The Enlightened Despot

Jerry Taylor is a CATO fellow and a contributor to NRO’s the Corner. As libertarian types go, he’s about as Republican-friendly as you could ask for. He generally posts about issues on which he agrees with the party line and pipes down when he doesn’t. He doesn’t believe the science on man-made global warming is conclusive. But earlier today, he had the nerve to point out that talk radio is stupid. So, naturally, he’s being brutalized over there:

Rush has been on the air three hours a day, 15 hours a week for 20 years. If he’d left that many hostages to fortune in all those thousands of tapes, you’d think Jerry Taylor could find something a little more substantial to link to than a feeble New York Times story that isn’t about talk radio at all. Is this the level of research required for a Cato Institute study? C’mon, man, surely you could at least link to a George Soros-funded “Media Matters” laundry list of outrageous if ellipsis-heavy quotations (or “ransom-note racism”, as it’s known in the trade).

It reflects a bizarre set of priorities when an obscure think-tanker lazily endorses the liberal critique of American conservatism’s only mass outlet. I confess I don’t quite understand where The Corner’s going with this shtick. Perhaps my colleagues will enlighten me…

Take that you lazy, obscure think-tanker! At this point, I don’t think the National Review is serious enough to be worth saving. There are still a few serious, intelligent people working there, but at this point, I don’t know why they haven’t left.

UPDATE:

Bonus question: are there non-obscure think tanks or think-tankers? What would a mainstream think tank do, exactly? Does Christina Aguilera write policy papers on the merits of rocking the vote?

UPDATE 2:

Mark Steyn defends his first attack:

Insofar as I understand it, I thought the critique of conservative talk radio was that these fellows were too “harsh” and “mean-spirited” and “partisan”. So as evidence of what’s wrong Jerry Taylor approvingly cites two books called Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot. Sorry, I think that’s pathetic on its face, and an embarrassment to National Review.

Here’s what Taylor actually said:

Regarding my claim that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity often use “dodgy evidence“ to back their claims, I can only plead that on the rare occasions that I’ve listened, this is exactly what I have found. Sure, maybe I just happen to listen in when they go off the rails . . . but I doubt it. Regardless, if you want chapter and verse on that score, you can’t do better than Al Franken’s two books on this subject (Lying Liars and Rush Limbaugh). Now, I know that this will double my hate mail, but the fact is that Mr. Senator-Elect is often spot-on regarding the facts when he goes after these guys.

Taylor says that Franken’s books provide evidence that Rush and Hannity have lied or twisted facts, without saying anything nice about Franken or even endorsing the books. Steyn’s response: Franken is a hypocritical jerk! Stop talking about facts! They’re pathetic! And a disgrace to the National Review!

Via The Corner, funnily enough, here’s a simple online logic test. If you can’t score 100% on this, do the reading: if everyone understood these things, The Corner would have to fire a lot of people.

K-Lo has been denied press credentials for the innauguration:

Here is my press-credentials-DENIED e-mail notice from the inaugural committee:

Thank you for applying for media seating for the 2009 Inaugural Swearing-In Ceremony.   Due to unprecedented demand for the limited number of seats, we are unable to accommodate your request for seating on the Capitol grounds.

While tickets are required for seating within the interior perimeter of the Capitol, the Inaugural Ceremony can be viewed without tickets from the National Mall, where video screens and speakers will be placed to convey the sound and images.

Your humble correspondent is headed for that interior perimeter - though, I must admit, not on the strength of press credentials. Still, it feels good.

And by a wide margin. I quote in full:

Timing Is Everything

from *The Corner* on National Review Online by John J. Miller

I have no opinion about the merits of this report from the Cato Institute, but the timing isn’t exactly propitious: THE BENEFITS OF PORT LIBERALIZATION: A CASE STUDY FROM INDIA

That’s about as dark as humor gets, but I freely confess to laughing long and hard.

Over at the Corner, in response to Andrew Sullivan’s beef with socialized medicine, Jim Manzi utters treason:

I know a lot of readers here have a big problem with Andrew, but ask yourself a practical question: Shouldn’t you, at a minimum, want a tactical alliance with somebody who believes this?

I’m not trying to personalize this, but am just trying to use this as an illustration of a broader point. Politics should not define our lives, and consequently, it’s not healthy to look to politics for your soulmates. Think of it as finding a team of people at work who can accomplish practical goals together. Somebody hurt your feelings? You don’t agree with the guy about gay marriage? Whatever. Unless it’s an extreme case, just get over it, and get on with the job at hand.

If you think of it this way, why wouldn’t you go out of your way to try to find areas of commonality and pursue them in the public square, rather than emphasize differences? There’s a simple term for a coalition built in this way - a majority.

Unfortunately, Manzi did not put the sentence about Andrew merely being an example of a broader point in all capitals and italics; as a result, some folks over there are losing their cool. I’m not in the least bit interested in the resulting debate over Andrew’s moral worth, the ups and downs of his relationship with Jonah Goldberg, etc. If you are, you can read this, this, and, no doubt, about 60 more posts to come - they really, really hate that guy.

But the broader issue Manzi is trying to talk about is interesting. As I’ve said before, I find all talk of where conservativism is heading, what conservativism really is, etc. to be a waste of time. But political parties, unlike conservativism, exist, and they need to have platforms for which a good percentage of the population will vote. Leaving aside Andrew’s personality, the NRO crowd has been pretty dismissive of his ideology as one their party needs to appeal to, airing rhetorical questions like: “Does anyone seriously still think this guy is a conservative?”

And the answer to that is yes people still think that, and yes those people are correct. The man doesn’t believe in progressive fucking taxation! Wars in Iraq come and go, but taxes are forever. The GOP simply can’t afford to throw away votes from people far to the right of them on tax policy.

I don’t think this is a deal-breaker for their short-term viability. Obama won big, but he didn’t win that big. Had the economy been better, the war been less disastrous, and Bush less detested, the Republicans would have been in this thing. Assuming they get the crazies in line, the economy, now safely in Democratic hands, could make them viable again four years from now. They can’t win as the Party of Palin, but they might have a shot as the Party That Includes Palin but Doesn’t Like to Talk About Her.

In the longer term, though, they really need the Sullivans of the world. Well, the kind that can actually vote, anyway. The demographics of the Proposition 8 vote showed what should already be obvious: hating gay people is slowly going the way of the buffalo. Old people are very into it; young people don’t see the point. As much as has been made of black homophobia, age is really the salient metric here. The percentage of black people in this country will hold fairly steady, while old people keep dying and young people keep turning 18. There’s no stopping this - that’s just what old and young people do, respectively.

What that means is that you’re going to have more and more Andrew Sullivans running around, and fewer and fewer Jess Helmses, and today’s Republican platform just won’t be electable. Talk about jettisoning social conservatives altogether is wishful thinking; it would be nice if that were the smart play, since social conservatives are a real downer, but it’s just not the case. But they do need to be shoved back into the shadows to some extent. There’s no reason this shouldn’t be possible. In the Reagan/Bush v1.0 years, they were humored whenever possible, but they didn’t run the show. And honestly, who else are they going to vote for?

With all the gloominess in the news today, it’s nice to know the guys at The Corner are still doing what they love: lying about things. In a post predicting that Obama will co-opt all of Bush’s terrific policies and rebrand them to rave reviews from the media, VDH says the following:

FISA and wire-intercepts of terrorist communications in the pre-Obama president months were once derided as more of Ashcroft-Bush stomping on the Constitution — except that now ABC News reports that, in fact, US intelligence agencies supplied India with general knowledge of the rough time period, place, and perhaps even method of terrorist attack. Are we to believe that such newfound capability to warn a country 7000 miles away about terrorist infiltration on its borders would be of no utility here at home?

I think in response what we will see is that insidiously, bit by bit, Obama and the Obama-brand press will begin to drop the shrill rhetoric about destroying constitutional liberties, and replace it with the vocabulary of ambiguity (e.g., try “complex,” “no easy answers”, “problematic”, etc.).

This is just flat out dishonest. No one has ever argued that we should just give up on intelligence altogether. Of course, no one has reported that we warned them based on information gained from warantless domestic wiretaps, and no one is going to report that, because it didn’t happen.

As far as I can tell, Hanson isn’t claiming something quite that crazy. Instead, he’s saying that we have this shiny new system for finding stuff out that is doing great work abroad (well, something seems to have gone wrong in this particular case, but still…) and we’d love to use it at home but the whiny Democrats won’t let us. But no part of this is in any way true. There is nothing ‘newfound’ about our capability to warn a country 7,000 miles away about things going on there. That’s called foreign intelligence, and we’ve always done it. Nor is there anything revolutionary about doing the same sort of thing at home. That’s called domestic intelligence, and we’ve always done that too.

What is at issue is something far more specific: warantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Some people think it’s a vital source of intel. Other people think it isn’t worth the loss of privacy rights. There is a serious debate to be had there (though the former group of people are on the wrong side of that debate, and anyway it’s illegal). But there is nothing at all serious about pointing to the existence of intelligence gathering as evidence one way or the other. It doesn’t even begin to bear on the question at issue. It is dishonest drivel, and that is the M.O. of the National Review these days.

As proof that I am part of the problem on this issue, I submit that I feel that the most interesting thing about the probable regime change in Canada is just how little interest Americans have shown in it thus far. Sure, Canada is goofy, but we only have two neighbors; you’d think we’d pay attention to who runs them. Yet all of the following stories are receiving more attention in the American media right now, as measured by the headlines on my Google News home page:

1.) The Hillary appointment, which everyone but me knew was coming over a week ago.

2.) Plaxico Burress has been charged with shooting himself in the foot. The shooting is old news by now, but the charge is new. The case against him seems pretty air-tight, but I suspect Suge Knight.

3.) Post-Thanksgiving-Weekend shopping was up from last year’s levels.

4.) Post-Thanksgiving-Weekend shopping was down from last year’s levels.

5.) Those horrible things really did just happen in Mumbai. The news here isn’t really news, as such, but this is the one issue that actually merits the attention it’s getting.

6.) Colleges continue to play football games against each other.

I like making fun of Canada as much as the next guy, but - especially with a president-elect and a secretary-of-state-in-waiting who spent primary season yelling at each other about NAFTA - we might want to take major shifts in their political situation slightly more seriously.

Mark Steyn - one of them, so he would know - has a summary:

what David Frum calls “the Harper government“* is about to fall, and the fellow set to replace him as Prime Minister is the October flopperoo Dion, reborn as leader of a freakshow coalition of Canada’s three opposition parties - the soft left, the hard left and the separatist left, all of whom have figured out that what they have in common (unbounded love of big government) is bigger than what divides them. Which is true. Quebec separatism is mostly one almighty bluff, a giant racket by which the francophone minority screws out of English Canada a hugely disproportionate share of the spoils. The Bloc Quebecois are separatists who have no interest in separating: no matter how wide you open the stable door, the flea-bitten old nag refuses to bolt. Granted all that, it’s weird to see the Liberals, until recently the most electorally successful party in the western world, reduced to climbing into bed with separatists and socialists.

I never said it was an invective-free summary.

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.

In the past, I’ve criticized Mark Steyn for his bigotry, so I think it’s only fair to point out that this is a pretty terrific bit of racist humor:

As NR’s in-house demography bore, I thought it worth a couple of updates on the biggest story of our time, the one that will determine the shape of the mid-21st century. From The Guardian:

Japan’s workers are being urged to switch off their laptops, go home early and use what little energy they have left on procreation, in the country’s latest attempt to avert demographic disaster…

A recent survey of married couples under 50 found that more than a third had not had sex in the previous month.

Many couples said they didn’t have the energy for sex, while others said they found it boring.

Well, it’s no karaoke night.

Well played, sir.

As to the substance of the post, I’ve always found the idea that people stop having sex when they get married too depressing to think about, so I have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

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.

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.

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.

Cliff May loses his cool:

With a veto-proof Senate majority, what would stop an Obama administration from granting statehood to Washington, DC (that was among Bill Clinton’s campaign promises long ago) which would guarantee two more Democratic US Senators pretty much forever?

What would prevent immigration policy from favoring immigrants who will vote Democratic?

And isn’t the governor of Virginia among those already pushing to allow felons to vote — and which party do you think most will vote for?

Out of all this and more, you can’t see a permanent Democratic majority shaping up in the House and Senate?

No, no I can’t.

The incomparable KJL:

Does the selloff on Wall Street have anything to do with the increasing likelihood that Obama will be our next president? Note that the two trends — the financial meltdown, despite passage of the bailout, and the solidification of Obama’s lead — are coinciding.  At a minimum, the market’s behavior is not a vote of confidence in an Obama presidency.

Admittedly she is posting a letter from a reader, but still.