Joe,

You left out the Volokh Conspiracy contest to name a Congressional hearing based on the one Speaker Hastert has called for. I did email it to you.

http://volokh.com/posts/1148515173.shtml

[Orin Kerr, May 24, 2006 at 8:03pm]
Suggestions for More Congressional Hearings:

News that the House Judiciary Committee is planning a hearing, "RECKLESS JUSTICE: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?", makes me think that VC readers probably have some suggestions for other hearings that the House of Representatives could hold.

For example here's an idea: "I BEG YOUR PARDON: Celebrating the vital role of Presidential pardons when members of Congress get into a wee bit of trouble with the law." Or how about this one: "JOB INSECURITY IN AMERICA: Do we really need to be reelected every two years, or can we be appointed for life like the Judges?"

More suggestions welcome in the comment thread.

Hmm. How about "SHOW ME THE MONEY: How much pork is your vote worth?"

"WARRANTS: Not good enough for us, too good for you."

POVERTY IN AMERICA: The role of bribery as an essential component of the Congressional compensation package.

GUARDING THE GATES: Strengthening pro-incumbency rules to ensure the stability of our glorious democratically elected leadership - "lest the people do something stupid."

"FISA, SCHMISA: Does the NSA's Warrantless Surveillance Program Filter Out Area Code 202 Calls That Begin With the Prefixes 224 and 225?"

Hearings on S.204, the Bipartisan Congressional Immunity Act.

"REIGNING IN RAMPANT SPEECH": After realizing that Congressmen are in campaign mode all year, not just the last 60 days before an election, we propose McCain-Feingold ver.VI, which criminalizes criticism of members of Congress whenever it occurs, but only when such criticism is in print or spoken aloud.

ELECTIONS: Democracy in Action, or Unnecessary and Damned Inconvenient?

I HEAR PARIS IS LOVELY THIS TIME OF YEAR: How moving the Capitol to somewhere in Europe, where members can enjoy diplomatic immunity for anything they do, will help save the US Government money in the long term

The Evolution of Asset Freezing -- From Judicial order to Legislative Privilege.

UNAMERICAN FRUGALITY: Did the outcry over the Bridge to Nowhere undermine national security?

CHECKS OR BALANCES: Either's fine, we also take Cash.

MCCAIN-FEINGOLD II: Can political campaigns that challenge incumbents be regulated or banned as hate speech?

Tom... see "this thread oiffers a bunch more suggestions..."

Will add a Hat Tip.

If only they could both lose it.

You know, this looks like a perfect job for the Motivator

Imaginary Constitutional Privilege: Warrants, we don't heed no stinking warrants.

I've had it with this Congress, I hope as many of em from both parties get tossed as possible, even if it means democratic majorities.

Re William Jefferson

Don't blame me. I voted for the other guy. Oops, looks like Marc Morial might be in the sights of a federal prosecutor as well.

You know Mark, I agree except I'd like to see both parties replaced completley. It's gotten to the point where the parties, not the candidate are elected. The parties control the process, the gerrymander the districts, they annoint the "candidate" who will run, and destroy independants or those who may disagree with the party line or conventional wisdom. I've seen it in every election I've voted in. The media ignores anyone who hasn't appeared on TV before or doesn't have a legacy famliy name. Donor access is locked up by backchannel deals and star chambers.

I'd really like to see some of the more prominent bloggers run for office, heck I'd even vote for Armed Liberal. :)

So would I.

If thier ever was a time for a 3rd party this is it.

I think its time for the Conservatives and the Liberterians to tell the Republicans to suck it and take over.

"I think its time for the Conservatives and the Liberterians to tell the Republicans to suck it and take over."

Yeah, we tried working within the system back in '94, but anyone that was part of that also remembers how the GOP betrayed those that dared believe that they had been elected to accomplish what they told everyone that they would accomplish.

If working within the system doesn't work, then we'll replace the system. I know alot of angry young Republicans, disenfranchised Libertarians, and otherwise plain disgusted with the system people that would be happy to vote third party, and alot of them would be willing to donate the time to see it work.

Right now, at the least, I'd be happy to see some incumbant Republicans tossed out in the primaries. Between this, the illegal immigration bill, the prolifigate spending, and a half dozen other betrayals, I'm steaming.

I don't blame the people. I blame the system.

We've reached a point in American politics where the system is sold out. Get elected, take money from one bunch and give it to the others. The Republicans for a while were running a protectionist racket "vote for us so we keep the Dems from socking it to you!" but after the last few years that schtick has gotten old.

The people don't matter any more. Take either party, heck take a new party and put them in power. The Washinton machinery would just eat them alive. I'm afraid there are no easy solutions. Anger would be a fulfilling feeling to have if there was some kind of point in it. There isn't.

Hastert is acting like a royal jackass. Either he is guilty of something or he's the biggest idiot that ever was speaker. If he has a constitutional question regarding the executive and leglislative branches, SURELY HE KNOWS TO TAKE IT TO THE JUDICIARY. He's not that stupid and politically inept, is he? I'm afraid there is really sensitive information in that office. I would love to find out what it was.

I'd even vote for Armed Liberal.

Even? Why not especially? :-)

"I don't blame the people. I blame the system."

I'm a firm believer that you do not get the government that you want, you get the government that you deserve.

Like it or not, we create, perpetuate, and sustain the system. The Washington machinery you mention? It's basically just an extension of our collective will.

There are lots of examples of that. You start talking to people about say, tort reform. Everyone is happy with the idea of other people not being able to sue, or not being able to sue for ridiculous ammounts. But, they are not comfortable with restricting thier own capacity to sue. They want a special priviledge for themselves.

Or take appropriations earmarks. Everyone is perfectly happy to cut everyone else's ridiculous pork barrel spending. But, most everyone in the general public draws the line at cutting spending close to home.

And so on and so forth. No, its not the system that's to blame. And that's precisely why it's so hard to fix. We are - as I predicted in 1998 - on the verge of reach De Tocqueville's foresighted calaminity: "The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." Noone but ourselves has allowed and encouraged them to do so.

We may see the American Republic for another decade. I don't expect it to endure beyond that unless God himself intervenes.

Just had a chat with The Dude Upstairs. He says y'all are keeping him wayyy too busy with intervention requests in football games et. al. If you promise to pipe down for a bit, he says he'll see what he can do about this Republic thingy.

He also said something about not thinking he was John McCain. Was that humility, or a jab of some sort? It would be so much more convenient if these visions would be clearer....

The reason that the U.S. is a democratic republic and some of these banana republics (ahem Venezuela) are not is not so much the elections, but the independence of the various government officials. There are a lot of elected presidents (ahem Chavez) that take office and use their law enforcement powers to investigate members of parliament or the judiciary. You find a favorable judge to issue a warrant, 2police comb their personal belongs for evidence of a crime, but only find evidence of a mistress or pornography or unpopular business associations. The embarassing evidence somehow gets stuck to someone's shoe and a call suggesting early retirement is made. A new judge or lawmaker is then appointed by the President to take his place.

So there is a legitimate interest in making sure the search is only for criminal evidence. If someone wants to argue that a member of the legislative branch should be involved in overseeing the search, I don't find that ridiculous. I personally think that judicial oversight is sufficient. And since Congress doesn't appear to have passed a law requiring such oversight, it couldn't have been that important.

But Hastert's handling of this issue has been atrocious, perhaps the worst I can remember from a House Speaker.

Would congressional corruption have descended to current depths had the politburo of nine (a.k.a. US Supreme Court) not nullified congressional term limits? The people’s will as expressed decisively in numerous state referendums was a bit like Flight 93. As the docu-drama, United 93, vividly portrays, the passengers and crew "fought like warrior poets" to recapture the cockpit.

Likewise during the 1990’s voters stormed the bridge of the ship of state, in order to seize the helm from an officeholder class homesteading in Congress. But the usurpers who hijacked the courts stepped into the breech and the term limits movement crashed. For more on Flight 93 as political parable, see: www.tell-usa.org/flight93

"Would congressional corruption have descended to current depths had the politburo of nine (a.k.a. US Supreme Court) not nullified congressional term limits?"

And the answer of course is, yes it would have. Again, you are blaming the system and its not the system which is the problem. Even if the public had decided that it wanted term limits and nothing else would do, given the current state of public corruption, all this would have done was further encourage the development of a behind the scenes power brokers to form some sort of shadow government so that there would be a continuity of thier interests. So not only would we have all the current corruption, but the real people in power - being invisible - would be even less accountable than they are now.

There is no law which in itself is a solution to our current problems. There is no change in the way government functions which is in itself a solution to our current problems. Our current problems are cultural and social. At best, we can pass laws which do not encourage cultural decay but we cannot through laws gaurantee anything. Because the law is only so much paper if no one believes in it, and the system is only so much empty ritual if its lost its mythic hold on the public mind.

We've lost our faith in the system. And this is precisely why the American Republic can't survive. For, as the problem progresses and gets worse and worse, everyone's proposed solution is going to be the same as yours, "The system is at fault, so let's change the system." The American Republic - indeed the entire American nation - is on a ticking time bomb right now. You think we are superpower, but national disolution is just around the corner.

Everyone has got there favorite bugaboo. It's the government. It's the giant transnational corporations. It's the mutliculturists. It's the socialists. It's the military industrial complex. It's the Christian fundamentalists. Whoever. All of those are suitably vague faceless villians suitable for demonizing. But of course, the problem is really none of those things. The problem is us.

When we say "the government", we know longer mean "We the People..." That's our fault, and no one elses. No one took that away from us except ourselves.

This is the least hypocritical post, and following thread, that I think I've read here at Winds of Change, since I've been paying attention.

A post on a real important issue that's flared up, with the appropriate reaction of contempt, for the appropriate parties.

Kudos. I can only hope (a forlorn hope probably) that if a Republican congressman was raided, that the same appropriate reaction would be coming from this group.

And Pelosi's rolling right along with this - showing concern right along with Hastert? That, along with "keeping the powder dry" for every important issue, thus continually getting rolled by the current crop of repugs (I wouldn't deign to call this crop conservatives).

Nice that.

Sadly, the only freaking thing that could unite radically different spectrums of the spectrum - mutual contempt for how the porkiticos are acting...

The truly amazing thing is that the American media is going along with the whole "abuse of congressional privilege" story... and not asking harder questions about taking large bribes on tape, connecting the dots on his post-Katrina conduct, and then using his congressional office to try to shield himself from a law enforcement probe.

Which is the real issue, as far as I'm concerned. People like that deserve jail and exposure, period - not voluntary shilling from the media and leaders of both parties. But that's what we've got.

OK, maybe it isn't so amazing in the media's case - a Democrat is involved, after all. Besides which, we wouldn't want to remind people that New Orleans was and is totally dysfunctional because they've worked to become so. Might spoil the story we've been selling...

There are days when I think that celebrim is right - not just about the underlying problem, but about where it's heading. At the same time, the self-correcting elements of the system are not yet totally broken, and there are a number of trends out there that suggest the possibility of a better ending. If we work for it.

"There are days when I think that celebrim is right"

What was celebrim right about, Joe?

It's good to see hypocrisyrules give out a compliment. A bit of a back-handed one, but a good one. I also hope that if the parties were switched around we'd see the same outrage. I think we would. More importantly, if the Dems had the White House and it was a republican office raided, would it be the same? I think so.

I was sitting in a small airport cafe in Santa Paula, California several years ago. I overheard the guys in the table behind me carrying on about how small the average television sound bite is. And how it's now down to under ten seconds. And how it changes the nature of the national discussion.

The voices kept sounding familiar, and finally I could resist no longer. I turned around and saw Jack Kemp talking to a couple of (aides? donors? friends?) Jack ran for Vice President.

Kemp was right -- smaller sound bites mean that people like Hastert can get on national TV and make some kind of "sounds good" argument. It doesn't matter the merits -- just get out there with something that people will respond to. And then the media eats it up. Sure -- the blogs will dissect it at length, but unless it changes the television news coverage it's only us "inside baseball" folks that care. The pork barrel rolls on. And that's a doggone shame.

TEE HEE
The phony bleating of wounded and outraged sheep at this blog are beyond believe. One can't go into the myriad ways Jefferson is guilty but to have found Hsaert protecting him tells you how much the Republicans abdicated their responsiblities under the constitution to the Bush II White House. Now that fearless leader incompetence is bringing down the house of cards as well as causing a potential change in leadership in the houses of congress, the fear of Abramhoff and De Lays abuses leading to indictments is creating the spector of the suspected guilty protecting the known guilty from indictment.

You reap what you sow. Condemning the Blonde bomb shell has never been enough and now the chickens are home to roost. That is what happens when you advocate a correct policy and let idiots run it and never condemn them.

Tell me what is it like being Pontius Pilate?

Robert M,
I am having difficulty figuring out what you are trying to say. Here we have a story about Congress as an institution trying to invent some right or power that doesn't exist to protect their perogatives. Your attempt to merge everything into a "Bush is incompetent" meme has long grown tiring, but the link here is incomprehensible to me.

Robert M: That was poorly written to the point of being incoherent. In the future, you should remind yourself that it is a bad idea to post when drunk or otherwise intoxicated.

There is no law which in itself is a solution to our current problems. There is no change in the way government functions which is in itself a solution to our current problems.

It's much easier to get a law to change the government structure than it is to change the culture. Nobody knows how to do culture change. And when it's a giant system people tend to feel hopeless and passive.

So here's my idea for changing the structure. Pass a constitutional amendment that when Congress passes a bill, it must be sent it to 1000 random registered voters. And those voters are required to read the bill and report back whether or not they understand it. And unless a majority of them say that the text is clear and they do understand it, the bill is vetoed for unclarity.

If Congress actually had to write clearly, it couldn't hurt.

"It's much easier to get a law to change the government structure than it is to change the culture."

Which is of course the lure of statism. Passing a law to solve a problem just seems so easy. Those that would want to do so treat reality as a simulationist thought experiment over which they have full control. Invariably, people in thier simulation act as they would want them to act. But recognition of the community law is only a small part of what drives human behavior, as anyone who has driven on the interstate ought to know.

"Nobody knows how to do culture change."

I'm not sure that that is entirely true. Or to the extent that it is true, it's equally true that no one knows how to write law.

"So here's my idea for changing the structure. Pass a constitutional amendment that when Congress passes a bill, it must be sent it to 1000 random registered voters. And those voters are required to read the bill and report back whether or not they understand it. And unless a majority of them say that the text is clear and they do understand it, the bill is vetoed for unclarity."

This is a typical example of people writing laws from a statist mindset. Why in the world would you think such a law would actually accomplish the thing that you think it does? Isn't there a great danger that people who did understand the law, but who didn't agree with it, would report back that they didn't understand it? Likewise, isn't there a reverse danger, that people who didn't understand it but who agreed with what they believed that it did, or who believed that they understood it but in fact did not, would report that they did? So in fact, aren't you essentially engaging in a 'Athenian' style democracy, forcing the elected representatives to go through what basically ammounts to a public referendum? Would that work? It didn't work in Athens. In fact, it failed so miserably that people accepted tyranny as the less burdensome system.

One obvious way to subvert the intention of the law would be to write into the laws a 'header' explaning the laws intention in glowing terms. Most readers of the law would likely be satisfied by the claim of the header, and would be tempted to vote based on thier approval of the header whether or not they actually understood the body of the law. In fact, we are not far from this practice as it is. I mean, who would vote against a law to "to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice such that no child is left behind...improving the academic standards of the disadvantaged...promoting informed parental choice and innovative programs"? What politician wants his opponent to be able to accuse him of being against that?

Another way to subvert the system would be to have your lobbying system publish and distribute 'legal cliff notes', explaining the law in glowing (or diabolic) terms so that people will sign off on it regardless of thier actual level of comprehension. And again, we are not far from such practices as it is.

There is something to be said for understandable law, but I doubt your law would change the culture at all. The real problem isn't the clarity of the language, its that the aforementioned 'No Child Left-behind' law is 670 pages long. That's too long for anyone not professionally employed to understand that peice of legislation to understand regardless of how clearly it is written. At best, a law requiring readable language would end up looking like the 1040 instructions only written out at more tortorous length using monosylabic words. Compare by contrast with the Constitution.

What's required here is a change in the culture. Lawmakers must simply stop approving of laws that are 670 pages long, and must disapprove of lawmakers which write such laws. Social condemnation would actually be more effective here than political condemnation. People being what they are, not getting invited to the good parties after writing a 670 page law would be more effective at supressing such behavior than denouncing it. Likewise, people must come to see any lengthy law as enherently dangerous to thier interests, and vote out of office law makers which propose lengthy laws.

Nothing else will do. Any law you made attempting to change the culture, even assuming that you could, would simply provoke the lawmakers to do an end run around the law or find a loophole in it or even to simply ignore the law because its convienent to do so. Thus, you'd actually increase corruption rather than decrease it. Witness McCain-Feingold, which has done exactly that and worse - exactly as many people including myself predicted that it would. In fact, in McCin-Feingold's case it is probably worse than that, in that it always seemed to me that the problems with the law were so obvious that it could not be anything but the case that the real intention of the law was to increase corruption.

A more workable solution would be to have a total federal law house cleaning. Elect someone on the platform that he's going to weed the law down to a more managable size tossing the old rules out and start over, and if this creates a temporary period of chaos, well that's a necessary evil in much the same way that a period of chaos was a necessary evil when remodling the house. But of course, this is never going to happen until you first create a culture accepting of such a plan and such a radical break with the past. People being what they are, this will not happen until the old system collapses, and then you'll likely have a throw the baby out with the bathwater situation. Hense, the end of the American Republic.

For years now I've been advocating seemingly radical solutions to current problems. The sort of stuff that gets people looking at me like a freak. This is the reason I wear moniker 'conservative' uncomfortably. But, I don't advocate radical solutions out of any desire to overturn the system. I advocate them out of a desire to save the system. My main interest is not in the seemingly radical solution itself, because in most cases I think that existing solutions if taken seriously could produce good results. My main interest in offering radical solutions is to deradicalize the less radical solutions in order to change the culture. The goal is radical debate for the sake of preventing the draconian steps that will follow from not having the radical debate. On so many issues, illegal immigration being one of them, people being what they are, they won't be comfortable with a radical solution until its too late to institute anything else. When that happens, public opinion will swing uncontrollably in one direction or the other and settle on something really ugly. I said 10 years ago that if something wasn't done about illegal immigration soon, that in our life time we'd see public approval of US troops gunning down people crossing the border or other similarly 'unthinkable' and ugly acts. I still see us heading that way. If something isn't done, we will end up with that and people will say, "Well we tried everything, and this is the only thing that worked.", when in fact they tried nothing and waited until it was too late for anything else because no less draconian reality would be believed because no less draconian solution had ever been seriously enforced.

Anyway, I fully expect to be Cassandra. People are saturated by doom sayers. I'm just one more voice in the wilderness, and there is no particular reason why people should believe me.

Celebrim, I find I agree with you right down the line. It's easy to think in statist terms because that's an easy target. Even anti-statists tend to think in terms of getting rid of state interference more than they do experimenting with ways to get large numbers of people to cooperate without state interference.

I like the idea that if a majority of a large sample of citizens either don't like a law or don't think they understand it, that the law would not pass. It would disrupt some of the horse-trading -- vote for each other's bills and maybe one passes while the other fails at the citizen stage. Makr one a rider on the other guy's bill and it gets more complicated. But as you say, even a constitutional amendment will be ignored if there isn't enough push for enforcing it. And that's a culture change that's hard to create. I thought this proposed amendment would be mostly harmless -- it probably wouldn't result in extra bad laws. But I could be wrong about that.

Mostly, nobody knows how to do effective culture change. Any idiot congressman knows how to write a law, but mostly nobody knows how to craft a good law that will do what you want it to.

I fully agree about McCain-Feingold.

I mostly agree about immigration. We have some employers with jobs that don't require much training, and for them it's great to hire low-wage illegals who have no recourse. Probably some employers have it down to an art -- like get a whole batch of workers deported just before they get their last paycheck, with a new back lined up to replace them.

Illegal immigrants are a problem for people who'd want the jobs, and they're a problem for people who don't like having a lot of foreigners around, but they're a fine solution for many employers. So the government can do whatever it likes to immigrants to placate the angry mobs, so long as it's completely ineffective at reducing the number of illegal immigrants....

I agree we tend to let problems fester and then have a sudden spasm of spastic action. I don't know what to do about it. When we try to reform the government we naturally find ourselves looking at statist solutions. The obvious alternative would be to look for ways to change the culture so the problems would be solved completely independent of what government did. But I don't have any idea how to do that. It's far easier to think about tinkering with the government.

"Even anti-statists tend to think in terms of getting rid of state interference more than they do experimenting with ways to get large numbers of people to cooperate without state interference."

Or worse yet, they just assume that large numbers of people will naturally be civil, responcible, and cooperative without any sort of unifying civic structure and that the only reason people are ever uncivil, irresponcible or uncooperative is state interference. Most moonbat libertarian theories of government can be put down to this assumption that 'original sin' is basically the result of having a government. (Conversely, most moonbat statist theories of government can be put down to the assumption that 'orginal sin' is basically the result of having the wrong government.)

"Mostly, nobody knows how to do effective culture change."

I don't think that that is entirely true. I think that one of the major cultural purposes of organized religion is bringing about cultural change. I think that on the whole, all the surving religions are pretty good at it and have proven techniques.

I also think that the academic system is and has always been more organized around bringing about cultural change than it is geared to producing effective workers. Wilson's famous declaration, "The point of education is to make a man as unlike his Father as possible." If you trace back the origin of the academic system the original point of education was to give distinguishing marks to the leisure class that would allow them to distinguish each other from lower class pretenders. Effectively, most of what you learned in college was designed to help you keep up with the conversations at cocktail parties, and had nothing to do with being an effective employee.

I also think that artists of all sorts, whether graphic artists, or novelists, or poets, or musicians or whatever have the conscious or unconscious ability to bring about effective cultural change. Though as Plato had Socrates observe:

"Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise."

The US since the '60's has experienced a tremendous cultural change that has largely rode on the back of a group of artists of all sorts and to which Socrates observation seems to me to be particularly appropriate.

What we don't know how to do yet, and maybe we should be very thankful for this, is how to consciously produce didactic memes which have the same ability to sway the reason, and the same natural attractiveness, as poetic ones. The question might be phrased as, "Why do totalitarian governments generally produce such bad art?"

I'm pretty sure the correct answer is non-trivial. Your first instinct might be to say that the ideas are less defensible, or that deliberate propaganda is always bad art, but neither assertion holds because we can find attractive pro-totalitarian propaganda art originating from non-totalitarian governments.

Another way to phrase the question is, "What do you need to do to gain control of those memetic commanding heights without destroying the very thing you are trying to seize?" Again, its probably a good thing we don't have a good theory here, but I have some suspicions. I think the first instinct of most people is that you can't grab ahold of the memetic commanding heights - schools, churches, the media, artists - without engaging in totalitarianism, and hense then purging the very thing you want to harness. But, a close reading of the 20th century indicates that this isn't true. The Cold War was in many ways foremost a memetic war, and while the USSR ultimately lost its not hard to put together an argument that it largely succeeded in gaining control of the West's memetic commanding heights before imploding on itself. In my cynical opinion, much of what is going on in the West can be simplified as a plague of rogue memetic weapons wrecking havoc on the West's cultural institutions. Conceivably, the West might still die of the Cold War. Mutually assured destruction indeed.

Again I find I almost completely agree.

I think established religions have mostly done the culture change they're going to, and are hell-bent on encouraging stability now. Not to say we'd be in the same place if they weren't here.

Here's a story about minor culture change that seemed interesting to me.

My parents told me they had invited their friends the Hurrs over for dinner. One of the dishes my mother served included steamed broccoli. Mrs. Hurr asked my mother, "Did you dip the broccoli in salted water?" My mother said no. Mrs. Hurr said nothing but both the Hurrs put the broccoli aside and didn't eat any of it. After dinner, Mrs. Hurr said, "Sometime you might try putting fresh broccoli in salted water, and just see what happens." Then she changed the subject.

My mother was curious, so the next day she put some broccoli in salted water. After a few minutes she checked it. A dozen or so little broccoli-green bugs had come out of the broccoli and were trying to climb up the side of the bowl. She called Mrs. Hurr and told her about it. Mrs. Hurr said that her daughter Laurie had come to visit them for dinner and had done exactly the same thing. She asked them if the broccoli had been dipped in salted water, and when they said it hadn't she didn't say anything and didn't eat it. Later she suggested they try it, and changed the subject.

In a very small way, this worked. People paid attention, and tried it out for themselves, and spread the message just as competently as it got spread to them. They didn't get all defensive and try to justify the value in eating bugs, as they would if approached differently.

"They didn't get all defensive and try to justify the value in eating bugs, as they would if approached differently."

Well, I would have, though I would have of course excused Mrs. Hurr from eating bugs once I became aware that that was the problem. For my part, I think bugs are good for you. In fact, I would hesitate to eat broccoli that didn't have bugs in it.

And that is the real cultural difference.

Both Mrs. Hurr and your mom culturally finds eating bugs objectionable. Very likely there isn't a rational reason for this, they just live in a culture that doesn't eat bugs. Bugs are 'yucky'.

On the other hand, I don't find bugs yucky and very likely after I performed the experiment and divined that what someone was trying to tell me was that my broccoli had bugs in it, I would have had a good laugh.

What I want you to note is that from my perspective no significant cultural change occured here. Essentially, Mrs. Hurr was appealing to your mother's shared cultural value - bugs are yucky, using a culturally acceptable technique. An actual cultural change would involve Mrs. Hurr convincing your mom of something she didn't believe in before. At most, Mrs. Hurr has imparted some knowledge that your mom didn't have before, namely that raw vegetables have insects in them. I hope Mrs. Hurr doesn't find out too much about this, or she might get too squirmish to ever eat again.

Remember the old picture books that showed worms crawling out of a hole in an apple? When is the last time you bit into an apple and found a worm? It's quite possible, that if you are under the age of 30, you've never bitten into an apple and found a worm. If you did, you'd probably be disgusted. If you're a bit over 30, you might remember seeing a worm in an apple every once in a while. If you are much over 50, and therefore had a childhood back when those old 'A is for Apple' picture books were being drawn, then you probably remember when every apple did have a worm in it. The question is, where did all the worms go? I know where they went, and that's one of the reasons I don't find the idea of insects in my food all that yucky.

But that is arguably also shallow culture. Again, I know something you don't know. But, I think that it is different in that if you knew it you'd have to make a difficult cultural choice. Your mom didn't have to make much of cultural choice at all. Bugs are yucky versus presoaking her vegetables. For your mom, that's probably no decision at all.

But there is an even bigger culture gap here. I don't believe I'm allowed to not eat the food that my host provides. In Mrs. Hurr's case, she felt she was excused from not eating the hosts food if she wasn't rude about it. But in my case, if your mom served a plate of live wood grubs for dinner, then live wood grubs is what I'm having for dinner. Not eating them would go beyond being rude, it would consitute hubris. Mrs. Hurr would be appalled if served something culturally disgusting. I'd probably (I hope) be amused. That's a cultural difference.

What would be really interesting is if I discovered that Mrs. Hurr actually has sufficient common culture with me that I could make a pitch to her on the basis of our shared culture, simply by providing her with some information she's never looked at in quite the way I do. Maybe. Probably not. Eating bugs sounds like it carries a huge cost for her.

Once again I find I mostly agree with you, Celebrim. I mostly prefer my bugs cooked, since a lot of them are intermediate hosts for tapeworms etc. If you eat a bug that nobody else eats, you might come down with something your MD has never seen before. And if the taste is too bad I'll pass -- some bugs have chemical defenses you don't want to mess with. And I don't feel a big obligation to eat what I'm served, particularly when it's important people serving it. If it's part of a job interview, say, I think I come out worse vomiting on the host than passing up the dish.

I said the story was a minor thing. The point is, they found a way to get the idea across without hardening attitudes against it. The more likely response, with most ways to present that, is that people who hate eating bugs still can't let the smart-aleck be right and paint themselves into some sort of corner. They can insist that they don't believe it and not try the experiment to find out. They can insist that no matter what, the other guy is wrong and rude, and there's nothing to talk about. Etc.

So, for example, we have the mess in iraq. Or more generally, the problems with Bush. Or more generally still, the problems with a one-party government. I anticipated problems for all of those, but I didn't expect them to get this bad this fast. But a lot of people are talking about how they knew it all along and the Bush supporters or Republicans or whoever were just stupid not to see it earlier. And the result is they get those people as enemies who go right on supporting continued disaster. It doesn't make sense, if what they want is our nation's survival.

Republicans who couldn't ignore the situation mostly wound up arguing from an ideological view -- like they suddenly noticed that Bush isn't a libertarian, and he ought to be. As if it took them 5 years to notice that Bush and the Republican legislature aren't libertarians! But they sure weren't going to agree with the guys who were sure Bush was bad because he wasn't a Democrat.

It's a big deal to find a way to tell people things they don't want to hear, and be heard. The natural response is "You're a liberal. You're a moonbat. Anything you say is wrong." Or conversely, "You're a wingnut, you're a warmonger, anything you say is wrong." The ideologies come first, and any information from the real world (whatever that is) get filtered through the ideology before they're considered. It takes special skill to get people to think outside their own little box, and I mostly don't have that. I'm impressed when I see it happen.

"So, for example, we have the mess in iraq. Or more generally, the problems with Bush. Or more generally still, the problems with a one-party government. I anticipated problems for all of those, but I didn't expect them to get this bad this fast. But a lot of people are talking about how they knew it all along and the Bush supporters or Republicans or whoever were just stupid not to see it earlier."

Where to start.

"The mess in Iraq" is a mess in parts of Iraq, and was in fact anticipated by some of us who supported doing it anyway. I've been saying since 2003 that this would be a decade-long commitment, and I don't see anything that would cause me to extend or shorten my forecast.

Assuming, of course, we don't pull a Nixon/Kissenger "Peace with Honor" deal and leave our many friends in Iraq to the hyenas. (Wrote "wolves" at first, but I rather like wolves. Honorable beasts for the most part.)

The problems with Bush? True, he's no Jimmy Carter.

One party? Last I saw, there were some Democrats in Congress, but maybe something happened in the last few days and the Republican Party has become the only legal political organization in the US. (Unless you were referring to the Party of Greed/Corruption, in which case I concede the point. 100% turnover is my prescription. Do what you can.)

This is my government mule, and I'm going to beat it again; we ain't gonna get a perfect government, so work on getting the best one you can. The people on the other side of the political fence aren't the enemy, they aren't tools of shadowy powers, they aren't evil, and probably they aren't even notably stupid. (Okay, on those last two points I'm excluding most of the Congressional Leadership at this point.)

Mark, if you were saying in 2003 that it would have to be a 10-year commitment, you were yet another lone voice howling in the wilderness. To the extent there was a consensus, the consensus was it would be easy, quick, cheap, and successful.

If we'd ever had a commitment to a 10-year war the effort would be going a lot better now. But we didn't. The people who expected it would be easy, quick, cheap, and successful are naturally losing heart.

Bush made no attempt to prepare the public for a 10-year commitment. He didn't submit a budget for the initial invasion until after the invasion had started. He did say it would be long and expensive -- after Baghdad fell. (And after we got a look at the Oil Ministry files, which might be a coincidence.)

If we'd only gotten the whole country signed on for a 10-year war before we started, the chance of a successful 10-year war would be a lot bigger.

We made plenty of mistakes in this war, and we continue to make more. Its the latter that is disturbing, not because mistakes are being made (which is inevitable, and some things arent even mistakes, just the lesser of 2 evils ie disbanding the Iraqi army) but because horribly flawed decisions dont get corrected. The repair of the electricity infastructure, for instance. 2 months into the invasion I was screamy bloody murder that this needed to be a United States national priority on the scale of the Marshall Plan if necessary. 2 years in I could do nothing but shake with rage that iraqis still sat baking in the sun for most of the day and we were treating it like a pot hole filling project on I-80. Now i cant even muster anymore outrage.

Its just terribly disapointing and depressingly sad that Americans and Iraqis will die again this summer when the heat baked brains of X more Sunnis and Shiia snaps and instead of sitting in their houses sweating they decide to pass the time blowing up humvees. For anyone familiar with Communist style propaganda, there is a morbid humor to the monthly report on Iraqi electricity production... we've been 'almost' back to the pre-war levels for 3 years now. Perhaps a Five Year Plan is in order.

J Thomas, some thoughts....

RE: the decision to find the war via supplementals, this has more to do with keeping procurement programs needed to recapitalize the force from being raided than anything else. It's also a bi-partisan desire, with some fairly sound policy reasons behind it as well as the usual jobs-in-our-districts reasons. There are also abuses of supplemental apropriation going on, something I've covered over at Defense Industry Daily. But the choice of supplementals as a vehicle is not itself evidence of anything - and certainly not of your absurd charge.

You might want to look into the thinking involved and grapple with it as a serious issue, if in fact you are a citizen who sees this a serious concern. It's fine to rip Congress, but citizens have duties just as their Reps. do. Representatives are not above the law. Citizens are not above the need to replace consiracy theories with reasoned debate.

Next topic... far from a lonely position, I recall many discussions in 2003 as often giving longer figures than 10 years. Reminders that the USA was still in Germany, Japan, and Korea abounded, for instance. Bosnia, promised by Clinton as a 1-year war that lasted over a decade (long after Serbia's military was routed in a cakewalk), was noted. Steven Den Beste's summary of the war (a major event in the right-wing blogosphere) said Iraq would be long and hard in 2002 - and the President's speeches, if you read them, have harped on the Long War meme since before OIF. Etc.

Having said all that, I have aired both strategy and execution issues with the conduct of this front before. While some major mistakes from Week 1 of the war are unfixable until circumstances change, explanation of the Pentagon's published Iraq policy and repetition that this is a long-term play should have been coordinated, relentless, and extend to party grassroots and local media levels as well as from the executive level as a consistent theme. It frequently has not been done well, with the largest deficit being at the party level, and people like Biden and McCain have been right to consistently raise this as an issue.

Since there is zero chance the Democrats as a party can accomplish this given its current "retreat and defeat" mode, either the GOP will step up here or it won't. Their record thus far has climbed from abysmal to mixed; we'll see.

Which brings us back from the off-topic foreign policy segue and onto the topic of this post.

In fact, the general lack of engagement or connection with its base on key issues is an ongoing GOP problem that is driving many things. Indeed, Hastert's conduct in the Jefferson case can be seen as one more symptom of a base-party disconnect that springs from a deeper chasm in Washington. Parties must not be hostages to their base - but at the same time, there is also a line that they are fools to cross. Party policy & electoral positioning is often defined by where that line is, and how close to it they are, and on which side.

Joe, I looked back in this thread and didn't see that I'd said anything about supplementals. What I said was that the war got pushed as easy, quick, and cheap, that Bush didn't release the first cost estimate until after the "major hostilities" were over, etc. Sure, there were individual bloggers who said it would be long and expensive -- I was one of them and I thought it was a bad idea. And I'm sure you can find a few Bush quotes where he said we were in for a long struggle, but he gave no indication that the war in iraq -- one battle in what's now getting called the long war -- would be anything but short, easy, and cheap. Until after the ocupation started.

I agree with you that it is entirely up to Republicans to unify the country for a long hard expensive deadly war. Republicans need to persuade everybody else that we have no choice but to sacrifice desperately, particularly we must take big cuts in standard of living and probably start a large draft and continue it for at least 20 years. We must give up most of our civil liberties for the duration. We must fight a long series of wars in which we will take many many casualties, and we must expect to lose a number of US cities before it's over. And probably before we win against the muslims we will face china as a bigger superpower than us, and we must win that war too.

Democrats will argue that this may not be completely necessary. They will want to hope that some of it can be avoided. Only Republicans can persuade Democrats and Independents that there is no choice but a longterm commitment, that we must make terrible sacrifices, that there is no alternative but to accept heavy losses, that our losses will be less in the long run if we destroy many our enemies before they are ready to attack us.

If we take the necessary steps without a national consensus, we are likely to lose. And the consequences of defeat after we wage war with the utter ruthlessness that's required -- make my blood run cold. We must not make the necessary attacks until we get a national consensus. It's up to the Republican Party to create that consensus.