Dick Cheney walks into a bar

A book I should be reading, according to two people whose tastes I respect-- my oldest brother Jay, a retired banker, and Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist, is Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Per Cent Doctrine."

I had the privilege of a brief friendship with Ron when we were both reporters at the St. Petersburg Times in the mid-80s.  Ron went on to an illustrious career at the Wall Street Journal and then as an author, beginning with "A Hope in the Unseen," based on a 1995 Pulitzer Prize winning series for the Journal. In recent years, Ron's reporting behind the firewall of the Bush spin machine published in magazines and books has been a thorn in the Bush administration's side.

Besides the "must read" advice from my brother and Rich, there's another interesting reaction I stumbled upon. This one came from John Allen Paulos, a mathematician committed to making the science of numbers accessible to those, like me, who saw in journalism a refuge from math. Oh hell, basic arithmetic can be a challenge.

The first weekend of every month, Paulos demystifies math in his aptly named  column, "Who's Counting?," published on ABCNews.com. In his latest, Paulos takes on what Suskind terms as Vice-President Cheney's "One Per Cent Doctrine" from a mathematician's perspective. Paulos writes:

Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' … Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."

Ron Suskind writes that Vice President Dick Cheney forcefully stated that the war on terror empowered the Bush administration to act without the need for evidence or extensive analysis."

Buttressed by that single digit, Paulos considers the 1 percent rule in other contexts, some which support the notion and others which carry unthinkable conclusions. He continues:

"There is a complex interplay between an act's possible consequences, evidence, and the probabilities involved. And sometimes, of course, the probability justifying action of some sort is even less than 1 percent. Vaccines are routinely given, for example, even for diseases whose risk of being contracted is much less than 1 percent.

That being granted, the simplistic doctrine of "if at least 1 percent, then act" is especially frightening in international conflicts, not least because the number of threats misconstrued (by someone or other) to meet the 1 percent threshold is huge and the consequences of military action are so terrible and irrevocable.

But what if, Paulos wonders:

"A young man is in a bar and another man gives him a hard stare. If the young Cheneyite feels threatened and believes the probability to be at least 1 percent that the other man will shoot him, then he has a right to preemptively shoot him in "self-defense."

"Or an older woman visits her Cheneyite doctor who, finding that the woman has suffered from a sore throat and fatigue for months, orders that she be put on chemotherapy since the likelihood of cancer is in his opinion at least 1 percent. Further tests, he might argue, would take too long."

The bottom line for Paulos: 

"Whether the issue is war, science, or a myriad of other issues, probability and evidence should play a critical role."

Even somebody who bombed on the math portion on their SATs can figure that one out.

(Source for book cover and author photo: ronsuskind.com)

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And yes, I do remember the criminal Agnew. He was as bad as Nixon, maybe worse. To quote Hunter S. Thompson: He was so crooked he had to screw his pants on in the morning.

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