Monday, June 14
Sunday, June 13
Walking Tall, Part 1
Andrew Ferguson, "Ride Along with Mitch: Can the astonishing popularity of Indiana's penny-pinching governor carry him to the White House in 2012?" Six volumes. June 14
WE'VE got a long slog ahead of us, but a journey of a thousand miles--even one that begins and ends in the same stinking slough where you began, the one some huckster named Kristol you are beginning to suspect is the same one indicted for fraud just last week is trying to sell you as prime real estate--should start under your feet, not with a single step; Alan Watts says this is both a permissible translation and the reasonable one: not "hurry up and do something, you've got a long trip ahead of you," but ""figure out which way you're going first".
The earth- or blogosphere-shaking pull quote from this, the umpteenth attempt to kickstart the doomed Daniels 2012 campaign--I think he's doomed, but if not then we are--has The Bantam Menace calling for a truce in the Culture War. Forgive me if, at the top, I betray a slight tendency to disbelieve anything the man says, but what I'd really like to see, what these people can do tomorrow, if they'd like to, is self-styled "conservative" intellectual journals losing the fucking walking goddam ads for a George Pataki PAC jammed onto the middle of every page like an ugly tattoo. Isn't Reading a traditional, Judeo-Christian, "conservative" virtue? As in, you start reading with the first word, and move on through to the last, without seeing George Pataki, who has nothing whatsoever to do with this story, nor any other--every two minutes? I can't say my study's been exhaustive, but I don't recall Edmund Burke doing a lot of product placement, nor sneaking personal endorsements for Croft & Tewsberry Wig Powder, or proprietary pox palliatives, into his Parliament speeches. And it's 8600 words plus; I'd really like to get on with it, instead of having it divided into thirteen pages, or roughly 2/3 of Ross Douthat's weekly production per. You really need page views that bad?
We'll get started in a minute, promise. But, look, Andrew, Astonish means "thunderstruck" or "mazed". And, indeed, this is one way to describe my personal reaction to Daniels' popularity ("suspicious" is another). But you mean something like "greatly surprising", which is acceptable from a usage standpoint--as the waterlogged and fish-nibbled corpse of a yeoman term lost in a sea of advertising hyperbole, hauled in without its pants--but then it isn't true. He's the Republican governor of a still-solid Republican state. It's Clear Blue Sky, not statewide thunderstorm activity events. What was George W. Bush's approval rating among Republicans the day he left office as the Worst President Ever? The Republican rank-and-file approves anything in Republican clothing, provided it hasn't been caught with a dead hooker or live preteen boy. Mark Souder resigned out of embarrassment, and because Choirboy Pence was on his ass, you should pardon the expression; not because he was in any danger of not being reelected. Richard Lugar is the most popular Hoosier politician of All Time, and the only thing he's done for Indiana in thirty-three years is get his wife off our highways.
Of course you don't want to say "Daniels' Surprising Popularity", since the reason for the surprising part is not that it exists, if it does, but that it's been bestowed on a loathsome toad, a contemptuous, miniaturized elitist in an Aw Shucks state, which actually was on to him in the beginning, back when he was remarkably unpopular. So you choose "astonishing" the way a self-conscious lad might stuff a zucchini in his jockstrap. Daniels popularity "soared", if it did, at the precise moment when he was able to use an immense war chest (containing Republican heavy hitter and corporate quids pro quo, not Frank and Ethel's egg money) to begin saturation bombing of the airwaves a month before a primary where he wasn't challenged, and continuing through November. Those ads lied about his economic record. In fairness, they had to. He then trounced a woman with an execrable track record, who'd only managed to win the primary by going negative, after which she couldn't repair the damage or get Evan Bayh to remember her name. The astonishing thing about 2008, lest we forget, is that the Republican brand was so degraded that Barack Hussein Obama carried the state, not that shit still floats.
Pausing every so often to cut some brush. Look, let's just get this out of the way. The man's a colorless gnome with a mean streak, and his entire career consists of suckling at the government teat, except for the decade when the Hudson Institute, then Eli Lilly, hired him because of his experience suckling at the government teat. There is no fucking way any impartial, or even partly-sighted, Hoosier observer sees Mitch Daniels as Jes' Folks, as someone who'd ride in an RV, tour in an RV, be caught dead in an RV, or allow one to be parked in his neighborhood, unless he was getting something out of it. This is cornball crap Mitch Daniels has done to get elected, and one look at his face and everyone's in on the secret. Do not try to tell someone who's witnessed six years of this any different. In a state where electricity did not still qualify as a marvel for one-quarter of the population, Daniels performance in 2004 would have been classified as Astonishingly Condescending. Daniels at the Indiana State Fair, forced to chomp a boiled ear of corn while rubbing elbows with the toothless, the shirtless, and the excessively solarized was like watching the audition tape of the guy who ran second to Tony Shalhoub for the role of Monk. He had the look of a man whose blind date smelled like dirty socks. Couldn't hide it. Not even close. The only reason he managed to get elected is that most Hoosiers are too polite to've bent down low enough to peer at his expression. And don't even start with the motorcycle thing.
Look, Andy--can I call you Andy?--if you wanna prove you've been to Indiana it's "He was bit by a pig, and I seen it."
Roughly coinciding with the local legend of a 3'2" wolf-like creature that walks on two legs, and, when the moon is full, swipes the wallets of unsuspecting travelers. They say you can recognize him by the pentagram on his left palm. And the comb-over.
Just for the record: there's no way I'd defend the chain restaurant, fried catfish, and sausage gravy cuisine of my home state, though if anyone but Ferguson shows up I'll be glad to make you a breaded pork tenderloin that'll make you weep. But th' fuck gives Andrew Ferguson the right to sneer at it? Where's his goddam cookbook? Better yet, sneer all you want, asshole, but never pretend to speak for Middle American values, or "explain" Indiana politics. There's a deal we could all live with. Meantime, if'n you knew what you were talking about, you'd know "Deep Fried Fucking Abomination" is a sort of state fair/carnival food concessionaire version of bungee jumping, except they have to think up a new one every year, and Indiana doesn't get it until the second go-round. Deep fried Snickers bar is about as regional as Red Lobster.
And that day is: July 20, 1977.
I'm not an expert in golf course attire, so let's just say this: if Mitch Daniels has ever played a public course in his life the term "Fundraiser" was attached. If what Mitch Daniels "favors" leads the knowledgeable student of such things to think "public course" then the scam is working, at least somewhat. Unlike that comb-over.
See, this is why you can't breeze in here and act like you know what's what (not that that was your purpose). Shoulda seen him in his first term. It took his image doctors eighteen months to get him to feign that awkwardness around lesser mortals, which, in Mitch's case, is everybody.
That "social awkwardness" is like the hitch in the speech of a life-long stutterer who's learned to navigate his difficulties while searching for a synonym he can handle; it's Mitch's way of not blurting out anything psychically revealing. His natural inclination is to let you know in no uncertain terms how insignificant you are by comparison. We in the Hoosier state watched while his handlers constructed the thing. And the mask still slips some times. (Dogs always know people better than people do, by the way.)
Congratulations, Ferguson. You just got a Racist Beacon editor fired for missing two days.
snort
That, and/or anything else that puts more money in their pockets. Daniels is a country-club Republican's imaginary hedge against Sarah Palin. Guaranteed to be as flexible as Bush--a few months back he was practically the only voice in the country complaining about the unfair treatment Toyota was getting--but with the ability to form complete sentences, and the requisite Randian derangement. 'Course the fact of the matter is that Mitch knows, the guy who shaves him in the morning knows, that he's not going to be President. He knows it's going to a lot tougher to hoodwink a national audience about his Indiana "miracle"; he knows what sort of a campaigner his wife makes.
Daniels insisted at the time that 2008 would be his last campaign. He's not the first nor only politician to lie about such things; it's probably the rule, not the exception. The simple fact, though, is that in 2008 he recognized how long the odds were: he's not an attractive candidate. He's churlish. His Indiana record as trumpeted in the local press and picked up by the national is a sham, a transparent PR reminiscent of Reagan's, because that's what it was modeled on. Like Reagan's, it relies on people proclaiming Whatever Happens as the greatest possible outcome, and due entirely to the application of infallible Randian principles. And, like Reagan's, the reality is both short and long-term disaster.
Finally, and like Reagan, the actual results mean nothing whatsoever to his mouthpieces, who prefer lower growth rates, declining wages, higher unemployment, poorer job creation, and painful boom-and-bust cycles controlled by members of the Randian Brotherhood to better results from someone else. (As would the rest of us, if we were Enlightened.) Y'know, I live in Indiana. It's not like I expect the shade of Eugene V. Debs to win an election hereabouts. As I've mentioned before on those rare instances when his name comes up (modest, self-effacing man!), I didn't view the 2004 election of Mitch Daniels as a great tragedy, although the campaign had gleefully roughed up Joe Kiernan, a real real Hoosier, war hero, and competent administrator. Oddly, for such a resoundingly Red state, Indiana Republicans are not all unbending religious maniacs. It's just the vast majority. And right off the bat Daniels pulled his "one-year surtax to reduce the deficit" routine, which I thought was evidence of potential open-mindedness, even though the wailing about state debt was contrived. That proposal, of course, lasted all of twelve hours, before Republican donors taught Mitch the facts of life. Next thing you knew he was calling minority Democrats in the General Assembly "car bombers" and going full-metal Gipper on the wasteful spending of previous (Democratic) administrations which had led us to the worst budget mess in history. That's the Mitch Daniels the public needs to be introduced to if he's really intending to climb on the national stage.
But politics is yet to come. For now let's just note that his policies haven't been reported any more accurately than his height, or the mesmerizing effect of his hairstyling.
WE'VE got a long slog ahead of us, but a journey of a thousand miles--even one that begins and ends in the same stinking slough where you began, the one some huckster named Kristol you are beginning to suspect is the same one indicted for fraud just last week is trying to sell you as prime real estate--should start under your feet, not with a single step; Alan Watts says this is both a permissible translation and the reasonable one: not "hurry up and do something, you've got a long trip ahead of you," but ""figure out which way you're going first".
The earth- or blogosphere-shaking pull quote from this, the umpteenth attempt to kickstart the doomed Daniels 2012 campaign--I think he's doomed, but if not then we are--has The Bantam Menace calling for a truce in the Culture War. Forgive me if, at the top, I betray a slight tendency to disbelieve anything the man says, but what I'd really like to see, what these people can do tomorrow, if they'd like to, is self-styled "conservative" intellectual journals losing the fucking walking goddam ads for a George Pataki PAC jammed onto the middle of every page like an ugly tattoo. Isn't Reading a traditional, Judeo-Christian, "conservative" virtue? As in, you start reading with the first word, and move on through to the last, without seeing George Pataki, who has nothing whatsoever to do with this story, nor any other--every two minutes? I can't say my study's been exhaustive, but I don't recall Edmund Burke doing a lot of product placement, nor sneaking personal endorsements for Croft & Tewsberry Wig Powder, or proprietary pox palliatives, into his Parliament speeches. And it's 8600 words plus; I'd really like to get on with it, instead of having it divided into thirteen pages, or roughly 2/3 of Ross Douthat's weekly production per. You really need page views that bad?
We'll get started in a minute, promise. But, look, Andrew, Astonish means "thunderstruck" or "mazed". And, indeed, this is one way to describe my personal reaction to Daniels' popularity ("suspicious" is another). But you mean something like "greatly surprising", which is acceptable from a usage standpoint--as the waterlogged and fish-nibbled corpse of a yeoman term lost in a sea of advertising hyperbole, hauled in without its pants--but then it isn't true. He's the Republican governor of a still-solid Republican state. It's Clear Blue Sky, not statewide thunderstorm activity events. What was George W. Bush's approval rating among Republicans the day he left office as the Worst President Ever? The Republican rank-and-file approves anything in Republican clothing, provided it hasn't been caught with a dead hooker or live preteen boy. Mark Souder resigned out of embarrassment, and because Choirboy Pence was on his ass, you should pardon the expression; not because he was in any danger of not being reelected. Richard Lugar is the most popular Hoosier politician of All Time, and the only thing he's done for Indiana in thirty-three years is get his wife off our highways.
Of course you don't want to say "Daniels' Surprising Popularity", since the reason for the surprising part is not that it exists, if it does, but that it's been bestowed on a loathsome toad, a contemptuous, miniaturized elitist in an Aw Shucks state, which actually was on to him in the beginning, back when he was remarkably unpopular. So you choose "astonishing" the way a self-conscious lad might stuff a zucchini in his jockstrap. Daniels popularity "soared", if it did, at the precise moment when he was able to use an immense war chest (containing Republican heavy hitter and corporate quids pro quo, not Frank and Ethel's egg money) to begin saturation bombing of the airwaves a month before a primary where he wasn't challenged, and continuing through November. Those ads lied about his economic record. In fairness, they had to. He then trounced a woman with an execrable track record, who'd only managed to win the primary by going negative, after which she couldn't repair the damage or get Evan Bayh to remember her name. The astonishing thing about 2008, lest we forget, is that the Republican brand was so degraded that Barack Hussein Obama carried the state, not that shit still floats.
Indianapolis
When Mitch Daniels ran for governor of Indiana in 2004, a friend and videographer got the idea of filming the candidate in vidéo vérité style as he traveled around the state in his Indiana-made RV. In both his campaigns for governor—in 2004, when he won a close race, and in 2008, when he won reelection against the Obama tide in an 18-point landslide—Daniels visited each of Indiana’s 92 counties at least three times, appearing in places that hadn’t seen a statewide candidate in generations, or ever. If he wasn’t riding the RV, he came to town on his custom-built Harley Davidson, a solitary aide trailing behind.
Pausing every so often to cut some brush. Look, let's just get this out of the way. The man's a colorless gnome with a mean streak, and his entire career consists of suckling at the government teat, except for the decade when the Hudson Institute, then Eli Lilly, hired him because of his experience suckling at the government teat. There is no fucking way any impartial, or even partly-sighted, Hoosier observer sees Mitch Daniels as Jes' Folks, as someone who'd ride in an RV, tour in an RV, be caught dead in an RV, or allow one to be parked in his neighborhood, unless he was getting something out of it. This is cornball crap Mitch Daniels has done to get elected, and one look at his face and everyone's in on the secret. Do not try to tell someone who's witnessed six years of this any different. In a state where electricity did not still qualify as a marvel for one-quarter of the population, Daniels performance in 2004 would have been classified as Astonishingly Condescending. Daniels at the Indiana State Fair, forced to chomp a boiled ear of corn while rubbing elbows with the toothless, the shirtless, and the excessively solarized was like watching the audition tape of the guy who ran second to Tony Shalhoub for the role of Monk. He had the look of a man whose blind date smelled like dirty socks. Couldn't hide it. Not even close. The only reason he managed to get elected is that most Hoosiers are too polite to've bent down low enough to peer at his expression. And don't even start with the motorcycle thing.
He insisted on spending every night on the road in the home of a local family. Nearly all the families were strangers to him. He slept in guest rooms, family rooms, dens, and children’s bedrooms, on bunks and foldout couches, with pictures of pop stars staring from the walls and an occasional Disney mobile dangling overhead, proving to the people of his state that he could sleep anywhere.By the way, this is about how condescending Daniels is when he tells the story. And it's always sold as a knee-slapper the equal of Earl Butz' crowning achievement. Which, come to think of it, it is. Mitch Daniels actually walked among these hicks! That's how bad he wanted the opportunity to straighten out their economy!
He was bit by a pig
Look, Andy--can I call you Andy?--if you wanna prove you've been to Indiana it's "He was bit by a pig, and I seen it."
and, later, a farm dog.
Roughly coinciding with the local legend of a 3'2" wolf-like creature that walks on two legs, and, when the moon is full, swipes the wallets of unsuspecting travelers. They say you can recognize him by the pentagram on his left palm. And the comb-over.
He paid special attention to the quality of pork tenderloin sandwiches he found in the local bars and diners. Pork tenderloin sandwiches, the size of a platter, are unavoidable in Indiana, no matter how hard you try, and Daniels made it clear he didn’t want to try. Food became a theme of the campaign. The best dessert he’d discovered, he said, was a Snickers Bar dunked in pancake batter and, this being Indiana, deep-fried.
Just for the record: there's no way I'd defend the chain restaurant, fried catfish, and sausage gravy cuisine of my home state, though if anyone but Ferguson shows up I'll be glad to make you a breaded pork tenderloin that'll make you weep. But th' fuck gives Andrew Ferguson the right to sneer at it? Where's his goddam cookbook? Better yet, sneer all you want, asshole, but never pretend to speak for Middle American values, or "explain" Indiana politics. There's a deal we could all live with. Meantime, if'n you knew what you were talking about, you'd know "Deep Fried Fucking Abomination" is a sort of state fair/carnival food concessionaire version of bungee jumping, except they have to think up a new one every year, and Indiana doesn't get it until the second go-round. Deep fried Snickers bar is about as regional as Red Lobster.
His telegenic appeal is highly unlikely. He’s 5′7″.On wheels, maybe.
His pale coloring is set off by his reddish gray hair, and the day is fast approaching when the combover will no longer be able to work its magic.
And that day is: July 20, 1977.
He favors pressed sport shirts and sharply creased Dockers, public-golf-course casual.
I'm not an expert in golf course attire, so let's just say this: if Mitch Daniels has ever played a public course in his life the term "Fundraiser" was attached. If what Mitch Daniels "favors" leads the knowledgeable student of such things to think "public course" then the scam is working, at least somewhat. Unlike that comb-over.
his manner is just awkward enough to make you wonder, when you talk to him, if you’re making him nervous.
See, this is why you can't breeze in here and act like you know what's what (not that that was your purpose). Shoulda seen him in his first term. It took his image doctors eighteen months to get him to feign that awkwardness around lesser mortals, which, in Mitch's case, is everybody.
That "social awkwardness" is like the hitch in the speech of a life-long stutterer who's learned to navigate his difficulties while searching for a synonym he can handle; it's Mitch's way of not blurting out anything psychically revealing. His natural inclination is to let you know in no uncertain terms how insignificant you are by comparison. We in the Hoosier state watched while his handlers constructed the thing. And the mask still slips some times. (Dogs always know people better than people do, by the way.)
He is everywhere in the news all the time; when I visited Indiana last month, his picture appeared on the front page of the Indianapolis Star, above the fold, on two of the four days I was there.
Congratulations, Ferguson. You just got a Racist Beacon editor fired for missing two days.
He is at once so visible and so self-effacing
snort
that he seems to have sunk into a black hole of personal magnetism and come out the other side, where the very lack of charisma becomes charismatic. He is the un-Obama. Republicans—notably some wealthy and powerful ones who have decided he should be president —seem to like that.
That, and/or anything else that puts more money in their pockets. Daniels is a country-club Republican's imaginary hedge against Sarah Palin. Guaranteed to be as flexible as Bush--a few months back he was practically the only voice in the country complaining about the unfair treatment Toyota was getting--but with the ability to form complete sentences, and the requisite Randian derangement. 'Course the fact of the matter is that Mitch knows, the guy who shaves him in the morning knows, that he's not going to be President. He knows it's going to a lot tougher to hoodwink a national audience about his Indiana "miracle"; he knows what sort of a campaigner his wife makes.
Daniels insisted at the time that 2008 would be his last campaign. He's not the first nor only politician to lie about such things; it's probably the rule, not the exception. The simple fact, though, is that in 2008 he recognized how long the odds were: he's not an attractive candidate. He's churlish. His Indiana record as trumpeted in the local press and picked up by the national is a sham, a transparent PR reminiscent of Reagan's, because that's what it was modeled on. Like Reagan's, it relies on people proclaiming Whatever Happens as the greatest possible outcome, and due entirely to the application of infallible Randian principles. And, like Reagan's, the reality is both short and long-term disaster.
Finally, and like Reagan, the actual results mean nothing whatsoever to his mouthpieces, who prefer lower growth rates, declining wages, higher unemployment, poorer job creation, and painful boom-and-bust cycles controlled by members of the Randian Brotherhood to better results from someone else. (As would the rest of us, if we were Enlightened.) Y'know, I live in Indiana. It's not like I expect the shade of Eugene V. Debs to win an election hereabouts. As I've mentioned before on those rare instances when his name comes up (modest, self-effacing man!), I didn't view the 2004 election of Mitch Daniels as a great tragedy, although the campaign had gleefully roughed up Joe Kiernan, a real real Hoosier, war hero, and competent administrator. Oddly, for such a resoundingly Red state, Indiana Republicans are not all unbending religious maniacs. It's just the vast majority. And right off the bat Daniels pulled his "one-year surtax to reduce the deficit" routine, which I thought was evidence of potential open-mindedness, even though the wailing about state debt was contrived. That proposal, of course, lasted all of twelve hours, before Republican donors taught Mitch the facts of life. Next thing you knew he was calling minority Democrats in the General Assembly "car bombers" and going full-metal Gipper on the wasteful spending of previous (Democratic) administrations which had led us to the worst budget mess in history. That's the Mitch Daniels the public needs to be introduced to if he's really intending to climb on the national stage.
But politics is yet to come. For now let's just note that his policies haven't been reported any more accurately than his height, or the mesmerizing effect of his hairstyling.
Friday, June 11
Six: Have You Stopped Economically Oppressing Your Feminist Life Partner?
Daniel B. Klein, "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics." June 8
OH, great, another Daniels hagiography in the wingnut press, this one in six volumes, so that I spent ten minutes cutting and pasting the thing so I could read it without having George Pataki and an amusing caricature of Barack Obama (he has big ears!) stare at me, before I realized that the little smear there at the top was a printer icon, and it was possible to grab the whole thing at once. This did, sadly, mean an end to the snippets I was catching while doing it page by page, but then even in Indiana we know you don't just tuck into a fancy cruise ship buffet as if it were a communal tureen of boarding house hash. I'll be tasting the damned thing all weekend, at least.
Today let's get to that Daniel B. Klein/ Zeljka Buturovic "study", which promises to answer once and for all the eternal questions 1) "Who is more likely to agree with bald declarations of libertarian economic 'truth': libertarians, or dirty hippies?" and 2) "In a bad economy, how many nickels do you need to get Zogby to add its name to any piece of crap floating by?" Though the second one had pretty much already been answered to most people's satisfaction.
Here, for the record, are the eight "questions" "posed" by the "researchers", coupled with the unenlightened response, and which I considered just making my entire post:
1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
4. Rent control leads to housing shortages.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly.
• Unenlightened: Agree
6. Third-world workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited.
• Unenlightened: Agree
7. Free trade leads to unemployment.
• Unenlightened: Agree
8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
[mystery bullets in original]
So we all see the game, here, like it wasn't made explicit by that steaming Opinion Journal pile, or by the use of "Unenlightened" to designate "wrong" answers. For that matter, so far as we can tell, Economics is the only academic discipline which regularly spends half its time proving that everybody else is an idiot, including the rest of Academia. Which leads us to conclude that there were a lot more Dirty Hippies swiping a lot more lunch money in the 1980s than previously imagined.
No, I might've just done that little strangled chortle I usually do when reading the Journal's Fluoridation page before moving on, had I not clicked on over to the .pdf file and found what is quite possibly the sloppiest goddam thing anyone with an academic position to maintain ever put his name on, unless that position was "RA" and he'd stayed up all night faking a paper due the next morning. Honest to fucking God:
• The thing is "published" by Klein's own Econ Journal Watch, an "electronic triennial", apparently because all the big electronic fortnightlies are controlled by Big Academia.
• It, and we quote here, was designed by the first author of the paper, Zeljka Buturovic, who holds a PhD in psychology from Columbia University and is currently a Research Associate at Zogby International, and whose "motivation in designing the survey grew out of her dissatisfaction with previous surveys treating economic understanding. She regarded many questions on previous surveys to be either too narrowly factual, too dry in a textbook way, and too removed from policy context, or, alternatively, too general in eliciting policy judgments apart from specific economic consequences."
• The preceding is particularly interesting, not just in that someone with an Ivy League Ph.D in Phrenology--sorry, Psychology--and a job with Zogby can't manage to write survey questions that aren't designed to prove what she already believes, but for this:
Eight out of sixteen get tossed for being too vague or too narrow, in a study which grew out of dissatisfaction with the "too narrowly factual" questions of previous surveys? Gentleman's C, then.
• We can't get through the goddam introduction before the authors're forced to list four "Caveats" about the study (which--you're sitting down, right?--they will then use as reason to pat themselves on the back for their brutally honest self-criticism):
Mind you, if you answer "incorrectly" based on a more complex understanding of the problem" you're still Unenlightened. (Gee, what if it went up to a millionty dollars an hour? There'd be almost no jobs, but if you got one you could retire after twenty minutes! Then again, what do I know? I didn't even rate a fucking self-described category in the thing.)
There, there. Don't be so hard on yourselves. You couldn't have known.
In other words, all the Idiots your survey found might actually be Super Geniuses, and you have no way of knowing. (By the way, that "1 of 4, 3 of 4" thing is in the original, even though presumably almost all of the most Redundancy-enlightened minds in the United States have all graduated from high school.)
Well, again, you weren't going to stop at that late point and, I dunno, think about it, or something? Not when a Ph.D in Graphology--I mean Psychology, of course--who fucking works for Zogby had approved the foolproof protocol of inviting randomly selected participants to a one-shot online link where they could answer the questions and self-identify as "Progressive","Liberal", "Conservative", "Very Conservative", "Deluxely Conservative", or "Libertarian".
I mean, really, after you designed the fucking thing there was no more reason to even concern yourself with accuracy, was there?
Y'know, assuming you had actually lifted a finger to assure your results, the thing that would be troubling me now--okay, not much--is that a number of Americans who describe themselves as "Liberal" or "Progressive" didn't fucking catch on to your slanted little survey by Question 2.
• Minor point, but still troubling: how is it that a Professor of Economics and Editor of the premier electronic triennial on the World Wide Web can't come up with a headshot
that doesn't have a blonde, or a blonde wig, or a treasured childhood Wookie doll halfway cropped out of it?
And all just so some loadpants could board the Opinion Journal short bus long enough to say "Liberals are Retarded!" Well, revealing fucking survey, Doc. I'll say that for you.
OH, great, another Daniels hagiography in the wingnut press, this one in six volumes, so that I spent ten minutes cutting and pasting the thing so I could read it without having George Pataki and an amusing caricature of Barack Obama (he has big ears!) stare at me, before I realized that the little smear there at the top was a printer icon, and it was possible to grab the whole thing at once. This did, sadly, mean an end to the snippets I was catching while doing it page by page, but then even in Indiana we know you don't just tuck into a fancy cruise ship buffet as if it were a communal tureen of boarding house hash. I'll be tasting the damned thing all weekend, at least.
Today let's get to that Daniel B. Klein/ Zeljka Buturovic "study", which promises to answer once and for all the eternal questions 1) "Who is more likely to agree with bald declarations of libertarian economic 'truth': libertarians, or dirty hippies?" and 2) "In a bad economy, how many nickels do you need to get Zogby to add its name to any piece of crap floating by?" Though the second one had pretty much already been answered to most people's satisfaction.
Here, for the record, are the eight "questions" "posed" by the "researchers", coupled with the unenlightened response, and which I considered just making my entire post:
1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
4. Rent control leads to housing shortages.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly.
• Unenlightened: Agree
6. Third-world workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited.
• Unenlightened: Agree
7. Free trade leads to unemployment.
• Unenlightened: Agree
8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
[mystery bullets in original]
So we all see the game, here, like it wasn't made explicit by that steaming Opinion Journal pile, or by the use of "Unenlightened" to designate "wrong" answers. For that matter, so far as we can tell, Economics is the only academic discipline which regularly spends half its time proving that everybody else is an idiot, including the rest of Academia. Which leads us to conclude that there were a lot more Dirty Hippies swiping a lot more lunch money in the 1980s than previously imagined.
No, I might've just done that little strangled chortle I usually do when reading the Journal's Fluoridation page before moving on, had I not clicked on over to the .pdf file and found what is quite possibly the sloppiest goddam thing anyone with an academic position to maintain ever put his name on, unless that position was "RA" and he'd stayed up all night faking a paper due the next morning. Honest to fucking God:
• The thing is "published" by Klein's own Econ Journal Watch, an "electronic triennial", apparently because all the big electronic fortnightlies are controlled by Big Academia.
• It, and we quote here, was designed by the first author of the paper, Zeljka Buturovic, who holds a PhD in psychology from Columbia University and is currently a Research Associate at Zogby International, and whose "motivation in designing the survey grew out of her dissatisfaction with previous surveys treating economic understanding. She regarded many questions on previous surveys to be either too narrowly factual, too dry in a textbook way, and too removed from policy context, or, alternatively, too general in eliciting policy judgments apart from specific economic consequences."
• The preceding is particularly interesting, not just in that someone with an Ivy League Ph.D in Phrenology--sorry, Psychology--and a job with Zogby can't manage to write survey questions that aren't designed to prove what she already believes, but for this:
We have omitted 8 of the economic questions in that format because they are not as useful in gauging economic enlightenment, either because the question is too vague or too narrowly factual, or because the enlightened answer is too uncertain or arguable.
Eight out of sixteen get tossed for being too vague or too narrow, in a study which grew out of dissatisfaction with the "too narrowly factual" questions of previous surveys? Gentleman's C, then.
• We can't get through the goddam introduction before the authors're forced to list four "Caveats" about the study (which--you're sitting down, right?--they will then use as reason to pat themselves on the back for their brutally honest self-criticism):
Caveat 1 of 4: Some will take exception to our take on the eight questions, particularly the one about minimum wage laws….Some will even say that, because of monoposony or coordination problems, minimum wages increase employment, but we judge such arguments to be of dubious plausibility and significance. We think that the basic logic asked by the question is revealed by carrying it to a minimum wage of, say, $20. Unemployment would go up a lot.
Mind you, if you answer "incorrectly" based on a more complex understanding of the problem" you're still Unenlightened. (Gee, what if it went up to a millionty dollars an hour? There'd be almost no jobs, but if you got one you could retire after twenty minutes! Then again, what do I know? I didn't even rate a fucking self-described category in the thing.)
Caveat 2 of 4: We acknowledge a shortcoming about the set of economic questions used here, and a corresponding reservation. None of the questions challenge the economic foibles specifically of “conservatives,” nor of “libertarians,” as compared to those of “liberals”/“progressives.”
There, there. Don't be so hard on yourselves. You couldn't have known.
Caveat 3 of 4: Even if one accepts that our handling of each of the eight economic questions tracks economic enlightenment, the set represents a baseline rather than the heights of economic wisdom. In other words, the most econ- omically enlightened mind would score no better than a solidly sensible mind on the eight questions, as they would both ace the 8-question exam. Yet presumably almost all of the most economically enlightened minds in the United States have all gone to college.
In other words, all the Idiots your survey found might actually be Super Geniuses, and you have no way of knowing. (By the way, that "1 of 4, 3 of 4" thing is in the original, even though presumably almost all of the most Redundancy-enlightened minds in the United States have all graduated from high school.)
Caveat 4 of 4: In commenting on this paper in draft, Bryan Caplan suggested that there is a strong reason to suspect that, among less schooled people, those more economically enlightened would be more likely to complete the survey.
Well, again, you weren't going to stop at that late point and, I dunno, think about it, or something? Not when a Ph.D in Graphology--I mean Psychology, of course--who fucking works for Zogby had approved the foolproof protocol of inviting randomly selected participants to a one-shot online link where they could answer the questions and self-identify as "Progressive","Liberal", "Conservative", "Very Conservative", "Deluxely Conservative", or "Libertarian".
I mean, really, after you designed the fucking thing there was no more reason to even concern yourself with accuracy, was there?
Y'know, assuming you had actually lifted a finger to assure your results, the thing that would be troubling me now--okay, not much--is that a number of Americans who describe themselves as "Liberal" or "Progressive" didn't fucking catch on to your slanted little survey by Question 2.
• Minor point, but still troubling: how is it that a Professor of Economics and Editor of the premier electronic triennial on the World Wide Web can't come up with a headshot
that doesn't have a blonde, or a blonde wig, or a treasured childhood Wookie doll halfway cropped out of it?
And all just so some loadpants could board the Opinion Journal short bus long enough to say "Liberals are Retarded!" Well, revealing fucking survey, Doc. I'll say that for you.
Wednesday, June 9
Three More Holes In The Atmosphere
• Matt Yglesias-Mercouri,"Why Is Paying Effective Teachers More A Form of 'Teacher-Bashing'?" June 7
I've admitted, here and there, that I voluntarily subjected myself to the first Star Wars flicker, complete with appropriately plastic Mall Cinema ambience, the smell of two-week-old "popcorn" reheated and topped with petrochemicals, and a crowded house of children and "adults" stomping and clapping and booing and hissing like their grandparents did for William S. Hart (it's different now, okay? As in "the people who were actually children at the time have so thoroughly adopted the parti-colored and sugar-drenched breakfast cereal of popular culture that juvenalia is in their marrow"; succeeding generationlets had no chance whatsoever. We accept and move on. But at the time we were convinced the entire exercise was a sort of mass hypnosis with a disturbingly political twist we only later came to identify as libertarian: the sort of easy psilocybin of special effects--no worries that you won't come back from this Trip, Mr. and Mrs. Middle America!--and the fact that the Good Guys won this one, like they should, like you knew they would, and in contradistinction to everything America Herself had her grubby mitts on at the time, and most everything since). And that I did so for the sake of the bible college student with the Amazonian physique and hypocritical taste and talent for premarital sex who sat to my right. It was a summer thing, as it most certainly had to be; she was up from Tennessee staying with her sister and brother-in-law. A months later we took advantage of their weekend absence to spend a night together at their place. On their return a concerned neighbor reported to Sis that my car had been parked in the driveway way past any other explanation, and my Amazon died of embarrassment.
What I don't think I've admitted is that I read the first twenty-five pages of The Fountainhead for approximately the same reason, with the same reaction most sane people who've undergone the experience while still young enough to excuse it report: five pages of thinking, "Hey, she's onto something," followed by a ten-page recognition that her crappy writing is not doing that Something any favors, followed by the distinct aroma of snake oil quickly becoming overpowering. My young darling at the time, a fellow highschooler who had, unbeknownst to me, already revealed as much of her dewy charms as I would ever be allowed, had pressed the thing into my hands between classes. I told her it sucked, even if she didn't, and that, as they say, was that. My best friend--I swear this is true--had a underclass coed walk up to him in the hall one afternoon as we were leaving and give him a copy of Justine. There's no way sexting has improved on that.
What's Yglesias' excuse? Missing what trades unions have done for this country, on the grounds that one is well-born enough to start off as an heroic Randian middle-management cog, is like missing the real struggle over Civil Rights on the grounds that one bought a book of Martin Luther King stamps. Let's just note--shits and grins--a couple of distinctions between the public school teacher and the tweedy professor, shall we? Professors don't roam the hallways between classes making sure everyone gets to where he's supposed to be without being stuffed in a locker, or shivved. They don't chaperone their young charges' prescription meds, or their apparel, or even their attendance. Secondary education is a shared occupation, inside and outside the classroom. My Poor Wife began last school year writing quick lesson plans for the classes of a new teacher whose health problems had worsened suddenly, a practice which would continue on and off for the entire year. Not because her feather-bedding contract required her to; she'd already agreed to teach an extra class per day. And certainly not because she was paid extra to do so. Because she is an adult (and experienced, Klein), and because all teachers are responsible for all the students in school. If the prof--sorry, I mean if the TA--next door doesn't show for ten minutes everybody leaves, or starts sexting, or something. The guy next door doesn't even look in.
Where? On camera? In the street? At cocktail parties or oxygen bars? Riding in the cabs they drive part time? Where'd you elicit the platitudes, Matt?
This is what's been said to me, several times, and not by my Poor Wife, who's too damn saintly: when they start paying someone teaching Math, or Physics, or for "Meritorious service in helping students cheat on standardized tests" more than me, that's the day that person gets no more of my help. Not watching her class, or taking his lunchroom duty, or helping with lesson plans. Nothing. If it's gonna be a free-for-all then it'll be a real free-for-all.
And we can add to that the fact that shared workplace effort so often seems invisible to people who've been Wi-fying it in all their working lives.
• Ezra Klein, "The problem of 'first-hired, last-fired' ". June 7
First, it's only fair to warn you I'm reporting this, so if you and Yglesias both put this imaginary cab ride on your expense tabs you might wanna get the story straight.
Second, and maybe all America should be listening: this pretense that such things exist in a vacuum, and so can be cut from the herd, as it were, and killed and et, has done none of us any good. See, for example, what you and Matt "figured out" about the Iraq war before it began.
Okay, I can only speak for Indianapolis, and Indiana generally, but it doesn't exactly work like that. Seniority only counts intra-discipline. We don't layoff physics or gym teachers with five years' experience and replace them with kindergarden teachers with fourteen. And--as always, as always, Klein! You hear me?--those Middle Management Heroes of yours have a certain amount of "flexibility" they can use to screw with peoples' rights. And do. And usually for petty personal reasons, like the rest of the race, and not the higher dictates of Excellence.
And, y'know, it's not visible--again--from your aerie, but union rules are real-world rules. In Indianapolis, at least, new teachers can pretty much be fired at will for their first two years. (Not that it's often done; generally people are given a chance to improve, which is only sensible. Interesting, though, that this gets chalked up to "trying to manage people rather than go through rigamarole"--oh, the poor Middle Manager, beset by a world of stupid rules!--rather than "poor fucking management technique" which ought to lead to wholesale firing of the classes Klein and Yglesias identify with.) One-third of all new teachers leave within three years, and half within five. Once you've decided to rely on them for your staffing you are committing public education to Excellence through Neophytism.
And make no mistake about that. Once you remove protection for the most experienced teachers they'll be the first on the chopping block, and with no more concern for "merit" than you claim that cabbie told you about this weekend. They'll be cut because they're paid more. They're paid more because they've survived the tests of time. On what fucking libertarian planet don't things work this way? And th' fuck shouldn't they? It's how we run the goddam military, Ezra, the only difference being that generations of its poor test results are routinely ignored.
God, do you really imagine that the more power we give petty tyrants, the more we turn schools into personal fiefdoms, the better, more dedicated everyone becomes? Grab a towel, son, and get to work behind those ears. This flippin' mythology of the excellent teaching corps buried underneath a bunch of feather-bedding oldsters--like the myth of thousands of technically-skilled experts who'd love to teach high school math to Poor Children, if only they didn't have to get a degree to do so--is really not one you want to find out in two years' time you were wrong about. It's not like this is just a little war or something.
• Sabrina Tavernise and Michael Slackman, "Turkey Goes From Pliable Ally to Thorn for U.S." June 8
Proving, once again--like we needed it--that nothing changes these fucks' tune about "spreading democracy" faster than somebody actually practicing it.
One tic I really don’t understand is the practice of referring to performance pay plans for K-12 teachers as “teacher-bashing”. If I proposed putting all the professors at the University of California on a flat salary schedule based on years on the job, would people deem that a “pro-professor” proposal? Why? What’s of interest, salary-wise, to teachers in the aggregate is how much overall money is spent on teacher compensation.
I've admitted, here and there, that I voluntarily subjected myself to the first Star Wars flicker, complete with appropriately plastic Mall Cinema ambience, the smell of two-week-old "popcorn" reheated and topped with petrochemicals, and a crowded house of children and "adults" stomping and clapping and booing and hissing like their grandparents did for William S. Hart (it's different now, okay? As in "the people who were actually children at the time have so thoroughly adopted the parti-colored and sugar-drenched breakfast cereal of popular culture that juvenalia is in their marrow"; succeeding generationlets had no chance whatsoever. We accept and move on. But at the time we were convinced the entire exercise was a sort of mass hypnosis with a disturbingly political twist we only later came to identify as libertarian: the sort of easy psilocybin of special effects--no worries that you won't come back from this Trip, Mr. and Mrs. Middle America!--and the fact that the Good Guys won this one, like they should, like you knew they would, and in contradistinction to everything America Herself had her grubby mitts on at the time, and most everything since). And that I did so for the sake of the bible college student with the Amazonian physique and hypocritical taste and talent for premarital sex who sat to my right. It was a summer thing, as it most certainly had to be; she was up from Tennessee staying with her sister and brother-in-law. A months later we took advantage of their weekend absence to spend a night together at their place. On their return a concerned neighbor reported to Sis that my car had been parked in the driveway way past any other explanation, and my Amazon died of embarrassment.
What I don't think I've admitted is that I read the first twenty-five pages of The Fountainhead for approximately the same reason, with the same reaction most sane people who've undergone the experience while still young enough to excuse it report: five pages of thinking, "Hey, she's onto something," followed by a ten-page recognition that her crappy writing is not doing that Something any favors, followed by the distinct aroma of snake oil quickly becoming overpowering. My young darling at the time, a fellow highschooler who had, unbeknownst to me, already revealed as much of her dewy charms as I would ever be allowed, had pressed the thing into my hands between classes. I told her it sucked, even if she didn't, and that, as they say, was that. My best friend--I swear this is true--had a underclass coed walk up to him in the hall one afternoon as we were leaving and give him a copy of Justine. There's no way sexting has improved on that.
What's Yglesias' excuse? Missing what trades unions have done for this country, on the grounds that one is well-born enough to start off as an heroic Randian middle-management cog, is like missing the real struggle over Civil Rights on the grounds that one bought a book of Martin Luther King stamps. Let's just note--shits and grins--a couple of distinctions between the public school teacher and the tweedy professor, shall we? Professors don't roam the hallways between classes making sure everyone gets to where he's supposed to be without being stuffed in a locker, or shivved. They don't chaperone their young charges' prescription meds, or their apparel, or even their attendance. Secondary education is a shared occupation, inside and outside the classroom. My Poor Wife began last school year writing quick lesson plans for the classes of a new teacher whose health problems had worsened suddenly, a practice which would continue on and off for the entire year. Not because her feather-bedding contract required her to; she'd already agreed to teach an extra class per day. And certainly not because she was paid extra to do so. Because she is an adult (and experienced, Klein), and because all teachers are responsible for all the students in school. If the prof--sorry, I mean if the TA--next door doesn't show for ten minutes everybody leaves, or starts sexting, or something. The guy next door doesn't even look in.
When you talk to teachers, in my experience they generally believe that the work they’re doing is important, that doing a good job makes a difference, and that the very best teachers are having unusually large impacts on their students’ lives.
Where? On camera? In the street? At cocktail parties or oxygen bars? Riding in the cabs they drive part time? Where'd you elicit the platitudes, Matt?
This is what's been said to me, several times, and not by my Poor Wife, who's too damn saintly: when they start paying someone teaching Math, or Physics, or for "Meritorious service in helping students cheat on standardized tests" more than me, that's the day that person gets no more of my help. Not watching her class, or taking his lunchroom duty, or helping with lesson plans. Nothing. If it's gonna be a free-for-all then it'll be a real free-for-all.
And we can add to that the fact that shared workplace effort so often seems invisible to people who've been Wi-fying it in all their working lives.
• Ezra Klein, "The problem of 'first-hired, last-fired' ". June 7
Even putting aside things like work rules and union contracts, layoffs are hard. You've got to be a cold soul to call someone you've known for years into your office and wreck their economic stability, their daily routine, their sense of self-worth. And so in good times, there are probably fewer layoffs then there should be. People try to manage employees who aren't carrying their weight rather than go through the rigmarole of firing them.
In that way, there can be a benefit to tight times when layoffs become unavoidable. They allow businesses to shed bad employees who should've been let go years earlier. But as Seyward Darby notes, this doesn't happen in most school systems. There, they follow a "first-hired, last-fired" rule, where the newest employees get kicked out first. The absence of discretion ensures that there's no silver-lining at all.
First, it's only fair to warn you I'm reporting this, so if you and Yglesias both put this imaginary cab ride on your expense tabs you might wanna get the story straight.
Second, and maybe all America should be listening: this pretense that such things exist in a vacuum, and so can be cut from the herd, as it were, and killed and et, has done none of us any good. See, for example, what you and Matt "figured out" about the Iraq war before it began.
Okay, I can only speak for Indianapolis, and Indiana generally, but it doesn't exactly work like that. Seniority only counts intra-discipline. We don't layoff physics or gym teachers with five years' experience and replace them with kindergarden teachers with fourteen. And--as always, as always, Klein! You hear me?--those Middle Management Heroes of yours have a certain amount of "flexibility" they can use to screw with peoples' rights. And do. And usually for petty personal reasons, like the rest of the race, and not the higher dictates of Excellence.
And, y'know, it's not visible--again--from your aerie, but union rules are real-world rules. In Indianapolis, at least, new teachers can pretty much be fired at will for their first two years. (Not that it's often done; generally people are given a chance to improve, which is only sensible. Interesting, though, that this gets chalked up to "trying to manage people rather than go through rigamarole"--oh, the poor Middle Manager, beset by a world of stupid rules!--rather than "poor fucking management technique" which ought to lead to wholesale firing of the classes Klein and Yglesias identify with.) One-third of all new teachers leave within three years, and half within five. Once you've decided to rely on them for your staffing you are committing public education to Excellence through Neophytism.
And make no mistake about that. Once you remove protection for the most experienced teachers they'll be the first on the chopping block, and with no more concern for "merit" than you claim that cabbie told you about this weekend. They'll be cut because they're paid more. They're paid more because they've survived the tests of time. On what fucking libertarian planet don't things work this way? And th' fuck shouldn't they? It's how we run the goddam military, Ezra, the only difference being that generations of its poor test results are routinely ignored.
God, do you really imagine that the more power we give petty tyrants, the more we turn schools into personal fiefdoms, the better, more dedicated everyone becomes? Grab a towel, son, and get to work behind those ears. This flippin' mythology of the excellent teaching corps buried underneath a bunch of feather-bedding oldsters--like the myth of thousands of technically-skilled experts who'd love to teach high school math to Poor Children, if only they didn't have to get a degree to do so--is really not one you want to find out in two years' time you were wrong about. It's not like this is just a little war or something.
• Sabrina Tavernise and Michael Slackman, "Turkey Goes From Pliable Ally to Thorn for U.S." June 8
Turkey’s shifting foreign policy is making its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a hero to the Arab world, and is openly challenging the way the United States manages its two most pressing issues in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”
Proving, once again--like we needed it--that nothing changes these fucks' tune about "spreading democracy" faster than somebody actually practicing it.
Tuesday, June 8
Y'know
FIRST: What Mencken said.
Second: I spent eight years in itchy discomfort because, on top of everything else, including much, much worse, Helen Thomas and Gentleman Farmer Sam Donaldson were the designated spokespersons for The Liberal Media during the Reagan excrescence. Thomas may be a good reporter, but the simple fact is that that's like being the top safety advisor at BP. The Gaggle's been owned since 1981, and at best she gave it some sort of credibility on Bizarro World. This is the period when our politics got taken over by "personalities"--beginning with Reagan, moving on to Tip O'Neill, Jerry Brown, Newt Gingrich, and George Will's bowtie--and you know where that got us. She shoulda got while the getting' was good. Goes for the rest of 'em, too.
(And maybe I'm the only one, but goddam if I don't hate the sort of place that has some legendary waitress or cashier who's been there for forty years and can't be bothered to refill your coffee or ring up your bill because she's been there for forty years, and is a legend, and so can pretty much spend her time doing nothing without fear of firing or reprimand, unless she criticizes Israel. Did Helen Thomas inspire any Gaggler to transcend stenography? Or did she inspire a lot of young careerists to a stagy combativeness except when the heat was on? You tell me.)
But, still: Jonah Goldberg has a job. Pat Buchanan has a job. Glenn Beck says worse shit than that in his sleep. Oh, they're not reporters? Monica Crowley has a job. Bernie Goldberg has one. David "Pimping Chelsea Clinton" Shuster had to make a non-apology apology and was suspended for a week. Mike Allen and Andrea Mitchell pimped the White House Vandalism story despite it being, y'know, utter bullshit.
And how long did Judy Miller keep her job at the Times again?
Second: I spent eight years in itchy discomfort because, on top of everything else, including much, much worse, Helen Thomas and Gentleman Farmer Sam Donaldson were the designated spokespersons for The Liberal Media during the Reagan excrescence. Thomas may be a good reporter, but the simple fact is that that's like being the top safety advisor at BP. The Gaggle's been owned since 1981, and at best she gave it some sort of credibility on Bizarro World. This is the period when our politics got taken over by "personalities"--beginning with Reagan, moving on to Tip O'Neill, Jerry Brown, Newt Gingrich, and George Will's bowtie--and you know where that got us. She shoulda got while the getting' was good. Goes for the rest of 'em, too.
(And maybe I'm the only one, but goddam if I don't hate the sort of place that has some legendary waitress or cashier who's been there for forty years and can't be bothered to refill your coffee or ring up your bill because she's been there for forty years, and is a legend, and so can pretty much spend her time doing nothing without fear of firing or reprimand, unless she criticizes Israel. Did Helen Thomas inspire any Gaggler to transcend stenography? Or did she inspire a lot of young careerists to a stagy combativeness except when the heat was on? You tell me.)
But, still: Jonah Goldberg has a job. Pat Buchanan has a job. Glenn Beck says worse shit than that in his sleep. Oh, they're not reporters? Monica Crowley has a job. Bernie Goldberg has one. David "Pimping Chelsea Clinton" Shuster had to make a non-apology apology and was suspended for a week. Mike Allen and Andrea Mitchell pimped the White House Vandalism story despite it being, y'know, utter bullshit.
And how long did Judy Miller keep her job at the Times again?
Monday, June 7
Chuckles
Charles "Merkwürdigeliebe" Krauthammer, "Israel Can Do No Wrong, Times Infinity". June 4
JUST so we're all straight here, right from the top: the settled-on defense is that Israel has an absolute right to blockade anyone provided Israel says it has such a right, and that, as a result, no one in international waters has a right to resist?
And no one on dry land has a right to be critical. Particularly not the government of the United States, which has been footing the bill for these little military excursions--wholly legal, friends!--for sixty years, and which, as a result, can count the Middle East as the one great success story for its post-WWII program of nuclear proliferation and unprincipled military meddlesomeness.
Leslie Gelb! And by invoking the time-honored "Only Knee-Jerk Left-Wingers and the Usual Legion of Poseurs Around the World Would Dispute This" Clause of the Hague Convention of 1907, and backing up that citation with an assemblage of well-reasoned scare quotes. So, alrighty, then. I mean, anybody who takes the time to explain to me why we had to fight in Vietnam even though we didn't have a fucking hope of winning, or even defining what winning might look like, because, y'know, Communism! is the last word in international diplomacy and reasoned analysis in my book.
Of course, nothing is so simple, let alone so simple-minded: a blockade isn't "perfectly legal" just because Tina Brown pays some guy to say so; and Israel's blockade of Gaza is problematic at best, since it almost certainly hurts a civilian population out of all proportion to the "military" objective. And that's before we deal with the question of whether the conflict qualifies as "international" or not, and whether Gaza is an independent state.
World War II is to the distorter of historical realities what The Near Future is to the social moralist: an easy way to make your assertions look inevitable. How 'bout WWI, where both sides claimed legal justification, and both claimed the other side was an international brigand? There's not much evidence the sinking of the Lusitania led to a great national mooting festival. I don't recall a lot of lawyerin' up over the Gulf of Tonkin Nonincident, and I don't remember anyone insisting that the Khmer Rouge had a right to seize the Mayaguez because, y'know, they said so an' stuff. The "right" to decide to do whatever you choose to do and blame it on national security is only recognized by the Court of Who Has the Bigger Battalions.
Y'know, this may be a personal quirk, but if there's anything in popular legalistics I have more distain for than the Borkian idea that one can read a document--the US Constitution, say--without interpreting it, it's this: assertion of black-letter certainty one minute and the intentional blurring of legal distinction the next. Krauthammer puts that "quarantine" in parenthesis just so he won't be accused of historical ignorance; he puts it in quotes so he can ignore it anyway. And the reason "quarantine" must be grudgingly admitted is not that the Kennedy administration chose a term from its Thesaurus, but because it had to seek an alternative to "blockade", which is an act of war. And--I know this is shocking--it managed somehow to get a legal opinion that a quarantine was not, and that a quarantine was a distinctive act.
Insist if you wish that there's not a dime's difference between the two--though the United States did permit the passage of food and medical supplies into Cuba, and without shooting anyone first--but this leaves you with an even bigger problem: now your paragon of legal action is itself of questionable legality.
Look: the blockade is legal under two circumstances: if this is a so-called International Armed Conflict ("IAC" to Magnetic Diplomacy buffs), or if it's ordered by the UN, which it wasn't. No one else on the planet imagines that Gaza is a nation. There is a third possibility; Israel could conduct a blockade if Gaza were an occupied territory. But Israel doesn't want to classify it as such, because it would be required to grant belligerents rights under the Fourth Geneva Convention, instead of as unlawful combatants, or, in other words, however it damn well pleases.
If so, so what? We began this thing talking about the Legality of it all; now we're busy wiping down our fingerprints. There's no legal justification for the use of military force on unarmed civilians (sorry, "civilians with potential access to cutlery") just because you're about to suffer a black eye in Public Relations. Shipments of food and medicine benefit Hamas, too. Why not intercept those as well? We did in WWII.
Assuming none of the others knows the distinction between Shi'a Hezbollah, and Lebanon, and Sunni Hamas, in Gaza, either, I guess the answer's None.
Yeah, poor Israel. Always so concerned with everyone else's opinions. Or, y'know, maybe this has a little something to do with the dismal showing it made in Lebanon in 2006.
Yeah. From the late 60s.
You know how you get one of those stately English lawns? First you get a piece of land, then you roll it every day for 600 years…
Same thing. Next time don't wait forty years to make a half-assed gesture you intend to abnegate militarily at the earliest provocation. Don't wait sixty years before you halfway listen to world opinion, then do as you please anyway.
Let's put it the other way 'round: when has the program of Perpetual Belligerence, Followed by More Belligerence, and if That Doesn't Work, Increase the Belligerence Level done anything for Israel? Yet people 3600 miles away never tire of it. Israel decided generations ago that all its neighbors had to accept its claims of Divine Right to the Land. They don't, and they won't, and no amount of ordnance will change that. They know Jehovah didn't create the modern state of Israel; the de facto postwar voice of decrepit colonialism did. Peace is possible in the Middle East. Not easily possible, by any means. But it sure ain't gonna come because the United States continues to fund long-range aggression on the grounds that the twenty minutes Israel once gave to considering peace initiatives didn't pan out.
Hundreds of thousands of Romani; three million Communists, homosexuals, mental defectives, and other undesirables, the first two subjected to systematic torture as well as planned extermination; seven million Soviet civilians; three million non-Jewish Poles, one million Serbs, more than a million Yugoslavs, nearly a million Hungarians. Two-and-a-half million German civilians. Half a million Japanese civilians in air raids. Four million Russian prisoners of war. Maybe as many as ten million Chinese under Japanese occupation.
In only one place are those numbers still used as grounds for Perpetual War.
JUST so we're all straight here, right from the top: the settled-on defense is that Israel has an absolute right to blockade anyone provided Israel says it has such a right, and that, as a result, no one in international waters has a right to resist?
The world is outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza. Turkey denounces its illegality, inhumanity, barbarity, etc. The usual U.N. suspects, Third World and European, join in. The Obama administration dithers.
And no one on dry land has a right to be critical. Particularly not the government of the United States, which has been footing the bill for these little military excursions--wholly legal, friends!--for sixty years, and which, as a result, can count the Middle East as the one great success story for its post-WWII program of nuclear proliferation and unprincipled military meddlesomeness.
But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal.
Leslie Gelb! And by invoking the time-honored "Only Knee-Jerk Left-Wingers and the Usual Legion of Poseurs Around the World Would Dispute This" Clause of the Hague Convention of 1907, and backing up that citation with an assemblage of well-reasoned scare quotes. So, alrighty, then. I mean, anybody who takes the time to explain to me why we had to fight in Vietnam even though we didn't have a fucking hope of winning, or even defining what winning might look like, because, y'know, Communism! is the last word in international diplomacy and reasoned analysis in my book.
Of course, nothing is so simple, let alone so simple-minded: a blockade isn't "perfectly legal" just because Tina Brown pays some guy to say so; and Israel's blockade of Gaza is problematic at best, since it almost certainly hurts a civilian population out of all proportion to the "military" objective. And that's before we deal with the question of whether the conflict qualifies as "international" or not, and whether Gaza is an independent state.
In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan.
World War II is to the distorter of historical realities what The Near Future is to the social moralist: an easy way to make your assertions look inevitable. How 'bout WWI, where both sides claimed legal justification, and both claimed the other side was an international brigand? There's not much evidence the sinking of the Lusitania led to a great national mooting festival. I don't recall a lot of lawyerin' up over the Gulf of Tonkin Nonincident, and I don't remember anyone insisting that the Khmer Rouge had a right to seize the Mayaguez because, y'know, they said so an' stuff. The "right" to decide to do whatever you choose to do and blame it on national security is only recognized by the Court of Who Has the Bigger Battalions.
And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded ("quarantined") Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry.
Y'know, this may be a personal quirk, but if there's anything in popular legalistics I have more distain for than the Borkian idea that one can read a document--the US Constitution, say--without interpreting it, it's this: assertion of black-letter certainty one minute and the intentional blurring of legal distinction the next. Krauthammer puts that "quarantine" in parenthesis just so he won't be accused of historical ignorance; he puts it in quotes so he can ignore it anyway. And the reason "quarantine" must be grudgingly admitted is not that the Kennedy administration chose a term from its Thesaurus, but because it had to seek an alternative to "blockade", which is an act of war. And--I know this is shocking--it managed somehow to get a legal opinion that a quarantine was not, and that a quarantine was a distinctive act.
Insist if you wish that there's not a dime's difference between the two--though the United States did permit the passage of food and medical supplies into Cuba, and without shooting anyone first--but this leaves you with an even bigger problem: now your paragon of legal action is itself of questionable legality.
Look: the blockade is legal under two circumstances: if this is a so-called International Armed Conflict ("IAC" to Magnetic Diplomacy buffs), or if it's ordered by the UN, which it wasn't. No one else on the planet imagines that Gaza is a nation. There is a third possibility; Israel could conduct a blockade if Gaza were an occupied territory. But Israel doesn't want to classify it as such, because it would be required to grant belligerents rights under the Fourth Geneva Convention, instead of as unlawful combatants, or, in other words, however it damn well pleases.
Oh, but weren't the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel's offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza -- as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.
Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel's inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.
If so, so what? We began this thing talking about the Legality of it all; now we're busy wiping down our fingerprints. There's no legal justification for the use of military force on unarmed civilians (sorry, "civilians with potential access to cutlery") just because you're about to suffer a black eye in Public Relations. Shipments of food and medicine benefit Hamas, too. Why not intercept those as well? We did in WWII.
Israel has already twice intercepted ships laden with Iranian arms destined for Hezbollah and Gaza. What country would allow that?
Assuming none of the others knows the distinction between Shi'a Hezbollah, and Lebanon, and Sunni Hamas, in Gaza, either, I guess the answer's None.
But even more important, why did Israel even have to resort to blockade? Because, blockade is Israel's fallback as the world systematically de-legitimizes its traditional ways of defending itself -- forward and active defense.
Yeah, poor Israel. Always so concerned with everyone else's opinions. Or, y'know, maybe this has a little something to do with the dismal showing it made in Lebanon in 2006.
Land for peace. Remember?
Yeah. From the late 60s.
Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land -- evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack.
You know how you get one of those stately English lawns? First you get a piece of land, then you roll it every day for 600 years…
Same thing. Next time don't wait forty years to make a half-assed gesture you intend to abnegate militarily at the earliest provocation. Don't wait sixty years before you halfway listen to world opinion, then do as you please anyway.
Let's put it the other way 'round: when has the program of Perpetual Belligerence, Followed by More Belligerence, and if That Doesn't Work, Increase the Belligerence Level done anything for Israel? Yet people 3600 miles away never tire of it. Israel decided generations ago that all its neighbors had to accept its claims of Divine Right to the Land. They don't, and they won't, and no amount of ordnance will change that. They know Jehovah didn't create the modern state of Israel; the de facto postwar voice of decrepit colonialism did. Peace is possible in the Middle East. Not easily possible, by any means. But it sure ain't gonna come because the United States continues to fund long-range aggression on the grounds that the twenty minutes Israel once gave to considering peace initiatives didn't pan out.
The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million -- that number again -- hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists -- Iranian in particular -- openly prepare a more final solution.
Hundreds of thousands of Romani; three million Communists, homosexuals, mental defectives, and other undesirables, the first two subjected to systematic torture as well as planned extermination; seven million Soviet civilians; three million non-Jewish Poles, one million Serbs, more than a million Yugoslavs, nearly a million Hungarians. Two-and-a-half million German civilians. Half a million Japanese civilians in air raids. Four million Russian prisoners of war. Maybe as many as ten million Chinese under Japanese occupation.
In only one place are those numbers still used as grounds for Perpetual War.
Sunday, June 6
Thursday, June 3
You Don't Have To Be Crazy To Work Here
IN honor of the frenzied, desperate, and doomed attempts to cap that thing in the Gulf (oh, we don't mean the massive oil spill; we mean the massive libertarian PR spew and containment operation, which led celebrity polititainment figure Sarah Palin to twit that Drill, Baby, Drill! was the one environmentally sound approach; Rush Limbaugh to suggest that Liberals should love the spill since they believe it'll cause marine life to evolve; and David Brooks' argument that since The Free Market couldn't prevent the wholly natural, and sociologically-explained, tendency of people charged with maintaining the safety of cosmically risky profit-driven ventures to begin slacking off after 48 hours without a catastrophe there's no reason the Government should try) I bravely descended my basement stairs yesterday to initiate search efforts for the Esquire Dubious Achievement Awards issue with the Great Mir Cascade. And I succeeded where all those BP engineers and flacksters failed.
For entertainment purposes only! Don't go getting any notions that we should distrust Technology Herself, nor, especially, Her dedicated mouthpieces. © 1997. used without permission:
OF COURSE, AS SPACE STATIONS GO, THAT'S A LONG TIME WITHOUT A FIRE
In February, after eleven years and sixty thousand orbits around the earth, a fire broke out aboard Russia's Mir space station, filling the main cabin with smoke and forcing the crew members to wear gas masks.
A LITTLE FIRE? NO PROBLEM, WE'LL BE FINE AS LONG AS THE GENERATORS DON'T FAIL, LEAVING US WITH ONLY A TWO-MONTH SUPPLY OF OXYGEN
In March, the generators failed aboard the Mir space station, leaving the crew with a two-month supply of oxygen.
OXYGEN GLITCH, SURE. BUT WE'LL BE FINE AS LONG AS OUR COOLING SYSTEM DOESN'T START LEAKING DANGEROUS ETHYLENE-GLYCOL
In April, Mir's cooling system started leaking dangerous ethylene-glycol.
YES, THE FUMES ARE A PROBLEM, BUT WE'LL BE FINE AS LONG AS WE DON'T COLLIDE WITH A SEVEN-TON CARGO SHIP, PUNCTURING THE HULL OF THE SPEKTR MODULE AND KNOCKING OUT MOST OR ALL OF THE SOLAR PANELS
In June, Mir collided with a seven-ton cargo ship, puncturing the hull of the Spektr module and knocking out all the solar panels.
IN A PINCH, WE CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON LAZUTKIN
In July, during an onboard repair, Mir cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin accidentally pulled the wrong plug, shutting off all power and sending the space station into a spin.
THERE'S ALWAYS THE MAIN COMPUTER
In August, the main computer failed.
WE WILL PERSEVERE. JUST GIVE US A FEW MORE WEEKS--
In August, the crew members were replaced and sent home.
AT LEAST WE'LL GET A HERO'S WELCOME AND OUR BONUS
The Mir cosmonauts did not get a hero's welcome. They did not get their bonuses.
For entertainment purposes only! Don't go getting any notions that we should distrust Technology Herself, nor, especially, Her dedicated mouthpieces. © 1997. used without permission:
OF COURSE, AS SPACE STATIONS GO, THAT'S A LONG TIME WITHOUT A FIRE
In February, after eleven years and sixty thousand orbits around the earth, a fire broke out aboard Russia's Mir space station, filling the main cabin with smoke and forcing the crew members to wear gas masks.
A LITTLE FIRE? NO PROBLEM, WE'LL BE FINE AS LONG AS THE GENERATORS DON'T FAIL, LEAVING US WITH ONLY A TWO-MONTH SUPPLY OF OXYGEN
In March, the generators failed aboard the Mir space station, leaving the crew with a two-month supply of oxygen.
OXYGEN GLITCH, SURE. BUT WE'LL BE FINE AS LONG AS OUR COOLING SYSTEM DOESN'T START LEAKING DANGEROUS ETHYLENE-GLYCOL
In April, Mir's cooling system started leaking dangerous ethylene-glycol.
YES, THE FUMES ARE A PROBLEM, BUT WE'LL BE FINE AS LONG AS WE DON'T COLLIDE WITH A SEVEN-TON CARGO SHIP, PUNCTURING THE HULL OF THE SPEKTR MODULE AND KNOCKING OUT MOST OR ALL OF THE SOLAR PANELS
In June, Mir collided with a seven-ton cargo ship, puncturing the hull of the Spektr module and knocking out all the solar panels.
IN A PINCH, WE CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON LAZUTKIN
In July, during an onboard repair, Mir cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin accidentally pulled the wrong plug, shutting off all power and sending the space station into a spin.
THERE'S ALWAYS THE MAIN COMPUTER
In August, the main computer failed.
WE WILL PERSEVERE. JUST GIVE US A FEW MORE WEEKS--
In August, the crew members were replaced and sent home.
AT LEAST WE'LL GET A HERO'S WELCOME AND OUR BONUS
The Mir cosmonauts did not get a hero's welcome. They did not get their bonuses.
Wednesday, June 2
Never Thought I'd Say This, But Maybe The British Had The Right Idea
SALLY Quinn, Sally Fucking Quinn, is on that CBS morning show to discuss the Gore's marriage. Y'know, because that's what friends are for.
As you can imagine I've been on the phone with friends ever since I heard it yesterday.
Yeah. We can just imagine. Must be quite a trial for ya.
There can be no saving grace in such matters, but I was momentarily cheered by the thought that she spent more time on the CBS morning show talking Al and Tipper than she did when CBS was paying her to play journalist.
Tuesday, June 1
The Reset Button
David Brooks, "The Oil Plume". May 31
READER, let us pretend you are the sere and drooping stalk of a left-leaning American midwesterner, born when the hydrophobic post-War American Right was barely out of its proverbial knee pants and yet, in some ways, at its peak: Edward Teller was a geo-political theorist; Curtis LeMay was a military genius; Richard Nixon was Vice-President, having been added to a Republican ticket headed by the victorious Supreme Allied Commander to make it more warlike. Roy Cohn had just kept the world safe, forever, from Ethel Rosenberg. Relax; it's just a fantasy. You lived through, or were taught by people whose recent experience included, outrage over the workable, real-world agreements made at Yalta being kept, but widespread approval for wholly arbitrary support for postwar Colonialism east of Suez and south of the Mediterranean; the dumbed-down Cold War; the losing Korean War, undertaken because a couple of patrician bureaucrats convinced a Missouri haberdasher that a transparent piece of shit entitled "The Testament of Peter the Great", a sort of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", but with more Slav, was a) genuine; and b) could possibly mean anything even if it was, which it wasn't; Quemoy and Matsu; the not-so-crypto militarization of the space program; the Missile Gap; dumbed-down outrage over Castro, and global thermonuclear brinksmanship in response; a decade when much of the South simply ignored Brown, and the North redlined itself into cozy superiority; the losing Vietnam war, undertaken because Presidents of the Democratic persuasion had to prove they were so rabidly anti-Communist they'd waste American lives in doomed and useless efforts just for show; what's good for GM being good for the country, Q.E.D.; the Kennedy assassination; the other Kennedy assassination; the King, Evers, and Malcolm assassinations; Heinz Kissinger, geo-political strategist; George McGovern, the Leon Trotsky of American politics; Jimmy Carter, the Vidkun Quisling of American politics; Ronald Reagan, the George Washington of American politics. The eight-year Blowjob Presidency. The astonishing discovery that there was a Bush even more incompetent than George Herbert Walker, and more venal than Prescott.
Th' fuck is there to scare you, or astonish you, after that? Even the fact that people keep trying is discountable. David Brooks, May 31:
David Brooks, September 18, 2005:
Brooks, yesterday:
Brooks, when his own fat was sizzlin':
What perspective would have taken our hypothetical Midwesterner there? How did the Iranian Hostage Crisis come to symbolize "the inability to take decisive action" when there was none to be taken (except, perhaps, negotiating some arms trading behind the government's back), and when the massive futility of Korea and Vietnam, (supposedly) real pervasive problems, not petty religious thugs run amok, was tossed down the Memory Hole, when it wasn't blamed on Fifth Columnists? For the fucking life of me there has never been any way to understand this short of Personal Dishonesty on a Massive Scale. The difference between Jimmy Carter allowing that Pahlavi character into the country for humanitarian reasons, and what would have occurred had Reagan, or Nixon, or either Bush been at the switch is that the Republicans wouldn't have given a shit about humanitarianism, and would have thumped the tub about the old puppet terror merchant being Our Trusted Ally. The exact same crisis would have ensued, but no one on the Right wouldn't been talking about Taking Decisive Action or Pitiful Helpless Giants. What exactly did all the Tough Talking Deciders get us? In Cambodia? In Lebanon? In Kuwait, Iraq, or Afghanistan? Let alone in Darfur, Somalia, Tiananmen Square, y'know, the places we Let Alone?
Same with this bosh. The party of Drill Baby Drill wags its finger at the Obama administration? For what? Agreeing with it? Things'd be different under President Palin, Dave? Or Michael Chertoff? This highlights the fucking distinction between the Founder's 18th century, Pre-Industrial Revolution Vision Thing and the sadly philosophically-flawed sort of Decisive Action a Democrat might take? Why weren't you saying so five years ago?
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that a good 98% of Americans oppose massive hurricane damage, and at least 89% continue to do so even if the victims are poor. Most want to play both sides of the fence when it comes to Oil, though. Which means if they're looking to fix the blame they can start with the mirror. And laissez-faire Republicans can...lie about shit.
READER, let us pretend you are the sere and drooping stalk of a left-leaning American midwesterner, born when the hydrophobic post-War American Right was barely out of its proverbial knee pants and yet, in some ways, at its peak: Edward Teller was a geo-political theorist; Curtis LeMay was a military genius; Richard Nixon was Vice-President, having been added to a Republican ticket headed by the victorious Supreme Allied Commander to make it more warlike. Roy Cohn had just kept the world safe, forever, from Ethel Rosenberg. Relax; it's just a fantasy. You lived through, or were taught by people whose recent experience included, outrage over the workable, real-world agreements made at Yalta being kept, but widespread approval for wholly arbitrary support for postwar Colonialism east of Suez and south of the Mediterranean; the dumbed-down Cold War; the losing Korean War, undertaken because a couple of patrician bureaucrats convinced a Missouri haberdasher that a transparent piece of shit entitled "The Testament of Peter the Great", a sort of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", but with more Slav, was a) genuine; and b) could possibly mean anything even if it was, which it wasn't; Quemoy and Matsu; the not-so-crypto militarization of the space program; the Missile Gap; dumbed-down outrage over Castro, and global thermonuclear brinksmanship in response; a decade when much of the South simply ignored Brown, and the North redlined itself into cozy superiority; the losing Vietnam war, undertaken because Presidents of the Democratic persuasion had to prove they were so rabidly anti-Communist they'd waste American lives in doomed and useless efforts just for show; what's good for GM being good for the country, Q.E.D.; the Kennedy assassination; the other Kennedy assassination; the King, Evers, and Malcolm assassinations; Heinz Kissinger, geo-political strategist; George McGovern, the Leon Trotsky of American politics; Jimmy Carter, the Vidkun Quisling of American politics; Ronald Reagan, the George Washington of American politics. The eight-year Blowjob Presidency. The astonishing discovery that there was a Bush even more incompetent than George Herbert Walker, and more venal than Prescott.
Th' fuck is there to scare you, or astonish you, after that? Even the fact that people keep trying is discountable. David Brooks, May 31:
The failure of the top-kill technique in the Gulf of Mexico represents an interesting turning point on the Obama presidency. It symbolizes the end of the period of lightning advance and the beginning of the period of nasty stasis.
David Brooks, September 18, 2005:
On Thursday, President Bush went to New Orleans and gave the second most important domestic policy speech of his life. Politically it was a masterpiece, proof that if the president levels with the American people and admits mistakes, it pays off.
But in policy terms, the speech pushed the journey toward Bushian conservatism into high gear. The Gulf Coast will be a laboratory for the Bushian vision of energetic but not domineering government….
On Thursday, the president was honest about the cost of all this, but he only began to lay out a plan. The Bushies are still trying to figure out how to help people from broken families and those with mental disabilities. They're trying to figure out where to cut government to offset the costs. There are arguments about what New Orleans should try to be, a smaller controlled-growth Portland or a booming and spreading Houston.
Brooks, yesterday:
Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself.
Brooks, when his own fat was sizzlin':
Like Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal era, Bush doesn't have a complete vision of what he wants to achieve. But he does have an instinctive framework.
His administration is going to fight a two-front war, against big government liberals and small government conservatives, but if he can devote himself to executing his policies, the Gulf Coast will be his T.V.A., the program that serves as a model for what can be done nationwide.
What perspective would have taken our hypothetical Midwesterner there? How did the Iranian Hostage Crisis come to symbolize "the inability to take decisive action" when there was none to be taken (except, perhaps, negotiating some arms trading behind the government's back), and when the massive futility of Korea and Vietnam, (supposedly) real pervasive problems, not petty religious thugs run amok, was tossed down the Memory Hole, when it wasn't blamed on Fifth Columnists? For the fucking life of me there has never been any way to understand this short of Personal Dishonesty on a Massive Scale. The difference between Jimmy Carter allowing that Pahlavi character into the country for humanitarian reasons, and what would have occurred had Reagan, or Nixon, or either Bush been at the switch is that the Republicans wouldn't have given a shit about humanitarianism, and would have thumped the tub about the old puppet terror merchant being Our Trusted Ally. The exact same crisis would have ensued, but no one on the Right wouldn't been talking about Taking Decisive Action or Pitiful Helpless Giants. What exactly did all the Tough Talking Deciders get us? In Cambodia? In Lebanon? In Kuwait, Iraq, or Afghanistan? Let alone in Darfur, Somalia, Tiananmen Square, y'know, the places we Let Alone?
Same with this bosh. The party of Drill Baby Drill wags its finger at the Obama administration? For what? Agreeing with it? Things'd be different under President Palin, Dave? Or Michael Chertoff? This highlights the fucking distinction between the Founder's 18th century, Pre-Industrial Revolution Vision Thing and the sadly philosophically-flawed sort of Decisive Action a Democrat might take? Why weren't you saying so five years ago?
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that a good 98% of Americans oppose massive hurricane damage, and at least 89% continue to do so even if the victims are poor. Most want to play both sides of the fence when it comes to Oil, though. Which means if they're looking to fix the blame they can start with the mirror. And laissez-faire Republicans can...lie about shit.
Monday, May 31
Friday, May 28
Jesus Wept II: The Crudening
David Brooks, "Drilling for Certainty". May 27
OKAY, so my earlier plans for vacation (1. Drink; 2. Leave the world unseen; 3. Post that pic of Sora Aoi;
4. Fade into forest dim) didn't quite pan out, though 1-for-4 isn't exactly a slump. And have, in fact, been replaced unintentionally by a sort of theme: the suggestion that the solution to all our problems is returning to The Teat.
Now, I'm a teat man myself, but I try not to make a philosophy of it. But as we're delving, yet again, into David Brooks' oral fantasy world, let's start with the fact that everything is not as it seems.
The Evil Sixties turned the social order on its head, though not without The Placid Fifties doing much of the grunt work. It's the sort of thing that happens periodically, and each time it does the people with a vested interest in the established order insist it was unprecedented. What was perhaps new that time is that instantaneous global communications were peering in, and that, following the 20s, 30s, 40s, and, yes, 50s, the concept of the Decade as a sort of Theme Park of Mass Experience was well established in the minds of most headline writers. Thus the chronological jumble which has subsumed Brown v. Topeka and the Montgomery bus boycott into The Sixties, and rendered the large-scale unpopularity of the Korean War an invisible speck in the glare of Vietnam.
David Brooks is born in 1961. His personal experience of The Sixties, then, is orthodontia, clarinet practice, and daily embarrassment on the kickball diamond. By the time he's old enough to be turned down for dates, the prevailing high school mode is the "Freebird"/Styx parody of Sixties rocker model. This is, of course, already past its sell-by date, assuming it was ever merchantable in the first place, and Brooks is matriculating on The Main Line, where his colleagues of snottier persuasion are likely faux-Punks, and where Geek Chic, Yuppiedom, and noses are in the air. To be fair, Brooks, according to his autobio, is a starry-eyed liberal kid with a Springsteen poster. To be honest, yeah, right.
Our point being this: when you read this shit about the mature viewpoint whose geographic center is Brooks' skull, which rejects both the simplistic, Springsteen-poster-bedecked Socialism to his left, and the worst excesses of the Right, the ones which he mentions, or caricatures, only in cases where the stench has become too great to ignore, you ought to bear in mind that what you are actually reading is Brooks reliving his long-practiced and quickly shot-to-pieces Would You Like To Go To The Prom With Me speech before some cracked Magic Mirror of the mind.
Okay. I'm sure glad we could get to The Real Issue so quickly. I was afraid it might take three or four paragraphs to dismiss the crazy crackpot idea that we might need to regulate private, profit-driven activities which have the potential to fucking eliminate private, oxygen- and food-consuming activities for anyone in their way.
(It's interesting, too, that the sort of wingnuttery Republican Mouthpiece Brooks has been soaking in for his entire professional life only makes an appearance when it's required to show that The Liberals are just as crazy! With their socialism and not understanding that we need oil an' stuff! Y'know, as such things run, "The BP Oil Spill is Obama's Katrina" is about as close to sanity as those people get, not that they didn't defend the Bush administration's Katrina dithering, not that they hadn't just recovered from screaming themselves hoarse over Obama raiding the sacred profits of the insurance industry. It's just that what else they say is even fucking crazier, and no less stupid. The idea that massive ecological disaster caused, and ineffectively planned for or responded to, by unfettered profiteers might be considered ample reason to assert public control is not the opposite of "Barack Hussein Socialst Obama"; it's the opposite of the insistence that all regulation is excessive and all taxation of business is dumped on the consumer. It is, in other words, David Brooks' own position, not the sensible middle ground, though I imagine he'd add "within reason" somewhere to make himself look thoughtful. The opposite of "Obama's Katrina" is the idea that massive oil spills are a natural occurrence, and no sweat if you're not a bivalve. But since that comes from Rush Limbaugh, not the Koo-koo Left, it wouldn't have done Brooks any good.)
Is there any explanation for this phony goddam dichotomy other than the fact that you can't win an argument without it?
Is there one thing we've learned? If so I doubt that's it. I'd be more inclined to say, "No matter what it is, somebody will come along and excuse it, either because someone pays him to, or because he hopes someone will. And at the end he'll explain that his is the only explanation which takes the mature view."
So, y'know, Fuck You; let's put the goddam pipeline in your back yard and see what you say. Let's make Matt Bai a bright eight-year-old born into inner-city poverty, and then ask him about the evils of affirmative action. I could fucking live without financial markets, energy exploration, Moon explosions, lost wars, lost luggage, 80% of what comes out of modern production plants, and the other 20% provided there was someone around to do it by hand. You can call that naivete if you'd like; I didn't say everyone could do so--especially NASA engineers and defense contractors, since you asked--and I don't say that I do without all those things now. I don't. Nor am I saying I wish to, though that one's more like Undecided. The point is that the assertion that this is all just one big, organically-developed Ball o' Fun we all dearly love and wouldn't dream of doing without is bullshit. And you can't even produce a list of all the essentials for modern life made possible by Hopeless Fucking Complexity Which Might Have A Slight Tendency To Kill Some Unfortunates without 90% of that list being shit that owes its very existence to political manipulation, not basic survival. And which has only incidental connection to most people's lives. Less than half of all Americans travel by air in an average year, and they take less than two trips per annum. They use banks, and gobble energy, but they're not lining up at the Recruitment office, and they care more about science fiction than colonizing Mars, unless it's a movie about colonizing Mars. The people who get to "vote" on whether we have that shit are on Wall St., or in the Senate Cloak Room, and they all specialize in chicanery.
Sure, some of this is organic, and it's likely that areas where we generally agree on the desirability of technological advancement--medicine, say--tend to pull everything else along with them. So you get increasingly sophisticated tests informing increasingly sophisticated procedures, and increasingly large bills to pay for it all, and high-speed porn and low cost storage for it. S'alright by me, but it doesn't erase the fact that we can't afford to keep up our infrastructure, and that we don't have any way to evaluate the benefits of the Next Big Step.
And, for that matter, the fact that the rest of the civilized world recognizes the need for sensible regulation, and it still manages to buy airline tickets, go to the bank, and drown in consumer gizmos. About the only thing it can't do is operate a military fifty times larger than anyone else's. Which, y'know, might tell you something right there. Within reason, I mean.
OKAY, so my earlier plans for vacation (1. Drink; 2. Leave the world unseen; 3. Post that pic of Sora Aoi;
4. Fade into forest dim) didn't quite pan out, though 1-for-4 isn't exactly a slump. And have, in fact, been replaced unintentionally by a sort of theme: the suggestion that the solution to all our problems is returning to The Teat.
Now, I'm a teat man myself, but I try not to make a philosophy of it. But as we're delving, yet again, into David Brooks' oral fantasy world, let's start with the fact that everything is not as it seems.
The Evil Sixties turned the social order on its head, though not without The Placid Fifties doing much of the grunt work. It's the sort of thing that happens periodically, and each time it does the people with a vested interest in the established order insist it was unprecedented. What was perhaps new that time is that instantaneous global communications were peering in, and that, following the 20s, 30s, 40s, and, yes, 50s, the concept of the Decade as a sort of Theme Park of Mass Experience was well established in the minds of most headline writers. Thus the chronological jumble which has subsumed Brown v. Topeka and the Montgomery bus boycott into The Sixties, and rendered the large-scale unpopularity of the Korean War an invisible speck in the glare of Vietnam.
David Brooks is born in 1961. His personal experience of The Sixties, then, is orthodontia, clarinet practice, and daily embarrassment on the kickball diamond. By the time he's old enough to be turned down for dates, the prevailing high school mode is the "Freebird"/Styx parody of Sixties rocker model. This is, of course, already past its sell-by date, assuming it was ever merchantable in the first place, and Brooks is matriculating on The Main Line, where his colleagues of snottier persuasion are likely faux-Punks, and where Geek Chic, Yuppiedom, and noses are in the air. To be fair, Brooks, according to his autobio, is a starry-eyed liberal kid with a Springsteen poster. To be honest, yeah, right.
Our point being this: when you read this shit about the mature viewpoint whose geographic center is Brooks' skull, which rejects both the simplistic, Springsteen-poster-bedecked Socialism to his left, and the worst excesses of the Right, the ones which he mentions, or caricatures, only in cases where the stench has become too great to ignore, you ought to bear in mind that what you are actually reading is Brooks reliving his long-practiced and quickly shot-to-pieces Would You Like To Go To The Prom With Me speech before some cracked Magic Mirror of the mind.
In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the political debate has fallen into predictably partisan and often puerile categories. Conservatives say this is Obama’s Katrina. Liberals say the spill is proof the government should have more control over industry.
But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.
Okay. I'm sure glad we could get to The Real Issue so quickly. I was afraid it might take three or four paragraphs to dismiss the crazy crackpot idea that we might need to regulate private, profit-driven activities which have the potential to fucking eliminate private, oxygen- and food-consuming activities for anyone in their way.
(It's interesting, too, that the sort of wingnuttery Republican Mouthpiece Brooks has been soaking in for his entire professional life only makes an appearance when it's required to show that The Liberals are just as crazy! With their socialism and not understanding that we need oil an' stuff! Y'know, as such things run, "The BP Oil Spill is Obama's Katrina" is about as close to sanity as those people get, not that they didn't defend the Bush administration's Katrina dithering, not that they hadn't just recovered from screaming themselves hoarse over Obama raiding the sacred profits of the insurance industry. It's just that what else they say is even fucking crazier, and no less stupid. The idea that massive ecological disaster caused, and ineffectively planned for or responded to, by unfettered profiteers might be considered ample reason to assert public control is not the opposite of "Barack Hussein Socialst Obama"; it's the opposite of the insistence that all regulation is excessive and all taxation of business is dumped on the consumer. It is, in other words, David Brooks' own position, not the sensible middle ground, though I imagine he'd add "within reason" somewhere to make himself look thoughtful. The opposite of "Obama's Katrina" is the idea that massive oil spills are a natural occurrence, and no sweat if you're not a bivalve. But since that comes from Rush Limbaugh, not the Koo-koo Left, it wouldn't have done Brooks any good.)
Is there any explanation for this phony goddam dichotomy other than the fact that you can't win an argument without it?
Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.
These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.
If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.
Is there one thing we've learned? If so I doubt that's it. I'd be more inclined to say, "No matter what it is, somebody will come along and excuse it, either because someone pays him to, or because he hopes someone will. And at the end he'll explain that his is the only explanation which takes the mature view."
So, y'know, Fuck You; let's put the goddam pipeline in your back yard and see what you say. Let's make Matt Bai a bright eight-year-old born into inner-city poverty, and then ask him about the evils of affirmative action. I could fucking live without financial markets, energy exploration, Moon explosions, lost wars, lost luggage, 80% of what comes out of modern production plants, and the other 20% provided there was someone around to do it by hand. You can call that naivete if you'd like; I didn't say everyone could do so--especially NASA engineers and defense contractors, since you asked--and I don't say that I do without all those things now. I don't. Nor am I saying I wish to, though that one's more like Undecided. The point is that the assertion that this is all just one big, organically-developed Ball o' Fun we all dearly love and wouldn't dream of doing without is bullshit. And you can't even produce a list of all the essentials for modern life made possible by Hopeless Fucking Complexity Which Might Have A Slight Tendency To Kill Some Unfortunates without 90% of that list being shit that owes its very existence to political manipulation, not basic survival. And which has only incidental connection to most people's lives. Less than half of all Americans travel by air in an average year, and they take less than two trips per annum. They use banks, and gobble energy, but they're not lining up at the Recruitment office, and they care more about science fiction than colonizing Mars, unless it's a movie about colonizing Mars. The people who get to "vote" on whether we have that shit are on Wall St., or in the Senate Cloak Room, and they all specialize in chicanery.
Sure, some of this is organic, and it's likely that areas where we generally agree on the desirability of technological advancement--medicine, say--tend to pull everything else along with them. So you get increasingly sophisticated tests informing increasingly sophisticated procedures, and increasingly large bills to pay for it all, and high-speed porn and low cost storage for it. S'alright by me, but it doesn't erase the fact that we can't afford to keep up our infrastructure, and that we don't have any way to evaluate the benefits of the Next Big Step.
And, for that matter, the fact that the rest of the civilized world recognizes the need for sensible regulation, and it still manages to buy airline tickets, go to the bank, and drown in consumer gizmos. About the only thing it can't do is operate a military fifty times larger than anyone else's. Which, y'know, might tell you something right there. Within reason, I mean.
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