Month: January 2011

That's the Washington Village's devout wish – from Palin's former spinmeister at the WaPo, Howie Kurtz, to increasingly embarrassed conservatives like Ross Douthat and now, more formally, from Dana Milbank. To my mind, this really is about the Village, not Palin. They have been deeply uncomfortable with her political presence for two years because she is such a farce as a candidate, such a congenital fibber, and so deeply unready for any political office (including mayor) that they don't know what to do, except squirm. Or attack her critics.

What they should have done is exposed this insanity from the get-go, demanded open press conferences before any exclusive "get" interviews, and treated McCain's worst misjudgment (among countless) as a campaign-ender. But they did not have the balls to do that because it would require leaving the safe box of Beltway normalcy. It might – and this is what so many of them really care about – hurt their reputations. Then there's the money factor, as Dana concedes. Their profession is crumbling economically and they are, as Milbank all but admits, scared of offending the third of the country who worships Palin as a cult figure, and just as desperate to get the readers she attracts. 

My view is that the reason Palin gets so much attention from readers is not that they are shallow or petty or deluded. It is because they, unlike the MSM, actually see the radical danger of a Palin presidency, and the corrupt state of our politics that such a person could have ever gotten so close to power and even now is the one to beat in the primaries. They are concerned in a climate of polarization, recession and war that a far right cult-figure could easily go further than would normally be the case. Now, as Palin's star has faded somewhat – entirely because of her own missteps, not media scrutiny – these pundits want to move on because they think of this story as fluff. They want to pretend this never really happened. Or that it is still happening. All I can say is: There is as total a Beltway consensus on Palin's prospect's for the GOP nomination today as there was on  Obama's as late as December 2007. They dismissed Obama then just as surely as they dismiss Palin today.

And what is their proposal now? To stop even the pretense of seriously scrutinizing someone who is still one of the most popular figures on the right. Well, I guess most of us won't miss much. But if news breaks in February that further exposes this person's haplessness, narcissism and endless odd lies, the Dish will be there. And, I suspect, the National Enquirer.

No surrender.

(Photo: Allison Shelley/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

Wait a second. I am no fan of Limbaugh's, but when he makes fun of Chinese speakers it's a "Limbaugh Poison Watch," but when you do it it's just holiday fun? And when criticized you replied with this:

Whether parodying upper-class twits, or stammers, or R and L jokes for Asians, or lisps for homos, it's just human to laugh at weird cultural mismatches. I know my reader knows I mean no harm. And I do not mean to offend. But fun is not the same thing as offense. And they will remove the Dish's non-p.c. silly humor quotient from my cold dead hands.

So why the double standard on your part when it comes to mocking the Chinese language? I am for holding Limbaugh accountable for the violent, ludicrous, and racist shit he says, but just make sure it's not from a glass house, especially on the small stuff like Chinese sounding discordant to the Anglophone.

Because it wasn't funny, went on far too long and was designed to offend as much as to entertain. But nowhere near his usual vitriol, I concede. I'll be more judicious in future selections.

Jim Tankersley examines the troubling economic failure of the lost Bush-Cheney decade:

The U.S. economy created fewer and fewer jobs as the 2000s wore on. Turnover in the job market slowed as workers clung to the positions they held. Job destruction spiked in each of the decade’s two recessions. In contrast to the pattern of past recessions, when many employers recalled laid-off workers after growth picked up again, this time very few of those jobs came back.

These are the first clues—incomplete, disconcerting, and largely overlooked—to a critical mystery bedeviling a nation struggling to crawl out of near-double-digit unemployment. We know what should have transpired over the past 10 years: the completion of a circle of losses and gains from globalization. Emerging technology helped firms send jobs abroad or replace workers with machines; it should have also spawned domestic investment in innovative industries, companies, and jobs. That investment never happened—not nearly enough of it, in any case.

A match made in Foreign Policy.

From Doug Short:

The index is 89.2% above the March 9 2009 closing low, which puts it 18.2% below the nominal all-time high of October 2007.

(Hat tip: Calculated Risk)

Fantasy baseball nerds run the, er, math.

Don't tell Mark Steyn he doesn't love Britain:

Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?

It's a little excessive, but the point is well-taken. Yes, I know I'm biased. Maybe American conservatives should adjust their notion of divine can-do-no-wrong exceptionalism jointly to Britain and America and Canada.

A reader writes:

Number of unrestricted press conferences held with US media:

Hu Jintao, Paramount Leader of Communist Red China                  1
Sarah Palin                                                                                                   0

Feel free to check the math (Jintao may have more … )

John Allen takes the party line on the latest evidence of Pope John Paul II's negligence in the sex abuse crisis. But he has a small point:

First, the letter warns the Irish bishops that if they were to adopt policies which violate the church’s Code of Canon Law, cases in which they remove abusers from the priesthood could be overturned on procedural grounds. Were that to happen, the letter says, “the results could be highly embarrassing and detrimental.” In other words, a main concern of the letter is to ensure that when a bishop takes action against an abuser, his edict should stick – suggesting a fairly tough line on abuse, rather than a drive to cover it up.

Second, the letter does not directly forbid bishops from reporting abusers to police and prosecutors. Instead, it communicates the judgment of one Vatican office that mandatory reporting policies raise concerns. It’s not a policy directive, in other words, but an expression of opinion.

That's true, as the NYT's change of headline confirms. But it's still troubling to me on such a clear-cut case of illegal and immoral conduct that any resistance was offered to immediate notification to the civil authorities. Then, alas, more excuses:

Third, the Congregation for the Clergy at the time was under the direction of Colombian Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, whose reservations about bishops reporting their priests to civil authorities have been already well documented. In another celebrated case which generated headlines last year, Castrillón wrote to a French bishop in September 2001 congratulating him for refusing to denounce a priest.

When that 2001 letter came to light, Vatican spokespersons conceded that it revealed a debate among senior Vatican officials about how aggressive the church ought to be in streamlining procedures for sex abuse cases – a debate, spokespersons said, which Castrillón Hoyos eventually lost to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict XVI.

In that light, the 1997 letter seems less a statement of Vatican policy than an expression of what would eventually be the losing side in an internal Vatican power struggle.

Get Religion backs Allen:

The opinion of one Vatican official that mandatory reporting policies raise concerns is different than the Vatican forbidding or dictating to the bishops in anything.

My point, however, stands. It is that there should never have been an internal Vatican power struggle in dealing with allegations of child and teen abuse and rape. If this isn't clear-cut in terms of morality and the law, nothing is.

And the man ultimately responsible for resolving this power-struggle – even as more children faced more horrors by his own priests and bishops – was John Paul II. I don't believe the church should run roughshod over its centuries' old practice of a long delay between death and sainthood – especially when promoting one of its own, whose legacy has not been able to be judged in full and in proper perspective.

Megan takes issue with this post on Loughner:

Andrew's defense seems to be that there are a lot of right wing jerks out there, and that by combing Loughner's writing, he can find a few sentences here and there that sort of sound like things that might have been said by one of those right wing jerks.  But I'm pretty sure that if I combed Loughner's writing, I could find some sentences here and there that imply that Loughner read Andrew's writing, or gay rights literature, or Edmund Burke.

Really? Go ahead. Make my day. Or withdraw the claim.