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Bill Kristol already has his picks for the 2012 race.
Having just returned from the e21 and Manhattan Institute-sponsored Conversation with Paul Ryan (very ably conducted by Paul Gigot)–and having seen Marco Rubio speak recently as well, I’ll just say this: Wouldn’t it be easier just to agree now on a Ryan-Rubio ticket, and save everyone an awful lot of time, effort, and money over the next year and a half?
UPDATE: For what it’s worth, these were the first four of many e-mails to arrive, responding to the Ryan-Rubio blog post:
“Excellent, excellent choices! Unbeatable pair! I’m so excited – a reason for hope!”
“All I can say is: YES!!!!!”
“I don’t want to take away from some of the other potentially great candidates, but you are so right. Rubio is inspirational and Ryan is simply the best out there. His knowledge of the issues, particularly issues related to the budget, is second to none and he is able to communicate his position in a concise and understandable way.”
“Love it.”
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the president’s recent snub of the UK for the French. Perhaps Gardiner can remind the British that there are lots of bitter Americans, clinging to our guns and religion, who think very highly of the US-UK relationship. This presidency, too, shall pass.
The Obama administration is not known for its pro-British track record, but this is by far the strongest indication yet that the current White House has little regard for the Special Relationship and its unique role in modern American history. At a White House photo opportunity with French President Nicolas Sarkozy today, recorded by C-Span (view the video at 2:45 for the remark), President Obama had this to say:
“We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.”
…There is of course no comparison between the extremely close-knit relationship between the United States and Great Britain, from defence and intelligence ties to economic investment and cultural exchange. It is an alliance forged over the course of 70 years, from the beaches of Normandy to the battlefields of Afghanistan. Today in the war against the Taliban there are more than 10,000 British troops fighting alongside their US allies, compared to 3,850 Frenchmen. Nearly 350 British soldiers have laid down their lives in Afghanistan in contrast to French losses of 53.
These kinds of presidential statements matter. No US president in modern times has described France as America’s closest ally, and such a remark is not only factually wrong but also insulting to Britain, not least coming just a few years after the French famously knifed Washington in the back over the war in Iraq.
Perhaps the White House would like to confirm that this is what the President of the United States firmly believes, or clarify the comments? Either way, this latest remark from Barack Obama will only further strengthen the impression of a president who is both woefully out of his depth on the world stage, as well as contemptuous of traditional friends and alliances.
In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin has a post on new construction in Jerusalem. He tells the rest of the story that the NY Times neglected to get.
…When the New York Times reported the fact that ground was being broken for the new housing in Sheikh Jarrah in a story published on Sunday, what it did was to focus on the destruction of what it claimed was a Palestinian “landmark.” What landmark, you ask? Was it a medieval structure that in some way represents the longstanding Arab presence in the city or its culture? No. The building that was toppled to make way for some new apartment houses was just a large home that was built in the 1930s as a villa for one of the most notorious figures in 20th-century history: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. Husseini may never have spent much time in what eventually was renamed the Shepherd Hotel, but he did make his mark on the region by inspiring bloody pogroms against the Jews then living in the country. After the outbreak of World War II, he joined forces with the Nazis, meeting with Hitler and then spending the war making Arabic propaganda broadcasts for the Axis and successfully recruiting Muslims (mostly Bosnians) to serve in a special SS brigade. He was promised that, in the event of a German victory, he would be made the puppet ruler of what is now Israel, where he would assist the Nazis in the massacre of the several hundred thousand Jews who lived there.
That a home that was in any way connected to Husseini or any other Nazi would be considered a landmark whose demolition inspired statements of sadness from contemporary Palestinian leaders like Saeb Erekat speaks volumes about the nature of Palestinian politics. That the intended home of the man who dreamed of wiping out every last Jew in Jerusalem is coming down to make room for Jewish homes is certainly ironic. One needn’t necessarily agree with the politics of Daniel Luria, a representative of Ateret Cohanim, the group that promotes Jewish building throughout Jerusalem, to appreciate what he termed the “beautiful poetic justice” of this event.
David Segal’s article on the law school bubble is the topic of conversation at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons. Nathan Harden opens with this post.
The New York Times has a lengthy article on how America’s law schools are juicing their numbers — Enron-style, inflating statistics about their graduates’ employment prospects in order to attract more applicants. In reality, new law-school grads face dim job prospects in this economy:
“A generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated…
But improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.
…How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?”
Phi Beta Cons continues: Jason Fertig quotes the sad comments of a recent grad.
Great job, Nathan and Jane, for noting that Times article on law-school fuzzy math. What is even more troubling in that piece is the story of the young individual with $250,000 of student-loan debt. This young man’s troubles are weaved throughout the article to emphasize the overselling of the J.D., and the last few paragraphs of the article are perhaps the most valuable:
Another of [his] techniques for remaining cool in a serious financial pickle: believe that the pickle might somehow disappear.
“Bank bailouts, company bailouts — I don’t know, we’re the generation of bailouts,” he says in a hallway during a break from his Peak Discovery job. “And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it’s a little illusory. I feel like at some point, I’ll negotiate it away, or they won’t collect it.”
He gives a slight shrug and a smile as he heads back to work. “It could be worse,” he says. “It’s not like they can put me jail.”
Like a good steak, those comments stand up fine on their own. I don’t need to add anything.
Phi Beta Cons: George Leef makes some excellent points about the legality of the law school reports, and the wider economic issue of the barrier to entry into the law profession.
…I wonder how long it will be before some aggressive member of the trial bar finds an underemployed law grad to serve as plaintiff in a suit against one of the schools that fudge their numbers. That looks like fraud; it’s no different than a homeowner hiding the fact that his basement leaks from a purchaser.
My disappointment in the article was that no one mentioned the principal reason that legal education costs so much — the requirement in nearly all states that you must earn a degree from an ABA-accredited law school before you can take the bar exam. The ABA insists on a three-year course of study, but just about everyone who has gone through law school will tell you that the second and third years are almost entirely useless. You take a lot of courses in subjects that you will never need to know anything about. There is some benefit to the first year, especially learning legal research and writing and key fields like contracts and torts — but there is no reason that you should have to learn even that in a law school.
All in all, forcing prospective legal practitioners through the portal of an accredited law school is nothing but a gigantic subsidy to the legal-education establishment, and it increases the cost of legal services. If state governments allowed people to take the bar exam without first earning an approved J.D., some of those going into the profession would probably be willing to take cases from poorer people who, as the ABA admits, are often unable to find counsel when they need it.
The mandated three-year law school was originally conceived as a barrier to entry that would keep down the number of lawyers, part of the legal profession’s cartel maintenance. What with the increasing wealth of society and the availability of government financial aid, it no longer serves that function. The U.S. is glutted with law grads, but the schools profit handsomely from continuing to churn them out. …
And the last post from Phi Beta Cons, George Leef adds more history and an opportunity to learn more on the topic.
One commenter asks whether lawyers really need to go to law school at all. Prior to the ABA’s big push in the 1920s for “higher standards,” most lawyers had not gone to law school, and many of the law schools then in existence had programs lasting less than three years. Using the typical smokescreen of concern for consumers, the legal profession went about lobbying for the requirement that prospective lawyers must get a degree from an ABA-accredited law school before being allowed to take the bar exam. There were some incompetent lawyers back then, and there still are. It isn’t formal legal schooling that makes for a competent practitioner. I covered all of that and the legal profession’s main cartel trick of prosecuting anyone who does anything resembling legal work, no matter how competently, for “unauthorized practice of law” in a Cato Policy Analysis, “The Case for a Free Market in Legal Services.”
Charles Krauthammer discusses the hate-filled Left and the mentally-ill killer.
…Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.
…His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with “unnerving, long stupors of silence” during which he would “stare fixedly at his buddies,” reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through “grammar.” He was obsessed with “conscious dreaming,” a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.
This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder – ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.
These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class “I sit by the door with my purse handy” so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.
…The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?
Peter Wehner comments on Charles Krauthammer’s column.
Sometimes, a future Hall of Fame pitcher is, during a key moment, asked to pitch out of rotation. So, too, with certain columnists.
Charles Krauthammer’s regular slot in the Washington Post is Friday — but he was moved up in order to address the liberal libel that the Tucson massacre was the result of a “climate of hate” created by conservatives. The result is a spectacularly good column. And it concludes with a devastating knockout of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has earned the distinction of being the most scurrilous and irresponsible commentator on the Tucson killings (the competition was stiff).
“The origins of [Jared] Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness,” Krauthammer writes. “What are the origins of Krugman’s?”
An excellent question. And whatever the answer is, Paul Krugman — based on his grotesque conduct during the past five days and Krauthammer’s withering takedown — will not recover. He may continue to write, but he has become, in serious circles, an object of ridicule as well as contempt.
John Steele Gordon adds his thoughts on Paul Krugman’s ignominy.
…I also agree that this may be a tipping point in Krugman’s disgraceful career as a columnist. For one thing, he is intellectually lazy and seems to operate on the principle that a Krugman assertion is, ipso facto, an established fact. He rarely buttresses his assertions with evidence. His one bit of evidence that ”eliminationist rhetoric” in American political life is overwhelmingly on the right was to quote Rep. Michelle Bachmann as saying that people who oppose the Obama agenda should be “armed and dangerous.”
Far worse, however, he is intellectually dishonest. Even the Times’s first public editor, Daniel Okrent, said that Krugman has a “disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.” He is no less cavalier with quotes. As John Hinderacker at Power Line shows, complete with a recording of the entire interview, Michelle Bachmann was merely using a metaphor. She was holding a town hall meeting with constituents regarding the cap-and-trade bill and said, “I’m going to have materials for people when they leave. I want people armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax, because we need to fight back.” She was arming them with information, not bullets, so they could successfully oppose a terrible bill, not shoot politicians.
On June 19, 1954, Joseph Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” It turned out to be the tipping point in McCarthy’s career, the moment when public opinion turned decisively against him. …
…I hope that Krugman’s column on Monday, when he shamelessly used a tragedy to smear his political opponents, will be his have-you-no-decency-sir moment. …
The Washington Examiner editors point out the First Amendment implications, and the hypocrisy, of the rantings from the Left.
…Another self-righteous voice in this debate is left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas, who said in June 2008 that he was placing a “bull’s-eye” on Giffords’ and other Democratic moderates’ districts because of their vote on an intelligence bill, by which they had “sold out the Constitution.” Last week, a Kos diarist even wrote an angry rant about Giffords, declaring, “My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!”
Let’s be clear: The Tucson crimes were not encouraged by any such heated rhetoric. Neither Kos with its rhetorical bull’s-eyes, nor the cross hair graphics on Sarah Palin’s Web site, nor the cross hairs used in the ads of nearby Arizona Democratic Rep. Harry Mitchell’s campaign in 2006, nor the bull’s-eyes used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to “target” Republicans in 2009 have any relevance to this discussion. Their elimination for the sake of political correctness would not have saved — and will not save — a single life…Unless our endgame involves burning books, banning certain kinds of speech and censoring the Internet, lest something someone says or writes might inspire some crazy person to kill someone, the discussion about “toxic political rhetoric” is a waste of time. Unless your aim is to use it as a pretext to repeal somebody’s First Amendment rights.
Jennifer Rubin has more on Krugman’s shameful opinions. She also highlights a liberal commentator who takes the hypocrites to task.
Longtime readers know I have my differences with David Brooks. But the Arizona massacre is the sort of incident for which David Brooks writing — calm, measured and moderate — is much needed. Today he writes:
“…These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness. …”
And John Steele Gordon wraps things up with a post on how the Internet brings accountability to the commentators.
Someone should tell liberals that the old days are over. Not so long ago, if you wanted to prove that a member of the chattering classes had flatly contradicted himself in order to advance a political agenda, you had to go to the library, get a roll of microfilm, insert it into a machine, and then search for the earlier statement. If your memory was faulty as to where or when the earlier statement had appeared, this process could take hours, even days. Often it wasn’t worth the bother.
Today you need only click the icons for Google and/or YouTube, push a few keys, and bam! — you have proof positive of the chatterers’ shameless hypocrisy. A few more clicks and their intellectual perfidy is all over the Internet.
The recent spate of liberals decrying the hostile rhetoric of the right following the tragedy in Tucson is a case in point. One would think that the incivility had started on January 20, 2009, and that political conversation of the previous eight years had been a modern-day Socratic dialogue. As Michelle Malkin demonstrates – in spades! — that is not exactly the case.
I don’t know how long it took Michelle to come up with her list, but I bet it was less time than she would have needed to take the bus to the library.
It is worthwhile having a look at Michelle Malkin’s long post. Here’s another link.