Welcome Liberators

Jonah Goldberg, "Republican or Conservative? About Karl Rove." August 15.

There’s an old maxim

YEAH, the new ones just don't seem to make it. Get yourself an editor, young Goldberg. Preferably a mean one. Maybe you could bleg it: "Do any of you readers speak and write English?"

that if Napoleon had been struck by a cannon ball on his way toward Moscow, he would be remembered as an unrivaled military genius and liberator.

Y'know, I've never heard that, and I'm always curious when I pick up a new old maxim, especially now that I'm old enough to have authored some had I tried. I'm not saying you made this up--the history alone is beyond you--I'm just curious about the provenance. Napoleon is unrivaled in the modern era as a military genius, Russian campaign or no, and while his contemporary rep might have been improved by a well-timed demise, he'd have eventually come under the jaundiced gaze of history; idolators are required to work the Churchill section. Maybe "Quit while you're ahead" is the real old maxim you're after. But then you'd have said "quit", which you people never do--ahead, behind, or hopelessly mired in an unwinnable war you never should have gotten into in the first place.

In this and other respects, Karl Rove strikes me as a Napoleonic figure.

I'm going to predict that shortly after this howler you're going to excoriate the left blogosphere for hysterically suggesting that Rove was a dictator with scant regard for civil liberties. I'm not sure how I do this. Sometimes I just get the tingle.

He won an impressive string of campaigns. He dreamed of erecting a new political order on the ashes of the old. He’d look awfully dashing in one of those bicorn hats.

[rimshot] Damn, an actual joke from Jonah Goldberg, with timing and everything. Not a particularly funny one, but you know what Dr. Johnson said about women preaching and dogs walking on their hind legs.

And, most of all, Rove — who announced he will retire Aug. 31 — stubbornly refused to depart the scene on a historic high note.

I wasn't really gonna take on that old maxim, old boy, but Napoleon did not invade Russia because he'd been at his desk too long. If that old maxim is out there, somewhere, it's as a caution against over-reaching, not bad timing. Rove could have sold hubris to Napoleon for sous on the dollar. As for that "historic", well, we'll see.

Now of course, the comparison has its limits. Rove is not a bloody-minded invader or a dictator with scant regard for civil liberties — though you might think otherwise if you get all of your news from left-wing blogs.

Would you...could you...is there any way you could just quit this? I don't mean accusing anonymous leftists of saying things you'd like them to say--I have no reason to care what you think, Jonah--but the hedging every motherfucking thing you ever write? Just quit? Go through everything and strike it all out, if you refuse to be edited? Because whatever you imagine it accomplishes (razor-sharp accuracy? the illusion of razor-sharp accuracy? why would you even try?) it's just an annoying tic, and god knows you're the last writer on earth who needs one. We've already established that the Napoleon bit was "an old maxim". Thus we've already established that you're applying it as a concept. Were I to say, for some reason, probably brain fever, "It's been said that the truly great players--think Michael Jordan--want the ball when the game is on the line, and no one at NRO fits that description more than Jonah Goldberg," I would not need to add, "of course he's not African-American, or athletic, or accomplished".

Yet he fits the picture, because if Rove had left the White House after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, he would have been a hero, a man remembered as one of the great political master-tacticians of the last half a century.

Name three.

Obviously, Rove was aided in his 2004 task by the fact that the Democrats nominated John Kerry, a Michael Dukakis without the brains. But Rove and then-Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman managed to help Bush increase his support among blacks, women, Latinos, independents and urbanites and defeat an opponent who got 8 million more votes than Al Gore. The Republicans held on to the House and Senate too — a feat not equaled since FDR’s reelection in 1936.

Okay, first let's fill in the blanks for Jonah--we're all his unpaid editors at some point--I believe what he means to say is that Bush was the first president since '36 to gain re-election while his party increased its Congressional majority. FDR's wins in 1940 and '44 were accompanied by Democrats holding on to both houses, with a net loss of seats in the former and a wash in the latter.

But let's try something Jonah can't--let's look at this with some sense of American history. Since 1936, how many Presidents had the opportunity to do this? Answer: one, FDR, and he did it, and if you switch the requirement back to what Jonah actually said, he went three for three. No President standing for re-election since has held Congressional majorities.

Coming on top of GOP gains in 2002, it was a truly remarkable achievement.

Shut up, Jonah, I wasn't finished. If we permit Johnson as a substitute Kennedy in 1964, then there were two. And in '64 the Democrats not only increased their majorities in the House and the Senate, they achieved a 2/3 majority in each, the only time either has been accomplished postwar. (Would Kennedy have done worse?) Which must make that an extra truly double-plus remarkable achievement x 2, with a scoop of butterscotch ice cream.

So now we're at 3-for-3, or 4-for-4, with asterisk. Not such an astronomical achievement, eh? But let's keep going. You've got four men who stood for re-election in that period without Congressional majorities. Eisenhower, who lost a House majority in his first midterm, lost two more House seats and had a draw in the Senate. Nixon lost a couple of Senate seats and gained several in the House, but did not overturn the Democratic majority. Reagan picked up House seats and lost Senate seats, but neither reversed their control. Clinton, like Ike a loser of his House majority in the preceding midterms, gained House seats and lost two in the Senate, with both majorities holding serve.

So...wow. We've gone from "Rove joins Bill Wambsganss as the only man to record an unassisted triple play in World Series history" to "That's just the second time this month that a left-handed middle reliever of Polish extraction has thrown three scoreless innings after a rain delay." Or, in other words, big fuckin' deal.

And then winter came.

Bush traded his political capital for the magic beans of Social Security reform, but the ground was too frozen for the seeds to take hold.

Please, please, do not do that again.

Rove deserves mixed praise for the effort.

Excuse me, did you say "mixed praise"?

It was courageous, but, as Bush’s political brain, he should have seen that it was doomed to failure and hence ill-conceived. As Napoleon said, if you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.


He might also have said, if you set out to pacify Baghdad, pacify Baghdad. Yet as the American public soured on the Iraq project, Bush’s political ear — i.e. the receiver of advice from Rove — transmogrified from gold to tin. Hurricane Katrina, Harriet Miers, delaying the defenestration of Don Rumsfeld until after the ‘06 election, immigration reform: All of these moves conspired to make the Bush White House’s grasp of the times seem increasingly thumbless.

Not "seem" lad, no. And all this from"one of the great political master-tacticians of the last half a century"? What'd the other guys do, chose our successive puppets in Vietnam? Tell Bush Sr to be sure to try the octopus sashimi? And those--save Katrina, which I thought Jonah blamed on the inability of African-Americans to mutate on command--are the Republican complaints.

Even Bush’s first-term gems tarnished rapidly.

So quickly, in fact, and so thoroughly, that neither of us seems to be able to name one.

While much of the criticism was disingenuous, few can doubt the White House regrets that “mission accomplished” stunt.

Well, we're used to all sorts of weather in the Midwest, but that's the first time I ever saw a sentence turn to slush in mid-thought. I suppose the disingenuous criticism will be extensively footnoted in that new book?

The Medicare prescription drug benefit may be surprisingly popular,

Surprisingly, given that everyone else in America hates social spending as much as Jonah wishes they would.

but the promised political windfall never materialized.

Again, surprisingly so, since the ham-fisted way in which it was handled usually assures popular acclaim.

Meanwhile, Bush’s two most important domestic accomplishments in the second term

Wait, what happened to the first term? Too much scrubbing required on that tarnish, and no intern around to do it for you?

have been the appointments of John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court. But even these masterstrokes ran at least partly against the first instincts of Bush and Rove. If they’d had their druthers, Miers and Alberto Gonzales would be on the court today — a calamity from which neither the republic nor the Republican Party would soon have recovered

.
First, is the appointment of a Supreme Court justice an "accomplishment"? Was there a danger that someone else would jump in and do it while he was napping? Second, that Miers/Gonzo thing is just another Republican complaint; most of us who get all our news from the left blogosphere don't see much downside left after Roberts and Alito, or much evidence of other "conservative" concern with national calamity. (And à propos of nothing: number of words spoken by Justice Thomas during oral arguments since February 2006? 132.)

The lesson here is particularly acute for conservatives. Rove engineered Bush’s victory in 2000 by

losing?

promising a different kind of Republican, a.k.a. a “compassionate conservative.” That meant generally staying mute on racial issues, luring Latinos into the GOP fold by any means necessary and advocating federal activism on everything from single motherhood to education.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that. Would you mind removing the hood before you speak?

The story is complex, of course. Bush won tax cuts and was stronger on defense than Gore or Kerry would have been. But the central point remains: Rove’s strategic vision involved securing a Republican victory at the expense of conservative principles.

Jesus H. Christ on a Low-Sodium Ritz. Compassionate fucking conservatism? I'm surprised anyone even remembers the fucker. It was test-marketed in '99, if I recall, and lasted about as long as Crystal Pepsi. Leaving aside how "stronger on defense" can mean "willing to fracture our military manpower and materiel into the foreseeable future in exchange for, roughly, squat", what "conservative principles" did the Bush administration violate? Aside from tax cuts and the undesirability of Latino luring, what "conservative principles" have survived the last two decades?

Partisan victories are nice, but they aren’t an end in themselves.

Right. Something I remember you saying so often when you're winning.

Harry Truman, whom Rove and others see as role models for Bush, himself liked to quote Napoleon on his fateful encounter with the Russians: “I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere.”

Look, Truman, who was our most over-rated President until Reagan rendered the phrase meaningless, like to quote The Testament of Peter the Great, too. He may have loved history, but it was largely unrequited.

Compassionate conservatism succeeded as a political tactic by coopting liberal assumptions in much the same way that Bill Clinton’s triangulation stole conservative thunder.

Oh, yeah. I remember how in each instance the opposition was largely struck dumb.

Rove was, famously, the architect of this strategy, and as such the left hated him not for his ideas but for his successes, which they now want to emulate at all costs. The net-root “fighting Dems” who care about partisan victory above all else are in many respects the children of Karl Rove.

Shit. First, Richard Nixon, not Karl Rove, is the architect of the so-called Republican majority, aka, the grafting of the rejected Dixiecrats, and it wasn't a move that required any great political genius--Johnson had remarked after ramrodding the Civil Rights Act that he'd created a Republican majority for a generation--just ruthlessness and a willingness to trade decades of partisan chaos for temporal political gain. Rove is just a campaign fixer for the least competent President in US history, and his "magic", his "genius", amounted to tinkering with the Nixon formula. Unlike Tricky Dick, Rove apparently actually believed the hype. Unlike Nixon, he had the press on his side. He still managed to lose one election and squeak through another despite "wartime" status. After the stolen 2000 election, and an incredibly negligent press corps/cheering section (Vandalgate, the Charm Offensive, the Commander Bush in Charge! coverage of the Chinese Spy Plane Imbroglio) Bush's popularity was about to take a major swing downward when the Towers fell, which, in retrospect, should have resulted in demands for his impeachment, but instead saved his ass through 2004. Rove may be a good tactician--it's impossible to say for sure when no one can figure out who did what when and why in this godawful mess of a government--but he clearly was no sort of strategist at all. He made binary decisions, and he made them in the most short-sighted fashion imaginable, and his assisted luck held for a time. If he was really willing to scuttle "conservative principles" for political gain he'd have done so after the election, not before and via slogan. I don't give a fuck for your principles, Mr. Goldberg, and I've no idea where you keep them--Thomas Sowell's columns?--but not even you can deny that every move the Bush administration made was designed to stoke the base and stiff the opposition. That's not brains, it's schoolyard bullying, and it's no surprise it didn't work. George W. Bush, the first loser of the popular vote in 100 years to seize the Office anyway, was in a unique position to reach out to the other side. That he did not--and that, as a result, he's going to be remembered a lot longer than he would have been otherwise, and in a way that will make him wish he'd just been forgotten--is not something to be chalked up to Brainpower. Quite the opposite, as Napoleon used to say.

Nuts: Real, Imaginary, Metaphorical, and Interjectory

I KNEW I was going to regret it, but The Editors had so much fun at Camille Paglia's expense that I clicked on the link, like I expected it might have wiped the smug off her caricature or somethin'. And the title was "Art Movies: R.I.P. Long before Bergman and Antonioni died, the mystical art-house film experience faded to black." And I was fucking stuck reading it. Nothing forces me to link to it, though, and I'm sure you can find your way there if you simply have to.

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s.

Well, it's a touching tribute. With any luck, cold douching will replace Taps.

Is there some container somewhere for that "my narcissistic generation of the 60s" bit, or have we discovered the Universal Solvent? Leaving aside the atrocious phrasemaking, is it perhaps time now, after an intervening four generations' respective Decades, to ask ourselves whether her generation of the 1960s was a particularly narcissistic one? Have you noticed a pronounced lack of self-absorption in those born in the 1970s, say? Is it possible that this supposed narcissism is an artifact of life lived in the Global Village, or buried under a constant barrage of Advertising and manufactured acquisitiveness and consumerism run amok? Or an artifact of our reaching a critical mass of people paid to say stupid shit? Or is it just an artifact of looking at people as though they're defined by what somebody said in a magazine somewhere?

It's one thing to use The Sixties as shorthand for the commonly accepted laundry list of poorly-understood and facilely-connected major events that occurred within its Gregorian borders (or within the popular imagining of those borders). It's another to hold a loaded metaphor to everyone else's head and deprive them of loose change. Camille Paglia watched European films while in her twenties. Wow. It was The Sixties. Wow again. She saw them in art houses in the company of friends. Totally unexpected. I'd have guessed "on DVD, while playing Tetris™".

Th' fuck? It's like me saying "The Sixties. The Decade When My Generation Played Little League Baseball." Antonioni's mature period, by proclamation, falls inside The Sixties based on release dates, but L'Avventura, from 1960, and La Dolce Vita, from the year before, are the capstones of 50s European cinema, as well as bellwethers for the decade ahead. Bergman was a rehab project by the mid-60s, when Persona restored some luster from his Fifties output. But has there ever been an artist working in a collaborative medium who was so strikingly individualistic? It's not just that Bergman doesn't "belong to" the Sixties. It's that I can't understand anyone watching The Virgin Spring and Wild Strawberries on a double bill in the Village in 1967 stepping back onto the streets saying, "Well, that was groovy."

We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces -- what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" or "Persona"? Perhaps only George Lucas' multilayered, six-film "Star Wars" epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

Shit. Merde. Cockie-doody.

Okay, I may be in the minority here, but 1) I don't consider Stanley Kurbrick to be a Sci-Fi director, and 2) I don't recall any flashbacks in The Godfather, nor Part II, which moves forward and backward in time as a story-telling device but doesn't do so by triggering some character's memory, and if your definition of "gritty realism" includes "epically expensive period scenes shot on a backlot" then it differs from mine. I'm not trying to put Coppola down; The Godfather, particularly viewed in Saga form, deserves a place in the pantheon, if perhaps somewhat lower than idol worship and an unfamiliarity with the competition put it on the Internet. I'm just trying to point out that tossing off a couple of pop-Auteur theory boneheadisms does not salvage that gawdawful "Where is this generation's Bergman?", especially when they don't even apply. Francis Ford Coppola is Francis Ford Coppola, not the answer to something else, and he is also Not a Boomer, which would make things even worsest still if that were possible. And Martin Scorsese is, apparently, chopped liver.

Meanwhile, is it permissible to ask that if Paglia can't do either of the two things she's paid to do she at least familiarize herself with their rudiments? Film is collaborative. It is also enormously expensive. One might, by talent, determination and some good luck, manage to get noticed and permitted to direct motion pictures with something like the budget required for general release and sufficient marketing to get a shot at wide viewership. Those tens of millions of dollars will not come one's way so that one may comment on the Social Condition, the Conflict between our Inner and Outer Lives, nor even the Dearth of Great Cinema. Teapots that talk, telekinetic kids who solve crimes, and lasers blowing shit up is more like it.

For which we may, if we wish, thank George Lucas and that talented director pal of his who also has nothing whatsoever to say but does so in a way that pleases the ticket-buyer. Their success in the mid-70s ended the brief American Golden Age, and relegated art films to the back of the video store. But why blame them? It's money, which neither of them invented. Money has everything to do with it. Narcissism nothing at all, except perhaps as a driving force behind talentless self-promoters grabbing seats on the gravy train. So what? There was a magical time in the cinema when in the ruins of Europe and Japan young talented people were able--in part because it was both financially and culturally feasible--to take film into audacious new directions. If it's Bergman you want, watch Bergman, and be glad to have it. And let us remember that it was the Academy Awards recognizing the great achievement of post-war Italian and Japanese filmaking which led to both critical acclaim and a surprising popularity of foreign film in the 19-fucking-50s, which made their continuing production financially feasible. Sure, it was partly tits, but it was also serious art speaking to people in serious times. Trendies watching that stuff in the 60s were, for the most part, worshiping at an altar which had been erected by their predecessors. If we're more frivolous now--and more solitary--well, let's just note that people who call Star Wars a "classic" aren't really helping matters.

(Almost forgot: Paglia says the title of Sexual Personae was an "explicit homage" to Bergman. I'm not about to try to discover just when and where that was made explicit, but I am required to state that if so it's like filling a Twinkie with birdlime and calling it an homage to Carême.)

Wicked and Bristling With Dots

LAST week we alluded to our upcoming AT&T U-Verse installation, which went by pretty painlessly Friday excepting an apparently standard glitch with sending email. In exchange we now have DSL (3 down, 1 up) and 190 channels of IP-video television, plus DVR recording of four shows at once, live pause, and a free year of all the premium channels that aren't part of the HBO universe, and I have just finished watching 71 hours of television.

The whole thing is an accident. I had recently explained the continuing dial-up misery of our existence to my Poor Wife (akin to explaining the difference between convection and conduction roasting to a vegetarian) viz, that our long-time service provider did not have DSL yet in Indianapolis for some reason, and that I had begun pondering severing a link that dates back to the mists of BBS dial-up. A few days later I was cooking dinner on a stove jutting at odd angle into the remains of our kitchen when she got a sales call, heard "DSL", and made an appointment to meet with a salesman the next morning. Next thing I know I'm dragging the card table up from the basement (the dining room table being buried under mounds of items that used to be in what used to be the kitchen), so the guy can whip out his laptop and start trying to sell me a replacement for cable teevee. Any other topic, save, probably, robot monkey household servants or a combination home cappuccino maker and mescaline factory, and I'd've thrown him out on his ear. As it was, I signed up greedily, and so far so good, especially since the math works out that we get this service for the cost of the old basic cable plus one of the two dial-up accounts, and we get to boot a dedicated phone line, plus we're rid of Comcast.

All this is almost enough to quiet the little voices in my head (I mean, the ones specific to this project, not the permanent consort) which have, as you might expect, been saying that getting more teevee is traveling in the wrong direction, and adding on occasion that I should consider that it takes twenty minutes now just to check what is on teevee in the first place, let alone the time spent in brain-softening "enjoyment". For a brief time they had been drowned out by a splinter group with a quite inventive a cappella rendition of "It may be the last advance in entertainment technology you live to see, and it's at least even money you won't be able to understand the next one, and you damn sure won't be reading the fine print on any diagrams six months from now. Drink up, sailor." This ended after a bit, but left me strangely elated, like good church singing; I've regained some of the old fondness for the seventeen cubic meters of still-halfway-organized videotape I've stashed in various locations around town. I'm not quite sure why that is.

It's too much teevee, and it's too much time spent working on the minutiae of personal emotional assuagement at a time when the world is going to hell faster than ever. On the other hand, when wasn't it? Plus I got to see several minutes of An Inconvenient Truth, which is probably about all I'd have wanted to see anyway, and without wasting any gas, although, to be fair, there's a Gogolplex three blocks away. Then again, at one point this evening I think I had my pick of four movies starring former Saturday Night Live funnymen, and none of them was Chevy Chase. In rebuttal (shut up, voices!) Comcast's most recent Allow Us To Yank A Portion of the Ugly Stained Rug You Rented From Us Out From Under You maneuver was to remove The Game Show Network off to Digital Cable Land and replace it with a sign saying There's No Longer Anything on Channel 34 You Drooling Apes. Go Ahead, Choose Another Cable Company. P.S. You Can't. Ha Ha Ha. And without the newly returned GSN I wouldn't have realized that Dennis Miller's New Last Career Move is to co-host an in-house Game Show Network Production. Co-host. Maybe Kennedy should have warned him.

(Is the standard right-wing best-seller sinecure not enough money for Dennis? Is this Objectivism in action? Z-List=Z-List? Tell me, does Howard Roark wind up supervising Stuckey's remodels for the Southwest Region? Really, tell me. I never finished it. Which is not surprising, since I never started it, either.)

The channel line-up is, briefly, every cable channel there is, plus the west coast feeds. This means I now have Sundance, BBC-America, Sleuth, IFC, Military History, and a half-dozen things I haven't discovered yet. I get two gay channels, which is only one fewer than the number of country music channels I was receiving as recently as last Thursday. I can order, a la carte, TV Japan, which means if I can find somebody who reads Kanji I'll be able to tape every Sumo honbasho. Please do not tell my wife this, as I've already begun hinting I needed to learn Japanese for professional development.

This embarrassment of riches reminded me that I was among the suscribers of one of the earliest CATV systems (Bloomington, Indiana, caught as it was in a sort of no-man's market in the rolling hills between Indianapolis and Louisville) and one of the most tardy (Indianapolis, outside the old city limits, when the city, which had sold the rights in the late 60s, figured that this did not include the area it annexed in '68 and managed to sell a second monopoly to a different company). And I remembered how, once we finally did get big-city cable television, it provided about the same fucking number of stations as basic cable today, for something like one-third the price adjusted for inflation (kudos, Minneapolis Fed for the online consumer price index calculator). I think it's curious that, when we do decide that government-sanctioned monopoly is the only way to provide a service, we allow the "provide increasingly crappier service while costs rise faster than inflation model" to overcome any potential public admiration for the process. Think Post Office. Is there any earthly reason why Fed-Ex should kick the Post Office's ass? Do not tell me it's The Genius of Free Enterprise or Innovation Born of Personal Investment or any such nonsense (and not, for that matter, that the Postal Service is required to deliver all sorts of mail, either). No. When the wind is right there's a UPS plane over my head every two minutes all night long. Tell me the government couldn't have thought that up. No. The first guy who ever suggested that found himself inspecting the levers on those stamp machines they used to have in grocery stores, in Alabama, for the rest of his career. The government, or the people who manage its private monopolies, do not want the service to be too good, lest people start to ask why they don't go ahead and run gas stations and doctor's offices while they're at it.

I have no idea how cable is run in your neck of the woods, but I suspect "Poorly" would be the way to bet. For a while, when it was just basic cable plus whatever "premium" channels you forked out for, Comcast added channels at a rate just far enough above Glacial to keep subscribers satisfied. Once digital showed them a path to removing services in order to charge more for them in another guise they showed they could move a little faster. When the premium channels left the dial the channels were never reassigned; I think the old Cinemax number eventually became another shopping channel, maybe. They didn't even move anyone off the channels with really crappy reception. The last channel added to the basic line-up was FAUX News, whenever that was. As far as I can tell the only money they did spend went into annoying advertising about how the evils of satellite dishes is especially visited on stay-at-home Moms, and how your family would remarkably stop hating each other's guts the minute you bought their digital phone service. I think they might have had a little left over for lobbying against the phone companies getting into the cable business. As they would.

Central Indiana's other Chinatown, Geist reservoir, the area northeast of town where in the 50s the Water Company flooded an existing town so it could sell waterfront lots in a new one, was in a tizzy this week after a warning that the blue-green algae now covering what's left of the "lake" this blistering August is toxic. This resulted in some charming soundbite television, as many of the residents of this little slice o' Caucasian boating heaven blame the government for not dredging the thing so they'd have unlimited recreational opportunities paid for by the descendants of the ratepayers who built the reservoir under the impression it was, well, a reservoir. The complaints were often accompanied by some anti-property tax rhetoric of the sort that erupts when you gently squeeze a white person of a certain age anywhere in the Central Indiana region. The refrain is familiar to anyone who's listened to the idea that we could continue to send troops to police whatever we felt like policing forever, yet no one would have to serve. These same people want the nearby interstate expanded to relieve the traffic congestion caused by thousands of white people fleeing to the suburbs buying "lakefront" property along a glorified drainage ditch, in an area whose infrastructure was designed for the passage of the occasional tractor. I do have to admit, all that blue-green algae looked mighty impressive on my new IP-teevee. Gonna have to spring for Hi-Def someday.

(Even) Better Answers for Mitt Romney

10) They'd already put down a court deposit for summer-league basketball.

9) You know kids. If one goes, then they'll all have to go.

8) It's a religious thing. Historically, we Momons do not fight. We ambush.

7) They're gay.

6) Jeez, if one was wounded he'd wind up in a VA hospital.

5) C'mon. That's for losers.

4) We've considered this matter prayerfully, as a family, and decided to be hypocrites about it.

3) Hey, look! An adorable puppy!

2) Two words: pilonidal cyst.

1) I think the answer's obvious, isn't it?

Happy Birthday

Jean Piaget
August 9, 1896--September 16, 1980

Happy Birthday

Joseph Arrington, Jr.
August 8, 1933--August 13, 1982

Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac!

BLOGGING probably will be light this week as I continue to pile up natural disasters in the kitchen and prepare to become a beta-tester for AT&T Uverse. Had anyone told me twenty years ago that I'd actually give money to AT&T in order to spite a corporation I hated even more (Comcast) I'd have asked them to quit bogartin'.

I did want to mention bumping into Dr. Elizabeth Kantor, Ph.D, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, on the Booknotes channel. Turns out that Phyllis Schlafly, she of the Dori-Ann Gray hairdo, invited all ten authors from the Politically Incorrect series to speak to a group of young conservative scholars from around the country at her Eagle Forum.

Several of the eager Republican matriculae appeared jet-lagged, despite the fact that they were on the east coast. Or maybe it was the fact that they suddenly found themselves hearing a lecture on a school subject and not a diatribe about Radical Islam or Feminism (not directly, anyway) or Science, three of the other topics in the Politically Incorrect series (yes, I realize that Science is a field of study--as Feminism and Islam, Radical or otherwise, might be as well--but not for these kids). I came in near the end of Dr. Kantor, Ph.D's, talk, so I'm not sure how long she went on, but as she seemed to have but one idea her speech may very well have been reversible anyway. She'd go on for a minute about Shakespeare, or Beowulf, sounding for all the world like a respectable, if slightly bored, junior college lecturer, and then without warning a sudden torrent of MarxistFeministPCProfessorsDeadWhiteMales would top the causeway and drench the audience. It's too bad that viewer choice of camera angle is not available with basic cable, since the director never showed--in the time I was watching--whether the flurry of buzzwords woke the happy throng or not.

Okay, as always, its possible to win these arguments without much effort, though it never shuts anyone up. DeadWhiteMales are not an endangered species, though if they were why we should restrict our concern to the explicitly Anglo among them was never explained. Yes, Time did eventually stir even the remarkable accumulation of dust on college English departments in the last century. Does this prevent one from enjoying Sense and Sensibility? Dr. Kantor, Ph.D, believes that the role of literary studies is to browbeat students into accepting a particular line of moralistic reasoning based on a, well, flatly peculiar reading of some of the Canon topped with the whipped cream of a completely untenable connection to modern American Movement Conservatism. All this requires the Great White European Males of the 20th Century--Mann, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov--be brushed aside (so maybe that explains the English Only sign). All the lockstep Marxist-Trotskyist-Feminist-PoMo-Chomskian brownshirts in the world haven't eliminated the Great Books approach, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. Kantor, Ph.D's book is for sale, even if the Exclusive Hardback Not Found In Stores only sets you back a buck. To adopt an argument from The Politically Correct Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, what the hell is the Western Canon afraid of? Aside from the fact that its purported defenders turning Chaucer into a 21st century anti-Feminist, or signing on Milton as a sponsor of the Chicago School of Economics do it a hell of a lot more damage than someone asking about the West's domestication of Women, I mean?

Instead, I wanted to mention what happened when they turned the mikes on for the crowd. A dewey-eyed young woman stood up and asked which Shakespeare play she should read to fulfill her obligation to The Culture?! I somehow managed not to guffaw so loudly as to disturb my Poor Wife's upstairs slumber. To her credit, Dr. Kantor, Ph.D., managed to stifle her own laughter long enough to spit out the Four Tragedies, then regained enough composure to add The Taming of the Shrew, a tell so obvious I was immediately reminded that George S. Kaufman once proposed a standing rule that anyone looking at Harold Ross' face was cheating.

The First Twenty-five Names in the Phone Book

Michael Ignatieff, "Getting Iraq Wrong." New York Times Magazine, August 5

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

NAH. That just seems like the decision to get a particularly regrettable tattoo in the throes of a bad romance a couple of seasons back. What seems like a distant dream is Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, or the dewey promise of the United Nations after the most horrific conflict in human history. Strangely enough, their being co-opted by liberals who intended to "spread freedom" to all the countries they hated is still fresh in the mind, even though I wasn't yet born when the process took off.

Having left an academic post at Harvard

Did you say Harvard?

in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

Uncounted thousands of deaths, but Professor Ignatieff picked up a homily. So I guess it wasn't all bad.

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Well, that's Harvard for ya...you can feel the quality of the nonsense.

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

Michael Grant Ignatieff. Born May 12, 1947. Awakened from profound coma, early 21st Century.

The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. “What is called wisdom in statesmen,” Berlin wrote, referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, “is understanding rather than knowledge — some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.” Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings.

Y'know, simple mathematics suggests there's a battalion of lesser politicians for whom that description is an even worse fit that it is for Churchill, but I don't know why you'd bother compiling it. I guess Churchill the theoretical construct is a lot more valuable than Churchill, the sainted war leader who was wrong about practically everything else in his political life, and usually at the service of his own imaginings.

As a former denizen of Harvard,

Did you say Harvard?

I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners.

Good Lord. Talk about your ivory towers. It's cab drivers, Doc. That way they can write your column for you. You're not allowed to talk to the bus driver.

The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t.

What're you, climbing back down the academic ladder now, Doc? Let us know when you make it to kindergarten. I understand that's where the real learning takes place. In the meantime, there's something somewhere about learning from history. I'll look it up and get back to ya.

Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.

No. Please. You've done enough already. Do not encourage the search for untried remedies that miraculously solve the disasters we've created listening to your earlier suggestions.

Having taught political science myself,

Really? Where?

I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver.

As I recall it, I picked up this little tidbit about twenty minutes into my first Poly Sci 101 lecture. Maybe it's time to take the world out of the hands of the terminally credulous and let the spitball-throwers in the back--the ones who felt that smokin' a doob and layin' a little pipe was at least equally important in the grand scheme of things--take over. They can't do much worse. And then you could, y'know, go find yourself somewhere. Somewhere farther away than Canada.

A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities.

Well, for one thing, yuck, and for another, we continue to learn from the work of great artists while we continue to view them as flawed human beings, a goodly number of whom we would not allow to babysit, let alone start wars. We seek to understand not just the work but how it came into being. There's not a whole lot of time in the Arts for knob-polishing some dead guys in order to turn your present inventory over a little faster. That is left to the political scientists. In politics it is permissible, even encouraged, to say something like, "George Bush is standing up to terrorists," or to compare him with that gold-painted bust of Churchill you admire so. In the Arts one lets out with a "Patricia Cornwall is the new Tolstoy" at peril of one's career. Unless one is happy to remain in public relations or has a Salon column.

To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

We have now roared past the 800 word mark, and we're discussing cavalry tactics. I could swear the title said something about Iraq. Will all of this be on the quiz? Is this going on much longer? Some of us would like to experience a little more of life while we're still able.

Improvisation may not stave off failure.

Do tell.

The game usually ends in tears. Political careers often end badly because politicians live the human situation: making choices among competing goods with only ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows — because no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq.

Nine-hundred and fourteen.

Okay, I apologize. I'd read all the way to the end before I did that, and it was cruel to subject you to such a chunk of--I'm not kidding--the first third. I suspect that you might be treated elsewhere to a couple of pull quotes about Iraq, namely:

[M]any of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

or

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action.

without a full appreciation that the payoff of Dr. Ignatieff's 2500 words, a stunning professorial version of "sure they were right and I was wrong, but I saw one of them compare Bush to Hitler", was preceded by four pages of gibberish, but not one word explaining why he put his Liberal Academic imprimatur on torture in 2004, long after the worst America-hating Leftist could back his knee-jerk opposition with plain evidence. We've suggested before that it was time for a new version of Godwin's law for this, but the difficulty is that anyone playing the You Lefties Made A Lucky Guess card already lost the game four years ago and still doesn't realize someone turned out the lights.

So again, Professor, since you appear to be the last man in the Americas to hear the response: there were plenty of voices cautioning against the rashness and the insane presumptions and the interminal commitment of the Iraq Adventure who did manage to observe the proper rites while addressing their superiors in the Bush administration and its academic enablers. They were ignored, too. And even granting you pardon for your emotional attachment to the pre-post-Sadam Iraqis and its horrific results--and we don't--we have to ask how a political science specialist, a professor of international stature, could, to chose just one example, have slept through 150 years of US-Latin American relations. Or how the editors of the Times Magazine could imagine the rest of us had slept through the last four years.

Fun With Monogamy, Volume CXLIII: Pain Edition

Considering the chasm between our relative positions, last week's discussion about the ethics of snapping a flash picture of your spouse from eighteen inches away when he doesn't know you've got the camera ended remarkably quickly.

MY Poor Wife had some minor surgery at the beginning of the week. Mole removal. (Her whole family's warty or gelatinous or something, plus they spent roughly 1954 through the Bicentennial in the sun; there's always something hanging off one or another of 'em. I fully expect to be told one day that PW is hopping a plane to Texas because Brother Dave is having a phantom twin removed. "He started biting," she'll say, or explain that David just couldn't stand the snoring anymore.)

Anyway, everything except the bill was benign, thank goodness, but she came home with five stitches and some oxycontin.

"They gave you hillbilly heroin?" I ask, somewhat incredulously.
"It's more like polyester heroin," says the PW.

I should mention here for the sake of her continued employment that this was made all the more amusing by the fact that if you asked her to pick the heroin on a multiple choice test reading:

a) Mexican Brown
b) Panama Red
c) Jack White

She wouldn't be able to do it. She just hangs around in bad company.

(This reminds me. She'd gone to the doctor, and in addition to taking a few slices off her she gets her introduction to the somewhat specialist appeal of colonoscopy next month. And in trying to talk her into it her doctor said--seriously--"you'll get really good drugs". Amazing. These are the same people who locked up the really good drugs thirty years ago and tried to put everyone else on the wagon, and now they're holding them out the way they used to give kids lollypops after a round of vaccinations.)

I know I've mentioned The Game once or twice. I was actually reminded of The Game's origins this week; they're generally shrouded in fog. But I remembered for some reason that it grows out of something the critic John Simon wrote about his--if I recall correctly--high school classmate Julian Beck, who would amuse himself at a performance of Oklahoma!, say, by loudly proclaiming, "It's okay, but it's no Hamlet," and then doing precisely the opposite at Hamlet the next evening. I believe it's my longest-running tagline. The proper execution is to make the items being rated as rationally indistinguishable as possible. Watching The Girl Can't Help It, for example, one would say "Well, Jayne Mansfield's all right, but she's no Mamie Van Doren." Beck's original, saying Gielgud is no Keanu, is permissible but generally avoided.

The game was born out of this. I'd do the gag. The PW would respond, "And she's no Charles Van Doren." And from there you note that she's no Charles Evans Hughes, or no Mies van der Rohe, or no Dr. Joyce Brothers (obscurantist connections are permitted, up to a point, but anything showy is frowned on, mostly by her). This continues until one or the other is out of ideas. It gets pretty competitive at times.

At some point The Game branched into more linear competitions, naming actors named Robert or movies with "Clock" in the title, or somesuch. The most important rule of The Game, though, is that it has to arise spontaneously and organically. You cannot challenge the other person to a game of The Game. It must begin as if by accident.

My all-time favorite was the Earthtones competition, which probably started with James Brown, or morphed from Aretha, some soul-stirring evening, and traveled through Brown to Green to Amy Tan, Kate Moss, and Herb Shriner. It seemed to go on forever, until I won by pulling Rodney Peete from somewhere.

I hadn't really thought about it before, but I guess The Game usually involves the Arts in some broad sense, either because of its (forgotten) origins in The Theatre or because we watch too much teevee. And so it was when Gregory Peck movies suddenly took off on Tuesday afternoon. I'm not quite sure exactly how that started, although Peck came up because Bergman died, which caused me to pull out the Season One SCTV discs to find the Bergman parody Whispers of the Wolf, which led to John Candy (RIP) in The Babe Ruth Story, and Joe Flaherty's incredible Peter O'Toole impression, and then his Peck in the SCTV "Taxi Driver, the Series" ("You...talking...to me?") and somehow, a couple hours later, we were trying to top each other naming Peck films.

I rarely offer advice, except to people who I know won't take it, but there's this: there are few better things to base a marriage on than a good running gag. It's certainly not sex, which, I've come to realize with the passage of time, was just God's way of trying to get me to smoke cigarettes when I was young. Believe me, at some point, provided medical science doesn't kill you first, you will reach the point of prostate health where it feels like you're wearing a cock ring on the inside. Unless you aren't equipped with a prostate, in which case, as I understand it, the Court has ruled you're too unstable to be thinking about sex at all, unless your husband orders some. Forget tantra. Work on gags. That's what kept Gilligan's Island on the air all those years, not Ginger. Or Mary Ann. Or Alan Hale, Jr. if you'd rather. We're open-minded.

Anyway, we found ourselves playing Peck movies, and, frankly, we did poorly. To Kill a Mockingbird. Twelve O'Clock High. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. They came slowly; a hot day and a too-large lunch, maybe. I actually tried to bluff my way around Spellbound when I couldn't think of the title. The Game does not admit bluffing, but I did it with a smirk so the PW knew I wasn't trying it seriously, and it bought me enough time to come up with Mackenna's Gold (The Game, naturally enough, is gentlemanly; it's required that you express admiration when your opponent executes some fine shot piece of shot-making, but in this case she knew I just remembered Julie Newmar skinnydipping). Moby Dick came out, and MacArthur. We both knew we were leaving a whole range of things on the board that just wouldn't come to either of us. She got Roman Holiday. I got Cape Fear. She chips in Duel in the Sun.

And I couldn't resist repeating Scott C.'s line, for which there needs to be an internet monument somewhere, and which I'd already repeated to her once: "They crawl toward each other, gut-shot but still flirty..." And she started laughing until tears came into her eyes.

"Oh, God, I forgot," she gasped. "I think I busted a stitch."

Things I Say Just To Keep The Little Voices Happy

I WAS standing in line the other day at the Modern American Supermarket--ironically, one of the best arguments I know of for starving yourself to death--and I was, as usual, being vexed, though I'd picked the best cashier-bagger combination the place has to offer. Because when the employees aren't testing what little patience you possess after fifteen minutes of being assaulted by the cleverest packaging some of our finest minds can design to obscure the barely-merchantable crap inside, some customer, with or without the aid of a cellphone, is.

The young woman in front of me had either escaped from the Express Line due to someone claiming her rightful spot at the front, or her physical exhaustion was so complete she could not manage the remaining twenty feet to get there. Whichever it was, the resulting energy savings had freed her from all earthly considerations including Time and Space Itself. Her six items were spaced, singly and regularly, across the entire available area of the mechanical grocery conveyor, and she and her cart remained stationary as the belt moved and she perused some People clone for some tidbit of some Paris news which hadn't come over her car radio on the way over. I am congenitally irritable but, I like to think, by a harnessing of will comparable to the highest levels of the martial arts, also considerate and forgiving. I try to have my selected items on the conveyor as quickly as possible, little plastic divider placed thoughtfully behind for the next happy consumer, date, payee, and signature affixed to check ahead of time. I try to grab non-sackables like milk or kitty litter as they pass the scanner, freeing the bag guy to concentrate (or not) on his task. I bag my own, happily and vigorously, when the bag guy is unavailable due to his chatting up his cousin on the next aisle. I'm seething inside, but you probably wouldn't notice unless you looked close, and I sure wouldn't hold you up.

This is rendered impossible when the person in front of one simply refuses to move until prompted a second time by the cashier for some method of payment, and one is always tempted to turn to the person behind one in line to propose a wager that the living statuary in the vanguard will take a minimum of one-hundred thirty one-Mississippis to deposit change (paper first, then coin), receipt, unused coupons, used Kleenex, glasses, breath mints, and cell phone in their various and proper slots before the cart moves again. I console myself with the knowledge that anyone who'd bet the Under on that is so simple that my conscience would bother me for days.

Anyhow, I was stuck fifteen feet behind the conveyor so long that I actually glanced at the periodicals gracing the endcaps, and I noticed Vanity Fair, the thinking person's celebrity rag. There was a nice oral history of the Simpsons, and David Halberstam's last (? !) piece, so I bought it.

The Simpsons piece contained the following:

Even conservatives have come around. "It's possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever," wrote the National Review in 2000. The Simpsons celebrates many...of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority....

Okay, maybe you recognized it, or maybe you jumped before I did. I avoid any Goldberg mention of the Simpsons like someone with a shellfish allergy avoids paella. I try to keep an open mind. It wasn't until that "skepticism about political authority" that I fully acknowledged we were once again, unmistakably, rooting around the waxy colored flakes at the bottom of the crayon box.

Jonah! I might have put the "skepticism" bit together with "in 2000" a little quicker, but the downhill slide at my age is inexorable. I briefly wondered how many Simpsons references he'd already worked into his skeptical assessment of the major anti-war critics O'Hanlon and Pollack's--who, of course, are not technically politicians, but who, of course, are technically worse--Op-Ed piece.

How does a piece of Goldbergian flatulence wind up as an example of "conservative thought?" Why is the NRO imprimatur--especially by Y2K Anno Domini--enough to bestow "conservative" cachet? The author presumably had to read enough of the piece to collect the quotes. Was that not enough of an excuse to identify Jonah as a Cheeto-flecked wanker utterly devoid of pop-culture discrimination? Does "even Cheeto-flecked wankers..." add any less of a point than the fact that Goldberg burped it up on NRO? Like I say, it's a nice little oral history, and Jonah sinks from sight after a paragraph. But what's the friggin' point? The Simpsons isn't a blatantly partisan political show. Would we say, "even conservatives like Bill Maher" just because Jonah had written, "well, readers may correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I occasionally find him funny?" It's actually hard to separate this sort of thing from "noted liberal war critics O'Hanlon and Pollack". We can't seem to tell the truth anymore, regardless of how much or how little it means. "Conservatives" were the dominant party in Congress for 2/3 of the Simpsons' first twenty years. They've held the White House for all but eight of them. Red State values dominate the map. Eighty-six percent of Americans believe Jesus is cosmically interested in what they see on teevee. Still The Simpsons has been on for two decades. Maybe Liberals just own lots of teevees. Maybe it's fucking immaterial what "even conservatives" watch, especially as explained by total morons.


Fortunately it was time for my nap.


It did remind me to mention, however, that the other night I was flipping vegetatively through late-night teevee fare when I landed on a local access tape of a seminar for small business people conducted by a guy who works in security for a check-printing company. It was surprisingly entertaining, and I was sticking around for an update on identity hacking when he started talking about pens. Specifically, about a major school test publisher looking for a replacement for the #2 pencil.

They were looking for an ink which would fill in those multiple-choice circles in an instant, saving the time it takes to color them in sufficient for grading by optical reader. The ink, of course, had to be erasable. But they wanted one which was erasable for the duration of the test and permanent thereafter.

And he was curious about why they'd need it to be permanent. Surely the possibility of students getting ahold of answer sheets and changing their answers was very slight?

It's not the students we're worried about, they told him. And they intimated that this was a very large problem nationwide and growing worse.

And I immediately thought about the remarkable, some might say unbelievable one-year test-score improvements shown by some of Indianapolis' plethora of new charter schools. But then, I'm skeptical about non-politicians as well. Especially right before nap time.

Foote Notes

THANK you kindly, John DeVille, for providing the excellent Civil War bibliography, from which I'd make special pleading for Potter's Impending Crisis and Vidal's Lincoln, and to which I'd add The Civil War Battlefield Guide, from The Conservation Fund, because they deserve the money, and because it's a nice collection of battle maps and short essays on the major battles, and Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, because it's a friggin' great book and because it's hard to imagine a better appreciation of the great man's language and intellect. And oddly enough...

Shelby Foote's trilogy, which is not good history, but is a damn fine read. I'd read bits and pieces of the first two volumes as a dedicated war-gaming slacker in college, picked up the set at some point and read it with relish, just noting some of the problems I'd already been warned about. But then I picked it up again a few years back and read straight through, and I was, let's say, somewhat mazed by the remarkable congruence between the ahistorical and mythological materials he includes and the Lost Cause romanticism that bubbles up from below the surface over and over. Maybe I've just grown less forgiving about that sort of thing in the last thirty years. I think he did well not to footnote. Still, there are much less entertaining ways to spend several weeks, and one comes away with a classic, Kings and Battles, standard American understanding (that is to say, Dixiecentric, the only time I can think of when history was written by the losers) of the war.

As for Lincoln in '64, if I left the impression of thinking he faced no real re-election worries I hope I did so in the same way Darwin emphasized gradual change over enormous periods--more as a rebuttal of the misuse of facts than a dogmatic belief. The war did turn bloody and wasteful--make that bloodier and wastefuller--that year, and no one can deny that Atlanta assured Lincoln's victory. But neither can anyone claim his defeat was a forgone conclusion without it. Lincoln knew the war was won militarily. He'd discussed Reconstruction plans in the fall of '63. He also knew that the war's opponents might gain control of the government, and he'd pledged to supporters that he'd make an all-out push for military victory in the event he had but months left to serve. Suggesting by extension that George W. Bush "knows" victory has been achieved, and has merely to figure out how to get this information "over" to an ignorant and war-weary public would be an egregious lapse in an armchair military historian; coming as it does, as a cynical partisan ploy involving more sacrifice and death on the part of the military it is damned infamy.

Sadly...Uh...

HTML Mencken, at the Labs, digs up some Hewitt on the wireless, swapping war stories with Mark Steyn:

HH: Victor Davis Hanson often comes on and reminds people about the summer of 1864. Prior to that, Lincoln was in terrible shape, politically. The war was stalemated. He found a commander and turned it around quickly. Do you think we might be in that same situation a year from now?


MS: Well, I think this is slightly different in that when you’re fighting the Civil War, you know, you’re up against an enemy that are, you know, in that case, your fellow Americans. And you kind of more or less know what the rules are. A lot of the problems we’ve had in Iraq, and in this broader struggle is that faced with an enemy that is depraved, we sometimes recoil from ruthlessness.

Apologies in advance; I've caught a bad case of summer indolence, which has prevented me from trying to find a copy of the broadcast, or looking up whether I've dealt with the Hanson quote before. Steyn's stammering response sounds curious, and I'd like to know if the live version answers whether he's massively uninformed or was simply dumbstruck by that question from Hewitt.

(However easy and obvious the answer seems, I'm trying not to prejudge. Which reminds me that I'm growing ever more perturbed that my faultless civility never comes up when people talk about the dire straits of partisanship we sail these days. To give you just one example, I'd like to wish John Roberts a speedy recovery, and a long and healthy life, immediately following his resignation.)

We'll begin with Steyn, and damn the charges of bullying the defenseless or Canadian. First, if the brutality of that war, not to mention the large-scale terrorism that both preceded and followed it, do not immediately come to mind when the subject is brought up, you do well to fumble and stumble. Bleeding Kansas? Morgan and Cantrill? Ft. Pillow, the March to the Sea? The Klan? Surely public instruction about the American Civil War isn't as intentionally smudged north of the border as it is here? At this point we'd be glad to vote Flummoxed by his Host's Pure Ignorance, except for two things. One, this exchange between Hewitt and a Hypothetical Intelligent Canadian Guest:

HH: Victor Davis Hanson often comes on and reminds people about the summer of 1864. Prior to that, Lincoln was in terrible shape, politically. The war was stalemated. He found a commander and turned it around quickly. Do you think we might be in that same situation a year from now?


HICG: (Cough, cough) Jeez, Hugh, have you or Hanson ever read your own history?

would result in very few invitations to return. Second, Steyn doesn't just cover up the whack from the 2x4 of Idiocy he's just received (as pure instinctual recoil, that "I think this is slightly different" is worthy of Willie Pep); he moves swiftly into the They're Not Fighting Fair routine, or, as we might term it, the 'If I Pretend Not Just Ignorance of the Whole of Military History, But of the Very Notion of Making Distinctions Itself the Debate Must Move to the Cloud of My Choosing' Gambit. We'll just close the door quietly on our way out.

So let's move on to HH, or possibly just through him. First, with apologies to Tom Lehrer, it is sobering to consider that by the time he'd reached this comparable point in the Bush Presidency, Lincoln had been dead for 2-1/2 years.

Second, let's address this history a tad (pardon). For all I know Hanson may still be coming on and saying this, but he started saying it in the summer of 2003, when it amounted to what it sounds like a faint echo of today: a pep rally speech for Bush supporters as the undeniable failure of the war fell into the general consciousness and the 2004 election season began. Hewitt's weaselly syntax--"prior to that", "was stalemated", "found a commander"--are a sort of tense memory of the original reason for Hanson's deceptions. I think bullets are appropriate:

• The South was defeated on July 4, 1863, when Grant took Vicksburg, and Lee was defeated at Gettysburg.

• Anyone who studies the Late Rebellion beyond 9th Grade History or Shelby Foote's semi-historical romance novels must come away in awe of Lincoln's meteoric rise from rank military amateur to accomplished strategist and tactician in a matter of months. By Antietam (September, 1862), Lincoln had Lee figured out. He knew Lee would have to cross into Northern territory, and he knew he'd be defeated there. This is clear from his communications with his successive commanders.

• "Stalemated" is not a word I'd use to describe the situation in 1864, nor any other time; Grant was doing in the East precisely what Lincoln had been urging on every commander since Burnside: make Lee's Army the target, grapple him and refuse to let go. "Hold on like a bulldog and chew & choke" he wrote to Grant in August of '64, when he was supposedly in such a panic over re-election.

• If you are going to use "stalemated" you can't use "found a commander" and "quickly turned it around" in the same breath. (You can, of course, do so when accuracy is not your aim; Davis was promising, without saying, that the flaccid Sanchez' replacement would be a real stud, the same way Hugh now fluffs Petraeus, oral sex being one of the few areas in life with a natural resistance to changes in fashion.) Grant was in command for all of 1864. In fact, let's use this as an excuse to strip away some of that "found a commander" romance: Lincoln was well aware of Grant's abilities long before he brought Grant east; he'd have to have been unconscious not to be. (His letter to Grant after Vicksburg is a remarkable document. He admits to having been confounded by Grant's wheeling at Big Black, but he had appreciated, even anticipated, all Grant's earlier moves, this despite the fact that Grant's actions below Vicksburg were the most audacious generalship of a war mostly known for high-level bungling.) Lincoln had good reason to believe that Burnside, then Hooker, then Meade, were capable of doing what he clearly told them needed to be done. And, of course, he kept making changes until that was accomplished. Compare George W. Bush.

• As for the politics of the thing, well, Bush did win reelection. See where that got him, and us. Lincoln, meanwhile, certainly benefitted from Sherman's late-summer presentation of Atlanta. But he'd won re-nomination earlier, and, most importantly, was a consummate coalition-builder among his other talents. He'd operated the war for two years after losing majorities in the Congress. In 1864 he ran--historical Fun Fact ahead--as a coalition candidate (the Union Party), not a Republican. Compare George W. Bush. Compare Hanson & Hewitt's bluster about military history with their complete silence on that.

• "Do you think we might be in the same situation a year from now?" Hugh Hewitt, Summer, 2007.

"We are near the end of such a pivotal summer ourselves, the type that defines not just a presidency, but an entire nation for generations to come." Victor Davis Hanson, Summer 2003.