From the monthly archives: February 2015
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There are many ways to be a dick. ?But, wow.
I remember thinking at the time that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was a great choice to run the DNC. She had some communicative ability, after all, and since her?job is basically being the captain who walks around the cruise boat rather than the one at the till, what else do you need? At this point it seems plain enough that she?is not very good at interacting with humans, since so many seem to want to destroy her. Quite possibly she should go, but I’m really not sure why I should care though. Coming or going, she’s never going to be a senator.
This is a pretty crazy story. I hadn’t realized that Hubert Humphrey was an initial skeptic of Vietnam from within the Johnson White House, and went so far as to write a lengthy memo outlining all the reasons not to get drawn into the conflict. (My favorite is that sure, Republicans may attack us for having “lost” Vietnam, but they just lost 45 states in a campaign where they were perceived as warmongers, so?ignore them.) Needless to say, LBJ disagreed quite strongly, and the next time it came up Humphrey backed up the hawkish line. His initial instincts were entirely correct though. But you can always play the “what if the Kennedys hadn’t rigged the West Virginia Primary and Humphrey becomes president” counterfactual. It is is one of the less popular ones, even though he might well be the only plausible president of the 1960s who ultimately may have avoided getting us into Vietnam.
Disappointing, perhaps. But hardly a surprise. Walker going after unions again is like Matthew McConaughey saying something dumb. You’d rather it didn’t happen, but it’s never a shock.
On the other hand, a Russ Feingold return is a considerably greater surprise, and a happier one indeed.
Ronald Reagan holds roughly the same place in modern conservative ideology than Vladimir Lenin did in Soviet ideology. You could?never criticize Lenin in the USSR and get away with it–after all, it was his beautiful, perfect vision toward which we comrades all strove! His imperfect successors only could be criticized in deviating from his path. Lenin was held to embody the revolution, of course. In real life, as Edvard Radzinsky’s Stalin book makes clear, Lenin was very much a conventional politician who changed his mind, dissembled and made unacknowledged flip-flops. Reagan was likewise. Both became mascots after death–in retrospect, the only thing holding the GOP back from the full bloom of current Reagan idolatry from 1988-2004 was the inconveniently alive, deeply sick man holding up the works. After he died, he could finally be turned into an ideological deity. All ideologies?must have them, after all.
Apparently the number of people wanting a ground war with ISIS is sharply increasing. Pres. Obama could, you know, try to argue that these beheadings are intentionally meant to draw us into another protracted ground war, only he can’t because those were essentially the basis for his whole air war in the first place. And now events are overtaking him.
Always this talk of the threat militant Islam poses to the West. I don’t deny that Europe has real things to worry about, but for America I just dunno. I mean, there is the threat of sporadic attacks, which I’m not minimizing, but?apart from that, what is it were terrified of again? Farfetched scenarios where they acquire a nuclear bomb? Nonexistent fifth columnists secretly plotting to implement Shari’a Law? (A worry, by the way, that is utterly banal if one has studied Islam a little and knows what Shari’a consists of.) The implausible notion of militant Islam becoming a mainstream political orientation?
This is great fun:
I do think that a considerable portion of the movie could have been improved if Thora Birch’s character Jane had turned down Wes Bentley’s offer at the end.?To go from “I got to get out of this place at the first opportunity,” to, “Maybe it’s a bit more complicated than that,” would be an arc, technically. But of course she accepts his offer to be a drug queen in a different city because the movie’s characters have no real motivation, particularly the female ones. In retrospect it’s amazing just how many people were fooled into thinking this was a great movie.
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