Thursday, May 20, 2004

PROSELYTIZING PESSIMISM: David Frum in his "diary" today is calling Islamic extremism their Reformation. I'll refer you to my 2002 posting on this very matter, and to Kathy Shaidle's article on Irshad Manji's controversial book The Trouble With Islam (which I have not read and cannot necessarily endorse; I have in fact heard a number of liberal minded Muslims pan the book on what sounded to me like reasonably legitimate grounds). (11:26)

ABSTENTIA: I wish I were posting, now that I've got the time, but I'm back in Pennsylvania at the height of the spring allergen intifada, and I have always found it very difficult to focus on writing while all doped up on histimine blockers with a throbbing head full of mucus. It is my absolute sincerest hope in the world at the moment that the onslaught will end very soon and I can get on with...well, just about everything. Until that blessed moment. (11:27)

DEAR MR. ROMANO,

Please shut up.

All the best,
Evan McElravy BA '04 (14:10)

SPAM SOCIOLINGUISTICS: I've just received an unsolicited commercial email exhorting me to avail myself of the entrepreneur's large inventory (with prices starting at $65!) of "Italian-crafted Rolexes." Sounds like the perfect thing to wear when I'm tooling around in my Russian-crafted Mercedes! Is this a new development in the language -- to refer to any watch whose armband is not made from latex as a "Rolex," analogous to the conviction of Torontonians that any alcoholic beverage not Molson is a "martini" -- or am I simply being hustled? (09:25)

LIFE, SATIRE: Canada's gift-that-keeps-on-giving to American civilization has penned a chapter in a new book of counterfactual history:

David Frum has President Gore pronouncing the attacks of September 11 "inappropriate" and insisting that, if there has to be a military response, it must be "the first environmentally sensitive war in history".

The joys of scholarship. (18:11)

ANZAC: Amazing photo of one of Australia's six remaining World War I veterans at the ceremonies in Sydney yesterday. I think it's rather amazing there are as many as a half dozen of them left, particularly given the shocking pace at which living memory of the second is vanishing, old man by old man. I wonder whether that epoch will seem as strange, terrible, and remote as the Great War does to us now once everyone no longer has in evidence fathers and grandfathers who were there. I think that must be when the past becomes history, when memory gives way to legend. (13:59)

THE ED MAN COMETH: Warren County motorists look out, Governor Rendell will be in town today to dispense some of Leviathan's largess. (11:02)

CITY OF CHAMPIONS: The Bleu-Blanc-Rouge win the war with the Red, White, and Blue in Boston, but nos amours drop their eighth straight in New York, solidifying their already firm grasp on last place in Major League Baseball. No prizes for guessing which outfit I have tickets to see next. (00:36)

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN THREE WORDS: Many thanks to Australian Labor leader Mark Latham for clarification:

"Youth of Australia, Labor's policy is bling-bling. Bling-bling for everyone," Mr Latham declared, after learning the hip-hop phrase that refers to flashy jewellery.

The policy was immediately confirmed as a success, when a young woman called to pledge her vote for Labor on the strength of its newly-hip leader.

Australia, if memory serves, has mandatory voting. One trembles for the Lucky Country. (18:26)

TOOMEY, KERRY, AND YOU: It's only April, and the conservative press is already spending about half its ink on Pennsylvania politics. My beloved home state is likely to be a gigantic media circus this summer, and it occurs to me that I might profitably get in on the action myself. In the meanwhile, I will attempt to restart coverage of state politics here on the blog.

To recap, President George lost the state, and its 23 electoral votes (21 now) by a fairly slender margin in 2000, and has since then made more campaign appearences in the state than any ther, and tailored a number of ill-conceived policies toward bribing the Pennsylvania electorate. The most grandiose of these, the infamous steel tariff, almost certainly cost more Pennslvania jobs in reality than it could ever have preserved, even had it done the impossible feat of saving every doomed steel job (and pension) in the state. Democrats would do well to constantly remind Keystone State voters of this over the next few months, but they are lost down their own anti-trade memory hole at the moment, and probably will not avail themselves of this golden opportunity to crucify Mr. Bush. Nevertheless, the election in Pennsylvania will almost certainly be won or lost on the question of the economy, which has been lapsing more or less steadily for my entire lifetime, but with especially nauseating velocity in the last four years or so. It is of course of little interest to Pennsylvanians that the fault for this decline rests almost entirely with our own state government, a model of near-third world ethics and competence, with a tax and regulatory regime pretty much guaranteed to discourage anyone who might have the insane idea to try and employ Pennsylvanians in any economically modern field of endeavour.

And so both Bush and Kerry, who has the very slight advantage of being married to possibly the most famous woman in the state, will probably campaign the life out of weary, suspicious Pennsylvanians (and isn't this the perfect opportunity to link to my all-time favourite Onion story?), for the former is, barring some radical shift in the political climate, almost guaranteed victory if he wins the state, and the latter certainly cannot win without it. But in the meanwhile, we have a separate right-wing side show to observe: the primary race between sitting senator Arlen Specter and challenger congressman Pat Toomey.

Specter is every red-blooded Republican's whipping boy, a Jim Jeffords-type character who inexplicably chooses to cast votes in a manner representative of his state's actual political terrain, which is famously evenly divided between Republican and Democrat. He is also something of a boob and a grandstander, it is only fair to say, having authored one of the most famous governmental fantasies in history. But Pennsylvania politicians are almost invariably boobs -- see, for instance, Senator Man-on-Dog or Governor Lead Foot-Lead Ass -- so this is not a seriously disqualifying objection.

This Toomey fellow, though, has decided to attack Specter from his exposed right flank. There is some profit to be had in this; there is a large block of Pennsylvanian voters who are willing to pay lip service to fiscal discipline, who want lower taxes (hey, who doesn't? but I'd suggest that reform starts at home), and who perceive abortion as the great national shame. Senator Man-on-Dog has, after all, been twice elected. (The abortion question is a sticky one in PA, though; in my life-time, we've experienced two terms of a rabidly pro-life Democrat, and one and a half of an avowedly pro-choice Republican.) The national conservative press is eating this up, and indeed, it now appears that Toomey has narrowed the margin to 10%.

Defeating an incumbent senator in a primary is just about an impossible feat, so this must be regarded as an impressive achievement, though I personally think that it is about as close as he is going to get. Toomey seems to be quite a likeable fellow with a crack sense of humour (see below), and has managed to be elected several times from the union belt out east, a difficult though by no means impossible task, and indeed Specter has been right to take him seriously. He may continue to surge up to the primary on the 27th, but I feel myself that he is very unlikely to win. For one thing, Specter is not widely unpopular and Toomey suffers from relative obscurity. The recent election of Governor Lead Foot-Lead Ass has revealed a previously unsuspected soft-spot for Jewish lawyers from Philadelphia in the hearts of the state electorate. For another, Toomey lacks that approbation of the GOP establishment which holds a powerful grip over Republican voters, inducing them to all sorts of strategic improbabilities, such as running Bob Dole for president.

This last difficulty has proved acutely embarrassing to the partisan press. Yesterday's OpinionJournal feature from Jason Riley is a typical specimen:

To the frustration of many conservatives, Mr. Specter also has the support of the White House and the Republican leadership and has used their endorsement as a shield against Mr. Toomey's otherwise valid charges.

According to conventional Republican wisdom on the matter, Pat Toomey isn't a viable candidate statewide because Democrats, which you need to win statewide in Pennsylvania, won't vote for someone so conservative. Arlen Specter's ability to draw split-ticket voters is said to give Republicans the best chance of hanging on to a Senate seat even if John Kerry wins the state.

That analysis is problematic, says Mr. Toomey in an interview. "First, if you look at my congressional district, it's one of the toughest seats for any Republican in Pennsylvania to hold. I've won it three times and I've never lost it." Next, Mr. Toomey turns his attention to Rick Santorum, one of the Senate's most conservative members and a person against whom these very arguments were used when Mr. Santorum ran for the Senate in 1994. "They make the case that there are no Toomey-Kerry voters," he says. "OK. So how do you explain the significant number of Gore-Santorum voters? In 2000 Gore beat Bush statewide, 51% to 46%, and Santorum beat [Democrat Ron] Klink, 52% to 46%. There were obviously a lot of Gore-Santorum voters."

There's also the matter of the Democratic nominee, presumed to be Joe Hoeffel, a congressman from Northeast Philadelphia who's running unopposed. While Mr. Toomey has consistently run ahead of the top of the ticket--in a district carried by Mr. Gore in 2000, Mr. Toomey won by 14 percentage points against an opponent with money--Mr. Hoeffel has regularly underperformed and has never won more than 53% of the vote. Which is to say that the Keystone state still has enough Reagan Democrats to make a Toomey-Hoeffel race competitive.

For conservatives, though, what's most troubling about the conventional wisdom aren't the possible holes in the argument. It's the mindset behind them and what a decision to back Mr. Specter might say about the direction of the party. Do Republicans want to keep electing feed-the-beast types like Mr. Specter? Or is the party interested in promoting candidates who want to do more than spend their way to re-election? That the party has a chance to enact some discipline on its Rockefeller wing and extract a thorn that's been lodged in its side for the past 24 years in the process is exciting. That it might end up taking a pass is unfortunate.

To recap, the Bush machine is endorsing Specter because he's a party man, afterall, a big fish, and because he has the best chance of keeping that seat Republican. This is probably true. But I find the more likely subtext in all this is that Toomey is a balm for the acute embarrassment many conservatives feel over supporting a president who is himself really just another "feed-the-beast type" himself. The Saviour Bush's budget numbers certainly suggest that this be true. Bush's fiscal profligacy, which seems dead certain to bring imminent ruin to the Homeland, is the Pederast Uncle of the right wing: a private shame, mentioned ruefully within the family, but rarely exposed to public light.

But Pennsylvanians are the archetypal swing voters, so there is no need for even the right wing among us to observe this destructive family piety. The choice for Pennsylvanian voters seems clear: if you want to send a message that appeasers of Leviathan will not be tolerated, and to "extract a thorn that's been lodged in [your] side for the past 24 years," by all means, weedwhack another Bush out of the Executive Branch. The Toomey-Specter matchup may be resounding loudly in the conservative echo chamber just now, but a Bush loss would be a shot heard round the world.

Of course, I don't actually believe for a minute that any majority of Pennsylvanians are actually principled fiscal conservatives, so who the hell knows what will happen. (11:37)

MISSING MAN'S BODY RECOVERED: The god-awful Warren Times-Observer has, inexplicably, gone to a subscription-based model, so I can't read the story attached to this enigmatic headline, but it sounds like Damien Sharp may finally have turned up. Tomorrow I'll call home and get the story.

But if they've really found his body as close to Warren as it sounds like they have, what I wrote last year about police incompetence in the case holds up pretty well.

UPDATE: False alarm. From the Erie Times-News this morning:

An autopsy was performed in Erie on Saturday on a Warren man whose body was found in a creek east of Corry.

The body of David A. Bremer, 42, was found Friday afternoon in Brokenstraw Creek near Spring Creek, seven and a half miles east of Corry.

Bremer was last seen at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday and was reported missing to Pennsylvania State Police on Thursday.

(22:13)

NOTE TO ARTS & LETTERS DAILY: Enough of the Shostakovitch artlces, already. (11:52)

REMEMBER WHY THE ALAMO: Apparently the new Alamo movie is pretty good. I'm glad, since I'd like to see it. I find the history of the Mexican Conquest, of which the Alamo was of course the opening chapter, extremely fascinating -- the taking of M�xico city was probably the greatest military feat to take place between Wellington's victory at Waterloo and the fall of France in 1940 (Wellington himself considered it an accomplishment far exceeding his own; he had early predicted the whole adventure would end in total disaster and ignominy), and would make a marvelous film itself.

Having said that, fascinating history usually involves at least some negative moral undertones. How, then, to read the CNN reviewer's final comments?

"Remember the Alamo" is one of the great battle cries in American history. This film brings home the point that freedom and liberty come with a price, and at times great sacrifice -- lessons needed as much today as they were then.

I myself can think of higher forms of freedom and liberty to rally around than an unrestricted franchise for hillbillies to seize land to which they have no plausible claim, then rebel against its sovereign authority largely on the grounds that said authority has the temerity to preclude them from owning and exploiting human chattels, but these are strange times we live in. (16:56)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Arlen, the idea that you're a fiscal conservative is harder to believe than your single bullet theory." (GOP primary senatorial challenger Pat Toomey to Arlen Specter)

Speaking of PA political howlers, here's a chestnut from way back last week on Governor Rendell's lead-footed staties. (22:21)

TAPS: A Warren County boy was killed Wednesday in Iraq. (12:15)

SIGH...This hasn't quite sunk in yet. (00:40)