Month: May 2012

More engaging than you'd expect:

A reader writes in reaction to our latest MHB:

I’m an American who’s lived in the UK for over 10 years. In fact, I’m such an Anglophile I became a British citizen. So I like to think I have a pretty good grasp of what makes the English tick. I get the UK/France rivalry. I understand that I’m supposed to hate the Germans (but never mention The War). I can queue with the best of them, and I’ve got talking about the weather down to an art form. However, one thing I will never understand, and something that has never been explained to me satisfactorily, is why the British give redheads (gingers) such a hard time. Perhaps you can enlighten us?

No clue. Maybe a residue of anti-Celtic prejudice? Maybe in a once-all white island, someone had to be the despised minority (after Jews and Catholics). The good news is that Pixar looks set to release a major Ginger-empowerment movie:

But prejudice is, alas, eternal. And Rebekah Brooks doesn’t help.

Frum weighs in on what it means for what's left of conservatism.

Obama's announcement hasn't moved the polls much:

[F]or all the hubbub, and all the column inches devoted to gaming out the political fallout, Obama's announcement led to little evident movement in the polls, and what movement there has been has been in his favor. That doesn't mean gay marriage can't matter later in the campaign — if it increases turnout among Ohio evangelicals, or leads to much-improved superPAC fundraising for Obama, it could have an impact on the election without having a major effect in national polling — but for now, it doesn't appear to be changing many votes.

Penn Jillette rages against Obama's drug policies:

From the transcript:

Do we believe, even for a second, that if Obama had been busted for marijuana — under the laws that he condones — would his life have been better? If Obama had been caught with the marijuana that he says he uses, and 'maybe a little blow'… if he had been busted under his laws, he would have done hard fucking time. And if he had done time in prison, time in federal prison, time for his 'weed' and 'a little blow,' he would not be President of the United States of America. He would not have gone to his fancy-ass college, he would not have sold books that sold millions and millions of copies and made millions and millions of dollars, he would not have a beautiful, smart wife, he would not have a great job. He would have been in fucking prison, and it's not a goddamn joke. People who smoke marijuana must be set free. It is insane to lock people up.

A-fucking-men.

We'd better hope – against all current evidence – that it's more like Clinton than that other guy no Republican ever mentions:

Today’s conservatives oppose tax increases so strenuously that many were willing to default on the nation’s debt last summer rather than raise taxes by a single penny. They overwhelmingly believe in a nonsensical theory called “starve the beast,” which asserts that tax cuts automatically reduce spending and tax increases never reduce the deficit because they invariably lead to spending increases.

The Clinton and Bush 43 administrations are almost perfect tests of starve-the-beast theory; the former raised taxes in 1993, while the latter signed into law seven different major tax cuts, according to a Treasury study. If there were any truth whatsoever to starving the beast, we should have seen a rise in spending during the Clinton years and a fall in spending during the Bush years. In fact, we had exactly the opposite results.

Bruce Bartlett has the numbers that prove it. What we really have right now is a choice between two conservatisms: one believes in a balanced approach to long-term debt (with increased taxes on the wealthy, investments in infrastructure, reform of entitlements); the other believes in slashing taxes and revenues still further, increasing defense spending, slashing core discretionary spending and entitlements. I don't think it's a debate any longer which approach would increase the debt more. There isn't a debate about Clinton's and Bush's records. The former was a conservative; the latter a big government spender and borrower who so crippled this country's finances it could barely survive the financial crash that was the exclamation point to the wreckage of the last Republican era.

In one brutal story of a love interrupted and then erased from existence:

The video hit a nerve for Michael Fleck:

[Tom Bridegroom] [yes, that's his actual name!] had been with his partner, Shane Bitney Crone, for six years. They traveled together, lived together and started a business together. They lived in California, yet had never been married.  

Unfortunately, Tom’s parents were not accepting of their child’s homosexuality or his relationship with Shane. When he died, all of Tom’s assets passed to his parents, even though to any outsider looking in, Shane was clearly his closest survivor. However, neither one of them had end-of-life documents. Shane had no legal right to any of Tom’s possessions, not even the ones with little monetary value, but exceptional sentimental weight. Nor was he able to hear firsthand from the doctor the circumstances of his partner’s death.

You can feel secure but without civil marriage, you aren't. So many of us learned this in the plague years – watching de facto spouses denied entrance to hospital rooms, thrown out of shared apartments by the spouse's family, denied access to the funeral, brutalized by those who never cared for someone until he died. I swore to myself then that this would be my life's work: to prevent such horror from happening again. We've made a start. But as this video shows, we are not close to the end yet. And that churches – churches – should be in the vanguard of brutalizing these people in this way – and justifying it -  fills me with oceans of sadness. And grief again.

Garry Wills is puzzled by it:

Everyone has noticed by now the non-laugh laugh of Mitt Romney, a kind of half-stifled barking. But what does it mean? It is blurted out as abruptly as it is broken off. Is it a kind of punctuation, part comma, part full stop, part interrogatory mark? What, if anything, is it trying to convey? Why does it seem more like coughing or burping than laughter?

Waldman decodes it:

[Romney’s] laughs in public almost always come when he’s been asked a probing question or finds himself saying something to which he thinks his audience will react negatively. That’s why the laughs are always so jarring, not so much because of their particular form (we all do a fake laugh for other people’s benefit now and again), but because they come at utterly inappropriate moments. They come when he ought to be grimacing, not laughing. That’s why when Mitt Romney laughs, nobody laughs with him.

Am I wrong to think there is also a Mormon angle here? Parker-Stone capture it here:

One gets the sense that Mormons, perhaps because they remain deeply insecure about their religion, make an extra effort to seem utterly great, happy, nice, genial human beings. Hence what’s been called “The Mormon Mask.” (More discussion of the concept here.)

Romney laughs that way; he also talks as if he’s learned the English language from some tribe of extremely cheerful, mainstream, extremely white Americans from around 1958. The reason the Parker-Stone treatment of Mormons is so hilarious (while also affectionate) is because it’s true. We don’t really know Romney and we can’t get a grip on his personality because he won’t tell us much about the most important thing in his life: his total dedication to the doctrines and practice of a Church that teaches that white people lived in America long before native-Americans and that Jesus visited them; that God the Father has “a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; that humans can eventually become gods; and that the Garden of Eden and location of Christ’s second coming were and will be in the state of Missouri.

How to overcome the huge gap between what one believes and how the general culture would react if the details of his faith were fully explained? One option: The construction of a personality designed to mimic the least offensive, nicest, all-American persona. So Romney sounds and looks like a focus-group tested model president from 1965. But the focus group doesn’t exist – except in his own mind and manner every year of his life.

Perhaps that’s why we cannot seem to get through to the real Mitt Romney. He may have lost the ability to get through to it himself.