The first, and oldest, of these scandals is Benghazi.  Four Americans were killed, including the Ambassador to Libya, when an Al Qaeda affiliate attacked a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya in September, 2012.  Since then, the conservative media has been pushing two separate lines of inquiry, seemingly in the hopes of embarrassing the president.  The first, and the legitimate one, is whether or not those lives could have been saved.  There have been numerous hearings on this, focusing on why various troops or planes were not called into Benghazi to assist that outpost during the attack; and while questions remain, it seems that the worst story that can be told is one of a lack of communication between the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon.

The second line of inquiry regarding Benghazi, and this one is just plain silly, is about the evolution of a set of talking points that UN Ambassador Susan Rice and others used in the days after the attacks to describe what was happening in public interviews to the American people.  The first version of those talking points speculated that while there might have been some connection to the ongoing protests in Cairo and Yemen over an anti-Muslim YouTube video, that it was likely that the attack in Benghazi was carried out by an Al Qaeda affiliate.  By the 12th and final version, all mention of Al Qaeda had been dropped–but not the mention of the ongoing protests.  And of course, it eventually turned out that the Cairo protests had nothing to do with it, and that Al Qaeda had been planning the attack for months–which means that Susan Rice and others gave wrong information in those first few post-attack interviews.

Sure, giving wrong information is bad.  But it’s also expected.  The first few news conferences after the Newtowne shooting got essentially all of the relevant facts wrong, and every news conference given for a week after the Boston Marathon bombings had at least one piece of false information.  But those weren’t conscious efforts to deceive the public.  They were mistakes made by tired and confused people who were trying to do their best in a stressful environment.  Information was coming in rapidly from a lot of sources and was being processed rapidly by a lot of different people–the truth hadn’t yet been pieced together.  The situation after the Benghazi attack would have been the same–and then you add on top of that the natural mistrust that the people from the different bureaucracies have for each other, and it’s not surprising that the first set of talking points were wrong.

The second conspiracy involves the IRS.  Essentially, the IRS in charge of such things improperly focused the attention of their audits on 501(c)(3) groups with conservative sounding names (things like “patriot” or “tea party”).  (501(c)(3) groups are “Social Welfare Organizations”; they do not have the full standing of “charities”, but they do have limited tax exempt status, are allowed to do some political fundraising, and are allowed to maintain private donor lists.  Ideally, they were meant to be groups like AARP, the Sierra Club, or the NRA; lately, the designation has been used to protect Super PACs from disclosing their donor lists.)  Note that what the IRS was doing is a bit like racial profiling at a security checkpoint: they were supposed to be picking people randomly from line, and instead they started screening people who matched a certain profile.  The harassment based on the profile is bad–but keep in mind, that their job is to harass some people, and in either case if you haven’t actually done anything wrong you won’t actually get into trouble.  In any case, there is no reason to believe that the president or the White House had any knowledge of what was going on, given that there are at least half a dozen layers on the organizational chart between the people who did something wrong (in Cincinnati) and President Obama.

The third scandal involves wiretapping the AP to find a leak.  This is both the least and most scandalous.  It’s the least scandalous because it’s the one least likely to cause the president any political harm.  After all, the President has repeatedly supported legislation to shield journalists from this kind of wiretapping, those laws have been filibustered (repeatedly) by the GOP, and the GOP has repeatedly attacked the Obama administration for not aggressively cracking down on leaks.  It’s the most scandalous, however, because it’s the one in which the Obama administration acted in a way that did active harm to the American people.  The wiretapping here affected hundreds of AP reporters, and was clearly excessive–and has to make you wonder what other wiretaps of other news organizations have been ordered.  And leaks are good.  Leaks let We the People know when the government is doing something that it shouldn’t be doing–you know, like torturing Iraqi captives, or kidnapping American tourists, or selling arms to Iran to fund the rebels in Nicaragua, or illegally bombing Cambodia.  As CJ on the West Wing once put it, leaks are how you know that the government doesn’t actually have a hidden bunker somewhere full of aliens.

So there you have it.  Two things that we shouldn’t be talking about–but will continue to obsess over for weeks and months to come.  Because, as a wise person once said, never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.  And one thing that we should be talking about, which will likely blow over sooner rather than later.  But hey, that’s democracy for you.

By “this”, I’m referring to the ‘controversy’ surrounding where to bury Tamerlan Tsarnev, the oldest of the two Boston Marathon bombers.  Tsarnev’s uncle came to Massachusetts to oversee the burial for the family.  A funeral home in Worcester, MA (a small city about 90 mins west of Boston) agreed to handle the arrangements–and have faced public criticism for doing so, including protesters outside the funeral home.  Finding a cemetery is proving a bit more problematic.  The Uncle is trying to find one in the Boston area, although the Cambridge City Manager (think “mayor”) has preemptively denied permission to bury him in any of the city-owned cemeteries, supposedly in the interests of “peace within the city”.

The man is dead, people.  Loved ones can’t get cooties from being buried next to a dead terrorist–any more than by being buried next to a dead black man or a dead Jew.

I don’t really care about Tamerlane.  But funerals, cemeteries, and other burial rites aren’t about the corpse.  They are about bringing closure to the families and friends of the deceased.  They are about trying to find solace and healing.  And right now, the Tsarnev family needs healing.  Not only did they lose a family member–a son, a father, a husband, a brother, and a nephew–they are also struggling to deal with how their boy could have done something so terrible.  This is a time of confusion, sadness, and guilty, for all of them.

And now protesters, the media, and local politicians are piling onto the family–trying to deny them the ability to bury their son and start the healing process?  That’s downright cruel.

Besides, let’s call a spade a spade.  I don’t recall any such controversies when we’ve buried serial killers and terrorists in the past.  Did people protest Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, being buried on American soil?  What about the DC sniper?  The Unibomber?  The Newtowne shooter, Adam Lanza?  All of those killed many more people than did Tamerlan Tsarnev.

The difference is that Tsarnev is a Muslim immigrant.  The attempts to deny burial rites for his family stems not from some greater feeling that terrorists shouldn’t be buried on American soil.  It’s a reflection of anti-Muslim hatred.   It’s racism, pure and simple.

Seriously, people, we’re better than that.  Or at least we ought to be.

Which makes the events of the last week all that much more baffling for me.  How could this kid get so twisted that he placed two bombs in a crowd of people, shot a police officer in cold blood, and hijacked a car at gun-point?

I have nothing but sympathy for the friends and families of the victims.  The eight year old boy whose life was ended just as it was beginning.  The graduate student from China who loved living in Boston.  The  restaurant manager from the suburbs who never missed a marathon.  And the MIT officer who was the consummate policeman.

But it’s the bomber, suspect number two, the one who was just arraigned on federal charges from a hospital room yesterday… he’s the one whose story seems most familiar to me.  And yet he’s the one who maybe I will never understand.  Because for all the similarity, how could I understand what drove him to commit such an act of evil–an act that is so viscerally repellent to me I have trouble even watching the footage of it?

Understanding is especially difficult because human motives are never easily understood.  They are never so simple as we would like them to be.  It would be nice if there were a simple, clean, explanation for why he did it.  His evil brother made him do it.  His felt abandoned by his family.  He felt abandoned by his friends.  He fell in with a bad crowd.  He started listening to the wrong preachers.  He was depressed.  He was angry.  He was on drugs.  He was crazy.

But the truth is always more complicated.  The truth is some combination of some or all of those things–and more.  The truth is that human beings are extraordinarily intricate creatures who usually don’t fully know why we do what we do, and who rationalize our behavior after the fact to make ourselves feel better about what we’ve done.

The best we can do is to understand his actions and associations.  Did anyone help him or fund him or advise him?  What else were they planning on doing?  Did they commit any other crimes before the marathon?  Those are all important questions.

As for motive?  Why he did it?  As much as I would love to know… it’s a fool’s errand.

Finally, let me end by quoting Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of the Boston Archdiocese: “Forgiveness does not mean that we do not realize the heinousness of the crime.  But, in our hearts, when we are unable to forgive, we make ourselves a victim of our own hatred.”

Weiner is the subject of a fascinating New York Times Magazine piece, along with his wife, Huma Abedin, who was Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman during her time as Secretary of State.  The piece describes Weiner’s fall from grace two years ago, which largely happened because he sent out pictures of his penis (mostly, but not entirely, clothed) to some women he “met” on Twitter.  In the piece, Weiner is clearly looking for some kind of public forgiveness and political redemption.

And, according to Cohen, this is a mistake.  Cohen clearly believes that politicians should be more like Margaret Thatcher, who was famous for not really caring what people thought about her.

Now, that picture of Thatcher is a caricature–of course she cared what people thought about her.  First, because she’s human and humans are social animals, whether we like to admit it or not.  And second, because you don’t win elections without trying to convince people that you are doing the right thing.  If you truly didn’t care about the public’s opinion, you wouldn’t bother campaigning–and Thatcher most certainly campaigned.

Still, the image of the politician who does what they think is best, public-opinion-be-damned, is a powerful one in American politics.  Many reporters and pundits hold it up as the ideal.

And I want nothing to do with it.  The heart of democracy is elections.  We are democratic because we hold regular, meaningful elections for the highest offices in the land.  Our leaders must stand for election–which means that they must strive to be liked by the public.

Ultimately, that’s the public’s only leash on our leadership.  If our leaders stop care about being liked–if they truly stop care about whether the public will support them or not–then there is nothing to stop our leaders from enacting whatever outrageous policies they want to.  There is nothing to stop them from openly taking bribes or ordering their subordinates to have sex with them at every opportunity.

Democracy works in large part because our leaders want to be liked.  It’s that desire to be liked–to want to run in future elections, and win those elections–that keeps our politicians in line.  When politicians lose that fear–that’s when they get dangerous.

So if I have a choice between an Anothony Weiner-type, who cares what the people think, or a Margaret Thatcher-type, who doesn’t–well, give me the Anthony Weiner every time.  Because as a voter, I can control the Weiner-type politician.  The Thatcher-type politician may have “political courage”, but I have no control over them once they are in office.   And as a country, we’re all better off if the voters remain in control.

I have so many fond memories of John. One story comes to mind in particular. When taking an independent study at Rice, students and mentors filled out contracts to ensure that they were on the same page about workload and expectations. John and I had been working together for several semesters, and had always used the same contract. So he didn’t even read the contract with me anymore before signing them. So as a prank, one year I modified the contract to include the phrase “the professor will bake the student brownies twice during the course of the term”. Sure enough, John signed it, at which point I asked for my brownies. Ever the good sport, he actually delivered. And being John, he also allowed me to include that phrase (and gave me brownies) in subsequent semesters as an inside joke that we shared.

Between classes, I’d often stop by his office – his door was always open if he wasn’t teaching. We’d chat about psychology and the latest project I was running, of course. But we’d also talk about life in general. He was a mentor in the truest sense of the word: he cared not just about my growth as a scholar, but also my growth as a person. And he mentored not just through his words, but through his example. John’s health was never good, but he’d never complain. Even in my senior year when he had heart surgery and I visited him in the hospital, he focused the discussion around my research, how grad school applications were going, and generally kept on mentoring even from the hospital bed.

So John, thank you. Thank you for helping me find my passion and a career that I love. Thank you for all the guidance, for all the support, for all the laughs, and for all the time you spent with me. Thank you for giving me the confidence to pursue research questions that aren’t popular (yet). Thank you for treating me like a colleague even from the getgo. Thank you for teaching me how to be a mentor to the many students that I have worked with in my career (and the many more who will come). Thank you for being a role model. Thank you for being my friend. I will miss you. Rest in peace.

[David] Frum defended what was then the consensus conservative (and consensus national) position. Redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, he argued, would explicitly sever the institution’s connection to the two interrelated realities, gender difference and procreation, that it had evolved to address. In so doing, it would replace a traditional view of matrimony with a broader, thinner, more adult-centric view, which would ultimately be less likely to bind parents to children, husbands to wives.

There are two models of family presented here.  In one model, a family is a two heterosexual parent unit, with children that are biologically related to both parents, and the primary purpose of that family is to ensure the proper upbringing of those children.  In the alternate model, family is a mostly adult group of people who have come together, and the purpose of family is to provide support (financial, emotional, sexual, etc.) to the members of that group for as long as they are together.

But notice that this dichotomy leaves out most families that have ever existed in the world.  Most families that have ever existed have not been two heterosexual parents raising their own children in their own household.  Most family households around the world have also included grandparents, aunts, uncles, and/or cousins.  They include step-children and step-parents.  Why?  Because until very recently, life-expectancy was short.  Men died of wounds on the farm, or in wars.  Women died in childbirth.  And their spouses got remarried, often multiple times, bringing the children of previous marriages along with them, or sending those children to live with aunts or uncles.

Adoption has also been a common practice, through one form or another, throughout the history of mankind.  Moses himself was adopted, of course, and King David grew up from the time he was a young teenager in the palace.  Noble families throughout Europe during the feudal era raised each others children as a way to secure political alliances–sometimes as a form of hostage taking, sometimes as a prelude to arranged marriages, and sometimes just as a way to cement a friendship.  In this country, churches would often encourage people to take in orphaned neighbor children.

The point of all of that, of course, is that being a family, even a family focused on raising children, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with procreation.  This idea that “procreation” and “child-rearing” go hand-in-hand is a 20th American century idea–and, even then, fails to describe a significant minority of actual families, even actual two parent “traditional” families.

Giving birth and raising a child are two very different things–I find it exceptionally odd that we seem to have forgotten that all of a sudden.

Rule #1: You don’t become president if you’ve completed a full term in the senate.  Only one man has ever done it: LBJ, and he had to become Vice President, and then only became president because JFK was assassinated.  A few have served less than a full term: Obama and JFK most recently.  But complete that first term, and you’re done for.  Many, many, many have tried.  None have succeeded.  Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Rob Portman will all be finishing up their first term in 2016; if any of them actually wins election, they will be the longest serving Senator to ever be directly elected from the Senate to the presidency, although only by a couple of years so it’s not completely out of the question.  Still, it’s doubtful.  This rule also casts serious doubt on both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden on the Democratic side: both have completed full terms, but one could argue that since both have more recently served in the administration that perhaps they are more like LBJ than John McCain, John Kerry or Bob Dole, just to name the last three senators to win their party nomination and lose the presidency.  Of course, serving in the administration didn’t help Walter Mondale in 1984, so I wouldn’t bet the house on either of them.

Rule #2: It’s good to be from a Big State, or a Democrat from the South.  Obama is from the 5th most populous state (Illinois). The Bushes were from Texas, which moved from third to second during W.’s tenure, as was LBJ.  Clinton and Carter were the Southern Democrats (and LBJ, of course).  Reagan and Nixon were from California, the most populous state.  Ford was from Michigan, which was a top 5 most populous state at the time.  You have to go all the way back to JFK to find an exception to this rule.  This rule favors people like former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, freshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and anyone that the Democrats can find with a southern accent.

Rule #3: Don’t nominate people from Massachusetts or Minnesota.  People from Massachusetts or Minnesota who won the nomination but lost the election since JFK: Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey.  And that’s not counting the many people from both of those states who never made it through the primary process (including Ted Kennedy and Tim Pawlenty).   None of the current contenders are from either of those states, but I thought it bore repeating.

Rule #4: It’s good to be governor or Vice President.  Obama came from the Senate.  Before him?  George W. was Governor of Texas.  Clinton was Governor of Arkansas.  Bush the Elder was VP.  Reagan was Governor of California.  Carter was Governor of Georgia.  Ford was VP.  Nixon was VP.  LBJ was VP.  JFK was Senator.  Truman was VP.  FDR was Governor of New York.  You get the idea.  (Yes, I skipped Eisenhower: if you win a World War, you get to be president without being governor or Vice President.)  The list of surviving former VPs seems a little thin: Joe Biden might want the job; Dick Cheney is about about as popular a root canal; Al Gore seems out of politics for good, and Dan Quayle… uh, yeah, right.  So if I were a betting man, I’d start looking around at the governor’s offices for our next president.  Or maybe former governors.

Put it all together?  Of all the candidates people have talked about, there’s only one that I can think of who fits all of the rules: a former governor from a big state that isn’t Massachusetts or Minnesota and he’s never served a day in the Senate.  That would be Jeb Bush of Florida.  At least until someone else comes along.

It’s not just pornography.  Justice, democracy, freedom, oppression, tyranny, war, peace, violence, ethnicity… we know on some level what all of those things are, but they are extremely difficult to define precisely enough to measure.  And yet measuring them is often critical to understanding how the world works.

To get around this problem, social scientists talk about two different kinds of definitions.  The theoretical definition tries to capture the intuition behind a concept.  In most cases, the theoretical definition is either uncontroversial, or is debated at length only by philosophers.  As important as they are, most social scientists prefer not to get bogged down in those debates–which is one reason why philosophers tend to look down their noses at social scientists. Instead, social scientists are usually interested in the operational definition.  The operational definition attempts to boil down the theoretical definition into something that can be measured.

To understand why operational definitions are important–and why they are so hotly contested–read today’s NYTimes.com, specifically Thomas Edsall’s discussion of the problem of counting the poor.  We all have some idea of what poverty is.  So a theoretical definition isn’t too hard: poverty is the difficulty or inability in acquiring basic necessities of life because of a lack of money.  I’m sure some people will have minor qualms with that definition, and we can get into the details of that sometime if you want, but the basic gist is correct.

The problem, as Edsall notes, is that if you want to actually do something about poverty, you first need to know who is poor and why.  In other words, you need to measure poverty–and that requires an operational definition.  Edsall, in particular, notes that there are currently three commonly used, ways to measure poverty, and that all of them imply different things about who is poor and what we should do about it, as a society.  He even notes that all three measures may be inadequate at actually capturing the underlying concept of what we mean when we say that someone is “poor”.

What Edsall misses–and what, I’m afraid, most lawmakers and even policy experts miss when discussing these things–is that the operational definition needs to be crafted in the context of a larger question.  For instance, one of the operational definitions of poverty takes into account the amount of money that individuals receive in aid from the government.  For anyone trying to measure the actual living conditions of actual people, this is a perfectly fine thing to do.  But if the point of the definition is to help inform lawmakers about how to spend public funds, this definition can lead to the wrong conclusions.

So let’s say that this “assistance included” measure of poverty says that very few children are poor, while many adults are poor.  A policy maker might look at that data and reasonably conclude that we need to shift assistance away from helping children, and towards helping adults.  But, of course, the reason that fewer children are poor is that government provides more assistance to poor children than to poor adults.  Shifting resources like that only means that the next time the statistics are measured, there will be more poor children and fewer poor adults.  If the point of shifting resources was to actually deal with poverty and lower the overall poverty rate, such a shift in funds would fail miserably.  Instead, law makers who are interested in dealing with poverty need to use a poverty measure that does not take into account government assistance, so that they can understand what causes people to need government assistance in the first place.

In short, the same theoretical concept might need multiple operational definitions–and it’s up to the people who use those definitions to understand them well enough to pick the right ones.  There will never be a single, widely agreed upon operational definition of poverty.  But that’s okay–as long as the lawmakers and policy makers understand the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

In particular, Senators should only ever vote against a nominee because they believe that the nominee is unfit to hold the post to which he or she has been nominated.

So let’s start with what’s expected of a cabinet secretary.  A cabinet secretary has three jobs:

1. To advise the president.
2. To administer his or her respective department.
3. To perform certain other duties that are incumbent upon that particular secretary (e.g. the Secretary of State is expected to serve as a diplomat; the Attorney General is expected to perform certain legal duties; etc.)

As far as the first of those duties go, there isn’t really anything that the Senate can do.  Sure, the senate can “advise” the president that a particular nominee is unlikely to be a good adviser, but at the end of the day the president can, will, and should be able to take advice from whosoever the president wants to.  Voting against a nominee because they will provide bad advice is impractical, at best.

So that just leaves the other two.  If there is reason to believe that a nominee is incapable of administering a federal bureaucracy, then it is perfectly reasonable to vote against them.  If a senator believes that a nominee is not qualified to fill the other duties that will be expected of them, then it is perfectly reasonable to vote against them.  This, by the way, was why I personally opposed the nomination of John Bolton as Bush’s Secretary of State a few years ago.  His record as UN Ambassador was poor, and there was plenty of reason to doubt whether he was a skilled enough diplomat.

So what does that leave?  What are bad reasons to vote against a nominee?  Just to name a few that have been in the news lately:

1. You don’t believe that the post should exist and want it to be perpetually empty.  This has happened both to the ATF (vacant for 7 years and counting, ever since an NRA-supported provision passed which required that the Senate confirm the head of the ATF) and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Obama filled it with a controversial recess appointment after it had sat vacant for 7 months) .  If Congress wants to cut an agency’s funding, investigate it for incompetence, or even kill it–all of those things are in Congress’s authority.  But leaving a federal bureaucracy in place, but leaderless, is just begging for waste and inefficiency.  If an agency exists, it ought to work properly, and that means having a leader.
2. You don’t like the policies of the administration and want to “draw attention” to some issue.  US Senators have all sorts of ways to draw attention to all sorts of issues.  Holding up a cabinet nomination–again, leaving a federal bureaucracy leaderless just to make some grandstanding political point–is the wrong place and the wrong time.  By the way, this was the stated reason for John McCain’s opposition to Chuck Hagel (drawing attention to Benghazi), and to Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan (drawing attention to the drone strike program).
3. You don’t like the outcome of the last presidential election.  The people vote for the President of the United States, and it is the president’s job to run the executive branch.  Opposing a president’s nominees because that president is a member of the other party, and has the temerity to nominate people who agree with himself, is petty and undemocratic.  This, by the way, was the stated reason that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas gave in voting against John Kerry for Secretary of State.

But what I find most fascinating with Chavez is his perverse, abusive, codependent relationship with the United States, especially American politicians.

To many American politicians–conservatives in particular–Chavez was the next great anti-American tyrant.  After all, Chavez rewrote the Venezuelan constitution to give himself more power; he courted a close relationship with Cuba; he paid visit and homage to anti-American dictators in Libya, Iran, and Syria; he led a movement in Latin America to break away from economic and foreign policy dependency on the United States; and he spouted all sorts of ad hominem attacks against the United States in general, and President George W. Bush in particular.

Chavez would get listed along with the dictators of Syria, Libya, Iran, and North Korea as modern examples of anti-American dictators.  None of the rest of those dictators were democratically elected (Chavez was), all of them have direct ties to terrorist organizations that have attacked Americans or American allies (Venezuela does not), and all of those countries have either directly attacked an American ally or attempted to acquire a nuclear weapon under their most recent dictator (whereas Venezuela has done neither of those things).  But  the contempt for Chavez was so deep rooted among many that when President Obama during this last election brushed aside concerned that Venezuela was a serious threat to American interests–because, you know, Venezuela has never demonstrated itself to be a serious threat to American interests–Romney expressed that he was “shocked” and “stunned” by the statement.

Oh, but this little tale of paranoia is only just beginning.  Because no one was more paranoid that Hugo Chavez himself.  Chavez seemed to have thoroughly convinced himself, and many of his citizens, that the United States was out to destroy the Chavez regime by any means–and I mean any means–necessary.  I remember seeing a 60 Minutes report from Caracas in which they interviewed numerous people who were stockpiling weapons, food, and other basic necessities, preparing to resist the American occupation of Venezuela that was surely coming.  When the 60 Minutes reporter told the people that the American government had expressed no plans to attack Venezuela, he was met by disbelief.  Chavez has claimed to be the target of numerous CIA assassination attempts, and if he can be believed is always one step ahead of the American-backed coup that is trying to destroy the work that he’s doing on behalf of the good people of Venezuela… or something like that.  The Chavez regime has even attempted to blame the cancer that took his life on the Americans.

The beauty of this relationship, of course, was that it was win-win.  For the American politicians, they got a Latin American punching bag–someone newer, fresher, and more charismatic than the ailing Castro, closer to home than the Middle East dictators, and less enigmatic than the North Korean.  And for Chavez, each attack on him by an American politician was only further proof that the Americans were, in fact, out to get him, and would prompt another anti-American diatribe.

It was political theater at it’s most macabre–yet their was no actual body count, just rhetoric, which meant that it was political theater that it was okay to laugh at, to appreciate for all it’s absurd glory.  And for that (and only that), Hugo Chavez, I will miss you.