The Dish

Tyler Cowen cites a few cost-benefit research papers. One finding:

Overall, a $1 increase in prescription drug spending is associated with a $2.06 reduction in Medicare spending.

Cowen adds:

It's a little late to go through all the usual pro and con arguments on the policy as a whole.  I'd just like to note that – relative to its reputation – the Medicare prescription drug benefit is one of the most underrated government programs of our time.  If the goal is to cut or check Medicare spending, and I think it should be, we should do it elsewhere in the program.

It's also possible that the prescription drug benefit will do more for peoples' health (as opposed to their financial security) than will the Obama plan. Try getting people to consider that.  The debate has become very emotional and not for the better.

Against all odds, Bruce Bartlett agrees with much of this article by Eliot Spitzer. Bartlett:

Spitzer makes the point that regulatory capture is a big part of why federal agencies looked the other way at actions by financial market players that should have raised red flags.  It's a fact documented by left wing historians like Gabriel Kolko and right wing economists like George Stigler that those being regulated by government eventually take over the agencies that regulate them.

Unfortunately, when some market failure becomes too big to ignore, Congress's natural response is not to fix the existing regulatory apparatus so that it works properly, but rather to add new layers of regulation and agencies on top of the existing agencies and regulations.  That's what it did with Sarbanes-Oxley in the wake of the Enron collapse and that's what [it] is going to do again to prove that it learned the lessons of our recent financial debacle.

That's what Pete Wehner is waging. Joe Klein counters:

[T]his sky-is-falling screeching is easy, painless and, occasionally, short-term, effective. But Republicans would be better served if they started thinking about policy rather than tactics–and their potential leaders started thinking about courage rather than fudge.

Dreher thinks it was a petty move, which it was. Michael Kinsley is right:

The more times [Joe Wilson] is required to write "I will not call the President a liar" on a special blackboard set up in the well of the House, the bigger hero he will become to a large chunk of the population. And, of course, forcing him to grovel will not help to convince him or his supporters that the president is not a liar.

A reader writes:

You seem to be suggesting that Bush's 'gut' was not always entirely or immediately off. The most consistent strain of informed criticism about his leadership, though, is that he is not interested in open debate, in getting all the perspectives and data out on the table, and that Mr. MBA failed to set up the management procedures that would establish honest deliberation and keep him in the loop regarding his own experts' thinking.

In this, he is a polar opposite not only of Obama but of his own father (whose management style and procedures, you may recall, Obama has openly sought to replicate). This is from Gates' From the Shadows:

A dogged defender of the Presidency, Scowcroft's lack of egotism and his gentle manner made possible the closest working relationships with other senior members of the national security team. Further, the strong individuals who ran State, Defense, CIA, and the other key institutions of national security trusted Scowcroft as no other National Security Adviser has been trusted–to represent them and their views to the President fairly, to report to him on meetings accurately, to facilitate rather than block their access to the President. Scowcroft ran the NSC and its process as it should be run (457-58).

Gates ran Bush Sr.'s deputies committee, which oversaw the interagency NSC process. Of that group he claims:

The friendships–and-trust–that developed among the core members of the Deputies Committee in 1989-1991 not only made the NSC process work, but cut down dramatically on the personal backstabbing and departmental jockying that had been so familiar (459).

The question is not so much "what was Bush thinking" but "how did Bush's administration think" — how did it process information and decision-making. Answer: it didn't. Bush allowed the most ruthless ideologues in his cabinet and on his staff to short-circuit deliberation at every key juncture.

Limbaugh echoes Malkin:

"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on… I wonder if Obama's going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard."

I'm sorry but this is outrageous. The story was a classic schoolbus bully incident; it could happen anywhere any time and has happened everywhere at all times with kids of all races, backgrounds and religions. To infer both that it was racially motivated and that this is somehow connected to having a black president is repulsive. I know that is almost de trop with Limbaugh, but sometimes you have to regain a little shock. This man is spewing incendiary racial hatred. He is conjuring up images of lonely whites being besieged by angry violent blacks … based on an incident that had nothing to do with race at all. And why, by the way, does someone immediately go to the racial angle when looking at such a tape? 

These people are going off the deep end entirely: open panic at a black president is morphing into the conscious fanning of racial polarization, via Gates or ACORN or Van Jones or a schoolbus in Saint Louis. What we're seeing is the Jeremiah Wright moment repeated and repeated. The far right is seizing any racial story to fan white fears of black power in order to destroy Obama. And the far right now controls the entire right. 

Do they understand how irresonsible this is? How recklessly dangerous to a society's cohesion and calm? Or is that what they need and thrive on?

After some hysterical race-war rhetoric from the tea-party right, the truth emerges:

A student on a Belleville West High School bus was beaten for his choice of seat, not because he was white, according to a witness and police. "The incident appears now to be more about a couple of bullies on a bus dictating where people sit," said Belleville Police Capt. Don Sax, who originally said Monday's attack may have been racially motivated. D'Vante Lott, 16, said he was on the bus and witnessed the attack by the two black students. The victim walked onto the bus, looking for an open seat, but students kept turning him down, as D'Vante said happened often with this student. But Monday, the victim apparently tired of asking for a seat, D'Vante said, moved one student's book-bag off a seat, and just sat down.

The police chief himself said he jumped to a conclusion. Now what does Malkin do in response?

She refuses to remove or correct the post that says baldly that the attack was racial and her correction amounts to:

The police are backing off the racial motive claims. Given the explosive consequences of candor about such matters, this is not surprising.

No: one police chief said he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. But Malkin insists that the real reason was racial and the the chief is bowing to political correctness. Every time I think the far right won't go there, they do. The race-baiting now going on as a way to build resentment of Obama is pretty amazing.

A reader writes:

I've come to the conclusion that George W. Bush is a character from a Shakespearian tragedy: the black sheep son in an aristocratic New England dynasty who goes into politics in order to show his father that he can make something of himself.

The problem is that W. never liked the position he put himself into and obviously was never comfortable around the howling teabaggers that made up his voting base. Thus, he checked out, and the running of the country fell to unhinged lunatics like Cheney and Rumsfeld or corrupt hacks like Gonzales.

I know you're not a baseball fan, but I am a big one.

The opening night of the 2008 baseball season was at the new Nationals Park in DC, and during one inning, Bush joined the broadcast team in the booth. I was stunned at how articulate, confident, and engaged he sounded while speaking about baseball. It occurred to me that he was finally talking about something that he likes and for which he feels a passion. Bush loves baseball, but he despises politics.

Thus, we had a president who hated being president lead the country to the brink of socio-economic collapse. It seems like part "Hamlet" and part "MacBeth" updated for the 21st century.

Google edges a little closer to world domination.

A reader writes:

The parallel to England is eerier than you acknowledge. In both cases, the underlying driver is a religious reformation. Europe's Reformation was led by thoroughly modern leaders, determined to return to religious fundamentals and to purge the faith of the accreted mass of folkloric and pagan practices. It was also an attack on traditional structures of authority and hierarchies. In place of a large number of deeply-local, culturally specific Christianities, the Reformation proposed a universal faith in which every believer had equal recourse to the scripture, the ultimate source of authority. No intermediation. (Of course, the ironic effect of such universalizing beliefs was to fragment Christiandom into a host of warring denominations, each claiming adherents across traditional social and geographic lines.) It took time – and a shocking amount of bloodshed – before new, stable societies were able to emerge from the chaos.

Compare that to the Islamic world, which is experiencing its own reformation. The young, in particular, are drawn to more universal versions of Islam. In immigrant communities and in urban enclaves, they tend to be embarrassed by the clergy imported from their native lands or from the countryside, who are relatively poorly educated and adhere to practices that are more cultural than religious. They turn instead to preachers offering what seems a purer faith, more closely grounded in Islamic texts.

This is why the West has found itself in the curious position of allying itself with older, tribal authorities against insurgents in Iraq, who are attacking both the West and traditional social

arrangements.

It's why the terror attacks in Western nations tend to be perpetrated by those for whom the contrast seems sharpest – young people fully embedded in modern life, drawn to a faith which radically rejects many traditional practices in the name of a purer, reconstructed tradition. They seek the same intellectual rigor in their religious observance that marks their professional lives, and the syncretic practices of their birthplaces seem backward and anachronistic. And, even more radically, they claim the right to seek out and select which religious authorities they will follow.

This suggests the somewhat-depressing conclusion that the shift in the meaning of Islam is going to have to play itself out internally before any measure of stability is restored. Moments of revolutionary change are seldom susceptible to outside interventions in the name of stability. Revolutionary movements that seize power eventually spend themselves, and tend to ossify into regimes that bear a startling resemblance to those they replaced – witness Russia, Iran, or even England's Protectorate. But to imagine, for example, that simply bolstering the old tribal structures can hold back the flood-tide is to place ourselves on the wrong side of history.