At Least Our Lynch Mobs Are Digital

Richard Cohen, "Digital Lynch Mob", Washington Post, May 9.

Of Cohen's take on Stephen Colbert's Correspondents' Dinner performance enough, or almost enough, has been said: in light of his harassment by Left Blogostan he should be reminded that a) he wrote a piece which took a few gratituitous swipes at the blogosphere; b) he wasn't funny; and c) he wrote about the thing a week after the event, one he had not attended.

So Cohen's claim people wrote in response to a column saying Colbert was not funny is not exactly so. Cohen begged for this, and like some David Blaine street stunt it's impossible to decide with these types if it's a fake or just completely phony.

[Regular readers are aware that I have no interest whatsoever in Tales of Blogtopia, being that I currently totter at the intersection of "Seen That Sorta Thing Come An' Go A Hundred Times, Sonny" and "I'm Old And There Are Wolves Out There". And I'm congenitally disinterested in any form of Utopia, Anti-Utopia, Dystopia, or Todd Rundgren's Utopia, whom I once walked out on (I had a temperature of 102º, which didn't make them any less boring). Blaming something called the Blogosphere for public rudeness is like blaming Alexander Graham Bell for telemarketing. ]

Cohen stepped into that knowing there was already an uproar and frankly he's no longer good enough to warrant as much of a response as he got, which is not the same thing as saying he didn't deserve it. On the other hand, it did get me to check out his Tuesday column all on my own, without first reading elsewhere that he'd performed another public sex act with a once-popular President. And here again, not only has the "mean people sent me rude emails and all I did was antagonize them" story been more than handled, Cohen is apparently unaware that it became a cliché exactly three weeks after the term "blog" was coined.

This, though, caught my eye:

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

Please, Dick, you've already earned the admiring glances of Kathryn Jean Lopez and Jonah Goldberg (warning: links take you to stuff written by those people). Personally, I'd rather have strangers calling me bad names.

Anyway, watch out, Hillary! because there are afoot in the land people who actually don't believe it's best to just shut up and let you conduct the disaster for a while, and if the word around the WaPo Pundits Only water cooler is to be believed they may be armed with Patchouli. And I don't remember exactly what we were smoking back in the Sixties, but I do remember why nobody shared any with Little Dickie Cohen. It was because he kept babbling about how, if we'd all just tow the line, the party responsible for the quagmire in Southeast Asia would straighten it up just as soon as it defeated Nixon. And we all believed that whatever he was on he'd had way too much of it already.

Programming Note

Note: I haven't the slightest idea why Olbermann has Howard Fineman on. This is different from asking why Tweety has him on, or why he's considered a pundit, or what his job description is, or why anyone would listen to him. I'm long resigned to living in a world where somebody with enough money to make it happen wants Howard the Suck to impersonate a journalist, and I know will never be able to figure out why. If you were choosing up sides Howard Fineman is the last person anyone would pick. For anything.

But why the hell does he turn up on Olbermann, which if nothing else at least is not Hardball. Is it to make the interminable WaPo contingent seem witty, or informed, or vaguely interesting? Mission Unaccomplished.

Monday night Fineman was in full Bush Ass Covering mode, and it was not at all a pretty sight. Catching Keith's toss of the Bush fish story, Fineman did a rendition of "Melancholy Baby" worthy of its reputation as the Drunk's Lament:

He [Bush] told me once in the middle of the 2000 campaign when things were going badly, he said, y'know, if this doesn't work out I'd be just as happy sitting on my lake in a fishing boat fishing.

And for a guy who was out at Stanford not too long ago talking about setting up his post-Presidential think tank, I think in some ways when you got a 31% approval rating and things aren't going too well you start thinking about what you're going to be doing after you're President, and I think that's sort what he was doing.

Well, what I'd like to see him do after he's President is time, but I'm really glad Howie got to share that personal moment with all of us. We can't bring ourselves to say the guy's an idiot, we can't summon up the balls to say that this is self-inflicted and that no President has ever deserved low poll numbers like George W. Bush. Things haven't been going well for him, and doggone it, George could probably use some cheering up right about now. Never mind the sort of shit that rained down on the rest of us when he was on top. Things haven't been going well.

Maybe you could come up with a new nickname for him, Howard. That sort of thing always used to give you boys a couple of them leg-humpin' doggie boners.

Part IV

"The man who comes to you to set up the meeting--that's the traitor."
--Vito Corleone

GRAPEVINE, Texas (AP) — Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't want one NFL team in Los Angeles. He wants two.

The California governor will probably have to be satisfied with half of his wish — at least in the near future.

Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and a committee of 11 owners heard presentations Tuesday from officials representing Los Angeles, Anaheim and Pasadena, three cities that want a club. The area has been without an NFL franchise for more than a decade.

Schwarzenegger went first. After meeting with the owners, the actor-turned-politician emerged to say he was there to make sure "we're getting not only one NFL team to the Los Angeles area, Southern California, but to actually get two teams. That's why I came. Why limit it?"

I dunno...because your constituents don't want 'em?

Or maybe they do. But they sure held the door open to make sure both the Rams and Raiders made it out safely a decade ago, and nobody squawked too much when the league expanded twice without glancing to its left. But then several mid-market teams--Indianapolis, San Diego, Arizona, Minnesota--faced stadium contract expiration dates. Suddenly the league was almost desperate to regain a foothold in the nation's Number Two Teevee Market.

Uh-huh.

The NFL is aware that it milked the LA business as far as it could go without making a realistic-looking move toward getting back into the market, and booster groups sprung up around renovating the LA Colosseum, the Rose Bowl, or building a new $800,000 M complex in Anaheim.

Even assuming that people care, why would they care enough to want two? Why would a politician, even one as tone-deaf as Arnie (who could've seen that comin', huh?) call for dueling franchises at god knows what expense in a state whose budget crises brought about his unlikely election in the first place? Schwarzenegger isn't going to be anywhere near an elected office should a second expansion club come So Cal's way, and he probably doesn't have much say about the first one, either. You'll forgive me if my primary focus is on the cost overruns for Hey Rube Lube Stadium in my own backyard, but I can look up long enough to wonder whether Arnie gets paid by the inanity, or whether threatening the rest of the league with another round of "We'll move to LA!" is part of the up-front money Cali had to provide.

Happy Birthday

Robert Johnson
May 8, 1911--August 16, 1938

Happy Birthday

Blind Willie McTell
May 5, 1901--August 15, 1959

Bollocks of Steele

Shelby Steele, "White Guilt and the Western Past," Opinion Journal, May 2

I spent two days staring at this thing, angry enough to jump in a mud puddle on the off chance that Shelby Steele would wander by and get splashed.

Sure, David Neiwert had pretty much taken him out with a headline. It still gnawed at me, because the whole End of Racism thing pisses me off. It's more personal than many other political issues. White people who proclaim that racism died a generation ago don't know what they're talking about. (In case you don't know, Steele is African-American, a Hoover Institute sinecure paid to tell the Right what it wants to hear from Black folk.) Racism is not Jim Crow laws. It's not Separate but Equal, but Separate and Brutally Kept in Place.

But then something else occurred to me, a good excuse to deal with this briefly since I'd go on forever otherwise. The bravery shown by people who marched and sat-in and boycotted and died to begin to put an end to an exceedingly long and ugly stain on this society cannot be dismissed like last year's faded singing sensation. Their contribution was as great as that of our military veterans and as deserving of eternal recognition. And as with our armed forces, that means remembering precisely what they did for us, not sticking somebody on a stamp and calling it even.

The thing that occurred to me was that Steele's dependent clause, that we have taken to fighting wars at less than full measure, was as full of shit as the racism hangover that supposedly engenders it:

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight.

Just for starters, why "the nuclear option aside"? If the argument is for the full measure of military power, why aren't nukes included? Because they suggest public insanity? Because we must provide a measure of plausible humanity along with the slaughter? What? Y'know, the "Nuke Baghdad/Tehran/France" crowd can avail itself of the same argument. And the use of nuclear weapons is the one sure way the US has of imposing its will on everybody else--on the surface, that is--so I think we're owed an explanation as to why "the nuclear option aside".

The reality is quite the opposite--any situation calling for the full measure of our military might would at the very least cause us to consider the use of nuclear weapons. It's a situation we actually lived under for a couple decades, Mr. Steele--you can look it up--and fortunately, cooler saner heads than yours prevailed. These are the circumstances of the modern world, no matter how some of us might wish for an era of kingly combat and comely indentured serving wenches.

And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East.

There are at least a half-dozen responses to this, and I hope I'll get around to them all. But I wanted to single this sentence out for its betrayal of a mindset which refuses to die despite being rebuked in toto and before our very eyes over the past three years.

This is, in fact, the Vietnam version of "the end of racism". For years the war's defenders insisted we didn't lose at all: "We weren't allowed to win," being the battle cry of terminal denial. You will still see claims the US "never lost a battle" (not exactly so), followed by the insistence that "We eradicated the Viet Cong in the Tet Offensive, but the media reported it as a loss" (true as to the first part, bass-ackwards in the second). Now that, for whatever reason, it's not longer considered expedient to avoid the D word, it's claimed that the loss somehow did not occur in the field, or didn't really count because we brought the wrong shoes. This amounts to a rather shocking admission of ignorance even of recent history (if you prefer a de-politicized example, try the Soviets in Afghanistan), let alone military history, let alone common sense. It's why so many of our warfloggers, up to and including the ones at the Pentagon, imagined war as being as settled as a Division I football factory taking on a state college on week two of the season. It ain't.

But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Oh, poop. We're divining the beliefs of the insurgents themselves without even understanding the nature of an insurgency. An insurgency arises only when there is considerable difference in the weight of the forces. You "make room" for an insurgency by being an invader, a large target, and by having enormous communication and supply networks to defend. You "make room" for an insurgency because leveling everything within a 1500-mile radius is not what you set out to do. Is this really so hard to think through? The US is not going to attack Carthage, raze it, and sew the fields with salt. And so long as we keep picking fights with kiddies 1/100 our size, we're not going to face an adversary who pulls on red jackets and marches onto an open field to have it out under Marquis of Queensbury rules. That's just stupid.

Unfortunately, it's not so stupid that it wasn't roughly all we prepared for in Iraq.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

One: while it's not my intention to answer the White Guilt Thesis here, it's absurd to suggest that the concept of "limited war" derives solely from tender-heartedness, a misapplication of resources, an unfamiliarity with guerilla war, or creeping hippie dogma. Two: it's both ridiculous and, well, amusing, given the circumstances, to suggest that the US should mobilize maximum force (nuclear option aside) against tenth-rate powers when, given the overheated rhetoric about WMDs and Infinite Clashes of Civilization vs Evil that preceded our most recent episode, this wasn't even considered. And it wasn't considered because the merest mention of conscription would have blown the whole program to smithereens, while actually taxing the current generation to pay for the thing would have led to outright revolt from the Right. Despite the fact that the American public largely swallowed the idea that Saddam Hussein personally planned 9/11 they still aren't flocking to enlistment centers. That's a very impressive sword you're waving there in the hallways of the Hudson Institute there, Mr. Steele, but in the future you might consider tempering.

Three: there were damned good reasons to wage limited war in Korea and Vietnam, and to avoid large-scale support of Afghan rebels, just as the Soviets avoided massive support of the Vietnamese. Even absent the Cold War our level of "involvement" in Iraq has caused us a considerable international migrane. All-out war would do worse, and perhaps much much worse. As it is there's no question the potential other major powers of the planet are watching us with an eye to thwarting our further schemes. I know it's a requirement on the Right to affect macho unconcern with international realities, but like most macho posturing it uses the wrong head to think with.

Why this new minimalism in war?

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

I mostly quote this in case you missed the real flavor of this leftover wad of 19th century bubblegum. And to address the fact that the politics behind this are as screwy as the military notions. We are not going to reinstitute The Great Game, sad as that may be to some folks. We could, I suppose, attempt to get away with totalitarian control of as much of the globe as we think profitable, just as we could have flattened Vietnam, or the Soviets destroyed Afghanistan. It works so long as you can deny there's any price to be paid, any legitimacy to any other viewpoint, and so long as you are not personally responsible for the actual nuts-and-bolts of putting the thing together.

Our "limited activity" in Indochina--which could have been avoided altogether had we extended our pledge of the right of self-determination to people who (shudder) weren't White Like Us, Mr. Steele--included the dropping of five times the total bomb tonnage we dropped on Germany in WWII. The Vietnamese were our allies in that one, sir, somehow managing to maintain an effective insurgency in the face of a Japanese invader who scrupled at nothing to control conquered territory.

"The iniquities of the fathers shall be visited unto the third and fourth generation". Doesn't it go something like that? (And White people wrote the Bible, of course.) But that isn't the case here, Mr. Steele. The iniquities are all too quickly forgiven, and forgotten, once they're finally exposed. It's the hard lessons of colonialism abroad and White Supremacy at home which keep smacking us upside the head, if you'll pardon the expression.

A Palate-Cleansing Lemon Granita Intermezzo

David Neiwert, "The End of the End of Racism" responds to that Shelby Steele Opinion Journal piece in a way I couldn't even if my brain weren't at the moment an inert mass trapped in a freakishly large skull. More inert than usual, I mean.

All I have the strength to add at the moment is this:


Mascot: Rebels
School Colors: Gray and Red

Mission Statement (abridged):

"Our mission at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School is to meet
the needs of a diverse group of students by offering quality
programs in academics, technology, fine arts, vocational, and
extra-curricular activities. "

Go Rebs! (In case it's too small to make out, the Scales of Justice in the upper left corner of the shield are a particularly fine touch.)

Let us move along to something refreshing and slushy, with a hint of self-indulgence and a touch of brave, politically incorrect high living we used to enjoy in the old days, before White European Civilization (is that a redundancy?) was illegal and the servant problem became impossible. Let us take as our inspiration the example of Professor Doctor Dr. Mike S. Adams, Ph.D., who is courageously celebrating not wasting any ammo on his imaginary adversaries this week by smoking three cigars of two ring sizes which I hope are reproduced actual size below:

because that was a lot more work than it looks like it would be. As Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in your case I wouldn't try it."

Where was I? Oh, the sorbet course:

Jonah Goldberg, "Is Bush the New Nixon?" (warning: this passes for thought in some quarters).

Maybe I can save us all some time and at least one of us an impending Category 3 headache. Abstract: Now that there's nothing redeemable left in George W. Bush the likes of Jonah can cough up, he's no Reaganite. In fact, one more disaster and he's a Liberal. A gay Liberal.

That cackling you're hearing comes from the chorus of Bush critics (an all-inclusive term that accounts for spittle-flecked bloggers and moderate liberal finger-waggers alike) giddy over Bush's basement-level poll numbers. Several bloggers have gone to the trouble of showing side-by-side charts of Bush's approval rating following close behind former President Richard Nixon's. At the end of the trail is the X-marks-the-spot treasure trove "Nixon resigns."

Now, there's a great deal that's wrong with the comparison. Nixon didn't resign because his poll numbers were low. The causation worked the other way. His poll numbers were low because he was involved in an impeachment-level scandal that prompted him to resign. I know there are many Bush-haters clicking their ruby slippers together about how impeachment is around the corner, but let's keep at least one foot on terra firma.

Sure, so long as we can use the other to repeatedly kick your lard ass.

There are other problems with the comparison. The economy was a mess toward the end of Nixon's term. It's going gangbusters now. As bad as the Iraq war may be going, it hardly compares to the bloodshed of Vietnam. And as loud as the antiwar movement may be today, it amounts to little more than a historical re-enactment of the antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s.

Well, there may be a problem or two with the problems there. For one, that "gangbusters" schtick isn't exactly playing everywhere, particularly among, oh, the public. Then there's Iraq. Bad as it may be going, it's still worse than you lot want to admit. I realize how comforting it is that the numbers of US deaths don't approach Vietnam's at its height, just as it's comforting that your ass is home in a Barcolounger in front of a teevee that isn't reminding you of the sacrifice of young men and women every night on the news. But as Phil Carter (whose ass is over there, God bring him home safely) and Owen West pointed out at the end of 2004, once you factor in improved medical care (in Vietnam a soldier was 1.5 times more likely to die of his wounds), adjust for troop levels, and take out Air Force deaths, Iraq is pretty damn close to as lethal as Indochina was. And as for that "historical re-enactment" of anti-war protests, it's beside the point. The public is far more opposed to our Iraq adventure than the roughly 50-50 split over Vietnam professional Sixties revisionists would have us forget.

Blah, blah, Nixon was the last of the New Dealers, blah, blah, Bush once said government should solve a problem, blah, blah, he's loyal to his father, who was a Nixonite, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, that's not a quote, exactly. This is:

Perhaps this unnoticed fact explains part of Bush's falling poll numbers more than most observers are willing to admit. The modern conservative movement, from Goldwater to Reagan, was formed as a backlash against Nixonism. Today, Reaganite conservatives make up a majority of the Republican Party. If Bush held the Reaganite line on liberty at home the way he does on liberty abroad, he'd be in a lot better shape. After all, if Bush's own base supported him at their natural level, his job approval numbers wouldn't be stellar, but they wouldn't have his enemies cackling, either.

Goldwater and Reagan were a Nixon backlash? Have you explained this to Mr. Buckley?

I skipped over Jonah's schoolyard witticism about Kevin Phillips. Phillips recently, rather famously, said that the GOP has become the first religious party in America. I think that can be stood on its head; rather than a religious party, the modern GOP, the spawn of the intellectually inbred Reaganaut Right, is now the party which behaves like a religion. It treats reality like pulpit fodder. Whoever or whatever makes it look bad may suddenly be out of the club, excommunicated, eyes closed with holy dread. The war's a Reaganaut war, and clearly still popular with the base. Jonah's still touting the economy. What has he got against Bush, aside from the fact he's a total failure? And one who got that way as the farthest-Right President evah? There's no principled opposition to Bush on the Right. Stop kiddin' yourself and realize that Bush's approval numbers are way higher than they have any right to be because you Republicans still cling to him, because he's your man.

Happy Birthday

Septima Poinsette Clark
May 3, 1898--December 15, 1987

"While We're Sure Mr. Parker and Mr. Gilespie Are Considered Highly Competent, We Were Led To Believe Mr. Welk Would Be Performing All Evening"

I had no intention of writing about Stephen Colbert's performance at the Correspondents' Dinner. Just of savoring it, and ignoring the wingnut backlash. Then I checked in with Robin yesterday morning and read "How I know that Dan Froomkin isn't a liberal blogger" and I realized it wasn't just the right-wing jackdaws pecking at Colbert; the fêted correspondent herd was stamping and snorting, too.

It turned out I was a day late, and the link took me to Froomkin's Tuesday column, which now covered the print reaction to Colbert instead of the event itself. I'm grateful that Dan had collected so much of that sorry mess in one place, and I'm forced to disagree with my friend Robin. In singing the Conventional Wisdom song one day, then penning a testosterone-free column on the controversy, Froomkin was behaving precisely as what passes for a liberal among Washington insiders.

Back up to Monday and the column Robin objected to. Froomkin wrote:

The boozy bonhomie of the annual event is intended to serve as a balm for the often tense relationship between the White House and the reporters who cover it.

Bush largely delivered on his side of the bargain. Colbert delivered something else entirely.

Now, perhaps you too find a hive of bees buzzing inside your head. Just as with last year's incredible performance when the First Lady delivered a monotoned monologue that had 'em rolling in the aisles, it's damn near impossible for me to believe that a roomful of insiders attending an event whose stated purpose is to poke fun suddenly go ga-ga because the Bushes proceed to read prepared skits which actually do so; and having watched both performances, there's simply no way I can describe either one as amusing. Hell, I can't even describe them as self-deprecating, since it's so obvious neither the President nor his wifebot believe a thing they're saying. It would be one thing to toss them a bone for the attempt. It's quite another to insist one actually found it funny. There's a world of difference between skewering yourself and poking imaginary fun at a caricature of your foibles. The former is a leveling experience. The latter just serves to build you up by pretending to knock yourself down. Neither Bush laid a glove on themselves, and anybody who doesn't see that is disqualified from acting as a public bullshit detector when it counts.

(And really, now, I understand this is not professional comedy, but for God's sakes, can't you find a lookalike who can make a fucking stab at the accent? It didn't take Bush himself too long to learn it. Or would that have hit something vital?)

So Colbert comes on, in the words of John Stewart, mistakenly believing he's been hired to do the thing he does four nights a week, and he doesn't go over. Okay, I understand that his comedy might be a little difficult for the Bob Hope mindset. Ann Althouse, who, to her credit, stood by her man, sort of, recognized that Colbert the actor couldn't just "supply some perfectly pitched stand-up humor, the way Drew Carey has done in the past," though perhaps if he'd borrowed Carey's practice of laughing at everything he says it might have eased the audience along. The fact that it pinched a lot of people in the audience in a tender spot is just a credit to its incisiveness, although to be honest much of that crowd seems to be tender all over. But to step beyond that and claim that Colbert wasn't funny? Horseshit, and whore's shit:

• I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

• I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

• The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.

• But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

The reaction?

Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts write in The Washington Post's gossip column: "The reviews from the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner are in, and the consensus is that President Bush and Bush impersonator Steve Bridges stole Saturday's show -- and Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert's cutting satire fell flat because he ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor: Make fun of yourself, not the other guy.

Huh? Colbert was hired to make fun of Colbert? I don't recall anybody saying that about Darryl Hammond doing his lame-ass Clinton impression in 2001. In fact, I don't remember anybody saying the dinner was supposed to poke fun at the current President, not the previous one.

Frank James writes in the Chicago Tribune's Washington blog: "I sensed a lot of uneasiness in the audience during Colbert's routine. It would make Republican partisans uneasy for obvious reasons.

"But I also had the sense that Colbert's toughness on Bush made people squirm because it raised that age-old question that goes back to the republic's start. How do you criticize the president without disrespecting the presidency?"

One order of Alien and Sedition Acts coming up for Mr. James.

On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann asked Washington Post political columnist Dana Milbank if Colbert crossed the line.

Milbank: "I don't think he really crossed the line. I just think he wasn't terribly funny. And he had the misfortune of following Bush, who actually did put on one of the better performances of his presidency."

He added: "The president's used to getting abused. He didn't get anything worse than he got at Coretta Scott King's funeral, which was certainly a bit more outlandish than this. So I think he probably comes out ahead in this whole thing."

Mrs. King's funeral was more outlandish than Colbert's routine? Sheesh, Dana, I sure hope you tip your caddie well.

Noam Scheiber, on The Plank: My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left--until recently more common on the right--wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value.

Opinion noted, Noam. Thanks for refraining from going over the top. (Oh, and a side note: if you intend to convince us of your opposition to the Iraq war "from the get-go" it would probably help to link to a piece you wrote before July of 2005. That sort of thing merely encourages the utterly disinterested reader to start leafing through your blog entries for the relevant period. Like, you know, the one which suggested we should pretend to use diplomacy just to keep the little guys in line, while having no intention of being constrained while facing mass death at the hands of terrorists, or the one that questioned Al Gore's political motivation for objecting to Bush's Iraq plans. You know, the plans you opposed from the get-go.)

All I can say is, thank God I've had thirty years to absorb the mendaciousness of our Free Press; I'm not sure my youthful idealism, such as it was, could have withstood it. Oh, and thank God for Stephen Colbert, and some of the best and bravest writers in the biz.

Happy Birthday

Satyajit Ray
May 2, 1921--April 23, 1992

The Plural of "Imaginary Anecdote" Is "Op-Ed Piece"

Nicholas Kristof, NY Times. "Opening Classroom Doors", April 30

Yes, it's time for another round of America's Favorite Parlor Amusement, "If We Captured a Terrorist and Had Only Thirty Minutes To Find Out Where He'd Hidden a Nuclear Device, and the Only Way To Get That Information Was To Let Him Sodomize Nick Kristof on Coast-to-Coast Television, Would You..."

Otherwise known as "Gee, I Could Get To Work So Much Faster if I Didn't Have To Stop for All These Red Lights."

Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama. Alas, they would be "unqualified" for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don't have teacher certification. That's an absurd snarl in our education bureaucracy. Let's relax the barriers so people can enter teaching more easily, either right out of college or later as a midcareer switch. Sure, there are lots of other problems in the U.S. education system. But this is one of the easiest to solve.

And one of the most difficult to solve is the Armchair Quarterback problem. Everybody who went to high school in this country seems to think he could run them. All of them.

I don't know about New York, but in Indiana, which has one of the stricter codes in the country (teachers are not supposed to teach outside their areas of accreditation, for example), Colin and Meryl (she's married to a Westside boy, btw, Steve Gummer) would be welcome to apply for teaching jobs. They could get provisional licenses for a year, after which they'd have to work on gaining full accreditation, and they'd have to comply with the new NCLB-era requirements.

So like many another "snarl in our bureaucracy" so beloved of sidewalk educational reformers, this one is caused, at least in part, by sidewalk educational reformers.

And, of course, like many another punditological magic solution, this one's uniformed (you'd think Kristof, who can galavant around the globe for a story, could have dropped in on at least one public school and checked his facts, huh?). Public school teachers do a hell of a lot more than teach a particular subject.

Let's ask what we might want a public school teacher to do besides teaching a specialty. Identify learning, developmental, and emotional disabilities? Monitor medications? Integrate students with learning disabilities into regular classes? Watch for signs of sexual and physical abuse? Mediate a wide-range of interpersonal problems among young people with varying ethnic, socio-economic, and religious backgrounds? Deal with physical altercations and anger management among hormonally-crazed adolescents? Get to know students and their families, alerting social workers and social service organizations about potential problems? Make college recommendations and give career-path advice to dozens of young people each year?

Meryl Streep been picking this stuff up in her trailer between takes?

One reason to act is that the U.S. faces a growing shortage of teachers. Just to keep student-teacher ratios where they are now, we need a 35 percent increase in the number of people entering teaching.

Maybe we could offer higher pay if we weren't spending $150 billion a year on Nick Kristof-approved military adventures. I'm just spitballin' ideas, here.

The other problem is that the quality of teachers is deteriorating, mostly because -- fortunately! -- women have more career options. A smart and ambitious woman graduating from college in 1970 often ended up as a third-grade teacher; today, she ends up as a surgeon or senator.

Huh, well, she doesn't actually start off as a senator, does she? As an entry-level senator? There are presently 14 female Senators and 67 representatives. I can't find any statistics for it, but I'm pretty sure there are more than 81 intelligent women in the United States, and the remainder of them aren't all surgeons.

The upshot is that between 1971 and 1974, 24 percent of teachers had scored in the top 10 percent on their high school achievement tests. Now only 11 percent have done so. So one study after another has concluded that it is time to relax teacher certification requirements. "Barriers to entry are too high," declared last month's final report of the Teaching Commission, a private blue-ribbon panel led by Louis Gerstner, the former I.B.M. chief. "Confusing and cumbersome procedures discourage many talented would-be teachers from entering the classroom."

Oh, good, some more advice on how to run America's classrooms from a retired CEO. You'd think with all the free advice these guys have been offering for the last thirty years we'd be out of the woods by now. Then again, if he's so smart, how come Gerstner's best move at IBM was dumping $40 million of the stock he'd artificially inflated before he retired?

Well, let's pick through the horseshit and sort out the weed seeds. I don't know whether the supposed tumble of achievement test scores is real or not. Lots more people take those tests than in 1970 (and it's unclear whether those numbers compare teachers entering the profession in the early '70s with today, or if that's a comparison of the entire teaching force). A lot more people go to college these days, and many more professions require higher education. By 1970 my dad (high school education) was the only person at his company doing his job who didn't have a Masters. Second, I'm not sure what relaxing teacher certification requirements is supposed to do to increase average achievement test scores, whatever the point of that is. If someone wants to teach (trust me on this, it's a calling, not a calculated ladder-climbing career choice) why not get an education degree? Or assuming they decide after graduation to pursue education instead of their major field of study, what's the problem with getting additional credit hours? There's lots of grant money out there, and tax breaks to ease the financial strain. Not to mention the fact that most states require teachers to continue their education anyway, a cumbersome requirement which seems to make good sense. If you're called to educate our young, why wouldn't you want to learn as much as you can about the process, as well as stay current?

So, would this be a good time to point out that not all public school teachers are women?

Or that this period we're discussing corresponds to the Yuppification of America? That between 1974 and 2006 we went from a society which valued knowledge to one which exalts in net wealth?

Have Bill Gates, Jack Welch, or Louis Gerstner applied for public school teaching positions, or are they content to use charitable foundations as megaphones? We don't let the B-schools run our universities, public or private. The disproportionate influence these people have over public education is one of the major causes of our current test-happy, math and language to the exclusion of all else public school environment, something which is short-changing public education and is going to explode on us in short order. A C-minus legacy idiot with a business degree is in the White House (that's workin' out well), and a public school student with a lick of smarts must realize that they same foundation chairmen who're fucking with his curriculum requirements every couple years are shipping jobs overseas. Maybe the first thing we need to do to improve education is to take the bullhorn out of the hands of Times Op-Ed writers who think they can lie about it with impunity.

Happy Birthday

Charley Patton
May 1, 1891--April 28, 1934