What the rest of us drone on about seriously and far more tediously, Iowahawk skewers with wit.
[Hat tip: commenter “expat.”]
Meet the new, kinder, gentler Andrew Sullivan
I don’t like to link to Sullivan, so I’ll link instead to Ann Althouse’s post about him, which alerted me to the following passage representing his new attempt to talk about his béªte noire Sarah Palin while taking the high road of civility in order to “make strong and lively points without demonization” [emphasis mine]:
…[T]here is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, her presence on the national stage can improve our discourse, help solve our problems or improve public life. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example she has shown in rearing a child with Down Syndrome, whatever his provenance, or noting her effectiveness as a demagogue, or from admiring her father’s genuineness or her skill in exploiting new media. I’ve consistently tried to do this without undercutting my still-raw amazement that an advanced democratic society could even contemplate putting such an unstable and irresponsible person in a position of any real power.
There is actually no conceivable way (note Sullivan’s use of that highly appropriate word) that anyone newly-committed to making “strong and lively points without demonization” can doubt the provenance of Trig Palin, as Sullivan continues to do in his ever-so-pompous (give me a break: “provenance?”) aside.
“Unstable and irresponsible,” thy name is Sullivan. At least he’s not in a position of any real power.
Loughner, dangerousness, and the collective gut feeling
It seems that nearly everyone who came into contact with Jared Loughner during the past year or two sensed that he was weird, perhaps even crazy. Nor did the form his oddity took seem harmless, although as far as we know he never directly threatened anyone.
Nevertheless, scads of people perceived him as a threat and as imminently very very dangerous. Of all those who had encountered this guy recently in daily life—and especially his teachers and classmate, and the former friends with whom he broke off relations (we don’t know much yet about his parents)—there seems to have hardly been a dissenting voice to the view that this guy was going to do something frightening and destructive to others.
But our justice system is act-oriented, not person-oriented. You can’t put someone in jail for being crazy and giving people a very uneasy feeling, especially in the absence of threats, although you used to be able to put that same someone into a mental institution for that very reason—sometimes for a short while, sometimes for a long while. We are now far more libertarian and restrictive about such things, and perhaps we should be; I’m a moderate libertarian (is that an oxymoron?) myself.
But something about a situation in which the consensus is so powerful makes one pause and wonder what could, would, and should have been done with a Jared Loughner, and who should have done it.
His parents seem to have had the highest responsibility, but maybe they tried and failed; after all, he was not a minor, although he still lived with them and one would think they had some leverage there.
His friends? The college? The police who escorted him out of school? It is unclear whether anyone had the power and inclination to change this although many were able to foresee it or at least something like it—if not in its details (who, what, where, how), then certainly in its general outlines.
The following is not a digression, although it may sound like it: about twenty years ago, when my husband and I were married and our child was small, we had a smallish dog. What a wonderful dog he was—friendly to all creatures, and usually very quiet. No yappy little dog was he. He never met a person he didn’t like—until one day, an old acquaintance of my husband’s came to visit.
My husband hadn’t seen him since high school, which had been a long time earlier. He called to tell us he was in town, and when he came to the door and we opened it, our dog growled.
I mean really growled. Snarled and bared his teeth and barked and barked and never let up. We had to put the dog in another room and close the door, and only then did he calm down. But it soon became apparent what had been going on with the dog, because it soon became apparent that our guest was unhinged.
Our visitor wasn’t dangerous. At least, he didn’t seem so to us; I’m not sure the dog, who clearly had methods beyond ours, shared our perception.
Who knows what it was the dog was picking up on? The whiff of madness? I think of the collective response to Jared Loughner as the equivalent of hundreds or even thousands of those dogs, all too polite to bark and snarl, but all sensing the same dangerous offness and the skewed mind that alerted them to the presence of danger.
[ADDENDUM: I didn’t read yesterday’s excellent post of Dr. Sanity’s until just now, but it’s highly relevant and well worth reading. Dr. Sanity has been in the trenches for decades, trying to predict the dangerousness of troubled and/or insane people, and she’s got a lot to say about how difficult it is.]
LBJ orders some pants
I’d heard this excerpt from the LBJ audio tapes before, but I forgot about it till Ed Driscoll reminded me.
Here’s a man who pay attention to detail. So folks, does this qualify as civil discourse?
Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.
The HCR PR war continues: pre-existing conditions
A new report has been released by HHS Secretary Sebelius as part of the Democratic campaign to convince people that the HCR bill they have grown to loathe will actually help them. This, by the way, is a completely separate issue from two others that plague the bill, and are hotly debated: the effect it is likely to have on the budget and the deficit, and whether it is constitutional.
The report states that up to half of Americans under 65 have pre-existing conditions that might serve to disqualify them from health insurance under the old system. That ignores the reality that most such people have insurance and will always have it, because group insurance bought through an employer takes all comers.
I don’t know what percentage of those people will actually ever be forced into the individual market, but it certainly would be a far smaller group than half of all Americans under 65. Even people who lose jobs temporarily are eligible to be covered through Cobra for quite some time (usually 18 months), and although Cobra is expensive, nevertheless some people manage to use it. What’s more, many states already have high-risk pools for individuals with pre-existing conditions, and although premiums are high relative to group insurance, it is certainly possible to get coverage even with pre-existing conditions.
In addition, not all the conditions listed in the report are enough to plunge a person into the high-risk pool. For example, controlled high blood pressure or high cholesterol does not usually do so unless it requires many medications or there are other complications. The real reason so very many Americans fall into these categories is not that we are sicker, but that “high” is defined differently than it used to be, and medication to treat the newly-defined conditions is used much more freely and earlier.
Here’s the hype, and the language used by Sebelius in trying to sell this report and HCR itself:
“Americans living with pre-existing conditions are being freed from discrimination in order to get the health coverage they need,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. Repealing the law, she argued, would leave such people unprotected.
Note the use of the loaded term, “discrimination.” One hears it again and again from proponents of HCR. One would think they were describing some capricious hate-mongering on the part of insurance companies, akin to racism or anti-Semitism or all the other vicious isms that we deplore.
At this point, why call our health insurance companies “insurance companies” at all? Might we not invent a new name to take into account the fact that they forbidden to operate in the traditional manner of insurers, who cover people for future catastrophic events, and are allowed to take into consideration such basics as risk factors?
Palin and the press
Ross Douthat thinks the Palin/press war is a cycle of violence.
He appears to equate the perpetration of baseless attacks with defending oneself against them; they both keep that cycle going, don’t they? Best to turn the other cheek in silence.
And did you know that Ben Stiller has more Twitter followers than Palin? Stiller for president!
I’m not going to…
…even try to explain this:
Nothing much has changed, except that Jay is old enough to not be a prodigy any more.
Clarification: my opinion about Obama’s Tucson speech
From the evidence of certain comments and a couple of emails I’ve received, it seems I didn’t make myself clear enough when I first discussed Obama’s Tucson speech—even when I expanded on my position here and here in the comments section.
I pretty much agree with Byron York here, and I have from the start. And when I state than I also agree with Rich Lowry that it was “a magnificent performance,” I mean to especially accent that last word: performance.
When I wrote that Obama’s speech was “pitch-perfect,” that’s what I was talking about. Like so many of Obama’s great conciliator orations—I am thinking especially of his “let us all reason together about race while I’m making excuses for my mentor the racist demagogue Rev. Wright and calling my own grandmother a racist” speech, for example, which was extraordinarily effective with many of the people he needed to reach at the time in order to continue to be viable as a candidate—it accomplished the task. Obama did just what he needed to do in Tuscon (accent on the “he”), and he performed the job very, very well.
It takes a bit of thinking, though, to realize that, if he had really wanted to damp down the inflammatory rhetoric, he could have and should have done so earlier, before it hit its marks. He had plenty of time.
But no. As I wrote here:
[This] is Obama’s m.o. He likes to play bad cop good cop, and he’s the good cop.
As far as wishing, as I wrote at the end of the original post, that government could live up to the expectations of an idealistic child such as Cristina Green, I’m giving her credit for being a great deal more thoughtful than a two-year old yelling “gimmee, gimmee!” in a candy store. I’m not talking about giving people whatever they want, whether it’s possible or not. Nor am I talking about mere civility, and certainly not about the absence of strong argument.
I’m talking about the sort of hope that an intelligent nine-year-old can have that people in government will be trying to do what’s right: to tell the truth, to be thoughtful and logical, to listen to their constituents and be responsive, and to work together to figure out what’s best for the country rather than what will solidify their own power. Things like that—things that the cynical non-nine-year-old in me realizes are highly unlikely to occur.
“This is normal; this is what we do.”
Excellent article in the NY Times (yes, the NY Times) on the medical response in the first hours after the shooting.
It is hands-on work, as you will see.
On Tunisia and Wikileaks
Michael Totten recommends that you read Barry Rubin on Tunisia. I second the motion.
If you’re going to commit adultery…
…don’t do it in the marital bed. It tends to make the deceived spouse very very angry.
There aren’t too many betrayals that cause as much rage as infidelity, nor as deep a rage. But apparently the worst way to do the dirty deed is in the marital bed. This makes sense; there’s a sort of innate horror at such an affront, something like the revulsion a dog might feel at soiling his own den, only in this case it’s the spouse committing the desecration.
The comments to the article are unusually personal, but this one just might be my favorite, a good example of someone making his own bed and then having to lie in it, with a little help from the ex-wife:
my husband was the cheater and probably not in the marital bed (he rented a second apartment for that purpose). during the denouement i couldn’t bring myself to sleep in it anymore – slept on the floor in the living room instead. so it astonished me during the division of stuff phase that the ex insisted on taking the marital bed. we had picked it out together in europe, it had a history. not hers! there should have been some reverence, but he saw it as something he paid for once. i didn’t want it, and i didn’t want him, but it felt sad and wierd and creepy that he would actually want to own it again, and use it with his co-cheater.
on my eventual expedition to buy my new mattress, the salesman – bit of a george carlin type – got going on a riff. the frame was european and it would cost an arm and a leg for the ex to have a new custom mattress made. salesman figured if my ex was too cheap to buy his (third) wife a new bed he’d probably go with the existing mattress as well. “so draw on it” he said. “circle the stains! you know, like george washington slept here, only write things like… first baby vomited here. second child conceived here. third child miscarried here. puppy had accidents here, here and here. 59-year-old-husband-dating-28-year-old-immigrant-seeking-green-card drools here a LOT when he snores…” it was hilarious. and cathartic.
i didn’t have the cold-bloodedness required to do it. but i did write the word “sucker” in her language in permanent marker on the back. and off the time-honored marital bed went to their new house! true story.
A Blow for civility on the left
Charles Blow pushes the civility program and chides the left for blaming the right for the Tucson slayings. His column is fairly hard-hitting, especially considering that his sympathies are clearly with the left. He nevertheless calls its campaign at linkage “a full-fledged witch hunt,” words the left usually reserves for either Joe McCarthy or other people on the right, or—well, the actual witch hunts in Salem:
Within hours of the shooting, there was a full-fledged witch hunt to link the shooter to the right.
“I saw Goody Proctor with the devil! Oh, I mean Jared Lee Loughner! Yes him. With the devil!”
The only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting.
The thrust of the rest of Blow’s column is a lot more predictable. His point is that such witch-hunting rhetoric against the right is not a good idea because, although the charges were plausible, they were still bad because the American people won’t buy them if they are not supported by the evidence, and therefore they backfire on those who make them [emphasis mine]:
…[This rhetoric from the left] only accomplishes two things: fostering sympathy for its opponents and nurturing a false equivalence within the body politic. Well done, Democrats.
[NOTE: In this past column by Blow, he goes on and on about invective from the right, but does not mention that of the left at all. The comic high point of the piece is a quote by Bill Maher which—if you’re familiar with Maher and his own “strong language”—drips with irony: “As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh.”]