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Before we get to the Bergdahl trade, the obama disaster de jour, we’ll pay some attention to some other items. Tennessee law prof Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit devotes his weekly USA Today column to the VA, the disaster of a few weeks ago. Reynolds makes the point that firing Shinseki will have little long term effect on the perverse incentives that always pervade government efforts.
… People sometimes think that government or “nonprofit” operations will be run more honestly than for-profit businesses because the businesses operate on the basis of “greed.” But, in fact, greed is a human characteristic that is present in any organization made up of humans. It’s all about incentives.
And, ironically, a for-profit medical system might actually offer employees less room for greed than a government system. That’s because VA patients were stuck with the VA. If wait times were long, they just had to wait, or do without care. In a free-market system, a provider whose wait times were too long would lose business, and even if the employees faked up the wait-time numbers, that loss of business would show up on the bottom line. That would lead top managers to act, or lose their jobs.
In the VA system, however, the losses didn’t show up on the bottom line because, well, there isn’t one. Instead, the losses were diffused among the many patients who went without care — visible to them, but not to the people who ran the agency, who relied on the cooked-books numbers from their bonus-seeking underlings.
And, contrary to what Klein suggests, that’s the problem with socialism. The absence of a bottom line doesn’t reduce greed and self-dealing — it removes a constraint on greed and self-dealing. And when that happens, ordinary people pay the price. Keep that in mind, when people suggest that free-market systems are somehow morally inferior to socialism.
A couple of left greenies got all excited thinking China was going to work on limiting carbon emissions. David Harsanyi points out it is not true. The Chinese are not as stupid as our government.
Jonathan Chait recently scolded the Wall Street Journal for an editorial it ran detailing the harm the EPA’s proposal to slash 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from existing power would inflict on the economy. And though he utilized the standard inventory of liberal grievances, Chait added a gotcha. You see, though the WSJ had “sneered” at the prospect of Obama’s unilateral move inspiring countries like China to similarly tackle emissions, Chait points out that the very next day the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases went ahead and promised to set its own absolute cap on emissions by 2016. “The target will be written into China’s next five-year plan, which comes into force in 2016,” said He Jiankun, chairman of China’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change, according to a Reuters story.
Obama’s leadership was already working! Salon, (“Hopping on the climate bandwagon? China says it, too, may cap emissions”) Think Progress (“One Day After U.S. Announces Emissions Target, China Says Carbon Cap Is On The Way”) and others, were thrilled about the news.
There are, it turns out, a few minor problems with this storyline. The most glaring? It isn’t actually true. Andrew C. Revkin of the New York Times did some legwork and reports that He Jiankun has absolutely no power to speak for the Chinese government or even the climate committee. And no one had actually made any mention of China pondering a new quantitative cap on carbon dioxide emissions. (h/t Tim Carney.) …
… it would irrational to expect a growing nation with a per capita GDP of $5,000 to set absolute caps in emissions. China, in fact, has consistently stated that emissions would likely keep rising until its per capita GDP was around five times what it is today. Which is good news for the billions of Chinese still living in poverty and bad news for Western Luddites.
And from USA Today more on the ice that is still on the Great Lakes.
I’m gonna keep writing about this until the last cube of ice is melted (if that happens). Unimaginably, there’s still ice from the savage winter of 2013-14 on the south shore of Lake Superior near Marquette, Mich.
The Marquette Mining-Journal newspaper reports that according to some forecasts, the ice may last until July:
“To many area residents who suffered through one of the worst winters on record for the area, seeing the ice chunks on the lake every day is a continuing reminder of that wintry grip of Mother Nature, which still has yet to completely loosen,” the paper noted on its website.
OK. Now we learn from Ralph Peters why the administration was so blindsided by the Bergdahl backlash.
… I actually believe that Ms. Rice was kind of sincere, in her spectacularly oblivious way. In the best Manchurian Candidate manner, she said what she had been programmed to say by her political culture, then she was blindsided by the firestorm she ignited by scratching two flinty words together. At least she didn’t blame Bergdahl’s desertion on a video.
The president, too, appears stunned. He has so little understanding of (or interest in) the values and traditions of our troops that he and his advisers really believed that those in uniform would erupt into public joy at the news of Bergdahl’s release — as D.C. frat kids did when Osama bin Laden’s death was trumpeted.
Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.
But compassion, please! The president and all the president’s men and women are not alone. Our media elite — where it’s a rare bird who bothered to serve in uniform — instantly became experts on military justice. Of earnest mien and blithe assumption, one talking head after another announced that “we always try to rescue our troops, even deserters.”
Uh, no. “Save the deserter” is a recent battle cry of the politically indoctrinated brass. For much of our history, we did make some efforts to track down deserters in wartime. Then we shot or hanged them. Or, if we were in good spirits, we merely used a branding iron to burn a large D into their cheeks or foreheads. Even as we grew more enlightened, desertion brought serious time in a military prison. At hard labor. …
Peter Wehner posts on the “dishonorable deal.”
Even I, a consistent and at times quite a harsh critic of President Obama, have been taken aback by the latest turn of events.
To recapitulate: Mr. Obama released five high-value, high-risk terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who it appears was a deserter–and has been known to be a deserter for a couple of years. People who served with him are calling on the military to court martial Bergdahl. Media reports indicate that at least six Americans died in their efforts to rescue him.
In de facto negotiating with the Taliban and acceding to their demands, the president violated a law he signed, requiring him to inform Congress 30 days in advance of any prisoner release from GuantanamoBay. And the effect of this deal will be to incentivize the capture of more Americans, since it obviously pays dividends. …
Jennifer Rubin wonders if Hillary Clinton will “go down with the obama foreign policy ship.”
…This is not only a catastrophe for Obama and for the United States, but also for Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, she defended the Taliban trade despite public outcry from even Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers. Clinton must decide whether to stick by the president and get pulled down in the undertow or to separate herself to maintain her credibility in a run for the White House. If she does the former, the press and public will increasingly see her as running for the third Obama term and determined to stick close to his failed policies. If she does the latter, she risks the ire of the base and the wrath of the White House.
The dilemma reminds us of several unappealing Clinton traits. First, she is overly cautious, always waiting to calculate which way the wind is blowing. That leaves all sides dissatisfied and reinforces the view that she is an entirely political figure, not a model stateswoman. Second, we really don’t know what she thinks. Unlike previously secretaries of state who left a personal imprint on their work, we really have no idea what her own policy would look like. She has been a good soldier, but where is the evidence she knows where and how to lead? And finally, a great deal of the downward spiral for the Obama foreign policy concerns her own competence and judgment. She didn’t seem to have kept an eye on al-Qaeda in North Africa, nor does her handling of the U.S.-Israeli relationship indicated a deft touch and ability to instill trust in others. She championed the president’s Iran engagement and backed the interim agreement, both of which seem destined to be seen as foolish gambits.
Obama’s foreign policy slide into chaos, retreat and appeasement now present Clinton with the most important choice of her career: Does she choose to play to the left or to strike out on her own and take the furor from her base on issues on which she claims to have expertise and maturity? I suspect it is first, but for her, her party’s and the country’s sake (since she could be president) I certainly hope she strikes out on her own.
WSJ – Notable and Quotable has this from Jay Carney last June.
… We cannot discuss all the details of our efforts, but there should be no doubt that on a daily basis we are continuing to pursue—using our military, intelligence and diplomatic tools—the effort to return him home safely. And our hearts are with the Bergdahl family.
With regard to the transfer of Taliban detainees from GuantanamoBay, we have made—the United States has not made the decision to do that, though we do expect the Taliban to raise this issue in our discussion, if and when those discussions happen.
As we have long said, however, we would not make any decisions about transfer of any detainees without consulting with Congress and without doing so in accordance with U.S. law.
John Hinderaker posts on the White House claiming Bergdahl was being “swift boated.”
This would be unbelievable, if we weren’t talking about Barack Obama’s White House. Chuck Todd reported on the Today show this morning that, in trying to explain why they so badly miscalculated the Bergdahl affair, White House aides told him that they didn’t know that the soldiers who served with Bergdahl were “going to swift boat him.” …
… There is a nice historical continuity here. Just as the men who served with John Kerry told inconvenient truths about him–far from being factually inaccurate, the most effective Swift Boat ads quoted Kerry’s own words when he called his fellow servicemen war criminals–those who served with Bergdahl were driven to tell the truth about him in the wake of the administration’s false claim that Bergdahl “served with honor and distinction.” Is the White House now calling them all liars? I don’t think so, but if that is their claim, let’s see the Army’s 2010 report. I am pretty sure it will confirm that Bergdahl was a deserter, at best.
Just when you think the Obama administration can’t make the Bergdahl fiasco any worse, they fool you.
Hinderaker also posts that Mad Magazine is making fun of the trade. Mad came up with a take-off of Saving Private Ryan and treated us to a movie poster for “Trading Private Bergdahl – They got five Taliban leaders. We got one deserting weasel.”
Recently, President Obama exchanged five Taliban leaders for an American POW, Bowe Bergdahl. One prisoner for five is an iffy trade to begin with — but even more so when it was revealed that Bergdahl had deserted his post. So, Obama got his man, but there was a lot of collateral damage — it kind of reminds us of a movie we once saw…