Tipping Pointless

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 14th, 2010


Observations


1) Any mention of the President’s demeanor, including this one, is a disservice to the process of covering the BP spill. Further, any continued lack of acknowledgment of the other things pounding the President’s imminent danger agenda is a further disservice.


I guess I could lump the Israel debacle into the attention sucking disorder. I mean, how these two issues make us more fragile for lack of a strategy on other issues is the chief threat to security today.


Iran, North Korea, China, Afghanistan {they are called “conflict minerals”}, Turkey, Mexico, and a host of domestic nightmares are stacking up, and we are still ADD magnetized to one and a half issues as we have been for five weeks.


Do you remember Richard Haas? Maybe get him back, and ask him to define the impact of the media vacuum? He used to come on an awful lot, then he let Dan Senor do some research for a potential run for New York Senator, then not so much.


As a micro-example of what happens in that vacuum, ISI in Pakistan is back collaborating with the Taliban. This is a sea change reversal. This could only happen when America is fixated elsewhere by a singularly focused media.


You have three hours, you can always find space for the beach shots, but stop exposing the flank through journalistic attrition. It’s weird that if it were features or Paris Hilton blocking the minimum necessary hard news focus, Mika would be throwing a tantrum. It just means you guys are hypnotized.


2) More and More the BP disaster is a 9/11 level tragedy. We are running around talking about MMS reform, it sounds nightmarishly like the conversations occurring in January of 2009 during the financial crisis, nightmarishly like the conversations after Katrina, and nightmarishly like the conversations we had in the weeks after the World Trade center attacks.


Our ability to understand why these bad things keep happening to us keeps coming back to a single failure type. If you speed down the road, there is a consequence for that. As an individual citizen you realize that if you set your cruise control to 84 miles an hour, you will get a ticket within a week. But if you are working outside of the standardized control mechanisms anywhere else within the government, you can see the weak points in the protective net of regulation, crisis management, and national intelligence from space. Corporations, terrorists, and figurehead government officials alike play these gaps like a violin while citizens lose.


Elizabeth Warren laments the loss of the usury laws a few decades back, I lament the lack of a GAO facility that requires implementation and stress testing of the functions and positions of the government regulatory, intelligence and reaction capacity.


3) Whitman and Fiorina are completely exposed and have a greater chance of squandering fortunes than buying a position in government. It continues to be a mystery why things like the San Francisco headline are recited regarding the 100 million dollar primary, and then, silence.


I don’t think it’s anything like a conspiracy, I just think these things are isolated by geography, and the available attention span of the cast. California is in so much trouble, forgive us for being suspicious when someone says on record that they will spend $150 million to get the Governor's chair. It makes many of us think there must be some pilfering left to be had if someone wants to pay for the ‘turn the lights out when it’s over’ gig.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.