Black Like Me

Friday's Washington Post included a piece by columnist Eugene Robinson that was truly pathetic.  Finally admitting to himself (I'm guessing) the sure Democrat Party disaster coming next month, Robinson lashes out in frustration at Republicans for....  Well, his title will tell you. "Why won't the GOP compete for African American votes?

It apparently occurred to Robinson that as the Democrat Party routinely receives 90-95% of the black vote,  it can fairly safely take that vote for granted.  And, as the Republicans have demonstrated their ability to win elections without the black vote, like they will do again in large numbers this fall, it doesn't need to pursue it.  Recognizing that this is not a good position to be in, early in the piece Robinson concedes that as competition is a good thing generally, maybe it would also be a good thing for black Americans if the two major parties actually competed for their vote.

But then, making no sense at all, he proceeds to call the GOP's success as a party, at least since the 1960s, a direct result of deliberately racist policies. He goes on to dismiss the party's current leadership by African American Michael Steele as a sure sign of tokenism.  (I suspect that as Colin Powell supported the candidacy of Barack Obama, the general is no longer a token.)  Finally, he is sure nevertheless that the liberalism of the Democrats remains superior to the conservatism of the Republicans.  Therefore, his conclusion is that blacks, whose interests are, in his judgment, better served by liberalism, would be foolish to vote against those interests by voting for the GOP.

I don't think he realizes it, but Robinson doesn't really want the Republican Party to court the vote of African Americans.  What he really wants is for the Republican Party to become more like the Democrat Party.  What he doesn't seem to realize, however, is that if this were to happen, there would be no real difference between the parties and, as a result, no real choice either.

But then there are still far too many white Republicans who think exactly the same way.

Him Again?

America lost an eloquent conservative voice last week with the passing of columnist and author Joseph Sobran.  The Skinny Blond Bomber Ann Coulter, a good friend of his, pays a very nice tribute at her website and does so mostly by posting a sampler of some of his best and most acerbic wit and wisdom.  My favorite will not surprise any of you who follow this blog regularly.  On then President Bill Clinton during his impeachment:

Once again, his defenders, furiously attacking the prosecution and equating opposition with 'conspiracy,' don't dare mount the best defense: 'He's not that sort of man.' It's because Clinton is, supremely, 'that sort of man' that this whole thing has happened. He's a lying lecher, a prevaricating pervert, an utterly slimy crook, without a trace of honor or loyalty, desperately trying to save his own skin one last time.

Sobran knew one when he saw one.  RIP.

Cooling Hot Tea

There's a famous exchange between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson where our first president asks our third about the constitutional purpose of the Senate.  Jefferson replied that it was to cool the hot tea of the House.

As a well-intentioned stab at cooling the boiling brew that is the Tea Party uprising, Ron Chernow, author of the very well-received Alexander Hamilton biography of a few years ago, as well as a forthcoming new one on Washington, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about the current movement's tendency, along with many other popular insurgencies throughout our history, to wrap itself in the mantle of the founders.  Chernow warns against such an inclination.

But any movement that regularly summons the ghosts of the founders as a like-minded group of theorists ends up promoting an uncomfortably one-sided reading of history.


The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything. Never has the country produced a more brilliantly argumentative, individualistic or opinionated group of politicians. Far from being a soft-spoken epoch of genteel sages, the founding period was noisy and clamorous, rife with vitriolic polemics and partisan backbiting. Instead of bequeathing to posterity a set of universally shared opinions, engraved in marble, the founders shaped a series of fiercely fought debates that reverberate down to the present day. Right along with the rest of America, the Tea Party has inherited these open-ended feuds, which are profoundly embedded in our political culture.

Fair enough.  But surely Mr. Chernow does not mean to imply that because the feuds were open-ended that the founders meant to establish an "open-ended society", a society that at once stood for both everything and nothing.  That their intention was to birth a nation, if such a one could exist, that would honor liberty in one generation and dishonor it in the next. 

As Chernow reports, the debates between the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians, as well as those that recur between their intellectual heirs, while heated, remained largely intramural, were contested chiefly within the constitutional framework.  Contemporary liberalism, by contrast, informed as it is by a long progressive pedigree, sees the Constitution instead as either a meaningless guide toward, or an outright impediment to its as-yet-unfulfilled dream of statist utopia.

Whatever else Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed about, no honest scholar would claim that either of them could look at our current Leviathan and be anything other than shocked.  And from what I gather, Ron Chernow is an honest scholar.

China Syndrome

Foreign Policy magazine just published a new article by one Ethan Devinewith this title and this header:

The Japan Syndrome

China's teetering on the verge of its own lost decade, and a meltdown in Beijing would make Japan's economic malaise look like child's play.

Has anyone told Tom Friedman?

The Greening of America

By now you've seen the pictures or heard the reports of what the participants of the John Stewart "One Nation" Rally did to the DC Mall and its surroundings.  This was brought to you by the people who, unlike you and me, really and truly care about the environment.

Proving, once again, that EVERYTHING about liberalism is phony, false, fraudulent, affected, bogus, counterfeit, forged, pseudo, sham, insincere, unreal, disingenuous, artificial, fake, hollow, specious, manufactured, deceitful, dishonest, duplicitous, empty, fixed, foul, spurious, contrived, rotten, contrived, two-faced, underhanded, perfidious, unethical, unprincipled, corrupt, misleading, bologna, bull$#!+,(C'mon, help me out!),...

Scratching My Head

I just read a piece by Jay Cost over at The Weekly Standard that left me puzzled.  Its title is "What We Learned from Obama's Rolling Stone Interview" and therein Cost wonders how such a steadfastly post-partisan fellow like Barack Obama became the hyper-partisan Democrat revealed in the interview.  (BTW, while I take Cost's point, in Obama's case I think hyper-ideologue is more apt than hyper-partisan.  As every poll demonstrates, his agenda has not served his party well at all.)

In his opening paragraph, Cost remarks: "Certainly, even those most skeptical of President Obama in January 2009 would have been a little surprised to read an interview that drips with contempt for so many of the president's fellow citizens."

Huh?  Has Cost forgotten Obama's "bitter-clinger" comments during the campaign, his 20-year association with the racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his marriage to the "not proud 'til now" Michelle, etc.?  How can anyone justly say they are surprised?  Well, I was among "those most skeptical" in January 2009 and there is nothing about the interview that surprises me.

I do, however, find myself scratching my head over another aspect of Cost's piece.  Before he proceeds to demonstrate Obama's hyper-partisanship, he's quick to make the point that the parties are actually much the same.

The Republican and Democratic stories are substantively different, but formally quite similar.  For instance:

(a) Each believes the other side has perfidious motivations. 

(b) Each believes that, to the extent that the opposition is acting on principle, they are  radical or foolish principles. 

(c) Each believes that the other typically conducts the dirtier campaign.

(d) Each reserves to its own side all the credit for policy successes, and pushes to the opposition all the blame for policy failures.

(e) Each has a Manichean view of American politics and history, with its own side representing the forces of light and the opposition representing the forces of darkness. 

This bugs me.  One problem with the list is that it communicates not just that the parties are similar, but that between them, there really is no difference.  And another is that it says nothing about whether, in their judgments of the other, one side is correct or not.  While both may think the other has perfidious motivations, one may indeed have them.  Distinctions such as this make all the difference in the world when one is deciding how to vote.

But what really bugs me is this: I cannot for the life of me understand this disposition, this reflex it seems,  displayed here by Cost, and elsewhere by far too many others hailing from the American political Right.  I'm referring to the willingness, the eagerness even, to establish and maintain an appearance of even-handedness, and to do so by pronouncing these "a pox on both your houses" judgments.  Judgments that are not only intellectually hazy and lazy, but, more importantly, do real harm to our side.

This past summer Sports Illustrated ran a retrospective on Hall-of-Famer Stan Musial. In the piece, fellow Hall-of-Famer Bob Gibson was asked about his teammate.  His reply: "Stan Musial is the nicest man I ever met in baseball and, to be honest, I can't relate to that. I never knew that nice and baseball went together."  Sure, Gibson was kidding a bit.  By all accounts, Gibson conducted himself honorably not only off, but on the field as well.  But he understood always that the object of the game is to win.  On the mound, Gibson's competitive spirit, as is well chronicled, was second to none.  He knew that a baseball game, like any game, is not a performance, it's a contest.

Gibson, a power pitcher, was famous for sometimes throwing two "knockdown" pitches in a row.  If a hitter was digging in, if he was too aggressive at the plate, Gibson would throw a fastball directly at the hitter in order to move him away from the plate and make him a little less aggressive the next time, after he got up, dusted himself off, and stepped back into the batter's box.  But Gibson, unlike almost any other pitcher, would then do it again, making clear to the hitter that the previous pitch was no mistake, that the ball hadn't merely slipped out of his hand.  Bob Gibson intended to win.

Politics is not a game; the stakes are far more serious.  But it is a contest.  And the object of a contest is to win.  I wish more on our side understood that.

Ya think Bob Gibson might be interested in running for political office?

Tea Party Anarchism?

This is from a couple of weeks ago now, but Newsweek and Slate uber-liberal columnist Jacob Weisberg (along with many others, I'm sure) sees an anarchic, anti-authority bent to the Tea Party movement.  Is he serious?

First, a charge such as this coming from anyone on the Left is just plain funny.  Whatever happened to sticking it to the Man?  Power to the People?  Workers of the world unite?  You know, the rallying cries of leftist demagogues for generations.

The only thing anarchic about the Tea Party uprising is the movement itself.  Its provenance gives new meaning to the word spontaneous.  To this point, try as they might, the leftists have been unable to identify successfully any single populariser they can then isolate and demonize.  Neither have they located any group or individual responsible for funding the whole operation.  Someone like, oh, I don't know, George Soros, for example.  They haven't, because there is none.

Finally, only a Lefty could confuse a demand for a return to constitutional government, a government of limited and enumerated powers, anarchy.

But then, maybe not.  If I understood the Constitution to be nothing more than a point-less rough draft of general guidelines that, in any case, could not be meaningfully interpreted even one minute after the ink with which it was written was dry, then maybe I'd think a return to it was anarchic too.