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Katherine Marie (Katie) Robertson, July 20, 1988 - August 1, 2004.
Trudeau's best line on W: "He later became rush chairman of Deke--I do believe he has the soul of a rush chairman. He has that ability to connect with people."
This expands a bit on the old description of W. as a frat boy. Bush is the leading frat boy who would be willing and able (perhaps a bit the worse for wear) to meet the police at 3 a.m. "True, there's some property damage, but you know from experience we pay for what we break. And I know the disappearance of the three young ladies is more serious, and their parents are here and all that, but here are the young ladies themselves, safe and sound!" Unfortunately, Kerry seems like a good who couldn't be bothered to show up at 3 a.m., because it was too much trouble. Clinton, of course, would be with one of the young ladies. Bush would be either misinformed about the number of them, or lying.
A weirder one:
He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable. He was very good at all the tools for survival that people developed in prep school--sarcasm, and the giving of nicknames. He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation.
This sounds a bit Monthy Python (Looking for sarcasm, litotes? Verbal abuse over here). But the suggestions of manipulation and control are interesting.
I like Clinton's cool-as-a cucumber assessment of the 2004 race: "If you assume that we carry every place we won last time, we win. But you can't assume that, because President Bush has been to Pennsylvania twenty-five times or something." Also Clinton's assessment of the Homeland Security bill: originally a Democratic initiative, which Bush opposed; then Bush added some amendments and insisted that anyone who didn't vote on his version of the bill wasn't a patriot. This helped the Republicans take the Congress in 2002. It's in that context that Kerry and Edwards voted for the war in Iraq. Again, the pros recognize that W is at least the figurehead of a first-class political operation. Clinton: "It's a great mistake to underestimate him."
Jacob Sullum on [link=http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/006285.shtml#006285]Hit and Run[/link]:
Speaking of the films, I did not notice any mention in Kerry's biography of his first wife; the film made it seem as if he had given birth to his daughters all by himself. I guess the Democrats would like the public to assume Alexandra and Vanessa's mother is dead rather than divorced. Very classy.
I did some research once on a deceased former premier of New Brunswick who had been married three times. I found it very difficult to figure out from the archives who the wives were, the years of the marriages, or even which kids resulted from which marriage.
It must be common at funerals now that the "last" wife does what she can to expunge previous wives from history, the way the Commies used to disappear Politburo members from the group photo.
Kingsley Amis' memoirs present an interesting twist. At one point he left good old wife No. 1 for younger wife No. 2, a novelist and literary lion like him, etc. By the time of the memoirs, however, he was back with No. 1, mother of his children again. It is No. 2 who almost disappears, despite a few words about a romantic affair.
A colleague of mine in the States commented once that graduations were getting messy for many graduating students. Both divorced parents would show up, each with a new spouse. Don't go for dinne with them; go for dinner with us. Can't we have a photo without them?
According to Michael Young, Kerry still sounds confused on Iraq: will he escalate in order to make the troops there safer, and bring events to a conclusion, or not? Is he prepared to fight for democracy there, or not? On the larger issue, he comes close to promising no pre-emptive wars, but of course no sane leader would actually keep that promise in all situations.
It may be an argument in Bush's favour that if things really go badly in Iraq, he might have more freedom to pull out than Kerry would. "Nixon goes to China" has become a familiar way of saying a leader's sustained oppostion to enemy x over many years provides that leader with credibility in changing tactics, and negotiating with that same enemy. He can't be giving in out of softness, seems to be the reasoning; he must be acting on strategic considerations. Nixon bugging out of Vietnam may be another example.
Kerry voted for the Iraq war, but not for the funding for it. He now says U.S. troops there need more support, but the U.S. shouldn't be building firehalls there. If he were elected, wouldn't he find himself under enormous pressure to fight on, no matter what, to make up for earlier straddles?
Alberta premier Ralph Klein said the other day he believes in finding out which way the parade is going, then getting to its head. If prolonged fighting by U.S. forces in Iraq becomes unpopular, it may be that either Bush or Kerry as president would want to pull out. But would they have the same ability or freedom to do it?
If Bush is re-elected, and has a Republican congress, he will be proposing massive spending cuts just about everywhere. How about the military? The 9/11 commission reminded us that the fight against terrorism is different from a fight against governments and recognizable armies. A case could be made for cutting back on conventional forces everywhere.
This contest started by Kevin Drum is fun.
He is sure Churchill is not top 10--as if to be provocative, he says something like top 100 at best. He wants to rank all kinds of poets and intellectuals higher (the group referred to in Aristophanes' Clouds: fortune-tellers, con artists, sophists, poets, people who just won't shut up, pathological liars--oh, and philosophers).
He lists Elizabeth I and Shakespeare near the top--surely, rightly so. As I understand it, Shakespeare actually formalized English as a respectable written language (not just the gibberish spoken by peasants and slum-dwellers), and added immensely to its vocabulary, while demonstrating that it would not necessarily respect any rules. The English language is the most successful prostitute in history--picking up everyone who is able to contribute, willy-nilly, always insisting ruthlessly that nothing be kept unless it is useful or beautiful--in rare cases, both.
Elizabeth ensured England/Britain would continue to exist as a great country. The Catholic countries of France and Spain still thought that if they got her to marry the right person, England would be a sort of province to one of them. Some French lords still thought they had the rightful claim to the throne. She dealt brilliantly and ruthlessly with Scottish and Irish problems. (The Welsh problem had been largely solved by the fact that ... er ... she was Welsh). Thanks to the somewhat fluky defeat of the Spanish Armada, Britain began to emerge as a great naval power. The biggest problem of her life, as of her father's, was the succession, and she didn't solve that; but she made it possible for her successors to solve it.
Ah yes, naval power. Nelson, as one of Drum's commenters points out. But what about Raleigh, who I think was more or less a pirate?
Churchill loved to compare himself to the generals: Marlborough (his ancestor), Cromwell, Wellington. Did any of them actually save the country, or ensure the world-wide dominance of English language and culture, the way the navy did?
Intellectuals,etc.: Locke must be the most successful political philosopher ever if that is judged by his ideas being adopted by a wealthy great power. The United States continues to defend capitalism (the right to property, the labour/investment theory of value), and to look askance at the welfare state because it allegedly saps ambition. What seem to be new and radical ideas about marriage being a contract between individuals, not something laid up in nature or Heaven, are in Locke (along with energetic efforts to show everything is in Scripture. "God wasn't giving Adam or Noah any great gifts, way back then... they had to discover that they had a right to self-preservation, and all morality and law flows from that"). The Europeans who think they are more intellectual than Americans have never really based a society on rational argument--with the arguable devastating exceptions of Communism and perhaps fascism/Nazism. They have simply gradually dissolved tradition, never being sure what comes next. They are open to the super-market of ideas because they are truly shopping. The Americans just keep exploring Locke, with just enough Spartan jingoism or exceptionalism to give them that enviable feeling of unity, "us against the world."
Anyway, I agree with commenters that Churchill is somewhere in the top 10, with a couple of notches to spare.
UPDATE Aug. 10: Robert H. Ferrell, editor, in The Eisenhower Diaries (p. 208): "Churchill now loomed as the greatest statesman in all of British history--greater than Cromwell by far, greater than his ancestor Marlborough, greater than Wellington, who was only a great captain, greater than Disraeli and Gladstone, not to mention th leaders of the early twentieth century." I would want to do some researh on Pitt the Younger, Palmerston, and maybe Salisbury. Could Churchill be the greatest when he presided over the final dissolution of the real British Empire? Maybe like Arthur in the Camelot story, he demonstrated the real nobility of the (late) regime he represented by fighting on, yet taking defeat as nobly as possible? Churchill once said the American Lend Lease program was totally lacking in squalor; perhaps this was even more true of his own actions in World War II?
Parts of the British campaign in World War II were like Cook in the Antarctic--poorly planned and hopeless, yet carried out with a stiff upper lip. Some attempt was made to hang on to Hong Kong, with the result that many prisoners were taken by the Japanese--and treated horribly. Hong Kong? Then the British fought back against Japan by struggling through the jungles of Burma (now Thailand). Burma? Did the British play the decisive role in any decisive battle?
By Salisbury's time the Empire had grown too big and, unknown to the great middle-class public, the rot was setting in. The Boer War was very foolish, and Salisbury probably never knew what to say to Rhodes and other white people who wanted to establish the Empire all over creation, other than "you've got to be kidding! Is this ever going to pay for itself, like India?" But Salisbury may have had the best grasp of the whole range of foreign policy issues, making both Disraeli and Gladstone look partial and cartoonish by comparison. Palmerston was also very intelligent, and knew how to turn off and on a kind of cracker or tough guy approach that was hugely popular.
Ann Coulter says the Democrats hid their true views in order to make their convention palatable to the public, or to the famous swing voters.
The only "issues" Democrats dare discuss publicly are the things everyone can agree on: They are for "jobs," a good economy and the middle class. None of their blather ever touches on any issue on which Democrats and Republicans could possibly disagree.
The issues on which the parties differ are: pre-emptive attacks on terror-producing nations, gay marriage, gun control, partial-birth abortion, taxes, letting non-citizens and felons vote. But the Democrats won't talk about those issues. This is the Democrats' week to make-believe they are Republicans for the folks watching at home on TV. In the lingo of the delegates, this is "story time."
But won't the Republicans do the same thing in reverse? Haven't we already heard they're going to have keynote speakers who are pro-choice, favour wide open stem cell research, and favour balanced budgets over tax cuts?
Coulter chooses her list of "dividing" issues very carefully. Partial-birth abortion--not abortion in general, and not stem-cell research, or "therapeutic" cloning. Taxes, but not balanced budgets. Gay marriage, which I guess is better for getting out the vote in the U.S. than it is in Canada--but still, hardly likely to help Republicans win the swing voters.
It's an old story. The people who are most committed to political parties either have a particular axe to grind (or business to protect, like the monopoly public school system), or they are "ideological," more or less predictably left or right, across the board. They quite likely differ from most voters precisely in that they are so political, and if they can be persuaded to calm down, they will disguise themselves a bit in order to win votes. Reagan sounded like a real conservative, but his record shows lots of spending and big government, and in any case the Democrats kept winning the legislative branch. Voters could be assured they were being given lots of programs, while being told they didn't have to pay for them. Christmas all year round.
So now Robin Cook, former Foreign Minister to Tony Blair who resigned over Iraq, says Britain has no intelligence whatsoever on Africa and uranium. This would at least explain why none has been shared with the IAEA, contrary to a Security Council resolution. But surely the Brits wouldn't lie?
Well, they probably have something. Wilson speculated that the second source was nothing more than the information that Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican visited Niger in 1999, which isn't exactly secret intelligence at this point.
But things still get weird.
Wilson says it's very unlikely that the Iraqi ambassador in question would have been charged with a uranium-related mission. For one thing, says Wilson, he didn't know anything about uranium. (NB: The 9-11 Commission Report recounts a story where al-Qaeda sent some operatives who didn't know anything about uranium to buy some in Sudan with the predictable result that they bought some stuff that turned out not to be uranium. On the one hand, this indicates that it's a very bad idea to send non-experts to buy your uranium for you, but it also indicates that it's not out of the question that someone would, in fact, send non-experts even though it's a bad idea.) What's more, for a variety of reasons (notably his Turkoman ethnicity and non-traditional sexual orientation) he wasn't a highly trusted figure in the regime. Wilson thinks that the point of the trip was simply to offer West African officials paid junkets to Baghdad as part of Iraq's long-term effort to undermine the sanctions regime.
(via Matthew Yglesias, TAPPED).
Now: Isn't this more fun than TV?
Mickey Kaus has some fun with Teresa Kerry's cookie recipe. Although it's hard to believe such things happen, "candidates" for First Lady enter cookie recipes in a contest. Teresa's recipe has not done well; she has agreed that the cookies don't taste very good, and she has blamed her staff. Kaus links to something else--probably those ridiculous photos of Kerry from NASA. Staff were obviously to blame for Kerry having that [link=http://http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39668 ]Dukakis[/link] look.
I am reminded of a Canadian example. Stockwell Day, leader of the short-lived Alliance Party, does a photo op/statement with Niagara Falls as a backdrop. Pretty cool. Then he says Canadian brains are draining south, just like the Niagara River. (The river flows north). He also can't answer basic questions about the alleged brain drain to the U.S. Then he practically says the staffer who's responsible for this fiasco is going to be fired.
Glenn Reynolds has been writing again about how indicators of teenage misbehaviour that were so prevalent 10 or 20 years ago are actually better now, even though the supposedly corrupting factors of readily-available violent movies, videogames, and porn, are also more freely available than ever.
He says jokingly that government should mandate heavy exposure to video and porn. More seriously, he says there is no clear cause and effect between bad pop culture and bad acts. If there is one, it might work in a way opposite to what the do-gooders predict; kids might get the wild stuff out of their system ("catharsis," not necessarily in Aristotle's sense of the word) so that they feel less need to act out in the world.
This reminds me of Allan Bloom, who apparently was always willing to get into the old arguments about censorship: Plato's Republic, and Rousseau's Letter on the Arts, even more than Milton and Mill. (Rousseau says the theatre, uninhibited dancing, and probably lots of other things, have a bad effect on the young. In a footnote he says: some will conclude from this essay that I do not dance--I love to dance; or that I hate the theatre--I never miss an opening night!).
More immediately, the Toronto Star had a nice piece about a young woman in the suburbs of Toronto. She takes a reporter around to her hang-outs. She has recently left high school. She says "hey" to lots of people, everywhere she goes. She likes to go clubbing (she works for her money, but some of her friends are simply given spending money by parents), so she plans where to go, and with whom. Were the cliques bad in high school? There are problems, but she found them manageable. She actually moved to a brand new town in high school, and had other girls over to her parents' house the first day of school.
She hung out to some extent with the popular girls, the "Ho-Train Girls," as they were nicknamed by some of the boys, but she was never really in that circle, and she never felt strong pressure to do something she didn't want to do. She sees every young person as making a decision as to when to have sex, and with whom. A 19-year old virgin is regarded as unusual, but there is still a strong sense that one decides for oneself. She smokes pot, with her parents' knowledge.
This all made me think that this life actually works quite well--and, as Reynolds says, in ways that moralists would not have predicted. How far is this from the cloistered lives that women used to lead in the West, and still do in much of the world?
What I think Bloom would want to bring up is the "political" part of "political life"--which certainly includes what we call morality. Kids may not be overtly violent, drug-crazed, or whatever, but what exactly are they thinking about? Does good citizenship have any meaning?
William Saletan:
"The son also lauds Kerry for 'the depth of his character, his soul.' This seems to be one of the peculiarities that brought John and Teresa together: their obsession with depth, thoughtfulness, and other fine qualities that people don't particularly care about in a president. We want you to make good decisions. The length and earnestness of your pondering are not a plus."
This takes me back to the very first episode of Cheers (set, fortuitously, in Boston): The lecherous prof on the phone to his wife, confirming that he is going back to her and dumping Diane: "Your depth frightens me."
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