How Bobby Fischer Won the Cold War

I know I will get a lot of flack from my fellow conservatives for saying this, but it wasn't Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War; it was Bobby Fischer, who died today in Iceland at 64. Sure, Fischer, who was probably the greatest chess player who ever lived, was anti-Semitic (although his mother was Jewish), renounced his American citizenship after he was arrested in Japan for violating sanctions against the former Yugoslavia, and rejoiced on September 11 saying he wanted to "see the U.S. wiped out," but nobody is perfect. For me Bobby Fischer will always be an American hero.

Young, handsome, brash, spoiled, somewhat insane, Bobby Fischer became a role model for American youth when he beat Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship. That this uncouth punk, playing a game most Americans didn't understand or care about, beat the cultured, pampered product of Soviet government largesse stunned the world. For one brief shining moment from July to September 1972 Americans huddled in their living rooms around their televisions debating the relative merits of the Sicilian Defense, the Queen's Gambit and Tartakover Variation. Fischer showed that an individual could triumph on his own merits and you didn't need government handouts to succeed. All you needed was confidence in your own genius, a big sense of entitlement and a lot of style. You can see the influence of Fischer not only in America's steroid-pumped baseball stars and Olympic athletes but even in the carefree arrogance of our own President.

When Fischer beat Spassky, America was at a low point in its history. The Vietnam War was winding to a close without any sign of victory. The American basketball team lost the Olympic gold medal to the Soviets in a controversial game that summer. Communist influence was on the rise. But Bobby Fischer showed the world that we Americans still had one weapon in our arsenal. That weapon was our faith that we are better than anyone else in the world and therefore we don't need to play by the world's rules and if you rile us we are just as liable to overturn the chessboard as we are to humiliate you in 41 moves.

Richard Nixon had once proposed to his aide Bob Haldeman a strategy for victory in Vietnam he called the Madman Theory. "I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war," Nixon told Haldeman. "We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry -- and he has his hand on the nuclear button' -- and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace." But Nixon just talked about the Madman Theory. Bobby Fischer put it into practice. And Nixon was right. Just a month after Fischer proved how crazy Americans can be, the North Vietnamese agreed to end the war. Earlier that year the Soviets signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the United States, no doubt because Soviet chess players had already relayed reports of Fischer's nuttiness to their government officials. Seven years later the Soviets signed the SALT II treaty. Bobby Fischer was the closest contact the Soviets had with a real American and he terrified them. By the time Ronald Reagan arrived, joking about dropping the big one on Russia, the Soviets were already running scared. To them it seemed as if Bobby Fischer had been elected President of the United States.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there are no second acts in American lives, but he was wrong. American second acts are played as farce. American genius is often too great for any one man to handle. Like Howard Hughes, Elvis and Tom Cruise, Bobby Fischer was always teetering just this side of complete and total looniness, so it is no surprise that he finally went all the way over. And yet he still managed to beat Boris Spassky again in their 1992 rematch.

The terrorists are probably too young to remember Bobby Fischer. But maybe there is a young American backgammon player out there who knows the game as well as Fischer knew chess. And maybe someday he will play the Arab world's champion backgammon player and he will complain about the lights and cameras and walk out in protest and generally cause a ruckus with his eccentricities. And then he will come from behind and crush their champion backgammon player. Maybe this young American backgammon genius will win the War on Terror the way Bobby Fischer won the Cold War.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, Chess, Nixon, Cold War, Soviet Union, Politics
Carnivals: Carnival of Mental Illness, History Carnival

Why Can't the President Fire Everyone?

Democrats are making a big deal out of the firing of few prosecutors who are appointed by the President and "serve at the pleasure of the President" or lack thereof as the case may be. Critics say that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been trying to politicize the Justice Department, but blogger and Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail columnist Don Surber thinks the department should be politicized, and so should the rest of the government. "Of course these firings were political," he writes. "Their hirings were political. It is all political. That is why we vote. We elected President Bush to be the chief executive of this government. He should be able to fire anyone."

I thought President Bush could fire anyone, but he was just extremely reluctant to do so even when someone screws up. But it turns out that there are a bunch of people in the government he can't fire. "Unfortunately, we have Civil Service, which protects most federal employees from being fired," Surber explains. "This makes it difficult to have the government serve the people."

I did a little research into this government cabal called Civil Service and it turns out that things were not always this way. Back in the early nineteenth century when everything was better in this country for everybody, except for blacks, women and apparently civil servants, everyone in the government served at the pleasure of the President and anyone could be fired at any time for any reason. Under the "spoils system" after a party won an election it could give away all the government jobs to its own people. When a new President was elected he fired all the government workers and replaced them with his supporters. Back then Presidents believed, as President Bush and Gonzales do now, that loyalty was a lot more important than merit.

Unfortunately, these happy days of patronage ended with the passage of the Pendleton Act of 1883. The act was passed in the wake of James Garfield's assassination by Charles Guiteau (pictured above), who was angry that he got passed over for a job for which he had no qualifications. This act set up the Civil Service Commission, which awarded jobs based on merit. (The law didn't apply to state governments where political machines continued to give out patronage jobs well into the 20th century) In 1939 the Hatch Act barred federal employees from engaging in partisan politics and eliminated the spoils system for all but the most senior positions. Except for a brief interlude during the McCarthy era when civil servants could be fired if they were perceived to be disloyal or gay, it has been very difficult fire government workers unless you have a good reason.

Unfortunately, the creation of Civil Service led to the federal government becoming too powerful. When federal workers were incompetent, government was weak and didn't bother people that much. But once the government was filled with people who knew how to do their jobs, the government became too strong. President Bush has done what he could to weaken the power of government bureaucracies by restoring some of the incompetence that was lost, but there is only so much one man can do in six years. Although people like Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Brown made great strides in weakening the bureaucracies they supervised, a lot more needs to be done.

President Bush would not only like to decrease the power of the bureaucracy but also increase his own power as well under the theory of the Unitary Executive, which says there should be limits on the power of Congress and that the President should be given powers that no other branch of government can interfere with. That is why he is citing Executive Privilege to resist Congress' efforts to get Karl Rove and Harriet Myers to testify under oath. If his advisers are subjected to "show trials" under "klieg lights," as he put it in his press conference the other day, then Congress might decide it can take away the power it gave him to conduct secret military tribunals for those he has personally dubbed enemy combatants and curtail his ability to decide who can be subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

President Bush has drawn a line in the sand by resisting Congress' attempt to wrest power from him, precipitating a Constitutional showdown. Vice President Cheney knows from first-hand experience how the power of the President was dangerously weakened in the Nixon era. In United States v. Nixon the Supreme Court rebuffed President Nixon's attempts to withhold the Watergate tapes by saying that Executive Privilege can be invoked only to "protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets." If Congress insists on taking this case all the way to the Supreme Court, the Court should reverse this terrible precedent. Even if they don't have the guts to reverse it, they should at least rule in Bush's favor since virtually everything he and Vice President Cheney do is a national security secret. "The Constitution is at stake," says Surber. "It puts the executive branch under a president's control. Congress needs to be put in its place."

Only with a weak bureaucracy and a strong executive will President Bush be able to fight the terrorists. A victory in the Supreme Court will be just the first step to restoring the President's power and taking it away from the bureaucrats. The entire Civil Service system also needs to be reformed so that the President can fire anyone he thinks is disloyal the way it was during the McCarthy era and before the passage of the Pendleton Act. Then government will be better able to "serve the people," as Surber put it. Surber is also right when he says the President "should be able to fire anyone." In fact, the President should have the power to fire members of Congress and members of the Supreme Court as well. Only then will the President have successfully neutralized the threat of those inside the government who have weakened us in the War on Terror.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Alberto Gonzalez, Don Surber, Justice Department, Terrorism, Bush, Cheney, Nixon, Civil Service, McCarthy, Rumsfeld, Politics

An Army of Martha Mitchells

Some bloggers just don't understand how journalism works. Back in mid-January TPM Muckraker an offshoot of Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo began writing that U. S. attorneys were being fired by the Bush Administration and tried to make a big deal out of it. Although most journalists paid no attention to the hysteria the bloggers were trying to whip up about what Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez would later call an "overblown personnel matter," Time magazine's Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Jay Carney took time out of his busy day to patiently mock Marshall.

"Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!" Carney wrote. "Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist." Though Carney admitted, "It's all very suspicious sounding," he pointed out that Marshall had no proof. Marshall was basing his claims on the complaints of one disgruntled district attorney, Carol Lam, who claimed her firing jeopardized investigations into the Duke Cunningham scandal, and the vague charges of Senator Dianne Feinstein who is clearly a partisan. Besides nothing about the story had appeared in the Drudge Report and journalists are bound by the rules of journalistic ethics to ignore rumors unless they appear there first.

Of course, journalists don't have the time or resources to investigate every suspicious rumor. If they did that, they wouldn't have time to report the news. And if their confidential sources in the White House thought that journalists were looking into something that might make them look bad, they would stop leaking to journalists, which would make reporting the news impossible.

But Marshall and his reporters, who apparently don't have anything better to do and may be slightly unstable, kept pushing this story until another U.S. Attorney, David Iglesias, went public with his suspicions about why he was fired. But even then Carney remained steadfast, writing skeptically, "If Iglesias names names, and others tell similar stories, I will take my hat off to Marshall and others in the blogosphere and congratulate them for having been right in their suspicions about this story from the beginning." Of course, he still wasn't prepared to waste his valuable time looking into the matter himself and he couldn't resist getting in a little dig at bloggers, pointing out that "Suspicions aren't facts," which bloggers apparently don't realize because they didn't go to journalism school.

Now Gonzalez has been forced to admit that "mistakes were made" although he didn't know anything about them. He pointed out that there are 110,000 people working in the Justice Department and he can't possibly know what they are all up to. Unlike bloggers, Attorneys General and Time correspondents have real jobs and they can't be expected to know everything.

Nevertheless, Carney made good on his promise to take his hat off to Marshall, no doubt relieved that he didn't say that he would eat his hat. Just in case anyone thought that Carney just sat on his hands and let bloggers do all the work, he also revealed that he actually made a few calls. "I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were 'concerned,' but this was not a priority." Without the cover of being able to report that Democrats were suspicious and looking into the allegations, Carney knew that he couldn't take the risk of looking into them himself so he was forced to publicly doubt they were true so that Time's reputation wouldn't be damaged. "The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I'd first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire," Carney admitted magnanimously.

Now because of one blog and despite the determined efforts of Jay Carney and other mainstream journalists, the Justice Department is in disarray. I don't need to tell you how dangerous it is to have resources diverted to defending the embattled Attorney General and away from fighting terrorists. I hope that Marshall and other bloggers will realize how reckless their actions have been and will learn some valuable lessons from this episode. They need to learn how journalism really works and to understand what drives modern journalism you have to go all the way back to the Watergate scandal, which many bloggers are too young to remember.

After Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency because of the Watergate scandal, he told David Frost in an interview, "If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate." Martha Mitchell was the wife of Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell. Before the Watergate scandal broke, she began calling reporters late at night and telling them that her husband was engaged in illegal activities. Reporters, of course, didn't believe anything she said and tried to help her by telling her husband what she was doing. He had her locked away and leaked a story to the press that she had a "drinking problem." The character of Martha Logan in the television series 24 is based on her so you can see why no one believed her and why she was so dangerous.

Although some blame for Watergate must also go to Mark Felt, the disgruntled FBI employee who has since been revealed as Woodward and Bernstein's source Deep Throat, it was Mitchell's indiscretions that first put the poisonous idea in the heads of reporters that our own government can't be trusted, which ultimately weakened our country. Just as people working for Gonzalez tried to stop U.S. attorneys from talking to reporters by threatening to release damaging information about them, John Mitchell tried to stop The Washington Post from writing about Watergate by warning, "[Post Publisher] Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."

Regrettably, The Washington Post went ahead with the story anyway. In the wake of Watergate laws were passed limiting what the government could do. Because of these laws government officials were barred from using all of the resources necessary to protect our country. So Mitchell was partly responsible not only for damaging the credibility and the power of the U.S. government for years to come but possibly even 9/11. It has taken years of painstaking work by the Bush Administration to restore some of the credibility and power the government lost after Watergate through laws like the Patriot Act. If one delusional, alcoholic woman, who just happened to be right in this one instance, can do so much damage despite the concerted effort of many reporters not to believe her, think what damage an army of Martha Mitchells could do. To journalists that's what bloggers are--an army of Martha Mitchells.

The idea of an army of Martha Mitchells is terrifying to reporters. Sure, Josh Marshall and other bloggers happened to be right on this one story, just as Martha Mitchell turned out to be correct despite the fact that she was a delusional drunken gossip. But that shouldn't tempt the Jay Carneys of the world to pick up the phone the next time one of these Martha Mitchells calls and tries to put subversive ideas in their heads. I think Carney and other reporters realize the damage Watergate did to this country and they are trying to undo it by returning journalism back to where it was before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ruined it. Unfortunately, there is an army of Martha Mitchells out there constantly ringing up journalists in the middle of the night, waking them up when they are trying to sleep.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Alberto Gonzalez, Joshua Micah Marshall, Talking Points Memo, TPM Muckraker, Jay Carney, Time Magazine, Justice Department, Terrorism, Bush, Nixon, Martha Mitchell, Washington Post, Politics