To slowly transform The American Scene into a virtual collective-living arrangement involving every hip yuppie intellectual in DC. Then one morning we wake up together in an actual house.
Michael, if you find a stack of foam egg crates in the upstairs bathroom, let me know. I’m building a studio in the basement.
While David Simon deserves all due credit, it should be noted that Isiah Thomas has also "prepared an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference" – the New York Knicks. Being on vacation at home in New York, I sometimes turn to "the home of Knicks basketball, 1050 ESPNRadio" and listen to Brandon Tierney do the post-game show until midnight. Every night the show has the same ominous feeling that came just before Bodie was killed on The Wire. Every night. Tierney would be McNulty in this analogy. (Here is his MySpace page)
As I write this, the Knickerbockers are getting ready to leave their hotel rooms for the AT&T center in San Antonio. Recently they suffered their eigth consecutive double-digit loss at Madison Square Garden. This humiliation came at the hands of the Sacramento Kings, a mediocre team when healthy. Two nights ago the Kings were missing their three top starting players to injuries. This happened the day after Thomas, the Knicks GM and coach, promised the New York media that the he’ll bring a championship to MSG, the place Michael Jordan referred to as "the Mecca" of basketball. "I know people will laugh even more at me," he said, "but I’m hell bent on getting this accomplished and making sure that we get it done,"
Not only has Chuck Norris discovered the secret to achieving negligible sensescence — he is also, according to a friend of mine currently in Baghdad, bizarrely well-loved by the US military.
have you heard about the US army chuck norris fixation? he’s literally on the walls of every port o john in iraq. at a base in kuwait, i peed into a urinal that said “chuck norris is watching you.” here in Baghdad, I’ve seen these: “Chuck Norris isn’t hung like a horse; horses are hung like chuck.” “Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.” and “Chuck Norris once ate a 72-ounce steak in 45 minutes. He spent the first forty minutes making love to the waitress.”
So perhaps General Petraeus will not lead the American military coup of 2012. Rather, it’ll be Norris and Huckabee, both bare-chested and festooned with bandoliers. Meanwhile, Barack Obama will lead a doughty band of center-left law professors and knife-wielding social workers in armed resistance, backed by Virtual Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Republic of Cyberbolivaria.
I am sympathetic to John Ellis and Ross Douthat’s assessment of Mitt Romney’s fundamental mistake (running on who he thought people wanted him to be, rather than who he is), which you could probably already tell based on the difference between the JFK Speech he gave and the one I wrote.
And yet, I can’t help feeling this is all just a matter of timing, the hardest thing of all to get right.
After all, current speculation is that, amazingly, the guy with the whip hand is Senator John McCain, who is expected to win New Hampshire, and then hopes to ride that win to victory in Michigan, and at least a second-place showing (to Mike Huckabee) in South Carolina, turning this into a McCain-Huckabee race that McCain wins on Feb 5th (after which it becomes a McCain-Huckabee ticket).
But McCain is the guy who started out this race running as somebody he’s not: the darling of the GOP establishment. The line that exemplified the McCain of the early months of this campaign was: “Did I fix it? Did I fix it?"
McCain just had time to become who he was. If the primary calendar were less squashed, so might Mitt Romney.
In any event, it may not be optimal to go always from strength to strength. After all, as a great man once said, “only if you’ve been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”
Many moons ago, I spoke with an Obama staffer who told me that the candidate Obama feared most was actually Giuliani, as he threatened Pennsylvania and a handful of other states. McCain, in contrast, was the candidate Obama could most easily beat thanks to the marked contrast in age and vigor, and thanks to the role of Iraq. This was before Giuliani suffered major setbacks and the political impact of Iraq started to take a different shape. But there’s a certain logic to it.
Chris Hayes, The Nation’s crack political reporter, finds that Swift Boat donors have donated money to Senator John McCain, who condemned the Swift Boat ads. Now John Kerry is blasting his “friend” for accepting the contribution to his cash-starved campaign.
“There is such a thing as dirty money,” said Senator Kerry in a statement, after The Nation informed him of McCain’s FEC records. “I’m surprised that the John McCain I knew who was smeared in 2000 and thought so-called Swift Boating was wrong in 2004 would feel comfortable taking their money after seeing the way it was used to hurt the veterans I know he loves.”
“The way it was used to hurt the veterans I know he loves.” Does John Kerry mean … himself? I assume he does. So Kerry knows McCain “loves” him, yet Kerry doesn’t “love” McCain back, or at least not enough to allow him to “accept” money.
This is a famous trap: How dare Bob Dole accept money from homosexuals! How dare Ron Paul accept money from white supremacists! How dare Hillary Clinton accept money from … Chinese Americans!
Don’t fall for it. McCain opposed the Swift Boat ads. If their contributions go to him, that money is not going to candidates who cheered on the Swift Boat ads. Kerry must understand that. But in this case friendship isn’t a two-way street. Imagine a world in which John Kerry said, “Look, I know Senator McCain opposed the Swift Boat ads. He broke with the Bushies and stood up for me when I needed him. So if he needs the money to fight the good fight, God bless him. I’ve accepted plenty of money from jackasses, cranks, anti-Semites, influence-peddlers, and other questionable people.” But yeah, that would never happen.
Of course, Mitt Romney has received far more Swift Boat money.
Romney’s success with Swift Boat donors is significant because he has surpassed even McCain in his demonstrated willingness to do or say anything in pursuit of the presidency and because he has emerged as the GOP establishment’s favored candidate.
One wonders what the “even McCain” means here exactly. I suppose McCain’s derisive remarks about ethanol were a craven attempt to win over corn-hating Iowans, and his talk of a 100-year occupation of Mesopotamia represent a craven attempt to cater to famously war-mad New Hampshire voters. McCain has many obvious failings as a candidate and perhaps even as a human being: he has a mean streak, he has a temper, he seems pretty stubborn. But has he demonstrated a “willingness to do or say anything in pursuit of the presidency”? Perhaps he is willing to do or say some things in pursuit of the presidency, e.g., his softer stance on the Bush tax cuts. But I fear that virtually all candidates, including even Barack Obama, will do or say some things in pursuit of the presidency.
Expect more abusive harangues directed against John McCain, the Republican shrewd Democrats fear most.
I’m not sure that anyone who reads The American Scene is all that interested in college football, but just in case, you may read on to see my vicious horsecollar tackle of Jonathan Chait.
Matt is exercised by John McCain’s remarks regarding a long-term US military presence in Iraq.
Patrick Ruffini writes:
Huckabee won women 40-26% (and men just 29-26%). He won voters under $30,000 by about 2 to 1. Cross those two, take away the Republican filter, and you’re talking about a general election constituency that is at least 2-to-1 Democratic. These are not people that conventional primary campaigns are designed to reach. These are the Republican voters the furthest away from National Review, other elite conservative media, and websites like this one. It’s easy to see just how the analysts missed the boat on this one.
Note that this constituency, which is at the heart of Grand New Party, has been key to Republican victories since 1980 at least. Jimmy Carter commanded the allegiance of many evangelicals on grounds of shared identity, and of course he lost it. But that was an early and innocent stage of evangelical identity politics. As a border-state governor with a moderate-to-liberal record, it’s easy to see Huckabee winning over culturally conservative Democrats. Yet it’s also easy to see Huckabee repelling those who don’t share his religious and cultural roots. Despite his aw shucks charm, it could be that Huckabee’s success means that the culture war is entering a new and more dangerous stage, in which Scots-Irish Chuck Norris-loving Bible Belt Christians became the latest grievance group demanding their own designated slice of the American pie. It’s easy to imagine ferocious attacks on Huckabee backfiring as evangelicals rally around one of their own. Sure, we can say he’s a Huckster – but how dare you say the same thing?
Imagine Mike Huckabee and Jim Webb squaring off in a vice presidential debate, the Noah Millman scenario. Both represent different faces of downscale identity politics, sunny vs. angry, yet both draw on broadly similar undercurrents of populist resentment. Moreover, the prescriptions they instinctively offer (Webb has basically been house-broken, on immigration and preferences, but thanks to the great Andrew Ferguson we have a sense of where his gut lies) are broadly consonant.
Nine years ago, Pat Buchanan wrote an interesting column on one of his perennial things: Euro-American exclusion from the Ivy League elite.
When foreign students and the children of alumni and faculty are factored in, only 25 percent of all slots at Harvard, wrote Unz, remain for that 75 percent of America that is non-Jewish white. Catholic ethnics and white Protestants are being crowded out of the Ivy League.
When I suggested that it might be time for Euro-Americans to demand affirmative action, the usual suspects answered with the usual invective.
Which direction will Huckabee’s populism take? Ross wants Huckabee
to pivot away from the pitfalls of Christian identity politics and toward a more ecumenical populism
and I agree. Huckabee needs to broaden his coalition. But it’s not the only path Huckabee has available to him. Rallying devout downscale evangelicals might not be enough to win the Republican nomination, but it does offer a lever of influence and power. At a slight remove, supermajorities of white voters have delivered a near-monolithically Republican South. My sense is that Huckabee is personally allergic to a white nationalist politics, in light of his instinctive immigration stance, but his dramatic shift on immigration, which itself reflects a desire to be led by his constituency rather than to lead his constituency, suggests that he’s willing to take Euro-American rabble-rousing further than it’s gone in a long time. Some will draw a direct line to George Wallace, which is both true and unfair: most of those who make the comparison are using it to polemical effect, to tar Huckabee with a racist brush despite the fact that Huckabee is manifestly not a racist. At the same time, Wallace did exploit an underserved political marketplace, in part by speaking frankly (and incendiarily) about crime.
I’m using scrupulously neutral language because I really don’t know how this will turn out. The scenarios I’m hinting at are sufficiently unrealistic given time constraints and the realities of media coverage that this is all capital-S speculative. I basically hope for a more responsive, more pro-growth politics and I’m open about how to get there. What I do know is that US politics has become far more interesting.
And another thing: in The New White Nationalism, Carol Swain argues that the narrowing of public conversation about race and immigration has fueled the rise of a chauvinist white nationalism, and that openness and debate are part of the solution. If we really are seeing the opening of debate, and a broadening of the permissible political spectrum, that could be a good thing insofar as it defuses white nationalist resentment: crankishness tends to recede under the pressures of coalition politics, though I know many Democrats who will disagree when it comes to the Republican Party. (Trust me, the cranks you have in mind are fully capable of being even crankier.)
What follows are some detailed prognostications pointing toward a referendum on therapeutic evangelical Americanism in South Carolina that will decide the election for both parties. The story told here may, of course, look completely insane in a month’s time. But that’s half the fun. At the very end I predict the nominees and suggest something heavy about the political fate of evangelical Christians.
Ron Paul agrees with me on the most pressing and important issue of the day — the legalization of unpasteurized milk. For some reason, this came to mind as I saw this amazing Mark Anderson playing card on Drawn!. You should also check out the animated Los Campesinos! videos which remind me of my great regret in life: that I never became an animator. Los Campesinos!, by the way, are pretty decent. I’m a sucker for all songs that explicitly reference mixtapes, like Los Campesinos!’ It Started with A Mixx and The Promise Ring’s Make Me A Mixtape, both of which belong on all mixtapes. (Pretty crafty!)
I haven’t said anything about the Caucus results. Well, I don’t want to jinx anything. So far everything is going according to plan … Rest assured, the plan does not involve a military coup led by General David Petraeus. I swear!
Below you’ll find a post on the evolution of the news media into an endless barrage of clashing Weltanschauungen. If that doesn’t make you want to read it, I don’t know what will.
Harvard economist Martin Weitzman has written a paper on global warming that has gotten a lot of attention in both academia and the blogosphere. It proposes non-traditional methods of economic analysis that lead to the conclusion that we should be willing to bear very large costs today to avoid the risks of potential catastrophic impacts of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The great advantage of Weitzman’s paper is that it goes to the heart of the issue: addressing the extreme uncertainty in predicting the extent and costs of climate change. In the end, though, I think he fails in this project, and ends up with what is a mathematically sophisticated restatement of the Precautionary Principle. In the very long post that follows below the fold, I try to explain why.
Below I briefly sketch out a possible way to reconcile the success of the VHA and the genomic revolution with the desire to preserve a pluralistic healthcare marketplace.
Editor’s note: This is our first cameo appearance, from commenter Freddie deBoer, best known for his lacerating attacks on The American Scene and many friends of The American Scene. For the record, I think Dana Stevens ain’t that bad, but it’s long since been established that I can’t be trusted.
Like Peter, I’m a fan of both David Edelstein and Slate’s year-end movie club. I am not, sadly, a fan of Dana Stevens. Though I don’t always agree with Ross Douthat’s criticisms of her, I find her heavy-handed invocation of contemporary politics no less leaden, clumsy and aggravating than he does. Like many snarks, her reviews yaw wildly from scornful condemnation to embarrassingly overcooked praise (Children of Men is the movie of the millennium! Ratatouille moved me to tears!), ignoring the simple fact that the large majority of any art is neither pathetic nor great, but some combination of successful and flawed. This hyperbolic aesthetic would be okay, I suppose, if it didn’t emerge from the desire that any scorched-earth critic has to be noticed. That kind of thinking leads to the worst in criticism: self-regard, imprecise language, a failure to understand nuance, the inconsistent application of an aesthetic.
