Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Sunday

Alex Massie

First CAMRA takes Manhattan?

This New York Times piece by Eric Asimov has, for British readers, a certain charm. It's rather like seeing the world through alien eyes. My what strange yet wondrous habits you quaintly old-fashioned humans have: I WAS sitting at a noisy bar on a beautiful fall afternoon, watching the bartender work, and she was indeed working. She pulled down on the tap, then pushed back, pulled down and pushed up, in rhythmic repetition like a farmhand at a well. The ale poured slowly into a mug, at first all foam, then turning translucent before suddenly clarifying into a brilliant suds-topped amber. I touched the faceted glass, cool, but not cold.

Alex Massie

Obama: Tiocfaidh ar la

Well, who'd have thunk it? According to today's New York Times: Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton In classic NYT fashion here's something a little Pooterish about the headline of course. But still, it's somewhat remarkable that just eight weeks before the Iowa caucuses the leading challenger has to be prodded and cajoled into, well, pointing out the reasons why he thinks he's better suited to the job. Still, perhaps we shouldn't write Obama off entirely. If we take him at his word we may find some steel.

Alex Massie

Midgets need not apply?

Via Arthur Goldhammer - curator of the excellent French Politics blog which has become an invaluable resource for keeping up to speed with Sarko et al - comes this splendid illustration of the benefits of a Harvard education. As Mr Goldhammer says, "Note the translation of Hautes Etudes": Mr Goldhammer also draws one's attention to a 60 Minutes profile of Sarkozy this evening in which Sarko decides he's can't be bothered answering CBS's questions and abruptly storms out of the interview. Should be fun! UPDATE:  Mr Goldhammer observes that Lesley Stahl does not seem to know very much about France. Fancy that!

Alex Massie

Why does John McCain hate America?

John McCain tells ABC's This Week that - shockingly! - torture is " a very important issue to me" and consequently that he can't guarantee that he will vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General if the nominee continues to fudge on the question of whether or not he believes waterboarding constitutes torture. McCain, noting yet again that it was a favourite method of Pol Pot's happy warriors, would, one senses like to vote No but there's the problem that... well, let's go and see what the GOP blogs are saying. Here's Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, confirming that supporting the use of waterboarding would indeed seem to be a prerequisite for anyone hoping to win the Republican nomination. This (cheese-eating?

Saturday

Alex Massie

Press Management By Dummies

Say what one may about the Blair-Brown years but I'm not sure even they would be mad brazen enough to try something like this: The Federal Emergency Management Agency's No. 2 official apologized yesterday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions. "We are reviewing our press procedures and will make the changes necessary to ensure that all of our communications are straight forward and transparent," Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., FEMA's deputy administrator, said in a four-paragraph statement.

Alex Massie

Forget 42nd St, Rush to See the 42nd Highland Regiment

As someone who has, er, fond teenage memories of being barked at by NCOs from the Black Watch during hours of drill on the parade-ground and rather fonder recollections of cricket matches against the regiment, I've been looking forward for months to seeing Gregory Burke's prize-winning play about the regiment's experiences in Iraq during its current run in New York. Today's good news then is that - hurrah! - I snagged one of the two remaining tickets for the shows' final performance on, appropriately enough, Remembrance Sunday. So it's really just a bonus that the New York reviews have been tremendous. Here's Ben Brantley in the NYT: “Black Watch,” which was the hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year and runs through Nov.

Friday

Alex Massie

Hillary Clinton’s Entrancing, Bewitching Power?

Andrew Sullivan really doesn't like Hillary Clinton. Fair enough. I look forward to seeing him make the case for Barack Obama in next month's Atlantic. Andrew's taken to calling Hillary "Nixon in a Pant Suit" and "She Who Is Inevitable".  Again, fair enough and good knockabout stuff. The latter appelation, mind you, made me wonder whether Andrew is riffing on Rumpole of the Bailey's wife Hilda who is, famously, "She Who Must Be Obeyed". This itself, of course, takes us back to H Rider Haggard's classic novel She in which a mysterious, beautiful and immortal sorceress somewhere in deepest recesses of the dark continent enslaves the local tribes: she's a masculine nightmare - terrifying yet irresistible.

Alex Massie

Laffering all the way to the Revenue

Lots of talk about the Laffer Curve these days as folk argue over whether it a) exists at all and b) under what circumstances it might be applicable if a) is true. But it seems odd to me that fiscal conservatives in either the US or the UK would seek to make the argument that tax cuts are good things because they increase government revenue. As Milton Friedman, I think, once said, if you're increasing government revenue by cutting taxes you're not cutting taxes by enough.

Alex Massie

Privileged Motion No 3, Mr Chairman…

Via Julian Sanchez, here's a documentary I hope reaches DC soon. Just the ticket: a movie about - drum roll please - debating. Like Julian, mind you, I'd rather it focused on proper debating  - by which i mean, naturally, British Parliamentary style - rather than the mad, mad, mad world of American Policy debating which is not, frankly, debating at all. If you don't believe me just watch the movie's trailer which, however unfairly, gives the impression that Policy Debating is an activity for autistic weirdos rather than an elegant - if disputatious - entertainment aimed at, you know, persuading* people of the validity of your case.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Laws Are for Other People

Rudy Giuliani in Iowa: Asked at a community meeting here whether he considered waterboarding torture, Mr. Giuliani said: “It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.” I think what that means is that if the Iranians were to waterboard a captured US pilot it would be torture but if the Americans were to waterboard a captured Iranian intelligence officer it would not. Such is the moral clarity of our times.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Further Perils of Jogging

David Frum reads Robert Draper's Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, and reports [emphasis added]: If he [Bush] has anything more to say, it will  have to wait for later. But my guess is that he has nothing to say. What Ulysses S. Grant said of himself is true of George W. Bush: He is a verb. He is able to do, to be, and to suffer. He cannot analyze or explain. His actions must be judged by results; any mysteries in the record will be clarified, to the extent they ever are, by the memoirs of his subordinates and the opening of the administration archives after the fact. This does not mean that Draper's book lacks interest. On the contrary, it is very interesting, and especially interesting on the president's early life and his governorship...

Alex Massie

An American, er, Werewolf in London…

I've a piece in the new edition of The American Conservative looking at Rudy Giuliani's trip to London last month - a trip designed to make Rudy seem like an international statesman who can claim, however implausibly, to be the heir to Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Hmmm indeed. It was an audacious gambit that a co-operative press corps was only too happy to buy. “His foreign policy pronouncements were certainly Thatcheresque,” gushed the Washington Post’s Dan Balz. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was even more enthusiastic, suggesting, “the picture of Rudy Giuliani, America’s Mayor, in front of 10 Downing Street, sends a signal to Republican voters that this guy is ready for primetime.” If only this were true.

Alex Massie

And her hair hung over her shoulder tied up in an Orange velvet band…

A splendid Daily Telegraph obituary of Sammy Duddy, a, er, colourful figure in Loyalist paramilitary circles: Sammy Duddy, who died on October 17 aged 62, had a rather unusual curriculum vitae for a member of the Loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association in having been a drag artiste who went by the stage name of Samantha. During the 1970s the self-styled "Dolly Parton of Belfast" became well known on Belfast's cabaret circuit, presenting a risqué act in Loyalist pubs and clubs, dressed in fishnet tights, wig and heavy make-up. Once he even performed for British troops on tour."I wore a miniskirt many a time," Duddy remembered, "but it was usually a long dress, a straight black wig, a pair of falsies I bought in Blackpool and loads of make-up to cover my freckles.

Alex Massie

The unmitigated ghastliness of Mitt Romney

I highly recommend Ryan Lizza's dissection of Mitt Romney's campaign in the current issue of The New Yorker. If, after eight years of presidential overstretch, you're looking for a period of calm and a President who might adopt a more restrained view of what he might be able to achieve, might I suggest that a pandering, hyper-competitive management consultant is exactly the sort of obsessive tinkerer you would not want to elect? Lizza sums up some of what makes Romney frightful in a single delicious paragraph that in a better world would torpedo and sink Romney on its own: Politicians tend to pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani, also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican.

Monday

Sunday

Alex Massie

Defending the indefensible

Mike Crowley has a jolly piece* in the new issue of The New Republic in which he gallantly makes the case for Fred Thompson. Or rather, strictly speaking, suggests that it's wrong to pick on Thompson's laziness (there being, after all, many other, better, reasons to be suspicious of Thompson's potemkin candidacy). Still, candidates are expected to be busy forever debasing themselves before a largely uninterested electorate like so many demented performing bears, trapped inside the campaign cage and driven crazy. Mike sanely observes: Knowing this, most candidates dare not allow themselves to be branded as anything but fanatical workers. Indeed, they even find ways of driving themselves to needless exhaustion simply to advertise their tirelessness.

Saturday

Alex Massie

NBC continues its mission to destroy its best show

Great. Not content with introducing one ridiculous, potentially series-killing storyline (the whole Landry killing a man and dumping the body in the river thing, you know) Friday Night Lights decides it needs a second: hence this evening's nonsense about Street seeking a miracle cure in Mexico so he may walk again*. This is schlock. And bad, tedious schlock at that made worse by the fact there are compelling storylines all over Dillon as the football team falls apart, as the Taylor family disintegrates, as Saracen ties to make sense of his life etc etc.

Alex Massie

Serge Toujours

Sweet, sweet piece on the great Serge Gainsbourg in Vanity Fair. Jane Birkin describes their daily routine in the 1970s as follows: they woke up at three in the afternoon; she picked up the children at school and took them to the park, brought them home for a children's dinner, the au pair would give them a bath, and when the children went to bed she and Serge would kiss them good night and go out on the town. They'd come back "with the dustman," wait until the children woke up at 7:30, then go to sleep. Their alcohol-fueled nights would often turn, as Jane puts it, "barmy." Once, at Castel's nightclub, on the Rue Princesse on the Left Bank, Serge turned over the basket that she carried as a handbag, emptying its contents onto the floor.

Alex Massie

Who dares say the Japanese are odd?

The New York Times' Martin Fackler has your most entertaining story of the day. Magnificent stuff, and oddly charming too: On a narrow Tokyo street, near a beef bowl restaurant and a pachinko parlor, Aya Tsukioka demonstrated new clothing designs that she hopes will ease Japan’s growing fears of crime. Deftly, Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine. Make sure you take a look at the accompanying slide-show too. Amazing.