wtf?

I’d be interested to know more about why the President of William and Mary was told that his contract wouldn’t be renewed; from what this IHE story says, it sounds pretty terrible.

Gene R. Nichol resigned immediately Tuesday as president of the College of William & Mary, days after being told that his contract wouldn’t be renewed. In leaving Nichol issued a blunt attack on those alumni and conservatives who have sought his ouster, defended his stances in a series of controversial decisions, and accused board members of seeking to offer him a “substantial” sum of money to publicly state that he wasn’t losing his job for ideological reasons. … Even while defending the board’s conduct, the chair acknowledged the potential for the controversy to hurt the college by giving the impression (false, the chair said) that alumni or legislators can get a president canned at William & Mary. … the board voted days after some legislators urged the trustees to get rid of Nichol, citing his willingness to let a controversial art exhibit appear on campus. … Nichol … defended the right of students to play host to the exhibit. …substantial progress in efforts he started… to increase student aid, attract more diverse students, and hire a more diverse faculty. … state political leaders have focused much less on those issues than on the controversy that to many defined Nichol’s presidency — a dispute over a cross he had removed from a prominent campus building. Vocal alumni critics have been pushing for Nichol’s removal since the cross fracas started. They have been met by strong defenders, particularly among student leaders and some professors. … Nichol was accused of being hostile to religion, with critics going out of their way to tell reporters that he had done legal work for the American Civil Liberties Union, as if that would make his views clearly wrong.

CT readers who have been around for a long time may remember a couple of posts I wrote in response to Eugene Volokh way back in 2005, asking for instances of prominent “commentators mak[ing] egregious claims that a substantial section of those who opposed the war are, in fact, rooting for the other side.” Now, CT readers came up with quite a number of ripe examples, but if there were still a Golden Eugene [UPDATE: since Eugene has since described Romney’s comments as ‘over the top’ in an update to his original post on the topic, it’s a bit unfair to name the award after him] award to be handed out, I think I’d be giving it to Mitt Romney for this claim in his forthcoming concession speech.

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Now I suppose that he’s not quite saying that Clinton and Obama support the terrorists; merely that they’re going to surrender to them (perhaps he’s even prepared to concede that they would surrender America to the forces of evil with reluctance and heavy hearts). But he’s also the Republican also-ran, who might have been an outright winner in a slightly more favourable political climate. You don’t get much more prominent than that. Also implicit iis that Mike Huckabee, if not quite a terrorist-surrender-monkey, is surely a terrorist-surrender-monkey-enabler as long as he stays in the race and delays the anointment of McCain. Finally, I understand from reliable sources that this isn’t even the creepiest part of the speech. The Republicans are a very, very messed up political party.

Happy no-longer-new year, everyone. Well, the final weeks of 2007 were pretty much like the whole of 2007 in my house: just before finals week, the sewage line in the basement backed up for the third time in four months, and as they say, the third time was the charm. This one left a good two inches of water in select basement areas, where “select basement areas” means “the corners in which Michael keeps his hockey equipment and his drums.” It’s been great fun cleaning everything and ripping up carpet and throwing out stuff and refurnishing part of the basement, but through it all, I know that the house has said to me and me alone, in an intimate and personal kinda way, “GET. OUT.” Of course, that was before the sheet of ice slid off the roof and knocked out our satellite dish thing. The people from the satellite station promised to send out a satellite dish repair person ASAP, which means in a week or so, because we live in the deep uncharted interior of the continent.

So good riddance to 2007. I hope it never comes back around these parts.

But that’s not why I’m here!

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It seems that the Revolutionary Communist Party has a large notice running in the latest New York Review of Books. I have not actually seen that issue yet, but over the weekend, a friend wrote to protest:

Simply staggered that you have not signed onto the full page ad in the NYRB (Engage!) demanding that the voice of Bob Avakian be projected and protected. You, who have done so much to keep Avakian before the masses. You, who have chosen not to join voices including Mumia Abu Jamal, Rickie Lee Jones, Aladdin, Ward Churchill, Chuck D, Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson.

Don’t you know that Martin Niemoller said that “first they came for the communists?”

Okay, my mistake. It is also true that I have neglected to blog about the doings of Chairman Bob for months now. In part, though, that has been because the Chairman went AWOL for quite a spell there. No new articles or interviews with him appeared in the party press, and after a while it became reasonable to wonder what was up. Something cardiac, perhaps? Involving rich pastries?
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So naturally I upgraded to Leopard a few days ago. Generally a smooth process, with the occasional headache (reinstalling stupid HP printer drivers, grr) balanced out with the occasional pleasant discovery not hyped beforehand (Terminal now aware of the Keychain, hurray). But here’s something that looks like a bug a slightly counterintuitive feature in OS X’s otherwise very nice PDF-handling abilities.

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As you may recall, the economy was supposed to have collapsed as of two weeks ago today. Right now, you should not be able to afford a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of $1000 bills.

I understand that bread baskets have been sent to headquarters in Virginia by ex-members. The sarcasm is tinged with philanthropy. LaRouche’s true believers are in serious trouble; their economy is collapsing, anyway. The group is being forced to come up with money for the IRS, and facing renewed investigation by the FEC, in the wake of events described by Avi Klein in a major article appearing in the new issue of Washington Monthly.
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Your clown show dollars at work:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s No. 2 official apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions. … FEMA announced the news conference at its headquarters here about 15 minutes before it was to begin Tuesday afternoon, making it unlikely that reporters could attend. Instead, FEMA set up a telephone conference line so reporters could listen.

In the briefing, parts of which were televised live by cable news channels, Johnson stood behind a lectern, called on questioners who did not disclose that they were FEMA employees, and gave replies emphasizing that his agency’s response to this week’s California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

“It was absolutely a bad decision. I regret it happened. Certainly … I should have stopped it,” said John “Pat” Philbin, FEMA’s director of external affairs. “I hope readers understand we’re working very hard to establish credibility and integrity, and I would hope this does not undermine it.”

The dollar will collapse no later than one week from today. As of noon on October 15, you will not be able to buy a loaf of bread for $100,000. That’s the optimistic scenario. The crash may come sooner than that. It might be Thursday. It sounds like Thursday will be bad.

Yeah, things are heating up again in LaRouche-land. The Youth Movement kids haven’t been out in force singing on Capitol Hill much over the past two or three months. But it’s clear that supporters are now being pushed into a frenzied state, more even than usual. At the website where ex-members get together, plans are being made to send one true believer a loaf of bread as soon as the deadline for disaster passes.

No doubt it is an utter and total coincidence that The Washington Monthly will soon publish an in-depth article on recent developments in the organization.
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Scott Lemieux reads my Brooks-Burke-Oakeshott-Bush piece, and “raises me one“, by finding this “astonishing outpouring” from Brooks’ 2003 archive.

Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. … But the fog didn’t make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. … We can’t know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. … I try to reply to these warnings. I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. … Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq—thank goodness, too, because any ‘’plan’’ hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality. I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions, and learning through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.

I fold. This has to be one of the most deeply and offensively stupid op-ed columns I’ve ever read. I don’t know whether even at the time Brooks was able to convince himself that these claims were true; they read to me as a self-consciously weak effort to cover up for a disaster in the making. As Scott says,

The Iraq War is a case in which Burkean conservatism (or its Foucauldian variants) has a great deal of wisdom to offer, and it’s advice is “it was an extraordinarily stupid idea.” That Brooks tried to turn this theoretical line into a defense of the war tells you what you need to about him.

The struggle to build a revolutionary vanguard party of the workers and peasants has never been easy here in the United States. The line of march is tortuous, the peasants rowdy, and it often happens that a group must split. Usually one of the resulting entities will keep the original name, while the other will assemble a new one from the standard combinatoire. (As Dwight Macdonald explained when the Socialist Workers Party begat the Workers Party, “Originality of nomenclature was never our strong point.”)

Once in a while both groups will lay claim to the orginal name, however. The usual practice in that case is to distinguish them by adding some identifying term in parentheses. And so the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Fight Back), which publishes a newspaper called Fight Back, is distinct from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Red Star). The latter refers not to the name of its journal but to the rather well-turned logo found on its homepage.

Within the past few days, an organization known as the Communist League has undergone mitosis, which nowadays means that each of the by-products has a website. I have examined the statements by each faction, but am still no wiser about the issues that require a tightening of ranks in the leadership of the workers and peasants. Yet it is clear that one side is ahead in the fight for hegemony—the one with the Cafe Press store offering very cool Communist League merchandise.

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This bloggingheads segment features one of the nastiest political slurs that I’ve seen in a while: David Frum engaging in a public episode of histrionic soul-searching about how he and his fellow conservatives have made Mark Schmitt (Mark Schmitt! ! !) into Charles Lindbergh. The background can be found in a previous bloggingheads debate where Mark politely pointed out that it was difficult for liberals like him to fully embrace the public commemoration of September 11, however they felt about it privately, because of the way that these commemorations had been politicized by Bush and Giuliani. This apparently was sufficient to brand Mark (who is a friend of mine) as the modern incarnation of a notorious isolationist Hitler-fancying anti-Semite. I’m not sure precisely why this particular slur is so attractive to soi-disant conservative ‘public intellectuals’ – but the ease with which people like Goldberg and Frum reach for it in order to smear people whom they simply don’t agree with suggests that they are (a) vicious and deranged (b) dishonest, or (c ) some combination of the above.