Experience Is The Name Everyone Gives To John McCain's Mistakes.

Noonan:

You know what he has in his favor. He's gentleman Johnny McCain, hero, maverick. He has more knowledge on national defense in his pinky than the others will have, after four years in the White House, in their entire bodies. He's the one who should be answering the phone at 3 a.m

S'FUNNY how things work out sometimes. For example, I doubt Peggy Noonan had an inkling that she was writing this on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the siege of Dien Bien Phu, in which a Western force led by a former POW and victim of torture, which was executing the strategy conceived by a career intelligence officer and veteran of two World Wars, was humiliated by an insurgent force led by a guy who'd been a journalist and a school teacher.

And it's not as if this is a minor curiosity; the minute the French realized les couilles were caught in a wringer they paid a visit to the man who'd been bankrolling their noble recolonization efforts, who just happens to have been the most knowledgeable modern President of the United States on national defense by at least a factor of ten, one Dwight David Eisenhower. With the able assistance of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man whose experience almost matched his own, Ike decided the United States would undertake to prop up the shabby remnants of an effete French empire after it had been defeated. Operation Vulture! And towards that end we aided their puppet emperor in selecting as Prime Minister a thuggish religious zealot whose murderous treatment of his own people made Saddam Hussein look like Marcus Aurelius.

I suppose we--let alone the Vietnamese--ought to be grateful that Ike's experience didn't result in the use of tactical nuclear weapons that Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford, the highly-experienced chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged on him.

(Other curio collectors might want to note that the White House meeting with the French chief of staff took place six months after these geniuses overthrew Mosaddeq.)


Experience seems to have taught John McCain some of the same lessons: that it's better to placate domestic crackpots than confront cold realities, better to have an international bogeyman on hand than a sound strategic doctine, better to win elections than tell the truth. That sort of experience runs you about a nickel a gross, plus deposit; having a lot of it is like cornering the market on ragweed.

Y'know, I Read The Thing Over Three Times, And I'll Be Damned, But That's What He Said.

David Brooks, "The Rank-Link Imbalance." March 14

HEY, I'm the first to admit there are some things no one should do for money:

They go through the oboe practice, soccer camp, homework marathon childhood. Their parent-teacher conferences are like mini-Hall of Fame enshrinements as all gather to worship at the flame of their incipient success. In high school, they enter their Alpha Geekdom. They rack up great grades and develop that coating of arrogance that forms on those who know that in the long run they will be more successful than the beauties and jocks who get dates.

Then they go into one of those fields like law, medicine or politics, where a person’s identity is defined by career rank. They develop the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names; the subtle skills of effective deference; the willingness to stand too close to other men while talking and touching them in a manly way.

For some time I've been toying with the idea that a strong undercurrent of our present social troubles is traceable to the collapse of the hegemonic Freudianism of the 30s through the 50s. On the one hand it was by and large a colossal mound of horseshit with a generous dollop of sexism and racism on top, but on the other was still more useful than the idiocy that tried to move into the resultant vacuum even though it was obvious that "vacuum" was both an improvement and unlikely to be improved upon. I think this especially at times when concepts such as "Projection" seem like just the ticket.  I mean, you gotta squirm a little as David Brooks, Republican insider, despoiler of forests, visiting professor at Duke, and television intellectual, pretends to be Joe Lunchcart clucking--more in sorrow than anger!--at the ruins of the Temple of Ozzy Mandus XIV, even if you're laughing your ass off at the time.  

That quote comes as part of a prissy little column on Eliot Spitzer that, among its other notable non-achievements, manages not to mention Eliot Spitzer, nor the high price of high-priced call girls. This is apparently meant to convince the reader that Brooks' water-added-ham-fisted pop psychoanalysis is the result of some serious musing on Our Times. It doesn't.

(Contrariwise, the smart boys on the "Left" used the opportunity to ponder Whether Prostitution Should Be Legalized, leading me, at least, to hope the practice of combining the temporalty of headline news with one's tiniest cerebral events continues into warmer weather, as it might provide us with the recipe for Matt's Favorite Potato Salad.)

Call me a skeptic, but I find it impossible to believe that such a large segment of the typing public is so utterly without feck when it comes to Sex and What People Might Do To Get Some. I mean, c'mon, I personally understand Larry Craig as far as that goes, though I wouldn't want to be seated next to him. Maybe the Young Guns of The Blogging House are still young and gunish enough to hope (irrationally, to judge by appearances) that a free sugar donut might fall out of this evening's sky and land on their dicks, but Brooks is as middle-aged as I. Oboe practice and grade competition and Alpha Male Bullshitism are not required to explain Eliot Spitzer's taste for pussy. It's pussy. Millions of Americans of any or all genders and every socio-economic strata enjoy some on a regular basis, whether or not they played soccer at the academy. For chrissakes.  None of these guys has ever gone to a strip club (which, to us, is a hell of a lot more perverted than paying for some close companionship)?  

At least with Freud we paid equal attention to what sort of pervert pretended he didn't understand what the attraction was.

Back Home Again

• I cannot tell you how satisfying it was to vote for Andre Carson in Tuesday's special election, because unless you live here and talk to white people--especially but not exclusively those from other, mostly-white districts--you cannot fully appreciate the ugly racism directed at his late grandmother, whom he now replaces for the rest of her term. In the 2002 county sheriff election, as the Democratic candidate was about to become the first African-American elected to the post, his opponent not only circulated fliers of him that cropped in Julia Carson (and Bill Clinton), but used a photo of her which had been xeroxed so many times she it made her look like an alleged Bigfoot sighting.

So, as you might have already guessed, this then was the election in which the Indianapolis Racist Star's political columnist Matt Tulley chose to complain about negative political ads two days before the special election. Andre Carson's negative political ads. Which consisted of a mailer, one of four, that characterized Jon Elrod, his Republican opponent, of wanting to privatize Social Security when, in fact, Elrod only suggested younger workers be allowed to opt out. This leads to a charge that Carson was playing on voters' fears, a charge which is remarkably forgotten when Elrod--or Tully himself--blather about the System's "impending insolvency."

• No progress in the World's Third Worst State Legislature™ on my proposal to begin statewide comprehensive testing of edumacation reporters and local school boards, but plenty of new ammo. Last week what seemed like the first forty-seven minutes of the nightly teleprompter-reading festival was taken over by that morning's mysterious disappearance of several Indianapolis Public School buses. And if you'll quit getting ahead of me I'll explain that, by the time the story aired the explanation for the no-shows--a sort of work stoppage by contract drivers for a private contractor of bus services--was well understood, and had been for hours, but it took them five minutes of This Could Have Been A Scandal-mongering to get around to spitting that out.

This is a refutation of sorts of the idea that Faux Balanced News is simply a matter of professional standards occasionally taken to extremes. Bus Drivers Walk Off Job simply didn't have a high enough Oomph Factor, so the story was told in the same aleatoric Bill Burroughs Meets Raymond Queneau Meets Standard Hollywood Potboiler Trailer Meets Junior High School Student With Issues And Very Sharp Scissors narrative technique they use when the local weather isn't scary enough and they have to switch to radar from the Great Plains, or Hudson Bay, or the Cape of Good Hope.

And this was bad enough, but when it finally ended (just after, by the way, shots of their reporter being ordered off the property of the contractor, as though they'd been thwarted trying to get the facts and so had been forced to extemporize), they ran it right into the story of a middle-school student arrested for bringing a knife to school. And the Knife Graphic was done by someone whose sole familiarity with cutlery comes from watching Halloween and its dozen sequels, and the student is identified as attending Custer Baker Middle School. And my Poor Wife and I look the same question at each other, namely, Where th' fuck is that? And the answer turns out to be "forty-five minutes away in Franklin, Indiana, Where You Can Refuse To Stand For The Pledge Provided You've Done Your Legal Research". And I found that out by googling it. The teleprompterette sorta left that minor detail hanging, like if you imagined this was IPS's fault as well it was jake with her.  

Several suburban school boards, meanwhile, have taken to open competition for the coveted title of Miss Incompetence of 2008. In Perry Township they couldn't figure out a way to discipline a 27-year veteran teacher who assigned a book with Very Bad Words in it without turning it into a cause célèbre; and up in Fishers ("The Selma of the North, Except With Traffic and Reservoir-front Property") they fired the superintendent in an emergency session--necessitating a six-figure buyout--and then had to come back a week later with a new explanation for why they did so. And the second one involved the fact that some of her staff (whom the Racist Star referred to as "underlings") were threatening to boycott a day of school because she was snotty with them, or the lounge didn't have a cappuccino machine, or something. Mind you, that was the revised explanation. Democracy simply does not work.

• But there may yet be some life in the old Faux Balance nag, as last week's sudden Republican love-fest on Property Tax Reform switching pockets to pick was described as "a grandstanding move according to some Democrats". As well as any objective observers that might have happened by, since what the Republican minority in the House agreed to was somewhat overshadowed by the fact that they were in the minority.

Senate Republicans, a Very Small Governor, and the minority House members got together to say how much they all supported the Guv's plan, which they'd had two months to do by that point, but suddenly History comes with an eraser.   In other words, at some point ("A") on March 7 last the Republicans had not held a photo-op presser on the matter, and at some later point ("A+n") they had, and the only difference was that your watch battery had wound down some imperceptible amount, and yet it was news.  

We are, thankfully, just hours away from completing the full gestation of the Property Tax pig, which the local media has been, with apologies to David "Homey" Shuster, pimping since last summer, and breathlessly reporting the imminent passage of corrective legislation since the first day of the session last January, which not even they could have possibly believed. And the arrival of that happy little bundle will mark the beginning of the countdown to the arrival of this year's property tax bills, and voter recognition that they're not appreciably lower in most cases, whereupon the whole matter will be dropped.

• Good news, though, in that despite more snow than average we managed to complete the clean-up of the Water Co. Canal downtown just in time to dye the thing green to celebrate St. Patrick, the original mythical Irishman.

Happy Birthday

The Truman Doctrine

b. March 12, 1947

You Heard It Here Last

• If there's some simple-minded answer for why Barack Obama stands athwart the Democratic party's nominating process today--some reason not related to his popularity as a candidate, say--then let me suggest to Ms Ferraro that the best place to look might be the massively sucking black hole at its center dating to the party's capitulation to the Reagan mystique, its abandonment of every principle save the principle of getting re-elected, and its failure--during a period when Ms Ferraro herself was nominally the second-most powerful person in the party--to distinguish itself from the clinically-insane bunch across the aisle to the extent that an entire generation of Obama supporters now imagine partisanship to be a two-way traffic jam. I'm no Obama fan, but he's managed to turn keynote-speaker/rising star buzz into a viable candidacy, which must to count for something and in fact counts for a lot. Compare Harold Ford, Evan Bayh, Mario Cuomo, and Mo Udall, who didn't, as well as Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan, who had no chance.

• I've been busy--I'll bring a doctor's note if you insist--so is there a reward out for the first person who can name a single solitary patriotic thing Jonah Goldberg has ever done in his nearly forty years of caloric intake?

He Paid Up, Right? And She's Not Dead? Okay, So What's The Problem?

I KNOW I speak for most Americans this morning when I convey my profound shock upon learning, yesterday, that there's only one "L" in "Eliot Spitzer".

This sort of thing, however, can't possibly surprise anyone: Christopher Beam in Slate's We-Put-The-'Conventional'-In-Conventional Wisdom snoozefest, the "Trailhead":

One problem, though: Addressing the Spitzer flap raises the ghosts of scandals past, namely Monica Lewinsky. Clinton has so far managed during this campaign to avoid public mention of her husband’s diddling. If the Spitzer controversy drags out, it could become a painful reminder of the final White House years. (Of course, you could argue that it would make people sympathize with her all over again.)

Once again, the mind would reel, if the mind hadn't long since shut down and begun consuming its own proteins.

Okay, fine, it's news. If you live in New York it's even real news. If you're a Republican, and you've been a consistent voice against corruption, public misconduct and private miscreancy, and if you've never uttered the phrase "limousine liberal", "class warfare", or remarked on the size of John Edwards' home or the price of his haircuts, have at it. In other words, if you're a Republican, shut up. You ceded Sex to the Democratic party long ago in exchange for the right to stuff yourselves at the public trough. If Spitzer had been caught manipulating the futures market you'd have something. If he'd dedicated his gubernatorial campaign to eliminating prostitution, or to bringing down high prices, you'd have something. As it is, he's a horndog who got caught.

All three nets ran the story first last night (I didn't actually check; my Poor Wife was at the controls, so three channels in ten seconds was something approaching slow motion), and we settled on ABC, which executed a toss about three minutes in (after the entire story had been laid out, and after they'd aired Spitzer's comments) apparently in order to show a picture that included Spitzer and Hillary Clinton. The were part of a line. They might have been marching for Breast Cancer Awareness or taking part in an amateur production of A Chorus Line for all I know. Or for all ABC cared. It was obvious they were in their element.

Still, it's an ill wind that blows any politician no good and doesn't provide me with a least a bitter chuckle, so here's mine. The wine store down the street from me used to be owned by a husband and wife team. They were each third-or-fourth generation money and acted like it, and they'd bought the place--formerly a neighborhood package store--in late middle age because they thought it would be "fun". They began turning it into a wine specialty shop on the grounds that this would keep the riff-raff out. They were, indeed, the sort of people who used "riff-raff" without irony, and who referred to their intended client base as "The Quality".

This was the late 70s, and the beginning of my wine collecting phase, so I frequented the place, because the nascent wine boom was not due to hit Indianapolis for another eight years and it was one of the few local spots where "Wine Section" didn't mean "Where do you keep the Gallo jugs?" The wife was the Expert, while the husband watched the books, and it was obvious even in my fairly green connoisseurship that she didn't know what th' fuck she was talking about and had turned a pastime of bullshitting about stuff she didn't know with other clueless snobs into a second career. So I took to coming in at times when she wouldn't be there, and I got to know the staff pretty well, and they loved to relay tales of their evil inbred masters.

Now, the husband--you might want to sit down--was a rock-ribbed Republican, goddamned-Democrats-steal-my-money type who once made a major production out of removing the appliance bulb from the EXIT sign when he learned he wasn't covered by regulations requiring it be lit. And one day the major story in the Indianapolis Racist Star concerns a local grocery magnate who's been caught by the feds skimming proceeds from his pop machines. And he was caught because he'd opened two accounts for his gilt and he put more than $10,000 in each.

(Sorry to interrupt the hilarity, but we would like to note that Spitzer didn't run afoul of the law, unless you, like ABC News, believe we're still enforcing the Mann Act; he ran afoul of financial institutions being "encouraged" to report whatever they consider to be attempts to skirt the law. Aaron Nimzowitsch, the great chess Grandmaster, once complained to officials about his opponent's smoking. He came back ten minutes later to complain again. "But he stopped smoking," they said. "Yes," Nimzowitsch replied, "but he looks as if he wants to.")

So the guy at the register is astonished when the Boss starts talking about the deal with one of the Quality who'd stopped by, and seems really critical of it, repeating, "How could he have done it?" over and over.

"I thought, jeez, this is a side of him I'd never seen," the register guy tells me. "Maybe he'd turned over a new leaf or this scared the shit out of him. And then he says, 'He had to know you only put $9000 in a single account.' "

Your Moment Of Schiavo.

NO. Really.

I don't get around much, and I'm used to the cool kids not letting me in on their plans, and I've been scrambling of late to get some things done before there's a horrible mixup during knee surgery and I wind up with a baboon heart. Plus there's nothing on this earth that could make me a Kos reader, so just in case everybody's already talked this to death I'm sorry, but via brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson I find I'm a couple days late for this:


Yes, the Clinton campaign has turned Barack Obama into a black man! Because, I guess, a considerable number of people who vote in Democratic primaries were unaware of the fact.

The unspeakable, worse-than-Hitler, Mussolini, and Jonah Goldberg-combined racism of every Democrat who does not support Barack Obama--and, frankly, we're beginning to suspect that mere support is not enough--was proven shortly afterwards when The Kos himself floated to earth bearing an email with the professional testimony from a guy who works as a copywriter. No, really.

Enough's enough. The Democratic party has borne the brunt of overt racism in this country from  before your grandparents were old enough to vote, and it explicitly created a forty-year-and-still-ongoing electoral hole for itself by doing what was right on race, rather than what was politically expedient. Are you simply too stupid to realize the import of your suggestion here, or are you all just really high? It's a goddam motherfucking insult to people whose shoelaces you aren't fit to tie, to people who marched and bled and died to fight domestic terrorism because it was right to do so, not because it gave them a feeling of superiority to buttress empty little lives.  They struggled, for decades, not one election season, in places where the simple fact of their pigmentation would have led Barack Obama's parents to find shallow graves. This is the part of the legacy of the 20th century Democratic party that used to make it something one could be proud to belong to.

Q&A.

ANONYMOUS, in comments:

When did Clinton depants Russert? During what debate or interview?

The one we like to think of  as a Great Moment in American political history is from last August's debate when Mr. Sharp As A Spud set what he must have imagined was a brilliant trap by quoting An Unnamed Guest on his show favoring a Presidential exception to a ban on torture, going for a response first to Senator Obama, then Senator Biden, then to Hillary, who echoed them in disagreeing with the sentiment. At which point Timmy reveals--ho ho!--that unnamed guest was none other than William Jefferson Clinton!  To which Senator Clinton replied, "Well, he's not standing here. I am."

And, with apologies to the pudding we're about to over-egg, this is so far superior to Reagan's overpraised (and slightly misquoted) "I paid for this microphone" bit that we're obliged to ask why it's not even more famous, other than the fact that it was directed at a Big Media Star while Ronnie was just lecturing a small-town reporter (IIRC). (Not to mention the fact that the line just doesn't scan: it has all the charm and wit of your half-drunk father telling you you'll eat peas and like it as long as you're living under his roof, and it was at the service--this is sometimes forgotten--of the Reagan campaign seeking to toss all the other candidates off the stage excepting George H.W. Bush. )

First, Russert, with the NBC research division behind him and nothing to do but concoct questions, comes up with what is clearly designed as a Gotcha! Leaving aside the question of whether this is what Mr. Russert is supposed to be doing, we still run into a couple of problems right out of the box. The first is that Bill Clinton is quoted out of context; he raised the Ticking Time Bomb scenario in order to note that both the President and military command already possess the right to use extreme measures under the stilted circumstances, and he went on to deny it supported the case for what he called "sweeping authority." So either Russert willfully misused the quote, or he doesn't know the difference between a declarative statement and a figure of speech, and either instance suggests he ought to be in the upholstery business. And the reasonable presumption that crack NBC staffers were helping him along means it's likely someone along the line recognized the discrepancy, so either they're all dishonest or the staff is afraid to look Miss Ross Mr. Potato Head in the eyes.  (Potato.  Eyes.  Some times I tickle myself.)

Second, this is a gotcha? Assuming there really was some yawning maw of philosophical difference on display, what would that have to do with anything? If we are sufficiently Clinton averse we might say, Well, she's lying! Because Bill already gave the game away! Except if we are sufficient Clinton averse we don't need that sort of thing, and we believe their marriage is the greatest sham in the history of Western Civ anyway. The reasonably sane are left to conclude that the intention seen in the most favorable light possible for Russert, suggests he was simply trawling for half-baked headline material.

The only basis for what he did is deception. Granted, the man sells used cars for a living, but we might ask that he transcend that sort of thing for a single evening with the direction of a troubled country at stake. But then, look at the question again. An "unnamed guest, ho ho!" The clever trap is predicated on the prey missing the bait. Is it conceivable Mrs. Clinton could do so? Only if distracted by the arduousness of the serious task before her, now being moderated with unserious buffoonery; such distractedness would amount to nothing but might possibly generate Press dumbassery. Were we in that situation we'd begin our answer with, "Russert, you shitbag, who do you think you're trying to kid?" But Clinton waited long enough to let Timmy slam the trap closed on his own foot, and then gutted him. "He isn't standing here. I am." is superior to any of the twenty-seven other ways I can think of to say that, and I'm just typing away in a basement, with Russertesque time on my hands.  

Free Curmudgeonry.

• Why is it only the Youth are allowed to construct Official Lists of post-dated cultural jetsam? "Shot of Jager" (see, or don't, Andrew Sullivan ) is now officially as dead as the goldfish in Walt "Clyde" Frasier's platform shoes. Because I say so. You hear me, punk? It is freaking inexcusable for a forty-five year old man to be writing about quaffing execrable alcoholic beverages by referring to them by their frat-boy nicknames. In fact, it's inexcusable to write about slugging any spiritous potable which has a frat-boy nickname. This doesn't mean you can't employ it, if you wish; drink raspberry-peach merlot or Purple Passion, for all I care. In fact, do me a favor and drink a lot more of them. But in writing about it, act like you've learned by this point in life that taste and experience matter, and that they are something either to be acquired or rejected, not flouted cluelessly.  Surely this would not be the first time you'd lied to the world about something just for appearance's sake. 

• What Tom Watson said:

Let's look at the scope of Hillary Clinton's victory. She'd lost 11 straight contests to Barack Obama, the most beloved candidate in either party since at least the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan and possibly since FDR's reelection in 1936. Obama's campaign outspent Clinton in Texas and Ohio by four to one, according to some estimates. His field operation was the stuff of organizing legend, and his big rallies made hers seem like church suppers. His online fundraising doubled hers. He led in all the national polls, and her leads in those big states had evaporated. Her imminent departure from the race was declared.

Hillary Clinton was laying on the canvas and the ref was pretty much at nine.

And unlike John "The Amazing Comeback Kid" McCain, she did this without the luxury of waiting for everyone else to lose, yet I didn't hear a bit of coverage which played that up. Then again, I avoided MSNBC. Maybe Tweety was gushing all night.

• That's not curmudgeonly, exactly, but we're building our way to a complete halt. I found it rather notable that most Clinton Bashing Progressives didn't miss a beat in defeat. "On the one hand, [Ohio] was a big win for her," notes young Ezra, the most ambidextrous of bloggers; on the other, "[her] trends in Ohio weren't that promising." This was demonstrated by the fact that Senator Obama cut into her lead once he started campaigning there, a remarkable occurrence assuming this is the first time you've ever looked.  Matt tips the boater to CNN for revealing that Clinton cornered the racist vote.   And yes, that was what he did.  Josh, befitting his greater experience, waits a decent interval before urging us to return the campaign to the issues, namely, the question of how much we all hate Mark Penn.

Or maybe he just has a lower tolerance for Jager shots and slept late.

• The more I read incontinent primary coverage the more I've come to appreciate the vast majority of the electorate, which couldn't fucking care less and yet, somehow, winds up being no more idiotic than the punditry.

• "This is my real hair. If it were a wig it would look much more natural."
--Quentin Crisp

Okay, I'll say it: Dante makes me sick, * and Barack Obama is overrated as a public speaker. And Will Ferrell making fun of 1970s hairdos is beginning to wear a little thin.

Modulate! The microphone is there to take care of volume concerns. You don't have to worry about being heard over the El anymore.

I was watching him the other night thinking, y'know, I'm sure the campaign thinks he's much better on the stump, since he's a little gaffe-prone in a smaller setting, but I think he's a lot more effective using his inside voice; the best I've ever seen him was on The Daily Show.   I'm not saying he's not impressive, au contraire, but that I think he's benefitted from the judging standards being set by people who are more familiar with Bob Barker than Martin Luther King (who, since we're speaking of standards, C. L. Franklin famously referred to as "a baby preacher").

Call it the Quentin Crisp Effect: Senator Clinton, no better than mediocre, over time begins to seem more real on the grounds that she isn't any better. And Senator Obama begins to sound like a guy who watched JFK shout "Ask not..." too many times for his own good.

This campaign has seen two moments I've waited for ever since Reagan made his reputation through paying for a microphone. One was Hillary depantsing Tim Russert. It doesn't matter that it didn't fold him up for good and pitch him in the dumpster; what matters is that it should have, and Russert knows it, and that it proved, however fleetingly, that our best politicians are 20x smarter than those guys, even if the rest of 'em bring the average way down.

The second was Senator Obama's reply to McCain's "al-Qaeda in Iraq" comment. One, here's the sort of thing the blogosphere makes plain, over and over, without making a dent in the CW, and two, it was long past time for a Democrat to start talking that way. And then Obama hits the all-caps key: I HAVE SOME NEWS FOR JOHN MCCAIN.... Dude, you didn't have to make sure he could hear it from the podium.

_____________
* Lope de Vega, on being assured that he was dying.

More Pantsuit Politics

Barack Obama, the Tito Jackson of hope.


John McCain shamelessly panders to the Noel Coward 

Lounging Pajamas in the Afternoon set.

You Do The Math.

MoDo: "Duel of Historical Guilts." March 5

WELL, that's settled. Maureen Dowd does write her own headlines.

Correction: That should read Pulitzer Prize-winning author Maureen Dowd writes her own headlines.

Okay, look: we are so far beyond the point of saying Dowd is a worthless gibberer with the taste and consistency of wet cardboard that I've lost track of what exponent goes with "cliché" when describing the sentiment. I believe we may even be beyond the point of wondering whether the language of Shakespeare, Swift, and Raymond Chandler is sufficient to do her real justice, and we know the psychiatric literature avails us nothing. I believe all that's left us is to wonder how many dead hookers and live donkeys there are in her blackmail photo files. We already know it's not enough.

While we're at it someone might want to consider whether there's some set of numbers between the natural and the integers, since without occupying negative space Dowd manages to crawl under Zero on a regular basis, with room to spare, even as we reset Zero to accommodate her previous efforts.  Go take a look at her freaking archive. The last time she wrote a column about anything other than Hillary Clinton was thirty-eight days ago, that one being a Thanks for breaking the story! post-mortem of the Giuliani campaign--a campaign she'd covered in a single column to that point--that mentioned "Clinton" nearly as often as "Rudy". Is there another columnist anywhere with that sort of record? Is there anyone who's been so completely left in the dust by this internets thing? The worst Clinton-bashing bloggers I know occasionally write about something else--even if they seem to share the notion that Senator Clinton ought to avoid saying anything that supports her own candidacy--and they turn out copy every day, and no innocent trees die in the process. The woman is the Taco Bell of columnists, except some people actually swallow Taco Bell's stuff. Today's combination of beans, cheese, and roadkill skunk begins:

Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don’t like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism.

Go ahead. Google it and find out how many of them aren't Maureen Dowd.

They feel that women have moved past that men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary’s campaign has lately revived with a vengeance.

Can't wait 'til "They" start callin' 'em "Mustache Petes".

Look, I'm sorry for quoting her once, let alone twice. But, one, MoDo and I are the same age. (Actually, she's two years older but looks much better, because I've spent forty-some years trying to do Math and she doesn't have to bother.) I have no idea what she was doing in the early Seventies, but I was trying to nail Feminists, which gives me a certain species of expertise in the matter. Surprisingly few of them thought I was a pig, though fewer still let me in their pantsuits. In fact, I don't remember any of them actually wearing pantsuits (which I suspect may just be anti-Hillary invective), or Zoot suits, or bustles. I think it was mostly jeans and dresses. You know, like normal people when they aren't dressing for something.  I don't recall any of them demeaning entire classes of people by connecting them with some twenty-years-out-of-date fashion trend, Junior-high style, either.

I don't recall any woe, either, beyond the natural if buoyant gloominess that comes from being in your early twenties and taking a hard look at your world and your culture. Au-fucking-contraire; what I recall was a spirited determination to Call This White European Male Shit out, and an optimistic sense that a rotten structure would crumble from common sense resistance, and that any shoring up it received on the Times' Op-Ed pages from hopeless misogynists would come from men. Ah, youth.

It's bad enough that valuable Times real estate is given over to Dowd so she can work out her personal problems. But it's beyond forgivable that those problems center on the six years following and two years before the first appearance of pubic hair.

Dowd knows better, but the loss of one's mind is an absolute excuse (as well as a good excuse to stop publishing). But if any of "today's Feminists" are tempted to judge their predecessors according to hairstyle let them hang their heads in shame. The Seventies are not exactly running neck-and-neck with the Icelandic Sagas in the Mists of Time race. The evidence of how (much more) bigoted society was against women a generation ago is all around you. It still has the power to astound me, and I lived through it the first time. And the idea that we've somehow transcended it for all time, along with whalebone stays and shag carpeting, is repudiated regularly. On the pages of the goddam New York Times.

The Mick Jagger Of American Conservatism

PANEGYRIC has its place; being forced to sit through it while maintaining a hypocritical silence is, like the occasional cold shower, not exactly the worst thing in the world. Bill Buckley himself waited over a week to slag the deceased Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, his major rival for the crown of Preeminent Psychopathic Chronicler of the 1960s in American Letters. But then noblesse oblige perched on Buckley's shoulders as naturally as the shoulders of those Pee Wee Herman suits of his.   

(It's interesting to note that Buckley and Thompson were not just polar opposites politically, but theatrically as well; one was left wondering how much Hunter just made up, while with Bill it was a question of just what, and how much, he was managing to keep bottled up with that twitchy ticciness. One always wondered--and I think I owe apologies to Roy here--whether a particularly bad performance, like his being depantsed   by Noam Chomsky, say, meant that his body servant would receive a particularly strenuous lashing that evening, or if that was just how he got himself up for a performance in the first place.)

The faster we're carried, the less time we have! my townsman Mr. Tarkington observed--in 1918--without ever dreaming that just over a lifetime later that would apply to how fast we hit the remote button when there wasn't a shirtless moron swallowing a Madagascar cockroach onscreen. But my quiet contemplation  and display of good manners (okay, by Internet standards, and, okay, except for that Vidal quote) was rewarded as first David Brooks, then Bill Kristol, turned out to have nothing to say about the man, and instead spent a total of over 1500 words worth of prime New York real estate reminiscing about Sophomore Year. (Which, I almost forgot, manages to make Kristol mention his 1970 prep school graduation, which sorta blows that whole "I was too young for Vietnam thing", huh?) 

So why is that? Neither the Last Cold Warrior Still Wobbling, nor the Libertarian AV Nerd, mentions a single book of Buckley's. In the dozen or so journalistic eulogies I read only George Eff Will mentioned anything other than God and Man at Yale, and that was something his quote boy dug out from the introduction to an essay collection. Most left it at "nearly fifty books", occasionally tossing in a discreet reference to his spy novels without mention of their dreadfulness. This, then, is the Father of Modern American Conservatism, the Intellectual whose allusions to Edmund Burke launched a thousand David Brooks columns. Half a century, fifty books, and one idea. And that not a very good one.

(Okay, so I haven't read them either, aside from wading into God and Man at Yale when a copy fell into my hands in college, but if Buckley's disciples can't cough up any contribution he made to serious thought then the matter's closed.)

I think we'd all be better off today if he'd have focused on yachting.

Okay, I take that back, at least to the extent that I was a regular, if not faithful, viewer of Firing Line in its heyday, if only for the bitter college-student satisfaction of noting that a freakish High Latin vocabulary combined with post-graduate dining club manners and the stage presence of a precocious fifteen-year-old essaying Miss Havisham in the Spring Play could convince any number of Americans that one was an Intellectual without the bother of genuine ideas or personal honesty. It was fairly amusing to read, multiple times (I think first at The Corner, but I managed to lose a page of notes to a cat-induced power outage and I'm not going back there to check) the Wither Bill Buckley? pieces which asked about how he might view the crew of  mental midgets bobbing in his wake (the Corner piece said something like "The Left is sure to bring this up") when, in fact, those people are his legacy, along with George Eff Will's bowties. "Conservatism" hasn't been dumbed down. It's been exhausted after producing a few ounces of low-grade ore and a mountain of slag. David Brooks is Bill Buckley after fifty washings; Jonah Goldberg after one-hundred-twenty, except he was beaten with a stick on a big flat rock, Old Skool.

The Dead Buckley was also given credit for "dekookifying" the American Right, by which is meant he kept Birch Society anti-fluoridationists and anti-Semites off the pages of his magazine, leaving more room for scholarly considerations of whether we were wasting time trying to cram Algebra into those smallish Negro skulls. Buckley's supposed opposition to the Iraq War got a nod or two, as did his brave decision to sail outside the then-Twelve Mile limit to do some bong hits. Here we repeat our gratitude that anyone on the Right who takes a reasonable, sensible, or nuanced position, or rejects any species of bigotry, hedged or no, is hailed as a Maverick, and our hope that the underlying point will some day soon be more widely appreciated. 

We're not going to quibble that his racism was left out of all the Buckley blather. He lived long enough to see it widely disseminated, thanks to new technologies, to see his crypto-Nazi AIDS stance jackboot its way up his own walk, and to receive an advance copy of Liberal Fascism. He lived long enough that even David Brooks, whose career he kick-started, could find precious little to say about him in the flotsam of that movement they share.  We do wish that whoever it was--the Times, maybe--who saw fit to mention his threatening to knock Gore Vidal's teeth down his throat had either not done so, or had refrained from editing out the "God damn" and the "you little queer".  (And we love the fact that Brooks--who keeps repeating that God damn story of his brilliant underclassman lampooning of Buckley as his single 'I was a Liberal' bona fide--is the only person on the planet left convinced that in offering him a job Buckley was demonstrating some sort of trans-partisan bonhomie, rather than a practiced eye for spotting the sniveling toady in his natural habitat.)

But that's just us, and at the end of the day we have to admit that the emptiness of the panegyric suits the man and his movement, but--as with the first of two disastrous Presidents it engendered--the nonsense should be buried with him. We add our own:  that thanks to Bill Buckley's movement the United States did not go Marxist in his lifetime, just as thanks to the lucky rock I keep under my pillow my home has not been overrun by marmosets.