We Were The Underpants Gnomes We Were Waiting For

Megan McArdle comes up with my favorite theory for describing the Democrats' ill-fated decision to pass nationalized health care and why they believed it wouldn't hurt them at the polls...

How much did health care matter in Tuesday's results?  A lot, argues Eric McGhee; in fact, it may have helped cost Democrats control of the House...

I'm still sort of awed that Democrats managed to convince themselves otherwise.  It was the Underpants Gnome theory of politics:

1.  Pass huge, unpopular bill

2.  ???

3.  Bounce in the polls

None of the arguments ever made any sense, and at the time, I assumed that the people advancing them were simply spinning for the media.  But as time wore on, it became clear that at least some of them actually believed it, including people who voted yes on the bill and then went to their doom. 

Those who seem to think that the election was decided simply by the poor state of the economy are ignoring reality.  The 60+ seat wipeout in the House represents more than just voter frustration with poor economic performance.  It also represents voter anger and discontent with a Congress that ignored thier wishes and pissed on their constiuents by passing a huge new health care entitlement.

It's important to note that Democrats still seem hell-bent on defending the bill, but they almost always fall back on defending the "popular provisions" of the bill, such as the ban on pre-existing conditions and the ability of parents to keep their kids on their insurance until they are 26.  They cannot defend the rest of the legislation amongst mixed company, because when they try, they get challenged on less-than-credible claims like the assertion that the bill will trim the budget deficit.  I don't even think many Democrats believes that claim. 

Mickey Kaus makes the related point that the sales pitch for health care was one guaranteed to lose senior votes, because of the realistic concern about death panels.  This may provide some comfort to Dems who truly believe that the problem with health care was the "messaging" and also have them arguing that Obama and Co. cost themselves votes by being honest in selling the program.  This would ignore two basic points: 

1.  If messaging was the problem, then the bill really would have become more popular after passage (it has not) and Pelosi's stupid claim that they had to pass the bill so we could find out what was in it might actually make some sense.

2.  Any honesty in the claims made about the health care bill is effectively offset by the Dems' gaming of the CBO score and the procedural shenanigans they engaged in to pass the bill.

So where does that leave us?  Well, back to the gnomes...

Obama, Iran, and the Underpants Gnomes

Wow, this is a great way to start Monday morning...

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.


Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.


Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.


One senior official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the memo, described the document as “a wake-up call.” But White House officials dispute that view, insisting that for 15 months they had been conducting detailed planning for many possible outcomes regarding Iran’s nuclear program.


In an interview on Friday, General Jones declined to speak about the memorandum. But he said: “On Iran, we are doing what we said we were going to do. The fact that we don’t announce publicly our entire strategy for the world to see doesn’t mean we don’t have a strategy that anticipates the full range of contingencies — we do.”


But in his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.


In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.


According to several officials, the memorandum also calls for new thinking about how the United States might contain Iran’s power if it decided to produce a weapon, and how to deal with the possibility that fuel or weapons could be obtained by one of the terrorist groups Iran has supported, which officials said they considered to be a less-likely possibility.

First of all, I'm always wondering why the New York Times finds it worthwhile to print classified information, but I suppose I should be grateful that this time they're not publicizing a way of gathering intelligence on terrorists. Hell, I'm not even sure this qualifies as news; the fact that our government is thoroughly unprepared to deal with the threat of a nuclear Iran -- while saying we won't tolerate a nuclear Iran -- seems to be par for the course, no matter which party is in power. Allahpundit says it well...

Of course they didn’t prepare alternatives. How could they possibly fathom that diplomacy might fail? The core plank of “smart power,” such as it is, has always been the Obama charm offensive. Simply by being the anti-Bush and offering an open hand to Iran, he would convince Tehran to unclench its fist and open a dialogue. Bush was the problem (he always is!) and once the problem was removed, solutions would inevitably follow. So why bother developing a Plan B? The result: Iran’s now enriching uranium to 20 percent purity and rolling out advanced centrifuges, which means nuclear “breakout” capacity, i.e. the ability to build a bomb quickly even if they haven’t yet done so, won’t be long in coming. I can’t believe The One would ever order a strike on Iran — see this Aussie op-ed citing security sources who claim the U.S. has all but given up on stopping them from building a bomb — so Israel’s going to do what it has to do sooner rather than later. In fact, in my darker Machiavellian moments, I wonder if one of the reasons The One has picked a fight with Netanyahu lately is because he knows they’re planning to act and wants to put maximum distance between America and Israel before they do. Iran will blame Washington for ordering the attack anyway, but plausible deniability may limit the extent of the reprisals.


No need to put all the blame on Obama here, though. Bush knew what it would mean to hand this issue off to a Democratic president and he went ahead and did it anyway. Invading Iraq necessarily left him with fewer military options against other threats; now the bill is coming due. As for Europe, Russia, and China, here’s the Times’s almost poignant description of the White House’s naivete: “Administration officials had hoped that the revelation by Mr. Obama in September that Iran was building a new uranium enrichment plant inside a mountain near Qum would galvanize other nations against Iran, but the reaction was muted.” The fact that western powers had been waltzing with Iran over its nuke program for fully seven years at that point might have given them a clue that no action would be taken, but that’s “smart power” for you.

The Bush Administration also took a diplomatic approach, although it's worth noting that the constraints weren't just logistics related to Iraq -- remember the leak of the NIE in 2005 that said Iran was at least ten years away from a nuke?  I don't think that leaked NIE ended up being right, but it did end up leaving us with diplomacy as the sole route by which we could tackle the problem of Iran's nuclear ambitions, although practically we had little choice in the matter.  And the diplomacy we've pursued has led to little in the way of results, unless you think Iranian progress toward a nuke is a good thing.  Of course, the foreign policy establishment seems to be hell-bent on building a road where we can keep saying we won't tolerate a nuclear Iran, right up until we actually actually, you know, tolerate a nuclear Iran.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure there is a good approach here -- one just may not be available.  But the government's approach to dealing with the issue reminds me of the business model used by the Underpants Gnomes on South Park...



Actually, if the Obama Administration hired Robert Reich to run foreign policy... sorry, that's a cheap shot. Anyway, I keep thinking that Phase One is "Diplomacy". And Phase Three is "No Nuclear Iran." But it's Phase Two that looks way too much like the Phase Two from the Gnomes business plan.

Then again, my guess is that I could have used this same videoclip to describe the healthcare plan.  At least we know where Obama is drawing his ideas from -- it's not Saul Alinsky, it's Parker and Stone.

Best.Science.Scandal.Ever

As if Climategate wasn't bad enough... the IPCC predicted that Himalayan glaciars may disappear by 2035, based on a 1996 study. Turns out that the study actually says 2350, so they're off by 215 years. (hat tip: Instapundit) This is only a big deal if you think the world might change a little in 215 years. It probably will -- keep in mind that in 1794, George Washington was stuck using dial-up Internet at Mount Vernon, or so I've heard.

Seriously, I'm guessing that this was an innocent error involving transposed numbers, but the IPCC seems to be losing credibility by the hour. The biggest problem for the climate scientists and researchers who believed in global warming is that their own arrogance makes them less credible when even innocent errors like this crop up. John Tierney, while discussing the scandal as a whole, makes this point generally...

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century — in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph — the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium — was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim.
...Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.

Read Tierney's whole piece -- it's measured and well-written by someone who probably believes in manmade global warming, but is at a loss to explain why many of the scientists who made the case for it opted for exaggeration and obfuscation.

Meanwhile, I have to cite my favorite comparison thus far in this scandal -- one reader of Jonah Goldberg's likened the climate researchers to the Underpants Gnomes. In fact, there's something beautiful in referencing that episode, as noted by this point on its Wikipedia page...

The episode satirizes the common complaint of large corporations lacking scruples and driving seemingly wholesome smaller independent companies out of business. Paul Cantor, a literary critic and economic theorist, who has taught college courses revolving around the "Gnomes" episode, has described it as "the most fully developed defense of capitalism" ever produced by the show. Cantor said the episode challenges the stereotype that small businesses are public servants who truly care about their customers by portraying local business owner Mr. Tweek as greedier and having less scruples than that of the corporation he is challenging. At the end of the episode, Kyle and Stan conclude big corporations are good due to the services they provide people, and uphold the notion that the businesses providing the best product deserve to succeed in the marketplace and grow to become larger.
The episode portrays the mainstream media as biased against capitalism during a news report in which the reporter openly speaks in favor of Harbucks' opponents. Cantor said the use of children in the anti-Harbucks commercials demonstrate a liberal tendency to use young people to advance their positions. Economic protectionism, portrayed in the episode as Mr. Tweek seeking a law to ban Harbucks from South Park, is portrayed as a tool used by businessmen to restrict free entry into the marketplace to protect their own profits.

This is a scandal where we can reference both Ghostbusters and one of my favorite episodes of South Park, while criticizing a graph that's been called a hockey stick. If someone could find a way to make a beer or Jessica Alba reference, this might be the Best.Scandal.Ever that didn't involve actors, musicians, or sports stars.