July 31, 2008
THE WHOLE THING IS HILARIOUS...:
America's Age of Denial: If you told me on October 22, 1962 that America's most formidable enemy in 2008 would be Iran, I would have been flabbergasted." (Tom Engelhardt, July 31 , 2008, Mother Jones)
Thanks largely, however, to one man, Gorbachev, who consciously chose a path of non-violence, after four decades of nuclear standoff in a fully garrisoned MAD (mutually assured destruction) world—and to the amazement, even disbelief, of official Washington—the USSR simply disappeared, and almost totally peaceably at that.
...but that bit is priceless. There was, of course, one official in Washington who wasn't at all surprised that Reaganism had finished off the USSR.
AND YOU THOUGHT HE WAS CONFLICTED AFTER YOU FINISHED PRIMARY COLORS?:
Joe Klein on Neoconservatives and Iran (Jeffrey Goldberg, 29 Jul 2008, Atlantic)
Has profanity ever sounded more like a desperate need to seem macho? And don't we have a pretty standard name for people whose hatred is directed at Jews?
HAVING PRINTED THE MYTH...:
Obama's best strategy? Attack: McCain's 'maverick' myth and ties to Bush should be prime targets. (Jonathan Chait, July 31, 2008, LA Times)
Here's the likely rationale: The public, by a wide margin, wants a Democrat to win the presidency. So all Obama has to do is make himself acceptable and he'll win. Hence the focus on building up his own credentials rather than tearing down McCain.Perhaps that sounds familiar. Let me refresh your memory: it was the John Kerry campaign strategy in 2004. Four years ago, the conventional wisdom had it that a majority of the voters would reject President Bush, so winning was just a matter of Kerry proving himself as an alternative. People "are looking for some change," one pollster put it at the time, "but the change has to be acceptable. John Kerry has to prove he is acceptable."
So rather than attack Bush, Kerry focused on defining himself. The Democratic National Convention was a model of civility and positive focus. The Republican National Convention, on the other hand, was a full-throated assault on Kerry. I don't need to remind you how it all turned out. [...]
To go on the attack, Obama doesn't need to engage in character assassination and baseless charges, as his opponent has done. All he needs to do is stop letting McCain paint a wildly distorted self-portrait.
Except that it isn't a self-portrait but his public persona, thanks in no small part to folks like Mr. Chait who thought he made a good foil to W. Now the public knows who Maverick is and he has tremendous leeway to go negative. No one, on the other hand, has any idea who the Unicorn Rider is, so if he goes negative that is their perception of him. The comparison to John Kerry is precise. Democrats just keep nominating these liberal ciphers and the GOP just keeps eating their lunch.
WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE SURPLUS?:
America's $53 trillion jumbo loan: The next president and Congress must not let the national debt surprise the country the way the subprime crisis did. (The Monitor Editorial Board, August 1, 2008)
It's true that the $482 billion deficit chasm estimated for fiscal year 2009 doesn't look so deep when taken as a percentage of the overall economy – 3.3 percent of gross domestic product compared to the 1983 nadir of about 6 percent.But this is just one "mortgage" that the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) must meet. It owes on all the deficits it has accumulated over the years (the national debt), and it has jumbo liabilities to come in the form of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Adding all those liabilities together, the government has dug itself into a $53 trillion fiscal hole – the equivalent of $175,000 per person living in the United States.
Meanwhile, we've built a $56 trillion mountain of household net worth. We could pay off all the debts and fund all the liabilities and have $3 trillion left over, it just wouldn't make a lick of economic sense to do so.
AND THERE IS ZERO CHANCE...:
America's Politically Correct Recession (James Pethokoukis, 7/31/08, US News)
[I]n short, the past four quarters were 4.8 percent, -0.2 percent, 0.9 percent, and 1.9 percent (the last one possibly with a bullet). That certainly does not meet the rule-of-thumb recession definition—back-to-back negative quarters. Nor do those numbers meet the recession definition of the National Bureau of Economic Research unless the economy totally falls off a cliff from here on out.But so what? Let's just come up with any definition we want to meet our political objectives or justify our recession predictions. Take a look at this howler from the economic consulting firm Global Insight. (Generally, I like its work very much.) According to Chief Economist Nariman Behravesh, "Based on these numbers, it is a safe bet that the domestic economy (excluding net exports) has been in recession since the end of last year."
Oh, that's right—exclude exports. It's not like the ability to sell your wares to the rest of the planet is important. The fact is, net exports had their strongest showing since 1980, adding 2.4 percentage points to real GDP growth. But ignoring inconvenient numbers is so much easier when the opposite reality would serve you so much better.
...that when the final numbers are all in--some time around 2018--the 4th quarter will have been negative.
IT'S STUPID PARTY FOR A DIFFERENT REASON...:
The HSA Revolution That’s Already Here (John Berlau, 7/28/08, OpenMarkets.org)
The new book America’s Health Care Crisis Solved has been praised as providing a detailed, free-market solution for healthcare’s future. This it does, but what’s almost as fascinating about the book is its description of what is going on in the present, with consumer-driven health savings accounts (HSAs). Almost without notice, HSAs have grown dramatically and have solved for millions of Americans the problem of healthcare’s lack of portability.First, some background. In the 2003 law that was rightly derided for massively expanding Medicare with a new prescription drug benefit was a separate section that let many more working-age people to take advantage of HSAs. This provision allowed any adult under 65 to open a savings account for medical expenses that receives much of the same special tax treatment as employer-based health care.
As a result of this change, you can qualify for an HSA by getting health insurance with at least an $1100 deductible for individuals or a $2100 deductible for families. So long as you don’t have another insurance policy, you can get a tax deduction for contributing up to $2900 for an individual or $5800 for a family to an HSA. Or your employer can contribute some or all of that amount. In either case, the money grows untaxed and can be withdrawn tax-free for health-care expenses.
And unlike the old flexible spending accounts, which you have to “use or lose” by the end of the year, an HSA can accumulate interest, dividends and capital gains year after year for 20, 30, or even 40 years until you reach the age of 65. And the same insurance policy remains in your hands regardless of whether you change jobs or become self-employed.
The book’s authors — insurance entrepreneur J. Patrick Rooney and longtime HSA advocate Dan Perrin — marshal impressive statistics to shatter critics’ myths that HSAs are only used by the young, wealthy and healthy. Citing statistics from eHealthInsurance.com, the authors note that more than 40 percent of HSA buyers had incomes lower than $50,000 a year, more than 50 percent were age 40 and older, and one-third had been previously uninsured.
And there has been a seven-fold increase to 3.2 million people with HSAs since just after the program began in 2004. In an interview with Open Market, co-author Perrin notes that, by contrast, it took several years to get to just one million individual retirement accounts after those were created.
In the interview, Perrin also credited HSAs with widespread innovations in the health care market. He says that the “minute clinics” that offer cheap and convenient medical services at Wal-Mart and other stores came about in part because of cost-conscious consumers with HSAs. When the government levels the health insurance playing field and consumers are spending their own health care dollars, market innovations arrive that make health care cheaper and better, just as other technologies and services have become cheaper and better when the consumer is in charge.
Much more could be done, Rooney and Perrin write, by the government, employers and insurance companies to make HSAs more accessible. HSA insurance premiums should be made tax-deductible, just as employer-provided insurance premiums are. But HSA have proven themselves as a way of dealing with the costs of U.S. healthcare by empowering patients, rather than empowering governments and limiting choices as socialized medicine does.
...but it does generally take them this many years to figure these things out also.
BUT DEMOCRACY IS A TIMEX:
Conservative Critics of Modernity: Can They Turn Back the Clock? (Robert P. Kraynak, Fall 2001, First Principles)
It is not easy to be a conservative in the modern world. In fact, it takes a high degree of moral courage, for conservatives are almost always on the defensive, fighting for causes that seem hopeless or lost because they go against the most powerful currents of the modern age.In praising the courage of conservatives, I am referring primarily to cultural rather than to economic or political conservatives. The proponents of free-market capitalism and limited government that are today called conservatives (in the economic and political sense) actually enjoy a certain momentum in their favor so they need not think of themselves as defenders of lost causes. But cultural conservatives are different. They are die-hard adherents of religious, philosophical, and artistic traditions that are out of place in the modern world. They are like dinosaurs who inexplicably missed the mass extinction sixty-five million years ago. As creatures from another era, cultural conservatives were not made for modern civilization and do not fit into the universe of respectable opinion. This gives them the distinction of being the last genuine radicals, and usually makes them the most interesting figures in today’s intellectual circles. To these wonderful pre-historic creatures, I would like to offer some words of encouragement by sketching a broad picture of modern culture that indicates why History is not as overpowering as it sometimes seems to be and why, in the long run, traditional patterns of culture are favored by the natural order of things and even by divine providence.
Let me begin with a simple definition: Cultural conservatives are those daring thinkers who are willing to question the basic assumption of historical progress—the assumption that the modern world as it has developed over the last four hundred years in the West (and now around the globe) is superior in decisive respects to all the civilizations of the past. This question has been raised by many great cultural conservatives and answered in a variety of provocative ways.
One striking example is the Russian writer and former dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn; he is a cultural conservative who shocked his audience during the Harvard Commencement Address of 1978 by asking if Western civilization took a wrong turn at the time of the Renaissance when it replaced God-centered societies with Man-centered societies, producing a world of secular humanism that now appears to be spiritually exhausted. Another great thinker who could be classified as a cultural conservative is Leo Strauss whose scholarly writings are dedicated to reviving classical Greek philosophy as a genuine alternative to modern philosophy—a proposal that implies no real progress in philosophy has occurred since its peak 2,400 years ago.
Other cultural conservatives look to the Middle Ages as the high point of Western civilization: For example, Henry Adams, who preferred Gothic cathedrals dedicated to the Virgin Mary to the dynamo of the industrial revolution. Or traditional Catholics, who think that Latin Scholasticism is the peak of Christendom. Or Eastern Orthodox believers, who believe that monasticism and the centuries-old liturgy are the authentic sources of Christian spirituality. Orthodox Jews are also cultural conservatives because they believe that traditional Judaism, faithful to the divinely revealed Mosaic Law, is superior to Reform Judaism. And one should not forget America’s Southern Agrarians, including Richard Weaver, who held fast to the conviction that the Old South, despite the evil of slavery, represented a higher civilization than the more “progressive” industrial and commercial society of the North.
Reflecting on these examples, one may infer that cultural conservatives are driven by a profound dissatisfaction with the modern world and look to the pre-modern world for sources of inspiration, especially for models of lost greatness. The root of their dissatisfaction is the belief that modernity does not constitute unmixed “progress” over the past because the advances in freedom, material prosperity, and technology that we presently enjoy are offset by a decline in the highest aspirations of the human soul—in the aspirations for heroic virtue, spiritual perfection, philosophical truth, and artistic beauty. Seen in this light, modernity is not superior to past civilizations because it has ushered in an un-heroic age. It has sacrificed the highest achievements of culture for a more equitable and secure but more prosaic existence that, in the last analysis, is not justified because it has lowered the overall aim of life and debased the human spirit. [...]
To illustrate the way cultural conservatives might challenge the present order and recover enduring patterns of human nature, I would like to speculate about four idols of the modern age—democracy, women’s “liberation,” modern art, and modern science. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I doubt that these phenomena are as inevitable or as desirable as most people have been led to believe by the dogma of historical progress.
Heck, three of the icons have already been clast, but while Europe demonstrates the reason monarchical republics are preferable to democracies, we're not going to win that one.
A DIVA-SIVE CAMPAIGN:
Nearly Half of U.S. Adults Now Applaud the Iraq Surge (Lydia Saad, 7/31/08, Gallup)
A new USA Today/Gallup poll finds nearly half of Americans saying the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, now over, has made the situation there better, up from 40% in February and just 22% a year ago. Accordingly, the percentage believing the surge "is not making much difference" has declined from 51% a year ago, and 38% in February, to just 32%.
Poll Shows Obama’s Lead Narrowing in Swing States (Brad Haynes, 7/31/'08, WSJ: Washington Wire)
Quinnipiac University’s latest swing-state polling suggests that Barack Obama’s foreign tour didn’t help him at home.Since the last Quinnipiac poll six weeks ago, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has pulled within the poll’s margin of error in Florida and Ohio and halved Democratic candidate Obama’s lead in Pennsylvania. In both Florida and Ohio, 46% of likely voters supported Obama compared with 44% for McCain, while Obama leads McCain 49% to 42% in Pennsylvania, down from a 12-point lead in June.
The polling was conducted during and after Obama’s trip to Afghanistan, Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East and to Europe.
The funniest response to the McCain comparison of Barrack Obama to Britney and Paris Hilton is that he's trying to play on fears of black men preying on white women. Do they really not get that the point is he's a bubble-gum pop star and completely unthreatening? It's an attack on his manhood, not flattery of same.
MORE:
On the other hand, Friend Perlstein is quite right to note the overtones of Triumph of the Will. Obamism is, after all, pretty much just a cult of personality--though on issues of race and abortion and euthanasia and the like his views too bear comparison to the party of Applied Darwinism.
WELL, 40% DEAD (via Jorge Curioso):
The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline (Joseph Bottum, August/September 2008, First Things).
America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets.The average American these days would have trouble recalling the dogmas that once defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive: a kind of verbal remembrance of the nation’s religious history, a taste on the tongue of native speakers. Think, for instance, of the old Anabaptist congregations—how a residual memory of America’s social geography still lingers in the words: the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish, set here and there on the checkerboard of the nation’s farmland. The Quakers in their quiet meetinghouses, the Shakers in their tiny communes, and the Pentecostals, born in the Azusa Street revivals, like blooms forced in the hothouse of the inner city.
And yet, even while we may remember the names of the old denominations, we tend to forget that it all made a kind of sense, back in the day, and it came with a kind of order. The genteel Episcopalians, high on the hill, and the all-over Baptists, down by the river. Oh, and the innumerable independent Bible churches, tangled out across the prairie like brambles: Through most of the nation’s history, these endless divisions and revisions of Protestantism renounced one another and sermonized against one another. They squabbled, sneered, and fought. But they had something in common, for all that. Together they formed a vague but vast unity. Together they formed America.
In truth, all the talk, from the eighteenth century on, of the United States as a religious nation was really just a make-nice way of saying it was a Christian nation—and even to call it a Christian nation was usually just a soft and ecumenical attempt to gloss over the obvious fact that the United States was, at its root, a Protestant nation. Catholics and Jews were tolerated, off and on, but “the destiny of America,” as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835, was “embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the whole human race was represented by the first man.”
Even America’s much vaunted religious liberty was essentially a Protestant idea. However deistical and enlightened some of the Founding Fathers may have been, Deism and the Enlightenment provided little of the religious liberty they put in the Bill of Rights. The real cause was the rivalry of the Protestant churches: No denomination achieved victory as the nation’s legally established church, mostly because the Baptists fought it where they feared it would be the Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians fought it where they feared it would be the Congregationalists. The oddity of American religion produced the oddity of American religious freedom.
The greatest oddity, however, may be the fact that the United States nonetheless ended up with something very similar to the establishment of religion in the public life of the nation. The effect often proved little more than an agreement about morals: The endlessly proliferating American churches, Tocqueville concluded, “all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man.” The agreement was sometimes merely an establishment of manners: “The clergy of all the different sects hold the same language,” he added. “Their opinions are in agreement with the laws, and the human mind flows onward, so to speak, in one undivided current.”
Morals and manners, however, count for a great deal in the public square, and, beyond all their differences, the diverse Protestant churches merged to give a general form and a general tone to the culture. Protestantism helped define the nation, operating as simultaneously the happy enabler and the unhappy conscience of the American republic—a single source for both national comfort and national unease.
We tend to remember the Mainline as the strong, unified denominations that emerged from the 1910s through the 1950s: Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and so on; their churches gently jostling one another along the pleasant, tree-lined streets of the typical American town. But the madly splintering sects that Tocqueville saw in the 1830s—they, too, are what we might stretch to call the Mainline, for even at its greatest, the undivided current of Protestantism never reached the ecclesial unity of a single church. It achieved, instead, a vocabulary: a way we had to understand ourselves outside our political struggles and economic exchanges.
Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg’s relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.
Through most of American history, these three legs of democracy, capitalism, and religion accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another. There’s a temptation to call Protestant Christianity the most accommodating religion ever known, but, again and again, the churches managed to withstand the politics and the economics of the age. Indeed, what made them good at accommodation was also what made them good at opposition: In the multiplicity of its denominations, Protestantism could influence the nation in churchly ways without actually being a church—without being a single source of religious authority constantly tempted to assume a central political and economic role.
The great fight to abolish slavery, or women’s suffrage, or the temperance struggle against the Demon Rum, or the civil-rights movement: Every so often, there would explode from the churches a moral and prophetic demand on the nation. But, looking back, we can now see that these showy campaigns were mostly a secondary effect of religion’s influence on America. Each was a check written on a bank account filled by the ordinary practice and belief of the Protestant denominations.
As it happens, the denominations were often engaged in what later generations would scorn as narrow sectarian debates: infant baptism, the consequences of the Fall, the saving significance of good works, the real presence of the Eucharist, the role of bishops. And yet, somehow, the more their concerns were narrow, the more their effects were broad. Perhaps precisely because they were aimed inward, the Protestant churches were able to radiate outward, giving a characteristic shape to the nation: the centrality of families, the pattern of marriages and funerals, the vague but widespread patriotism, the strong localism, and the ongoing sense of some providential purpose at work in the existence of the United States.
Which makes it all the stranger that, somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.
And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.
The nation has passed through even harsher periods, of course. In 1843, for instance, the Antislavery Society adopted a resolution that famously read, “The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” But since the 1970s, we have faced a unique kind of political dilemma, in which no agreement can be reached even on the terms by which we will disagree with one another.
Notice, for instance, how quickly these days any attempt to speak in the old-fashioned voice of moral criticism turns sour and bitter—segueing into anti-Americanism, regardless of its intentions. Many Americans are profoundly patriotic, no doubt, and many Americans are profoundly critical of their country. We are left, however, with a great problem in combining the two, and that problem was bequeathed to us by the death of Protestant America—by the collapse of the churches that were once both the accommodating help and the criticizing prophet of the American experiment. [...]
In 1948, as he completed his draft of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Canadian law professor John Humphrey went home and noted in his diary that what had been achieved was “something like the Christian morality without the tommyrot.”
That seems a nearly perfect phrase: Christian morality without the tommyrot. Humphrey meant, of course, all the unnecessary accretions of prayer and miracles and faith and sacraments and chapels. But the phrase might be the motto of all who answer surveys by saying they are “spiritual, but not religious.” It might be the motto of all who have a vague and unspoken—indeed, unspeakable—feeling that it is somehow more Christian not to be a Christian.
It might even be the motto of the Mainline churches today. Of course, without all that stuff about God and church, the morality proves to be empty: cups for us to fill with almost any meaning we want—which, in the actual give and take of public life, will almost always be political and economic meaning. In other words, having gotten rid of all the tommyrot, the liberal Protestant churches can at last agree in nearly every particular.
Unfortunately, they obtained their ecumenical unity at the price of abandoning most of the religious work that ecumenism was supposed to advance. Indeed, the churches’ desperate hunger to mean more in politics and economics had the perverse effect of making them less effective opponents to the political and economic pressures on the nation. They mattered more when they wanted to matter less.
Social nature abhors a social vacuum, and the past thirty years have seen many attempts to fill the place where Protestantism used to stand. Feminism in the 1980s, homosexuality in the 1990s, environmentalism today, the quadrennial presidential campaigns that promise to reunify the nation—the struggle against abortion, for that matter: Leave aside the question of whether these movements are right or wrong, helpful or unhelpful, and consider them purely as social phenomena. In their appearance on the public stage, these political movements have all posed themselves as partial Protestantisms, bastard Christianities, determined not merely to win elections but to be the platform by which all other platforms are judged.
Look at the fury, for instance, with which environmentalists now attack any disputing of global warming. Such movements seek converts, not supporters, and they respond to objections the way religions respond to heretics and heathens. Each of them wants to be the great vocabulary by which the nation understands itself. Each of them wants to be the new American religion, standing as the third great prop of the nation: the moral vocabulary by which we know ourselves.
Just as religion is damaged when the churches see themselves as political movements, so politics is damaged when political platforms act as though they were religions. And perhaps more than merely damaged. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the killing fields of Cambodia, the cultural revolution in China: We had terrible experiences in the twentieth century when political and economic theories succeeded in posing themselves as religions.
We’re not on the edge of something that frightening today. But the death of Protestant America really has weakened both Christianity and public life in the United States—for when the Mainline died, it took with it to the grave the vocabulary in which both criticism and support of the nation could be effective.
That vocabulary was incomplete in many ways, and the churches often failed to provide true Christian witness. But in its everyday practice, Protestantism nonetheless gave America something vital: a social unity and cultural definition that did not derive entirely from political arrangements and economic relations. And America gave Protestantism something in return: a chance to flourish without state interference, a freedom to fulfill the human desire for what lies beyond the material world.
Among conservative Christians, much attention is devoted to the question of whether the hole in public life can be filled by either Catholicism or the evangelical churches. I have my doubts. The evangelicals may have too little church organization, and the Catholics may have too much. Besides, both are minorities in the nation’s population, and they arrive at our current moment with a history of being outsiders—the objects of a long record of American suspicion, which hasn’t gone away despite the decline of the churches that gave the suspicion its modern form.
Perhaps some joining of Catholics and evangelicals, in morals and manners, could achieve the social unity in theological difference that characterized the old Mainline. But the vast intellectual resources of Catholicism still sound a little odd in the American ear, just as the enormous reservoir of evangelical faith has been unable, thus far, to provide a widely accepted moral rhetoric.
America was Methodist, once upon a time—or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. Protestant, in other words. What can we call it today? Those churches simply don’t mean much any more. That’s a fact of some theological significance. It’s a fact of genuine sorrow, for that matter, as the aging members of the old denominations watch their congregations dwindle away: funeral after funeral, with far too few weddings and baptisms in between. But future historians, telling the story of our age, will begin with the public effect in the United States.
As he prepared to leave the presidency in 1796, George Washington famously warned, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Generally speaking, however, Americans tended not to worry much about the philosophical question of religion and nation. The whole theologico-political problem, which obsessed European philosophers, was gnawed at in the United States most by those who were least churched.
We all have to worry about it, now. Without the political theory that depended on the existence of the Protestant Mainline, what does it mean to support the nation? What does it mean to criticize it? The American experiment has always needed what Alexis de Tocqueville called the undivided current, and now that current has finally run dry.
It seems, rather, that something quite different has happened. While both the Catholic Church and the Jewish state have been Americanized/Reformed--with a Tocquevillian Pope and a post-socialist Israel--a portion of the American electorate has become secularized/Europeanized, so that there is an internal anti-Americanism. But this is not a sudden fissure that has opened. After all, the coastal elites have been hostile to Kansas since at least the Scopes trial.
K.I.S.S.:
Factors that Improve Online Experience (Sathish Menon and Michael Douma, Idea.org)
Executive summaryThis report outlines key findings from surveys that explored factors that drive online experience as expressed by the three different subject groups – nonprofit organizations and cities, web designers and firms, and the general public. The survey’s major findings are:
* Designers underestimate the thresholds for an effective site. Respondents consider a site “effective” when visitors are satisfied with respect to enjoyment, can find information somewhat easily, and never get lost in the site. By at least one point on a five-point scale, visitors have higher expectations for effectiveness than do designers. Nonprofit organizations believe that effective sites do not have “information gaps between what visitors want and what the site provides” and that visitors are at least “somewhat satisfied” with their sites. Designers should give greater consideration to overall effectiveness, thereby reducing the chance of failure for a user to find the information they seek.
* Easy access to complete information is key to visitor enjoyment. All three survey groups believe that the ease with which visitors can find information and the ability to maintain orientation is critical to enjoyment. Both organizations and visitors believe that reducing the gap between what web sites provide and what visitors seek is critical to enjoyment. These variables explain 25% to 30% of the variance in visitor enjoyment; hence, ease of finding information is an important foundation for most sites.
* Good visual design and up-to-date information are critical. Over 80% of designers and organizations believe that good visual design is important. A healthy 50% of the visitors agree. Fully 80% of visitors and organizations believe that up-to-date information is very important. Only 60% of designers believe that to be the case. When budgeting for your project, don’t be overly seduced by fancy graphics and multimedia. Invest in strong, clear design and simple methods to quickly deliver current information to your visitors.
* Visitors want information fast. Web site visitors are looking for simple, accurate, fast, and easy to navigate web sites - preferably with links to information they seek. A significant number of comments revolved around the need for speedy access, including but not limited to download speed, in order to find the information visitors are looking for. Even in a broadband age, visitors value fast sites, both those that are fast loading and those that quickly deliver sought-after information.
* Visitors want a broad range of topics. Relative to designers and organizations, visitors more strongly believe that a broad range of topics is important. Visitors believe sites can be more effective by helping visitors find interesting information - even if they are not looking for it. Designers and content developers can provide ample sidebars that link to other recommended pages, and extensively cross-link to other pages based on keywords.
* Designers are overly optimistic about visitors’ ability to maintain orientation. In the survey, the ability to maintain orientation was defined as visitors’ ability to know “where they are, where they can go next, and which pages are related.” About 70% of designers believe that visitors are almost always able to maintain orientation. That drops to about 30% when non-profit organizations express their view. In contrast, only about 10% of visitors report being able to almost always maintain their orientation. Fewer than 5% report that they tend to get lost frequently. Said another way, your visitors don’t know your site as well as you do, so make sure it is obvious how to find information through meaningful menus, prompts, and not too much clutter.
* Visitors still need handholding. The study asked about hypothetically providing visitors with personal assistance using a site. About 70% of organizations and visitors believe that a personal guide would increase the effectiveness of a web site. Only about 50% of designers believe the same. Designers tend to overestimate the clarity of their designs.
* Visitors point to the lack of breadth and depth of site content as causing an “Information Gap.” Although over 90% of visitors say that they are able to find the information they are looking for, over 50% report that there is a gap between what they are looking for and what typical web sites provide, and 60% think that a personal guide would help them navigate web sites. The reported gap is negatively correlated to visitors’ ability to find information, and positively correlated to the need for a local search engine. This indicates that most web sites are unable to provide the breadth of information that visitors seek. Visitors often request broader and deeper information, when in fact they need to find existing information more easily.
Unfortunately, designers are generally more interested in their design than in the users' experience. We've always tried to keep things as simple as possible here, but suggestions for further simplification are always welcome. Suggestions for complexification aren't.
HEY, SINCE THEY AREN'T HUMAN WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL:
Nurse gave wrong woman abortion (BBC, 7/18/08)
A nurse who gave a chemical abortion to a patient who had only come for a consultation has been cautioned.Ann Downer, based at the Calthorpe Clinic in Edgbaston, Birmingham, failed to check the woman's personal details before giving her the drug.
The woman was recalled when Ms Downer realised her mistake but the drug had already taken effect.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council said she could keep her job but would have a caution on her record for three years.
It's the blasde tone of the story that's most chilling.
WHICH IS WHY WE GIVE THEM RITALIN:
Pushover parents to blame for generation of children who 'lack discipline and moral boundaries', says teachers' leader (Laura Clark, 30th July 2008, Daily Mail)
A decline in parenting skills has created a generation of children without moral boundaries, a teachers' leader has said.Philip Parkin warned that teachers are increasingly forced to discipline bad behaviour and take on the role of bringing up children because parents too often pander to their demands.
THE TRUMAN COMPARISON IS A SLANDER...:
A Truman for our times: The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both claims are wrong—Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US will benefit from Asian growth (Edward Luttwak, August 2008, Prospect)
Until 9/11, Islamic militants, including violent jihadists of every sort, from al Qaeda to purely local outfits, enjoyed much public support—either overt or tacit—across most of the Muslim world. From Morocco to Indonesia, governments appeased militants at home while encouraging them to focus their violent activities abroad. Some, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) funded both militant preachers and armed jihadists. The Saudis financed extremist schools in many countries, including the US and Britain, and had thousands of militant preachers on the payroll in addition to writing cheques for jihadists in the Caucasus, Pakistan and a dozen other places (although not to Osama bin Laden himself, their declared enemy). The UAE rulers who now talk only of their airlines and banks are reliably reported to have handed over sackfuls of cash to Osama in person, meeting him at Kandahar's airfield when flying in to hunt endangered species. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were also the only countries that joined Pakistan in recognising the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. Other Muslim governments, notably Sudan, Syria and Yemen, helped jihadists by giving them passports and safe havens, while others still, including Indonesia, simply turned a blind eye to Islamist indoctrination and jihadist recruitment.Other than the Algerian and Egyptian governments, every Muslim state preferred at least to coexist with militant preachers and jihadis in some way. Pakistan did much more than that; its Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, funded, armed and trained both the Taliban in Afghanistan and thousands of jihadists dedicated to killing Indian civilians, policemen and soldiers in Kashmir and beyond.
All this came to an abrupt end after 9/11. Sophisticates everywhere ridiculed the uncompromising Bush stance, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," as a cowboy stunt, but it was swiftly successful. Governments across the Muslim world quickly changed their conduct. Some moved energetically to close down local jihadist groups they had long tolerated, to silence extremist preachers and to keep out foreign jihadis they had previously welcomed. Others were initially in denial. The Saudis, in the person of interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, started off by denying that the 9/11 terrorists were Arabs, let alone Saudis, while the UAE princes accused of giving cash to Bin Laden pretended they had never heard of him.
Denial did not last. As they saw American special forces and long-range bombers smashing the Taliban, the Saudis began to admit responsibility for having spread extremism through the thousands of schools and academies they financed at home and abroad. An agonising reappraisal of their own Wahhabi form of Islam continues. The Saudi king has convened an inter-faith conference of Muslims, Christians and Jews—a huge step given the Wahhabi prohibitions of any form of amity with non-Muslims. Inside the kingdom, only less extreme preachers now receive public support. Bin Laden had been the Saudis' enemy for years, but it was only after 9/11 that they began actively to hunt down his supporters and made their first moves to discourage rich Saudis from sending money to jihadists abroad. More than a thousand Saudis have been arrested, dozens have been killed while resisting arrest, and Saudi banks must now check if wire transfers are being sent to Muslim organisations on the terrorist list.
In different ways, other governments in Muslim countries all the way to Indonesia also took their stand with Bush and the US against the jihadists, even though jihad against the infidel is widely regarded as an Islamic duty. Suddenly, active Islamists and violent jihadists suffered a catastrophic loss of status. Instead of being admired, respected or at least tolerated, they had to hide, flee or give it up. Numbers started to shrink. The number of terrorist incidents outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq keeps going down, while madrassas almost everywhere have preferred toning down their teachings to being shut down. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, the dominant association of imams condemns all forms of violence without exception.
But it was in Pakistan that Bush forced the most dramatic reversal of policy. He had said that it was with us or against us, and he meant it. President Musharraf was given a stark choice: stand with the US to destroy the Taliban that Pakistan itself had created, or be destroyed. Musharraf made the right choice, shutting down the flow of arms to the Taliban, opening the Shahbaz airfield to US aircraft and giving blanket permission for US military overflights across Pakistan. Nothing will stop the North-West Frontier Province from being as violent as it has been since the days of Alexander the Great. Nothing can dissuade the Pashtuns from their twin passions for boys and guns. And naturally they approve of the Taliban on both counts. But at least the Pakistani state is no longer funding these pederasts. Musharraf also started to remove the bearded extremists who once practically ran Pakistan's ISI, starting with the chief, Mahmood Ahmed, who was replaced within a month of 11th September by the moderate Ehsanul Halqas. It has been less easy for Musharraf and his acolytes to identify and remove the more subtle smooth-shaven extremists in the ISI, who still support the renascent Taliban, but they tried hard enough to trigger at least one of the assassination attempts against Musharraf himself.
What happened in Pakistan within 24 hours of 9/11 was something the world had never seen before: the overnight transformation of the very core of a country's policy—the support of jihad—which derived from the national myth of Pakistan as the Muslim state par excellence. It was as if President Bush had sent an envoy to Italy to demand the outlawing of spaghetti al pomodoro—and succeeded.
Yet one hears well-informed people casually remark that Bush's war on terror has been a total failure. This is not just political prejudice; after all, the dog that does not bark is not heard. But one need not be Sherlock Holmes to recall that 11th September was meant to be the beginning of a global jihad, with a 12th September, 13th September, 14th September and so on.
Not that al Qaeda itself could do it—its one shot had been fired. But the destruction of the twin towers inspired thousands of young Muslims to go down to the local Islamist prayer hall to offer their services to jihadists. The Koran, after all, explicitly promises victory in all things to the believers, making Muslim weakness the source of agonising, if unspoken, doubts about the credibility of the faith itself. That is the true source of the resentment that no policy accommodations in the middle east could possibly assuage. And it was those doubts that induced not only the hapless Palestinians but even westernised, affluent, wine-drinking Tunisians to celebrate the television images of 9/11 with tears of joy, and that of course made Bin Laden the first pan-Islamic hero since Saladin.
The destruction of the twin towers was therefore the most powerful possible call to action. It was quite enough to trigger not just a Madrid, a London or a Glasgow attack, but many more in Europe alone. The main target, however, was bound to be the US itself, as well as American tourists, expatriates, business residents and, naturally, any troops anywhere.
Instead, the global jihadi mobilisation, triggered by post-9/11 enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden, was stopped before it could gain any momentum by all that Bush set in motion: the destruction of al Qaeda training bases in Afghanistan, the killing or capture of most of its operatives, and, most importantly, the conversion of Muslim governments from the support of jihad to its repression.
...but he gets the bigger argument right. For the comparison to be valid W would, of course, have had to accept al Qaeda control of several billion people.
IF THEO CAN GET HERMIDA AND PROSPECTS I'LL BEAR HIS CHILD...:
Red Sox, Marlins, Pirates talk three-way trade (Ken Rosenthal, July 30, 2008, FoxSports.com)
In one proposed scenario, the Marlins would trade outfielder Jeremy Hermida and a prospect for Ramirez, and the Red Sox then would flip Hermida and prospects to the Pirates for left fielder Jason Bay and possibly left-handed reliever John Grabow.The players in the deal, however, remain fluid, according to the source, who described the names as "not set."
Two prominent Marlins prospects who have been mentioned — Class AA right-hander Ryan Tucker and Class A outfielder Michael Stanton — will not be in the trade, Marlins sources said.
For Bay, the Pirates presumably would need to exceed the offer they received from the Braves last week — Class AAA outfielder Brandon Jones, Class AAA shortstop Brent Lillibridge and two pitchers in the low minors.
The Red Sox and Marlins have yet to notify the commissioner's office that they have a deal in place, two sources said. Approval from the commissioner is required for any trade that involves a cash transaction of more than $1 million.
...but why would you then deal Hermida for the same player six years older? [Hermida is the archetypal Sox player, having walked 111 to 389 at-bats in 2005.]
This seems like nothing more than a three-way for the sake of complexity that Michael Lewis notes, in Moneyball, is characteristic of these baseball brights.
MUCH AS WE LOVE THE HATCHET MAN...:
Anne Armstrong, Presidential Adviser and Pioneering Politician, Dies at 80 (WILLIAM GRIMES, 7/31/08, NY Times)
Mrs. Armstrong was a prominent figure in Texas and national Republican Party politics when she was appointed counselor to Nixon in 1973. She was the first woman to be named to the cabinet-level position.In that job, she became highly visible for her willingness to face hostile audiences as the Watergate scandal gathered force. She was, as a reporter for The New York Times described her then, the Nixon administration’s “best, brave front to the public.”
Under Nixon, Mrs. Armstrong created the White House Office of Women’s Programs to provide a liaison between the president and women’s groups. It sought to recruit female appointees to high-level government positions and to broaden opportunities for women in the federal government.
Mrs. Armstrong stayed on as counselor under Ford, who named her to the eight-member Council on Wage and Price Stability. She helped plan the United States bicentennial celebration and, for a time, seemed a likely contender to be Ford’s running mate in the 1976 election.
Instead, she was named ambassador to Britain, where with her breezy, energetic style and the mere fact of being a woman, she seemed to fascinate her host country. She held the post from 1976 to 1977.
...as close as '76 was, she might have made a difference for Ford (though four more years of him might well have been a bigger disaster than four of Jimmy).
HE'S JUST BEEN BETTER AT EVERYTHING:
For White House, Hiring Is Political (CHARLIE SAVAGE, 7/31/08, NY Times)
On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of a Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.
The report, the subject of a Senate oversight hearing Wednesday, provided a window into how the administration sought to install politically like-minded officials in positions of government responsibility, and how the efforts at times crossed customary or legal limits.
Andrew Rudalevige, an associate professor of political science at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania who studies presidential power, said that while presidents of both parties over the last half-century had sought ways to impose greater political control over the federal bureaucracy, the Bush administration had gone further than any predecessor.
The core premise of "civil service reform" was the elitist notion that elections shouldn't have consequences and that government should be run by professional bureaucrats, anathema to republicanism.
IS THAT HER PORNSTAR NAME?:
Scrabulous brothers launch new Facebook game: Wordscraper (Jemima Kiss, 7/31/08, guardian.co.uk)
The two brothers behind Scrabulous, the unofficial online version of Scrabble that has become a hit among among Facebook users, launched a new online word game last night - Wordscraper.Developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla launched Wordscraper worldwide less than 48 hours after being forced to take their original creation, Scrabulous, offline in the US and Canada in response to a lawsuit from Hasbro.
'Scrabulous' gets a nip-tuck, returns as 'Wordscraper' (Caroline McCarthy – July 30, 2008, C-Net)
The reason for Scrabulous' extreme makeover has its roots in some pretty gray legal matters: the real problem wasn't that it ripped off Scrabble, but that it ripped off Scrabble so blatantly. The colors of the board were the same, the list of rules led to a Wikipedia entry for Scrabble rules, and the two names were similar enough for Hasbro to cry foul.On Wednesday I spoke to Pete Kinsella, a partner at the Faegre & Benson law firm who specializes in intellectual property, and he gave me his take on the gritty details. "Copyrights are not supposed to protect board games," Kinsella explained. "What copyrights protect is the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself."
Returning as Wordscraper is a way for its creators to keep the game running while avoiding legal complaints. In effect, it's just different enough.
"I think there's a very fine line to walk in this one, and the question is whether Scrabulous went over the line or not in mimicking the colors or everything else," Kinsella assessed (keep in mind that we had this conversation before the advent of Wordscraper), "or whether they could've designed a generic version of the game with the same points system and scoring system, and that would've fallen out of Hasbro's copyrights."
BREAKFAST SERIAL:
The Orwell Diaries (The Orwell Prize)
‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.
What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.
Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’
What will you see in the Orwell diaries?
AT THE POINT WHERE YOU RETAIN THE DIVISION INTO 16 AGENCIES...:
Bush redefines roles of intelligence agencies (The Associated Press, July 31, 2008)
President Bush approved an order Wednesday that rewrites the rules governing spying by U.S. intelligence agencies, both domestically and abroad, and strengthens the authority of the national intelligence director, according to a U.S. official and government documents.Executive Order 12333, which lays out the responsibilities of each of the 16 agencies, maintains the decades-old prohibitions on assassination and using unwitting human subjects for scientific experiments, according to a multimedia briefing given to Congress that was reviewed by the Associated Press.
...you've given up on their being useful. Shutter them all and open intelligence completely. The market does a better job than bureaucrats.
TWO ESPECIALLY GOOD READS IN THIS REGARD...:
What If Iraq Works?: There could be a promising future there (Victor Davis Hanson, 7/31/08, National Review)
These shifting realities may explain both the shrill pronouncements emanating from a worried Iran and its desire for diplomatic talks with American representatives.Other rogue nations — North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba (not to mention al-Qaeda itself) — also do not, for all their bluster, think that or act as if an impotent U.S military is mired in defeat in Iraq.
Meanwhile, surrounding Arab countries may soon strengthen ties with Iraq. After all, military success creates friends as much as defeat loses them. In the past, Iraq’s neighbors worried either about Saddam Hussein’s aggression or subsequent Shiite/Sunni sectarianism. Now a constitutional Iraq offers them some reassurance that neither Iraqi conventional nor terrorist forces will attack.
None of this means that a secure future for Iraq is certain. After all, there are no constitutional oil-producing states in the Middle East. Instead, we usually see two pathologies: either a state like Iran, where petrodollars are recycled to fund terrorist groups and centrifuges; or the Gulf autocracies where vast profits result in artificial islands, indoor ski runs, and radical Islamic propaganda.
Iraq could still degenerate into one of those models. But for now, Iraq — with an elected government and a free press — is not investing its wealth in subsidizing terrorists outside its borders, establishing fundamentalist madrassas abroad, building centrifuges, or allowing a few thousand royal first cousins to squander its oil profits.
Iraq for the last 20 years was the worst place in the Middle East. The irony is that it may now have the most promising future in the entire region.
...are THE BIG BROTHER: IRAQ UNDER SADDAM HUSSEIN (ELAINE SCIOLINO, February 3, 1985, NY Times Magazine) and Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map, written before Bushophobes had to pretend Saddam's firm hand was helpful to the Iraqi people.
KNEW:
What Kansas Knows (Peter Ferrara, 7/30/2008, American Spectator)
Few outside the Democrat party understand what has just happened in the historic primary season that recently ended. But in those primaries, the party made a fundamental decision that marks a dramatic turning point in American politics.Bill Clinton swept up the Democrats in 1992 based on the new politics of the Democrat Leadership Council (DLC), which he headed. The DLC sought to remake the Democrats based on recognition of what had then just happened in the real world of American politics. Reagan's Republicans had won three straight national elections, thrashing unreconstructed liberals like Mondale and Dukakis in landslides.
The DLC sought to accommodate what they saw as the valid components of the Reagan Revolution. The historic battle between capitalism and socialism was over, and capitalism had won. The Democrats had to modify their policies and their rhetoric to recognize that. Most importantly, they had to accommodate the essential vision that led to the political success of the Reagan Revolution -- the American people overwhelmingly favored the policies of economic growth over the policies of taxation and redistribution ("It's the economy, stupid").
This meant that Democrats had to build on, not reject, the essentials of free markets, and the realities of globalization. Democrats didn't have to swallow the whole libertarian agenda to succeed in this new environment. But they had to project an agenda that plausibly would advance economic growth, not ignore it and all of its possibilities and implications, or even actively undermine it. This became Bill Clinton's awkwardly expressed "Grow the Economy" theme, which was meant to imply that it was still the government that would be producing the economic growth through its wise policies, not the decentralized free market by itself.
This meant, in turn, that the Democrats were not going back to income tax rates of 70% and even 90% as in the heyday of the Left. They could still raise tax rates somewhat on "the rich," especially if they promised at the same time to cut taxes for the middle class, a central theme of Clinton's 1992 campaign that was completely forgotten after the election. But it was also time to recognize and embrace the realities of free trade, and the desirability and overwhelming popularity of welfare reform based on work requirements. It was also time to recognize and extend the successes of deregulation.
The Democrats went along with it because having lost 3 straight national elections, and 5 of the last 6, they were hungry for power. President Clinton stumbled out of the gate because he didn't initially lead with this vision that won him the election, but rather with Hillary's old 1930s warhorse vision of socialized medicine. That produced the historic Gingrich Revolution of 1994. The insight that made Clinton's presidency a success is that he then went along with the policies of the Gingrich congressional majorities, attacking and trimming only what could be projected as its excesses. The result was robust economic growth, and even a booming budget surplus, vindicating Clinton's DLC vision. Thus Clinton became the only Democrat since Roosevelt to serve two consecutive terms, with only one more Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, having accomplished that since Andrew Jackson.
BUT THE DEMOCRAT IDEOLOGUES, what Howard Dean later described as the Democrat wing of the Democrat party, hated and despised what they saw as Clinton's sellout.
Just happened?
YOU KNOW HE'S IN TROUBLE WHEN HE STARTS MAU-MAUING:
McCain Ad Compares Obama to Britney Spears (NY Sun, July 31, 2008)
Senator McCain's presidential campaign yesterday released a withering television ad comparing Senator Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, suggesting the Democratic contender is little more than a vapid but widely recognized press concoction. Mr. Obama's campaign quickly responded with a commercial of its own, dismissing Mr. McCain's complaints as "baloney" and "baseless." Mr. McCain's ad, titled "Celeb" and set to air in 11 battleground states, intercuts images of Mr. Obama on his trip to Europe last week with video of Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton — both better known for their childish off-screen antics. "He's the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?" the voiceover asks, noting the Illinois senator's opposition to offshore oil drilling and suggesting he would raise taxes if elected. "He doesn't seem to have anything positive to say about me, does he?" Mr. Obama said. "You need to ask John McCain what he's for, not just what he's against."
Obama: McCain Trying to Make Voters 'Scared' of Me (Sunlen Millerm 7/30/08, ABC News)
While campaigning in a traditionally Republican district, Sen. Barack Obama attempted to beat back rumors about him– telling the Springfield, Missouri crowd that Republicans and Sen. McCain are trying to make voters “scared” of him because they don’t have another strategy.“Nobody thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they are going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama warned, “You know he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all of those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
Because he is running exclusively on his race he keeps getting stuck with nothing else to talk about when first Hillary and now Maverick corner him on the issues.
McCain: My opponent is an inexperienced over-hyped transnationalist liberal.
Obama: Racist!
MORE:
McCain Tries to Define Obama as Out of Touch (JIM RUTENBERG, 7/31/08, NY Times)
Although Mr. Obama has been under an intense public spotlight for the last year, he is still relatively new on the national scene, and polls indicate that for all the enthusiasm he has generated among his supporters, many voters still have questions about him, providing Republicans an opening to shape his image in critical groups like white working-class voters between now and Election Day.Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.
The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip last week, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.
Mr. Rutenberg's accusation, that the Unicorn Rider is new and unknown, is patently racist.
'The One'? Take a Number, Sen. Obama (David Montgomery, 7/31/08, Washington Post)
There have been so many Ones. The human imagination seems inclined to think in terms of them: King Arthur, Superman, Anakin Skywalker (or Luke, depending on your cosmology), Bobby Kennedy, John Galt, the Who's Tommy, Frodo, Bob Dylan, Siegfried, Harry Potter, Mighty Mouse, Godot, Joe Gibbs, Storm, Wonder Woman.The One is the one who has the Answer. He will fix a fallen world. He will bring . . . change we can believe in. [...]
Sometimes he seems to playfully encourage his image as the One. Before the New Hampshire primary, he joked to an audience, "I am going to try to be so persuasive in the next 20 minutes or so that a light is going to shine down from the ceiling. . . . You will experience an epiphany. You will say to yourself, 'I have to vote for Barack.' "
He told House Democrats this week, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," our colleague Dana Milbank reported.
Also this week, the Obama campaign sent out an e-mail in the name of Michelle Obama to invite folks to contribute money for a chance to be among 10 lucky supporters who will get to "go backstage with Barack" at the Democratic convention in Denver, as if he were that special kind of One: the rock star.
Racist!
GOP's celeb-Obama message gains traction (CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN, 7/31/08, Politico)
It wasn’t until the last week, however, that the narrative of Obama as a president-in-waiting – and perhaps getting impatient in that waiting - began reverberating beyond the e-mail inboxes of Washington operatives and journalists.Perhaps one of the clearest indications emerged Tuesday from the world of late-night comedy, when David Letterman offered his “Top Ten Signs Barack Obama is Overconfident.” The examples included Obama proposing to change the name of Oklahoma to “Oklobama,” and measuring his head for Mount Rushmore.
Racist!
