These two things are not exactly related, but they seem to go together.
First, the good news: Lawyers Yoo and Bybee will face no discipline for writing their memos (my take on a related issue here).
Next, the bad: nine Justice Department officials worked to defend and/or free terrorists (please read the whole thing).
Dana Milbank argues that, irascible and difficult though he might be, Rahm Emanuel is actually the best of Obama’s close advisers, not his worst.
I came to a similar conclusion here. Of course, being the best in Obama’s Gang of Four isn’t saying much.
Last night I watched “Blind Spot,” a filmed interview with Traudl Junge, who was Hitler’s secretary during his last year and final days.
It’s a remarkable document, although a very simple one: Ms. Junge, aged eighty or so at the time of the interview, talks into the camera with no interruption in what appears to be three different sessions (marked by changes of outfit and the slight passage of time).
That’s all. But it’s quite a bit. The young and relatively apolitical Junge was selected for her job almost by chance—and the fact that she scored high in a typing test—but ended up being a witness to a very dark history. She describes her isolation from information other than Nazi propaganda, the growing desolation of the people in the bunker, and her own increasing numbness in the bizarre and grisly atmosphere.
Junge is quite composed and even dignified; the only time she breaks down at all is when she describes the Goebbels children (see this). She says that it is mostly since the 1960s, and then increasingly as time went on, that she has come to deeply reflect on her own guilt, and to be shocked at her failure to question what she saw and her hero-worship of a Hitler who seemed avuncular to her (she had been raised without a father).
Because I am particularly concerned with how people come to question previous assumptions and ultimately to change their minds, especially about politics, the part of Junge’s narrative that interested me most came during the war’s immediate aftermath. She had been given a cyanide pill in the bunker at her request, and had considered ending her own life because she had heard stories of what would happen at the hands of the Allies post-war: like something out of Hieronymous Bosch, she said. The men would be castrated, the women raped, and Germany would be returned to a very primitive technological existence by the vengeful victors.
But she took her chances and escaped, and although she was imprisoned (for a fairly short time, it turned out) by first the Russians and then the Americans, she encountered a world of Care packages and was well-treated by good people, especially the Americans, and saw Germany (she escaped to the West) become a free country. Junge observes that it was the beginning of her discovery that what she had been told by Hitler, “was all a lie.” In fact, she learned that the premise for the war itself was a big lie, and spent the rest of her life trying to come to terms with how she could have believed in, gotten caught up with, denied the warning signs of, and participated in such a grievous set of lies that perpetrated so much evil in the world.
Traudl Junge died not long after the film was made. She is reported to have said shortly before her death, “Now that I’ve let go of my story, I can let go of my life.”
I’ve not written about Tiger Woods before, and I’m not going to write much about him now. But I just turned on the news and happened to catch the last half of his public apology, in which he said “I am sorry” multiple times to multiple people.
It struck me that he sounded sincere. But it also struck me that he’s always sounded sincere, even when he was living a double life.
Woods has been in therapy, he reports. But compulsive behavior such as his is difficult to treat. I wish him good luck; as he says, it’s his future behavior that will tell the tale:
I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply…I thought only of myself…I felt I was entitled…I was wrong…It’s up to me to start living a life of integrity.
Yes.
I often hear someone tell a really funny joke and think, “I must remember that one.”
But I almost never do; they seem to evaporate almost as soon as I hear them. I’ve tried practicing, but it rarely helps.
Some people (my brother, for example) have a vast repertoire of set pieces and can entertain others for hours with them, doing all the voices and acting out the parts just right. But I’m fortunate even to be able to access and deliver the five or six I’ve laboriously managed to retain over the years.
It’s not that I’m not humorous. But whatever wit I have tends to be of the ad-lib, spontaneous variety (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And I’m pretty decent at telling funny stories about things that happened to me, events from my own life.
But both seem to tap into a different skill than telling the joke that’s a set piece. Anyone have any pointers on how to improve in that arena?
A guy walks into a bar…
Well worth reading, including the comments.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s another good one: “the last bull capitulates.”]
Today two columnists try to dish out the tasteless old pap claiming that, although Obama and the Democratic Party are tanking, it’s not the President’s fault.
The dauntless Obama apologist E.J. Dionne claims that it’s the Senate’s fault, as well as the fact that the Republicans somehow grabbed hold of the bully pulpit and got their message across while the Democrats (despite the help of most of the MSM) unaccountably failed to explain things properly. Now, where have we heard that before?
And then there’s this by Steve Chapman, who says that Obama has lost ground because of “things he can’t control.” I’ve read the piece twice, and I still can’t figure out exactly what those things might have been. Chapman cites presidential predecessors who had low popularity at a similar point in their terms, but he fails to mention that all of them showed far more flexibility at course correction than Obama, and that none of them had the advantage of the excessively fawning press that Obama has enjoyed till quite recently (some of them had the disadvantage of the exact opposite).
Both articles are similar to many others that have appeared ever since the January day one month ago when Scott Brown was elected. At the time everyone who was paying objective attention realized that a seismic shift had occurred in the Democrats’ fortunes, and that the only way Democrats could possibly reverse this trend would be to face reality. But neither of these columnists (nor the Democratic leaders, nor Obama) seems interested in taking such an approach.
But I wonder what they think will be accomplished by maintaining this high a level of denial. Do they really believe that staying the ultra-liberal course they’re on, and just “communicating the message” better, or trusting to chance, will turn things around? If so, they are delusional.
Or do they just believe that we’ll believe whatever they tell us, if they just phrase it better and more forcefully? If so, they are contemptuous of the voters. Why do they not realize that the common sense of the American people tells them otherwise, and that people don’t respect or trust those who continually lie to them?
Or are they just trying to keep their own base from panicking? If so, it is hard to know why this would be of that much help, or whether it’s even effective. I’ve spent enough time on liberal and left blogs to see that some pundits and commenters there definitely parrot the same message as these columns. But surely this cannot represent a sizable enough group to matter in the election of 2010.
You can fool some of the people some of the time….
A blogger reports that he went on a White House tour and saw some books on socialism in a library stocked by Michelle Obama.
I say: big deal. That has no particular meaning. In fact, if both Obamas were dedicated to fighting socialism in all its shapes and forms, you certainly would expect them to have read up on the subject. Know thine enemy, and all that.
The more significant point is that here we are, a year after Obama’s inauguration and several years after he began his campaign, still speculating about the true nature of the Obamas, especially Barack. And by the word “we,” I’m not just referring to the right; the left and the middle are trying to figure him out as well.
Have we ever before had a deliberately cloaked mystery man as president, about whose goals we must continually speculate? No. Everyone wonders about Barack Obama, although some of us think we know.
I, for example, believe him to be a leftist ideologue dedicated to the redistribution of wealth even if the American electorate turns on him and his fellow Democrats in the process, and even if he has to lie through his teeth about who he is and what he intends. And I don’t need a couple of books here and there to tell me that—although in fact, these books tell me nothing. His actions are what determine my viewpoint, combined with his multiple lies and obfuscations.
Remember this, from July of 2008? It wasn’t very funny then, and it’s not all that funny now:
The only difference between then and now is that we have much more evidence of Obama’s true nature, and we also have more evidence that the American people have woken up and are onto the program, and may be able to stop it.
Remember this clever video on Keynes and Hayek’s theories? Look at the actors in it:
And look at the actual men, when they were young. Here’s Keynes:
And here’s Hayek:
Pretty good likenesses, no?
This WSJ piece and this one from RealClearMarkets both comment on the fact that the bills have come due for the welfare state. This is most readily apparent in Europe, a part of the world that has pursued the cradle-to-grave comforts of the system most relentlessly. Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are a day late and more than a dollar short.
If you weren’t around during the fifties and sixties, perhaps you’ve never heard of Julie London. But she was one of the most beautiful—and sexiest—singers ever. So here, since we all need a little relief from the cares of the day, I invite you to sway with Julie:
Compare and contrast with this roughly contemporaneous version by Rosemary Clooney. It’s not bad, but to my mind it can’t compare:
Clooney is talking about dancing. But London seems to be talking about quite a bit more.
Here’s the beauteous London on the special quality of her own singing:
It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.
I don’t think it was quite as automatic as that.
Why was Amy Bishop not apprehended and incarcerated long ago? Or, at the very least, forced to have an encounter with the mental health system?
If this report is true (and I’d like to see a link to the additional police records to which it refers), new facts have been uncovered about her behavior after leaving the house in the 1986 shooting of her brother that make it even more shocking that she was never charged with a crime. Talk about the proverbial smoking gun:
Bishop had fled with the gun, and two officers tracked her down outside a car dealership near her home. As one officer asked Bishop to put the gun down, a second officer, using a truck as cover, moved within about 5 feet of Bishop.
“I drew my service revolver and yelled three times drop the rifle,” Officer Timothy Murphy wrote. “After the third time she did.”
Police examined the shotgun and found it loaded with a 12-gauge round. A second round was discovered in her pocket.
She didn’t drop the rifle immediately? She had more rounds in her pocket?? And there is also a report that she had threatened a worker at the dealership, pointing the shotgun at his chest and demanding a car; the police must have known that as well, because the man said they questioned him.
When combined with is known of the other facts of the 1986 case, these more recent revelations point to a massive coverup; no police force could be that incompetent. Not only was Amy’s 18-year-old brother unserved by the justice system of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but her later victims are a direct result of that abject failure as well.
Were there other chances to get Amy along the way? Unfortunately, we do not know enough about the 1993 pipe bomb case to make a judgment. Perhaps the police simply did not have enough evidence to pin that one on anyone. And the fact that Amy was the terror of her Ipswich neighborhood—you know, the sort of person who complains about everything and everybody and becomes its scourge—was not actionable under the law, either. What could they have charged her for: being obnoxious?
But one excellent chance to have gotten Bishop into the criminal justice system was muffed in 2002, when she physically assaulted a woman in an International House of Pancakes. This time, there appears to have been no dispute about the facts, no “accident” excuse was accepted And yet the charges were dismissed, and Bishop was not even required to attend anger management classes, despite a prosecutor’s recommendation (not that this would necessarily have helped, but it would have represented the first and only intervention by the mental health system in Amy’s very obviously troubled and aggressive life).
There is virtually no question that Bishop should have been convicted in 1986 and in 2002. If the records of the 1986 crime had not been “disappeared,” the lesser crime of 2002 might have been taken more seriously. But even without these convictions, it is also surprising that Bishop never was treated by a mental health professional (again, that would not have necessarily made a particle of difference, but there’s a chance it might have). People cannot be forced into the mental health system, even temporarily—unless they have harmed themselves or others, or seriously threatened such harm. Amy Bishop most definitely fit either or both of those categories.
In addition, even at the U. of Alabama there were serious and official questions about her mental health. A group of student complained to the department. A professor on her tenure committee (who wishes to remain anonymous) had reported her as “crazy,” and his complaints reached the associate provost of the university, John Severn. But there was no thought to do anything about it; the context in which Severn was concerned was the university’s defense against a lawsuit filed by Bishop after her tenure denial, in which she alleged (what else?) gender discrimination. The professor didn’t budge; he reiterated his claim to Severn.
Well, now the prescient teacher gets to say “I told you so.” But that must be scant comfort:
No one incident stands out, the professor said, but a series of interactions caused him to think she was “out of touch with reality.” Once, he said, she “went ballistic” when a grant application being filed on her behalf was turned in late. The professor said he avoided Ms. Bishop whenever he saw her, on or off the campus. When he spotted her not long ago at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, he made sure he was out of sight until she had left the store. He even skipped a faculty retreat because he knew she would be there…
When the professor found out on Friday afternoon that there had been a shooting on the campus, he didn’t immediately hear exactly where it happened, who was involved, or whether the shooter was a faculty member, student, or someone from outside the university. Even so, the professor said his first thought was: “Oh my God. I bet it was Amy Bishop.”
Why do I continue to harp on the Bishop case? It points out how profoundly the system failed Bishop’s brother, her family, her neighbors, many people who crossed her path along the way, and her final victims. Why did it take their deaths to call attention to a woman whose acts were screaming for intervention her entire adult life?
We think Bishop’s story began with the Braintree coverup—but for all we know, there were earlier incidents. We think we know the steps along the way—but for all we know, there were other victims at other times. Why did it have to get to the point of blowing away three more people and seriously wounding three others before this woman was recognized as a danger to the entire community? There was no one to put all the facts together and see the big picture until it was much too late.
[NOTE: On reflection, it is difficult to escape the thought that at least part of the reason Bishop was not taken seriously enough was that she is a woman. While there is no question that women are much less likely than men to be murderers, there is also no question that a significant number of them are (see this and this), and that this particular woman exhibited clear signs of extreme dangerousness that were ignored.]