Columnist.
Mitt Romney is the most improbable of presidential candidates: a weak juggernaut. He is poised to sweep every primary contest -- a first for a non-incumbent. And yet, in Republican ranks there's an abiding sense that he should be beatable -- and beaten. It's not that Romney doesn't have fans. His events in New Hampshire were packed to the rafters and felt like general-election rallies. He's surging in polls in South Carolina and Florida.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a man whose political success is largely attributable to the aura of befuddled incompetence he uses to disarm his adversaries, was a failed Watergate baby. In 1974, a slew of often sanctimonious and very liberal Democratic politicians rode the tide of understandable national disgust with Richard Nixon to Congress. Then the lieutenant governor of Nevada, Reid ran for the U.S. Senate, hoping to tie his opponent to the "imperial presidency" that had allegedly sprung up ex nihilo under Nixon.
Charlie Sheen was clearly the man of the year. You'll recall that 2011 began with the oafish actor celebrating his own narcotic and sexual crapulence like a victorious gladiator working the crowds. He was egged on by a media with as much decency as the cons on the top tiers of the prison who chant "fresh fish" as the new inmates walk into general pop, their eyes stinging from delousing powder. Sheen succeeded at turning his own debasement into a national pseudo-event by calling the very definition of losing "winning."
I've made a disturbing discovery: I am a member of the conservative "establishment." I feel like Michael Douglas at the end of "Falling Down": "I'm the bad guy?" Largely in response to the real and perceived excesses of the Bush years and the overreach of the Obama administration, the base has become more populist. In particular, the rank and file of the GOP and the conservative movement have become deeply disenchanted with what they see as the rubber-spined, foot-dragging quislings drinking from a trough of Chablis at some Georgetown party. The term "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) has become an epithet of ideological enforcement, spit out in much the same way Mao cursed "running dog capitalists."
As a non-Christian with a deep affection for Christmastime, I've always felt a little left out around this time of year, but not in the way you might think. I've always felt a bit out of place with the venerable conservative tradition of denouncing the "war on Christmas." I should offer some background. When I was a kid, my parents cut out a jokey headline from a local newspaper that read "Santa Knows We're Jewish" and put it on a cardboard Christmas tree ornament. My father insisted I be raised Jewish. (I went to a Jewish day school and was duly bar mitzvahed.) My Episcopalian mother insisted we celebrate Christmas.
So now it's Ron Paul's turn. The diminutive Texas libertarian is poised in the latest polls to win the Iowa caucuses. Obviously, this would be rough news for Newt Gingrich -- who's in third place and falling -- and very good news for Mitt Romney, who has used Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and now Paul as blockers to fend off challenges from the various "not-Mitt" candidates of the moment. (Perry must feel particularly disoriented because he's been both blocker and blockee.)
Wedge issues are back. What are wedge issues? Well, a lot depends on whom you ask. Political consultants usually define them as issues that unite the base but split the opposition. The most familiar examples are guns, God and gays. But they can include everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to crime. Traditionally, conservatives are cast as the villains in the wedge-issue story. And there's some truth to the tale. What initially offended liberals was the way Republicans made race and civil rights issues for national discussion (ironic considering how liberals are always clamoring for a "national conversation" on race). Liberals will tell you that Republicans shattered the consensus on civil rights by running on racially charged issues. Conservatives will say that liberals invited a so-called "racial backlash" by going too far on issues like quotas and being soft on crime.
"How do we stop Newt?" I've now been asked that question by a lot of conservatives. It's not that I'm the go-to guy for that sort of question. Rather, one gets the sense that many "establishment" conservatives are asking everybody that question -- in staff meetings, at the chiropodist, even at the McDonald's drive-thru. ("I'll have two happy meals, two chocolate milks and -- by the way -- do you have any idea how to stop Newt?")
In 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama insisted that the coming presidential primary and general election campaigns "shouldn't be about making each other look bad, they should be about figuring out how we can all do some good for this precious country of ours. That's our mission." "And in this mission," he continued, "our rivals won't be one another, and I would assert it won't even be the other party. It's going to be cynicism that we're fighting against." I guess I missed the moment when Obama hung his "Mission Accomplished" banner. Because from where I'm sitting, it looks more like the president not only lost his battle against cynicism, he defected to the other side.
In 2008, the Democrats were blessed with two candidates the party's rank-and-file admired almost as much as the press corps did. Ultimately Barack Obama, the hope-and-change guy, was more popular than Hillary Clinton if for no other reason than that the former first lady came with so much baggage -- mostly in the form of her husband, but also some scandals of her own -- while Obama was a fresh start. But everyone let that contest play out. There was little urgency over the need to pick a candidate as soon as possible. This time, the GOP field is not getting the same courtesy. There's an almost manic rush to pick a winner, or at least a GOP front-runner. And while it would be tempting to put the blame squarely on the liberal media or some other convenient villain, the truth is that it's the right that is largely to blame.
Newt Gingrich wants to pay poor kids to clean toilets. And all of the right people are horrified. The Nation says Gingrich is running on "a platform that seems to have been written by the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge." The editors of the Newark Star-Ledger proclaim Gingrich wants to "bring back the days of Oliver Twist." The host of "Meet the Press," David Gregory, suggests Gingrich's take on the inner-city poor is a "grotesque distortion." This controversy started last month at Harvard, when Gingrich suggested in a speech that perhaps the best way to break the cycle of poverty in inner cities is to break the culture of poverty that sustains it by, among other things, paying kids to do janitorial work.
In 2008, I wrote a book called "Liberal Fascism." That title came from H.G. Wells, one of the most important socialist writers in the English language. He believed, as did his fellow Fabian socialists, that Western democratic capitalism had outlived its usefulness. What was needed was a new, bold, forward-thinking system run by experts with access to the most modern techniques. For Wells, the label for such a system mattered less than the imperative that we implement a revolution-from-above. He admired how the Germans, Italians and Russians were getting things done. In 1932 he proposed calling his revolutionary movement "enlightened Nazism" or "liberal fascism."
Earlier this month, the left-wing magazine The Nation highlighted Joe Therrien as a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A New York City public-school drama teacher, Therrien was frustrated with the shortcomings of the school system. So he quit his job and "set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion -- puppetry." Three years and $35,000 in student-loan debt later, Therrien returned home, only to find he couldn't land a full-time job. Apparently, a master's in puppetry doesn't provide the competitive edge in the marketplace he'd hoped for. Therrien joined Occupy Wall Street, constructing giant puppets and "figuring out how to make theater that's going to help open people up to this new cultural consciousness. It's what I'm driven to do right now."
I've long thought the notion of a prison-industrial complex to be laughable left-wing nonsense peddled by Marxist goofballs and other passengers in the clown car of academic identity politics. For those who don't know, the phrase "prison-industrial complex," or PIC, is a play on the military-industrial complex. The theory behind PIC is that there are powerful forces -- capitalist, racist, etc. -- pushing to lock up as many black and brown men as they can to maintain white supremacy and line the pockets of big-prison CEOs and shareholders with profits earned not just from the taxpayer but from the toil of prison-slave labor.
Whether the matchup between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney is the final bout on the GOP primary card is impossible to know. The whole season has been more like professional wrestling than boxing, with weird characters sporting implausible hair appearing out of nowhere to talk smack and explain why they are the greatest in the world. (I'm looking at you in particular, Mr. Trump.) Still, let's assume for the moment that it's a Gingrich-Romney contest.
Congratulations, average American! It's your turn to be blamed for President Obama's -- and America's -- problems. This is the biggest honor you've won since Time magazine named "you" the Person of the Year. Being the root cause of our dire national predicament puts you in some very august company indeed. You are joining the ranks of George W. Bush, the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, Wall Street fat cats and other luminaries, both living and merely anthropomorphized.
He's baaack! Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is back in the saddle after falling off his horse at the starting line. At least according to one poll (Public Policy Polling), Gingrich is actually the GOP front-runner. Many say it's simply Gingrich's turn to be the not-Mitt contender, now that Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain have had their chances.
"Of course we're going to riot," Paul Howard, a 24 year-old aerospace engineering student at Penn State University, told The New York Times. "What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o'clock that they fired our football coach?" The coach in question, as we all know, is Joe Paterno, the decades-long patriarch of Penn State football. Paterno was fired by the board of trustees for his part in a reprehensible non-response to the alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy in the locker room showers.
You know who I blame for the terrible tone in American politics? Tom Brokaw. No, not the man himself, but what he represents. Since Dan Rather famously beclowned himself, Brokaw stands as the last of the respected "voice of God" news anchors (CBS News executive Don Hewitt's phrase). These were the oracles who simply declared what was news and what wasn't. Walter Cronkite, the prize of the breed, used to end his newscasts, "And that's the way it is" -- as if he were speaking not just with journalistic but also epistemological and ontological authority.
Up to 40 million Chinese people still live in caves. That's more than the populations of Texas and Illinois, combined. In fairness, a fraction of these caves are apparently pretty nice, complete with electricity and well-compacted dirt floors. But that's grading on a curve because, well, they're still caves. Meanwhile, 21 million Chinese live below what the Communist Party calls the "absolute poverty" line. That sounds pretty good if you have in mind our poverty line, which is just under $11,000 per year for an individual and roughly $22,000 for a family of four. The absolute poverty rate in China is $90 a year, or $7.50 per month. And 35 million live on less than $125 per year. Hundreds of millions of Chinese live on $1 or $2 a day.
