92,000 government secrets aren't secret any longer

Something there is that doesn't like secrecy in government.
Democracy. That's what.
Journalism in its moments of freedom can be the strong right arm of government by the people, for the people and of the people.
The other strong arm is a standing army under civilian control.
The result: Conflict, thy name is warrior vs. journalist.
Soldiers have a fundamental right of secrecy to protect their own lives from disclosure of troop movements, tactical strikes before they happen and critical knowledge that would give aid and comfort to an enemy.
Reporters have a fundamental need and right to transmit a broad picture of the battlefield so people will know what their citizen-soldiers are up to and up against.
The proper balance between the competing values of a warring democracy seems intact after a huge test disclosing government secrets from the interminable war in Afghanistan. 
We are hearing the predictable screams about lack of patriotism by leakers of secrets.
When values of military good order and the citizen right to know collide, however, you can make a case that it's honorable to publish -- as long as no one gets hurt.  
The publication of  -- how many? -- 92,000 low-level classified documents from the war in Afghanistan makes me feel better about our balanced freedoms.
The same act must set teeth on edge in the Pentagon.
The price of democracy is bruxism by the generals.
The military-political complex responded to the document disclosure by WikiLeaks in the predictable, quaint way of the past.
"Nothing new...old stuff...threat to national security...could endanger soldiers."
Yeah, well, if the information is obsolete, how can it endanger anyone?
Disclosure provides the Taliban an enemies list, officials say.
Pardon?
You mean to tell me the enemy needs our help to list victims for ambush and assassination and roadside bombs all on its own?
WikiLeaks withheld 15,000 documents until it could redact names of individuals whose lives really could be endangered. 
Critics also said the information didn't advance the public debate abut the war. Their point is the benefit didn't outweigh the danger of disclosing stolen secrets.
Actually, we've never had as good a look at the war and the rationale for or against prolonging it still further. That's partly because disclosure coincided with a congressional vote on continued war funding. The leaked secrets proved their worth by that timing alone.
The reporting lacked credibility, another complaint goes, because official sources didn't approve the release of information.
Yeah, well, government never was going to reveal what the leakers did. And Washington itself doesn't enjoy credibility with the people. Too many secrets!
The New York Times, which along with The Guardian in England and Der Spiegel in Germany had a head start on parsing over the secrecy archive, verified information in the trove with its own reporting for the sake of credibility.
Still, a whistle-blowing competitor labeled WikiLeaks an "information vandal."
That's a really nice phrase someone manufactured there. But "information rebel" seems more to the point.
If we're to make our way democratically in this time of information revolution, we'll need more data patriots to do their jobs.
"All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people," The Times quotes the WikiLeaks.org website.
"We believe this scrutiny requires information."
War ordinarily demands secrecy.
But Afghanistan  is our longest conflict ever without solid purpose, goals or resolution.
We've waged it with both of our good, democratic arms tied behind our back: It's not the people's war they know enough to understand or to support, and their military mightily labors against treacherous allies who aid the furtive enemy on uncertain moral and geophysical terrain. 
We've been climbing the Hindu Kush with a backpack full of dead weight and an ammo pouch filled with rocks.
The transparency WikiLeaks and the cooperating news media strive for should actually help the cause by opening the eyes of Americans. Their involvement then could aid the prosecution of the war or hasten withdrawal.
Resolution at last! One way or another.
Quit grinding your teeth, generals. The armed forces are better off either way. 
Oh, it's irksome to government for documents to be compromised -- possibly by a PFC under suspicion. A private first class? Really!
Logic inquires who bears the greater blame -- the leaker or the officials who preside over such a readily compromised treasury of secrets.
The degree of official pique over the publication is a measure of Washington's distance from its own democratic roots.
We have a need to know, we the people do. And government has a need for our informed consent of its wars, if conflicts are to be won.
"Beware the fury of an aroused democracy," Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the Nazis in 1942. Ike presided over the secrecy of D-Day to our great joy and success in World War II. But he knew enough to cultivate media so the home front would fall in step behind the military push.
Freedom feeds on disclosure. Oddly, so does war when waged by a people aroused by information.
The equation of secrecy and disclosure balances itself out in a healthy democracy.

Writers take note of desperate times when government becomes noble and necessary

The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes; Harper, New York, 2008, 468 pages, $15.95.

Granddaddy fell off a two-story house and broke both feet in the Depression.
It was the era of The Forgotten Man. Before workmen's comp. Before Social Security. Before government cared about occupational safety or about family or, really, about the common man — grandfather or not.
The natural wisdom of Americans elected a leader in 1932 for the most desperate of times. They chose a government to preserve ordinary, everyday folk.
We're testing the limits of economic endurance again today.
Back then no one held the safety net for my Grandpa Jay. He was a big, loving-in-his-own-way, rough-laughing workingman in the tough prairie town of Lawton, Okla. Frontier rules still prevailed — make your own way.
Buffalo nibbled grass around ruts left by horse caissons out on Fort Sill. If it hadn't been for the artillery garrison, the U.S. government would have had no presence at all in my grandparents' lives.
Military demand for housing gave granddaddy work as a housepainter — until he couldn't climb a ladder. Yet he was the sole support of a wife and three school children of his own and two others taken in from family down on their luck.
Grandma Essie had spooned the last cornmeal into the cast iron skillet. Her children were going hungry.
What happened next was the defining story of my family. Manna fell from heaven. Well, potatoes actually.
My Daddy was tall and skinny but didn't miss a stride as he scooped up the bulging, burlap bag on the railroad siding as though he was paid to unload the boxcar.
You do what you have to do for family, when you literally are "The Forgotten Man."
The original use of the phrase meant the worker who never went on the dole. The person struggled but somehow made it with no more help than a providential sack of spuds the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe never would miss anyway.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked the name up like stolen taters for his presidential campaign to use about every common American. God love them, heaven made so many who needed a handout or a hand up.
FDR's brain trust got to work. The president's and wife Eleanor's skillful use of media cranked up. And the specter of a nation going under created a social experiment out of every working class American, forgotten no more.
The Amity Shlaes account is revisionist history — not original, but well-told: The line has it that FDR didn't end the Great Depression with the New Deal; that his anti-business vigor and monetary policy vacillation made things worse; and that only World War II ended the country's worst downturn ever.
The trouble with her view is the nation did sense a rescue mission and regain hope as a result. The government sun did come up again every day. The light around FDR's jaunty visage and sparky effort did counter the dark economy.
The vigor of Roosevelt's government dispelled even fear itself. His fireside chats made the White House a comfortable home for the nation to visit on the air. Lasting institutions such as deposit insurance reformed and protected banking.
Shlaes is right to remind us government can get in the way as FDR's did, creating a depression within the Depression. She is right about politics too easily diverting public works spending from its mission to rebuild the economy. And she is right that government takes steps in a national emergency we don't want from it all the time —— such as the current nationalization of industries.
But heroic measures electrified rural America. Americans went to work building roads and bridges and schools. Government organized writers and artists to make us sensitive to the desperate times, represented by Dorothea Lange's photograph of a migrant mother.
Those were noble and necessary acts of government we should not forget.
To say otherwise is like telling President-elect Barack Obama to stay in Chicago. Yet our once again fearful nation counts on him to avoid another Great Depression in the unforgettable FDR-style.
Sometimes you just have to scoop up the potatoes.

The incurious rush to save mortgages

Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions. . .Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

What’s the point of journalism, if not to ask questions?
The Media delved into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaskan past. Her Republican presidential running mate complained about the background check. And that political tactic now seems stronger than journalistic curiosity.
The reportage wanes as the Palin phenomenon waxes stronger.
Reporters also seem to have used up their quota of inquiry on politics just when we need answers about economic issues..
They need to ask if Americans really want Uncle Sam as a landlord.
The case for Treasury takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sure seems compelling.
The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation are a mess. Heads had to roll along with any other cliché that would clean up the government-sponsored secondary home mortgage market.
We don’t yet know for sure if the debacle in the total pubic and private securitized loan market will bring down the American economy.
So the government had to reform the two federally backed agencies that own half the mortgages in the nation.
But insuring the market is different from owning it.
We have just socialized mortgages in this country.
And the Press is asking fewer questions than about The Bridge to Nowhere that connects falsehood with Gov. Palin’s claim to reform public works.
For decades we’ve resisted socialized medicine.
Even now Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, campaigns against letting a federal bureaucrat stand between my doctor and me.
So why would I want a government clerk overseeing where I lay me down to sleep?
That’s neither a conservative nor a liberal question. It’s something sensible for The Press to ask as surrogate for ordinary, everyday folk.
Yes. Something had to be done about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. And quick.
The swift and sure government action, however, has the look of forever about it.
Why isn’t there a sunset provision built into the takeover? Then the government could fix the problem and get out of the mortgage business, returning it to private or quasi-private enterprise.
But the business pages and Wall Street programs on TV aren’t asking that question.
Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions.
Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

There's a simple way to shape political coverage on Oval Office qualifications

Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard. First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.

The President ought to be as smart as the cabinet.
Now that’s a proposition The Press could use to focus election year coverage.
No more teen mother angst or fighter pilot claim to superiority or community organizing theory or Delaware do-righteousness.
The person who appoints the heads of our governmental departments should be on a par with them.
Besides selecting the best and the brightest, the Chief Executive then has to monitor and manage and motivate them.
Oh, the President doesn’t have to out-lawyer the Attorney General. But a feel for the Constitution and the rule of law would be nice.
Contrary to GOP candidate John McCain’s emphasis, there’s more to the presidency that serving as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.
So it’s not necessary to hold a driver’s license for an aircraft carrier or a permit to carry a howitzer or a flight plan for a stealth bomber.
Sufficient unto the day is the sure and certain knowledge that it’s the duty of every soldier to kill the enemy. The how can be left up to the Secretary of Defense.
What the president needs is the judgment to know when to unleash those dogs of war.
And it’s pretty important to have the analytical ability to maintain our tradition of civilian control of the military.
The Secretary of Agriculture may know a lot about crops and markets. But to carry on a conversation about farmers, the President needs to grasp the nuances. For instance we don’t have food stamps merely to feed the poor. The program is foremost an Ag subsidy program.
The Treasury is not a place we keep money. It’s the control room for keeping the dollar sound despite our debtor nation status.
Interior is not about raping the land but extracting its resources soundly.
Education isn’t about enforcing ideology but planting our seed corn for the smart nation we must be to compete in the world.
Commerce isn’t all census and weights and measures – not when we’re killing off our fisheries and can’t get trade policy to work right.
Labor is about fair pay for fair work instead of this seesaw between the rights of unions vs. the prerogatives of corporations.
And what does the President need to know about the State Department to monitor that Secretary?
This: State is the sum of all the other Departments, because we make our way in the world by projecting our good name with justice, intelligence, respect for full bellies and sound minds, caution against bullies and confidence in a Yankee sensibility about trade and money.
Barack Obama has a good idea about appointing a technology chief for the government. There’s a better claim for making that a Cabinet job compared with Veteran Affairs, which could be folded into the Pentagon.
How alienating toward the future and futurists – every person on the Internet – when McCain patronizingly said he doesn't do computers. His implication was we who appreciate the digital world are eccentric.
Technology actually is a way of making science work for us…of causing the future to happen now…of compensating America in the global prosperity race where others enjoy advantages over us.
That sort of thinking and a keenly organized mind would make the President an equal with any Cabinet.
Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard.
First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.
It’s always intelligent to elevate the national conversation and to focus.

Media generations: MTV and the AARP crowds can set government right again

MTV may save the republic
Ladies Home Journal and the Crown Forum book How to Raise an American and even The AARP Magazine will help.
’Bout time someone did something. Really. It’s all about time or at least age. The issue is how to motivate the youth vote, and those media are onto something.
The big news is Viacom’s countercultural music broadcaster announcing it will now take political ads.
It’s for the money of course. When Sen. Barrack Obama passed up public funding of his Democratic presidential campaign, he put a monster ad budget in play with a youth orientation.
But an ad is information, too, not just a commercial. If campaign advertising weren't suddenly cool, MTV wouldn’t break its 27-year ban against marketing candidates.
This is watershed stuff. Potentially, anyway.
Just a few years ago David T. Z. Mindich wrote Tuned Out, explaining why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. He said political process alienated the young who found it immoral, unresponsive to the people and irrelevant along with the news media that covered politics.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam broke that ground with his landmark study of civic disengagement.
And journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., decried the exchange between politicians and the governed as “unintelligent” in his book, Why Americans Hate Politics.
For the smart set, the young set, the MTV set to tune back in as both the Iowa caucuses and the Obama millennials indicate is big for the future of self-government.
A letter to Reader's Digest calls this "The Facebook Election." But ultimately, the writer said, two things will have to happen:

• These young activists will have to run for office;
• And leadership in both major parties will have to step aside to "let younger, more open minds take over."

Too soon to say if the information industry and especially newspapers will reverse their own downward spiral related to civic malaise.
Mindich anticipated some rise from the ashes, because “despite their disengagement with news, young people are as thoughtful and passionate and self-reflective as they have ever been, ready to interact with news if we just provide the right conditions for them to do so.”
One condition could be for parents and grandparents to be civic-minded and to model participatory government for the generations to come of voting age.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, started Take Your Kids 2 Vote, promoting the idea of adults taking their children into polling places with them. She remembered it when she was a kid.
She and cofounder Chriss Winston researched Election Day involvement and wrote How to Raise an American.
Naturally http://www.takeyourkids2vote.org/ is their Web site. Emphasis is on recollection and narrative.
“Sharing your memories of voting makes kids realize their family is part of the American experience,” Blyth said to writer Nick Kolakowski of AARP http://www.aarpmagazine.org/.
And that’s cool too. For the self-described “World’s Largest Circulation Magazine” to publicize civic lessons across the generations really does link MTV’s ad policy news with shoring up the Republic’s future.
Rap that tune.

This just in: Government discovers rumor!

Can’t fool Washington. It’s just slow on the uptake.
Word-of-mouth is humankind’s oldest form of communication.
Dame Rumor flies, wrote ancient poets such as Virgil. Truth is a pedestrian.
The feds were bound to get around to investigating that hare and tortoise race.
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants Wall Street to stop spreading false information.
Lots of luck with that.
Those turkey buzzards of day trading, the short sellers, make a living from bad information and misinformation and disinformation. They borrow stock at a high price to sell low and pocket the difference.
The shorters naturally benefit if gossip hurts a company on the Exchange while they hold its paper.
Speculation flitted right behind rumor out of Pandora’s box.
Journalism could tell federal regulators all information is baseless until verified.
But fact-checking is a tedious process that suffers when a reporter is close to deadline and when the financial world is in near panic mode as it is lately.
So we shouldn’t be cynical either about editors’ stern warning to authenticate or the SEC’s crackdown on illegal trading practices.
Realism simply tells us rumor mongering is a never ending story, with us always.
The wagging tongue as way-of-life is how vast numbers of non-readers of newspapers and non-watchers of TV are getting their news these days. Much of the news actually is commentary if not downright gossip.
Abandon all hope for straight poop as you enter the blogosphere. Yes, this blog is an outpost in the vastness of cyberspace too.
That’s why you see my name, my picture, my bona fide credentials listed – the stuff of credibility, the eternal enemy of rumor.
Trusted sources: That’s what professional journalism is all about, regardless of media platform.
The government might defeat rumor in the marketplace. Not likely. But it might. The weapon would be instantly available truth, denial, explanation to counter every whisper.
But that would require government, corporations and the financial world to be quick with credibility too.
Every reporter knows those institutions trade in deception and withheld information and controlled flow of news.
So short sellers and average citizens take rumors for granted.
Credible journalism can’t. That’s why there’ll always be a market for honest reporting.
Uphill battle that it is with Dame Rumor whispering in your ear.

Live wires promote the living truth

I know, let’s open all the microphones all the time.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is merely the latest public figure to speak ugly into a hot mic he apparently thought was dead.
He apologized to Barack Obama for calling the Democratic presidential hopeful out of his name. (That’s a wonderful country idiom for, “Momma, Jesse said something vulgar”).
Here're a couple of points.
First, it’s nuts to say anything in a broadcast studio you don’t want picked up.
Really, don’t say anything anywhere you don’t want the world to hear these days.
Which leads to the possibility Jackson actually wanted to be heard. But that’s too cynical and spy-vs.-spy to contemplate. Let’s don’t go there.
Instead think about a world where everybody gets everything out in the open naturally.
This flap won’t go anywhere. Because Obama quickly accepted a quick apology. And it wasn’t big enough to label “Jessegate.”
But the remark inside a Fox Broadcasting studio focused on the candidate’s stand that African American fathers should be fathers. That means at home and attentive to children as Obama’s dad was not.
Jackson called that “talking down to black people.”
Really interesting is his published statement of apology.
The old line Civil Rights leader said he wanted black males’ personal moral responsibility to be matched by the country’s collective responsibility for public policy.
Oh, really? H-m-m-m-m, say those folks who have moved beyond that view.
Government ought to correct itself for “the lack of good choices” that often led to their black dads’ irresponsibility, according to the Jackson statement.
Suddenly we understand Obama better for Jackson’s gaffe and follow-up.
The younger leader believes in personal responsibility. The older leader still labors under the entitlement mindset that government is to blame and needs to make up for it.
Barack Obama couldn’t pay for that kind of left-handed endorsement.
And public understanding is the better for climbing the continental divide between two views.
The unintended free flow of ideas all resulted from a single hot mic.
Open all the microphones!