Just keep walking

It's been two days, and I'm still trying to get over Peggy Noonan's appearance on Sunday's This Week (with George Stephanopoulos) on ABC. I've written about this Wall Street Journal pundit before, her hunching forward in her chair as she whispers out pronouncements about the world from her perch that we are to take oh-so-seriously. Her reporting by walking around has allowed her to miss pretty much everything that's been going on in the country, and her self-important manner is in complete contrast to the wispiness of her ideas.

Peggy and the gang, Stephanopoulos, Will, Donaldson, and Roberts, were meandering in typical fashion through the news of the week, taking their predictable positions on all things, when they came to the release of the torture memos.

[Note: Perhaps the most ridiculous criticism of the release of the memos is that it would allow the terrorists to "prepare" for torture by revealing the methods. First of all, the techniques are already out there; there didn't seem to be anything new in the memos.

Second, Chertoff and Hayden, I have a suggestion: we're going to wire your genitals to a car battery in, say, three months. You have all that time to prepare, so I'm sure you'll breeze right through it, right?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the average person can withstand a pain level of 3 on a 0-10 scale. So we tell our enemies that we torture, so they begin to prepare themselves. They get up to the point where 6 is no problem, then we capture them. And...we turn it up to 7.]

I've expressed reservations over putting various members of the Bush administration on trial. I'm not certain the country is well-served by what would be lengthy and partisan trials. (I'm unsettled by the prospect of a lengthy trial of Illinois ex-governor Blagojevich, but it must happen under our system.) There was a lot of fear in the aftermath of 9/11, so, while I support a complete release of the facts, I'm still not convinced that turning that truth into a criminal proceeding against Bush, Cheney, and the others who approved of these activities serves any purpose. Frankly, either option makes me ill.

And then comes Peggy. She definitely feels we need to move on, which she expressed as, "Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

As a result, I've changed my opinion. That this wealthy, respected opinionator could, in her usual flippant manner, could believe that we should just gloss over this, the systematic (and ineffective) torture of prisoners in our custody is revolting. She would happily cloak herself in the 1st Amendment if anyone tried to abridge her freedom of the press, but her desire to discover the truth, which ought to serve as her job description, is conditional on what might be found - and who might be found under the rock.

If Peggy Noonan feels that our democratic government should cover things up, that we "need to be mysterious," that we "need to just keep walking," then she should walk right out of her cushy sinecure, her lush job pontificating to the great unwashed, and take some time to explore what other acts would deserve the brush-off. If someone breaks into her lavish digs and steals all her stuff, maybe the NYPD should just keep walking.

So, inspired by Peggy's limp thinking, I now believe we need to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. If Bush and Cheney violated the laws of this land, put them on trial. The lawyers who wrote the opinions that permitted the use of illegal tactics should be turned out; at a minimum, Bybee should be impeached and Yoo should be kicked out of Berkeley. Maybe Peggy will quit and join the defense team, using her novel strategy of "keep walking."

Martha and Bernie

I try to be philosophically consistent, or explain when it doesn't appear so. For example, I support making education better, but don't believe that we can try to educate everyone to the same level and then be surprised when we fail to see the outstanding kids do as well as we need them to do. Is this inconsistent, that education needs to be better but, for some students, we need to get them off the college track? I can see where some might think my logic doesn't hold up, but I've laid out my thinking in several posts and ask only for people to try to follow it, then evaluate it.

(At the same time, I don't find it consistent that people say we need to pay teachers more, but we also have to standardize the curriculum; so we're paying more money at the same time we're making teaching easier.)

Crises often present opportunities for great inconsistency. The problems are so large, and, clearly, no one orthodoxy is up to the task of making them better. It might seem incongruent to believe simultaneously in the power of the free market and in the Obama programs; if you believe both those things, you need to be prepared to explain yourself further.

David Letterman is going through such a time himself. He has been merciless in his treatment of "investor" Bernie Madoff, with a barrage of jokes and skits that can only make one believe that Dave has a few million dollars with the faux financier.

At the same time, better living guru Martha Stewart continues to get gentle handling on Dave's show. He has joked repeatedly (and somewhat tediously) about how, first, we can feel safer now that Martha's locked up, and now, how we should be worried that she's back on the streets (chortle, chortle).

But these crimes come out of the same sensibility. It's pat to argue that Bernie victimized people, while Martha's offense was "victimless." But, if you were one of the people who bought stock while tipped-off Martha was selling, you lost money just as surely as if you wrote Bernie a check. In fact, in some ways, her crime was worse; each of the people who signed up with Bernie had every opportunity to do due diligence, and they didn't. The other sides to the Martha trades had every right to believe that they possessed requisite information.

I'm not saying that the crimes were entirely proportional, and the relative prison terms strike me as roughly correct. But it's a much harder argument to claim that one case was unfair, the other fair. For both Martha and Bernie, the attitude of "something for nothing" was present, it informed their actions. And there were people on the other side of those trades who were hurt. Just because it's easy to see one group and not the other does not mean that we can't be bothered by both cases, and it doesn't mean that one perpretator should escape punishment.

Review - See you in Court

Thomas Geoghegan is a long-time Chicago labor attorney who has thrown his hat in the ring for the vacated U.S. House seat being vacated by new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Kathy G. of blog The G Spot has been hitting his candidacy hard since he announced; she clearly feels that Geoghegan would be a huge positive in the seat. (I won't link to any specific post, as it's pretty much the only topic she's been writing about - just go to the blog and look around.)

Her ardency is so pronounced, not only about his beliefs, but about his writing, that I went to the library and picked up a copy of his most recent book, See you in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation (2007). My review is, I'm sorry to say, mixed.

First, the good. Geoghegan's contention is that changes to the law have created a world in which the law is seen as arbitrary by average citizens. He is passionate on the subject that changes to the law over the past 30 years, whether deliberately cooked up by special interest groups, or well-meant changes that have suffered the Law of Unintended Consequences, have all conspired to make the legal system either rigged or capricious. Basic principles of equity and democracy have been subverted, all to the detriment of the little guy and, ultimately, the republic.

At its best, this book provides a useful counterpart to High Wire, Peter Gosselin's excellent book about the ways in which risk has been shifted from the institutions best equipped to handle it to the people and families who have the smallest safety net. It's often quite entertaining as it focuses on the legal system, as opposed to Gosselin's broader look at the trends in American society.

Unfortunately, that is also its undoing, as Geoghegan gets fairly deep (at least for me) into the arcana of our legal system. I'm fairly well-read, but I have no basis for deciding if the move from contract to tort law, for example, has as dire consequences as presented here. He is an unabashed "lefty," though I'm not really sure how he defines that exactly, so all of these changes and their deleterious effects are the results of right-wing conspiracy or incompetence. (Given the acquiescence of the left in areas in which I do have some knowledge, I'm not sure that we need to focus solely on the right in formulating our enemies' list.)

The information just spills out across the pages of the book - it is clearly the product of a feverishly thinking mind - but it too often lacks a focus that would put it all into context. I have no doubt that our legal system suffers from many problems, but I can't say that this book convinced me that an unwillingness to follow "the fourth footnote" is really a major one.

There are solutions, naturally, and I will admit that I have no basis for determining if they're the best we could come up with. I do know that most of them have no hope of being implemented, though I'd like to see them put on the table. For example, I had never considered the idea of moving toward European-style workers' councils, and it seems appealing to give employees some power over issues that affect them. At the same time, we are seeing a massive depowerization of employees in this country, so this "solution" is not one at all.

In summary, this is a book worth reading, especially if you want a liberal take on the legal system. If you have the level of knowledge I do, there are some skimmable areas, but there is still a lot of worthwhile material.

(By the way, I have no real opinion on Geoghegan's candidacy. I'm electioned out, and am not going to spend time before next month's primary evaluating the many candidates in a race in which I have no direct interest.)