Two Examples Show How The Legal System Is Stacked In Favor Of The Rich

This is what happens to people at the bottom of the justice system. Reported today at VOX.

This is what happens to the people at the top. Reported today in the New Yorker.

A 75 year old disabled man in Mississippi who did time many years ago for robbery is tried for marijuana possession. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison, a mandatory sentence because of his 20-year old conviction for robbery. The Supreme Court refuses to consider his appeal. Apparently life imprisonment for marijuana possession is not cruel and unusual punishment. Or the Supreme Court can’t be bothered. This is what happens to people at the bottom of the system.

Meanwhile the SEC, the agency charged with investigating and bringing charges against the largest financial companies, hesitates to prosecute individuals who made billions by defrauding millions of ordinary Americans during the financial crisis.

Why?

Because the man at the SEC who was in charge of the case had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.”

People at the top level of massive multi-billion dollar frauds that ruined thousands of ordinary people’s lives are “real people” who “have done one bad thing” but a sad old disabled onetime felon who possesses pot is nobody.

The poor man in Mississippi is nobody that anybody running the system knows personally. Nobody the prosecutors care about. Prosecutors mingle with “real people” who earn massive fortunes, sometimes by fraud. The fraudulent seem very plausible, that is how they are able to commit the fraud. The larger the fraud, the more plausible and real they seem. Prosecutors don’t enjoy mingling with people at the lower end of the criminal spectrum where their misfortune and desperation makes them less plausible and less deserving.

Successful criminals who have massive fortunes and fabulous Manhattan apartments plus expensive homes in various luxury enclaves are real people but ex-cons who live quietly on a farm in Mississippi are not real people––at least in the eyes of the law. There have been multiple cases rejected by the right hand side of the Supreme Court, cases where a man has been proved innocent but is still facing the death penalty. The conservatives on the court shrug and say No. But the criminal who has stolen massive amounts of money from millions of unsuspecting Americans gets a pass. Someone who seems that real and that plausible must not have meant any harm. He can keep his houses and his money.

This is what Americans are angry about. This is what Bernie Sanders is listening to. This might be the kind of non-violent marijuana "offender" President Obama pardons. But we need to repair the system, not simply hope that occasionally a hand reaches down from the sky and corrects one or a handful of the terrible injustices. This is why electing a Democrat president is so vital this year. It would begin to redress the harm and rebalance the scales in favor of regular people.

Place Blame Where It Belongs

The recent arguments over the GOP's determination to block President Obama's constitutional obligation to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court have tended to return to the old canard that "both parties do this." Both parties are not equally extreme or rigid or prejudiced or hypocritical. One party is causing most of the dysfunction, even if, sadly and unfairly, most Americans have a habit of blaming everyone in elected office.

Which makes it worth re-reading an op-ed from a few years ago by two of the more clear-eyed political observers, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann.

Saying both parties are to blame for the dysfunction we’ve seen in recent years is the result of public laziness. Or perhaps it's exhaustion. Either way it flows from a bad habit in our journalism and the news media who are supposed to moderate and referee our public discourse. I’m referring to the bad habit of false equivalency or false balancing.

“Both sides do it” was Nixon’s defense when a bit of political spying exposed the massive corruption in his presidency. It's also the defense given by five year olds who want to misbehave like the friends their parents don't want them to hang around with.

I’m reminded of something that happened at a friend’s house when I was eight or nine. The older brother was in the rec room pounding the hell out of my friend when their mother came in. She didn’t drag the older brother off and send him to his room; she yelled at both of them and punished both of them for fighting. This is false equivalency: if one party is doing wrong, whether beating or lying or cheating, it is somehow “unfair” to punish or rebuke the one that is offending without also rebuking and punishing the other, the victim. Both were fighting. "It takes two to make a fight." If one party does wrong something in our sense of fairness requires us to say, “Well, both were probably to blame.” This is why we hear people say that the victim of a crime probably asked for it, the beaten wife probably shouldn’t have provoked her husband, the rape victim should have dressed more primly or not gone outside after dark. This kind of lazy rationalization licenses the wrongdoer.

A lot of Americans have expressed disappointment with President Obama because he "doesn’t fight hard enough" for what the Democrats want to achieve, because he doesn’t go full-on political with the Republicans who have embargoed his presidency from day one. But when Obama was elected most Americans breathed a giant sigh of relief because he promised to preside as a moderate, as someone willing to look for common ground, willing to get things done, willing to avoid the bitter partisanship which had disgusted Americans in recent years. Americans applauded his promise to keep away from the nastiness that obsesses the other party. When others got ugly, he did not. When a freshman congressman called him a liar at the State of the Union, he answered civilly and without rancor, because it was a ludicrous and ugly remark. When idiots like Donald Trump questioned his birth certificate he laughed; it was the only sane response to a stupid charge that was provably false and proven to be so.

We’ve heard it seriously suggested by Republicans that Obama has been a divisive president. And there has been no moderate voice to point out what a stupid suggestion this is. The news media has simply reported the Republicans are saying it. They have reported it endlessly without invalidating it or even questioning it. (Just as they have covered Donald Trump’s candidacy without examining his statements or positions for validity or falsehood or bigotry or contradictions.) Calling Obama divisive is a bit like blaming the black family down the street for the burned spot in their front yard. True, that cross would not have been burned there if they had not been black and had not lived in that house. But it is deeply wrong and dishonest to blame the victim for the offenses committed against him. These things are an offense to all of us; perhaps we are all to blame.

All the evidence––the comments, the obstruction, the disrespectful comments by Republican officials, the outright hatred in the comments sections in newspapers and websites––tells us that the Republican base believes Obama was divisive simply because he was elected as a black man. Having a black family living in the White House upsets and somehow “insults” the base of the Republican Party––therefore it was “divisive" of Barack Obama to win the office. And twice as "divisive" to win it twice. That this ludicrous charge isn't greeted with broad disgust shows how corrupted our public conversation has become. Other ugly ideas flow from this unrepudiated and racist sentiment in the Republican base. It now seems the Republicans feel––since the Constitution stated that black Americans were only 3/5 of a human being––that any black American president should have a similarly limited presidency, say three years instead of four. This is difficult to dispute if you believe the Constitution was perfect as written, as if it was a sacred text from God, complete with its slavery provisions, and this is what most Republicans seem to believe. Especially canvassed en masse. One member of a mob will tend to uphold the consensus of the entire body no matter how ugly it is.

This core belief among Republicans that Democrats––and especially Democrats of color––are illegitimate is a deep seated, habitual, and outright form of bigotry. And it is a core part of the Republican brand. It has been so ever since the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and the Republican Party happily invited all the racists to join the GOP. It was written into the party’s campaign strategy in the Southern Strategy that elected Nixon to the White House twice.

A good short piece on the Republicans' Southern Strategy from Bloomberg.

Because Americans prize civility we are barred from calling this racism or bigotry, and we are barred by our news media’s habit of false equivalency from calling the Republican Party racist and bigoted, even when it is, but failure to call out bigotry tends to license it. When we (or our news media) accept a political extremist’s values without opposing or rejecting them we see the political middle skewed toward that extremism.

The center shifts. The standards of validity are rewritten to accommodate what was formerly unacceptable. Just as failure to call out a lie against science and reason shifts public opinion toward the lie and away from the scientific truth. People have a habit of balancing opposing arguments, and if the false argument is not repudiated, whether out of politeness or laziness or cowardice or bad habit, it corrupts the public conversation and the public conception of what is true. Barack Obama has chosen to match political extremism and bigotry and anti-science unreason and outright dishonesty with moderation and reason and tolerance and honesty.

Reason has a disadvantage when it is confronted by unreason. Unreason is louder, it is more fanatical, it is more stubborn, it is narrow minded and will not listen to dispute. President Obama has responded reasonably and tolerantly to the unreason and bigotry of his opponents. Does answering intolerance with tolerance make him a hypocrite? No. He was only tolerant in allowing the bigots the freedom to speak. As Voltaire put it “‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Which puts truth and science and reason and tolerance at a tactical disadvantage. When the Democratic Party repudiated racism the Republicans seized that opening. Knowing that no politician would win by calling the voters bigots, the GOP decided to embrace the bigots and this tactical advantage.

Which means that reasonable people need to engage in the argument instead of relaxing in the comfortable belief that they are right and the comfortable habit of not getting angry about someone else’s offensive beliefs. We cannot relax and feel confident that falsehood will be evident to everyone hearing it. We cannot be confident that everyone will see and repudiate racism or unreason or hypocrisy or unAmerican values without our taking the trouble to point them out. We are obligated to repudiate bigotry and unreason and dysfunction and to place the blame for these things squarely on those causing them. If we do not we are making it likelier that the ugly dishonest things we deplore will become the norm.

The Bullying Of American Opinion And How We Let It Happen

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre of grade school children the president spoke for most Americans and spoke well and clearly. He decried gun violence, which this was. He expressed sadness that our system was not permitting changes to make Americans safer. But he did it calmly, not as a demagogue. The moment would have been perfect for a demagogue. We are most easily persuaded when we are horrified but we are wise to keep our heads, and a wise leader respects that. Discussing these things calmly is the American Way.

His main points were vehemently opposed and rejected by the Republican Party who were devoted to guns and gun rights and gun manufacturers. Two opposed points of view. We need to choose. Were the two points of view equally valid? Were they equal in light of our values?

Did President Obama fail us here? Should he have whipped up our emotions and forced a change over the violent objections of many Americans? This is exactly what those opponents have warned he would do. They say it so loudly it seems to many that he has done what he has not. Obama did not do what George W. Bush did after 9/11. President Bush exploited our anger to start a war against a nation that had nothing to do with the attack of 9/11. The attackers did not come from Iraq. President Obama did not use Sandy Hook or his considerable oratorical gifts to create a frenzy of anger against the NRA or gun owners, nor did he demonize the sick individual who had perpetrated the attack, he didn’t demonize the mentally ill or gun owners or teenagers or anyone. He did not use the opportunity of national horror to parade his concern for the survivors and their families on national television.

The response among his critics was what it always has been, that he doesn’t care enough, because he doesn’t flaunt his emotions or exploit the emotions of the mourning. Instead he met with the families as they would have wished, as any of us would have wished, away from the prying glare of television and media. There is modesty and decency in this. Of course his critics found fault with modesty and decency. Because he respected their private mourning Republicans and the folks at Fox said he didn’t care enough. Today I saw this article about Obama visiting Sandy Hook. There’s been a decent interval since that horrible day. We now know more about his personal response to the families.

We have two parties in this country, clearly opposed in values and goals. One is an armed camp. The other is less so. One is prone to whipping up violent irrational emotions. One is calmer and more deliberate and is criticized for it. (It took Democrats a few years to determine that the war in Iraq was sold with fraudulent arguments. Deliberations can save you from bad decisions but it can make it harder to oppose them.) One party is a bully, one is quieter. Is quietness the same as weakness? Does it mean the values are not as strong or valid? One party shouts what is on its mind immediately, without thinking things through. The Democratic Party is called dithering because it consults and discusses and listens and doesn’t blurt whatever is on its mind at any given moment, especially at angry moments. The GOP has many angry moments. I have sometimes used the old Goofus and Gallant canard to describe this striking difference.

So I read this article about a quiet respectful president visiting the bereaved out of the public eye.

And this is the top article Facebook recommends I read after I read the article about President Obama's response to Sandy Hook. Point and Counterpoint. It’s implied that both stories are equally true. Facebook is how America sorts its feelings and opinions today. It’s how we sift fact and fiction, right and wrong.

What does this say about us, about what is becoming of us, about what is being done to us?

Are we becoming binary? Either we love and totally believe someone or something or a set of values or we hate them and dismiss them. I think this is the problem Obama has faced from day one: the opposing party decided, its leaders swore a solemn oath on this, to oppose everything he tried to do and everything he said. This filters down to the average person as a command from on high.

When a Republican candidate makes irrational and racist claims and demands it licenses the worst kind of instincts in his followers. Donald Trump’s and Ted Cruz’s and other candidates’ ugly remarks about Muslims and refugees from the chaos we created in the Middle East encourages individuals to confront Muslims they meet on the street and vent their previously suppressed hatred. That hatred was previously unacceptable in public, now it has the Republican seal of approval and everyone who identifies with that party feels he is right to vent those ugly opinions in the faces of anyone they suspect might not be as “American” as they are.

In 2001 President Bush said “You’re either with us or against us.” But he was emphatic that most Muslims are our friends and many are our fellow citizens deserving of respect. Why was that civility and decency discarded? Possibly because of the oppositional nature of the Republican Party that swore to oppose Obama’s presidency at every turn. If this president said peaceable righteous Muslims deserve our respect the Republican attitude needed to be, or at least turned out to be the absolute opposite. Whatever President Obama says has to be disputed and opposed. Binary politics.

Computers are binary, everything reduced to a zero or a one, no ambiguity or nuance. It’s either yes or no. Humans are smarter than that. This Yes/No, either/or evenhandedness expresses itself in different ways. To a computer both zero and one are valid, but Americans increasingly see Yes or No. And the arbiters of the public conversation tend to keep their judgments to themselves. Journalists are barred from having a political affiliation. Which means they must––MUST––write every article in an evenhanded manner… to the point of saying that every point of view, every opinion even an unfactual or unscientific one, is equally valid. Thus articles are built on false equivalencies. If the first paragraph sets out the truth the second paragraph is obligated to set out the opposite, the falsehood, the superstition, and there is no appropriate place for any journalistic judgment. The reader must decide. And that decision is most often made according to team affiliation or inherited prejudice. The reader chooses the version he or she “believes in”––it doesn’t matter which is true or which is a deception or which is paid for by a fossil fuel billionaire or which is cynically expressed by a candidate who wants to harness the hatred in people’s hearts to win power. There is no judgment, only feelings matter. False equivalency, by giving equal status to error and poorly formed opinion encourages that wrongheadedness, endorses it. False equivalency validates falsehood and discredited beliefs by saying they are just as true as truth and enlightened values. So hateful prejudice and fair-mindedness are equally valid today. Right and wrong are equally OK, you get to choose.

And now, it appears, Facebook has embraced this false equivalency laziness. Because they are not a newspaper or broadcast outlet there is no place to point out the flaw in their system. There are no letters to the Facebook editor. There are no retractions of stories they push on us. And Facebook now stands as the absolute standard. This is now how we decide things by giving equal status to our worst instincts and letting the volume of our shouting decide which set of values is valid. This is democracy, of a kind. But absolute majority rule, brute democracy, the democracy of the mob, doesn’t give a damn about the minority. Hitler was elected by a democracy, a German republic, with a congress and parties. His brownshirts hustled and bullied the majority into following its worst instincts, or the worst instincts of its worst members. We know what resulted. Hitler was put in power by powerful men and corporate power who saw a benefit in erasing the individual and creating a mob they could control, but they were unable to control Hitler and his mob. They went along with that mob until the bitter end.

Racism Top to Bottom

Racism top to bottom.

No matter if you’re president of the United States.

(Obama's re-election resulted in a flood of deeply racist tweets)

Or those trying to advance the agenda of this black president of the United States.

(The Atlantic reported on the Republican obstruction of Obama)

Or if you’re the best female tennis player ever to play the game.

(Serena Williams gets more racist catcalls on court than Sharapova does.)

Or some middle class black kids using a public pool.

(You no doubt heard about the mass arrest of teens swimming-while-black in Texas)

(Reported in The Guardian)

Or if you are black and behind the wheel of your own damn car.

(Reported by the Washington Post)

(The ACLU began responding to this problem 16 years ago)

God help you if you are voting-while-black

(The National Memo reports on the GOP push to limit voting)

If you are black or a person of color in this country, you have powerful enemies who will oppose your right to do anything. Still. In 2015.

If you are president and black and are attempting to advance the interests of ALL working Americans, there are many millions of white Americans who will despise and oppose you because you are doing this while black.

Voting while black. Getting elected while black. Driving while black. Playing tennis while black. Using a public pool while black. Walking on the public sidewalk while black. Breathing while black. All these things are up for debate, insulting opposition, hatred, violence and arrest.

Give War A Chance

This Iran deal has Republicans upset. The point seems not to be whether it’s a good deal or a wise deal but that it’s a deal reached by a Democrat. And a black Democrat at that.

Scott Walker promises to blow up the deal, no matter what our allies think. (Washington Post)

But even the very conservative Chicago Tribune has these treaty-haters figured out, explaining they'd hate anything Obama did.

The less exciting but more rational experts are also weighing in, saying it’s a better deal than they’d dared hope for. (Mother Jones has links to all of them)

The consensus among experts who didn't plan the War in Iraq is that the deal is a good one.

(Slate)

(Vox)

All the rightside pundits are alarmed. Is it because an Iran deal would decrease the likelihood of another profitable war? Apparently.

(Peggy Noonan)

Of course Ms. Noonan’s hero and former boss, Ronald Reagan, did business with Iran. He did business with them, cut a deal with them, even before he was president. He arranged that Iran would hold the American’s hostage until he was sworn into office. Clever move. It probably got Reagan elected. (Reagan's Secret Help-The-Hostage-Takers Deal from 1979)

But Reagan didn’t stop there. He later sold the Iranians weapons to arm their mideast terrorist allies. He did it secretly, and used the proceeds to arm our own terrorists in Central America. Again, secretly, because it was illegal to do so. (Iran-Contra)

Those involved were criminals. But they were pardoned. And many of them are now criticizing Obama’s nuclear disarmament deal with Iran. They seem to like arming Iran, but don’t like disarming Iran.

Former congresswoman Bachmann is ever ready with the inapt comparison. Such an unfortunate mouth on that woman. (Mrs. Bachmann compares Obama to a psychopathic mass murderer)

On this Easter weekend you have to wonder if the superChristians in the superpatriotic Republican Party are disappointed because the Middle East might not deliver the full scale global war that prophecy has promised them. You know, the one that means that Jesus is coming again to sort out the dead.

Republicans don’t like peace. They don’t like calm prosperity. They like ructions and chaos and financial collapse. Why? Because it’s more profitable of course. Profitable for their clients. Profitable for their chums who’ve bought short positions on the U.S. and the world. The calamatists who’ve been squirreling away all that gold expecting it to zoom up when the edifice collapses again. They love a nice spectacular collapse. They know how to profit from collapse. When things go really really bad, they're clients will still get rich selling weapons.

Lincoln Was Hated Too

...Until they killed him.

On the day Obama was inaugurated Republican leaders met in private and swore to oppose everything, EVERYTHING, the new president tried to accomplish. This article in Tikkun summarizes it well. So do these articles: Washington Post, the Guardian, and DailyKos.

In at least one press interview these Republican conspirators compared their opposition to the Taliban. An interesting choice, considering they spent a lot of the first year screaming that Obama wasn’t killing enough Taliban in Afghanistan.

For two years the blockade leaked. Democrats got bills passed. The economy began to recover. The Affordable Care Act passed against a fierce fire from Republicans, never mind that the plan was designed around mandates and a healthcare marketplace first proposed by the Heritage Foundation. When Democrats found Republican points they could agree on Republicans hated them for it. They didn’t want compromise. They wanted dysfunction. They wanted war.

In 2010, corporations (whom the Supreme Court had reclassified as people) poured hundreds of millions of dollars (which the Supreme Court had reclassified as protected speech) to Republican candidates. Most of these candidates didn’t hide their anarchist fervor on the stump, and the wave of Republicans who retook the House of Representatives were the most radical the institution had ever seen. Radicals who scorned the rules and traditions of the House itself. They were anarchists. Their sole wish was to make the Congress cease to function. Their goal being to make Obama’s presidency a failure.

Now the opposition was total because they had the numbers. They refused to compromise on anything and could block everything. They used procedural maneuvers to prevent majority measures from passing. They used procedure to slow up ordinary congressional business. Routine stuff like departmental appointments which the opposition party generally allowed because departments needed people doing the work.

Not this time. No judges. No heads of various departments. Bush appointees were therefore left in place, which pleased the Republicans. Understaffed government agencies began to function less efficiently. Brilliant! This was exactly what the Republicans wanted. They wanted the government that did things to cease doing things like helping the unemployed, like treating veterans, like helping veterans of their wars find jobs. Maximum pain was the goal.

Then there was the debt limit. Bush had started two wars and kept their trillion dollar cost off the books. Obama put them back on the books, in a refreshing act of accounting honesty. But Republicans decided they didn't want to pay this debt. Just as they didn't want to pay unemployment benefits to vets. Or the upkeep of the nation's highways. Or relief to people suffering from the economic collapse. They didn't want to spend any money unless they could cut the taxes owed by their wealthy clients. International markets downgraded U.S. Treasury Bills, our sovereign debt. Republicans cheered. Something they wanted to happen couldn't possibly be their fault. It was the president's fault.

Republicans in the House voted more than 50 times to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They wanted to undo Obama’s signature achievement. Republicans who controlled red states refused to enact the ACA in their states, refusing federal money to assist their citizens who didn’t have healthcare coverage. A Scroogelike opposition.

Nice guys, these Republicans. Millions cheered them on. Why?

What was different? Was it because the president was….(black)? Perish the thought. Apparently it was because he was a foreign born Muslim, a silly falsehood Republicans raised again and again. Why did they raise it again and again? Because their constituents believed it. They believed it because their political masters told them to.

They hated Obama. They have hated him ever since he was elected. They hated him the moment he became black, which they prefer to believe was not in Hawaii.

People hated Lincoln too. People North and South, but mostly in the South. Until they killed him.

Lincoln had one advantage. He tried to solve serious problems that Americans had kicked down the road for generations, but he didn’t have to deal with a Confederacy that controlled the Congress and the Supreme Court. Today the Confederacy, the Lost Cause of sacred memory, lives in the Republican Party.

It didn’t die in 1865. The Confederacy lived on in Jim Crow all across the South where blacks could be lynched for registering to vote or for looking at a white person the wrong way, and there were a lot of wrong ways, whole etiquette books of them (the South was and is famously courteous.)

After LBJ passed civil rights and voting rights Southerners blamed the Democratic Party and became Republicans overnight. Nixon devised a whole program to welcome the racists and the anti-unionists and the male supremacists into the Republican fold. It was called the Southern Strategy. It was carefully written to enable white folks to hate and oppress black folks without calling them n*****s. So the Confederacy lives again. No white hoods required, just stubborn willingness to pour sand in the works of our democracy. Why? Racist spite seems extremely probable. You need to work very hard not to think so.

And it’s working brilliantly. Oppose everything, block everything Obama tries to do––even those proposals first made by Republicans––show willingness to make the nation default. The Republicans’ plan contained an explicit desire to make Americans suffer. They’ve laughingly admitted this. They know Americans will blame the president for all of their pain and frustration even if its caused by his enemies. Which is the purest, sickest, most unAmerican kind of cynicism. They've willed his exclusion from the public conversation, hogtied his economic recovery and carefully orchestrated hatred and blame from half of the country. They've gagged him and criticize him for not talking. When he does speak they damn him for poisoning the air––because they disagree. It is hard to be a black leader in a country with a history of racism. It's gotten so bad the news media feel compelled to minimize Obama's achievements. He has achieved a great deal, but who remembers? We've come a long way back since the previous president drove us into the ditch. How could a successful president be this unpopular? It is hard to explain.

So the harm is done. And we’ve let it be done. Our news media has hidden what has been done because to describe this kind of behavior honestly would appear partisan. So they soften it, disguise it, create phony balance. If the president’s opposition behaves in a racist fashion, well Obama must be a racist too.

It’s like that other case in Ferguson, Missouri, where the black man was wrongfully arrested, beaten, jailed and when the police discovered they’d arrested an innocent man from out of town they charged him with destruction of police property. While they’d been beating him up he’d bled on their uniforms.

Hanging Private Ryan

A bit of dialogue from Saving Private Ryan that seemed topical today...

"Private Jackson: Sir... I have an opinion on this matter.

Captain Miller: Well, by all means, share it with the squad.

Private Jackson: Well, from my way of thinking, sir, this entire mission is a serious misallocation of valuable military resources.

Captain Miller: Yeah. Go on.

Private Jackson: Well, it seems to me, sir, that God gave me a special gift, made me a fine instrument of warfare.

Captain Miller: Reiben, pay attention. Now, this is the way to gripe. Continue, Jackson.

Private Jackson: Well, what I mean by that, sir, is... if you was to put me and this here sniper rifle anywhere up to and including one mile of Adolf Hitler with a clear line of sight, sir... pack your bags, fellas, war's over. Amen.

Private Reiben: Oh, that's brilliant, bumpkin. Hey, so, Captain, what about you? I mean, you don't gripe at all?

Captain Miller: I don't gripe to *you*, Reiben. I'm a captain. There's a chain of command. Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer, so on, so on, and so on. I don't gripe to you. I don't gripe in front of you. You should know that as a Ranger.

Private Reiben: I'm sorry, sir, but uh... let's say you weren't a captain, or maybe I was a major. What would you say then?

Captain Miller: Well, in that case... I'd say, "This is an excellent mission, sir, with an extremely valuable objective, sir, worthy of my best efforts, sir. Moreover... I feel heartfelt sorrow for the mother of Private James Ryan and am willing to lay down my life and the lives of my men - especially you, Reiben - to ease her suffering.”

.......

A lot of bickering goes on in war. Soldiers grumble about the mission. Some of them have reason to. Some lose hope. Some die for no clear reason. Some are horribly wounded in mind or body. Some go missing. Some are taken prisoner by the enemy. When the war is declared over those prisoners are brought home and those taken by our side are returned according to international law. Making a political game out of it is not uncommon, but it is in bad taste.

Hey Romney––Disaster Isn't a Business Opportunity

Even Republican governors are praising Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy. Such a contrast with the guitar strumming response we got from a recent Republican president. Romney has urged shutting FEMA down altogether. There's a difference between the two parties. Mega-disasters like this remind us of the importance of good government that works for everyone. Sometimes we really need it.

At Raw Story.

The Washington Post.

Under a President Romney this hurricane's aftermath would look a lot different. Instead of FEMA being ready, fully equipped and on the ground, Romney would open the devastated areas up to the "magic of capitalism". Disasters are a business opportunity in Romney's eyes. An opportunity for profit, and you can imagine how prices could be affected by sudden mass shortages. Don't worry, his friends on Park Avenue would win a bidding war for bottled water, and would probably do well selling their excess. If you think about it, Mr. Romney, looting is a business opportunity, we just don't condone it.

Worth reading and sharing with your fence-sitting friends.

A very good post on the New York Times blog.

At The New Republic.

Also this, also at TNR.

Want irony? Remember "Heckuva Job" Brownie? The man who ran FEMA for Bush, who fumbled the Katrina response, whose previous experience before his government job was running a horse show association? (Maybe he knows Rufalka...) Brownie has criticized Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy, saying he responded too quickly... Story reported by The Hill newspaper.

I think it comes down to something I saw on a wall last week:

"ObamaCare. RomneyDon't"

Today's Must-Read-the art of the possible and the manipulation of history

A great Ezra Klein analysis of the new Suskind book about the economic crisis and Obama's handling of it. Suskind does what opponents, critics and fantasists love doing: he simplifies complex situations, evades hard facts, ignores contradictory evidence, and assumes he would do better than the people he writes about. Economics is a dismal science, politics is an ugly business and democracy is a grueling enterprise, but all three are necessary. Fantasists do not perform well in these fields but they have no trouble writing about the practical people who do the work.

In effect, Suskind and many other Obama critics are impatient, impractical, unforgiving people, with short attention spans and short memories. Obama didn't have the luxury FDR had. FDR arrived when the worst had happened and was given a large majority to put things right. We could have done worse this time around. We may yet do better if we show, wisdom, patience, practical sense and unity.