Two Roads Diverged . . .

Karl Zinsmeister, the former American Enterprise editor who has just been appointed to be a Whitehouse Domestic Policy Advisor (replacing the guy who got arrested for making phony retail returns) was a legislative aid to Sen. Pat Moynihan with Bill Kauffman before they both went into journalism. Zinsmeister even took the jacket photo for Kauffman's first book,Every Man a King: A Novel. I won't go into the minor controversy over Zinsmeister altering some quotes from a news article before publishing them at The American Enterprise website and his talk about his fellow embeds being "whiny and appallingly soft." I don't have any comment on Zinsmeister arguing that "the war is over and we won."

I'll just note that the paths of Zinsmeister and Kauffman couldn't have diverged more and we are fortunate that the latter took the road less traveled.

Outrage!

Salon's "Broadsheet" (a clever name for a women's blog) reports that various feminist groups are outraged that ABC News anchor Elizebeth Vargas stepped down because she is expecting a second child in a couple of months:

The official word is that Vargas is leaving the demanding job for another: mother of a 3-year-old and a child due this summer. "For now, for this year, I need to be a good mother," she said on Friday. After the second child arrives, she'll return to coanchor "20/20." Charles Gibson has replaced her on "World News Tonight."

But three leading women's groups aren't so sure that that's the whole story. NOW has joined with the Feminist Majority Foundation and the National Council of Women's Organizations to protest Vargas' departure. In a letter sent Monday to ABC, they characterize Vargas' move to "20/20" as a "clear demotion" and "a dispiriting return to the days of discrimination against women that we thought were behind us.". . . NOW president Kim Gandy finds the whole thing fishy: "It seems unlikely to me, having survived and thrived through her first pregnancy, that she would logically give up the top job in TV a few months out, anticipating she couldn't handle it."

. . .

Vargas, for her part, suggests that because her situation is unique, it should not necessarily be taken as bad news for all women. Not only is she the first person to get pregnant while working as lead anchor, but -- remember -- her former coanchor, Bob Woodruff, was critically injured in Iraq. . . The "20/20" job is more predictable and less demanding, she said.

NOW still isn't buying it. "If she can't have it all," said Gandy, "who among us could?"

What kind of horrible woman decides to stay at home with her kids for a couple of years and what kind of sick society allows it over feminist objections?

Contra Crunchies

The Contra-Crunchy Conservative, a blog dedicated to the blinding and obsessive hatred of all things Dreher noted last week that the paperback edition of Crunchy Cons has been announced with a thankfully shortened subtitle. This leads Pauli to engage in some theorizing:

I suppose there's not as much real estate on a paperback, but let indulge in some conspiracies. Do you think the Birkenstock company sued? Probably not -- maybe there was just a little something on there to offend more people in the paperback-buying market demographic. I haven't seen too many Birks at the pistol range.

Or maybe Rod was asked (or bribed) by the evil Republicans to remove the reference to saving their party? This is actually the most interesting aspect of the subtitle to me -- I had been pointing to that little parenthesized remark as kind of an obstacle to the claim that CCism isn't really about politics but the, you know, transcendental free-range sensibilities of the greater good or whatever.

So I'll be the first one to praise this change as a recognition and application on Rod's part of a "regular conservative" sensibility called unity. With a lot of the pundits buzzing with the uncertainties of continued Republican majorities, and therefore conservative influence in general, I imagine the market for the quaint and eccentric topics in Crunchy Cons may be soon questioned by conservative book-buyers and the publishing industry. A liberal takeover might be devastating for an author like Rod whose success in large part depends on conservatives not having anything better to do.

And devastating for the rest of America.

How about this -- the original subtitle was simply way too long?

Memorial Day Salebration!

As we head into the holiday set aside to honor our nation's retailers, theme parks, beaches and anyone who has a "salebration," it is worthwhile to remember that Memorial day, originally called "Decoration Day" was originally set aside to remember those who died fighting for the United States during the Civil War; and then later expanded to include all of America's war dead. Bill Kauffman (who else?) denounced the standardization of most of our holidays into Three Day Weekends a few years ago:

The traditionalists had a monopoly on wit. Fletcher Thompson (R-Ga.) offered an amendment to rename our holidays "Uniform Holiday No. 1, Uniform Holiday No. 2," etc. The immortal skinflint H.R. Gross (R-Ia.), who had opposed spending government money to keep the eternal flame over jfk's grave, proposed to move Christmas and New Year's Day to Monday. The Mondaynes were not amused.

The Uniform Holiday Act of 1968 passed the House, 212-83, and the Senate by voice vote, without debate. "This is the greatest thing that has happened to the travel industry since the invention of the automobile," rejoiced the president of the National Association of Travel Organizations.

Rep. Dan Kuykendall (R-Tenn.) saw it differently: "If we do this, 10 years from now our schoolchildren will not know what February 22 means. They will not know or care when George Washington was born. They will know that in the middle of February they will have a three-day weekend for some reason. This will come."

This has come.

Former Confederate states also established Memorial days on several dates ranging from Robert E. Lee's birthday on Jan. 19 to Jefferson Davis' birthday of June 3. Myrta Lockett Avary wrote of the first Memorial Day in Richmond, Virginia in her Reconstruction chronicle,Dixie After the War:

The young men of Richmond, the flower of the city, marched to Hollywood [cemetery], armed with picks and spades and numbering in their long line, . . . remnants of famous companies, whose gallantry hand made them shining marks on many a desperate battlefield . . .

Thousands visited the green hillside where General Jeb Stuart lay, a simple wooden board marking the spot; his grave was a mound of flowers. . . No Hero, great or lowly, was forgotten, What a tale of broken hearts and desolate homes far away the many graves told! Here had the Texas Ranger ended his march; here had brave lads from the Land of Flowers and all the states intervening bivouacked for a long, long night, from whose slumbers no bugle might wake them.

Accountability moment

The Nerve of these people. Over at Neocon Central -- the Wall Street Journal editorial page-- they are upset at the lack of accountability in the new Iraqi government:

Most troubling is the lack of accountability for past performance. Take Bayan Jabr, who presided for the past year over an Interior Ministry infiltrated by "death squads" that undermined Iraqi trust in the police. Mr. Jabr is at least out of that job, but he's nonetheless gotten the plum and important Finance Ministry instead.

Don't these guys know how democracy works? Iraq had its "accountability moment" and they have put their decider in place. Past performance no longer matters.

Town Hall Truth Forum?

Via Volunteer Voters, I saw this post at Team GOP. "Corker’s campaign said he would not be a part of a series of 'Town Hall Truth Forums' initiated by former Congressman and GOP Senate contender Ed Bryant." A "Town Hall Truth Forum" sounds positively Orwellian to me.

Explanations

Ramesh Ponnuru asks why President Bush doesn't get more credit for the good economy:

It seems to happen every week: Some new piece of good economic news comes out, and Republicans sink a little deeper in the polls. In late April, it was estimated that the economy had grown by 4.8 percent during the first quarter of the year. A few days later, new jobs numbers came out. It turns out that 5.3 million jobs have been created since August 2003. The unemployment rate is 4.7 percent — well below the average of each of the last three decades. The stock market continued to rise, and looked likely to hit a record soon.

The public responded to all this good news by turning a little more against President Bush. In a mid-April poll by Gallup and USA Today, 36 percent of the public approved of the president’s performance in office and 59 percent disapproved. In an early-May poll, approval had fallen to 31 percent and disapproval had risen to 65 percent. Bush’s 23-point deficit had widened to 34 points.

Perhaps it is because economic growth isn't enough. Walk or drive around your town. How many check cashing stores, signs saying "we buy houses" with a phone number and rent-to-own places do you see? I see too many in Knoxville to believe that the economy is truly healthy. Maybe that's why people don't approve of the President's handling of the economy. Or perhaps people have noticed how incompetent that the Bush administration is in almost every area, and are convinced that they can't do anything right.

Reactions

In the last day or so at Reactionary Radicals, I went off on a backyard totalitarian I discovered at Pajamas Media who would impose an ideological litmus test for grilled hamburgers:

Vote check at the backyard gate and turn away anyone who voted for Al or John, any Kennedy or any woman who ever wore even a single piece of “organic” clothing.

Extra points for guests that arrive one or two to a large, flashy vehicle, families with three or more children, snack items brought from Wal-Mart, and t-shirts reading “Iraqi Freedom Campaign”.

What a cretin! I also worked in a quote from my favorite Walker Percy novel, Lancelot:

. . . The story which I never had quite the energy or desire to correct was that in the grand mythic Lamar tradition I had confronted the Kleagle in his den, “called him out” with some such Southern Western shoot-out ultimatum as “Now listen here, you son of a bitch, I don’t know which one of you is bothering Ellis but I’m holding you responsible and if one hair of a Buell head is harmed, I’m going to shoot your ass off for you,” and so forth and so forth. I put a stop to it all right, but in a manner more suited to Southern complexities and realities than the simple dreams of the sixties, when there were only good people and bad people. I went to see the Grand Kleagle all right, who was none other than J.B. Jenkins, a big dumb boy who played offensive tackle with me in both high school and college . . .

"Courage"

If you are like me, you start gagging at the mention of Michael Novak's name, but to read him praising the president's "courage" is a bit much. George W. Bush is brave, according to Novak, for withstanding the slings and arrows of Moveon.org and the Harvard faculty.

The Da Vinci Concentration Camp

The self-absorption of some of these people! Stanley Kurtz senses a chill wind blowing at conservatives from the Da Vinci Code movie:

Conservatives have forgotten just how precarious our position is. One cable news channel, talk radio, and the blogosphere do not an invincible army make. It only seems that way because we also have nominal control of the reigns of power. But lose our foothold in government, and conservatives are up a creek. The other side controls the levers of cultural power in this country, and we are the enemy in their eyes (and on their screens).Conservatives need to face the fact that our position in this culture is genuinely precarious. If we lose our hold on power, we’ll scream bloody murder on our outlets at everything the other side does. Yet those screams may only confirm our helplessness.

Yeah, the next step is concentration camps. In case you didn't get it, Kurtz thinks that his movement's position is precarious, and is threatened by Hollywood. I haven't seen the movie, but I have read both The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons and see them for what they are -- page-turning suspense novels that go a little tough on the Catholic Church, which being one of the most enduring institutions in the history of the world, will survive its encounter with Dan Brown. They are not attacks on the political right.

Note that Kurtz also says that Democrats are "angry" in part, because of "the return of patriotism." When did patriotism go away? Was there an epidemic of flag burning and people renouncing their citizenship that I slept through? Or does Kurtz believe that patriotism goes away whenever a Democrat is in the Whitehouse?

It's Hard Out There . . .

. . . For a Crunchy Con: "Greetings from Key West, where I'm attending a conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. We're about to hear a lecture on what Muhammad accomplished and why it matters. The lecturer is Michael Cook, one of the leading authorities in the world on Islam, who teaches at Princeton; in fact, he holds the chair once held by his mentor, Bernard Lewis. The lecture is about to begin. I'll liveblog throughout."

Cut and Run

Retired Lt. Gen. William Odom minces no words in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy:

In fact, getting out now may be our only chance to set things right in Iraq. For starters, if we withdraw, European politicians would be more likely to cooperate with us in a strategy for stabilizing the greater Middle East. Following a withdrawal, all the countries bordering Iraq would likely respond favorably to an offer to help stabilize the situation. The most important of these would be Iran. It dislikes al Qaeda as much as we do. It wants regional stability as much as we do. It wants to produce more oil and gas and sell it. If its leaders really want nuclear weapons, we cannot stop them. But we can engage them.

None of these prospects is possible unless we stop moving deeper into the “big sandy” of Iraq. America must withdraw now.

If course, if you still have faith in Bush and Rumsfeld . . .

Shocked, Shocked!

So what did these people expect, Connecticut on the Gulf?

So glad our troops, including my cousin, helped liberate Iraq. So what do we get in return? Islamic law, a Shi'ite government that is inching toward Iran-style fundamentalism, and NOW, that country supports the Arab Boycott of Israel.

Imagine a country where about 60% of the population practices Shi'ite Islam organizing a government on those principles and not the Declaration of Independence!

A Byrd in the Senate

I draft Robert C. Byrd at Reactionary Radicals and express a desire that this Mountain Lion in Winter hang around the Senate, at least until you know who is gone.

The Party of the People

Dennis Hastert: People who earn $40,000 don't pay taxes.

We Call It Life

Damned environmental Nazis and their attempts to keep kids from breathing.

Update: Real Climate addresses the substance of the ads.

Crunchy Review

The June issue of Chronicles is out, and with it my review of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons. I'll post the first couple of paragraphs along with the opportunity to subscribe:

Rod Dreher's book labors under a few handicaps. First, there is the cloying title and absurdly long subtitle. In addition, the cover features a cutesy picture of a VW microbus with a GOP elephant painted above the grille. The back cover features a "Crunchy Con Manifesto" that is a bit simplistic. "We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly." However, the old adage about not judging a book by its cover applies here because Crunchy Cons does merit serious attention.

The conservative movement, as currently constituted can accomplish little more than elect Republicans, demonize Democrats and liberals and turn execrable books by talk radio hosts and syndicated columnists into best sellers. Since politics has devolved into a team sport many conservative rank-and-file are happy just to be "winning." In Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher looks at the deeper issue of whether conservatives are accomplishing anything of value.

Parenthood

I find the Glenn Reynolds' reasoning to be wanting in his article about the decline of parenthood, but how does one argue with such logic?

People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan's close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn't prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.

I had foolishly assumed that people are having fewer (or no) children for a variety of reasons, the main ones being:

1 The increasing availability of various forms of birth control.

2 The large number of people who finish their education deep in debt.

3 The extention of adolescence in a prosperous society where lots of people go to college and grad school.

Down Home

I go all East Tennessee on Reactionary Radicals this morning, praising Jimmy (Duncan) and Dolly (no last name needed).

Snobs

The odd thing about this article in The American Enterprise proclaiming that opposition to "sprawl" is movtivated by snobbery is that TAE is one of the few neocon magazines that has been running articles critical of the burbs for years now as this old issue demonstrates.