Hagiographers Under Every Rock, Says Publishers Weekly

Every one of us has their obsession.  We just like to interpret the world to fit our prejudices.  The problem is when we let things get a little out of hand, as Reagan biographer Paul Kengor complains:

Though one would never know this from reading Publishers Weekly, the fact is that Ronald Reagan is now consistently rated among the most successful presidents in all of American history—even by liberals who comprise academia and media.

 Even those of us conservatives who came late to Reagan, say in mid 1980, realize that there was a lot more there that we realized.  Reagan was an actor, and he let us see what he wanted us to see.  In retrospect that was not much.

Reagan was a man who had done quite a bit of reading.  But he never felt the need to tell us that.  Reagan was a man who had done quite a bit of thinking.  But he never felt the need to impress us with his learning.

Reagan was quite happy for everyone to think him an “amiable dunce,” in Clark Clifford’s immortal phrase.  And because wise man Clifford thought that many liberals thought that too.  And many liberal writers echoed the idea.

Frances Fitzgerald’s blistering, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War, was reviewed glowingly by Publishers Weekly as a “painstakingly detailed study.” The book portrays Reagan as, indeed, way out there in the blue.

Only Reagan wasn’t way out there.  His policies, foreign and domestic, especially after the jumble of Iraq, look astonishingly precise and focused. He did stand fast while the Federal Reserve painfully squeezed inflation out of the economy.  He did lower tax rates and start a 25 year boom.  He did increase defense spending and twirl the Soviet Union into confusion.

This is not way out there in the blue.  This is political genius of a very high order.

It is such a pity that the anonymous reviewers at Publishers Weekly still don’t get it.

If America Won't Buy Quality Newspapers...

Here it comes.  It was inevitable, really.  We can thank Steven Rattner for giving us a heads-up on it, an early warning so we can head it off at the pass.

Rattner takes a look at the delicate state of the newspaper business today.

The Washington Post has lost 14 percent of its circulation since 2000.  And newspapers have lost half of their young readers.

Perhaps most worrisome is the loss of young readers, who have drifted away steadily since the early 1970s, long before there was an Internet, when more than 70% of 18- to 34-year-old Americans read a daily newspaper. Last year that figure stood at 35%.

Guess where the growth in the newspaper is coming from?

Only two newspapers in the top 25—the two New York tabloids—grew circulation during this period, a statement in itself.

Yes.  That really is nasty.  Americans are turning away from quality newspapers, and what are they reading instead?  Tabloids! 

Of course newspaper reading on the Internet is up.  But most people get their news from the big on-line portals,

which means that they are mostly consuming a bland porridge of wire service stories.

Things are getting so bad that the market soon may not support true quality newspapers.  It is time for action.

[W]e can’t expect the objectives of enterprises that were organized around a for-profit interest to necessarily intersect with the societal value of quality journalism. So perhaps it’s time to think about new models for the news business.

 Ah yes.  Why newspapers might be just like the New York subways, a vital service that nobody wants to pay for.

We could create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded). News organizations with an expensive but important project in mind could apply for funding, much the way producers in the public television world have for the last 40 years.

Oh innocent, how reasonable it sounds.

Over my cold, dead body.

 “” 

Secular Dem Candidates Off to Church

The Republican Party is the party of the religious, married, with children.  The Democratic Party is the party of the secular, the single, and the childless.  So much we know.

So then why does the Edwards campaign feel it necessary to separate from blogger Amanda Marcotte, whose blog, according to Mary Eberstadt, is full of

scatological Catholic-baiting rants about "theocracy" marked by leering references to the pope and liberal use of the F-word.

What do they expect from a “a bilious feminist with a potty mouth?”

After all, the whole of America left of center is railing about “theocracy” these days.  When trendspotter Kevin Phillips is out with American Theocracy, you know that there is good money to be made selling theocratic scare stories to book-buying liberals.

But then why are the Democratic presidential candidates crowding into church?

Here is Sen. Barack Obama in California’s Saddleback pulpit at the invitation of mega-selling pastor Rick Warren. There is Sen. Hillary Clinton with downcast eyes in Newsweek, praying before the cameras in New York’s Riverside Church. And there preaches John Edwards, also in Riverside Church, weaving his personal faith into everything from AIDS to the minimum wage.

The answer is, of course, that even though the liberal base is militantly and religiously anti-religious, most Americans are religious.  And the politicians know it.

Sophisticates and secularists have always titillated themselves by despising the Bible Belt. But professional Christian-bashers have never been as "embedded" in the liberal mainstream as they are today. And therein lies a problem for Democrats. More Amanda Marcottes are not what the party needs as it scrambles to re-establish its religious bona fides with wary red-staters. No wonder so many Democratic candidates are in church. Now they really have something to pray about.

So the presidential campaigners have become regular churchgoers.  Just don’t expect the liberal media to complain about the separation of church and state.  At least, not until Republican Mormon Mitt Romney decides to visit a temple of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints. 

Oh Good. Michelle Malkin Is "Not a Shill"

Our liberal friends seem unable to deal with people like Michelle Malkin.  Never have, never will.  So Howard Kurtz’s profile in the Washington Post is just par for the course in liberal condescension.  He goes to Andrew Sullivan for a quote:

She may be shrill, but she’s not a shill.

Well, you can certainly say that Andrew Sullivan knows “shrill.”

Actually we should not be offended.  So long as liberals just don’t get people like Michelle Malkin then so long do they just not get it, period.

Imagine, if you will, the Washington Post profiling a young, attractive, passionate liberal activist.  Suppose they quoted her saying:

"They’ll ridicule my looks, ridicule my ethnicity, go after my family," the 36-year-old blogger says of her critics. "They’ve attacked my husband relentlessly. There’s a strong sexist strain among my liberal critics, who think it isn’t possible I could have gotten anywhere without my Svengali husband, or some white man, embedding ideas in my head."

 Why, it would be the central quote on an article all about the nobility and the selflessness of the activist and bristling with outrage towards the cruel bigotry of her critics.

But not when the subject is a female, minority, Catholic, conservative woman.

But we should be understanding.  Our liberal friends just cannot understand such a person.  Their whole scientific, evolutionary world view says it could not happen.

Obviously it is not the liberal world-view that is the problem. So it must be the Svengali husband.  Or something.

Did America Overreact to 9/11?

David A. Bell wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times that the United States overreacted to 9/11.

The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we’re overreacting.

Oh really, writes philosopher Lee Harris?

Now if by this Bell means that they cannot kill us all, or even more than a few thousand at a time, then history seems to have proven him right

But that’s not quite how the world works.

The inmates of any jailhouse know that even mildest acts of aggression must be instantly and firmly challenged. If you are a newcomer and another inmate demands that you give him your candy bar, the worst thing you could possibly do would be to try to put the incident into perspective.

So the question about 9/11 is whether the Islamist terrorists represent any kind of possible threat.  If they do, then we are right to overreact, because underreacting just encourages them. 

If they will never have a chance of bringing power to bear on the United States, then we should do as Bell recommends, and ignore them.

One thing seems fairly certain.  The Islamists firmly believe that they are going to take over the world.

“” 

War on Terror and Cousin Marriage

What in the world has cousin marriage to do with the War on Terror?

Good question senator.  I just so happens that there is one particular part of the world that goes in for men marrying their father’s brother’s daughter.

That is significant because “in-marriage” of this kind promotes very strong clan loyalty.  Whereas “out-marriage,” that is marrying mother’s brother’s daughter or any less close kin all the way out to marrying people unrelated at all, promotes social and cultural adaption and peaceful relations between families.

It is Islam that is the only society in the world that practices “in-marriage.”  That means, of course, that Islam has very strong kinship ties, but also cultural stasis and resistance to change.

Why is this important?  Stanley Kurtz connects the dots.

This means that any a long-term strategy for winning the war on terror will have to undercut, counter-balance, or reverse the functional “advantages” (cultural stasis and isolation) accruing to Muslim society through the ongoing practice of parallel-cousin marriage.

Of course, Kurtz assumes that the cousin marriage of the Muslims really is an advantage.

Arguably, the cultural advantage of “in-marriage” went out with the industrial revolution.  In the agricultural era rigid conservatism was universal, and for a good reason.  If you failed to follow the time-tested ways for food production you were probably going to starve.  But the market revolution of the last two centuries has put a premium on adaptation.

And the pickle in which the Islamic societies find themselves in is presumably related to their cultural resistance to adaptation.

Newt's Full of Ideas

Newt Gingrich is not announced as a candidate for the presidency, but he’s certainly busy doing what he does best—churning out political ideas.

First of all, he’s issued a 21st Century Contract With America, a ten point program like the old 1994 Contract.  As Newt writes: 

In a rapidly changing world with new threats and new competitors, we must implement policies that will ensure America’s leadership, safety, and prosperity. And we must reinvigorate the core values that have made an exceptional civilization.

A quick scan of the ten articles in the Contract show that Newt’s got his heart and his mind in the right place.  It is every conservative’s dream agenda and it even has a nod for the ageing baby boom generation with a proposal for facilitating active retirement.

But Newt is also ready with ideas for improving health care.  He’s proposing a 21st Century Intelligent Health System.  First of all, he writes, let’s go paperless. Yes, but wouldn’t that be kind of expensive?  Actually, no. For you doubters out there, Newt has a suggestion.

I will urge you to contact the North Fulton Family Clinic [in Alpharetta, Ga.], which in 1998 went paperless with a workflow-organized ambulatory electronic health record.
And in the first year, to their shock, they discovered that they were saving $33 per patient visit. Not costing ! saving.

And then, of course, we are all going to go wireless.

But we have to be careful.  We want the federal government to help get this intelligent system off the ground but not dictate its exact form.  That would freeze it in place and stop further development, because, he writes,

whatever standards we set this year will be wrong five years from now, because the technology is going to keep evolving dramatically.

A big challenge for the future is to train people to look after their own health care. Already, in diabetes, the patient is essential in long-term well-being.

If we find out as soon as you become diabetic and learn how to teach you to be able to take care of yourself so that you don’t end up in the emergency room, you don’t end up hospitalized, you don’t end up losing your limbs or going blind or losing your kidneys and needing dialysis or having heart disease.

Doctors can’t do it.  When you get to the emergency room, it is already too late.

Nobody knows what will happen in the presidential race.  But New Gingrich is ready, as always, with ideas.  Lots of them.