Letters to the Editor
FredrickBernanke
Published Letters: 170 Editor's Choice: 8
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LBJ/Humphrey,Bush/McCain, Nixon & Barack...Vietnam & Iraq
[Read the article: McCain's risky strategy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Way back in 1968, poor Hubert Humphrey had the unenviable task of defending the Vietnam War record of the President he served as VP. Essentially, he had to defend the indefensible.
John McCain is in somewhat the same position, surge-success notwithstanding. Welding McCain to the Bush Administration should be priority number one, period. McCain=Bush repeated as many times as is necessary for the public to think "Bush" whenever candidate McCain's name is mentioned.
Humphrey=Johnson, McCain=Bush. Then the dems can move on to other tactics.
Who was Humphrey's opponent in 1968? None other than the most complex of all the presidents in my lifetime: Richard Nixon. Critics (including this writer) can bash him on many fronts; but nobody's going to alleged that the guy was a dummy.
He was certainly no "cut and run" liberal but was smart enough to know that the American public wanted out of Vietnam, regardless of their party affiliations. The same can be said of Iraq today. So how did Nixon manage to walk the thin line between capitulation (immediate withdrawal) and a continuation LBJ's discredited policy?
He announced that he has a "secret plan" to end the war, with honor. The operative word being "secret." For the plan to succeed it needed to remain secret until he was elected. He was elected, and their was no "secret plan." But the operative phrase in the last sentence was "he was elected...."
As long as McCain=Bush can be chiseled in stone in the public's mind, anything but outright surrender in Iraq (and who would we surrender to even if we wanted to?), will be preferable to more of the same.
Barack is the candidate born to redux the Nixon Vietnam Strategy. Obama's own campaign has been most noteworthy for its reliance on brilliant rhetoric (not a criticism in this writer's mind) that sort of allows the listener to fill in the details. The perfect style for a "secret strategy" that would allow the US to "re-deploy' its troops currently engaged in the War on Terror in Iraq...and do so without defeat and with honor.
The specifics of the plan, for it to be successful, must, like Nixon's, remain secret until Barack's election. "I don't want to tip my hand to bin Laden." "Re-deployment" is a wonderful substitute for re-treat or de-feat. It lets the American people know that Obama still plans to neutralize the terrorism threat to the civilized world, but has a more efficacious plan to do it than Bush/McCain.
[Note on the "surge:" Somehow the media allowed the administration to substitute this action oriented world, surge, for the real essence of what the maneuver was: an increase in the number of troops. In all fairness, McCain had been arguing for years that the Iraq adventure was undertaken with too few troops, and therefore destined to fail. He was almost alone among republicans to publicly voice that opinion and later was also one of the only republicans to publicly call for Rumfeld's resignation. It took the administration nearly four years to increase the number of troops. It may have had some temporarily positive effect on muting the anarchic violence in Iraq. But it did nothing to address the inherently flawed strategy (?) and planning that went into the effort. If McCain tries hanging his hat on a tactic that was essentially a shot of B-12, but did not address the fallacious reasoning upon which the misadventure rests, he's doomed.]
The McCain=Bush strategy should also be employed regarding the economy. And in that realm, McCain's self-admitted ignorance is virtually all the dems need.
As insane as this looks, in 2008, McCain=Humphrey and Obama=Nixon.
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The Quickie-Oil-Change Model Extends Its Tentacles
[Read the article: Wal-Mart can be good for your health]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The approach described in the article seems quite similar to the advent of the "Quickie-Oil Change" phenomenon.
Skim off the easiest, least complex, lowest risk tasks usually performed by service stations, do them quickly with no appointment necessary and use unskilled labor, rather than a well paid mechanic, to do the job.
It has proven to be a brilliant concept in automobile care. The consumer benefits are convenience and perhaps a slight savings on the cost of the service; the oil-change-only shops can make low risk profits. The losers? Traditional repair shops who lose the "easy money" of oil changes.
It's a model that just might be transferable to medical care.
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@Treeple
[Read the article: Wal-Mart can be good for your health]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am not particularly fond of or sympathetic to doctors, though I agree they work their asses off to become certified MD's. And their work carries with it enormous responsibility and seemingly inhuman effort.
Having said that, there seem to be two essential problems at the core of the medical services delivery apparatus.
1. People, particularly with insurance, seeking out MD-medical care when they don't need it, and,
2. The artificial restriction on the number of doctors in our society. Unquestionably MD's need to possess a high degree of general intelligence, an almost superhuman work ethic, and a natural non-maverick temperament. But they need not be Einsteins; in fact, if they were it might be counterproductive to their medical careers.
If there were more Medical Schools in the United States, graduating, say, two or three times the current number of MD's, the price value of each MD would naturally decline...not something the AMA would be thrilled about. This can be done without obliterating the high standards in place for Medical School admission. [Even now, not every MD has graduated from Harvard or Yale.]
The artificial (monopolistic) restriction on the production of physicians is the root cause of the ludicrous growth of sickness care.
On a final note, the number of licensed physicians per 100,000 population has dramatically decreased over the past 35 years---"you can look it up," as Casey Stengel used to say.