PMC Commentary

"The Interview": still on my Christmas list

I can't speak for the metropolitan effete, but those at the medium-market multiplex with whom I stood shoulder-to-shoulder yesterday afternoon weren't the least bit cowered by Mr. Kim. Christmas Day releases were selling out--including, I assume, The Interview--sending theatregoers to their respective Plan Bs. Pop-culture consumerism (the culturally vulgar to which I haughtily referred yesterday) was roaring--defiantly, or maybe just obliviously.  

This came as no surprise. My only surprise was that I found my mildly agoraphobic self among the throng. My daughter adores attending films with audiences the size of Cecil B. DeMille casts, so off we went. Since she wasn't particularly keen on seeing Rogen-Franco's "goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce," as the NYT's A.O. Scott puts it, "propelled ... by the usual spectacle of male sexual, emotional and existential confusion," I had a choice: another agonizing installment of the Hunger Games franchise, or Into the Woods. Now I ask you, which would you choose? Right.

It had just enough Meryl Streep, but much too little of Johnny Depp--some of which I actually saw between naps in the neck-craning second row, after consuming my Christmas dinner of a mustered hotdog and smuggled cookies and cashews.

I still wish to throw $8 or $10 or whatever it is at The Interview, and I will, but I'll probably do it the way Mr. Scott did it: He patriotically suffered the film on easily escapable YouTube. Or perhaps I'll just wait till the theatre crowds thin out. Which is the point of this post. From what I could see yesterday, American moviegoers aren't the skittish type--unlike American capitalists.

 

Merry Christmas

Well, Christmas survived another year, notwithstanding certain unAmerican, atheistic Jacobins' efforts to kill it. I'd like to think this holiday's plucky resistance to diabolical social democracy will, once and for all, quiet the fears and comfort the sensitivities of those virtuous O'Reillys and Palins, though something tells me the poor dears will unravel again in 10 or 11 months. It pays for all their Christmas gifts, I guess.

Speaking of which, from my daughter I received a beautiful volume of Shakespeare's works--annotated!--and (inside joke) an ascot. Actually it's not inside-ish enough to keep concealed. She always kids me for wanting to be a first-class cultural snob, but yea, verily, I haven't the material resources to play the role properly. But now, by God, I can read my Shakespeare ascotted, so to speak, as, on occasion, I bellow deprecations of the vulgar, Henry Higgins-like.

As for reciprocity, I gave my daughter perhaps the smallest diamond (it did come with a ring) known to gemologists; they searched far, wide, and heroically yonder for this pebble. But she loves it. I also gave her an inscrutable tea pot and cup (to aid in her battle against the scourge of soda-drinking during her two-year sentence of braces). Neither of us is a "loose" tea drinker, so perhaps that explains my use of "inscrutable." Our first attempt at tea-making was a bit of a mess.

Anyway, a most pleasant day. I hope yours is the same. Merry Christmas.

 

A rewarding Christmas Eve for some of us political junkies

I tender thee tidings of a superb Christmas Eve. Santa is being quite good to some of us junkies. President Obama's job-approval rating is, after a sustained and irrational slide, on the upswing; Jim Webb's stock, too, is receiving some early, positive revaluation; and the Clinton camp remains cursed by its Entitlement Plague pods of '08.

Obama's approval rating is still snorkeling, which, for a president opposed by a pixilated herd of congressional crackpots is unrelentingly disappointing. Yet the most recent CNN/ORC poll shows his rating at a "20-month high," 48 percent. The bump is probably due to the wrong reason--a global glut of oil, rather than healthy GDPs, lower unemployment and a soaring equity market--but what the hell. Whenever popular ignorance blesses the approximately righteous, one doesn't go out of one's way to correct it.

My other holiday gift came wrapped in the brilliant Jacob Heilbrunn's op-ed in yesterday's NY Times. I say brilliant, because Mr. Heilbrunn agrees with humble your truly that "it isn’t really the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren who should worry the Clinton camp. It’s the former Virginia senator Jim Webb."

Dark horse candidates traditionally only get darker, but Webb is poised to make some real news and provide Hillary a formidable challenge. Her "interventionist foreign policy record," observes Heilbrunn, "leaves her politically vulnerable," and Webb--"a Vietnam War hero, former secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, novelist and opponent of endless wars in the Middle East"--is perfectly situated to exploit that vulnerability, just as the sitting president did in 2008. Handicappers would be prudent to watch Webb. He's a comer, and he won't be lurking in the dark for long.

And then there's this belatedly noted gift, proffered in the Washington Post earlier this month: "Clinton backers snicker a bit about Webb--one strategist called his Internet [exploratory committee] announcement a '14-minute hostage video.'" You gotta love that; and unquestionably the Sun Tzus of political warfare are amused. Perhaps self-woundingly greater than the Clinton camp's interventionist vulnerability is its irrepressible arrogance; its scattered, dimly lit advisory torches of insufferable superiority and morbid sense of entitlement. Keep snickering, ye children of territorial Clintonism--the most rookie mistake any political campaign can make, all over again.     

Yes, this year's is a Christmas Eve to the fare-thee-well. Thank you, Santa.

 

Sony careens and reverses

Today's statement coming from Michael Lynton, Sony's chief executive, is embarrassingly deceitful. I haven't yet read it online (otherwise I'd link to it), but I've seen excerpts on several cable news segments. In it, Lynton protests that Sony had never given up on releasing The Interview--and that is simply untrue.

Yes, theatre chains retreated from showing the film, but Sony was also preemptively explicit in its announcement that it was pulling the film's release--period--a profoundly superfluous act if no theatres were going to show it. Sony also made that announcement before exploring other avenues, likely because it didn't want to explore other, and possibly perilous, ones. It was only after North Korea's "victory lap" and President Obama's press conference last Friday, in which he charged Sony with having made "a mistake," that the studio's CEO became a determined champion of free artistic expression and a courageous, carefree foe of cyberthugs.

But, I accept that Lynton can't just say that. Corporate p.r.--every bit like government p.r.--prohibits the plain truth.

 

The WSJ editorial board faces a cruel decision

I can just imagine the next WSJ editorial headline (for one): "Doom, DOOM, DOOOOM! Goddammit That Man in the White House Is Destroying This Country." Or, as the NYT puts it:

The American economy grew last quarter at its fastest rate in more than a decade....

Economic output rose at an annual rate of 5 percent during the summer months.... The advance followed a second quarter where growth reached a rate of 4.6 percent....

The revision was led by an upswing in investment by businesses.... Higher consumer spending and a healthier trade balance also helped. The gain makes the third quarter the strongest since the summer of 2003.

Oh, and "the Dow Jones Industrial average [rose] above 18,000 for the first time."

So, either the delusional headlines will come, or conservative publications will do what they generally do in the agonizing face of good news: they'll go silent on that, and double-down on truly offensive absurdities, such as "Obama the cop-killer." My money is on the conventional approach.

 

How deeply crazy are Mitch McConnell's troubles?

How insanely chronic and thoroughly penetrating has Republican obstructionism become? Mitch answers.

As he prepares to guide Republicans out of the wilderness of the Senate minority, Senator Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader, knows his real problem is not corralling mavericks in his party like Senator Ted Cruz. It is persuading other Senate Republicans conditioned to voting no that it is time to vote yes.  

"One of my challenges is to try to convince some of my members that passing an appropriations bill is a good thing, not a bad thing," Mr. McConnell said.

This is important to underscore: McConnell's not talking about his radical Ted Cruzes here. He's addressing his party's "moderates"; he's talking about having to convince so-called mainstream conservative lawmakers to fund the friggin' government; he's confessing a huge challenge that just a few years ago would have been unimaginable--the herculean task of persuading a governing party to actually do some governing. The concept of even rudimentary governance is that foreign to them.

That's how insane, and internally penetrating, McConnell's problems have become. 

 

National identity and corruptive ideology

Sullivan engages the problem of identity:

For me, America has always been about freedom. You can criticize this country all you want, and of course it has its flaws. But that it gives countless millions a new chance at life, that it embraces hard work and new voices, that it values experimentation and exploration, that it churns with an individualism and a vibrancy found almost nowhere else is indisputable. It’s why I fell in love with America almost as soon as I got here....

[Yet b]ecoming or being an American seems to me to be to embrace a struggle, not to bask in perfection.

In that final line, Sullivan subdivides identity by also engaging our essential left-right split, while making his allegiance clear. From the antebellum age of reform--abolitionism, women's suffrage, universal education--to the civil rights movement, feminism and its reassertive support of public education (to name, obviously, just a few sociopolitical movements), the American left has always demonstrated its love of country through its struggles to improve it. The American right--from Calhounism to Bob Taftism to Palinism--has instead basked in perfection; indeed, a kind of absolute perfection--and it brooks no dissent.

Put another way, for the American right, it's been a long road from Edmund Burke. In a Foreign Affairs review of a just-released book on modern conservatism's "founder" (an appellation the book's author is at variance with), it is noted, in its insightful conclusion, that "Almost any theory, even those espoused by self-proclaimed conservatives, can be held in an absolutistic way such that it poses a threat to institutional and political stability." And that, of course, defines our most recent iteration of modern conservatism to a t.

It--the "theory," conservatism--has become what Burke disdained most: an absolutistic grab bag of ideology, utterly removed from experience. The American right has walled itself off from historical America and effectively disabled its powers of rational thought, yielding its well-known "epistemic closure." And that's how the American right now manages to defend the enormously indefensible--that which lies at the heart of Sullivan's thoughts on national identity: vastly unAmerican torture.

 

The C.B.O., R.I.P.

Dave Weigel reports that the sitting director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, is on his way to involuntary retirement next year, courtesy Republican leaders who prefer budget-office directors who majored in necromancy, not economics.

What Republicans want in Elmendorf's place is a pliable sorcerer who practices the subspecialty of "dynamic scoring"--which means that heaps, piles and reams of faith-based, pseudoconservative fantasies such as Paul Ryan's magic-asterisk budgets will add up.

In future CBO forecasts, more tax cuts will result in yet-discovered oceans of government revenue; block-granting Medicaid and voucherizing Medicare will yield miraculous pools of compassion, efficiency and universality; and troublesome, long-term discretionary spending will simply evaporate through the immense power of wishful, reactionary thinking. 

In short, at some point next year the CBO's happy forecasts will begin sounding like Joseph Goebbels' radio updates on the Wehrmacht's Eastern front progress, post-Stalingrad. While the CBO's reports may be phony, its war on reality won't be.

 

North Korea: now officially in the Stone Age

Dang these infernal coincidences!

North Korea’s already tenuous links to the Internet went completely dark on Monday after days of instability, in what Internet monitors described as one of the worst North Korean network failures in years.

The loss of service came just days after President Obama pledged that the United States would launch a "proportional response" to the recent attacks on Sony Pictures.

According to Internet "security experts," this actually could be a coincidence: "North Korea," they say, "could be preemptively taking its systems offline to prepare for an attack."

Odds are, though, Kim Jong-un's nightmare regime is suffering from a US-launched DDoS attack, with which I am all too familiar. Typepad, and therefore this site, were similarly and repeatedly assaulted last spring. Each attack required days to overcome, as you may recall, and I'd rather forget.

Welcome to the future.

 

How's that hopey-changey thing working for Chuck?

An MTP update:

On Sunday, September 7, a slimmed-down and newly tanned [Chuck] Todd interviewed President Obama for his first show as moderator. The program attracted its largest audience in six months, earning NBC a hard-fought ratings win. The following week, Meet the Press fell back to third place. It hasn’t returned to the top since.

When I watch MTP, what baffles the hell out of me is why Todd bounces back and forth from interview table to commentator panel. It's weird, and not a little disorienting. The show's producers have the poor man perambulating all over the set; one minute Chuck is enlightening the Beltway's lesser talking heads and the next minute he's yards away, under the interview spotlight, and in the background we espy the forsaken panel, wasting idly away in dimness. I always half-expect Chuck to crank his neck and shout a question at them.

Not that the question, as well as the answer, would be noteworthy. The Washingtonian reports that when NBC News hired Deborah Turness as president to shake things up for the sagging program,

[she] considered contemporary Sunday shows a snooze. Every week, they put the same talking heads on air to rehash the same stories that cable TV and the internet had been chewing on all week. Turness didn’t see much value in that.

Is she seeing any value in this?

Turness is left with two options only: Either make it a shouting freak show of the Crossfire breed or cancel MTP altogether. There is a third option: convert the show to a genuine public affairs program on which assorted public policies (and not political horseraces) are explored in depth by qualified interviewers and equally qualified interlocutors--and in which turning a profit is not the prime consideration (as network news divisions once honored themselves).

As I said, Turness has only two options.

 

The supremely contemptible Rudy Giuliani

Politicians don't come more contemptible than Rudy Giuliani. Yesterday, playing to a receptive Fox News audience, the former mayor essentially blamed President Obama for the murder of two NYC police officers, saying the killings were the predictable outcome of "four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police."

Given that you and I were subjected to four months of police-hating propaganda by Obama, I should think I'd remember it. At least some of it. Whether from a political, a law enforcement, or just a plain human point of view, police-hating would be an odd--and definitely memorable--angle for any U.S. president to play. But alas, my memory bank is empty. And there's nothing to draw on, of course, because Rudy Giuliani is a fabricating snake of a demagogic rabble-rouser.

How effortlessly his venom affects the already delirious Fox crowd. For years they've been told that this black president is somehow in cahoots with black liberationists, the Black Panthers, and all manner of "anti-colonial," white-hating black radicals. They've also been informed--relentlessly, and indeed emphatically for the past few weeks--that this black president is "lawless"; he's an illegitimate chief executive who's looking to upheave the very foundations of traditional America. Now this. It all fits and it's all there, in the record. You can look it up. Or, you can just ask Dinesh D'Souza--or Rudy Giuliani.

What's also odd is that NYC's police commissioner, Bill Bratton, was asked this morning on "Today" if he could recall a time when tensions had been this high. He said he could: "1970, when I first came into policing, my first ten years were around this type of tension." 1970--smack in the law-and-order era of the lily-white Nixon administration.

Wait, Barack Obama may have only been 9 years old at the time, but he was around. Hmmm.

  

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About that NYT editorial on torture and prosecutions

I wish the NY Times had been more explicit. This morning, in an editorial that is sure to spoil many a torturers' Christmas, the Times calls for a "full and independent" investigation (and thus the probable prosecution) of the Bush administration's war criminals, which, almost by definition, would include George W. Bush himself. Yet the editorial board chooses to finger W. in an oblique and peculiar way:

[H]ard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.

So an investigation/prosecution should include Dick Cheney et al, which is to say, Dick Cheney on down. But, are these secondary inclusions--that is, secondary to the investigation and prosecution of the criminal regime's chief executive, the one man with the ultimate say as to whether the United States would obey statutory and international law? That depends on how one reads the Times' passage, which is infuriatingly ambiguous. The first paragraph ends only with imagining "a criminal probe" of President Bush, while the second picks up with unmistakable imperatives, by name.

Readers would have been better served by a difficult imaging of a criminal probe of a former administration; to have been followed by a George W. Bush-led list. That would have left no question as to who should ultimately be prosecuted. The editorial's actual wording, though, leaves me with the sickening feeling that the Times meant to be vague--that in an otherwise bold editorial, it sort of chickened out.

***

note: I will, as they say, be away from my desk, till early afternoon. My daughter, poor kid, is getting her braces this morning--right before all the holiday meals. I, my moral support and my credit card will be accompanying her to the orthodontist.

 

Censorship throughout American history: liberal or conservative?

Today Douthat enjoys a holiday from historical context as he interprets Sony's capitulation to Pacific-Rim thugs as symptomatic of America's larger problem of liberalism's brutishly imposed illiberalism, meaning, of course, censorship and political correctness. It's everywhere, as Douthat knows and wants you to believe: "universities, Internet companies, the press and the film industry"--all perpetrators or victims (is there much difference?) of contemporary liberalism's "hypersensitivity" to offense, and thus tyrannical censorship. Douthat's condemnation, while sweeping, is conspicuously blinkered:

It would be far easier to live with this predictable liberalism if these institutions, so pious about their commitment to free expression, weren’t so quick to knuckle under to illiberalism in all its varied forms.

"We cannot have a society," President Obama said on Friday, when asked about the Sony hack, "where some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States."

In theory, that’s absolutely right. But in practice, Kim Jong-un has our culture’s number: Letting angry people impose a little censorship is just the way we live right now.

I share Douthat's abhorrence of political correctness. The cancellation, for instance, of university commencement speeches only because of a speaker's perhaps objectionable views I would find hideously illiberal and hypocritically grotesque. But Douthat implicitly concedes that such cancellations are the result of "hothouse-flower campus activists" rather than irruptions of popular liberal conceit--which is another way of conceding that the cancellations are really the result of apolitical, administrative gutlessness, which is a well-known component of bureaucratic behavior. And if apolitical, whence the political correctness? I'm not trying to be sophistic here; I'm only suggesting there's much more to this than Douthat's political analysis reveals.

But I digress, and for that I'm sorry, since I also find hothouse-flower activists as insufferable as Douthat does. So I'll move on to my principal objection to his analysis, which is that, as I hinted in my opening, it stands American history on its head. Douthat, "as a conservative," decries censorship as both a liberal phenomenon and a uniquely contemporary one at that: It's "just the way we live right now," he complains. Yet let us survey the historical span of censorship in America, and let's further see if we can detect a common ideological strain--that is, liberal or conservative?      

There were the Federalists' Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 18th century, which were aimed not only at voter suppression, but that of free political speech; there were congressional gag rules and the suppression of U.S. mails during the antebellum period, in defense of institutional slavery; there was 19th-century Protestant "hypersensitivity" to all things Catholic, which saw papal bogeymen everywhere and wanted them damn well gone; there was the 100-Percent-Americanism campaign that fused two xenophobic centuries; there were the ultranationalistic Espionage and Sedition Acts--with "ultranationalism" possessing a definite ideological flavor; there was the Red Scare; there was McCarthyism; and now the country harbors a political party of abject intellectual isolation and, like the Protestant paranoids of the 19th century, sees ideological bogeymen everywhere and denounces their very presence, and virtually every word, as unacceptably unAmerican.

I put it to you: Is all that the censorship, self-censorship, quasi-censorship and p.c. history of American liberalism? Or, at root, American conservatism?

 

Yesterday's all-ladies presser

The Washington Post's Nia-Malika Henderson:

President Obama did something remarkable on Friday. He held his last press conference of the year, and the only people in the entire press corps who were called on to ask questions were women. Yes, this was on purpose; it had to be.  

And yes, it was totally awesome.

Pretty much everyone could agree on that.

Pretty much everyone, that is, except the men in the White House press corps. Watching "Hardball" last night, I heard American Urban Radio's April Ryan, who was the eighth and last woman to hurl an answer-met question at the president, tell Chris Matthews that male reporters descended, post-presser, on Josh Earnest, demanding to know in their characteristically emotional, male-meltdown mode why only women were called on. Apparently hell hath no fury like a bipedal, external-genitals mortal scorned.       

Honest, I didn't even notice the all-women queries--not, anyway, until Matthews brought it up hours later. Matthews, too, said he didn't notice until a co-worker mentioned it toward the presser's end. So, not to brag, but maybe we're not all excessively tender, emotionally overwrought pigs in need of fainting couches whenever our pathetic egos are challenged.

An aside ...

After watching "Hardball" I returned to reading Roosevelt's Second Act--an engrossing study of FDR's agonized decision to seek a third term--and ran across the familiar observation that the president might well have declined his renomination if he didn't get the running mate he wanted, Henry Wallace. Circumstances looked bleak. Conservative Democrats wanted what they thought was their due: a conservative vice president. FDR was both furious and entrenched. It would be Wallace, or no Roosevelt. But the president and all his men were rather botching their Wallace maneuvers. Who pulled it off, behind the scenes? Eleanor and Francis Perkins--yet neither FDR nor his chief male operatives "ever fully acknowledged the critical, indeed decisive role that [the women] played to keep the convention from unraveling completely.

"It was a time," remarks author Richard Moe, "when women weren't expected, or even permitted, to play an important role in politics."

Yesterday I opined that Obama's presser was "brilliant" because of its unexpectedness, thinking that its unexpectedness was singular (the president's blame of Sony). But his calling only on women reporters was of far greater import and, in historical retrospect, far more unexpected. And yet I failed to even notice. Maybe that's a good thing.

 

The CIA decides that the CIA is pretty darn legit

It seems the Nuremberg defense--a postwar futility used to justify amoral obedience to immoral orders--is alive, well, and perfectly valid in the upper-echelon land of its chief prosecution.

This morning the NYT reports that a CIA panel investigating the CIA's illegal snooping into the U.S. Senate's investigation of other CIA illegalities--said snooping ordered in defiance of constitutionally mandated oversight--"will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode" (which is to say, the crime), because the perpetrators "staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases [Befehl ist Befehl!] done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director."

If you're a garden-variety felon, try using the Nuremberg defense in a run-of-the-mill U.S. court of law. Then let us know, from your prison cell, how it worked out. 

The five-member CIA-investigating panel was appointed by the CIA director and weighted 3:2 with CIA officials, the balance being the überconventional Evan Bayh and a former counsel to the Brennan-approving White House.

Such panels are also known as "accountability boards."