Archive Listing
June 14, 2007 - June 7, 2007
Friday, April 21, 2006
The Roman Spring of
Madeleine Albright
Secretary Albright shows the NYT that she can leg press 400 lbs.
Madeleine Albright
Secretary Albright shows the NYT that she can leg press 400 lbs.
UNDERCURRENTS. It's official. Madeleine Albright has been elected to the Democratic Hall of Fame, just as we predicted. The first sign of the elevation was the leaking by Editor & Publisher that the former Clinton secretary of state will be profiled in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Since everyone remembers how effective she was at responding to al Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies and the USS Cole, the Times didn't see fit to question her about the past but solicited her criticism of Condoleezza Rice and the War in Iraq, which she was happy to provide. But what's clearest about the interview is the fact that Ms. Albright has embarked on a new life, a kind of post-politics blooming that wiill undoubtedly make her a role model for many American women. She boasted about her exercise regimen and revealed the fact that she can leg press 400 lbs.
She was also eager to assign the credit for her curent fitness to her three office interns, Paolo, Giuseppe, and Antonio, who help her answer fan mail and supervise her workouts. As the Times reporter notes, "she positively glows with joie de vivre" when discussing her day-to-day activities.
Is there any romance she'd like to share with Times readers? To this, Secretary Albright responds with a girlish giggle before saying, "Of course not. I'm a very respectable woman. When I'm not lifting weights, I'm having tea parties and reading the papers. I have a reputation to uphold, you know, so I just carry out my responsibilities as a former secretary of state."
Interns Paolo, Giuseppe, and Antonio
At a later point in the interview, Secretary Albright does turn serious when asked to identify the biggest lesson she took from her years in the Clinton adminitration. "I learned a lot," she says, "but the most surprising thing I learned was just how exciting it is to lie about sex. It's almost as much fun as the sex you're lying about."
Then she lit up a big cigar.
Welcome to the Pantheon of Democratic Gods.
posted at
1:53 pm
by
The Headhouse Gang
Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Dumbest Talking Head
Science to the rescue: Dynamic Intelligence Monitoring
Science to the rescue: Dynamic Intelligence Monitoring
FIRE WITH FIRE. One of the hottest debates among those who watch cable news programs is the difficult question of exactly which talking head host is the dumbest. Everyone seems to have a personal favorite, and a definitive answer has been impossible to arrive at due to the absence of hard data -- until now, that is.
A new high-tech company named IQuick has just released the first instantaneous intelligence test, capable of measuring intelligence in real time based on audio input. They call it Dynamic Intelligence Monitoring (DIM) and have already made units available to those who begged and pleaded with them the hardest.
We used ours to monitor the likeliest candidates at CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The field included Jack Cafferty, Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, Rita Cosby, Keith Olbermann, Geraldo Rivera, and some other people at CNN whose names we can never remember. It doesn't matter, though, because there was a landslide winner. One of his DIM samples is shown above. His name is Keith Olbermann.
In retrospect, the findings seem obvious. We've had occasion to discuss him here before, but his most astonishing property is that -- something like one of those infinitely descending Escher puzzles -- he just keeps getting dumber, no matter how technically impossible such a feat appears to be.
For those who do not number themselves among Mr. Olbermann's 265 devoted daily watchers, here's an excellent roundup of some of his more recent performances on his Countdown show. But all these pale beside his most recent demonstration of idiocy in his standard feature called "Worst Person in the World," in which he decided to set up Michelle Malkin for physical intimidation and assault:
Olbermann chose Michelle Malkin for
posting the names and phone numbers of UC Santa Cruz students that
recently forced military recruiters off the campus. In Olbermann’s
words, the students, “as a result, have been inundated with death
threats.”
What Keith conveniently failed to inform his viewers was that these phone numbers were actually part of a press release by the organization responsible for the protest, Students Against War. In addition, these names and phone numbers are still available at a number of left-wing websites including this one. I guess Olbermann didn’t think it was important to inform his viewers of this.
Another thing Olbermann omitted from his report were the atrocious e-mail messages and threats that Malkin herself has been receiving all day for posting this previously made public information at her website. I guess it might have diminished Olbermann’s point a bit to share with his viewers some of the reprehensible comments Malkin has found in her inbox all day for merely sharing the exact same information that those responsible for this protest gave to the press.
What Keith conveniently failed to inform his viewers was that these phone numbers were actually part of a press release by the organization responsible for the protest, Students Against War. In addition, these names and phone numbers are still available at a number of left-wing websites including this one. I guess Olbermann didn’t think it was important to inform his viewers of this.
Another thing Olbermann omitted from his report were the atrocious e-mail messages and threats that Malkin herself has been receiving all day for posting this previously made public information at her website. I guess it might have diminished Olbermann’s point a bit to share with his viewers some of the reprehensible comments Malkin has found in her inbox all day for merely sharing the exact same information that those responsible for this protest gave to the press.
Worse, the incitations to assault on Ms. Malkin by Olbermann and like-minded morons at Democratic Underground have led to the internet posting of her home address, satellite photos of her house, and other information designed to help thugs lay their hands on her person and family. She says she's not afraid, and we both applaud her courage and stand with the others (here, here, and here) who are ready to assist her in any way possible. But we're not like the others in one respect. At Instapunk we believe in fighting fire with fire.
To this end, we have decided to publish a satellite photo of Keith Olbermann's home, the place in which he refreshes his hard-headed connection to real life in the terrible fascist country that has rewarded him so well. Here it is:
Most times, you'll find Keith sleeping alone at the castle.
You'll find the exact location and
address of the property at the website linked above. Finding Keith
there shouldn't be too hard either. He spends a lot of time sleeping at
the castle, because it's so darn hard to stay awake when you're barely
conscious anyway. When he does wake up, he sometimes takes a stroll out
to meet his closest friends Donald and Mick. His route is shown on the
map: through A, E, D, G, and F. Don't bother looking for him at the
Matterhorn. He's scared to death of heights.
So how do you like it, Keith, when the shoe is on the other foot? And speaking of foot, you better be listening for the sound of footsteps coming up behind you. That's what happens when irresponsible pinheads go out of their way to fan the flames of hatred against you in the media. Kind of scary, isn't it? Think maybe it's time for you to become a man?
And one more thing, Keith. Cornell sucks.
So how do you like it, Keith, when the shoe is on the other foot? And speaking of foot, you better be listening for the sound of footsteps coming up behind you. That's what happens when irresponsible pinheads go out of their way to fan the flames of hatred against you in the media. Kind of scary, isn't it? Think maybe it's time for you to become a man?
And one more thing, Keith. Cornell sucks.
posted at
12:42 pm
by
The Punks of South Street
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Laying Out the
President
Rolling Stone Magazine is cranking up a stunt by Sean Wilentz.
Rolling Stone Magazine is cranking up a stunt by Sean Wilentz.
HISTORY. It may seem
unfair to review an essay by "one of America's leading historians"
before it is published, and in all but a very few instances I'd
cheerfully concede that it is
unfair. But not this time. Why? Because the essay I'm pre-reviewing is
guilty of exactly the same kind of unfairness and therefore, as an
historical analysis, cannot be anything more than a grotesque and
laughable exercise in rhetorical political assassination.
Judging "bests" and "worsts" in history depends absolutely upon knowing outcomes, which on the national and world stages can take decades to become clear. Not always, of course. Genocidal tyrants like Hitler and Stalin were obvious worsts while they still lived, but these exceptions highlight the particular role that should (but isn't always) played by historians. While Hitler was in power, all that was required to assess his villainy was accurate reporting of his actions. Historians became necessary after the fact to explore the causes and lasting effects of his barbarism, which they have done wih great gusto. Stalin, too, was self-evidently the nadir of Eastern European history while he still ruled the USSR, but even a half century after his death, far too many academic historians are still making excuses for his regime and its anti-human ideology. The lesson? Historians are as vulnerable to ideological bias as anyone else, and since what we ask of them is objective and unemotional analysis based on research and reason, we cannot trust them when they claim to speak as historians about the present or recent past. At best in such circumstances, they function as (presumably) well informed partisans. At worst, they function as propagandists, misusing their authority in one discipline to cover their dead ordinary opinions in another.
Historical analysis isn't possible in the absence of facts. Long-term outcomes are necessary facts, as are the reams of minutiae that eventually reveal what all parties to a given event knew, guessed, or imagined at the time. Try writing the history of the most recent party you attended. You could record your own recollections of what transpired today. Tomorrow you could hunt down some scraps of gossip that might augment your flawed and incomplete memories. But how long would it take to determine the most important things that really happened -- the argument that led to a divorce and tragic custody fight, the spectacular spats that didn't, the quiet first meeting that became a moving love affair, the one careless word that somehow fathered a lifelong grudge of disastrous consequence between two familes? That could not be done during the party, the day after, or probably for years to come. How much harder to assess Lincoln's absolute worth before he died -- or George W. Bush's before we behold the state of the world in 2036 or beyond?
Yet here in the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone, we have a highly credentialed historian who is willing to declare, however hypothetically, George W. Bush the worst U.S. President in history. Balderdash. Hubris of this sort immediately permits us to examine whatever personal information we can find about the dissembler who is so willing to tarnish his own reputation thus. He must have a relevant history himself.
I invite one and all to research Sean Wilentz in this way. I've done just a bit of digging myself and it wasn't hard to find a few suggestive facts in his curriculum vitae. He's the Dayton-Stockon Professor of History at Princeton and the Director of Princeton's Program in American Studies. That's very nice, I'm sure, but it might not make him an expert on middle eastern politics or asymmetric warfare, which are likely to figure into the eventual assessments of how good or bad a president George Bush was.
He's written a few books -- and edited others -- which is also very nice, but the titles seem to indicate a focus on the development of democracy and culture in pre-twentieth century America:
His essays and articles are listed on the same page, so you can investigate them more closely yourself, but the titles and the publications he wrote them for demonstrate a heavily populist frame of reference, including such subjects as Jimmy Hoffa, the American labor movement generally, class conflicts in America, working class culture, crime and poverty in New York, property and suffrage reform, and in more contemporary contexts televangelism and Ross Perot. One brief excerpt ought to convey the flavor:
Sorry for breaking off in mid-sentence, but it doesn't require a psychic to complete the main thought of the essay. At the very least, Wilentz's populist bent has made him a hard-core socialist. Still, this preoccupation with redressing the inequities of capitalism shouldn't be interpreted to mean that he's spent a lot of time living with manual laborers. His educational background launched him into a different sphere entirely:
Additionally, Wilentz's employment record and his list of academic prizes and awards indicate that he has spent his whole working career in the shade of the Ivy League's beneficent foliage.
Whence, then, his empathy for the poor and oppressed of the capitalist machine? We've already gotten the principal clue. Columbia College, Class of 1972. He received his undergraduate education at the epicenter of the radical sixties, the Columbia University of Mark Rudd's SDS and the riots in Morningside Heights. Would we be going overboard to infer that his love for the working class is complemented by a view of American foreign policy shaped during the darkest days of the Vietnam War? That he was then and is still a charter member of the musico-political counterculture that gave rise to Rolling Stone Magazine in the first place?
When exactly is a picture worth a thousand words?
Sean Wilentz
The photo is part of a promotional
piece that verifies the connection between Wilentz and the sixties
counterculture:
The piece also includes quotes from Wilentz:
So he was born to the counterculture, raised in Greenwich Village at his father's bookshop (what kind of books, one wonders? Beat Generation? CPUSA dialectics?) and involved deeply enough in the unfolding sixties to have met and conversed with Bob Dylan. He wasn't just there during the sixties; he was the sixties.
Judging "bests" and "worsts" in history depends absolutely upon knowing outcomes, which on the national and world stages can take decades to become clear. Not always, of course. Genocidal tyrants like Hitler and Stalin were obvious worsts while they still lived, but these exceptions highlight the particular role that should (but isn't always) played by historians. While Hitler was in power, all that was required to assess his villainy was accurate reporting of his actions. Historians became necessary after the fact to explore the causes and lasting effects of his barbarism, which they have done wih great gusto. Stalin, too, was self-evidently the nadir of Eastern European history while he still ruled the USSR, but even a half century after his death, far too many academic historians are still making excuses for his regime and its anti-human ideology. The lesson? Historians are as vulnerable to ideological bias as anyone else, and since what we ask of them is objective and unemotional analysis based on research and reason, we cannot trust them when they claim to speak as historians about the present or recent past. At best in such circumstances, they function as (presumably) well informed partisans. At worst, they function as propagandists, misusing their authority in one discipline to cover their dead ordinary opinions in another.
Historical analysis isn't possible in the absence of facts. Long-term outcomes are necessary facts, as are the reams of minutiae that eventually reveal what all parties to a given event knew, guessed, or imagined at the time. Try writing the history of the most recent party you attended. You could record your own recollections of what transpired today. Tomorrow you could hunt down some scraps of gossip that might augment your flawed and incomplete memories. But how long would it take to determine the most important things that really happened -- the argument that led to a divorce and tragic custody fight, the spectacular spats that didn't, the quiet first meeting that became a moving love affair, the one careless word that somehow fathered a lifelong grudge of disastrous consequence between two familes? That could not be done during the party, the day after, or probably for years to come. How much harder to assess Lincoln's absolute worth before he died -- or George W. Bush's before we behold the state of the world in 2036 or beyond?
Yet here in the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone, we have a highly credentialed historian who is willing to declare, however hypothetically, George W. Bush the worst U.S. President in history. Balderdash. Hubris of this sort immediately permits us to examine whatever personal information we can find about the dissembler who is so willing to tarnish his own reputation thus. He must have a relevant history himself.
I invite one and all to research Sean Wilentz in this way. I've done just a bit of digging myself and it wasn't hard to find a few suggestive facts in his curriculum vitae. He's the Dayton-Stockon Professor of History at Princeton and the Director of Princeton's Program in American Studies. That's very nice, I'm sure, but it might not make him an expert on middle eastern politics or asymmetric warfare, which are likely to figure into the eventual assessments of how good or bad a president George Bush was.
He's written a few books -- and edited others -- which is also very nice, but the titles seem to indicate a focus on the development of democracy and culture in pre-twentieth century America:
with Paul E. Johnson) The Kingdom of
Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 222 pp.
(with Michael Merrill) The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning. "A Laborer." 1747-1814 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 240 pp.
Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class. 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 446 pp.
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. (New York: Norton Books, 2005)/992 pp.
(with Michael Merrill) The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning. "A Laborer." 1747-1814 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 240 pp.
Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class. 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 446 pp.
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. (New York: Norton Books, 2005)/992 pp.
His essays and articles are listed on the same page, so you can investigate them more closely yourself, but the titles and the publications he wrote them for demonstrate a heavily populist frame of reference, including such subjects as Jimmy Hoffa, the American labor movement generally, class conflicts in America, working class culture, crime and poverty in New York, property and suffrage reform, and in more contemporary contexts televangelism and Ross Perot. One brief excerpt ought to convey the flavor:
Egalitarianism assumes many shapes in
contemporary America: equality of opportunity, equality of rights,
racial equality, sexual equality, equal justice, equal pay for equal
work, and more. One egalitarian ideal is, however, conspicuously absent
from most American public discussions: the
ideal of equal wealth. Although complaints about economic
inequality arise from the margins, the subject passes virtually
unnoticed in our political debates. Apparently, most Americans find
nothing unjust about gross disparities of economic resources, so long
as every citizen is given a reasonable chance to prosper.
Discrimination, prejudice, extreme poverty, and other enormities may
endanger the stability and prestige of the republic (although there is
intense disagreement about how much they do so anymore). Yet staggering
inequalities of wealth, in and... [emphasis mine]
Sorry for breaking off in mid-sentence, but it doesn't require a psychic to complete the main thought of the essay. At the very least, Wilentz's populist bent has made him a hard-core socialist. Still, this preoccupation with redressing the inequities of capitalism shouldn't be interpreted to mean that he's spent a lot of time living with manual laborers. His educational background launched him into a different sphere entirely:
Ph.D., Yale University, 1980.
M. Phil., Yale University, 1976.
M.A., Yale University, 1975.
B.A., Balliol College, Oxford University, 1974.
BA., Columbia College, [Phi Beta Kappa] Columbia University, 1972.
M. Phil., Yale University, 1976.
M.A., Yale University, 1975.
B.A., Balliol College, Oxford University, 1974.
BA., Columbia College, [Phi Beta Kappa] Columbia University, 1972.
Additionally, Wilentz's employment record and his list of academic prizes and awards indicate that he has spent his whole working career in the shade of the Ivy League's beneficent foliage.
Whence, then, his empathy for the poor and oppressed of the capitalist machine? We've already gotten the principal clue. Columbia College, Class of 1972. He received his undergraduate education at the epicenter of the radical sixties, the Columbia University of Mark Rudd's SDS and the riots in Morningside Heights. Would we be going overboard to infer that his love for the working class is complemented by a view of American foreign policy shaped during the darkest days of the Vietnam War? That he was then and is still a charter member of the musico-political counterculture that gave rise to Rolling Stone Magazine in the first place?
When exactly is a picture worth a thousand words?
Sean Wilentz
A 52-page booklet accompanying "Live
1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall -- The Bootleg Series Volume 6"
includes a historical and critical essay by Sean Wilentz... Documenting
the historic Halloween concert from the vivid memories of attending it
as a 13-year-old, Wilentz illustrates the musical and social importance
of that night's performance in New York.
"'Live 1964' brings back a Bob Dylan on the cusp of that turmoil," Wilentz writes. "It brings back a time between his scuffling sets at the downtown clubs and his arena-rock tours of the 1970s and after. It brings back a long gone era of intimacy between performer and audience, and the last strains of a self-aware New York bohemia before bohemia became diluted and mass marketed. It brings back a Dylan moment just before something that Pete Hamill (on the liner notes to 'Blood On the Tracks') called 'the plague' infected so many hopes, and destroyed an older America sung of by Guthrie and, in prose, by Jack Kerouac -- and by Dylan as well, who somehow survived. Above all, it brings back a great concert by an artist performing at the peak of his powers one who would climb many more peaks to come."
"'Live 1964' brings back a Bob Dylan on the cusp of that turmoil," Wilentz writes. "It brings back a time between his scuffling sets at the downtown clubs and his arena-rock tours of the 1970s and after. It brings back a long gone era of intimacy between performer and audience, and the last strains of a self-aware New York bohemia before bohemia became diluted and mass marketed. It brings back a Dylan moment just before something that Pete Hamill (on the liner notes to 'Blood On the Tracks') called 'the plague' infected so many hopes, and destroyed an older America sung of by Guthrie and, in prose, by Jack Kerouac -- and by Dylan as well, who somehow survived. Above all, it brings back a great concert by an artist performing at the peak of his powers one who would climb many more peaks to come."
The piece also includes quotes from Wilentz:
I don't know Bob Dylan -- who really
does? but I've been fortunate to be around him for many years. When I
was growing up, my father's bookshop was in Greenwich Village and so I
have childhood memories of seeing Bob Dylan when he was a very young
man and I was a very young kid. I've been around that world for a very
long time, which has a lot to do with my interest in music and
politics. When he came to Princeton in 2000... I did get the chance to
see him and rekindle an old acquaintanceship.
So he was born to the counterculture, raised in Greenwich Village at his father's bookshop (what kind of books, one wonders? Beat Generation? CPUSA dialectics?) and involved deeply enough in the unfolding sixties to have met and conversed with Bob Dylan. He wasn't just there during the sixties; he was the sixties.
None of this disqualifies Sean Wilentz from being a good and objective historian. It does, however, explain much about why he would engage in the folly of pretending to write "history" about a sitting president and from what perspective he is likely to classify George W. Bush as the worst president ever. Who out there is willing to bet that the article, when published, won't embody an absolute prejudice against the use of American military power in Third World countries, a flaming ideological hatred of "tax cuts for the rich," a condescending screed against the religious right and pro-lifers, a series of ruthless indictments of Bush policies on racial, gender, and labor relations, and a lot of general venom in support of contemporary counterculture orthodoxies about the environment, global warming, corporatism, and the super-soveignty of international law.
The piece may turn out to be an eloquent partisan polemic, but it will bear no relation to what you'd call an historical assessment.
The betting window is open in the Comments section. I'm not expecting many takers.
Let's Impeach the
President 
