Month: October 2010

A reader writes:

Beck is NOT offering, in your words, a "pretty deep, if internally inconsistent, worldview for people who do not have another worldview."  He is offering a stream-of-consciousness rant studded with fragments of conservative propaganda dressed up as history.  He makes his uneducated listeners feel smart by reinforcing their prejudices with his pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook.  His radio show is an audio version of an unprepared college freshman attempting to bullshit his way through a term paper.

Another writes:

In your attempt to defend Glenn Beck, you said that "he got into Yale," using it as evidence of his intelligence. As a Yale alumnus, I hasten to point out that Beck got into Yale in the same way that Christine O'Donnell got into Princeton – namely, by enrolling in a single course as a special student.

Another:

Please don't defend Beck by reducing the standard for intelligence to the equivalence of saying, "He reads books". I know the bar has been set so low by the Palins of the world, but by no means does surpassing her in intellectual endeavor mean that someone is smart. Behind the cursory references to Hayek or Friedman is a Top-40 Radio DJ who is somewhat knowledgeable about US history, simple as that.

Another:

I had to read Mr. Oppenheimer’s piece twice to make sure my leg wasn’t being pulled. People “want ideas to chew over, they appreciate complex ideas”? You’ve got to be joking! People want to feel smart, without having to do any actual, you know, thinking. The history of mankind makes perfectly evident that people almost uniformly detest complex ideas. Isn’t that clear watching Beck? How often does he present a perceived problem, an issue, without simultaneously presenting his opinion and diagnosis? That’s not grappling with issues; it’s issuing sermons.

John Cole explains blowback:

When you bomb people and kill their family, friends, and neighbors, burn down their homes and burn down their businesses and kill their livestock, spewing unexploded ordnance and munitions in fields where they work and their children play, it pisses them off. Many of them even get pissed off enough to fight back against the people they think are responsible for the bombing. They probably even form lifelong grudges when they find their mother and children in thousands of bloody pieces in their former homes.

In other news, NATO supply trucks are again struck in Pakistan.

Rufus F. offers an answer:

Culture matters. I disagree with the culture warriors on a number of issues, but not with the sense that, when we struggle over cultural issues in the public sphere, we’re struggling publicly over private terms of existence. Unless we take part in that struggle, internally or externally, existence is something given to us, instead of made by us. When we discussed The Republic, it was hard for me to fully condemn the censoriousness of Plato. Isn’t it better to tremble at the power of poetry than to see all cultural expressions as consumer items, no more threatening than deodorant?

A survey shows that the Tea Partiers are mostly socially conservative. Well: duh.

* Nearly half (47%) also say they are part of the religious right or conservative Christian movement. Among the more than 8-in-10 (81%) who identify as Christian within the Tea Party movement, 57% also consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement.

* They make up just 11% of the adult population—half the size of the conservative Christian movement (22%).

* They are mostly social conservatives, not libertarians on social issues. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and less than 1-in-5 (18%) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.

* They are largely Republican partisans. More than three-quarters say they identify with (48%) or lean towards (28%) the Republican Party. More than 8-in-10 (83%) say they are voting for or leaning towards Republican candidates in their districts, and nearly three-quarters (74%) of this group report usually supporting Republican candidates.

They are the hardest of the hardest core and the notion that they care about actually cutting spending as a key priority when none of them will actually propose anything even faintly serious as a program of cuts is self-evident. Allahpundit is disappointed:

A single tear rolls down a socially centrist, fiscally conservative, atheist blogger’s cheek… [T]he tea party has in part simply been a way for conservative Republicans to rebrand themselves after souring on the GOP — but with all the attention the movement’s gotten from libertarians, there’s a lingering question as to who really dominates when it comes to non-fiscal matters. The answer, it appears, is conservatives, not libertarians, which we should have known from the response to Beck’s religious rally on the Mall and the hero status accorded among most tea partiers to Jim DeMint, who was last seen insisting that you need a big God to have a small government.

And if you think Sarah Palin's cultists want to cut defense in any way any where, you need some therapy. Like Allahpundit, I wish there were a Tory party in America – socially centrist, fiscally badass. But there isn't. And the last place to look is the Tea Party.

Jacob Sullum corrects some dubious arguments against Prop 19. On its constitutionality:

Nine former heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration claim the initiative conflicts with the federal Controlled Substances Act and therefore violates the Supremacy Clause, which says "this Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme law of the land." The Supreme Court has upheld national marijuana prohibition, even as applied to purely intrastate cultivation and possession of the drug, through an absurdly broad reading of the federal government's authority to "regulate commerce…among the several states." But it has never held that the Constitution requires states to impose their own penalties for crimes created by Congress.

Assuming Californians approve Prop. 19, which is ahead by 11 percentage points in the latest poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, the feds will not have the resources to enforce marijuana prohibition throughout the state on their own. That's a good thing, since the freedom to experiment with different policies is one of federalism's main virtues.

A candid account from Tim Gunn:

Phoebe Maltz explains their difficult position:

I've written here before about the challenges of dealing with negative images of Jewish women in entertainment created by Jewish men. Am I saying Jews control the entertainment industry? No, but Jews do have a disproportionate role in the entertainment-with-a-Jewish-theme-intended-for-a-mainstream-audience industry. Same as all other minorities… We-as-a-society would be a whole lot less forgiving of the Mrs. Broflovski norm if we imagined it was coming from non-Jews.

Add to this the generally-held idea (held, I suspect, by those who've never seen the first two seasons of "Absolutely Fabulous") that women have no sense of humor, and it's clear enough why Jewish women are in a bind if we try to complain (get that – Jewish women complaining?) about the use of representations of our kind as comic relief.

Er, have you examined the character of Mr Broflovski? South Park takes no prisoners. And Sarah Silverman? She kills every stereotype with one bat of the eyelashes.

Contra his co-blogger, Orin Kerr tentatively concludes that an individual mandate to buy health insurance does pass constitutional muster, and solicits comments from anyone who thinks he is wrong.

Charmant: