“It makes no sense”

The New Neo Posted on by

Another pundit agrees that the current House Republican stance on immigration makes no sense.

That makes it pretty much unanimous, doesn’t it? I haven’t seen a single pundit, whether RINO/establishment or conservative/Tea-Party, say it makes sense, except when turning themselves into pretzels trying to guess at what might be going on in Boehner’s Byzantine or simpleton mind. I’ve tried to figure that out myself (today’s earlier post, for example), but it doesn’t change the fact that the deal appears to make no sense at all.

It’s not a whole lot that can unite the warring wings of the Republican Party. But dislike of what Boehner is doing seems to have accomplished the difficult feat.

Maybe that’s his real goal. Nope, probably not.

[ADDENDUM: This would make a certain amount of sense, if it were true. I wouldn’t bet on it.]

Who is Boehner, who is he?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to say at the outset that I think John Boehner is a poor leader, and I don’t trust him—either to do what’s right for the Republicans, the conservatives, or for the country. As long ago as December of 2012 I said he should be replaced as Speaker.

But I don’t agree with those who would call him “clueless, gullible, stubborn, out of touch, and a Dunce,” although I have absolutely no difficulty seeing why a person might call him that. Maybe they’re even right, although I hope not, for all our sakes, because he’s Speaker at a time when we need someone very very smart and very very principled.

Well, we’re not going to get that; I’m not alleging that’s who Boehner is. And I confess I find him very opaque (and no cracks about orange skin, either). He certainly seems like a simple, cloddish sort. But I don’t think he is, because I don’t think a person gets to be Speaker of the House that way.

I’ve already written about this topic, and so the next portion of this post is going to be a recycling (slightly edited) of something I wrote back in October of 2013, when I was trying to puzzle out this same question: who is Boehner, and what does he think he’s doing?:

Conservatives are predictably lashing out in frustration at John Boehner, whom they already neither liked nor trusted.

Sellout. RINO. Wuss. You know the drill.

But I don’t see it quite that way.

Before there’s any misunderstanding (although as Popper said, misunderstanding’s gonna happen no matter how you try to head it off), let me say I’m not a Boehner fan. He’s uninspiring, seems naive, and exhibits nothing especially superior in either the brains or the rhetoric or the spine department.

But I don’t think he’s dumb, nor do I think he’s all that naive. It’s been my observation over time that people don’t get to be head of a party (either party) in Congress without having some smarts in at least the strategy and tactics department. Or without being somewhat good at playing political poker.

Now, Boehner may be one of the worst of recent political party leaders at that. Or he may be one of the better ones, given the not-so-great hand he’s been dealt. I don’t know; I can’t really tell because I sense that most of what goes on in Congress right now (or ever) is hidden from view. But I’m willing to at least entertain the idea that Boehner may (as this American Thinker piece by Fisher Adams claims) be playing a smarter game than is immediately apparent.

As commenter “T” (who linked to Adams’ article) wrote:

I am reminded of Henry Kissinger’s comment about foreign affairs: he said that there are always two chess games being played, the one on the table that everyone watches and a second game under the table that no one sees. Could that be the case here?

Could be. Fervently hope so, anyway. Because the alternative is pretty grim.

Boehner has a rather interesting history that at least indicates the possibility of a considerable amount more toughness than is apparent on the surface, as well as more devotion to conservative principles than many people credit him with. For example, he had a hardscrabble childhood and young manhood and managed to work his way up from it:

[Boehner] grew up in modest circumstances, having shared one bathroom with his eleven siblings in a two-bedroom house in Cincinnati. His parents slept on a pull-out couch. He started working at his family’s bar at age 8, a business founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938…All but two of his siblings still live within a few miles of each other; two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

Boehner attended Cincinnati’s Moeller High School and was a linebacker on the school’s football team, where he was coached by future Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust…[Boehner was] the first person in his family to attend college, taking seven years as he held several jobs to pay for his education.

If Boehner’s a RINO now, he certainly wasn’t at the outset. Or, if he was a RINO even back then, he certainly managed to keep it pretty quiet:

Boehner, along with Newt Gingrich and several other Republican lawmakers, was one of the engineers of the Contract with America in 1994 that politically helped Republicans during the 1994 congressional elections during which they won the majority in Congress for the first time in four decades.

By 1997, when Gingrich was perceived by the others as a political liability, Boehner was also one of a group of Republicans that tried to get Gingrich to resign as Speaker. But when Boehner ran for Majority Leader in 2006, he “campaigned as a reform candidate who wanted to reform the so-called ‘earmark’ process and rein in government spending.” Of course, because Republicans lost in the House in 2006, he was demoted to Minority Leader and it wasn’t until 2010 that he got to be Speaker.

For the most part, Boehner’s political positions have been conservative. So if he’s actually a RINO, he’s a very odd one indeed. What he is, however, is a guy who’s been in Congress and in some position of party power for a long, long time, which would officially make him an “establishment Republican.”

As for naivete, there’s very good evidence that Boehner knows at least some of what he’s up against in Obama and Pelosi, et al. He may not know exactly what to do about it, given that the Senate is in Democratic hands. But he knows the intent of today’s Democratic leaders:

House Speaker John Boehner told a group of Republicans the day after President Barack Obama’s [2012] inaugural ceremony that the president’s focus was to “annihilate the Republican Party.”

In remarks to Republicans attending a closed luncheon sponsored by the Ripon Society, Boehner pointed to the president’s speech as evidence Obama recognizes he can’t achieve his agenda because of the GOP-led House of Representatives.

“Given what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans. So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party,” the House speaker said.

Boehner underlined his point, adding, “And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal ”“ to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

My only disagreement with what he says would be that it’s not merely “the Republican Party” they want to “annihilate.” It’s the whole idea of small government and conservatism which they wish to discredit and demonize. They are well on their way to doing so, with the help of a compliant MSM, and unfortunately events such as the shutdown and the debt ceiling negotiations have the paradoxical effect of helping them in that endeavor with a large segment of the American public.

Republicans face a dilemma. The Congressional elections of 2014 are of the utmost importance. They have a chance to take the Senate (although even if they manage to do so—and to keep the House, which they must also do—Obama will retain veto power). But the conservative wing of the Republican Party is clamoring (and understandably so) for more action now, and threatening to defect if more isn’t done to stop the Democrats in their tracks. Boehner is in the position of having to weigh approaches that could backfire, knowing he will be reviled if he fails, and knowing it is very late in the day and the stakes are incredibly high.

But that’s the role he asked for.

So, now that it’s about three and a half months since those words were first written, what would I add? That it may be that Boehner’s most salient characteristic is personal ambition, and that he’s more interested in saving the “Republican Party” than saving its supposed principles, that of conservatism. And it is likely that those principles of the Republican Party are not especially conservative at all.

But in terms of the current immigration battle in Congress, aren’t at least some of the interests of the Republican Party as a whole and conservatives as a whole one and the same? Not that there isn’t a conflict—we can assume that the big donors are more in favor of caving on immigration than holding firm, and that’s certainly a large conflict. But if the Republicans vote for a law that multiplies the demographic advantages for the Democrats in a way that will “annihilate” the Republican Party anyway, it doesn’t seem like a self-serving move, much less a good one in principle.

Perhaps the best move would be to placate the donors by pretending to cave to the Democrats on immigration, but pulling away from passing a bill at the last minute? So Republicans such as Boehner can say to the donors, “at least I tried”? Or perhaps it’s the other way around and they’ve pretended to placate the conservatives but in the end will do what the donors want. But both the withdrawal of donor funds and the act of giving many millions of potential Democratic voters a way into the system threaten Boehner and his fellows, because who’s going to be donating a lot of money to them when they’re no longer in power? Yes, they may be getting cushy jobs in the private sector as a result, and that could be a sufficient motivator. But somehow I don’t think that money with a loss of political power is what they’re after, although it may be what they’d be willing to settle for.

Politics is a dirty business. Even those who start out clean (and I have no idea whether Boehner was one of them) have to fight to stay clean, and many aren’t interested in that fight.

The GOP’s present stance on an immigration bill…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is not only maddening, it’s puzzling.

Why are they doing this? And especially why now? Doesn’t it constitute an unforced error of major, major proportions?

I’ve been mulling it over for a while. I’ve had a lot of thoughts: money, some hidden Machiavellian but brilliant agenda (would that it were true), stupidity, a doomed attempt to curry votes that will end up losing them votes, and the odd idea that they are afraid of winning and want to sabotage themselves. Why would they be afraid of winning? Because they don’t want to actually have to take responsibility for what they do or don’t do.

But Sean Trende has a lot more to say about it all. His piece is probably the most intelligent thing I’ve read so far on this almost impenetrable subject. That doesn’t mean he’s correct; I still think what the Republicans are reportedly considering defies logic and understanding. But I give him a gold star for effort and imagination.

D’Souza gets a defender

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first read that Alan Dershowitz had said the charges against Dinesh D’Souza are most likely a case of selective politically motivated prosecution, I was surprised. But I wondered about the strict accuracy of the report, since the source was Newsmax.

But now we have some WSJ corroboration, so I think we can safely assume that Dershowitz is indeed defending – although not in any official capacity as a defense attorney – D’Souza.

Dershowitz is an odd case himself. He’s a liberal who endorsed Barack Obama for president not only in 2008 (when one might argue Dershowitz could be somewhat forgiven), but in 2012 as well (unforgivable). But Dershowitz sometimes shows that here and there he can spout something other than the liberal party line. One area is his general stance on Israel, another concerned the Zimmerman/Martin case, during which he excoriated the prosecutors and called for their disbarment.

But this isn’t about Israel, nor does it concern local prosecutorial misconduct. This is a federal case, and not just metaphorically. And his accusation is about liberals in Washington DC using the legal system to abuse a conservative:

“This is clearly a case of selective prosecution for one of the most common things done during elections, which is to get people to raise money for you,” famed law professor Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax.

“If they went after everyone who did this, there would be no room in jails for murderers.”

But Dershowitz is just getting warmed up:

The Justice Department’s tactics remind Dershowitz of the words of Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

“This is an outrageous prosecution and is certainly a misuse of resources,” charged Dershowitz. “It raises the question of why he is being selected for prosecution among the many, many people who commit similar crimes.

And then he adds:

This sounds to me like it is coming from higher places. It is hard for me to believe this did not come out of Washington or at least get the approval of those in Washington.

We don’t know who gave the order or who approved it. I certainly agree it’s likely to have been “those in Washington,” but which “those”? Holder? Obama? All of the above?

Chuck Schumer?:

The prosecutor in the D’Souza case is U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, a former staff member to Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and an Obama appointee. Bharara has earned a reputation for his rigorous prosecution of white-collar crime on Wall Street and has been mentioned as a potential successor to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Richard Hasen, professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, had some interesting observations, too:

“My sense had been that in the past many of these, when they were smaller scale [like D’Souza’s], were handled civilly or were pleaded out,” Hasen said.

Hasen pointed to the cases involving then-Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and then-House Speaker Tom DeLay of Texas, both Republicans, as examples of cases that were politically motivated. In both circumstances their convictions were overturned.

Indeed. Remember the prosecution and conviction of Ted Stevens? That case also involved egregious prosecutorial misconduct. And the takedown of Stevens helped pave the way for Democratic control of the Senate in 2008 and the subsequent passage of Obamacare. But if it was politically motivated (and I would wager it was), who was actually behind the prosecution of Stevens? Obama was not yet president, nor was Holder Attorney General. The FBI and the IRS were investigating Stevens, but it was during the waning days of the Bush administration.

I don’t know if anyone has ever figured that one out. And in the D’Souza case, Dershowitz is careful to make it clear he’s not accusing the prosecutor of misconduct:

[Dershowitz], though, said he has a high regard for Manhattan U.S. attorney Preet Bharara, whose office under his watch has won corruption convictions against nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers in New York. “I’m a big of supporter. I think he’s doing a great job, but this is a mistake,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

A spokesperson for Mr. Bharara’s office did not have an immediate comment.

I would guess that Dershowitz knows more about this than he’s letting on, or at least has strong suspicions who’s behind it.

And it’s not Bharara.

Perkinsnacht

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember Tom Perkins? The guy who compared the war on the 1%, not to Kristallnacht, but to the beginning of a pattern that could lead to something like Kristallnacht?

Well, his letter to the WSJ may be “the most-read letter to the editor in the history of The Wall Street Journal.” He’s been forced to eat a little crow:

Amid the ongoing media furor and an ungallant rebuke from Kleiner Perkins, Mr. Perkins has apologized for the comparison, without rebuking the larger argument.

It’s no surprise that Perkins was made to walk back his comparison—a fact that doesn’t take away from his analogy. We discussed the issues he raised in the original thread on the subject on this blog, and I’ll just add that the last sentence of the WSJ‘s editorial defending Perkins is somewhat naive:

The liberals aren’t encouraging violence, but they are promoting personal vilification and the abuse of government power to punish political opponents.

There are many ways to encourage violence, and not all of them take the form of saying, “Go out and kill the [fill in the blank]!” To encourage hatred and envy, rather than mere disagreement and rational argument, is to help to encourage violence, at least potentially, and that’s what Perkins was talking about.

Of course, sometimes violence isn’t necessary. Sometimes the re-education camps will do. Sometimes it is enough to silence people or discourage them from speaking up in a way judged to be insufficiently PC.

No, the Romney film would not have made a particle of difference in the election

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep reading about how wonderful the Netflix documentary “Mitt” is, what a nice guy it shows Romney to be, and how if only the film had been released before the 2012 election it would have made a difference.

Well, however fine a film it is, and however nice a guy it reveals Romney to be, I have to say that “they” (the media, the pundits, the left, the liberals) would have destroyed it before the election. They don’t need to do so anymore, and therefore they can afford to be magnanimous. They can even let little bleats of wistful praise escape: gee whiz, we didn’t know what a nice guy he was!

Of course they (the MSM, for example) did. They tried to make sure we didn’t know. And the Republican Convention had plenty of information available, too. But not many people watched it, and the networks didn’t even cover the parts about Romney’s bio and good deeds. That was no accident at all.

I’m not sure whether I’ll watch the Netflix film, because I’m not really a glutton for punishment.

Whoever is the Republican nominee in 2016, get ready for the full-court-press-press. Anyone who thought that what happened to George W. Bush or Sarah Palin had something to do with some special characteristics of stupidity, accent, word choice, does not understand politics and the press today, nor do they understand the opposition in general.

The opposition (and that most definitely includes the propaganda wing, the MSM) will find whatever vulnerability exists, and if it doesn’t exist they will make it up. They will do the opposite for their candidates, the Democratic candidates. People may say they don’t trust the MSM or don’t listen to them. But most do, and even if they think they don’t the message still seeps in.

It’s as though the Republican (and/or conservative) candidate starts a footrace carrying a 100-pound sack. What’s inside the sack may differ for one candidate versus another. But everybody on that team has got to carry the sack all the way to the finish line, and then for the rest of his/her life, and that person had better be very very strong.

Dirty dogs

The New Neo Posted on by

Some dogs really really really don’t want to take a bath.

And some dogs really do.

I think the anti-bath growlers and teeth-bearers are kind of scary; seems to me they could bite. But some of the rest are pretty funny (hint: click on the “x”s in the black circles to get rid of those annoying ads):

Churchill and speechmaking

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night when I was engaged in not watching Obama’s SOTU speech, I was thinking of the antidote: Churchill. I even wrote a couple of notes for this post.

And funny thing, today I see that commenter “Beverly” had the same notion (see also this).

I have long cringed when anyone refers to Obama as a great orator. I just don’t get it. He’s a terrible orator: flat, repetitive delivery; contentless (that is, when he’s not engaged in flagrant lying, or errors); and cliche upon cliche.

But why single Obama out? The US hasn’t had a president who’s a great orator in a long, long time. Kennedy had some good moments, Reagan was quite good, but I can’t think of anyone of Churchillian quality since Lincoln. But “Churchillian quality” is a tall, tall order, because Churchill was a great orator.

It helped that Churchill was a writer who wrote his own speeches. Actually, if you read the Manchester biographies of Churchill (one volume of which appears in my blog header photo), you’ll learn that Churchill actually dictated most of his speeches in the early morning (as in, “late night”) hours to a bevy of night-owl secretaries.

Churchill carefully plotted out his delivery, too, and he was a master at it:

At the Morgan Library are several drafts of a single speech from February 1941, when England stood alone against the Nazi onslaught and Churchill appealed to President Roosevelt for aid. The first draft looks like a normal typescript; the final draft, says Kiely, “looks like a draft of a poem.”

Churchill made those markings, Kiely explains, to indicate how the speech should be delivered. He inserted white space to remind himself to pause.

Churchill asked: “What is the answer that I shall give, in your name, to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty millions?”

Here, lots of white space is inserted into the final draft.

“Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt.”

Another long pause, and then he said:

“Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and under Providence, all will be well. We shall not fail or falter. We shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long”drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

Historian Andrew Roberts says the impact of Churchill’s speeches cannot be underestimated. “An awful lot of people thought that it was impossible to beat the Nazis,” Roberts says. “Yet what Winston Churchill did, by constantly putting Britain’s peril in the greater historical context of other times that Britain had nearly been invaded, but had been ultimately successful, he managed to tell the British people that this could happen again.

I recall reading in the Manchester books that Churchill had the final drafts of his speeches written out in a sort of blank verse form, and had not only the pauses written in but sometimes instructed himself to stutter slightly for emotional emphasis. A master of wit, word, and the delivery of both, he had a general rule about speech-writing and speech in general:

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

You will note that most of Churchill’s speeches – and virtually all of his most memorable quotes – feature short, “old” (Anglo-Saxon root) words. They also tend to have the cadence of the best poetry.

Which means we’ll have to hear a bit of Churchill now, won’t we? How about the speech described in this post? The pauses aren’t quite as long as I expected from the description, but it’s a great, great speech (note the way he says “nay,” “give us,” and “finish the job,” as well as the way he reads the Longfellow verse, and how Biblical the tone becomes towards the end of the clip):

Defending Debbie Wasserman Schultz

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t worry folks, I’m not defending her politics. I’m just defending her hair, on behalf of curly-haired women everywhere.

First let me establish my bona fides (if my photo on this blog hasn’t done so already): yes, I am a curly-haired woman. I’ve written about it, and I’ve been through every conceivable way of dealing with it. I don’t look good in straight hair (tried to iron it long ago, and blow dry it more recently). Straightening it is just not complimentary to my face or my hair, and it’s a royal pain in the butt, so I don’t do it.

But most curly-haired people can’t just let the hair go completely au naturale, or they get a huge frizzball. It needs to be coaxed—ideally, gently and without too much fuss—into showing off its natural curl in the best way possible. That usually involves a good haircut, a few products, and air-drying or drying with a diffuser. Not that terrible a process, really, although the drying can take time, and if the hair is especially curly the taming can be more difficult to accomplish. For all of us our sworn enemies are humidity, the brush, and too-frequent washing.

That said, Wasserman Schultz was dealt a particularly bad hand in that she’s got hair that’s both curly and thinnish, and she resides either in Florida or Washington DC, two of the frizz capitals of the world. She’s also Of A Certain Age (although it’s an age that sounds youngish to me), which means her hair isn’t getting any thicker with time.

Now at this point you might say, “Neo, I thought you said you were going to come to Wasserman Schultz’s defense.” But bear with me; all in good time.

Today I was reading Ann Althouse’s entertaining list of 10 things she might have live-blogged from last night’s SOTU speech, had she been live-blogging it (my hat is off to anyone who could watch that thing, much less watch it and make amusing comments about it), and I saw this:

“Shirley Temple is there,” I said, spotting Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and being unfair to Shirley Temple, whose ringlets ”” as I do an image search this morning ”” look artlessly subtle and not at all like Debbie’s headful of boing-y springs. Incredible what women can do to themselves and still be taken seriously…

Ah, but I’d wager that Wasserman Schultz hasn’t “done” very much to herself at all to get that headful of boing-y springs. She’s probably desperate for an “artlessly subtle” look, but that’s probably beyond her powers, or would take so much “doing” for her as to be all-consuming. She’s lucky if her hair doesn’t frizz up into a big puffball or frizz down into a limp and wan collection of wires.

As for Shirley Temple, who was indeed a cutie-pie, it was her hair that was the product of a great deal of work (in addition to having the glow of youth). Her “look” was – as Althouse suggests – “artlessly subtle,” but there was actually a great deal of art behind it:

Temple was undoubtedly a great actor for such a young child, but it didn’t hurt that she usually had a head full of perfect curls when she stepped in front of the camera. As you might expect, giving a preteen such a meticulous hairdo was no small task. Before she turned in for bed each night, her mother had to set her hair in 56 carefully planned curls.

Temple reportedly didn’t love the hairstyle; she preferred the shorter, tousled locks that her hero Amelia Earhart sported. Temple did, however, understand the value of her trademark look. In 1938 she visited the Roosevelts at their Hyde Park estate. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt asked the star to go swimming with her, but Temple declined “because of my hair.”

Indeed.

Here’s Temple in her heyday:

shirley temple

You all probably know what Wasserman Schultz looks like on a bad hair day, so I’ll spare you. I couldn’t find a still photo of her at the SOTU speech last night, but here’s a video clip. She’s in black at the right of the video, and then later towards the center and slightly in back, and I think her hair looks darn good, and although not “artlessly subtle” it’s actually going the way curly hair goes when you get a decent haircut, put just a couple of taming products on it, and dry it naturally:

And that’s probably the last nice thing I’ll ever say about Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

[ADDENDUM: And if you still want to read something about the actual SOTU speech rather than the travails of curly-haired women, here’s a reflection on the reactions to the speech, more about the speech, and the Tea Party rebuttal by Utah Senator Mike Lee (sounds interesting).]