Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why Is Everyone Upset With Obama?

2 Comments

He’s just being Obama:

The saga of Obama is marked by the uncanny ability to soar through the academic and government cursus honorum without ever being held too accountable for what followed. Obama’s selection as editor of the Harvard Law Review broke new ground. But to this day, no one cares much that his record was mediocre with no scholarly work to show for his tenure.

For that matter, ditto also his law career at the University of Chicago: an impressive appointment, but no scholarly book as promised, not even an article, and no distinguished record of teaching. Not much of anything. The point of the Nobel Prize was winning it — not doing anything that might have earned it. Just as there was no foreign policy achievement that preceded the prize, so there was naturally none following it. Why expect anything different now?

Anyone who is disappointed by him is a fool, and just one of the rubes.

[Update a few minutes later]

It’s all about trust:

Every president faces the predicament of overpromising. Often the gap can be chalked up to the difference between campaigning and governing, between rhetoric and reality. As with past presidents, people desperate to turn the page on the previous administration voted for the Obama they wanted and now are grappling with the Obama they got.

I got exactly what I expected, but I never wanted it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Futility Of Gun Laws

25 Comments

They don’t seem to work in California:

So we are again left with the question: how did the killer get this gun? It would seem as though he broke a stack of laws, without much of a struggle. It almost makes you wonder if California is barking up the wrong tree. They pass all these laws, starting with attempts to deal with a mass murder involving a mentally ill person in 1989, and they do not work. Short of house-to-house searches for guns, how are they going to be successful at enforcing these laws? Perhaps most importantly, if someone is mentally ill and intends to murder people (a capital crime), what sort of penalty is going to actually deter such a person from breaking gun-control laws?

Gun-control advocates, at least the more rational ones, will usually admit that these laws only work at the margins, by making guns harder for criminals and the mentally ill to get. I can buy that argument; all laws work only at the margins, and that is all that they have to do to justify their existence. I can also agree that when there is a large stockpile of illegal goods in circulation, it can take a while before laws aimed at those goods will remove them from the illegal marketplace. Still, when I see that laws that are decades old failed to disarm a 24 year old who could not possibly have legally acquired this weapon, I find myself wondering in what century California’s gun-control laws are going to be effective.

Because, you know, criminals don’t obey the law. By definition. And as he says, it’s not really a gun problem.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Detroit’s Van Gogh

2 Comments

…would be better off in LA:

Rather than an offense against art, a properly structured sale would represent a public-spirited update of how the art came to Detroit and other U.S. cities in the first place: as a way of providing liquidity to Europeans in need of cash. “The second world war has opened up an opportunity such as may never come again,” the DIA’s director wrote unabashedly in 1948. “Great private collections which have been held intact for a hundred years or more are being broken up.” Detroit is like an aristocratic estate forced to adjust to changing times. It can’t marry an heiress, but it might find some lucratively appreciative new homes for some of its heirlooms.

This is the just consequence of terrible voters’ decision and awful city management.

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