Looking Back

And another thing...

"Let's not look back," they say. Need to move forward. Said by the party that spent tens of months and dozens of millions trying to impeach Bill Clinton. And, from one point of view, they were right then but not now. If crimes are suspected, part of the deal is looking into it. How, exactly, do you march forward if you don't know whence you are coming? Why prosecute the guy who robbed your store, or raped your wife? It's in the past. Those cops: what a bunch of whiners. What's done is done.

Of course this is way bigger than lying about a blow job. We're talking about killing prisoners, taking us to an unnecessary war on false pretenses. Big stuff, you'd think.

Like virtually all the Republican talking points of late, this one is made of sand, built on sand. I accept that it's not black and white, given the politics. I understand why President Obama is reluctant: he has lots to do to clean up the mess, and even without this, he's encountering resistance to pretty much everything he does. Reversing direction like Dick Cheney from his draft board, Senate Republicans have decided there's nothing like a good old filibuster, especially for judges. No wonder they don't want to look back: just a couple of years ago they were saying such a thing was unconstitutional and a threat to our very existence as a democracy.

What's particularly disingenuous is that such talking points are based on the idea that the electorate is stupid. Obama addresses us as if we are adults, capable of carrying a thought beyond one line of small words. To the Rs, we're idiots, bamboozle-bait. Not that it's certain they're the ones that are wrong. It's easy to forget that Joe the Plumber was made god-like. McCain put him up there; but it was the people who ate it up, and the media, and the RWS™.

And then there's this. So there you go.
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Yet Another Nail

As we witness the continuing spectacle of Dick Cheney polluting the airways while being fawned over by the usual RWS™ and their enablers, it's well to remember how wrong he and the president he controlled were on everything Iraq. From the costs, the time requirements, the liberator-greetings, to the idea of installing Ahmed Chalabi, the failings of the US citizen-rulers, the resistance to holding elections and to the writing of a constitution (how quickly we forget), it's pretty damning. And now, there's this:

In an eye-opening article in Vanity Fair, the one remaining feather in a rotting headdress is taken away, leaving mere smoke. There's nothing those guys said or did that was right. The "working," as in "the surge is working," could have happened years before it did. It's generally understood by all but the most idiotic that the real reason the "surge" worked is that the Sunni tribal leaders agreed to put down their arms: the so-called Sunni awakening. What the article says is that they offered to do so years earlier, the officers on the ground supported it, and the Bush administration rejected it.

After the Awakening, the Sunnis helped obliterate al-Qaeda’s networks in most of Sunni Iraq, a development that many believe did more to dampen the violence than the subsequent “surge” in American troop numbers. Having reached a peak in 2006 and early 2007, the casualty rates for combatants and civilians quickly plummeted.

What the history books should also record, revealed here for the first time, is that the Sunni insurgents had offered to come to terms with the Americans 30 months earlier, in the summer of 2004, during secret talks with senior U.S. officials and military commanders....

...For a variety of reasons, some of them petty, some of them ideological, and some of them still obscure, these men were blocked by superiors in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House.

The article includes this quote from a Jerry Jones, then special assistant to Rumsfeld:

“From July ’04 to mid-’07,” he points out, “you can directly attribute almost all those K.I.A. [killed in action] in the Sunni regions of Iraq to this fatal error, and if we hadn’t been fighting the Sunni, we’d have had a lot more resources for dealing with Shia militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr in places such as Baghdad. It didn’t have to happen. Those lives did not have to be lost.”

This is pretty strong stuff. And yet, like some sort of undead wraith wailing from a grave he refuses to occupy, Cheney is still out there, criticizing everything Obama, defending everything he did: the indefensible. The demonstrably failed. Worse, he's still given a platform, still given credence. And in Congress, his defenders and apologists do everything they can to block the changes we need, and the people who intend to carry them out.

As difficult are the challenges we face, we shouldn't have to be wasting time arguing over the obvious.
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Oh Well

Shhh

In discussions about the evils of doctors, one of which I guess I still am, one frequently hears talk of "the conspiracy of silence." Doctors, we are told, are part of some sort of grand and nefarious cabal which has pledged never to criticize one of their own. I'm not sure when I was supposed to receive the order and sign the pledge, but I must have missed it. Or maybe I was also programmed to not remember.

Since, as will become evident in a moment, it's not really the point of this post (would have been a good one for my Surgeonsblog), I won't dwell on it; but I will say there are situations that can be uncomfortable. For example, it wasn't rare that I saw a patient who'd been given what I thought was improper or questionable care by another doctor. What to say to the patient about it, and whether and how to express my concerns to the original physician are not easy questions, for a number of good and bad reasons. But, for the purposes of this discussion, let's agree that nearly everyone -- especially non-doctors -- find the tendency to hold one's tongue in such situations abhorrent. Dishonest, maybe. Conspiratorial, and dangerous. (As a general principle, I can't disagree; but, largely because in medicine there aren't always clear-cut answers, in practice it's not always as black and white as it might seem.)

And that brings us to my point. Along with several commenters on this blog, and various pundits and screamers, Jeb Bush doesn't like Barack Obama pointing out that things were pretty bad when he took over from Brother George. Funny, isn't it? What's good for the goose isn't good for the goosed.

First of all, it's not as if blaming one's predecessor (assuming he's from the opposite party) isn't traditional. When G W Bush came into office he set about reversing just about everything Clinton had done. Rather than thinking up things on his own, he appeared simply to look at Clinton's policies, decide what would be a 180º turn, and do it. In the case of Barack Obama, it really IS different: he really DID inherit a huge mess. By anything standard claiming touch with reality, it's undeniable. So what would be the argument for staying silent about it? Professional courtesy?

Jeb frames it in terms of Obama "trying to make himself look good." Well, I suppose there's some of that. In the medical context, I'd rather not take the blame for a bad outcome if what I was trying to do was salvage the wreckage of a previous surgeon. (In fact, the first time I was sued -- as mentioned in my book -- was after the death of a patient horribly botched and then transferred to my care when I was in training. I practically lived by her bedside as we tried everything, in vain, to save her; the summons was a shock and an eye-opener, and even though I was rapidly dropped out of the case, it left a horrible impression.) More important, though, is the need to make clear what was done wrong so it doesn't happen again. Maybe, too, it's helpful to engender confidence in the new plan by clearly stating how it differs, and why, from the old one. Not to mention why such drastic action is necessary.

Only the most blindly partisan and unbalanced could claim the US was not in crisis when Barack Obama took over. Unsurprisingly, the head of the RNC is among those who think everything is just ducky, while Congressional Republicans propose only more of what got us here. It would seem, in other words, that reminding people of why things are the way they are is more than politics. It's imperative. Because as far as the opposition is concerned -- refining the definition of insanity -- all we need is to keep doing what we did and things will get better.

In a rational world, one in which politicians were capable of thought and collaboration, where people who disagree with each other were able to find ways to some sort of middle ground, I might join those who call for focus only on plans and not the past. Reminding everyone of the mess the previous administration caused could become tiresome, in a land free of denial. But that world most clearly no longer exists, if it ever did. Against the tide of distortions and erased memory that flows from the other side, a little reminder of the truth now and then seems like smart policy.
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