Bloodthirsty Liberal

David Brooks, has spun back and forth on President Obama so many times and so violently, he’s had to lie down with vertigo.

But he is the Rock of Gibraltar compared to Christopher Buckley.

10/10/08:

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

1/25/10:

A year ago, I inspired the nation to have the audacity to hope that I would change the political culture in Washington. Now, a year later, it turns out I’m another hack politician—from Chicago, where, believe you me, we know a thing or two about hack politics.

I was going to set a new standard. Now I’m just a complicit bystander as Harry bribes, among others, a senator from Nebraska who wants his state to get a free pass on Medicare—in return for his vote on a health-care reform bill that would make the Founders weep, or throw up. Or both.

What a difference a year makes. But I’m pleased to report that before I came up here tonight, I was able to sign a contract with my publisher for a new book. I’m going to call it The Audacity of Oops.

Shouldn’t Buckley be the author of a book with that title? Especially when…

1/28/10:

Tonight Mr. Obama proved—once again—that he hears the American music and can play it like a maestro. As well as Ronald Reagan. Both presidents had—have—have music in their souls. The other people in the room where I watched the speech were in tears by the end—the kind that stream down the face. I managed to hold those back. But I could not hold back my admiration at the performance, in particular of Mr. Obama’s deep humanity, as evinced by his profound, almost Lincolnesque humor. Oh dear, are tears streaming down my face, one way or the other?

He proved himself capable, too, of drama, as when he (figuratively) pointed a finger at the Supremes, sitting in their courtly robes directly in front of him, hands demurely folded, and accused them (in my opinion, unjustly, to say nothing of injudiciously) of allowing “foreign enemies” to influence our elections. I had been under the impression that it was called “free speech.” But never mind. It was an electrifying moment. Thank you, Mr. President.

An electrifying evening, all in all. Well done. And yes, God bless the United States of America.

Please.

Somebody hand me a barf bag.

I’m all for forgiving people when they’re wrong. As I’ve pointed out many times, I have a quarter-century of straight-line Democratic Party votes to atone for.

But don’t you kind of have to acknowledge that maybe you’re, I don’t know, full of s**t? Who could possibly take this clown seriously ever again?

What makes Rush and Sarah Palin so popular is that they don’t feel they have to apologize for espousing conservative beliefs. Same thing makes them so unpopular, of course. Maybe the likes of Buckley and Brooks get invited to more of Sally Quinn’s dinner parties, but Rush and Sarah (and I) know that we’d rather stay home with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s than have to work so hard to be liked.

We’ve already heard from conservatives who voted for Obama, and regretted it. Including Christopher Buckley.

Look who’s shocked, shocked to learn that he voted for a Democrat and instead got a socialist [link fixed]:

It seems as good a time as any to ask: Ought a sitting president be cozying up to late-night comedy show hosts?

I know, I know—I feel like a fusty old crank merely posing the question. (Maybe it’s this darned flu.) But it’s hardly as though the president of the United States lacks for venues, and such appearances have a way of trivializing any issue.

…

Yes, it’s appalling that “retention payments” (why we can’t call things what they are?) should have been paid out. But it is also appalling that the US Congress, in a fine foam of pique, should attempt to solve the problem by passing, willy-nilly, a confiscatory tax bill that aims to reduce such payments to a net of 10 percent. I am no homme sérieux when it comes to financial policy, but I know the maxim that “bad cases make bad law.”

One of the backers of this idiotic measure is the distinguished senator from Connecticut, Christopher Dodd, who inconveniently has received $300,000 in campaign pelf from…AIG. Congressional reasoning at times resembles a Mobius strip of hypocrisy. Meanwhile, give that man the Captain Renault “I’m shocked, shocked!” award.

You know, it’s even worse than that, Chris:

But it turns out that Senator Dodd’s wife has also benefited from past connections to AIG as well.

From 2001-2004, Jackie Clegg Dodd served as an “outside” director of IPC Holdings, Ltd., a Bermuda-based company controlled by AIG.

…

Clegg was compensated for her duties to the company, which was managed by a subsidiary of AIG. In 2003, according to a proxy statement, Clegg received $12,000 per year and an additional $1,000 for each Directors’ and committee meeting she attended. Clegg served on the Audit and Investment committees during her final year on the board.

IPC paid millions each year to other AIG-related companies for administrative and other services. Clegg was a diligent director. In 2003, the proxy statement report, she attended more than 75% of board and committee meetings.

…

Dodd is likely more familiar with the complicated workings of AIG than he was letting on last week. This week may provide him with another opportunity to refresh his recollections.

How can liberals be corrupt? It’s contradictory to their core beliefs of liberty and justice for all. They can be stupid, they can be misguided—but venal? I can’t believe it.

I have the answer, if you’ll follow my irrefutable logic: Liberals can never be corrupt; Chirs Dodd is corrupt to the bone; ergo Chris Dodd is a Republican.

It’s the only answer.

If I were to lead a counter-revolution (believe me, the thought has occurred), I would line a whole hell of a lot of people against the firing-squad wall. Not President Obama, oh no—he’s only delivering the “redistributive” society he promised.

No, David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Gergen, Jim Cramer—anyone with the sense to know better, but did not—these are the ones whose names I have written on a .30 M1 Carbine round.

Mark Steyn provides another pundit in need of “re-education”:

National Journal’s Stuart Taylor becomes the latest sophisticated analyst to notice the moderate bipartisan centrist in the White House is behaving very oddly. Or as Mr Taylor’s headline puts it:

Obama’s Left Turn

What left turn? He’s chugging in the same direction he has since he decided to become a “community organizer”. His budget is entirely consistent with his voting record as a US Senator, his state politics back in Illinois, his friends and political mentors - and even, as the late Dean Barnett noticed in February last year*, his non-teleprompter campaign rhetoric:

Virtually every time Obama deviated from the text, he expressed the partisan anger that has so poisoned the Democratic party… At one, point when addressing what we have to do for the economy, Obama ad-libbed, “The insurance and the drug companies aren’t going to give up their profits easily . . . Exxon Mobil made $11 billion this past quarter…”

Obama’s shot at Exxon Mobil’s profits is strikingly disingenuous. He seems to be implicitly saying that the healthy earnings are good news for Mr. Exxon and Mr. Mobil, who will promptly stash most of the profits underneath their obviously outsized mattresses… Barack Obama is far too intelligent to not realize that many of the school teachers and union workers and working moms that so often people his more elegant speeches likely have an interest in Exxon Mobil’s profits either from their retirement plan’s portfolio or their union’s holdings or their own investments that they actively manage…

Worse still was the threat to take away the profits of the drug and insurance companies. Perhaps Obama thinks that the drug companies will continue to develop life saving therapies out of benevolence, and that their employees will happily take the pay cuts that will accompany the loss of profits.

Ah, well. As it turns out, corporate profits don’t seem to be such a pressing problem anymore.

…

Dean looked past Obama’s tailoring and “temperament” (elite-speak for “cool”), and listened to what the guy was saying.

As for Stuart Taylor, he still doesn’t quite get it:

The house is burning down. It’s no time to be watering the grass.

If only. The house is burning down. And Obama’s soaking the neighboring buildings in Exxon-Mobil’s finest. Fortunately for Mr Taylor’s fit of the wobbles, the alternative to the Obama Fire Department is a GOP “dominated by such hard-right conservatives as Rush Limbaugh”. Twenty-five million people listened to Rush last week. Millions of them have listened to him for 20 years. That makes them “hard-right” extremists.

Whereas being one of a few thousand who listened to Jeremiah Wright every week for 20 years makes you a mainstream moderate.

“He seemed like such a nice man. Quiet. Kept to himself.”

Nonsense. President Obama made no secret of his political persuasion. I guess these a-holes thought it was more important to be with the cool kids than to stand up for their beliefs and their country.

Fine, now they can stand up against this post.

Any last words, Mr. Taylor? Cigarette? Blindfold?

Ready… aim….

We have come to the attention of Media Matters, and they are not pleased with us.

Please, I’m blushing!

The Republican Noise Machine doesn’t need the customary 100 days to size up the new president. Right-wing commentators barely needed 30 days to come to their conclusion that they hate everything Barack Obama stands for.

Yeah, of course, get to the point, man!

I suspect the unvarnished hate directed toward Obama, the radical rhetoric behind it, and most especially the overnight delivery used to proclaim it, is unprecedented for our modern politics. Even during the first Clinton weeks and months in 1993, I don’t think the right-wing ratcheted up the demonizing language this quickly.

“Unvarnished hate”, “radical rhetoric” unprecedented?

The poor man: to have been in a coma for eight years.

Has no one explained the irresponsible, unhinged history of the left’s attitude toward the Bush administration—the media most especially?

If you feel our rhetoric is radical, it’s because we try. If you feel our hate is unvarnished, look again. It shines with a gleam and a sparkle. But if you read us regularly, you know that while we are contemptuous of President Obama (more so his policies and politics), our hatred is reserved for the press that bore him on their shoulders like the ass that bore Jesus on his entrance into Jerusalem.

Thanks for reading, MM, and do keep writing about us. We feel a kinship: as former liberals ourselves, we are sympathetic to fellow turncoats—no matter how misguided they may be!

Can we all agree that the discussed bailout of Big Auto is actually anything but? A failing business model will continue to fail, no matter how much money you cram into it.

But the United Auto Workers could use the money. The state of Michigan could use the money. Reliable voters who reliably vote Democratic.

Tens and twenties okay, fellas?

GOP bailout stooge to Cavuto: “It’s not your money”

Behold the hubris of an entrenched Republican congressman shilling for the auto bailout. His name is Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Michigan) and you’ll be happy to know that he lost his re-election bid.

Attention, Republicans obsessed with “re-branding” the party and crafting appealing messages to win back voters. Here’s your textbook example of how not to act and what not to say if you want to restore credibility to conservatism.

The phrase “tipping point” is overused, but I fear we have reached a literal tipping point. The mass of people who now expect the government to do for them outweighs the mass of people who wish the government would do without them. Even hitherto conservatives now elbow aside the rest of the swarming pack at the public teat.

Where’d my country go?

The automobile industry still thrives in America. Just not in Detroit. Make of that what you will.

PS: At least someone is thinking straight.

P.J. O’Rourke comes to bury conservatism, not to praise it:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone–gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that’s headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Oh, [bleep], I hear you say.

Or was that just me? It’s hard to argue with him, but I would be wary of predicting the future if I were a pundit (hey, I guess I am, if only in my own mind). Momentum, as they say in baseball, is the next day’s starting pitcher.

Still, it’s a fair point. Just when I came around to the philosophy of conservatism, that that government is best which governs least; that American exceptionalism, to the extent it exists, is based on the freedom of its citizens to live as they will under the protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; that those rights are universal and eternal, not localized passing fancies; that tyranny will not be talked down, but must be vigorously opposed—is when the party self-identified with those beliefs abandoned them.

Not everybody, certainly not Sarah Palin, but enough of them.

But as out of date as those doctrines sound today, as irrelevant to filling gas tanks and paying mortgages, they may well resonate with our future selves (perhaps even as soon as four or even two years). For they never truly go out of style, and the candidate who best articulates them always has a chance to persuade America that her best days come when she is true to her best principles. If it’s a losing argument, so be it. It’s still the only argument.

That Bill Ayers was invited to speak at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was in itself an outrage: he’s not used to being on campus without a nine-millimeter to take the Dean hostage and a Molotov cocktail to torch the library. Anyway, the average faculty has more than its share of Bill Ayerses—in the physics department alone.

But the cancellation is an even bigger outrage:

Just 11 days after next month’s election, the University of Illinois-Chicago professor, William Ayers, is scheduled to speak at a student research conference held by the UNL College of Education and Human Science.

Gov. Dave Heineman released a statement saying that UNL leaders should not allow Ayers, a 1960s radical-turned-professor at the University of Illinois, to talk during a campus event on Nov. 15.

“Chairman of the Board of Regents Chuck Hassebrook and President of the University J.B. Milliken should immediately rescind the invitation extended to Bill Ayers to speak at the University,” the governor said. “This is an embarrassment to the University of Nebraska and the State of Nebraska. Bill Ayers is a well known radical who should never have been invited to the University of Nebraska.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, today said in a statement that he is disappointed that UNL invited William Ayers to speak on campus Nov. 15.
“His past involvement in a violent protest group and incendiary comments are not consistent with the agenda of unity that we need in America today,” Nelson said. “I encourage the university to reconsider this decision.”

…

University officials said in a news release Friday evening that “the university’s threat assessment group monitored e-mails and other information UNL received regarding Ayers’ scheduled Nov. 15 visit and identified safety concerns which resulted in the university canceling the event.”

Mixed feelings: we on the political right have excoriated academe for its lack of political diversity and the absence of real free speech—so we can hardly support the disinvitation of a speaker, even one who does not exactly provide that diversity of thought we demand.

But if we are angry when conservative speakers are protested at campuses (when are they not?), we ought to be angry now. If they thought it was important to hear Ayers, then they ought to have made it work. To let emailers and bloodthirsty bloggers (don’t look at me) decide the agenda is a terrible precedent.

But Ayers’ unique viewpoint was never the point, was it? I’m betting the good folks in Lincoln were looking to capitalize on his recent notoriety, and when they couldn’t stand the heat they abandoned the kitchen.

It’s interesting that Democratic Senator Nelson condemned the decision to invite Ayers—and his comments (”the agenda of unity that we need in America today”) might explain why: it’s an embarrassment to their candidate. The “agenda of unity” is practically the Obama motto, and Ayers’ history of violent opposition to the government and values of the country is off-message and more than a little bothersome.

I want Ayers to speak not because I will like what he has to say; I want him to speak to not embarrass my political adversaries (or not just, anyway)—no, I want Ayers to speak because that’s what college campuses are supposed to do. If they don’t let someone as lionized in academia as Ayers speak, when will they ever let the demonized likes of John Bolton or David Horowitz or William Bennett speak?

In fact, that’s what a true institute of higher learning would have done: let Ayers speak, and let others speak. I can’t say I’m surprised it turned out this way, however.

That’d be World War Two to you and me, “the Good War”.

Fascinating interview in five parts with Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson on Buchanan’s book arguing that the whole thing was avoidable.

Part One here.

I haven’t watched all five parts yet—the whole thing takes probably about 40-45 minutes—but parts one and five are very good, and take Buchanan’s appalling thesis head on. There are even parallels to Iraq (alleged by Buchanan, dismissed by Hitch and Hanson).

A cheap shot intended to point out that often our first instinct on how to solve a problem—often motivated by feeling, rather than rational analysis—is not necessarily the best approach:

If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?

This is a small amount compared to rich-government budgets. But if we could set aside an extra $10 billion, we could achieve an awful lot.

…

Unfortunately, we too often focus on the most fashionable spending options, rather than the most rational. Spending an extra dollar cutting C02 to combat climate change generates less than one dollar of good, even when we add up all the economic and environmental benefits. In contrast, a dollar spent on research and development into cleaner energy technology generates $11 of economic good. If that dollar was spent combating heart disease in the third world, it would achieve more than twice that again.

I’m not convinced by the analysis of every case—but it’s a good place to start.

Okay, his is going to blow our cover of being omnipotent and omniscient, but we can’t post a comment on our own blog. (One out of two ain’t bad.) Some Word Press error message won’t let us. I know several of you have had the same problem—as we have too, before.

If you really want to get your comment in, send us an email, and we’ll try to post it ourselves (under your name, if you care to provide it).

In our own case, we’ll start the thread over again. We’ll pick up with Professor Michael Olneck’s most recent response, followed by Aggie’s responses to that response.

michael olneck said,
July 9, 2008 @ 9:04 am

During some recent research activity, I ran into the following comment, made by, of all people, a politician [!!!!!] in the California legislature in the mid-1990s:

“The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not evidence.” (Politicians love argument by anecdote. Just read the re-authorization hearings of the Bilingual Education Act during the 1990s. The same story of a Chinese student, Louie, “trapped” in a Spanish bilingual education class, was told multiple times over the course of several years.)

So, I propose that the ACLU or the AAUP collaborate with David Horowitz’s organization to fund a rigorous survey of individuals who have attended college over the last 20 years to ascertain the extent of abuse suffered at the hands of instructors by students for their political views.

Bloodthirsty Liberal said,
July 9, 2008 @ 9:35 am

But Professor Olneck, didn’t the original NY Times article quote you as saying that you had left numbers based analysis for something essentially more anecdotal? Is the article still available? What was the shift that you described undergoing in the 80’s? My understanding was that younger profs are returning to rigorous research and at the same time are becoming more “moderate” politically.

You never addressed the question about your course title, by the way. Why was it called Race, Ethnicity and Inequality in American Education if the underlying assumption wasn’t that there is no equality in American education?
Let’s revisit the course description, from the catalogue of University of Wisconsin as reported in the NY Times:

“Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.”

Again, I don’t see much hope for the student who doesn’t mindlessly swallow your premise.

It is true that I don’t have a randomized sample of college students or recent grads. But I am at a stage in life where I know many of them and have heard these stories from universities such as Wellesley, Harvard, MIT, UWisc, Berkley, Stanford, UMich, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, etc., etc. And they all got terrific grades by following my simple formula - write about gender inequality and racial inequality. Tell personal stories, make them up if necessary. Works well. The personal stories are not scientific evidence, but I have yet to see a single incidence where that mattered. I know a fair number of professors too, and have heard the rant. It is impossible to go to a dinner party these days and avoid it.

- Aggie

Hi Professor Olneck and the rest of you,

I took the time to go back to the NY Times article to see how Professor Olneck described himself, but more importantly, how he described his research:

“At the start of his career, Mr. Olneck traced the links between where someone’s family came from and where they ended up on the economic and social ladder. Although he has done quantitative research, 20 years ago he jettisoned number-centric studies for historical narrative, exploring how schools throughout the 20th centhe era’s preoccupations when he argues, for instance, that fights over bilingualism and standard English were about power.”

Ok, Professor Olneck, you criticized the comments of some of our readers because they were anecdotal. It looks to me as though you have spent the past 20 years doing anecdotal research. And if we look up the term, anecdotal research, we learn that in fact people in many disciplines do practice just that. What happens in academia, all too frequently, is that Professors have opinions, because they are human beings. They conduct research based on their opinions, asking questions in such a way that the answers are a foregone conclusion. We get opinions in high-falutin’ terminology.

There is also the section in the NY Times article in which he describes himself as a “pink diaper baby”, meaning that his parents were socialists. All well and good. I think that background does belong in the universities, along with conservative colleagues, colleagues from different cultures, the whole shebang. My gripe is not with some bias, which is inevitable. It is with the loss of any kind of checking mechanism. By hiring only leftists, the universities have succumbed to mono-thought. As a new group of scholars comes on-board, perhaps we’ll see a shift towards more “nuance” as John Kerry would say, or more real conversation at least.

- Aggie

Okay, folks, take it away!

PS: Those new to the discussion can refer to Knocking Opportunity.