A poll conducted late last month for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) shows him with a wide lead over challenger David Brat heading toward next Tuesday’s Republican primary election.
The poll, shared with Post Politics, shows Cantor with a 62 percent to 28 percent lead over Brat, an economics professor running to Cantor’s right. Eleven percent say they are undecided.
The internal survey of 400 likely Republican primary voters was conducted May 27 and 28 by John McLaughlin of McLaughlin & Associates. It carries a margin of error of +/-4.9 percentage points.
Bottom-Up Bipartisanship? Yesterday Dave Brat, the conservative economics professor who is challenging Majority Leader Eric Cantor in today’s primary, sent out what I assume will be his final pitch to voters …
Notes: 1) This is a pitch — against a “low wage agenda” and “crony corporate lobby” — that can appeal to Democrats as well as Republicans. Maybe partisanship will eventually be transcended, not at the top, with David Brooks, Gloria Borger and Jon Huntsman imposing a Beltway consensus they hammer out at an Atlantic panel, but at the bottom, where less sleek figures like Brat, Phyllis Schlafly and Jeff Sessions, can make common cause with Democratic workers who’ve gotten the short end of previous top-down triumphs such as global trade and Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, as well as of ineluctable technological trends like automation. 2) Perhaps not coincidentally, Democrats can vote in the Cantor vs. Brat primary. …
Backfill: See also this earlier Brat release, which expands the potentially bipartisan anti-corporate agenda to “other issues – like spending, debt and insider trading” …
That’s what Brat seems to represent, so far as I’ve been able to glean in the past hour or so. And here’s part of Mickey’s previous post, mocking Cantor for backing “amnesty” for immigrant “kids”:
Little did Cantor know that this exquisitely calibrated stand would prove to be about the most embarrassing position he could take — when the “kids,” often unaccompanied, started surging across the southern border, causing a humanitarian and policy crisis just as he was facing a challenge in Tuesday’s Virginia primary. Even the New York Times couldn’t help but notice that the young illegal migrants said they were motivated, not just by conditions back home in Central America, but also by the prospect that they’d qualify for Cantoresque amnesty. ”Central Americans, [said a Salvadoran immigration official] were left with the sense that the United States had ‘opened its doors’ to women and children.”
Check out how many of his posts for the past two months have been obsessively about the Cantor race.
Thank you! “@Buddy743: After watching your rally with Dave Brat at Randolph Macon we voted for Brat today! Fingers crossed!” –LI
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) June 10, 2014
Draft Boehner Statement: “I for one welcome our new talk radio overlords.”
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) June 11, 2014
So after all the obits for the Tea Party, we get the stunning news that Eric Cantor has been ousted from his Congressional seat by an anti-amnesty professor, touted by Laura Ingraham. This appears to have been a factor:
In an interview just last Friday, Cantor suggested he could work with President Obama to allow a path to citizenship for some children of illegal immigrants already in the country. In the campaign’s final days, Brat criticized Cantor for siding with Obama on the contentious issue.
His district had also been extended recently to include some more conservative areas around suburban Richmond. But this race – which Cantor once won by 79 percent in a primary – wasn’t even close. 56 – 44 is pretty much a landslide.
Here’s a glimpse of Dave Brat, introducing himself at a fundraiser last February. This was his intro:
This is his core pitch:
It doesn’t get more Tea Party than that: debt and amnesty, with a real populist, anti-big-business message. Notice also the anger at the big banks, the loathing of Wall Street, the populist equation of the Republicans and the Democrats, and the appeal to average and middle income “little guys.” Cantor was portrayed as an “insider-trader.” And yet this appealing message from an appealing and effective figure didn’t get much support from national Tea Party groups, as Laura Ingraham is now venting on Fox.
Does this completely end the chance of immigration reform in this Congress? Surely it has. In the next Congress? I’m beginning to suspect so. Does it cement the rightward-still passion of the GOP base? Yep. Does it give it an appealing, populist, insurgent message of change? You bet it does.
In a review of Stephen Budiansky’s new biography of Charles Ives, Jeremy Denk discusses how doubt informed the composer’s work:
Many of Ives’s most important pieces are about blurred or doubtful perception. The beloved song “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” depicts a morning walk in haze and mist, while hearing a hymn from a church across the river. The loss of information, the disintegration of the tune, is essential to the beauty, like the crackle and hiss of old recordings: a failure that connotes authenticity. Toward the end, the river heads to the sea (a gigantic mass of notes) but this climax is followed by a wonderfully quiet afterimage, a remnant of the hymn—an ending that disputes the very idea of ending. Most of Ives’s works end with beautiful but undermining echoes, instead of audience-pleasing affirmation.
Ives turned doubt to artistic insight, but the doubt turned back against him.
He was an unusually insecure pioneer. When he published the “Concord” Sonata, an act of supreme confidence, he also released a companion book (Essays Before a Sonata) as a preemptive defense. It’s hard to imagine Beethoven supplying a program note to his late quartets. Ives also had serious doubts about notation—unfortunate, since that is more or less the foundation of Western music: “After you get an idea written down it’s no good. Why when I see the notes I write down on the page and think of what I wanted it to sound like—why—it’s dead!” Budiansky describes the difficult process when, in the flush of fame, it came time to make a revised edition of the “Concord”:
An eight-year saga…. Ives’s deteriorating eyesight and his endless agonizing…drove the editors at Arrow Press to distraction…. Harrison Kerr at the press told [the pianist John Kirkpatrick, who gave the first full performance] in despair in 1940 that “Mr. Ives had been putting in sharps and flats and taking them out again all summer.”
It is just there—where the classical composer is supposed to “land” his move, to crystallize the work into a masterpiece—that Ives seems most uncertain, most ambivalent. As a result, many of his works deserve asterisks; they retreat away from the final, single form toward a set of possibilities.
Dan Bannino captures celebrity fad diets as classical still life:
With this series my aim was to capture the beauty that lies in this terrible constriction of diets and deprivation, giving them the importance of an old master’s painting. I wanted to make them significant, like classic works of arts that are becoming more and more weighty as they grow older. My aim was to show how this weirdness hasn’t changed even since the 15th century.
The caption for the still life seen above:
Beyoncé Knowles – “Master cleanse diet,” lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, salt, and laxative herbal tea
Tyler LeBlanc revisits the last decade of Jack London’s life, noting that the author best known for the literature of roughing it sought out futuristic techniques to cultivate his beloved Beauty Ranch:
[London biographer Earle] Labor says many of the innovations London introduced on his farms – he ended up buying multiple properties in the area as his love of farming grew – were widely respected at the time. He refused to use chemicals or pesticides on his crops, favoring natural fertilizers he stored in large concrete silos – the first concrete silos west of the Mississippi. He adapted crop-terracing techniques he witnessed in Asia and insisted on only purchasing and breeding livestock that were suited for the climate.
Of his innovations, arguably the most impressive was the pig palace, an ultra-sanitary piggery that could house 200 hogs yet be operated by a single person. The palace gave each sow her own “apartment” complete with a sun porch and an outdoor area to exercise. The suites were built around a main feeding structure, while a central valve allowed the sole operator to fill every trough in the building with drinking water.
London wrote that he wanted the piggery to be “the delight of all pig-men in the United States.” While it may not have brought about significant change in the industry – it is said to have cost an astounding $3,000 (equal to $70,000 now) to build — it was one of London’s greatest innovations, and, unfortunately, his last. He died the following year.
A Reynolds High School student is reunited with her mother after a shooting at her school in Troutdale, Oregon on June 10, 2014. Authorities said one student was fatally shot and the gunman was found dead. By Natalie Behring/Getty Images.
Shane Bauer, who was held hostage by Iran between 2009 and 2011, wants to know what the US government did to secure his release. He filed a lawsuit to find out:
For the two years that I was in prison, I wondered constantly what my government was doing to help us. I still want to know. But my interest in these records is more than personal. Innocent Americans get kidnapped, imprisoned, or held hostage in other countries from time to time. When that happens, our government must take it very seriously. These situations cannot be divorced from politics; they are often extremist reactions to our foreign policy. Currently, Americans are being detained in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Cuba, and other countries.
What does our government do when civilians are held hostage?
Sarah’s, Josh’s, and my family, like others in similar situations, were regularly assured by our leaders—all the way up to the Secretary of State and the President—that they were doing everything they could, but our families were rarely told what that meant. Why is this information so secret, even after the fact? It is important to know how the government deals with such crises. Is there a process by which the government decides whether or not to negotiate with another country or political group? How does it decide which citizens to negotiate for and which not to? Are the reassurances the government gives to grieving families genuine, or intended to appease them? Do branches of government cooperate with each other, or work in isolation?
Watch Shane discuss his capture and captivity in our Ask Anything series. Meanwhile, as if on cue, North Korea appears to have detained another American citizen:
The country’s state-run news agency reported that the man, identified as Jeffrey Edward Fowle, “entered the DPRK as a tourist on April 29 and acted in violation of the DPRK law, contrary to the purpose of tourism during his stay.” A Japanese news outlet, Kyodo, said he was part of a tour group and was held after leaving a bible in his hotel room.
Reviewing the new documentary, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, David Schmader finds that the late writer’s literary achievements are “perhaps given short shrift” – but the politics are plenty:
Born into high privilege to a father who “dreamed of being the Henry Ford of aviation” and taught his son to pilot a plane by age 10, Vidal followed most naturally in the footsteps of his grandfather, a US senator who overcame his blindness by having his young grandson read him all necessary documents. Vidal came away with a lifelong fascination for the workings of the American political system, which he explored from the inside during two unsuccessful runs for office and investigated from the outside through a lifetime of ferocious writing and commentary.
As the subtitle suggests, [director Nicholas] Wrathall’s film focuses on the decades Vidal spent denouncing the American political machine, from a jarring critique of the presidency of his beloved friend JFK (whose photo Vidal kept framed in his office as a reminder to never again fall for a politician’s charm) to endlessly articulate screeds against the “American Empire” and beyond. (Forget 9/11—Vidal believed Pearl Harbor was an inside job.)
Hence the sad, twisted embitterment of an American scion. I’d like to admire Vidal – and his early novels are breathtakingly good. But the precious posturing, the all-too-defensive lambasting, and the cheap sneers always force me to keep my distance. As for Pearl Harbor, well, sheesh. And we’re supposed to admire someone for this conspiratorial nonsense? (My own review of his novel on the American mid-century, The Golden Age, is here.) Meanwhile, Ted Scheiman marvels at Vidal’s precocious early writing about homosexuality:
At 19, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, while convalescing in the North Pacific, where he served for three years during World War II. Writing in the Times in 1946, Orville Prescott gave a triumphalist review, and Vidal had arrived, terribly young, in the world of letters. The glittering accomplishments of Vidal’s youth are more impressive, even moving, when we consider that Vidal published The City and the Pillar just two years later, in 1948—an explicitly gay novel that the Times refused to review….
In his earliest television appearances, culled here with sensitivity by Wrathall, the young Vidal is remarkably composed and confident as he declares the difference between gay and straight to be “about the difference between somebody who has brown eyes and somebody who has blue eyes.” He was an outspoken pioneer on dangerous territory despite being—to believe Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor and the documentary’s M.C.—“really quite shy” at the time.
Except, of course, that he subsequently insisted that there was really no “gay” and no “straight.” My own direct experience of him on the matter was his steadfast opposition to marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s. Even the director of this fawning film, Nicholas Wrathall, notes Vidal’s crankiness on the subject in the years after The City and the Pillar‘s publication:
I think he felt that was a fight he fought at a different point in his life. He had written The City and the Pillar, and he had been outspoken at the time. He’d never been in the closet. He had a lifelong relationship with Howard [Auster], which was a sort of marriage in its own way. He has been criticized for not being at the forefront in the fight against AIDS and now, more recently, in the marriage equality situation. But I think he had let go of it a little bit and didn’t want to be pigeonholed—although it was a big part of his life—but I think marriage was something he didn’t have a lot of fondness for. His parents’ marriage had been a disaster. I asked him about marriage equality and he said: “Why shouldn’t everyone share in the misery of marriage.”
Zooming out, Tricia Olszewski wasn’t impressed as some with the documentary, calling it “hagiography”:
Archival footage of Vidal’s television appearances, photos of his mingling with 20th-century glitterati, and interviews with the man are punctuated—a little too often—with his Oscar Wildean bons mots. Every element showcases Vidal’s quick wit, eloquence, and astoundingly insightful, often prescient editorials on whatever hot topics the zeitgeist offered. There are also documentary-requisite comments from fans and colleagues (including Tim Robbins, literary executor Jay Parini, and, naturally, Hitchens) that tend toward drooling (except, naturally, Hitchens).
The cumulative effect is worship overload. Vidal was undoubtedly an impressively well-rounded and accomplished human being—though it should be noted that he was born into privilege—and he all but says so in the film. It would be surprising if he ever admitted he was wrong. And while such confidence may have drawn people—a lot of people—in, it’s nearly unpalatable here. Vidal spoke regally (a missile was a “miss-aisle”) and expected to be regarded that way, too.
Read our coverage of Vidal’s death, in 2012, here, here, and here.
Parenthood curtails the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure, she observes, but it also puts those pleasures in perspective, by revealing the deeper, more meaningful satisfactions of connection, attachment and service to others:
Indeed, one could argue that the whole experience of parenthood exposes the superficiality of our preoccupation with happiness, which usually takes the form of pursuing pleasure or finding our bliss. Raising children makes us reassess this obsession and perhaps redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is. The very things Americans are told almost daily to aspire to may in fact be misguided.
This is a troubling paragraph. It seems reasonable enough for Senior to want to correct some of her fellow Americans’ more callow, entitled attitudes. And she is not to be faulted for pointing out that fun is more usefully regarded as an occasional by-product of experience than as an end in itself. (British readers, who tend to have more modest expectations of life’s fun quotient, may be forgiven for finding her progress towards this revelation a little ponderous.) But there’s something grim about asking parents to resign themselves to the end of paltry bliss-seeking in order to concentrate their energies on the higher satisfactions of duty, service and sacrifice. Let’s by all means concede that parenthood isn’t a trip to the funfair, but does it have to put the funfair off-limits? And can it only be appreciated if the funfair is dismissed as having been a rather childish and squalid diversion?
The Dish 