The Dish

“I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled: ‘Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights — then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.’ … And so today, in this year of war… we have learned lessons — at a fearful cost — and we shall profit by them. We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger… The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mightily blows for freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world.” – president Franklin Roosevelt, January 20, 1941.
– Andrew

Read this “sordid history of the biggest taboo in sports” to find out why.

GRAMBO IS SUBLIME: I shat you nizz.

WILL IN THE WORLD: Whenever I want hard-hitting legal analysis, I look to Will Baude. Hard-hitting analysis or news about whales. That’s deep, man. Too Deep.

NEW LABOR: Steve Rosenthal, the brains behind uber-527 America Coming Together, is planning on souping up his operation for 2006 and 2008. He figures there are votes to be found in Republican-leaning exurbs “among teachers, police officers and other public employees who can’t afford the close-in suburbs.” What if the aforementioned public employees don’t want to live in the close-in suburbs for the same reasons they don’t want to live in the cities? Crime, crowded schools, congested roads, and a general perception of disorder, not to mention high taxes, might have been enough to drive them out. My guess is that the ACT will have a tough time.

Reaching out to the exurbs is worth a shot, but Rosenthal and his allies in the union movement might want to think about retooling the union movement itself. Instead of relying on constant growth in the number of public employees-trust me, conservatives are finding ways to outsource key functions to the private sector, and it’ll probably save money-why not create service-oriented labor unions focused on lifelong learning? Virginia Postrel had the right idea in 1998. Rather than shackle members to a particular employee, these unions would enhance labor mobility. They’d act as talent agents for regular workers, working aggressively on their behalf by upgrading their skills, negotiating better deals, and finding new opportunities.

DONNELLY RUNS DE-FENSE: Think disbanding Saddam’s army was a disastrously bad idea? Think again.

Before jumping off the bandwagon, don’t forget Jon Lee Anderson’s case for the prosecution.
— Reihan

I spent the first several years of my life speaking an impenetrable patois of Bengali and Brooklynese; my desperate pleas for food or water were answered only by puzzled expressions and, in time, utter indifference. That I survived is a minor miracle. That I remain incomprehensible is a minor tragedy.

Kevin Drum writes, “I guess I might as well step up to the plate and confess to Reihan Salam that I don’t understand about half of what he writes.” Faced with this meandering monstrosity of a post, his best guess is that I’d scrap Social Security if I could. And he’s right-sort of.

THE RIGHT KIND OF REDISTRIBUTION: Redistribution can be a very good thing. Hayek thought so, and so does card-carrying libertarian Will Wilkinson. But to build a decent society, we need to go beyond cutting checks. We need to strengthen citizens and communities by giving them the tools to thrive. Social problems like the unusually high rate of black male unemployment require serious policy interventions, and that means spending serious money. And then there’s health care. Like a lot of conservatives, I think we need consumer-directed health care. Mandatory health insurance, as proposed by Ronald Bailey, is one way to get there. As Bailey suggests, that means subsidizing coverage for the poor-a very expensive proposition. Finally, there’s the fact that many Americans, despite working hard and playing by the rules in Bill Clinton’s memorable phrase, remain in poverty. That undermines the legitimacy of the market economy. When that happens, the threat of class warfare looms large. Wage subsidies for low-income workers are one way to solve that problem. (Ask Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review‘s wonk-in-chief.)

If we could alleviate the social isolation faced by the inner-city poor, secure health care for all Americans while preserving competition and preventing a government takeover, and see to it that hard-working parents can earn a decent wage, we’d go a long way towards healing deep divisions that have plagued this country for a long time. That’s worth a lot of money, particularly since a lot of these programs would eventually pay for themselves-by making us healthier, by fostering innovation, and by reducing crime. This is real demand-side conservatism: spend money now to save money later by nudging people in the direction of self-reliance.

SCRAP SOCIAL SECURITY: Alas, while it’d be great to buy every man, woman, and child a Segway (in homage to GOB, style icon), there’s only so much government can do apart from providing for the common defense. If asked to trade, I’d choose improving the life chances of the poor, making us all better off in the process, over transferring vast sums of money to the elderly.

Which is why I’d scrap Social Security if I could. Will Wilkinson breaks it down here. To the extent possible, encourage self-reliance. Create Personal Security Accounts, provide supplementary retirement benefits to poor retirees, and make sure that no one falls through the cracks. Just don’t tell me there’s a God-given right to wage-indexed benefits as far as the eye can see.
— Reihan

In response to this post on the notorious Kansas murder/kidnapping, a reader writes:

I think you’re off-base on your harrumphing over the press’s language in this fetus case . . . It’s far less complicated (or inconsistent) then you make it out to be. It was a fetus until the moment this bastard ripped it out of its dead mother’s womb. At that point, it became a baby. Similarly, if a pregnant woman gives birth conventionally, her fetus turns into a baby the moment it slides through the birth canal. So it is accurate to write about the theft of the fetus, but the discovery of the baby. I don’t think abortion politics really has to play into it, it’s just a matter of precise language.

It’s true that the absurd sentence that Rich Lowry cites — in which the woman is described as “cutting out the fetus and taking the baby back to Kansas” — is technically correct under this rule. (Headlines that trumpeted a search for a “missing fetus,” on the other hand, seem more dubious.) But the larger point is that the “precise language” is itself absurd, because it treats a shift in location (from womb to outside world) as though it were a developmental distinction. “Her fetus turns into a baby the moment it slides through the birth canal,” my correspondent writes. By what magic, exactly, is this “turn” achieved? Obviously, the English language is filled with small absurdities, and the strange “baby-fetus” distinction (which is hardly universally hewed to, I might add) wouldn’t matter much — except that as a matter of law, one can kill a “fetus,” whereas a “baby” is deemed worthy of legal protection. So when a case comes up that highlights the absurdity of this distinction, the press’s difficulties in describing the fetus/baby/unborn child/clump of cells has everything to do with abortion politics – even if reporters themselves don’t know it.
– Ross

They’ve been debating, over at the Corner, the funniest book ever. I’m not really a connoisseur of humor in the novel (though the best literary critic of the present moment is interested in the subject, so perhaps I should be too), but I’d probably join John Derbyshire in his assessment of Portnoy’s Complaint, which is, indeed, inutterably hilarious. P.G. Wodehouse, on the other hand, tends to leave me cold — which automatically disqualifies me from membership in the Club of Conservative Aesthetes, I know (as does my disdain for Brideshead Revisited). I tend to prefer my mid-century British humor leaved with a little more seriousness than Wodehouse brings to the table — give me Anthony Powell any day, or some of the non-Brideshead Waugh.

I should add that there are passages of David Copperfield that I recall being as funny as anything I’ve ever read. Nabokov, too, is brilliantly witty, though rarely in a fashion that makes you laugh out loud.

And if you’re looking to laugh at a novelist, well, there’s always James Fenimore Cooper.

— Ross

I know, it’s enough already — but how can you resist a James Lileks–James Wolcott steel cage death match? That’s right, you can’t.

Also, Mark Steyn’s Christmas column is typically entertaining (though you have to register to reach it, I’m afraid).

— Ross

“The liberal elite think their superior wisdom, and their control of education and the media, should convince us to become a bunch of pagans. They fantasize we will give up our guns, values, morals, and Constitution. They romanticize we will embrace socialized medicine, tolerate failing schools, and become mindless socialist whimps eager to be euthanized before becoming a burden on society.” – Donald R. May, Townhall.com.
— Andrew

About a month ago, William Stuntz wrote this piece about political common ground between red-state evangelicals and blue-state liberals: “Helping the poor is supposed to be the left’s central commitment, going back to the days of FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared from national politics… I can’t prove it, but I think there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it.”

Today, Nicholas Kristof observes that the most indefatigable advocates of liberal humanitarianism are now found on the Christian right:

Members of the Christian right…are the new internationalists, increasingly engaged in humanitarian causes abroad — thus creating opportunities for common ground between left and right on issues we all care about… Liberals traditionally were the bleeding hearts, while conservatives regarded foreign aid, in the words of Jesse Helms, as “money down a rat hole.” That’s changing. “One cannot understand international relations today without comprehending the new faith-based movement,” Allen Hertzke writes in “Freeing God’s Children,” a book about evangelicals leaping into human rights causes.

Hertzke, in a recent interview, noted that evangelicals’ human-rights advocacy has led to tensions with “business conservatives” and “proponents of realpolitik.” It seems that a religious revival wouldn’t necessarily be a gift to the political right, if only the left were not so resolutely secularist.
— Steven

John Lewis Gaddis suggests that the Bush administration needs to shift from “flaunting U.S. power to explaining its purpose,” as presidents did during the Cold War. He sees common ground between America and the rest of the West:

The terrorists of September 11 exposed vulnerabilities in the defenses of all states. Unless these are repaired, and unless those who would exploit them are killed, captured, or dissuaded, the survival of the state system itself could be at stake. Here lies common ground, for unless that multinational interest is secured, few other national interests — convergent or divergent — can be. Securing the state will not be possible without the option of pre-emptive military action to prevent terrorism from taking root. It is a failure of both language and vision that the United States has yet to make its case for pre-emption in these terms.

But this is a distinctly American perspective on the lesson of 9/11. As Francis Fukuyama notes, America and Europe don’t perceive the same threats:

Americans tend to believe that September 11 represents only the beginning of a new age of nihilistic, mass-casualty terrorism, while Europeans tend to think of it as a single lucky shot, of a kind familiar to them through their experience with the IRA or the Baader-Meinhoff gang. In campaigning for the presidency, John Kerry said he looked forward to the day when terrorism would be a nuisance rather than a mortal threat. Many Europeans believe it is nothing more than a nuisance now – even though, given the large Muslim populations in countries like France and Holland, they are more threatened by Islamist radicalism than are Americans.

Says Fukuyama: “One cannot simply will into existence a set of common interests on a scale sufficient to replace the once-overwhelming Soviet threat.” Tod Lindberg, meanwhile, is more optimistic. To him, Europe and America represent two poles of opinion within a common Atlanticist community, one marked by agreement on fundamental principles. There’s no doubt that Europe and America agree on norms governing relations with each other (for all their tensions, who can imagine war breaking out between France and America?) and even share a vision of a better world, about which both Americans and Europeans speak of universal human rights, freedom, equality, and so on. “So the difference is not over ends but over how to arrive at them.” But if arriving at these ends involves determining which threats are most important, and whether preemption is necessary to address them, Europe and America might find themselves moving in different directions, even if inadvertently.
— Steven

Tony Judt thinks Israel is to blame for widespread anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere. “Its leaders purport to speak for Jews everywhere,” Judt writes. “They can hardly be surprised when their own behavior provokes a backlash against…Jews. Thus Israel itself has made a significant contribution to the resurgence of the anti-Semitism.” But in its ethnic-national identity, Israel is like other nation-states. Jacques Chirac, for example, speaks routinely “on behalf of the French people.” As one can see from this collection of statements by heads of state, that’s the norm. Jiang Zemin purports to represent not only the Chinese government, but also the Chinese people. As Time has reported, Vicente Fox “has said that he intends to be President to ‘all Mexicans’ – at home and abroad.”

But does anyone think that attacks on ethnic Chinese or Mexicans living in America or Europe would be a sensible response to political controversies in their home countries? Of course not. Tibetans living abroad may have their grievances against China, but it hasn’t led to violence against their Chinese neighbors — no matter who Chinese leaders claim to speak for. Indeed, the Palestine Liberation Organization has long held itself out as the “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Yet attacks on Palestinians living in Europe or America remain hate crimes rather than expressions of opposition to the PLO. As Ran Halevi, in an essay on Tony Judt and the nation-state, has written, “When one burns down a synagogue or attacks a Jew in the street for sins attributed to other Jews, these are not ‘misdirected’ acts (to employ Mr. Judt’s euphemism) but the very essence of anti-Semitism.”
— Steven