A Powder Day at Breckenridge

Nine inches of new snow last night! Epic! Wonderful conditions for a day ski trip with two Right-leaning friends....

Yes, I have a few.

On the way back, talk turned to politics. The first subject was Iraq. It turned out we were in remarkable agreement: U. S. troops should get out as soon as we can. We talked of training the Iraqis. My right-leaning friends were in agreement that two and a half years should be sufficient to train an army. After all, we geared up for World War II in three and can train a recruit in less than six months. All of us commented on the images we've seen of Iraqi soldiers and the one eerie agreement there, they don't move like soldiers. They don't move like they want to be soldiers. They move much as I envision the Iraqi troops did when faced with the U. S. invasion. We also agreed that we should give the Iraqis six months to complete their training, look after our interests thereafter and if the country breaks up into Kurdistan (already de facto an independent state), Shiite Islamic Republic of Iraq - just not too friendly with Iran - and whatever the Sunnis have in mind to call their state, so be it. In a stunning turn of events, the three of us agreed that the Iraq war was over oil.

A watershed moment in my political life, agreeing with Republicans that the Iraq war was over oil. Let that sink in a few minutes. Two Republicans said the Iraq war was over oil.

Then we expressed hope that someone good from at least one of the parties will run in '06. I hope it isn't Hillary or Joe Lieberman but someone from our side with two qualities: Clear policies and the gender-specific organs to express them clearly and simply. Kerry couldn't speak a subject-verb-object sentence to save himself from waterboarding; every phrase contained qualifiers and parenthetic elements and so much weasel wording that Donald Rumsfeld must have been taking notes for future speeches. We do not need John Murtha. His policy is correct but he has some articulation problems, if the interview on NPR the other night was any indication. But I digress....

It's hard to get three skiers of any pursuasion together without a discussion of snow and the prospects for it which, given the mix in the car, had to lead to a discussion of environmentalism. Here again, we found a strange middle ground. All of us agreed that individual actions and incentives are important, driving a fuel-efficient car, turning down thermostats, using compact fluorescent bulbs. At first I got some resistance on the regulatory side but then I mentioned that California companies had saved nearly sixty billion dollars as a result of their emissions standards. Not only are they finding savings, they're finding new technologies and that translates to money in the pockets of stockholders. Agreeing with two Conservatives is a wonderful thing, particularly when both sides mean it.

Long and short of the discussion, we're not going to get anywhere by individual actions (conservatism) alone, nor will we solve our problems through regulatory action (liberalism) alone. Massachusetts's approach to solving the state's health insurance problems is a prime example of both sides working together, each true to their ideology, to solve the problems. The Conservatives want a requirement that everyone in the state have health insurance and the Liberals want subsidized insurance available to low-income families and individuals. It's the most sensible approach I've heard in a while. The outcomes of our discussions on the way home today were similar, that both individual actions and regulations are necessary to protect the environment.

Maybe we should take some of our representatives skiing.