The Strident Centrist Blog

After two years, accounts of what it was like in New Orleans during Katrina can still leave me with nothing to say. This week Dr. Anna Pou, the head and neck cancer surgeon who was arrested at the behest of the Louisiana attorney general but whom the grand jury refused to indict, tells her side of the story in an interview in Newsweek. Here’s an excerpt:

Tuesday night, we lost generator power, and that changed things a lot. ‘Til then we were on generator power so we did have some lights, and we did have some water. Water wasn’t clean, but it was running. But then we didn’t have water, we didn’t have any electricity, commodes were backing up everywhere. Conditions in the hospital started to deteriorate Tuesday night and early Wednesday.

. . .

By the time Wednesday evening came around, if you can imagine in our mind, there is a central area that is a sea of people. A lot of very sick patients in that central triage area. It’s grossly backed up. Few patients had been evacuated. So there was just enough space to walk between the stretchers. It is extremely dark. We’re having to care for patients by flashlight. There were patients that were moaning, patients that are crying. We’re trying to cool them off. We had some dirty water we could use, some ice. We were sponging them down, giving them sips of bottled water, those who could drink. The heat was—there is no way to describe that heat. I was in it and I can’t believe how hot it was. There are people fanning patients with cardboard, nurses everywhere, a few doctors and wall-to-wall patients. Patients are so frightened and we’re saying prayers with them. We kind of looked around at each other and said, “You know there’s not a whole lot we can really do for those people.” We’re waiting [for help]. The people in that area could have [been evacuated] by boat but no boats were coming. I would do what I could with the nurses: changing diapers, cooling patients down with fanning. It wasn’t like, “I’m a doctor, you’re a nurse.” We were all human beings trying to help another human being, whatever it took.

. . .

Let me tell you, for a patient to be triaged—typical triage isn’t that difficult. Reverse triage is heart wrenching. Absolutely heart wrenching. You place patients into categories. With boats coming and going we could evacuate patients who could sit. There were elderly couples—how do you make that decision who can go when one was sick and the spouse wasn’t? Do you let elderly couples go together as husband and wife? Some of these couples had been married 50 years.

. . .

I was tired but I was more in total disbelief that the sick and the poor could be abandoned the way that they were in the United States of America. I never thought I would ever live to see that day. I was sad, heartbroken, kind of amazed and shocked at the lack of organization—the fact that there was no type of coordination. I have friends who practice in the third world and this was less than third world.

During World War II, Senator Harry Truman of Missouri chaired the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Programs, popularly known as the Truman Committee. We certainly need a committee like it today, with all the scandals and malfeasance oozing out from under the rocks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Forbes dot Com tells us what life is like for those brave enough to blow whistles:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

There’s more. Plenty more.

Retired Army officer Andrew Bacevich, who is now a professor of history at Boston University and whose son was killed in Iraq last May, offers his take on Bush’s selective use of the Vietnam analogy:

The president views the abandonment of our Southeast Asian allies as a disgrace, deploring the fate suffered by the “boat people” and the victims of the Khmer Rouge. According to Bush, withdrawing from Iraq constitutes a comparable act of abandonment. Beyond that, the president finds little connection between Vietnam and Iraq. This is unfortunate. For that earlier war offers lessons of immediate relevance to the predicament we face today. As the balance of the president’s VFW address makes clear, Bush remains oblivious to the history that actually matters.

Here are a few of the lessons that he overlooks.

In unconventional wars, body counts don’t really count. . . . We killed plenty of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. But killing didn’t produce victory — the exertions of U.S. troops all too frequently proved to be counterproductive. . . The real question is not how many bad guys we are killing, but how many our continued presence in Iraq is creating.

There’s no substitute for legitimacy. Wars like Vietnam and Iraq aren’t won militarily; at best, they are settled politically. But political solutions imply the existence of legitimate political institutions, able to govern effectively and to command the loyalty of the population. . . In the end, South Vietnam proved to be a fiction. . . So too with Iraq, conjured up by the British after World War I out of remnants of the Ottoman Empire. As a courtesy, we might pretend that Iraq qualifies as a “nation-state,” much as we pretend that members of Division I varsity football programs are “scholar-athletes.” In fact, given its deep sectarian and tribal divisions, Iraq makes South Vietnam look good by comparison.

In his VFW presentation, Bush described Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki as “a good guy.” Whether Maliki is a good guy or even a heckuva good guy is beside the point. The real question is whether he presides over a government capable of governing. Mounting evidence suggests that the answer to that question is no.

As a lens for strategic analysis, ideology distorts rather than clarifies. From Dwight D. Eisenhower through Richard M. Nixon, a parade of presidents convinced themselves that defending South Vietnam qualified as a vital U.S. interest. For the free world, a communist takeover of that country would imply an unacceptable defeat.

Yet when South Vietnam did fall, the strategic effect proved to be limited. The falling dominoes never did pose a threat to our shores for one simple reason: The communists of North Vietnam were less interested in promoting world revolution than in unifying their country under socialist rule. We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were defending freedom against totalitarianism. In fact, we had blundered into a civil war. . . . Politics, not ideology, will determine the future of the Middle East. That’s good news and bad news. Good news because the interests and aspirations of Arabs and non-Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis, modernizers and traditionalists will combine to prevent any one faction from gaining the upper hand. Bad news because those same factors guarantee that the Middle East will remain an unstable mess for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes people can manage their own affairs. Does the U.S. need to attend to that mess? Perhaps not. . . Here the experience of Vietnam following the U.S. defeat is instructive. Once the Americans departed, the Vietnamese began getting their act together. Although not a utopia, Vietnam has become a stable and increasingly prosperous nation. It is a responsible member of the international community. In Hanoi, the communists remain in power. From an American point of view, who cares? . . Bush did not even allude to the condition of Vietnam today. Yet the question poses itself: Is it not possible that the people of the Middle East might be better qualified to determine their future than a cadre of American soldiers, spooks and do-gooders? The answer to that question just might be yes.

Amen! (h/t to Arthur Silber)

Here’s UC Berkeley Econ Prof Brad DeLong’s definition:

I think a bank is something [that] (a) takes deposits, (b) provides loans, (c) pretends to its depositors that their money (its liabilities) are more liquid than its assets, (d) collects net interest as a result, and (e) gets away with it almost all the time.

For those times when it looks like they might not get away with it, we have reserve requirements, capital standards, central banks, and other lenders of last resort.

Brad forgot the extortionary fees that banks have been hitting their customers with in recent years.

It was instantly obvious that President Bush stepped in his own turd a few days back when he went before the national VFW convention and compared his (and our) Iraq fiasco with the war in Vietnam. The punditocracy hasn’t let go of it since, and today is no exception. But no one nails it better than Josh Marshall this morning, who riffs on a Jim Hoagland column in the WaPo that he uncharacteristically largely agrees with. Here’s how Marshall sums things up: (more…)

Who was it that said, in regard to our campaign financing “system” that it’s not what is illegally done that is truly shameful, but what is done legally? The same apparently goes with regard to lobbying practices. Marcy Wheeler (aka emptywheel) at The Next Hurrah has been checking up on Ed GIllespie’s connections now that he has segued from K Street to the cubbyhole next to the Oval Office. Here’s just some of what she found:

So, when Bush pushes back S-CHIP eligibility to prevent S-CHIP from becoming a cornerstone to a universal, government-provided health care program, I think it relevant to consider that, until recently, Bush’s counselor was representing the interests of the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform–a corporate group pushing privately-funded healthcare. And as Bush prepares to veto a bill reforming the corrupt student loan process, I think it relevant to consider that Gillespie was also, until very recently, representing Nelnet, one of the student loan companies most deeply mired in the scandal. And as Bush commands Congress to enact a bill giving telecommunications companies immunity for their past illegal actions associated with the warrantless wiretapping program, you might want to remember that until recently, Gillespie was representing the interests of AT&T, Verizon, and the US Telecom Association.

She goes on to tell how Gillespie’s former firm just happened to land the US Chamber of Commerce as a client two days after he exited stage right.

I know I’m late to the party, which started with the publication of last Sunday’s New York Times, and has been the talk of the net and news pubs ever since. But it’s important enough that everyone should read it, so on the odd chance that you’ve only just emerged from under your rock take a look. It’s a piece of ground truth about Iraq by seven enlisted men of the 82nd Airborne Division, which is about to depart back to the States. One has departed already, with a severe head wound. Read it, if you haven’t already. And if you have, you might read it again.

I do hope there are enough shreds of decency left among the moral midgets who brought us and continue to mismanage this war to deter them from scapegoating the signers. If not, you saw the term “82nd Airborne Seven” here first (as far as I know).

Two weeks ago tomorrow, Wednesday, August 8, I attended the first of four Town Hall Meetings held by my district’s Republican Congressman, Jim Ramstad, who is one of the diminishing handful of moderate Republicans in the national legislature. Here from memory is the core of what I was trying to get across, with the key sentence in bold:

I then said that that I had voted for Bill Frenzel and you continuously from the time I moved into the district in 1979 until the year 2000. I also said, as I recall, that I stopped voting for you in 2002 because I was alarmed that the Republican House leadership was not pushing back against the administration’s use of 9/11 to gut Constitutional protections, and its assertions of unitary executive power. To be sure, the Democrats did not acquit themselves well during those times either, but your party was in control and it abjectly failed to defend the traditional prerogatives of the Legislative Branch, a failure that if left to stand will set ominous precedents for the future. I then said that I had concluded that any good you might accomplish in Washington in the policy arena would be negated many times over by the fact that, as a member of the Republican caucus, you were bound to support its far-right, sycophantic nominees for the House leadership in the event that your party won a general election.

Jim responded heatedly, and as he denied that he had caved on his centrist beliefs and now “blindly followed” the House GOP leadership, it quickly became apparent that either I had misstated what I had intended to say, or he had misunderstood what I had said. I’m inclined to think the latter, since after I objected to his characterization of what I said at least half a dozen others agreed with me.

I decided to clarify matters with an open letter to the Congressman, which you can read either by clicking here, or by clicking the “An Open Letter To Representative Jim Ramstad” target under the “Screeds” heading on your left. The above quote is taken from the letter.

I continue to believe that Mr. Ramstad has represented our district quite well, and also capably served the interests of the American people as a whole. Unfortunately he is one of only a small and ever-diminishing handful of Republican legislators and executives at any level about whom that can be said.

Update: You learn something every day. In the first line of the above post I initially tried to put the “August 8″ in parantheses: (August You will note that this configuration displays as a smiley. Whatever.

From CNN. The headline: “Man kissed ailing wife, threw her off balcony, prosecutors say.” The details:

The body of Criste Reimer, 47, was found Tuesday night outside the apartment building, near the upscale Country Club Plaza shopping district.

Stanley Reimer, 51, appeared dazed when authorities arrived. He was taken away from the scene by ambulance.

. . .

According to Jackson County Probate Court records, Criste Reimer had been in ill health for several years. Her weight had fallen to 75 pounds and she was partly blind.

According to the court records, she had no health insurance to pay for medical bills that ranged from $700 to $800 per week.

We’ll no doubt see many creative ways in which 12 guage long term care is provided here in the good ol’ USA in the coming years.

Fox News has announced they are canceling The Half Hour News Hour, the program that was supposed to be their Jon Stewart killer. The bad news memo reads, in part:

While HHNH performed admirably in the ratings and Kurt Long and Jennifer Robertson did a wonderful job, we are considering ways to retool the show for future scheduling needs. There is still a chance you will see the program at some point in the future.

As TRex at Firedoglake put it, Fox finally realized “the ugly truth about conservatives only being funny when they’re trying to be serious.”