Lunch at the Labs

Joseph Califano's moral compass.

Joseph Califano was interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes, May 23, 2004 concerning his new book Inside: A Public and Private Life . Near the beginning he was asked about why he wrote the book and he responded:

And the other thing was, I think it's very important for people with public power to have a moral compass. Now, mine happened to be my Catholic faith and what I believe in. And there are lots of different moral compasses, and people have them. But it is important to have that. You can't exercise public power amorally. It's -- especially in a democracy, and especially where government is now so powerful.

Then later when talking about the Watergate tapes and Nixon he says:

Al (Haig) called me and said, you know, if you were me, what would you advise Nixon to do about the tapes? And I said, look, Al, I'm not your lawyer. And he said, yeah, but just if you were me. I said, if I were you, I'd tell Nixon to burn the tapes. And he said, well, that would be a terrible problem. I said, look, it would be a terrible firestorm. All hell will break loose. I understand that. But it will be over in three weeks.

If that's not amoral behavior, I don't know what is. But my guess is that Califano, a lawyer and a politician is not capable of seeing that. What happened to his Catholic faith and moral compass?

Accepting blame for Iraq.

In today's New York Times op-ed column, Thomas Friedman laments we are failing in Iraq because the Bush team is more interested in getting re-elected than doing the "right thing". Duh, I'm not a NYT columnist, but wasn't that obvious from the start. I think we need a regime change at the New York Times to get rid of dumb columnists.

Friedman isn't alone. It seems all those who thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq are putting the blame on others for all the mistakes that were and are being made. Is there anyone who will admit that they them self made a mistake in reasoning? After all there were others (in fact most of the world) that weighed the benefits (overthrow of a horrific dictatorial regime, an Arab democracy, cheaper oil, etc.) versus the costs (money for the war and rebuilding Iraq, American and Iraqi lives, alienation of the most of the world etc.) and saw that the risks outweighed the rewards.

Maybe God is to blame? Didn't God tell GWB that he should go to war with Iraq? If Bush doesn't get re-elected because of this, will he lose faith? No, if God's advice works out, it reaffirms his existence and if things don't go well it's because he wasn't a good enough christian.