Mr. Obama’s speech last night struck me as serious and cautious.  He exhibited caution with respect to Iraq and caution with respect to the economy.  Moreover, not by what he said so much as what he didn’t say, I received the distinct impression that he now realizes there is only so much a president can do and that sometimes you just have to let events play out.

Iraq is a sore point, to be sure.  Mr. David Brooks in yesterday’s N.Y. Times declared nation building there a success.  He considered the economic and political fronts, just as Mr. Obama did.  Others are not so positive, including Mr. Obama.  While Iraq this year might end up with the fastest growing economy in the world, growing from zero is a lot different than growing from an already high level.  ABC News even thinks it’s significant that people can now go out in Baghdad and eat ice cream.  I don’t know if that’s economic or political, but it is sophistic.

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To end the week, it is appropriate to follow-up on some of my recent posts.

First, with respect to California’s Prop 8, the judge has opened the door to gay marriage, starting August 18.  He is giving time to the Prop 8 defenders to gather together arguments on how to deny rights to a group of people.  Given his carefully constructed decision, they will need all the time they can get.

It’s hard to argue for giving rights to one class of citizens and not to others.  Yet it seems we, as a society, always have this debate, probably because there’s always a new crop of fundamentalist bigots out there that want to impose their way of life on everyone else.  The Pilgrims and Puritans brought this kind of bigotry with them to America.  We celebrate it each Thanksgiving.  I suppose they would be happy that the tradition continues.

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The latest gnashing of Republicans teeth and their bashing of most Dems is directed at supporters of Mr. Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for those making $250,000 or more and leave them in place for those that make less.  Other options are to leave them all in place for everyone (what the GOP and some Dems prefer) or to remove them for everyone (what a few GOP members and a few Dems prefer).  Eliminating them for everyone will add $1800 to the average NJ family’s tax bill—this is the last estimate I’ve seen.

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I’ll focus on only those agencies that deal with intelligence—not my intelligence or yours, as taxpayers, but intel: snippets of data that allow us to stomp on the “bad guys.”  You can focus on any other part of the government, of course, and ask the same question.  Here I’m just referring to the usual alphabet soup of acronyms: DHS, DEA, CIA, FBI, etc.  In some sense, they are the most important ones when analyzing losses to our personal freedoms.  They are inextricably involved with the future of our democracy.  They also provide good examples of waste in government, especially if you add the cost of the military’s bureaucracy.  And they are the most important to me as a writer.

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You hear it on the news all the time: conservative Dems do this; Rockefeller Republicans do that; neocon Republicans twirl; liberal Dems swirl.  It is a fact of political life in America that we basically have two parties.  It is another fact that each party has a wide ideological spectrum and the labels Republicans and Democrats at best only indicate a general tendency.

The only way such a chaotic taxonomy can work is that every voter study the candidates, independent of their party, and determine where they stand on the issues, selecting the candidate that best overlaps with their own opinions and prejudices.  Fat chance of that!  Too many voters are yellow-dog Dems or rabid Republicans.  Too many voters are one-issue voters.  And too many voters choose on the basis of the candidate’s personality, mannerisms, race, or hair styles (Ms. Carly Fiorina’s comment about Ms. Barbara Boxer is an example of a candidate even encouraging this).  In our media world of tweets on the internet and thirty-second ads on TV, there is a tendency to trivialize politics.  Most politicians really don’t want voters to be informed—an informed voter is likely to know all the bad stuff about a candidate as well as the good stuff.

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Term and age limits for our congress people will probably require amendments to the Constitution (Justice Scalia has taught me to capitalize both God and the Constitution).  Prohibition shows that amendments can be enacted rapidly when the nation puts its mind to it (once to kill the booze and again to revive it, in rapid succession).  While we deal with term limits, let’s have amendments to eliminate the Senate and the Electoral College.  Both institutions are anachronisms reflecting the fear of the Founding Fathers that an emotional electorate would control government decision making, otherwise known as tyranny of the majority.  We see justification for their fears in states that allow ballot initiatives—in other words, the Fathers’ fear can be expressed as a protection against something like the proposition system in California (where the emotional electorate can and does control government decision making).

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The Tea Party mantra, the Libertarian golden fleece, the holy grail of conservatives, and so forth, have long been summarized in these two words “less government.”  As the Wall Street bankers ride the commuter rail from New Jersey’s posh Upper Mountain estates in Montclair and their rustic McMansions in the woodlands of Bernardsville, as the Madison Avenue shakers and movers take their ferries across the Hudson from their penthouses along the river, as the professors of Princeton drive their BMWs and Mercedes into their labs financed by federal funding, and as the Lock-Martian engineers from Moorestown sign yet another fat contract with the Pentagon, you would think that these members of the nation’s “elite” would recognize the contradictory crap that trips so easily off their tongues.  Unfortunately for this country the rich and powerful are not inoculated against stupidity—they live it in their daily lives continuously.

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