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Paul Johnson, British historian is interviewed by WSJ. He says our country will be OK
… “Of course I worry about America,” he says. “The whole world depends on America ultimately, particularly Britain. And also, I love America—a marvelous country. But in a sense I don’t worry about America because I think America has such huge strengths—particularly its freedom of thought and expression—that it’s going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future. And therefore take care of the world.”
Pessimists, he points out, have been predicting America’s decline “since the 18th century.” But whenever things are looking bad, America “suddenly produces these wonderful things—like the tea party movement. That’s cheered me up no end. Because it’s done more for women in politics than anything else—all the feminists? Nuts! It’s brought a lot of very clever and quite young women into mainstream politics and got them elected. A very good little movement, that. I like it.” …
… His concern with the human dimension of history is reflected as well in his attitude toward humor, the subject of another recent book, “Humorists.” “The older I get,” he tells me, “the more important I think it is to stress jokes.” Which is another reason he loves America. “One of the great contributions that America has made to civilization,” he deadpans, “is the one-liner.” The one-liner, he says, was “invented, or at any rate brought to the forefront, by Benjamin Franklin.” Mark Twain’s were the “greatest of all.”
And then there was Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Reagan had thousands of one-liners.” Here a grin spreads across Mr. Johnson’s face: “That’s what made him a great president.”
Jokes, he argues, were a vital communication tool for President Reagan “because he could illustrate points with them.” Mr. Johnson adopts a remarkable vocal impression of America’s 40th president and delivers an example: “You know, he said, ‘I’m not too worried about the deficit. It’s big enough to take care of itself.’” Recovering from his own laughter, he adds: “Of course, that’s an excellent one-liner, but it’s also a perfectly valid economic point.” Then his expression grows serious again and he concludes: “You don’t get that from Obama. He talks in paragraphs.” …
IBD editors look over the GOP contenders and see no obvious candidate and they like that.
… A weak field? We can’t imagine any of them bowing to a foreign leader or public-sector unions. And we remember 1980 when Democrats couldn’t wait to run against Ronald Wilson Reagan, whom they dismissed as a likable but unelectable former actor.
Instead of agonizing over who can be elected, Republicans need to realize one of their own, perhaps even a name not now being considered, must be elected. Maybe none of these candidates is the next Reagan, but what’s clear is that this nation cannot afford four more years of the second Jimmy Carter.
Last month the federal government had the worst monthly deficit ever. Imagine what they could have done if it wasn’t a short month? These guys in DC, they’re good!
According to press reports, the federal government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February at $223 billion, according to preliminary numbers the Congressional Budget Office released this morning. Matt Drudge does us the service of linking to an October 5, 2007, story that reported that the “Congressional Budget Office estimated … that the U.S. federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2007, which ended Sunday, was about $161 billion, or 1.2% of gross domestic product.”
In other words, the FY 2007 deficit for the year was $62 billion lower than the deficit for last month. And to make matters worse, President Obama, rather than reining in federal spending, is adding mightily to it.
On the fiscal side of things, Barack Obama is turning out to be a record-setter, though not in the way he or we had wanted.
From The Corner we learn Charles Krauthammer is writing a book.
It’s hard to think of a more important contemporary standard-bearer of American fusionist conservatism — small-government domestic policy coupled with a muscular and liberty-advancing presence abroad — than Dr. Charles Krauthammer. Over the last two-plus decades, he has been an almost singularly influential columnist; and of late, he’s also been a ubiquitous cable-news presence, with a rare complement of insights that makes him equally comfortable proffering ground-level political analysis and grand first principles. Perhaps rarer still is that he is widely respected by both the Right and the Left — he has made frequent contributions to The New Republic, and Bill Clinton recently called him “brilliant.” A Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award winner, Dr. Krauthammer is by all appearances at the peak of his powers, which makes the sole lacuna in his formidable résumé somewhat jarring: He has never written a book-length work of original material.
But that’s set to change. This morning, Crown Forum will announce that Krauthammer is working on a new book, set for release in the months ahead of the 2012 elections, detailing his prescription of a “minimalist domestic policy” and realist-grounded democracy promotion abroad as the way forward for an America limping through the second (and perhaps last) decade of its unipolar moment. …
The importance of Krauthammer made Pickerhead think of David Brooks whose mind has turned to mush. He has a new book out, a review of which is here tonight. First though, we have a Brooks column from February seven years ago. Bush the Younger had just been interviewed by Tim Russert and Brooks columned on how Bush could have articulated his views better.
Like most of us, President Bush doesn’t have the facility for perfectly expressing his situation in conversation. But if he did, he might have said something like this to Tim Russert in the interview broadcast Sunday:
President Bush: Tim, I know I’m repeating myself, but I am a war president. Do you remember how you felt on Sept. 12, 2001? Do you remember the incredible sense of shock, sadness, anger and pride, all welling up into a consuming sense of urgency? That’s how I still feel every day.
I wake up every morning and get briefed about the terrorist threats that menace this country. I read about terrorists in Iraq who murder doctors and teachers so they can abort freedom. I wake up every morning and stare into the hole where civilization used to be.
I have staked the security of this nation on two propositions; this election will be about whether those propositions are true. The first is that the war on terror means we have to escalate our alert status. We cannot wait for our enemies to launch their attacks because we are a nation already at war. We cannot wait for countries like France, China and Russia to see things our way because we are a nation at war.
I made a decision that we would take the fight to the enemy every day, and that every sin we would commit — and we would inevitably commit some — would be a sin of commission, not a sin of omission. We would not repeat the mistakes of the previous decade. …
… I do feel called upon to use American power to help create a freer world.
I could lose this election. I don’t know whether the American people are with me or not. But I know our hair-trigger reputation has jolted dictators in Libya, North Korea and elsewhere. I know that if in 20 years Iraq is free and the Arab world is progressing toward normalcy, no one will doubt that I did the right thing.
Here is Newsweek’s review of Brooks’ book. You will see why he no longer spends much time on our pages.
Seated in a booth at Equinox, a generically posh restaurant across the street from his office in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, David Brooks seems shy for a public figure—someone who would rather talk about his heroes Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton than himself. At other tables, men in suits talk in loud voices; Brooks talks in a soft voice, and is wearing a gray sweater, no tie. His media persona, the ubiquitous commentator you see on television, popping up after State of the Union speeches to analyze the president’s performance, is nowhere in evidence. The self-assured columnist we read in the Times has been supplanted by a nervous author preparing for the reception of his new book, The Social Animal. A mint copy had just arrived that morning with no blurbs on the back, only a brief description of the contents adapted from the text. “I don’t think blurbs do much good. I just wanted to explain the book.”
There’s a lot to explain. The book’s subtitle—The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement—conveys its ambition. Brooks’s first two books, Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, were acutely witty satires of a social group whose name he coined: bobos, or “bourgeois bohemians,” the “affluent educated class” that frequents “gourmet coffeehouses” and issues corporate reports “with quotations from Émile Zola.” The books are smart—Brooks is a shrewd anthropologist of this fanciful type—and hugely entertaining. But they lack gravitas. The Social Animal is of a whole other order: authoritative, impressively learned, and vast in scope.
Its thesis can be stated simply: who we are is largely determined by the hidden workings of our unconscious minds. …
Your indulgence please as we look at what Car Lust Blog calls the first SUV, the Jeep Wagon. Pickerhead learned to drive in one of these. When 14 years old, permission was granted to use the Jeep to take sails to the boat. So some summer days I went sailing three or four times! Perhaps David Brooks would say that is why an Escalade is in my garage. Ours had a steering-column mounted three speed manual transmission. Occasionally it would stick in 1st gear. The fix was to open the hood and pry the linkage loose with a monster screw driver we kept in the car. My mother was proud of the times she would do this in front of an audience of open-mouthed friends.
… I hereby posit that pride of place as The First SUV goes to Willys-Overland. In the late 1940s, they came out with a wagon-ish version of their famous Jeep that was directly aimed at a consumer rather than commercial market: The Jeep Station Wagon. Besides being a consumer vehicle, it seems to me to also have those key attributes that anyone today would recognize as An SUV. Later, they even tried to broaden the reach of this new class they had invented and, arguably, produced the first crossover SUV, the Jeepster. …