• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
IT DOESN'T TAKE an Anglophile to appreciate the English way with understatement, particularly at moments of high tension or pique. Readers of the Moscow Times got a slight taste of this national characteristic last Friday, when Mr. Giles Cattermole, a resident of Sonning-on-Thames, wrote in to express his discomfiture at the current state of British-Russian relations:
So Andrei Lugovoi allegedly assassinated Alexander Litvinenko. And that's fine--he becomes a hero, gets elected to the State Duma and is appointed second head of the LDPR party list. He also gets asked if he will run for president.
Vitaly Kaloyev, the architect from the Caucasus region of North Ossetia, assassinates Peter Nielsen, a Swiss-based air-traffic controller, and Kaloyev gets a senior government job in his hometown.
Now, just what message about Russian society and morals does that send?
You couldn't have asked it more politely yourself.
A "temple-throbbing Italian-American New Yorker who ruled a cacophonous city seen as the very definition of liberalism." Now how long has the New York Times been sitting on that description of Rudolph Giuliani?
When you consider that the mayor might have lost the primary in New York, betting all on Florida - "God's waiting room" to so many erstwhile Gothamites - maybe didn't seem so silly after all. But after his humiliating defeat last night, it seemed as if an army of eager political obituarists could finally crack its knuckles and settle down to work. Let's see now... Was it his stance on abortion? Gay rights? The infield fly rule? Did he take his own celebrity for granted and fail to mug convincingly for the red states? The Pat Robertson endorsement was as awkward as it was meretricious. Dress up once in drag, and you're just doing your duty in the megalopolis of camp. Dress up twice and you maybe preempt some of the gravitas of a wiry Colossus bestriding the Financial District. Or so the National Review claimed.
Giuliani was outflanked on every saleable characteristic as a Republican candidate. He was wise to shake the mantle of social conservatism, which he wore as convincingly Hillary did that Yankee cap in 2000. And no host of Riverside Drive wartime consiglieres could compete with McCain's solidity on Iraq. (Though the counterinsurgency doctrine does seem to owe a debt to the "Broken Windows" theory of crime prevention.) His greatest economic coup was getting the Mouse to replace the Masturbator in Times Square. And if it was the touch of the divine the people wanted, well, he was no choirboy. What he had was 9/11, but his idol Churchill had World War II and that wasn't enough either win an election in 1945.
What if Fred had endorsed? What if Jeb had? Ah well.
Indeed, what if Fred Thompson had endorsed Romney after staying in the race just long enough to crush Huckabee in South Carolina and deliver the state to his old friend John McCain, whom he had supported against the Bush machine in 2000? What then?
So now riddle me this. John McCain will easily absorb Giuliani's support base and, should he win the nomination, Romney's and Huckabee's as well. The nasty sparring with the Mormon CEO is of a quite recent vintage, and how many Independents or conservatives will care come next November? On the other side, however, we have a likely Hillary candidacy that will require... the endorsements of Barack Obama, Teddy Kennedy, etc. Will anyone, even the most self-deluded liberal, take such a knighting seriously after how ugly she and her gruesome husband have been toward their Democratic opponents for so long?
I'm listening now to CNN now and how McCain is reviled among severe conservatives and all the loudmouth talk show hosts -- Limbaugh, Ingraham, etc. But if Clinton is the nominee, will any cigar-chomping apparatchik of the right fail to come out, and come out vigorously, for the granite war hero who predicted a military success in Iraq?
CNN just projected McCain the winner. A margin of about 50,000 -- not as huge a walloping as Hillary delivered Obama, but still substantial. More than 50% of the precincts reporting.
Possibly one of the most ill-coordinated presidential campaigns in recent memory. He staked it all on tonight yet forgot that staying in the headlines was more important than biding one's time for a comeback. He allowed the media to paint this a two-man race, as if his sense of entitlement and national celebrity as America's Mayor would keep him relevant in the public consciousness. Even Commentary, whose former founding editor is an advisor to him, had turned weeks ago into a pro-McCain engine.
Now he vies for an ungentlemanly third place with Mike Huckabee, a Christian fundamentalist, in a state known among New York Jews as "God's waiting room." A pathetic terminus for Giuliani.
If McCain wins tonight -- and it looks increasingly likely that he will, especially with economy-minded voters turning out overwhelmingly for him -- then the question becomes, who will be his running-mate? Not Joe Lieberman, according to Joe Lieberman.
"No, I'd tell him, 'Thanks, John, I've been there, I've done that. You can find much better,'" Lieberman told The Associated Press during an interview Tuesday in his Senate office. "I'm not seeking anything else."
The Connecticut senator said he was unequivocally ruling out sharing the GOP ticket with McCain.
My prediction, and it's hardly groundbreaking: Fred Thompson. He ran a narcoleptic campaign and never took on the front-runner. Giuliani, I doubt very much because two hot-headed liberal Republicans is a guarantee for electoral failure (and Hillary would run against that ticket from the right).
Any minute now, Hillary Clinton will give a Potemkin victory speech in recognition of her "win" in the Florida "primary" tonight. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Hillary will assure her legion-strong minivan and menopause coalition that their voices will be heard, their votes will be counted, and that she will deliver them out of Egypt and into the house of bondage, or something like that.
Two small flies in the ointment: When Hillary Clinton had a chance to protect the franchise of Floridian Democrats, she declined. Also, among voters who decided in the last month, Obama won 47-40.
After six years of the administration using terrorism as a bludgeon against domestic opposition to its national security and foreign policies, the returns on that particular rhetorical trope have terminally diminished. The American people oppose warrantless wiretapping by a 3-to-1 margin, including a majority of Republicans. By a similar 3-to-1 margin, they want Congress, and not the president, "to take the lead role in setting policy for the country".
The Democrats should have been able to parley that massive structural advantage into an easy victory on Fisa by throttling retroactive immunity for telecoms and toothless oversight provisions in their legislative cradles, putting forward a bill to modernise Fisa that includes robust safeguards for civil liberties, and daring the White House and congressional Republicans to take a stand on whether national security or extra-constitutional claims of executive power are their top priority.
The events of the past week leave no doubt that Harry Reid has a surfeit of confidence in his dexterity as a parliamentarian. If only he had the backbone to match.
Edward Kennedy recommended Barack Obama today as a "president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past." And one does admire the quaintness of this sentiment coming from the scrofulous mastodon of American liberalism who has never missed an opportunity to invoke that ancient and sorry filial myth, "Camelot." The senior senator of Massachuttsetts admitted that his endorsement of Obama was guided along by his niece Caroline, who penned a cringe-inducing editorial in the New York Times this weekend comparing the Democratic candidate to her father. "We need a change in the leadership of this country," Ms. Kennedy noted somewhat prosaically, "just as we did in 1960." The need for a change in leadership comes along, courtesy of the Constitution, at least every eight years, but somehow this cycle is of the same urgency as the one nearly half a century ago. How's that for refusing to stay trapped in patterns of the past?
Remember when, during the South Carolina debate, Hillary Clinton accused Barack Obama of being a crony of Chicago "slumlord" Tony Rezko, even though Obama's association with Rezko was far from incriminating, and Rezko, while crooked in many ways, was not really a slumlord?
Well, today on the Today Show, Matt Lauer confronted Hillary with a Drudge-baiting photo that might make her regret ever bringing up Rezko's name.
From left to right, that's Hillary Clinton, Tony Rezko, and Bill Clinton. As you'll see in the exchange below, Hillary isn't thrown off stride for a moment when Lauer presents the goods, remaining in such firm control of the situation that she directs the conversation away from her own ties to Rezko, and towards a hypothetical "seventeen year relationship" with him that she, for one, never had. Whomever could she be referring to?
Still, this might be the moment for the Clintons to make a tactical retreat on the Rezko stuff. By loudly and self-righteously proclaiming her innocence of any association with Rezko, she effectively gives the press an engraved invitation to see whether there's anything more to it. Even if she's telling the unvarnished truth in this case --- and why assume that she is? In the 90s, Tony Rezko was precisely the sort of semi-criminal fundraiser/lackey with whom the Clintons couldn't wait to crawl into bed, and he was not the sort of man who met politicians simply to have his picture taken --- any publicity of her Rezko pic immediately prompts some well-deserved scrutiny of the many other crooked financiers she and her husband have loved in the past (and present!). In other words, not only can this baby go viral, but it might well touch off a cascade of truly damaging coverage.
Moving to a more concrete example of Hillary's chutzpah, some of you may have seen the piece I wrote on Hillary Clinton's democracy problem for PJM. Well, Hillary Clinton has yet another problem with democracy. Last year, the Democratic National Committee stripped Michigan and Florida of their delegates to the party's nominating convention, as a reprisal for the state parties' decision to hold primaries before February 5. None of the candidates bothered to demur. In fact, they all signed agreements not to contest those primaries; except that for Hillary, unlike the others, not contesting did not entail removing her name from the ballot.
Lo and behold, the Clinton campaign, which won Michigan and will win Florida by virtue of having the only candidate on the ballot, is suddenly concerned with the disenfranchisement of Michigander and Floridian primary voters, and insists that their delegates be seated. It's just another example of how Hillary Clinton is willing to selflessly go that extra-mile for all our sakes.
Rudolph Giuliani's candidacy for president must have evaporated in the minds of many on the day that Pat Robertson supported it. The preacher who thinks the terrorist attacks of September 11 were caused by abortionists, gays and lesbians allying divine providence with the pro-choice, cross-dressing Atlas of that dark day? And be honest: how many of you realized "Barack Obama '12" was more like it after John Kerry declared for the Illinois senator in '08?
When political endorsements aren't banal and predictable, they're disastrous. The New York Times has been a reliable Vesuvius every four years. The paper of record with all the opinions fit to have demands unity but stands a towering object lesson in polarization. Indeed, right now, across the American Middle West and South there are campaign workers for John McCain and Hillary Clinton wondering how they're going to cope with this seismic level of damage control.
It seemed not long ago that Bill Clinton was the elder statesman with six-figure speaking fees and fawning press profiles devoted to his charity work on AIDS in Africa. Did it really matter who ran against the incumbent in 2004 when we still weren't sure what his predecessor's next career move would be? (Secretary-General of the U.N. seemed the most mutually beneficial arrangement.)
Now one cannot open a newspaper or click on the television without seeing 1992 played out in farcical sequel. When Bill isn't chivvying journalists for the "aggressive" tone with which they ask him necessary questions about his wife's sleazy campaign, or falling asleep during a Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial sermon in Harlem, he's sounding as if he were the one locked in a David Mamet script with Barack Obama, easily his equal as a national politician.
Clinton likes to blame the media, but how can the media help itself? The aged and flabby Mr. Slick thunders and grumbles about the youthful and lean Mr. Smooth - copy like this doesn't just hand itself to you every four years.
What John Edwards and Scientologists Have In Common
There are lots of reasons to dislike John Edwards. The best one, surely, is his cringe-worthy populist demagogy on trade and labor issues. For example, when he promotes horror stories about a trade deal with Peru, a dagger pointed at the heart of Bolivia, the fact that he's wrong on the merits is almost beside the point. He's trying to win votes by convincing unsophisticated people who don't know much about economics, but have understandable insecurities about their jobs and health care, that big scary financial institutions and globalization generally --- and not, say, a secular flight to skill --- are responsible for their troubles. This is more or less the precise economic equivalent of Republican fear-mongering about national security. It's a despicable way to behave, a despicable way to run a campaign, and since Edwards is a smart lawyer and former hedge fund consultant who presumably knows better, it's also cynical as hell.
But in case you're looking for a more superficial reason to dislike Edwards --- or even if you're not but could use one on reflection --- I think I've discovered what makes Edwards so goddamn creepy. Here are two clips from the Late Show with David Letterman. One is of Edwards laughing inanely at something that isn't funny. The other is Tom Cruise laughing inanely at something that isn't funny. The resemblance is uncanny.
Ezra Klein --- whom economist Paul Krugman describes as "very, very good" --- has a post up about labor economics called "How Unions Can Increase Productivity." In it, he tells the story of an encounter with friendly UPS worker, who lingered momentarily in an office building after business hours to check for packages. Not because he gets paid by the parcel, but rather because "we're union, so if UPS is making more, we can say, 'you're doing this many packages, and making this much money,' and we can renegotiate our contract."
Allow Ezra to explain how this counts as an instance of unions increasing productivity:
The guy I met in the elevator, at 7PM at night, is hustling for packages. Why? Because he know that if the company does better, his union has the power to ensure that he'll do better, too. His work doesn't just enrich management and ensure ever more lavish executive compensation -- it pays his salary, and the better he does, the higher his salary. And he can bank on that, because he's in a union.
This is just stupid. Here are three reasons why this story proves nothing:
(i) The metric for productivity, the number of parcels collected and delivered, is a function of how many parcels are in circulation. Doubling back to check for packages doesn't increase that number, nor does wishing it increases in order to give your union greater leverage in collective bargaining. Conversely, if a worker doesn't pick up and deliver the packages on his route, he should be fired. To the extent that unionization prevents that happening, it's an impediment to productivity.
(ii) There are countlessly many non-union business models that tie outcomes for employees to outcomes for the firm as a whole. For example, a delivery business that paid wages relative to number of parcels collected and delivered would create an unambiguous incentive for workers to ramp up their productivity. Alternatively, a business could just stipulate that "third prize is you're fired." Either way, a union adds no value.
(iii) "I met some guy in an elevator" is not the beginning of an economic analysis, however informal.
None of this entails that unions can't be good for their members, or even that unions, under certain circumstances, can't increase productivity. But pulling an anecdote out of your ass is not much of a strategy for establishing that they can. Labor economics is a real field with an extensive literature. If you're unfamiliar with it, the least you can do is avoid arguments that fail on purely logical grounds.
Since my esteemed co-blogger and economist Nic pulled on a Hoffa on Snarksmith way back, I've been looking for someone to pick up the slack. Enter Dan Koffler, a left-libertarian philosopher and Jewcy Cabalist. He'll be writing here as much as he likes about whatever he likes. Dan has written for Dissent, Reason and Comment is Free. We tend to disagree in what I hope are interesting and rewarding ways, except on religion (we're against it) and Deutscher's Trotsky biography (we're for it).
I think it's been established that the worst thing that can happen to Hillary Clinton is to win the Democratic nomination. Her increasingly Tammany-style tactics, which include using her awful husband to snarl and growl for her, have thoroughly repulsed those who used to not only be willing to settle for the Clintons but actually loved them. There's no more of the effusiveness that greeted a relatively unknown Southern governor in 1992. (Back then, getting tough on crime meant executing a mentally disabled black man; this time it's threatening to bomb Iran.) Just as Democrats are heavily attracted to Barack Obama but question his political maturity or ability to govern based on a wafer-thin c.v., they're merely resigned to Hillary because the last time she resided in the White House, the economy was brisk, terror was a Jerry Bruckheimer production, and the toppling of genocidal dictators was a yawning afterthought that we'd eventually get around to when the sell-by date for a "quagmire" had passed. This at least seems to me the vote from the viscera in '08. Though I wonder if we can truly suffer a national rhyme scheme of administrations: Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Such alternating dynastic presidencies never improve with age.
Question: Who seems the abler elder statesman now, George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton? The latter's chances of nabbing the Secretary Generalship of the UN -- it always seemed to me like his next logical step -- are now slim and none unless he's prepared to take anger management instruction from John Bolton.
William Greider hits what I think it the loudest chord among old-guard 90's liberals:
We are sure to see more of Mr. Bill's intrusions because the former president is pathological about preserving his own place in the spotlight. He can't stand it when he is not the story and, one way or another, he will make himself the story. I used to be sympathetic toward Mrs. Clinton on this point. No longer.
She is using her egocentric husband to do the low-road hits for her campaign. He is good at it--a real charmer if you've never seen his act before. Or is Mrs. Clinton's husband using her? People can ask that question without disturbing the principles of feminism.
And this is all before the general election. Can you already smell the dead Maoist hookers with shady investment portfolios bursting out of the Chappaqua closet come September?
Der Spiegel is calling it the "End of the Obama Revolution." The managerial style of Hillary Clinton has triumphed among women and working-class voters who may not feel tingly all over when she speaks but nod along as they would to a wise old aunt.
It may be premature yet to write Obama off: He'll almost certainly win South Carolina, which won't give him the boost Iowa did but could still renew some of the faded lustre of his campaign--especially if black voters turn out heavily for him, as they are expected to do. And as against Hillary's ratcheting up of the Hispanic vote in California, Obama's appeal to the Sonoma-and-Prius set in that state could tip the balance in his favor, or at least give him enough delegates to make a loss interesting. (Right now he leads Clinton by two delegates).
Whatever the case, can we agree this is the silliest sentence you'll see out of the foreign press this week?
Obama personifies Europe's hopes for a modern America: black, socially minded and gentle.
A slightly expanded version of the blog post below, now up at PJM:
Unless you think that the “audacity of hope” refers to making Harvard Law Review, you will admit that Obama has used the perception of his lineage to his advantage. This is a trick that works both ways, of course, as he’s recently found with the minor scandal engulfing his openly “Afrocentric” hometown church, the head pastor of which lionizes Louis Farrakhan.
I didn’t like the demands placed on Obama to repudiate a notorious racist Jew-baiter whom he has never professed to admire. Something about this struck me as being insecure and commissar-like at the same time. However, I found it equally disturbing that Obama’s defenders rushed to remove his eyebrow-raising house of worship from the same scrutiny they’d happily apply to, say, the Mormon Church.
If a black aspirant to the White House belongs to a Christian congregation that is stained by demagogy and charlatanism and he doesn’t have to justify this to anybody, then have we really moved beyond the condescending and conservative mental categories of the 1960’s?
When we've reached the point in our national consciousness that people begin asking themselves again if Mike Huckabee wasn't the name of that garrulous gentleman who overquoted them on the price of a Ford Taurus, we shall be confronted with this extraordinary fact: Hillary Clinton botched the opportunity to get Christopher Hitchens to vote for her.
I remember asking my old professor whom he was for in this presidential election. Choice one was Giuliani, who'd at least demonstrated some pluck and ingenuity in making the work of Al Qaeda just a little harder. Choice two was Clinton, who, despite a lifetime of co-sponsoring her husband's falsehoods and using any and all means of getting ahead in politics herself, at least showed that, as a senator serving on the Committee on Armed Services, she, too, wasn't shy about bringing the fight to the forces of theocratic reaction. But the problem with Hillary, as we're all rediscovering again, is that she loves to remind you of every reason you ever had for wishing her into some unscrupulous senior partnership at a third-tier M&A firm.
Readers will have already seen Hitch's brief against her candidacy in Slate. Now comes a broader takedown of a phenomenon I once heard him describe as the "auction of ethnic self-pity" as it applies to the junior senator from New York and her closest challenger:
Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like "a plantation," adding in a significant tone of voice that "you know what I mean . . ."
She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently).
Here again, the problem is that Sen. Obama wants us to transcend something at the same time he implicitly asks us to give that same something as a reason to vote for him. I must say that the lyricism with which he does this has double and triple the charm of Mrs. Clinton's heavily-scripted trudge through the landscape, but the irony is still the same.
What are we trying to "get over" here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a "white" American. He is as distant from the real "plantation" as I am. How -- unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so -- does this make him "black"?
Unless one thinks that "hope," which is all the audacious rage, refers to making Harvard Law Review, one will admit that Obama has used the public perception of his lineage to great political advantage. Yet he has done so without quite seeming demagogic or orotund about it. (Even Tom Wolfe might tear his white pants trying to pen one of his racist caricatures of this local Chicago wheeler-dealer with the funny name.) And Clinton seemed to care not at all about having a pair of ovaries until she thought they might help propel her back into the White House.
To get a sense of how silly identity politics is (I haven't been immune to its whorish charms, I'll admit) one need only consider what a spectacle John McCain would make of himself if he chose the "Kiss me, I'm Irish" route to the executive. Is anyone even interested in what Upper Silesian wilderness "Kucinich" sounds more like "Jones"?
If the country really were so concerned with elevating a minority or the second sex into higher office, and thus seeming worldly enough to get invited to all the swank European parties, then why hasn't a brilliant high-profile African woman with a lot of vowels in her name not yet been asked to run for something?
"I am Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I approve this message" would satisfy nicely both the audacity and hope quotients.
To burn or not to burn? It's not a question we can argue over forever. Time is running out, and the stakes are high: Dmitri's past pronouncements suggest that Laura is not merely another scrap of paper. At one point he called it "the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity."
I think Ron's been had by Dimochka all these years. There's no way someone from that family would cash in on papa's unfinished -- and woefully clipped (30 pages!) -- final masterpiece. The only ones who could outdo the Boyds and Rosenbaums in the realm of Nabokov Obsession were the writer's own son and widow. (Vera once snapped at a fawning Martin Amis because she thought he wasn't deferential enough to Volodya's corpus.)
Then there's that theme in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight of odious literary bone collecting. The narrator dutifully tosses the love letters and ephemera of his dead celebrity brother into the fireplace in the end. Nabokov always said the reader sought in vain for parallels between his creations and himself, but if ever there were a viable congruence between the art and the life, it's in that novel.
9:04 PM: What the hell, it's between this and American Idol tryouts. NBC News projects Romney wins Michigan. "Dearborn Awakening" no help to John McCain, evidently.
9:06 PM: Did Hillary just say that MLK died so she could run for president?
9:14 PM: I want to say that Obama is being gallant to answer that race had no part in his New Hampshire loss, but really, how can he presume to know that?
9:16 PM: Hillary's evasiveness on the BET founder Robert L. Johnson's winking allusion to Obama's wayward youth is later invalidated by her admission that Johnson's statements were out of bounds. What he said: "I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing but he said it in his book." He "clarified" that he was talking about Obama's days as a "community organizer." Uh-huh. And the most memorable scene in Basic Instinct was the opening credits.
9:19 PM: Cute question to Edwards about his insecurities as a white male running for president.
9:23 PM: What'd that heckler say? And why does John Edwards think it's impressive to point out that monied interests damage domestic legislation?
9:24 PM: Hillary said it was "pathetic" for Bush to beg the Saudis to reduce the price of oil. Good point. No one would want to see Hillary beg.
9:25 PM: Obama's greatest weakness: he'd lose the briefcase with the launch codes.
9:29 PM: Edwards's greatest weakness: he cares so damned hard. Lucky that being president would keep him away from the down-at-heel hoi polloi. That upper lip ain't going to get stiff by itself.
9:30 PM: Hillary mentions cronyism without any visible cracks in her Lancombe foundation. What a pro.
9:34 PM: Brian Williams just asked Obama about being a pledge-thwarting Muslim. Is John Edwards' Freemasonry up next? Where's Ron Paul when you need him?
9:37 PM: I'm watching this on Windows Media Player. What commercials are they running? I ask because I'd like to learn something about this country and the people who run it.
9:39 PM: True confession: American Idol is playing in the background. A guy in a Princess Leia bikini just showed up. So far the most winning executive personality this evening.
9:40 PM: Citibank agonistes. Subprime mortgages are the new missile gap. Snore.
9:44 PM: The curious thing about Edwards is that he speaks in timeless homilies. Children, parents, responsibility, growth. If the whole White House gambit doesn't pan out, he'd make a fine Royal Proconsular Authority of Tobacco Farming at Jamestown.
9:49 PM: Hillary tries to take credit for the failure of a bankruptcy bill she voted for. Bill claps his trotters backstage.
9:54 PM: OK, I learned something. Warren Buffett still pays taxes.
9:58 PM: Hillary gives the most technical and comprehensive answer to our economic woes. I still can't pay my Capital One bill. Also, she gibbers too long, says Brian Williams.
10:00 PM: Edwards's goofy-toothed smugness challenges Obama on insurance executives giving to his campaign. Obama has that about-to-take-you-school look on his face. It delivers.
10:03 PM: Hillary in deep bullshit mode now. Question: How can Bush "bind the hands" of the next president by bypassing Congress in fashioning a deal with the Iraqi government to maintain U.S. troop presence until whenever. If this is peremptory executive whim, then the next executive can de-whim it, he can't he?
10:04 PM: Obama goes along with her.
10:05 PM: All troops out by the end of the year, says Clinton. Excuse me?
10:06 PM: Russert calls them on this. Obama clarifies his position: "end the war as we understand it." All three most disingenuous and delusional on this point. Now they're outjockeying one another to promise to do what they cannot feasibly do, nor what the military commanders say is necessary for maintaining basic security. (See this WaPo article on the window the surge has afforded for political reconciliation, which is now proceeding at a sluggish--as opposed to glacial--pace given the new de-Baathification law passed by the Iraqi government.)
Edwards wants "quick reaction force" in Kuwait. A garrison there somehow different from the "occupation" in Iraq.
10:19 PM: Now comes the liberal chest-pounding about federal funding for colleges that deny ROTC programs. All in favor.
10:22 PM: Look, any place called Yucca deserves toxic avenging. Why no one bringing up how we're losing the mutant warrior race to the Russkis?
10:30 PM: Enough with the fission already.
10:34 PM: English as a national language. Hillary in favor because "it will likely make it harder for Senator Obama's paymasters in Al Qaeda to coordinate themselves."
10:35 PM: Am I the only one creeped out by Hillary's continual recourse to "black-brown" as an identity politics category?
10:44 PM: Assault rifles, Second Amendment. As Edmund Wilson wrote in his diary shortly before he died and just after seeing The Godfather and The French Connection: "Bang bang."
10:49 PM: John Dickerson at Slate: "Romney ran in Michigan the way many people thought he should have from the start: as a man from the business world who could fix their problems. He also pandered robustly. Romney told Michiganders he would protect them from the business cycle and save their jobs." The Managerial Revolution begins and ends here, methinks.
10:59 PM: My live feed crapped out on me. Here's what happened anyway: John Edwards mentioned Tom Maller, a one-legged longshoreman he had the pleasure of meeting yesterday. Unfortunately, Tom doubled down on eleven two weeks ago, in a rare moment of excitement at New York New York, and frittered away his and his wife Geraldine's nest egg. This is why we need to fix social security before our children suffer. Hillary said Osama bin Laden is hoping that a President Obama misplaces the executive memo to bomb Waziristan. Meanwhile, the Senator Obamam slowly smoked a cigarette on camera and proceeded to explain to Tim Russert that he was against ingesting cloned animal meat long before any of his other esteemed colleagues were. The end.
Katrina vanden Heuvel has an excellent piece at the Nation about the Clinton camp's sudden reversal of opinion on ensuring that hard-working Americans get to vote in the primaries.
Last week the powerful, 60,000 member Culinary Workers Union Local 226 chose to endorse Senator Barack Obama after "fierce lobbying" from the three frontrunners. Two days later, the Nevada State Education Association – with ties to the Clinton campaign in its leadership – filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to shutdown nine casino caucus at-large sites created to allow both union and non-union shift workers to vote during the workday. (On any given day, it would be difficult for these workers to participate without these caucus sites. It will be even more difficult during the busy Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend.) According to the Washington Post, the system was created last March with input from the presidential campaigns and – as meeting minutes reveal – "several of the parties to the suit were there and approved of the process."
Clinton of course threw a fit about the undemocratic nature of the Iowa caucus, and surely would have lent her support to any plan to revamp that demagogic tally--that is, after knowing she was going to lose it. Now, not only is she whistling through a crackdown on voters' rights in Nevada, but members of her team are actively helping it along.
One outcome of this election has been that, like most New York Post headlines, "with ties to the Clinton campaign" has become a phrase that says it all.
The video below is making the rounds, with all manner of collar-loosening guilt expressed at the American Prospect about our nation's celluloid Orientalism. Hollywood, see, never depicts the cool Arab i-banker who fronts a Guster cover band. It's reel-to-reel swarthy leches, self-immolating nincompoops, and genie-pilfering megalomaniacs, isn't it?
Leave aside the fact that the following was sent to Steve Clemons by an Al Jazeera journalist, whose employers's rendering of Middle Eastern Jewry is always cool and collected. Ross Douthat has already pointed out that the most recent films depicted herein are at least fifteen years old. I'd add that despite what the 200 pounds of bad veal calling itself a narrator in this documentary will tell you, Aladdin and True Lies are not quite as culturally paradigmatic as all that. If Jafar merits a Saidian dissertation, then perhaps I can enjoin a Caribbean scholar of stereotypes to explain the Rasta rock lobster who told Ariel how to land her man in The Little Mermaid?
Also, the only suicide-bomber I spot below played the greasy right-hand-man to a Colombian drug lord in Crocodile Dundee II, and thank you, I didn't need Al Jazeera to tell me that brown skin is still eminently fungible in American popular culture.
Douthat's also right to say that since 9/11, the only movies to come out depicting Arabs in a negative light were The Kingdom (and really, it was more the Wahhabists what done it, as Stephen Schwartz argued in the pages of Jewcy), and United 93, which, you'll admit, at least aimed at verisimilitude.
It's long been a cause of minor consternation among my British friends that American filmmakers cannot make a schlocky science-fiction epic without casting the sons and daughters of Albion as imperial assholes. Check out the accents on the Death Star personnel sometime.
I don't mean to sound like a white Stanley Crouch (well, okay, maybe a little), but as for the narrator's claim that we got over vilifying blacks in cinema a long time ago, so why can't we do the same for Arabs, he clearly has yet to take in the latest Ice Cube/Tracy Morgan vehicle.
My latest for PJM. Note the Paul supporters flooding the comments section already. An early start to a day of collecting Army surplus goods and "Holy Grail" quotes. My favorite so far is the man who says: "I would image Mr. Weiss is a supporter of the apartheid state of Israel." Please, JoeMorgan. My father is Mr. Weiss. Call me Michael.
Imagine this scenario. You are an elected representative of Congress and a pamphlet has been produced in your name on a monthly basis for three decades. It’s been written in the first person and makes frequent reference to your family and other biographical details. You admit to being aware of its existence. Do you a) attempt to have its publication stopped for fear of how it might damage your reputation; b) oversee every aspect of its production to ensure its vicarious fidelity to your own opinions and style of expressing them; c) take only a passing interest in its contents?
Greg Sargent at TPM had this nugget from the Las Vegas Review Journal:
Clinton implied that Obama's career has mostly been spent running for office rather than governing.
"He was a part-time state senator for a few years, and then he came to the Senate and immediately started running for president," she said. "And that's his prerogative. That's his right. But I think it is important to compare and contrast our records."
To which Sargent adds: "I haven't heard the "part time" line before. It suggests that Hillary is going to keep going with her "experience" frame, and that the sharp elbows are still out, even though Hillary isn't perceived to be behind right now."
Actually, what the "part-time" swipe most probably refers to, albeit in an arcane way, is Obama's bad habit of voting "present" in the Illinois legislature, as opposed to taking a position, on a whole host of bills. He did this, according to the New York Times, 130 times. Granted,
An examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way.
In more than 50 votes, he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy.
By my count, that leaves 44 or so votes where Obama sat quietly amidst a total sea of yeas and nays. Casting one's lot in a debate is so 1990's.
No doubt the pop-up version of Machiavelli's The Prince he read in kindergarten advocated abstention as a cute way to stay "above politics," but isn't a basic duty of an elected lawmaker to at least actively participate in sessions of lawmaking?
Trying to have it both ways. Now where have we seen that in the Democratic Party before?
Notwithstanding the compelling on-air duo of Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee (am I the only one who thinks GOP debates now sound like NPR's "Car Talk"?), John McCain will still likely win the South Carolina primary next week. It's Iran, stupid.
As the usually reliable Fred Kaplan at Slate has described the scary-weird events in the Strait of Hormuz last week, in which Iranian speedboats came perilously close to a U.S. warship patrolling international waters:
It's hard to say what the Iranians were trying to accomplish or, for that matter, whether their actions were approved by the Tehran regime. (The boats are said to be under the control of the Revolutionary Guard, which is more militant than the regular navy and which has been known to act on its own authority, even in defiance of the foreign ministry.) Were they sending a signal to President George W. Bush, on the eve of his trip to the Middle East, that the U.S. fleet shouldn't assume it can act with impunity in the Gulf? Were they testing the fleet's rules of engagement? Were they playing to the crowd at home, trying to provoke the United States in order to stoke the fear of a larger U.S. attack on Iran, a fear that sustains their own political power?
Had the captain of that warship done what was well within standard navy protocol for him to have done -- fired a warning shot at the speedboats -- there is every chance that a lethal confrontation might have occurred. (Firing across the "bow" of a speedboat is not so easy that one doesn't risk actually hitting the easily maneuverable dirigible instead.) In other words, we might have found ourselves at war with Iran this week.
That this dire contingency exists in the minds of most Americans -- particularly conservatives who would still endorse a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, NIE be damned -- is enough to eclipse a little Bible-thumping below the Mason-Dixon line.
Mike Huckabee seems to think he can run for president and win a la George W. Bush in 2000: as a Jesus-loving Southern good ole boy advocating a more "humble" U.S. foreign policy, with a score of anti-partisan, or "compassionate," economic policies in his domestic arsenal. The trouble with this program is that it is not even a necessary, let alone sufficient, electoral condition in the post-9/11 age. John McCain still sounds able and imperious describing his military and overseas bona fides before a GOP gallery within which, it should not go unremarked, he is the only one to have seen actual combat. (The increasingly farcical Ron Paul was an Air Force surgeon during Vietnam.)
Another way in which the conventional wisdom has been forgotten for a seductive new counterintuitive analysis of American politics is that military service still matters for White House contenders. Would John Kerry have come so close in 2004 without his former presence in the Mekong Delta? And can there be any "Swift Boating" of the Republican front-runner this time around?
Among likely Republican voters in S.C. concerned with healthcare, the war in Iraq and homeland security, McCain still outpaces his rivals by an impressive margin. Even the moribund Thompson and Giuliani were downright kittenish toward him last night, confining their attacks against Huckabee. This is suggestive of their desire for a vice presidential post in the probable event that McCain enters the general race and wins.
UPDATE: Breitbart is reporting that the cruiser did in fact fire a warning shot. Not as "passive," then, as Brit Hume made out.
Chris Beam at Slate's campaign blog Trailhead titles his liveblogging debate post: "Thompson Teabags Huckabee." I think -- I hope -- he meant to say, "Sandbags," because the only verbal definition of teabag that I'm aware of I was first made aware of by reading Savage Love.
At all events, Southern hospitality and the Party of Reagan just got redefined.
Jamie's been the recipient of all manner of double-digit IQ spillover as a result of his debate-ending article on Ron Paul. 1,600 commenters have left their two cents (in gold, precious gold!) as to why Jamie is a fascist hater, a bitter queer, a socialist, a charlatan, crank and hypocrite. Pay close attention to that last noun. A openly gay Paul supporter called Berin has "called out" Jamie on his hypocrisy, and the following email has been making the rounds in cyberspace as evidence of a murky journalistic agenda (which, you'll note, does nothing to mitigate the evidence against Paul). Andrew Sullivan, predictably, linked to this as proof that Jamie doesn't really believe Paul is a bigot, just that he has some explaining to do. Behold:
I first met Jamie at a holiday party held by the venerable libertarian magazine Reason just a few weeks ago. When Jamie saw my "Ron Paul 2008" button, he snickered and said, "Oh, Ron Paul... I've been reading up on him. Have you read the stuff that guy's written? Nasty stuff! Racist, anti-semitic, homophobic!"
I emailed Jamie the next day to engage him further and to ask just what he found so offensive. His response:
Hi Berin,
Thanks for writing; and I’m glad you enjoyed by [sic] piece in the Boston Globe. I’ll try and make the [DC Log Cabin Republicans] party tonight, though [LCR President] Patrick Sammon isn’t particularly happy with me after I wrote this piece [attacking LCR for not endorsing Giuliani, whom Kirchick calls "the most pro-gay Republican White House contender in history"]
http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid50709.asp
Anyways, I don’t think Ron Paul is a homophobe; I’m just cynical and enjoy getting supporters of political candidates riled up. If you were a Giuliani guy I’d have called him a fascist. But I must say, the Ron Paul supporters are the most enthusiastic of the bunch! [Emphasis added.]
Best,
Jamie
Let's see now. Jamie opens this letter by pointing out that he thinks rather highly of Giuliani's pro-gay policies and has been critical of the gay community for not endorsing the candidate because of them. He then closes by saying that he'd gladly call any Giuliani supporter a fascist. Which of these two contradictory statements do you suppose was written in irony, to take the piss out of a slightly antagonistic correspondent who seemed immune to persuasion?
As always, literal-mindedness and political stupidity are joined in holy matrimony (or civil union, as the case may be). We in Welfaria clap our barbarian trotters.
As an antidote to the much-derided Gloria Steinem editorial in the New York Times, let us propose the following scenario: A depressed male candidate for president breaks down on camera and, close to tears, talks about how personal this race is for him and he can't understand why people don't like him more. Would this play in New Hampshire, or anywhere else? (CNN would cut from this vignette to a screenshot of Osama bin Laden snickering and making crybaby gestures in his Waziristan redoubt.)
But for Hillary, it worked like a dream, didn't it? A woman who has had her eyeshadow poll-tested finally put the script away and sounded human, vulnerable, needy. My God, did she remind me of my beloved mama tonight.
"Women were the key" is the refrain right now on CNN (are they ever right about anything? Carl Berstein, your inferiority complex is showing again), and maybe that's so. Obama may have a sauve style and smoky voice, but if the ladies prefer to stick with their own kind, who can blame them?
Here's my theory: Hillary's basically an Angela Merkel-type center-left pragmatist who's deeply hawkish at heart. What unites her with John McCain? They both advocated strongly for the war in Iraq, and only Hillary -- adjusting for that war's increasing unpopularity -- changed her tune. I'd trust either of them as commanders-in-chief to bring the fight to the forces of jihad and ragtag totalitarianism. What are the odds that Hillary will not to take credit, as one of the most vocal Congressional war authorizers, if the surge continues to work and Iraq becomes, if not quite a model democracy in the Middle East, then at least a darker shade of Turkey in the space of the coming administration? Get her in the White House and the talons will come out. Did you hear what she said about Vladimir Putin the other day?
Also, like Joseph Lieberman, she is still loathed by the DailyKos/MoveOn.org contingent of the antiwar left, and yet commands respect among the more conventional Democratic constituents. For all John Edwards's ain't-that-America pro-union bluster, organized labor turned out heavily in New Hampshire for Clinton. How about that.
At the very minimum, a nice consequence of how this weird election had transpired so far is that Clinton no longer carries that irritating air of entitlement she once did. She realizes she has to earn it now, and she seemed genuinely ecstatic and humble in her fine victory speech this evening. (Obama sounded unchastened and smug, like King Solomon with a sprained ankle.)
Knowing that my friend Jamie Kirchick had a conversation-stopping TNR piece about the darker side of Ron Paul in the works, I commissioned Daniel Koffler to do some digging of his own on the Paul "newsletter." Dan's piece for Pajamas Media is here, Jamie's here. Both were linked on Drudge today and flooded the site with the kind of hebephrenic idiots upon whom Paul's sliver of political legitimacy seems to rest.
For those new to story, the gist is this: Before he was a congressman, Paul had a leaflet that appeared under the multiple headings "Ron Paul's Freedom Report," "Ron Paul Political Report," "The Ron Paul Survival Report," all of which trafficked in some of the most recognizable and hideous tropes of racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Though the newsletter never had a byline, according to Jamie's article, Paul's campaign manager conceded that Paul did in fact write some of the material that appeared in it over the years (the manager then retracted this statement after Jamie read him some colorful excerpts).
Whatever the case, the candidate has formerly accepted "moral responsibility" for all his newsletter's contents. That makes him morally culpable for them, doesn't it? Furthermore, if, as Paul said today, he repudiates such claims that Martin Luther King was a gay pedophile or that all supporters of Israel take their marching orders from Norman Podhoretz, then why has it taken him so long to do so? The newsletter was published under his own name for years. Did he never bother to read it, or discover its true author, if this was not actually himself? If you or I had our names committed to such filth, would we not wish to uncover the source in order to end it?
A small but significant side note: I rang up the 800 number attached to the bottom of one Paul article -- a charming disquisition on the "barbarism" that drove the L.A. Riots -- and who answered by a Paul campaign representative. Question: Am I the first reader of the newsletter to use this number, and if not, why had no campaign staffer ever bother to inquire why so many rednecks and hicks kept asking about "Welfaria"?
A taste, from Jamie's diligent reporting:
This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals who "want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."
Needless to say, anyone attempting to defend Paul at this stage must resort to Stalinist standards of self-deception and falsification.
Andrew Sullivan, a mind-numbingly effusive Paul supporter, twists and groans to find a saving grace in all this. He doubts Paul wrote any of this awful stuff, yet applauds him for his swift denunciation of it. Andrew still says, however:
Taking moral responsibility is the right thing to do. But I should say I think less of Ron Paul after reading this article than I did before. Much less. I am not persuaded he is a bigot (like Jamie, apparently), and I remain impressed by the message and spirit of the campaign he has waged.
Why feel that Paul has dropped in stature if Andrew doubts he holds the very views Andrew thinks he doesn't?
The editors at Reason have been more honorable in their disgust.
My friend Pieter Schoolwerth is easily one the most talented artists on the scene today. Check out his stuff here. I'd ask how many painters you know who infuse their canvases with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, but chances are, you know plenty. Nevertheless, Pieter's about to hit it big this year, and for good reason. Nabokov once said that Salvador Dali was "Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood." The same rule applies to Pieter, and this doco does his fascinating and hilarious mind justice:
A friend emailed to say that he was worried about Obama's victory speech. It sounded too messianic. Some people like this sort of thing: Andrew Sullivan knows hope and was assumed straight into heaven last night. But as against Howard Dean's primal scream, the Chicago boy went in the orotund, let-my-people-go direction. The air of election was upon him, as Harold Bloom might have put it if Harold Bloom were trying to sleep with Obama.
One might easily write this off as the fervor of a hard-won first victory in a long campaign. But the wisecracks have already started:
Obama did work a new joke into his speech. Referring to his new status as the Democratic front-runner, he said: "This feels good. It's just like I imagined it when I was talking to my Kindergarten teacher."
The problem is, he's still not the Democratic front-runner. He's behind Hillary in all the national polls by a substantial margin and, as I noted earlier, he cleared what was a potentially dealbreaking obstacle for him only. Hillary could afford to lose Iowa; Obama could not.
The press has unsurprisingly focused on his race as the starkest factor in the Iowa win: A Lillywhite state goes head over heels for a black man. No doubt that is historic, but more significant is Obama's religiosity to a deeply Christian, Midwestern polity. Sixty percent of the Republican caucus-goers identified as evangelical, to which fact we can attribute almost entirely Mike Huckabee's win. (Were we hearing so much about "breaking the mold" and defying the "conventional wisdom" when Pat Robertson convinced a sizable number of the field of dreamers he was the man for the White House in 1988?) How many Democrats are equally faith-minded? And doesn't Obama make a more convincing person of God than Hillary does?
Readers of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir Infidel will recall that one of the reasons the Somali refugee ran for Dutch parliament in the first place was to prevent the scores of female genital mutilations occurring on tabletops across the Netherlands. The perpetrators of such child abuse may have been African in nationality, but their religion was never hard to guess. Spare me the "phobia" whines. If you were told of a series of Brooklyn rituals involving bearded adult men performing fellatio on infants while those infants's parents celebrated the event, would you have any difficulty identifying the Abrahamic faith behind such barbarism?
Now comes news that a different Islamic practice -- the honor killing -- has made its improbable way to Dallas, Texas. In one sense, it really can't happen here because the mainstream stream press refuses to report about it.
Sisters, Amina, 18, and Sarah, 17, were each shot to death. Friends of the girls say their father was Egyptian and critical of popular American lifestyles. ""He was really strict about guy relationships and talking to guys, as well as the things she wears," said Kathleen Wong, a friend of the dead teenagers. "I'm definitely 100% sure that it was her dad that killed her."
The neighbors really do describe Said as a "nice guy," too.
I've always been an opponent of hate crime laws, but this instance begs an important question in these post-PC times of ours: If a Muslim fanatic murders his own children for what he perceives as their waywardness or creeping apostasy, doesn't that warrant prosecution under a new category of biased violence?
It looks like McCain edged out the dignified pair of jowls that are Fred Thompson for a gentleman's third place (with 78% reporting as of this writing)*. To give this some perspective, that's exactly where George H.W. Bush placed in 1988, right behind Pat Robertson (second) and Bob Dole (first). To give it further perspective, we need only define the driving force behind a number of Republican caucus-goers:
About a third of Republicans interviewed before they cast their votes cited illegal immigration as the most important issue facing the country, followed by the economy and terrorism.
There's something about GOP-centric triptychs in Iowa that tend to get things exactly backwards, isn't there? I can already envision Mike Huckabee's SlimFast spots: "I may have lost the nomination, but that's nothing compared to the weight I lost on these shakes."
As for the Democrats, the big winner is actually John Edwards, who managed to eclipse Hillary by a small but telling margin (716 votes to 704 votes). I don't think the better-coiffed Huey Long has got much of a chance moving forward, though. In national politics, populism is good for demonstrating how it generates an unexpected momentum before extinguishing itself.
As for Obama, his win doesn't surprise, given the polls, but it's a hurdle he had to surmount in order to stay in the game -- not to necessarily win it. (Contrast to other cases: Bill didn't snag the Iowa caucus in '92. Native Senator Tom Harkin did. And do you remember anything about him, even that last fact?) Moreover, as even conservatives have begun to appreciate, Obama's style comes off as being "above politics" rather than left-wing or right-wing. In rhetoric, he shrewdly employs the dialectic without seeming smarmy about it. It goes like this: "Yes, illegal immigrants are a major problem, and the burden falls mainly on employers who hire them -- and on George Bush, who has done nothing to enforce the law. But, we can't very well kick every illegal out of the country. It's not practical and it's cruel. So let's enforce the current laws and create incentives for naturalization." Not groundbreaking, but nor is it triangulation because Obama actually tells you what he thinks; he just wants to show you how he got there, and he doesn't take opposing opinions for granted. And in this paraphrased example, he was talking to a seven year-old.
I pulled that example from Stephen Hayes's fulsome profile of Obama in the Weekly Standard, which seemed to argue that his more affable personality is a good vote-splitter, particularly in the idiosyncratic states:
I spoke to a lawyer from Des Moines whose first choice is Dennis Kucinich. (We agreed that I would not use his name because, well, would you want your name used if you supported Dennis Kucinich?) Since Kucinich is unlikely to be viable, the lawyer's second choice will be particularly important. Right now it's among Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama. The lawyer told me that he has problems with each of them. Clinton is too opportunistic, too corporate, too Washington. Edwards is too insincere. Obama is too inexperienced. Still, of the three, he prefers Obama.
And after the Ron Paul Revolution becomes an Alamo, how many disgruntled anti-partisans like our Des Moines attorney will choose to stick with the maverick who also was too prematurely counted out?
Rotten luck on Hillary, either way.
UPDATE: * Looks can be deceiving. McCain came in fourth. Some pundit burbling indicates this actually helps McCain and Giuliani (a distant sixth) because it's driven a small stake into the Romney campaign, and Huckabee has little chance of excelling outside of such an evangelical-friendly state. New Hampshire has been good to McCain, historically, and I wonder if Hillary can't mount a comeback closer to home. Whatever the case, the premature gushing over Obama doesn't distract from the fact that he gave a very admirable victory speech.
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
When we've reached the point in our national consciousness that people begin asking themselves again if Mike Huckabee wasn't the name of that garrulous gentleman who overquoted them on the price of a Ford Taurus, we shall be confronted with this extraordinary fact: Hillary Clinton botched the opportunity to get Christopher Hitchens to vote for her.
As an antidote to the much-derided Gloria Steinem 
Knowing that my friend Jamie Kirchick had a conversation-stopping TNR 
A friend emailed to say that he was worried about Obama's victory speech. It sounded too messianic. Some people like this sort of thing: Andrew Sullivan knows hope and was assumed straight into heaven last night. But as against Howard Dean's primal scream, the Chicago boy went in the orotund, let-my-people-go direction. The air of election was upon him, as Harold Bloom might have put it if Harold Bloom were trying to sleep with Obama.
