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As we ponder the most recent example of hackery from George Will, let’s recall my personal favorite. That would have to be when he claimed that judicial filibusters were “unconstitutional” during the Estrada nomination controversy–after having argued the (correct) position that the Senate can conduct votes by whatever procedures it chooses while Clinton was in the White House. Hacktacular!
…more amusing commentary from Dave Weigel: “We went from “George Bush is a regular guy you can have a beer with” to “I’m George Bush, bitch!” in pretty short order.”
As readers of this blog know, when it comes to the 2008 primary I’m a strong Gore supporter. But I can see cases for two of the major candidates who are currently being discussed (leaving potential runs by various lesser-known governors out of it for now.) Edwards is interesting and has some advantages, but for me the pro-war vote (not because I think he would have initiated the war as President, but because it make it much more difficult to take advantage of what should be an albatross for the Republican candidate) and his lack of executive experience are serious drawbacks. The other interesting one is Wes Clark. About his 2004 primary campaign, I think Ezra is right. I think a good argument could be made that Clark was the best candidate on paper. The Great Unanswered Question of the 2004 campaign is whether Clark’s abysmal performance as a candidate was exclusively the product of the fact that he was greener than the felt on a new pool table, or because he just lacks the skills. I think this question is, as of now, unanswerable. If he runs again, we’ll find out.
As of now, though, I would have to rank him behind Gore. I’m inclined to think Gore would be a better President on the merits, and he’s literally electable. Also, while I’m not sure that much can be inferred from Clark’s campaigning per se I do think that the choice to enter the race so late itself raises serious questions about his acumen as a candidate; it’s not clear what the hell he was doing. I’m open-minded, but as of now I’m skeptical about his candidacy.
Speaking of Majikthise, I note that she wrote the cover story in this week’s New York Press.
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but acting on a tip from Lindsay and A White Bear I was sent a free bottle of the 2004 Amelie by the Mankas Hills Vineyards. (It didn’t come with any obligation to write about it.) I also decided to pick up a bottle of the 2002 Contado Cab, for which I paid full retail (New Yorkers can get ‘em both at Sherry-Lehman.) I lack the chops to be wine critic–trying to communicate the quality of wine immediately makes me think “OK? Now, stick your nose in it. Don’t be shy, really get your nose in there. Mmm… a little citrus… maybe some strawberry…and, oh, there’s just like the faintest soupçon of like asparagus and just a flutter of a, like a, nutty Edam cheese…are you chewing gum?” But I can say that both have become part of my wine rotation. I prefer the cab slightly to the Amelie (which is a cab/merlot blend), but perhaps by less of a margin than I was expecting. I rarely taste purported hints of mocha in a wine, but in the Amelie I did; it was quite complex for the genre. I had a half bottle tonight with a ziti a la bolognese and a spinach/chick pea salad, and it complemented it very well. When it comes to west coast wines I try cabs almost exclusively, and I thought the complex but very fruity straight cab measured up well to others in its price range. I would definitely recommend either if you like the varietals in question–it’s good wine for the price.
In addition, the Times has a good article about American-made rye (as opposed to Canadian) whiskey today. I’ve only sampled two–the Van Winkle is terrific, and the Rittenhouse is a bargain; and thanks to a friend with a PhD in mixology I can testify that it makes an excellent Manhattan.
When I’ve posted about Orson Scott Card, I am often assured that despite of his recent tendency to express nutty political ideas (and film reviews) in terrible prose he was once a gifted novelist. I cannot judge this claim, but it is now clear that the only viable version of this claim requires the word “once”. Really, one can make this point by picking almost any sequence from his new “novel” at random, but here’s my candidate:
Princeton University was just what Reuben expected it to be — hostile to everything he valued, smug and superior and utterly closed-minded. In fact, exactly what they thought the military was.
He kept thinking, the first couple of semesters, that maybe his attitude toward them was just as short-sighted and bigoted and wrong as theirs was of him. But in class after class, seminar after seminar, he learned that far too many students were determined to remain ignorant of any real-world data that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.
Well as far as Reuben could tell, the middle they found was still far from any useful information about the real world.
Am I like them, just a bigot learning only what fits my worldview? That’s what he kept asking himself. But finally he reached the conclusion: No, he was not. He faced every piece of information as it came. He questioned his own assumptions whenever the information seemed to violate it. Above all, he changed his mind — and often. Sometimes only by increments; sometimes completely. Heroes he had once admired — Douglas MacArthur, for instance — he now regarded with something akin to horror: How could a commander be so vain, with so little justification for it? Others that he had disdained — that great clerk, Eisenhower, or that woeful incompetent, Burnside — he had learned to appreciate for their considerable virtues.
And now he knew that this was much of what the Army had sent him here to learn. Yes, a doctorate in history would be useful. But he was really getting a doctorate in self-doubt and skepticism, a Ph.D. in the rhetoric and beliefs of the insane Left. He would be able to sit in a room with a far-left Senator and hear it all with a straight face, without having to argue any points, and with complete comprehension of everything he was saying and everything he meant by it.
In other words, he was being embedded with the enemy as surely as when he was on a deep Special Ops assignment inside a foreign country that did not (officially at least) know that he was there.
[...]
Thank heaven he could go home to Cecily every day. She was his reality check. Unlike the ersatz Left of the university, Cessy was a genuine old-fashioned liberal, a Democrat of the tradition that reached its peak with Truman and blew its last trumpet with Moynihan.
The “no, he was not” is a nice touch.
Anyway, it’s not surprising that this would win the endorsement of Glenn Reynolds. Recently, Reynolds quoted a passage from Neal “Into the Nipples” Stephenson, which consisted of two “characters” expressing trite points about hypocrisy by reading B+ high school essays at each other. According to Reynolds, not only does this demonstrate that “Stephenson’s position as a moral thinker is underrated” but–I swear I’m not making this up–he was able to “slip that stuff in without being overbearing.” Yeah, if you find Neal Stepehnson subtle then Card’s recent novel should be just right.
Nancy Pelosi has, thankfully, chosen to reject both Hastings and Harman, the obviously correct option. The evidence against Hastings is pretty compelling, and taking a bribe as a federal judge isn’t the typically vacuous “character” issue; it suggests a lack of ethics and judgment in ways that can affect policy. Moreover, the political hit would have been immense, and it’s not as if Hastings was so great on the merits it would be worth paying the price. Meanwhile, Matt is right that Hastings’s only virtue was not being Harman: “Hastings shook some dudes down for $150,000 and ruined three FBI investigations. Jane Harman, by contrast, supported an invasion of Iraq based on bogus intelligence that’s costs hundreds of billions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Who do I have more doubts about?” Avoiding both of them was clearly the right call, and kudos to Pelosi for bucking the various caucus pressures and doing it.
Alas, it seems as if the oft-touted Rush Holt is out of the running. I don’t know much about any of the three viable candidates, but while it’s not literally true that they can’t be worse than the two who were passed over it seems like a safe assumption.
…UPDATE: As Matt Weiner points out in comments, I should note that Yglesias is just stipulating to a worst-case scenario; Hastings is almost certainly innocent of the charges of sabtoging FBI investigations.
The Dead-EnderSphere’s latest attempt to gin up another Dan Rather story out of nothing at all has apparently gone the way of such classics as the “fake” Schiavo memo. Of course, as Jim Henley points out, even had this been something other than unsubstantiated state propaganda, it’s still all about evasion:
But beyond that, what’s the point? Let’s imagine for a minute that the mosque burning story was exaggerated or fabricated. Does that mean that three thousand bodies a month aren’t turning up at Baghdad’s morgues these days? Does it mean that Mohammed of Iraq the Model didn’t spend the weekend barricading his block against rievers? Does it mean that no Sunnis are being killed by Sadrist death squads? Does that mean we should think more highly of Baby Sadr? Does it mean no Shia are being butchered by Salafist bravos?
[...]
Unless these fellows with suspect surnames in the newspapers are making it all up and Iraq is really quite swell, then impeaching this or that specific report or reporter is a trivial pursuit. It doesn’t change the structure and trends. It’s fun to pretend that “a goodly portion of our success or failure in Iraq has ultimately to do with how we react in terms of either lending our support or leveling our criticisms against the campaign.” Among other things, it’s very self-flattering. It allows the sedentary hawk to feel good about himself, to imagine that, just by feeling the proper emotion, “I’m fighting too!”
It’s also utter bullshit. The real constraint on success or failure is the US governmenet’s capacity to achieve its political objectives in Iraq itself. The audience that matters is one the deadenders neither understand nor even like much. (Michael Novak gets this exactly and completely backward.) It gets its news from papers we can’t read, television and radio broadcasts we never hear and couldn’t translate, phone calls to and from people we’ll never meet and the direct experience of things we can only pray never to find on our curbs of a morning. Every thesis that does not recognize the primacy of a local situation we can neither completely know nor even successfully imagine is mere narcissism, every attempt to pretend that touching up some detail obliterates the big picture is folly.
Indeed.
Shorter Ann Althouse: Mocking religion is bad. When it’s done in a mild form by a blogger Glenn Reynolds doesn’t like.
Elsewhere, Roy saves me the bother of dealing with the latest excretions of Pajamas Media’s resident foreign policy epxert, which several commenters have already brought up. I think this sentence says it all:
“So don’t expect the world’s liberal conscious to weigh in much on the latest poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.”
Sure, one could point out that the media hasn’t ignored this at all, but the nice thing about inventing the “liberal conscious” is that it makes falsification all but impossible (especially if you don’t have access to the same acid that Hanson was on when he wrote the column.) But what really amuses me is the idea that it’s liberals who have been naive about Putin’s authoritarianism. Let’s turn to VDH’s most-admired political leader:
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue.
“I was able to get a sense of his soul.
“He’s a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship,” Mr Bush said.
I think Hanson needs to work on the “conservative conscious” first.
Ben and Ezra say most of what needs to be said about this atrocious, risibly anachronistic op-ed by Thomas Edsall. An argument this silly contains multitudes, however, and there’s one point I’d like to add. My question: if we’re throwing “organized labor, minority advocacy organizations [and] reproductive- and sexual-rights proponents” out of the Democratic coalition, who’s left? Where are the votes coming from? (The irony here is that DLC types, who see the Democrats building a governing Democratic coalition out of wealthy, complacent white males, are the flipside of Ralph Nader, who seems to think that a governing progressive coalition can be built by white college students.)
There are two moves Edsall makes that are crucial to propping up this nonsense. The first is the egregious double standard in evaluating Democratic and Republican-affiliated factions. Supporters of reproductive freedom are a “special interest” dragging down the Democratic Party, while the cultural conservatives are simply “real Americans” or some such (even on issues, like Roe v. Wade, where the pro-choice position is also the majority position.) The second is that the “public interest” adduced by pundits like Edsall to contrast with “special interests” tends to match up not with the priorities of voters but with what Bob Somerby calls “millionaire pundit values.” We’re about to see this play out again with respect to Social Security, where Democrats will be urged to be “responsible” and endorse some kind of privatization scheme, although the Democrats’ position on Social Security involves backing the majority position against “special interests.” Such conceptions of the “public interest” are just empty tautologies used to defend whatever position the pundit happens to hold, and has nothing whatsoever to do with coalition-building.
[Cross-posted to TAPPED.]
Far behind on my reading, I still gotten to my review of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? In the meantime, Michael has an interesting interview chez the Talking Dog, which is particularly relevant in light of the most recent embarrassment to befall the hapless David Horowitz. Michael’s point here is, I think, particularly important:
It’s important to attend to how the shell game is played, first. The fact that liberals outnumber conservatives on campus– by a ratio of roughly 2.6 to 1– is indisputable. What the culture-war right derives from this fact, however, are two highly disputable conclusions: one, that the ratio can be explained only by active collusion among liberals (note that Horowitz makes this suggestion in the NRO interview)– a belief that, in my opinion not only expresses a good deal of right-wing projection but also provides convenient cover for the fact in the arts and humanities as well as in some of the sciences, there simply aren’t very many smart young conservatives in the academic-market pipeline to begin with. (In other words, it allows them to say, “well, we would be more numerous on campus– we’re simply told that we’re not wanted.”) Two, that this preponderance of campus liberals actively discriminates against conservative students as well as potential conservative colleagues. As I note in the book, this second charge– the most incendiary one, for most parents, alumni, trustees, legislators, and bystanders– is supported by exceptionally weak and anecdotal evidence, much of it provided by students themselves in an almost comically self-undermining manner. The first charge is something I take more seriously, because, as I argue in the book, domination of certain academic fields– like mine– by liberals is good neither for those fields nor for liberals. (I can’t believe that conservatives are complaining about a dispensation in which they run the country and we teach the American Novel survey.)
So because Horowitz has almost no evidence about anyone’s actual classroom behavior, he goes after the public statements of professors instead. (Which also means, by the way, that when he says he doesn’t do this, he is lying.) And he does so partly because he has nothing to bring to the table when it comes to serious discussions about classroom matters, and partly because it’s a convenient way for him to attack people like me and Gitlin– and Navasky, and Eric Foner, as liberal-leftists at large. I might add, under this heading, that Horowitz has exceptionally thin skin and takes perceived slights very personally, so some of the entries in his book– like his attacks on a handful of notable black scholars– stem from nothing more than an unhealthy obsession or two.
This distinction isn’t made often enough. The objection to Horowitz’s argument is not that it’s wrong to say that there are more liberals than conservatives in academia, which isn’t any more surprising than the fact that there are more conservatives than liberals among Fortune 500 executives. The problem is that this doesn’t, in and of itself, constitute evidence of systematic bias in hiring or treatment of students, and on the narrower but more important issues the evidence of alleged bias is thin-to-non-existent.
In light of some of the comments to this post, I should clarify what I meant when I said that Bush’s election was inevitable by the time Bush v. Gore was decided. There are two points, I think, we can all agree on. The first is that Bush v. Gore was a legal abomination that permanently disgraces the record of every judge who joined it. The second is that a clear majority of Florida voters intended to vote for Al Gore, and a rational recount that could address both undervotes and overvotes would almost certainly have determined this fact.
So far, we agree. The problem is that (contrary to what the commenters seem to believe) is that these two points don’t contradict my premise:
So, by the time of the Supreme Court’s lawless intervention, Bush was going to become President one way or another. Does this mean that the Supreme Court’s decision didn’t matter? No–the Court certainly legitimized Bush’s election–a transparently political appointment would have made the anti-democratic circumstances of Bush assuming office much more publicly apparent. And while we can’t know, this could plausibly have affected many aspects of Bush’s term in office, including his re-election. But in terms of Bush actually assuming power per se, a variety of factors–Ralph Nader, the purging of the voting rolls, election laws that undercount votes in poor districts, bad ballot designs, the fecklessness of the Democrats who hauled Warren Christopher out of a cryogenic chamber somewhere to act as a sponge in a knife fight–were considerably more important. As is often the case, the Supreme Court’s intervention is more important for what it symbolizes than for its actual causal impact.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
