I looked for a new, small Bush countdown widget this morning and was amazed at the number I turned up in a Google search. They come in all sizes for all operating systems. Here’s one from Credo Action. I wonder if it will self destruct on January 20.
And somehow I missed this video during the presidential campaign. Thanks to Liberal Revolt for the reference. It’s a good reminder that my guy is trying to become the president of all of us, not just nerds like me.
No spiel promised: A caller from the democratic congressional hoo-ha, just now, promised “no spiel,” then cozied up with a couple of comments designed to make me feel part of the in-group, I guess, and wound up by suggesting that I contribute $209 to the cause of keeping the congress Democratic. Myomy! I’d have been more inclined not to hang up if the leaders of my party, Pelosi, Reed, Feinstein, etc., would rein in their egos and get to work.
Rick Warren: Beating a horse that perhaps ought to be dead, I intend to listen very carefully to Rick Warren’s prayer on inauguration day. I don’t like Warren, don’t like religion hucksters generally–from Joyce Meyer to Deepak Chopra. And I think my guy could have chosen any number of better people to deliver the invocation before he, himself, delivers the most important speech of his career thusfar. Nor do I think the choice is clarified by the claim that we have to listen to folks with whom we disagree. But what the hell–this is America, God love us:
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
No child left: Two interesting pieces in today’s Washington Post (here and here) tell an ironic tale about education in the land of the free. The Shrub of legacy-seeking touts his putative achievements in the realm of education reform whilst a political pressure group lobbies a DC area school system for lower grading standards, complaining that “students [are] at a disadvantage when they seek college admission or scholarships.” I’m remembering a Czech graduate student who worked for me back in the last century. She told me one day that she was grateful to have come to the United States for graduate school because education in her country consisted of “dictionary learning” only; whereas she found herself surrounded by intellectual stimulation and creativity at our large, public, provincial, American university. That’s what we stand to lose by the pursuit of education as measurement and measuring up, what Jill Ker Conway found at Harvard in the ’50s and details in her book, True North (1994). My guy got a very good education that also included Harvard. His education secretary-in-waiting notwithstanding, I very much hope he doesn’t sign on to the Nicklebee ideology.
All we like sheep: As part of my holiday reading binge, which is by no means done yet, I read last week a wonderful little book entitled Three Bags Full (2005), characterized by author Leonie Swann as “A Sheep Detective Story.” It reminded me that The Good Shepherd remains a powerful a myth of leadership, and rightly so. A classical evocation of the myth (designed to do honor to a secular prince and not to God as is sometimes thought) occurs in Bach’s hunt cantata, #208. Everyone knows the tune, but it isn’t every day one gets to hear it performed by authentic sheep. Read through the comment thread attached to this lovely performance of “Schafe können sicher weiden.”
We’re in a strange historical trough at the moment, as the economy gets worse and worse. Laura McKenna, at 11D, fears the CitiGroup crisis is worse than reports have told us, and says “Rumor has it that Citibank is going to go bankrupt.” So as public affairs exhibit all the signs of panic on the one hand, Paul Krugman describes “the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis” on the other, a vacuum reminiscent of the interregnum between 1932 and 1933 when “the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action.”
But the present crisis of leadership seems more than an accident of history. While the new administration struggles to be born, the old seems determined to perpetuate itself and do, from my perspective, as much damage as it possibly can while it still holds the reins of power. The Bush team’s promulgation of “midnight regulations” and its shifting of large numbers of its political appointees into high-level civil service positions, a strategy called burrowing in, in order to protect them from being fired and thereby perpetuate their influence, have been the most reported of the outgoing administration’s efforts to thwart the public will–together with speculation that Bush may issue blanket pardons to many of his most vulnerable appointees who have committed crimes during his lawless administration for which somebody might decide to prosecute them. Add to these disturbing developments the present congressional stalemate over aid to the auto industry and Henry Paulson’s foot-dragging over the next stage of the $700b rescue plan, and the trough becomes a slough.
Indeed, across the spectrum of the conservative movement, so-called, there seems to be a determination to continue to defend and perpetuate bankrupt ideology that has been falsified by events and by and large repudiated by the public. Mike Huckabee has a new book entitled Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America and is on a tour promoting it, looking every inch like a presidential candidate again. Sarah Palin has been on a victory tour, finding new venues for cognitive dissonance, and wherever she goes she speaks for the old time religion. David Brooks predicts this week that control of the Republican Party will remain with “Traditionalists,” because “Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists,” and “Traditionalists have the institutions.”
Brooks goes on to argue that conservatism has rigidified into Traditionalist ownership of conservative mythology. Here are a couple of of observations that I think are insightful in that regard.
Members of the conservative Old Guard see themselves as members of a small, heroic movement marching bravely from the Heartland into belly of the liberal elite. In this narrative, anybody who deviates toward the center, who departs from established doctrine, is a coward, and a sellout.
This narrative happens to be mostly bogus at this point. Most professional conservatives are lifelong Washingtonians who live comfortably as organization heads, lobbyists and publicists. Their supposed heroism consists of living inside the large conservative cocoon and telling each other things they already agree with. But this embattled-movement mythology provides a rationale for crushing dissent, purging deviationists and enforcing doctrinal purity.
And bogus or not, this mythology gives its adherents who still hold power in Washington a license to attempt to shape the future in its image even in the face of resounding defeat at the polls.
All the signs seem to point to a pragmatic Obama administration rather than an ideological one. I find this very hopeful. David Sanger predicts that Obama will govern from the center right of his own party, and that is hopeful too. Both Brooks and Sanger are predicting an Obama administration characterized by thoughtfulness and creativity rather than ideology as they survey the choices Obama is advertised to be making for his cabinet and White House staff. As Sanger puts it:
The choices are as revealing of the new president as they are of his appointees — and suggest that, from its first days, an Obama White House will brim with big personalities and far more spirited debate than occurred among the largely like-minded advisers who populated President Bush’s first term.
President Obama will need broad and diverse support if he is to govern effectively. His first moves seem calculated to garner such support and to maintain it in the future; though during its early days in office the new administration will need to do a good deal of house cleaning to disencumber itself from the Bush administration’s last ditch efforts to bind that future.
At the end of the day, yesterday, the speech, the faces in the crowd.