Archive Listing
November 10, 2012 - November 3, 2012

Friday, November 18, 2011

BATTLING DESPAIR. I did the big post Monday because I wanted a few days off to think. Then it gets difficult knowing how to jump back in. Why I rely on serendicity so much. Eduardo had this to say when he grew tired of the Dexter discussion:


What he left out was the magic he was reporting on. The Tebow Magic. An almost cartoon hero, looking lousy for the whole game, then suddenly doing everything right to win at the end. Even people who are rooting for him are embarrassed by it. How can it be? How is it possible to have a talent for nothing but winning?

I was already thinking about it when I saw Eduardo's comment. Because in Philadelphia, we are facing the exact opposite situation: a whole team of great talent that keeps finding a way to lose late. The Eagles roll up yardage, points, and spectacular highlight plays, then collapse in a heap when it really counts.

I think both these phenomena are related to what I've been struggling with of late. (I concede Penn State was a kind of last straw... the one that broke this camel's back. The past is still alive in the present, and if some part of the past you trusted is corrupt, where does that leave you? Gasping.)

Why is the whole world falling so completely apart right now, so that the news is just sickeningingly awful every day, and not enough people appear to see it to take any decisive position against it? Obama is so utterly the worst president of not only my lifetime, but my parents' lifetime, including even FDR, that every even-toned discussion of how he might yet win reelection fills me with a sensation approaching panic. Polls showing the race close are like getting stabbed by glass.

There's way too much evidence to cite. He has set not just the poor against the rich, but the middle and upper middle classes against the rich, endorsed the "Occupy Wall Street" shibboleth of the 99 percent against the 1 percent. And the mainstream media endorse him in that idiotic characterization, so that polls for a long time indicated that ordinary Americans preferred incoherent, lice-ridden squatters -- with no political platitudes not plagiarized from expressly marxist 1960s SDS mimeographs -- to the Tea Partiers who asked, politely, and amazingly hygienically, for less government control of their lives. In the United States of America.

The Republicans keep calling him a socialist, but he's more national socialist -- i.e., fascist -- than marxist. The party with the closest links to the financial epicenter of the country is the Democrats, not the Republicans. Why Solyndra gets the sweetheart deal, why Goldman Sachs provides more money -- and White House functionaries -- to Obama than to the evil conservatives the dim-witted 'Occupy' thugs are so anxious to do in.

Why I keep saying -- and no one ever listens -- that the crisis facing us is not about hunger for money but the thirst for power. Last night, on Fox News's four-to-one against libs show The Five, a conservative insisted on describing the Penn Sate mess as being about greed. It's not. The people who run government, universities, and the media don't care about prosperity at all. They want to be vindicated in their belief that they're smarter than all us flyover fools, and more than anything, they want the power to tell us what to believe, who to believe in, how to live, how to bring up our children (uh, as theirs, or their compliant drones), and how to go gently into the good night of totalitarianism.

Sometimes, the devil really is in the details. You have the mayor of New York, a billionaire, who cites freedom of speech when he's approving a mosque nobody wants at Ground Zero but who refuses to tolerate religious representation at the tenth anniversary of September 11. He cites freedom of speech again when he refuses to crack down on dope-smoking 'Occupy' protesters who are incapable of any kind of articulate speech while he insists on regulating the tobacco, caloric and salt intake of the law-abiding citizens of his city. He just wants to be in charge, to be our daddy and mommy by turns, until we are only children waving pennants for sports teams.

What they all want.  And they don't care about prosperity for the real 99 percent. Especially Obama. They just want credit for pretending to care about people they demonstrably don't give a shit about.

Obama won't approve drilling for domestic oil or natural gas. Jobs? He won't approve a pipeline that would create what? Jobs. He pushes a government control bill that is guaranteed to raise health insurance premiums and lies about the fact that everyone's premiums will go up and many will have to give up plans he insisted they wouldn't? Does he care? No. He blames it all on his predecessor and the rich. Also why his whole approach to tax policy for stimulus is to pay the wages of teachers, cops, and firemen and perpetuate unemployment indefinitely rather than turn the much larger private economy loose to do the 'evil' American thing of creating new economic opportunities where bureaucrats typically see none.

Europe is financially imploding. Even the dumbest of the mainstream media used to know that if the United States catches an economic cold, Europe catches economic pneumonia. Now Europe has something worse than pneumonia, and the only remaining mechanism for reining in the world-bankrupting federal spending levels in the U.S. is an extra-congressional committee of octogenarians who are empowered only to trim a fraction of the automatic growth of a U.S. budget that hasn't existed in legislative reality since Obama became president.Try to find a description of the European debt crisis that places the blame for Euro-tuberculosis on American pneumonia. Good luck.

Foreign affairs? Oil prices spiking, rising, scaring? Obama doing nothing -- absolutely nothing other than bland talk -- about Iran's nuclear intentions. Withdrawing completely from Iraq. Promising to flee Afghanistan soon, if not sooner. He chooses to kill bin Laden, Awlaki, etc, rather than capture them because his political buttboy attorney-general is committed to trying them in New York City if they're captured alive, and the alternative of a mlitary tribunal in Guantanamo would be even more embarrassing. And maybe we'll be able to get rid of Israel too. Who doesn't want that in the American liberal community? Lousy goddammed Jews. Except for the ones who insist on helping us every step of the way. (They'll get something for their help in the end....)

Am I boring you? Back to first questions. What do Tebow and the Eagles have to do with this mess?

So, this morning, I heard two different sets of analyses. Maybe they were close to the truth because the facts are so stark, I don't know. A quarterback I know doesn't think Tebow has what it takes shook his head and said (something to the effect of), "You can't underestimate the power of belief. If he's really able to convince them they can win, that's an incredibly potent force in sports."

Conversely, I heard from multiple analysts who still believe the Eagles might yet be a force to be reckoned with this season (none of them from Philadelphia), I heard (and I'm just summarizing), "When bad things start to happen, you can start to look for the bad things, and then they happen."

I'm sure you all want a bottom line. I refrained from watching news coverage of the 'Occupy' nonsense that was happening yesterday. I watched a SyFy movie instead. All about the moon about to collide with the earth. Lady Laird makes fun of me for watching these movies. I enjoy them because we always escape Armageddon at the end. Totally unlike what we see on the History, Discovery, and Science channels. They actually can't wait for the end of the human race.

Which is where I come down on the whole subject. Since World War I, the so-called intellectuals have been rooting for the end of the world as we know it. They believe they killed God and the proof they seek is that we disappear into nonentity and meaninglessness. Which makes them look smart.

Simple as that.

Why do you suppose they have battled so hard and furiously against the idea of American Exceptionalism when the actual history is so decisively against them? The American Revolution is responsible for all the freedom in what we call the western world. Directly. Muscularly (given WWI and WWII and the Cold War). They want to die. They want us to die. To this end, they have conquered the educational institutions and the media, they have turned truth into lies (post-modernism), and they have created a phony ideal of a green world that if it had ever existed would not contain Gizeh, Athens, Pompeii, Michelangelo, Newton, Shakespeare, Paris, Einstein, or New York. Where most of them live or wish they did. Their fantasy is that we all live naked on the banks of the Amazon drinking bad beer made from capsum bark. While listening to John Lennon on our iPods.

Buying it? Not me.

But I'm buying the bigger point. Which is that the world is at a crossroads. The propagandists have succeeded in convincing something like a majority to give up. (William O'Blivion is looking forward to the breakup of the United States.)

The resisting minority have not perceived the extent of the danger. They believe that most people still believe. They are in error about that. Something cracked in the body politic after the end of the Cold War. They haven't caught up. The end of the Cold War thawed out the worst emotion of all -- Thanatos. They still think they are raising their children to participate in something like a continuum from the past. Wrong. The continuum was fatally sabotaged long long ago.

Why I am so, so unhappy. Death is advancing on everything we hold dear. Our children have to be raised not as good citizens but implacable warriors.

I'm too old to understand all the implications of my own statement. But it's making me close to catatonic.

I took down a post earlier in the week. I should explain. I apologize. But cover-ups go way way back. The roots of the "Occupy' movement go all the way back to my own adolescence in 1969, when a third of the student body walked out of Saturday Chapel at Mercersburg Academy. It was, perhaps, the moment when the Boomer Bible was born. I tried to go back. Thomas Wolfe famously said, "You can't go home again." He was mistaken. You can go home again. I have. You just can't go back in time. Everyone who was alive then has his own version of what happened, and almost nobody else remembers anything that could be called truth. There is only the myth of what happened.

So I spoke to old teachers and younger relatives of those who were, in fact, present. I was trying to understand how institutions remember things that changed their histories for good or ill. The answer? They don't. It's all a continuous present that ejects the past like shit from a goose.

Why do I trust my memory? I committed an historic event. I published an "Extra" of the school's award winning newspaper. I got it published in 48 hours. I documented what was said at the all-school meeting after the walkout, I solicited pro and con articles from members of the faculty, and I wrote an editorial. The only thing I don't remember is my editorial, except that I was opposed to what had happened.

What did my research disclose? Nobody knows anything about the event itself anymore, even though my Extra still sits in the annals of the paper, on record and accessible.. My favorite teacher doesn't want to know about the relevance of that moment to 'Occupy Wall Street' because it conflicts with what he wants to remember about his own liberal tenure. And the youngsters have been taught to remember that only my graduating class -- 1970 -- is somehow mysteriously bitter about their alma mater.

What does any of this have to do with Penn State or the state of the world? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Except I'm still stubbornly thinking about Tebow. And this:


And this, meaning the whole thing:

Watch My Life as a Turkey on PBS. See more from NATURE.

Including the moments when he learned that turkeys live quite alertly and consciously in the present... and the moment when his last turkey friend suddenly, savagely, attacked him as a male rival.

The human plus? We get to think about it. If we can. We can't go back, but we live not to die but to live.

Are we alive? Or dead like those others? Your call.

Monday, November 14, 2011

EVEN THE BEST HAVE THEIR WEAK MOMENTS. I read all the comments but I can't respond to all of them. That would be folly. The good ones need no particular remark unless they start a new line of thinking. The bad ones are usually self-evident unless they illustrate a pattern of some kind or are so absurd as to need calling out. But if you want your comments replied to, I can give you some guidelines. 1) Be brilliantly original or provocative. Or 2) Demonstrate that you haven't read what I've written, 3) Be nonresponsive to what I've written while pretending to respond, 4) Ignore what I've written to pursue your own personal agenda, or 5) Cherrypick what I've written to register some great gotcha that bores everybody but you.

I've made no secret in the last week or two that I'm disgusted with things in general, but that hasn't deterred stratagems 2) through 5). Which is your right, of course. And some of you have been valued commenters in the past. Like William O'Blivion, who has many erudite thoughts -- but not this week. Case in point. He replied to my post about how dumb conservatives are being thus:


A slap at my dismissal of Herman Cain, sure. Fine. Never mind that Harry Truman was anything but an amateur. He was a skilled Washington politician who got lots of attention for pursuing war profiteers when he was in the House of Representatives. Yes, he was a haberdasher at one time and never earned a college degree. Not quite the same thing as never having held any kind of  elective office. But that was just the opening salvo. The bottom line here is the bottom line: "Not even Reagan was a Reagan." Uh, yeah. He was. Mr. O'Blivion is wallowing in his own despair and wants us to wallow with him. Disgust is not despair. In fact, it's the opposite. He's welcome to his own agenda, but I write my posts. Comments should be written too, not splattered across the Internet.

There's also Pittsburgh Guy -- uh, Bud -- all bent out of shape because KDKA broadcast a football game on the radio in the 1920s and the Wiki entry I quoted about the University of Pennslvania claimed that laurel for Penn. Which justified a slander only half mitigated by one of those opaque Internet typographical prompts:


Never mind what the post was about. Meaning the worst scandal in the history of amateur sports. Or that I wrote an actual -- if wry -- love letter to Pittsburgh a week or so ago.

Wrenching the whole discussion into a back alley nobody cares about is its own reward. Cherrypicking is its own reward, however off topic, distracting, and dull.

Yes, I'm grousing. William O and Bud will understand that I'm just teasing them. Commenters are entitled to commit most of the sins I've enumerated. But Sins 2) and 3) actually piss me off. Which brings me to SkinnyDevil. He's a Paulista. Initially he was befuddled by this post.


Then he collected himself and (non)responded to what he didn't like.


I admit it. This whole post is about sneaking up on SkinnyDevil, who has his own blog and seems to think the weight he's throwing around is somehow equal to InstaPunk's. Wrong. He commits the cardinal sins that make Lord Laird mad. He hasn't read what I've actually written, which answers the questions he triumphantly asks, and he is nonresponsive to the central point of the post he presumes to be superior to.


The weakest argument in the world is presuming that your own lame assumptions bind the person you're disagreeing with the same way they bind you. ("You are well aware that if I shoot your brother I haven't harmed you in any way.") I despise Ron Paul's foreign policy precisely because it doesn't conprehend that events in the world -- such as the annihilation of Israel -- would also be crippling assaults on the United States. Not perceiving that fundamental point is the stated reason for my detestation of Ron Paul. Why I -- in the text of my post -- call him "not a politician" but "a cult leader." So SkinnyDevil can't or doesn't read. Which is my problem with all Paulistas.


Read what I fucking wrote: "The plan is published as a spreadsheet, with no description of how any transition is to be accomplished. The problem I've always had with libertarians. We're right. Who gives a shit about what happens when we finally take charge?" [Boldface added after the fact because it's apparently necessary for some of the tools in the audience.]

If Gingrich says he wants to do away with various federal departments, I know that he knows it requires more than the stroke of a pen and a crazy grandma smile of jubilation. Which makes him vastly different from the congressman who could guest star as the villain of the week on Criminal Minds without raising an eyebrow.

What part of that don't you get, SkinnyDevil?

 
Disgust, Part 2

BY ALL MEANS LET'S IGNORE THE DESERVING.. Disgust. Here are the winners of the Mark Twain Prize:


Disgust. Mark Twain was not a standup comic or movie actor or producer. Hemingway said of him, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." (Except that there was also Edgar Allan Poe.) He was a writer. Here's a reminder from a lovely and still affecting souffle called Innocents Abroad, which none of the winners could duplicate or even aspire to. So what else is new? As Keith Richards says, "90 percent of everything is crap." MT is an exception. Behold the American voice:


uh, yeah. Like I said. He was a writer, not a comic. Or the racist of Tina's ignorant imaginings. Here's the bed he died in.


I'm betting if he were still in it he'd raise himself up and cuss a blue streak against the shallow nothings who have been lent his name as an honor they feel free to dishonor.

He was a great cusser. Just like me.

      

NOT AS LOYAL AS THE PENN STATERS. I went to a lot of games when I was a student, and in those days the Patriots also played at Harvard Stadium on Sundays (yeah, I'm that old.) I saw Joe Namath subjected to the gentlest sack any NFL quarterback has ever received. They owed him.

But here's the funny thing. I never bought anything that said Harvard on it. I never bought a Harvard tee-shirt, sweatshirt, or class ring. I was so used to the squiggly-eyed look people gave you when they asked you where you went to college and you said "Harvard" that I just never went there. How many times can you hear people say "Hah-vid" and laugh as if it's the first time you heard the joke? Pahk the cah in the Hahvid Yahd? Fine. Go for it. Enjoy yourself.

Then I got married for the final time a few years ago. I introduced my bride to the fun of college football, which she had never cared about and suddenly fell in love with. We got Rutgers season tickets. And, as if by magic, I suddenly started getting all this Harvard stuff as presents from my wife. Tee-shirts advertising their frequent Ivy football championships, an official Harvard sweatshirt (my first one ever, at the age of 57), a long-sleeved gray jersey that felt almost discreet and another bright crimson one that boasted of the team Ryan Fitzpatrick led to the title. And my wife had a tee-shirt that contained the coats of arms of all the Harvard houses on the back. Presents for the female kids and grandkids turned out to be Harvard things, some of them involving glitter.

I was embarrassed. Sometimes I'd change my shirt before a family gathering or a trip to the hardware store. I always disliked people who wanted Harvard to be the first thing strangers knew about them. As if... well, who needs more snobs?

You know what, though? This week, I'm finally proud. Especially of Harvard football. Harvard Stadium has 40,000 seats, usually half-empty except for the Yale game. Franklin Field, Penn's home, has 60,000 seats, usually two-thirds empty when Harvard is playing there, and we've been there twice for that with abysmal results. The last time I actually had to apologize to the guests we'd invited to the dismal performance of Harvard -- it was the single worst, dullest college football game I've ever seen. Why I picked up the whole tab at the fabulous Ralph's Italian restaurant in South Philly.

I'm not apologetic now, though. I'm proud. Finally proud. With one week to go in the season, Harvard has clinched its 14th Ivy football title out of the last 56 years. It doesn't even matter what happens against Yale next week, except that Yale's quarterback should definitely attend his Rhodes Scholarship interview in Atlanta rather than play a meaningless rivalry game.

Which is why I'm proud at this point. Big time football has just exploded in a nuclear firestorm. The Ivy League ("The Ancient Eight" as one of my tee-shirts has it) has been, after all these years, vindicated. Harvard football players aren't physics majors and classics scholars. They tend to live with other jocks in Kirkand House. On the whole, they're dumber than the rest, but some of them still make it to the NFL, which they do NOT turn their noses up at. But, but, but... they are definitely, absolutely amateurs. They do not go to bowl games, there are no challenges or replays at Ivy games, and every one of us roots for Columbia to win at least one game every year, because they are the smallest undergrad population and we don't want them to become hopelessly discouraged.

Yesterday I had to run an errand that encompassed two states. I put on a 2006 Harvard football championship tee-shirt. I was just hoping someone would make a sleighting remark, so I could say we play football cleanly as a sport. Unlike some schools we could mention.

No one did.

I mean, who cares about Ivy League football? Let's be real here.

But we did help invent the game. Does that count for anything...?

uh, No. So be it. And I'm busting my buttons over it, for the first time in 40 years. Go figure.


We win. Or, rather, I win. Who out there has a wife like mine, who always knows what's important way ahead of time? I tell you, it makes me humble.

FAIR WARNING: I HATED SEASON 4. I promised myself I would do four posts today. I concede I'm getting tired after just three. But the Lady and I have been watching Dexter Season 5 in our usual fashion -- all at once -- and I have to confess I have a confession to make.

Maybe I was burned out by watching the end of the Harry Potter saga. Deadliest Hallows XIX showed up in the queue on Friday, so we watched it. Okay. Best of the whole 45-movie saga. I can admit that. Who among you can say I'm not fair about all matters not pertaining to the Rolling Stones? See?

But then there were the On Demand continuations of CSI New York, NCIS, and Not CSI Somewhere, USA, and I have to tell you there's such a thing as series burnout. Too much of a good thing is still too much of a good thing, and there's no way I wouldn't tell the truth to my faithful readers about such a thing.

Which is why I have to report that Dexter Season 5 is absolutely the best ever. They've changed the show without changing the show. How Michael Anthony Hall doesn't automatically win the Emmy for most killer TV performance every year is far beyond my poor powers of film criticism.

I can't say much without risking spoilers, so I won't say much. Just watch. Especially if you're a Christian. Oops. I said too much. What I meant to say was, watch especially if you're a homicidal heretic with a grudge against the world. Except that...

Something I never ever thought would happen. Dexter making me cry. With him, for him, by him being human.

He does that. Lady Laird left home half an hour early this morning to mail the DVD so we could get the last epsiode ASAP.

I think I can stop writing now. Four posts. All done. Except one thing: Franco Harris? Fuck you. Dexter would know what to do with you, and being an NFL fullback wouldn't make a particle of difference. He's a, well, killer.

Friday, November 11, 2011

GO SPARTANS? First, my gratitude and congratulations to all veterans. This is your day, and we should all feel honored to have you living among us.

Anything different this year that's worthy of special remark? Yes. A couple of things. The date: it's 11/11/11, which constitutes a natural numerical tribute to the original Veterans Day, called Armistice Day and set on November 11 because the armistice ending World War I was concluded at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. Sadly, I believe we have no more surviving veterans of that war. The time set aside to remember them is now Memorial Day.

The other thing is the basketball game that will be played between UNC and Michigan State on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson this evening. I confess to having mixed feelings about this event and am curious how others feel.

On the one hand I understand it's a great opportunity for the navy to show off one of its crown jewels in prime time, and I'm sure active service military personnel around the world will get a morale boost from the game.

On the other hand I've got some nagging doubts I probably shouldn't mention. But I will. The video clip shows the impressive and no doubt hugely expensive effort that's gone into making a flight deck into a basketball stadium, and I can't watch it without remembering the dire Drudge headline in which Leon Panetta declares that the U.S. military will become "a shell" of itself if the president's "supercommittee" can't agree on other ways to reduce budget deficits. So is this ostentatious one-off sporting event the right message to be sending the nation at this moment in time? I don't know. Especially given that some of the cuts being discussed involve serious reductions in veterans benefits.

Another question no one wants to raise. Is this whole show underway because our commander-in-chief loves college basketball? He's definitely going to be there (though I thought he was bound for Bali to get as far away from the supercommittee as possible). To the best of my knowledge he hasn't yet attended the regularly scheduled Army-Navy football game (played in an arena that doesn't have to be built from scratch), though I guess he will this year since it'll be his last chance before the 2012 election. And, you know.

Please forgive my skepticism. I know it's unworthy of the day. But I sometimes wonder if he is too.

What do you think?

POLLSTERS ARE SMART, RIGHT? Found an interesting essay today (h/t Hotair) that I agree with somewhat. It purports to explain why people engage in irrational loyalty to leaders and institutions that have betrayed them in profound ways. What's interesting is that the author is observant, and even self-deprecating at times, but still manages to omit entirely the very best example of the idea he's advancing, which makes him a sorry proof of his otherwise excellent point. The title is indicative:


Cute, huh? Penn State and two besieged Republicans automatically belong together. Is he saying that defenders of Penn State and Paterno are necessarily Republicans? Noooooooo. He's far more even-handed than that. He's so even-handed that no one would guess what he finally reveals in the second to the last paragraph -- "I'm not a Republican."

Well, actually I did guess, but I can be even-handed, too, and there's much wisdom in what he's saying:


He cites the examples of Rick Perry's record of crony capitalism, Herman Cain's repeated story changes about the sexual harassment charges leveled against him, and the Penn State scandal as instances in which tribal loyalty inspires the defense of behaviors no one in the tribe approves of or would accept in other contexts. And I believe he really is trying to be fair since he begins the column with his mistaken childhood adulation of Steve Garvey and also references the Monica Lewinsky scandal:


And he's right about Cain:


His bottom line advice is good, too:



Peeking at reality. I like that. Why I couldn't help wondering why the article never took a single peek at Obama. Presumably, the tribe of Obama supporters still believes in transparency, the dismissal of lobbyists from the corridors of DC power, the end of the kind of crony capitalism that has this author so disgruntled about Rick Perry, and the spirit of civil bipartisan problem-solving Obama proclaimed as his ideal in the 2008 campaign. But somehow the need for self-questioning by Democrats about the performance of their hero with respect to these basic tribal values never made it onto the writer's radar. I guess some realities are too difficult to peek at, let alone examine with a fine-toothed comb.

So I was mulling his problematic essay when I encountered this entry at Hotair:


Ed Morrissey does his usual competent job of explaining exactly why the WAPO claims aren't true, which is worth reading to be sure but entirely unnecessary. You don't have to be an economist to know that the economy sucks and that consumers are unhappy because there's no sign that things are going to get better anytime soon. When a consumer knows his house probably isn't worth what he owes on it, he's not going to be elated by decimal point changes in leading economic indicators. This "has perplexed economists?" Really? Which economists? Ah. The smart ones.

That's when I finally understood the oxymoron at the heart of the column I quoted above. Note that the whole thrust of the essay was about moral issues, which evidently concern conservatives more than they do liberals, at least in the sense that liberals regard conservative talk of morality as hysterical and naive, whereas their own is objective and nuanced (uh, persiflage designed to sound sensitive). The essence of liberal tribalism is not moral but intellectual. The thing they can't let go of because it's a "cornerstone of their self-identity" is their rational superiority, the unwavering irrational conviction that they are simply smarter than we are. Their obliviousness to the sheer, obvious awfulness and incompetence of the Obama presidency may be the biggest blind spot in the history of any American political party. And think just how much work it must take to keep from seeing how bad everything is and how much worse it is getting day by day.

I mean, what kind of mental, er, rational, gymnastics did Ylan Mui have to perform in order to write such a piece of fantastic bilge about the state of the economy? In terms of intellectual honesty, he's every bit the vandal of the Penn State students who overturned a TV news van and busted out its windows in protest of the Paterno firing.

Which is when I had one of those flashes I sometimes have. I flashed forward to the endorsement editorials we will all be reading in the fall of 2012 when the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times the Chicago Sun-Times, and the San Francisco Mother Jones Daily will soberly articulate their reasons for recommending Barack Obama over anything Republican.

Think about it. It's already a done deal. All those editorials could be written today and nothing would change between now and then but a few vagabond facts.


So write me one of those editorials. If you don't want to pick a Republican candidate to beat up on, go with [Generic Republican], though I don't mind if you put your own favorite into the mix. The purpose is to do kind of the opposite of what our friendly columnist advises: put yourself into the minds of the libs who are committed to reflexively defending the worst president in U.S. history. It will take some imagination, some sleight of hand, and some artful phrasing.

I can help with an artifact from Shuteye Nation. I wrote an endorsement editorial well before the 2000 Republican nomination was decided. It may help you capture the appropriate objective tone. The winning entry can't sound like Moveon.org. It's got to sound like Moses coming down from the mountain with his commandments in hand.



Pick any newspaper you like. I'll post any that are good. And then we can discuss what if anything we've learned through the exercise.

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