Krauthammer vs. Generals

Charles Krauthammer usually manages to piss me off. So he's got an MD? An MD friend of mine says that an MD is easy compared to a PhD. So he's got a law degree? So do a lot of people who aren't able to apply what they learned to living inside the law. And when he goes off, as he did last Friday, on retired generals who (heaven forbid!) are saying unkind things about Rumsfeld and Bush, he really pisses me off. I'd love to hear what my father-in-law, a retired military officer and (now) a staunch Democrat, has to say on the subject.
See, Dad wrote a letter to the Washington Post about a year ago when the Swift Boat slugs crawled out from under their rocks to attack John Kerry for his opposition to the Viet Nam war. As Dad pointed out, free speech is the right of every American, but it particularly belongs to those who have fought for it. And the generals surely fall into that category. Apparently Charlie Krauthammer thinks that people in the armed forces should permanently give up some of the rights of American citizens rather than just checking them at the door and picking them up as they leave the service.
Charlie seems to think that the generals kept quiet while they were still in uniform. I'm not so sure. Some of these guys were one-stars before the war, and in the Pentagon, where anything less than a bird colonel is a go-fer, a one-star isn't going to get much of an audience. Anything they said would have had to percolate up the chain of command to Rummy, and those who told the truth--see Shinsecki--suffered the consequences. It's entirely possible that some of these guys made their thoughts known to their superiors, and their superiors (for whatever reasons) refused to carry the message forward. ("One-star, what you say makes sense to me, but my fourth star makes even more sense, so I'm not going to tell the boss.") And they were soldiers, so they didn't step outside of the Pentagon and make their cases to the first reporters they could find. That's part of being a good soldier, and being a good soldier matters a lot to officers.
The generals have every right to call it as they see it. If they didn't do so when they were in uniform, shame on them. If they did and they were ignored by those who outranked them, those who outrank them are a disgrace to their uniforms. The Republican Revolution is over. The defection of military is a clear sign.

Death for Moussaoui?

Now that the prosecution has wrung the jury members' emotions in the sentencing hearing for Zacharias Moussaoui, the self-proclaimed would-be 9-11 hijacker, the defense gets a chance to save him from himself. I hope they succeed for several reasons.
First, I think Moussaoui is demented, regardless of what the court's psychiatrists said. His courtroom behavior is often bizzare, and the filings he entered when he was defending himself were incoherent. The only thing that seems to organize his perceptions is his claim that he is al Quaeda (a claim that some al Quaeda operatives have denied) and his eagerness to be executed.
Second is that he is so eager to be executed so that he can be a martyr. In the US, we overlook the seriousness with which suicide bombers approach martyrdom. Suicide is such an anathema that we don't accept any possibility that a suicide could go immediately to paradise and be surrounded by seventy virginis ready to perform whatever sexual favors or other services he wants. (Yeah, it sounds pretty far-fetched.) But the fact is that there are people in the al Quaeda world who really believe it. There's a possibility that we're wrong and the guy really does get paradise and the virgins; I'd hate to give even a terrorist wanna-be a reward like that. And why let would-be terrorists know that we're willing to help them get what they are after? Imagine for a minute that you're one of the guys who's susceptible to this stuff in the first place. Moussaoui is executed, your leaders tell you that he is a martyr and got the paradise and virgins package, and you know that you're going to get the same package, even if you don't succeed in your mission. You're more likely to take on your mission because you can only win. If you think that you might just end up rotting in a cell in a super max prison for the rest of your natural life with no hope of parole, that could give you pause.
Finally, we need to stop promoting this notion of closure through execution. It's terrible that people lost loved ones on 9-11, and I can't imagine their pain. But I doubt that executing anybody is going to relieve that pain. No one will ever see the families of victims after the execution; no one will see that the execution did nothing to diminish their sense of loss and may, thereby, have made them even angrier. Increasingly, the media presents execution as something that we do to ease the pain of survivors, and that makes it a more desirable act. I think it overlooks that loss is loss, and tragic loss is unalterably tragic.
Don't get me wrong. Moussaoui shouldn't live because he's innocent. He shouldn't live because I don't believe in capital punishment to begin with. He should live the rest of his life in prison because jerks like him shouldn't be permitted to go to their executions cheerfully, expecting that they are on the verge of something wonderful.

Bush Authorized the Leak

It looks like Scooter Libby is not going to go down gently; he's going to hang onto Bush and Cheney for dear life, and if they get dragged down, so be it. Now he says that Bush authorized the leak, and some folks are saying that Bush had the authority to do that. Time out, folks. I used to work with classified information. Once something was declassified, it was declassified. Notices were given, markings were changed and any use of it by anybody was governed by the new classification. Bush could have done that; there are procedures. But that's not what he did. He authorized giving classified information to someone who had neither the requisite security clearance nor the need to know. Anyone looking to find a record of when Bush declassified the information in question is going to look in vain, because it wasn't declassified. And if the information had been properly declassified, there wouldn't be any case at this point because the laws only prohibit disclosure of classified information.
I can't remember the penalties for disclosure of classified information; I remember the steps necessary to safeguard it, and I remember that the penalties were severe. Maybe we'll reach critical mass on criminal charges and Bushie can rot in a penitentiary.

The End of the Dance

George Mason is out of the NC double-A championship tournament. They had a great run, and I’m sorry that they don’t get to bring home the trophy. One of the players says that they changed the face of college basketball, and I only wish he were right. They may have made the point that five guys who play together and love to compete can beat guys who are worrying most about their highlights tapes and NBA contracts. What they didn’t touch was the governance of college basketball, the NC double-A. (By the way, the NCAA insists that broadcasters say “N-C-A-A” instead of NC double-A, and they’re the ones who insist that players be called “student-athletes,” even those who, like Chris McCray, don’t go to class.)
In Saturday’s game, there was room for complaint from George Mason fans. Early in the game, Ginger started complaining that the commentators were talking about Florida as if they were the only team on the court. That got worse. Then even the broadcasters began pointing out that there might well be questions about some of the officiating. I thought the second foul actually called on Noah was really about his fourth, and it was almost criminal that Tony Skinn got called for a blocking foul when he had clearly set up and taken a charge in a situation that might have slowed Florida down a bit. Jim Larranaga says that Mason didn’t use because of officiating, but I’d say that officiating certainly wasn’t even-handed, and that’s a problem.
At the end of the game, Ginger commented that the NC double-A had gotten the outcome they wanted. And there’s reason to believe that. After all, when the tournament brackets were announced three weeks ago today, some fairly respectable commentators, such as Billy Packer and Dick Vitale, started talking about how George Mason didn’t belong in the tournament. It was arguably good for the credibility of the tournament that George Mason beat Michigan State, and it probably didn’t hurt that they beat North Carolina. That indicated that the selection committee really hadn’t erred; a case could be made for that George Mason was the Cinderella team—the one that really belonged. The credibility of the selection committee and the selection process was preserved.
But sports in the United States in the twenty-first century have taken some hits. Too many spectacular performances have been powered by steroids. Those of us who thought that it was dirty of Ford Frick to put an asterisk after Roger Maris’ single-season home run record now wonder what present-day records should carry an indication that the recordholder was artificially enhanced. The integrity of the competition must be preserved, and that means that a near-interloper like George Mason can’t win the National Championship. There would be questions about games being fixed. There would be questions about whether the players were trained illegally. It’s much easier to make sure that the Cinderella team doesn’t win the biggest game—that the magic carpet ride ends before the last dance.
Think of the marketing problems if George Mason wins. Think of the J. J. Redick jerseys that have to be sold at a loss. Think of the Carolina and Connecticut tee-shirts that nobody wants. Think of the recruiting problems. Guys who were committed to Duke might want to rethink. The whole college basketball world might be thrown into disarray. It wouldn’t just be a case of an upstart out-of-nowhere school winning; George Mason played a totally different kind of basketball in which being a MdDonald’s High School All-American doesn’t matter and in which the superstar doesn’t matter. So George Mason was a threat, and George Mason had to go.
To their credit, the Patriots and their coaches walked off the court with their heads high, proud of what they had accomplished, and not crushed by what they had not accomplished. And maybe the NC double-A didn’t do anything to orchestrate the outcome. But now that sports is about business and entertainment and only peripherally about competition, the powers that be were surely comfortable with this outcome.