Category Archives: The Nation

What if I’d come back in 2013? Would I have been impressed? I think not…

Some seemed to doubt the premise of the preceding post about how static and dull and lifeless popular culture has become (or at least, to discount the importance of it). But to someone who was young in the ’60s, there’s something very weird about living in a time when a photograph of people 20 years ago would look no different from a photo today (assuming you could get them to look up from their smartphones for a second during the “today” picture).

As I said in a comment on that post…

I’ve written in the past about how enormously exciting I found American pop culture when I returned here in 1965 after two-and-a-half years in South America without television. My words in describing it are probably inadequate. It was so amazingly stimulating, as though all my neurons were on fire. It was like mainlining some drug that is so far unknown to pharmacology, one that fully engages all of your brain.

If I had returned at that same age in 2013 rather than ’65 — meaning I had left the country in March 2011 — I doubt it would have been such a huge rush. It would be like, “Oh, look: The latest iPhone does some minor stuff that the old one didn’t. And now we have 4G instead of 3G. Whoopee.”

Most of the big movies would be sequels of the big movies when I left — or “reimaginings” of Superman or Spiderman. The best things on TV would still be “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” “Firefly” would still be canceled. I’d be disappointed that “Rubicon” had only lasted one season. And I’d marvel at the fact that, with hundreds of channels out there, everything good was on one: AMC. (HBO hasn’t impressed me since “The Sopranos,” and that would have been over years before I left the country.) “The Walking Dead” would be new to me. Again, whoopee.

I just can’t imagine what I’d grab hold of and say, “Wow, THIS is different and exciting…”

But consider this list of things that I saw and heard for the first time in 1965, either immediately when I got back into the country, or over the next few months:

James Bond – who was enormously important to my friends and me, and who did a lot toward defining the decade (just ask Austin Powers), and who embodied much of what “Mad Men” recaptures about the decade. Yes, Bond had been around earlier, but I had never heard of him before the film “Dr. No,” which I actually saw on the ship on my way down to Ecuador. Which I did not enjoy. I didn’t really get Bond, as something that interested me, until “Goldfinger.”
Really exciting new cars that changed dramatically from model year to model year. I had seen ONE Mustang, parked outside the Tennis Club in Guayaquil, and I thought it was awesome. I’d never seen a Sting Ray, and the ’65 model was particularly cool…
Not just the Beatles, but the entire British Invasion – the Stones, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Animals, Tom Jones, Petula Clark. Just those few names illustrate the tremendous diversity of styles just within that one category we describe as the “Invasion.”
Folk rock – The Byrds, Chad & Jeremy, Simon and Garfunkel, and so on.
Beach music, West coast – The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, the Surfaris
Gimmick bands – Paul Revere and the Raiders, Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, etc.
One-hit wonders – Much of the vitality of the era was personified by such groups as ? and the Mysterians, the Standells and the Troggs (OK, all three of their hits were technically in ’66. But consider such one-time hits of 1964 and 65 as “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Eve of Destruction,” “Keep on Dancing,” “Land of 1,000 Dances”…)
Ordinary guys wearing (relatively) long hair. Yes, we’d heard of The Beatles by this time in South America, but the fashion had not caught on.
Beach music, East coast – Yeah, this music had been around, and white kids had been listening to this “black” music, but it didn’t have the kind of profile where I could hear it until this point. I think Wikipedia rightly cites the heyday as being “mid-1960s to early 1970s.”
Color TV – It had existed, but I hadn’t seen it.

OK, taking off on that last one, let’s just take a quick run-through of the TV shows, icons of the era, that were either new in 1965, or new to me because I’d been out of the country:

Gilligan’s Island
Green Acres
I Spy
Hogan’s Heroes
The Wild, Wild West
The Smothers Brothers Show
Lost in Space
Bewitched
Daniel Boone
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Get Smart
The Munsters/The Addams Family
Shindig!

I want you to especially note the variety in those shows — they weren’t all manifestations of the same cultural phenomenon, the way, say, “reality TV” shows are today. (A phenomenon that would not be new to me at all from a two-year absence.)

I’d like to include “The Beverly Hillbillies,” but it actually premiered shortly before I left the country, and I’d seen it once or twice. And I won’t cite the ground-breaking “Batman” because it premiered in January of 1966 – which was still within my first year back in the country. Also, I never saw “The Andy Griffith Show” before my return, but that was my fault — it had been out there for a year or so before I left.

This may all seem silly and superficial to y’all, but I think it’s actually significant that our popular culture is so static and unchanging today. Someone, trying to dismiss this, said on the previous post that I was ignoring the fact that the dynamism of popular culture in previous decades was just a First World, affluent-society phenomenon.

No, I wasn’t. In fact, that is sort of my point. I had come from an unchanging, static culture in the Third World into one of the most exciting cultural moments in the life of the most affluent country in human history. I would even go so far as to suggest that the dynamism of the popular culture is related somehow to economic dynamism.

And maybe the economic stagnation that is the New Normal today is related to cultural stagnation. We could feel our economic horizons expanding in past decades. No longer…

The Rolling Stones – Live in Shindig! (1965) by Vilosophe

I couldn’t watch Werner Herzog’s anti-texting-and-driving video; it made my heart hurt too much

10 Replies

At the behest of AT&T, German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a half-hour video that shows the real-life human tragedies that texting while driving causes.

I couldn’t get through the very first story. It made my heart hurt too much. From the very first second that I saw that young woman holding her fingers out to her side, I knew that there was supposed to be a small child clinging to them, and that the child was gone.

It’s brutal. But as an updated, higher-quality film of the sort they made driver’s-ed students watch back in my day, it’s got to be effective. I hope.

In case you weren’t entirely convinced that Weiner is a jerk

34 Replies

… watch this video, in which he mocks a British reporter for being British (likening talking to her to a Monty Python sketch), and then mocks England for being a “rainy, cloudy and grey” place.

But it’s not so much what he does as how he does it, with everything from his tone of voice to his body language to his constant demonstrations that he’d rather pay attention to anything but the reporter.

Yes, Anthony, there is an absurdist feel to the questions reporters ask you — to the entire existence of your campaign, for that matter. But whom do you have to blame for that?

SC GOP chairman doing what party chairmen do

44 Replies

That’s Matt Moore, second from right, with some other modern SC politicos and some fugitive from the early 19th century, at a political forum last fall.

You’ve probably seen this silliness:

COLUMBIA, SC — The chairman of South Carolina’s Republican Party says he will not allow CNN or NBC to broadcast debates of Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina unless the networks refuse to air a documentary on Hilary Clinton, a possible Democratic nominee for president.

NBC plans to broadcast a miniseries starring Diane Lane as Clinton, the former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State. CNN has also announced plans for a feature-length documentary on Clinton’s career.

Monday, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent letters to NBC and CNN telling them he would ask the RNC to ban any Republican candidates from participating in presidential debates hosted by NBC or CNN unless the two networks agree to not air the programs.

Matt Moore, South Carolina’s newly elected Republican Party chairman, said he agreed with Priebus…

Matt Moore is doing what party chairmen do — inspiring ire toward the opposition (and, if you’re a Republican, toward media, which is perceived by the most ardent loyalists as the opposition), inspire the constituency to say “hell, yeah!,” and keep them giving money.

Making sense is not a job requirement.

It is extremely unlikely that I will watch either of those programs, mainly because the chief reason I have a TV is to have something to watch movies on. These programs do not seem to fit into the category of things I deem worth spending time on.

But it seems to me that given the far less interesting and compelling figures who have inspired docudramas in the past, Hillary Clinton certainly qualifies as legitimate fodder. I found it interesting to see what Emma Thompson did with the Hillary-inspired character in “Primary Colors” — a movie that, by the way, was far from laudatory.

People make too much of such things. And they ignore the fact that these things can do as much harm as good to candidates. I’m mindful of the how media overexposure (much of it on her terms) eliminated Sarah Palin from consideration for the presidential nomination in 2012, despite her popularity for a year or so after the 2008 contest.

People have always made too much of such things. I vividly recall the way full release of “The Right Stuff” was delayed to avoid charges that the filmmakers were boosting John Glenn’s chances in the 1984 Democratic nomination process.

If only they had been able to do so. If that awesome film (which never got the attention it should have, due in large part to its on-again, off-again release) could have gotten him elected or even nominated, I would have been much happier than I was with the choice available to us that November.

Russia has committed a deliberate, hostile act against U.S.

22 Replies

Lindsey Graham took little time in reacting to the news that Edward Snowden has been allowed to enter Russia technically and officially, and will be granted asylum for a year:

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) made this statement today on the reports that Russia has granted Edward Snowden temporary asylum.

“If these reports are accurate, Americans in Washington should consider this a game changer in our relationship with Russia. Mr. Snowden has been charged with serious crimes and has put American lives at risk at home and abroad.

“Today’s action by the Russian government could not be more provocative and is a sign of Vladimir Putin’s clear lack of respect for President Obama. It is now time for Congress, hopefully in conjunction with the Administration, to make it clear to the Russian government that this provocative step in granting Snowden asylum will be met with a firm response.”

#####

Basically, Putin has just flipped a gigantic bird at the United States. He has shown a gross disrespect for the United States and its laws, protecting Snowden from prosecution on charges of doing things for which — and here’s the ironic part — were a Russian citizen to do them to his country, Putin would put him under Lubyanka Square.

So, what do we do about it? For his part, Sen. Graham has suggested that we consider boycotting the winter Olympics to show our displeasure. Some have reacted as though that were crazy talk. I don’t know why. Jimmy Carter kept us out of the real Olympics in 1980 to protest the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan.

But it doesn’t seem to me the best response to this situation. Right off, it would seem to accept the fact that we’re not getting this mutt back before February 2014, because that’s when the games are. On the other hand, if we got him back before then, we could then go ahead to the Olympics.

There must be a better approach, but I don’t know what it is. What does Putin want that we could deny him without hurting our own interests further? Someone must know.

GOP accuses Democrats of waging ‘war on women’

43 Replies

OK, I sort of got a kick out of this:

In 2012, Democrats’ constant refrain that the Republican party was in the midst of a “war on women” left the GOP — all the way up to presidential nominee Mitt Romney — exasperated at what they called a gross mischaracterization. Now Republicans are embracing the term as a way of reminding voters of Democratic men who have cheated, sexted, and harassed.

In e-mails, press releases and tweets, the Republican National Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee are highlighting a “war on women” waged by San Diego Mayor Bob Filner (harassment), New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner (sexting), and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer (prostitutes).

Mentioned less often but still on the list: New York State Assemblyman Vito Lopez (harassment) and Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen (mistakenly thinking he had a daughter, calling a reporter “very attractive”) among others.

“The best tools we have as Republicans to recruit women candidates this cycle are three Democrats named Bob Filner, Eliot Spitzer, and Anthony Weiner,” said NRCC spokeswoman Andrea Bozek…

Yes, it’s ridiculous to accuse an entire party of a “war on women” because of the personal misdeeds of a few. But it’s no more ridiculous than the Democrats using the hyperbolic term the way they did in last year’s election.

Once a sailor, always a sailor: McCain hopes bill to eliminate bills will help enrich strippers

32 Replies

OK, to be fair, he was set up. But he rose to the bait, and had fun with it:

(CNN) – If Congress passes the COINS Act replacing the $1 paper bill for a coin, the U.S. government may be able to save billions in printing costs at the expense of a little more jangle in the average consumers’ pockets. But what about the strippers?

That’s what The Hill newspaper asked one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sen. John McCain, in a piece published Thursday. The question came from a separate 2011 story where the publication suggested strippers could suffer in a bill-less economy, with G-strings and garter belts far less accommodating of cold metal.

For his part, the Arizona Republican responded in stride in a Capitol Hill hallway.

“Then I hope that they could obtain larger denominations,” McCain reportedly told The Hill.

According to The Hill, the 76 year-old McCain started answering questions from another reporter before a smile spread across his face and he shouted down the hallway to The Hill, “Fives, tens, one hundreds!”…

Hundreds? Bada-Bing!

You know, if this bill passes, and the senator wants to determine whether it’s having the desired, um, stimulative effect on the economy, I’ll be glad to help him with the research. But only if he’s buying; I hear the drinks are pretty pricey in those dives.

But seriously, I like the idea of this bill. When I was in England, I thought it was great that I could make small purchases — postcards, newspapers, a cuppa, or a bottle of beer from an off-license — with pound and two-pound coins. They were very handy.

But dollar coins have never caught on in my lifetime. And you know why? Because we haven’t produced a dollar coin that anyone could respect, much less love. Not since the old silver dollars, which by the time I came along were already collector’s items that your grandma gave you for your birthday and you stashed them safely in a dresser drawer where they still reside to this day.

I’m not going to get into the politics of choosing Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea as the “heads” side of these coins; that’s neither here nor there. People would use dollar coins with Alfred E. Newman on them, if the coins themselves were substantial and respectable.

Instead, our mints have produced these light, cheesy things that look and feel like they’re inherently worth less than a copper penny. They look and feel like something you’d get out of one of those old machines in arcades that squished a penny and stamped your name on it. And you can’t distinguish them from quarters in your pocket.

By contrast, the pound coin has heft, and thickness, and a good tactile feel to its surfaces. You can immediately distinguish it when you reach for one. As for the two-pound coins — they’re amazing. They are so distinctive, so substantial, you’d think they were crafted by the dwarves in Middle Earth in time out of mind. It even appears to have Elvish inscriptions on it.

Craft something like that, and America won’t miss the dollar bill.

Maybe we could use some of the money saved by eliminating the paper ones to make these coins something Americans would actually want to use. For a change.

In speaking about race and justice in America, Obama makes good use of bully pulpit, only without the ‘bully’ part

64 Replies

This story about the speech in the WSJ this morning summed up the challenge:

The remarks, delivered without a teleprompter, were a striking example of America’s first black president seeking to guide the country’s thinking on race without inflaming racial tensions or undermining the judicial system.

He managed to do that, and he did it just right. While the topic was a sensitive as all get-out, the president didn’t make a big deal of it. He wasn’t making a pronouncement, or proposing policy. He wasn’t speechifying at all. He started out by lowering the temperature, reducing expectations, making the whole thing as casual as possible without making light of it. It came across this way:

This isn’t really a press conference — we’ll have one of those later. Today, I’m just this guy, talking to you, sharing a few thoughts that I hope will help help black and white people understand each other a little. Not that I’m some oracle or something, I just have some life experiences — just as we all have life experiences — that might be relevant to share…

It was the president using the bully pulpit, only without the bully part. No-drama Obama. Just talking, not speechifying. Thought, not emotion, even though some of the thoughts were about deep, visceral feelings, and the way people act as a result of them. Just, “I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit…”

He had said earlier, on the dispassionate level — what needed to be said: The jury has spoken, and that’s that. He repeated that (read the whole speech here):

The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a — in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works.

Going beyond that, he downplayed any expectations that his administration would somehow take up the cudgels against Zimmerman as a way of undoing that verdict:

I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it’s important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government — the criminal code. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels…

This speech Friday was about trying to explore, just as calmly, the emotional reaction that causes such dissatisfaction with the verdict, appropriate as it may have been given the case:

But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.

In other words, look, a lot of white folks don’t understand why a lot of black folks react to this thing the way they do, and here’s my take on that:

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

Furthermore, a lot of whites may be laboring under the impression that black folks are blind to the fact that young, black men are statistically more liable to be dangerous, especially to each other:

Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naïve about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context…

I think the African-American community is also not naïve in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.

So — so folks understand the challenges that exist for African-American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it or — and that context is being denied. And — and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different…

Oh, and in case you think he had some pompous, trite notion of launching something so grand as a “national conversation on race,” he deflated that:

You know, there have been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.

On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s a possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

Again, and again, his manner, his verbal cues, kept the intensity on the down-low: “watching the debate over the course of the last week I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit… And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but…” Throughout, he interjected the phrase “I think,” to make sure you knew he was just this guy talking, and not The Man, speaking ex cathedra.

Another thing that a lot of whites say about blacks is that they “talk about race all the time.” Well, Barack Obama certainly has not. He’s been the president, not the black president. But it’s a fine thing for America that when he does, on rare occasion, decide that OK, in this situation, maybe he should say something about the topic, he does it so deftly, so thoughtfully, so well.

Barack Obama, like any other presidents, has his strengths as well as weaknesses. Some of his strengths were on display Friday.

Big Brother doesn’t need NSA to know where you’ve been

15 Replies

Several of the most amazing things I’ve seen technology do in recent years are associated with Google Maps.

Such as the traffic feature.

Look at Google Maps on your phone, and you’ll see how well traffic is moving — or whether it’s moving at all — on the road ahead of you.

Google does this by — Edward Snowden and the ACLU should brace themselves at this point — keeping track of all the Maps-equipped phones traveling on the road. Not only that road, of course, but all roads, all of the time. In real time.

Now, we see that law enforcement can do, and does, something similar by tracking license plates:

The spread of cheap, powerful cameras capable of reading license plates has allowed police to build databases on the movements of millions of Americans over months or even years, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report released Wednesday.

The license-plate readers, which authorities typically mount along major roadways or on the backs of cruisers and government vehicles, can identify cars almost instantly and compare them against “hot lists” of vehicles that have been stolen or involved in crimes.

But the systems collect records on every license plate they encounter — whether or not they are on hot lists — meaning that time and location data are gathered in databases that can be searched by police. Some departments purge information after a few weeks, some after a few months and some never, said the report, which warns that such data could be abused by authorities and chill freedom of speech and association…

You have to pity the ACLU, Rand Paul, et al. They are doomed to worry themselves to death. Because this toothpaste is not going back into the tube.

I liked the way it was put in an explainer of the Google traffic function:

So how does Google know what traffic is like on the roads, nearly all the time? From our smartphones, of course. Whether you like it or not, “telephone companies have always known where your phone is,” Dobson says, because cell phone companies need to use location to appropriately charge customers for calls. That means the companies are constantly monitoring location based on the strength of signal to a cell tower, which allows the phone to switch towers as it travels. Since 2011, the Federal Communications Commission has also required that phones come with GPS, so between the triangulation with cell towers and the GPS requirement, your phone is a marked man….

Now, this has stirred up some controversy about whether the process is an invasion of privacy. But both Dobson and Zhan Guo, a transportation policy professor at New York University, nearly laughed when asked about privacy concerns. That ship has already sailed….

Indeed. One might as well laugh.

Some will say that a private company keeping tabs on your every move, for its own greater profit (and utility, of course) is preferable to the gummint doing so.

I don’t think either is necessarily preferable, just different. And either way, ultimately inevitable.

Thoughts on the Tsarnaev ‘Rolling Stone’ cover?

16 Replies

Slate brought my attention to this item:

This is the cover of the August issue of Rolling Stone, set to hit newsstands soon. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the Internet will likely have a few thoughts on the editorial decision to give the “Free Jahar” crowd something to pin up on their bedroom walls. (As a man who’s had to art an untold number of Tsarnaev-related posts with only a handful of images to choose from, I’ll grant the editors didn’t have a whole lot of options to accompany Janet Reitman’s report on the “life and times of Boston bomber Jahar Tsarnaev.” That said, it’s pretty clear the masthead knew what they were doing when they settled on this one.)

They had to do that, because it’s been awhile since I found anything interesting in Rolling Stone. (The last thing was probably the book, Generation Kill, by one of their writers. It was a good, unblinking look at the experience of a group of Marines in the Iraq invasion in 2003. But I didn’t read that in the magazine.)

This is the first I’d heard of their being a “Free Jahar” movement among young females, which is apparently a sort of squealing, latter-day Apple Scruffs sort of thing. Disturbing. Apparently, some people are still in need of consciousness-raising (do feminists still use that term?)…

Pouring oil on the waters: Obama’s statement on verdict

46 Replies

The proper expression, to go with the proper statement, striking the proper emotional tone.

First, let’s set aside the fact that I don’t hold with the morphing of the job of president of the United States into Emoter-in-Chief. The idea that the president is supposed to comment, strike the proper emotion, on every news development that engages people’s morbid curiosity at a given moment — whether it has the slightest thing to do with his duties and responsibilities or not — is a discomfiting sign of a republic in decline.

But that’s where we are today, and if the White House didn’t put out a statement on the latest sensation, meaning would be read into the lack of it, so a president who cares about the dignity of his office is really in a spot.

The best he can do is put out as dispassionate a statement as possible, and move on.

That said, I think President Obama did a pretty good job with this statement yesterday:

“The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy. Not just for his family, or for any one community, but for America. I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son. And as we do, we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities. We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis. We should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like this. As citizens, that’s a job for all of us. That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.”

I could have done without the bit at the end, which mentions “honoring” Trayvon Martin. Those aren’t words I would have chosen. Nothing against the victim of this horrid mess — it’s just that that is what he is, a victim. He’s not a hero, he isn’t a martyr to a cause. He didn’t set out to make a statement. He just had a late-night yen for Skittles (possibly the expression of a case of the munchies), and it got him killed.

I don’t know him, and I think “honoring” him is best left to those who did.

But I know why the president used those words. He used them to head off people who would react inappropriately to this verdict under the guise of “honoring Trayvon.”

Anyway, beyond that, I thought the piece just right. There are two main messages here. The first is neatly contained in this statement: “But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken.”

Absolutely.

But for those who feel that’s not enough, that something must be done, are challenged with the second message, which is a corollary to the first: That, this being a nation of laws, if you didn’t like the way this turned out, engage the system and change the society in which you live, from changing the laws down to “being the change” in your own interactions with fellow citizens.

And I think that if the president had to say something, those were pretty much the right things to say.

Profumo showed what Sanford, Weiner, Spitzer should have done

18 Replies

Peggy Noonan’s column this week is a good one.

After recounting the Profumo Affair that rocked Britain (and broke a government) 50 years ago, she draws a clear contrast between what a man of honor — which is what John Profumo proved in the end to be — does, and what the likes of Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer do.

In case you’re confused — in case you are thinking, “Well, a man of honor wouldn’t get himself into such a situation” — let me remind you that we’re all sinners, in one way or another, some more spectacularly than others. What this is about is whether you do the honorable thing after you’ve done something terribly wrong.

Here’s the best part of the column:

Everyone hoped he’d disappear. He did. Then, three years later, he… announced he’d deepened and matured and was standing for Parliament “to serve the public.” Of course, he said, “It all depends on the voters, whether they can be forgiving. It’s all in their hands. I throw my candidacy on their mercy.”

Well, people didn’t want to think they were unmerciful. Profumo won in a landslide, worked his way up to party chief, and 12 years later ran for prime minister, his past quite forgotten, expunged, by his mounting triumphs.

***

Wait—that’s not what happened. Nothing like that happened! It’s the opposite of what happened.

Because Profumo believed in remorse of conscience—because he actually had a conscience—he could absorb what happened and let it change him however it would. In a way what he believed in was reality. He’d done something terrible—to his country, to his friends, to strangers who had to explain the headlines about him to their children.

He never knew political power again. He never asked for it. He did something altogether more confounding.

He did the hardest thing for a political figure. He really went away. He went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement house called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. There he did social work—actually the scut work of social work, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane, helped with housing for the poor and worker education.

And it wasn’t for show, wasn’t a step on the way to political redemption. He worked at Toynbee for 40 years…

What Profumo did addresses what I’ve written about in the past, about actual remorse and penitence.

He did the right thing under the terrible circumstances that he himself had brought about. Sanford, Weiner and Spitzer have not. Shame on them for that. And shame on voters willing to let them get away with it.

John Profumo

No, those House Republicans did NOT lose in 2012

4 Replies

It’s probably not fair to pick on this Andres Oppenheimer guy, because he’s just doing what political writers across the country do. But I’m going to anyway. He leads a recent column thusly:

Judging from Republican House leaders’ latest objections to an immigration bill that would legalize up to 11 million undocumented immigrants, it looks like the Republican Party has not learned the lesson from its 2012 electoral defeat — and that it won’t win a presidential election anytime soon.

Just as I forecast in this column early last year that Republicans would get clobbered in the November elections because of their anti-immigration, Hispanic-allergic rhetoric, it’s safe to predict that — once again — Republicans will kill their chances for the 2016 elections by continuing to sound like the “anti-Hispanic” party…

Yeah, OK — if you’re talking about the presidential election, failing to get on board with comprehensive immigration reform could hurt in 2016. Maybe.

What I object to, because it speaks with the central flaw in political coverage in this country, is when he asserts that “the Republican Party has not learned the lesson from its 2012 electoral defeat.”

To which I have to say, “What defeat?” We’re talking about House Republicans. Current House Republicans. Not people who used to be in the House, but were defeated, and therefore aren’t there anymore. Every current member of the House Republican Caucus is someone won election or re-election in 2012. I’m going to go out on a limb here (not knowing the details of each and every House member’s electoral strategy) and say that lots of them ran as the kind of guy (or gal) who would be against a path to citizenship for illegals. And I’ll go further and say that as they look forward to running for re-election from their gerrymandered districts (with minorities, including Hispanic minorities, carefully drawn out of them), their biggest worry is having a primary opponent who would come across as more against a path to citizenship than they are.

Who gets elected president in 2016 is not their problem. Who gets elected to their congressional seats in 2014 is. The Framers designed it this way — the House is set up to be concerned with narrower time frames and narrower constituencies, which of course have become even narrower as lines have been drawn according to ethnic and ideological considerations.

Too much political coverage and commentary is written as though each political party is some amorphous mass which the entire country is either for or against at a given moment. But the world isn’t that way. Each candidate may get some help from his party, perhaps a lot of help, but each race — whether it’s a House election or for the presidency — is decided based upon factors specific to the candidates, what happens during the time in which they are running, the way the district is drawn (in the case of district elections), who can raise the most money, who gets his message across most forcefully, and a lot of silly things such as who has the most name recognition, or who says the stupidest thing that gets reported on.

It would be nice if those House Republicans did look at a bigger picture. It would actually be good for the country. But if they don’t, don’t say they failed to learn the lesson from their 2012 defeat, because they did just fine in 2012.

New York has SC’s 1st District to blame for Spitzer return

19 Replies

Sanford, having his Spitzer moment. Now Spitzer wants to have a Sanford moment.

“The Fix” over at The Washington Post mentioned it in the lede of their Spitzer story:

It’s officially the year of the political comeback, with Mark Sanford winning a congressional seat and Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer attempting their own second acts in New York City…

The New York Times was discreet enough to save it until the 3rd graf:

…His re-emergence comes in an era when politicians — like Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina and the New York mayoral contender Anthony D. Weiner — have shown that public disapproval, especially over sexual misconduct, can be fleeting, and that voters seem receptive to those who seek forgiveness and redemption….

“It,” of course, is the embarrassing decision by the voters of South Carolina’s 1st District to send Mark Sanford to Congress again.

It’s apparently just given all sorts of bad actors bad ideas.

It shouldn’t. Just because voters in one state elected one guy who couldn’t keep his pants zipped (or even stay in this country when he was supposed to be on duty as governor of SC) doesn’t mean a whole other set of voters will vote for a whole other guy who also spectacularly engaged in misdeeds of a sexual nature. Particularly when the two men are so different politically, and their respective electorates are so different. It’s not like they’re all running on the “adultery” ticket, and that’s the political flavor of the month or something.

But national media too often act as though there is a real connection, and I fear that the backers and political consultants and hangers-on who talk these guys into making these comeback attempts do take such absurd, superficial, incidental correlations into consideration.

These things have been inextricably joined by national media since the start. The day that Mark Sanford did his super-painful (to watch, anyway) confessional presser, I was walking over to the State House for it, not exactly knowing what to expect, when an editor from The New York Post (in whose behalf I was on the way to cover the thing), called me on my old Blackberry to ask what I knew. Not much, I had to tell him. He asked, “Is he going to have a Spitzer moment?” I said again I didn’t know, although yeah, it was possible. I had been hearing things the last couple of days, but what I had heard was so sketchy and dubious that I didn’t want to embarrass myself promising such wild stuff when I had insufficient reason to believe any of it. (The only thing I had to go on was the governor’s bizarre disappearance, and his showing up that morning on a flight from Argentina.)

Then, when Sanford finally came out and started talking, I kept thinking, Wow, it was all actually true.

So now, they’re all like, Spitzer’s gonna try to do a Sanford.

Thanks, 1st District. Thanks so much.

Edward Snowden, the sniveling ‘hero’

5 Replies

This piece over at Slate…

On the merits, Snowden’s claim for asylum would not count for much in any country. Applicants for asylum typically must prove they are the victims of persecution on account of their race, ethnicity, religion, or membership in a social or political group. Frequently, these are political dissidents who are fleeing government oppression, or members of the wrong group in a civil war or ethnic conflict. They have been tortured, their families have been massacred. Snowden could be regarded as a political dissenter, but the United States is attempting to arrest him not because he holds dissenting views, but because he violated the law by disclosing information that he had sworn to keep secret. All countries have such laws; they could hardly grant asylum to an American for committing acts that they themselves would regard as crimes if committed by their own nationals…

… reminded me of the statement Edward Snowden put out a day or two ago, through his friends at Wikileaks. After complaining that President Obama is employing “the old, bad tools of political aggression” against him, he went on:

The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum…

Well, first, young Edward, you have been “convicted of nothing” because you have not been tried, which is because you have not been apprehended, which is because you’ve been running like a scalded dog ever since you revealed your identity to the world.

And I thought Slate, above, explained pretty well why most nations would be unwilling to grant you the asylum that you wrongly regard as your “right.”

The whiny tone of Snowden’s statement this week sort of stands in contrast, in my mind, to the tone of self-righteous martyrdom that he struck at the outset, from Hong Kong:

I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end… There’s no saving me…

In other words, it’s a far, far better thing I do, yadda-yadda. Back then, he wasn’t concerned for himself, only for others:

“My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner. Anyone I have a relationship with,” he said. “I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. I am not going to be able to communicate with them. They (the authorities) will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.”…

In other words, he was worried only about those whom HE had deliberately and unilaterally betrayed, along with his employer, his own oaths, and his country. He’s right — anyone associated with him, particularly anyone who worked with him, will be under suspicion, as our counterintelligence people will naturally wonder how one guy, working alone, had access to so much compartmentalized information.

But have you noticed something about those people he supposedly was so worried about? They’re still here, in this country. They are not hiding in an airport in Russia, desperately trying to find a country that will protect them from the legal consequences for their own actions. Only Edward Snowden, “hero” in the cause of transparency, is doing that.

If Snowden really wants a national conversation about the issues he raises, there would be no better stage for him than his own trial. The one he’s unwilling to face.

Have the ‘Obama scandals’ indeed gone ‘up in smoke?’

36 Replies

I meant to post this over the weekend, but the question still bears examining, I think.

Late last week, Andrew Sullivan wrote the following, under the headline, “The ‘Scandals’ Go Up In Smoke:”

There was always something desperate about them: an attempt somehow, after five years of remarkably scandal-free governance, to try once again and prove Michelle Malkin’s fantasies (and Peggy Noonan’s feelings) correct. Darrell Issa was the perfect charlatan for the purpose; and Roger Ailes desperately needed a new narrative in the post-election doldrums. But there really was no there there … and you can feel the air escaping from the hysteria balloons…

Here’s an excerpt from the Jonathan Chait piece that inspired him:

Do you remember how all-consuming the “Obama scandals” once were? This was a turn of events so dramatic it defined Obama’s entire second term — he was “waylaid by controversies,” or at least “seriously off track,” “beset by scandals,” enduring a “second-term curse,” the prospect of “endless scandals,” Republicans “beginning to write his legislative obituary,” and Washington had “turned on Obama.” A ritualistic media grilling of Jay Carney, featuring the ritualistic comparisons of him to Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, sanctified the impression of guilt.

It has come and gone, having left barely a trace. To be sure, the Obama scandals live on in the conservative world, where the evidence of deep corruption and venality grows stronger and stronger. But that is merely the confirmation of suspicions of “Chicago politics,” ACORN and so on, that predate recent events and don’t require any particular facts to survive…

Not one to sit still for that, Peggy Noonan responded:

‘Documents Show Liberals in I.R.S. Dragnet,” read the New York Times headline. “Dem: ‘Progressive’ Groups Were Also Targeted by IRS,” said U.S. News. The scandal has “evaporated into thin air,” bayed the excitable Andrew Sullivan. A breathlessly exonerative narrative swept the news media this week: that liberal groups had been singled out and, by implication, abused by the IRS, just as conservative groups had been. Therefore, the scandal wasn’t a scandal but a mere bungle—a nonpolitical series of unhelpful but innocent mistakes.

The problem with this story is that liberals were not caught in the IRS dragnet. Progressive groups were not targeted.

The claim that they had been rested mostly on an unclear, undated, highly redacted and not at all dispositive few pages from a “historical” BOLO (“be on the lookout”) list that apparently wasn’t even in use between May 2010 and May 2012, when most of the IRS harassment of conservative groups occurred.

The case isn’t closed, no matter how many people try to slam it shut….

But the truth is, I haven’t heard much lately about the IRS thing, or Benghazi. And the “scandal” that Edward Snowden supposedly revealed never was a scandal, and his own saga has become the kind of farce that reminds us of Father Drobney, who has been hiding in an embassy for years in Woody Allen’s play, “Don’t Drink the Water.”

But according to Ms. Noonan, this is all a matter of the liberal media trying to wish the scandals away. She gets particularly indignant about the IRS one:

No one has gotten near the bottom of this scandal. Journalists shouldn’t be trying to make the story disappear. The revenue-gathering arm of the federal government appears to be politically biased, corrupt in its actions, and unable to reform itself.

The only way to make that story go away is to get to the bottom of it and fully reveal it. It’s not a bungle, it’s a scandal.

What do y’all think?

Rewriting the rules of war, Obama-style

7 Replies

The New Republic this week is devoting itself to suggestions for how Barack Obama might have a more successful second term. I was sort of intrigued by this suggestion, “REWRITE THE LAWS OF WAR,” to wit:

One of the most persistent criticisms of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism policy is that he has not definitively broken with the troubled legacy of George W. Bush. But he could put that judgment largely to rest by pushing to modernize the laws of war.

The Geneva Conventions and other similar instruments were designed to deal with traditional armies—not groups with no ties to state sponsors or that operate in failed states. Obama should organize an international conference to establish new standards and agreed-upon interpretations for such subjects as the definition of enemy combatants, the treatment of detainees, and the rendition of suspected terrorists. Drones could also be considered—especially standards to minimize civilian casualties and to establish whether targets pose an imminent threat…

Things have changed, so maybe we should convene a new gathering in Geneva. Or somewhere. If we do, here are some ideas of new rules that the president might want to suggest, but which might not go over well with other potential signatories:

If you make my personal list, I get to take you out with a drone, like Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Mt. Olympus. And if you don’t like that, you just made the list, buddy.
If you make our special short list, we will send in the bully-boys to give you a triple-tap in the forehead in your boudoir in the middle of the night, no matter where in the world your boudoir happens to be. As for countries who object to our doing this within their borders, you, too have a special right under this agreement: You get to try to stop us. Heh, heh.
All battles must take place at night. In the event that night-vision equipment becomes sufficiently ubiquitous that all of our potential enemies have it, this rule will be revisited.
Guantanamo will close when I damn’ well get around to it.

And so forth. You get the idea. I’m sort of kidding, sort of not, given the way this president has continued to conduct the War on Terror. Not only has he “not definitively broken with the troubled legacy of George W. Bush,” as TNR so daintily puts it, he has in some ways been more aggressive than his predecessor in employing the Bush Doctrine.

Basically, the way I just worded all that is probably pretty close to the way folks in some other nations out there see the current U.S. policy. And they’d probably want to address these perceptions at a convention.

So maybe POTUS would like to convene such a gathering, and maybe he wouldn’t…

Happy side-effect of SCOTUS ruling on Prop 8 — undermining government by plebiscite

6 Replies

I thought this was an interesting sidelight on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that advocates of Proposition 8 had no standing to defend the law made by referendum:

SACRAMENTO — Activists on both sides of the bitter fight over same-sex marriage managed to agree on one thing in the wake of Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision.

The justices, they said, set a worrisome precedent by giving elected officials undue power over ballot initiatives.

The court essentially voided Proposition 8, a measure placed on the state ballot by foes of gay marriage and passed by voters in 2008. The justices said supporters of the initiative had no standing to defend the measure after state leaders — who opposed the law — had refused to do so.

Their reasoning drew a testy dissent from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a Sacramento native, who wrote that the decision “disrespects and disparages” California’s political process — a staple of which is the ballot initiative.

The court, Kennedy wrote, did “not take into account the fundamental principles or the practical dynamics of the initiative system in California.”…

I read that, and I think, “Good.” Nothing worrisome about it. Anything that undermines California’s chaotic government-by-plebiscite process is a good thing for representative democracy (a.k.a., “The American Way”).

Everybody’s writing about this now. I first saw the subject raised in the WSJ, this morning, and here’s the Washington Times take on it:

DENVER — The Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday on Proposition 8 unlocked the door for same-sex marriage in California but also may have stifled the voices of the state’s voters…

No, it didn’t stifle anything. They still get to elect their representatives, and that’s how things are supposed to work in a republic.

Whether it’s the definition of marriage in California, or the Confederate flag flying on the State House grounds in Columbia, or more routine, everyday laws, they are far better made through the deliberative process of representative democracy, as imperfect as that is.

There is almost no issue that is best defined as an option between “yes” and “no,” which is all you get in a referendum. True, as our politics have become more and more polarized, far too many issues get defined as “yes” or “no” even in our supposedly deliberative bodies. And that’s a tragedy.

But the cure for that is not to dumb things down further by reducing them to “yes” or “no” on a ballot voted on by people who haven’t even had the opportunity to interact with each other through ordered debate.

So anything we can do to move away from that trend, in California and the rest of the country, is a plus.

Who wants ANY kind of watch in 2013, much less a Rolex?

22 Replies

This news item is a real head-scratcher for me:

A prominent political donor purchased a Rolex watch for Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, according to two people with knowledge of the gift, and the governor did not disclose it in his annual financial filings.

The $6,500 luxury watch was provided by wealthy businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., the people said. He is the chief executive of dietary supplement manufacturer Star Scientific and the person who paid for catering at the wedding of the governor’s daughter. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of an ongoing federal investigation into the relationship between Williams and the McDonnell family…

It raises all sorts of questions:

Who needs a watch in 2013? Cell phones (and computers, and tablets, and other devices that surround us) do everything a watch does and so much more, and are perfectly set to Naval Observatory accuracy.

If you were so atavistic as to feel the need for a watch in this century, why would you ever shell out more than $10 for one? As I recall, back when I was still aware of the price of watches (back in the day when, as Douglas Adams would say, we were so amazingly primitive that we still thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea), that’s more than what a little LCD digital from the grocery checkout line would cost, and it would get the job done.

Assuming you received a watch as a gift, and it was an ostentatiously expensive watch, why on Earth would you keep it, if you were in politics? Your natural reaction, if you had half a brain, would have been to quote Bo Diddley in “Trading Places,” saying, “Man, that watch is so hot, it’s smokin’.”

It’s just astounding.

Part of my problem is that I really don’t get the appeal of jewelry. Jewelry for men, that is. I mean, honestly, I don’t understand jewelry for women, either, but I’m willing to accept that women like the stuff based on the fact that men and women are just different, and vive la différence.

I don’t get it at all. I see these professional ballplayers with gold chains around their necks, and I think, “Did they just run out of stuff to spend all that money on?”

And it seems to me that the only way to explain wearing a watch in 2013 is to say that it just appeals to some people as jewelry.

I just know that, if someone gave me a Rolex, and it was ethical and legal for me to accept the gift, I would immediately run out and sell it and spend the money on something practical, something either I or someone else could actually use.

But not everybody is like me, I’ve noticed. More’s the pity…

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits