The Enlightened Despot

Pat Ruffini is a pretty awful person, as has been mentioned in this space before. But he is what he is, and proud of it. When thinking about the GOP’s best political response to the financial crisis, he doesn’t even pretend to actually care about the economy itself:

The GOP’s number one priority politically is to set into motion a series of events that will make Obama look more ineffective, partisan, and unpopular than he is today. Playing hard-to-get on the stimulus is one way to do it. And we need to set the stage for a unified and effective Republican opposition that will actually fight from top to bottom.

Go on with your bad self, Patrick.

(h/t Sullivan)

K-Lo reports Michael Totten’s reaction to the shoe-throwing incident:

The Bush shoe incident made me laugh slightly. Only because of the U.S. was an Iraqi journalist allowed to throw that shoe. On some level, he knows that. Tellingly, Prime Minister Maliki stepped in the way to protect the president, and many Iraqis in the room apologized for the offense.

I have briefly met many Iraqi journalists in Baghdad. They seem like decent people, for the most part, and are not as shifty as many other civilians I encounter.

Shifty? Shifty? In all fairness, Totten goes on to praise the Iraqi press:

In the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, where journalists are credentialed by the U.S. Army, is a poster showing the faces of all the journalists killed in Iraq last year. There are dozens of faces on that poster, and almost every single one of them is Iraqi. Iraqi journalists are very brave, much braver than I am, and I’d hate to see Americans get the wrong idea about these people from one lousy incident.

That’s lovely, but it makes what comes before even more bizarre. He’d hate “one lousy incident” to force Americans to lose sight of the fact that these reporters aren’t all that shifty, on an Iraqi-adjusted scale? Totten is a field reporter. He’s won awards for his coverage of Iraq on the ground. He’s been embedded with both the Army and the Marine Corps. The whole point of him is that he’s supposed to have some privilged insight into the situation in Iraq, based on the connections he has formed with people over there. Even if he hated every last Iraqi man, woman, and child, you’d think he’d have a somewhat politic way of expressing that fact, given that interacting with them is his job. So he praises their press corps for being reasonably unshifty. Shifty!

The other day, I wrote about what struck me as a pretty astonishingly dishonest portrayal by Victor Davis Hanson of Obama as secretly appropriating Bush policies he’d formerly condemned. The specifics aren’t worth getting back into, but here was VDH’s take-away lesson:

And I suppose that, given the Obama appointments, Iraq is now no longer an open sore, and of no utility in fighting radical Islam, but quietly evolving into a success better turned over to the Petraeus/Iraq timetable. And I think there will be both no more campaign-trail chest-thumping about going into Pakistan (lest India finds that a useful exemplar), and quiet compliance with existing stealthy Predator strikes against bin Laden followers in Waziristan.

All this is very American: Like taking the same old laundry detergent, sprinkling in a few new inert green crystals, and putting it in a more eye-catching redesigned box, with “New and Improved” (rather than ‘hope’ and ‘change’) spashed in bold cursive across its top.

Bush’s policies, obviously, are far too awesome to abandon. All they need is a little rebranding. I suspect this is mostly hedging; for the most part, the Cornerites of the world will actually be attacking Obama’s policies, not explaining that he doesn’t deserve the credit for how terrific they are. There’s a tanking economy that needs a scapegoat, after all, and signs are not pointing towards a safe and peaceful world any time soon.

Still, on some issues at least, Hanson’s strategy appears to have legs. Here’s Andy McCarthy a few days ago:

In any event, today the Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will be staying on in the new administration, says, yes, we’d love to close Gitmo yesterday, indeed shutting it down remains a “high priority,” but, whaddya know, it may take a while to get that done.  Why?  “Mr. Gates said the Democratic-controlled Congress would need to craft legislation resolving legal issues before the prison could be closed. Specifically, he said the bill would have to bar freed prisoners from seeking asylum in the U.S.”

…

Moreover, regarding this new Gates/Obama proposal that the Democrat-controlled Congress enact some legislation to bar prisoners freed by the courts from seeking asylum in the United States, Attorney General Michael Mukasey made precisely this plea to the Pelosi/Reid rabble some four months ago — i.e., shortly after the Supreme Court set disaster in motion with its Boumediene decision that gave our alien enemies the constitutional right to petition our courts for their release.  In this piece, I recounted AG Mukasey’s proposal and — speaking of deaf ears — the reaction to it by leading Democrats.

Naturally, now that it’s Obama rather than Bush doing the asking, there will surely be action — probably even quick action (though, as Obama will remember and come to rue, many in the hard Left from which he comes don’t mind the prospect of terrorists being freed and would prefer the more detainee-friendly procedures that courts are likely to make up on their own if Congress continues sitting on its hands).

It all underscores a reality that grates even though that we’ve long understood it:  Democrats were never going to get serious about the war until they owned it.  Be prepared for all sorts of things that were “constitution-shredding” for the last seven years to transform before our very eyes into “smart, effective counterterrorism.”

Now, it may be the case that Pelosi et al didn’t respond to this issue responsibly - I don’t know. But there is absolutely nothing inconsistent between believing that a policy was very wrong and believing that getting rid of it without a lot of ugly side-effects is difficult. McCarthy is being disingenuous in pretending not to recognize this distinction. His closing point - more or less identical to Hanson’s - is a complete non-sequitur - his quotation marks notwithstanding, no one on the Obama team is calling the practice of keeping prisoners locked up indefinitely in Cuba outside the reach of law “smart, effective counterterrorism.” There are voices pointing out that figuring out what to do with them now that we have them there is a serious problem. But GITMO was not conceived as a solution for what to do with all the detainees in GITMO, so this hardly qualifies as a defense of the place.

This line of attack is an area in which the crazy left will be of invaluable help to the crazy right. Take the withdrawl timetable: even during the primaries, Obama couldn’t stop repeating his line about being as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. When the general election rolled around, he “tacked to the center” by, basically, adding on “Oh, and I actually mean that. Really. I’m not just saying it.” The Daily Kos cried treason. To those guys, ‘facts on the ground’ are weasel words, so admitting that he wouldn’t bring the troops back with his eyes closed was a betrayal.

Now that he’s actually president, this is terrific fodder for the right. Any practical considerations that slow down our withdrawl from Iraq, the shutting of Guantanamo, the reform of the CIA, etc. will be offered up as proof that even Obama recognizes that Bush was right. That he won’t be continuing Bush’s policies or doing anything other than what he said he would do will be immaterial. The far right can simply point to statements from the far left screaming about how such behavior constitutes a reversal on Obama’s part. And if Kos and K-Lo agree, they must be right. Right?

Mark Krikorian, charming as ever:

Here’s the WaPo subhead for a story on Bobby Jindal’s presidential prospects:

Jindal May Prove To be Republicans’ Version of Obama

What? You mean Jindal’s a post-American political radical who’s never held a real job and was catapulted to political success because of his race? Because I thought he was a sober patriot, rooted in his native Louisiana, who’s been successfully handling significant executive responsibilities since he was 25. Maybe that’s some other guy I’m thinking of.

Awwww.

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on the (inane) debate about why Obama is appointing Clintonians:

I’ve collated the dozens of articles from liberal thinkers that explain why so far Obama—the candidate of hope and change, and cleaning out the entrenched status quo that so warps our D.C. politics and ensures stasis in our policies—has surrounded himself either with Clintonites, outright Bush people or those who worked closely with them, and centrists of ambiguous politics. The explanations are quite creative and run the gamut:

1) Whom else might a Democrat pick, given that the Carterites are now 28 years out of office, and team Clinton the only experienced circle of liberals still around (and given that Democrats have only been in the executive branch for 8 out of the last 28 years)?

2) This is part of Obama’s brilliant grand strategy. Just wait and see how Machiavellian it works out: By coopting power-hungry centrist pros to enact HIS “progressive” policies, he can advance a leftist agenda much more effectively and fend off gratuitous attacks from the right-wing attack machine.

3) Review what Obama actually promised and you will learn he actually ran a centrist campaign; the problem is that too many liberals simply projected their own agendas on him, and saw what they wished rather than what was there.

4) These are not centrists at all. Gates was at heart a sort of anti-Bush maverick. Hillary and others are liberals that used to be the bane of right-wingers. The new economic team wants to assume government control of essential industries.

5) This is just a small sampling of appointments; wait until you see the U.N. rep, NEA, NEH, key figures at State and Justice. By picking bumper-sticker centrists at the figuratively top spots, he can appoint real progressives under the radar at the bread and butter posts where real policies happen.

I’m fairly confident that Hanson belongs to Lowry’s dishonest and crazy faction at NRO, rather than K-Lo’s actually-that-stupid faction* or Manzi’s (ever smaller) deeply crazy but mostly honest and intelligent faction. These are generally the least interesting people to read, since they are simply campaigning for the Republican Party, rather than actually thinking and writing about things.

Here, I think, he has slipped up. Several of those points are put fairly well and are actually true. One is dead on, three is right in some respects, and we’ll see if two proves to be right in others. Seeing as Hanson doesn’t bother to share with us why all of this is nonsense, he probably should have butchered them a little more. In any case, here’s his analysis:

Note that the most obvious and embarrassing explanation is taboo and blasphemous: That Obama is a masterful politician who never has had any real ideology or persona other than his own diversity story and history, youth, and charisma that together allow him to be whatever is politically expedient at the time.

It’s so simple! But the truth is that most of the people actually supporting Obama were pointing out that many of his views were fairly moderate all along. So who ever said he was extremely liberal? Well, for one, there’s this guy called Victor Davis Hanson:

Actually, I think Mark, myself and others “in the gang” would like nothing better than for the Wright mess to die, so that Obama could drop the ‘hope and change’ generalities, and instead get serious, present his agenda to the public, and thus make the case to the electorate why and how the Senate’s most liberal member should be the first Northern Democratic candidate to win the Presidency in almost a half-century.

Republicans just wouldn’t shut up about that meaningless ‘most liberal’ rating (more on why I am filled with disdain for all such rating systems another time). Obama tried to assure everyone that he was no such thing. So it’s hard to take them seriously now when they cry false advertising.

Quite a neat trick for a Republican these days:

Despite a protest or two, John Boehner was just voted majority leader again. Good luck to the guys and gals in the house. This will be a tough time for some real opportunities to show leadership.

Phottogaffe aside, I’m pretty sure this would have provoked more than a protest or two. Perhaps Ms. Lopez was reporting what would have happened in a world in which Sarah Palin - whom “Thomas Jefferson would be proud to meet” - had been at the top of the ticket.

We haven’t said anything about David Frum’s departure from NR here, since we have been pretty consistently clear about what we think of that outfit. Along with the departure of Christopher Buckley and Kathleen Parker, this move has prompted a lot of rumbling about the demise of the National Review.

Sure, it’s getting worse, but this seems a bit arbitrary to me. Taken as a whole, it had long since lost any claim to seriousness, but even now, there are still a few people who are intelligent and honest, even if they tend to scare me (think Jim Manzi). So it’s getting a little worse, but, like, whatever.

It does seem to me though, that there will be more and more of a shift from dishonest partisans to people like K-Lo who are actually this stupid, which could undermine the value of NR to the Republican Party. If you nominate Sarah Palin to be your VP candidate, it’s good to have people in the media who will lie and say they think she is a terrific choice. It’s much less good to have idiots who actually believe that pushing her 2012 candidacy, as she is an unelectable joke.

George Packer dismembers Bill Kristol.

Well, perhaps that had nothing to do with it. I find it very difficult to say with any certainty why the market behaves as it does over a short period of time. This puts me in the minority. The WSJ, for instance, recently ran an editorial laying out a theory already popular with many of our friends at the Corner:

No President-elect in the postwar era has been greeted with a more audible hiss from Wall Street. The Dow has lost 1,342 points, or about 14%, since the election, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hitting similar skids. The Dow fell another 4.7% yesterday.

…

But there’s little doubt that uncertainty, and some fear, over Barack Obama’s economic agenda is also contributing to the downdraft.

Little doubt? Jonathan Chait seems to have quite a lot of doubt, gloating as the Dow soared today. No doubt Chait is largely joking, but there have certainly been plenty of lefties giving Obama credit for every silver lining they can find in the dark economic clouds, while sub-prime morgages are rapidly being reduced to a minor contributing factor in the conservative account of the financial crisis Obama has brought down on all of our heads.

These bits of market analysis are absurd, but no more so than what we hear about the markets every day of the year. People are up in arms over attributing market gains or losses to Obama beacuse a new president-elect is something about which people get up in arms, not because those attributions are any less grounded than usual. Headlines following the same formula as the one above this post are a regular feature of the daily news. But the idea that the day’s trading can usefully be explained as the effect of a simply stated cause immediately obvious to reporters is ludicrous. It’s probably true that, from time to time, some easily observed event occurs whose effect on the market is sufficiently dramatic to make all other factors relatively uninteresting in accounting for market movement over a very short period, but, for the most part, media outlets are simply looking at whether the markets did well or poorly, then running with the most recent news event that seems most conducive to that outcome, and voila. There may be some utility to this sort of analysis, but the ubiquitous practice of presenting it as fact (in headlines!) is unfortunate.

There is a lot of outrage out there about Ralph Nader’s use of the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’. A few fringey lefties are upset that Ralph is being falsely accused of calling Obama an Uncle Tom, when what he really did was say that the big question facing us is whether Obama will prove to be an Uncle Tom. That’s a bizarre complaint, since even Fox News honestly reported the comments in context and gave Nader a chance to recant, which he roundly rejected:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IshiClQqCM&hl=en&fs=1]

Nader, clearly, is a nasty human being, and the Fox News hack, the faux-outraged conservatives, the habitually-outraged liberals, and the deranged Nader-defenders are all letting him off easy by focusing on the words ‘Uncle Tom’. Smith asks him if he wishes he’d “used a phrase other than ‘Uncle Tom’”, as if Nader’s problem was simply word choice. But word choice isn’t the problem here at all. If Nader had used words that people didn’t like to argue a legitimate point, I would be unhappily defending him. But Nader was using the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’ because it was the easiest way to express an ugly, racist sentiment, namely that Obama has more of a responsibility to sign on to Nader’s wackjob agenda than previous presidents because he is black. This is something he has said in the past:

Asked to clarify whether he thought Obama does try to “talk white,” Nader said: “Of course.

“I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas, and have a very detailed platform about how the poor is going to be defended by the law, is going to be protected by the law, and is going to be liberated by the law,” Nader said. “Haven’t heard a thing.”

Nader has some unpopular ideas, and he isn’t afraid to call black people who disagree with them race traitors. Even if his ideas weren’t batshit crazy, that would be disgusting. Focusing on the words he uses to express that bile is silly.

The most notable thing about that article is that the author thinks that ‘epistemology’ refers to theories of truth. This is false, on any workable theory of truth; Wikipedia’s understanding of what ‘epistemology’ means is correct. That is enough to convince me the article is not worth reading.

From K-Lo’s debate coverage, after the Corner crashed (again):

I am so sorry. (Again.) We were slammed with traffic again tonight. (I promise I resign – because I may not survive the day — if this happens Election Day.)

There is only one reasonable response to this. Hit the corner on E-Day, hit it often, hit it hard. Tell your friends.

As we’ve noted before, the Corner has done an excellent job covering the story no one else dares to touch: Mexican culpability for our current economic troubles. Until now, however, they’d only hinted at the related, and perhaps even more important, questions we all have about this crisis: to what extent is gay sex to blame, and why hasn’t Mark Steyn weighed in on this? Well, better late than never:

Last week in this space, I made a jocular reference to a global economy ’so vulnerable that only the stalwart action of Barney Frank stands between it and ten years of soup kitchens’. I tittered too soon. It turns out the entire planetary meltdown is due to Congressman Frank’s sex life: Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s. So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions… Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie… Frank met Moses in 1987, the same year he became the first openly gay member of Congress. ‘I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus,’ Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. ‘On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.’ The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses ‘helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs.’ Critics say such programs led to the mortgage meltdown that prompted last month’s government takeover of Fannie Mae and its financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad mortgages throughout the private financial sector… Three years later, President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank. Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting the seeds of today’s economic crisis. Perhaps not the most felicitous way of putting it.

This charming piece of analysis was soon followed by this:

(more…)

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who noticed Krikorian on Latinos and the financial meltdown. Kossacks are up in arms, and he has a retraction:

Media Matters and Kos have their knickers in a twist about my ‘Cause and Effect’ posting yesterday, and they actually have a point. It should have been titled something more like ‘Misplaced Priorities,’ because the point was not that gay or Hispanic employees caused WaMu to fail, but rather the irony that even as the bank was on the verge of death due to the diversity-driven mortgage meltdown, it was still touting its diversity.

That’s actually a perfectly fair position. But as much as I hate to align myself with the Kos crowd about anything, the problem isn’t that he slipped up in titling his post. The problem is that he - and many other anti-immigration advocates - consistently rely on Mexican baiting to sell their position.

If you want to oppose immigration, I disagree, but I can see your point. If you want to make off color remarks about Mexicans, I’m okay with that, insofar as I’m okay with off color remarks about everything. But if you’re disguising xenophobia with a thin veneer of humor to sell your social policies, that’s ugly. And that’s pretty clearly what’s going on here.

UPDATE 9/27 2:04PM: I notice I didn’t read Krikorian’s second post carefully enough. I’m not sure exactly what he’s driving at with the phrase ‘the diversity-driven mortgage meltdown’, but it’s likely xenophobic nonsense. Still, it’s a lot better than the initial post.

In the midst of a crisis this size, it’s easy to lose sight of the things that really matter. That’s why it’s heartwarming to see that - even as he blogs about Wall Street - Mark Krikorian hasn’t forgotten who he is: a guy who, whatever the economic climate, in good times and in bad, really, really hates Mexicans:

Cause and Effect? [Mark Krikorian]

I really thought this was a joke, but it’s not. WaMu’s final press release, before it sank beneath the waves (h/t Sailer):

WaMu Recognized as Top Diverse Employer—Again

Company ranks in top ten of Hispanic Business’ Diversity Elite and earns perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index SEATTLE, WA (September 24, 2008) – Washington Mutual, Inc. (NYSE:WM), one of the nation’s leading banks for consumers and small businesses, has once again been recognized as a top employer by Hispanic Business magazine and the Human Rights Campaign.

One of the strangest effects of the economic crisis has been its injection of sporadic bouts of intellectual honesty into the folks at the discourse at the National Review. Almost no one over there wants anything to do with W’s version of the bailout. Some of them have been pretty skeptical of McCain, and K-Lo even went through a phase of thinking Obama looked better than McCain on the campaign-suspension issue. They all panned McCain’s posturing over firing Cox. Mark Krikorian has returned to his former position of refusing to vote for a man who, let’s face it, has never displayed a healthy hatred of Mexicans.

But not everyone has completely lost their cool:

Gimmick? No. Hell No. [Michael Ledeen]

I’m with Newt. I think we sometimes get so involved with inside baseball that it becomes impossible to see real leadership. McCain is right: if this crisis is as grave as most everyone says, it should be the only thing, not just the most important thing for those who would be president.

It’s hard to go wrong with a post that begins: “I’m with Newt.”

(h/t PM Dawn)