Barack Obama campaigned offering a new era of sane government. And I believe he would do it if he had the chance. But he has been so sucked into the system that now he stands by while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about passing health care via “deem and pass” — a tricky legislative device in which things get passed without members having the honor or the guts to stand up and vote for it.
Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?
Linked by Glenn Reynolds, who has his theory as to why the Cartoon Network is more popular. Thanks.
Since it seems we’ll never have Fox News at the airports, is there any chance of switching from CNN to the Cartoon Network there? It would certainly soothe the nerves of the passengers better than CNN, as well as provide more honest reporting.
ABC, which Tom Hanks called home during his Bosom Buddies salad days claims, “Hanks Angers Conservatives.” But Victor Davis Hanson takes exception to the legacy media’s attempting to claim that the backlash against Tom Hanks’ racialist remarks to Time magazine when promoting his series on World War II in the pacific that’s currently airing on (Time-Warner-owned) HBO is purely partisan-driven:
Tom Hanks said this to Douglas Brinkley in a Time interview: “Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
Some of us dissected this nonsense point by point. In subsequent remarks Hanks did not back away from his theses that the Pacific war was predicated on racism (I wonder whether our WWII alliances with China and the Philippines, or our prior alliance in WWI with Japan, were as well?), and thus similar to our attitudes in the current war on terror. (Racism apparently explains the American effort to foster democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia.)
What was strange is the media’s reaction to the reaction. Why is being appalled by Hanks’s infantile philosophizing a “right-wing” or “conservative” reaction? Would not liberals as well be angry that in blanket fashion, Hanks had reduced veterans’ efforts in the Pacific after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor (and to be followed by a magnanimous peace that fostered autonomous Japanese democracy) into largely a racist rage to annihilate?
Compare and contrast the thoughts of representatives associated with the Reuters news agency on Middle Eastern terrorists with American conservatives. Regarding the former, let’s flashback to Stephen Jukes, then the global news editor for Reuters on September 11th, 2001. As James Taranto wrote:
Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity. . . . “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,” Jukes writes in an internal memo. “To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”
So while a radical terrorist such Osama bin Laden or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserve special nuance from Reuters, what about half of the American people? Check out this article from Godfrey Hodgson, in MercatorNet, which describes him as:
“[The former] director of the Reuters’ Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer’s correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. His most recent book is The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009).”
And with a C.V. like that, Hodgson’s take on recent American history is just about as reactionary as you’d expect (emphasis in passages below mine):
During the cold-war years, and especially after the disgrace of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, public life in the United States was dominated by what I have called “the liberal consensus”. This does not mean (as conservative commentators occasionally try to suggest) that America was subject to the will of a liberal elite indifferent to the feelings and interests of “ordinary” Americans; it means that the public sphere, and in particular the mood of Congress, was ruled by a vast if unspoken compact in which the different political sides accepted elements of the other’s doctrine.
Thus, most liberals (who could equally be described as social democrats and progressives) shared the conservative, anti-communist ideology of the era; this was as true of the labour unions as it was of the Kennedy administration. At the same time, most conservatives accepted, if often grudgingly, the underlying principles of Roosevelt’s new deal; this could be said of the majority of elected Republicans, and the dominant figures and thinkers in corporate business-management and the law. [This gets history exactly wrong. Most conservatives, whether pre-National Review paleocons such as Albert J. Nock, or proto-libertarians such as Ayn Rand and even H.L. Mencken did not accept, grudgingly or otherwise the New Deal. And the Republicans of the time in office were "me too" Rockefeller liberals, until Barry Goldwater and then Reagan began making inroads in the 1960s. -- Ed]
The Kennedy-Johnson years saw many “outliers” to both left and right: union leaders, black leaders, intellectuals on the left, and old Taftite or new Goldwaterite conservatives. But it is possible to speak, without doing violence to the truth, of a liberal consensus in American public philosophy in the period. In broad terms, Americans accepted social-democratic government and a mixed economy at home and the containment of communism as the chief principle of foreign policy.
Since 1968, everything has changed – in such a way that the world in which Lyndon Johnson could dominate the political scene has disappeared into the “urns and sepulchres of mortality”.
Before 1965, each of the two parties that dominated American politics was a coalition of ideologically and demographically distinct elements. The division between them was rooted in the events of the 1860s: civil war, the emancipation of the slaves, the reconstruction of the south and its ending. The legacy of these events was that the core cleavage in American party politics was not a straightforward left-right one.
But since Richard Nixon’s years in power (1968-74), [even though Nixon governed domestically as an extension of LBJ's Great Society? -- Ed] and even more since Ronald Reagan’s (1980-89), the division between the parties has become as ideological – and as much a conflict between “haves” and “have-nots” – as in Europe. The pivot was the events of the 1960s: the civil-rights struggles, the Vietnam war, the early women’s movement, and the decade’s social libertinism.
* * *
The large shift in the intellectual history of the United States in the late 20th century continued as conservative ideas advanced in the law schools and eventually the Supreme Court. The court, once controlled by a liberal majority that accepted the doctrine of social activism inherited from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D Brandeis, came to acquire a more or less reliable five-to-four permanent majority on the right. A single example can stand for many: the Buckley vs Valeo judgment in 1974, which held that political ads were free speech and thus protected by the first amendment to the constitution. This ended attempts to reform the electoral-finance system.
Perhaps even more important in America’s large-scale move to the right was the changing profile of the news industry. The fashionable depiction of a liberal media establishment had always been exaggerated; the majority of journalists may long have been liberals, but most of their bosses were always conservatives. [So what? This is a variation on the Folk Marxist trope that all businesses are conservative. -- Ed] If the news media had once sustained the “liberal consensus”, however, there has been a steady change over the last half century in the direction of more variety and then more conservatism. [Sure. Just look at their voting records. -- Ed]
A few landmarks indicate the trend. William F Buckley’s founding of the National Review in 1955 broke the monopoly of liberalism in the intellectual magazines. Robert Bartley’s promotion to head of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in 1972 (for which he had worked since 1964) allowed him to make it the vehicle of undiluted conservative propaganda. [Only in the editorial section. -- Ed] Between the the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the three television networks found their New-York-liberal tone gradually diluted – first by the appearance of cable (albeit the pioneering Atlanta-based CNN was relatively liberal), then by the foundation of Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch and controlled by Richard Nixon’s spin-doctor Roger Ailes. [Until Fox News came along, how exactly did cable TV in and of itself "dilute" the monolithic liberal nature of the Legacy Media, since, as Hodgson acknowledges, CNN was and is liberal. -- Ed]
The result of this overall social and intellectual progression (or regression) has been a profound change in the United States’s ideological weather. The difference helps to explain why Lyndon Johnson could preside over a monsoon of liberal legislation that completed and in some ways transcended the achievements of his hero Franklin Roosevelt, whereas Barack Obama’s more modest reform efforts have become mired in frustration amid bitter polarisation and populist resurgence.
President Obama reached office on the promise of changing America. But the country had already changed. It is time to shift attention from the individual personality and specific failures of the president to what has happened to the United States’s public philosophy and its political-media climate.
So there you have it. In the morally inverted world of Reuters, Osama bin Laden could be a terrorist…or he could be a freedom fighter! (Tell that to those who died on 9/11, or those whom Al Qeada and the Taliban would return to a Stone Age lifestyle.)
But those conservatives seeking to be free from statism in America represent “regression”, not to mention “bitter polarisation and populist resurgence”, ginned up by Rupert Murdoch, the English left’s favorite boogieman, and “controlled by Richard Nixon’s spin-doctor Roger Ailes.”
Great job, Reuters. I’d suggest picking up a few extra gallons of condescension from the company store, but I doubt you’ll run out anytime soon. Or as Theodore Dalrymple notes on the Pajamas homepage, “Our Contemporary Sanctimony Puts the Victorians to Shame.”
Update: ABC’s Peter Jennings had a worldview quite similar to Reuters. Evidently the network believes such an anti-American, pro-Middle Eastern tone has been lacking since his untimely passing, something they plan to rectify shortly.
After Scott Brown’s victory, we heard that the White House was going to “pivot” toward jobs. But the Obami did no such thing. Doubling down, and doubling down again, became the order of the day. We’ve had 24/7 coverage of health care — when not interrupted by news of a new low in U.S.-Israeli relations. So how’s that affecting Obama’s standing? For the first time, he’s “upside down” in Gallup — with 46 approving and 47 percent disapproving of his performance. Over at Rasmussen, only 44 percent of voters approve of Obama’s performance.
For members of Congress, it’s getting harder and harder to deny reality. Whether one looks at the generic congressional polling or the president’s own standing (which is as good a predictor as any of the fate of his party in the midterm election), the conclusion is the same: ObamaCare and the attendant procedural stunts are political losers for the Democrats. Republicans are struggling mightily to defeat ObamaCare, but one senses it’s a predicament that’s not altogether unwelcome. After all, running against ObamaCare and Democratic tricksterism may have its benefits both in November and in 2012.
The New York Times gives us a glimpse into David Axelrod’s mood, which confirms exactly what the president tends to exude when talking about critics:
In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”
Unfortunately for the White House, these days “the peanut gallery” critics more often than not are reflecting what many Americans outside the Beltway are saying. And that’s not just an Election Day concern for those in the White House. Their jobs there entail representing those who sent them to Washington in the first place.
BAIER: Do you know which specific deals are in or out, as of today?
OBAMA: I am certain that we’ve made sure, for example, that any burdens on states are alleviated, when it comes to what they’re going to have to chip in to make sure that we’re giving subsidies to small businesses, and subsidies to individuals, for example.
BAIER: So the Connecticut deal is still in?
OBAMA: So that’s not — that’s not going to be something that is going to be in this final package. I think the same is true on all of these provisions. I’ll give you some exceptions though.
Something that was called a special deal was for Louisiana. It was said that there were billions — millions of dollars going to Louisiana, this was a special deal. Well, in fact, that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe, that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help. Louisiana, obviously, went through Katrina, and they’re still trying to deal with the enormous challenges that were faced because of that.
(CROSS TALK)
OBAMA: That also — I’m giving you an example of one that I consider important. It also affects Hawaii, which went through an earthquake.
Incidentally, Jim Hoft quotes ABC News’ Jonathan Karl’s report on the “Louisiana Purchase”, who said, “I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.”
This moment, from Bret Baier’s interview on Fox News with Obama, might just be one of the biggest “WTF?!” moments from Obama’s presidency yet. Obama is either completely making things up, living in an alternate reality, or really, really confused.
Concurrent with the administration and the left-hand side of Congress continuing to distance themselves from reality, as Mark Steyn noted recently, the American people are becoming increasingly re-engaged with politics:
Jonah, I enjoyed your column today – a nice rebuke to David Brooks’ latest silly unpersuasive thesis. You write:
[Michael] Lind argues that the right has become a “counterculture [that] refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rules of the game that it has lost”… Whereas the Luddites and know-nothings once dropped out for the “Summer of Love,” today’s Luddites and know-nothings have signed up for the “Winter of Hate.”
That’s almost exactly backwards. There was more right-wing “dropping out” in the Nineties, when Dan Rather was warning of”the shadowy right-wing militia movement” and there was a kind of psychological Ruby Ridge siege mentality among a certain sliver of the right: Find a strip of land, live off the grid, stockpile ammunition, raise emus for meat, and keep your eyes peeled. There’s your right-wing counterculture.
A New Hampshire neighbor of mine did this for a while. Then he figured out the ATF guys don’t need to besiege his stockade. What with GPS and so forth, Obama can take him out with an unmanned drone launched from Diego Garcia and no-one would know a thing about it. So he came back down to town and ran for the Select Board as a budget-cutter – and won.
The Tea Party has a certain paradoxical quality – a mass movement of self-reliant individuals, etc. But Brooks and Lind are wrong: It represents a conscious re-engagement, and a rejection of dropping out. That’s why the left is rattled.
On the other hand, as Iowahawk satirically notes, channeling his inner Mamet, and (language alert) firing plenty of F***ing F-bombs along the way, patent medicine salesmen who are desperate enough will do pretty much anything to earn a commission.
When you think over the last year, it’s clear Obama has some of the most inept advisers in recent presidential history. Allowing him to risk his entire presidency on a global overhaul of health care – when an incremental overhaul could have been had simply for the asking – seems absurd politics, win or lose. It also isn’t worth that much in the grand scheme of things – other than the obvious, increasing the amount of the economy under government control. The nostalgia for marxism inherent in it all this almost pathetic. Don’t these people live in the real world?
At Big Hollywood, James Hudnall has a Climategate-related question. He asks, “What Will Television Do With All Their Scare-Programming?” Read the whole thing; there’s too much for me to quote to do it justice. But here’s the pith of the gist of the marrow, as James Lileks might say:
But two things happened last year that shot an arrow in the heart of the beast; one of the worst winters on record and Climategate. And the hits keep on coming. Now it turns out that NASA, who claimed for years that their data proves Global Warming is real, was actually just using CRU data all along. And the CRU couldn’t back up any of its data. In fact, they “lost the records” when they were forced to produce them. Oops!
So now these news channels who’ve been trumpeting the story as fact, all those cable networks who spent millions on documentaries hyping it, all those TV shows hawking green as the in color; they all look like fools. Or worse, they look like they were in on what will go down as one of the biggest scams in human history.
What would you do if you were in their position? It’s not hard to understand why they’re carrying on like Climategate never happened. They have a president in the White House as clueless as they are, pushing the Cap and Trade agenda as if those darn glaciers are just about melted. We have to do something fast! Not a moment too soon, kiddies.
The climate scam is worth trillions of dollars and who knows how many millions, if not billions have been spent to win over the public. Too bad the public is losing interest fast. People are increasingly saying it’s all made up or at best, exaggerated. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, The cat has left the bag. There’s no going back to the lies and spin. But our friends in the media are still living a lie. It’s like they threw a party and only their mom and a few friends showed up. What was once a hip thing to be a part of, like smoking, is fast becoming a loser tattoo on their foreheads.
The public’s trust is evaporating and it’s not helping that many in the media are circling the wagons. As their ratings drop and their Nielsens tank, as the suits upstairs start laying off staff, they’re going to have to deal with reality. Something they’ve tried to deny all these years. Yes, folks. The warm-mongers are in fact the deniers.
The economy is in a down-spiral. Telling people they need to cut back is like rubbing salt in their wounds. Promising them “green jobs” is like telling a 40 year old Santa Claus is coming to town.
A 1930s scare film such as Reefer Madness was seen as high camp by liberals by the time the 1970s rolled around, as were Jack Webb’s anti-communist efforts of the late ‘1950s. But seventies liberals, perhaps spurred on by the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, if not the actual contents, had plenty of fears of their own, and wanted you to share the cold sweat of their own brand of paranoia.
Recall the horrific slate of politically-oriented science fiction films that Hollywood churned out in-between 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1977’s Star Wars. Films such asSoylent Green, Silent Running and ZPG were obsessed with the Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation and deforestation that dominated the overculture of the time. Rollerball depicted a world controlled by giant corporations, at precisely the same time that Steve and Woz were cobbling together the first Apples in their Bay Area garage. They were followed by Leonard Nimoy’s cheesy synthesizer-scored In Search Of TV series a few years later, which explored Global Cooling, Killer Bees, Deadly Ants, and other ’70s obsessions.
Today, these ’70s efforts are seen as equally campy as Refer Madness became three or four decades after its release. The eco-doomsday films of the naughts, such as The Day After Tomorrow, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, and Al Gore’s own An Inconvenient Truth are well on the way to becoming late night camp TV themselves, and at much faster rate as their equally schlocky predecessors.
Perhaps someone can recut Al’s film and dub it “Climate Madness.” Maybe hire William Shatner to cut an exaggerated Jack Webb-style parody opening.
Who knows: “Climate Madness” could eventually even have the same impact on its genre as his wife Tipper’s efforts to curb raunchy lyrics in pop music.
Related: Zombie observes some camp Malthusian performance art on the Streets of San Francisco, here.
As Noemie Emery writes at the Weekly Standard, the ObamaCare train wreck is “beginning to look like The Godfather crossed with a Marx Brothers movie, a bad sign for an administration that came in touting competence and projecting the feel of a Frank Capra film:”
Strangest of all is the popular theory that if the bill passes—by bribes, threats, and payoffs, and against fierce opposition—there will be a triumphant, Rose Garden signing, and then the whole issue will fade. Good luck with that. A bill forced through against such popular dissent is likely to start, and not settle, contention, for two big reasons.
First, this bill is not only disliked, it is disliked intensely, and across a wide swath of the population. Majorities not only dislike it, but majorities of those majorities dislike it intensely. Twice as many independents dislike as support it intensely, and the intensity of antipathy has only grown. They dislike it intensely because it will affect them intensely, on a personal level. Tax cuts don’t affect everyone equally. Very few people are ever on welfare. Most people who live long enough do get on Medicare, but not everyone does at the same time. Health care involves everyone, every day, on an emotional, primitive, life and death level. Everyone needs doctors. Everyone has had an experience, or has friends and relations who have had the experience, where the right or wrong medical treatment at the right or wrong time by the right or wrong doctor made the difference between life and death, between a full and a partial recovery, and an experience that was neither traumatic nor financially ruinous, or one that was hell on all counts. Everyone fears a system that could give them the wrong doctor instead of the right one at just the wrong moment, and everyone, no matter how rich, strong, well-connected, or seemingly healthy, knows that an accident or a bad diagnosis can come any day. Polls show that most people believe this plan will make their care more expensive, and at the same time, less satisfactory than what they already have. Add to this the fact that the bill by necessity trips a mare’s nest of hot wires—abortion, rationing, euthanasia on the basis of “social utility,” and the whole moral complex of beginning- and end-of-life issues—and one has no reason for thinking this issue will be laid to rest soon.
Second, the bill’s defenders say “process” themes don’t move the public, and they may be right. But what they call “process” in this case reads like “corruption” to others, such as the bribes, threats, and buyoffs with which the bill cleared the Senate. Three hundred million dollars to buy Mary Landrieu, over a billion to pay off Ben Nelson. Besides being corrupt, the administration is looking inept in the bargain: The past week brought Massapiece Theatre, along with the wavering Democratic congressman whose brother was offered a judgeship just as he was being asked to the White House for a collegial talk. This is beginning to look like The Godfather crossed with a Marx Brothers movie, a bad sign for an administration that came in touting competence and projecting the feel of a Frank Capra film.
In fact, the process is part of the problem, and stems from the bill’s weakness, which makes payoffs essential: “Because the legislation is frightening and unpopular, Democrats have had to resort to serial bribery,” writes George Will, correctly. “Massachusetts voted immediately after the corruption of exempting, until 2018, union members from the tax on high value” insurance plans. This and the Cornhusker Kickback helped fuel Scott Brown’s upset, which created the need for still more extravagant buyoffs: Each bribe makes the bill more unpopular, creating the need for more bribes. Senate rules may bore voters, but they find this arresting—one reason the strife will go on.
Other big bills may have been controversial, but most passed in the end by comfortable margins. No reform bill on this grand scale has ever passed in the face of such opposition, with solid majorities so firmly against it, with no votes at all from the opposite party, and with the party in power so split. No such bill had an organized opposition—the tea party movement—in place against it, ready to march at the first opportunity. Opposition to health care has been very good to the Republican party, and as long as it is, the party will use and run on it. Legal challenges from the states, already in progress, will also add to the air of contention. This is a war that could go on for years.
Liberals say Democrats have to pass this bill to prove they can govern. But will the public see wasting a year on something that’s not a priority, then pushing a bill they don’t want through multiple payoffs, and ending up with something they think will make their lives worse as a species of “governing” they want anything more to do with? Meanwhile, the Democrats are in the intensive care unit, their president wounded, their members demoralized, their coalition in tatters. Come November, voters may decide they’d rather be much less “governed”—or governed by somebody else.
The “elite” the restorationists dislike is better understood as a “new class” (to borrow a phrase from the late Irving Kristol). The legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted in 1942 that capitalism couldn’t survive because capitalist prosperity would feed a new intellectual caste that would declare war on the bourgeois values and institutions that generate prosperity in the first place. When you hear that conservatives are anti-elitist, you should think they’re really anti–new class. Conservatives see this new class of managers, meddlers, planners, and scolds as a kind of would-be secular aristocracy empowered to declare war on traditional arrangements and make other decisions “for your own good.”
And that’s why Obama backlash is part of the culture war. Defenders of Obamacare, cap-and-trade, and the rest of the Democratic agenda insist that they’re merely applying the principles of good governance and the lessons of sound, sober-minded policymaking. No doubt there’s some truth to that, at least in terms of their motives. But from a broader perspective, it is obvious that theirs is a cultural agenda as well.
The quest for single-payer health care is not primarily grounded in good economics or in good politics but in a heartfelt ideological desire for “social justice.” The constant debate over whether the “European model” is better than ours often sounds like an empirical debate, but at its core it’s a cultural and philosophical argument that stretches back more than a century.
The restorationists reside on one side of that debate, while the Obama administration and the bulk of the progressive establishment reside on the other. And that debate is far from over.
Connery’s overall performance was pretty awesome in Brian DePalma’s 1987 big screen version of The Untouchables, though the Oscar he won for best supporting actor is likely more for his overall career than his role in the movie itself. But Connery’s accent in the film is much more of his own Scottish brogue than anything authentically Irish sounding. So it’s not surprising that he made the cut in this collection of video clips assembled by the British Screen Rush Website of “The Worst Irish Accents In The History Of Cinema.”
Not to mention their much ballyhooed claiming of embracing a tolerance for diversity. Back in 2002, Charles Krauthammer famously wrote, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
Moody’s Investor Service, the credit rating agency, will fire a warning shot at the US on Monday, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be “downward pressure” on its triple A credit rating.
Examining the administration’s outlook for the federal budget deficit, the agency said: “If such a trajectory were to materialise, there would at some point be downward pressure on the triple A rating of the federal government.”
If you had a time machine and it was good for only one trip, would you go back and give contraceptives to Hitler’s parents — or to the parents of John Maynard Keynes?
Obviously, I’m being facetious, but only by half.
Hitler discredited fascism, by launching wars of aggression and sending millions of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and the handicapped to the gas chambers. And, minus the extent that he started all those wars and killed all those people — well, good for Hitler.
Again, obviously, I’m being facetious.
But I’m not being facetious at all when I tell you that Keynes legitimized fascism, by giving decent, liberal democracies license to tax and spend and borrow in the name of political expedience.
Look, whatever Keynes may have gotten right — I suppose he could wipe his own bottom unassisted — what he got wrong is precisely what bedevils us today. And Keynes, the fascistic bastard, I think got it wrong on purpose.
Let me explain.
Quite famously, Keynes wrote, “In the long run we are all dead.” Which politicians of the Great Depression, and long thereafter, took to mean, “Right now I can buy votes with money borrowed from people who aren’t even born.” And Keynes enabled them. Keynesian theory held that governments should save money in the good times, so that they could spend it during lean times to “stimulate” the economy.
Gee, where have we heard that word before?
But let’s be frank here. That bit Keynes said about saving money must have been with a wink and a nod and a nudge, nudge — because popular democracies almost never save any money. And Keynes was too smart not to know it, and too conniving not to say it.
Of course, Keynesian theory also held that inflation and recession couldn’t coexist — but then Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and the 1970s came along and disproved all that. And yet, somehow, liberal governments still hold by Keynes.
As Roger L. Simon writes, with the healthcare bill possibly slipping even further into the month, the president is not a happy man right now:
[T]he Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt, no conservative by any stretch, is detecting a “happiness deficit” in our president:
Here’s a theory about why President Obama is having a tough political time right now: He doesn’t seem all that happy being president.I know, it’s the world’s hardest job, and between war and the world economy collapsing, he didn’t have the first year he might have wished for. And, yes, he’s damned either way: With thousands of Americans risking their lives overseas and millions losing their jobs at home, we’d slam him if he acted carefree.
Still, I think Americans want a president who seems, despite everything, to relish the challenge. They don’t want to have to feel grateful to him for taking on the burden.
Hiatt concludes:
A year later, here’s how they [the Obamas] came across to People Magazine:
“It was their first interview of the New Year on Jan. 8 in the rose-colored library on the ground floor of the White House. President Obama spoke in such a hush about the loneliness of his decisions on war and terrorism that one could hear between his words the tick of an old lighthouse clock across the room.”
Do Americans really want to hear the tick of the old lighthouse clock? Or would they prefer the good cheer that we associate with FDR or JFK, the jauntiness with which they took over the White House and made it theirs?
Less lugubriousness wouldn’t necessarily buy him a health-care bill. But in the long run, Americans might find it easier to root for or with Obama if he’d show us, despite everything, that he’s happy we hired him.
Well, this morning at least, it doesn’t look as if there is going to be a health-care bill – one that passes anyway. The Dem Whip is opining that the vote could slip past Easter – a sure sign the bill is in trouble. Conventional wisdom had it that Obama postponed his Asian trip to get the thing passed before Easter, for fear that when the Members returned to their home districts for vacation they would get a negative earful from their constituents. Well… look what’s going to happen. It’s not a cure for depression.
ONE OTHER NOTE on Presidential Depression: What we may be watching is what happens when a man who has faced very little adversity in his life finally has to.
Clearly the president could use a little relaxation right now. I suggest he (and you) tune into this hit, hip new sitcom. It’s a show about the ultimate show about nothing!
Jules Crittenden reviews the first episode of Tom Hanks’ The Pacific miniseries on HBO, in light of Hanks recent shameful comments to Time magazine (owned by Time-Warner, which also owns the HBO channel and HBO Films, which co-produced the series). Jules writes:
If “The Pacific” delivers us blissfully out of the opening soap opera scenes and drops us unceremoniously into Guadalcanal, it does so without much of the context that illustrated the forging of a unit and the transformation of young men into warriors that was one of the strengths of BoB. The Guadalcanal scenes are beautifully shot but poorly edited, having the effect of being more of a horrific montage, lacking the impact they could have had, while the lead characters are effectively strangers. For all the nudge-nudge-get-it dialogue and meaningful looks, little effort has been made to put you cinematically into the minds of these young men. I also came away with the sense that the filmmakers are going to carefully balance out every Japanese atrocity with some example of the enemy’s humanity, every dehumanization of young American boys with an American boy’s thoughtful, chin-scratching realization that the hated Jap is just like him. A regrettable tendency to lecture, hector and handhold that underestimates the audience.
Jules adds, “would anyone expect them to bend over backwards to humanize the SS?” Didn’t The Reader, which I watched last week on DirecTV for the first time attempt to do just that? It begins — SPOILER ALERT! — as a sort of pedophilic version of The Night Porter with the genders reversed, then attempts to excuse the former SS guard character played by Kate Winslet for not knowing she was condemning Jews to death because she’s illiterate.
Can you say metaphor, boys und girls? I knew that you could. But as Ron Rosenbaum writes, in a spot-on review of the film last year at Salon:
Indeed, so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of illiteracy—despite the fact that burning 300 people to death doesn’t require reading skills—that some worshipful accounts of the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps because it’s been declared “classic” and “profound”) actually seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of than participating in mass murder. From the Barnes & Noble Web site summary of the novel: “Michael recognizes his former lover on the stand, accused of a hideous crime. And as he watches Hanna refuse to defend herself against the charges, Michael gradually realizes that she may be guarding a secret more shameful than murder.” Yes, more shameful than murder!Lack of reading skills is more disgraceful than listening in bovine silence to the screams of 300 people as they are burned to death behind the locked doors of a church you’re guarding to prevent them from escaping the flames. Which is what Hanna did, although, of course, it’s not shown in the film. As I learned from the director at a screening of The Reader, the scene was omitted because it might have “unbalanced” our view of Hanna, given too much weight to the mass murder she committed, as opposed to her lack of reading skills. Made it more difficult to develop empathy for her, although it’s never explained why it’s important that we should.
Using extensive and fairly believable make-up effects, the film depicts Winslet’s heavily aged character spending decades in a prison cell rather than confess to her illiteracy. At the film’s climax, after teaching herself how to read — and keeping with the metaphor of the film, presumably beginning to understand the crimes she was involved in, Winslet’s character hangs herself from the ceiling of her prison cell, after first climbing on top of a desk containing the books that she had taken out from the prison library.
As Rod Lurie writes at the Huffington Post, the Reader’s coda adds one final insult on top of the the rest of its facile metaphors, all designed by author Bernhard Schlink to excuse his fellow Germans of their guilt:
The hollowest scene is the one I am sure was intended to be the film’s most redemptive. A grown up Michael goes to see a survivor of the very church burning Hanna was involved with. She lectures him about the camps and refuses the money Hanna has willed to her (though she accepts the tin the money came in). The beautiful Lena Olin plays the survivor. She is well dressed. Her New York apartment is large and gorgeously furnished, her art collection on display.
In the scenes preceding it we see Hanna. She has nothing. She is in bad health. She commits suicide.
So, the SS representative in the film ends up pathetic and sad and, by the way, not guilty of the crime for which she was sentenced.
The lone representative of the survivors is haughty and glamorous — a near perfect (and negative) stereotype of the wealthy European Jew in New York.
Guess whom the audience can relate to more?
So sure, I don’t have to imagine Hollywood bending over backwards to humanize the SS. I just watched it last week in HD on Showtime.
The term “Social Gospel” has been considered a dirty phrase by conservatives for a while now. But if that’s what Beck meant, he has quickly learned the consequences of sloppy language. And in any event, he has certainly discovered the dangers of publicly practicing theology without a license.
I think Beck is likely safe, other than the occasional rhetorical bomb tossed his way by someone on the payroll of his former employer. After all, Time has managed to stay in business for almost 45 years since they first attempted to practice theology without a license.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club tries to guilt beer drinkers into chugging “tasty, eco-friendly ales” for St. Patrick’s Day. (Which of course, begs the question: are you celebrating Christianity or its successor religion?)
And if you’re thinking of switching to the hard stuff, forgetaboutit: “Cocaine users were last night accused” by the British government of “helping to make global warming worse.”
So no bright lights, no coke, no beer. That would leave the characters in Pete Gent’s classic sports novel and film North Dallas Fortywith very little to do.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News (where I guest post on weekends) has a new interview with Karl Rove. At one one point, Rove tells John that the Bush administration not punching back hard against the “Bush lied about WMDs” solipsism was, as Rove claims, “principally my responsibility because I should have seen it for what it was, which was a corrosive dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush Administration.”
Rove did not realize that the daily pounding about WMD was “a corrosive knife aimed at the heart” of Bush’s presidency? How could he not, when the rest of us saw it so clearly, did battle over it, and still — to this day — find ourselves having to answer the mindless, specious charge “Bush lied about WMD!” that has become so entrenched in our national narrative?
There are other interesting parts. Rove talks a little about minding the fact that while the press and the democrats had a free-for-all about him, his family and kids had to hear it. Politics is a rough game, but it has always surprised me, how viciously the press can let loose about politicians, without considering what it does to spouses and children -until they have to consider what their own kids are hearing about them. No one’s kids should have to be victims of politically expedient hate, but Rove actually helped a journalist not have to see his child upset, at one point. That journalist did not return the favor.
I am also struck by Rove’s defense of Bush’s run against John Kerry in ‘04:
. . .the Democratic Party was united, the country was in an unpopular war, and I repeat, the Democrats outspent us by $124 million. Six or seven million dollars came from George Soros and an equal amount came from five of his friends. That’s the kind of disadvantage that we faced and we won.
Rove forgot something. He forgot that the Democrats not only outspent the GOP, they also had the press promising (by way of Newsweek’s Evan Thomas) to deliver 10-15% of the vote Kerry’s way, and the MSM did manage to do something like that. They carried Kerry’s water, called him “brilliant” while neglecting to look at his college transcripts (after the election, it was revealed Kerry’s grades were worse than Bush’s “gentleman’s ‘C’”) or demand to see his military records (even as they went through Bush’s with a fine-toothed comb and even made stuff up). They demonized the Swift Boat Vets who questioned Kerry’s fitness for office, and in all ways protected the Democrat candidate while beating daily on Bush.
Taken singly, it was sound and fury, signifying nothing, but taken all together, the daily pounding was effective.
The press understood how successfully they had enhanced the Kerry campaign, and I believe it is one of the reasons they were so bold about going “all in” with Obama. They repeated the strategy of protection; of not asking the candidate any tough questions, or looking at his history or his associates, all while administering daily beatings to the opposition. Admittedly, they had a more difficult time beating on McCain, who was a weak candidate, because they’d spent the last 8 years calling him the “good” sort of conservative, when doing so could hurt Bush. But then McCain brought Sarah Palin into the picture, and the press managed to savage her in an unprecedented manner, even before she made her own mistakes, to excellent effect. The press did not manage to win the presidency for John Kerry; they made sure they could deliver it to the “sort of God”, Barack Obama, using the lessons they learned during the Bush-Kerry campaigns.
But note what not punching back against the left wrought: The Iraq war and Bush’s handling thereof initially had very high poll numbers; even Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment was not initially spun negatively by the press. CBS would go to town against Bush in the fall of 2004, but in May of 2003, Bob Schieffer told Larry King:
“We saw some very powerful pictures,” reported CBS’s Bob Schieffer. “I think this was a remarkable moment. I mean, it really was…. [H]ere you have the president flying onto the aircraft carrier. The first president to fly on to an aircraft carrier in a fixed wing jet like he did, climbing out in that flight suit, looking very dashing. This whole day was quite an event…. We saw a little spontaneity today. We saw a little showmanship that we haven’t seen in a long time in politics, and frankly, I think that’s kind of good.”
After quoting additional praise for that moment from some equally unlikely sources, in the American Thinkerback in 2008, Paul Kengor added:
Yet, aside from those accolades — a natural, honest response — something else was stirring. In the New York Times, the angry Frank Rich dismissed the landing as Hollywood hype: “The Bush presidency,” growled Rich, “might well be the Jerry Bruckheimer presidency,” referring to the producer of Hollywood features like “Top Gun,” “Black Hawk Down,” and “Armageddon.”
Of course, it is hard to take Rich seriously on anything, including references to the dramatic arts – his specialty. Rich observed the scourging of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ and literally thought about gay porn. (Don’t believe me? Click here.) Nonetheless, the op-ed page of The Times has a Scripture-like influence on liberals, and this salvo by Rich was the start of something: Much of the left, for the first time since the Iraq invasion a few weeks earlier, now began to descend on Bush, especially those who had predicted a bloodbath in Iraq and didn’t get one. They would excoriate the landing, from its message to its symbolism, and they would not cease and desist for the next five years.
From the Senate, Robert Byrd (D-WV), who had harshly criticized Bush war policy, called the Lincoln landing a “spectacle” that was an “affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq.” At the House, Henry Waxman (D-CA) lost his mind, actually demanding a Congressional investigation of the landing.
Liberals were lunging, reaching, grasping for something to criticize. They had been shown up. They would wait stubbornly until something bad developed in Iraq, and got just what the doctor ordered once the body bags began piling up in Iraq from 2005-7 in the occupation/reconstruction that followed. They would incessantly, mercilessly pound the “Mission Accomplished” episode as an example of a brazenly, arrogantly premature celebration by George W. Bush.
In point of fact, Bush had been correct in that the mission had been accomplished. The military effort to remove Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq was over. That was Phase 1, a separate, successful mission, altogether different from the much more treacherous, difficult period when the United States sought to stabilize Iraq, fighting Al-Qaeda on a daily basis, and seeking to establish a rare oasis of sustainable democracy in the sick powder keg that is the Arab-Muslim Middle East. In its typical lack of sophistication on matters military, the left simplified the whole thing-Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, Phase 15-as “The War.”
But here’s what everyone seemed to miss: a crucial marker was indeed laid on the deck of the Lincoln that day. In retrospect, the landing provided a profound example of the major, ultimately most destructive liability of the two-term Bush presidency: the utter failure of the president and his administration to respond to critics, to fight back, to engage not Al-Qaeda but domestic detractors on the left.
And once the WMD argument was raised by the legacy media, and once they encountered no pushback from the Bush administration, poll numbers began to move south. Why the Bush administration didn’t trot out clips such as this to remind voters of Democrats’ duplicity on regime change in Iraq in 2004 versus their 1998 stance has to be considered another enormous mistake in retrospect.
Of course, the Obama administration can demonize its opponents because the news media and the administration share the same ideology. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Rove and former President Bush could not have fired back at their opponents with anywhere near their severity. and But somewhere between the antics of Anita Dunn, Van Jones, Robert Gibbs, and Obama himself, and not fighting back at all, there has to be, if not a happy medium, at least a functional one.
It seems that John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter had no idea that her photoshoot with GQ would make her look straight-up crazy. On “The View” today, Barbara Walters discussed a phone call with Hunter in which she asked the videographer about the GQ photoshoot:
“She was in tears when she called and said that when she saw the pictures in GQ, she screamed for two hours.” Rielle, who had previously met with Barbara last June in preparation for an interview that never transpired, told Barbara “she found the photographs repulsive. When I asked if that was the case, why did she pose the way she did, she said she trusted Mark Seliger, whom she said is a brilliant photographer, and quote, ‘I went with the flow.’”
I’m not sure which is more naive of Hunter: trusting John Edwards to be honest, or trusting a legacy media photographer to make his or her subject look good when there’s a narrative that needs to be illustrated.
Voters of North Carolina need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask how it is that they completely fell for a man — electing him a United States senator — so flawed as John Edwards, a man who would so completely fall for a shambles like Rielle Hunter.
And that goes double for the boys and girls at McClatchy who allowed themselves to get swept up in John Edwards fever simply because he punched all their liberal do-gooder buttons.
Not that the man who ultimately punched all their liberal do-gooder buttons has been much of an improvement, of course.
Ed Morrissey writes, “For the first time, the Social Security Administration will start cashing in its IOUs from the Treasury in order to meet its benefits obligations”:
We’ve noticed the cash shortfalls at Social Security for more than a year, and now they appear to be permanent. For the first time, the Social Security Administration will start cashing in its IOUs from the Treasury in order to meet its benefits obligations. Unfortunately, the Treasury doesn’t have the cash, either:
The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.
It’s time to start cashing them in. … Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.
Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.
Social Security’s shortfall will not affect current benefits. As long as the IOUs last, benefits will keep flowing. But experts say it is a warning sign that the program’s finances are deteriorating. Social Security is projected to drain its trust funds by 2037 unless Congress acts, and there’s concern that the looming crisis will lead to reduced benefits.
The IOUs won’t last. Technically, they’re worthless now. The Treasury doesn’t have the cash to reimburse Social Security, and we’ll have to sell more debt on the lending markets in order to finance the benefits in the short run.
And as Ed adds, the Moody’s bond rating service is considering lowing America’s debt rating, which will jack up interest rates and make borrowing more expensive.
