About an eon ago, David Brooks coined the memorable phrase “status-income disequilibrium.” It diagnosed modern elites, politicians in particular, whose jobs endowed them with power that dwarfed the attendant financial compensation. It would seem quaint to fret over SID today, grubby pols having turned the monetizing of “public service” into an art form for which the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation is the national museum.
Ah, but there’s a new SID in town. Those closely following the GOP presidential sweepstakes have doubtless noticed the haggard Beltway Republicans in its throes: Status-Influence Disequilibrium.
The condition was in evidence Tuesday night, as Donald Trump rolled up another series of primary victories. Bewildered GOP strategists groped for a silver lining, in chorus with commentators who wear establishment sympathies on their sleeves — and never more openly than when denying that there is any Republican establishment.
Solace was sought in the triumph of Ohio governor John Kasich, who managed to win his home state primary with less than 50 percent of the vote, denying Trump a sweep of the night’s five contests. The glow was not exactly like “feeling the Bern.” With this victory, Kasich ran his record to one win and 28 losses (in the Kasich spirit of Christian charity, I’m just counting states and ignoring losses piled up in D.C., Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and so on). As competitors go, Kasich is the ’62 Mets. Yet, Ohio became a ray of establishment hope: an aberrational win by a candidate already mathematically eliminated from contention somehow means the home team still has a shot.
Back in 1992, I was having lunch with a bunch of disenchanted GOP friends. We were looking at October 1992 polls and desperately seeking something to get excited about. One guy said: “[Expletive deleted] Ross Perot.” He spoke for all of us!
I hope I’m not looking at October 2016 polls and saying, “[Expletive deleted] Trump!”
Go ahead and tell me that March polls are meaningless. Or that Megyn Kelly of Fox News hates Trump. Or whatever other excuse is going around these days.
The GOP will be running against the weakest candidate on the other side.
Let’s look at Clinton, according to Doug Schoen:
Mrs. Clinton appears to have a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination. She leads Bernie Sanders with 1,561 pledged and superdelegates to his 800 (though superdelegates can defect, as Mrs. Clinton found out in 2008). In the latest WSJ/NBC News poll she beats the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, by 13 points. But dampening this good news for the Clinton campaign is a sobering reality: The candidate’s base of support is shrinking, and it may not be broad enough for her to win a national election. Mrs. Clinton retains the core of her husband’s presidential constituency, doing best among moderates—but in 2016 these are a diminishing portion of a Democratic base increasingly dominated by more-liberal voters. Bill Clinton drew support in large numbers from white men, independents and young people. Mrs. Clinton struggles with those groups.
Even among the ultimate Democratic Party voting bloc—blacks—she is showing signs of erosion both in support and enthusiasm for her candidacy. Since her 80% take of African-American voters in South Carolina and Mississippi in recent weeks, Mrs. Clinton has seen her black support in other states drop by about 10 percentage points. In Michigan, Mr. Sanders pulled in 30% of the African-American vote and broke even with Mrs. Clinton among black voters under age 45.
This trend continued on Tuesday: Mr. Sanders took 32% of black support in Missouri, 30% in Ohio and 29% in Illinois, highlighting a significant gap in Southern and Northern black support for the former first lady.
Mrs. Clinton is the weakest Democrat candidate since Governor Dukakis had the misfortune of running against V.P. Bush in 1988, or President Reagan’s third term.
Mrs. Clinton creates zero excitement, turnout is down, and supporters are scared that she will start coughing at a moment’s notice.
So why is she leading Trump by 13 points? Why is Trump down 6 in the RCP average?
The paradox of the individualistic society is that it can only exist if individuals embrace virtues that are greater than their own needs and whims. A society where each individual acts as a little tyrant, pursuing his desires with total selfishness at the expense of everyone else becomes collectivist as the little tyrants turn to a series of big tyrants to get what they want no matter who gets hurt by it.
Social compacts are the alternative to big government. Communities built around unwritten laws in which people do the right thing keep government at bay better than a million laws ever could. No Constitution can protect a people that does not know or care about what it says. Laws embody ideas about what a society can be. But only the people can actually live out those ideas in their lives.
As individual virtues and social compacts break down, selfish squabbles escalate. Tribalism turns into legal civil war. Laws become the means by which one group imposes its will on the other and by which one man seizes the property of another. The people come to view the system with contempt. All virtues and principles are abandoned as neighbor turns on neighbor in resentment and hatred.
Our society has cultivated narcissism as its highest virtue. Even liberalism has become condensed to an identity politics of narcissism in which each victim gets to talk about their feelings for fifteen minutes before crybullying for someone’s head. Political discourse has become an exchange of feelings. And unlike contradictory ideas, clashing feelings of entitlement cannot be resolved.
Ideas can exist objectively. Feelings only exist subjectively. Identity politics resolves this problem by treating the objective response to feelings as privilege. But even subjective empathy can never truly approach the subjective experience of the crybully. Even a member of that same identity group will differ in some way from the multiple intersectional identities of the crybully. And that difference is its own privilege. This isn’t really politics. It’s self-help narcissism crossbred with stale Marxism.
Marxism pretended to be a science. Its idiot inheritors use the same highly specialized vocabulary to describe their imaginary science of feelings to decide whose feelings get hurt microscopically worse.
But that’s the only kind of politics that narcissists can be expected to embrace. The left has personalized the political as much as it has politicized the personal. Its politics is purely personal. Its ideas can be condensed to “X upsets Y”. With the corollary that in the future X will not be allowed to upset Y because Y will be in charge of everything and stupid people like X will all die off so that history is on the side of Y and not X. This is a seven year old’s politics with better vocabulary.
There seems to be something about Eastertime that makes liberal American presidents want to indulge Cuba’s atheist dictators. Perhaps it’s the hope of redemption and resurrection, which are, after all, at the center of the Easter story. The facts, however, weigh heavily against that idea.
Take President Obama’s plans to visit Cuba on Monday of Holy Week. One can’t help remembering that wretched Good Friday 16 years ago when President Clinton pried Elián González out of a closet in Miami and sent him away from freedom and into Fidel Castro’s arms.
Did that make Castro any less anti-American? No. If anything, it made him more obdurate. He redoubled his efforts to nurture a hard-core crop of Latin American dictators determined to thwart the U.S. in the hemisphere and around the world. At the height of that effort, the group included the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Nicaragua; at times, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were also involved.
President Obama’s two-day Havana journey will do no more to redeem Fidel’s little brother, Raúl, who took the reins of power from the ailing Fidel in 2008, or to resurrect civic and economic life on the island of Cuba.
President Obama met with musician Emilio Estefan and other Cuban-Americans invited to the White House in advance of his trip to the communist island next week.
Congress has still not lifted the embargo on Cuba, but the Obama administration on Tuesday relaxed travel and currency restrictions as he prepares for the visit.
Others at the White House meeting included Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Export-Import Bank General Counsel Angela Freyre, and Father Fernando Heriao of St. Brendan Catholic Church in Miami. There were also leaders of groups that have supported Obama’s calls to lift the embargo, such as #CubaNow and the Cuba Study Group.
“The president met today with Cuban-American leaders at the White House, including civil society advocates, faith leaders, and representatives from the private sector, in advance of his trip to Cuba,” press secretary Josh Earnest said in a readout of the meeting. “From the beginning of his administration, President Obama has consulted closely with the Cuban-American community about his Cuba policy, and wanted to hear directly from community leaders about his upcoming trip to Cuba.”
“The president reviewed our ongoing efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. The president highlighted the recent regulatory changes made by the Departments of the Treasury and Commerce, and the impact those changes would have on the ability of Americans to travel to Cuba and engage directly with the Cuban people,” Earnest continued.
More than a year after its publication, the worth of novelist Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” shines ever brighter, its synthesis of cynicism, seriousness and sadness a jaded reminder that fiction remains stranger than fact, but only just
In 2014, Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas almost lived up to its name. The speaking schedule featured the fearsomely hirsute Uthman Badar, media representative of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The title of his lecture: Honour Killings Are Morally Justified. Twitter outrage ensued, the festival organisers bleated and cancelled the lecture, and Uthman Badar’s mouth remained uncharacteristically closed.
His silence disappointed me. I’ve been unable to decide whether Badar’s topic and those who see merit in it are best described as risible or contemptible. Maybe it’s a combination of the two. His speech could have been a clarifying moment, perhaps even a useful one. If one wished to make an easy case for women’s rights and liberal democracy, one could simply call attention to the theocratic-minded alternatives put forward by the likes of Badar and Hizb ut-Tahrir.
The cancellation provided an easy task for columnists. Their safe chatter prompted a reprise of well-worn thoughts about ardent Islam, our murky conception of free speech, and the relative tameness of The Festival of Dangerous Ideas. All sides claimed victory, the next topic trended, and everyone moved on.
One aspect of the affair escaped notice, though, and this was the lecture Badar had initially proposed: The West Needs Saving By Islam. A rather dangerous idea, yes, as well as a fascinating, frightening and thought-provoking one. It finds expression in myriad ways, but we rarely encounter it in such direct language. Rather, it is a sentiment that lurks quietly behind other ideas. Islam, as its most confident adherents claim, is the solution, not merely to philosophical problems but to all human inquiry. And so, the Islamist movement’s fantastical and totalitarian goal of world domination offers a form of salvation for the West, even if salvation looks more like destruction. Here, the certainty and vibrancy of Islam compare favourably to a soulless and etiolated West, where Christianity scarcely seems sure of itself, nihilism reigns, and the promise of even minimal economic stability is continually and casually broken.
WILL HE BOW THIS TIME????RSK
WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama will travel to Saudi Arabia next month for a summit with Gulf Arab leaders, the White House said Wednesday, offering them a chance to repair relations strained by last year’s nuclear deal with Iran.
The summit with the Gulf Cooperation Council follows one Mr. Obama hosted last year at Camp David in an attempt to ease concerns among U.S. allies over the Iran deal. This year’s summit will take place on April 21.
Mr. Obama will also visit Germany and the U.K. in April. While in London, Mr. Obama will meet with Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron. In Germany, he is scheduled to attend the Hannover industrial-technology trade show and meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The White House said the summit in Saudi Arabia “will be an opportunity for leaders to review progress in strengthening U.S.-GCC security cooperation” in the year since the gathering at Camp David.
“It will also provide an opportunity for leaders to discuss additional steps to intensify pressure on [Islamic State], address regional conflicts, and de-escalate regional and sectarian tensions,” the statement said.
GCC countries include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The U.S. and other global powers reached the nuclear agreement with Iran last summer, triggering the lifting of economic sanctions that had been imposed on Iran in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program. CONTINUE AT SITE
The very act of converting the Shoah into a story on film is a violation of its meaning, its force, and its evil.http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/03/why-i-dont-watch-holocaust-movies/
I have not seen Son of Saul, and I will not see it. As a general rule I do not see Holocaust movies, even though I have been a working film critic for 37 years. It is not because they do not affect me but because they do—and I do not trust the way they affect me. I did see Schindler’s List, and I wept at its conclusion, when Steven Spielberg has the Schindler survivors walk toward the camera as the film’s black- and-white blooms suddenly into color. But what was I weeping at?
The director Stanley Kubrick spent years trying to figure out how to make a movie about the Holocaust and never succeeded. When the writer Frederic Raphael talked to Kubrick about Schindler’s List, the universally praised work of Kubrick’s acolyte Spielberg, Kubrick issued an off-the-cuff criticism as great as any considered analysis by Erich Auerbach or Lionel Trilling: “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.” I was weeping because Schindler’s List is the Holocaust with a happy ending. The Shoah did not have a happy ending. It ended. And the tragedy of it will be with us until the end of time. It’s no wonder people seek to mitigate the horror by turning it into fable, but it is an impulse that should be resisted.
In his brilliant and scorchingessay on Son of Saul, Dan Kagan-Kans quietly and systematically exposes the contrivances of this self-consciously “new” kind of film about the Holocaust. The very fact that I just used the words “contrivance” and Holocaust in the same sentence is an example of the insurmountable aesthetic and moral problems faced by this and every other movie about the Shoah.
Now, all films are contrivances, whether they are about Auschwitz or about a couple meeting cute in a department store in Philadelphia. What we are seeing is not happening. The people we are watching are not the characters they are playing. The characters they are playing do not exist and never have existed. The words they are speaking were put into their mouths by someone else, which is not how actual people converse. As these simulacra move and speak those words, dozens of real people are a few feet away watching them, recording them, moving pieces of furniture in and out of their way, sending other people and cars and even rolling debris through the viewer’s line of sight to mimic the passing flow of life.
The problem is that, more than any other art form before it, the cinema is designed to trick you into forgetting that what you are seeing isn’t real. It’s the ultimate in stylization—it hides its stylization behind a veneer of reality. For what you are seeing looks real. Maybe even more real than reality itself. Bodies are walking back and forth before you. People are speaking words. Cars are moving in the background. It’s just that what they are actually doing and what you are seeing are two different things. They are making a movie. You are watching a story.
And the act of converting the Shoah into a story is itself a violation of its meaning, its force, and its evil. The imposition of a plot makes the inexplicably and unimaginably awful falsely explicable and, since it is at the same time literally being made imaginable, not quite so awful.
Whatever Barack Obama aimed to achieve in Syria with half measures and rhetoric, allowing he had any firm notion to begin with, must be deemed far from fruition. The contrast with Putin’s willingness to place military muscle at the service of strategy could not be more clear — or more damning
The announcement by Russia’s truculent leader, Vladimir Putin, that his nation’s forces are to withdraw from Syria confirms what we all suspected: propping up the Assad regime was, and is, Russia’s key priority in the region. Its mission ‘fulfilled,’ only months after entering the fray, the Putin model of pursuing goals is, in its own way, impressive. Granted, the methods chosen by the Russian military have given only slightly more concern for civilian casualties than the Assad regime, however the dogged determination to get things done, and quickly, has shown, along with the war in the Ukraine, the ease with which Putins turns bellicose rhetoric into action. Russia is not alone in its efforts to seek an outcome to the Syrian conflict favourable to its aims, as Turkey also is heavily invested.
Despite the current reprieve in Syria as a shaky ceasefire holds, violence is increasing in neighbouring Turkey, a NATO member and alleged bastion of moderate Islam. The most recent terrorist attack in Ankara, which killed over 30 people, has not yet been claimed by any group, however it is likely to be the work of either a Kurdish separatist movement or the Islamic State. Fighting his own war against the Kurds within his country, as well as against various enemies over the border in Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has sought to expand the culpable parties in terrorist attacks. There is no difference, he insists, between ‘a terrorist holding a gun or a bomb and those who use their position or pen to serve those aims.’
The irony of this comment cannot go unnoticed: while an ally quickly claimed by the US, Turkey has not only become increasingly Islamist in recent years, and apparently allows the passage of foreign fighters into Syria, but explicitly supports—along with Saudi Arabia—a coalition of hard-line Islamist factions in Syria fighting the Assad regime. One of the member groups included in this sponsored alliance is the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda spin-off responsible for attacks throughout Syria, and a ‘terrorist’ designated group according to the UN.
