Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Johnny Kerry
By Tom Smith


A Right Coast reader and 101st Airborne veteran who served in Vietnam sends in this version of the famous Kipling poem:



Johnny
(With apologies to Mr. Kipling and the British Army)

Johnny went public with ‘is boasts, an’ ‘ero without fear,
“Til sudden like the Swifties say, “We got a turncoat ‘ere.”
The Libs they just ignored ‘em, sayin’ “Ah, it’s all a lie!”
Then Johnny’s outted by their ads an’ to myself says I:

Oh it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, ‘e’s the ‘ero of the day.
But it’s wait now, Mr. Kerry, what’s that record really say?
The horns are loudly blowin’ boys as our band begins to play,
An’ it’s goodbye, Mr. Kerry, as they blow your arse away.

Johnny goes to Cincinnati sober as a man can be,
An’ they give ol’ George a “Bravo Lad!” but John no sympathy.
They give ‘im plain their message, sittin’ silent in the ‘alls,
That when it comes to fightin’ men, they know oo’s got the balls.

For it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, but wait, he might ‘a lied
From the platform of his campaign train an’ on the Boston tide.
His ship is on the tide, my boys, his ship is on the tide,
An’ it’s plain as day she’s sinkin’ boys, because the turncoat lied.

Yes Johnny mocked our uniforms that guard you while you sleep.
He cheapened all our medals throwing his upon that heap;
An’ rustlin’ up his phony troops, he led them for a bit,
Until his aspirations and theirs no longer fit.

Now it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, an’ Johnny how’s yer soul,
In that brave front rank of ‘eroes as our drums begin their roll?
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
An’ they’ll keep right on a rollin’ boys, ‘til we chuck ‘im in the hole.

We make no claim as ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But ‘onorable men an’ warriors fightin’ once agin for you.
An’ if your ‘ero’s record, our charges soundly taint,
That’s what we’re tryin’ to tell you blokes, your ‘ero ain’t no saint.

For it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, an’ “Check him out, the Loot!”
Was ‘e the “Savior of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot?
Now it’s Johnny’s turn to prove us wrong, an’ make us all out liars,
By signin’ that one eighty form an’ puttin out the fires.

Oh it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, ‘e’s the ‘ero of the day,
But it’s hold on, Mr. Kerry, what’s that record really say?
The horns are loudly blowin’ boys, as our band begins to play,
“Cheerio, Old Man,” to Johnny and blows his arse away.

* * *

We get quite a few veterans as readers of the Right Coast, which pleases me immensely. The poem above, in addition to its political content, does a pretty good job, IMHO, of capturing the sound and feel of Kipling's underrated verse.
posted by thomas at 8/31/2004 10:15:55 PM

 
Arnold!
By Mike Rappaport

A great speech by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In a strange way, by focusing on freedom and big ideas, it reminded me of that other California Governor, who was an actor. Undoubtedly, if Arnold had been born in the United States, given his fame, his personality and his performance as governor of California, he would be the front-runner to be the Republican nominee in 2008. Sadly, the Constitution forbids his serving as president.
posted by Michael at 8/31/2004 09:23:49 PM

 
Israel Again and the British Intellectuals
By Maimon Schwarzschild

The two leading book review / literary journals in Britain are the Times Literary Supplement ("TLS") and the London Review of Books ("LRB"). TLS is notably the less anti-American and anti-semitic of the two.

The London Review, by contrast, is notorious for its post-9/11 symposium, which included dozens of the Review's regular contributors, and whose themes were essentially that the Americans "had it coming", and that the key lesson of 9/11 is that the State of Israel is loathsome. (The LRB symposium is not online, but here is a pro-LRB account of the affair from the left-wing Guardian, and here is a less pro-LRB mention from Andrew Stuttaford) That horrifying symposium was not an aberration: it typifies the tone of the London Review of Books article after article, week after week.

The Times Literary Supplement, as I say, is the less anti-American and anti-semitic of the two journals.

The cover article that leads TLS on August 6th, just arrived in the mail, is a piece on Islam by one Malise Ruthven. (Also not online, unfortunately.) The article is in the form of a review of various books about politics and Islam, and its theme is "optimism" that there should be common ground between Islam and the western Left -- especially "at a time when American neo-conservatives are attempting to impose their own questionable version of 'democracy' in the Middle East by the use of military force". (Islam, so we are told, is really against free markets. You see, there is hope!) So far, so routine.

But the piece opens by acknowledging that there is a terrorism problem.

Numerous atrocities have been attributed to and claimed by extremists, both before and since September 11, causing mayhem and carnage in many of the world's cities and tourist destinations: Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Mombassa, Riyadh, Casablanca, Bali, Moscow, Tunisia, Jakarta, Mumbai, Istanbul, Madrid: the list grows longer, the casualties mount.

Let's see. Has Mr Ruthven got them all? Surely he has. There isn't any other perennial target of Arab terrorism is there?

For shame.
posted by maimon at 8/31/2004 12:27:33 AM

 
Another Political Survey
By Mike Rappaport

Stephen Bainbridge recommended another of these political surveys, so I took it. This one seems a bit better designed than the previous ones, but still has the usual problems.

This survey has two axises: left versus right, and pragmatic versus idealistic. I cannot really complain with the overall result: I am a little to the right and a little to the pragmatic side. That seems about right.

The last time, Bainbridge and I had very similar results under the political compass test. Again this time our results are similar, although more different than they were the last time. Bainbridge is far more right than I am, and he is considerably less pragmatic.

My results: Left / Right +1.47; Pragmatism +3.49

Update: Some readers as well as the Atlantic Blog have complained about this survey. The principal complaint is the placement of Stalin and Hitler: Stalin on the right, and Hitler so near Thatcher. This is a good complaint. While I could speculate, I don't really know why the results turned out that way. And certainly Hitler and Thatcher should be quite far away from one another. Nonetheless, the right way to approach these surveys is as a fun exercise. They have their limits, and some are worse than others, but one shouldn't take them too seriously.
posted by Michael at 8/30/2004 08:12:22 AM

 
I want a purple heart
By Tom Smith

I seem to have done something to my rotator cuffs (that's in your shoulders to you aliens to the weight room) attempting to do more than my usual pathetic number of pull ups. It hurts, and I want a purple heart. Yes, I did it to myself and no, I was not in any real danger, but I still want a purple heart. But I am not in the military, you say. True, but on my side there is the fact the shoulder is a much less embarassing place to get wounded than the butt, and also, I promise to request only one such medal and to be duly modest about it, should one be given to me. Think it over.

In the alternative, I request to marry a billionairess. I don't want to give up my current spousal unit, so the best way to work this out is for you simply to give her a billion dollars. If this seems too much, a hundred million plus a Gulfstream V will do. In exchange, I will give really boring speeches, and ride around on my expensive toys clad in lycra, showing off my middle aged body.

Just some random observations: no one has mentioned that maybe the reason Kerry threw his medals, ribbons or whatever away is that (1) they just evoked embarrassing memories of butt wounds and/or (2) he knew they were a big fraud anyway, so what the heck? If you were the Richard Burton character from Where Eagles Dare and you got a Victoria Cross, would you toss it away? Not bloody likely. But if you knew it was just for, well, you get the picture. Moreover, nobody seems to have pointed out how rude it was for Kerry to throw away medals which he requested in the first place. If I ask somebody for tickets to the game, and somebody gives them to me, and then I throw them away, that's rude. He could at least have kept them and bartered them latter for a fancy haircut or something, assuming you could find a stylist who wanted a purple heart.
posted by thomas at 8/30/2004 08:12:18 AM

 
In case you missed this little treasure . . .
By Tom Smith

John Kerry's classic book. What else do you need?
posted by thomas at 8/30/2004 08:09:02 AM

 
The Times
By Mike Rappaport

The New York Times is at it again, with a big headline saying "Vast Anti-Bush Rally Greets Republicans in New York" and another headline that reads "Upstaging Before the Show." (The link is to the Times home page, since there is no other way to show the headline. I don't know how long it will last.) The test for New York Times media bias is whether one can distinguish the Times headlines from those that the Democratic Party would have written for the Times if they could do so. These headlines read as if they come from Democratic Party talking points.

Update: The Times website has been changed, but the newspaper's front page sends the same message that the web site did.
posted by Michael at 8/29/2004 10:47:54 PM

 
Differences
By Tom Smith

Women like to compete, just not against men.
posted by thomas at 8/29/2004 10:43:50 AM

 
Surf Science
By Tom Smith

Shocking to me is that this seems to be almost the only, and apparently the leading, research paper on the hydrodynamics of surfing, at least as far as I can tell from Google. It's 30 years old! Have there really been no advances in the theory of surfing in all that time?

I tend to think many improvements could be made in surfboards to make it easier to learn how to surf. I'll let you guess why I would think so. In the last ten years, there have been enormous improvements in snow ski design, making skiing much easier and more fun. Ski design, it seems to me, stagnated for a long time before it really took off in the '90's. Is surfing due for a similar technological revolution?

I'm not really sure. I don't yet understand what's going on with surfing well enough to tell. It may be that surfing is just planing on water, and there's only so much that can be done with a plane. On the other hand, I wonder if more sophisticated designs, of the sort one sees in speedboats, kayaks, and sailboats, for instance, might be applicable to surfboards.

Here are some wild ideas. Surfbboards are flat, giving them high initial stability, but very low secondary stability (or whatever you call it), so that one tipped, they tend to keep tipping. A U shaped hull is much more stable. Less likely to plane, though and harder to turn. Maybe big fins would make it easier to turn. This would look like a kayak you stood on to surf.

Or, what about a big channel down the middle of the board, like a tunnel boat? (I know some boards now are concave on the bottom) Would the decreased drag increase the speed of the board? Would there be a lift effect? What would the effect on turning be?

How about a catamaran surfboard? Think long, slender sponsons with fins. Could such a barge be made to turn? What if the sponsons had significant rocker (that bannana shape) and even some side cut to their shape, like slalom skis? That would increase drag, but would it make them easier to turn? Could sponsons be designed so that they planed readily?

But this is all wrong. Maybe it's all just planing, so all you can do it make subtle variations to an essentially flat surface.

posted by thomas at 8/29/2004 10:43:09 AM

 
Bush's tax cuts
By Tom Smith

Nice graphic on Bush's tax cuts. Via instapundit. The middle classes only had to pay more if you count the top 20 percent as the middle classes -- that's in terms of tax burden, not marginal rate.

I'm in favor of tax cuts because the federal government wastes the most astonishing amounts of money.
posted by thomas at 8/29/2004 10:29:51 AM

 
But this doesn't mean we don't need world socialism because of global warming
By Tom Smith

In my first law school teaching job, I had lunch with some colleagues and the dean, a notoriously unpleasant woman. She expressed admiration for the Chinese, who forcibly aborted the fetuses of women who had deviated from official population policy. I allowed that if that ever happened in this country, I would head for the mountains with my gun and join the Resistance. She seemed to think I was kidding, but I wasn't, of course.

But it turns out all the fuss about the population bomb was rubbish and nonsense. How very shocking. I remember reading stories in Time magazine about women who, hearing the tick tick of the population bomb, got themselves sterilized in order to make the world a better place (which they may have inadvertently done, genes being what they are), while at most just making themselves victims of the tragedy of the commons.

I still want my SUV. It will burn lots of gas and be full of kids.
posted by thomas at 8/29/2004 09:16:53 AM

 
Should consrvatives hope W loses?
By Tom Smith

Fergeson thinks so.
posted by thomas at 8/28/2004 09:24:41 PM

 
White Mischief
By Tom Smith

African tragi-comedy.
posted by thomas at 8/28/2004 06:59:28 PM

 
New Corporate Law Blog
By Gail Heriot

Our colleague at USD, Professor Lynne Dallas, and several corporate law professors from other law schools have started a new corporate law blog called "Biz Fems Speak!" Check it out.
posted by Gail at 8/28/2004 05:51:34 PM

 
Right wing grousing
By Tom Smith

Readers with access to the San Diego Union Tribune might want to check out the front page of tomorrow's Sunday paper Insight section. It should have a piece by me about the upcoming Republican convention. I share with Herr Professor Rappaport some disaffection with W, from the right. In my case, I think he has been pretty lame on social issues, throwing sops to social conservatives and expecting a lot in return. But support your local paper to see the rest. Or if you don't sully your hands with newsprint, look here later for a link. A
AND here it is.
posted by thomas at 8/28/2004 05:42:56 PM

 
Hiram Fong
By Gail Heriot

I love success stories. And Hiram Fong, the first senior Senator from Hawaii, had a great one. His parents were illiterate Chinese immigrants. As a young boy, he did did all manner of odd job, picking beans for 10 cents per 100 lb. bag and shining shoes. Yet he grew up to be one of Hawaii's most successful businessmen and politicians. (He was lucky too; his "seniority" over the junior Senator was won on a coin toss.)

The Republican Fong, who served in the Senate from 1959 to 1977, died last week at the age of 97; his passing was duly noted in several papers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. But Post's obit contains a stray sentence that I am afraid may mislead some readers. It says, "His support for civil rights legislation put him at odds with many in his party in the 1960s." I'm sure it put him at odds with some Republicans, just as it put him at odds with some Democrats. But, for the record, Republican support for 1960s civil rights legislation tended to be significantly greater than Democratic support. For example, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by a final vote of 73 to 27. Of the "no" votes, 21 were Democrats and 6 were Republicans. On the House side, Republicans voted in favor 138 to 34 while Democrats voted for the measure 152 to 96, with most of the "no" votes coming from Southerners.

posted by Gail at 8/28/2004 04:38:56 PM

 
Cool news from Keck
By Tom Smith

New planet hunting news from the gigantic Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
posted by thomas at 8/28/2004 09:01:05 AM

 
How is this possible, if it's not Abu Ghraib?
By Tom Smith

Don't hold your breath for the trial on this one.
posted by thomas at 8/27/2004 06:41:53 AM

 
Republican Convention Bloggers
By Mike Rappaport

Descriptions and pictures of bloggers who will be blogging from the Republican Convention. (Hat tip: Instapundit)
posted by Michael at 8/26/2004 11:24:37 PM

 
Bush
By Mike Rappaport

According to the New York Times:

President Bush, responding to criticism that he should act against groups attacking John Kerry's war record, will pursue legal action against all "shadowy" outside groups on both sides of the campaign's fence that use unregulated funds to finance political advertising, the White House announced today.

"The president said he wanted to work together to pursue court action to shut down all the ads and activity by these shadowy 527 groups," the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters aboard Air Force One. "If the court action doesn't work, then he would be willing to pursue legislative action and work with Senator McCain on that."

I am sorry, but Bush is not making it easy to support him. I don't trust Kerry to fight terror, so I will vote for Bush. But Bush is making me have to hold my nose tighter and tighter in order to cast the ballot for him.

Compare Bush to Ronald Reagan, whose veto of the Fairness Doctrine did so much to promote the new media and media diversity. Bush signed McCain Feingold and now he is attempting to try to stop speech by unorganized interests. It is just outrageous.
posted by Michael at 8/26/2004 05:23:57 PM

 
Krauthammer
By Mike Rappaport

A great column by Charles Krauthammer on President Bush's decision to redeploy troops from their positions in Europe and Korea that were set during the Cold War. Here is a taste:

Democrats accuse the administration of politicizing the redeployment by bringing it up as a campaign issue. This truly is precious. The Democrats turned their convention into a four-day teach-in celebrating the Swift boats of the Mekong River circa 1968 -- and then question the legitimacy of raising as a campaign issue for the consideration of the nation the most significant redeployment of U.S. troops abroad since the Korean War.

The New York Times editorial page offered this reason for maintaining the status quo: Otherwise, "the military will also lose the advantage that comes with giving large numbers of its men and women the experience of living in other cultures." Seventy-thousand GIs parked in Stuttgart, practicing their German and listening to Wagner. Finally, a military deployment the New York Times can support.

posted by Michael at 8/25/2004 11:00:25 PM

 
The Perfect as the Enemy of the Good
By Mike Rappaport

An illustration of that error in an argument for why sports that require judges should not be part of the Olympics.
posted by Michael at 8/25/2004 04:17:05 PM

 
Resolving the Paul Hamm Controversy
By Mike Rappaport

Allen Barra on Opinion Journal argues that there should be a "do over": a one on one competition between Hamm and South Korea's Yang Tae Young. While Barra is right that this would be great for the public and ratings, I think it would be unfair to the athletes to have to compete again at this stage. Instead, I think Young should also be awarded a gold medal.
posted by Michael at 8/25/2004 12:03:20 AM