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Scott Johnson with a meditation on the ungrounded Peggy Noonan.
Peggy Noonan joined the crowd that turned on George W. Bush in what I thought was (in Noonan’s case) a grossly unfair manner in 2008. I wrote critically about one of Noonan’s weekly Wall Street Journal columns in which she identified with the public disapproval of Bush that April in “Season of the witch.”
Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama later that year. Noonan all but endorsed Obama in her 2008 column “Obama and the runaway train.” The anti-Bush and pro-Obama columns fit neatly together. She wrote of Obama just before the election:
“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.”
In a sense, Obama delivered, but in another sense Noonan got everything wrong. Obama has changed the direction and tone of American foreign policy, alright, yet the change hasn’t yielded the results Noonan anticipated.
Noonan has now turned on Obama. …
Same treatment for another who should have known better. Scott Johnson on David Brooks.
… But what are we to make of Brooks? In his day job, he is one of the regular columnists accorded prime journalistic real estate on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Brooks came to the Times from a conservative milieu. Life at the Times has domesticated him. Gabriel Sherman recounts in his 2009 NewRepublic piece on Brooks:
In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”
That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”
Brooks’s 2006 column is accessible online here; P.J Gladnick excerpts the highlights of Sherman’s 2009 New Republic article here. Sherman documents Brooks’s continuing infatuation with Obama as of 2009. Sherman quotes Brooks conceding his shift on the political spectrum and Obama’s assessment of himself as “a Burkean,” which Brooks took at face value. And they say journalists are cynics.
Now those of us who aren’t as smart as Brooks had no problem pegging Obama’s place on the political spectrum, and it wasn’t a terribly difficult task. We didn’t find him to be “a Burkean.” We thought he was a left-wing ideologue who would do great damage to the United States at home and around the world, and I believe he has done so. Steve says that Brooks has gone silent on Obama, but, if so, he needs to open up. The man is a political columnist, after all, not a spiritual adviser. …
Matthew Continetti profiles film maker John Milius.
… there may be no better moment than now to reflect on the life and work of John Milius, the Romantic genius whose influence spans the films he wrote, the films he directed, and the films such as American Graffiti (1973) and The Big Lebowski (1998) whose characters he inspired. The documentary Milius (2013) is available for free on Amazon Prime. It is the best place to start for someone eager to learn more about Hollywood’s most notorious conservative, a natural storyteller attracted to, as his daughter puts it, “the extreme man who knows no fear.”
Born in 1944 to a Jewish family in St. Louis, Milius’ childhood heroes were Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Chuck Yeager. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven years old. Milius was a troublemaker, a raconteur, a tall and hefty teenager who surfed and shot and dreamed of a military career. But he couldn’t enlist: asthma. “It was totally demoralizing,” he once said.
Milius’ inability to fight in Vietnam led to a profound crisis of identity. What to do? One day he wandered into a retrospective of the films of Akira Kurosawa. He found his calling somewhere in the images of armored samurai enforcing ancient codes of honor. He enrolled in the film school at the University of Southern California. It was, he said, “the West Point of Hollywood.”
Milius was among the early graduates of film programs at USC (George Lucas), UCLA (Francis Ford Coppola), and NYU (Martin Scorsese) who established the contemporary movie experience. They were joined early on by Steven Spielberg, who had been rejected from USC twice but won a job at Universal television nonetheless. The group socialized, promoted, and collaborated with each other.
Milius was known for his writing ability, his girth, his bravado, his hijinks, his politics. He was skeptical of government and defended the Second Amendment and supported the war in Vietnam. He mocked the counterculture that was on its way to becoming the dominant culture. The hero of the student revolutionaries was Ché Guevara. Milius’ was Theodore Roosevelt.
These were not the dominant opinions in Hollywood. Hippies often wore buttons emblazoned with peace signs and the slogan, “Nirvana Now.” Milius changed the peace sign into the silhouette of a B-52 and replaced the slogan with “Apocalypse Now.” …
Kevin Williamson with another example of an out-of-control government. This time NSA employees who spy on significant others. One commenter on Instapundit says; “The government is in open rebellion against its people.”
A private investigator once explained to me why he always turned down husband-and-wife cases: If your marriage has gone so sour that the best course of action you can think of is hiring a guy to spy on your spouse, then you don’t need an investigator — you need a minister, a therapist, or a good divorce lawyer. That has always seemed eminently sensible to me.
So how screwed up does your relationship have to be that getting the NSA involved sounds like a good idea?
Thanks to a Christmas Eve document dump, we learn that agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners. And that’s our government at work: While the guys who are supposed to be keeping an eye on Gordon Gekko are keeping their eyes on marathon porn sessions instead, the guys who are supposed to be putting a hurt on Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad are trying to figure out whether their girlfriends are browsing Tinder. One curious analyst targeted the numbers in her husband’s telephone directory. Another spied on his wife, who was stationed overseas.
As usual, basically nothing happened to the wrongdoers — working for the government means facing no real consequences for real crimes. …
Here’s one bit of snooping we’ll all like. WaPo reports DNA testing solves a messy problem.
Joe Gillmer had a problem. A big, stinky, sole-troubling problem plaguing Midtown Alexandria Station condos, where he serves as board vice president.
How to put this gently? Dog, er, waste in the vestibule, in the elevator (yes, really), and — this particularly incensed Gillmer — in the garage beside handicapped parking, making life difficult for residents with physical challenges.
“What were we going to do?” Gillmer says. “Put up 13 cameras for $100,000 with the slim chance of catching the guy?”
Instead, the condo association hired a service called PooPrints to match evidence from the crime scene to registered DNA taken from all condo dogs.
Yes, yes, Gillmer has heard all the jokes: “CSI: Manure,” you name it. “I got a lot of criticism,” he recalls. “They called me the ‘Czar of Poop.’ ” …