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McCain at the Western Wall.
More on the fifth year of war. Power Line posts on Bush’s speech with an O’Henry twist at the end.
Fouad Ajami makes the Iraq case.
Wars have never been easy to defend. Even in “heroic” cultures, men and women applauded wars then grew weary of them. This Iraq war, too, was once a popular war. It was authorized and launched in the shadow of 9/11. During the five long years that America has been on the ground in Iraq, the war was increasingly forced to stand alone.
At a perilous moment in early 2007, when the project was in the wind and reeling, the leader who launched this war doubled down and bought time. …
Daniel Henninger notes David Mamet’s conversion.
The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the “Mamet-word”), didn’t himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: “I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: ‘Shut the [Mamet-word] up.’” Been known to happen.
Toward the end of the essay, he names names: “I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”
This of course is an outrage against polite American wisdom. Isn’t Paul Krugman supposed to be our greatest living philosopher? One would have thought that David Mamet saying bye-bye to liberalism would have launched sputterings everywhere. But not a word.
As I think Groucho Marx once said, either no one reads the Village Voice anymore or my watch has stopped. …
Ann Coulter has Obama thoughts.
Obama gave a nice speech, except for everything he said about race. He apparently believes we’re not talking enough about race. This is like hearing Britney Spears say we’re not talking enough about pop-tarts with substance-abuse problems.
By now, the country has spent more time talking about race than John Kerry has talked about Vietnam, John McCain has talked about being a POW, John Edwards has talked about his dead son, and Al Franken has talked about his USO tours.
But the “post-racial candidate” thinks we need to talk yet more about race. How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people? …
… Imagine a white pastor saying: “No, no, no, God damn America — that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme!”
We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will not pat blacks on the head and say, “Isn’t that cute?” As a post-racial American, I do not believe “the legacy of slavery” gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered. …
Couple of posts illuminate Obama’s continued problem.
Stephen Moore adds perspective to our lives.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk on the state of the economy to a group of college students — almost all Barack Obama enthusiasts — who were griping about how downright awful things are in America today. As they sipped their Starbucks lattes and adjusted their designer sunglasses, they recited their grievances: The country is awash in debt “that we will have to pay off”; the middle class in shrinking; the polar ice caps are melting; and college is too expensive.
I’ve been speaking to groups like this one for more than 20 years, but I have never confronted such universal pessimism from a young audience. Its members acted as if the hardships of modern life are making it nearly impossible for them to get out of bed in the morning. So I conducted a survey of these grim youngsters. How many of you, I asked, own a laptop? A cellphone? An iPod, a DVD player, a flat-screen digital TV? To every question somewhere between two-thirds and all of the hands in the room rose. But they didn’t even get my point. “Well, duh,” one of them scoffed, “who doesn’t have an iPod these days?” I was way too embarrassed to tell them that I, for one, don’t. They thought that living without these products would be like going back to prehistoric times. …
Wonder why Easter is so early. The Corner answers.
Couple of weeks ago the NY Times wrote on kit homes sold 80 years ago by Sears Roebuck.
… what is especially notable about Sears houses, said Amy R. Pappas, co-curator of the New Castle Historical Society’s current exhibit on them, is how well they have withstood 80 years’ worth of shifts in architectural styles and tastes.
Nine houses are featured in the society’s show, but Sears, which sold them from 1908 to 1940, offered 447 architect-designed models — from “a modest little home to a mansion,†according to an ad in one catalog. Most of them were priced from about $725 to $2,500, although some of the larger models like the Verona sold for more than $4,000.
It is estimated that more than 100,000 Sears homes were sold in the United States, said Norman T. MacDonald, the president of the historical society in Ossining, which so far has documented 115. They were especially popular in the Northeast and Northern Midwest states, areas that were undergoing suburban growth at the time, according to Gray Williams, New Castle’s historian.
The houses were shipped via railroad boxcar in pieces — some 30,000 of them, not including nails and screws — then assembled on site. Often the new homeowners did the building, with help from friends and neighbors, although some hired local workers, said Nancy O’Neil, the other curator for the exhibit. …
Turns out kit homes are still available. WSJ has the details.
One hundred years after Sears, Roebuck began offering its first mail-order house, the kit home is gaining renewed attention.
Promoted by design magazines such as Dwell, these houses sold as parts have attracted a near cultlike following among style-minded home shoppers and do-it-yourselfers. The factory-fabricated houses, often in modernist designs, can bring efficiencies to a process notorious for cost overruns and delays. And fans say they are greener because they create less waste than on-site construction.
But assembling a kit house, also called a flat-pack house, can present unexpected pitfalls. From mismatched doors to missing parts, buyers’ experiences suggest there are endless ways to burn time and money on the prefab route. Custom touches tend to evaporate any cost savings — some prefabs end up being as expensive as architect-designed traditional construction. And despite the buzz, only a few hundred modernist kit houses have been sold. …