The American Conservative

There is more than one way to forget a vet.

For one, leaving a veteran to the mercy of an ineffective, byzantine bureaucracy, where he will struggle to receive the healthcare and benefits he earned fair and square fighting Uncle Sam’s wars of choice. The Bush administration wanted its Global War on Terror, but it completely failed to anticipate the impact that rotating two million men and women in and out of a bloody two-front conflict would have on an already strained Veterans Administration benefits system.

If you are a veteran in northern California, where men and women of all wars are waiting an average of 10 months to get their disability claims processed through the Oakland VA (the most backlogged VA in the country, next to Seattle), then you’re feeling pretty well forgotten right now. According to news reports this week, about 200 “frustrated, often tearful” California veterans attended a Town Hall-style meeting Monday and told officials one by one that the Oakland VA is stalling and bungling their claims, so much so that the VA is actually “making their lives worse” than if they weren’t trying to pursue their benefits at all.

That meeting came on the heels of a VA Inspector General’s report (.pdf) that found significant mistakes and delays in processing veterans’ disability and healthcare claims at the Oakland VA. The report charged that 60 percent of brain-injury claims reviewed by inspectors had been mishandled. And the backlog is so bad that, according to the Los Angeles Times, the VA is now sending vets out of state to get faster service.

Not that it’s so great anywhere else. As of April, there were over 903,000 claims pending nationwide, with 65 percent of them active for more than 125 days. Another 256,000 disability claims are mired in appeal. That makes 1.1 million claims awaiting some sort of adjudication. According to Paul Sullivan, managing director for public affairs and veteran outreach at Bergmann & Moore, which provides legal assistance to veterans, waiting nearly a year to get a claim processed can be living hell for veterans who are suddenly out of work, dependent on family, suffering from the trauma of war, or simply trying to start over.

“A few years ago, VA was averaging five months” to process original claims, Sullivan testified before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs back in April. “These significant VA delays seriously harm our Veterans who need access to VA healthcare and who need disability benefits to pay rent, put food on the table, and pay other important expenses.”

He also pointed out that, according to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s own numbers, the VA has seen a 48 percent increase in claims filed since 2008.

“He expects the claim volume to increase by another 4 percent in 2013 to 1.25 million claims,” said Sullivan. “This means an already bad situation continues deteriorating. This is unacceptable for our Veterans.” Read More…

Conventional wisdom on the left has it that President Obama let slip the populist mantle by, first, supporting TARP and then, after taking office, choosing to side with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner by taking a more lenient approach toward Wall Street and the too-big-to-fail banking industry.

If he’d been tougher with the banks, maybe even broken them up; if he’d insisted on financial reform with real teeth; if he hadn’t been “in Wall Street’s back pocket” (a point on which the left and right were in basic agreement); if he actually delivered on his campaign promise to change the way Washington works — then maybe Obama could have prevented the Tea Party from stealing the populist thunder that was rightfully his.

Counterfactuals aside, we’re now getting at least a glimpse of what the elite media’s reaction to such policies would have been like.
Read More…

The literary critic Paul Fussell died yesterday. Best known for The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell also wrote about his experiences as an infantryman in World War II, Kingsley Amis, and the dumbing down of American culture.

Fussell’s books on the Great War and Amis, as well as his war memoirs, will be mentioned in most obituaries. One work that may escape notice is Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. The references have been rendered obsolete by the rise of the bourgeois bohemians (Fussell calls them “category X”). But I know no better or funnier exposure of the myth of that America is a classless society.

Readers who enjoyed Charles Murray’s “how thick is your bubble?” quiz will particularly enjoy Fussell’s “Living-Room Scale”, which measures class by interior decoration. Did you have a “tabletop obelisk of marble, glass, etc.” circa 1983? If so, you were 9 points on the way to the 245 necessary to qualify as upper class.

American letters will be poorer without Paul Fussell.

 

 

 

In the 2008 presidential debate dedicated to foreign policy, Sen. John McCain tried to sound magisterial when he kept repeating the line “Sen. Obama doesn’t understand.”

Instead — and this is astonishingly easy for McCain — he sounded like a jerk.

Now comes Mitt Romney — whose magisterium, we’re told endlessly, is the economy — with the declaration that President Obama “just doesn’t have a clue.”

Read More…

The media critic Michael Wolff has written a long and disturbing piece on the physical and mental decline of his 86-year-old-mother. Like many people her age, Mrs. Wolff can no longer speak, walk, or care for herself. She lives alone in an assisted-living facility in Manhattan. For this, her long-term-care insurance and her family pay $17,000 a month. Her daughter visits daily, the author a few times a week. Mrs. Wolff also has another son who lives in Maui and apparently sees her rarely.

Under these circumstances, Wolff confesses frankly that he wishes his mother would die sooner rather than later. More precisely, he wishes for “a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother’s end”. Death panels, of course, don’t exist. So Wolff and his family face an excruciating  wait as Mrs. Wolff’s functions “depress” sufficiently for her to be moved into palliative care.  That could take weeks, months, or years.

The piece has attracted criticism. Former TAC associate editor Michael Brendan Dougherty tweets that Wolffs thinks “his sick old mother should be helped to death for being sick and old.” I suppose that’s literally true. But it also entirely misses the point.

Wolff’s main argument is not that he wishes someone would take his mother off his hands. It’s that modern medicine has created an unprecedented condition in which otherwise healthy people can expect to experience long-term incapacity. There have always been people in comas, suffering from degenerative illness, or simply in the process of dying. What’s new is that situations like Mrs. Wolff’s have become so predictable, and that they last so long. Another big change is the physical dispersal of families. Although most of the Wolffs live close enough to see their mother regularly, none seems to have a house large enough to take her in. Finally, the costs are enormous. In addition to contributions from her family and insurance, Mrs. Wolff’s care has cost Medicare, and thus taxpayers, nearly $500,000.

One might argue, that these considerations are morally irrelevant: no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient it may become, we shouldn’t destroy innocent life. That’s the Roman Catholic perspective and, with certain adjustments, the orthodox Jewish one. It’s also shared by some secular ethicists, particularly those worried about slippery slopes from assisted suicide to medical murder.

On the other hand, the ideal of prolonging life as much as possible is not of Biblical origin.  Rather, it’s rooted in the conquest of nature theorized by Bacon and Descartes. According to the Bible, death is a central part of the human condition–a fate that should not be hastened but also is not to be escaped. According to the founders of the modern project, it’s a problem to be solved by technology, which is supposed to be infinitely improvable.

The problem, then, is not that theologically-grounded deference to life and modern utilitarianism point in opposite directions. It’s that they’ve been synthesized in a medico-bureaucratic cult in which deference to life has been severed from the recognition that it must and should end at some point. Although he doesn’t put it in those terms, that cult is Wolff’s real target. It’s also the knot that we’ll all have to unravel as the number of very old Americans increases to nearly 20 million by 2050.

Here’s more fodder for economist Tyler Cower’s “Great Stagnation” thesis.

For the uninitiated, Cowen argues, in short, that technological innovations are harder to come by, rates of annual growth have therefore stagnated, and Americans need to adjust to the reality that prosperity won’t grow on trees like it seemed to in the last century.

Appropriately, Leslie Kwoh has an instructive piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining how companies fling around the term “innovation” with abandon. These days, it pretty much means everything except what it used to plainly mean:

Like the once ubiquitous buzzwords “synergy” and “optimization,” innovation is in danger of becoming a cliché — if it isn’t one already.
Read More…

Daniel Larison responded to Noah Millman’s questions about Christianity and human rights. Millman argued for religious autonomy against impossible religious liberty, and reviewed films “Rope” and “Bernie” for Shakesblog. Rod Dreher appraised the art of Thomas Kinkande, reflected on the HHS mandate, (hyperbolically) delighted in a movie theater slap-down, and looked forward to a potential “Confederacy of Dunces” film adaptation.

Larison exposed Rubio’s phony constitutionalism. Jordan Bloom celebrated Thomas Massie’s primary victory, and pondered Arthur Davis’s potential return to politics. Scott Galupo debunked liberal faith in Justice Scalia, and counseled against a partisan interpretation of civil rights.

Philip Giraldi questioned Jose Rodriguez’s defense of torture, while Larison challenged misunderstandings of the American foreign policy consensus, joined Millman’s critique of   Romney’s Iran rhetoric, and watched Colin Powell ask Mitt to think. Dreher explained the problem of moral licensing and hypocrisy, and Scott McConnell is going to Paris.

The interwebs are abuzz(feed) with news that former Alabama Rep. Artur Davis might be returning to politics.

So far he’s not showing his cards, though the state Republican party has welcomed the idea. Davis’ statement to The Fix:

“I do receive encouragement from friends to join the Republican Party and to get into politics in the [northern Virginia] area, but I recognize the challenges of reentering politics in a new state and a new party, and am nowhere near taking those challenges on,” Davis told The Fix. “If I did, I would have a lot to learn about this region and a lot of people to meet, and frankly, would need a lot of help from people in this community.”

Should he choose to stand for election, he would run against Gerry Connolly in the Virginia 11th. Weigel notes the district seems ideally suited for Davis:

The district in question, VA-11, was held by moderate Republican Tom Davis for years. Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat, took it in 2008 and held it narrowly against the 2010 wave. He has demographics on his side — the suburbs, bolstered by good economic growth, are getting bluer. It really is the sort of district you’d carve out for a black Republican. It’s fairly hard to achieve what Davis did in Alabama 10 years ago, and primary a liberal (in this specific case, anti-Israel) black incumbent in a heavily black district.

However, there are good reasons to believe he’d have his work cut out for him. First, the new parts of the district including Dale City and other parts of eastern Prince William County, while they have less of an affinity for Connolly, they’re not as economically stable as the rest of the district and a less-than-ideal place to test out his positions on affordable housing, welfare reform, and voter ID laws.  Still, it’s a district that went for McDonnell by four points; in a wave year it could very well swing Republican again.

Connolly held on by a mere .4 percent in the 2010 midterm elections–in other words he won handily in 2008 thanks to Bush backlash and nearly lost thanks to Obama backlash. As a longtime Northern Virginia resident, my impression generally is that the district is to the left of where Davis is, but maybe not by much. His national stature would certainly help in a general election, as would a solid endorsement from Tom Davis, Connolly’s Republican predecessor.

This mean-spirited piece at the Atlantic Wire mocks his honest centrism as traitorousness. But unless his rightward shift was planned career move informed by the racial calculus of him being a “black Democratic critic of Obama” that’s a pretty uncharitable assessment. Various attempts to paint him as either doctrinaire for his positions on voter ID, or opportunistic, for being the go-to black critic of Obama, just don’t match the man himself. When I asked him back in October about his bipartisan campaign donations he was very careful to express that his donations had more to do with his personal affinity for the candidates than their positions on any given issue.

Blogging will be light for the next few days, as the McConnells will be in Paris. (I’ve been waiting to write that sentence for many years.) I used to know Paris fairly well and could speak at least decent French, sometime back in the ’70s. By now it’s all atrophied — my language, my ties to French friends, etc.  But Paris is still something to look forward to.

Yet I wonder. I was there with my wife in the early 1990s and came back and wrote a New York Post column entitled “Why Paris Works and New York Doesn’t.” Since then the cities have gone in opposite directions, and one reads of seemingly incomprehensible events in Paris, cars being torched on the Blvd. Saint Germaine. New York in 1991, by contrast, seemed on an inescapable Detroit trajectory — at least a lot of people felt so.

Then came Giuliani, and his efforts to restore law and order to the city remains the most effective use of government power I’ve seen in my lifetime. TAC hasn’t been kind to him, but that’s of course due to his absurd foreign-policy positions, not his record as mayor.

I’m not sure how far Paris has fallen — in all my recent visits it was still beautiful. But France as a whole now struggles with the same issues of class and ethnicity that American cities have, though of course with differences.

Anyway, this is a pleasure trip: I plan to watch tennis, hang out in the Luxembourg Gardens, visit museums, eat and drink, etc. But I’ll read the paper, and may share insights on the new Hollande government, the prospects of “growth” versus “austerity,” and try to get a sense of shifts in French foreign policy.  A bientôt.

Thomas Massie, the libertarian Republican congressional candidate won a hotly-contested primary in Northern Kentucky last night by a 15-point margin.

Josh Liederman reports for The Hill:

Massie, also a county official, had been endorsed by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and the Club for Growth. Much of the establishment support had lined up behind Webb-Edgington, while social conservatives were rallying behind Moore.

All three were considered relative newcomers to the Kentucky political scene. …

Massie’s win was an important victory for fiscal conservatives and the Club for Growth coming off a stinging loss last week in Nebraska, where the Club’s favored candidate, state Treasurer Don Stenberg, suffered an embarrassing loss to Deb Fischer (R), a relative unknown state senator.

Former TACer Jack Hunter says it’s because neither the GOP mainstream nor the Moral Majority social conservatives have taken meaningful steps to reduce the debt and deficit:

Read up on Massie’s brand of fiscally hawkish, PATRIOT Act-opposing, NDAA-kneecapping, anti-drug war constitutional conservatism in this Reason profile.

In other Kentucky election news, 67 out of 120 counties and 42 percent of total voters voted for an unnamed candidate over Barack Obama in the Democratic primary.