New York Times
Gaze upon the jowly, saturnine face that is apparently the future of American conservatism. My guess, as an unlettered political animal, is that if Fred Thompson runs for the Republican nomination, he will win. If I turn out to be right, I'll take full credit, and if I'm wrong, I'll pretend I never said it. This is how the internet works.
My reasoning goes like this: the current front runners are piloting poisoned campaigns.
McCain has no pull among the party elite, his fevered toeing of the party line in the past few years has failed to win broad GOP support and has alienated the moderate vote (his only chance all along), and his aversion to torture will probably hurt him as well--the stony silence that greeted his strong stand against torture in the Republican debate was as frightening as it was enlightening.
Giuliani is Catholic, Italian, pro-Choice, an associate of luminaries like Bernie Kerik, and publicly reviled by firefighters. With America's hazy memories of 9/11 all he has going for him, and the FDNY chipping away at even that, he doesn't really have a serious chance. Even if he did get the nod, evangelicals would stay away from the polls in droves and he'd go down to a crushing defeat.
Romney is also pro-choice (his extremely recent Saint Paul-style conversion notwithstanding) and a Mormon. Polling indicates that being a Mormon is nearly as bad as being an atheist, electorally. So far, he's drubbing the other candidates in the money race, being the only Republican keeping anything like even pace with the Democrats, but that's probably because the deep pocket Republican donors think he's the only chance they've got. If a better candidate shows up, they'll leave Romney in the lurch.
Fred Thompson certainly seems to have the momentum. Multiple quotes in this NYT article compares him to Reagan in a favorable light. In conservative vernacular, "strong, almost Reagan-esque communication skills" is exactly equivalent to saying he wears a halo and heals the lame. The nay-sayers in the article talk about how he's too far behind in the money race, or that their candidates are stronger, but this is silly talk. Thompson has great grassroots buzz, the other candidates are very weak, and he has nine months before primary season starts. This is plenty of time to pick up the slack, especially since he'll be taking all of that money out of the other guys' pockets. He's also getting a lot of free publicity from the "is-he-or-isn't-he" game that news outlets like the New York Times are playing.
The quote from the Romney rep amused me most. He's talking about how the Romney charisma outweighs anything that Thompson brings to the table, so Mitt ain't scared. The spectacle of a member of such a shambling campaign praising the Romney magic pleases me, and I hope to see more of this kind of thing as the campaign goes on. The sublime incompetence of Romney's hunting/varminting episode has already made Romney a joke (which McCain cannily exploited for a good stomping), and as I mentioned above, he's a Mormon who was pro-choice until the day before he decided to run for president. Also, from what I understand, while Mitt is photogenic as all get-out, he is not actually very good at working the crowd.
The kicker of this whole thing is that Thompson isn't actually that strong a candidate. He has the right stands on the right issues, but he's still got the Iraq millstone around his neck, and the plain fact is that he's only so strong because people don't know anything much about him except for what he's told them so far. Looking into his senate record and plank, he seems to be a pretty standard old-school conservative. The status of the Republican party these days made even "Nasty Newt" Gingrich look good, so it's not surprising that a fairly average candidate would look like gold.
Of course, whichever Republican candidate wins the nomination, he'll be sailing against gale-force winds and will probably go down in a defeat of Goldwater-esque proportions.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Monday, May 28, 2007
Iran?
I've been at my cousin's wedding all weekend and change, hence no updates. Here's something! Thanks to Janani for pointing me to this fine website.
Commentary?
Is it just me, or is there some very special kind of arrogance that goes into giving your publication a name like "Commentary"? Is this word, unalloyed by any declamatory embellishment, meant to indicate that you will provide the reader with the definitive commentary on any subject appearing within its pages? Or am I reading too much into titles? Questions, questions.
The article I examine here comes courtesy of their editor-at-large, Norman Podhoretz.
Mr. Podhoretz begins by informing us that he considers the Cold War to have actually been World War III, and that this means that the current Global War on Terror is really WWIV. This rhetorical flourish bothers me, so Podhoretz succeeds in pissing me off in the first two sentences of his article. An auspicious start.
Forgive me for my ignorance, but I was under the impression that a "World War" required that a fairly hefty portion of the world be directly involved, and also that a war should be going on. I tend to think that the second requirement is more critical than the first--after all, World War I is undisputed as a World War, thought it was pretty much a European affair. So, calling the Cold War, which amounted to a lot of diplomatic posturing and arms racing plus a handful of proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.) WWIII might be exaggerating. By that sort of logic we can say that, due to the diplomatic maneuvering taking place prior to August 1914, WWI actually went on from ca. 1905 to 1921 (counting the Russian Civil War as a direct outgrowth).
As for the putative WWIV, America and Britain plus loose change versus a lot of Stateless Jihadists and also Iraq fall rather short of requirement number one, and requirement number two is foggy. If one subscribes to the notion that a cultural and ideological struggle constitute a war, then definitely we're in a bit of a scrap, maybe the biggest since the American Civil War of 1830-1877.
Kidding aside, Podhoretz is just engaging in a completely empty saber-rattling rhetorical exercise. By asserting that we're in a World War he instantly ratchets up the issue and escalates the language, which is always a good position to be in. When a fuzzy-headed liberal insists that we need to stop and think, then you can tell him that it's time to fight the Good Fight in WWIV. Maybe it's the lack of any direct American experience with the toll that a real war, on home territory, exacts on a nation that allows people like Podhoretz to make fatuous statements like this.
I've also noticed a marked strategy of the Neo-Conservatives to reference to long, hard struggles. Podhoretz informs us that WWIV is "likely to go on for decades." By speaking in long timescales and the language of hard struggle, they're achieving two goals. First, this is a long war, so Americans should not be dismayed if there are no results for five or six or twenty years. Second, this is a tough fight, and Americans always rise to the challenge.
Let's not lose our heads, Norman. I'll grant you that eradicating terrorism will be a long fight. The roots of this guerrilla movement within the Muslim world are deep, and while cutting the weed down helps (viz. our invasion of Afghanistan) it's going to take a long time to dig up the roots--economic, political, and ideological--that drive the Jihadists. But as unfashionable as it might be to say this, terrorism is not that great a danger to America in general. Terrorists are very scary--it's in their name, for Christ's sake!--and every death is a tragedy, but exactly how much damage did the 9/11 attacks do to America, to the sinews of its Great Power status, in the realistic analysis? It hurt us substantially less than the invasion of Iraq did, militarily, economically, and diplomatically.
For a long time people were afraid to say things like that, for fear of being accused of "making light of terrorism" or otherwise minimizing the threat. But I think it's beginning to dawn on a lot of people that they've been bamboozled. Certainly Osama bin Laden or any of his thugs would like to kill me if he met me in person. But the concrete likelihood of me, here in the Midwest, being killed by a Jihadist is substantially less than my likelihood of being struck and killed by a drunk driver. Get ready for WWV, the War on Alcohol.
Rather than semantics-mongering about World Wars Three and Four, maybe we should examine the problems of terrorism and radical Islamism on their face and come up with real solutions. Treating them as struggles of national intelligence and law enforcement and economic/cultural change, respectively, would be a start. Of course people like Podhoretz would insist that This is a War unique in human history, and that I'm being a flippant, unrealistic ivory tower liberal by saying that we can handle this with Kid Gloves--we must throw the full force of the immense American Military-Industrial complex behind WWIV. My feeling is that if your house is infested with rats, you should try poison and traps before grabbing gun and shooting holes in all the walls.
Moving on.
Podhoretz follows up this up with typical Iran-based fearmongering. To prove how dangerous Iran is, he cites a State Department annual report about terrorism that says Iran is the main sponsor of global terrorism. The State Department of course being an entirely neutral party as regards Iran. Being as Mr. Podhoretz is a leading neoconservative, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and member of some important neoconservative committees, and being as the Bush administration and State Department are shot through with neoconservativism, isn't there some rule against him citing them? Can I cite myself and my friends as a source as well?
There some kind of cognitive disease at work here, as well. Iran as the leader of global "Islamofascism" is hard to swallow, because Iranians are Shi'ites and most everyone else are Sunnis. And the jihadists of al Qaeda et al. are not only Sunnis, but super-Sunnis who foam at the mouth and so on. Are the Ayatollahs who run Iran sad when al Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups kill Americans? Clearly not. They probably pop open their non-alcoholic champagne on just those occasions. But the aims of Al Qaeda and co. are completely anathema to everything the Ayatollahs hold dear; what the radical Islamists want is one Muslim state, the Caliphate, which will encompass all Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia in one glorious, utopian superstate. For Persian Iranians, this means permanent occupation and horrific religious persecution at the hands of Sunni Arab zealots. Not exactly an ideal outcome, and reason enough to belief the State Department might be making more out of this than actually obtains.
Podhoretz then moves from this mind-bending on to Nuclear panic. For my part I subscribe to the leftist lie that Iran mainly wants nuclear capability for the purpose of generating power, and secondarily for bombs to make themselves even scarier. Iran, despite being a petroleum exporter, lacks refining capacity and has to import gasoline. Nuclear power would alleviate a lot of their problems. It's also hard to believe that Iran wants to attack anybody with nuclear weapons. There's a lot of mileage on the idea of The Bomb in the hands of a Madman, but I have my doubts. If nobody up till now (including Stalin and Mao, legendary for their mental stability) has deployed the nukes, why would Ahmadinejad be the first?
It's also egotistical to think that the Iranians would be willing to go down to certain annihilation in the face of America's colossal nuclear arsenal, irrevocably destroying a 4,000 year old continuous cultural history of which they are tremendously proud, just to maybe kill a few hundred thousand Americans. Do we really think that other nations want to commit suicide just to deal America a few grim but easily survivable blows?
Then there's the more concrete question of whether Ahmadinejad would actually have to power to exercise the use nuclear weapons in any capacity. The answer is no, for reasons that pretty much undo the entire thrust of Podhoretz article. Ahmadinejad is a popular figure in the western media. "Look at the crazy President of Iran. He wants to destroy Israel!" This springs, I think, from an American delusion that the office of President is the same in Iran as it is in the USA. It isn't. Ahmadinejad exercises executive power at the pleasure of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollahi Khamenei, and his decisions can be overruled at any time. Ahmadinejad's role is mostly ceremonial.
Following Podhoretz, we then move into some kind of bizarre Cold War paranoid fantasy.
The article continues to degenerate with a kindly reference to the nonspecific "British Press." Who does Norman indicate with that moniker? Is the Times of London? The Guardian? The Daily Mirror? The Sun? Or (my own guess) a letter to the editor from some East Anglian village newsletter? That counts as the British Press--it came out of a printing press located somewhere in Britain! A few paragraphs later, we run into "some observers". I am a great fan of "some observers", they always have such fascinating things to say. Already some observers are warning that the American government (or "Zionist Occupational Government" or ZOG as they call it) is controlled by a shadowy camarillo of International Jew Bankers whose sole objective is the mongrolization and destruction of the white race.
Only a quarter of the way through this trainwreck and already I'm tired of Podhoretz. It's late and time for bed. Perhaps I'll revisit him in the future, but don't count on it.
Evan
Commentary?
Is it just me, or is there some very special kind of arrogance that goes into giving your publication a name like "Commentary"? Is this word, unalloyed by any declamatory embellishment, meant to indicate that you will provide the reader with the definitive commentary on any subject appearing within its pages? Or am I reading too much into titles? Questions, questions.
The article I examine here comes courtesy of their editor-at-large, Norman Podhoretz.
Mr. Podhoretz begins by informing us that he considers the Cold War to have actually been World War III, and that this means that the current Global War on Terror is really WWIV. This rhetorical flourish bothers me, so Podhoretz succeeds in pissing me off in the first two sentences of his article. An auspicious start.
Forgive me for my ignorance, but I was under the impression that a "World War" required that a fairly hefty portion of the world be directly involved, and also that a war should be going on. I tend to think that the second requirement is more critical than the first--after all, World War I is undisputed as a World War, thought it was pretty much a European affair. So, calling the Cold War, which amounted to a lot of diplomatic posturing and arms racing plus a handful of proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.) WWIII might be exaggerating. By that sort of logic we can say that, due to the diplomatic maneuvering taking place prior to August 1914, WWI actually went on from ca. 1905 to 1921 (counting the Russian Civil War as a direct outgrowth).
As for the putative WWIV, America and Britain plus loose change versus a lot of Stateless Jihadists and also Iraq fall rather short of requirement number one, and requirement number two is foggy. If one subscribes to the notion that a cultural and ideological struggle constitute a war, then definitely we're in a bit of a scrap, maybe the biggest since the American Civil War of 1830-1877.
Kidding aside, Podhoretz is just engaging in a completely empty saber-rattling rhetorical exercise. By asserting that we're in a World War he instantly ratchets up the issue and escalates the language, which is always a good position to be in. When a fuzzy-headed liberal insists that we need to stop and think, then you can tell him that it's time to fight the Good Fight in WWIV. Maybe it's the lack of any direct American experience with the toll that a real war, on home territory, exacts on a nation that allows people like Podhoretz to make fatuous statements like this.
I've also noticed a marked strategy of the Neo-Conservatives to reference to long, hard struggles. Podhoretz informs us that WWIV is "likely to go on for decades." By speaking in long timescales and the language of hard struggle, they're achieving two goals. First, this is a long war, so Americans should not be dismayed if there are no results for five or six or twenty years. Second, this is a tough fight, and Americans always rise to the challenge.
Let's not lose our heads, Norman. I'll grant you that eradicating terrorism will be a long fight. The roots of this guerrilla movement within the Muslim world are deep, and while cutting the weed down helps (viz. our invasion of Afghanistan) it's going to take a long time to dig up the roots--economic, political, and ideological--that drive the Jihadists. But as unfashionable as it might be to say this, terrorism is not that great a danger to America in general. Terrorists are very scary--it's in their name, for Christ's sake!--and every death is a tragedy, but exactly how much damage did the 9/11 attacks do to America, to the sinews of its Great Power status, in the realistic analysis? It hurt us substantially less than the invasion of Iraq did, militarily, economically, and diplomatically.
For a long time people were afraid to say things like that, for fear of being accused of "making light of terrorism" or otherwise minimizing the threat. But I think it's beginning to dawn on a lot of people that they've been bamboozled. Certainly Osama bin Laden or any of his thugs would like to kill me if he met me in person. But the concrete likelihood of me, here in the Midwest, being killed by a Jihadist is substantially less than my likelihood of being struck and killed by a drunk driver. Get ready for WWV, the War on Alcohol.
Rather than semantics-mongering about World Wars Three and Four, maybe we should examine the problems of terrorism and radical Islamism on their face and come up with real solutions. Treating them as struggles of national intelligence and law enforcement and economic/cultural change, respectively, would be a start. Of course people like Podhoretz would insist that This is a War unique in human history, and that I'm being a flippant, unrealistic ivory tower liberal by saying that we can handle this with Kid Gloves--we must throw the full force of the immense American Military-Industrial complex behind WWIV. My feeling is that if your house is infested with rats, you should try poison and traps before grabbing gun and shooting holes in all the walls.
Moving on.
Podhoretz follows up this up with typical Iran-based fearmongering. To prove how dangerous Iran is, he cites a State Department annual report about terrorism that says Iran is the main sponsor of global terrorism. The State Department of course being an entirely neutral party as regards Iran. Being as Mr. Podhoretz is a leading neoconservative, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and member of some important neoconservative committees, and being as the Bush administration and State Department are shot through with neoconservativism, isn't there some rule against him citing them? Can I cite myself and my friends as a source as well?
There some kind of cognitive disease at work here, as well. Iran as the leader of global "Islamofascism" is hard to swallow, because Iranians are Shi'ites and most everyone else are Sunnis. And the jihadists of al Qaeda et al. are not only Sunnis, but super-Sunnis who foam at the mouth and so on. Are the Ayatollahs who run Iran sad when al Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups kill Americans? Clearly not. They probably pop open their non-alcoholic champagne on just those occasions. But the aims of Al Qaeda and co. are completely anathema to everything the Ayatollahs hold dear; what the radical Islamists want is one Muslim state, the Caliphate, which will encompass all Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia in one glorious, utopian superstate. For Persian Iranians, this means permanent occupation and horrific religious persecution at the hands of Sunni Arab zealots. Not exactly an ideal outcome, and reason enough to belief the State Department might be making more out of this than actually obtains.
Podhoretz then moves from this mind-bending on to Nuclear panic. For my part I subscribe to the leftist lie that Iran mainly wants nuclear capability for the purpose of generating power, and secondarily for bombs to make themselves even scarier. Iran, despite being a petroleum exporter, lacks refining capacity and has to import gasoline. Nuclear power would alleviate a lot of their problems. It's also hard to believe that Iran wants to attack anybody with nuclear weapons. There's a lot of mileage on the idea of The Bomb in the hands of a Madman, but I have my doubts. If nobody up till now (including Stalin and Mao, legendary for their mental stability) has deployed the nukes, why would Ahmadinejad be the first?
It's also egotistical to think that the Iranians would be willing to go down to certain annihilation in the face of America's colossal nuclear arsenal, irrevocably destroying a 4,000 year old continuous cultural history of which they are tremendously proud, just to maybe kill a few hundred thousand Americans. Do we really think that other nations want to commit suicide just to deal America a few grim but easily survivable blows?
Then there's the more concrete question of whether Ahmadinejad would actually have to power to exercise the use nuclear weapons in any capacity. The answer is no, for reasons that pretty much undo the entire thrust of Podhoretz article. Ahmadinejad is a popular figure in the western media. "Look at the crazy President of Iran. He wants to destroy Israel!" This springs, I think, from an American delusion that the office of President is the same in Iran as it is in the USA. It isn't. Ahmadinejad exercises executive power at the pleasure of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollahi Khamenei, and his decisions can be overruled at any time. Ahmadinejad's role is mostly ceremonial.
Following Podhoretz, we then move into some kind of bizarre Cold War paranoid fantasy.
"And in the realm of domestic affairs, Finlandization would mean that the only candidates running for office with a prayer of being elected would be those who promised to work toward a sociopolitical system more in harmony with the Soviet model than the unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living.Hippies and libero-commie politicians were all prepared to bring down the capitalist system and force us all to live under soft-pedal Stalinism, but Lech Walesa, the Gipper, and the LORD rescued us at the very doors of defeat. What a spectacular world these people live in, of narrow escapes and secret conspiracies.
Of course, by the grace of God, the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and Ronald Reagan, we won World War III and were therefore spared the depredations that Finlandization would have brought."
The article continues to degenerate with a kindly reference to the nonspecific "British Press." Who does Norman indicate with that moniker? Is the Times of London? The Guardian? The Daily Mirror? The Sun? Or (my own guess) a letter to the editor from some East Anglian village newsletter? That counts as the British Press--it came out of a printing press located somewhere in Britain! A few paragraphs later, we run into "some observers". I am a great fan of "some observers", they always have such fascinating things to say. Already some observers are warning that the American government (or "Zionist Occupational Government" or ZOG as they call it) is controlled by a shadowy camarillo of International Jew Bankers whose sole objective is the mongrolization and destruction of the white race.
Only a quarter of the way through this trainwreck and already I'm tired of Podhoretz. It's late and time for bed. Perhaps I'll revisit him in the future, but don't count on it.
Evan
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
More News
Most of my blogging is going to come from the New York Times online, because they're kind enough to give me full access for free, just because I am a student.
Abortion Foes See Validation for New Tactic
The article in the NYT today that caught my eye was this one about the grand old abortion debate, the favorite stomping grounds of the Falwells and Dobsons, and the famed litmus test for all GOP candidates. It concerns the evangelical infatuation with their new strategy of claiming that abortion isn't just bad for fetuses/babies/martyred saints, it's bad for women, too.
I have a few immediate problems with this argument:
1) On the issue of psychological harm, well, duh. Of course it's a difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy, only made worse by the vitriolic disapproval from the anti-abortion types. The people who say they only want to look out for the health of both baby and mother are the same people who camp outside the clinics and call the women seeking abortions whores and murderers. Anti-abortion groups assert that there is a psychological disorder called Post Abortion Syndrome which is related to PTSD, but unfortunately this isn't recognized by the psychological or psychiatric communities and isn't to be found anywhere in the DSM-IV (the bible of mental disorders). So, PAS exists in the same murky ground as claims that homosexuality is a mental defect.
2) As for the claims that abortion is a severe danger medically, well, the evidence doesn't obtain. When you're making a medical argument this total lack of reputable, peer-reviewed research is a serious problem. In reality an abortion performed by a doctor in a clinic (e.g., a legal abortion as opposed to the back-alley jobs that would be necessitated by a renewed ban) is safer than childbirth.
3) Finally, the entire argument is flawed. Even if abortion were as dangerous for a woman as claimed, where is the justification for state intervention? Divorce can be an emotionally damaging, difficult experience. Should the state force married couples to undergo counseling before they're allowed to file for divorce?
Then there's the matter of the actual content of these state-mandated "informed consent" sessions and counseling procedures. As reported by the Times, the South Dakota informed consent law (under legal challenge) states that abortion kills a
(South Carolina also wants to force women to look at the fetus via sonogram before having the abortion. I don't think this will work because it is illegal to force people to undergo medical procedures without their consent, but it is a nice touch. Maybe they can also make a law saying that the doctor has to slap the woman across the face and yell "It's a child, not a choice!" before starting the procedure.)
Something else I enjoyed:
Abortion Foes See Validation for New Tactic
The article in the NYT today that caught my eye was this one about the grand old abortion debate, the favorite stomping grounds of the Falwells and Dobsons, and the famed litmus test for all GOP candidates. It concerns the evangelical infatuation with their new strategy of claiming that abortion isn't just bad for fetuses/babies/martyred saints, it's bad for women, too.
I have a few immediate problems with this argument:
1) On the issue of psychological harm, well, duh. Of course it's a difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy, only made worse by the vitriolic disapproval from the anti-abortion types. The people who say they only want to look out for the health of both baby and mother are the same people who camp outside the clinics and call the women seeking abortions whores and murderers. Anti-abortion groups assert that there is a psychological disorder called Post Abortion Syndrome which is related to PTSD, but unfortunately this isn't recognized by the psychological or psychiatric communities and isn't to be found anywhere in the DSM-IV (the bible of mental disorders). So, PAS exists in the same murky ground as claims that homosexuality is a mental defect.
2) As for the claims that abortion is a severe danger medically, well, the evidence doesn't obtain. When you're making a medical argument this total lack of reputable, peer-reviewed research is a serious problem. In reality an abortion performed by a doctor in a clinic (e.g., a legal abortion as opposed to the back-alley jobs that would be necessitated by a renewed ban) is safer than childbirth.
3) Finally, the entire argument is flawed. Even if abortion were as dangerous for a woman as claimed, where is the justification for state intervention? Divorce can be an emotionally damaging, difficult experience. Should the state force married couples to undergo counseling before they're allowed to file for divorce?
Then there's the matter of the actual content of these state-mandated "informed consent" sessions and counseling procedures. As reported by the Times, the South Dakota informed consent law (under legal challenge) states that abortion kills a
'“whole, separate, unique, living human being,” and that it carries a variety of psychological and physical risks to the woman.'It becomes rather clear what the "informed consent" law really is. Abortion foes can assemble across the street from an abortion clinic and yell abuse at women who enter. But, sadly, they can't follow the woman into the clinic and continue to verbally assault her. This where the God-fearing South Dakota state legislature comes in, because now you are directed by law to stop and listen to a state-mandated official tell you that abortion is murder before you're allowed to go into the operating room. How splendid, and might I add, it is wonderful to hear that in the state of South Dakota the government mandates officials inside a medical clinic to make false statements about the medical safety of a procedure.
(South Carolina also wants to force women to look at the fetus via sonogram before having the abortion. I don't think this will work because it is illegal to force people to undergo medical procedures without their consent, but it is a nice touch. Maybe they can also make a law saying that the doctor has to slap the woman across the face and yell "It's a child, not a choice!" before starting the procedure.)
Something else I enjoyed:
"But Allan E. Parker Jr., president of the Justice Foundation, a conservative group based in Texas, compares the campaign intended for women to the long struggle to inform Americans about the risks of smoking. “We’re kind of in the early stages of tobacco litigation,” Mr. Parker said."Now, see, the difference here would be that tobacco has been established by decades of unanimous scientific evidence to be dangerous, and that there isn't any strong evidence that abortion is particularly dangerous medically or psychologically.
Monday, May 21, 2007
College!
At the University of Iowa, you need 120 credit-hours to graduate. There is also a regulation that says, of those 120, a maximum of 50 can be derived from any one department. I have run up into that barrier with history classes. The field that I have majored it, the only field in which I have genuine, unalloyed interest (I like German, but as sort of an adjunct to my history work), must now stop contributing credits to my graduation.
This is not going to stop me from graduating, and it's not going to stop me from taking history classes. I have 104 credits right now, and of the 15 I'm taking next semester 9 will apply toward my total. Seven non-history credits in Spring 2008 will be a breeze. I am annoyed, however, partially because I can't divine any purpose to this rule. How did they arrive at the figure of 50 credits from any one department? Arbitrarily, I'm certain. I dispute the legitimacy of this number. Fie on it.
This is not going to stop me from graduating, and it's not going to stop me from taking history classes. I have 104 credits right now, and of the 15 I'm taking next semester 9 will apply toward my total. Seven non-history credits in Spring 2008 will be a breeze. I am annoyed, however, partially because I can't divine any purpose to this rule. How did they arrive at the figure of 50 credits from any one department? Arbitrarily, I'm certain. I dispute the legitimacy of this number. Fie on it.
First Post
Because of encouragement by a couple friends I've decided to try to keep a blog. Hopefully I'll be adding to it daily, but we'll see. My main purpose will be to look at news stories and use my brain to formulate a type-written response, available for your tube-driven internet perusal. Here's my first effort, starting with something from the New York Times week in review.
The article concerns the claims which are apparently being made about the conservative movement being in its death throes. Right away this gives me pause, because I don't know who's talking about that. Apparently, "many" are behind this line of thought. I wonder how "many". I don't really know anybody who has said that the conservative movement is finished, maybe because all the liberals I know are too pessimistic--or realistic. Or maybe the "many" don't actually exist, and are merely a straw man fallacy, created and held up so that it can be knocked down. Unidentified multitudes say that the conservative movement is over, thus giving us a perfect opportunity to talk about how wrong they are.
The gist of the article is, of course, correct. The conservative movement isn't finished. It's actually very hard, maybe impossible, to kill an ideology. The Nazis were complete and utter failures whose efforts accomplished nothing but the utter ruination of their homeland and stained German history forever, yet there are still swastika-toting goons to be found in any country one cares to look at.
The problem with the article is it's uncritical placement of Wolfowitz and Falwell in the same category. Since both supported the Republican party, the reasoning goes, they're similar enough to talk about them as one. But if you look at what the two actually supported you find they have almost nothing in common. For Falwell social issues (homosexuals, fetuses, condoms, and indecent television) were paramount; Wolfowitz didn't care about anything but invading Iraq. There are multiple movements within the Republican party which scarcely bear resemblance to one another and are allied for political convenience--to whit, Falwell's fundamentalists with their foam-at-the-mouth social agenda, Wolfowitz's neo-conservatives with their military adventurism, and the Eisenhower school exemplified by Arlen Specter or John McCain circa the 2000 campaign (these days he's just another goon). America being a two-party system, these elements overlook their wildly divergent goals and focus on their similarities.
The reason for Reagan's success and his saintly image in the Republican party today was his capacity to make all the different parts of the GOP feel loved by him (he was an actor, after all). Still, making reference to a conservative movement exemplified by both Wolfowitz and Falwell is a little odd--shouldn't a "movement" tend to move in one direction? Maybe Tanenhaus was thinking more about the similarities in rhetorical strategy, with both F and W having plenty of contempt for truth, logic, and the rule of law.
Finally, a last nitpick
"The unpopularity of the Iraq war is nearing Vietnam proportions, and President Bush’s plummeting poll numbers resemble those of Mr. McNamara’s boss, Lyndon B. Johnson."
With margin of error, and depending on what poll you trust, Bush's approval ratings are actually right around Lyndon Johnson's deepest valley of 35%, and have at times dipped even lower. Newsweek polls reported a 28% percent approval rating at the beginning of the month.
Polling Report
Another prominent difference would be that Bush's abysmal poll rating has held steady for quite a long time, whereas Lyndon Johnson's numbers dipped severely after the Tet Offensive and then climbed back to just under 50% by the time he left office. The jury is still out on whether Bush will recover to lofty 40% territory or not, but it doesn't look too good.
NYTThe article concerns the claims which are apparently being made about the conservative movement being in its death throes. Right away this gives me pause, because I don't know who's talking about that. Apparently, "many" are behind this line of thought. I wonder how "many". I don't really know anybody who has said that the conservative movement is finished, maybe because all the liberals I know are too pessimistic--or realistic. Or maybe the "many" don't actually exist, and are merely a straw man fallacy, created and held up so that it can be knocked down. Unidentified multitudes say that the conservative movement is over, thus giving us a perfect opportunity to talk about how wrong they are.
The gist of the article is, of course, correct. The conservative movement isn't finished. It's actually very hard, maybe impossible, to kill an ideology. The Nazis were complete and utter failures whose efforts accomplished nothing but the utter ruination of their homeland and stained German history forever, yet there are still swastika-toting goons to be found in any country one cares to look at.
The problem with the article is it's uncritical placement of Wolfowitz and Falwell in the same category. Since both supported the Republican party, the reasoning goes, they're similar enough to talk about them as one. But if you look at what the two actually supported you find they have almost nothing in common. For Falwell social issues (homosexuals, fetuses, condoms, and indecent television) were paramount; Wolfowitz didn't care about anything but invading Iraq. There are multiple movements within the Republican party which scarcely bear resemblance to one another and are allied for political convenience--to whit, Falwell's fundamentalists with their foam-at-the-mouth social agenda, Wolfowitz's neo-conservatives with their military adventurism, and the Eisenhower school exemplified by Arlen Specter or John McCain circa the 2000 campaign (these days he's just another goon). America being a two-party system, these elements overlook their wildly divergent goals and focus on their similarities.
The reason for Reagan's success and his saintly image in the Republican party today was his capacity to make all the different parts of the GOP feel loved by him (he was an actor, after all). Still, making reference to a conservative movement exemplified by both Wolfowitz and Falwell is a little odd--shouldn't a "movement" tend to move in one direction? Maybe Tanenhaus was thinking more about the similarities in rhetorical strategy, with both F and W having plenty of contempt for truth, logic, and the rule of law.
Finally, a last nitpick
"The unpopularity of the Iraq war is nearing Vietnam proportions, and President Bush’s plummeting poll numbers resemble those of Mr. McNamara’s boss, Lyndon B. Johnson."
With margin of error, and depending on what poll you trust, Bush's approval ratings are actually right around Lyndon Johnson's deepest valley of 35%, and have at times dipped even lower. Newsweek polls reported a 28% percent approval rating at the beginning of the month.
Polling Report
Another prominent difference would be that Bush's abysmal poll rating has held steady for quite a long time, whereas Lyndon Johnson's numbers dipped severely after the Tet Offensive and then climbed back to just under 50% by the time he left office. The jury is still out on whether Bush will recover to lofty 40% territory or not, but it doesn't look too good.
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