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Michael Barone gets the lead again. This time he picks up on the NY Times article by O’Hanlon and Pollack, and the Hewitt interview with John Burns.
But there is evidence—just a little evidence so far—that opinion may be changing. The New York Times and CBS took a poll and found that support for going to war in Iraq had risen to 42 percent from 35 percent from May to July. The percentage of those thinking it was the wrong decision fell to 54 percent from 61 percent. This was a statistically significant difference and indicated a very different political balance. …
T… he Times and CBS News didn’t believe the 42-54 result, for the good reason that the poll didn’t show movement on opinion on Iraq and for (I suspect) the bad reason that they couldn’t imagine there could be any rise in the percentage favoring the policies of Bushchimphitler. So they took another poll—an unusual step, because it costs money to take polls, and news organizations, particularly those with declining audiences like the Times and CBS, have limited budgets. Presumably they expected to get a different result. But they got pretty much the same numbers.
Interesting. We’ll be able to see if there are similar shifts in other polls. Maybe there will be; maybe there won’t. The nightmare scenario for Democrats is that increasing numbers of Americans will see progress in Iraq and will not want to accept defeat when they could have victory. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, according to the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza, is already having such a nightmare. He said that a positive report by Gen. David Petraeus in September will be “a real big problem for us”. …
… The “us” in question is of course the House Democratic leadership. A political party gets itself in a bad position when military success for the nation is a “real big problem for us.” Voters generally want their politicians to root for the nation, not against it. We’re still a good distance from this nightmare scenario for congressional Democrats, and we may never get there. But it seems that Jim Clyburn, a highly competent politician and from everything I’ve seen a really nice man, is worried about it. …
Max Boot in Contentions gives us an overview of the Hewitt interview with John Burns. Pickings passed on it only because it is 10,000 words.
Say what you will about reporters in general or the New York Times in particular: John Burns breaks all the stereotypes. As the Times’ longtime Baghdad bureau chief, he has been a fearless and honest chronicler of the war. He has presented plenty of evidence of disasters, but he isn’t afraid to highlight successes when they occur, and to warn of the dangers of American disengagement. …
… Given the positive assessments coming from such dispassionate analysts as John Burns and the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, the chances of just such a positive report from Petraeus seem to be growing—and hence leftist activists’ hopes of abandoning Iraq seem to be fading. At least for the time being.
Thomas Sowell comments on the O’Hanlon/Pollack piece.
If victory in Iraq was oversold at the outset, there are now signs that defeat is likewise being oversold today.
One of the earliest signs of this was that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he could not wait for General David Petraeus’ September report on conditions in Iraq but tried to get an immediate Congressional mandate to pull the troops out. …
… Another revealing sign is that the solid front of the mainstream media in filtering out any positive news from Iraq and focusing only on American casualties — in the name of “honoring the troops” — is now starting to show cracks.
One of the most revealing cracks has appeared in, of all places, the New York Times, which has throughout the war used its news columns as well as its editorial pages to undermine the war in Iraq and paint the situation as hopeless. …
Tony Blankley, as he often does, puts the Iraq debate in interesting historical perspective.
On June 25, the following resolution was tabled in the House:
“That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces … in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war.”
That would be June 25, 1942. The House would be the House of Commons in London, England. And the government in which no confidence was expressed was that of Winston Churchill.
Almost three years into World War II, repeated military failures had induced considerable war fatigue in Britain. In February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese with 25,000 British troops being taken prisoner. In March, Rangoon fell. This was vastly damaging to Churchill’s prestige in Washington as Rangoon was the only port through which aid could be shipped to China’s Chiang Kai-shek — a very high priority for the United States in Asia.
In April, the Japanese Navy drove the Royal Navy all the way back to East Africa and shelled the British Indian coastal cities.
Then on June 21, 1942, Tobruk in North Africa fell to Gen. Rommel, with 33,000 British prisoners taken and the Suez Canal (Britain’s lifeline to her Asian empire and oil) threatened. …
Corner post on an important anniversary.
Rush Limbaugh celebrates his 19th year on the air today. People love him and people hate him and just like my post on Bill Bennett yesterday, I’ll get the predictable ridicule for praising Rush today. But you know what? People love Rush and people hate Rush because he matters and he matters because he is effective. He has a wildly successful radio show (see Byron) that works because he’s good at what he does. He’s a smart entertainer — he’s funny and he’s clearly having fun those three hours daily. And so you want to listen. For 19 years now. …
Marty Peretz posts on Deval Patrick, another NE liberal governor in some trouble.
John Fund posts on Murtha, the Dem version of the GOP pig Stevens.
John Stossel’s weekly column is on economic illiteracy.
When I speak on college campuses, students often ask what can be done about the “problem” of young people who don’t care enough to vote. I always say that I don’t see it as much of problem “because most of you don’t know anything yet. I’m OK with you not voting!” The students laugh, but I’m not joking.
It wasn’t until I was about 40 that I started to believe I had acquired a good sense of what domestic policies might serve people well. (I still have no clue about international affairs.) I only started to think I knew what ought to be done after years of reporting and reading voraciously to absorb arguments from left and right. The idea that most voters vote without having done much of that work is, frankly, scary. …
Walter Williams, as if on cue, writes on economic thinking about costs and benefits.
… The only costs relevant to decision-making are what economists call marginal or incremental cost; that’s the change in costs as a result of doing something. That cost should be compared to the expected benefit. Think about pollution. Getting rid of pollution is a no-brainer. All that the authorities of, say, Los Angeles would have to do is to mandate that all pollution-emitting sources shut down. That would mean no driving, no manufacturing, no airplanes, no power generation and no lawn mowing. Angelenos would have perfectly clean air, but I doubt whether they’d agree that it’s worth the costs. That means perfectly clean air is non-optimal, and so is perfectly dirty air. The question is, how much clean air do we want and at what cost? In other words, we should compare the additional benefit of cleaner air to the additional costs of getting it.
The idea of weighing the costs of doing something against its benefits are part and parcel of intelligent decision-making. If we only look to benefits, we’ll do darn near anything because everything has some kind of benefit.
As if Stossel and Williams were not enough, Volokh posts with a good definition of “rent seeking”.
… The difference between these methods of gaining wealth — between, say, competing to build a better restaurant and competing to get to the treasure first (rent seeking) — is that the first one creates wealth, or better-offness, for the world. Customers are made happy, and restaurants gradually get better. Fighting over who gets the treasure isn’t like that. The treasure doesn’t get bigger as a result. In a sense it gets smaller because wealth is eaten up in the effort to lay hold of it.
Think of this on a larger scale and you can see that the more a society spends on rent seeking — on quarrels over who gets what — the poorer it becomes. If that’s all that anyone did, everyone would starve in due course.
Apply the point to politics. To adapt the oversimple dichotomy to this arena: one can gain wealth in two ways — through the marketplace (by creating things people want) or through the political system (by lobbying for handouts or favored treatment). The latter is a type of rent seeking. Notice not only the temptation to try it but also that Politicians might like creating rents, because they encourage the attentions of the rent seekers known as interest groups. …
Steve Forbes tells us how to get 90% off on open heart surgery.
A fast-growing phenomenon–”medical tourism,” which will be a $40 billion industry by 2010–is showing how we can “solve” the health care financing crisis.
More and more Americans are choosing to go abroad for elective and/or major surgeries. What entrepreneurs began more than a decade ago by constructing world-class facilities to lure patients from the U.S. and around the world into traveling for cosmetic surgery has now blossomed into freshly built foreign hospitals offering a wide array of other types of medical procedures. India, Thailand and Singapore are among the countries heavily involved. Panama and others are just entering this arena. …
The Guardian reports on 108 year-old woman in Great Britain who has to wait 18 months for a new hearing aid.
A 108-year-old woman has been told she must wait at least 18 months before she receives a new hearing aid.
Olive Beal, who has failing eyesight and uses a wheelchair, finds it difficult to hear with her five-year-old analogue aid and needs a digital version that cuts out background noise and makes conversation easier. Mrs Beal, a former piano teacher who was involved in the suffragette movement, would be 110 by the time she gets her new hearing aid. “I could be dead by then,” she said yesterday.
WSJ on Bill Walsh, 49ers coach.