Fruit Flavored G3, RIP

My very old (in computer terms) lime green iMac finally gave out the other day and I bought a new, pre-Intel iMac G5. I assume that I am the last blogger in the world to have been using equipment from the last millenium. No more.

Question

Can you imagine how outraged these people would be if this could be blamed on Bill Clinton or Al Gore?:

AN AUDIT of US reconstruction spending in Iraq has uncovered spectacular misuse of tens of millions of dollars in cash, including bundles of money stashed in filing cabinets, a US soldier who gambled away thousands and stacks of newly minted notes distributed without receipts.

The audit, released yesterday by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, describes a country in the months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein awash with dollars, and a Wild West atmosphere where even multimillion-dollar contracts were paid for in cash.

Mean People Suck

Which party is "meaner"-- the Democrats or Republicans? If you said that is a stupid question then you have successfully completed the sixth grade, but you would be wrong according to Patrick Hynes. Hynes, of the website formerly known as "Crush Kerry" thinks that Democrats are mean. Mean for a lot of reasons, but consider just this one:

AND LET'S NOT DISREGARD the looming (and increasingly inevitable) financial disaster that will strike when swarms of baby boomers storm the pay window to collect what they've been promised. The politicians in Washington and American interest groups spent the first half of 2005 debating the creeping crisis as it relates to Social Security and whether we can or should do anything about it. President Bush and some Republicans wanted to introduce personal retirement accounts. Democrats (sadly with the help of more than a few RINO's) demonized the plan. But what is most notable about the debate is that the Democrats' official position was that we had nothing to worry about. Don't be fooled by Republican tricks, they told Americans. Everything is going to be just fine.

This false sense of, ahem, security, over the years has resulted in millions of soon-to-be-on-the-dole Boomers making the disastrous decision to not put money away for themselves. And so now we have the most prosperous generation in human history prepared to retire without a penny to their names, fully convinced that the government checks are on their way; "guaranteed" in a "lock box," as the liberal parlance goes.

So the mean Dems, who opposed the President's plans to "reform" Social Security in 2005 are responsible for boomers who failed to plan for retirement over the last forty years. I could ask how anyone could possibly trust the Bush administration to reform Social Security after their disasterous prescription drug plan, but that would be mean.

Corrupt Care

Jonathan Chait recommends that the Democrats use the awful new prescription drug program against the Republicans in the forthcoming elections:

FOR THE LAST few weeks, Democrats in Washington have been thrashing about in search of some way to make the Republican corruption scandals relevant to the broader public. Meanwhile, the public seems much more concerned about the Medicare prescription drug plan, which, with its horror stories of bureaucratic bungling, has turned out to be the Hurricane Katrina of entitlement programs.

It's the corruption! It's the Medicare drug plan! Wait a second -- is it me, or did the answer to the Democrats' dilemma just fall right into their lap?

The Medicare drug plan is the perfect issue for Democrats to run on. It perfectly encapsulates the corruption of Republican Washington, and it's a concrete thing that voters can relate to. Running on this issue makes so much sense that naturally the Democrats won't do it.

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I don't care much for Dean, Clinton and Pelosi; although I can't see how they could be more corrupt or dishonest or incompetent the Bush, Cheney, Delay, Rumsfeld . . .

Conservatives for Breathing

A sneerfest erupted in NRO's The Corner because their house Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher came out in favor of breathing. Perhaps I exaggerate, but the tussle erupted after some fairly innocuous comments:

Yesterday here at the Dallas Morning News, we met with a group of local folks that included Margaret Keliher, the Dallas County Judge . . .. Keliher is a Republican, and she's also taken the lead in fighting for cleaner air in north Texas. Dallas has filthy air, in part because of cement plants just south of the city, and we're under federal government sanction to clean it up. In north Texas, the environment is not really a liberal vs. conservative issue, but a civic issue
. . . If I were sitting at the RNC in Washington right now, thinking about this fall's election, I'd spend a half hour on the phone with Judge Keliher and talk about this stuff. It's foolish to let the Democrats have this issue all to themselves--and by the way, enlightened environmentalists are starting to realize how foolish they've been to put all their hopes on the Democratic Party, and are now reaching out to conservatives. All to the good, say I.

This led to a series of snarky comments by Ramesh Ponnuru (who eventually made a peace offering) and others; along with rejoinders from Dreher. Perhaps the most obtuse comment came from (who else?) John Podheretz. The Birthright Pundit sneered, "In fact, I believe the rise in diagnosed asthma cases is a nationwide phenomenon of the past three or four decades, and nobody knows the cause. Except, it appears, a few judges in Texas, who got it all figgered out. I wasn't aware that degrees in epidemiology, cardiology, and pulmonology accompanied election to judgeships around Dallas, but now that I know, I'll be sure to consult your new friends about these matters."

That this mild suggestion that Republicans work on being less beholden to the interests of polluters and more to the interests of breathers is so controversial shows how screwed up the right is these days. Dreher is one of the few people involved with NR who is actually worth reading. I have a feeling he the he will not last there much longer and in a few years the onetime serious publication will become the exclusive preserve of mediocrities such as Podheretz.

Tract Society

Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of The Baffler has a review in the February issue of Harpers of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37), by Bernard Goldberg. 100 People is the kind of book that I would only read under the circumstances that Frank did -- for pay and with the opportunity to mock in print. It is essentially a tract for the converted. The production of such tracts, from both the left and right, has exploded in the Bush years and I have reviewed three of them and briefly looked at several more. Most of them are awful. Those on the right seem worse and I'm not sure if it is because liberals are at least attacking the party in power or because this kind of thing has a larger audience on the Right and thus casts a wider net.

Whatever the reason, most authors of these political tracts lack the wit and subtlety of Jack T. Chick. They all make valid points. I agree with Ann Coulter that some of the mockery of Dan Quayle was unfair though I am not nearly upset about it as she is. And I'm sure that many on the left are as Unhinged as Michelle Malkin believes them to be, though I would take her more seriously is she didn't seem so unhinged herself and didn't link to patently looney rightwing nutcases such as the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.

This description by Frank probably applies to them all:

This is a book that scarcely requires an author. You could have assembled it yourself, with an afternoon's browsing of the major right-wing websites and a copy of the collected speeches of Spiro Agnew for stylistic guidance. And yet it stubbornly remained on the bestseller list for weeks. Why?
Perhaps it is the literary equivalent of one of those K-Tel albums from the Seventies: the greatest, most irritating hits of the decade.

The Littlest Poddy

Gosh! Is it even remotely possible that John Podheretz, who Steve Sailer correctly tagged as a "birthright pundit" has the gall to call anyone else a "finger wagger?" The man's finger never stops wagging.

Good News . . .

Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals is listed on Amazon.com. Here is the book description:

In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can't-- or shouldn't -- be filed away in the usual boxes labeled "liberal" and "conservative." Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.

I can't wait.

P.S. Here is my review of his last book.

The High Road?

Look for more articles like the one by Jed Babbin in the bandwith of the American Spectator. Babbin laughibly argues that it is time to "take the gloves off" against the left and cease taking the "high road" against them. Anyone familiar with the American Spectator knows that they have had the gloves off for the last fifteen or so years.

I think we will be seeing more screeds like Babbins because the right will become more and more desparate. They have dragged the country into an unnecessary and unwinnable war in Iraq, and now the Abramoff/DeLay scandal is exposing the seamy underside of the party that was supposed to "reform" Washington when it came to power in 1994. In order to maintain their hold on power, or in Babbin's case, their proximity to it; the Right must shift the blame for their domestic and foreign scandals onto others.

UPDATE: One of the letters in response to Babbin hits upon an issue that the Liberal Media refuses to cover. Perhaps Pajamas will take up the slack:

A good place to start in pushing back might be for someone to suggest that John Murtha release his military medical records so we can all see what got him his two Purple Hearts. (Another Hero Mystery.) I have read in only one place that Mr. Murtha shares the military modesty of John Kerry in this regard. Do we need a group comparable to the Swifties to ask this reasonable question? After all, Mr. Murtha has enjoyed wounded hero status for some years.

Priorities

While the MSM focuses on the ho-hum Jack Abramoff story, look to Pajamas Media, which as been on top of the far more important Google PC's story all day.

Be Prepared

President Bush: "I'm going to continue to work as hard as I can to lay that foundation for peace." I suppose that means we will invade Syria and/or Iran in the next few months.

Dr. Percy's South

I have been reading some of the comments on Jeffrey Hart's essay in the Wall Street Journal about conservatism. A line about how the shift in the base of strengh to the Sun Belt South and West has had a negative effect "with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture." has generated controversy in National Review's The Corner and other places. Matt Yglesias would seem to have a point arguing:

Can anyone seriously dispute that the vast majority of America's premiere institutions of education and high culture are located in the "blue" areas? That's not to say the South is some kind of total wasteland -- I visited the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum earlier this year and it's first-rate, albeit a bit small -- but on the whole this stuff is primarily in the Northeast and to a lesser extent on the Pacific coast. At the same time, these institutions used to be bastions of conservatism and now -- as conservatives are wont to complain -- go the other way politically.

But there is another way of looking at it. Which state has made the greater contribution to American culture in the last one hundred years -- Mississippi or Connecticut? I would imagine that most people would conclude that poor, benighted, Yaleless, Mississippi would win the contest. What is the Nutmeg state's answer to Faulkner, Eudora Welty or Marty Stuart?

Walker Percy addressed this apparant contradiction -- at least as itconcerns writers -- in his "Self Interview" pubished in Esquire and reprinted in Signposts in a Strange Land:

Well, I've heard about that, the storytelling tradition, sense of identity, tragic dimension, community, history, and so forth. But I was never quite sure what that meant. In fact, I'm not sure that the opposite is not the case. People don't read much in the South and don't take writers very seriously, which is probably as it should be. I've managed to live [in Covington, La.] for thirty years and am less well known than the Budweiser distributor. The only famous person in this town is Isiah Robertson, Linebacker for the Rams, and that is probably as it should be too. . .

I have a theory of why Faulkner became such a great writer. It was not the presence of a tradition and all that, as one generally hears, but the absence. Everybody in Oxford, Mississippi, knew who Faulkner was, not because he was a great writer, but because he was a local character, a little-bitty fellow who put on airs, wore a handkerchief up his sleeve, a ne'er-do-well . . . One of the nice things about living an obscure life in the South is that people don't come up to you, press your hand and give you soulful looks.

Ten years ago, when I was living outside of the South, I would probably have been offended by Hart's and Yglesias' assertions about my native region. These days I'm not so sure that they are wrong -- Jeff Foxworthy has made a mint spoofing Southern redneck culture -- but I still prefer to live here. I spent seven years in Port Townsend, Washington. It is a wonderful place and I miss living there sometimes, but it was the opposite of the type of community that Percy describes. It is larded with creative types -- I was once the only person at a party who didn't at least claim to be an "artist" or "poet." Some of them actually create.

You Could Look It Up In Toynbee . . .

Roger Kahn remembers Gene McCarthy's presidential announcement in 1967.

Sign of the Times . . .

The latest issues of The American Conservative and Mother Jones are out with cover articles by the sam person. In TAC Robert Dreyfuss reports on neocon plans for Syria. In MJ he profiles North Carolina Congressman Walter B. Jones of "Freedom Fries" fame who has now turned against the war. That latter article has high praise for Jones in the form of a quote by the cretinous Christopher Hitchens that Jones is a "moral and political cretin."

Politics, and George W. Bush, makes strange bedfellows.

An Army of Slackers

You don't need incredibly high standards to be a right-wing media critic. Note this post endorsed by the Eisenhower in the Army of Davids. The poster, identified only by a photo of an unshaven slacker (not that there's anything wrong with that) and the cutesie name "The Only Republican in San Francisco." Our slacker/journalist reports:

If you read my site, well, you are in a very small minority but you also are aware of how little regard I had for mainstream media reports of Katrina. Among the many outrages were the reports of crimes and deaths that simply didn't happen.

The LA Times now reports that the deaths in NO were not disproportionately among the poor. The storm, and the response, did not discriminate.

Add this to the fact that black folks died in proportionally smaller numbers than whites. Quick stats are that black folks comprised 67% of the population but represented 59% of those who passed. White folks comprised 28% of the population but represented 36% of the deaths.

Everything you read about Katrina was wrong, and was, sorry, racist. An enormous amount of PR damage was done to the US, and race tensions were fanned without any factual basis. Will the MSM address this?

Note what his post doesn't say. He implies that the "MSM" reported that blacks died disproportionately when New Orleans was flooded, but he doesn't cite, or link to, any inaccurate report from a media source making that claim. In fact, he cites Los Angeles Times reporting to help his case. Note his closing question. If he had bothered to read his own post, he would see that the "MSM" is addressing it.

This "Pajamas Media"post makes a similar claim with the same failing. It links to several blog posts that say little or nothing of substance and two "MSM" stories based on actual reporting.

I have been skeptical of the media all of my adult life but I have gained new respect for them in the last few years. I am glad we have alternative sources of information both in print and on the web, but this will never replace this.

UPDATE: San Fran's lone Republican replies to my criticism of his vagueness with a vague reference to the Economist's "Shaming of America" cover. But cover relates to their Leader (Britspeak for editorial). I didn't see any wild claims, now debunked, in one Katrina related article on the web from that issue.

Good News . . .

I came in 15th!

Free Vermont!

I tried to imagine the pro-torture, war-worshipping neocons at National Review running an article like Bill Kauffman's Free Vermont in The American Conservative, but I just couldn't:

Organizers billed the Vermont Independence Convention of Oct. 28 as "the first statewide convention on secession in the United States since North Carolina voted to secede from the Union on May 20, 1861." North Carolina, the final state to join the Confederacy, overcame its unionist scruples with some reluctance; by contrast, the 250 or so Vermonters gathered in Montpelier, that coziest of state capitals, gloried in the prospect of disunion.

Montpelier is the only McDonald's-less state capital in the land, and from its late October splendor issued a Jeffersonian firebell in the night, ringing a warning to the national capital: the United States deserve a break(up) today.

Only in Vermont, with its town-meeting tradition and tolerance of radical dissent, would the golden-domed State Capitol be given over to a convention exploring the whys and wherefores of splitting from the United States. And all for a rental fee of $35! (It would have been free if the disunionists had knocked off by 4 p.m.)

Tis the Season . . .

It's Christmastime and you know what that means: celebrating the birth of Jesus, greedy children and crowded malls. Oh, and the newly traditional "War on Christmas" battles. I think I will sit out the fight this year. I am still disgusted by Orwellian Newspeak terms such as "holiday tree" used by corporate and government bureaucrats horrified at the possibility of giving offense to anyone outside of the majority culture.
However, I grow weary of using war metaphors when the country is still fighting a real war. And when Christmas becomes just another front in the Culture Wars, I want nothing to do with it.
The best response to people such as Ruth Marcus, who wrote in the Washington Post that "this is the time of year, though, when those of us who aren't Christian, or who don't celebrate Christmas, most feel our minority status" (other than to point out that no law constrains her from putting up a tree, wrapping some presents and watching A Christmas Story); came from Michael Kinsley, commenting on the ACLU's anti-creche fundamentalism in the eighties:

"On a practical level," the ACLU writes, "a child whose family does not believe in the Divinity of Christ must view the public creche as a symbolic representation of his or her status as an outsider. The child will question . . . his identification with the American culture."

I think that's right. But I also think this child had better learn early on to question his identification with the American culture, because it's a tough question that will follow him all his life no matter how successful the ACLU is in banning nativity scenes. There is a majority culture in this country. It is Christian, white, middle-class. Jews and nonbelievers (I am both) are outsiders to some extent in that culture. So are blacks, homosexuals, Orientials, and so on. This is so even though we are a society that is constantly remaking itself, and a society committed to protecting civil rights and economic opportunities for minorities. The battle for minority rights goes on, of course, but does final victory require the eradication of the majority culture? And is every manifestation of that culture an insult to those who aren't fully a part of it?

People who want to go through life with nothing to remind them of their minority status ask too much. They will not get it, and full civil equality does not require it. Furthermore, in the name of ethnic or religious or racial or sexual awareness, they would impose a vast unawareness of national life in which, for official purposes, most Americans are of no particular race or religion(or equally divided among all) . . .

Far from being a handicap, a sense of "outsideness" can be a great asset in a society that does, in the end, try to protect the rights of cultural outsiders. It energizes, promotes skepticism, gives perspective. . . I am happy to be a bit of an outsider in my own country. I am no less American for it, and may even hope to be a better one as a result.

RWB RIP

Numerous websites that I link to have already noted the passing of Liberty magazine's founding editor, RW (Bill) Bradford. Like Brian Doherty and Jesse Walker, Bradford gave me my first job in journalism. He encouraged and was a genuine fan of my writing. I discovered his magazine in 1989 and I have been involved with it since 1993. It has never had a party line and it is open enough to have published Murray Rothbard, Michelle Malkin(!), Bill Kauffman (even praising Robert Byrd once), Peter McWilliams and Ron Paul.

Some of the comments on Jesse's post indicate that Bradford provokes strong reactions both negative and positive, which is not surprising. He was brilliant and demanding, and he was often difficult to work for. He had a hard time dealing with a staff of more than two or three people at a time. As a result, several people left on bad terms with Bill. However, those I have been in contact with recently have many postive memories, amidst those of conflict, of their time at Liberty. I know I learned a great deal and had a lot of fun while I was there. And I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

God Only Knows . . .

If I understand Roger Simon correctly (and God only knows what is going home in his head) the reporting of the American "reactionary media" of the almost daily terrorist attacks in Iraq does more to harm attitudes in that country than the terrorist attacks themselves.

P.S.: One doesn't have to wait very long for the inane comments from Simon's readers like this one from David Thomson. "There are about twenty seven million people living in Iraq. The terrorists are able to murder far less than one percent of the general population. Obviously, these thugs are slowing down the rebuilding project---but still life goes on." Wow, only one per cent. Of course, one per cent of the United States is about three million people.