Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers
In this installment it is not necessarily the mystery that grips or holds the reader, but once again the singularly enjoyable experience of observing Lord Wimsey, especially within the new wrinkle of his determination to rescue the damsel from the gallows and win her hand in marriage. Another great and enjoyable read.
As one only a couple of months away from graduating from college and entering the tumultuous world of adulthood I have begun to develop a growing awareness of the reality of aging. Sooner than I would ever prefer I will leave the inviting cocoon I have previously spent my life within, the shelter where I have enjoyed the ease of having my needs provided for by loving parents, the lack of too much responsibility, and the infinite expanse of my dreams and the possible. My childhood is nearly gone, sinking away like the last grains of sand in an hourglass.
This awareness isn't comforting. Dreams unchallenged are now to be responsibilities incapable of being avoided. It's time to be a man, on my own and for the first time responsible for the provision of my own well-being. That means finding and maintaining a job, paying the rent and bills, buying food, buying a car and all of the other tedious necessities of adulthood.
I don't presume to speak for others of my generation but if I had to guess I would believe they are feeling something of the same sense of unease. If we could turn back time – go back home and have everything provided for, live without care, dream unchallenged – we would. But alas we can't; we must press forward – both determined and hopeful – and make our way in an uncertain world replete with turmoil and uncertainty.
Nevertheless it has been said that life is full of little consolations, and mine is the return of Ken Griffey, Jr. I am no different from any Northwest male around my age. We grew up spending our summer nights at home or in the Kingdome, often with our fathers, waiting for each at bat, each new opportunity to witness that sweet upper-cut swing send another unfortunate baseball deep into the red seats of right field. We would cheer when the Kid would then drop his bat, walk a few steps down the first base line gazing at his unique work of art, and then easily jog around the bases to home plate, always too cool to so much as crack a smile or to give any indication that hitting moon-shots over outfield fences was anything other than what he was born to do. And then, whether there was light out enough to or not, we would run out into our back yards and do it all ourselves – turn our hat backwards, straighten ourselves into that stiff batting stance that only Junior has, and pretend we were doing the same thing.
Those days were childhood, they were happiness. On that awful day that he left, when most of our hearts were broken for the first time, we began the process of growing up. The Kid was gone and our boyhoods would slowly go with him. Since that one catalyzing moment we've learned many lessons and have done a lot of maturing. We've graduated from high school, taken up summer and part time jobs, entered the permanent work force or gone to college. Some of those dreams we still have, but a great many more have flown away forever. We approach full adulthood at the same time we confront reality in all of its starkness.
But at least Griffey is back. Sure it won't be as it was before. Since his absence he's done as much growing as we have. He's battled injury and seen his skills slowly taken away from him by that over-bearing tax man, Time. He's no longer a gazelle in centerfield but a fragile leftfielder or designated-hitter who will inevitably get a few days off each week to rest his aging and surgically-reconstructed body. Back when Griffey was "the Kid" we expected nothing less than fifty home-runs each year; now we'll be elated with twenty-five.
But he's still back. He's back to don the 24 once more, back to remind all of us in the Northwest of the glories of a time past, and hopefully back to create new glories still.
To all of us who were kids when he was "the Kid," he's back to console us with warm memories of a time now completely gone. And as we are exposed to that first realization of aging, of losing youth to the ceaseless passage of time, he's back to teach us one more lesson about growing up. No matter how old we get – no matter how far we are removed from the homes of our childhood and the warm protection of our parents – we will always be young and we will always be able to come home through the fond memories of our youth. They are there now and always shall be, ready to be summoned when life gets too stressful and existence too dull. Regardless of our age it is through our memories that we shall always be young.
Welcome home, Junior, and thanks for bringing us back with you.
There was never any question that the "stimulus" – either in the form of an actual stimulus or as one big pork bill guised as such – would pass the Congress and be signed by the President. This was his first initiative. To reverse course and/or fail with overwhelming majorities in Congress during the zenith of his political power would have done irreparable damage to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. This was a short term battle neither he nor Congress could conceivably lose, and so they would ultimately persevere and pass something come hell or high water, no matter how ugly and painful the endeavor became.
It did get ugly (the most unpleasant sausage making possible, in fact), but the Democratic establishment did finally pass something. Though it was a lot more painful and difficult than anyone had originally expected, the President has his first legislative "victory." Accordingly, now is the time for a post-mortem – an assessment of what he has gained, what costs he has incurred, what he now assumes, etc.
Of the greatest foregoing significance is the fact that Barack H. Obama has now become of flesh and blood. His and the Democrats failure to shove the package through Congress without meaningful deliberation, debate, or scrutiny came at a tremendous cost to the President's image. Though he is still residually very popular, and probably will be for sometime yet, President Obama had to sacrifice his transcendent status and assume the mantle of yet another politician to get the bill through. The scattershot spending on parochially liberal plantation initiatives incurred public disillusionment (as well it should have) and put the President and Democrats in an uncomfortable position defending it. On the merits this was an impossible task, so the agent of a new politics resorted to the tried and true Washington fallback of partisan attack, falsely accusing Republicans of favoring total inaction over action and demagogically predicting economic Armageddon if the "stimulus" was not passed. This dashed, in quite literally a matter of days, the pre-existing illusion that he could and would govern while hovering above the partisan fray. Now that the pinnacle of Olympus has been surrendered it's not at all likely he will be able to reclaim it.
Lost too was the mantle of hyper-competence and good judgment. A handful of his nominees to significant administration positions have been disgraced by ethical issues, a string of developments which condemns him as either incompetent or hypocritical. (It's incompetent if his team's vetting process failed to find these red flags and it's hypocritical if the President who promised to have the most transparent and ethical Presidency in history selected these tax cheats and lobbyists in full awareness of that baggage.)
Such loss of capital doesn't augur well for the next initiatives of his Presidency. He and the Congress plan trillions more in spending to help the economy but they've already cried wolf. They claimed that disaster loomed if the "stimulus" did not pass. Doing so again when the next round of generational theft comes up will not carry the same credibility. The public already had a hard time swallowing this massive new level of spending – the pill is only going to grow larger and bitterer the next time they're asked to ingest. Beyond that, how he will be able to justify vast expansions in government-provided health care and other entitlement spending after all of these emergency spending programs is a gapingly open question.
Most importantly, as the President affixes his signature to this "stimulus" he at the same time affixes it to the deed of ownership for the economy. This package was laid at his feet and he recognized it as his own. To gin up support for it he traveled the country doing the only thing he has ever known and that which he is most adept at – campaigning. He promised it would "create" or "save" 3.5 million jobs. He said we would suffer economic catastrophe if it didn't pass. For that the American people will hold him accountable. If they don't see an equitable return in value for the price of a trillion dollars he and Democrats will suffer terribly. As Irwin M. Stelzer explains:
He now owns the recession. He has asked to be judged by whether this bill and other measures he will propose, create or "save" 3.5-to-4 million jobs, the number lost so far since unemployment turned up. Forget "save" -- if unemployment keeps rising, voters are not likely to rally around the slogan 'It would be still worse if I hadn't spent your trillions'. What the President has done is to promise what he certainly can't deliver in time for the congressional elections next year -- a reversal of job destruction, and millions of new jobs. If the voters prove patient in 2010, they are unlikely to remain as forgiving when the presidential election rolls around in 2012. Since employment is what economists call a lagging indicator -- employers are not confident enough to start hiring until economic recovery is well underway -- Barack Obama will have a lot of explaining to do. Unless, of course, the Republicans find a candidate so inept that the President can once again rely on his very attractive persona to see off any challenger.
Of course, his fear-mongering will only hurt him in this decisive regard. Speaking ad nauseam about how terrible the economy is sends a terrible message. Sure it managed to get the "stimulus" passed but only at the steep price of scaring away investment, consumer-spending, and other engines of economic growth and job creation. As Jen Rubin writes,
Usually, the president and treasury secretary in an economic crisis try to project calm, certainty, and a sense of command. The Obama administration approach is something new indeed. Perhaps it is some Zen-like exercise to 'be the panic; own the fear!' Whatever they are doing they should knock it off. They're going to scare the living daylights out of markets, consumers, and businesses."
It's hard to fathom what victory the administration thinks they're winning when to pass a bill to generate economic recovery the President has to employ rhetoric that only terrifies people away from behaving in a manner conducive to generating that recovery.
The President won his crucial first victory, but the content of the victory itself and the means that had to be employed in securing it pretty much assure that he is in a weaker position politically coming out than he was going in. In fact it's very possible that this initial success has sown the seeds of ultimate failure and pain for the President and his party in the long run, which is also bad for the American people. (There's also that little fact that we just exacerbated our country's debt by a trillion dollars for something that is likely to yield few, if any, actual benefits.)
Sweet victory, Mr. President.
One of the central promises of the Obama movement was a new age of bi- or post-partisanship – however you want to put it – and an end to the old games and tired bickering and disagreement. Since the "stimulus" debate has occurred at all and is doing so along strictly partisan lines, the punditry has spent time and ink debating whether such an age is possible and desirable or whether the President has utterly stopped pursuing it (he never substantively did). Not usually dependable for reasonability, the Speaker of the House was at least partly correct in responding to this hoopla by saying that excessive discussion of bi-partisanship tediously over-focuses on process.
The valid point she implicitly makes is that bi-partisanship is not an end in itself. It is not even a means to an end. It is only a characteristic of the means to an end. When we do try to make it an end – when we make a value-based judgment on the ultimate result of something based upon whether it was created in a bi-partisan manner – we are misguided, usually disastrously so. To reach a common consensus all too often you have to sink down to the lowest common denominator, watering down something to such a degree that everyone or a vast majority of people can agree to it. The upshot is ultimately a product that is ambiguous, contradicting, and ineffective. Seeking bi-partisanship for its own sake then is a recipe for a bad product, for it foolishly confuses process and means with the end product itself.
None of this is to say that pursuing bi-partisanship is always a bad thing. It is entirely salutary if you seek issues which enjoy broad agreement and take care of those first, moving on to more contentious matters after. This is no different than plucking the lowest hanging fruit before climbing the tree to grab the stuff nestled securely at the top.
Indeed, this is exactly what the President and Congressional Democrats should have done with the "stimulus" package. There are matters – even within the current legislation, odious as it is – that Republicans and Democrats can mostly agree to, such as some tax relief and infrastructure spending. Why not pass those common items in a smaller version first and take up the divisive stuff after? President Obama would have enjoyed an early success in his Presidency and he would have created an atmosphere of improved comity and seriousness right at the beginning. Instead he allowed Congressional Democrats to rashly create a mountain of disagreeable, wasteful spending that alienated Republicans and became a massive target for ridicule and scorn. (This error is the fruit of President Obama's sense of bi-partisanship, which is to declare "I won" and expect the opposition to support something completely inimical to their better judgment simply because it is his. That isn't bi-partisanship, it's hubris.)
Such a tack is much more productive than racing to the bottom in search of agreement among people who often fundamentally disagree, engaging in some fool's errand not for a good product but one arrived at on a bi-partisan basis. That is just a waste of time.
Implicitly acknowledging the regrettable failure the "stimulus" promises to be, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have refused to defend it on its own merits. Instead, they have adopted the tactics of fear-mongering and straw men construction to resurrect and grow declining public support for it.
If we were to accept – for the sake of argument – that we face an economic "catastrophe" if nothing is done, then this legislation and the behavior of the President et al would be all the more abominable (or Obaminable). It would be malfeasance in the most extreme sense to concoct a trillion dollar appropriations bill with little economic stimulus (even in the Keynesian sense) or comprehensive logic while the country slowly slides over a deep precipice. Yet, if the President is correct in his apocalyptic warnings, that is exactly what is happening – in a time of mortal national danger Democrats are using the crisis as an opportunity to indulge in a smorgasbord of spending on initiatives they've long dreamed of, gorging themselves to gluttony at the public trough.
If things really were as dire as they say they are, they would be a lot more serious in devising a credible ameliorative (one would hope), one that is consistent with the "targeted, timely, and temporary" standard they originally devised.
The President also erred by misrepresenting the Republican position in his prime-time press conference last evening, creating a false dichotomy between passing the present iteration of the "stimulus" and doing nothing. I myself am a Republican, I know many other Republicans, and know of many more Republicans beyond that. None of us have claimed that the federal government should do nothing and that is certainly not the basis for our opposition to the Democratic package. We and many Democrats and Independents oppose it because in times such as these we cannot afford to mess up, especially when the price tag of such a mistake would be north of a trillion dollars. The federal government should enact a real stimulus package, one that addresses the problems plaguing the economy and one that creates the right incentives for future economic growth. We've crafted our own plans that would accomplish exactly that – they've been ignored by the powers that be.
If we are going to borrow so much money from our children and grandchildren we ought to make it worth our while, which is not what the President's package will do. It is little more than a massive scatter-shot of government spending and growth which will plunge us deeper into debt with little in return. Sophistry can only obfuscate this fact, it cannot change it.
The War for all the Oceans – Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins
A comprehensive review of the naval aspect of the Napoleonic Wars which, as the authors convincingly argue, was the decisive aspect in Napoleon's ultimate failure. The Adkins' instruct the reader by explaining the meaning of the day's naval terms in footnotes each time they are used or quoted and cite often from the participants diaries, letters, and other reminiscences to depict what life was like fighting on the high seas.
There were several weaknesses with the book. While the extensive quoting was a strength they do often go to excess, depriving the reader of the broader contextualization and analysis that hindsight permits the historian to engage in. I would have liked to have seen more in this way from the authors. Topics and focuses are also dropped and taken up rather clumsily at points and the narrative was not as exciting as it could have been.
Nevertheless, any reader of Forrester and O'Brien should take this book up to gain the historical basis and inspiration for Hornblower and Aubrey.
In his remarks to the House Democrats' retreat last evening President Obama's growing frustration was palpable. Gone was the calm and even demeanor that had previously been an alleged virtue of his, replaced by a peevish partisanship bred from anger and dismay that he has not gotten his way on the "stimulus." Some of the national columnists have written about how his magic and mystique have disappeared, taking with it the aforementioned tranquility in mien and post-partisan utopia that were supposed to have been hallmarks of the Age of Obama.
This was destined to happen sooner or later, so I will avoid deeper examination of it here. What is worthy of response and examination is the President's angry charge that Republicans dissenting from the "stimulus" are engaging in the same old game and that the solutions they offer are the same prescriptions that got us into this mess. Perhaps President Obama's extreme disillusionment has caused him to be given leave of his senses, for both prongs of this argument are easily refuted.
Criticism of the bill is not the same old Washington game and the President runs into absurdity when he attacks opposition just by virtue of it being opposition to himself. The minority party's province is to oppose, especially when confronted with an egregiously excessive and misguided appropriations bill guised as something it self-evidently is not. President Obama won the election, as he is fond of reminding everyone, but that does not excuse him or Democrats from having to defend their measures on their merits, which they have not done (and really cannot do), or to enact whatever he wants regardless of how much it conflicts with how he presented himself as a candidate. As Rich Lowry writes today, "Obama didn't campaign on a sprawling, nearly $1 trillion new spending plan. If he had pledged in October to double federal domestic discretionary spending in a matter of weeks—including increasing the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by a third, spending hundreds of millions more on federal buildings and throwing tens of billions on every traditional liberal priority from job training to Pell Grants—he'd have been hard-pressed to win at all."
What is really an exercise in the old Washington game is the boondoggle the President and Democrats are trying to enact. The "stimulus" package is the very same bit of excessive, pork-barrel spending that Washington has traded in for decades. The only distinction is the degree, which is multiplied by Democrats using the present economic crisis as an opportunity to enact all of the spending they've dreamed about for years within the Trojan horse of a "stimulus." President Obama should take a breath and realize that he is indeed in his present position because of tired Washington ways, but that it is himself and his Congressional cohorts who are indulging in it.
The charge that Republicans are offering as solutions the policies that incurred this downturn demonstrates that they don't actually understand its causes. It was not Republican policies of lower taxes that got us here (those policies were the source of twenty-five years of unprecedented growth prior to the recession) but irresponsible borrowing and lending, especially in the give and take of home mortgages. Democrats had more than a hand in this, encouraging "fair lending" standards that led to mortgages being given to people who should have never received them. Echoing Victor Davis Hanson, "What exactly does [President Obama] think was the cause of the current financial panic if not over-borrowing, unsustainable household and national debt, and reckless government housing policies, along with too accessible amounts of capital?" Between the two parties, which one is now proposing policies that resemble this? It is of course the President and Congressional Democrats, both of which are now trying to engage in more irresponsible debt creation which will only be another drag on the economy and future generations of Americans.
The next time the President decides to bitterly vituperate he should get his facts straight.
It's terrible enough that Sen. Daschle neglected to pay taxes he owed on a car and driver provided him by his employers. (That he ever got his foot in the door of the Obama administration is all the more astounding given the fact that they equate paying one's taxes merrily with patriotism.) But the fact that really grinds the gears of average Americans is the deeper circumstances behind his dereliction.
Sen. Daschle used the influence and prestige he had accumulated over years of service in Congress to cash in on millions from various interests paid to exercise that influence on their behalf. In other words, he used the benefits he had accrued from years of receiving the trust of his public constituencies to make a fortune for himself and then neglected to pay his fair share of every working American's social obligation – taxes. He got a lot from public trust and then contributed nothing back in return.
That is absolutely reprehensible.
The Obama Presidency has suffered a rough start in its opening fortnight, largely because it has cannibalized itself through self-generated hype and astronomical expectations that mere mortals could not possibly achieve. To aggravate matters, they have deliberately set-aside or betrayed those standards right out of the gate to an appalling degree, as the events of the day demonstrate. They promised to be the most ethical and transparent administration in history yet waived their ethical regulations – explicitly or implicitly – for a host of administration officials and nominees when they got in the way. Instead of the most ethical administration in history Americans have witnessed one which has installed high ethics standards only to cast them away with the flick of a wrist when they become inconvenient. Some "change we can believe in."
Also promised was a new Washington and an age of post-partisanship, which quickly met the same fate as the new ethics and transparency. The problem which they haven't been able to run away from any longer is that President Obama has always talked of bi-partisanship but never really practiced it. In the first major initiative of his presidency he reached out to pat Congressional Republicans on the forehead only to offer them a nakedly partisan bill full of Democratic pet-spending. The gesture was pleasant but it didn't actually change anything, i.e. make the bill any less partisan after the meeting than it was before.
Beyond the unfulfilled standards and expectations, the administration has also shown an early tendency to act clumsily and overly-passive at times. They foolishly allowed the partisan dogs of the Democratic Congress to write the "stimulus" bill, receiving in return a political headache that provided Republicans an easy means of principled opposition. And, worst of all for the President, it is the gift that keeps on giving: as each day passes the package appears less and less palatable. Despite this there has been little visible effort from the President to improve it. During the transition period he laid out clear guiding principles for a stimulus (timely, targeted, and temporary) but has done little to enforce them. He simply isn't control of the issue, despite the fact that he is at the zenith of his popularity and influence (or at least should be).
This fecklessness is all the more astounding when you consider the frame of mind the President revealed when he declared, "I won" on his second day in office. For all of the assertiveness and command this forceful statement conveyed he sure hasn't lived up to it. He did win and he is the man in charge, but from all appearances he has failed throw his political weight into the issue and forge a stimulus that isn't ripe for ridicule. Instead he's permitting his counterparts in Congress to make a mess that will eventually extend all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue, making him the owner of a stinking pile of refuse. His administration's one positive action to prevent this has apparently been to encourage disenchanted Democrats in Congress to go after their leadership, summoning others to do what they should be doing themselves. That kind of helplessness isn't worthy of a President who confidently replied, "I won." It's worthy of a lame duck, which we were supposed to have been rid of on the twentieth of last month.
Of course no observant person should really be surprised at the President's inauspicious start. His previous government experience was negligible, his executive experience non-existent. His personality and demeanor were always conspicuously passive. Throughout the campaign he demonstrated an unyielding reticence to make firm commitments, preferring instead promises to consider, review, and discuss issues. What's more, he and his supporting structure demonstrated little command of the governing and decision-making skills relevant to the unique demands of the Presidency. (Their talent was in marketing to America's youth culture and independents who simply wanted a Democrat who met the minimum of standards.) As Peter Wehner writes, "so much of his appeal has been aesthetic, theatrical, and tonal, based on creating a particular mood and impression. Obama's appeal was not, and never has been, grounded in anything solid, philosophical, or permanent."
The Obama team did little to hide the fact that they planned to govern as they campaigned, which you simply cannot do. A campaign is a practice in potentialities and hypotheticals, and is relatively brief and transient. Governing is a different animal, entirely a practice in coordinating and moving unwieldy and disparate parts in desired directions over a relatively extended period of time. The President and his administration will inevitably learn and improve going forward, but it has been made abundantly clear that they didn't understand this and so were woefully unprepared to do it when the time came. They better figure it out soon.
The hero of the American Left wrote last week about the vastly increased number of personnel and officials President Obama has filled his administration with, specifically his White House Staff. These "changes to the management structure of the White House…will likely undermine his stated aims and create a more centralized and possibly incoherent policy process."
In one example of this, the President has apparently mastered the recipe for confusion and tension in his appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, Sen. George Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East, and Richard Holbrooke as the same to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Each of these personages are points of accomplishment and power in their own right who have been lumped together with concurring jurisdictions in the same area. Almost inevitably this will entail jealous turf wars for influence and authority that will leave the President directly in the cross-fire, in much the same manner as his predecessor was caught between the turf wars of Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld.
This tack is in keeping with the ideas the Left has of governance. To manage affairs you install as many managers as possible in a central point. These are either in the form of individuals ("czars") and/or offices, commissions, and agencies (bureaucracy). These entities are the brains in their fields; usually highly educated and experienced officials who are respected by other officials in the central government and trusted to knowledgeably manage a specific set of affairs from their central perch. (It's basically a system of reciprocal self-emolument). This conception of enlightened government runs all the way back in history to the Enlightenment ideology of the philosophѐs in the French Revolution. Messrs. Mitchell and Holbrooke are manifestations of it in the Obama Administration; Mr. Rove details even more in his piece. Congressional Democrats' pleas for a "car czar" to manage the bailout of Detroit were another, as was the creation of the Iraq Study Group. The ultimate example is the infinite number of cabinet departments and federal agencies that have malignantly developed within the federal government (and state governments too) over the decades.
And as Rove points out, it's all a cluttered mess of redundancy, excess, and confusion. It breeds jealousies, petty rivalries and, all too often, slow, stilted, unresponsive action. It's scarcely a wonder that the ship of state rarely ever gets anywhere when so many hands are on the helm pulling it in opposite directions. It is nothing but a big mass that is completely unwieldy, as are the areas it presumes to be able to manage effectively for that matter.
Regrettably, President Obama has deliberately permitted this sorry state of affairs to metastasize within his own White House and administration, almost inevitably guaranteeing its follies will metastasize as well. To respond to the sudden challenges that always pop up – especially in times like these – the President should have a more streamlined structure in place, one capable of rapid and effective response. This current iteration doesn't look to be it.
