The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Marty Peretz and the Inevitable Obsolescence of Yesterday’s Liberalism

Posted on | December 28, 2010 | 2 Comments

One of the beauties of conservatism is that, if we define it as William F. Buckley Jr. did — standing athwart history, yelling “stop!” — the conservative never need to change his ideology, which is essentially a stance of opposition to whatever innovations liberals propose on their march toward the Utopia of Social Justice.

The issues that make headlines may change from day to day and year to year, but the wrongness of liberalism is so reliable you can set your watch by it. Today’s latest “innovative” liberal policy idea is inevitably revealed, on closer examination, to be just a re-tread of old liberal ideas that have failed before. And the conservative stands firm in opposition.

Pity, then, the liberal.  He must constantly update his beliefs to keep pace with the relentless advance of Progress.

Once upon a time, Marty Peretz was a liberal in good standing, but has now been effectively purged by what I call the Sirhan Sirhan wing of the Democratic Party. And now a fascinating article in New York magazine shows us 71-year-old Marty Peretz as a lonely and embittered exile, unable to comprehend how liberalism has failed him or, as Peretz’s critics would say, how he has failed liberalism.

Category: Liberals

Sour Grapes for Mid-Term Losers

Posted on | December 28, 2010 | 10 Comments

Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan, they say. Another difference is that only defeat requires a scapegoat:

“The Tea Party movement really is quite a bit different than the old Republican conservative movement,” [Delaware loser Mike] Castle said. “They’re more than willing to take out Republicans, call us Republicans in name only, or whatever it may be. It was one thing when you were dealing with Democrats and Republicans. Now you’re dealing with divisions within your own party.”

Since when is the majority — and conservatives are the overwhelming majority of Republican primary voters — responsible for divisions in a coalition? But enough about that useless idiot Mike Castle. Let’s exult in the useless idiocy of defeated Democrats:

Defeated Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (N.H.) suggested in a recent interview that Chinese interests contributed to her loss in the November midterm elections. . . .
“I think it’s strangling us,” she told ABC News in a recent interview. “They’re in the halls of Congress everywhere, and it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don’t even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn’t even have to say where they got it.”

Democrats for Equality, Tolerance and Irrational Xenophobia.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Category: Delaware, Election, New Hampshire

LIVE AT FIVE – 12.28.10

Posted on | December 28, 2010 | 1 Comment

TOP NEWS
New York Airports Open After Heaviest Snowfall Since 1948

Snow falls in Richmond, obscuring the statue of Robert E. Lee

Northeast begins to dig out from record “global warming”

Israeli Talks With Turkey Fall Short
Apology not forthcoming for raid on Gaza “peace flotilla”, says Netanyahu

Khodorkovski Conviction Brings International Protests
Widely seen as proof that rule of law no longer exists in Russia

Bad Weather Chills After-Christmas Shopping
Results could be brutal for retailers




Amazon Touts Kindle As Best Selling Product Ever
Not even Harry Potter tops the e-book reader



POLITICS
Joe Miller Continues Election Challenge In Federal Court

Joe Miller consults his attorney before last week's defeat in state court

Won’t block Murcowski’s certification, swearing-in

Justice Sotomayor Whines A Lot About Rejected Appeals

Obama Weighs In On Michael Vick, Other Weighty National Issues

Gavin Newsom To Keep Pushing For Wave Power

Alvin Greene’s Running For The SC House



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asia Stocks, Currencies Rise On Economic News; Copper Hits Record High
Early Reports Show Holiday Spending Up 5.5% Over 2009
Microsoft Windows Tablets Fighting Long Odds Against iPads?
Amazon: iPad LCD Tablets No Threat To Kindle



SPORTS
Winter Classic 2011: Capitals, Penguins Brace For Rain

Heinz Field

The pussification of American professional sports continues

Mavs Top Thunder Despite Losing Nowitzki

Howard’s Double-Double Leads Magic Over Nyets


Air Force Wins Independence Bowl

Bruins Slip Past Panthers In Shootout



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Porn Prez: We’ll Buy And Bury Any Demi Lovato Sex Tape

Steve Hirsch, Vivid Video prez; Demi Lovato

Nobility in the strangest places.

LeAnn Rimes, Eddie Cibrian Engaged

“Teen Mom” Charged With Felony Assault




Alanis Morrisette: It’s A Boy!

No Illegal Drugs Found At Teena Marie’s House



FOREIGNERS
Medvedev Calls For Amendments To Patriotic Curriculum; Aims To Tamp Down Ethnic Friction In Russia
Gbagbo’s Support Weakens As The Money Runs Out
Egypt Seizes SAMs Headed For Gaza
Fourteen Killed In Fresh Clashes After Christmas Eve Bombings In Nigeria



BLOGS & STUFF
Newsbusters: Jon Stewart Gets Ultimate Praise From NYT
Jim Geraghty: Carol Shea-Porter Claims The PRC Did Her In
Cubachi: More Dim Bulbs – California Banning 100-watt Incandescent Bulbs
The Jawa Report: Meet The New Batman, Insha’allah


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

Media Headwinds, Media Tailwinds

Posted on | December 27, 2010 | 5 Comments

Ace of Spades describes a basic truth of American politics:

The liberal media sells liberal candidates as brilliant and even-tempered and “sophisticated” and “nuanced” of thought; all of these are non-ideological attributes which appeal to most, whatever one’s politics. And they need to do this, as only about 25% of the country can be persuaded to come along on the basic liberal message of higher taxes, more spending, more government power to dictate the affairs of men, and less freedom.
Meanwhile, Republican candidates get the opposite treatment from the media. I’ve noted before that every single Republican candidate is claimed by the media to be:

1. Stupid
2. Evil
3. Crazy
4. Out-of-touch

…and pretty much you can categorize every Republican office-seeker since Eisenhower (Out of touch) in this way. Nixon: Evil and Crazy; Reagan: Stupid and Crazy and possibly Evil; Bush I: Out of touch; Bush II: Stupid, Crazy, Out of Touch and Evil.

Brilliant as it is, Ace’s post doesn’t exhaust the endless variety of ways in which the media help elect Democrats. For instance, when Democrats are in office, the media can simply ignore the existence of opposition.

During the recent midterm congressional campaign, many Republican candidates were quite nearly ignored by local media. In fact, if you had been reading local newspapers in some key competitive districts, you’d have scarcely known there was an election coming up — much less that the incumbent Democrat was locked in a fight for his political life.

And this kind of non-coverage continued until the folks picked up their paper the Wednesday morning after Election Day and saw — for the first time in a front-page headline — the name of the previously ignored Republican who’d just gotten elected to Congress.

Those of us who followed the recent election might have thought, for example, that Orlando-area papers would have covered the FL-8 race between Alan Grayson and Daniel Webster the way the Tuscaloosa News covers the University of Alabama football team: Exhaustively, as the only game in town.

But it wasn’t that way at all and, with few exceptions, local newspaper coverage of campaigns in the top 70 or 80 competitive congressional races ranged from sporadic to minimal. So these papers voluntarily forfeited the readership they might have attracted if they had hyped up the mid-terms as The Most Important Election in Our Nation’s History.

Anyway, that wasn’t what Ace was talking about. He was explaining the media’s shameless overselling of Obama, and you ought to read the whole thing.

Category: Ace of Spades, Barack Obama, Media Bias

More Proof Exercise Is Bad for You

Posted on | December 27, 2010 | 10 Comments

A marathon runner is diagnosed with stress damage to her gluteal tendons, a malady called “dead butt syndrome.”

Exercise is to yuppies what Islam is to suicide bombers. “Fitness” has become a cult among the college-educated and upwardly mobile.

Tom Wolfe noticed this phenomenon nearly 30 years ago when he described the “social X-rays” — those bone-thin yuppie women who worked out constantly. “Fitness” and “health” are related but not entirely coterminous concepts, and the latter is not necessarily the purpose of the former, at least from a sociological perspective.

Fitness — typically running or weight training, but also cycling or any form of exercise requiring a gym membership — is intrinsically competitive, and thereby serves as a marker of superior status. The disciples of Fitness are engaged in a form of what Thorsten Veblen would have described as “invidious display.”

One cannot help but notice that the Cult of Fitness has arisen during the same period that traditional religion in the West has declined. It is as if people have embraced physical righteousness in a society whose standards of moral or spiritual righteousness have become so ambiguous.

Also note that the instability of marriage seems implicated in this trend. Divorce is now commonplace, and the median age at first marriage (which was about 21 in 1960) is now about 27. People are staying single longer and, when they do marry, there’s a greater likelihood that their marriages will end in divorce.

So whereas couples once married while still in full natural vigor of their youthful attractiveness and then grew older together, today’s yuppies must attempt to extend their peak attractiveness much longer — while they finish law school, get an MBA, etc. — and the Cult of Fitness is their safeguard against becoming unattractively flabby before they land a mate. You’ll not be surprised to learn that Jen A. Miller, who describes her marathon-induced muscle damage in the New York Times article linked above, is 30 and single.

My wife and I are happily middle-aged and neither of us is in danger of “Dead Butt Syndrome.” Our cardiovascular health may not be ideal, but at least our butts are still alive.

Of course, Professor Glenn Reynolds — whose link to that article called it to my attention — is all the time linking to health-and-medicine stories, but I think he linked that New York Times article just because “Dead Butt Syndrome” would be such a great name for a punk-rock band.

Category: Culture

Rule 5 Sunday Falls On A Monday This Week

Posted on | December 27, 2010 | 9 Comments

I won’t bore you with excuses as to why this is so; content yourselves with the knowledge that after a crappy day shoveling snow, fighting gale-force winds, or whatever it was you were doing outside today, you have a cornucopia of lush Rule 5 pulchritude to warm yourself with as you sit before your monitor with a warm beverage.

Appropriately enough, we begin with Match Pricks’ commemoration of Boxing Day. Nice gloves!

Next, Yankee Phil reveals that Lady Gaga, for one, is unimpressed by Europe’s cold weather. He also adds this impressive collection of Rule 5 linkagery.

Dave C. sends this verse with his submissions:

For Robert Stacy and his blogging apprentice, Wombat
Who is standing in for Smitty, may he ne’er see combat
I hereby declare these following entries for my Sunday, rule five.
In the hopes that Christmas traffic should not only grow but thrive.

He follows this with a helpful PSA From Team Unicorn, Zooey Deschanel singing us a song, Sarah Chang giving her fiddle a workout, and a double feature of Megan Kelly and Ronald Reagan on the evils of socialized medicine.

Somewhat chastened by last week’s tirade by the Boss, Soylent Green offers a Yuletide Spassfabrik damsel who is definitely at least PG-13. Maybe even M. I’ll have to study this one more closely…

…but in the meantime, let us hearken to WyBlog’s tale of Christmas tipping. If we can tear ourselves away from the illustration, that is.

On a  more serious note, Uncoverage reveals the sordid tale of how the late Anna Nicole Smith apparently brought the government of the Bahamas to its knees. Or something.

The JerseyNut regales us with a magnificent assortment of babes barely clad in Santa costumes, Fishersville Mike submits an interesting photo of Santa and a couple of his helpers at the Brickyard, and Chaz at Dustbury sends us tidings of Jennifer Aniston and The Veronicas.

Finally, Troglopundit wraps up this week’s Rule 5 bounty with a foursome of Troglofavebabes who made the Maxim Hot 30 and a homemade version of the “leg lamp” from some obscure Christmas movie.

Thanks to all for your submissions and patience!
Send next week’s pinup possibilities to Rule5Wombat!

Category: Rule 5

Unwatchable BloggingHeadsTV Episode in Which I’m Mentioned

Posted on | December 27, 2010 | 6 Comments

Amanda Marcotte and Maureen “Moe” Tkacik discuss the rape accusations against Julian Assange — including the feminist rage over “rape apologism” — and one of my posts is allegedly discussed but (a) like most episodes of BloggingHeadsTV, this is quite nearly unwatchable; and (b) even if it were watchable, my house is too doggone noisy today for me to listen and transcribe it. So if anyone wants to watch this and try to transcribe it, please be my guest. But I warn you: That’s an hour and 22 minutes of your life you can never get back.

Why are BloggingHeadsTV episodes generally so unwatchable? Well, first off, if we wanted to watch TV, we’d be watching TV, not reading blogs. People who read blogs do so because they prefer reading to watching TV. The spoken word is seldom more than 150 words per minute, and fluent readers can read much faster than that, so that the experience of watching writers talk is much less satisfactory than reading what they write.

The second factor which makes BloggingHeadsTV so unwatchable is that, if bloggers were telegenic, they’d be TV stars instead of bloggers. And I don’t mean this purely in terms of physical attractiveness. Being good on TV is a skill, a skill that most people have had neither motive nor opportunity to develop. Most writers aren’t good at TV because we spend so much time alone with our thoughts and our computers that our ability to communicate via the spoken word atrophies.

So it’s painful to watch this BloggingHeadsTV show and see Mo Tkacik — a very witty and articulate writer — go “mmm” and “uhhh” while she searches helplessly for the right words to say what she wants to say.

UPDATE: Donald Douglas managed to watch 25 minutes of it, and says: “The discussion devolved into gratuitous and surprisingly prurient sex talk, with an extremely selective commentary on the Julian Assange allegations.”

Also, according to Donald, Moe Tkacik describes me as a writer for The Washington Times, which I haven’t been since January 2008. The weird thing about that is, when I resigned, I went out of my way to leave on good terms, but I’ve nonetheless been treated like persona non grata by the subsequent parade of editors.

Seriously: If I scored an exclusive interview with the Pope in which the pontiff revealed that he’s a huge fan of Sarah Palin, my scoop could not be mentioned in the pages of The Washington Times. And yet, despite three years of such ostracism, there are still people who — knowing of me only what they read on the Internet — continue to describe me as a writer for The Washington Times.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Crime, Feminism, WikiLeaks

Natalie Portman: ‘Paint the Shotgun White, Pa! It’s Gonna Be Formal!’

Posted on | December 27, 2010 | 14 Comments

Donald Douglas beat me to this one: The Oscar-buzzed actress is pregnant and now engaged to marry the guy who knocked her up.

This is very good news, of course. It is vitally important that beautiful people have babies, because otherwise the human race would become progressively uglier with each succeeding generation.

Go to any trailer court or public housing project and look around: Ugly people are having lots of babies. The world’s great beauties must be encouraged to do their share procreatively, or else the future will look like the green room for the Maury Povitch show.

Also, it’s good to see the traditional hillbilly shotgun wedding making a comeback in Hollywood.

Category: Celebrities
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