Op-Ed

AUSTIN, Texas -- Have you had a terrible stomach illness lately? It's quite likely you should blame the Bush administration. I know, that sounds like some demented spoof of left-wing paranoia, but it's actually an especially visceral example of one of life's iron rules -- you can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.

Unless you have reason to suspect that your nearest and dearest are putting arsenic in your food, your bad stomach was likely caused by tainted meat. It is not hard to connect the dots on this one -- the massive meat recalls of recent months have now culminated in the largest in the nation's history, 27.4 million pounds worth, due to suspected contamination by the killer bacteria Listeria.

According to Reuters News Service, the Listeria outbreak in the Northeast has so far caused 23 deaths, and that is not particularly unusual. According to government data, contaminated food causes more than 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths annually. How's that for Homeland Security?

AUSTIN, Texas -- For those interested in high points in the history of Bad Manners, there was rather a breathtaking moment last week when columnist and television pundit Bob Novak chose to use the occasion of Jimmy Carter's winning the Nobel Peace Prize to trash the man.

"It's one of those inevocable (that's what the transcript says) signs of autumn," said Novak on "Crossfire." "Year in and year out, we get the inevitable boomlet to give Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. The admittedly incompetent president, who is supposed to be a terrific ex-president. Well, this year they slipped up and actually gave him the Peace Prize. So we are giving the peanut man from Georgia something else: our 'Quote of the Day.'"

(They then run a clip of Carter being modest and amusing about getting the call from Norway that morning. "I thought it was some joker who was calling," he says.)

Novak continues: "You know, James, the Nobel Peace Committee's been making mistakes on that prize, giving it to people like Yasser Arafat and Le Duc Tho. But Jimmy Carter's one of the biggest mistakes. He's the guy that was for the communists in Nicaragua and Fidel Castro in Cuba."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Have you lost your homeowner's insurance lately? Seven hundred thousand of us here in Texas have, after Farmers Insurance decided to pull out of the Texas market -- despite the fact that we pay the highest insurance rates in the nation, an annual average of $680 more than homeowners in other states.

So here's 700,000 of us scrambling to find new insurance and fainting when we hear the rates quoted. If we don't carry insurance, under law, the mortgage companies can seize our homes. Great, a whole new class -- the affluent homeless.

How, you may ask, did we get into this mess? If you listen to the insurance companies, they'll tell you it's all because of those terrible trial lawyers bringing those ridiculous lawsuits, and the stupid juries that award millions and then the appeals courts never, ever throw those verdicts out.

Actually, that's not the problem. It is however, part of the problem. It is a small part of the problem.

AUSTIN, Texas -- We just lost the whole ballgame on corporate reform without the news even making it to the front page. The sick, sad tidings were tucked away discreetly on the business pages: "SEC Chief Hedges on Accounting Regulator." Now there's a sexy headline.

All of you who were shafted by Enron, shucked by Worldcom, jived by Global Crossing, everyone whose 401(k) is now a 201(k) (I think that's Paul Begala's line), you just got screwed again. They're not going to fix it.

They've already called off the reform effort; it's over. Corporate muscle showed up and shut it down. Forget expensing options, independent directors, going after offshore shams, derivatives regulation. For that matter, forget even basic reforms like separating the auditing and consulting functions of accounting firms and rotating accounting firms every few years. Bottom line: It's all going to happen again. We learned zip from the entire financial collapse. Our political system is too bought-off to respond intelligently.

News coverage of the United Nations gets confusing sometimes. Is the U.N. a vital institution or a dysfunctional relic? Are its Security Council resolutions profoundly important for international relations -- or beside the point because global leadership must now come from the world's only superpower?

These days, we keep hearing that the United States will need to launch a full-scale attack on Iraq because Saddam Hussein has violated U.N. Security Council resolutions -- at the same time that we're told the U.S. government must reserve the right to take military action unilaterally if the Security Council fails to make appropriate decisions about Iraq.

To clarify the situation, here are three basic guidelines for understanding how to think in sync with America's leading politicians and pundits:

SAN FRANCISCO -- The conventional wisdom in Washington is that it's pointless or reckless for Americans to speak with Iraqi officials. But some on Capitol Hill are beginning to think otherwise.

Last month, for the first time since George W. Bush became president, members of Congress -- four Democrats -- visited Baghdad. Hopefully, more will be making the journey later this fall.

Rep. Nick Rahall, a 13-term congressman from West Virginia, started the trend in mid-September when he joined former Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota to lead a small delegation of Americans to Baghdad. As a member of that group, I was impressed with the candor of the discussions during several hours of meetings with high-level Iraqi government ministers.

AUSTIN, Texas -- One thing I have always admired about the U.S. military services is their ability to learn from their mistakes. They have institutionalized this ability in the form of remarkable After Action Reviews, which include rigorous dissection of every aspect of whatever operation they were last required to take.

These AARs are both unsparing and illuminating -- I recall the particularly trenchant review of the (SET ITAL) opera bouffe (END ITAL) episode in which they were required to invade Grenada, an exercise so stunningly silly that it is beneath comment. They should have sent a Texas Ranger.

Of course, the military spent years poring over Vietnam, the one it lost. Even now, the feelings of many are still so tender on that one that I feel obliged to point out they didn't actually lose it -- they were sent into an unwinnable situation.

AUSTIN, Texas -- I realize it's early days for this sort of thing, but I already have a nomination for dumbest sentence of the decade. You have a mere eight years to top this one, so you'd better get cracking.

I found it in the midst of nasty little ad hominem attack on Bill Moyers in The Weekly Standard. The writer, Stephen F. Hayes, is laboring under the delusion that Moyers is "dedicated to promoting the views of most extreme elements of the far left in America." One can only conclude that Hayes has never met anyone on the far left: Billy Don Moyers from Marshall, Texas, is actually a Baptist, albeit of the Jimmy Carter school.

Hayes worked himself up into a fine lather of indignation because "Moyers spends much of his time pointing out the conflicts-of-interest of those in government and corporate America." Some would call that journalism, but it was not the inanity of the attack on Moyers that stopped me. It was this sentence, which Hayes stuck in to show how far-left he thinks Moyers is: "Moyers used water rights in Bolivia as an illustration of the perils of capitalism."

AUSTIN, Texas -- The economy is a mess. We are now in the second dip of a double-dip recession. ("Looks like a W," say the economists, another reason why economists are not famous for their humor.) Six and a quarter trillion dollars has disappeared from the stock markets. We have so far to go in cleaning up corporate corruption, it makes the Augean stables look like spilt milk.

In the Sept. 23 issue of The New Yorker is an excellent piece called "The Greed Cycle," examining the effects of stock options on corporate culture. The most depressing thing about it is that even though it is a long article, it doesn't begin to cover the range of iniquities and inanities that have been allowed to flourish.

Robert Bryce's Enron book, "Pipedreams," provides more chilling detail. Mickie Siebert, the legendary and impressive head of Muriel Siebert & Co. (and a Republican) has been calling attention to the dangers of derivatives for years. Nothing was done even after Long Term Capital Management's spectacular failure. How many disasters does it take to get Washington's attention?

You might remember the old movie "Twelve Angry Men," starring Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and E.G. Marshall. Most of the dramatic film takes place inside a jury room as a dozen people deliberate at the end of a murder trial. It's sweltering hot. At the outset, most of the jurors are eager to render a guilty verdict and go home. As the story unfolds, viewers learn that some are influenced by prejudice against the dark-skinned defendant.

We'd like to think that such bias doesn't hold sway in jury rooms these days. After all, "Twelve Angry Men" came out in 1957, and a lot of progress has occurred since then. But stereotypes and semi-conscious racism are still widespread factors in American society.

An essay in the new anthology "Race and Resistance" notes that "the power of the media is profound" -- and adds that "its most powerful impact is on children, who frame definitions of and draw conclusions about the world through the messages they receive."