As seen from Just Above Sunset

Tuesday, 27 January 2004

Topic: The Culture

The problem with strong, educated women with opinions? They ruin everything!

In this blog on Saturday and in the magazine on Sunday I wrote about Teresa Heinz Kerry. The idea was we're really not ready, should John Kerry become president, for an outspoken strong-willed first lady. We have become accustomed to Laura Bush.

In As Seen from Just Above Sunset: Trouble on the Horizon: The United States is Just Not Ready for THIS!

And in Just Above Sunset Magazine: Election Notes: Women! - "Portuguese, born in Mozambique, fluent in French and four other languages! Trouble."

So what would having a well-educated, outspoken and strong-willed first lady be like? Tony Blair can tell us.

A Times of London article says a new book details Cherie Blair's "displays of open animosity towards President Bush," which included picking a fight about the death penalty over dinner.

If you hop over to FreeRepublic.com "A Conservative News Forum" you'll find the article and reactions.

The article:

Cherie [Blair] said Bush 'stole' power and tackled him on executions
London Times, January 24, 2003, London Times
Cherie said Bush 'stole' power and tackled him on executions
By Nicholas Wapshott in New York, Philip Webster and David Charter

TONY BLAIR has been embarrassed by his wife's displays of open animosity towards President Bush, according to a forthcoming biography of the Prime Minister.

Cherie Blair is said to have made no secret of her conviction that Mr Bush "stole" the presidential election, and picked an argument with him over the death penalty during a private dinner.

Although the Prime Minister was pragmatic about Mr Bush's victory, Mrs Blair was far less sanguine about the Supreme Court decision that gave him the keys to the White House. She believed Al Gore had been "robbed" of the presidency and was hostile to the idea of her husband "cosying" up to the new President.

Even as they flew to Washington for their first meeting with the presidential couple, Mrs Blair was in no mood to curry favour, the book Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader by Philip Stephens, states. "Cherie Blair still believed that Bush had stolen the White House from Gore," he wrote. She asked more than once during the journey why they had to be so nice to "these people".

Mrs Blair scarcely concealed her impatience as the Blair team debated on the plane whether the gift he had brought for the President, a bust of Winston Churchill, was of sufficient quality for the Oval Office. They decided to find a better one and that Mr Blair would tell the President it was on its way. Mrs Blair was annoyed at the fuss but was overruled. Another bust was delivered months later.

The book's disclosures of Mrs Blair's forthright views will cause embarrassment in Downing Street, because of Mr Blair's good working relations with Mr Bush, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although they will not surprise officials or ministers who know her well. She is known for expressing her views forcefully in private.

You get the idea.

But the core is here:

Stephens writes that Mrs Blair behaved impeccably at her first meeting with the President "for all her outspoken resentment on the flight" and "to the great relief of her husband and aides" she had been at pains to make friends with Laura Bush.

But when the Bushes came to Britain in the summer of 2001, Mrs Blair, "more tribal in her politics than Tony", according to a close family friend, embarrassed her husband. As the two couples sat down to dinner, with the officials no longer there, Mrs Blair could not resist an argument. She is a human rights lawyer and turned to the death penalty, a subject on which she has blunt views.

Judicial executions were an immoral violation of human rights, an affront under the US Constitution as much as under European laws to the fundamental principles of justice, she said. This opinion was delivered to a man who as Governor of Texas signed warrants for more than 150 executions.

Mr Blair was reported to have "squirmed", even though he shares her opposition to the death penalty. The author says that when he asked Mr Blair about the incident during research for the book he looked uncomfortable - all he would say was that Cherie had raised the issue but as far as he was concerned the United States and Britain simply had different systems.

Damn. It's embarrassing when your wife is an actual attorney with strong views! She might even express them!

But then it gets worse for Bush too.

Stephens also states that later in the evening Mr Bush had been embarrassed by his wife. Laura Bush had made it clear that her views on abortion were a great deal more liberal than his.

Really? No one ever knew that. Laura knows usually enough to keep her damned mouth shut. A good woman.

By the way, Stephens is a political columnist on the Financial Times and the paper's former political editor. This biograrphy of Blair was commissioned by the publishers Viking to meet an urgent demand from Americans for more information about the Prime Minister and his family. The book will be published in here on February 5 and is expected to sell reasonably well.

And the comments you will find at FreeRepublic.com "A Conservative News Forum"?

"Cherie is nothing but an embarrassment, to her husband and the rest of the country. The criminal-consorting, hypocritical, spurious 'human rights' lawyering, crystal gazing bit? I wouldn't worry about anything this dumb cow has to say."

posted on 01/24/2004 1:00:06 AM PST by ScudEast

"Laura should have bitch-slapped her !!"

posted on 01/24/2004 1:12:07 AM PST by Rainmist

"Cherie Blair is L? all the way. Looney left liberal. A chowderhead. Britain is full of these cranks. I will however give her credit for being woman enough to bear 4 children."

posted on 01/24/2004 1:24:07 AM PST by dennisw ("We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." - Toby Keith)

John and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, better watch their backs.

Posted by Alan at 10:47 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 27 January 2004 10:59 PST home

Topic: World View

America as seen from Paris last week...

Two items down, from last night, you will find my comments on Paul Krugman.

Christine Mital had a profile of Paul Krugman last week in Le Nouvel Observateur. This was in the section of the magazine - Les nouveaux economists - in the L'Am?rique qu'on aime edition of the magazine.

The theme of this issue?

Elle est ?videmment anti-Bush. Et m?me violemment. Mais elle est cr?atrice, g?n?reuse, innovante. A l'origine des ONG les plus contestataires. A l'avant-garde de la litt?rature et de l'art. A la pointe des techniques mais aussi des id?es. Certes, ? un an de l'?lection pr?sidentielle, jamais cette Am?rique n'a ?t? aussi ?loign?e du pouvoir. Mais l'enqu?te de notre correspondant Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, de notre envoy? sp?cial Jean-Gabriel Fredet ainsi que des diff?rents services du ?Nouvel Observateur? montre ? quel point elle n'a pas disparu. A quel point elle fourbit ses arguments contre l'Am?rique n?oconservatrice de George W. Bush. Voici l'histoire de cet affrontement - un des plus forts qu'aient sans doute connus les Etats-Unis. Voici aussi, ? travers ses principaux porte-drapeaux, la carte de cette ?autre Am?rique?. Avec ses n?opopulistes et ses radicaux, ses dissidents et ses moralistes, ses alternatifs et ses artistes, qui n'ont jamais ?t? aussi cr?atifs que dans le refus de l'ordre ?tabli ...

Seems the editors think there is some hope for us.

For the Krugman piece see...
Paul Krugman : L'?conomie ? l'estomac
Semaine du jeudi 22 janvier 2004 - n?2046 - Dossier

Yes, it is in French.

Oh yes, see Les n?opopulistes for the Fran?ois Forestier profile of Michael Moore. Click here Michael Moore : Flingueur-n? for that. Michael Moore is on the cover of the magazine, as a scruffy version of the Statue of Liberty, France's gift to us.

By the way, you can see the Michael Moore cover on Ric Erickson's site MetropoleParis on this page - The Week's New Metropole Paris Posters II. Ric each week publishes four to six photographs of posters currently in the kiosks of Paris. Pretty cool. Highly recommended.

Back to the ?Nouvel Observateur? ... in the section Les r?volt?s de la culture you will find these short portraits: Sean Penn : Le bad boy de Hollywood along with the odd Eminem : Le n?gre blond.

Interesting stuff, no?

Posted by Alan at 07:02 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 27 January 2004 09:26 PST home

Monday, 26 January 2004

Topic: The Culture

Everyone has his or her heroes. For me? Duke Ellington, and Roberto Clemente, and, yes, George Carlin.
Heroes? Well, folks I admire might be a better term.
"I'm splitting semantic hairs here, but that's what they're for."

In an earlier post I pointed out that Jonathan Swift in his the "Digression on Madness" (1710) implies that the world can be divided into "fools" or "knaves" - the only two options.

It's quite funny, and nasty. And very cynical.

Swift only implies a third alternative - there are fools, and there are knaves, and then there can be total cynics who trust no claim about anything, ever.

I said that I'm working on that third option. George Carlin has it down.

George Carlin is sixty-six and still a hoot. Carlin now has twenty-four albums, he's done twelve HBO specials, and he has three Grammy Awards and five Emmy nominations. And his next book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? will be published later this year. Should be amusing.

And it seems Carlin recently gave a telephone interview to The Idaho Statesman. It's pretty cool.

See 'Liberal' is a dirty word for George Carlin
Michael Deeds. The Idaho Statesman, January 24, 2004

Here's some of it.

Q: You don't do a lot of topical, current event comedy, do you?

A: I don't like topical stuff. It's too easy. Anybody can make fun of Bush. Hillary Clinton. Monica Lewinsky. Mike Tyson. That ... ain't hard. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. So I prefer going at things from an odd angle, different angle. I'm doing stuff about suicide ... I'm doing stuff about the fabric of space-time splitting open. I'm doing stuff about being a modern man with the language. So I'm just different, you know?

Q: Is being dark as important to you now as it was earlier in your career?

A: I don't know that I ever was (dark) - except now. I like testing people's limits. I like finding out what an audience feels uncomfortable with and pushing on that. That's the fun of art.

Q: You're known as a very liberal comic. Are you trying to change people's political views when you go out there? Do you have an underlying agenda?

A: No. First of all, I'm not liberal. I'm just about (being) anti-United States. I don't like the way this country operates. I think we've ruined this place. And I think it's largely because of businessmen. And businessmen are not liberals. So if that makes me a liberal, then that's just an association. It's not a choice. ...

I do not care about changing anybody. Nobody. I go out there to show the rest of the Americans how badly they're doing. This country has been, for about 180 years now, badly mishandled. And it's been in the wrong hands. It's been in the hands of the business interests.

And a lot of the beauty of this country has been shattered by them. The physical beauty and the kind of institutional beauty that was originally built into this place - this experiment, this magnificent experiment in democracy is just being shredded to pieces by these right-wing Christians, the Ashcroft branch of Republicanism. (They're) just shredding the rest of the Bill of Rights which hadn't been shredded already. (But) they'd been doing a pretty good job on it up until then, anyway.

Q: Do you feel like this country has progressed any way, shape or form in the past 20 years?

A: Everybody's got more jet skis and Dustbusters now and sneakers with lights in them. They've got more cheese on their thing that they buy. They get double helpings.

Yep, they do.

Of course he's saying Americans measure all their progress in the wrong way. This seems be about our national character and priorities. I guess it's bigger than Bush.

And this doesn't even touch on religion. You might want to check out Positive Atheism's Big List of George Carlin Quotations for his take on that.

And there is Carlin's work on language. And you might check out the interview he gave The Onion a few years ago. Here's some of that - just a bit...

O: You've said, "If you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem." Do you really lack hope?

GC: Well, they say, "If you scratch a cynic, underneath you'll find a disappointed idealist." So I would imagine there's some little flame, however weak, that still burns, but I know time is against my seeing that. I think this world would need a long time, maybe a thousand years, to evolve to what may be a golden age, and in the meantime, there are all these very small, parochial struggles between peoples of different language and color and arbitrary political and national boundaries. And my understanding of it is that there is no hope, because I think we're locked in by commerce. The whole idea of the pursuit of goods and possessions has completely corrupted the human experience, along with religion, which I think limits the intellect. So with those two things in place as firmly as they are, I don't see any hope for getting around them short of some sort of interesting cataclysm. So I root for a cataclysm, for its own sake, just as entertainment. I don't even care if it has a good result. We're circling the drain, and I just like seeing the circles get faster and shorter all the time.

O: I was reading your web site [georgecarlin.com], and you referred to George W. Bush as a fascist. But you don't vote. Why not vote against someone you think is a fascist?

GC: Well, because it wouldn't make any difference. When fascism comes to this country, it won't be wearing jackboots; it'll be wearing sneakers with lights in them, and it'll have a smiley face and a Michael Jordan T-shirt on. They learned the mistake of overt control. They've learned how to be much subtler. No, I don't think my vote would mean anything, and at the same time, it would make me very untrue to myself to participate in what I really think is a charade.

O: Well, you more or less hate society anyway, don't you?

GC: Um, I'm very disrespectful of it, and I'm contemptuous of it, but I don't think hate is in me, although we use that word the same way we use love: "Oh, boy, I love ice cream and I hate the Dodgers." But it is a distaste, a contempt, a dissatisfaction, a disillusionment, and a lot of qualities and feelings that come together and appear as anger on stage. I don't experience them as anger; I experience them as a deep distaste. I'm splitting semantic hairs here, but that's what they're for.

O: Aren't you supposed to be slowing down?

GC: Yeah, that's the "old" deal, yeah. That's right. You know, I'm blessed with a great genetic package: Among the genetic qualities I got for free was this energy and stamina, as well as great enthusiasm and a positive, optimistic sense of self. My personal sphere is really positive; it's the world that I have my doubts about.

Yep, some of us have the same doubts.

Posted by Alan at 21:33 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: The Economy

Americans love the rich. We want to be like them, so we indulge them, and dream of the day each of us will be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Paul Krugman has a good piece in tomorrow's Times. But he is quite wrong in thinking this matters as he thinks it does.

See Red Ink Realities
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, January 27, 2004

The opening is cool.

Even conservatives are starting to admit that George Bush isn't serious when he claims to be doing something about the exploding budget deficit. At best - to borrow the already classic language of the State of the Union address - his administration is engaged in deficit reduction-related program activities.

But these admissions have been accompanied by an urban legend about what went wrong. According to cleverly misleading reports from the Heritage Foundation and other like-minded sources, the deficit is growing because Mr. Bush isn't sufficiently conservative: he's allowing runaway growth in domestic spending. This myth is intended to divert attention from the real culprit: sharply reduced tax collections, mainly from corporations and the wealthy.

Krugman goes into some detail explaining that, except for farm subsidies - which help our large farm corporations like Archer-Daniels-Midland and really tick off Europe and the third world - there's not been a whole lot of new spending, at least in programs that cost money now. The prescription subsidies don't kick in for a few years. Most of the AIDS money pledged to Africa has not been authorized, much less spent. The No Child Left Behind funds are being held up, and they weren't much to begin with. (My teacher friends call it the No Child Left Alive program.) Krugman shows that while overall government spending has risen rapidly since 2001, the great bulk of that increase can be attributed either to outlays on defense and homeland security, or to types of government spending, like unemployment insurance, that automatically rise when the economy is depressed.

Heck, he's an economist. He knows.

So what's the deal? How did we get this deficit, and why is it growing so fast?

Yes, part of the answer is big increases in defense and homeland security spending. But that's only part of the answer.

The main reason for deficits, however, is that revenues have plunged. Federal tax receipts as a share of national income are now at their lowest level since 1950.

And most people won't believe that. Of course. They pay the same taxes they always paid.

And they're right: taxes that fall mainly on middle-income Americans, like the payroll tax, are still near historic highs. The decline in revenue has come almost entirely from taxes that are mostly paid by the richest 5 percent of families: the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These taxes combined now take a smaller share of national income than in any year since World War II.

Krugman shows that this decline in tax collections from the wealthy is partly the result of the Bush tax cuts, which account for more than half of this year's projected deficit. But it also probably reflects an epidemic of tax avoidance and evasion.

Fine. The rich get richer and we pay for it. Yeah, yeah.

And Krugman get on his high horse again about why this is worse than ever.

What's playing out in America right now is the bait-and-switch strategy known on the right as "starve the beast." The ultimate goal is to slash government programs that help the poor and the middle class, and use the savings to cut taxes for the rich. But the public would never vote for that.

So the right has used deceptive salesmanship to undermine tax enforcement and push through upper-income tax cuts. And now that deficits have emerged, the right insists that they are the result of runaway spending, which must be curbed.

But this is why we the people elected Bush in the first place. We love this stuff. We love the new Donald Trump reality show, "The Apprentice," where he fires folks who don't serve him well. The ultra-rich are our heros.

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, some, the Democrats, the opposition, don't love this stuff. What should they do?

While this strategy has been remarkably successful so far, it also offers a big opportunity to the opposition. So here's a test for the Democratic contenders: details of your proposals aside, which of you can do the best job explaining the ongoing budget con to the American people?

Hey Paul, what if they don't CARE?

Yeah, it's a con. A good one. And folks love it.

After all, one day any of us could be ultra-rich, destroying others. What fun!

____

Note on the title:

AUTHOR: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
QUOTATION: "The potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice."
ATTRIBUTION: Life of Johnson (Boswell). Vol. viii. Chap. ii.
Actually about beer, or more precisely porter, and then, finally, about stout:
"Johnson's oft-quoted remark arose from the immense popularity of Porter in the mid and late 1700s. A porter brewery was "not a parcel of boilers and vats but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avaricee," remarked Johnson. He nursed a jealous passion for Hester Thrale, wife of a gentleman brewer. Johnson's memorably extravagant phrase was intended to help the Thrales sell their porter brewery, in Southwark, London. The brewery survived, latterly under the ownership of Courage, until the 1980s, and Russian Imperial Stout was made there."
... this from The Independent (UK)

... or ...

"I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice." - Edward Moore: The Gamester, act ii. sc. 2. 1753. [ ... not performed often these days! ]

Posted by Alan at 20:15 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Bush

I sometimes worry that our leader is not all there - as in "actually detached from reality."
No. Couldn't be. But then again, the problem seems to be spreading.

Ah, it's not just me.

This on the blog Body and Soul today...

Let's twist again, like we did last summer

Remember that bizarre moment last summer when George Bush forgot that Hans Blix existed?

"The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

Wouldn't let them in?

Fine, chalk that up to a senior moment, or even a slip of the tongue. Sometimes I don't manage to say exactly what I mean either.

But then yesterday, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, discussing the David Kay report, Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) repeated Bush's twisted history:

"But, in regards to Saddam Hussein, if in fact he didn't have them, why on earth didn't he let the U.N. inspectors in and avoid the war? That is a real puzzlement to me."

Okay, they're freaking me out now. Either senility is running rampant in the Republican party, or they're making a concerted effort to keep repeating the same lie until it becomes the accepted truth.

Can they get away with it? ... Blitzer didn't even notice Roberts' revision of history.

Well, many of my friends discussed this with me in many an email.

Bush said that last July. I was appalled that Bush either lied or really was detached from reality. My friends in the news business said not to worry, everyone knew what he meant. No big deal.

But I worry.

Posted by Alan at 19:41 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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