Sunday night cheap shot

Snarkists everywhere say, "Yes! Yes!"

Just couldn't resist sharing—famed celebrity fiction writer Edward Klein, writing in conservative fanzine New York Post, has been hearing voices, sorry rumors, that the Mittster is tanned and rested (he was always those) and ready too, having suddenly mastered all those pesky issues after eight years of not quite getting there:

“The smart folks in the party are not committed to any presidential candidate this early,” said Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the US Chamber of Commerce, the powerful business lobby that has scored a string of establishment victories over Tea Party candidates in this year’s Republican primaries. “But Romney can’t be dismissed as the guy who lost last time.

“You watch him on TV these days, and he’s a new guy with total command of the issues and a real presence,” Reed added. “He could throw an organization together and get the money.”

Hey, I didn't know Mormons believed in the Real Presence.

One anonymous "wealthy New York–based Republican" told Klein,

“Most of the people I talk to who are involved in Republican politics as donors want a winner.”

And you know how to recognize a winner, right?

It's easy! Just watch Fox.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Tan of the hour

Vixen's right, he should have gone with flat-front instead of pleats. And maybe made everybody else wear pink ties. Why isn't Obama less of a wimp and more like this guy? Image from Society Bride.

The big takeaway for me of last week's tan suit imbroglio was the light it threw on President Obama's war aims, not in the Middle East, but inside the White House. The Anonymous Sources were so startled that they stumbled into a kind of honesty, as reported in The Daily Beast:

Those inside the administration advocating for going after ISIS in both Iraq and Syria were sorely disappointed – and lamented their boss's lack of urgency in rooting out a threat that only days before was being described in near-apocalyptic terms....

There are more things in philosophy...

...Than are dreamt of in David Brooks's heaven and earth.

Harold Lloyd, The Freshman, 1925.

The old moral humilist is back from a brief holiday, somewhat refreshed and in some philosophically louche company, that of Christian psychologist Robert C. Roberts (Baylor University) and regulative epistemologist W. Jay Wood (Wheaton College). It's his more or less monthly book report, on a book by Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).

And what, you want to know (don't deny it!), is regulative epistemology (if not a metascientific stool softener)?

Progressive capital of the lolwut?

Check this out, Jim Hoft, is that a gang sign? Photo by AP.

All of a sudden young Andrew Cuomo has decided he wants my vote. Two mailers yesterday, and a phone call, where I'm afraid I got a little sputtery with what I'm sure was a very nice young volunteer (well, at least nice and young; I'll bet she was paid). One of the mailers said

Governor Cuomo helped New York reclaim its place as the progressive capital of the country

Really?

Well, last time he wanted my vote there wasn't even an election going on, in January 2013, when he delivered his third State of the State message, and announced his plans for a bunch of progressive initiatives. How's he doing on that list, by the way?

1. Called for a minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $8.75. Settled for $8 even. Less than California ($9), Connecticut ($8.70), D.C. ($9.50), Illinois ($8.25), New Jersey ($8.25), Oregon ($9.25), Vermont ($8.73), Washington ($9.32).

Hornendämmerung

Via AZCentral.

Sometimes you just look away for a second and they're gone! One of the blog's favorite conservative characters, Arizona attorney general Tom Horne, who just lost his primary yesterday, according to Ed Kilgore, and will presumably be passing at last through that semifinal revolving door to a consulting career:

Edgy Wedgie

[Producer Deborah Turness's] new vision for “Meet the Press” includes adding a regular panel of journalists who will question guests, something of a return to the venerable show’s original format. “The show needs more edge,” she said. “It needs to be consequential. I think the show had become a talking shop that raked over the cold embers of what had gone on the previous week. The one-on-one conversation belongs to a decade ago. We need more of a coffeehouse conversation." (New York Times)

My proposal for a truly edgier Meet the Press:

PROJECT BELTWAY

The show becomes a kind of reality series in which a group of, say, 10 contestants from the worlds of politics, industry, the military, and the press, etc., try to persuade Heidi and a panel of judges (Cokie Roberts, Ralph Nader, and Howard Stern) that they have what it takes to brand themselves as survivable in the hothouse atmosphere of Washington—a balance between avant-garde and commercial, friendly and freezing, smart and fart.

HEIDI: You know how it is in politics. One day you're in, and one you're out. Right, Cokie?

Each week they perform a different task—trying to have a conversation with John McCain, drafting a budget balancing agreement, eating their way down the midway of the Iowa state fair, and so on, changing with the political seasons. Tim counsels them through, and they ignore him at their peril.

TIM: I'm not sure you should be writing a book about Martin Luther King, Governor Huckabee. Shouldn't you open yourself up to a bigger color palette?

MIKE: I know what I'm doing, Tim. You'll see.

TIM: Well, make it work!

And then on Sunday morning—well, you see what I mean.

We'll just have to muggle through

As our nation lurches from crisis to crisis this summer, with ominous movements taking place everywhere from Afghanistan to Scotland and an increasing climate of unquiet here at home, where institutions as important as Meet the Press rock and teeter toward a possible doom, when what we need most is a voice of unity to speak to our fears and hopes with a calm but convinced voice, one key figure appears to have gone AWOL, abandoning us for the golf course or whatever he does when he's not working, puttering while Rome burns, vanishing on an unprecedented number of vacation days in the face of the people's anxiety and uncertainty.

I refer of course to New York Times columnist David Brooks, who was missing in action during much of July and has now been off again for a week so far with no pretext of "book leave" and no indication of when he plans to return, leaving bloggers bereft and forcing us to write about unpleasant things like murderous cops, murderous Salafi organizations, Ross Douthat, and worse. He needs to speak to the nation in our hour of confusion, and the column he needs to write goes something like this:

In which I agree with Ross Douthat...

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IV, 1911.

...when the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street makes fun of the administration's insistence that there's anything "medieval" about the self-denominated "Islamic state":

The idea that America’s foes and rivals are not merely morally but chronologically deficient, confused time travelers who need to turn their DeLorean around, has long been a staple of this administration’s rhetoric. Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and tyrants in general have been condemned, in varying contexts, for being on the dreaded “wrong side of history.”

Obviously if the would-be Caliph were to be transported back to the actual medieval Caliphate of Baghdad with its alcohol and sexual adventurousness, freedom of thought and easy acceptance of Jews, Christians, Chinese, and even Shiites (Sunnis, however, often had to bend to the theological whims of the ruler),  and art, music, fragrance, he'd want to behead them all or run away.

But I have a little difficulty with the warmed-over Fukuyamism with which he goes onto explain,

The peacemaker malgré lui

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is really not that good at planning:

A 50 Billion Dollar Ghost Town – #Sochi Six Months After Putin Games http://t.co/HGtPczIOBV pic.twitter.com/2JhpbztHmb via @Interpreter_Mag
— Kathryn Brusco (@KathrynBruscoBk) August 21, 2014

So I was pretty startled to see a very frazzled Michael Weiss at Foreign Policy announcing that the "humanitarian" truck fleet breaking into Ukraine yesterday was really a Russian invasion, or rather "the" Russian invasion:

The Ratchet of the Earth

Via New York Magazine, counterclockwise: Beyoncé, Gaga, Ratchet.  “Ratchet Girl Anthem,” a parody track recorded by Philip and Emmanuel Houston, collected tens of millions of Youtube hits. In it, the Atlanta brothers pretend to be ratchet women describing their ilk: They carry outdated flip phones, go clubbing while pregnant, and try to punch other women in the face. “Ratchet is basically a lack of home training — being out in public and acting like you don’t have any sense,” Philip Houston told the Cut. “Putting a weave in the microwave just to curl it, that’s ratchet.”

Old George Will sez (and the National Review reproduces—never noticed it before, but they use as much syndicated material as the Tooterville Gazette, and much of it—this, and stupid Krauthammer—is from WaPo) that he is going to propose a kind of Unified Field Theory of politics in the form of

Running the rhetorical gamut

From Liar Game 156, via MangaPanda.

Alyssa Rosenberg mocked conservative admirers of the film The Giver, dryly, for the suggestion that normal humanity is some kind of special uniquely conservative quality:

the movie makes absolutely clear that it is grotesque to kill a baby who cries when he is not soothed and that something is missing in families designed by the state. Though it may be in Palin’s and Lopez’s interests to suggest otherwise, these ideas are hardly the sole provenance of conservatives. Suggesting that people who advocate for continued access to abortion do not care about the welfare of young children is an unpleasant rhetorical gamut, but often an effective one.

Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review responds:

New York note

Some Twitter idiot from the Southwest borderlands was saying a week or two ago that if "libs" are so worried about unaccompanied kids from Central America fleeing violence in their homelands we ought to take some of them in up here. Which was of course pretty stupid, because there are more of them fostered or staying with relatives in New York than there are in Florida or California, to say nothing of those pathetic whiners in Arizona.

New York Times, August 7 2014.

And New York is handling it pretty well, too, as you can learn from a warm-'n'-fuzzy story from WNYC radio focusing on soccer as therapy for the traumatic soul injury many of these children have sustained. I was really pleased by the attention given to their voices and the lack of attention to paranoid nativist fantasies about how our country is being invaded.

Also, I bet a lot of readers don't realize this is what the South Bronx looks like. Photo by Mirela Iverac/WNYC.

Brief break

I'm not happy with anything I'm trying to write about #Ferguson, and not trying to write about anything else.

I'm happy with Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra op. 6, which I was listening to this morning. Here's the first of them:

First-rate intelligence

Today's David Brooks is written for some reason by Mr. Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, no relation, I believe, who doesn't do it quite as well, but stands in a similar position, urging American conservatives to adopt an innovative "compassionate" conservatism (Hey, kids! Let's put on a show!) with fresh ideas like offering more tax breaks for poor people (look at all tax breaks have done for the rich!) and the inevitable Scott Fitzgerald quote:

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

I can't understand why people think Fitzgerald's Law means if you want to show a first-rate intelligence you must hold opposed ideas in your mind at all times. That's not first-rate, it's irrational.

What Fitzgerald was talking about in The Crack-Up was a serious crisis in his own life that hit him in the early 1930s, a moral-emotional collapse that hollowed him out and left him in despair. The "test" was not to spend the rest of his life living in contradiction but to live through it to some kind of resolution. You have to at least look at the next sentence:

Chris Cross

Why are these men laughing? Via Capital New York.

New Jersey governor Christopher Christie, although his job as chairman of the Republican Governors Association tasks him above all things with working for GOP victories in this year's 36 gubernatorial races, is strangely reluctant to offer any support to the Republican candidate across the Hudson in New York, somebody called Rob Astorino (which would be the Italian for "little goshawk" and not, as I hoped, "little star"—twinkle, twinkle!), against the Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo.

That may be, according to a brilliant analytic piece by Andrea Bernstein of WNYC radio New York. because Christie and Cuomo are practically the same person:

Pretty state of things

Image from Hastings on Nonviolence.

Maureen Dowd didn't like the reporter Judith Miller much. Or rather, she liked Miller a lot, but in a special Dowdy sort of way:

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy -- her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur -- have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Sometimes I wonder if Dowd isn't a fictional character invented by Clare Booth Luce to preserve the worst early 20th-century stereotypes of the independent woman as uncontrollably catty misogynist. Anyhow, what she didn't seem to think at all was that Miller's jailing for contempt of court in the summer of 2005 was a case of "strange and awful aggression against reporters and whistle-blowers". Au contraire!

Heart of Whiteness

Papa K illustrating the "West Side" sign, possibly making a universal gesture of primate territorial challenge as well.

I just found out (via Sick Horses) that National Review has taken to running literary fiction, starting with a charming effort by its "roving correspondent" and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kevin Williamson, entitled "Where the Sidewalk Ends: Danger and Despair in Pat Quinn's Crumbling Illinois".

The story is a journey narrative, a re-imagining of a trip to East St. Louis, Illinois, as an enchanted, surreal landscape seen through a child's eyes, taking its cue, as the title makes clear, from Shel Silverstein's poem:

Decalogical fallacies

Via Retinart.

We the People of the United States of America, in order to have no other Gods before you-know-Who, remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy, honor our parents, not kill, not commit adultery, and all that good stuff, do ordain and establish this Constitution...

No, seriously, where does this shit come from? Where County Commissioner Tim Guffey of Scottsboro, AL, explains to the press about his desire to erect a little group of monuments to the Ten Commandments, which according to him have nothing to do with religion, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence:

David Brooks, Feminist Film Critic

Dark Passage, by Delmer Daves (1947).

I think Brooks's main aim this morning is to display his quirky independence by devoting his Lauren Bacall tribute not to the most cliché moment of her career (from To Have and to Have Not, Howard Hawks, 1944) but instead to the second most cliché moment [jump]

For Mike Brown and the witnesses

BooMan says he's "tired of trying to figure out what happened" in a case like the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, and I am too. I've been tired of it since Trayvon Martin was killed, this whole situation where one set of people is obviously lying and another set of people is plainly telling the truth and I'm going to sit there and try to weigh all the evidence, judiciously, and come up with my own independent conclusion, and I'm not going to do it any more.

I mean, not unless I want to and think I can make a contribution nobody else is making.

Because I don't know much, and am not likely ever to learn much, about the forensics of the thing, the bullet entries and exits, the angle at which the person fell, the identification of screams off cell phone audio, all that. But I'm pretty confident I know who's lying, and who's covering up, and fairly confident I can find out who's corrupted.

The cops of Ferguson are lying, and covering up, and motivated by fear, of being exposed as bigoted murderers and bad cops. The community witnesses (including this one who turned up today at Kos) are telling the truth the best and the most precisely they can. That's all the story I need. You go ahead and sift your evidence, and do your diligence, for the court system and the gearheads, and I'll read it as far as I can, but I'm not working at it. I'm on strike against taking those liars seriously. I'm on strike against disbelieving, "just for the sake of argument", those who are true to the complicated and novelistic way I understand the world.

Michael Brown, via 3chicspolitico.