Roy Blunt, as in Dull, Obtuse

Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri is an announced candidate for the job of majority leader in the US House of Representatives. I live in Florence, Oregon, population about 8000. It's 15 miles from Mapleton, population about 1000. Almost two years ago, I wrote the following:

Congressman Roy Blunt, the third ranking Republican member, told a joke to the Missouri Republican Convention. "How many Frenchmen would it take," he asked," to defend Paris? It's not known. It's never been tried." The audience laughed and applauded.

I was in France in September, 2001. I recall vividly a monument in a small French village, definitely smaller than Florence, perhaps the size of Mapleton. It commemorated the young people from the parish who had died defending their homeland in the Great War. There were more than 50 names.

On September 11, fewer than 3000 Americans died. Between July, 1914, and November, 1918, the French lost 1,357,000 defending Paris. In proportion to their smaller population, they lost as many as we have lost in the war on terrorism. Every day. For 50 months.

During the battle of Verdun in northern France, a ton of high explosive was dropped on every square yard. Decades later, nothing grew there. A half century later, one could still sometimes see green chlorine gas collecting in the bottoms of old shell craters after rain.

The French know something about death during war. They know something about chemical warfare. Representative Blunt, who represents the Ozarks, is the sort of person who gives hicks a bad name.

If this moron is the best that the Republican Party can find to lead them in Congress, they deserve to lose control in November.

Spooner predicts Iraq cost at $100 trillion!!!

Not really, but as long as we're playing competitive prognostication, why not take a kick at the can. I'm on record as estimating that the cost of the Iraq invasion will be about a half trillion dollars. I'm sort of taking the official guesses of a couple hundred billion and adding a large fudge factor.

But I have been completely upstaged by a new study that says it could be a couple trillion. "Economists say ..." begins the headline in the Boston Globe. It sounds so much more authoritative than "Astrologers predict ..." but it isn't a lot better founded.

The problem is that the study has wandered into "economic impacts," a practice that has less and less connection with reality as the subject gets larger and larger. The economic impact of a new mill being built in a small town may make some sense. The gross long-term impact of the war in all its guises? Compared to what?

Two trillion dollars is a big number. I have the same reaction to it as I do to the prediction of rising oceans due to global warming. I've been hearing about this for 20 years. I live next to the ocean. If the problem will eventually become huge, then it should by now be noticeable. It isn't.

The study (although I haven't seen the details) evidently includes a consideration of the impact on US productivity. This is perhaps based on calling up guardsmen and reservists and thereby removing important skills from the civilian economy. Unfortunately for the study, productivity has continued to rise while we've been at war.

The war is presumed to have a bad long-term impact on the federal government's finances. Here's a contrarian thought. The war will cause a fiscal crisis that will force Americans to deal with the entitlement problems facing the country. The Social Security crisis looming two decades hence will be avoided.

Sheer speculation? Of course. It's all speculation. I could probably hit $500 trillion if I tossed in the compounded additional interest expense for 500 years. It might earn me my fifteen minutes of fame.

A dozen is a dozen is a dozen. Except in the Media.

Twelve American servicemen have been killed in a helicopter crash in Iraq. It will make the news today and perhaps tomorrow. Twelve miners died in a coal mine in West Virginia, and it has been covered extensively, every day, in our local newspaper for a week. We're nowhere near West Virginia.

Twelve people in California are killed on the highways on a typical day. Every day, all year. Unless it was somebody famous, a dozen traffic deaths wouldn't be much noticed in California, and not at all outside the state.

GOP: Without DeLay without delay

Tom Delay is out. I'm actually surprised there have not been more puns on his name. It may be an indication of the fear he engendered in so many people. Anyway, he's gone and good riddance.

His letter to fellow GOP solons, giving up his idea of regaining power, reeked of hypocrisy. According to the story,

In a letter to colleagues on Saturday, DeLay said that he had always "acted in an ethical manner within the rules of our body and the laws of our land" and that he was "fully confident time will bear this out."

A more objective statement would have been that he has been advised by a well compensated lawyer that no action of his to date has been technically sufficient to result in a conviction, although that may change.

Ethical? His wife accepts $115,000 for a grade-school homework assignment about the preferred charities of congressman, from a "charity" that does no charitable work but takes money from Russian oil oligarchs who want (and get) some kind words from DeLay. No problem here, I guess.

All of this from a guy who lead the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex. Here's just a random thought. How many congressmen would be left if we eliminated every one of them who has lied to his wife about sex? I think the ranks would be badly depleted. God's ministry would probably also pass into new hands if we eliminated all the preachers who have been banging church secretaries.

I always like to think there's a rule (if not quite a moral) to be learned from such experiences. Maybe it's that whenever someone says he's more ethical than the ordinary guy, you should watch your back and keep a hand on your wallet. But that's really not a new rule.

Time to amend the US Constitution

The Jack Abrahamoff scandal promises to be the gift that goes on giving for us scandalophiles. The depressing side note is that although quite a few members of Congress may be implicated, the chances of Democrats winning their seats is small because most house seats have now been gerrymandered to be safe for one party or the other.

There's an obvious problem with letting politicians decide the prospects of their losing their own next elections, but it's been perfectly legal at both state and federal levels. Amazingly, when Arnold tried to fix the problem in California, the voters trounced the idea. It fared even worse in Ohio.

In the words of H L Mencken, American politics is dominated by the "boobocracy." Do Americans really want corrupt government by entrenched politicians? Probably not, but most of the time the average voter is too inept to see the connection between "entrenched" and "corrupt." With luck, Abramoff has delivered a teachable moment which can be converted, during the notoriously short attention span of the voting public, into action.

I suggest a constitutional amendment that requires the redrawing of districts for both Congress and state legislatures to be conducted after each decennial census by a panel of retired judges. They should be instructed to consider only the need to create compact districts of nearly equal size, without any consideration to racial, ethnic, economic, or political composition.

This is the political equivalent of the flat tax. The argument for progressive taxation with many exemptions is that the result should be fairer to vulnerable elements of society, but in fact everyone becomes a special interest and the cost may be greater than the benefit.

I'm not a flat tax fan, even though I understand the argument for it. Impartial redistricting, on the other hand, is solid. The preference that politicians feel towards doing the job themselves is obviously self-serving. The idea that minorities are best served by "reserving" some seats in Congress for them by creatively drawing district lines is harder to disprove, except to use Congress as a whole as an example of failure.

If I were a betting man, I'd give 1000:1 against this idea right now. But if we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg, and if it entangles enough Democrats to make it bipartisan, maybe there could be a spasm of political morality. Then, who knows?

If we need more air raids in Iraq, we should get out

During the past year, the US has turned increasingly to air raids to wage war against Iraqi insurgents without incurring US casualties. Air raids are, unfortunately, blunt instruments, prone to error. In the latest fiasco, we seem to have killed 12 civilians while aiming for three insurgents.

People who give customer service training to places like restaurants and retail stores like to say that customers are much more likely to tell their friends about an instance of bad service than good. Same in war. We're probably rebuilding a school somewhere in Iraq right now, but that's not the headline. It's 12 civilians killed by a US air strike.

Let's be honest. If that house had contained 12 Americans, we wouldn't have bombed it in the hopes of getting 3 insurgents. We don't view Iraqi "collateral damage" as being as important as the lives of Americans.

I'm not saying we should, but we don't and it's no secret from the Iraqis. We're not going to win a war for "hearts and minds" while we regard our allies as less important than ourselves. On the other hand, you can't run an army any other way. Soldiers are trained to kill enemies. There's no practical way to deliver democracy to a hostile population on the point of a bayonet.

So let's get out now.

Nuclear Waste? Dump it in the Pacific!

There are several problems plaguing the nuclear power industry, but the most intractable seems to be where and how to dispose of waste. People keep looking at locations around the United States and, since no one wants it in their backyard, finding an acceptable site will probably be mired in controversy forever.

A very simple option exists on paper. Wrap it in something fairly solid, take it out somewhere in the Pacific, a thousand miles from the closest inhabited land, and dump it in 13,000 feet of water, the average depth. Then go home and sleep the sleep of the innocent.

What, I hear you cry, don't I care about the purity of our sacred oceans? Somewhat, but in this case, not a lot. Or rather, I know enough about geometry to realize that there is essentially no way for mankind to pollute the volume of water that the oceans contain.

With a great deal of work, we could pollute its two-dimensional surface, although it's hard to do even that over a serious portion. We can, and have, polluted its shorelines, which are one-dimensional. But in three dimensions, our puny efforts could not mess up the ocean an iota.

The volume of water in the oceans is about 1.37 billion cubic kilometers. In scientific notation, 1.37 x 10⁹ km³. Or 1.37 x 10¹⁸ m³. Or 362 billion billion gallons.

The DOE estimates that it is storing 100 million gallons of nuclear waste. That would certainly already be diluted and would not consist entirely of radioactive molecules. If you stupidly sank it in a manner that it would leak rapidly, you would be diluting the volume of waste to one part in three trillion. Radioactive molecules would be much less concentrated. Even this assumes that essentially no effort is made to contain the waste, so that it leaks quickly before radioactive decay kills it. Any decent containment process would reduce the impact by orders of magnitude. In short, you could easily get rid of our entire Cold War legacy and it wouldn't even be detectable with current technologies.

Unfortunately, this reasonable solution is banned by a treaty that the United States signed in 1993. Thank you, Bill Clinton.

This is why Democrats aren't surging

I subscribe to the Register-Guard, the only daily newspaper in Eugene, Oregon. The editors seem to be nice, well meaning sorts with a definite bias toward Blue politics. Like most Democratic politicians, their thinking on Iraq seems hopelessly muddled. Today's editorial was typical.

They begin by saying that the cost, $8 million per hour, is staggering and cannot be sustained. It is staggering, but sustainable. It's about what we lose gambling each year. It's less than we spend on tobacco. We could do it if we wanted to, and we would want to if it was securing our oil supply and thwarting terrorism. We could spend it next year, and every year thereafter.

But we won't, because it is doing neither of those things. The RG correctly notes this and proposes two actions for President Bush to take. One is irrelevant and the other is impossible.

The irrelevant suggestion is that the United States should declare in writing that if the Iraqi government asks it to leave, it will leave. The Iraqi government has had "sovereignty" for a year and a half. What does sovereignty mean if not the right to exclude foreign troops? We might not have taken such a rebuff from our puppet interim government (not that they were ever likely to deliver it), but if the government, quasi-freely elected under a quasi-legitimate constitution, tells us to go, then the game will be up. It doesn't help to put it in writing.

The second suggestion was that we tie our withdrawal to concrete progress. If we were making concrete progress, we'd be leaving! Nothing would make the United States happier than to have the conditions exist for a graceful departure, but since that's not happening, the departure is likely to become less and less graceful. Sooner or later, you get Saigon. Let's get out now.