Hasta La Gadget!

A few weeks ago I wrote in a column that “Election Day once again showed that our political system is broken — voters went to the polls, sent a message, and then leaders will in the days and months ahead ignore what the public was trying to tell them.” And President Obama’s recent announcement bypassing Congress with executive orders related to immigration reform puts a highlight on our broken democracy.

We have two presidents who were given a great opportunity to fix the system in D.C. and provide common sense leadership, and both have forgotten that the means of governing needs work and just sought partisan ends. President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 and President Obama in the days after his transformative election were each given a great window of opportunity by a huge majority of voters to lead in a different way. And both squandered this in the course of their time in office.

Americans have voted for two presidents in a row whose main campaign message was they were going to bring the country together, fix the divisiveness in Washington, D.C., and build consensus across the aisle. And in the aftermath of the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, the country is coming away more polarized and governance more dysfunctional. And both political parties have a growing demographic problem that will make it very hard for them to capture the hearts and minds of a majority of Americans while they still win elections (or more accurately lose less).

I have talked for years, and pushed while I worked for President Bush, that the GOP has a growing Latino problem. Republicans can’t ignore this fast growing part of the electorate and expect to be a majority party. Conversely, Democrats have a huge problem with white, working-class voters, especially males, that they must fix. Ever since President Clinton’s re-election in 1996, Democrats have done considerably worse among white male voters even while winning elections. In the 2014 general election, Latinos represented 8 percent of all the votes cast and the GOP lost them by 26 points; white male voters were 37 percent of all votes, and Democrats lost this group by 31 points. The demographic vice is squeezing both parties.

And simultaneously to all this there has been a consistent rise in voters who are fed up with both political parties and who are now calling themselves independent. Faster than the growth of Latino voters and the rise of the angry white male is a growing group of voters who are registering as something other than Republican or Democrat. In state after state, voters are opting out of casting ballots in primaries and are picking a third way to express themselves. For now, this has been heard in ways of a voice of consistent frustration or by voting each party out of office every two years, but at some point independent candidates will begin to find success. And then maybe this red/blue monopoly will be broken. One can hope, and also see it realistically coming.

I agree with President Obama on the substance of what he has done on immigration and I support the compassion for folks who live in the shadows in our country, but I totally disagree with the manner with which he has done it. His party just lost a midterm election and if the president really wanted to fix things in this country he wouldn’t have just stuck a finger in the eye of the opposition. The country keeps asking for the means of governing to be fixed, and President Obama’s actions on immigration only exacerbates the governance problem.

President Bush’s and Obama’s “my way or the highway” approach to leadership might get them to where they are going faster, but it is only going to leave us as voters more frustrated and less trustful of the journey in this road of democracy. Over the last 15 years, both sides are to blame for where we have arrived, whether it’s Democrats fighting President Bush or the GOP attacking President Obama as either party holds Congress.

When arrogance meets obstructionism, dysfunction is born and breeds wildly. And while President Obama’s intentions I am sure were good, his recent actions on immigration will only compound the loss of leadership we all feel in this great country of ours. It is time each of us stands up and says enough is enough, and begin to demand more, starting with the communities in which we live.

There you have it.

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Matthew Dowd, Founder of ListenTo.Us, is an ABC News analyst and special correspondent. Opinions expressed in this column do not reflect the views of ABC News.

Growing up, the only time we wore pajamas to bed or around the house was Christmas Day. The other 364 days of the year it was tightie whities or at best Funderoos. That means that each year when Christmas would come around we had to go buy new PJs. A robe also would do the trick. If your house has similar traditions, you might as well come down the stairs wearing something cool like this robe.

Robes are admittedly out of place just about anywhere but a spa, but this Walking Dead Sheriff’s Robe is pretty awesome. It isn’t covered with blood and guts though. It looks like Rick’s clean uniform before things went to hell. It has a sheriff’s badge on both sleeves and a nametag on the pocket that says Grimes.

I could see me wearing this robe on Christmas day, though sweats are more my style these days. This would make a great gift for Walking Dead fans and it’s available now for $69.99(USD) at ThinkGeek. Now all they need to do is make a terrycloth sheriff’s hat to go with it.

Your favorite bearded drag queen and international superstar is back with a new video, and it’s absolutely breathtaking.

Conchita Wurst, winner of the 2014 Eurovision song contest, released “Heroes” this week, the first single since her victory. The song is slow but powerful and showcases Wurst’s impressive range of vocals.

Earlier this month, Wurst traveled to the United Nations to join U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon where the pair delivered a message about tolerance. They advocated an end to homophobia and transphobia, with Wurst claiming that he dreams of “a future where we don’t have to talk about sexual orientation or the color of your skin.”

Check out the video for “Heroes” above.

Listening to Martin Dempsey speak over the past months, one might conclude that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is uncomfortable waging war in Iraq under the White House banner of ‘No Boots on the Ground.’

Time and again this fall, Dempsey has said U.S. ground troops may be required to take on the Islamic State militias in Iraq, perhaps in offensive operations with Iraqi forces as forward advisers or spotters for U.S. airstrikes (“I’m not predicting,” he temporized at a congressional hearing Nov. 13, but added: “We’re certainly considering it”). The White House has drawn a seemingly harder line against recommitting Americans to combat in Iraq.

If Dempsey, a soldier with a long and distinguished career, cannot in good conscience preside over a military campaign he feels will be ultimately doomed, should he quietly (or noisily) resign?

The question is already being raised as the officer corps once again struggles to define a professional soldier’s responsibility in a democracy. Military officers swear allegiance to the Constitution, not to any particular administration. They are expected to offer advice to civilian leaders, then smartly execute whatever decisions are made. The idea is enshrined in Samuel Huntington’s classic 1957 book, The Soldier and the State, and codified in military regulations such as this one from the Army: “Army professionals properly confine their advisory role to the policymaking process and do not engage publicly in policy advocacy or dissent.”

But it’s not that simple, argues Don M. Snider, a senior military ethicist, in a new essay published by the prestigious Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. A three-tour combat veteran of Vietnam who’s held staff positions at the Joint Chiefs and White House, Snider is a retired professor emeritus at West Point who now teaches ethics at the War College, and has wrestled with the issue of professional military responsibility for decades.

Snider frames the issue like this: How should military professionals “maintain the necessary trust of the American people, while at the same time disagreeing in an appropriate manner with civilian leaders who, by our Constitution, rightly exercise authority over them?”

The issue is resurfacing now, Snider writes, as military leaders express frustration with the Obama administration’s airpower-only strategy against ISIS. But is it okay, Snider asks, for military professionals to “dissent in a public way — including resignation or retirement — from an administration’s policy that they believe to be so incorrect as to be ineffective, potentially endangering the Republic’s security?”

There is precedent, including the 2007 “Revolt of the Generals,” when some two dozen retired general officers broke with President George W. Bush over the Iraq war. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta issued stinging criticisms of President Obama’s national security policies, but only after they retired from office.

Yet the perils of waiting until retirement were underscored in 2006, when retired Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold wrote an article for Time magazine explaining his deep regret for having failed earlier to openly challenge the Bush administration and Pentagon officials over the Iraq war.

Newbold had been operations officer for the Joint Staff during the planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and fought with then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top generals for what he considered an unnecessary and poorly planned military campaign. He quietly resigned in late 2002 and kept silent for four years — “long enough,” he finally wrote in the 2006 article. “I regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined” to launch the war in Iraq. “I am driven to action now by the mistakes and misjudgments of the White House and the Pentagon, and by my many painful visits to our military hospitals.

“A leader’s responsibility is to give voice to those who can’t — or don’t — have the opportunity to speak,” he concluded.

Bad idea, writes Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver in an essay last month in Foreign Policy. “Advocating resignation and protest like this is bad counsel and would do much to undermine healthy civil-military relations if it ever became accepted practice among senior officers.”

Indeed, for a White House that has had uneasy relations with the uniformed military, a principled, public resignation by Dempsey would detonate in the superheated political atmosphere of the capital like a nuclear warhead.

Dempsey, of course, has not publicly shared his deepest convictions about the best way to deal with ISIS. He has gamely supported in public the Obama’s policy of seeking to “destroy” ISIS over the long term with a combination of coalition air strikes, training and arming Iraqi and other fighters, and international pressure to shut down the militias’ access to money, resources and recruits. U.S. military leaders have sometimes chafed at that sort of indirect approach, preferring instead to use sufficient force for a decisive victory with minimal risk to American forces.

While Dempsey has said he would recommend U.S. ground combat troops if necessary, the White House suggests that no such recommendation would be accepted (“That’s a no,” Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said on the PBS documentary, The Rise of ISIS, which aired in late October). Last week President Obama did say he would consider using ground troops but in dire circumstances — if, for instance, ISIS was discovered to have “gotten possession of a nuclear weapon…”

As true professionals, military officers must be able to exercise moral autonomy to do what’s right, not merely to practice blind obedience, Snider concludes. But when it is permissible to use that moral authority remains unclear.

Are senior officers required to support policies with which they disagree? Can there be official dissent without insubordination? The question is not an easy one. But it persists.

When it comes to smartphones, Easter eggs normally mean a hidden drawer of emoji, or maybe the ability to make the voice control sing you a song. But in the case of the Nexus 6, it means that there’s a hidden LED notification light, fully functioning, but deactivated and hidden from view by Motorola.

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