Daniel Larison has some fun at the expense of Roger Kimball, an unserious man in a serious bowtie, who is one of many “thinkers” to see John McCain’s extra-sensory detection of the letters K-G-B in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, and raise him a U-S-S-R. Now, crazy as the notion that foreign policy towards the Soviet Union is substitutable salva veritate for foreign policy towards the Russian Federation may be, Daniel is being far too charitable in crediting a hypothetical hawk who claims “that Moscow is trying to reassemble parts of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire” with avoiding “embarrassing himself by saying completely nonsensical things.” Really? There was fairly considerable overlap between the territory of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, including the only non-Russian territory Russian troops occupy at present, so the available data doesn’t tell us precisely which prior frightening Russian polity Messrs. Putin and Medvedev are trying to reassemble, nor (therefore) which rapacious expansionist regime’s rebirth we’re going to have to go to pre-emptive war to, um, pre-empt. (Could it be that Putin is really trying to re-establish the Kievan Rus? That man is capable of anything, after all.) More to the point, as Daniel says, Kimball &co. couldn’t say the things they are saying if they knew what ’soviet’ means, but just as the workers’ councils have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, so have any number of the political and cultural artifacts of the Rossiyskaya Imperiya. And on the other hand, there are features the Russian Federation shares with the USSR — like a tank army and a nuclear arsenal — that certaintly weren’t present in the empire of the Tsars. Which is unsurprising. As has been noted before, “any two things share infinitely many properties, and fail to share infinitely many others. That is so whether the two things are perfect duplicates or utterly dissimilar.” Comparing the Russian Federation to the Russian Empire: nutty. Comparing the Russian Federation to the Soviet Union: also nutty. (Which is nuttier? Depends on which dissimilar features are particularly salient, which in turn depends on context and subjectivity.)

I’d probably be taking a more critical tone in responding to this Marty Peretz post talking up a Saudi Arabian columnist agitating for war with Iran, except that somewhere amid the prose I completely lost my foothold on whatever point he was trying to make. Still, this jumped out: (more…)

This could be big.

By this time tomorrow most people following the campaign are likely to have read the Daily Kos diary about the story John McCain recounted last night of one of his Vietnamese captors drawing a cross in the dirt of the Hanoi Hilton on Christmas Day — an experience, according to this McCain campaign ad from late last year, Team Maverick believes constitutes an argument for a McCain presidency without further elaboration. Flagging the DKos diary, Andrew Sullivan notes that he has heard McCain tell the cross-in-the-dirt story “countless times.” Problem is, unless prison guards who oversee torture and abuse have a strange and heretofore undocumented habit of drawing crosses in the dirt (in which case, I’ll be the first to apologize and correct), it would appear that McCain blatantly and shamelessly stole the anecdote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Nor does McCain’s evident admiration and familiarity with Solzhenitsyn’s life and works (would that it were slightly more complete) paint him in cherubic hues. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that as a citizen of a historically Orthodox Christian state, a prison guard in Soviet Russia could reasonably expect to be able to connect his own experiences to a prisoner’s by means of Christian iconography; whereas Christians are only 8% of the Vietnamese population today, and with most of them concentrated in the south around Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (where European missionary activity was centered), there were probably not all that many guards and soldiers in the North Vietnamese army for whom a cross in the dirt would be a useful way of sharing a moment of humanity with an American prisoner. In other words, it looks really, really bad for McCain. (more…)

Michael Walzer has a short, sharp online-only piece for Dissent about the Georgian crisis. A few points in response: (A) Walzer’s point (1), about how Russia’s war is an “unjust war,” seems to fail to recognize a distinction whose essentiality to discussing the justice of war Walzer himself is most responsible for promulgating, namely the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, or just cause and just conduct. Clearly, Russia’s behavior fails appallingly on the second score. But the first is murkier. The Russian invasion was of course hardly launched for humanitarian purposes, and as Walzer notes, “the Russian claim that the Georgians killed or injured 2,000 civilians [isn't] credible.” Nonetheless, Georgia triggered the conflict with an unjust attack on Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatists. It can’t be that Russia doesn’t even have an arguably legitimate interest in protecting them.

(more…)

Unbeknownst to me (and needless to say, this comes totally unprompted and without any financial incentive), “Burning Birthdays,” the first EP of the Harlem Shakes — a phenomenally talented band that happens to be fronted and bassed by a couple of pretty good friends of mine — has been available for download on itunes for a while now, and at less than $0.99/song (!). You should do yourself a favor and check it out. Start with “Sickos,” their signature song. I wish I could give a detailed description of their music but it’s too eclectic for simple characterization; closer to punk than anything else but not particularly close to punk. Sadly, one can’t do the Harlem shake to any of their songs — at least not easily — but otherwise “BB” is pretty close to flawless. And think of the opportunity to tell people you were into them way back when; or, if you’re a hipster douche, you can tell people about how you liked them before they sold out their values and all the real music fans who followed them.

English journalist tries to eat what Michael Phelps does in a day; gets a small fraction of the way through; fails miserably; gets sick. Obviously, the thing for Phelps to do is seek out more variety in his diet. What could go wrong with that? Hot peppers are a lovely addition to most any savory breakfast or lunch food, and would go a long way to cutting through the disgusting (I’m assuming) taste of all that mayonnaise.

Sort of….

Tom Maguire has a few justified chuckles at the expense of some tested and ready practitioners of the august profession of journalism innumerate hacks at the Grey Lady. Clearly, the fourth estate would be better off if its members were required to undergo some basic quantitative training — not even necessarily anything involving actual computation or problem-solving, just enough to get a grasp of basic concepts — and the whole nation might be better off as a result as well. (At the very least, it would not be possible — to paraphrase a former Dean of Admissions at Yale — to shoot every reporter in the country, recruit pajamas-wearers to fill every, um, cancelled position, shoot all of them, and then recruit a third string journalistic corps with scant if any diminishing of the substantive quality of reporting.) That said, it’s sort of cute that Maguire thinks business school credentials would stand our press in markedly better stead. Sure, there are exceptional B-school grads; there are also exceptional J-school grads. And really now — has he met many Harvard MBAs? They’re supposed to be the best of the lot, and…let’s leave it at that. (more…)

Christopher Hitchens wants to know, in re: the 79 billion dollars of petrol-fueled surplus funds the Iraqi government is expected to accrue by year’s end, if “we [may] take a moment to apologize to Paul Wolfowitz? Of all the many slanders hurled at this advocate for Iraq’s liberation, probably none was more gleefully bandied about than his congressional testimony that Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism could be self-financing.” Well, before we decide whether we owe Wolfowitz an apology, it might be helpful to take account of what Wolfowitz actually said. Wolfowitz’ 2003 statement to Congress on the eve of the invasion didn’t refer to “Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism” — and note the classic Hitchens gambit of putting his own highly tendentious characterization of an event into other people’s mouths, the better to stack the deck rhetorically in favor of the moral blackmail* sure to come within a few paragraphs — but it did include a handy timeline and some dollar estimates: (more…)

Oh, I’m not done with the Commentards yet. Here’s what Sam Munson highlighted as the Comment(ard) of the Day: (more…)

The worst blogger on earth, writing for the worst site on the world wide web (including all the porn), demonstrates the nonideological idiocy undergirding her entire output quite apart from her laughably slavish partisanship, dishonesty, and stupidity:

Rove’s analysis [of state-by-state contests] should put much of partisan punditry into proper perspectiveational polls are fun but largely irrelevant. Remember Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani’s double-digit leads months before the first votes were cast?

Jesus H. Christ. How many confusions is it possible to pack into two short sentences? (more…)

For reasons I might explain some other time, I have the professional qualifications of a NCAA strength and conditioning coach. So it raised my eyebrows just a bit to come back from al-Quds to the land of Coca-Cola to find Matthew Yglesias offering Michael Phelps the sort of advice you’d expect a professional blogger to offer a champion swimmer:

The story [of Phelps eating ≈12000 calories/day] is written in such a way as to make it seem as if he eats this exact same set of meals every day, but it seems to me that if you’re in a position to eat so much you ought to take advantage of the situation and incorporate more variety.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and again, no. That’s insane. (more…)

One last thing before I leave for the Holy Land: Anyone who hasn’t yet seen this needs to drop everything and watch.

Contra David Weigel’s prediction (linked below) that John McCain’s lies about Barack Obama would blow up in his face, Daniel Larison notes that McCain has a history of getting away with this sort of thing:

Back in January, the media criticized McCain for his lies about Romney, but ultimately forgave him on the twisted grounds that he doesn’t enjoy lying, and so he remained their hero. The same will happen concerning McCain’s lies about Obama.

Ah, but McCain laying about Obama and McCain lying about Romney are not ceteris paribus cases. Everyone hates Mitt Romney. (more…)

Staying classy, the McCain campaign launches a new Spanish-language ad trying to drive a wedge between Obama and Latinos by dwelling on the senator’s failure to call out Latin American states or cities during his speech in Berlin. This is the kind of high-risk strategy Team McCain will have to pursue to have a shot at winning, but it seems to me a potentially fatal mistake for them to launch these sorts of ridiculous attacks this early. The evidence is mounting that the mainstream media are not only falling out of love with McCain, but losing all patience with him — including his most preposterously stalwart defenders. And it’s only the beginning of August. The conventions are still weeks away. Unless the Obama campaign is struck by sudden fatal incompetence, the likeliest way for this campaign to play out is surely the scenario David Weigel envisions: “at the rate McCain’s cranking out attack ads and lines about Obama lusting “to lose the war,” the higher the odds he’ll wreck his image. And then Obama can say whatever he wants about McCain without much blowback. I can’t believe McCain doesn’t remember how this works.”

Sincere thanks to Rick Perlstein and Eve Fairbanks, whose (apparently independent) detection of Riefenstahlian themes in John McCain’s execrable “celeb” ad makes my view that the shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were meant (in part) to play on racial anxiety about black man/white woman pairings the sensible centrist position. Now, nobody besides the most preposterous of pro-McCain hacks is actually defending the content of the ad, but the fact that people I respect and admire immediately found it as obvious that there are no racial undertones to the ad as I found that there are such undertones gives me pause (and I hope, gives them pause too). Don’t just take my word for it; here’s Robert George, who appears to be of at least two minds on the question, noting that the fear-of-miscegenation trope has particular resonance when the women concerned are blondes. In other words, this is not an open-and-shut case.

(more…)

The Etonian, Oxonian, Bullingdonian Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson endorses. Which only serves to underscore the McCain campaign’s point that Senator Obama’s global popularity makes him comparable to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

There’s an old wistful joke I heard frequently in my days as a Dissentnik to the effect that if you asked the old New York intellectuals about their favorite flavor of ice cream, their answer would begin with an analysis of the division of labor in ancient Babylon. The roots of the latest round of hostilities among rival Jewish political camps — in addition to the Daniel Levy summary Jim links downblog, check out Todd Gitlin — stretch back at least as far the origin of the admonition within the community not to air out grievances “in front of the goyim.” That’s what makes the apoplexy over Joe Klein’s references to “Jewish neoconservatives” and “divided loyalties” so silly. Head over to Commentary’s “about” page. Notice the fourth tab down on the TOC on the left, “Israel, Jews, & Judaism,” falling underneath “Politics and Society,” “American & the World,” and “Culture & Religion.” Now have a look at their mission statement:

Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards. [my emphases]

In other words, the magazine that regards itself as “the flagship of neoconservatism” regards the question of “the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel” as on a par with the most important of all political questions. More precisely, of course that’s Commentary’s position. It is a Jewish neoconservative magazine, until recently funded by the American Jewish Committee, whose fundamental political allegiances are to a set of now-familiar foreign policy positions both for the United States and Israel. What exactly is one supposed to make of a group of strutting, ignorant, dishonest, censorious Jewish bullies who accuse other Jews of being anti-Semites and self-loathers for pointing out their divided loyalties when the bullies themselves advertise those divided loyalties prominently on the website of their “flagship” publication? What Joe Klein’s statement of the obvious — and the Commentary apparatchiks’ increasingly embarrassing failure to enforce the equation of stating the obvious with anti-Semitism — has helpfully demonstrated is that these bullies are as powerless as Polonius and his wagging finger unless people choose to be afraid of them. (more…)

Once and apparently no longer future McCain strategist John Weaver got a load of the maverick’s latest spot — that would be what Atrios aptly calls the “uppity negro who wants to fuck your sister” ad — and he’s had enough: (more…)

Not “General Betray-us,” but this attempt to capture the youth vote what vote exactly? by likening support of Barack Obama to herpes. Well done folks. Glad to see you’re putting your members’ dues to good use:

(more…)

In due course, I should have something more substantive to say about all this (you can probably guess where my sympathies lie), but for now, I’d just like to pose the open question of whether gentiles find this sort of thing remotely interesting. I’m not referring to the debate over US foreign policy towards Israel and the middle East, which includes a surfeit of material that should hold most people’s attention, but the second- and third-order rearguard action amongst neocon and anti-neocon Jews over who is and isn’t a true friend to Israel, a self-loather, etc. I’d guess that bitchy infighting is generally amusing, all the more so when it involves infighting over who truly represents maybe 1% of the electorate, and especially given what must be the immensely entertaining paranoid insecurities of one of the sides in the squabble, but only up to a point. After that, it becomes as byzantine and dull as Keith Gessen’s feud with Gawker. (Not exactly relatedly (but this doesn’t seem to deserve its own post), I might be missing the point and/or joke Spencer Ackerman is trying to make here, but it seems neither mysterious nor disappointing to me why the Hill didn’t assign Jackie Kucinich to do a write-up of how hot her step-mother is.) But my intuition about what the non-chosen make of Semitic royal rumbles is surely corrupted by lifelong exposure to them, so I’d like to open up the floor especially to those of you who aren’t fellow Red Sea pedestrians. A corollary question: more Jew/Israel content at AotP, or no?

It’s good that Ezra Klein is kicking off the inevitable word games with the name of the likeliest next VPOTUS, Tim Kaine, but I would have expected him to do a little more than Kaine-can/can’t puns given the richness of the material. We are, after all, talking about the most ubiquitous fantasy villain name ever.

(more…)

Dick Armey just now on MSNBC: “John McCain knows that tax bills originate in the House of Representatives.” So let none say that Senator McCain doesn’t have a goddamned clue what he’s talking about. He’s seen that Schoolhouse Rock video, like, twice.

A further word about my musings on how to shift the judicial and regulatory system to be more congenial to personal liberty (by means of maximally severe punishment of violations of what laws and regulations remain): According to the framework I’ve sketched, drunk drivers would get away with their DUI if they didn’t get caught, and face no punishment at all, whereas drunk drivers who get caught would face punishment; that is (duh) already the case, but the difference is that in my framework, those who get caught would face never being able to drive legally again, so the gulf between the two outcomes, despite there not being any inherent moral or public-interest difference between the two cases, would be greatly amplified.

(more…)

My post downblog on Bob Novak’s hit-and-run on an elderly pedestrian sparked a debate on access to driver’s licenses and whether senior citizens should be required to retake their driver’s tests. Of course, because seniors vote in disproportionate numbers and have powerful lobbies representing them, any policy of singling them out for increased scrutiny is a non-starter. But that’s not so bad, ultimately, because raising the standards on driving tests, and requiring re-tests at regular intervals throughout one’s life — perhaps every 5 years, perhaps every 10, perhaps every 20 — would be both fairer and better policy. The fact is that there are all sorts of reasons why one’s competence behind the wheel can decline, some related to aging, many others related to any number of chronic physical and mental conditions that can strike at a variety of ages. And though such a policy shift would (obviously) impose new restrictions on drivers, a) the benefit — namely fewer drivers on the road and much greater competence among them, hence much safer roads — presumably outweighs the burden of spending a few hours at the DMV every so often, and b) there is no real legitimate libertarian concern in the first place, because except on privately owned tracks, getting behind the wheel doesn’t just impose risks on a driver and those who voluntarily ride with her. And perhaps most importantly, c) significantly ratcheting up the standards for acquiring a driver’s license can be a stepping stone to making society friendlier to liberty in general. With greater confidence that drivers are for all intents and purposes uniformly competent to handle high-speed driving situations, for example, there shouldn’t be any barrier on non-libertarian grounds to raising speed limits and/or creating autobahn-type options which would, in turn, greatly ease road congestion and traffic-induced stress, and thus be a boon both to productivity and overall quality of life (even if only at the margins).

(more…)

AOTP readers are more than familiar with a large cross-section of the strong, and arguably decisive objections to voting for Senator Obama. But the problems we libertarians/civil-libertarians/anti-warriors have had with the candidate, especially recently, hardly exhaust the very good reasons to oppose him. Someone for whom opposition to abortion rights and other forms of reproductive freedom is more salient than any other issue would be more or less rationally obligated to support any marginally better (by those lights) alternative. Likewise with gay marriage and other social conservative issues. A sufficiently rich person motivated exclusively or nearly so by short-term self-interest — especially on the assumption that restrictions on liberty don’t really apply to persons of sufficient wealth — would have a clear rationale for supporting Senator McCain, which conclusion could only really be shifted by an antecedent shift in that person’s priors (i.e., getting her to take other factors into consideration besides her marginal tax rate). There’s lots more where those examples came from, and there are people who can make the good case against Obama much more persuasively than I can.

(more…)

Granted, having enemies with axes to grind is just part of the job description of being the most uniformly detested man in Washington. But seriously, what would be fair odds on a bet that Bob Novak is telling the truth when he says he didn’t notice the pedestrian he hit, and that eye-witness David Bono is not telling the truth when he says that the victim of Novak’s hit and run was “sort of splayed into the windshield”? (The two propositions are logically compatible of course, but if both are true Novak has no business holding a driver’s license.) I don’t think I’d take less than 10:1. Also — can we keep it real here? — what are the odds Novak hasn’t, at some point in his long journalistic career, killed at least one pedestrian in a hit and run and gotten off scot-free. Not to make light of an increasingly serious situation — quite the opposite actually — can we at last have a long-overdue national conversation about requiring the elderly to retake their driving tests? Even without the accidents due to inattention or dulled senses, driving 35 m.p.h. in a 65 m.p.h. zone with the emergency brake on is fucking dangerous. What other licenses are good for life with no upkeep required? And do any of those confer the right to place other people’s lives at risk?

Back when depraved torture enthusiast, dissembler, and Princeton admissions error (it happens) Michael Goldfarb officially began collecting paychecks directly from the McCain campaign instead of the Substandard, John Schwenkler tried to make the point that McCain’s hiring of Goldfarb reflected poorly on Honest John given a) Goldfarb’s depravity across a spectrum of issues, and b) Goldfarb’s resemblance to the more sociopathic elements of the Bush administration, the latter of which doesn’t aid Team McCain’s efforts to dodge the “McSame” label. For that, John was taken to task by, among others, Reihan Salam and James Joyner, who noted that Goldfarb was hired to head up the campaign’s online communications — a job for which his work experience from Time.com to the Substandard presumably qualified him, and in which role, in any case, he would not be shaping the candidate or the campaign’s beliefs, but rather, expressing whatever beliefs the campaign instructed him to express. Though true, this defense of Goldfarb (or at least his employment) misses the crux of the matter, which is that yes, Goldfarb was not brought on board to drag the campaign down to his level of loathsomeness; contrarily, one only hires Michael Goldfarb as one’s communications point man if one is already thoroughly loathsome. There is no shortage of talented young-ish McCain-backing writers with ample new media experience who could do a fine job in Goldfarb’s position — the (GOP affiliators among) David Brooks’ Dirty Dozen, incl. Reihan and Ross Douthat, come to mind — without, to put it in McCainian terms, utterly destroying the campaign’s claim to honor. They hired Goldfarb because they never had any honor in the first place.

(more…)

Since I devoted far, far more words than Dick Morris deserves last week to dousing the Dickster’s fatuous column about a supposedly tied race between the presidential candidates, it would behoove me to point out that a trend towards McCain over the last couple of weeks is discernible at this point, as reflected in both FiveThirtyEight’s analysis and the rolling average of polls, both of which are converging on a 2 point Obama lead. By the same token, the notion that the race is tied remains spurious.¹ For these reasons, as well as those adduced in my prior post, I would caution Obama supporters that today’s Ras poll showing Obama ahead in Florida, and yesterday’s Ras poll showing McCain ahead in Ohio, are considerably more likely to be statistical noise than accurate representations of the conditions of either state race. (Indeed, outlying surveys ought to dampen confidence in Ras’s accuracy as against other pollster — not that Ras is particularly bad (or good), but rather that the field of polling is so fraught with error that an individual survey is a nigh-on-worthless datum.) Not that that is going to deter partisans from trumpeting the results they like or ignoring the results they don’t.

(more…)

The most valuable consequence of the Maliki government’s unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama’s 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of US forces is not the blow it deals to the John McCain campaign, but that it has forced the war party to drop their ridiculous pseudo-humanitarian, pseudo-democratic conceit, and choose either naked imperialism, or abandoning their position.

(more…)

Daniel Larison, who knows better, throws caution to the wind and decides to defend the credibility of a Dick Morris column. Has anyone ever made money on that bet? In the Morris column in question, Tricky Dick puts forward the thesis that the presidential race is in fact tied, and times it perfectly to coincide with the late week dip last week in Obama’s numbers in one prominent daily tracking poll, but not to coincide with those numbers predictably reverting to the mean of a modest but unequivocal and stable Obama lead. Having completed that sleight of hand — have you spotted how he knew which card was yours? he’s resting every word of his column on a single poll from which, at the time of his writing, drawing any strong conclusions was literally unintelligible, and which was contradicted by nearly simultaneous polls; and did I mention that the solitary result upon which the whole charade hangs happens to conform perfectly to P. Dicky’s pre-existing biases?; really now, I’ve seen birthday magicians whose tricks showed fewer seams and took longer to crack — the Dickster then projects his own biases onto the electorate as a whole, under the pseudo-objective guise of listing Obama’s flip-flops on salient issues in the campaign, thereby (since he presents neither evidence nor argument for their salience) just gruesomely begging the question a second time (the first time being his mendacious assertion of an Obama ex-lead). In other words, bullshit from top to bottom, an effort tha not only fails to add any value, but destroys existing value. In yet other words, exactly what one expects from a Dick Morris column.

(more…)

Doing research for an article about US-Iranian relations coming (relatively) soon to a newsstand near you, I encountered some eye-grabbing verses from the Shahnameh (”book of great kings”), the national epic not only of Persia/Iran, but the whole expanse of the Airyanem Vaejah (modern Persian: Iran-vez, whence the name “Iran”), the “Aryan lands” divinely consecrated by Ahura Mazda and civilized by Cyrus the Great (Old Persian: Kurush Xsyathiya Vazraka) and his descendants. The epic poem was composed by Ferdowsi c. 1000 years after the birth of Jesus and somewhere between 1100 and 7000 years after the birth of Zoroaster (Avestan: Zarathushtra, modern Persian: Zartosht). It includes these lines: (more…)

A heartfelt congratulations to Sarah Silverman, a phenomenal talent, a living testament to the decline in Christopher Hitchens’ acuity (is there really anything surprising about the fact that his defense of the Iraq war has deteriorated into a denial of the principle of scarcity?), and scourge of dolts like Lambert who confuse feminism with hating fun. Silverman appears to have finally woken up one morning from restless dreams to discover that her bedmate was a monstrous vermin. At last, after five long years of wandering out of the land of Egypt and into the House of Bondage, there is no reason for feeling residually guilty about being a fan of hers. So congratulations as well to America and the broader English-speaking world (presumably her comedy suffers in translation). Note that the news comes during the July 4th season, and on Bastille Day. I doubt those are coincidences. USA #1!

(more…)

Downblog, re: the flap over the New Yorker cover, I asked in passing: “Anyone care to wager how long it will take an idiot at Commentary or the Substandard to suggest that the joke is really on the New Yorker, since in their parallel epistemic universe Obama does have troubling connections to radical Islam…The over/under is 4:30 pm EST, today, Monday.” Sure enough, Abe Greenwald at Commentary, in two posts timestamped 10:02 and 11:55 am, respectively, first writes: “In assuming that the serious Right seeks to burlesque Obama as the embodiment of our anti-American nightmares, the New Yorker burlesques itself.” And then, still commenting on the New Yorker not quite two hours later, he adds: “You know, if Obama is going to keep ex-terrorists around, he should at least utilize them.” Attaway, old sport, the credibility of the Commentary brand isn’t going to maintain itself. Anyway, the unders have it.

(more…)

As expected, the witless overreaction to a Bernie Mac riff that Mona mentioned has metastasized into regions of the internet where irony goes to die. And boy oh boy, the combination of exemplary hackery and hysteria yields a mighty entertaining synthesis. Take this bit of apoplexy from Lambert of Corrente Wire, the lead blogger of one of the most prominent pro-Clinton blogs during the primaries. He (I think he’s a he) writes: (more…)

The fact that John McCain doesn’t know or understand, as noted below, the mechanism by which Social Security is funded, tends to vitiate whatever credit he might derive from his statement that the Social Security system is an “absolute disgrace.” (For example, since he has no rational grounds to support his view, it provides no basis for arriving at further positions of equal justificatory standing.) Nonetheless, he’s right.

Last week, John Schwenkler posted the latest in a series of well-taken criticisms of those of us anti-warriors who plan to vote for Senator Obama. The fundamental conflict here is between John’s claim that “if we all beat the drums nice and loudly on the issues that are close to our hearts and refuse to join into marriages of convenience where too many core principles are violated, there’s the possibility for a real shake-up,” and mine that the best outcome of this election at any possible world within the inner (relevant) sphere of possibility (to borrow a Lewisianism) is an Obama victory. There’s certainly nothing I can say to decisively refute John, and I feel somewhat sheepish trying, since an occasion on which, ahem, Bismarck’s maxim that “politics is the art of the possible” applies is also highly likely to be an occasion on which Orwell’s maxim that politics is “the defense of the indefensible” applies. By the same token, I don’t see how John can decisively refute my position either. The stalemate is something like Schopenhauer’s description of the philosophical sceptic (from memory, not verbatim): a knight guarding a fortress which can never be conquered, but from which he can never sally forth to challenge others. (John’s the one with the morally unblemished position here, so I take it he’s the knight for purposes of this metaphor.)

(more…)

The Economist is on-target in their analysis of why the latest New Yorker cover is bad news for the Obama campaign. The caricature of Barack decked out like Muammar Gaddafi fist-jabbing a camo’d, AK-wielding Michelle, is so clearly and profoundly over the top that there isn’t any non-negligible possibility that it’s anything but satire; as satire, there is really nothing objectionable about it; in fact, it makes the Obama campaign’s point; and if there are any New Yorker readers who fail to pick up on the satire, Ripley’s would like to have a word with them. The problem is that the images are going to circulate, firstly, among non-New Yorker readers who see the magazine cover in person and don’t understand satire, and secondly and crucially among TV chattering heads whose job it is to be incapable of appreciating irony, and who will ever so earnestly recirculate the cartoons, devoid of context, to an audience orders of magnitude larger than the magazine’s readership [but Remnick & co. hit all the right demos -- ed.]. What will be the net effect of the wide-scale circulation of such images? It’s hard to imagine them achieving anything on balance besides pushing some people in the direction of believing there is something fishy involving Obama and Islam and/or terrorism. Though I suspect the impact will ultimately be too marginal to matter.

(more…)

As someone who wants John McCain to lose (and lose badly), I’ve been hoping he’ll pick Mitt Romney as his running mate, and fearing that he’ll pick Mark Sanford or Sarah Palin (and indifferent to Tim Pawlenty). Well, the last few weeks have taught us that any divergence from Team McCain’s narrative of abundant maverickiness and heroism is tantamount to slandering the senator’s military record. So I assume this means Sanford’s out. Mittmentum, baby!

Inspired by this post by Emily Gould, I went back and listened to Exile in Guyville, which I haven’t listened to since high school even though it’s been on my itunes for ages. Two thoughts that intersect: Exile is very, very good; and it still holds up 15 years later. Liz Phair’s more recent output, especially her 2003 self-titled album, isn’t as good as Exile. That’s partly because a wildly successful debut album (novel, play, movie, art exhibit) is likely to capture the decades of angst and insight that inspired its contents (if it doesn’t, that’s an indication that the debut wasn’t very good, despite being successful). A follow-up, on the other hand, is either going to be repetitive or else constructed out of only a few years of new experience at most, i.e. an order of magnitude less experience (which is likely to be less inspirational raw material anyway). Some very rare, very talented, and very lucky artists can produce second- and third-acts that are better than very good debuts; but (it’s analytic that) those artists are very rare. An artist who is only lucky and talented enough to produce an exemplary debut is still extremely lucky and talented — and therefore much more talented than the median art consumer.

(more…)

Matt Yglesias notes that movement conservatives seem to have succeeded to a significant degree in making support for torture an indispensable commitment of anyone who gets to call herself a member of the conservative movement. (Presumably, this counts as evidence that Jesse Helms might really have been a conservative par excellence.) Now, nanny-state liberals like Matt might have some public-interest based objections to obliging those who wear shirts that say “I’d rather be waterboarding.”† However, as a Nozickian libertarian who thinks the night-watchman state is as close to utopia as it gets, and who thinks that one should observe broad interpretive charity and take people at their word, I therefore have no problem at all with people who would like to be waterboarded having their wishes fulfilled, or with anyone who endeavors to assist in fulfilling those wishes. On the contrary, I say, let’s maximize the total utility of the world by making sure everyone who would “rather be waterboarding” has her preference realized. Indeed, if an appropriate form of utilitarianism is correct, one might have an obligation to see to it that those who would “rather be waterboarding” get waterboarded.‡

(more…)