09.16.2011 - 6:08 PM
In his column today, Michael Gerson makes a very strong case that Representative Michele Bachmann, who said earlier this week that the HPV vaccine might cause mental retardation, “seems prone to a serious condition: the compulsive desire to confirm every evangelical stereotype of censorious ignorance.” Ms. Bachmann, meanwhile, has dug in, insisting she will not apologize for her remarks.
She should.
09.16.2011 - 5:48 PM
This week Democrats lost two significant special elections that were referendums on the president, with Democrats sustaining an eight-point loss in a district (NY-9) they had controlled since the Harding presidency and getting blown out by 22 points in a swing district (NV-2) of a battleground state. Perhaps more ominously for Democrats, the “Mediscare” tactics Democrats have used against Republicans for decades was completely ineffective.
Americans are increasingly gloomy about the future, with a gauge of expectations falling to the lowest level since 1980, according to a new survey. The Census Bureau informed us that the poverty rate in 2010 rose for the third consecutive year, with 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published. The report also indicated that median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower last year than any year since in 1997.
09.16.2011 - 4:00 PM
Yesterday, Jonathan ably fisked a leftist attempt to dismiss the statement this week by the PLO’s ambassador to the United States that Jews would not be
allowed to live in a future state of Palestine.
But there is another important point to be made about the comments that ambassador and other Palestinian officials later made to try to clarify that he really didn’t mean what he had said. At least one American news outlet sees their words as sufficient cause to headline an article, “Jews Welcome.” Still, these newer comments demonstrate, perhaps even more clearly, that Palestinian officials remain incapable of the basic understanding and acknowledgement of the Zionist proposition a true peace will require.
09.16.2011 - 3:20 PM
Lost in the avalanche of commentary about the shocking victory of a Republican in a heavily Jewish New York Congressional district this week was one inexcusable comment from a prominent Democrat about the prospect of just such a defeat for his party. Rather than defend his party on the issues, and echoing a well-established anti-Semitic cliché, Rep. Henry Waxman claimed the reason many Jews were trending Republican was only because they care about their money.
Here’s the complete quote in an article in The Hill published Tuesday:
“I think Jewish voters will be Democratic and be for Obama in 2012, especially if you get a Republican candidate like Gov. Perry. But there’s no question the Jewish community is much more bipartisan than it has been in previous years. There are Jews who are trending toward the Republican Party, some of it because of their misunderstanding of Obama’s policies in the Middle East, and some of it, quite frankly, for economic reasons. They feel they want to protect their wealth, which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.”
This is odious.
09.16.2011 - 3:00 PM
Gone are the days when all Obama had to do to charm the news media was don a pair of blue jeans. Now the Solyndra scandal has become a Jon Stewart punchline, news outlets are joining the mockery of the the AttackWatch campaign site, and even James Carville is advising the White House to panic.
David Axelrod, clearly longing for the good old days, is now blaming the media for hyping Obama’s bad month (in a memo he released to the media):
09.16.2011 - 2:40 PM
The best indication an American politician was seriously considering a run for president used to be either a trip to Israel or lending their name to an effort to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Most of the candidates have already taken their trips, and hypocrisy on the embassy is a bit old-fashioned (especially since all of the candidates who pledged to move it never did so). But if you’re a presidential candidate who wants to lay down a pro-Israel marker, putting your name on an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post as a supporter of the Jewish state will do just as well.
It is in this moderately cynical light that backers of Israel will read the piece published in the Post yesterday as well as the Wall Street Journal today) with Perry’s byline. Pro-Israel rhetoric is not wasted even in Republican primaries in which few Jews vote, as so many evangelical Christians also care about the issue. But though the text of the article is excellent, the main point is it is the beginning of Perry’s outreach to American Jews on the one issue on which he can appeal to them.
09.16.2011 - 12:12 PM
With the sack of Israel’s embassy in Cairo last week fresh in everyone’s minds, the prospect of a repeat of that debacle caused Jerusalem to evacuate their diplomatic staff from Jordan prior to a scheduled rally in Amman. But as it turns out, worries about a proposed “million man march” were, to put it mildly, exaggerated. Only 200 Palestinians showed up outside the embassy yesterday, illustrating not only the impotence of their movement in a country that has peaceful relations with Israel.
The flop of the rally at a time when anti-Israel ferment in the Arab world is peeking shows the vast differences between the situation in Jordan and what is going on in Egypt.
09.16.2011 - 11:28 AM
Joe McGinniss’s new book on Sarah Palin has had a surprisingly strong backlash from the left, as Politico reports this morning. Most of the focus has been on this unfavorable New York Times review by Janet Maslin, but even progressive activists have been jumping to Palin’s defense.
“If male political figures were subject to the cataloging of hookups and reverie from their young-and-single years as Sarah Palin apparently is in this book, these invasions of privacy and dignity would stop. I am no fan of her politics, but she doesn’t deserve this gossip,” wrote Adam Bonin, the chairman of Netroots Nation on Politico’s Arena yesterday.
Leon Panetta is rightly warning lawmakers if they continue to eviscerate defense spending there will be considerable cost not only to the nation’s defense
but to our economy as well. The defense secretary estimates trimming $1 trillion from the defense budget during the next decade–as could occur this fall–would add one percent to the unemployment rate. Given that unemployment is now at 9.1 percent, that’s a further hit that our economy simply can’t afford. That is in addition to what Panetta describes as the “devastating” consequences for the Department of Defense and U.S. power around the world if these cuts are implemented.
Against Panetta’s economic and strategic arguments–and they are coming, remember, from a noted fiscal hawk–what does the anti-defense side have to offer? An unholy alliance of the National Taxpayers Union, a conservative group, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a left-wing group, have issued recommendations for cutting more than $400 billion during the next decade. They are a combination of harmful cuts and wishful thinking.
09.16.2011 - 10:43 AM
Tomorrow is the 224th anniversary of when the delegates to the Federal Convention voted to approve a new Constitution.
One of the encouraging things we’re witnessing in our time is a renewed interest in the Constitution, most especially among Tea Party activists, many of whom consider themselves to be “Constitutional Conservatives.”
09.16.2011 - 10:09 AM
The semifinalists for the National Book Awards — 20 of them in four different categories — will be divulged with much fanfare in a PBS radio program next month. Perhaps the most prestigious American literary prize, the NBA is handed out for the best book published between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the current year; or at least the “best” as judged by a panel of five designated literary experts. Only publishers are allowed to nominate books for consideration, and self-published books are locked out — a feature of the prize that emphasizes its true function. Namely: to provide advertising for publishers. Like the NCAA, the National Book Award is something of a cartel that protects its own.
Last year 302 books were formally submitted for the fiction prize. The surprise winner was the horse-racing novel Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon — a “bona fide bolt from the blue,” according to Janet Maslin of the New York Times. Published by the “independent literary and arts” house McPherson & Co., the prize was viewed in some precincts as a gesture of support to small publishers. Gordon edged out Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, Nicole Krauss’s Great House, Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel — an undistinguished bunch.
So what fiction is most likely to make the first cut? I don’t know that I can come up with 20, but here are at least 10 that I would nominate if I could (in alphabetical order):
• Jo Ann Beard, In Zanesville (Little, Brown). For a long time now I have been complaining about the absence of place in American fiction (see here and here). Beard’s winsome novel of two girlfriends growing up together in a small Ohio town shows what has been missing and why it adds such a rich dimension to good fiction.
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A novel about a graduate student whose adoration for the traditional English novel — the novel with a marriage plot — collides with her academic allegiance to poststructuralist theory, and her own pre-conjugal adventures. Sounds terrible, I know, but everything that Eugenides touches turns to gold.
• William Giraldi, Busy Monsters (W. W. Norton). A revival of the facetious mode of the early Evelyn Waugh, Giraldi’s first novel tells the uproarious story of a New England nebbish trying to win back his Southern belle’s love.
• Ron Hansen, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (Scribner). A reconstruction of the famous “dumb-bell murder” case of 1929 told with a fine eye for historical detail and a light, almost undetectable moral touch. (Review coming up in the October COMMENTARY.)
• Ha Jin, Nanjing Requiem (Pantheon). A brave and bracing novel about the heroic American missionaries — the epiphet is Jin’s — who helped save 200,000 civilians from the Rape of Nanjing.
• William Kennedy, Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (Viking). As a reporter, Kennedy covered the Cuban revolution and the civil rights movement. In the latest installment of his “Albany cycle,” he strings them together in a high-spirited yarn. His novels don’t always cohere, but few writers can compete with Kennedy for sentence-to-sentence enjoyment.
• Lee Martin, Break the Skin (Crown).
• Roland Merullo, The Talk-Funny Girl (Crown). The honest and plainly told story of a girl who “was not treated well” by frightening antisocial parents, and how she redeemed something beautiful from the evil. (Review coming up in the October COMMENTARY.)
• Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner).
• Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home (Simon & Schuster). A family saga that spans thirty years in the lives of four small-town Iowa children and their parents. The novel does not set out to document social changes or memorialize a social class, but rather to suggest that some people still think in terms of what has to be done, even in an age of technological convenience and easy divorce. A work of unusual optimism.
I am already on record as saying that Stone Arabia is the best novel of the year so far (although Merullo’s nearly flawless Talk-Funny Girl is breathing down Spiotta’s neck), and Jeffrey Eugenides is the best American writer born since 1960, but my prediction is that none of these 10 novels will win the National Book Award. It will go to a book few people have heard of and fewer have read.
09.16.2011 - 10:00 AM
Tony Karon, Time magazine’s anti-Zionist commentator on Israel, delivers a quality howler. Here’s his description of Mahmoud Abbas:
He had bet his entire political career on the expectation that jumping through whatever hoops the White House placed in front of him would eventually earn him the reward of statehood.
09.16.2011 - 9:40 AM
More than half of yesterday’s State Department press conference was consumed by questions about the impending Palestinian petition to the UN next week. Spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. envoys, David Hale and Dennis Ross, held meetings yesterday with Israeli President Shimon Peres, E.U. Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, having met the day before with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Hale and Ross are “consulting closely” with other Quartet envoys and will “remain in touch” with them today, Saturday, and again on Sunday in New York. Toner characterized all this as the U.S. being “engaged very intensively on the ground.”
Henry Kissinger shuttled between countries, separated armies, and arrived at armistice agreements with less frenetic effort than the U.S. is devoting to getting the Palestinians to adhere to multiple agreements they already signed – all of which expressly prohibit unilateral moves such as their current one. In Wednesday’s hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation reminded the committee how the first Bush administration handled a similar situation:
09.16.2011 - 9:17 AM
Hot on the heels of the Democratic loss of the congressional seat in New York’s heavily Jewish 9th district, comes a new poll from Gallup showing President Obama’s approval rating heading south among American Jews. The poll shows 40 percent of Jews disapprove of Obama’s performance. That’s an eight percent increase since the last such survey taken in June. While that still leaves him with a 55 percent approval rating (down five points in the last four months), considering that historically, Jews are second only to African-Americans in loyalty to the Democrats, this is an earth-shaking result that may well portend disaster for both Obama and his party next year.
Leftist scribblers such as Eric Alterman are still trying to dismiss the NY-9 result as well as claiming that Jews are, despite all the evidence, quite happy with President Obama’s generally hostile attitude toward Israel. He’s kidding himself about that because, although Obama hasn’t destroyed the alliance altogether, most Americans — Jews and non-Jews alike — agree with most Israelis who consider the president to be the most unfriendly American leader to their country in a generation. Combined with the general dissatisfaction with the economy and Obama’s weak governing style, the stage is set for a historic repudiation of the Democrat by one of the party’s strongest constituencies. But though Alterman’s daffy optimism about the Jewish vote may be unfounded, it does have one solid leg to stand on: Rick Perry.
