John Derbyshire

Makes a point I clumsily tried to make far better than I did.

Bring out the hookers

What a boon this Eliot Spitzer thing is to the media. Right now I'm watching "New York's highest paid escort" giving relationship advice on "Today."

Monday, the show devoted its Spitzer coverage to talking to psychologists. Tuesday, it was about political wives, starring the former Mrs. Jim McGreevy, one-time wife of the country's favorite Gay American. Today it's hookers. I can't wait to see what tomorrow will bring.

Yawn! Another quarter heard from

Bridge team faces sanctions after displaying a sign saying "We did not vote for Bush" at the World Championships.

The players have been stunned by the reaction to what they saw as a spontaneous gesture, “a moment of levity,” said Gail Greenberg, the team’s nonplaying captain and winner of 11 world championships.

“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.

The controversy has gone global, with the French team offering support for its American counterparts.

“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,” the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”

What would we do without ambassadors like Ms. Greenberg to explain our little quirks to our friends abroad.

Because up until now, all of our friends abroad thought every American save Natalie Maines and her band mates had voted for Bush. And look at how those poor girls suffered for their outspokenness.

Let us hope that Ms. Greenberg et al don't suffer similarly.

Ms. Greenberg said she decided to put up the sign in response to questions from players from other countries about American interrogation techniques, the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues.

“There was a lot of anti-Bush feeling, questioning of our Iraq policy and about torture,” Ms. Greenberg said. “I can’t tell you it was an overwhelming amount, but there were several specific comments, and there wasn’t the same warmth you usually feel at these events.”

And let's applaud her and her cohorts for choosing China as a venue for exercising their First Amendment rights. So appropriate, really.

Now I've heard everything

Little Green Footballs is denounced for being a pro-Muslim, left-wing blog.

Black is white. Up is down. The Red Sox are the Yankees. What's next in this crazy, mixed up world?

When Bonnie Frost writes her book

About how she was attacked by the Right Wing Hate Machine, she'll likely be able to afford health insurance to cover not only her kids, but her and her husband, too.

Bonnie Frost, stood before a microphone at a Baltimore church, in a peasant shirt and clogs, to make a quiet appeal for broader health coverage in Maryland.

"My husband and I cannot afford health insurance," she said, as advocates announced a new radio ad featuring her. The plan, to be debated as the legislature convenes in Annapolis next week, "would help a lot of working families like us."

She said she didn't hesitate to join the Maryland effort, despite the events of the past three weeks. "I'm not going to let the nasty bloggers scare me away from standing up for what's important," she said yesterday.

Now, when I first read this I thought "she just doesn't know when to shut up," thinking that poor Bonnie would just find herself "caught in the partisan crossfire" again as a result of her bold outspokenness.

Then I remembered that I seem to have heard a gazillion talk show interviews yesterday with Valerie Plame, who while hawking her new book, told everyone that posing for the cover of "Vanity Fair" was "the worst thing that could have happened to her." And I realized that becoming the victim of the Right Wing Hate Machine has its perks.

You can travel the world and hang out with dictators. You can be on TV. You can become the Democratic front-runner for President. You can even win a Nobel Prize.

Where can I sign up? I'm kind of short on cash these days and becoming a victim of the Right Wing Hate Machine would be just the thing. And I'm highly qualified: I'm unemployed. I'm irresponsible (I don't have health insurance, either!). And I can wear a peasant top just as well as Bonnie Frost does.

Gentlemen and ladies: I'm at your service.

The unbearable triteness of political blogging

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while have probably noticed that I'm doing fewer and fewer political posts, much to the detriment of my traffic. I'm just all politicked out. Some day, probably sooner than later, I'll get interested again. Just not now.

This is not to say that I'm not--at least vaguely--aware of the issues of the day. It does mean, however, that I no longer spend hours clicking back and forth between combatants like these guys, trying to figure out who said what to whom first in the never-ending left/right blogosphere game of one upmanship. In the past, I'd spent whole days reading everybody's posts on the latest fray--partly because if you fall into one of these things in medias res it's really hard to figure out what's going on and partly because it's kind of like watching a trainwreck. I seldom got into the fray myself. The big boys seemed to have it covered, plus by the time I'd read what everybody else had to say I'd find that everything had already been said. Or I'd become bored with the whole thing.

And that's what it is: Boring. It's also petty and stupid. And it generally goes something like this:

1. Right-wing bigshot says A.
   
2. Left-wing blogosphere gets all up in arms, parsing every syllable of the bigshot's remarks.
   
3. Right-wing blogosphere makes fun of left-wing bloggers, adding that blogger so-and-so had no problem with the much more vile statement three months ago made by left-wing bigshot.
   
4. Left-wing blogosphere retorts that right-wing blogger is homophobic and hates brown people.
   
5. Right-wing blogosphere takes umbrage, occasionally flashes his civil rights credentials.
   
6. Left-wing blogosphere calls original bigshot a faggot and implies that right-wing blogger Mr. X is probably a latent homosexual.
   
7. Right-wing blogosphere muses that the left-wing blogosphere is supposed to really like faggots.
   
8. Left-wing blogosphere brings up incident several years ago when a certain right-wing blogger was mean to a faggot.
   
9. Right-wing blogger brings up old incident in which left-wing blogosphere verbally attacked attacked a black person because he happened not to agree with them.
   
10. And on and on and on.

It's like a Eugene O'Neil play without the booze.

It's not that I don't like a good exchange of invective. I always enjoy it when Ace goes after Andy Sullivan; I also love reading his commenters. Ann Althouse does good takedown. Althouse also occasionally goes off the deep end herself, which keeps things interesting.

But I'm pretty sick of the rest of it.

Another unhappy customer

A historian leaves the AHA.

Anyway, enough is enough. I'm letting my membership lapse and am discontinuing my affiliation with the AHA. I'm fed up with their inability to resist immersing themselves in ideological politics while under a veneer of doing so to safeguard the "values necessary to the practice of our profession." Sure, there are other, practical ($) reasons why I'm checking out of the professional side of the, er, profession. Basically, the services the AHA offers an "Independent Historian" like me (basically, access to book reviews and a few articles in AHR) are easily found (for free!) here on the web. Frankly, because I wasn't going to be going for a PhD or teach any time soon, it was never a perfect match to begin with. Face it, the AHA is of, for and by the PhD's, all of their wailing and gnashing of teach about the "role of the MA" or "public historians" aside. And that's fine, but ain't for me. No harm, no foul....and no more money from me.

So also goes the American Library Association, which is always taking political stands, and not doing much else. I wonder, what is it about such organizations that causes them to drift so far from their mission? And why do they always shift left?

Via Callimachus.

Tony Snow's cancer is Bush's fault

That appears to be Daniel Gross' conclusion in this rather muddled discussion of Snow's decision to leave his job as White House spokesman.

Gross asks: Why is Tony Snow's 401(k) empty? It turns out it's empty because Snow didn't put any money in it. But Gross doesn't see it that way.

And yet Snow's own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society—and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary.

When Snow came to the White House after several years at the Fox News Channel, it was clear that he had relied entirely on others to save for his retirement. Snow conceded: "As a matter of fact, I was even too dopey to get in on a 401(k). So there is actually no Fox pension. The only media pension I have is through AFTRA [a union]." Even though his employer provided a 401(k) and would have matched contributions, and even though he was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, Snow had not shown either the interest or financial capability to manage his own retirement benefits.

Clearly then, the government should have stepped in and made sure that Snow took advantage of his 401(k). Or Fox should have a traditional pension plan. Or the government should provide a lavish retirement plan for Snow because he's incapable of managing his own affairs.

Then Gross takes Snow to task for putting a positive spin on the economy, when Snow himself couldn't afford to live on his salary.

As part of his press secretary job, Snow had to spin economic news to make it seem as if the typical American was doing well in an economy in which gains have been distributed unevenly. A report issued by the Census Bureau last month showed that median household income, at $48,201, hasn't budged since 1999. Snow admitted to feeling pinched on his salary of $168,000, which is about 3.5 times the median U.S. income. "We took out a loan when I came to the White House, and that loan is now gone," he said. "So I'm going to have to pay the bills."

I'm no expert money manager, but I'm pretty sure I could manage well on a salary of $168,000. And just because Snow was unable, as an individual, to pay the bills on that salary doesn't mean that he doesn't believe that the economy isn't doing well. Nor does it mean that the economy isn't doing well.

Maybe it means the Snows are spendthrifts. Who can say? It might just mean that a man with serious health concerns dropped out of a public service job because he could make much more money in the private sector. A man with a chronic disease who might want to leave a little something to his wife and children should he die before his time.

Snow's cancer is another cudgel with which to beat the administration.

Snow survived colon cancer in 2005, but earlier this spring it returned to his liver. Snow is fighting it valiantly. "I finished chemo two weeks ago today," he said last week. "We did CAT scans and MRIs in the last week and it indicates that the chemo did exactly what we hoped it would do, which is hold serve. The tumors that we've been tracking have not grown. … We'll be doing what's called a maintenance dose of chemotherapy just to keep whacking this thing." He also noted that he'd be having scans every three months, "just to stay on top of everything."

That's great news for Snow and his family, and we wish him much success in his battle. But such treatment is enormously expensive and only available to people who have good insurance—like the kind taxpayers fund for public employees such as Snow. If Snow had owned his own benefits, or approached health care as a consumer, as the administration wants people to do, he'd certainly be singing a different tune. Had Snow stashed a few thousand dollars in a health savings account, which is one of the administration's chief proposals to reduce the rising number of the uninsured, he likely wouldn't have enough cash to afford chemotherapy. According to the Census Bureau, there were 47 million Americans without insurance in 2006, up from 41.2 million in 2001, when Bush entered office. Were any of them to be afflicted with cancer as Snow has been, they'd be largely out of luck—unable to pay the bills for all those scans and chemo doses, and unable to find an insurer willing to cover such a pre-existing condition.

Let's skip over the fact that Snow's first bout with cancer came when he was working for Fox so the taxpayers had nothing to do with that treatment. And since Snow left public employ, the taxpayers won't be footing the bill any longer. Snow can opt for a temporary continuation of coverage, but it'll cost him.

In addition, one can take advantage of a health savings account and still have insurance. Most people who enroll in HSAs, in fact, opt for a high-deductible insurance plan and use the HSA to pay for routine care, like checkups, while saving the insurance for catastrophic events, like cancer.

It's touching that Daniel Gross is so concerned about Tony Snow's well being. But maybe it's just a tad disingenuous to use a man who's leaving a job paying $168,000 for a chance to make hundreds of thousands more.

Adventures in pandering

Senate ponders bill to give fashion designers copyright protection, led by chief Senate panderer, Chuck Schumer.

“Designers spend countless hours doing and redoing, testing, creating, thinking, and then some counterfeiter comes along and just takes it away,” said Mr. Schumer. “It’s stealing, plain and simple.”

Pardon Scooter Libby

Christopher Hitchens makes the case.

Does it not seem extraordinary that a man can be prosecuted, and now be condemned to a long term of imprisonment, because of an alleged minor inconsistency of testimony in a case where it is admitted that there was no crime and no victim?

RNC slashes staff

Fires 65 telephone solicitors, who blame a drop off in fundraising for the cut backs. But a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee says fundraising is going strong.

"Any assertion that overall donations have gone down is patently false," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail yesterday in response to questions sent by The Times. "We continue to out-raise our Democrat counterpart by a substantive amount (nearly double)."

Miss Schmitt said terminating the phone solicitation staff "was not an easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The RNC was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain viable."

She also said that "the changing ways in which people choose to contribute" meant that the RNC's in-house phone bank "was simply no longer cost effective, although unfortunate."

This sounds very, very bad.

Not that bad

Gerard Baker remembers the halcyon days of the Carter administration.

Bush's speech

He sounded awful, which is not unusual, though I guess the speech portion was OK. The question and answer period was awful, with Bush on defense on both Iraq and the immigration bill. Though he defended the immigration bill better than the war. It's really just a sorry dance that I guess will be replayed endlessly until Bush leaves office. Unless the surge works and September brings a better outlook to the war, but I doubt that either the press or Congress would even acknowledge a successful campaign.

It starts with the motto

Britain's Royal Society stealthily drops its former motto, "on the word of no one" to "respect the facts." Trouble is, say Ben Pile and Stuart Blackman, the facts have morphed into opinions much like the Society's motto.

Science has earned its stripes over the past four centuries. It has proved the best method we have for understanding the material universe and has transformed our lives for the better. We now have chief scientific advisers to the UK government and scientists in the House of Lords. But science has correspondingly become more entwined with the political process, and custodians of the scientific facts need to be especially careful how they wield them.

In his TLS review, [Royal Society President Lord] May exemplifies some of the problems of dealing in a currency of facts. He quotes Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change to demonstrate that global warming will devastate species diversity: ‘Ecosystems will be particularly vulnerable to climate change, with around 15–40 per cent of species potentially facing extinction after only 2°C of warming.’ That’s not a fact. It’s not even an accurate quote. Stern actually wrote: ‘Ecosystems will be particularly vulnerable to climate change, with one study estimating that around 15–40% of species face extinction with 2°C of warming.’ (Our italics.) Stern’s claim was a worst-case scenario based on a single study, not a fact.

Unrepresentative evidence has morphed into scientific fact by a process that owes more to Chinese whispers than scientific rigour. Moreover, a scientist should be scrutinising the facts of the Stern report, not deferring to them. May’s assertion that ‘CO2 is, of course, the principal “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere’ is just as questionable, given that water vapour has far more influence on the global greenhouse, and other gases such as methane are more potent, measure for measure.

Jerry Falwell dead at 73

Founder of the moral majority found unconscious in his office this morning.

“Behind the idea of the Moral Majority was this notion that there could be a coalition of these different religious groups that all agree on abortion and homosexuality and other issues even if they never agreed on how to read the Bible or the nature of God,” said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, who studies the religious conservative movement. “That was a real innovation. And even if that’s an idea that did not completely originate with Falwell, it’s certainly an idea he developed and championed independently of others. It was a very important insight, and it’s had a huge influence on American politics.”

The Wolfowitz smear campaign

Christopher Hitchens defends the World Bank president.

Since I've spent the past week or so driving around to job interviews and getting things notarized, I got most of my information on the Wolfowitz story on my car radio from NPR where Wolfowitz has been presumed guilty of a host of corrupt offenses. Hitchens and this WSJ piece provide a different point of view.

A message to the troops

Long, but full of good stuff, from this guy, whom I'd never hear of before.

Via Bryan.

Meant well? I don't think so

Claudia Rosett:

In visiting Syria this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi no doubt meant well. She wants dialogue. As a woman, mother, and now the third-highest-ranking elected official in American politics, she has achieved a great deal in life by talking with people. On this trip she made a point of showing how easy it is to interact with Syrians, with an itinerary that included a visit to a souk in Damascus - where she was photographed holding out her hand while a cheerful vendor gave her some nuts.

What a crock! Pelosi is a grown woman, a veteran member of Congress who knows that foreign policy is the province of the President. As such, she knew exactly what her trip meant: It meant she was shoving a sharp stick into the President's eye. It meant that she was legitimizing a dictatorial, terror-supporting state to score cheap political points against George W. Bush.

This search for a reason to justify Pelosi's behavior reminds one of the mental gymnastics I've seen people perform to mitigate Jimmy Carter's freelance diplomacy. He's a good man, they say, pointing to his work with Habitat for Humanity and his conspicuous church going. As it happens, Carter's most recent book and his petulant behavior since GWB took office pretty much puts paid to that notion, but his motives don't matter. Carter is a former President who knows better. He has no right to go jetting off to foreign capitals on unauthorized diplomatic junkets. He knows that such behavior undermines the president, whoever that may be, and damages America's reputation abroad.

The same goes for Nancy Pelosi. She isn't some naif who just landed in Congress; she was elected in 1987. She knows--or should know--how the Syrians operate.

The Assad regime knows a thing or two about manipulating world opinion at America's expense. Eleven years ago, Bashar Assad's father made a point of humiliating us by making Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, cool his heels for four hours before refusing to meet with him. There was widespread outrage about Christopher's servile kowtowing to Assad. But the GOP didn't send in its own diplomats to negotiate a ceasefire in Lebanon.

And that's how it should be.

Consider the source

Zbigniew Brzezinski grades the three most recent presidents on their foreign policy.

No one familiar with Brzezinski's work or his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq will be surprised to learn that George W. Bush is the dunce of his presidential class. His chapter on the current administration is titled "Catastrophic Leadership," and he gives Bush II a resounding F. But Brzezin-ski's tone changes dramatically in these pages. Detached appraisal gives way to caricature and denunciation. Bush is at once a simple-minded "Manichaean," obsessed with "good and evil," and a cynical manipulator, "propagating fear and paranoia" in order to win votes. He is guilty not only of "Islamophobic demagogy" but of using democracy promotion as a "subversive tool," meant to create an excuse for deploying force.

'Political clowning in the shadow of a mushroom cloud'

Thomas Sowell on Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria. And the Republicans on that trip ought to be ashamed of themselves.