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It is fitting that one editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, would see off another. His obit of Irving Kristol starts us off today.
The intellectual and political life of the United States over the past 60 years was affected in so many important and enduring ways by Irving Kristol that it is difficult to capture in words the extent of his powerful and positive influence. Irving, who died today at the age of 89, was the rarest of creatures—a thoroughgoing intellectual who was also a man of action. He was a maker of things, a builder of institutions, a harvester and disseminator and progenitor of ideas and the means whereby those ideas were made flesh.
The clarity of his thinking and the surety of his purpose were one and the same; they were immeasurably enhanced by a powerful curiosity for the way things worked and the ways in which things could be made to work better. His was a restless intelligence, always on the move; there was not an idea he didn’t want to play with, and there wasn’t a new idea for a think tank or a magazine or a center for the study of something-or-other that didn’t excite him. He was a conservative by temperament and conviction, but he was an innovator to the depths of his being.
The number of institutions with which he was affiliated, or started, or helped grow into major centers of learning and thinking is hard to count. There is this institution, COMMENTARY, where he began working after his release from the Army following the conclusion of the Second World War. There were two other magazines in the 1950s, the Reporter and Encounter, which he helped found and whose influence on civil discourse was profound and enduring, even legendary. There was the Public Interest, the quarterly he co-founded in 1965 with Daniel Bell and then ran with Nathan Glazer for more than 30 years, which was the wellspring of neoconservative thinking on domestic-policy issues. He helped bring a sleepy Washington think tank called the American Enterprise Institute into the forefront. And he made Basic Books into a publishing powerhouse that was, for more than 20 years, at the red-hot center of every major debate in American life.
It was through his encouragement and lobbying efforts that several foundations began providing the kind of support to thinkers and academics on the Right that other foundations and most universities afforded thinkers and academics on the Left. Through his columns in the Wall Street Journal, he instructed American businessmen on the relation between what they did and the foundational ideas of capitalism as explicated by Adam Smith, and changed many of them from sideline players in the battle over the direction of the American economy into front-line advocates. …
…We at COMMENTARY will be opening the entirety of his 45-article oeuvre in our archives (from his first contribution, a short story called “Adam and I,” published in November 1946, to his last, a 1994 essay entitled “Countercultures“) for free perusal by all readers. It is a treasure trove, as he was himself an incomparable treasure of a man, an intellectual, and an American. May Bea, Bill, Liz, and Irving’s five grandchildren be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
David Harsanyi says f*%# civility. No seriously, he tells us that politicians don’t want civility, they want everyone to say yes to them, or even better, say nothing at all.
If you’ve been paying attention lately, you may be under the impression that the United States was spiraling into mass incivility.
The evidence keeps mounting: Congressman Joe Wilson yelling. Serena Williams yelling. Kanye West . . . whatever. All of these uncouth characters have been strung together by critics to establish, indisputably, that there is a societal explosion of boorish and coarse behavior.
On the political front, columnist Kathleen Parker calls this “a political era of uninhibited belligerence.” House speaker Nancy Pelosi, lamenting an imaginary climate of violence, wishes “we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”
Such a preposterous statement should be actionable. Pelosi, who only recently compared her political opponents to Nazis, isn’t exactly a paragon of civil discourse. …
Didn’t want the moment to pass without another slap at our worst president and worst ex-president. We have something from Christopher Hitchens from May 2007.
… “Worst in history,” as the great statesman from Georgia has to know, has been the title for which he has himself been actively contending since 1976. I once had quite an argument with the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who maintained adamantly that it had been right for him to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 for no other reason. “Mr. Carter,” he said, “quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had.” …
… In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president’s dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House “Bible study” sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev’s occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter’s mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence. …
George Will discusses art and the government – and several ways that government has had a corrupting influence.
“This is just the beginning,” Yosi Sergant told participants in an Aug. 10 conference call that seems to have been organized by the National Endowment for the Arts and certainly was joined by a functionary from the White House Office of Public Engagement. The call was the beginning of the end of Sergant’s short tenure as NEA flack — he has been reassigned. The call also was the beginning of a small scandal that illuminates something gargantuan — the Obama administration’s incontinent lust to politicize everything.
Sergant’s comments, made to many individuals and organizations from what is vaguely and cloyingly called “the arts community,” continued: “This is the first telephone call of a brand-new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government.” Wrong preposition. Not “with” the government, but for the government. …
…They were exhorted to participate in a conference call “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda.” The first core area mentioned was “health care.”
The NEA is the nation’s largest single source of financial support for the arts, and its grants often prompt supplemental private donations. He who pays the piper does indeed call the tune, and in the four months before the conference call, 16 of the participating organizations received a total of nearly $2 million from the NEA. Two days after the call, the 16 and five other organizations issued a plea for the president’s health-care plan. …
We have National Review Online shorts. Here are two:
The raw pit has been spruced up a bit: It looks like a building site, not a wound. But eight years after 9/11 and counting, nothing has been put in place of the Twin Towers. Postmodern New York is a notoriously difficult city for getting anything done, and the local political class simply could not make new buildings happen: George Pataki, governor through 2006, was a limp nonentity, and his successors, Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, have been, in their different ways, even worse. Probably the best course would have been to let the owner of the former towers, Larry Silverstein, take his insurance payout and build whatever he liked. The hole in New York’s skyline bespeaks a hole in America’s competence and resolve. It is a disgrace.
ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and the organization has a long history with Barack Obama. James O’Keefe, a conservative filmmaker, visited ACORN offices in four cities, posing as a pimp accompanied by his prostitute (Hannah Giles, an assistant). The two asked how to secure a mortgage for a brothel, which they proposed to stock with underage Salvadoran girls. It sounds like a comedy sketch, but in each office ACORN workers tried to help, giving sage counsel on dodging taxes and the police while collecting maximum welfare benefits (by, among other things, claiming underage victims as dependents). In Baltimore, Giles was told to list her occupation as “performing artist.” In D.C., the faux prostitute was told to call herself an “independent consultant.” “Honesty is not going to get you the house,” said ACORN in Brooklyn. In California, an ACORN staffer reminisced about shooting her husband dead and her own career in prostitution. Once O’Keefe revealed his findings, the Census Bureau dropped ACORN as a partner in next year’s census. Counseling fake pimps is lurid, but small potatoes. Pimping out the census to a sleazy outfit like this is an act of civic sabotage.
Steven Malanga, in Real Clear Markets, explains how the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 helped cause the finance and housing crisis. In an astounding move, Congress is now looking to expand the businesses covered by CRA.
The Acorn scandal, in which amateur journalists posing as a prostitute and a pimp went seeking a mortgage for a house of prostitution and received advice on how to evade the law, is a fitting new chapter in the controversial history of the advocacy group.
Acorn found its way into the mortgage business through the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 legislation that community groups have used as a cudgel to force lenders to lower their mortgage underwriting standards in order to make more loans in low-income communities. Often the groups, after making protests under CRA, were then rewarded by banks with contracts to act as mortgage counselors in low-income areas in return for dropping their protests against the banks. In one particularly lucrative deal, 14 major banks eager to put CRA protests behind them in 1993 signed an agreement to have Acorn administer a $55 million, 11-city lending program. It was precisely such agreements that helped turn Acorn from a network of small local groups into a national player. And Acorn hasn’t been alone. A U.S. senate subcommittee once estimated that CRA-related deals between banks and community groups have pumped nearly $10 billion into the nonprofit sector.
Given the economic fallout from the long efforts by advocacy groups to water down mortgage lending standards, as well as the controversy surrounding Acorn’s mortgage counseling methods, you would imagine that politicians in Washington would be eager to narrow the scope of the CRA and reduce the leverage that community groups wield under it. But to the contrary, Washington is actually looking to expand the CRA once again.
On Capitol Hill today the House Committee on Financial Services under Chairman Barney Frank is holding hearings on legislation supported by the Obama administration that would bring insurance companies and credit unions under the umbrella of CRA, placing new lending demands on these groups and opening them up to protests and pressure tactics by organizations like Acorn. As proof that Washington is a looking-glass world where basic values and logic get perverted, proponents of the new legislation claim we need more CRA to rein in the bad practices of the housing bubble, which is sort of like arguing that the cure for alcoholism is another martini. Any review of the history of the affordable mortgage movement in America demonstrates the power that CRA had in helping to shred mortgage underwriting standards throughout the industry and exposing us to the kind of market meltdown we’ve experienced. …
In The Wall Street Journal, Rob Long tells us the story of the Weather Channel.
…That’s what television entrepreneur Frank Batten Sr.—who died last week at age 82—did 30 years ago when he created perhaps the most vanilla of all cable offerings, the Weather Channel. Talk about your lousy branding! The Weather Channel? Where’s the pizazz? Where’s the sizzle? Other channels have snappy, trippy names like Bravo and Discover and Syfy and Fuel. Some are classy, like Turner Classic Movies, and some are a little down and dirty, like Cinemax. But they’re all the products, it’s pretty clear, of some extensive—and expensive—marketing and branding and “identity-crafting” consultants, who gather in chic-looking clumps in conference rooms everywhere, with their posters and PowerPoints and interesting eyeglasses.
Mr. Batten took a different approach. Despite an almost universally held belief in the television industry that a channel devoted entirely to the weather would not and could not work, he started one. And he called it, with refreshing and diabolical directness, the Weather Channel.
It was a pretty instant sensation. People, it turns out, absolutely love the weather. They’re riveted by temperature, captivated by precipitation, and entertained by hearing about the exterior conditions of towns and places they’ve never heard of and can’t even spell. …