Pandagon

Book Report Day

Okay - I just got Against All Enemies and The Price of Loyalty in the mail, so I'm going to be reading them most of today. I'm about 20 pages into Clarke's book, and something about it really surprised me - it's hard for me, still, to read about the day of September 11th. I seized up and had to put the book down, particularly when Clarke talks about the chaos and confusion concerning who had been attacked, and when...I still remember sitting in Swarthmore's main hall (Parrish) with dozens of other people, watching MSNBC and CNN and not knowing how many planes were in the air, not wanting to leave because it seemed like every time I did, something newly catastrophic happened.

It hasn't stopped being a difficult day, even two and a half years out.

Nu Church Values

Richard Clarke is outselling the second coming of Christ.

We know whose side God is on.

Buy The Books

Against All Enemies and The Price Of Loyalty. Buy them. Read them. If you don't have children, treat them like they're yours. But don't bathe them or feed them, because that would be bad for the books, actually.

Bestsellers

Exactly how ironic is it to trumpet the fact that Sean Hannity's book is on the NYT Bestseller list at the same time you're selling it for 99 cents?

Feminist Nightmares

If I had to pick one book to never, ever read, it would almost certainly be Feminist Fantasies, by Ann Coulter and Phyllis Schlafly. Just knowing that those two wrote a book makes me ill, actually reading it might destroy my soul. Kind of like it did to whoever reviewed it for Publisher's Weekly:

Sounds terrific.

Reviews by the Haters

The Washington Post has James Pinkerton review Eric Alterman's new book, "The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America".

He gives it a thorough drubbing. Sucks, right? Could have been a good book.

Not so fast. James Pinkerton is a Newsday columnist and hard conservative who:

I'm all for diversity of opinion, but is this in anyway fair to Alterman and Greene? Pinkerton is their opponent, part of the team they're attacking, and he's the one who gets to inform the Post's readers of the book's worth? That's like asking Neil Cavuto to review Al Franken's books, the outcome is pretty damn predictable.

The Post is an influential paper whose political book reviews should be second to none. They can, and should, be better than this.

Legacy - A Review Of Two Paragraphs

Having read portions of Rich Lowry's Legacy (i.e., two paragraphs that I read after flipping open the book), I have to say that it's a meticulously well-researched piece of fair, balanced insight into the Clinton presidency.

Well, I don't *have* to, but it's going to soften the blow when I give you my actual opinion of the junk theorizing masquerading as political analysis that Lowry passes off.

The portion that I read had to do with Reaganite "trickle-down" supply-side theory. Basically, during the Clinton boom, Clinton made several statements to the effect that his economy would help everyone by making sure that there was enough economic growth to sustain job growth and wage increases. In short, a booming economy would result in economic gains for most of the people who participated in it - a statement as obvious as it is redundant.

For Lowry, this constitutes a victory for supply-side theory. Why? Because they're both variants on "a rising tide lifts all boats". The problem is, they're not talking about the same idea. What Lowry cites, and what Clinton was saying, is that a booming economy results in job growth - greater investment and expansion on the part of employers results in more jobs and wages for workers.

Now, what supply-side theory says, which is totally different from what Clinton was saying, is that business subsidies and tax cuts will create the environment that Clinton described. Clinton and Reagan both agreed that expanding businesses would increase employment, and increased employment means increased spending in the overall economy. In fact, virtually any economist would tell you that. It has nothing whatsoever to do with supply-side economics, or demand-side economics, or any other economic theory.

Worst. Debunking. Ever.

Someone figured out the worst way possible to critique Al Franken...and it's here.

My favorite parts are the O'Reilly ones, mainly because I wouldn't be surprised if they were written by O'Reilly trying to pretend that he wasn't O'Reilly. The defense is...sterling. "Obviously, this isn't a lie because it was true! And it was true because Franken is an ideologue!!!"

My gift to you all. Oh, and the guy's cheesecake site.

An End To Evil, A Beginning To A Meme

In a pretty even0handed review of Perle and Frum's new book on terrorism, Kaplan says that:

This neoconservative=Jew thing has to have come from somewhere, but I just can't figure out where. I realize many of them are Jews and that may have done it, but I'm a Jew, and people surely don't call me a NeoCon, so it isn't an organic evolution of the label growing to fit its adherents (Zionist is often used to mean Jew, particularly by some of the far Left). Instead, it must have come from somewhere specific, some article or comment or utterance, maybe it was Ted Rall or Robert Fisk, but it has to have come from somewhere. Any ideas?That sums it up pretty well. We don't want to fight, which is not the same as being unwilling to fight. The majority of the Left believes force should be used as a last resort, and as such, wars that serve no pressing purpose (such as Iraq) are necessarily opposed because we don't want to fight. I often wonder if much of the Right's bluster comes from a strange fetishism with the awesome might of our armed forces, one that is only blunted by the realization that after our spectacular victories we suffer endless, and painful, mundane losses in battlefields where larger bombs and more accurate artillery do no damage. Some may point to humanitarian qualms, but that was neither the rationale offered nor the focus of our mission, and as such it is simply disengenuous to bring it into the broad conversation of how the Left views force.

Pandagon Book Club

On a different note (one that has nothing to do with Bush or Dean), Einstein's Dreams is one of the best books I've ever read. It's a collection of short stories by a physicist in which each paints the picture of a world which time works in only one way. Our world sees time working in numerous ways at different points, but seeing what they all do singularly is truly thought-provoking. If you're looking for something new to read, check it out, it's a great experience.