Author Page for Scott Lemieux

Passing the Penn Test

So, it appears that (as expected) Hillary Clinton has passed [via] the first test of whether her 2016 candidacy is serious, the Mark Penn question.

I enjoyed this from the linked article:

Penn has been tagged as the egocentric villain of the campaign who sowed seeds of dissent in the Team of Rivals. [Ugh, STOP THAT. Not every group of mediocrities and much-less-than mediocrities that fights a lot is Linclon's cabinet. --ed.] One campaign staffer recalled Penn exiting his office, extracting all of the pens from a colleague’s mug, returning to his office and closing the door.

The vast majority of the former Clinton aides — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of upsetting the powerful Clintons — believed that it was impossible for Penn to rejoin an eventual campaign.

“If you are the losing team,” Penn said, “you get blamed. Hillary told me, ‘It comes with the territory.’ ” He said that he and the candidate had a “thorough post-discussion of everything” but wouldn’t divulge specifics. He admitted, though, “You are always a little bit haunted when something is lost.”

Yes, maybe Penn is just being blamed because he happened, through no fault of his own, to be part of the losing team that by coincidence was the prohibitive favorite at the start of the race. Or because, say, of errors like failing to understand how delegates are allocated. Who can say, really? But even leaving aside the many concrete blunders of Penn’s Campaign to Insult America’s Intelligence, this brings us to the paradox of the consultant racket. You can wash your hand of responsibility of the results — plausible in a presidential campaign (as the fact that you can win a presidential election with the “help” of both Penn and Dick Morris makes clear), much less so in a competitive primary — but if this is true it’s far from clear why your services are worth millions of dollars.

I have to say, however, that it makes sense that the next institution that agreed to sign Mark Penn’s paychecks also came up with Windows 8.

On History’s Most Recent Greatest Martyr

Wilkinson sums up the Richwine controversy very nicely:

I suspect that Mr Richwine may have been able to survive either controversy taken in isolation. Had he not just argued, in an extremely tendentious fashion, that Hispanic immigrants are, on the whole, parasites, he might have endured public criticism of his dissertation. Had he not in his dissertation argued that Hispanic immigration ought to be limited on grounds of inferior Hispanic intelligence, he would have endured the firestorm over the risible Heritage immigration study, as Mr Rector did. Taken together, however, these two works produce a strong impression of hostility to Hispanics—they’re parasitical because they’re a bit dim as a breed, you see—which would be very hard to dispel. It’s easy to see why Heritage let Mr Richwine dangle.

Nevertheless, Mr VerBruggen, sees “a shocking unwillingness on the part of Heritage to stand up to bullying and protect the academic freedom of its researchers”. Michelle Malkin says that Mr Richwine was “strung up by the p.c. lynch mob for the crime of unflinching social science research”, which she finds “chilling, sickening and suicidal”. This sort of indignation speaks more to the right’s failure to take seriously the history and reality of American racial injustice than it does to Mr Richwine’s fate. As long as conservatives are inclined to think that Mr Richwine was “bullied” and “lynched” for his brave empiricism, instead of having been sunk by the repugnant prejudice exposed by the shoddiness of his work, non-white voters will continue to flock to a party less enthusiastically receptive to the possibility of their inferiority.

I would suggest that, as a rule, if you find yourself using the term “lynching” to describe “people who resign from wingnut welfare sinecures,” you should probably avoid ever writing about race ever.

In Conclusion, Any Increase in Marginal Tax Rates Is Grossly Immoral

I wanted to alert LGM readers about an exciting real estate opportunity. You can buy property in a Manhattan high rise for as little as $158,000! Of course, that’s for the wine cellar. A three bedroom apartment will run you about nine grand a month…after you’ve paid $32 million for the property.

Fortunately, you can purchase a maid’s quarters for as little as $1.5 million. Start saving today!

Impeachment? More Like Tried For Treason!

Roy reports on the scandal that is even worse than the Benghazi failed Arkansas drug running land deal scandal: something about an umbrella. There are many crazy responses documented, but the source of the very funniest is, in retrospect, not entirely surprising:

We must clear some extra space for Ann Althouse’s four (!) posts about the umbrella. First Althouse was “seeing something tragic” in the umbrella scandal: “The old ways — that made us love him — don’t work anymore,” she sighed. “The gentle, slow-talking, stalling with ‘uhs’ for Woody Allen-like timing… We see the rain failing on his dark suit, and maybe we think about how, yes, that’s the White House in back of him and he does have his closets in there, full of suits… empty suits… skeletons in the uh uh uh…” After a good deal of this, Althouse challenged a Washington Post story that said conservatives were irked by the umbrella: “who were these ‘irked conservatives’?” she demanded. “WaPo only cites an email from the conservative Move America Forward PAC…”

Althouse later posted on Nabokov’s objections to Freud, asking “What would Freud have said about Obama’s endless uh-ing?” Later still she told us, “The word ‘umbrella’ appears exactly once in Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father’… Now, I’m astounded to see that the umbrella figures importantly in the book — and it is even an umbrella held over him by another man… it is at the moment when he finds out who he really is that another man suddenly appears and is sheltering him with an umbrella… Flash forward, and he’s President. He is in the Rose Garden. It starts to rain. No man suddenly appears with an umbrella. He is getting wet and he is President — with plenty of airplanes and rifles and all of the world’s greatest military at hand — but he is still getting wet…”

She also discussed the phallic symbolism of umbrellas. You can read the rest at the links, or just wait for the audiobook version. (Throughout, Althouse’s commenters reacted in their by-now expected way, e.g., “That baboon isn’t fit to shine the Marine’s boots.”)

If the Wall Street Journal is ever in the market for a conservative hack for people who find Peggy Noonan a little too substantive and coherent, they always have somewhere to go. I do regret, however, that Althouse failed to emphasize the new evidence that Dreams From My Father was written by the Weather Underground.

Neocons:Munich :: Austerians:Stagflation

Matt O’Brien is correct:

I checked, and re-checked, and triple-checked, and I can confirm that it’s not 1979 anymore.

Now, that shouldn’t be too surprising — I’m not writing this on an Apple II, after all — but it is to a generation of men (and yes, they are all men) who think stagflation is always and everywhere a looming phenomenon. No matter how low inflation goes, they see portents of Weimar. But that neverending 70s show isn’t just a phobia of rising prices. It’s the idea that the solution to economic pain is more pain. In other words, Volcker-worship.

Indeed, Kinsley was actually explicit about it:

But only in this sense. Austerians believe, sincerely, that their path is the quicker one to prosperity in the longer run. This doesn’t mean that they have forgotten the lessons of Keynes and the Great Depression. It means that they remember the lessons of Paul Volcker and the Great Stagflation of the late 1970s. “Stimulus” is strong medicine—an addictive drug—and you don’t give the patient more than you absolutely have to.

You might think the fact that inflation remains very low might give Kinsley pause, but apparently not. You might also think the fact that the invocation of the 70s makes no sense even on its own terms might also undermine the argument. Except, again, that logic and history don’t really have anything to do with it — it’s an excuse, like pretending to believe that Saddam Hussein was a threat comparable to Hitler to advocate a war you’ve wanted for other reasons anyway. It’s just overclass moral panic, identical to Kinsley’s silly arguments about Chris Christie. Other people have to suffer to pay for some perceived sins; that’s the whole argument. And you can bet that if it was Kinsley being asked to make sacrifices he’d start recognizing the errors in his own arguments very quickly.   The drug analogy is perfect, although not in the way Kinsley intends; a similar logic is used to justify a war on drugs whose immense costs and gross inequities can’t be rationally defended, but persist in large measure because there are sinners and someone has to pay.   As the manager said in Wall Street, “it ain’t going to be me.”

An Impressive Acheivement, In A Way

Apparently, Ken Cuccinelli’s running mate has been chosen to appeal to people who feel Cuccinelli is a bit of a wet.

On the Cincinnati IRS

Jared Bernstein’s take on this very good NYT story seems right:

There’s a long cover story on the Cincinnati IRS office which is ground zero for the recent scandal. The piece paints a picture of an understaffed, poorly managed group of mid-level bureaucrats, trying to follow impossible guidelines. Clearly, the agency screwed up in a big way that threatens to deepen our already dysfunctional politics. That said, partisan bias on behalf of the agents is not obvious.

What would help clear up this part of the issue is a number I’ve yet to see showing that (c)(4) groups with conservative names were disproportionately targeted. It’s clear, for example, that more “Tea Party” and similarly named applications were given extra scrutiny than liberal ones (like those with “Progress” in their title) but it also seems that there were a lot more of the former. The question of proportionality has yet to be answered.

Although all of this leaves out the fact that Barack Obama clearly took some time out from his busy schedule of arranging the murder of Christopher Stevens to cover up a failed Arkansas land deal to personally direct the actions of the Cincinnati field office.

Weekend Beer Notes

This thread was a classic illustration of what generally happens when people discuss craft beers on the intertubes.    For obvious reasons, nobody wanted to defend the actual argument being made by the article under discussion — i.e. “Craft breweries should avoid making their best-selling beers because Tom Freidman’s apocryphal cab driver craft beer fanatic found a mild 30 IBU saison ‘too hoppy.’”    So, instead, we got reiterations of some banal points, most notably the indisputable point that hoppier does not always equal better.  And, yes, yes, there are some craft brewers that add excessive hops as a botched gimmick, proving that IPAs can be screwed up just like any other style.  And I suppose there are beer snobs who look down on people who don’t primarily drink very hop-forward IPAs; I’ve never personally met a beer snob who looks contemptuously when someone orders a porter or trippel, but, hell, it’s a big country, I’m sure they exist somewhere.   And…so what?  I turn things over to djw:

What he meant, of course, was “I don’t like ESBs”. It’s true of even the most ecumenical beer drinkers with wide-ranging taste that there’s some style they don’t like. Myself, I don’t care for Hefeweizens. But unlike this silly article, I’m careful to recognize that drawing broad conclusions about the appropriate direction for an entire industry from my own tastes is probably not a good idea.

There’s something weird about the way people who don’t care for hop-forward beers to infer all manner of strange things from this. People who don’t like wheat beers, or stouts, or hefeweizens, or whatever, generally avoid drinking them and call it good, whereas people who don’t care for hop-forward styles are rarely content with such a simple, straightforward approach. The “bigger is better” accusation is particularly absurd. Like most fans of the Imperial IPA style, I find some 100+ IBU hop-bombs sublimely well balanced, and others a one-note throat punch of a beer. I wouldn’t expect people who don’t care for hop-forward flavor profiles to be able to tell the difference, for the same reason I’m not good at distinguishing between a mediocre hefeweizen and an excellent one. But, crucially, I don’t deny that such a distinction is impossible to make about hefeweizens.

I’ve never understood what problem such arguments are supposed to be addressing. There are vastly more good beers available in all styles than there were 10, let alone 20, years ago. The preference that some beer snobs have for IPAs hasn’t diminished the availability of other styles of beers. So what are people kicking about? For people who don’t like pilsners to repent and admit their false consciousness? I don’t get it.

Speaking of excellent craft brews, I don’t know how often they put them on, but if you ever have a chance to attend one of these Dogfish Head nights, they’re strongly recommended. In a musical theme, I was able to try both the Bitches Brew and the Hellhound on my Ale (the latter of which I had never tried in a bottle), both of which are superb. Of what I was able to sample from the rest of the table, the Burton Baton was especially fine. (I was tempted to try Dogfish’s barleywine, but had too much work to do this weekend.)

And, finally, I would like to present the following exhaustive list of circumstances under which a pub that doesn’t have dancing should play recorded music at volumes high enough to drown out any conversation:

None. There are no such circumstances.

I look forward to the contrarian article about how when you sit down for a beer with friends there’s nothing more awesome than having to yell to not even be able to make yourself heard.

…and, yes, as noted in comments this applies with perhaps even greater force to coffee shops, although I’ve never encountered it outside of Astoria.

Today In Not Notably Rational People Paid to Write About Politics

Our Lady of the Magic Dolphins.

Did Michael Kinsley Invent the Concept of Same-Sex Marriage?

You would think that Michael Kinsley’s defense of austerity would be the most glibly know-nothing thing you’d read all week. And you might still be right, but Kinsley has decided to make it interesting. His basic argument is that we should leave Ben Carson alllonnnnnnnne! because lots of people who weren’t notably homophobic didn’t support same-sex marriage rights until recently. Well, maybe not entirely unreasonable on its face. But is it applicable to Carson? Kinsley saves us some time by taking his own argument behind the office building and firing twenty shots into it with one of those new smart rifles:

Carson is the latest Great Black Hope for the Republican Party, which is quickly running out of African American conservatives to make famous. But Carson’s appearance was not a success. He should have left bestiality out of it. And any reference to NAMBLA—the “North American Man / Boy Love Association”—is pretty good evidence that we have left the realm of rational discussion and entered radio talk-show territory.

I will concede that there are non-homophobes, especially in public life, who came too late to supporting same-sex marriage rights. It seems pretty obvious that people who are still comparing supporters of same-sex marriage to pedophiles and people who have sex with animals are not part of this group but are just homophobes, full stop. How can a defense of Carson possibly proceed from here? Very unconvincingly:

Carson may qualify as a homophobe by today’s standards. But then they don’t make homophobes like they used to. Carson denies hating gay people, while your classic homophobe revels in it.

I hate to tell you, but disavowing hatred is pretty much the first play in the respectable homophobe’s playbook. “Hate the sin, not the sinner” and all that. Tony Perkins claims not to hate gays and lesbians. It’s like saying that Richard Russell couldn’t have been a white supremacist because he didn’t use the same racial slurs Theodore Bilbo did.  And comparing gays and lesbians to pedophiles is homophobic by the standards of 25 years ago.

But, anyway, this is just a garden-variety bad argument, and I wouldn’t have bothered addressing it if it wasn’t for this great moment in unwarranted self-aggrandizement:

The first known mention of gay marriage is an article (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989.

I…wow. I don’t mean to suggest that the Sullivan article wasn’t important in its way, or to deny Kinsley his appropriate share of the credit for publishing it.  But “first known mention?” I don’t know what the very first was, but I do know that there were lawsuits claiming that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional that made it to state appellate courts in Minnesota, Kentucky, and Washington between 1971 and 1974. Nor was the concept unknown in mainstream news sources during the 70s. It’s just remarkable that Kinsley wouldn’t bother to take a little time to check out this implausible, self-serving claim.

In reference to Kinsley’s austerity self-immolation, a couple of colleagues noted that Kinsley has the strengths and defects of the clever high-school debater: he writes well, and give him something — like a Wall Street Journal editorial — that’s illogical on its face and he can do an excellent job on it. But his knowledge of both history and contemporary policy is puddle-deep, and he feels no need to try to learn something before making definitive pronouncements. Claiming to be personally responsible for inventing the concept of same-sex marriage 1989, though, takes this problem to a new extreme.

In All Fairness

If I were a Maple Leafs fan this week, crack would seem pretty appealing.

I assume it was seeing this that made him feel that alcohol was insufficient:

…More:

The footage begins with the mayor mumbling. His eyes are half-closed. He waves his arms around erratically. A man’s voice tells him he should be coaching football because that’s what he’s good at.

Ford agrees and nods his head, bobbing on his chair.

He says something like “Yeah, I take these kids . . . minorities” but soon he rambles off again.

Ford says something like: “Everyone expects me to be right-wing, I’m . . .” and again he trails off.

At one point he raises the lighter and moves it in a circle motion beneath the pipe, inhaling deeply.

Next, the voice starts in on Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. The man says he can’t stand him and that he wants to shove his foot up the young leader’s “ass.”

Ford nods and bobs on his chair and says yes, “Justin Trudeau’s a fag.”

The man taping the mayor keeps the video trained on him. Then the phone rings. Ford looks at the camera and says something like “that better not be on.”

The phone shuts off.

Today In Aesthetic Stalinism

The 21 greatest conservative episodes of The Golden Girls brands of masking tapehip-hop songs! Not that I recommend getting out of the boat beyond Roy, but if you’re a masochist this gives you the general flavor: Eminem should be a conservative icon, you see, because of the “Role Model” lines “Hillary Clinton tried to slap me and call me a pervert/ripped her f****** tonsils out and fed her sherbet (B****!)” Yes, I wish I was making this up, too.