Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Republicans at 21% and Full Speed Ahead!

Indefatigable commenter ConservativeCabbie argues: No doubt someone will report on the latest WaPo poll which shows Republican ID at 21% and use it as evidences of the GOP's terminal decline. The only thing I would say to this... is that in the most recent important poll, the election, the GOP still won 47% of the vote. And that was with decidedly unpropitious circumstances. I agree that the GOP are on the ropes. But isn't that a fact when it comes to parties falling out of power - that they move towards  their more extreme base before moving back to the middle. That's what happened to post-Carter Democrats, post-Callaghan Labour and post-Thatcher/Major Tories. I would suggest that this process is even more pronounced in America due to the lack of a party leader.

Alex Massie

Swine Flu and Decentralisation

Actually, Tuesdays are now the best day for the NYT's op-ed page since in addition to Ross there's David Brooks. His column today is a good one, making the point that the response to the swine flu outbreak offers a fresh example of the debate Brooks frames as: Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states? Gordon Brown is, you will be shocked to discover, in the former camp. Brooks, sensibly, puts himself in the latter. This is not, you'll appreciate, merely a question of how best to deal with an infectios disease. Much the same balance of risk and reward applies to the financial crisis.

Alex Massie

If Dick Cheney had won the Republican nomination last year…

Ross Douthat's debut column for the New York Times begins with a good joke, designed (one might think) to have the Upper West Side howling that all the talk of young Mr Douthat being a conservative we can do business with must be so much baloney: Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

Monday

Alex Massie

The Swine Flu Shot

After the jump, a series of American PSAs warning about Swine Flu, dating from 1976. The second of them features a soundtrack that sounds as though it more properly should accompany a detective show on American TV. Or, for that matter, a movie such as The Three Days of the Condor. Appropriate in times such as these, the government never ceases to remind us, when You Can Never Be Too Careful. Trust Nobody, remember. These days, mind you, any such government-sponsored warning would be much, much more terrifying and, one presumes, be designed to convince us all that the apocalypse was upon us and yet also - conveniently -  avertable.

Alex Massie

The Changing Face of Domestic Murder

Consider this chart: As you can see, since 1976  there's been a marked decline in the number of men murdered by their wives in the United States and a smaller, but still significant, decrease in the number of women killed by their husbands. The graph comes from Sociological Images where Jay Livingston asks for suggestions that might explain this trend. He suggests that perhaps men are behaving better (not a popular theory, I'm going to guess) and that women have more options, citing the work of women's shelters and the like in making it easier for women to escape abusive situations without murdering their spouse.

Alex Massie

Government Rules Out Recreating Workhouses, Debtors Prison Etc

Sometimes it seems as though the British appetite for nostalgia can never be satisfied. On the other hand, it seems there are in fact limits to our willingness to recreate the past, albeit often as pastiche. Announcing plans for new prisons, Jack Straw reassured/disappointed us by promising: "These new prisons will be neither Victorian replicas nor large warehouses," Mr Straw said. Does this mean they'll be modern and bijou instead? Perhaps not, since rather than build three huge prisons, they're planning to construct five very large ones. And then again, the government is missing a trick here: recreating Victorian prisons might be quite popular...

Saturday

Alex Massie

When Lost Blondes Get Mad…

This is the set-up: “Penned up in the Mediterranean’s most infamous prison farm, beautiful young bodies subject to their cruel jailer’s every whim, these man-craving convict women joined forces with a brawling Yank adventurer to burst out of their barbed wire hell cage, setting off a love-and-vengeance revolt that sent tremors through an entire Mid-east empire!” It really can't get much better than that. Apparently this gripping tale was written by Neil Turnbull and featured in the July 1966 edition of Male magazine. Sadly, the story does not appear to be online. Internet Fail. [Hat-tip: John Holbo. More cool pulp photos here.

Alex Massie

Dolly Parton: Still Fab After All This Time

A lovely piece on the Queen of the Smokey Mountains, Dolly Parton, by Jesse Green in this week's edition of New York magazine. Here is the Backwoods Barbie in typically forthright, charming form:  “I’m an energy vampire,” she says. “I just suck off everybody’s energy, but I give it back.” She almost dares me to ask her something tawdry: “What else ya got?” But like the fan in the hilarious documentary For the Love of Dolly who finds Judy’s car in a mall parking lot and can think of nothing better to do once inside than lick the seat belt on the passenger side, I find myself deranged by her openness.

Friday

Alex Massie

Denying the Armenians

So, as expected Barack Obama has reneged upon his campaign promise to call the Armenian genocide, er, genocide. Instead it's "slaughter". Such are the prosaic demands of office. As Mike Crowley suggests this is not a defining moment in the Obama administration, but nor is it a particularly edifying spectacle. Memo to politicians: be careful what you promise! Memo to voters: Don't believe the promises! Today's statement in full here; reaction from Turks and Armenians here. UPDATE: Courtesy of Ben Smith there's this video in which Samantha Power argues that: "What is amazing about Barack...[is]...his willingness as president to commemorate [the genocide] and certainly to call a spade a spade and to speak truth about it...

Alex Massie

The Gurkha Campaign

No surprise, alas, that the government should still be trying to find ways to deny Gurkhas the right to live in this country. The most charitable interpretation of today's announcement is that the Brown ministry is making it more difficult than it should be for Gurkhas who retired before 1997 to live in Britain. A more accurate assessment might be that this is a typically mendacious, mean-spirited, shameless, pointless piece of bullying bullshit from a government that's so past its sell-by date that there's no point in even wondering whether there's any further use for it. Here's the BBC account: Immigration Minister Phil Woolas denied he had betrayed the Gurkhas, adding: "This improves the situation.

Alex Massie

Karl Rove Endorses Torture in Just 140 Characters

This is where the Republican party is now. Karl Rove's latest Tweet is this: Precautions taken 2 guarantee compliance w/ federal prohibition on torture. U might characterize diligence as overcautious. Got that? A - highly questionable! - "compliance" with anti-torture statutes was "over-cautious". That is, it was mistakes were made in trying to comply with, you know, the law. As I say, these people damn themselves with their own proud confessions. And sometimes they only need 140 characters with which to do it.

Alex Massie

Torture and Porn: Stuff You Know When You See It

Not so long ago the American conservative movement denied that waterboarding and the other "enhanced interrogation techniques" used upon prisoners were anything remotely akin to torture. That line has shifted somewhat in recent days. Now it's "Well, maybe you think it is torture but - look! - it works!" Does this constitute progress or not? My own view is that torture is one of those things you recognise when you see it. But because we associate it with the rack and with thumbscrews and the oubliette, too many people assume that this is the only form of punishment that constitutes torture. Not so.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Torture, Dissidents and Talking to Dictators

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal today: In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: "If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?" He said: "I would think that I was losing ground." Fair enough. Hugo Chavez isn't my cup of tea either. But it's hardly that unusual for American presidents to be photographed with autocrats and dictators.

Alex Massie

Caption Contest: When Obama Met Lara

Brian Lara gives President Barack Obama a lesson, during last week's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. Photo: White House photo by Pete Souza. Kridaya rounds up some of the cricketsphere's reaction to the President's meeting with the Prince of Trinidad. Obama is said to have been delighted by his encounter with "the Michael Jordan" of cricket. While well-intentioned - and doubtless popular in Trinidad - this won't, as you know, quite do. Technically, there are clearly some issues with elbow flex and, vitally, weight transference. Obama looks as though he's going to be attempting a front-foot drive while keeping his weight on his back leg. This ensures his head won't be over his right knee and the ball. That's not so good and likely to end in disaster. Ugly disaster at that.

Alex Massie

Asking More from Your Friends

There's a good deal in David Hare's speech to the Index on Censorship awards* with which I would disagree, but not this bit: "The principal lesson of the new century is the following: that you must condemn censorship, intimidation, bullying, coercion, torture, encroachment on human rights and illegality in your friends with exactly the same rigour you bring to its condemnation in your enemies." And in fact, one might go further. It is precisely because we expect more from our friends than from our enemies that we must be vigilant in holding them to the standards they profess to believe in themselves.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Are the SNP even more deluded than Labour? Why, yes, they are!

Scottish public spending has essentially doubled (albeit in absolute terms) since Labour came to power. (To what end, you ask? To very little end, I reply.) Now the British government has run out of money and it is obvious that there are going to have to be spending cuts if the public finances are ever going to be restored to some semblance of stability. This is obvious, I should say, to everyone but the SNP for whom any suggestion that it might be possible to cut even a tiny sliver of cash from the Scottish Government's £35bn kitty is the vilest sort of anti-Scottish treachery. Then again, the Nationalists aren't responsible for raising revenue, so it's no great surprise they howl whenever any budget is threatened.

Alex Massie

The American Justification for War

Linking to this post, Daniel Larison makes an excellent point: Even though this claim about fighting on behalf of innocent Muslims is dubious (not least because several of our wars, especially the war in Iraq, have killed or led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of these people), it reflects something basic to Americanism. This is the idea that anytime the U.S. fights a war, no matter what the actual reasons for it are, whichever group or nation comes out ahead at the end of the fighting must show eternal gratitude to us. It is apparently an additional requirement that anytime the U.S. fights a war that may benefit some Muslims, all Muslims must similarly be grateful, even if the U.S. wages other wars and backs other policies and governments that harm and kill many other Muslims.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Bombing Iran? Counter-productive and unlikely to even work.

Of all the many reasons to be wary of bombing Iran, one of the best is also one of the simplest: it won't work. Or, rather, whatever advantage there may be in delaying Iran's nuclear ambitions by a year or two is unlikely to be worth the unfortunate consequences involved, merely increasing the risks of a nuclear Iran further down the line. As Deence Secretary Robert Gates says: Using his strongest language on the subject to date, Gates told a group of Marine Corps students that a strike would probably delay Tehran's nuclear program from one to three years. A strike, however, would unify Iran, "cement their determination to have a nuclear program, and also build into the whole country an undying hatred of whoever hits them," he said.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Glenn Beck and the Useful Idiots at Fox News

David Frum is, once again, spot on. Writing about the ludicrous - and loopy - Glenn Beck and his fantasies of armed resistance against the Obama administration's "fascism", Frum points out how useful Beck is to Obama (and vice versa) and how poisonous he and his ravings are to the future of the Republican party: Beck is a comedian at bottom, and he does not want to incite anyone to do anything except stay tuned through the following commercial announcements. But if the Obama press team had consciously designed an Exhibit A for their coming campaign of defamation against conservative America, they could not have asked for anything better than what Beck and the Fox network have provided them. In fact, one can already see the shape of the tacit deal between Obama and the Fox team.