Cloyce's Coffee Klatsch

I'm Somewhere Other Than Here

2010-07-28T20:49:00.002-04:00

This dormant (verging on dying) blog will remain comatose for some time, as I've been spending my days (and nights) launching and maintaining two new blogs for my day job at The Library of America, which happens to be the one that pays.

The half-dozen readers who still check in once a month to see if I'm still sputtering might be interested in my new homes away from home:

Story of the Week
Reader's Almanac

Mark Twain and the Legend of the "Vibrating Sex Toy"

2010-05-29T22:05:00.006-04:00

This is how spectacularly silly myths get started.

Our story begins with Guy Adams, writing in the Independent, about Mark Twain's unpublished autobiography, which has been (more or less) sealed for 100 years, as stipulated in Twain's will. Adams claims, without citation or anything much in the way of research:

A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy.

The next thing you know, "Mark Twain and the Vibrator" (or some equally salacious headline) gets picked up by dozens of media outlets and blogs, including John Hudson at the Atlantic and Adrian Chen at (of course) Gawker.

There is a bit of truth buried in two embarrassing falsehoods here: Twain and Lyon did have a stormy relationship, but:

(1) "The Autobiography of Mark Twain does not contain any references to sex toys or vibrators of any kind," and

(2) there is a separate document, the "Ashcroft-Lyon MS., which does contain [a reference] to a pair of vibrating machines." The machine in question was in fact "the then-popular health aide the Arnold Vibrating Machine, a very above-board medical appliance which Clemens recommended to friends." It was designed to cure headaches and back pains.

You can read more about it here (via the University of California Press blog), from the editors of the forthcoming autobiography themselves, who wryly note that "this is not news."

The Independent has yet to correct or retract this section of the article.

Suffer the Children: The Church and "Problems of this Sort"

2010-03-26T11:38:00.002-04:00

William Donohue, of the so-called Catholic League, on the ever-growing child-abuse scandal:

Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.

Though this is starting to change, any discussion of employee sexual abuse that took place 30 and 40 years ago must acknowledge this reality....

Is Bill Donohue equating the sexual dymanics of the workplace (screwed up and horrific as it sometimes might be) with child rape? Does he really mean to compare children with subordinate adult employees harassed or molested by their bosses?

In any case, here's the best—indeed, the only—comparison he can come up with:

According to a report by The New York Times in October, the Brooklyn district attorney's office had filed charges in 26 cases of sexual abuse involving members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Note the "filed charges" in this sentence—which is notably lacking in stories where the Church is involved.

And then we have the usually sensible E. J. Dionne, writing in the Washington Post (via Atrios) :

Enemies of the church will use this scandal to discredit the institution no matter what the Vatican does. Many in the hierarchy thought they were doing the right thing, however wrong their decisions were. And the church is not alone in facing problems of this sort. [emphasis added]

Really? The church is not alone dealing with the abuse, molestation, and rape of thousands of children? Other than perhaps NAMBLA, can Dionne name another organization dealing with "problems of this sort"?

Is this going to be the new talking point offered by defenders of the Church: "Why pick on us; even though we can't think of anyone, everyone else was raping children and covering it up, too?"

Update: Does three make a trend? Matt Taibbi discovers Archbishop Timothy Dolan making the same claim:

But he condemned the media for portraying child sexual abuse “as a tragedy unique to the church alone. That, of course, is malarkey.”

Taibbi's reaction is the same one I had to similar statements like Donohue and Dionne:

One expects professional slimeballs like the public relations department of Goldman Sachs to pull out the “Well, we weren’t the only thieves!” argument when accused of financial malfeasance. But I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read through Dolan’s retort and it dawned on me that he was actually going to use the “We weren’t the only child molesters!” excuse.

Worst Novels of the Decade?

2009-12-09T00:16:00.006-05:00

The Guardian books blog proposes that we "commemorate the very worst writing of the decade," to counter all the Best of the Decade lists and give us a more balanced view of the first years of the millennium.

Well, the titles listed below aren't necessarily the worst. Certainly, I read slush-pile books, self-published titles, and little-known debuts that were deservedly neglected and are (for the most part) already out of print. And let's not even go into the swath I cut through the science-fiction booklists. Instead, these are the novels I read that either didn't live up to the hype or to the author's reputation.

The Biographer's Tale, A. S. Byatt. You know those index cards that scholars once used when doing research? If you ever wondered if they might add up to a good novel, Byatt tackles the question for you and offers up an answer. No.

The Body Artist, Don DeLillo. I had a hard time choosing between this one and Cosmopolis, but DeLillo's newfound disdain for the grammatical artifact known as the pronoun antecedent won out.

Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee. B-sides and outtakes from the New York Review of Books do not a novel make.

The Fourth Hand, John Irving. I've occasionally felt that John Irving is unjustifiably maligned by critics and ignored by the awards committees. Here was his attempt to write a subdued, more blatantly literary novel and validate their disapproval.

How to Be Good, Nick Hornby. How to be sanctimonious (and, even worse, not funny).

Life of Pi, Yann Martel. Kind of a neat story, in that Fountainhead or Stranger in a Strange Land kind of way. Then you ponder it a few days and resent the preachy manipulation.

The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger. Too bad about those last 300 pages.

Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. A debut by an author who ingested Geek Love and HBO's Carnivale and regurgitated them blanched, without the crispy edges.

Honorable mention: Vernon God Little, D. B. C. Pierre. A blend of the best of the adolescent-angst genre and Southern gothic fiction. And the worst.

Maureen Dowd's Astral Projection

2009-12-06T15:21:00.001-05:00

I would venture to guess that, if asked what Desiree Rogers and Tiger Woods have in common, most people might say that they're both African Americans and be stumped to come up with any other likeness. But Maureen Dowd finds a connecting thread:

They were both elegant and entitled swans... They presumptuously put themselves beyond authority... Both the golf diva and the social diva... It was the assertion of personal privilege by Tiger and Desiree that was so off-putting... these two controlling players spiraled out of control... She mistook herself for the principal, sashaying around...

Yes, they're both quite uppity, aren't they?

The first question Ms. Dowd and her allegedly liberal fans need to ask themselves is: why these two? Why not focus on presumptuous players Tareq and Michaele Salahi, entitled adulterer Max Baucus, sashaying diva Carrie Prejeans, asserter of personal privilege Roman Polanski, or any of the many other celebrities and wannabes who have dominated the scandal headlines recently? As Jamison Foser asks, "What's behind Maureen Dowd's contempt for Desiree Rogers?"

The second question is more basic (and now I'll steal MightyOCD's pithy Twitter post.)

Wow. Maureen Dowd gives new meaning to projection this week. Entitled swans obsessed with the brand, huh?

Books, computers, and alcohol

2009-10-29T00:17:00.007-04:00

In a much discussed interview, Philip Roth predicts that novel-reading will be a "cultic" activity within 25 years. Ron Charles, of the Washington Post tweeted (how appropriate) in response: "Let me counter Roth's daring prediction by predicting that cars will soon replace horses."

The demise of novels and literature and books has been predicted as often during this past century as the Second Coming--and with about as much accuracy and evidence. In a blog post, JK Evanczuk responds to the gist of Roth's prophecy ("5 Reasons Why the Novel is Not a Dying Medium"), arguing that the digital age provides opportunities for, rather than threats to, the future of literature.

Yet, other than anecdote and projection and an obvious generation gap, is there any truth to what the infamously reclusive Roth is telling us? Does he have his finger on the zeitgeist or does he just need to get out more (or, better yet, do some research about "kids today")?

I do wish someone would undertake a study that attempts to answer these questions. Yes, it's incontrovertible that consumers spend more time on computers (although, on average, the American consumer spends less leisure time than many folks might think: ranging from 45 minutes per day for teens to 30 minutes for retirees--still far less time than is spent watching television.) Has increased computer activity resulted in less book-reading over the last few decades? Or is the leisure time spent on the computer "coming" from somewhere else?

What about (to take one of many possible examples) alcohol consumption and socializing in bars? Let's examine alcohol consumption since 1969, the year "Portnoy's Complaint" was published. In 1969, 9.1 liters were consumed annually per U.S. consumer, rising to a peak of 10.7 in the early 1980s, and falling dramatically to 8.6 in 2003 (the most recent year available). That is, for those keeping tabs, a rather astonishing 20% drop in alcohol consumption since the arrival of the personal computer on the market.

Compare, however, the number of books checked out by the average American library user. The number served per library user has increased from 5.8 in 1969 to 7.0 in 2003, while attendance has nearly doubled. (It should be noted, however, that excluding juveniles, the books-per-user figure has declined somewhat.)

Both the figures for alcohol consumption and for library readership should be taken with some skepticism; reporting such behavior depends on sample sizes, methodologies, and populations trends. But that's the point: it might be true that increasing reliance on computers is resulting in the demise of book-reading, but in the absence of reliable data, it would be just as accurate to say that the increasing reliance on computers is resulting in a decrease in alcohol consumption and barhopping (with its collateral morning-after damage).

And, in the end, who's to say who's better off: the reader or the author who spends 10 hours a week scanning bite-sized word morsels on the Internet, or famous drinkers Hart Crane and Jack Kerouac, who both still, somehow, found time and energy during their abbreviated, inebriated lives to read canonical books--and to write equally canonical works.

Ill-chosen adjectives

2009-10-24T13:05:00.002-04:00

In today's New York Times is a long-overdue article by Brian Stelter on the Lou Dobbs menace to CNN's dwindling reputation and the network's continuing (and inexplicable) protection of his anchor status. It's a decent if short article, but contains this curious sentence:

Mr. Dobbs is known to be exploring an exit from CNN, and he is viewed as a potential hire for the Fox Business Network, an upstart channel owned by the News Corporation.

Yet here is the influence wielded by this so-called "upstart" network:

Fox Business averaged 21,000 viewers between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. in June, according to Nielsen Co.

Now, it's true that the train wreck known as Don Imus has recently given FBN a bump in viewership during the early morning hours. Since the network is available to more than 49 million homes, it must alarm Fox that someone with Imus's name recognition attracted only 177,000 viewers on the show's first day---most of whom are over 65, a poison demographic for advertisers. And viewership for the first week dropped to 149,000 viewers a day, indicating a rather significant decline on subsequent shows.

Finally, how many "business viewers" does FBN expect to watch Imus and Dobbs? As the Daily News article notes, Imus and CNBC "tap different audiences and are not really in direct competition." Fox's strategy seems to be to make FBN an annex for disgraced shock jocks from other networks--hardly a magnet for the personal investor.

Considering that this "business" network is now two years old, perhaps Stelter should have considered a more accurate adjective, along the lines of ailing or wannabe or money-sucking. To call the network an "upstart" at this point is akin to calling the kids' lemonade stand on the corner a threat to Snapple.

Soupy Sales (1926-2009)

2009-10-23T10:35:00.006-04:00

I am quite devastated to hear of the death of Soupy Sales (pictured above with our dog Klonoa).

Almost every week for several years now, Klonoa has been making the trip by subway from Brooklyn to the Manhattan neighborhood where we used to live, passing the whole day roaming various apartments in a building on East 35th Street and visiting with Darryl, a former roommate from years past, and with Marlin Swing (a former producer for the late Walter Cronkite's CBS show). Darryl and Marlin would also take care of Klonoa when we left town for any period of time.

During many of those visits Klonoa spent a few hours with Marlin's neighbor and friend Soupy Sales and his wife Trudy Carson. I had the good fortune to meet with Soupy on a few of those occasions; the comedic spark was ever-present, and both he and Trudy genuinely seemed to love having our dog around--sometimes prompting Soupy to recall one of his White Fang routines. [For those too young to remember: The Soupy Sales Show featured "puppets White Fang (the meanest dog in the United States) and Black Tooth (the nicest dog in the United States)." I was never certain whether to be pleased or worried that our dog reminded Soupy of White Fang rather than Black Tooth.]

My thoughts and good wishes are with Trudy and Marlin and all of Soupy's friends, neighbors, and fellow comedians.

2012: We Were Warned

2009-07-27T22:04:00.008-04:00

Last night before we saw "Harry Potter and the Half-Drunk Kids*," we were treated to 532 trailers for forthcoming movies, and we yawned through the Emmerich model-kit destruction called "2012" because deep down we New York liberals in the audience harbor a secret: we know that the truly horrific juggernaut in that pivotal year won't be the end of civilization predicted by peyote-popping Mayans but rather the fearsome Unstoppable Candidate herself, Sarah of Palin, the prospect of which sends terror into the meth-raced hearts and LSD-laced minds of hippies everywhere (as TBogg disgracefully confesses, probably after one of his daily waterboarding procedures). Also.

* Favorite line in the insipid New York Times "news" article by Tara Parker-Pope about inebriated wand-wielders: "“in a world where dark wizards are kidnapping or killing people on a regular basis, a little under-age drinking is the least of their problems." (via Atrios) Otherwise, the entire piece must have been written in a bar, on a napkin.

Stuart Little

2009-06-09T10:31:00.002-04:00

Shorter Stuart Rothenberg:

Now that Republicans are losing, we need to change political news coverage.

Yes, cable news was so much more objective six years ago.

When Democrats Become Republicans

2009-06-08T21:34:00.007-04:00

Today, two New York Senate Democrats, Pedro Espada of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, switched parties kinda sorta, remaining D in name, but voting R for a power-share arrangement that hands over control of the legislative body to the Republicans after five whole months of Democratic rule.

With the Republican Party so, um, popular, what kind of Democrat would do such a thing?

Mr. Espada said he was motivated by the unwillingness of fellow Democrats to reform the rules of the Senate. “We had five months of sheer chaos in these chambers,” he said. But his own record could undermine his positioning as a reformer. Mr. Espada has been fined tens of thousands of dollars over the years for flouting state law requiring disclosure of his campaign contributions.
Mr. Monserrate was indicted in March on charges that he stabbed his companion late last year with a drinking glass, leaving a gash that required 20 stitches to close.
Asked Monday how he would coexist with Republicans, he said, “We’ll figure it out, but I’m a Democrat.”

Plus:

The state attorney general’s office is investigating a health care agency, Soundview HealthCare Network, that Mr. Espada ran until recently. And Mr. Monserrate, who was indicted on felony assault charges in March stemming from an attack on his companion, would automatically be thrown out of office if convicted.

Look, guys, you can have them. Like attracts like, and all that. (And you might want to take the Bronx uber-bigot Ruben Diaz with you while you're at it.)

Next election should be real fun, though. The Bronx isn't exactly GOP territory. (And neither is Queens, for that matter.)

Update: Today's Republican Rebel Yell revolt may have violated parliamentary procedure, and the Dems are still claiming to be in power. This would be exciting if it weren't so boring.

Magnetic Strips, Black Helicopters, and the Right-Wing's Tenuous Grip on Reality

2009-06-01T21:43:00.016-04:00

Amidst the horrific revelations surrounding the murder of George Tiller, one truly bizarre tidbit describing the suspect caught my attention:

“He told me about a lot of conspiracy stuff and showed me how to take the magnetic strip out of a five-dollar bill,” Leach said. “He said it was to keep the government from tracking your money.”

Clearly, I need to get out more. I had no idea that this urban legend, which may have got its start in a 1994 episode of the X-Files (apparently the go-to source before 24 came along), had become standard lore among right-wing conspiracy theorists. An article advancing this truly moronic notion even appeared in the May 2000 issue of The American Spectator. (Never mind that the suspect strip is made of polyester--to foil counterfeiters rather than counteract tin-foil hatters.)

Perhaps the inability to distinguish between fiction and fact, between fantasy and satire is endemic. I suppose such stupidity goes a long way to explaining the belief among conservatives that Steven Colbert is really one of their own or that there exists an Obama-Chrysler conspiracy against Republican car dealers.

Jeffrey Rosen, Jonathan Chait, Gossip, and Lies

2009-05-30T13:30:00.008-04:00

The writers for The New Republic--fast becoming America's leading magazine for milquetoast politics and tabloid-style hit pieces--is circling the wagons against the widespread censure of Jeffrey Rosen's Sonia Sotomayor hatchet job, which was a hastily written piece based entirely on gossip from anonymous sources. Its most infamous line is almost certainly this one: "I haven't read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to have a confident sense of them." (And yet Rosen is a lawyer; one would think those opinions might have been of interest to his assessment.)

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait weakly defended Rosen against accusations that he is a gossipmonger, and John Cole eviscerates Chait's defense in a must-read post ("The Worst Defense Since the '81 Colts").

Chait's basic premise is this: If I say it isn't gossip, then it isn't--dictionary definitions be damned. But what really irritates me about Chait's post is that, in order to defend Rosen's article, he has to deliberately distort--scratch that, he had to lie about--what it contained: "He [Rosen] spoke first-hand with several of Sotomayor's former clerks, who provided a mixed picture."

Yet here's what appears in Rosen's original piece:

Sotomayor's former clerks sing her praises as a demanding but thoughtful boss whose personal experiences have given her a commitment to legal fairness.

The trash talk against Sotomayor, on the other hand, comes not from "Sotomayor's former clerks" but from other sources:

But despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor. Over the past few weeks, I've been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. [emphasis added]

Chait has always struck me as one of few remaining intelligent writers for a magazine I have found increasing loathsome over the years, so it's particularly disappointing to see him engage in these tactics--tactics that assume both the stupidity of his readers and critics and their inability to look things up on the Internet to see whether various claims are true.

If Rosen (and Chait) had any integrity left, they would apologize for an extraordinarily indefensible, gossip-filled piece (parts of which have been proved false) rather than try to excuse themselves by claiming that the article contained things it most certainly did not.

But, unfortunately, that clearly won't happen. In the world according to The New Republic, only politicians should apologize. Journalists are exempt from such indignities.

A Reader's Orgasm

2009-05-18T20:50:00.007-04:00

Looking over various publishers' lists of forthcoming titles, I've noticed an overwhelming number of new works by "heavyweight" writers of literary fiction: Margaret Atwood, the late Roberto Bolaño, A. S. Byatt, E. L. Doctorow, John Irving, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Lethem, a posthumously translated novel by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates*, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, John Updike (and another one -- even dead, the man is prolific), and William Vollmann.

It's quite a feast, and the only way I can see that I'll be able to satisfy the craving is with heavy doses of amphetamines (or, lacking that, coffee). How can I possibly read all these favorites and still sample new writing by new authors? (Although it would help if I stayed off this damned computer.)

I'm also looking forward to Percival Everett's pre-season appetizer, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, which is coming out next week as a paperback original. Everett is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers in America.

* Granted, a season without a new title (or two) from Joyce Carol Oates would almost certainly herald the Death of Publishing. I see there's already one lined up for early next year.

Relaunch: The Maureen Dowd Edition

2009-05-18T00:02:00.010-04:00

I've been crazy with work for the last few months--not to mention the fact that I've been so gobsmacked by the GOP's insistence on following the Federalists and Whigs into oblivion that I really haven't had anything truly inspirational to add to the melee. But it has been bizarrely fun watching Dick Cheney come out of "retirement" once again to treat us all to a final Death Tour.

(It does seem we need to revise the old joke about what will left after a nuclear attack: cockroaches, Cher, and Cheney.)

Still, I can say that I was never so desperate for copy as was Maureen Dowd, who wholly lifted, without attribution, another blogger's post--and then basically lied about the cut-and-paste job, claiming that the paragraph was somehow passed along, verbatim, in the Beltway society version of telephone.

This blog started in response to plagiarism and I suppose it's only proper that I relaunch it on the same theme.

Also: One blog I've been reading with increasing regularity in recent months is Balloon Juice. John Coles's frequent reminder to his readers that he's often been wrong is both refreshing and endearing. Move over, David Brock!

Bobby the Page's Neighborhood

2009-02-25T16:51:00.011-05:00

Bobby Jindal "will not be easily caricatured or dismissed."--Michael Gerson, staff hagiographer for The Washington Post, 2/24/09

"I'm pretty sure he's going to be SNL's next target."--Amanda Carpenter, Townhall.com, less than 24 hours later (via TBogg)

Cliff Mason's Bogus Bonus Boogie

2009-02-01T13:46:00.011-05:00

Justifying the $18.4 billion handed out to Wall Street investment bankers at the end of last year is a tough job. But Cliff Mason apparently feels up to the task of defending the indefensible--because that's what they seem to be paid to do at CNBC:

This isn't a compensation issue, it's a diction issue.
... on Wall Street, and at many law firms as well, a bonus is simply part, often the greater part, of your regular compensation. It may vary from year to year, but when you take one of these jobs, the understanding is that you'll be paid a base-salary and once a year you'll also get a "bonus."
The bonus varies in size from year to year, but it's not actually a "bonus" in the way most people think of the word. It's an expected part of your salary, delivered in a lump- sum near Christmastime.

There are, of course, several problems with Mason's Clintonian word-parsing, and I'll highlight one of them by asking:

Did all the investment bankers who used to work for Lehman Bros. get bonuses around Christmastime? And what is the difference between Lehman Bros. employees and (say) Merrill Lynch employees?

Well, we know what happened to Lehman Bros. and its hapless managers. Other banks, like Merrill Lynch--the banks handing out billions of dollars in bonuses--are (to quote Dean Baker) "bankrupt banks. In other words, they would be shut down and put out of business if we let the market run its course." Bonuses, not to mention the "base salaries" themselves, would be a moot point were it not for government bailouts.

Not content with a mildly stupid argument in semantics, Mason then insists that, by awarding bonuses at 2004 levels, it will convince these souls "to stay at their jobs," that the "base salary is much less than they could be earning elsewhere." Really? If these underemployed bankers don't get their Christmas checks they'll quit and go elsewhere? Is Mason really trying to argue that there is a dearth of investment bankers on Wall Street right now? And does he really think that these bankers--if they manage to remain employed this year at all--will receive similar checks at the end of 2009?

He then sums up by arguing that Wall Street simply needs to adapt a new linguistic strategy: "Call [bonuses] something else. Think of something boring like 'annual performance-adjusted block compensation.' "

As Kagro X (Daily Kos) asks, "Say you're a banker and you flushed $30 million down the toilet, which is the actual scenario we're looking at. When can we expect you to pay a part of that back?"

These banks are still in business and their employees are still employed only because the federal government has handed them hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's a little surreal (but all too predictable) watching these same pseudo-capitalists abandon or contort their Ayn Rand-based principles to justify their newly assumed positions on the government dole.

Mason doesn't need to tax his brain coming up with a "boring" phrase to describe these payments. There's already a word for the compensation given to workers whose underproductive labor is supported by government money:

Workfare.

Wingnut Welfare Becomes Wingnut Warfare; Or, When Conservatives Collide

2009-01-31T19:42:00.020-05:00

It's hard to believe it's been two months since my last post--did anything happen while I was away?

Via Tbogg, I notice that some self-proclaimed "free marketers" have learned a horrifying truth: they have been subsisting as wards of charity and may now actually need to find productive employment. I speak, of course, of the allied bloggers associated with Pajamas Media. Says Roger L. Simon, Man of Mystery:

I wrote a letter to the Pajamas Media network bloggers yesterday, some of whom took it a bit more personally than intended. We disbanded the ad network part of our business for a simple reason: it was losing money and we couldn’t see how in the reasonable future that would change.

Actually that part of our business has been losing money from the beginning, so the people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn’t happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole.

Stipend? Dole? Dole? Them's fighting words! The gist of which causes Jeff Goldstein to clutch his pearls of Protein Wisdom:

Here’s the thing, Roger: you never once told us that the blog network you kept insisting was the next great thing “has been losing money from the beginning” — at least, not to our faces, and certainly not in any way that would suggest that you were carrying us like welfare recipients.

Well, you see, Jeff, as those of use who work in the real world of the free market can tell you, the last thing a struggling business wants to do when it's, um, struggling is let all its creditors and affiliates and clients know that it's in danger of collapsing: that pretty much will insure the enterprise will collapse.

I might also point out the lack of "free market" wisdom, protein or otherwise, exhibited by the business model of Jeff's blog, which depended entirely on another firm for its only source of revenue. But, Jeff assures us, evidence to the contrary: "We free marketers aren’t complaining that the business model failed."

The remainder of Jeff's response is a shot across the bow (grab the popcorn!): Jeff's former source of income is now "a vanity site for wannabe journalists"--which marks, I'm afraid, the first time Goldstein and I have ever agreed on anything. Then Jeff really tells us how he feels:

The fact is, Roger, not everyone was given millions of dollars of venture capital to blow through. So before you go comparing people YOU SOLICITED TO JOIN YOUR ORGANIZATION to people taking welfare (you ever try paying a hooker with food stamps?), you might want to think about where it is “your” money is coming from.

Regarding the forms of payment accepted by prostitutes: I'll admit this is beyond my area of expertise and will leave that argument to Rush Limbaugh. But what really seems to gall Jeff is that the "venture capital" (dole) for Pajamas Media will now go to Roger's new enterprise: online conservative video featuring people too ugly even for radio (to enhance a joke from one witty commenter).

Alas for Jeff:

What this means is that as of April 1, I am officially out of work. So save going to a pay model, this site will likely have to shut down.

Equally alas for Jeff, Starbucks isn't hiring--and I doubt his Protein Wisdom is protean enough to get a job in the current administration.

Meanwhile, proving yet again that misery loves company, another nascent conservative war is brewing. Via Instaputz, we see that Erick Erickson (no relation), intending to rally the troops against the skinjobs hiding in the ranks of the Republican Party, has regurgitated the speech he wrote when he ran for (and, we're guessing, lost) senior class secretary at Ridgemont High--a homily that is only slightly short of the world's record for most cliches in a final paragraph:

We must fight and our fight must frequently induce pain on our own side. It is frequently the only way to make headway.

... We will be sometimes defeated. We will be sometimes victorious. But most importantly, we won’t be idly bitching and yelling into the wind — we’ll be working to make a difference. It is no good to complain and not act. It is very good to act without complaint and fight the good fight until the setting of the sun.

Oh, yea--you and what army?

One way to do so is to join the RedState Army.

Oh.

(Above: the reaction from one Dog of War upon reading Erick's post.)

Larry Kudlow's Distant Mirror

2008-11-20T17:08:00.007-05:00

I see Larry Kudlow, inexplicably, still has a job at CNBC and, unsurprisingly, is still spewing optimistic nonsense at the Not-So-National Review.

So it's time to look through our way-back machines, to August 2007, and review what Larry wrote, using the neurons lingering after his historic cocaine binge:

It Ain't 1929
[here Kudlow exhibits his remarkable ability to read a calendar]

The way some people in the mainstream media are talking about the stock market and economy these days, you’d think it was 1929 rather than 2007. [...]

As for all the gnashing of teeth over corporate and mortgage loans, capital markets are absorbing the credit backup. Stocks posted strong gains the last two days and the long awaited market correction is currently tallying a 4-5 percent loss—quite mild by historic standards. [...]

So, while the mainstream media peddles its flimsy “sky is falling” narrative, the reality is a 13,400 or so Dow, along with rising wages and a 4.6 unemployment rate, point to a prosperous nation. These are the key barometers. The Bush boom continues. [emphasis added]

No on should buy into this 1929 scenario. It’s not happening.

Okay, Larry. Maybe last year wasn't 1929. But this year is sure looking a lot like 1930.

Why anyone would take seriously anything said or written by Kudlow, or by his lackey Donald Luskin, is beyond me.

Philip Reed (1949-2008)

2008-11-08T13:45:00.007-05:00

I first met Phil Reed nearly 20 years ago, when I first became an executive committee member of Manhattan's Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats. As I recall, his relationship with certain senior GLID members was often prickly; he was a district leader at the time, and his political priorities were often local. Not a few fuzzy-minded dilettantes withered under his blunt and irreverent style. He was more than willing to compromise the luxurious, often abstract principles of middle-class whites from the Village and Chelsea if it meant he could more readily meet the day-to-day needs of the residents of East Harlem, Manhattan Valley, and the "Upper Upper West Side," where he lived, on Central Park West and 103rd Street.

By 1992, the ground had shifted and a rapprochement of sorts existed. GLID honored him at that year's annual dinner; that's me presenting his award "for his commitment to health care issues and for promoting lesbian and gay political power in the Upper West Side." And six years later he returned the favor: he served as presenter when I received the 1998 Howard Schaetzle Award, named in memory of a mutual friend who was an unsung grassroots activist.

As "the first openly gay black member of the City Council," as well openly HIV-positive, Phil chalked up a lot of footnote firsts. But, like any friend, he was more to us than these categories, which he reluctantly resigned himself to for political purposes but resented all the same--"I'm openly male, too," he once said to me under his breath when he endured such descriptions at yet another event. And he was one of the funniest politicians I'd ever met; his caustic, catty, campy wit pretty much insured he would never be elected to a higher post. (Without directly naming him, I mentioned him in an anecdote I recalled last year about the difficulties black men faced simply hailing a cab in Manhattan.)

Since I "retired" from politics a few years ago, I hadn't seen him much, something I'll forever regret. He is and will be missed.

A Tale of Two Economies

2008-09-14T15:21:00.007-04:00

Donald Luskin (McCain adviser, Larry Kudlow pal, and economic ostrich), September 14, 2008:

Things today just aren't that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression -- or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That's virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since -- yes -- the Great Depression.

Alan Greenspan, on the same day:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the financial crisis that began with the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market last year "is probably a once in a century event'' that will lead to the failure of more firms."

"There's no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I've seen, and it is still not resolved,'' Greenspan said in an interview today on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos.'' Greenspan, 82, retired from the Fed in January 2006 after serving for 18 years as chairman.

Let me add: Luskin's article is filled with statistics to support his claim--but all of them, needless to say, measure the past, and the "last reported quarter" was buoyed by a one-time stimulus package and a resilience in American exports. (And Luskin could probably not have picked a worse day to publish his myopic article.) In sum, Luskin argues that only three or four dominoes have fallen; look at all the rest that are still standing up! So what if a few are wobbling! He's a bit like Wile E. Coyote, running off the cliff and congratulating himself on how high he still is.

Luskin might argue that one can only predict the future of the economy based on the results of the past, but he's cherry-picking his figures. Very few politicians or economists are arguing that we're about to enter a depression; but there's little doubt that the fundamentals of the economy have undergone a seismic shift.

I suspect that even Luskin knows, as Greenspan does, that things are on the way down, it's going to get worse, and nobody knows where the bottom is. What's true for Merrill and Lehman is true for many financial institutions: "no one knows how badly their balance sheets have been damaged, not even their managements. As credit markets fluctuate and housing prices fall, the value of many financial instruments changes every day."

Luskin seems to belong to the school of thought that says we can cheerlead ourselves out of this crisis--the same way we deceived ourselves into a bubble. But the banking crisis will not stop with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or Washington Mutual, or AIG, or Merrill Lynch, and on and on and on. The reason for the current panic is that nobody knows how many dominoes there are, or when the last one will fall.

Obama, The New Yorker, and Mirrors

2008-07-14T22:22:00.008-04:00

While good satire is very often offensive, offensiveness is only rarely good satire.

In defense of the now-infamous The New Yorker cover, David Remnick claims that the artwork "hold[s] up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama’s — both Obamas’ — past, and their politics."

But where's the "mirror"?

The illustration misfires so badly because it is far more literal than satirical and its target is unclear. As the ever-ridiculous Jonah Goldberg admits (via Atrios), "it's almost exactly the sort of cover you could expect to find on the front of National Review." Even G. Gordon Liddy boasts that "The New Yorker finally got it right." Surely, this kind of recommendation is the stuff of Remnick's nightmares (or should be): accolades from a writer for a magazine with a noted history of racism and an ex-felon with a hatred of democracy.

Likewise, Byron York, another wannabe parodist at the National Review, gloats that "privately, some McCain types admit they find the cover funny. And how bad can it be for your campaign when a national magazine, in an effort to take a shot at Fox News and talk radio, portrays your opponent like this?"

And there you have the problem: we see the reflections in the mirror (Obama and his wife), but the viewers distorting that reflection (conservatives, Fox News, talk-show gasbags, etc.) are nowhere to be found. Not only does the caricature miss its targets, it doesn't even suggest they're there.

As Kevin Drum points out, there was a way to do this well--but Remnick and illustrator Barry Blitt must have been too busy preening in front of the mirror.

Why Keith Olbermann Matters

2008-06-15T13:48:00.006-04:00

Peter Boyer's New Yorker profile of Keith Olbermann, filed by the editors under "The Political Scene," isn't really about politics or even about television; instead, it's a gossip-filled, behind-the-scenes look at MSNBC cooler talk and corporate obsessions. As such, it's remarkably boring--tabloid-style shop talk more suited to Ad Week than to the political section of a major magazine.

A reader of Boyer's article who has never seen Olbermann's program will come away with the idea that MSNBC has created a left-wing version of The O'Reilly Factor. But, setting aside Olbermann's public goading of O'Reilly, that's not the reason for the show's success. Any article about Countdown that doesn't mention Rachel Maddow, Dana Milbank, Eugene Robinson, Howard Fineman, John Dean, Craig Crawford, or Jeffrey Toobin (himself a New Yorker contributor) has missed the point. Every hour of Countdown features four or five several-minute segments of Keith wonking wonkishly with a respected wonk about some political issue, be it the latest election result or the latest Supreme Court decision. Even if it's presented from a liberal/progressive slant, you simply won't find such in-depth analysis on any other celebrity-driven news program outside of PBS.

What the show doesn't have are commentators shouting over each other, anchors ridiculing guests while cutting off their microphones, and ignorant viewpoints masquerading as just another side in a phony, tempestuous debate. ("Coming up: Is the earth 4,000 years old? We report. You decide.") What is intolerable about Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs and Chris Matthews and their ilk is their insistence that the most reprehensible prejudices and brainless nitwits are worthy of equal time.

That's not to say that the show always lives up to its goals. Keith has become infamous for the question that answers itself; occasionally a rambling comment leaves a guest staring blankly at the monitor, wondering if a response is needed or expected. And I agree with James Poniewozik that Olbermann's rant against Hillary's "assassination" gaffe was over the top; it made me uncomfortable, and for a brief moment the show became what it had been an answer to.

But I think that particular ten-minute tirade was notable for being an exception to the overall setting of the program: an often cynical, usually funny, sometimes heated, but rarely belligerent discussion among intellectual equals who assume that certain viewpoints are beneath their viewers' dignity and, above all, who never condescend to their audience when talking about politics. Behind Olbermann's success is the still-radical notion that the most fervent American patriot can voice dissent against government malfeasance and right-wing spin.

Larry Craig's Own Private Idaho

2008-05-29T17:29:00.007-04:00

Shoot me now: Larry Craig "is writing a book detailing the state of American politics, and also the story behind his arrest in a Minneapolis airport men's room."

A good working title for this project might be Sunday in the Park with George Michael.

Sean Wilentz and the Fall of American Democracy

2008-04-06T23:40:00.009-04:00

My friends are finding it increasingly implausible that I have no real preference for the Democratic nomination; I was, as many know, a Clinton delegate to the 1996 convention, and I am a longtime fan of the Clintons.

Still, in truth, I would be thrilled with either Obama or Clinton as President. In fact, for the first time in 24 years, I couldn't bring myself to vote in a New York primary; I simply couldn't decide among all three candidates (including Edwards).

But this desperation-smacking, politically motivated, ahistorical rant from historian Sean Wilentz, published by Salon, has temporarily tilted my equilibrium. Wilentz argues that, if the entire primary system were different ("if the system made sense"), Hillary would be winning the nomination and would soon have it wrapped up. Different how, you ask? If the primary were run the same as the Electoral College, with the winner taking all the delegates in each state.

Five observations:

1) Salon reprehensibly and irresponsibly does not identify Wilentz as an unwavering Clinton supporter--one who has published a series of articles attempting to prop up her faltering campaign. (Instead, they leave that important tidbit of information to a reader who, in the comments, lists Wilentz's many essays.)

2) In 2000 Wilentz organized a $100,000 advertising campaign, placing two ads in The New York Times, both of which decried the constitutional crisis that resulted when the Electoral College and the popular vote were in conflict. (Wilentz even got in a bit of trouble for these ads; a few signers had not approved the text as published.) This "constitutional crisis" resulted, as Wilentz well knows, because the American Electoral College and the popular vote are pretty much designed to provide different results--as they have on several occasions in our history.

3) Now, however, Wilentz suddenly finds an argument in favor of these bipolar elections. The argument's name, it seems, is Hillary Clinton. "Like it or not, we will choose the president under the indirect and fractured democracy of the Electoral College." In other words, the Democratic Party should mimic the nation and go with the "indirect and fractured" system more likely to cause a discrepancy between the popular vote and the delegate count. After all, who needs just one crisis during an election year when you can have two?

4) Let's be merciful and grant that Wilentz is right: that the state primaries and caucuses should be winner-take-all, to best imitate the general election. If that were the case, then Obama would certainly have run a different campaign--a consideration Wilentz blithely ignores. But both candidates used campaign strategies for the system as it exists--not as Wilentz imagines it should have been now that the game is nearly over.

5) "It's like the Patriots on their final drive against the Giants saying that if you went by just touchdowns they were actually tied."

Susan Jacoby, meet Charlotte Allen

2008-03-02T17:25:00.004-05:00

You might think that The Washington Post has declared war on its readers, but I think it's more accurate to say that that Fred Hiatt and his staff are honest truth-seekers trying to zero in on the cause of the inanity plaguing American discourse.

Two weeks ago, the newspaper published Susan Jacoby's essay "proving" that Americans are dumber than ever. Today, the editors allow Charlotte Allen space for a follow-up claiming that it's not all Americans who are stupid, just American women.

If they keep whittling down their sample size, eventually they'll come up with the correct definition: the true morons are self-loathing American women who write opinion pieces for Fred Hiatt.

The Dumbing of Susan Jacoby

2008-02-17T16:57:00.013-05:00

When I reviewed Susan Jacoby's book Freethinkers on Amazon several years ago, I mostly praised the book but noted that

Jacoby does occasionally overreach; she has a tendency to assert all-encompassing theses and easy generalizations that teeter on the shaky basis of her random sampling of people and events.

I also pointed out that Jacoby based pseudo-scientific observations on slim research and anecdotes and that her terminology was too often vague for her subject. In sum, she pretends to be a sociologist but her conclusions and arguments (as opposed to the valuable biographical accounts in the book) rarely rose above the type of analysis we've come to expect from, say, Lee Siegel (and I don't mean that as a compliment).

Her latest salvo in the Washington Post, just one of several marketing ploys for her new book, The Age of American Unreason, presents the incendiary argument that Americans are, largely, dumber than ever--and proud of it. She compares their newly acquired stupidity with an imagined past, in which the pioneer children of the Wild West, I suppose, sat around reading Shakespeare and Melville in between their farm chores. Worse, she has a persistent tendency, which surfaced in her previous book, to compare the masses of today (60% of Americans...) with the luminaries of the past.

It's an utterly offensive article, lacking anything resembling historical perspective, but her rage is directed especially at a not-so-new culprit:

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video.

Ah, yes, the idiocy of the boob tube. In opposition, I would argue, and I offer Jacoby's essay as a prime example, that "first and foremost" among the tools abused and misused by today's journalists are polls. Jacoby loves them, but since they didn't exist decades ago to the pornographic extent that they do now, she has a difficult time proving that they tell us something about America present and America past.

Research surveys have a history of systemic methodological problems (after all, we all know that Obama won New Hampshire). By definition, polls measure the decreasing number of people willing (or "dumb" enough) to answer the phone and respond to questions posed by a complete stranger--nothing more. "Sometimes as many as eight out of 10 people telephoned won't take the time to be interviewed," according to one report. Pollsters claim the ability to "correct" for non-responders but that's nonsense on its face; you can't collect the views of non-responders by reaching other non-responders. As a result, surveys favor the views of certain groups (the unemployed, the retired) who are easily reachable at home via a land-line telephone. And, with the rise of cell phones and caller ID, many Americans-- "intelligent" and otherwise--screen out pollsters, lumping them (correctly, in nearly every case) with that other annoying scourge: telemarketers. Most polls, after all, are done for market research rather than the common good. And pollsters certainly won't admit to the overwhelming methodological problems they increasingly face; that would put them out of business.

I'm sure Jacoby knows the problems inherent in using surveys to make generalizations about a populace--she can't be that dumb--but nothing will let her get in the way of selling a screed. And make no mistake: her article (and, it seems from the reviews, her book) is little more than a defensive tirade. Judging both from the essay and from the excerpt she has posted on her Web site,* Jacoby has now taken to writing hyperbole for a living. Laura Miller in her (gentle but devastating) review of Jacoby's book notes that a

writer who has just come from ridiculing Diana Trilling and David Brooks for ludicrously exaggerating the influence of old left intellectuals ought to know better than to write a sentence like: "It has now become more insulting to call someone a Luddite than to call her a cheat, a drug addict, or a slut."

That's pure balderdash--to borrow one of those high-falutin words Jacoby uses.

Jacoby begins her article in the Washington Post quoting Emerson, but Ralph Waldo never wrote of people as a unified herd of cloned minds; he celebrated the individualism he saw around him--an individualism that Jacoby would see thriving around her if she took the time to note that not everyone listens to the same music, watches the same programs, and reads the same books--as they were more likely to do in the fantasy past whose passing she mourns.

We have turned into a fragmented culture of niched tastes and divergent interests--and, I would argue, that's not a bad thing. (Were the 80% of Americans who tuned into Roosevelt's fireside chats really more intelligent? Wouldn't they have been smarter turning off that damn radio and going to a museum or reading a neglected homegrown artist like Faulkner?) It's the lack of intellectual conformity that horrifies Jacoby, who feels there should be some common body of knowledge (or, more precisely, trivia) on which we could all be quizzed by pollsters interrupting our dinners, in order to prove our worth as "good citizens."

"Call Me a Snob" the subhead of her article screams. Okay, Susan, you're a snob. And, sad to say, snobs are often people who are projecting their personal weaknesses onto others. Get your nose out of that book and look at the world around you. People can be really interesting.

*And, yes, Jacoby argues that the Internet is a vapid mindsuck, but she apparently exempts her own use of it.

Addendum: Kevin Drum highlights the most obvious flaw of Jacoby's article: "Susan Jacoby spends 1,500 words telling us that Americans are getting dumber but doesn't offer a single piece of evidence to support this notion. Not one." Exactly.

Big Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (Part Two)

2008-01-17T23:12:00.000-05:00

At about the same time I finished my last post, Salon published a new article by Andrew Leonard, who echoes my previous theme:

Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says nothing has changed. "A Keynesian is a supply-sider in a recession," he jokes, implying that as soon as economic ill winds begin to blow, fans of trickle-down economics turn into New Deal activists.

In this case, Leonard and Bernstein (there's a joke there somewhere) are discussing the sudden, seemingly universal consensus on "the need for putting extra money into people’s hands quickly"—and how that policy once worked to stave off a recession that could have been worse:

In 2001, some 90 million households received $38 billion in rebates, in the form of checks for $300 for individuals and $600 for married couples. In 2005, a landmark paper by economists David Johnson, Jonathan Parker and Nicholas Souleles, analyzed how and when those rebate checks were spent.

"We found there was a fair bang for the buck," says Parker. "It provided a substantively important effect. And those who spent it more quickly were those who had low incomes and low liquid assets."

The trick this time, Leonard notes, will be to keep all the major components of a stimulus package directed at those who need it (and, more important, will spend it) rather than at richest taxpayers and the corporations who are first in line when the handouts start flowing—all the while insisting on the primacy of free-market principles.

Big Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

2008-01-17T22:22:00.000-05:00

It's becoming increasingly clear that the question isn't whether there will be a recession in 2008 but rather whether there will be a Recession in 2008.

But what's flabbergasting is the raised middle finger our most respected financial institutions are provocatively (and desperately) waving at the ghost of Ayn Rand:

Wall Street's elite banks, longtime freedom fighters for deregulation and scorners of all government intervention in the marketplace, are now begging, cup in hand, for aid from a gallery of regimes that includes some of the most authoritarian and undemocratic governments on the planet.

So says Andrew Leonard, who has a detailed post on the new Freedom-Free Free Market.

Likewise, Elizabeth Warren finds fervant support for government intervention from even the most unlikeliest of sources—William F. Buckley:

After prattling on for several paragraphs about the beauty of the market, he does a quick double axel and declares that we should have regulated the mortgage lenders and mortgage brokers much earlier. Now, he says, the federal government has no choice but to halt all foreclosures "until the disparity between true value and hypothetical value is pounded away by time and inflation."

As Warren notes, hell hath frozen over and Buckley is skating on the rink in the Ninth Circle.

So much for the supremacy of the unfettered free market. The new definition of a liberal may well be a conservative whose home value and stock portfolio has tanked.

What Does This Button Thingy Do?

2008-01-15T23:47:00.000-05:00

Yep. I sure want these people running the country.

Another Ludicrous Top Ten List

2007-12-30T19:08:00.000-05:00

One of the more annoying annual events is the proliferation of Top Ten Lists. So here's my list of the Top 10 Books I read in 2007--none of which were published in 2007 (it was that kind of year).

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond
Wounded, Percival Everett
The Vision of Emma Blau, Ursula Hegi
A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oë
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Genet: A Biography, Edmund White

Coming tomorrow: my list of Top Ten Footnotes.

It's the Economy, Stupid (Redux)

2007-09-27T13:50:00.000-04:00

The conventional wisdom holds that the Iraq war, because it's the "biggest issue" now, will be the lead issue in the 2008 elections. At least one poll disagrees, saying that "the overall care and resources devoted to children" and "the quality of a public school education" could be (or should be) the focus of the candidates.

In any other year, such issues might stay in the foreground. For most Americans, however, Iraq is already a sideshow that in no way affects them directly, and "the care of children" is too nebulous an issue to inflame the passions of voters. (Which candidate is "against" the care of children? For that matter, which children welfare proposals are the best or most urgent?)

Instead, it is becoming clearer each day that the issue that there will be one issue on the mind of every American come next July: the economy.

Calculated Risk has a chart showing the strong historical correlation between dropping home sales and recessions--and it seems clear we're on the edge of a big one. In addition, by next summer, a devastating number of adjustable-rate mortgages will reset (almost twice as much as the amount that caused fainting spells on Wall Street last month), foreclosures will shatter new records, and the current mortgage/credit crisis will be a fond memory. Complicating matters will be the price of energy. And a severe downturn in the economy often leads to an increase in violent crime, a hint of which we're already seeing.

Nouriel Roubini, one of the doomsayers who had been warning of the current debacle for some time, has changed his tone again, saying that his previous forecasts were too "optimistic":

With lower home prices, lower home equity withdrawal, a credit crunch in mortgage and consumer credit markets, high oil and gasoline prices, falling employment, lower consumer confidence, the savings-less and debt-burdened US consumer – that spent well above its means for years – is now on the ropes and at the tipping point.

Iraq will still be on the radar, but the average American will be spending far more time worrying about how to pay the monthly bills. And traditionally, when that happens, the party in power gets the blame. The election in 2008 could turn out to be a replay not of 2006 but of 1992.

Grace Paley (1922–2007)

2007-08-25T11:49:00.000-04:00

Having been out of circulation this past week playing tour guide to a visiting nephew, I've only today heard of the death of Grace Paley on Tuesday. To many New Yorkers, she was not only a writer but also, as Thulani Davis remembers, "a sunny isle of sanity in a world gone mad with hasty, hardened greetings."

For several years almost two decades ago, when I lived in the Bronx, I spent weekends cat-sitting in an apartment on West 11th Street in Manhattan, and Ms. Paley was the always-friendly neighbor I'd see many Saturday mornings. (Maud Newton also recalls her "genuinely warm" accessibility--even in embarrassing circumstances.) Although I knew of her renown, I had never read her stories, so I had the oddly intimate experience of being introduced to her fiction by way of these personal encounters.

And I always found it difficult reconciling her easygoing vivaciousness with the woman whose famous political activism would endure to the end of her life—most recently at "a sit-in at Congressman Peter Welch's office" (where her 87-year-old husband Bob Nichols was arrested). In later years, after I'd moved to Manhattan myself, I would run into her at various marches or at political meetings in Greenwich Village, and I would finally understand that the neighborly Grace Paley was really no different from the activist Grace Paley. Her example taught many of us young firebrands that activism could be amicable and angry at the same time.

Ron Charles and the Death of Reading

2007-07-15T13:16:00.000-04:00

It's the latest craze! First a David Mehegan article in the Boston Globe, then Motoko Rich in The New York Times, and now this piece by Ron Charles in the Washington Post.

The new kewl trend in literary journalism is to argue that the Harry Potter series hasn't resulted in increased reading--among adolescents or adults.

All three articles read like poorly written blog entries, filled with specious reasoning. All three leave newspaper readers knowing far less than each pretends to convey. And all three articles are short on evidence and long on anecdote and opinion. (Mehegan mentions a survey nobody's seen yet. And Rich finds a survey showing that "the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998," and the results were unchanged in 2005, but I'm not sure what that tells us since we don't have a control group, we don't know the average age when children start reading Harry Potter, and we don't know how much of an impact assigned reading has on adolescent reading habits.)

But, for all their tenuous conclusions, the Mehegan and Rich essays are at least commendable for raising the question, which is clearly an open one.

It's the Ron Charles piece that is particularly deserving of ridicule:

It happened on a dark night, somewhere in the middle of Book IV. For three years, I had dutifully read the "Harry Potter" series to my daughter, my voice growing raspy with the effort, page after page. But lately, whole paragraphs of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" had started to slip by without my hearing a word. I'd snap back to attention and realize the action had moved from Harry's room to Hagrid's house, and I had no idea what was happening.

And that's when my daughter broke the spell: "Do we have to keep reading this?"

O, the shame of it: a 10-year-old girl and a book critic who had had enough of "Harry Potter."

What does this little story tell us? Only that Ron Charles managed to convey, quite clearly, his own boredom to his daughter--a dilemma I suspect he would have faced even if he had been reading a Frank Baum story to her. The obvious problem here is not that his daughter lost interest in the series, but that he is reading it aloud to a 10-year-old. A 700-page book, no less. At what point was this man going to let his poor daughter start reading on her own? Was he planning on torturing her with his dramatic interpretation of Watership Down when she reached 11? Or how about Proust on audio tape when she turns 18?

The entire article says far less about Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling, the book industry, and the reading public than it does about--well, about Ron Charles. To wit:

The vast majority of adults who tell me they love "Harry Potter" never move on to Susanna Clarke's enchanting "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," with its haunting exploration of history and sexual longing, or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," a dazzling fantasy series that explores philosophical themes (including a scathing assault on organized religion) that make Rowling's little world of good vs. evil look, well, childish.

This paragraph alone says all we need to know about Ron Charles's reading (and moralizing) tastes--not to mention his abilty to draw unsupported generalizations from anecdotal conversations. Yes, Pullman's books are excellent in their own way; yes, they deal with philosophical themes; yes, they'll offend anyone who subscribes to an organized religion--and, yes, (as even Charles implies) they are preachy, pedantic, and ponderous--too much so, I've always felt, for a series of books aimed at young readers. And they also lack three elements that the Harry Potter books have in spades: wit, humor, and memorable characters.

And if a book ever exhibited symptoms of a literary case of elephantitis, it would be Suzanna Clarke's sprawling doorstop--which, you'd never guess from the article, was a huge best-seller. Critics like Charles might compare her to Pynchon and Vollman but I found the novel more like Conan Doyle* framed in the plodding plots of Bulwer-Lytton and burdened by the purple prose of Jean Auel.

Again, the problem is not with his friends, but with the question posed by Charles himself. Why does he believe that Rowling to Pullman to Clarke should be a natural reading course for everybody (or anybody)? While he was conducting his little survey, did he happen to ask if his adult friends had "moved on" to Tolkien? Asimov? Vonnegut? Neil Stephenson? Ursula Le Guin? Or, for that matter, Pynchon and Vollman?

Does Charles really want to argue, as he seems to, that we'd be better off if Harry Potter (or Stephen King or Watership Down or The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind or Little Women or Uncle Tom's Cabin) had never been read at all? Or if fewer people had read them? Or if they served the sole purpose of getting people to read books that aren't best-sellers?

The argument that people should read something other than "best-sellers" is a good 200 years old, and it doesn't get any better with repetition. Neither does reading about a book critic's Mencken-like sense of cultural superiority.

What disappoints me about articles of this type is that they delight in contrarianism for its own sake--a fit of pique substituting for a series of carefully reasoned arguments. That's what blogs like this one are for. Not the Washington Post.

* To clarify: I refer here to the atmospherics of Conan Doyle's historical romances or his phantasmagorical Challenger novels--not to the formulae of his Sherlock Holmes tales.

Revenge of the Amateurs

2007-06-18T22:39:00.000-04:00

{tap tap} Is this thing on? {ahem}

Pardon my extended leave of absence; this "amateur" has been far too busy being a professional to keep my online scrapbook current.

Speaking of amateurs, James Marcus (who is anything but) eviscerates Andrew Keen's screed, The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values. The full review is in the Los Angeles Times; on his blog (House of Mirth) Keen gleefully points out the amateurishness of the book's production:

...for a book trumpeting the reliability of traditional media over the slovenly standards of the Web, The Cult of the Amateur contains an extraordinary number of typos. Proper names seem like a particular challenge for Keen: meet "Nick Hornsby," "Jurgen Haberman," and "Edward Gibbons," plus music journalist "Ann Power" and media critic "Michael Wolf" (whose name Keen spells three different ways over the course of two pages). Even the pikers at Wikipedia could probably beat this guy at a spelling bee.

Now, all of us in publishing have been embarrassed by the mistakes that make it into the final book (and even, I shudder to admit, on the jacket), but apparently Keen and his publisher have redefined Typophilia and made it an art form.

Keen, in spite of his substandard English, his contributions to the money-losing Weekly Standard, and his notable failure at business in Silicon Valley, apparently counts himself among the professionals. I'm not sure why these self-proclaimed Daddies feel threatened by kids posting their scrapbooks and diaries, housewives (and househusbands) sharing recipes, activists strategizing for the next election, and whatever else the amateurs do online these days. How dare people form communities that aren't supervised by "professionals"! How awful that works are distributed without being vetted by "experts" hired by Bertelsmann (the German company that owns Doubleday, the exclusive publisher of Keen's typos).

To get a taste of Keen's thesis, you can read the anti-strawman tirade that preceded his book. His article relies on quotes from an unnamed friend, "a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur." Keen looks enviously at the guy's $4 million home (and, presumably, the success that evaded Keen)--and sees a Marxist in disguise. (I'm not kidding.) The rot is everywhere:

Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts.

(Is it churlish to interrupt here and point out that if it weren't for these self-affirming blogs, I would never have encountered Keen's article in the first place? And does Keen really believe that people who disagree with the "thoughts" of neoconservatives like himself subscribe to The Weekly Standard?)

Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

Worse, this Web 2.0 (the new Internet culture we're all supposedly talking about) "suggests that everyone--even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves." (A few can even publish articles in The Weekly Standard.)

I know, I know--in Mozart's day, music was made only by geniuses; everyone else knew enough to stay in the breadline. Still, one could say about the Keen's beloved "traditional" media: "Instead of Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, and Margaret Bourke-White, we get William Kristol, Andrew Keen, and Rupert Murdoch."

Marxists--every one of them.

First they came for the ferrets...

2007-05-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

As those who know me will tell you, I will admit to being "obsessed" with my pet chinchillas. (That's Baby at the left.) I'm also a dog owner, so our apartment boasts an always lively menagerie of happiness and enjoyment. Having pets is one of the things that calms me each day after the hustle and bustle of working in New York City.

That's why Rudy Giuliani has always scared me: It's not that I couldn't live without chinchillas (or even a dog). Rather, it's that I couldn't begin to live with an authoritarian leader dictating to its citizens how they should live their lives.

There are, of course, valid reasons to prohibit the ownership of certain types of animals in certain types of environments. Nevertheless, I'm glad to see that Herr Rudy's infamous two-minute tirade against a ferret owner is getting a new life in the news:

This conversation is over, David. Thank you. [Mr. Giuliani cuts him off.] There is something really, really, very sad about you. You need help. You need somebody to help you. I know you feel insulted by that, but I'm being honest with you. This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness. [...]

There's a lot more, but you can get the gist. First of all, as Greg Sargent notes, the conversation is funny--in a scary sort of way. What's scary is Giuliani's insistence that there can be no debate once his "heavy-handed government" (Greg's term) has made its decision. And it's clear that the person who needs "help" here is not the ferret owner but the presidential candidate himself and his anger management issues.

We shouldn't be surprised Giuliani feels the way he does. After all, this is a man who leaves pet wives and pet children far more easily and callously than most of us would ever discard an animal.

Mark Noonan's Echo Chamber

2007-04-19T13:26:00.000-04:00

One of these excerpts is written by a mass murderer and the other is written by Mark Noonan, editor of Blogs for Bush:

Excerpt #1:

The monster I refer to is the monumental depravity of our society - the combination of glorified violence, socially acceptable rudeness, a sea of pornography, seeking to assign blame rather than accept responsibility, rampant greed for the things of the world, the concept of "its ok to lie" in certain circumstances...you mix this vile brew and you will be forced to drink it to the dregs...and what happened yesterday was just another sip of the cup.

Excerpt #2:

You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.

(Hattip to Sadly No! for the Noonan quote.)

John Derbyshire, Kick-Boxing Dinosaur

2007-04-17T21:49:00.000-04:00

Today's "Worst Person in the World," self-defense expert John Derbyshire, charitably scolds the Virginia Tech victims and fellow students:

Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? [...] And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

I guess the .22 had found "something important" in no fewer than 50 people. You really have to read the whole quote to understand the thoroughness of Derbyshire's self-delusion and self-aggrandizement. In his able hands, the entire tragedy turns into a story about ... John Derbyshire.

An appropriately eviscerating response from Kelly Sedinger (Byzantium's Shores) includes the following:

My God, this guy -- and anyone who has thought anything like this -- is just living in a delusional fantasyworld where the things that people do in action movies or shows like 24 are actual options in real life.

I doubt Sedinger realizes how close he is to the truth here:

Derbyshire had an uncredited role in "Meng long guojiang", a 1972 martial arts film starring Bruce Lee released in Western countries under various titles, such as "Way of the Dragon" and "Return of the Dragon".

John Derbyshire's only other related qualification is that he used to hum along to "Macho Man" whenever it came on the radio.

And let's call it the Ronald Reagan Syndrome: if it happened in one of my movies, it must be true.

Jonah Goldberg, Lumbering Dinosaur

2007-04-17T19:47:00.000-04:00

The Hon. Dr. St. Rev. Bradley S. Rocket, Esq, PhD, MD (George Soros Professor of Anthropology at Sadly No! University) discusses the Proterozoic Era throwback known as Jonah Goldberg.

For about three million years (give or take thirty-two months), Neoconderthal Goldberg has been working on his incisive new book, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, which has been available for pre-order on Amazon.com since before the Internet was invented. Both Professor Rocket and Slate's Timothy Noah have reviewed the book based solely on the description posted on Amazon, as well as the book's title, which itself posits the Euclidean equation "Liberal = Fascist = Mussolini = Hillary." When (and if) finished, the book will be a revisionist history, one supposes.

(News flash: A rough draft, apparently written on either papyrus or sheeting made from used condoms, has been unearthed. Archaeologists and Jonah's editors are hoping to locate a Rosetta Stone to translate the work into English. )

Professor Rocket, however, follows his post with a retraction of sorts:

Ah, it seems that Jonah has disavowed the Amazon.com description. Mea culpa.

And it's true. Here's what Jurassic Jonah himself says:

It isn't what the Amazon description says or what the Economist claims it is

Now, a biblical scholar might wonder, where exactly where did this Amazon Apocrypha come from? Here, word for word, is the original source--the Web site of Jonah's publisher, Doubleday, a division of Random House.

The bottom line: Jonah is full of petrified crap.

I've been working for book publishers for 25 years. (Full disclosure: I used to work for a division of the corporation that owns Random House--and I know how things work there.) That copy most certainly must have been written by his editor, based probably on Jonah's original proposal. If Jonah is upset by the "Amazon description" provided by his publisher (and still on the publisher's Web site), he could--with one phone call or an angry e-mail to his shameless editor, Adam Bellow (yes, he's related)--have it revised in both locations in a matter of days.

I have personally done exactly that on many, many occasions, either at the request of authors or because a final manuscript didn't match a proposal. Publishers are constantly updating their own Web sites; the publication date for Jonah's book, for example, has been recently revised. (Hell, we even changed a single word on an Amazon description for a title because it was technically inaccurate.)

So there seem to be only two possibilities here: either the description is pretty much as the Jonah represented the book to the publisher, or Jonah doesn't care that his own publisher is misrepresenting the book.

Related:
If Wishes Were Horses (Jonah Goldberg Remix)
Party Killer

Global Warming, Global Warring

2007-04-05T22:04:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, Ezra Klein wrote a comment that echoes my recent thinking:

Readers know I'm a global warming pessimist, almost completely convinced that we'll never muster the political will nor global unity to meaningfully curb carbon emissions in time to head off the ravages of climate change, if for no other reason than global warming will harm the developing world first and most, and it's hard to get individuals to sacrifice when they can't feel and don't really expect consequences.

I'm even more of a pessimist than Klein: I think it's too late even if we could whip up some miracle through "political will" or "global unity." And a new report underscores why that's so:

Climate models generally assumed a gradually increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere until 2050, at which point they assume that nations will have found ways to replace fossil fuels as the main source of energy. Because climate responds steadily but slowly to the buildup, however, the full effect on precipitation changes would not be felt until 2100.

The changes are already taking place and will not be stopped for decades even by dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers said.

Kurt Vonnegut has remarked on several occasions, half-jokingly, that humankind behaves like a virus ("I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us"); the kernel of truth in his quip is what makes the laughter that often greets his remark sound so nervous. Like any virus or weed, we destroy the host. If we are too successful, we effect our own demise.

I recently read Jared Diamond's Collapse and I'm currently reading John Reader's Africa, and if there's a common theme to these two disparate books it's that humankind has repeatedly and predictably exceeded the limits of its invitation on this planet. One of the thought exercises Diamond poses to his students and readers is to imagine what the guy was thinking who chopped down the last tree from the once-lush forests on Easter Island. It's a loaded question: by the time that "last tree" was destroyed, it was too late. Miserable desperation, cutthroat competition, and survivalist violence had been the norm long before the natives had reached that point.

It's disarming, too, to read Octavia Butler's Parable books, which imagine an American Southwest where violent gangs battle over water. Sure, it's fiction, but in many ways, we're far closer to the world she imagines than we are to the world as it existed when she wrote those stories. If societies are so easily lead to horrific wars over non-essentials like gold, diamonds, and (above all) oil, imagine what's going to happen when we don't have enough water for everybody.

Klein hints and hopes that maybe technology will save us, but that's where our musings part. Humankind's own ingenuity has an uneven track record of rescuing us in the past, and it's hard to see how we will desalinate and purify enough water for 10 billion people, hold back the tidewaters of the rising oceans, prevent topsoil from washing away from deforested hills, raise enough foodstuffs on our diminishing pastures, eliminate the widening spectrum of new diseases, and curb all the other assorted ills that are headed our way. Accomplishing any one of these tasks will be miraculous; fulfilling all of them will be close to godlike. (Consider that three decades ago, techophiles were predicting we'd have populated other planets by now. We can't even reach the moon anymore.) What we need to do now is not just think about slowing down future environmental degradation but also make plans to share our resources and soften the blow of the inevitable miseries, which are certain to be of such a scale that it's almost silly to think of New Orleans as a practice run.

April Fools Day, Continued

2007-04-02T23:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Presidential wannabe (and ne'ergonnabe) John McCain and Indiana Representative Mike Pence visited a busy, thriving, peaceful Baghdad market on a lovely spring day, "haggling with merchants and drinking tea" while waving kisses to the "more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company, " while celebratory "attack helicopters circled overhead" in their honor.

Today, the happy hagglers and tea-sipping onlookers showed their sinceere appreciation of their Most Important Customers Ever:

A day after members of an American Congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain pointed to their brief visit to Baghdad’s central market as evidence that the new security plan for the city was working, the merchants there were incredulous about the Americans’ conclusions.

"What are they talking about?" Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. "The security procedures were abnormal!" [...]

“This area here is very dangerous,” continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. “They cannot secure it.”

Told about Mr. McCain’s assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: “He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing.”

Fortunately, McCain's visit offers the shopkeepers the promise of a brigher future:

Several merchants said Monday that the Americans’ visit might have only made the market a more inviting target for insurgents.

Yep, you read it here first: nearly one year ago today, I told you all that Senator "Straight Talk (in a Non-Gay Way)" McCain would make a better president than even than his forerunner, Seth Pecksniff (who, alas, wasn't eligible to run).

Update: You think I'm overstating the case? Josh Marshall practically endorses McCain as the presumptive Pecksniff Party presidential pick.

Only 21 Days Before Earth Day... *

2007-04-01T14:10:00.001-04:00

... but it's already time to get down and party:

A new venue occurring on the same day called “Live Lies” will seek to discredit the green celebration and offer even more incentives for people to attend. Just as Live Earth has its list of celebrity organizers, Live Lies organizers were quick to point out their own star-studded board. “Senator Jame Inhofe and Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerman are on board,” commented Communications Manager Mitch Parker. “We’ve also got Tucker Carson and Ann Coulter ready to MC the event. We think their edgy humor will bring a level of levity that Live Earth just will not have.”

This event promises to be as thrilling as "Dancing with the Stars" meets "The Gong Show." And maybe Rex Tillerman will perform his rendition of the MC Rove Rap. All the kids are doing it.

Meanwhile, the Space Cowboy shows some love to Senator Inhofe, who is trying to prevent "Live Earth" from happening on the Capitol Grounds:

Here's the deal, Inhofe: The concert is still going to happen, the issue will still be front and center, and you'll still be a cranky dick.

What the godless Mr. Cowboy seems too dense to understand is that Inhofe is valiantly defending the Oklahoma's tourist industry, specifically its Dust Bowl Heritage Theme Park, the existence of which is in jeopardy because of Al Gore's utterly selfish mission to save the rest of the planet. If these ecoterrorists arent't stopped--and soon--Oklahoma could end up looking like a Amazonian rainforest (and, unless you're Ben & Jerry--or Sting--where's the money in that?).

* Before getting your knickers in a twist, figure out what day falls 21 days before Earth Day.

Michael Kinsley and Ana Marie Cox at the Martini Ranch

2007-03-19T22:08:00.000-04:00

To celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Know Nothing movement, the editors of Time have invited Michael Kinsley to blog about various matters.

As a result, patient readers have been entertained by the spectacle of Ana Marie Cox (the primordial Wonkette) debate Kinsley about the "wrongness" and illegalities of the Bush administration's firing of eight attorneys.

There are so many things wrong with Kinsley's posts (two so far) that a point-by-point smackdown would be ironically pointless. Suffice it to say that Atrios granted Kinsley the coveted Wanker of the Day award (I assume the recipient will plead "no contest"), and the usually even-tempered Kevin Drum is getting shrill and trashing the furniture at the Washington Monthly.

There's one moment, however, that pretty much sums up the willful ignorance of Kinsley's arguments (and Cox's responses). After condescending to his readers, he asks Cox the following:

For late arrivals: the administration snuck a provision into the odious Patriot Act that allows the Attorney General to fill US Attorney positions without Senate approval. [...]

Help me out here, AnaMarie. I am confused about the administration’s use of this provision. Has it ever put a US Attorney in place and not submitted the name to the Senate for confirmation? There is one guy who is explicitly temporary, but they insist that they intend to get Senate approval for every US Attorney they put in place. Is that right? And have they kept their word on this, at least so far?

First of all: For late arrivals??? Is this meant to be self-referential?

But then Cox responds:

As for the Patriot Act provisions about Senate confirmations: I am going to have to get back to you though I suspect our commenters will have Googled some data before I have my first martini.

My initial reaction to this exchange is simple: Is there anyone working at Time or are they just hosting a martini brunch over there? I mean, I've seen more in-depth, up-to-date political discussions over at the Debbie Gibson fan site.

Ana Marie Cox had one thing correct: in the time it took her to write that sentence, either Kinsley or Cox could have answered their own question while sipping a medium vodka dry shaken not stirred. (The answer = yes x 14, as commenter Helpy McHelper quickly noted in response to Kinsley's post.)

But more to the point, it's not only that the Justice Department honchos had already used that provision but that they intended to do so going forward. That same Google search found this bit of information from a relatively obscure news source:

In September, Sampson produced another list of firing candidates, telling the White House that Cummins was "in the process of being pushed out" and providing the names of eight others whom "we should consider pushing out." Five on that list were fired in December; the others were spared. [...}

Sampson also strongly urged bypassing Congress in naming replacements, using a little-known power slipped into the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in March 2006 that allows the attorney general to name interim replacements without Senate confirmation.

"I am only in favor of executing on a plan to push some USAs out if we really are ready and willing to put in the time necessary to select candidates and get them appointed," Sampson wrote in a Sept. 17 memo to Miers. "It will be counterproductive to DOJ operations if we push USAs out and then don't have replacements ready to roll immediately.

"I strongly recommend that as a matter of administration, we utilize the new statutory provisions that authorize the AG to make USA appointments," he wrote.

By avoiding Senate confirmation, Sampson added, "we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House."

Now, I wouldn't expect a seasoned veteran like Kinsley to know about a newfangled kid on the block like The Washington Post, but I would think he could ask the bartender to use the Google in between rounds.

Robert Novak's Ongoing Senior Moment

2007-03-12T13:57:00.000-04:00

I think this may be the first time Joe Klein and I agree on something:

Robert Novak has always been an old man.

Why is this well-known and well-established fact suddenly relevant? Let me explain:

When I was in high school, a horrifying phase of life that Novak apparently avoided, I was certainly one of the most politically liberal (and loudest) voices on campus. Yet--and here I would rather admit to a secret past life in pornographic films--my favorite novel at the time was Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (not to mention We the Living).

I also professed to be heterosexual then, and my enjoyment of books by the uber-conservative Ayn Rand, every one of which I had read, was directly related in no small part to the literary tastes of my first (and penultimate) girlfriend. Hormones are evil things.

Similarly, anybody who's been through adolescence would understand that the opening passage of Novak's latest column is just "foolish" (to use Klein's term):

While Hillary Rodham Clinton came out second best to Barack Obama in their long-range oratorical duel at Selma, Ala., the real problem with her visit there a week ago concerned her March 4 speech's claim of her attachment to Martin Luther King Jr. as a high school student in 1963. How, then, could she be a "Goldwater girl" in the next year's presidential election?

The incompatibility of those two positions of 40 years ago was noted to me by Democratic old-timers who were shocked by Sen. Clinton's temerity in pursuing her presidential candidacy.

Now, about those films...

How to Read Another Book

2007-03-08T02:04:00.000-05:00

Tom Lutz, who teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, has written a witty and perceptive article for Salon ("Think you know how to read, do you?"). He starts off by noting the division between theorists and practitioners (critics and writers) that divide English departments, and he acknowledges the sometimes deserved ridicule that has greeted the "FemiMarxiDecons."

But he goes on to say:

I still don't understand, frankly, why people hate literary scholars for having a professional vocabulary while remaining perfectly content with economists' using "devaluation" or philosophers' using "existentialist," or physicists' talking about a "projective Hilbert space endowed with the Fubini-Study metric."

Certainly, the chasm between art and critic in the humanities is kin to the division one sometimes sees in the sciences (between, say, theoretical physicists and astronomers). And it's true, as Lutz notes, that the artist-critic who can bridge the gap can become the literary equivalent of Richard Feynman: "Have there been excesses of obscurantism and pomposity? Yes, but as our literary writers have long known, from Laurence Sterne to Herman Melville to James Joyce to William Vollmann, sometimes nothing succeeds like excess."

All these arguments make up part of a review of recent books that tell readers how (and what) to read, including Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Lutz shows that there's nothing new about this entire theory vs. practice debate; in fact, the "New Critical mantra" advocated by Prose and Harold Bloom and the rest of these new/old backlash warriors was itself mocked by the writers of their day. He also reminds us that these types of "how to read" books have a long tradition, going back long before Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book (1939).

I've never quite understood who makes up the audience for these books (and I've read several of them). I mean, if you're not a professional critic or a student, wouldn't you be better off spending your limited time reading a novel instead of reading a book which tells you which novels to read and how to read them? Similarly, Lutz concludes, "In the end, Dear Reader, these books themselves are part of that dread project: literary criticism written by professors. And they all beg the obvious question: Shouldn't we be reading something better?"

All in all, it's a much-needed rejoinder to a bizarrely didactic genre. Read it quickly, then go read something by William Vollmann.

Even More Shorter Joe Klein

2007-03-05T10:26:00.000-05:00

"I won't name a single example of a right-wing extremist, but he reminds me of every Republican I've met lately."

For more, see Atrios.

Shorter Joe Klein*

2007-03-05T00:17:00.000-05:00

Here's the condensed version of the latest salvo from Time magazine's most famous wit:

"I can't name a single left-wing extremist, but he reminds me a lot of a strawman I once knew."

* I usually don't traffic in tautologies, but the above is one I couldn't pass up.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007)

2007-03-01T10:06:00.000-05:00

Author, historian, teacher, journalist, New Deal Democrat, speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson, advisor to John F. Kennedy--Arthur Schlesinger was, above all, always the perfect gentleman. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone clearly enjoyed his company. (Even his political "enemies," quick to condemn his opinions, were hard-pressed to defame his personality.)

My comments aren't simply the commendatory cliches typical of a day-after eulogy. I first met Schlesinger in 1996--the year I was a Clinton delegate to the Democratic convention--and my off-and-on acquaintance continued until a little over a year ago, when I ran into him at a cocktail reception. His unflagging energy was enviable; he seemed to be at every celebration, every anniversary, every awards ceremony, no matter the occasion; a colleague remarked that Arthur would show up for the opening of an envelope.

Yet, if there is one word that comes immediately to mind when I think of him, it is approachable. He was surprisingly soft-spoken, self-deprecating, and kind. It was with some surprise that I read in the Washington Post this morning that he recalled his own youthful temper, "I was indignant, hot-tempered, brutal in my style . . . [John Kenneth Galbraith] taught me that irony is more effective than indignation." When he disagreed with you, he would kill you with kindness.

His last book, War and the Imperial Presidency, was a strident condemnation of the Bush administration and its policies. It is not the book for which he will be remembered; it is a prophetic screed-of-the-moment containing gentle reminders of the sort we greatly need right now. He chided Bush and Cheney for creating an "the American Presidency [that] has come to see itself in messianic terms as the appointed savior of a world whose unpredictable dangers call for rapid and incessant deployment of men, arms, and decisions behind a wall of secrecy," but he optimistically felt that this, too, shall pass, that history "supplies an antidote to every generation's illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive."

Update: Josh Marshall recalls his encounter with Schlesinger at (naturally) an awards ceremony, where he tried to explain the concept of a blog. That's an attempt at a conversation I would have loved to have heard. (The only correspondence I have from him, from 2005, was written on a manual typewriter.) One of the things I noted in my brief Amazon review of War and the Imperial Presidency was that Schlesinger was wary of the "electronic town hall" (his phrase) and he "judged the Internet secondhand by its excesses (on both right and left) rather than by intimate knowledge of the online political community."

Abraham Lincoln, Saboteur

2007-02-16T15:25:00.000-05:00

Much has been made of the fake Lincoln quote cited by Frank Gaffney in the Washington Times (which has still not corrected it*) and repeated on the House floor by Rep. Don Young (and subsequently entered in the Congressional Record):

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.

The quote was easily proved a fraud, and there's no point in adding to the history of its provenance, which you'll find here.

But the remark should have raised eyebrows to anyone with a passing knowledge of American history: after all, it was Lincoln himself who, while in Congress, voted to end the Mexican American War.

What seems to have received no attention is another suspicious aspect of the quote, pointed out to me by a coworker and confirmed by our inhouse facsimile of the original OED. The problem is the word saboteurs. Lincoln could not or would not have used this term. Although coined by the French in the early nineteenth century, its use in English dates only to the era of the Wobblies (the OED's first citation is from 1918).

It's almost as if somebody were trying to sabotage the quote itself.

Update: Finally, the Washington Times not only corrected the article, they removed it--more than two days after it was posted and only after enduring ridicule by a number of newspaper articles and news programs and after Gaffney was humiliated by Glenn Greenwald on the Alan Colmes Show.

Paglia the Poltergeist

2007-02-14T00:22:00.000-05:00

The headline of the lead article in tomorrow's Salon reads like a veiled threat:

Camille's Back!

No, it's not a tagline promoting a Tobe Hunter movie. Instead, it announces the return of one of the silliest and vainest darlings offered by the publishing world since Erich von Däniken.

Only two weeks ago, I took Salon editors to task for scolding their audience for a lack of civility, arguing that the trendsetters in that department had been their own colleagues in the media--"insult mongers like Ann Coulter, Camille Paglia, Dinesh D'Souza, Dale Peck, and Bill O'Reilly."

Apparently, the folks at Salon had a change of heart. They now feel that spurious insults and shoddy writing make up a market best not left to their readers. Presumably, the other five on my list weren't available at the moment, so they had to settle for Camille Paglia. (And, I'm sure they will be shocked--shocked--that their unhappy readers are responding in kind.)

In the inaugural relaunch, Paglia takes credit for getting Andrew Sullivan fired, shakes Mitt Romney's hand and predicts he's going to be president (that ought to make K. Lo. jealous), and brags about telling African Americans that Anna Nicole Smith died (huh?). We are treated intermittently to various pleas for relevance:

"I burst on the national scene in 1990 . . . I addressed this matter last week in "Religion and the Arts in America," the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College . . . By 1996, I was writing a controversial cover story about Hillary for the New Republic . . . I was asked to review Hillary's memoir, "Living History," by the Times of London in 2003 . . . While waiting to go on the David Brudnoy Show . . . ABC's "Nightline" called via my publisher for comment, but I felt far too upset to go on TV . . . The current February issue of Interview magazine, where I am a contributing editor."

Rarely has so uninteresting a resume padded such a lengthy article filled with so little substance.

The endless stream-of-unconsciousness blather includes such valuable tidbits as:

This past Sunday night, there was a floating, mesmerizingly sensuous moment on Matt Drudge's radio show as he segued long from the midnight news with Yaz's "Winter Kills" ("Green in your love on bright days/ You grew sun blind/ You thought me unkind/ To remind you how winter kills"). No one but Drudge these days uses AM radio for artistic mood and ambience. People who know Drudge simply through his Web site are clueless about his eclectic musical sensibility.

Sorry, Camille, I don't need Matt Drudge to dust off the Yaz albums in my vinyl collection. Nor do I need Camille Paglia to tell me that one of Edward's "problems" is that he sports "a dated hairstyle that looks femme and foofy at a time when military buzz cuts and Caesarian close crops are in." After all, look who's talking.

Update: Let's all remember what the late Molly Ivins had the prescience to say about Paglia way back in 1991.

If Wishes Were Horses (Jonah Goldberg Remix)

2007-02-08T18:52:00.000-05:00

Today, as Atrios kindly reminds us, is Jonah Goldberg Day.

Two years ago, the nationally syndicated columnist and self-proclaimed "expert" (of what, it's still not clear), in a self-described "fit of pique" made a wager with Middle East expert Juan Cole:

Since he [Cole] doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there's another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I'm all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc.

Matthew Yglesas has a brief summary of the debate, the proffered wager, and the aftermath. Cole, to his credit, declined to treat the Iraqi people as if they were a bunch of greyhounds at the track.

Goldgerg now argues that he's off the hook, since the bet was "off."

Nice try, JG.

There are two issues here: (1) the proposed bet (which was tawdry, as both parties have come to agree) and (2) Jonah's allegations of his own so-called expertise and judgment when weighed against Juan Cole's extraordinary knowledge of affairs in the Middle East. The first action may have been null and void, but the debate--which preceded and superceded the wager--was alive and well and should call into question anything Goldberg says about the Iraqi civil war. He was not only wrong (and Cole was right), he was spectacularly wrong.

But Jonah's new strategy in response to his second defeat is more telling: He approvingly quotes an e-mail correspondent who says Jonah "made the bet in the honest hope and desire that things would and could get better [emphasis added]."

And right there you can see the problem. The entire debacle in Iraq has been faith-based rather than reality-based: our entry into Iraq and our subsequent strategies there are founded not on what could have been done (according to experts familiar with both the region and with the pitfalls of "nation-building") but on what might have been done if we lived in some neo-con utopia that never has and never will exist.

This isn't a matter of bad guesswork, or a reasonable prediction gone bad. Instead, the state of affairs in Iraq today is something any (and every) reasonable and/or knowledgeable person predicted two years ago--and many folks predicted it four years ago. That our foreign policy continues to be dominated by the faith-based war-planning community is frighteningly clear not only because "pundits" like Jonah Goldberg refuse to leave the arena in shame but also because non-experts like Fred Kagan are now advising Bush and Cheney.

For more than five years, the supporters of Bush's policies have been praying, not thinking; they have based their outlook entirely "on honest hope and desire" rather than on evidence or reason. Hell, I have the "honest hope and desire" that (to quote Jonah's correspondent again) "liberty and democracy [will come to] one of the most troubled regions of the world"--let's start with China. But I would be a total ass to suggest, much less believe, that we could invade a sovereign country (like China), overthrow their authoritarian regime, occupy their territory, install a government friendly to our interests, control their natural resources, reconcile longstanding ethnic differences, and make them love us.

Imagine if a company's CFO announced in a board meeting that his rosy outlook for future growth was based mostly on "honest hope and desire." He'd be filing for unemployment within hours. It's time for Jonah and Company to do the same.

The Best Ever (So Far)

2007-01-31T17:37:00.000-05:00

In Time magazine, Lev Grossman gives notice to a new volume that solicits, collates, and tabulates the top-ten all-time favorite books as chosen by 125 well-known writers. The results, along with all 125 lists and a variety of supplementary materials, are gathered in J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten.

I agree with Grossman: such lists are “basically an obscenity”—ridiculous parlor exercises that are often as not used to promote friends’ novels and flaunt one’s own superior and eclectic tastes.

Except my list, of course.

Here, alphabetical by author, are twenty choices for my all-time personal favorite novels (so far). To avoid the vexing question of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Dante, not to mention all the Greeks, I’ve excluded plays and poetry. (I'm bending Zane's rules here, there is no way I could begin to pare this list down to ten—and the only way I could rank them would be to run them all through my iPod shuffle.)

-- Emma, Jane Austen
-- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
-- Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
-- A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham
-- Bleak House, Charles Dickens
-- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
-- Light in August, William Faulkner
-- Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-- The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner
-- The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
-- The Known World, Edward P. Jones
-- The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence
-- The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham
-- Pierre, Herman Melville*
-- Beloved, Toni Morrison
-- The Bell, Iris Murdoch
-- At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O'Neill
-- Blindness, Jose Saramago
-- Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
-- Germinal, Emile Zola

And I have to give honorable mention to Richard Adams’s Watership Down, which was my favorite book as a young reader and which is single-handedly responsible for my spending more money on books than on groceries each week. (If you have his address, please forward it to me so I can send him an invoice.)

I also wish I could find room for something by Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Willa Cather, John Fowles, or Doris Lessing. Although I've read and I like nearly everything they've written, no single work catapults itself onto this list.

This very personal list, like anyone’s, could not be considered an “all-time greatest” list. For starters, my reading hasn’t been comprehensive enough (I haven’t yet read War and Peace or Middlemarch or anything by Dostoevsky or Dumas, and I haven’t finished In Search of Lost Time), nor is it global enough (there are only three works in translation included here), nor can I remember many of the books I read 25 years ago (such as works by Conrad and Fielding and Stevenson, all of which I remember enjoying--but were they really as good as my memory insists?).

Even so, nearly all of these authors are included in Zane’s complete listing of books chosen by the 125 writers (the exceptions are John Gardner, Jamie O’Neill, and—surprisingly—Jose Saramago).

* So, do I really think Pierre is better than Moby-Dick? Yes.

Yak and Cheese

2007-01-30T13:16:00.000-05:00

On the very same day that Gary Kamiya publishes for Salon a 5,300-word article complaining about the quality of letters to the editor and the presence of trolls on the Internet [see my previous post], the editors of Salon vet and vomit a bizarrely smug 1,800-word muckraking column denouncing--and I am not making this up--boxed macaroni and cheese.

It's the new paradigm: yak and yuk. Needless to say, the letters are predictably priceless.

What used to be an influential online magazine has become a sad display of masturbatory self-parody. I dread that one day budding reporters will look back and regard this confluence of events as a high point of groundbreaking journalism and a watershed in American food writing. Sigh.

Readers' Reign of Terror

2007-01-29T23:28:00.000-05:00

Gary Kamiya has written a J'Accuse! article for Salon. He ponders the demoralizing rise in mean-spirited reaction from online readers and mourns the increasing dominance of trolls. While well-meaning and thoughtful, the article is also unappealingly defensive and rather myopic in its purely "blame the audience" approach.

In the spirit of Kamiya's tone, I've posted a dignified response on Salon, and I repeat it here in slightly modified form (and with a couple of embarrassing typos fixed--Salon's submission form is even worse than Blogger's):

It's easy to confirm Kamiya's premise--that a chunk of the Internet's readership has increasingly responded to journalists with vitriol and stupidity. But ... Kamiya never wonders what some of the causes might be for this phenomenon. Did the Internet itself somehow generate and nurse a million little HAL 9000s who never before existed?

Here's a clue: when I first read the sentence beginning "[the Internet] has also thrown open the gate to creeps, narcissists and wannabe Byrons," I honestly thought Kamiya was describing not readers, but rather the least of his colleagues, the extraordinary number of untalented journalists, hacks, and commentators working for online news sources, partisan newsletters, talk radio, and (probably worst of all) the proliferating number of specialty magazines. Throw in Kamiya's later reference to "fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts," stir in the word "drunks," and you have the century-old stereotype of--well, of journalists.

And therein lies the truth: the maddening and maddened crowd is taking their cues not only from Gary Kamiya, Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, and Dana Milbank, but also from insult mongers like Ann Coulter, Camille Paglia, Dinesh D'Souza, Dale Peck, and Bill O'Reilly. (Do I really need to point out that the latter group is more famous and certainly richer than the former?)

Why do Kamiya and his colleagues seem surprised that there exists an element of the Internet community that is no more civilized than Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage? Have they listened to what those "blowhards" have to say about the liberals on Salon lately? Is the reprehensible way some Salon readers treated the Yaskulka family really any different, in substance or style, than the way an appalling number of pundits on major network and cable news programs treat, say, Cindy Sheehan or the "Jersey Widows"?

As someone who used to work for a print magazine and an academic journal, I can vouch that there have always been cranks. But the sheer quantity (and, sometimes, the quality) of hostile reaction should make anyone wonder if maybe today's audience is nothing more than a crystal-clear mirror of Kamiya's profession.

Ideas Have Consequences

2007-01-29T10:51:00.000-05:00

Over at National Review's postmodern blog, The Corner, Mark Steyn begins a chirruppy little morality lesson with this head-spinning morsel:

Remember the days when our segregated society was so deeply prejudiced that different groups had to use separate bathrooms.

Why, yes, Mark we do. Remember which magazine proudly boosted Jim Crow laws and boasted the byline of Richard Weaver in its pages?

You remember: the Richard Weaver who Jonah Goldberg still recommends as required reading and who wrote this nugget on Jim Crow in 1957:

'Integration’ and ‘Communization’ are, after all, pretty closely synonymous. In light of what is happening today, the first may be little more than a euphemism for the second. It does not take many steps to get from the ‘integrating’ of facilities to the ‘communizing’ of facilities, if the impulse is there.

You would think that, given its proud Aryan history, National Review writers would learn to just avoid the topic of segregation altogether.

Ideas have consequences, indeed.

Bachmann Turns Her Overdrive

2007-01-28T15:59:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure what the headline for this post might mean; perhaps I'm just dizzily slaphappy with the thought that we've already found a replacement for Katherine Harris, whom most of us were beginning to miss. (Oh, fess up, you were too.)

Michele Bachmann, you've surely heard by now, is the freshman Representative who felt up Bush after the State of the Union address. While Bachmann sure looks like the clone of the great dame Harris herself, she is the spiritual spawn of Tammy Faye and Phyllis Schlafly, what with her "special obsession" with gays, gays, gays.

Bachmann's most notable cause in the Minnesota State Senate was her repeated (and failed) attempts to introduce an anti-gay marriage amendment--a cause which brought her lesbian stepsister Helen LaFave out of the closet and onto the hearing floor to testify against the bill, not to mention to write this zinger for the local newspaper's letter section mocking Bachmann's own "lifestyle" choices:

For someone whose dream job has always been that of a wife and mother, state Sen. Michele Bachmann seems to have made an odd career choice. The Jan. 1 photo depicting her vacuuming in heels is just as confusing. Perhaps what she really meant to say is that her dream job has always been that of politician and actress.

Helen LaFave, Minneapolis

Bachmann had been an embarrassment to Minnesota for quite some time before she pawed her way into the national spotlight. Her moonbat buffoonery is sure to provide plenty of laughs in the coming months, and Watertiger at Firedoglake starts off the season by dispensing with Bachmann's Bushlust and, as a bonus, thoughtfully drags her husband (a therapist who is virulently homophobic and allegedly "cures gays") into the cesspool of innuendo:

God woke me up this morning and told me to wear something ivory-colored on Tuesday night. I think I know just the outfit. Now what to do about jewelry? I can't ask Marcus - he's sound asleep after last night's session of making homosexuals ungay at those evil nightclubs in St. Paul. I wonder if God will speak to me (I mean, The Father, not studmuffin George Bush!)

As for the Divine Ms. Harris, she was seen handing out her business cards to the State of the Union crowd. How the mighty have fallen.

Fredo and the Buffet: A Morality Tale

2007-01-19T02:33:00.000-05:00

There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away. . . . the Constitution doesn’t say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended. -- Alberto Gonzales

Once upon a time, immediately after the glorious days of King George I, a court jester known by the name of Fredo found himself out of a job. He examined the various opportunities available to him and decided to open a restaurant.

In The Free World, there was no better guarantee of success with consumers than to allure them with the promise of plenty. So Fredo made a sign advertising an "All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: Only $9.99."

The night of the grand opening, more than a hundred eager customers arrived, paid the cashier, and seated themselves at their tables, awaiting the unveiling of the buffet tables. When the gold-woven linens were lifted, the guests were astonished to see that the trays were empty.

"Where is the food?" they asked Fredo.

Fredo responded, "You all paid to enter so that I would let you have all you can eat. I did not say that I would provide the food."

And they all lived hungrily ever after.

Dinesh D'Souza, His Inner Mullah, and His Wallet

2007-01-18T10:50:00.000-05:00

Last September I trashed Dinesh D'Souza's new book, based solely on the publisher's catalog copy and without seeing the book itself; I concluded that "D'Souza feels that we must be more like the Taliban and Al Qaeda in order to convince them that we're really not their enemies after all."

Well, the reviews are in, and perhaps I had jumped the gun on Doubleday's shiny new lead title for the spring season. The Enemy at Home is is apparently worse than I ever imagined.

Writing for Washington Post Book World, Murray Bass says exactly that, calling the book "the worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11." (And what a competitive field that is.)

In the upcoming New York Times Book Review (I'll add the link once the review is available online--here it is), Alan Wolfe remarks how D'Souza portrays Osama bin Laden as a "quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person" who "uses a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him." D'Souza goes on to argue, according to Wolfe, that "conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their combat enemy: the cultural left." Such moral relativism causes Wolfe to howl:

I sense [D'Souza] is appealing to people like me because I write for The New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this "decent" liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D'Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker. . . . His book is a national disgrace. . . .

Tell us how you really feel, Alan.

And in Slate, Timothy Noah concludes that D'Souza breaks through one of Noah's customary restrictions:

Ordinarily, though, I would never equate hard-right views on these matters [gay marriage, feminism, divorce, Hollywood, etc.]—even from a Dartmouth Review alumnus—with the rantings of an Islamist terrorist. I do so now only because D'Souza has written an entire book encouraging me to do just that. He wants his fellow conservatives to embrace their inner mullah. [emphasis in original]

Hugh at Jihad Watch mourns the passing of decency at the Hoover Institution (the host to D'Souza's inner mullah), which "once had Sidney Hook and Robert Conquest as fellows." But I have to point a finger at Doubleday, whose editors have apparently has decided to fill a perceived market void in outrageous stupidity.

Contrary to the sarcastic title of my post last September, I don't believe that D'Souza really wants Americans to join forces with the Taliban. Nobody at an institution hosted on the campus of Stanford University could be this stupid (and, if he is, then he has pathological issues I can't even begin to address). Instead, I believe that D'Souza is more than happy to make a complete idiot of himself on the Colbert Show, as long as he sells some books and makes some money. You might call it "Fear Factor" syndrome, where you can become famous by acting like a repulsive imbecile. Apollo of Snarky Bastards (a self-described "religious and social conservative") perceptively and wittily notes that "D’Souza’s been possessed by the Coultergeist."

Nor do I believe that the editors at Doubleday thought this book was truly worthy of publication. Doubleday has cynically decided that publishing a Bollywood version of Ann Coulter and making a quick buck are worth far more to their corporate interests than the damage they may cause by creating divisions among Americans and inciting violence against gays, women, and whoever might be deemed a "leftist."

It's not that I'm advocating "censorship," folks. There are plenty of presses that would have been happy to publish a screed like the one penned by D'Souza--but they exist at the fringe of publishing world, along with the disgraced Judith Regan and "publisher" Tom Metzger. That Doubleday has proudly decided to join them is a disgrace to the publisher of such classy writers as Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem.

Update: Confirming what D'Souza's whoredom has bought him, TBogg points to a damning San Diego Reader article that describes his "home in that gated and guarded warren of mansions called Fairbanks Ranch" with "six bedrooms, seven and a half baths, and a four-car garage, where they keep their maroon 1992 Jaguar XJS." The upkeep on such an estate alone must motivate him to plumb lower and lower depths.

Later in the article, the booty and plunder is put in raw terms:

One estimate, reported by James Warren in the Washington Monthly, says D'Souza garnered $1.5 million over ten years from the American Enterprise Institute; another estimate has him receiving $173,000 from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to help underwrite Illiberal Education; on hundreds of campuses, he's received, as he told Booknotes, "a few thousand dollars to give the same speech, with minor variations, again and again and again"; and his books remain in print and sell healthily.

Yes, America, stupidity is a goldmine.

The Cakewalk at Waterloo

2007-01-14T16:38:00.000-05:00

Josh Marshall shines a light on exactly why we're screwed in Iraq. It's been widely noted that the "architect" of the Great White Surge is Frederick Kagan, a "military historian" who has never been closer to a battlefield or, for that matter, a boot camp than a stint teaching history to bored cadets at West Point. (For a defense of Kagan's "qualifications," see this post by Steven D. at the Booman Tribune.)

Kagan's scholarly area of "military" expertise is Napoleon. His projected 4-volume history only takes him through the opening months of 1815--which pretty much sums up the problem right there. I'm imagining Kagan finally reaching Chapter 40 of his edition of Lockhart, finding out what happened to cause the "gathering tears, and tremblings of distress" that June, and making an urgent call to the hotline in the Oval Office ("Uh, George? There's something I need to tell you...").

Still, perhaps somewhere in Kagan's empirically calculated Iraqi plan there's room for a 21st-century emperor. One with clothes, even.

But I'm being too pessimistic. After all, with a stroke of his antique cavalry sword, Kagan himself has magically reduced the absolute minimum number of troops needed for the surge from 80,000 to 30,000. What's 50,000 among friends? And, who knows? Things could always turn around in 2007, as Kevin Horrigan notes hopefully in his preview of an imaginary textbook of the future:

[Bush's] famous speech in January 2007 owed a lot to Kagan, particularly where he stressed, "Hey, we're at war," and that higher U.S. casualties, albeit unfortunate, are worth it when U.S. interests are at stake. Mr. Bush's call for young Americans to sign up for the military (30,000 more combat troops were needed) was so eloquent that thousands of young people, including his own twin daughters, immediately stopped partying and signed up for extended 15-month tours on the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad.

And even though Congress had shifted to Democratic control, billions in new reconstruction dollars were authorized because "reconstruction contracts" is just another way of saying "pork." Unlike the first $80 billion of reconstruction money, this time there was no fraud and profiteering. Insurgents stood aside in Iraq to let the reconstruction projects proceed.

It was a cakewalk.

Gored

2007-01-02T23:18:00.000-05:00

In Salon, Allen Barra, who usually is more judicious, dismisses Gore Vidal's entire oeuvre on the basis of his admittedly ill-considered and certainly narcissistic memoirs (Palimpsest and the apparently redundant exercise called Point-to-Point Navigation).

True, Vidal has always dotted his i's with boldface celebrity names and crossed his t's with his blueblood connections. And I agree with Barra that Vidal's "dogged insistence that there is no such thing as a homosexual or heterosexual person, but merely 'heterosexualists' and 'homosexualists'" is a bit too twee for thee and me. (It would be shameless, yet appropriate, to pull a Vidal here: I've had to listen to Gore himself bloviate mindlessly and endlessly on this very topic at a cocktail party.)

Yet it's far too facile to dismiss, as Barra does, Vidal's entire literary career because the author can be, well, tiresome; it's akin to dismissing Ezra Pound for his fascism. I believe, for example, that Myra Breckinridge will survive the cannon of the canon. Barra asserts that it "is little read today" (and it does seem to have gone recently out of print), but that's hardly a barometer; it's too easy to remind him that Faulkner was completely out of print (and, by implication, "little read") when he won the Nobel Prize.

Similarly, I think several of Vidal's historical novels will continue to attract readers long after he's gone. In addition, I recently read The City and the Pillar for the first time; it is not a "masterpiece" by any means, but it is surely a significant work--an influential precursor to such works as Giovanni's Room and City of Night--that deserves more than Barra's curt dismissal. And I may be alone here, but Kalki and Duluth are deserving of rediscovery. Overall, I'm sure there are truly bad Vidal novels, but I guess I've been the lucky reader who has managed to avoid them.

I think Barra will eventually regret this seemingly petulant review. He surely knows that one shouldn't let an artist's personality get in the way of an assessment of the work. It's not easy (okay, okay--I can't bear to watch anything by Mel Gibson either), but it's the honorable thing to do.

Addendum: Speaking of narcissistic, dishy, name-dropping autobiographies by "homosexualist" authors, I should have noted that Tennessee Williams's Memoirs is back in print, with an introduction by John Waters (note to publisher: fabulously brilliant!). By coincidence, I recently read this book, and I found it hilarious, campy, and endearingly bitchy. Almost needless to say, you'll find Vidal in its pages, but more memorable are Williams's infrequent and catty encounters with Thornton Wilder, which are everything you'd expect when two titans from The Theatre collide.

Praying for More

2007-01-02T21:42:00.000-05:00

Almost a year ago, I finally read Melissa Fay Greene's stunning Praying for Sheetrock (1991), an expose of corruption and racism in a "backwater" Georgia town during the 1970s and 1980s. Not only is Greene a perceptive, brave, lyrical writer, she also was a witness to most of the events, working at Georgia Legal Services and marrying one of the lawyer-heroes. (That her participation is not apparent until the very end of the book makes her balanced retelling all the more admirable.) Reading her work made me not only wish I could write like she can, but also that I could live so admirably.

I've been meaning to read more of her books, and this short interview with Jennifer Reese posted at the NBCC's blog has transformed that intention into the status of a New Year's resolution. Greene's twin pursuits of justice and compassion are what I'd like to see more of in 2007.

Where Jesus Shops

2006-12-20T11:14:00.000-05:00

In an article for Good magazine, author Nancy French provides, in the original Aramaic, a plethora of scriptural support for Christians who want to shop at Wal-Mart. Who knew? All the ingredients of the Sermon on the Mount can be found there:

And that's the thing about Wal-Mart shoppers. We don't want tips on how to live or entertain or save the sharks. We just want a popcorn bowl, the largest flat screen television we can afford, and a new Xbox 360. Oh, and we'll need laundry detergent and paper towels, too.

Good for Nancy. I certainly can't begrudge her ability to find spiritual comfort in aisle 10, along with a gift for her son "next to the whoopee cushions, and it only cost $1.50" (her very words).

But, as Amanda Marcotte translates for those of us with only a passing knowledge of dead languages, Nancy French seems to be under the impression that the Secret Progressive Manifesto requires all good "liberal secularists" to donate their hard-earned money to a different capitalist cause: behemoth corporations who cater to an upper crust far removed from the hoi polloi:

Urban Outfitters, for example, reveals eclectic style; Williams-Sonoma illustrates a sophisticated domesticity, and IKEA (admittedly affordable, but 300 miles from my house) demonstrates the urban need for maximizing space. [...] Blue State shopping, you see, is more than just acquiring items. It Makes a Statement, it Reflects Personal Style, it Helps Save the Planet. [...]

One of the reasons liberals believe evangelicals lack moral gravitas is because we don't attach our beliefs to our purchases like an overpriced service plan.

In other words, according to the Gospel of Nancy, liberals are all wealthy and the wealthy are all liberal.

Now, this not-so-wealthy liberal secular humanist (an admittedly unscientific sample) has never been to IKEA. And perhaps the teenagers I saw during my one or two purchase-free visits to Urban Outfitters were really Greenpeace activists disguised as Suburban Mallrats.

But Williams-Sonoma? Why, there's one just a couple of blocks away from me, but the store always seems filled with Bree Van de Kamp clones who strut perkily fresh from their Upper East Side Republican Women's Equestrian Club meetings and whose styling and plastic surgery were inspired more by the remake of The Stepford Wives than by the Independent Film Channel--that sculpted look known to drag queens as "camp chic."

In fact, they all look suspiciously similar to how I, with my fondness for stereotypes, would imagine someone named Nancy French looks.

Dirty Pinkos Invade the National Review

2006-12-19T17:50:00.000-05:00

John Derbyshire gets mugged by free enterprise and turns into a shrieking liberal:

My health insurer has just notified me, in a brief form letter, that my monthly premiums are to rise from $472.33 to $857.00 on January 1st. That's an increase of 81 percent. ***E*I*G*H*T*Y*-*O*N*E* *P*E*R*C*E*N*T*** Can they do that? I called them. They sound pretty confident they can. Ye gods!

Um, John, really. Can they do that? What magazine do you work for?

Meanwhile, Derbyshire's colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez hangs out on the same blog to remind us what really matters to the underemployed, pajama-clad readers of The Corner:

Just on the Off Chance You Were in a Good Mood this Morning... it is about to end: The Bush administration has sent signals since last month's elections that the president is prepared to accept some tax increases on upper-income families...

I'm not sure which of these possibilities is more frightening: the implication that National Review employees consider themselves members of the upper class or the delusion under which K.Lo. thinks this news will depress her readers and her colleagues.

Meanwhile, the cutely named Jane Galt operates under the equally frightening delusion that rising health care costs are unique to New York State.

Granted, health care certainly costs more in New York, but (news flash) everything costs more in New York. And it should also be noted that Derbyshire's 2006 monthly premium was far, far below the average for, say, Nassau County. But Jane asserts, without evidence, that state regulation--not the market--are responsible for John's 81% rate increase between 2006 and 2007.

Yes, Jane, the situation is stable in Wyoming:

Families USA found that annual premiums for family health care coverage offered through the workplace in Wyoming increased on average from $5,605 in 2000 to $12,274 in 2006, an increase of $6,669 or 119 percent.

And Kansas, too:

The report by Families USA says median wages in Kansas rose a little less than 16 percent from 2000 to 2006. During that same time period, premiums for employer-sponsored family health insurance skyrocketed more than 78 percent.

Galt even claims that "Employer purchased insurance is on the expensive side in New York, but nothing like the individual policies"--even though a simple Google search and the use of a caculator would tell her that, in 2007, John Derbyshire's individual policy will cost ($10,284) almost the same as the national average forecasted for employer-provided plans ($10,018, not including co-pays and deductibles).

I'm sure Jane still scratches her head, wondering why she and her fellow conservatives/libertarians are increasingly out of touch with the average American--and with reality. That brain-tickler is as puzzling as her animus to evidence.

Joker's Wild

2006-12-13T15:17:00.000-05:00

So Jeff Greenfield insists his fashionista comments comparing Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were just a joke. (See previous post.)

The pretty-much-unanimous verdict (even from Greenfield's wife, apparently) is that the preplanned segment wasn't funny--and it wasn't obviously a joke. Comedy Central won't be calling him any time too soon.

And, looking for a third time at the video clip, I have to say that I doubt Greenfield's word on this: He may have meant to be sarcastic, even mean, but I don't think he was joking--distinctions usually lost on the preciously self-absorbed pundit class. Greenfield's entire segment is focused around a serious premise: he feels strongly (and clearly) that a presidential candidate shouldn't appear so hip or dress so casual, that Obama should fill Greenfield's preconceived notion of what a politician should look like.

Coat and tie are required for admission to Jeff's country club--until recently, whites-only.

It's all about context. CNN has been filling its schedule with inappropriate commentary about Obama's middle name (Hussein, for those not in the know) and last name (sounds like--well, you know), not to mention his race. The power of suggestion in this context is alone worrisome; I'd expect this type of "joking" from the clowns at the NRO's Corner. Instead of addressing the issues and the news on the so-called Situation Room, Greenfield has time to mock the way Obama dresses. (See: Pelosi, Nancy; Clinton, Hillary; et al.)

The Carpetbagger Report has the most trenchant comments on Greenfield's misfire; I suggest you read the whole thing, but I want to highlight its postscript:

Greenfield’s shot at bloggers — we feel the need “to fill all that space every day, or hour, or 15 minutes” — was cheap and unnecessary. Indeed, this little incident, if anything, demonstrates the problem isn’t with bloggers filling pages, it’s with news networks filling 24/7 airtime. Did CNN so thoroughly cover every major news story on earth on Sunday that the network had time left over for jokes about Obama’s name and clothing? Please.

Put simply, instead of commenting on the news, Greenfield created it.

Separated at Birth

2006-12-12T14:09:00.000-05:00

Wow. Just wow. CNN "analyst" Jeff Greenfield flushed the remnants of his credibility into a cesspool with these beyond-odious comments:

But, in the case of Obama, he may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb. Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable.

And maybe that's not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke.

[...]

Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads?

Gosh, I just don't understand why I didn't see the connection before.

Let's see now.

Ask yourself, is there any other well-known journalist who dresses the way Jeff Greenfield does and who sports a similar haircut and pair of glasses? Why, yes. It is disgraced reporter Stephen Glass, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the Hair-Club-for Men-and-wire-glasses look agreeable.

And maybe that's not the comparison a respectable journalist really wants to evoke.

(Oh, and speaking of that jacket-and-no-tie look that Greenfield associates with "charter members of the axis of evil.")

Panic! (Hang the DJ)*

2006-12-01T10:59:00.000-05:00

A funky odor of panic and denial is wafting from the pundits and pols in the Beltway. The Great American Wet Dream in Iraq is over, and its visionaries are left collectively with the evidence of their own dirty linen, which they are furtively trying to deny, hide, clean, or destroy as fast as their sticky hands will let them.

Glenn Greenwald strings up onanist Thomas Friedman as a prime example of the "frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country." For the last four years, Friedman (whose Geraldo Rivera shtick has never struck me as particularly intelligent or believable) has offered a curious, but hardly unique, brand of sophistry, which Greenwald neatly encapsulates for the PowerPoint generation:

(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.

Now, of course, Friedman and his ilk are claiming justification of sorts, having said as early as in 2003 that "I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the country into his war [emphases added]." In other words, the war was justified and good and the right decision, but Bush wasn't the man to implement the policy. Such disingenuousness allows Friedman to say: see, I was right all along.

But this was never Friedman's war. Greenwald politely describes this entire line of reasoning as the product of an "adolescent fantasy world," and it's true: Friedman may as well argue that, gosh, we would have won the war if only we had a bigger army and bionic hornets and atomic jet packs. The truth Friedman will never face is that he consistently supported the war with the full understanding that Bush was president and that our army's resources are limited and that futuristic weapons are the stuff of science fiction.

(Update: As I was finishing this post, Greenwald added a pointer to Harold Myerson's 2005 article that anticipates my response to Friedman's "my war" inanity: "Was it too much to ask the nation’s most important foreign-policy journalist to focus on Bush’s war -- particularly because, well, it was Bush, and not Friedman, who was president?")

The second and unguardedly related symptom of the Great Pundit Panic of 2006 is the blitheness with which they try to shift the blame of our Mideast catastrophe from themselves to the Iraqi people (i.e., we gave them democracy on a silver platter and then they went and voted in a bunch of douchebags who we would never supported had we given ourselves the power to install a better dictatorship).

Worst of all, as Walter Shapiro quotes with delicious irony from the now-infamous Hadley memo about Maliki, Iraqis have elected someone who "is the captive of 'a small circle' of advisors who are 'coloring his actions and his interpretations of reality.'" An American-style democracy would never have done something like that.

More desperately, these self-anointed Magi and their neocon allies have taken to blaming the American people as a whole (excluding, of course, themselves). As Digby says,

Blaming the American people is an excellent political strategy, however, and I hope these conservatives keep it up. There's nothing that betrayed voters like more than to be called stupid, cowardly and traitorous.

Desperation has rarely been quite so transparent--and so ugly.

* Here's a handy reference for you kids who are too damn young to recognize the allusion.

Seeing Green

2006-11-22T21:27:00.000-05:00

Julia Turner has a nifty little article about how magazine editors avoid the color green on their covers. And nobody knows why.

It's not just magazines. In the book publishing industry, one occasionally confronts the same prejudice (and this was particularly true during the 1980s, when I began my career as a book and direct-mail designer). As Turner notes, the most bizarre aspect is that it's a prohibition that has never (to my knowledge) been backed by evidence. In an industry that is focus-grouped to death, Turner assumed there was proof, but

I was surprised, then, that when I asked the research arms of magazine publishing houses and independent consultants whether they had data showing that green suppresses newsstand sales, the answer was no.

I was a rebel (and not the only one) against this so-called standard; a small number of designers held that, because green was so rarely used, green covers really stand out (which makes all the difference on the crowded shelves of a bookstore.) I remember a meeting where I held up copies of James Carroll's Mortal Friends and John Fowles's Daniel Martin as two best-selling examples by maverick designers. Many of my early (and best) book covers were green, and my first brochure ever to win an award was a rich metallic copper green. Truth be told, after a few successes, I never heard any complaints from either authors or editors, and now, it seems, green book covers are no longer unusual.

An explanation I commonly heard was that blue appeals to women, red appeals to men, and green appeals to nobody. This sound-bite theory of non-sequiturs held weight mostly because the first two premises were, and are, so widely held. The truth, however, is a little more nuanced, as this summary indicates. Depending on the circumstance, blue is preferred by both sexes, but

According to a 1964 Color and Gender study, women favored blue-green (aka turquoise) more than men. This same study found that "76% of women preferred cool colors." and turquoise is a mix of the two cool colors of blue and green.

Still, green always "tests" well among both sexes. In addition, this online survey found "48% of the study participants preferred blue over yellow, red, and green" for Web site colors, with very little distinction between the sexes. (Interestingly, there is research for children's books that indicates green is ranked near the bottom, beating only black and yellow, while purple tops the list as the favorite.)

But, clearly, not everything can be (or should be) blue. Like any other prejudice, the case against green has always been one without much rhyme or reason.

File Under: Calculus, Moral and Mathematical

2006-11-17T23:38:00.000-05:00

It's been a fun two weeks over at the National Review's Corner, but none of its contributors hold a candle to the meltdown of a very repressed and very depressed Kathryn Lopez sulking over the landslide loss of her electoral idol Rick Santorum. (James Wolcott: "Her political crushes--for Santorum and especially for Mitt Romney--have passed the cute Sandra Dee stage into a nattering form of erotomania.")

Kathryn's unrequited itch has brought on a new social prescription: if K-Lo can't get any from Rick, nobody else is going to get any either. Her latest crusade is a defense of Eric Keroack, the Bush administration's appointment to head family-planning programs at HHS, who "is getting grief for his involvement with a pregnancy center that believes: 'that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.' "

Saint Kathryn asks rhetorically "Does Anyone Really Disagree with This?"--only to find out just about everyone does (including a few of her fellow writers and readers). Not to be cowed by a horde of nihilistic heathens, Kathryn ups the ante, arguing that "A contraceptive mentality is demeaning to women and men." You know where this is going: given the chance, as Andrew Sullivan points out, contraception would be banned in Keroack and K-Lo's Amerikka.

I might eventually regret writing publicly what many of you are thinking privately, but, my goodness, somebody over there clearly needs to get laid.

Meanwhile, another Cornered contributor John Derbyshire has (temporarily) cast off the Corner's visionary gloom and Kathryn's virginal doom to promote his intriguing new book, ambitiously called Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra.

Derbyshire has a "well-earned reputation as the most astute and outspoken Darwinian gadfly to emerge from the slum of modern intellectual conservatism" (so says Hoover Hog), but I still have a very difficult time getting past the gross-out caused by his pedantically pedophiliac remarks on Lolita a few months back.

Nevertheless, my inner geek is telling me to ignore the ickiness caused by Derbyshire's faux-Darwinian view of impressionable young boys and girls (not to mention his slaughter of American literature). I would love to see this book sell well, if only to prevent those same impressionable young boys and girls from becoming intellectually stunted journalists for the Washington Post.

Silver Linings in the Mist and Crows in the Graveyard

2006-11-08T15:30:00.000-05:00

It's unseemly for a gentleman to gloat.

Fortunately, this jaded diva from ~~the Bronx~~ ~~Manhattan~~ Brooklyn (I need to stop moving) has never been burdened with the sobriquet of gentleman and has no desire to become one anytime soon. So let's start off with this blast from the past from Brian the Boobhead Baptist:

Top 10 Reasons Katherine Harris Will Beat Bill Nelson
Fresh from the Katherine Harris website, are the 10 reasons why Katherine Harris will beat Bill Nelson. I provide it here for you liberals and naysayers that think Harris can't and won't win. We will see you in November.

You go, girl! Well, it's November, Brian, and I'll see you Harris and raise you Santorum (and Rumsfeld and Pombo and Doolittle and Ney and Foley and Tenant and Delay and Sweeney and Weldon and Sherwood and if I keep going people will think I'm a high-stakes gambler like William Bennett).

Showing that absolutely nothing can keep him down, Brian today boasts of a "Great Republican Night - November 7, 2006" because the GOP managed to retain their hold on most of the races on his little streetcorner in Southwest Knox County, Tennessee. Hire this man as manager for the nearest Silver Lining Department Store!

But the Nostradamus Award goes to Mark Noonan, who bravely offered this bit of prescient wisdom the morning of the election (and was immediately mocked for it by Glenn Greenwald):

As for me, this is a great day to be a Republican - I've been talking big about how well we're going to do and my faith, shaken from time to time, never failed. Now it is to be put to the acid test - we shall know within 24 hours of this writing if I've been whistling past the graveyard, or have been realistic in my predictions. I'm standing by my words: the GOP gains seats in both Houses. [emphasis added simply out of spite]

Today, Mark insists that's it's still A Great Time to be a Conservative Republican, perhaps because he has surveyed the landscape and has discovered belatedly that there aren't that many of them around anymore.

But (who knew?) he's an epicure, too:

First off:
Mmmmmm; nummy, nummy crow! Best I ever tasted!

Nice first step, Mark. Now about that graveyard...

The Map Turns Pink

2006-11-08T11:38:00.000-05:00

Let's peek at what the graceful conservatives at the official blog of The National Review were discussing as their candidates lost race after race in the House and the Senate over the last 24 hours.

Seen This Movie [Mona Charen]
Democrats in power in Capitol Hill; Ortega in power in Managua. Posted at 8:07 AM

Elections [James S. Robbins]
Ortega in power in Nicaragua, and Democrats in Congress? Can a "Dear Commandante" letter be far behind? Posted at 12:20 AM

Insert Your Own Mordant Joke Here [John Podhoretz]
Also in the news tonight: Sandinista Head Daniel Ortega Wins Presidential Election. Posted at 11:41 PM

Bad Guys' Songs [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Daniel Ortega's campaign song is "Give Peace a Chance" by John Lennon. Posted at 8:43 AM

Bellwether Nation? [John J. Miller]
Can a left-wing wave in the United States begin south of the border? Posted at 5:34 AM

So there you have it. Americans didn't just vote against Republicans; they participated in the Commie plot to take over North America.

Sigh. Mona Charen is right: We've seen this movie before.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

2006-11-06T21:55:00.000-05:00

Or perhaps in this case, it's: Toilet. Vase. Porcelain.

It takes an immeasurable amount of chutzpah for a certain someone to write this statement about the "male escort" who exposed the "Reverend" Ted Haggard (via TBogg):

More importantly, liberal gay Americans are getting a new hero, an untrustworthy, drug-dealing gay prostitute. Now there’s something to be proud of.

Perhaps we should just chalk this one up to professional jealousy?

Maybe next time Jeff Gannon/James Guckert can be our hero. By his own accounting, he's fully qualified.

Mommy, Did the President Just Fart?

2006-11-06T17:50:00.000-05:00

It would appear so. How else to explain the decision of Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist to avoid the "expected 10,000-person crowd that Bush was expected to draw at the Pensacola Civic Center." At the widely publicized rally, Bush was scheduled to introduce Crist, who opted instead to attend a bake sale in Delray Beach (or something like that).

So Bush--and the crowd--turned the event into an impromptu performance of Katherine Harris's "I Love Jews" concert tour.

And Crist's refusal to stand downwind from our rank President apparently incited Rove to a rare, unscripted outburst in front of the cameras:

Asked what the Crist cancellation meant for Bush, Rove said "Let's see how many people show up in Palm Beach on 24 hours notice versus 8 or 9,000 people in Pensacola." Rove also said to ask Crist's people why they cancelled. The pool producer noted that Rove was "a little uppity" in his response.

Some folks are getting a little testy...

Criminal Desperation

2006-11-06T11:30:00.000-05:00

Josh Marshall (among others) has been busy documenting the latest Republican scandal that won't be reported by the press in time for tomorrow (but you can bet we'll be hearing a lot about it after the Election). As Nicholas Beaudrot notes in a nutshell:

Republicans are harassing voters while pretending to be Democrats.

That is, the Republican Party is rather brazenly (and openly) making "robo-calls" with not one, but two twists. At first, the pre-recorded call sounds like it's from the Democratic candidate in the race. But if you hang up (as most normal people do when they get such calls), you'll get the call again and again and again. The idea, of course, is to disgust Democratic and independent voters with their own candidates.

It doesn't surprise me that Republicans are doing this in, say, Kansas. But it's a sign of true desperation that they're doing this in New York, where the Republican Party has virtually imploded.

For the first time in years, there is no significant Republican candidate running for any statewide office. The only potential for a challenge would have come for the office of Comptroller, because of Alan Hevesi's malfeasance--but the Republican opponent is an inexperienced joke--and the race seems certain to go to Hevesi.

Granted, perhaps Republicans think that this strategy of harassment may work in a few Congressional races--there are surprising Democratic challenges against such Republicans as Sue Kelly and the wife-beating Party Monster John Sweeney and pederast-enabling Thomas Reynolds. But all of these Democratic challenges, particularly Kirsten Gillibrand against Sweeney and Jack Davis against Reynolds, were long-shot campaigns that are in play mostly because of Republican scandals that no last-minute dirty trick will erase.

Instead, the Republican Party in New York is in desperate need of regrouping and rebuilding, and the backlash against these types of calls--among voters and among the media, not to mention with prosecutors and elections commissions--could wipe out the party's credibility for good in this state.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is ultimately responsible for these calls, but local Republican officeholders who care about the party's future in New York could stop them with a few phone calls to Ken Mehlman. Perhaps the State Republican Party hopes nobody will remember this latest trick two years from now. Or have the Republicans really decided to sacrifice the entire state of New York in the long term in order to retain control of one or two House seats in the short term?

Addendum: For those wondering about the legality of these calls, which has already attracted the attention various state attorney generals, here's a partial answer:

One of the calls features a woman who opens by saying "Hello. I'm calling with information about Paul Hodes." She goes on to criticize his position on taxes and ends by saying the call was paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to a tape recording released by the state Democratic Party.

According to the Federal Communications Commission Web site, automated calls must state the identity of the business, individual, or other entity making the call at the beginning of the message. [GOP committee spokesman] Burgos said the messages comply with all federal laws, but declined to comment specifically on the placement of the sponsor message.

Family Values: Straight Upside the Head

2006-10-31T22:20:00.000-05:00

From Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to James Inhofe--American voters have been repeatedly warned that gay unions would threaten the existence of the institution of marriage.

Maybe there's something to this argument after all. First, you have reports of Don Sherwood (R-PA) choking his mistress (and then, incredibly, apologizing for the affair in a commercial).

And now, this (via Talking Points Memo):

The wife of U.S. Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY) called police last December to complain her husband was "knocking her around'' during a late-night argument at the couple's home, according to a document obtained last week by the Times Union.

I see the nefarious gay agenda is having its desired effect, but who knew that subversive thoughts of two men (or, perhaps, two women) doing the deed would cause such violent and self-destructive behavior?

Update: I'm giving Mark Levin less than 24 hours before he ignores the horrifying substance of this story and instead blames Democrats and the Liberal Media for its timing.

Sweet and Innocent

2006-10-31T16:17:00.000-05:00

Ezra Klein reminds me once again why I shouldn't read his blog.

There's a new history of Spy magazine out that's getting good reviews. The publication was before my time...

Before my time. Let's see, Spy was around until eight years ago (although, granted, its first incarnation ended in 1994).

Geez, Ezra, what are you, 15? Thank you very much, but I really don't need a daily reminder that I'm old enough to be your father. So you're young, you're cute, you're intelligent, you're prematurely successful--just get over it already.

The Stupid and the Astute

2006-10-05T00:29:00.000-04:00

With remarkable sleuthing skills, certain members of the reality-deprived community have deducted, with no evidence whatsoever, that Democrats withheld documents regarding Mark Foley's page predilection until right before the election. See, for example, the ever fey and every fanciful Mark Levin, who points to the fact that CREW (an organization funded by--who else--George Soros) got copies of the e-mails in July.

Of course, CREW immediately turned over the e-mails to the FBI (which, if I recall correctly, still reports to George Bush), but Levin still insists that CREW's simply having the stuff

would certainly explain the timing of the public release of the information and the well-coordinated campaign now underway to smear the entire Republican party.

Never mind that we know for an absolute fact that the Republican leadership had those same e-mails for far longer--and as a result had complete control over the timing of their release or suppression. That, of course, would be introducing reality onto the same stage set they used to fake the Apollo moon landing.

Furthermore, I'll admit to confusion when I try to reconcile these two arguments: (a) Republican leaders reasonably assumed that the first set of (non-graphic) e-mails were just "over-friendly" and (b) Democratic insiders saw the very same e-mails and realized that they had uncovered the Millennium's First Great Political Sex Scandal.

What makes this theory almost believable is its reality-based assumption that Republicans, as a breed, are very, very stupid and that Democrats are very, very astute.

Then, of course, there's another fact just reported by The Hill (via Talking Points Memo):

Longtime Republican was source of e-mails

And that's just the headline, spelled out so that even the very, very stupid can understand it. For the very, very astute, there's more detail:

The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley's (R-Fla.) suspect e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP aide.

That aide has been a registered Republican since becoming eligible to vote, said the source, who showed The Hill public records supporting his claim.

The same source, who acted as an intermediary between the aide-turned-whistleblower and several news outlets, says the person who shared the documents is no longer employed in the House.

But the whistleblower was a paid GOP staffer when the documents were first given to the media.

So, it looks like Levin & Co. will need a new conspiracy theory. And, right on cue, the ever fey and ever fanciful (and very, very astute) Barney Frank (D-MA) fills us in:

Newsweek: What do you think about President Bush's reaction through all this?

Frank: There's not much he can do. They may be happy to get the attention off the Woodward book for a change.

So there we have it: Republicans (Foley, Hastert, Boehner, the FBI--hell, maybe even Levin) held off on disclosing the e-mails to the public because they knew the scandal would draw attention away from the incompetence and mendacity revealed by Bob Woodward in State of Denial. Then, they would blame the scandal on the Democrats and discuss the matter at press conferences shielded by the children of their constituents. Genius!

Now that's a conspiracy theory for the very, very astute.

Note: The original version of this post misidentified NRO contributor Mark Levin as NRO contributor Mark Steyn. Hell, who can tell them apart?

Have You No Sense of Decency?

2006-10-04T18:05:00.000-04:00

Good God. I take a couple of weeks off my blog-writing chores to (1) move to Brooklyn, (2) play catch-up at my real job, and (3) entertain my mother and sister while they are visiting New York.

And all hell breaks loose.

The entire argument over whether the USA should legalize torture was demoralizing enough, but, now, here we are debating whether or not (and which) House leaders have been enabling--and there is no other word for it--the abuse and/or harassment of teenage pages. On the one hand, it makes one's blood boil that two former high school teachers like Denny Hastert and John Shimkus either (at best) couldn't recognize the not-very-subtle signs on display by a lecherous predator or (at worst) cared less about the welfare of these kids than they did about their respective positions in Congress. Cruelly incompetent or callously cruel--take your pick.

On the other hand, it's sure hard not to be gleeful that, finally, the GOP leadership has been exposed as wearing (ahem) no clothes, which certainly reduces the likely audience for their newly formed circular firing squad.

Maybe I should probably have written again rather than finally. I thought that Hurricane Katrina had permanently stripped our current government of its paper toga constructed from competence and caring. Instead, we had to work our way down the alphabet a bit for Hurricane Mark to remove the final tatters of GOP integrity. (And I haven't even mentioned the "new" bombshell revelations by Bob "Am I Too Late for the Party" Woodward.)

In a few short days, after several years of government malfeasance, presidential power grabs, and partisan posturing, we've experienced a modern-day rerun of Joseph N. Welch's exposure of McCarthy and Cohn as lying, conniving, self-serving hypocrites. Fifty years from now, historians once again will wonder what in the hell took everyone so long to see these bastards for who they really are.

D'Souza Joins the Taliban

2006-09-12T00:42:00.000-04:00

Among others, Michael Berube (with accents), Ezra Klein, and Clif (at Outside the Tent) are mortified by the "Coulter-like" blurb for Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11.

Assuming the publisher's promotional copy accurately summarizes the book's contents, D'Souza follows in the footsteps of Jerry Falwell, who (not coincidentally) was the subject of a hagiography penned by D'Souza 12 years ago. His latest book claims to reveal exactly who's to blame for the September 11 attacks:

He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom--from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

So, do I have this right? D'Souza feels that we must be more like the Taliban and Al Qaeda in order to convince them that we're really not their enemies after all.

Um, Brother Dinesh--wouldn't it just be a whole lot easier if we all just became adherents of Islamic fundamentalism?

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason Magazine, though, wins the prize for the most appropriate and most sarcastic response to D'Souza's neo-fundamentalist screed:

I'm just hoping D'Souza's got the balls to object to the aspect of our sick society that infuriates the Islamists most of all: America's notorious tolerance for Jews. After all, hip hop and gay marriage are pretty small potatoes compared to that one.

I'm sure that part will be in his next book.

The Butler Did It

2006-09-07T14:37:00.000-04:00

My regularly scheduled irregular posts will now resume: I've found an apartment in Brooklyn--in East Williamsburg, to be precise. (I still have to move, but the hard part is over.) Following the Bronx and Manhattan, this will be my third borough in three decades

Previously I had disclosed that our landlord requested a 24% rent hike (to $3,350/month) for our 1-bedroom/converted-2-bedroom apartment. I've just discovered, however, that my current landlord has had a change of heart; they've now listed our apartment for $3,900/month. Yes, the real estate market in Manhattan is that crazy.

I'll start off with a follow-up to a previous post: "Guess the Mystery Author." HarperCollins has been selling a secret title with a September 12 release date, without identifying the author or the topic. Via Media Bistro, we learn that everyone's guesses were off: the book is not by or about Colin Powell, Michael Brown, Porter Goss, Tom DeLay, Jennifer Aniston, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Michael Moore, or even Princess Christina Oxenberg.

Instead, it's by Princess Diana's butler--his second book on their "relationship." (What--he's suddenly remembered "shattering, provocative and mesmerizing" stuff that didn't appear in the first book?)

Geez. What short-sighted publicist thought this was deserving of all the secrecy--and the inevitable letdown and derision? (Coming soon to the remainders section of your local bookstore...)

Perhaps next year we'll read a tell-all book by her chambermaid.

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)

2006-08-31T18:31:00.000-04:00

The life and career of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz were often just as notable as the eccentric characters who populate his wide-ranging works of fiction.

An outspoken social critic who urged moderation among Arabic nations, he was an early and vocal supporter of Egypt's 1978 peace treaty with Israel. A decade later, Mahfouz at first condemned the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as "intellectual terrorism"; he later mitigated his views.

For more than a century, Islamic fundamentalists had often charged Mahfouz himself with blasphemy, especially for his portrayal of Muhammad in Children of Gebelawi, a novel written in 1959 (and no longer in print in the West). Renewed denunciations of Mahfouz accompanied the Rushdie affair, and in 1992, a lone assailant stabbed him in front of his apartment building.

A good summary of Mahfouz's political activism can be found here.

The New York Times obituary calculates that he wrote "33 novels, 13 anthologies of short stories, several plays and 30 screenplays." But he will long be remembered outside of Egypt for his Nobel Prize in Literature, for his Cairo Trilogy, and (perhaps) for a film starring Selma Hayek, which took his novel set in Cairo, Midaq Alley, and transplanted it to Mexico City.

Not surprisingly, far more Americans have seen the movie than have read the novel--but both are excellent in their own ways. After I read the novel, I wrote that it is reminiscent of Tales of the City and "could be (unfairly) dismissed as Melrose Place in Cairo," but "scratch below the surface, and you'll find a morality tale about the ultimate displeasure that materialism brings to those who worship it." The book has improved in my mind with age; I find it immensely more memorable than I would have expected when I read it. It's probably as good as place as any if you're looking for somewhere to start in his vast oeuvre.

Hell: Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

2006-08-21T01:24:00.000-04:00

Every two or three weeks, some soul with a spiritual side feels obliged to remind me that I have spent over four decades on this planet charting the fast track to Hell. This weekend the prognosticators have been proved correct: my boyfriend and I looking for a new apartment in New York City.

We live in a relatively new building (c. 1985), so it's unprotected by rent control laws, and my "landlord" (some faceless corporate behemoth with offices on Lexington Avenue) has decided a 75% increase over the last thirteen years was not quite enough for my 1-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan. The latest notice was for another 24% (to put it in raw terms, that's $640/month), and they plan to convert my 600 square feet of purgatory to a 3-bedroom hell for the lucky kids who go to NYU Medical Center down the street.

I suppose the business strategy is working in the short term: three youngsters and three stereos just moved into the mirror-image apartment next door, and there are three kids living in the studio apartment across from us. My formally respectable building has become a college dorm, and the halls are alive with the sound of music.

My situation is hardly unique. The New York Sun published an article this past Thursday noting that

The cost of one-bedroom apartment rentals in Manhattan's doorman buildings is surging, with starting prices for these apartments hovering around $3,000 a month -- about $500 more than they were just three years ago, city brokers say.

An article in the same paper a week earlier contained this quote:

"With vacancies hovering around 0%, demand for rental housing going through the roof, and rents being increased by over 25% in the last five months, owning a residential rental apartment building in Manhattan is a better investment than owning treasury bills," [the managing partner and co-founder of Stonehenge Partners] said.

Thus is life amidst a virtual monopoly; people's lives become "investments" and the places they live are compared to commodities like treasury bills (or, for that matter, pork futures). So while New York landlords aggressively convert even the nicest buildings to over-occupied tenement sties, those (like me) unwilling to live three pairs of lungs per 600 square feet are heading out, displacing those who are even less fortunate in Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx. Soon the bubble will burst as expected, housing stock will be once again unliveable, and we'll be back again to the New York City of the early 1970s, with an aging Kurt Russell reprising his original role.

And yet, in spite of it all, I love this city and my job and the people and the diversity and the excitement, and I can't bring myself to move anywhere else.

So, in the more immediate future, there were be light posting for the next month or two while I scramble, looking in greener (and quieter) pastures just on the other side of the East River, and then sorting thirteen years' worth of detritus into piles labeled Must-Take, Must-Give-Away, and Why-Did-I-Ever-Keep-This. I've always been meaning to search for a place with more space, and now a have a devil prodding me with a pitchfork.

The Radical Fringe of the Democratic Party

2006-08-10T15:16:00.000-04:00

For nearly a year now, a steady 60% of Americans have believed that the war in Iraq was and is not worth fighting.

Among Democrats, well over 70% disagree with the decision to use our military to topple the Iraqi regime and feel that this debacle has hurt the "war on terrorism"; more than 60% feel we should bring the troops home now.

Yet a small but vocal (and powerful) fringe of the Democratic Party is spreading divisiveness and sowing discontent in its radical efforts to bolster support for a war that the majority of Americans feel is unnecessary. Senator Joe Lieberman is only the most prominent example of this fringe group, but an instructive one. The problem for the overwhelming majority of Democrats (and Americans) is simple but frightening: this radical group happens to be the one currently in power.

We'll have to leave to future historians the task of pondering how this group--including politicians like Lieberman and both Clintons and journalists like those writing for the New Republic--transformed themselves from respectable "centrists" to a fringe element. But one thing we need to stop now is this penchant for describing the sky as yellow and the sun as blue--that is, the dire need for folks like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman to paint mainstream Americans as "out of touch" with themselves.

Let's reiterate what's really happening: it is a small, powerful group of pro-war elements who are trying to divide this country and subvert the will of the majority. And it is Lieberman, not Ned Lamont, who is attempting to sabotage his party by refusing to accept the legitimate result of the Connecticut primary.

Jacob Weisberg's latest article on Slate, in support of Lieberman, mirrors this attempt to convince the majority of Americans that they really represent some kind of fringe element. Safety-pinned in his soggy diapers from 1972, Weisberg attempts to compare Democrats to the hippie peaceniks of the 1960s and to supporters of McGovern. (Never mind that our initial involvement in Vietnam and the acceleration of the war were the pet projects of two Democratic presidents.)

Nixon had the gift of hippie demonstrators and fellow-traveling bluebloods like Ned's great uncle Corliss Lamont as antagonists. Today's Republicans face an anti-war movement with a different tone and style, including an electronic counterculture of enraged bloggers and callow entrepreneurs like Ned himself. Yet the underlying political dynamic is not altogether different.

Weisberg uses this rather unacademic bit of sociology as "evidence" for his thesis that "Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War."

This argument is not only ahistorical; it simply makes no sense. Exactly how did McGovern's candidacy harm Jimmy Carter's prospects for becoming president? Instead, as I mentioned earlier this week, one could just as relevantly--but with far more evidence and immediacy--argue that Carter's centrism (i.e., "malaise") destroyed the Democratic Party's prospects in presidential elections. Both positions are similarly illogical and equally anachronistic.

Weisberg concedes that

The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be dismantled, we had no plan for occupying the country, and our troops remain there only to prevent the civil war we unleashed from turning into a bigger and more horrific civil war.

In spite of this rather strong condemnation, he offers no alternative but instead implies that we should continue to support those politicians who encouraged and mismanaged the war. His underlying argument, as Digby points out, is that

if somebody wants to wage a cynical, immoral, useless war for no good reason, Democrats simply have to go along with it if they want to be taken seriously.

Finally, Weisberg bizarrely (and dishonestly) argues many Americans do "not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously"--and he makes this claim without explaining what in the hell he means or who in the hell thinks this way.

It is far more accurate to say that Americans clearly (and correctly) believe that supporters of our Iraq policy have abandoned the "global battle" for an ill-advised, ill-planned, and ill-executed military excursion that we never have any chance of "winning" (however that word is defined). As Mark Schmitt writes in response:

It is a perfectly reasonable position to support ending the U.S. involvement in Iraq as quickly as possible, while strongly advocating the sort of engagement in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere that would be part of "the fight against global jihad," if you want to put it that way.

Instead of pursuing the real "battle against Islamic fanaticism," Lieberman, along with his powerful Republican allies and many of his Democratic colleagues, have irrationally hijacked the process, forgetting our original (and laudable) missions against Osama bin Laden and in the now-disintegrating Afghanistan. To the chagrin of the majority of Americans, in place of that legitimate purpose, this fringe element has launched a new counterculture of their own: a series of high-risk military adventures with no goal in mind and no end in sight.

Six More Years

2006-08-07T18:40:00.000-04:00

If undecided primary voters in Connecticut needed reasons to swing their vote to either Joe Lieberman or Ned Lamont tomorrow, then New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz certainly did his best to give them several in the pages of--where else--today's Wall Street Journal.

Digby provides the spot-on summary of Peretz's tantrum: "You really can't read this histrionic classist, racist, red-baiting tirade without wondering why Peretz maintains the fiction that he is a Democrat."

And Peretz hits each of these low-lying adjectives with the sort of beside-the-point overkill his magazine's dwindling readers have come to expect from him.

Peretz opens his piece by condemning Lamont for the pedigree and sins of his great-grandfather and ~~grandfather~~ great-uncle*, noting that Lamont hails "from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont." Never mind that Corliss Lamont's most famous contribution to left-wing American literature is his pamphlet "Why I'm Not a Communist." Any accusation of inadequate blueblood is pretty rich coming from a man whose sole credential for owning The New Republic is to be found in the Singer Sewing Machine fortune he married into.

Granted, it was not Peretz's magazine, but William Buckley's National Review, whose support for Lieberman in 1988 over a liberal Republican incumbent may have helped turn the tide against "liberalism." But nearly two decades have passed, and now Peretz is happily aligning himself with his neoconservative allies at Buckley's toxic gift to journalism. You can't even tell the damn magazines apart by their acronyms.

Not content with simple Red-baiting, Peretz concludes his piece with the race card:

The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove's dream come true.

We can argue over which is Peretz's worst nightmare: that African Americans have taken over the Democratic Party or that the "left" is taking over. What's clear is that there's very little Party to take over in the first place: "Karl Rove's dream come true" has been the muzzled gaggle of spineless Democrats--like Lieberman--who have cowered for the last six years while Bush was bravely feeding the remnants of our Constitution to the bonfires lit while clearing the brush off his ranch.

One of the problems with Peretz's argument is that it ignores the reality of what's left, right, and center among American voters. Guest-blogging at Salon's War Room, Glenn Greenwald points out that

Peretz copies the bizarre method used by almost every pundit who wants to equate a Lamont victory with doomsday for the Democrats. That is, he devotes his entire column to a purported discussion of the politics of the Iraq war without ever once mentioning or even alluding to the most significant fact: what the American electorate thinks about the war.

Thus, in the world occupied by people like Peretz and [Cokie] Roberts, only "left-wing radicals" are "antiwar" -- that view is the province of Maxine Waters and crazed bloggers -- while the serious, responsible, mainstream folk (like them) still support the commander in chief's difficult though noble decision to invade Iraq and to courageously slog on with the occupation. Facts and polls -- which have long demonstrated exactly the opposite -- be damned.

Elsewhere in his fact-challenged screed Peretz recalls the ghost of George McGovern to remind us all how "appeasement" and "peace candidates" have ruined the Democratic Party before. Skipping over the equally relevant historical nicety of how Jimmy Carter's "centrism" is supposed to have strengthened the party, Peretz then issues his Dire Warning:

If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength.

Wow, Marty, you've won me over: it should be obvious to anybody how six years of bootlicking by Democratic "centrists" have done such miraculous wonders for the strength of the party and, for that matter, combating the far-right ambitions of the Republicans like Frist and Cheney. Let's do six more years of the same. "Stay the course," indeed.

* Correction: I've discovered that Corliss Lamont was Ned's great-uncle, not grandfather--which makes Peretz's guilt-by-pedigree charge even more ludicrous and irrelevant than it already is.

Guess the Mystery Author

2006-08-01T13:22:00.000-04:00

The bookworld is abuzz over the identity and nature of the mystery book that HarperCollins is peddling to bookstores. Via an alert from Publishers Weekly:

HarperCollins reps have been selling a new, secret September title for a little more than a week without disclosing its title or author to accounts. Speaking about the mysterious work, which is coming out from Morrow, publicist Debbie Stier would only confirm that the imprint does indeed have "an embargoed book that reps are selling without a title or author." While Stier quashed a rumor that the work is a White House expose from a former member of the Bush administration, she refused to offer any details about it. In a note to booksellers, Morrow said the book will have a September 12 laydown. PW has also learned that the imprint is championing the book as "a shattering, provocative and mesmerizing true story" which "will receive major national media attention" in both the U.S. and abroad. Additionally, one bookseller told PW that the mysterious work, dubbed Title to be Revealed, is a biography and is going to press for 300,000 copies.

I doubt we can take Stier's "quash" at face value: Could it be Colin Powell? Michael Brown? Porter Goss? (Or, God forbid, Tom DeLay.)

Or might we have a Hollywood revenge book (in which case I couldn't care less): A book by Jennifer Aniston? A book about Tom Cruise?

Stay tuned...

Update: Two other clues: the book is categorized as, in part, a childhood memoir--and it's by a "proven author." The entire press release was posted by Sarah at Media Bistro, who suggests it might be related to Michael Jackson. (If that's the case, I predict remainderville for thousands of unsold books.)

Edward Champion builds an unlikely and unconvincing circumstantial case for Michael Moore--but then dismisses it.

One of his commenters links to an intriguing possibility, two-time novelist Princess Christina Oxenberg:

She also gets asked about rumors that President Kennedy was her real father. Was he?

"I just don't discuss that," Princess Christina said.

But she acknowledges that the rumors might make for a good plot for another novel.

Riding the Tail

2006-07-30T12:48:00.000-04:00

In May I made some petulantly critical remarks about a column on the book biz by Rachel Donadio of The New York Times. In today's Book Review section, however, Donadio offers a far more perceptive and, I think, accurate portrait of the current state of publishing.

In her earlier column, she posited that "if a novel doesn't sell a healthy number of copies in the first two weeks after its publication, its chances of gaining longer-term momentum are slim," and she blamed this trend on superstores. I'd criticized her column for its datedness and, specifically, for ignoring the influence of the Internet, and, now, she seems to offer a revised view, noting that online sales can and do fuel sales of books long after they are published.

"The mass market is turning into a mass of niches," Chris Anderson writes in "The Long Tail," his best-selling new book on the economics of entertainment. A handful of blockbusters may dominate at the multiplex and the megastore, he argues, but there's untapped potential in the vast number of books, movies and recordings that sell relatively few copies--the so-called "long tail" of the sales curve--potential that can now be tapped through online retailers.

Donadio points out the large corporate publishers have been so far been uninterested, with the exception of a few famous titles, mostly because the potential of selling 1,000 to 2,000 extra copies per title a year isn't worth it for them. But one person's trash is another person's gold: for small publishers, university presses, and nonprofit organizations, such sales can make all the difference in the world:

Some small presses build their business entirely on the long tail, bringing back into print esoteric titles that are in the public domain or had been abandoned by other publishers as unprofitable. "We're like scavenger birds on the back of hippopotamuses," said Edwin Frank, the editorial director of New York Review Books Classics, which was founded in 1999 and is affiliated with The New York Review of Books. Top sellers among the imprint's 200 titles include Richard Hughes's dreamlike novel "A High Wind in Jamaica" and historical novels by J. G. Farrell that revolve around Britain's colonial rule. "We're happy with any book that sells over 5,000 copies" during its sales life, Frank said.

The enviable success of New York Review Books Classics is mirrored by the experiences of the nonprofit publisher for which I work, and other firms should take note. Our backlist sales are skyrocketing for one reason only: thanks to the Internet, people looking for one of our titles can easily find a copy and buy it on the spot, something that was impossible only ten years ago. (If you were looking for a particular novel by, say, William Dean Howells, your chances of finding one even in a superstore were minuscule.)

The number of good titles and potential gems that are out of print is, of course, growing. In recent years, I've tried to purchase a number of books--both popular fiction and literary award-winners--that were surprisingly unavailable yet could turbocharge the bottom line for many small niche publishers:

The Girl in a Swing, Richard Adams
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
Dora, Doralina, Rachel de Queiroz
Nickel Mountain, John Gardner (and many of his other novels)
The Ghostly Lover, Elizabeth Hardwick
Whisper My Name, Ernest Hebert
The Other, Thomas Tryon (and all his other novels)
Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal
Sunflower, Rebecca West

There are plenty more where those came from: books ripe for second lives or perfect for new series (e.g., Classics of Horror). And such a list doesn't even take into consideration many worthy titles that escaped readers' attentions the first time around.

One book whose unavailability has always surprised me is A Cry of Angels, by Jeff Fields--a favorite from my adolescent years and a book that has acquired an intensely loyal following. (I still have my tattered, treasured 1975 paperback.) It's been out of print for twenty years, and I'm happy to note that the University of Georgia Press has grabbed a hold of "the long tail" and is bringing this novel back to life next month.

Jonah Goldberg Takes on Bill Bennett's Favorite Ballot Proposal

2006-07-28T01:04:00.000-04:00

You may have heard about the ridiculous initiative on Arizona's ballot to host a lottery for $1 million to encourage folks to vote. (One vote = one chance to win.)

Democrat Mark Osterloh, whose credentials can be summed up as "an ophthalmologist from Tuscon and a noted political gadfly," collected enough signatures to get the initiative on the November ballot.

Never one to defy a vertigo-inducing leap of logic, Jonah Goldberg tries to connect this dumb idea to the enfranchisement efforts by "voting rights activists" in his latest Los Angeles Times column:

What is surprising about Doc Osterloh's wacky idea is that the franchise maximizers hate it. The New York Times dubbed it "daft" and "one of the cheesier propositions on the November ballot." USA Today called it "tawdry." Fair enough.

But I think part of the reason they're so scandalized is that Osterloh is taking their logic to its natural conclusion. [emphasis added]

See the connection? No? Well neither do I. Perhaps he is arguing that gamblers are a disenfranchised voting bloc.

Well, I can hardly say I'm shocked that Goldberg would use a fringe ballot initiative both as the topic for a nationally syndicated column and as an opportunity to score a nonsensical political point. Not surprisingly, though, he neglects to note that this proposal is only one of 17 initiatives on the Arizona ballot, nor does he use this initiative as a textbook example of the stupidity of the ballot initiative process in many states (and Infinity Ranch has a few choice comments on that subject).

Even so, Jonah's skating on razor thin ice here.

This proposal is less about voter enfranchisement than it is about plain, old-fashioned bribery. And if there's a political party in this country that has fine-tuned the art of bribery in the last ten years--well, how much more need I say? I can think of a pretty hefty number of GOP politicians and lobbyists who have used money as a lure to get people to do things they normally wouldn't do out of principle--or because they're just too lazy. Do I need to remind Jonah which party tried to bribe voters with a $100 gasoline "rebate"?

No, I think part of the reason Jonah is so scandalized is that Osterloh is taking Republican logic to its natural conclusion.

From President to King to God

2006-07-27T17:57:00.000-04:00

There are two strongly worded editorials criticizing Bush in, of all places, the Des Moines Register. (A frequent business traveler to Des Moines, I'm a regular reader.)

The first is today's lead editorial: an unequivocal condemnation of Bush's signing statements. The editorial notes (correctly, I think) that the veto of the stem-cell research bill was not a unique act:

Just because this president doesn't use the veto pen doesn't mean he intends to abide by every bill Congress sends to him. Rather than veto bills he doesn't like, he signs them and then quietly appends a "signing statement" saying he doesn't consider himself bound to enforce them. [...]

[The Constitution] does not say presidents may choose which laws to faithfully execute. [...] That seems obvious based on a minimal understanding of the American constitutional system in which Congress has the power to pass laws, the president the duty to enforce them and the courts the power to define their meaning. If the president could simply ignore statutes enacted by Congress that he or she deemed unconstitutional, the balance of powers would collapse.

Such a collapse would make presidential powers indistinguishable from a king who uses a parliament as an advisory committee. (Um, not to be picky, but isn't that what our nation's founders fought against?)

The conservative defense of these "signing statements" has been strikingly feeble, resorting even to dictionary definitions of "executive" or to ellipses-filled excerpts designed to make the statements look incomprehensibly innocuous. But I'm fairly confident that GOP supporters will tell us exactly what's wrong with them when the next Democratic president follows Bush's precedent.

The second article in the Register is a signed piece by Rekha Basu, avoiding the issue of the veto's uniqueness and arguing instead for its moral vacuousness. Basu notes, as many others have, the silliness of Bush's position, since so many of the embryos are routinely destroyed anyway. But Basu goes one step further, making a point I've usually seen made only by certain blogs and by Jon Stewart:

In fact, if Bush is so genuinely distressed by the loss of human life, how does he justify Iraq, Lebanon, the death penalty or simply the innumerable deaths that occur in America for lack of access to medical care?

It's a damned good question. But, As Paige argues at My Take on the News, when one shines a spotlight on the hypocrisy behind this allegedly "pro-life" stance, many conservatives cry "moral equivalence"--a new favorite term that right-wingers are trying to turn into a slur to replace the moribund "politically correct."

If conservatives truly value the sanctity of life, then this philosophical issue must be addressed with more than a meaningless slur. How have Bush and his supporters been able to justify the deaths of 50,000+ innocent civilians, including thousands of children, to conduct his experiment in Mideast democracy, yet at the same time condemn the use of otherwise useless embryos to conduct experiments in medical science. Who's really playing God here?

One conservative blogger mixes and stirs this very argument (which, I suppose, could be written as a mathematical formula: "embryos > American soldiers - terrorists"). Judging from his logic, we'll probably hear next that those children killed in Iraq are "willing participants in armed conflicts." I suppose they must have signed up at the local martyrdom recruiting station.

But at least the King Bush the Divine saved the embryos.

Full Spectrum Warriors

2006-07-22T14:26:00.000-04:00

As part of his discussion of the unflagging cheerleading exhibited by neoconservatives for the insane situation in the Middle East, Glenn Greenwald has written a particularly insightful essay. (Greenwald is always insightful, which is why he is increasingly a source of frustration on the right and a source of envy on the left--and count me among the envious.)

The real underlying premises and impulses of neoconservatism are being laid bare for all to see. And what they really want is more war and destruction -- lots and lots and lots of it -- to rain down mercilessly on their enemies and anyone nearby. [. . .]

So many of them seem to be driven not even any longer by a pretense of a strategic goal, but by a naked, bloodthirsty craving for destruction and killing itself, almost as the end in itself. They urge massive military attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Iran -- and before that, Iraq -- knowing that it will kill huge numbers of innocent people, but never knowing, or seemingly caring, what comes after that.

His comments are so thorough and devastating that they need to be read in their entirety, and I have only two points to add. First, it's this business of a "strategic goal" that both perplexes me and underscores the validity of Greenwald's arguments. Even from a purely Machiavellian point of view, the current campaign of death and destruction seems destined to defeat itself.

I can't wrap my brain around the internal logic which argues that the only way to respond to provocations by Hezbollah and Hamas is to annihilate the fragile infrastructures of Lebanon and Gaza (and to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent civilians in the process). Do Israel and the neoconservative supporters of its current actions (e.g., Cheney, Bolton, Kristol) really believe that by returning Lebanon to its pre-1985 Stone Age status that they will eliminate or weaken Hezbollah? Some foreign policy experts share my cynicism:

Robert Malley, who handled Middle East issues on the National Security Council staff for President Bill Clinton, voiced skepticism about whether the current course would pay off for either Israel or the United States. "It may not succeed with all the time in the world, and Hezbollah could emerge with its dignity intact and much of its political and military arsenal still available," said Malley, who monitors the region for the International Crisis Group. "What will you have gained?"

Indeed, if our recent history in Iraq (and, for that matter, Afghanistan) proves anything, it must be that terrorist organizations thrive far more insidiously in an area governed by a weak or nonexistent state instead of a territory controlled by a strong one. The "new" neoconservative attitude reeks not simply of callousness but more of desperation, as if certain warmongers have suddenly felt free to abandon (in Greenwald's words) "all of the lofty pretenses about the virtues of spreading democracy and winning hearts and minds."

Second, while I agree with Greenwald that behind the public feebleness of the White House's response is an administration still composed "largely of adherents to neoconservatism," it also seems to me that the U.S. has boxed itself, policy-wise, into a corner. From the Israeli perspective, how is their shock and awe campaign, in response to the kidnapping of three soldiers, different from our shock and awe campaign, in response to an imagined (and invented) stash of lethal weapons?

Both responses were obscenely disproportionate to the initial problem, both involved a cavalier disregard for the lives of innocent bystanders (including, recently, seven Canadian tourists), both were launch with an apparent disregard for the aftermath. For their part, the Israel government can (and does) point to an actual provocation rather than an imagined one, but the Bush administration can hardly chide the Olmert administration on moral or policy grounds without denouncing by implication every justification for their own ill-conceived and ill-executed adventure.

Martini Republic (quoting an op-ed piece by Richard Reeves) juxtaposes how things were only two decades ago with how things stand today. When Michael Deaver threatened to quit over the American silence in response to the bombing of Beirut ("I can't be part of this anymore, the bombings, the killing of children. It's wrong."), Reagan woke up, called Menachem Begin, and argued successfully for an end to the attack. Perhaps Bush has "the power to stop the killing" as well, but the integrity of that power has surely been weakened by our own foreign policy adventures of the last three years.

Meanwhile, over at Chock Full o' Nuts and among other sundry chickenhawks, the most spirited argument, as James Wolcott mocks, seems to be over what to name their shiny new war: "World War III, World War IV, or, according to the perhaps innumerative Sean Hannity, World War V." The glee which these pundits approach the violence and bloodshed and the enthusiasm they display for its continuance reminds me of my nephew's unsettling love of certain video games. ("RPG! They've got an RPG!") Maybe we should just capitulate to the juvenile minds who won't hand over the game controller and call it "The Whole Wide World War."

Clucked

2006-07-14T17:21:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, Kathryn Jean Lopez transformed herself into a one-woman promotion machine for Adam Sandler's latest movie, Click. In her world of high-toned criticism, Click was an "all-American movie"; it was "pro-fatherhood and family."

(Similarly, she saw The Lake House and pigeon-holed it as, I kid you not, "pro-abstinence.")

I find unsurprising, to say the least, that K.Lo. would critique a movie as she would judge a sermon. The final assessments on which she constructs her sophomorically conceived and appallingly written "reviews" rarely consider artistic merit, production qualities, the intelligence of the screenplay, creativity and originality, intellectual rigor, or the professionalism of the acting. Her capsule judgments are always boiled down to an estimation of the message: catechismally correct (good) or immoral (bad).

Click is the type of movie I would never see on my own. Two words: Adam Sandler. Okay, four words: Adam Sandler fart jokes. But my 12-year-old nephew is in town, and he was just dying to go see it. Being the #1 super-cool uncle, I obliged.

And I am here to report that, for the first time ever, K.Lo., my nephew, and I agree on something. Click is indeed the perfect movie for someone with the intellectual capacities and moral development of a 12-year-old.

An Orgy of Insult Uninterrupted

2006-07-09T17:21:00.000-04:00

A decade ago, Thomas Pynchon presciently described the rabble that would eventually swarm the Internet:

Oh, one may, if one wishes, find insult at ev'ry step,--from insolent Stares to mortal Assault, an Orgy of Insult uninterrupted,--yet how does one proceed to call out each offender in turn, or choose among 'em, and in obedience to what code? [...] there never be time enough to acknowledge, let alone to resent, such a mad Variety of offer'd Offense."

Okay, okay--Pynchon was really describing eighteenth-century London, not the Internet. Nevertheless, his description aptly describes the fact that the blogosphere and politics both, as "a function of simple Density," seem to attract more than their fair shares of creeps and charlatans.

With such a "mad Variety" of crazy people, frauds, neo-Nazis, racists, and pedophiles to choose from, who finally tips the moonbats of the right wing over the edge of the curb and into the sewer drain? A woman named Deborah Frisch.

Who the hell is Deborah Frisch, you might ask (unless you spent your weekend reading blogs)? Well, I wondered the same thing. Like most people on "The Left," I'd never heard of her, so I had no idea that this particular mountain was erupting over at the right-wing molehill. Many other progressive and liberal bloggers were in a state of equal oblivion. (See, for example, the astutely comic posts by the heavily trafficked Sadly No and TBogg.)

It turns out that, if this were eighteenth-century London, Frisch would be the wino we would notice babbling incoherently on an East End street corner. Granted, she has a blog (who doesn't these days), but fewer than a dozen people a day visited her site--at least before she made a blooming idiot of herself at the prominent right-wing blog of Jeff Goldstein, apparently making ominous and insane noises about Goldstein's two-year-old son. Although she apparently held a position as a part-time instructor at the University of Arizona, she has no power, no audience, and no influence. She is a tree falling in a forest, and nobody heard it until Goldstein stubbed his toe on her.

The atrocity's relative insignificance didn't keep a blogger named the Confederate Yankee from hysterically (and, boy do I mean hysterically) condemning The Left because The Left "couldn't quite seem to find so much as a single word to condemn a fellow liberal who threatens the murder of a child."

Yet, on his own site, we read the following comment posted only five days before by an unknown right-wing troll:

We must systematically execute all liberals and democratnazis now, now, now. Let the purges begin. God help me I hate them so much. Kudos to you brother in arms for pointing out the truth!!!!!!! [Posted by Jehovah at July 3, 2006 05:09 PM]

Now, I'm not so silly and childish that I would suggest that "Jehovah" is one of Confederate Yankee's "fellow conservatives." It would be just as relevant to remind everyone that Ted Bundy was a Republican Party campaign staffer. Equally, it is ludicrous to suggest that a low-life like Ms. Frisch is one of my "fellow liberals." Jehovah is anonymous; Ted Bundy is dead; Deborah Frisch is nobody.

What's more disquieting, however, is that, of all the examples from the Orgy of Insult to choose from, the Confederate Yankee selects this one. Only a few weeks ago, Shakespeare's Sister noted, with disturbing accuracy, that "the party that considers gay marriage, women's reproductive freedom, condoms, and comprehensive sex education all vicious threats to civilization as we know it, is curiously prolific in its production of true perverts," including:

-- Brian Doyle, fourth highest ranking official the United States Department of Homeland Security's public affairs office [arrested for pedophilia]

-- Political consultant Carey Lee Cramer, the Republican consultant who created ads for Republicans in Texas [convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child, two counts of indecency with a child by contact and one count of indecency with a child by exposure]

-- The infamous former Mayor of Spokane Jim West [who lured underage boys to his city office]

and dozens of other well-known Republicans and prominent office-holders whose actions have actually harmed children. (And, I'm sure, one could add a few Democrats to the list as well.)

Let's be clear: I don't think every conservative blogger needs to condemn each and every one of these criminals. To repeat Pynchon: "there never be time enough to acknowledge, let alone to resent, such a mad Variety of offer'd Offense."

We must all choose our battles wisely (and perhaps, merely by discussing this mini-tempest, I'm violating my own advice), but given the Confederate Yankee's professed outrage against "disgusting, abhorrent behavior by deranged individuals," one would expect to find a condemnation of one of these sickos rather than his feverish disgust at the incoherent ramblings of a crazy woman. Yet, if you search Confederate Yankee's site, you'd be hard pressed to find a single mention, much less a condemnation, of any of these actual criminals.

In his own words, you'll find "{crickets}. Not one post."

Compare this silence with his hissy fit about a woman that even Jeff Goldstein admits was never really a "threat" and is "as nutty as the ring inside a squirrel's crapper." Confederate Yankee's selective targeting would seem to bring new meaning to the now-well-worn adage, "It's OK if you're Republican." He (and not a few of his right-wing colleagues) reduce their principles to the level of team sports (a phenomenon I've noted before), where the relevance and significance of the argument doesn't matter so long as it can score some points with the crowd.

Confederate Yankee closes his post with, "Welcome to the new face of the most deranged members of our political opposition, the toddler-threatening community." Might I suggest to Mr. Yankee that the next time he decides to roll a babbling drunk in a dark London alley, he should instead look up and attend to the screams of the children coming from the dusky Windows of his own Chambers?

Love Trainwreck

2006-07-08T18:13:00.000-04:00

slightly revised, with additional quote

I've been too busy with work to attend to my irregularly scheduled blogging duties, but I'm not too busy to check out Atlas Shrugs, the very personal site of our favorite right-wing hippie-chickhawk.

And she comes through again, with a video clip of her own bad self, "singing" and dancing to "Love Train" (with the lyric changed, natch, to "Islam all over the world").

You'll recall from my previous post that Pamela has been serving up double portions of politics to her pro-abstinence, post-adolescent adulators. ("Pamela, you move really nicely and your smile is gorgeous. Well, among other things," sighs one, typing with his free hand.)

While there's no denying that she does have her handful of geeky fans, it's clear that Pam remains deluded in the belief that the increased traffic to her blog is a sign of approval and popularity rather than disbelief and horror. Grown men have been known to weep.

Indeed, her videos have transcended their origins as forces of nature; they have been known even to perform miracles:

I'm reconverting to Christianity because I'm terrified of being in hell. And why does being in hell scare me so, you ask? Because I know that Satan will strap me down to a burning lava chair and force me to watch Atlas Pam's vlogs over and over again... forever.

So saith the Blessed Brad, newly beatified cohost of Sadly No.

Other pagans remain alarmingly cynical, such as this commenter at Glenn Greenwald's blog:

Somewhere in New York or New Jersey a crystal meth dealer has hit the jackpot.

The possibility of nasal infusions aside, you have to give Pamela credit: she has no shame about having no shame--and few people could make such a claim, at least without plagiarizing. This is, after all, a woman who repeatedly and unabashedly refers to Jews as "the Jews." (Her tone-deaf semi-literacy knows few limits: in her video earlier this week, she refers to Muslims as "Islamics.") Pamela is fearlessly comfortable in her belief that any diverse group of people can be reduced to a monolithic entity. To wit:

Now if only the Jews could rid the world of Islamic Jihad.............

or this rare gem of critical interpretation:

John Bolton came out strong for the culture of life, the importance of one life. It defines the Jews.

or, more astonishingly, this:

But the left wing Jews are impossibly suicidal.

Since Pamela is so talented at painting her world with such broad strokes, we can only look forward to her comments on "the women."

And, as a special bonus, I'll share my thoughts about "the gays."

Enemies of Fashion, Allies of Democracy

2006-07-04T15:40:00.000-04:00

The last two weeks have been hectic times for those of us ferreting out the enemies of democracy.

Valiant think-tank employees have marshaled their fiscal resources to perform the mathematical analysis necessary to prove that Jon Stewart is an enemy of democracy. Mighty Michelle Malkin and Heroic David Horowitz have unveiled The New York Times as an enemy of democracy for reprinting top-secret documents and photographs previously available only to readers of Newsmax. And, in a beautifully orchestrated homage to Joe McCarthy, Rick Santorum, the future ex-Senator from Pennsylvania, ~~planted~~ distributed evidence that the Defense Department itself is harboring enemies of democracy who are covering up the existence of the very WMDs for which we originally went to war.

In the battle against the enemies of democracy, it doesn't matter whether any of these stories might be true; what only matters is that our followers believe that these stories are true.

But the forces of democracy suffered a serious setback today. A few days ago, I wrote an encrypted message advising the Loyal Legions of the Right Chicken Wing that it was time to don our brownshirts.

Unfortunately, the ever-Randian (and ever-randy) Pamela at Atlas Shrugs mistook the memo and instead donned a brownskirt (and, it would appear, not much of anything else).

The result--well, the result has to be seen to be believed. That most loquacious enemy of democracy, Glenn Greenwald, managed to watch the whole thing twice (unless he was referring the--ahem--double vision caused by the most prominent parts of Pam's dangerously hypnotic video).

I too watched Ms. Pamela attempt to perfect her triptych of imitations of Ann Coulter, Janet Lupo, and Susan Mayer all at the same time, but I'm afraid I wasn't able to make it past the first two minutes. I was too distracted by a single un-PC thought: Oh my god. What the hell is she wearing?

If this is the best in media savvy that the pro-Georgian ~~Monarchists~~ Republicans can come up with, then our democracy is, I fear, doomed. (Some friendly advice to Pamela: Connie Chung might be available to enhance the production values of your next video.)

Setting aside my Independence Day snark and awe campaign, I note that Justice Clarence Thomas engaged in the type of sound-bite demagoguery we have come to expect from both him and his puppetmaster, Antonin Scalia. In his dissent last week to Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, Thomas claimed that the decision: "would sorely hamper the President's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy." Brave words, especially coming from a man who never served in the military, yet who proudly claimed that World War II veteran Justice Stevens displayed an "unfamiliarity with the realities of warfare." I suspect that Justice Thomas has been playing too many video games like this one between his post-adolescent pranks involving cans of soda.

Let me match Thomas's challenge to engage in sound bites. On this anniversary of our nation's founding, let us all remember that the only enemies of democracy we need fear are those who would gladly sacrifice the most essential characteristics of our democracy in order to save it.

On Burning Flags and Chicken Livers

2006-06-28T10:59:00.000-04:00

By only one vote, our government's most recent attempt to curtail purely political speech has failed. (North Star Politics duly notes how scary this one-vote margin truly is.) The tenor of the debate and its overt political opportunism has been, to say the least, distressing.

I'm surely wasting my time, but I want to address a particularly mendacious argument, which compares bans on flag-burning to laws against cross-burning and which has been making the rounds (again and again) and has been offered even by allegedly liberal senators from solidly blue states who claim to have law degrees.

Over at the blog of the National Review (new and improved in its post-segregationist form--although not really, it turns out), Jonah Goldberg reprints such a comment, from one of his more intelligible fans, without so much as a fact-checking grunt:

if politicos can figure out how to outlaw burning crosses w/o running afoul of the 1st amendment then surely they can figure it out in regards to the flag. just copy cross burning laws and change "cross" to "flag". how hard was that?

Well, like using the cap key on your keyboard, such a maneuver is not hard at all. But it's not accurate or pertinent, either.

You wouldn't guess it from the way it's often described by certain white supremacists, but the relevant Supreme Court decision (Virginia vs. Black, 2003) clearly permits laws against cross-burning only if they forbid acts that involve destruction of property (i.e., vandalism) or a clear intent to intimidate. (Note to the crazier elements of the right wing: the pivotal word here is intimidate, not offend. You are still free, obviously, to offend, and you do it quite well, thank you very much.)

To help put it terms that Goldberg and his lower-case minions can understand, I will quote from the relevant Law.com article. (You can read the case law here.)

First, the Supreme Court specifically held that:

under some circumstances, cross burning could be a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. So, by a separate vote, the Court struck down a part of the Virginia law at issue that said jurors could presume that anyone who burns a cross intended to intimidate. [emphasis added for the lexiconically impaired]

Virginia vs. Black might seem like a complicated decision because there were two separate alleged misdemeanors under consideration, which, perhaps, is one too many things for some armchair patriots to keep track of:

Black was arrested under the Virginia law in 1998 after burning a cross on an open field in connection with a Ku Klux Klan rally. Elliott and O'Mara, by contrast, were arrested in a separate incident in which they burned a cross on the lawn of Elliott's African-American neighbor.

But, writing the majority decision, O'Connor noted the distinction between these two acts. The Court actually struck down part of the law--the part that implied "jurors could presume that anyone who burns a cross intended to intimidate."

Justice O'Connor found the law objectionable mainly in the case of Black, the Klan leader. Applying the law's presumption to him, O'Connor suggested, deprived him of the ability to make a defense that he was "engaged in core political speech." O'Connor continued, "The prima facie evidence provision in this case ignores all of the contextual factors that are necessary to decide whether a particular cross burning is intended to intimidate. The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut."

In other words: As a form of political speech, cross-burning was upheld.

Indeed, a recent law passed in New York State, considered the most restrictive in the country, still contains several caveats in an attempt to meet these dual tests against vandalism and/or intimidation:

Etching, painting, drawing or placing a swastika on public or private property without the owner's permission, along with cross burning, will now be considered felonies punishable by up to four years in prison. [emphasis added]

Even parts of this law are being challenged as too restrictive or severe by those pesky liberals (yes, far-right racists, we've got your back).

Nevertheless, here is the net effect in as plain language as I can possibly muster: While you are still free to, say, carry a flag with a swatiska at a political rally or paint one on the wall of your tool shed, if you want to perform this act on the front lawn belonging to your black neighbors, you have to ask their permission first.

For those conservatives who waste their days sighing under the very mistaken impression that they can no longer burn a cross, I refer you to my earlier post on this very subject. It's an art form that is alive and well.

As for the moral equivalence of the act of flag burning, what group of people can it be said to intimidate? (Other than, perhaps, cowardly chickenhawks, who, I'll grant, suffer recurring jaundice caused by their genetically lily livers.)

Barbarians with Keyboards

2006-06-26T14:02:00.000-04:00

I noted previously that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (agent code name: Kos) hadn't really done himself any favors with his handling of the accusations against both himself and his co-author, Jerome Armstrong.

The controversy itself is a mix of the germane and the mundane, with a heavy dose of malarkey. On the one hand, the allegations against Armstrong, although perhaps old news peddled by a "nemesis of wayward capitalists," are troubling and worthy of discussion, investigation, and a good public airing.

On the other hand, the idea that Kos sends out marching orders to the left half of Blogistan (including, I suppose, me) and that we all obey said marching orders is, to borrow Glenn Greenwald's polite phrase, "too stupid to merit a response." Most of us can't even agree on whether Bill Maher is a liberal comedian or a pompous blowhard, much less which candidates we should all support.

"The whole story would have had a greater impact if The New Republic hadn't overshot its load," observes Amanda at Pandagon. Faced with declining circulation and even more rapidly deteriorating relevance, however, the editors and reporters at The New Republic decided to call Kos's histrionics and raise him by several piles of sophistry. The ploy worked. Once again, they're the talk of the town, even eclipsing last week's flavor, Coulter Ice.

Roger Ailes (the good version) summarizes everything nicely:

This week has turned out to be The New Republic's biggest embarrassment since it employed ~~Mickey Kaus~~ ~~Fred Barnes~~ ~~Mort Kondracke~~ ~~Charles Krauthammer~~ ~~Jim Glassman~~ ~~Andrew Sullivan~~ ~~Stephen Glass~~ ~~Ruth Shalit~~ ~~Michael Kelly~~ ~~Gregg Easterbrook~~.

First, TNR reporter Jason Zengerle boosted his journalistic credentials with a fake source. Then, TNR culture critic Lee Siegel chimed in with not one, but two way-way-way-over-the-top posts on his blog condemning, um, blogs; comparing the sudden ascendancy of Daily Kos to the donning of brownshirts ("hard fascism with a Microsoft face"); and providing proof, if you needed it, that Kos's personal brand of anarchic politics were (I kid you not) formed by the time he was nine years old.

Siegel's trenchant entrenchment resulted in a Final Snark Offensive that forced Digby to resign from the field in disgrace, Yglesias to surrender in horrified mortification, TRex to hole up in the castle broadcasting signals over the heads of the invading Kossack mobs, and Wolcott to offer to conduct negotiations between the Allied and Axis forces.

For me, however, the defining moment of Web War III was the extraordinary sighting of the heroic TNR editor-in-chief and co-owner Marty Peretz, who emerged from the bunker he's been sharing with Cheney ever since the onset of the comparatively insignificant and short-lived Iraq War and who graced us all with what I believe may be his first-ever attempt at a blog entry.

Alas, it disappoints. Peretz's rambling post is little more than a defensive rant complaining about Kos's defensive rant. What could be more surreal than an "editor" calling Kos illiterate in a rambling diatribe composed almost entirely of sentence fragments, half of which begin with conjunctions?

Look again, above, at the struck-out roster of reporters in Ailes's quote. That's quite an inning; most teams, I think, are allowed only three outs. (Hey--I'm just proving that I can switch metaphors faster than Peretz can pen a grammatically correct belch.) Pondering that list of all-stars, one can understand why Peretz hesitates to reclaim the words progressive or liberal when describing his magazine. Instead, he settles for heterodox. Whoa, baby: now that's a tag the circulation director can use for the next subscription campaign. TNR: "The magazine with so many opinions you can't say we have any."

Peretz so clearly longs for the day when decent people would send in the annual subscription check, read a few articles, look at the all the pretty advertising, and then just shut the hell up. Oh, sure: if you had an advanced degree from an Ivy League school or could prove your landed British ancestry, your letter to the editor might be read and, if you were super-dooper nice, even published. Or, if you objected to the caliber of one of Stanley Kaufmann's genteel movie reviews, you were encouraged to dictate to the secretary a short essay explaining why those birds in that "stupid" Hitchcock movie really did scare the bejesus out of the wife and kids.

In those serene and not-so-long-ago days, the gatekeepers were better able to keep anyone else from going public with their response. Letters neglecting the Queen's English, notes defying the Protocol of the Stiff Upper Lip, hastily penned rants against the Establishment, well-reasoned treatises signed by unpronounceable names--they all were tested for anthrax and filed safely away, or they were occasionally forwarded to the proper authorities.

The unwashed masses, really, had no right--and the very worst thing that could happen to proper civilization was that the mob might find the wherewithal to cast away their mimeograph machines and enjoin the battle on an equal footing. After all, it had taken decades for glossy magazines and four-color newspapers to quash the sort of cheap pamphleteering practiced by the likes of the "illiterate" Thomas Paine and the "ungrammatical" Ethan Allen. Egad, Peretz sighs, what a horrid invention, that thing they call the Internet. What it hath wrought too closely resembles (shudder) a democracy.

Filled with Pride

2006-06-24T12:47:00.000-04:00

I suppose I should be out this weekend doing something appropriate for New York Pride, like throwing free Madonna concert tickets from a parade float or sprinkling talcum powder on a dance floor.

Last night, however, as I was falling asleep reading a collection of Melville's nonfiction (sad, but true), TRex at Firedoglake excerpted my post mocking the National Review's fundraising campaign, and, suddenly, I have an audience. So, instead of concert tickets, I'll throw virtual candy and a belated, hearty welcome to all the Firedoglakians.

Speaking of Pride, I'm happy to see that performer Kevin Aviance has recovered enough from a recent gay-bashing attack to attend the festivities tomorrow. In a previous life, on my very first trip to Miami over a decade ago, Kevin was kind enough to be my guide through the highlights (and, er, a few low points) of the then-burgeoning South Beach after-hours club scene. His notoriously bitchy stage persona was belied by the fact that he was a gracious and unassuming (if frenetic) host. Like thousands of other New Yorkers, I wish him well.

Shameless at Salon

2006-06-22T21:42:00.000-04:00

The blogosphere is abuzz with an internecine fight about the financial history of Kos blogger Jerome Armstrong and, more bizarrely, about Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zuniga's ham-fisted attempt to get fellow bloggers to remain silent on the topic. I haven't caught up with all the ins and outs of the allegations, accusations, and responses (to be frank, the whole thing seems much ado about nothing), but you can find some information here and here.

You can also find a post on the subject at Salon. Michael Scherer offers a few choice words on Kos's misguided, "bile-filled response to the controversy." But then Scherer includes a statement that is both irresponsible and (perhaps unintentionally) hurtful:

Since then, the discussion has exploded online. Firedoglake [and other bloggers] have all weighed in with alacrity.

And what was Jane Hamsher's response at Firedoglake? Basically, she has been absent from her blog for a week and has no response because her mother is critically ill:

My sister and I have been splitting 24 hour shifts in the hospital as my mom slips in and out of consciousness.... I have not had internet access at the hospital and have only had moments at home when I could grab quick glances at the blog. I have no idea what's going on in the world, let alone the internecine politics of greater blogistan.

Hours after she took the time to post her remarks, her mother, I'm sorry to report, passed away.

How can Scherer suggest that this is Hamsher weighing in with alacrity? (Does he even know what alacrity means?) None of her remarks address the controversy; instead her entire post is about her dying mother and why she hasn't had time to respond to a matter--in fact, any matter--that has seemingly little to do with her or her immediate concerns.

If, as I suspect, Scherer simply linked to Jane's post without reading it because he saw it listed on a service like Google or Technorati, then he owes Jane an apology. If Scherer, a professional journalist who should know better, actually read the post and still linked to it to support his spirited attempt at journalism, then he is simply cruel.

As regular readers of my blog know, Jane Hamsher is one of my favorite online writers (blogger or otherwise). Her sense of humor and her stalwart liberal principles have managed to enliven the most arcane political points and humiliate the most entrenched bedwetting chickenhawks. Her presence at Firedoglake has already been greatly missed, and we look forward to her return. My heart and my thoughts go out to her and her family.

Update (June 23): Today, Scherer reinstated his credentials as a gentleman. He updated his post with an apology.

Block Me, Amadeus

2006-06-21T17:52:00.000-04:00

The career of Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher reminds me of the Catholic Lives of the Saints I used to read when I was a small boy. An ordained minister, Fletcher has valiantly risked opprobrium, scorn, unpopularity--not to mention mauling by vicious liberal lions--all to serve the Holy Cause of the Right Wing and Wallet.

Although his 28% approval rating doesn't really hold a candle to the beatific beauty currently in the lead, Fletcher has tried everything he can to pursue the path to martyrdom and lower his popularity to saintly levels. Yesterday's New York Times offered a hagiographic summary of his various attempts to bring the spirit of the Inquisition to the Kentucky executive branch.

Running neck-to-neck with the Bush administration for the number of political appointees who have been indicted, Fletcher topped it off by getting indicted himself.

The charges against Mr. Fletcher -- conspiracy, official misconduct and political discrimination -- were brought on May 11. The 14 other members of his administration who have been indicted are charged with a total of 23 felonies and 60 misdemeanors for, among other things, criminal conspiracy and evidence tampering.

His goal: to rid the state government of anyone who might be a God-hating Democrat.

The governor is permitted to fill 4,000 political jobs. But the attorney general says Mr. Fletcher sought to fill many of the state's 32,000 merit-based jobs with political allies. . . . Featuring a list of Civil Service workers to be fired or exiled because of party affiliation, the documents revealed the existence of 12 officials who called themselves the Disciples and who pursued with religious zeal a systematic plan to clean house of Democrats.

The epistles of the Disciples displayed a missionary zeal:

"No one on earth faced more adversity than the Apostles -- we should not think we are any different," said one e-mail message between two coordinators of the plan, known as the Governor's Personnel Initiative.

Harassed by a veritable Pontius Pilate (State Attorney General Gregory D. Stumbo), Fletcher and his holy Disciples handled the impending indictments with the professionalism and valor expected of his office:

Throughout, the two sides fought every step of the way. In a 48-hour standoff on May 13, 2005, armed guards for the transportation cabinet blocked another set of armed guards from the attorney general's office from entering a transportation building to seize records.

And Fletcher rewarded his Disciples with something more valuable than canonization:

On Aug. 29 [2005], after the first nine of his administration officials were indicted, Mr. Fletcher issued a blanket pardon covering these officials and anyone else other than himself who might be indicted.

Recently, at a pivotal moment, one of the leading Apostles turned Judas:

Fletcher is also a co-star in the side ring, which features an undignified spat with his lieutenant governor, Steve Pence, who also was the Justice Cabinet secretary. Pence was also Fletcher's 2007 running mate but suddenly filed for divorce from the ticket. Fletcher then demanded Pence resign as lieutenant governor. But Pence refused, so Fletcher did what he could and fired him from Justice.

One of the most virulent critics of this paragon of Democracy is a young heathen named Mark Nickolas, who runs a blog named The Bluegrass Report and who received honorable mention in the New York Times article. In an apparent attempt to protect the Disciples and the unchurched state employees who might be influenced by online heresies, Fletcher's administration today reinstated the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and banned selected blogs and news outlets, including such pagan sites as Wonkette and TPMMuckraker.

One of the disciples of the Disciples, a Mark Routledge, explained that the new dogma was instituted by his Commonwealth Office of Technology, which "had made a decision to block state employees from viewing the entire category of blogs." When asked why only certain blogs were affected, Routledge responded, according to TPMMuckraker, that "their internet filtering service Webwatcher is to blame for that, not the governor's office." Unconfirmed rumors suggest that Webwatcher used to go under the sobriquet of The Holy Spirit.

(Note to Routledge: Block me! Block me!!)

As for the real St. Ernest, it somehow seems weirdly appropriate that he was tortured to death in Mecca.

Take Me to Your Loss Leader, Earthling

2006-06-16T16:55:00.000-04:00

The National Review's current Star Trek-themed, online fund-raising campaign has proved an easy target for mirth and derision.

At Outside the Tent, Clif sees a betrayal of principle, arguing that the magazine

has kicked to the curb its free market principles and begun shamelessly begging for the money that the NRO website couldn't earn in the marketplace.

(Clif seems to be providing much of my material lately, which can only mean his blog is better than mine--go check it out.)

And TBogg has a few suggestions for reigning in the National Review's staff budget:

no more free hair care products for Byron York, eliminate the Nacho Cheese fountain in the lunchroom and make Jonah bring his own lunch, cancel the Derb's Panty-of-the-Month Club subscription, and tell Cliff May and Victor Davis E Pluribus Unum Hanson "no more Christian Fellowship Paintball weekend retreats."

(Apparently, TBogg received an inside scoop from noted prophet Pat Robertson, since he seems to think that William Buckley is dead.)

True: I also work for a nonprofit organization, one that grubs for donations to support the worthy cause of American literature. Nevertheless, far be it from my sense of decency to leave untouched the comedic material provided by the NRO's campaign. What nearly stills my poison pen from heaping scorn on their efforts, however, is the aura of utter pathos that emanates from the fundraising appeal written by the magazine's editor Rich Lowry.

I said nearly. Then I got to this sentence (emphasis added):

... if you read National Review Online regularly and don’t subscribe to the print or digital editions of the magazine, you are in a weaker position to rebuff our appeals for help.

Um, Rich: No I'm not. And, besides, what is the bastion of conservatism doing using the same technique honed by that menacing swindler I see every day on the 6 train? You know the one--the guy whose bum leg changes from left to right and back again every few weeks.

Rich continues by offering some expert business advice:

Because—let me be frank here—we lose money. NRO is a loss leader. And here’s what’s unfortunate—the print magazine is a loss leader too. We are surrounded by loss leaders. If we ever have ideas to further our mission, they are guaranteed to be loss leaders. If your business needs advice on how to develop a loss leader, come to us. We have it down. I assure you we can help you start to lose money almost immediately. It’s our specialty. We have been doing it for 50 years and hope to keep doing it for many more.

In case you didn't get the message, Lowry is admitting that the National Review is a loss leader. Which begs the question: what exactly are these losses leading their customers to? The Ninth Circle? Kool-Aid? A weird political cult?

In the real business world, a loss leader is designed to attract customers, who will then buy items that will make a profit; by definition, loss leaders only work as such if you make a profit on something else. For example, Wal-Mart uses "everyday items" as loss leaders, knowing that their customers, once in the store, might make some purchases that are steeply marked up. Even Amazon discounts some of their books as high as 60% in the hope that book buyers will add other, more profitable items to their shopping carts.

But how are the National Review's magazine or its site or its advertising "loss leaders"? Is Lowry really claiming that all the NR's business revenues are loss leaders for their fundraising? Or, as I suspect, does Lowry, the editor for a magazine that claims to represent business and conservative interests, have no idea what this term means?

As for the fund-raiser's Star Trek theme and the promise that "NRO will launch a line of Trek-inspired merchandise" if they reach their financial goal: it seems that several NRO staff members don't even understand the meaning of those pesky business concepts copyright and trademark.

Related posts:
Party Killer

Politics, Polls, and Polar Bears

2006-06-13T18:01:00.000-04:00

Paul the Spud (Shakespeare's Sister) is justifiably saddened by the plight of polar bears. As the earth heats up, the ice floes break up, and the bears have to compete for declining real estate and diminishing resources: "Not only won't they have anywhere to stand, they're also unable to find food."

It's a little like living in Manhattan, but many New Yorkers can and do move off the island or away from the city altogether. Folks in the Big Apple, however, are not yet this desperate:

Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.

But one doesn't have to travel all the way to the Arctic Circle to witness this sort of heartbreaking and gruesome behavior.

Instead, one can just visit any of a number of right-wing blogs, where pajama-clad pundits and virtual-reality chickenhawks have begun feasting on each other. In recent months, they've chewed up and spat out a smorgasbord of former heroes--including such tasty morsels as Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown, Katharine Harris, and even His Eminence George W. himself.

The most recent delicacy served up at the Neocon Cafe is, believe it or not, Ann Coulter. According to a diarist at Daily Kos, other members of her species have begun to smother her with A-1 sauce.

Coulter's antics are hardly anything new; as Digby says (providing plenty of examples), she's been spewing crank-enhanced invective for years, "saying the most vile things imaginable and making a good profit at it." Yet, suddenly, a veritable pack of omnivorous Ursus timidus are distancing themselves from the Ice Queen's latest attacks on September 11 widows.

So what has precipitated this new wingnut sensitivity? Republican popularity, that's what. That's when the movement starts casting its dead weight overboard.

Things are heating up for the right, and their little islands of ice are gradually shrinking. (For conservatives, of course, this will inevitably mean that women and children will be tossed out first.) And this is bad news for someone like Ann:

When someone becomes a bother they are no longer conservative --- no matter that you've spent your whole life doing exactly the same disgusting thing to great acclaim by all these people. You've been voted off the island.

An increasing number of the GOP's paunchiest have a message for the Ice Queen: go get your own floe. It's the inevitable bottom line of the moral calculus we call Coulter's Crystal Methematics.

There is, of course, one major and obvious ethical difference between what's happening to the polar bears and what's happening to their equally white primate counterparts:

I feel sorry for the polar bears.

But What's the Rope For, Daddy?

2006-06-09T17:56:00.000-04:00

Clif, who remains unapologetically Outside the Tent, is writing letters; he recently sent one to the editor of The Birmingham News, noting the paper's sudden and somewhat surprising sensitivity for Politically Correct word choice.

It seems the paper doesn't want to offend any of their readers, so they recently "referred to a KKK cross-burning as a cross-lighting ceremony." The phrase strikes Clif as a tad "euphemistic," although he did find the following usage note on the KKK web site, handily available for journalists:

The cross lighting ceremony is another example of how the national media distorts the Klan image. They purposely use the word "burn" because of the negative image that is conjured up in the minds of many people.

Hmmm. I do see the problem. But I think the suggested remedy leaves out an important element of these soberly conducted ceremonies--heat. These cheerful bonfires can sure warm up the soul on frosty winter nights. Plus, the religious imagery isn't quite obvious enough either. Overall, the marketing angles seem limited.

Taking a cue from Tristero, I suggest we call these events "Christianist Bright Light and White Heat Spectaculars." The rhyming alliteration along with the current nostalgia for childhood toys and the subtle James Cagney allusion will work to bring in the crowds. We can even promote the global warming aspects.

If you'd like to send the editor of The Birmingham News your suggestions for the proper way to describe these traditional family events, then you can e-mail him at tscarritt@bhamnews.com.