Reader F.W. writes to draw my attention to Rich Lowry’s spy thriller Banquo’s Ghosts commenting “apparently he managed to pack every imaginable vapid right-wing cliché into his “forthcoming literary masterpiece”:

Lowry: Here’s the basic plot: Peter Johnson is a left-wing journalist who writes for a New York-based publication called The Crusader. He’s a lush, a cynic, and a little corrupt. But watching the 9/11 attacks from his Brooklyn Heights apartment changes something in him. He begins to have doubts about the “hate America” pieces his editrix, Josephine von Hildebrand, constantly assigns him. Meanwhile, an old forgotten CIA spymaster, Stewart Bancroft (he works under cover of the name Banquo), has an eye on him. Banquo is old school. He’s been marginalized in the new overly bureaucratic, politically correct CIA, as an anachronism who believes in aggressively and imaginatively taking the fight to the enemy. He concludes that the best possible man to send to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist is the one no one would suspect–the unreliable, famously America-hating Peter Johnson. And then, as they say, mayhem ensues.

In Lowry’s defense, the idea of Christopher Hitchens reacting to 9/11 not by abandoning his Nation column in favor of a Slate column, but instead by becoming an assassin is pretty amusing.

Also there are tons and tons of vapid right-wing clichés that aren’t involved in this plot sketch. My recollection of the Tom Clancy book in which Jack Ryan becomes President is that not only does he do a bunch of right-wing national security stuff, but he also implements common sense domestic policy solutions like a flat tax.

Andy McCarthy writes, in what I understand is not an April Fool’s Day post, that:

We know that lowering marginal tax rates can increase federal revenue, but it’s clear that the President won’t cut taxes (not even for “95 percent of Americans”). So we need a Plan B.

Every time I read this kind of thing I wonder: Why on earth does McCarthy think that Obama is stubbornly refusing to cut taxes when doing so would raise revenues? Tax cuts are broadly popular, and with the increased revenue Obama could reward his supporters in the public employees’ unions. Shouldn’t AFSCME, NEA, and AFT be constantly clamoring for lower taxes and higher revenues? I mean, how stupid are we supposed to believe Democrats to be? They’re just all in the pocket of big accountant, I guess.

David Frum’s essay on Rush Limbaugh winds up making the excellent point that there’s an issue these days in which the conservative movement is hard-wired to offer solutions to the problems of the 1970s when, whatever you think about the solutions they offered at that time, today’s problems are totally different. Exhibit A for that trend could be this Larry Kudlow post at the Corner warning that current policy is going to produce inflation. This is like worrying that Barack Obama’s defense budget is showing weakness and likely to leave us open to aggression from Martians.

We have actual statistics about inflation, which show the core CPI increasing by just 0.2 percent in February. Inflation is very low. Very recently there was a very real threat of deflation, and expansionary policy has been aimed at preventing that from happening. Meanwhile, we have very good policy tools at our disposal for curbing inflation should it start to reach problematic levels.

At the moment, however, not only is deflation a bigger worry than inflation, but a modest (albeit non-accelerating) amount of inflation would probably be beneficial as it would help firms and households get out from under the load of debts they’re currently dealing with.

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife’s former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

First off, as Schiffren notes Barack and Michelle Obama are both high-achieving meritocrats in their own right. Indeed, his entire administration is staffed with such people. She should, perhaps, consider the hypothesis that nobody is being “demonized.” Rather, a judgment is being made that a return to Clinton-era income tax policies in order to finance comprehensive health care reform would serve the national interest.

But beyond that, there’s the obscene implication that if people are poor, it’s because they don’t work hard and certainly not as hard as those long-toiling business executive. As I wrote back in October 2008:

I’m a veteran of several moves of a “let’s get a bunch of friends together and all move a bunch of stuff” variety. Today, I hired a moving company. It was a good choice. It’s also the kind of thing that, on a more political note, really dramatizes how bizarre it is that people often characterize current levels of inequality in the United States as reflecting a desire to reward hard work or say that in the United States you can get ahead by working hard. I’m sure the partners at Jones Day and the wizards at Goldman Sachs work hard, but I don’t think you can seriously deny that moving furniture for a living is hard work.

Indeed, one of the main advantages that professional career offer is precisely that, money aside, they don’t involve the sort of taxing physical labor associated with many low-skill jobs. Guys who move furniture are, of course, working extremely hard. And even your basic retail employee needs to be on her feet for hours and hours at a time while “executives” comfy chairs. And, again, I don’t think the Salvadoran guys who moved my bed found themselves in that line of work because they were too busy partying in college.

Via Tyler Cowen, Daniel Klein offers up a study that proves the obvious:

Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty commissions, the magazines may be criticized for anti-liberty omission—that is, failing to oppose anti-liberty policies. Magazines investigated include National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, and The American Spectator. We find that National Review has had the strongest record on liberty on the issues treated, while the others have preponderantly failed to be pro-liberty or have even been anti-liberty.

I sort of doubt that anyone was genuinely confused about this, but now we have a real study to prove it. On the other hand, conservative do take the freedom of business enterprises to have a negative impact on the quality of the air you breath, the quality of the water you drink, and the stability of the climate you live in very seriously. They’re also pretty keen on the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. These are important freedoms to many Americans.

But therein lies the rub. Conservatives are suddenly rediscovering this topic and reaching out to the Taylors of the world. It’s funny.

For example, as Isaac Chotiner observes, Andrew Breitbart doesn’t seem to have actually seen the end of Gran Torino. Isaac, meanwhile, likes any list that encourages people to go see The Lives of Others. And I agree, but we’re really defining conservatism down if we take “the pervasive intelligence state of Communist East Germany” to be a distinctly conservative notion. Perhaps more truly typical of the conservative worldview is that after Lives of Others comes in at the number one slot, The Dark Knight takes position number twelve specifically because of its alleged advocacy of pervasive surveillance. Many movies on the list, (Pursuit of Happyness e.g.), aren’t even remotely good.

At the time of the invasion back around Christmas 2006, right-wing commentators were busy offering unusually stupid opinions. Robert Farley reminds me of a classic Corner post in which Deborah Glick and Cliff May teamed up to explain the “real” (i.e., fake) roots of European skepticism about the operation:

Israelis routinely assume that Europe’s pro-jihadist policy towards the Palestinians is a result of anti-Semitism or anger over Israel’s military victory in 1967. But the EU’s treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG [the secular Transitional Federal Government] indicates that Brussels’ hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe’s pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is over-arching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds.

According to Glick, European governments have adopt a wide-ranging pro-jihad stance “in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them.” Also, the people who write for The Corner are idiots.

Ever since Barack Obama’s election, the very same conservative movement that had been castigating him for months as a harbinger of sharia socialism has spent an awful lot of time crowing about weird nonsense concepts like Obama’s cabinet coming from the “center-right” of the Democratic Party. It’s a bit annoying, I miss the classics. Fortunately, Victor Davis Hanson is willing to kick it old-school and explain that in 2008 “50 years’ worth of careful thinking and hard-won wisdom were erased, as the Reagan Revolution, the work of Milton Freidman, and the classical free-market ethos were suddenly Trotskyized.”

Trotsky! I like it. I wonder which kind of Friedman-style, free market thinking Hanson thinks was prevalent back in 1958. As I recall it, the 50s were a time of high taxes, high levels of unionization, and strict regulation in the economic sphere with conservatism generally prevailing on matters related to sex and gender relations.

As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare, and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-2007 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman, Bush’s supposedly “worst” presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.

And what about the years 2004-2007 in Iraq? Here’s Hanson’s “Sizing Up Iraq” from December 2004:

First, is the United States winning its engagements on the ground? The answer is an overwhelming yes—whether we look, most recently, at Samarra or at the thrashing of the Mahdists in Najaf. The combination of armor incursions, constant sniper attack, and GPS bombing in each case has led to decisive tactical defeat of the insurgents. Our only setback—the unfortunate pullback from Fallujah—was entirely attributable to our wrongheaded constraint, as if we somehow felt that releasing the terrorists from our death grip would either placate the opposition, empower the Iraqi government, or win accolades from the international community.

And in his 2006 “Winning the Iraq Wars” he not only claimed we weren’t making mistakes, but that no alternative strategy was possible at all:

Note also that after the hysteria over body armor and unarmored humvees, the Democratic opposition offers no real concrete alternatives to the present policy .

Why not? Because there are none.

Oh well.

With the right on the way out, maybe that can change and conservatives can start seeing problems and trying to devise distinctly conservative solutions to them. So far, though, Andy McCarthy seems determined to stay in denial mode, deriding talk of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression as a bit of “Obamanomics” spin.

A lot of us had this suspicion about Derbyshire.

It’s nice to see that Andy McCarthy is putting aside his crazy anti-Obama conspiracy theories and getting back down to his core competency of incredibly stupid commentary on national security policy. Thus, via Dave Noon, I give you this paragraph:

Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam’s terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.

Because, of course, historically people have welcomed being invaded and occupied by a foreign power whose actions lead to years of chaos, a huge civilian death toll, and millions of displaced people.

It seems that David Frum, one of National Review’s very best writers, is going to be leaving the magazine and he suggests that NR’s burgeoning penchant for cocooning and purges is part of the issue:

In October came the resignation of Mr. Buckley’s son, the writer and satirist Christopher Buckley, after he endorsed Barack Obama for president. He did so on Tina Brown’s blog, The Daily Beast, to avoid any backlash on The Corner.

Now David Frum, a prominent conservative writer who enmeshed himself in a minor dustup during the campaign by turning negative on Governor Palin, is leaving, too. In an interview, he said he planned to leave the magazine, where he writes a popular blog, to strike out on his own on the Web.

“The answers to the Republican dilemma are not obvious and we need a vibrant discussion,” he said. “I think a little more distance can help everybody do a better job of keeping their temper.”

An interesting development. An End to Evil is a preposterous book, but Frum’s Comeback and Dead Right are both very interesting and, frankly, more worthy of your time than a lot of political books written by people I have more substantive agreements with.

And here’s the shape of a statewide race the GOP lost:

Clearly, when Republicans win they’re more than “the party of the rich” just as when Democrats win they’re more than “the party of the poor.” But richer people are friendly to Republicans than are poorer people, presumably because Republican policies are friendlier to richer people than they are to poorer people. It’s rather astounding that you see professional political commentators getting this wrong so frequently. The correlation between income and proclivity to vote for the more conservative political party exists in all U.S. states, has existed for a long time, is in line with traditional stereotypes, is replicated in almost every country around the world (Israel and Ireland are, I think, the main exceptions), and follows straightforwardly from the parties’ competing policy priorities. It shouldn’t be difficult to remember.

Dept. of Enduring Myths [Jay Nordlinger]

I’ve just come back from a weekend in Vermont — and here’s how I understand it: Modestly off people — “real Vermonters,” as some people say — are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them — driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on — are voting Republican.

Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich, and it still suffers from that label. Over and over, that which I was taught is contradicted by the evidence of my lived experience.

That may what “the evidence of [Nordlinger's] lived experience” says, but it would be strongly at odds with the historical pattern. Here’s Andrew Gelman’s map of voting patterns among the top third of the income distribution in 2004:

As you can see, John Kerry did win the votes of most rich people in California, New York, and Maryland. These states happen to be where most influential media people live, and this often gives influential media personalities a misleading impression of the voting behavior of rich people overall. But rich Vermonters, like rich Alabamans and rich Oregonians and rich Texans voted for George W. Bush. Which, if you know what you’re talking about, isn’t surprising — rich people vote Republican.

By contrast, this is the equivalent map for people in the bottom third of the income distribution:

Here you see overwhelming support for Democrats, including in Vermont. Those are the facts. Presumably the McCain-Obama map will look somewhat different, but it would be bizarre for the pattern to reverse itself as Nordlinger seems to be anticipating.

I continue to be quite perplexed by a few things that are surely related: Where is Bill Ayers? Where is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright? They seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth. Why? How?

No two figures relating to Barack Obama have been talked about as much as Ayers and Wright. That being the case, why aren’t these two figures talking? Why is no one talking to them, or demanding to talk to them?

Have Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright been silenced? If so, who has silenced them, and how?

I see two plausible options here. One is that Barack Obama, as the first step in his campaign to perpetrate a second holocaust or turn us into the U.S.S.A. has sent Wright and Ayers into some kind of gulag. The other is that Wright and Ayers, like the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, don’t want to see four more years of conservative rule in the United States of America and have therefore decided not to act as useful idiots for the Republican Party. You be the judge.

Ed Whelan deems this absurd:

What an idiotic statement. If Sarah Palin said something so stupid, she’d be pilloried from coast to coast. As I explained months ago (when Obama used a figure of 95% for the same general proposition):

As Obama ought to know, the unanimity rate on the Supreme Court is nowhere near 95%. According to the Harvard Law Review’s statistics for the past three terms, cases with dissents accounted for 64.4% (2006 term), 45.7% (2005 term), and 62.0% (2004 term) of all cases. Indeed, last term, cases dividing 5-4 accounted for over a third of all cases, and the three justices that Obama cited as justices he likes—Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter—agreed in the disposition of non-unanimous cases only 61%, 60%, and 63% of the time, respectively.

Obama, far from being an idiot, is very intelligent. And, “as somebody who taught constitutional law for ten years” (as he tells us in the interview), he surely knows that what he is saying is false.

This seems to totally miss the point. The reason Supreme Court decisions are rarely unanimous isn’t that cut-and-dry legal issues are rare. The reason is that the Supreme Court has absolute discretion over which cases to hear, and they disproportionately choose the “hard” cases. There are lots of cases where the Supremes could choose to offer a 9-0 affirmation of a Circuit Court decision, but that would be a waste of time. Meanwhile, in his eagerness to call Obama a liar, Whelan is completely misrepresenting what Obama is saying — he’s not, at all, denying that judicial philosophy is important. He’s just making the point that the cases where it comes into play are a minority of the total docket that sits before the federal judicial system.

UPDATE: Ed Whelan has a response here that I do agree makes his point of view on this look a bit less ridiculous, but I would still stand by the contention that he’s completely misrepresenting Obama’s fairly clear and basic point here.

The Corner hits a new low of absurdity:

Now here’s a subversive little thought about that Khalidi tape that the Los Angeles Times is guarding like a cargo of plutonium.

* Item: The Los Angeles Times is owned by the Tribune Co.
* Item: The Tribune Co. is based in Chicago.
* Item: “In 2008, Tribune is struggling under a $13 billion debt load, much of it incurred in taking the company private in 2007, and from plummeting advertising income at its newspapers.” (Wikipedia. A business friend tells me the current figure is actually $14.7 billion.)
* Item: Tribune Chairman and CEO Sam Zell is a major Republican donor. Why would he not want his paper to release the Khalidi tape?
* Item: The federal government is sitting on a bailout fund of $700 billion.
* Item: It’s not likely the Treasury can disburse more than one or two hundred billion of that before the next administration comes in.
* Item: The next administration will therefore have at least half a trillion greenies to hand out to anyone it deems worthy of being bailed out. Anyone — there are no hard and fast rules.
* Item: 14.7 billion is a very small proportion — less than three percent — of half a trillion.

Again, the tape is not being released because the LA Times was given the tape under the condition that they not release it. The only reason anyone knows of the tape’s existence is that the LA Times wrote a story revealing its existence and describing its content. If the LA Times were conspiring to keep the tape covered up, all they would have had to do would have been to not run the story. But they did run the story. Because they’re not perpetuating a cover-up.

We’ve grown accustomed in recent years to thinking of the Supreme Court as having a “left” bloc, a “right” bloc, and a “center” block. In truth, relative to the state of the judiciary in the 1970s and 80s we’ve seen an entire wing — judges who took the kind of positions that Justice Thurgood Marshall and others espoused — to the left of the current liberals essentially vanish. Someone like Justice Kennedy should be seen as representing a center-right viewpoint and the current liberals are a center-left viewpoint. The more robust liberal jurists of yesteryear believed in affirmative economic rights. Barack Obama was on Chicago public radio back in 2001 and said he disavowed those views:

“Maybe i am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know, I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts,” he said. “You know the institution just isn’t structured that way. Just look at very rare examples where during he desegregation era the court was willing to, for example, order … changes that cost money to local school district[s], and the court was very uncomfortable with it. It was hard to manage, it was hard to figure out, you start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. The court is not very good at it, and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts, I think that as a practical matter that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.”

This should all be clear enough, but a lot of the right-wing, led by the McCain campaign and the Drudge Report, have decided that it would be good to pretend that Obama said the opposite of what he said. So we get a series of posts by Mark Levin dedicated to that idea. But the text is clear — Obama thinks you could come up with a rationale for affirmative economic rights if you wanted to, but that it would be a bad idea to do so. On this topic, the right would do well to take “yes” for an answer.