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Mark Levin Wrong About the Marketplace of Ideas
Tweet Share on Facebook April 26, 2010 Comment (2)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I have no dog in the fight between Mark Levin and Jim Manzi—which, for the uninitiated, began when Manzi, a conservative policy wonk, accused radio talk show host Levin of propagandizing to the echo chamber of global warming deniers. But I will note, as a sidebar, that Levin has a tendency to resort to Howard Stern-style chest-thumping about his popularity. He does here, in this Facebook retort at David Frum, and I noticed it as well in Levin’s infamous radio showdown with Frum.
“No one is buying it—or his books,” he writes of Frum. You might call this the argument from vulgarity, to employ one of the literal senses of the word. What’s the deal?
Lots of people bought Al Franken’s books. Lots of people have seen Michael Moore’s documentaries. Does this validate them in any meaningful way? Does the fact that the major journals of political opinion, conservative and liberal alike, have tiny paying readerships mean they’re not influential? Of course not.
Memo to Levin: The “marketplace of ideas” is more than, well, the marketplace. -
New Jersey Education Fight Shows Union Pettiness
Tweet Share on Facebook April 22, 2010 Comment (4)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Back in my days as a staffer involved in selling the No Child Left Behind bill to a skeptical Republican caucus, we had to penetrate brick walls of boilerplate—especially the idea that education is the exclusive province of states and local districts.
This is descriptively true. Most education spending is sub-federal, and it will likely remain that way for good. But as an ideal, it shouldn’t be the end of the story. Other nonpartisan ideals—sunlight, empiricism, accountability—are just as important.
One need only look at the New Jersey Education Association’s furious opposition to Gov. Chris Christie’s pay-freeze proposal to see that fears of “nationalization” miss the point when it comes to education. State and local bureaucracies are every bit as entrenched and self-serving locally as they are in Washington. And as George Will wrote in 1991: “[L]ocalism makes less and less sense in a nation of increasing mobility among regions, a nation flunking—as a nation—the international test of competitiveness.”
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Are Tea Party Activists Just Republican Party Dupes?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 21, 2010 Comment (17)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I like Jonah Goldberg. His wildly successful book Liberal Fascism exposed a raw nerve in liberal academia: When they weren’t ridiculing it, they were conceding that he had a point. But I fear he, and the increasingly overexposed Glenn Reynolds, have become far too enamored of the Tea Party movement.
Today, for instance, Jonah tries to explain away the selective timing of the Partiers’ deficit hawkishness, calling such suspicions “lazy sophistry”:No doubt partisanship plays a role. But partisanship only explains so much given that the tea partiers are clearly sincere about limited government and often quite fond of Republican-bashing. So here’s an alternative explanation: Conservatives don’t want to be fooled again.
Fair enough. I happen to think criticism of Bush’s record on deficits is as oversimplified as that of Obama’s today. Very few conservatives—Tea Partiers especially—are willing to concede that the 2001 tax cuts are a major driver of our current fiscal mess. Conversely, the prescription drug benefit isn’t necessarily the disaster it’s made out to be. As Tyler Cowen has written, there’s reason to believe that the Medicare Part D program might yield substantial savings down the line.
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Obama's Supposed Hatred of America
Tweet Share on Facebook April 14, 2010 Comment (15)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Wow. David P. Goldman, the artist formerly known as “Spengler,” just defended his theory about the roots of President Obama’s supposed hatred of America (he’s “the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men”)--which John Podhoretz quite reasonably denounced here--by saying his characterization has earned wide if not universal acceptance among conservatives.
The approving conservatives he cites as proof? Sean Hannity and Michael Ledeen. Sure—and Charles Manson was an otherwise normal dude who dug the Beatles.
Sorry, Oswald. You’ll need to try harder than that. And kudos to Podhoretz for the intellectual hygienic effort.
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Newt Gingrich: Republicans Won 1995 Government Shutdown
Tweet Share on Facebook April 13, 2010 Comment (15)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Argh! What’s that awful sound I’m hearing? So familiar, so grating, so egomaniacal, so ... Newt.
According to Dave Weigel’s fine new blog at the Washington Post, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich bridled at the suggestion that the 1995 budget showdown between the congressional Republican majorities and President Clinton redounded in the favor the Democratic party.
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Conservatives' Rhetoric on Economy Could Haunt GOP in 2012
Tweet Share on Facebook April 13, 2010 Comment (6)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The deficit picture might be improving. And, according to Larry Kudlow, a full-fledged economic recovery is in the offing:
The current reality is that a strong rebound in corporate profits (the greatest and truest stimulus of all), ultra-easy money from the Fed, and some small stimuli from government spending are working to generate a stronger-than-expected recovery in a basically free-market economy that is a lot more resilient than capitalist critics think.
By all means, salt the latter news with a reminder that its source is Mr. “Goldilocks Economy” himself. And, to be fair, later in the column, Kudlow makes the requisite noise about how Obamanomics threatens the prospect of growth in the out years.
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Taxes, Spending, and Washington’s Bipartisan Conspiracy of Cowardice
Tweet Share on Facebook April 9, 2010 Comment (9)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
In the short term, news of Rep. Bart Stupak's retirement is going to inspire chatter of a "breakdown of civility," increasing polarization, a lack of any significant bipartisan cooperation on major issues—all the stuff that's purportedly making Washington, D.C., a lousy place to work. But here's why I'd want to retire if I were in Congress: the specter of facing an electorate that is utterly unprepared to deal with the country's fiscal problems.
As Stan Collender writes, in response to a recent Economist/YouGov poll:
"almost two-thirds—62 percent—of those responding said that they wanted to cut spending to reduce the budget deficit rather than raise taxes. But just three questions later, the only are of federal spending that a majority—71 percent—was willing to cut was foreign aid."
Which, as we dreaded Beltway insiders know, constitutes less than one percent of federal spending, and a large portion of which goes to Israel.
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Reading Too Much Into Sarah Palin's Speech Style
Tweet Share on Facebook April 8, 2010 Comment (12)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Via Andrew Sullivan, I see the linguist John McWhorter, blogging at The New Republic, has tried gamely to deconstruct the speech patterns of Sarah Palin:
What truly distinguishes Palin's speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance—Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended "there," as in "We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there..." But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to "forge that peace." That peace? You mean that peace way over there—as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She's far, far away from that peace.
Oh, come off it. I'm no fan of Sarah Palin; I wouldn't want her running my son's preschool, let alone the country. But this is a bit much. I've heard her employ the "there" fetish when she was talking about her years as a college student. "There" and "that" are her filler words, no different than the "um" and "like" of teenagers or the plaintive "just" of extemporaneous Protestant prayer (as in, "Father, if you would just heal his sickness...")
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Obama's Angry Critics Have a Point
Tweet Share on Facebook April 5, 2010 Comment (12)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
One says "anger."
The other says "righteously indignant."
Crispin Sartwell cries foul at New York Times columnist Charles Blow for copping a superior attitude here:
The Apostles of Anger in their echo chamber of fallacies have branded [Obama] the enemy. This has now become an article of faith. Obama isn't just the enemy of small government and national solvency. He's the enemy of liberty.
This underscores the current fight for the soul of this country. It's not just a tug of war between left and right. It's a struggle between the mind and the heart, between evidence and emotions, between reason and anger, between what we know and what we believe.
"This is a fine crystallization of where today's left is at," writes Sartwell. "There is no argument at all, just continual, insufferable self-congratulation."
Sartwell, for the uninitiated, is no conservative. Though I initially discovered him via a shared irrational pro-Rolling Stones exuberance, I kept up with his writing because of its bracing defense of elemental liberty. Take the title of the late Robert Nozick's famous philosophical treatise Anarchy, State, and Utopia—Sartwell argues that it's a heavy lift to justify the transition to the second stage.
He is, in short, an anarchist. For him, Obamacare is a monstrosity—but so is Dick Cheney.
Now: I get where he's coming from regarding Blow.
There's nothing worse than a smarmy, self-satisfied liberal.
But here's what I take Blow to mean: not that liberals have a monopoly on reason, but that the core of Obama's conservative opposition isn't making reasonable arguments.
I wonder if Sartwell would agree there's a qualitative difference between the following statements:
