Mr. Moderate

I’m involved in a long-running but gentle discussion with another old-style Republican who is uncomfortable enough with the modern Republican Party to strongly consider not voting for McCain. He isn’t to the point where I am yet, voting for Obama, but he clearly recognizes that the Republicans have strayed so far off track that they no longer deserve his vote.

As our discussion of Obama continues, he expressed discomfort with the family history of Obama, particularly the doings of Obama’s own father. Barack Obama Sr. fathered Barack Jr. (the current candidate for President) while messing around in Hawaii with a white woman while Sr. was still married to Kezia Obama back in Kenya. This explains why two of Senator Obama’s half-siblings are older than he is while two others by the same mother are younger. The reference for this discussion was a tabloid newspaper article in The Sun.

The question that my friend raised was whether or not there might be some “criminal gene” which somehow managed to infect Obama, Jr. that was somehow deemed to be present in Obama, Sr. since Sr. was seemingly involved in a number of shady dealings, not the least of which was whatever story he told to Obama, Jr.’s mother about his family in Africa. In reply I pointed out that it really hardly matters since so many politicians are lawyers and since lawyers, cops, criminals, politicians, and military members are all part of a common archetype that believes in “win by any means.” We have a lot less to fear from politicians than we do from other members of the archetype because politicians are so addicted to power and so much in the public eye that they learn to behave better, more often than not, so as to retain the power that the people entrust them with.

It certainly does seem that a lot of politicians, and a lot of their relatives, are at least “ethically challenged” if not outright criminals. This is true regardless of party. While my friend worries about Obama, I worry more about the damage done to the USA by the current administration by, among other things, giving private keys to the US Treasury to Halliburton and KBR (Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which was the company Dick Cheney was head of before he became Vice President, in case you’ve had amnesia for the past eight years). And then there is the President’s brother (or, if you are talking about the elder Bush, his other son), Neil Bush. The key paragraph from the Wikipedia article says this:

The US Office of Thrift Supervision investigated Silverado’s failure and determined that Bush had engaged in numerous “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest.” Although Bush was not indicted on criminal charges, a civil action was brought against him and the other Silverado directors by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; it was eventually settled out of court, with Bush paying $50,000 as part of the settlement, as reported in the Style section of the Washington Post.

A Republican fundraiser set up a fund to help defer costs Neil incurred in his S&L dealings.

One can only wonder what sort of political strings the Bush family pulled to effect the above bailout of their relative. Neil was clearly caught with his “hand in the cookie jar” but Republicans closed ranks around him and paid off all of his debts, which were limited to $50,000 and his own attorney fees and costs. That was, in and of itself, a pretty cheap bailout for a billion dollar cost to the US taxpayer!

And there are still rumors about the dealings of Senator Prescott Bush with Nazis before World War II. No matter what the nature of those dealings were, the business entities run by Prescott Bush and his partners were siezed by the US government after the start of World War II under the “Trading With The Enemy Act.”

And also on the Republican side we have Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon and his brother, Donald Nixon, who was involved in numerous shady dealings with Howard Hughes, Robert Vesco, and the Castro brothers in Cuba.

On the Democrat side, we have any number of Kennedy-clan members who have been accused or even convicted of various misdeeds. No matter what you believe about the murder of Martha Moxley, there is no question that Michael Skakel is in jail for committing that crime. And then there are odd brothers here too, like Billy Carter who had questionable dealings with Libya and even registered as an agent of the Libyan government.

Of course, if you move down the political scale just a tad, you get to genuinely corrupt congressmen like Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-California) and William Jefferson (D-Louisiana). The former pled guilty to the largest bribes in the history of Congress while the latter was caught with a mere $90K of “cold cash” in his freezer. And I guess it was just an odd coincidence that the serial numbers on those bills exactly matched a list of serial numbers kept by the FBI of money that their informant was to give to Congressman Jefferson as part of a bribe that was supposed to go to a foreign government official. And that money just happens to end up in Congressman Jefferson’s freezer. What a coincidence!

The point here is that in any large group of politicians and their families, you are going to have a substantial number of “ethically-challenged” individuals and even a few outright criminals. So, when my friend wonders whether or not there is a “crook gene,” and whether or not that “crook gene” might have infected Senator Obama, I replied essentially that there probably was a “crook gene” (or rather a set of one or more genes which might predispose a person to anti-social behavior) and that, in most cases, politicians have successfully channeled whatever ill-motivations they might have into doing good for the society as a whole. You can really begin to wonder if there is a “crook gene” that is part of the nature of any family with a series of “ethically challenged” individuals. Or, then again, should we wonder instead about the nurture that each such member was exposed to?

In any argument about “nature vs. nurture” (genes vs. environment), almost all scientifically valid studies are forced to conclude that both play a strong role in determining the end result. There are genes associated with all sorts of behavioral dysfunctions, so I would not doubt for a moment that there are some genes associated with anti-social behaviors including criminal activities. But whether or not those genes “express” (become active) in any given individual usually has a lot to do with environmental (nurture) considerations. Here, when it comes to Senator Obama, we cannot doubt one bit that he received substantially different nurture (environmental influences) than did any other members of his family. In this sense, at least, he is substantially different from most of the other presidents and their siblings because those families were not raised apart by people from entirely different cultures.

This discussion of a “crook gene” led me to reminisce about an old attorney I was close friends with in the early 1990s. He once told me that lawyers, cops, and criminals all have essentially the same personality type. He claimed this had been validated scientifically. It was simply a matter of “nurture” (environmental considerations) which of the three branches of the “family” (archetype) you fell into. And of course, the vast majority of politicians are lawyers, and another small group are cops (or, for the purposes of this discussion, we can probably throw in military fighting men and women, which would substantially raise the percentage of politicians who are clearly part of this archetype).

What is essentially wrong with this whole archetype is that in each of the sub-groups (criminals, lawyers, cops, politicians, and/or military members) there is such a strong “urge to win” that it overrides all sense of restraint or ethical behaviors. Since ethical restraints are the key to maintaining any social order, this archetype is biased towards anti-social behaviors. In all but the criminal subgroup, the bias is channeled towards some claimed “larger good.” The cop lies on the witness stand in order to put away a known criminal, and the lawyers for each side put their clients’ interests ahead of ethics more often than any of us care to admit. Again, since so many politicians are trained as lawyers, the ramifications of this are blindingly obvious. And as for military members, it is our patriotic duty to wish them to win at any cost and using any subterfuge whatsoever. That is, after all, what war is all about: tossing social restraints out the window in order to win at the lowest cost and while claiming the most-valuable possible prize(s).

Most of the ordinary citizens of our nation are law-abiding folks. They have strong ethical boundaries and they will not allow themselves to be tempted into wrongdoing. For these people, playing by the rules is far more important than is winning. People who exemplify these ideals become role models for good behavior. But, unfortunately, they win far less often than do members of the “win by any means” archetype. That is just the nature of a constrained versus unrestrained ethical nature.

But as we look at group dynamics over time, we get all confused over the shifting alliances which demarcate the “us group” from the “them group.” In the thinking of the “win by any means” archetype, the “us group” deserves victory any means whatsoever. This makes rule violations not only acceptable, but necessary. Why? It is because the “them group” deserves defeat without any holds barred. So, it was the height of patriotism in the 1980s for the CIA to give “weapons of mass destruction” to the Taliban terrorists when the Taliban were fighting our mortal enemies, the Soviets. But when the Taliban decided that the USA was evil, and the alliances shifted all around, we now find ourselves doing battle to the death with the very evil we helped create.

We help create our own opposition in other ways, too. We were all too ready to condone any sort of atrocity committed by the old Shah of Iran because he was our “friend” (in some sense of the word, anyway). But he grew so alienated from his own people that he could not protect our interests from the uprising that tossed us out on our collective behinds.

Since the Enlightenment, each major war has brought about some sort of retrospective view that some thing(s) done by one or both sides were “evil” in an absolute sense of that word. Accordingly, “civilized” people agreed to not do that “evil” ever again. The various Geneva Conventions and UN treaties are just the modern counterparts of a tradition that stretches back to at least the mid-18th-century. The US Constitution itself was one such document demarcating what the founders of the United States believed the British had done wrong (and immorally/unethically) and declaring that such things were not to be tolerated where the write of US law ran.

But such declarations do nothing to change the nature of mankind. The archetype identified above continues to ply its various trades unencumbered by any “hard-and-fast” ethical constraints. Bush and company are just following in a tradition as old as the hills when they declare that our “enemies” in Guantanamo just don’t have any special rights under US law after all, despite what the Constitution might say. Luckily, so far they haven’t been able to make that stick. If they do, then the US will be on the path to a tyranny that will make the reign of Caligula look tame by comparison.