Because he’s an idiot. Which is why I didn’t support him as the Republican nominee.
[After the end of the debate]
Well, if McCain is going to win the election, it sure didn’t happen tonight.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Secession
Should American writers secede from the Nobel Prize for literature?
There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.
But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater–as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel–it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.
Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.
Other than that I think Hemingway is vastly overrated, and ample fodder for parody, I agree. The Peace prizes have been a joke since Arafat and Rigoberto Menchu (not to mention Jimmy Carter), and I think that the literature prizes have gone the same way, decades ago.
Pants On Fire
CNN (of all places) essentially calls Barack Obama a liar:
Griffin also tells a somewhat nonplussed Cooper that Obama has lied about his “coming out party” at the home of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in 1995. Obama has said that Alice Palmer arranged the fundraiser and the venue, but Griffin spoke to two people who attended the event, who claim Obama lied. Palmer had nothing to do with that event outside of being invited to it. Obama and Ayers planned the event themselves.
The story never made much sense. Why would Ayers and Dohrn allow their house to be used for an event in which they had no role? I wonder how long he’s been falsely fingering Palmer for it? I’m betting that he never told this fairy tale until recently, when it suddenly (and inexplicably, to him) became a potential campaign issue.
And of course, the next question is, if he’s lying about this, what else is he lying to us about? After all, as Senator McCain pointed out yesterday, for a guy who has written two books about himself, his life hasn’t been anything close to an open book.
SF For Voters
I’ve long thought that people who don’t read, or haven’t read science fiction are much more ill-prepared for the future. Well, in the near future, we have a presidential election coming up. Here are some suggestions for SF to read in preparation from some notable web pundits.
The Bankruptcy Of Iceland
Thomas James has some space-related thoughts.
More Ayers Thoughts
The point is not that President-designate Obama is a “close friend” of the unrepentant Ayers, or that he was only eight when his patron was building bombs to kill the women of New Jersey. As Joe Biden would no doubt point out on his entertaining “This Day In History” segment, McCain was only six when Czogolsz killed President McKinley. But I doubt he’d let the guy host a fundraiser for him.
But, in the world in which Obama moves, it would seem absurd and provincial to object to partying with an “unrepentant terrorist.” The senator advanced and prospered in a milieu in which men like Ayers are not just accepted but admired for their “passionate participation”, and function as power-brokers and path-smoothers. This is a great country, and most of us (as Peter Kirsanow notes below) make it without having to kiss up to America-haters like Ayers and Wright. But not Obama.
Who is this man on course to be 44th president? Apparently, it’s not just impolite but racist to ask.
Speaking of which, Sarah Palin apparently handled the racism nonsense from CNN pretty well yesterday.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Jonah Goldberg has some more thoughts on the terrorists“passionate anti-war and civil rights movement” and the contradictions of the fascist left.
Clueless Space Commentary
Jeff Foust has a roundup.
And as I note over there in comments, the Kennedy myth persists:
“Not since John F. Kennedy, has a president truly understood the incalculable value of space…”
Not even then…
Pre-Humans
Alan Boyle has a story on the latest thinking about Lucy, with a cool artist’s rendering. And of course, no post like this is complete without the usual clueless comments by the creationists.
Hilarious
Mickey Kaus points out the foolishness of the press, in imagining that there was ever any possibliity that the media would be supporting McCain.
It’s one thing to have pro-Democratic, pro-Obama media favoritism: That’s just the way it is. Political reporters have opinions. Better blatant than latent.
It’s another to have that very favoritism used as evidence that McCain is blowing it, losing his reputation for “integrity” and his “gold plated brand.”
Yes, they only like McCain when he’s running against Republicans. The NYT endorsed him in the primary. Does anyone imagine they’ll endorse him in the general?
He also has a warning:
It might seem as if the MSM reaction against McCain’s shift to negativism has “driven the final nail into his coffin,” as Heilemann suggests. The Feiler Faster Thesis says no–given the speed with which the country now processes information, there’s plenty of time for several dramatic twists and turns, including lead changes. Obamaphiles (in the press and elsewhere) are deluding themselves, I think, if they think they can ride the economic crisis and the reaction against negativity to victory in a month. Plus Obama’s not that far ahead.
Nope.
About Time
UCLA economists have calculated how long FDR extended the Great Depression. Seven years.
Roosevelt’s role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century’s second-most influential figure.
“This is exciting and valuable research,” said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. “The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can’t understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won’t happen again?”
…”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
Remember this the next time someone talks about a new “New Deal.” The myth of Roosevelt is akin with the current idiotic nonsense being promulgated by Democrats that the financial crisis was a result of “deregulation.”
[Update about 9 AM EDT]
Sebastian Mallaby has a nice corrective to the “deregulation” nonsense:
The key financiers in this game were not the mortgage lenders, the ratings agencies or the investment banks that created those now infamous mortgage securities. In different ways, these players were all peddling financial snake oil, but as Columbia University’s Charles Calomiris observes, there will always be snake-oil salesmen. Rather, the key financiers were the ones who bought the toxic mortgage products. If they hadn’t been willing to buy snake oil, nobody would have been peddling it.
Who were the purchasers? They were by no means unregulated. U.S. investment banks, regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, bought piles of toxic waste. U.S. commercial banks, regulated by several agencies, including the Fed, also devoured large quantities. European banks, which faced a different and supposedly more up-to-date supervisory scheme, turn out to have been just as rash. By contrast, lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part — though they are now vulnerable to the broader credit crunch because they operate with borrowed money.
If that doesn’t convince you that deregulation is the wrong scapegoat, consider this: The appetite for toxic mortgages was fueled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the super-regulated housing finance companies. Calomiris calculates that Fannie and Freddie bought more than a third of the $3 trillion in junk mortgages created during the bubble and that they did so because heavy government oversight obliged them to push money toward marginal home purchasers. There’s a vigorous argument about whether Calomiris’s number is too high. But everyone concedes that Fannie and Freddie poured fuel on the fire to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
As he points out, it’s important to understand the actual cause, because if we misdiagnose the disease, we’re likely to come up with nostrums that make it worse, just as FDR’s “brain trust” did. And that’s exactly the path we’re on with Obama. McCain may make similar mistakes, but with him, at least it’s not a sure thing.
[Mid-morning update]
Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on the upcoming speculative bubble in regulation. I agree that we need to design the system to be much more fault tolerant.