Thoughts on the decrepit state of the teaching “profession.” Like the commentator, I find the notion of a “graphic novel” of the teachings of the terrorist sadly ironic. As one commenter notes, in a sane world, holding a teaching certificate would bar you from the classroom. And there would be no federal support for colleges of “education.”
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Watchmen Watched
I have pretty close to zero interest in and, prior to the current movie hype, zero knowledge of The Watchmen. But for those less apathetic than me, WIll Collier has a review. He’s not impressed.
[Early afternoon update]
Heh.
Deconstructing Rush
Jeff Goldstein, on how he learned to stop worrying and love the f-bomb:
if, as I’ve argued, political realism as a strategy is doomed — not because we can’t be more careful with our words, but rather because it is not always rhetorically effective to do so, nor does such care prevent us from being misrepresented, no matter how precise we try to be — what is the alternative? As many pundits will patiently explain to you, ideological purity and idealism doesn’t win elections, so if not pragmatism, what?
To which I reply, pragmatism is fine. But why not use our idealism pragmatically — which is to say, why not make it our strategy to use idealism as our cudgel against the media and the left in such a way that their tactic of misrepresentation and outrage no longer pays dividends? Why not make it our strategy to destroy their tactics — and in so doing, reaffirm the very principles at the heart of classical liberalism?
The fact of the matter is, for all of Limbaugh’s provocation, his statement, having been carefully and purposely misrepresented by the media as a way to demonize him and drive a divide between conservatives and more moderates within the party, has had the rather happy effect of getting us talking and arguing about what we as a movement should do next. And it was precisely his choice of language that baited the press and the left (and, more frightening even, the White House) to engage him, and to force the ideas of conservatism center stage.
We have to continue to fight to take back the media, and the language, regardless of the demagogues, semioticians and word twisters.
[Tuesday morning update]
More lies about Limbaugh. This is as stupid as Harry Reid’s continuing moronic accusations that he disrespected the troops. Kaus offers some advice, which they’ll be too stupid to take:
The whole Begala-Carville coordinated campaign against Limbaugh seems misguided when Obama is supposed to be leading the nation out of crisis (see Warren Buffett’s comments, below). Quite apart from whether it’s a good idea to take one of your smarter opponents and build him up, the campaign seems petty, partisan and poll-driven — not designed to produce any kind of national pulling-together. If Begala weren’t around I’d suspect Chris Lehane of thinking it up.
I too am shocked, shocked, that when Warren Buffet is critical of The One, suddenly no one in the media is interested.
Logical Disconnect
Some of my commenters attempt to make the illogical argument that because the top marginal income tax rate was almost forty percent during the Clinton era that there is no harm in raising it back to that now. Jim Manzi dissects this foolishness. I doubt if they’ll understand it, though.
[Update a few minutes later]
Victor Davis Hanson — Oh What Debts We Will See:
Athens in the fourth century B.C. chose to mint “redheads”, silver coins with bronze cores that were quickly exposed once the patina around the coins’ imprinted busts wore off. Rome did the same thing, and by the fourth century AD simply flooded its provinces with money of little real value. Germany paid off its war debts to France in the 1920s, with deliberately inflated German marks. I lived in Greece during the oil-embargo hyperinflation of 1973, and remember buying individual eggs with three or four inked-in price figures crossed out, as the store-keeper kept upping the price each day. (And I remember farming in the early 1980s when full-strength Roundup herbicide seemed to go from $60 to $70 to $100 a gallon in a single year).
I don’t think any one knows what is quite going on. I recently gave a lecture, and a Wall Street grandee afterwards approached the dais, asking me for advice (me, who could not even turn a profit growing raisins, and was a lousy peddler of family fruit for years at Farmers’ Markets), saying in effect something like the following: “Mr. Hanson—Consider: Real estate bad—not going to put money there when I’m not sure where the bottom is. Stocks worse—had I got out at New Year’s, I’d have thousands more than I do now. Cash pathetic—the interest doesn’t even cover what’s lost to inflation. So what’s left—the dole?”
I had no advice, of course, other than some vague warning that we are in a war against capital, sort of similar to what Sallust and Cicero claim that Catiline and his band of dissolute and broke aristocrats were planning, with his calls for cancellation of debts and redistribution of property.
It seems less than vague to me.
[Evening update]
How to wage a war on business. Any resemblance to current administration policies are purely coincidental, of course.
“There’s Nothing Special About Britain”
I guess this is the kind of smarter diplomacy, and “reengaging with the world” that we were promised in the campaign. Of course, we were promised a lot of things in the campaign.
[Update Sunday night]
More smart diplomacy, with Russia.
[Monday morning update]
Gee, just what we want in an American Secretary of State:
Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering was effusive in his praise, saying that with the new administration, the United States and Europe once again “share the same values.”
“What you said mostly could have been said by a European,” he told Clinton after she fielded questions ranging from climate change to energy security and aid to Africa and one on gay rights from a participant wearing an “I love Hillary” t-shirt.
I suspect that, even more than is usually the case, she’s going to represent the world to America, rather than the other way around.
[Bumped]
[Monday afternoon update]
Gift-giving advice from Barack Obama:
With my busy schedule of entertaining foreign dignitaries and celebrities at the White House, I know how important a well chosen gift can be. Two weeks ago, for example, we received a visit from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister brought a few housewarming gag gifts including a pen set made from a boat, a framed paper thing from another boat, and some old books by Churchill (not Ward, but that English guy). Obviously we wanted to return the nice gesture so I sent my interns out on a scavenger hunt for an appropriate present. They couldn’t find anything in the West Wing, but luckily Costco was open and was running a 25-for-the-price-of-10 clearance sale in the DVD department. You should have seen Mr. Brown light up when he opened that sack of classic titles like “Wizard of Oz” and “Baby Geniuses 2.” I like to think those DVDs helped cement our Anglo-American “special relationship” even if, as he mentioned to me, they probably wouldn’t work in his European player. Thinking quickly, I told the PM I would send him an American DVD player as soon as I earned enough cash-back points on my Costco card. Crisis averted, but that episode taught me a valuable lesson: always keep a stock of gifts handy in case some foreign poobah or supreme religious figure or failing industry pops by for coffee. As a result, I make sure the Oval Office closet is filled with pre-wrapped Sham-Wows and Snuggle blankets and trillion dollar bailout packages for whatever emergency might arise.
Why not? It makes as much sense as taking market advice from someone who doesn’t know what a P/E ratio is.
[Update late afternoon]
Here’s a completely plausible thesis on why the Obama administration dissed the UK:
The alliance that Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt crafted to win World War Two was more than just good strategy. They forged it in order to assert and defend an ideal which had fallen on hard times in the dark days of 1941, that of individual human liberty.
Originally born in Britain, this common ideal holds that human beings have a God-given natural right to arrange their lives as they see fit without interference from any authority, whether pope or king or government bureaucrat. The belief has always been America’s most precious historical legacy, and the rock on which our friendship with Great Britain is built.
It was that ideal which the Founding Fathers inherited from Britain, expressed as the rights of freeborn Englishmen. Our founders fought and nearly lost a war of independence against the British crown, and devised their own Constitution, to preserve the same ideal.
… Perhaps the president simply believes some other nation should replace Britain as our closest friend. (For a while, the Clinton administration meant to put Germany ahead of the UK.) Or perhaps Obama has a different view of the special relationship – one held by the likes of his onetime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
These critics don’t see a legacy of freedom going back to Magna Carta. They see a historical procession of self-serving white males. And Churchill is not the man who singlehandedly stood up against Hitler and who warned us all about the Soviet Union’s iron curtain, but a white supremacist.
In this view (which also sees an America steeped in racism, colonialism and greed, rather than a nation dedicated to the proposition of liberty under law), there is no need to preserve any precious British-born legacy.
Including that fuddy-duddy English common law, and particularly contract law. After all, dead white guys came up with it. And that Churchill guy was on the wrong side in Kenya.
I wonder if Barack and Michelle Obama know who it was who freed the slaves? And who it was who originally sold them into slavery? I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of actual historical knowledge from either of them.
Tax Rates, Not Taxes
Even Alec Baldwin gets it. So why doesn’t Barack Obama?
Well, as he revealed explicitly in the debate, to him, taxes are not about revenue. They are about “fairness” and “social justice.” Which is why his tax policies will be disastrous for the economy.
Are We Serious About Space Policy?
Jeff Foust reports on a forum where that is the topic of discussion. The (unsurprising, or at least it should be to readers of this weblog) answer is, “no.”
Space, at least civil space, is not important, and has not been since the early 1960s. What is more dismaying, though, is that military space is not treated seriously, either, and that really should be considered important.
The panel also doesn’t think much of reviving the Space Council. I agree that the focal point should not be at OSTP, and that space does need a more serious advocate on the National Security Council.
I wonder why Jeff doesn’t quote anyone by name? Was he reporting under restrictions?
[Update in the afternoon]
Apparently, he was. He writes over at Space Politics:
Because of the ground rules of the discussion, none of the comments are attributed to any of the attendees.
I’d be curious to know at least who the attendees were, even if we can’t correlate specific statements with specific attendees. Is that a secret, too?
Also at The Space Review today, a good tutorial on how to tell a launch system from a ballistic missile.
I should note that one point not made here is that it’s actually easier to build a launch vehicle than an effective ballistic missile, if one defines “effective” as being able to hit a precise target, because the latter requires an entry vehicle. Getting into orbit, per se, does not require a precise injection, or heat shields, as long as the resulting trajectory doesn’t intercept the atmosphere.
Finally, Dwayne Day clears up (or at least attempts to clear up) media misconceptions about the Chinese space program.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Jeff provides the list of speakers, though it’s still not clear whether the quotes are from speakers or attendees.
“The Malady Of Islam”
This seems to me a fundamental problem:
Modernity has multiple meanings: industrialization, urbanization, adoption of liberal values, women’s rights, elected governments, etc. I want to emphasize here the concept of citizenship as a core component of modernity. The idea of citizenship is linked to the idea of individuals in society possessing unalienable rights. The evolution of this idea has meant that even though society is a collection of individuals, individual rights override collective rights and distinguish modern society from mob rule. On this idea rests the modern democratic society, wherein political leaders are elected by citizens to whom they are accountable. They hold office with citizen approval; they make laws, but none might be passed that override the unalienable rights of citizens written into the constitution. They govern with support of the citizens and are replaced when they fail to meet the goals that saw them elected.
Let us now consider the malady of Islam given the above description of the problem as I see it. Modernity, and its concept of individual rights, is Western in origin. It evolved through centuries of philosophical and political debates, and then equally long periods of war to defeat those who opposed the principle of individual liberty. Eventually modernity and its off-shoot, citizenship, prevailed over the opposition and were more or less firmly established in the West and places beyond by the end of the last century.
Arabs were in close proximity to these ideas and the struggle that accompanied them. What, it might be asked of the Arabs, was their response to modernity? Even with all the apologia and obfuscation, the answer that cannot be evaded is that the collective Arab response has shown a preference for totalitarian ideology. In the period following the end of the World War II and European colonialism, there were three ideological responses that marked out the Arabs into three groups: secular Muslims, and orthodox Muslims divided into the majority Sunni and minority Shi’i sects.
Secular Muslims were mobilized by Arab nationalism embodied in the Ba’ath party. Sunni Muslims chose Wahhabism/Salafism embodied in the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban. Shi’i Muslims followed Khomeinism embodied in the politics of the clerical regime in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrists in Iraq.
All three ideologies and movements they spawned are totalitarian. For all their professed belief in Islam’s sacred scripture, Arabs — given their blood-soaked history of suppressing dissent and despite their close proximity to the evolution of liberal movements in Europe — have been engaged in suppressing or eradicating any form of individual liberty while making no allowance for their opponents. Arabs have shown by their conduct that tyranny is their preferred response to modernity.
I wish that I had any sense whatsoever that the current administration understands this problem.
What A Change An Election Makes
It used to be that dissent was the highest form of patriotism, when the Chimp-in-Chief was the decider. But now, apparently consent is the highest form of patriotism under The One. And anything less is unpatriotic.
If this site disappears without notice, you’ll know what happened.
[Update late Sunday night]
Yup. Traitors.
How To Get Your Family Out Of A Financial Crisis
Apparently, this is wise advice in these tough times, for families everywhere.