Archive Listing
June 14, 2005 - June 7, 2005

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

THE FUTURE. There is something I call the invisible parenthetical. It shows up most often in election analysis, though not exclusively. It also makes intermittent appearances in assessments of the Iraq War. Its purpose is to signify that can of worms which remains stubbornly unopened. There's a good example in Tony Blankley's latest column:


It's the second parenthetical we're concerned with here, the one that alludes to the radical change in circumstances represented by another 9/11, or larger, attack. Blankley's diction differs from most in that he doesn't use the word 'if'; it's clear he has no doubt that it's coming, and the only question is when. Whether we admit it or not, I believe most of us agree with this gloomy prediction. We know that our borders are still porous, the INS still can't keep track of all those expired student visas, and increasingly, the various Islamo-fascist terror plots in other parts of the world are reported to involve the supposedly nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Was it the mass media's deliberate intention or our collective turning away that caused the bomb plot in Jordan to disappear so quickly from public view? A plan to kill as many as 80,000 people with explosives and chemical agents -- does this not merit our interest?

That's why I call it the invisible parenthetical. It's there in plain sight, the asterisk that says everything we're thinking about right now could be rendered void in a single moment, but we're not going to think about that right now. Politicians and pundits put it in almost ritually, as if they were knocking wood to keep bad luck away, but the ballooning dimensions of horror that live inside the mention are closed off from scrutiny by protective brackets.

But I have another name for it too: the presidential parenthetical. From this perspective, it's the clearest indication of just how far away most of us are from seeing the world situation the way President Bush has to see it. For him the "next attack" can be no aside or sotte voce appendix. It is, in many respects, the only topic of importance. We don't like to imagine, but he has to imagine, the reality and the cascading consequences of an attack that kills 80,000 Americans.

What happens on that day? Compared to its impact 9/11 will be seen in hindsight as only a ripple, a warning not heeded. There won't be space in 10 years of New York Times editions to honor the dead with individual eulogies. Panic and the interdependencies of technological infrastructure will plunge the United States, and the world, into an instant economic depression.. If such an event were to happen the day after tomorrow or the day after a month from now, what would become of all our earnest editorializing about Abu Ghraib, the role of the U.N., the shocking $25 billion overrun in occupation costs, the need to win hearts and minds in the 'moderate' Muslim world, the dangers of the patriot act, the disputed basis of the war in Iraq, the jobless recovery, gas prices, the 9/11 commission report, and Bush's attendance record in the National Guard?

All would be swept away. We would confront images of death so widespread that almost everyone in the country would know one of the victims personally. A major city would be paralyzed, gripped in a sudden crisis of survival as water, electricity, food, and medical care became unavailable for hundreds of thousands of citizens. The president would confront a near universal demand for revenge on a massive, nuclear scale. Pundits who are at this moment writing sober columns about the need for Rumsfeld's dismissal will propose lists of targets -- Mecca, Medina, Damascus -- requiring immediate annihilation. Those who continue to oppose self defense on the basis that America somehow deserves the wrath of dark age fanatics (there will be some, and you can meet them today at Moveon.org and Democraticunderground.com) (but notice who's parenthetical now) will be reviled and persecuted by people who once marched with them in anti-war demonstrations. The editorial columns of newspapers will bulge with indignant outcries about why it is taking so long to retaliate, to seal our borders, to clamp down on the Arab autocracies who are breeding mass murderers with impunity. And when the evidence indicates that the plot was hatched and harbored in Iran (Syria), the chattering experts will demand to know why nothing was done before it was too late.

Does this day of transformation seem far-fetched? Of course it doesn't. We the people just don't want to think about it. Maybe we can't think about it. But the President of the United States has to think about it. It is already real to him. He experienced 9/11 from the perspective that none of us has had, as the one who is responsible for leading the country through the mess. He knows what that is like, which is why we can demean his intelligence all we want to in our hubris; the truth is, in this respect, he is the only intelligent person among us right now. He knows that every sacrifice is worth making to prevent that impending horrific day from coming. He knows that America the Free is impossible to defend through sheer defense. That's why he took the fight to the terrorists at once and why it doesn't matter which reason he picked for taking out Saddam. He fought in Iraq the way the allies fought in North Africa in 1942, because it was a way to engage the enemy right now. He knows it doesn't matter if the Europeans whine and splutter because they will wail with misery after the economic crash caused by mass death in the land of the hated Americans.

What does he see that we don't? Body bags. Thousands upon thousands, if not millions, of the slippery black lozenges that used to be mothers, fathers, children, marines, airmen, and seamen, bags filled and buried on his watch in such numbers that the casualties we are experiencing now seem not reckless but prefatory, the scattered shots of the phony war in the days before blitzkrieg awakened a sleeping nation.

We must try to see those body bags too. If we can't, all our convictions about what's right, what's wrong, what's important, what isn't, are likely to be wrong. Dead wrong.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

JOBS AND SUCH. One of our faithful readers has written in to ask InstaPunk to say a few words about the economy. The Democrats keep talking about how bad the economy is, he notes, even though the economy is doing well by most measures. And they're hammering George Bush every day about all the jobs that have been lost. What, he wonders, does InstaPunk think about all this?

Well, InstaPunk laughs whenever a politician uses the word "I" and the term "create jobs" in the same sentence. What images come to mind when John Kerry intones, "I will create 20 million new jobs in eight years"? A Hollywood montage of Kerry in a hardhat digging the first shovelful of earth in a new dam project, Kerry bent over blueprints of a new supertanker at the shipyard, Kerry in a surgical mask supervising the manufacture of the newest and fastest microprocessor yet, Kerry in a straw hat piloting a John Deere tractor in the fields of Iowa, Kerry with his thinking cap on, devising the next high technology industry that will fuel years of economic growth...

It's all ridiculous. Presidents don't create jobs. They don't run the economy. They have less power over it than the federal reserve chairman does. They have a few tools they can use to try to influence the economy, although most of these consist of asking congress to spend more or less money, cut or raise taxes, and monkey with the minimum wage. Beyond this, they can negotiate trade agreements and serve a facilitating role in finding overseas markets for American business. And that's about it.

Now let us consider all the things a president has no control over. He can't do much , for example, about droughts, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other acts of God or demons. He can't do much about the billions of good and bad decisions made by companies and entrepreneurs in their day to day pursuit of prosperity. He also can't do much about the global economy that everywhere impacts American business prospects.

He certainly can't do anything about the stagnant European economy, which depresses the overseas opportunity for American business. The Europeans work about 35 hours a week, show up about 200 days a year, and make exorbitantly high wages so they can pay the exorbitantly high taxes that pay for all the Europeans who don't work at all. On top of this, the Europeans have a steeply declining birth rate. Their economies aren't going to be growing anytime soon.

The president can't do anything about the boom and bust cycles of the Asian economies, which are currently more bust than boom because they tend to be chronically lacking in either natural resources (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore) or capital (China, Phillipines, Malaysia).

He can't do much about the other American economies either. Canada is locked into a socialist bureaucracy that spends money faster than Canadians can earn it. Mexico's only economic strategy is sending all its workers here, because there aren't any jobs at home. South America suffers from European-style lethargy combined with the kind of political stability one might expect from the Phillipines.

The old Soviet states still don't have any economies to speak of, just gangsters and crude barter systems. They can't seem to do anything about it. How could the American president?

And no one can do anything about Africa.

The biggest economic role played by a president of the United States is to take the blame when things go south and to (try to) take credit when things go well.

The funniest part of all of this is that everyone knows it. Every four years, though, we go through this period of hysterical amnesia in which we abandon common sense and converse gravely about how well or poorly the president has "managed" the economy.

Bah. That's what InstaPunk says.

Monday, May 17, 2004

Sunday, May 16, 2004

The Philly Flyer

The one-eyed terminator from Philadelphia ices the competition at Pimlico.

HORSE TIME. Philadelphia claims him, but so does Salem County, New Jersey. He lived here before he began his racing career. Now it looks as if the whole country is ready to claim him. The Associated Press says:

His victory in the Kentucky Derby was merely impressive. But his triumph in the Preakness Stakes was the horse racing equivalent of a one-punch knockout.

A small colt of humble origins, unbeaten Smarty Jones cast himself as a possible great when he blew away his rivals in yesterday's 1900m Preakness to win by a race-record 11 1/2 lengths over Rock Hard Ten before a record crowd of 112,668.

Next stop the Belmont Stakes on June 6, when he will be poised to become only the 12th Triple Crown winner and first since Affirmed pulled off a sweep in 1978. Not bad for a horse who knocked himself unconscious, and nearly lost his life, when he bashed his head into the starting gate before running in his first race.

Now he's eight-for-eight and on the cusp of joining racing's legends.

There's also this eerie quote in the Chicago Sun Times:

Said Servis: ''You know, I saw an interview where Billy Turner [the trainer of Seattle Slew] said that as the Triple Crown [sequence] went on, he noticed an incredible transformation in his horse as he approached the paddock before these races. It was almost as if the horse was transforming himself into something incredible, something fantastic. I looked at Smarty today and that's what I sensed. For the first time, I really felt I was witnessing what Billy was talking about.''

All of this makes Smarty Jones the equine equivalent of a South Street Punk. Shammadamma.

Saturday, May 15, 2004

EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE. We've been told over and over and over again that Senator Kerry has experience that uniquely qualifies him to be our Commander in Chief. We decided to do some research on this. Everyone knows that President Bush has been our Commander in Chief these past four years. Before that he was governor of Texas, the head of a major league baseball franchise and operator of miscellaneous oil service companies. Senator Kerry has been a legislator for 20 years, which is not an executive position because executives are responsible for getting things done and legislators aren't. Prior to that he was a lieutenant governor, which sounds executive but isn't because lieutenant governors are like vice presidents, invited to a lot of meetings but not in charge of anything. If we look all the way back to Kerry's youth, we do find one brief period of executive responsibility: he commanded a swift boat in Vietnam — for 90 days — over 30 years ago. Of course, there is one aspect of the executive life with which Senator Kerry is intimately familiar, which may or may not impress the voters. He doesn't talk much about this area of his expertise, though, for whatever reason. He appears to be hanging his hat on having once been a lieutenant in the navy.

We can't help pointing out that rarely in the annals of military history has a lieutenant sought such a promotion. (Of course, Hitler was a corporal...) So to be fair, we dug into the specifics and compiled the following for your consideration.

Experience Counts Unless It Doesn't
Four Years on Top of This	90 Days on Top of This
CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS	CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS

Friday, May 14, 2004

MEDIA PATRIOTS. I'm sure the mainstream media are grateful for the unexpected windfall they received this week. What could be a better distraction from the butchering of Nicholas Berg than the discovery of SEX PICTURES from Abu Ghraib? Maybe the pictures themselves, but I'm sure they're working on getting those for us too. If we could just lay our hands on a few of those, we could forget about Berg altogether. Possibly something featuring a BREAST. We all know how pleasurable it is to feel offended about seeing one of those. And, let's face it, it's not nearly as icky as looking at savage real world violence. Did anyone see Nancy Pelosi after she had viewed the sex pictures? She looked overcome, almost as if she had witnessed an unbelievable slaughter. Oh that's right. The Berg video didn't upset her nearly as much.

The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby has some interesting thoughts about all this:

Offensive and shocking pictures that undermine the war effort should be played up, but offensive and shocking pictures that remind us why we're at war in the first place shouldn't get played at all?

Yes, Virginia, there really is a gaping media double standard. News organizations will shield your tender eyes from the sight of a Berg or a Daniel Pearl being decapitated or of Sept. 11 victims jumping to their deaths, or of the mangled bodies on the USS Cole, or of Fallujans joyfully mutilating the remains of four lynched US civilians. But they will make sure you don't miss the odious behavior of Americans or American allies, no matter how atypical that misbehavior may be, or how determined the US military is to uproot and punish it.

The ruse that is used to rationalize this double standard is both clever and corrupt. Somehow, the mass media have connived to convince us that these truly national events belong only to the dead victims and their families. The major networks no longer run footage even of the planes striking the twin towers because the images are too troubling to the "9/11 families." Excuse me? We're all 9/11 families now. Our world changed profoundly on that grisly day and we are not permitted to remind ourselves of how awful the carnage was? The same logic has been employed from the very beginning to deprive us of the worst and most personal images of the WTC attack, those who chose to plummet dozens of stories to their deaths rather than be burned alive.

Yet Peter and Tom and Dan have no scruples about showing us six-year-old amputees as a way of driving home the collateral damage of American bombing. If they were as fearless about showing us the mutilated victims of Saddam's torture chambers, we might be better enabled to keep the "prisoner abuse" photos in perspective. Maybe Teddy Kennedy couldn't get away so easily with his glib and revolting comparison of Bush to Saddam. But I guess that's the point. They want us to forget why our country is embroiled in a complex situation in Iraq. Why else would Peter Jennings somehow forget to mention that Berg's self-proclaimed murderer has clear ties to the 9/11 attacks? Or is he already confident that the memory of those attacks has been driven from our heads by a picture of a smoking girl in a tee shirt pointing at the genitals of an Iraqi terrorist victim?

It's up to us to remember. Let's do so: Look here, and here, and here.

TAXIDERMY. Just as Andy Rooney has overstayed his welcome, columnist Jimmy Breslin really needs to go home and do his ranting in a Lazyboy in front of the TV. A quote from his latest stream of bile:

The prison pictures they watched in such secrecy belong to the public whose taxes pay for this war. These utter fools in suits and uniforms, some smooth-faced liar from the Pentagon, or a general who should be in a grand jury himself, try to control the free speech of the nation and commit a war crime.

You see, he knows that people are watching the Berg video on the internet, and he just can't stand not being able to displace those images with those of sex parties in Abu Ghraib cells.

Get stuffed, Jimmy.

Thursday, May 13, 2004

The most coherent anti-war statement yet produced by the intellectual left
LOGIC. Finally. The Nation, inveterate defender of Stalin and Soviet communism, has just published a dizzying array of pieces by its most renowned contributors offering a bunch of brilliant strategies for extracting the U.S. from the quagmire in Iraq. Such luminaries. Such credentials. Such knowledge. Such insight. Such eloquence.

Now for our rebuttal: uh, no.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Randi Rhodes looking cute and mischievous

PASSIONATE INTENSITY. If you're one of the 280 million or so Americans who haven't had a chance to listen to Franken's Folly (a.k.a. Air America), it's probably news to you that the most tempestuous little teapot in the lineup is a woman who calls herself Randi Rhodes. (Is my bias showing, or doesn't that sound rather like a pornstar monicker?) Thanks to the dutifulness of a handful of columnists who live in New York City, the Great Unwashed among us can at least read brief quotes of this doll's daily fulminations. For example:

The queen of venom, Randi Rhodes, followed Franken in the host slot. Her imitation of a cracker military type telling a soldier to "insert this fluorescent light bulb into that man's buttocks" was revolting. She compared U.S. prisons in Iraq to the "Nazi gulag" and said, "The day I say thank you to Rumsfeld is the same day I'll say thank you to the 12 people who raped me."

Rock bottom came when she compared Bush and his family to the Corleones in the "Godfather" saga. "Like Fredo, somebody ought to take him out fishing and phuw," she said, imitating the sound of gunfire.

There's more, and to be fair, Franken hasn't completely lost his light touch. The same article reports that he's gotten off some good ones about torture, pedophiles taking communion, and a bunch of new (well, not really) names for Rush Limbaugh. Ironically, the author of this little recital seems to hate Limbaugh as much as Franken does. Perhaps he's listened to Limbaugh as much as the rest of us have listened to Randi Rhodes. Still, my bet would be that we won't have Randi around to not listen to for much longer. So we'd better not listen to her while we can. Well, you know what I mean.


SELF-DELUSION. It's painful to read Andrew Sullivan these days. It used to be that he wrote reasonably about policy and politics, with occasional forays into the, for him, emotionally volatile subject of gay marriage. But since Massachusetts and San Francisco raised the specter of a constitutional crisis about marriage, it's just about all he can think about. He pretends to be weighing the relative strengths and weaknesses of Bush and Kerry, as if he were performing some kind of rational calculus. What is transparently obvious to an increasing number of his readers, however, is that he is desperately searching for an excuse to throw his weight behind John Kerry, a man he knows to be weak, hypocritical, and undistinguished. Yet Kerry's ability to pander to every politically correct fad makes him seem like the road to happiness if gay marriage is the only thing on your mind.

The coup de grace in the descent of a superior intellect to idiocy was delivered in Sullivan's latest column for The New Republic. This once unflinching champion of the war on terror has now devised a workaround for his preferred candidate's career-long record of appeasement: prop up Kerry with McCain in the role of VP. He begins by reasserting his long, and utterly unfounded, faith in the unstable and self-obsessed publicity hound from Arizona. Then he proceeds to offer up a truly ridiculous proposition:

He could become for Kerry what Cheney has been for Bush: a confidant, a manager, a strategic mind, a guide through the thicket of war-management. But he could also be more for Kerry: He could be a unifying force in the country in the dark days ahead.

Domestically, a Kerry-McCain ticket would also go a long way toward healing the Vietnam wound, now rubbed raw again by recent events in Iraq. The two men represent very different responses to that war, and could help unite their generation -- finally! -- over it.

Sigh. What all is wrong with these few sentences? Practically everything. McCain the politician is hardly anyone's guide through a thicket of anything. He threw himself out of the presidential race in 2000 by blowing his stack in public much the way Howard Dean did. His fellow senators aren't fond of him. Quite a few of us in the general public -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- are under the impression he's slightly nuts. He's a "unifying force" only if the constituencies you wish to unify are Andrew Sullivan and Chris Matthews.

But these are mere quibbles compared to the red flag Sullivan hoists in his next paragraph. Think about it. We're being asked to believe that the country will "finally" get over the Vietnam War if we put in charge the very two men who seem most obsessed with that war. Name any two other politicians who appear more likely to eat, sleep, and dream Vietnam every day of their lives. Imagine the policy discussions in the Oval Office:

"This latest thing in Iraq is the Tet offensive all over again."

"No, it's not. It's Qe Sanh."

"Tet."

"Qe Sanh."

"Tet."

"You say that one more time, I'm going to frag you myself."

Mr.Sullivan, if you want to back Kerry because you think he'll cave in on the gay issues you care about, go ahead. Everyone's entitled to be a one-issue candidate on occasion. But please spare us this kind of lunacy. There's always the danger that someone might actually listen to you. And that would be a disaster for the nation.

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