MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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Fall-deral (and Fiddlededee)
Some miscellaneous observations about recent developments in politics and popular culture:
n Dumb-ocrats and Repo-publicans In this year’s Congressional elections, Democrats have regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives and also apparently have gained a thin, one-vote majority in the U.S. Senate (pending the outcome of the Allen-Webb contest in Virginia). They didn’t deserve to win; Democrats are intellectually bankrupt, offering nothing more than “cut and run” in foreign policy and, in domestic policy, “tax and spend” – the same old, tired bromides, the failed programs of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state (such as increasing the minimum wage and expanding protectionism). Democrats base their re-taking of the House on the same phenomenon on which they had based their 40-year period of control, from the mid-1950s to 1994: the success of their own demagoguery, taking advantage of the ignorance and gullibility of the American people. (“A change”? “A new direction”? Not with Democrats – we’ll get just more of the same old shit.) The Republicans, in comparison, did deserve to lose their majority in the Congress. Notwithstanding a tremendous last-minute push, the Republican effort to “get out the vote” ultimately failed because too many rank-and-file Republicans had been alienated by their Congressional representatives’ loss of principle. The Republican majorities in Congress squandered their opportunity to institute real reforms – they couldn’t even make tax cuts permanent, and they didn’t even touch Social Security or Medicare reform – and, accordingly, deserved to get control of the House repossessed from them by the Democrats, who are the real experts of “tax and spend” politics. Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom – attributing the Republican losses to the unpopularity of the Iraq war “quagmire” – the GOP’s crack-up really should be attributed to more fundamental problems in modern conservatism. Those problems are ably discussed in two superb articles by Brad Thompson, professor of political science at Clemson University (and executive director of The Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism) and Ed Hudgins, executive director of The Atlas Society and its Objectivist Center. (See Brad Thompson’s “The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism,” published in The Objective Standard, Fall 2006; and Ed Hudgins’ “The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party,” published in The New Individualist, Fall 2006.) Ed Hudgins’ essay discusses the self-defeating direction in which the Republican Party has moved during George W. Bush’s presidency: “its decades-old Cold War coalition of libertarians and traditional conservatives has broken down, and is being supplanted by a seemingly odd alliance of neoconservatives and social conservatives who explicitly reject the Goldwater-Reagan, pro-individualist, limited-government vision of America.” President Bush’s administration has ushered in a new era of “Big Government conservatism” that has brought the biggest increase in federal spending and greatest extension of the welfare system since LBJ’s Great Society programs of the 1960s, with the “No Child Left Behind Act” expanding the federal role in education, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit further socializing the health-care system, and Bush’s “Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” mushrooming the federal dole. In the current “battle for the soul of the Republican Party,” if the coalition of neocons and social conservatives prevails, Hudgins warns, “then our political landscape and future will be dominated by nothing but statists, right and left: by those who wish to restrict individual freedom and run other people’s lives in accordance with their own grandiose notions of a `good society.’” Brad Thompson goes further, exposing the ominous philosophical roots of both “compassionate conservatism” and neoconservatism, and maintaining that these movements “have not corrupted the GOP” but rather “have simply exploited and brought to the surface principles that have been at the heart of the conservative intellectual movement from the beginning.” Thompson concludes, bluntly: “The Bush administration, the Republican Party, and the conservative intelligentsia have now fully and openly embraced liberalism’s two basic principles: altruism and pragmatism. The conservative movement has stepped both its feet into a philosophic sinkhole and is drowning in a miasma of sentimental mush and cynical manipulation. Compassionate conservatism permits Republicans to demonstrate publicly how much they `care’ for those in need, while neoconservatism provides them with a philosophy of governance that shows them how to devise (allegedly) more cost-effective welfare programs.” Because both types of “Big Government conservatives” accept the premises of the welfare state, they can offer no principled defense of the real American values. “Conservatives may posture as supporters of individual rights, limited government, and capitalism; but, in reality, they are morally opposed to these values, and their history is one of actively betraying them.” Both the Hudgins and Thompson articles underscore the continuing relevance of Ayn Rand’s observation: “If the `conservatives’ do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing: they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone.” (Ayn Rand, “Conservatism: An Obituary,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.) That’s the ultimate reason why Republicans lost – and deserved to lose – so many elections. As Hudgins concludes, “If the Republican Party continues to move in this direction, what’s left of its intellectual foundations will collapse, along with its political fortunes. What it needs urgently is a firm philosophical foundation based explicitly on the moral rights of individuals to live for their own sakes – the principle that is the implicit ethical bedrock of the United States.”
n Like a Plague of Locusts A veritable army of thousands of lawyers, election monitors, and volunteers with video cameras were mobilized on Election Day in an effort, supposedly, to guard against – but really, in many cases, to manufacture – “problems” at the polls. Election lawyers from both major parties, but especially Democrats, have since the 2000 presidential election (and the effort by Al Gore’s lawyers in Florida to steal the state’s electoral votes from George W. Bush) resorted to legal chicanery – “gaming the system,” as some call it – to win elections. (For more on this, see the excellent books by Bill Sammon, At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried To Steal the [2000] Election, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2001, and by John Fund, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004.) Among the many examples of election fraud that John Fund has documented in his book was the large number of fraudulent ballots cast in the state of Missouri, particularly in the St. Louis area, in both the 2002 and 2004 elections. Scandals involved left-wing activist groups like the George Soros-funded America Coming Together and the Big Labor-funded ACORN group, both of which have been caught registering dead people, non-existent people, or people (like convicted felons) legally incompetent to vote. Indeed, in 2004 then-state auditor Claire McCaskill (this year’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri) issued a report concluding that nearly 10%, or 24,000, of St. Louis’s May 2004 votes were “questionable,” including over 4400 dead people, over 2200 felons, over 1.450 people voting from vacant lots, and nearly 16,000 registered somewhere else in Missouri or Illinois. Ironically, Ms. McCaskill may owe her election this year to the same sort of voter fraud she had criticized two years ago as state auditor. The Wall Street Journal reported in a recent editorial (“The Acorn Indictments,” Nov. 3) that four ACORN workers were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri election board. As the Journal reports, allegations of fraud have tainted ACORN voter drives across the country, with convictions in Wisconsin and Colorado and investigations still underway in Ohio, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania – several of them “battleground” states where key Congressional elections were close. How many of the newly-elected Democrats in Congress owe their election to non-existent, dead, or convicted felon “voters”? (Don’t expect the major media to investigate this important question.)
n “It’s Not the Economy, Stupid!” With the United States having the healthiest economy in the world – and with unemployment in October at a five-year low, at 4.4% (virtually full employment) – it’s apparent that the economy was not an issue of concern to voters this year. If it had been, Republicans should have done much better: after all, the strength of the economy was helped by the one success that has come from Republican control in Washington, D.C. – the Bush tax cuts. Now with the Democrats poised to take over control of Congress, it’s likely that the measures they will be pushing – such as an increase in the federal minimum wage and repeal of the tax cuts – will hurt the economy. In Ohio, which has been suffering from sluggish economic growth and relatively high unemployment, the situation was different: Democrats may have benefited from dissatisfaction with the state’s economy, by blaming it on incumbent Republicans. (The Taft administration’s ethics scandals also hurt Republican candidates for statewide office, by tainting all Republicans, even mavericks like gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell.) Nevertheless, Ohio voters – by approving a minimum-wage increase and by electing Democrats – perversely voted, essentially, to make the state’s economic woes even worse. As I noted in my previous entry “Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly,” Ohio’s economy is depressed because of its high level of business taxation and regulation. Ohio has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs – a fifth of its total – in the past five years. The state’s 5.7% jobless rate is more than a full percentage point above the national mean. Democrat politicians will do nothing to solve Big Labor’s stranglehold on the economy (a major cause of the state’s economic woes); and the new minimum-wage mandate (made permanent by adding it to the state constitution) inevitably will increase unemployment (trapping unskilled workers in perpetual unemployment) and further hurt business, especially small businesses (adding to their labor costs and imposing on employers burdensome reporting requirements, which also expose them to costly lawsuits).
n The Joy of Early Voting When I heard over the radio on Election Day the news about long lines and various problems with the new electronic voting machines at polling places here in Ohio, I was glad that I’d voted early – by absentee ballot, submitted to my local elections board via U.S. mail in October. (I took advantage of the change in Ohio law making it easier to vote early, by absentee ballot.) Even without all the problems at the polls this year, Election Day voting is usually not a pleasant experience for me: I frankly admit that I hate rubbing elbows with the masses; indeed, I find it rather depressing to show up at the polls on Election Day and to see all the idiots who are voting, whose votes in effect are canceling mine. Tuesday’s editorial in USA Today (“Thoughts for Election Day”) reported that as many as 30% of voters nationwide had voted prior to November 7, either in person or by absentee ballot. (That’s up from 22% in 2004 and 14% in 2000). Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia now allow early voting. That’s an encouraging trend for those of us who think that everyone voting at public polling places on Election Day is an obsolete institution whose time has long gone by. Critics of early voting argue, among other things, that it “undercuts Election Day as a communal celebration of democracy” (as the editorial puts it); but that’s not a negative, in my opinion, because, frankly, I don’t give a damn about democracy and think that our society has far too many “communal” activities and far too little individualism. More serious drawbacks associated with early voting are the greater potential for election fraud and the delay in the results caused by the processing of absentee ballots; but these problems can be corrected with appropriate safeguards in the law, as more and more people vote in the civilized way – in the privacy of their own homes.
n Libertarians: The New “Soccer Moms”? David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., has argued in a recent Cato Policy Analysis (coauthored with David Kirby, executive director of America’s Future Foundation) that some 13 percent of voting-age Americans are neither conservatives nor liberals but rather are libertarian. Libertarians are increasingly a swing vote, and they are a larger share of the electorate than the fabled “soccer moms” or “NASCAR dads” of past elections. If Boaz and Kirby are right, then it’s likely that the Republicans’ losses in this fall’s elections can be attributed to the GOP’s failure to attract those voters who believe that “government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses” (one of the poll questions that identify libertarian voters). In other words, there’s empirical support for the arguments of Hudgins, Thompson, and others who maintain that “Big Government conservatism” is destroying the GOP’s majority. (See David Boaz and David Kirby, “The Libertarian Vote,” Oct. 18, 2006, posted on the Cato Institute website.)
n Ex-Foley-ated Republicans, Kerry’d-Away Democrats, Rangel On When the two major parties divide on personalities and policies, without any real disagreement on principles, it’s not surprising that both sides relied on negative campaigns with ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Republicans had to deal with the Mark Foley congressional page scandal. Then Democrats had their own sort of Foley scandal – involving not a Congressman overly friendly to young male pages but rather a Senator overly contemptuous of the U.S. military – after John Kerry essentially accused servicemen of being too dumb to do anything but get killed in Iraq. Finally, in another episode that seems to typify this year’s elections, there was the exchange between Vice President Dick Cheney and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D.-N.Y.), who as the most senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee is in line to chair the Committee, which writes tax laws. In a TV interview, Cheney cited Rangel’s opposition to the Bush tax cuts and predicted Rangel would block efforts to renew them. “I think Charlie doesn’t understand how the economy works,” Cheney said – a perfectly reasonable (and truthful) criticism of Democrats’ ignorance of basic economic principles. Rangel responded, when asked by the New York Post, that Cheney is “such a real son of a bitch, he just enjoys a confrontation.” That may be true, too: but if Cheney is a son of a bitch, he’s my kind of son of a bitch! (By the way, Vice President Cheney, in his official capacity as president of the Senate, will play a pivotal role in the new Congress. The Senate is divided into 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and two members (Connecticut’s Lieberman and Vermont’s Sanders) who are independents but who’ll caucus with the Democrats. Whenever there’s a 50-50 vote (which would require only one moderate Democrat to break ranks and vote with the Republicans), it will be Cheney who will break the tie.)
n A Thin Reid of Credibility An analysis by the Center for Media and Public Affairs of midterm election stories aired on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts Sept. 5 – Oct. 22 found – surprise, surprise! – that network news coverage favored Democrats. The study found that coverage in 2006 was almost five times as heavy as in the 2002 midterm elections: 167 stories compared with only 35 four years ago . The study also found that three out of four evaluations of Democrats’ chances of winning were positive, compared with one out of eight for Republicans. Coverage was dominated by two major themes, both of them “spun” in a way to favor Democrats: the effects of the Mark Foley scandal, and the impact the Bush presidency had on Republican congressional candidates. The networks produced 59 stories on the Foley scandal alone, compared with 33 on Iraq and 31 on terrorism or national security issues. “What’s hurting Republican candidates is the media’s focus on two non-candidates: Mark Foley and George W. Bush,” said center director Robert Lichter, prior to the election. The obvious glee with which the network newcasts reported Democratic victories on Election Day shows clearly where their bias lies. More evidence that the major media were nothing better than mouthpieces for the Democrat party is how the media ignored one serious political scandal – arguably, the most important scandal, for it involved genuine political corruption: the scandal centered on Senate Democratic leader “Dingy” Harry Reid, who failed to properly disclose to Congress the $1.1 million windfall he collected on a Las Vegas land deal. (Reid bought the undeveloped residential property in 1998, then in 2001 sold the land for the same price he paid to a limited liability corporation created by a friend – Jay Brown, a former casino owner whose name has surfaced in some organized-crime investigations – and in which Reid held a financial stake. After getting local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, Brown’s company sold the land in 2004 to other developers, and Reid took $1.1 million of the proceeds, nearly tripling his initial investment. Reid reported it to Congress as a personal land sale, even though he hadn’t personally owned the property for three years.) Reid also violated federal election laws by using campaign donations to pay Christmas bonuses for the staff at the Ritz-Carlton where he lives in a condominium. Neither of these stories involving real “ethics lapses” got any media coverage comparable to that given the silly Mark Foley matter.
n Multiple Obasms The Center for Media and Public Affairs study also found that network newscasts featured Senator Barack Obama in ten stories, even though he wasn’t up for re-election this year. But he has written a just-published book and is testing the waters for a possible presidential bid (or, more likely, to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate) in 2008. The major media have become positively orgasmic over Obama, who’s been trying to tout himself as above partisanship. (One passage in his book -- a passage that reveals the Senator’s penchant for writing the kind of bullshit generalities that make politicians popular – declares, “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”) Obama’s a liar and a hypocrite: he’s a left-wing Democrat partisan. For example, he voted against John Roberts’ confirmation as Chief Justice of the United States (joining only the most far-left Democrats in opposing the well-qualified Roberts simply because they considered him too conservative); and notwithstanding his earlier-stated support for Joe Lieberman, he campaigned in Connecticut not for Lieberman but for his leftist, anti-war Democrat opponent.
n Spastic Like a Fox Big Media’s pro-Democrat bias also was exposed by the major networks’ coverage of the controversy over Michael J. Fox’s TV ads on behalf of Democrat Senate candidates in Missouri and Maryland because they support government-funded research on embryonic stem cells, which some conservative Republicans oppose. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, was seen visibly shaking in the ads, just as he was during his past testimony before Congress; he’d admitted in his autobiography that he sometimes deliberately fails to take his medications, when making public appearances, so the symptoms of his disease are more evident. Rather than focusing on Fox himself – on how he was exploiting his illness for partisan political purposes, as well as misrepresenting Republicans’ position on stem cell research – the media focused instead on the critical comments by Rush Limbaugh, who on his radio show had justifiably questioned Mr. Fox’s exploitation of his own illness for partisan purposes. Just for the record, I disagree with conservatives who oppose both cloning and the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research; I do not regard these techniques of medical science to be immoral in any way. But I’m opposed to federal funding of all sorts of stem cell research, just as I’m opposed to federal funding of all kinds of medical research, period, because that’s not among the enumerated (and hence the only legitimate) powers of Congress under the Constitution. And I respect the beliefs of those who oppose the use of their federal tax dollars for medical research they consider morally wrong. (Opponents of government funding for embryonic stem cell research do not oppose the use of adult stem cells for such research; and they argue, with some justification, that non-embryonic stem cell research actually holds more promise. See, for example, Tom Bethel’s interesting article, “The Great Stem Cell Error,” in the current, November issue of American Spectator magazine.) “Moderate” Republicans and Democrats who are insensitive to these moral beliefs do so at their own peril. It may not have hurt them in this week’s elections, but it will come back to haunt them in future elections.
n Santorum the Sanctimonious and DeWine the RINO Two Republican U.S. Senators who went down in well-deserved defeat were Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum and Ohio’s Mike DeWine. Both Santorum and DeWine epitomize what’s wrong with the Republican Party. Santorum is a social conservative who has “gained justified notoriety for rejecting any notion of the constitutional right of privacy, and for comparing gays to child molesters,” notes Ed Hudgins in his article “The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party” (in a section aptly titled “Santorum the Sanctimonious”). “His version of conservatism draws from the most toxic elements in the philosophical stew served up by the GOP: it’s an ideology that, at its ethical base (though certainly not in policy details) unites Santorum more with Karl Marx than with Adam Smith.” Hudgins notes how Santorum’s book It Takes a Family, which was meant to be an answer to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village, actually shares the same collectivist premises: “Santorum is a collectivist, only his collective (the family) is different from those of Marx and Hillary.” Santorum also has been outspoken in his criticism of libertarians, whom he contemptuously described this way: “They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want.” Santorum has made clear that he will have none of this. He’s just as contemptuous of individualism, arguing that conservatives should regard “the basic unit of society” as not the individual but “the family,” and that “the individual needs to be supported and molded and shaped through this family structure, through the real village, which is the church, the community organizations,” and so on. To such a collectivist, I say: good riddance! It’s good to see him defeated for reelection to the Senate and (I hope) thereby deprived of a platform from which he can voice his repulsive opinions. (It’s also worth noting that Santorum’s victorious opponent, Bob Casey, Jr., although an old school left-liberal on taxes, wages, trade, and union issues, is also an anti-abortion, anti-stem cell research, pro-Iraq war conservative. As David Weigel reported in the November issue of Reason magazine, in a column aptly titled “Penn Statists,” in the Pennsylvania Senate race, both sides ran for the middle. Weigel quoted Hardball’s Chris Matthews, calling Pennsylvania “the hottest race in the country,” but added, “He could have continued, `Unless you’re a libertarian.’”) Mike DeWine, on the other hand, is a “moderate” Republican whose voting record in the Senate so closely resembled that of Democrats on many important issues – particularly, environmental issues such as oil drilling in Alaska, “welfare state” spending programs, and other regulatory matters – that he epitomizes the “RINO,” the Republican In Name Only. True, his Democratic opponent in the Ohio Senate race, Sherrod Brown, was even worse; but I was reluctant to vote for DeWine as the lesser of two evils (or, rather, to vote against Brown as the evil of two lessers) until I heard a Brown ad that criticized DeWine for voting against increases in the federal minimum wage nine times. At last! I told myself, I’ve found something good about DeWine’s voting record. Still, I held my nose as I voted for him, and I’m not at all sorry to see him go. Nor was I surprised to see him defeated by a Democrat who more fully and consistently follows DeWine’s regulatory/welfare state policies. (Another incumbent RINO, Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee, similarly went down in defeat to a more politically consistent Democratic challenger.)
n A Victory for Civil Rights One bright spot in the November election results is the approval by Michigan voters of Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibits the government (including state universities) from using race or gender preferences in hiring employees, admitting students, and awarding government contracts. Opposed by virtually the entire political establishment of the state (including both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor), as well as the major public universities and businesses in the state, the initiative was a great victory for the grassroots citizens group that supported it – it won with 58 % of the vote, despite their being outspent by opponents of the measure by a three-to-one margin. In voting “yes” on the proposal, Michigan voters gave a well-deserved slap in the face to the University of Michigan, which had arrogantly defended its policy of racial preferences in admissions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 2003 “affirmative action” cases. (I should note that I am an alumnus of U of M and still a fan of Michigan football – not very popular, here in Buckeye country – but I stopped supporting the University and quit my membership in the alumni association six years ago in protest against U of M’s racist admissions policy.) Adoption of Proposal 2 was also a great victory for civil rights, in the true sense of the term: for the principle of a “color-blind” legal system, in which the government treats people as individuals – according to their own individual merit – rather than as members of groups. It was also one more nail in the coffin of a policy that deserves to die, the policy that has been mislabeled as “affirmative action” or “diversity”: a misguided policy that reversed the genuine progress in civil rights that the United States had achieved by the 1960s and 1970s, by reintroducing racial and gender classifications. (For more on this, see my previous entry, “Affirmative Racism,” January 23, 2006.) Opponents of Proposal 2 rolled out Tommy Amaker and Tom Izzo, the men’s basketball coaches at Michigan and Michigan State University, respectively, to declare at a press conference that the initiative would hurt the universities by reducing “diversity.” The proponents of the Civil Rights Initiative sent the two coaches a question they could not answer: “Do you use quotas or preferences when you choose the players on your basketball teams?” Approval of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, I hope, will inspire other states – including Ohio – to follow the example. (Indeed, I have it on good authority that a similar campaign will take place here in Ohio next year, and I plan to support it enthusiastically.)
n Taking Issue with Other Issues Ohio voters foolishly adopted a constitutional amendment raising the state’s minimum wage and a referendum that banning smoking in most public places. (See my previous entries, “Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly” and “Smokers’ Rights as Everyone’s Rights.” Although Ohio voters did adopt the more draconian Issue 5, they rejected Issue 4, which would have permitted smoking in some public places but which also would have amended the constitution in doing so.) They did, however, wisely reject another proposed constitutional amendment that would have created a state-sponsored cartel to operate some gambling casinos. (I have nothing against gambling per se – I think the state should repeal all laws criminalizing gambling, allowing the free market to prevail with regard to this vice, as with all others – but I’m opposed to true, government-established monopolies, like the cartel that Ohio’s Issue 3 would have created.) Voters in several other states also foolishly raised the minimum wage. Voters in three states considered proposals to liberalize drug laws – in Colorado and Nevada, proposals to decriminalize adult possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, and in South Dakota, a proposal to OK medical use of marijuana – but, unfortunately, voters in all three states rejected the proposals and thus failed to enact more common-sense drug laws. Voters in seven of the eight states that had same-sex marriage bans on the ballot approved them, bringing to 26 the number of states than ban same-sex marriage. For those of us who support equal rights under the law for homosexual couples, there was some good news: Arizona became the first state where voters rejected a same-sex marriage ban, and nearly half (48%) of the voters in South Dakota opposed the ban. (There was also good news several weeks ago in the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision that same-sex couples in the Garden State must be given all the rights and benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples. The court based its decision on proper constitutional grounds and avoided justifiable charges of judicial activism by leaving to legislators to decide whether to expand the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples or to create a civil-union status for same-sex couples that would give them the rights of married heterosexuals. For more on this issue – including my view why American constitutional principles support expanding the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples – see my previous entry, “Marriage, American Style,” May 12, 2004. As I argued there, notwithstanding conservatives’ fears that allowing same-sex couples to marry would somehow undermine the institution of marriage, the real threat to marriage in America today comes from heterosexuals who do not take it seriously. Like Britney Spears, who this week filed for her second divorce – from Kevin Federline, or “K-Fed,” who’s about to become “Fed-Ex.”) There was some more good news: The property-rights movement (which has gathered broad public support in recent months, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s outrageous Kelo decision) gained ground as voters in nine states passed measures to restrict governments from abusing eminent domain powers.
n “Il” Winds Blow Around the World International news continues to be ominous. In addition to the very real and continuing threat that militant Islam poses to the United States and indeed to the entire Western world (the topic of a future blog essay), Communist tyranny has had a resurgence in various trouble spots around the globe. North Korea’s mad Communist dictator, Kim Jong Il, continues to hold nuclear tests and thereby to threaten stability and security on the Asian side of the Pacific Rim. The Castro Communist regime continues to hold Cuba in its iron grip (even if news reports of Fidel’s imminent death are not exaggerated, his brother will continue to rule). And, most recently, voters in Nicaragua have brought back into power Daniel Ortega, the Marxist whose Sandinista tyranny was opposed by U.S.-backed Contra freedom-fighters in the 1980s. Ortega’s return to power marks yet another Latin American government that has fallen to Marxism: Venezuela, of course, is currently ruled by anti-U.S. thug Hugo Chavez; and both Bolivia and Brazil also have elected leftist presidents.
n Clintonistas’ Continuing Attempts To Rewrite History Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton, the worst man who ever occupied the White House and the greatest failure as president in American history (see my “Rating the U.S. Presidents,” Feb. 15, 2006) in late September lost his temper during an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, after Wallace asked him if his administration had done all it could to deal with the threats of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda Islamic terrorists. Clinton is obviously sensitive on this subject – he exploded with an attack on the ABC docudrama The Path to 9/11 and a rant about his “right-wing” enemies (raising again the specter of the supposed “right-wing conspiracy” against him that his wife, Hillary, earlier had complained about) – and “methinks he doth protest too much.” He’s sensitive about the topic because his administration’s negligence truly did make the United States vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks – and all the attempts of Clinton and his cronies (including those former members of the Clinton administration who are as determined to rewrite history to make themselves look good as is Slick Willy himself) cannot change those facts. (The attempt by the Clintonistas to white-wash their deplorable record includes the 9/11 Commission itself, and particularly Commission member Jamie Gorelick whose main task on the Commission was to cover up her own responsibility – as the member of the Clinton Justice Department who mandated the infamous “wall” between FBI and CIA intelligence – for the U.S. government’s failure to anticipate the September 11, 2001 Islamic terrorist attacks.)
n Well Hung (Well, Eventually) Some truly good news coming out of Iraq: Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been found guilty of crimes against humanity, in ordering the deaths of 148 Iraqis in 1982, and has been sentenced to death by hanging. It’s truly a historic moment: for the first time in recent human history, a nation has put on trial – in a public trial that, for all its flaws, was procedurally fair – a dictator who terrorized its people. (Other public trials of overthrown rulers that come to mind – France’s trial and execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and England’s trial and execution of Charles I in 1649 – were more in the nature of show trials conducted by revolutionary tribunals, with preordained verdicts of guilt and death by beheading, lacking even rudimentary guarantees of fairness and impartiality.) Georgie Anne Geyer observes in a recent column that Saddam’s trial in Iraq, notwithstanding its flaws, was much better than the international court’s trial of the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. “I went to The Hague four years ago to see that trial. It had become a public farce. New Europe’s deadening bureaucracy, its lethargic pace of movement, its refusal of the death penalty for any crime at all allowed Milosevic and many other Serbs accused or suspected of killing hundreds of thousands to speak for years. In the end, Milosevic handily died of natural causes.” In contrast, she adds, “[g]iven the world as it is, the Baghdad trial has not gone badly. And if it introduces into the public mind the idea that such men should be tried in their own countries by their own people and not in some remote and post-modern court far away, it will have served a purpose far beyond ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.” Don’t expect to see the welcome sight of Saddam Hussein’s dead body hanging from a rope anytime soon, however; the appeal process is expected to take a few months, and he is the defendant in another trial involving the gassing of Kurds in northern Iraq. Eventually, though, justice will be done – and in resolving it, Iraq’s fledgling government has marked another milestone of success.
n Not “Mightier than the Sword” (Not even mightier than a “Jackass”) Moviegoers this fall have been confounding the critics by snubbing films predicted to be blockbusters and instead makings some lesser-hyped films surprise hits. Consider, for example, the poor box-office showing of the Sean Penn remake of the 1949 Oscar winner, All the King’s Men, which opened in September at No. 7 with a dismal $3.8 million, the same weekend that Jackass: Number Two came in No. 1 with $28.1 million. Perhaps King’s Men, the story of a demagogic Louisiana governor in the 1930s, based on the life of Huey Long, failed not because it’s a bad movie but because Sean Penn, with all his leftist political rantings against the Bush administration and the Iraq war, has made himself as obnoxious to the movie-going audience as Tom Cruise earlier had, with his Scientology craziness. In other words, moviegoers weren’t interested in seeing one demagogue (Penn) play another. Two other movies that have had unexpected success are The Prestige, a taut thriller about the deadly rivalry between two late-19th century magicians (starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale), and Borat, Sascha Baron Cohen’s hilarious satire. Prestige bested the ponderous Clint Eastwood film Flags of Our Fathers, and Borat had an amazing $26.4 million debut last weekend (all the more astounding because it opened on only 837 screens, about one-third the number for most major releases – the biggest opening for a movie on fewer than 1,000 screens since Nielsen EDI has kept records). Borat succeeds because it’s so refreshingly different: a “mockumentary,” starring Cohen in the character of Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist assigned to travel to the USA and report on what he encounters, ostensibly for the enlightenment of his native populace (hence the film’s ponderous subtitle, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan). Borat is both vulgar and naïve; “a lascivious and blithely bigoted” man, as one reviewer put it, his character is also, oddly, endearing; and his cross-country trip is amusing, in part, because it exposes Americans’ own prejudices as well as their uptightness about sexuality and bodily functions. In his Wall Street Journal review (“With Insults for All: In Irreverent `Borat,’ Idiocy Has Never Looked Smarter,” Nov. 3), Joe Morgenstern nicely summed up Borat as “a twisted De Tocqueville with a peerless gift for showing us ourselves in a funhouse mirror.”
n Rockin’ Dick Clark Last week’s entertainment reports included the welcome news that Dick Clark will return as host of “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve” this year. Clark missed the show two years ago when he suffered a stroke, but he returned with a brief appearance last New Year’s Eve. Like Kirk Douglas, who recovered after his stroke and has continued to act in films, Clark is an inspiration to us all – showing that a stroke needn’t end one’s career, even in show business.
n American Royalty The late Ronald Reagan was, next to Calvin Coolidge, the greatest president of the 20th century and one of the top ten or so best presidents in United States history. (See my previous entry, “Rating the U.S. Presidents,” February 15, 2006.) President Reagan also had a marvelous sense of humor, as the following true story reveals. The release of the movie, The Queen, starring Helen Mirren in an Oscar-worthy portrayal of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, has prompted some former Reagan aides to tell the story “behind the headlines” about President Reagan’s visit to Great Britain. It seems that one of Reagan’s favorite pastimes, horseback riding, was also a favorite activity of Queen Elizabeth. The two went riding together – a perfect “photo op.” Just as they rode out of sight – and hearing – of the news media, the Queen’s horse, in the lead, began farting. Not one of those raised-tail, silent-but-deadly horse farts, mind you, but a loud series of staccato farts. The Queen turned around and said, in her typically elegant style, “Mr. President, I’m terribly sorry.” Reagan, without missing a beat, simply replied, “That’s all right, Your Majesty. But I thought it was the horse!”
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, November 9, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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