. The laundry is almost all done, and none of us have gotten sick, so it looks like we’re through this.

I didn’t get much done yesterday or last night, so I’m way behind on work that needs doing, which means I’ll be ignoring blogging for the next day or so. I’ll catch up midweek.

So public apologies for bailing out to our dinner companions, and again, thanks to the good people at Torrance Memorial for their excellent care of him and all four of his parents.

From CNN:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraq will have a new transitional government with full sovereign powers by the end of June 2004, the Iraqi Governing Council said Saturday, and will have a constitution and a permanent, democratically elected government by the end of 2005.

My first reaction: sha-WHAT?

On reconsideration: shaaaa-WHAT?

OK, time to calm myself down. There really isn’t enough information there for me to start testing Dean banners on the site yet.

But the first sniff certaily does sound like a big departure from “we’re done when we’re done,” which I’ve argued is the right approach. If so, it’s a diplomatic disaster unparallelled during my lifetime. If we didn’t have the bottom to do this, we should have stayed home.

We’ll know more next week. But it sure could make my decision about who I’ll vote for in ’04 much, much simpler.

I’m busy all day today, but two things you ought to go take a look at while I’m gone.

Den Beste makes my point about what happens if we don’t succeed in tempering Islamist rage – and it isn’t pretty for the Middle East. He seems to suggest that total war is new (it isn’t – think Troy), but he makes good points, and in case anyone wonders what I’m so damn afraid of, he nails it.

Julian Sanchez demonstrates once again that libertarians seem to have spent waaay too much time in logic class and not enough studying history or political theory, as he backhands Rob Lyman’s post below. I’m out till this afternoon, but watch this space for a fisking.

As agreed, Calpundit and I will have a back and forth on the six points I raised in my post a week or so ago, plus the thorny issue of internationalization. Buckle up…

First, we’re not going anywhere in Afghanistan or Iraq until we’re done. Afghanistan will not turn into Vermont any time soon, but we will make sure that the power of the warlords is checked, and that it doesn’t collapse again. Iraq could be the leader of the Middle east, and we intend to help build it into that;

My comments from this post.

The essence of war is a violent struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other. War is fundamentally an interactive social process. Clausewitz called it a Zweikampf (literally a “twostruggle”) and suggested the image of a pair of wrestlers locked in a hold, each exerting force and counterforce to try to throw the other. War is thus a process of continuous mutual adaptation, of give and take, move and countermove. It is critical to keep in mind that the enemy is not an inanimate object to be acted upon but an independent and animate force with its own objectives and plans. While we try to impose our will on the enemy, he resists us and seeks to impose his own will on us. Appreciating this dynamic interplay between opposing human wills is essential to understanding the fundamental nature of war.

USMC Warfighting Manual MCDP-1 (.pdf)

In any negotiation, there are two ideal positions: 1) “I don’t care,” in which you challenge the other side to get you to engage in a negotiation at all; and 2) “No matter what it takes,” in which you make it clear that no matter what the other side does, you have the will and means to escalate further and prevail.

Looking at the war with Islamism that’s taking place primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s clear that option 1) isn’t available to us (it really hasn’t been since 9/11).

Our objective needs to be to break the effective will to fight of the opposition. This isn’t about the will of the hundred thousand or so fanatics who will fight the West to the death; it’s about the more-rational millions who are on the verge of tipping over toward that position, and who are inclined to do so because they think they will win.

We brought 9/11 on, in part, by showing irresolution in the face of earlier attacks. (We also brought it on with a hamhanded and shortsighted foreign policy as relates to the Middle East and Arab world, but that’s a subject for another, longer blog post). Osama Bin Laden genuinely believed that the U.S. would withdraw – as we did from Lebanon and Somalia – if we were bloodied.

Their perception is based on two simple facts; most of us don’t like to kill other people, and most of us really, really don’t like it when ours get killed.

Our goal, I believe, is as much to correct those misapprehensions as to physically disrupt the infrastructure that supports the Islamist movement. This presents some significant dangers. As long as I’ve been quoting Schaar in support of my views, let me quote him challenging them (from his essay ‘The American Amnesia’):

Action taken for psychological objectives (e.g. credibility) inherently contains an element of theatricality, and can easily slide into pure theater. Policymakers come to think of action – even military action – in theatrical terms and lose sight of the real costs. Policymakers’ and spectators’ sense of reality become attenuated. Even death becomes unreal. Image and substance become independent of each other.

Public policy becomes public relations.

A war fought for symbolic ends is very difficult to explain and justify to the citizenry. Officials easily employ concealment and evasion, and retreat into isolation. Government and the public get out of touch with each other. Furthermore, when the symbolic end sought is an image of national toughness or determination, then any domestic opposition or criticism threatens that image, thereby threatening – in the eyes of the government – the national defense. Under these conditions, opponents at home seem more dangerous than the enemy abroad. Feeling beleaguered on all fronts, seeing enemies everywhere, officials fear loss of authority and strive for more and more power, even at the expense of constitutional processes. The government becomes enclosed in a private reality, and wrapped in a mood of paranoia and impotence. That was exactly the mentality of the Nixon Administration. And that mentality drove it to the near destruction of the Indochinese peninsula and the American constitutional order.

Schaar sums up what it is that I fear about this war; that it will become a war of theater rather than substance, and that – because our leaders are too weak or afraid to demand our commitment in it – that we will create a ‘shell’ of a war, using theater and image to replace substance. He also sums up the core position of many of the opponents of the war, as well.

The problem, of course, is that if you read the theorists (well summed up in the USMC manual), a substantial part of war is theater; it involves both the physical destruction of the enemy and their assets through violence, and the degradation of their ability to use them – through a number of means, including violence, misdirection, reduction in morale, etc. And I do believe there is a key difference between the war in Vietnam and this war: In Vietnam we were fighting our enemy (the Soviet/Chinese alliance) indirectly, through the Vietnamese. The war was as such purely theatrical, in that the resources at risk and expended far outweighed the possible gain (this isn’t a complete explanation of my position, but it’ll do as a placeholder). Suffice it to say we were fighting the shadow of our real enemy, not the enemy itself.

In fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are directly confronting two of the many faces of the Islamist movement. Arab Nationalism – one of the roots of the ‘Baath movement, and the reason why Iraq, Egypt, and Lybia briefly entertained the notion of uniting – was a secular attempt to restore Arab greatness and create a secular Caliphate. It is another face on the core desire that is expressed in terms of fundamentalist Islam by Qutb and Bin Laden.

And, simply, I’d rather convince an enemy not to fight than actually kill them (because I do in large measure subscribe to the facts about our Western society set out above).

Now in a real wrestling match, one isn’t going to win – impose one’s will on the opponent – simply by sitting on them. They will continue to fight, or simply wait until you get bored and get up, and then continue to fight. Particularly if you’re having a loud dialog about whether it’s worth it or not to fight with them in the first place; they will simply be more confident that in the face of resistance, or simple patience, you will give up and get up. Sadly, that path leads only to more fighting – because they aren’t defeated, they are simply at what they perceive to be a momentary disadvantage.

So you will get tired of the game, get up, and then they will attack again. You will sit on them again, and the whole process restarts. Much like our response to the escalation of Islamist rhetoric and action through the 80’s and 90’s.

The way to win is simply to sit on them and make it clear that you will sit on them until they have really and truly given up – until their will is broken to yours.

John McCain said it simply and well in his Nov. 5 speech to the CFR:

“Let there be no doubt: victory can be our only exit strategy. We are winning in Iraq – but we sow the seeds of our own failure by contemplating a premature military drawdown and tempering our ambitions to democratize Iraqi politics. Winning will take time. But as in other great strategic and moral struggles of our age, Americans have demonstrated the will to prevail when they understand what is at stake, for them and for the world.” [emphasis added]

Let me repeat it: “victory can be our only exit strategy.”

By taking this position, by making it clear that we will stay as long at it takes, spend the treasure and blood required to break the wave of Islamist rage, in my view we will reduce the amount of actual violence we will ultimately have to impose.

We have broken the bad governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. We are there, on the ground, and there we will stay until we have accomplished some basic goals.

What are these goals? Here is a rough first try:

First, until the overall level of violent Islamist rhetoric and action will have abated.

Second, until Iraq will have attained some level of stable civil society (note that I think Bush misspoke when he set democracy as the threshold; I’ve discussed it before, and I believe that simply establishing civil society – the primacy of law – is the necessary precondition to democracy, and that alone will be difficult).

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, I doubt that we’ll break the isolated, violent tribal culture. I do think that we can restrain it, and prevent it from being used as a base and recruiting ground for Islamists, and provide some skeletal level of civil society while reining in the tribal warlords who truly rule the country.

These goals will require a certain level of commitment – of resources, cost, and most of all of lives disrupted, damaged, or lost. I will leave it to people who more than I do about the levels of forces required, but I will say that I seriously doubt that we have them today.

Making sure we have those forces – through alliances or through a commitment to expand our own military – is the necessary first step down this road. When Bush does that, I’ll have more confidence that he means what he says.