Something wrong invaded my sight in the beer aisle, namely, an obnoxiously named product called Whale Tail Pale Ale. The name sounds like a second grader's poem. It grabbed my attention, and I guess that's the point. But it also raised my ire. This silly-sounding beer (Yeah, "ale." That's right. I'm calling you beer!) cost $10.59 for a four pack. Momentarily stunned that four packs existed, it nearly escaped my notice that, through some marketing Jedi Mind Trick, the beer company charges more for four beers than most other beer companies charge for twelve.
Beer is supposed to be sold in divisions of six, decree the beer gods. Who drinks four beers? Beer nerds who drink Whale Tail Pale Ale, that's who. Beer nerds? They are effeminate men who would rather be drinking wine but drink beer to convince themselves, their wives, and everyone around them of their manliness. They would chant an affirmation, but Whale Tail Pale Ale works just as well. The $10.59 price and deliberately quirky four-pack packaging says to the beer nerd: buy me. It says to the beer drinker: smash me.
So fascinated/disgusted by the $10.59 Whale Tail Pail Ale, I scanned the beer aisle last night for other offenders. I found something bedecked in fleur-di-lis called Don de Dieu, four of which cost $9.99. This was a deal compared to Scotland's Legends Skull Splitter--$18.59 for a four-pack! Brewed closer to home is the appropriately named Midas Touch; $12.59 will get you four of these "handcrafted ancient ale," made from "barley, honey, white muscat grapes & safron." They are not going for that freeze-wave Coors Light Silver Bullet Train demographic, are they?
There's something amiss at package stores, (that's what we call store-type establishments that sell alcohol in the northeast). I inveighed against excessive prices at bars in a post last year. Now it's the packies that have brought out the Bill Bixby in me. Beer nerds, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.
The packaging and price of microbrews hypnotize beer nerds into believing that they're buying great beer. Someone is laughing hard counting his money. My strong suspicion is that there is no such thing as a microbrewery, just one enormous Anheuser-Busch style megacorporation that produces one beer with a wide variety of packaging. The formula goes something like this: 1. Devise a gonzo name, e.g., Salty Dog's Magiclicious Wheat Stout or Big Bob's Bongo Bock; 2. Splash lots of color on the packaging, as if one were buying not a man's beer but a child's juice box; 3. Say that your beer is brewed in Vermont; 4. Charge for a six-pack (or even a four pack) what domestic brands charge for a twelve-pack; 5. Make the beer heavy enough so that drinking twelve of them at a sitting will surely induce vomiting, or at least the feeling that one has eaten four loaves of bread.
The economics of beer works in strange ways. Instead of low prices attracting consumers, they scare them away. High prices convey the idea that this is a good beer. Low prices are the kiss of death. Budweiser, Busch, and even Schlitz are all good beers who hang out with a bad crowd. If you fraternize in the cooler with Meisterbrau and Naragansett enough, people are going to start thinking you are like them. But Schlitz, Busch, and company are different, even if their prices are the same. Don't tell that to beer snobs, who run from a $15 case as if it were botulism on sale.
Stella Artois is more their style. The advertisement slogans, "Reassuringly Expensive" and "Perfection Has Its Price," are a far cry from "Put a Little Weekend in Your Week." But they make the point: you are better than the people who drink Coors. It's as if one separates oneself from the riffraff by the beer one drinks. This is what Thorstein Veblen (a beer nerd's name if there ever was one) called "conspicuous consumption." But true beer drinkers know that it's your behavior, and not the beer you drink, that should be conspicuous.
It's labor day, and as a working man--okay, okay, I spend my days reading and writing, but I once hauled hot dogs up the grandstand at Fenway Park, cleaned latrines in the Marines, and bagged groceries for minimum wage--I protest white-collar, snob beers. I protest them by walking past the Whale's Tail Pale Ales and Scotland's Legendary Skull Splitters of the beer world, my nose high in the air, going straight to the bad-beer neighborhood end of the cooler, and grasping a case of Busch. This weekend, every flipped top, every first sip, every finished bottle slammed down on the table, will strike a blow against beer nerds.
What would a Democrat have to do to lose the support of other Democrats?
The Larry Craig imbroglio, in which Republicans colleagues have quickly called for his resignation, reminds of the time when Democrats.... Well, okay. You got me. I can't remember the last time Democrats asked one of their own to resign over improprieties. I'm not even sure that too many Democrats, at least the ones in Washington, would view two-to-a-stall solicitations as an "impropriety."
When Democrat Gerry Studds and Republican Dan Crane simultaneously faced House ethics charges for bedding teenaged congressional pages, Crane's constituents promptly threw him out of office while Studds' constituents continued sending him back to Congress. Bill Clinton had sex in the Oval Office with an intern and lied about it to a grand jury. One woman accused him of rape, while another alleged that the president's goons harrassed her. Bob Livingston, soon-to-be Republican Speaker of the House, on the other hand, stepped down when it was revealed that he cheated on his wife. Ted Kennedy killed a woman in a drunken auto accident off a Chappaquiddick bridge. Massachusetts voters responded by making him senator for life. Sorry, I can't come up with a Republican parallelism for that one. James Michael Curley? Alcee Hastings? Huey Long? Marion Barry? Barney Frank?
More so than any stance on an issue, the Democrats' situational ethics alienates me. If you're part of their club (Bill Clinton), you can sexually harrass women, lie, cheat, and have sex with interns without repercussion. But if you're a Republican (Arnold Schwarzenneger, Clarence Thomas, Bob Packwood), the mere allegation of any of that will elicit calls for resignation and investigation, usually in that order. In other words, being a Democrat makes you a good person and immune from consequence. Being a Republican automatically makes you a rogue and guilty until proven liberal (see Trent Lott's lame attempt to support affirmative action after his Strom-Thurmond-would-have-made-a-great-president gaffe).
Good people don't necessarily belong to one party or the other. Both parties have dudes peering through your bathroom stall, using cocaine, and taking bribes. The difference is one party punishes such people, the other reelects them.
"A good many people fret themselves over the rather improbable speculation that the earth itself might be blown asunder by nuclear weapons. The grimmer and more immediate prospect is that men and women may be reduced to a sub-human state through limitless indulgence in their own vices--with ruinous consequences to society generally."
Russell Kirk, The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky, 1988
The Fed seeks to manipulate the currency. One of the purposes of the legislative act creating the Fed was "to furnish an elastic currency." It succeeded. During the first full calendar year of the Federal Reserve's existence, the currency inflated at a greater rate than during the previous century and a quarter of the Republic's existence. In other words, inflation was worse in that first year than it had been in the entirety of the previous 125 combined.
There is no direct democratic accountability with the Federal Reserve. Voters can't unseat board members as they can congressmen. Coining money is constitutionally the duty of Congress, but congressmen meekly gave it up to the Federal Reserve--whose board is comprised of presidential appointees--in 1913. They would later hand over war powers and even quasi-legislative functions through the misused executive order. But the Fed was one of the first abdications of power by elected congressmen, who became more concerned with getting elected than with representing the people who elected them.
The term of office for a Fed board member is fourteen years, as opposed to two years for a member of the House of Representatives. They are immune to removal, so they answer to, well, no one. But since the president gets to appoint them, subject to senate approval, let's blame presidents (Isn't that what congressmen wanted us to do when they abdicated their responsibility?) for the Federal Reserve's near-hundred-year war on stable money.
Using MeasuringWorth.com, I crudely calculated the inflation rates under individual presidents. Since the site calculates inflation on a yearly basis, and presidential terms of office--regularly starting in March and then, beginning in 1936, in late January, and irregularly starting upon death or disgrace--don't conform to calendar years, the figures undoubtedly are off ever-so slightly. Nevertheless, they give a good feel for inflation under the various post-progressive era presidents.
Woodrow Wilson 11.09
Jimmy Carter 10.77
Richard Nixon 6.11
Gerald Ford 6.10
Harry Truman 5.71
George H.W. Bush 4.20
Ronald Reagan 3.83
Lyndon Johnson 3.40
Franklin Roosevelt 2.82
George W. Bush 2.63
Bill Clinton 2.54
Dwight Eisenhower 1.47
John Kennedy 1.16
Calvin Coolidge 0.04
Warren Harding -2.35
Herbert Hoover -7.27
Alas, even presidents do not know in advance the policies their appointees will pursue and can't be held responsible for board members serving during their presidential terms who were appointed by previous presidents. So we're left to blame people whose names we don't know, whose faces we've never seen, and whose jobs we can't take away. And this was perhaps the idea of progressive-era reformers: empower unelected technocrats, geeks, and managers, and emasculate elected officials, which is another way of emasculating the citizenry.
The University of Vermont just spent $10,000 adding four "gender-neutral restrooms" to cater to the campus's transgendered community. Annie Stevens, a campus life official, told the Associated Press, "It's about inclusivity and accessibility and the importance of meeting all people's needs, not just a few." No, it's not, it's about liberal administrators making themselves feel good by fooling themselves into believing they are on the cutting edge of the latest civil rights battle. Anyhow, in an effort to help the University of Vermont better serve its transgendered community, I am petitioning the FlynnFiles readership on ideas for a symbol to designate the "third" bathroom. Men's rooms get the, well, men's room symbol, and women's rooms get the, well, women's room symbol. They are internationally recognized. What should the symbol for the "third" bathroom look like? Let's see your ideas in the comments section. The University of Vermont is counting on you.
The Federal Reserve poured $17.25 billion into the market today, following a month in which it released more than $100 billion. The moves, supposedly, will help lenders imbroiled in the crisis enveloping their industry. Like most things the Fed does, I have no idea what its effect will be. I don't second-guess the Fed's complicated individual moves because understanding them is beyond my limited scope of economics knowledge. The Fed itself is another matter. It's fairly simple.
In 1790, $1 was worth, well, $1. By 1912, $1 had balloned to $1.06. That's right, from the First Congress until the Sixty-Second Congress the dollar had inflated just six percent. That $1 from 1913 is now worth about $21.50. Or, viewed from the current perspective, today's dollar is worth about a 1913 nickel.
What happened in the republic's first century-and-a-quarter or so that did not happen in the ninety-five years since? Congress abdicated its Constitutionally-mandated responsibility of coining money. In 1914, the Federal Reserve took over. The result has been a manipulated, fraudulent dollar.
For anyone interested, an excellent website called MeasuringWorth.com, run by economists Lawrence Officer of the University of Illinois-Chicago and Samuel Williamson of Miami University (emeritus), calculates the value of the dollar over time. Inflation is slow and barely noticable. It's like that boiled frog analogy, where it's best to make the pot feel initially like a hot tub, with the temperature gradually increasing. The frog, then, won't leap out. Before the frog knows it, he's cooked--literally. It's the same with inflation. It doesn't knock you over the head and steal your money. It works methodically, subtly. Then you wake up and ask yourself why a pack of chewing gum costs a $1.16, why you can't rent a room for $300 a month anymore, or why it costs $10 to go to the movies.
Inflation is another way of saying an unstable, dishonest currency. Whether dubbed greenbackers, bimetallists, progressives, or New Dealers, whether in the 1860s, or 1890s, or 1930s, whether through the mouth of Edward Kellog or William Jennings Bryan, currency depreciation has been a longstanding leftist goal. The Left initially failed in making the dollar in your pocket today worth less than the dollar in your pocket yesterday. But it persevered, and persevered. It's success on this front is so total that even many of those who call themselves "conservative" view criticism of the Fed--I speak of criticism of the institution's existence and not mere criticism of the institution's decisions--as something akin to talk of the grassy knoll, Big Foot, and Martians.
But conservatism isn't about conserving the successes of liberalism, or progressivism, or populism--or at least it shouldn't be. Conserving, or even restoring, the basic outline of government bequeathed by the Founding Fathers should trump attempts to retain the liberal status quo. The Founding Fathers, as evidenced by the Constitution, directed that Congress--an institution certainly more accountable to the people and the states than the Federal Reserve--should coin money. Article 1, Section 8 grants Congress's powers, including "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." At the very moment when Congress bailed, the relatively static value of money started becoming quite flexible.
Had private merchants fiddled with weights and measures half as much as the Fed has meddled with the dollar they would be in jail. A pound is a pound, a foot is a foot, but a dollar is...whatever the Federal Reserve says it is.
PETA, which led the charge to throw NFL star Michael Vick in jail for staging pit-bull fights to the death, now says the right thing to do with the fifty or so dogs left on Vick's property is to, well, kill them. "These dogs are a ticking time bomb," PETA's Daphna Nachminovitch told the Associated Press. "Rehabilitating fighting dogs is not in the cards. It's widely accepted that euthanasia is the most humane thing for them." Humane? Isn't that "speciesist"? The humane thing isn't always the canine thing. It's good to see PETA choose people over animals occasionally, but it's ironic that Vick will serve more time for killing fewer animals than those two PETA creeps caught dumping dead dogs and cats in dumpsters. That's right, PETA puts perfectly healthy animals to sleep. The duo received, with the help of PETA funded-lawyers, mere littering convictions. Michael Vick may do a year or more in the penitentiary, lose millions of dollars in salary and endorsements, and crucial years for a mobile quarterback.
"America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
--John Quincy Adams, 1821
I detailed the paradox of the New Republic's shoddy journalism alongside its respectable reputation in an earlier post. Its current fact-checking department, woefully inadequate even after so many earlier scandals, gives indication why the magazine finds itself in an embarrassing situation in the Scott Thomas Beauchamp imbroglio. Beauchamp, if you haven't been following this story, authored a series of pieces behind, at least from the perspective of some of the people pushing this story, enemy lines in Iraq.
I don't know if Beauchamp lied in all the contested specifics of his articles and posts. The peer pressure, and above pressure, exerts a heavy weight in the military, so second-hand reports of fellow soldiers disputing his account isn't proof enough for me. Much of what he alleges, at least to one who served in the military (albeit stateside and as a reservist), also doesn't seem so far-fetched--at least to anyone who views American servicemen as fallible human beings and not superheroes or movie characters. So I don't know if a Bradley deliberately ran over a dog or if soldiers ridiculed a disfigured woman. And, with tens of thousands of servicemen in Iraq, I don't think any of Beauchamp's anecdotes, if true, is terribly consequential. But I do know the New Republic and its "Baghdad Diarist" have been deceptive.
The magazine neglected to tell anyone that the army private at the center of this controversy is married to one of the magazine's fact checkers. Had a company, or government department, done similarly, the New Republic certainly would have charged "stonewalling." But this is the press, and they play by rules that differ from the rules they lay down for others. Take TNR editor Franklin Foer's refusal to take calls from adversarial bloggers. What's there to hide, Frank? How would you treat a guy in print who hid from your reporters? And how about the smearing of the New Republic employee who had the guts to hold his employers up to the same standard that they hold everyone else up to?
A second-generation leftist has gone after this whistle blower as, as, as....you're not going to believe this....a HOMOSEXUAL. Omigod, this totally vindicates the New Republic, right? Seriously, what does the fact that this guy is gay have to do with any of this? What a completely lame way of avoiding the issue. Though the New Republic itself did not smear this whistleblower, they did fire him and send him a silencing cease-and-desist letter. And then there is the "Baghdad Diarist" himself, who portrays himself as a good guy turned callous and an idealistic enlistee turned dejected because of the war. Yet, the other woman he was recently engaged to, contends that Scott Thomas Beauchamp joined the army--which, if true, would be absolutely crazy--for the same reason he married the New Republic fact-checker: To bolster his writing career. "He hates the army," she told Pajamas Media "The only reason he joined was because he wanted to have more experience to write about.”
Stephen Glass? A Soviet Utopia? A Communist Spy as Editor? Ruth Shallit? A pseudononymous television critic praising his better known self? The Baghdad Diarist? Never has a publication enjoyed such a high reputation while practicing such shoddy journalism.
"An illegal immigrant who took refuge in a Chicago church for a year to avoid being separated from her American-born son was deported from the United States to Mexico, where she vowed Monday to continue her campaign to change U.S. immigration laws," went the Associated Press article on Elvira Arellano, the celebrillegal alien. Might I point out a problem with this article specifically, and with the coverage of this story generally? Ms. Arellano is not being separated from her child. She is voluntarily separating from her child. She chooses to leave her eight-year-old son in the United States. If she wanted, she could bring him back to Mexico. But the mother-son relationship, for Arellano, pales in importance to the political point, which Fourth Estate propagandists have taken and run with.
Now that Karl Rove is out of work (or at least soon to be out of work), the networks will be clamoring for his voice of objectivity, even-handedness, and commitment to truth to enhance their political coverage. Right? Surely ABC News will offer him a job, say, as the moderator of their Sunday morning political show as they did with Bill Clinton political advisor George Stephanopolous, or, if that's unavailable, a job as a reporter, as they did with John Kennedy press secretary Pierre Sallinger. Maybe PBS will give Rove a platform to air his views, as they did for Lyndon Johnson's hatchetman Bill Moyers. Perhaps the San Francisco Examiner will make Rove the bureau chief of its DC news division, since Chris Matthews, speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, no longer holds that position.
Oh wait, I totally forgot, uberpartisans don't belong in political journalism because of conflicts of interest, the appearance of impropriety, bias, embrace of partisanship over truth, and a curtailed ability to be fair. And we all know that Karl Rove is an uberpartisan. So he should look elsewhere for work. And we all know that George Stephanopolous and Bill Moyers aren't uberpartisans because liberal Democrats can never be uberpartisans. They can only be fair, balanced, objective, and truthful--at least that's how they appear to the liberals who hire them. If the thought of Karl Rove in the moderator's chair or in the news editor's corner office makes you cringe, then you can empathize with conservatives who face the reality of hardened liberal activists--mirror images of Rove--in such positions throughout the world of journalism. Bias? What bias?
On second thought, that computer poll I raved about in the last post, though pretty accurately reflecting my presidential preferences, smells worse than the Jersey Turnpike's Elizabeth exit on a sweltering day. Computer gods, I, a mere human, do not wish to offend. Methinks men, not machines, corrupted this poll.
Of twenty-five questions asked, three are devoted to gay marriage but not one to taxes, government spending, or the war on terrorism (though a few indirectly relate to this last point). There are questions on non-starters such as the Kyoto Treaty, on such leftist punching bags as Guantanamo, Torture, and Wiretapping--Who, exactly, votes on these issues?--and on such locutions as "Abortion Rights" and "Citizenship Path for Illegals." In other words, the questions in this form generally reflect the liberal outlook of its crafter(s?) and are, in several instances, not in any way salient to large chunks of voters.
How would leftists, to offer a couple of examples, react to "Do You Support the U.S. Leaving the United Nations?" or "When Should the United States Resume Control of the Panama Canal?" There are at least as many people concerned about these questions as those concerned with "Torture," a so, so popular political position that undoubtedly, in the imaginations of the people at 2decide who determined the issues, gains the approval of so, so many right-wingers. Really now, how many people, without even so much as a qualifier listed, support torture, and would identify it as a "key" issue? Why not ask about "wife beating" next time? Furthermore, are there candidates for president on record endorsing torture?
Curious about this, I retook the test, leaving every question blank save "Torture." This time, I checked "support" on torture, listed it as a "key" issue, and discovered that my faux position alligned me with Duncan Hunter, Rudolph Giuliani, Tom Tancredo, and Mitt Romney, all, apparently, of the Marquis de Sade wing of the Republican Party. Do they really support torture? I found a web site that claims, "Duncan Hunter stands for torture and the destruction of our freedoms, through and through." But I haven't come across anything where Hunter (or Giuliani, or Romney, or Tancredo) have said that they support torture. Perhaps, through some action that betrays their words, they showed themselves as veiled sadists. I'm not familiar enough with their rhetoric or records to know one way or another, but I'm skeptical that these candidates support torture (save in some theoretical instances which are often the stuff of debates in ethics classes).
Thus, when I was asked late Friday evening who, of all the candidates, proved sympatico with the most respondents, I, reflecting on the bias underlying many of the positions listed, naturally answered: Dennis Kucinich. You are correct, sir. In fact, Kucinich, the candidate who least represented my stances on issues, got eight times more matches than his nearest competitor, Mike Gravel, the senator who time forgot time. The former boy mayor of Cleveland got more matches than all the other candidates combined. Admittedly, candidates on the extreme wings of the party have an advantage in such questionnaires in that the candidate's ability to win is a non-factor, and the candidate's ability to stake positions in line with party purists--who never prove so pure in the voting box--matters most. The candidate who wins your heart, and not necessarily your vote, does well here. And, perhaps, news of the test spread disproportionately to Kucinich supporters.
All that having been said, any poll whose results overwhelmingly suggest that the political positions of Dennis Kucinich--who, should he win, would be the first president from outerspace--are closest to the mainstream might need some fine tuning. Or, perhaps, the initial fine tuning--too contrived to be the work of machines--has already done much to humanize this computerized test.
I took a computerized test that asked my positions, and the weight that I give them, on various political issues. The computer then spat out what presidential candidate my positions mesh with. Who should I vote for? The computer told me Ron Paul. I didn't need some fancy electronic abacus to tell me that, now did I? Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter followed Paul as candidates I have similarities with on the issues. All of the Democrats came in the "negative" category, meaning I'm more dissimilar than similar. (I feel validated.) Perhaps most interesting to me is the fact that Rudolph Giuliani is the only Republican who reaches that "negative" category, coming in beneath, gasp, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In fact, Giuliani comes in beneath all the candidates save one: Dennis Kucinich. This sounds about right. Computers are smart. We should give them all power. Hey, wait! How'd that get in there? Computer, stop it. Stop it or I'll hit "controlaltdelete." Okay, that's better. Anyhow, take the test here and report back to the readership on who the computer says you should vote for, and who the computer says you shouldn't vote for. And then do exactly as the computer says. Hey! Cut that out!
It's been thirty years since Elvis left the building for good. For all the Elvis haters out there, ask yourselves a few questions: What other talent could, thirty years after death, inspire the massive pilgrimage going on in Memphis? Who, before Elvis, needed just one name? Who else stayed home but still made dough by sending his car and clothes on tour? The most talented singer the world has ever known is dead (yes, he is dead, and so is Tupac), but his songs live forever. Here's a few of my favorites:
Suspicious Minds
Jailhouse Rock
I Can't Help Falling in Love
Always on My Mind
Hound Dog
American Trilogy
Share your Elvis favorites and Elvis stories (fictional or otherwise) in the comments section.
I don't have much respect for most political journalists. The inherent dishonesty of feigning objectivity when the whole purpose of pursuing the profession was to push politics is the main reason fueling my disresepct. Two recent examples of that which I speak, one from the Right and one from the Left, give reason to my instinct. The first comes from the Seattle Times, where several journalists erupted in cheers at news of Karl Rove's departure from the White House. "When word came in of Karl Rove's resignation, several people in the meeting started cheering," the paper's editorial page editor notes. "That sort of expression is simply not appropriate for a newsroom." Inappropriate? Yes. Unheard of? No. At least the editor was contrite. I have heard no such apologies from Fox News, which displayed a graphic (Hat tip: Chris Brunner) omitting the top-tier finishes of Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo while including the results from Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani that gave viewers the impression that they had finished close to the top. In fact, they had finished beneath Paul and Tancredo in the meaningless straw poll, but viewers would certainly think otherwise by viewing the misleading graphic. I liked it better when journalists worked for entities with the guts to wear their opinions on their mastheads: the Republican, the Democrat, the Whig, etc.
UPDATE: MSNBC's Joe Scarborough detailed on his "Morning Joe" program how people in MSNBC's newsroom incessantly booed President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address. But remember: they're not partisans, really they're not.
"By a series of reinterpretations of the Constitution, the reformed Supreme Court has so relaxed the austerities of the supreme law as to give government a new freedom. In this process it has cast itself in a social role. Formerly its business was to say what the law was, according to the Constitution; if people did not like the law they could change it, only provided they changed it in a lawful manner by amending the Constitution. Now the Supreme Court undertakes to say what is justice, what is public welfare, what is good for the people and to make suitable inflections of the Constitution. Thus law is made subordinate to the discretions and judgments of men, whereas the cornerstone of freedom was that the government should be a government of law, not of men."
--Garet Garrett, Ex America, 1951
I'm pleased to announce to the FlynnFiles readership the title and release date of my third book. A Conservative History of the American Left, a book that I have been working for a long, long time, will be released by Crown Forum on April 29, 2008. Crown Forum's site has a graphic of the book's cover on its site. I think the dust jacket looks classy. I'm excited about the inside, too. The history of the American Left is filled with some amazingly interesting figures, who, once trends pass them by, get tossed down the memory hole. Well, I descended into the memory hole ("On belay?" "Belay on.") to rescue these great stories, and lessons, for posterity. There will be more detailed information on A Conservative History of the American Left in the coming months. For now, check out the periodic chronicles of the seemingly endless saga of writing this book, which includes teasing the readership about the top-secret project in March 2004, quitting a regular 9-5 job two years ago (Financially, a move that in its brilliance is rivalled only by my purchase of Enron stock), dispensing with trivial matters such as personal hygiene and grooming, going Bohemian on a writing trip to Bohemia, and visiting research libraries and interviewing cool people.
When it's a taunt. That is what President Bush got from CBS News's Bill Plante during the press conference announcing the departure of Karl Rove from the White House. Plante shouted out, "If he's so smart, how come you lost Congress?" This is a jeer of the type one might direct toward an umpire, toward a fellow second grader, or toward the arch nemesis of the villain in a comic book. If you're so smart, how come.... Anyhow, with The Architect gone, who will build it? Now that Bush's Brain has retired to Texas, who will think for the president? Without the Evil Genius, who will become the liberal's punching bag?
A straw poll is like a straw man. It's not real. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won Iowa's straw poll this weekend. Does it matter? Candidates John McCain and Rudy Giuliani declined to participate. Why should they have? The straw poll is a money-raising stunt by the local party that has no bearing on delegate accumulation for the 2008 convention. Voters had to pay $35 for the honor of casting a ballot. Romney is spending a lot of money early. To compete with the more well-known Giuliani and McCain, he has to. In addition to Mike Huckabee, whose strong showing has marked him as the religious right's candidate, Romney emerges as the big winner from the small event. He may trail opponents in national polls, but in crucial states such as Iowa and New Hampshire he does well. Add his three home states--Utah, Michigan, and Massachusetts--and one understands why he is such a formidable candidate. There is also this intangible: Romney seems to want it more. There's less than five months to go before the real deal in Iowa.
Can you say that? Apparently not. Reporting on the Justice Department's study showing that about half of U.S. murder victims are black exclusively focuses on African Americans as victims of violent crimes. But the study also showed that African Americans disproportionately commit such crimes. That information isn't fit for a headline--anywhere. Washington Post: "Study: Almost Half of Murder Victims Black." Detroit Free Press: "Nearly half those slain in U.S. black." UPI: "Nearly half of all murder victims black."
Unity is overrated. Furthermore, it's generally a bad thing. But a liberal writing for the Philadelphia Daily News pines for consensus so much that he wishes for another 9/11 to achieve it. Stu Bykofsky complains of "how splintered we are politically." North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and other such hotbeds of despotism, Stu, have no such problems. Unity generally comes from outrageous violence, either from without, as was the case in World War II, or from within, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Even when unity comes naturally, it usually stems from conformism and non-thinking. I'll take beautiful incoherence, anarchy, and disorder over ugly unity, structure, and rigidity, anyday.
After a five-month hiatus, open-thread Friday is back! Say anything about anything in the comments section. Start a fight! Give props! Get random! The thread is open. Go crazy until it is closed.
Human Events: "Do you see any sort of moral obligation to avoid any sort of Cambodia or Saigon in Iraq, on our part?"
Ron Paul: "I see a lot of moral obligation, it's a moral obligation to our troops, so that no more are killed. So that we don't have 50,000 instead of 30,000 coming back without their arms and legs, and brain injuries. And I have a moral obligation to our taxpayers. I know there is going to be chaos. And there will be. There might be a lot less. Vietnam is now a trading partner. They're westernized. We achieved in peace what the Founders advised, what we couldn't achieve in war. But there was, you know, an up tick in the major problems in there. But it's because we're there. If we leave and there is more trouble, it's not because we left and take my policy, it's because we went in there in the first place, and shouldn't have. So, we do have a moral obligation."
--Ron Paul, Human Events Interview, August 2, 2007
"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," counselled Vince Lombardi. Sports fans adore the statement, but detest athletes that live by it. Barry Bonds's competitive juices were too much to let Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire to have all the glory. Last night, six years after breaking the single-season home run mark, Bonds broke the all-time record. The consumate five-tool player, Bonds was one of the game's all-time greats before steroids ever entered his body. Gaylord Perry cheated his way into the Hall of Fame. Barry Bonds may have cheated his way out of it. His Ahab-like pursuit of 756 will prove a pyrrhic victory too. It was the most coveted number in sports, but not anymore. Its association with Bonds devalues it. Like a dollar after years of inflation, the home run mark after years of steroids is worth less than it once was. But don't hate the player. Hate the game. MLB tacitly approved steroids by looking the other way as home runs put bodies in the seats. Barry Bonds never broke a rule, at least a rule important enough to enforce. Purists take heart: Alex Rodriguez, or perhaps even Junior Griffey--both, one would suspect, clean--stand a chance to eclipse the record in the coming decade.
Rudy Giuliani admits to being a "big admirer" of John McCain, confessing that if he weren't in the race for president he would support the Arizona senator. Translation: Please endorse me when you drop out Senator McCain. I want your donors, your volunteers, and your voters. Rudy Giuliani is not dropping out of the presidential race, so he won't have to support Senator McCain. Senator McCain may be the first top-tier candidate to fall, so Rudy's faux-endorsement is really a clever way of petitioning an endorsement from McCain.
Is there a magazine whose reputation is so impervious to the fallout from its scandals as the New Republic? In its 93-year history, its pages have been turned over to Soviet apologists and Soviet spies, plagiarists and fabulists, and now, apparently, to an imaginative army private whose briefs outlining bad behavior in Iraq by American troops meshes well with the elitist outlook at the New Republic but not with the truth.
TNR infamously reported Soviet Russia as boasting "the most democratic franchise yet devised in our world," among other lies, in the aftermath of the Communists' post-revolution coup. Michael Straight, grandson of the New Republic's founding sugar daddy, served as publisher of the magazine immediately after secretly serving as a spy for the Soviet Union. In those days, the mid-1940s to be precise, the switch in professions required no great shift in ideology. The magazine, however, did shift, from far-left to milquetoast liberal in the 1950s, which is perhaps the greatest factor in awarding it an undeserved immunity to sloppiness, distortions, and other journalistic sins. Its respectable liberal stance makes it, in the eyes of its milquetoast-liberal snobbish readership, de facto a respectable magazine. Being an urban, establishment liberal means never having to say you're sorry. Such are the perks of the enlightened, the elect, the good.
It's not that the magazine hasn't enjoyed lively periods. The editorship of Andrew Sullivan brought out the best of the New Republic. But the liveliest periods in the magazine's history involved not the subject matter its scribes wrote about, but the writers who penned that subject matter. The cardinal sin of journalists--becoming the story--is one that so many of TNR's young writers have had trouble avoiding. In the 1990s, the magazine printed words previously written in other journals by other writers under Ruth Shalit's byline and Steven Glass's wildly-creative fiction under the rubric of serious reporting. I encountered Glass at CPAC, conversed with him for five minutes or so on the type of article he planned to write, learned that he had had a youthful dalliance with conservatism at Penn, and later encountered his made-up article on the conservative conference in the New Republic. A co-worker, who had gone to school with one of Glass's TNR colleagues, called to complain. The response, as I remember it, went something like: we, as conservatives, were sour grapes simply because our side made itself look bad--and got caught. As it turned out, it was ideological prejudices among the neoliberal (whatever that word means) editors at the New Republic that allowed them to print distortions with such gullibility. They saw us as ideologically inspired, unable to see our ugly selves--which in Glass's imagination included coke binges, "whale" hunts, and other nihilistic pursuits among young conservatives--through our blinders. They could not fathom themselves suffering from such politically-motivated delusions. But they did, and apparently, still do.
Now comes word that the magazine's Baghdad Diarist, a private in the army, recanted the claims made pseudonymously on the New Republic's website to army investigators. The jury is still out, as higher-ranking military interrogators could exert such pressure on junior enlistees as to induce a false confession and as the private at the center of the controversy is not available to give his side of the story. But it doesn't look good. The New Republic has admitted inaccuracies in the private's articles, the army concludes that he's a phony, and well, the magazine's track record, if not its reputation, in this regard is not good.
Unlike the Led Zeppelin reunion rumors, the Van Halen reunion rumors are apparently true. A teenager named Wolfgang Van Halen (no relation to Eddie--jus keeding) will play bass along with the Van Halen brothers and David Lee Roth (What? Gary Cherone wasn't available? I demand a refund).
I celebrate the opportunity to see one of America's best hard-rock bands, and understand why the tour will gross a lot of dough. Alas, I sense it really won't work. Here's why:
1. Ditching Michael Anthony, perhaps for maintaining a friendship with Sammy Hagar, is a vindictive move that hurts the fans. Obviously the least visible member of Van Halen, Anthony, if you really, really listen, provides an ingredient to Van Halen that makes it more delicious than, say, Kiss or Motley Crue. I've never really noticed anything spectacular about his bass playing (you have to be a pretty spectacular bass player--Peter Hook, John Entwhistle, Duff McKagan--to make the bass sound spectacular), but Anthony's background vocals are about as good as they come (Mike Mills from REM is also excellent in this regard). Listen to Dance the Night Away, Pretty Woman, and When It's Love. Background vocals make those songs, which is a claim that cannot be credibly applied to too many songs. The novelty of a teenage Van Halen, even if a prodigy like the original Wolfgang, is pretty cool. But it's not as cool as hearing Michael Anthony provide vocal harmonies alongside Eddie Van Halen.
2. David Lee Roth is a shadow of David Lee Roth. Aside from the real David Lee Roth adopting the cartoonish persona of the stage David Lee Roth, which makes for some serious identity issues, Roth has aged ungracefully. Superficial evidence, such as that (not?) found atop his head, abounds. Substantive evidence comes in the form of his voice, which lost that rich, bass quality a long time ago. Sammy Hagar is six years older than David Lee Roth. David Lee Roth looks and sounds six years older than Sammy Hagar. Try not to pull a quad doing a Bruce Lee ceiling kick, Diamond Dave.
3. Alex Van Halen is an okay drummer with the reputation of an awesome drummer. My sense is that this stems from Van Halen the elder playing behind drum kits larger than the van that guy from Silence of the Lambs used to kidnap great big fat women. He's not bad, but Charlie Watts can make better sounds with four drums than Alex Van Halen can make with 144. Now that playing behind a millions drums has taken its place alongside such insecurity complexes as lead singers stuffing socks in their trousers, Alex Van Halen can no longer use his Jedi Mind Trick to hoodwink crowds into believing he is to the drums what his brother is to the guitar.
4. After divorce, hip replacement, bitter spats with lead singers, and too many trips to rehab, Eddie Van Halen comes across as a cranky geriatric. Hopefully, he doesn't play like one on this tour.
5. Something is lost without those dudes in their early twenties, driving camaros, wearing vintage nikes and three-quarter sleeve shirts, sporting barely grown-in mustaches, smuggling joints inside, and bearing strong resemblances to Todd from Beavis and Butthead, who populated the Van Halen concert audience in the golden years. Ditto for the considerably younger concert sluts they brought along. Because they're not there I'm not there.
I know. I know. They will be there. It's just that they will be thirty years older, and so will the band they came to see. It's tough to imagine the excitement that greeted Van Halen when they rolled into town in the late '70s/early '80s. Those Marshall stacks, that lion-haired, karate-kicking frontman, that massive, massive drum set, that overweight guy swigging down a Jack Daniels bottle filled with iced tea, that virtuoso guitarist--what it might have been to have heard Ain't Talkin Bout Love or Unchained. Alas, that's not the Van Halen that's coming to town this fall.
California Republicans are clever. Sick of seeing their state's electoral votes awarded quadrennially to the opposition--Democrats have been able to pencil it in since 1992--they've borrowed liberal arguments against the winner-take-all system to bolster a ballot question that, if passed, would award the state's presidential vote winner just two electoral votes and award the remaining 53 on a district-by-district basis. In other words, instead of Republicans getting shut out of the Golden State's golden electoral prize, the GOP would likely pick up twenty or so electoral votes.
The Constitution established the Electoral College, but it doesn't impose on the states a singular way in which electors are to be selected. Maine and Nebraska, for instance, award electoral votes on a district-by-district basis (with the statewide winner picking up the two additional votes), so California would not be alone should they go this route. Where California would depart from Maine and Nebraska is its likelihood of splitting its pot of electoral votes. Despite allowing for it, Maine and Nebraska, because of small size and political homogeneity, have never split their votes. California, because of its massive size and political diversity, would split votes in every election.
The Electoral College defers to state power, in the same way that the Senate does. It is a part of federalism, like the Senate. Liberals don't like this reminder of the system of governance the founders intended. They see the Electoral College as a relic, making the 2000 election in which Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College all the more stunning. Rather than the states electing the president, they'd prefer a plurality of the people. Naturally, efforts to make the system more democratic, and less representative of the states, meet with their approval.
Alas, the practical results of a principled stand in California on making the Electoral College more democratic would make the White House less Democratic. Wily Republicans can tout the economic benefits the state will reap from advertising dollars and campaign promises once the state is in play again. Presidential candidates will campaign there not just to suck money from the utters of the state's cash cows, or to help downticket candidates, but for direct, personal, and pressing reasosns. More so than under winner-take-all, every vote will count. The votes the state awards will more proportionately resemble the votes the state's people cast. It doesn't eliminate the Electoral College--a liberal's dream since at least the progressive era--but it makes it more responsive to the people.
Many of the arguments Republicans will use to propel the ballot question will no doubt echo those used by Al Gore partisans in 2000. Alas, something tells me those arguments won't be as persuasive to California liberals in 2008 as they were to Florida liberals in 2000.
Ignoring the consequences of actions is one of the markers of American liberalism. A day after declaring that he would use force in Pakistan to root out terrorists, Senator Barack Obama categorically ruled out the possibility of using nuclear weapons to fight terrorism in the Near East. Pakistan, of course, is a nuclear power. Invading or bombing Pakistan, might have nuclear repurcussions. So, if President Obama invades Pakistan in search of bin Laden and his ilk, should Pakistan feel more comfortable or less comfortable about using nukes knowing that Obama has promised to refrain from using them under any circumstances?
Why do people in blue states blame people in red states for their problems? Living in the DC area for more than a decade, I heard about how guns transported from Virginia were the cause of the city's violence and how Republicans in Congress underfunding education were responsible for illiterates graduating from the city's overfunded schools. New Orleans, administered by corrupt Democrats for as long as any of the living have been alive, blamed the Bush administration for a hurricane and the problems that ensued. Now Minnesotans lash out at Republicans for the collapse of a bridge that has resulted in numerous deaths.
Tragedies are opportunities for the vultures. They're circling in Minneapolis. Gross.
One featured post on Daily Kos notes, "it's possible that delayed maintenance--delayed because of budget cuts, as the Republican Pawlenty would rather chop off his own genitals than undo his tax cuts for the rich--may have been a factor." Another blogger imagines that "too many years of 'no new taxes' may be coming home to roost." "Months from now, (hopefully in time for the 2008 election) some commission will issue a report," Peter Smith writes on Huffington Post. "Minnesota will know the causes. If, as some already suspect, showboating fiscal constraints, budget-bending accounting flim-flam, and gridlock born of political ambition led to deferring the project and the expense of repairing the bridge, the pols will be made to know that those kinds of things aren't supposed to happen here."
The disaster happened Wednesday. Its blame readied itself in moth balls long before it occurred.
Government is tasked with the construction and maintainence of most bridges, so the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge will naturally have political implications. That recriminations will involve the federal government will naturally follow the fact that the road was an Interstate (Please inform this ignorant blogger in the comments section who--state or federal--traditionally maintains interstate bridges.). The federal government deemed the bridge "structurally deficient." State officials, including several inspecting professors, didn't see it that pessimistically. No one, it seems, dubbed the bridge so unfit that it needed structural repairs yesterday.
Louisiana had a Democratic governor during Hurricane Katrina and Minnesota has a Republican governor during this bridge-collapse disaster. Therefore, it's okay to blame the governor in this instance when it was verboten to blame Louisiana's governor in the Katrina instance. In 1967, the Silver Bridge between West Virginia and Ohio collapsed, killing 46 people in the worst such disaster in American history. Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was president then, so it wasn't his fault. But in 2007, George Bush, a Republican, is president, so it is his fault.
Do you get it?
These are the rules of big government. The party of bigger government never has to say "sorry." They take on responsibilities that they don't fulfill. When disaster strikes, they demand more responsibilities and damn those who initially warned against their irresponsibility. Thus, big government becomes bigger not despite of but because of its incompetence.
The Congressional Budget Office says of the war in Iraq that "we are now spending on these activities more than 10 percent of all the government's annually appropriated funds." The CBO notes that $500 billion has already been spent on combat operations in Iraq, estimating, conservatively, a $1 trillion eventual cost for the war. Reporting this, the Boston Globe noted that "when Lawrence Lindsey, one of Bush's top budget advisers, estimated in 2003 that the entire undertaking could cost as much as $200 billion, he was fired." Additionally, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer claimed that Iraq would "shoulder much of the burden" for reconstruction, while Defense Department big-wig Paul Wolfowitz guessed that Iraq would "finance its own reconstruction." Should anyone be surprised that cavalier men, who recklessly launched a war of choice, would predict a short, inexpensive war and punish those who dissented?
Imported cars outsold domestic cars for the first month ever in July. There's something symbolic in this. But the substance of the matter is an "American" car now means a car with "Ford," "GM," "Chrysler," or some other familiar label on it. Who knows if my Ford is made in Canada, or Mexico, or somewhere further away? Complicating matters further, Chrysler is now owned--perhaps as a "thank you" to the U.S. government for bailing it out during the Carter administration--by Europeans. Japan's Toyota has factories in Alabama, West Virginia, and Texas. Companies don't have allegiances to the nations they're based in, so why would people in those nations have allegiances to them? If paying Toyota makes better dollars and cents than paying GM, an American will pay Toyota. If paying a Mexican makes better dollars and cents than paying an American, GM will pay a Mexican. All of this seems true of Americans, but the ubercapitalist's notion that this is a universal truth seems to clash with the reality in certain nations, particularly Japan, where up until fairly recently imported American vehicles made up less than one percent of its auto market. Parochialism, nationalism, xenophobia, patriotism (pick your word depending upon your point of view), though not generally more powerful than economics in America, trumps economics elsewhere. Strangely, in exalting economics over all, libertarians and Marxists find common ground. Ideology makes strange bedfellows.
In 2005, Vice President Cheney said that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes." In May 2003, President Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq. Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld guessed before the war, "It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." It's August 1, 2007, four years, four months, and thirteen days after the Iraq war started. The War Between the States, World Wars I and II, and the Korean war all lasted less than the Iraq war has. This is because those wars involved defeating an enemy. This war is about the regeneration of a society. Concrete goals, not abstractions, make for mission accomplished, six-week wars, and putting the enemy in the final throes.
