Trying for accountability

Peggy Noonan has an interesting piece in the WSJ, contrasting the way the Marines handled the plane crash near Miramar in December -- complete investigation, identifying mistakes, naming names, suspending or firing people responsible, doing it in public -- and contrasting it with the financiual crisis, where pretty much nobody took anything resembling personal responsibility.

If you want to know who really was responsible, however, I would recommend reading Thomas E. Woods' new book, "Meltdown." I'll link to the review I did for the Register when they put it up.

Only stimulating pork

Peggy Noonan has a tendency to over-romanticize politics and its capacity to be ennobling or even sometimes constructive. Still, she has a point in yesterday's column. Obama missed a big chance to assert himself and come up with a "stimulus" that might have actually stimulated some economic activity instead of just being a pastiche of pork (assuming government spending is actually stimulative, which is far from certain. Tax cuts can be, however.). Both Democrats and Republicans couldn't wait to return to their hyper-partisan habits, with the Democrats crafting a bill with everything on their wish-list for the last couple of decades with zero GOP input, and all House Republicans taking a stand and voting against it. I'm inclined to agree that there's a stupid party and an evil party, and when they get together and produce something both stupid and evil they call it bipartisanship. But the swiftness with which both parties were so eager to let Obama know post-partisanship wouldn't last a week was kinda shocking. If he had had more legislative experience or had thought this stimulus thing through more, I think he could have knocked some Dem heads together and forced a slightly less obnoxious bill. Maybe it will happen in the Senate. Here's the Register's take on the situation.

As conservatism implodes

Even as the Republican Party seems poised to suffer a defeat of post-Watergate-like proportions on Tuesday, I was amazed to find a recent poll to the effect that 59 percent of Republicans still think highly of George W. Bush. That suggests to me that 59 percent of Republicans have virtually no discernment or a death wish. George W. Bush has taken the Republican Party and strangled it with his bare hands, abandoning every limited-government principle along the way. My old friend and former colleague Harold Johnson used to say the Republicans love to "touch the purple," meaning they have what seems a natural urge to dote on and be impressed by those in power.Can it be that, or is it enough that Dubya once said he had a conversion experience and really loves Jesus?

Thank goodness there are still a few conservative commentators with a sense of proportion and a certain respect for principle, like George Will and to some extent Peggy Noonan. I don't know if I want the modern conservative movement to reconstitute itself on somewhat more sophisticated principles or just disappear into the mist, which just might leave an opening for libertarians, constitutionalists, Paulistas and genuine devotees of limited government. Obama will surely do many stupid things that have dire consequences, but who will be there to point them out in a coherent way?

I take some comfort from Adam Smith's admonition that there's a great deal of ruin in a country. But I fear we may have to endure a good deal of it.

Conservatives (some) getting honest about Palin

One expected it from Andrew Sullivan, who has been in the tank for Obama since at least last December and has been on a special mission against Sarah since she first emerged. But of late we have seen any number of conservatives, often after giving her a pretty good chance, come around to the position that Sarah Palin is about as far from being qualified to hold high office as one can imagine. It was certainly a factor in Christopher Buckley, WFB's son, endorsing Obama and getting fatwahed out of his father's old magazine. But as usual, the most eloquent judgment has come from Peggy Noonan, all the more devastating for being fair-minded and almost gentle. Money quote:

But we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but what for?

Peggy sees the Palin choice as an example of the infantilization of American politics. We want people who drop their g's and say "mom and dad,"people who are "like us" rather than adults we might consider looking up to. I might suggest it could be more like a sign of the decline of the empire.

Peggy's not mad about the pastor

I was glad to see that in this column Peggy Noonan, one of my favorite writers even when she's wrong, expressed her lack of outrage about Rev. Nathaniel Wright. It's not that she agrees with him; she disagrees at a rather profound level. "But I am finding it hard to feel truly upset about what Mr. Wright has said," she writes. "I do not feel a sense of honest anger or violation at his remarks, in part because I don't think his views carry deep implications for our country." She can certainly understand black anger, and reminds us that it is hardly a new phenomenon. But she claims that anger, while it can be used for short-term political gains, is "essentially unhelpful and impractical." She compares the prevalence in a time that has seen remarkable advances (though certainly short of utopian gains) to the insistence of some Irish-Americans on reveling in old anti-English attitudes despite the fact that no Englishman has ever oppressed them as a species of ethnic loyalty that satisfies some messy inner need but doesn't leave people wanting to punch somebody's nose.

I don't know if I'm quite as sanguine about hate being impractical. I'm neither black nor Irish, so I can't speak for those identities. I got old stories from my grandmother about anti-German prejudice during WW I (when my grandfather wasn't allowed to enlist largely because of his last name) but she tried to use the stories to teach us never to succumb to that kind of prejudice or to bitterness. It seemed long ago to me and still does. Maybe I can understand bitterness, but I can hope that it will fade as the generations that most embodied it fades.

Noonan and Judis on Buckley

Here are a couple of more pretty good appreciations of William F. Buckley. Peggy Noonan is such a graceful writer, and she usually finds a point or perspective nobody else has said quite the same way -- in this case the value to the country of people with broad and deep educations and wide-ranging curiosity. John Judis, still with the New Republic, is a liberal who wrote a pretty even-handed biography of Buckley, I think in the late 1980s. He describes Buckley as a rebel, but not a heretic.