The Dish

And a merry Christmas to all you geeks and hippies out there (you know who you are):

Great catch by Jim Warren:

When the dinner was over, "I don't think I'm dying. I go to sit down and nobody's meeting my eye. Only [the late journalist-turned-White House spokesman] Tony Snow comes over and says I'm doing a great job." Then Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came his way and told him he was brilliant.

"I said, oh, s-, don't let me like Antonin Scalia!"

Wondering what exit he should use, Colbert recalls being approached by actor Harry Lennix, whom he knew from their days at Northwestern University. Colbert indicated that he sensed some of the audience wasn't happy. "And he [Lennix] said, 'f- these people."

Indeed.

Dave Weigel makes a point the Dish has been banging on about for a year and a half now:

The problem is that Palin has put the political press in a submissive position, one in which the only information it prints about her comes from prepared statements or from Q&As with friendly interviewers. This isn’t something most politicians get away with, or would be allowed to get away with. But Palin has leveraged her celebrity — her ability to get ratings, the ardor of her fans and the bitterness of her critics — to win a truly unique relationship with the press. She is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.

To be fair to Palin, she had every right to try and get away with this. But she couldn't have if the press had truly resisted together. They could have all refused to do one-on-one interviews until she gave a live, long, no-holds-barred press conference, answering any question asked. But they didn't. They each wanted their ratings-winning "get" more than they wanted to expose this person's ineptitude and cluelessness for the good of the country.

They've also lost their nerve, fearing that aggressive, adult but civil questioning of Palin would get them tarred elitist or condescending or all the other class warfare memes the GOP is now so adept at deploying. And so this farce of a candidate continues to plague us.

But, yes, Dave, it probably doesn't help to cite her Facebook nonsense. I just feel a responsibility to keep tabs on the lunacy, and have done since it began.

A reader submits Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Paper.” It centers on a homeless man:

Jim Cornette lets it rip against those, on both sides, who have resisted the opportunity to extend insurance to so many who don't have it or can't afford to get it. It's a TNC classic.

Someone needs to sign these guys:

(Hat tip: TDW)

A reader writes:

I agree that Obama has a chance to reorient American politics the way Reagan did, but I think he first needs to explain to the American public a comprehensive political philosophy.

Like Reagan, Obama ran against a political philosophy that was weakened by current events (2008 meltdown was to laissez-faire economics/deregulation as Stagflation was to Big Government liberalism). Reagan explained that government wasn't always the answer, and was often part of the problem. His subsequent tax and regulatory policies were consistent with his stated philosophy.

Obama's philosophy could be called "pragmatism," but the problem is that while pragmatism might reorient how things get done in Washington, it won't reorient the country's political philosophy because it won't connect with the public.

Voters knew where Reagan would come out on an issue, even if they disagreed with him. If voters ask themselves what Obama will do to address a problem, and the answer is "Whatever government programs/regulations he can get thru Congress," they will both disagree with him (he'll "betray" liberals and anger conservatives) and have no sense of what compromises he will make on subsequent issues.

In an age where government actions is needed, Obama needs to have a simple hook with voters to explain his philosophy, something along the lines of "Not big or small government, but effective governance." Following a period where regulators didn't regulate, because "the market" was never wrong, the public clearly believes that the markets aren't always right, but that government isn't much better.

If Obama can explain his philosophy as a shift from "markets vs. government" to "how to best utilize markets to create opportunity for the general public" has a chance to truly reorient the political landscape.

CPAC will be co-sponsored this year by … drum-roll: The John Birch Society! I think it's a prefect match for today's conservatism: paranoid, angry, convinced of a Jihadist-Communist plot, and deeply deeply populist and, er, white. Genius.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"My only real regret is Bush in 2000. I trusted Bush's incompetence over Gore's insufferable ego. But I suspect that with the invasion of Iraq, the end-result would have been the same. They both would have gone in on false pretenses. And would have failed for similar reasons."

Is it possible to find a worse moment of self-justification, of self-absolution and post-hoc rationalization, than this? So Gore, the one major political figure to publicly oppose the Iraq War before its start, who had nothing to do with the neocons and had been part of an administration that focused with urgency during its waning days on the problem of Al Qaeda — Gore is just as likely to invade Iraq as W? "The end-result is likely the same"? This is absurd on its face.

Gore would certainly have invaded Afghanistan, as any American President would have — and then done nation-building, competently, during the critical period as was consistent with his foreign policy statements and advisers in 2000. A Gore foreign policy cabinet would have been entirely different than Bush's, and you know it. There would not have been the neocon-nationalist alliance that provided the key faction in favor of war in Mesopotamia.

I know you have some visceral dislike of Gore; you think this "ManBearPig" nonsense is somehow relevant, rather than petulant; you seem to have imbibed a meme minted c. 1999 by a bored and malignant gang of Press Courtiers, that Gore is unbearably arrogant and mendacious and a legitimate target of scorn (unlike that compassionate, would-like-to-have-a-beer-with fella' from Texas). And so it seems that you did indeed vote (or rather endorse) in 2000 based on personality. You could at least own up to this as an unmitigated error, rather than entertain us with unlikely counter-factuals.

Yes, I did endorse on personality in 2000 – along with Bush's fraudulent campaign as a moderate – and I have owned up to the error. I guess my sense is that Gore opposed the Iraq war in part out of bitterness. If you look at Gore's record – and at TNR, I was hardly unaware of it – it was full of extreme vigilance about Saddam, willingness to use military force for moral ends (as in Bosnia), and completely conventional neocon views on the Middle East. I can absolutely see him going to war against Saddam if goaded sufficiently. Maybe he would have been persuaded by the intelligence that we didn't actually have the goods on WMDs; maybe his hawkishness would have waned in office as it did in opposition. But knowing Gore, I stick with my point. In office, I suspect he would have been much closer to my position on invasion at the time than he was.