Instant Grits

One of my late mom's (it's four years this month, still miss you daily) best jokes, belated Mother's Day tribute:

Shopper: I'd like some grits, please.
Attendant: Hominy?
Shopper: Oh, two or three...

True Grits by NibbleMeThis.

David Brooks has put his humble-failed-political-journalist baseball cap back on the rack and shown up in his world's-greatest-education-expert mortarboard, for the first time in weeks or months ("Putting Grit in its Place", New York Times, May 10 2016):

We all know why it exists, but the grade-point average

No, you mean like any time you have a set of integers between 0 and 4 you can calculate the mean and—

is one of the more destructive elements in American education.

No wait, I think I don't know why it exists. Can we go back over that, Prof?

Success is about being passionately good at one or two things,

It is? In what sense? Is it a limit, like it's not OK to be passionately good at three things, or that's the best you can hope for? Is it what high schools or colleges should be aiming at, graduating kids with a minimum number of passionate skill sets, or is it a choice the kids should be making, in contradistinction to aiming at a high GPA, say? Is it a definition of success in school, or is it about preconditions for success in their future lives, that if they don't come out of school with those passionate skill sets they will end up failures as adults?

Nick gives himself a sad

H/t PJ for the idea.

Buster Keaton and Roscoe Arbuckle in Oh, Doctor! (1917), via SilentWeeks.

Shorter Nicholas Kristof, "A Confession of Liberal Intolerance", New York Times, May 7 2016:

Golly, folks, we progressives are supposed to be so open and accepting, so how come conservative intellectuals in our academic institutions are forced to use separate drinking fountains and bathrooms and summer camps? I've been thinking about this because I wrote about it on Facebook. 

That last bit is practically verbatim:

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

He tried saying something about it without thinking, and that didn't work out, so now he's looking at this alternative approach. What strikes me here is something I've never noticed about Kristof, which is that he's really not very good at thinking; his idea of thinking is to assert that something is bad, enumerate many examples of its badness, and declare that something needs to be done about it, for which he may or may not have some specific suggestions which may or may not be of some use; there's no dialectic between, for instance, different ways of approaching the problem.

A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Something

Portrait of Don DeLillo learning that he has fans in the corridors of power. Just kidding. But it's a nice picture. Via Alchetron.

This deeply annoying David Samuels profile of Obama's youthful deputy national security advisor for strategic communications in the Times Magazine—

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru

How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age.

—has been arousing a lot of comment in my Twitter timeline, though very little to none here in our quarter of Left Blogistan, and I feel as if I ought to be reporting on it, even though I'm not quite sure why it's worth noting. Fact is, I'm not quite sure what it's attempting to accomplish, because it seems to be doing two different stories, somewhat overlapping, one about what a gigantic crush Samuels has on Rhodes (they both love the novelist Don DeLillo! It's Kismet!) and the other about how he thinks Rhodes has led some kind of Benghazi-like conspiracy to hide the Truth About the Iran Deal, which is that Obama started negotiating it with Ayatollah Khamenei before the election of President Rouhani, as evidenced by

the letters that Obama covertly sent to Khamenei, in 2009 and in 2012, which were only reported on by the press weeks later.

OK, a conspiracy, if there was one, to delay the truth about the Iran deal for several weeks on two separate occasions in the years before it was negotiated, because I don't know but it looks to Samuels like proof that Rouhani and Republican Guard factions in Iran aren't really at war with each other and thus the Iran deal is really a huge trick being played on somebody by somebody else. Perhaps. Or I may be reading it wrong, because frankly the prose is so simultaneously purple and clichéd, from its first DeLillo name-check—

Annals of Derp: Jonah's MacGuffin Theory

Via Amy Sterling, who's a little worried about Jonah's diet: "heart attack waiting to happen". Seriously, you need to ease up on the brandy and beef suet—and Froot Loops too— and pay some attention to the vegetables.

The derpetology practice here at Rectification Central too often focuses on rebarbative matters like statistics or money or earth science with which your correspondent himself is, to tell the truth, not all that in love or even very familiar. If it's just David Brooks misreading a chart, that's one thing, but frequently we are obliged to deal with the work of real scientists—or economists, which is even worse, imaginary scientists or scientists of the imaginary—and I really have to wonder why I'm working so hard. Can't some qualified person take over?

So it's pretty refreshing when we get Jonah Goldberg turning to film theory, riffing off a 2013 piece by the so-called Ace of Spades, "The MacGuffinization of American Politics".

The Ace's original complaint was the not very original thought that American politics has been turned into entertainment, which he believed had suddenly happened with the election of Barack Obama as president:

Brooks's Imaginary Problem

Alfred Hitchock's The Lodger, 1927. Via somebody's Tumblr.

Shorter David Brooks, "Clinton's Imagination Problem", New York Times, April 6 2016:

Hillary Clinton seems very nice, but her ideas for revitalizing the lives of Appalachian coal miners whose livelihood has disappeared are just the same old stale Democratic nostrums, like trying to create new jobs to replace the lost ones. Instead, she needs to consider some fresh approaches such as that of David Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain, of reweaving the social fabric through relationship counseling and parenting classes. I mean who needs a job when you can get a social reweave?

So he's returned from his excellent adventure in West Virginia, though it remains unclear whether he ever did manage to get out of that hotel room; the only West Virginia experience he discusses is reading the local papers (Charleston Gazette-Mail) online.

From which he learned, of course, that things are pretty dire in West Virginia, as he probably might have suspected already. Indeed he might have been afraid to leave his hotel room, under the impression that the entire population consists of fiendish drug addicts, which would be an exaggeration. As he did earlier this week, he offers some evidence that he recently did go outdoors in Pennsylvania for some reason, and there, certainly, the drug addicts are pretty much wall-to-wall:

Cheap shots: Latino outreach

Like, he hasn't changed his mind, but is vice president a man's job exactly? Image via NewsMax (sorry).

Buried lede department

This paragraph down near the bottom of the Times report struck me this morning: Is Trump selecting a VP candidate?

Still, in some quarters, reconciliation between Mr. Trump and his onetime critics is underway. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who clashed bitterly with Mr. Trump before dropping out of the presidential race, has had multiple phone conversations with him recently, according to Republicans close to Mr. Trump. (Aides to Mr. Rubio declined to comment.)

I wasn't the only one. The Trump-Rubio (Short Hands and Little Heels) ticket could actually be a thing, The Hill was saying, though by afternoon Newsmax was claiming Dr. Ben, the leader of the search team, had ruled it out. Why???

I believe it's because Donald's got a different strategy for getting that all-important Hispanic vote:

Poor Jonah

Update: Hi MBRU fans, thanks Blogenfreude!

Pieter Aertsen, The Egg Dance, 1552. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, via Wikipedia.

Goldberg is so guileless, really, it's almost kind of sweet:

Donald Trump almost never uses the language of traditional American conservatism, with its emphasis on classically liberal notions of limited government, constitutionalism, individualism, and free trade. He prefers to talk about “strength” and “winning” while vowing to restore the “greatness” of yesteryear through his indomitable will.

The language of traditional American conservatism, dear boy, has never won an election and never will, because the voters don't give a shit about it, unless you mean when you're talking about their taxes, and they're the kind of voters (as we mostly are, unfortunately) who look at their paystubs and don't realize that the bulk of what's deducted from the gross pay is insurance for old-age health care, pension, and unemployment, and the amount dedicated to cash for welfare clients and foreigners vanishingly tiny.

Turnout tribulations

Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels in Young Mr. Jazz (1919), from Shari Lobdell.

"If the turnout is high, we win," quoth the Bern, and he keeps saying it, with the implication that all the nonvoters out there are just waiting for some explosion of progressiveness to stimulate them into showing up at the polling place, an attractive idea, certainly, to me; the indifference to politics of the many always seems to me like the main thing stopping this from being democracy, and the solution should be to offer them something worth voting for (which happened, clearly, in the relatively high turnout of November 2008).

Only by Super Tuesday you could see pretty clearly it was not true in the present case, and it began to really irritate me that Sanders kept on believing it, but I kind of stopped trying to prove he was wrong because he didn't seem to be wrong in a very interesting way—not so much a pattern he was missing as no pattern at all—and trying to get a properly numerical grip on it was really difficult, or boring, or both.

Then as the Indiana results started coming in I got interested again, with the exit polls suggesting there was some kind of surge among young voters, with an unusual 47% of the total younger than 45, Was the Sanders prediction starting to come true at last?

We interrupt this program

We're grieving over the Big Lose of Big Cruz, but life must go on!

Cartoon by Steve Benson, via the West Central Tribune of Willmar, Minn.

New from the Sherman Oaks Review of Books:

• A letter from the imaginary editor of the even more imaginary Rancho Cucamonga Review of Books, C.W. (Crinkle Wrap) Charles, in which your correspondent had a collaborative hand
• A follow-up on that infinite number of monkeys that typed Hamlet some time ago—those guys were geniuses, whatever happened to them?
• A heroically individualistic eggplant recipe from the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand
• And much—some—more!!

"Farewell Cruz", via YouTube. I'm not watching it. Just saying.

A choice of embarrassments

Endless Wall Trail over New River Gorge near Lansing. Via LiveAndLetHike.

So David Brooks ("The Choice Explosion") seems to have started his project of atoning for his failure as a journalist and changing the way he does his job, venturing out into that vast dark forest where the Trump voters lurk to get "socially intermingled" with them, trying to find out, as Trump himself would put it, "just what in the hell is going on". At least his column today has a dateline, just like a Friedman column—"Lansing, W.Va."

But he hasn't actually started on any of that social intermingling yet, though it looks like a location well supplied with undereducated and underemployed white guys—not even with a taxi driver.

The real neo-monarchist

Still dead. Image lifted from an openly fascist website (in Spanish).

Stung, no doubt, by the shrieks of derisive laughter that greeted his essay on why our political thinkers should pay more attention to the thinking of neo-reactionaries (not the racism, of course, just the good parts), Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has now issued his "Well, liberals are the real neo-reactionaries anyway" piece. Or liberals are the real neo-monarchists at least. Or "the center-left and center-right rather than the ideological extremes" in "a kind of moderate-middle enthusiasm for crown government, as a means of escape from congressional dysfunction and endless right-left war". Or those identical-twin princes Barack Obama and George W. Bush:

Executive-branch Caesarism has been raised to new heights by the last two presidents, and important parts of the country have responded by upping the ante, and — like ancient Israelites in the Book of Samuel — basically clamoring for a king.

West of Eden: Green Zone update

Sadrists invading the legislature. Photo via Al-Jazeera.

Faithful readers had a chance to learn about this weekend's startling news from Baghdad a month before it happened (as blogfriend MBouffant showed up to notice in comments there), or sort of, when I reported the beginnings of a mass joint Sunni-Shi'a protest movement threatening to break into the Iraqi capital's high-security Green Zone, where foreign VIPs and local politicians are normally able to cut their deals without fear of getting blown up or kidnaped. Or contemplating the faces of thousands of victims of their corruption and irresponsibility.

And now they're in the Green Zone, after I'd more or less thought the whole thing must have fizzled out already, and they're attracting the attention of the New York Times. They've busted in in the hundreds and perhaps thousands, mostly nonviolently and perhaps with the collusion of sympathetic security forces, and rioted inside the Parliament itself, breaking some furniture. So you can say you heard about it here first, if you did.

I seem to be virtually alone in regarding this as a positive development. Atrios and BooMan are sadly rolling their eyes and shaking their heads, and with good reason, over this new evidence of the endless chaos caused by George W. Bush and his companions. I agree it's that, but I think it's something more, as I've been trying to say...

Annals of Derp: Tell me what is Kansas thinking?

Via YouTube.

Rachel Sheffield and Elmore Wallace over at the Heritage Foundation's Daily Dogwhistle write about a major success for Kansas governor Sam Brownback. If you're not reading the rightwing press you may be under the impression that Brownback hasn't been successful in anything—

Brownback pledged to bring 100,000* new jobs to the state in his second term; as of January, he has brought 700. What’s more, personal income growth slowed dramatically since the tax cuts went into effect. Between 2010 and 2012, Kansas saw income growth of 6.1 percent, good for 12th in the nation; from 2013 to 2015, that rate was 3.6 percent, good for 41st.

Meanwhile, revenue shortfalls have devastated the state’s public sector along with its most vulnerable citizens. Since Brownback’s inauguration, 1,414 Kansans with disabilities have been thrown off  Medicaid. In 2015, six school districts in the state were forced to end their years early for lack of funding. Cuts to health and human services are expected to cause 65 preventable deaths this year in Sedgwick County alone. In February, tax receipts came in $53 million below estimates; Brownback immediately cut $17 million from the state’s university system. This data is not lost on the people of Kansas — as of November, Brownback’s approval rating was 26 percent, the lowest of any governor in the United States.

But no, apparently there's this one thing where he's accomplished something according to plan, kicking people off SNAP (or "food stamp") benefits if they don't get a job.

What pulled me in was Sheffield's and Wallace's obnoxious quotation from Lincoln:

Across the Chasms of Segmentation

Image by Peshkova/Getty Images (stolen by corporate bloggers too numerous to mention, at least I'm crediting).

Poor David Brooks ("If Not Trump, What?") back for seconds on the artisanal humble pie with pâte brisée and seasonal fruits, which he'll take à la mode, with a great big scoop of the butter-brickle self-congratulation:

I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country.

Chasms of segmentation! Can't help imagining him somewhere out in the Heartland anxiously searching an Applebee's for the salad bar. "What did they do with it? Is this some of that downsizing?" For now, though, he needs to get ready for his excursion, and he's doing some online shopping:

Comedy is war

Cherry-picking at Stella Creek in the Adelaide Hills. Or maybe a stock photo.

I wanted to say something about that very long essay on liberal smugness or smug liberalism by Emmett Rensin (apparently an anagram, for "Eminent Terms", or maybe "Mr. E. Sentiment") in Vox, which I have not had a chance to read all the way through, as I was having my ironic smile straightened.

In fact I am not planning to read it all because there's too much of it, if you want to know the truth. I'm just going to cherry-fisk, so to speak, picking on the especially offensive sentences as they pop out at me and ignoring the no doubt very significant and judicious argument that Tem Tem Sinner worked so hard to assemble in favor of the stupid argument I discern from this superficial technique, and if you want to complain about it, why don't you just bring it up before the next Blogger Ethics Panel.

But first,

Q. How can you tell when National Review's famed Iraq combat attorney ("Cover me, Jack, I'm going in there as soon as the shelling lets up, with a motion to change venue") David French is lying?

A. When he claims to have had some human experience or other.

As in this contribution on the Rensinade, where he's discussing his own sad experience of the smugness of liberals:

Ross Douthat's Electric Slide

GIF by ifoundabritty.

That Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is such a sneaky guy! Here he is ("Trump and the Madness of Crowds") chewing yet again through the mystery of how an apparently nonconservative person such as Donald J. Trump seems to be capturing the apparently conservative Republican party:

1. They aren't really that conservative:

This [the party's refusal to nominate "mavericks" thought to be not purely conservative from McCain through Kasich] doesn’t mean that all Republican voters care about the conservative movement’s goals and shibboleths. Many clearly don’t, and it was obvious that there was an underserved constituency for policy heterodoxy among Republican voters — especially working-class voters— long before Trump came on the scene.

Getting a Zero

Cats in Finca Vigía. Ernest Hemingway Photographs Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Brooks is still in Cuba, or still using it as a dateline. Naturally his favorite spot on the tourist itinerary has been the farmhouse of Finca Vigía, a few miles outside of Havana, where Ernest Hemingway started making his main winter residence a little before his 40th birthday and his marriage (the third) to Martha Gellhorn, in 1939. Brooks's meditations at that melancholy spot are the subject of his new essay, "Getting to Zero", and it's pretty unnerving.

It takes the form of what could have been a sketch for a chapter on Hemingway in The Road to Character, starting with a quick description of Finca Vigía as the setting, then outlining the elements of the novelist's long decline, as human and writer, during the 20 years he lived there, with his many severe moral failings, and finally looking for that redeeming feature that you can use in your own struggle to become a nice person, with eulogy virtues, like St. Augustine or D.D. Eisenhower. As you work through it, though, you're drawn irrepressibly to another kind of reading. The first sentence—

Havana — Ernest Hemingway’s house in Cuba seems like such a healthy place. It is light, welcoming and beautifully situated.

—for example, immediately makes me think:

Cleveland Park—David Brooks's house in the D.C. area seemed like such a healthy place. It had vast spaces for entertaining.

And when I get to

Post Hawk Ergo Propter Hoc

I'm guessing this (from the January 2013 Senate Benghazi hearings, photo by Alex Wong/Getty North America) is more "In the second place..." than "Peace out!" but it does show her fingers know how to go there.

If you saw that cross-head in Mark Landler's book-promo excerpt (for Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power, being released from Penguin Random House today) in the Times Magazine—

—you might have started feeling a little panicky, and you wouldn't have been alone.

Though you also might want to just take a deep breath and ask yourself what it means, if Carpet-Bomber Cruz, who was still in the race last I heard, doesn't qualify as a hawk. Or John Kasich, who's called for a major US ground force in Syria. Or Donald J. Trump, who may claim (although he's demonstrably lying) to have opposed the war in Iraq back in 2002 but is eager to "bomb the shit" out of it now, and kill all the families of the ISIS fighters as well and send Exxon in to do the nation-building, and thinks Japan and South Korea and Saudi Arabia should have nuclear arsenals. True that Trump doesn't have a lot of respect for NATO, though neither did Donald Rumsfeld. But what's a "true" hawk?

Or you might want to look at the fine print—the part of the article known in the trade as "the article"—and see what that has to say about, for instance, her stance as opposed to that of President Obama:

Cheap shot: Didn't see that coming

Who, me? Photo via Vice.

Paul Ryan setting the bar pretty low:

CNN host Manu Raju asked Ryan how he dealt with the warring factions in the House's GOP majority differently than his predecessor had. "I think I do it better," Ryan said. "Not to knock John, but, um I spend more time with all of our members on a continual basis."

Uh, Paul? That's not what I hear from David Dayen:

Old Whine in New Bottle

The second funniest thing about today's column by Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, under the title "The Reactionary Mind", has already been pointed out by Corey Robin:

Does Douthat realize that Eisenhower era was the golden age of labor union membership? https://t.co/i3no05CFfY pic.twitter.com/knV3o4uI72

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) April 24, 2016

Apparently

1. Liberals think conservatives are reactionaries;
2. conservatives are merely nostalgic for the 1950s;
3. just as liberals are nostalgic for the golden age of unions; thus,
4. liberals and conservatives are nostalgic for the same thing, but liberals may not know when it was and conservatives (including Ross Douthat) definitely don't know what it was like.

The first funniest thing, which Corey is evidently silent about out of modesty, is that he himself is the source for the Monsignor's headline, The Reactionary Mind being of course the title of Robin's own brilliant 2011 book, a comprehensive tour through the history of conservatism showing clearly that what unites the conservative perspective over the centuries is not some coherent set of changeless principles, but an impulse that can only be called reactionary, on the part of some ruling class that feels its power under threat from below, from the French Revolution through the Tea Party, and yearns—and conspires—for the sweetness and rightness of an old regime. Which is of course not the argument the Monsignor is making: he's going to be telling us that although we ought not to think of him as some kind of reactionary, he has a certain appreciation for those who are—he thinks they're cute.