Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Destroying A Brand

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If this rumor is true, ABC will have completed the destruction of a respected Sunday-morning news show that started with the late great David Brinkley:

If Amanpour does accept, the long-running Sunday show could he shaken up, according to the report.

Amanpour said she wants to make “This Week” more about foreign affairs and less focused on domestic American politics. If she takes the job, her desire is to do a number of shows each year outside the country. If she takes the post, sources say this would be a complete remaking on the show, a program much more focused on international affairs. What’s more, Amanpour is telling colleagues that she does not wish to move to Washington, D.C., that she’d prefer to remain in New York and travel for the job should she decide to take it.

Given that Amanpour’s career has focused more on international news than Beltway politics, it makes sense that there could be format changes that play upon her strengths.

Since Brinkley’s retirement, it’s been all downhill, starting with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, then Stephanopolous. They’ve been trying out a few others since the latter left, including Jake Tapper, who (in my opinion) would have reelevated it significantly. If Amanpour takes over, I know I’ll never watch it again.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Dispatch From Some Alternate Universe

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John Judis has some advice for Barack Obama, including the following paragraph, which makes it difficult to take the rest seriously:

Reagan and the Republicans ran against Carter and the Democrats in the same way as Roosevelt ran against Hoover. Baker and Atwater had studied Roosevelt’s and the Democrats’ 1934 campaign. (They even swiped “stay the course” from FDR.) But Obama and his advisors have been reluctant to stigmatize George W. Bush and the Republicans–perhaps out of a spirit of bipartisanship.That’s a mistake, as Obama seems finally to have realized.

Emphasis mine. Is this man insane? Or is this some new meaning of the word “reluctant” with which I was previously unfamiliar? Perhaps he means they’ve been doing it 24/7/365 “reluctantly”?

Political Commentary

Woodrow Wilson’s Third Term

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Thoughts from George Will on the parallels between Wilson and the current president.

How gripped was Wilson by what Beinart calls “the hubris of reason”? Beinart writes: “He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let’s write down the basic rules, he suggested; ‘then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.’ It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn’t get you very far, where reason could never be king.”

Professor Obama, who will seek re-election on the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy. Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said: “I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”

Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at “comprehensive” solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has consistently argued, in effect, that the health care system is like a Calder mobile — touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely piecemeal change is impossible.

So note also Obama’s yearning for something “academically approved” rather than something resulting from “a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people,” aka politics. Here, too, Obama is in the spirit of the U.S. President who first was president of the American Political Science Association.

It’s worth noting that Wilson was the first fascist dictator we ever had as president, and a model for much of Mussolini’s program. We’ll never know what he might have done had he failed in his bid for a third term — the nation was saved by his stroke.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Five Lies

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…about the economy:

1. Bold government action staved off a Depression, saving or creating 1.5 million jobs.

“Just remember,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said on November 1, 2009, “a year ago today, last year, you had markets around the world come to a stop. Economic activity just stopped, came to a standstill, like flipping a switch.”

Geithner implies that the American business climate improved substantially in the first year of the Obama administration. In fact, nearly every indicator, from employment to freight transport to rents to retail sales to real estate, has headed steadily south. In some cases, such as unemployment, the numbers have been far worse than the Obama economic team’s worst-case projections. In others, such as real estate, the weakness of the market is masked by expensive government support, including but not limited to the unkillable First-Time Homebuyer Credit, an assault on loan underwriting standards (see Lie No. 2) by the Federal Housing Authority and the government-run mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the completely opaque $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP).

The $787 billion in stimulus spending authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is now best known for its inflated and unsupportable job creation numbers. At press time, Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina D. Romer (who, confusingly, made her academic reputation proving that fiscal stimulus did not help the U.S. economy during the Great Depression and World War II) was giving the stimulus credit for 1.5 million American jobs in 2009. All efforts at checking her claims, however, have turned up very different numbers.

There’s a lot more.

Political Commentary

End The Slaughter

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Mark Levin is calling for her to be expelled from Congress. Good luck with that.

And Dan Riehl says that the president is on the verge of an impeachable offense. Good luck with that, too.

For what it’s worth, I thought that George Bush should have been impeached for signing McCain-Feingold. In doing so, he failed to keep his oath of office to defend the Constitution. It’s politically craven to sign a bill while saying that you think that it’s unconstitutional, and hope that the Supreme Court will fix it (they didn’t, at least not until recently). If a president believes that a bill is unconstitutional, it is his constitutional duty to veto it, and say why. It is the job of all three branches of government to obey and protect it, not just the judiciary. I’ve long given up any hope of Congress giving a damn about it, but I expected more of a Republican president. Silly me.