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March
13
10:26 am
Conservatives vs. Republicans
Categories: George Bush, Republicans
The Los Angeles Times published three conservative critics of President Bush in its Sunday “Current” section, as part of an examination of what the paper calls the “conservative crackup.”

University of Chicago political scientist (and blogger) Daniel W. Drezner says the president’s trouble with conservatives stems from his foreign policy. “When Bush’s [poll] numbers were high, his popularity papered over the GOP’s traditional ideological splits on foreign policy. Now, Bush lacks the political capital to prevent these rifts from resurfacing,” Drezner writes. And remarkably, Bush has managed to disappoint his own party while also alienating Democrats:

What makes today’s atmosphere so perilous for Bush is that both sides of the Republican divide feel betrayed. The conservative realists outside the administration, who thought the pre-9/11 Bush was one of their own, were alarmed by the decision to invade Iraq. They expressed grave doubts about the war — and it looks as if their fears were realized. The absence of a stable Iraq has hamstrung the White House in other areas where force might need to be an option.

Meanwhile, the neoconservatives have become disillusioned too, as Bush’s second-term foreign policy has failed to even remotely match the ambitious rhetoric of the second inaugural.

Finally, doctrinal disputes aside, Republicans like me are angry at Bush because he has frittered away one of the party’s greatest assets — the belief that when it came to international relations, the GOP was the party of competence. …

In the eyes of his party, Bush’s biggest foreign policy sin is not his aims, or even his means. It’s that he has done the improbable — he’s made the Democrats look like a credible alternative.

Jeffrey Hart, a former speechwriter for Reagan and Nixon and the author of the new book “The Making of the Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times,” says Bush is an “ideologue,” not a conservative. “Ideology is the enemy of conservatism because it edits, omits or ignores reality,” Hart writes. He criticizes the president’s policies on conservation, privatization, stem-cell research and abortion.

Finally, seemingly omnipresent Bush critic Bruce Bartlett (who is a guest columnist at TimesSelect this month) complains about Bush’s “total lack of control over federal spending.” Without a “massive tax increase” to pay for Bush’s spending, Bartlett warns of a “financial Katrina.” Of that tax increase, he writes, “Future presidents may be the ones to enact it. But Bush’s policies will have caused it.”


9:58 am
Annie Proulx: We Wuz Robbed!
Categories: Worth a Click
Annie Proulx, who wrote the short story on which “Brokeback Mountain” was based, gives her take in the Guardian on getting snubbed by the Oscars for Best Picture :

We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.


Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell says the seeds of the Barry Bonds steroid scandal – which has been revived by “Game of Shadows,” a new book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters that is excerpted in Sports Illustrated – were planted after the baseball strike of 1994:

When baseball returned in ‘95, the game needed something to boost its performance, juice its attendance and muscle up its fan base. The obvious answer was more home runs. …

Never has a sport, from its executive suites to its union, been so mutually complicit in its own moral contamination. After the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, the game merely juiced its ball, promoting the home runs of Babe Ruth and others. But from the sport’s return in ‘95 until the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative scandal two years ago, baseball looked the other way as sluggers put dangerous or illegal substances into their bodies.

The N.C.A.A. basketball tournament begins Thursday, and the Los Angeles Times editorial page warns employers not to expect too much productivity from workers after Thursday morning, especially now that CBS will broadcast the first three rounds of games over the Internet, for free. But, the paper says, it’s too bad the network doesn’t fully commit to its online strategy:

Regrettably, the network is not letting online viewers watch the games that are being shown on their local TV stations. The restriction may be unavoidable because of the network’s deals with its affiliates, but it’s irrational. Given the choice between watching a game on TV or on a computer monitor, no one would choose the latter. Instead, the limit merely cuts off fans who want to watch the local games but can’t reach a TV set.


TimesSelect guest columnist Bruce Bartlett, author of “Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” responds to Paul Krugman’s criticism of him in Krugman’s Times column. Bartlett says if Krugman believes he is “a Johnny-come-lately Bush critic, then so be it. In the end, I was fired from my think-tank job without severance for writing my book. That’s a price none of my critics have had to pay.”

12:15 am
Income Inequality: More Get Less
Categories: Worth a Click
The Washington Post editorial page has announced an occasional series on inequality in America. Sunday’s opening editorial notes that the wages of the typical American worker fell from 1980 to 2004, while the wages of the top 10 percent “jumped by more than a quarter.” The Post fears the trend is permanent: “Depending on which statistics you choose, the tide is either not lifting most boats or lifting many of them modestly. … [A]fter a quarter-century of disappointment, the struggles of Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution cannot be viewed as temporary.” The editorial also observes that “the United States has become less socially mobile than nations such as Sweden and Germany.”
In a long analysis that expands on his column in this week’s U.S. News, Michael Barone compares current political conditions to the factors that led to the Republican congressional wave of 1994. He concludes “that 2006 is not another 1994 — at least not yet. But Democrats need only 15/40ths of a 1994 to win control.” That’s 3/8 for those who don’t want to simplify fractions at home. As Barone notes, “Democrats only need 15 seats for a majority this year, while the Republicans needed 40 in 1994.”