He Hasn't Accomplished Nothing

Does anyone have confidence in Barack Obama?

By JAMES TARANTO

Slate's Jacob Weisberg doesn't think Barack Obama has accomplished nothing, and Weisberg ain't usin' no bad grammar neither. Weisberg disputes the "conventional wisdom about Obama"--to wit, that he "hasn't done anything yet." This, he claims, "isn't just premature--it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20." Or maybe not sure. Weisberg continues:

If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record--how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

Actually, maybe Weisberg does have a problem with grammar. He certainly has a problem with logic. He claims to have disproved the claim that Obama "hasn't done anything yet"--a formulation in the present perfect tense--by citing something Obama hasn't done yet!
Further, Weisberg's "if" is not an insubstantial one, especially given that any "health care reform" bill would have to be passed by the Senate, which so far has only approved a motion to end debate on a motion to begin debate, and that by the absolute minimum required number of votes. With public opinion increasingly turning against the effort, passage of such a bill can hardly be taken for granted.
What's more, Weisberg himself admits that "health care reform" could be a dubious accomplishment indeed:

The bill he signs may be flawed in any number of ways—weak on cost control, too tied to the employer-based system, and inadequate in terms of consumer choice. But given the vastness of the enterprise and the political obstacles, passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later is probably the only way to succeed where his predecessors failed.

Despite not being a politician, Weisberg is not as honest as Robert Reich, so he doesn't even mention that ObamaCare could end up impoverishing the young, killing the old, and stifling medical innovation.
Keep in mind that Weisberg is a flatterer, not a critic, of Obama's. When he says the president may end up burdening the country with an "imperfect behemoth," he means it as praise, and lavish praise at that. Objectively, this is faint praise at best--and that is just the tip of the Weisberg. By his standard of presidential greatness--the making happen of "big, transformational things"--George W. Bush was a great president if you believe that the liberation of Iraq was the greatest disaster in the history of American foreign policy.
Yesterday we noted that a Georgetown University scholar had this to say about the president's prolonged show of irresoluteness over Afghanistan: "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one." That this was meant as a defense shows how little confidence the speaker has in Obama. The test of decisiveness, after all, is not how one faces the easy questions.
In a related vein is this comment from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos":

If there's one thing that this president is good at [it] is explaining things. That's what he ought to be able to do. And look, I mean, I feel a little bit sorry for him. This was inflicted upon him. This was--he was left a legacy . . . of basically a failed war, a war that might have been won quite easily in 2001, 2002, if Bush hadn't had his eyes on Iraq instead. And now he has got to play catch-up. I'm sure he would prefer not to be doing this at all. He's kind of in a political box. What can you do?

This, of course, is an echo of Obama's own incessant whining about the "mess" he "inherited" when he somehow, through no fault of his own, became president. But there is one additional element here: Paul Krugman doesn't have confidence in Obama. He feels sorry for him.
Obama's strongest sympathizers in the media don't seem to have anything to offer him right now except sympathy. They are able to praise him only by holding him to ridiculously low standards. Does anyone in America have real confidence in Barack Obama? Does he have it in him to inspire it?
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
"Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year," London's Daily Telegraph reported Thursday:

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours.

Concerns about death rates at the foundation hospital trust were first raised a year ago, but an internal investigation failed to find anything wrong and managers dismissed the concerns.

But the new report found "systematic failings" in the trust's management, all of whom are still in their jobs. The CQC said its confidence in the management's ability had been "severely dented."

Perhaps the only good news in the whole story comes from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who observes: "And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason--treason against the planet."
Sorry, wrong quote. We mean this one: "I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."
Whoops, wrong again. OK, let's try once more: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."
That's it. Third time's the charm. And do you know what, Krugman is right. The Daily Mail has the number of deaths cited in the "shocking report" as just 70--well, "at least 70." Oh, but wait, the Mail's Saturday follow-up raises the figure to 3,000. The left-wing Observer, a Sunday paper, says 5,000.
But does it really matter? As Stalin is said to have observed, while one death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic. And here's a first for this feature: a tragedy--or prospective tragedy--here in the U.S. It comes from Krugman's New York Times colleague, Nicholas Kristof, who has no connection to Enron.
It seems that 23-year-old John Brodniak has a cavernous hemangioma, "an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John's case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain." He suffers from constant pain, impairments of memory and coordination, and nausea and vomiting. There is a danger of premature death should a blood vessel burst. Surgery could relieve his condition, but he says doctors won't operate on him because he's uninsured, and he can't get insurance because he has a pre-existing condition.
If any of our readers are in a position to help this young man, please email us and we'll pass the information along to Kristof.
From the standpoint of public policy, though, the key passage in the Kristof column is this one:

In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn't been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low.

Somehow Kristof thinks he has made an argument for more government control over health care, when in fact the case he has made against it is nothing short of devastating.
Keep America Beautiful
To help pay for the ObamaCare boondoggle, Democrats in the Senate have proposed a 5% tax on "any cosmetic surgery that is not necessary to address deformities arising from congenital abnormalities, personal injuries resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring diseases," the New York Times reports. Such operations already get unfavorable treatment in the tax code, under which they are not deductible medical expenses.
The Times, to its credit, tells the opponents' side of the story, but this comment is a non sequitur:

The 7,000-member American Society of Plastic Surgeons said its internal surveys showed that 60 percent of members' patients earn less than $90,000 a year.

"A lot of people think of this as a tax on rich Republican housewives; rich, nonworking Republican housewives," said Dr. Phil Haeck, the group's president-elect. "And that's not the case."

By definition, someone who doesn't work for pay has an earned income of zero. Thus the ASPS's statistics are consistent with up to 60% of cosmetic-surgery patients being "nonworking Republican housewives," although our guess is that the proportion isn't actually quite that high.
Are Usurious?
Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com has a very amusing follow-up on the Acorn stings. It turns out that in its 2005 annual report, Acorn boasted that one of its employees, Christina Talarczyk of San Antonio, had cooperated with a major broadcast TV network in a hidden-camera journalistic sting not unlike the ones that hit Acorn this summer. Talarczyk, who worked as a tax preparer for the organization, wanted to call attention to "refund anticipation loans," which she believed were usurious:

In March 2004, Christina introduced millions of primetime television viewers to RAL scams when she played an undercover role in a segment of Dateline, NBC's Emmy-winning investigative news program.

Pretending to be a naive tax preparation customer, Christina walked into a Jackson Hewitt office with a Dateline producer who had a camera hidden in his sunglasses. The tax preparation employees were caught on camera as they tried to convince Christina to take out a high-interest RAL. "The Jackson Hewitt employee said it takes the IRS too long to process a refund, and made RALs seem so much faster," Christina explains. "It was surreal to see myself on TV. I had family members calling from Minnesota and New Mexico to tell me they'd seen it."

One suspects many of her Acorn colleagues' families were considerably less proud to see them on TV. Better to sting than to be stung. As a matter of journalistic ethics, though, it's difficult to conceive of a standard by which the Talarczyk-NBC sting would measure up but the Giles-O'Keefe-Breitbart sting of Acorn would not.
Accountability Journalism
The Associated Press manages to find fault with the Obama administration, but the case it makes could hardly be weaker:

President Barack Obama entered the White House promising a new era of openness in government, but when it comes to bad news, his administration often uses one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook: putting it out when the fewest people are likely to notice.

Former White House environmental adviser Van Jones' resignation over controversial comments hit the trifecta of below-the-radar timing: The White House announced the departure overnight on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, when few journalists were on duty and few Americans awake, much less paying attention to the news.

If the White House has a pattern of making news at times when journalists aren't "on duty," doesn't that suggest that news organizations ought to reconsider which hours their employees work?
What's more, the "controversial comments" that led to Van Jones's resignation had been reported by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck in July. There was ample time for reporters at the AP and other "mainstream" news outlets to bring their readers and viewers the "bad news," had they been inclined to do so. Or maybe all journalists are off duty for the entire month of August.
The Metric System, Explained
A passage in a Reuters dispatch on Bethlehem (the one in the Bible, not Pennsylvania) clarifies something that has long mystified this column:

Foreign tourists are whisked through Bethlehem from nearby Jerusalem on half-day visits organized by tour companies located in Israel. The two cities are divided by just a few kilometers (miles) but also an Israeli wall that complicates the journey.

Of course. "Kilometers" are miles. Now it all makes sense. The one complication is that they're the wrong length.
An Athlete Puts Things in Perspective
"You never forget that day. That was pretty unbelievable for all of us. A lot of us you know, your first chance to play in a Super Bowl and winning the Super Bowl, and of course the circumstances of that year with 9-11 happening and U2 performing at halftime--that was pretty unbelievable."--New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady on Super Bowl XXXVI, quoted by the Associated Press. Nov. 26
We Blame Global Warming
"Hezbollah Blames U.S. for All Terrorism"--headline, CNN.com, Nov. 30