Is the Campaign All a Sham?

Edward Luttwak thinks that if Kerry is elected, he may behave very much like Bush, and maybe more so. See his thoughts here:

"Of course many people support John Kerry for the next president of the United States for a variety of reasons - he is credible when he promises to cut the Federal deficit, for example. But to support him in the hope that he would make American military policy more doveish is absurd. All the evidence is that he will do the exact opposite."

In short, Luttwak thinks Kerry, like Wilson and Roosevelt before him, is a Democrat who promises to keep us out of war but will break his promises almost at once.

Indeed, one could argue that Bush will be less able, say, to act against Iran if it's about to go nuclear than Kerry, because of the pounding Bush has taken on the Iraq intervention. (I'm not saying we should act against Iran. Haven't analyzed it).

So we shouldn't worry so much about Kerry being a peacenik wuss, because he's lying to his base about where he really stands, and he's really a fighter by temperament.

Now there certainly is a historic bellicosity among some big-government Democrats, and until the Cold War, the conservative Republicans were anti-interventionist. As Taki argues, the 20th Century might have turned out better if Wilson had really kept us out of World War I -- and although Taki's often off-putting, he's got a point.

So if Luttwak is to be believed, this election really won't make a difference in foreign policy.

I'd like to believe him, because I think Kerry's "global test"-UN-worshipping rhetoric and the wishful-thinking namby-pambyism among his Kumbaya-singing supporters is more dangerous even than the questionable competence, indiffference to the budget, trade deficits, and government expansion among the Bushies.

I still think Nuance is more likely than not to lose, so we'll never know whether he's really somewhat sound on the war against Islamicism. Luttwak's thought, ironically, is somewhat comforting in the event Kerry wins -- he's really an inveterate liar and will fool the whole world.

I still think my ineffective vote for Bush (in dark-blue California) was the right thing to do.

Longing for Mud

Gerald's latest on the Kerry platform as reflecting a rejection of American culture and an urge to American self-destruction, uses the term nostalgie pour le boue. I've always heard nostalgie de la boue, but in any case the literal translation of this French phrase is "longing for mud."

It's metaphorical, of course, not a Parisian version of

Mud, Mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood!
So follow me, follow
Down to the hollow
And there let us wallow
In glorious mud.

by Flanders & Swann. (When the French get into lumbering beasts they prefer this sort of thing, anyway.)

Having recently googled la nostalgie de la boue and found this definition by the anthropologist Esther Pasztory,

"ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered 'lower' than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home."

I was intrigued, as Gerald's definition appears closer to the one stuck in my head from years ago--"a compulsion that comes over people when they have, for complex reasons, a need to immerse themselves in self-degradation."

This definition reeks of absinthe, the demi-monde, "Apache" dancing, and sexual license. Perhaps these concepts meet somewhere near the horizon line, where nostalgics conceive of both the "primitive" and the lower classes as closer to Rousseau's concept of man having been born free, but being everywhere in chains.

This dilletantish "mud" is mostly a creation of the imaginations of the leisured and bored. Whether drumming in the woods, cultivating a fabricated American Indian "spirituality," or traveling around the country emulating hobos like the Beats, or around Central Asia in search of hashish and liberation, we moderns have sought our own "mud" in many ways.

Meanwhile, of course, the "primitives" seek televisions, tube wells, green cards, and Christianity.

If you, gentle reader, know more about the origins and development of this muddy nostalgia, let me know. Meanwhile, I'll see what I can discover.

A Beery Swine?

There is a saying that there are only 50 actors in England. One could say equally well that there are only 50 intellectuals of any particular variety, including philosophers. One difference between a continental nation such as ours and one that shares a middling island with two others is that any profession becomes a very small community.

In 1946, two philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, both Austrian Jewish émigrés, had a legendary encounter during a meeting at Cambridge University. During this encounter, Wittgenstein either gestured with or threatened Popper, the speaker, with a fireplace poker, and stormed out of the room.

This incident is the unlikely subject of a book, Wittgenstein’s Poker, which I recently read.

Wittgenstein, born super-rich and turned ascetic, was a forceful personality and either an enfant terrible or a self-absorbed boor. In any event, he acquired a reputation as an iconoclastic genius and the promoter of linguistic philosophy, which posited that many of the traditional philosophical problems are meaningless, and reduced philosophy to so many linguistic puzzles.

Popper, on the other hand, was a bourgeois type who made contributions on more traditional philosophical issues. He was the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, an anti-totalitarian work, and developed the concept of falsifiability, which holds that meaningful scientific propositions are those capable of being shown to be wrong by empirical observation or experiment.

David Edmonds and John Eidinow, the authors, have created a well-crafted and engaging book out of a series of riffs on the poker incident, Wittgenstein, Popper, their backgrounds, the world of Cambridge. It might seem that the subject would be like the famous book that told the schoolboy more than he wanted to know about penguins, but much of the book fascinates as much as any account of a human milieu in some ways like our own and in others quite different.

Today’s world of grants, junkets, and the academic system of field marshals and grunts is recognizably related to the world in which Wittgenstein and Popper lived, but it has changed. This book includes biography, history – notably of pre-World-War-II Vienna, and a portrait of an era. If you are of a certain perhaps uncommon bent, this book is a good read. And the clever cover of the paperback edition alone makes the book worth picking of the shelf at a bookstore.

Let the Children Cavort!

We needed it, and boy have we got it. The unofficial fault-line between fire season and flood season out here in the Southwest. Given the possibly long-term drought we're in, this rain affords welcome relief. Soon the hills will be green, and rodents and snakes will multiply to feed our hungry hawks and coyotes.

Puts a crimp in my cycling though. The first rains float up all the months' acccumulation of grease, and wash all sorts of things from the trees and elsewhere, and on to the streets. As a would-be randonneur even dreaming of (horrors!) France, I should be tougher, I know.

At our local Middle School, the children started to run and play in the rain, to the consternation of Authority. Although I suspect it gave up on Propriety long ago, no doubt worried about slips, falls, the myth that getting cold or wet causes colds, and hungry lawyers, Authority harrumphed and tried to drag their charges indoors.

That's one reason why I could never be a school principal. Let the tykes and striplings cavort. This is the day that the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. I told my 11-year-old I hoped she would still play in the rain when she is 80.

Nothing personal about the principal, whom I like and admire. But the magic hat she's wearing turns the wearer into a stuck-up sticky-beak.

Cavort, children, while you can. Algebra can wait.

50 Reasons Why To Vote For Bush

I'm really not a shill for American Digest, even though I've been linking to it a lot, but once again Gerald has created a telling and superbly moving piece. You can see it here.

HT, of course, to Hugh.

Why Bush and Not Kerry? A Response to Hugh Hewitt

There is one overarching reason to vote for Bush.

We are at war, attacked by a widespread and fanatical enemy. Bush understands this reality and has the determination to win. Notwithstanding failings and errors, Bush is a war leader. Kerry lacks both understanding and determination, and so in time of war is a danger to the nation.

Kerry has attempted to straddle the contradiction between the Deaniac core of his party, that wants no part of the war and includes true defeatists, and the patriotic centrists he needs to cobble together a majority. He has used bluster and an exaggerated version of his Vietnam service to straddle between these two groups. Unfortunately for Kerry, his Vietnam days are far less relevant than what he did on his return and his consistently anti-defense, uncritically pro-UN, and just plain goofy record since then.

Second, without getting into details of domestic policy, Bush draws his support from the core of American strength: intact families, parents, small businesspeople, those who work with numbers and their hands, the church-going. Kerry draws his support from elsewhere: word- and human-service-workers, mis-educated elitists, the militantly secular. His party's money comes from billionaires like George Soros, trial lawyers, and unions of mostly public employees.

Bush will look to the heartland, and will fight. Kerry will look to Europe and the word-drunk bicoastals, and will waver.

We must set aside our doubts and criticisms, and support Bush. Our lives and those of our children depend upon it.

Homo Homini Lupus

This moving essay inspired by a Pietà-like photograph of a Beslan mother and her dead child, ends with a question. Referring to his 10-year-old stepson, Gerald asks:

I am willing to do anything, anything at all, no matter what it may be, to keep him out of that photograph. That's my answer to what I saw. My question is, "Are you?"

HOMO HOMINI LUPUS. Man is the wolf of man.

• Tibet


• Cambodia


• Kurdistan


• Rwanda


• Bosnia


• The Congo


• Darfur


• Beslan

Are we willing? Are we ready?

HOMO HOMINI LUPUS. Man is the wolf of man.

God grant us the discernment to know how to protect the children, and the courage to act.

The Suspense and Waiting is Over at Last: New York Times Endorses Kerry

My fellow-blogger, poet and graphics whiz, who sits atop the next hill over, notes here the surprise story of the month:

"One of the most suspenseful moments in modern journalism came to an end today, when The New York Times, after months of coy beating around the bush, came out for Senator Kerry."

His White House source was shocked:

"Asked if the Times endorsement was costly, the source replied candidly, 'Why yes. We were really counting on the Times to deliver their numberless hoard of readers who have been enslaved to the paper so long that they do the Sunday Crossword in ink.'"

I commented:

Surely you can't be satirizing America's Newspaper of Record. Tsk, tsk!

Perhaps they had before them a penetrating biographical piece on Kerry. By a brilliant young African-American journalist, Jayson Blair.

In the tradition of Walter Duranty.

This reminds me of an old story my father used to tell:

A young Irish lad goes off from his village to university. Upon his return for vacation, the lad tells the local priest he's become an atheist. "I'm certain," said the father, "that when the news reaches the Holy Father in Rome, he'll be mightily distressed."

When Karl Rove hears the news about the Times endorsement of Kerry, I'm certain he'll have at least five seconds of heartburn.

Post on School Security

I have posted a note on the need to beef up school security after Beslan and word that plans of U.S. schools were located in Iraq.

Mobile Phones and Hinky Polls

With the polls so close -- within the margin of errors, some have suggested that the number of potential voters who don't have land lines and have adoped mobile phones, and never get pollster calls -- is big enough to skew the polls substantially. A discussion by Mystery Pollster suggests the answer may be "not yet."

Here's a list of possible error factors in political polling this year:

1. Unreached mobile phone users.
2. People with caller ID who screen their calls.
3. People who won't talk to pollsters -- a growing number, I'll bet.
4. Unlikely voters who may unexpectedly show up this year:
   • Karl Rove's 4 million evangelicals.
   • Everybody else who votes because of the great interest of this watershed campaign.
5. Possibly depressed turnout:
   • Among blacks because Kerry hasn't connected with them.
   • Among a rainbow of Floridians who are who knows where because of the hurricanes.

Bottom line: likely cliffhanger. Bring on the litigators!

A Nod's As Good as a Wink to a Blind Bat, So They Say--Know What I Mean? Nudge Nudge

The indispensable Hugh Hewitt has set as this weekend's symposium topic the following:

How deep a hole have John Kerry, Mary Beth Cahill and the Edwards dug for themselves?  How lasting the damage?

Read literally, this title calls for a "horse race" analysis -- will it hurt Kerry-Edwards? Good question, but first let's think about the ethics and taste of the allusion.

Hugh suggests that the candidate's children are always off limits. In general, he's right. This principle is strongest when the child is young and when the child doesn't have a public political role in association with the candidate parent. Ronald Reagan the politician should not have been judged by Ron Reagan the ballet dancer or Patty Reagan the bohemian. The first George Bush should not have been judged by the S&L affairs of his son Neal, nor should Jeb Bush or George McGovern be held politically responsible for the substance abuse problems of their adult children, who did not choose to be public figures.

It's a little different when the candidate and the child become associated with public politics, and the child acts as a public advocate for the parent. At that point, the public life of the child may become relevant.

Perhaps an example will help. Years ago, I ran against and defeated Ruth Goldway, a radical, publicity-seeking Mayor of Santa Monica. Ruth's husband, Derek Shearer, was her political sidekick and campaign manager, and was appointed to the Planning Commission. When in running against Ruth, I attacked Derek, and was accused of "sexism" for tagging the wife for her husband's positions. I rejected the charge, because they were in fact a public political team who acted in concert. Were Derek a private citizen, he would not be fair game in a campaign against his wife.

This case is in-between. Mary Cheney is to a degree a public political person, and one could imagine a scenario when mentioning her would be appropriate--if, for example, Cheney had taken the position (which he hasn't) that homosexuals should be shunned, but didn't distance himself from his daughter.

What happened here, however, was nothing of the kind. Edwards and Kerry figured they wouldn't antagonize their homosexual or pro-gay-agenda supporters by mentioning the fact, but might cause some religious conservatives to question voting for Bush-Cheney if they learned for the first time that Cheney had a lesbian daughter. The mention of Mary Cheney was non-responsive to the question (stupid though it was) of whether homosexuality was a "choice" or innate. No one knows her history, or whether she follows her way of life because of her deep inward nature, or for other reasons. Nor is one's approval, indifference, or condemnation of homosexuality necessarily relevant to one's views on gay marriage or the proposed constitutional amendment. Kerry-Edwards's mention of Mary was thus nonresponsive to the question, gratuitous, and probably calculated "wedge" politics.

Now to answer Hugh's question in literal terms. The effect is likely to be different in different quarters. Gay movement folks will still vote for Kerry-Edwards, first because they don't think mentioning the sexual orientation of someone who is "out" should be a big deal, and second, because they know Kerry will tacitly, if not openly, acquiesce in their agenda, and Bush won't.

Likewise, few "social issue" conservatives will change their mind. Christians (even those who condemn homosexual conduct as un-Biblical) understand the "love the sinner, hate the sin" concept as intelligently discussed at length here, and know we are all sinners. And they know the Democrats are the party of secularism and the ACLU, and the GOP is not.

Where this is likely to play is among women, and some fathers, who are fiercely protective of their own children, and will viscerally react to the remark, and Kerry's refusal to say "I made a boo-boo in the heat of the debate, and I'm sorry." There's a segment of the population that doesn't love Bush, and is looking for reasons to vote for Kerry-Edwards, but questions their merits and character. This smacks of demagogy and political calculation, and to a parent, will resonate. Gratuitiously bringing up Mary and pretending it's praise of the Cheney family doesn't pass the smell test. It will cause some of the waverers and weak Kerry folks to waver and hesitate to vote for them. If a few of these folks decide not to vote or to vote Bush, it could be significant in swing states.

Grade for the Final Debate

	Substance	Delivery	Grade
Bush	B	B+	B+
Kerry	C-	B+	B-

W finally exceeds the "Gentleman's C" in something.

The third debate was mostly recycled claptrap, except for a few revealing moments:

• Bush finally tags Kerry as a Massachusetts liberal and a do-nothing
  Senator.


• Bush radiates sincerity on the faith and wife questions while Kerry can't bring himself to say anything nice about Terezinha. In fact, the question puts him in mind of his mother's deathbed. Guess who's sleeping in the garage tonight.


• Bush was programmed to answer jobs question by talking about education.


• Listening to Kerry is like listening to a neighbor child practice the tuba, pace Roger Bobo. Bush, on the other hand, has adopted the persona of a cracker Alfred E Newman by way of Andover, Yale, and Harvard B-School.

As for the rest of this gabfest, been there, done that.