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August 23, 2008 - August 16, 2008

Monday, November 19, 2007

IMPROVING ON THE OLD WAY. Is he getting soft? Friday, he had an on-air guest, which is usually verboten. "The Great One," a.k.a. Mark Levin, the most ruthlessly go-for-the-jugular conservative there is (including Ann Coulter), appeared with Rush to promote his book about Sprite, a dog. At times, they were both in tears, and Levin parted the show biz curtain to reveal that Rush is a warm, compassionate, and generous friend. Limbaugh was clearly surprised and a bit befuddled at being unmasked as a real human being. Or so I thought.

Today, the Limbaugh Show threw us another curve. Rush did a simulcast with Martha McCallum of Fox News, who confessed her nervousness about being on the radio with an audience much larger than her usual TV audience. Rush was becomingly bashful in her presence and made a joke about how dumb men become in the presence of blondes. He subsequently said he was "drawing a blank" on one of her questions, although he answered it in his usual direct fashion.

The real surprise was that he allowed her to televise photos of him as a boy and young man, and he answered personal questions about his relationship with his father and his experience of drug rehab, which he called one of the best experiences of his life and something he "thanked God" for having gone through.

Rush Limbaugh doesn't have to do any of these things. His listeners know that he's not as pompous and arrogant as he pretends to be. They also don't need him to confess his personal failings or to share intimate parts of his private life. Why, then, is Rush developing an entirely new mode of communication with the mass audience?

I think he's stepping up in anticipation of the electoral ordeal the country will be experiencing in the next year. No one knows better than he does just how vicious Democrats, particularly Clintons, can get. In the past month he's already been the target of an unprecedented attack on a private citizen from the floor of the Senate, which he brilliantly turned against Reid, Pelosi, Clinton, et al. Still, he knows that the media environment -- thanks to blogs and reality TV and tabloid journalism -- is changing on a daily basis, and he has concluded that the disembodied Lowell Thomas/Edward R. Murrow "voice of reason" is not long for this world. That's what he's been for more than a decade to American conservatives. He's done it so effectively and so uniquely that he could retire forever at a moment's notice without having to surrender any more of his (obviously) intensely valued privacy.

Instead, he's innovating again. He's going to show us that a grandiloquent media identity and a sincerely humble personal identity can coexist in a way that enhances the credibility of both. Today's performance was an exemplary masterpiece. Yes -- like most single divorced men -- he found Martha McCallum attractive and allowed himself to be seen finding her attractive. Then he protested like crazy when his emails noted the fact. Genius. He's allowing his listeners to look behind the mask of managed celebrity and draw their own conclusions, confident that what they learn about him as a human being will only increase his believability when the partisan tornado that is the next Democrat assault on his (and our) integrity begins.

Hats off, Rush. It's a clever strategy and a brave one. You are personally committed to your beliefs. Showing a personal vulnerability you never had to proves it. Q.E.D.

P.S. Martha. He likes you. He really does. Give him a call.


Old guys are mostly just old guys. But we do have our points.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

MORE CODE CONSPIRACIES. It's not enough that he invented tanks and helicopters 400 years in advance. Or that in forging the Shroud of Turin, he might have invented photography half a millennium early. Despite his long deceasement, da Vinci is still cutting edge. Stung by the notion that Leonardo might have had seditious notions about Christianity (The Gospel According to Tom Hanks), an Italian musician named Giovanni Maria Pala has now discovered that the Last Supper fresco is also the first multimedia production in the history of art.

Truthfully, we suspected as much in our own treatment of the da Vinci code controversy a year-and-a-half ago. Now that we've been proven right, we can't help but crow a little.

On the other hand, if you look up the history of music, it seems that Leonardo's first music video hit the bricks in a near but losing dead heat with contemporary conventions for musical notation. Or did he sort of invent those from before-the-fact too?


When they get the writers' strike settled, we think it's time for a hilarious sitcom about how Leonardo invented absolutely everything, only nobody would listen. And he was gay, wasn't he? Perfect. For a title we're thinking "Hip Hop Wop." Unless that's not politically correct enough. And you'd need a co-star with blonde hair and big boobs. Maybe Jessica Some Body.

That's as far as we've got. But you probably have ideas of your own. What stumps us is who to cast as Leo. Forward your suggestions.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

CIAO, DUDES. If we have the nerve to contemplate it, there's a very real chance that by the year 2016 the world's oldest democracy will have been presided over by just two families for close to three decades. Is that what we really want? I'm just asking.

If Hillary is nominated in 2008, every U.S. citizen aged 38 and under will be in the position of having never voted in a presidential election without a Bush or a Clinton on the ballot. If Hillary gets elected and reelected (as though there's any "if" involved about what all she'd do to secure a second term), every U.S. citizen under the age of 46 won't have seen a presidential ballot without a Bush or Clinton on it. You'd have to go back to the days of France's Louis-Napoleon-Louis round robin -- or to North Korea -- to find a comparable monopoly of power.

Of course, France had an additional guarantor of continuum during the Louis-Napoleon-Louis era, a weasel named Talleyrand. Thankfully, we don't have to worry about that. Unless you count Yale University.

Does everyone know about Yale? Our nation's oldest second banana? The refuge for three centuries-plus of envious American snobs who couldn't get into Harvard? You know. If you can't be Teddy Roosevelt, be William Howard Taft. If you can't be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, suck eggs. If you can't be John F. Kennedy, be Gerald Ford. If you can't be John Adams and John Quincy Adams, wait for 175 years and be Bill and Hillary instead.

Yale is the tie that binds George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton. It's the fly in the ointment that guarantees Instapundit won't link to this post either, because Glenn Reynolds went to Yale too.

The thing is, I thought we were a democracy, the country where you could rise from the humblest, not the snottiest, origins to lead your fellow citizens. In particular, I thought the Democrats believed in democracy. But if you subtract Yale, Harvard, and Princeton from the mix, the only remaining Democrat presidents in the twentieth century are Truman, Johnson, and Carter, who account for just 16 years out of a hundred. No wonder their favorite kind of candidate is a Talleyrand-esque francophile plutocrat like John Kerry (Yale '66). Unless it's a tobacco trust-fund baby and senator's son with a gentleman's C from Harvard like Al Gore.

What if we really believed in the American Dream? What if we really believed in the idea of a "man of the people" instead of a scion of the pampered elite? What if, just once, we decided to chuck Yale and Harvard, and Bushes and Clintons, out of our national election process? Bye Hillary. Bye Romney. Bye Obama.

Sorry. I know that's too scary a thought. Especially for Democrats. If there's no elitist aristocrat on the scene, there's no hope at all for the Utopian egalitarian dream.

We can't have that, can we? Hey!. Here's an idea. Maybe the Democrats could convince Prince Harry or Andrew to run for president. They're for the little guy, aren't they? Sure they are.

Baa, baa, baa.

UPDATE. I told you Reynolds wouldn't link here. What I'm delighted to report is his unwitting revelation of the second-banana-ness of Yale in a post about something completely other. It's an example of the phenomenon called false learning -- ostentatious conformity to a rule most people know nothing about but which is then applied erroneously.


But you weren't right about your use of the subjunctive, Glenn. I'm glad you know that it should be used at times. Now, all you have to do is learn how to use it properly.

Monday, November 12, 2007

HARD CASES. If you wanted to see yesterday's wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns, you had to watch it on C-SPAN. Fox News carried snippets of it between breakaways for celebrity gossip and the latest Peterson murder. CBS's 60 Minutes demonstrated its appreciation of the veterans and our currently serving troops by doing segments about the MRSA virus, a possibly psychotic murderer on death row, and a wry look at the so-called "Millennial Generation" entering the workforce. Thanks, CBS.

If Morley Safer and company were conscious of the irony of spotlighting spoiled slackers on a day when many were preoccupied by  a different segment of the Millennial Generation, they never hinted at it. Their touchstone was the sweeping characterizations articulated by Jeffrey Zaslow of the WSJ Career Journal:


The on-camera experts -- Zaslow, employers, consultants -- did express concern about the millennials, but their primary message seemed to be that most of the growing and adapting needed must be done by the Boomer and post-Boomer adults presently in charge of the workplace. What incompetent parents began must be continued and fine-tuned by the rest of us because there's no realistic alternative. They are who they are.

Did I mention irony? I should revise the number. Let me count the ironies embodied in this segment. There's the irony of an elite news organization choosing to lavish attention on the most pampered and relentlessly attention-demanding subset of American youth on a day when they themselves can't spare a minute for the most selfless of our youth. There's the irony of that same news organization's flagrant refusal even to report on the recent very dramatic achievements wrought by that selflessness. And there's the irony of the historical role played by that news organization -- and the elite liberal culture it speaks for -- in maliciously libelling and evicting from university campuses one of the (very) few institutions capable of undoing parentally caused damage: the U.S. military.

The best and brightest among the cognoscenti have been adamant about the desirability of keeping ROTC as far away as possible from our most prestigious -- dare I say narcissistic? -- colleges and universities, the very places that have become the breeding grounds for silver spoon kids too loutish and lazy to master eating with a common knife and fork. What manner of unspeakable perversion do they imagine is underway at the supra-ROTC campuses of West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy? Something so vile that preventing it is worth the price of turning America's once world-leading corporations into permanent servile babysitters?

You couldn't possibly figure out the answer to such questions from the MSM's network news organizations. But if you're a lowly college football fan, you could have learned a lot over the past two weeks about what goes on inside America's service academies. Two weekends in a row, you could have seen smaller teams with far less available practice time defeat the heavily recruited football celebrities of Notre  Dame.  Navy and Air Force prevailed over the Fighting Irish the same way -- with discipline, unflagging determination, and, yes, brains. Both teams featured running backs too small to be recruited by any football power, and both backs played in multiple roles, on special teams as well as the offense, where they also blocked ferociously when they weren't carrying the ball.

Even sports announcers were moved to point out that playing football for a service academy means a five-year commitment after graduation that rules out professional football -- and that the daily regimen includes on average 10-12 hours of rigorous study (no phys. ed. majors), drill, and other work besides football practice. Nevertheless, they find ways to excel. Air Force's diminutive star (5'8", 180 lb), Chad Hall, is just one example:


A football fan could have seen something even more educational watching Friday night's Army-Rutgers game. Rutgers is far better than this year's Notre Dame and they defeated Army handily. But Army played the whole game exactly the same way Navy and Air Force played theirs, with practically no penalties or mental errors, and as resolutely on the final snap as the first. The ESPN announcers had spent an entire week at West Point and were so overwhelmed by the experience they couldn't stop talking about it.  They expressed their sense of privilege at having been permitted to witness the daily lives of the cadets, which filled them with admiration. One of Army's best defensive players was also commander of one of the academy's four regiments; his duties were so time-consuming that he slept about four-and-a-half hours a night. They spoke on the phone on-air with the father of the Army quarterback, who had been on duty in Iraq throughout his son's football career and thus had never seen him play in person, but only via the Armed Forces Network.

Apparently, not all of the Millennial Generation are like the dysfunctional creeps in Morley Safer's piece. The military seems to know a little more about raising adults than the nation's affluent parents. But, I can hear the libs tut-tutting, what happens to them in the cauldron of war? What kind of beasts do they become after they've experienced combat? What becomes of them when they realize they've been duped into a greater sacrifice than kids should be expected to bear?

You could have learned something about that, too, last night, though not on CBS. You'd have had to go exploring as far as the Military Channel, which devoted the entire day's programming to some of the tougher consequences of military service. For example, from 9 to 10, the channel broadcast War Wounds: Women Fighting On (video at link) and from 10 to 11, War Wounds: Home and Still Fighting. Neither show is for the faint-hearted, and if you don't have the courage to watch all the way to the end, you might very well draw a wrong conclusion, as did the reviewer for the ever-reliable New York Times (Take special note of the gag-me rhetoric in the second sentence):


Beginning with the fact that he doesn't know the difference between soldiers and Marines, the NYT's Neil Genzlinger doesn't know much. He fundamentally misstates the purpose and value of this show and Women Fighting On. Yes, the wounds we see are horrible, and peculiarly unnerving in the case of the women, but the point of their additional sacrifice in sharing their ordeals is not our reaction, but theirs. We observe them depressed, in pain, trying to assimilate considerable and in some cases overwhelming physical loss, but if you were looking for an exact opposite of the feckless me-ism of CBS's Millennium Generation, they are it.

In the Women episode, we meet three veterans who have experienced amputations and worse, but the tears they shed are for the comrades-in-arms who didn't make it home. One carries a copy of her dead friend's (large) tattoo so that she can have it inked onto her own forearm in permanent remembrance. Another insists that she doesn't regret her decision to enlist, because her experience and the people she met, including the two close friends killed in the same accident that so grievously wounded her, have meant so much to her life. All three remain proud of their service and determined to lead strong, rewarding lives.

It's the same with the men, as well as the friends and families in their lives. There is a sergeant whose face and most of whose eyesight were obliterated by an IED. He worries that the burden of his many reconstructive surgeries and his various intervening disabilities, including damage to his hands, falls more heavily on his wife than on him. She has two young children to care for, but they all care for each other, and for those who watched Morley's Millennials earlier in the evening, it was far easier to see how they could manage to remain cheerful, hopeful, and forward-looking than to imagine how any of the stunted human beings in the 60 Minutes piece could respond as bravely to any setback, including the loss of an iPod.

The final image was the first trip out of the hospital for a young Marine who had sustained the loss of a leg, severely wounded hands, and multiple head and facial traumas. His mother pushed his wheelchair to the Iwo Jima Memorial, past Marine guards who saluted his passage along the path to that huge and familiar sculpture. He was on the mend and he was smiling as he explained how seeing his mother's ceaseless care of him throughout a series of life-threatening emergencies had taught him how he must care for his children when he had his own one day. The red-jacketed Marines who performed the memorial ceremony swarmed him afterwards and had their picture taken with him, all of them standing in the kind of thin red line fabled for never breaking.

What the wife of the man with the wounded face said turned out to be true. The injuries were atrocious and terrifying the first time you saw them. But as soon as you recognized the people inside, you stopped seeing the wounds at all. Then the frightened pity fell away too. What remains is warmth and admiration... and pity for the Genzlingers whose only reaction to their experience is counting up ammunition for the next polemic about the war.

There's more to the Millennial Generation than Morley suspects. But you have to know where to look. And you have to be willing to look. What say you to that, Mr. Safer?

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