Phone Booth--That's the Name

Yglesias reports that McCain says he "hates the bloggers" (link). Y, watching the video, observes: "It seems that old people find this anti-blogger campaigning to be worthy of tepid laughter."

Ah, the most despised minority: elderly bloggers. We could meet in one of those stand-up coffins on street corners that people used to use for making telephone calls.

Meanwhile, there's this that I lift as is from Laudator Temporis Acti (link):

An Old Man and His Books

Lu Yu (1125-1209), The Wind and the Rain (tr. Pai Chwen-yu):

Though I am seventy, I do not want to leave my books:
I fear that only death will be able to snatch me away from them.
I wake and poke at the lamp beneath my window,
And so I pass through this night of wind and rain.

Oh, to be 70 again...

There, That Gets It Nicely

Keep this one in mind (link):

Rudy's lead is perfectly consistent with only a tiny number of actual "values voters" actually deciding that perpetual war is more important to them than banning abortion of persecuting gays and lesbians.

Italics added. Ought to be a good index of how the battle goes over the next few months.

Hillary Clinton, Hélas!

Matt Yglesias huffs at Jon Chait and David Broder as they ponder the need for a third-party presidential candidate link . "It makes you think,” (sound effect: dripping irony).

if only, instead of the party that's been governing the country for the past six years, there was some kind of second major party whose elected officials supported substantial policy shifts on Iraq, immigration, energy, and health care. Wouldn't that be great? It could almost make this Bloomberg business irrelevant.

I’m sympathetic with what he says here, but I don’t think he grasps how frustrated people like, well, me, are with the Democratic roster. Stipulated that it’s light-years less God-awful than the other lot. Stipulated that politics is the art of compromise and that we never get exactly what we want. And for sure I don’t want another Ralph Nader (come to think of it, I never much wanted the first one).

Does anyone really—I mean really, really—think that if we chose presidents by merit, we’d end up with any one of this lot? Or indeed anyone else from a process that seems so structurally corrupted that it can’t begin to churn up the kind of candidates we so badly need? They asked André Gide, who was the best French novelist? --“Victor Hugo, hélas!” I suppose I’ll vote for Hillary, holding—not my nose, precisely, but surely my breath, hoping against experience and expectation that she won’t annoy me quite as much as I expect her to do.

Roosevelt's Gimpy Legs

Matthew Yglesias is raggin’ on Jonah Goldberg about pictures of FDR and his bum legs. Jonah says (link):

There were more than 35,000 pictures of FDR taken. Two show him in a wheelchair. Why? Because the press almost unanimously agreed that — despite the huge news value — depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort. The few dissenting photographers from that consensus were routinely blocked or deliberately jostled by the senior photographers so as to shield FDR from embarrassment and the public from its "right to know."

Matt says (link):

Okay, this is a subject I know virtually nothing about. I do, however, know that FDR became president in 1933 after winning the 1932 election. The war in Europe didn't begin until 1939, and the United States didn't enter the war until 1941. Under the circumstances, that "depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort" can't be the primary reason nobody ever did it.

Since I am older than Matt and Jonah cumulatively, I feel entitled to play the age card here again. I’ll stipulate that 1939>1932, but I think Matt may miss the point. I’m pretty sure I learned about Roosevelt’s gimpy legs while I was at Camp Mi-Te-Na on Half Moon Lake in Alton, NH. That would have been about 1944—i.e., smack in the middle of the war. I was told that they would hide his wheelchair behind the podium and that two of his sons would lift him up so that he would appear to be standing, and that at the end of his talk he would collapse back into his chair again. I was told that this was important because we didn’t want folks to know that he was a cripple during a war (how much of a secret it could have been if it was gossip among eight-year-olds—that is a matter for another day).

Anyway, it seems perfectly consistent to say that people thought it would be “bad for the war effort” during the war, even if it might have been “bad for some other reason” before the war started.

A propos of not much, there is a great picture of Mussolini at the podium —I guess I saw it in the Dennis Mack Smith biography—taken from behind, so you can see that he is standing on a milk crate. Little squirt.

Fn.: Hey, it’s still there! And they have an alumni weekend (link)!

We Can't Go Home Again

I’m happy to sign on with Mark Kleiman here, more or less, or maybe not, but close. Anyway, I join those who think that the war is a dreadful mess but that we can’t just pull out. I’m not talking about “victory” here—Matt Yglesias has pointed out that we achieved that, and years ago. And I don’t for a moment mean to associate myself the accusation of “cut and run”—a thought-killing mind virus if there ever was one.

Say rather that the tragedy of this stupid war is that it has made it impossible for us to cut and run—immured us in the Middle East to an extent and for a time period that mirrors our worst nightmares. We’ve exponentially ramped up the necessity for American presence in the Middle East, and for American wisdom and prudence, two virtues in short supply under any conditions, and wretchedly absent from our recent history.

There is absolutely nothing in the record of the incumbent ruffians to suggest that they are fit to offer this kind of leadership. The Democrats are doing a bit, but not much, to make things better. The maligned John Murtha had a whiff of reality in his voice when he talked about withdrawing from the center of the action but maintaining a presence. But the measured part of that measured response is fast getting swamped in the rush for a timetable.

It’s enough to get up any decent person’s nose to listen to the Republicans’ smug and dismissive provocation—“well, what would you do?” Tearful and groveling apology might strike a more harmonious note. But it’s annoying not least because it is, at core, a fair point. Like it or not, the Dems can’t avoid the responsibility for Getting it Right just by asserting (correctly) that the Republicans Got It So Wrong.

The Middle Way: home of yellow lines and dead armadillos. The political traction in this centrist posture is just about zero—the only candidate who comes anywhere close to embracing it is Wesley Clark, and his chances rank somewhat lower than Bill Richardson, or perhaps Harold Stassen. Doesn’t make it less right. One can only hope that some of this prudence worms its way into policy, even if by indirection and accident.