The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=punim
1. punim
A yiddish word for face, or more specifically a cute face.
Oy, look at the punim on that one!
;D
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: jmmgallagher on February 17, 2009, 08:52:19 pm ---
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=punim
1. punim
A yiddish word for face, or more specifically a cute face.
Oy, look at the punim on that one!
;D
--- End quote ---
Punim, indeed! ;D
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Also poster in the 'Obama Art' thread--
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,30120.260.html
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/02/23/090223sh_shouts_mccall
Our President’s New BlackBerry
by Bruce McCall
February 23, 2009
1. Oath-of-Office Interactive Memory Game.
2. Press to delete announcements of new Iraq self-government start date.
3. Press to play prerecorded “Love to, but this term’s no good” response to Senator McCain lunch request.
4. Tap to get today’s White Sox 2009 astrological chart.
5. Push for hourly update on Michelle clothing expenditures.
6. Alarm flashes if Malia and Sasha are jumping on Lincoln’s bed.
7. Push to get Rahm Emanuel’s Wisecrack of the Day.
8. Push to set automatic “Line no longer in service” response to incoming Hillary calls.
9. Press to activate simulated busy signal on incoming Caroline Kennedy calls.
10. Push to reset automatic cigarette-break reminder buzzer.
11. Tap once to activate C.I.A. briefing. Tap twice to activate C.I.A.-briefing lie detector.
12. Press to activate simulated nuclear alert ten minutes after Vice-President Biden enters Oval Office.
13. Automatic alert beeps if Al Gore is within one mile of White House.
14. Press to divert incoming Bill calls to Hillary’s number.
15. Press for Mensa chat line.
16. Mute button for twenty-four-hour live CongressCam.
17. Press for Illinois Attorney General’s office Crisis Hot Line.
18. Push once to add another ten billion dollars to bailout plan.
19. Press to refresh current Cabinet roster.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Also poster in the 'Obama Art' thread--
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,30120.260.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_mayer
A Reporter at Large
The Hard Cases
Will Obama institute a new kind of preventive detention for terrorist suspects?
by Jane Mayer
February 23, 2009
“We don’t own the problem,” Greg Craig,
the White House counsel, says.
“But we’ll be held accountable for
how we handle this.”
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2009/02/david-brooks-is.html
Semi-regular thoughts on foreign affairs, politics, and books, from George Packer.
February 24, 2009
Conservatives Take on Obama
David Brooks is going to be one of the best critics the Obama Administration will have, because his reservations and attacks are based on a world view that’s not only viable and thoughtful but almost always proved right: the view that we human beings overrate our ability to solve problems through the application of reason. The return of liberals to power has driven Brooks back down to his philosophical roots in Burkean caution toward rapid change based on abstract principles (he had lost touch with this inner self during the early Bush years, especially around the invasion of Iraq). Today’s column http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1 is just one of many recent examples, prompted by the fact that the Obama White House is taking on massive challenges in the economy, housing, banking, health care, energy, and education—all at once. It is, Brooks writes, “the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes.” Obama should do what Bush never did and make sure he talks to a critic like Brooks at least once every few months.
In one sense, the Administration is bound to disappoint, and Brooks’s “epistemological skepticism” is bound to be vindicated. If the test for Obama is whether “highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change,” what are the chances that in a year or two Brooks will have to admit he was wrong? History never produces such clear outcomes. The results of government attempts to deal with huge systemic crises, like the ones we face today, are always dissatisfying, especially in the short-term, and leave most of the old problems unsolved. Brooks’s standard is so high that it sets liberalism up for certain failure.
Here’s the test Brooks should set: will Obama’s efforts lead to worse than the alternatives? Will they be worse than his predecessor’s? The conservative approach to economic and social policy, as refined to ideological purity under Bush, is to get government out of the way, trust free markets, and let chronic problems fester until they turn into disasters. The results are all around us (one example among hundreds: the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall Street). Brooks pits a rigid, abstraction-loving liberalism against a wise, experience-loving conservatism. But recent American history has shown the truth to be closer to the opposite. We are where we are because the ruling conservative ideology of the past few decades refused to face facts, like the effect of private insurance on health-care costs, or the effect of deregulation on investment banking. Facts drove the Republicans out of power. And judging from their response to Obama’s first month in office, facts are very hard things to face in politics.
Obama isn’t trying to remake America’s economy and society out of ideological hubris. He’s initiating sweeping changes because he inherited a set of interrelated emergencies that require swift, decisive action. There’s an instructive example for both Brooks and Obama’s supporters to bear in mind: Herbert Hoover became President with the sterling reputation of a practical man, an engineer and businessman who had succeeded at everything in his life. When the Depression began, he took what he assumed to be practical steps to ameliorate it. But, as Richard Hofstadter observed in The American Political Tradition, “What ruined Hoover’s public career was not a sudden failure of personal capacity but the collapse of the world that had produced him and shaped his philosophy…Because, on his postulates, his program should have been successful, he went on talking as though it were, and the less his ideas worked, the more defiantly he advocated them.”
This is an apt description of the current attitude of John McCain, Eric Cantor, and Bobby Jindal. Like Hoover, they cannot fathom the failure of their philosophy, so they cling to it and insist that it has all the answers while the country drowns. Conservatism, pace Brooks, is no more likely to be clear-eyed and critical-minded than liberalism. Any set of ideas can harden into ideological certainty, especially when it’s been in power for a long time. Obama’s emphasis on government intervention could become as calcified and resistant to facts as the Republican Party’s free-market conservatism is now. If or when it does, Obama will need to hear from Brooks all the more. But for the moment, Obama is necessarily experimenting in the face of disaster much like the President who followed Hoover.
Unfortunately, Brooks’s fair-minded critique is rare on the right. Most conservative critics of Obama’s first month are not hoping to be proved wrong, as Brooks says he is. Far from it: their dice were loaded from the start. Charles Krauthammer, Karl Rove, Peter Wehner, and others have already concluded that Obama is a failure, even as they pretend to reserve final judgment. Given the amount of wrongheadedness and damage pundits like these have inflicted on the country in its recent history, the decent thing for them to have done is say nothing for at least six months. They might even have learned something.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version