This is how he puts it, “Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.)

And a bit later, “If what I’m suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.”

Now if the head of the local machinists union, no. 1275 were to say this we wouldn’t give it a thought, or a even passing glance. For all union officials are programmed to see no further than the job security of their members.

But Andy Grove? Although he didn’t found Intel (that was Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore and friends) he is now credited with having transformed the company from a manufacturer of memory chips into one of the world’s dominant producers of microprocessors.

He became Intel’s president in 1979, its CEO in 1987, and its Chairman and CEO in 1997, and during his tenure as CEO, he oversaw a 4,500% increase in Intel’s market capitalization from $4 billion to $197 billion, making it, at the time, the world’s most valuable company.

So yes, when he talks about start-ups and job creation we have to listen. But not for long. 1979, the year when Grove became Intel’s president, is not 2010. The world has changed and Grove doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Just one week later, also in Bloomberg-Business Week, Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at University of California at Berkeley, makes this clear. Start-ups, he says, do create jobs.

“The Kauffman Foundation’s analysis of Census Bureau statistics shows that net job growth in the U.S. economy occurs only through start-up firms. From 1977 to 2005, existing companies were net job destroyers, losing 1 million net jobs per year. In contrast, new outfits in their first year added an average of 3 million jobs annually.”

Also, he points out that tariffs have been tried before, with the goal of stemming job losses. In the infamous case of the The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of June 1930, that which raised U.S. tariffs to historically high levels, jobs were not created but destroyed.

So what has happened to Grove? He must know the history of tariff wars and how little they benefit the participants.

Wadhwa makes his own common sense recommendations for what we might do to create additional jobs.

First we need to upgrade our investment in workforce training and development as a national priority. We need to have the concept of lifelong education become part of our culture. Education … is the best way of staying ahead in the global race for skills.

Second, we need to foster entrepreneurship at the source…. What inhibits Americans from starting companies is a lack of knowledge of how to do it, lack of financing, and fear of failure…. a significant proportion of the workforce can be taught to start successful companies and create jobs.

Third, we need to recruit the world’s best and brightest to the U.S. and do all we can to keep them here …. These skilled workers tend to be highly educated, to understand foreign cultures and markets, and to be highly entrepreneurial.

Fourth, we need to more effectively tap the gold mine of knowledge and innovation locked in our universities…. by building mechanisms [that promote] the nexus between the scientists who make the discoveries, the universities that market the discoveries to the world, and the entrepreneurs with domain experience who could take these discoveries and turn them into products.

Lastly, he says, and probably Andy Grove would agree, we need to provide incentives to American companies to keep research in the U.S. … The lure for these companies isn’t just cheap labor but also heavily subsidized infrastructure and cash subsidies. We may have to level the playing field [but not start anything like a tariff war as in 1930] in those industries where other countries aren’t playing by the rules.

I voted for him also because his election, as I thought at the time and still do, would take us another giant step forward in our march towards equality of races and peoples.

No matter what the subject, first the Senator and then the President always seemed to have thoroughly mastered the material in all the relevant details. Invariably I would come away from listening to him persuaded that he had missed nothing important.

I had much the same kind of feeling you get after reading a white paper or an article in the encyclopedia, those inclusive treatments of a subject that do justice to all the varying points of view.

Well what has changed? Why am I now questioning my support for the President? Probably not Obama himself, nor his ability to make good speeches. But it has become all too evident that the speeches are not enough to satisfactorily handle the burning issues and questions of our times.

And the burning issues that call out for something else, that call out for strong leadership, are many. There are the war, the millions of the unemployed, the sputtering economy, the oil spill in the Gulf, and others, real problems that continue to resist the President’s efforts to either contain them or change and resolve them for the better.

On the other hand there are those, mostly on the Left, who praise this President, placing him up there right along with FDR and Ronald Reagan in respect to his two major legislative accomplishments. These being:

A health care reform bill that corrects some of the most unsatisfactory elements of an earlier, inadequate health insurance system, and a financial reform bill that substantially strengthens government regulation of Wall Street, lessening if not eliminating some of the worst abuses of the financial industry.

But, and this also has been said by others, both reform bills are creations of Congress, not of the President. Instead of going to the leaders in Congress with his own ideas he called them and asked for their ideas, and expected them to write the text of the legislation.

He didn’t go to them as a leader, taking his own ideas with him. And in fact one is not even sure what the President’s own ideas are, his failure in this regard being a major source of my own doubts regarding his presidency.

In any case the result is that both bills suffer from being creatures of Congress, a kind of a mythological hydra or many headed creature, representing as it does multiple messages stemming from multiple and powerful lobbying groups.

We really don’t know what to think of these two bills, whether or not they will turn out to be real, substantial reforms of health care and banking and business practices. Because both bills reach us without an accompanying, single, powerful reform message from the president, one that would have better served to carry our country forward than the chatter of the headless and nameless Congressional authors.

The President from up on a bully pulpit ought to have got behind the several, perhaps as many as 10 or so reforms that everyone could agree were necessary, such as making health insurance affordable for the millions now not able to pay the premiums, such as eliminating the insurance companies’ practice of holding preexisting conditions up as a reason for rejection, such as enabling workers to hold onto their health insurance even when losing their jobs….

And in respect to financial reform, measures such as ensuring that shareholders and creditors — not taxpayers — bear the losses when big financial institutions fail, such as establishing new capital requirements for banks in order to limit speculative excess, such as the regulation of derivatives, such as appropriate restrictions on proprietary trading….

It’s not that these and other needed reforms are not within the bills passed by Congress. But they’re buried there in thousands of pages of what we have to call bureaucratic gobbledygook, that which puts them out of easy, perhaps out of any reach at all of the people whom they are supposed to curtail or benefit.

And worse, the few who do read them and understand something of what is being said will probably find in the thousands of pages hundreds of ways around their provisions, and in many respects things will go on much as before, although with additional government workers and regulators, if not new departments, to manage the bills’ provisions whatever they may turn out to be.

So far I’ve only spoken of the President’s “successes,” and how these will suffer from being without his leadership. When one turns to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the oil spill in the Gulf, there are no successes. Nor is there presidential leadership.

In regard to Afghanistan it’s as if the President were ignorant of the past, in Afghanistan of a past that is centuries old, and in Vietnam of our own recent past experience in that country. In two un-winnable wars, and elsewhere, the President continues to sacrifice the nation’s blood and treasure, and for no good reason. And I continue to wonder why.

And again regarding the oil spill in the Gulf why here also has he left leadership to others? He might not have been able to plug the hole as his daughter wanted him to but he could have at least made sure that from the beginning the number of actors in the Gulf, —Federal and State authorities, local governments, private organizations, and many others— were all coordinating their efforts to clean up the spill if not stop the flow.

He didn’t do this, and too often we heard stories of how this or that initiative or step in the clean-up process was not taken because of disagreements among the various organizations working, but not working together, there in the Gulf.

So I’m left with questions, and so far the single answer to all of them seems to be that the president is not up to the task of leading the country out of the several deep quagmires in which it finds itself.

In Afghanistan the President doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that the war, now in its ninth year, is going nowhere, that people are dying, or living but losing both arms and both legs, and for no good reason, and that there is no end in sight other than eventual withdrawal following a recognized failure to change things on the ground, at least for the better, if not in our favor.

Finally, in regard to what is still the freest market economy in the developed world the President doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that our country’s wealth, and health, are probably more dependent on the private sector than on the actions of his government, and that by his continuing to strengthen the government’s part in regulating and controlling the health and financial industries he is also running the risk of diminishing the people’s part, making them less responsible for their own lives and actions, and thereby weakening the private sector, which is still, in spite of the growing reach of the welfare state, the principal source of the country’s wealth.

Entitlements, including public schooling, social security, medicare and medicaid, ought to have tightly targeted with their benefits those populations in obvious need of help. Instead, too many, many not in need, tend to benefit from Obama’s and earlier entitlement programs, with the result that their cost is becoming more that the country, which means ultimately the private sector, can possibly bear.

Doesn’t the President realize this? Does he think that there are not strict limits to what the government can do for the people? Governments, including that of President Obama, tend to make all their reforms blanket reforms, leaving no one out, perhaps because that’s what’s going to get the members of that government re-elected.

I’ve never heard the President say that his government, any government, needs to live within its means, and that the funds are just not there to pay for the two wars, to bail out the automobile and financial industries, nor especially will there ever be enough to assure access for everyone to whatever health care is out there and available regardless of the cost.

My disappointment with the President has been that he sees the principal role of government as doing things for the people, making their lives easier, solving their problems etc. — rather than employing government programs and services, such as schools and neighborhood health centers, not to mention police and fire departments, to help people become better at doing things for themselves.

Just as one raises children to fend one day for themselves, so governments should be doing this, as much as possible, with the people who have elected them.

Much as the public school gets in the way of kids learning.  And they drop out.

How many of you ever think of the fact that our public school system is just one huge entitlement paid for mostly by taxes on the upper middle classes, many of whom don’t even have kids in the public schools?

Now schooling being an entitlement there is the danger, as in all entitlement programs, that the stated goals of the providers and spokespeople, in this case the educators, will not always, nor even in most instances, be accepted, let alone understood or acted upon responsibly by the beneficiaries.

For kids in school by and large do not take principal responsibility for their own learning, no more than do “welfare” recipients for their own lives.

Bill Gates left Harvard to take on the responsibility for his own learning and Microsoft was the result.

Just recently Bill Gates in a “talk” at the Aspen Ideas Festival, perhaps remembering his own situation decades ago, said that kids needed only to want to learn, and then occasions for their learning, given the internet and the number of “schools” or learning opportunities freely available to them online, such as the Khan Academy of which he spoke, will do what the school entitlement failed to do, and he or she will do what they both were genetically programed to do and learn.

Michael Walzer in an article, “Which Socialism” in this summer’s Dissent Magazine says that “today’s” socialism (or if you  prefer, social democracy) combines three features, each of them crucial to the overall meaning of the word.

These features are:

Democracy, — for a socialistic regime is no less a democratic regime, with rival parties, a well-entrenched right of opposition, and a formally free press.

A (free) market, but, under socialism, one subject to state regulation, resulting in a macro-economy heavily influenced and shaped by government.

A welfare state, meaning the system of entitlements and income redistribution that provides the people with health care, schooling, transportation, a safe environment, security in old age, and basic protection from the failures of the market economy.

Now those who call our president a socialist are not speaking of his obvious democratic leanings, his adherence to a system of rival political parties, his acceptance of a well-entrenched right of opposition, or his promotion of a free press.

Rather the socialist designation probably stems from a combination of Walzer’s second and third features, Obama’s positions on market regulation and entitlements.

In the wake of the recent market collapse and the Gulf oil spill the talk in Washington has been mostly about government regulation of a too free market, one that allowed (caused) these calamities to happen.  And so far Obama seems to be mostly on the side of those who would regulate the oil and financial industries.

Now this may make him a socialist, but is there any other position to take? Who among us would defend no regulation at all of market activities? Probably no one of us, and hence we are no less socialists than Obama. Yes, as I said in my earlier Blog, we are in some respects all socialists now.

Finally we have Walzer’s third feature of modern socialism, the welfare state. Probably when Tea Partiers and other such call Obama a socialist what they really mean is that Obama is furthering the expansion of  the state, and doing so at the expense of individual responsibility and initiative.

This is the position of Guy Sorman who in a City Journal article says that socialism now means the unlimited growth of entitlements and jobs protected by the state. In that regard Obama’s attempt to extend health insurance to all would be just the latest example of this growth, thus earning him the socialist designation.

But there is another point of view to all this that I want to develop, but only in a subsequent Blog. Walzer, and the other liberal democrats, who talk about the role of government are not so much mistaken in what they say. Rather they don’t say enough.

All their talk is about the responsibiity of the state, in Walzer’s discussion the state’s responsibiity to defend democratic values, prevent market abuses, and protect the very young, the very old, all those needing help from the state’s actions and programs.

I can accept Walzer’s three features as being the meaning of socialism today.  And I would say also that there’s nothing wrong with his discussion as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough.

What’s lacking from Walzer’s discussion of socialism is the individual. What Walzer has to say is all about the state. Furthermore there is no apparent awareness that even seemingly reasonable state actions, such as the market regulations and entitlements of which he speaks, may in too many instances also serve to stifle individual growth.

For there are dangers to the individual proceeding from the actions of the state, no less than those from the market. Is Walzer aware of these dangers?

Finally, is our President a socialist? I would say we don’t yet know, but that things don’t look good in this regard. For most of the President’s talk has been about what the state can, and should do for the people, and not what the people need and should do for themselves.

Perhaps this was true at the time of the Union’s creation, I don’t know. (Actually, the Union was “created” over a period of some 50 ears, and is still a work in progress.) But I’ll assume that Sorman’s statement is accurate and that at the “start” belief in the free market and adherence to its principles was widespread among the members.

Is this no longer the case? Sorman says it’s not, and that in this regard things have changed, radically changed. Instead, of adherence to free markets all the Union members, even those of the right, have created, perhaps without always knowing what they were doing, gigantic welfare states, inspired not by a belief in economic freedom but by socialist ideology.

So that there be no misunderstanding, where there often is in regard to the meaning of the word, Sorman tells us what he means by socialism. In his view this means “the unlimited growth of the welfare state, along with the accumulation of entitlements and jobs protected by the state.”

Now most of us would agree that under this definition the present member states of the European Union, as well as many others, including the United States, are, in fact, “welfare” states.

And in as much as a given administration is growing the size of the government, and the size of the entitlement portion of the budget, such as what went on under President Bush, and is now going on under President Obama (and probably under every previous president, although under some more than others) both these men might understandably be called socialists.

But, and this is important to keep in mind, the difference between a welfare socialist (say a Roosevelt or Johnson) and a free market “capitalist” (say a Nixon or Reagan) is one of degree, not of kind. In respect to welfare socialism these men are all closer than apart. Also, their followers ought not now to be battling with the followers of their opponents over differences of degree, and they should certainly not be calling one another names.

What our country desperately needs is, first, for everyone on both sides of the left-right or welfare-free market divide, for everyone to agree that governments are (and have always been) in the business of welfare, the bottom line of which is simply helping people who for whatever reason are not able to help themselves.

Furthermore, this state of affairs is not going away, especially since welfare is probably the most legitimate form of government there is, after the police and fire departments and other such. Some degree of welfare, accompanied by a growing central government, is here to stay, and we should accept this and move on.

Second, and just as important, what the country needs, is agreement among opponents, belonging to different groups on the left-right spectrum, that welfare socialism is not possible without having, simultaneously, a flourishing free market, one that is growing the country’s, and the government’s, wealth.

And furthermore, just as we support the efforts of government to ease the lives of people, especially those who can’t do for themselves, we ought to no less get squarely behind the efforts of individual entrepreneurs to establish and grow their businesses, thereby generating new wealth and permitting governments to even be in the business of welfare.

For otherwise, as we’re seeing in Greece and other members of the European Union, and to some extent in California and in other nearly bankrupt states, the welfare governments will come crashing down as liabilities far outnumber available assets.

For governments, having no wealth creating powers themselves, will quickly find that they are unable to meet their own obligations, other than perhaps temporarily by additional taxes. Temporarily because tax revenues, like everything, else depend on new wealth creation in the private sector, and private sector wealth, is of course, the only source of new wealth there is.

In the not too distant past there were governments that saw themselves as being wealth creators. They believed that with the means of production in their hands there was no reason they couldn’t create new wealth. Of course they failed miserably, as evidenced by the many examples of the former members of the now defunct Soviet Union.

So the big question that the developed countries of the western world is now facing, that which Sorman is writing about, is whether the expansion of the ubiquitous welfare state will slow down and in the process lower its sites from still more target benefits and entitlements.

Will they undergo a reality check, reality being what they’re able to do with the means at hand, while all the time being sure that any additional benefits they might be considering, let alone those already on the books, will not ask more of the wealth producing entrepreneurs and businesses than these latter can possibly provide.

And given the present fiscally irresponsible leadership in the Western world things do not look good in this regard. In Europe and in America leaders are still talking more about what governments can do for the people, than what the people will have to do for themselves, and what they will have to do without, if they would grow, and not simply spend until there is no more, their country’s wealth.

The subject of President Obama’s most recent address was immigration. The Times in an editorial about this speech had two things to say, two things that I might have said myself, and almost with the same words. Although I don’t always agree with the Times editorial positions in this case I did.

Two things, one, that the President’s speech “had the eloquence and clarity we have come to expect when he engages a wrenching national debate.” I agree, it did have that. Obama touched reasonably and accurately all the bases, neglecting neither the conservative nor liberal positions in the debate over immigration.

It’s true that we’ve come to expect great speeches from the President, perfect renderings of the subject at hand, —whether it be racism, moderate Islam, economic collapse, or any number of other critical national and world-wide issues —where nothing of note is overlooked.

Yet as the Times points out, and number two, my second point of agreement with the editorial writer:

“Mr. Obama’s call to action applies not just to Congress but to himself as well. He neatly defined the obstacles to a comprehensive bill….But Mr. Obama has presidential powers, and he should use them.”

That he should! Use the real power he has, not just to persuade us by his reasonableness, but to lead us by his action. Get up and out there and lead from the bully pulpit. Great speeches are just not enough. As for the speeches he might have remained in Chicago. He is in Washington where we expect more from him.

While speaking, because he has to go on speaking, he should be much more in contact with the particular problem he is addressing. In regard to the oil spill in the Gulf is he aware that the Coast Guard, the Feds, the locals, the staties, all the many others involved in the clean-up are not coordinating their efforts, with the result that much time and money is being wasted? If he is aware why isn’t he the coordinator?

In Afghanistan the principal problem, as in Vietnam before, is that we haven’t won over the people to our point of view of what’s best for them. For the most part they don’t even want us to be there.

Why isn’t the President confronting this problem head on? Either convincing us that we should stay, or getting us out and bringing to an end what seems more and more like a terrible sacrifice of blood and treasure in a cause no one believes in. Not an impossible task, but he evidently sees it that way and therefore avoids facing up to it.

And in regard to immigration debate before us why isn’t he out front, stressing the great importance, say, of getting behind potential entrepreneurs, many of whom have come here as students and have not remained because we have not made it easy for them to do so. He must know that these entrepreneurs have the power to grow the nation’s economy and thereby create jobs for the now millions of jobless.

And why isn’t he doing more for the children of illegal immigrants, those who have lived most of their lives in this country but who are not citizens? We need these children as much as they need us. Why does the President allow them to be threatened with deportation? Why doesn’t he become their spokesperson as they are in no small degree the future of the country?

And there is so much more he could be doing, that would promise more for the country’s future than building walls along the border and putting, as he says and repeats in his speech, more “boots on the border.”

How does he reconcile these “boots on the border or on the ground” with the words of Emma Lazarus that he cites in the conclusion of his talk, “Give me your tired, and your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free?”

It is no longer enough, if it ever were except as a university lecturer, or perhaps while campaigning for office, merely to display one’s full understanding of the issue.

The President ought to drop the mask of evenness, of reasonableness, of acceptance of all points of view, get “narrow,” get fiery and angry, and yes speak out but from a bully pulpit, and in doing so lead the people and the country to needed action, dragging us along if necessary, in order to get behind real changes that will insure our country’s future. Isn’t that the principal role of the President?

Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Protesters clashed with riot police during a strike against austerity measures in Athens on Tuesday.

Late Monday the head of the main civil servants’ union, Spyros Papaspyros, said that the Greek people, not just the union members, would never accept the proposed changes. “They violate the law and the Constitution and affect 95 percent of Greeks — there is no way they will pass.”

The two main labor unions, evidently representing some 3 million workers, vehemently oppose the measures. Now the entire population of Greece is hardly more than three times that number, so on the face of it the union workers would seem to represent nearly all the workers — non-working men and women, school children, retirees et al. probably making up most of the remaining 7 million Greeks.

What chance does Papandreou’s government have to lower the budget deficit by cutting worker and retirement benefits when the organizations representing most of the working population will go on demanding continual work stoppages rather than accept the government’s proposals? A snow ball’s chance.

Now the principal money making “industries” of Greece are tourism and shipping. Don’t the workers at least in the tourist industry realize that any strikes will reduce the revenues from tourism? And don’t they all realize that if the shippers are made to pay additional taxes the shippers will probably pick up and operate their ships under the flag of another country?

If there ever were a case of someone, in this case a country, of shooting herself in the foot this must be it.

How has it come to pass, as in Greece, but also in Spain, in France, in California even, that to a large extent, the people seem not to have ever encountered Economics 101, or the knowledge that their own livelihoods, not to mention medical and other benefits, and ultimately retirement checks, will always depend on there being large numbers of entrepreneurs and workers who continue to grow (the tourist services and the shippers, for example) the country’s wealth,…

and that the very first task of everyone, not just the government in response to European Union pressures, ought to be to assure that this goes on happening?

This is the sad tale of our times. The gross national products of too many countries of the developed world are stagnant, or growing too slowly to permit a significant reduction in existing budget deficits, not to mention extend new benefits and services to the rising populations everywhere of the needy and the elderly.

In Greece what will happen when the government cannot fulfill its promise to the European Union, and is unable to reduce its debt, the proposed austerity measures having been rejected by the people? They cannot sell more government paper, nor print more euros.

When the checks stop coming what will the people do? These are interesting times.

But it may also be that Spyros Papaspyros is just an actor in the latest comedy, and that when his bad boy role is played out, the people will go back to work.

“There seems to be more awareness now of what I call the two weeds that have grown in Progressive soil: entitlement spending; and compensation of unionized public sector workers. Greece seems to be an object lesson in what can happen if these weeds are left untrimmed for too long.”

I would say “new awareness” on the part of whom? I certainly would like it to be true that there be such new awareness, and in particular on the part of our Congressional and other leaders in Washington, including President Obama.

But I haven’t seen the evidence of it, only heard the voices from the Right, such as that of Kling, and the angry shouts of the Tea Partiers. I haven’t yet heard our leaders in power apply the “object lesson” that is Greece, to California, say, where retired police and firemen in their fifties are being paid annual pensions of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also, while agreeing with Kling’s point that entitlements and public sector compensations have gone wild I wouldn’t have called them two “weeds” growing in progressive soil.

Because they’re not weeds. Social security, medicare, medicaid do have value and there are few, if any Americans who now would want to tear them from our ground and discard them as weeds

These government programs are rather much more like those “indeterminate” tomato plants sold in the garden sections of Home Depot, Lowes, and other outlets.

These plants, just as these entitlement programs, if not carefully watched and disciplined, will quickly overrun your entire raised bed garden, crowding out everything else.

In any case that does seem to be what Kling’s “weeds” are now doing to our country’s budget, overunning it, and while doing so restricting our ability to address any of the many other more pressing needs that are out there and confronting us and demanding action.

“If you enjoy reading with your children, wonderful. But if you skip the nightly book, you’re not stunting their intelligence, ruining their chances for college or dooming them to a dead-end job.”

“The same goes for watching television, playing sports, eating vegetables, living in the right neighborhood: Your choices have little effect on your kids’ development, so it’s OK to relax.”

“And once you realize that your kids’ future largely rests in their own hands, you can give yourself a guilt-free break.”

And if you’re a grandparent, like I am, I’m sure you’ll join me in saying, “If I had known grandchildren were this much fun I would have had them first.”

So, is the author, Brian Caplan right? Do we really have little or no influence on what our children become? Without going quite as far as he does I would say yes.

The evidence is on his side. What the children become in most cases cannot be attributed to the actions of the parents. Parents, of course, do not believe this and go on being soccer moms and fervid adherents to Sylvan Learning Centers, Kumon, and Suzuki violin lessons.

So if you’re a parent what should you do? Caplan has this right when he says, “If you create a loving and harmonious home for your children, they’ll probably remember it for as long as they live.”

Why? Because the General is our President’s man in charge of the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year and without an end in sight. And the President’s man doesn’t do Rolling Stone interviews.

So given the interview one has to wonder if the General, incredible as this may seem, understood his own position and what this meant in regard to his own behavior in public.

First there was his position as the designated leader of our armed forces in Afghanistan. How could he not have understood that a free-wheeling Rolling Stone interview would be anything but detrimental to the war effort, probably reducing his own chances, as the leader of that effort, to succeed?

And then there was his subordinate position in the chain of command to the President. For in spite of his attitude and actions this wasn’t his war.

How could he not have understood, not been aware that the interview would have been seen as a flagrant disregard of not only this President’s, but any President’s authority?

Now during the time of the General’s Rolling Stone Interview Errol Morris was posting daily, five altogether, pieces in the Times, all about what he called the Anosognosic’s Dilemma, the dilemma being that although something may be terribly wrong we may not be aware of it.

The first to use the term (from the Greek  meaning no knowledge of an illness, or “nosos”) was the French-Polish neurologist Joseph Babinski

who in 1914 used it to describe what he saw when patients with a complete paralysis of the left side of the body didn’t know they were paralyzed and even believed they were moving their left hand or leg when they weren’t.

Well it occurred to me while reading Morris that this was how I could make some sense of the General’s behavior. Couldn’t he also be seen as a victim, as suffering from the Anosognosic’s Dilemma?

Just as the hemiplegic would go on “moving” (not moving) his left arm and hand, so the General evidently went on believing that he was leading the war effort for his President even while in the irreverent company of his closest aids and talking simultaneously with them and with the interviewer from Rolling Stone for later publication.

I have to understand what happened as the General not being aware of what he was doing. He certainly acted as if he weren’t, as if he didn’t know that his words and the disrespectful remarks of his staff regarding the civilian authority would be seen as totally irresponsible, totally detrimental to the war effort, and ultimately undoing his own position as the leader of that effort.

In this case the nosos, or illness, was his own ignorance of the meaning of his words and action. Clearly the General had reached the very top of his profession without having learned that the positions awarded him along the way, and in most instances probably having earned them, came with their own code of responsible behavior.

Will he ever again be in a position in which he can demonstrate a new found awareness of that code? His chances in that respect may be no greater than those of the hemiplegic becoming aware of the existence of his own paralysis.