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Obama the Cosby candidate?
This WaPo article points to facets of the Obama campaign that at the very least represent an effort on Obama’s part ot appeal to an older generation of African-American voters. It sounds a bit more like what Bill Cosby once said than like pandering. (Indeed, it might get Obama in trouble with some of the same people who went after Cosby.) By contrast, as the article points out, HRC offers nothing of substance that isn’t at the same time statist. Of course, there remains plenty of statism in Obama’s approach, as this LAT article shows. Contrast this: "All of us know little shorties, and we see them when they are young. Something is happening to them around age 4 or 5. A darkness comes over them, and you can see the loss of hope in them," Obama said [in response to a 2006 shooting]. He added: "There is a reason they shoot each other, because they don’t love themselves, and the reason they don’t love themselves is we are not loving them, we’re not paying attention to them, we’re not guiding them, we’re not disciplining them. We’ve got work to do." With this: "We have now spent half a trillion dollars on a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged," Obama said. "We could have invested that money in SouthCentral Los Angeles, or the South Side of Chicago, in jobs and infrastructure and hospitals and schools. Why is it we can find the money in a second for a war that doesn’t make any sense?"*** "There’s a little bit of money that folks piece together to send it into the community to make sure that folks are quiet and go back to the status quo, but we never take the bullet out of the arm," Obama said. "We don’t need panels and reports and commissions. We need some surgery on the indifference to poverty in this country." The question that Obama needs to address is whether he thinks government can be an instrument of love. As someone once said,
"Government is law and justice; government isn’t love". Does he agree or disagree?
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [27] | 5/3/2007 10:23 AM
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Evangelical orphan care?
Because adoption has become politicized and because the abortion debate is so polarized, this is news. Of course, the article doesn’t mention Bethany Christian Services, an evangelical adoption agency that has been at it since 1944, or Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and his wife, who provided foster care without any fanfare long before he sought statewide office. In other words, the article makes it seem as if this initiative is almost purely the result of the culture war politics of abortion, marriage, and adoption. It isn’t.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments | 5/3/2007 10:14 AM
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Is Cheney Betting on Bad Economic News?
According to Pat Deneen Dick is putting his money on the prediction that the global assets bubble is about to burst. I’ll be the first to say that Pat’s "limits to growth" analysis here is probably too dismal and dramatic to really be science, but there’s a huge difference between exaggerating and being completely wrong. Is there something to Pat’s warning?
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [12] | 5/2/2007 9:53 PM
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Deep Thoughts on Romney’s Favorite Novel
...are found on Slate. Actually, they’re pretty good. Hubbard’s novel isn’t evil; it’s just really long and really bad. And, of course, liking it doesn’t necessarily imply an enorsement of Scientology or Tom Cruise. Mitt’s genuinely quirky and clearly unscripted preference reveals his geeky "inner goofball." Maybe it makes him more charming by making him less smooth and boring. Maybe it actually frees him from one Mormon stereotype. In some ways, the problem with Mormons is that they (despite their admittedly strange beliefs and rituals) seem overly wholesome.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 5/2/2007 5:12 PM
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Let’s Play "Guess the News Source"
Pop quiz time: Q. Where would you find a headline reading "Venezuela Pulls Control from Big Oil"? a) An organ of the Venezuelan Propaganda Ministry. b) An organ of the Cuban Propaganda Ministry. c) CNN. To find the answer, go HERE.
Posted by John Moser | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 5/2/2007 4:54 PM
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Am I Really Providing a Link to THE NATION?
And Alexander Cockburn? It may be the first, last and only time this happens--but I guess it had to happen once. Here he compares the selling of "carbon credits" with the selling of indulgences in the medieval Catholic Church. A taste: The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments [7] | 5/2/2007 3:32 PM
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Bourgeois Porn Moguls Mark the End of Illicit Sex?
Maggie Gallagher has an interesting lament at the end of this article detailing the rise of the so-called "perfectly respectable" bourgeois porn industry: Doesn’t anybody want illicit sex anymore?
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments [226] | 5/2/2007 3:28 PM
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NLT in D.C.?
I’ll be in northern Virginia for roughly the first week of June, attending a seminar at the George Mason University School of Law. I’m assured there will be a little free time, and have already begun to schedule the wasting of it with old friends. Anyone who wants in on the fun should send me an email.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [3] | 5/2/2007 10:18 AM
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More good news from Anbar
I saw this USA Today piece at the gym today. Seems like Gen. Petraeus isn’t the only smart guy in the Army, and that there are a few other folks to whom the strategists are paying attention. Too bad the Democrats know better....
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [4] | 5/1/2007 9:53 PM
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McCain Surging and/or Rudy Fading
...in the key states with the early primaries. (By the way, I too am stunned by Romney’s shamelss appeal to the Scientology vote, although I don’t agree with Steve that the gaffe was anytning near fatal.)
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [10] | 5/1/2007 7:52 PM
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The Secret to Fred’s Timing
It turns out that Thompson would cause HBO insurmountable "equal time" problems if he were to announce his candidacy before the movie/miniseries in which he plays President Grant airs. Another issue: Lost residual payments for his fellow Law-and-Order actors.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 5/1/2007 7:33 PM
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Romney Lost the Nomination Today
Political junkies all recall how Mitt Romney’s father, Michigan Governor George Romney, self-destructed in a single instance in his quest for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. Here’s my account of it in The Age of Reagan:
Had [Romney] changed his mind about that trip [to Vietnam]?, he was asked on a Detroit television show. Romney replied: “I just had the greatest brainwashing that anyone can get when you go over to Vietnam, not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job.”
Romney’s plausibility as a presidential candidate imploded instantaneously. “In a matter of hours,” James Jackson Kilpatrick wrote, “commentators across the country were remarking acidulously that it certainly took a long time for George to get his brain back from the laundry.” Goldwater, whom Romney had pointedly refused to endorse even after Goldwater had captured the nomination in 1964, now got his revenge: “When you admit that you can be brainwashed, you’re in trouble.” Democrats piled on, too. Eugene McCarthy displayed the wit that was shortly to become more widely known to Americans: “There was no need to brainwash the Governor. All he required was a light rinse.” Romney lamely tried to reverse the damage: “I wasn’t talking about Russian-type brainwashing; I was talking about LBJ brainwashing.” But it didn’t wash. He dropped ten points in the polls, and never recovered. The Detroit News, which had long supported Romney, urged him to get out of the presidential race with a brutal editorial. Taking note of Romney’s “inexplicable blurt-and-retreat habit,” the Detroit News said the brainwashing comment illustrated Romney’s “unfortunate incapacity to achieve stability and constancy in Presidential politics.”
It seemed inconcevable that MItt Romney was capable of a commensurate gaffe. Surely he had learned from his father’s classic blunder. Apparently not.
Today, when asked by Fox News to name his favorite novel, Romney replied: L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. OMG! OMG! Did the candidate whose Mormonmism is dogging him really pick the ur-text novel of the founder of the whacko cult of Scientology? Romney added that he doesn’t endorse scientology, but likes the novel. Serious sci-fi readers will be appalled. Evangelical Christians will be appalled. It is doubtful he’ll even get the Scientology vote (which probably ranks next to the Zoroastrian vote as a significant American voting bloc). The faact that it is such a wacky pick means that it is surely true.
Prediction. Romney will not recover from this. He is finished. I don’t care how much money he raises. Or spends. Picking Battlefield Earth will rank as one of the top ten political blunders of all time.
Posted by Steven Hayward | Link to this Entry | Comments [21] | 5/1/2007 7:03 PM
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Geriatric rent-seeker? Moi?
Received the dreaded (and unsolicited) AARP membership card in the mail today. Plan to mail the ashes back to that socialist organization after a solemn immolation of said card next week. My daughter says she’s eager to help.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments | 5/1/2007 3:28 PM
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This week’s faith-based flashpoint
This week, the House will take up a bill reauthorizing the Head Start program. Some religious conservatives will propose an amendment that permits the organizations that offer the Head Start programs to engage in what some (I) would call mission-sensitive hiring or what others call religious discrimination. I’ve got a brief post about it over at Knippenblog, but that site seems to be down as I’m writing this. When it’s up, you’ll find links to the legislation and to some of the pro-amendment statements, which I don’t want to reproduce here. I will, however, call attention to this post, which contains the text of a letter written by the usual suspects opposing the amendment, and to a piece I wrote for the Ashbrook site a couple of years ago. The big disagreement boils down to this. Must everyone who receives government money be a standardized extension of the state or can the government exercise a bit of restraint, using its resources to invigorate rather than simply to homogenize civil society? Some of course might argue that we should dismantle the welfare state altogether. This week, that’s not the point. The Head Start reauthorization is going to pass. Will it pass in a way that augments the secularizing force of government or in one that qualifies it? I confess that I’m not sanguine about the prospects of the amendment. Update: Here’s the Knippenblog post.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments | 5/1/2007 7:09 AM
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Obama’s church and its pastor
We’re seeing articles like this NYT piece about Barack Obama and his church every so often. For previous posts on this subject, go here, here, and here. I’ve also written on his most extensive statement on the relationship between religion and politics here. Herewith a few newish thoughts about Obama, his church, and his pastor. First, let’s do Obama the courtesy of letting him speak for himself on the relationship between religion and politics. We shouldn’t identify him with his pastor, unless his own words or deeds compel the identification. Conservatives who don’t want Mitt Romney’s Mormonism (and caricatures about it) to be the first and last words about him and who don’t want the justices in the majority in Gonzales v. Carhart to be drawn with mitres on their heads should practice what they preach when it comes to the relationship between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. Second, this doesn’t mean we can’t probe Obama’s biography for clues about his attitude toward religion and his religious views. Our paleo friend Dan Phillips thinks Obama is a more or less straight social gospel type. I think there’s a lot of social gospel worldliness to him, but he occasionally gestures in deeper and more interesting directions, as when he complicates his narrative about poverty by pointing to brokenness and personal responsibility. Some of this comes from the "self-help" tradition in black churches. You occasionally even see it in Jesse Jackson’s rhetoric (though it’s been a long time since I’ve paid much attention to him and probably an equally long time since he took his own words at all seriously). Such words are worth applauding, but the all-too-statist social and political recommendations that usually accompany them (both from Jackson and from Obama) still need to be answered and criticized, not as theological or religious statements, but as analyses of what works in dealing with poverty and other social pathologies.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [10] | 4/30/2007 9:40 PM
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Fred Ahead in the "Blog Primary"
Thompson’s numbers are impressive, but he may have, the blogger astutely notes, the popularity of a second-string quarterback on a losing term. People can’t help but imagine that things would be different if he were in the game, and he hasn’t fumbled yet because he hasn’t played yet.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/30/2007 7:44 PM
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Happy Birthday Willie Nelson!
You have to love his distinctive voice and tireless devotion to performing and recording.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [17] | 4/29/2007 11:01 PM
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Leave It to Deaver
One of Reagan’s main men sees Law-and-Order Fred as another actor who’s also a man of substance. We’re reminded of the Gipper’s memorable comment that he just couldn’t see how "any fellow who wasn’t an actor" could get the presidential job done. And Hollywood has known for a while that Fred "personnifies government power." Because each of the other candidates’ flaws are inching toward fatal, now it really is Thompson’s moment to take the Oval Office screen test by actually getting into the race. A movie in which he actually plays a president--the Grant being rehabilitated on all fronts--opens next month.
(Thanks to Ivan the K.)
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [6] | 4/29/2007 10:41 PM
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The Rebels
This review of Sandor Marai’s novel, The Rebels, is worth mentioning because (just maybe) this guy is the best Hungarian novelist ever. The Rebels was first published in 1930, just now translated. Marai was born in 1900 and died in San Diego in 1989, by his own hand. He is a rare writer for that part of the world, not affected by the insanities of Fascism or Communism. Bad guys always hated him. I listened to my mother (once) and read him in Hungarian (she met him once in Southern California, in one of her literary circles) and thought it pretty good. It’s easier in English. He’s thoughtful, fluid, and a bit lean in his prose, with good characters, universally recognizable, but Hungarian. I will read this as I have his Embers, which I mentioned here.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/29/2007 8:37 PM
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Anbar province
Good news from Anbar prvince, according to a front page New York Times article: "Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/29/2007 8:32 PM
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Mitt’s Foreign Policy Vision
Well, it may be short on eloquence. But it’s full of good sense, on why we can’t let a possibly suicidal nation have nuclear weapons, on the demographic challenge of Islam, and on why we still have all the decisive advantages unless we do nothing. Some of Law-and-Order Fred’s writers should volunteer to make Romney’s prose more punchy and genuinely memorable.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/29/2007 8:36 AM
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