Vladimir Putin is a throwback. For Putin, it's as though the 20th Century never happened. Which stands to reason, because for Russia generally the 20th Century was something that happened someplace else.
The 20th Century was very largely a continuation of the later 19th Century 'til sometime around the end of the First World War in 1918, and Russia was knocked out of the war in '17 by the Bolshevik Revolution and descended first into chaos and before long into that Hadean nightmare called communism, 'til the 20th Century was near enough to over. And because communism can't survive the exposure of its people to the alternative, the Soviet Union had of necessity to be a hermetically-sealed hermit-state which would shoot and kill its citizens summarily rather than let them walk across its borders and out of its system. So Russia skipped from the Edwardian world of 1917 to the 1990s, and passed the intervening decades in a bad dream.
The idea that annexing territories is the worst kind of gauche in international relations is novel, coming as it does in the 20th Century among the earlier phases of Western Civilization's project of dismantling itself and reducing the towering, gleaming skyscraper to a useless, miserable little heap of broken and twisted bits. Putin is a quite conventional nationalist and imperialist like is found from the dawn of time 'til sometime in the 20th Century, as alien to the West in 2014 as it is commonplace to every civilization 'til living memory. As though Putin had skipped the 20th Century.
Plus which, it has to be said, Russia is nothing if not self-consciously un-Western, and repudiating the vogues of our Western bien-pensants is a point of pride over there.
So Vladimir Putin is unbound by our decadent 21st Century Western notions of "international law" or even "morality", which in practice amounts to voluntarily binding one or both arms behind our backs in war against barbarians who want us all dead and burning in Hell. Putin's only constraints in the end are practical ones. Putin may be expected to push, in other words, 'til someone pushes back and draws the line that constitutes the geopolitical limits of his Russia. Putin may prefer to reconquer the old Soviet or Czarist empires by maneuver, but then, even Hitler won his early conquests of the Rhineland and Austria and Czechoslovakia and Klaipeda without a shot fired, and it can only be assumed that if push comes to shove, Putin will shove.
Barack Obama's Russia policy from the very outset has been capitulation to Russian demands and psychoses, as gestures of comity to bring about some mythical global harmony or anyway as an uncomprehending rote-Left reaction against George W. Bush. Obama's defense and foreign policies generally are to retreat and contract, which only invites trouble and raises the price of answering it, because threats and half-measures won't suffice without something bigger and badder behind them. If one may be permitted to mix metaphors, a serious president with a demonstrable capacity for pulling triggers and upsetting applecarts may need only rattle a sabre to get the attention of trouble-makers or would-be trouble-makers, but an Obama can wag his finger day and night without effect, because those trouble-makers have the measure of him and understand him to have not the constitution or even the interest to give force to his finger-wagging.
And the West in 2014 isn't much in the mood for anything costly or causing of discomfort, any more than we were in the mood in the 1930s to confront Hitler on his assorted acquisitions, least of all to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine or Georgia or whatever other old Soviet satellites and Czarist colonies Putin has in mind to reconquer.
So Vladimir Putin is liable to have things his way, and the Lord only knows how far he'll go along that way, unless and until someone pushes back and wins the shoving-match and a very different president of the United States sits in the Oval Office.
March 18, 2014
January 24, 2014
Monty Python apostasy
John Cleese had it more or less right when he walked away from Flying Circus after the first three seasons, or "series" as they call seasons over there. Python was of a particular time and place, it could only exhaust itself and achieve a point of diminishing returns before long, and anyway less is more.
Python and the Holy Grail is cheap and cheerful; it's episodic to the point of being practically glorified sketch comedy and doesn't succumb to service of a plot; it bookends the TV series, so that the Flying Circus spirit hasn't yet gone out of the Pythons; it's All-England, England being the font of comedy in the world and the sort-of infrastructure for a very great deal of Python; and most of all it's comedy for comedy's sake -- comedy first, second, and last and none of your dreadful politics or pretensions, thanks very much.
The two later Python features Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life depart from that Holy Grail formula and are disappointments for it. Life of Brian commits the comedy sin of taking itself seriously. It's politics, it's insufficiently episodic to liberate itself from its point-making plot, its setting and subject could scarcely be any less comic, and it comes too late, after the spirit had passed.
Meaning of Life is at least a compilation of sketches, but it too much presumes to be a proper movie, a big-deal feature film, it has a weightiness if not an air of menace about it which acts as a wet blanket on the fun of the TV series and Grail movie, and by the time of Meaning of Life there wasn't material or spirit enough left in the Pythons to fill a feature film. The Pythons were too old and too changed for a reprise of Flying Circus, and anyway the time for Flying Circus had come and gone.
Which is not to say there's no life after Python, only that the Pythons stayed too long at the fair. Of all the post-Python projects John Cleese's Fawlty Towers is far and away the greatest and incidentally also the proof positive for the Cleese Doctrine of less is more, that series lasting all of two seasons and 12 episodes all told. Cleese was good in Fish Called Wanda and he near enough to hijacked Cheers in his recurring role there, so outshining the rest of the show as to have diminished it in his wake. Cleese doesn't miss too many opportunities to trade on his brand, whether in Schweppes TV ads or Harry Potter cameos, etc., but he's an institution and a sort-of ambassador for Britain, and anyway he was the one Python who got it right, that the thing to do was walk away and quit while Python was ahead.
I dearly love Michael Palin's movies and travelogues post-Python, although those don't presume to be comedy proper; they're more humor than comedy per se. Graham Chapman was a hard-case drunk and died too young, of cancer. Eric Idle has inclined more than I can abide to showtunes. Terry Jones is a politician with jokes. And Terry Gilliam who really never was so much a comic as a visual artist has made of himself a leading exponent of fantastical filmmaking.
And another thing: the Pythons didn't invent comedy or TV comedy or TV sketch comedy or even British TV sketch comedy, and would never pretend to that claim themselves. Flying Circus was derivative of Spike Milligan's Q, and Milligan's Goon Show before that, and the Pythons generally were products of England and of Austerity Britain and of the good schools and of the English way of humor, which goes back further than I'm able to put a finger on.
All that said, I suppose I'm relieved in a way that the Pythons did return to the trough one time too many, or several times too many, because otherwise we might be compelled to venerate them as demigods and despair of attempting humor ourselves.
December 28, 2013
At the risk of rendering this a baseball blog...
I'm compelled to hold forth on the vote of the Major League Baseball Rules Committee to outlaw the upper-body collision at homeplate: Beyond the question of the emasculation even of baseball, there is the question of how the homeplate collision can be outlawed as a practical matter, unless as A. J. Pierzynski joked, a fifth base is tacked on someplace behind homeplate.
A play at the plate will be very much more often than not a tag-play, that's to say, the baserunner will need tagging out as opposed to forcing out, which is in turn to say, it won't suffice for the catcher to get a foot on the plate while in possession of the ball, and in order to record the out the catcher must make physical contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate.
That in itself wouldn't make for collisions at homeplate; the collisions come into it because homeplate is of course the fourth and final base, and a baserunner is thus free to overrun it. Safe or out, once he's crossed homeplate, a baserunner is through running the bases. And because sliding means slowing, not only in the act itself but in the preparation for it, a baserunner will often find that unless sliding will get him around or under the catcher somehow, he'll be further ahead to run through homeplate: he'll get there faster by running through it than by sliding to it.
It is the natural right of a catcher to block his plate, following from the necessity of his making contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate, and in that same way, it is the natural right of a baserunner to run his course through homeplate, and may the best man win. Those are among the more fundamental of the natural rights and laws of the Great American Game and most Victorian of sports.
And all those fixed and moving parts work together to produce the collision at the plate. It's not as though Abner Doubleday sat down one fine day in Cooperstown, New York* and said, what this game needs is brutalizing, bone-crunching, bodily collision. Collisions are what come out the other end of the natural rights and laws, and formal rules, and physics, and plain sense, in baseball.
Now it may be stipulated that all of this is right and true, but at the same time, the homeplate collision is an injurious institution and consequently MLB is left with no alternative but to "do something". But I fail to see how a collision at the plate should be any more injurious today when it's outlawed than in the 20th and presumably also 19th Centuries when it was lawful and a commonplace. My idea is that what has changed is the society, with this decadent nature-is-what-we-say-it-is 21st-Century erosion and subversion of the manful virtues, and my suspicion is that what has moved MLB to action is the 21st-Century peril of the disabled list, if not also the monetary valuations of the catchers and runners.
A collision at homeplate cannot rationally be more injurious in the 21st Century than it had been in the centuries prior, but in this 21st Century an oopsie can knock a multi-million-dollar-salaried asset out of the lineup and make a treatment-and-rehabilitation case of him, and a season can easily be decided by the names appearing on the disabled list as opposed to the starting lineup. And fair enough: I'd never say that money on that order of magnitude oughtn't be a consideration, that a ballclub oughtn't have a right to expect some playing time out of a man they're paying maybe multiple millions of dollars in a single season, and the disabled list has gotten to be a scourge of big-league baseball to where it's a cliche for a contending ballclub to pray "so long as we stay healthy" as a sort of "Lord willing" appended to their more hopeful pronouncements. But it does strike me that that's what's moved MLB to action just now in rewriting a rule which I have to assume reaches back more or less to the dawn of the game as we know it.
In another century I played catcher, albeit as the rankest amateur, so I like to think I know whereof I speak on this score, not that I ever let my ignorance stand in the way of my opinion. I respect too much some of the men who've championed the MLB ruling to call it pussified, but I will say I'm against it and what's more that I regard it as an artificial imposition counter to the natural law of baseball, and time will tell if it can be enforced without aggrieving and outraging the catchers and runners, their ballclubs, and their fans. A baseball type can have his day spoiled by an umpire's calling a ball for a strike, even, and a play at the plate is as big a call as they come, ending as it does in an out or a run -- one or the other and nothing else.
* - Yes, yes, I know: that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, NY is known now to be a ludicrousness
A play at the plate will be very much more often than not a tag-play, that's to say, the baserunner will need tagging out as opposed to forcing out, which is in turn to say, it won't suffice for the catcher to get a foot on the plate while in possession of the ball, and in order to record the out the catcher must make physical contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate.
That in itself wouldn't make for collisions at homeplate; the collisions come into it because homeplate is of course the fourth and final base, and a baserunner is thus free to overrun it. Safe or out, once he's crossed homeplate, a baserunner is through running the bases. And because sliding means slowing, not only in the act itself but in the preparation for it, a baserunner will often find that unless sliding will get him around or under the catcher somehow, he'll be further ahead to run through homeplate: he'll get there faster by running through it than by sliding to it.
It is the natural right of a catcher to block his plate, following from the necessity of his making contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate, and in that same way, it is the natural right of a baserunner to run his course through homeplate, and may the best man win. Those are among the more fundamental of the natural rights and laws of the Great American Game and most Victorian of sports.
And all those fixed and moving parts work together to produce the collision at the plate. It's not as though Abner Doubleday sat down one fine day in Cooperstown, New York* and said, what this game needs is brutalizing, bone-crunching, bodily collision. Collisions are what come out the other end of the natural rights and laws, and formal rules, and physics, and plain sense, in baseball.
Now it may be stipulated that all of this is right and true, but at the same time, the homeplate collision is an injurious institution and consequently MLB is left with no alternative but to "do something". But I fail to see how a collision at the plate should be any more injurious today when it's outlawed than in the 20th and presumably also 19th Centuries when it was lawful and a commonplace. My idea is that what has changed is the society, with this decadent nature-is-what-we-say-it-is 21st-Century erosion and subversion of the manful virtues, and my suspicion is that what has moved MLB to action is the 21st-Century peril of the disabled list, if not also the monetary valuations of the catchers and runners.
A collision at homeplate cannot rationally be more injurious in the 21st Century than it had been in the centuries prior, but in this 21st Century an oopsie can knock a multi-million-dollar-salaried asset out of the lineup and make a treatment-and-rehabilitation case of him, and a season can easily be decided by the names appearing on the disabled list as opposed to the starting lineup. And fair enough: I'd never say that money on that order of magnitude oughtn't be a consideration, that a ballclub oughtn't have a right to expect some playing time out of a man they're paying maybe multiple millions of dollars in a single season, and the disabled list has gotten to be a scourge of big-league baseball to where it's a cliche for a contending ballclub to pray "so long as we stay healthy" as a sort of "Lord willing" appended to their more hopeful pronouncements. But it does strike me that that's what's moved MLB to action just now in rewriting a rule which I have to assume reaches back more or less to the dawn of the game as we know it.
In another century I played catcher, albeit as the rankest amateur, so I like to think I know whereof I speak on this score, not that I ever let my ignorance stand in the way of my opinion. I respect too much some of the men who've championed the MLB ruling to call it pussified, but I will say I'm against it and what's more that I regard it as an artificial imposition counter to the natural law of baseball, and time will tell if it can be enforced without aggrieving and outraging the catchers and runners, their ballclubs, and their fans. A baseball type can have his day spoiled by an umpire's calling a ball for a strike, even, and a play at the plate is as big a call as they come, ending as it does in an out or a run -- one or the other and nothing else.
* - Yes, yes, I know: that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, NY is known now to be a ludicrousness
August 6, 2013
The trouble with the World Series
When somewhere along the way the All-Star Game went from life-and-death struggle to exhibition and spectacle, with no great import attached to the winning or losing of it, Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to "make it count", investing it with the determination of home-field advantage for the World Series.
We haven't got so het up about the All-Star Game in these past years and decades because we don't have any great investment in one league over another. I'm an American League man of longstanding, but I can't think of a good reason for it, and I couldn't think of a good reason to be very upset that the National League had won three All-Star Games in a string before 2013.
The two leagues aren't Republican and Democrat, or even GM and Ford; it's the luck of the draw whether your ballclub happens to belong to one or another, and it wouldn't make any rational sense at this point to attach to one over the other with any great emotion. It's something like being born with a surname starting in "S" as opposed to, say, "A": those of us blessed with surnames starting in "S" might think we've got the finest last initial going, but we'd be worse than silly to invest any great emotion in the S names, or to set ourselves against the A ones, because we've got to know on some level that A or S, it's the luck of the draw.
And there's a practical cause for divesting the All-Star Game of world-ending passion. Big-league ballplayers are something like Winston Churchill's description of modern warships: egg-shells with hammers. One rolled ankle from turning second base in a hurry, and a ballplayer can wind up on the disabled list, watching from the bench and worse than useless to his team. Injuries anymore have gotten to where "stay healthy" has become a sort of "Lord willing" of winning ballclubs, as in, "We ought to make it to the post-season, if we stay healthy."
If an injury is a tragedy to a ballclub, then an injury in a game that counts for nothing is a catastrophe. And if the fans and players and management weren't bothered about injuries from an All-Star Game before 1970, Pete Rose and Ray Fosse had a run-in at homeplate for the ages in the All-Star Game of that year which separated Fosse's shoulder and had some part in truncating his career.
But they say they had to "do something" to "make it count", so here we are, with the outcome of the All-Star Game determining home-field advantage for the World Series.
Maybe in some other sports a home-field advantage isn't so concrete, but in baseball the home field can and not infrequently does make the difference. Home-field advantage when it comes to the World Series means the first two games and the last two are played in the home ballpark, assuming the series goes to seven games. And since 2003 when home-field advantage for the World Series was first decided by the All-Star Game, the league that's won the All-Star Game has carried the World Series as well, seven times out of ten. Apart from the more psychological element of many tens of thousands of human beings supporting as opposed to spitting on the men on the field, there are at least two very practical advantages to playing at home in the game of baseball.
No two big-league ballparks are alike, for a start: the contours and heights of the walls, the dimensions from homeplate to the outfield walls and from the baselines to the sideline walls, the liveliness or otherwise of a ground ball on the grass and dirt, the way the wind carries along or knocks down a fly ball, the very atmosphere of the place -- vary from one major-league park to another, and sometimes appreciably. An outfielder for instance will be familiar with the way a ball caroms off the outfield walls in his home ballpark, and where those walls are in the first place, and familiar with the prevailing winds and native atmosphere in that park and their effects on an airborne baseball. And so on.
And home-field advantage means hitting last. Hitting in the bottom of the inning makes very little odds except when the game happens to be tied or close in the bottom of the 9th and into extra innings, when a go-ahead run for the home team ends the ballgame and the visiting team has spent its chance to answer that run. That may be said to be psychological like the support or otherwise from the stands: the visiting team gets no fewer at-bats for hitting first, after all, so hitting last is no advantage except in that psychological sense of knowing where you stand, that a run here wins the ballgame, say, or that you've got to register one run before the other fellow registers three outs just to stay alive, etc. But it's a structural psychological advantage, and very real, for the home team and against the visitor. And because the World Series is played between the two best teams in the game, by definition or anyway on paper, you're apt to get some evenly-matched, close-run ballgames between them, and tie-games in the bottom of the 9th and later.
So this is not scrapping over scraps. Baseball is a game of fractions of an inch and of a second, and whole ballgames and even World Series can turn on infinitesimally small things. And home-field advantage for the World Series is no small thing.
The one fair way of deciding home-field advantage would be to compare regular-season records, so that the superior ballclub of the two left standing in late October was rewarded for having been the better team over the course of the season. A coin-toss would be capricious, and the present arrangement of determining home-field advantage by All-Star Game outcome puts the decision into the hands of men who are uninvolved in the World Series, inasmuch as the All Stars are drawn from all 30 major-league clubs.
This scheme for "making it count" that Major League Baseball and the Players Association hit on in '03 is probably the best that could be devised for investing the All-Star Game with anything approaching the import it had in the time of Ted Williams. But I fail to see why the All-Star Game must be so life-and-death, and why it's not perfectly reasonable to regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, as opposed to desperately, earth-shakingly serious.
And anyhow, Major League Baseball ought to make it its policy to let the people decide. If the fans do invest the All-Star Game with some world-ending passion then more power to them, and if they regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, well, so be it. Who can blame them if they do conceive of the All-Star Game more as a spectacle, and what on earth is wrong with it? It ought to be good enough for the All-Star Game to be what the name implies, the one moment in a season when all the very best are assembled on one field and two dream teams. Let the people decide if it counts for anything, and don't let it skew the World Series.
We haven't got so het up about the All-Star Game in these past years and decades because we don't have any great investment in one league over another. I'm an American League man of longstanding, but I can't think of a good reason for it, and I couldn't think of a good reason to be very upset that the National League had won three All-Star Games in a string before 2013.
The two leagues aren't Republican and Democrat, or even GM and Ford; it's the luck of the draw whether your ballclub happens to belong to one or another, and it wouldn't make any rational sense at this point to attach to one over the other with any great emotion. It's something like being born with a surname starting in "S" as opposed to, say, "A": those of us blessed with surnames starting in "S" might think we've got the finest last initial going, but we'd be worse than silly to invest any great emotion in the S names, or to set ourselves against the A ones, because we've got to know on some level that A or S, it's the luck of the draw.
And there's a practical cause for divesting the All-Star Game of world-ending passion. Big-league ballplayers are something like Winston Churchill's description of modern warships: egg-shells with hammers. One rolled ankle from turning second base in a hurry, and a ballplayer can wind up on the disabled list, watching from the bench and worse than useless to his team. Injuries anymore have gotten to where "stay healthy" has become a sort of "Lord willing" of winning ballclubs, as in, "We ought to make it to the post-season, if we stay healthy."
If an injury is a tragedy to a ballclub, then an injury in a game that counts for nothing is a catastrophe. And if the fans and players and management weren't bothered about injuries from an All-Star Game before 1970, Pete Rose and Ray Fosse had a run-in at homeplate for the ages in the All-Star Game of that year which separated Fosse's shoulder and had some part in truncating his career.
But they say they had to "do something" to "make it count", so here we are, with the outcome of the All-Star Game determining home-field advantage for the World Series.
Maybe in some other sports a home-field advantage isn't so concrete, but in baseball the home field can and not infrequently does make the difference. Home-field advantage when it comes to the World Series means the first two games and the last two are played in the home ballpark, assuming the series goes to seven games. And since 2003 when home-field advantage for the World Series was first decided by the All-Star Game, the league that's won the All-Star Game has carried the World Series as well, seven times out of ten. Apart from the more psychological element of many tens of thousands of human beings supporting as opposed to spitting on the men on the field, there are at least two very practical advantages to playing at home in the game of baseball.
No two big-league ballparks are alike, for a start: the contours and heights of the walls, the dimensions from homeplate to the outfield walls and from the baselines to the sideline walls, the liveliness or otherwise of a ground ball on the grass and dirt, the way the wind carries along or knocks down a fly ball, the very atmosphere of the place -- vary from one major-league park to another, and sometimes appreciably. An outfielder for instance will be familiar with the way a ball caroms off the outfield walls in his home ballpark, and where those walls are in the first place, and familiar with the prevailing winds and native atmosphere in that park and their effects on an airborne baseball. And so on.
And home-field advantage means hitting last. Hitting in the bottom of the inning makes very little odds except when the game happens to be tied or close in the bottom of the 9th and into extra innings, when a go-ahead run for the home team ends the ballgame and the visiting team has spent its chance to answer that run. That may be said to be psychological like the support or otherwise from the stands: the visiting team gets no fewer at-bats for hitting first, after all, so hitting last is no advantage except in that psychological sense of knowing where you stand, that a run here wins the ballgame, say, or that you've got to register one run before the other fellow registers three outs just to stay alive, etc. But it's a structural psychological advantage, and very real, for the home team and against the visitor. And because the World Series is played between the two best teams in the game, by definition or anyway on paper, you're apt to get some evenly-matched, close-run ballgames between them, and tie-games in the bottom of the 9th and later.
So this is not scrapping over scraps. Baseball is a game of fractions of an inch and of a second, and whole ballgames and even World Series can turn on infinitesimally small things. And home-field advantage for the World Series is no small thing.
The one fair way of deciding home-field advantage would be to compare regular-season records, so that the superior ballclub of the two left standing in late October was rewarded for having been the better team over the course of the season. A coin-toss would be capricious, and the present arrangement of determining home-field advantage by All-Star Game outcome puts the decision into the hands of men who are uninvolved in the World Series, inasmuch as the All Stars are drawn from all 30 major-league clubs.
This scheme for "making it count" that Major League Baseball and the Players Association hit on in '03 is probably the best that could be devised for investing the All-Star Game with anything approaching the import it had in the time of Ted Williams. But I fail to see why the All-Star Game must be so life-and-death, and why it's not perfectly reasonable to regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, as opposed to desperately, earth-shakingly serious.
And anyhow, Major League Baseball ought to make it its policy to let the people decide. If the fans do invest the All-Star Game with some world-ending passion then more power to them, and if they regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, well, so be it. Who can blame them if they do conceive of the All-Star Game more as a spectacle, and what on earth is wrong with it? It ought to be good enough for the All-Star Game to be what the name implies, the one moment in a season when all the very best are assembled on one field and two dream teams. Let the people decide if it counts for anything, and don't let it skew the World Series.
May 8, 2013
So, about this Syria business
Syria in 2013 looks in places like Berlin circa 1945, it's been carved up already by jihadist and Islamist rebels, instituting sharia wherever they command a preponderance of men and arms, the Alawite, Ba'athist "national government" is sustained by Russian and Iranian and Hezbollah intervention, and the body count has hit 70,000 and counting, per the United Nations which is useful for such jobs as counting corpses in the more godforsaken corners of the earth, and not a lot else.
So what's to be done about this Syria business. The short answer is, as of now and beyond the usual humanitarian assistance, nothing. There was a moment when an intervention on a small margin, supporting the rebels without a very direct involvement on our part, would have been advisable, at the outset of this Syrian civil war in '11 when there was a true national rebellion, led by elements of the Syrian armed forces, against the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship and enemy to the United States and Israel.
But that moment came and went because Obama and his administration prefer to "lead from behind", which is to say, go golfing and hope things somehow work out in the end, or that no-one notices if things don't work out, or that somehow the decision is made for us, or that Britain or France or anyone else at all rides over the crest of the hill and spares us from getting our hands dirty. Plus which, Obama and his administration had committed themselves to the line that Bashar al-Assad was a "reformer", some sort of misunderstood moderate and great man worthy of the praise of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and his Ba'athist dictatorship worthy of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations with the United States. Bush and his administration had recalled the American ambassador to Syria in '05 after Syria's assassination of Rafik Hariri, twice the Prime Minister of Lebanon, so of course Obama and his administration had to go altogether in the contrary direction.
Obama's timing was impeccably awful to boot: he claimed a recess appointment to circumvent Senate confirmation of his nominee for ambassador to Damascus, rewarding Bashar al-Assad with normal diplomatic relations, not three months before the onset of this Syrian civil war, just in time for al-Assad to demonstrate beyond all doubting that he was a dictator and butcher of the first magnitude, with whom the United States ought to be in a state of cold war at the very best. And it was worse than even that: Obama was so loath to come down against the Butcher of Damascus, exposing himself as a fool and vindicating Bush's judgment on the al-Assad regime, that he watched five months of al-Assad's butchery before calling for his resignation, at long last, and even then, Obama couldn't bring himself to speak the words, preferring the medium of the presidential "written statement". So our moment passed, and with it our only good alternative.
Because before long, the national rebellion was hijacked by the international jihad, as in Libya not long before. So that by this point, per a memorable and frank New York Times report, "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of."
Obviously the United States isn't great guns for getting in the middle of this Alawite-jihadi-Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah melee, although in the abstract, that would be the one unalloyed good alternative, to sort of descend on Syria like some Heavenly host bringing ruin to the wicked on all sides, then institute a democracy for the ordinary Syrians still drawing breath. But that's as comprehensively mooted a point as can be, inasmuch as it'll never happen, which leaves us with the binary choice of keeping clear of Syria, or intervening indirectly as in supporting one side over the other.
But to support one side over another would be to support our principal enemies and threats in the world, and without reason to believe the end would be anything other than awful for us and for the people of Syria both. If I may be forgiven for invoking that most overdone of wars a second time in one piece, this Syrian civil war has gotten to be something like a science-fiction parallel-universe theater of the Second World War, where for various reasons the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese wound up going at one another hammer-and-tongs, somehow at war against one another and not together against us. We'd have been fools to touch that with a pole, instead of letting it play out and letting the works of them bleed one another dry, while we followed the developments from afar and counted the blood and treasure expended on their side and husbanded on ours.
The peculiarities of this Syrian civil war have conspired to assemble our principal enemies and threats in the world, on opposing sides. Al-Qaeda, or the international jihad more generally, and Iran are more or less equivalent as menaces to the United States, and this Syrian business has set them one against the other, to the point where the reports are that Iran has expelled some of the al-Qaeda-ists it had made welcome before Syria made things awkward between them. Then Hezbollah which menaces Israel has come into it, and the Russians who are our geopolitical rivals and general ne'er-do-wells have been on the ground in support of the al-Assad regime as well, for reasons best known to themselves. And the Syrian regime, or rather whatever's left of the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, is an enemy of longstanding to the United States and to Israel, and has been at the very least an enabler and ally to those people trying to blow us up. So given that those are the parties to this Syrian civil war, as of now, what justice may be claimed in helping any faction over any other, and what good may be expected, for us or for the people of Syria?
Of course the trouble with this is that in the meantime those people of Syria are dying by the tens of thousands, and indeed the last man standing in Syria, holding or inheriting whatever assets and armaments are left by that time, will be no friend to us. But that's the price of not intervening at the outset, when there were still white hats against the black hats, and when indirect intervention might have helped those white hats to victory inasmuch as the outside forces propping up the al-Assad regime had not yet come into it with both feet.
So there is no good alternative left to us, but there is one least bad alternative, namely, to keep our powder dry, do nothing for the time being apart from putting up some innocuous humanitarian assistance. But of course Barack Obama has just now commenced thumping his chest on Syria, days after being reduced to impotent observer while Israel acted in Syria boldly and deftly, Obama's chest-thumping coming complete with a gratuitous and unjust slight against President Bush and a declaration of "moral obligation" which Obama discovered only after two years and 70,000 dead bodies. And Obama's interventionism is of course to take the form of some unquantified new support for the rebels who are by now al-Qaeda-ists and Islamists and assorted jihadists. How we or the people of Syria would be better off for al-Qaeda's being propped up by the United States, so as to carry on the civil war with the aim ultimately of rendering Syria a terrorist squat and a colony of the new caliphate, is unknown to me, but that is the course set for us by our occasional Commander-in-Chief.
He does nothing at the moment when supporting the rebels might conceivably have tipped the balance, and when it'd have meant supporting worthy men against a common enemy and conceivably helping to replace a tyrant and a menace with friends and allies in a decent and democratic successor government; then when it's far too late for that and supporting the rebels amounts to aiding al-Qaeda and Islamists and the international jihad, Obama gives the order to support the rebels. The worst of all worlds, as ever.
So what's to be done about this Syria business. The short answer is, as of now and beyond the usual humanitarian assistance, nothing. There was a moment when an intervention on a small margin, supporting the rebels without a very direct involvement on our part, would have been advisable, at the outset of this Syrian civil war in '11 when there was a true national rebellion, led by elements of the Syrian armed forces, against the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship and enemy to the United States and Israel.
But that moment came and went because Obama and his administration prefer to "lead from behind", which is to say, go golfing and hope things somehow work out in the end, or that no-one notices if things don't work out, or that somehow the decision is made for us, or that Britain or France or anyone else at all rides over the crest of the hill and spares us from getting our hands dirty. Plus which, Obama and his administration had committed themselves to the line that Bashar al-Assad was a "reformer", some sort of misunderstood moderate and great man worthy of the praise of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and his Ba'athist dictatorship worthy of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations with the United States. Bush and his administration had recalled the American ambassador to Syria in '05 after Syria's assassination of Rafik Hariri, twice the Prime Minister of Lebanon, so of course Obama and his administration had to go altogether in the contrary direction.
Obama's timing was impeccably awful to boot: he claimed a recess appointment to circumvent Senate confirmation of his nominee for ambassador to Damascus, rewarding Bashar al-Assad with normal diplomatic relations, not three months before the onset of this Syrian civil war, just in time for al-Assad to demonstrate beyond all doubting that he was a dictator and butcher of the first magnitude, with whom the United States ought to be in a state of cold war at the very best. And it was worse than even that: Obama was so loath to come down against the Butcher of Damascus, exposing himself as a fool and vindicating Bush's judgment on the al-Assad regime, that he watched five months of al-Assad's butchery before calling for his resignation, at long last, and even then, Obama couldn't bring himself to speak the words, preferring the medium of the presidential "written statement". So our moment passed, and with it our only good alternative.
Because before long, the national rebellion was hijacked by the international jihad, as in Libya not long before. So that by this point, per a memorable and frank New York Times report, "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of."
Obviously the United States isn't great guns for getting in the middle of this Alawite-jihadi-Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah melee, although in the abstract, that would be the one unalloyed good alternative, to sort of descend on Syria like some Heavenly host bringing ruin to the wicked on all sides, then institute a democracy for the ordinary Syrians still drawing breath. But that's as comprehensively mooted a point as can be, inasmuch as it'll never happen, which leaves us with the binary choice of keeping clear of Syria, or intervening indirectly as in supporting one side over the other.
But to support one side over another would be to support our principal enemies and threats in the world, and without reason to believe the end would be anything other than awful for us and for the people of Syria both. If I may be forgiven for invoking that most overdone of wars a second time in one piece, this Syrian civil war has gotten to be something like a science-fiction parallel-universe theater of the Second World War, where for various reasons the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese wound up going at one another hammer-and-tongs, somehow at war against one another and not together against us. We'd have been fools to touch that with a pole, instead of letting it play out and letting the works of them bleed one another dry, while we followed the developments from afar and counted the blood and treasure expended on their side and husbanded on ours.
The peculiarities of this Syrian civil war have conspired to assemble our principal enemies and threats in the world, on opposing sides. Al-Qaeda, or the international jihad more generally, and Iran are more or less equivalent as menaces to the United States, and this Syrian business has set them one against the other, to the point where the reports are that Iran has expelled some of the al-Qaeda-ists it had made welcome before Syria made things awkward between them. Then Hezbollah which menaces Israel has come into it, and the Russians who are our geopolitical rivals and general ne'er-do-wells have been on the ground in support of the al-Assad regime as well, for reasons best known to themselves. And the Syrian regime, or rather whatever's left of the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, is an enemy of longstanding to the United States and to Israel, and has been at the very least an enabler and ally to those people trying to blow us up. So given that those are the parties to this Syrian civil war, as of now, what justice may be claimed in helping any faction over any other, and what good may be expected, for us or for the people of Syria?
Of course the trouble with this is that in the meantime those people of Syria are dying by the tens of thousands, and indeed the last man standing in Syria, holding or inheriting whatever assets and armaments are left by that time, will be no friend to us. But that's the price of not intervening at the outset, when there were still white hats against the black hats, and when indirect intervention might have helped those white hats to victory inasmuch as the outside forces propping up the al-Assad regime had not yet come into it with both feet.
So there is no good alternative left to us, but there is one least bad alternative, namely, to keep our powder dry, do nothing for the time being apart from putting up some innocuous humanitarian assistance. But of course Barack Obama has just now commenced thumping his chest on Syria, days after being reduced to impotent observer while Israel acted in Syria boldly and deftly, Obama's chest-thumping coming complete with a gratuitous and unjust slight against President Bush and a declaration of "moral obligation" which Obama discovered only after two years and 70,000 dead bodies. And Obama's interventionism is of course to take the form of some unquantified new support for the rebels who are by now al-Qaeda-ists and Islamists and assorted jihadists. How we or the people of Syria would be better off for al-Qaeda's being propped up by the United States, so as to carry on the civil war with the aim ultimately of rendering Syria a terrorist squat and a colony of the new caliphate, is unknown to me, but that is the course set for us by our occasional Commander-in-Chief.
He does nothing at the moment when supporting the rebels might conceivably have tipped the balance, and when it'd have meant supporting worthy men against a common enemy and conceivably helping to replace a tyrant and a menace with friends and allies in a decent and democratic successor government; then when it's far too late for that and supporting the rebels amounts to aiding al-Qaeda and Islamists and the international jihad, Obama gives the order to support the rebels. The worst of all worlds, as ever.
February 6, 2013
On the official divorce of the stock markets and the real economy
One wonders if January 30 of 2013 may be one of those days like they write into movies set circa 1929: "Oh, Father, don't be such a bore. 'Gross domestic product' is for the university men. All I know is, my Radio Corp shares are up and I'm taking my best gal Millie out for a malted." Or something like that.
On that day the news came down from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that its initial estimate for gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012 was very slightly negative, that's to say, the United States economy actually shrank a bit in the final few months of 2012. Barack Obama ought to praise Almighty God that the BEA doesn't issue those initial estimates as projections and before November 6, because the exit polling found a clear plurality of voters on Election Day holding to the quaint notion that the economy was affirmatively improving, where we now know it was in fact contracting, or at best standing still, at just about that time.
Time was, the stock markets were dependent on what we fusty traditionalists insist on calling "the real economy". A BEA report like the January one showing Q4 2012 GDP at -0.1%, making the first decline since the official, statistical end of the recession in '09, would've been received by the markets as bad news and sent them lower -- and indeed the markets did go lower, only just, but they dusted themselves off and carried on toward their sunlit uplands such that all of two days later, the Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 were registering 52-week highs, with the NASDAQ not far off a 52-week high of its own and the Dow crossing 14,000 for the first time since October of '07 when its record of 14,165 was set, putting it one good day away from a new record high. The stocks-and-economy headline for those few days might read something like "U.S. economy shrinks, markets rejoice."
The markets and the real economy were seen in public together hand-in-hand until sometime after the economy found its bottom in '09; as the economy bounced along that bottom in 2010 and '11, neighbors overheard the real economy and the markets squabbling acrimoniously, with the markets becoming by times accusatory; by 2012 as the markets went from strength to strength, the real economy was known to be sleeping on the couch while the markets took the master bedroom upstairs, with the real economy stopping on the way from work for a hamburger while the markets had salmon and risotto at home on the good china; and finally when the Dow crossed 14,000 points two days after GDP came in negative on January 30 of 2013, the divorce papers came through. It's now official: the real economy and the stock markets are well and truly divorced, and they don't much feel like speaking to one another for the time being, either.
I'm not a writer of upper-middle-class American vernacular dialogue circa 1929, and I'm certainly no market analyst, so I offer herewith the considered assessment of Bob Janjuah who despite the funny name was Chief Markets Strategist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, via the pseudonymous Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.com:
"Real wealth can only be created by innovation and hard work in the private sector, with policymakers, the financial sector and financial markets there to aid and encourage/incentivise. Real wealth is not created by the printing press and by excessive government spending. We simply cannot turn wine into water – after all, if it were that easy, why have we not done this before...
"Sure, central bankers through [quantitative easing] can create a chemical/synthetic concoction that may well get us even more intoxicated than real wine, but like most chemical processes that are focused on by-passing the rules and focused on immediate quick fixes, the "wine" they are synthetically creating will I fear ultimately lead to either a large market hangover (at best) or – at worst – to the "market equivalent" of serious liver poisoning or something even worse.
"The scale of the fallout will I feel be determined largely by how far markets and policymakers are willing and/or able to stretch the elastic band between real world reality and liquidity fed asset markets. Past experience shows us that this band can be stretched a long way, and we know that central bankers have a bad track record at both spotting and managing asset bubbles."
Thus spake Janjuah. And that looks about right. Every ridiculously overinflated boom must bust; the trouble with this bubble is, it's the product of the wholesale printing of dollars and profligate deficit spending, and built on an economy that's arguably recessionary and inarguably enervated. The United States could absorb a crash in 2000 and again in '08, because by those times it was near enough to full employment and coming off good long stretches of healthy expansion in GDP, plus which the American dollar hadn't been debased wantonly in the inflation of the bubbles that were popped in those crashes.
There is just no reconciling the Dow Jones skipping giddily toward its record high, with -0.1 percent GDP and 14.4 percent effective unemployment. A crash in these circumstances, and affecting the dollar that all Americans deal in, could be a catastrophe.
On that day the news came down from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that its initial estimate for gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012 was very slightly negative, that's to say, the United States economy actually shrank a bit in the final few months of 2012. Barack Obama ought to praise Almighty God that the BEA doesn't issue those initial estimates as projections and before November 6, because the exit polling found a clear plurality of voters on Election Day holding to the quaint notion that the economy was affirmatively improving, where we now know it was in fact contracting, or at best standing still, at just about that time.
Time was, the stock markets were dependent on what we fusty traditionalists insist on calling "the real economy". A BEA report like the January one showing Q4 2012 GDP at -0.1%, making the first decline since the official, statistical end of the recession in '09, would've been received by the markets as bad news and sent them lower -- and indeed the markets did go lower, only just, but they dusted themselves off and carried on toward their sunlit uplands such that all of two days later, the Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 were registering 52-week highs, with the NASDAQ not far off a 52-week high of its own and the Dow crossing 14,000 for the first time since October of '07 when its record of 14,165 was set, putting it one good day away from a new record high. The stocks-and-economy headline for those few days might read something like "U.S. economy shrinks, markets rejoice."
The markets and the real economy were seen in public together hand-in-hand until sometime after the economy found its bottom in '09; as the economy bounced along that bottom in 2010 and '11, neighbors overheard the real economy and the markets squabbling acrimoniously, with the markets becoming by times accusatory; by 2012 as the markets went from strength to strength, the real economy was known to be sleeping on the couch while the markets took the master bedroom upstairs, with the real economy stopping on the way from work for a hamburger while the markets had salmon and risotto at home on the good china; and finally when the Dow crossed 14,000 points two days after GDP came in negative on January 30 of 2013, the divorce papers came through. It's now official: the real economy and the stock markets are well and truly divorced, and they don't much feel like speaking to one another for the time being, either.
I'm not a writer of upper-middle-class American vernacular dialogue circa 1929, and I'm certainly no market analyst, so I offer herewith the considered assessment of Bob Janjuah who despite the funny name was Chief Markets Strategist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, via the pseudonymous Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.com:
"Real wealth can only be created by innovation and hard work in the private sector, with policymakers, the financial sector and financial markets there to aid and encourage/incentivise. Real wealth is not created by the printing press and by excessive government spending. We simply cannot turn wine into water – after all, if it were that easy, why have we not done this before...
"Sure, central bankers through [quantitative easing] can create a chemical/synthetic concoction that may well get us even more intoxicated than real wine, but like most chemical processes that are focused on by-passing the rules and focused on immediate quick fixes, the "wine" they are synthetically creating will I fear ultimately lead to either a large market hangover (at best) or – at worst – to the "market equivalent" of serious liver poisoning or something even worse.
"The scale of the fallout will I feel be determined largely by how far markets and policymakers are willing and/or able to stretch the elastic band between real world reality and liquidity fed asset markets. Past experience shows us that this band can be stretched a long way, and we know that central bankers have a bad track record at both spotting and managing asset bubbles."
Thus spake Janjuah. And that looks about right. Every ridiculously overinflated boom must bust; the trouble with this bubble is, it's the product of the wholesale printing of dollars and profligate deficit spending, and built on an economy that's arguably recessionary and inarguably enervated. The United States could absorb a crash in 2000 and again in '08, because by those times it was near enough to full employment and coming off good long stretches of healthy expansion in GDP, plus which the American dollar hadn't been debased wantonly in the inflation of the bubbles that were popped in those crashes.
There is just no reconciling the Dow Jones skipping giddily toward its record high, with -0.1 percent GDP and 14.4 percent effective unemployment. A crash in these circumstances, and affecting the dollar that all Americans deal in, could be a catastrophe.
November 8, 2012
The Complete Guide to the 2012 Presidential Election, According to Me
(Updated, Dec 5)
I'm afraid I'm unrepentant in my prophesies that Barack Obama was to be a one-term president: I'm not sure that was so very far off considering that the Gallup and Rasmussen polls both had Obama at 48 percent on election eve, with Romney favored albeit by just a point, considering that the difference in the four deciding swing states came to not much more than 400,000 votes combined, considering that Obama shed something like four million votes off his '08 numbers, considering that Obama's margin in the popular vote was hacked from over 7 percent in '08 to something over 3 percent in '12, considering that whites who are after all the great majority voted against Obama by all of 20 points, 59-39 percent, and considering that independents came down against Obama by five points. But Democrats outnumbered Republicans by six points, and that decided it.
Romney's surplus independents might well have lifted him over that Democrat advantage except that they were shorn away in the last days of the campaign by Obama's Superstorm Sandy photo-op, that storm becoming a humanitarian and economic crisis only after Obama had taken his victory lap and jetted off again to his campaign rallies, with such statesmanlike displays as urging his followers to vote for "revenge". Had he belonged to the unapproved party, Sandy would've been treated by the press and popular culture as Obama's Katrina, but because he's a Democrat, a leftist, and an Obama, he showed up for the first inning of a nine-inning ballgame and was acclaimed World Series champion, just in time for the vote.
Obama has become one of two presidents in all American history to win a second term with a narrowed margin in the popular vote and a shrunken share of the electoral vote. The other one to do it also was a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who won a second term in 1916 on keeping America out of the war, then proceeded promptly to take America all the way into it, conscription and Sedition Act and all. (In case you're curious, things went badly for Wilson's Democrat Party after 1916: they were reduced in the 1918 midterms from 53 seats to 47 in the Senate, and from 214 to 192 in the House, and they were shut out of the presidency 'til 1932.)
Barack Obama won his re-election with very many fewer votes than four years prior and very much shrunken margins, flopping over the finish line about 400,000 votes ahead of Romney in the four kingmaker states put together, with independents affirmatively voting to terminate his presidency, and on the strength of an "anti" campaign, "killing Romney" as per the explicit Obama strategy from the start, as opposed to presenting a program for the next four years. But now the course for those next four years is set, to wit:
Foreign affairs and war.
Afghanistan is a lost war and Obama has lost it, after throwing three times more dead American bodies at it in four years than Bush did in seven. The trouble with Obama's surge was that it wasn't a surge; it was something closer to the pre-surge policy in Iraq. And now Obama will withdraw from Afghanistan in what he prefers to conceive of as "ending the war", only, there is no such neutral alternative in war. Wars are won or lost, and very occasionally stalemated, but to withdraw from the field without achieving your object, and abandon it to the enemy, is what is called "losing a war". And Obama will be the president who lost the Afghan War; indeed, he's that already, but now that fact will be made plain.
Al Qaeda is running amok across the greater Middle East including especially Libya, and when Obama thumps his chest about "decimating" al Qaeda, I believe he is deluding himself or lying, because as commander-in-chief he has to see the reports of al Qaeda ascendancy, including in precincts that were until lately free of Islamist militancy. Al Qaeda affiliates have now killed an American ambassador and three other Americans, and sacked an American consulate, in what is arguably al Qaeda's greatest coup against the United States since the 9/11 attacks of '01. Obama failed utterly to act before that attack to defend against it, despite that the consulate in question had been attacked twice in the months before and that every man and his dog on the ground were pleading for security. Come to that, a good part of what little security they did have was withdrawn not long before the final assault. Obama then failed also to intervene in the seven-hour assault with the ready forces he had at his command. And finally Obama tried to make out that this al Qaeda-affiliated terror attack was some sort of movie review that got carried away, to borrow from Mark Steyn. There is real trouble, and real incapacity on the part of Obama to attend to it or even to recognize it.
Iran is four years closer to going nuclear than when Obama ascended the presidency. A nuclear Iran would be the Armageddon nightmare that's had people awake nights since the advent of the bomb in 1945, and Obama is very much more against action to forestall Iran's going nuclear than he is against an Iranian bomb.
Economics and finances.
The markets are in freefall as I write this. The Dow Jones gave up 313 points or 2.4 percent in the wake of the vote, for its worst crash of the year. And that's the second-worst selloff yet registered on the Dow following a presidential election, second only to the bloodbath of 486 points and over 5 percent, on the day after Obama's first election in '08. So there's progress.
The national debt under Obama's own optimistic FY2013 budget proposal would go past $20 trillion in four scant years, i.e. 2016, as Obama retires from the presidency, meaning that Obama would have doubled the debt single-handed, adding as much debt in one presidency as was added in the other 43 combined.
And about how much longer before America runs up against the credit wall? There's not capital enough in the world to finance this kind of debt, and the Federal Reserve on Obama's watch is presently into its third round of quantitative easing, i.e., printing American dollars to soak up some part of this uncoverable debt, which has the effect of debasing the dollar and making everything that much more expensive. Obama's Plans A, B, and C for resolving the debt crisis are to raise taxes on the rich, despite that the revenue from his proposed tax hikes would come to a drop in the bucket, and the top 10 percent of federal income tax filers have been carrying 71 percent of the federal income tax burden for some time already, at the Bush rates.
When the economists and business analysts have observed in this Age of Obama that "capital is sitting on the sidelines", what they've been getting at is that real-economy investment has been waiting and watching for a change in direction. The election has determined there'll be no such change in direction for four years more, and so that capital can only be expected to stay put or to flee for jurisdictions where the leadership doesn't treat businessmen as sort-of enemies of the state. There is no good reason to imagine that the economy in the next four years will be appreciably different from the last four years. Come to that, full implementation of Obama's greatest onslaughts against business, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, the financial regulatory leviathan, was deferred 'til after the election, as if to prove beyond all doubt that they'd be economically crushing and politically toxic, so there's good cause to suspect the Obama economy has not found its bottom even yet.
Recessional remarks.
Dick Morris had by my lights the best line of the campaign. (Yes, I know Morris has come out of this badly inasmuch as he was projecting a world-beating Romney landslide, though to be fair he was going on historic averages of turnout among blacks, Hispanics, and young people, which was not an indefensible presupposition. In any event, Morris had a good line.) He said, Obama likes to tell about all the troubles he inherited as president; just imagine how he'll complain if he wins a second term and inherits this mess.
I talked a long while a couple months ago with an old Marine, who said something I mostly set aside 'til election night, namely that if Obama were to be re-elected, the patience of the people would run out. And along those lines, Bill O'Reilly is no hack like me, and unlike me he never passes up an opportunity to extend Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt, so when he comes down against Obama with great force of conviction, I take notice, and I was frankly shocked to hear O'Reilly's pronouncement on Obama and his Democrat Party on the night after the vote. He said, if Obama hasn't got the economy rolling again in two years, it's the end for the Democrats, not for two years but for good. Even I wouldn't be quite so categorical as that -- I'd prefer "for a generation" -- but I thought on it, and O'Reilly is hitting on something there. This unending sort-of depression that we've got mucked down in has carried on for about half a decade now; Obama was elected to fix it, and instead he turned a recession into the next thing to a depression. If the desolate moonscape of this economy does not bloom with new growth, if our lives are kept on hold for not half a decade but nearly a decade as in the Great Depression, then the people and history will never forgive Obama.
Now to the usual refrain that this is "the demise of the Republican Party!" which we get every year the Democrats can claim a victory, from the press about as much as from Democrats: if ever there was a case to be made for that proposition it was in '08, when the Rs lost the presidency by half a dozen points and were reduced from minorities to smaller minorities in both houses of Congress, but a year later they were winning again even in statewide races in New Jersey and Massachusetts, and a year after that they had won arguably the greatest turnover in the century and a half of the Grand Old Party, taking into account the red wave in the statehouses and governorships. There really is no reason in 2012 to see some smouldering hole where the Republican Party used to be: Republicans held their big majority in the House, filled out their governorships to a nice round 30 of 50, and came within 400,000 votes in the four deciding swing states to knocking off an incumbent president.
And another thing. Since I was a boy, I've seen three two-term presidents, and I've observed in these presidential second terms a couple common traits: nothing much gets done, with the prospect for accomplishment declining as the term progresses; scandals, sometimes from the first term, fester and pop; and that second term flies by. In a year and a half, we'll be into the midterms campaign, and it won't be long after the vote in November 2014 that things will turn inexorably to the presidential primaries, on both sides, with the president becoming in his final year a kind of afterthought, pushed aside first by the primaries and then by the general election. By maybe the spring of 2015, candidacies will be declared and so on, and the sitting, lame-duck president will begin to fade from our thinking. A second-term president gets closer to three years than four, effectively, and indeed sometimes he doesn't get even that much. It'll go faster than you know.
I'm afraid I'm unrepentant in my prophesies that Barack Obama was to be a one-term president: I'm not sure that was so very far off considering that the Gallup and Rasmussen polls both had Obama at 48 percent on election eve, with Romney favored albeit by just a point, considering that the difference in the four deciding swing states came to not much more than 400,000 votes combined, considering that Obama shed something like four million votes off his '08 numbers, considering that Obama's margin in the popular vote was hacked from over 7 percent in '08 to something over 3 percent in '12, considering that whites who are after all the great majority voted against Obama by all of 20 points, 59-39 percent, and considering that independents came down against Obama by five points. But Democrats outnumbered Republicans by six points, and that decided it.
Romney's surplus independents might well have lifted him over that Democrat advantage except that they were shorn away in the last days of the campaign by Obama's Superstorm Sandy photo-op, that storm becoming a humanitarian and economic crisis only after Obama had taken his victory lap and jetted off again to his campaign rallies, with such statesmanlike displays as urging his followers to vote for "revenge". Had he belonged to the unapproved party, Sandy would've been treated by the press and popular culture as Obama's Katrina, but because he's a Democrat, a leftist, and an Obama, he showed up for the first inning of a nine-inning ballgame and was acclaimed World Series champion, just in time for the vote.
Obama has become one of two presidents in all American history to win a second term with a narrowed margin in the popular vote and a shrunken share of the electoral vote. The other one to do it also was a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who won a second term in 1916 on keeping America out of the war, then proceeded promptly to take America all the way into it, conscription and Sedition Act and all. (In case you're curious, things went badly for Wilson's Democrat Party after 1916: they were reduced in the 1918 midterms from 53 seats to 47 in the Senate, and from 214 to 192 in the House, and they were shut out of the presidency 'til 1932.)
Barack Obama won his re-election with very many fewer votes than four years prior and very much shrunken margins, flopping over the finish line about 400,000 votes ahead of Romney in the four kingmaker states put together, with independents affirmatively voting to terminate his presidency, and on the strength of an "anti" campaign, "killing Romney" as per the explicit Obama strategy from the start, as opposed to presenting a program for the next four years. But now the course for those next four years is set, to wit:
Foreign affairs and war.
Afghanistan is a lost war and Obama has lost it, after throwing three times more dead American bodies at it in four years than Bush did in seven. The trouble with Obama's surge was that it wasn't a surge; it was something closer to the pre-surge policy in Iraq. And now Obama will withdraw from Afghanistan in what he prefers to conceive of as "ending the war", only, there is no such neutral alternative in war. Wars are won or lost, and very occasionally stalemated, but to withdraw from the field without achieving your object, and abandon it to the enemy, is what is called "losing a war". And Obama will be the president who lost the Afghan War; indeed, he's that already, but now that fact will be made plain.
Al Qaeda is running amok across the greater Middle East including especially Libya, and when Obama thumps his chest about "decimating" al Qaeda, I believe he is deluding himself or lying, because as commander-in-chief he has to see the reports of al Qaeda ascendancy, including in precincts that were until lately free of Islamist militancy. Al Qaeda affiliates have now killed an American ambassador and three other Americans, and sacked an American consulate, in what is arguably al Qaeda's greatest coup against the United States since the 9/11 attacks of '01. Obama failed utterly to act before that attack to defend against it, despite that the consulate in question had been attacked twice in the months before and that every man and his dog on the ground were pleading for security. Come to that, a good part of what little security they did have was withdrawn not long before the final assault. Obama then failed also to intervene in the seven-hour assault with the ready forces he had at his command. And finally Obama tried to make out that this al Qaeda-affiliated terror attack was some sort of movie review that got carried away, to borrow from Mark Steyn. There is real trouble, and real incapacity on the part of Obama to attend to it or even to recognize it.
Iran is four years closer to going nuclear than when Obama ascended the presidency. A nuclear Iran would be the Armageddon nightmare that's had people awake nights since the advent of the bomb in 1945, and Obama is very much more against action to forestall Iran's going nuclear than he is against an Iranian bomb.
Economics and finances.
The markets are in freefall as I write this. The Dow Jones gave up 313 points or 2.4 percent in the wake of the vote, for its worst crash of the year. And that's the second-worst selloff yet registered on the Dow following a presidential election, second only to the bloodbath of 486 points and over 5 percent, on the day after Obama's first election in '08. So there's progress.
The national debt under Obama's own optimistic FY2013 budget proposal would go past $20 trillion in four scant years, i.e. 2016, as Obama retires from the presidency, meaning that Obama would have doubled the debt single-handed, adding as much debt in one presidency as was added in the other 43 combined.
And about how much longer before America runs up against the credit wall? There's not capital enough in the world to finance this kind of debt, and the Federal Reserve on Obama's watch is presently into its third round of quantitative easing, i.e., printing American dollars to soak up some part of this uncoverable debt, which has the effect of debasing the dollar and making everything that much more expensive. Obama's Plans A, B, and C for resolving the debt crisis are to raise taxes on the rich, despite that the revenue from his proposed tax hikes would come to a drop in the bucket, and the top 10 percent of federal income tax filers have been carrying 71 percent of the federal income tax burden for some time already, at the Bush rates.
When the economists and business analysts have observed in this Age of Obama that "capital is sitting on the sidelines", what they've been getting at is that real-economy investment has been waiting and watching for a change in direction. The election has determined there'll be no such change in direction for four years more, and so that capital can only be expected to stay put or to flee for jurisdictions where the leadership doesn't treat businessmen as sort-of enemies of the state. There is no good reason to imagine that the economy in the next four years will be appreciably different from the last four years. Come to that, full implementation of Obama's greatest onslaughts against business, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, the financial regulatory leviathan, was deferred 'til after the election, as if to prove beyond all doubt that they'd be economically crushing and politically toxic, so there's good cause to suspect the Obama economy has not found its bottom even yet.
Recessional remarks.
Dick Morris had by my lights the best line of the campaign. (Yes, I know Morris has come out of this badly inasmuch as he was projecting a world-beating Romney landslide, though to be fair he was going on historic averages of turnout among blacks, Hispanics, and young people, which was not an indefensible presupposition. In any event, Morris had a good line.) He said, Obama likes to tell about all the troubles he inherited as president; just imagine how he'll complain if he wins a second term and inherits this mess.
I talked a long while a couple months ago with an old Marine, who said something I mostly set aside 'til election night, namely that if Obama were to be re-elected, the patience of the people would run out. And along those lines, Bill O'Reilly is no hack like me, and unlike me he never passes up an opportunity to extend Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt, so when he comes down against Obama with great force of conviction, I take notice, and I was frankly shocked to hear O'Reilly's pronouncement on Obama and his Democrat Party on the night after the vote. He said, if Obama hasn't got the economy rolling again in two years, it's the end for the Democrats, not for two years but for good. Even I wouldn't be quite so categorical as that -- I'd prefer "for a generation" -- but I thought on it, and O'Reilly is hitting on something there. This unending sort-of depression that we've got mucked down in has carried on for about half a decade now; Obama was elected to fix it, and instead he turned a recession into the next thing to a depression. If the desolate moonscape of this economy does not bloom with new growth, if our lives are kept on hold for not half a decade but nearly a decade as in the Great Depression, then the people and history will never forgive Obama.
Now to the usual refrain that this is "the demise of the Republican Party!" which we get every year the Democrats can claim a victory, from the press about as much as from Democrats: if ever there was a case to be made for that proposition it was in '08, when the Rs lost the presidency by half a dozen points and were reduced from minorities to smaller minorities in both houses of Congress, but a year later they were winning again even in statewide races in New Jersey and Massachusetts, and a year after that they had won arguably the greatest turnover in the century and a half of the Grand Old Party, taking into account the red wave in the statehouses and governorships. There really is no reason in 2012 to see some smouldering hole where the Republican Party used to be: Republicans held their big majority in the House, filled out their governorships to a nice round 30 of 50, and came within 400,000 votes in the four deciding swing states to knocking off an incumbent president.
And another thing. Since I was a boy, I've seen three two-term presidents, and I've observed in these presidential second terms a couple common traits: nothing much gets done, with the prospect for accomplishment declining as the term progresses; scandals, sometimes from the first term, fester and pop; and that second term flies by. In a year and a half, we'll be into the midterms campaign, and it won't be long after the vote in November 2014 that things will turn inexorably to the presidential primaries, on both sides, with the president becoming in his final year a kind of afterthought, pushed aside first by the primaries and then by the general election. By maybe the spring of 2015, candidacies will be declared and so on, and the sitting, lame-duck president will begin to fade from our thinking. A second-term president gets closer to three years than four, effectively, and indeed sometimes he doesn't get even that much. It'll go faster than you know.
July 26, 2012
Betting on form for November 6
Never mind the polls and unemployment rates and even Harold Macmillan's "events, dear boy, events". If Barack Obama were to win re-election come November 6, he'd be only the second Democrat president to be elected to more terms than one since Franklin Roosevelt, back when Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters were tearing up the Billboard charts with "Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby)".
Bill Clinton was of course elected to two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of an unusually strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot. Perot split the anti-Clinton vote in 1992 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. Obama has no third-party spoiler on Perot's order of magnitude to save him, and in any event Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton, having no truck with Clinton's Third Way, more pro-business, incremental leftism which as an ideology has turned out to be nothing much more than a curiosity of the 1990s.
Jimmy Carter's offer for re-election in 1980 went sufficiently badly that he had conceded to Ronald Reagan before the polling stations on the West Coast were closed.
Lyndon Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and proceeded handily to win a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election and was the presumptive Democratic nominee until Eugene McCarthy finished seven points behind the sitting president in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968. By the end of the month, Johnson had uttered maybe his most famous remark, that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." The Democratic National Convention that summer was a madhouse, the party was radicalized, and Democrats were banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.
John Kennedy was of course assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration here. Unfair though that may be, it just can't be said with certainty that he'd have won re-election, and neither that he'd have lost, so Kennedy is counted out for these purposes.
Which leaves the case of Harry Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and won a term of his own in 1948, but he'd been exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was thus eligible for another kick at the can in '52. He wrote that he'd no intention of offering for re-election, but his name was on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary that March when Estes Kefauver won 55 percent to Truman's 44, and it was only after the Kefauver upset that Truman announced he'd be standing down. The Democrats chose Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, as their nominee to lose to Dwight Eisenhower.
On the Republican side over this same period were George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower. Four of those six were elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term and a couple years later gave way to the Carter interregnum, but Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he wasn't elected in the first place. And so one is left with Bush the Elder as the only Republican president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to be elected and not re-elected, and obviously he wasn't helped by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that smoothed the way for Clinton.
And the period from Hoover back to the advent of the Republican Party in the middle-19th Century is bleaker still for Democrats: James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson constitute the totality of elected Democrat presidents in the three-quarters of a century spanning 1856 and 1932. There's a reason they call Republicans the Grand Old Party.
Come to that, the grand total of Democrat presidents to be elected to more terms than one, in the century and a half since the founding of the Republican Party, is four. And that counts Cleveland whose two terms were non-consecutive. Republicans have re-elected presidents as many times in just the last sixty years.
It may justly be said that none of this history and statistics is dispositive, but there is such a thing as betting on form.
Bill Clinton was of course elected to two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of an unusually strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot. Perot split the anti-Clinton vote in 1992 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. Obama has no third-party spoiler on Perot's order of magnitude to save him, and in any event Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton, having no truck with Clinton's Third Way, more pro-business, incremental leftism which as an ideology has turned out to be nothing much more than a curiosity of the 1990s.
Jimmy Carter's offer for re-election in 1980 went sufficiently badly that he had conceded to Ronald Reagan before the polling stations on the West Coast were closed.
Lyndon Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and proceeded handily to win a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election and was the presumptive Democratic nominee until Eugene McCarthy finished seven points behind the sitting president in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968. By the end of the month, Johnson had uttered maybe his most famous remark, that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." The Democratic National Convention that summer was a madhouse, the party was radicalized, and Democrats were banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.
John Kennedy was of course assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration here. Unfair though that may be, it just can't be said with certainty that he'd have won re-election, and neither that he'd have lost, so Kennedy is counted out for these purposes.
Which leaves the case of Harry Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and won a term of his own in 1948, but he'd been exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was thus eligible for another kick at the can in '52. He wrote that he'd no intention of offering for re-election, but his name was on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary that March when Estes Kefauver won 55 percent to Truman's 44, and it was only after the Kefauver upset that Truman announced he'd be standing down. The Democrats chose Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, as their nominee to lose to Dwight Eisenhower.
On the Republican side over this same period were George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower. Four of those six were elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term and a couple years later gave way to the Carter interregnum, but Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he wasn't elected in the first place. And so one is left with Bush the Elder as the only Republican president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to be elected and not re-elected, and obviously he wasn't helped by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that smoothed the way for Clinton.
And the period from Hoover back to the advent of the Republican Party in the middle-19th Century is bleaker still for Democrats: James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson constitute the totality of elected Democrat presidents in the three-quarters of a century spanning 1856 and 1932. There's a reason they call Republicans the Grand Old Party.
Come to that, the grand total of Democrat presidents to be elected to more terms than one, in the century and a half since the founding of the Republican Party, is four. And that counts Cleveland whose two terms were non-consecutive. Republicans have re-elected presidents as many times in just the last sixty years.
It may justly be said that none of this history and statistics is dispositive, but there is such a thing as betting on form.
April 15, 2012
The mystical awfulness of Troll 2
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
