Taking a cue from George W. Bush, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said of the Times Square bomber, “We will not be intimidated by those who hate the freedoms that make … this country so great.” This was the mantra after Sept. 11. We are hated not because of what we do in the Middle East, but because of who we are: people who love freedom and stand for women’s rights. And that is why they hate us — and why they come to kill us. In a way this is a comforting thought, because it absolves us of the need to think…

(Or) American’s toxic culture may be a reason devout Muslims detest us. It is not why they come here to kill us. Mohammed Atta’s friends did not target Hollywood, but centers and symbols of U.S. military and political power. U.S. Marines were not attacked by Hezbollah until we inserted those Marines into Lebanon’s civil war. No Iraqi committed an act of terror against us before we invaded Iraq. And if the Sept. 11 killers were motivated by hatred of the immorality of our society, what were they doing getting lap dances in Delray Beach?…

By Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Looking at America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Maj. Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Shahzad decided that what we call the war on terror was in reality a war on Islam.

All decided to use their access to exact retribution for our killing of their fellow Muslims. We are being attacked over here because we are over there. [Bolds mine—R]

This line of thought seems to be one of the more controversial in recent memory, which is probably why so few public people outside of academia voice it. I could leave my house this moment and easily round up a dozen or more people who realize this simple cause-and-effect relationship, but these are not people whose voices get airtime. No, public personalities who speak out loud this provable, painfully obvious sentiment get called “weird” or “radical” or “unpatriotic” (see Paul, Rand, and the Campaign for U.S. Senator from Kentucky, 2010).

Taking a hard look at American policies is simply uncool, for politician and pundit alike; whether it’s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (patriots vs. anti-Semites), the abortion debate (respecters of women vs. intolerant chauvinists), or tax policy (Reaganomics/Clintonomics/Obamanomics vs. anyone who admits out loud that Social Security, Medicare and/or military spending will have to be drastically cut in the near future)… the question is never “what exactly is wrong,” but “which side is right?”

Wrong, wrong, wrong… all wrong. It’s why so many people are fed up with politics, and why I haven’t bothered to blog about it for so long. The conventional wisdom is what people are expected to discuss, from either the “conservative” perspective or the “liberal” one. Problem is, the conventional wisdom is rarely wisdom at all. It’s just so much bumper-sticker boilerplate, and the only one who benefits from it (aside from the bumper-sticker printers) are the politicians who rely on it to keep them from having to make any difficult decisions on anything of significance.

PS: Other anti-conventional-wisdom posts I’ve appreciated recently include the following: Ross Douthat’s “Myths of the Supply Side,” Daniel Larison’s “Questioning Our Assumptions About Iran,” and James Antle’s “Run, Ron, Run!”

Republicans object to so many irrelevant things that Obama does and they treat absolutely everything as some supreme, unpardonable error that it is impossible to take any of their criticism seriously.

Read it twice. Then reflect on the past few months. Then read it again, and see if you don’t agree.

This is why I’m commenting so little on politics these days — vanity, vanity!

If homeowner’s insurance worked like American health insurance, it would not only pay for fires but also cover utility bills, replacing broken appliances, baseballs hit into the window and all the food, drink and paper towels that pass through the kitchen. Certainly, a company could offer an insurance product that covered absolutely every expense of living in a home. But such insurance would be phenomenally expensive and full of ultra-complex rules; the insurer would also acquire an incentive to dream up excuses to deny payment. Just like American health care insurance!

— Gregg Easterbrook, “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”

Politicians seem to live in a two-dimensional world (think C.S. Lewis’ “flatlanders”), while the rest of us are out here in 3D, pleading with them to see features they simply aren’t built to recognize. Put another way, our representatives present us with black and white on health care — Bad Option A, and (totally different but just as) Bad Option B. Thus you have the “public option,” and the “leave it alone” camps battling for supremacy.

(You haven’t heard Republicans saying, explicitly, “leave it alone.” They talk about “sensible reforms” that are supposed to come if the Dems scrap all their current plans and go back to the drawing board. This is kind of like me saying, “Sure, I’ll exercise more, just as soon as I start getting enough sleep the nights before.” In other words, it ain’t gonna happen.)

Leave it to a football column to provide a far better alternative. In his “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” article at ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook takes a break from dissecting plays and mocking the punt — no, he says, it is NOT that risky to try on fourth down — to present a quite cogent and perfectly simple argument: Insurers should face price-controls, and providers should have to offer non-insured individuals the same pricing they offer insurance companies. (More quotes after the jump.)

Denying coverage to people with medical conditions is not only unjust, it causes insurers to waste money engaging in wars with their own customers. If health insurers must sell to anyone who wishes to buy, then their resources can be better invested in providing care. … Not enough attention has gone to a simple change that would remove much of the injustice from health insurance — standard rates with no denials for existing conditions. This is the key to the successful health care system of the Netherlands.

Good points, there, and we’re not even into the meat of the argument. Easterbrook — a conservative/libertarian hybrid, from what I can tell — seems to agree with my notion that human beings should not necessarily NEED health insurance, any more than they need car insurance. I could — and can — save the money I’d put toward high coverage on my auto every month, and when something does happen, I could use that money to fix the car myself. (I’m not speaking of liability coverage, which is a pretty sound practice.) Why is our health any different? Because health care is so expensive, that’s why. But WHY?

Recently, a family member needed an MRI. The clinic had a list price of $1,500 for the scan but was in the insurer’s PPO, and so discounted (“adjusted”) the price to $690, of which we paid 10 percent and the insurer paid the rest. Clearly, that $690 price allows the MRI clinic to do business … or else the clinic would not participate in the PPO. Yet if I’d walked in off the street and said, “I will buy this MRI myself,” the price would have been $1,500. Meanwhile, if the clinic had not been a member of my PPO, the insurer would have paid the same $621 it pays within the PPO, and I would have been on the hook for the rest, $879. …

The distinction between list prices and “adjusted” prices prevents health care services from functioning as a rational marketplace. It’s not just that many physicians refuse to speak about dollar figures. (“We don’t discuss prices over the phone,” a doctor’s office told me a few months ago when I had the gall to ask what something would cost, adding, “after the doctor has seen you, then we will tell you what the visit cost.”) [Bold mine-R]

This strikes me as one of those things a 7-year-old could figure out, but that a 55-year-old congressman just simply can’t quite crack open. It’s changing the system, it’s doing something rationally… in other words, it’s totally against everything Washington is.

Suppose insurance covered only catastrophes, and you paid the rest. You might think, “No way I am paying some doctor hundreds of dollars to set a broken arm.” But today a typical family’s health care policy that appears to cost the family $5,000 a year actually costs $15,000, it’s just that much of the money is hidden as employer’s costs — and thus, as higher wages the employer can’t pay. If you spent $5,000 a year for catastrophic coverage but earned an additional $10,000 a year, you could cover those strep-throat and broken-arm bills yourself, and probably come out ahead. Plus you’d have a keen incentive to comparison shop. Doctors could no longer loftily say, “We don’t discuss prices.” [Bold mine-R]

Seriously, the guy’s thoughts are just too hard not to quote. (You should really go read it yourself, but you’ll have to wade through thoroughly enjoy all the football talk first.)

Seriously! Check out her Facebook page, and tell me it’s not a parody! 1.) The name; 2.) The Obama-meets-Globetrotters logo; 3.) The “info” page (her favorite books include “The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business”??); 4.) And comments like this one: “Tell Krystal Ball you support her in being an openly psychic nominee for the Democratic party.”

The things the president said he was looking for — greater competition among insurance providers, market-based cost controls, even some malpractice reform — are all things that conservatives (including moderate conservatives with a libertarian bent and liberal nuance, like myself) should applaud. Applaud they did, at least on that last, but something tells me that tomorrow they won’t take Obama’s words on the others at face value. It may have to do with Pelosi (notice how that name is starting to be uttered with the same seething contempt of “Clinton” and “Kennedy” once were?); it may have to do with them cow-towing to a fringe-yet-vocal group among their base who question Obama’s allegiances, birthplace, etc.

But, seriously, I am at an utter loss to see how any of Obama’s notions are anything like “socialism.” Reminds me of liberal college kids, picketing GOP White Houses and screaming “fascist!” with no historical understanding of what that word actually means. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of some of the president’s claims, especially those saying there’ll be “not one dime” added to the federal deficit if a plan passes. But skepticism shouldn’t mean defeatism, nor alarmism, and it stands to reason that a compromise bill is worth a shot, since it can always be changed a couple years down the road if the savings don’t pan out.

Alas, what I just wrote is essentially the GOP’s best argument: Once it’s built, an “entitlement program” (though that’s not really what this would be) is quite hard to tear down. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of our brand of democracy, that a “popular” program that isn’t working (read: Social Security) can never be touched, despite all manner of expert opinion, because pissing off the constituents — even when it’s right — is political disaster. And so, I can understand Republican worries that, if established, the “public option” will become a staple and then a third rail, potentially costing this country trillions more down the line.

And yet, and yet… We can’t continue to allow our politicians to avoid the hard decisions, simply to maintain a status quo and avoid the political risks. Will we ever see term limits?

Our own local paper reported that school officials will provide alternate activities for students whose parents don’t want them watching Obama’s speech. Which is fine, so far as it goes — one wonders why schools don’t make it so easy for parents who don’t want their children immunized, for instance, or subjected to all manner of “tolerance” seminars — but what possible reason would one have for not wanting their child to see it? The same talking heads who are denouncing the speech are the ones who claim superiority on most issues of “patriotism”; since the presidency is set up by the Constitution, it would seem they’d at least let the guy tell their kids to do their homework and not play so many video games.

Some people, it seems, are so bent on finding anything wrong with Obama that, in turn, they’re forced to find everything wrong. The whole thing reminds me of one of the wiser comments I heard during the Sotomayor hearings a couple months back (it may have been Larison who said it, but I don’t remember off the top of my head). In her now-infamous “wise Latina woman” comments, Sotomayor was roundly accused of being racist — a charge that Republicans have long claimed was being leveled against them all too often, unfairly and generally with no regard to the context of what they were saying. Yet, instead of prove their point by holding their tongues, they simply decided that what was good for the goose was good for them, and hence lowered even further the amount of dialogue allowed where issues of culture/heritage/class are considered.

The equation seems to be this: Liberalism is socialism (it’s not). Obama is liberal (well, on some things). So Obama is a socialist. And since socialists like Hitler and Kim Jong Il sometimes speak to their people, the fact that Obama wants to give a speech shows just how socialist he is.

Only those who recognize the omnipresence of sin—recognizing first of all that they themselves number among the sinful—can possibly anticipate the moral snares inherent in the exercise of power. Righteousness induces blindness. The acknowledgment of guilt enables the blind to see. To press the point further, the statesman who assumes that “we” are good while “they” are evil—think George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11—will almost necessarily misinterpret the problem at hand and underestimate the complexity and costs entailed in trying to solve it. In this sense, an awareness of one’s own failings and foibles not only contributes to moral clarity but can help guard against strategic folly.

Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.

Those are the words of Col. Timothy Reese, a U.S. adviser to the Iraqi military, in the rarest of communications — a soldier suggesting that he and his colleagues should actually withdraw.

Pundits like Larison and Bacevich have been saying this for years; the former a “paleoconservative” and the latter a military expert of the realist school. And their overarching premise has been this: American pols have never undertaken to understand Mesopotamia, have little if any understanding of what drives these people, and can never be a real agent of change there as long as the goal is something as romantic as “liberation” or “democracy.”

Iraq never attacked us, and in fact does not play any sort of strategic role in the region; all along its borders are our allies, places with no organized ill intent toward us or any real ability to mount an offensive. It’s time to leave, and in fact it was never time to arrive.

President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood … His news conference the other night was bad. He was filibustery and spinny and gave long and largely unfollowable answers that seemed aimed at limiting the number of questions asked and running out the clock. You don’t do that when you’re fully confident. Far more seriously, he didn’t seem to be telling the truth. We need to create a new national health-care program in order to cut down on government spending? Who would believe that? Would anybody? [bold mine–R]

I’m not defending or promoting the status quo, which is bleeding people dry and heavily favors those with more over those with less. I think the free market has to be reined in sometimes, especially when we’re talking billion-dollar insurance companies and drugmakers who can exert undue influence on “our representatives” (see previous post). But what’s being bandied about is unlikely to fix much and will probably add all sorts of new problems.

I suspect voters, the past few weeks, have been giving themselves an internal Q-and-A that goes something like this: Will whatever health care bill is produced by Congress increase the deficit? “Of course.” Will it mean tax increases? “Of course.” Will it mean new fees of fines? “Probably.” Can I afford it right now? “No, I’m already getting clobbered.” Will it make the marketplace freer and better? “Probably not.” Is our health care system in crisis? “Yeah, it has been for years.” Is it the most pressing crisis right now? “No, the economy is.” Will a health-care bill improve the economy? “I doubt it.” …

The final bill, with all its complexities, will probably be huge, a thousand pages or so. Americans don’t fear the devil’s in the details, they fear hell is. Do they want the same people running health care who gave us the Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office and the invasion of Iraq? [bold mine–R]

Again, she nails it. And then there’s this:

[S]ome of the bills being worked on in Congress will allow for or mandate taxpayer funding of abortion. Speaking only and narrowly in political terms, this is so ignorant as to be astounding … telling those who believe abortion is evil that they not only have to accept its legality but now have to pay for it in a brand new plan, for which they’ll be more highly taxed. …

Americans in the most personal, daily ways feel they are less free than they used to be. And they are right, they are less free. Who wants more of that?

I think I’ll pass. Oh, wait — that’s not quite how it works, is it?

I am not interested in going to dinner with a great many people, and don’t feel the need to come to compromise with them on where I eat.

Had I been going by myself, I may have chosen Quiznos; had she, Thai Express may have been the destination. Instead, we discussed the issue until we agreed: Steak ‘n Shake.

What I’ve described is the essence of democracy: That a group of people discuss (whether explicitly or procedurally) issues and come to either consensus or compromise.

That doesn’t sound like our system, though. Take the current debates over health-care reform. Have a multitude of Americans been complaining about health-care costs for decades? Sure. And is our ratio of spending to results totally out of whack? Probably. But what’s going on in the halls of Congress isn’t limited to those questions… in fact, it may well be irrelevant to them.

We have these people, supposed “representatives,” whom we elect primarily based on factors like this: Moral philosophy // Speaking skills // Ability to procure funds for my district // Use of catchphrases and code words … the whole thing is slightly absurd, especially when you consider that the “representative” speaks with fewer than 1/100th of a percent of his/her constituents (except, perhaps, in Rhode Island).

These people are not representatives. They’re rulers, plain and simple, over whom we happen to have occasional hiring/firing power and a few other minimal checks. What’s more, they MAKE LAWS — an entirely separate topic, but suffice it to say that “law” once meant a moral code that most reasonable people understood and accepted, and was never meant to be invented and reinvented with each election cycle.

And what will it reap, in the instance I’m using? A host of health-care changes that confuse and confound and complicate, but which hardly any of us will be completely happy with — that is to say, individually, we would make different choices it it were simply up to us. You may say that this sounds just like the dining illustration I used above, except for this: I am not interested in going to dinner with a great many people, and don’t feel the need to come to compromise with them on where I eat. Yet my health care will be shared with all, my payments going not toward what I want but what “we want,” which really means “what few of us want.”

I’m afraid I’m being confusing, and possibly infuriating? But bear with me for a few more paragraphs. “Majority rules” is something we’re raised to see as reasonable, and rarely do we consider what a poor system this is. But take a presidential election, for example. Practically speaking, in the year 2000, 51 people voted for George W. Bush for every 49 who voted for Al Gore. (I’m simplifying the numbers a bit and avoiding discussion of the high court’s intervention in the election. Deal with it.) So the majority got its way — but what of the 49? They effectively got the same result as if they’d been zero.

That’s the two-party system to a tee: There is no compromise… just a whole lot of people forced to eat at a restaurant they didn’t choose, many of whom would have preferred to stay home and cook for themselves.