Category: The Dish

Yesterday, Karl Rove defended his recent comments that suggested Hillary Clinton could have brain damage:

Chotiner expects the attack to backfire:

Beinart isn’t so sure:

Why does Rove allegedly smear his opponents this way? Because it works.

Consider the Clinton “brain damage” story. Right now, the press is slamming Rove for his vicious, outlandish comments. But they’re also talking about Clinton’s health problems as secretary of state, disrupting the story she wants to tell about her time in Foggy Bottom in her forthcoming memoir.

Assuming she runs for president, the press will investigate Clinton’s medical history and age no matter what Rove says. But he’s now planted questions—about the December 2012 blood clot that forced her into the hospital, and about her mental condition as she ages—that will lurk in journalists’ minds as they do that reporting. If she has a moment of Rick Perry-like forgetfulness sometime between now and the fall of 2016, Rove’s comments make it more likely that voters will wonder whether she’s still with it mentally.

Kleiman makes related points:

My high-school biology textbook told me that the paramecium is the lowest form of animal life. Obviously, the author of that textbook had never encountered Karl Rove. He knows how to play the media like a violin, half-saying things he can later deny, getting a story each time that plants a nasty suspicion about an opponent, and reporters don’t know how to resist.

Waldman weighs in:

Here’s one way to understand Rove’s comments: They might be a way of testing how allegations about Clinton’s health — or about anything else — play out in the press. Will the news media pick them up and run with them? How far can Republicans go in making unsubstantiated charges? What kind of blowback will there be, and would it outweigh the benefits to Republicans of making Clinton answer uncomfortable questions? After all, while Rove may not be quite the political genius many believe, he doesn’t make statements like that without a reason.

Cillizza adds:

Rove is not exactly the ideal messenger to carry the “Is Hillary healthy enough to be president?” argument. “Having Karl Rove lead the charge will only solidify Democratic support behind Hillary, and risks alienating independents who think personal attacks are out-of-bounds,” said one Democratic consultant granted anonymity to speak candidly about the political impact from Rove’s comments.

In the end, Clinton’s health and age will only be an issue if there is a re-occurrence (or some new occurrence) of a medical problem that suggests she may not be able to carry out the duties of the office. If Clinton is actively moving around the country — speaking, raising money and, eventually, campaigning — without incident, the age and health questions will likely disappear.

Noah Millman argues that although “a rise in sea levels and an increased incidence of extreme weather are the easiest parts of climate change to understand, they aren’t actually the most important.” He makes some reasonable points:

Human beings adapt pretty readily to flooding. We know how to build sea walls, and ecologically-sophisticated systems of flood control. In the extreme, we know how to move – we are a highly mobile species.

It’s less clear how well we’d adapt to wholesale changes in the ecology attendant on changes in CO2 levels. An increase in the acidity of the oceans, for example, could significantly disrupt the marine food chain (what’s left of it after over-fishing). A wide variety of land-based species are also sensitive to changes in the climate; global changes could have an unpredictable global impact on overall biodiversity. The earth, of course, will adapt just fine; the terrestrial climate has seen some pretty huge swings over geological timescales, and the diversity of life has recovered from multiple mass-extinctions. Human beings, though, have only been around for a million or so years (much less depending on how picky you are about what counts as “human”), and large-scale civilization is only a few thousand years old. We have no idea how well that civilization would adapt to widespread ecological disruption.

Moreover, there is a synergy between efforts to reduce the impact of human activity on the environment and efforts to repair or adapt to the consequences of that activity. The slower the rate of CO2 and methane emissions, the slower these changes will progress; in effect, we’d be buying time to adapt.

With regard to height:

For centuries, Americans were the NBA players of the world. We were two inches taller than the Red Coats we squared off against in the American Revolution. In 1850, Americans had about two and a half inches on people from every European country. But our stature plateaued after World War II, and since then, other countries shot past us. White Americans have grown a bit taller since the early 1980s, but African Americans haven’t.

And the tallest in the world?

[T]he Dutch are the tallest, at an average of six feet for men and five-foot-seven for women. They’ve come a long way: In 1848, a quarter of Dutch men were rejected from military service because they didn’t meet the five-foot-two height limit. “Today, fewer than one in 1,000 is that short,” the Associated Press noted in 2006.  (The tallest people on record, though, are apparently the people of the Dinaric Alps, in the former Yugoslavia, where adolescent males are, on average, six-foot-one monoliths.)

The Danes, Norwegians, and Germans stack up right under the Dutch. American men and women, meanwhile, measure just 5’9″ and 5’4″, respectively, barely edging out the Southern Europeans.

Noting that only 30 percent of American workers say they are engaged with their jobs, Krystal D’Costa wants us to start taking the problem of burnout seriously:

Burnout is a work-related disorder that results from prolonged experiences of stress, which can stem from work overload, role ambiguity, a lack of autonomy, and low social support. It’s characterized by a lengthy list of symptoms including exhaustion, disinterest, boredom, heightened irritability, feeling unappreciated, loss of concentration and feelings of detachment. And if allowed to fester, burnout can result in depression, substance abuse, and make you more susceptible to illnesses overall. …

Search for “burnout” and the majority of the news results you’ll found are Canadian or based in the EU. The scarce recognition of burnout in the United States is noticeable and what exists reads like the same general piece over and over again.

We’re dancing around the topic despite the potentially serious impact of burnout because there is also be a degree of stigma in the assignment, particularly in a market where jobs are still somewhat difficult to come by and employees may feel pressure to perform (or appear as if they are). Burnout suggests you don’t fit with the company—that you can’t cut it. It implies that you’re not a prime candidate.

Denial, which is a huge factor in the progression of burnout, is also at work on a larger social level: we acknowledge the problem with general self-help articles, but place the burden of diagnosis and treatment largely on the individual with suggested tips for identifying and managing symptoms. This overlooks the ways in which organizational and social structures can create a setting for burnout.

Hugh Byrd and Steve Matthewman warn that electrical blackouts are “becoming increasingly common” across the globe and “will only get more frequent and severe”:

Electricity systems are complex, high-tech assemblages in which small failures can interact in unanticipated and often incomprehensible ways. The North American grid, for example, is arguably the world’s largest machine, but is highly fragmented. It crosses borders and regulatory zones and has no single owner or manager. Over 3,100 utility companies are on it.

Other continent-scale grids have similar weaknesses. The vulnerability of such systems is demonstrated by the Italian blackout of 2003. The event began when a falling tree broke a power line in Switzerland; when a second tree took out another Swiss power line, connectors towards Italy tripped and several Italian power plants failed as a result. Virtually the whole country was left without power. It says something when a nation can be brought to a halt by two trees falling outside its borders. …

Resource depletion is already having an effect on countries that rely on fossil fuels such as coal for electricity generation. Countries with significant renewable resources are not immune, either. Weather is not predictable and is likely to become less so, courtesy of climate change: in the past decade shortages of rain for hydro dams has led to blackouts in Kenya, India, Tanzania and Venezuela. Deregulation and privatization have created further weaknesses in supply as there is no incentive to maintain or improve the grid. Almost three-quarters of US transmission lines and power transformers are more than 25 years old and the average age of power plants there is 30 years.

(Photo: Indian women and children wait inside a darkened train carriage at a railway station in New Delhi on July 31, 2012. A massive power failure hit India for the second day running as three regional power grids collapsed. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images. Dish coverage of the blackouts here.)