Judith Miller, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a FOX News contributor, was given a tour of Gitmo a couple of weeks ago, and reports that “[o]fficials are sparing little effort or expense to improve Gitmo,” and have allocated $440,000 to improve the quality of life of the 226 remaining detainees so that “relocating its inmates is a largely empty political gesture that makes little sense.”

Miller’s article also indicates that the detainees get a level of medical care that few Americans can afford - even if they were covered by “Cadillac” health insurance plans, like members of Congress:

[T]he detainees make roughly 7,800 visits a year to the medical center to receive state-of-the-art care. That includes colonoscopies for "age-appropriate" detainees; 25 have been performed so far. The medical center has one staff member for every two detainees. …

Detainees are also screened for a variety of illnesses - diphtheria, tuberculosis, flu and HIV.

Assuming the 226 detainees all see a healthcare provider the same number of times a year, that comes to 34 visits per detainee per year – without any co-pays or other out-of-pocket fees. And with a 1:2 ratio of healthcare providers to patients, they don’t even have time to read a tattered copy of People in the waiting room before they’re whisked into an examining room.  

Getting Inside Obama’s Head

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner and Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson play armchair shrinks in an effort to figure out what makes President Barack Hussein Obama tick.

About Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Barone writes:

Much of the speech seemed to be an exercise in what Sigmund Freud called "projection," assuming that others think the way you do. Obama spoke as if the mullahs of Iran, the Kim Jong Il clan of North Korea, Vladimir Putin and his gang of oligarchs, and the rulers of China had the same gripes against the Bush administration as Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress. Hey, if we just close Gitmo, they'll realize that we're all in sympathy now.

In that spirit, Obama at the General Assembly on Wednesday and while chairing the Security Council on Thursday tread warily on the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program. "This is not about singling out individual nations," he said Wednesday, before stating that if Iran and North Korea "ignore international standards," they "must be held" - in unspecified ways - "accountable." The next day, the Security Council approved a resolution on the subject that did not name either country.

Yet on Friday, information became public that suggested that Obama's comments on Iran were an example not of Freudian projection but of what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance," refusing to process facts that conflict with deeply held beliefs. The information was that Iran has been operating a second uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom and that it had so informed the International Atomic Energy Agency earlier in the week.

Samuelson calls Obama’s relentless push for healthcare “reform” that the majority of Americans don't want “an ego trip”:

What's driving the great health debate of 2009 is not a popular clamor for universal insurance. … The underlying driver is politicians' psychological quest for glory.

"My colleagues, this is our opportunity to make history," Chairman Max Baucus implored last week as the Senate Finance Committee opened consideration of his bill. Politicians, in their most self-important moments, see themselves as instruments of national destiny. They yearn to be remembered as the architects and agents of great social and economic transformations. They want to be at the signing ceremony; they want a pen.

Ordinary Americans are rightly suspicious of this exercise in collective ego gratification, which has gripped Obama and many of his congressional allies. …

Grandiose rhetoric obscures unflattering reality. The proposals don't force the major structural changes in the delivery system that might curb uncontrolled health spending, which is the central problem. The bills that Congress is considering might marginally improve Americans' health but would worsen the federal budget outlook and squeeze other public and private spending. Whatever bragging rights result will quickly erode in the face of the health system's continuing problems.

In a post on the “Serious Medicine Strategy” blog, New America Foundation fellow and FOX News analyst Jim Pinkerton adds this to Samuelson’s observations:

[I]t's not so clear that the current crop of political incumbents knows very much about improving health care, to say nothing of medicine and cures.  … [T]hey all seem preoccupied with health care as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. The means, in this case, is process, and yet the end is more important. The end is better and longer lives for people.

And that preoccupation with means suggests that politicos are easily sidetracked into political projects: If they are Democrats, they are easily seduced into building bureaucracy and protecting trial lawyers; if they are Republicans, they feel compelled to expand the free market, which seems to be defined, in practice, mostly as protecting private insurance companies. Which is to say, neither party seems very interested in actual medical cures. …

The main thing is to sign the bill, make a speech, take credit - and hopefully get your name in the history books.

Back in the day, a legacy-seeking ruler would bankrupt his people with punishing taxes to build a temple or pyramid or some such extravagant structure that would stand as testament to his greatness and glory. Today, presidents and lesser pols do it with 1000+ page bills, earmarks and pork barrel projects.

The Cohen Brawlers

Here’s Eliot Cohen’s take: 

Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase [Iran’s] nuclear program. The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time. …

An American attack would be more effective [than an Israeli strike], but it would take longer and probably lead to real warfare in the Persian Gulf, disrupting oil supplies and producing global responses. More to the point, it is difficult to believe that the Obama administration has the stomach for war. Its  appalling public case of nerves over the war in Afghanistan - a "war of necessity," as of only a few months ago - is indicative of its true temper. And if President Obama does not have the courage to accept hazards and ugly surprises, and if he cannot bring himself to deploy his rhetorical skills to the mobilization of opinion at home and abroad, he should not start a shooting war, even if the Iranians are already waging one against us.

That leaves living with an Iranian bomb. … It will embolden the Iranian regime to make much more lethal mischief than it has even now. In a region that respects strength, it will enhance, not diminish, Iranian prestige. And it may yield the first nuclear attack since 1945 some time down the road.

And Roger Cohen’s:

The revelation that Iran has built a second uranium enrichment plant in secrecy did not change the nuclear equation if that’s measured by the country’s ability to produce a bomb. No uranium has entered the facility. Iran’s eventual capacity to produce weapons-grade fissile material, let alone deliver it, is unaffected.

What has changed is the psychology of the Iranian nuclear program. Mistrust, already deep, is now fathomless.

The choice is indeed between a military strike and living with a nuclear Iran. But what is a “nuclear Iran?” Is it an Iran that’s nuclear-armed - a very dangerous development - or an Iran with an I.A.E.A,-monitored enrichment facility?

I believe monitored enrichment on Iranian soil in the name of what Obama called Iran’s “right to peaceful nuclear power” remains a possible basis for an agreement that blocks weaponization. Zero enrichment is by now a non-starter.

Eliot Cohen describes the Obama administration’s diplomatic initiatives as being “a program of apologies and a few sharp kicks to small allies' shins” and pessimistically concludes that the “most likely” outcome is Obama “presides over the emergence of a nuclear Iran.”

In Memoriam

William Safire, December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009