Roman Polanski Freed By Switzerland

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Because Europeans are “sophisticated” like that:

Switzerland said on Monday it would not send Roman Polanski back to the United States to face sentencing for unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, freeing the Oscar-winning director from 10 months arrest.
Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said she had decided against extradition because of potential technical faults in the U.S. extradition requests but also because Polanski had for years come to Switzerland in good faith. . . .
“He can go to France or to Poland, anywhere where he will not be arrested,” she said.

Nice of Reuters to use the term “unlawful sex” to describe feeding a girl Quaaludes and wine and then anally raping her. All the creeps who have been busted by Chris Hansen on “To Catch a Predator” are watching this news and thinking to themselves: “OK, now I see my mistake. All I’ve got to do is win an Oscar and move to Switzerland and then . . .”

Rachel Maddow and the Politics of Stupid

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Why hasn’t the American public completely repudiated the policies of the Obama administration? At a time when the unemployment rate has been hovering near 10 percent for nearly a year, Obama’s job approval numbers are very near dead even, and Republicans are just barely leading on the generic ballot.

Why isn’t the administration’s abject failure on economic issues more apparent? The reason, I suspect, is that many independent voters are still willing to blame Republicans for these problem. The GOP has still not figured out how to undo Bush-era “brand damage” and Democrats continue to point the finger at Republicans (and those convenient proxy villains, Big Business and The Rich) for the nation’s economic woes.

It is only in this context of the GOP’s lack of credibility that Democrats can get away with advocating policies that obviously aren’t working and, really, don’t even clear a minimal threshold of common sense. Consider Rachel Maddow’s statements on Sunday’s “Meet the Press”:

Well, you end, you end up with the situation which again you’re back to choice vs. referendum because Republicans . . . can argue about how it’s all about spending, it’s all about debt. But it’s not just talking about the past to say, “When Republicans have had the reins, this is what they’ve done: two wars not paid for, prescription drug benefit not paid for, two tax cuts that mostly benefited the rich not paid for.” They put all that stuff on the deficit, $1.3 trillion sitting there as — in a deficit when Obama took over, after the previous Democratic president had handed him a surplus. If you talk about — if Republicans want to run as this fiscally responsible party, it’s neat, but it’s novel. It’s not how they’ve actually governed. . . .
I think that, I think that most Americans also, though, understand the basic arithmetic that when you’re talking about pushing tax cuts that do mostly benefit the wealthy and you’re simultaneously talking about getting tough on the deficit, you’re talking about a world in which math doesn’t work the way most people think it works. . . .
Tax cuts hurt the deficit. . . .
If you really want, if you really want a stimulus, do what we — what’s proven to work in stimulus, which is things like extending unemployment benefits, which is something that Republicans are completely blocking. . . .
It’s the most stimulative thing you can do.

What Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters notices here is the similarity between Maddow’s statement about unemployment-as-stimulus and Nancy Pelosi’s recent remarks. What I notice, however, is a message that cleverly muddles the policy picture in such a way as to make it appear that Republicans are actually worse than Democrats in terms of economics.

When Maddow says that various Bush-era policies were “not paid for,” she means only one thing: Taxes weren’t raised.

Notice how Maddow hammers on the idea that tax cuts are bad policy which increase the deficit and benefit the rich. I’d be interested to see how that kind of message plays with a focus group of independent voters, because I think it resonates much deeper than most Republicans understand. Conservatives are always talking about how we’ve “won the war of ideas,” but the fact that Democrats still believe they can win with such economic themes — utterly ignoring the supply-side revolution — means that the war of ideas is a long way from being won.

Of course, as the Obama/Pelosi/Reid “stimulus” spree illustrates, there is no such thing as a liberal “deficit hawk.” Like other liberals, Maddow talks about deficits only as an argument to raise taxes or reduce military spending. Domestic entitlement programs are sacred and cannot be subjected to any budgetary discipline, and certainly no liberal expressed any deficit-related concerns about ObamaCare.

Maddow and Democrats clearly believe that voters are too stupid  to notice these inconsistencies, and are counting on Republicans being too stupid to point them out. And I fear that they may be right on both counts.

‘You Could See Him As A Thinner Chris Christie’

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by Smitty

PowerLine embeds a Pawlenty stump speech, and floats the idea of a 2012 run:

Tim Pawlenty is a likable fellow. When he came to Virginia to support Bob McDonnell in 2009, I enjoyed his stump speedspeech at very close range. He seems to be about as moderate a candidate as you’ll find without major RINO drawbacks.

A major question for a Pawlenty candidacy will be foreign policy.  The current administration is on a trajectory to leave a crap sandwich of biblical proportions for its successor.

Domestically, Let Freedom Ring has a fairly extensive Pawlenty play-by-play. If anything, my concern would be that Pawlenty may be too nice. We need leadership with an attitude towards Progressive policies along the lines of, to paraphrase Gen. James Mattis:

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody Socialist program you meet.

Seriously. Political tenable plans will be about transitioning away from the culture of dependency the Progressives have been sowing. To what degree does Pawlenty recognize the evil? To what degree is he committed to emancipating Americans from Progressive evil, and to what degree is he, like so many RINOs, prepared to compromise his way into letting the evil snooze until it can re-spawn?
This is the same set of questions on which every GOP candidate should stand and deliver.

Rule 5 Sunday

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by Smitty

Rule 5 Sunday greets us with a shiny outlook on life, brought on by the likes of:

That’s all for now. Cheers!

Pariah Dogs And Wandering Madmen

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by Smitty

Returning home, I sat down with a cuppa tea and took in Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage. As an unrepentant fanboi, it was a full-on treat, except the part which was a pleasure. I’ll definitely catch them on the Time Machine Tour.

Somewhat cheesily, the movie ends with an exit question of why Rush never made it big in the mainstream. The movie proffers a couple of reasons; Geddy’s tenor voice, the band’s general weirdness. I wonder to what degree the ‘N’ word might have played a part. Allow me to offer a quotation from Roadshow, by Neil Peart, pp83-84, and then explain. Emphasis original.

Now that we were getting close to opening night, Alex, Geddy, and I played through that show with earnest dedication to getting everything right. I was giving it everything that I had, straining and sweating, and in fact, I was already playing for an audience, though they were imaginary. It is a defining trait in my character and attitude toward performing that no audience is more unforgivingly critical than that imaginary one. They knew exactly how well I was supposed to play, and whether I had or not.

People sometimes misunderstand the difference between doing something for fun and doing it at the highest possible level. With memories of Little League, or just a necessary fantasy to hold onto, people like to imagine that it must be fun to be a professional athlete or performer, not realizing the difference between a pastime and a profession. It is probably safe to say that any job done professionally is never going to be fun, exactly–because it’s a job.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my work as much as anyone ever could, but it is still work. As the great American journalist Ernie Pyle use to say, after describing someone’s difficult job, “Try it sometime.” Late in his life, Buddy Rich was asked if he considered himself the world’s greatest drummer, and he gave an inspiring reply: “Let’s put it this way: I have that ambition. You don’t really attain greatness. You attain a certain amount of goodness, and if you’re really serious about your goodness, you’ll keep trying to be great. I have never reached a point in my career where I was totally satisfied with anything I’ve ever done, but I keep trying.”

Amen. And it’s the trying that’s so hard, especially in live performance. Every night you push yourself to your absolute limits, mentally and physically, and as the standards rise, you’re like a high-jumper continually raising the bar. On a good day, you might clear it, but the rest of the time you just fall on your ass.

All this is context for a crucial idea:

And trying, the philosophy of Tryism, is the key to much about me, my attitude toward fans, other artists, and my own self-image. If I am uncomfortable with strangers making a fuss about me, and feel embarrassed by any show of admiration, people sometimes accuse me of thinking I am “too good”. In fact, the opposite is true–I don’t believe I deserve that kind of attention. I have never thought I was very good at anything; I just tried hard. And nothing came easily. Having one’s childhood personality shaped by being inept at every sport is a cliché, but it had its effect on me. What else do people judge you by at that age?

This un-pretentious concern for excellence as its own reward shines through Rush’s catalogue, and is crucial to their status as possibly the biggest cult band of all time. While that interest in rugged, individual purity of expression resonates with fans, it’s a standing affront to critics and executives, so admirably skewered as the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx. While Rush are less political than most, and may in fact be raging Trotskyites in real life, such a revelation would come as a shock.

Rush will always be labeled pariah dogs and wandering madmen by critics, until the precious mainstream narrative lies shattered by the weight of critical projection.

This post’s title is the opening line to “Far Cry”:

Bonus, full Colbert appearance:

Who Commits Crime?

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When I was about 15, I read Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Manson Family and the Tate-LaBianca murders. One fact that struck me was that Manson was, for most of his life, a small-time hoodlum who compiled a record for relatively minor crimes like burglary, car theft and foregery long before he became notorious as the leader of a murder cult.

A few years later, as a freshman in college, I was assigned to read In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s classic crime story about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. The same pattern was evident: Dick Hickock and Perry Smith had been a couple of minor criminals — forgery, theft, assault, etc. — until they committed the mass murder that made them infamous.

You see this pattern replicated in many other high-profile murders. Matthew Shepard’s killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, both had criminal records — one for marijuana possession and the other for burglary. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been busted as juveniles for a break-in and theft about 14 months before they perpetrated the Columbine High massacre.

This pattern illustrates a common-sense truth so basic that it seems a bit silly to state it directly: Criminals commit crime.

Because of the way crime is portrayed in both the news media and popular entertainment, many Americans have been conditioned to think of murder as a crime to which everyone is equally susceptible. TV detective dramas especially present this distorted perspective, because the element of surprise usually requires that the killer be someone unsuspected — the apparently upstanding citizen whose hidden motive for murder is uncovered in the final 10 minutes of the hour-long mystery. The man-bites-dog angle in journalism means that when a murder is committed by a previously law-abiding person, this fact will be highlighted in news coverage. And sometimes, as in the Shepard murder, the criminal background of the killers will mostly be ignored by media focused on more “newsworthy” elements of the crime.

Contrary to media distortions, criminality is not evenly distributed throughout the population. A small and fairly distinct group of career criminals — recidivists, habitual violators, call them what you will — account for the majority of serious crime in America. This fact was best illustrated in the early 1990s, when transit policy in New York City decided to crack down on subway turnstile-jumpers and discovered that about 15 percent of those apprehended were wanted on warrants for major felonies, including armed robbery, rape and murder.

Murder is simply one end of a continuum of criminality and, therefore, leniency toward “minor” crimes will inevitably result in more murders, as illustrated by the case of a suspected Los Angeles serial killer:

Investigators believe they have connected “Grim Sleeper” suspect Lonnie Franklin Jr. to 10 murders.
Now they are trying to tie him to dozens more.
More than 30 cold case files dating back to 1984 are getting a new look in light of Franklin’s arrest, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said Friday. . . .
Franklin was arrested at least 15 times for car theft, burglary, assaults and other crimes, but avoided prison despite calls by law enforcement officials for tough sentences, according to Los Angeles County court records released Friday and obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Franklin faced up to three years in prison in 2003 after pleading no contest to receiving stolen property, He was sentenced to 270 days in jail and released in May 2003, more than four months early, the records showed. Two months later, the body of one of Franklin’s alleged victims was found.

If Franklin is indeed the “Grim Sleeper,” many victims may have died simply because California authorities failed to imprison him for his “minor” offenses.

Criminals commit crime.