Are we having fun yet on the Right?

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep seeing comments around the blogosphere in which the Left accuses the Right of anger at the news of Obama’s Peace Nobel. Here’s a typical one, but there are plenty more:

It certainly is interesting to watch the conservatives twisting in the wind. This is a win for America ”“ and again, the GOP can do nothing but bitch and moan. Keep up the good work.

Obama supporter Michael Tomasky, writing in the left-wing Guardian, agreed that the award was a bit absurd, and not warranted by anything Obama has ever accomplished. But he took heart in the following prediction:

But there is one lovely, delicious, delectable thing about the whole business: it will drive the American right wing up the wall.

I normally can’t stand to hear Rush Limbaugh’s voice, but I just might listen today. I might flip on Fox for a bit. I’ll make sure at some point this afternoon to Google “Orly Taitz and Obama Nobel” to imbibe the analysis on offer from the queen of the birthers. I’ll definitely check in on the rightwing websites, and I urge you to do the same if you have the time. It’s going to be an extremely entertaining day.

Sorry, Michael and the others: the Right has certainly done plenty of bitching, moaning, and tearing its collective hair out since that January day when Obama was inaugurated. But Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize for Good Intentions (and you know what they say about good intentions) offers the greatest opportunity for right wing entertainment since Jimmy Carter fought off the killer rabbit.

And unlike the Left, the Right has no Peace Prize disillusionment to deal with, because it learned long ago (certainly by 1994, when Yasser Arafat was the recipient) that the Prize was a worthless and hopelessly partisan accolade.

So how could this award to Obama possibly cause any sort of disappointment on the Right? On the contrary; the dominant emotion was a sort of manic glee. Since the Right has been complaining for decades about the Peace Prize, and criticizing Obama since his campaign began, what better gift could fate have bestowed than to unite those two targets in such a ludicrously tight embrace, a veritable folie a deux?

The delightful absurdity of the Committee’s decision, so transparently inappropriate that even most Obama supporters were left sputtering in astonishment and embarrassment, merely underscored what the Right already knew: that certain elements of Europe and the world now reside in a Leftist fantasyland in which words are as good (or even better, because they’re more pure) than deeds, and a dream is a Nobel Prize-winning wish your heart makes.

Demise of the deli

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve often observed that there’s no deli like a New York deli.

Now, you may think you’ve found some exceptions to that rule. And perhaps you have; I haven’t sampled all the delis in the world. But outside of New York (most particularly, the New York of my youth) I haven’t yet located any that can compare.

Tasteless corn beef. Slimy pickles without that special zip I remember so fondly from long ago. And rye bread? Please, let’s not go there. Soft crust instead of the chewy kind, and a stale center instead of a succulent and springy one studded with the bite of caraway.

But now I learn to my greater dismay, via my arch-enemy the NY Times, that even in the New York metropolitan area delis are going the way of the dodo. The economy has taken its toll, but that’s not the half of it:

In the old days, everybody cured their own corned beef and pastrami, made their own pickles, and used bread from a neighboring bakery. Now, few even make their own matzo balls…But delis are up against more than a bad economy. “Jews are largely assimilated and don’t want to eat only Jewish food,” Mr. Sax said.

When they do, they have to face concerns that might have been overlooked a few years ago. Foods like pastrami and kishke (beef intestine casings stuffed with brisket fat or chicken fat, matzo meal, onions and carrots) are delicious, but they’re not health food.

The Times also notes the heartening news that there’s a blog devoted to saving the deli. But on my maiden voyage there, I encountered some very sorrowful tidings about rye bread.

I’d recently been on a quest in several cities for the real thing, to no avail. But until now I had continued to hold onto the notion that it could still be found somewhere in New York, the mother ship. But this recent post disabused me of that notion [emphasis mine]:

There’s a crisis in the Jewish deli, and it starts at the bottom: the rye bread. Simply put, most of the rye bread at delicatessens around America is not worth the effort it takes to chew. Of all the ryes I tasted in my global research into Jewish delicatessens, none were more disappointing than the supposedly legendary New York rye. The bread at such landmark delis as Katz’s or the 2nd Ave Deli is a disgrace, and the delis’ owners readily admit to it. The crusts are limp, the centers dry, and there is hardly any yeasty aroma to account for. It falls apart under any real stress, leaving you with a handful of greasy meat and mustard. If the finest musicians in the world shine on the stage at Carnegie Hall, doesn’t the finest pastrami in New York deserve a canvas to make it sing?

Real Jewish rye, made with a large percentage of coarse rye flour, hasn’t existed for years in New York. Most so-called “rye” is made from white flour, tossed with a few caraway seeds, and diluted with just enough rye flour to legally call it rye bread. The change came about during the postwar era, when white flour became cheaper, and easier to preserve, than rye flour. Industrial bakeries, such as Levy’s, hooked many on the taste of a packaged, pasteurized rye bread with their famous slogan “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye.” That the bread paled in comparison to traditionally-baked loaves wasn’t the point. It was hip, it was cheap, it could last longer. Jewish eaters followed suit. As independent Jewish bakeries succumbed to their larger, industrial competition, quality rye bread disappeared from delicatessens.

But just when I had dissolved into a puddle of tears, devastated at the idea of relinquishing my dream (think Proust and the madeleine forever lost), I discovered that real rye is not dead, it’s alive and well and living in other places. The article goes on to mention that there are small enclaves of old-fashioned rye bread in Los Angeles, DelRay Florida, Skokie Illinois, and an especially large offering of bakeries in Detroit. I will have to make a visit to one of these places soon, because of descriptions like this:

I first experienced double-baked rye at the Bread Basket, a small chain of Detroit delicatessens, with Sy Ginsberg, the corned beef king of Michigan and much of the Midwest. As the waitress set down a sandwich of Ginsberg’s trademark corned beef in front of us, I was equally impressed with the bread. It had a darker flecked color to it (the rye flour), with a golden crust that reminded me of good sourdough. The crumb was warm to the touch, and the heat of the oven had released a tangy perfume of yeast. It felt like a little pillow in my hand, cradling the tender corned beef slicked with mustard. The crust had crackle and chew, the crumb was soft and doughy. It tasted like rye bread ought to.

Please read the whole thing. And then make your pilgrimage to one of these sacred spots. Tell them neo sent you.

[NOTE: In the accompanying photo—from this kosher deli in Florida—the pastrami looks mighty tasty indeed. But the rye bread not so, I’m afraid:

pastrami-sandwich.jpg

Obama, the poison chalice, and…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Danny Kaye.

Yes, you got that right: Obama, the poison chalice, and Danny Kaye.

Bob Schieffer wondered on the CBS Early Show whether there will be negative fallout for President Obama from his Peace Prize:

…[O]ne European commentator…said ”˜will this become a poison chalice?’ In other words, is this going to hurt the President rather than help him?…is this going to widen the…partisan divide rather than bring people together?

Oh how I love that phrase “poison chalice”—because it puts me in mind of one of my favorite childhood movies, “The Court Jester.”

So let’s have a look. And remember, the vessel with the pestle has—whatever:

Nobel Committe is at least honest about its motives: to manipulate Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, at least they’re coming clean [emphasis mine]:

Jagland…rejected the notion that Obama had been recognized prematurely for his efforts and said the committee wanted to promote the president just as it had Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in his efforts to open up the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev ended up presiding over the fall of the USSR, of course. Hmmm.

And here’s the mechanism by which the current Peace Prize is assured to be Leftist and politically motivated:

Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, which are awarded by Swedish institutions, the peace prize is given out by a five-member committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. Like the Parliament, the committee has a leftist slant, with three members elected by left-of-center parties. Jagland said the decision to honor Obama was unanimous.

Despite all this unanimity among Committee members, reporters were apparently as surprised as the rest of us on hearing the news:

The president had not been mentioned as among front-runners for the prize, and the roomful of reporters in Oslo, Norway, gasped when Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel committee, uttered Obama’s name.

Yes, the press still has a bit of integrity. Which is more than can be said for the Committee.

April Fools Day comes early: Obama gets the noblest Nobel of them all

The New Neo Posted on by

My first reaction was to check my calendar when I heard the news that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. But since it stubbornly remained October 9 rather than April 1, and the TV I turned on insisted on treating the event as reality, I came to realize that it’s actually rather appropriate, because of the direction in which the Prizes have been trending in recent years.

But even as debased and nakedly political as the Peace Prize had previously become, this award still surprised me, despite my attempts to look at it from the proper Leftist point of view. For example, I almost immediately thought: boy, must Jimmy Carter be pissed! After all, he had to actually broker a peace agreement between Egypt’s Sadat and Israel’s Begin in the late 70s, and then suck up to the dictators of the world for decades, before he finally got his. And Gore had to produce a movie.

So what has Obama done? I was puzzled at first because I figured that, even on the Nobel’s own bizarre terms (for example, need I say more than Yassar Arafat, Nobel Laureate for Peace?) Obama has actually done nothing.

But after some reflection, I realized it makes sense to award the Peace Prize to Obama for a few months of lofty rhetoric. That’s because the Left and the world of the Peace Prize has become all about good intentions and blah-blah-blah, and it feels so good to hear Obate orate about exactly the things they so want to hear. That’s accomplishment enough, isn’t it, to put him in the ranks of illustrious predecessors Carter, Gore, and Arafat?

One can look at the Peace Prize to Obama as a kind of “A” for effort, akin to the Miss America (actually, Miss World) Congeniality Award. It’s also in line with the trajectory of Obama’s previous political career, in which all he’s usually had to do is show up, say a few things that sound good, and stand back to receive the accolades.

I joked only a few weeks ago that Obama’s next role should be as UN Secretary-General. US President just didn’t seem to be enough for him and doesn’t quite suit his real skill set, which is to mouth platitudes that appeal to the internationals. So in retrospect I should have seen this coming.

But I didn’t. I guess I retained a smidgeon of unjustified respect for the Nobel committee—I thought they’d at least wait a few years. As some have pointed out (take a look at this; funny stuff), Nobel nominations must be in by February 1, and so at that point Obama would have been in office for twelve days. No matter.

But no wonder Obama said he was “humbled” (one of his favorite words) by the decision, and that he sees it as not having been given in recognition for his accomplishments. In this case I think he actually may be sincere. Even egotist Obama may have been surprised by the sheer audacity of this award, as are almost all of us.

But in retrospect I wonder why. In retrospect, it seems inevitable.

[ADDENDUM: Mickey Kaus thinks Obama should turn it down. Fat chance. And even Glenn Greenwald thought the news was an Onion gag.]

[ADDENDUM II: And this is worth reading, for a more serious take on the subject.]

[ADDENDUM III: Here’s another point that had occurred to me as I wondered why give the Prize now: since the Committee wanted so badly for Obama to get the Prize, they had to award it to him before he had a chance to act in some way that might make it more difficult for them later. I’m not at all sure they had anything to worry about on that score, but why not make sure by a preemptive Prize?]

By hook or by crook: the public option edges closer

The New Neo Posted on by

Whoever said our legislators (approval rating: 21%) weren’t creative?

They sure are working hard to figure out a way to get enough votes to slide some sort of public option by, whether Americans like it or not—although if certain recent polls are any indication, Americans actually like it quite a bit.

Let’s see: first there was the trigger. Then, the opportunity for states without affordable insurance to opt-in to a public option if they choose to do so. A new twist on the latter theme is a for a state opt-out clause, whereby:

…[I]nstead of starting with no national public option and giving state governments the right to develop their own, the newest compromise approaches the issue from the opposite direction: beginning with a national public option and giving state governments the right not to have one”¦

Allahpundit sees a state opt-out clause as just another ploy to hide the fact that the slide to a public option will be well-nigh inevitable:

When, not if, some sort of federal tax hike is passed to help pay for this boondoggle ”” maybe it’ll be a VAT, maybe just an increase in the marginal income tax rates ”” would residents of states without a public option get some sort of deduction or credit? If not, there’s going to be intense pressure on the state legislature to approve a public option if only to ensure that the locals get something for the tax dollars being siphoned from them.

And then of course reconciliation’s always available to pass the public option. Its use, however, would be unprecedented for a non-budget bill that promises to make sweeping changes in a matter so vital.

Does America care about the methods used to pass the bill? It would seem so, if this poll is any indication. Not surprisingly, Democrats polled wouldn’t mind if a health care reform bill has no Republican support (63% in favor), while Republicans protest (88% against). The more interesting finding is that Independents are against it too (62% say no). So using reconciliation to pass transformative legislation that Republicans fail to support and some Democrats oppose also would seem to be a highly unpopular move.

Obama’s health care reform plan (whatever that is) gets low marks in general, 47% against to 40% in favor, with Independents again making the difference by coming down against it. One would think that would mean opposition to the public option, but that doesn’t seem to be the case—although the way the poll question on that subject is worded, “Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?” may skew the response (for example, some people might not mind a public option that would fairly compete with private plans rather than drive them out of business, but don’t think the bill will provide one). At any rate, according to the poll, Americans say “yes” to this question about the private option by a wide margin, 61% to 34%.

Why then do so many people remain against Obamacare? Perhaps it’s because some of them, like me, don’t believe that private insurance will be able to compete with the public option as proposed, and that their health care choices will be more highly restricted; the poll is mum on that score since it doesn’t ask that question. But we do know that there’s a great deal of skepticism about Obama’s promise that the plan will be deficit-neutral. Even Democrats have their doubts (only 50% think it will be, versus 32% who don’t), whereas Republicans have powerful suspicions about Obama’s claim (93% to 5%), and Independents feel likewise, although not quite as strongly (75% to 18%). That’s not exactly a vote in confidence in the bill as a whole. It’s likely that what has been percevied as Obama’s broken promises on the stimulus have added to the public’s distrust, and rightly so.

As for the CBO, someone may have done a bit of arm-twisting there to get them on board. Megan McCardle finds their new figures “deeply puzzling” (and remember, she used to be an Obama supporter):

So most of the major components of the program are scheduled to either cost more, or raise less revenue . . . but overall, it’s generating a bigger surplus. It’s the healthcare economist’s version of “We’re losing money on every unit, but we’ll make it up in volume!”

Follow the link to see her efforts to figure it out, as well as some interesting attempts in the comments section.

I don’t usually make predictions, but I’ll make a tentative one right now: some form of health care reform will be passed, and it will include at least some type of public option. The method will be controversial, and the results will not be deficit-neutral.

New York finds out that (gasp!) taxing the rich more doesn’t pay

The New Neo Posted on by

Why do we have to keep rediscovering—as the state of New York recently has—that raising taxes on the rich is so often of illusory benefit?

Probably because it’s such a tempting thing to do. After all, there the rich are, with their perks, their conspicuous consumption, and their excess money (“excess” may be defined as “making more money than I think they should”) just ripe for the plucking. So why not take it? Heaven knows the states could use the money; many are in dire straits. And they’ve got the power to tax, so why not use it?

Well, aside from any other issues, there’s one simple and practical reason: raising taxes on the rich often results in a drop in tax dollars collected. This simple but counter-intuitive economic truth is something many liberal legislators continue to ignore, as New York has just demonstrated:

Paterson [New York’s governor, who to his credit had opposed the tax hike, to no avail] noted that revenue from tax increases was running 20 percent below projections and that, in particular, the wealthy were not paying up. So far, the state had only collected about half of an expected $1 billion in income tax revenues from the state’s wealthiest residents. “You heard the mantra, ‘Tax the rich, tax the rich,”‘ Paterson said. “We’ve done that. We’ve probably lost jobs and driven people out of the state.”

Well, it’s not as though they weren’t warned; but I guess they don’t read neo-neocon (see this article I wrote on the subject back in May, and also this one). And I guess they don’t read the Wall Street Journal either, because the mechanism by which it all happens was explained there as follows:

We [Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore] believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.

Whatever his flaws may be (and Obama seems to think he has a good many), New York Governor David Paterson seems to have been paying attention. Perhaps this is because he has had personal experience on the matter; here’s how it went down [emphasis mine]:

When David Paterson became governor of New York…the former state senator from Harlem shocked New Yorkers by declaring that taxes were too high and that he had many friends who had left the state because there were better opportunities elsewhere. New York had to grab control of its spending rather than continue raising taxes, said the former state senator with a long tax-and-spend track record, in what amounted to the equivalent of ideological heresy.

Still, as a political lightweight and accidental governor, Paterson quickly got rolled by the big-government wing of his own party, who passed a budget for this year with $6.1 billion in projected new taxes and fees, led by sharply higher rates starting for those earning more than $200,000 a year. Asked if the budget made sense in the recession an outgunned Paterson said, “None of this makes sense.”

The irony is that it’s Paterson who will be the one more likely to suffer the political fallout, rather than that big-government wing of his party. My guess is that most of those representatives are from districts where the people like what they did, and even demand it; the desire to give the at least the appearance of soaking the rich is so very strong.

If these state legislators face re-election, I doubt that their voters will connect the dots and realize that higher taxes are driving money away from the state rather than towards it. After all, as the article said, this is political heresy—and we can’t have any steenking facts get in the way of our cherished beliefs, can we?

Obama and the Generals: decison-making on military matters

The New Neo Posted on by

Presidents are civilians, but they are also Commanders-in-Chief. Generals advise them in times of war, but there is an inherent conflict present in the relationship.

The buck stops on the president’s desk. But especially when he has no military experience or knowledge (and President Obama has neither, although he is not alone among past presidents in having little or none of both) it can be difficult to for a president to weigh how much to rely on his generals and how much to rely on himself.

LBJ famously faced this conundrum, and he solved it rather poorly. Sometimes he relied too much on his civilian “best and brightest” such as McNamara, and sometimes he believed the generals. But he was aware of his own limitations, as suggested by this excerpt from a April 1964 phone call with McNamara:

LBJ: Have we got anybody that’s got a military mind that can give us some military plans for winning that war?

RM: Well, Buzz Wheeler is going out with me.

LBJ: I know but he went out last time and he just came back with, with planes, that’s all he had in mind, wasn’t it?

RM: Well we, uh, yes, well he had more than that but he emphasized the planes. And the planes, Max Taylor agrees, are not the answer to the problem. Whether we should have more planes or not is another question, but it’s not going to make any difference in the short run, that’s certain.

LBJ: Let’s get some more of something, my friend, because I’m gonna have a heart attack if you don’t get me something. I’m just sitting here every day and uh, this war that I’m winning and I’m not doing much about fightin’ it, and uh I’m not doing much about winnin’ it, and I just read about it and uh. Let’s get somebody that wants to do something besides drop a bomb, but uh, that can go in and take in after these damn fellas and run them back where they belong. It looks like-…

We need somebody over there that can give us better plans than we’ve got, because what we’ve got is what we’ve had since ’54. We’re not getting it done, we’re, we’re losing so we need something new. It’s uh, if you pitch this ol’ southpaw every day and you wind up as the Washington Senators and you lose, well uh we’d better go us get us a new pitcher.

RM: I know it-

LBJ: Let’s find one. And tell those damn old generals over there to find one for ya, or you gonna go out there yourself…

Johnson struggled for his entire administration with this dilemma and never found a satisfactory answer, and it wound up ending his presidency prematurely. Now Obama faces a different version of the same conundrum. And I’m not at all sure that he’s aware of his own limitations in the area.

Let’s just assume, however, that Obama’s heart is at least in the right place, and that he wants the US to succeed in Afghanistan (if only to shore up his own reputation as a tough guy, or for other, less narcissitic, reasons). Even so, it’s not at all clear what’s to be done, just as it wasn’t clear for LBJ in Vietnam or for President Bush in Iraq. The surge was Bush’s answer during his administration, and it turned out to be a good one. But the decision wasn’t arrived at until a great deal of time had passed, and valuable blood and treasure wasted.

Obama is not short on advice, but of course it’s contradictory. There’s been a great deal of discussion about whether McChrystal was right in publicly discussing what he thinks ought to be done, or whether he should have kept quiet and taken it up with Obama only (of course, if Obama had previously consulted McChrystal—his own hand-picked commander in Afghanistan—more often, it might have been easier for the general to go the private route). But I’m more interested in the question of how a civilian president makes military decisions, including how he much he decides to follow the advice of his military advisers.

There is little question that Obama’s approach to Afghanistan was never well thought out, and is still very confused. We don’t need to see the inner working of the Obama circle to conclude that; as Christi Parsons reports in the LA Times:

The exchanges suggested some disarray in the Obama administration’s attempts to forge a new policy on Afghanistan and underscored wide differences among top officials over the correct approach.

Ah, but things were so much clearer to candidate Obama! Back in March of 2008, he had no problem seeing what Bush was doing wrong, and talking about it:

Obama said that while President Bush has said that he follows the advice of his generals regarding Iraq, when they give the president advice he doesn’t like — cautioning against the War in Iraq, for example — Bush doesn’t listen to them.

“There were generals at the beginning of the conflict that said this is going to require many more troops, will cost us much more … those generals were pushed aside,” Obama said.

Hindsight is wonderful, but the shoe is on the other foot now. And it’s not so easy after all, is it, President Obama?