Category Archives: Words

‘Jumping the shark:’ You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means…

In today’s WSJ, under the headline, “Jumping the sequester,” columnist Kimberley A. Strassel writes the following:

The phrase “jumping the shark” describes that gimmicky moment when something once considered significant is exposed as ludicrous. This is the week the White House jumped the sequester.

The precise moment came Tuesday, when the administration announced that it was canceling public tours of the White House, blaming budget cuts. The Sequesterer in Chief has insisted that cutting even $44 billion from this fiscal year will cause agonizing pain—airport security snarls, uninspected meat, uneducated children. Since none of those things has come to pass, the White House decided it needed an immediate and high-profile way of making its point. Ergo, it would deny the nation’s school kids a chance to view a symbol of America.

The act was designed to spark outrage against Republicans, yet the sheer pettiness of it instead provided a moment of clarity. Americans might not understand the technicalities of sequester, but this was something else entirely. Was the president actually claiming there was not a single other government item—not one—that could be cut instead of the White House tours? Really?

Yeahhh… I don’t think that’s jumping the shark. Do y’all.? That sounds to me like somebody wrote the headline first, and tried to force the column to fit it. Let’s look at the Wikipedia definition:

Jumping the shark is an idiom created by Jon Hein that is used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery, which is usually a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of “gimmick” in a desperate attempt to keep viewers’ interest…

And here’s the origin:

The phrase jump the shark comes from a scene in the fifth season premiere episode of the American TV series Happy Days titled “Hollywood: Part 3“, written by Fred Fox, Jr.^[4] which aired on September 20, 1977. In the episode, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where a water-skiing Fonzie (Henry Winkler) answers a challenge to his bravery by wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket, and jumping over a confined shark. The stunt was created as a way to showcase Winkler’s real life water ski skills.^[5]

For a show that in its early seasons depicted universally relatable adolescent and family experiences against a backdrop of 1950s nostalgia, this incident marked an audacious, cartoonish turn towards attention-seeking gimmickry. Initially a supporting character, the faddish lionization of an increasingly superhuman Fonzie became the focus of Happy Days. The series continued for seven years after Fonzie’s shark-jumping stunt, with a number of changes in cast and situations. However, it is commonly^[who?] believed that the show began a creative decline in this era, as writers ran out of ideas, and Happy Daysbecame a caricature of itself. As a nod to the episode, Henry Winkler’s character again jumped a shark in the 2003 show Arrested Development…

To me, that’s a pretty clear definition that the Strossel example doesn’t fit. You can call the White House cancellation of tours all kinds of things — in these parts, we’d call it a “Big Bird defense” — but it’s not jumping the shark.

That said, the very same Wikipedia entry I quote above gives an example, also involving Barack Obama, that I don’t think fits either:

In 2008 during the Obama presidential campaign, at a meeting of Democratic governors in Chicago, each governor was identified with a name plate while Senator Obama had a large seal – that looked official but was not.^[11] The New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich wrote “For me, Mr. Obama showed signs of jumping the shark two weeks back, when he appeared at a podium affixed with his own pompous faux-presidential seal”.^[12]

So what do I consider to be a perfect example of jumping the shark? This: When the Beverly Hillbillies went to England. Actually, that series jumped the shark several times; it was sort of a defining characteristic. It sort of did so when Jethro received his draft notice and costumed himself as Patton and bought a tank. It really, really did so when the whole cast jumped fictional universes, going to Hooterville to interact with characters from “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres.” (A radical change of venue can be a good sign that a shark is being jumped.)

In fact, those examples are so good that I have trouble coming up with any others that illustrate the concept so well, as I understand it. It’s not limited to iconic sitcoms, of course. And it can be translated to politics. When Bill Clinton played saxophone on Arsenio Hall seems a pretty clear example. If you go way back, there’s Richard Nixon’s “Sock it to me?” on “Laugh-In.”

But closing the White House to tours? Not so much…

Economist takes live-and-let-live position on Oxford comma

12 Replies

An alert reader brought this piece from The Economist to my attention. An excerpt:

To recap, the Oxford comma separates the last two items in a list, as in “red, white, and blue”. For reasons opaque, the use or non-use of the final comma here stirs passions all out of proportion to its importance. As OnlineSchools.com’s graphic notes, much of the world uses it, but equally respectable publishing houses and publications do not. The Economist is in the latter camp: we would write “red, white and blue”. Defenders of the Oxford comma point to an almost certainly apocryphal story of the student who dedicated a piece of work to “my parents, God and Ayn Rand”. But anyone who writes such a thing has bigger problems than punctuation. Any sensible person would edit and remove such messes as this, whether they use the Oxford comma or not.

What I like about OnlineSchools.com’s graphic is its explanation that the Oxford comma isn’t a black-or-white, always-or-never thing. It is a matter of style. Use it or don’t, but be consistent, and you’re fine. Rarely is such finesse on display when people talk about these things…

What that sort of implies, but doesn’t clearly say, is that even someone who does not use the Oxford comma as a rule might use it, without being untrue to himself, in a series of elements that are more complex than red, white and blue. For instance, if he were to describe the same colors as the hue of an apple at the perfect point of ripeness, that of a face that has been drained of blood at the moment when its owner has heard appalling news, and the color that you see staring straight down into the Pacific when you’re out of sight of land.

No one should be so rigid about this or any other style rule that it gets in the way of clear communication.

Of course, just plain “red, white and blue” would be the more economical way to say it.

Yes, public schools should teach Bible as literature

9 Replies

An op-ed in the WSJ today made the case for putting the Bible into the public school curriculum, as a foundational work (or rather, body of works) of Western civilization. The authors were educated in Europe and were taught the Bible as a matter of course. But that reckons without the reflexive horror the suggestion of doing so engenders in this country:

Teaching the Bible is of course a touchy subject. One can’t broach it without someone barking “separation of church and state” and “forcing religion down my throat.”

Yet the Supreme Court has said it’s perfectly OK for schools to do so, ruling in 1963 (Abington School District v. Schempp) that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as a part of a secular (public school) program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court understood that we’re not talking about religion here, and certainly not about politics. We’re talking about knowledge. The foundations of knowledge of the ancient world—which informs the understanding of the modern world—are biblical in origin. Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president known more as a cigar-chomping Rough Rider than a hymn-signing Bible-thumper, once said: “A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.”

I agree entirely, totally apart from all the phrases with which scripture has enriched the language, or the fact that Shakespeare makes 1,200 biblical references.

I think there are other things we should have to read as well. I’ve always felt sort of ignorant that I’ve never read the Iliad, preferably in the original Greek. But that’s peripheral, compared to having a thorough understanding of such allusions as Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, Jonah and Judas Iscariot. Those are basic.

And it’s not just the stories or the language. As an overview of different forms of ancient literature (poetry, allegory, history, etc.) it’s a treasure trove.

Before someone misunderstands me — nothing that I’ve said gives anyone any reason to, but Kulturkampf in this society being emotional rather than rational, someone will — I’m not an advocate of mandatory prayer in public schools. Although people should be (and are) free to pray there as well as anywhere else.

The authors of this piece, if anything, underestimate the objections such a suggestion will meet. For instance, they neglect to anticipate the objection that other religions’ texts, say the Bhagavad Gita, should be given the same status in the K-12 curriculum. But of course, that work is not foundational to western culture. It’s a great subject for upper-division college electives, but there’s no more reason to make it part of everyone’s education than, say, Kerouac’s Dharma Bums as opposed to Huck Finn. One is enrichment; the other is basic.

Anyway, since these folks brought up the subject, I say yeah: Put Genesis and the rest in there with Shakespeare. They are still reading Shakespeare in the schools, aren’t they? If not, I give up…

The first pope, babbling incoherently

1 Reply

My post about E.J. Dionne’s take on how the Chair of Saint Peter should be filled brings to mind yesterday’s Gospel reading in Catholic churches. It’s one of my favorites — Luke’s account of the Transfiguration:

Jesus took Peter, John, and James
and went up the mountain to pray.
While he was praying his face changed in appearance
and his clothing became dazzling white.
And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah,
who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus
that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.
Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep,
but becoming fully awake,
they saw his glory and the two men standing with him.
As they were about to part from him, Peter said to Jesus,
“Master, it is good that we are here;
let us make three tents,
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
But he did not know what he was saying.
While he was still speaking,
a cloud came and cast a shadow over them,
and they became frightened when they entered the cloud.
Then from the cloud came a voice that said,
“This is my chosen Son; listen to him.”
After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.
They fell silent and did not at that time
tell anyone what they had seen.

Why is it a favorite? Because in the middle of this description of a mystical event that transcends everyday experience, we have a very human reaction that brings things down to Earth and makes the story real: Simon Peter babbling about tents or booths (depending upon the version of the story). Just as you’re wondering what in the world he’s on about, the narrator tells you not to mind him, because “he did not know what he was saying.”

Instead of the event being accompanied by humming choirs of angels, you have a soundtrack in which Jesus’ most impetuous disciple is heard clearly freaking out. It’s another example of the reason why Peter is one of my favorite, if not my very favorite, figures in the Bible. No matter how holy or somber the occasion, Peter could always be relied upon to do something that drew attention to his very human attributes: His bluster that nobody was going to lay hands on Jesus while he was around, followed by his clumsy denials, leading to his bitter self-reproach. The way he fell behind the younger and apparently fitter John running toward the tomb, then impatiently pushed past him at the entrance, so he could get in and see whether what the Magdalene had said was true.

These details in these stories have a naturalism about them that says, to me anyway, that no matter how fantastic these events being related are, you can tell a real person actually witnessed them.

It’s like… recently I was rewatching “All the President’s Men” (I have it on DVD), and being impressed all over again. One of the best parts of the movie is that so much of the dialogue seems off. Particularly in the awkward scenes in which Redford and Hoffman are trying to get information from sources who don’t want to talk, the dialogue often doesn’t follow. Someone says something, and the response doesn’t quite make sense in that context, or it’s awkwardly worded. Which is the way real conversations go — nervous people in particular babble in non sequiturs. They don’t speak as though a skilled writer had composed their lines. This makes the story real.

And so does Peter’s nonsensical response to the Transfiguration…

E. J. Dionne: ‘The best choice for pope? A nun.’

4 Replies

Over the weekend, E.J. Dionne — who does this sort of thing every week with David Brooks — was kind enough to write me and say he’d caught my bit on Weekend Edition Saturday on NPR, and “I wanted to tell you that you were excellent.”

Which, along with similarly kind plaudits I got from other friends and family, made my day.

While he had me, as a fellow RC he brought up Pope Benedict’s retirement, and asked whether I had read his “make a nun Pope” column.

I had not, but I went and read it immediately, and really enjoyed it. Excerpts:

In giving up the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI was brave and bold. He did the unexpected for the good of the Catholic Church. And when it selects a new pope next month, the College of Cardinals should be equally brave and bold. It is time to elect a nun as the next pontiff.

Now, I know this hope of mine is the longest of long shots. I have great faith in the Holy Spirit to move papal conclaves, but I would concede that I may be running ahead of the Spirit on this one…

Nonetheless, handing leadership to a woman — and in particular, to a nun — would vastly strengthen Catholicism, help the church solve some of its immediate problems and inspire many who have left the church to look at it with new eyes…

More than any other group in the church, the sisters have been at the heart of its work on behalf of compassion and justice. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times made this point as powerfully as anyone in a 2010 column. “In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches,” he wrote. “One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch. . . . Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.”…

Throughout history, it’s not uncommon for women to be brought in to put right what men have put wrong. A female pope would automatically be distanced from this past and could have a degree of credibility that a male member of the hierarchy simply could not…

And a church that has made opposition to abortion a central part of its public mission should consider that older men are hardly the best messengers for this cause. Perhaps a female pope could transform the discussion about abortion from one that is too often rooted in harsh judgments (and at times, anger with modernity) into a compassionate dialogue aimed at changing hearts and minds rather than changing laws.

Unborn children are vulnerable. So are pregnant women. In my experience, nuns are especially alive to these twin vulnerabilities…

There was a lot of other good stuff, about how consistent this would be with the church’s devotion to Mary, and other points. But I fear I may have exceeded the bounds of fair use already.

You might wonder, “Is Dionne kidding? He knows this can’t happen, right?” Yes, he knows it won’t happen, and no, he’s not kidding. At the least, he hopes “they at least consider electing the kind of man who has the characteristics of my ideal female pontiff.

I urge you to go read the whole, well-reasoned piece.

Did the WSJ’s editors do this on purpose?

Mark Sanford’s math doesn’t add up, either

35 Replies

Mark Sanford’s new ad begins, “Washington’s math doesn’t add up.”

Well, neither does his. It goes like this: He spent six years representing the 1st District before. And his accomplishments added up to zero. And yet he blithely tells people that they should send him to Washington because he’s “fought to do something about it.” Yeah, I guess so, if ineffectual posturing counts. Which it doesn’t, in my book.

Change Washington? Really? You? You never made the slightest dent on Washington.

Then, he gets to talking about mistakes.

Really? You sure that’s the work you want to use? Mistakes? So… you accidentally slipped away from your SLED detail and went to Argentina, only admitting what you had done after you were caught dead to rights?

I truly don’t want to be the guy who casts the first stone. But I will note the line that everyone seems to forget in recounting that great story of forgiveness: Go, and sin no more.

In this ad, with regard to mistakes, Sanford piously intones, “In their wake, we can learn a lot about grace, a God of second chances, and be the better for it.”

Here’s the thing: When did our former governor repent of anything, so that he might clear the way for second chances? After the sins that we are all prone to, we only become “better for it” when we sincerely believe what we did was wrong, and repent.

After his rambling confession that day in June 2009, what was his penance? How did he live his life differently going forward? I’m not at all clear on that. Of course, that’s between him and God — unless, of course, he spends money buying ads that pull us into the equation.

I’ve heard a lot from this guy about how we are supposed to forgive him. He places that burden on us. Well, what’s his part of the deal?

I’ve got a great idea for a penance that would demonstrate that he’s truly sorry: If he would stop inflicting himself on the electorate. That would be better, in his case, than a thousand Hail Marys.

But no. There he is again, saying the same stuff. And we’re supposed to take him back. That’s the way he sees it, anyway.

One thing Graham definitely is NOT is dumb…

15 Replies

Say what you want about the increasingly ubiquitous Lindsey Graham, Salon was way off the mark today when its header featured an unflattering photo of our senior senator next to the teaser hed, “Hagel’s dumbest enemies.”

Of course, as is often the case with such hyperbolic come-ons, the actual headline that the teaser linked to took it down a notch: “The increasingly ridiculous Hagel opposition.” The subhed, situated atop huge mugs of Graham and John McCain, begins, “Republicans block a vote for no reason…”

The very first paragraph of the body copy then refutes that (boldface added):

Sen. Graham and his best friend John McCain have been blocking the confirmation of Chuck Hagel as Defense secretary, because they want to know whether President Obama called the president of Libya the night of the Benghazi attack. While that’s not a very good reason to filibuster a Cabinet nominee, it is at least “a reason.” The White House has complied, giving Graham and McCain what they want. Graham’s response: Now he is just going to pointlessly delay the Hagel vote, because it will make him feel good. As always, with Lindsey Graham, being a senator is all about feelings.

Disagree with Graham — and McCain — all you want, but making him the poster boy of the “dumbest” is, well, pretty stupid.

I find a lot of the indignation on the left about delaying the Hagel nomination a few days a little on the disingenuous, even absurd, side. My least favorite manifestation of this is when I hear a Democrat express absolute mystification that these Republicans could possibly be objecting to Hagel, since he’s a Republican. There is no mystery as to why this is a Republican Democrats love. and Republicans have problems with him for the same reasons.

There are actual substantive reasons to question this nomination. We could start with his having been completely wrong on the Iraq surge. Which is kinda relevant in a candidate for SecDef. But then, of course, we’d have a whole other argument that we’ve had too many times before…

So never mind all that. I don’t call the president “dumb” for wanting a guy who looked at Iraq the way he did. I have more respect for the president than that.

But there’s a bigger reason I wouldn’t call Barack Obama dumb: I’ve heard him speak. And the same goes for Lindsey Graham.

I was speaking to a class at Lexington High School yesterday, and I let slip a comment that always makes me sound arrogant when I say it, but it’s true: It’s pretty unusual for me to interview a political officeholder in South Carolina who makes me think to myself, “This guy’s smarter than I am.” But I’ve had that thought more than once when talking with Lindsey Graham.

And I may have a host of faults — correction, I do have a host of faults — but being dumb isn’t one of them.

Thoughts on the State of the Union?

26 Replies

As I type this, Marco Rubio is wrapping up his response to the State of the Union. And I find myself wondering yet again, as I do every year this time, no matter who is in the White House… how did this ridiculous ritual get started?

I don’t mean the SOTU; I mean the response. The State of the Union is the president fulfilling a constitutional duty — which, by the way, he can do in writing (just a suggestion). But as much as that has transformed into political theater, the response is nothing but theater.

And you know what? It always comes across as lame, no matter which party is delivering it or which up-and-comer they choose to be the face of it. It rubs our noses in the fact that partisanship is so obligatory and ritualized today that an elected official can’t even deliver a constitutionally-mandated message without the other party immediately standing up to say “nyah-nyah, that guy’s full of it.”

The artificiality of it is underlined by the fact that it is not a response at all, but a speech prepared ahead of time — a set of partisan talking points that the party wants to deliver regardless of what the president said.

Anyway, to me, the party delivering the response always comes across as petty and pointless. To me, anyway. Kind of sad, really.

Enough about that. Thoughts on the real speech, the one the president gave? Here’s an assessment from over at the WashPost:

That was an incredibly ambitious speech.

Imagine, for a moment, that President Obama managed to pass every policy he proposedtonight. Within a couple of years, every four-year-old would have access to preschool. The federal minimum wage would be at $9 — higher than it’s been, after adjusting for inflation, since 1981. There’d be a cap-and-trade program limiting our carbon emissions and a vast infrastructure investment to upgrade our roads and bridges. Taxes would be higher, guns would be harder to come by, and undocumented immigrants would have a path to citizenship. America would be a noticeably different country.

Yes, it was ambitious. About everything. I found that no particular part of it stood out for me, because he touched on so many things that he didn’t fully focus on anything. But maybe that’s just me.

I did like the communitarian touch at the end, about “the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another.”

Which of course Rubio summed up as “growing government.” Whatever. Although I’ll say that the president wanted to do so much that anyone would have to wonder at some point how we’re going to pay for it.

What did y’all think?

My favorite spam of the day

3 Replies

Mostly, my spam filter works pretty well, but some days small groups of them sneak through. I got four of them back-to-back this morning.

I get a kick out of the way these bots try so hard to produce comments that sound real, but still fall so short of their goal. Here’s my favorite today:

I’ve been browsing on-line more than three hours lately, yet I never discovered any fascinating article like yours. It is beautiful price enough for me. In my view, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you probably did, the internet will probably be a lot more useful than ever before.

I love this part: “…if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you probably did….” It doesn’t want to go too far and commit itself…

It is beautiful price enough for me, too.

‘Conservative.’ You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

43 Replies

On a previous thread, Kathryn noted that “satire” doesn’t mean what Todd Kincannon claims to think it means.

inigo

That put me in mind of this joke (at right) I ran across on the interwebs a few days ago. You may have seen it before; there seem to be several versions of it out there. Still, it’s funny, if you’ve seen the movie.

When we started watching “Homeland” at my house a few weeks ago (and, in the modern fashion, zipped through both seasons fairly quickly), it took me an episode or two to realize that “Saul” — the one really likable, admirable character on the show, which makes me worry something awful’s going to happen with him — was Mandy Patinkin! Then, for the rest of that episode, I kept thinking, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You keeled my father. Prepare to die.”

Which in turn, this morning (after seeing Kathryn’s comment), got me to thinking about his performance as “Che” in “Evita,” so I listened to that on Spotify while doing ADCO work.

See how everything in the world is related? But no, I don’t know how many degrees away from Kevin Bacon Mandy Patinkin is…

Anyway… a couple of recent posts, this one and this one, centered around the word “conservative” and its obsessive overuse in SC politics. And indeed, one of my objections to hearing it over and over, apart from the pure monotony, is that I do not think it means what many of the people using it think it means. As Bud noted earlier, “Seems to me it’s not particularly useful to just advocate for ‘conservatism’ when the meaning of the term is so blurred and overused.”

For instance, 19th-century classical liberalism is not conservatism, although many in SC — those along the Mark Sanford/Nikki Haley axis — seem to think it is. Nor is the kind of rhetoric and attitudes that Todd Kincannon puts on display on Twitter a conservative way to communicate. It’s not prudent; it’s not respectful of traditions for human communication. It’s bomb-throwing rather than keeping the peace. So neither he nor those who cheer such Tweets as the Trayvon Martin ones are conservative people. Or at least within that context, they are not being conservative.

Conservatives don’t give themselves over to anger; they are temperate. If language is to have meaning, that is. But too many people gut words of their actual meanings, and restuff them with whatever strikes their fancy. And pretty soon, words don’t mean what any of us think they mean.

Todd Kincannon seems to have found his own Heart of Darkness

26 Replies

I’m not sure how else to put it.

I’ve known Todd, slightly, for several years now. Once, I would have said, “I know him to say hello to.” Now, I say, “I know him to exchange Tweets with,” which I have done frequently. I’ve only met him in person a handful of times, and when I have, he’s been a polite, friendly young man who seems to know how to behave himself in public.

But lately, his Tweets — and there are a LOT of them; I don’t personally know anyone who Tweets more constantly — have been trailing off into a strange, dark, extreme place. Following them is like traveling up the Congo (or, in Coppola’s version, the Mekong) in search of Kurtz, who had lost himself in savagery. Increasingly, they are of a sort that I can’t quote here without violating my own standards. Even showing you the ones that this post is about is a departure. But now that Todd has gone on national media to defend these truly indefensible Tweets, and not backed down an inch or admitted in any way that they are beyond the pale, and been identified to the world as a former executive director of the state GOP, well… I’m laying them out before you.

Here’s the one that the above video interview is about:

Here’s another related to it:

I don’t know what has led Todd on this path. I know that when he stepped it up (or rather, down) a few degrees a month or so ago, he found himself gaining a lot more attention, and I’ve seen that do bad things to people’s heads before.

Is it just immaturity? When Rusty DePass posted something on Facebook that deeply offended all who saw it, he immediately took it down (too late; it had been grabbed and preserved) and truly, sincerely apologized to everyone for it. (I think Kathryn, and others here who know Rusty, will back me up as to his sincerity.)

Todd operates in an environment where… well, the maturity level is pretty well established in the language used in this Wonkette piece criticizing him. A place where there are no rules of civility, or at least it seems that there aren’t — until Todd manages to find a way to violate them. (The problem with Wonkette’s reaction, of course, is that it helps Todd believe in his explanation that this is just a left-right thing, and he’s just doing what everybody does to people on the other side.) A place where obscenities that would only sound daring to a 7th-grader are the standard.

How hard is it to simply say that, for instance, Trayvon Martin was just this kid, you know? He was neither an angel nor a devil, he was just a kid who didn’t deserve to die because he had a run-in with this George Zimmerman guy, who wasn’t an angel or a devil either. MIsguided people on the left and right have glommed onto these people as some sorts of symbols, but they were just people. And his shooting was what the prosecutors in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities would have called a “piece a s__t case,” a case that’s just a horrible, tragic mess any way you look at it, with no heroes, no one to admire, no good coming out of it, no redeeming lesson to be drawn.

But one thing is clear: Now that the kid’s dead, he sure as hell doesn’t deserve to have his memory trashed in terms that shouldn’t be used in public under any circumstances, about anybody.

Todd’s performance in the above video is nothing short of appalling. I don’t know what to say but to define it in Conradian terms, and express how sorry I am to see it. He might not be sorry, but I am…

Yeah, but they didn’t necessarily mean it as a compliment…

7 Replies

I enjoyed seeing the profile on Larry Grooms’ Twitter feed:

SC Senator who believes in faith, family and freedom. Named the “Conservative’s Conservative” by @TheState. Candidate for SC’s 1st Congressional District.

Leave it to Larry to hear “conservative’s conservative” as an honorific. But he’s far from alone in his party. As I’ve said before, I expect that any day now, we’ll see a release from a GOP candidate — one running in a contested primary, of course — that consists of nothing but the word “conservative” repeated over and over, 40 or 50 times.

There are some who have come pretty close to that ideal.

By the way, I was being ironic when I said “ideal.”

Graham: ‘Hillary Clinton got away with murder’

19 Replies

Our senior senator is just all over the place this week, to the point I’m having trouble keeping up with him.

FIrst, he and John McCain are in bipartisan moderate mode as they attempt to revive the issue that almost did McCain in (and did Graham a world of hurt back home) the last time they tried it. Then we see him trying to hold his base at bay by standing up against gun control (here’s video of that, which his office put out today).

Somehow in all this, I missed that he said the following words yesterday on FoxNews:

I haven’t forgotten about Benghazi. Hillary Clinton got away with murder, in my view.

Somehow this escaped me until some friends mentioned it this afternoon. The way I heard it was “Lindsey Graham said Hillary Clinton got away with murder in Benghazi.”

Now when you look at what he said in context, it’s not nearly that bad. He didn’t say she “got away with murder” in Benghazi. It seems pretty clear that he was just saying she got off too easy in the hearings last week.

But still.

That he would use words that could be (and of course, would be) misconstrued that way — especially with a clip as short and context-free as this one on Politico — is remarkable given that this is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about. Yes, there are those in Mr. Graham’s base who may consider her a she-devil of some sort, but Lindsey Graham and Hillary Clinton have long formed a well-known mutual admiration society. Each has only had kind things to say about the other since their early days in the Senate together, and each has used the other to prop up his and her bipartisan cred.

That he would rhetorically throw her under the bus (just to use another common expression) this way is surprising.

I mean, come on, Lindsey — the lady just got out of the hospital…

Whoa! I missed the part about ‘Peace in our time’!

45 Replies

MunichAgreement_

As I said before, I didn’t catch all of the president’s speech yesterday, and something rather important got by me:

The WTF moment for me in Obama’s second inaugural address, delivered Monday at noon, was his use of the phrase “peace in our time.” This came during his discussion of foreign policy, and in such circles, that phrase is a synonym for appeasement, especially of Hitler by Neville Chamberlain in September 1938. What signal does his using it send to Iran? I hope he was just using it to jerk Netanyahu’s chain.

I also simply didn’t understand what he meant by “a world without boundaries.” But my immediate thought was, No, right now we need boundaries — like those meant to keep Iran out of Syria and Pakistan out of Afghanistan…

Yikes. You know, there are certain phrases that anyone with an understanding of history would be careful to avoid. Such as “Mistakes were made.” “I am not a crook.” “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

And of course, “peace in our time.” What was the thinking on that? Did the president think that his base would like the sound of it, and not understand the profoundly disturbing historical allusion? Hey, it was politically popular when Chamberlain said it, although Britain woke up later.

I just don’t see how a line like that appears in such a formal speech by accident. And no other explanation is excusable.

That’s an association you don’t want. And for another thing, it doesn’t fit well with the president’s ongoing aggressive drone war. That suggests cynicism. As in, the president gave the gift of peace to four al Qaeda militants on Monday…

Oh, and another thing… since when did people who right for Foreign Policy start using such expressions as “WTF”?

Your thoughts on Obama’s second inaugural speech?

77 Replies

I don’t have time to get into it right now, but I thought y’all might have some thoughts to get off your respective chests.

I didn’t quite hear all of it, but from what I heard, well, it’s wasn’t Lincoln’s second inaugural, which I was just reading about last night (almost done with “Team of Rivals”!). But that’s unfair. Lincoln had just been elected while guiding the nation, successfully (that is, he was on the verge of success, and all knew it), through its greatest crisis ever. But then, he also rose to the occasion as a speaker, with what is regarded by many as the greatest political speech in our history.

But then, on the other end of the spectrum, I thought there was more to it than Chris Cillizza’s distillation: “I’m the president, deal with it.”

It was somewhere between the two. Thoughts?

Hey, I LIKE my pols to be off-message…

2 Replies

Today in the WSJ, Daniel Henninger asks the unmusical question, “Where Is the GOP’s Jay Carney?” By which he meant that the president — and by extension the Democrats as a class (as Henninger sees it) — has someone who can be out there constantly, every day, pushing a consistent message. And that message gets pushed without the president himself having to waste his own capital by commenting on every little thing.

An excerpt:

The whole wide world is living in an age of always-on messaging, and the Republican Party is living in the age of Morse code. It isn’t that no one is listening to the GOP. There is nothing to hear.

Smarting from defeat by Barack Obama’s made-in-Silicon-Valley messaging network, congressional Republicans in Washington are getting tutorials to bring them into a Twitterized world. I have a simpler idea: First join the 20th-century communication revolution by creating an office of chief party spokesman. One for the House and one for the Senate…

Henninger goes on at some length about how the GOP lack that everyday messenger — and complains that our own senior senator makes matter worse (for the party), not better:

The best members are becoming frustrated at the messaging vacuum, and some are moving to fill the void. Marco Rubio comes to mind, and more power to him given the nonexistent alternative. But others will follow, creating a GOP tower of Babel. The TV networks know they can dial up a Lindsey Graham to blow a hole Sunday morning in any leadership effort at a unified message. It will get worse, and the near-term consequence of getting worse is being out of power.

But of course, that’s precisely what I like about Lindsey Graham. He can be relied upon to think for himself. Oh, sure, he’ll mouth orthodoxies now and then, as with this release on the president’s gun proposals. But an unusual amount of the time for a Washington politician, he has something more thoughtful to say than what may be in the party playbook. Not as off-message as Chris Christie, perhaps, but he still says things that show he actually thought about the issue himself.

Would it really be a good thing for the House to have its own Ron Ziegler?

(Oh, and by the way — unlike some of my friends here, I see nothing wrong with Graham going out of his way to let us know when he DOES agree with the orthodox position. That doesn’t make him inconsistent, or a hypocrite, or anything else that some of y’all call him. I, too, sometimes agree with the party zampolits on an issue. And if I were a Republican officeholder — or Democratic; the dynamic is the same — and wanted to continue to serve in that office, I would put out releases emphasizing the issues on which I agreed with my likely primary voters. Why wouldn’t I? I’m sure I’d do plenty of things to tick off those voters at other times, so why not say, when I can honestly do so, “Hey, we agree on this one”? I want Lindsey Graham to stay in office, so I’m glad he puts out such releases.)

Also, I think Henninger overemphasizes the extent to which a presidential press secretary is a spokesman for the entire party that the president belongs to. He speaks for the president. And yeah, in these hyperpartisan times, that can benefit his party. But it’s more of an institutional phenomenon than a partisan one. It’s in the nature of the presidency, and has been since long before the modern office of press secretary developed. The president speaks with one voice; the House is not expected to (and I would argue, should not, except in the context of the outcome of a specific vote). The presidential press secretary is a surrogate standing in the bully pulpit. I see no good reason for the House, or Senate, having a similar functionary.

Reagan told Irmo kid to get his act together

Yep, that’s Mark Sanford running all right…

23 Replies

Back on the day we’ll not soon forget.

Mark Sanford has now told the National Review — apparently his ability to charm SC media has worn thin — that he is running for his old seat in the 1st Congressional District, and he’s doing it in order to save the country from budget deficits.

There’s a bunch of other stuff in the interview should you like to peruse it. Me, I just wanted to check it for his verbal DNA, and make sure it really was Mark Sanford they spoke to.

At first, I worried, because he didn’t say “at the end of the day” or “soil conditions” a single time. But there is one “I would say” (which he used to say so often that I wanted to shout, “Well then why don’t you just say it?”).

And he says “look under the hood” no fewer than four times, which was reassuring. I am not making this up:

You have to, in essence, look under the hood. There’s a larger philosophical question. In life we’re all going to make mistakes, we’re all going to come up short. The key is, how do you get back up and how do you learn from those mistakes? . . . But I think that the bigger issue is, don’t judge any one person by their best day, don’t judge them by their worst day. Look at the totality, the whole of their life, and make judgments accordingly…

You’ve got to look under the hood. There’s that sensational headline, to look and say, “Wow, big ethics charge.” Beyond the headline, what does that mean? You say, “Hm. There were 37 counts the ethics committee brought, and did you know half of those are for taking a business-class ticket?” You look under the hood and you say, “Wow.”…

It’s important in this instance to look under the hood and say, “Wait a minute, they keep talking about default, and that’s just not true.” You can prioritize spending. When I was in Congress, I remember a GAO report that said that Treasury has the capacity. There’s no statutory requirement for them to default. They could prioritize their spending, and they’re doing things in the short run, to shuffle things around, all based on prioritization…

Yep, that’s Mark Sanford.

Oh, by the way, someone else is getting set to announce he’s running, too:

MEDIA ADVISORY
FOR RELEASE ON JANUARY 15, 2013

SOUTH CAROLINA SENATOR LARRY GROOMS WILL ANNOUNCE RUN FOR SOUTH CAROLINA’S FIRST CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

WHO
South Carolina State Senator Larry Grooms

WHAT
Grooms will announce his bid for South Carolina’s First Congressional District.

WHEN
Thursday, January 17, 2013
3:00p.m.

WHERE
Scout Boats
2531 Hwy 78 West
Summerville, SC 29483
Next to Summerville Auto Auction

Maybe one of y’all would like to cover that for us. I’m not going to be down that way.

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits