Party of 1

“I like Glenn a lot and I think he has something to teach us. But not what he offered last night,” writes Bill Bennett at National Review Online about Glenn Beck’s Saturday night speech to conclude the CPAC conference.

“Analogizing his own struggles with alcohol to the problems of our polity and in our politics, he said, ‘Hello, my name is the Republican party, and I have a problem!’… Glenn has … taken to our politics a cosmologizing of his own deficiencies. This is not a baseless criticism; they are his own deficiencies that he keeps publicly redounding to and analogizing to. It is wrong and he is wrong.”

I’ll say this much for Beck: He’s moved quickly to preempt Austin plane-crasher Joseph Stack from being turned into any kind of hero or martyr.  Conspiricist Alex Jones is not happy….

I sometimes discuss Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns in the overnight press reviews, but his interests are such that his topics often stray from the breaking political news. Hank Stuever in the Washington Post reviews a new HBO documentary on Kristof’s international reporting. For better or worse, Kristof’s readership would appear to be narrow — those “who can find Darfur or Congo on a map and tell you precisely what’s been going on there.” The reporter persists nevertheless, committed as he is to “witnessing the world’s atrocities and scintillating them into stories that will call on people to act. Which is what Kristof did with his work in Darfur, Sudan: He caused people — from George Clooney on down — to do whatever they can.”

According to Stuever’s review, the documentary “asks its viewers to consider the world and all its problems, only without newspapers that will pay journalists to bear such global witness. Even the reporter himself, sitting in his office in the Times’s fabulously expensive skyscraper, can only guess at the question of his own extinction.”

At DoubleX, Jessica Grose urges feminists not to get too bent out of shape over college football quarterback Tim Tebow’s pro-life Super Bowl ad for Focus on the Family.

As every sports fan knows, the really serious question is whether Tebow will be able to make it in the NFL….

Cord Jefferson writes “In Defense of John Edwards” at The Root. “John Edwards made a lot of poor choices during a tremendously difficult period in his life, and that’s unfortunate for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the trail of destroyed emotions he left in his wake. But liberals discussing Edwards’ affair with judgmental superlatives need to realize that absolute truths and vengeful motivations are what cause people like Pat Robertson to say that the devil-worshiping Haitians had it coming.”

I’m afraid this will not do. In fact, it is liable to be cited for the sake of ridiculing “nonjudgmental” progressives. This man attempted to become president or vice-president of the United States, knowing full well that a scandal could have exploded at any moment. He could have done untold damage to his country or his party, or both.

At one point in 2008, I might have told you that I was supporting the guy. He was the most outspoken candidate on the economic question, and he lacked some of the “ssilk-stocking” baggage that plagues so many Democrats. I depend on the news media to look into the foibles of these people, such as whether they can keep their pants on. In this case, the matter had to be ferreted out by a tabloid newspaper. It has been claimed that during the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s proclivities in this area were an open secret. Ideological conservatives have always believed that the vaunted mainstream media did not report the story because they leaned toward Clinton politically.

I am afraid that in the case of John Edwards, the people leaving remarks in the  comments section for this article have it about right.  “We progressives aren’t mad at John Edwards because he had sex outside of marriage. That’s up to his definition of marriage. We aren’t mad that he cheated on his wife….We are mad because he lied to us. Lied. Stone-faced, ice-bucket lied. Stood right there and lied. Got his friends to lie. LIED. And that is unforgivable in a politician. Perhaps not in a person; I have no beef with Edwards having a life after this. But not as a professional politician.”

The New York Times Magazine for this weekend brings news of the fate of Charles Johnson, creator and webmaster of the Little Green Footballs site — named after an inside joke, the significance of which is known only to Johnson.

Johnson established his site for the sake of staking out a “neocon” position — perhaps he would not have described it exactly that way — in the fight against “Islamofascism.” To make a long story short, he now has “flipped,” moving from right to left in the “blog wars,” having concluded that some of his would-be allies in the fight against “Islamofascism” were fascists themselves.

The site is not one that I have followed closely. (I notice that as of today [Sunday], he has an interesting post on his homepage about the budding “glaciergate” controversy.) The article reports that his traffic has dropped off since his switch, although the site apparently continues to earn him a good living. (I wish the same could be said for this site, which in its existence so far has made me enough money  to buy a supersized extra-value meal at McDonald’s.)

The magazine article is entitled “Right-Wing Flame War!” It seems that since his “flip,” Johnson has spent a good bit of his time blocking from his site, those who have made unfavorable comments. This affords me as good an occasion as any to comment on what I have attempted to accomplish with this site.

I am, I suppose, a decade or two too old to be fully immersed in Internet culture and “blog wars.” I established this site for the sake of providing literate commentary, and even some original journalism. I did not know what to expect when I launched it. I did know that there was a fair amount of vulgarity on the Internet, and that bloggers were liable to attract a fair amount of “flaming,” that is, hostile and belittling comments laced with a fair amount of obscenity.

I did not know what to expect when I launched this site. I did not want to waste time managing “blog wars” or fending off hostile criticism. I feared that I would be especially vulnerable to such things, because the blogosphere is full of libertarianism — and my politics are not libertarian.

Therefore, in order to prevent the site from becoming unmanageable, I set it up so that readers would have to register before commenting. What has happened is that I have attracted no more than a handful of comments, several of which have come from personal acquaintances of mine.

Some changes are going to have to be made within a month or two. I am going to have to take down the registration “firewall,” to see if any more interest can be attracted. Before that happens, the site may go on hiatus for a few days, although I will continue to try to post the overnight press reviews.

If anyone stumbles upon this post, please note that comments are welcome! All you have to do is register. Any thoughts? Is anybody out there? Charles Johnson, how about you?!?…

On the Time magazine website’s “Swampland” blog, Michael Scherer looks at Sarah Palin’s debut on Fox News Tuesday evening with a jaundiced eye. In a nutshell, it appears that Fox is, in effect, running the former governor up the flagpole in the hope that its audience will salute….

On this site, I do my best to leave the celebrity news to TMZ. Nevertheless, in polemics, everything is grist for the mill, and a minor controversy has erupted over Brit Hume’s remarks during a January 3 Fox News Sunday roundtable to the effect that, in the light of his marital infidelities, Tiger Woods needs to abandon Buddhism and find Jesus. Michael Gerson weighed in, defending Hume in Friday’s Washington Post. “Hume, in an angry sea of loss and tragedy — his son’s death in 1998 — found a life preserver in faith. He offered that life preserver to another drowning man. Whatever your view of Hume’s beliefs, he could have no motive other than concern for Woods himself.”

If Hume insists on expressing himself with regard to such matters, I might suggest a less partisan context. I am not able to watch the Sunday talk shows regularly, but I have some acquaintance with the sort of opinions Brit Hume expresses in this context. The problem is that one week we are liable to hear that the emerging health-care reform bill is a scandalous power grab; the next week, that Barack Obama is laughably soft on terrorism; and, the week after that, that Tiger Woods needs to find Jesus. It may become just another episode in the process by which Christianity is rendered partisan.

Beyond that, if pressed on the matter, I might have objected that, something like Will Rogers, all I know about Tiger Woods is what I read in the papers, generally in electronic form these days. Before  offering a spiritual diagnosis, I would prefer to have some up-close-and-personal contact with the troubled individual — and I might also stipulate that I lack training as a pastor or counselor. Absent those elements, such a high-profile comment in national media smacks a bit of Bill Frist’s diagnosis-by-videotape of Terri Schiavo, which derailed his presidential ambitions. For those, such as myself, whose Christianity is less gung-ho than Brit Hume’s beliefs would appear to be, his statements about Woods come across as a bit presumptuous. Of course, in Protestantism there is the notion of a priesthood of all believers — and, in sectarian evangelical expression, there is the insistence that everyone needs to become “convicted” and to experience a spiritual turnaround. If anyone has a serious problem, it just must be the case that he or she needs to find Jesus. Spiritual counseling is one-size-fits-all, no experience necessary.

Too much should not be made of Brit Hume’s remarks, especially in light of the ease with which hackles can be raised over “secularist” media bias. Hume’s remarks may simply represent what we can expect from someone with the sort of beliefs he appears to harbor. Suffice it to say that I wouldn’t have said it….

Foster Kamer at media website Gawker has hit the nail on the head with its critique of Sunday’s New York Times op-ed by Bono. “Your intentions are excellent and at least 60% of your music catalog is still indisputably great. But if you were to play the whole ‘Bono Thing’ a little more low key, tipsters and I might not laugh every time you talk about changing the world like it’s the pop culture punchline it is—regardless of the excellent work you’ve already done!—if you keep on delivering it to everyone year after year.”

Before the passage of much more time, when most of us will be caught up in holiday celebrations, Frank Rich’s column from yesterday (Sunday) merits a look. He suggests that the revelations about the infidelities of Tiger Woods illustrate a broader problem with the American mentality and temperament. Excerpts:

“If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us … have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy)….”

“Indeed, if we go back to late 2001, the most revealing news story may have been unfolding not in New York but Houston — the site of the Enron scandal. That energy company convinced financial titans, the press and countless investors that it was a business deity. It did so even though very few of its worshipers knew what its business was….”

“What’s striking … is the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led. What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it….”

“People wanted to believe what they wanted to believe….”

“After his ‘indefinite break’ from golf, Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out. But after a decade in which two true national catastrophes, a wasteful war and a near-ruinous financial collapse, were both in part byproducts of the ease with which our leaders bamboozled us, we can’t so easily move on….”

NPR editor Sara Sarasohn reviews Disney’s new animated feature, “The Princess and the Frog,” for the Washington Post’s Sunday “Outlook” feature. The film has garnered attention by introducing the first black “Disney princess.”

Sarasohn finds that “Disney used the culture of New Orleans to avoid a mistake made by a lot of entertainment for kids: Simply coloring a character brown and calling it diversity…. The important thing is that you could not have plunked Belle or Snow White down in Tiana’s movie. This is her unique story.”

Furthermore, Tiana “marries the prince, but the wedding isn’t the fulfillment of her destiny. After they are married, she and the prince buy an abandoned building with money she saved in coffee cans. They open a restaurant, and they run it together. They are business partners as well as husband and wife…. The Disney fantasy wedding denigrated the real deal: a strong, collaborative, long-lasting marriage. With ‘The Princess and the Frog,’ I can’t believe how right Disney got it, after getting it wrong for so many years, through the lives of so many girls.”