As Nina becomes paranoid about Lily stealing her role, she begins to have delusions — sometimes she believes she’s looking at Lily, only to realize she’s visualizing a darker and more liberated version of herself. The fluidity of that relationship culminates in a heated sex scene between the young women, which is teased in the movie’s trailer and has for months been the subject of media fascination.
It was one of the few scenes the actresses shot together, and Portman — whose character also masturbates in the film — described it as “super awkward.”
Exit Question 1: Were the lesbian scene and the masturbation scene in the original screenplay, or did director Darren Aronofsky add those scenes to the script, just so he could film them?
Exit Question 2: How wrong is it that Aronofsky gets paid for that kind of “work”?
Instead, he would perhaps have us believe, the whole of conservatism is encapsulated in Charles Krauthammer’s brain.
It is not Krauthammer’s fault that the media are obsessed with presidential politics. It is not Krauthammer’s fault that, when Palin’s choice as running mate in 2008 suddenly made the GOP ticket competitive with Obama (see the poll numbers cited here), the media embarked on a search-and-destroy mission against Palin. And it is not Krauthammer’s fault that the media have continued to use Palin as a scarecrow, a Republican demon-figure presented as the too-horrifying-to-contemplate alternative to supporting Obama.
However, it is Krauthammer’s fault that he can’t speak of Palin except to dismiss her with a sneer. (Am I the only one who noticed his significant pause between “glorious” and “woman”?)
Allahpundit isn’t as openly sneering as Krauthammer: “While no one would claim that conservatism begins and ends with Palin, some of her more devoted supporters do seem to regard her as an avatar of the movement.”
Here’s my problem with such dismissive attitudes toward Palin from conservatives: It sets up the 2012 primary contest as a battle between Smart Republicans (who are presumed to oppose Palin) and Dumb Republicans (who presumably support Palin). This message — which is being shouted from the rooftops by Krauthammer, Rove and many others — will tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Which is to say, most of the Smart Republicans who take their political cues from the conservative intelligentsia will in fact oppose Palin. But the influence of Rove, Krauthammer et al. is not so great as they wish and, in a multi-candidate field, the irreducible hard core of Palin supporters among GOP primary voters is still large enough to win pluralities in every state where the primary electorate is limited to registered Republicans. (Seriously: Comparing the average Romney supporter to the average Palin supporter, which is more likely to trudge through the snow to attend an Iowa caucus meeting?)
There is therefore a very real possibility of Palin winning the 2012 presidential nomination, at which point all the sneering condescension of the Krauthammer/Rove class will justify the MSM in declaring, “The Dumb Republicans have won!”
And that’s not going to help beat Barack Obama, is it?
At least for the sake of argument, let Palin’s supporters stipulate that, as a candidate, she has very real liabilities. Let them grant that Palin’s detractors are sincere in their criticisms. Rule out of bounds any ad hominem attacks on the “Beltway elite” or any accusation that the anti-Palin conservatives are expressing mere snobbery toward someone they perceive as a provincial rube.
Still, from a standpoint of pure political strategy, Palin’s conservative critics are at risk of wrecking the GOP’s chances in 2012 by their constant reiteration of anti-Palin memes. If Republicans are to defeat Obama in 2012, they absolutely must have the enthusiastic support of the Palinistas, whether or not Palin wins the nomination.
If Palin’s supporters believe that she has been cheated out of the GOP nomination because a cabal of elitists conspired against her, they’re unlikely to volunteer to man phone-banks and canvass precincts and do the other kinds of grassroots activism necessary for some other Republican nominee to beat Obama.
And what if Palin is the nominee?
Elections are about choices, and I presume that Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer — and even David Frum –would prefer to see Sarah Palin take the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2013, rather than to see Obama win a second term. If I am correct in that presumption, I would hope to see the conservative intelligentsia start acting as if a Palin presidency were both possible and preferable to Obama’s re-election.
Because it is possible, even if Palin is not your ideal candidate for job.
Most of the baseline assumptions about the size of our debt assume that today’s exceedingly low interest rates continue. If they don’t — even if rates just return to the average of the past 20 years — the picture looks far more grim.
Levin was responding to a Weekly Standard article by former Federal Reserve official Lawrence Lindsey. There are limits to the neo-Keynesian fiscal and monetary games that Washington has been playing for the past couple of years. The market for U.S. debt is not infinite, and monetizing the debt (which is what “quantitative easing” is about) involves the not-insignificant risk of a Weimar-like disaster.
America’s problems have been overshadowed, and to some extent mitigated, by the much more immediate problems of Europe. However unattractive U.S. bonds may be to investors, they are still more attractive than investing in Greek, Irish or Portugese bonds, and the weakening of the euro inevitably strengthens the purchasing power of the dollar. (Although a stronger dollar hurts our exports, so it’s not an unalloyed good.)
Still, anyway you slice it, the huge deficits resulting from two years of neo-Keynesian interventions — which include, of course, the Bush-era TARP bailout — represent real reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects for economic recovery. And the fact that we’re now at risk of military conflict with an ally of China, a major purchaser of U.S. government debt, adds still more grimness to the picture. Some other reasons to be pessimistic:
There is no pain-free way out of our fiscal and economic predicament. Sound fiscal policy would likely, in the short term, result in higher unemployment. But the policy path we have followed since 2008 — massive federal borrowing to fund the stimulus-and-bailout agenda — has only increased the debt overhang that is the 800-pound gorilla we ignore at our peril.
UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. I wish serious posts about economics got as much traffic as a Kate Middleton upskirt photo, but we must live in the real world — which is, of course, one of the great lessons of economics. That’s the problem with liberals: They pursue policies aimed at bringing about some abstract ideal like “social justice,” instead of developing policies that take cognizance of economic reality.
The blame for this discovery goes to John Hawkins’ “Linkiest” aggregator, which linked a Coed Magazine gallery of Kate Middleton pictures that included the aforesaid photo.
Would it be wrong to post that photo? Would it undermine the dignity of the woman whom Prince William has chosen as His Royal Consort? Would this weaken the “special relationship” with the United Kingdom, America’s strongest ally in the Global War on Terror?
That’s right: Today is the day when readers get to do their part to bring joy to the heart of Mrs. Other McCain.
And as the old saying goes, “A happy wife makes a happy blogger.”
Actually, I just made that saying up.
Same way I just made up “Make My Wife Happy” Day.
Sue me.
What this actually is — and clever readers automatically suspected it — is yet one more desperate attempt to persuade readers to hit the freaking tip jar. Unlike some other bloggers out there, however, I consider it an obligation to give readers extra value for your contributions, to provide incentives for you to kick in $10 or $20 to help pay the bills.
There is, perhaps, some analogy between (a) the inability of Americans in the mid-1960s to understand why Cold War liberalism failed to cope effectively with the Soviet menace, and (b) the inability of liberals in 2010 to understand why Democrats lost the election. But Stormer’s conspiratorial interpretation of events at least was aimed at defeating a real existential threat to the United States, whereas liberal conspiracy theorists like Matthew Yglesias and Steve Benen are merely seeking scapegoats for partisan political purposes. (Scapegoats — you know, like that evil Nazi Glenn Reynolds.)
Certainly, there were those during the Cold War who interpreted every unfortunate development as evidence of Bolshevik treachery. The problem was that liberals refused to confront the real evidence of such treachery. The question “Who lost China?” was a legitimate question and — between the Amerasia case, the Hiss case, the Rosenberg case and other documented examples of pro-Communist subversion — there were legitimate reasons to believe that Soviet agents and/or communist sympathizers were deliberately betraying their country.
Rather than lend their aid to efforts to expose security risks and prevent the propagation of subversive doctrines, however, the leading lights of liberalism from the 1940s through the ’60s instead strove to convince the American people that the greater danger to the commonweal was anti-communists like Joe McCarthy. And it was this typical reaction — i.e., “anti-anti-Communism” — which did so much to convince many conservatives that liberals were secretly pro-communist.
Most younger Americans today know very little of Cold War political history, and what they know of it consists of liberal mythology about the evils of McCarthyism. American anti-Communists are portrayed as a collection of dimwit kooks, demagogues and warmongers. That one can trace a straight line of influence from Whittaker Chambers (who exposed Alger Hiss) to William F. Buckley (who co-authored a book defending Joe McCarthy) to Ronald Reagan — you know, the guy credited with finally winning the Cold War — is one historical circumstance that students today are expected to ignore.
Because no one can expect to gain a tenured professorship if he writes his Ph.D. thesis with the aim of vindicating American anti-communists, there are very few defenders of Chambers, Buckley and Reagan in academia, and anti-communism therefore lacks respectability among the intelligentsia. And so Gerson doesn’t hesitate to depict John Stormer as a tinfoil-hat kook.
But look again at the 1964 question asked by Stormer that Gerson quotes: “Is there a conspiratorial plan to destroy the United States into which foreign aid, planned inflation, distortion of treaty-making powers and disarmament all fit?”
Yes, there was such a plan and there still is such a plan. It’s called “liberalism.” Its adherents do not admit or declare their intention “to destroy the United States” — and may not consciously intend such a result — but the result will be the same, if liberalism prevails. Consider for a moment New York Times columnist Bob Herbert’s battle cry for class warfare:
What’s really needed is for working Americans to form alliances and try, in a spirit of good will, to work out equitable solutions to the myriad problems facing so many ordinary individuals and families. Strong leaders are needed to develop such alliances and fight back against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy and have left working Americans in the lurch.
One need not be a conspiracy theorist to discern in such rhetoric very familiar ideas — “workers of the world unite,” “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” etc. — and no one is accusing Bob Herbert of being an agent of the KGB. Yet what are these “forces that nearly destroyed the economy”? Doesn’t Herbert mean capitalism? And is his phrase “working Americans” not a synonym for the proletariat? And what are these “equitable solutions” that Herbert urges us to adopt?
You see that certain harmful ideas are being advanced which, however, are not called by names that would cause us to take alarm. This is the sort of phenomenon that long ago inspired a poet’s maxim, which in turn inspired a famous book title.
Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
— Sir John Harrington
Sven OlsenMohamed Mohamud had gotten in touch with an “unindicted associate” in Sweden Pakistan and expressed an interest in anti-abortion activism “violent jihad.” So the feds arranged a sting and supplied the fanatical LutheranMuslim with a van rigged up with phony explosives:
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested at 5:40 p.m. just after he dialed a cell phone that he thought would blow up a van laden with explosives but instead brought federal agents and Portland police swooping in to take him into custody.
Mohamud yelled “Allahu Akhbar” and tried to kick agents and police as the arrest came, according to prosecutors.
Of course, if Mohamed Mohamud and Sven Olsen were both boarding a plane in Portland, the decision of whether Mohamed or Sven got an enhanced TSA screening would have to be as random as a coin-flip. Or else the ACLU would say “Allahu Akhbar”“see you in court.”
The arrest marks another episode in which Somalian-Americans are accused of radicalism. In 2009, after a sweeping federal investigation of more than 20 young Americans believed to have joined a militant Islamist group in Somalia, authorities charged two of the men with providing material support for terrorism. In 2008, another man under investigation blew himself up in an attack in Somalia, becoming the first known American suicide bomber.
Did you see that? They said “militant Islamist”! The New York Times actually referred to the Religion of Peace™ by name! That’s Change We Can Believe In.
I’m not aware that any “right wing blogs” tried to “turn this into a defeat for the Obama administration” and I certainly didn’t make any partisan political references.
But then again, Malkin also often excoriated the previous occupant of the White House — that would be the Republican, President Bush — when he rhetorically obscured the specific nature of the jihadist danger.
