Panic in Year Zero Panic in Year Zero Humorous and astute observations about politics, culture, sports, and daily life, updated daily by a professional writer. Articles
Start the Celebration Without Me
2008-01-08 14:28:00 Considering that less than one half of one percent of the population has registered an official vote in the 2008 presidential election, America sure is in a self-congratulatory mood. Barack Obama's triumph over John Edwards and Hillary Clinton in predominantly white Iowa has motivated more than one victory lap from pundits on both the left and right. Aside from ignoring the fact that Jesse Jackson won a handful of primaries and caucuses in 1988 (including a few Southern states and Michigan), the TV blabbers celebrating our country's defeat of racism have allowed a nasty side to emerge, both from some of the gasbag commentators themselves and from some of their less enlightened fans.By now, all of you have probably read or heard somebody make the facile contrast between Senator Obama and the Reverends Jackson and Al Sharpton. See, they tell us, we don't judge by the color of the skin, as Dr. King once said (having no idea how later generations would pervert his words), but by the ... More About: Celebration , Start
Days of Rage, Years of Backlash
2008-01-07 15:08:00 I'm thinking maybe I should extend my comments from yesterday, because I don't want to leave the wrong impression. The culture wars that began during the 1960s have been, at least over the past thirty years, largely one-sided. The three important battles of the hippie era—civil rights, women's rights, Vietnam—were all won by the left. Winners typically move on; losers never do.Defeat and humiliation are powerful emotional forces, and these forces are often spent in destructive ways. Hitler's terrible rise to power came, at least in part, as a result of Germany's humbling failure in World War I. After the Second World War, the new German government wisely proscribed the free speech rights of those who wished to celebrate or even rehabilitate the Third Reich. This remains an extreme case, of course, and censorship is rarely the answer to what ails a defeated nation, but after two catastrophic wars in less than half a century, nobody wanted to face the risk.Certainly, th... More About: Rage , Days , Years , Backlash
They Hate You. They Really Hate You.
2008-01-06 16:03:00 Two of the bigger headlines coming out of the Iowa Democratic Caucuses involved the youth vote and how it divided between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The first was that young Iowans attended the caucuses in record numbers, most throwing their support behind the 46-year old Obama. The second was that this result held up across gender lines, with Clinton finishing behind Obama among both men and women younger than forty. Given a choice between gender and generational solidarity, the young women of the Hawkeye State opted for the latter, which is terrible news for Senator Clinton as she attempts to answer Obama's Iowa victory with a New Hampshire comeback.There is, however, another story here that may transcend the temporary issues and candidates of the 2008 presidential election. Generation gaps existed long before the term was actually invented some forty or so years ago. But rarely have they been as one-sidedly acrimonious as they are today.During the 1960s, the hippies hated... More About: Hate , Hate You
Dragging Out the Dead Horse for Another Beating
2008-01-05 15:17:00 In this brief moment between elections, as candidate momentum works its voodoo magic on a new set of voters, I'd like to pause to expand on something I briefly addressed in my Thursday post. It is, of course, easy to get caught up in the bizarre American system of choosing presidents. Politics is sometimes dismissed as show business for ugly people, but what it really is is an athletic competition for the poorly coordinated. It's about winning and losing, staying ahead and falling behind, beating your opponent and trying to win the championship. In that sense, one can enjoy an exciting primary season the same way he or she can savor a good pennant race in baseball. It's fun to follow the standings as each week passes, choose a favorite candidate, and then root, root, root for the home team.There is, however, one rather obvious and staggering distinction between baseball and presidential politics. For winning the 2000 World Series, the New York Yankees received a big shiny trophy.... More About: Dead , Horse , Beating
Caucus Schmaucus
2008-01-04 14:09:00 As expected, Barack Obama is the big story coming out of Iowa. While Hillary Clinton may be far from finished, she received two pieces of very bad news last night. First, if Iowa is any indication (and that is a bigger "if" than most pundits will admit), the former First Lady will not be able to count on the women's vote nearly as much as expected. Obama held his own with female caucus goers, and actually beat Clinton soundly among women younger than forty. Unless Hillary can generate significantly greater gender solidarity over the next few weeks, she will, very simply, find herself without a base and, therefore, in deep trouble. Second, young people, who represent a large part of Barack Obama's core constituency, turned out in record numbers for the Iowa caucuses. Again, this may or may not be the start of a trend, but if young Americans flock to the polls in New Hampshire and beyond, Clinton will likely remain a U.S. Senator for at least another four years.With the New Hampshir... More About: Caucus
Another Year in Hawkeye Hell
2008-01-03 14:58:00 So here we go again. A small subset (caucus goers) of a small subset (Iowans) of the American people are about to decide the fates of several candidates and significantly alter the trajectories of a few others. By this time tomorrow, we'll have our winners, our losers, and our big surprisers. Then we'll do it all over again next Tuesday in New Hampshire, after which the roster of viable candidacies will have shrunk still further.I have already complained about the ridiculousness of making an unrepresentative state such as Iowa so prominent in our presidential selection process. I have similarly registered my objections to the use of a voting method that is so arcane and time consuming that it discourages all but the most frenzied political geeks from participating. This is simply not the way anyone with any sense would design a presidential campaign, even during years in which the stakes were relatively low. But to tolerate such a system in what may be the most important ele... More About: Hell , Year
Live Free or Die
2008-01-02 14:41:00 The New Year typically brings with it a bushel of new state laws, and 2008 is no exception. Drivers in Washington State, for example, may now be fined for text messaging while driving a vehicle. Californians may no longer fire a BB gun in a "grossly negligent manner". From Hawaii, a state that still bristles when U.S. citizens arrive expecting to clear customs, comes word that the government will "[a]ppoint an aha kiole advisory committee to prepare recommendations in the creation of the aha moku council for indigenous resource management practices". I have no idea what this means. Finally, the ever-thoughtful Texas legislature has adopted a requirement that patrons of topless clubs pay the state a five dollar entrance fee (referred to by local wags as a "pole tax") to help offset funding for programs dealing with sexual assault prevention. The nudie bars are appealing…er, going to court to challenge the law.And in a measure passed with so little national fanfare that I knew nothi... More About: Free , Live
Welcome to 2008: Enter at Your Own Risk
2008-01-01 16:34:00 Well, here we are at last in 2008 . We've been talking about the presidential campaign so long that it feels like we turned the calendar ages ago. But no such luck. We still have eleven months of obfuscating, catcalling, and mudslinging ahead of us. The good news, however, is that we are less than a month away from leaving six or so of the current set of candidates on the scrap heap.Mike Huckabee, as I have observed previously, is likely to be one of them. The media that created him is busy dismantling his bid for the White House interview by painful interview. How, after all, can a man be president if he is unaware that Pakistan is to the east, and not the west, of Afghanistan? While there is certainly some validity in not wishing to revisit the flaws of our callow and ignorant incumbent, the inability to master an atlas is not George W. Bush's most troubling problem. Nor is it Mr. Huckabee's, at least not so long as the former Arkansas governor rejects the nineteenth century sci... More About: Risk , Enter
President Bloomberg?
2007-12-31 15:58:00 According to the New York Times, Michael Bloomberg , Democratic-turned-Republican-turned-Indep endent mayor of Gotham, is moving closer to declaring for president of the United States. That would, of course, raise to two the number of candidates whose sole experience in government consists of overseeing five small, overpopulated boroughs wedged in between New Jersey and Connecticut. Aside from trade junkets and the like, about the only time New York City's mayor deals with anything resembling foreign policy is when he travels north of Dutchess County and attempts to negotiate more financial aid from rural upstate legislators. I know Sinatra said that if you could make it in Manhattan you could make it anywhere, but really, guys, that was just a song. Mayors are supposed to run for governor; governors are supposed to run for president.Still, Mayor Bloomberg does have an ego, a title, and several billion dollars, and that alone gives him more credibility than, say, the governor of New ... More About: President , Berg
Bipartisanship and Other Bad Ideas
2007-12-30 15:20:00 From David Broder comes word that a gaggle of political old timers has collected with the express purpose of agitating for bipartisanship and exploring the possibility of supporting a third-party presidential candidacy in 2008. This who's who of has-beens is evidently led by David Boren, an undistinguished oil state senator who, upon retirement, was handed the presidency of an undistinguished state university. On January 7, a team of 1980s all stars will make their way to Boren's new playground, the University of Oklahoma, where they will reminisce about the era of good feelings that was the Reagan years and throw what little remaining weight they have into the political mix.That a conference on political unity will take place in a state that has recently elected such unhinged extremists as James Inhofe and Tom Coburn to the U.S. Senate is only the beginning of our wonderment. The cast of characters evokes still more head-scratching. Evidently, we will soon be receiving lectures o... More About: Ideas
Get Me Rewrite!
2007-12-29 15:27:00 Aside from the obvious insensitivity, there is another reason why only fools speculate about the domestic significance of a foreign tragedy in its immediate aftermath. That would be the enormous likelihood of getting it all embarrassingly wrong.In this case, the fools, known as political pundits, have dominated the airwaves in the forty-eight hours since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. They have assured us in tones of unshakable confidence that the current unrest in Pakistan will benefit Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain, the three candidates with the greatest degree of foreign policy experience. They have insisted that Iowans and New Hampshirites, the only people in the republic who currently matter, are now tasked with reassessing the presidential race for what must be at least the tenth time in the last six months.First, please allow me to digress. Precisely what foreign policy experience do the two senators and the former mayor possess? Clinton traveled the gl...
A Pakistani Tragedy
2007-12-28 15:09:00 Watching the coverage yesterday of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, it might be easy to forget that this was, first and foremost, something that happened to Pakistan and its people. From CNN to Fox News to MSNBC, the overwhelming majority of the focus centered on how the former prime minister's death would affect the United States and American interests. Perhaps the crassest reaction, which occurred within minutes of the first terrible reports from Rawalpindi, involved speculation about the impact of the killing on the standing of the U.S. presidential candidates just one week before the Iowa caucuses.Pakistan is a complicated place, and Benazir Bhutto was a complicated woman. Daughter of her country's most important and controversial leader of the 1970s, she took control of her father's political party (sometimes in exile) after the elder Bhutto's 1979 execution on charges of plotting the killing of a political opponent. She eventually won election twice as prime minister i... More About: Tragedy , Pakistani
...And Let God Sort Them Out
2007-12-27 15:11:00 December is, as always, the great burial ground for stories of significant national import. People gear up for the holiday season, they travel to visit relatives, they deal with a houseful of children freed from school for three glorious—or not so glorious—weeks. When such a December falls just a month before the first presidential primaries, what little attention is paid to the news will be overwhelmed by broadcasts with such unlikely datelines and Sioux City and North Conway (Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively, for those who have truly been hibernating).Regardless, life and death go on, even as we storm the malls and beg Amazon.com for last-minute overnight shipping. One underreported December story that clearly does involve life and death was the recent decision in New Jersey to repeal capital punishment, making Tony Soprano's home state the first to outlaw government executions in over three dozen years. This action, while dramatic, was also primarily symbolic, given ... More About: Sort
Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News
2007-12-26 15:22:00 If you were, like most of us, preoccupied with holiday preparations this past week, you may have missed the news that Rudy Giuliani spent last Wednesday night in a hospital in St. Louis. The immediate word was that the former New York mayor suffered from flu-like symptoms, a slightly odd locution that drew the immediate attention of the press corps. Was it a high fever, early-stage pneumonia, stomach illness? Or, perhaps, did Giuliani's handlers use the influenza story to cover up something bigger, perhaps a recurrence of hizzoner's cancer? The fact that Giuliani emerged from the hospital the next day appearing flu-free only intensified the questioning.Presently, the former mayor gave an interview to George Stephanopoulos, which was featured on the latter's Sunday morning gabfest. According to Giuliani, a bad headache, made worse by the pressurization of his airplane cabin, had forced him to order a return to Missouri, at which time he checked into the Barnes Jewish Hospital. Cou... More About: News , The News , Give , Doctor
A Christmas Carol
2007-12-25 14:15:00 Jennifer was my sixth grade girlfriend, a bright-eyed brunette with the sweetest smile I had ever seen. We talked incessantly on the playground, passed notes in class, and once, during a special school assembly, danced to "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies. As young as we were, our relationship probably fell at least one step short of puppy love, but "dog fetus love" doesn't have much of a ring to it, so there you go.Christmas time was the best. We both belonged to the school choir, which allowed us time out of the classroom to practice the usual collection of non-challenging songs designed to test our meager pre-teen harmonies. With no seating chart to separate us, Jennifer and I could sit next to one other, holding hands beneath the long cafeteria tables. Our song was "The Twelve Days of Christmas", because it was endless and gave us ten glorious minutes of uninterrupted physical contact.Then one day in early December, I floated into the cafeteria at the appointed time and found Jennife... More About: Carol , A Christmas Carol , Christmas Carol
The Decline and Fall of Mitt Romney
2007-12-24 15:21:00 As late as Thanksgiving, I was convinced not only that Mitt Romney would win the Republican presidential nomination, but that he also stood a reasonably good chance of beating the Democrats in the general election. Since then, the former Massachusetts governor has done everything in his power to prove me wrong. As we reach Christmas Day, 2007, Romney faces the growing prospect of losing both the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary. Should that occur, he will almost certainly join his dad, who failed in 1968, as yet another footnote in the annals of promising campaigns that fizzled long before the swallows returned to Capistrano.Given that some of you actually thought that Fred Thompson was going to win, I really shouldn't have to defend myself, but I will anyway. Here's what I figured: John McCain would get pummeled on the immigration issue. Check. Rudy Giuliani would find himself, at long last, unable to outrun the shadow of his own myriad scandals. Check. Thompson's muc... More About: Fall
Hanks for the Memories
2007-12-23 15:14:00 I am not a big movie fan. Very few motion pictures, regardless of the hype, compel me to surrender ten dollars to witness some director's faux-artistic vision. It's not a matter of snobbery; live theater leaves me just as cold, as do opera and the philharmonic. I like to think of myself as having a restless mind, but perhaps I suffer from that adult-onset A.D.D. that I keep hearing about on television. In any event, I have managed to avoid every film that generated buzz in 2007.The buzz itself, however, cannot be escaped. Reading material in my doctor's waiting room is spare, and I periodically find myself perusing Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine during the cold and flu season. The only alternative is Reader's Digest, which remains little more than an imbecile's guide to life, filled with lame homespun humor and trite Middle American homilies. Thus, despite my lack of interest in the latest cinematic achievement, I inevitably learn which movies are hot and which stars ... More About: Memories
The U.S. and Russia: A Tale of Two Presidents
More articles from this author:2007-12-22 20:29:00 Accompanied by blaring trumpets and a choir of schoolboys, Time Magazine has announced its Person of the Year for 2007. I'm not sure when this turned from a curiosity into an event, but it apparently now merits its own prime time television special. Because it was a slow year and Al Gore simply cannot be allowed to win everything, the honor, such as it is, went to Vladimir Putin, the increasingly autocratic Russia n president.Since Hitler was once named Man of the Year, the bar is not set especially high. Hell, last year, You won it. But Putin's selection does reflect his country's first significant rise up the ladder of scariness since Boris Yeltsin faced down a Communist coup in 1991 and followed up that accomplishment by assiduously poisoning his liver for the next decade. By the time Big Boris was done dancing and slurring his way into legend, Russia seemed so harmless that practically nobody noticed that Yeltsin's hand-picked successor had spent most of his pre-political lif... More About: Presidents , Tale 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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