Entries Tagged 'cluelessness' ↓

If Amy Alexander, writing in The Nation, can admit to it, I suspect that soon enough other women will follow:

Even though I detest her politics, as I watched Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated interview with ABC News’s Charles Gibson, God help me, I had to admire her steeliness. …

[T]here are probably more than a few of us who drift off, from time to time, on the delicious fantasy of what it would feel like to draw down with shotgun on the misbehaving men in our lives. We don’t know if Palin has ever done such a thing, but it appears she sure as hell could. I have to own up to the part of me that admires that. After watching her with Gibson, it’s safe to say that it took a spine of titanium to stay upright in that chair as “Charlie” scowled at her over the top of his reading glasses …

[B]y over-intellectualizing this steeliness factor, and by underestimating its power to sway voters, we are not being true to our cultural history. …

Progressives and feminists who sneer at women unwilling to separate that stimulus-response “I heart ballsy women!” from the business at hand–”Does she have the intellect and experience to be vice president?”–are spinning their wheels. They also conveniently overlook the possibility that Palin’s raw ambition is very close to the self-confidence we want to encourage in our daughters. Sarah Palin is a strong woman, and that is good. Her politics, and what they may lead her to create for our democracy… not so much. [e.a.]

I was encouraged to be self-confident and outspoken by my parents, and I have certainly encouraged my daughter to be self-confident and outspoken.

Judging from the softened attitude I saw this morning from Katty Kay on the Chris Matthews Show and from her pal and fellow op-ed writer Claire Shipman on This Week with George S [transcripts are not yet available at either site], the high-powered women of the MSM have gotten the message to think before they pop off their mouths, and to learn to accommodate other women’s choices—including those who don’t have the luxury of opting out of “prestige” jobs and those whose ambitions include helping to guide the United States of America toward a better course.

Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn’t build and don’t want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin’s case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms — even if we sacrifice some “prestige.”

I find it very interesting that these two women, who beg for time to be with their families, who are supposedly remaking their lives, both find the time to be front and center on the Sunday talk shows (and one of them appears on air with her husband. So excuse me if I feel it necessary to ask Ms. Shipman and Mr. Carney: Who, exactly, is minding your kids while you earnestly debate John McCain’s disappointingly political campaign for president and while you pass judgment on Sarah Palin?)

Joseph Epstein was raised in blissful freedom in the Midwest, by parents who tended to their own lives—and to him and his brother—without making much of a fuss:

When I was a boy my parents might go off to New York or to Montreal (my father was born in Canada) for a week or so and leave my brother and me in the care of a woman in the neighborhood, a spinster named Charlotte Smucker–Mrs. Smucker to us–who was a professional childsitter. Sometimes an aunt, my mother’s sister who had no children, would stay with us. We seldom went on vacation as a family. When I was eight years old, my parents sent me off for an eight-week summer camp session in Eagle River, Wisconsin, where I learned all the dirty words if not their precise meanings. None of these things made me unhappy or in any way dampened my spirits. I cannot recall ever thinking of myself as an unhappy kid.

Not surprisingly, little Joseph became quite sturdy and self-sufficient:

After the age of ten, I made every decision about my education on my own. The one I didn’t make, at ten, was to go to Hebrew school in order to be bar-mitzvahed; this was a decision made for me and was nonnegotiable. But my parents felt no need to advise me on what foreign language to take in high school, where I ought to go to college–though my father paid every penny of my tuition and expenses–or what I ought to study once there. …

When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life. My father never explained about the birds and the bees to me; his entire advice on sex, as I clearly remember, was, “You want to be careful.” …

I did not seek my parents’ approval. All I wished was to avoid their–and particularly my father’s–disapproval, which would have cut into my freedom. Avoiding disapproval meant staying out of trouble, which for the most part I was able to do. Punishment would have meant losing the use of my mother’s car, or having my allowance reduced, or being made to stay home on school or weekend nights, and I cannot remember any of these things ever happening, a testament less to my adolescent virtue than to the generous slack my parents cut me.

Now, having retired from teaching at Northwestern University, Epstein reflects on the “Kindergarchy”—the well-meaning but toxic child-rearing style which has produced the many insufferable students he has known. His (tongue-in-cheek) conclusion? Too much love in the home:

As a teacher at Northwestern University (not long retired), I found the students in my classes in no serious way I could discern much improved for all the intensity of home and classroom attention most of them received under the Kindergarchy. A very small number, those who had somehow found passion for books and the life of the mind, were remarkable, a number proportionally probably little different than in any generation of students; the rest were like students everywhere and at all times: just wanting to get the damn thing called their education over with and get on with life with the best start possible.

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn’t become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint–and maybe a touch of the fear, too–that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were. [Could this account for the vociferous and influential Irish Catholic "mafia" in the MSM? Just wondering.---ed.]

So often in my literature classes students told me what they “felt” about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to–but did not–write: “D-, Too much love in the home.” I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality.

Then Epstein lowers the boom [e.a.]:

Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

Uncharitably, I can’t help but think that a lot of whippersnapping Obama lovers are going to learn that lesson in the coming months. And Paul Krugman, for one, isn’t above advising BHO on that score:

Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

We are tough, capable, high-achieving, well-adjusted, and secure baby boomers! Hear us roar!

[reposted to correct a typo in the title] 

Will sharia come to Britain? The notion certainly has a lot of people up in arms.

Ali Eteraz makes the case against (in case you need to hear it).
As for me, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. For one thing—though it’s not PC to bring this up, but it does reflect reality—there most certainly is a supernationalist streak in Britain, most obviously represented by its soccer hooligans. Potentially violent, uncontrollable “Islamophobia” is a real concern among this demographic, and it is not to be ignored.

Perhaps it was those, er, “blokes” who the otherwise sharia-loving (and enemy of culture) Tariq Ramadan was thinking of when he nixed the Archbishop’s idea:

“These kinds of statements [about the addition of sharia in Britain] just feed the fears of fellow citizens. I really think we, as Muslims, need to come up with something that we abide by the common law and within these latitudes there are possibilities for us to be faithful to Islamic principles.”

For another thing, on one side of the front page of its website, the Daily Mail tears to shreds the sharia-embracing Archbishop of Canterbury:

Officials at Lambeth Palace told the BBC Dr Williams was in a “state of shock” and “completely overwhelmed” by the scale of the row.

It was said that he could not believe the fury of the reaction.

On the other side of its front page, the Daily Mail goes about its business, advertising its other typical features:

Femail

Bedraggled and bra-less: Britney back to her old tricks after hospital release
A spell in a psychiatric hospital seems to have done little to change Britney’s lifestyle - or her dress sense

Cheek to Cheeky…the girls bare all for a good cause
Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia has never much cared for the twinset-and-pearls image of an MP’s consort - but this pose with her identical twin sister Monica - is risque by even her raunchy standards

Rehab star Amy is all smiles after getting her teeth fixed ahead of Grammy performance tonight
Amy Winehouse is all smiles these days after finally being granted a US visa - and getting her teeth fixed

‘Sadistic Wife Swap nearly cost me my sanity’ says TV presenter Anna Courtenay
On last week’s Channel 4 show Wife Swap, businesswoman Anna Courtenay, 42, was seen trading her privileged expat life in Marbella for nine days with another family on an ‘eco-friendly’ tugboat. She was not prepared for the lengths to which producers were prepared to go in the name of entertainment

When the Mail is forced to clean up its lurid act, let me know. Likewise, satellite TV in Europe (which is a mixture of lecturing imams and soft-core pornography). Then I’ll get nervous about sharia.

In the meantime, I take comfort from the sensible attacks on the mental defective masquerading as the Archbishop of Canterbury:

The most damaging attack came from the Pakistan-born Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali.

He said it would be “simply impossible” to bring sharia law into British law “without fundamentally affecting its integrity”.

Sharia “would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence.

“This is not to mention the relation of freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy.”

Regular readers know that I’m not a politico. Nevertheless, I’m ready to make a prediction (of sorts). I get the very strong feeling that America will not go for an unknown quantity come November.

From the heart of DemocratLand, over at TPM Cafe, here’s why:

Clinton deserves a huge amount of credit – especially from the press corps. Tonight should be a wake-up call: We need to take seriously that outside of those cutting very cool YouTube videos and packing unbelievably large rallies, there is a significant silent – at times – majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women who like Hillary Clinton, and will vote for her. For Obama, he has upscale whites and African-Americans …

Even more devastatingly accurate is this from Jim Sleeper, also at TPM Cafe:

Obama is in trouble if too many of his famously small $20 and $30 contributions come … mainly from people like the up-and-coming young white writers and journalists with whom I watched one of the recent Democratic debates from the tony (but not too tony) New York neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.

Every time John Edwards mentioned broken workers in mills he’d known, the young crowd watching the debate hooted derisively, “The mill!, The mill!” Every time Hillary Clinton mentioned her 35 years of experience, they hooted, too.

Yep. The wiseasses at the back of the classroom—or in the leftosphere—will not put Barack Obama in the White House. More to the point, they probably would do nothing to help him realize the Democrats’ supposed dreams [e.a.]:

I fear that too many young whites with bright prospects have no really serious intention of redressing the growing inequities which the neoliberal world that employs them is spawning, not just between themselves and poor blacks on the Southside but, these days, between blacks and blacks, and women and women, let alone between cool young whites like themselves and the declasse, lumpy white and Latino workers all around them.

Not that my young friends defend wholeheartedly the system in which they’re prospering. To their credit, it makes them uncomfortable. But they grasp at mostly symbolic gestures of a politics of moral posturing that relieves racial and class guilt and steadies their moral self-regard with smallish contributions to Obama, an Ivy alum whom they trust to help those people on the Southside without dragging them too deeply into it; without reconfiguring how we charter our corporations and re-construe the private and public investments that employ upscale young whites and well-behaved non-whites; and certainly without redistributing their own bright prospects and future prerogatives and second homes.

This pretty much reflects the conversations I’ve had with my son, who happens to live in Brooklyn. What are you planning to do to help Obama’s agenda after he gets elected? I asked.

He had no answer. It never occurred to him that merely voting for Obama isn’t enough. In this, he’s like most Americans, who are not involved in public service.

I don’t blame my son for casting a symbolic vote. I blame Barack Obama, his campaign strategists, and his supporters—particularly Oprah Winfrey—for suggesting to a gullible public that voting for Obama is enough, an end in itself.

That is a huge load of smelly bullshit, and I know in my gut that in early-21st-century America, with the enormous raft of problems facing us, his campaign will not fly beyond the Precincts of Political Correctness.

He couldn’t even win Massachusetts after the Kennedy Coronation, not to
mention California.

Obama deployed powerhouse friends, including Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. A Sunday Los Angeles rally with Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and Kennedy’s niece, Maria Shriver, added high-profile female counterweight to Clinton.

“If Barack Obama was a state, he’d be California,” said Shriver, wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Kennedys have strong resonance in California.

Really? I have yet to see evidence of that. What I see is a lot of Kennedys who have expended their dwindling-to-nonexistent political capital on a mirage.

An election is for votes.
You can market celebrities to potential voters, but that doesn’t make them behave like consumers.

Philip Weiss discovers anti-democratic extremism.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama’s campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don’t be an idiot. …

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about “the war on terror”. We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can’t forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

The sewer rats in his comments section are none too pleased about Weiss’s revelation:

We liked you better when you blamed everything on the Jews.

Posted by: Realist | December 28, 2007 at 07:57 AM

For his cheerleading of those other blamers of the Jews, Weiss made a Top Ten Moonbats of 2007 list:

Weiss has become an “Israel Lobby” fundamentalist. In his eyes, to question the scholarship of Walt and Mearsheimer is to question truth. Every page of their book is gospel. Any negative review of their work is automatically dismissed as a “smear,” and every day that passes without an expose of the “Israel Lobby” on “60 Minutes” or the cover of Time magazine is further evidence of Jewish control over the media.

This mild critique doesn’t do Weiss justice. He has to be read to be believed. I’ll give you all the pleasure of finding out for yourselves, but I won’t provide another link.

Norman Podheretz takes time out of his 24/7 job counseling that the U.S. bomb Iran to answer a charge brought by Andrew Sullivan and now spread further by The Economist:

Linking to the Economist post, Sullivan accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for failing to admit that I have made an “error” in relying on a “bogus quotation” to bolster my argument that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would not be deterred from using them by the fear of retaliation.

I do not usually bother responding to Sullivan’s frequent attacks on me, which are fueled by the same shrill hysteria that, as has often been pointed out, deforms most of what he “dishes” out on a daily basis. But in this case I have decided to respond because, by linking to a sober source like the Economist, he may for a change seem credible.

The Economist concludes its piece by challenging Amir Taheri to produce “the original source for this quote.”

In response to a query from me, Mr. Taheri has now met that challenge.

Sullivan responds by casting doubt on Taheri:

Taheri, whose reliability has come under suspicion before, says the remark was purged or censored or removed in subsequent editions of the book. I have no independent way of confirming any of this. Taheri, it should be noted, was the source of the story that Iran had recently required that Jews wear yellow stars in public, a story that was subsequently debunked.

Well, I hate to say it, but The Economist ’s counter-translator, Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, also seems compromised—not at all an disinterested party. He’s the husband of the Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who was detained in Iran this past year and, under great international pressure, released. I wouldn’t be surprised if Iranian agents haven’t put tremendous pressure on both Esfandiari and Bakhash to toe the line.

His comments in The Economist certainly sound different than these impassioned words, published in May 2007:

Once Haleh was arrested, however, silence was no longer an option. It is preposterous that she is accused of conspiring to overthrow the Iranian government by organizing conferences and encouraging dialogue between Iranians and Americans. The Wilson Center issued a fact sheet; Lee Hamilton, its president and director, held a news conference; and I began to speak openly about Haleh’s frightening predicament.

The extraordinary media attention, as well as the support for Haleh from presidential candidates and political leaders, from scholars and academic associations, from the students at Princeton University who she taught to love the Persian language, from women’s groups, human rights organizations and people everywhere have astonished and gratified her family and friends.

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of a state’s overweening power — especially a state that arrests, incarcerates and accuses its citizens at will. But the events of the last few weeks — the universal condemnation Iran has earned by imprisoning Haleh and others — have taught me that people also have power when they condemn injustice and stand up for wronged individuals. Is the Iranian government listening?

Americans are too naive about Iran, and about the Middle East. It’s time to get with the program.