The Mittens plan on health care: repeal the PPACA, make it much harder to obtain private insurance without providing public insurance, gutting Medicaid, ending Medicare. And how could I forget TORT REFORM, the solution to all life’s problems. Well, those contradictions won’t heighten themselves!
See also Serwer, Bernstein, and Kilgore.
Does this National Review article about how conservatives are the real supporters of civil rights even mention the National Review’s contemporaneous position on civil rights? I think you know the answer. Of course, if you define civil rights so that Jesse Helms can be a supporter, it’s a pretty big tent…
My take on the lawsuits challenging the contraception requirement is up. The short version is that 1)in a rational universe the idea that religious affiliated institutions performing secular functions with taxpayer money have a constitutional or statutory right to impose their religious views on employees who don’t share them would be considered somewhere between “implausible” and “frivolous” but 2)that doesn’t mean the actually existing federal courts won’t buy the argument.
The proliferating conservative meme that criticizing legal arguments you disagree with is some kind of unethical intimidation is probably too stupid to require an elaborate rebuttal, although Mark Tushnet does the job very effectively.
Although, in fairness, can anyone remember a conservative criticizing a Supreme Court decision they disagree with? I find it hard to imagine Republicans engaging in such incivility. I think even the most detailed search would fail to find the slightest criticism of Roe v. Wade or Kelo v. New London.
As MacGillis says, Obama certainly could lose in November, but weak performances in meaningless primaries in states he has no chance of winning aren’t evidence of anything.
As Roy notes, wjts has immediately entered the inner circle of the internet commenter Hall of Fame. Before we get to that, however, I must note this classic Roger Kimball moment:
At the beginning of the Metaphysics, Aristotle observes than human beings are by nature curious animals: they ask questions and want to know the truth about the world around them.
Kimball’s place in the universe seems to be to illustrate the difference between the intellectual and the pseudo-intellectual, in a way that’s particularly amusing because of his tendency to pat himself on the back for his high intellectual standards. Today’s lesson is that the pseudo-intellectual thinks that name-dropping Aristotle makes space-filling cliches profound. The special Kimball touch, of course, is to follow this fake erudition with a bunch of birther-curious horseshit that cites Stanley Kurtz as an authority. Admittedly, this is probably an effective strategy in trying to impress Kimball’s presumed audience, Glenn Beck fans who are considered slow by other Glenn Beck fans.
Which brings us to the great wjts, who takes the time to answer the questions that Kimball considers Very Important:
Kimball: “There are a lot of questions to be asked about Barack Obama.”
Why are his college records sealed?
Because of the The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974.
Why can’t we see a certified copy of his birth certificate?
Because there’s a problem with your wireless connection.
Why are his medical records sealed?
Because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
I’ve been told that his Social Security registration was issued by Connecticut, which would be odd, but cannot check because that too is sealed.
That’s not a question, so I don’t have an answer. But, yes, it is troubling that the President’s Social Security number is not available to the public.
Obama worked as a lawyer, but we don’t know who he worked for because his client list is sealed.
That’s not a question, so I don’t have an answer. From my paralegal days, I dimly remember the existence of things called “attorney-client privilege” and “non-disclosure agreements,” which may provide a partial explanation.
Why is it that Michelle Obama can no longer practice as an attorney?
This is not a question about BARACK Obama, but MICHELLE Obama who is, so far as I have been able to determine, a different person entirely. But since you asked so nicely: she requested that her license be placed on inactive status in 1993 when she began work at a series of jobs that did not require her to appear before the court or provide legal counsel to clients.
I hope this has been helpful, and I am all too aware of the fact that none of this information answers Kimball’s most fundamental question: “How the fuck did a black man get into the fucking White House?”
Now that’s smart.
I’ve been withholding further discussion of the second volume of Caro’s LBJ biography hoping that the New Republic would put Blumenthal’s review online. That doesn’t seem to be happening, but even better I noticed that the NYRB has made Garry Wills’s review available. As you would expect it’s a wonderful piece of writing in itself. The review uses telling examples to demonstrate that Means of Ascent is a hatchet job — the whitewash of Coke Stevenson, the withholding or emphasis of Lady Bird’s intense fear of flying depending on whether it’s needed to make LBJ look bad, the meaninglessness of saying that the 1948 Democratic primary was “stolen.” Even better, it does so with even more wonderful turns of phrase than one expects from Wills, which is saying something. “One finishes this long volume with the fear, page by page, that Bambi will show up in the final paragraph to lick Coke’s cheek.” “Those who decide they are too good for politics may be right, but they are often the least qualified judges, either of their own virtue or the system’s viciousness.” And my personal favorite:
One reason for Caro’s deep belief that no one of any discernment or importance liked Johnson is his own inability to like anything about him…Caro’s imperviousness to Johnson’s weirder charms shows in many little ways as well as large ones. His evidence for the contempt students felt for him is their open use of the nickname Bull (for Bullshit) to his face. But there is bullshit and bullshit. “Bull sessions” is a neutral term—Johnson would later ask if he had to give a set speech at a political meeting or just bullshit. Bullshitting can be a skill, and even an art, not least in Texas. Caro has no critical ear in this regard, on the evidence of his unremittingly humorless pages. To write of Lyndon Johnson without a sense of humor is like setting a tone-deaf man to write about Mozart.
And yet, and yet, even at his worst I’m not immune to Caro either. Means of Ascent is a train wreck, far below the standards of Caro’s other four books, but it’s still an oddly fascinating train wreck. Once you can start to half-ignore the ridiculous framing, he still uncovers a lot of good stories about a political figure who’s worthy of extensive attention. And as I’ve said, it’s also interesting to me in terms of what it says about a certain generation of liberals, when (understandably) Vietnam loomed large while the Great Society could be seen as the emergence of a consensus. Means of Ascent seems to be working within the framework that caused a lot of people on the left to hold Hubert Humphrey — very possibly the most liberal major party nominee of the 20th century — in contempt. (For me, always symbolized by Mailer saying that if forced to choose he would prefer Nixon in Miami and the Siege of Chicago.) And as Tom Carson’s excellent review of Passages of Power points out, Caro reflects a particular variant of this — the patrician variant rather than the radical variant. Caro seems to find Jeffersonian leadership norms where politicians shouldn’t explicitly seek power very attractive, an ethos that Adlai Stevenson reflected. LBJ’s transparency was the opposite of this, which is part of what explains how Caro analyzes the 1948 Democratic primary.
But by Master of the Senate, Caro has changed. Part of this, I’m sure, is that he was stung by the criticism of Means of Ascent, and his clear-eyed view of Richard Russell (as compared to his embarrassing canonization of Stevenson in particular reflects this. But I don’t think it’s just that. The last two volumes pass the “Tyrone Guthrie” test. The third volume has — and should — a lot of critical material, but Caro no longer seems entirely immune to LBJ’s charms. And this is more pronounced in Passages of Power. As a longtime Camelot skeptic I’m not surprised to find “Rufus Cornpone” a more sympathetic figure that Bobby Kennedy and many of his associates, but I am surprised to find that at times this seems to be Caro’s view as well. I’m guessing that the evolution of Caro’s views about LBJ is shared by a lot of liberals of his era.
More than 2,000 people have been exonerated of crimes they were convicted of since 1989. It’s worth noting that this is only a count of official exonerations, resulting from dismissed charges or a finding in a court of law. So for example cases such as Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham, where Texas was able to get someone executed before their innocence could be established by a court of law, don’t count. This number is terrible enough, but the real number is higher and probably much higher.
It’s amusing to see Ann Althouse (and Rush Limbaugh, to whatever extent there’s a difference anymore) repeating PUMA comedy classics. Yes, clearly Obama’s literary agent was engaged in a preemptive conspiracy to make Republicans look like idiots. But shouldn’t they be trying something challenging?
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
