McConnellgate

The New Neo Posted on by

Jonathan S. Tobin has a piece in Commentary entitled, “The Media Can’t Bury McConnellgate”:

Is it ever okay to bug an opponent’s political headquarters? Even those who are too young to remember what happened when officials connected with Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign unleashed an incompetent band of dirty tricksters on the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex, one would think the answer to that question is an emphatic no. While the Watergate scandal may have been more about the cover up than the crime, the line crossed by Nixon’s henchmen has always appeared to be a bright line that no one””not even liberals who can generally count on favorable media treatment””dare cross in this country. Yet someone or some group may have done so in Kentucky, and if that explanation of what happened at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Louisville office holds up what follows will be an interesting test of the media’s integrity.

…[T]here are only two possible explanations for the tape. One is that one of the senator’s high-level aides made the tape and sent it to Mother Jones magazine. The other is that one of the senator’s political opponents was running their own version of Watergate and found a way to bug his private conversations. While one cannot exclude the possibility that the former is the case, it seems unlikely. If the latter is true, then we’re going to find out whether liberals can get away with the sort of thing for which they once took down Tricky Dick.

I agree with Tobin’s characterization of the McConnell taping situation. I disagree with his idea that there’s any doubt whatsoever anymore about the tack the MSM will take. “Interesting test of the media’s integrity”? That test has been taken, and flunked, too many times to count, in situations far more weighty than what Tobin refers to as “McConnelgate.”

“We’re going to find out” whether liberals can do the same sort of stuff they get all hot and bothered about when Republicans do it? No, we found that out quite some time ago.

It has been a long, long journey for me from thinking that the media was not biased, or that it was equally biased, or not really paying close attention (before the advent of the internet, I regularly read two periodicals: the Boston Globe and The New Yorker. Nuff said.)

When did I last subscribe to the idea that the media would be fair, or even somewhat fair, or at the very least fair if circumstances were clear and dire enough? Hard to say, but certainly it would go back at least a decade. Should have realized it longer ago that that, of course. But as I said, before the internet my reading matter regarding current events—even though at the time I considered myself fairly well-informed—was rather limited, to say the least.

But I also believe that, especially during the Bush administration (which seemed to rouse the particular ire of the media) and then in particular with the advent of Barack Obama (the opposite), the MSM hasn’t just appeared worse—or more blatant in its biases, anyway. It has become worse. More monolithic, more shameless, and with this particular administration more obviously, with very few exceptions, the propaganda arm of the government.

If women were in charge

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Heather Wilhem rightly skewers an idea that has long seemed to me absurd on its face (and that many women, and even some men, seem to believe): that if women were in charge of the world, it would somehow be a better place.

Nothing in my experience or my observation of human beings indicates that this would be so. I’m not speaking of individual men and women, who have a broad range of characteristics with a great deal of overlap. But in the aggregate, there is nothing “better” about the way women operate, either in terms of the way they treat other people, the policies they advocate, or the degree of their propensity for tyranny.

The world wouldn’t be better, although it would probably be different. The tyranny of women in charge would probably resemble something like the world Sarah Conly envisions; they don’t call it the nanny state for nothing.

Where’s Tom Lehrer?

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[Hat tip: “Gringo.”]

Here’s an update on Tom Lehrer, that bitingly sarcastic troubadour of the 50s and 60s. But because he’s a reclusive sort, the article really doesn’t have all that much to say except that at 85 he’s alive and well and living in Santa Cruz and Cambridge.

If you read my previous piece on Lehrer, which is based in part on an interview he gave in 2003 to a Sydney newspaper, you’ll see that at least at that point he had gone somewhat off the deep end with Bush Derangement Syndrome. Now perhaps, with the Obama presidency, Lehrer is a bit mellower—although “mellow” seems hardly the right adjective for a man whose songs skewered almost everything and everybody.

As a minor Lehrer expert—I know almost all his songs by heart, having memorized them in my tender formative years—I have to say that one of the reasons Lehrer was so effective was that he wrote during a time when we still retained our ability to be shocked. His songs worked in part because they were so subversively funny, but it was much easier back then to push against conventional propriety.

Lehrer was a cynic with a built-in smirk to his voice. Even his tinkly piano-playing seemed to have an overlay of cynicism, although it’s hard to understand exactly how that was done. In trying to think of a song of his to post here as an example, I find an embarrassment of riches—or maybe just an embarrassment, because Lehrer’s not for everyone and is still remarkably offensive. But I especially admire the rhymes in the lengthy bridge of this one:

Educational evolution

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Commenter “Mike” quotes me in a previous post, and adds his reaction:

“In high school we were assigned to read Crime and Punishment, as well as the “Grand Inquisitor” excerpt from Karamazov, and in college I read his chilling work The Demons (then titled The Possessed), about the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the revolutionaries.”

Need we say more about how the Liberal Thugs have captured and destroyed out once esteemed education system?

Well, I’ll say a bit more, whether we need to or not.

Yes, the reading I was assigned in high school was heavy-duty, and this was at New York City public school. Our English department was especially rigorous. We had to read—and these are just a few examples that quickly come to mind—The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick, much of Shakespeare (plays and sonnets), Sophocles and Plato and a full year-long survey course of English literature and poetry beginning with Beowulf and ending with T. S. Eliot, as well as a similar year-long survey of American literature.

There were no special interest groups involved. Women, for example, were there if they had earned their place (e. g. Dickinson, Bronte). And a lot of the poetry had to be memorized.

On top of that, in twelfth grade we were required to write a paper a week, in which we were asked to analyze a work of literature and answer some sort of thought question about it. There was no way to research the answer, which could not be found in our texts or in the library (at least not easily, in those pre-internet days). We had to think—to develop an idea and defend it with evidence from the text of the novel or poem. And we had to do it again and again and again with many different works of literature, until it became easier.

Quite a few of our teachers were old even back then, and since I’m no youngster, that means they were from another era entirely. You didn’t mess with them, and if you did your parents would mess with you.

But—

I will also add that I was in honors classes and then AP classes. When I had first arrived at that high school I was put into the “regular” academic classes (there was a non-academic track, too, where the kids were pretty much warehoused and were fairly serious discipline problems, although not by today’s standards) and therefore I had experienced what the non-honors classes were like. The fare there was not that difficult at all, although I believe it was still quite a bit harder than today’s equivalent assignments.

In our AP classes (ordinarily in the last year of high school) we were also required—and expected to pass—the AP exams to get college credit. I’ve heard from a teacher friend of mine recently that in quite a few schools today this is not true, and that “AP” has often become a designation that just means “the smarter kids take this class.”

When I was in school this high school system was preceded by a grade school track system, although not one set in stone. A child could move back and forth among the tracks, although in practice it didn’t happen all that often because each child was usually fairly consistent in performance. But everyone knew which class had the smart kids and which the “dumb” kids, even though the school didn’t call them that but used a rather transparent system of number designations instead.

Much of that changed—just as “Mike” says—a little while after I got out of school. I heard about the changes rather than experiencing them, but I remember being horrified because I knew how bored the higher-achieving kids would almost have to be if placed in a system in which they were not challenged. But I guess I wasn’t all that smart, either, because back then I didn’t understand that this was in large measure a politically motivated move rather than just some random and arbitrary educational vogue.

Now, of course, I understand better. And now we’ve had decades of it, although some remnants of the track system still remain (and of course, those reportedly-dumbed-down AP classes). These days, though, many of the young people who would have been in those public school honors classes of yesteryear have fled to private schools. Many of the kids who remain are embedded in a culture that does them no favors academically, with parents who no longer know how to supervise and guide them even should they want to. My own parents weren’t especially hands-on with my schoolwork, except on rare occasions. But they didn’t have to be, because the environment as a whole encouraged working hard.

It’s not enough to banish smoking, now we won’t hire smokers

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Here’s the story:

In small but growing numbers, employers in recent years have been refusing to hire smokers, arguing that coaxing tobacco users to quit with free cessation programs or cash incentives hasn’t worked. Some medical experts back the bans, saying the end result of reducing smoking is worth it. But other health-care experts say the policy crosses an ethical line by singling out poorer and less educated groups who, federal data shows, smoke more often.

In all, about four out of 10 employers reward or penalize employees based on tobacco use. But hiring bans, which are legal in 21 states, are gaining traction, with about 4% adopting the policy and an additional 2% planning to do so next year, according to a recent study by the National Business Group on Health and consulting firm Towers Watson (TW).

Note the argument against these bans is that they discriminate against the poor, not that they are anti-liberty (although there’s also a libertarian argument that can be made in favor of the smoking bans: that businesses ought to be allowed to make hiring choices such as this one).

Note also how health care costs are increasingly the avenue to coming down hard on a group (in this case, smokers) whose health practices are considered harmful. Next it will be the overweight, and then those who fail to exercise, or perhaps even drinkers (except for the officially-approved red wine, of course).

Talk about slippery slopes. Our friend Professor Conly of Bowdoin would be oh-so-pleased; remember, she wants to ban smoking altogether—and, no doubt, lots of other things as well—even in the privacy of your own home.

When I read the article it was news to me that only 21 states allow this sort of practice. And sure enough, here’s a list of the 29 other states that have already passed what’s known as smoker protection laws. The fact that so many states have done so actually surprises me, although I would guess that if smoker protection laws weren’t seen as a way to protect poor people rather than just smokers, the liberal states would find the practice of not hiring smokers to be perfectly fine. As it is, in the New England area, Massachusetts seems to be the only state currently allowing companies to discriminate against smokers.

Lenin, Dostoevsky, and me

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[NOTE: The other day I happened across an old post from March of 2009. As I read it, I realized that I was probably describing one of the earliest manifestations of my change experience, even though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time it occurred, back when I was in college. I think it bears repeating, and so here it is, a bit edited and expanded.]

A while back a commenter here offered a link to this page of Lenin quotes. Some of them seem pretty apropos in light of recent developments, and so I offer them to you for your contemplation:

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

The goal of socialism is communism.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.

The final quote is of special interest because of the way it dovetails with the insights of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although Lenin was a mere nipper of ten when Dostoevsky wrote “The Grand Inquisitor” (a chapter from Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, written in 1880), Lenin seemed to steal a page (or several) out of his book.

Dostoevsky was no stranger to the revolutionary socialist zeal and terrorist nihilism that was already beginning to shake Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, which terminated in the Russian Revolution and the ascent of Communism there. Although he died in 1881 and did not live to see the final flowering of the movement that had taken root decades earlier, he had been a revolutionary himself in his youth, and had actually faced a firing squad after being arrested for subversive activities.

It was a traumatic experience for Dostoevsky, already a highly emotional and even unstable youth. He and his companions were subject to a mock execution, their sentences commuted at the last moment to years of harsh labor in prison camp. That experience and others made Dostoevsky a “changer;” he later renounced both socialism and a host of other Western ideas, embraced Russian Orthodoxy and a mystical spirituality, and became one of the world’s greatest writers.

I came across Dostoevsky’s works in high school and then again in college, during the period of upheaval and unrest that started in the late 1960s. In high school we were assigned to read Crime and Punishment, as well as the “Grand Inquisitor” excerpt from Karamazov, and in college I read his chilling work The Demons (then titled The Possessed), about the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the revolutionaries.

Did I understand these works then? Not as well as I think I would understand them now. But of all the lessons I learned during my school days, and of all the books I was assigned to read, these made perhaps the deepest and most powerful impression on me.

Much of school and even college felt like the memorization of dry and irrelevant facts. Many novels seemed obscure and and hardly applicable to my life, and one would have thought that would have been even more true of these startling and intense Russian works from a time that seemed so distant then (although it seems much closer now; odd how that happens, isn’t it?).

But something in them rang a bell, especially as the political upheaval of the 60s progressed. That bell had a sound not only of strange and inexplicable familiarity, it was also an ominous toll of warning. The books seemed to speak to the troubled times in which I was living, and made me realize that there is hardly any new thought under the sun. Those headstrong revolutionaries of the far-off Russian past were not stilted figures in an old and faded photo; they too closely and uncomfortably resembled the rebels of my own generation, who thought they had invented protest and cast off the shackles of the past.

But it was Dostoevsky—as well as other 19th-century Russian writers I was assigned in a college course entitled “Russian Intellectual History,” the single most memorable course of my college career—who informed me across the span of time that my generation was at least as stupid and short-sighted, and even more lacking in knowledge of history, as those Russian firebrands of long ago who thought they were building a better world (some of them thought that, anyway) and ended up constructing a police state and the Gulag in which quite a few of them met their own ends, as well.

I’ve quoted the following excerpt before on this blog. I’m quoting it again now. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I have reason to quote it in the future.

In this excerpt Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is addressing Christ, who has returned to earth but is arrested and imprisoned again:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

[ADDENDUM: And then there’s Machiavelli.]

[ADDENDUM II: For an interesting discussion as to whether the Lenin quotes are authenticated or not, please see the comments section of the 2009 post.]

[ADDENDUM III: You might want to take a look at two interesting recent articles at PJ about Dostoevsky, here and here.]

I’m shocked, shocked!

The New Neo Posted on by

Now let me get this story straight: Mother Jones has reported the contents of a clandestine tape made of a private meeting between Mitch McConnell and a few aides, who were planning to use Ashley Judd’s somewhat sketchy mental health history (which she herself had previously discussed in a memoir) and her actual stated views on a number of subjects (including religion) against her if she ran for office.

What an outrage!

The closest thing to an outrage I can find in this story is that, if one looks at the comments section, one can only conclude that many of the same liberals who were angry at Nixon for the dirty tricks of Watergate have no trouble whatsoever with the bugging of McConnell. Au contraire.

McConnell has requested an FBI investigation of who was responsible. My prediction is that nothing much will come of it.

Now that they’re not compulsory…

The New Neo Posted on by

…membership in Wisconsin’s public sector unions has fallen significantly.

Quelle surprise!

More:

There is an important lesson here: not only did Scott Walker’s reforms strike an important blow for employee freedom, they also had the happy side-effect of depriving the unions of a large chunk of their funding, and therefore their ability to sway elections.

RIP Annette Funicello

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr”]

The news of Margaret Thatcher’s death today eclipsed this news for me. But to those of a certain age, Annette (we were on a first-name basis) was a formative figure in our childhood.

I never was a Mickey Mouse Club fan, I must admit. I thought the show strangely silly even though I was a very young child; I just didn’t get big kids wearing mouse ears. Not my style even back then. But Annette struck a chord because she was the first curly-dark-haired pop icon I knew of, and as a curly-dark-haired sort myself I appreciated her presence. And she even did a little ballet on the side.

Multiple sclerosis, the disease from which Annette died, can be either a relatively minor ailment or a very cruel affliction. Annette’s went from the first variety to the second over a period of many difficult years in which she showed courage that belied her fluffy image.

Today, even the fact that she was already 70 (seventy!) came as a shock; now how did that happen, I ask you? I know, I know—in the usual way.

RIP.

Thatcher and “saving” the West

The New Neo Posted on by

Bill Kristol has a piece in the Weekly Standard in which he writes:

And now the last of them is gone. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II””three who won the Cold War and, it isn’t too much to say, saved the West (at least for a while!)””are no longer with us. Their examples remain.

Note that parenthetical “at least for a while.” Will their examples be followed in kind, or was the “save” just the equivalent of fingers in the dyke against an unstoppable wave of leftism that will once again swamp us?

Their opponents would gleefully say it’s the latter; that’s why they are so triumphantly stomping on Thatcher’s grave before she’s even been placed in it.

I can’t see the future. But I do see the conflict between the same forces that have long been fighting a war for people’s minds.

Sometimes one side seems to be winning, sometimes the other. Right now leftism believes itself to be in the ascendance, and there’s no doubt it has some natural advantages in term of appealing to human emotions both positive and negative, such as starry-eyed and somewhat naive idealism, as well as covetousness and lust for power.

But conservatism has some advantages too, which might best be summed up in the words of Lady Thatcher herself:
The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Or perhaps this:
Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation. We Conservatives are returning power to the people.