Monday, October 18, 2010
NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the conservative reaction to the Chile mine rescue. You'll never guess. Oh, you did -- capitalism saved the day and Obama sucks! Well, at least they aren't giving all the credit to Connie Mack.
Daniel Henninger's insane column has already passed into comedy legend, but it does us smart alecks no good to laugh at his gibberish -- in part because it's not aimed at normal people, but at the rest of the relatively small cadre of libertarian nutcakes who believe this sort of thing. It's not meant to influence the 2010 elections, the course of which I think is pretty well set by now, but to keep up the message discipline so the coming Republican gains may be interpreted as a victory for the most extreme rightwing ideas, rather than for a bunch of senior citizens who don't like that black President nohow.
2:33 AM by roy edroso
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Sunday, October 17, 2010
ON TONIGHT'S MAD MEN. "The truth is they're mourning for their childhood rather than anticipating their future. They don't know it yet, but they don't want to die."
11:05 PM by roy edroso
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Friday, October 15, 2010
ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, CONT. ETC. Let's stick with libertarians as a subject. For example, Tunku Varadarajan. Oh, you didn't know he was a libertarian? Well, he's shown himself to be an entitled asshole, which is pretty much a prerequisite for libertarianism. We also know that when black people complain about the Tea Party, Varadarajan gets mad ("NAACP: Can we all agree that it stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Cynical Politics?") and starts yelling about Robert Byrd, and he sure loves him some Sarah Palin.
But that doesn't mean he's a regular conservative, mind you: Even in the midst of his Palin swoons he can summon the perspective to say, oh, the Right gets her wrong, too!
Maybe we should just flip all the cards and settle on our default position: That there is no meaningful difference between conservatives and libertarians, except for the roles they play in the great pretense that they give a shit about anything except themselves and the rich people they hope to meet at dinner parties or in heaven.
Anyway, Varadarajan professes todayMy first instinct as a libertarian is, of course, for Republican victories everywhere... You don't say. [Pause] OK, ready for the bullshit now:...particularly for candidates running specifically on a small-government platform. The big-government Bush Republicans have already been punished; now it's time to get rid of the big-government Democrats—i.e., all of them. For a guy who called Newt Gingrich's Contract With America an "unforgettable, obstructive disaster," Varadarajan has a lot of faith in Republican panaceas.
But things have changed, he says: "The Republicans, this time, have been chastened by the emergence of the Tea Party, which should greatly dampen any residual GOP ardor for big government." This time for sure! Just you watch!
Still, what's the point of being a libertarian if you're just going to rubber-stamp Republican candidates? (I know, I know; humor me.) Varadarajan offers his opinion on the three more contentious Tea Party nuts: Sharron Angle, Carl Paladino, and Christine O'Donnell. He disdains two, accepts one. Can you guess which is which? I'll give you a hint: One is leading in the polls, the other two have no chance in hell.
Congratulations, winners!Nevada’s Sharron Angle raises similar issues: She, too, is an unconventional Republican candidate, easily typified as “extreme” by the media. It never hurts to blame the media early in your argument.There is no doubt that, objectively, some of her positions are, indeed, hard-line. But there are no libertarians, I would wager, who’d like to see her lose to Harry Reid. However distasteful she may be, the political and symbolic importance of defeating Reid is so great that its imperative trumps all distaste... Call me cynical -- go on! I can take it! -- but does anyone who has attained a Deep South Age of Consent doubt that, were Paladino anywhere near striking distance of the son of the hated liberal Cuomo family, and O'Donnell poised to take Joe Biden's former Senate seat, Varadarajan would swiftly move them into the Support With Misgivings column?
Oh, well, at least they give Radley Balko some work. That ought to knock a couple minutes off their time in Purgatory.
UPDATE. Prominent libertarian Perfesser Glenn Harlan Reynolds on how homosexuals are the real authoritarians. While the Republican wing of the conservative party has shrunk its tent, the libertarian wing has expanded theirs to an extraordinary degree. Were Paladino closer to victory, no doubt they'd be celebrating his racist emails as the new Lady Chatterley's Lover.
11:03 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, October 14, 2010
ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM CONT. Sometimes I think Katherine Mangu-Ward is a plant, but I can't figure out why anyone would bother -- maybe the intention is to embarrass libertarians, but obviously they're impervious to embarrassment. Maybe she just believes this stuff. What an amazing world we live in!
Gizmodo finds some apparently homeless men using laptops. Their basic take is, huh, that's weird, homeless people with laptops. But Mangu-Ward finds it inspiring! But if Gizmodo is right that the second guy has WiFi and some speakers, then he has access to more information and entertainment than even the richest, most powerful men could imagine for most of human history—and he can share it with whomever he likes. When he's bored of beans straight from the can, he can research for-the-homeless, by-the-homeless cooking tips. He can read about the latest in funny cardboard signage. He can watch this week's episode of Glee. He can look at porn (or maybe he doesn't need porn because he's keeping an eye on forums like this one.) Someone ought to tell her that some homeless people have cars, in which they sleep. How awesome is that? Homeless people with cars!
Remember when fundamentalists were the crazy members of this coalition?
UPDATE. Some commenters think Mangu-Ward is kidding. But I've been hearing from libertarians for years that we're all rich now because we have iPods, and other, similar nonsense. In their madhouse, this sort of thing is mainstream thinking.
UPDATE 2. A few commenters remind me of Michelle Malkin's rage over bums with cell-phones. Fish cites Poe's Law, which suggests that he, too, thinks Mangu-Ward has to be joking. That's what they said about Robespierre. These people are accustomed to laugh at the misfortunes of the littlebrains and, in private, Nick Gillespie's hair.
10:00 PM by roy edroso
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GOLDBERG RETURNS FOR FURTHER SELF-HUMILIATION. You will recall Jonah Goldberg's attempt to -- well, not so much refute Anne Applebaum's column on conservative anti-elitism as to misrepresent it and then attack the misrepresentation. Even on those terms he did a lousy job.
Yesterday Applebaum responded to Goldberg with extraordinary patience (especially considering that she noticed, as I did, that Goldberg "actually attributes arguments to me that I never made"), explaining in simple words that right-wing bitching about elites conflicts with their meritocratic views, and is particularly ridiculous coming from conservatives who are members of elites themselves.
Goldberg re-stumbles onstage with a bucket on his foot and what he thinks is a winning comeback: What Applebaum doesn't understand about him and his fellow wingnuts is that they use "elite" as code! And he's actually mad that she didn't impute to him the bad faith that he admits of himself:I’m trying not to let my exasperation get the better of me... ...'cause when I do my face turns red and my pits smell really, really bad....so let me explain what I think she is missing. Attacking the Ivy League is a very old, very recognizable shorthand in American political discourse. What Applebaum is doing is reading these statements literally, and painfully so. I mean, really! I'll bet she doesn't even know about the "uppity" connection! Fart.
Goldberg also isn't done attributing things to Applebaum that she didn't say:She is also asserting that Ivy League simply means the smartest and the best, as if there was no plausible case that the Ivy League’s reputation is any way overblown or underserved. I wished as hard as I could, so hard I think I pulled a muscle, that Goldberg would try to make that case immediately, using as an example his skill at walking around with a bucket on his foot. But again God was deaf to my pleas.
As to Applebaum busting him for making shit up, Goldberg huffs, "Applebaum is now moving the goalposts," which in this context means she's getting into the weeds and Goldberg has to noodle it and anyway he has to walk Cosmo and farrrarrrt -- that is, nothing:What I objected to was the bizarre insinuation that what is motivating Tea Partiers and other conservatives these days is a backlash against elite education, academic achievement, or the rise of the meritocracy as personified by the Obamas. That remains what I dismiss. This is as fine an example of "You were supposed to hear what I meant to say" as you'll find anywhere.
Goldberg also receives non-help from Jay Nordlinger, who says that Bill Buckley wasn't an elitist despite having every attribute of an elitist because Bill Buckley was always talking about how he hated elitists. Unfortunately he began rambling before he would inform us that George W. Bush may have gone to Yale but he by God cleared brush at his ranch which, by the way, is in Texas.
3:36 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, October 13, 2010
IT'S NOT TEA IN THAT CUP. Larry Kudlow at National Review:Obama the Alien They must be running out of slurs, as this one is recycled from the cauldron of Dorothy Rabinowitz. The main thrust of Rabinowitz' column was that Obama is an alien because he doesn't pander like a white man true American; Kudlow's is that Obama panders plenty, but not the Republican way:Believe it or not, with jobs falling for four consecutive months and unemployment stubbornly high near 10 percent, President Obama is out on the campaign trail bashing businesses and promoting class warfare. Huh? Oh my gosh is he off message.
He’s slamming the Chamber of Commerce for allegedly using foreign money in campaign ads, even though there’s not one shred of evidence of this. What Kudlow means, if he means anything, is that the CoC demonstrably gets plenty of foreign money and runs plenty of ads against Democrats but claims it keeps the foreign money in a different cookie-jar from the campaign funds.Huh (again)? Is the Chamber really a big election-year issue? Is it causing high unemployment? In that the Chamber helps its constituent members ship jobs overseas, sure.
One of the great things about Kudlow being such a hack is that you can make a decent post just by putting in the relevant facts he leaves out. But in this column the Republican Party's second-most-famous former cokehead goes beyond the usual card tricks to remind us of what the GOP is really about.Of course, Obama never mentions the unions, including the SEIU and AFL-CIO, and all their foreign money from their big international affiliates. Instead, he extends his own cast of villains, attacking special interests, Wall Street banks, corporations, the oil industry, the insurance industry, credit-card companies, AIG, and ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil? What did they do? Oh, they’re an oil company.
Phew. Kind of anti-business, wouldn’t you say? I was with him on the "all their foreign money from their big international affiliates" -- oh-yeah-what-about-the-other-guy is a time-honored electioneering gambit. But in this the year of the Tea Party, isn't it a little weird to be defending Wall Street banks, credit-card companies, and big business in general? I thought it was all about the grassroots overthrowing the "ruling class." And then:Obama then blasts millionaires and billionaires, waging war on capital and investors, too. Next he talks about getting young people, African Americans, and union members to the polls. Even more division. Even more class warfare. It's divisive for Obama to invite these people to vote? I thought working people were the bedrock of the Tea Party movement, and all the cool kids were wearing tricorner hats. And minorities -- why, Perfesser Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a whole scrapbook of tea-partying black folk photos!A series of investor-related polls shows how totally detached the president is from the nearly 100 million folks who directly or indirectly own stocks.
A survey conducted by Citigroup Global Markets of 100 mutual-fund, hedge-fund, and pension-fund managers... Hedge-fund managers! OK, let's flip all the cards: While most of the tea party stuff you see these days focuses on the concerns of yahoos, neo-confederates, and people who think America went downhill when the Negroes cancelled Matlock, Kudlow's column is for the other Republican base -- the disappointed day-traders itching to get back in the game; the guys following Jim Cramer as if he were a Sherpa guiding them back to civilization; the people who think of hard work as something admirably American so long as other people are doing it for them while they measure the angles and make the big plays and otherwise work the system like they were in god mode -- which hasn't been paying off so well lately, true, but will again as soon as they get the right people in there -- that is, people like Larry Kudlow, who can be trusted completely because he wears nice suits and speaks their language and one of these days will dispense that final key of wisdom that unlocks the door to riches for them -- and they better be watching when he does!
In other words, behind the con there's always another con, and a sucker born every minute.
9:41 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, October 12, 2010
GOLDBERG SKOOLS APPLEBAUM FARRRRRT! I hate to make it Goldberg Week, but he's in rare form. After a stint gazing through the window at a Times seminar on Woodrow Wilson, slugging Mountain Dew and telling passers-by how he could lick them perfessers even with this bucket stuck on his foot, Goldberg hobbles over to the Washington Post, where he notices a column by Anne Applebaum.
Applebaum looks at the Tea Party types' condemnation of top-college graduates as elitists, and wonders why they're complaining. For one thing, Applebaum says, the elite is less elite than once it was, since "the most elite American universities have in the past two decades made the greatest effort to broaden their student bodies" with children of the lower classes. For another, many of the conservatives yelling about elites are pretty damn elite themselves. Her unremarkable conclusion is that the elitism charge "often means nothing more than 'a person whose politics I don't like' or even 'a person who is snobby,'" and is unlikely to lead to more responsive leadership.
Here's how Goldberg reads it:Borrowing from Daniel Bell (and I suspect, Hannah Arendt), Applebaum argues that the current tide of resentment at “elites” boils down to envy. Sigh, now we have to suffer through grafs of Goldberg missing the point. Not that it isn't entertaining in its own way: Now, I do believe envy plays a serious and under-appreciated role in politics. But Applebaum’s theory of the sources and contours of that envy strike me as not merely wrong but actually silly. Come on, Goldberg, show this Yale bitch that Goucher College grads know how to argumentate! For Applebaum, the fact that the elite graduated from top-tier schools is all the proof she needs that these people deserve to be in charge. Indeed, Applebaum — without a moment’s pause to cite any evidence — insists that universities have diversified without dropping standards at all. (But I don’t want to have an argument about quotas and all that, because it’s a distraction from my real objection). Wow -- even after misrepresenting Applebaum's point, it only takes Goldberg three steps to get his other foot in a bucket. At the Ivies admissions are about as competitive as they've every been, yet they still have high enough minority representation that Goldberg's fellow yahoos, such as Glenn Harlan Reynolds, are forever bitching about it. Simple shame wouldn't keep Goldberg from trying to argue that more black people means worse education, so I have to assume someone warned him he was headed for a trap. (I wonder which of the interns drew this terrible assignment. The one they're trying to get rid of, probably.)Applebaum doesn’t seem to comprehend that it is not status-class anxiety that is driving the main critique of the elite. It is that this particular elite is hellbent on bossing the country around that will make America less meritocratic. No one ever taught Goldberg about the folly of argument from italicization.No one begrudges kids who’ve made good from tough backgrounds. What bothers lots of Americans is when those kids then think they are entitled to cajole, nudge, command and denigrate the rest of America. Thankfully these patriots have access to thesauruses!To date, I’ve seen not one instance of Tea Partiers denouncing engineers, physicists, cardiologists, accountants, biologist, archeologists or a thousand other professions who’ve emerged from elite schools. Because those people aren’t bossing anybody around. Also not mentioned by Goldberg and his TP pals: Investment bankers. Because they never boss anybody around. At least not so's you'd notice. And I hear Carl Paladino is a real sweetheart behind the mask of psychosis he puts on to win votes.
In the inevitable follow-up inspired by "reader mail," I expect to see added in evidence those obnoxious brats from the Yale Drama School who go on to Hollyweird, become stars, and boss around their personal shoppers and assistants. Who will later write to National Review, "That's exactly right, and that's why this lifelong-Democrat personal assistant will vote Republican for the first time in his/her life!"
The rest is all flailing to get the buckets off his feet, in the course of which Goldberg lets slip something real:Fair or not, to the extent the Ivy League comes up it is as a codeword or symbol for the agenda of progressives. Which is almost exactly what Applebaum was saying. Well, it's better than when they were using "Jew" and "nigger-lover."
Maybe he drinks in the morning. I know it's a longshot, but as a Christian I'd like to find one thing I can admire about him.
UPDATE. In comments, Whetstone banks one I could kick myself for not seeing: So when Jonah whines about the smarty-pantses bossing him around while pining for whatever scraps of intellectual approval they'll toss his way (or, barring that, whatever he can misread to make himself feel smart), I consider the possibility that yes, he's been "bossed around," if that means "being edited" or "not getting jobs that writers with a better grasp of language got."
1:49 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, October 11, 2010
STREAKING. When I saw Jonah Goldberg hoisting a flagon of Pibb Xtra and declaring, "I score that as Anti-Wilsonites 5 defenders 0 (or forfeit)," I was intrigued. As has been proven by several incidents since his famous declaration that, after Juan Cole had handed him his ass, he was "going to take my victory lap now," Goldberg is never more ebullient than when he's pooped his drawers.
Turns out he's scoring an NYT seminar on the conservative fad of bashing Woodrow Wilson starring six historians -- not frauds like Goldberg, but experts in their field who write books rather than book-length cheerleading manuals. All concede negative aspects of Wilson's Presidency, which is probably why Goldberg thinks he's bested the field -- his agenda is that Wilson is a rat, and if other people discuss the subject without insisting Wilson was a saint, that means they're losers in the Jonah Goldberg remote control debate.
Some of the historians explain that the most obnoxious parts of the "progressive" Wilson program -- censorship, opposition to women's rights -- have since been absorbed by the conservative movement. Goldberg gets right to the important part:A few of the folks use [the Times article] as an excuse to beat up on Glenn Beck, even trying to make him into a mouthpiece for Leo Strauss (no, really). No, not really. The two guys who mention Beck and Strauss -- the conservative George H. Nash and the liberal Michael Lind -- don't "beat up" Beck; they just don't take him seriously, and who can blame them. But since Goldberg believes that "Beck got on the anti-Wilson train largely because of my book," you can see how he'd consider this an assault of some kind. (Also Goldberg himself is mentioned in the article and even more quickly dismissed. You can see how this became a grudge match!)
When John Milton Cooper, Wilson's biographer, says that "the main problem with this current denunciation is that it does not spread the blame far or early enough" and mentions that Theodore Roosevelt also made use of Big Government, Goldberg flies into a sack dance. That's "a game-ending concession," he yells:So, John Milton Cooper — a great and revered historian — says that the chief problem with the right’s indictment of Woodrow Wilson is not that it is wrong on the merits, but that it’s too selective? In other words, the substance of the attack is fine, it’s just not inclusive enough. I’ll take that any day. If you read the essay by Cooper -- Goldberg clearly hopes that you won't -- you'll see that the "main problem" passage is a rhetorical gambit used to bring up the immense change in Republican standards of government activism over the years. But Goldberg seems not to have read any further, and goes on for a couple more paragraphs about the tangential TR connection as if it were his Safe Place and he were afraid to leave it; yet even ensconced there, he's never out of danger so long as he keeps yapping:So while Cooper is right to a limited extent, what he leaves out is that TR wasn’t nearly the progressive Wilson was as president. It is entirely possible that had TR won in 1912 (and all else was held constant) the same conservatives would be beating up on TR more than Wilson. Though even that I doubt, for the simple reason that Wilson’s progressivism was a real ideology. TR’s progressivism was far more instinctual... Etc, fart, burp. If K-Lo hadn't come along and banged him on the back of the head, he'd probably have started typing IS TOO IS TOO IS TOO over and over again. Once unstuck, Goldberg relies on his old standby arguments. For example, his response to the comments of Harvard's Jill Lepore is "Riiiiiight." When challenged, he explicates:What I found hilarious was the claim that liberals don’t label things. This from the crowd that has shouted “tea bagger” at everything that moves. I have not been able to find any writings by Professor Lepore in which she talks about teabaggers, but unlike Goldberg I'm not looking for them through Miss Nancy's Magic Mirror.
Goldberg on what he considers a victory lap is like one of those guys who run out onto the field during a ball game, hear the bellowing crowds, and think, "They love me!"
UPDATE. Thanks John for correx.
UPDATE 2. "I'm a little confused here," says DKF in comments. "Are we modern liberals supposed to venerate Wilson? If we didn't, what would be the point of all this right-wing Wilson-bashing? I don't give a rat's ass about Woodrow Wilson. Why should they?"
I have a couple of theories on it, DKF.
1.) Republicans -- having been for a half-century the Party of Dirty Tricks, Southern Strategy, and the allegedly magical Deregulation that was supposed to make us wealthy forever but has instead doomed us all -- like to shift the conversation to the distant past, especially eras with decent Republicans and problematic Democrats. Hence the "GOP Can't Be Racist, Look at Frederick Douglass" argument (though I believe those National Review readers who actually looked upon Douglass' visage in that post probably wondered what Fred Sanford was all dressed up for.)
2.) Conservatives really despise Franklin Roosevelt, but when they tell people that FDR's crimes include using the federal treasury to employ hobos, they do not get the horrified reaction they seek. They can't even bitch about the Japanese-American relocation camps because that would get Michelle Malkin mad. So they turn to Wilson, who is not associated with such heroic issues as World War II and the Great Depression, and tell people about all the horrible things he did and that Obama would do if he had the chance. (Sometimes he does, unfortunately, but the problem with Obama's conduct is not that it differs radically from that of his Republican predecessor, but that it resembles it too closely.)
3.) Goldberg wrote a book called Liberal Fascism that made millions of rightwing knuckleheads believe a bunch of bullshit.
(Freshly Squeezed Cynic's explanation, also in comments, is shorter and better, which I can mention now that you've just read mine.)
10:07 PM by roy edroso
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NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the recent Obion County, Tennessee case in which a city fire department refused to rescue some guy's house because he hadn't paid the user fees up front. They let his house burn to the ground. The conservative endorsements of this psychopathic course were depressingly expected, as was the ratio of endorsements made on sterile grounds of libertarian ideology versus those made on grounds that some parasite/looter had been made to suffer. Sometimes I wonder if Jack the Ripper wasn't a precocious Randian.
3:41 AM by roy edroso
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