| Today on NRO ELIANA JOHNSON: Will Harry Reid’s super PAC, and intimidated GOP donors, make the difference for the Democrats? Hey, Big Spender. KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: What this country needs is a war of attrition against the welfare state and entrenched incompetency. The Thirty Years’ War. VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: In a racially diverse America, we have no discernible rules for what determines one’s race. What Determines ‘Hispanic’? CONRAD BLACK: The economic rebound is not real. We need new policies. Shaky Recovery. SLIDESHOW: Cinematic Contagions. | Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty October 16, 2014 The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself. Well, That and Ebola. Fear is not always a bad thing*. Fear can be useful. Fear is an indicator that we care about something and fear losing it. Fear can be a powerful motivator to action. For weeks, officials at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Obama administration have told us that we have the very best people in government and medicine working on the problem of Ebola. They told us that they would “stop it in its tracks.” They assured us they could handle this. Anyone who said otherwise was fear-mongering. | Why Republicans will LOVE President Hillary Hillary Clinton will likely win the 2016 Presidential Election. Warren Buffett said that he'd even be willing to bet on it. She may even go down as one of the best Presidents in U.S. history despite her socialist ideas and her class warfare politics… People in America will make extraordinary amounts of money during her potential presidency thanks to a controversial opportunity. Details here. | | | Now they’re admitting to us they “dropped the ball.” In the case of Amber Vinson, the Dallas nurse who flew commercially as she was becoming ill with Ebola, one health official said "somebody dropped the ball." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Vinson called the agency several times before flying, saying that she had a fever with a temperature of 99.5 degrees. But because her fever wasn't 100.4 degrees or higher, she didn't officially fall into the group of "high risk" and was allowed to fly. Thus, we see the familiar pattern from the VA scandal, Healthcare.gov, insurance cancellations, and our foreign-policy crises. Someone notices a problem. The government assures us they’ve got this under control. People outside government publicly express doubts. Government officials scoff and dismiss the critics. And then the critics turn out to be a lot more right than the government admitted. Rick Wilson’s chilling -- and at least somewhat prescient -- little story on Twitter from late July stands out for his main point that in a crisis, human beings make mistakes. That is not avoidable, no matter the preparation, the amount of resources, or the leadership. It’s baked in the cake. So a realistic plan has to have contingencies to deal with those inevitable human errors. So far, it seems that the Centers for Disease Control designed and implemented a plan that would have worked . . . as long as no one made any mistakes. If the screener at the Liberian airport where Duncan got on the plane had detected an elevated temperature, or he had not lied in his answers on the questionnaire, as Liberia’s government claims, the plan would have worked. If he had clearly communicated he had recently been to West Africa, and the hospital had clearly understood, the plan would have worked, or at least worked better. If the first nurse hadn’t made (some yet undetermined) error in removing her protective gear, then yes, the plan could have worked better. If the second nurse had not made the decision to get on an airliner while “being monitored,” and chosen to get onto a return flight with a 99.5 degree fever, the plan would have worked better. And then the CDC “dropped the ball,” telling her it was okay to get on that flight. The problem is that human beings make mistakes, and because of a variety of psychological factors -- including fear and denial -- they sometimes get worse at assessing risk and reward in circumstances like this one. Even people with a background in medicine and knowledge of the virus take risks that seem unacceptable to others. Nurses get on airplanes. The NBC News medical correspondent goes out for soup. President Obama canceled his fundraising event and economy speech scheduled for today. * A counter-argument from Paul Atreides: “Fear is the mind-killer.” Everything We Thought We Knew About Iraqi WMDs Is Wrong. Dear Bush Administration . . . What the heck? I mean, what the heck? From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule. In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This is the sort of information that would have been useful in a lot of really important national discussions from 2004 to 2009, wouldn’t it? How is it that almost every other national-security secret leaks, but not this one? Even if you want to argue that the statements of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War were inaccurate -- particularly the ones about the Iraqi nuclear program -- the post-2003 shorthand that “there were no WMDs” was equally inaccurate. If you want to denounce the Bush administration for the Iraq War, denounce them for this: Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States’ encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, an al-Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found. The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds. The Bush administration didn’t lie about chemical weapons being there. They lied about chemical weapons NOT being there. The anti-Bush crowd was right, for completely the wrong reasons. Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “'Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical-weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound. Unbelievable. Unforgivable. Wrap your mind around it: Our government lied to us about attacks on our troops using chemical weapons: The United States government says the abandoned weapons no longer pose a threat. But nearly a decade of wartime experience showed that old Iraqi chemical munitions often remained dangerous when repurposed for local attacks in makeshift bombs, as insurgents did starting by 2004. Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.” And this isn’t just a shell here and a shell there: In late 2005 and early 2006, soldiers collected more than 440 Borak 122-millimeter chemical rockets near Amara, in southeastern Iraq. And in the first nine months of 2006, the American military recovered roughly 700 chemical warheads and shells, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. British forces also destroyed 21 Borak rockets in early 2006, including some that contained nerve agent, according to a public statement to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in 2010. The Pentagon did not provide this information to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as it worked in the summer of 2006 examining intelligence claims about Iraq’s weapons programs. Even as the Senate committee worked, the American Army made its largest chemical weapons find of the war: more than 2,400 Borak rockets . . . Mr. Lampier, then a captain commanding the 756th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, was with the first to arrive. “At first we saw three,” he said. “Then it wasn’t three. It was 30. Then it wasn’t 30. It was 300. It went up from there.” The rockets appeared to have been buried before American airstrikes in 1991, he said. Many were empty. Others still contained sarin. “Full-up sloshers,” he said. And it gets worse, with plenty of blame for both the Bush and Obama administrations . . . we left the stuff there. Didn’t we nearly bomb Bashir Assad’s regime in Syria for using chemical weapons? Isn’t our policy to consider these poisons and gases as one of the most dangerous weapons imaginable? Florida Man Refuses to Take Stage With Rival over Ceiling Fan Unfortunately, that Florida man is Governor Rick Scott. In the weirdest start of a gubernatorial debate, Florida governor Rick Scott initially refused to take the stage Wednesday night because Democrat Charlie Crist insisted on a fan to keep him cool. The Republican governor finally emerged at least six minutes late as flummoxed moderators struggled on live TV to figure out what to do with a bemused Crist standing solo on stage at Broward College. “Are we really going to debate about a fan? Or are we going to talk about education, and the environment and the future of our state?” Crist asked. “I mean, really.” The sharp elbows started almost as soon as Scott walked out, looking rattled. His campaign contended “electronic” devices were not allowed in the debate. On stage, Scott went on offense quickly, but some of his supporters privately fretted the fan incident could be a defining and damaging moment for the incumbent in the final stretch of a close race. ADDENDA: Some much-needed good news: Lockheed Martin may have invented nuclear fusion, meaning that within ten years, we could see pint-sized reactors creating huge amounts of energy with little waste. Man, if this pans out, Putin’s Russia is so screwed. I’m starting to have this nagging fear that The Weed Agency is going to look dated in the not-so-distant future, as it depicts complacent, incompetent, irresponsible federal bureaucrats failing in their missions and wasting taxpayer money with non-lethal consequences. Or at least if not dated, Pollyanna-ish and too optimistic! From Our Sponsor:
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