A DADT Timeline

Barney Frank sets one:

Repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will likely be included as part of next year’s Department of Defense authorization bill in both chambers of Congress, Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said Wednesday.

“Military issues are always done as part of the overall authorization bill,” Frank said, insisting that this has been the strategy for overturning the policy all along. “'Don’t ask, don’t tell' was always going to be part of the military authorization.”

The Case Against Representatives Reading The Bill, Ctd

A reader writes:

Bartlett's point about reading bills being a waste of time is exactly right. As a computer programmer, reading that section of legislation felt EXACTLY like reading a "snippet" of code.  I worked until very recently at a bank that has a large (> 3000 headcount) IT department.  The idea of managers reading every line of code that goes into a release is absurd – in fact, many senior managers who grew up programming mainframes in COBOL are effectively illiterate in the VB, Java and .Net paradigm that's taken over.

The analogy between computer code and federal legislation isn't spurious, either.  The similarities run quite deep because both are formal languages.  They give precise and unambiguous instructions on how a program (whether the computer or government variety) should behave for any given scenario, whereas natural languages are more vague but less opaque in expressing intent.

In fact, the comparison between congressman and IT manager runs even deeper than at first blush.  The snippet is not merely a standalone piece of legislation, but an amendment to one that already exists.  That is akin to the situation quite common in IT where the behavior of a large, existing piece of software needs to be patched.  At a code level, that might entail injecting just a handful of blocks of code at various points in a 50,000 line code base.

Reading the text of the amendment without the context into which it was inserted would be not so much losing the forest for the trees as losing it for the molecules.

“I Just Know”

K-Lo gets an email:

Your article about marriage struck a chord with me, mainly when you wrote about the brutal tactics employed against defenders of traditional marriage. I'm 26 years old and my generation holds very strong views on this topic… in my experience, mostly in support of same-sex marriage. Personally, I'm on the fence about it. But for most people my age, that is not good enough. The peer pressure to support gay marriage is enormous. Which is precisely why I refuse to give my (socially mandatory in many circles) full-throated support to it. When friends tell me it's a civil right and denying gays their "universal right to marriage" is the same as forbidding whites and blacks to marry, it makes my skin crawl . . . but I don't know how to argue against these points. I just know deep down there's something fishy about the arguments.

In K-Lo's piece, Robert P. George continues his argument that those of us who want to be full members of our own families and societies are working for "the abolition of the conjugal conception of marriage as the union of husband and wife." This is untrue. I completely support the conjugal conception of marriage as the union of husband and wife. I cherish marriage as an institution between husband and wife. It remains a bedrock of society, critical to rearing children, central to teaching mutual responsibility and a miraculous place for the creation of new life. You can pore through every word I have ever written (and they have) to find a scintilla of hostility to this.

And when my own mum and dad were there at my wedding, and my husband's mum and dad were there at my wedding, they did not even begin to see how our marriage invalidated, let alone abolished, theirs'. In some ways, our marriage completed theirs'. We are their sons. They want us to be happy. They are thrilled we found each other. And this civil rite knitted us together in a way nothing else could.

Yes, it was painful not to marry in church. But we had mass the day before together. When I look back on that day, and the weddings of so many others, all I can see in George and Lopez is a simple blank refusal to accept our existence and our dignity, an inability to see that expanding marriage to include everyone does not destroy it – it just brings in those previously left outside.

These are the blinders of abstraction and fear; they need to be dropped to see the reality and the love. One day, they will. And that I just know.

“Childish Evasions”

Rich Lowry takes aim at the "obsession with PTSD" in several press reports about Hasan:

[I]t fits the media’s favorite narrative of soldiers as victims. Here was poor Hasan, brought low like so many others by the unbearable burden of Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that PTSD usually results in sleeplessness, flashbacks, and — in the extreme — suicide. […]The press keeps mistaking Hasan for Private Ryan, when the closest he’d come to combat was counseling sessions with soldiers.

Lowry later airs an email from an expert who explains that military psychiatrists have indeed been known to suffer "vicarious traumatization" from their PTSD patients. However, the reader insists, Hasan probably wasn't one of them:

First, by all accounts Major Hasan's observed problems were not overcommitment compassion and over identification with traumatized soldiers. There is no suggestion that he identified with his clients, took his job overly seriously or that he habitually advocated for his clients and went beyond expectations to serve them. (There was, in fact, suggestion that he argued with clients, something rarely seen in cases of compassionate care.) As the previously mentioned characteristics are hallmarks of secondary or vicarious traumatization, it calls this 'diagnostic' explanation into question.

Second, there is ample evidence that Major Hasan experienced a long-standing personal religious/moral angst that was fueled by self-defined spiritual dilemmas. The reported chronology pre-dates the clinical work that allegedly produced secondary or vicarious traumatization. Over the course of his training and service with the Armed Forces, there appears to be a clear pattern of thoughts and behaviors that indicate escalating anger and frustration over the self-styled dilemmas created by his choice to be both a committed Muslim and an active member of the US Armed forces.

Given these observations, it is very difficult to characterize Major Hasan's behavior as being the consequence of his clinical experiences. It is more reasonable to conclude that Major Hasan's clinical work did not lead to a state of vicarious or secondary traumitization, although it may have served as the final straw or the catalyst which sent his spiraling rage and frustration into a murderous frenzy.

Priorities

Conor Friedersdorf points out some cognitive dissonance over at Hot Air:

The author argues that it is folly for David Frum to criticize an article on Sarah Palin when the right should be focusing all its energy on opposing the health care legislation now en route to the Senate… yet the author finds that when it comes to his own writing, rather than focus on health care, it makes sense to write a blog post complaining about the fact that David Frum is complaining about an article on Sarah Palin instead of writing about health care.