In testimony before the Congressionally appointed committee, Bernanke said that statutory gaps were an important contributor to the buildup of risk in the system but that even when regulators had the tools they needed to stem those risks, they did not use them well.
“Once a crisis occurs, timely and effective action by the government is critical to containing the severity of financial disruptions and their economic effects…However, the crisis revealed large gaps in the government’s ability to respond quickly, effectively, and with minimum cost to taxpayers and the economy,” Bernanke said.
Next week, President Obama is scheduled to propose new measures to boost the economy. I hope they’re bold and substantive, since the Republicans will oppose him regardless — if he came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American. So he should put them on the spot for standing in the way of real action.
Tolerance, however, isn’t the same as understanding, so it is appalling to see New Yorkers who could lead us all away from mosque madness, who should know better, playing to people’s worst instincts.
That includes Carl Paladino and Rick Lazio, Republicans running for governor who have disgraced their state with histrionics about the mosque being a terrorist triumph. And Rudolph Giuliani, who cloaks his opposition to the mosque as “sensitivity” to 9/11 families without acknowledging that this conflates all prayerful Muslims with terrorists, a despicable conclusion.
Republicans will do anything to get elected, including foster hate. It’s not new, but neither is it pleasant to watch.
A church in Florida is poised to commemorate an act of violence committed in the name of Islam, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with an act of stupidity committed in the name of Christianity, the public burning of the Koran.
This threatened libricide proves little more than the existence of a few attention-seeking crackpots in a continental country — the natural resource that makes cable news possible. But the Manhattan mosque controversy has exposed a broader, conservative Christian suspicion of mosques and Muslims.
Gerson’s been very reasonable of late. The Bush people are looking downright moderate compared to this crowd.
For all of Palin’s popularity within the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, poll after poll shows that the American people don’t think she’s ready to be president of the United States. This was the case last February. Also last April. And now this week in the 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, 59 percent of those surveyed said Palin would not “have the ability to be an effective president.” This chart from Pollster.com paints a picture of Palin’s ultimate problem.
For one thing, I don’t really have heroes, not in politics anyway. For another, Ron’s weakness has always been a too-strong adherence to ideological consistency. You can’t get past a certain point in politics without some small quantity of the fudge factor. From that point of view Ron isn’t operating so much in politics as in what Kingsley Amis (who was speaking of Enoch Powell at the time) called “some obscure branch of the truth-at-any-price business.”
For another, in the case of the mosque, Ron seems not to have done his due diligence. He sounds ill-informed, talking about the mosque issue as if it’s entirely a matter of private-property rights. But if the money is being put up by foreign governments, how is the mosque private property? And since we don’t know who is putting up the money, but the funders of mosques and “Islamic cultural centers” have a long and slimy trail of duplicity in these matters, why should we not suppose the worst?
And then Ron says: “The neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia . . . never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for their ill-conceived preventative wars.”
Say what? Well nigh the first thing über-neocon George W. Bush did after 9/11 was show up at a local mosque to make a gassy speech saying the attacks had nothing whatsoever to do with true Islam, which is a religion of peace, doncherknow? The people Ron calls “neo-conservatives” and the people who have been most shamelessly kissing up to the CAIR thugs, the slippery imams, and the shady Saudis this past nine years, look to me like the same people.
And come to think of it, Ron does know how to fudge. When he was campaigning in 2008, he departed considerably from the libertarian True Faith on immigration, even going so far as to give a friendly interview to the immigration-restrictionist site VDARE, if I recall correctly.
Well, perhaps Ron only fudges on the campaign trail. That would make him only nine times more honest than the average politician, versus my previous estimate of ten.
Trendline Test Having been somewhat dismissive of libertarianism there, let me try to make up a bit. There are some follies in libertarianism, but some excellent good sense too.
I’m a math geek, so my favorite chapter in Charles Murray’s book What It Means to Be a Libertarian is the one titled “The Trendline Test.” Murray shows us a marvelous way to illustrate the futility of most government action.
What you do is, draw a graph of some social-progress indicator over time. Murray uses “Deaths Per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled” as an example, but the Trendline Test can be applied to any such indicator: poverty, health, education, and so on.
Now see whether, by examining that graph, you can spot where the government took strong action to affect the indicator. In Murray’s example, the strong action was the imposition of the 55 mph speed limit in 1974. Did the fatalities graph thereupon take a sharp downward turn? Nope.
Murray allows that there have been cases where government action made a positive difference. Mostly, though, as he says: “Among trendlines involving social indicators — crime, the family, community, education, welfare — deterioration has been the rule and improvement is the exception. Among trendlines involving safety and health by far the most common result is . . . nothing. Whatever was happening before the government got involved continued to happen after the government got involved.”
I spotted a very striking illustration of this great truth in the August 21 issue of The Economist, page 31. The graph in this case is titled “China’s fertility rate, live births per woman.”
I rest my case — I mean, Charles Murray’s case.
Eagle Scout A word of congratulation to our friends the Meagher family of Greenlawn, N.Y., whose son Brian made Eagle Scout this month. We attended the presentation ceremony, which was nicely done, and a timely reminder in this, the BSA’s centenary year, of how much good the organization does in that most challenging of all social endeavors, the civilizing of young males.
The event also gives me a chance to expiate my guilt at having nursed uncharitable thoughts about the Boy Scouts in my own adolescence. Youth-training-wise, there were two games in town when I was a teen: the Boy Scouts and the Cadet Force (i.e., boy soldiers). There was a strong expectation that every boy should join one or the other. Boys who’d been in the Cub Scouts naturally gravitated to the Boy Scouts. Never much of a joiner, I’d missed out on Cub Scouts; and anyway the Cadets looked more exciting, with guns and stuff. So I yielded to expectations and became a cadet.
Once committed to the Cadets, we of course got caught up in an ethos of rivalry with the Scouts. We thought they were juvenile, with their shorts and toggles and made-up code words and rituals. They thought we looked ridiculous in our army surplus uniforms (generally a couple of sizes too big), squeaking out orders at parade-ground drill and stamping our boots theatrically as we did about-face.
Looking back, I’m not sure they were wrong. We all had fun in our own way, though, and kept out of trouble for a few years, and learned to take orders and carry out disagreeable tasks without complaining.
My first reaction on seeing that picture was: “It’s a doodlebug!” Yes, I know, it’s a different beast, but it sure looks like a doodlebug.
“Doodlebug” was the name given by the English to the V-1 unmanned flying bomb in World War II. Before my time, but I heard all about it from the older generation, on whom it made a great impression. The doodlebug had a very distinctive sound, so everyone knew when one was coming over. Then (everyone told us), in that heartlessly self-protective way that people get after a few years of war-weariness, you prayed that it would keep going. If the sound stopped, that meant it had run out of fuel and was falling, possibly on you. “Then you got under the table and waited for the crash.”
Nearly ten thousand of the things fell on southern England in the last year of the war, causing around twice that number of casualties. That’s war. Squinty should know all about it — he lived through the war with Iraq in the 1980s, which included heavy shelling and air attacks on Iranian cities. For us in the West, it’s all a remote memory. To remember hearing a doodlebug coming over, you need to be in your seventies at least.
The experience of war doesn’t necessarily seem to make people less warlike; just more determined to get it right next time.
Fat poets The question came up across the dinner table the other day: Can you name a fat poet? After a moment’s reflection I offered G. K. Chesterton. A fellow diner trumped me with Samuel Johnson. We pretty much ran out of names right about there, though. This doesn’t seem right. Surely there have been more fat poets than that?
Get a Government Job, Series #19,846 Stephen Meister in America's Newspaper of Record, August 24: “A shrinking group of private workers — now numbering 107 million — is paying the salaries and benefits of more than 22 million government workers. Thus, every five private-sector workers chip in to cover the costs of one government worker. (Maybe taxpayers should get cards with the name and picture of the government worker they’re sponsoring.)”
That took me back to my days teaching college in China. Reading up on the country before I went, I’d learned that 80 percent of Chinese people were peasants. In other words, it took four peasants to feed one townie.
My college was out at the edge of a provincial town, with villages and fields nearby. Once I’d settled in enough to kid around with my students, I used to point to peasants working in the fields, telling any students nearby: “See those four there? They’re mine! They’re feeding me!” The students would laugh, though probably only out of politeness. (The Chinese, even more than other foreigners, incline to the view that all English people are slightly wrong in the head.)
Now the boot’s on the other foot. Some cop, teacher, DMV bureaucrat, or federal GS-15 somewhere is reading this and chuckling: “Yeah right, Derb. You’re one of my five, pal! You’re feeding me!”
In the movies again I spent an interesting morning being filmed by leftist documentary-maker Justin Strawhand for his new project, a movie about nihilism. He asked me to do a spot and I agreed from simple vanity, though I shall probably regret it. Justin told me the film will be shown at London’s Tate Gallery sometime round about a year and a half from now, so there’s something to look forward to.
I’m still not sure what I’m doing in a movie about nihilism. I certainly don’t consider myself a nihilist, unless having zero interest in the supernatural makes you one. I certainly believe in the natural world and all its countless fantastically complicated productions, among which I include myself. That’s not nothing; it’s a great deal. But Justin had read my latest book and spotted some themes he wanted me to talk about.
The encounter turned out to be very convivial. We’d read a lot of the same authors and visited a lot of the same websites. The conviviality was marred only slightly by, on Justin’s part, a Hitler obsession the size of an asteroid and a failure to grasp the elementary principles of scientific inquiry, and, on my part, irritated impatience with all that plus the usual insecurities about my effectiveness at expressing myself in speech. I am much better at writing.
Justin assured me, however, that the couple of hours of me that he’d filmed would be edited down to a few potent minutes, so sometime in early 2012 we’ll see what transpires.
Chick flick Still on movies, but this time big box-office blockbuster ones.
None of the Derbs saw the movie Avatar when it came out last year. Well, this month it came round again, at a local theater with the full IMAX and 3-D deal. We decided to go see it, the whole famn damily. So off we went: Dad, Mom, daughter, and son.
When the movie was over and we came out, Dad and son headed for the men’s room, Mom and daughter for the other place. The following conversation then took place in adjacent stations in the men’s room.
Junior: So, Dad, whaddya think of the movie?
Dad: Tell you the truth, Son, I was rooting for the Colonel.
Junior [laughing]: Me too.
Dad: For goodness’ sake don’t tell Mom I said that, though.
Junior: Course not.
Europe’s gypsy problem Europe’s getting into some nasty problems with gypsies. As movement between EU members has become more and more free, gypsies from Romania and Bulgaria have been showing up in numbers all over Western Europe. Their behavior, wherever they go, has been appalling.
Here’s a news story from the East Midlands of England, where I grew up. A riverside park and wildlife preserve has been taken over by Romanian gypsies (the “Eastern European immigrants” of the story). They are slaughtering the wildlife, camping in the carefully tended picnic areas, poaching the fish stocks, and covering the scenic spots with layers of litter. Local people are now afraid to fish in the river. Earlier this year a man in my home town left his house for less than an hour and found on his return that a Romanian gypsy family had moved in after forcing the locks. (And this was by no means the only such case.)
The British welfare state has been easy game for gypsy criminals, who have milked it for millions, often — as in that case — under cover of “human rights” campaigning. Children are shipped in to be used in these benefit-fraud schemes, and to be raised in Oliver Twist–style pickpocket academies.
Western Europeans are very seriously fed up with the gypsy problem. There is a surprising degree of hostility toward the gypsies. You can be sitting with left-liberal, stuff-white-people-like, PC-as-all-get-out, middle-class Europeans, and mention the gypsies, and their faces go purple and they start foaming at the mouth. In Italy there were anti-gypsy riots, followed by expulsions.
Now France is taking action. On orders from Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy, hundreds of gypsies have been expelled this month, put on planes back to Romania. The EU human-rights busybodies are making a fuss, but the expulsion policy seems broadly popular in France (though it hasn’t done much for Sarko’s poll numbers, which are in the tank on account of economic issues).
This story will run and run. Nobody really knows what to do about the gypsy problem. There is not even general agreement on what kind of problem it is. Human rights? The model here for Americans is always segregation and Jim Crow, where black people were denied bourgeois goods to which they desired access — school and college places, housing and job opportunities — and suffered legal disabilities. None of that is the case with the gypsies in Western Europe. The welfare state is generous to them, and the judicial authorities are scrupulously — over-scrupulously, in the opinion of some of the commenters on those news stories — respectful of their rights in law.
The problem is that the gypsies, or far too many of them, like being gypsies. They don’t want bourgeois goods; they want to continue to live as their ancestors did, by begging and stealing. They don’t want their kids to go to school; they have no desire or aptitude for regular work. They are Europeans, but nomads, with no allegiance to any country, and only scorn for the law, and for non-gypsies.
What’s the answer? I have no clue. I can only assure you that, as I said, you’ll be reading occasional stories out of Europe about this issue for many years to come.
Channeling Espy In some private exchanges about the mathematics of voting, the name of the Marquis de Condorcet naturally came up. My correspondent reminded me that Condorcet’s wife, an intellectual lady who ran a famous salon, bore the evocative name Sophie de Grouchy. This inspired me to doggerel in the style of the late great Willard Espy, thus:
Madame Sophie de Grouchy
Was no intellectual slouch. She
Took her knickers off
For a famous philosophe.
So far as I can discover the lady defied her name, being of a sunny and uncomplaining disposition.
When Spain was different I see that Catalonia is to ban bullfighting, beginning in 2012. Most of the commentary on this puts it down to Catalan nationalism — they just want to differentiate themselves from the rest of Spain, with a view to eventual secession and independence.
I can’t say I have any strong feelings about bullfighting, a thing I’ve never seen myself. It does seem a bit cruel to the bull; but then, the matador risks his life too, and not infrequently loses it, so it’s an honorable combat. The real cruelty, as I recall from reading eyewitness accounts, is to the horses of the picadors, when the bull gets his horns under their protective blankets and disembowels them.
It does seem a shame, though, for a nation to lose its distinguishing characteristics and become just another bland modern glorified shopping mall, with airhead politicians babbling about global warming, universities teaching Women’s Studies, the populace gawping at “reality TV,” and a Starbucks every hundred yards. On those vague, general, and reactionary grounds, put me down as pro-bullfighting.
I was only once in Spain, for a summer month in 1963. The place was still frozen in the Francoist time-warp. None of the buildings in Barcelona seemed to be less than 200 years old. In the waiting rooms of country railroad stations peasants drank wine from goatskin bags beneath yellowing Proclamaciónes Reales still pasted to the walls. The police were brutish, arrogant, and corrupt. Outside the towns the grinding poverty described in El Cordobés’s biography was still in plain sight. The whole country slept through the afternoon. It was another world, far and away the most different place I had been to at that point in my young life (I was 18).
Flamenco memories Actually my strongest early impression of Spanish culture, even before I went to Spain, came not from bullfighting but from flamenco dancing.
The English country town I grew up in had a theater. They mostly staged lowbrow comedies and thrillers, with an occasional Sheridan or Shaw for the carriage trade. Once a year, though, they were visited by a flamenco dance act. It was a Spanish couple — I forget their names — presumably man and wife, with a guitarist-singer for accompaniment.
Every year through the early 1960s this trio would show up for a few days and perform to sold-out houses. They were sensational; after 50 years I can still recall their act vividly. Their duets practically threw off sparks, they were so erotic (so perhaps the dancers weren’t married after all . . . ) but they each did solos, too — to give each other a break I suppose. To us hicks, stuffed up to the gills with English restraint, our upper lips frozen stiff, the sheer sweaty exotic stomping vitality of it was incomparably thrilling.
Perhaps if I saw it today, in jaded late middle age, I’d think it corny, I don’t know. I just went browsing on YouTube to see if I could recapture the thrill, but nothing much came up. This clip gives the general idea; but there are no sparks, and where are the castanets? Same remarks for this one. I suspect these people are closer to the real thing, but it’s a terrible recording, mostly dark. Anyone know of a good-quality clip with castanets and sparks?
(Halfway through writing that segment I thought it might make up a bit for my earlier negative remarks about gypsies, since I’ve always supposed that flamenco was a product of gypsy culture. Reading up on it, though, the gypsy connection seems doubtful. Flamenco was apparently created by 19th-century entrepreneurs working from traditional Spanish folk dances. Oh well. For gypsy cultural influence, we still have Carmen.)
Marmite meets the love fascists I’m a bit late with this one, but have to post it anyway. It concerns Marmite.
Yes, Marmite, that delicious savory spread so beloved of the English (though not the Australians, who unaccountably spurn it for the loathsome and inedible Vegemite), was in the political news a few months ago, in the run-up to the election campaign for the European Parliament.
In Britain, as here, there is a common political outlook you might call “love fascism.” This is the point of view that regards any opinion to the right of, say, David Brooks as a species of “hate.” People with correct opinions — opinions, that is, to the left of, oh, Frank Rich — are motivated by “love.” People in between are infected to some degree with “hate,” though perhaps not irredeemably so. They need to be re-educated over to the side of “love” — or, failing that, lumped in with the “haters” and excluded from polite society.
Well, the Marmite people ran a TV ad for their product that was entirely premised on the love-fascist approach. This probably wasn’t intentional: love fascism is the default position for the kind of media types who make and approve TV ads. They no more notice it than they notice the air they breathe. The ad compared the Love party, which of course is pro-Marmite, to the Hate party (footage of a skinhead rally), which spreads(!) lies about Marmite.
The British National party, which was running candidates in the election, took umbrage at this, not unreasonably. They’ve been trying for years, with mixed success, to shuck off their old street-fighting, skinhead-attracting image and present themselves as serious players in British politics. They returned fire with an ad on their website prominently displaying a jar of Marmite.
Unilever, the manufacturers of Marmite, threatened a lawsuit, and the BNP backed down.
That is the end of the Marmite news.
Human dominoes. I mentioned dominoes last month. Over in the People’s Republic, someone picked up the theme: “A total of 10,276 people in China’s Inner Mongolia have broken the world record for the biggest human domino chain, state media say. The participants in the city of Ordos sat cross-legged and fell backwards in sequence in a record which took an hour and 20 minutes. The group of mainly high school students spent more than twelve hours over three days to train for the event.”
Well, I’m glad they're keeping themselves busy over there in Inner Mongolia; though what their world-conquering ancestors would have thought, beggars the imagination.
Math Corner I’m sorry: In my July diary I posted a dud link to my June solution — the “Tuesday’s Child” conundrum. If you haven’t already had enough of it, the worked solution, with many notes, is here.
Here’s one for this month.
I have an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards. I shuffle it thoroughly. What is the probability that not one card is in its original position?
Related, but more general:
I have a deck of n cards, numbered from 1 to n. I shuffle the deck thoroughly. Then I turn the cards over one by one. If the k-th card I turn over bears the number k, call that a “match.” What is the probability that after going through the whole deck I shall have tallied m matches, where m is some number in the range from zero to n?
Ready for your morning bowl of crazy? Five years ago, Congress set aside millions of acres of public land in the Southwest for the development of solar farms. This was primo real estate for solar, considered one of the best spots in the world. So far not one solar panel has been erected.
Oh, you want us to build something? This discouraging news comes courtesy of the AP’s Jason Dearen, whose investigation shows that the understaffed U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) focused almost all its time on approving oil and gas projects and leased the land on a first-come, first-served basis, often to outfits with little or no experience in actually building solar farms.
Case in point: Cogentrix Solar Services, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. Cogentrix had zero solar experience, but holds leases on nearly half the Nevada acreage for which applications have been filed. Another sickening stat: In the last five years, the BLM has approved more than 73,000 oil and gas leases on public land, but hasn’t given final approval to one solar lease. Not a one. Writes Dearen:
BLM’s solar leasing system ended up allowing developers to lay claim to prime sites — many located in the deserts that span California, Nevada, and Arizona. All developers had to do was fill out an application, pay a fee and file development plans. But many were so vague that it was difficult for BLM to separate the serious projects from the speculative ones.
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Green diary rescue appears Thursdays and Sundays. Inclusion of a particular diary does not necessarily indicate my agreement with it. The rescue begins below and continues in the jump.
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Haole in Hawaii posted another photo diary of Hawai’i Underwater: “These photos were taken during a handful of dives over the past two weekends including a night dive last night at Pupukea Marine Reserve. I hope you enjoy your visit.”
Deep Harm had looked at rotten eggs in Rodents, maggots and steaming piles of hypocrisy at egg farms: ”The inspectors found manure piles up to 8 feet high, holding doors open and giving wildlife access. “Wildlife” included live rodents, wild birds and a plague of flies, live and dead, including their larvae (maggots). ‘Additional problems included overflowing manure pits, improper worker sanitation and wild birds [a potential source of avian influenza] roosting around feed bins,’ reports The New York Times. The investigators also found salmonella bacteria in chicken feed and in barn and walkway areas, and in water used to wash eggs at a Hillandale facility. It isn’t clear, yet, which came first: the salmonella or the egg.”
Tonight’s Diary Rescue comes to you courtesy of the hard work and diligence of the following Rescue Rangers: Louisiana1976, ItsJessMe, YatPundit, sunspark says and srkp23. dadanation is thought to have done double duty both rescuing and editing, but we all have our doubts…
thE rescueD diarieS
Young diarist Earley Post tells us that regarding corporate influence in politics, “What if…?” iis the Wrong Question. (Louisiana 1976)
Please use this as an Open Thread as well as your chance to promote your favorite diaries of the day. Respectful engagement is most welcome here. Please keep in mind that each Diary Rescue’s daily purview extends from 3pm PST yesterday to 3pm PST today
Before peace can come, Palestine’s culture must be changed.
Hamas sent a greeting card to the quintet of leaders meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to initiate negotiations about a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In a well-planned ambush, they killed four Israeli civilians near the city of Hebron, two men and two women (one nine months pregnant), creating seven orphans. The murderers escaped, and may perhaps have videotaped the atrocity. In Gaza that evening, 3,000 celebrants clogged the streets, waving flags, setting bonfires, passing out candy, and carrying their children on their shoulders. If there is videotape, it will presumably permit the revelers to relive the pleasure, even as the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading has circulated on the Internet.
While the Palestinian Authority did condemn the attack, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad did so, he explained, because “the operation went against Palestinian interests.” It would be difficult for a leader of the “moderate” (that word is always attached) PA to condemn such attacks as, say, immoral or despicable, as the Palestinian Authority itself (formerly the PLO or Fatah) was conceived in violence and continues to honor its spirit. In the course of the past few months, the PA has named a square and a children’s summer camp in honor of a terrorist who murdered 37 Israeli civilians on a bus, and provided a hero’s funeral to Amin Al-Hindi, one of the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The official PA newspaper described Al-Hindi as “one of the stars . . . who sparkled at the sports stadium in Munich.” Both Abbas and Fayyad attended the funeral.
#ad#These realities, reflecting as they do the unreadiness of the Palestinian people for peace with Israel, have been and will continue to be ignored by the Obama administration, the so-called international community, and most journalists. Instead, world leaders, very much including President Obama, speak of borders, and confidence-building measures, and opportunities for peace, as if the problem were one of details. This thoroughly misconceives the nature of the dispute. An Israeli saying (now decades old) captured the essence: If the Palestinians were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no conflict. If the Israelis were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no Israel.
With whom would Israel be making binding agreements? Since a bitter civil conflict in 2007, Palestinian society has been divided. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip and the PA controls the West Bank. Just last month, the PA canceled scheduled municipal elections for fear that Hamas might again triumph at the polls as they did in 2006. Hamas and Fatah thugs continue to target and assassinate one another. By standing up the wobbly Abbas and perhaps even signing a treaty with him, the Obama administration may imagine that they can strengthen him. But this is a figure so unsure of his current standing with his people — and this is before making any unpopular concessions — that he canceled elections.
Abbas’s weakness in this regard is not so much a personal failing as an inheritance. The entire Arab world (and Iran) has conspired to embitter and enrage the Palestinian people in perpetuity, encouraging maximalist demands and enshrining bloodshed and frenzied hatred. Though Abbas has shaken hands all around in Washington, D.C., the incitement at home continues. A year ago, at Fatah’s general congress in Bethlehem, the delegates reaffirmed their longstanding commitment to “armed struggle” as “a strategy, not a tactic. . . . This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”
Just this week, the PA’s minister for prisoners' affairs presented an award called the Shield of Resoluteness and Giving to Um Yousuf Abu Hamid. Her accomplishment? Four of her sons are serving long sentences in Israeli prisons for committing terrorist attacks. Handing her the plaque, the minister intoned: “The Palestinian mother is a central partner in the struggle, by virtue of what she has given and continues to give. It is she who gave birth to the fighters, and she deserves that we bow to her in salute and in honor.”
A Palestinian children’s-television program instructs its viewers that all Israeli cities — including Haifa, Lod, Ramle, and Acre — are “occupied Palestinian” cities. Another show aimed at children, which often dispenses advice like “drink your milk” and “obey your parents,” also advised a young viewer named Saraa that “all Jews must be erased from our land. . . . We want to slaughter them, Saraa, so they will be expelled from our land. . . . We’ll have to [do it] by slaughter.”
This latest iteration of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks midwived by the U.S. is doomed just as all of its predecessors were — because it is based on a fallacy and a stubborn refusal to face the truth about Palestinian society.
Tea partiers are mad as heck, and they’re letting the world know — politely.
The much-analyzed speeches at the Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial rally weren’t as notable as what the estimated 300,000 attendees did: follow instructions, listen quietly to hours of speeches, and throw out their trash.
Just as stunning as the tableaux of the massive throngs lining the reflecting pool were the images of the spotless grounds afterward. If someone had told attendees they were expected to mow the grass before they left, surely some of them would have hitched flatbed trailers to their vehicles for the trip to Washington and gladly brought mowers along with them.
#ad#This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society. The spark that lit the tea-party movement was the rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who inveighed in early 2009 against an Obama-administration program to subsidize “the losers’ mortgages.” He was speaking for people who hadn’t borrowed beyond their means or tried to get rich quick by flipping houses, for the people who, in their thrift and enterprise, “carry the water instead of drink the water.”
The tea party’s detractors want to paint it as radical, when at bottom it represents the self-reliant, industrious heart of American life. New York Times columnist David Brooks compares the tea partiers to the New Left. But there weren’t any orgiastic displays at the Beck rally, nor any attempts to levitate the Lincoln Memorial — just speeches on God and country. It was as radical as a Lee Greenwood song.
A New York Times survey earlier this year occasioned shock when it found that “Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class.” We’re so accustomed to the notion of a revolt of the dispossessed that a revolt of the possessed (in the non-demonic sense, of course) strikes us as a strange offense against the nature of things. But it’s threatening to wash away the Democratic congressional majorities in a historic wipeout.
In extremis, Democrats and liberal commentators have dragged the debate over the tea party into the well-worn rut of elite condescension to the bourgeois, a term coined in its modern sense by Rousseau and not meant as a compliment. For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.
#page#The tea party represents a revolt against his revolution, and thus a restoration. If a tea-party-infused Republican party were to take Congress and manage to cut federal expenditures by a sharp one-fifth, that figure would only be back to its typical level of recent decades of roughly 20 percent of GDP. If the party were to succeed in making the federal government more mindful of its constitutional limits, it would only be a step toward the dispensation that obtained during most of the country’s history.
To be sure, the tea partiers are fiercely anti-establishment, and that produces political candidates who are exotic and unexpected. Then there’s Beck himself. As he’d probably be the first to admit, he’s an unlikely leader for the disaffected bourgeois. He’s emotionally extravagant and conspiracy-minded, an intellectual enthusiast and rollicking showman.
#ad#The last time Republicans benefited from a wave election, they had their own Beckian figure at the top in the person of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They wallowed in their revolution and let Gingrich’s ideological grandeur define them — to their regret in the end. If the wave comes this time, Republicans should endeavor to be a sober and responsible party for sober and responsible people, resolutely cleaning up after the failed Obama revolution.
They could do much worse than to take their cue from the tea partiers at the Lincoln Memorial, who knew how to make an impression without scaring anyone or trashing the place.
Our Distracted Commander-in-Chief | read this item
Some presidents may not like being wartime leaders. But they don’t get to decide; history does.
Many have charged that President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan ten months from now is hampering our war effort. But now it’s official. In a stunning statement last week, Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Conway admitted that the July 2011 date is “probably giving our enemy sustenance.”
A remarkably bold charge for an active military officer. It stops just short of suggesting aiding and abetting the enemy. Yet the observation is obvious: It is surely harder to prevail in a war that hinges on the allegiance of the locals when they hear the U.S. president talk of beginning a withdrawal that will ultimately leave them to the mercies of the Taliban.
#ad#How did Obama come to this decision? “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser at the time told Peter Baker of the New York Times. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”
If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate congressmen, pass health-care reform, and thereby maintain a president’s political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.
But Obama sees his wartime duties as a threat to his domestic agenda. These wars are a distraction, unwanted interference with his true vocation — transforming America.
Such an impression could only have been reinforced when, given the opportunity in his Oval Office address this week to dispel the widespread perception in Afghanistan that America is leaving, Obama doubled down on his ambivalence. After giving a nod to the pace of troop reductions being conditions-based, he declared with his characteristic “but make no mistake” that “this transition will begin — because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”
These are the words of a man who wants out. Most emphatically on Iraq, where from the beginning Obama has made clear that his objective is simply ending combat operations by an arbitrary deadline — despite the fact that a new government has not been formed and all our hard-won success hangs in the balance — in order to address the more paramount concern: keeping a campaign promise. Time to “turn the page” and turn America elsewhere.
At first you’d think that turning is to Afghanistan. But Obama added nothing to his previously stated Afghan policy while emphatically reiterating July 2011 as the beginning of the end, or more diplomatically, of the “transition.”
Well then, at least you’d then expect some vision of his larger foreign policy. After all, this was his first Oval Office address on the subject. What is the meaning, if any, of the Iraq and Afghan wars? And what of the clouds that are forming beyond those theaters: the drone-war escalation in Pakistan, the rise of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the danger of Somalia falling to al-Shabaab, and the threat of renewed civil war in Islamist Sudan as a referendum on independence for southern Christians and animists approaches?
This was the stage for Obama to explain what follows the now-abolished Global War on Terror. Where does America stand on the spreading threats to stability, decency, and U.S. interests from the Horn of Africa to the Hindu Kush?
On this, not a word. Instead, Obama made a strange and clumsy segue into a pep talk on the economy. Rebuilding it, he declared, “must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.” This in a speech ostensibly about the two wars he is directing. He could not have made more clear where his priorities lie, and how much he sees foreign policy — war policy — as subordinate to his domestic ambitions.
Unfortunately, what for Obama is a distraction is life or death for U.S. troops now on patrol in Kandahar province. Some presidents may not like being wartime leaders. But they don’t get to decide. History does. Obama needs to accept the role. It’s not just the U.S. military, as Baker reports, that is “worried he is not fully invested in the cause.” Our allies, too, are experiencing doubt. And our enemies are drawing sustenance.
Jim DeMint Looks toward November, and Beyond | read this item
The American people are finally waking up — and the Senate Republican old bulls had better take note.
Joe Miller (Alaska), Sharron Angle (Nevada), Ken Buck (Colorado), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Marco Rubio (Florida), Dino Rossi (Washington), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Mike Lee (Utah) — these are just a few of the Reaganite insurgents with whom Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) hopes to work in the upper chamber come January. Should they win in November, DeMint predicts, this new crop of conservatives will help to push the GOP back toward the party’s principled, free-market roots.
“These candidates have gotten the message,” DeMint says in an interview with National Review Online. “They understand that if we get the majority, and we don’t do what we said we would, then we’re dead as a party — and should be.”
GOP incumbents, DeMint warns, should pay close attention to what is happening around the country. Even if there is a Republican sweep, he says, “many Americans fear that senior members of our party will go back to focusing on getting earmarks for their states, that we will betray them again. But with ten to 15 new allies in the Senate, which I think we’ll have, that will not be tolerated any more.”
#ad#Even if conservatives make major gains, DeMint says, he will not challenge Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky in a Senate leadership contest. Still, he pledges that he will do his best to change the direction of the party with the help of however many new colleagues he may have. But don’t expect him to try to corral freshman Republicans into a DeMint bloc — “I’d like to throw that idea into the trash can,” he says. “It’s simply not true. These candidates are leaders in their own right. I’m supporting them, because they’re not running on some consultant’s talking points. They’re running on principle.” Jockeying for a leadership position, he says, is not his focus. “What I’m interested in is turning this country away from its fiscal cliff — and for the first time since Reagan, I think that we have a chance for real action, not just political posturing.”
Still, without naming names, DeMint remains critical of many establishment GOP senators. Earlier this summer, former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (Miss.) told the Washington Post that the Senate does not “need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples.” Party leaders, he said, need to move quickly to “co-opt” any rabble-rousing conservatives who may find their way to the marble halls of Washington. DeMint, with a hint of disgust, says, “We need to realize that Trent Lott was speaking for many senior Republicans.”
But some of the GOP elders, DeMint notes, understand the stakes, and they may be open to working for a fresh conservative coalition. There are some “good aspects,” he says, to Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) winning his primary last month. “McCain is a real opponent of earmarks, he supports a balanced budget amendment, and, during the campaign, he really addressed border security. If those things stay in place, we’ll be fine. I’ll work with all Republicans, and I can work with John McCain.”
Try as they may, big-spending Democrats — and Republicans — will not rule if the “people continue to make their voice heard,” DeMint predicts. The South Carolinian points to Joe Miller’s victory in Alaska’s GOP Senate primary as the most recent example of what he calls a “stunning American awakening” that may force Congress to change its ways.
Even DeMint’s PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has funneled millions to primary challengers this cycle, was surprised by Miller’s out-of-nowhere win. “Joe was certainly the candidate we supported philosophically, but it did not appear that he was in play,” DeMint explains. “It was, obviously, a mistake on our part. I underestimated the movement in Alaska.” But he couldn’t be more pleased about the outcome.
What does he make of Glenn Beck’s Washington rally and the tea parties? “Everywhere people are pulling together and connecting the dots,” DeMint says. “They see a fiscally out-of-control, immoral federal government that is destroying our culture, our economy, and our opportunity. That [belief] is solidifying in this country, and I think Reagan Democrats, independents, and conservative Republicans are coming together to pick candidates — sometimes it’s the least bad candidate, but sometimes, as with Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, there are people to get excited about.”
As we parted, DeMint was heading off to celebrate his 59th birthday. But he left me with a final thought: “This is not about me or the Senate Conservatives Fund. We are just a little bit of a catalyst, trying to raise the profile of some good candidates.”
– Robert Costa is a political reporter forNational Review.
Obama Could Use Some Clintonesque Salesmanship | read this item
Obama’s condescending tone makes his policies even more unpopular.
There’s been a lot of talk about Bush nostalgia lately.
At Martha’s Vineyard, the Obama-bilia wasn’t moving like it was during the Obamas’ previous visit there. The biggest seller was a T-shirt depicting a smiling George W. Bush with the tagline “Miss Me Yet?”
#ad#Meanwhile, liberal writers, and even the president in his Oval Office address, have had kind(er) words for Obama’s predecessor.
“Words I never thought I’d write: I pine for George W. Bush,” Peter Beinart recently vented in the Daily Beast, in response to Obama’s vacillating and lawyerly support for the Ground Zero mosque.
Well, I’d like to return the favor, a little. I’m suffering from a mild case of Bill Clinton nostalgia.
Yes, I’m grading on a curve. I was no fan of Clinton’s — I vaguely recall predicting in writing that he’d spend eternity in Hell sandwiched between Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, and the cast of Cats.
And while I can’t say I pine for the Caligula of the Ozarks, I have mellowed in my animosity for the man. More to the point, I miss having a Democrat who could sell.
Clinton, a political prodigy of the first order, loved the human side of politics. He listened to the hoi polloi more than he listened to the Harvard faculty. It made him a less consequential but more democratic president.
Meanwhile, Obama’s “People of Earth Stop Your Bickering” aloofness often makes him seem exasperated with the country he leads. He doesn’t seem to care what the people think. If voters disagree with him, that’s their mistake.
He’s lost — if he ever had it — his appetite for persuasion. Oh, he can explain things just fine. But there’s a difference between explaining your position and selling it. Clinton, the consummate salesman, understood the difference.
When you look back, the only thing Obama really sold on the campaign trail was the semi-magical thrill of being one of “the ones we’ve been waiting for.” He didn’t sell policy proposals; he sold abstractions. He even picked fights with abstractions, insisting, for example, that his biggest opponent in the Democratic primary was “cynicism.”
Lots of salesmen start by trying to sell you on a fantasy. That’s how they get their hooks in you. Get the customer to say “yes” in principle before he even knows what he’s buying. “Would you like to look young, feel great, and eat all you want?” That’s the easy part. The hard part is translating that abstract yes into an actual sale.
Obama has never been good at that. There was a lot of talk in the late stages of the Democratic primary about how Obama couldn’t “close.” People liked the Hope and Change stuff, but he fell short on convincing people he could transmogrify the rhetorical gold into reality. Sure, he won in the end. It was a change election, and he was the ultimate change candidate, with no real record to serve as ballast for all of his hot air.
But then came the governing, when the steak needed to outrank the sizzle. Obama has had remarkable success cramming his agenda through Congress — often thanks to the sorts of backroom deals he swore to oppose — but he hasn’t made a sale outside of the Beltway. For instance, despite a year of infomercial-level hawking, Americans still don’t want his health-care reform (the American people loved the fantasy car he described, but they’ve balked at both the clunker and the financing). He’s gone straight from messiah to Michael Dukakis.
In fairness, he’s tried to sell. He claimed the Gulf oil spill proves we need cap-and-trade. He told us from the Oval Office this week that we owe it to the troops to unite around his economic agenda. But these weren’t arguments so much as condescending harangues. No one who doesn’t already agree buys such nonsense. Rather, they ask, “How stupid does this guy think we are?”
Just as often, Obama confuses explanation for persuasion, as if simply telling us that because he thinks X, then X must be the way to go. More infuriating, nearly all of his explanations assume that disagreement with him must stem from ignorance or villainy. That pose worked a little when he could claim that opposition was synonymous with Republican partisanship. But now that disagreement has moved to the mainstream, he seems to have an adversarial relationship with the people he’s supposed to represent.
I’m not shopping for a Clinton version of the “Miss Me Yet?” T-shirt, but I do miss having a Democratic president who didn’t seem to think the job was beneath him.
Polling and Political Wrap, 9/2/10 | read this item
There is a lot of polling in the Thursday edition of the Wrap, and little-to-none of it is bound to make Democrats terribly optimistic about the direction in which the 2010 election cycle is heading.
Sure, a lot of the less-than-charitable data comes from partisan sources. But even a couple of independent sources come up with data that shows Democrats in considerably bleaker positions than earlier data would seem to indicate.
That warning offered in advance, let’s trudge forward with the Thursday edition of the Wrap….
THE U.S. SENATE
FL-Sen: Crist internal gives him (narrow lead), as he gains Dem nod Given where public polling was on this race as recently as three weeks ago, it is hard to get a lot of confidence for Independent Charlie Crist based on the release of his own internal polling by Keith Fredrick. The new poll gives Crist a lead of just a single point, with Crist at 35%, Rubio at 34%, and Kendrick Meek well behind the pack at 17%. Crist did get some welcome news today, as he locked in a surprising endorsement in the form of state senator Al Lawson. Lawson just finished with a closer-than-expected primary challenge to Congressman Allen Boyd, one in which he challenged Boyd to his left. Lawson’s defection is particularly notable, given that he is an African-American Democrat who is choosing Crist over Kendrick Meek, who is seeking to be the first African-American member of the U.S. Senate ever from the state of Florida.
KY-Sen: New Braun Research poll puts Paul back in the lead Braun Research is back with their semi-regular survey of Kentucky on behalf of CN|2, and their assessment of the race has changed quite a bit in the past few weeks. After giving Democrat Jack Conway a one-point lead in their last survey, the pollster moves Republican Rand Paul back into the lead. The new numbers put Paul at 42% and Conway at 37%. The poll also decides to look ahead to 2011, where they find Democratic Governor Steve Beshear in position to get re-elected narrowly, as he leads Republican challenger David Williams by six points.
NY-Sen: Primary poll puts undecided in the lead…by a lot In a sign of how pedestrian the Republican primary to challenge Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been, half of the GOP electorate is still undecided with less than two weeks to go, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll of the Empire State. Former Congressman Joe DioGuardi paces the field with 28% of the vote, with David Malpass trailing at 12% and Bruce Blakeman in the third spot at 10% of the vote.
OH-Sen: PPP poll gives Portman a solid edge over Fisher PPP’s new poll out of the Buckeye State is a reversal of fortune from the previous PPP survey in the state. Republican Rob Portman has pulled out to a seven-point lead over Democrat Lee Fisher (45-38). Tom Jensen of PPP points to an interesting dichotomy among the undecideds: they voted for Obama in 2008 by a two-to-one margin, but have a net disapproval (40-46) of the President at this point. What direction will those folks head in November? This pattern could be repeated in races all over the country.
THE U.S. HOUSE
IA-03: Boswell gets key endorsement as Dems hammer Zaun In agricultural Iowa, incumbent Democrat Leonard Boswell got a key endorsement in his dangerously close battle with Republican Brad Zaun in the swing 3rd district. Boswell won the endorsement of the Iowa Corn Growers yesterday. Meanwhile, Iowa Democrats have launched a hard hitting ad on Brad Zaun that goes after the Republican for a domestic incident in 2001 that recently came to light (for what it’s worth, DMR columnist Kathie Obradovich is not a fan of the ad).
NY-23: Hoffman vows to fight until November For those hoping for some delicious Republican infighting saving a tough seat for the Dems, you are about to get some love from a very familiar source. Doug Hoffman has now made it clear–if he does not win the Republican primary in a couple of weeks, he will continue onward to the general election as the nominee of the Conservative Party. Interestingly, the Tea Party that launched Hoffman to prominence in 2009 is making it clear that they may not go along for the ride in November if Hoffman decides to split the conservative vote yet again.
PA-12: GOP internal predicts GOP to snag Murtha seat in November Democrat Mark Critz might have won the special election to replace John Murtha in May, but a new internal poll out from Public Opinion Strategies is claiming that Republican Tim Burns will claim the district on his second attempt in November. An internal poll from the NRCC claims that Burns is at 48%, with the newly-minted incumbent Critz five points back at 43%. The district is a swing district, one carried by both John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008 (a rarity, to be sure).
VA-05: The ugliest poll on Earth just got…uglier Republicans crowed, and Democrats blanched, when a summer poll in the 5th district held by Democrat Tom Perriello from SurveyUSA showed the incumbent trailed by twenty-three points to Republican Rob Hurt. SurveyUSA is back in the Fifth, and the results are even worse. The pollster, which has been unrelentingly negative in its assessment of Democratic House candidates this year, has Hurt now at 61% of the vote, with Perriello well behind at 35%.
RACE FOR THE HOUSE: Ayers McHenry heads west, and the ugly continues Consider the source (Republican pollster, partisan sponsor), but the third wave of House polls from GOP number-crunchers Ayers McHenry looks at the West, and the numbers for the Democrats there are almost universally awful. The pollster, looking at ten Democratic-held districts, has the GOP going 6-3-1 in trial heats for November. The standard caveats apply for internal polls, but the Colorado blog ColoradoPols uncovered another potential issue: the fact that the firm did not appear to poll more than the two major party candidates. In races with active teabagger candidates, that could actually matter in a close race.
AZ-01: Paul Gosar (R) 47%, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D) 41% AZ-05: Dave Schweikert (R) 50%, Rep. Harry Mitchell (D) 44% AZ-08: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) 46%, Jesse Kelly (R) 46% CA-11: David Harmer (R) 45%, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D) 44% CA-47: Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D) 45%, Van Tran (R) 43% CO-03: Scott Tipton (R) 51%, Rep. John Salazar (D) 43% CO-04: Cory Gardner (R) 50%, Rep. Betsy Markey (D) 39% NM-01: Rep. Martin Heinrich (D) 49%, Jon Barela (D) 42% NV-03: Joe Heck (R) 48%, Rep. Dina Titus (D) 45% OR-05: Rep. Kurt Schrader (D) 44%, Scott Bruun (R) 36%
THE GUBERNATORIAL RACES
FL-Gov: Scott selects running mate for November Rick Scott made an interesting selection today, giving the nod to African American Republican state legislator Jennifer Carroll as his choice for Lt. Governor. Besides the obvious gender and racial balance represented by Carroll is a potentially more important political consideration: Carroll had been a supporter of Bill McCollum during the recently concluded primary. The thaw between Scott and supporters of McCollum could be a long time in coming, as the vanquished foe is still very reluctant to support his fellow Republican.
MD-Gov: Dems pounce on Ehrlich union endorsement It has become common practice for Republicans to pooh-pooh union endorsements of Democrats, arguing that such endorsements are the work of the “bosses” and not good rank-and-file teachers/officers/etc. Therefore, it is a tad ironic that a rare union endorsement of a Republican candidate has such transparent evidence of such top-driven influence. The Democrats are pouncing on the endorsement of Republican Robert Ehrlich by the Maryland Classified Employees Association. Democrats were lightning-quick to point out that the union’s executive director is a former Republican state legislator, who is running for office as a Republican this year (and could probably use some love from the top of the ticket).
NY-Gov: Republican primary poll shows race still in the air Rick Lazio has been the frontrunner for the GOP gubernatorial nomination throughout the 2010 election, but that might be changing at the last, according to the new poll from Quinnipiac. Lazio’s lead is down to twelve points (47-35) over businessman Carl Paladino. Lazio is probably close enough to 50% to be comfortable, but his days of having a two-to-one lead over Paladino are pretty much over.
OR-Gov: Labor comes in big for Democrat John Kitzhaber Oregon is one of those states where donors can drop big coin on their favored candidates: at one point earlier in the cycle, the majority of Republican Chris Dudley’s take came from just two donors. Labor is starting to weigh in on the race. The latest example: the AFSCME, which dropped six figures ($100K) during August into the coffers of Democratic gubernatorial nominee John Kitzhaber.
TX-Gov: Even GOP internal polls have Perry sitting at 50% As a sign of how potentially vulnerable incumbent Republican Rick Perry truly is, even internal polling for the GOP cannot put the incumbent over 50% in his re-election bid. That said, the poll conducted by Wilson Research Strategies for GOPAC does give Perry a sizeable edge, with Perry at 50% and Democratic challenger Bill White at 38%.
THE RAS-A-POLL-OOZA
Not a ton of data from the House of Ras today, but it joins the rest of the numbers from their day in that unremittingly negative tone. Team Ras-sie put both Rick Scott (FL-Gov) and Dino Rossi (WA-Sen) out in front today. The only poll that can come close to being construed as positive for Dems is the relatively small lead for GOP incumbent Sean Parnell in Alaska.
AK-Gov: Gov. Sean Parnell (R) 53%, Ethan Berkowitz (D) 43% FL-Gov: Rick Scott (R) 45%, Alex Sink (D) 44% WA-Sen: Dino Rossi (R) 48%, Sen. Patty Murray (D) 46%
