Kotkin is a demographer, about which is said: demographics is destiny. He charts trends through numbers and tells us California is about to fall into the metaphorical sea under the weight of its unfunded pension liabilities. Kotkin even admits to having voted for Governor Moonbeam. In 2010 no less. But now says he’s sorry for doing so. Moonbeam had a reputation for austerity, but apparently that doesn’t lap over into curbing the enthusiasms of greedy unions.

Mead is a professor somewhere out east and fesses up to being a “lifelong liberal.” And yet he has disparaged what he calls the “blue social model,” which translated is simply the holy grail of liberalism: entitlements, entitlements, entitlements and has called for sanity in that area, something that too few conservative pundits have targeted, being instead too besot with social issues. With the exception of the exceptional Charles Krauthammer and anyone who writes for Weekly Standard.

Mead blogs on American Interest, Kotkin can be found anywhere from the right to the left, from City Journal to New York Times and both are taking liberalism to task. If liberals have half a brain, they will follow these two men and not the false prophets of the left who have risen up as if in anticipation for endtimes.

Here’s Mead’s latest, a screed about the “greening of America,” another issue he’s been all over from the get-go.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/28/global-green-agenda-continues-to-fail/

Retro dudes living in yesteryear. But that hopefully is changing. (See, hope and change can be used in the same sentence without hypocrisy.)

Gay marriage is a big yawn. I’d have been happy to have started my 44 years-and-counting marriage with a civil union after a year of living together. The only reason we got a license is so she could pay in state tuition. So what’s the big deal about gay marriage? Oh, yeah, it’s a god thing. God doesn’t like gays, or something, right? I doubt that, but then I doubt god too.

I’m not only for legalizing drugs and gay marriage, I’m not a Christian, nor anything else, though I like to say I’m not even an atheist because that’s become a form of religion too. Anything’s possible, why close off any options? The day I’m driven to my knees by something, I’ll respect that. But just to hedge my bets against going to hell. That’s hypocrisy squared.

And yet I’m a die hard conservative. But rather one as Rick Santelli, godfather of the Tea Party, describes himself: a fiscal conservative, but also a live and let live social liberal.

Except for the liberal part. I reject that too. Liberalism in general has gotten away with being a positive adjective for  too long, while conservatism has had the exact opposite label. There’s nothing socially liberal about legalizing pot or gay marriage. It’s just common sense and it’s the direction our evolving society has been taking for some time, and no, I don’t attribute or thank Obama for his definition of “evolving” here either. There’s a difference between evolving an attitude about something over time and selling out your principles while trying to make it look like you’re upholding them. He’s of the latter school, sell your principles to the highest bidder and make sure they pay through the mouth for it too. Damn principles don’t come free, says Obama.

But my biggest gripe about conservatives is that they’re still trying to play the liberals’ game as the loyal opposition that “reacts” to history instead of making it. Not that being the party of no hasn’t served a purpose. It has. Never has the word no been used to better effect than the last three years. After all, there’s been nothing coherent to say yes to that’s come from the Obama administration. So just say no. And then say it again.

But now it’s time to go for a little more than no. What’s our agenda? Well, it’s already here.

What’s really ironic is that this all changed in 2010 and nobody noticed it. Not even conservatives. We are suddenly the party of the future. Our young Turks, having been ushered in on the Tea Party wave and those who were already there who got a big bump from the Tea Party’s presence, like Paul Ryan.

Ryan, Cantor, Daniels in Indian, Walker in Wisconsin, and many many more. These guys give lip service to their religious affiliations, but what they’re really into is the economy. The money. The honey. How it’s made, where it goes, and how much of it government should be allowed to tax and spend. That’s their passion and it’s the right passion for the times. This isn’t a global recession by accident. We’re in the process of sorting out the future and as usual that process is open to the good, the bad, and the butt ugly. So where should conservatives fit in this scheme? Everywhere. We’re the only people on the planet talking about the money in the right context. Where it comes from, where it goes, and how to get out of its way most of the time and when to intervene when absolutely necessary.

The left, on the other hand, continues to loll along in lala land. Look at Greece and California and look no further. This is where liberalism ends, not in a bang, but with a clang. A penny hitting the bottom of an otherwise empty tin can.

Our public schools should teach economics from the early grades up. Those buildings aren’t there for the sole purpose of holding Gay and Straight Alliance Clubs. They’re there to teach young Americans the skills they need to survive in a rapidly changing world in which our preeminence is no longer something we can take for granted. If you want a Gay and Straight Alliance Club in your town or city, start your own. It’s a good org, it just doesn’t belong in a public schools that already can’t deliver a full academic spectrum. Plus, in a decade or less, all our public schools will be gone in favor of digital learning that can take place anywhere.

But above all, conservatives, it’s time to think Big Tent. We’re not all the same guy and gal here in this unsightly string of pup tents. I like my fellow conservatives, even the evangelicals who have a special place in my heart for all the ridicule they receive. But I often wonder if they like me. Or put differently, do they even want conservatives like me.

I’d consider being a libertarian, but it just sounds like too much work. Too many issues, so little time. Too much diligence, not enough fun.

So what do y’all at RedState think? Do you want conservatives like me who break all the old molds? Can I fit in your pup tent?

He’s pushing his new book, The Road to Freedom—apparently a spin-off title from Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

Brooks says that conservatives have failed to make a moral argument against liberalism, especially in regard to the issue of nanny welfare states. He says liberals have been winning the moral argument for decades. They have. Disingenuously, but nonetheless.

But it’s long been my contention that moral arguments are out of order in this context; still, this has challenged me to consider their place and value in this discussion. Unlike many conservatives here and elsewhere, I’m not a Christian or anything else, and as I like to say it, I’m not even an atheist, as I see that as just another form of religion. I do believe in a higher power, but define it simply as the universe being a greater entity than myself.

Brooks’ stance on the moral argument is a simple, classic conservative one (and reminds us that the best ideas are not necessarily the most convoluted as our liberal brethren like to make them be). According to Brooks, it’s the slow drip torture of welfare entitlement that damages its recipients beyond repair over time. That’s immoral. (I’d say it more simply; it doesn’t work.) And it doesn’t just enable them, it cripples them. We see it in our ghettos, in our rural poor, in all populations who’ve become dependent on it. There was a time when some of our poor still had their pride and refused welfare. That time is now long gone.Today, we see it even more clearly in Europe where nearly half its population no longer works for a living. In England, where it is said that once you go on the dole, regardless of age and that includes the very young, you have at best a 50% chance of ever working again. So what’s the result? In England, for example, students are still funneled into trade tracks based essentially on socioeconomic background, but those jobs have dwindled. So you have a permanent lower class who have either lost jobs and can’t find new ones or have never worked and never will. How long will that be sustainable? Is it sustainable today?

Welfare in western countries has become a lifestyle. And with the rise of disabilities’ payments under Obama, we see yet another set of teeth in the welfare mouth, grinding loudly for more substance (taxation) to masticate into the body politic.

But I don’t like moral arguments any more than I like fair share arguments. Brooks even brought that up; that the fair share argument will be Obama’s prodding stick throughout the upcoming election, and that it’s a moral argument. It is and it fails as such. You can’t legislate fairness. You can’t legislate happiness. You can’t legislate success.

However it does appear that you can legislate failure and we’ve done so very successfully. Nine percent of Americans lived in official poverty before LBJ’s war on poverty that’s cost us approximately $15 trillion and now as an outcome we have fifteen percent poverty. So, as usual, liberals front the counterfactual: “think of how high it would have been otherwise.”

That logic has had its heyday and is in the process of pooping out altogether as is the liberal ideology behind it. Liberalism today is a dead religion struggling for its last breath and now is the time to drive the sword in to the hilt. Liberals once had good ideas and have accomplished much by way of moving society forward, but like all good things, liberalism has fallen apart under its own weight. It’s monopoly on the hearts of Americans has been taken to trust court.  Its bad ideas have come to the surface by default after the good ideas were stretched to the breaking point and today’s liberals cling to them like psychological safety nets.It’s hard to kick a religion cold turkey and liberals are fighting it tooth and nail. We need to free them from their depredations and be gentle in assimilating them back into society as they are also part of our kit and kin. We need to be stronger and better than them. Then we win and we don’t crow about it, we open our arms. They will be a welcomed entity when they return back  into the fabric of our ever forgiving society. We have missed their productive output in these dark years of liberalism.

And, oh by the way, Brooks says there has to be a safety net but it should only be for the very poor and downtrodden. Not the middle class, who now receive social security checks three times bigger than their original contributions. This is fact and has been discussed a lot lately but only by conservatives. Liberals refuse to go there.

The goal, whether deliberate or not, is to hook the middle class on entitlements as well as the lower class. Why that’s seen as a positive move is rather difficult to ascertain, but we know one thing about it; it attracts votes and polls well. Tell people they’re going to get stuff for free; they’re there.

The NPR interviewer challenged Brooks on these polls and he agreed that while Americans poll 70% in favor of gonzo free market enterprise, conversely they poll 65% for wanting health care coverage by govt fiat.

These discrepancies shouldn’t be bothersome, but rather are totally logical. Of course we all want whatever we can get for free and of course we believe in free enterprise, that’s what America is all about.

So bottom line is that we have to make some wise discernments here. Trim down government, make it leaner and meaner. See it as a last resort. Militarily, economically, philosophically. And don’t abuse its limited talents in trying to do too much with it. Make a better safety net, but discriminate who gets its services and make them time limited and means tested so that recipients, if humanly possible, have a path to crawl out of subservience. Some won’t and we will continue to protect them, give them necessary shelter. But to not wield a discerning sword over who gets entitlements; that’s when entitlements damage people. They rob them of incentive and leave them with nothing to plot their own survival going forward.

My bottom line on moral arguments: if you have to use them to push back against liberalisms’ annoying tendency to brandish them like little secular bibles when forwarding an argument, fine. But know their limits and wean yourself off them as soon as possible. Don’t attach to moral arguments, attach to common sense policies that prove to work. And do the research to make sure they do work.

Anybody see any difference between the soi disant “far left” and moderate liberals anymore? I don’t.

But has it always been that way? Perhaps.

Unions, entitlements, Big Bro Government, the whole shebang all goes back to the early 20th century and that means it goes back to communism. Originally, most of these atrocities were good ideas. Or at least worth trying, with some components of them worth keeping.

Workers were mistreated, underpaid and had few rights. People shouldn’t starve or sleep in the streets in America. There is a role for government.

Where it all went so wrong also was early on. Famous and influential Americans, such as educational innovator John Dewey, went on an elitist cruise to visit Soviet Russia in 1927. They were blown away by what seemed to be (and what they called) The Great Experiment. They didn’t realize they were being led by the hand to Potemkin villages and faked set-ups. Dewey, then 60, fell in love with a factory worker at one of these set-ups. She was 20 and was known as the Sweatshop Cinderella, by all accounts a gorgeous and vivacious redhead. Doubtful that was accidental or true love.

The mags of the day, many still around, like The Nation and The New Republic enthused unabashedly about the miracles they thought were being witnessed in Russia. The NYT reporter who had the Russian beat, Walter Duranty, knew of Stalin’s deliberate starvation in the Ukraine, but chose not to write about it for fear of losing his insider connection to Stalin.  He even won a Pulitzer for his disingenuity. In ’47, writing for The Nation, Duranty defended Stalin’s show trials insisting that was just your-government-at-work-and-play, i.e., a necessary part of founding a new governmental system. Cracking eggs to make omlettes, don’t you know.

As time went by, and cracks in the surface of The Great Experiment started to show more vividly, and then got uglier and uglier, the left’s fantasists couldn’t stand the disappointment and began rationalizing about it all. That was an awesome undertaking, because they had to defend or blot out epidemics of mass starvation, gulags where hundreds of thousands of innocents were sent for no better reason than their ethnicities, then the Khrushchev Papers came out spelling it out for any fool to read, and in the 90s, after Russia’s collapse, the Venona Intercepts, showing that the Russian Big Bro was up to everything and more that they had been accussed of by conservatives who were laughed at by the press for saying so. Each time, a new and improved rationalization was cooked up. “This wasn’t the right kind of socialism, but socialism still works if done right,” was basically what they’d predictably say.

Now, a century later, they have so much invested in their lies and dissemblings, they can’t back out.

Unions served a purpose and anyway in the west we did them a lot better because we’re not totalitarians. But their time is past. Their job done. We no longer need them as society has changed to deal with those issues. And done so successfuly. But unions are still essentially modeled after the tactics of communist revolutionaries, hence the vitriol, the shaking of fists when speechifying, the occasional violence committed in the name of worker’s rights. We established Social Security. Maybe it works, maybe not, but it was worth trying. Same with Medicare and Medicaid. But you can’t run a business when you no longer can pay your bills. And that’s where all of this has taken us.

Time for a new paradigm, but it ain’t going to come from the left. They’re still hanging on for dear life, still bailing out their own BS, and still rationalizing like crazy.

However, if you want to read moderate liberals who make sense, the best two right now–and they’re actually better than most every commentator out there save Krauthammer, Will, Buchanan and a few more conservatives–are Walter Russell Mead and Joel Kotkin.

A word to conservatives everywhere: the comments section in all these online offerings, particularly Redstate, since it’s set up largely for that reason,  is itself a new form of media. Consumer driven, self-educational, and who knows where it’s going since the sky is the limit. I suspect big places. And hey, it’s kind of like the communist revolution in redistributing assets from the big players to the rest of us, this time maybe, just maybe, for the right reasons.

(apologize for the repost, forgot to stamp a headline on it)

Whatever it’s called, it’s typically liberal in that it sounds good on the surface, but once you venture into the weeds it just gets progressively thornier.  As do all progressive adventures.

While liberal interventionism is considered the brain storm of British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, the thought first disturbing his sleep in the latter half of the 19th century, we know it here as the initiative President Woodrow Wilson took to engage us in WWI. It was part and parcel of Wilson’s great overarching goal, that of founding the League of Nations, and was the likely reason for his change of heart about entering the war.

Its goal is to fold failing nation states into the realm of successful democratic capitalist states and at the same time to indoctrinate them into the virtues of free markets and one-man-one-vote theology. It’s a seductive proposition. We ride in on white horses to rescue a nation from itself with no ostensible skin in the game other than fulfilling our do-gooder hearts. Of  course we make fast new friends and trading partners and expand our corporate reach, which is a very good thing. We did it successfully in Japan and Germany. Aren’t we wonderful, we tell ourselves? Yes, but only when it works. Those countries had been eviscerated by war and were desperate for any new vision of the future. Had the Hari Krishnas stopped by first, they would have got the franchise. Plus both countries already enjoyed many of the fundamental democratic institutions, a prerequisite to their success. Nonetheless, we extrapolated from those experiences and liked what we saw.

So we repeated it in WWII. FDR had his own personal motivations, reelection and the still failing economy. And then we marched into Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. In every one of those countries, with the exception of Vietnam, we still have troops at great expense to ourselves. There’s a value to all that, but also a huge downside with our present economy.

By the time we get to our current wars abroad, Bush, the compassionate conservative, by way of Fukuyama’s End of History had fallen for the Neocons version of liberal interventionism. I fell for it myself, having hitched through the Mideast in the mid-60s and feeling that the Arab Muslims there deserved a break from their downlow lifestyles and demonic leaders. But that’s the problem with compassion. It’s an emotional response and allows our emotions to cloud our minds. Try as we may, and we’ve tried heroically in Iraq and Afghanistan, we still don’t have a clue how to bridge the culture gaps in these very different cultures. We spend huge amounts of our money, sincerely, but continue to fail to grasp the cultural undercurrents that should direct our efforts.

In the real world, the physical world, there’s something called natural consequences. It’s an immutable law of nature. When you screw up big time, you earn the honor of paying for your sins. In the process of paying your well-deserved debts to society or whoever, you learn your lesson; you adjust your thinking to avoid a reoccurrence. When we violate that immutable law by intervening in wildly diverse cultures that we don’t understand, we can’t predict much less direct the outcomes, and that’s asking for trouble. And trouble is likely what we’re going to get in all three of these countries.

It’s high time for us to consider a semi-isolationist moratorium on military adventures abroad while reassessing how and if we want to do them more effectively.

As for Libya, Obama gets zero credit for involving us, as it once again shows how weak and unthinking he is when it comes to foreign affairs. Enough so to allow a radical extremist like Samantha Powers influence his thinking on a global level event with lasting consequences attached. It’s like Obama is saying to Powers’ “theory”: “Hey, cool, sounds good, let’s go for it!” His is a “go for it” diplomacy and a “cool, sounds good” foreign affairs management approach.

Sorry to inform you, Obamageddon, but the world is not your personal video game.

Having been a nominal liberal when it occurred, I bought lock stock and barrel the MSM line about it being a non-issue raised by prudish and prurient right-wingers and failed to ponder it thoroughly myself at the time. But in recent years, and especially after my post-9/11 conversation to conservatism, one basic fact about it started to gnaw restlessly at me the way old hurts and injustices tend to do.

To have an honest, productive, and future-leaning self-history, a nation must come to grips with even its most painful (or simply unsightly) past issues. Since the MSM is responsible for much of our short-term history, and since it is reliably liberal/leftist, significant parts of our true history is perpetually being wiped out by MSM tail-draggers and these occasional injuries to our collective soul too often fail to see the light of day until decades later. Look at the continued love the MSM has for Woodrow Wilson, arguably our most racist president who is simultaneously the godfather of modern progressivism. Look at Amity Shlaes’ economic revelations about the Great Depression and FDR’s role in perpetuating, not healing, it.

Clinton had a moment of biblical proportions in the minutes before he went on TV that day when he ultimately proclaimed that he’d ‘never had sex with that woman.’ Was he going to fess up to the dirty deed, or was he going to permanently demean and scar a vulnerable and arguably somewhat unstable young woman, who was clearly in the thralls of an infatuation? Was he going to out her to the entire world as the most bald-faced (and ribald) of liars for the rest of her life for having had what was to her a post-teen crush and to him a tawdry, one-way, self-pleasuring? That was the most moral of all dilemmas that he faced that day as he prepared for his statement.

Since he’d most likely taken this route many times before and because the MSM along with his wife, Hillary, had discredited and trashed and made fools of his likely previous lovers, and because he had to know as a father of a young woman how devastating it could be to call someone he’d been intimate with a liar and a cheat, this was his moment to come clear. Or not. As we all know, he chose wrong and paid for it.

Without the blue dress, he most surely would have continued living this destructive, serial lie that time and again redirected from himself and thrown right back in the faces of those women with whom he’d shared what they must have thought were intimate moments.

Did he think about her feelings and her future that day? Did it occur to him that for the rest of her life she would be a global laughing stock? That she’d be forever seen as a needy and deeply disturbed young woman who’d made up an enormous lie for purposes of self-aggrandizement? That she cried not wolf, but fallatio, and yet it was nothing but a giant fib–and one potentially destructive to her country–just to gain a few seconds of cheap attention? What an awful fate that would have been for her.

And all this when it wasn’t even Ms. Lewinsky who brought it to our attention?

It’s only one of the deeper sadnesses of this incident that that fate has partially befallen her anyway with the willing complicity of the MSM. Watch Leno or Letterman or Stewart on any given night and a slimey Monica joke is likely to be slipped in somewhere. She has been made a laughing stock while he’s once again adored by the global left.  And yet how much worse would it have been for her in the long run had it not been for the physical evidence; the forensic evidence without which he’d never have admitted a thing while her reputation was being savaged by one and all.

In that sense, his own DNA not only betrayed him, it saved him. Had he had to live with this, and if he has any conscience at all–and I believe he does, that his is a complex and conflicted character visited not infrequently by a legion of private ghosts–it surely would have ruined his peace of mind for all time. It would have become for him a burden too painful to live with. As it is, he’s been able to air it out, and in the absence of any substantial criticism from the media, return at least temporarily to the favor of the global public. (I doubt, however, that his will be a prized legacy, for this and other reasons.)

As a father of two daughters, I can see how a young woman who’s in close proximity to a handsome, bedeviling, intelligent man–and of such unthinkable power and influence as the president of the United States–could fall for his charms. (But, it also has to be said of him, a cunning sexual predator who was (I hope in the past tense) able to direct all his formidable assets to the seduction.

And yet, at the same time, as a father, I can also conceive of the hurt to any young woman should she be betrayed as heartlessly as he attempted to do to her in his failed biblical moment.

Okay, first of all, thanks for taking this one-on-one and being sober about it. As you can tell, the slightest hint of the word racism is going to set me off and I’ll not apologize for that.

That’s a tilted and very partisan perspective from (your friend) and gives zero credit to the average American, and even less to the average conservative.

I think the truth about Obama’s growing alienation from the American people is far simpler than (your friend) says. A majority of Americans have come to see Obama as a guy who in the most basic ways isn’t one of them. It’s not his fault; he had an unusual life, and inarguably a life as far as far can be from mainstream America. His life consisted of attending madrasses in Indonesia; hanging with (alleged) pedophiles and pot-smoking grandpa in Hawaii; an absent mother and a nonexistent father; placement in Ivy League Colleges as a sort of affirmative action prodigy, and mucho pandering to him by white liberals around him.

It’s not his fault that he had an unusual life; what is his fault is that he doesn’t seem to begin to know how to correct his disconnect from the American people, and in fact he seems to think that this perception is everybody else’s fault but his. That’s approaching some symptoms indicative of a personality disorder. According to the left, it’s not Obama’s fault that people can’t relate to him; it’s their fault that they don’t understand. Huh? Isn’t he supposed to be The One who is enlightening and as our president, understanding our needs? And isn’t one of our needs that of having him understanding our lives, our dreams, the dreams of our fathers, and our understanding of America and the privilege of being born here?

Did he ever work a lousy summer job? Play little league ball? I could probably throw a hundred more things like this in, and I’ll bet the answer is likely no for all of them. Again, not his fault, but people see the absence of these types of experiences expressed daily in his thinking and in his speeches and in his ideals as they find their way into legislation that Americans grow ever more concerned with.

Americans are intuitively aware of this, though not everyone has the language to express it. He is an outsider, by definition of his life story, and to suggest anything else is to be blinded by partisan hysteria. (Your friend) frankly should be embarrassed to put forth such a facile explanation.

And as of late, as Obama carps on and on about Boehner and Republicans in general, that opinion has started to spread throughout the country and to harden ever more against him. And as long as pundits like E.J. Dionne and Joe Klein and others keep egging him on to be more and more antagonistic and brutal toward conservatives, the worse it gets. This can’t be expressed with enough force: This constant drumbeat of vitriol that comes from the left and from this WH has done far more poisoning of the well than anything Gingrich has said or could say.

Now, let me stop here and give a little praise: last night O’Reilly played a clip of Obama talking to school kids about the struggles of his childhood with an absent family, no father, the loneliness of his biracial identity, etc., and O’Reilly gave Obama his stupid “patriot award” for his talk. But O’Reilly was right; it was a wonderful talk and had to go straight to the hearts of the children who had similarly troubled backgrounds. That Obama, I like a lot, but that’s not the one we’re seeing. We’re seeing a spoiled brat who tantrums when adults tell him no.

If you can find an instance of a president who presided during troubled times in the last 100 years and said such toxic things about the opposite party and signaled out certain individuals with such withering scorn as he’s done Boehner, I’d like to see it.  

Obama’s poisoned the well and it’s showing up in his polls and more recently in the ballot box and his inability to “change,” his inflexibility in general, will serve him even less well in the future.

I agree completely with Ms. Miller’s assessment of Manning, and yet I do have sympathy for the kid. But here’s the deal, my caveat: you should be assessed for your crime, in court, cold-heartedly and based solely on your act and sentenced accordingly. After your sentence, which again should only reflect your crime, then conditions that may have played into your state of mind can be considered and dealt with accordingly.

Having raised two daughters, both of whom were taunted throughout their school careers in a tony and well-heeled suberb of uber-liberal Madison, WI (where such behaviors go unpunished and instigators are often from the wealthier families), I feel for any kid who is bullied at school. My girls survived the experience, however, and both drew positive results from it. One has just been accepted into a doctoral progam and will receive her MBA in Sept. The other, recently married, more recently had our first grandchild, and works in shipping and handling in the warehouse of the business my wife and I work for. They are well adjusted and happy and while bullying is an awful thing, it’s a sad but typical life lesson that you can turn into a positive experience if you’re well-grounded.

When I was a freshman at good ol’ “PU” (University of Platteville, a state college in Wisconsin), a young man–who had been given the cruel (or as it turned out, accurate) nickname “Psycho Jack” in high school, and who hailed from a nearby small town–walked into the school cafeteria one day with a German Lugar and put a bullet in the brain of the homecoming queen who he had been stalking for some time. She died instantly. This was fall 1964, and at the time the Supreme Court was paving the way toward handing out ever lighter sentences for ever more serious crimes.

Psycho Jack got five years in Mendota State Hospital, a site notorious for housing at the time, Ed Gein, of the movie “Psycho” fame. I always wondered if Psycho Jack became pals with ‘Psycho’ Ed.  And I wondered if Gein would have gotten five years (after all, he only killed one person, the rest he dug up) had he been sentenced a decade later.

I suspect that were P. Jack to have done that today, he would have been labelled a sociopath and since DSM IV was approved a decade plus ago, those with that label are no longer eligible for an insanity plea, because the 11 sociopathic subtypes, while considered evidence of mental disease, are at the same time deemed untreatable (at least that was so in DSM IV, it may have changed slightly since then). In which case, he would likely have received a much more appropriate sentence, but even then not stiff enough to meet the reality of his deed. I frequently saw Jack in the college pool hall, where I too loitered too frequently, and while he stood out as eccentric, he did seem to function more or less satisfactorily.

Upon “graduating” from Mendota after his five years, he married a “fellow student” (from Mendota, not PU) and the entire episode has haunted me ever since. Did they have children? If so, how were they raised? Etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. Bottom line: only a sick society would have leveraged so lenient a sentencing for so serious an act.

Sentencing should reflect the severity of the crime, then and only then can we intervene with America’s famous humanitarianism and deal with the convicted, and appropriately sentenced criminal, in a way that is sympathetic and helpful. Up to that point, he’s just another murderer and should be treated as such.

The same applies to Private Manning. If there is sufficient evidence that he was harrassed and that the harrassment was of a serious nature, counseling would be appropriate. However, he should be sentenced without compassion and strictly for the egregious crime, the results of which could reverberate for years, that he allegedly committed.