Rachel Sklar of the Huffington Post has launched an attack on those who criticized Newsweek last week for its decision to run a cover photo of Sarah Palin in extreme closeup without the benefit of retouching. “Let’s just state for the record that we’re in crazyland at the outset.,” Sklar writes.
Let me explain what “retouching” is, for those who have yet to learn how to do it yourself with digital photo programs. News photographs are taken by high-speed cameras; those photographers capture dozens and dozens of images for every single one used. The cameras, which magnify, capture distracting and unflattering aspects of everyone — a weird grimace, an eye half-rolled up. In the case of photographs of women, they capture facial inconsistencies even through make-up — a stray hair growing in an unflattering place, a pitted cheek.
The retouching of photos is almost precisely analogous to the experience everyone has when he goes on television — makeup, often very heavy makeup, is used to offset the unflattering aspects of TV studio lighting. A man’s bald pate is patted down with powder to make sure it doesn’t shine. Everyone has his hair brushed and even teased. Women often get the full blow-dryer treatment and a form of spray-on makeup that is called (just like photo retouching) “air-brushing.”
The Palin image on the cover of Newsweek captures skin mottles and hairs she had not yet plucked from her lip. The editorial purpose of not doing the standard work of retouching is to show “the real Sarah Palin” — and since Newsweek’s editorial package is extremely unflattering, so is the photograph. It is, therefore, an intentional effort to uglify her. And pointing that out is not “crazyland,” as Ms. Sklar thinks it is.
But if she is so sure, then I have this challenge for her. Rachel Sklar does a lot of television. I think she should go on television without any makeup on. For several weeks, she should appear without makeup or hairstyling help, until the number of people who see her equals the number who will see Sarah Palin on the cover of Newsweek in every airport and newsstand in the country. Oh, and run an unretouched photo of herself, in extreme closeup and in ful size, with her column. And then come back and tell us how it was for her.
I recall hearing that when the US went to Kyrgyzstan to ask for basing rights immediately after 9/11, they only real question on their minds was whether the US would stick it out to the end or would the US turn tail leaving them a mess.
Given that Kyrgyzstan voted this week to end basing rights, one has to ask if they have already figured out that the US will roll up the sidewalks and come home.
There are two ways in which the Obama campaign made the Obama Presidency more difficult. First, in order to gain momentum in the primary and peal support away from Hillary, the campaign had to woo the radical liberals, unions and interest groups with promises they could never fulfill in the real world. Second, in the general election, since they could not run on Obama’s experience or record of accomplishments, they had to create an image of extraordinary intelligence and competence. “No, he has never run a government entity, but he’s so miraculously gifted that anything he touches will turn to gold.”
This was a sort of deal with the devil. It led them to victory, but it did not position him well for actually governing. The Obama political team (especially Obama himself) are responsible for creating the myth of Obama, of the Obammesiah who would cause the oceans to recede and the earth to heal, who would convince the world’s dictators not to hate us anymore, and who would regulate the economy responsibly (no more “cowboy capitalism”) so that everyone can have a home, two cars in the garage and a unicorn in the backyard. Now they must face the consequences. The problem is: How can a Messiah fail at anything? Given someone so miraculously intelligent and competent, shouldn’t our problems fall away before him like dominoes, one after the other?
So they have had to change the narrative, and the liberal press has cooperated. Prior to the election the air was filled with possibility and hope, with grand stories of all that Obama could accomplish and transform. After the election the air changed quickly, and not only on the economy: now everything was impossible and hopeless, and newspapers produced lists of the daunting challenges the Obama administration would face. “Yes we can” became “We almost certainly cannot.” The Obama team found the answer. A Messiah has to do miracles; the eager crowd is waiting. So now the miracle will be if he is able to accomplish anything at all. Obama has inherited such colossal problems from the Bush administration that if he is able to do anything good it will be an accomplishment of Herculean proportions. And if he cannot overturn the catastrophic forces put in place over the country as a whole, he can still conduct healings of the Henrietta Hugheses of the world.
Americans apparently went to the polls in November thinking they were players in some Hollywood epic in which a previously untested person with unsuspected talent steps forward in time of great peril and leads his people to safety and everlasting glory. Wonderful story. Found often in fiction and film.
Reality bites.
I know that many will never credit George Bush. So, I call attention to the famous picture of Ike on D-Day, smiling and exuding confidence as he sent the paratroops off on their fearsome mission. It would be many years before they knew of his private worries; and the statement of personal responsibility he had already drafted in event of failure. That is the way leaders behave in difficult times.
The Socialists spent the last 8 years downtalking everything–the war, the economy, the President, the country. And they rode that doom and gloom to power. They couldn’t stop now if they wanted to. Its all they know.
When you’ve got Slick Willie giving advice to the One, six to five the Obama Myth is about to become an Aesop’s fable.
#4, Under the conservatives, the cost of Government is 18%,under the “socialists” it is 21%. Big Deal. We get higher deficits with the Conservatives;we get higher taxes with the “socialists”. It all bad. It’s all they know.
#4,
Oh, I forgot to point out that NOW,under the “Socialists”, cost of government will go up to 26% of GDP;when the conservatives take over;their cost of government will go up to 23% to keep the historical 3% in place. Nothing is going to change.
RCAR, you may be right. Still, I’ll take the 3%.
I really could not be more tired of this “Democrats are socialists” meme. I mean, I know that Commentary does not represent any sort of mainstream view on anything, but really… you guys think that 51% of the country has a secret plan to create socialism? You really believe that? Have you ever met anyone who is actually a socialist? Or do you think that when we Democrats go home at night, we press a secret button and descend into our evil socialist batcaves?
The below discussion of the GDP is from Salon.com. The statistics are from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and have also been quoted on that crazy left-wing television network, Fox News:
“Government spending’s share of the GDP has risen under each of the last three Republican presidents, while it fell fell under former President Clinton’s watch. Under Ronald Reagan, it reached a high of 37.2 percent, in 1986. George H.W. Bush saw it top out at 38.5 percent in 1992 — his son watched it climb to a peak of 38.6 percent last year. This year, the OECD projects, it will hit 39.8 percent. ”
…Wow. Government spending rises under Republican presidents, fell under Clinton, and it will rise 1.2 percent this year during the worst economic crisis in seventy years. Whoo hoo. Big deal.
#8
I forgot something important in #s6&7. Our GDP is now reduced from $14Trillion to $10 Trillion,therfore the cost of Government for the “Socialists” will hit 32% soon. Again,when the conservatives take over,they’ll be stuck at 29-30%. Take the 3%,that’s great, but you’re only chosing higher deficits over higher taxes. Both parties are now socialists.
Obama is a political bubble, a product of irrational exuberance, that is now bursting — like the other bubbles that came before him.
thinking they were players in some Hollywood epic
Even “Dave” did better than Obama has in the first 4 weeks.
Dave, at least, didn’t need a teleprompter.
fell under Clinton
Only when he had a Republican Congress.
Hey, that’s the ticket .. let’s give Obama a Republican House .. send Nancy running for the Botox.
I agree Huxley (#11). I made the same comment to friends and family. This bubble too must burst.
My hope is that Americans will learn from experience and reject all bubbles in the future. Hope is good; but don’t plan your future on hope alone. Bubbles are pretty while they last, but only a fool would try to go aloft on a bubble.
#9, I don’t know anybody who will admit to being a socialist, but I don’t know anybody who admits to being “liberal” either. Its a dirty word, even to Democrat activists whose mission in life is to grow government at every level and to put government in charge of every aspect of the economy. They won’t admit to being socialists, they’re sure it doesn’t reflect well on them, but they are in fact socialists. I think you’re going to hear that dirty word more and more as the Socialists attempt to enact their makeover.
BTW – as to the numbers games in posts ca. #6 – #10: We’ve only just begun… to spend – and I wonder how those numbers will look for next year and subsequent, and after you’ve stripped out direct monetary transfers via theoretically self-financing and non-discretionary entitlements.
Otherwise, it’s the reasoning of the bankruptcy in gestation: “Sure, I’m tapped out and living on a credit card, but that new home theater/car/bathroom/acquisition etc. would be only a fraction of what I owe already, so why not?
From Mark McKinnon’s article on The Daily Beast:
“George W. Bush was president through some of the darkest days of our history and yet his optimism never waned. He is optimistic by nature, but he also understood the importance of always communicating a sense that things will get better. And it’s in part why John Kerry lost in 2004. He painted a terrible picture of the future. And as Bush said, “You can’t say things are going to be awful, follow me and expect to turn around and see a crowd.””
Enough said.
The word “socialist” has at least several different meanings in modern discourse. It could be the transitional stage described by Marx between the overthrow of capitalism and the emergence of communism. It could be a belief that *all* of the means of production, transfer and exchange should be owned by the community/government. Or it could be a more modest form of the latter, as in the European socialist democratic parties.
I personally don’t use the word “socialist” when talking about today’s Democrats, unless I’m talking about Obama’s flirtation with the socialist democrats in Chicago. But I think what most of my fellow conservative are getting at is a pressing out of the free market and toward government ownership of more and more of our economy (health care, insurance, banking, etc.) and our lives.
As to the previous administrations, I think one has to take a rather more detailed view. Reagan cut taxes and saw government receipts grow, and there was a fair amount of military spending due to the Cold War. Bush I was never exactly a conservative; he raised taxes, famously. Clinton saw a contraction of Government during his term after the Republicans took power in the Congress in 1994; remember that it is Congress that controls the purse-strings. Clinton had no wars, and he was largely frustrated into inaction; his major action that reduced government expenditures was welfare reform, and the Republicans twisted his arm into it and liberals hate him for it. if his wife had universalized health care, you can bet the government would have grown. Bush is now known as a big-government conservative, for good reasons; obviously he had a number of extraordinary events to contend with as well.
What I’m concerned with is our political process. It seems that the way to retain political office, for Democrats as well as Republicans, is to make the government deliver more and more–more pork, more benefits, more jobs for the folks back home. This is why I had some reason to support John McCain, since he understood that the whole pork culture was corrupting our governmental system. Representatives and Senators are judged by how much pork they can bring back home, Governors by how much they can get out of the federal budget, local leaders by how much they can get from the state and federal budgets, and on and on. This creates enormous pressure for expansion of government spending and services.
What’s the solution? Line item vetoes? Greater transparency? Get rid of the pork mechanisms so that only Governors and mayors can request federal monies? I don’t know. But I’ve long felt we need some basic changes in our culture, including our political culture, before much is going to change.
I guess that should have been “moneys”?
Ahithophel and Neo addressed it already, but it’s worth saying again: substitute “Democratic Congress” for “Republican president” in the sequence outlined in Andrew’s quote at #9, and you have a better description.
That’s not an excuse of Bush II and his Republican Congresses, BTW. They come in for their share of blame. But Congressional spending rises more with Democratic Congresses.
Ahithophel has captured pretty well what conservatives mean when they call Democrats (at least some of them) “socialist.” Too much is made by left-wing commentators of the theoretical definition of “socialism” in academic discourse. Political discourse is what is at issue here. There is an excellent real-world paradigm by which American Democrats meet many of the criteria of POLITICAL socialism, and that is their agenda similarity to the “centrist” Socialist parties of Europe.
Europeans have been calling themselves socialists for decades without necessarily proposing that the state literally own and direct all the means of production. Such Europeans represent themselves as advocates for the common man, the working man, and show that they have his welfare at heart by voting a list of state benefits for him, and funding those benefits by taxing all economic activity. Europe’s political socialists work to ensure that labor unions have the upper hand in dealing with business, and maintain firm positions on how much profit private companies should be allowed to make, and how many hours people should work each week.
European political socialists favor a variety of the same things American Democrats do, from unlimited (including state-subsidized) access to abortion, to affirmative action and hate-crime laws. However, when US conservatives (who would, for the most part, be “classical liberals” in Europe) refer to Democrats as seeking socialism, or being socialist, it is government encroachment on private economic transactions they are typically referring to.
Conservative commentators have tried to come up with other adjectives for the left, like “statist” (or, of course, Jonah Goldberg’s “liberal fascist,” which obviously isn’t going to catch on in temperate discourse, but is technically valid on many points). In political debate, “socialist” is close enough for most people, though, in that it implies government taking charge of industries and “picking winners and losers.”
One thing I would observe to Andrew is that you have to understand business to know that government exerts control over business with taxation, regulation, government spending, and government “investment.” Government doesn’t HAVE to literally “own” the means of production to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to which businesses will succeed and which will fail. Everything government does affects the viability of business. It also affects the face of goods and services to consumers, through their availability and price.
We are often confused about this, and attribute to “business” or the “market” phenomena that have actually been created by government policies. Today’s health care environment is a prime example of that. For virtually everyone who pays for his care with private insurance, service prices are set on schedules that map back to the fee schedule of Medicare. At least half the states have cost-shifting built into their systems: paying patients pay the costs of the non-paying, with their insurance premiums and the payments made by their insurers (plus co-pays). In some states, health industry businesses — insurance companies and health corporations — pay a premium from their incomes into state health care funds. The businesses, of course, charge their ratepayers to cover the premiums. Taxpayers who also carry private health insurance thus pay for state-provided health care by two methods: through their taxes, and through their insurance premiums and co-pays.
This is why health care has become so expensive. It has all been achieved through the introduction of Medicare, state health care programs, and state regulation of health insurance (which last is the reason most Americans don’t have the option to pay only for cheaper coverage of catastrophic illness, and must carry whatever their state deems comprehensive and mandatory). Government did not have to literally take over the health care industry to make it a cost-shifting system; it has done it through benefit programs and regulation.
If you have never run a business, or worked for one, you may not immediately see how a government can gain leverage, and control over your economic future, with benefits and regulation. Those who CAN see it, and who call it “socialism” when they do, are seeing something much more important and intrinsically valid than the theoretical definition of socialism, as opposed to capitalism and communism. The predictions of those people, about concrete economic outcomes, are accurate. The consequences of interventionist state economic programs may be unintended, but they are never unforeseeable — or unforeseen.
Neither the Administration’s pessimism or Kagan’s optimism are correct in Afghanistan.
Sure we can prevail there. But what for?
Now 17,000 more men are being dispatched. An additional 13,000 will follow. At the same time we we are being evicted from the key Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan and our supply route through the Khyber pass is being attacked. We will soon have 100,000 forces to supply in all. That makes us ever more dependent on the good will of Pakistan, also Russia whose influence on the south Caucasus is profound as we just found out in Kyrgyzstan. How much sense does this make? And for what?
What do we care whether al Qaeda’s safe havens are in Pakistan or in Afghanistan? Wherever they shelter, we are not more or less safe. Have we vital interests in Afghanistan? Iran does, she hates the Taliban and almost went to war against them in the ’90s. Russia too fears them as a nefarious influence on Chechnya and on the entire Muslim belt across the south Caucasus. She too has a vital interest in the Taliban’s defeat. But why should we spend our money and blood to do them this favor; what is our vital national interest there?
Real optimism would take us out of Afghanistan and leave Russia and Iran to struggle against the Taliban. And it would remove the gun Pakistan has to our head, and the hand it has in our pockets.
One more note: pessimism in the president’s administration is a cold chill down the spine of the deployed military. Military force is not a SUBSTITUTE for will, but a tool of it. If Obama is not optimistic about what he is sending additional troops to Afghanistan for, then it would be better for them if he simply pulled out now. Military ops never achieve success on autopilot. When the leader does not have the stomach for the fight, the troops become bullet sponges.
The other lesson team Obama could take from the Bush administration, and especially President Bush, is that part of the job is accepting that people will criticize, even revile, you.