Ron's View

Fellow fans of the NYT Vows column, be sure to read tomorrow’s celebration of its twentieth anniversary. Lois Smith Brady tracks down six of the first featured couples and updates us on their marriages, providing stories of happiness, divorce, and death. Good stories all.

The one weakness is Brady’s introduction, which in true Vows style is a bit overdone. For instance:

The way people look at marriage, and live it, has changed over the years. It’s like farming, once considered drudgery and hard work, but now seen as a soulful utopian adventure.

Young people are so beautifully ambitious about marriage these days. I recently interviewed a couple for a Vows column who said they wanted to spend their lives finding each other’s “inner voices.” Marriage may have changed, but love has not. It still makes people say crazy things. And it’s still a glue that no one has control of.

Has so much changed in twenty years? I think not.

But never mind. Read the stories, which Brady recounts well.

To celebrate ten years of blogging, Atrios has been writing a series of posts at Eschaton on the top ten wankers of the decade. It culminated today, the anniversary day, with his selection of the winner. If you haven’t been following along, I recommend some remedial reading.

You can start with this morning’s review, a list of the nine runners up with links to his posts about them. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from his comments last Wednesday on 8th runner up Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist. The excerpt will give you an idea of Atrios’s perspective and the criteria for making the list.

Cohen’s had a long career, wearing one of the “liberal” hats at the Washington Post. It’s a bit sad, thinking about it, as occasionally the “good” Cohen makes an appearance and gets something really really right, but all of that is washed away by decades of the kind of wankery that can only come from lifetime employees of Fox on 15th. And when bad Richard makes an appearance, he’s really, really bad. Monsters walk among us bad.

As for the big test of the decade – just how awesome do you think the Iraq war will be! – Cohen failed miserably. He was bested by the fools, the Frenchmen, and of course the dirty fucking hippies.

From 2/6/03.

It is time once again to quote my favorite philosopher — Tevye, the lead character from “Fiddler on the Roof.” It was his habit to weigh his options by saying, “On the one hand, ” and then, “On the other hand,” until he confronted a situation where there was no other hand. This is where Colin Powell brought us all yesterday.

The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.

I’ll quote also from Atrios’s post about 3rd runner up Joe Klein of Time.

He’s a fairly typical Democrat who hates Democrats, liberal who hates liberals, the real problem with the Democrats being unions, hippies, people who hate the military, people who vote for Democrats, the Democrats they vote for. The usual.

He spent years being America’s Concern Troll when it came to Iraq. He opposed the war except, you know, he didn’t really bother to tell anybody. He wasn’t all that much of a fan of how things were playing out, but the real problem, of course, were the Democrats who were trying to kill off all of our troops by cutting off funding.

And the winner is? Well, who else? Tom Friedman, come on down.

Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false “centrism” which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.

If you’re still not sure why Friedman is a fraud, review the video above from May 29, 2003, with Friedman’s famous “suck on this” explanation of why we needed to go to war in Iraq. What an arrogant SOB!

Yet he continues to rake in the big bucks: mega-bestselling books, highly paid speaking appearances, TV, the column. If ever an emperor had no clothes, it’s him.

Anyway, read Atrios.

The mystery of Olive Garden is a recurring topic here at Ron’s View. I wrote about it most recently just before Christmas, discussing a WSJ article about the efforts by national casual-dining chains to upgrade their offerings while maintaining their appeal to a broad demographic. Olive Garden was the primary example, with their president explaining that they “don’t use the word authentic” to describe the Olive Garden experience, preferring “Italian inspired.” I expressed my concern at the end that I was “trapped between demographic groups, condemned never to find my proper home.”

Our last Olive Garden outing was in mid-July, when I solved the problem of how to choose from three OG classics — lasagna, fettucini alfredo, and chicken parmigiana, by having them all, thanks to a menu special called the Tour of Italy. I commented at the time that “putting quality aside for a moment, it’s way too much. And an absurd mix. No side vegetable for one. What was I thinking? How did Gail allow me to do it, and then follow suit?” But I did enjoy the separate items.

Which brings me to last Wednesday’s now-viral review of Olive Garden by Marilyn Hagerty in North Dakota’s Grand Forks Herald. When I saw a link to it on Facebook, via one of Gail’s cousin’s sons (who has inside knowledge as an OG waitstaff veteran), I instantly clicked on it. In these parts, one doesn’t expect to see a review of Olive Garden or its peers, so I was curious to see what a restaurant reviewer would make of it.

I thought Ms. Hagerty did a good job of explaining its appeal. Here’s a sample.

After a lengthy wait for Olive Garden to open in Grand Forks, the lines were long in February. The novelty is slowly wearing off, but the steady following attests the warm welcome.

My first visit to Olive Garden was during midafternoon, so I could be sure to get in. After a late breakfast, I figured a late lunch would be fashionable.

The place is impressive. It’s fashioned in Tuscan farmhouse style with a welcoming entryway. There is seating for those who are waiting.

[snip]

At length, I asked my server what she would recommend. She suggested chicken Alfredo, and I went with that. Instead of the raspberry lemonade she suggested, I drank water.

She first brought me the familiar Olive Garden salad bowl with crisp greens, peppers, onion rings and yes — several black olives. Along with it came a plate with two long, warm breadsticks.

The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese.

As I ate, I noticed the vases and planters with permanent flower displays on the ledges. There are several dining areas with arched doorways. And there is a fireplace that adds warmth to the decor.

[snip]

All in all, it is the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks. It attracts visitors from out of town as well as people who live here.

Well, you can imagine the wave of snark attacks that ensued, prompting a second wave of spirited defenses. Ms. Hagerty is now a celebrity, and an admirable one at that. It turns out that she retired in the 1970s, is 85 years old, but still writes five columns a week. Thursday, The Village Voice included an interview with her. Yesterday, she appeared on CBS This Morning: Saturday with co-hosts Rebecca Jarvis and James Brown.

Hagerty’s own Grand Forks Herald had a piece Friday on her new-found fame, with follow-up coverage yesterday by publisher, Mike Jacobs. Trying to make sense of why the review elicited such a response, Jacobs concluded that

Marilyn’s modesty stood in sharp contrast to pretension that characterizes lots of critical writing in the United States, not just restaurant reviews. Her “aw shucks” attitude helped, too. So did her age.

Probably, so did her home town, a small city in a state that much of America has ridiculed — until oil made us rich and good government made us famous.

So, it was a kind of perfect storm.

Marilyn went viral, and her fame reflects on the Herald and Grand Forks.

We’re hoping to extend this by sending Marilyn to New York. Haven’t all of us always wondered what it would be like to dine at one of Gotham’s toniest restaurants?

Marilyn’s going to tell us.

There was a time when Gail’s brother lived in the small (really small, on the order of 200 people) town of Grygla in northwest Minnesota, 90 miles east-northeast from Grand Forks. In the summer of 1986, we visited him and his family, flying into Grand Forks, where they picked us up. I have to say, if I lived in Grygla, or any of the hundreds of other small towns in a 90-mile radius, I would find it pretty darn cool to have an Olive Garden open up within reach. A day trip to the city for shopping, a movie, and an Olive Garden dinner — that would be real special. I would spend my days dreaming about that Tour of Italy.

[Jen Sorensen, from Slowpoke Comics*]

David Brooks appears alarmed by the treatment Mitt Romney is getting, so much so that Brooks devotes today’s NYT column to defending him:

Mitt Romney is a rich man, but is Mitt Romney’s character formed by his wealth? Is Romney a spoiled, cosseted character? Has he been corrupted by ease and luxury?

The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a grinder. He earned two degrees at Harvard simultaneously (in law and business). He built a business. He’s persevered year after year, amid defeat after defeat, to build a political career.

Romney’s salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions.

Gosh, who knew? Two Harvard degrees simultaneously! A worker and a grinder! And here I thought the problem was that Romney is a liar. Brooks never gets around to that. He’s too busy recounting the hardships endured by Mitt’s ancestors. “Where did this persistence come from?” Brooks asks. “It’s plausible to think that it came from his family history.” Brooks spends the remainder of the column reviewing that history.

Who gives a darn about Romney’s persistence, or his family history? How about his long-time willingness to say whatever he thinks needs saying to get elected, whether as senator, governor, or president? How about his campaign being based on slandering President Obama? (See for instance this account of Romney lies by your fellow columnist Paul Krugman, who asks, “is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true?”)

That’s what disturbs me.

*The cartoon alludes to the 1983 Romney family vacation, which began with a drive to Canada for which Mitt put Irish setter Seamus in a crate and strapped the crate to the top of the station wagon. NYT columnist Gail Collins has referred to this incident throughout the primary season whenever writing about Romney.

You are probably familiar with some of the animations the Taiwanese news organization Next Media Animation (nma.tv) creates in which various news stories are re-enacted. I first learned about their work two years ago, thanks to their video that provided two interpretations of what happened in the post-Thanksgiving early morning hours when Tiger Woods drove his Cadillac Escalade into a tree. Did his then-wife Elin Nordegren use a golf club to free him, or did she find another use for the club? See the classic NMA video below for an answer.

Today I bring you their latest video, which you’ll find at the top. (Hat tip: Jim Fallows.) As they explain in the accompanying on-line article:

Funding for University of California schools has been slashed in recent years, and UC schools are looking to students to make up the difference. This means cutting spots reserved for California students in favor of out-of-state or international students, who pay full tuition.

The University of California, San Diego, for example, will be accepting 500 fewer in-state students this year. Some of these slots will be filled by students from China. The number of Chinese students at UCSD increased 12-fold from 2009 to 2011 to almost 200, while the number of Asian-American Californians enrolled fell 29 percent to 1,230. UC San Diego tuition is $13,234 for California residents and $22,878 for non-residents.

Although an American education is expensive, students return to China with a prestigious degree and a broadened outlook. American universities in turn get a welcome injection in funds, at the expense of tax-paying residents.

This approach to funding higher education has been a big issue here in Washington State as well. My own school, the University of Washington, has followed the same strategy in response to a 50% cut in state support over the last few years, increasing tuition steeply while recruiting more out-of-state and out-of-country students who pay higher tuition. We have also made an effort to maintain in-state freshman admissions at the same level, which of course can only be done by increasing enrollment overall.

Since tuition increases haven’t been enough to make up for state budget cuts, the university budget has been cut in part by shrinking the size of the faculty. Decreasing faculty size while increasing student enrollment is hardly an ideal recipe for maintaining educational quality.

But that’s another story. I don’t want to write a long post about public higher education. We do what we can. I just want to point to NMA’s take on the matter, which looks right to me.

I’m a huge fan of the Language Log blog and its co-founders, the linguists Mark Liberman at Penn and Geoff Pullum at Edinburgh. Pullum has spent two decades in fierce combat with the myth that Eskimos have twenty-three words (or is it two hundred? or two thousand?) for snow. (See his 1991 essay The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which follows up on the 1986 work of Linda Martin.) I made brief reference to this in a post three Julys ago on linguistic fact checking, or the lack thereof.

Two Sunday nights ago, I was reading some of the next day’s NYT online when I clicked on the Monday book review and stumbled on the astonishing opening by Emma Brockes to her review of Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel:

“The Stranger’s Child,” Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, opens on a scene in Harrow and Wealdstone, a suburb north of London chosen by the author to represent the middle ground, that is the space between the upper and lower orders — or rather, this being England in 1913, between the orders of lower upper middle and upper upper middle.

As Eskimos do with snow, the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife.

Wow! Eskimos have not just a multitude of snow words, but also gradations of snow perceptiveness invisible to the rest of the world.

The thing about those words is, any language has every bit as large a snow vocabulary as the Eskimos. Slippery snow. Grainy snow. Powdery snow. Oh, those aren’t words? Okay, how about slippery-snow, grainy-snow, powdery-snow? The oft-repeated claim is inane. But read Pullum for that.

Speaking of which, I wasted no time sending the latest example of Eskimo snow inanity on to Professor Pullum. A day later, in his characteristic style, he pounced.

If Emma Brockes were one of the sharper knives in the journalistic cutlery drawer she might have avoided becoming the 4,285th writer since the 21st century began who has used in print some variant of the original snowclone. (I didn’t count to get that figure of 4,285, I just chose a number at random. Why the hell not? People make up the number of words for snow found in Eskimoan languages that they know absolutely nothing about. I might as well just make stuff up like everybody else.)

I notice that Brockes’ version of the familiar Eskimological claim deals in visual cognition rather than linguistics (though the two are closely intertwined). The usual citation of a surprisingly large (and randomly chosen) number of snow words is absent; instead she actually claims to know about Arctic nomads’ perceptions of gradations that non-Eskimos cannot see. Where does she get this fascinating fact about perceiving the imperceptible?

Apparently, from credulous acceptance of an urban myth that goes back to the writings of an amateur linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Pullum goes on at length, all worth reading, concluding with a blast at the NYT.

A casual unsupported assertion about Inuit people perceiving distinctions to the rest of us are blind? That won’t cause any trouble at the New York Times (which has published several different figures for the number of snow words in “Eskimo”, and has ignored the letters of correction that have been sent). Don’t worry about it: it’s only language and cognition we’re talking about — just make stuff up.

I’ll say this, though. We Pacific Northwesterners perceive gradations of gray invisible to the rest of you. Dark? Rain? Give us more, so we can make our perceptive skills still more powerful.

Police in Chapel Hill, November 13, 2011

[Katelyn Ferral, kferral@newsobserver.com]

I got home from Chicago Monday night and woke up Tuesday to the news of Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City police clearing out Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Streeters. Then I read a reference to Chapel Hill and stumbled on the photo above, accompanying an article in Raleigh’s News & Observer about Chapel Hill police clearing Occupy Chapel Hill protesters from a vacant car dealership on Sunday afternoon. I’m tempted to say the photo speaks for itself and leave it at that. But in case more needs to be said — really, is this what it has come to? Has the militarization of our country reached the point where small-town police forces operate like domestic armies? Are there not more benign ways to clear unarmed people from a space, assuming there’s good reason to clear them?

From News & Observer reporters Katelyn Ferral and Mark Schultz we learn that

Officers brandishing guns and semi-automatic rifles rushed the building at about 4:30 p.m. They pointed weapons at those standing outside, and ordered them to put their faces on the ground. They surrounded the building and cleared out those who were inside.

About 13 people, including a New & Observer staff writer covering the demonstration, were forced to the ground and hand-cuffed.

Those who had been outside of the building at the time of the arrests – including N&O staffer Katelyn Ferral – were detained and then let go after their pictures were taken. Eight people inside the building were cuffed and put on a Chapel Hill Transit bus to be taken to the police station to be charged with misdemeanor breaking and entering.

“Along with facilitating citizens’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights, it is also a critical responsibility of all levels of government in a free society to respond when rights of others are being impinged upon,” Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said in a statement issued Sunday night.

“This weekend a group of protesters broke into and entered a privately owned building in downtown Chapel Hill. … The Town has an obligation to the property owners, and the Town will enforce those rights …”

Okay, go ahead. Enforce those rights. But with semi-automatic rifles?

The LA Times picked up the story Tuesday, with a link I might otherwise have missed to the statements of Chapel Hill’s mayor and police chief at a news conference Monday. Police Chief Chris Blue explained that the tactics used were “based on the known risks associated with anarchist groups.”

Those darn hippie anarchists. Meanwhile, the News & Observer requested an apology for the police behavior.

The News & Observer is seeking a public apology from the Town of Chapel Hill after one of its reporters was detained with protesters Sunday afternoon.

“She wasn’t doing anything illegal,” said John Drescher, N&O executive editor. “She was doing her job, and she identified herself as doing her job.”

Staff writer Katelyn Ferral arrived at the former Yates Motor Co. building at 419 W. Franklin St. about 4:30 p.m. to report on the occupation of the building.

Ferral was on the scene for approximately 15 minutes, interviewing people inside and walking around the site, when she heard demonstrators say police were gathering down the block.

When police approached the building, they ordered everyone to get on the ground, but they allowed Ferral to continue to shoot photographs. After a few more minutes they told Ferral to get on the ground as well.

Ferral told them she was a member of the media. She was wearing her press photo badge around her neck.

She remained face-down on the ground for about 15 minutes before she was cuffed with plastic zip ties and told to sit in a line with about 12 other people who had been detained.

After about 30 minutes police took her picture, took down her name, address, date of birth and drivers license number.

Ferral asked why she was being detained and was told that she was not on the bus with those charged with breaking and entering because she wasn’t inside the building.

Police told Ferral she would be arrested if she was caught on the premises again, Ferral said.

After she was released, Ferral was not allowed to take additional photographs and was told to go across the street.

During a press conference Monday, Police Chief Chris Blue said officers detained everyone that was either in the building or at the entrance. Ferral was treated like anyone else who was outside the front of the building, he said.

Meanwhile, back in New York … I was dumbfounded as I listened on Tuesday morning to the news of Zuccotti Park’s clearing at the matter of fact way NPR’s reporters gave the news. Is it really possible to talk about Mayor Bloomberg ordering the NYC police to empty the park without noting that Bloomberg is himself number 12 in Forbes’ list of the 400 richest people in America? Look, Bloomberg has done many good things with his money. (As a mathematician and one-time member of the Institute for Advanced Study, I’m especially fond of this.) But, I’ll say it again. He’s the 12th richest person in the US. He’s worth $20 billion, give or take. He bought himself the mayoralty of New York. In his eighth year as mayor, when faced with term limits, he had the law changed and bought himself a third term.

Maybe Bloomberg was a better choice than the alternatives. That’s not my point. My point is, this is no ordinary mayor. I don’t understand how his actions with respect to Occupy Wall Street can be described without reference to his wealth and its source. I don’t know how to take a news report seriously that doesn’t provide this context. I don’t know how to take NPR seriously. Any regular reader of Gail Collins knows that whenever she mentions Mitt Romney in her NYT columns, she provides a reminder that he drove the family to Canada on vacation with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car. I take her motivation to be that you can’t understand anything about Romney without knowing this. Surely a similar rule should apply to Bloomberg. No story should be written about his actions, especially those related to Occupy Wall Street, without a reminder that he’s the twelfth richest person in America, and yes, that he made his fortune on Wall Street.

Fonthill Castle, Doylestown, Pennsylvania

[From the Mercer and Fonthill Museums website]

Another Sunday, another Vows column in the NYT. I’m addicted to them, as I have discussed before. One of the pleasures of reading them is letting the suspense build as I wonder whether this is the week the paper has chosen an ordinary couple as its newlyweds. Please, please, just a regular couple. Sometimes that hope is dashed the moment I see the couple’s names. Last week, for instance, the bride’s name — Allison Pataki — gave it all away. Yes, that Pataki, the daughter of the former governor of New York.

But this week looked promising, as I read about two physicists, a young American woman who went to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy as a Yale undergraduate and met a Parisian who was then a postdoc at Brown. She’s now a postdoc at Harvard, studying neutrinos, he’s still at Brown, studying dark matter, and last Sunday they were married on the grounds of Fonthill Castle, pictured above.

Every Vows column comes with at least one outrageously silly line. This week’s was spoken by a colleague at Brown:

They are both cutting-edge physicists. They are so smart that, really, they can talk about things together that few people would even understand. I say that’s perfect.

We also learned that the “couple exchanged rings made of titanium (their favorite element),” the bridegroom’s sister “designed an invitation inspired by the freewheeling trajectory of subatomic particles in ‘bubble chamber’ experiments,” and the bride “left most of the planning of her wedding to her more humanities-minded mother, Rebecca Bushnell, the dean of the school of arts and sciences and an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania.”

The mother’s being Dean of A&S at Penn gave a hint that this might in fact not be all that ordinary a couple. But the punchline came when we learned that during the reception, updates were being given of the Jets-Patriots football game. It was explained that these updates were

meant particularly for Ms. Bushnell’s stepmother, Betty Wold Johnson, who is known as Granny to the bride and who is the 91-year-old mother of Woody Johnson, the Jets’ owner.

Some ordinary couple! The bride’s step-grandmother is a member of the Johnson & Johnson family, her step-uncle the wealthy owner of the Jets. And wasn’t it his daughters, the bride’s step-cousins, whom the NYT featured just three days ago in a big spread? Why yes it was!

Sigh.

What can be more painful than having to read super-hacks* Thomas Friedman and David Brooks? How do they continue to be columnists at the country’s leading newspaper? Worse, how do the silly books they write become bestsellers? (Just two days ago, Friedman’s latest piffle entered the NYT bestseller list at #2. If it has to be that high, couldn’t it at least have done some good up there and taken the #1 spot away from the evil piece of —- whose name I won’t utter?)

Of course, no one has to read their columns, and so I don’t. But fortunately, the New Yorker’s Ric Hertzberg and the Center for Economic Policy and Research’s Dean Baker have been on the case, writing separate posts today on our two hacks’ latest columns.

On Sunday, Friedman was babbling yet again on the need for the two parties to compromise and strike a bargain. Hertzberg is so infuriated he can hardly contain himself. After stating that the column “damn near ruined my Sunday, Hertzberg goes through it in detail. I can’t do justice to Hertzberg’s analysis with a summary, excerpt, or “money quote.” It’s worth reading in full. Nonetheless, let me include a bit from near the end.

On the one hand, the Republicans are lunatics dedicated above all to destroying the Obama Presidency.

On the other hand, Obama didn’t endorse all the provisions of the Simpson-Bowles report.

See? They’re equally bad.

Which is another way of saying that they’re equally good. Which means that if they could just reason together in good faith, with a readiness to compromise their ideological preferences for the sake of the common good, all would be well.

Except that, as Friedman can’t help implicitly acknowledging, they’re not equally bad and equally good—not remotely. One side rationally understands (and fears) the consequences of inaction and is demonstrably willing to compromise. The other side irrationally dismisses (and might even welcome) those consequences and is demonstratively unwilling to compromise.

We don’t know whether, someday, “history” will hold Obama most responsible for what happens. What we do know—and on this point the “we” is everybody—is that, next year, voters will hold Obama most responsible. And we know that even among voters who think that Obama and the Republican leadership are both responsible but Obama less so, many will vote against him because he will be on the ballot everywhere. “The Republican leadership,” an abstraction both faceless and hydra-headed, won’t be.

The true, underlying, and presumably unconscious logic of Friedman’s analysis is that compromise between a side that is insane and unwilling to compromise and a side that is sane and willing to compromise is in fact impossible just now and will continue to be impossible for some time to come. For Obama, a Grand Bargain, which is to say a Grand Compromise, is not currently an option. His real choice is between a Grand Surrender and a Grand Fight.

I know which of the two I want him to choose. I hope Tom Friedman would have him make the same choice.

As for Brooks’ column today, Dean Baker (hat tip, Paul Krugman) gets to the heart of the matter regarding Brooks’ reasoning in his opening:

David Brooks is really upset, we may have a lost decade because he is sitting there being right, standing in the middle, and the two extremes who control public debate won’t agree with him. How do we know Brooks is right? Well, he is in the middle between the two extremes he just told you about, how could he not be right?

Baker focuses on Brooks’ criticism of the Obama stimulus plan as just another example of Democrats’ desire to increase government spending, doing the arithmetic to demonstrate that the stimulus was destined to be too small from the get go. This leads to the following comment.

So how is anything about stimulus disproved because a stimulus that could have been expected to create maybe 3 million jobs was not adequate in a downturn where we needed 10 million jobs? There are no tricks here, this is all arithmetic and it is all right there in black and white.

But, Brooks does not want to be bothered by arithmetic. He wants his readers to support his plans for tax reform, for cutting Social Security and Medicare. In other words he wants his readers’ support for doing all the the things that David Brooks always wanted to do, but he now says that we absolutely have to do because of an economic crisis caused by the incompetence of the people who always wanted to do these things.

Hacks. Just hacks.

*You might wish to review Alex Pareene’s list in Salon last November of the 30 leading hacks among political commentators. I mentioned it in a post at the time, giving special attention once again to Friedman and Brooks.

John Maynard Keynes, wrong again

[UPI]

I’ve been enjoying the columns of the NYT’s newest columnist, their erstwhile restaurant critic Frank Bruni. It was with great disappointment, then, that I found he had joined the “blame both sides” bandwagon in his column last Sunday.

Taking off from the prayer rally in Houston the day before at which Governor Perry spoke, Bruni writes that

it presented a spectacle that — let’s be honest — most of us in the news media don’t really get. Seeking relief from the country’s woes through a louder, more ardent appeal to God strikes us as too much hope invested in too magical a solution. It suspends disbelief and defies rigorous reason.

But if we stick with this honesty thing, don’t we also have to admit that to varying degrees and with varying stakes, there’s magical thinking in secular life, and that it springs from a similar yearning for easy, all-encompassing answers? Didn’t the debt-ceiling showdown show us that?

That battle was defined largely by the unshakable, grandiose convictions of low-taxes, small-government puritans in the House, for whom Cut, Cap and Balance wasn’t so much a three-pronged wager as a holy trinity, promising salvation. While it’s inarguable that government has a tropism toward waste, and while tax increases should indeed be preceded by an inquiry into other options, the adamancy of the puritans’ position flew in the face of what many economists say, and it brooked no dissent. It felt more like theology than science.

Okay, I’m with him so far. But here’s the passage where I lost him.

Faith-based is right. We all have our religions, all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now. And if yours isn’t a balanced-budget amendment and a government as lean as Christian Bale in one of his extreme-acting roles, it might well be a big fat binge of Keynesian stimulus spending. Liberals think magically, too, becoming so attached to a certain approach that they wind up advocating it less as option than as panacea.

Huh? We’re now comparing a belief in Keynesian stimulus spending with the faith-based madness of drastic budget cuts, continuation of Bush tax cuts, and protection of military spending? What if the approach the liberals are attached to just happens to be correct? What if all evidence points to the original stimulus being inadequate, as unemployment remains high and demand low. What if we are repeating the history of the depression despite having the means and the knowledge to avoid it?

I stopped reading the column at that point. Now, returning to it, I see that Bruni concludes with a call for “a full range of extant remedies, a tireless search for new ones and the nimbleness and open-mindedness to evaluate progress dispassionately and adapt our strategy accordingly. Faith and prayer just won’t cut it. In fact, they’ll get in the way.”

Yes, sure. But Frank, why are you dismissing one of the extant remedies? What is the point of your seeming even-handedness? A dispassionate evaluation of our progress should lead Obama to the realization that he screwed up in 2009 with his too-small stimulus. The adaptation he needs to make is to fight like hell for a new stimulus package to get the country moving again. Instead, he and David Pfouffe have made the political calculation that they should cave, setting re-election rather than economic growth as their priority.

One side is wrong here, not both, and Obama has joined that side. Or at least he is trying to, even as they run farther to the right. Pathetic.