Bloggasm

Andrew Olmsted is a Major in the United States Army Reserve serving on active duty at Fort Carson, Colorado. He has served fourteen years on active duty in Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, Cuba, Korea, Colorado and Kansas. He is currently deployed to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he is helping to train American forces preparing to deploy to Iraq to support the Iraqi Army and security forces. He began penning his eponymous blog in October, 2001 and includes commentary on the military, philosophy, politics, movies, major league baseball, and frequent diversions into current events.

Simon Owens: In our last interview, you predicted that the Republicans would be able to hold onto their majority. As it got closer to the election, did your prediction change? What other issues besides Iraq do you think really hurt them?

Andrew Olmsted: My Election Day prediction was pretty bad: I predicted the Democrats would take the House, but with a 219-216 majority, and that the Republicans would hold the Senate 52-48. I’m not sure how much of the Democratic landslide was due to Iraq, however. I think that a great deal more voter outrage was directed at the Republicans’ apparent cluelessness regarding the reasons they were handed the keys to Congress twelve years earlier and their arrogance in power. Which is not to say the war wasn’t a factor at all, but I think that many people, including me, voted Democratic because they believed that the Republicans were running Congress as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Presidency rather than as the first branch of government. Add in the degree of corruption and things like Mark Foley, and the end result is unsurprising.

Simon Owens: You, like most military bloggers, were angry at William Arkin’s recent outburst. His constant backstepping since the incident has reinforced my own belief that opinion columnists are completely useless. Why do major media outlets hire pundits/columnists like Arkin, Malkin etc… Can’t they just report the news and let people form their own opinions?

Andrew Olmsted: That’s a tough question, given that like most bloggers, my site is about my own opinions on things. So it’s tough for me to argue that people shouldn’t be interested in how other people interpret the news. For the most part, I think it is a business decision. I don’t have access to the Washington Post’s server stats, but I’ll wager that Arkin’s series of articles damning the military drew a lot of eyeballs to the Post’s website. That helps the bottom line, since advertisers tend to look at issues like hit counts when determining where to spend their money. And the media hasn’t reported straight news in a very long time. Opinion suffuses every aspect of most media reports, as we saw just this week with the media spinning the Republican filibuster of the Iraq War resolution as ’shutting down debate’ rather than providing an accurate and dispassionate description of what occurred.

Simon Owens: As a Major in the Army Reserve, how do you view the new troop “surge”?

Andrew Olmsted: I should note up front that my time in the Reserve is about to come to an end. I have been accepted back into the active force and will return to active duty on the 18th of March, at which time I’ll start training to deploy to Iraq, although not as part of the surge. I am very dubious that the surge can work. Counterinsurgency warfare requires a lot of manpower and a lot of time, and this surge provides insufficient amounts of each in my opinion. If we have any hope of prevailing in Iraq, it is going to take years and a few hundred thousand troops, and I don’t think the American people are willing to go that distance at this point.

Simon Owens: In our last interview, you indicated that there wasn’t a large Libertarian voice in the blogosphere. Now that Libertarians are distancing themselves from Republicans, do you think that voice will grow?

Andrew Olmsted: Actually, I think there is a very large libertarian voice in the blogosphere, but not a very large Libertarian one. There is a vast gap between small-l libertarians and big-L Libertarians, in that the former refers to a pretty large group of people who share generally libertarian ideas and the small group of Libertarians who support the Libertarian Party. Just as liberals make up the base of the Democratic Party and conservatives make up the base of the Republican Party, libertarians comprise the base of the Libertarian Party. But unlike Democrats and Republicans, Libertarians tend to be a small-tent party, which is a major factor in their inability to influence the debate meaningfully. Much as I might like to see a lot of government programs torn down, to be effective in politics you have to be willing to make compromises, and that’s something most Libertarians don’t like.

I think that the blogosphere already has a pretty strong libertarian presence, as befits a medium based on the Internet, and the recent spate of ‘libertarian democrat’ arguments that shot around the blogosphere for a time last Fall indicated the value the major parties see in trying to co-opt libertarians to their side, and as long as we remain a closely-divided nation, we’ll see that continue, because small groups hold value disproportionate to their size in closely-divided societies. But most Americans are intellectually libertarian but functionally statist, so I doubt we’ll see any major changes in how government operates. The strength of libertarians on the Internet is very disproportionate to their strength in the electorate, and politicians understand that. Nonetheless, as the blogosphere continues to evolve, I think that the presence of libertarians in great numbers will at least help to get more libertarian arguments into the discussion, and I see that as a good thing.

Simon Owens: You’ve been a harsh critic of Al Gore and his attempt to make Global Warming a major agenda, going so far as to say that he hasn’t produced any real change. But to me, it seems that ever since his documentary came out, there’s been a lot more political and news coverage on the subject, and I’ve noticed that fewer news outlets refer to the “debate” over global warming and are starting to accept it as fact. You don’t think there’s a slight chance that he has essentially helped produce a chain reaction?

Andrew Olmsted: I think harsh overstates the case. My post in which I noted that Gore hasn’t done a great deal towards alleviating global warming was more directed at the devaluation of the Nobel Prize than a swipe at Gore. While I disagree with Gore on what needs to be done regarding global warming, I respect his passion for the issue and I concur that his efforts are probably getting the issue more attention than it might otherwise have received, although it’s difficult to tell cause and effect. Are the spate of global warming stories a result of Gore’s efforts, or do we notice Gore’s efforts more because of the spate of stories about global warming? Ten years from now, it will probably be easier to discern how effective Mr. Gore’s contributions were. I think the real balance of power with global warming remains with the Chinese and Indians, however, as I don’t know if many western nations will be willing to make truly substantive efforts to curb their carbon outputs as long as those two nations continue on their current course. If Gore can effect their actions, then he’ll deserve every bit of publicity he gets for making a major impact on the global warming debate.

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(Relates posts: Interview with Kevin Holtsberry from Collected Miscellany, Every single doner to a Green Party Campaign fund was made by a Republican, Put on your tin-foil hats: Here come the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists)