Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles

Me the people

"The system is broken." This lament is heard constantly these days. But it's the same system we've always had. Resistant to change, to be sure, but, as the New Deal and the Great Society proved, capable of major reform.

What's wrong now is us, as Evan Thomas points out in a recent Newsweek article with the very apt title "We the Problem." In my own view, a culture of selfishness gradually developed out of the many good changes of the 1960s. An assertion of justified rights morphed into a sense of group entitlement, soon to be the sense of personal entitlement reflected in the Me Generation of the 1970s and the explosion of greed that followed in the 1980s. Too many people are concerned only with getting theirs, without regard to the other folks. It must be said, however, that the political organization that appeals most strongly to our selfishness is the Republican Party. Its abuse of the sixty-vote requirement for stopping filibusters has become a major obstacle to change, as has its propensity for saying no to any reform that does not involve trial lawyers.

The real reds

It is ironic that the Republicans, who are trying to label the Democrats as socialist, have themselves been imitating the communists. Recall Lenin's strategy to make Kerensky look bad: don't cooperate on anything so he will fail and we can take over.

Reconcile this

Remember how Mitch McConnell said that reconciliation had "never been used for ... major systemic reform," Orrin Hatch called it the "nuclear option," and Charles Grassley said that "it was never contemplated for this kind of legislation," meaning the health care bill? Much of the media bought this Republican propaganda. I recall Wolf Blitzer saying reconciliation was not used for "major legislation." Then came Slate's Timothy Noah, who pointed out that the most momentous piece of social legislation in the last twenty years, the welfare reform bill, was entitled the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and was supported by McConnell, Hatch, and Grassley.

After Noah's piece, we learned that at least fifteen major pieces of legislation since 1981 were passed using reconciliation, making Obama's health care bill the sixteenth, not the first as the Republicans contended.

C.O.A.

When Vanity Fair's Michael Lewis asked why Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas were making another movie about Wall Street, they told him that their original message did not get across. Douglas explains, citing a typical reaction from people from the world of finance: "Man, I want to tell you, you are the single biggest reason I got into the business. I watched Wall Street, and I wanted to be Gordon Gekko." In other words, the people who have been coming to Wall Street in recent years are not corruptible, as was the ambitious airline mechanic's son played by Charlie Sheen in that movie, but already corrupt on arrival.

Filtering out the facts

The attacks on Obama for not being clear about his message grew to a point where they became the conventional wisdom. Yet I noticed that even when what Obama was saying could not be more clear, as in his recent criticism of insurance companies, the media filter made it almost impossible for his message to reach the public. Journalists are so eager to give us their take or to solicit the opinion of "Democratic and Republican strategists" that Obama's actual words tend to get short shrift. Consider, for example, the Washington Post's lead story on March 9 about Obama's speech the previous day at Arcadia University. The second paragraph contains one sentence of the speech. Twenty paragraphs later, the speech is quoted again. And those are the only times Obama gets through the maze of analysis and opinion about his tactics and strategy.

This magazine has been a pioneer in injecting analysis and opinion into facts only journalism. But we have tried to include enough of these elements to explain what we think the facts mean, not to relegate them to the role of bit players in the story.

A different kind of chicken

When Timothy Geithner had finished telling the Atlantic's Joshua Green that he warned the financial community of the dangers of derivatives long before the collapse, Green asked him why he had not warned the public...