Government shuts down; Tom Clancy, RIP

View 792 Wednesday, October 02, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

The President has brought in workers from off furlough to barricade the national monuments in the Mall. Last time I visited that place I was able to walk through the Korean War memorial and up to the Lincoln Memorial, and all along the Mall, at midnight, and I never saw anyone; there were no barricades or barriers and none were needed. Of course there is a need for maintenance, but the money spent putting up the barricades would have paid for weeks of routine maintenance of the mall and reflecting pool, and if that weren’t true then a short appeal for public help in keeping America beautiful would have turned out an embarrassing number of volunteers complete with retired officers to organize them: there is no danger that the national war memorials will be neglected whether the government shuts down or not. The President knows this, but the barricades went up anyway.

This is small and petty, as is the refusal to negotiate anything.

Newt Gingrich visited Mount Vernon – a privately operated national monument and well worth a visit – and has noted that the bus turnaround (a paved turnaround off the national highway) has been closed by the Federal Government. Taking those barriers out there and setting them up cost money: normally it’s just a place for busses to pull off the highway and turn around, there are no facilities and it has no operating personnel, so the barriers are an added cost. No word on whether bus operators have simply throws the barricades off, as the WWII vets sort of did at the WWII monument on the mall.

This is the new presidential leadership. It is probably effective. The Republicans closed down the government. Any inconvenient consequences of that clearly are the fault of the stubborn Republicans who want to keep the poor from getting their free health care.

One strategy I would consider would be to pass the continuing resolution, including funding Obamacare, with the stipulation that it is funded exactly as written in law, without illegal exceptions; and all the subsidies that make life easier for Congress and its staff are removed; they all must buy their own insurance, on the exchanges or from private vendors, just like anyone else. Congress and its staff must live like the rest of us, and the rest of us must live under the law: no blanket exceptions to one group but not another. If Business is to be granted exceptions, so must individuals. Pass that, make sure the terms are widely known, and send it to the Senate as the Restore ObamaCare Act.

It makes it clear that whatever the consequences of ObamaCare may be, they belong to the Democrats: which is to say, if it’s really a great thing, they get the credit and those of us who thought it would be a disaster were dead wrong and should take the consequences; but it was not a grant of arbitrary authority to use for party building or as a slush fund.

The Wall Street Journal today has an important piece:

Visions of a Permanent Underclass

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303918804579107754099736882.html

It is a book review and worth your time.

Tom Clancy, RIP

My first contact with Tom Clancy was a package. I thought it was a book to be autographed, but when I opened it I found it was an autographed book: The Hunt for Red October, published by the US Naval Institute. There was a letter: it said “I’ve always wanted to write you a fan letter, but I thought I’d wait until I had a work of my own.” There were other comments in the letter, including, of course, an invitation to read the book if I had time, because he thought I would like it.

About a week later a reporter caught President Reagan reading a book and asked what it was. Regan replied that it was a new novel, The Hunt for Red October, and it was really good. This was before the Internet and things going viral but Time carried the story and within a week Tom’s book was on the best seller list. We had other correspondence – again this is before email and Internet – and the next time I had to go to DC I arranged to add a few days to me trip and stayed with Tom and Wanda and the kids in his house in Frederick. We drove down to the Navy base at Patuxent River and spent the day there, taking some of the test pilots to dinner and having a great time. I wrote up that visit in my BYTE column. After that when I had to visit Washington we usually saw each other, for a meal or for a day. We drove to the old shooting club which he had bought and was turning into his new house, so I saw that being built and later after it was finished. I was a fairly successful writer, but Tom was spectacularly so. He used to say he was making so much money it scared him.

We saw each other fairly frequently until sometime in the 90’s after which correspondence tapered off. It picked up again for a bit during my cancer treatments, but we had both slowed down by then. I think I last saw him during one my trips to DC for some SIGMA event; by then he was living in I think New York, and it just happened we were both in DC at the same time. We remained friends, but no longer very close, I didn’t know he was ill.

Tom once told me that a lot of his classmates went into the Navy and were doing all these neat things, and he thought somebody ought to tell about them. He had in those days fairly rigid writing schedule habits – on a visit to his home I once spent two hours telling stories to the children while Tom went into his room and pounded away on his Mac – and he was a good story teller. His success was deserved. We toyed with the notion of collaboration at one time, but this was early into the computer era and no one outside academia had high speed digital communications, and it just wouldn’t work. I’d be a richer man if it had, of course, but whether I could have improved his stories is questionable. What he did he did very well.

He was a long time subscriber to this place even if he didn’t comment much. I can’t really say I’ll miss him in the sense that we were close or even that I thought about him much in recent years, but I will miss him for all that. He was a good story teller and a patriot. And I’ll certainly miss his stories.