Later On

In a conversation on Wicked_Edge, the movie Life of Brian occurred to me, along with a great desire to watch it. I went to Netflix, but not on Watch Instantly, so have to wait for DVD… but wait! I can purchase from Amazon for $10 and watch now via Amazon streaming. That’s steep for a rental, but this is a purchase and becomes part of my Amazon “Video Library” so that I can rewatch at any time. Pretty nifty. And it’s even better than I remembered.

I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but not shaving stuff. For one thing, poor selection. For another I like the stock choices offered by the independent shaving vendors. But I see that others are backing off from Amazon, as reported in the NY Times by Stephanie Clifford and Claire Cain Miller:

Harold Pollack used to spend $1,000 a year on Amazon, but this fall started buying from small online retailers instead. The prices are higher, but Dr. Pollack says he now has a clear conscience.

“I don’t feel they behave in a way that I want to support with my consumer dollars,” Dr. Pollack, a professor in Chicago, said of the big Internet retailers.

Giant e-commerce companies like Amazon are acting increasingly like their big-box brethren as they extinguish small competitors with discounted prices, free shipping and easy-to-use apps. Big online retailers had a 19 percent jump in revenue over the holidays versus 2010, while at smaller online retailers growth was just 7 percent.

The little sites are fighting back with some tactics of their own, like preventing price comparisons or offering freebies that an anonymous large site can’t. And in a new twist, they are also exploiting the sympathies of shoppers like Dr. Pollack by encouraging customers to think of them as the digital version of a mom-and-pop shop facing off against Walmart: If you can’t shop close to home, at least shop small.

“Folks are exercising their desire to support local stores where local is not just in their town, but anywhere in the country,” said Michael Walden, a professor who studies regional economics at North Carolina State University. “A large number of Americans have a general suspicion of bigness in the economic world — they equate bigness with power, monopoly.”

Lacy Simons, owner of Hello Hello Books in Maine, a small store with an e-commerce site, says she is seeing customers “cement their determination to shop local” — which on the Internet, means shopping at the smaller vendors — even when the big sites offer lower prices.

“We know there’s only so much that we can do to compete against them, so you end up relying on what hopefully becomes an emotional or personal connection with the retailer online,” Ms. Simons said.

The battle between supersites and small online retailers became pitched this holiday season, as . . .

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Without a benchmark for measurement, how does one decide the truth of theological issues? Or is “truth” the wrong word to use for faith-based beliefs? With the common run of statement, one can decide the truth or falsity by observation of the world around us: the method use by science (or, as it is called by those who dislike the approach, “scientism”) But with theological statements, how does one decide?

This article in the NY Times, written by Laurie Goodstein, discusses the issue in the context of the Romney presidential campaign in South Carolina, a hotbed of religious belief.

For example:

On the most fundamental issue, traditional Christians believe in the Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all rolled into one.

Mormons reject this as a non-biblical creed that emerged in the fourth and fifth centuries. They believe that God the Father and Jesus are separate physical beings, and that God has a wife whom they call Heavenly Mother.

Okay, that seems pretty clear cut: Are God and Jesus one? or are they two?

Normally a question like that is resolved by looking to the real world, but that’s no help here. The President of Union Theological Seminary offers, “God and Jesus are not separate physical beings. That would be anathema. At the end of the day, all the other stuff doesn’t matter except the divinity of Jesus.” Well, that’s pretty clear. But the Mormons don’t buy it (nor, for that matter, do the Unitarians, the Muslims, the Jews, and many other religions). And I don’t see any way to reach a decision, other than the usual route the religious follow: kill everyone who does not accept the belief your yourself happen to hold. That does work, to some degree, but not very well: we still have many, many different religions and many, many different views of the same religion (see previous post on the role of women in Israel: the argument seems to be occurring within a relgion).

My view is that, on the whole, it’s easier to advance in arenas in which issues can be settled by reference to an outside benchmark, and external reality turns to work out really well.

The article is interesting, though, and discusses how religions regularly revise their beliefs in order to reduce the shock they present to logic, real-life experience, and current cultural values. For example,

Another big sticking point concerns the afterlife. Early Mormon apostles gave talks asserting that human beings would become like gods and inherit their own planets — language now regularly held up to ridicule by critics of Mormonism.

But Kathleen Flake, a Mormon who is a professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt Divinity School, explained that the planets notion had been de-emphasized in modern times in favor of a less concrete explanation: people who die embark on an “eternal progression” that allows them “to partake in God’s glory.”

“Don’t like that belief? Fine, we’ll just change it until you do like it. It’s all metaphorical anyway.” I imagine that’s the tack they will take. We also see efforts to revise beliefs to make them slightly more sensible (and more acceptable to current context) in the Israel story posted earlier, on the role of women.

I think the real challenge is to find which beliefs to revise readily—as Professor Flake demonstrated—and which to fight to the death: how does the poor religious zealot know which beliefs can just be rewritten wholesale—”It’s just a metaphor, let’s reinterpret in the light modern knowledge and culture”—and which to clutch unrevised, clinging to the literal meaning: “Noah’s ark was 135 m long” is seen as the actual truth—not 134 m, not 136 m. This is generally the position taken by fundamentalists of any religion: sticking to the literal meaning of words, without regard for consistency with daily experience. That approach has the virtue of a kind of consistency, but given the textual history of the ancient documents—the collation from various sources, the interweaving of various legends—that approach also leads to serious logical difficulties, though those have proved not to present a problem insofar as acceptance of the ideas is concerned—though I wonder whether logically contradictory notions warrant the label “ideas”.

This story, like most on Mormonism, avoids the other “translations” Joseph Smith did—those of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. That seems to be rather clear-cut to me; strange that it is so seldom mentioned. Are we not supposed to talk about it?

UPDATE: Still pondering the issues. In shaving, we have the “YMMV” factor: a shaving soap or brush or blade or razor that works well for me may well turn out not to work at all for another shaver: YMMV, so he happily uses the Mühle R41 while I dote on the Slant Bar: no problem. The same approach holds for foods: I love the taste of cilantro, and to you it tastes like soap. So I enjoy and you avoid and life goes on quite well. This same approach could work equally well for religion—YMMV, in religion, shaving, cilantro—except that religions couch their assertions as matters of fact, rather than taste. And they do try to “settle” differences by killing those who disagree—which in a sense does work, in that only one point of view remains. And yet it’s not very satisfactory.

To take an example from math rather than science: Do I really establish that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides by killing anyone who disagrees? Is the truth of the theorem thus established? The problem, you see, is that with the same type of “argument” one can similarly establish that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is NOT equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, but rather that it is larger, or smaller, or any other statement one cares to make about it: that it is cute, in a roguish way. All can be “established” by killing anyone who disagrees.

Doesn’t it seem that there should be a better way? We’ve found better ways in other fields of human endeavor.

Kim Wilsher reports in the LA Times:

What’s in a title? Plenty, according to French feminists who have persuaded a town to drop the honorific “mademoiselle” on official forms.

From now on, the women of Cesson-Sevigne, population 16,000, will be addressed as “madame” regardless of age or marital status.

“Mademoiselle,” the Gallic form of “miss,” is normally used for young, unmarried women, thus, feminists say, openly declaring them either available or unwanted in a way that men, always referred to as “monsieur,” are not. A French form of “ms.” would solve the problem, but there you go.…

Exactly when a woman reaches the age when she becomes a “madame,” married or otherwise, is not only a matter of debate but a social minefield; women of a certain age will often ask themselves whether the waiter who calls them “mademoiselle” is being gallant or sarcastic.

French movie stars Catherine Deneuve, 68, once married, and Jeanne Moreau, 84 this month and three times married, prefer to be addressed as “mademoiselle” and, as a quirky exception to the rule, are allowed, as actresses, to claim that right. . .

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Fascinating article on religious requirements regarding subjugation of women encountering a modern determination to live a life of secular values. Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner report in the NY Times:

In the three months since the Israeli Health Ministry awarded a prize to a pediatrics professor for her book on hereditary diseases common to Jews, her experience at the awards ceremony has become a rallying cry.

The professor, Channa Maayan, knew that the acting health minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, and other religious people would be in attendance.  So she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt. But that was hardly enough.

Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.

Though shocked that this was happening at a government ceremony, Dr. Maayan bit her tongue. But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.

At a time when there is no progress on the Palestinian dispute, Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.

And it is centered on women.

“Just as secular nationalism and socialism posed challenges to the religious establishment a century ago, today the issue is feminism,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.”

The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women’s health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.

Public discourse in Israel is suddenly . . .

Continue reading. I don’t know about you, but I have my own culture clash with the idea of grown men spitting on small children. Are we supposed to admire them? For what, exactly?

Could be that both are true, of course. Bob Grant reports on the second issue in The Scientist:

A University of Connecticut researcher who has conducted hundreds of studies on the health benefits of compounds found in red wine has been punished by the school for faking data on numerous occasions throughout his career. Dipak Das, director of cardiovascular research at UConn, fabricated data in 145 separate instances, according to an extensive, three-year investigation conducted by the school. The university has frozen all external funding to Das’s lab and has declined $890,000 in federal grants awarded to him.

“We have a responsibility to correct the scientific record and inform peer researchers across the country,” Philip Austin, interim vice president for health affairs at UConn, said in a statement.

The university has notified 11 journals regarding Das’s misconduct, potentially triggering the retraction of several published studies on resveratrol, a phenol found in red wine. Das’s work formed part of the scientific foundation for the claim that resveratrol conferred cardio-protective benefits and could even increase longevity by activating proteins called sirtuins, which regulate transcription, apoptosis, and stress resistance in the human body.

Apparently, Das cut and pasted western blot data from several experiments into single figures, and altered images connected to his research on numerous occasions in publications, grant applications, and communications with publishers. The investigation even turned up damning emails sent between scientists working in Das’s center. One such email referred to a “corrected picture.” In another, a student informed Das that “I have changed the figures as you told me.”

The center that Das headed has been “inactive” since January 2011, according to the Connecticut Mirror.

Maybe not, writes Elizabeth Dickinson in the Washington Monthly:

he sun was barely setting over a colonial villa in rural central Colombia as Álvaro Uribe Vélez, by any measure Colombia’s most transformative modern president, recited lines of poetry to a small crowd beside a courtyard fountain. The former head of state, who left office in August 2010, projects the air of a financier in his official portraits. But today he was dressed like a paisa—with a traditional sombrero, a white handmade cloth draped over his shoulder, and a walking stick given to him by citizens of a nearby town.

On that perfect summer evening in early July, Uribe liked one particular verse—about a beautiful woman with enchanting eyes—so much that he recited it over and over to the dozens of locals seated in a circle around him. Also in the audience was the Colombian celebrity Catalina Maya, an actress and model, who sat perched on an armchair, her body twisted over its back to regard Uribe. Women and girls were crammed onto the villa’s steps, and housemaids pretended to continue working as they peeked for glances at the expresident, who every so often locked eyes with a new member of the crowd.

Álvaro Uribe is a well-loved man. During the eight years in which he led Colombia, he won the hearts of millions of his countrymen, from those in small villages to the most elite urban circles. And the reason why these millions adore Uribe largely boils down to one word: security. Uribe still casts a powerful spell over his former constituents because he used his time in office to smash a four-decades-old guerrilla insurgency with an overwhelming show of force—and in so doing made countless Colombians’ lives immeasurably safer.

When Uribe took office in 2002, Colombia was the murder and kidnap capital of the world, the source of nearly all global cocaine, and an economic weakling. The government had staggered through four decades of armed conflict with leftist rebels, most notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and had tried everything—even negotiations—to end the strife. Nothing seemed to work until Uribe came along. Unlike previous presidents, Uribe believed—and managed to convince the country—that if Colombia fought with all its military might against the guerrillas, it could win. Determined to make a hard break from the past, he ended a fraught peace process that his predecessor had initiated with the rebels. Then he dispatched tens of thousands of troops to retake control of Colombian soil, focusing on securing the cities and highways. Uribe found an eager partner in the United States, which supplied state-of-the-art weapons and intelligence to aid in the dismantling of armed groups. Eventually, he also convinced the United Autodefense Forces of Colombia (AUC)—a private paramilitary force of some 30,000 fighters that had emerged to protect local elites and landowners from the guerrillas, only to become just as wrapped up in drugs and violence as its enemies—to demobilize.

By the time Uribe was reelected in 2006, a conflict that had long threatened to break the Colombian state suddenly seemed as if it might be drawing to an end. The murder rate had fallen by 45 percent, and the kidnapping rate—which hovered near 3,000 people per year in 2002— plummeted more than fourfold. Even drug interdictions were up to the point that traffickers started looking for alternative routes into the United States (though Mexico) and Europe (through West Africa). By the end of his second term, Uribe began talking about “the end of the end” of the guerrillas.

Colombia’s incredible turnaround and the strategy credited with bringing it about have become not only a rare success story in the drug war, but also its most formidable brand and export. The governments of Mexico and several other Central American countries that have been plunged into violent confrontation with drug gangs have tried assiduously to replicate their South American peer’s strategy. With U.S. support, Mexico has deployed troops, militarized its police, and fought tooth and nail to regain control of its farthest-flung states. Honduras, which has the world’s highest murder rate, and Guatemala are flying in Colombian experts to advise them. Even in far-away conflicts such as Afghanistan, U.S. policy makers have looked for a model in the Andes.

There are two problems, however. The first is that none of these places, despite years of effort, has yet seen the kind of transformation that Uribe brought about in Colombia. In fact, so far, the momentum runs in the opposite direction. The case of Mexico is particularly striking; roughly 50,000 lives have been lost since the country’s experiment with a Colombian-style militarized drug war began in 2006. The Citizen’s Council for Public Security in Mexico recently estimated the kidnapping rate at three times that of Colombia’s darkest days. Cartels are growing more sophisticated and violent, not less, despite the numerous leaders the government has picked off. By November 2011, 80 percent of the population polled by the public opinion firm Consulta Mitofsky said they believed security to be worse than just a year ago. A mere 14 percent believed that the government could beat the drug gangs.

The second problem is that, in Colombia itself, Uribe’s strategy has reached a point of sharply diminishing returns. Having largely defeated what was, at bottom, a sweeping leftist insurgency against the state, and having decapitated a relatively cohesive paramilitary force, Colombia now faces a hydra-headed, apolitical, essentially criminal set of groups vying for turf and control over what’s left of the drug trade. None of these groups is as powerful as its precursors, but nor do they seem to be susceptible to the same strategic countermeasures. And violence is starting to drift upward. “If you look at the trend lines on homicides and kidnapping, it looks like a backwards J,” explains Adam Isacson, director of the Regional Security Policy Program at the Washington Office on Latin America. “They drop really sharply from 2002 to 2006, then there’s a stagnation. In 2008 and 2009 several of those measures start to creep back up again.”

The idea that sheer military might and political will can beat back the narcotics trade is a powerful one. Uribe’s ideas and tactics have spread to every corner of the globe marred by the drug trade and nearly every institution that is fighting organized crime. Which means that if those ideas are misguided—or, perhaps more dangerously, misunderstood— then so too is nearly every fight in the drug war.

On the day of his visit to the countryside, Uribe woke well before dawn, driving off in his motorcade at six a.m. to make the three-hour trip from Medellín to a small mountain town called Támesis. On the winding road through alternating alpine coffee fields and orange trees in the tropical plains, Uribe pointed out the results of his time in office. “During the first years of my presidency, I received news twice a day about this road and kidnappings,” he told me. “Eight years ago, it was impossible to cross.”

Now almost sixty, Uribe speaks in a voice that is at once brash and familiar. When he talks—as he does almost constantly—his words come out as simple sentences, clean and well crafted without an extraneous word. His considerable charisma is of an austere variety. He doesn’t smoke or drink, which is unusual in a country proud of its rabblerousing parties. He is famously demanding, but often refuses to delegate. While in office, he won a reputation for calling his force commanders’ cell phones at five a.m. when he wanted an update. “Security policy needs strong direction,” he told me as we drove.

Behind Uribe’s sense of conviction, and his public persona, is a harrowing personal history. While most of Colombia’s presidents have come from a small group of Bogota elite, Uribe came from the countryside, where his family lived in intimate proximity to the country’s endemic violence. His father was killed by FARC guerrillas in 1983 on the family farm, not far from Támesis, when Uribe was thirty-one years old. Uribe dedicated his presidency to making sure the guerrillas paid for his loss—and the losses of so many of his countrymen. Many Colombians seem to regard him with the kind of gratitude you might reserve for someone who has pulled you back from the edge of a cliff.

As Uribe made his way by car from Medellín, hundreds of people from the countryside around Támesis were converging on a sniper-guarded gymnasium in the town, where the former president was scheduled to take part in a meeting of local civic leaders. Just after ten a.m., a tanned coffee farmer named Pedro Antonio Restrepo sat expectantly crouched near the edge of the bleachers there, his skin crinkled from years working outside in the sun. His eyes were wide with excitement. “I am an enemy of politics 100 percent,” Restrepo told me. “But I had to come to see Uribe.”

A decade ago, Restrepo lived under the gun. His land fell under the purview of the paramilitaries, which ran a mafia-like protection racket in the area. While their official name, the United Autodefense Forces of Colombia, suggested that these armed groups were a cohesive liberating force, freeing the countryside of the guerrillas that had pillaged, kidnapped, and massacred for so long, the paramilitaries had become as oppressive and dependent on the drug trade as FARC. Restrepo paid “taxes” to that local regime. If he didn’t have the cash, the paramilitaries who knocked on his door would wait, guns in hand. “Go to town and sell a bag of coffee to get the money,” they would tell him.

When Uribe came into office, his security strategy began with the recognition that the paramilitaries and guerrillas were taking advantage of the many spaces in his country— places like Restrepo’s coffee-farming community—where the state simply didn’t have a presence. If Uribe wanted to eliminate these illicit networks, Colombia needed to impose sovereignty over its own territories. It had to go in with troops, smash the rebel or paramilitary presence, and establish control. Then, with the rebels chased to the bush, the military assault would shade into a regime of police patrols and institutions—in a word, a state. He called his strategy “democratic security.” (If he had crafted it later, after the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps Uribe would have simply called it counterinsurgency, or COIN.)

The task Uribe had set before himself was essentially one of nation building, something he knew would be neither cheap nor easy. Making aggressive use of American aid was essential. Uribe’s predecessor had already secured a $1.4 billion aid package from the United States as part of the Plan Colombia policy, a legacy of the Clinton era; the new president worked to make it his own. “Plan Colombia was essentially an antidrug policy,” explains Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. “The trick in the Colombian case was to take aid intended to go after the drug war and to use it in a much more rational way: to build the strength of the state.” The whole aid package eventually grew to the size of $8 billion.

Uribe found a willing and like-minded partner in George W. Bush, who often referred to the Colombian president as “mi amigo.” A true coproduction of American aid and Colombian strategy, Uribe’s “democratic security” became the centerpiece of the U.S. government’s international counter-narcotics plan. America supplied helicopters, weapons, intelligence equipment, expertise, and military trainers, and even footed some of the bill for gas. It also helped fund new military and police brigades created specifically to root out traffickers and interdict drugs. The military streamed into every corner of the country, burning cocaine labs and catching guerrilla leaders in its path. One of the biggest legacies of Uribe’s time in office is sheer military manpower: today there are nearly 270,000 soldiers patrolling the country, as well as 162,000 police officers— meaning that the total number of security forces has been bumped up by more than 100,000 people since 2002.

As the aid poured in, Colombia reciprocated by going out of its way to cooperate with U.S. goals. In a move that would have made many South American governments squirm, Colombia let the United States vet and polygraph certain military recruits. Even more controversially, between 2002 and 2008 Colombia extradited 951 of its citizens to face criminal charges in the United States. Previous presidents had balked at foisting off their problems, and citizens, on a foreign justice system; Uribe embraced it. On American soil, the suspects often found themselves locked up on trafficking convictions with stiff sentences. Frequently, this was helpful for Uribe—his government was relieved of having to try some of its most contentious and despicable cases—but it also meant that many of the perpetrators of Colombia’s worst human rights violations, including massacres, murders, and rapes, would likely never be held accountable for those crimes at home.

According to critics, . . .

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I’m not sure I’m convinced: a high-scoring volleyball player (“hot hands”) scores more points because his/her teammates recognize the “hot hands” and feed him/her more shots. That simply sounds like the higher score results from more attempts, not greater accuracy. Still, the report by Bruce Bowers in Science News is intriguing:

Volleyball players have taken a stand — make that a leap — for the existence of that statistically elusive feat known as the hot hand.

Not only do top volleyball strikers go on scoring runs that can’t be chalked up to chance, but players and coaches notice when a player is on a hot streak and funnel the ball his or her way, say psychologist Markus Raab of German Sport University Cologne and his colleagues, who studied the hot-hand phenomenon by analyzing playoff game data from a German volleyball league.

That strategy usually works, because players who on average score on a high percentage of shots tend to get hot hands. So getting them the ball during a scoring streak boosts a team’s score, the researchers will report in an upcoming Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. This tactic backfires if a player with a low scoring average develops a hot hand and draws shots away from better scorers, the scientists hold.

Debate about whether hot hands are real or illusory has raged since a 1985 report that professional basketball players’ shooting and free throw records contain no chance-defying streaks. . .

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Tom Engelhardt takes a penetrating look at the military in our future in her Salon.com article:

Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.

Here’s the way it actually went down in Washington last week: a triumphant performance by a commander-in-chief who wants you to know that he’s at the top of his game.

When it came to rolling out a new 10-year plan for the future of the U.S. military, the leaks to the media began early and the message was clear. One man is in charge of your future safety and security. His name is Barack Obama. And — not to worry — he has things in hand.

Unlike the typical president, so the reports went, he held six (count ‘em: six!) meetings with top Pentagon officials, the Joint Chiefs, the service heads and his military commanders to plan out the next decade of American war making. And he was no civilian bystander at those meetings either. On a planet where no other power has more than two aircraft carriers in service, he personally nixed a Pentagon suggestion that the country’s aircraft carrier battle groups be reduced from 11 to 10, lest China think our power-projection capabilities were weakening in Asia.

His secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, spared no words when it came to the president’s role, praising his “vision and guidance and leadership” (as would Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin E. Dempsey). Panetta described Obama’s involvement thusly: “[T]his has been an unprecedented process, to have the president of the United States participate in discussions involving the development of a defense strategy, and to spend time with our service chiefs and spend time with our combatant commanders to get their views.”

In other words, Obama taking ownership of the rollout of “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” a 16-page document summarizing a review of America’s strategic interests, defense priorities and military spending. Its public unveiling was to reflect the steady hand of a commander-in-chief destined to be in charge of American security for years to come.

The president even made a “rare visit” to the Pentagon. There, he was hailed as the first occupant of the Oval Office ever to make comments, no less present a new “more realistic” strategic guidance document, from its press office. All of this, in turn, was billed as introducing “major change” into the country’s military stance, leading to (shades of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) a “leaner, meaner” force, slimmed down and recalibrated for economic tough times and a global “moment of transition.”

As political theater, it couldn’t have been smarter. For a president, vulnerable like all Democrats to charges of national security weakness in an election year, it was a chance for great photo ops and headlines. And it left his Republican opponents (Ron Paul, of course, excepted) in the dust, sputtering, fuming and complaining that he was “leading from behind” and “imperiling” the nation.

Even better, in an election season which has mesmerized the media, not a single reporter or pundit seemed to notice that, whatever the new Pentagon plan might mean for the U.S. military globally, it was great domestic politics for a president whose second term was in peril.

Another “Mission Accomplished” Moment?

The actual Pentagon planning document, released the day of the president’s Pentagon appearance, might as well have been written in cuneiform script or hieroglyphics. Just about any military future might have been read into or out of its purposely foggy, not to say impenetrable, pages. That, too, seemed politically canny, offering the president a militarized version of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism.

While the document only referred to the Pentagon budget-cutting process that had been making headlines for weeks in the most oblique manner, the briefings offered by the president, the secretary of defense and other top officials highlighted those “cuts”: $487 billion over the next decade. It was the sort of thing that should have made any deficit hawk’s heart flutter. Yet somehow — a bow to defense hawks? — the same budget, already humongous from an unprecedented 12 straight years of expansion, was, Obama assured his audience, actually slated to keep on growing.

Like a magician pulling the proverbial rabbit from the hat, the president described the situation this way: “Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.”

This magic trick was only possible because . . .

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