'Knock It Off' on Health Care: Firing Line

When I was a fighter pilot we would brief our "Training Rules" before getting into our jets to conduct training missions.

We considered these rules written in blood, and we strictly adhered to them. Early in the history of air-to-air training there weren't too many guidelines for training missions and the mishap rate reflected this. Midair collisions and crashes caused by insufficient fuel were common, as were crashes caused by pilots flying "outside the envelope" and losing control of their planes.

Today we still lose an occasional aircraft due to a training rule violation, but the mishap rate is a fraction of what it used to be.

If you observed an aircraft violating a training rule, or you violated one yourself, you called "Knock it off!" over the radio. As soon as those three words were heard, everything stopped. Red and blue aircraft returned to their starting locations and the unsafe situation was sorted out. If the situation wasn't too serious, the exercise continued. If not, everyone returned to base. Either way, the violation was thoroughly debriefed to figure out what happened and how it could be avoided in the future.

Tomorrow when the president speaks he should call "Knock it off!" on this health care exercise. There are too many red and blue aircraft in the same piece of sky and I've seen numerous training rule violations on both sides.

Americans tend to distrust the government, usually for good reason, and the administration has sufficiently clouded the discussion. Americans are also a forgiving people. We like when someone stands up and says "I messed up." This is the sign of a true leader. Bill Clinton learned this the hard way in the Lewinsky affair. Everyone knew he wasn't telling the truth, and had he admitted his indiscretion earlier the country wouldn't have been subjected to the red-faced finger-waving and the not-too-genuine mea culpa.