Author Archives: Brian Lambert

My Experience with Our “Best in the World” Health Care System

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterA personal experience with our best-in-the-world health care system … .

So my lovely wife and a group of friends are enjoying a long weekend in the Santa Cruz area this past April. Wine, cook outs, bawdy tales … the usual. All very relaxing. But after a stroll through some nearby redwoods we drop in at a pleasant little bistro .. where I’m attacked. By a pulled pork sandwich. One minute I’m happily hoovering the thing off the plate, sauce slobber splattering the one clean shirt I have left. The next moment a glob of ex-pig is lodged in my gullet, unwilling to move down … or up.

I’ll spare you the regurgitative details (with sound effects) of the next 90 minutes as I tried a range of contortions to get the fiend to shift and slide, except to say I was eventually convinced by the Mrs. and a couple pals to go to … a hospital, where an expert could do the Roto-Rooter work.

Three hospitals later we found an Emergency Room set up to do the job. Were I surfer with a shark bite I might have been allowed in at the first stop.

Once in the building we began treatment, by which I mean repeated visits from clerical workers checking insurance and painstakingly re-identifying me, my residence, my medical history and my family’s medical history. There were at least five variations of this, as though I might get mistaken for the only other patient on the floor at that moment, a very elderly woman suffering from a babbling dementia.

The decision was made to first — see if I could pass the demon on my own. When it became obvious the thing had its claws deep into my esophagus and wasn’t going anywhere without a fight, decision #2 was to summon the on-call doctor, who, this being a beautiful Saturday in California I assumed was either tending his vineyard, test driving a Tesla or trying to talk his trophy wife out of more liposuction.

Two hours later the doctor arrived. A very nice gentlemen — everyone was nice, even the series of accounting internists re-checking that I wasn’t 85, female and demented.

Cutting the medical part of the story short, somewhere into the fourth hour, I was told to change into the inevitable butt-out-the-back hospital gown, helped into a wheel chair, rolled down a series of halls to an Operating Room, assisted up on the table, given a general anesthetic … (“100, ninety … zzzz.”), and woken back up 12 minutes later, free of the demon glob.

The “operating” doctor explained he simply rammed the auger in and pushed the monster down into my vast beckoning gut. No biggie. Very routine. He apologized for the inconvenience on my holiday, hoped I’d be back in Santa Cruz soon and told my wife the hospital would cover the cost of the half hour taxi ride back to where we were staying.

So … flash forward to three days ago when I received a bill from the hospital system controlling the facility where all these friendly, capable, fact re-checking people work.

Now, we all know that what hospitals charge for their services in not based on anything rooted in the natural world or competitive marketplace. It’s why our system is “the best in the world”. If you have insurance, which we do, no one gives a damn. All the hospital wanted from us was $75 … or roughly the cost of the complimentary cab ride.

As Steven Brill explained in his classic piece “A Bitter Pill”, hospitals pretty much make the numbers up. Like George R.R. Martin dreaming up character names and places in “Game of Thrones.” “Thousand” always sounds better than “hundred”. And who says an aspirin can’t cost $75? Or the plastic cup you’re spitting up in wouldn’t be more “fun” priced at say, oh , $400?

Anyway, given the (competent) service I was given in Santa Cruz and asked what I thought my insurance would be charged, and understanding the fantasy-based pricing that makes the cost of our health care far and away the most expensive in the world, I would have said the total coast, with ludicrous premiums and surcharges, might have spiked as high as … um … $5000. Wild guess. Crazy shit. The 12-minute Operating Room procedure being the only high-skill event of the day, unless you premium-price the medical history re-checkers.

Have you made a guess at the actual charge?

How does $16,000 sound?

Sixteen freaking thousand. I flipped the bill over to see if they were confusing me with the demented grandmother’s 40-day stay ICU stay and associated experimental drug regimen. Nope. Just me and my tangy pork bolus.

Naturally nothing was itemized. So I called HealthPartners here in Minnesota. Their policy does not allow them to give patients a hard copy of the itemized invoice, but the (very pleasant) woman was happy to read me the charges, which include $2000 for the “Recovery Room”. This would be the tiny curtained off space where I woke up and was allowed to struggle back into my underwear and pants.

After ranting a bit about the utter science fiction of this pricing, i apologized and told her I just needed to vent.

“It’s OK. I understand. It happens a lot. I think its crazy, too. But these costs fit with the contracts we have.”

“Do you ever challenge these costs?”

“Only somewhat. As long as they’re within with the contract range, we’ll pay.”

(Yesterday I had a follow-up visit with a local gastroenterologist. The allergy that sets off these glob attacks is under control. But I run the Santa Cruz action by him and ask him to guess at the bill. He thinks for a couple seconds, “Four, five thousand.” When I tell him $16,000, he shakes his head. “It makes no sense. It’s the worst system on the planet.”)

A second call, to the actual hospital’s accounting department, in California, was your typical phone tree hell. Four minutes of pressing “1”, pressing “3” and then “5”  and entering codes and invoice numbers before being connected to a woman who after taking the same information all over again put me on hold and then came back to say that my records had been sent another department, which she transfered me to … until I was disconnected.

Bottom line: The Health Partners of our “best in the world” system can afford to be completely sanguine about absurd hospital system charges because they have an epic cash flow, from you and me, sustaining their costs.

By contrast, can you imagine State Farm shrugging off a $10000 charge from some body shop for a new hood for your hail-dented Yugo?

 

 

Still Waiting for the State GOP’s “Winning Strategy”

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterJust a crazy, hysterical notion here … .

I’m not sure Minnesota’s Republicans have quite figured out the winning strategy for this November’s elections. The national crowd isn’t much better, but they’ve got games going in places like Kentucky and Mississippi and Georgia, hotbeds of 21st century conservative zealotry and deep-thinking, so they have an advantage.

Minnesota is a little different. The whole Kenyan Muslim Socialist selling the country out to terrorists while destroying our best-in-the-world medical system thing doesn’t play quite as well around here as in South Bogaloosa. Or at least it needs to be dressed up quite a bit to be presentable in public.

In part, that explains the four GOP contenders dialing back on the social issue pandering. But the recent assertion that the miserable state of the local economy, in particular Mark Dayton’s steering of said economy into a sludge-filled ditch will be the focus of the campaign also leaves me a bit skeptical in terms of efficacy.

Now, granted we are in the final weeks of primary season, when the game is all about rallying every registered Republican who listens to six hours a day or more of AM 1280 The Patriot. But still, the economy? That’s what they see as their best shot?

Again, the targeted primary voter would rip Dayton even if he cut their taxes to Medtronic levels, brought in the reincarnation of Ayn Rand to home school their kids, re-paved their driveway and gassed up the family Yukon — the one with the star-spangled license plate and the waving flag sticker that says, “Fear This.” But what then for the general election, back in the pesky world of the “reality-based”? What does the GOP have for that rather crucial slice of the electorate?

There probably aren’t five people of any persuasion who don’t think “the economy” should be better. Every “corporate inversion”-minded CEO, every hardware store operator and Caribou barista will tell you they’d like more money — i.e, a better economy — in their pockets. But given a choice between the party who many will remember wasted its recent majority at the local legislature on tone deaf notions like Voter ID, opposing gay marriage and multiple votes to suppress or rollback abortion rights and the guy who had to restore some order and discipline after the godawful fiscal mess left from Tim Pawlenty’s careerist reign, the choice is pretty easy.

And it remains fairly easy even when the various candidates try to roll “the horror” of Obamacare, or (gasp!) the MNsure website, into their economic message. Where for example do they get a credible metric that says Obamacare isn’t considered an asset by the majority of Minnesotans? Moreover, when “shrewd” businessmen like Mike McFadden wander off the empirical ranch and start talking about replacing Obamacare with something else … something “market-based” and “patient-oriented” — a Minnesotan who actually intends to vote is by now familiar enough with Mitt Romney-style boardroom gobbledygook and corporate-speak to dismiss him as yet another political variant of Gertrude Stein’s Oakland. You know: “There’s no there there.”

And speaking of tone-deaf out past the barbed wire … . Where do you even begin with a guy like Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson promising to “go all Scott Walker” on Minnesota if he can just, A. Get elected himself, and B. Get that dang majority of anti-abortionists, homophobes and election fraud conspiracists back at work?

Scott [bleeping] Walker !? I have to assume that a self-proclaimed smart guy like Johnson has, again, some credible metric showing how much better Wisconsin’s economy is performing than Minnesota’s, because it sure as hell hasn’t appeared in any study or survey produced anywhere other than low-power talk radio.

As I mentioned after Romney cratered two years ago and the national GOP began its extensive soul-searching, (okay they issued a press release and then roared back to tin foil hat business-as-usual), the GOP has a future if it can talk coherently and credibly about some issue, any issue, presumably economic, that has direct positive effect on the middle-class. Screw all the trickle down blather. At this point the public is hip to how little reducing corporate taxes benefits them.

It’s loony, I admit, but let me repeat my advice. Find something that gives the middle-class something they truly want — better schools, better roads, better/cheaper health care — and apply actual brainpower, not glaze-inducing messaging, to constructing such legislation and demand the DFL cooperate in passing it.

In other words: Try credibility for a change.

 

Here’s Hoping Jesse Wins

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterIt hard to take Jesse Ventura’s defamation suit seriously. Too much irony keeps getting in the way. I mean Jesse Ventura outraged that someone put too much show biz in their shtick? Gotta love it.

But whether he wins — which is doubtful, despite, I believe being warranted — I’d like to think his willingness to mount an attack will have, if only a momentary, impact on our vast, fetid “non-fiction” industry.

Our guy Jesse is many things. Among them: A grasping, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, thin-skinned galoot. But he is also positively reverential about the Navy SEALs and the bond of macho brotherhood with those who have served. Similarly, he has been unabashedly vocal about the War in Iraq since it was launched, saying rational, reality-based things about that misbegotten adventure I’ve still never heard from the likes of John McCain or Lindsey Graham.

For those reasons alone it is nearly impossible for me to believe that he ever said the SEALs “deserve to lose a few” to anyone, much less a group of actual (half drunk) SEALs practically in their own backyard. Even if he too was drunk or hell, on mescaline, like some sage native mystic, asking me to believe Jesse Ventura urged death on any of his brothers-in-shark-infested-waters is a bridge … way too far.

And based on the deposition of Chris Kyle, the now-deceased “American Sniper” himself, the whole incident at the bar in San Diego, with all the chest bumping, swaggering, taunting and brawling sounds deeply flaky, as in it made for a much better story when you’re trying to sell a tough guy/uber-patriot memoir. Certainly a lot better than letting Ventura get away with an anti-war crack. When your target audience is gun-worshipping, flag-waving, hoo rah wannabes, you slap that shit down … even if you actually didn’t.

Jesse’s fight coincides with right-wing fantasist Edward Klein’s latest best-seller, “Blood Feud”, in which we’re too believe the Obamas and the Clintons are, behind the scenes, in private, barely different in their connivery and blood lust than the Lannisters and the Starks on “Game of Thrones”. If Jesse thinks he got unfair treatment in Kyle’s book (ghost-written, of course) imagine how Hillary feels with Michele Obama calling her the “Hilldebeest”, and how about Barack pounding down the vino and bad-mouthing Bubba to his face? I always knew that guy a drunk and a boor. I mean, hell, did you see him boozing it up in Texas? W* never behaved like that.

Point being of course we rarely have any good reason to believe anything in a memoir — really, any memoir, including Hillary Clinton, Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachman, every tired old statesman, jock, pop star, etc. — although, personally I’d actually read Vladimir Nabokov or William Styron in their own words than the ghost-written, demo-targeted tale of an expert rifleman, who despite the hagiographic lurches would never have been mistaken for Vasily Zaytsev defending Stalingrad from the Nazis.

And why stop with memoirs? The publishing industry has only the most loosely defined and even more loosely policed definition of “non-fiction”. It hardly matters to the average publisher, and not at all to the partisan houses pushing precisely what their demographic wants to hear, if no one can corroborate the author’s astonishing verbatim dialogue from private episodes between characters who’d rather flatten him under their limo wheels than grant him an interview.

House attorneys may scour books for the most egregious slander, to avoid time-sucking litigation. But once into the realm of “celebrity” or “public person”, why waste time checking and deleting the juicy stuff that might accelerate on the Interwebs and move product? If the aggrieved celebrity yob wants to declare the whole thing an insult to nature and a hideous, despicable lie, well hell, thank them for being stupid and vain enough to goose the publicity effort.

According to reports from the Ventura trial, Jesse’s original complaints about the Kyle book spiked sales and delighted the publisher, proving again that the best offense in the face of obscene offense is … nothing. Ignore it. The shelf life of the average, under-publicized unlitigated memoir is about as short as a mayfly, or a jihadi in a sniper’s crosshairs.

Hillary Ain’t No LBJ Either.

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterAs we watch our political leaders try to deal (and not deal) with the flood of Central American kids over our southern borders, and as the pundit class wiles a few summer days offering variations on the same themes they always play — Why is Barack Obama ineffective in this crisis? Why is “Washington” broken? Why, darn it, does everything have to be so hard? I’ve heard several “experts” invoke (again) the name of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ is the kind of guy, they insist, who would … get something done. There’d be no mealy mouthed politesse about him. No bogus “reaching out” to virulent enemies crapola. What they’re wetting themselves over is a guy who, on reflex, would threaten your livelihood, your reputation and the well-being of the family dog to get you to do what he wanted done.

Although a lot of them look old enough, the same pundits seem to have overlooked a handful of serious misadventures — The Domino Theory/Vietnam — in Lyndon Johnson’s career of unmitigated success. Likewise, few of them spend much energy imagining LBJ maneuvering through Texas politics, circa 2014. Even fewer bother to wade too deeply into the much more recent reality of the current GOP (House variety to be absolutely specific) blocking the “Gang of Eight” immigration legislation, then cutting off all discussion of a coherent immigration policy, with adequate funding while howling about Presidential ineffectiveness …  in order to stay “true” in the eyes of their most rabid, primary-voting base in an election year.

Likewise, I don’t hear much from liberals and Democrats on how the current scenario, with the Tea Party dictating total gridlock to their “leaders”, will be any different with Hillary Clinton in the White House. The Clintons may be more ruthless and better connected through the bureaucracy than Barack Obama. But I don’t see Hillary having any magic wand ability to break the Tea Party spell over the few traditional Republicans left in DC.

My wife has just finished listening to the John Heilmann-Mark Halperin book, “Game Change”,and has been reporting her surprise at how badly the Clintons come off — in the early stages, before the arrival of Sarah Palin and uttter batshittery makes Bill and Hill look like petal-strewing cherubs by comparison. Simultaneously, I finally pulled Seymour Hersh’s late ’90s book on JFK, “The Dark Side of Camelot” off the shelf and have been refreshing my memory of what a gangster the Old Man was and the bubble world of reckless privilege and double-standards Jack and Bobby were born into, molded by and never ever worked too hard to escape.

Point being, the average American knows very little about the true nature of any high-profile politician and an enormous number of us, credulous pawns to a celebrity culture, don’t want to know. We actually prefer the slickly marketed hagiographies, perhaps because raw reality has a nasty way of leaving us even more cynical than we already are. (How we as a culture have clutched at the lacquered veneer-over-rotted wood Camelot myth for so long, proves my point.)

All elections come down to “the choice”, and given the imbecilic levels the GOP has fallen to, the choice these days is profoundly easy. At least with Hillary Clinton or the average Democrat you’re not dealing with someone who is dubious of evolution, climate change, women’s reproductive and employment rights, the desperate need for affordable health care, a less ideological Supreme Court and immediate immigration reform.

But anyone wistful about a “new LBJ” really should read Nick Confessore and Amy Chozick’s piece this week, titled, “Wall Street Offers Clinton a Thorny Embrace”. The reminder, in case you’ve forgotten, is that Bill and Hill are about as tight with the true barons of American-style democracy as any two people can get, and give no indication that they’d go “all-LBJ” on the crowd best-positioned to drain the juice out of the lunatic Right.

Most likely the game has changed so much since Lyndon Johnson’s, uh, uninterrupted march of success that we’ll never see his kind again. But fodder for another post is the peril underlying Democrats’ near-unanimous embrace of a Clinton Restoration.

For the Moment, Aereo Will Not Loosen TV’s “Sports Tax”

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI’m of the belief that far fewer people understood the implications of Aereo, the tech company smacked down by the Supreme Court yesterday, than understand their own health insurance. In others, almost no one is conversant in what Aereo, with its tiny little antennas, might have done to the way you and I consume, and more importantly, pay for television entertainment.

Most of the large, national papers, (and here), break down the legal arguments in the case, decided by a 6-3 vote with the Court’s resident trolls — Scalia, Thomas and Alito — actually dissenting in favor of Aereo’s “disruptive” technology. (So yes, let the record show I’m actually aligned with those three … on this one.)

Aereo’s case was always a hard sell. It smells pretty densely of someone making a buck off someone’s else’s investment, and god knows we can’t allow that kind of thing to happen here in the US of A. But the concept of paying one company maybe $80 a year to deliver network programming … instead of handing $50-$120/month to some cable or satellite giant like Comcast or DirecTV … has a lot of appeal, and, more to the larger point, seems an utter inevitability in the age of streaming media … (which I think is going to last a while.)

The Court was careful to assert that it wasn’t going all Luddite with this case. It says it has no quarrel with new technologies, just that this one was pretending to be an antenna company when in fact it was a “retransmitter” like Comcast and the satellites, and therefore should pay ABC, NBC, PBS etc. … like cable and satellites do.

But with Aereo’s defeat goes another opportunity to loosen the grip professional sports has on our wallets. Had Aereo won, the betting was that millions of people would have begun dumping Comcast, et al, since viewers wouldn’t have needed them to get “Two Broke Girls” and “America’s Got Talent” and all the other high-quality, advertising-glutted programming the networks are “providing” for their viewers.

Moreover it would have been, some argued persuasively, an evolutionary moment in the war-on-bundling, the preposterous practice whereby Grandma Millie pays $100 a month for 300 channels of cable/satellite service even though she only watches six shows, none of which are the NFL or local pro sports teams like the Twins and Timberwolves. (I find it odd that our legions of raging, anti-tax zealots never complain too loudly about this kind of flagrant, no-freedom-of-choice scam.)

Pro sports have had a fine, long run at the trough of bundling, via the way cable and satellite operators cover the fantastically large costs of paying the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL for game rights by requiring sports fans to buy packages of 40 other channels to watch them, or in sweet Grandma Millie’s case, in order for her to watch HGTV and the Food Channel.

The bet is that very soon someone will invent a way to grab live streaming of sports broadcasts via the internet and stick a dagger in the heart of the cable/satellite business plan. It may not be free, but it’ll be tough to duplicate the $50-$75 a month bundling up-charge most of us pay to have “free access” to any Twins game when we want it.

Beyond all that though is the threat to the standard, laughably ossified TV advertising model. Even as a geezer, the appeal of the DVR/Apple TV/”cloud” experience is simple: Better picture, no commercials. Watching hackneyed pitches for pickups, beer and Cialis is not a quality use of my time, and who in their right mind, especially younger consumers, will ever accept it any other way? I, for example, had no problem paying $2.99 an episode for “Fargo” sans the interminable three and four minute commercial blocks. (Also, as I say, the streaming picture is far superior to the compressed signal coming in via Dish satellite. The picture quality difference was particularly noticeable with “Breaking Bad’, a virtuoso moment in small screen cinematography.)

So let’s get real. Pay-per-view is the natural future for everything. It’s what we do with everything else. Buy only what you really want. Especially when post-bundle, you’ll find you have plenty of jing leftover at the end of the month for programming that you actually watch. Someone, maybe even a re-considered Aereo, will eventually construct a business model that provides exactly that service to every corner, holler and mountain top of the country.

But it won’t be happening right now.

– Brian Lambert

Eric Cantor dies by the sword of paranoia

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI’m tempted to say something like, “Just when you thought they couldn’t be any more frightened … .” But when it comes to today’s conservatives the fear factor has no reverse gear. It only accelerates forward. For politicians like truly loathsome Eric Cantor, fear is what propelled their career, and for the even more fear-struck voters in his carefully gerrymandered district who threw him out of office last night, fear — lacquered in a farcically distorted righteousness — is the staple of their informational diet. Paranoid-filled coconuts for the culturally marooned.

Fear the “illegals”, (i.e. “everyone who isn’t as white as we are”). Fear and arm yourselves against “street crime”, (i.e. “people who aren’t as white as we are and who are violent for different reasons than us”.) Resist anything — anything — suggested by Barack Obama, (i.e. “a guy who is both not white and clearly … “, well, you get the idea.)

If you’re a fan of Chuck Todd’s morning show, Cantor’s opponent, college professor/economist Dave Brat, was on both yesterday and today and couldn’t sound more like a very poor (old and white) man’s echo of Newt Gingrich. Begging off a question as simple as, “What do you mean by ‘amnesty’?”, on the grounds, he said, that it wasn’t one of the “important issues”, Brat’s standard rhetorical technique is to drop the names of James Madison and other Constitutional leaders into every other sentence. If he was ordering at the Taco Bell drive through it’d sound like this: “Good morning, American! I’d like to exercise my right, as provided by James Madison, to enjoy the freedom of a burrito supreme with extra sour cream and then eat it in a place of my choosing without fear of federal oppression.”

Brat’s appeal, like Gingrich’s and Paul Ryan’s, is that he is what not-so-bright people think a smart guy sounds like. A frappe of grandiloquent slogans and catch-phrases amid constant reminders of imminent peril to body and soul. Brat — with enormous help from talk radio — actually benefited from the assertion that Eric Cantor — Eric friggin’ Cantor — was too cozy with Barack Obama. That’s how cluelessly angry Republican voters are in Virginia’s Seventh. (Not that that is unrepresentative of the Tea Party everywhere else.)

Given the effort Cantor went to to wall his district off from any Democratic voter, Brat is dead certain to be elected in the fall. (His “liberal” challenger is another professor from the same college.)

But that same deep-Tea Party base exclusivity is also a reason there may be a false message here. Gun-crazy Ayn Randers will certainly be ermboldened by Cantor’s defeat, (look out Thad Cochran in Mississippi), but in any race outside the Laura Ingraham/Mark Levin inflated talk radio bubble, Tea Party nuttery and paranoia is a catalyst for the rational-minded. Drop a nattering demagogue like Brat into any contest with a viable alternative and the rather sizeable chunk of the population repulsed by Eric Cantor’s greasy, big money/faux populist obstructionism will stampede to the polls.

The obvious peril — a fear-inducing peril to be sure — is that that there has been so much gerrymandering of “safe” Republican districts, invariably away from urban areas and toward heavily white rural enclaves, an emboldened Tea Party, (and their fear has them in a state of constant high agitation) could actually increase its strangehold over what’s left of the GOP this fall. That would — if it were possible after the most do-nothing Congress in generations — create even more gridlock in D.C.

… which is what James Madison would say is what “the people”
want.

– Brian Lambert

Six Died for a Deserter! It’s a Facty.

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It is summer(y) and already the slow-news season, unless you’re one of the millions still hyper-ventilating over last weekends’ party conventions here in Minnesota. (By all indications, this guy McFadden will be an endless supply of good copy.) But knowing how desperately politicians and news organizations require conflict to spike fund-raising and traffic I knew within a half a heart beat that this “prisoner swap” business was headed for the Great Conflictinator.

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterWhy? Because … A. Obama did something, and B. It involved “sworn enemies” of the American way of life.

And so, like mushrooms after a rain, the talking heads — several poisonous — sprouted, outraged (“Outraged!” I say!) that “Congress wasn’t informed”, and that “Obama had released the worst of the worst” in exchange for one piddly U.S. soldier. Who was … a deserter at that … .

But the real hook wasn’t releasing five cunning, homicidal Muslim psychopaths against whom all of America stands helpless for a nutty kid who probably should never have been in the Army, it was that … six brave soldiers died while out looking for this squirrely Bergdahl deserter guy. I’m sure you’ve seen that. Their pictures have been on all the best cable channels … over and over again. To the point that as far as any single-source cable viewer cares, that Bergdahl killed them is God’s honest truth.

Except for that part where no one can say for certain … .

From this morning’s New York Times:

“The furious search for Sergeant Bergdahl, his critics say, led to the deaths of at least two soldiers and possibly six others in the area. Pentagon officials say those charges are unsubstantiated and are not supported by a review of a database of casualties in the Afghan war. …

The most intense search operation, leaked war reports show, wound down after eight days — well before the deaths of six soldiers on patrols in Paktika Province in late August and early September. But, complicating matters, some soldiers contend they were effectively searching for 90 days because of clear orders: If they heard rumors from locals that Sergeant Bergdahl might be nearby, they should patrol the area. …

“A review of the database of casualties in the Afghan war suggests that Sergeant Bergdahl’s critics appear to be blaming him for every American soldier killed in Paktika Province in the four-month period that followed his disappearance.”

To which I say, “Well, hyeah!? That’s what you do when it’s goddam June and ratings and fund-raising need a good goosing.” Let the nuancy pointy heads figure out what’s what later. Right now we need an audience, preferably a pissed off one.

Though not a big military guy — I’ve skipped the last half dozen Little Big Horn reenactor get togethers — I am aware of the hard and fast military policy that “we bring ours home”, and that fine, decent and brave soldiers have died picking dead bodies off battlefields. I’m also aware that to date, Comrade/King/Mullah  Obama has not ruled out young Mr. Bergdahl facing the music once back in the States.

But how many dottering old codgers are going to get purple-faced with rage over Standard Military Procedure?

– Lambert

It’s Good to Be Here

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterTo first mind my manners: Thank you, Joe Loveland, for inviting me to post here at WWP from time to time.

There’s a Noel Coward-allows-feral-urchin-into-drawing room quality to the invite, but I’m conscious enough to (attempt to) respect the established decorum. Joe and I were together before as part of the late, lightly-lamented Same Rowdy Crowd. But when Joe moved on to start WWP the “Crowd” part of SRC was pretty much reduced to a voice of one, as often happens in the heavily-trafficked, highly-paid universe of unsolicited opinion writing.

Anyway, I’m happy to be here and have made myself a couple promises which I’ll probably break before lunch. I: To be briefer than my usual “Lawrence of Arabia”-meets-“War and Peace” posts at SRC, and 2: To mix in a bit more culture than in the past. (Also, for the pedants who focus more on punctuation than content, I’ll do everything in my limited power to re-check the apostrophe when using “it’s” instead of “its”. Sheesh.)

That all said a couple (brief) thoughts on media stories “out there” recently.

The canning of Jill Abramson at the New York Times reignited the familiar complaint about women being held to a higher standard than men when it comes to being overbearing misanthropes in executive offices. My old pal, David Carr tread as fine a line as an employee could when decoding the equation of the episode for his readers, and of course Ken Auletta has maintained vigilance throughout. Neither though has aggressively fingered Abramson’s boss, Arthur O. Sulzberger as the critical putz of the story.

While there is an interesting walk-through-the-minefield discussion to be had over whether (some) women breaking through the glass ceiling exaggerate the obnoxious qualities of male executives as a way of asserting their new sheriff/tough as any y-chromosome, pretty clearly Sulzberger — the scion of the family-controlled enterprise — couldn’t deal with Abramson. This despite the fact, as Carr and Auletta have pointed out, that unlike a couple of her sausage-bearing predecessors the paper suffered no egregious ethical lapses under her reign — like, you know, not policing a serial plagiarist or failing to fact-check a credulous reporter carrying water for a White House ginning up a fraudulent case for war

Point being, if Sulzberger had a boss he’d have been whacked a decade ago. He hired Abramson. If her personal style annoyed him, it was his job to work it out.

Next … Ann Hornaday, the movie critic of The Washington Post rips into … Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen as inspiration for the latest/this week’s heavily-armed nut job’s mass slaughter? Rather than risk making the obvious point that here in ‘Murica our sexually repressed nuts can accumulate an arsenal of firepower (and yes, I realize this Rodger kid stabbed three of his victims to death), Hornaday points her finger at popcorn comedies that suggest — horror! — that nerds can get hot chicks.

Talk about ineffectual editing.