Month: October 2007

I’ve been gamely trying to watch and/or listen to the debate online, but nothing works. Update: try CNBC instead.

A kiddie book about marijuana. My favorite page was 10. It has the illustration above and the text:

Dr. Eden had a very colorful office.

The receptionist told Jackie and her mother that they could come right in.

Goddamn hippies. Aaron dragged me to the anniversary screening of Spielberg’s Poltergeist last week. I’d never seen it; and it was amusing enough. It’s always uplifting to see small children dragged screaming into an Ent. But what struck me the most was how a movie in 1982 could show a middle class American family where the parents smoke pot as casually as they drank coffee. How did we get so unhinged on the subject only two decades later?

Oh, and speaking of kiddie books, have you met Brasco, the Jewish, gun-toting bear?

Beyond red and blue: Macs or PCs? 60 percent of Princeton students now have Macs, up from 10 percent in 2003. As a convert, I couldn’t agree more.

Four other competitors say they’ll stay out of the January 15 Michigan primary. Hillary waits till last to say … she’ll stay, thank you very much.

Norman Mailer takes the long view:

Let’s say that in my lifetime, certain things have gotten better and other things have grown worse, so much so that latter-day events would stagger the imagination of the nineteenth century. If, for example, the flush toilet is an improvement in existence, and if the automobile is an improvement, if technological progress is an improvement, then look at the price that was paid. It’s not too hard to argue that the gulags, the concentration camps, the atom bomb, came out of technological improvement. For the average person in the average developed country, life, if seen in terms of comfort, is better than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century, but by the measure of our human development as ethical, spiritual, responsible, and creative human beings, it may be worse. Reason, ultimately, looks to strip us of the notion that there is a Creator. The moment you have a society built on reason alone, then individual power begins to substitute for the concept of a Creator.

Progressivism has yet to prove itself. We live in a more diffuse state of general anxiety than people did in 1900. I don’t want to be a bore about this, but nuclear warfare also came along. The argument: Did we really improve anything spiritually? For instance, were people better off when they had to squat over a hole in the ground and so could smell their own product? Maybe they were a little closer to themselves than they are now.

If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, some in the GOP will want to make an issue of his race – not merely because of racism, but because in their desire to maintain power they have a record of using every weapon to hand. They will have to tread very carefully, of course. It could backfire. So much of this will take the form of legitimate questions that nonetheless help impress upon white voters that this guy is black. You saw it with the 24-hour news cycle emphasis on his recent preaching in a black church (a pretty major non-event that accrued more interest than a serious energy speech); and you will see it in references to the congregation he has long belonged to in Chicago. Again: legitimate coverage of legitimate issues, but loaded with the racial angle. Fox News will lead the way. They already are.

The first mention of Barack Obama in the New York Times – from 1990. (Hat tip: Kottke).

It takes Dan Bartlett to voice the obvious problem for Romney:

"The Mormon issue is a real problem in the South, it’s a real problem in other parts of the country. But people are not going to say it. People are not going to step out and say, ‘I have a problem with Romney because he’s Mormon.’ What they’re going to say is he’s a flip-flopper. … It’s a fact, it’s reality. I don’t know if it’s one that will keep him from becoming the nominee for the party but it’s something they clearly understand they’ve got to deal with."

I have a feeling that if Romney were not a Mormon, Fred Thompson would not have a campaign (assuming you concede he has one in the first place).

I’m struck by how sober Rich Lowry and Victor Davis Hanson appear to be after returning from a Pentagon trip to Iraq. Hanson provides the usual morale-boosting, but now seems aware of the failures of 2003 – 2006 (which he pooh-poohed at the time, of course). Lowry’s conservatism keeps interfering with his need to remain on good terms with the Republican base:

In discussions of what motivates Iraqis, Bush’s favorite theme of freedom never comes up. It’s always survival, fear, power, or pride, or some combination of all of them. Bush has been famously resolute, but one wonders how much — even after four grueling years — he truly understands the war on which he has staked his presidency.

Translation: the president hasn’t got a clue what’s going on and never has. It’s up to the military – finally free from Rumsfeld’s idiocy – to forge some kind of tolerably feasible permanent occupation. We’re lucky to have them. They’re not so lucky to have us.

A reader writes:

Re: Nixon in a pant suit.

"I don’t want Al Gore policing the culture" (you in 2000).

No offense Andrew but your track record of predictions is just not very good (but to be fair, neither is anybody else’s).

Actually, I stick with that Al Gore position. I’m totally serial.