On the menu today: Why Lloyd Austin should be confirmed or rejected upon his merits and not upon his time out of uniform; laying out why we’re having a spike in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from the coronavirus. (Hint: It’s not the guy down the street who doesn’t wear a mask when he’s going for a walk. It’s in large part because of the number of Americans who live in large institutions and who cannot control their surroundings.)
A General Sense of How to Assess This General
I find myself in half-hearted disagreement with Kevin Williamson on the issue of the nomination of retired general Lloyd Austin to be the next Secretary of Defense.
The National Security Act of 1947 declares “a person may not be appointed as Secretary of Defense within seven years after relief from active duty as a commissioned officer of a regular component of an armed force.” The law used to require ten years out of the services, and then in 2008, Congress reduced it to seven years. If a nominee has been in on active duty within the past seven years, both houses of Congress must pass a waiver for the nominee. Congress has granted waivers twice — for George Marshall in 1950, and for James Mattis in 2017.
There’s no magical transformation of a former military leader that occurs at the end of that seventh year. Austin has been out of the uniformed services for four years, eight months, and four days. Mattis had been out of the service for almost four years when he stepped into the job, retiring in March 2013, and sworn in as Secretary of Defense last Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017.
The purpose of the law is to ensure the Secretary of Defense is a civilian and doesn’t step into the job directly from military service, where his existing relationship with other military leaders could presumably complicate things. Under the law, on April 5, 2023, Austin will be considered “a civilian” and no longer need a waiver. But he’s legally a civilian now. It’s unclear what another two years, three months, and about 28 days in the private sector would give him that he doesn’t have now.
(Note that President Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander Europe until May 30, 1952 and did not retire from active duty until June 3. Eisenhower was nominated at the Republican convention the following month, won the election in November, and was sworn in January 20, 1953. If the commander in chief can be someone who recently departed the uniformed services, why is there a restriction upon the Secretary of Defense?)
In the eyes of most of those objecting to Austin this week, he’s the wrong guy for the job now, but he’ll become the right guy for the job in the spring of the third year of Biden’s presidency. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. He’ll have the same experience, the same connections within the military ranks, the same character and worldview. Biden laid out why he nominated Austin here. (Also note that CNN’s Jake Tapper reports that Biden’s late son, Beau, served on General Austin’s staff when the latter commanded U.S. forces in Iraq. Perhaps Beau Biden’s high opinion of Austin is what ultimately swayed Biden’s decision.)
Members of Congress should take a long look at Austin, and Biden’s justification, and accept or reject him on his merits, not on a fairly arbitrary argument that seven years out of the service is fine but four and two-thirds years isn’t.
One potential substantial objection is that since leaving the service four and two-thirds years ago, Austin has done what retired generals usually do, which is rake in big bucks working for defense contractors and other big corporations. Austin serves on the board of directors for Raytheon Technologies, Tenet Healthcare Corporation, and steel manufacturer Nucor. Members of Congress may have doubts about whether Austin, as Secretary of Defense, could fairly assess the performance of a military contractor that lucratively employed him.
He’s also a partner at Pine Island Capital Partners, which describes itself as “an experienced investment team with a group of deeply-connected and accomplished former senior government and military officials. Each of our D.C. partners teams with the investment professionals to actively participate in sourcing deals, conducting analyses, winning bids, closing transactions, and directly advising the companies in which Pine Island invests.”
I suppose they called the firm “Pine Island” because those are often found in a swamp.
Diving Deep into Why We’re Having a Surge of Coronavirus Cases
I don’t think there’s a lot of space between how I see the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and how David Bahnsen does. David and his Radio Free California podcast co-host, Will Swaim, discussed yesterday’s newsletter in their most recent recording, and have a bone to pick about context here and there. They make their arguments eloquently and respectfully. As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t an NR civil war about the pandemic.
David is probably one step closer to the “this is a serious problem, but manageable with some simple, common-sense steps” and I’m probably one step closer to “this is the biggest public-health problem we’ve faced with since 1918, and we’re going to have to be really cautious until we get vaccinated.” But if those two statements don’t seem terribly different . . . well, yeah, they aren’t.
But the various schools of thought can get easily misconstrued. The “this is a really big deal” viewpoint gets tarnished every time somebody such as Michael Stern writes an op-ed declaring, “COVID-19 has turned every man, woman and child into a potential serial killer.” Every nonsensical government restriction, every hypocritical elected official, and every “Karen” lecturing someone about their mask in public make the pandemic sound more like a national yearlong festival of nagging, virtue-signaling, and power grabs than the serious problem that it is.
And as David mentions in the podcast, his sense that various state and local governments are overreacting or reacting badly to the problem is not synonymous with believing that the whole pandemic is a hoax, or that it is a “plandemic” that sinister powers have organized, or that masks don’t work, or that no social distancing of any kind is needed.
I suspect David and I would agree on reopening the schools when and where possible, think lockdowns aren’t going to work any longer, and that many elected officials — particularly in California — should be greeted by angry crowds hurling rotten fruit for how shamelessly they have violated their own orders. We might disagree on what capacity businesses should be operating at, how many people should get together in one place for the holidays, and other specific details.
My view of how others see the virus is probably shaped in part by the skeptics I encounter, particularly online. It is an endless series of motte-and-bailey arguments and goalpost-shifting. I suspect that a decent number of people, remembering the first SARS and MERS and H1N1 and Zika, decided early on that COVID-19 would be another “much ado about nothing.” They pushed all their chips to the center of the table and bet on “not that big a deal,” and they refuse to acknowledge otherwise.
If you point to a rising number of daily cases as a sign that the virus is spreading and the situation is getting worse, they will dispute that the tests are accurately measuring who has the disease and point out that roughly 40 percent of people are asymptomatic. If you point to hospital capacity, they will point out that many hospitals are proactively testing all admitted patients for coronavirus and that hospitals are usually at high capacity without a pandemic. They will hand-wave away statements from hospital officials in places such as San Jose and Monterey County, Calif., Uniontown, Pa., Shreveport, La., and so on as no particular cause for alarm.
These skeptics always seem to know some unnamed friend who works in a hospital who says they’re not seeing any significant influx of patients. Based upon the conclusions of these unnamed friends, these skeptics will dismiss the assessments of the CDC, Department of Health and Human Services, and Johns Hopkins University, and other hospitals and medical schools.
If you point to the numbers of intensive-care-unit beds in use, they will make similar arguments that hospitals don’t want empty beds, and hand-wave away concerns that an ICU bed by itself doesn’t do much good unless it has a sufficient number of nurses, doctors, and other personnel to treat the patient in it, as well as sufficient supplies of treatment medicines.
If you point to the daily number of new deaths, they will insist that the daily count is inaccurate because not every person who is included in a day’s death count died that particular day — some deaths aren’t reported immediately, and in some cases it takes time to determine the cause of death. Skeptics really believe that a lot of people who are counted as coronavirus deaths shouldn’t be included in the death toll because the person died of pneumonia, respiratory failure, kidney failure, sepsis, or systemic inflammation. They contend that elderly and immunocompromised individuals might have died of those causes anyway, even if they didn’t have COVID-19. Years from now, when we’re all at some memorial service for the ugly six-figure U.S. death toll from this pandemic, some of these folks will still insist that the death toll was wildly exaggerated by health officials and the media.
Imagine that COVID-19 couldn’t kill anyone under age 65. (That shouldn’t be hard to imagine. According to the CDC’s data, 229,718 deaths from the virus so far, or about 92 percent, are among those 65 and older, as of December 2.) It’s still a calamity to have a couple hundred thousand American senior citizens die from a contagious respiratory virus. And not everyone who is 65 or older was at death’s door before this pandemic!
Some people continue to insist that herd immunity is just around the corner, even though the positive rate nationwide is around 11 percent and as of September, single-digit percentages of Americans were testing positive for antibodies. If we were near or at herd immunity, those percentages would be way higher.
In other words, whatever measurement you use to indicate “this is getting really bad,” the skeptics will find a reason to doubt it. Number of cases, hospitalizations, ICU use, deaths — they can always find a way to insist that what looks like bad news isn’t really that bad, and that everyone else is either fearmongering or Chicken Little. Therefore, from their perspective, the situation can never get really bad.
There’s a flip side to this dynamic, of course. The people who don’t wear masks — either in justifiable circumstances, like walking by themselves or family members outdoors, six feet or more from other people, or in less justifiable circumstances, like at the supermarket — get an enormous amount of grief and anger and shaming because people can see them. But it is exceptionally unlikely that someone who refuses to wear a mask, walks down the street, and briefly passes within six feet of you passes the virus on to you. The CDC defines close contact as “within 6 feet for a total of 15 minutes or more.”
So where are our cases coming from? A healthy percentage of the virus spread is occurring behind the walls of institutions that keep individuals living in close quarters.
A study of all cases in the U.S. calculated that the share of “all deaths linked care homes up to the 24th September would be 41 percent, and, assuming that all those who died were residents, the share of all care home residents who died would be 4.24 percent.” One state-run home for veterans in La Salle, Ill., had 32 deaths since early November. Another 30 residents of a Lancaster, Pa., home passed away from the virus. At one nursing home in New Hampshire, almost 90 percent of residents tested positive.
The Marshall Project calculates that based upon available data, 227,333 people in prison have tested positive for the illness and 1,571 have died. Homeless shelters are not known for their spacious accommodations, and shelters in Utah, Fort Collins, Colo., San Diego, Chicago, and elsewhere have reported significant outbreaks.
Why are people angrier about the guy whose mask is below his nose than the current circumstances in nursing and assisted-living facilities, prisons, and homeless shelters? Because they can’t see them. People largely get mad about what they can see, and they just don’t think about what they can’t see.
ADDENDUM: Hunting Four Horsemen is up to 20 reviews on Amazon and 14 ratings on Goodreads. If you’ve read it, thank you — and please share your thoughts about the book with the world!*
*I mean, presuming you liked it, or at least liked parts of it.