Another Viet Nam? You bet.

CNN is reporting the results of a new poll that 6 in 10 of Americans questioned feel like the American commitment in Afghanistan could turn into another Viet Nam. That has already happened.

A few weeks ago my toddler knocked a bunch of books off a low shelf, one of them being Stanley Karnow's excellent Viet Nam: A History. So I re-read parts of that.

(I am in the camp contending that the central folly of our Viet Nam War was the belief that Ho Chi Minh was essentially a Communist, when he was in fact a nationalist. If the Best and the Brightest had viewed the Viet Cong--and Viet Minh before them--through that prism, they would have rightly judged the war unwinnable. )

The US support of Diem in the late '50s and early '60s is what really caught my eye. He was corrupt in the way that such a leader in such a circumstance needs to be corrupt to survive. He also stuffed ballot boxes, all with the acquiescence of the US government, including the Democratic Administration of JFK. He was our puppet.

You may not remember a certain news story back in the heady days after the fall of the Taliban in 2002. The grandees of tribal Afghanistan gathered for their tribal loya jirga (a political convention, for these purposes), to form the Afghanistan Transitonal Administration. Hamid Karzai was trotted out on stage at one point to accept the jirga's election of himself as President. Except that the participants had not yet cast their votes. Whoops. Strike one for his handlers.

I guess that was my first clue that we were setting him up as our puppet. And now look. Opium trade accounts for, by one estimate, HALF of the country's GDP. Wow. The country is falling apart so completely that some Afghans would rather have the hated Taliban running the show than the corrupt officialdom now bleeding them dry. And Karzai can't buy himself an election.

Diem was assassinated by coup plotters in November 1963, also with the acquiescence of JFK, coincidentally only a few weeks before he met a similar fate in Dealy Plaza. What followed were increasingly corrupt and weak presidents (I'm talking about Viet Nam here.) We need to change policy but fast in Afghanistan.

The US at first raised only minimal "concerns" about what was obviously overwhelming fraud--because he is our guy. But now he may be going the way of Diem.

Have a Super Sunday

Today is Super Bowl Sunday, commemorating the playing of Super Bowl XXXLCMIV. I am observing this holiday by inviting 374 of my drunkenest college-educated friends over. To avoid the usual frenzy at the supermarket, I did all my shopping yesterday, but even so I had to knock over two elderly men to grab the last 13 cases of Budweiser off the shelf. I bought a 25-pound bag of potato chips, and the batch of guacamole I made is so big that FDA agents have already visited my house 3 times for health violations and made me issue a recall.

I Thought No One Was Looking

There's a rash of embarrassing behavior going around. It's called I Thought No One Was Looking. It happens when you engage in moderately sinful behavior that you think is OK because it's very unlikely you'll get caught--but when you do, you look like a grade-A ass because you have no excuse.

Exhibit A is Timothy Geithner. Cheated on his taxes. Case closed. "Careless." "Innocent." "Mistake." Whatever. He cheated on his taxes. Even President Smooth couldn't gloss this over. "It's an embarrassment," he said a couple of weeks ago. Truer words never were spoken.

(Note to Tim Geithner: From now on, just assume the IRS is looking.)

I'm not talking about Bill Richardson and his steering of state contracts to campaign donors, or Rod Blagojevich (the Liberace of corruption), or Ted Stevens and his souped-up ski chalet full of "gifts" he alleged he didn't want, or...well, the list just goes on. That stuff is all felony worthy.

Then we have Caroline Kennedy. I'm not talking here about the ridiculous and shifting list of reasons she and her anonymous flacks gave for her "dropping out" of the New York senate sweepstakes. ("My uncle is sick." No, there are tax and "nanny" problems. No, there is an as-yet undisclosed personal reason. Meanwhile, the Governor says, I was never going to pick her anyway.)

I'm talking about the revelations a few weeks ago that she has almost never voted. That is an abdication of civic duty for any American, but just shameful for someone of her pedigree: Father was president. Uncles were US Senators. Two cousins (at least) have served in Congress. When did she not get the memo about how important it is to vote? What possible excuse could she have for not voting? I vote in every single election in my town, every city council race, every Congressional primary, every special referendum election. Her reasoning, I imagine, was: I never thought anyone would notice.

This is about white lies--and maybe a little worse--and it's about context. Cheating on your taxes is not drunk-driving wrong, or adultery wrong, or smoking-near-my-child wrong. But it looks awful dumb when you're suddenly put in charge of the IRS. And you have nothing to say except, "It was an innocent mistake."

Not voting is not the biggest sin in the world either. But for someone who wants to serve in the most select legislative body in the world, it's positively disqualifying. You simply cannot explain that away.

Tim Geithner will, I hope, still have enough credibility to serve as an effective Treasury Secretary and help lead us out of our current mess. Caroline Kennedy, though, is done in politics forever, unless she wants to put in a decade or two on her local school board to regain a shred of believability as someone who cares about public service.

That's my view from up in the frozen north of Hollywood, at least. What say my Tri State readers?

Move Over, Millard Fillmore

That's my message to George W. Bush. Inauguration Day was a wonderful day for America, rare, fine, cloudless and cold. For a single day at least we could look to the future--and its enormous, planetary challenges--with hope and pride even amid our trepidation.

I was very skeptical of Barack Obama until well into the primary season because of his inexperience, but his every move over the summer and fall won me over: the discipline, the intelligence, the seriousness and lack of drama, the move towards solving our problems and away from partisan (and intra-mural) squabbling. His acceptance speech in Grant Park and the transition to the White House were further evidence of, at the very least, a basic competence that was like a tonic, throwing the cronyism and secrecy surrounding 43 into sharp relief.

His inaugural address spoke beautifully to this moment. It did everything it should have done: soothed our fears, excited our hopes, and perhaps will eventually inspire the best of us. That is no small job for a speech that must be everything to everybody. You can view it again and read the text on the BBC.

President Obama was right to challenge us--all of us--in the speech because one thing is clear now: Those of us on the left will have to accept compromise and disappointment as he and his team forge solutions. And we must work with him to do it. We all have to partake of the tough choices ahead: on health care, military spending, climate change, financial restoration and a host of other serious problems. Tuesday we woke from a long sleepwalk. America has to start living within its means.

Tom Paine started off his pamphlet The Crisis with these words:

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value."

And W.? One last thing: You would not even have made a good vice president.

Some Poet

Tough times in the publishing industry, according to this New York Times article, Puttin’ Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing. Long lunches and annual retreats to Bermuda are out, replaced by web-cam meetings and (shudder) teleconferences.

Amanda Urban, an agent for Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, makes a valid point about the price point of books in general. “It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”

The end of this statement is simply hilarious, though, and defies further comment from me.

And this quote from the same story:

“Everybody is trying to look at acquisitions in the prism of a reduced and a hurting retail market,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster. “You used to buy some books and you paid X because you figured it would sell 100,000 copies. Now you have to do the math saying this book may sell only 50,000 copies.”

Talk about lazy talking and lazy thinking. These people come off as doofuses. Did publishing companies not "do the math" before September of this year? I seriously doubt that. I'm sure their corporate parents and bean-counters never let them fling around huge contracts willy-nilly.

The Great Debate

Last night's presidential debate at Ole Miss was a missed opportunity. When we could have heard serious conversation about what the real opportunity costs of a $700 billion bailout are likely to be, we came away unconvinced that either candidate truly understood the bailout package, other alternatives and the causes of our banking meltdown. When we could have had serious engagement about our insane tax code, we got lowest common denominator tit-for-tat and campaign sloganeering. When we could and should have heard the candidates had , the word "Iraq" was not mentioned until 40 minutes into the debate.

Untouched were areas where America desperately needs true leadership and difficult decisions: retooling our economy to address climate change, ensuring the long-term solvency of Social Security and Medicare, fixing an inhumane health-care "system" that is crippling American businesses.

Obama should have landed several haymakers on the old gent. Perhaps it looks more presidential if he stays away from the more vicious attacks and addresses the voters in a measured way.

McCain meanwhile comes across neither as a total warmonger or a dotard. My dominant impression was of his egomania. Everything was about him and about tooting his own horn. "They called me the sheriff" because he opposed earmarks. "I'm the Senate's original maverick!" he crows about the nickname his campaign seems to have contrived for him, sounding like he's hawking New Coke. Obama, on the other hand, comes across as much humbler, in fact invisible sometimes, using the royal "we" that must be natural for all candidates, who appear alone before the voters but in reality are in conference constantly with advisers, managers and spouses.

McCain's closing statement was impressive: brief, straight-ahead and powerful. It had a strange opening, though: "When I got out of prison..." My wife and I looked at each other. Prison? Was he in a Johnny Cash song or something? Of course he meant the Vietnamese POW camp, but still, I had never heard him refer to it that way.

Avon, Phillips, Madrid

The road north of Farmington to Rangeley, Maine is a favorite drive of mine. In August, the wife and I bundled up the baby, shelved our Blackberries (mine is a really cool silver color called Lunar Glow), and jumped off the hectic 24/7 whirlygig of modern life here in Hollywood to go camping in Rangeley for a weekend. (Full disclosure: I am lying. My sister and brother and their families camped; we stayed at the Rangeley Inn and joined them for 'smores.)

North of Farmington on Route 4 one follows the Sandy River, a wide stream full of boulders that weaves back and forth under the road. The forest is lush here in the summer, everything is overgrown, and one focuses on the deep green of the trees. There is not a lot going on here any longer. Rangeley is a hopping town, a "four season tourist town" with spectacular fall foliage, a ski resort and camping and watersports in the summer. (What do they do in the spring? Mud sightseeing? Mud snowmobiling? No idea. )

But driving out of Farmington, through Avon, Phillips and Madrid, this time, I was struck by the number of empty houses. The area is very slowly losing its population. There is little forest products industry anymore, once the dominant source of jobs in northern Maine. In Phillips a large logyard and sawmill sits at a fork in the road. Now the yard is empty and the mill is quiet. That's new from the last time I was there.

A few years ago the town of Madrid was "de-organized," a term of art describing the dissolution of an incorporated Maine town. The townspeople vote to dissolve their town and throw their municipal functions back onto a state agency with the acronym LURC, which is pronounced, ominously, "lurk." It's a little sad driving through this crossroads now. The sign is still there on Route 4 though: "Welcome to Madrid, 1807." (Madrid is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable here.)

(A description of Madrid from 1886 is here, including a mention of Smalls Falls, one of the reasons this drive is one of my favorites. The town then had 437 residents.)

There's nothing but trees here now; why in God's name would anyone have moved to this inaccessible wilderness in 1807? What did they think would be here in 200 years? Would they be disappointed, or were they headed up here to escape the law or a landlord or the colonial equivalent of the Blackberry?

Today there is basically only one way to get to Avon, Phillips and Madrid, and that is to drive for three hours from Portland (or fly in to the airfield in Phillips, I guess). 200 years ago the only way was over rutted and rocky wagon trails, by horse or by foot. Starting in the 1870s, a series of small railroads sprang up to serve these towns. (The founding of so many tiny railroad systems in Maine seems pretty mind-boggling, considering that, in my lifetime, it took decades for consumers and government to restore passenger rail service from Boston to Portland.)

Tall hills on either side of the Sandy River dictated that roads and railbeds follow the river valley, and the paved roads today trace those early routes. It's easier to get to, but not much easier, and there's not a lot more there.

Sometimes civilization doesn't follow a straight line. People go to one place, and it grows. People go to another, and that one doesn't grow, and they move on. The houses fall in on themselves. Eventually even the cellarholes disappear. 173 people live in Madrid now.