Category: Rants

Although it has not gotten much attention yet, but the practice of using race as a factor in university admissions is not long for the world. When the Supreme Court hears and decides Fisher v. University of Texas later this fall (just in time to inject some racial invective into the General Election) the 5-4 decision striking down the Texas system will surprise exactly no one. Anthony Kennedy has dissented in every affirmative action case the Court has ever heard. His vote here is utterly predictable, especially given his dissents in Grutter/Gratz v. Bollinger, of which Fisher is essentially a replay. The decision in Fisher will affect the handful of states that have not passed laws banning race-based admissions. It turns out that it's pretty easy to get a state full of white people to support a ballot measure that eliminates affirmative action.

I have none of the typical White Guy hangups about affirmative action. Since around 2000, right before the Grutter and Gratz cases were jointly decided, there has been a seismic shift on the issue – not in public opinion, but in the legal logic used by universities to defend the practice. When AA was first institutionalized in the 1960s, its enumerated purpose was to redress historical grievances. After a few centuries of legal discrimination, segregation, and slavery, one could hardly expect that black students – and remember, we're talking about an era in which the schools were still segregated and some state universities had to be browbeat into admitting blacks – would immediately perform on par with white students who had received so many comparative advantages over the years. Although schools may no longer be de jure segregated, they remain mostly segregated nonetheless. So affirmative action-type programs have continued as the black/white(/Hispanic) gap in educational performance has lingered.

Eventually, perhaps out of fear that courts were becoming less favorable to the "righting historic wrongs" argument, academia began defending its practices on what we might call a Value of Diversity argument. That is, the university and the state have a compelling interest (as O'Connor's majority decision admitted in Grutter) in obtaining and providing "the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."

I have never put stock in the "Affirmative action is insulting to minorities" argument, seeing as how I have never heard it come from the mouth, pen, or keyboard of anyone who was not a white conservative. This, however, is not only a legally tenuous argument but one that rests on a remarkably insulting premise: that diversity has educational value, and, by implication, that white students will miss out on it if the university does not admit enough black and Hispanic students. There is no other way to read that, especially as explained in Grutter. This is a drastic change; rather than black students benefiting from programs designed to benefit them, it's the majority white students who benefit from having some Colored People around as scenery. The schools are saying, in a sense, that they need to admit blacks and Hispanics in order to provide some sort of Diversity Experience for whites.

I suppose we could have a philosophical debate about how the ends justify the means. That wouldn't be terribly convincing, and more importantly it ignores the reality of the impending Fisher decision. What happens afterward will be telling. Hopefully universities will reorient themselves toward a policy that tells black and Hispanic students, "We want you here," which is much different than, "We need you here." Fortunately, some states where the universities operate under bans on racial preference have already proven that it is possible to maintain elite programs that recruit and accept diverse student bodies without resorting to tactics that will irritate Samuel Alito. There is more to any college applicant than a test score, so I guess admissions boards will just have to do some actual work and read applications rather than simply sorting data in Excel spreadsheets.

In general, internet comment sections are where hope goes to die. If you want to go from a good mood to being on your knees praying for a comet to hit the Earth and wipe out humanity, the fastest way to accomplish that is to read the comment sections on any general interest website. Big content providers (AOL, Yahoo, YouTube, AP, etc.), local newspapers (for some reason the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is the worst I've ever seen aside from the NY Post), and non-political niche interest sites (cars, sports, fashion, entertainment, etc.) are all guaranteed to destroy your psyche in five minutes flat if you dare to wade into the comments. This is doubly true when the topic at hand is even remotely political. And of course the people who troll the internet as though it is their life's calling can turn anything into an Obama bitchfest in less than three posts.

Because we are well aware of how bad most comment sections are – and some are quite good, particularly on sites with educated, relatively narrow audiences – it's a lazy form of blogging to use comments as fodder. I can't think of anything easier than copying what some idiot wrote on a Trayvon Martin story and saying "Look at how stupid this is!" Yet I think a simple comment section can turn into a wonderful mix of performance art and psychology experiment when that rare news item comes along that ties the brains of the Obama loathing trolls in knots.

Cognitive dissonance can be a beautiful thing sometimes.

Take this story from the internet's most popular blog on the auto industry.

Headline: "Treasury orders executive pay cuts at GM including CEO Akerson." Imagine for a moment you are the kind of doughy, inchoate pant-wetter who sits at a computer all day posting comments about Barack HUSSEIN Obummer on every news item you see. Your mind is being torn in so many directions here.

1. The government is telling a corporation what it can do. Socialism. BAD.
2. GM might fail. Obama gave GM money (note: forget the bailouts under Bush). GM fail = GOOD.
3. Your authoritarian-follower tendencies mean you worship the wealthy, so limiting compensation = BAD.
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4. Limiting compensation means "the best talent will leave the company", proving that Barry Hussein does not understand business. GOOD.
5. GM got a lot of money from taxpayers. They need to pay it back before giving themselves raises!
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GRRR!

So GM should pay back the taxpayers, but rich executives need to be lavishly compensated, but Obama doesn't understand the free market, but GM needs to fail to prove that he was stupid to give them money, but…

Watch them run in circles in the comments. It's hilarious. They can't decide piss and moan about Obama giving GM money or Obama telling GM that it can't have more money. A similar thing happened a few weeks ago when the Department of Energy declined to give a massive loan to would-be auto startup Carbon Motors (which has been the Duke Nukem II of auto startups, by the way). The comments are hysterical in every sense of the term. These people have spent years bellyaching about how the government shouldn't be propping up failing or non-viable companies, except now when the government declines to do so it hates America and doesn't understand job creation. So just to clarify, it is terrible when Obama gives car companies money except when he doesn't, which is also terrible.

We know that these people will complain, often with violent anger, about anything Obama does. It's a special treat, however, to watch them argue two diametrically opposed viewpoints just to keep the president in the wrong about everything. He must always be wrong, so adjust reality accordingly.

I was forwarded an item from Forbes that is more remarkable for its tone than its content. Retail giant Best Buy is failing (largely because it is discovering that selling CDs and DVDs is not a growth industry, but also because electronics buyers are so willing to shop online rather than in big box stores) and it is attempting to turn things around by closing a bunch of stores.

A commentator with Forbes, a name synonymous with a conservative take on business and financial news, points out that this is a silly strategy. It is not a difficult point to make. If the chain's fundamental problem is with its product offerings and retail model, having fewer stores selling the wrong thing the wrong way isn't going to help. The writer sums it all up in her title: Best Buy Cutting 50 Stores To Get Profitable. Good Luck With That.

An excerpt:

Best Buy is closing 50 superstores and focusing on mobile in an effort to reduce expenses. But since when is cost cutting to profitability a successful retail strategy?

Since never.

…

In so many ways, it feels like a shell game. The kind that companies use to deflect negative attention by waving their arms and yelling, “look over here!” Changing things up, reducing its footprint and getting out of too large or otherwise unfavorable locations is important and probably needed to be done long ago. But these changes look more like an olive branch to the financial community: a restructuring to reduce costs.

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…

Analysts believe Best Buy is doing the right thing. Right or wrong, at least Best Buy is doing something. Sometimes the bigger thing to do is go small, but a retailer still has to sell more stuff, not just jettison the people and locations that are supposed to help it do just that.

Now let's pause and consider how the great minds at Forbes can wrap their heads around this idea as a business strategy…

but not as a public fiscal policy. True, the analogy between government and business is imperfect (yet infinitely more useful than the favorite right-wing trope of the government balance sheet as a household budget) but it takes some active denial to gloss over the broader implications of "You can't cost-cut your way to profitability." This is true, and obviously so.

So why, one might wonder, can Congress or state legislatures spur economic growth by cutting spending? The fundamental problem of the business and the government is the same: not enough revenue coming in to meets its obligations.

Firing people and shuttering stores is a knee jerk response that promises meager short term benefits at the cost of substantial long term losses.

Just a brief review: businesses that try to become profitable by cutting expenditures are on the road to ruin, but growth in the planet's largest economy will be spurred by the government cutting costs and taking in even less revenue. Yep. That's about the logical consistency I would expect from a publication with Steve Forbes' name on the masthead.

Being in higher education requires one to accept a strange relationship among status, social class, and income. Being a professor is theoretically a high status job, but the pay isn't stellar. Accordingly, we have to get used to the fact that most of our students have more money than we do. They drive nicer cars, go on two or three vacations per year, wear more expensive clothing, enjoy the family beach house on Tybee or Martha's Vineyard, and blow $500 on a night out at the bar without thinking twice. And most of them don't even work. But hey, this is the line of work we chose and we knew the limited income potential. It's just a reality we get used to. I hardly notice anymore.

Of course the preceding paragraph somewhat misrepresents the situation. The students themselves are not wealthy; the money is coming from Mom and Pop. And on my campus it seems that the recession has managed to miss many of the Moms and Pops. For example, the house across the street from me is occupied by three very nice female undergraduates. It has three cars parked in the driveway: a Range Rover (base price: ,275), a Mercedes SLK (,800), and a Lexus IS350 (,480).

I guess the latter girl's parents don't really love her.

This experience is not shared by every student – many of them are taking the bus and busting ass to pay rent – but it certainly isn't rare either. The parking decks at all three large state universities at which I've spent several years have been like exotic car showrooms. Or check out the parking lot at the frats and sororities. There's a lot of money being thrown around at these places.

Any head of a household, especially with children, understands that a very high income is necessary to afford buy one's 19 year old an $80,000 car (and if that's what Susie drives, what are mom and dad driving?). We're talking about real "one percenters" here, with household incomes most likely over $250,000. And I can never stop myself from wondering: What in the hell do all of these people do for a living? There can only be so many doctors in the world.

Now I have to make a confession – I grew up in a family and neighborhood with very limited imagination as far as career paths. Growing up, the two careers available in this country (as far as I knew) were Doctor and Lawyer. Girls could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries too. People who "weren't college material" became cops, electricians, low-skill civil servants, or meth addicts. This is not an exaggeration. I seriously had no idea what an MBA was when I got to college. "Banker" meant the guy who wore a tie and a brown tweed sportcoat at the bank in my home town. I had never met anyone who held a Ph.D. and professions like accounting, engineering, computer science, and so on were only vaguely understood. And it's not like I grew up poor – our family was well above average. But I was never exposed to anyone who told me that there were professions in the world other than Doctor and Lawyer. To this day, whenever I see or think of great wealth, that's what I assume wealthy people do.
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It's very naive and New Money of me, I know.

When I think about it, of course, I realize that not every family showering its college-aged children with money is headed by doctors and lawyers. I still can't tell you exactly what they do, though. I have a vague sense that people make a ton of money in "business" or "finance" but I'm short on specifics beyond that – lots of people must be working in generic offices in some sort of Executive Vice President in Charge of Administration type positions, at least as I envision it. All I know is that recession or not, 10% unemployment or not, there are a lot of these people out there, presumably in the Atlanta suburbs. There are far more poor people in this state, of course, but the absolute number of wealthy families is significant.

And I'm teaching at the cheap public school – I can imagine what the student body is like at Atlanta's ,000/yr private schools or the more academically demanding publics.

I think that one of the reasons that the children of wealthy parents tend to become wealthy too – aside from the obvious – is that they comprehend more career options. Poor, working-, or middle class kids tend to think of high paying careers in terms of the stuff they see on TV and they gravitate toward the most clearly defined paths. I certainly did, and I've had enough conversations with friends I grew up with to be confident that I'm not the only one who suffered this failure of imagination as I transitioned to adulthood. Perhaps there are more people than I realize taking advantage of the world's oldest method of getting rich – inheriting it – or maybe there really are that many doctors in this country. It is rare that I admit such all-encompassing ignorance, but all I know is that I am surrounded by a large number of the children of wealthy families and I don't fully comprehend where all the money is coming from.

There are few things in law, government, or politics more ridiculous than the notion of constitutional "originalism", the idea that the law is to be interpreted only in light of the intent of its authors. Anton Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and many others of those stripes wear this label as though it is the mark of a True Defender of the Faith. Originalists, textualists, and strict constructionists are the real lovers of the Constitution, whereas interpretivists are a bunch of liberal defilers who make up whatever it is they want to see in the document. Conservatives respect the law, you see, and liberals do not.

If it is not immediately apparent why this is a complete daily ration of happy horseshit, please consider how originalist logic works. Take DC v. Heller (2010), for example, the case in which the conservative majority decided for the first time in 230 years that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. In Scalia's majority opinion he cites copious historical evidence that he thinks is proof that the 2nd Amendment was intended to define an individual right. So you see, Anton Scalia isn't making something up or interpreting a new right out of thin air based on his opinion like a liberal would. Instead, Scalia is asserting this new right based on his opinion of what the authors of the Constitution thought! Isn't that so much better? Because really, how much room for personal bias, judgment, and ideology could there be in the selective interpretation of fragmentary historical evidence?

In short, it's simply another form of judicial activism and interpretivism. They merely add an extra step to the process, and you can be certain that they'd be howling like stuck pigs if liberal judges decided that they could read the minds of the attendees at the Philadelphia Convention.

The idea of Scalia as some sort of staunch defender of the Charter is particularly galling, because in his old age he isn't even bothering to cook up dubious assertions about James Madison's thought process as a cover for his personal preferences. He's lapsing into strict constructionism (which he has ridiculed publicly in the past) or the kind of anecdotal, let's-just-be-practical reasoning that he claims to detest. In the recent companion cases about plea bargaining and the effectiveness of counsel (Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper) Scalia uses quite a bit of magical reasoning in his dissents.

In Lafler, a defendant's attorney failed to tell him that the state offered him 3 years in a plea bargain, and he went to trial and got 6. Scalia wrote the dissent, arguing:

With those words from this and the companion case, the Court today opens a whole new field of constitutionalized criminal procedure: plea-bargaining law. The ordinary criminal process has become too long, too expensive, and unpredictable, in no small part as a consequence of an intricate federal Code of Criminal Procedure imposed on the States by this Court in pursuit of perfect justice. See Friendly, The Bill of Rights as a Code of Criminal Procedure, 53 Cal. L. Rev. 929 (1965). The Court now moves to bring perfection to the alternative in which prosecutors and defendants have sought relief. Today’s opinions deal with only two aspects of counsel’s plea-bargaining inadequacy, and leave other aspects (who knows what they might be?) to be worked out in further constitutional litigation that will burden the criminal process.

God, the courts are so busy. You people and your rights inconvenience us. You should be subject to what all parties agree in this case and Frye is ineffective counsel because the Court is too busy and there might be future cases the Court would have to hear on this matter. Additionally, did you know that because plea bargains are not binding until accepted in court they don't actually count as part of "the criminal justice system"? It's true!

And it would be foolish to think that “constitutional” rules governing counsel’s behavior will not be followed by rules governing the prosecution’s behavior in the plea bargaining process that the Court today announces “‘is the criminal justice system,’” Frye, ante, at 7 (quoting approvingly from Scott & Stuntz, Plea Bargaining as Contract,101 Yale L. J. 1909, 1912 (1992) (hereinafter Scott)). Is it constitutional, for example, for the prosecution to withdraw a plea offer that has already been accepted? Or to withdraw an offer before the defense has had adequate time to consider and accept it? Or to make no plea offer at all, even though its case is weak—thereby excluding the defendant from “the criminal justice system”? Anthony Cooper received a full and fair trial, was found guilty of all charges by a unanimous jury, and was given the sentence that the law prescribed. The Court nonetheless concludes that Cooper is entitled to some sort of habeas corpus relief (perhaps) because his attorney’s allegedly incompetent advice regarding a plea offer caused him to receive a full and fair trial.

So, you know, it doesn't matter if your ineffective counsel fails to tell you about an offer as long as you get a fair trial afterward! In Frye, a defendant rejected a plea offer after his counsel (bafflingly) told him that a jury could not find him guilty of attempted murder because the victim was shot below the waist. Here again Scalia shows his strict adherence to the Constitution:

This is a companion case to Lafler v. Cooper, post, p. ___. The principal difference between the cases is that the fairness of the defendant’s conviction in Lafler was established by a full trial and jury verdict, whereas Frye’s conviction here was established by his own admission of guilt, received by the court after the usual colloquy that assured it was voluntary and truthful. In Lafler all that could be said (and as I discuss there it was quite enough) is that the fairness of the conviction was clear, though a unanimous jury finding beyond a reasonable doubt can sometimes be wrong. Here it can be said not only that the process was fair, but that the defendant acknowledged the correctness of his conviction. Galin Frye’s attorney failed to inform him about a plea offer, and Frye ultimately pleaded guilty without the benefit of a deal. Counsel’s mistake did not deprive Frye of any substantive or procedural right; only of the opportunity to accept a plea bargain to which he had no entitlement in the first place. So little entitlement that, had he known of and accepted the bargain, the prosecution would have been able to withdraw it right up to the point that his guilty plea pursuant to the bargain was accepted.See 311 S. W. 3d 350, 359, and n. 4 (Mo. App. 2010).

Even though more than 90% of cases in our legal system our disposed of with plea bargains, Scalia continues to beat this idea that because they are not immediately binding when offered, it really doesn't matter whether or not your counsel botches it. No big deal. You'll just do a lot more time in prison. Which was the Founders' intent – that individuals' rights in the justice system be kept to a minimum. Right? I have to check my notes but I'm pretty sure that's what they wanted.

These cases, although not greatly publicized, should serve a dual purpose as Anton Scalia's epitaph and proof that he is an irredeemable asshole adhering to an ideology that takes "judicial activism" to heights that would make Earl Warren blush.

This is awkward to write.

DL Hughley has a joke about why "extreme" recreational pursuits like skydiving or bungee jumping are mostly for white people. He argues that white people need to pay someone to get the thrilling experience of cheating death, whereas black people can get the same experience by going out in public, reaching for their wallet, and hoping they don't get shot 41 times.

The joke is over a decade old and the 41 shots refer to Amadou Diallo, the black Guinean immigrant who was shot by four plainclothes NYPD officers while delivering take-out food in the Bronx.

It's a good joke. I understand why people laugh at a topic like this; the only other choice is to cry. But honestly I do not understand how it is possible to be black and maintain one's sanity in the United States. I can't conceive of having to go through daily life on guard against behaving "suspiciously" or making any (NYPD favorite) "furtive movements" that would allow anyone – police or vigilante – to shoot me and suffer absolutely no consequences. As a white man, I am keenly aware of the fact that people like me merely have to say "I was afraid" (omitting the implied "afraid because he was black, and black people are scary") and/or claim that I was attacked (black men always manage to attack with the crazed strength of a dozen oxen in these scenarios, naturally) and I wouldn't even need to bother hiring a lawyer to get myself out of the police station. American courts and law enforcement have been making this message perfectly clear since the days of public lynching – if a black person is making you feel uncomfortable, even if he isn't doing anything but being in your presence, it's better safe than sorry. Shoot first and no one will ask many questions later.

I'm bringing this up, of course, in the context of the Trayvon Martin case (non-case, more accurately) in Sanford, Florida. For those of you who are not familiar with it, don't feel too bad. It hasn't gotten much mainstream media attention. The New York Times said little until its (lone black) columnist Charles Blow wrote about it on Friday. Think Progress also has a summary of interesting, relevant, and mostly sickening facts about the case: 17 year old black kid walks to 7-11 for iced tea and Skittles. Self-appointed 28 year old man on "neighborhood watch" finds him "suspicious." The dispatcher tells him that police are on the way. He gets out of his car – with a gun, of course, because assholes with vigilante complexes should definitely be armed – and pursues the kid. Minutes later he's dead. Here's a 911 call, where you can actually listen to the kid die.

So, to recap on being black in America: If anyone finds you suspicious or simply doesn't like the look of you, they get to shoot you. Then the police will pat you on the back and send you home with an implied "Attaboy!" and an explicit "We understand. We know how They are." Then the district attorney helps the police make more excuses for the shooter and coaches the witnesses to make the facts fit the storyline. The law that is supposed to protect you instead contrives to make it sound plausible to the public that a 140 pound teen armed with Skittles and a soft drink was a threat.
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No matter how transparently ludicrous that story sounds, to the majority of white people it will sound perfectly plausible. After all, We've all been there!
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We know how They are: scary, suspicious, and forever committing dozens of crimes. In our minds.

No one questions the key assumptions, which are so ingrained in our society that police, the courts, and the media cannot even conceive of them. One is that black people are scary. Just say that you were scared and everyone will believe you. No one will ask if it was reasonable for you to be scared, or if you're some kind of paranoiac hung up on Granddad's warnings about how black people are always about to mug you. The second assumption is that your response was appropriate to the threat (or "threat"). If you felt like shooting him, pepper spraying him, or putting him in a chokehold until he died (Cincinnati cops love that one), then obviously you did so because that's what the situation called for. The most basic questions that a reasonable person would ask in this situation – Why did you approach this kid? What made you think you needed to shoot him? – go unasked. The answers are simply implied.

I don't understand how black males, especially younger ones, do it. I don't know how their parents do it, knowing that every time the kids leave the house there's some cop or concealed carry asshole who will imagine them "reaching for a weapon" and you'll never speak to them again. I don't know how you accept that reality and then add to it that the law won't lift a finger for you when it happens other than to tell you that it's your kid's fault he got show. I feel like if I was black rather than white I'd probably be dead or in prison right now – and that's not hyperbole, as the statistics bear it out. I can't comprehend what it must be like to live in a society that considers it Progress that public lynchings no longer happen, ignoring the fact that the lynching process has simply become more efficient. When the best possible outcome is to hope that grassroots publicity can guilt the law into charging someone for your son's murder so he or she can be perfunctorily found not guilty by an all-white jury.

That's your best case scenario. The worst and far more common is that no one will even know it happened. You'll just be another dead black male on the local news, and no one will care because getting shot and killed is what black males are supposed to do.

There aren't many growth industries in this economy, but the U.S. has consistently churned out one commodity in record numbers since the 1970s: prison inmates. Thanks to the War on Drugs, corrections has transformed from a relatively modest component of state budgets to a resource hungry leviathan that cash-strapped legislatures are now struggling to control. In California, for example, prisons were 2% of the budget in 1980 but now consume a full 10% of every dollar the state takes in. Texas is now spending $6,000,000,000 annually on its carceral empire, nearly 8% of a state budget facing a $20 billion shortfall.

Given the high caliber of person serving in the average state legislature these days, it should come as no surprise that the proposed solution is the usual privatization-?????-PROFITS!!! shell game that looks suspiciously like taking a payday loan. It looks like that because the logic is exactly the same: the state gets a one-time cash payment now, signs a 20 year contract, and then spends far more than the short term infusion of cash to meet the terms of the contract. Most states – Louisiana, Minnesota, Florida, Virginia, on and on and on – have discovered that the proposed cost savings from prison privatization are an illusion, as the state ends up spending less on salaries and maintenance but far more on secondary costs like medical care and lawsuits. But who cares! We can get the cash today!

Private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America recently sent an offer to 48 states offering immediate cash payments in exchange for 20 year contracts on the state prison system. Some states will undoubtedly take them up on the offer, either falling for the promise of savings through "efficiency" or reasoning that the current crop of politicians will be long gone by the time the piper requests payment. The offer has an interesting caveat, though – CCA requires the states to guarantee 90% capacity in the prisons for the duration of the contract.

Several of my social networking site friends focused on the 90% requirement when commenting on this story. Predictably, most sane people are appalled at the idea of the state guaranteeing to incarcerate a minimum number of citizens every year. I understand the shock and disgust, but this requirement should be taken with a grain of salt. Every single state prison system in the country is currently operating at 97% capacity or higher according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics – in some cases much, much higher – and as recently as 2005 every single state was operating over capacity. We have been locking up so many people with such draconian sentences for the last 30 years that nothing short of blanket pardons for all non-violent offenders could bring inmate populations below 90% of capacity.

I understand why the idea of guaranteed inmate populations is jarring. The modern American correctional system is already such a disaster, though, that such guarantees are hardly necessary. It would be like the Arizona State Legislature signing a contract guaranteeing a set number of stupid, psychotic bills proposed per session; the implications for the democratic process are troubling, but the practical matter of hitting the target is a given.

One of the oddest things about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is how little attention the American public has paid to them for the duration. Through the rose colored glasses of history, we generally accept that the public was involved in the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam to an extent that seems strange and foreign to us today. The news that trickles out of the Middle East has been and remains infrequent, bad, and received with little interest.

Focusing on bad news is neither exclusive to the American media nor to these wars. Still, part of me wonders if the situation in Afghanistan is not somewhat more positive than we might think because only the bad news gets reported. Then the other parts of me remind Part 1 that bad news is getting reported because the news is almost exclusively bad.

Last fall there was an astounding piece of public opinion research done in Afghanistan, showing that 92% of the 1000 Afghan males surveyed have never heard of 9/11. Think about that. They have no idea whatsoever why the US military is in their country beyond perhaps a vague notion that we do not like the Taliban. Conducting a scientific poll in a primitive, war-torn country with an illiteracy epidemic presents major challenges, and I have no doubt that the polling agency would allow that the data and sample are imperfect. Regardless, even if 92% is an overestimate the data still underscore the reason that we are not winning and never will win the war there. It is impossible to win the hearts and minds of a population with no understanding of the geopolitical events that started the war. It's also impossible to win hearts and minds by blowing stuff (and people) up, but that goes without saying.

So bearing in mind that the Afghan population does not know why we are there – Does the American public even know? Do our leaders? – consider this kind of news in rapid succession:

– The US military is caught burning Korans. I believe the official explanation that this was accidental only because I cannot conceive of anyone being stupid enough to do it intentionally. Regardless, Afghans are understandably displeased.

– With that fiasco fresh in everyone's mind a US soldier goes on a one-man killing spree, killing sixteen. Most were women and children. While the US military will argue that it can't be judged by the deranged choice made by a single soldier, the Afghan public is unlikely to appreciate that fine point of distinction. As a scholar quoted in the article notes, "This is a fatal hammer blow on the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan. Whatever sliver of trust and credibility we might have had following the burnings of the Koran is now gone."

That is starting to look like a fair assessment. It's hard to spot the end of a war that had no coherent mission and no measurable progress from the beginning, but I'd say this is looking quite a bit like the endpoint. There appears to be little left for the US military to do but turn everything over to the sparse, corrupt, and weak Afghan government and then pull up stakes in the middle of the night and disappear. It's eerie how we were just talking about the Fall of Saigon a week ago; we may be re-enacting something similar in the near future.

Will anyone even notice? Have the GOP candidates – or any candidate for Congress, for that matter – devoted anything but token attention and interest to Afghanistan? No, they're all breathlessly laying out plans to start a war with Iran, taking care to stand behind the podium to hide their erections. The war nobody paid attention to, fought for reasons Afghans didn't understand and toward ends that Americans couldn't define, will finally get the full attention of the political system…when the candidates decide that it will be a convenient excuse to call Obama a quitter, pansy, cheese-eating surrender monkey, and betrayer of the American way.

And ten or fifteen or thirty years from now, we still won't have learned our lesson about saving countries by blowing them up and trying to teach their people to thank us for it.