Today is the fourteenth anniversary of the day when Charles Krauthammer announced to the world:
Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.
It’s now been 168 months since that confident pronouncement – or, put differently, we’ve seen 33.6 Krauthammer Credibility Intervals come, and then go, without any sign of self-assessment, let alone personal acceptance of responsibility for his prominent cheerleading for a war that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Still out there opining.
In a recent post I remarked that MLK is a figure well worth stealing. And NR obliges me with the first sentence of their anniversary editorial. “The civil-rights revolution, like the American revolution, was in a crucial sense conservative.” They do admit a few paragraphs on that, “Too many conservatives and libertarians, including the editors of this magazine, missed all of this at the time.” And then manage to wreck it all again with the next sentence: “They worried about the effects of the civil-rights movement on federalism and limited government. Those principles weren’t wrong, exactly; they were tragically misapplied, given the moral and historical context.” No look into the question of how such a misapplication transpired, since that would not produce gratifying results. After all, if we are talking about what actually worried people, then plainly federalism and limited government were more pretext than motive. The tragedy is that so many people wanted to do the wrong thing, for bad reasons. But they couldn’t say ‘Boo justice!’ So they said stuff about … federalism. There is obviously no point to conservative’s revisiting how they got things wrong without bothering to consider how they got things wrong. But let’s be positive about it. “It is a mark of the success of King’s movement that almost all Americans can now see its necessity.” Yay justice!
The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal. Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some time now, but this is extra extra dismal, because the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now. Colleges and universities have already taken — and administered — hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc. And I don’t know how many searches were cancelled last year after being advertised. But I do know that in the modern languages, we might be looking at a 50 percent dropoff in jobs from last year, and there’s no federal stimulus coming to bail us out.
In January 1995 I published a little essay that almost nobody liked. Eh, that happens sometimes. It was a review essay on the then-recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals, and I wrote it quite simply because the <i>New Yorker</i> asked me to. I was a newly-tenured associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I was surprised by the request; to this day it’s the only time I’ve written for the <i>New Yorker</i>. And then, within about three months of the thing’s appearance, a whole mess of people decided to weigh in on the work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals. Many of those people came to the conclusion that I had done a pretty piss-poor job of writing about the recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals; the general verdict was that I had basically written a press release, a puff piece on a bunch of lightweights and/or sellouts. But some of those people weren’t responding to me at all; they had much more important figures to go after, like Cornel West. And it wasn’t just my little essay they were responding to; my essay was bad enough, sure, but it was compounded by the appearance, in the March 1995 <i>Atlantic</i>, of a much longer essay by Robert Boynton. That essay was about the work of a couple of <i>other</i> African-American intellectuals, and, like my essay, it drew a loose analogy between contemporary African-American intellectuals and the New York intellectuals of yesteryear, so clearly there was some kind of conspiracy afoot.
We may not have mutated beavers (jokes on this topic to the beaver thread, please!), but life in Australia is still interesting. I’ve never had a roo in the house, but I once had to remove a green tree snake which had come in through the window. And that reminds me of my favourite Australian tourist promotion.
Washington, DC — Responding to Republican charges that President Obama’s proposed budget includes $8 billion for a high-speed, magnetic-levitation train that “<a href=”http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_03/017129.php”>will deliver customers straight from Disney . . . to the doorstep of the moonlight bunny ranch brothel in Nevada</a>,” Democratic leaders today unveiled plans for a “<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOV6siQOwYc&feature=related”>Love Train</a>” that will join “people all over the world.”
Matthew Yglesias was kind enough to link to my Necrotrends post. In comments over there I explained that, in all false modesty, I actually hadn’t worked out whether I thought it was a seance story or a zombie story. Is it Mark Penn as the kid in “Sixth Sense” – ‘I poll dead people’. Or is it William McKinley stashed in a shed like the former roommate at the end of “Shaun of the Dead”? Unclear, is all I can conclude. (One commenter suggested BOTH: si se puede! Fair enough.) But mostly I bring this up because Bruce Bartlett showed up in comements over there. As there was considerable speculation in comments to my original post as to whether the man could say such things with a straight face … I report, you decide: [click to continue…]
A few commenters have complained that they misread my post title, below, as concerned with Prediction Markets in Republican Spain, which would have been a far more inventive topic. We apologize for the inconvenience but have nothing to add to prior work in this field.
But I have added a new category, ‘the water pitcher is still broken’, for future usage. (I expect that discussions of the Republican party, in the months to come, may fall naturally under this heading.)
[amazon]. I’m planning to agree with it, but the framing is odd.