MY Poor Wife watches The Young and the Restless, her secret shame before the founding of this blog. Her viewing dates to college and, I suspect, the peer-pressure influence of some theoretical-minded sorority sister who'd read some French guy who said that poshlost taste was the new avant-garde. This, of course, did nothing much other than actually lower the standards of trash, predictably, since while it is certainly true that Joyce, to choose one example, was a regular reader of The Police Gazette, so, too, were hundreds of thousands of others who left no evidence they could decipher a Ulysses, let alone produce one. This was a Continental doubletalk version of the romantic sophomore notion that drinking to excess turns one into Dylan Thomas.
(Just to be clear about it: there's no problem with enjoying this crap, provided you realize why you ought to be ashamed to admit it to functioning adults. The whole Star Trek phenomenon would be harmless fun if it weren't for morphological adults walking around in public wearing Spock ears, speaking Klingon, or teaching law classes.)
Over the years, though--the problem is newly exacerbated by the fact that she's discovered SoapNet and nightly replays; for years it was a holiday/sick day lark--I've managed to wrest enough entertainment from occasional congruence with the thing to actively seek it out, in carefully controlled doses. (This used to be easier, as soaps traditionally moved at roughly the same pace as lichen growth, but they've speeded up now for that hip, complex-story-line-following 18-26 demo.) It's something of a revelation, and not necessarily a good one, which has led to Doghouse Riley's First and Only Rule of Teevee Scriptwriting, which is:
Even granting the ridiculous plot line someone adopted, how fucking difficult can it be to make things semi-believable?
Okay, so that's not really a rule, but over the years Y&R, as it's known to Soap Digest aficionados, has served up these memorable contributions to Western culture, as recorded by a guy who passed through the room occasionally:
• Years ago, a Private Investigator (we'll be returning to the Law in a moment) discovered the key to a case, a cassette tape containing vital evidence. The plot then turned on it taking three days for him to hook up with the guy he knew who had a cassette player.
• The perfume-baronage family decided to take its privately-held company public, only to accidentally sell 51% of the stock, and this to one of the other major international industrialists inexplicably squatting in West Bumfuck, Wisconsin, who had hidden his identity in order to buy it up.
• Jurisprudence, forget about it; if the rest of daytime teevee is equally bad there's little point in worrying about what we're teaching kids in school. That PI became a PI because his dad was a cop. That was his one qualification; Dad joined in on some cases. A product-tampering case, whose victim was in California, is being handled by the local bunco desk; a long legal limbo has resulted from the question of whether the victim died from the poison no one disputes was present, or had an unrelated heart attack. Innocence before the bar, and Due Process, are apparently superseded, under the Wisconsin constitution, by drawing legal concepts out of a hat. No one ever runs a major multination corporate decision past a lawyer, let alone a board; someone just barks out an order to form a new division, and the next week it's in operation, being run by a supermodel.
• Everyone in town has had transient global amnesia, a doppelgänger, or both, at least once; one current story line involves the wealthiest woman in the Great Lakes Region suffering from both simultaneously, except the doppelgänger died, so she has to get her slowly-recovering identity back by stealing records from a pawn shop, which might at least make some sort of sense if they'd had a pawn shop set lying around, which they didn't.
Well, I'm sure I started out with a segué for that.
Oh, the Blizzard. This week there was a Blizzard, apparently so an adulterous couple could get trapped in a cabin, and some kid could fall through the ice. I don't recall ever visiting Wisconsin in February, but I'm guessing that people there are at least somewhat concerned with the weather, and that the ice is more or less generally thick, but no mind. The amorous trapees are interrupted on a regular schedule by some sort of Park Ranger; people come and go through the screenless door without so much as a little frosty blowback; despite the fact that we're in the deep woods, and minus electricity, the thing is the quietest damn blizzard in the meteorological record books. It gave every appearance of people in Southern California believing that blizzards, or perhaps all natural disasters, followed the wildfire pattern, like it was just over the next hill or something.
And hell, they may believe that, but the fact is that even if they don't it's easier to pretend they do.
I thought that Applebaum column was pretty much a throwaway--I was just gonna use the headline without further comment--but then your comments convinced me otherwise. We aren't a nation of Hawaiians with twelve words for poi and none for snow. We may not know precisely what should be done about the crisis in the finance sector, but we know a hawk from a snowshovel, and we know that greed, theft, misfeasance and malfeasance are at the core, the result of thirty-five years of Republican rule. We know it's the major arteries which need to be cleaned off; people's stoops are of lesser importance. We know it's the average citizen--the same guy these people are grifting in good times as well as bad--who needs and deserves protection, and we know that massive government intervention is the only way we'll solve things, if they are to be solved at all. It's torchlight and pitchforks otherwise, Ms Applebaum, and if certain segments of the mob see fit to start with the WaPo building, well, that's the way the snow blows.
Friday, February 6
Thursday, February 5
Of Course, One Difference Is That The Tories Haven't Spent The Last Forty Years Trying To Convince The Public That Snow Shovels Lead To Socialism.
Anne Applebaum, WaPo:
And I'm told tin foil makes lovely--and durable--protective headcoverings, though that depends to some extent on what's about to fall on you.
Trudging around snowy London, it was impossible to escape another thought: Surely what's true of the weather is true of other kinds of unexpected change, too. People who no longer remember slow economic growth, for example, might not be able to cope with negative growth, let alone a severe recession. In London, it hasn't snowed much for 18 years, so no one owns a snow shovel -- and if they do, they don't know how to use it. In the United States, the economy hasn't really collapsed since 1929, so no one knows how to save string and tinfoil -- and if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with them. A whole set of skills, from cooking with leftovers to recycling bottles (not because it's green, but because it's thrifty) has been lost during two generations of prosperity, in much the same way the British have forgotten how to drive their cars through slush. The last time I went to have some shoes resoled in Washington, the cobbler told me he wasn't going to be in business much longer, so low had the demand for his services sunk. Does anyone know how to repair toasters anymore? What about television sets?I SEE; now it's the public's fault that mega-capitalism has been able to lobby, or "lobby", its way into an economy and a government designed to protect stock prices rather than labor? Like the producers of consumer electronics, clothing, and "convenience" items are unaware they benefit from premature obsolescence? They don't know the relative profit margins of shoddy vs. well-made products, nor the precise point where the Returns begin Diminishing? They haven't been manipulating this sort of thing for decades, and as much by political as economic means? I grant you it's The Public that voted for Empty Promises and Rising Tides time and again, but the public can't be expected to know better without the repeated application of Hard Lessons. People toss out junk and buy new because it's cheaper to do so; it's cheaper because that benefits Big Business. Lady, Thomas Edison's light bulbs still work.
And I'm told tin foil makes lovely--and durable--protective headcoverings, though that depends to some extent on what's about to fall on you.
Guttersniping
I WAS in the basement last evening, changing cat littler boxes, when the full force of that David Brooks Tuesday column hit me. This is one of the many drawbacks of routinely writing shit down: things tend to morph into academic exercises, or alternative courses seem more reasonable. Not that this blog would ever do anything either academic or reasonable. I mean metaphorically.
Maybe it had something to do with the Sorta CEO salary cap ("And this time we expect the Honor System to work!") announced earlier, and the predictable loathsome toadying faux-balanced "reporting" on the "controversy" that followed on local "news".
One really must look at the bush leagues to get the full picture of what thirty years of the Happy Chatter and Relatively Exorbitant Salaries Breeding Program has done for the quality of our lapdogs. It is abundantly clear that any form of reporting--beyond the routine tales of lower-class brigands, celebrity worshiphate, and the never-fails-to-wow-'em-for-three-days-running discovery of a House With Animal Feces Everywhere--that any reporting, I say, which cannot be approached in the same spirit of unbridled enthusiasm which would have met the announcement, at the Closing Ceremonies of the Games of the XXIII Olympiad, Los Angeles, CA, that President and Mrs. Reagan had decided to adopt Adorable Girl Gymnast Mary Lou Retton, make her an instant millionaire, and marry her off to Magnum P.I. himself, Mr. Tom Selleck, is simply alien to them. I don't think breeding is necessarily too strong a word there; watching the younger reporters on this story was like watching a dog you're talking to after inhaling helium. It wasn't as though the concept of a CEO salary cap were objectionable to them, or even a foreign concept. It was as though they'd never heard the words before. Channel 8 has a couple of middle-aged anchors whose careers date to the early years of Happy Talk; behind their eyes was a sort of misty half-remembrance of the sunny greenspaces of the Early Geraldo Era, the happy time when real reporting was replaced by the fake, before being abandoned altogether. When they could feel something. It was like watching a wheelchair-bound nonagenarian remembering his lost tricycle. People who make lots of money are not supposed to be the subjects of downer reporting! unless they're flighty celebs, or people who Used To Make A Lot Of Money But Don't Anymore.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that local "news" has had to play along with Mitch "The Munchkin of Miracles" Daniels for four years, touting his phony budget numbers, propping up his image as Entrepreneur-in-Chief, and reporting that the closing of Delphi Electronics in Anderson was ameliorated by Mitch's eleventh-hour offer to throw union employees into the White River, which ain't that much of a hydraulic threat, exactly, but the shit Delphi dumped into it for decades would have killed 'em all before they'd floated to Noblesville. And between last April's kickoff of the Constant Barrage of Highly Profitable Nonstop Fact-Free Mitch Daniels Reelection Campaign Commercials, and his glorious re-ascension to the Booster Seat of Power in November, they'd had to tout Indiana's Economic Miracle to the very people it had already collapsed on. Of course now that we really do need a miracle they seem to have lost his cell number.
Yet the odds of any of these people ever being plagued by a $500,000/year salary cap are nil, and they know it. It's Indianapolis. There are precisely two local news success stories: David Letterman, who had other talents, and Jane Pauley, who had one: being attractive without being threatening. (She is a beacon of hope for local hairdos, however; she was so awful local wags--okay, me and my friend Kelly--called her Jane Palsy. Couldn't read two lines without fumbling one. The moral of the story, kids, is she improved. Try it some time.) Some Chicago station or other wanted sports gasbag Chet Coppock, for some reason, and some other sports pretty boy (who was, seriously, promo'd for his looks while he was here; must've been Channel 13) moved to CNN. That's it. If you're a local teleprompter reader in Indianapolis your big career expectations are a) getting to fuck race car drivers; b) being chosen to conduct a five-minute fungo session during Fred Thompson's forty-five minute Presidential campaign; c) getting to write a cookbook, local-flavored mystery fiction, or heart-warming tale of your conversations with your faithful dog who is now deceased, which will be published by some vanity-press operation and never appear in a county not contiguous with Marion; or d) getting to cut to the head of the line in some restaurant which doesn't even deserve to have a waiting list. Still, the possibility that some members of our newly-licensed beggar class might have to fly commercial someday was treated like the vague passing of some touchstone of The American Way of Life.
Although, as Roy points out, there is some evidence of a hesitation to risk the populist riptide, but it appears to come from the news management, not the "talent"; here we are fortunate in being able to compare the current response with the one seven months ago, when the price of filling up their family Panzers hit $130, and are thus aware that, wisely, not all the emotion's been bred out of 'em. Otherwise they might start letting their hair go.
Anyway, I'm in the middle of cleaning out the cat boxes, and out of the blue I think: Motherfucking Brooks pulled another Applebee's salad bar/Red Lobster $20 entree routine, and I let him off. Covetous staffer/regulation authors seethe while having to clean their own gutters and decide to Stick It To Da Man in response. And I'm there with a snootful of cat crap, and I think, first, out here where the Real People live, the place Brooks has supposedly nailed down again and again, to the grudging delight of "Liberals", most people enjoy doing this sort of thing, and even compete at it, even if they don't particularly care for one job or another. It wouldn't even occur to me to hire somebody to clean those litter boxes, and I'm the laziest man on earth. And those who don't, or can't, hire people to do it for them. There're grass mowers and painters and housemaids and gutter cleaners at work almost constantly in our little barely managing suburban enclave. But Brooks put it down to not having household help! I've never had household help; I might've changed my mind had I known you could order them to clean gutters, repair furnaces, or corrugate tin. You can put that one right alongside the idea that Real America just loves it some Fat Cat, a notion that owes everything to thirty years of Reagan mythologizing and the canny setting of middle class on poorer like some political cockfight, and nothing to actually knowing any Real Americans. Maybe you should have given this a bit more thought before you destroyed the middle class altogether, but then you wouldn't be the same charming, gouty face-stuffers who imagine the household help tends the gutters, waxes the town car, and trims the topiary.
Real phoniness is bad enough, but it's the fake phoniness that really struck me. Envious Congressional staffers have been crafting legislation since Shay's Rebellion. And from the time David Brooks could tell gabardine from vicuña they've been handing all those hated rich people tax break after tax break. That's his experience. Although, in fairness, maybe the trees in Ward Three just now rose above roof height.
Maybe it had something to do with the Sorta CEO salary cap ("And this time we expect the Honor System to work!") announced earlier, and the predictable loathsome toadying faux-balanced "reporting" on the "controversy" that followed on local "news".
One really must look at the bush leagues to get the full picture of what thirty years of the Happy Chatter and Relatively Exorbitant Salaries Breeding Program has done for the quality of our lapdogs. It is abundantly clear that any form of reporting--beyond the routine tales of lower-class brigands, celebrity worshiphate, and the never-fails-to-wow-'em-for-three-days-running discovery of a House With Animal Feces Everywhere--that any reporting, I say, which cannot be approached in the same spirit of unbridled enthusiasm which would have met the announcement, at the Closing Ceremonies of the Games of the XXIII Olympiad, Los Angeles, CA, that President and Mrs. Reagan had decided to adopt Adorable Girl Gymnast Mary Lou Retton, make her an instant millionaire, and marry her off to Magnum P.I. himself, Mr. Tom Selleck, is simply alien to them. I don't think breeding is necessarily too strong a word there; watching the younger reporters on this story was like watching a dog you're talking to after inhaling helium. It wasn't as though the concept of a CEO salary cap were objectionable to them, or even a foreign concept. It was as though they'd never heard the words before. Channel 8 has a couple of middle-aged anchors whose careers date to the early years of Happy Talk; behind their eyes was a sort of misty half-remembrance of the sunny greenspaces of the Early Geraldo Era, the happy time when real reporting was replaced by the fake, before being abandoned altogether. When they could feel something. It was like watching a wheelchair-bound nonagenarian remembering his lost tricycle. People who make lots of money are not supposed to be the subjects of downer reporting! unless they're flighty celebs, or people who Used To Make A Lot Of Money But Don't Anymore.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that local "news" has had to play along with Mitch "The Munchkin of Miracles" Daniels for four years, touting his phony budget numbers, propping up his image as Entrepreneur-in-Chief, and reporting that the closing of Delphi Electronics in Anderson was ameliorated by Mitch's eleventh-hour offer to throw union employees into the White River, which ain't that much of a hydraulic threat, exactly, but the shit Delphi dumped into it for decades would have killed 'em all before they'd floated to Noblesville. And between last April's kickoff of the Constant Barrage of Highly Profitable Nonstop Fact-Free Mitch Daniels Reelection Campaign Commercials, and his glorious re-ascension to the Booster Seat of Power in November, they'd had to tout Indiana's Economic Miracle to the very people it had already collapsed on. Of course now that we really do need a miracle they seem to have lost his cell number.
Yet the odds of any of these people ever being plagued by a $500,000/year salary cap are nil, and they know it. It's Indianapolis. There are precisely two local news success stories: David Letterman, who had other talents, and Jane Pauley, who had one: being attractive without being threatening. (She is a beacon of hope for local hairdos, however; she was so awful local wags--okay, me and my friend Kelly--called her Jane Palsy. Couldn't read two lines without fumbling one. The moral of the story, kids, is she improved. Try it some time.) Some Chicago station or other wanted sports gasbag Chet Coppock, for some reason, and some other sports pretty boy (who was, seriously, promo'd for his looks while he was here; must've been Channel 13) moved to CNN. That's it. If you're a local teleprompter reader in Indianapolis your big career expectations are a) getting to fuck race car drivers; b) being chosen to conduct a five-minute fungo session during Fred Thompson's forty-five minute Presidential campaign; c) getting to write a cookbook, local-flavored mystery fiction, or heart-warming tale of your conversations with your faithful dog who is now deceased, which will be published by some vanity-press operation and never appear in a county not contiguous with Marion; or d) getting to cut to the head of the line in some restaurant which doesn't even deserve to have a waiting list. Still, the possibility that some members of our newly-licensed beggar class might have to fly commercial someday was treated like the vague passing of some touchstone of The American Way of Life.
Although, as Roy points out, there is some evidence of a hesitation to risk the populist riptide, but it appears to come from the news management, not the "talent"; here we are fortunate in being able to compare the current response with the one seven months ago, when the price of filling up their family Panzers hit $130, and are thus aware that, wisely, not all the emotion's been bred out of 'em. Otherwise they might start letting their hair go.
Anyway, I'm in the middle of cleaning out the cat boxes, and out of the blue I think: Motherfucking Brooks pulled another Applebee's salad bar/Red Lobster $20 entree routine, and I let him off. Covetous staffer/regulation authors seethe while having to clean their own gutters and decide to Stick It To Da Man in response. And I'm there with a snootful of cat crap, and I think, first, out here where the Real People live, the place Brooks has supposedly nailed down again and again, to the grudging delight of "Liberals", most people enjoy doing this sort of thing, and even compete at it, even if they don't particularly care for one job or another. It wouldn't even occur to me to hire somebody to clean those litter boxes, and I'm the laziest man on earth. And those who don't, or can't, hire people to do it for them. There're grass mowers and painters and housemaids and gutter cleaners at work almost constantly in our little barely managing suburban enclave. But Brooks put it down to not having household help! I've never had household help; I might've changed my mind had I known you could order them to clean gutters, repair furnaces, or corrugate tin. You can put that one right alongside the idea that Real America just loves it some Fat Cat, a notion that owes everything to thirty years of Reagan mythologizing and the canny setting of middle class on poorer like some political cockfight, and nothing to actually knowing any Real Americans. Maybe you should have given this a bit more thought before you destroyed the middle class altogether, but then you wouldn't be the same charming, gouty face-stuffers who imagine the household help tends the gutters, waxes the town car, and trims the topiary.
Real phoniness is bad enough, but it's the fake phoniness that really struck me. Envious Congressional staffers have been crafting legislation since Shay's Rebellion. And from the time David Brooks could tell gabardine from vicuña they've been handing all those hated rich people tax break after tax break. That's his experience. Although, in fairness, maybe the trees in Ward Three just now rose above roof height.
Wednesday, February 4
Why Is The President Of The United States Apologizing To Brian WIlliams?
POP quiz time; close your books:
1) Name the first Bush II administration Commerce secretary.
2) Name the first Bush II cabinet nominee to be withdrawn.
3) Name all the Democrats who served in the Bush cabinet.
4) Who is Thomas E. White?
• Extra credit: find a YouTubes video featuring Brian Williams in January 2001, expressing concern over, say, Dick Cheney's failure/refusal to divest himself of stocks or create a blind trust in a timely fashion, despite the obvious conflicts of interest. Or Donald Rumsfeld, same. Or Karl Rove. Or Paul O'Neill. Or Mitch Daniels. Or video of George W. Bush apologizing for that. Or for anything.
(As always, any little brown-noser seeking extra credit is dropped one letter grade.)
Okay, okay. That's the point. It's different this time. It's called getting off to a good start. Surely you agree that doing what Bush did is the absolute wrong way to go about things?
Well, yeah and no, as Ron Nasty would say. The President is really good in this format, as good or better than Bill Clinton, without the baggage; as good, maybe, as Kennedy. It could be a very effective way of neutralizing bullshit. But it runs the opposite risk, of making bullshit seem valid, and for now it's leaving the tinny aftertaste of unrequited post-partisanship. See Lance. At some point this PR fest is over, and once it's over, it's dead. Nobody remembers who the Secretary of Commerce is, or what he does, let alone that he's a Republican. Heaven forfend that someone mistake me for a Beltway insider or Inside Baseball type; I'll be happy to concede that you and half the population know more about it than I do. But the counter-argument is that it doesn't matter, whether or not it works. Crack open the skulls of half the Republican House members, and fill the empty space inside with a tantalizing mélange of arugula, organic chickpeas, and cruelty-free figs in a marsala/honey reduction with artisan pygmy-goat cheese; it doesn't matter. If some vast pacific calm settles on the world for the next four years, and no one ever finds anything else to talk about, it still won't matter. God help us, maybe you really do believe this post-partisanship business. Still, at some point, it'll reverse course and begin to look like a dodge.
This is certainly not the complaint of a Democrat who thinks he deserves more, nor of a Leftist left out in the cold (from My First Book of Democratic Primary Verses--like you need to explain to the American left that it might experience mild disappointment in a Democratic administration!). It's simple experience: not rushing off to apolo-splain every misstep sure didn't impede the Reagan or Bush administrations.
You wanna be better than them? Fine. Get rid of whomever thought Tom Daschle was a good idea in the first place.
If post-partisanship leads you to believe that Tom Daschle was an effective leader (or even an explicable one) in the United States Congress, or that his career since is one which inspires confidence, then Post-Partisanship should be a psychiatric diagnostic category. The vetting process is supposed to catch things that might otherwise slip through. It's not a substitute for judgment. Still, let's set his vetting aside, even though his tax returns seem to have come chewed by rodents. Forget his regrettable Congressional leadership. Let's table the question of whether he skirted lobbying laws after he was voted out. Daschle, and Mrs. Daschle, the former Linda Hall, gorge themselves at the public/private K-street buffet, a fact that casual acquaintance, let alone serious investigation, should have told you. Daschle spent twenty-five years in Congress (and what a twenty-five years those were for Democrats!). That ought to earn you, maybe, a gold watch. Not the keys to a gold Rolls.
__________
1) Donald Evans 2) Linda Chavez 3) Norman "Lonesome Norm" Minetta 4) Enron-linked contract-peddling Secretary of the Army who wasn't fired until he sided with General Shinseki on Iraq troop levels in 2003
Score: 25 points for each correct answer; 2 points if you vaguely recalled any of it after you saw the answers
1) Name the first Bush II administration Commerce secretary.
2) Name the first Bush II cabinet nominee to be withdrawn.
3) Name all the Democrats who served in the Bush cabinet.
4) Who is Thomas E. White?
• Extra credit: find a YouTubes video featuring Brian Williams in January 2001, expressing concern over, say, Dick Cheney's failure/refusal to divest himself of stocks or create a blind trust in a timely fashion, despite the obvious conflicts of interest. Or Donald Rumsfeld, same. Or Karl Rove. Or Paul O'Neill. Or Mitch Daniels. Or video of George W. Bush apologizing for that. Or for anything.
(As always, any little brown-noser seeking extra credit is dropped one letter grade.)
Okay, okay. That's the point. It's different this time. It's called getting off to a good start. Surely you agree that doing what Bush did is the absolute wrong way to go about things?
Well, yeah and no, as Ron Nasty would say. The President is really good in this format, as good or better than Bill Clinton, without the baggage; as good, maybe, as Kennedy. It could be a very effective way of neutralizing bullshit. But it runs the opposite risk, of making bullshit seem valid, and for now it's leaving the tinny aftertaste of unrequited post-partisanship. See Lance. At some point this PR fest is over, and once it's over, it's dead. Nobody remembers who the Secretary of Commerce is, or what he does, let alone that he's a Republican. Heaven forfend that someone mistake me for a Beltway insider or Inside Baseball type; I'll be happy to concede that you and half the population know more about it than I do. But the counter-argument is that it doesn't matter, whether or not it works. Crack open the skulls of half the Republican House members, and fill the empty space inside with a tantalizing mélange of arugula, organic chickpeas, and cruelty-free figs in a marsala/honey reduction with artisan pygmy-goat cheese; it doesn't matter. If some vast pacific calm settles on the world for the next four years, and no one ever finds anything else to talk about, it still won't matter. God help us, maybe you really do believe this post-partisanship business. Still, at some point, it'll reverse course and begin to look like a dodge.
This is certainly not the complaint of a Democrat who thinks he deserves more, nor of a Leftist left out in the cold (from My First Book of Democratic Primary Verses--like you need to explain to the American left that it might experience mild disappointment in a Democratic administration!). It's simple experience: not rushing off to apolo-splain every misstep sure didn't impede the Reagan or Bush administrations.
You wanna be better than them? Fine. Get rid of whomever thought Tom Daschle was a good idea in the first place.
If post-partisanship leads you to believe that Tom Daschle was an effective leader (or even an explicable one) in the United States Congress, or that his career since is one which inspires confidence, then Post-Partisanship should be a psychiatric diagnostic category. The vetting process is supposed to catch things that might otherwise slip through. It's not a substitute for judgment. Still, let's set his vetting aside, even though his tax returns seem to have come chewed by rodents. Forget his regrettable Congressional leadership. Let's table the question of whether he skirted lobbying laws after he was voted out. Daschle, and Mrs. Daschle, the former Linda Hall, gorge themselves at the public/private K-street buffet, a fact that casual acquaintance, let alone serious investigation, should have told you. Daschle spent twenty-five years in Congress (and what a twenty-five years those were for Democrats!). That ought to earn you, maybe, a gold watch. Not the keys to a gold Rolls.
__________
1) Donald Evans 2) Linda Chavez 3) Norman "Lonesome Norm" Minetta 4) Enron-linked contract-peddling Secretary of the Army who wasn't fired until he sided with General Shinseki on Iraq troop levels in 2003
Score: 25 points for each correct answer; 2 points if you vaguely recalled any of it after you saw the answers
Tuesday, February 3
Happy Birthday
STINKY, who joined our happy throng sixteen years ago today, with his heart murmur and his enormous feet and love of heating and cooling vents. His addition made four (all of whom made it to an advanced age), a personal record unlikely to be broken. His immediate assignment was lighting Hoover's notoriously short fuse every couple of minutes. He later became the chief mole/vole catcher, and a master of outdoor ahimsa, earning the soubriquet "Gandhi" (he wasn't allowed outdoors unsupervised, and if spoken to sharply, or moved upon in an effort to bring him in, would simply flop on his side and refuse to move). Went about 14-15 pounds in his heyday, but just a big pussycat at heart. Chronic cystitis, hyperthyroid, a little arthritic in his front legs, but he still kicks Larry's ass on a regular basis. Figured out some time ago that elderly cats get away with all kinds of things they used to be punished for, including attempted swiping off unguarded dinner plates. Must have the back door opened for him every morning so he can sniff the air, but almost never goes out. Used to be quiet. Sixth sense about vet visits and the dreaded vacuum cleaner--just picking stuff up in preparation for running it sends him to the basement--whose terrors have been transferred to the vacuum's evil henchman, the feather duster. Has never forgiven the Nature Valley people for changing their granola bar packaging ten years ago; the old wrappers were his favorite toy.
Oh, it's my Poor Wife's birthday, too. She's not real crazy about the vacuum cleaner either.
Like George Eff Will, But With One Of Those Propeller Bowties
David Brooks, "Ward Three Morality". February 3
WITHER th' fuck David Brooks, huh? At the risk of repeating myself, I have no interest in the man as a thinker, or "thinker", a pundit, a stylist, or a Political Personality, in which role he manages to regularly increase the drabness of a PBS talking heads news program (which, while not exactly a record, is still no mean feat) while simultaneously employing a little strangled half-laugh of inherent superiority which would cause any full-blooded person forced to endure it regularly to simply haul off and clock him at some point. It's a hothouse maneuver, and if one must continue it into middle age one ought to have enough respect for others to actually be superior, or to acknowledge that one feels oneself to be despite all evidence to the contrary. (Think Tucker Carlson. Brooks, so far as we know, has never been fired from anything, and Jon Stewart has never publicly called him "a dick", but, between the two of them, it's Brooks this would probably do some good.)
No, the interesting thing about Brooks--okay, let's make that "curious"--is this lack, this unacknowledged deficit which one apparently must pretend not to even notice, while demanding the same of everyone else. From a perspective of age it seems impossible not to conclude that Brooks found a solution to his teenaged angst in the arms of Milton Friedman, and immediately turned into Miss Havisham. We do not mean to belittle the role of unchecked hormonal frenzy in human history, au contraire. It's just that by dint of some Cultural Biorhythmic Convergence--concerted Reagan mythologizing, concerted formulation, and re-formulation, ad infinitum, of anti-Sixties cultural backlash as "normal" "American" "behavior", the accidental congruence of geek chic with their personal fashion choices, and the mere fact that, as "conservatives", Reagantots were able to defend intransigence and groupthink as Tradition long after people with real jobs would have been forced to quit slamming into that Same Brick Wall--Brooks, et.al., were given a twenty-five year free pass. It's as if The Monkees, once they charted, were guaranteed a position in the Top Ten for the next three decades, regardless of whether they ever recorded anything new, or different, ever again. In fact it's almost exactly like that, except it turned out that one of The Monkees had some personal integrity.
Brooks, on the other hand, found himself a nifty gig updating old hippie jokes for the Age of Real Estate, something which proved effortless in more senses than one, and he drew a regular stipend from The Weekly Standard for name-dropping right-wing texts from Poli-Sci 235. And it shows; the man does not seem to be able to engage an argument, even his own. In the recent past he has simply disappeared from issues--Iraq, the economy--whenever they became inconvenient. He was swept away by the power of Barack Obama's oratory when Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner; he was disturbed by his hollow speechifyin' after the tables turned. He's a man the GOP can always count on in a crisis. Always count on to turn in some dreamy, three-quarter Randian pseudo-futurist pseudo-profundity that might slip in three or four talking points obliquely, that is.
Note here that it's not Brooks who defends $35,000 commodes (although he does insist it was for the Merrill-Lynch washroom [!]) or helicopter pond aerations, oh no; these are the excesses of the fatuously wealthy, but the Board approved it! Therefore the people to whom you come to beg handouts should just keep quiet about it, lest their gutter-cleanin' hands betray the pathological jealousy behind every instance of the regulation of commerce.
I'm sorry; is there someone at the Times who can explain how this constitutes an argument. Or even a simulation of one? If not there, how 'bout the University of Chicago? Just answer one of the following:
1. Who fucking came to whom with their hands out? Whose administration was it?
2. Is it conceivable that one can be both a Free Market Privateer and wholly innocent of the very concept of government regulation, let alone the fact that the great majority of non-hallucinatory Americans support it in some form or another?
3. Is he fucking serious?
Last week Brooks wrote a piece which seemed to argue for a return to Enlightened Surfdom; now he seems to be suggesting that the real economic problem we face is that a few peasants have grown wealthy enough to install gutters. It is, we think, a lot like arguing that David Brooks' ideas must be good, since they're published.
WITHER th' fuck David Brooks, huh? At the risk of repeating myself, I have no interest in the man as a thinker, or "thinker", a pundit, a stylist, or a Political Personality, in which role he manages to regularly increase the drabness of a PBS talking heads news program (which, while not exactly a record, is still no mean feat) while simultaneously employing a little strangled half-laugh of inherent superiority which would cause any full-blooded person forced to endure it regularly to simply haul off and clock him at some point. It's a hothouse maneuver, and if one must continue it into middle age one ought to have enough respect for others to actually be superior, or to acknowledge that one feels oneself to be despite all evidence to the contrary. (Think Tucker Carlson. Brooks, so far as we know, has never been fired from anything, and Jon Stewart has never publicly called him "a dick", but, between the two of them, it's Brooks this would probably do some good.)
No, the interesting thing about Brooks--okay, let's make that "curious"--is this lack, this unacknowledged deficit which one apparently must pretend not to even notice, while demanding the same of everyone else. From a perspective of age it seems impossible not to conclude that Brooks found a solution to his teenaged angst in the arms of Milton Friedman, and immediately turned into Miss Havisham. We do not mean to belittle the role of unchecked hormonal frenzy in human history, au contraire. It's just that by dint of some Cultural Biorhythmic Convergence--concerted Reagan mythologizing, concerted formulation, and re-formulation, ad infinitum, of anti-Sixties cultural backlash as "normal" "American" "behavior", the accidental congruence of geek chic with their personal fashion choices, and the mere fact that, as "conservatives", Reagantots were able to defend intransigence and groupthink as Tradition long after people with real jobs would have been forced to quit slamming into that Same Brick Wall--Brooks, et.al., were given a twenty-five year free pass. It's as if The Monkees, once they charted, were guaranteed a position in the Top Ten for the next three decades, regardless of whether they ever recorded anything new, or different, ever again. In fact it's almost exactly like that, except it turned out that one of The Monkees had some personal integrity.
Brooks, on the other hand, found himself a nifty gig updating old hippie jokes for the Age of Real Estate, something which proved effortless in more senses than one, and he drew a regular stipend from The Weekly Standard for name-dropping right-wing texts from Poli-Sci 235. And it shows; the man does not seem to be able to engage an argument, even his own. In the recent past he has simply disappeared from issues--Iraq, the economy--whenever they became inconvenient. He was swept away by the power of Barack Obama's oratory when Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner; he was disturbed by his hollow speechifyin' after the tables turned. He's a man the GOP can always count on in a crisis. Always count on to turn in some dreamy, three-quarter Randian pseudo-futurist pseudo-profundity that might slip in three or four talking points obliquely, that is.
The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.
But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.
For those who don’t know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.
Note here that it's not Brooks who defends $35,000 commodes (although he does insist it was for the Merrill-Lynch washroom [!]) or helicopter pond aerations, oh no; these are the excesses of the fatuously wealthy, but the Board approved it! Therefore the people to whom you come to beg handouts should just keep quiet about it, lest their gutter-cleanin' hands betray the pathological jealousy behind every instance of the regulation of commerce.
I'm sorry; is there someone at the Times who can explain how this constitutes an argument. Or even a simulation of one? If not there, how 'bout the University of Chicago? Just answer one of the following:
1. Who fucking came to whom with their hands out? Whose administration was it?
2. Is it conceivable that one can be both a Free Market Privateer and wholly innocent of the very concept of government regulation, let alone the fact that the great majority of non-hallucinatory Americans support it in some form or another?
3. Is he fucking serious?
Last week Brooks wrote a piece which seemed to argue for a return to Enlightened Surfdom; now he seems to be suggesting that the real economic problem we face is that a few peasants have grown wealthy enough to install gutters. It is, we think, a lot like arguing that David Brooks' ideas must be good, since they're published.
Monday, February 2
Go Figure
FIRST: The Guardian UK 9th Year Math Quiz, given to Britain's brightest 14-15 year-olds. I aced it, but not without some difficulty. I'd like to see similar supervised tests required of everyone who mouths off about failing public schools. (My Poor Wife nabs a lot of books her school's library is getting rid of, and last week she came home with one originally stamped by an old Indianapolis vocational high school [Harry E. Wood] she'd never heard of. This led her to do some digging, and she found, somewhere, mention of a system-wide graduation rate under 50% for 1958. Can't attest to the accuracy, or the methodology, and there's no question that a high-school dropout in the 50s had better employment prospects than a graduate of today, provided he was male and could withstand a mind-numbing and finger-crushing factory job, but it sure does offer something of a reality check, while we're at it. If we still had moderately-well-paying salt mines urban youth were marching off to at sixteen, who'd be complaining about graduation rates? Colin Powell?)
I wanna see his math scores, by the way.
Anyway, the Sadlynauts bring us news this AM of Andrew McCarthy's Super Dyspepsia:
So let's just start with the ethical considerations: Mr. McCarthy is entitled to his share of bile, and we're personally gratified that The Corner offers such an elaborate system for continually sluicing the excess, lest he explode somewhere and shower innocents. 'Tis true, as Tintin points out, that modern teevee sets come with a Mute function and the ability to change channels, both now generally, and of necessity, available without the disturbing of any major muscle groups. And, as M. Bouffant points out, the full measure of patriotic reassurance for the insatiably needy could be found, and right on schedule, shortly before game time, with Faith Hill singing America The Beautiful (now with Twice the God! thanks be to Faith!), Jennifer Hudson deafening sound technicians across the country with the Star Spangled Banner, in an unexpectedly understated performance which held off the beginning of the unfettered melismafest until the fourth bar [UPDATE: I'm informed they were both lip-syncing; why did I imagine anything else? Good news for audio technicians who will now be able to hear their newborn's first words], and a fly-over of Air Force Thunderbirds, just in case either end zone needed strafing or Janet Jackson was thinking of running out onto the field just before kickoff.
Fine, fine. Y'know, I live in Indianapolis, and I know I'm not alone in the waves of nausea that greet every appearance of Professional Paragon and Perennial First-Round Tank Commander Tony Dungy, and, believe me, you haven't been able to swing a Gay Marriage Amendment in these parts without running into him (complaining about public school graduation rates with phony numbers copped from General and Mrs. Powell, by the way) lately, particularly since he's had nothing else to do since Wild Card week. Hell, as people around these parts know, I'm no fan of Olbermann's MSNBC work. I don't like Jenna Elfman either. I think Friends blew donkeys, the ratings success of "reality" and home makeover shows proves we humans share morphological characteristics with an as-yet-unrecognized subspecies of baboon, and the concerted, highly-financed attempt to sell me the equine charms of Sarah Jessica Parker as sexy, or au courant marked the final triumph of Unfiltered Bullshit. I pay some small amount every month so one cable movie network or another can bring me weekend-long John Waynefests, and some channel claiming to present History, Learning, or some other form of Empiricism can play endless Searches for the Historical Jesus/Moses/ or Alien Autopsy. Christ, I thought the old Mickey Mouse Club was creepy when I was four; try lugging that around for half a century (try walking four blocks in any direction without running into something Disneyfied). And don't even mention Barbara Walters or Gene Roddenberry.
No, sir. You don't like it, change the channel, feel free to complain to High Heaven, or both; but do not pretend you are somehow being singled out for harsh treatment.
That's it for theory. But what interests us, once again, is why there seems to be a direct correlation between public "Conservatism" and Congenital Aesthetic Witling Syndrome. What sort of "football nut" considers the Super Bowl "an escape"? What sort of football nut wishes he could tune in to all sixteen hours of pre-game blather, with or without unpleasant political ramifications? None, to my knowledge; this is the attitude, where it exists at all, of the weekend partier, and it is soon to be transferred to The Oscars™, where you can gripe all you want about Hollywood Leftism. Just kindly stop pretending you do so as a lover of cinema. Asshole.
I wanna see his math scores, by the way.
Anyway, the Sadlynauts bring us news this AM of Andrew McCarthy's Super Dyspepsia:
People tuning in to football for an escape were treated, as they have been all season, to Keith Olbermann. I used to like Olbermann as an ESPN sportscaster when sports was all he did, but that was a long time ago. Now, just the sight of him turns off a lot of the audience — though I am nut for football, I generally just don't watch, turn off the sound, or switch to something else when he's on, and I know I'm not alone.
So let's just start with the ethical considerations: Mr. McCarthy is entitled to his share of bile, and we're personally gratified that The Corner offers such an elaborate system for continually sluicing the excess, lest he explode somewhere and shower innocents. 'Tis true, as Tintin points out, that modern teevee sets come with a Mute function and the ability to change channels, both now generally, and of necessity, available without the disturbing of any major muscle groups. And, as M. Bouffant points out, the full measure of patriotic reassurance for the insatiably needy could be found, and right on schedule, shortly before game time, with Faith Hill singing America The Beautiful (now with Twice the God! thanks be to Faith!), Jennifer Hudson deafening sound technicians across the country with the Star Spangled Banner, in an unexpectedly understated performance which held off the beginning of the unfettered melismafest until the fourth bar [UPDATE: I'm informed they were both lip-syncing; why did I imagine anything else? Good news for audio technicians who will now be able to hear their newborn's first words], and a fly-over of Air Force Thunderbirds, just in case either end zone needed strafing or Janet Jackson was thinking of running out onto the field just before kickoff.
Fine, fine. Y'know, I live in Indianapolis, and I know I'm not alone in the waves of nausea that greet every appearance of Professional Paragon and Perennial First-Round Tank Commander Tony Dungy, and, believe me, you haven't been able to swing a Gay Marriage Amendment in these parts without running into him (complaining about public school graduation rates with phony numbers copped from General and Mrs. Powell, by the way) lately, particularly since he's had nothing else to do since Wild Card week. Hell, as people around these parts know, I'm no fan of Olbermann's MSNBC work. I don't like Jenna Elfman either. I think Friends blew donkeys, the ratings success of "reality" and home makeover shows proves we humans share morphological characteristics with an as-yet-unrecognized subspecies of baboon, and the concerted, highly-financed attempt to sell me the equine charms of Sarah Jessica Parker as sexy, or au courant marked the final triumph of Unfiltered Bullshit. I pay some small amount every month so one cable movie network or another can bring me weekend-long John Waynefests, and some channel claiming to present History, Learning, or some other form of Empiricism can play endless Searches for the Historical Jesus/Moses/ or Alien Autopsy. Christ, I thought the old Mickey Mouse Club was creepy when I was four; try lugging that around for half a century (try walking four blocks in any direction without running into something Disneyfied). And don't even mention Barbara Walters or Gene Roddenberry.
No, sir. You don't like it, change the channel, feel free to complain to High Heaven, or both; but do not pretend you are somehow being singled out for harsh treatment.
That's it for theory. But what interests us, once again, is why there seems to be a direct correlation between public "Conservatism" and Congenital Aesthetic Witling Syndrome. What sort of "football nut" considers the Super Bowl "an escape"? What sort of football nut wishes he could tune in to all sixteen hours of pre-game blather, with or without unpleasant political ramifications? None, to my knowledge; this is the attitude, where it exists at all, of the weekend partier, and it is soon to be transferred to The Oscars™, where you can gripe all you want about Hollywood Leftism. Just kindly stop pretending you do so as a lover of cinema. Asshole.
Saturday, January 31
Fun With Monogamy, Vol. MMDCCCI
POOR WIFE: You know it's my birthday next week, right? Have you bought my present yet?
RILEY: How many does this make, dear?
[silence]
RILEY: See, I knew that would shut you up.
POOR WIFE: Quiet! I'm counting.
RILEY: How many does this make, dear?
[silence]
RILEY: See, I knew that would shut you up.
POOR WIFE: Quiet! I'm counting.
Friday, January 30
They're Not Booing, They're Saying "Looou, Looou...Fuckin' Get Over It, Already".
Lou "Boom Boom" Cannon, "Obama's Reagan Transformation?" January 27
WITH little to go on beyond a few excerpts and the fact that their combined throw weight is fast approaching that of James Mitchner (plus the fact that he's now enlisted his son in the effort), we've pretty much restricted ourself to the occasional baseless insinuation about Lou Cannon's Reagan canon, now up to volume five and, one imagines, Young Ronald's first day of school, or perhaps the cutting of his second molars or first public park massacre. Really, I happen to view Ronald Reagan as the edge where McCarthyism, modern PR flackery, and the bombing of Dresden meet, and I'm not exactly taciturn, and I have no idea how I'd fill five volumes about the man without a lot of repetition. And cussing.
Sure, my opposition is ideological and, as I've admitted, might not differ qualitatively from age-group Gipper-worship nerds of the David Brooks class. I was, thankfully, spared the direct experience of that sort of Hollywood which carved Reagan into a demi-star. My first encounter with him was when he took over Death Valley Days from The Ol' Prospector, or whomever, though what I remember most about the show was 20 Mule Team Borax, the sponsor whose product, as a hand cleanser, I adored (Lava, too; I just liked washing with grit, I guess). Next thing I knew he was Governor of California, somehow, and a Nazi. Then he spent a time as a political punchline, then out of the blue he bought a microphone, stole a briefing book, and was elected President. I'm not sure I've had another experience that compares. Maybe the time my sister knocked me unconscious with an old wood-shafted driver she was swinging, but that didn't last nearly as long or hurt as much.
My young life had seen an Oval Office occupied by The Allied Commander in Europe, Mr. Camelot, the Crafty Senate Fixer, a Former Vice-President and Perpetual Paranoid, then the Accidental Accident Not Waiting To Happen, and Jimmy Who?, the last two the product of interesting times, as the Chinese would say. For sure, Nixon had always seemed to me to be the President of Somewhere Else, not anywhere where I lived, but at least one understood the political dynamic that had put him there. If Carter came from nowhere and was already a primary lock before anyone noticed, well, at least he'd accomplished it with a sort of new understanding of the process, like he'd gotten the Democratic nomination by hiking the ball directly to the running back, which you had to respect. Reagan, on the other hand, was like looking up and seeing Cap'n Bob from the old morning Popeye cartoon show of your youth taking the Oath. Not to mention that he'd run on a platform of These Kids Today! With the Hair and the Music an' the Marihuana! Let's Shoot 'Em! Reagan wasn't a fluke, or an aberration; he was New Coke™, he was Pepsi Clear™, he was Harley Davidson™ cookware. He was the cynical manipulation of Product Placement by a coterie of Kennedy-obsessed wingnuts who'd realized that Name Recognition, properly packaged, could be hurled onto peasant houses below with a reasonable expectation of success, provided you defined "success" in a certain way.
The Reagan hagiography business has, among other things, tended to suggest that he rode into the White House having convinced the American people that his time-honored ideals, recently fallen into disrepute through fashionable Sixties commie-narco-nihilism, were in fact the magic elixir of American Greatness. Or it does so when it isn't necessary to tell the opposite story (a common feature of St. Ronnie tales is their reversibility). This is where we find Cannon:
the presidential exemplar that may be most useful to President Obama as he seeks to jump start the economy is a Republican whose single-mindedness in his first months in office enabled him to gain the confidence of the American people and approval of his proposals from a Congress he did not control.
That president is Ronald Reagan, whose long-term goals were different from Mr. Obama’s but who was also willing to put pet projects on the back burner in the cause of economic recovery. In 1980, Reagan campaigned against President Jimmy Carter on a mix of issues, while giving priority, as Mr. Obama did in 2008, to a sagging national economy. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan asked over and over again.
Wage and Price Controls. The end of the Gold Standard. Two Oil Embargoes. WIN buttons. Stagflation. The 70s were not exactly a decade humming along economically until Jimmy Carter fucked it up. That Reagan "ran against a sagging national economy" is hardly surprising (the gross understatement of "sagging" is curious, the dog that hiccuped instead of barking, designed to suggest that the whole thing was just a matter of Carter's lazy posture); that he "ran on a mix of issues" is the pop historian's version of giving every kid who enters the race a trophy.
And the real irony here is that in the annals of US Presidential politics Reagan is the shining example of a Single Issue candidate who persevered long enough to gain the nomination without ever having been relegated to a crackpot third party. Of course this is due in large measure to the fact that the major party he already belonged to was now a den of cranks. Reagan's appeal for sixteen years had been The National Debt, aka, the evil and metaphysical ineptitude of a strong central government. That this idee fixe attracted a range of political positions on everything from Space Weapons to school dress codes, some intellectually contradictory, shamelessly pandering, or simply incoherent, isn't an accomplishment; it's a description of sentience. Whoever was elected in 1980 was going to have as his first order of business The Economy, which had been the first order of business at least since the Fall of Saigon.
And furthermore, he was going to operate in a climate where The Fed was squeezing the money supply dry until inflation ended, come hell or high water. That was the decision (finally) reached during a moderate Democratic administration, however warming to the cockles of whatever's in the place of the heart of an incoming Republican one, was The Gipper's good fortune. The government threw people out of work to break the back of double-digit inflation. The Reagan administration knocked itself out trying to claim credit for any positive effect. (One of my favorite Reagan era anecdotes involves then-Treasury secretary Don Regan stating, in Spring, 1981, that the market upturn was the result of anticipation of Reagan's Miracle Tax Cuts; he then shut up about it for the following 19 months, for some reason.)
As for "not controlling Congress", it depends here on describing the remaining Dixiecrats in Congress as belonging to the party opposite Reagan's. We think no more need be said.
And look, if there's some lesson to be learned from the single-minded front of the early days of Reagan, we hope it's not taken. Because that lesson is how easy it is to appear competent with the Press as your courtesan. Indeed, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" would become a mantra, in large part because it was rarely examined, just as "Stay the course" would subsequently become an exercise in mass hypnosis. Reagan's tax cutting was disastrous (as he himself would be forced to tacitly admit; compare the Bush II gang, having learned the Lessons of Vietnam, which simply refused to admit anything of the sort. We Win!). His military spending was incontinent, big-ticket Star Wars nonsense. Naturally this meant that in the end he'd be hailed as Our Economic Savior for modest economic growth, the worst jobs-creation record since WWII, two recessions, the massively accelerated wage stratification, and the Olly Olly Oxen Free regulatory climate that already had led to the looting of the Savings and Loan industry, not to mention, of course, the near quadrupling of that National Debt he'd been so obsessive about. If only for balance's sake was he lauded for rebuilding a military chockablock with AWACs and B1s and aircraft carriers in search of a mission, one capable of launching the greatest Armada since Normandy at Grenada while simultaneously training groups of armed thugs to disrupt democratically-elected Central American governments we didn't like, culminating in the glorious defeat of The Soviet Union by bank overdraft. It's odd that this latter method wasn't mentioned at the time, nor has it ever been attempted or even suggested since, but there you are.
No, Mr. President; though it may be tempting to cruise through your administration getting blowjobs from the Press and posing for stamps, and while it might mean that Josh Marshall is still laboring over you twenty-five years after The Final Stiffy, we like to think you were elected to do the opposite. And if Lou's right, and you are the one Democrat who "understands the nature of Reagan's appeal", we hope this just means you're the one least likely to try to duplicate it, if you care about the rest of us.
Thursday, January 29
Programming Note
TWELVE-point-five inches of snow here, officially, and a Republican mayor, which means the streets are still such a mess that Indianapolis Public Schools, which almost never close to begin with, and never for two days in a row, are closed for the second day in a row. I took yesterday's closing as God's insistence, via Dennis Prager, that we should have sexual relations in as many and various positions as we're still able to get into; my Poor Wife took it to mean I should get the driveway shoveled. We compromised: I cleared it enough to make sure the paramedics could get in.
The bit about "a Republican mayor" is hardly partisanship on my part, since I'm not a Democrat, and neither is the opposition party in Indiana; the last Republican mayor, Stephen "I Am Legend" Goldsmythe, routinely skimped on maintenance in order to protect his image as a tax-cutter, and would have lost his reelection bid in 1996 if the election had been held at the end of winter instead of the beginning, and if the Demopublicans had managed to nominate someone who'd ever been photographed.
Mayor Gomer's not being blamed for the shoddy work, not yet, in part because his handlers launched a highly-effective preemptive strike last October (The price of salt is up! Our trucks are aging!), and in part because that would require something resembling an adversarial Press. And the storm did dump about twice as much snow on us as predicted, but it was still supposed to be bad enough, and lengthy enough, that they should have preparting to plow all along. Instead they wasted time salting, which wasn't going to work for long, if at all. Okay, so you get wrong-footed sometimes; there's no grading on a scale. The Japanese still lost Midway, but one imagines that Nagumo didn't get to go on local teevee afterwards to explain how well everything was going.
So, posting is on Snow Holiday, but I did want to mention this. tbshrew, in comments:
Almost certainly Kristol enjoyed [a] student deferment from '70-'73...
I hold a personal advantage here, since I was a member of the '72 draft class: Nixon ended student deferments in 1971, the year of Kristol's eligibility, as part of an ongoing attempt to answer charges of favoritism in conscription before the law expired in mid-1972. My recollection is that deferments were grandfathered for people who had completed two years of college. That may not be accurate, but at any rate, Kristol could not have received one; it's possible he could have applied for one when he registered, but he would have been classified 1-H until the lottery, after which it would have been no longer available, even if he was already in college. He's a big fat liar, in other words.
Anyway, back to work, and if you think getting a savvy, desirable, middle-aged woman shit-faced drunk at 8:30 in the morning, without her realizing it before it's too late, isn't work, then you and I run in different social circles.
The bit about "a Republican mayor" is hardly partisanship on my part, since I'm not a Democrat, and neither is the opposition party in Indiana; the last Republican mayor, Stephen "I Am Legend" Goldsmythe, routinely skimped on maintenance in order to protect his image as a tax-cutter, and would have lost his reelection bid in 1996 if the election had been held at the end of winter instead of the beginning, and if the Demopublicans had managed to nominate someone who'd ever been photographed.
Mayor Gomer's not being blamed for the shoddy work, not yet, in part because his handlers launched a highly-effective preemptive strike last October (The price of salt is up! Our trucks are aging!), and in part because that would require something resembling an adversarial Press. And the storm did dump about twice as much snow on us as predicted, but it was still supposed to be bad enough, and lengthy enough, that they should have preparting to plow all along. Instead they wasted time salting, which wasn't going to work for long, if at all. Okay, so you get wrong-footed sometimes; there's no grading on a scale. The Japanese still lost Midway, but one imagines that Nagumo didn't get to go on local teevee afterwards to explain how well everything was going.
So, posting is on Snow Holiday, but I did want to mention this. tbshrew, in comments:
Almost certainly Kristol enjoyed [a] student deferment from '70-'73...
I hold a personal advantage here, since I was a member of the '72 draft class: Nixon ended student deferments in 1971, the year of Kristol's eligibility, as part of an ongoing attempt to answer charges of favoritism in conscription before the law expired in mid-1972. My recollection is that deferments were grandfathered for people who had completed two years of college. That may not be accurate, but at any rate, Kristol could not have received one; it's possible he could have applied for one when he registered, but he would have been classified 1-H until the lottery, after which it would have been no longer available, even if he was already in college. He's a big fat liar, in other words.
Anyway, back to work, and if you think getting a savvy, desirable, middle-aged woman shit-faced drunk at 8:30 in the morning, without her realizing it before it's too late, isn't work, then you and I run in different social circles.
Tuesday, January 27
Not To Mention That People Pay To See Asashoryu.
Asashoryu's great comeback win in the just-completed Hatsu basho--going 14-1 after withdrawing from the previous three tournaments due to injury--was marred by his making this gesture afterwards. No, really. The Yokozuna Deliberation Council plans to warn him about it. Compare the career of Bill Kristol.
Richard Pérez-Peña, William Kristol's Column in The Times Ends". January 26
Michael Calderone, "Who Should Replace Bill Kristol?" January 26
Scott Horton, "The Sacking of Bill Kristol". January 26
Peter Edmonston,"Thane Says He'll Repay Remodeling Costs". January 26
YES, indeed: compare the career of Bill Kristol. I was not one of the Left Blogostaners who thought the sky was falling because the Times hired him. When your stable includes MoDo, Brooks, Friedman, Kristof, Herbert, Collins, and Rich, with John Effing Tierney departing, the sky, like your pants, is already around your ankles. We'll grant the larger issue is probably the idea that the Op-Ed Ward should be fastidiously faux-balanced according to the dictates of someone who imagines Maureen Dowd to be at the far pole of political discourse, one opposite David Brooks; obviously, if the Times would just acknowledge the lack of epistemological rigor--without even addressing the remarkably narrow "range" between "liberal" and "conservative" exemplar--things could improve overnight. How about balancing all those people who were dead wrong about Iraq, or the Bush presidency in general, or the importance of selecting a Commander-in-Chief who doesn't wear earthtones, with someone who wasn't? How about adjusting for abject careerism, Conventional Wisdom molding, or apparent sanity? Maybe one Op-Ed slot should go to someone who has actually met an American who earns less than $125,000 without having to calculate how much to tip.
Just kiddin'. Look, anyway, my problem with Kristol was not that he got the slot, so much as it was he who got the slot: no writer, no thinker, apparently holds no opinions which could not be predetermined by anyone familiar with Hudson Institute press releases, and personally and professionally dishonest. (Again I repeat--since it was on C-SPAN, making me one of thirty-five people who actually witnessed it without working there--that in August of 2002, on that morning call-in show, Mr. Kristol twice told callers that he was "too young for Vietnam". I had no idea at the time how old he was, but it was obvious the moment he said it that he was lying. In fact, it was obvious the moment he was asked the question that he had already been lying about it for years, probably decades. Kristol is in fact a year older than I, making him a member of the last draft class eligible for conscription for an entire year. He got a high draft number [rare for a December baby; they didn't mix the lotto balls thoroughly, apparently] and so was able to go right from The Collegiate School to Hahvahd Yahd. I do understand that should we decide to remove everyone who is personally dishonest from the ranks of journalism/pundithood vast stretches of teevee/newspaper/magazine reporting would go unmanned, but there are probably some arguments against doing so as well; it's just than none comes to me offhand. So Kristol, faced with incontrovertible proof of his hypocrisy--something any college grad should at least have been able to talk his way around, if not confront head-on--chose instead to lie, blatantly, in an effort to get through the following twenty minutes. There's only one reason to lie under those circumstances, and it answers the question of whether the Chickenhawk business is all feathers or marrow-deep.)
Last night I started poking around news coverage of the Kristol Dismissal, beginning with the Times own coverage, a couple hundred words from Pérez-Peña (who now tops Michael Bérubé for Most Superfluous Actions Required To Type A Last Name), including a howler artfully withheld to the last second, when Kristol says of his Times column: "It's a lot of work."
Scott Horton tops that bit, albeit unintentionally, with this from his "inside source with first-hand knowledge":
The source makes clear that the decision not to renew Kristol’s contract is not related to his neoconservative ideology—Kristol’s proximity to key Washington players ranging from Bush and Cheney to John McCain (whom he supported in 2000) was considered a distinct plus. His leading advocacy of the Iraq War also added to his appeal. Kristol was viewed as a mover and shaker whose ideas had ready impact on the political firmament in Washington.
So in other words, when hiring a by-lined opinion writer, the Times imagines that insider connections are a positive, rather than, in this case especially, an explanation for a lifetime as a sluice for slightly-liquified bullshit. Kristol--it almost goes without saying--was one of the "journalists" Scooter (or Dick) called with the Plame story. I'm pretty sure this had made the papers by December, 2007; I wonder why it didn't make the vetting process. I wonder why the Times would offer to pay for what it could get for free, aside from the fact that in printing it on the Op-Ed Ward avoids any more Judy Miller-type unpleasantness while still getting the story out. I mean, Kristol could always claim under oath that'd he'd been lying; who the hell would question that?
The real cake-topper, though, is Calderone's Politico blog, wherein Andy Rosenthal, the other end of the two-shitty-ended nepotism stick here, tells at audience at Columbia that he admires the work of Byron York and Megan McArdle. We are left, again, to explain the frequency of the modern juxtaposition of the utterly incredible and the dirt-common, as well as the self-annihilating sentence; there is, simply, no way anyone could make that statement and simultaneously maintain that words mean things.
Maybe we're just not supposed to notice. Take Peter Edmonston's piece on John Thain, the ex-Merrill Lynch CEO who spent $1 million redecorating his office last Spring, and who, like the Christian school that beat the girls with learning disabilities team 100-0 in basketball, suddenly discovered the error of his ways just after the PR snowball gained enough mass to start rolling on its own. Million-dollar 'dos belonged to an earlier era, he now realizes; namely, the one in which you didn't get called on this crap:
“They were a mistake in the light of the world we live in today."
Which, I gotta admit, sorry as either one is, still makes two more apologies for egregious behavior than Bill Kristol's ever gonna make.
Monday, January 26
I'm Guessing The Times Announced It's Kristol's Last Column So You Could Tell It From His First, Or His Second, Or...
William Kristol, "Will Obama Save Liberalism?" January 26
I was afraid Bill was going to choke in the final inning and actually say something that wasn’t instantly and flatly contradicted by observable reality, but he stepped up like a champ and protected his streak.
SPENT the weekend watching films, great and near-great, partly by accident. The 120-hour U-Verse DVR limit is too skimpy for me, and there's no upgrade or way to hook up an external drive, so I have to record anything I want to save, and the cheap-ass DVD recorder I bought for the purpose is quirkier than a roomful of Siamese cats. In response I do what I always do faced with balky equipment: I revert into shamanism, spouting various incantations and making the 21st century urban equivalent of blood sacrifices. I could, I suppose, just read the manual, but there are a couple of problems with that: a) I did read the manual, initially; what is now required is studying the damn thing; b) this is, I think, more effort than ought to be required by any piece of machinery costing less that $100; it ought to be like a fuckin' Chevy Chevette: obvious place to put the key, standard, intuitive, readily visible means to choose between 'D' and 'R', and no radio; and c) it's buried somewhere in the twenty-eight columnar inches of my manuals and warranties file, which dates to 1977. No, they're not in order. What kind of question was that?
The set-up requires (this much is science) that the set remained tuned to the recording, which, until a recent upgrade, meant it had to be performed on the main teevee, the only one which could play recorded material. As a result I try to slip recording time in at odd hours. One of the magickal oblations involves leaving the set on, since nearly every time I haven't the recording gets fucked somehow. I think that's the technical term. Anyway, this meant that beginning early Friday I watched the filmic, arty, Royal Shakespeare Company Lear from 1971, followed by Paths of Glory and Easy Living, which I watched in part. Then Friday night my Poor Wife was making sure the bedroom remote had the same hair-trigger as the two downstairs, until she landed on Dr. Strangelove, fortuitously at the beginning of the scene with George C. Scott and his secretary, which stopped her dead in her tracks in a way Slim Pickens changing from helmet to cowboy hat in a crisis might not've, and we watched the rest of the way through.
My knees were objecting to being kept in bed after that, so I came downstairs and watched The Rules of the Game, my first purchase upon belated entry into the DVD world, a film I've seen thirty times and still see differently on each viewing. After that I went looking online for Ruggles of Red Gap (the real one) for my Poor Wife's birthday, but found the only available copy is an import missing (so someone says at Amazon) a scene. (This is an abomination; where's Criterion?) This led me Sunday morning to check out the racks at Fry's, and bring home Criterion's The 3rd Man, not as a birthday present but a replacement for the copy she'd bought some time ago at Half-Price Books, which came from Alpha Video, specialists in fast and indifferent transfers of a collection of copyright-free films taped over rabbit ears and stored in a car trunk for twenty years, apparently. We watched Shadowing the Third Man, an excellent 90-minute documentary about the production, though it controversially suggests that Orson Welles was something of a jerk, and my Poor Wife reports that she can't see the later, goateed Orson without hearing John Candy doing him on SCTV, so now I can't, either. She went to bed; I treated my insomnia to Fellini's The White Sheik.
This was supposed to be the long way around (please, O Reader! you expect that, no?) of noting how much I enjoyed the escape, but then I ran into Kristol's column and the conflicting note at the end:
This is William Kristol’s last column.
Which cannot possibly be true, beyond the bounds of the Times Op-Ed Ward (hence the conflict; I feel no need of having Bill Kristol to kick around, which we'll have anyway). And somehow with the opening words (I did not yet realize it was the swan song, of sorts, of the fugly duck, the trumpeter chickenhawk):
All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.
I saw my weekend in an entirely different light. I had watched two of the films most admired in cinema history for, among other things, the presentation of human morality as confused and complex, not black and white (for that matter, even the Sturgis-penned Depression-era screwballs break the mold; the Ur-libertarian banker and his profligate playboy son have hearts as well as bathroom fixtures of gold, while the clucking hens of Boys' Companion Magazine are ready to think their narrow-minded worst of someone). Fellini gently chided morality for its tone-deafness; if Strangelove and Paths of Glory painted their villains in broader strokes, still they were fools as well as murderous martinets. And from Lear, of course, not just the foul corruption of power, but the swift cosmic retribution for utter stupidity in statecraft.
Good Lord; I'd been watching thirty years of "conservative ascendancy".
There's really no question about the discrepancy; Kristol's had the best education money can buy. His recurring mantra, that the last thirty years of "Conservatism", viewed through the prism of "Conservatism", has been a roaring success, provided one filter out all evidence to the contrary, is a function, not a bug-wit.
We would, just for starters, argue that this "ascendency"--not of "conservatism" with or without quotes, but of Rightist extremism--dates to Nixon's brilliant and cowardly Southern strategy, and thus has crested forty. And we'd ask What's been accomplished? The Crackpot Rightist litany of complaints is the same as it ever was; Sarah Palin's gurgling hardly differs from Spiro Agnew's. Reproductive rights, despite four decades of hammering, still reside with the individual where they have not been rodent-gnawed at the edges; we're more diverse and multi-cultural than ever. Backwoods moralism is everywhere on the run, even in your own party last election, Billy. Public school biology classes are still part of the science curriculum, and prayer is restricted to silent, individual efforts to see one's classmates burst into flames, or to get laid. If a facile hero-worship still rules common sense in the matter of military spending and global adventurism, well, 'twas ever thus, at least since the Whisky Rebellion, and exempting brief periods when the public's lust for Glory ran headlong into the Army's Need for Cannon Fodder (I'm sorry. Did that hurt, Bill?). No amount of post-defeat lying about Iraq is going to usher us on to Damascus, Billy-boy. You got your shot, you ran with it, and you broke the Army, and US hard-power capabilities, worse than Nam did. We celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday now, not Bull Connor's. Even the National Review's stopped calling him a Red. I think.
But hey, everyone has his reasons, as Renoir said. It hasn't been all disaster. There's all the tax-cutting, though we might be forced to mention that thirty years covers the period between Reagan grandstanding about signing the trillion-dollar debt ceiling and the Bush administration handing us trillion-dollar debts per year. The single-handedly defeated Soviets are
And Bill Kristol
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