Eric The Blue

Hinderaker looks into his crystal ball

Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker is not impressed by Obama's high standing in the polls:

What is really significant, I think, is that Obama's popularity is muted even though the ill effects of his policies have yet to be felt.  Taxes haven't gone up yet; inflation hasn't hit; deficits have not yet proved (as they undoubtedly will) to greatly exceed Obama's estimates; years of slow growth and elevated unemployment due to statist policies are still in the future; and foreign policy setbacks are yet to come.

Let us file this work of prognostication away with such golden oldies as his takedown of Paul Krugman for worrying, in August of 2005, about an imaginary housing bubble:

It must be depressing to be Paul Krugman.  No matter how well the economy performs, Krugman's bitter vendetta against the Bush administration requires him to hunt for the black lining in a sky full of silvery clouds.  With the economy now booming, what can Krugman possibly have to complain about?  In today's column, titled That Hissing Sound, Krugman says there is a housing bubble, and it's about to burst. . . .

[Snip]

Krugman thinks the fact that James Glassman doesn't buy the bubble theory is evidence in its favor, but if you read Glassman's article on the subject, you'll see that he actually makes some of the same points that Krugman does. But he argues, persuasively in my view, that there is little reason to fear a catastrophic collapse in home prices.

Krugman will have to come up with something much better, I think, to cause many others to share his pessimism.

And here he is in July of 2003 dressing down the journalist Robert Scheer, who dared to regard with skepticism Team Bush's rationale for war in Iraq:

When all the facts are known about Iraq's weapons programs--which will be soon--extremist critics of the administration like Robert Scheer will look very foolish indeed.

Sidekick Scott Johnson called the post from which this characteristically oracular pronouncement was culled "one of Power Line's greatest hits."  The supercilious curl of the lip has yet to be straightened by these serial exercises in unconscious self satire.

Quick take on the news of the day

I don't think Specter's switch is cause for exhiliration.  The whole thing about sixty and a filibuster proof Senate is overrated--something for the talking heads to jabber about without mentioning how few votes break down along party lines.  Last week, it was very unlikely that Specter would ever be the sixtieth vote for some enlightened piece of legislation.  It's still unlikely.

Besides, the Republican party needs people like Specter more than the Democrats do.  There ought to be an opposition party, not just a remnant of madmen drawling through flecks of foam.

La Rochefoucauld explains

Today I shall not paraphrase La Rochefoucauld (as here) but, discounting the difficulties involved in translating an aphorist, quote him exactly: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it." 

If good writing expresses memorably large truths in few words then not many of all the sentences ever written are better than that one.  Thoreau, in Walden, wrote that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"--a contender for the same title and, in subject matter and acuity of vision, an obvious cousin. 

Who is not afflicted?  Reading Coetzee on Beckett in The New York Review, an unlikely victim swings into view:

One of the more unexpected of [Beckett's] literary enthusiams is for Samuel Johnson.  Struck by the "mad terrified face" in the portrait by James Barry, he comes up in 1936 with the idea of turning the story of Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale into a stage play.  It is not the great pontificator of Boswell's Life who engages him, as [his] letters make clear, but the man who struggled all his life against indolence and the black dog of depression.  In Beckett's version of events, Johnson takes up residence with the much younger Hester and her husband at a time when he is already impotent and therefore doomed to be a "Platonic gigolo"  in the menage a trois.  He suffers first the despair of "the lover with nothing to love with," then heartbreak when the husband dies and Hester goes off with another man.

[Snip]

In the confident public man who privately struggles against listlessness and depression, who sees no point in living yet cannot face annihilation, Beckett clearly detects a kindred spirit.

Netflix: "Sense and Sensibility"

Emma Thompson plays Elinor, who is Sense, and Kate Winslet is Marianne, or Sensibility, which here means something like: impulsive in love.  That is why she falls for Willoughby (Greg Wise) and, having paid the price, emerges somewhat more sensible herself, thereby preparing the way for a doubly happy ending when the obstacle preventing Elinor's wedding to Edward Ferrars, played by Hugh Grant, melts into thin air, too.  The dashing but untrustworthy Willoughby guides his steed to where he can view from a distance the celebration of the double wedding before riding off like the Indian in Minnesota's state seal.  The pleasure the movie vicariously affords was explained by La Rochefoucauld when, in the 17th century, he wrote (I'm paraphrasing): "It is not enough that we should succeed.  Our former lovers must fail."  Ang Lee directs what Jane Austen might have called a tolerable entertainment.

Power surge: Scott Johnson talks sense (no kidding)

Did Scott Johnson bump his head?  Here he is, talking sense to his fellow wingnuts on the Franken-Coleman election tussle here in Minnesota.  Either the atoms of his brain were somehow jostled into functioning order for a half hour, or we are living in the end times. 

I have written, here and here, that Coleman, with the lawyerly polysyllables stripped away, is asking Minnesota judges to overturn Minnesota election law, and that the success of this endeavor depends upon finding activist judges of the kind Republicans purport to abhor.  So I was not surprised when, on April 13, the three-judge panel hearing his election contest unanimously rejected his arguments and found that Franken is entitled to an election certificate.  The panel's findings of fact, conclusions of law, and order for judgment are available here.

I was surprised, however, to read Johnson saying practically the same thing as I.  Money quote:

The election-contest court has simply followed Minnesota’s absentee-ballot statute. Arguing, as Coleman has, that a panel of judges should disregard the Minnesota absentee-ballot statute seems like a losing proposition, at least to me.

Oh, sure, he drops in some Power Line boilerplate concerning Franken's "ugly" political views--if he didn't, no one would believe it was him, for his analysis of what actually has happened in the legal proceedings is a welcome corrective to what one reads, for example, on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. 

Coleman has now appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which will likewise decline to overturn Minnesota election law.  Will he then appeal to the federal courts?  On this question, there is in Johnson's column one more sensible, if somewhat oblique, passage:

Coleman contends that he comes out a loser only under a system that allows for Republican counties to apply a strict standard and Democratic counties to apply a lax standard to the counting of absentee ballots. He may be right, though the Franken campaign disagrees, and it has had an impressive read on the universe of rejected absentee ballots.

This is the last arrow in Coleman's quiver, and it rests on the idea that election officials in venues such as Hennepin County, home to a significant proportion of the Democratic vote in Minnesota, performed their duties with an eye toward boosting Franken's prospects, while their counterparts in outstate Minnesota strictly adhered to the law.  I consider that an outrageous imputation, an example of a reckless and paranoid style. There is an additional problem, which Johnson, by choosing "may,"  rather too gently indicates: the claim is unsupported by any evidence.

Torturing in good faith

Amy Davidson, writing at The New Yorker's News Desk blog here, captures the unreality of the world we glimpse while reading the Office of Legal Counsel's torture memos.  Our experience of this world is something like that of reading an essay written entirely in the truncated passive voice.  ("John hit the ball" is a sentence in the active voice; "The ball was hit by John" is in the passive voice; and "The ball was hit," wherein the subject of the sentence is elided, is an example of the truncated passive.)

Let us assume a decision had been made--(truncated passive)--to torture "high-value detainees."  Well, there is a problem.  Torture is against the law.  What to do about that?  You can start by not calling it torture but, say, "an alternative set of procedures" or "enhanced interrogation techniques."  You can add a layer of obfuscation by having the people who perform the hands-on torture seek the legal advice of lawyers who themselves work for the same people who, sitting in their offices in Washington, have decided to resort to an alternative set of procedures.  The lawyers naturally conclude that the alternative set of procedures is not torture.  So now, when you torture, you are "acting in good faith" since, after all, you sought, received, and acted upon the advice of legal counsel.  And regarding the lawyers who advised you?  For them, too, it seems it is a question of acting in good faith.  And, as Davidson points out, you cannot "look in a person's heart and know whether the deluded thing they said was something they actually believed."  The question of whether the lawyers acted in good faith comes down to whether they kept a straight face.  If you read the memos you know very well that they did indeed keep a straight face.

The prisoners were tortured--(truncated passive)--but it seems that no one is responsible for having tortured them.

The torture memos

Yesterday, the Obama administration released some of the torture memos written by Bush lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel.  They are available here.  The experience of reading them is difficult to describe.  You feel things you aren't used to feeling, and, though they are sickening documents, nausea commingles with a certain fascination.  Some part of the effect has to do with the application of cold, antiseptic prose to the subject of (for example) water boarding.  The footnotes are not to be ignored.  For example, Steven J. Bradbury, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, enumerates, in the memo of May 30, 2005, the "enhanced techniques"--"nudity, water dousing, sleep deprivation and food deprivation"--that "appear to bear some resemblance" to practices which, when employed by Egypt or Indonesia or Iran or Algeria, have been condemned by our State Department as instances of "torture."   The possible relevance of this "resemblance" is dismissed in a footnote that reads,

We recognize that as a matter of diplomacy, the United States may for various reasons call another nation to account for practices that may in some respects resemble conduct in which the United States might in some circumstances engage, covertly or otherwise.  Diplomatic relations with regard to foreign countries are not reliable evidence of United States executive practice and thus may be of only limited relevance here.

Soon thereafter Mr. Bradbury signs off, "Please let us know if we may be of further assistance."

Nonsense from the Archbishop on the conscience clause

I said, in my post on the fighting Catholics, that Archbishop Nienstedt's intemperate letter denouncing the University of Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to deliver this year's commencement address was not available on the Archdiocese's website.  And it's not.  But I don't want to give the impression that visitors to the website will be spared being subjected to all The Most Reverend Nienstedt's rantings.  For example, there is something called The Catholic Spirit, to which Nienstedt contributes a regular column, the most recent of which, on the Department of Health and Human Service's "conscience clause," is here.

The Archbishop appears to assume readers will not know what he is talking about and so is unrestrained by facts.  He writes,

This rule is one of the critically important legal protections currently offered to our nation’s health care workers — our doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others who care for the infirm and disabled.

The rule protects those who object to being involved in an abortion or other morally objectionable acts that are contrary to both their faith and their Hippocratic Oath....

Images from ultrasound show prospective parents the living movements of their child in the womb. No government should force a doctor or nurse to act in a way that they know to be morally wrong.

Nienstedt here is clearly encouraging Catholics to believe that the "conscience clause" is all that prevents doctors who object to abortion from being forced to perform them.   But the "conscience clause," which I hope President Obama is on the verge of repealing, is no older than the last days of the Bush administration.  I would like Nienstedt to provide the names of doctors who have been forced to participate in abortions.  Let us hear their stories.

He proceeds to paranoid expressions concerning how the repeal of the "conscience clause" would amount to the eclipse of democracy and a slide into "despotism."  Apparently it is not hard to quote other Catholic churchmen in support of such a view.  The Church would like to substitute its teachings for the laws of the United States.  

Why all the emphasis on the conscience of the health care worker and so little on the needs of patients?   It is a telling detail that patients appear in Nienstedt's column only as "the infirm and disabled"--helpless people in need of a guardian.  No rape victims who might want emergency contraception, no scared teenagers or older women trapped in bad marriages who might want an abortion.  Should part of caring for them involve information regarding the full range of available treatments?  Not according to the Archbishop, who wants these unfortunate people, if they happen to stumble upon a health care worker who shares his views on contraception and abortion, to remain ignorant of options they might otherwise exercise.  People are not independent agents but pawns of the Church's "infallible" paternalism.

For some enlightened commentary on the subject of the "conscience clause," check out this compendium of statements from religious organizations less benighted than the Catholic Church.  And here is a learned take from Stanley Fish.

An outsider looks at the fighting Catholics

Here is the text of a letter sent by the Archbishop of the Catholic Church's local franchise to the President of the University of Notre Dame, who has invited President Obama to deliver the commencement address there later this spring.

March 26, 2009

Rev. John Jenkins
President, University of Notre Dame
400 Main Building
Notre Dame, IN 46556

Dear Father Jenkins:

I have just learned that you, as President of the University of Notre Dame, have invited President Barack Obama to be the graduation commencement speaker at the University’s exercises on May 17, 2009. I was also informed that you will confer on the president an honorary doctor of laws degree, one of the highest honors bestowed by your institution.

I write to protest this egregious decision on your part. President Obama has been a pro-abortion legislator. He has indicated, especially since he took office, his deliberate disregard of the unborn by lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research, by promoting the FOCA agenda and by his open support for gay rights throughout this country.

It is a travesty that the University of Notre Dame, considered by many to be a Catholic University, should give its public support to such an anti-Catholic politician.

I hope that you are able to reconsider this decision. If not, please do not expect me to support your University in the future.

Sincerely yours,

The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt
Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis

If The Most Reverend Nienstedt were a judge instead of the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, you might say that his letter--what with "egregious" and "travesty" and the name-calling and the attempt at satire ("considered by many to be a Catholic university")-- exhibits a lack of judicial temperament.  Perhaps that is why his letter, which is all over the Web, was not released by the Archdiocese.  Someone who works there, though not the Archbishop, is sufficiently level-headed to recognize an embarrassment.

The appellation "anti-Catholic politician" made me wonder what American Catholics think about the subjects mentioned in The Most Reverend Nienstedt's letter.  Turns out that, according to both Gallup and The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the views of Catholics on abortion, stem cell research, and gay rights are virtually indistinguishable from the views of the general population.  For example, in the Gallup survey 40% of Catholics, and 41% of non-Catholics, indicated that abortion was "morally acceptable."  For medical research using stem cells obtained from human embryos, the comparable figures were 63% (Catholics) and 62% (non-Catholics); on homosexual relations, 54% of Catholics, but just 45% of non-Catholics, have no moral objection.

And here's a shocker on a subject The Most Reverend Nienstedt did not take up:  Catholics are somewhat more likely than the general population to give their imprimatur to gambling.

Everyone knows the Catholic Church has a problem with pedophile priests.  I was unaware of the extent to which the Church is threatened by Catholics who are, if we employ the logic and diction of The Most Reverend Nienstedt, anti-Catholic.  Surely there must be a Bible passage that advises against condemning others when your own imperfections may be detected by the most casual of auditors.

Netflix: "Howards End"

Milton's life, as every English major knows, divides into three periods: a youthful apprenticeship, ending with Lycidas; pamphleteering on behalf of the Parliamentary and Puritan causes, ending with the Restoration; and, finally, blindness and the composition of the famous epic poems, ending with death.  Maybe that is not how it seemed to him while he was living it, but he is now a character in literary history, and that is what he gets.

I thought of Milton's biography while watching with Amanda Howards End (1992), our latest Netflix rental.  It's the Merchant-Ivory version of E. M. Forster's novel of the same title in which the characters are all meant to represent their class: lower-middle, up-and-coming, and crusty rich.    Given these choices, who wouldn't want up-and-coming?  Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter, Merchant & Ivory call on you! 

Possibly, from 30,000 feet, everything breaks into threes.  The plot, similarly tidy, involves an altered will and poetic justice.  The novel is Forster's, the screenplay is Ruth Prawer Jhablava's, the technique is O. Henry's, and the Oscars go to Thompson and Vanessa Redgrave (whose character writes the codicil that gets tossed into the fire).  It takes 140 minutes for the up-and-comers to get what they deserve.  England, hooray!

Local weather

Every time it's colder than usual, or snows before December or after March, you can count on Power Line Philosopher John Hinderaker to note that the local weather has once again confounded all the scientists who claim the earth is warming.  Saturday night, there was a significant snow fall in the south metro of Minneapolis, where Hinderaker lives, and his predictable comment Sunday morning was esthetically enhanced by a photograph of the snowy landscape in his neighborhood.  I want to call attention, though, to his claim, below the nice picture, that "the earth's climate has been cooling for the last decade."

What is he talking about?  He offers no evidence, but my guess is he's alluding to the fact that, according to the World Meterorological Organization, the hottest year on record is 1998.  So for ten years in a row we haven't broken the record.  Chris Mooney, replying to George Will, who in a column made the same claim as Hinderaker, points out that by this kind of logic "global cooling sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive."  He adds that at least seven of the ten hottest years on record have occurred in the 2000s. 

My mind is on baseball today and it occurs to me that, in the world according to John Hinderaker, Joe DiMaggio was mired in a slump at the conclusion of game 57.  His batting average kept sinking through about five straight at-bats!

In the news: signs of decline

Amanda and I subscribe to the local daily, the Minneaplis Star Tribune, only for the Saturday and Sunday editions.  On weekdays I read it at work.  I've been reading the paper since I was able to read anything and it is not hard to detect decline.

In today's edition, the game stories for the national semi-finals of the NCAA men's basketball tournament are by Arthur Staple, of Newsday, and Eddie Pells, of the Associated Press.  Besides the box scores, that is all there is.  The Final Four is being contested in Detroit, about a one-hour plane ride away.

The news sections, too, are filled with wire-service stories.  And advertising.  The editorial pages are interesting mainly to students of abnormal psychology.  No one reads the newspaper's unsigned editorials.  I think the last one I did endorsed Norm Coleman for US Senate.

On Sunday, the editorial section is four pages (counting advertising) instead of the usual two and calls attention to a longer, lead commentary with tall headlines, art work, and large font for the portion of the article that fits on page one.  Today's specimen is by David Lebedoff, a local attorney who has published a few books, most recently The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War.  His subject for the commentary is Orwell, how he saw that modern man, having sloughed off belief in heaven and hell, and with them all moral restraint, no longer treats his fellows with strategic decency.  He is subject then to self-seeking greed and the financial collapse is the inevitable result.  The book or essay in which Orwell works this all out is not named.  In fact no work of Orwell is mentioned.  Twelve of his words are quoted.  Here is a fair sampling of Lebedoff's words:

If you only go around once, then the main thing is to have fun.  If you start by admitting that from cradle to tomb it isn't that long of a stay, then life is a cabaret, old chum, and so, by the way, is Wall Street. . . .

Back to our wretched economy.  We are in this sorry state because those managing our production and our wealth are in many cases free from moral restraint.  There have always been some crooks and sharpies in the world, but this is not about them.  The greater problem is that the ubiquitous disbelief in an afterlife has altered the behavior of vast numbers of otherwise decent managers.

At least you get grocery coupons.

Popes and other pious prattlers

Of all the pious prattlers in these United States, is any more annoying than Michael Gerson?  Maybe it only seems that way on account of the megaphone he has at The Washington Post.  These poor, trod-upon Christians.  The heathens running America are keeping them from getting their message out.  It is rare that you have to listen to one but the Post has made sure we all know what's on Gerson's mind.

Most recently, the Catholics: how Obama won their votes but is now double-crossing them on abortion.  Where to begin?  Gerson, anticipating the objection that Obama was a pro-choice candidate who is now governing as one, argues lamely that--it's quite disappointing to see him govern as one.  It seems a lot of Catholics are less surprised than Gerson, for the polling figures he breathlessly cites do not appear to be particularly alarming to Obama's prospects.  A full 41% of white, non-Hispanic Catholics disapprove of his job performance!  I guess that means that 59% of white, non-Hispanic Catholics do not disapprove.  No wonder Gerson feels obliged to add, "It could get much worse."  Indeed it could!

Personally, I think it would be a good sign for Obama if his approval rating among Catholics were somewhat lower.  What is he doing that so many of them like?  The Church's leaders--I'm talking about the superannuated virgins in robes and funny hats--are, like Gerson himself, afflicted with a preening self-assuredness on moral questions.  They know, and you had better listen, because they stand with God.  To an outsider it appears that standing with God means never having to worry about the consequences of actions.  Thus the pope blithely re-condemns condoms.  That their use can save lives and lighten the load of suffering in the world is immaterial.  He insists upon an impossible ideal.  People will die but the Church will remain unsullied by the bleeding world.  It sounds best in Latin.

Gerson is reprehensible but check out the comments below his column.  Yech! 

Best laid plans

Scanning my Word files at work, I noticed a forgotten document, "Reading LIst," that I had started some months ago in order to remind myself of books, or authors, I"d like to read.

Lady Luck by Warren Weaver
Balzac
Edm. Wilson
Schopenhauer
Russell's History of Western Philosophy
Hughes on Goya; also, his memoir
The Red and the Black
Nietzsche
Kaufmann on Nietzsche
The Selfish Gene
The Merchant of Venice
Antony and Cleopatra
Robt. Sapolsky

I've since read The Selfish Gene, Lady Luck, and the 900-page Library of America volume devoted to Edmund Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1930s & 40s--basically, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, and Classics and Commercials.  So I haven't altogether failed to follow through.  I find now that my interest in most of the remaining items has waned.  When I finally make it to the end of Righteous Victims, I mean to tackle Dickens--Bleak House, and then, possibly, Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit.  I also would like to reread the principal novels of Dreiser, all of which--Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, An American Tragedy, and The Financier--are of Dickensian heft.  I have a dim idea that Dreiser's stock is down, but I love him, and so did Saul Bellow, who knows something about novels.  Speaking of Bellow, I'd like to read several of his novels again, too.  Hell, why not Henry Adams's nine-volume History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Proust, and the late novels of Henry James?

It's a good thing that I don't get to most of what I intend, for if I did Amanda would divorce my sorry bookish ass.