(Mis-)Interpreting DC

Brilliant writers do not always make good political analysts, especially when they are from the United Kingdom and have Washington, D.C. as their beat. Dr. Potomac refers, of course, to Andrew Sullivan, late of the New Republic and now periodic contributor to the Sunday Times, the New York Times and his own blog. Mr. Sullivan's piece in the Sunday Times this week, while surely of great interest to readers in metropolitan London, was, from start to finish, a misinterpretation of developments in the American capital. It is difficult to tell whether this is the result of little or no reporting on Mr. Sullivan's part or his ongoing obsession with religious conservatives as a clear and present danger to the
Republic.

Paragraphs three and four are where Sullivan runs into a ditch he never gets out of. First, he explains that the filibuster deal in the Senate will "mildly constrain" the President hen vacancies occur on the Supreme Court later this year. Second, he claims the "hard social right" is "livid" over a "defeat" on stem cell policy in the House of Representatives. And finally, he believes that John McCain, by exploiting the excesses of the conservative wing of the Republican party on both of the above issues, has succeeded in transferring power away from the White House, toward himself and strengthening the McCain for President in 2008.

Let's take these ideas one at a time, shall we?

The ink on last week's Senate deal began to run off the page before all 14 signatures were affixed. (By the way, the pretentiousness of that signing boggles the mind. Signing things is what President's do and what just about every senator wants to do but can't. By in large, senators regard themselves as presidents-in-waiting and putting their names to that "agreement" must have given them a frisson of executive action but that's about all it will accomplish.) Sullivan's notion that this will in any way constrain President Bush in his choices for the Supreme Court represents a fundamental misreading of Bush's character. It is far more likely that Bush will take great joy in rolling a grenade onto the Senate floor in the form of a highly qualified and highly controversial conservative judge. This will re-divide the parties and force dissident Republicans back into the fold while driving the Democrats into full filibuster mode. The primary objective here is not to fill seats on the Supreme Court or the Appellate courts but to take the courts out of policy development and restore them to their proper role as administrators of justice. In short, POTUS wants a fight over the courts and the Senate "agreement" means little or nothing to his objectives. He has gotten approval for three conservative judges. Fine. He will want more and will continue to pursue this course irrespective of what the moderates think is best for the country.

On stem cell policy, pro-life forces on the Hill, far from being chagrined, saw last week's outcome as an unqualified success. No one is under the illusion that the Bush policy is in any way popular among Democrats, the bio-tech industry or the public at large (at least in the terms that the debate is typically conducted: people in wheel chairs versus frozen embryos.) The main threat the pro-life movement saw leading up to the vote was that there would be an insufficient minority to sustain a presidential veto of the legislation in the House. After weeks of intense effort, the pro-life movement was able to build a substantial cushion against a potential veto override. There was even modest progress on reshaping public attitudes on the moral status of the embryo through pictures like this that appeared on the front page of the Washington Post following the House vote. The Bush policy on stem cells is safe through 2008 and is likely to be a central issue in the Republican presidential primaries. No one who favors overturning that policy will stand a chance of getting the nomination meaning that the pro-stem cell research team must now wait for the election of a Democrat. That could be a very long wait given the dynamics of an Electoral College that continues it glacial movement toward the South and West.

Finally, John McCain. Dr. Potomac has a confession to make: he loves John McCain. This affection is based on having seen the man in action on the Senate floor in some private, unscripted moments in which he revealed great humor and personal humanity. He brings joy to the work of politics. He hates the French. So, what's not to like? Being a reasonable conservative, Dr. Potomac is as much dismayed as anyone by Senator McCain's strayings from the orthodox faith. He's like an unstable chemical element - on wheels. It would be great fun to watch a President McCain but there's a strong chance the whole enterprise would end in tears.

With this confession in mind, Dr. Potomac is willing to assert firmly that last week's Senate deal and the vote on stem cell research will do much to retard the Senator's chances of becoming President. On judges, he injected himself into an issue of great import to his chief adversaries - the base of the Republican party, keeping the enmities of 2000 very much fresh in the religious right's mind. On stem cells, he will face withering grassroots attacks and suffer a political death by a thousand door knockers in Iowa. New Hampshire independents will love him; latitude not withstanding, South Carolina will be much colder climes. McCain told reporters after the deal on judges was announced that he wasn't afraid of the politics as long as he was sure he did the right thing. Dr. Potomac
hopes this thought will warm him when his candidacy folds its tent on a cold March night in 2008.

The Shaky-Shaky Dance of Defeat

Readers of the Manolo know all about the Eurovision Song Contest, more really than we ever wanted to know, but did anyone ever suspect that the Eurovision Song Contest may contribute to the demise of the EU?

Bookish, hard, and full of rage

Far be it from the Style Editor to cock a snook at the writing world. I am generally supportive of most writers as I know darn well that I would never have the patience or talent to write an actual book; I can barely make it through a blog entry. Further more I salute any writer who can make a living at the game, even if they do so by writing the purplest of romance prose. But a deplorable spirit is creeping into the book world, a menace that must be stopped. I refer of course to the "SAT/ACT vocabulary novel" These novels are designed as "fun" prep pieces full of the 1,000 most common SAT vocab words. That is their purpose at any rate, although not all readers seem to grasp that purpose.

I've heard of teaching to the test, but this is ridiculous. When do the "SAT reading comprehension" novels come out? I can do no better than to quote the Ombudsman who when informed of this development replied, "Hey kids, read a damn book, and stay off my lawn!"

Jacques-ass
Reluctant as he is to wade into the fever swamps of Euro-politics, Dr. Potomac would like to offer a quick reflection on today's overwhelming rejection by the French public of the proposed European constitution. A salutary development, no doubt, but how to explain it?

Dr. Potomac hasn't seen the internals on the French exit polls but he'd be wiling to bet a half year of his salary in euros that those polls will not reveal that the French were suddenly seized by the threat the proposed European constitution poses to individual liberty and free enterprise. Occam's razor suggests that one should look for the simplest, most direct, and since we are talking of the French, the most irrational explanation. Bear in mind, treasured readers (all three of you), this is the same country that in the depths of the Cold War took its army and its nuclear weapons out of NATO, depriving the alliance of critical strategic depth in the event the Red Army plunged across the Central European plain, on the grounds that France (the same France that Nazi Germany sucker-punched into oblivion) could go it alone in defending itself against the Soviet threat. The French may engage in dangerous liaisons but they don't do alliances in the sense of cooperating seriously with anyone. For shear pig-headedness, no one can out do the French.

This has the sting like the dickens for Monsiour le President. He, after all, has spent the last several years building up in the French mind the notion of a French-led Europe as counter-weight to the American hyperpower; la gloire de France, ex-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin with his painting of Napoleon on the office wall and all that daft stuff. Suddenly Chirac's imperial pretentions have turned to bite him in the derrier: the French public, made to believe that France is the savior of the Western world is now reluctant to see itself as just one of 29 countries in a European union subject to, say, the wishes of the Latvians. Quelle surprise! This must surely be the Night of the Long Faces in Paris as the leaders of all the major political parties contemplate how much has been lost: a central European bureacracy (cushy jobs with expansive, unenumerated powers and a constitutional license to meddle endlessly in the lives of 400 million people) that large countries like France and Germany really could dominate. All of that gone with single Gallic, "Non!" One can almost hear the word proceeding from the nose of DeGaulle himself.

After a long and glorious Spring, the Summer season is upon us in the Nation's capital. The traditional signs are beginning to appear: squaddles of interns wandering about the streets in a dazed fashion snarling traffic. Gaggles of Greenpeacers congregating in Metro entrances, blocking the smooth flow of traffic as they urge people to sign petitions. And just today I saw a man walking over the Key Bridge his Oxford shirt dangling from his hand, as he bared his nude torso to the elements. It was not an aesthetically pleasing sight, and I hope this is NOT the start of some sort of trend in DC. Please, gentlemen, keep your shirts on. Let the seersucker suit and a nice Panama be the height of your summer frivolity.

Still, as the season is upon us, I present to you, from the pen of my good friend, Miss Maximally Cool, a ditty to the American condiment. Yes, this is how we citizens of the nation's capital keep ourselves occupied during the "work" day. One can read only so much of an asbestos bill at the time.

Ketchup

Shall I compare thee to a mayonnaise?
Thou art more lovely, more smooth and scarlet
Mayo globes like celluloid as on it you gaze,
And its expiration has all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the sun on checkouts shines,
And that pungent smell can serve as a ruler
To avoid the egg-based condiment that can decline
By chance or nature's course when outside the cooler.

But thy sweet scarlet ketchup shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of natural mellowing agents.
Thou need not hide deep in the cooler's shade,
But sit out, an icon to Christians and to pagans.
For so long as men can taste and eyes can see
So long live ketchup, to give good times to you and me.

Bernie Sanders in the Senate? Yup, says the latest polls. Vermont remains a perplexing place, to be sure. I lived there for four years while an undergraduate, and while it still retains traces of its former conservative Yankee self, it is now thoroughly dominated by the People's Republic of Burlington.

You have to head off into the woods and fields to find that old Vermont, of guns and pickups, and bumper-stickers that say "Welcome to Vermont -- Now Get Out," and hardscrabble farms, and the smell of cow manure hanging in the morning air, and small towns out of a Currier and Ives print. Nowadays, when people think of Vermont, it is Starbucks and Ben and Jerry's, left-wing used book stores and daily protests over [insert favorite cause here], aging hippies with fat portfolios and waistlines, and New Yorkers who use Chittenden County as their weekend vacation home (the Hamptons are so yesterday, no?).

The Union-Leader says it best: Vermont is where Calvin Coolidge, one of America’s most conservative Presidents, was raised and where he got his values. It used to be a land of common-sense conservatism much like New Hampshire. Now it is run by liberal refugees from New York who have turned the state into a hippie haven. Both Sanders and Dean were born and raised in New York City.

Sending Sanders to the Senate would make Vermont look even kookier than Howard Dean did. And most Vermonters don’t seem to have a problem with that.

They are an odd bunch, take it from me. Pity the real Vermonter, up there in the "Northeast Kingdom." Call it the Tyranny of Burlington, giving the once proud state such a reputation.

Amazing, ain't it? Bunnie abuses us, and we recover from our end of semester torpor. Or, since I am not currently on the semester system, my six-thousand-words-left-on-my-dissertation-here-comes-the-cliff feeling.

But I have to say, whatever torpor might do to me, I have no intention of giving a remote control to my students. If I cared about their opinons, I would be taking their class!

Hah! And stay the hell off my lawn, you damn kids!

There, that's a little bile and vituperation and curmudgeonly spirit, flowing each way free.

And I am somewhat serious...

Bunnie is quite correct. We have all been lax. Semester has finally ended for me, so now that I am out from underneath the correcting perhaps I can resume normal blogging.

Cleaning out the desk drawers of my mind:

- Sorry Clarence. Strict construction of the Constitution and a healthy respect for states rights versus my love of the vine. Waiter! Chardonnay!

- I've never watched a single episide of "Everybody Loves Raymond." And do you know I must be one of the last few Americans who has never seen "ET." And now, out of pure spite, I have no intention of ever seeing it.

- Two books I am reading right now: Patrick O'Brian's Ionian Mission and Sidney Fay's Origins of World War One.

- A boulder appears suddenly in an Iowa cornfield. No one knows how it got there.

-Mr. Soames likes John Wilkes? Now what would Dr. Johnson say of this?

- Match Game, Password, and probably Pyramid were the best game shows. I say this after watching a bit of GSN this week.

- Barrett Wendell on Unitarianism: "The second person of the Trinity having thus lost his mystic office, the third spread wing and vanished into the radiance of a new heaven. In this glorious region the New England Unitarians discerned singly and alone the one God, who had made man in his image. One almost perfect image they recognised in Jesus Christ; a great many inferior but still indubitable ones they found actually to populate the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."

More later.