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Our old domain, snarkybastards, has expired and has been replaced by what one can only politely describe as the ugliest variety of porn. If for any reason you’re looking for an old post from us, you can find it under the same extension on federalistpaupers.
Tom posted this at 11:48 AM HKT on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 as Uncategorized
That phrase may particuarly apply to this telecast, but, honestly, that sounds like a good description of most network news programs over the last few years.
I don’t watch tv news anymore, but, with commercial radio being pretty bad here in Corpus Christi, I do listen to NPR. It is really quite striking how they present the president’s government-run healthcare plan as the Great Hope to Save Us All, and anyone opposed to it is a knave or liar. “Industry” is portrayed in a good light when it supports the president, but when it doesn’t, it’s a bunch of self-interested fiends out to steal granny’s last Social Security check.
Apollo posted this at 8:09 AM HKT on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Journalism
After the Palins’ over-the-top reaction to Letterman’s joke, Letterman apologizes. I’m no fan of canned outrage, but since canned outrage isn’t going away anytime soon, I’m pleased to see it work in favor of a conservative. One can hope that this is the beginning of the end of the utterly meritless and shameless treatment that Sarah Palin and her family have received.
But let me also say that Letterman’s apology is one of the most sincere sounding that I’ve read in a very long time. And it comes a full week after his bad joke, when he could have let the whole incident slide on into the oblivion of television’s memory.
In an age where “I’m-sorry-that-you-were-offended” apologies are par for the course, it’s pleasing to see someone apologize by actually admitting that he was at fault, and by stating that he will try to mend his ways. In an ideal world, this wouldn’t be noteworthy; people would routinely accept the blame for their wrongs, and say that they will try to do better in the future. In that ideal world, we wouldn’t congratulate people on apologizing correctly. Indeed, only in a world turned upside down would we congratulate Letterman on describing exactly how classless and bad his joke was. But we live in that world turned upside down, and we should applaud the better to help guide others toward the best, and, perhaps, to eventually right the place.
How do we do that without encouraging more bad behavior? It’s a difficult question; I wouldn’t have applauded as his audience did, but I suspect my standards of behavior are different from the average late night show audience member’s.
Apollo posted this at 9:46 PM HKT on Monday, June 15th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Journalism, Pop Culture Is Filth
From the Google Toolbar:
Glad I’m employed.
Tom posted this at 5:57 PM HKT on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 as Wicked Crazy Massachusetts
Marty Perez on the president’s self-congratulatory, manipulative style:
[H]istory has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom. And, sometimes, in an American president’s mind.
The truth is that Barack Obama has a penchant for these narratives and yet an inclination to rise above them. Two grand but antithetical stories about the same problem, awaiting him and his Olympian skill for the discovery of “common ground”: That is Obama’s favorite script. He regards himself as a kind of unprecedented referee between histories and philosophies. He likes to think that he can see what others cannot see and that, therefore, they must come to him if they wish to live in peace and with meaning. He did this with race in the Philadelphia speech, articulating what blacks see from their end of the periscope and what whites see from theirs. (Until, that is, he had to dump his minister from the campaign truck as a matter of survival. “Common ground” is sometimes not discovered so much as invented, or imposed.) A man of not especially discriminate empathy, he sees himself in the Whitmanesque sense of containing multitudes.
In addressing American intelligence and security professionals at the National Archives, the president again aimed at bridging differences by showing that apparent contradictions are not contradictions at all and that everything will go together, if only for as long as he is speaking. National security that never compromises national values? No problem. National values that guarantee national security? Say it and it will be done. Yes, we have values that elevate and restrict us at once, the ideal of free men and women that procedurally protects also the guilty and the wicked–and never mind that, absent energetic domestic and international defenses, these principles would be outmaneuvered and outclassed on both fronts. And again at Notre Dame, the same above-it-all structure of rhetorical conciliation was applied by Obama to the subject of abortion. “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.” Nice enough. But the debate on abortion will not be so tidily retired. All of this is rising above but not really reconciling.
One of the surest signs that someone is being intellectually dishonest is when they refuse to acknowledge flaws, contradictions, or trade-offs to their policy proposals or philosophies. If we do things my way, everything will be self-reinforcing and beneficial. There is no acknowledgment either that the world is messy or that people are messy, and that ideas and feelings are sometimes irreconcilable. To paraphrase Madison, such problems may not exist among the angels, but they do among us humans.
Though I’d argue that this kind of thinking is more pronounced on the political left, it’s hardly foreign to the political right. Here’s David Frum on Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny:
What should conservatives think or do about this [the financial] crisis? Levin offers a couple of pages of argument that the whole thing was brought about by overweening government. That’s partially true, but only partially. (Indeed among the actions for which Levin blames the government is the failure to raise interest rates in 2005 and 2006 to prick the housing bubble as it inflated. Then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan refrained from doing so because his libertarian instincts recoiled from the suggestion that he as a government official should decide that asset prices had risen “too high.”)
It’s also true however that manias and bubbles do occur in marketplaces even absent government. They occurred much more often in the less-governed 19th century than in the heavily governed mid-20th. New Deal financial reforms – disclosure requirements, margin limits, and regulation of securities exchanges – have contributed to the greater stability of modern finance, a lesson we have all painfully relearned from the disasters unleashed by the unregulated derivatives market…
None of this interests conservatives very much right now, and it interests Mark Levin not at all. Levin thinks there is nothing to learn from the present crisis, and indeed seems to regard the whole enterprise of learning as ideologically suspect. It’s very striking that nowhere in this book does he ever engage the ideas of intelligent people on the other side. He quotes stupid statements from a fringe group like Earth First! But he flinches from any encounter with any more substantial opponent. He lives in a sealed mental universe, into which nothing new or unsettling can ever penetrate.
I want to give Mark Levin some credit for Liberty and Tyranny. It is in its way an ambitious book, an attempt to offer a major political statement. Levin is not a stupid man, and Liberty and Tyranny is not a stupid book. What it is, unfortunately, is an airless and isolated book, an exercise in pure ideology radically quarantined from the life around it.
Update: Geoff just pointed out the rather profound irony of this post; i.e., bemoaning (in part) Obama’s tendency to create a false balance between opposing arguments, before I segued into a critique of conservatives. On the one hand, I’m rather grateful for the critique. On the other, I want to punch him in the face.
Tom posted this at 1:45 PM HKT on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 as Conservatism, Ex Pede Herculem, Philosophy
Is when leftists are referred to as “moderate” or “not radical” because they advocate change from within the system rather than changing the entire system.
If a right-winger wanted to abolish a cabinet department, I don’t think many people would have problems calling that person a radical. And certainly we neo-cons have been called radicals quite a bit over the last few years. In neither of these cases would I want to work “outside” the system.
But if a leftist wants government to dictate how much each person is paid, and wants the government to require that businesses discriminate racially in order to achieve balance, and wants to take money from taxpayers and fund abortions at all stages of pregnancy both here in America and throughout the developing world – well that person’s really just a moderate because she wants to do it through the system rather than using violence to overthrow the government.
So long as she dramatically changes the nature of American life by working through the system, she’s a moderate. What a great standard to be held to.
Apollo posted this at 10:01 PM HKT on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 as Politics and the English Language
Roger Ebert has a must read post on the 30th anniversary of John Wayne’s death. He sums up as well as I’ve ever read what made John Wayne so great:
On screen he held so much authority so that he was not even being ironic when he explained his theory of acting: “Don’t act. React.” John Wayne, you see, could react. Others actors had to strain the limits of their craft to hold the screen with him. There is this test for an actor who, for a moment, is just standing there in a scene: Does he seem to be just standing there? Or does he, as John Wayne always did, appear to be deciding when, and why, and how to take the situation under his control?
And the Duke himself, expressing his thoughts on the greatest American art form:
But when you think about the Western–ones I’ve made, for example. ‘Stagecoach,’ ‘Red River,’ ‘The Searchers,’ a picture named ‘Hondo’ that had a little depth to it–it’s an American art form. It represents what this country is about. In ‘True Grit,’ for example, that scene where Rooster shoots the rat. That was a kind of reference to today’s problems. Oh, not that ‘True Grit’ has a message or anything. But that scene was about less accommodation, and more justice.
They keep bringing up the fact that America’s for the downtrodden. But this new thing of genuflecting to the downtrodden, I don’t go along with that. We ought to go back to praising the kids who get good grades, instead of making excuses for the ones who shoot the neighborhood grocery man. But, hell, I don’t want to get started on that
Of course, it’s Ebert, and the Duke was one of the great Hollywood right-wingers of yore, so politics can’t slip past unnoticed. Ebert’s fair enough, except for observing “I believe [Wayne] would have had contempt for the latter-day weirdos of the Right.” Yeah, right. Wayne supported Nixon and the war, he supported Reagan’s runs for governor. He was a through-and-through reactionary, and it’s impossible to imagine him any other way.
Apollo posted this at 8:33 PM HKT on Friday, June 12th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!, Belles Lettres, Film Rants
This is the best post on deficits I’ve read in a while.
In Sum: Both sides are full of shit.
Jamie posted this at 2:24 PM HKT on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 as It's Economics - Stupid!
The Fed’s capping executive pay at $1,ooo,ooo through the tax code in the 1980s lead to current incentive based executive compensation via stock options. Now, Comrade Barry wants to further limit executive pay.
The last time they tried this feel good communist crap we got the system that is now, according to them, broken. Who wants to bet that whatever crazy scheme they come up with now will be just as bad, if not worse?
What happens when people can’t get what they think they are worth? They move to place where they can. If Barry and Barney want to destroy American business and decimate the job market they are on the right track.
Jamie posted this at 2:11 PM HKT on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 as Bailoutistan, That's Not Change!
So by now we’ve all heard of the kerfuffle over David Letterman’s tasteless joke about Bristol Palin. I’m not going to link to it here because, besides behing a pretty bad joke, I also find it extremely slimly for him to go after a young woman who made a mistake.
As one might expect, an attack on Saint Sarah of Wasilla has caused much of the right-wing blogosphere to go completely batshit insane. Now let me be clear, this was a terrible joke made in very poor taste and Letterman should not have made it.
But, rape? Are you kidding me? Anyone with any sense of humor would understand that this joke was a reference to Bristol Palin – still a joke in poor taste, but there is no way Letterman would joke about a 14 year old having sex with a 30 year old. Oh HEY he said so himself.
And in the end Letterman has admitted his mistake, unlike some other popular entertainers we know.
Jamie posted this at 11:40 AM HKT on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 as Pop Culture Is Filth
Rick Brookhiser summarize WFB’s life lessons:
Writing: Swing for the fences. Why not? We don’t remember the cautious because we never read them in the first place.
Politics: Do the right thing, even if all liberalism disagrees, or all conservatism. The risk of independence is that you will be wrong, but the only way never to be wrong is never to think or decide.
Personal: Be generous. Bill was a self-oriented, even narcissistic man, but one of the ways he expressed himself was by showering favors on others. This is a hard one for me.
It’s a good interview, so read the whole thing.
Hubbard posted this at 12:48 PM HKT on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, The Right Words
This [President Obama's] naiveté is worrying, and it means that among the global Muslim audience, the wrong sort of people were laughing at us, while the ones who ought to be our friends and allies were shedding a disappointed tear. – Christopher Hitchens
Tom posted this at 2:14 PM HKT on Monday, June 8th, 2009 as Hitch-slapped!, I bid you stand: Men of the West
I just listened to Obama’s Cairo Speech. If I didn’t already know better I’d think it was satire. He’s standing there in an oppressive country, speaking to the people of the Middle East, and he makes the statement that no country should be elevated above another.
This kind of morally relativistic hogwash is the reason why I despise liberalism and why it is so very very dangerous. Obama would have us believe that countries which oppress their women, supress freedom of speech and religion and insight violence against people who don’t share their creed are no better than America.
That concept isn’t just wrongheaded, it is evil.
Jamie posted this at 10:32 AM HKT on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 as Another Great Victory For Jihad, CHANGE!
We are getting closer and closer…
Jamie posted this at 3:30 PM HKT on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 as Brave New Worlds
