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?

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.

The Recurring Prop Newspaper

Peter Sciretta, at slashfilm

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.

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.

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:

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.

Never Forget

Sewell Avery: John Galt Goes To War

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.

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.

Dear God, I Think It's Contagious

Dahlia Lithwick, "The Kagan Kids: Why the younger generation doesn't care about the debate over the latest Supreme Court nominee." May 26

JACK Casady is one of the finest players ever to pick up a bass. And he (and Jorma Kaukonen) played with a collection of megalomaniacal gits known as Jefferson Airplane. This is essentially how I feel about Dahlia Lithwick appearing in Slate.

(Unless you were TV Guide, in which case they were The Jefferson Airplane rock combo. The Guiders thought such Way Out monikers had to be explained. Guests: Hal Holbrook, Vickie Lawrence, and The Who rock combo. Special guests The Jimi Hendrix Experience rock combo. Featuring The Procul Harum vocal group. Always with the article, too. The Cream. The Ultimate Spinach. Somehow, though, if The Lettermen were on Sullivan they were just The Lettermen. Apparently the Guide figured sports fans were harder to confuse.)

Anyway:

Every time I've been on a radio show on the subject of Kagan's wardrobe/softball playing/marital status, some twentysomething caller has taken me to school. It turns out, they invariably tell me, that twentysomethings just don't care if their Supreme Court justices are black, white, Jewish, Protestant, gay, or straight. Every day someone under the age of 30 either sends me an e-mail or tweet or a Facebook post reminding me that those of us making a huge big fat media deal about the nominee's race, religion, sexual preferences or marital status are quickly becoming cultural dinosaurs.

Y'know, more than a little of this is because these are the sorts of people who call in, or Tweeter, to shows about Elena Kagan coverage that include Dahlia Lithwick on the panel. Because that's what those people believe, and it's what all their friends say they believe, and so it's what they pretend everyone they'll admit to having in their potential mating pool believes. What're they saying on FOX?

Young people reading Robin Givhan's article on Kagan's scandalously open knees think they're reading something hilarious from their grandparents' stack of dating magazines from the 1950s. When they hear us yelping about racial diversity at the court, they think about the fact that their classrooms are already incredibly diverse and their Facebook friendships span continents. When they hear us shrieking over women's softball, they shake their Title IX heads and figure we're just idiots for thinking straight women don't play sports. And when they hear us whispering behind our hands about whether someone is gay, most of them tell me they think we're just freaking idiots. Just as they embody Barack Obama's post-racial America, they identify almost completely with Kagan's post-gender America—in which womanhood simply isn't defined by skirts, babies, or boyfriends anymore.

Delightful. If true.

But forgive me for being stuck in The Evil Sixties, when another miracle generation, better educated, more open, and tolerant, and less driven by material acquisition than the doomed reptiles that gave it birth morphed into Reaganaut Yuppie Scum. Jebus Magic was supposed to disappear under 19th century scientific advancement, too. I'm not saying we're going to see Ozzie and Harriet III, or Amos and Andy 2025, or the Get The Gays Back Out Of The Military movement. I am saying that perhaps this is a tad overblown. Perhaps people tend, if not to become their parents, to become a lot more like them once they discover the shocking fact that they aren't going to be twenty-two forever.

I'm saying that the racism, sexism, and homophobia in our present politics come from somewhere, and that somewhere is not restricted to AARP members. None of that stuff was invented by anyone living today, no matter how old or unfashionable, nor how undesirable the demographic. The "attitudes" of "millenials" that "pollsters" detect sure haven't prevented Barack Obama from being slimed, or put FOX News out of business, any more than it prevented the Reagan Counterrevolution, any more than "moving beyond old-style politics" salved the presidencies of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. We will see. In the meantime: if you're Way Beyond crypto-Lesbian bashing by softball photo, then either do something about it, or shut th' fuck up. Apparently the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal aren't really scared of you. The Indianapolis Racist Beacon, for whatever this is worth, thinks the way to attract your spendthrift demographic is to display photos of cleavage models hoisting their favorite alcoholic beverages, not to display their careful respect for multicultural diversity. Tell them about it. Or don't fucking care. The one thing you might quit doing, like as of two years ago, is blaming both sides of the argument for some reason.

It's the goddam real world; just because I have a mortgage doesn't mean I like it any better than you do. But who th' fuck's responsible? The Post and the Journal used that softball photo. This blog didn't greet her nomination with "Yay, Lesbians!" If you think you're smart, then try being wise. If you think the culture is going to turn into the perfect paradise of meritorious, color-blind diversity without someone doing the grunt work; if you think such diversity will be achieved, or maintained, simply because of your superior social views, then you aren't paying attention.

Barack Obama has made two Court nominations. The first was attacked for being a Latina, and the second has been attacked for being an insufficient breeder. And both times he was attacked for making the choice "just for diversity's sake". Is this half his fault?

Both Obama and Kagan have been at great pains to distance themselves philosophically from those crazy "judicial activists" of the '60s and '70s. Yet the president and his nominee are also reaping the benefits of an America that every day becomes more accepting of difference and personal choice as a result of that very same judicial activism. When Obama and Kagan talk about the landmark victories of Thurgood Marshall's era with a nostalgic smile and express their confidence that such battles are behind us, they really aren't wrong. But they also ignore the ways in which the Supreme Court has used the argument that the old intolerance is behind us to upend voluntary desegregation programs and threaten affirmative action in recent years. These open-hearted twenty somethings are proof that integrated schools and affirmative action and gay rights have created a more tolerant nation. But what today's twentysomethings should know—and what one hopes Kagan will remember—is that that this tolerance is partially their own choice, and partially an inheritance they need to fight to protect.

And, Dahlia, I still love ya. But let's add that all of the above need to know that partly through ignorance, and partly through a Texas-like, decades-long effort to camouflage inconvenient truths, the incredibly brave sacrifices made in the name of civil rights and cultural diversity have been reduced to King on a Postage Stamp and Chicks on the Court. Just as Vietnam gets treated as a museum piece no one under fifty should be bothered to look at, the very real lessons are lost on people who insist they're Over It, and too advanced to care. We forget the sacrifices made more than a century-and-a-half ago to end chattel slavery at peril of our mortal souls, and at risk that the whole thing gets rewritten for the next generation by Confederate sympathizers. Old French postcards are quaint; Matthew Brady's photographs are not. If young people are "concerned about the economy" then they're concerned with Hamilton vs. Jefferson, with the First World War, and Plessy v. Ferguson. They're concerned with Wounded Knee, and incontinent militarism, with the transcontinental railroad and the subjugation of women. Or else they're just a few more jackdaws which can imitate human speech. Wi-fi doesn't exempt you from this stuff. You stand where you stand because of the sacrifices of others, and that's not just the people who got marched off to war. And if you don't know, or don't care, then people who do have to keep schooling you until you get it.

And don't get me wrong; it's great that the bright young teenager next door told her Republican father to stuff it. It's great that she won't make overtly racist comments in public (though this hasn't proven she's immune). But, y'know, I'll try to report back in a few years, when she's more concerned with property values than looking good.

Jesus Wept

Matt Bai, "Why Our Politics About Shit I Care Nothing About and Know Even Less, Explained". May 26

SHORTER "Doghouse" Riley, the man who can't even write a Shorter without adding "for once", for once:

"Nothing on earth quite matches reading analysis from someone who claims to have believed that Candidate Obama had banished The Evil Sixties from our political lexicon forever."

"Doghouse" Riley responds: "Unless you can get a bet down that his version of history will come pre-filtered through his own intestines."

Mr. Blumenthal, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, is a respected, if somewhat colorless career public servant. Mr. Paul, a Kentucky eye doctor and a Republican, is a doctrinaire libertarian like his father, Ron Paul, the onetime presidential candidate. But last week, both men found themselves unexpectedly sucked into the vortex that pulls us inexorably back to the 1960s.

Y'know, sir, you're forty-one fucking years old. I'm not really sure how you managed it, and I'm metaphysically certain there is no possible explanation for you having done so while still holding that point of view. It's not many people who reach the Big 4-0 without some contemplation of fleeting Youth, of the possibility that they've traversed the healthier half, or more, of their lifespan; without feeling the full force of the Tidal Wave of History pick them up and toss them around like a pop bottle, or without the glance over the shoulder at the young hotshot eyeing their jobs, the one who doesn't know half the shit he should. For that matter, few English speakers make it that far without knowing one, and only one, line of Santayana. I had it here somewhere.

So let's rephrase the question: Why is even the most incidental public mention of the whole panoply of "Sixties" events grounds for the Matt Bais of the typing pool to moan about how "trapped" our politics are? Especially when it's their own profession which is largely responsible, and their own paper which ginned up the Outrage over Richard Blumenthal? (Said outrage would have been equal had he been a non-heroic non-veteran of Iraq War I, Iraq War II, Afghanistan, Kosovo, or a two-day wait for the new iPhone, though, presumably, this would have rendered the argument satisfyingly Contemporary.)

This wrinkle in the political space-time continuum was supposed to have been smoothed out, of course. Barack Obama based his presidential campaign on the notion that the nation needed to step past the cultural chasm of an earlier era, and younger Americans, in particular, endorsed that vision.

And, of course, this had made for smooth political sailing ever since; I'll never forget how Wise Younger Voters came to the rescue of healthcare reform back in Aught Nine.

In both cases, the trite and simplistic debate seems mismatched to the more complex conversations that most Americans are actually trying to have.

Damn! What conversations? Where? We Seniors are always the last to find out about such things.

Listen, the goddam blogosphere erupted about both, and none of us Golden Agers can find the switch that turns the damned thing on.

[T]he controversy, stoked by his Republican opponent, has as much to do with all the 40-year-old emotions around draft boards and deferrals, the lingering bitterness among those who served and the torturous guilt among those who did not, as it does with the straight-up issue of veracity.

Bullshit. The only connection the Blumenthal story has to Vietnam, apart from the coincidence of its historical setting , and the willingness of the Press to lie about it until it's too late, is that the outraged patriotism of so many right-wing combat veterans (who just happen to be stateside while we fight two wars for the future of Civilization Herself) is itself a ginned-up artifact of losing in Vietnam being blamed on spitting Hippies and Walter Cronkite. Of which "torturous guilt among those who did not [serve]" is a sparkling example.

This is all well-trod ground for voters who can easily recall the allegations over Bill Clinton and his draft letter, John Kerry and his Swift boat, George W. Bush and his missing time in the National Guard. But in a country where no one under 50 has ever seen a draft notice, it is increasingly irrelevant; to those Americans, we might as well be having an argument over who sunk the Maine.

No one, evidently; it appears to've blown up accidentally, after which we blamed Spain, declared war (there's a quaint custom for you kids!), and seized a global empire under the pretext. So you're right; I can't understand why anyone would imagine there are any lessons we could learn from that today.

Let's try it this way, Sonny: way back before you were born, and, hence, care, at the end of WWII (just curious: do we care about that one, or not?), the United States (Motto: E Pluribus Unum, which is Latin for "A Great Place to collect a paycheck, buy consumer electronics, and contemplate your navel in print, provided you don't get drafted") and the Soviet Union, late allies in the war against Hitler, began to distrust each other. And with good reason. This led to something called The Cold War, which is a more efficient way of saying "spending untold trillions of dollars on weapons of mass extinction"; it also led to hotter wars in Korea (in which we backed a wretched despot on the grounds that he was anti-Communist, and lost), and Vietnam (in which we backed a series of wretched colonial mandarins and homicidal military strongmen on the grounds that they were anti-Communist, and lost). I'm sorry, could you snore a little more quietly? We also backed a number of proxy wars generally backing authoritarian strongmen on the grounds that the Commies had cornered the National Liberation market, which, anyway, tended to be too anti-Coca-Cola for our tastes. And lost. A lot of this took place in Africa, Asia, and South America. Which are continents, and located elsewhere. You don't have to worry about them.

So why worry about Vietnam? In the first place, and rather obviously, because you've swallowed a load of bilge water about it over the last thirty years, and that bilge didn't get in your sippy cup by accident. It got there because the people who wasted the lives of 60,000 American dead have done their damnedest to cover it up since. And because they're still at it today, and because the twin disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of their handiwork (or are those Old News now, too?) Because otherwise you might recall that, absent a draft, we didn't have enough troops to do either job, let alone both.

Old news, kiddo? Are taxes, or deficits, part of the serious discussion you'd rather be having? Even the G admits to spending 40% of its take on Defense, which is an anodyne way of saying "a gizmo-loaded military larger than the next fifty armies combined". And that's because they subsume things like veterans' benefits and the interest on the debt for past military impulse purchases under "Other".

And they do this year-in, year-out, so you, and your children, and their children, can keep paying for it. While exercising your God-given right as Americans to remain butt-ignorant of the history, and cosseted in the dryer-warm blankie of phony General Consensus.

Why then, to quote the ubiquitous Bono,

Okay, I take it back. Make it "unless you can get down a bet that sooner or later he'll reference one or more of his Aging Cultural Touchstones in the middle of excoriating other people for being stuck in their own time zone."

is our political debate so stuck in a moment it cannot get out of?

….this all probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view the decade as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.

How interesting it is that "conservatives" are never the ones being instructed to give up their own post-sell-by date attachment to The Evil Sixties, which constitutes, what? 95% of their platform? How interesting that Ronald Reagan, a man whose entire political career was an anti-Sixties diatribe with a grin, remains as fresh today as, well, Bono.

By contrast, war today seems more a question of degrees and limits,

Like "the limits of our pocketbooks, and the degree to which the most high-tech military on earth will be flummoxed by boring old WWI explosives".

while equality seems less about the laws of the land than about disparities in economic and educational opportunities that are subtler and harder to address. The choices of our moment are not nearly so neat or so satisfying as they were a generation ago, which makes them less useful as a basis for one’s political identity, and harder to encapsulate in some 30-second spot or prime-time rant.

Bosh. This stuff is only simplistic because your view is cursory at best. The Pentagon Papers run to 7000 pages. Taylor Branch's History of America in the King Years runs to three volumes. There wasn't anything easy about deciding the government was lying to you, and assembling the case to back it up. And the suggestion that it was some moral snap to toss two-hundred years of racism out on its ear--simple, indeed, compared to the painful ratiocination required today to think about affirmative action while surfing for porn--is odious at best. People went to prison, were beaten, and died for the sake of that easy moral clarity.

Y'know, Mr. Bai, the more I hear this shit the more convinced I become that the real problem is a massive intellectual indolence, and the more I prefer ideological gridlock to trendy and facile disinterest.

Bible Studies

David Brooks, "I Don't Think I've Lectured On Burke This Month". May 24

Mitch "The Dealer Is Standing" Daniels, Commencement speech at Franklin College. May 22

DUNNO how it is in your neighborhood, but around here if someone begins a sentence "When I was in college I took a course in…" and the course in question was not some practical or technical instruction (ceramics, glass-blowing, accounting), and the observation which follows does not merely affirm, or perhaps modify, some general banality ("and it's pronounced 'kill'"; "and math is hard"), then the one thing you are about to learn--have already learned--is that the speaker doesn't know what th' fuck he's talking about.

When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment — thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire and Condorcet.

"Whereas nowadays, when people say 'Enlightenment' they usually mean 'enlightenment.com'. Where you get Big Ideas for less!"

These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth.

Their great model was Descartes. He aimed to begin human understanding anew. He’d discard the accumulated prejudices of the past and build from the ground up, erecting one logical certainty upon another.

What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution.

Marge: I can give piano lessons!

Lisa: But mom, you can't play the piano.

Marge: I only have to stay one step ahead of the kid.

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke.

So John Locke doesn't make the cut, just so you can squeeze in Smith and Burke? Or did we skip a lesson?

As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote...

Sorry. Just clearing my throat.

in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.

Lemme just ask a question, here; maybe we've covered this before. But th' fuck are American "conservatives" so intent upon this stuff? It's not like they discovered it or something. It isn't like Burke is a towering presence whose pamphleteering caused the earth to tremble. It's not like Adam Smith debunked Marx before he was even born. Hume's a titan, to be sure, but he's not exactly Hayek in a powdered wig. If he were he wouldn't be a titan. None of these fellows is anything like the one-dimensional oracle of Man's Imperfectability, So Let's Take It Slow, Boys his self-described intellectual descendants keep insisting on.

And what if they were? Maybe it would be a good idea to take a second course in the Enlightenment, the one that explained something about history as a competition of Ideas, not a menu from which you're supposed to pick your Rotisserie League philosopher squad. I don't understand whom it is this is supposed to impress, or gull, excepting maybe people who've volunteered to have it hurled at them from a pulpit. I don't think Man is Perfectible, either, at least to the extent I'd ever think about such a silly notion, and I'm unclear what, if anything, that's supposed to tell me about NAFTA, offshore drilling, or the Iraq war. And I sure don't see how this awe-inspiring principle has informed American "conservatism" for the better. I don't believe in social justice, or a strong social safety net, because I believe it's going to perfect people. (And what kind of a fool Indian would say a thing like that?) I believe in those things because a lot of imperfectible shits have hereditary control over the distribution of basic human services, and they're imperfectibly willingly to watch other people starve, drown, or bleed to death unless they're paid up front to do otherwise.

Look, you wanna get all dressed up in period costume before you jerk off, it's all the same to me. Go ahead and strangle yourself, while you're at it. Let's just see the game for what it is, is all I'm sayin'.

Speaking of our natural aristocracy and its bogus philosophizing, Indiana Governor Mitch "2012" Daniels recently gave the commencement address at Franklin College, and I swear to God these are the fifth through tenth paragraphs:

These days we hear constantly about luck on a grand scale. The most recent Powerball winner, a convenience store clerk from Marshall, Missouri, won $258 million dollars. Don't you often wonder what happens to these lucky people? Not everyone knows how to handle luck that good.

I heard about a Hoosier Lottery winner of many millions who turned up dead broke a couple years later. When a reporter asked him how this happened, he said "Well, I spent the first half on liquor and loose women. And, to be perfectly honest, I wasted the rest."

That one's made up, of course, but this does happen in real life, and it's no joking matter. Mack Metcalf, a 42-year-old forklift operator from Kentucky, won $65 million back in 2000. He was dead three years later, his millions dissipated on frivolities and his life dissipated on alcohol. Looking back, it's hard to call him "lucky."

A current lawsuit making its way through Indiana courts caught my eye. In Donovan v. Grand Victoria, plaintiff Thomas Donovan is protesting the practice of Indiana casinos in refusing to permit card counters to play at their blackjack tables. Donovan's sin in the casino's eyes is not that he is inordinately lucky, it's that he's inordinately smart. He has taught himself to count the cards as they are played, then constantly and quickly to calculate the odds on his winning the next hand. In a game where luck still plays a large part, Donovan has through hard work learned to improve his chances.

Around the country, most courts have allowed the casinos to throw the counters out. But the world is not a big casino. We can't banish luck from our lives, but we can all be card counters, who take actions and decisions that move the mathematics of life to our side of the table.

I've never met a card counter. The closest I've knowingly come was watching the movie "21", about the MIT students and their raid on Las Vegas. But what's clear is there's nothing sentimental about what they do; it's all about the numbers, and the data, and it's serious business.

Yes, The Brain not only used the opening portion of a commencement address to make his first public comment about a card-counting lawsuit recently filed in Indiana, but to oppose property rights into the bargain.

Now, don't get me wrong; I think card-counting, absent the use of any mechanical device, should be legal, and for the same reason denial of health insurance over pre-existing conditions should be illegal: the law already allows you to rig the system for profit; it shouldn't, on top of that, allow you to refuse to do business when that profit's not to your liking.

What I don't understand is why Mitch Daniels thinks so. I mean, I'm not the one going around telling everybody that the Market takes care of all things if we just sit back, close our eyes, and let go of the wheel. Th' fuck's Hard Work got to do with it? Man had no concern about the Hard Work the (hourly) folks at Delco-Remy put in, or the sort of wisdom involved in organizing for better working conditions.

Of course, this is Indiana, where Big Brewing, in-state liquor distributors, and fireworks peddlers have already established What We Are, so that now we're just Haggling Over the Price; come Monday the Bantam Menace was quick to announce he "had no plans" to ask the state gaming commission to step in. Which just means he's obeying an even higher principle: that if you can't reach the wallet, you might see if kicking 'em in the balls gets their attention.

Why Do We Need This, Again?

Ross Douthat, "The Principles of Rand Paul". May 23 or so

IT'S almost Summer Vacation! What th' hell, let's read Douthat; he might not have a paper to work at by the time the thing's over.

Which would be a shame, especially since it's precisely the sort of internet savvy that allows Young Ross to comment on last week's news even though it's only Monday of the next week which the newspaper business so sorely needs.

Okay, okay, so you can't rush craftsmanship:

No ideology survives the collision with real-world politics perfectly intact. General principles have to bend to accommodate the complexities of history, and justice is sometimes better served by compromise than by zealous intellectual consistency.

Are you sure the Pope is okay with you saying that?

This was all that Rand Paul needed to admit, after his victory in Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary, when NPR and Rachel Maddow asked about his views of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “As a principled critic of federal power,” he could have said, “I oppose efforts to impose Washington’s will on states and private institutions. As a student of the history of segregation and slavery, however, I would have made an exception for the Civil Rights Act.”

In other words, Paul should have told his supporters and his principles to Suck It, now that he had the nomination, lest Ross Douthat be reminded of the post-1964 pedigree of the party he shills for. Assuming he knows what that is.

But Paul just couldn’t help himself. He had to play Hamlet, to hem and haw about the distinction between public and private discrimination, to insist on his sympathy for the civil rights movement while conspicuously avoiding saying that he would have voted for the bill that outlawed segregation.

By the weekend (and under duress), he finally said it. But the tap-dancing route he took to get there was offensive, tone deaf and politically crazy.

In other words, it was a prime example of how facile glibertarians have been allowed to be, and how quickly they turn tail when they collide with real world consequences.

And not even "real" world consequences; all that happened to Paul was he was asked a legitimate question, one he's had at least thirty years to prepare for, and he not only proved unprepared, he then proved to be a political coward to boot. If he'd said, instead, "Y'know, Rachel, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an exception to the rule I claim should guide every other public action" he might've avoided a public outcry, but he'd'a been just as big a liar and just as much a coward. The reason you wish for this, Ross, has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with electing Republicans so they can hope that someday there'll be enough cover that they don't have to scurry off every time someone unfurls the Stars and Bars.

It was also sadly typical of the political persuasion that Rand Paul represents.

It might be, if anyone had been in the habit of asking them pointed questions since Reagan's States Rights speech, and if they'd been in the habit of answering honestly, not ducking the way enlightened Republicans such as yourself prefer.

This persuasion shouldn’t be confused with the Tea Party movement, whose inchoate antideficit enthusiasms Paul rode to victory last Tuesday.

Just because Teabaggers openly clasped him to their prodigious man bosoms is no reason to tar them with the same oil spill. Especially when you'll be needing their votes in five months.

Nor is it just libertarianism in general, a label that gets slapped on everyone from Idaho milita members to Silicon Valley utopians to pro-choice Republicans in Greenwich.

Unlike the care and precision with which the Right has hurled "Commie", "Traitor", and "Baby Killer".

Who th' fuck devalued "libertarian" exactly, if not the very people who claim the label, the very people who are little more than Reagan Republicans who smoke dope? Libertarianism--small L--has come to mean "anti-taxation, pro-gun rights, or gun lobby, and opposed to all government regulation of business", while large-L Libertarianism has been essentially taken over by 2nd Amendment types who've kept a DIY approach to Federal Narcotics schedules around as a sort of political equivalent of Marilyn Monroe's beauty mark. If these are not the same ideas which have been driving the Republican party--or at least its election-year sloganizing--for thirty years, then what has?

Paul is a libertarian, certainly, but more importantly he’s a particular kind of a libertarian. He’s culturally conservative (opposing both abortion and illegal immigration), radically noninterventionist (he’s against the Iraq war and the United Nations), and so stringently constitutionalist that he views nearly everything today’s federal government does as a violation of the founding fathers’ vision.

This worldview goes by many names, including “paleoconservatism,” “the old right” and “paleolibertarianism.” But its adherents — Paul and his father, Ron, included — view themselves as America’s only true conservatives, arguing that the modern conservative movement has sold out to both big government and the military-industrial complex.

Let's hie ourselves over to the Paul for Senate website, shall we? Whadda we see on the home page? "On the Issues" with subheads for "Taxes and Debt", "Health Care", "Federal Reserve", "Privacy & Liberty", "Energy Innovation", and "(I'm Pro-) Life". Nothing there about "The Military-Industrial Complex" or "Ending the War in Afghanistan Now", or much of anything that wouldn't appear on a Douthat for Congress site, god help us all, except maybe the business about De-fluoridating the Fed. Even "Privacy and Liberty" pays the required homage to national security threats, but is a little light on the Wall of Separation. Clicking the "MORE" button gives you "National Defense" (he's for it, the "most important function of government"; that must have the boys at Boeing quaking in their loafers), "Bailouts", "Term Limits" (when it comes to comedy, you can't beat the classics), "Homeschooling", and "Campaign Finance". Find the brave, iconoclastic stance that doesn't come straight from a GOP platform from the last forty years and win a prize. But lose a primary.

Look, short answer, except, as always, it's too late for that: nobody who uses "paleoliberal" without cracking up has any right to complain there's been some semantic drift in political labeling.

In an age of lockstep partisanship, there’s a lot to admire about this unusual constellation of ideas, and its sweeping critique of American politics as usual.

Yeah, so long as you don't bring it into focus.

Like many outside-the-box thinkers, they’re good at applying their principles more consistently than your average partisan, but lousy at knowing when to stop. (Hence the tendency to see civil rights legislation as just another unjustified expansion of federal power.)

Here's today's pop political quiz: The last Republican to run for national office as a political pragmatist, rather than a raging ideologue, died how many years before Ross Douthat was born (within five)? ____

That De-Explains It.

John Dickerson, "Rand Old Party: Why Democrats can't wait to use Rand Paul against the GOP". May 20

SHEESH, John, this would be considered an anemic money shot on the set of Geezers and Pleezers IV: Back Porch Swingin':

Democrats are pressing Paul so hard for several reasons. It's not just that they want to win his seat. They want to make every Republican defend Paul. Democrats need African-American turnout to be high this election. Getting into a debate about civil rights would help that. But they'll also try to keep Republicans responding to Paul's other non-establishment views—such as the need to abolish much of the federal government, including the Federal Reserve and Social Security Administration.

Parties always try to do this with extreme figures: They impute their views to the party as a whole. Long after she stopped being a politician and became a political celebrity, Democrats are still trying to make Republicans answer for Sarah Palin. They'll have an easier time with Paul because before today's moving away, Republican officials were rushing toward him.

"Parties always try to do this." I spent about five minutes trying to figure out why this wasn't your entire column, before I glanced up and saw "Slate."

Now, first, maybe I got this wrong, but my recollection is that Sarah Palin was the unanimous VP choice of the Republican National Convention less than two years ago, a move which may have been de rigueur, or pro forma, or abusus non tollit usum, but was noted at the time for its having energized the base; if her subsequent mid-term resignation and second career as an itinerant Mom Someone Else Would Like To Fuck and Dan Quayle impressionist is supposed to exempt her from political criticism or being held up as a paragon for the views she makes so much money off, kindly inform the party which is still running against Jimmy Carter thirty years after he became a house painter. Second, the fact that you, sir, or your Slate ilk, tend to take Republicatoonianism seriously, and would not have it sullied by the likes of Mrs. Malaprop of the Tundra, is beside the point.

But on to Dr. Paul: doesn't the concept of "Tarring with the same brush" require, or at least imply, that some of the people getting coated are innocent? Or at least somehow distinct? There may be some Republicans out there who aren't dyed-in-the-wool Teabaggers, but they sure take some effort to spot; the party's been in the thrall of high-volume Free Marketeers since 1980. Just because the party now admits it has a little PR problem with its fringiest religious nutjobs doesn't mean it's having an ongoing internal debate about Friedmanomics.

Maddow spent about 20 minutes last night quizzing Paul about his views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he and the Republican Party have spent the last 24 hours cleaning up the mess. Paul said he believed that the federal government should not tell private businesses whether they could discriminate. He hated racism as much as anyone, he said, but believes that businesses that discriminate should be forced to change through private action: speaking out, boycotts, and the like.

As a practical matter, that ignores history and the human behavior of the time. But as a political matter, this just isn't something a candidate says out loud—even if he believes it. At worst, it makes him seem to take racism lightly, and at best, it's distracting. Before lunch, Paul had put out a statement that he would not support the repeal of the law.

Hold up. The man's a 47-year-old afflicted with congenital libertarianism; this means, at the very least, that his treatment was his own responsibility. Enough, already, with the "he's not a savvy politician, or he would have kept his mouth shut" routine. He's a guy with The Answer. That's his point. Why then can't he just answer a simple question, and one which not only goes to the heart of his, you should pardon the expression, philosophy, but one which he couldn't possibly have avoided answering already if that philosophy is come by honestly? Why th' hell would ducking, or side-stepping, the question have been preferable to affirming that his core beliefs include the idea that laissez-faire property rights trump personal rights, even in the most egregious cases? In a perfect world this wouldn't even be a story; it would be old news.

Truth is, the guy got himself hauled up onto the national stage--hell, onto MSNBC--and suddenly The Answer runs into actual questions. And, in response, it tries to reshape the story, blames the liberal media for yelling Racist in a crowded time slot, and vows it's learned its lesson: never go on the Rachel Maddox Show again. That's not a shortcoming to be exploited; it's a long-overdue demonstration of basic principles.