Month: November 2008

Here’s a clip from Southpark’s post-election show last night:

You can watch the whole episode online here.

Larison throws some cold water on Fred Kaplan:

What I am trying to say is that we should not set up the next President for failure by making such grandiose, unfounded claims about what his election will mean for our relations with the rest of the world.  The next administration is going to enjoy a long honeymoon, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but we should all be as sober and clear-eyed as possible about what a President Obama is realistically going to be able to do and what he isn’t.

London, England, 4.30 pm.

Bradford Plumer highlights a smart way to encourage green energy projects.

Freddie has a smart post on faux small government:

You didn’t hear John McCain agitate against Medicare, or Social Security, or the prescription drug benefit. I highly doubt you would have heard any of his rivals for the GOP nomination do so, either. Being the candidate who tells the American people he’s going to cut their benefits is political suicide. If you think the McCain-Palin ticket performed poorly with elderly voters in key states like Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, well– I invite you to imagine how they would have done if they had been perceived as threatening social security, a cherished (yes, cherished) American institution.

The American population is graying rapidly. We will have an unprecedentedly large number of senior citizens moving forward. Elderly people vote. If there was any ideological space in this country for meaningful entitlement reform, it be crushed before that simple fact of demographics. I don’t think people understand what a massive change for America this prescription drug benefit was. Preventing a new entitlement from being passed is a far easier thing than revoking one which already exists. Of all the reasons conservatives have for anger towards George Bush, I think the existence of this new, enormous and expensive federal entitlement might be the biggest. He spearheaded a new and costly expenditure for the American government that, once calcified and entrenched, has very little chance of being taken away, and no chance of being taken away without massive political consequences.

Some would say that small government conservatism doesn’t require entitlement reform. I think this is a strange definition of small government. But suppose conservatives content themselves with chipping away at the margins, shrinking government in the spaces between the vast expenditures of military spending and entitlement programs. I still think the existence of these vast governmental programs undercut the case for small government. Perception matters, and more and more Americans seem to perceive that government is the appropriate vehicle for positive social change. I simply don’t see much stigma attached to the use of government assistance, and I find less and less people who feel any real commitment to "getting the government out of their day to day life." They say they are small government conservatives. What can that appelation possibly mean, when they feel perfect comfort in an expanding state apparatus?

Ross, Jim Manzi, Kmiec and others on the right are debating the future of conservatism.

One recalls the comic character of Michael Goldfarb declaring only last week that Obama liked palling around with anti-Semites. Funny how Obama’s chief of staff makes Goldfarb look like a goy. Josh Green’s 2005 piece on Rahm Emanuel is worth a read. Money quote:

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel’s success is his legendary intensity. There’s the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There’s the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army.

And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth — Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it’s a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton’s White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don’t earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.

(Hat tip: Suderman)

A reader forwards an e-mail from a Professor of Law & Women’s Studies:

Yesterday’s historic victory for Obama was tempered for many of us in the West by what looks like a win for Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage.  But it’s not over by a long shot.  California actually has two methods for changing its state constitution.  Amendments, for relatively minor changes, can be made by majority vote.  But revisions, which create major changes, require a 2/3 majority.  It’s hard to imagine that removing a constitutional right from an entire group of people could be construed as a minor change.  So unless the California Supreme Court loses its nerve, it should rule that Prop 8 required a 2/3 majority in order to revise the state constitution, and that failing to do so means the right to marry remains.

Eugene Volokh weighs in on the question. He’s skeptical, as am I.

Well, it looks as if she may be the gift that keeps on giving. The narrative is now beginning to look something like this: the McCain campaign picked her essentially out of a hat and with Bill Kristol’s recommendation letter. They did no vetting. They assumed she wasn’t completely out of her mind and dumb as a rock, which, one should concede, is not that big an assumption for a sitting governor with her approval ratings but still …

Then they find out the truth:

Now all I want to say here, ahem, is that they realized all this about this person within a few days of picking her and yet they went ahead for two months bullshitting us  … and risking the live possibility that she could be president of the United States at a moment’s notice after next January.

You know: I took a lot of grief for my pretty instant realization back in August that the Palin candidacy was a total farce. But when you cop to the fact that the McCain peeps knew most of that too very early on after their world-historical screw-up, you’ve got to respect and be terrified by their cynicism. I mean: country first?

And they only lost by a few points?