It’s come to this

The New Neo Posted on by

Susan Estrich writes that the people of Nevada should re-elect Harry Reid because of his ability to bring home the bacon. And that’s about the only reason. A more crass and cynical political column I don’t think I’ve ever read.

And in other not-so-great media moments, the WaPo’s David Broder doesn’t believe the projected resounding Republican victory would mean that the country is turning to the right. After all, the House will probably only gain a bare Republican majority, and the Senate is likely to stay in Democratic hands.

Many people predict a greater House turnover than even that, however, which would be of hugely historic proportions. And on the issue of a Senate turnover, Broder seems to conveniently forget that only a third of the Senate is up for re-election in any one year. In 2010, by my admittedly quick calculations, if every single Republican incumbent won re-election (a feat in and of itself), and every single previously and currently Democrat-held seat turned over into Republican hands (a virtually impossible one, even in a tsunami year), the largest number of seats the Republicans could possibly gain would be 19. So gaining even eight or perhaps more, as they are projected to do, would be huge.

Also—have you noticed a lull in the news for the past couple of days? It’s almost as though the nation and even much of the world is holding its collective breath to see what will happen on Tuesday.

Plisetskaya: ballet rehearsal

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes I need a break from all this politics (like right now!), and one of the things I turn to is dance. Most often ballet. Specifically, certain dancers of my youth, who now, to my joy, are readily available for the watching on YouTube.

I’ve written about Maya Plisetskaya many times before. One of my all-time favorites, she was distinguished in her heyday by her tremendous vitality, an enormous springy jump, great strength, flexible arms, sexiness, joy, drama, and a fluidity of movement that seemed remarkably free, despite her long confinement to the USSR by Soviets who were afraid she would defect if they allowed her to leave.

The lady is now well into her eighties and she looks marvelous. Here’s a videotape from a few years ago; I believe Plisetskaya was then a bright young thing of 74. She is rehearsing a French dancer named Marie-Agnes Gillot, who was about 24 years old at the time.

I am transfixed by Plisetskaya’s high heels, among other things. I’m significantly younger than she, but I’d have trouble even standing in them for more than a few minutes, and here she’s practically dancing in them. As I watched the video, despite Gillot’s approaching the prime of her dance life and technique, my eyes were riveted on Plisetskaya instead.

This is how major dance roles are generally transmitted, by a sort of spirit transfer. The older dancer tries to infuse the younger with the sense of the thing as it was first taught to her, adding all she’s learned about the subtleties of dance in the interim. Such teaching doesn’t always really take, except in bits and pieces; dance has changed too much.

You can see that Gillot’s technique is exponentially more spectacular than Plisetskaya’s ever was: in particular her huge extensions, the arched articulation of her feet, and the secure plumb line of her turns. But to my taste, Plisetskaya is above and beyond her in everything else that makes for dancing. Even here, when she had lost the ability to dance on the stage, so much remains (be patient; she doesn’t really get going till about midway through the clip).

[NOTE: I’m aware the Gillot is learning the role and not dancing full-out. But Plisetskaya certainly isn’t dancing full-out either; she can’t.

For those of you unfamiliar with the variation they are rehearsing, it is part of the third act of Swan Lake: the role of Odile, an evil temptress come to impersonate the heroine and make the Prince forget his vows to his true love. You will note that, towards the end of the tape, Plisetskaya mimes a whole series of moments: where Odile laughs in manic triumph at her success when she gets the Prince to swear falsely (around 4:42), and then in turn some of the reactions of the assembled court, including his swooning mother.]

Election predictions

The New Neo Posted on by

You may notice that I haven’t done any posts on how many seats the Republicans will gain next week. And I don’t plan to, either.

That’s because it’s not my thing. There are plenty of articles all around the MSM and in the blogosphere that do just that, though. If you want to read predictions, just start scrolling down at Ace’s; RealClearPolitics has lots on its left and right sidebars as well as this; and Jay Cost opines here.

I don’t like to speculate on numbers at all. I think the Republicans will make large gains, but exactly how large is anybody’s guess.

That’s right: guess. All elections hinge on turnout, but this year turnout is far more of an unknown than usual. What we do know is the following:

(1) Republicans and Independents are more highly motivated than Democrats. This will favor Republicans.

(2) Fraud is occurring, and it will favor Democrats.

(3) The tendency is anti-incumbent.

(4) The unknown factor of weather will also tend to favor the more highly motivated, which we already know is Republicans.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that this is one of the most important elections I can ever remember, certainly one of the most (if not the most) important midterm elections. This means that—despite the glowing prognostications of huge Republican victories—as the big day approaches, I am getting very nervous.

It’s one thing to read predictions and even to look forward to something fervently, which I most definitely am. It’s another to know that very soon it will happen and we will know the results. Till then, Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive, and we won’t learn which until very late next Tuesday night, when we open that box.

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[NOTE: To all you physicists out there: yes, I know it’s not the most perfect metaphor. But I like it.]

The neofication of Juan Williams

The New Neo Posted on by

I see it in Williams eyes when I happen to catch him on Fox these days: he’s spitting mad. Personally outraged, and most of all surprised.

I don’t know whether the NPR firing will lead to any political change for him, and it almost doesn’t matter. But it is interesting to watch—and to recognize—the emotional process he’s undergoing. He appears to be struggling with a sense of betrayal and of shock, because he seemed to have previously been a believer in the essential fairness of the liberal world of which he was a part. His unjust treatment by NPR—“after all I’ve done for you”—came as a surprise.

It shouldn’t have, if he’d been paying attention. But people (not just Juan Williams) tend to filter their perceptions of reality through their belief systems, and ignore that which doesn’t fit in. But there is nothing quite like a personal experience to focus the attention. Williams’s attention is pretty focused these days.

It’s not for nothing that I have a category on the right sidebar entitled, “Leaving the circle: political apostasy” (a category to which I will assign this post when it’s done). I remember quite vividly when I first experienced the phenomenon. At the time, I was far from being a Juan Williams, having lived a relatively apolitical life. The reaction I got when I first politely voiced my relatively moderate disagreements wth the liberals who surrounded me sent me reeling, in the emotional sense.

I’ve adjusted in the many years since it first happened (neo’s not so neo any more). I’ve gotten used to it and come to expect it. But in some ways I’m still reeling, and probably always will be. It’s that profound an experience.

Again…

The New Neo Posted on by

…with the narrative.

And in other news, Mr. Bipartisan Lovefest speaks out:

[Obama] said Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch and then stood by and criticized while Democrats pulled it out. Now that progress has been made, he said, “we can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

Class act, that Obama. And it’s an interesting metaphor, isn’t it, conjuring up not only back seat drivers who are not allowed to give advice on steering, but Southern blacks relegated to the back of the bus.

And it wasn’t just some accidental, off-the-cuff metaphor, either. He said much the same thing last week at another venue.

But I say, better in back of the bus than under it, where so many of Obama’s erstwhile friends have ended up. Honestly, though, forget the racial overtones; I’ve never heard a president in my lifetime publicly express such a vile, contemptuous—okay, I’ll say it, un-American—sentiment about the other party.

Assange and Ellsberg: together at last

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When I wrote this post I perceived the philosophical connections between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers renown. But little did I know that their ties are even more concrete than I thought.

For instance, Assange appeared as special guest (courtesy of Skype technology) at a conference organized by Ellsberg back in June, where Assange paid explicit homage to Ellsberg by stating, ““Dan is a hero of mine.”

More quotes from the conference:

Ellsberg had said that rather than go through the laborious work of photocopying the [Pentagon] papers on primitive machines, and then schlep them across the country, he wished he had been able to use the Internet to leak the documents…

“Dan has a wonderful statement that we’ve used. And that is that courage is contagious,” said Assange, citing a leaker who spoke to Ramparts magazine in 1972, who credited Ellsberg as his inspiration.

At the end of the day the two said they would “keep in touch.” And so they apparently have; last Friday the two appeared together at a London news conference:

Mr. Ellsberg, who said he had flown overnight from California to attend, described Mr. Assange admiringly as “the most dangerous man in the world” for challenging governments, particularly the United States. He said the WikiLeaks founder had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services and compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon.

I wonder whether Ellsberg thinks a government shouldn’t try to prosecute security leaks. It’s hard to imagine a government on earth that wouldn’t try to do so; any government that did not would probably not last very long.

Ellsberg knew he was risking prosecution when he gave the Papers to the media, but his case never went to trial because charges were dropped due to the transgressions of the Watergate perpetrators. You may or may not remember why they originally called themselves “plumbers” [emphasis mine]:

The White House Plumbers, sometimes simply called the Plumbers, were a covert White House Special Investigations Unit established July 24, 1971 during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Its task was to stop the leaking of classified information to the news media…

The Plumbers’ first task was the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding, in an effort to uncover evidence to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The operation was reportedly unsuccessful in finding Ellsberg’s file and was so reported to the White House.

Government is constrained by laws against this sort of thing, and rightly so. Its power and potential for abuse is ordinarily far greater than that of the average citizen. But the consequence of it all is that leakers now seem to be able to breach national security with impunity, at least most of the time (I offered some suggestions on how to deal with this phenomenon here and here).

In addition, like many on the Wikileaks staff, Assange is not a US citizen, so it’s hard to see how those particular people could be prosecuted for anything. Also, the internet helps him not only disseminate the information, but affords extra layers of anonymity to the leakers who are US citizens. What’s more, it allows Assange to organize the whole thing much better and to increase the number of players; in contrast (at least as far as I know), Ellsberg acted mostly alone, although he needed the cooperation of the MSM to broadcast the information.

And cooperate they did. Most people got their ideas about what the Papers contained by what parts the MSM chose to highlight and summarize. As I wrote in 2006:

We all know the drill [presented by the MSM]: fearless Daniel Ellsberg, at the risk of prosecution, spirits away classified information…and gives it to the press, who publish it in brave defiance of government efforts and a Supreme Court case trying to enjoin them from doing so. But Ellsberg’s”“and the Times and Post’s”“devotion to truth won out, the American people were informed of the government’s deceptions, and we finally disengaged from an unwinnable battle…

A fascinating piece on the subject of war coverage by the MSM”“both then and now”“was written by James Q. Wilson and appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. Take a look at this, on the Papers:

Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.

In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.

The internet giveth and the internet taketh away. It may make it easier to dump the information and get away with it. But it may make it harder for the left to control the message for those who want to think for themselves. For example, already it has become evident that some of the recent Wikileaks information on Iraq tends to implicate Iran and its apologists on the left. And, wonder of wonders, even the NY Times is reporting as much.

As Michael Ledeen writes:

No thanks go to…those like Sy Hersh who wrote again and again that American forces were operating in Iran, and who warned that the Bush administration first, and now the Obama administration, were planning a shooting war against the Islamic Republic. Hersh and the various Giraldis, Lobes, Cannistraros, and their echo chambers on the wacky left should take the opportunity to apologize for failing to report what was actually going on: the Iranians were waging war against us, while we were doing precious little to fight back, despite a high cost of life and limbs.

Probably not exactly what Assange had hoped for from Wikileaks.

[NOTE: Two of my previous posts on Daniel Ellsberg and his influence on military whistleblowers and security leaks may be of interest: this and this.]

Fear and racism

The New Neo Posted on by

The brilliant Richard Fernandez on the new blasphemy against PC thought:

But there are indications that blasphemy, far from being dead letter, is alive and well. Wikipedia, in discussing the subject, warns the reader to also consult the entries for “hate speech”. That is now the alias the blasphemy lives under and it certainly has that effect among modern true believers…

Reuters reports that “the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions” making insults to Islam a human rights violation. What those insults may be is the rub. If there are just some things the blasphemers don’t instinctively “get” or which they wrongfully assume is protected under such quaint notions as freedom of speech, then too bad.

I distinctly remember when I first encountered the new blasphemy, although the subject matter was not Islam. It was twenty years ago, and I had returned to the university to get my Master’s degree. Every now and then I was required to take a course that featured mainly undergraduates, and one of those was called Human Sexuality.

At the time, the campus had been shaken by a disciplinary action against a professor, sparked by a student who objected to something he said in class. I no longer remember exactly what it was, but I do remember this: it was a supposedly sexual reference he made to no one in particular, illustrating some point in his lecture, and it was so mild as to be remarkable only for its inoffensiveness. And yet it had offended one person, a female student in his class, who reported him to the proper Thought Police authorities.

I’d been away from college for some time, and it came as quite a shock to me that it had been taken over by PC thinking. To a woman (there were very few men in my Human Sexuality class, which was made up of future social workers and therapists), the youngsters in the class backed the protesting woman student against the old geezer goat of a professor.

I rose and spoke of my puzzlement at their stance. Did they really think he should be disciplined merely because he offended someone’s tender sensibilities? Shouldn’t there be like, you know, something objectively offensive about what he had actually said?

No, they answered. It was enough that she felt what she felt. She had a right to never be offended, and he needed to be re-educated. As I recall, he had been forced to take classes in gender sensitivity in order to keep his job.

I looked around at these lovely young women, all fresh and bright and intelligent and eager, and felt the cold chill of something dreadful creep up my spine. And then I shook my head sadly and sat down, because I had no way of reaching them.

Wikileaks again

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest Wikileaks dump is the most recent salvo in an information counterwar that’s been going on for quite some time. Here’s one of the better articles about it, if you want some information about the major issues and players.

I’ll only add that when I say this counterwar has been going on for quite some time, I mean a very long time. One of the first shots fired was the Pentagon Papers, which helped establish the willingness of the MSM to print what heretofore would have been considered secret documents counterproductive to a war effort in which we are still engaged. I wrote about the phenomenon and its aftermath here:

…[I]t appears that national security whistleblowers are being encouraged to act as virtual moles within their own organizations, remaining in their jobs in order to gain more of the sensitive material and to reveal it as they see fit, according to the dictates of their individual consciences, and often for political reasons. And the idea that there will be any serious legal consequences for the whistleblowers has been weakened; Ellsberg expected to be charged with treason (and was, [although he never came to trial; charges were dropped because of Watergate]), but many whistleblowers today seem to consider such possibilities to be idle threats.

There is now an entire cottage industry dedicated to this sort of thing, composed of self-righteous crusaders against any sort of war in which the US in engaged. Since they can’t pin enough atrocities on the US, their main goal, they now resort to something like the latest Wikileads data, which implicates the Iraqi forces who were allied with us.

Of course, Wikileaks is silent on the much greater atrocities committed then—and now—by the enemy in Iraq, both by Saddam’s government before the war and then the “insurgents.” The folks at Wikileaks have no solution to the problems of aggression, terrorism, evil, or the carnage committed by our enemies, and they don’t care that their work is going to hurt our soldiers and give the enemy aid and comfort and fuel for its own propaganda war. It’s almost as though the enemy doesn’t exist for them, except as victim.

[NOTE: I have not read the Wikileaks data itself, only the descriptions of it.

And here is another piece I’ve written about Ellsberg, in this case about his “Truth-Telling Project.” Here is a description:

“The Truth-Telling Project””“now, what might that be? Wretchard quotes from its web page, which offers the following description of the organization’s purpose and function:

“The Truth-Telling Coalition, comprised of high-level national security truth-tellers, as well as non-profit whistleblower organizations, provides a personal and legal support network for each other and for government insiders considering becoming truth-tellers.”

So, according to its own description, the group appears to be an organization dedicated to supporting the spilling of secrets by national security officers in the interests of “truth.”

Please read the whole post.]