A poll says that 67 percent of Americans don’t understand Obama’s healthcare plan. I’m one of them. It’s not because I don’t pay attention. I’m a news junkie. Could it be that I’m an idiot? If my insurer offered psychiatric coverage I could afford to find out. I’m pretty sure, though, that my friends are smart. I asked my publisher, who runs the oldest publisher of graphic novels in the U.S., whether he understood what Obama’s “public option” was. He didn’t. I asked a teacher, who earned a masters from an Ivy League school. She didn’t either. I asked a bunch of political cartoonists. Neither did they. Obama’s attempt to reform healthcare is all but dead; his polls are dropping. How did Obama turn lemonade into battery acid? Obama PR flack David Alexrod tries to explain that “to make choices is to make some unhappy.” GOP strategist Charles Black counters that the president’s popularity and “good will” doesn’t equate to…

Nazis. Americans are Nazis. We are Nazis. Godwin’s Law be damned–it’s impossible to read the newly-released CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of the Third Reich. Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in Lhasa, that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out criminals’ eyes and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities were stylistically distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians or the Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war crimes were characterized by methodical precision, the application of “rational” technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality and the perversion of medical science. Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told the latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong. “The CIA’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules…

No wonder President Obama won’t stand up for us. He won’t even defend his personal safety! Two weeks ago, a right-wing man protested outside the president’s healthcare meeting in New Hampshire wearing a gun strapped to his leg. Lest we miss his point, he carried a sign that called for the shedding of blood in a new revolution. A week later, a dozen men appeared outside Obama’s appearance in Phoenix brandishing loaded guns. “We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote,” said one, who carried an AR-15 military-style automatic rifle. You read that right–they threatened to use guns to annul the results of the last election. Cops stood by and watched. The Secret Service did nothing. Strictly speaking, these mooks are allowed to openly carry guns. Which is fine with me. I’m a big fan of the Second Amendment. It is, however, horrifying to watch goons threaten to assassinate…

“What worries me: time and time again,” writes Brendan Skwire in the Philadelphia Weekly about the circuses which are currently passing for Democrats’ town hall meetings on healthcare, “[is that] the needs of the stupid and disingenuous are not only treated as valid concerns, but as the greatest concerns.” Well, yes. This being the United States, one of the most gleefully anti-intellectual nations on earth, stupid people aren’t pathetic dolts to be pitied or perhaps sent to a reeducation camp. They’re the shining example we’re supposed to look up to. Obamacare, whatever it is or was going to be once the President saw fit to share it with the public, is dead. That it would die a dog’s death was predictable, so predictable that I predicted it a couple of months ago. “No one is going to call their Congressman, much less march in the streets, to demand action for a half-measure–or, in this case, a quarter-measure,” I wrote then.…

Obama Still Trying to Define Victory in Afghanistan What if they gave a war and nobody knew why? When the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, America’s war aims were clear: capture or kill Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban government, deny Al Qaeda training camps and a safe haven. Of course, two out of three of these goals were based on lies; both bin Laden and most of Al Qaeda’s camps and personnel were in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. There was also a fourth unmentioned war aim, a lie of omission: lay an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan.  Still, the Bush Administration deserves credit for articulating clear goals—metrics, in bureaucratese—against which success or failure could be measured. President Obama has rebranded Bush’s Afghan War as his own. Afghanistan, Obama said during the campaign, was the war America should be fighting. And so we are. Obama has dispatched tens of thousands of additional troops to…

“At Will” Employment Laws Unproductive, Barbaric You’ve seen how TV covers the immediate aftermath of a disaster. A tornado or earthquake or whatever has just ripped through a community. Rubble and bodies lie scattered. Asked to comment, stunned survivors weep and confirm the obvious—they’ve lost everything. Then the reporter’s wrap-up: “Now, the rebuilding begins. Back to you, Bob.” The impulse to clean up and move on after taking a hit is universal. But the underlying assumption—that everything will eventually be OK again—is uniquely American. Taking office four months into the economic collapse, President Obama played to our belief that gumption cures everything, saying in his inaugural address: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” They don’t roll that way in Yugoslavia, where Serbs still seethe over a battle fought in 1389. Nor in the Middle East, where displaced Palestinians hold on to deeds and house keys for homes they…

After Professor Gates, Why Pretend? The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road. “How long as he been there?” I asked my host. “Three, maybe four days,” he said. “What happened to him?” “Shot, maybe,” he shrugged. “Or maybe hit by a car. Something.” I didn’t bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field. With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it’s…

Were 3,000 Afghans Murdered As U.S. Troops Stood By? “I’ve asked my national security team to…collect the facts,” President Obama told CNN. Then, he said, “we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts together.” Probably. Such was Obama’s tepid reaction to a New York Times cover story about an alleged “mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.” Obama sounds so reasonable. Doesn’t he always? But his reaction to the massacre in the Dasht-i-Leili desert is nothing more than the latest case of his administration refusing to investigate a Bush-era war crime. There are two things Obama doesn’t want you to know about Dasht-i-Leili. First, the political class and U.S. state-controlled media have sat on this story for six to seven years. Second, U.S. troops are accused of participating in the atrocities, which involved…

Why Can’t Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable? Robert McNamara, one of the “best and the brightest” technocrats behind the escalation of the Vietnam War, eventually came to regret his actions. But his public contrition, which included a book and a series of interviews for the documentary “The Fog of War,” were greeted with derision. “Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” editorialized The New York Times in 1995. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.” McNamara’s change of heart came 58,000 American and 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late. If the dead could speak, surely they would ask: why couldn’t you see then what you understand so clearly now? Why didn’t you listen to…