This last week, there has been lots of chatter about George W Bush and the claim by his brother that he “kept us safe.” Paul Campos wrote a good overview of the issue, Let Us Now Blame George Bush: Trump and Jeb Force a Long Overdue Debate About 9/11. But I have a slightly different take on the matter. I think it is quite reasonable for people to have not held Bush accountable for the attack at the time.

Having said that, since that time, it has become clear that at least some blame ought to be leveled against him. Most of what I know came from Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies. And the thing I remember from that was Bush’s total lack of interest in terrorism. The Clinton people stressed how important terrorism was. But they were part of reality-based community. Bush and company made their own reality, and it was that the big threat to the United States was Russia and Iraq.

There was also the revelation that after being given the presidential daily briefing titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” Bush told the briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” It shows how important it is to have serious, competent people run the country. Bush has always reminded me of the end of Primary Colors, where Jack Stanton says, “You know as well as I do, that plenty of people playing this game, they don’t think that way. They’re willing to sell their souls, crawl through sewers, lie to people, divide them, play on their worst fears for nothing! Just for the prize.” That’s Bush: dad was president, so he needed to be. He wasn’t much interested in doing the job.

But when I think about it, I’m not at all sure that 9/11 would have been foiled if we lived in a democracy and Al Gore had been president. So I have a hard time blaming Bush for that specific event. But where the whole thing went on tilt was when Bush and company — including the whole the Republican Party — came up with the meme that he “kept us safe.” As Campos noted, ” Jeb is merely repeating many years of GOP dogma.” I’m not sure that it was the same words, but I remember in the 2004 election, a big deal was made of the fact that Bush would keep us safe whereas Kerry would not.

The whole thing goes back — as so much does — to Kissinger on Revolutionary Power. No normal political party would make that claim after it had overseen the murder of 3,000 citizens. And the media reaction to this claim is just what Kissinger indicated: stunned silence — an inability to do anything because what was being done was so outside the bounds of normal behavior. But that is exactly why we need to talk about it. As long as Bush didn’t try to make political gain out of it, sure: let’s not hammer on him because it is hard to see his direct fault. (Again: for that one act, because he was totally incompetent and disengaged in a general sense.)

In addition to this, Bush and the Republicans can’t have it both ways. Either he gets credit for both what happened before and after 9/11, or he gets credit for neither. I don’t see the president as that powerful, so I would give him credit for neither. But it isn’t even true that he kept us safe after. It is only true that there wasn’t another 9/11. And that seems to be the case only because there wasn’t another 9/11 attempted. There were lots of other terrorist attacks of varying degrees of success. There is a tautology here: George Bush kept us safe because George Bush kept us safe. It is like William Lane Craig’s defense of God against the attack that he is evil: whatever God does is by definition good. And so with Bush: whatever Bush did was by definition keeping us safe.

I’m not inclined to hammer on Bush. But if Republicans are going to keep claiming that Bush “kept us safe,” we need to push back. He didn’t keep us safe before 9/11. He didn’t keep us safe afterwards. That’s just partisan nonsense.

I read an interesting article by Daniel Drezner at The Washington Post, The One Question That Hawks Need to Answer About Syria. The point he made was that war hawks always talk about all the great things they are going to accomplish. But they can never explain how it is that more arms shipments, more bomb dropping, more invasions are going to accomplish those goals. Drezner went through the list: Iraq, Libya, Yemen. In each case, we just made things worse. Why would this time be any different? That’s an important question that we never get an answer to.

The more fundamental question is why these kinds of people are constantly pushing for yet another invasion. I don’t buy what Drezner says, “There is a strong and bipartisan 21st-century record of US administrations applying military force in the Middle East with the most noble of intentions and then making the extant situation much, much worse.” I italicized the significant part. We go to war for the most noble of intentions?! This is the crap I was taught growing up — it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. This is what a “professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University” thinks?! No wonder we are so screwed up.

What we do is to claim the “most noble of intentions.” This is just like American presidents always claim that war is the last thing they want. This is discussed in good depth in, War Made Easy (pdf). You could not pick a more premeditated war than the Iraq War. Yet George W Bush said, “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly.” He also said, “We seek peace. We strive for peace.” And most telling of all, “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” Yeah, that was just what the Iraq War was about!

But what do people like Dick Cheney get out of calling for war as the solution to every international conflict? I think it is tribalism. People like that see the world as a struggle between good and evil. In this case, the Iraq War wasn’t a disaster at all. They went in to deal with Saddam Hussein and now he’s dead. Everything else was just a necessary sacrifice. And if a despot rises from the ashes of that damage, well, there’s always another war to fix that.

So the problem is not that going to war to solve these problems is a bad idea — although of course it is. The problem is that those who drag us into war are doing it for different reasons than they say. And it is a real problem that an academic buys the official line and doesn’t dig any deeper. I doubt very seriously that Daniel Drezner thinks that we went into Iraq for the “most noble of intentions.” Indeed, we know that the Bush administration came into the White House looking for any way it could to go to war with Iraq.

Increasingly, I see our country’s political problems not as the result of a Republican Party gone mad, but of a media infrastructure that just accepts the myths of the country and never calls out nonsense for what it is. I’m glad that Drezner is against intervention because it doesn’t work. But that just provides the intellectual groundwork for support of the next conflict that a president says is really, really important — the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a blah blah blah.

Jonathan Chait brought my attention to something interesting, Why Are Republicans Suddenly Fixated With Urban Failure? His take on it is that Republicans are fleeing from the “Obama is destroying America!” meme, and have gone back to their tried and true meme, “Democrats have created scary urban areas!” I think this is actually not true. What’s happening is that Republicans know that Obama is at the end of his term. In the past their argument was, “Just you wait!” It’s like the Paul Bibeau satire, What If They NEVER Come For Our Guns? So the Republicans are just marking time until they can explain that it is really Hillary Clinton who is destroying America.

But Chait does note the most important issue: where “big government” is a problem is not at the federal level; it is at the state and local level. That’s where we have problems with onerous business regulations and zoning that causes rent to be exceptionally high. It is also, it seems reasonable to note, where county clerks refuse to marry people because of their hatred of gays and where minority groups have had the most problems with the law. So it is ironic that Republicans would claim that cities are dysfunctional as a justification for stopping the federal government from repairing bridges.

What Chait completely leaves out is the Ultimate Republican Idea™ — that everything is better at the local level. So we need no national education standards, for example. But most of all, there is Block Grant mania! By this logic, the federal government doesn’t need to tell states what to do; it just needs to give them block grants and the states will innovate in ways that we just can’t imagine! So there’s no need for Medicaid: just give money to the states and figure they will sort it out.

But if that’s the case, how does highlighting dysfunction at the local level help? Well, that’s the great Republican trick. They don’t actually believe that local control is better. Block grants are all about destroying these programs that they don’t like. Making Medicaid a block grant is a way to defund it. They know that they can’t just eliminate it. They’ve tried and there is too much support for it. But making it a block grant, allows them to slowly kill it, since Congress won’t be keen on properly fund it when it isn’t really their program. So year by year, Medicaid would have less and less purchasing power to the point where it was effectively repealed.

But as for the likes of George Will, this is just a period where they relax and complain about little things. They will be back. They just don’t yet know who will be the next Liberal Destroyer of All That Is Good™. Once that person arrives, it will be back to usual. In fact, George Will can just go back and use his columns from the 1990s. It will be especially great if Hillary Clinton is the next president — he will be able to recycle some articles without even a search and replace. “President Clinton is destroying America…”

Last week at Vox, Sarah Kliff wrote, This Study Is Forcing Economists to Rethink High-Deductible Health Insurance. High deductibles were supposed to be a way to keep healthcare costs down by incentivizing patients to get cheaper care. This is what “health economists” thought. It goes along with something that should have been clear for a long time: most economists are so far removed from reality as to be useless.

Think about deductibles. They don’t cause people to shop around. For one thing, it is hard to shop around (I’ll come back to this in a moment). But more to the point, this isn’t how people look at their deductibles. If people have a $1,000 deductibles (roughly half of Americas have deductibles this high or higher), then they see it as something getting in the way of their insurance. It is just a barrier that stops the insurance company from actually providing care.

But most economists are above such real world considerations, so they had to study the question. And a great opportunity came back in 2013, when a company decided to shift “tens of thousands of workers into high-deductible insurance plans.” But to offset the cost, they provided “new shopping tools” that allowed the employees to compare prices. So at least the study did look at the question of whether or not people would shop around if they had an easy way to do so — the way they do when buying groceries. And the result was clear: no.

And it is worse than even this. What the company did was provide health savings accounts for the employees. So they really had an incentive to shop around! Generally, you get to keep whatever you don’t spend (although you would have to pay taxes on it). This is, of course, the Great Conservative Idea™. High deductibles and health savings accounts would solve all our problems — or so the story goes. But that story comes to us from reality deficient economists.

The new policy did work in that it reduced spending. And let’s face it: that’s all that conservatives care about. But it didn’t reduce spending because it made the market more efficient. And remember: that’s the key issue. We pay roughly twice as much for healthcare as people do for equivalent care in other advanced economies. So the fact that we can bring healthcare costs down by forcing people to consume less of it misses the whole point. By that logic, we should eliminate all healthcare availability — that would really bring down costs!

The study also found that the sickest people were the ones who reduced their spending the most. Again: this wasn’t because they were getting a cheaper MRI, but rather because they were getting no MRI at all. So the reduction in healthcare spending resulted in a reduction in health. This is not a solution to our healthcare problems — unless your point is to appear to be addressing the problem but to actually do nothing.

After sick patients reached their deductibles, however, they spent normally. Kliff wonders why this is, and presents a few possible reasons. But is it really that complicated? Isn’t it just that humans aren’t that rational? They don’t live in a world of perfect competition and information. And they have other things to do besides try and hunt down a great deal on their next procedure. Not surprisingly, one of the economists who did the study thinks it might just be a matter of time before people get used to the system and it starts cutting down on costs the way it was intended. Because we should never forget: people serve markets, not the other way around.

I hope you will forgive me for talking about monetary policy. But really, you should pay attention, because it is good for you, in a far more important way than Cymbeline. Tim Duy has a sub-blog over at Mark Thoma’s place, Fed Watch. In general, I skip what he writes, because it makes my brain hurt. Monetary policy really is difficult. It drives home just what a slippery concept money is.

But there is another aspect of it, that is really important but also keeps me away from it: the Federal Reserve is irrational. It has been obsessing for the last two years about when exactly it will raise interest rates. I saw an interview recently where Dean Baker explained in clear terms what that means: the Fed raising interest rates is deciding to put millions of people out of work to head off inflation. Now, maybe that’s a good thing when inflation is a problem. But when there is just concern that maybe the economy is kind of, sort of at the place where maybe inflation will tick up to the Fed’s own 2% target, talking about raising interest rates is not just mad — it is evil.

I’ve been in this very uncomfortable position of thinking that the Fed is making no sense. But everywhere you look, people are saying that they are right to do this. I realize that most of this is nonsense. It’s an unstated kind of moralism that cheap money just can’t be good. But this belief is so common that it makes me uncomfortable. If I didn’t have Dean Baker, who I trust completely, I’d wonder if I weren’t just really ignorant. So any indication that the conventional wisdom is actually wrong is welcome.

Thus we get to Duy’s recent article, Brainard Drops A Policy Bomb. That’s a reference to Lael Brainard, a Fed governor, but formally Undersecretary of Treasury. She’s something we don’t see all that much in economists: an independent thinker. She recently gave a speech at the National Association of Business Economists. And she said that she was not willing to make “calendar-based statements” about raising interest rates. This is a shot across the bow at Janet Yellen and others at the Fed who seem to do nothing but.

The issue, to me at least, is that most of the people are not letting the facts guide them. They want to raise interests rates. (That is: they want to put people out of jobs and make wages continue to stagnate.) And they are looking for any reason to do so. And now, it’s December. If the economy can just hold on and look good for a couple of months, then Yellen and company can raise the interest rates and get the bankers off their backs!

Paul Krugman offered an interesting take on why it is that Brainard has such a different idea from the other folks at the Fed, “I would say that Brainard’s experience is dominated not so much by the Great Moderation as by the Asian financial crisis and Japan’s stagnation.” In other words, Brainard isn’t hyper-focused on the possibility of inflation — she knows that there is at least as big a threat of low and even negative inflation.

What I find fascinating is that the inflation rate in the 1970s was high — but not that high. In 1980, it reached almost 15%. But before the Federal Reserved decided to tame inflation, the unemployment rate was less than 6% — so workers weren’t suffering that much. I can see being totally freaked out if the inflation rate had been 200%. But it was manageable. And that was it at its worst. And they are only concerned about that, and not the great threat of low inflation.