Tilting at windmills

Washington Monthly, May-July, 2008 by Charles Peters

That disturbs me. It disturbs me because all the American people have seen of Wright is his crazy side. They have no idea why Obama would have respected him for so long and would not be able to understand why Obama had not "distanced himself" earlier.

I got a foreboding of the disaster the press might be creating when I read Dana Milbank's report of a Pennsylvania voter who said of Obama: "I think he just wants to be president because he's black."

How to operate with the operators

Jim Johnson is a charming man. Curiously, the only time I met him was when we shared a table with Vernon Jordan. As I chatted to him, I thought, "My God, he's even smoother than Vernon."

Washington is full of skilled operators, though these two are a little smoother than most. Many see themselves as devoted to the public interest, and more than a few really are. But there is one exception that Barack Obama should understand: their devotion to the public interest ends when it conflicts with the interests of their clients.

A wise president will certainly use operators like these if he wants to be effective. But he has to be very careful to look at the background of each in terms of his fitness for the particular assignment. In Johnson's case, Obama clearly failed to do this. It would have been fine to have Johnson as a member of his vice presidential search committee. But the symbolism of him as the head of the committee was painfully wrong. Johnson should have been disqualified by his history with Fannie Mae and his participation in the back-scratching clique of CEOs and board members who take care of one another with lavish compensation.

They all laughed ...

Gregg Easterbrook warns, in the cover story of the June Atlantic, that the Earth could be struck by an asteroid capable of causing catastrophic damage, and NASA is doing almost nothing to prevent this potential calamity. Although he makes a persuasive case, my first reaction was, "We've already got enough other dangers to worry about." Then I remembered an article Easterbrook wrote for the Monthly in 1980 in which he told astronauts that if a booster rocket failed, "You'd die." His warning was ignored by NASA, with the result being the Challenger disaster.

By stop-loss, we don't mean loss of life

The Army's suicide rate, reports the Associated Press, is now the "highest it has ever been." If you want to understand why, I suggest you look at the Army's cruel policy of sending soldiers back to Iraq for repeated tours, and most especially its "stop-loss" program. This policy permits the Army to compel soldiers to remain in the service even though their enlistment has expired. The poor soldier who had signed up for four years and served his time, been shot at in Iraq and thinks he is now safe, is told he must stay in the Army and return to Iraq once more. This happened to Sergeant David White, who told NBC's Jim Mikiaszewski, "I was just in disbelief. I didn't think something like that could ever happen to me."

But happen it did. Another stop-loss victim was shipped back to Iraq, where seven months later a roadside bomb "severed my hand almost completely off."