Greg Sargeant says something that crystallized my thinking about the state of the Administration today.

The question is whether Dem leaders will decide they’re tanking because voters don’t like the health reform bill they’ve been trying to pass, making them decide to shelve it – or whether they’ll conclude that voters don’t like failure, making them redouble their efforts to pass something they can call a historic accomplishment. Anyone taking bets?

The issue from my POV is that what attracted many of us to Obama was the competence that his campaign displayed. He was on message, unflappable, his campaign consultants weren’t eating their young on national TV and I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone – even those whose eyes cross with rage at his politics – believed he had a handle on things. So even if you disagreed somewhat with his politics or policies, you had comfort that the nation would be well-run.

For me it was a combination of that and a belief that his core values (government should help the powerless and keep the powerful in check) were balanced by a novel perspective for a liberal (part of the problem is that government itself has become too powerful and needs to be kept in check).

That’s what I read into the speeches and policy papers.

The problem, as I see it, is that in his first year he’s shown very little domestic competence (I think foreign affairs are a separate matter), and that he either never believed in the “new^2 liberalism” or got completely stuffed by the interest groups and their Congressional sponsors.

So the question is “now what?”

In foreign policy, I think he’s done some things right, some things wrong; I think we’re drawing down in Iraq too soon, and I worry (a lot) about making Afghanistan the centerpiece of our battle against violent Islam worldwide.

I think he’s taken the conciliatory road, bowing (literally, sometimes) to foreign leaders in the hopes that the anti-Bush rhetoric was right, and that the problem was just that we were mean.

He’s discovering – and Hillary is voicing – that that’s not the case, and that we need to be more forceful in our speech and acts.

That’s a really good thing, and exactly what I’d hoped for in supporting him – that he’d be conciliatory and either a) it would work; or b) it wouldn’t and then the commentariat and the non-shackled swing voters would follow him down either path.

So now the question is – having been slapped internationally and pivoting toward a more assertive national role – what will he do having been slapped domestically?

My hope, obviously, is for the Obama that I voted for and supported – one with liberal ends and novel means. That Obama can still be a terrific President – even a terrific two-term President.

The Obama we’ve seen so far – the one opening the interest-group buffet – won’t be.
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Take a moment, and look at your surroundings. Most of us – many of us – are blessed with a rich mixture of friends, family, some measure of financial security, and health.

Those may vary widely; I’m nowhere near financially rich (trust me – the projects I was counting on for December fell apart – and I committed the cardinal sin of all consultants, which was to assume that the ‘about to happen’ project was the same as a ‘happening’ project), but I’m blessed with family, and colleagues, and friends – many of whom I have made thanks to blogging. So when I get a day when I feel like I’m living the blues, it’s not long before someone does something that reminds me of how lucky I really am.

I need more business, and I need to get serious about working out, and Littlest Guy once again repeated that he plans to get into Stanford, but those are “high class” problems. I will get more business, I can work out, and I’m blessed with three amazing sons, who I’m happy to do what’s necessary for.

Blogger Gary Farber, of Amygdala isn’t.

And he’s hitting a crisis point as his disability claim has been denied, meaning he can’t get assistance with his healthcare or his finances. He’s written a scaldingly honest post about it, and he’s asking us for help – yes, I know he’s needed it before.

But I just tossed another $25 in the pot, and encourage others to do the same thing. We’ll watch a streaming Netflix movie this weekend instead of going out.

Look, it’s a complicated thing. There are a lot of voices calling out for support right now. But I’ll suggest, strongly, that generosity (not grandiose generosity, but small, frequent acts) is something that I know is central to my values. If you have enjoyed his work over the years (and he’s put the work into his blog), it might not even be generosity. You might just be paying him for the thinking he’s made you do.
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The executive editor of the National Enquirer says he plans to enter his paper’s work on the John Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer Prize.

No memo on this yet from the LA Times’ Tony Pierce.
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From commenter Drogo Bunce, the Detroit News tells us:

The Wixom company under fire for putting tiny references to Bible verses on gun sights sold to the U.S. military, announced today it will drop the inscriptions on future arms shipments and offer kits to help the military remove codes on sights in the hands of troops.

Trijicon Inc., responding to an uproar in the United States and abroad, said it has voluntarily decided to drop the inscriptions on all of its products made for the Defense Department. It will also supply the Pentagon with 100 “modification kits” to allow for the removal of the codes.

I just switched to a Droid, which meant my old Blackberry was sitting forlornly on the shelf along with all it’s accessories.

So I put it up for sale on my local email lists, with the proviso that whoever gave $150 to Team Rubicon would get it.

Team Rubicon is a group of nurses, medics, and doctors who have flown to Haiti on their own dime to offer emergency medical aid. Blackfive told me about them (speaking of B5 – we’ll do a post on how to support him – he’s in a primary on Feb 2nd!!).

What’s on your shelf?
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I’ve made no bones about my stance on torture – it’s bad. See this post, for example.

And then today I was flooded with links to this CNN dialog about torture, where Christine Amanpour and Phillipe Sands hammer author Marc Thiessen on the issue:

…and frankly, I’m appalled at Sands and Amanpour.

The idea that what we call ‘waterboarding’ – where a cloth is placed over someone’s face, and water poured over the cloth to give the sensation of drowning – is comparable to actually handcuffing someone with their head underwater (which usually leads to actual drowning) as was done by the Khmer Rouge is factually wrong, deeply offensive, and unhelpful to the very real debate of what the rules ought to be.

There’s a real debate over what the treatment of captured non-American resident terrorists ought to be (note that American residents ought to be entitled to the protections of American law as they are prosecuted for treason). Clearly real torture is Right Out, as should be a Chicago 7-style trial by farce.

Having the commentariat confuse harsh treatment (which I’d certainly say our version of waterboarding is) with torture (which the Khmer Rouge version certainly is) doesn’t remotely help that discussion, and doesn’t remotely add to their credibility – such as it is.
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Ann Althouse pretty neatly summed up my macro reaction to the Massachusetts election:

Poor Obama! It’s the eve of the anniversary of his inauguration. The State of the Union was supposed to be very grand. And now what? He has been repudiated! He made this election a referendum on the Democrats agenda, and the people of Massachusetts, the most liberal state, gave him a resounding no.

Now, I think that could be good for Obama. He’s a man of change. Let him change. I hope he becomes the President I thought he could be when I voted for him. With the midterm elections looming in the fall, he can readjust, set himself apart from Congress. Take the people seriously.

I’ve got to believe that healthcare is headed for the wheels of the bus, because both Obama and the Democratic elites are passionate, primarily, about one thing – being re-elected. And the optics of their taking a stand on top of the monstrous pile of paper that this bill has metastized into in the face of such public opposition…and in the face of the weak coattails that Obama has shown to date…would be devastating both in 2010 and 2012.

I supported Obama for three reasons:

I felt that our conflict with radical Islam needed a reboot, a breather, in the face of the temptation to escalate our way out of things;

I felt that his campaign demonstrated immense competence at the mechanics of politics, and that that competence would neatly transfer to governing;

I felt that he meant it when he said he was about a different kind of politics than we’ve seen for the last decade or two – a more constructive, more inclusive politics that was about problem-solving and not about rewarding red-meat interest groups.

It’s clear that I was massively naive on 3); but he needs to decide – this week, really – whether he wants to keep marching down that path or whether he wants to pivot and try something different. The Blue Dogs and the Netroots are arguing over a two-dimensional map – conservative/moderate Democrats vs. liberal/progressive ones. I’ll suggest a third dimension – is he for the current malignant centers of political power (both liberal and conservative) who are sucking the life from the polity in America and killing our politics – or is he for something different?

He’s confronted with the horns of a brutal dilemma; and if he chooses one, he’ll inevitably be gored by the other. So the answer is to choose neither.

We’ll see this week what he does, and where his instincts take him, and we’ll know – very soon – if those of use like Ann and myself were mistaken in putting our trust in him. I think not. I hope not.
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…arguably the best commentary on today’s election I’ve run into so far:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Mass Backwards
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

“…the Republicans are playing chess while the Democrats are in the nurse’s office because they glued their…”

We saw two films in the last two days, and they couldn’t have been more different – although both were just flat excellent.

‘Book of Eli’ needs no introduction. But we also saw (via streaming Netflix) ‘The Way We Get By,’ a brilliant documentary about…well about this:

I don’t care how much of a badass you are, you’ll cry when you see this movie, and then restart it and watch it again because it’s simultaneously sad, humane, funny, and affirming. Amazing. rent it, see it, tell your friends.

Then we saw ‘Book of Eli’ last night. Littlest Guy dragged us there, but after seeing it I’ll say that it’s a film that I was happy to see on a big screen (even though it was shot with a Red camera and the colors are deliberately skewed). And I’d say it’s a film well worth going out and seeing; it works on a bunch of levels – as one of the best post-Apocyolyptic stories I’ve seen (and, humorously, there was a poster from ‘A Boy And His Dog’ in one scene) – as a straight-up action film (hence the question in the title of this post…) – and as a genuine parable about faith.

It’s been shelled by a lot of the mainstream critics, and I’m honestly not sure why. See it and judge for yourself.
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Update:

The Wixom company under fire for putting tiny references to Bible verses on gun sights sold to the U.S. military, announced today it will drop the inscriptions on future arms shipments and offer kits to help the military remove codes on sights in the hands of troops.

Trijicon Inc., responding to an uproar in the United States and abroad, said it has voluntarily decided to drop the inscriptions on all of its products made for the Defense Department. It will also supply the Pentagon with 100 “modification kits” to allow for the removal of the codes.

So the story broke yesterday that Trijicon, makers of the excellent line of ACOG firearms sights is embossing the codes for Bible verses on the sights along with the model number and serial number.

A friend of mine checked his Army-surplus Trijicon and conformed this to me (not all that necessary, because in the ABC stories that broke this, the manufacturer apparently confirms it):

Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions “have always been there” and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them.

The usual suspects are having heart attacks over this:

who would jesus kill?

via oliver willis, we find an american munitions company that is secretly inscribing coded biblical quotations on their weapons sold to the u.s. military for use in the middle east…

And I’m feeling very, very sorry for some poor SOB in the Pentagon tonight who is drawing up contingency plans to replace or modify a whole shedload of delicate, technologically advanced weapons sights.

So where do I stand on this? On one hand, I’m annoyed at Trijicon for doing this – they’re devout, but not stupid – and they had to know that this would be a significant issue. They have every right to print anything they want on their products, including the unexpurgated text of ‘Ulysses’ but the folks purchasing them have the right to demand that they be ‘Ulysses’-free.

I’m annoyed at the folks in the procurement process who didn’t catch this and deal with it.

I’m going to be incredibly annoyed at the pure-heart activists who are going to demand – DEMAND – that we recall every ACOG in service IMMEDIATELY. Because G** forbid we offend people before we shoot them.

The sights are really good ones. There are meaningful options – Aimpoint and Elcan make great optics (Biggest Guy has an Elcan optic on his M249 SAW). But the overwhelming majority of the optics I’ve seen in contemporary military use are ACOGS – and for good reason, they’re great sights.

I really will hate to see some kind of fire drill resulting from this that will put our troops at risk. And I’ll say that acknowledging that the real reason I’m annoyed at Trijicon (and the reason I may have just switched my purchase decision on an optic for my M1A to Aimpoint) is that by doing this, they have put US troops at risk. There’s no good answer here, except to give a solid attention slap to the procurement officers who had to know about this and let it pass.

My head hurts…
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