A word of deep thanks to Reihan, Steve and Ross for doing such a fantastic job while I was in blog de-tox for a week or so. Hard to find a more enthusiastic, brilliant or unpredictable trio of young thinkers. Don’t forget to check in on them in their own forum, The American Scene, in the coming days and weeks. And thanks again, guys. I had a wonderful time off – lazy, lazy, lazy. In trying to get a handle on the time-management issues a blog inevitably entails, I may be blogging a little less frenetically in the new year. I have a book to write, and my New Year’s resolution is to finish it by the end of this year. My other, post-CPAP resolution is to get up each day by 9.30 am and not to stay up so late. No, I’m not following John Derbyshire’s advice. But my boyfriend deserves a little better than being a blog widower; and evenings are better spent than in front of a computer screen. Of course, I’ll probably break all these resolutions soon enough. Just watch.
THE FINAL TALLY: This blog contained around 522,000 words in 2004. Maybe six big books. Just for the record. And 2005 will be the fifth year that this blog has been around. Thanks to Blogads and you for the support to keep going.
BUSH AND MORAL VALUES: Here’s a simple question: isn’t it a matter of morals not to fiddle the books? The Bush administration has made some promising noises about reducing domestic spending in the last couple of months, but this news is not encouraging:
To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security. To make Mr. Bush’s goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year’s actual shortfall of $413 billion. By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.
How can anyone take this administration’s fiscal intentions seriously when it engages in this kind of flim-flam? We’re now used to the fact that the administration doesn’t count the war in its fiscal calculations (what’s a few hundred billion when it’s other people’s money?), but that doesn’t make it any the less preposterous. And the strong case for partly privatizing social security is undermined by the president’s inability to concede that it will require serious short-term borrowing. All of this is as much a moral failure as an economic one, which is why I’m still befuddled by the anemic conservative outrage. Or is sex the only area in which Republicans care about morality?
MOVIE WRAP-UP: When I read this A.O. Scott piece on the over-rating of the movie, “Sideways,” I was relieved. I wasn’t nuts, after all. It’s great to see a reviewer finally copping to reviewers’ own biases – in favor of movies celebrating older, dweeby, neurotic characters who unsurprisingly resemble … many critics. Don’t get me wrong, the movie was far better than most – and was superb at times. Charles wasn’t crazy. But it was too long, a little too precious, and the halleluia chorus greeting it far too loud. (It also reaffirmed my own pet peeve with many movies: that male characters are almost always far less attractive then the women they date and/or marry. Again: that’s surely a function of the fact that many movie producers and directors are aging neurotics and movies are their way of reversing reality.) Maybe the encomia for “Sideways” are primarily a function of just how truly terrible most movies now are. But I’m glad to see this little film knocked down a few pegs. Still, compared to “National Treasure” … I did, however, finally get to see “Garden State” on video. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but it was one of the few movies last year that seemed to me in touch with reality. The reality I see around me anyway.
The Dish 