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Saturday, January 17, 2004

And now for that endorsement

It has become increasingly clear to serious observers of American politics that the Democratic Party will have no hope of renewal if it nominates a Democrat for president in 2004. And the clearest, bravest alternative is Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman.

To have any prospect of winning back the hearts and minds of the professional political class in Washington, Maryland, and northern Virginia, the Democrats must make a final, decisive break with the demotic populism and so-called “grass-roots” organizing that has long entranced those among the party’s liberals who make a specialty of self-righteous delusion.  That means, among other things:

-- the Democratic nominee must have a strong record of creating innovative forms of corporate accounting that allow stock options to be treated dynamically, rather than being classed under the hidebound and antiquated heading of “expenses.” Only Lieberman has this kind of record, for only Lieberman has had the courage to break with paleoliberal tradition and allow companies such as Enron and WorldCom to reimagine the corporation so as to unlock shareholder value.  Yes, it is true that a few bad apples walked off with tens of millions of dollars while ordinary people lost their life’s savings.  But alone among the Democratic contenders, Lieberman knows that this is no time to play class warfare with the nation’s future.  Indeed, where Lieberman diverges most from his competitors on domestic policy is in his willingness to challenge entrenched party interest groups, the better to court the other party’s entrenched interest groups.

-- the Democratic nominee must be able to continue the important work of the Project for the New American Century even after the Bush administration has passed the torch.  When others chose obstructionism, appeasement, and demagoguery, only Senator Lieberman had the mettle to declare that there was “not one inch” of difference between himself and President Bush on Iraq-- and there is the hope that a President Lieberman, likewise, would have the exceptional vision necessary to see Ariel Sharon as a man of peace.  The tradition Lieberman represents is an honorable one, of supporting democracy or something more or less like it in some ways by whatever means are closest to hand, without hamstringing the moral authority of the United States with pettifogging questions about whether Iraq had “weapons” or a “weapons program.”

-- the Democratic nominee must be able to bond with Dick Cheney over the latter’s substantial success with Halliburton.  Lieberman’s honest and forthright debate with Cheney in October 2000 gave every indication that his admiration for the Cheneys goes well beyond his merely tactical alliance with Lynne Cheney in the fight to restore values to American culture.

-- finally, last but not least, the Democratic nominee must demonstrate a willingness to cite a wide array of sources, including the work of cyberjournalist Matt Drudge, in order to attack his Democratic rivals on Iraq.  Senator Lieberman’s recent criticism of Wesley Clark demonstrates that he has the intestinal fortitude to cross party lines and make new friends, just as it shows that he has the determination necessary to endure the scorn of Old Democrats calling his reliance on Drudge “opportunistic,” “misguided,” or “completely out to lunch.”

I further suggest that because Senator Lieberman looks and sounds so much like the unctuous, lugubrious Senator Palpatine in Star Wars, that we grant him emergency powers to marshal a Grand Army of the Republic, secure in the knowledge that he will lay aside those powers once the immediate crisis has passed.

And I have to admit that I wrote this endorsement with help.  All the italicized passages above were taken from The New Republic’s endorsement of Lieberman earlier this month.

Posted by Michael on 01/17 at 06:42 AM
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Hockey update

Self-indulgent blog entry on my hockey season.  Of interest only to hockey fans, and only a very small subset of those.

I don’t usually post reports of individual hockey games, but this morning’s was actually narratable.  My B-league team, the Capitals, faced off against the Wolves, a team we’ve beaten all four times we’ve played them this year, outscoring them by a total of 28-6.  But in the pregame warmup I noticed that they’d added a new player, a relatively young fellow who appeared to be a strong skater with a quick shot.  I suggested to my teammates that we keep an eye on him-- with my advancing age, I’m getting better as a scout and as a commentator as I gradually lose a step or two or three to the under-30 crowd, and sure enough, I was right.  I scored on a breakaway on my first shift, but the Wolves’ new guy tied it up ten minutes later.  We went up 2-1, and New Guy tied it with about 25 minutes left (we play 60 minutes running time).  Then with 4 minutes to go, New Guy picked up a loose puck in mid ice, behind our left defenseman, who’d unwisely pinched in the Wolves’ zone (so much for heeding my pregame advice), came in alone, and scored: he now had a hat trick, and it looked like he would beat us singlehandedly.  So our bench decided to go to its One Goal Down strategy-- putting out a forward line consisting of me, Craig Polen, and Keith Varney, the three leading scorers on the team.  And with two minutes left, Craig shot a long clearing pass out of our zone, from beneath the faceoff dot, off the far boards toward a streaking Varney, who corralled the puck at the red line, came in alone, and beat the Wolves’ goaltender to the near side-- clanking a wrist shot off the post.  Just like that, we were at 3-3.  Our line stayed on the ice, and with 30 seconds to play and the puck deep in our zone, I came across the middle and called for our defenseman to hit me with a breakout pass.  He shot it my way, but maybe two or three feet behind me, and I thought, well, that’s that-- there goes our chance at mounting a last-second offensive rush.  But just for the hell of it, I reached all the way back and tipped the pass forward, just barely getting my stick on the puck . . . and weirdly, that proved enough to put the puck out of reach of the Wolves’ last defenseman at center ice, whereupon Craig Polen swooped in, picked up the loose puck, bore down on the Wolves’ goaltender, deked him to the left, and slid the puck under him on the backhand.  With seventeen seconds to go.

Well, that was fun, and uncharacteristically dramatic too.  And the moral, for all you kids out there, is get your stick on the puck even when you don’t think you have a play.  Redirect passes.  Create open ice.  Get a lucky assist on a last-minute winning goal.  You never know.

The season so far: the Capitals are 15-6-1. I’ve played 16 of those games and now have 33 goals and 15 assists for 48 points; Polen leads the team with 27-23-50.  By contrast, on my A team, the Centre County Misfits, I’m having a really terrible year: after decent seasons of 22 and 29 goals, I now have exactly 5 in 14 games.  It hasn’t helped that in October I suffered a groin injury so severe that I couldn’t even put weight on my right leg for a while, and missed five weeks of A-level play (and three weeks of B), but still, the dropoff from last year’s numbers is pretty obvious to everyone on the team.  Sigh.  Hoping for better things the rest of the way.

Posted by Michael on 01/17 at 06:37 AM
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Book club recommendation # 2

Just arrived at my doorstep yesterday: Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, edited by Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr.  I’ve only flipped through it so far, but it looks terrific.  Noll and Trent are two of the best historians in the field (see Noll’s Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940 and Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States), and anyone interested in the history of citizenship and state policy in the United States-- that’s the history of citizenship, not just the history of the “mentally retarded,” for any of you who might not consider the history of mental retardation sufficiently interesting or important in and of itself-- should give this thing a look.

Full disclosure: I have a brief, chatty, inconsequential essay in the volume, a lightly revised version of “Family Values,” also available here.  But I assure you that (a) I’m not recommending the book for that reason and (b) I have no pecuniary interest in promoting the book.  Personally, I’d much rather have submitted a later and more substantial essay for inclusion in the book, my Dissent essay on “Disability and Citizenship” (also available right here), since that would’ve been more in keeping with the quality and the direction of the rest of the contributions, but I didn’t have that option, because . . . well, because I didn’t write that essay until late 2002, a year or two too late for this collection.  So tell NYU Press that you’d like to have your very own copy of Noll and Trent, and tell ‘em I told you, and also tell ‘em I told you that you could skip my essay and read everything else instead.

Posted by Michael on 01/17 at 05:17 AM
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Thursday, January 15, 2004

Conservatives denounce gay marriage, Mars mission

From “Bush’s Push for Marriage Falls Short for Conservatives,” David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, January 15, 2004:

Some major conservative Christian groups said yesterday that they were pleased but not satisfied by a new White House initiative to promote marriage, and they stepped up pressure on President Bush to champion a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage in his State of the Union speech next week.

“This is like lobbing a snowball at a forest fire,” said Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women of America, one of the largest conservative Christian advocacy groups. “This administration is dancing dangerously around the issue of homosexual marriage.”

Responding to conservative critics of the Bush administration, the Mixed Metaphor Association of America suggested that Rios’s remarks left Americans with a “thoroughly unclear” image of the threat posed by homosexuals.  “Gay marriage is like a forest fire, right, we got that part,” said Buster Poindexter, general secretary of the association.  “But then the administration is ‘dancing around’ it?  Exactly how big is this forest fire, anyway?  Is it one of those ‘raging’ things, or is it maybe just a campfire?  And where does the snow come from?  Did gays and lesbians build a campfire in the snow?  These are not idle questions.  Ordinary Americans need to know whether gays and lesbians are raging or just camping.”

In a related development, a spokesman for the Family Research Council today denounced President Bush’s plans for a manned mission to Mars later in this century.  Reginald Dwight, associate vice chair of the Council, said at a news conference that manned space exploration of the kind proposed by Bush would contribute to the deterioration of the American family.  “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,” said Dwight.  “In fact, it’s cold as hell.  And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did.” Asked whether the Council would eventually support civil unions on Mars or perhaps one of the gaseous outer planets, Dwight replied, “I think it’s gonna be a long long time” before Christian conservatives would be willing to consider gay and lesbian rights anywhere in the known solar system.

Posted by Michael on 01/15 at 05:21 AM
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Finally, a place for us

The online emporium for members of the latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show is right here.  I can’t endorse it fully-- for one thing, it didn’t offer me the option of identifying with a double skim cappuccino instead of a latte, and surely any self-respecting left-wing freak show should reject the Club for Growth’s charge that we are “Hollywood-loving” (I don’t know about you, but I will only watch films directed by John Sayles or François Truffaut)-- but on the whole, it seems OK to me.  And of course no update on the freak show would be complete without a shout out to our Left Coast goddess, Arianna, whose contribution to the growing Paul O’Neill discussion is over here.

As for that endorsement I promised:  still working on it.  I’m trying to make it worthy of a certain once-influential Beltway weekly.

Posted by Michael on 01/14 at 05:50 PM
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004

On Paul O’Neill

Two quick takes:  one from economist Brad DeLong, who’s just devastating on the subject, and one from a presidential candidate I’m occasionally impressed by, especially when he utters things like this takedown of the Bushies’ curious eagerness to investigate O’Neill (thanks to Nick Confessore of the American Prospect).

Coming soon:  this site endorses somebody or something.  Stay tuned.

Posted by Michael on 01/13 at 04:04 PM
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