The recent murders in Fort Hood shocked us all. They could have been avoided, however. The killer had poor performance reviews, he wanted out of the army, he had displayed some irrational behaviors, he was a vocal opponent of the current wars, and had hired a lawyer to file a suit to keep him from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Why was he assigned to counsel soldiers on their way overseas?
That makes no sense, whatsoever. I often make the half-joke that if a government policy makes sense, we won’t be doing it for long. Why is it now such a painful observation? If anything, the man should have been placed in a posting where he would not have contact with soldiers.
I’m not asking for a review of the policy that somehow allowed this to happen. That’s not nearly enough. As a people, we have to look at the way we want our government to run: do we want it as it is now, or do we want it to make sense?
PBS’ Frontline recently ran a story on the former head of the CFTC, Brooksley Born, and how she sounded an alarm about the then yet to happen meltdown in derivatives. Because her call for tighter reform flew in the face of Greenspan’s Ayn Rand-dominated philosophy of complete separation of markets and state, Greenspan and Clinton’s Treasury people shut her up and sidelined her comments. 