The story goes wrong very early on, when it’s explained that the Waits family is moving from the suburbs to the country community of Nilbog for a month as part of some rural-urban exchange program. Now, anyone who’s tried his hand at fiction will surely forgive a little shoehorning. Certain things must happen to advance the plot, certain characters must be in certain places at certain times and so on, and a little coincidence or implausibility is eminently forgivable when it’s in aid of a plot point. The trouble with this rural-urban exchange explanation is that it’s so needlessly implausible. We all know there is no such thing in America as a rural-urban exchange program, in which whole families uproot and displace themselves and switch homes with some other family for the sake, presumably, of mixing the rural and urban populations, like something out of the imagination of some mad mid-20th Century Communist central planner.
What’s worse is that there’s a compelling explanation for the move to the country that’s screaming itself hoarse and which could have tied up two other dangling ends at the same time. Apart from this business of the move, we are left with the still bigger questions of why does the ghost of Grandpa visit the boy to warn him about this place called Nilbog and the goblins there, and why do these goblins consume humans? Could the goblins not eat animals like the rest of us, or that is to say, could they not convert animals to the vegetarian goop that they consume as they do with humans? It’s explained at the outset that goblins “need no reason” for what they do, that they eat people out of sheerest evil, but that’s not terribly interesting. Come to that, why are the goblins so hell-bent on eating the Waitses and what odds does it make to them which humans they eat?
So why, oh, why did it not occur to the filmmakers that they had three elements which made no sense at all, but which could be explained in one swoop, all of them together, and in a way that would make the story very much more compelling? The family goes to the country because their recently-deceased patriarch owned property there; the ghost of Grandpa visits the boy from beyond the grave because he has unfinished business with the goblins of his old Nilbog homestead; and the goblins don’t eat people for its own sake but to vanquish their mortal enemies. Maybe the goblins had been driven out of Nilbog long ago but regrouped and reclaimed the place after a long struggle, and maybe the Grandpa character was the last of the goblin-fighters and finally had to abandon the property at Nilbog to save himself, and now the Nilboggian goblins want revenge against their old nemesis, in consuming his surviving family. There, in one motion, the story would have made sense of the senseless and given some purpose to the thing to boot. Not to say it wouldn’t be fairly silly still, but it would at least not be both silly and nonsensical.
To the extent Troll 2 crosses from horror into something resembling science fiction, Jules Verne it ain’t. In order that these vegetarian goblins can at the same time be cannibals, they must first feed the people they mean to eat some elixir which converts them into a vegetarian green goop. Now I know they’re doing great things these days in trying to make soybeans taste like hamburgers, but that’s the point: because soybeans are vegetables, anything that is made from them is necessarily vegetable; if a story is asking us to suspend our disbelief far enough to accept that humans can be converted to vegetable matter, it’ll have to give us some compelling explanation -- science or sorcery, but something big and something particular -- or else the whole business will come off as a joke. And it does. And to this day the Italian fellow who directed Troll 2 is painfully plain that it was not for laughs, and indeed he’s affronted that folks are laughing where he didn’t intend for them to.
The special effects are dreadful, but that’s not necessarily a strike against Troll 2, or anyway it’s not so much a strike against it in this 21st Century. A lot of us are sick to death by now of CGI and have a newfound appreciation for “real” faking. CGI FX are too often too perfect and too canned and too busy to move a lot of us viewing public, and so a puppet arm rigged with fake goblin blood getting the chop with an actual axe is really rather quaint and honest to us today. There’s a lot to be said for cheap and cheerful.
The dialogue comes off by times like it was translated from the German, and that’s not far off: the screenwriter is in fact Italian and not the most expert at the American vernacular.
The acting is said to be bad, but I’m not so sure there was anything in the way of acting in Troll 2 that couldn’t have been salvaged by the right material and direction and editing. Hold a shot for too long and even Remains of the Day could be made to look unnatural and silly. And I defy any great actor to pull off lines and directions like were in that script. Let’s see Anthony Hopkins try and pull off the father role in the most representative scene: Father dumps boy onto bed and bellows, “You can’t pi** on hospitality! I won’t allow it!” whereupon the father goes for his belt and the frightened boy asks what he means to do, with the answer being, “Tighten my belt by one loop so I don’t feel hunger pangs!” The only way to come at material like that and make it work is to play it as a gag, but the director wouldn't hear of it.
I may be prejudiced on this point on account of I incline to what may be called the Roberto Rossellini school, that most anyone can act for the movies if they’re cast in the right parts and if the director handles them and their footage in the right way. They got the chap who plays the proprietor of the general store out of a mental institution, and he did a fine job, despite or maybe because of his being off his nut during shooting. Connie McFarland’s performance as the daughter is held out for special scorn, but I don’t see how her acting was anything worse than what qualified for Saved by the Bell at about that same time -- and Saved by the Bell is an American institution. Robert Ormsby as Grandpa was perfectly competent and absolutely grandfatherly. And I certainly don’t see why the father himself, good old George Hardy, shouldn’t get work as an actor today, provided of course that the roles call for a Southern accent.
Which brings us to the near-mystical question of what it is about this ridiculous Troll 2 that is so fascinating to so many. EPIX, the poor man’s HBO, has run Troll 2 along with its companion documentary Best Worst Movie by Michael Stephenson, who played the boy in the film. As this documentary goes on it becomes plain, slowly but surely and without ever spelling it out, how it was that Troll 2 turned out as it did.
At one point a Troll 2 appreciator in line outside one of the theatrical showings offers that Troll 2 is a movie that aliens might make if they'd been receiving our TV signals and tried to ape what they had seen, without properly understanding any of it. Well, that fellow may have been righter than he knew for: the director is a strange man and an Italian, who only just gets by in English, and the screenwriter happened to be his wife, also Italian and not the most proficient in English. This was an all-American horror picture circa 1990 through the funhouse mirrors of strange Italian filmmakers. That explains it, really, and once you've worked that out then the fascination falls away a bit. Troll 2 is an American movie, and American popular culture for a couple decades up to 1990, as perceived by outsiders who don't have a very firm grasp on anything American.
Which wouldn’t be the first time Italian filmmakers aped an American film genre. I refer of course to the Spaghetti Westerns, which also turned out a bit off and not in a bad way.
April 15, 2012
January 29, 2012
Before Alberta puts its tarsands oil on a slow boat to China
Any Canadian wondering how it is that President Obama's job approval average for his third year rated second-from-bottom in the Gallup archives among presidential junior years, need wonder no longer. If a president of the United States cannot bring himself simply to permit a pipeline carrying cheaper, steadier fuel from a friendly neighbour, at no cost to the taxpayer and generating a modest boom to boot in economic activity and jobs, then all that's left is to hang on in there 'til he can be put out of our misery sometime around January 20th of 2013.
The average American pulled at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart and made president-for-a-day not only would have approved the Keystone XL pipeline project, he'd have wondered why there was any question about it at all. The Keystone XL line is what is called a no-brainer, a win-win, as uncomplicated a proposition as any president can expect to have dumped on his desk. The reader will pardon me if these points have been rehearsed overmuch already, but they bear repeating:
The pipeline would have shifted some part of America's oil importation from the sort of characters who threaten to shut the Strait of Hormuz and precipitate a global energy crisis, half-way around the world, to a sort-of cousin-nation directly over the border. It would have taken the thumb that much off the windpipe, to invoke the old Suez formulation, and given America that much more insurance against a crisis. Besides which, this cousin-nation in question happens to carry on a deal of trade with the United States, so that not all of the exported dollars for that imported oil would have been lost to the American economy.
The pipeline would have helped depress the price of oil in America by the increase in supply and availability, and by cutting the transportation overhead. It's Obama policies like declining the pipeline or banning new offshore oil production for seven years -- announced once the November '10 elections were safely past, undoing an opening of the offshore to exploration announced eight months before the vote -- that have helped push the price of a gallon of gas to slightly more than double what Obama "inherited," to borrow his preferred usage.
The pipeline would have cost not a thin dime to the taxpayer, being one of those private enterprises which Obama daily damns and menaces and punishes. One almost wonders if that counts as a strike against it to Obama's way of thinking: two years ago Obama put up $2 billion that America didn't have for offshore drilling -- in Brazil -- so demonstrably he's got it in him to support big oil projects, at least where government money is involved and American oil is not.
And then there are the jobs involved in building a pipeline so ambitious as to amount to a transcontinental highway of sorts. In the mind of Barack Obama, unemployment insurance is where the jobs are; not in any great private project to connect Alberta and Texas with the fuel to move and do things. Obama made the point explicit in December: "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline, they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance." There's the Age of Obama in a sentence, if ever I saw it. They ought to make a campaign slogan of it. "Obama - He's for the dole."
The story is of course that Obama's concern was for "health and safety," and something called "the Ogallala aquifer" in Nebraska, and that the three years of State Department study on the project were inadequate, and indeed that the Keystone pipeline now in operation wasn't proof enough of the "healthiness and safety" of the thing. There may even be people in the world who truly believe that was the reasoning. Some of the less credulous types have it that Obama's prohibitionism was a sop to the hard-Left environmentalist interest groups, which is fine as far as it goes, only it lets on that Obama is something apart from the hard-Left himself, when I think the inquiring mind will find that the larger part of Obama's deleterious policymaking is down to his own unworkable, alien, doctrinaire leftism.
At the risk of presuming to offer unsolicited advice to the prime minister and government of Canada, I'd say don't sign any papers on that east-west pipeline to serve China just yet. It happens that there's an election in America in a matter of months, and it happens also that the other side in this election are the sort who could conceivably approve the Keystone XL among their early orders of business.
I decline to say that America makes mistakes, but it does occasionally have accidents, and it had one of those one day in November of 2008. Now, it could conceivably be that America will vote for four more years of this, or anyway that the vote could be split by a serious third-party challenge allowing Obama to slip through to a second term with a plurality, but that very expression, "four more years of this," and the way it sounds to American ears, inclines against it. So before you put your tarsands oil on a slow boat to China, maybe see how that election turns out.
The average American pulled at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart and made president-for-a-day not only would have approved the Keystone XL pipeline project, he'd have wondered why there was any question about it at all. The Keystone XL line is what is called a no-brainer, a win-win, as uncomplicated a proposition as any president can expect to have dumped on his desk. The reader will pardon me if these points have been rehearsed overmuch already, but they bear repeating:
The pipeline would have shifted some part of America's oil importation from the sort of characters who threaten to shut the Strait of Hormuz and precipitate a global energy crisis, half-way around the world, to a sort-of cousin-nation directly over the border. It would have taken the thumb that much off the windpipe, to invoke the old Suez formulation, and given America that much more insurance against a crisis. Besides which, this cousin-nation in question happens to carry on a deal of trade with the United States, so that not all of the exported dollars for that imported oil would have been lost to the American economy.
The pipeline would have helped depress the price of oil in America by the increase in supply and availability, and by cutting the transportation overhead. It's Obama policies like declining the pipeline or banning new offshore oil production for seven years -- announced once the November '10 elections were safely past, undoing an opening of the offshore to exploration announced eight months before the vote -- that have helped push the price of a gallon of gas to slightly more than double what Obama "inherited," to borrow his preferred usage.
The pipeline would have cost not a thin dime to the taxpayer, being one of those private enterprises which Obama daily damns and menaces and punishes. One almost wonders if that counts as a strike against it to Obama's way of thinking: two years ago Obama put up $2 billion that America didn't have for offshore drilling -- in Brazil -- so demonstrably he's got it in him to support big oil projects, at least where government money is involved and American oil is not.
And then there are the jobs involved in building a pipeline so ambitious as to amount to a transcontinental highway of sorts. In the mind of Barack Obama, unemployment insurance is where the jobs are; not in any great private project to connect Alberta and Texas with the fuel to move and do things. Obama made the point explicit in December: "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline, they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance." There's the Age of Obama in a sentence, if ever I saw it. They ought to make a campaign slogan of it. "Obama - He's for the dole."
The story is of course that Obama's concern was for "health and safety," and something called "the Ogallala aquifer" in Nebraska, and that the three years of State Department study on the project were inadequate, and indeed that the Keystone pipeline now in operation wasn't proof enough of the "healthiness and safety" of the thing. There may even be people in the world who truly believe that was the reasoning. Some of the less credulous types have it that Obama's prohibitionism was a sop to the hard-Left environmentalist interest groups, which is fine as far as it goes, only it lets on that Obama is something apart from the hard-Left himself, when I think the inquiring mind will find that the larger part of Obama's deleterious policymaking is down to his own unworkable, alien, doctrinaire leftism.
At the risk of presuming to offer unsolicited advice to the prime minister and government of Canada, I'd say don't sign any papers on that east-west pipeline to serve China just yet. It happens that there's an election in America in a matter of months, and it happens also that the other side in this election are the sort who could conceivably approve the Keystone XL among their early orders of business.
I decline to say that America makes mistakes, but it does occasionally have accidents, and it had one of those one day in November of 2008. Now, it could conceivably be that America will vote for four more years of this, or anyway that the vote could be split by a serious third-party challenge allowing Obama to slip through to a second term with a plurality, but that very expression, "four more years of this," and the way it sounds to American ears, inclines against it. So before you put your tarsands oil on a slow boat to China, maybe see how that election turns out.
August 4, 2011
The war on the Irenes of America
On what accounting does a 67 year-old grandmother in Kansas called Irene, perched on some town square with an Uncle Sam top hat and miniature American flags duct-taped to her Dollar General lawn chair, become "anti-American", a "terrorist", a "suicide bomber", a "hostage-taker", a "hijacker", an "extremist", "dangerous", a "threat", and a "Salafist/Wahabbist/Hezbollah-ist/Taliban"? On the accounting of your garden-variety leftist commentator and elected Democrat, if the magic-markered posterboard that Irene is holding reads some variation of "Stop the Spending!"
I'm no head-shrinker, but over the years I have given this sort of thing a deal of thought and so I will try my hand at diagnosing the leftist impulse for war against the Irenes of America, following the lead of MSNBC, which brought in a psychologist and psychotherapist to diagnose the psychological disruptions that MSNBC imagines must explain this "dangerous" phenomenon of Tea Party insistence on cutting spending.
Now, the first point to be made is that there is nothing remotely extreme or disturbed about concern for goverment spending when in four years under President Obama, America will have added $7 trillion to its national debt, after taking two and a quarter centuries and 43 presidencies to add the other $10 trillion. That MSNBC head-shrinker -- besides finding parallels between the Tea Partiers and the Norwegian shooter/bomber who killed a hundred innocents -- diagnosed the Tea Partiers as "delusional. But my best assessment is that the delusion in this is to be found much more in the notion that we can go most of the way to doubling the national debt in just four years, and carry on spending still more indefinitely.
The second point to be gotten out of the way is that these elites and leftists (if there's a distinction anymore) who have discovered "terrorism" and "anti-Americanism" in the decent, law-abiding, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, backbone-of-the-nation folk of America, are the same elites and leftists who have no interest whatever in fighting the actual enemies of America who actively want us all dead and burning in hell. The Left and the elite who damn decent folks within their own borders as "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party" have nothing but sympathies and excuses and apologies for the actual Hezbollah and like Islamic terrorists and fascists and eliminationists, and the greatest shock in all this is seeing them use "Hezbollah" as an epithet. But that's as may be. Onto the amateur head-shrinking.
The easy diagnosis is desperation, and that makes a fine start. Then there's the less psychiatric easy explanation: the dearth of intellectual rigor and the reliance on cribbing the arguments and even the verbatim coinages of other, more original commentators and politicos. So some highly overrated New York Times columnist types up some line about the Tea Party being "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party", and the next thing you know it's being aped by every leftist hack who thought "Bushitler" was clever circa 2003.
Also, the old-line press corrodes the Left and enables their extreme and extraordinary public pronouncements. The press subjects Republicans and conservatives to the most merciless scrutiny and skepticism, while any Democrat and leftist in America can be assured they will never be called out in the mainstream for contradicting themselves or fudging and fabricating their figures or making outlandish claims about their enemies. They do it because they know they'll get away with it, and over time they lose sense even of where the line is drawn.
And because politics is religion to the Left, there can be no vice in advancing the leftist cause. To be a leftist and an elite in the 21st Century is to be post-Christian, and when it is politics that takes the place of religion, the descent into ends-justify-means-ism must surely follow. Say and do whatever can be gotten away with, if it is necessary for the cause. So if it is necessary for the leftist cause that the Tea Party be repudiated and ruined, and if that means biscuit-baking grandmothers must be demonized by the nation's leaders as America-hating terrorists, well, the ends justify the means.
But why accuse the Tea Partiers of "anti-Americanism" of all things? When the Left and the elite aren't busy accusing the Tea Partiers of trying to blow up the country, they're scorning them for their earnest, childlike, rah-rah-sis-boom-bah patriotism. The America-haters claim may be explicable in some part by the conservative theory of leftist "projection", i.e., much of what leftists accuse their enemies of is in fact what's in their own hearts. So the Left reflexively accuses conservatives of, say, staging phony, "astro-turf" protests, because that's just the sort of thing they get up to, with their "Rules for Radicals" seminars and their college courses on activism and their paid labor-union rent-a-mobs bussed in from out of state. And if the Left is motivated by contempt for America then that's just the motivation that they'll project onto their opposition. Projection may explain some part of the leftist accusations of anti-Americanism in the flag-waving, flag-wearing Tea Partiers of all people, but I'd guess there's something more semantic at play.
The American conservative's patriotism is for the nation and not the government; the leftist's equivalent to patriotism is more or less the contrary. The conservative trusts that a nation of individuals pursuing what's best for themselves and their loved ones can only be the happier, richer, and freer nation; the leftist starts with a disdain for the average man and distrusts him to make the "right choices" for himself if left to his own devices, and sees the state as the font of all things good, the rightful distributor of wealth, the patron of the approved and scourge of the unapproved, and as the teacher of the nation, correcting its unenlightened history and base nature.
Well, if you're the sort of person who imagines that the good in the country is reposed in its government, then you're liable to regard the Tea Party and its rearguard action to roll back the cost and reach of government as a dagger at the heart of all that's right and good. Only, the very most foundational principle of the United States is freedom from government, of restricting and restraining the state. Which is why a lot of statists damning limited-government Tea Partiers as "anti-American" is the world turned upside down.
I'm no head-shrinker, but over the years I have given this sort of thing a deal of thought and so I will try my hand at diagnosing the leftist impulse for war against the Irenes of America, following the lead of MSNBC, which brought in a psychologist and psychotherapist to diagnose the psychological disruptions that MSNBC imagines must explain this "dangerous" phenomenon of Tea Party insistence on cutting spending.
Now, the first point to be made is that there is nothing remotely extreme or disturbed about concern for goverment spending when in four years under President Obama, America will have added $7 trillion to its national debt, after taking two and a quarter centuries and 43 presidencies to add the other $10 trillion. That MSNBC head-shrinker -- besides finding parallels between the Tea Partiers and the Norwegian shooter/bomber who killed a hundred innocents -- diagnosed the Tea Partiers as "delusional. But my best assessment is that the delusion in this is to be found much more in the notion that we can go most of the way to doubling the national debt in just four years, and carry on spending still more indefinitely.
The second point to be gotten out of the way is that these elites and leftists (if there's a distinction anymore) who have discovered "terrorism" and "anti-Americanism" in the decent, law-abiding, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, backbone-of-the-nation folk of America, are the same elites and leftists who have no interest whatever in fighting the actual enemies of America who actively want us all dead and burning in hell. The Left and the elite who damn decent folks within their own borders as "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party" have nothing but sympathies and excuses and apologies for the actual Hezbollah and like Islamic terrorists and fascists and eliminationists, and the greatest shock in all this is seeing them use "Hezbollah" as an epithet. But that's as may be. Onto the amateur head-shrinking.
The easy diagnosis is desperation, and that makes a fine start. Then there's the less psychiatric easy explanation: the dearth of intellectual rigor and the reliance on cribbing the arguments and even the verbatim coinages of other, more original commentators and politicos. So some highly overrated New York Times columnist types up some line about the Tea Party being "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party", and the next thing you know it's being aped by every leftist hack who thought "Bushitler" was clever circa 2003.
Also, the old-line press corrodes the Left and enables their extreme and extraordinary public pronouncements. The press subjects Republicans and conservatives to the most merciless scrutiny and skepticism, while any Democrat and leftist in America can be assured they will never be called out in the mainstream for contradicting themselves or fudging and fabricating their figures or making outlandish claims about their enemies. They do it because they know they'll get away with it, and over time they lose sense even of where the line is drawn.
And because politics is religion to the Left, there can be no vice in advancing the leftist cause. To be a leftist and an elite in the 21st Century is to be post-Christian, and when it is politics that takes the place of religion, the descent into ends-justify-means-ism must surely follow. Say and do whatever can be gotten away with, if it is necessary for the cause. So if it is necessary for the leftist cause that the Tea Party be repudiated and ruined, and if that means biscuit-baking grandmothers must be demonized by the nation's leaders as America-hating terrorists, well, the ends justify the means.
But why accuse the Tea Partiers of "anti-Americanism" of all things? When the Left and the elite aren't busy accusing the Tea Partiers of trying to blow up the country, they're scorning them for their earnest, childlike, rah-rah-sis-boom-bah patriotism. The America-haters claim may be explicable in some part by the conservative theory of leftist "projection", i.e., much of what leftists accuse their enemies of is in fact what's in their own hearts. So the Left reflexively accuses conservatives of, say, staging phony, "astro-turf" protests, because that's just the sort of thing they get up to, with their "Rules for Radicals" seminars and their college courses on activism and their paid labor-union rent-a-mobs bussed in from out of state. And if the Left is motivated by contempt for America then that's just the motivation that they'll project onto their opposition. Projection may explain some part of the leftist accusations of anti-Americanism in the flag-waving, flag-wearing Tea Partiers of all people, but I'd guess there's something more semantic at play.
The American conservative's patriotism is for the nation and not the government; the leftist's equivalent to patriotism is more or less the contrary. The conservative trusts that a nation of individuals pursuing what's best for themselves and their loved ones can only be the happier, richer, and freer nation; the leftist starts with a disdain for the average man and distrusts him to make the "right choices" for himself if left to his own devices, and sees the state as the font of all things good, the rightful distributor of wealth, the patron of the approved and scourge of the unapproved, and as the teacher of the nation, correcting its unenlightened history and base nature.
Well, if you're the sort of person who imagines that the good in the country is reposed in its government, then you're liable to regard the Tea Party and its rearguard action to roll back the cost and reach of government as a dagger at the heart of all that's right and good. Only, the very most foundational principle of the United States is freedom from government, of restricting and restraining the state. Which is why a lot of statists damning limited-government Tea Partiers as "anti-American" is the world turned upside down.
May 7, 2011
The Adoration of The Obama
I wouldn’t have felt compelled to add my own blot of ink to the metric tons already dumped on the subject of the killing of Osama bin Laden, except that we are now coming to Day Seven in one of the most unbecoming spectacles I’ve yet seen out of even Barack Obama.
Some part of me can’t blame Obama and the Obama-adulating old-line press for their interminable Glory Tour, because of course the hunt for Osama bin Laden is just about the only thing that’s not gone from bad to worse in the Age of Obama. Indeed, the fact they’re all making so very much of this, for so very long, is final proof that Obama has no other success to show for his two years and three months as president. By this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had led America in the tearing down of two of the very worst regimes on earth since the Second World War, and the implanting of decent, democratic systems in their place, making 50 million Muslims free citizens for the first times in their histories.
And that’s the trouble with this Adoration of The Obama, as much as anything else: the bin Laden operation was a sort-of SWAT team swoop on a man who hadn’t been out of the house in half a decade; the Afghan and Iraq wars were earth-quaking re-makings of ancient and malignant whole nations. There is no perspective in this bin Laden affair whatever, for the obvious reason that Obama and all that the press had invested in him are on course for a historic repudiation in 2012, and so he’s desperate for a shot in the arm.
America is today losing in Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden does nothing to arrest or reverse even that, much less every other blessed thing that’s gone the wrong way. America is losing also in Libya, which is a war without a cause and which no-one even dreamt of until the moment we learned we were at war, Obama having decided to take us to war in that country the night before. And I will spare the reader a recapitulation of all those other troubles, and let it suffice to say only that the share of Americans on food stamps stands today AT 14 PERCENT.
One could go on, but it’s all been said ad nauseam already so I’ll endeavor to make a point or two that have been under-made or not made at all:
*There’s a reason some of us Bush-nostalgia-ists have lamented that Bush and his administration have not been more credited in the bin Laden mission, and it goes beyond the usual reasons -- the intelligence trail that ended at bin Laden’s bedroom a week ago, began with Bush's “enhanced interrogations” including at “black sites”, and progressed with the interrogation of al-Qaeda captured in Iraq; the CIA team on the ground in Pakistan that tracked bin Laden the rest of the way was instituted under President Bush; and the Navy SEALs team that did the deed in the end was part of the Joint Special Operations Command which had been denounced on the Left as “Dick Cheney’s assassination ring”; and so on. The deeper reason we whine that Obama is credited with the bin Laden operation single-handed, and Bush mocked, is that Obama damned all of this as senator and candidate, and then outlawed some part of it as president, and so one cannot but fear that the bin Laden operation was the cashing in of investments that have not been kept up since the day Barack Obama moved into the White House.
*The man most responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their success was in fact not Osama bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and of course Obama wanted him granted the rights and protections of a U.S. citizen, in an open-ended civilian trial in New York City, in which the United States itself and especially the Bush Administration would have wound up in the dock at least as much as the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack on America in its history. Obama suspended for two years the military commission case against KSM, in which Mohammed had already pleaded guilty. If it had been up to Obama, that civilian trial would be ongoing even now, but blessedly it was not up to Obama, and the Congress intervened to deny funding for any such abominable thing.
*The Greeks and Romans were great ones for warning leaders and the sycophants who stroke them, and so it’s not for nothing that so many of the best words to describe Barack Obama generally and in this instance especially come to us from the classical languages: narcissism, hubris, vanity, etc. Had Obama been a man, and honorable and meek, he’d simply have authorized some functionary to break the news of bin Laden’s death, as for instance President Bush did on the occasion of the capture of Saddam Hussein, instead of calling a televised address for 10:30 Eastern on Sunday night to announce the news personally and peppered with the personal pronouns (for which Obama was an hour late, as ever, while the nation panicked at what emergency must be warranted by such an extraordinary development), and then giving a blockbuster, blow-by-blow interview for Sunday evening TV, staging an event at Ground Zero, accepting a presidential jersey at Fort Campbell, etc. Had Obama been the breed of man who truly does great and heroic things, he’d have gone about his business and let other folks talk about heroism and greatness if they cared to. But Barack Obama is not that kind of man; he is the kind of man who will fly very high and in the end be brought very low, like in those Greek myths and Roman cautions.
Some part of me can’t blame Obama and the Obama-adulating old-line press for their interminable Glory Tour, because of course the hunt for Osama bin Laden is just about the only thing that’s not gone from bad to worse in the Age of Obama. Indeed, the fact they’re all making so very much of this, for so very long, is final proof that Obama has no other success to show for his two years and three months as president. By this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had led America in the tearing down of two of the very worst regimes on earth since the Second World War, and the implanting of decent, democratic systems in their place, making 50 million Muslims free citizens for the first times in their histories.
And that’s the trouble with this Adoration of The Obama, as much as anything else: the bin Laden operation was a sort-of SWAT team swoop on a man who hadn’t been out of the house in half a decade; the Afghan and Iraq wars were earth-quaking re-makings of ancient and malignant whole nations. There is no perspective in this bin Laden affair whatever, for the obvious reason that Obama and all that the press had invested in him are on course for a historic repudiation in 2012, and so he’s desperate for a shot in the arm.
America is today losing in Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden does nothing to arrest or reverse even that, much less every other blessed thing that’s gone the wrong way. America is losing also in Libya, which is a war without a cause and which no-one even dreamt of until the moment we learned we were at war, Obama having decided to take us to war in that country the night before. And I will spare the reader a recapitulation of all those other troubles, and let it suffice to say only that the share of Americans on food stamps stands today AT 14 PERCENT.
One could go on, but it’s all been said ad nauseam already so I’ll endeavor to make a point or two that have been under-made or not made at all:
*There’s a reason some of us Bush-nostalgia-ists have lamented that Bush and his administration have not been more credited in the bin Laden mission, and it goes beyond the usual reasons -- the intelligence trail that ended at bin Laden’s bedroom a week ago, began with Bush's “enhanced interrogations” including at “black sites”, and progressed with the interrogation of al-Qaeda captured in Iraq; the CIA team on the ground in Pakistan that tracked bin Laden the rest of the way was instituted under President Bush; and the Navy SEALs team that did the deed in the end was part of the Joint Special Operations Command which had been denounced on the Left as “Dick Cheney’s assassination ring”; and so on. The deeper reason we whine that Obama is credited with the bin Laden operation single-handed, and Bush mocked, is that Obama damned all of this as senator and candidate, and then outlawed some part of it as president, and so one cannot but fear that the bin Laden operation was the cashing in of investments that have not been kept up since the day Barack Obama moved into the White House.
*The man most responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their success was in fact not Osama bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and of course Obama wanted him granted the rights and protections of a U.S. citizen, in an open-ended civilian trial in New York City, in which the United States itself and especially the Bush Administration would have wound up in the dock at least as much as the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack on America in its history. Obama suspended for two years the military commission case against KSM, in which Mohammed had already pleaded guilty. If it had been up to Obama, that civilian trial would be ongoing even now, but blessedly it was not up to Obama, and the Congress intervened to deny funding for any such abominable thing.
*The Greeks and Romans were great ones for warning leaders and the sycophants who stroke them, and so it’s not for nothing that so many of the best words to describe Barack Obama generally and in this instance especially come to us from the classical languages: narcissism, hubris, vanity, etc. Had Obama been a man, and honorable and meek, he’d simply have authorized some functionary to break the news of bin Laden’s death, as for instance President Bush did on the occasion of the capture of Saddam Hussein, instead of calling a televised address for 10:30 Eastern on Sunday night to announce the news personally and peppered with the personal pronouns (for which Obama was an hour late, as ever, while the nation panicked at what emergency must be warranted by such an extraordinary development), and then giving a blockbuster, blow-by-blow interview for Sunday evening TV, staging an event at Ground Zero, accepting a presidential jersey at Fort Campbell, etc. Had Obama been the breed of man who truly does great and heroic things, he’d have gone about his business and let other folks talk about heroism and greatness if they cared to. But Barack Obama is not that kind of man; he is the kind of man who will fly very high and in the end be brought very low, like in those Greek myths and Roman cautions.
March 21, 2011
No way to fight a war
Seeing as how we’re at war in a Mideastern Muslim nation which to my knowledge we've not intervened in militarily for a quarter-century, it might be worth blowing the cobwebs off this blog, which was for its first three years a repository mostly of military news and analysis. This just seems to me to be no way to fight a war:
1. One day in March, we woke up with no conception that we’d be at war in some godforsaken, basket-case country called Libya; as of suppertime, we were at war. Up until the moment that the war vote came down in the United Nations Security Council, there was not the first hint that America was going to war.
The President and Commander-in-Chief who was ordering the United States Armed Forces into this new war had not given the faintest indication that he had been headed toward war, because until the moment he decided on war, he in fact wasn’t headed to war. If the silence had been to preserve some operational secrecy and element of surprise, that would be one thing, but the reason we had no inkling that we’d be at war on that day in March was that the Commander-in-Chief himself had no conception of it and had done none of those things that any other president of the United States would have done to prepare his forces and brace his nation for a military campaign.
2. To broadcast that we’ll bomb a bit for a few days and then quit is to tell the enemy to just hang in there. Anyone plucked at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart would understand that implicitly, and yet Obama has made this same mistake twice now as commander-in-chief of the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, the first time being his declaration on the occasion of his Afghan faux-surge order, that he’d start hauling out come hell or high water 18 months later. The very Commandant of the Marine Corps reported that the date-certain for withdrawal was “giving sustenance” to the enemy, and yet here is Obama duplicating his mistake and announcing that his campaign will last “days, not weeks” -- i.e., just hang in there for a few days, Moammar; there’ll be some smoke and noise, but keep your head down and it’ll be over before you know it. The way to go about it is to set objectives and to declare that the campaign will last for as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.
3. I am sympathetic to the argument from history and necessity that a president and commander-in-chief needn’t always seek and receive Congressional authorization for an act of war before the bombs start flying, but in those cases where he must act first and ask later, he had darn well better get that authorization after the fact, and of course Barack Obama has not so much as suggested that Congress authorize his new Libyan War. Oh, yes, and Obama lectured the last president on the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization of acts of war, despite that President Bush had authorizations for both of his wars from a Republican House and Democrat Senate.
4. There is not the faintest, nascent notion of a mission, beyond "protecting civilians" -- from tens of thousands of feet up. We’re lobbing some bombs for a few days. At what, who knows? To what end, who knows? And what next, who knows?
5. The time for no-fly zones was two to three weeks before the no-fly zone vote at the UN. I'd have supported a no-fly zone over Libya at that time, and I’m compelled to support it now, but now it’s a dollar short and a more than a day late. There was a time, a couple weeks before the intervention, when the Gaddafi regime had lost effective control over most of the nation to the rebels; at that time Gaddafi’s only prospect was importing mercenaries and outside help to prop himself up and try to push back the ascendant rebels. And at that time a no-fly zone and naval blockade would have gone a long way toward denying Gaddafi the means of saving himself.
Wars aren’t won by air power alone, but air power may in fact have been decisive at that stage of what became the Libyan Civil War, in guaranteeing rebel gains on the ground and in preempting Gaddafi’s counteroffensive.
But by the time the no-fly zone was agreed to at the UN Security Council and the first British and French warplanes lifted off to enforce it, Gaddafi already had his mercenaries and outside support, and had pushed the rebels back to not much more than Benghazi, which is Libya’s second city but nothing to compare with the rest of the country.
The British Prime Minister was calling for a no-fly zone at the time when it might have made the difference, and so indeed was Sarah Palin, but Obama was disengaged as ever on the rolling Arab revolts, caught flat-footed by each and every development and following the now-familiar pattern of silence, then flailing and incoherence, then calls for the inevitable and the faits-accompli, and finally self-congratulation. Four days before he went to war, Obama played the 61st golf game of his presidency and attended a Beltway soiree, and two days before he went to war he was filling out his March Madness "brackets" for ESPN. We had our chance to do this on the cheap and win the war for the rebels before the bloodshed started in earnest, and we missed it.
6. If we’re lobbing Tomahawks into Libya, then at least one of them had better have Moammar Gaddafi’s name on it, however it may be spelled. Libya is at this point as close to a one-man regime as you’re liable to find -- Gaddafi is dependent for his regime on mercenaries and outside help -- so hit Gaddafi and his regime may very well expire with him, the war may be ended blessedly quickly, the rebels may be spared and untold unlucky civilians besides, and there may just be some outside chance of a decent society emerging in that godforsaken country. There is no telling what atrocities have been committed already or are forming in the mind of a terrorist madman dictator who uses language like “cleanse” in describing what he means to do to a rebel-held city.
President Reagan tried hitting Gaddafi in ’87 because Gaddafi was by that time a known terror-sponsor with the blood of innocent Americans on his hands; today there’s all that plus the immediate humanitarian reasons to argue in favor of a hit on Gaddafi. But as of this writing, the United States government is expressly not targeting the actual culprit in all this, and I’m afraid they really mean it.
7. And another thing: when a commander-in-chief launches a war, the place for him is his White House, and on no account should he be swanning around Rio de Janeiro while the bombs fly. A president of the United States can cancel a prior engagement, and the Rio trip could have waited.
1. One day in March, we woke up with no conception that we’d be at war in some godforsaken, basket-case country called Libya; as of suppertime, we were at war. Up until the moment that the war vote came down in the United Nations Security Council, there was not the first hint that America was going to war.
The President and Commander-in-Chief who was ordering the United States Armed Forces into this new war had not given the faintest indication that he had been headed toward war, because until the moment he decided on war, he in fact wasn’t headed to war. If the silence had been to preserve some operational secrecy and element of surprise, that would be one thing, but the reason we had no inkling that we’d be at war on that day in March was that the Commander-in-Chief himself had no conception of it and had done none of those things that any other president of the United States would have done to prepare his forces and brace his nation for a military campaign.
2. To broadcast that we’ll bomb a bit for a few days and then quit is to tell the enemy to just hang in there. Anyone plucked at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart would understand that implicitly, and yet Obama has made this same mistake twice now as commander-in-chief of the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, the first time being his declaration on the occasion of his Afghan faux-surge order, that he’d start hauling out come hell or high water 18 months later. The very Commandant of the Marine Corps reported that the date-certain for withdrawal was “giving sustenance” to the enemy, and yet here is Obama duplicating his mistake and announcing that his campaign will last “days, not weeks” -- i.e., just hang in there for a few days, Moammar; there’ll be some smoke and noise, but keep your head down and it’ll be over before you know it. The way to go about it is to set objectives and to declare that the campaign will last for as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.
3. I am sympathetic to the argument from history and necessity that a president and commander-in-chief needn’t always seek and receive Congressional authorization for an act of war before the bombs start flying, but in those cases where he must act first and ask later, he had darn well better get that authorization after the fact, and of course Barack Obama has not so much as suggested that Congress authorize his new Libyan War. Oh, yes, and Obama lectured the last president on the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization of acts of war, despite that President Bush had authorizations for both of his wars from a Republican House and Democrat Senate.
4. There is not the faintest, nascent notion of a mission, beyond "protecting civilians" -- from tens of thousands of feet up. We’re lobbing some bombs for a few days. At what, who knows? To what end, who knows? And what next, who knows?
5. The time for no-fly zones was two to three weeks before the no-fly zone vote at the UN. I'd have supported a no-fly zone over Libya at that time, and I’m compelled to support it now, but now it’s a dollar short and a more than a day late. There was a time, a couple weeks before the intervention, when the Gaddafi regime had lost effective control over most of the nation to the rebels; at that time Gaddafi’s only prospect was importing mercenaries and outside help to prop himself up and try to push back the ascendant rebels. And at that time a no-fly zone and naval blockade would have gone a long way toward denying Gaddafi the means of saving himself.
Wars aren’t won by air power alone, but air power may in fact have been decisive at that stage of what became the Libyan Civil War, in guaranteeing rebel gains on the ground and in preempting Gaddafi’s counteroffensive.
But by the time the no-fly zone was agreed to at the UN Security Council and the first British and French warplanes lifted off to enforce it, Gaddafi already had his mercenaries and outside support, and had pushed the rebels back to not much more than Benghazi, which is Libya’s second city but nothing to compare with the rest of the country.
The British Prime Minister was calling for a no-fly zone at the time when it might have made the difference, and so indeed was Sarah Palin, but Obama was disengaged as ever on the rolling Arab revolts, caught flat-footed by each and every development and following the now-familiar pattern of silence, then flailing and incoherence, then calls for the inevitable and the faits-accompli, and finally self-congratulation. Four days before he went to war, Obama played the 61st golf game of his presidency and attended a Beltway soiree, and two days before he went to war he was filling out his March Madness "brackets" for ESPN. We had our chance to do this on the cheap and win the war for the rebels before the bloodshed started in earnest, and we missed it.
6. If we’re lobbing Tomahawks into Libya, then at least one of them had better have Moammar Gaddafi’s name on it, however it may be spelled. Libya is at this point as close to a one-man regime as you’re liable to find -- Gaddafi is dependent for his regime on mercenaries and outside help -- so hit Gaddafi and his regime may very well expire with him, the war may be ended blessedly quickly, the rebels may be spared and untold unlucky civilians besides, and there may just be some outside chance of a decent society emerging in that godforsaken country. There is no telling what atrocities have been committed already or are forming in the mind of a terrorist madman dictator who uses language like “cleanse” in describing what he means to do to a rebel-held city.
President Reagan tried hitting Gaddafi in ’87 because Gaddafi was by that time a known terror-sponsor with the blood of innocent Americans on his hands; today there’s all that plus the immediate humanitarian reasons to argue in favor of a hit on Gaddafi. But as of this writing, the United States government is expressly not targeting the actual culprit in all this, and I’m afraid they really mean it.
7. And another thing: when a commander-in-chief launches a war, the place for him is his White House, and on no account should he be swanning around Rio de Janeiro while the bombs fly. A president of the United States can cancel a prior engagement, and the Rio trip could have waited.
February 15, 2011
Any story about an author
I just can’t do it. Try as I might, I cannot sit still for another indulgent, navel-gazing, semi-autobiographical story about a writer. I refer of course to Any Human Heart, from the novel of the same name not a decade ago, adapted for Channel 4 in England in ’10 and duly picked up by PBS for Masterpiece Classic, which was called Masterpiece Theater back when it was worth spoofing on Sesame Street with Cookie Monster. (Incidentally, I fail to see how any nine-year-old book qualifies as a “classic”, but I suppose I ought not be such a dreadful pedant.)
So following is what’s the matter with Any Human Heart; points so obvious as to be gleaned merely from periodically checking in on the first installment.
For a start, the protagonist is an author. When they say “write what you know,” a writer needn’t take them so literally as to write about a writer, who writes and thinks about writing and meets other writers and talks about writing. It’s indulgent, overdone, and plain boring. We -- and I think I speak for nearly all of humanity here -- do not find authors endlessly fascinating or terribly important.
Point Number Two is the “historic sweep of the changing 20th Century”. That was quite a neat little device at one time -- my, how things change, didn’t they wear funny clothes back then, see how world events shaped our hero’s life, didn’t they listen to funny music back then, etc., etc. Indeed, it became a device of the mob movie, from the Godfather movies to Goodfellas to Casino. And that’s precisely the point: it was old when Martin Scorsese did it in a gangster movie in 1995; quit it, already.
Then there was the “protagonist walks home on Cloud Nine after first date with girl of his dreams” scene. That was probably old when Ernest Borgnine did it in Marty circa 1955. Is this really a “masterpiece”, or is it a string of literary and cinematic clichés?
And fourth, as if to answer that last question beyond all doubt, is the “writer with writer’s block stares at blank sheet in typewriter” scene. Was there no-one at the BBC, which is after all the preeminent broadcaster in the world, to observe that it might be wearisome to bludgeon the viewers with a “writer’s block/blank page” scene in which the unmarked paper in the typewriter is actually shown on-screen? Surely the writer’s block scene was clichéd before my time, and it was past old in I Capture The Castle the best part of a decade ago. Maybe those film schools and “creative writing” courses never get around to the class about how the great stories tell new things, and when they must say old things they come up with some novel way of saying them.
Why, yes, I am bitter to see such resources devoted to such cliché-flogging. And it’s a good job I couldn’t stand to watch but a few bits here and there, else this would run 3,000 words and be at least as tedious as the show itself.
So following is what’s the matter with Any Human Heart; points so obvious as to be gleaned merely from periodically checking in on the first installment.
For a start, the protagonist is an author. When they say “write what you know,” a writer needn’t take them so literally as to write about a writer, who writes and thinks about writing and meets other writers and talks about writing. It’s indulgent, overdone, and plain boring. We -- and I think I speak for nearly all of humanity here -- do not find authors endlessly fascinating or terribly important.
Point Number Two is the “historic sweep of the changing 20th Century”. That was quite a neat little device at one time -- my, how things change, didn’t they wear funny clothes back then, see how world events shaped our hero’s life, didn’t they listen to funny music back then, etc., etc. Indeed, it became a device of the mob movie, from the Godfather movies to Goodfellas to Casino. And that’s precisely the point: it was old when Martin Scorsese did it in a gangster movie in 1995; quit it, already.
Then there was the “protagonist walks home on Cloud Nine after first date with girl of his dreams” scene. That was probably old when Ernest Borgnine did it in Marty circa 1955. Is this really a “masterpiece”, or is it a string of literary and cinematic clichés?
And fourth, as if to answer that last question beyond all doubt, is the “writer with writer’s block stares at blank sheet in typewriter” scene. Was there no-one at the BBC, which is after all the preeminent broadcaster in the world, to observe that it might be wearisome to bludgeon the viewers with a “writer’s block/blank page” scene in which the unmarked paper in the typewriter is actually shown on-screen? Surely the writer’s block scene was clichéd before my time, and it was past old in I Capture The Castle the best part of a decade ago. Maybe those film schools and “creative writing” courses never get around to the class about how the great stories tell new things, and when they must say old things they come up with some novel way of saying them.
Why, yes, I am bitter to see such resources devoted to such cliché-flogging. And it’s a good job I couldn’t stand to watch but a few bits here and there, else this would run 3,000 words and be at least as tedious as the show itself.
November 30, 2010
Several more predictions for the Age of Obama, and then some
I'm sufficiently happy with my first fortune-cookie job in February of '09 to undertake a second, with predictions great and small, to wit:
1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was madness that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision outlawing the incandescent light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, they cost a matter of pennies each, and they're so towering a monument to ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is the very symbol for genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as intended by the Founders if it busies itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. But the House of Representatives now is to be re-taken by Republicans, and those Republicans will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show something over two-thirds support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.
2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.
And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority not long after the midterms, in re-electing Nancy Pelosi to lead them, Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government and one of three authors of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. Something like re-nominating Carter against Reagan for '84. That lot won't be entrusted again with a House majority anytime soon.
3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated for president by the Republican Party in 2012, but that question is an open one. Already there are maybe a dozen prospects, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.
Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.
So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.
Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.
4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.
Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.
Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.
But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.
When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.
5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.
And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.
The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just past, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.
1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was madness that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision outlawing the incandescent light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, they cost a matter of pennies each, and they're so towering a monument to ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is the very symbol for genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as intended by the Founders if it busies itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. But the House of Representatives now is to be re-taken by Republicans, and those Republicans will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show something over two-thirds support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.
2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.
And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority not long after the midterms, in re-electing Nancy Pelosi to lead them, Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government and one of three authors of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. Something like re-nominating Carter against Reagan for '84. That lot won't be entrusted again with a House majority anytime soon.
3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated for president by the Republican Party in 2012, but that question is an open one. Already there are maybe a dozen prospects, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.
Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.
So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.
Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.
4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.
Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.
Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.
But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.
When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.
5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.
And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.
The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just past, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.
October 4, 2010
Clinton v. Obama, 2012
Though I'm not predicting it at this point, a Hillary Clinton insurgency against President Obama doesn't seem so outside the realm of possibility -- not in the Democratic Party. The speculation is occasioned by the remarkable Gallup poll of September '10 finding that just 52 percent -- of Democrats -- would vote to re-nominate Obama for president, to 37 percent for Clinton. In fact there've been quite a lot of one-termers and contested re-nominations on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War.
Clinton of course won two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of a strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot, who split the anti-Clinton vote in '92 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. And a third-party candidacy as substantial as Perot's is not a usual thing historically.
Carter was the object of a contested primary in '80 which might conceivably have gone to Ted Kennedy had Kennedy not fallen on his face in the 60 Minutes interview when he couldn't answer the question of why he was running, and of course the Chappaquiddick business didn't help. Carter was only weakened the more by the challenge and wound up losing the general election to Reagan so badly that he'd conceded before the polls were closed on the West Coast.
Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and then won a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election in the spring of '68 when the writing on the wall had become sufficiently plain that he announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Johnson had come within eight points of losing the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy, which result had brought Bobby Kennedy into the race. The Democratic National Convention that summer was a circus and the Democrat Party was radicalized and banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.
Kennedy obviously was assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration.
Which leaves Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and then won a term of his own in '48 but was exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was on the ballot in the Democratic primaries of '52, until he lost New Hampshire to Estes Kefauver, 55-44 percent, whereupon he announced he'd not stand for re-election. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, to lose to Eisenhower.
So Bill Clinton is the only proper two-termer the Democrat Party has produced since FDR in the '30s and '40s, and even Clinton got a push across the finish line by a historically-anomalous third-party candidacy.
On the other side in that same period are Bush 43, Bush 41, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower. Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, and Eisenhower were all elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish out his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term, was challenged seriously in the '76 Republican primaries by Reagan, and gave way to the Carter interregnum. But Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he was never elected. Which leaves George H. W. Bush, who was the object of a spirited primary challenge in '92 from Pat Buchanan among others, and a one-termer, though Bush 41 was hindered by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that aided Clinton.
And that's it: the one-termers and the contested re-nominations have tended to be on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War, and in fact that kind of thing has been the rule rather than the exception with Democrat presidents.
I wrote when Obama clinched the Democrat nomination in June of '08 that "the Democrat Party has made a mistake". That must have looked foolish sometime that November when Obama won the presidency with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, but it was one of the shrewder assessments I've ever made. Obama was unqualified and unprepared for the presidency, his instincts are consistently and suicidally wrong, his ideas are unworkable and alien to the American nation, and he is unusually vain and bitter and arrogant even by the standards of the sort of men who presume to lead the world. Barack Hussein Obama is a plain bad president, and he could only ever have been a bad president.
Obama is already a marginalized, discredited, unheeded, and failed president. He fell further, faster than any president since the advent of polling. His campaign was a fraud, and the more he says and does -- the more he reveals himself truly -- the more abhorrent he is to the American people. I decline to say that the American people make mistakes, but they do sometimes have accidents, and November of 2008 was one for the ages. It will be put right at the first opportunity. The question is whether Obama marks the end of leftism in American national government, and the rebirth of First Principles, for a couple of election cycles, or for a generation.
So Obama is a one-term president, though the details have yet to be written. If he tells the American people that they can't fire him, he quits, or if he takes his chances on a re-election and the Democratic Party does to him as the mob does to a fellow who's outlived his usefulness, then the obvious alternate standard-bearer will be the the one they now know they ought to have nominated in the first place. Only, that assumes Hillary Clinton would want another run at the presidency, but my assumption has always been that Clinton would never run unless she could be confident of winning, and in 2012 she would of course lose: if a party can't re-elect a sitting president, it won't elect a runner-up pleading that she's one of the good ones.
Clinton of course won two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of a strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot, who split the anti-Clinton vote in '92 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. And a third-party candidacy as substantial as Perot's is not a usual thing historically.
Carter was the object of a contested primary in '80 which might conceivably have gone to Ted Kennedy had Kennedy not fallen on his face in the 60 Minutes interview when he couldn't answer the question of why he was running, and of course the Chappaquiddick business didn't help. Carter was only weakened the more by the challenge and wound up losing the general election to Reagan so badly that he'd conceded before the polls were closed on the West Coast.
Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and then won a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election in the spring of '68 when the writing on the wall had become sufficiently plain that he announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Johnson had come within eight points of losing the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy, which result had brought Bobby Kennedy into the race. The Democratic National Convention that summer was a circus and the Democrat Party was radicalized and banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.
Kennedy obviously was assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration.
Which leaves Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and then won a term of his own in '48 but was exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was on the ballot in the Democratic primaries of '52, until he lost New Hampshire to Estes Kefauver, 55-44 percent, whereupon he announced he'd not stand for re-election. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, to lose to Eisenhower.
So Bill Clinton is the only proper two-termer the Democrat Party has produced since FDR in the '30s and '40s, and even Clinton got a push across the finish line by a historically-anomalous third-party candidacy.
On the other side in that same period are Bush 43, Bush 41, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower. Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, and Eisenhower were all elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish out his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term, was challenged seriously in the '76 Republican primaries by Reagan, and gave way to the Carter interregnum. But Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he was never elected. Which leaves George H. W. Bush, who was the object of a spirited primary challenge in '92 from Pat Buchanan among others, and a one-termer, though Bush 41 was hindered by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that aided Clinton.
And that's it: the one-termers and the contested re-nominations have tended to be on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War, and in fact that kind of thing has been the rule rather than the exception with Democrat presidents.
I wrote when Obama clinched the Democrat nomination in June of '08 that "the Democrat Party has made a mistake". That must have looked foolish sometime that November when Obama won the presidency with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, but it was one of the shrewder assessments I've ever made. Obama was unqualified and unprepared for the presidency, his instincts are consistently and suicidally wrong, his ideas are unworkable and alien to the American nation, and he is unusually vain and bitter and arrogant even by the standards of the sort of men who presume to lead the world. Barack Hussein Obama is a plain bad president, and he could only ever have been a bad president.
Obama is already a marginalized, discredited, unheeded, and failed president. He fell further, faster than any president since the advent of polling. His campaign was a fraud, and the more he says and does -- the more he reveals himself truly -- the more abhorrent he is to the American people. I decline to say that the American people make mistakes, but they do sometimes have accidents, and November of 2008 was one for the ages. It will be put right at the first opportunity. The question is whether Obama marks the end of leftism in American national government, and the rebirth of First Principles, for a couple of election cycles, or for a generation.
So Obama is a one-term president, though the details have yet to be written. If he tells the American people that they can't fire him, he quits, or if he takes his chances on a re-election and the Democratic Party does to him as the mob does to a fellow who's outlived his usefulness, then the obvious alternate standard-bearer will be the the one they now know they ought to have nominated in the first place. Only, that assumes Hillary Clinton would want another run at the presidency, but my assumption has always been that Clinton would never run unless she could be confident of winning, and in 2012 she would of course lose: if a party can't re-elect a sitting president, it won't elect a runner-up pleading that she's one of the good ones.
August 31, 2010
The Great Peasant Revolt, or, the state of the United States, Age of Obama, Year 2
(Updated and expanded, October 9, '10)
The United States is roiling. This Age of Obama has brought a wrack and upheaval in America beyond what even Obama-bashing right-wing reactionary rednecks like myself had reckoned on.
This is the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation, and what is called the mainstream press mostly missed the story, because it's part of the same elite that's looking over the palace balconies at all those uncouth, unlovely commoners in this Great Peasant Revolt.
It does seem that there's an entire class of people who deny or dismiss what President Obama and his Congress have wrought, or else blame the American people for not more joyfully giving their country away and deferring to their elite while it "remakes the nation" unrecognizably. There's a conventional wisdom among the conventional Obama-apologists to explain it all away, invoking the old "it's the economy, stupid" formulation from the 1992 presidential campaign, that if the natives are restless then it's a simple matter of their impatience with the pace of Obama's economic "recovery," which is perceptible mainly to the most partisan Democrats and the press. It is the economy, sure enough, but it's everything else as well.
So here is a pitifully inadequate list of recent news to give some small sense of the state of the United States in the Age of Obama, Year 2. Anyone depending for their news on the news sections of this Chronicle-Herald would be oblivious to all of the following points and more besides.
In just the first year and a half under Obama, the national debt "held by the public" went from $6.3 trillion or $20,000 per American, to $8.8 trillion or $28,000 for every man, woman and child in America -- more debt in 19 months than was accumulated under the first 40 presidencies over 200 years.
In the 19 months since Obama's $862 billion stimulus to "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs," the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net.
More Americans have died in Afghanistan in 20 months under Obama and his suicidally-restrictive rules of engagement, than died in seven years under Bush.
The Commandant of the Marine Corps confirmed that Obama's announced date-certain for starting the Afghan withdrawal is giving "sustenance" to the enemy.
The ruinous ramifications of Obama's unread, 2,700-page health-care bill have been coming out every few days, from the very East German requirement that businesses file two "1099" forms for every transaction with another party having dealings amounting to more than $600 a year, to increases in premiums of up to 9 percent, to the outlawing of the cheaper, no-frills prescription plans held by over 3 million seniors.
Obama's mad "Cash for Clunkers" policy of destroying used cars caused a needless and predictable shortage, so that Edmunds.com found the average used car a year later cost $1,800 more.
Obama's allies at the "Business Roundtable" turned on him, its chairman blaming him and his Congress for an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."
Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is regulating the smaller operators in the New England groundfishery out of business, its Obama-appointed administrator having declared openly her intent to "remove" a "significant fraction of the vessels."
The House of Representatives didn't bother itself with passing a budget for the first time since the Budget Act of 1974, despite that House Democrats have a 77-seat margin and can pass any old thing they please.
The Democratic Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who was as responsible as any single figure for Obama's unread, 2,300-page finance reform bill, announced that "no-one will know until this is actually in place how it works."
Two Justice Department lawyers testified that Obama's Civil Rights Division is "hostile" to "race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act."
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement union council voted "no confidence" in the Obama administration, 259 to 0, charging that Obama's ICE director and assistant director "have abandoned the agency's core mission."
When the president of Mexico used the occasion of his address to a joint session of Congress to denounce Arizona's modest and necessary steps against its illegal alien invasion -- which steps are supported by two-thirds of the American people -- the Democratic majority and Obama administration attendees rose in a 20-second standing ovation, after which the Obamas threw him a White House celebrity dance party.
And after Obama's cancellation of America's manned space program, for the first time since there's there's been such a thing as manned space flight, his NASA administrator listed three charges given him by Obama, none of which had anything to do with space, and "perhaps foremost" of which was "to reach out to the Muslim world."
Obama and his Congress have taken things uniformly from bad to worse, and conjured new troubles where there were none. They have replaced the consent of the governed with contempt for the governed, and they do not know better than the American people what's good for them. Obama's campaign was a fraud, and the question now is whether he'll even offer for re-election, or if he'll tell the American people that they can't fire him, he quits. There's a reckoning coming.
The United States is roiling. This Age of Obama has brought a wrack and upheaval in America beyond what even Obama-bashing right-wing reactionary rednecks like myself had reckoned on.
This is the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation, and what is called the mainstream press mostly missed the story, because it's part of the same elite that's looking over the palace balconies at all those uncouth, unlovely commoners in this Great Peasant Revolt.
It does seem that there's an entire class of people who deny or dismiss what President Obama and his Congress have wrought, or else blame the American people for not more joyfully giving their country away and deferring to their elite while it "remakes the nation" unrecognizably. There's a conventional wisdom among the conventional Obama-apologists to explain it all away, invoking the old "it's the economy, stupid" formulation from the 1992 presidential campaign, that if the natives are restless then it's a simple matter of their impatience with the pace of Obama's economic "recovery," which is perceptible mainly to the most partisan Democrats and the press. It is the economy, sure enough, but it's everything else as well.
So here is a pitifully inadequate list of recent news to give some small sense of the state of the United States in the Age of Obama, Year 2. Anyone depending for their news on the news sections of this Chronicle-Herald would be oblivious to all of the following points and more besides.
In just the first year and a half under Obama, the national debt "held by the public" went from $6.3 trillion or $20,000 per American, to $8.8 trillion or $28,000 for every man, woman and child in America -- more debt in 19 months than was accumulated under the first 40 presidencies over 200 years.
In the 19 months since Obama's $862 billion stimulus to "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs," the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net.
More Americans have died in Afghanistan in 20 months under Obama and his suicidally-restrictive rules of engagement, than died in seven years under Bush.
The Commandant of the Marine Corps confirmed that Obama's announced date-certain for starting the Afghan withdrawal is giving "sustenance" to the enemy.
The ruinous ramifications of Obama's unread, 2,700-page health-care bill have been coming out every few days, from the very East German requirement that businesses file two "1099" forms for every transaction with another party having dealings amounting to more than $600 a year, to increases in premiums of up to 9 percent, to the outlawing of the cheaper, no-frills prescription plans held by over 3 million seniors.
Obama's mad "Cash for Clunkers" policy of destroying used cars caused a needless and predictable shortage, so that Edmunds.com found the average used car a year later cost $1,800 more.
Obama's allies at the "Business Roundtable" turned on him, its chairman blaming him and his Congress for an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."
Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is regulating the smaller operators in the New England groundfishery out of business, its Obama-appointed administrator having declared openly her intent to "remove" a "significant fraction of the vessels."
The House of Representatives didn't bother itself with passing a budget for the first time since the Budget Act of 1974, despite that House Democrats have a 77-seat margin and can pass any old thing they please.
The Democratic Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who was as responsible as any single figure for Obama's unread, 2,300-page finance reform bill, announced that "no-one will know until this is actually in place how it works."
Two Justice Department lawyers testified that Obama's Civil Rights Division is "hostile" to "race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act."
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement union council voted "no confidence" in the Obama administration, 259 to 0, charging that Obama's ICE director and assistant director "have abandoned the agency's core mission."
When the president of Mexico used the occasion of his address to a joint session of Congress to denounce Arizona's modest and necessary steps against its illegal alien invasion -- which steps are supported by two-thirds of the American people -- the Democratic majority and Obama administration attendees rose in a 20-second standing ovation, after which the Obamas threw him a White House celebrity dance party.
And after Obama's cancellation of America's manned space program, for the first time since there's there's been such a thing as manned space flight, his NASA administrator listed three charges given him by Obama, none of which had anything to do with space, and "perhaps foremost" of which was "to reach out to the Muslim world."
Obama and his Congress have taken things uniformly from bad to worse, and conjured new troubles where there were none. They have replaced the consent of the governed with contempt for the governed, and they do not know better than the American people what's good for them. Obama's campaign was a fraud, and the question now is whether he'll even offer for re-election, or if he'll tell the American people that they can't fire him, he quits. There's a reckoning coming.
July 17, 2010
Stimulus repudiated
(Updated August 6, '10.)
America had problems, but too little federal spending was not one of them. President Bush spent too much; President Obama is spending much, much more. Obama and his Congress are fixing problems America doesn't have with solutions America can't afford. And it all started with the $787 billion stimulus -- since revised upward to $862 billion.
Obama's stimulus, by his own measures, has failed. Obama promised his stimulus would "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs over the next two years" -- "90 percent...in the private sector"; it's been nearly a year and a half already, and in that time the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net. Obama's advisers projected that unemployment wouldn't hit 8 percent if Obama got his stimulus; Obama got his stimulus, and unemployment went over 10 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Obama promised his stimulus would "immediately creat[e] jobs"; 16 months later, in June alone, 652,000 Americans despaired even of looking for work, which for purposes of government statistics wipes them from the official labour force and conveniently lowers the top-line unemployment rate.
The stimulus was sold as the greatest improvement in America's roads since Eisenhower built the Interstate system, but spending for roads and bridges came to just 3 percent of the final bill.
Forty-three percent of the bill remains unspent nearly a year and a half after it was passed -- $370 billion as of late-July -- and what is the use of a "stimulus" for "immediately creating jobs" if 43 percent of it is still on the shelf after 17 months?
The bill became too much a cheque-book for the preoccupations of the Democratic Party, and bonus spending on institutions favoured of the Democratic Party, from $39.5 billion for public schools, to $2.4 billion for something called "carbon-capture demonstration projects," to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nowhere in the bill was there any bonus spending for some of the most "shovel-ready" of government work in war-time -- defence projects -- and in fact the Obama administration later announced cuts to missile defence and production of the world-beating F-22 stealth fighter, national defence being the solitary area of government spending which Democrats are capable of cutting, never mind that there's a war on.
The bill cost $205 billion more than President Bush spent on the Iraq War in six years.
The bill ran to 1,073 pages, and neither the Congressmen and Senators who passed it nor the president who signed it into law bothered to read the thing.
The usual legislative process was suspended, committee hearings were bypassed, and the Republican minority was shut out. ("I won," President Obama explained. "We won the election. We wrote the bill," House Speaker Pelosi elaborated.)
The bill got exactly 3 of 217 Republican votes in both houses of Congress -- one of which three turned Democrat not long after -- and the final votes were reported by the Associated Press in this newspaper as "a major victory for President Obama."
And that was the least of the press abuses where the stimulus was concerned. The Canadian Press in this newspaper reported in March of last year that if Obama's economics are socialist then "it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks." The CP report didn't cite any of those "countless" polls, and at least three major national polls in the days and weeks previous were pointing in quite the opposite direction.
The Rasmussen poll found "just 27 percent of voters nationwide favour passage of a second economic stimulus." The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 61 percent were more concerned the government would spend too much than too little in aid of stimulating the economy -- even if spending less would mean a longer recession. And the Gallup/USA Today poll found all of 14 percent saying it would have been better to spend more on the stimulus.
And never mind any "additional stimulus spending": it was only 44 percent who were calling the first stimulus a "good idea" in the Journal/NBC poll even when the bill was passed in February of '09. Five months later, that number was down to 34. And a year after passage, the New York Times/CBS News poll could find only 6 percent to say the stimulus had actually created jobs.
There was ample warning it wouldn't work. Dominic Lawson in the London Times had it right even before the stimulus was law. "Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus."
And it turned out Obama's crudified Keynesianism was his Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C for the American and global economies. So far from discreetly retiring the stimulus and taking a new direction, Obama mystifyingly claimed "every economist" had concluded the stimulus "did its job," proclaimed this "Recovery Summer," called for $266 billion more stimulus spending, pushed the $26 billion "state aid" bill to supplement the stimulus, and lectured the G-20 nations on following his example and spending their way to prosperity with bottomless boondoggles.
The best thing at this point would be to cancel as much as is workable of the unspent provisions of the stimulus, and cut the losses. But Obama's Congress has refused to redirect even a fraction of the stimulus allocations to cover an unfunded unemployment benefits extension, so any change of course is going to take a very different government in Washington.
The stimulus was an act of faith in government, and in Barack Obama, and in the end its greatest effect has been on the national debt.
America had problems, but too little federal spending was not one of them. President Bush spent too much; President Obama is spending much, much more. Obama and his Congress are fixing problems America doesn't have with solutions America can't afford. And it all started with the $787 billion stimulus -- since revised upward to $862 billion.
Obama's stimulus, by his own measures, has failed. Obama promised his stimulus would "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs over the next two years" -- "90 percent...in the private sector"; it's been nearly a year and a half already, and in that time the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net. Obama's advisers projected that unemployment wouldn't hit 8 percent if Obama got his stimulus; Obama got his stimulus, and unemployment went over 10 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Obama promised his stimulus would "immediately creat[e] jobs"; 16 months later, in June alone, 652,000 Americans despaired even of looking for work, which for purposes of government statistics wipes them from the official labour force and conveniently lowers the top-line unemployment rate.
The stimulus was sold as the greatest improvement in America's roads since Eisenhower built the Interstate system, but spending for roads and bridges came to just 3 percent of the final bill.
Forty-three percent of the bill remains unspent nearly a year and a half after it was passed -- $370 billion as of late-July -- and what is the use of a "stimulus" for "immediately creating jobs" if 43 percent of it is still on the shelf after 17 months?
The bill became too much a cheque-book for the preoccupations of the Democratic Party, and bonus spending on institutions favoured of the Democratic Party, from $39.5 billion for public schools, to $2.4 billion for something called "carbon-capture demonstration projects," to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nowhere in the bill was there any bonus spending for some of the most "shovel-ready" of government work in war-time -- defence projects -- and in fact the Obama administration later announced cuts to missile defence and production of the world-beating F-22 stealth fighter, national defence being the solitary area of government spending which Democrats are capable of cutting, never mind that there's a war on.
The bill cost $205 billion more than President Bush spent on the Iraq War in six years.
The bill ran to 1,073 pages, and neither the Congressmen and Senators who passed it nor the president who signed it into law bothered to read the thing.
The usual legislative process was suspended, committee hearings were bypassed, and the Republican minority was shut out. ("I won," President Obama explained. "We won the election. We wrote the bill," House Speaker Pelosi elaborated.)
The bill got exactly 3 of 217 Republican votes in both houses of Congress -- one of which three turned Democrat not long after -- and the final votes were reported by the Associated Press in this newspaper as "a major victory for President Obama."
And that was the least of the press abuses where the stimulus was concerned. The Canadian Press in this newspaper reported in March of last year that if Obama's economics are socialist then "it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks." The CP report didn't cite any of those "countless" polls, and at least three major national polls in the days and weeks previous were pointing in quite the opposite direction.
The Rasmussen poll found "just 27 percent of voters nationwide favour passage of a second economic stimulus." The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 61 percent were more concerned the government would spend too much than too little in aid of stimulating the economy -- even if spending less would mean a longer recession. And the Gallup/USA Today poll found all of 14 percent saying it would have been better to spend more on the stimulus.
And never mind any "additional stimulus spending": it was only 44 percent who were calling the first stimulus a "good idea" in the Journal/NBC poll even when the bill was passed in February of '09. Five months later, that number was down to 34. And a year after passage, the New York Times/CBS News poll could find only 6 percent to say the stimulus had actually created jobs.
There was ample warning it wouldn't work. Dominic Lawson in the London Times had it right even before the stimulus was law. "Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus."
And it turned out Obama's crudified Keynesianism was his Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C for the American and global economies. So far from discreetly retiring the stimulus and taking a new direction, Obama mystifyingly claimed "every economist" had concluded the stimulus "did its job," proclaimed this "Recovery Summer," called for $266 billion more stimulus spending, pushed the $26 billion "state aid" bill to supplement the stimulus, and lectured the G-20 nations on following his example and spending their way to prosperity with bottomless boondoggles.
The best thing at this point would be to cancel as much as is workable of the unspent provisions of the stimulus, and cut the losses. But Obama's Congress has refused to redirect even a fraction of the stimulus allocations to cover an unfunded unemployment benefits extension, so any change of course is going to take a very different government in Washington.
The stimulus was an act of faith in government, and in Barack Obama, and in the end its greatest effect has been on the national debt.
June 21, 2010
There Will Be Blood has no clothes
Dreadful. There Will Be Blood is just dreadful. It derives from a novel by Upton Sinclair, so in fairness it could only ever have been dreadful. There Will Be Blood presumes to be some searing indictment of oil and capitalism and America, but what it achieves is a reprise of Gangs of New York and Bill "The Butcher" Cutting; just another bombastic, braying, murderous madman, just another Daniel Day-Lewis psychopath picture.
Oil doesn't make "Daniel Plainview" a psychopath, much less America and its exchanges for goods and services. I defy anyone to watch that ordeal-by-cinema and tell me that Daniel Plainview would've been any more decent a human being had he not got into the oil business. Make him poor, make him a subsistence farmer, make him East Indian, and Daniel Plainview would be every bit as much a psychopath. It wasn't oil or capitalism or America that compelled Daniel Plainview to bludgeon the helpless pastor to death with a bowling pin. There Will Be Blood proves nothing more than that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a psychopath.
There Will Be Blood is not an enjoyable two-and-a-half hours; it's meant to be unsettling, and there's no fun in a movie engineered to upset. Heaven forfend that Hollywood in the 21st Century produce a "serious" film that doesn't leave the viewer despairing of living. "Seriousness" in Hollywood since circa 1968 is too much measured by un-enjoyable-ness. But if a film isn't enjoyable then it had better achieve something of import, and There Will Be Blood is pointless.
The picture is presented with the affectations of the "sweeping historical epic" and "indictment of American society" or "portrait of the evils of oil" or some such rot. And the elite swallowed it as ever: eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and best film of the 2000s per prominent publications. But then, this was 2007-8, when those same elites were head-over-heels for another fancy nullity, this one running for president of the United States. They were unanimous about him, too; uniformly worshipful and uniformly wrong. It was some reassurance to read at Box Office Mojo that notwithstanding the accolades and awards, coinciding with its run in theaters, There Will Be Blood at the time of this writing worked out to Number 1,429 in all-time domestic box office receipts. You might say The Dark Knight drank There Will Be Blood's milkshake.
There Will Be Blood is shot artfully, and I'd be the first to commend its sort-of cinematic style, which doubtless will be aped transparently until its succession by some more novel trend. And Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor, particularly if you find indulgent bombast becoming in an actor. Though there must be a million actors who could've played a more real Daniel Plainview in a more true portrait, but those actors weren't in the right place at the right time or didn't attend the right school or don't know the right people, and so they toil in oblivion. But presentation and style don't make a film great any more than they make a president worthy of carving into Mount Rushmore.
The critics who venerated it and the industry insiders who decorated it were responding to the "great film" trappings and elite prejudice-affirmation in the picture. The Wikipedia entry on There Will Be Blood stipulates that the industry didn't cotton to the script: "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." The studios had it right the first time. And there you have it: strip away the "great film" affectations, and those same industry insiders who later would elevate There Will Be Blood to the pinnacle of human achievement dismissed that same film as pointless.
And when a "jury" of the American Film Institute inserts the most turgid rote-leftist ideology into a single-paragraph assessment of a movie, then one gets the idea that the politics of the film figured more than a little in the support for it by the establishment. AFI pronounced There Will Be Blood "a true meditation on America." Only if you imagine a cartoonish psychopath to be a precis for America, which of course is precisely how America is caricatured by radical, hard-Left America-haters, of which the American film industry has more than a few.
More from the AFI "jury": "The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal." Again, the only thing that film "drills down into" is the "dark heart" of a cartoonish psychopath. I can only guess that it's not to venture out too far onto a limb to pronounce that anyone associated with the composition of those words is not hard done by capitalism, and that my income in this year would strike them as an impossibility or a joke. But in their alternate universe, the decadent elite are the noble crusaders against the "dark heart of capitalism", and some impoverished nobody alternately shivering and sweating in a cheap apartment at a malfunctioning laptop would be part of the "system" that needs tearing down, if those elites believe in all the "right" things and that nobody is an unreconstructed believer in the goodness and greatness of America.
The Daniel Day-Lewis character is a caricature -- unreal, unbelievable, and unhinged -- and There Will Be Blood is a cartoon. I have no doubt that leftist elites imagine Daniel Plainview and the corrupt pastor character to be representative of oil-men, businessmen, pastors, and Americans more generally, and the universally congratulatory reviews of those elites confirm as much. But the leftist elite deal in caricatures. They know nothing of business or Christianity or indeed of America; they have set themselves apart from the reality of the world and are interested only in stereotypes and caricatures to affirm them in their ignorance and prejudice and contempt.
What the leftist elite mean by "challenging our assumptions" is of course "challenging your assumptions". They're not iconoclasts; they mean to replace your icons with their own. The salt-of-the-earth, all-American folks who actually do things are the ones to be pilloried, scorned, and damned, while all the hatreds of the elite are stroked and sanctified, even as they preach reverently about "challenging our assumptions" and "afflicting the comfortable", etc, etc. ad nauseam. There's no-one more self-righteous than a godless leftist elite.
If they weren't blinded so by their prejudices from seeing the movie plainly, those elites might recognize it to be too cartoonish to be a serious or understanding portrait. What do they teach in Creative Writing 101, about the danger in single dimensions? Villains without redeeming characteristics and flawless heroes make for an unreal story and a tedious one. Some conventions are useful, and that's one of them; any story that relies on this kind of Soviet poster cartoonery won't hold up, and makes a dreadful, dreary picture even on the first showing.
It might have been the better way, to dispense with the weighty and solemn self-seriousness of the movie and come at it as a burlesque. A very slight tweaking could have made a joke of the picture. "I drink your milkshake" is a fine line, and might've made a good departure point for reworking the movie as a comic enterprise. That line and the Daniel Day-Lewis character were taken up by Saturday Night Live at the time, and formed the basis for an entire sketch. An English film team especially might've concluded that the script was too cartoonish to make a properly serious film, and developed and expanded the cartoonish elements to make a romp of the thing. But these dreary moviemakers presumed to make a "big", "serious", "important" film. And when a caricature isn't put up to make the audience laugh then it'll surely make them groan. So if There Will Be Blood is not a roaring spoof, the Daniel Day-Lewis character can only be a psychopath. If Daniel Plainview isn't someone's idea of a joke, then all that's left is psychopathy.
Try this on: give Daniel Plainview a dog; make it a little one, and sweet, and with a silly, cutesy name. Then have Plainview dote on the little dog with equal force to his abuse for human beings. And then tweak the script and direction very slightly, so that Daniel Day-Lewis comes off more mad than malevolent. Every menacing word and turn of the head go from disturbing to hysterical. When it may be said of a movie that a little tweaking might convert it from "sweeping epic" and "indictment of society" to comic romp, then what you've got hold of is not the weighty picture that There Will Be Blood presumes to be.
Oil doesn't make "Daniel Plainview" a psychopath, much less America and its exchanges for goods and services. I defy anyone to watch that ordeal-by-cinema and tell me that Daniel Plainview would've been any more decent a human being had he not got into the oil business. Make him poor, make him a subsistence farmer, make him East Indian, and Daniel Plainview would be every bit as much a psychopath. It wasn't oil or capitalism or America that compelled Daniel Plainview to bludgeon the helpless pastor to death with a bowling pin. There Will Be Blood proves nothing more than that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a psychopath.
There Will Be Blood is not an enjoyable two-and-a-half hours; it's meant to be unsettling, and there's no fun in a movie engineered to upset. Heaven forfend that Hollywood in the 21st Century produce a "serious" film that doesn't leave the viewer despairing of living. "Seriousness" in Hollywood since circa 1968 is too much measured by un-enjoyable-ness. But if a film isn't enjoyable then it had better achieve something of import, and There Will Be Blood is pointless.
The picture is presented with the affectations of the "sweeping historical epic" and "indictment of American society" or "portrait of the evils of oil" or some such rot. And the elite swallowed it as ever: eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and best film of the 2000s per prominent publications. But then, this was 2007-8, when those same elites were head-over-heels for another fancy nullity, this one running for president of the United States. They were unanimous about him, too; uniformly worshipful and uniformly wrong. It was some reassurance to read at Box Office Mojo that notwithstanding the accolades and awards, coinciding with its run in theaters, There Will Be Blood at the time of this writing worked out to Number 1,429 in all-time domestic box office receipts. You might say The Dark Knight drank There Will Be Blood's milkshake.
There Will Be Blood is shot artfully, and I'd be the first to commend its sort-of cinematic style, which doubtless will be aped transparently until its succession by some more novel trend. And Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor, particularly if you find indulgent bombast becoming in an actor. Though there must be a million actors who could've played a more real Daniel Plainview in a more true portrait, but those actors weren't in the right place at the right time or didn't attend the right school or don't know the right people, and so they toil in oblivion. But presentation and style don't make a film great any more than they make a president worthy of carving into Mount Rushmore.
The critics who venerated it and the industry insiders who decorated it were responding to the "great film" trappings and elite prejudice-affirmation in the picture. The Wikipedia entry on There Will Be Blood stipulates that the industry didn't cotton to the script: "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." The studios had it right the first time. And there you have it: strip away the "great film" affectations, and those same industry insiders who later would elevate There Will Be Blood to the pinnacle of human achievement dismissed that same film as pointless.
And when a "jury" of the American Film Institute inserts the most turgid rote-leftist ideology into a single-paragraph assessment of a movie, then one gets the idea that the politics of the film figured more than a little in the support for it by the establishment. AFI pronounced There Will Be Blood "a true meditation on America." Only if you imagine a cartoonish psychopath to be a precis for America, which of course is precisely how America is caricatured by radical, hard-Left America-haters, of which the American film industry has more than a few.
More from the AFI "jury": "The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal." Again, the only thing that film "drills down into" is the "dark heart" of a cartoonish psychopath. I can only guess that it's not to venture out too far onto a limb to pronounce that anyone associated with the composition of those words is not hard done by capitalism, and that my income in this year would strike them as an impossibility or a joke. But in their alternate universe, the decadent elite are the noble crusaders against the "dark heart of capitalism", and some impoverished nobody alternately shivering and sweating in a cheap apartment at a malfunctioning laptop would be part of the "system" that needs tearing down, if those elites believe in all the "right" things and that nobody is an unreconstructed believer in the goodness and greatness of America.
The Daniel Day-Lewis character is a caricature -- unreal, unbelievable, and unhinged -- and There Will Be Blood is a cartoon. I have no doubt that leftist elites imagine Daniel Plainview and the corrupt pastor character to be representative of oil-men, businessmen, pastors, and Americans more generally, and the universally congratulatory reviews of those elites confirm as much. But the leftist elite deal in caricatures. They know nothing of business or Christianity or indeed of America; they have set themselves apart from the reality of the world and are interested only in stereotypes and caricatures to affirm them in their ignorance and prejudice and contempt.
What the leftist elite mean by "challenging our assumptions" is of course "challenging your assumptions". They're not iconoclasts; they mean to replace your icons with their own. The salt-of-the-earth, all-American folks who actually do things are the ones to be pilloried, scorned, and damned, while all the hatreds of the elite are stroked and sanctified, even as they preach reverently about "challenging our assumptions" and "afflicting the comfortable", etc, etc. ad nauseam. There's no-one more self-righteous than a godless leftist elite.
If they weren't blinded so by their prejudices from seeing the movie plainly, those elites might recognize it to be too cartoonish to be a serious or understanding portrait. What do they teach in Creative Writing 101, about the danger in single dimensions? Villains without redeeming characteristics and flawless heroes make for an unreal story and a tedious one. Some conventions are useful, and that's one of them; any story that relies on this kind of Soviet poster cartoonery won't hold up, and makes a dreadful, dreary picture even on the first showing.
It might have been the better way, to dispense with the weighty and solemn self-seriousness of the movie and come at it as a burlesque. A very slight tweaking could have made a joke of the picture. "I drink your milkshake" is a fine line, and might've made a good departure point for reworking the movie as a comic enterprise. That line and the Daniel Day-Lewis character were taken up by Saturday Night Live at the time, and formed the basis for an entire sketch. An English film team especially might've concluded that the script was too cartoonish to make a properly serious film, and developed and expanded the cartoonish elements to make a romp of the thing. But these dreary moviemakers presumed to make a "big", "serious", "important" film. And when a caricature isn't put up to make the audience laugh then it'll surely make them groan. So if There Will Be Blood is not a roaring spoof, the Daniel Day-Lewis character can only be a psychopath. If Daniel Plainview isn't someone's idea of a joke, then all that's left is psychopathy.
Try this on: give Daniel Plainview a dog; make it a little one, and sweet, and with a silly, cutesy name. Then have Plainview dote on the little dog with equal force to his abuse for human beings. And then tweak the script and direction very slightly, so that Daniel Day-Lewis comes off more mad than malevolent. Every menacing word and turn of the head go from disturbing to hysterical. When it may be said of a movie that a little tweaking might convert it from "sweeping epic" and "indictment of society" to comic romp, then what you've got hold of is not the weighty picture that There Will Be Blood presumes to be.
June 1, 2010
The bias of The Chronicle-Herald, or, the job description of Canadian Press "Editor-in-Chief"
(UPDATE: Expanded since first posted. A chapter and part of the introduction from an over-long and long-overdue post which I'm far from finishing, in lieu of the rest of it. I'm afraid this can't be of much interest for a general readership, but it needs putting on the record.)
Obama and the 2009 NATO summit according to The Chronicle-Herald.
This was the solitary example offered by Scott White, the "Editor-in-Chief" of Canada's newswire monopoly, as proof that "virtually all" of the news in a little Chronicle-Herald Opinions page article of mine had "been reported", presumably by his Canadian Press or by the Associated Press in the United States, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian arrangement whereby an Upper Canadian outfit headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute a superior American product to its captive market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. They call it "Confederation".
Now, if you'll be good enough to bear with me, in my little op-ed I concerned myself with the coverage of Obama's first 100 days in The Chronicle-Herald specifically, which is why my very second sentence read, "If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency." In case that and the other references in the article weren't clear enough, I explained again in my reply to an accusatory e-mail from this Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly that "I read the paper every day. The paper I write for, The Chronicle-Herald. I know what it has reported on Obama and what it hasn't." And I was referring to points of scrutiny and skepticism, which is why the summation of my list in the article -- which I'd have thought was fairly obviously a list of points -- read, "Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?" Again, if my little article wasn't clear enough, I continued in my reply to this man's e-mail, "Anyone who depended for their coverage of the Obama administration on that newspaper would have been oblivious to those points and many more."
Whereupon the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly carried right on declaring that "virtually all of the stories" I cited "have been reported", period, and I was pronounced "wrong" -- only this time it was in print on The Herald's Opinions page. Now, I've had published negative feedback since a few months after I started writing little letters to the editor. Most of it angry, much of it nasty, and some of it personal. And not only letters, but quite lot of 800-word op-eds, too. I've always appreciated that it came with the territory, and after I finished reading The Herald that morning, I shrugged and had a fried bologna sandwich. But this demands revisiting. I know The Chronicle-Herald and have been meaning for some time to document some part of its near-daily abuses, in what its "News Director" and editors choose to print, and at least as much in what they determine their readers needn't be exposed to. Those conspicuous omissions -- the "sins of omission", as Matt Drudge has called them. And so I might as well start from what is for me the beginning. I've made a thorough search of the very useful Herald Archive for the period of Obama's first 100 days, and this is what I've turned up.
I made the points among the many in my little op-ed that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to rally the allies to muster their troops for Afghanistan, coming away from the Continent with commitments for more of the accustomed noncombat tokens as opposed to fighting forces, which are after all what is called for in a shooting war and which he and his party had claimed such support would have been forthcoming -- that some mythical European cavalry would have ridden over the hill to save the day -- if only the president of the United States had been less cowboy and more Continental, i.e., if only George W. Bush had been replaced by a president exactly like Barack Obama. Then I asked rhetorically why these points and many more like them had to be made on the Opinions page of The Chronicle-Herald. But according to the very Editor-in-Chief of the national newswire monopoly, all of this had apparently been made quite clear in the coverage which I had somehow overlooked at the time, and particularly in a Canadian Press dispatch from a correspondent who'd been sent specially to Strasbourg in France to cover the summit.
(UPDATE: Ah ha. I uncovered with some effort a Canadian Press dispatch from the conclusion of the said NATO summit, uncarried in The Chronicle-Herald per The Herald's Archive and picked up in papers few and far between per my latter-day testing for it elsewhere. That report to its credit -- and I do credit it, sincerely -- made and if I say so myself vindicated half of one of the twelve points listed in my op-ed, that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to wring combat troops out of "our European allies", although I didn't see where that fine reporting carried on to observe as I did that Obama and his lot had sworn for years that a president with a "D" appearing after his name would've had those Continentals fighting and bleeding for our Afghan cause. So there it is: the report was out there, somewhere, making half of one of my dozen points admirably, only not in the only newspaper I'd concerned myself with.)
And lo and behold, there was in fact a Canadian Press dispatch datelined Strasbourg, in the April 4, 2009 edition of The Chronicle-Herald, under the Herald headline of "NATO faces new challenge; Afghan law which curbs women's rights makes mission tough sell".
I read the CP report elsewhere, and in fact it did get around to the only practical business of the NATO summit -- in paragraphs 26 and 27. Paragraph 26: "Several European countries made a show of announcing more support for the Afghan mission on Friday, but the numbers were small." A fine bit of reporting, even if it did come at paragraph 26. Better late than never. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.
Paragraph 27: "Britain said it would add 'mid to high hundreds' to the 8,000 troops it has in Afghanistan. France promised more police trainers and civilian aid, and Belgium said it will add 65 soldiers and two more F-16 fighter jets." Another fine bit of reporting, even if it never did get around to that other point in my little op-ed, that Obama and his party had sworn Europe would put up and pitch in if only the president were less like Bush and more like Obama. But half is better than none. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.
Again, that entire passage of two paragraphs never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald. The Herald version was abridged to 564 words. Of course, the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly wouldn't have known that the dispatch of his man in Strasbourg hadn't made it in one piece to the readers of The Chronicle-Herald, and clearly he didn't heed the explanations in my article itself and in my reply to his e-mail, that I was referring to the coverage in The Chronicle-Herald specifically and that my concern was not so much stories covered as points made. But the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly pronounced against some nobody contributor to the Opinions page of a Nova Scotia newspaper, by name and in print, and brandishing his fancy title and invoking his office, despite that the one bit of evidence he offered for his case never appeared in the newspaper in question, denying the plain meaning of that nobody's words, and despite that to this day, that nobody has declined out of professional courtesy and Christian decency to name him or his reporters in print, where more people than a few might actually read it.
Of course, there was more coverage of the NATO summit in The Chronicle-Herald than that Canadian Press dispatch. The Herald ran an Associated Press report datelined Strasbourg on everything you ever wanted to know about Anders Fogh Rasmussen, headlined "Dane chosen as new NATO boss". (NATO "boss"? Anyone who knew anything about the office of NATO secretary-general would never accuse him of being "boss" to very much more than his secretarial staff.) And The Herald devoted an entire news item to an AP report on the protests against the NATO summit, headlined "Police quell protesters' first try".
Finally the Herald Archive turned up an Associated Press story, also datelined Strasbourg and published on the same day as the aforementioned Canadian Press report, under the optimistic Herald headline, "Obama pitching for help today". In all the news sections of the Chronicle-Herald, in all the reports making any mention on the 2009 NATO summit, a single sentence in a single story was the closest The Herald came to reporting Obama's failure:
"But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan." That's a good start at reporting, or at least it would have been. Beside the fact that this was not a report of what had been but a reporter's expectation of what would be, and was discountable as such -- Obama was still "pitching for help today", after all -- and beside the fact that the blame for Europe's resistance to throwing in with us was put on "the European public" -- acquitting Obama -- even that much was negated by the preceding paragraph, which was the most inexplicable Pollyanna-ism: "Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections." ("Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments"! Gimme an O! Gimme a B! ....)
And that was it. A single sentence in a single story, indicating only that Obama was "unlikely to get additional help", preceded by a preemptive acquittal of Obama for any shortcomings plus some cheerleading that Obama "seems likely to win fresh commitments" which gave precisely the contrary impression, under a Herald headline of "Obama pitching for help today" which gave no hint of Obama's imminent failure, and without recalling the claims of Obama and his party that it'd be different if only a man like Obama were in the White House. The question of combat troops for Afghanistan was the one and only story of any practical significance in the 2009 NATO summit. And this was the first NATO summit since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Afghan mission at which the president of the United States was not George W. Bush. "NATO tells Obama 'no' on Afghanistan; New president, no 'change'" ought to have been the headline, the lead paragraph, and the bulk of the story.
Nowhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald was there any final report that NATO had told Obama "no", and nowhere in The Herald's news sections was the point in my op-ed made, that Obama and his party had sworn for at least half a decade that "our European allies" would have been wading into the melee with us, to spill their blood and treasure by our side, and fight and die for our cause in Afghanistan, but for that "cowboy" Bush and his "unilateralism" which was "alienating our allies" and all the rest. Now the Continentals had their very dream candidate for president of the United States, and still they declined to fight. The 2009 NATO summit was the final repudiation of six years of theorizing and politicking by Obama himself, his party, and indeed also the international press. Is is remarkable that all that didn't warrant a mention somewhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald, and was left to me over on the Opinions page.
But it was worse than that. The Herald carried an Associated Press report at about this time, unrelated to the NATO summit, which mentioned a new allied commitment for Afghanistan and positively went out of its way to credit Obama personally for it: "Australia plans to add 450 soldiers, increasing its force to about 1,550, Prime Minister Rudd announced Wednesday, saying Obama persuaded him to increase the deployment during discussions last week." Now, Australia is of course not a NATO member nation, it's certainly not one of "our European allies", and in fact it and New Zealand were the lone Western nations to stand with America in Vietnam, so this is something apart from the NATO summit story, but here was the AP in The Chronicle-Herald crediting Obama personally with an allied commitment of 450 troops, while there was no corresponding report in that same paper of Obama's corresponding failure of persuasion with those European allies who were the foot-draggers, and the ones in need of persuasion according to Obama and his crowd themselves.
(That AP report included the only reference I could turn up in the Herald Archive over Obama's first 100 days to Britain's disappearing-ink commitment of 700 extra troops, promised at the NATO summit, to be withdrawn again after a few months. But Britain is America's greatest ally and foul-weather friend, whose support was so taken for granted that it was discounted when the president was named Bush, so that's also in a different category from what is meant by "our European allies".)
Indeed, the AP dispatch reported "the United States and other NATO countries now have some 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan -- a record level." Anyone would think from reading that AP report that the Obama ally-rallying was going swimmingly. But how much of the increase to 70,000 came from those "other NATO countries"? So far from reporting Obama's failure, that AP dispatch in The Herald actually left just the contrary impression.
And it was worse than even that. Not one month before the NATO summit, The Chronicle-Herald reproduced an Associated Press report, albeit left to The Herald's Metropolitan edition, which referred to "President Barack Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency," and added to that bit of fantasy this bit of editorializing: "Biden said the Obama administration will be keen to engage NATO allies in global security discussions, marking a departure from the last eight years when Washington often was on a go-it-alone course that upset its European allies."
So The Chronicle-Herald was quite happy to report that it was "Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency", but when, a matter of weeks later, that was shown to be less "policy" than "fantasy" -- or if it was a "policy" then it was shown to be a failed one -- The Herald declined to make the point. And The Herald was happy to pass off as matter-of-fact newswire copy that it was the Bush administration's alleged "go-it-alone course that upset its European allies", but when, just weeks later, it was finally proved that those "European allies" hadn't been "upset" so much as unwilling and unable, and it turned out that supposed presidential "go-it-alone-ism" hadn't entered into it, The Herald again declined to make the point.
Obama and the 2009 NATO summit according to The Chronicle-Herald.
This was the solitary example offered by Scott White, the "Editor-in-Chief" of Canada's newswire monopoly, as proof that "virtually all" of the news in a little Chronicle-Herald Opinions page article of mine had "been reported", presumably by his Canadian Press or by the Associated Press in the United States, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian arrangement whereby an Upper Canadian outfit headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute a superior American product to its captive market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. They call it "Confederation".
Now, if you'll be good enough to bear with me, in my little op-ed I concerned myself with the coverage of Obama's first 100 days in The Chronicle-Herald specifically, which is why my very second sentence read, "If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency." In case that and the other references in the article weren't clear enough, I explained again in my reply to an accusatory e-mail from this Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly that "I read the paper every day. The paper I write for, The Chronicle-Herald. I know what it has reported on Obama and what it hasn't." And I was referring to points of scrutiny and skepticism, which is why the summation of my list in the article -- which I'd have thought was fairly obviously a list of points -- read, "Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?" Again, if my little article wasn't clear enough, I continued in my reply to this man's e-mail, "Anyone who depended for their coverage of the Obama administration on that newspaper would have been oblivious to those points and many more."
Whereupon the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly carried right on declaring that "virtually all of the stories" I cited "have been reported", period, and I was pronounced "wrong" -- only this time it was in print on The Herald's Opinions page. Now, I've had published negative feedback since a few months after I started writing little letters to the editor. Most of it angry, much of it nasty, and some of it personal. And not only letters, but quite lot of 800-word op-eds, too. I've always appreciated that it came with the territory, and after I finished reading The Herald that morning, I shrugged and had a fried bologna sandwich. But this demands revisiting. I know The Chronicle-Herald and have been meaning for some time to document some part of its near-daily abuses, in what its "News Director" and editors choose to print, and at least as much in what they determine their readers needn't be exposed to. Those conspicuous omissions -- the "sins of omission", as Matt Drudge has called them. And so I might as well start from what is for me the beginning. I've made a thorough search of the very useful Herald Archive for the period of Obama's first 100 days, and this is what I've turned up.
I made the points among the many in my little op-ed that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to rally the allies to muster their troops for Afghanistan, coming away from the Continent with commitments for more of the accustomed noncombat tokens as opposed to fighting forces, which are after all what is called for in a shooting war and which he and his party had claimed such support would have been forthcoming -- that some mythical European cavalry would have ridden over the hill to save the day -- if only the president of the United States had been less cowboy and more Continental, i.e., if only George W. Bush had been replaced by a president exactly like Barack Obama. Then I asked rhetorically why these points and many more like them had to be made on the Opinions page of The Chronicle-Herald. But according to the very Editor-in-Chief of the national newswire monopoly, all of this had apparently been made quite clear in the coverage which I had somehow overlooked at the time, and particularly in a Canadian Press dispatch from a correspondent who'd been sent specially to Strasbourg in France to cover the summit.
(UPDATE: Ah ha. I uncovered with some effort a Canadian Press dispatch from the conclusion of the said NATO summit, uncarried in The Chronicle-Herald per The Herald's Archive and picked up in papers few and far between per my latter-day testing for it elsewhere. That report to its credit -- and I do credit it, sincerely -- made and if I say so myself vindicated half of one of the twelve points listed in my op-ed, that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to wring combat troops out of "our European allies", although I didn't see where that fine reporting carried on to observe as I did that Obama and his lot had sworn for years that a president with a "D" appearing after his name would've had those Continentals fighting and bleeding for our Afghan cause. So there it is: the report was out there, somewhere, making half of one of my dozen points admirably, only not in the only newspaper I'd concerned myself with.)
And lo and behold, there was in fact a Canadian Press dispatch datelined Strasbourg, in the April 4, 2009 edition of The Chronicle-Herald, under the Herald headline of "NATO faces new challenge; Afghan law which curbs women's rights makes mission tough sell".
I read the CP report elsewhere, and in fact it did get around to the only practical business of the NATO summit -- in paragraphs 26 and 27. Paragraph 26: "Several European countries made a show of announcing more support for the Afghan mission on Friday, but the numbers were small." A fine bit of reporting, even if it did come at paragraph 26. Better late than never. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.
Paragraph 27: "Britain said it would add 'mid to high hundreds' to the 8,000 troops it has in Afghanistan. France promised more police trainers and civilian aid, and Belgium said it will add 65 soldiers and two more F-16 fighter jets." Another fine bit of reporting, even if it never did get around to that other point in my little op-ed, that Obama and his party had sworn Europe would put up and pitch in if only the president were less like Bush and more like Obama. But half is better than none. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.
Again, that entire passage of two paragraphs never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald. The Herald version was abridged to 564 words. Of course, the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly wouldn't have known that the dispatch of his man in Strasbourg hadn't made it in one piece to the readers of The Chronicle-Herald, and clearly he didn't heed the explanations in my article itself and in my reply to his e-mail, that I was referring to the coverage in The Chronicle-Herald specifically and that my concern was not so much stories covered as points made. But the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly pronounced against some nobody contributor to the Opinions page of a Nova Scotia newspaper, by name and in print, and brandishing his fancy title and invoking his office, despite that the one bit of evidence he offered for his case never appeared in the newspaper in question, denying the plain meaning of that nobody's words, and despite that to this day, that nobody has declined out of professional courtesy and Christian decency to name him or his reporters in print, where more people than a few might actually read it.
Of course, there was more coverage of the NATO summit in The Chronicle-Herald than that Canadian Press dispatch. The Herald ran an Associated Press report datelined Strasbourg on everything you ever wanted to know about Anders Fogh Rasmussen, headlined "Dane chosen as new NATO boss". (NATO "boss"? Anyone who knew anything about the office of NATO secretary-general would never accuse him of being "boss" to very much more than his secretarial staff.) And The Herald devoted an entire news item to an AP report on the protests against the NATO summit, headlined "Police quell protesters' first try".
Finally the Herald Archive turned up an Associated Press story, also datelined Strasbourg and published on the same day as the aforementioned Canadian Press report, under the optimistic Herald headline, "Obama pitching for help today". In all the news sections of the Chronicle-Herald, in all the reports making any mention on the 2009 NATO summit, a single sentence in a single story was the closest The Herald came to reporting Obama's failure:
"But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan." That's a good start at reporting, or at least it would have been. Beside the fact that this was not a report of what had been but a reporter's expectation of what would be, and was discountable as such -- Obama was still "pitching for help today", after all -- and beside the fact that the blame for Europe's resistance to throwing in with us was put on "the European public" -- acquitting Obama -- even that much was negated by the preceding paragraph, which was the most inexplicable Pollyanna-ism: "Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections." ("Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments"! Gimme an O! Gimme a B! ....)
And that was it. A single sentence in a single story, indicating only that Obama was "unlikely to get additional help", preceded by a preemptive acquittal of Obama for any shortcomings plus some cheerleading that Obama "seems likely to win fresh commitments" which gave precisely the contrary impression, under a Herald headline of "Obama pitching for help today" which gave no hint of Obama's imminent failure, and without recalling the claims of Obama and his party that it'd be different if only a man like Obama were in the White House. The question of combat troops for Afghanistan was the one and only story of any practical significance in the 2009 NATO summit. And this was the first NATO summit since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Afghan mission at which the president of the United States was not George W. Bush. "NATO tells Obama 'no' on Afghanistan; New president, no 'change'" ought to have been the headline, the lead paragraph, and the bulk of the story.
Nowhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald was there any final report that NATO had told Obama "no", and nowhere in The Herald's news sections was the point in my op-ed made, that Obama and his party had sworn for at least half a decade that "our European allies" would have been wading into the melee with us, to spill their blood and treasure by our side, and fight and die for our cause in Afghanistan, but for that "cowboy" Bush and his "unilateralism" which was "alienating our allies" and all the rest. Now the Continentals had their very dream candidate for president of the United States, and still they declined to fight. The 2009 NATO summit was the final repudiation of six years of theorizing and politicking by Obama himself, his party, and indeed also the international press. Is is remarkable that all that didn't warrant a mention somewhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald, and was left to me over on the Opinions page.
But it was worse than that. The Herald carried an Associated Press report at about this time, unrelated to the NATO summit, which mentioned a new allied commitment for Afghanistan and positively went out of its way to credit Obama personally for it: "Australia plans to add 450 soldiers, increasing its force to about 1,550, Prime Minister Rudd announced Wednesday, saying Obama persuaded him to increase the deployment during discussions last week." Now, Australia is of course not a NATO member nation, it's certainly not one of "our European allies", and in fact it and New Zealand were the lone Western nations to stand with America in Vietnam, so this is something apart from the NATO summit story, but here was the AP in The Chronicle-Herald crediting Obama personally with an allied commitment of 450 troops, while there was no corresponding report in that same paper of Obama's corresponding failure of persuasion with those European allies who were the foot-draggers, and the ones in need of persuasion according to Obama and his crowd themselves.
(That AP report included the only reference I could turn up in the Herald Archive over Obama's first 100 days to Britain's disappearing-ink commitment of 700 extra troops, promised at the NATO summit, to be withdrawn again after a few months. But Britain is America's greatest ally and foul-weather friend, whose support was so taken for granted that it was discounted when the president was named Bush, so that's also in a different category from what is meant by "our European allies".)
Indeed, the AP dispatch reported "the United States and other NATO countries now have some 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan -- a record level." Anyone would think from reading that AP report that the Obama ally-rallying was going swimmingly. But how much of the increase to 70,000 came from those "other NATO countries"? So far from reporting Obama's failure, that AP dispatch in The Herald actually left just the contrary impression.
And it was worse than even that. Not one month before the NATO summit, The Chronicle-Herald reproduced an Associated Press report, albeit left to The Herald's Metropolitan edition, which referred to "President Barack Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency," and added to that bit of fantasy this bit of editorializing: "Biden said the Obama administration will be keen to engage NATO allies in global security discussions, marking a departure from the last eight years when Washington often was on a go-it-alone course that upset its European allies."
So The Chronicle-Herald was quite happy to report that it was "Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency", but when, a matter of weeks later, that was shown to be less "policy" than "fantasy" -- or if it was a "policy" then it was shown to be a failed one -- The Herald declined to make the point. And The Herald was happy to pass off as matter-of-fact newswire copy that it was the Bush administration's alleged "go-it-alone course that upset its European allies", but when, just weeks later, it was finally proved that those "European allies" hadn't been "upset" so much as unwilling and unable, and it turned out that supposed presidential "go-it-alone-ism" hadn't entered into it, The Herald again declined to make the point.
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