The course of true blogging never did run…

The New Neo Posted on by

…smooth.

I’m having some connectivity problems today, so this post will be quick. I plan to be back at full speed tomorrow.

As any of you who are trying to sell a house right now or who have watched the stock market do loop-de-loops lately know, the economy appears unstable. And, of course, in this election year, that has consequences for the candidates.

There’s no death of opinions about what those consequences will be, or where the economy is really heading, although there’s also no consensus. This is hardly unusual in economic matters.

One thing that’s clear is that things have changed lately. This piece by Michael Barone makes the excellent point that ideas about the economy used to be shaped by a populace the bulk of whom had lived through the Great Depression, but are now shaped by a very different group.

If you want to feel old, just take a look at this: Continue reading →

The MSM should know

The New Neo Posted on by

The blurb for this AP article on Yahoo News caught my eye, so I clicked on it. It indicated that a new study had documented that during the lead-up to the Iraq War the Bush administration had made hundreds of “false statements” about the security threat Iraq represented.

I was expecting, at the very least, something new. Even perhaps something significant.

And I was certainly expecting evidence of lies on the part of Bush and company, although I should have understood that the phrase “false statements” was ever-so-carefully chosen to conjure up the idea of a lie in the reader’s mind but to stop short of actually saying it. Continue reading →

Sarkozy, the Heartbreak Kid

The New Neo Posted on by

Can’t resist some more gossip.

I’ve been following Sarkozy’s latest uncouplings and recouplings with some fascination. But until I read this piece I wasn’t aware of the histrionic history of how he’d met and married his previous wife, Cécilia.

It’s either romantic or abominable, depending on how you look at it—or perhaps both:

[Sarkozy] had famously fallen in love with his second wife, Cécilia, while officiating at her wedding in his capacity as mayor of Neuilly, a well-to-do inner suburb of Paris. He was 28, Cécilia was 26, and her groom–Jacques Martin, France’s answer to Johnny Carson–was 51. Sarkozy later recalled thinking: “What am I doing marrying her off to someone else? She’s for me!” Still married at the time to his first wife, Sarkozy pursued Cécilia relentlessly for four years. Where he departed from the usual pattern was in eventually suing for divorce even though he was mayor of a famously conservative town. It would take him eight years to secure a divorce from his devout Catholic, Corsican-born first wife, Marie; but in the meantime, including his stint as budget secretary under Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, he lived, sometimes in official residences, with Cécilia, who called herself Madame Sarkozy.

Wow. Continue reading →

Be wary of inspiration: the Age of Aquarius dawns again

The New Neo Posted on by

Many liberals I know are enthralled with Obama.

In New Hampshire during the primary campaign, where voters get to see the candidates up close and personal, he made a very strong impression. As far as I could tell, this was based primarily on the feeling he gave his supporters: hope, trust, excitement. It was as though the optimistic part of the 60s had come back after a long absence and many dashed dreams.

A lot of people who went through the 60s keep yearning for that special feeling they’d gotten back then (when they weren’t stoned, that is, or maybe when they were stoned): a sense that wonderful things were possible and just around the corner, that all it would take was the right attitude and the casting off of the old and fusty, that charismatic leaders with inspiring words and good intentions would lead the way.

The way to where, and to what? The goals were fairly clear: liberty and justice—and equality of outcome, not just opportunity—for all. Oh, and the end of bigotry, war, and the economic exploitation by the nasty rich of the noble poor.

Not too much to ask.

Exactly how this was to be accomplished wasn’t as clear. Continue reading →

The Sanity Squad: where have all the soldiers gone?

The New Neo Posted on by

Click here to listen to tonight’s Sanity Squad live at 8 PM Eastern time. Or click later to listen to the recording of our latest foray into commentary.

The topic is the soldier, as seen by Left and Right: victim, villain, hero, protector. We’ll also be discussing—what else?—the election.

Join Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Shrink, and me for another half-hour of Blog Talk Radio.

The decline of the $400 purse—and the streetwalker

The New Neo Posted on by

The $400 purse isn’t dead yet, not by a longshot. But in the current economy, fewer people are able to easily afford them.

Although I suppose designers have got to eat, too, please excuse me for not being able to shed a tear on this one.

Luxury designer items have always seemed exceptionally silly to me. During regular visits to New York over the years, I’ve watched prices climb to astronomic heights. The last time I was there I visited stores where fairly ordinary-looking people saw nothing odd about purchasing a purse with a price tag of $2000—oh, why not take two? They’re small.

This upward creep of prices seems to have little relation to the quality of the clothes. Nowadays women’s fashion resembles a cross between something a color-challenged little girl might choose for herself (wildly-printed pinafores over ragged t-shirts with clashing colors over leggings with high boots), the garb of a heroin addict, and something that used to be found only on streetwalkers peddling their wares.

And, while we’re at it, whatever happened to streetwalkers? Not that I much miss them, but they used to be a fixture in all the big cities.

I’d been wondering whether the internet and cell phone has largely replaced them, and a brief bit of research indicates that this is indeed so. It also turns out, if you follow the article, that some of those $400 bags are being wielded by those very same internet prostitutes. Hmmm.

[CORRECTION: Oops, I grossly underestimated the price of a Louis Vuitton bag, the internet prostitute’s choice for holding those all-important items. Four hundred dollars would be a bargain, it seems.]

Landes confronts Enderlin at Harvard

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Those of you who have followed the Al Durah controversy and the lawsuits instigated by French journalist Chrarles Enderlin against bloggers accusing him of lying (see my posts under the category “Paris and France2 trial” on the right sidebar) will be interested to learn that Richard Landes has written about Enderlin’s recent talk at Harvard.

Landes’ post makes for sobering reading. It also contains the interesting tidbit that Enderlin casually mentioned that those famous photos of Arafat giving blood after 9/11 were staged, and that Enderlin and the press were well aware of that fact.

Enderlin doesn’t seem to be the least bit apologetic, or even aware that there might be something wrong with this. So much for journalistic ethics—“higher truth” and all that, you know. Continue reading →

Collateral damage, Vietnam-style (sound familiar?)

The New Neo Posted on by

jane_gun.jpg

I’ve been reading Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, an examination of what I’ve referred to as the “second act” of the Vietnam War, the period of Vietnamization under General Creighton Abrams.

I have a feeling I’ll be writing quite a few posts based on this book before I’m through. But for now I’ll just offer a quote or two.

The following is tossed in almost casually on page 44 of Sorley’s 388-page tome:

Military facilities, such as the antiaircraft gun on which Jane Fonda posed, were deliberately crowded in next to civilian areas, almost ensuring extensive collateral damage if they were attacked, thus using American scruples against causing such injuries to inhibit attack.

Sorley’s book was written in 1999, so it includes no comparison to the techniques of Islamic totalitarian terrorists, Palestinians, or the like. But reading it now, one cannot escape the similarity.

When our press focused on civilian casualties during the Vietnam war, the connection between this enemy technique of locating their forces among civilians and the resultant collateral damage could have been made clear. It was not.

For that matter, why pick on the press? Perhaps it’s my memory that’s at fault, but I certainly don’t recall our own government making the excellent point of emphasizing the details of the pernicious nature of the enemy we faced. It would have helped ordinary American people understand who we were fighting, and the reason it was extraordinarily difficult to avoid civilian casualties. Continue reading →

“Attack of the Killer Journalists”

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, not really.

But Iowahawk’s clever satire about journalists run amok makes a good point about the absurdity of the recent NY Times article on crimes committed by returning vets.

That Times piece is an excellent example of failure to include all-important comparative statistics in an article that one can therefore conclude has been written with an agenda—in this case, to portray vets in time-honored post-Vietnam fashion as broken victims/perpetrators, crazed and traumatized by their military service. Continue reading →

Bobby Fischer and the lunatic fringe of anti-Semitism and 9/11 truthers

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Bobby Fischer, who put chess on the mainstream map for a while back in the early 70s, has died at the age of 64.

Those of you too young to remember may find it odd that the nation was riveted by his televised chess match with Boris Spassky back in 1972. In fact, those of us plenty old enough to remember may find it odd, as well.

I didn’t share chess fever. But many watched, entranced by the static but tensely cerebral scene:

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, in his 1973 book, “Grandmasters of Chess.”

Well, I’m sure it is intellectually demanding. But for me it wasn’t all that thrilling. The intellect demanded is a very specialized and narrow one, and Fischer was a particularly specialized and narrow example of the genre. Continue reading →

The Blog of the Ancient Mariner

The New Neo Posted on by

[This is a version of a post I originally wrote a while back about the reasons I took on my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series. I thought I’d publish it again now that I’ve resumed the project.]

Whenever I finish writing a section of the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, I’m amazed at how much I have to say, and how long it takes me to say it. My guess is that there are at least eight more posts coming up in the series, maybe even more.

I’m always gratified and surprised that so many people actually have the patience to hear me out. And I’m especially and deeply touched by those who take the trouble to thank me (particularly any Vietnam vets, or Vietnamese-Americans), or those who identify with what I write, or those who were too young to remember but are nevertheless still interested. I’m flattered by those who suggest this could actually be a book (although sometimes I feel like it already is a book).

And I sort of chuckle at those who say–“well, but what about this, what about that, why haven’t you talked about x, y, and z?” I want to say, “Hey, man, are you some sort of glutton for punishment? Isn’t this long enough?” Actually, if I ever do write a book, I imagine I’ll get around to answering some of the excellent questions raised by many readers.

Every response and every reader is appreciated. The real reason I began blogging, I believe, was to write this series. But I don’t think I ever would have done so if some of the people whom I originally most wanted to hear my story–certain friends and family members–had not made it clear they did not want to hear from me about this at all. Continue reading →

The New Democratic Congressional Theater

The New Neo Posted on by

You may recall I wrote a series of posts about the Democrats’ proposals to block the surge and its funding (see this, for example).

You may also recall I recently wrote about an effort by Bush to lock in an alliance with Iraq in such a way as to make it impervious (or at least resistant) to dismantling by his successor.

Now it turns out that the antiwar leadership has turned its attention from the poorly-thought-out and doomed-from-the-start efforts to block war funding. Continue reading →