Dowd and Friedman

MoDo writes “On Safire,” and says William Safire was anything but a nattering nabob of negativity. He had none of the vile and vitriol of today’s howling pack of conservative pundits.  (He’s spinning like a lathe in his grave now, MoDo, because you used “vile” as a noun, which it ain’t.)  The Moustache of Wisdom asks “Where Did ‘We’ Go?”  He says there is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” can only manage, let alone fix, our huge problems if there is a collective “we” at work.  Here’s MoDo:

During the Clinton impeachment circus, I walked by William Safire’s lair.

He had an imposing office in “murderers’ row,” as he dubbed the hall where we worked, full of English antiques, Oriental rugs and a couple of old ties he kept for those rare moments when he needed one.

He was sitting in an armchair reading that bodice-ripping best seller, The Starr Report.

“There’s a word here I don’t know,” said The Times’s wordsmith. “What is a thong?”

I flushed and stammered that it was a scanty panty with a string for the back. His hazel eyes glinted with curiosity.

Trying to elucidate, I blurted: “Maybe you’re thinking of thong sandals, where thong is an adjective. With Monica, it’s used as a noun.”

He smiled. “It’s like a G-string,” he said. “That brings back memories of some clubs I went to as a young man in Union City, N.J.”

Bill Safire was anything but a nattering nabob of negativity. He had none of the vile and vitriol of today’s howling pack of conservative pundits: Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and Malkin.

Even though we disagreed on the Iraq war, he chastised me only once about it, for writing that Cheney & Co. had shoehorned all their “meshugas” about Saddam’s W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links into Colin Powell’s U.N. speech. “Mishegoss,” he wrote in his language column, would have been a better spelling of the word.

One of my proudest moments was when I proved to him that “jade” could be a noun referring to a woman, citing Edith Wharton’s “The Gods Arrive.”

He walked with a Walter Matthau shamble, and he always dressed down in tweeds, earth tones and Hush Puppies. But there was a natural elegance about the guy.

Married to the gorgeous English rose Helene, he was a man who loved women; his novels, even the one about the founding fathers, were full of zesty sex scenes.

He told me the story of how when Barbara Walters worked for him at the famous New York P.R. company of Tex McCrary, back in the “Mad Men” era, he wanted to loosen up Barbara, who was very serious. So one Christmas he gave her a sheer black shorty nightgown with matching panties.

“Today I would have had to take him to Human Resources,” she recalled dryly. “But then, I loved it.”

When he learned that my mom shared his love of weird head meats, he would buy tongue sandwiches from Loeb’s Deli to send home to her.

He had a rough time with his transition from the Nixon White House to The Times. He told me that many of the liberal reporters stiffed him for the first couple of years until he dove into a pool to save a drowning child at an office party.

When I became his “colleague in columny,” as he called me, we shared a bathroom, and I teased him for being the one who kept hair spray there.

He always had interesting advice.

“Put a phone in your office that doesn’t go through the switchboard,” he told me.

If White House officials wouldn’t call you back, leave them a single-word message about what you wanted to talk about: “Malfeasance.”

I saw him having lunch once in the ’80s with Bert Lance, the former Carter official. I asked him afterward why he was hanging out with the Georgian he had eviscerated; his columns on Lance’s irregular banking practices had won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and lost Lance his job. “Only hit people when they’re up,” he told me.

The only time I ever saw a shred of doubt was after the famous dust-up when he wrote that Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, was “a congenital liar.”

A congenital pot-stirrer, he acted delighted with Bill Clinton’s subsequent threat to punch him in the nose. But, as a famous expert on etymology, he must have known he had used the wrong word. Congenital usually connotes a condition existing at birth. Was that really what he intended?

Shortly after that happened I went into his office to talk to him. He wasn’t there, but I noticed a piece of paper on a table on which he’d written two words: “chronic” and “habitual.” A rare case of Safire second thoughts.

He would have appreciated the fact that his obits ran on Yom Kippur. He had a famous dinner every year at his home in Chevy Chase, Md., to break the fast that gathered many of the city’s most influential players.

Curious, I pestered him for years for an invite. He patiently explained it was just for Jews or people who were, or had been, married to Jews.

After years of pleading, including many protestations that I had had Jewish boyfriends and that I would one day find a Jewish husband, he broke down and let me come.

He was a mensch. And that’s no mishegoss.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.

I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish settler as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.

Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo, in “Where the Wild Thing Is,” says Tom DeLay on “Dancing With the Stars” is a reminder that in our lowbrow-loving culture, a scoundrel can do the redemption tango simply by being a good sport.  The Moustache of Wisdom addresses “Cracks in Iran’s Clique” and says signs that the Iranian regime is becoming vulnerable might mean the United States is in a better position to negotiate a deal at the next round of talks.  Here’s MoDo:

Tom DeLay was icing his foot and resting his booty.

On Monday, his debut as a dancing fool (or just a fool, depending on whom you talk to), he had started at 10 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m., and his pre-stress fracture was acting up.

“It swole up a little bit,” he said, on the phone from Los Angeles. “The doctor says to keep icing it.”

That meant a delay in learning the tango from Cheryl Burke, his partner on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” who blessedly had never heard of the guy once dubbed “The Meanest Man in Congress” when he was first assigned to her.

“Cheryl says the tango’s macho, arrogant and aggressive, and I said, ‘That’s me,’ ” he recalled.

The Hammer, who in rehearsal admitted to feeling like “a complete goose” — and not simply because he had his golf shirt tucked into his sweat pants — is clinging to his Texas machismo even as he follows Cheryl’s instruction to find his “feminine side.”

“I’m being more feminine and a little prissy,” he said, using a word that smacks of über-alpha “I am not gay even though I have on heels and sparkles and want a disco-ball trophy” overcompensation.

“My brain is telling my hips, ‘We don’t do that.’ It’s not like a speech or a press conference. This is exposing your soul.

“At the beginning, I told Cheryl, ‘No rhinestones, no frilly shirts and no pink.’ Well, it didn’t take Cheryl two seconds to put rhinestones on me. And she swears she’s going to put ruffles on me for the tango — probably pink.”

It might be a sign of the apocalypse — a frilly Tom DeLay shimmying away from an indictment and onto “Dancing.” It’s certainly a blazing reminder that in our lowbrow-loving, no-attention-span culture, most any scoundrel can do the redemption tango simply by being a good sport.

“I’m very excited for people to see the real Tom DeLay,” the former House majority leader said. The Hammer vigorously flipped his fanny and played air guitar to the tune of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” a song that came out in the mid-60s when the teenager was starting at Baylor University in Waco.

“I used to gator to this song in my wild days before I was kicked out of Baylor,” he said. “I was so good they nicknamed me ‘Gator.’ ”

No gatoring on campus, though. The Southern Baptist college banned dancing for 151 years, relenting in 1996.

“Somebody gave the school a student union building that had the most beautiful dance floor you ever saw with the provision that if we ever had a dance, they’d tear it down,” he said. “We had our dances off campus in hotel rooms and parking lots.”

So DeLay, 62, cutting loose in his orthopedic shoes with the cha-cha and his Texas mugshot grin, was the Lipitor version of the finale of “Footloose.” The judges gave him tepid scores in Monday’s male dance-off, but a scandal-plagued former Dallas Cowboy and George Hamilton’s glossy son rated lower.

The man whose house was christened “Macho Manor” back in his party-boy, “Hot Tub Tom” days in the Texas Legislature compared looking for his feminine side to “knocking on a closed door.” But he gave it a shot during his cha-cha by winking and pointing at Bruno Tonioli, the effervescently effeminate judge.

“You’re crazier than Sarah Palin!” Bruno shouted when a winded DeLay was done swiveling in a leopard-skin-sequin-trimmed brown get-up.

“I think that’s a great compliment,” DeLay told me afterward.

Once the Hammer tried to outfox Democrats. Now he’s trying to outfox-trot Donny Osmond. Once he whipped Republicans relentlessly to keep their votes in line. Now he says he and his daughter have “a strategy to whip the vote” on “Dancing.”

“Nothing complicated,” he said. “Twitter. Facebook. My daughter taught me how to tweet.”

The former exterminator drove the loony Clinton impeachment, pushed the nutty Terri Schiavo legislation, gutted the House ethics committee, engaged in gerrymandering schemes, enhanced the pay-to-play political culture and made the Republican Party so sulfurously partisan, ethically suspect and God-centric that voters recoiled.

He dropped out of politics in 2006 after a campaign finance violation indictment and ties to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

I asked DeLay about Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a watchdog group that had a “Dancing” watching party at a bar here featuring Hammer-tinis — an occasion to reiterate that DeLay was corrupt and should go to jail.

“I wish I could have gone,” said a cheery DeLay, adding that he’s not worried that his foes will skew the voting. “You can’t vote against somebody. You can only vote for me or somebody else.”

Would he want to be on another reality show?

“No,” he said. “I’d probably end up killing somebody on ‘Big Brother.’ ”

I didn’t watch the show (there’s not enough money in the world to bribe me to do that) but from the clips I saw The Hammer looked a bit light in the loafers…  And I’ll never forgive him for never letting me hear “Wild Thing” without the vision of him waggling his butt.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

For the first time since Iran began enriching uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon, we have a glimmer of hope for a diplomatic solution to this problem — as long as we are not too diplomatic, as long as the Iranian regime is made to understand that biting economic sanctions are an absolute certainty and military force by Israel is a live possibility.

The reason we now have a slight chance — and I really emphasize slight — for a negotiated deal is because Iran’s nuclear program has always been a survival strategy for Tehran’s ruling clique: what Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment, calls “the small cartel of hard-line clerics and nouveau riche Revolutionary Guardsmen who run Iran today.”

After stealing June’s elections, this ruling cartel is now more unpopular and illegitimate than ever. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot hold a rally in Tehran without hearing “death to the dictator” chants more than “death to America.” As a result, his government can ill afford real biting sanctions that would make life in Iran not only politically miserable but even more economically miserable — and his dictatorial clique even more unpopular.

I wouldn’t exaggerate this because this regime has never minded inflicting pain on its people, but this time it may be more vulnerable. That is why we may be in a position to say to the Iranian regime that continuing to grow its stockpiles of low-enriched uranium outside international controls, and suffering real economic sanctions, could threaten its survival more than it would help.

On Oct. 1, William Burns, the American under secretary of state, will join diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China for talks with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator to see whether any deal is possible.

While real sanctions are necessary to exploit this moment, they are not sufficient. We also need to keep alive the prospect that Israel could do something crazy. I don’t favor Israeli military action against Iran and hope we’re telling Israel that privately. But I do believe that U.S. officials, particularly the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, need to stop saying that publicly. Gates is a smart power player. He knows better. If any U.S. official is asked for an opinion on whether Israel should be allowed to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, there is only one right answer: Refer them to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2005 comment that Israel “might well decide to act first” to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and say nothing else. Why should we reassure Iran?

I would hope by now that the murderous crackdown on Iran’s mass democracy movement by the country’s oil-funded ruling cartel would have removed the last scales from the eyes of those Iran watchers who think this is simply a poor, misunderstood regime that really wants to repair its relations with the West, and we just have to learn how to speak to it properly. This is a brutal, cynical, corrupt, anti-Semitic regime that exploits the Palestinian cause and deliberately maintains a hostile posture to the West to justify its grip on power. A regime that relates to its own people with such coercive force is not going to be sweet-talked out of its nuclear program. Negotiating with such a regime without the reality of sanctions and the possibility of force is like playing baseball without a bat.

The U.S. is being advised to explore a variety of sanctions, including encouraging capital flight from Iran, thereby creating a run on the Iranian currency. It is also considering a global ban on companies doing business with Iran’s oil industry, which would be a big blow to the regime, because its oil industry — which provides the vast majority of government revenues — needs modernizing and that requires foreign technological help and financing.

By improving relations with Russia, President Obama has done a good job of increasing his leverage with Iran. But as the negotiations begin, there is another dimension that we have to keep in mind: Obama officials want to be careful not to say that all they care about is a deal that neutralizes Iran’s nukes, and, if we get that, we have no problem with those in power in Tehran. That would be a rebuff of Iranian democrats. This will get tricky.

“The Obama administration must reconcile how to deal with a disgraced regime, which presents urgent national security challenges, while at the same time not betray a democratic movement whose success could have enormously positive implications for the U.S.,” said Sadjadpour.

“If we neglect to be vocal about human rights,” he added, “our message to the Iranian people is ‘We don’t care about you. We only care about nukes.’ Ultimately, it has to be Iranians themselves who change their history. We can’t want it more than they do. But it should be a U.S. foreign policy imperative not to do anything to deter the green movement’s success or alter its trajectory. We cannot forget that the underlying problem we have with Iran has more to do with the character of its regime than its nuclear ambitions.”

Dowd, Friedman and Rich

Mr. Kristof is off today.  MoDo is channeling the Pasty Little Putz and has barfed up “Blue is the New Black,” in which she whines that studies show women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?  Kee-ripes…  The Moustache of Wisdom says “Real Men Tax Gas,” and that there is something wrong when our country is considering sending more troops to Afghanistan, but can’t even talk about a gasoline tax to reduce our dependency on oil.  Geez, ya think so?  Some of us have been howling that for 8 years now.  Mr. Rich says “Even Glenn Beck is Right Twice a Day,” and that President Obama — and our political system — are being tested by a populist rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox.  Here’s MoDo:

Women are getting unhappier, I told my friend Carl.

“How can you tell?” he deadpanned. “It’s always been whine-whine-whine.”

Why are we sadder? I persisted.

“Because you care,” he replied with a mock sneer. “You have feelings.”

Oh, that.

In the early ’70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers’ circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold.

But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?

According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.

As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling”: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”

(The one exception is black women in America, who are a bit happier than they were in 1972, but still not as happy as black men.)

Marcus Buckingham, a former Gallup researcher who has a new book out called “Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently,” says that men and women passed each other midpoint on the graph of life.

“Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy,” Buckingham writes in his new blog on The Huffington Post, pointing out that this darker view covers feelings about marriage, money and material goods. “Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older.”

Buckingham and other experts dispute the idea that the variance in happiness is caused by women carrying a bigger burden of work at home, the “second shift.” They say that while women still do more cooking, cleaning and child-caring, the trend lines are moving toward more parity, which should make them less stressed.

When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.

“Choice is inherently stressful,” Buckingham said in an interview. “And women are being driven to distraction.”

One area of extreme distraction is kids. “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at Wharton who co-wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” “It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”

The more important things that are crowded into their lives, the less attention women are able to give to each thing.

Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men.

They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants.

“Women have lives that become increasingly empty,” Buckingham said. “They’re doing more and feeling less.”

Another daunting thing: America is more youth and looks obsessed than ever, with an array of expensive cosmetic procedures that allow women to be their own Frankenstein Barbies.

Men can age in an attractive way while women are expected to replicate — and Restylane — their 20s into their 60s.

Buckingham says that greater prosperity has made men happier. And they are also relieved of bearing sole responsibility for their family finances, and no longer have the pressure of having women totally dependent on them.

Men also tend to fare better romantically as time wears on. There are more widows than widowers, and men have an easier time getting younger mates.

Stevenson looks on the bright side of the dark trend, suggesting that happiness is beside the point. We’re happy to have our newfound abundance of choices, she said, even if those choices end up making us unhappier.

A paradox, indeed.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Do we owe the French and other Europeans a second look when it comes to their willingness to exercise power in today’s world? Was it really fair for some to call the French and other Europeans “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” Is it time to restore the French in “French fries” at the Congressional dining room, and stop calling them “Freedom Fries?” Why do I ask these profound questions?

Because we are once again having one of those big troop debates: Do we send more forces to Afghanistan, and are we ready to do what it takes to “win” there? This argument will be framed in many ways, but you can set your watch on these chest-thumpers: “toughness,” “grit,” “fortitude,” “willingness to do whatever it takes to realize big stakes” — all the qualities we tend to see in ourselves, with some justification, but not in Europeans.

But are we really that tough? If the metric is a willingness to send troops to Iraq and Afghanistan and consider the use of force against Iran, the answer is yes. And we should be eternally grateful to the Americans willing to go off and fight those fights. But in another way — when it comes to doing things that would actually weaken the people we are sending our boys and girls to fight — we are total wimps. We are, in fact, the wimps of the world. We are, in fact, so wimpy our politicians are afraid to even talk about how wimpy we are.

How so? France today generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, and it has managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panics. And us? We get about 20 percent and have not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors. We’re too afraid to store nuclear waste deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — totally safe — at a time when French mayors clamor to have reactors in their towns to create jobs. In short, the French stayed the course on clean nuclear power, despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and we ran for cover.

How about Denmark? Little Denmark, sweet, never-hurt-a-fly Denmark, was hit hard by the 1973 Arab oil embargo. In 1973, Denmark got all its oil from the Middle East. Today? Zero. Why? Because Denmark got tough. It imposed on itself a carbon tax, a roughly $5-a-gallon gasoline tax, made massive investments in energy efficiency and in systems to generate energy from waste, along with a discovery of North Sea oil (about 40 percent of its needs).

And us? When it comes to raising gasoline taxes or carbon taxes — at a perfect time like this when prices are already low — our politicians tell us it is simply “off the table.” So I repeat, who is the real tough guy here?

“The first rule of warfare is: ‘Take the high ground.’ Even the simplest Taliban fighter knows that,” said David Rothkopf, energy consultant and author of “Superclass.” “The strategic high ground in the world — whether it is in the Middle East or vis-à-vis difficult countries like Russia and Venezuela — is to be less dependent on oil. And yet, we simply refuse to seize it.”

According to the energy economist Phil Verleger, a $1 tax on gasoline and diesel fuel would raise about $140 billion a year. If I had that money, I’d devote 45 cents of each dollar to pay down the deficit and satisfy the debt hawks, 45 cents to pay for new health care and 10 cents to cushion the burden of such a tax on the poor and on those who need to drive long distances.

Such a tax would make our economy healthier by reducing the deficit, by stimulating the renewable energy industry, by strengthening the dollar through shrinking oil imports and by helping to shift the burden of health care away from business to government so our companies can compete better globally. Such a tax would make our population healthier by expanding health care and reducing emissions. Such a tax would make our national-security healthier by shrinking our dependence on oil from countries that have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs and by increasing our leverage over petro-dictators, like those in Iran, Russia and Venezuela, through shrinking their oil incomes.

In sum, we would be physically healthier, economically healthier and strategically healthier. And yet, amazingly, even talking about such a tax is “off the table” in Washington. You can’t mention it. But sending your neighbor’s son or daughter to risk their lives in Afghanistan? No problem. Talk away. Pound your chest.

I am not sure what the right troop number is for Afghanistan; I need to hear more. But I sure know this: There is something wrong when our country is willing to consider spending more lives and treasure in Afghanistan, where winning is highly uncertain, but can’t even talk about a gasoline tax, which is win, win, win, win, win — with no uncertainty at all.

So, I ask yet again: Who are the real cheese-eating surrender monkeys in this picture?

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

If only it were just about the color of his skin.

With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, the racist component of Obama-hatred has been undeniable since the summer of 2008, when Sarah Palin rallied all-white mobs to the defense of the “real America.” Joe Wilson may or may not be in that camp, but, either way, that’s not the news. As we watched and rewatched the South Carolina congressman’s star turn, what grabbed us was the act itself.

What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.

The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another “national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments we have, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been for Obama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But there is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.

Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.

Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts.

Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.

Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).

Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.

Nor has Obama succeeded in persuading critics on the left or right that he will do as much for those Americans who are suffering as he has for the corporations his administration and his predecessor’s rushed to rescue. To mark the anniversary of Lehman’s fall, the president gave a speech on Wall Street last Monday again vowing reform. But everyone’s back to business as usual: The Wall Street Journal reported that not a single C.E.O. from a top bank attended. The speech sank with scant notice because there has been so little action to back it up and because its conciliatory stance was tone-deaf to the anger beyond the financial district.

That same day a United States District Court judge in New York, Jed S. Rakoff, scathingly condemned the Obama Securities and Exchange Commission for letting Bank of America skate away with what Rakoff called an immoral and unjust wrist tap to settle charges that it covered up $3.6 billion paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch. How is this S.E.C. a change from the Clinton-Bush S.E.C. that ignored all the red flags on Bernie Madoff?

Beck frequently strikes the pose of an apocalyptic prophet, even insisting that he predicted 9/11. This summer he also started warning of domestic terrorism in the form of a new Timothy McVeigh. On this, one fears he knows whereof he speaks. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He — and our political system — are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo, in “Rapping Joe’s Knuckles,” says the pressure from House Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, on Joe Wilson to apologize was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Have a Nice Day,” says China and Germany understand that prosperity and growth depend on nurturing a renewable energy industry. When will the United States?  Here’s MoDo:

Joe Wilson, congressman, argued that Joe Wilson, chucklehead, should not be formally rebuked.

It would be a waste of time, he asserted on the House floor where, six days earlier, he had committed his conduct most unbecoming.

Other Republicans stepped up to the microphone to agree that this was a distraction from the important things they could be doing. (Like stepping up their effort to kill President Obama’s attempt to provide health care for the have-nots in society?)

“When we are done here today,” said the man who accused the president of lying, “we will not have taken any steps to improve the country.”

Actually, Wilson is dead wrong again. When House Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, reprimanded the congressman on Tuesday evening for refusing to apologize to his colleagues for breaking the rules, it was quite a wonderful way to improve America.

It was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it — from music arenas to tennis courts to political gatherings to hallowed halls — and a ratification of an institution that has relied on strict codes of conduct for two centuries to prevent a breakdown of order.

“When you look at the various incidents of misbehavior all across the spectrum,” Representative James Clyburn, the highest ranking black lawmaker in Congress who had pushed for the reprimand, told me afterward, “the one place we ought to be able to say that such conduct is not acceptable and just cannot be tolerated is in America’s classroom, as I call Congress. Students are looking at us, and they ought not to be able to ever feel that such bad behavior would be condoned.”

It was a powerful showdown between two congressmen from South Carolina, one black, one white; one Democrat, one Republican.

“Joe Wilson has worked very hard to cultivate a sort of choir-boy image, but I think that most people realize that there’s something else going on with him,” Clyburn said.

The two started off on friendly terms long ago when Clyburn was on the board of a national bank and Wilson was on the bank’s local board in West Columbia.

“Frankly,” Clyburn told me, “I supported him financially the first time he ran for office.”

Over the years, Clyburn tried to “look past” things that bothered him — Wilson’s “membership in some groups that call into question his feelings about his whole notion of white supremacy” and his defense of the Confederate flag flying above the Columbia, S.C., Statehouse.

Clyburn said he was “bothered a great deal” by the “real nasty things” Wilson said about the black woman who turned out to be Strom Thurmond’s daughter.

In August, Clyburn picked up a newspaper to see that Wilson was holding his first town hall meeting in Clyburn’s district, three minutes from his house, at the high school Clyburn’s children went to — an “in your face” breach of Congressional protocol.

“He was being confrontational and combative,” Clyburn said. “And Wednesday night was just bringing his town hall meeting antics to the floor of the House of Representatives.”

The black members of Congress were fed up, after a long, hot summer of sulfurous attitudes toward the first black president. Clyburn privately pressed Wilson three times last Thursday to apologize for breaking the rules — Wilson’s own wife asked him who the “nut” was who was hollering at the president — but the Republican was getting chesty with his unlikely new role as king of the rowdies.

He was regarded as a hero at the anti-Obama rally in Washington last weekend that featured such classy placards as, with a picture of a lion, “The Zoo has an African and the White House has a Lyin’ African;” “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy;” “We came unarmed (this time)” and “ ‘Cap’ Congress and ‘Trade’ Obama back to Kenya!”

A camera also caught Wilson in Washington signing for a fan a picture of himself confronting the president, and he has raised $2 million in the last week.

Former President Jimmy Carter weighed in with Brian Williams of NBC News on Tuesday: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.” He said he felt that was true in the South and elsewhere.

Clyburn won the manners round, but Wilson was back Tuesday night tweeting his rude new fans, people who, as the minority leader, John Boehner, put it, are “scared to death that the country that they grew up in is not going to be the country that their kids and grandkids grew up in.”

It’s not. That country is gone. And in terms of biases that have faded, that’s a good thing. But partly due to the Internet, the standards of behavior in this new country are terrible.

If Beaver and Wally were around today, they’d likely be writing snarky, revealing blogs about June and Ward.

What a wonderful example of pearl-clutching on the fainting couch from a woman who has written some of the tripe that she has.  She and Bobo can share the smelling salts…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you’ve probably never heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer. The chip business, though, is volatile, so in 2004 Mike Splinter, Applied Materials’s C.E.O., decided to add a new business line to take advantage of the company’s nanotechnology capabilities — making the machines that make solar panels. The other day, Splinter gave me a tour of the company’s Silicon Valley facility, culminating with a visit to its “war room,” where Applied maintains a real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years. I could only laugh because crying would have been too embarrassing.

Not a single one is in America.

Let’s see: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. I suggested a new company motto for Applied Materials’s solar business: “Invented here, sold there.”

The reason that all these other countries are building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments have put in place the three perquisites for growing a renewable energy industry: 1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy; 2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and 3) the utility has to buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good deal for the family or business putting the solar panels on their rooftop.

Regulatory, price and connectivity certainty, that is what Germany put in place, and that explains why Germany now generates almost half the solar power in the world today and, as a byproduct, is making itself the world-center for solar research, engineering, manufacturing and installation. With more than 50,000 new jobs, the renewable energy industry in Germany is now second only to its auto industry. One thing that has never existed in America — with our fragmented, stop-start solar subsidies — is certainty of price, connectivity and regulation on a national basis.

That is why, although consumer demand for solar power has incrementally increased here, it has not been enough for anyone to have Applied Materials — the world’s biggest solar equipment manufacturer — build them a new factory in America yet. So, right now, our federal and state subsidies for installing solar systems are largely paying for the cost of importing solar panels made in China, by Chinese workers, using hi-tech manufacturing equipment invented in America.

Have a nice day.

“About 95 percent of our solar business is outside the U.S.,” said Splinter. “Our biggest U.S. customer is a German-owned company in Oregon. We sell them pieces of equipment.”

If you read some of the anti-green commentary today, you’ll often see sneering references to “green jobs.” The phrase is usually in quotation marks as if it is some kind of liberal fantasy or closet welfare program (and as if coal, oil and nuclear don’t get all kinds of subsidies). Nonsense. In 2008, more silicon was consumed globally making solar panels than microchips, said Splinter.

“We are seeing the industrialization of the solar business,” he added. “In the last 12 months, it has brought us $1.3 billion in revenues. It is hard to build a billion-dollar business.”

Applied sells its solar-panel factories for $200 million each. Solar panels can be made from many different semiconductors, including thin film coated onto glass with nanotechnology and from crystalline silicon. At Applied, making these complex machines requires America’s best, high-paid talent — people who can work at the intersection of chemistry, physics and nanotechnology.

If we want to launch a solar industry here, big-time, we need to offer the kind of long-term certainty that Germany does or impose the national requirement on our utilities to generate solar power as China does or have the government build giant solar farms, the way it built the Hoover Dam, and sell the electricity.

O.K., so you don’t believe global warming is real. I do, but let’s assume it’s not. Here is what is indisputable: The world is on track to add another 2.5 billion people by 2050, and many will be aspiring to live American-like, high-energy lifestyles. In such a world, renewable energy — where the variable cost of your fuel, sun or wind, is zero — will be in huge demand.

China now understands that. It no longer believes it can pollute its way to prosperity because it would choke to death. That is the most important shift in the world in the last 18 months. China has decided that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry and is now creating a massive domestic market for solar and wind, which will give it a great export platform.

In October, Applied will be opening the world’s largest solar research center — in Xian, China. Gotta go where the customers are. So, if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo, in “Boy, Oh Boy,” says Joe Wilson’s outburst in Congress revealed one thing: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Policy Has to Match the Sacrifice,” says in Iraq, for way too long, our policy did not match the sacrifice of our soldiers. The same mistake cannot be made in Afghanistan.  Mr. Kristof, in “The Body Count at Home,” says about as many people who were killed on 9/11 die every two months because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?  Mr. Rich, in “Obama’s Squandered Summer,” says this was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted.  Here’s MoDo:

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”

Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.

Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.

“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”

Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

On Sept. 3, this newspaper published a very revealing front-page article from Iraq about a bizarre bank-robbery that summed up the challenge of where we are in Baghdad and Kabul and how to think about what it will take to succeed in both places.

The article began with an appalling tale: bodyguards for one of Iraq’s most powerful men, Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, tied up eight security officers at a Baghdad bank, executed them point blank and then made off with $4.3 million in cash. It is the sort of story that leaves war supporters shaking their heads, asking what have we accomplished in six years of U.S. involvement there, and war opponents saying, “I told you so.”

But then, suddenly, the story took an interesting turn. It noted that the robbers were quickly identified by witnesses, and most were arrested. After a short trial, a court in Baghdad sentenced four out of the nine robbery suspects to death. One man was acquitted; the other four are still missing.

Although the plotters are still on the loose, “the robbery also demonstrated in some rickety way that Iraq’s young institutions, the judiciary, the news media and its increasingly democratic politics, make it difficult for even the country’s most powerful people to snap their fingers and make an embarrassing case go away,” the article noted. “And, contrary to the state of affairs under Saddam Hussein, there was an open trial free for anyone to criticize — and they did — even if death sentences were handed down in only two and a half days.” All the money was reportedly recovered.

Why is this story revealing? First, Iraqis and Afghans have one big thing in common: They are like battered children. And battered children often grow up to be battering adults. That is, to survive under Saddam in Iraq or to survive the Russian occupation and the Taliban years in Kabul was to survive terrifying levels of brutality. And it made many people brutal and corrupt to get by.

What you see in this bank robbery story is the struggle between Iraq’s old political culture of brutality and corruption and its incipient new one of democracy and the rule of law.

Now that Saddam is gone, we have to hope “that a new generation will grow up with enough rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and democracy that it will be able to overcome the culture of brutality that Saddam instilled,” said Joseph Sassoon, the Baghdad-born author of “Iraqi Refugees” and an adjunct professor at Georgetown. “But we should have no illusions; the batterers may still win.”

That is what we have accomplished in Iraq so far: At a huge cost, we have given a chance for a more democratic political culture to emerge in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. That is not insignificant. But changing a political culture is hard. It will take a long time before one trend decisively wins — and more American help will be needed to keep it on track.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. military is advocating a new strategy, designed to make the Afghan people feel safe in order to get their cooperation in defeating the Taliban. It, too, requires changing the political culture and state-building from bottom up, another long historical process. You can’t visit a Greg Mortenson school for girls there without being touched by the necessity of such an effort. But you can’t walk through an Afghan town made of mud huts, or observe how our Afghan “allies” perverted the last election, without sensing how hard it will be.

While visiting Afghanistan in July, I met a U.S. diplomat in Helmand Province who told me this story: He had served in Anbar, in Iraq, and one day a Marine officer came to him, after carrying a wounded buddy off the battlefield on his back, and said to him, “The policy had better match the sacrifice.”

In Iraq, for way too long, our policy did not match the sacrifice of our soldiers. It was badly planned and under-resourced. Before we proceed with this new strategy in Afghanistan we have to give our generals a chance to make their case, we also have to insist that Congress debate it anew, hear other experts, and, if Congress decides to go ahead, to formally authorize it. Like Iraq, it would involve a long struggle, and we can’t ask our soldiers to start something we have no stomach to finish.

In short, President Obama has to be as committed to any surge in Afghanistan as President Bush was in Iraq, because Mr. Obama will have to endure a lot of bad news before things — might — get better.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told an American Legion convention about Afghanistan: “Let’s take a good hard look at this fight we’re in, what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I’d rather see us as a nation argue about the war, struggling to get it right, than ignore it. Because each time I go to Dover to see the return of someone’s father, brother, mother, or sister, I want to know that collectively we’ve done all we can to make sure that sacrifice isn’t in vain.”

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

In the debate over health care, here’s an inequity to ponder: Nikki White would have been far better off if only she had been a convicted bank robber.

Nikki was a slim and athletic college graduate who had health insurance, had worked in health care and knew the system. But she had systemic lupus erythematosus, a chronic inflammatory disease that was diagnosed when she was 21 and gradually left her too sick to work. And once she lost her job, she lost her health insurance.

In any other rich country, Nikki probably would have been fine, notes T. R. Reid in his important and powerful new book, “The Healing of America.” Some 80 percent of lupus patients in the United States live a normal life span. Under a doctor’s care, lupus should be manageable. Indeed, if Nikki had been a felon, the problem could have been averted, because courts have ruled that prisoners are entitled to medical care.

As Mr. Reid recounts, Nikki tried everything to get medical care, but no insurance company would accept someone with her pre-existing condition. She spent months painfully writing letters to anyone she thought might be able to help. She fought tenaciously for her life.

Finally, Nikki collapsed at her home in Tennessee and was rushed to a hospital emergency room, which was then required to treat her without payment until her condition stabilized. Since money was no longer an issue, the hospital performed 25 emergency surgeries on Nikki, and she spent six months in critical care.

“When Nikki showed up at the emergency room, she received the best of care, and the hospital spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her,” her step-father, Tony Deal, told me. “But that’s not when she needed the care.”

By then it was too late. In 2006, Nikki White died at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor, Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

“She fell through the cracks,” Nikki’s mother, Gail Deal, told me grimly. “When you bury a child, it’s the worst thing in the world. You never recover.”

We now have a chance to reform this cruel and capricious system. If we let that chance slip away, there will be another Nikki dying every half-hour.

That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths.

After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?

Mr. Reid’s book is a rich tour of health care around the world. Because he has a bum shoulder, he asked doctors in many countries to examine it and make recommendations. His American orthopedist recommended a titanium shoulder replacement that would cost tens of thousands of dollars and might or might not help. Specialists in other countries warned that a sore shoulder didn’t justify the risks of such major surgery, although some said it would be available free if Mr. Reid insisted. Instead, they offered physical therapy, acupuncture and other cheap and noninvasive alternatives, some of which worked pretty well.

That’s a window into the flaws in our health care system: we offer titanium shoulder replacements for those who don’t really need them, but we let 32-year-old women die if they lose their health insurance. No wonder we spend so much on medical care, and yet have some health care statistics that are worse than Slovenia’s.

My suggestion for anyone in Nikki’s situation: commit a crime and get locked up. In Washington State, a 20-year-old inmate named Melissa Matthews chose to turn down parole and stay in prison because that was the only way she could get treatment for her cervical cancer. “If I’m out, I’m going to die from this cancer,” she told a television station.

Mr. and Mrs. Deal say they are speaking out because Nikki wouldn’t want anyone to endure what she did. “Nikki was a college-educated, middle-class woman, and if it could happen to her, it can happen to anyone,” Mr. Deal said. “This should not be happening in our country.”

Struggling to get out the words, Mrs. Deal added: “The loss of a child is the greatest hurt anyone will ever suffer. Because of the circumstances she endured with the health care system, I lost my daughter.”

Complex arguments are being batted around in this health care debate, but the central issue isn’t technical but moral. The first question is simply this: Do we wish to be the only rich nation in the world that lets a 32-year-old woman die because she can’t get health insurance? Is that really us?

Well, if you’re a Republican in Congress it’s FYIGM, and if you’re a Republican/libertarian it comes down to YOYO…  Here’s Mr. Rich:

The day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.

After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.

So it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.

As a mode of campaigning, this tactic was worth a great deal. Obama not only produced eloquent speeches — especially the classic disquisition on race that silenced the Jeremiah Wright pogrom — but also executed a remarkably disciplined tortoise-vs.-hare battle plan that outwitted and ultimately vanquished the hypercaffeinated political strategies of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. As a style of governing, however, this repeated cycle of extended above-the-fray passivity followed by last-minute oratorical heroics has now been stretched to the very limit.

Wednesday night’s address on health care reform was inspired, lucid and, in the literally and figuratively Kennedyesque finale, moving. It was also (mildly) partisan, a trait much deplored by high-minded editorial writers but in real life quite useful when your party is in the majority and you want to rally the troops to get something done. But there was little in the speech that Obama couldn’t have said at the summer’s outset. Its practical effect may prove nil. Short of signing a mass suicide pact, the Democrats were always destined to pass a bill. Will the one to come be substantially better than the one that would have emerged if the same speech had been delivered weeks earlier? Not necessarily — and marginally at most.

In the meantime, a certain damage has been done — to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from “death panels” to “government takeover” — ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat.”

None of this served his cause of health care reform or his political standing. The droop in Obama’s job approval numbers isn’t remotely as large or precipitous as the Beltway’s incessant doomsday drumbeat suggests. But support for his signature program declined, not least because he gave others carte blanche to define it for him. Perhaps the most revealing of all the poll findings came in an end-of-August Washington Post query asking voters what “single word” first came to mind to describe their “feelings” about Obama and his health care proposals. For Obama, the No. 1 feeling was “good.” For the policy package he’d been ostensibly selling all summer, the No. 1 feeling was “none.”

It’s not, as those on the right would have us believe, that Obama’s ideas are so “liberal” that the American public recoiled. It’s that much of the public didn’t know what his ideas were. Even now I’m not convinced that most Americans know what a “public option” really means or what Obama’s precise position on it is. But I’d bet that many more have a working definition of “death panels.” The 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, and the liars and crazies filled it while Obama waited for his deus ex machina descent onto center stage.

That he let the hard-core base of a leaderless minority party drive the debate only diminished his stature. That’s why his poll numbers on “leadership” declined. The right-wing fringe has become so deranged that it will yank its kids out of school to protest the president and risk yanking more Americans off assembly lines by boycotting General Motors to protest the administration’s Detroit bailout. Even Laura Bush and Newt Gingrich stepped in last week to defend Obama’s classroom homily from the fusillades by some of their own party’s most prominent ideologues. The White House should have landed a punch before they did.

Obama would have looked stronger if he’d stood up more proactively to the screamers along the way, or at least to the ones not packing guns. As the Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith has reminded us, it didn’t harm the New Deal for F.D.R. to tell a national radio audience on election eve 1936 that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies. Indeed Obama instantly gained a foot or two in height Wednesday night once that South Carolina clown hollered “You lie!” (One wonders what this congressman calls the Republican governor of his own state, Mark Sanford.) As the political analyst Charlie Cook has pointed out, Obama’s leadership poll numbers have also suffered from his repeated deference to Congress. Waiting for the pettifogging small-state potentates of both parties in the Senate’s Gang of Six is as farcical as waiting for Godot.

Now that he has taken charge, Obama will speed the process and, we must hope, secure reform that may make a real difference for everyone, starting with the 46-million-plus Americans who have no health insurance. But when we gain some perspective on the summer of 2009, the health care debate, like the crazed town-hall sideshows surrounding it, may seem very small in the history of this presidency — maybe even as small as the Condit follies and the breathlessly reported shark attacks of summer 2001 now look in the history of the previous administration.

The reason is that health care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York’s two demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president’s and our country’s fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in the silly summer of ’09.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of the war that 9/11 bequeathed us in Afghanistan, the endgame is still unknown and more troops are on their way. Though the rate of American casualties reached an all-time high last month, the war ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking the issues important to the American public. Most of those who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). But the essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan — and make the heavy sacrifices that would be required — or look for a Plan B was punted by the White House this summer even as the situation drastically deteriorated.

No less unsettling is the first-anniversary snapshot of 9/15: a rebound for Wall Street but not for the 26-million-plus Americans who are unemployed, no longer looking for jobs, or forced to settle for part-time work. Some 40 million Americans are living in poverty. While these economic body counts keep rising, tough regulatory reform for reckless financial institutions, too-big-to-fail and otherwise, seems more remote by the day. Last Sunday, Jenny Anderson of The Times exposed an example of Wall Street’s unashamed recidivism that takes gallows humor to a new high — or would were it in The Onion, not The Times. Some of the same banks that gambled their (and our) way to ruin by concocting exotic mortgage-backed securities now hope to bundle individual Americans’ life insurance policies into a new high-risk financial product built on this sure-fire algorithm: “The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.”

When we look back on these months, we may come to realize that there were in fact “death panels” threatening Americans all along — but they were on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and on Wall Street, not in the fine print of a health care bill on Capitol Hill. Obama’s deliberative brand of wait-and-then-pounce leadership let him squeak — barely — through the summer. The real crises already gathering won’t wait for him to stand back and calculate the precise moment to spring the next Do-or-Die Speech.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo, in “Less Spocky, More Rocky,” says President Obama is so wrapped up in his desire to be a different, more conciliatory, beer-summit kind of leader, he ignores some verities.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Our One-Party Democracy,” says China’s one-party autocracy can impose the important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century, and asks if this is a political advantage.  Here’s MoDo:

As soon as I started covering Barack Obama, I knew he was going to be trouble.

Not Global Trouble, like W. and Dick Cheney. Or Hanky-Panky Trouble, like Bill Clinton and John Edwards. Or Tedious Trouble, like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis.

He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left you flat, and then, when you were deflated and exasperated and time was running out, ensorcelled you again with some sparkly fairy dust.

It’s an irritating pattern. Not as puerile as Bill Clinton’s pattern of wasting time and plunging into personal chaos, or as horrifying as Dick Cheney’s routine of bullying and cutting paper dolls out of the Constitution.

But not as reliably uplifting as Jed Bartlet either.

After keeping his great powers of persuasion and elucidation under wraps all summer, the president at long last comes forward to explain his health care plan to an utterly confused and increasingly skeptical and wary public.

He should have done this speech back in June and conjured up a better glossary. You can’t combat a scintillating term like “death panels” with a somnambulant one like “public option.”

President Obama is so wrapped up in his desire to be a different, more conciliatory, beer-summit kind of leader, he ignores some verities.

Sometimes, when you’ve got the mojo, you have to keep your foot on your opponent’s neck. When you’re trying to get a Sisyphean agenda passed, it’s good if people in the way — including rebellious elements in your own party — fear you.

Civil discourse is fine, but when the other side is fighting dirty, you should get angry. Don’t let the bully kick sand in your face. The White House should have impaled death panel malarkey as soon as it came up.

By the time the president got feisty in a speech on Monday, the inmates had taken over cable TV, much like the spooky spirits swarming up over Bald Mountain in “Fantasia.”

Even Steve Hildebrand, the strategist who helped shape Obama’s historic win in the Iowa caucuses, complains that his former hero “needs to be more bold in his leadership.” Disenchanted at Obama’s disengaged approach on health care and gay rights, Hildebrand told Politico’s Ben Smith that he was “losing patience.”

It was one thing for Obama to delegate freely when he was on the Harvard Law Review, but it’s madness to go play golf and delegate freely to Congress, letting Nancy Pelosi make your case. After signaling that there was nothing he’d fall on his sword for on health care; after dropping Van Jones at the first objection from Glenn Beck — a demagoon who called Obama a “racist” — the president is getting to be seen as an easy mark.

If Obama didn’t have a knife-thrower like Rahmbo in the Oval, Democrats would be totally convinced that the president would fold in a heartbeat.

In the absence of more vivid presidential leadership, the Democrats have reverted to their old DNA — self-destructive scrapping and spending. And the Republicans are sticking to theirs — being mean-spirited and shameless, attacking big government spending while taking no blame for their own.

Just as he let Hillary breathe new life into her faltering campaign in New Hampshire, Obama let the moribund Republicans revivify themselves in the slashing image of Limbaugh and Palin. Administration officials have been chortling that Republicans overreached in criticizing the president for giving a speech urging kids to study hard, write their own destiny and wash their hands.

It’s true that Republicans who objected looked risible. On MSNBC, Joe Watkins, a G.O.P. strategist, explained the perils of letting “one of the most gifted speakers that the world has ever seen” speak to impressionable children.

What if next time, he asked, the president made a strong argument to kids about the Defense of Marriage Act? “What if,” he wondered, “kids come back home and say to their mom and dad, when the president who they like and who they agree with, tells them marriage is not necessarily between a man and a woman?”

But if such Republicans seem loco, and the far left looks easily outmaneuvered, the president seems lame, too, for letting the crazies and uglies get on offense all summer, showcased by a superficial media beast. Laura Bush had to ride to Obama’s rescue and explain that he wasn’t a brain-washing alien, that it was a good thing for a president to inspire kids.

It shouldn’t take a superhuman effort by the Democrats, with an assist from a Republican former first lady, to beat back the most obviously nutty, stupid things that Republicans say.

The president told students on Tuesday that “being successful is hard” and “you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.”

He should take his own words to heart. He can live long and prosper by being less Spocky and more Rocky.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

Look at the climate/energy bill that came out of the House. Its sponsors had to work twice as hard to produce this breakthrough cap-and-trade legislation. Why? Because with basically no G.O.P. representatives willing to vote for any price on carbon that would stimulate investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, the sponsors had to rely entirely on Democrats — and that meant paying off coal-state and agriculture Democrats with pork. Thank goodness, it is still a bill worth passing. But it could have been much better — and can be in the Senate. Just give me 8 to 10 Republicans ready to impose some price on carbon, and they can be leveraged against Democrats who want to water down the bill.

“China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want,” said Joe Romm, who writes the blog, climateprogress.org.

The only way for us to match them is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy.

The same is true on health care. “The central mechanism through which Obama seeks to extend coverage and restrain costs is via new ‘exchanges,’ insurance clearinghouses, modeled on the plan Mitt Romney enacted when he was governor of Massachusetts,” noted Matt Miller, a former Clinton budget official and author of “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.” “The idea is to let individuals access group coverage from private insurers, with subsidies for low earners.”

And it is possible the president will seek to fund those subsidies, at least in part, with the idea John McCain ran on — by reducing the tax exemption for employer-provided health care. Can the Republicans even say yes to their own ideas, if they are absorbed by Obama? Without Obama being able to leverage some Republican votes, it is going to be very hard to get a good plan to cover all Americans with health care.

“Just because Obama is on a path to give America the Romney health plan with McCain-style financing, does not mean the Republicans will embrace it — if it seems politically more attractive to scream ‘socialist,’ ” said Miller.

The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.

“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

Solo MoDo

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today.  MoDo has her panties in a bunch about the interwebs toobz.  In “Stung by the Perfect Sting” she says the Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where everyone was free to have their say. Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide.  Here she is:

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Sooner or later, this sort of suit will end up before the Supreme Court.

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.

Cohen called and forgave Port, but did not get an apology. She had her lawyer, Steve Wagner, drop her defamation suit. But now Port says she’ll file a $15 million suit against Google for giving her up.

Port contends that if Cohen hadn’t sued, hardly anyone would have seen the blog. (If a skank falls in the forest and no one hears it … ?)

But Cohen says the Internet is different than water-cooler gossip. “It’s there for the whole world to see,” she told me. “What happened to integrity? Why go out of your way solely to upset somebody else? Why can’t we all just be nice?”

She said she may become an activist, and has been e-mailing with Tina Meier, mother of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who killed herself after getting cyberbullied by the mother of a classmate who pretended to be a teen suitor named “Josh.”

“If that woman had started a MySpace page as herself, that little girl would still be in her mother’s arms,” Cohen said.

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

Since there’s nothing important happening in the country MoDo decided to waste our time with “The Last Empress” in which she says the real question about Anna Wintour is not whether she’s warm — she has her furs for that — but whether she can stay relevant in a more down-market age.  I know I lose sleep wondering about Anna Wintour…  Feh.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Connecting Nature’s Dots,” says policy solutions for climate change, poverty, food security and biodiversity need to be as integrated as nature itself.  Well, in that case I guess we’re doomed if we have to rely on the Washington crowd.  Mr. Kristof gives us “Food for the Soul,” and says the central problem with modern industrial agriculture is not just that it produces unhealthy food. More fundamentally, it has no soul.  Mr. Rich, in “The Guns of August,” says that the simmering undertone of violence in our politics seems to be getting darker.  Here’s MoDo’s blithering waste of words:

The Devil does wear Prada.

I ended up sitting a stiletto’s throw away from Anna Wintour at the Monkey Bar, after the Museum of Modern Art screening of the new documentary about her. Nuclear Wintour looked summery in a floaty print Prada dress so au courant it hasn’t yet hit the stores.

Just like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Wintour can be seen in the new film clutching a Starbucks cup in her office and the back of her chauffeur-driven car. It seems to be her only sustenance, so I was curious to get the skinny on what the Skinny One eats.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I told a startled waiter, who assumed I was kidding and pointed me to the part of the menu he thought suited me better: Chasen’s chili and Mrs. Carter’s butter tart.

“Anna eats steak and burgers, protein, and drinks a little wine,” said the Vogue editor André Leon Talley, mesmerizingly mountainous in a navy Armani with a white saber-toothed tiger tooth necklace and Manolo framboise velvet Woodstock sandals.

The documentary by R. J. Cutler chronicles Anna and her courtiers compiling the September 2007 issue of Vogue. Setting a record at 840 pages, 727 of them ads, and weighing as much as a preemie — 4 pounds, 9 ounces — that issue is now detritus of the Golden Age of excessive spending.

So the question invariably arises: Behind those bangs and dark glasses, is Anna human? Or did she tie Hermès scarves together and make a daring escape from District 9 in a getaway car driven by Oscar de la Renta?

On CBS’s “Early Show” on Thursday, Talley said it was a misconception that “she’s an ice floe or an iceberg and that she has no human flesh or bones.” Tom Florio, the publisher of Vogue, concedes in the documentary that “she’s not warm and friendly.”

At the screening Wednesday, towering with gorgeous girls in bondage gladiator heels and threaded with famous designers, one designer not favored by Anna muttered that she was a sartorial Star Chamber who smothered creativity.

David Letterman will probe Monday night to find out if Wintour is as frigid as we think. But there’s no need for her to drop the Cruella de Vil guise. Moviegoers want to see a brittle Anna belittle, Simon Cowell-style. We enjoy the editrix as dominatrix.

She’s a sacred monster, an embodiment of the highest standard of style, and we don’t expect our monsters to be nice.

“She’s the Sun King and you don’t want the Sun King to act like the mayor,” says Gioia Diliberto, a fashion writer for The Huffington Post.

Just like Miranda Priestly, who dismissed her assistant with a cold “That’s all,” Anna frostily murmurs “That’s it? There’s nothing else?” as she surveys photos and clothes and prods a staffer: “It’s Vogue, O.K.? Please, let’s lift it.”

She dresses down one editor for “sameness,” deems a Sienna Miller cover photo too toothy, and tells designers they should “edit” and be more exciting. Looking at a picture of a slender Jennifer Garner, Anna says ominously, “She looks pregnant.”

Her lovely daughter makes light of the gravity at Vogue, saying, “Some of the people act like fashion is life.” Indeed, the Vogue priestesses choosing glamour spreads in “The September Issue” seem just as intense as the soldiers in Iraq defusing bombs in “The Hurt Locker.”

There is friction in the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards relationship between the 59-year-old Anna and her closest collaborator, the 68-year-old flame-haired creative director and former model Grace Coddington, who is the only one willing to tweak “the Pope,” as Anna is dubbed by a staffer. Coddington tells French Vogue, “We have a real mutual respect for each other, even though sometimes I feel like killing her.”

The Vogue team and moviemakers didn’t know they were dancing on the deck of the Titanic. This September, ad pages in Vogue plummeted 36 percent and a Wall Street Journal story trumpeted “Thick Fashion Magazines Are So Last Year.”

The real question about Anna is not whether she’s warm — she has her furs for that — but whether she can stay relevant in a more down-market age and stay happy if she can’t continue to throw away $50,000 photo shoots that are not up to her exacting standards. In the new issue, there’s a small bow to democratization. A piece called “What Price Fashion?” allows that “overpriced fashion no longer makes sense” and features an Oscar de la Renta dress for under $2,000 and a Proenza Schouler executive touting the “very best skinny stretch-twill pant you’ve ever seen” for $550.

Anna herself continues to resist egalitarian impulses. As Keith Kelly wrote in The New York Post, Condé Nast may be slashing costs, but Anna is not scaling back at the upcoming fall fashion shows in Europe. She’s keeping her suite at the Paris Ritz, her chauffeured Mercedes sedans and her entourage of 10 that costs a quarter of a mill.

That’s all.

It’s really past time that the New York Times took her keyboard away.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Jao Flats, Botswana:

Who knew that deep in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where there are no paved roads, phones or TVs, you could find the morning paper waiting for you every day outside your tent, with the latest news, weather and sports? Who knew?

True, this is no ordinary journal. The newspaper here on the Jao Flats of the northwest Okavango flood plain is published on the roads — literally. The wetlands are bisected by hippo trails and narrow roads made from pure white Kalahari Desert sand. And every morning, when you set out to investigate the wilderness, it is not uncommon for a guide to lean out of his jeep, study the animal and insect tracks, and pronounce that he’s “reading the morning news.”

We were lucky to be accompanied by Map Ives — the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, which supports ecotourism in Botswana — and it was fascinating to watch him read Mother Nature’s hieroglyphics.

This day’s “news,” Ives explained, studying a stretch of road, was that some lions had run very quickly through here, which he could tell by the abnormal depth of, and distance between, their paw prints. They were in stride. The “weather” was windy coming out of the east, he added, pointing to which side of the paw prints had been lightly dusted away. Flood waters remained high this morning, because the nearby hyena tracks were followed by little indentations — splashes of water that had come off their paws. Today’s “sports”? Well, over here — the hyenas were dragging a “kill,” probably a small antelope or steinbok, which is very obvious from the smooth foot-wide path in the sand that ran some 50 yards into the bushes. Every mile you can read a different paper.

It is mentally exhausting hanging with Ives, who was raised on the edge of the Okavango Delta. He points out the connections, and all the free services nature provides, every two seconds: Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water. Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites. Yes, thank God for termites. All of the raised islands of green in the delta were started by them. The termites keep their mounds warm. This attracts animals whose dung brings seeds and fertilizer that sprout trees, making bigger islands. Ives will be talking to you about zebras and suddenly a bird will zip by — “greater blue-eyed starling,” he’ll blurt out in midsentence, and then go back to zebras.

“If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work, then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand, the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air, the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space,” said Ives. Humans were actually wired to do this a long time ago.

Unfortunately, he added, “the speed at which humans have improved technology since the Industrial Revolution has attracted so many people to towns and cities and provided them with ‘processed’ natural resources” that our innate ability to make all these connections “may be disappearing as fast as biodiversity.”

Which leads to the point of this column. We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.

They all need to go on safari together.

“We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion, constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett, senior vice president with Conservation International. “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue, but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture. So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.”

But we also need to double food production to feed a growing population. “So we’ll need to do that without clearing more forests and draining more wetlands, which means farmers will need new technologies and practices to grow more food on the same land they use today — with less water,” he added. “Healthy forests, wetlands and grasslands not only preserve biodiversity and store carbon, they also help buffer the impacts of climate change. So our success in tackling climate change, poverty, food security and biodiversity loss will depend on finding integrated solutions from the land.”

In short — and as any reader of the Okavango daily papers will tell you — we need to make sure that our policy solutions are as integrated as nature itself. Today, they are not.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof, who is writing from where he grew up, in Yamhill, Oregon:

On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all.

More fundamentally, it has no soul.

The family farm traditionally was the most soulful place imaginable, and that was the case with our own farm on the edge of the Willamette Valley. I can’t say we were efficient: for a time we thought about calling ourselves “Wandering Livestock Ranch,” after our Angus cattle escaped in one direction and our Duroc hogs in another.

When coyotes threatened our sheep operation, we spent $300 on a Kuvasz, a breed of guard dog that is said to excel in protecting sheep. Alas, our fancy-pants new sheep dog began her duties by dining on lamb.

It’s always said that if a dog kills one lamb, it will never stop, and so the local rule was that if your dog killed one sheep you had to shoot it. Instead we engaged in a successful cover-up. It worked, for the dog never touched a lamb again and for the rest of her long life fended off coyotes heroically.

That kind of diverse, chaotic family farm is now disappearing, replaced by insipid food assembly lines.

The result is food that also lacks soul — but may contain pathogens. In the last two months, there have been two major recalls of ground beef because of possible contamination with drug-resistant salmonella. When factory farms routinely fill animals with antibiotics, the result is superbugs that resist antibiotics.

Michael Pollan, the food writer, notes that monocultures in the field result in monocultures in our diets. Two-thirds of our calories, he says, now come from just four crops: rice, soy, wheat and corn. Fast-food culture and obesity are linked, he argues, to the transformation from family farms to industrial farming.

In fairness, industrial farming is extraordinarily efficient, and smaller diverse family farms would mean more expensive food. So is this all inevitable? Is my nostalgia like the blacksmith’s grief over Henry Ford’s assembly lines superseding a more primitive technology? Perhaps, but I’m reassured by one of my old high school buddies here in Yamhill, Bob Bansen. He runs a family dairy of 225 Jersey cows so efficiently that it can still compete with giant factory dairies of 20,000 cows.

Bob names all his cows, and can tell them apart in an instant. He can tell you each cow’s quirks and parentage. They are family friends as well as economic assets.

“With these big dairies, a cow means nothing to them,” Bob said. “When I lose a cow, it bothers me. I kick myself.” That might seem like sentimentality, but it’s also good business and preserves his assets.

American agriculture policy and subsidies have favored industrialization and consolidation, but there are signs that the Obama administration Agriculture Department under Secretary Tom Vilsack is becoming more friendly to small producers. I hope that’s right.

One of my childhood memories is of placing a chicken egg in a goose nest when I was about 10 (my young scientist phase). That mother goose was thrilled when her eggs hatched, and maternal love is such that she never seemed to notice that one of her babies was a neckless midget.

As for the chick, she never doubted her goosiness. At night, our chickens would roost high up in the barn, while the geese would sleep on the floor, with their heads tucked under their wings. This chick slept with the goslings, and she tried mightily to stretch her neck under her wing. No doubt she had a permanent crick in her neck.

Then the fateful day came when the mother goose took her brood to the water for the first time. She jumped in, and the goslings leaped in after her. The chick stood on the bank, aghast.

For the next few days, mother and daughter tried to reason it out, each deeply upset by the other’s intransigence. After several days of barnyard trauma, the chick underwent an identity crisis, nature triumphed over nurture, and she redefined herself as a hen.

She moved across the barn to hang out with the chickens. At first she still slept goose-like, and visited her “mother” and fellow goslings each day, but within two months she no longer even acknowledged her stepmother and stepsiblings and behaved just like other chickens.

Recollections like that make me wistful for a healthy rural America composed of diverse family farms, which also offer decent and varied lives for the animals themselves (at least when farm boys aren’t conducting “scientific” experiments). In contrast, a modern industrialized operation is a different world: more than 100,000 hens in cages, their beaks removed, without a rooster, without geese or other animals, spewing out pollution and ending up as so-called food — a calorie factory, without any soul.

And last but not least here’s Mr. Rich:

“It is time to water the tree of liberty” said the sign carried by a gun-toting protester milling outside President Obama’s town-hall meeting in New Hampshire two weeks ago. The Thomas Jefferson quote that inspired this message, of course, said nothing about water: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” That’s the beauty of a gun — you don’t have to spell out the “blood.”

The protester was a nut. America has never had a shortage of them. But what’s Tom Coburn’s excuse? Coburn is a Republican senator from Oklahoma, where 168 people were murdered by right-wing psychopaths who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Their leader, Timothy McVeigh, had the Jefferson quote on his T-shirt when he committed this act of mass murder. Yet last Sunday, when asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” if he was troubled by current threats of “violence against the government,” Coburn blamed not the nuts but the government.

“Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government,” the senator said, “but we’ve earned it.”

Coburn is nothing if not consistent. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was part of a House contingent that helped delay and soften an antiterrorism bill. This cohort even tried to strip out a provision blocking domestic fund-raising by foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas. Why? The far right, in league with the National Rifle Association, was angry at the federal government for aggressively policing America’s self-appointed militias. In a 1996 floor speech, Coburn conceded that “terrorism obviously poses a serious threat,” but then went on to explain that the nation had worse threats to worry about: “There is a far greater fear that is present in this country, and that is fear of our own government.” As his remarks on “Meet the Press” last week demonstrated, the subsequent intervention of 9/11 has not changed his worldview.

I have been writing about the simmering undertone of violence in our politics since October, when Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate of a major political party, said nothing to condemn Obama haters shrieking “Treason!,” “Terrorist!” and “Off with his head!” at her rallies. As vacation beckons, I’d like to drop the subject, but the atmosphere keeps getting darker.

Coburn’s implicit rationalization for far-right fanatics bearing arms at presidential events — the government makes them do it! — cannot stand. He’s not a radio or Fox News bloviator paid a fortune to be outrageous; he’s a card-carrying member of the United States Senate. On Monday — the day after he gave a pass to those threatening violence — a dozen provocateurs with guns, at least two of them bearing assault weapons, showed up for Obama’s V.F.W. speech in Phoenix. Within hours, another member of Congress — Phil Gingrey of Georgia — was telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that as long as brandishing guns is legal, he, too, saw no reason to discourage Americans from showing up armed at public meetings.

In April the Department of Homeland Security issued a report, originally commissioned by the Bush administration, on the rising threat of violent right-wing extremism. It was ridiculed by conservatives, including the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, who called it “the height of insult.” Since then, a neo-Nazi who subscribed to the anti-Obama “birther” movement has murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, and an anti-abortion zealot has gunned down a doctor in a church in Wichita, Kan.

This month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization that warned of the alarming rise in extremist groups before the Oklahoma City bombing, issued its own report. A federal law enforcement agent told the center that he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. “All it’s lacking is a spark,” he said.

This uptick in the radical right predates the health care debate that is supposedly inspiring all the gun waving. Nor can this movement be attributed to a stepped-up attack by Democrats on this crowd’s holy Second Amendment. Since taking office, Obama has disappointed gun-control advocates by relegating his campaign pledge to reinstate the ban on assault weapons to the down-low.

No, the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Bell’s analysis appeared in his essay “The Dispossessed,” published in 1962, between John Kennedy’s election and assassination. J.F.K., no more a leftist than Obama, was the first Roman Catholic in the White House and the tribune of a new liberal order. Bell could have also written his diagnosis in 1992, between Bill Clinton’s election and the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton, like Kennedy and Obama, brought liberals back into power after a conservative reign and represented a generational turnover that stoked the fears of the dispossessed.

While Bell’s essay remains relevant in 2009, he could not have imagined in 1962 that major politicians, from a vice-presidential candidate down, would either enable or endorse a radical and armed fringe. Nor could he have imagined that so many conservative intellectuals would remain silent. William F. Buckley did make an effort to distance National Review from the John Birch Society. The only major conservative writer to repeatedly and forthrightly take on the radical right this year is David Frum. He ended a recent column for The Week, titled “The Reckless Right Courts Violence,” with a plea that the president “be met and bested on the field of reason,” not with guns.

Those on the right who defend the reckless radicals inevitably argue “The left does it too!” It’s certainly true that both the left and the right traffic in bogus, Holocaust-trivializing Hitler analogies, and, yes, the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink have disrupted Congressional hearings. But this is a false equivalence. Code Pink doesn’t show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as the 1960s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era.

This week the journalist Ronald Kessler’s new behind-the-scenes account of presidential security, “In the President’s Secret Service,” rose to No. 3 on The Times nonfiction best-seller list. No wonder there’s a lot of interest in the subject. We have no reason to believe that these hugely dedicated agents will fail us this time, even as threats against Obama, according to Kessler, are up 400 percent from those against his White House predecessor.

But as we learned in Oklahoma City 14 years ago — or at the well-protected Holocaust museum just over two months ago — this kind of irrational radicalism has a myriad of targets. And it is impervious to reason. Much as Coburn fought an antiterrorism bill after the carnage of Oklahoma City, so three men from Bagdad, Ariz., drove 2,500 miles in 1964 to testify against a bill tightening federal controls on firearms after the Kennedy assassination. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his own famous Kennedy-era essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” these Arizona gun enthusiasts were convinced that the American government was being taken over by a “subversive power.” Sound familiar?

Even now the radicals are taking a nonviolent toll on the Obama presidency. Obama complains, not without reason, that the news media, led by cable television, exaggerate the ruckus at health care events. But why does he exaggerate the legitimacy and clout of opposition members of Congress who, whether through silence or outright endorsement, are surrendering to the nuts? Even Charles Grassley, the supposedly adult Iowa Republican who is the Senate point man for his party on health care, has now capitulated to the armed fringe by publicly parroting their “pull the plug on grandma” fear-mongering.

For all the talk of Obama’s declining poll numbers this summer, he towers over his opponents. In last week’s Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 21 percent approve of how Republicans in Congress are handling health care reform (as opposed to the president’s 41 percent). Should Obama fail to deliver serious reform because his administration treats the pharmaceutical and insurance industries as deferentially as it has the banks, that would be shameful. Should he fail because he in any way catered to a decimated opposition party that has sunk and shrunk to its craziest common denominator, that would be ludicrous.

The G.O.P., whose ranks have now dwindled largely to whites in Dixie and the less-populated West, is not even a paper tiger — it’s a paper muskrat. James Carville is correct when he says that if Republicans actually carried out their filibuster threats on health care, it would be a political bonanza for the Democrats.

In last year’s campaign debates, Obama liked to cite his unlikely Senate friendship with Tom Coburn, of all people, as proof that he could work with his adversaries. If the president insists that enemies like this are his friends — and that the nuts they represent can be placated by reason — he will waste his opportunity to effect real change and have no one to blame but himself.

MoDo and Egan

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today.  MoDo, in “Lust, American Style,” says there’s no such thing as a private affair anymore. We live in a transparent era atwitter with indecent exposure.  Mr. Egan gets all stoopid in “Prairie Health Care Companion.”  His brilliant idea is that as the public health care option gets hammered by a campaign of disinformation, the co-op model deserves a fair hearing.  Hey, Sparky — you’re supposed to be a fracking journalist.  Howzabout trying to put out some, you know, information to counteract the disinformation?  I know, I know, it’s a difficult concept to grasp…  Here’s MoDo:

Sadly, there’s no such thing as a private affair anymore.

We live in a transparent era atwitter with indecent exposure.

Next up in bookstores: “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me,” by Sheryl Weinstein, a 60-year-old former executive with the Jewish women’s group Hadassah, who writes that she was romantically involved with the fraudulent financier in the early ‘90s, though both were married.

The last thing you probably need in your head at this point are images of the Wall Street sociopath nuzzling and nickering. Weinstein, according to a preview in The New York Daily News, gets her revenge for losing her life savings by revealing that Madoff’s unimpressive assets were not merely financial. She also recalls that her friends called her Bernie “Winky Dink” because he blinked anxiously when he was around her.

Jenny Sanford is still sharing about her husband’s affair as well. Her interview in Vogue is accompanied by a leggy photo of the 47-year-old in a beach cover-up that looks like a fetching ad for a new, less embarrassing husband.

She has moved out of the governor’s mansion but says she’s still open to getting back together, noting that pastoral and marriage counseling taught her that “these affairs are almost like an addiction to alcohol or pornography.”

“I think,” she tells the interviewer, “my husband has got some issues that he needs to work on, about happiness and what happiness means.”

She couldn’t resist Googling her husband’s Maria and generously deemed her “pretty.” “I am sure she is a fine person,” she says. “It can’t be fun for her, though I do sometimes question her judgment. If she knew the newspaper had those e-mails back in December, why did she want him to come in June?”

Jenny, who says she wasn’t “madly in love” with Mark Sanford when she married him, is praying for her husband’s soul mate. Her friends agreed that she’d be fine with or without him; one commented that, for a long time, Mark “has been dead on the inside.”

There’s even a TV show inspired by the wives of misbehaving politicians — women who long to never hear the words “long suffering” again. In the new CBS drama “The Good Wife,” Julianna Margulies channels Jenny, Silda, Hillary and Elizabeth, summoning stoicism even when her teenage daughter tells her, “Some girl said Dad slept with a hooker my age.”

When the Sanford scandal broke, some chatterers contended that it was a sign that we should have more women in public office because they get less caught up in sexual intrigue.

A pol paying for sex with a call girl is an old story. But even Heidi Fleiss dropped plans for a bordello for female clients outside Pahrump, Nev., telling The Las Vegas Review-Journal that she’s now focused on alternative energy because “that’s where the money is.”

The only place at the moment where you can see women forking over money to have sex with a gigolo is on HBO’s salaciously named “Hung.” The kooky comedy is about a divorced Detroit high school basketball coach, Ray Drecker (played by the hunky Thomas Jane), who needs money after his house burns down and his twin teenagers are forced to go live with their mother.

He decides to sell his best asset, dubbing himself “a happiness consultant,” and teams up with an unlikely pimp, Tanya Skagle (played by Jane Adams), an aspiring poet who listens to PBS and has “Proust” tattooed on her forearm.

His first lesson on the job is that women frequently derive sensual happiness in a more complex way than men. One of his first clients is a sexy blond ad executive who has had bad luck with guys. He is befuddled to find he must fulfill her fantasies rather than her libido — running along the lake laughing and picnicking with her; going to couples therapy and pretending to be a rich ex-boyfriend; and feigning falling madly in love with her because it’s their fate.

After paying him cash to pick her up by the side of the road, she accuses him of making “an inappropriate pass.” His Proustian pimp has to explain that the young woman with the “bruised heart” is seeking a romantic connection more than a physical one.

“O.K.,” he says with exasperation. “I’ll pretend I’m totally in love with this freak.”

After many rewrites and redos, Drecker tries to summon the necessary acting chops to give his client what she’s paying for. In the parking lot of the roadside diner where they keep eating, a la “Groundhog Day,” while he struggles to figure out what this woman wants, he grasps for a better performance.

“I just wish in some crazy long-shot version of this universe,” he tells her, “that you would stay here with me and not vanish from my life.”

When he spits out the word “destiny,” he finally manages to please her — momentarily.

Now here’s Mr. Egan, who usually makes more sense.  He’s writing from Seattle:

Finding Democrats in the north of Idaho can be like panning for gold in the East River of New York. The area is white, rural and extremely conservative.

But if you get sick in that land of deep lakes and ponderosa pines, a consumer-governed, nonprofit health care provider — Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound — offers extensive coverage at some of the lowest premiums in the nation. And if you need advice on bailing twine or baby chicks, the Co-op Country Store, now in its 75th year, can provide service that the nearby Home Depot cannot.

I mention these successful member-owned businesses in a deeply red state because as the public health care option gets hammered by a campaign of disinformation, the co-op model deserves a fair hearing.

Co-ops may not work as the best way to extend care to the more than 45 million Americans without coverage. But they do tend to keep private insurers honest, are fairly good at controlling costs, and will be harder to demonize. When Sarah Palin starts making things up about co-ops, as she did with the famous nonexistent death panels, she’ll be lying about a familiar model for many Alaskans.

Plus, co-ops are built around something that’s been missing thus far in a debate dominated by ill-informed shouters: the consumer.

The West is the native ground of co-ops. It’s in our collective DNA. People buy their tents, sleeping bags and bikes from the nation’s largest consumer co-op, REI, founded in Seattle in 1938, now with 3.5 million active members. It’s consistently rated one of the best places to work in the United States.

Yes, people wince at paying $20 for a water bottle, but they can bring it back any time — and usually count on part of the purchase price returning to them in the form an annual dividend. Last year, REI paid the highest dividend in its history: $73 million.

By way of disclosure, I should say I belong to REI, not out of any political conviction, but because I can get stuff there that I can’t find anywhere else, the sales people are not commission-motivated, and I like that dividend check.

Group Health, founded here in 1947, serves nearly 600,000 people in Washington and northern Idaho, with doctor-choice and an emphasis on preventive care. It’s consumer-governed and nonprofit.

But perhaps because those consumers who run Group Health are less cold-hearted than insurance company bureaucrats, Group Health is sometimes seen as too generous, and thus unable to control costs as much as it would like. Still, the business model has much to contribute.

All over the West, people get their electricity, their hardware, their water from co-ops, and sell their apples, their wheat, their medical services in the same way. I can see why Senator Kent Conrad, the Democrat from North Dakota, has been pushing co-ops. They come out of the prairie progressive tradition.

For now, Republicans have decided to wage a scorched-earth policy on health reform, a strategy that may restore them to power but won’t do a thing for the majority of Americans concerned about the future. Palin, auditioning for the role of most willfully ignorant politician in America, and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the grumpy old man who is supposed to be a serious voice for bipartisan legislation, have told whoppers about killing grandma, and have become heroes to their base because of it.

They will lie about the co-op model as well. “You can call it a co-op,” said Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, “which is another way of saying a government plan.”

But it’s not, as hikers and farmers in Utah can tell him, or as Mormon-run welfare and retail outlets in Salt Lake City could attest.

Here in Seattle, a city known for a certain kind of caffeinated capitalism, Group Health is a major market player, and a big reason why our health care premiums are cheaper than those in most cities. We also have public power, giving us some of the lowest electrical rates anywhere, and a chain of co-op grocery stores, which I find a bit too granola-crunchy for my tastes, but which others swear by.

In order for the co-ops to get beyond the vague outlines that Senator Conrad has put forth, they will need some government seed money, $4 billion to $6 billion by most estimates — a mere week in the life of bank bailouts. They will also need to be large enough to compete, as Group Health does here.

But if there’s any doubt a health care co-op can work, ask the people who own one, including more than 11,000 consumers in the sparsely populated, deeply Republican north of Idaho.

Sweet heavenly saints [slaps forehead].  OF COURSE that’s the answer!  If it works for 11,000 people Republicans in the middle of nowhere it MUST be ideal for, say, New York City.  Sheeeit….

Dowd, Friedman, Egan and Rich

In “Sarah’s Ghoulish Carousel” MoDo says that despite putting out a proclamation in 2008 to plan ahead for health care decisions, Sarah Palin has managed to hijack the health care debate from President Obama with one catchy phrase.  The Moustache of Wisdom is writing from Chief’s Island in Botswana.  In “The Land of ‘No Service’ ” he says while maintaining “No Service” in the wild is essential for Africa’s ecotourism industry, the rest of the continent desperately needs more connectivity if it is to prosper.  Mr. Egan and Mr. Rich apparently watch the same TV shows.  In “The Distant Mirror” Mr. Egan says as much fun as it is to revel in fascination at the early 1960s seen in “Mad Men,” the series works best as a startling reminder of just how distant the near past really is.  Mr. Rich, in ” ‘Mad Men’ Crashes Woodstock’s Birthday,” says while the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is getting much air time this summer, perhaps it is Don Draper’s America, the early ’60s country-at-a-pivot-point, that really resonates today.  Here’s MoDo:

I’m not sure the man who popped off and tweeted that Sonia Sotomayor was a “Latina woman racist” is the best Henry Higgins for the Eliza Doolittle of Alaska.

But Newt Gingrich was a professor. And he does know something about pulling yourself up by dragging down others and imploding when you take center stage — both Palin specialties.

Besides, he agrees with Sarah — who fretted that her parents and son Trig might be in danger from Obama “death panels” — that we should be very wary about trusting government with end-of-life decisions.

So Newt took it upon himself to become Palin’s Pygmalion. He told Politico that the out-of-work pol should write a book; take a commentator gig on TV; get a condo in D.C. or New York to use as an East Coast base; and prepare three types of speeches — one “to make money,” another to “project her brand” before universities and interest groups, and a vivid campaign stump speech to use for Republican candidates in 2010.

Most important, he advised, the dizzy Palin has to be “clear in her own head what she wants to do.”

At the moment, what she wants to do is tap into her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats.

Just as she was able to stir up the mob against Barack Obama on the trail, now she is fanning the flames against another Harvard smarty-pants — Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a White House health care adviser and the older brother of Rahmbo.

She took a forum, Facebook, more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking, and with one catchy phrase, several footnotes and a zesty disregard for facts, managed to hijack the health care debate from Mr. Obama.

Sarahcuda knows, from her brush with Barry on the campaign trail, that he is vulnerable on matters that demand a visceral and muscular response rather than a logical and book-learned one. Mr. Obama was charming and informed at his town hall in Montana on Friday, but he’s going to need some sustained passion, a clear plan and a narrative as gripping as Palin’s I-see-dead-people scenario.

She has successfully caricatured the White House health care effort, making it sound like the plot of the 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run,” about a post-apocalyptic society with limited resources where you can live only until age 30, when you must take part in an extermination ceremony called “Carousel” or flee the city.

Painting the Giacometti-esque Emanuel as a creepy Dr. Death, Palin attacked him on her Facebook page a week ago, complaining that his “Orwellian thinking” could lead to a “death panel” with bureaucrats deciding whether to pull the plug on less hardy Americans.

Never mind that Palin herself had endorsed some of the same end-of-life counseling she now depicts as putting Grandma down.

As the Democratic National Committee pointed out, Palin put out a 2008 proclamation for Healthcare Decisions Day “to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care … and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions.”

Consistency was long ago sent to a death panel in Palin world.

Sensing traction, she took more shots against Dr. Emanuel, quoting the bioethicist’s past writing that some medical services might not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. … An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

“Dr. Emanuel,” she wrote ominously, “has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which ‘produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.’ ”

She crowed that she had him on the run, and the White House felt that the doctor, who was being portrayed as a proponent of euthanasia, needed to get out there and explain his opposition to euthanasia. So he interrupted his hiking vacation in the Italian Alps to give a raft of phone interviews saying he was taken out of context and calling Palin’s charges “completely off the wall.”

But, much to Sarah’s delight, he also conceded to The Washington Times that his “thinking has evolved” on the “very vexing” issue of deciding who gets treatment and who doesn’t.

“When I began working in the health policy area about 20 years ago … I thought we would definitely have to ration care, that there was a need to make a decision and deny people care,” he told the paper, adding that he now feels that if we get rid of expensive “unnecessary care” that “we would have absolutely no reason to even consider rationing except in a few cases.”

A few cases? Sounds like another Facebook entry for Sarah.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

If you travel long enough and far enough — like by jet to Johannesburg, by prop plane to northern Botswana and then by bush plane deep into the Okavango Delta — you can still find it. It is that special place that on medieval maps would have been shaded black and labeled: “Here there be Dragons!” But in the postmodern age, it is the place where my BlackBerry, my wireless laptop and even my satellite phone all gave me the same message: “No Service.”

Yes, Dorothy, somewhere over the rainbow, there is still a “Land of No Service” — where the only “webs” are made by spiders, where the only “net” is the one wrapped around your bed to keep out mosquitoes, where the only “ring tones” at dawn are the scream of African fish eagles and the bark of baboons, where the only GPS belongs to the lioness instinctively measuring the distance between herself and the antelope she hopes will be her next meal, and where “connectivity” refers only to the intricate food chain linking predators and prey that sustains this remarkable ecosystem.

I confess, I arrived with enough devices to stay just a teensy-weensy connected to e-mail. I wasn’t looking for the Land of No Service. But the Okavango Delta’s managers and the Wilderness Trust — a South African conservation organization that runs safaris to support its nature restoration work — take the wilderness seriously. The staff at our camp on the northwestern tip of Chief’s Island, the largest island in the delta, did have a radio, but otherwise the only sounds you heard were from Mother Nature’s symphony orchestra and the only landscapes, sunsets and color combinations were painted by the hand of God.

So, like it or not, coming here forces you to think about the blessings and curses of “connectivity.” “No Service” is something travelers from the developed world now pay for in order to escape modernity, with its ball and chain of e-mail. For much of Africa, though, “No Service” is a curse — because without more connectivity, its people can’t escape poverty. Can there be a balance between the two?

For the normally overconnected tourist, the first thing you notice in the Land of No Service is how quickly your hearing, smell and eyesight improve in an act of instant Darwinian evolution. It is amazing how well you can hear when you don’t have an iPod in your ears or how far you can see when you’re not squinting at a computer screen. In the wild, the difference between hearing and seeing with acuity is the difference between survival and extinction for the animals and the difference between a rewarding experience and a missed opportunity for photographers and guides.

It was our guide spotting a half-eaten antelope lodged high in a tree that drew our attention to its predator, a leopard, calmly licking her paws nearby and then yawning from her midday meal. The cat’s stomach was heaving up and down, still digesting her prey. The leopard had suffocated the antelope — you could still see the marks on its neck — and then dragged it up the tree, holding it in her jaws, and placed the kill perfectly in the V between two branches. And there the antelope dangled, head on one side, dainty legs on the other, with half her midsection eaten away. The rest would be tomorrow’s leopard lunch, stored high above where the hyenas could not get it.

But while maintaining “No Service” in the wild is essential for Africa’s ecotourism industry, the rest of the continent desperately needs more connectivity. Eric Cantor, who runs Grameen Foundation’s Application Laboratory in Uganda, explains what a huge difference cellphones and Internet access can make to people in Africa:

“A banana farmer previously limited to waiting for a buyer truck to pass his farm to sell the week’s harvest can now use a mobile-phone marketplace to publicize the availability of his stock or to search for buyers who might be in the market or have truck transport available to a larger market,” said Cantor. “They can also compare going prices to gain more power in a negotiation. Teenagers too shy to ask parents about causes and symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases can research them privately and improve their own health outcomes. A farmer with no money who needs a remedy for the pest attacking her primary crop can find one that uses locally available materials, when they need it.”

Botswana, about the size of Texas, luckily has enough diamonds to be able to turn 40 percent of its land into nature preserves. Its urban connectivity with the global diamond exchanges enables it to maintain “No Service” in its wilderness. Zimbabwe, by contrast, has become virtually a country of “No Service” after decades of dictatorship by Robert Mugabe, and, as a result, both its people and wildlife are endangered species.

The more African countries where “No Service” can be a choice, not a fate — an offering for the eco-tourist to enjoy, not a condition for the entrepreneur to overcome — the more hope that this continent will be able to enhance its natural wonders and its people at the same time.

Next we get to Mr. Egan:

This week marks the return of “Mad Men,” the television drama that serves as anthropological time travel to a world where doctors smoke, sexual harassment is a hoot, and it is never too early for an office drink because it’s always noon somewhere.

But as much fun as it is to revel in the cosmetic retro fascination of the era — ooh, bullet bras, up-do hairdos, and finger-snapping hepcats down in the Village — the series about a Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s works best as a startling reminder of just how distant the near past really is.

Americans may be heavier, with a diminished attention span, even less classy than the troubled souls of the Men in the Gray Flannel Suit costume drama. But clearly, we’re better off in most regards.

Consider the show’s treatment of three themes: personal health, attitudes toward race, and sexual equality.

My parents and their friends were nicotine fiends, the women smoking even during late pregnancy. The high point of tobacco addiction was around 1964, when 42 percent of adults smoked. Today, the figure is less than 20 percent — a modern low.

I remember rattling around inside a station wagon filled with secondhand smoke. No seat belts, of course. And after the ride, we 6-year-olds reeked of Lucky Strikes.

Now, smokers are such pariahs that the actors on the set of “Mad Men” can’t even puff real cigarettes; they have to use herbal ones, or run afoul of the law.

If a driver of that station wagon had a drink or two before getting behind the wheel, so what? Drunken driving was a respected social skill. Last year, 11,773 Americans died in accidents involving drunken driving — tragically high, but down by more than 50 percent from a generation ago.

Roger Sterling, the silver-haired sybarite in the “Mad Men” ad agency, suffered a major heart attack, telegraphed from his first three-martini lunch. Today, coronary heart disease is still the leading cause of mortality in the United States, but the death rate from heart attacks is down 72 percent since 1960.

The brooding, unfathomable ad man at the center of the show, Don Draper, has high blood pressure. When his doctor asks how much he’s boozing, he admits, after some hesitation, to five drinks a day. He also has sexual problems, unable to match the passion of his stunning wife, a Grace Kelly look-alike who is a shrink session away from going full Betty Friedan.

Another mad man has an African-American lover. When a child sees the girlfriend in a picture frame on his desk, she asks, “Is that your maid?”

It was not an unreasonable assumption. Interracial marriage was illegal in more than a dozen states until 1967, and constituted less than 2 percent of all sanctioned unions in that decade. Now the number is close to 7 percent. And the child of one such marriage is president of the United States.

Women are portrayed as both ferocious felines and passive hens in the show. Peggy Olson, the secretary allowed into the writers pool, is smarter than most of her colleagues, but is still treated like office furniture — a situation that matches my mother’s memories of writing ad copy with the Brylcreemed boys.

“When God closes a door,” Sterling says at one point, “he opens a dress.” The more meditative Draper asks Sterling, in a Freudian ad moment, “What do women want?”

“Who cares?” he replies.

In the office 2009, he would have to care, or risk offending his boss. Women account for 51 percent of all workers in high-paying management, professional or related occupations, the federal government reported in its latest labor force portrait. They outnumber men as writers and public relations managers.

For gays, it’s been a similar sea change. A closeted homosexual art director, Salvatore Romano, can only sigh and speak in artsy code with the writer he pines for on the show. Gay marriage, which has been legalized in six states, would not even have made a source of homophobic office jokes in 1962, it was so far-fetched.

Is all of this progress, a march toward a more tolerant, equitable, less socially inauthentic society? Sure. Plus, Don Draper would have Lipitor for his heart and Viagra for his sexual troubles. The interracial couple would hardly draw a stare in most states. Romano would be part of an old married gay couple. Peggy would run the place. But Roger Sterling, beyond redemption, would be dead.

Still, some things are clearly missed from those days, when life was perhaps better in the margins. Breakfast without a BlackBerry next to the blueberries, for one. No rush to tweet or post every idle thought, for another. And that soundtrack … fly me to the moon.

Well, except that “Fly Me To the Moon” was written in 1954 and most of what people think of as “the 60s” started in about 1966, the Summer of Love…  Here’s Mr. Rich:

In our 24/7 mediasphere, this weekend’s misty Woodstock commemorations must share the screen with Americans screaming bloody murder at town hall meetings. It’s a vivid reminder that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be — literally in some cases — those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation ’69.

The most historically resonant television event this weekend, however, may be none of the above. Sunday night is the premiere of the third season of “Mad Men,” the AMC series about a fictional Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s. The first episode is to be simulcast in Times Square after a costume party where fans can parade their retro wardrobes. This promotional event is Woodstock, corporate style, with martinis instead of marijuana, Sinatra instead of Shankar and narrow ties supplanting the tie-dyed.

Woodstock’s 40th anniversary is being celebrated as well — with new books, a new documentary, a new Ang Lee movie and the inevitable remastered DVDs and CDs. But it’s “Mad Men” that has the pulse of our moment. Though the show unfolds in an earlier America than Woodstock, it seems of far more recent vintage, for better and for worse.

As many boomers have noted, Woodstock’s nirvana was a one-of-a-kind, one-weekend wonder anyway, not the utopia of subsequent myth. It wasn’t even meant to be free; in the chaos, the crowds overwhelmed and overran the ticket sellers. That concept of “free” — known to some adults as “theft” — persists today in the downloading of “free” music, which has decimated the recording industry far more effectively than brown acid ever did.

Even in Woodstock’s immediate aftermath, there was no consensus on its meaning. A Times editorial titled “Nightmare in the Catskills” saw “a nightmare of mud and stagnation” and asked rhetorically, “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” Time magazine, surprisingly, was more sympathetic. “It is an open question,” the writer intoned, “whether some as yet unknown politician could exploit the deep emotions of today’s youth to build a politics of ecstasy.” Actually, both proved wrong. Woodstock was no apocalypse, but neither was it a political turning point. Nixon would be re-elected in 1972, and the only politician with a touch of ecstasy, Robert Kennedy, had already been murdered.

Ten years later, a New Yorker cartoon depicted a Woodstock reunion as a buttoned-down yuppie cocktail party, not a hippie love-in. By then, the ’60s counterculture had been completely commodified. Today a Woodstock couldn’t exist without corporate sponsorship; in fact this weekend’s planned 40th-anniversary concert was canceled for lack of one. Any large-scale youth “community” would be virtual, on Facebook and Twitter, and so might some of the sex. Only pot remains eternal.

That the early ’60s of “Mad Men” seems more contemporary than the late ’60s of Woodstock has little to do with the earlier period’s style or culture in any case (however superior the clothes). The rock giants of Woodstock remain exponentially more popular than Vic Damone and Perry Como, the forgotten crooners heard in “Mad Men.” The repressive racial and sexual order of Sterling Cooper, the show’s fictional ad agency, is also a relic, in part because of the revolutions that accelerated in the Woodstock era. The misogyny, racism and homophobia practiced in the executive suites of “Mad Men” are hardly extinct — and neither are the cigarettes that most of the characters chain-smoke — but they are in various stages of remission.

What makes the show powerful is not nostalgia for an America that few want to bring back — where women were most valued as sex objects or subservient housewives, where blacks were, at best, second-class citizens, and where the hedonistic guzzling of gas and gin went unquestioned. Rather, it’s our identification with an America that, for all its serious differences with our own, shares our growing anxiety about the prospect of cataclysmic change. “Mad Men” is about the dawn of a new era, and we, too, are at such a dawn. And we are uncertain and worried about what comes next.

In his new book “1959: The Year Everything Changed,” Fred Kaplan writes about the forces that were roiling America in the year before “Mad Men” begins. It was in 1959 that Berry Gordy founded Motown, that G. D. Searle applied to the F.D.A. for approval of the birth-control pill, and that Texas Instruments announced the advent of the microchip. The year began with a Soviet technological triumph, the launching of the spacecraft Lunik I, and ended with an embarrassing capitalist fiasco, Ford Motor’s yanking of the ignominious Edsel. Along the way the first two American soldiers were killed in South Vietnam. “By the end of 1959,” Kaplan writes, “all the elements were in place for the upheavals of the subsequent decades.”

The first season of “Mad Men” was set in 1960. This season — and there will be no spoilers here — opens in 1963. That’s the year of Beatlemania’s first sightings, of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington and, of course, of gunfire in Dallas. Bruce Handy sums it up in the current Vanity Fair: “As in Hitchcock, the characters are unaware of shocks that the audience knows all too well lie ahead, whether they be the Kennedy assassination and women’s lib or long sideburns and the lasting influence of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s witty, self-deprecating ‘lemon’ ad for Volkswagen.”

What we don’t know is how the characters will be rocked by these changes. But we’re reasonably certain it won’t be pretty. That’s where the drama is, and it’s tense.

In the world of television, “Mad Men” is notorious for drawing great press and modest audiences. This could be the season when the viewers catch up, in part because the show is catching up to the level of anxiety we feel in 2009. In the first two seasons, the series was promoted with the slogan “Where the Truth Lies.” This year, it’s “The World’s Gone Mad.” The ad hyping the season premiere depicts the impeccably dressed Don Draper, the agency executive played by Jon Hamm, sitting in his office calmly smoking a Lucky Strike as floodwater rises to his waist.

To be underwater — well, many Americans know what that’s like right now. But we are also at that 1963-like pivot point of our history, with a new young president unlike any we’ve seen before, and with the promise of a new frontier whose boundaries are a mystery. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan framed this mood the last time around, but you don’t know what it is. We feel Don Draper’s disorientation as his once rock-solid ’50s America starts to be swept away. We recognize his fear that the world could go mad.

It’s through this prism we might re-examine the raucous town hall eruptions this month. Even if they are inflated by activist organizations and cable-TV overexposure, they still cannot be dismissed entirely as made-for-media phenomena made-to-measure to fill the August news vacuum. Nor are they necessarily about health care. The twisted distortions about “death panels” and federal conspiracies “to pull the plug on grandma” are just too unhinged from the reality of any actual legislation. These bogus fears are psychological proxies for bigger traumas.

“It’s the economy, the facts that millions of people have lost their jobs and millions of others are afraid of losing theirs,” theorizes one heckled senator, Arlen Specter. That’s surely part of it. So is fear of more home foreclosures and credit card bankruptcies. So is fear of China, whose economic ascension stands in stark contrast to the collapse of traditional American industries from automobiles to newspapers. So is fear of Barack Obama, whose political ascension dramatizes the coming demographic order that will relegate whites to the American minority. In our uncharted new frontier, even the most reliable fixture for a half-century of American public life, the Kennedy family, is crumbling.

These anxieties coalesce in various permutations right, left and center. In most cases they don’t surface in the explosions we’re seeing at these town hall meetings but in the kind of quiet desperation that afflicts Don Draper and his cohort in “Mad Men.” But this summer’s explosions are also in keeping with 1963.

The political rage at the young, liberal Kennedy administration in some quarters that year was rabid and ominous. When Adlai Stevenson, then ambassador to the United Nations, spoke in Dallas that October, jeering zealots spat on him and struck him with a picketer’s placard. Stevenson advised Kennedy against traveling there. Dallas rushed to draft a new city ordinance restricting protesters’ movements at lawful assemblies and passed it on Nov. 18. We need not watch “Mad Men” to learn how that turned out.

Oh, to be back in the idyllic summer of 1969, when the biggest sin committed by the rebellious mobs at Woodstock was getting stoned. Something else is happening here in our anxious summer of 2009, when instead of flower-power and free love there are reports of death threats and fanatics packing guns.