A Must-Read Opinion-Editorial in the WashPost

Via Atrios, I read this Uwe (pronounced oo-vuh) Reinhardt essay in the Washington Post this morning. It nails the phony "support of our troops" mantra from those who want to stay the course in a disaster that was based upon the administration's lies and incompetence.

Reinhardt is a giant in analyzing the misallocation and waste of resources in our medical insurance system. I recall him as a voice of sanity during the early to mid-1990s when he appeared on McNeil-Leherer with the morons who could not get passed the banshee scream of "no socialized mediciene!" He would politely explain with factually-based detail, in his polite, soft German accent (Reinhardt is a native of Germany who knows well the abuse of nationalism by demogogues), how and why the American medical insurance system is inefficient and wasteful. Here is Reinhardt's class day speech to Princeton students in 1995. It has his mischevious and playful meter turned up, but there is one line in it that sums up Reinhardt, told to him by a rabbi: "A culture will be vibrant, strong and lasting if every decision a generation makes is washed by one fundamental question: What will it do to or for our grandchildren?" And here is a brief interview with him that gives us a glimpse of his knowledge of his area of study.

That his son joined the Marine Corps upon graduating Princeton in 2001, despite his father's particular, emprically-based arguments over how our society devalues its soldiers, tells us that despite those particular arguments, Reinhardt's raised his son with his best values that we as a society owe a duty to help and protect each other through our government. Uwe knew our society has failed in that duty, however, and he was merely trying to protect his son from harm, which is another admirable value.