Girl Monday - Audrey Hepburn

Blogging about Richard Avedon got me thinking back to Audrey Hepburn.   I know she's been the girl of the day before, but, seriously, can a little bit more of Audrey Hepburn be a bad thing?   Here's an Avedon portrait of her:

And here she is with Fred Astaire in the Avedon-inspired Funny Face:  

Social Security Retirement Age

Social Security was enacted in 1935.   At that time, the average life expectancy for Americans was 61.7 years.   Obviously, that figure is distorted by early deaths that now would be avoided, primarily deaths in childbirth.   So, if you made it to 61.7, you were actually likely to live for a few more years.  

Nevertheless, when we began providing for the elderly at age 65, we were really providing for the elderly, with little expectation that they would live on average too much past 65.   Heart disease and cancer were untreatable; hips and knees fell apart and could not be replaced, the victims becoming bedridden and, often as not, dying of pneumonia; etc., etc.  

We are extraordinarily fortunate to live at this time when medical science has advanced so far and give so many so much additional time and quality of life.  The average life expectancy for Americans today is 77.9; and, of course, if you make it that long it's a matter of actuarial science that you are likely to make it much longer.   It's not uncommon anymore to talk about 90 and 95 and even 100 year old folks still around and still kicking. 

This is a great "problem" to have, don't get me wrong.  But it's a problem for a Social Security system that was not created and is not structured to deal with people living 15, 20, 25, 30 years beyond 65.   We could have fixed it much sooner, and should have fixed it much sooner; by the early 1970s, the average life expectancy for Americans had gone up by more than 10 years, yet the retirement age for Social Security remained the same.   In 1983 we made a modest fix, changing the retirement age in increments from 65 to 67, with people born in 1960 or after having a retirement age of 67.  (Note: born in 1959, my retirement age will be 66 years and 10 months.  My sisters, born in 1955 and 1957, will have retirement ages of 66 and 2 months and 66 and 6 months, respectively.)   But it isn't nearly enough.

No one who is serious about saving our country from fiscal ruin should disagree with the proposition that the first step in reforming Social Security will be to change the average retirement age significantly.   A real leader (like Paul Ryan) would propose something like this:

Age 60+                No change
Age 55-59             Retirement Age = 67
Age 50-54             Retirement Age = 68
Age 45-49             Retirement Age = 69
Age 0-44               Retirement Age = 70


Do I want to work until I'm 68?  No.   But should the federal government or me do the saving to pay for my retirement if I want to retire earlier?   And, beyond "should," can the government afford it?   No.  

Too bad for me.   Is there generational inequity?  Sure.   On the other hand, earlier generations also fought World Wars and, generally, had harder lives than we have.   So tough.

Republican Presidential Campaign - Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

We keep hoping for a perfect candidate, the "Giant" who will rescue us from all evils and restore utopia.  Not going to happen.   So, some notes toward the "supreme fiction" of a GOP Presidential candidate who can defeat Obama and restore us, in a minor key, to some semblance of smaller government and living within our means as a society:

1.  Newt Gingrich implodes.    No one really thought Gingrich could win this thing.   Too much baggage.  But did he really have to come out over the weekend and call Paul Ryan a "radical" whose plans for Medicare in his budget are "right wing social engineering"?   Really?   I think most GOP primary voters think Ryan didn't go far enough.   Cross Newt off.  

2.  Romney gets some decent press.   From Hugh Hewitt, no less, who claims that his speech on Romneycare, in which he promised to repeal Obamacare by executive orders granting waivers to all 50 states on his first day in office, was secretly brilliant.   I don't know.   And I don't like, as a Constitutionalist, the notion that presidents can simply undo legislation they don't like by granting waivers.   And Hewitt has long carried water for Romney.   But it doesn't hurt him and maybe he can get to the point where Romneycare (the Massachusetts precursor to Obama's national health care reform) can be dismissed as "old news."  

3.  Trump and Huckabee demur.   Who's kidding whom?   Does anybody believe that Trump was going to run for President and give up Celebrity Apprentice?   Does anybody believe Huckabee was going to run for President and give up his FoxNews gig?   Too much money involved.   Now wait for the Sarah Palin shoe to drop, although maybe she could get some legs from being the one GOP candidate who didn't grab for the brass ring of television millions.   

4.  Paul Ryan speaks.   Ryan is speaking today at a high profile event, the Economic Club of Chicago.   Here's the text.   And here's a couple of key passages:

Those committed to the mindset of “shared scarcity” are telling future generations, sorry, you’re just going to have to make do with less. Your taxes will go up, because Washington can’t get government spending down.

They are telling future generations, you know, there’s just not much we can do about health care costs. Government spending on health care is going to keep going up and up and up… and when we can’t borrow or tax another dollar, we’ll have to give a board of unelected bureaucrats the power to tell you what kind of treatments you can and can’t receive.

If we succumb to this view that our problems are bigger than we are – if we surrender more control over our economy to the governing class – then we are choosing shared scarcity over renewed prosperity, and managed decline over economic growth.

That’s the real class warfare that threatens us – a class of governing elites picking winners and losers, and determining our destinies for us.

We face a choice between two futures. We can continue to go down the path toward shared scarcity, or we can choose the path of renewed prosperity.

The question before us is simple: Which path will our generation choose?

Sounds like a candidate.  Over the weekend, Ryan did not demur when asked about running for Herb Kohl's now open Senate seat in Wisconsin.   If he's willing to do that, is he willing to run for the big job?   Maybe, maybe not.  

In short, there are lots of balls still in the air. 

Birthdays Today - Where the Regular Guy Thinks Deep Thoughts About Modern Art

Two birthdays today of visual artists whose work is immediately recognizable and iconic, but, to me anyway, unappealing and unsatisfying.

First,  Richard Avedon, the photographer, was born today in 1923.   Avedon branched out from fashion photography into portraiture in the 1950s; his most famous photographs are probably of Audrey Hepburn, and his work with her became the inspiration for the Fred Astaire-Hepburn movie, Funny Face.   He was known for capturing his subjects' personalities in his pictures.   Here is one of his classic portraits of a different Hepburn:

And here is another Avedon, this time of Marilyn Monroe:

I don't know.   I like these photographs, but I can't help thinking that what makes them interesting is not the skill or talent of the photographer but the fame of the subject.   Avedon seems to me like a one-trick pony, who managed to ingratiate himself with the famous, and then having an "Avedon" taken of you became the thing to do.   He made a name for himself by taking pictures of people caught slightly off-guard.   Interesting, but... did he make great art?  I can't say yes.

Also born today, in 1930, was the painter, Jasper Johns.   Of all 20th Century American painters, Johns is probably the most famous, and, to the Regular Guy, controversially so, because his work, more than most, requires the overlay of art criticism to be even marginally comprehensible as art.  Call me a Philistine, but I don't think you ought to need to footnote your work if you're going to be a great artist; it ought to please without exegesis all men at all times; it ought to be beautiful in a way that touches the human eye and mind without having to have an Associate Professor of Art History tell you why it should.  

I can't help thinking that much of modern art is really a matter of self-promotion to the guardians of elite opinion in academia.   Maybe it has always been thus.  But I suspect that there's a reason that, as of 2011, I can't name a single living contemporary visual artist or a single living contemporary poet.   I am an educated, literate and affluent person, but those "artists" have chosen to stop speaking to me.   If they can't speak to people like me, I submit that they won't pass the test of time.   If they won't pass the test of time, I submit that they aren't making art in any real sense.  

Compare and contrast:

Girls of the Day - Beach Blanket Bingo Edition

Milwaukee winters go on forever.   Last night at Little League the temperature was in the low 40s and the wind was howling out of the north at 25 miles per hour.   My son hit a blast that might have gotten out over the left-field fence if it hadn't been hit into the wind; the leftfielder caught it in deep left.   We won, 13-11, but the main feeling we took away was... cold.  Bone-chilling, teeth-chattering, finger-numbing cold. 

So we need us some beaches, so to speak:

Just sayin'. 

Modestly Revised Thoughts on the GOP Field

I will generally stand with my comments below that the GOP Presidential field is actually pretty strong.   But Romney's apparent doubling-down on the health care reform he helped enact in Massachusetts -- let's call it Romneycare, because everyone else will -- in his speech this week, effectively hobbles him as a GOP candidate.   Here's what Mark Steyn had to say:

Unfortunately for [Romney], his signature legislation in Massachusetts looks awfully like a pilot program for Obamacare. So in recent days, he’s been out yet again defending his record: If I understand him correctly, his argument is that the salient point about Romneycare and Obamacare is not that they’re both disasters, but that one’s local and the other’s national, and that Obama has a one-disaster-fits-all approach to health care whereas Romney believes in letting a thousand disasters bloom. Celebrate diversity!

Ouch!   Romney may think that this is what he has to do to distance himself from the Tea Partiers in the GOP and present himself as the responsible adult alternative, but I think he underestimates how damaging his support for the individual mandate part of Romneycare/Obamacare is in a GOP primary.   Obamacare is hated by GOP activists precisely because of the individual mandate, ergo, Romneycare and Romney will also be hated.   Again, here's Steyn:

American conservatives’ problem with Romneycare is the same as with Obamacare — that, if the government (whether state or federal) can compel you to make arrangements for the care of your body parts that meet the approval of state commissars, then the Constitution is dead. And Americans might as well shred the thing and scatter it as confetti over Prince William and his lovely bride, along with an accompanying note saying, “Come back. It was all a ghastly mistake.” For if conceding jurisdiction over your lungs and kidneys and bladder does not make you a subject rather than a citizen, what does?

Double ouch!

Romney has a reputation, perhaps undeserved, as a northeastern liberal Republican squish, not necessarily trustworthy on taxes or abortion.   And now this. 

Can you say "Mitch Daniels"?

Thought Experiments on the National Debt

$14.3 trillion dollars in national debt.  What exactly does that mean?

OK, well, that means that if we ran a $143 billion dollar surplus and paid whatever interest on that debt we are obliged to pay every year for 100 years -- that's pronounced "a hundred f***ing years" for those listening at home -- we could pay it off.   Of course, an $143 billion dollar surplus is larger than every surplus America has ever had except one -- the $236 billion surplus we ran in 2000 at the height of the Internet dot.com bubble.   So that's not really happening.   True, as we move through that timeline, paying $143 billion a year will be less and less due to inflation, but still… not going to happen.   Recalling John Maynard Keynes, in the long run we're all dead.   So, for all meaningful purposes, we're in debt forever.  

So what is going to happen?    Well, if we could somehow balance the budget and if we could somehow grow the economy to double its current size over the next 20 years (requiring, by the "Rule of 72," an average growth rate of 3.6% per year), at the end of that time, our national debt would be roughly 40% or so of our total GDP.   Not bad…. but is that level of growth do-able?    Not in an America that has Obamacare, with a government engaged in hyper-regulation, with a legal system that is over-lawyered and dedicated to the extortion rackets of class actions and mass torts.   We've had average growth of 2.7% since 2000.   Think it's suddenly going to get better?    Somebody going to invent the personal computer again?  And, of course, we've begged the question... how exactly are you going to balance the budget?   With this President?   With this Congress?   With 300 million Americans crying about their Social Security and Medicare and how Paul Ryan's plan is going to kill Grandma?   Not likely.    

So what's left?  If you can't pay off debt and you can't grow your way out of it, there's really only one thing to do.    Hyper-inflation.   Hold the line marginally on spending, but print money like crazy and, presto, your national debt evaporates.   And I think that's where we're headed.  

Of course, if our national debt evaporates, so does your life savings.  Bon appétit!  Which is French for…. we're so boned.

Blogger Down

The service that supports this blog and probably millions of others, blogspot.com, has been down since yesterday, so I haven't been able to blog.   It's amazing how we become completely dependent on these technologies, so when they go out we're lost.   Anyway,somewhere out there, every day engineers are working hard to make my life more fun.   Thanks to all of them.  

The Morality of Killing Osama

Peter Wehner has a brilliant article up at Commentary, in which he refutes a Christian theologian's argument that killing Osama bin Laden was unChristian murder.   Here is the key logic Wehner uses, which is an argument that made me really think:

Wright [the theologian] is falling into a common error, which is to assume the Sermon on the Mount was intended to articulate a political philosophy and blueprint for how the state must conduct itself. In plain fact, the moral duties placed on persons are, in important respects, different from those placed on the state. Indeed, within Judaism and Christianity the state has invested in it powers and responsibilities that are different from, and sometimes denied to, persons....

Collapsing the distinction between person and state represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of government, which has granted to it powers of life, death, and coercion denied to individual persons. And these powers can be used to defend innocent lives and establish social order. They can also create the conditions that allow the church to exist, Christians to minister, and good works to be done. For this reason, the callings of soldier, policeman, and president are not merely permissible for Christians, but honorable.

The Immorality of National Debt for Entitlements

"Monty" at Ace of Spades publishes a daily entry entitled "DOOM," which discusses, in suitably terrifying terms, the coming financial apocalypse that America seems unable to avoid, a disaster he attributes largely to government policies and, in particular, unaffordable entitlement programs (the big 3, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid).  After linking to a good post by Greg Mankiw (Harvard economics professor) about the "negative bequest" to our children that our national debt represents, Monty has this to say, which pretty much sums up what I think on the issue, and says it in a way that can't be improved:

It is morally wrong to force young people to make good on false promises made before they were even born. It is an outrage, a scandal, a shame on our society. A society that invests in the old at the expense of (actually, to the large detriment of) the young cannot survive. A caring and kind society cares for the weak and elderly and helpless; a dynamic and just society allows the young to grow and prosper on their own merits. If America is to prosper as a nation, the young must be given room to build families and careers. To build lives, without the onerous, crushing burden of debt run up by their forebears.

Girl of the Day - Not Faye Dunaway

At the beginning of one of my favorite all-time movies, the original version of The Thomas Crowne Affair, with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, McQueen has an extraordinarily beautiful girlfriend to whom he pays scant attention.   The one scene I remember is when he is flying his glider very dangerously while the girl waits for him on the ground nervously.   Anyway, her name was Astrid Heeren:

Again, the crap you remember when you get older.  Sheesh!

Birthday Today - George Carlin

Not a lot of great birthdays today.   About the only one of note is George Carlin, the great comedian.   I loved Carlin growing up, and, apropos of yesterday's comments on Petticoat Junction, I still find myself saying some of his lines.   For instance, at spring Little League games where it looks like the sun is going down before we can finish the 7 innings, I often find myself saying, to some blank looks from my 13 and 14 year-old team, "Forecast for tonight.... dark!   Changing to widely scattered light in the morning."

Here, in fact, is the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman:

Contrarian Thoughts on the GOP Candidates for 2012

There has been a good deal of talk about the supposed "weakness" of the Republican field for President in 2012, despite the fact that we are still 8 months away from the Iowa caucuses.   Here is a typically gloomy description of the prevailing GOP mood, from Byron York of National Review: 

Talk to enough people around this key primary state and you'll learn two lessons, over and over again.  One is that there is absolutely, positively no unity among Republicans about any presidential candidate or potential candidate; there's no such thing as a frontrunner.  The other is that in the back of their minds, many Republicans are hoping that somewhere, somehow, a superhero candidate will swoop down out of the sky and rescue them from their current lackluster presidential field.  They know it's a fantasy, but they still hope.

I have a contrary opinion.  Let's review who we know for sure is in the race, namely, the people who showed up for the first debate in South Carolina: Tim Pawlenty (former Governor of swing state, Minnesota); Rick Santorum (former Senator of swing state, Pennsylvania); Herman Cain (prominent African-American businessman); Ron Paul (libertarian Congressman from Texas and medical doctor); Gary Johnson (libertarian former Governor of swing state, New Mexico, and successful businessman).   That's not bad... you have two former Governors, two successful businessmen, some ideological diversity (Santorum provides the strongest pro-Life voice in the party and Paul and Johnson provide a libertarian alternative vision), some racial diversity (Cain).

Now let's add the people we think will be in the race because they're doing everything they ought to do if they're running:  Mitt Romney (former Governor of "blue" state, Massachusetts, and successful businessman); Mitch Daniels (current Governor of Indiana, former head of federal OMB, and successful businessman); Newt Gingrich (former Speaker of the House and high-profile commentator); and Michelle Bachmann (current Congresswoman from swing state, Minnesota, and, fairly stated, the "Queen" of the Tea Party movement).   Again, that's not that bad... you have two more Governors with executive experience (Romney and Daniels), business experience (same), people who are capable of making strong conservative ideological arguments (Gingrich and Bachmann), and, again, some diversity with a woman candidate who is, not to belabor the point, pretty attractive (Bachmann).  

Now let's add in the people we don't know about, but who might conceivably run:  Rick Perry (current governor of Texas since 2000); Jon Huntsman (former Governor of Utah and ambassador to Singapore and China (and fluent in Mandarin); Donald Trump (billionaire real estate developer and high-profile reality TV star); Mike Huckabee (former Governor of Arkansas and Fox News star); and Sarah Palin (former Governor of Alaska, former Vice-Presidential candidate in 2008, and current multimedia star (books, TV, etc.).   Again, this is a pretty good group, with four Governors, interesting life experiences (Perry was an Air Force pilot, Huntsman was a Mormon missionary in China, Trump is Trump, Palin is Palin, etc.).  

Finally, let's think about the "bench" -- people we don't think are going to run, but who could be persuaded to join a ticket as VP, or who might be in the wings waiting for 2016:  Paul Ryan (leading Congressman and budget hawk from a swing state, Wisconsin); Bobby Jindal (Indian-American governor of Louisiana and Rhodes Scholar... like to see him debate Joe Biden, wouldn't you?); Nikki Haley (Indian-American governor of South Carolina and very attractive young female leader); Marco Rubio (Cuban-American senator from a swing state, Florida); and Chris Christie (governor of New Jersey and Youtube sensation with his stare-downs of state employee union members).   That's a great list, and, for my money, where the future of the party is.  

Sure, there are some people I'd rather not see in the race, namely, Donald Trump, whom I don't believe is a real Republican or conservative and who is, frankly, weird; and Newt Gingrich, whose three marriages kill his candidacy for me.   And there are some people whom I don't believe can win, although they add some intellectual interest to the debates we're going to have:  Cain, Paul, Johnson, Santorum, Bachmann.   And, finally, there are some whom I don't believe are going to run:  Palin and Huckabee, because they can't win, and because they'd be giving up too much money to run.   But, if the race comes down to Romney, Daniels, Pawlenty, Huntsman and maybe Rick Perry (here's hoping), you'd have a field of five successful governors whose real executive experience will contrast well with the incompetence and inexperience of Barack Obama.   Couple them with an attractive younger VP candidate (Ryan, Rubio, Jindal), and you'd have a really good ticket.

Finally, let's think about where we were in 2000, the last time we didn't have an obvious candidate (McCain, in retrospect, was due in 2008).    Senators John Ashcroft, Fred Thompson, and Trent Lott all decided not to run, as did Governors Tommy Thompson and Jeb Bush.   Former Vice President Dan Quayle withdrew before the primaries, as did Governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, former Education Secretary and North Carolina Senator Liddy Dole, and TV commentator Pat Buchanan.   The candidates in the primary elections were thus down to Gary Bauer (pro-Life activist), businessman Steve Forbes, African-American commentator Alan Keyes, and two relatively old Senators, John McCain and Orrin Hatch, along with a single Governor, George W. Bush of Texas, who had served there for a total of six years.   Bush, of course, won, and the pool for potential VP candidates was so thin that he ended up naming Dick Cheney, who brought nothing to the table in terms of electoral votes (Wyoming), and hadn't been part of anybody's thinking prior to that.  

We're much better off now.   Santorum is better than Bauer; Herman Cain is much better than Alan Keyes; we have governors instead of old Senators; we have real conservatives rather than RINOs like McCain and Hatch and Liddy Dole; we even have a Texas governor with more experience who isn't named Bush.   And then there's that bench.

I'm just saying.   Jay Cost in the Weekly Standard comes to the same conclusion, with a different rationale.   Essentially he says it's too early to tell.  I agree, but I also think that what we have is pretty good.   For my money, a Daniels-Jindal or Perry-Jindal or Huntsman-Jindal ticket would be just fine.  

Birthday Today - Doggy Version

Our family hound, Gibby (named after Bob Gibson, the Cardinals pitcher), turns three today. In people years that would make him 21, which means he should move out of the house and get a job.

Doesn't look like he's going anywhere, does it?

Happy Birthday, Gibby!

Birthday Today - Irving Berlin

A good follow up to yesterday's birthday of Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin was born on this day in 1888.   Astaire actually was the singer for some of Berlin's best songs, and there were a lot of great ones.   Here's one of my favorites, which I used to sing to my children:

Girl of the Day - Petticoat Junction Edition

We remember our childhood, if happy, as mine was, through rose-colored glasses.   Sunny days, baked fields, the arc of a ball through the air, the salty taste of sweat, the cool of the air in the house when you came in from play.   Little things stand out, and often echo in the pet phrases we continue to use that only we understand, because the origins are so obscure.   For instance, I often say, "I'm wearing a cardboard belt!" when someone intimates that I make a good living.  It comes from the movie "The Producers" by Mel Brooks; in the movie it's a lament from Zero Mostel to his accountant about why he hadn't paid income taxes -- he simply didn't have a pot to piss in.

Another phrase that I use habitually, usually when I see someone hobbling or when I see a kid in baseball practice not moving quickly enough to suit me is "Hey, Uncle Joe, he's moving kinda slow."   That phrase, which is truly obscure, is from the theme song to a popular Sixties television show called "Petticoat Junction."

Anyway, about all I remember from the show is that it had a set of three young ladies on it who were very attractive, none of whom, at least as far as I recall, ever went on to stardom.   The show was set in a fictional small Southern town called "Hooterville," which, in retrospect, captures its appeal perfectly.   The girls' names on the show were "Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo, and Bettie Jo."   Here's a shot from the set:

And here they are in a semi-famous shot from the opening credits, where the girls, or so it is implied, are skinny-dipping in the water-tank at the train station:



I have a sense that the girls changed over the years the show was on, 1963-1970, but it doesn't much matter.   The prettiest of the bunch was probably Meredith MacRae, who had a certain classic Sixties California blonde appeal:

Man, the crap you remember.   I'd probably work better if I could purge the memory banks every few years.  



Birthday Today - Fred Astaire

Born in 1899, Fred Astaire is.... well, he's Fred Astaire, and no one else is, or likely ever will be.   The greatest dancer ever?  I think so.   Here he is with Rita Hayworth, whom Astaire considered to be the best female dancer in Hollywood during the 1940s.   Funny, I never thought of her as a dancer, but she's cute as a button in this number.   Neat stuff.

Girl Monday - Kim Novak

Kim Novak was never really my cup of tea; something about her looks seemed a little too harsh for my taste.   But she was a huge star in the late 1950s in great movies like The Man With the Golden Arm, Picnic, and Vertigo (opposite Frank Sinatra, William Holden and Jimmy Stewart, respectively).   In Picnic, she has one of the iconic scenes in history, dancing on the pier with Holden:

I, Me, My... the Rhetoric of Barack Obama

Victor Davis Hanson captured something important earlier this week about Obama's nature, as he analyzed the rhetoric of Obama's speech announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden.   Hanson, a classical scholar, noted the obvious and by-now-default mode of Obama to use the first person singular in speeches that are about his administration's or the nation's accomplishments, as if he had done it all himself:

Here are a few excerpts from President Obama’s speech on Sunday night about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“Tonight, I can report . . . And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken. . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed. . . .”

It is amazing that Obama's speechwriters haven't learned the first lesson of Presidential rhetoric.   It's found, most notably, in the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Presidential speeches, especially in times of national crisis or moments where national security is at stake, should always be in the first person plural, not the first person singular.  It's always about "us"; it should never be about "me."  

The narcisissm of President Obama was on full display in this truly poor speech.  Over at Ace of Spades, they've usefully compared Obama's speech with the speech of George W.  Bush announcing the capture of Saddam Hussein, in which Bush used "we" or "our" formulations almost exclusively.  Quite a contrast, one that reflects the difference between a narcissist and a man with real humility and generosity.  

Vindication

From Jim Geraghty at National Review:

Here is Geraghty's commentary, which I can't improve.   Great stuff:

I can hear the liberal cries of outrage, so to recap: The interrogations of KSM (which included waterboarding) and the interrogation of Hassan Ghul (held in “black site” prisons) were key to identifying the courier; the president then authorized military action in a foreign country without going to the United Nations or informing the host government; the military action was unilateral, and we did not consult with our allies; Congress was not informed of the military action; and it increasingly appears that no serious effort was made to treat Osama bin Laden as a criminal (reading him his rights, etc.). The monitoring of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s phone call was a result of an extensive global wiretapping system. Furthermore, as Charles Krauthammer notes, the helicopters used in the raid came from Bagram and Jalalabad; if we had withdrawn from Afghanistan on the antiwar Left’s timetable, we would have had no bases from which to launch this operation.

On a similar tack, Victor Davis Hanson nails the Obama administration's hypocrisy:

Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away.

Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush. Conservatives might resent Obama’s prior demagoguery at a critical period in our national security, as much as they are relieved that he seems to have grown up and repudiated it.

Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.

Birthdays Today

Really great birthdays today.  

First, today is the birthday of Sigmund Freud, born in 1856.   Freud was, of course, the author of the theory of psychoanalysis that dominated much of the middle part of the 20th Century, at least in high European, Western culture.   Freud has never been my cup of tea; I've always thought that his emphasis on childhood sexuality and sexuality generally as the main motivator of human action is both simplistic and sensationalistic.   I think human beings are both more complex and more boring than the sex-crazed loonies that seem to appear from Freud's world-view.   I also think his emphasis on dream interpretation is just silly; and that his use of the "talking cure" as the mode of treatment for depressed or neurotic or even psychotic individuals has had a horrible effect on our entire culture -- we now seem to believe (or, at least, liberals do ) that any problem can be solved simply by talking about it.   But it's hard to overstate his influence on our common cultural vocabulary.   My favorite work of his is probably Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), which deals with the repression of aggressive impulses by society and the formation of a super-ego which internalizes that societal repression.   Essentially Freud says that, while we need civilization to survive, civilization also inherently makes us unhappy because it represses our sexual and aggressive impulses.      "Civilization," Freud writes, "therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city."

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It's also the birthday of Orson Welles, born in 1915.   Welles directed arguably the greatest American movie ever, Citizen Kane, when he was 25, and followed it with some remarkable, lesser-known works, including The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, as wells as his remarkable series of Shakespearean dramas, Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight (focusing on the character of Falstaff).   Here is a great, great scene from a movie he took over directing and starred in, but did not receive credit for directing, The Third Man, with his running mate, Joseph Cotton:




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It's also Willie Mays' 80th birthday.   Possibly the greatest baseball player ever; surely the most exciting, Mays provided probably the greatest World Series catch ever, with this grab against the Indians in the Polo Grounds in the 1954 series:



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Finally, it's also the 28th birthday of one of our favorite actresses, from one of our favorite shows, Friday Night Lights, Adrianne Palicki, who has been a Girl of the Day in the past, but obviously deserves a reprise:

Girl Friday - Miss Wisconsin

The reigning Miss Wisconsin, Kimberly Sawyer, was apparently a college softball player at St. Norbert in Green Bay and has two cats, named Mickey and Joe after Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio.   I mean, seriously, could that get any cooler?

Update on the "Narrative"

The use of the word "narrative" to describe a sequence of facts relayed by political operatives -- it has been often used by Jay Carney, the President's Press Secretary in connection with the bin Laden raid -- has to stop.   Are they fools?  Don't they know that when the rest of us hear the word "narrative" we think "story" or "fiction" or "made-up plot"?   They should always just say, here are the facts as we know them right now, period.   Just the facts, ma'am, in other words.  

Anyway, the "narrative" for the bin Laden raid has been under some scrutiny for days now, and appears to have changed significantly.  Where initially bin Laden was an armed participant in a 40-minute firefight, it now appears that he was never armed, and that the firefight was very brief.   There is also at least some suggestions that he was captured, or else could have been captured, and was shot anyway, perhaps afterwards.  

I guess I won't lose sleep over it, one way or another, but it sure makes hypocrites out of all the liberals who claimed we needed to give due process rights to al Qaeda fighters we captured and afford them all of the rights they would get as uniformed combatants for a sovereign enemy under the Geneva Conventions. 

Here is a good timeline from Fox News that summarizes the evolving understanding of the facts about the raid -- a "narrative" about the "narrative," if you will.    

Pujols and the Concept of a "Decline Phase"

Three months ago, I wrote this in answer to the question "Is Pujols Worth It":

If Pujols' demand is for $30 million a year for 10 years, in a word, no.  Pujols will be 32 in the first year of his new contract.   If you pay him, you'll have a right to expect him to put up all-time great years for that amount of money.  But, of the 150 highest OPS years in baseball history for hitters (on base average plus slugging average), only 34 (roughly 22%) occurred when the player was 32 or older.  Of the Top 50 OPS years, only two happened when the player was 37 or older, and both were by Barry Bonds when he was, shall we say, doing some suspicious things.  And, the three players who Pujols' career most resembles through age 30 (again, through the miracle of online baseball statistics) -- Jimmie Foxx, Frank Robinson and Ken Griffey, Jr. -- had a grand total of 17 seasons between them with an OPS of 1.000 or more and none of them occurred when they were 32 years old or older.

As sad as it makes me to say this, I think I was prescient.  Pujols appears to now be officially in his decline phase.   He currently has an OPS of .725, and this with a red-hot Matt Holliday and Lance Berkman protecting the hell out of him.   His OPS in April of .794 was the lowest full month OPS for Albert since July of his rookie year, and it's only gone down since then as he's been slumping through the first week of May.  And, as weird as it sounds, this pattern give me some pause:

Year              OPS
2008               1.114
2009               1.101
2010               1.011
2011                 .725 (through May 5)

That pattern to me can be read as slight decline followed by significant decline followed by catastrophic-falling-off-the-cliff decline.   Now, while I fully expect Pujols to turn his season around and end up with an OPS that's decent, it wouldn't surprise me if he's going to finish with an OPS in the .900 range.   A very good player, to be sure, but not someone you want to sign to a $30 million a year contract.   He sure looks to me like he's in a decline phase.
  

Girl Thursday - Evan Rachel Wood

I much prefer my "Girl of the Day" to be an actress from the 1930s through 1950s or so; somehow looking at young actresses from today's films seems a little, well, yucky.  I have two beautiful daughters, after all, and I don't like to think of myself as ogling some girl who could easily be their older sister. 

On the other hand, the wife (the beautiful and still scrumptious JEB) and I are currently watching Mildred Pierce on HBO (we DVR'ed it when it played a month or so ago), and it's set in the 1930s, so I guess I can pretend as if the young actress who plays the evil daughter Veda in the show isn't actually the now 23 year-old Evan Rachel Wood.  (Note: this is the actress who plays the daughter at an older age; another, younger girl, plays Veda as a child.   Still evil as hell.)  

Anyway, Evan Rachel Wood is a very fine actress and a very beautiful girl, so she's the Girl of the Day:

Thoughts on Blowing the Osama PR

I am willing to cut the Obama administration some slack for some of the public relations miscues that have occurred since the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden.    They are ably outlined here by Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller, in his article "Obama administration takes victory lap in clown car":

Then there’s the official narrative of the raid, which has already gone through more versions than the Star Wars movies. First Bin Laden had a gun; then he didn’t. He hid behind one of his wives, who was killed; wait, no, scratch that, she’s alive and wasn’t his wife. Maybe? Now Leon Panetta says he and President Obama didn’t actually see the whole thing go down, after the White House made a point of releasing that instantly iconic picture of the whole gang watching it go down.

Isn’t it kind of important to get all that stuff right the first time? Personally, I don’t care if Bin Laden was holding a tray of freshly baked cookies and asking our boys if they wanted any tea when they shot him. You’ve heard of suicide by cop? As far as I’m concerned, Osama Bin Laden committed suicide by 9/11. But now the White House just looks like a bunch of bumblers. If you’re not exactly sure what happened, why give details you might have to retract? How in the world do you screw up a win this big?

And here by Stephen Green in his article "The Gang That Could Shoot Straight -- But Not Much Else":

The plan for killing Osama Bin Laden was perfectly conceived and as perfectly executed as any special forces operation since Israel’s raid on Entebbe. But the follow-through has been strange at best, sometimes bordering on incompetence.

First, there was that weird burial at sea “in accordance with Islamic tradition.” There, the White House managed to annoy most everyone. There are those like me, who thought Bin Laden’s corpse was treated with too much respect, to those in the Islamic world now inflamed because it wasn’t really done properly after all.

Then there was the president’s oddly bloodless speech Sunday night. For almost ten years we’d been trying to get the guy who murdered 3,000 Americans, attacked our military HQ, and ripped the heart out of the New York City skyline. The effort spanned two continents, four or five countries, a Caribbean Navy base, and the persistent efforts of two presidents, the American intelligence community, and the best of the best of our special forces. And yet President Obama sounded as if he were announcing a “worthwhile Canadian initiative.”

Now the Administration can’t even decide whether or not to release a photo of the body. They didn’t have a PR plan in place before the killing? It must be amateur night at the White House, because what I’m hearing sounds increasingly like karaoke. More specifically, a Last Call group chorus of “My Way,” with the participants too drunk to remember all the words.

And, finally, a less snarky round-up of inconsistencies in the administration's story by Amanda Carey, again at The Daily Caller:   

The White House also had to backtrack on early reports that Bin Laden was armed and engaged in combat when U.S. forces swept the compound. On Monday, a senior official at a Pentagon briefing said that Osama used his wife as a shield and “was firing behind her.”

Brennan also said at his briefing Monday that the terrorist leader joined in the fight when the raid was underway. “He [bin Laden] was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know,” he said.

In Tuesday narrative change, however, Carney told reporters that Bin Laden was actually not armed during the raid.

I think the first two commentaries are too harsh.   As I said, I am willing to cut the Obama administration some slack on this.   We are talking about a huge undertaking, involving many layers of bureaucracy and much secrecy, where plans and tactics were likely kept secret even from most of the people in the White House -- and properly so, as information about such an operation would be on a strict "need-to-know" basis -- and where the events took place around the world in the middle of the night in what is aptly referred to as the "fog of war."   I get how some details would be mistaken.   It happens.  It's like the "telephone game" that kids play:  someone tells their superior in Afghanistan that X happened; the superior translates that to his superior back in the U.S.; that officer tells someone further up the chain of command; then the White House is told, perhaps at the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State level; then the information is finally trickled back down to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney at the podium in the press room.   Not surprising that he might get some things wrong.

But (and this is a big "but") the one thing that this trail of misinformation shows beyond dispute is that, at the level of tactical details, the White House had little first-hand knowledge and little input into what was going on.   Other than giving the ultimate order (which, as I've written below, any President would have done), the White House had little involvement.   And appropriately so; civilian leaders set policy, military personnel plan and conduct the actual operations.  

But when they then take credit for their own "bravery" and act as if Obama was somehow remotely conducting the operation as tactical commander, taking away credit from the brave SEALs and the unknown number of intelligence operatives around the world who likely risked their lives to develop the information to lead to bin Laden, that's the part that really irks me.  

Obama would have gotten credit for being President when the Osama takedown occurred anyway.   He could have given credit where credit was due to the servicemen and intelligence personnel who made it happen.  He didn't need to seize the credit from them and trumpet his own wonderfulness.  It shows a good deal of insecurity, methinks. 

 

Thoughts on the Osama Photo

A good rule when thinking about any conspiracy is that, when the number of people who would have to keep quiet about X -- where X is something really really big, like the assassination of President Kennedy, or, now, the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan -- then the likelihood of there being a successful conspiracy to keep X quiet is vanishingly small.   So, if I never saw the picture of Osama bin Laden dead, I still wouldn't believe that there was a conspiracy to pretend that we got him, and that he's still alive, because such a conspiracy would have to involve hundreds of men and women whom, I believe, wouldn't countenance being part of it.   Men like the men of the SEAL team that took him down, men like our military leaders, and, yes, even men and women who work in the White House, even this White House.   We forget:  there are honorable people in the world, after all.  

I don't need to see the picture to prove to my satisfaction that we got him.    Weighed against the likelihood of it being used as a propaganda tool to enflame the Middle East and Islamists around the world, I'd say not releasing it is an easy call.   Another easy call that Obama has apparently gotten right.   It's the hard things -- what to do about Iran and Syria; what to do about our national debt; what to do about our unsustainable Medicare and Social Security programs -- that's when Obama has trouble.

Girl of the Day - Very Oldy, But Very Goody

Looking back, I think I've noted Mary Pickford and Clara Bow on The Regular Guy Believes, but I don't think I've ever mentioned Lillian Gish, who was arguably the greatest actress of the silent film era.   She, of course, appeared, in Griffith's landmark Birth of a Nation, but she also starred in several other Griffith films, notably Intolerance and Way Down East.  Here is the famous climax of Way Down East, in which Gish floats toward a waterfall on an ice floe (flip ahead to about 7:50 in the video)... it's absurd as a matter of physics, but brilliant as movie-making, particularly in the era before special effects:

The Decision

Much will be made of Barack Obama's decision to order what essentially is the assassination of Osama bin Laden, using Seal Team 6 "behind enemy lines" inside our erstwhile ally, Pakistan.   Certainly he deserves credit for making the decision, although in a somewhat negative way.   Surely no one can deny that, faced with the same intelligence, and offered the same advice by the American military and intelligence chiefs, any number of other actual and potential Presidents would have given the same order.  Indeed, it's hard to imagine a circumstance where anyone wouldn't give the same order -- George W. Bush certainly would have; so would John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or Sarah Palin for that matter.   The only Presidents where we have any doubt about whether they would issue such an order are, of course, Democrats -- Carter, Clinton, and Obama himself.   And perhaps Obama most of all:  isn't it true that, one of the main reasons we want to give Obama credit for making the decision and giving the order is that, for most people, we just didn't think he had the balls to do it?   In that sense, the credit we give him is negative... he gets credit for doing his job because Obama's incompetence, vacillation and weakness have become the default assumption about him.   He didn't f*** this one thing up, so we give him credit.  

So, two cheers for Obama on the great triumph of giving an order that anyone else would have given.   He's not my hero; the men of Seal Team 6 and the other brave servicemen serving in Afghanistan and Iraq... those guys are my heroes.  

Blessed John Paul II

Pope John Paul II was beatified today, the first step toward sainthood.   John Paul II was arguably the greatest man of the 20th Century.   The only man who even might be in the argument would be Winston Churchill, in my judgment.  FDR and Ronald Reagan and Gandhi might be in the next tier down.  

The crowds in Rome agree: