Stromata Blog

Taking Sides in Berlin

A column in today’s Wall Street Journal (Matthew Kaminski, “Obama and the German Question” invites another perspective on Barack Obama’s Siegessäule rhetoric.

Much has been made of the need to improve America’s image in Europe. This narrative is some two years past its sell-by date. President Bush may not be popular at home or on the Continent, but America is again the ally of choice. On Iran, Russia, China and the Mideast, the big players of the European Union eagerly and pragmatically seek out U.S. leadership; in the surprise twist of this century so far, France leads the way.

Berlin is the exception. Its foreign policy can be charitably described as inconsistent and confused – and infused with a strain of anti-Americanism hard to find among other European ruling elites these days.

Germany’s government is a “grand coalition” between conservatives and socialists. The leading figure among the latter is Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who used to be former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s chief of staff.

Like his previous boss (Mr. Schröder is now on the Kremlin’s payroll at gas giant Gazprom), Mr. Steinmeier nurtures friendly ties with Moscow and is cool toward Washington. Chancellor Merkel’s instincts lead her in an opposite direction, yet she has shown little leadership on foreign policy of late, possibly to avoid a costly fight before elections.

Russia is a major concern to European leaders today, as Tsar Prime Minister Putin grows steadily more authoritarian, anti-American and irrational. It wasn’t a major topic of the Siegessäulesprache, but the few words devoted to it took an unambiguous stand. Quoth Senator Obama:

In this century — in this city of all cities — we must reject the Cold War mindset of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

That is the Schröder/Steinmeier line: See only good in the Kremlin. David Frum rejoins:

Russia has reverted to authoritarian rule. It uses its oil and gas to muscle its neighbors. The rulers of Russia are almost certainly responsible for the assassination of one of their most effective critics on British soil — and for the murder of dozens of journalists at home. These are facts, not delusions born of some “Cold War mindset.”

[And here and here are more to read about the current state of Russian liberty.]

Did Slick Barry realize that he was taking sides in an important European debate? Perhaps not. Did he mean to pass lightly over Russian misconduct? Not necessarily; the passage may have been “just words”. Nevertheless, it means more than a little when an immensely popular American politician stands on German soil and endorses a key tenet of Germany’s anti-American Left. At the very least, the political climate will now be colder for our friends in that country. The next President, whoever he is, will have to live with the consequences.

A Star Is Born

We interrupt this blog to note that Los Angeles SF fan Ed Green (this Ed Green) has landed the lead in a great commercial on YouTube. Definitely worth 90 seconds of your time.

Quote of the Yesterday

Denis Boyles wrote this before the Siegessäule Oration:

Ultimately, with Obama, it’s the substance problem. Not drugs (inhaling, Obama truthfully said, was kind of the point of smoking marijuana), but content. Obama’s speeches are like Cocteau Twins’ songs. Each one is a sugar hiccup of audacious hope: they sound great, but the words don’t mean anything, no matter which language is used.

“Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

A Song We Can Believe In (or at least hum)

Speaking to a huge and receptive audience today, Barack Obama could have performed a valuable service for our country. He professes to regard Afghanistan as the crucial battleground in the War on Terror. He must be aware that our European allies have, with a few commendable exceptions (of which Germany is not one), given the Afghan government only faint-hearted support. The main reason for that reticence is that European public opinion strongly favors doing nothing.

So here he was, in front of a crowd of 200,000 admirers and every television network on the continent – an unsurpassed opportunity to make the case for the Afghan campaign directly to Hans and Jacques. But he didn’t. Instead, he delivered a standard, gaseous campaign speech, complete with a cringe-inducing tribute to his personal genealogy and a vacuous “This is our moment” refrain. Afghanistan got one paragraph. As a paragraph, it was okay, but it did not lay out the reasons why what happens in that distant land is important to the future of the civilized world. The chance to open a crack in the wall of European indifference slipped away, maybe because Senator Obama did not know how to seize it, maybe because he wasn’t all that eager to try. He has never told us why he regards Afghanistan as vital and Iraq as a throw-away. What could he say to his fellow citizens of the world?

On the more positive and uplifting side, Jim Geraghty has discovered that Slick Barry has unexpected talents as a lyricist. Half of the following stanza is from that monument of 1980’s vacuity, “We Are the World”, the rest from the Siegessäule Oration. (Jim tells which is which, so I don’t have to.)

We can’t go on pretending day by day
That someone, somewhere will soon make a change.
This is the moment we must help answer the call.
But if you just believe there’s no way we can fall.
The world will watch and remember what we do.
Let us realize that a change can only come when we stand together as one.
We cannot afford to be divided.
These now are the walls we must tear down.
This is the moment when we must come together.
They’ll know that someone cares, and their lives will be stronger and free.

The lines almost hum themselves, whether or not the words make much sense.

Welcome to Jerusalem!

Shortly before Barack Obama was due to arrive in Israel’s de jure capital, an Israeli Arab ran amok with a bulldozer. Luckily, he was killed before he could murder anyone. (Sixteen people were wounded.) A Jerusalem Post columnist suggests a lesson that the candidate might want to ponder:

Although subsequent investigation may prove different, there’s good reason to believe Ghassan Abu Tir’s bulldozer terror attack was deliberately staged as a greeting gift for you, Senator Obama.

He belongs to the same Jerusalem family clan as imprisoned Hamas official Muhammad Abu Tir, so he is likely to have had ties to radical Islamist elements. He was shot dead as he was driving his bulldozer up King David Street straight in the direction of the King David Hotel, which you were due to check into later in the day.

And the timing of the incident was logical, since such an attack would have been much harder to pull off after your arrival, when the heavier police presence on the street would have stopped Abu Tir’s rampage even sooner than was the case.

What was the message, then, that Abu Tir was likely trying to deliver to you? Well, let’s consider some of the few facts about him that we already know. His village of Umm Tuba is one of those fortunate Arab neighborhoods on the periphery of Jerusalem that is not cut off from the rest of the city by the security barrier. Thus it is one of the better-off Arab communities in the capital – just like Jebl Mukaber and Sur Bahir, the neighboring Arab villages that produced the perpetrators of the previous two terror attacks in Jerusalem, including the original bulldozer rampage just three weeks ago.

So keep in mind, Senator Obama, that the gainfully employed Abu Tir was probably not one of those Palestinians you spoke about earlier on your trip, whose motivation to carry out terror was primarily due to economic deprivation. Nor is he likely one of those who shared your dream to see a Palestinian state rise up alongside Israel.

His message to you was that some things are not negotiable, and some people do not really wish to be negotiated with, at least not on any terms but their own; that Israel’s crime is not what it does or where its borders are, but its very existence; and that no matter which president sits in , those basic – or, one might say, sacred – principles will remain unchanged. . . .

[W]e need a US president wise enough to understand the need for diplomacy, yes – but equally so, one strong and courageous enough to utilize America’s incomparable might when diplomacy fails.

In short, we need a president who won’t be bulldozed by those who hold in contempt the values that both the US and Israel stand for. That, Senator Obama, is the message you can send back home from Jerusalem, on the day after the blood spilled by Ghassan Abu Tir practically on your doorstep ran down King David Street.

And what did Senator Obama say a few hours after the act of terrorism?

What I think can change is the ability of the United States government and a United States president to be actively engaged with the peace process and to be concerned and to recognize the legitimate difficulties that the Palestinian people are experiencing right now and recognize that it is not only in the interest of the Palestinian people that their situation improves – I believe that it is in the interest of the Israeli people.

It looks like Ghassan Abu Tir’s message was not successfully delivered.

“Even Obama Cannot Change the Past”

That saying from Aristotle used to be translated differently, but now we know what ‛o theós really refers to. The Man from Change obviously doesn’t agree with the dead white male Greek. His positions may appear to meander across the political spectrum in close coincidence with electoral convenience, but he will be the first to tell us that on all these matters – from the desirable future status of Jerusalem to the success of the “surge” in Iraq – he has been like a tree that’s standing by the water.

Some non-worshipers shake their heads and conclude that arguing about what Slick Barry said last year isn’t worth the effort. Jennifer Rubin responds with four good reasons why his attempts at historical revisionism matter:

#1: He doesn’t tell the truth. His lack of credibility on this and matters small and large (e.g., he never heard Wright’s hate speech, he played a major role in immigration, he always thought the surge would work) reveal him to be, at the very least, not offering anything resembling New Politics and, at worst, entirely untrustworthy.

#2: All his bouncing around is evidence of inexperience. He will confound our allies and embolden our foes because he says silly things or doesn’t understand what he is saying or doesn’t realize the import of his words.

#3: It reveals that he is weak and subject to persuasion by whichever group he is in front of at that moment. Before the netroots, unconditional talks sounded good, but no longer. In front of AIPAC “Undivided Jerusalem” sounded good, but not when trying to play the “honest broker” with the Arabs.

#4 . . . : Obama is stubborn and won’t admit when he makes an error. This is the Bush-redux argument. (The “You don’t want another bullheaded president” argument.)

Let me add one more item: Senator Obama’s indulgence in implausible reconciliations of past and present statements evidences an internal conviction that he is so charismatic, clever and convincing that ordinary mortals can be counted on to fall in readily with this week’s version of reality. “Arrogance” has become an overworked accusation, but it is a real phenomenon, and the junior solon from Illinois has a case so hyper-developed that Bill Clinton himself looks humble by comparison. The negative consequences for the Big He were more personal than political. The country may not be so lucky during an eight to ten year Obama reign.

A Ten-Year Presidency

Barack Obama is touring Afghanistan. The Daily Telegraph picks up an interesting quote:

Mr Obama did little to disappoint critics who accuse him of arrogance. He said the objective of the trip was to “hold substantive discussions” with national leaders “who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to ten years [emphasis added]”.

Is there something about the length of the President’s term of office that those of us who have never taught constitutional law don’t understand? Or is this the first trial balloon for repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment?

The paragraph just quoted is the only negative bit in the story, showing that the “Torygraph” is as easily duped by Slick Barry as any other outfit. For instance,

Senator Barack Obama has demanded plans be drawn up immediately for US troops to be redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Visiting Kabul on the first stop of his first major overseas trip since winning [sic] the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Mr Obama described conditions in Afghanistan as “precarious and urgent”.

“I think the situation is getting urgent enough that we have to start doing something now,” he told CBS television. “We can’t wait for a new administration otherwise it will be a year before new troops arrive.” . . .

Mr Obama has placed defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda at the centre of his foreign policy.

How close to the centre? You can search the “Issues” section of BarackObama.com in vain for one word about Afghanistan or the Taliban or al-Qa’eda. The safest prediction in the political marketplace is that, by about noon next Guy Fawkes Day, Mr. Obama, whether Senator or President-elect, will have joined the rest of the transnational Left in its conviction that Afghanistan is no more worth saving than Iraq.

Further reading: Jake Tapper, “Obama’s Butterfly Effect”
BeldarBlog, “MSM covers up both Obama’s arrogance and imprecision in interview gaffe during Afghanistan/Iraq trip”

Kelo: The Sequel

Three years ago, the Supreme Court held, by a five-to-four majority, that governmental authorities have the right to seize private property for private purposes. Susette Kelo was ordered to vacate her home so that a shopping center could be built on the site. The WSJ Political Diary today took note of subsequent events:

Ms. Kelo herself moved out of New London in the wake of the long legal battle. But, ironically, the “development” that supposedly required her home’s demolition is a shambles. The tract is now mostly empty, the original developer unable or unwilling to secure financing. Ms. Kelo’s former home, on the other hand, has been reassembled piece-by-piece a mile from where it originally stood, and a local supporter has committed to keep it standing for 99 years, with a plaque to commemorate the legal battle. The empty lot where it once stood – and the urban desolation that surrounds it – are a monument of a sort too, to the folly of many large-scale urban redevelopment schemes.

All of the Justices whom Barack Obama has held up as exemplars (Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg) voted with the Kelo majority. He’s already denounced their positions on child rape and gun control. Since Kelo was one of the most widely unpopular decisions of the last decade, we can anticipate that, if asked, Slick Barry will throw it, too, under the bus. An excellent follow-up would be why, if he agrees with them on so many important legal issues, Professor Obama voted against the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito.

Random Reading: Joseph Pearce’s Papist Bard

Browsers at conservative Web sites have probably seen adverts for The Quest for Shakespeare by Joseph Pearce, which, according to the publisher, is –

a stimulating and vivid biography of the world’s most revered writer that is sure to be controversial. Unabashedly provocative, with scholarship, insight and keen observation, Pearce strives to separate historical fact from fiction about the beloved Bard.

Actually, he is interested in only one historical fact or fiction: Shakespeare’s religious affiliation. His theses are, first, that the playwright was, “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a Roman Catholic and, second, that his faith is crucial to understanding his works.

The first is not an outlandish idea. Among the writers of his day, Shakespeare is noteworthy for the absence of anti-Catholic animus. His history plays fall outside the popular “elect nation” paradigm, in which England’s story is identified with the advance of Protestantism and the rejection of Papal authority. He puts nuns, friars, cardinals and Catholic rulers on the stage without suggesting that they are other than normal human beings. His most famous hero whispers, “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered” and converses with a soul from Purgatory. His most famous buffoon was originally named after a proto-Protestant martyr; complaints from the man’s descendants prompted a switch from “Oldcastle” to the less controversial “Falstaff”.

From these signs alone, one can be fairly certain that the Bard of Avon was out of step with the bigoted Protestantism of many of his countrymen, and might well have been a Catholic himself. Not many scholars believe, however, that such inferences from negative evidence are enough to support an indisputable verdict.

Mr. Pearce’s confident judgement rests not on the works but on scattered facts about the author and his family. He has taken them almost entirely at second hand. His main authority is Michael Wood, whom he describes as “an historian of some repute”. Mr. Wood is, in reality, a film maker, whose In Search of Shakespeare was written to accompany a BBC television production. He is able at what he does, but what he does isn’t path-breaking literary and historical scholarship. His book rarely cites sources, speculates well beyond the data, and ignores interpretations that don’t fit his thesis. The Quest for Shakespeare accepts his conclusions as proven, without subjecting them to even cursory analysis.

The Wood-Pearce argument for Shakespeare’s Catholicism boils down to this: His father John Shakespeare’s name appears on a Catholic profession of faith discovered in the 18th Century (and since lost again). A few other facts are consistent with the hypothesis that John was a Papist for at least part of his life (and a few others need explaining away). His mother’s relatives included many Catholics. An appreciable number of residents of his home town, Stratford-upon-Avon, clung to the old religion. His daughter Susanna, though married to an outspoken Protestant, has been suspected of Catholicism on the ground that she appears once in a list of Stratford townspeople who missed Easter communion. There is no affirmative record that Shakespeare himself ever received the Anglican sacrament. His friends and business associates included known or likely Catholics. A note written 70 or more years after his death, by a man in no particular position to know, states, “He died a Papist.”

In a period when cross-sectarian relationships were commonplace, that is thin gruel. Mr. Pearce thickens it with speculation. His method consists of composing a narrative on the assumption that Shakespeare was a committed Catholic and finding ways to fit as many facts as possible into it. No one during the Bard’s lifetime suggested that he did not conform to the Established Church. He was baptized, wed and buried within it, as were his wife and children. His name appears on no lists of recusants. All that could have been a blind, as Mr. Pearce expatiates at length, but it is a bold step to be certain that appearances deceive us.

There are also indications that whatever pro-Catholic sympathies Shakespeare felt were more emotional than ideological. If he was in fact a practicing Papist, it is odd that the version of Scripture he most often uses is the Geneva Bible, a hardline Protestant translation whose notes brim with hostility toward the Church of Rome. [Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 38ff. (2002).] Furthermore, his and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII climaxes with the birth of, and a lavish tribute to, Queen Elizabeth, whose death Mr. Pearce is sure he greeted with delight. Macbeth roundly condemns the Gunpowder Plot and “equivocation” (which Protestants routinely associated with Catholicism), praises the House of Stuart and endorses King James’ platform of “concord, peace and unity” (IV.iii.97-100) – hardly signs of hostility to the new, Protestant dynasty.

Mr. Pearce ignores all such objections to his thesis. So far as I can tell, he is unaware of their existence. He is, on the other hand, much aware of facts that aren’t so, such as, to take an especially egregious instance, “that the Elizabethan-Jacobean theatrical world was strongly Catholic in spirit” [p. 98], a view that he picks up from a secondary source but that no one who has read non-Shakespearean plays from that era, brimming with anti-Papist bombast, could possibly share. As noted above, the absence of overt anti-Catholicism makes Shakespeare’s oeuvre stand out from his contemporaries.

All in all, I see no way to render a verdict on Shakespeare’s religious allegiance more definitive than “Not Proven”. Nonetheless, we may, as a thought experiment, imagine that Mr. Pearce’s confidence is justifiable. How significant would the “fact” of Shakespeare’s Catholicism be?

Mr. Pearce’s answer is a classic of what C. S. Lewis called “the personal heresy”, the belief that literature is, first and foremost, an expression of the author’s personality and should be read in that light. Mr. Pearce alters “personality” to “personhood” but otherwise stands on the side of E. M. W. Tillyard in the famous Lewis-Tillyard debate (The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939)). There Lewis argued that what is important about a literary work is what is “public”, that is, discernible to any reader who is literate in the author’s language and possessed of the knowledge common to his milieu. What the author himself thought or felt or meant to convey is of interest only to his biographer. “I maintain that when we read poetry as poetry should be read, we have before us no representation which claims to be the poet, and frequently no representation of a man, a character, or a personality at all [emphasis in original].”

Mr. Pearce, by contrast, asserts, “Even if we accept, as we should, that a great work of literature will have a profundity of meaning beyond the conscious design of the author, we still need to see the transcendent beauty through the prism of the personhood of the author [pp. 177–78, emphasis in original].” Hence,

We must know what the author believed in order to know what he is saying and doing in his work. We must empathize with, even if we don’t sympathize with, the author’s beliefs. Failure to understand the author’s beliefs will lead to a failure to understand the work. Our prejudice or our ignorance will have made us blind. [p. 178]

An approach to reading books cannot be incorrect in the same sense as an approach to solving equations, but it can be profitless. If our appreciation is vitiated by ignorance of “what the author believed”, any work by an unknown author is condemned ipso facto to an inferior rank. We know nothing reliable about what Homer believed. Le Morte d’Arthur bears an author’s name, Sir Thomas Malory, to which scholars have attached a patchy biography; the beliefs that can be inferred from that biography do nothing to help us understand the last great chivalric romance. Tens of thousands of other works languish in anonymity or auctorial obscurity. As for those writers whose lives and opinions are thoroughly documented, are we to read their biographies before their novels, plays and poems? That is the inescapable corollary of Mr. Pearce’s doctrine. Were it to become universal, it would kill off reading altogether.

What’s more, the doctrine works poorly even when applied to Mr. Pearce’s particular quest. He has convinced himself that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic. There were, however, many flavors of Catholicism in that era, ranging from fanatics of the Guy Fawkes/Robert Persons stamp to saintly dissidents like Edmund Campion and Henry Garnet to loyal subjects like the court musician William Byrd to nominal believers whose adherence to Rome was a matter of heredity, fashion or contrariness, like Ben Jonson, Edward de Vere and countless country gentlemen. Mr. Pearce doesn’t pretend to know where on the spectrum the author of King Lear fell. How, then, can he claim a true understanding of his beliefs?

The last part of The Quest for Shakespeare is a reading of Lear that, Mr. Pearce avers, “shows how our knowledge of the playwright’s religious faith and philosophy permits us to read the plays through the eyes of the playwright himself [p. 10]”.

Really? One of the leading themes of the Pearce interpretation is that the play protests against the secularization of the English state under Elizabeth and James. What in the biographical factoids that Messrs. Wood and Pearce have assembled suggests that Shakespeare held the anachronistic view of the relationship between Church and State that Mr. Pearce attributes to him? Some Roman Catholics, like Father Persons and Cardinal Allen, favored a Catholic confessional state. Others, including many rank-and-file Catholics, thought that the Pope had provoked persecution by foolishly “deposing” Elizabeth from her throne. Neither of those positions is easily reconcilable with the “meta-historical” meaning that Mr. Pearce discovers. In lieu of “the playwright’s religious faith and philosophy”, we seem to have what a 21st Century Roman Catholic apologist would like them to have been.

Without pretending to possess a window into the author’s heart, I can’t help concluding that The Quest for Shakespeare is primarily a venture in wish fulfillment. William Shakespeare would indeed be an ornament to the 16th Century Catholic Church, but rational scholarship is a greater ornament still.

A Study in Paranoia

Bruce Ackerman, a Yale Law School professor, has posted an essay with the heated and ominous title, “Take Your Paws off the Presidency! – Does the Bush administration have a secret succession order that bypasses Congress?” He thinks that the answer is very likely “yes” and wants Congress to investigate. A host of lefty bloggers (check Google) have turned his tentative conclusion into a “fact”. Instapundit remarks that it is “pretty thinly sourced”. That is a generous way to put it. In actuality, the Ackerman piece is pure paranoia, an illustration of how Bush Derangement Syndrome has affected the minds of even mainstream leftists.

The chain of “reasoning” goes like this:

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side, opens with a shocker. Apparently sometime in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan issued a “secret executive order” that in the event of the death of the president and the vice president “established a means of re-creating the executive branch.” Reagan’s order violated the express terms of the Constitution and governing statutes.

Does a similar order exist today? We aren’t told. But we do know that Dick Cheney participated in the secret “doomsday” exercises under the Reagan order, and given his central role at present, it is imperative for Congress to find out.

Professor Ackerman concedes that the Administration’s directive on the continuity of the federal government conforms to the Constitution and the Presidential Succession Act, but the directive has a “secret appendix”. Maybe the appendix reverses the public document and “bypasses the speaker and the Senate president pro tempore in favor of an official in the executive branch”. What else explains the failure of the Administration to “take energetic steps to make much-needed revisions to the law of presidential succession inherited from the days of Harry Truman?” “It never occurred to me that Bush didn’t care how Congress responded to the problem because he had issued a secret executive order that took the law into his own hands.”

In the scenario I’m envisioning, Nancy Pelosi would [after a terrorist attack killed the President and the Vice President] assert her claim as acting president under existing statutes while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or some other executive official, would simultaneously assert her competing authority under the executive order.

When confronting these competing claims, it would be the military that would call the shots. As the Washington Post reported three years ago, the Pentagon has “devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country.” In acting on these plans, would the Joint Chiefs choose to recognize the constitutional authority of Pelosi as commander in chief? Or would they respond to the commands of the executive official presiding over the “doomsday” crisis center at some “undisclosed location”? To ask the question is to answer it: The whole point of these “doomsday” exercises is to assure instant obedience to the will of the executive on the other side of the hot line. We are staring at a clear and present danger to the republic.

Observe that Professor Ackerman has reached this alarm over “a clear and present danger to the republic” on the basis of an executive order that he has been told was issued by President Reagan over 20 years ago. Jane Mayer relies, he says, on “on James Mann’s earlier book Rise of the Vulcans”. He evidently has not looked at what Mr. Mann wrote. He could have found out without even getting a copy of the book, for the notion is summarized in an article in The Atlantic that is available on-line.

Mr. Mann gives no source, disclosed or anonymous, for the “secret executive order”, but let’s suppose arguendo that it existed. Its contents, as described, don’t match Professor Ackerman’s “Chinese whispers” version. In particular, there is no suggestion of bypassing the Presidential Succession Act. The situation envisioned is a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and the purported order’s provisions deal with dispersing Cabinet members so that someone in the legislated order of succession will remain alive and be able to carry on the government. A premise is that Congress has been mostly wiped out. Someone to whom Mr. Mann spoke expressed concern over what might occur if Congress reconvened and elected a new Speaker. Would he supersede the already acting President? That’s an interesting question, but it wouldn’t have been asked if the “order” had simply cut the legislative branch out of the succession.

In short,

• There is only thin evidence that President Reagan ever issued the “secret executive order” that is the foundation of Professor Ackerman’s conspiratorial construct.

• If the order existed, it did not contemplate overriding the Presidential Succession Act.

• There is no reason to think that the order, if it existed, remains in effect. (It’s interesting the Professor Ackerman takes it for granted that Bill Clinton would have been happy with this supposedly dangerous and unconstitutional scheme. How far Slick Willie has fallen in the eyes of his one-time admirers!)

• President Bush has issued a directive explicitly recognizing the order of succession designated by Congress.

• Medications are available to treat paranoia. I’m sure that the Yale Infirmary can meet Professor Ackerman’s needs.

Barry’s Words

Gregory S. McNeal:

In view of his non-existent record, Obama’s words must merit greater scrutiny because they are the only remaining measure voters have for what Obama believes. Those words have been woefully inconsistent over the totality of Obama’s short career, and are full of generalities like “hope” and “change.” In fact, the only consistent theme in his campaign is one policy change after another. All politicians modify their positions (including McCain), but usually those changes take place over a few years and as circumstances dictate. Obama’s changes on dozens of issues came about in just three and a half years and not for policy reasons, but for political gain.

But let’s be fair. At the core of Slick Barry’s shifting words about Iraq is an unchanging principle. A year ago, USA Today interviewed him and reported,

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday [July 19, 2007] the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

The danger of “a potential genocide in Iraq” has receded, but the candidate’s attitude toward America’s most important Arab ally remains unaltered. The Washington Post – sounding almost like a cog in the VRWC – summarizes:

The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome — that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves.

It is, nonetheless, a natural view for an isolationist left-winger, who knows little about the world outside Hyde Park and cares less. “Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

Thomas M. Disch, R.I.P.

I’m one of the great mass of fans because of whom Thomas Disch was, in John Clute’s words, “perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied, and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers”. My knowledge of his oeuvre is nugatory, so I didn’t feel at all qualified to say anything when he died (by his own hand, sadly, impelled by illness, personal troubles, financial straits and who knows what else?) on the Fourth of July. Happily, Joseph Bottum, who knew him well, has crafted an excellent brief obituary, from which I excerpt a few paragraphs:

[T]he truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius. There was nothing he couldn’t do with words. In 1980, he banged out a children’s tale called “The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances” that became a popular Disney film. In 1987, he penned a screenplay for Miami Vice: the weirdest episode of that television program, starring – if I remember correctly – the soul singer James Brown as an extraterrestrial and the gawky young Chris Rock as a hitman, with some inexplicable subplot involving peanut butter.

Just because he was who he was, he got away with things that few other writers have managed. Who else could have written comically lowbrow reviews for Entertainment Weekly, deliberately pretentious theater criticism for the Nation, wisecracking essays on art for The Weekly Standard, and formal verse for First Things?

He was best known for the science fiction he wrote early in his career, from The Genocides in 1965 through On Wings of Song in 1979. . . .

He wanted, however, to be known as a poet, even changing his byline from “Thomas M. Disch” to “Tom Disch” whenever he published his verse. His two volumes of essays about poets and poetry are the most lively of the last twenty years, and his own poetry was at its best in comic applications of fantastically difficult forms.

All in all, it was a fine career – one with which nearly any popular writer would be satisfied. And yet, it seems, in the final analysis, strangely lacking. Or lacking, at least, in the works one would expect from a talent as prodigious as Tom Disch’s. He once told me that part of the reason he quit writing science fiction was that, to deepen it into real art, “I would have to be like . . . Gene Wolfe and return to the Catholicism that I barely got away from when I was young – and I can’t do that, of course.”

There is one small inaccuracy here. After a long lapse, Disch returned to science fiction in the past few years, publishing a number of short stories (to be collected in The Wall of America (scheduled for October)) and two small novels, The Voyage of the Proteus: An Eyewitness Account of the End of the World and The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten. A posthumous novel, The Proteus Sails Again, has also been announced.

Something to Talk About

Thirty years ago, a Palestinian woman led a terrorist attack that killed 37 Israelis (including ten children), wounded 76, and ended only when she and her team were themselves gunned down at a police barricade. Their goal was to disrupt peace talks between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat. In that, they failed. The negotiations went forward and led to the Camp David accords and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Nonetheless, killing Jews was enough to turn Dalal Mughrabi into a Palestinian heroine, after whom numerous schools and other buildings have been named.

The Jerusalem Post now reports that the Palestinian Authority has asked Israel to turn over Mughrabi’s remains as part of the forthcoming prisoner exchange.

“We want to turn Dalal’s funeral into a national wedding, a major celebration,” the Fatah official [a close associate of PA “president” Mahmoud Abbas] said. “The operation she carried out off the shores of her hometown of Jaffa was heroic and exemplary. She will always be remembered as a symbol for the Palestinian women’s struggle.”

Next week Barack Obama plans to meet with “President” Abbas. Senator Obama is fond of lecturing Americans about our bad habits. Could he perhaps preach a few words to Abbas about the indecency of “a major celebration” in honor of a multiple murderess?

Quote of the Day

As the Dow slides further into bear market territory, the WSJ Political Diary (subscription-only but cheaper than you think) suggests that factors are at work other than the poor state of the housing market and the Fed’s timidity about defending the dollar:

Are global investors anticipating a Barack Obama victory in November and the economic storm that his high-tax and anti-trade policies would bring? . . .

Now some smart analysts have decided to quantify the relationship. They find a definite inverse correlation between Mr. Obama’s probability of winning the election (as measured by the Intrade political futures market) and the ups and downs of the stock market. Intrade provides a trading market where investors can bet on who will win the election – such betting markets have a record of performing better than polls in forecasting election outcomes. University of Michigan Economist Mark Perry was perhaps the first to uncover the relationship between this Obama index and asset values. Radio host and fund manager Jerry Bowyer notes on CNBC.com that investors would have good reason for wanting to flee U.S. markets ahead of an Obama victory. Increases in capital gains and dividend taxes alone will “mean very large additional levies on investors.” Mr. Bowyer adds: “Of course, this affects stock prices. It is ludicrous to suggest that adding taxes directly on an asset class would have no effect on its value.” . . .

The lesson here for investors is to keep an eye on the betting markets as a leading indicator as to the direction of stocks. “If the political winds keep blowing left,” says Dan Clifton of Strategas, an investment advisory firm, “the market is going to tank. In that case, I advise, get out of the market while you still can.”

Also worth noting is that the latest market declines coincide with Senator Obama’s blurring of his image. Maybe, as some posit, that’s a slick political move. Its extraordinary clumsiness hints, however, that the candidate is in fact as ill-prepared for higher office as his sparse record and patent unfamiliarity with public affairs portend. The prospect of a President as bumbling as Jimmy Carter, as uninformed as Warren G. Harding and as personally radical as George McGovern hardly bodes well for a Dow-friendly future.

Update (7/15/08): MSN.Money columnist Jon Markman has the same idea, expounded in considerably greater detail.

Creating a disincentive for the rich to get richer may sound good in an election year, but it doesn’t make for great industrial policy. Especially at a time of broad economic stagnation when home prices are still plunging, consumer spending is weakening, credit is in short supply and a weakened financial system is already repellent to all but the bravest entrepreneurs.

Right or wrong, Wall Street’s message is that a policy of stripping more money from people with proven records of creating wealth to give more to people who are shopping for Asian-made goods at dollar stores will only exacerbate the tenuous current economic climate, not help it.

Days of Whine and Poses

Obviously it was impolitic for Phil Gramm to say that the U.S. is “a nation of whiners” in the throes of a “mental recession”. He quickly tried to backtrack, and Senator McCain, whom he has been advising on economic matters, suggested that he has lost his chance for any post more consequential than ambassador to Belarus.

Eppur si muove. By the standards of our past (if not by those of modern Europe), “nation of whiners” is right on the mark. The confident, resilient, ingenious Americans, who seized independence from the world’s mightiest empire, settled a continent, forged the most prosperous nation in the history of mankind, assimilated tens of millions of immigrants, pivoted three times from peace to total war, and through all vicissitudes maintained and expanded their freedoms – are they not now an endangered species? The grumpy old sages who forecast that a prosperous republic would in the end succumb to moral and mental softness can’t be facilely refuted on the basis of current evidence.

The ultimate measure of whether a country can survive is whether it can endure a long war. If it can’t, it will eventually give way to its enemies. By that test, the United States is in serious trouble. If Iraq has been a traumatic challenge, will public opinion tolerate a serious war, one with casualties of several thousand a month, rather than a thousand a year? Will any future President dare risk such a confrontation?

Opponents of the Iraqi campaign pretend that they object to it only on cost-benefit grounds, but that is patently untrue of the vast majority. When the going was easy, the war was popular – even among liberal Democrats. But when the enemy kept fighting back, courage failed. Were it not for George W. Bush’s willingness to sacrifice popularity for the sake of victory, our country would have suffered the most humiliating military defeat in our history, and all the world’s mufsidun would today be ecstatically pummeling the Great Satan wherever and whenever they could.

This easy discouragement is what the old moralizers expected any time a people became too contented and comfortable. They would be unsurprised, too, by the panicky reaction to current economic conditions. To judge by polls, the country is in the worst shape since pollsters started asking the public to opine – worse, for instance, than in 1980, when the unemployment and inflation rates were 7.5 and 13.5 percent, respectively. Only those who take fat years for granted could be so nonplused by the present slowdown.

In the course of castigating Senator Gramm, the usually sensible Dean Barnett illustrates my point:

Contra Gramm, there are fundamental problems with the economy that have given the American people a serious case of agita. Many Americans have seen the value of their homes depreciate dramatically in recent times. They’ve also seen a huge increase in fuel prices. Both of these situations are beyond the typical American’s power to address. . . . The causes of the insecurity are real, and the diminishment of the typical American’s economic situation is equally real.

Contra Barnett, anyone who bought his current home more than about three years ago is likely still to have a substantial profit, the recent pullback is of concern only to homeowners who are overburdened with debt or who plan to exit from home ownership in the near future, falling housing costs are a boon to new buyers, and gasoline prices, in relation to family income, are not especially high. The “diminishment of the typical American’s economic situation” isn’t an illusion, but it is a modest decline from a high peak. A generation ago, it would have passed almost unnoticed. Now we hear cries about a second Great Depression.

Further evidence of a pampered existence is the fashion for hypersensitivity. The schoolyard chant has morphed to, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are really, really hurtful.” Men who have never faced genuine challenges – moan and groan about using “man” as a generic noun. Or declare that particular ethnic slurs are so unspeakably horrible that they cannot be mentioned even to condemn them and must be excised from works of literature. (I merely sigh at the earnest fellow who condemned the word “niggardly”; no doubt there were Victorian spinsters who wouldn’t let “factotum” escape their lips.) Pari passu the bounds of “inappropriate conduct” have expanded so far that one can hardly avoid violating the rules of the new etiquette. A legion of perpetually offended, constantly angry poseurs has replaced the brash, cheerful, thick-skinned Americano of yesteryear, and the alteration is not for the better.

It occurs to me that, though he never speaks of it, Senator Obama may see the state of the nation as I do. He proposes high taxes, high energy costs, expanded government regulation and an approach to terrorism that is bound to generate more terrorists. Perhaps he believes that the best way to restore the national character is to strip away the placid comfort we have been enjoying. Hasn’t his wife told us, “Barack Obama will require you to work”. Maybe to suffer, too, but it will be for our own good in the end.

Then, once the citizenry has reacquired the virtues of self-reliance, persistence, stoicism and hard work, it can vote out the saviors and get back to acting like Americans instead of European fainéants.

Alternatively, we could prove the moralizers wrong by keeping both our comforts and our virtues. While I’m not entirely sure how to accomplish that, it seems worth a try.