All over the news today is the release of teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, who may be reunited with the now-of-age former student whose children she had.

I have my own six-degrees story about her – having met and dined with her late father, insanely conservative California State Senator John Schmitz.

He graced me with an insightful observation about modern partisanship I’ve carried around for a long time

When Moscone ran the Senate, he and I used to fight hammer and tongs all day, then go out and have drinks over dinner and laugh about it. We differed on where we wanted the boat to go, but we recognized that we were in the same boat. These new guys would gladly sink the boat rather then compromise.

but he was certainly a guy with issues of his own.

But the man who saw conspiracies everywhere, who was an equal opportunity bigot, and who decried America’s moral decrepitude, had, himself, a skeleton in the closet. It came to light in a curious way. An Orange County child abuse case in 1982 concerned a thirteen-month-old infant who was discovered with hair so tightly wound around his penis that the organ had nearly been severed. The baby was placed in protective custody, and the court demanded that the father step forward. It turned out to be none other than John G. Schmitz, now again a state Senator, paterfamilias of five children and, er, two others with his German mistress, once his student at Santa Ana.

One of the reasons I’m so resistant to calls for public enforcement of morality is that sad fact that so many of those who do so are moral failures on their own terms.

In my post at Armed Liberal, I suggest that “I’ll take as a given that the family had…issues….” Well, that appears to be true as well (from the same article as above):

…the Schmitz household was revealed to have been a chilly place, often under siege due to John’s latest atrocious remark. Mary Kay and her brother would sometimes play German marching music out the window to drown out angry demonstrators. Schmitz’s wife Mary was said by Mary Kay to be an unaffectionate mother who stressed personal appearance, counseling her daughter to always wear lipstick and even toenail polish. Mary was a vocal ally of Phyllis Schlafly, and appeared on TV to denounce the ERA. She stuck with her man to the end.

Eugene Volokh has an interesting essay on the different thinking about sex between an older woman and a boy as opposed to an older man and a girl. As a parent of three boys, it’s something I’m chewing on a bit. Our emotional reaction is somewhat different; but I know that I’d be mighty pissed off if my twelve year old were seduced by his teacher.

And I’ll also note that if – nine years later – he were to go off and build a real life with her, and be genuinely happy, I’d eat my words on toast.

So in the comments to my post below, encouraging energy efficiency, Trent and Joe are jumping up and down and suggesting that I’m somewhere between foolish and stoned.

Which may be true.

But which doesn’t change the validity of my core policy argument, which rests on three legs:

# the most secure energy we can create is the energy we don’t use, and it’s possible – through some modest changes in lifestyle and in better engineering on what we consume – to enjoy pretty much the life we lead now while using substantially less energy per person and dollar of GDP. I tossed out 20 – 25% as a good target for that.# this is a good thing to do, for three basic reasons: a) it will shelter our economy – relative to the rest of the world’s economies – from interruptions in supply or spikes in price, both of which are likely as the Middle East works out it’s problems with or without our help and guidance; b) it will allow us to pick and choose where we buy our energy from – which may not help when it comes to price spikes (see above) but will make us relatively invulnerable to interruptions caused by shutting off the ME oil spigot; c) it will lessen the damage to the world economy from interruptions in supply, as there will be more ‘headroom’ in the markets; d) it will give us more of the moral high ground in discussion about the future of the Middle East, as we take concrete (and expensive) steps to demonstrate that we’re not killing Arabs to ensure that we have cheap gas to burn in our SUV’s.

# that the “don’t conserve” alternative has to be examined and priced out as well. As many of the same commenters who dinged me noted, increases in demand from a consumer society in China and India will wipe out the markets anyway.

Well, let’s go to the numbers again. Again, from www.eia.doe.gov, we get this Excel file that shows annual energy budgets by country.

In 2002, the US used 97.6 * 10^15 BTU. China used 43.2, and India 14.3.

Assume for a moment that China and India – each of whose populations in increasing at slightly more than 1%/year – start using 5% more energy each year. That suggests that in eight years, they’ll go from using a total of 57.2 (*10^15) BTU, to 84.4, for an increase of 27.3.

If the US consumption increases at about 1% per year, we’ll go from 97.6 to 105.7 – an increase of 8.1. But if, instead, we were to cut our consumption by 2% per year, we’d end up using 83.1 – for a swing of 22.7, almost enough to make up for the monstrous growth in consumption in China and India. And certainly enough to have a significant impact on the markets for energy worldwide.

As before, disagreements are fun, but they’re even more fun when based in facts (and occasionally arithmetic).

Do I think that we can conserve out way out of the Middle East crisis? Of course not, and I’ve never said so. I do believe that we’ll have far more freedom to act in the Middle East when we’re not worried that the Saudi’s will shut off the Middle East tap and lop 10% or so off our annual petroleum energy budget.

As Joe notes below, Den Beste lays the smack down on those who suggest that we can conserve our way to energy independence.

If we went all-out, I imagine that we could (over twenty years or so) cut our energy needs by at least 25% and 50% isn’t out of the question. In the long run it would save us money and it wouldn’t hurt the environment any, either.

I’m afraid not. It is impossible to achieve that much gain solely through technological changes like that.

I don’t mean “infeasible” or “impractical”, I mean it is physically impossible. To get a 50% gain solely through technology improvements we’d have to revoke the laws of thermodynamics and figure out how to change the universal electrical constant. I don’t expect to see that happen in my lifetime.

He makes a good case, which is kind of depressing.

Fortunately, off the debating floor – in the real world – he’s wrong.If you define the question narrowly, to say that the sole change is fixing the technology underlying our economy, he may have a point (although I might be motivated enough to argue it at some point). But on my planet – Planet Reality – people change their technology and their behavior in response to scarcity. Have you noticed any new Excursions on your local Ford dealer’s lot lately? Notice the signs on the Expeditions? You know, those big SUV’s – they’re so 90’s.

Let look at some economic facts for fun. The folks at DOE have a wonderful site – www.eia.doe.gov – that’s just chock-full of buttery good data. One piece, an Excel file, has the gross energy consumption by country by year per dollar of GDP. Let’s go to the numbers…

In 1980, the US consumed 16,297 BTU per dollar of GDP. In 2002, we consumed 10,575.

In 1980, Sweden consumed 10,839, and in 2002 7,405.

The average energy consumption per dollar of GDP in the UK, Germany, Italy, and Japan is 5,593. Japan is an outlier, at 3,876 BTU per dollar, so let’s just look at the UK, Germany, and Italy – their average is 6,165.

Now, clearly, there are issues that make us different – our pattern of sprawl versus their more urbanized, transit-dependent lifestyle.

But we cut 35.1% out of our energy budget in 22 years. Our major industrial competitors are 47% more efficient than we are; the European Big 3 are 42% more efficient than we are.

Do you think that if paid some attention, we could have a significant impact here? And do you think it would change the nature of our relationship with the Middle East?

Juan Cole lays out his notion of how the ‘Kerry Policy’ in Iraq might work. Go read the whole thing.

No, really.

OK, in case you didn’t. Let me summarize:

* Iraq holds elections, gets UN legitimacy.

* Asks for UN peacekeeping force.

* The UN agrees, because force is under UN command, not US command, and because the Iraqis asked.

Here’s the result he hopes for:

This UN force, with vastly reduced US participation under a UN general, would give the new, elected Iraqi government time to rebuild its own armed forces and national guard. As effective Iraqi divisions were trained and equipped, they could begin relieving UN troops, allowing all the multinational forces, including those of the US, gradually to rotate out of the country as they were no longer needed. At the end of this process, Iraq would have an army of 60,000 men, able to maintain order in the country but posing no threat to neighbors. It would be an independent country, midwifed by the United Nations. The US would have finally gracefully exited the country, since it is unlikely that an elected Iraqi government would want foreign troops on its soil any longer than necessary.

But wait……there may be problems with this idea. He continues:

I would be the first to admit that the plan is not perfect. Sometimes UN troops have not performed very well. Iraq is a complex and highly armed society, and would be the biggest challenge ever faced by the UN. But I think the plan has at least a chance of working. And, it is hard to see how it could produce results worse than those produced by the Bush administration in the past miserable 16 months.

(emphasis mine – AL)

No shit, Juan.

Just because I know that I have known unknowns, let me start by tossing a question out to the crowd: Can any of you think of any single case where UN peacekeeping forces have prevailed in an environment where the participants really wanted to fight, rather than have the UN provide a fig leaf for armistice? I can’t. I’m hoping there is one…

Because I have one reply to Juan’s suggestion. Srebenica. Srebenica. SrebenicaSrebenicaSrebenicaSrebenicaSrebenicaSrebenicaSrebenica.

…of course if there are facts that suggest I’m wrong, I’m wide open to changing my mind and apologizing.

And I’ll point out that it keeps looking like the key issue, to Juan, and the other Democratic foreign policy experts is simply that it’s Bush’s policy. And so it cannot stand. We’ve gotta do better than this, team.

I really want to vote Democratic this fall. But someone, somewhere, has to show me a foreign policy that makes some modicum of sense for me to do it. Help me out, will you…

I spent they afternoon at Top Gun yesterday. I mean literally – I was at MCAS Miramar for the retirement ceremony of Col. Robert “Carrot” Foltyn. We met through Spirit of America, and he seems to be entertained enough by me that we’re extending that professional relationship into a friendship.

The ceremony was interesting, as all ceremonies are when you look at them; the mechanics of setting up tents, flagpoles, a sound system are all a bit complex, and if you’re like me and try hard to notice things you wind up paying a lot of attention to all the people and components. Then suddenly you look at them again and they morph into a whole, a stage, and you’re standing behind the crowded seats, watching the event unfold.
The unfolding itself was short, a few speeches from the brass and then a longer, soft-spoken one from Carrot himself (he and all his colleagues refer to each other and themselves by their call signs; they greet each other in the hallways as ‘Carrot’ and ‘Smoke’ and ‘Bluebell’ – I’m not a member of the club, so it felt pretty odd when he asked that I do the same thing – but I’m certainly not going to cross him), and then it was over and he was retired. Not an ex-Marine, though. There are no ex-Marines, I was told. As the long-haired stranger there (actually, his brother – a physicist at Los Alamos – has longer hair), I took a seat at the side of the dining room, with a group of older couples that I took to be friends of the family and discovered that I had seated myself with a group of Marine aviators going back to the Korean war (one was an ace). That’s how the older gentleman with the rheumy eyes and walking stick identified himself – as a Marine aviator.

There’s not too much of a point here, except first and foremost to express my affection and admiration for Col. Foltyn both for his achievements (he was among other things the training department head at Top Gun, which implies both a certain technical competence and a small measure of leadership) and for the kind of neat, warm, interesting guy he is.

It also continues my education in being impressed by then men and women in uniform, and the institution they serve.

I was talking about Spirit of America with one officer just back from Iraq, and he walked me through some of the command-level debates that had taken place over ‘what to do about Fallouja’, and he brought up the Chechen war, and Grozny. Smart, well-informed people. One of the officers I talked to was a young black woman – I don’t think this is the Marine Corps of the 1950’s.

In talking to them, they are – oddly, I think – outspoken about their appreciation for Spirit of America and the related organizations working to help the people of Iraq. “You are literally saving Marines lives,” was something I heard four times. “And Iraqi ones as well,” one of the Marines added.

So this is my personal thanks to Carrot for his service and to his wife and family for what I know it has cost them as well. Gratitude doesn’t fill your bank account or read bedtime stories to the baby when Daddy is away for a year.

But right now, it’s the best I have to offer.

[Update: I’m a dork. I also forgot to mention that the unanimous take among Iraq veterans – in spite of my best efforts to trap them through clevel cross-examination – is that things over there are a whole lot better than what they read in the media. What can I say? More on this Sunday]

Dean Esmay posts a darn good question:

…debate all you want but, once a decision is made, partisanship should stop at the water’s edges. At least so far as I’m concerned.

Now here is my interesting question: I’ve made myself some friends among conservatives by speaking this way. But I do find myself wondering: how many of you on the right will embrace such a philosophy if John Kerry should carry the election in November?

Personally, I haven’t jumped either way on the election yet (and yes, you’d better believe there’s a long post coming on that). But I do think that Dean’s challenge – right now – is a good idea, and one that should be made right and left.

It will do one important thing; it will self-select those who I’d be happy to join in a Party of The Sensible. Go check out his comments and leave some yourself.

I know I’m late to this, but…Atrios has come out, and he apparently works for a policy house, specifically the Soros-funded Media Matters.

Now I’ve been critical of Atrios (for tone and policy reasons), but he’s someone I respect as a leader and a powerful voice in the current dialogs.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with bloggers getting picked up by think tanks and media organizations (yeah, but where are my offers, anyway??). I think that’s a good thing, and that if part of what blogging has done is to let some civilians move into the pro ranks, that’s neat.

I think there’s more to blogging than that – but that’s another conversation.

But there’s an issue here. (OB Lebowski: Hey! I’ve got an issue here!) As someone who stood behind a pseudonym for a long time (and sometimes kind of wishes he was still there…), I’ve got a huge issue with Atrios’ affiliation, however. And that’s because the nightmare of mine has always been that I would be accused of somehow trimming my blogging to my career, of – on one hand – claiming to write as a disinterested citizen, moved only by my passions and feelings, and – on the other – making a living doing advocacy and therefore by shaping public discourse.

It’s not that people with jobs in advocacy somehow lose their voice, or that they are somehow recused from participating as citizens.

But disclosure is important, because it allows people to weigh what you say and judge it based not only on its merit, but on the question of cui bono? (who gains).

I don’t know if Atrios was just picked up by Media Matters, or if he’s worked there for a year. I don’t know if he got the job because of his blog, or because of his academic credentials.

I wish, more than a little, that I did.

Because one thing about small-scale media is that – compared to the costs of doing business in Big Media – we could be bought cheap. Offer 30 of the highest-profile bloggers jobs for $120,000/year – $3.6 million, a small ad buy – and you could shape political discourse for a year. I believe that the blogosphere would eventually correct for this; it would route around the problem. But I don’t know how fast the credibility of the blog universe would heal.

Was in the car, so I listened to the convention for a while, and heard Teddy Kennedy’s speech. The coals of his oratory are pretty well banked at this point, and the rambling, discursive speech lacked the punch I know it meant to have.

But one of his three big applause lines tonight was this:

When the voices of many citizens went unheard and their lives were blighted by bigotry, we fought for equality and justice ­for civil rights and voting rights and the rights of women, for the cause of Americans with disabilities.

A few months ago I wrote this:

Rhetorically, what I’d like to say is that “While the GOP sells a past that never was, the Democrats sell a future that will never be.” But that’s not the case.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, are living in the past. They have a slight edge, in that the past they are living in – Selma in 1965 – is real. But like the aging high school baseball star, they see everything through the lens of the One Big Game, of the time years ago when they stood at the plate swung away and hit one over the fence.

Heh, as they say.

Well, the comments to my two posts below confirm that one shouldn’t blog under the influence of dextromethorphan – cold tablets and la grippe make for fuzzy thinking in my case, it appears.

So let me clarify a few things.

First, I do think we’re at war. But it’s not the traditional ‘mobilize the nation’ kind of war, it’s a war that will, sadly, be long-lasting, relatively low-intensity, and messy. Because it’s that kind of a war, many of the historic responses to a more intensely focused, limited in time war – like those to World War II – aren’t appropriate.

They aren’t appropriate for two reasons; because they won’t do much good, and because by themselves, they won’t help us win.We don’t need to sacrifice our economic well-being at the levels we did in WW II in order to produce at the level required, and because the boundary between war and peace is fluid we can’t treat everyone from, say, Saudi Arabia as an enemy combatant. In fact, a big part of this war will, like wars against street gangs, consist of trying to peel away the less-committed supporters from the core, and to do that will require some form of positive engagement, of ‘selling’.

As a consequence, this war will look much more like the ‘war’ between the Italian government and the Mafia in Sicily, and it’s conclusion will be equally undramatic.

Things will simply get better.

Now, having said that I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being in direct opposition to Michael Ledeen, whose column in today’s NRO (hat tip, Instapundit) says:

…many scholars at the time insisted that Nazism was first and foremost an ideology, not a state. Indeed, Hitler was at pains to proclaim that he was fighting for an Aryan Reich, not a German state. And if you read some of the literature on Nazism or for that matter the broader work on totalitarianism produced by the “greatest generation,” you’ll find a profound preoccupation with “winning the war of ideas” against fascism. Indeed, a good deal of money and energy was expended by our armed forces, during and after the war, to de-Nazify and de-fascify the Old World.

But the important thing is that when we smashed Hitler, Nazi ideology died along with him, and fell into the same bunker.

The same debate over “whom or what are we fighting” raged during the Cold War, when we endlessly pondered whether we were fighting Communist ideology or Russian imperialism. Some … mostly intellectuals, many of them in the CIA … saw the Cold War primarily in ideological terms, and thought we would win if and only if we wooed the world’s masses from the Communist dream. Others warned that this was an illusion, and that we’d better tend to “containment” else the Red Army would bring us and our allies to our knees.

In the end, when the Soviet Empire fell, the appeal of Communism was mortally wounded, at least for a generation.

You see where I’m going, surely. The debate is a trap, because it diverts our attention and our energies from the main thing, which is winning the war. It’s an intellectual amusement, and it gets in our way. As that great Machiavellian Vince Lombardi reminds us, winning is the only thing.

I think that Ledeen misreads history here, and in a way that is potentially very dangerous.

Nazism, by it’s nature, wasn’t a contagious meme. You were Aryan, or you weren’t. They made alliances with other ‘blut und volk’ nationalist movements in Japan and Italy, but the reality is that by it’s nature, it couldn’t spread except through conquest. Britain was in no danger of a Nazi takeover from within; Oswald Mosely was an isolated figure.

This limited the ‘infected’ areas to the core nations – Germany, Italy, Japan – and the areas they had conquered, which did not produce new energy to spread the infection, but instead demanded resources to control.

In the case of the Society Union and Cold War, the reality is that we did both. We contained the Soviet Union’s attempts to control territory through overt military means by using our own overt military actions; and we contained their efforts to grow in influence through covert and ideological means by countering their covert moves and working hard to spread our own ideological roots.

I can’t believe that Ledeen thinks that the collapse of Communist Poland – unanswered, as opposed to Hungary and Czechoslovakia – would have happened without the Pole’s ideological infection from the West? Without rock music and Catholicism?

We will win this war by changing people’s minds and making Islamist terror an unattractive option. We’ll make it unattractive by raising its cost and lowering its effectiveness (which are military and civil defense issues), as well as by giving people the option of taking on other, less destructive belief structures.

I believe that we’re seeing the beginnings of a set of waves of terrorism, caused in some part by philosophical and ideological fractures here in the West. The Islamist wave is the first, and potentially the most dangerous, because the scale of action of the terrorists is amplified because they have states that will sponsor and succor them. Conventional and unconventional military action that has the goal of changing the minds of those states is a good thing, in my view, and is the major reason why I continue to support the decision to invade Iraq.

But military victory alone is hollow and ineffective in the kind of environment we’re in now, and for that, I’ll point to another example from history – Vietnam.

UPDATE: Even by Winds’ high standards, the reader comments are excellent.