Blog Fatigue

Back in the primeval days of personal corrective journalism--the precursor to blogging--gadflies like I. F. Stone and George Seldes would mail newsletters weekly to a tiny minority of Americans who wanted to know what was really going on behind newspaper headlines and radio bulletins.

A. J. Liebling, who did similar work in the pages of the New Yorker with occasional pieces on "The Wayward Press," once said that such efforts were hampered by the need to fill a fixed amount of space and suggested that, when conditions dictated, media critics just mail postcards to their subscribers: "No infamy this week."

Liebling's dictum is brought to mind by a New York Times piece on the short life and high death rate of blogs based on Technorati figures that show, of an estimated 7 to 10 million, "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream--or at least an ambition unfulfilled."

As a late-in-life arrival after decades in the maligned mainstream media, I can testify to the exhilaration and frustrations of blogging--the freedom to react instantly to what passes for news, the brain pressure of making meaningful connections in the chaos of it all, the all-too-human need to find evidence of being heard and, in moments of doubt, anxiety over becoming the windbag at the cocktail party who sends listeners to the bar in urgent need of another drink.

At such times, there is the pep-talk wisdom of Andrew Sullivan: "You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality."

Unlike those pioneers who had to go to the post office with cartons of newletters, today's would-be founts of wisdom don't even have to get dressed and leave home. And Lord knows there is more than enough infamy to go around.

Getting rich and famous is another matter entirely, but these days the odds are closer to those of starting on a career in Wall Street and a lot more respectable.

Advice to the Times: Get Noonan

As William Kristol's year-long gig (Why does it seem so much longer?) runs out, the Gray Lady should go after the stylish Peggy Noonan to replace him.

Those of us who have been gagging over Kristol's dopey, fact-free New York Times columns would welcome Noonan as a reminder of the days when conservatives had a way with words as well as ideas (see Will, George and Sullivan, Andrew). In the coming era of Sarah Palin, they will be needed more than ever in the national political discussion.

Today's Noonan effort in the Wall Street Journal is a sweet sample of her talents, parsing yesterday's Obama speech about the economy:

"He spoke of 'our capacity for future greatness' and argued 'the very fact that this crisis is largely of our own making means that it is not beyond our ability to solve.' This was a relief. It's time someone began to speak of the current crisis with optimism, as if it can be handled and got through. This is not a nation of 300 million people in extremis and on a morphine drip; it's a nation of 300 million people who are alive, alert and ready to go."

Looking at the mug shot of five presidents in the Oval Office, Noonan observes:

"The Founders, who were awed by the presidency and who made it a point, the early ones, to speak in their inaugural addresses of how unworthy they felt, would be astonished and confounded by the over-awe with which we view presidents now...It's no good, and vaguely un-American. Right now patriotism requires more than the usual candor. It requires speaking truthfully and constructively to a president who is a man, and just a man. We hire them, we fire them, they come back for photo-ops. They're not magic."

If the Times needs any further incentive to go after Noonan, it would bring the added satisfaction of taking something valuable away from the media's mad acquirer Rupert Murdoch.

Will Obama Be Bad For Blogging?

Over two years and 2000 posts ago, George W. Bush made a blogger out of me. I was coasting along in octogenarian ease, writing an occasionally lofty OpEd piece or irate letter to the editor, when my reactions to what Bush was doing--rage, ridicule and disbelief--demanded a more immediate and unbuttoned outlet.

Now, with Barack Obama on the horizon, a different set of responses seems to be in order. The new president, unlike Bush, is familiar with the connections between words and actions, and what he does and says is likely to prompt more serious and prolonged thought than raw emotion, analysis rather than upset, not the best aphrodisiac for blogging spontaneity.

If so, that would be a social loss. As Andrew Sullivan noted in his recent Atlantic piece, "The wise panic that can paralyze a writer—the fear that he will be exposed, undone, humiliated—is not available to a blogger. You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality."

This melancholy mood is inspired by Jon Swift's now-annual collection of the best blog posts of the year. Reading these self-selected outpourings of estimable minds and hearts is a reminder that the most effective criticism is inspired by boobery rather than brilliance (see John Mason Brown's classic review of a Hamlet performance: "He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace").

Will next year's collection be as much fun to read? Will Obama, with his elegance and (please God) effectiveness, subdue us into nodding our heads in agreement and interjecting the occasional, tentative "Yes, but..."? Will a literate Leader of the Free World enslave our critical savagery?

Not to worry. Right from the start, with his choice of Rick Warren for the Inaugural benediction, the new President has indicated he will show clemency for bloggers. He will, at a minimum, provide enough mistakes and miscalculations to inspire us to keep saddling up and riding to the republic's rescue with our wit and wisdom.

Even Obama's most fervent admirers should not "misunderestimate" his capacity for the kind of folly that keeps life interesting and bloggers blogging.

Pursuing Palin, Shunning Ron Paul

It would be restful if, along with Joe the Plumber, John McCain's running mate just went off into a disposable-celebrity waste basket along with the other used Kleenex of the campaign, but Sarah Palin and the idea of her are still with us, as Andrew Sullivan so cogently points out today:

"That the Palin absurdity should follow the two-term presidency of another individual utterly out of his depth in national government is particularly troubling; 46 percent of Americans voted for the possibility of this blank slate as president because she somehow echoed their own sense of religious or cultural 'identity'. Until we figure out how this happened, we will not be able to prevent it from happening again."

Promoting an over-aged cheerleader with no political substance whatsoever for 2012, as William Kristol and others are doing, is a sign that the diaper division of the Republican Party has no interest in going back to its Goldwater-William F. Buckley roots and offering principled opposition to the new Democratic majority.

Palin's ascension is highlighted by the decline and fall of Ron Paul who, in his own idiosyncratic way, identified some of the issues that his party should be considering and debating. As Paul now writes:

"In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power--with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government."

Instead, the GOP focus is on Palin's "star quality" and her media blitz this week to make GOP true believers forget how her vast emptiness and arrogance helped bring down John McCain's campaign.

Wisdom of the Aged

Andrew Sullivan cites her for commentary "that knocks your socks off," but with the restraint more seemly for age, I just tip my hat to 82-year-old Helen Philpot of Texas and her college friend, Margaret Schmechtman of Maine, who have started an octogenarian blog that really rocks.

Ms. Philpot does not mince words:

"I am surprised that some of you are up in arms about my calling Sarah Palin a bitch, or John McCain an ass or even George Bush a jackass...Some of you are actually praying for me...

"Well this old broad is hurt...I am so sorry if I have offended any of you...

"New rules:

"I will stop calling George Bush a jackass when he stops calling me a terrorist: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

"I will stop calling John McCain an ass when he stops calling Barack Obama a socialist at every dog and pony show on the Straight Talk Express tour.

"I will stop calling Sarah Palin a bitch when she stops calling Obama a terrorist sympathizer. And I will stop calling Sarah Palin a bitch when she stops calling the parts of the country where I don’t live more Pro-American than the part of the country where I do live. And I will definitely stop calling Sarah Palin a bitch when she stops acting like a bitch.

"I’m old enough to remember the Republican party of Barry Goldwater--when the party stood for fiscal responsibility, small government and personal freedoms. I remember when I could talk with friends about politics and just agree to disagree. And then religious nut cases decided that if you didn’t agree with them you were immoral. So they went and elected George Bush President so he could take the Republican Party from being a party full of respectable people to a party filled with asses, jackasses and yes--bitches like Sarah Palin."

Ms. Philpot has a good memory and a salty tongue that makes some of her contemporaries (like me) sound timid and lame.

Withdrawal Symptoms

The pundits will have to go into rehab--the TV talking heads, newspaper columnists, the bloggers who have been overdosing on Obama-Clinton for more than a year and just can't quit cold turkey.

Maureen Dowd ransacks pop culture to describe Hillary as "less Blanche than Scarlett. 'Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you,' Rhett told the willful belle at the start of her rugged odyssey.

"And heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans 'a nuclear option' during her Shermanesque march to Denver...get the Florida and Michigan delegates seated."

"Is Hillary Done?" Howard Kurtz asks in the Washington Post but scrounges for evidence that she isn't after citing the New York Post headline "TOAST" and Andrew Sullivan confesses that Obama's "patriotic message tonight...moved me to my core" while noting that "African-American voters killed the Clinton candidacy."

The reluctance to let go brings back memories of what the politicians said after Eisenhower had a heart attack before his reelection in 1956: If he dies, they'll run him posthumously.

The Clinton campaign is now entering its life-after-death phase.

Irish Eyes

After President Kennedy was killed in 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart."

Growing up in the Bronx of the 1930s, almost everyone I knew was Jewish. In our apartment building, there was one Irish family whose men sat on the front steps in summer, drinking beer and joking. As the evening went on, their smiles got wider, their talk louder. They seemed to be breathing some other air. They were as poor as the rest of us, but so full of life.

As a young man in Manhattan of the 1950s, I would go after work to Costello's, a saloon where you could breathe that "other air" with writers, editors and artists, a place John McNulty had made famous in the New Yorker. Pat Moynihan was sometimes there, wearing an outdated straw boater, but no one seemed to think it odd.

Tim Costello was our Irish godfather, keeping us happy but grounded and civil. When Frank McCourt, who later wrote "Angela's Ashes," came over as an 18-year-old immigrant, Tim sent him to the New York Public Library to read Samuel Johnson.

It was Tim's policy to help the poor but never to buy drinks for anyone who could afford to pay for his own. When someone at my bachelor party told me he was coming and bringing a case, I said that, if so, a lawyer would be handling it. Tim came, empty-handed, but his presence was honor enough.

Over the years my life has been entwined with colleagues, friends and relatives by marriage who have leavened my Jewish gloom with Irish wit and cheer, so here's a St. Patrick Day's toast to Tim Costello et al, along with a new generation of Irish-American writers of all political persuasions--Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, Andrew Sullivan, P.J. O'Rourke and more--who are helping keep us sane as George W. Bush breaks our hearts.

Cheers to all.

Desperate Househusband

Not easy to boggle the public mind these days, but Bill Clinton seems to have done it again by appearing on the Rush Limbaugh show on the day of the Texas primary.

The former President did not have intercourse with that man himself, who was suffering from a convenient case of one-day flu after urging his listeners to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton on the theory that Barack Obama would be harder for Republicans to beat. A substitute interviewer did the deed.

Andrew Sullivan's reaction: "Now just wrap your mind around this: the Clintons were happy to support a cynical, partisan Republican campaign to wound the Democratic front-runner, and they were brazen enough to go on the Limbaugh show to do so.

"There also seems little doubt that Republican mischief played a real role in affecting the results."

Several days later Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson complained about Obama's "attacks" on his candidate: "I for one do not believe that imitating Ken Starr is the way to win a Democratic primary election for president."

His target, the former President, is making Starr look like a pussycat.

Beatifying Bill Buckley

It is no disrespect to the memory of a remarkable man to marvel at the efforts of disciples he left behind to elevate him to conservative sainthood.

The latest gush is from William Kristol in today's New York Times, asserting Buckley "helped many of us realize there were far richer intellectual traditions available than 20th-century liberalism even dreamed of" and crediting him with the rise of Reagan followed by "victory in the cold war, a revitalized economy and a renewed nation."

Last week, David Brooks was almost at a loss for words, but not quite. "I don’t know," he wrote, "if I can communicate the grandeur of his life or how overwhelming it was to be admitted into it. Buckley was not only a giant celebrity, he lived in a manner of the haut monde. To enter Buckley’s world was to enter the world of yachts, limousines, finger bowls at dinner, celebrities like David Niven and tales of skiing at Gstaad...He took me sailing, invited me to concerts and included me at dinners with the great and the good."

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan celebrated Buckley as a "complete American original, a national treasure, a man whose energy was a kind of optimism, and whose attitude toward life, even when things seemed to others bleak, was summed up in something he said to a friend: "'Despair is a mortal sin.'"

Among conservatives, only Andrew Sullivan spoke a truth rare among all the superlatives by asking, "(A)m I the only person who found Buckley close to unreadable a lot of the time? I never read his fiction, but his nonfiction was packed the endless sentences, ridiculously long words, and meaning that sometimes took several reads to excavate. I don't know how many times I finished a Buckley column with the thought: what on earth was he trying to say?"

For benighted liberals like me, there was an even more basic problem. For all the conservative blather about our latte-drinking elitism, Buckley was the most elitist figure of his generation, growing up in inherited luxury with a monstrous sense of entitlement and disdain for those who did not share it.

As he dazzled the likes of Kristol, Brooks and Noonan, the rest of us saw only brilliant rationalizations for the politics of selfishness and "Dieu and Mon Droit." Not quite "Let them eat cake," but not too far removed from it.

But speaking ill of the dead may be churlish and ungracious. Let Noonan have the last word about "the defender of great creeds and great belief": "Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels take thee to thy rest."

Hillary: The Case for Humility

The other day, Andrew Sullivan distilled his and America's '08 dilemma into a choice "between fear and loathing. I loathe Clinton; I fear Giuliani."

The Rudy side of the equation is easily quantified (see below), but the hatred of Hillary Clinton, not only Sullivan's, but that, if polls are to be believed, of close to half of all Americans, is more complicated.

A visitor from another planet might see her as a former First Lady of undoubted intelligence who stood by her husband in a pre-election sex scandal, was later victimized by another in the White House and then went on to an independent political career and the brink of nomination for president. As they used to say on Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Critics call her cold, calculating and ruthless but, in some political circles, those are qualities deemed vital in a president. Among the less sophisticated, there is a resentment over exploiting her spousal status that overlooks George W. Bush's leveraging of his filial tie into the White House.

But underneath all that, I would suggest, is a vague rage at her sense of entitlement, the unquestioning attitude toward her right to be President, the confidence she projects of having somehow earned it by claiming her White House years as executive "experience."

That Achilles' heel has, in recent days, been exploited by her opposition, as in Barack Obama's observation, “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”

In some ways, Sen. Clinton may have damaged her own campaign narrative by framing the choice as experience vs. change. Some of those experiences are turnoffs for voters, who might be impressed by strong stands on issues that concern them but see her waffling only as reinforcement for the feeling that she takes her succession for granted.

Humility is not high on the list of qualities the electorate wants in a president, but modesty could go a long way in offsetting the arrogance Hillary Clinton projects and, in a general election, it might serve her well against Rudy Giuliani, who is over-endowed with it to the point of frightening Andrew Sullivan:

"His obsessive loyalty to aides, his reflexive defense of the security and police forces, his discomfort with any argument smacking of civil liberties, his mean streak, his desire to extend his own term of office as New York City mayor, his authoritarian, meddling instincts, and his frequent, hotheaded outbursts: all this make giving him the Cheney-style presidency a huge risk."

Hillary haters and supporters, take note.

Conservative Crush on Obama

If upscale Republicans and Independents decide the '08 election, Barack Obama might well be our next President, judging from new love letters to the candidate from Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic and Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.

Sullivan argues that Obama is beyond the toxic quarrels of the Baby Boomers over Vietnam, Nixon and cultural issues, an alternative to a Giuliani-Clinton contest that would be "a classic intra-generational struggle--with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink."

Obama, according to Sullivan, opposed the Iraq war "for the right reasons" and is therefore "the potential president with the most flexibility in dealing with it." His face would be "a re-branding of the United States" to the rest of the world, particularly Muslims. He might even, Sullivan argues, bridge the religious divide in America:

"(H)e is not born-again. His faith...lives at the center of the American religious experience. It is a modern, intellectual Christianity. 'I didn’t have an epiphany,' he explained to me. 'What I really did was to take a set of values and ideals that were first instilled in me from my mother, who was, as I have called her in my book, the last of the secular humanists—you know, belief in kindness and empathy and discipline, responsibility—those kinds of values. And I found in the Church a vessel or a repository for those values and a way to connect those values to a larger community and a belief in God and a belief in redemption and mercy and justice … I guess the point is, it continues to be both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey for me, this issue of faith.'"

Peggy Noonan's crush on Obama is less global but just as clear. In a column on Hillary-bashing in last week's debate, she writes:

"Barack Obama, with his elegance and verbal fluency really did seem like that great and famous political figure from his home state of Illinois--Adlai Stevenson, who was not at all hungry, not at all mean, and operated at a step removed from the grubby game."

Last month Noonan observed: “Barack Obama has a great thinking look. I mean the look he gets on his face when he's thinking, not the look he presents in debate, where they all control their faces knowing they may be in the reaction shot and fearing they'll look shrewd and clever, as opposed to open and strong...

“You get the impression Mr. Obama trusts himself to think, as if something good might happen if he does. What a concept. Anyway, I've started to lean forward a little when he talks.”

Compare this to her take on John Edwards' attack on Clinton "like a furry animal on a wheel, trying so hard, to the point he's getting a facial tic, and getting nowhere, failing to get his little furry paws on his prey, not knowing you have to get off the wheel to get to the prey. You have to stop the rounded, rote, bromidic phrases, and use a normal language that cannot be ignored."

Andrew Sullivan and Peggy Noonan may not represent much of a constituency but, if the Democratic nomination becomes a battle over electability, their attitudes may foreshadow Obama's advantage on that issue.

Styles of Stealing: Bush and Maliki

The news today is about contrasts in corruption. In Baghdad, they do it the old-fashioned way, with Prime Minister Maliki’s friends and family taking $18 billion and then muscling or murdering those who try to expose them.

In Washington, the Bush Administration has been taking away our national morality to the point that headlines are all about crimes of character. Torturing and lying about torture is only the latest in a long list leading conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan to call his President a “war criminal” and David Brooks to accuse him of destroying the “social cohesion” that true conservatism values.

Testifying before a House panel yesterday, a former Iraqi investigator described scenes right out of our Roaring Twenties.

"They are so corrupt that they will attack their accusers and their families with guns and meat hooks, as well as countercharges of corruption," Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi testified. He recounted how one of his staff was gunned down with his seven-month-pregnant wife, his security chief's father found dead on a meat hook and another investigator’s father riddled with holes from a power drill.

Bush and Cheney have been more subtle. Senate Committees are still trying to get hold of documents that apparently condone torture while the White House was, and still is, insisting that it doesn’t.

Democrats on Capitol Hill were demanding classified memos, disclosed by the New York Times, giving the C.I.A. approval in 2005 for “harsh interrogation techniques.”

Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the 2005 opinions had “reinstated a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret” and his panel had been asking for those opinions on interrogation for two years without success.

Chris Matthews summed it all up succinctly yesterday: "They've finally been caught in their criminality.” But the MSNBC anchor, who will co-host a Republican candidates debate next week, may be too optimistic. Unlike the new Baghdad government, Bush and Cheney have an almost seven-year backlog of illegality waiting to be uncovered.

Bitching About Hillary

Hard to tell what prompted it but Andrew Sullivan today offers an enigmatic post headed “Best. Movie. Line. Ever.” and reads in its entirety: "’Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.’ ‘Dolores Claiborne’, not Hillary's forthcoming campaign slogan.”

It’s accompanied by a film clip in which her rich employer encourages much-abused Delores to murder her husband.

Since Clinton’s “bitchiness” has not been an issue and offing Bill is not on the table, there must be something more subtle here.

Perhaps it goes back to Sullivan’s recent assessment of Hillary as a victim of “political post-traumatic stress disorder” who hasn’t outgrown the Clinton Administration’s failure to push for needle exchanges to reduce HIV transmission among IV users “regardless of the science and epidemiology, because they were terrified of being labeled ‘liberal’ by the GOP machine.”

If the intent is to connect Clinton’s caution to Delores Claiborne’s passivity and urge a tougher stance, there’s a slight problem. At the moment, Hillary’s attitude is giving her everything she wants. Being a bitch is beside the point.