As quoted by Steven Hayward in The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980, political philosopher Michael Oakeshott once wrote that “politics is an activity unsuited to the young,” because:

Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands—unless it be a cricket bat. … Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own.

Perhaps that’s one explanation why so many liberals, as they get up in years, have both a surprising nostalgia for the past, and a “you kids get off my lawn” crankiness about contemporary society. This, despite that fact that liberalism, or progressivism, or simply the left, has been the dominant political philosophy – at least in Washington, academia and the media – for the last 75 years or so. Here are but a few examples we’ve rounded up of this trend in action. Back in November, a brief profile of a then-new biography of Kurt Vonnegut at NPR was titled, “Kurt Vonnegut Was Not A Happy Man. ‘So It Goes:’”

Vonnegut’s public persona was often at odds with the actual man. “He read the signs of what was happening in the country,” Shields says, “and he realized that he was going to have to be a lot hipper than a nearly 50-year-old dad in a rumpled cardigan to be a good match with what he was writing about.”

As a former public relations man for General Electric, Vonnegut knew how to construct an image, a public version of himself who readers could believe had written books like Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions.

“I don’t mean to persuade anybody that Kurt was a cynic,” Shields says. “Just the opposite.” But Vonnegut was more of a reactionary than a radical, someone who showed up for a meeting with the band Jefferson Airplane dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip shoes. Someone who was deeply scarred by his experiences, and longed for the older, gentler America of his pre-war childhood.

As Kyle Smith noted at the time:

I think when you’re famous people call you “irascible,” but if not, you’re just a jerk. Also in the new biography of him: Vonnegut carefully constructed his hip image, using lessons he learned as a PR man for G.E. (Did Vonnegut and Reagan overlap there at all? Seems like they must have.)

In addition to the professional similarity with the Gipper, the late Vonnegut shared a love of American nostalgia with a much more unlikely source – someone, like Vonnegut, also deeply unhappy with contemporary America:

Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, [Paul] Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the ­middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”

Krugman remembers Merrick in these terms, as a place that provoked in him “amazingly little alienation.” “All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.” The Krugmans lived in a less lush part of Merrick, full of small ranch ­houses each containing the promise of social ascent. “I remember there was often a typical conversational thing about how well the plumbers—basically the unionized blue-collar occupations—were doing, as opposed to white-collar middle managers like my father.”

In his review of Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, Bruce Bawer noted perceptively that the Woodman, like Krugman is also another New York arch-liberal at odds with contemporary society:

While Allen likes to think of himself as a standard-issue Manhattan liberal, the sensibility of his films (whether he realizes it or not) is largely conservative.  Over and over he makes it clear that he despises pretty much everything that came out of the 1960s, and one after another of his films is an exercise in cultural nostalgia for the pre-Sixties world.   His pictures’ musical scores testify to his obsession with the Great American Songbook.  (Recall, for example, the sequence in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Dianne Wiest takes him to see a punk rock band that he hates, joking that “after they sing, they’re gonna take hostages” – after which, in order to give her a taste of “something nice,” he takes her to the Carlyle to hear Bobby Short perform Cole Porter.)  Just as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days are love letters to the 1930s and 40s – and both very charming ones, at that – Midnight in Paris is a love letter to the 1920s.

Nostalgia for the mid-century past isn’t just rooted to liberals on this side of the Atlantic, of course. “London is no longer an English city, says John Cleese. Is he right?” Ed West (no relation) of the Telegraph asked last year:

Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a “middle-class culture” and the emergence of a “yob culture”.

He said: “There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it’s a yob culture. The values are so strange.”

He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt “English”.

“London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath,” he said. “That’s how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”

More after the page break.

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In “The Gold Violin,” a second season episode of Mad Men, there’s a classic scene where Don has to deal with a pair of young writers that have been foisted upon him by Duck Phillips, his bete noir, in the hopes of attracting a younger, hipper demographic for a coffee company that Sterling Cooper is pitching to. (Perhaps the episode should have been titled 1,000,000 Years Before Starbucks.) In an effort to explain themselves to Don, the head of the tyro ad duo begins riffing in quasi-proto-hipster jazz speak-style riffs:

Smitty: I think it’s pretty clear why we’re here. You want to know how our generation feels. So! I get this letter from my friend back in Michigan. He’s still in school, man, and it’s got this – I don’t know – 60-page rant in it. So, dig it!

Smitty starts to read the Port Huron Statement: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance, by power in uniqueness, rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”

Don: That’s a beautiful sentiment. Does your friend know what you do for a living?

Smitty: Yeah, there was a sh*tty note with it. But this whole concept, is deeeeep.

Don: Student for a Democratic Society. That’s a hell of a focus group.

Kurt, Smitty’s sidekick: It is…what it is.

Don (while shooting off a withering look): It’s idealistic – that’s nice.

Smitty: Your generation wants to talk about that newly designed can or the premium beans. But we don’t want to be told what we should do or how we should act. We just want to be.

Flash-forward to 2012. James Lileks asks,“Who’s up for a manifesto?”

 The Atlantic posted a Letter to Old People from the Web Generation today, the work of a young Polish chap. I’m writing this only because it was given some traffic by the Atlantic, and it’ll probably be held up as a brave thing the old, frightened media types will have to understand.

He begins with the usual mistake: young people are different than ANYONE ELSE and maybe your problem, pops, is that you don’t get it. You’re square. L-7. Herbert.

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it.

Heavy, man. But perhaps Dick Clark said it best in 1967 — with a bitchin’ backing track, to boot.

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To paraphrase Ace, Harry Truman, he of the famous “The Buck Stops Here” motto, wept:

President Obama does not “accept responsibility” for high gas prices, his spokesman indicated today, arguing that Obama has done everything he could to bring down the price of oil and blaming the high gas prices on oil price increases caused by global factors.

“The president accepts the responsibility that he identified the next president should accept, back in 2008, which is the need to develop a comprehensive energy policy,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today when asked if Obama “accept[s] responsibility” for the high price of oil and gas. “If you’re suggesting that there is responsibility for a rise in the global price of oil, it’s certainly not because of anything he hasn’t done to expand domestic oil and gas production,” Carney added.

Well, that’s one way not to put it.

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Ruminating on the 500th episode of The Simpsons, in his latest Bleat, James Lileks writes:

I watched the 500th Simpsons last night, because it was the 500th episode. I suspect many tuned in, just to see what they’d do, or to have their suspicions reconfirmed, or see if Barney is drinking again. It made me nostalgic for the 90s, and I’m never nostalgic for the 90s.

(ten minutes thinking about the 90s)

It’s odd. The 90s were interesting. If there was a decade in my life I’d like to replay, that would be the one. The reason I have no nostalgia of the sorts you get for your teens and twenties is this: I was divorced from popular music. Not from popular culture, just the music. Early on in the 90s a switch flipped, and everything on the radio started to sound annoying or irrelevant, full of convictions I didn’t share. When that happens, memories lose their soundtracks. Maybe that’s it.

What were the sounds of the 90s? Here. I like quite a few. I remember listening to “All I Wanna Do” while watching the sun go down over Santa Monica Boulevard, which was a nice moment. I only remember “Buddy Holly” because the video came with a computer I bought. Otherwise, lots of songs whose artist had a made-up name with a hyphen, and “featured” two or three people of whom I was unaware.

I had the same reaction in the early 1990s to pop music’s change in tone as James did, but I attributed it to hunkering down in the business world, and turning my back for a time on a pop culture that I was previously saturated in. But in retrospect, while pop music was headed towards a blind alley back then, the movie industry had a pretty good run in the 1990s. On my shelves of DVDs and a few aging laser discs include the following titles from that era:

• Goodfellas
• The Crow
• Terminator 2
• Reservoir Dogs
• JFK
• The Fugitive
• True Lies
• Groundhog Day
• Apollo 13
• Pulp Fiction
• Schindler’s List
• Star Trek: First Contact
• Toy Story
• Austin Powers
• Starship Troopers
• Men In Black
• Dark City
• The Matrix

Yes, there’s plenty of nihilism in there, and particularly in the case of JFK, plenty of Manchurian Candidate-level paranoia. But all in all, the 1990s was a pretty good decade for popcorn-style summer movies and entertainment, and Hollywood and movie theater owners were rewarded accordingly. In 1997′s Air Force One, Hollywood asked for a president (played by Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford) who was a Vietnam-era veteran who knew his way around the business end of a jet airplane, and took no guff from terrorists. Two years later, George Clooney made Three Kings, in which he called out George H.W. Bush for not removing Saddam Hussein and finishing the job in Iraq.

Be careful what you wish for…

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“Left’s Attempt At Their Own ClimateGate Based on Forged Document?”, as pondered by Ace of Spades:

Megan McArdle was, to my knowledge, the first to raise red flags over the authenticity of documents from the Heartland Institute, supposedly showing them acting all evil and stuff about the climate.

Most of the documents are real and are fairly bland. But one memo is in dispute. This memo, by McArdle’s reading, seems written not from the point of view of a climate change skeptic — who would naturally see himself as the good guy — but from the point of view of a climate change zealot impersonating a climate change skeptic — and is thus written, oddly, as if the person doing the writing believes himself to be a bad guy.

(My own take: I skipped this because I think the Likely Forged Document itself is pretty bland, too. If this is an attempt at a takedown, it seems pretty subtle to me. But subsequent events seem to show that Megan McArdle was likely right and my lack of interest was likely wrong.)

5. The worldview is different. In my experience, climate skeptics see themselves as a beleaguered minority fighting for truth and justice against the powerful, and nearly monolithic, forces of the establishment. They are David, to the climate scientists’ Goliaths. This is basically what the authenticated documents sound like.The memo, by contrast, uses more negative language about the efforts it’s describing, while trying to sound like they think it’s positive. It’s like the opposition political manifestos found in novels written by stolid ideologues; they can never quite bear (or lack the imagination) to let the villains have a good argument. Switch the names, and the memo could have been a page ripped out of State of Fear or Atlas Shrugged.

Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.

McArdle’s theory is that the real information (bland stuff about donors) was in fact obtained by some lefty, but it wasn’t juicy enough. So someone faked up a Memo, basically a digest of the information in the other documents (or through Google), but wrote about that information in the most negative way possible, in order to juice up a pretty weak leak.

Stacy McCain adds, “In Apologizing for Global Warming Hoax, Peter Gleick Blames His Victims”:

The Heartland Institute was victimized by global warming fanatics who published stolen documents and at least one forged document in their attempts to portray the Institute as dishonest.

One of the central figures in this criminal hoax was Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, who uses the Huffington Post to offer an excuse:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

“It’s not my fault!” The end justify the means: The alleged evil of their opponents excuses any shoddy smear Gleick and his allies may perpetrate against them. And despite their admitted amorality, they wonder why we doubt their claims to “science”?

If it turns out that Gleick had a 2012 RatherGate moment, it wouldn’t be the first time that radical environmentalism has cooked the books, as we’ll discuss on the following page.

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Back in 2001, actor Stanley Tucci told Variety magazine that HBO has “the biggest balls in the business.” Maybe so back then. These days? Not so much. As Bryon York asks in the Washington Examiner, why did HBO focus on only one-half of the best-selling look at the 2008 presidential election, Game Change, written by liberal political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin? As York writes, “The other half would have made a great movie:”

And then there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What a great role the fiery preacher from Chicago would have made! “Game Change” — the book — reported that Obama and his top aides knew all along that Wright would be a problem, and yet did nothing about it until Wright’s “Goddamn America” sermon burst into the news.

The alternate “Game Change” could have featured top Clinton aide Harold Ickes’ suggestion that the campaign hire a private investigator to probe Obama’s connections to Wright. “This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty f–king years,” Ickes is quoted in the book as saying. “If you really want to take him down, let’s take him f–king down.” Screenwriter Danny Strong — he also worked on “Recount” — couldn’t have written it better himself.

The movie also could have focused on Hillary Clinton’s anger at Obama’s ability to escape the Wright mess unscathed. “Just imagine, just for fun, if my pastor from Arkansas said the kind of things his pastor said,” Clinton told aides, according to the book. “I’m just saying. Just imagine. This race would be over.”

Finally, the alternate “Game Change” could have focused on top Clinton strategist Mark Penn, the man who wrote campaign memos questioning Obama’s American identity. “Obama’s roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” Penn wrote, before concluding: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

It could have been an extraordinary look at the troubling issue of race playing out inside a party that takes pride in its civil rights record. The alternate “Game Change” could have been a complex picture of complex people in a complex situation.

And most of all, the alternate “Game Change” would have provided insights into the man who became president of the United States.

Instead, as York notes, “HBO decided to focus on an out-of-office, former half-term governor of Alaska who was on the losing ticket in the 2008 election and isn’t running for anything today.” Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again.

In the last five years, Hollywood and TV networks have gotten the vapors over mini-series involving the Kennedys of a half-century ago, and the Clinton administration’s decisions (and the lack thereof) in fighting Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s. How could they suddenly grow a pair of balls sufficient to properly cover both sides of a story as recent as 2008?

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2008 — The Wright-Free Zone is built:

2009 — CNN anchor reminds viewers that “it’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging,” and in-field reporter berates a tea partier for his rejection of Obama’s (read the taxpayers’) stimulus funds.

2010 — Let the viewers eat cake! Baking a cake on-air to promote the “success” of the “Stimulus” program:

2012 — “CNN’s Piers Morgan and Soledad O’Brien ‘Obama Bump’ Roberta Flack at Whitney Houston Funeral:”

Of course, the network is totally objective — just ask any of their journalists the next time you Obama-bump into them.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

“What Changes Will We Make After the Giffords Shooting?”

– Alec Baldwin, January 15th, 2011, at the Huffington Post.

“Alec Baldwin Goes Nuts on Twitter After Davis Execution: Attacks Cheney, Rumsfeld and Michelle Malkin.”

– Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters, September 22nd 2011.

Flash-forward to December 7th, 2011, a date which will live in irony:

As Greg Pollowitz writes, “Alec Baldwin Kicked Off Flight for Acting Like . . . Alec Baldwin:”

And after this, does Baldwin apologize? Nope. He feels the need to slime the flight attendant:

#theresalwaysunited Last flight w American. Where retired Catholic school gym teachers from the 1950′s find jobs as flight attendants.

Keep in mind this is the same jackass who showed up at Occupy Wall Street to declare his support for the “99%.” Unemployed losers in tents get his appreciation. A hard-working flight attendant gets treated like crap.

And here endeth today’s lesson on liberal hypocrisy.

At the risk of quoting one the three foot high characters in the Star Wars series who isn’t an Ewok, no, there is another.

And flash-forward again to yesterday:

As John Nolte wrote yesterday at Andrew’s Big Hollywood site:

While we can appreciate how thesaurusly hard Baldwin worked to impress with his tweet, I think we can all agree that Breitbart proved that truth combined with simplicity still cuts the deepest. [Indeed -- Ed.]

There’s a lesson here: People who berate their daughters and working class airline personnel might want to ease up on the rock throwing.

Though to be fair, it does provide us with at least one definitive answer to the TV performer’s query from a year ago.

Related: “After Tucson, Will Media Tone It Down?”

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From Brian Lamb’s 2000 C-Span Booknotes interview with Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s brother) concerning his then-new book, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana:

BRIAN LAMB: One of the things in your book, you have as a subtitle, “From Winston Churchill to Princess Di”–or Princess Diana. Why did you bracket this book between Winston Churchill’s death and Princess Di’s death?

PETER HITCHENS: The crucial chapter and really the point around which the whole book revolves is the one which compares the two funerals of Winston Churchill in 1965 and Princess Diana. And the difference between them seems to me to sum up very eloquently the way in which the country has changed; the difference in the self-discipline of the people and their attitudes, the way in which the two things were …(unintelligible). It’s obviously two very different kinds of people, but here were two funerals in London of revered and much-loved figures. And they were utterly different, as if they’d taken place in different countries, and, in fact, they had taken place in different countries. The Britain of Princess Diana was an utterly foreign place to the Britain of Winston Churchill. And it seemed to me to be a good starting point.

This actually came to me during the bizarre weeks after Princess Diana’s death, when voicing any kind of criticism of the hysteria was pretty much taboo. And I did the sort of thing that Chinese dissidents used to do in the days of Mao Tse-tung. If they wanted to write about a political controversy, they’d actually write about one that had taken place in some dynasty 3,000 or 4,000 years before which they felt paralleled it. And I wrote about Winston Churchill’s funeral to make the points that it had been so different. And everybody got the message.

LAMB: What were the differences?

Mr. HITCHENS: The differences are in–first of all, in the open showing of emotion. Now some people might say let it all hang out, show exactly what you feel. The trouble is that, in the case of British people, if they let it all hang out, quite a lot of what they let hang out isn’t very nice. We are a pretty bloodthirsty and violent lot, especially when we get outside out own borders and start misbehaving. And we need to restrain ourselves. And one of the reasons we’ve been so peaceful for so long is that we have. That was very much in evidence at the Churchill funeral and very much less in evidence at the Diana funeral when people applauded, for heaven’s sake, at a funeral, which is completely un-English, whereas in Churchill’s time, people queueing up to file past his coffin might occasionally dash a tear away from an eye and consider that to be slightly embarrassing. That’s one difference.

And the other differences were really in the whole shape and face of the country. Britain in 1965 was still a serious country, still scarred by what was seen by most people as a recent war, still very much a country living in the afterglow of imperial greatness, also quite a lot poorer and, in some ways, the better for it in that the self-indulgence which comes with affluence hadn’t really begun to take hold. And this whole feeling of a country self-disciplined for a serious purpose as opposed to a frivolous country weeping and wailing about a princess who was really a glorified film star with a crown on her head.

Flash-forward to 12 years later in the Colonies, where New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie has ordered the flags to fly at half-staff in honor of Whitney Houston. Like Peter Hitchens in the late 1990s, Jazz Shaw of Hot Air is not amused:

There’s no sense sugar coating this, so let’s get straight to it. Whitney Houston was not unknown to me, though I never saw the movie “The Bodyguard.” She had one heck of a set of pipes. But at the same time, she wasn’t kidnapped and murdered by terrorists. She died under some set of circumstances which the police are not yet even listing as suspicious. She had a troubled marriage and a history of problems with drugs and alcohol. Neither of these things make her any better or worse than the rest of us, though it is still tragic when someone passes at such a young age.

Lowering the flags for her? She was a singer. As the WCHS report notes, after researching previous executive orders, the flags were not lowered for Frank Sinatra. In fact, the first “celebrity” person (as opposed to military or elected leaders) for whom the flags were lowered was Clarence Clemons, and that was done by Christie also. (For the record, I’m a HUGE fan of The Boss and the Big Man, but never heard that he had lowered the flags for Clemons, which I would have objected to as well.)

Lowering the flags for national disasters, etc. is fine. But for this? Whitney Houston was a wealthy woman who achieved fantastic success in the field of opportunity which is America. She was a great singer. She died in a tragic fashion as far too many Americans do. But this is not a national tragedy.

This is getting far too much like the recent decision to name a US Navy warship after Gabby Giffords. I’ve been a huge supporter of her tremendous effort to come back after that horrific attack, but naming a ship after her? We have a massive list of dead Marines who are in line first. I’m just saying we need to keep our priorities in order.

The England of 1965, the date of Churchill’s death, was already in decline, having surrendered most of its colonies in the aftermath of World War II, and had already begun the process of replacing empire building with the narcotic of pop culture. Over the next few decades, it would  jump from the happy, cheerful nihilism of the Swinging London of the mid-1960s, to the grim, gobbing nihilism of punk rock a decade later, to the maudlin demise of Princess Diana, as Hitchens wrote above. What does America’s recent pop culture trifecta — the election of a president who struck rock star poses in 2008, and the Diana-style death cults in the wake of first Michael Jackson and now Whitney Houston portend for our own future. Or the lack thereof?

Related: “Whitney Houston’s fans will be given a virtual front-row seat for what’s shaping up to be a star-studded funeral,” New York’s NBC affiliate breathlessly observes. “Houston’s publicist, Kristen Foster, announced Wednesday that The Associated Press will be allowed a camera at Saturday’s private service at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, NJ,” and that it will be streamed live online.

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Every generation gets the media it deserves. In the 1950s, there was Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, decades before the conspiracy theories kicked in. Today’s media? Goodnight and good luck, indeed. First up, the generally left-leaning Media Bistro finally calls Keith Olbermann’s number:

When Big Journalism Contributor Lee Stranahan complied all the rape and sexual assault stories about Occupy in one post for the world to see, you’d think that would’ve been the end of it. But Olbermann’s ego won’t allow anyone to have the last word on anything, so he “debunked” each one, one by one.

Unfortunately for Keith, the Breitbart websites are not the silent, wallflower types even if their writing is sometimes abominable.

In his “debunking,” Olbermann changed his tune from “No Occupy rapes” to “Because almost none of the allegations are of rape and most of this list are duplicated…” to “2 stories duplicated” to “Occupy MEMBERS were victims.” That’s quite a journey in just one day, especially without ever acknowledging his position completely changed.

Even still, where he ended up, that the victims and not the perpetrators were the only Occupy people involved in these rapes and sexual assaults, isn’t the truth. After Olbermann’s “debunking, Stranahan was back a few hours later with a section by section debunking of what Olbermann said. Keith then went silent, maybe to bed, maybe to play with his baseball cards, or maybe to Stuart Smalley in the mirror to calm his nerves.

Hey, say what you will about the man behind Stuart Smalley; while Olbermann’s inability to play well with others during recess has driven him further and further into the bowels of cable media (from ESPN to MSNBC to CurrentTV aren’t exactly steps upward on the ol’ CV), Al Franken’s particular brand of idiocy took him from Saturday Night Live to the halls of the U.S. Senate. From that perspective, Al did OK playing a pretend journalist on “Weekend Update.”

And speaking of pretend journalists, Jon Stewart, dubbed “the most trusted man in America” and “the most-respected journalist in America” by his fellow Obama worshipers in the MSM* has a moment of clarity, regarding a fellow postmodern poseur. Hey Rube!, as the Professor would say:

”I don’t know if he’s going to re-elect us. I worry about Obama. … I get the sense with Obama, he doesn’t really like us all that much. He’s kind of had his fill.

But it’s just a moment, before Jon quickly retreats to the warm innervating afterglow of 2008:

He’s the only president I’ve ever seen who begins each press conference with a heavy sigh. … [Bush] was the kid in sixth grade who gave the book report about a book he clearly hadn’t read. … Obama is the kid who has read the book in first grade and he can’t believe you idiots are just getting around to it.”

Well, that’s what he wants you to think, but until he actually releases his grades (among the many known-unknowns of BO’s bio), why should we believe he’s smarter than George W. Bush — who after all is smarter than Obama’s 2004 media-created prototype?

To paraphrase a certain fictional starship captain** I’m laughing (to keep from crying) at the results of the superior intellect:

Besides, if it’s brainpower you want, Obama’s got plenty just down the hall:

* Which tells you all you need to know about the “real” journalists in the MSM. Not that there are many left.

** As opposed to the non-fictional starship captains…

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In the London Telegraph, Tim Stanley goes all Alinsky upside Sean Penn’s sorry old spicoli:

Sean Penn pretends to be a friend of the developing world, but really he is not. To be fair, his recent call for the Falkland Islands to be returned to Argentina was an admirable strike against capitalist imperialism. Moreover, I and the entire North Korean press corps cheered him on when he flew to Iraq to parley with Saddam Hussein, or when he spoke about Hugo Chavez in such glowing terms. But there have always been hints that his sympathy isn’t really with the workers at all. Aside from that time that he spent 32 days in prison for hitting an extra, his net worth of an estimated $150 million is a bit of a giveaway.

His continued occupation of Malibu is an unacceptable mockery of national self-determination. The Mexicans owned that stretch of real estate well into the early 19th century and it was stolen by the Americans in a naked act of imperialist aggression. America’s claim over Malibu is tenuous and rooted in patriarchy. Sean Penn’s house is a mocking reminder of that brute chauvinism, with its high white walls and spacious interiors. Its swimming pool is an insult to the honour of the Mexican people.

Now, I know that some will say that the Mexicans never actually lived on Sean Penn’s estate. But how many of them have worked there? Think of the maids, the cleaners, the butlers, the pool boys, the cooks, the gardeners. Think of the sweat that has dripped pouring Martinis, or the blood that was spilt pruning the roses. Truly, Sean Penn’s estate is part of Aztlan.

Heh. Roger Waters’ last album with Pink Floyd was The Final Cut, released in 1983. It was a beautifully recorded but thoroughly depressing affair, built around Water’s petulant rage against Margaret Thatcher for defending the Falklands. Presumably though, were someone to steal Waters’ Ferrari, or squat in his mansion, he’d think nothing of calling the cops, even though the odds are extremely high they’d use violence in recovering Waters’ property and bringing the thieves to justice. Similarly, he’d likely sic his lawyers on a record company executive who attempted to come between he and his royalty checks. (According to some press reports, Waters had no qualms about threatening his fellow bandmates when they reconstituted Pink Floyd without him later in the 1980s.)

Similarly, why shouldn’t England as a nation defend their property?

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As Thomas Sowell writes in “The ‘Progressive’ Legacy,” “Obama’s ‘new’ vision is borrowed from an earlier age:”

Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States, but his doctrine is by no means unique. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished 100 years ago.

Many of the trends, problems, and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.

The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.

What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common — and what attracts some of today’s Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to be following in their footsteps — was a vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for the Constitution of the United States.

Like other Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business. In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and his own business ventures lost money.

“In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics” — what a marvelous turn of phrase. And as Sowell concludes regarding another president with a lacuna of economic common sense, “Barack Obama’s rhetoric of ‘change’ is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated 100 years ago.”

Think of it as “Barack to the Future.”

Of course, Wilson and both Roosevelt had the advantage of getting there first, and expanding a then-small government. Today, after a century of unending bloat, the left is now a series of competing special interest groups, often working at cross-purposes with each other, all vying, hat-in-hand for their president’s attention and the taxpayers’ money. Just as the Keystone pipeline pitted unions (who’d like more jobs) against radical environmentalists (who in the Rousseauian heart of hearts would like to see all industrial production everywhere end, as long as they can keep NPR and their local Starbucks), as the Anchoress writes,  “Obama Has Stranded the Catholic Left:”

But Obama’s move on Friday wasn’t about nuance; it was about destroying the surprising unity of the “Catholic Right” and the “Catholic Left” on this issue; it was about dividing and conquering. In a deeply cynical move, Obama used Sister Carol Keehan to foment that division; he needed her credibility to reassure the Catholic Left that it could prefer unity with his administration over unity with the church.

His punch was off. Possibly he hadn’t anticipated a block to guard the possession of rights, which are not his to dole out as he sees fit. He seems not to realize, even now–as his administration muddies up the story with talk of costs and savings–that his Catholic allies’ rejection of his HHS Mandate wasn’t about contraception or sterilization, nor could their approval be regained with a skillful uppercut to the men in the miters. What the HHS Mandate has revealed is that the preservation of the freedom of religion–of the churches rights to be who and what they are and to exercise their missions–is worth going to the mat for, no matter which corner you’re coming from.

QED.

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“‘The history of philosophy,’ Jean-François Revel observed in The Flight from Truth (1991), ‘can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.’”

In addition to the books I linked to yesterday, another title arrived while I was in New Jersey last week — the galleys for my PJM colleague Roger Kimball’s forthcoming book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, due out the end of May, which presumably fleshes out the article that Roger wrote with the same title for the New Criterion:

“The history of philosophy,” Jean-François Revel observed in The Flight from Truth (1991), “can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.” That fight has escaped from the parlors of professional sceptics and has increasingly become the moral coin of the realm. As Anthony Daniels observed, it is now routine for academics and intellectuals to use “all the instruments of an exaggerated scepticism … not to find truth but to destroy traditions, customs, institutions, and confidence in the worth of civilization itself.” The most basic suppositions and distinctions suddenly crumble, like the acidic pages of a poorly made book, eaten away from within. “A rebours” becomes the rallying cry of the anti-cultural cultural elite. Culture degenerates from being a cultura animi to a corruptio animi.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may be a second-rate novel, but it has turned out to have been first-rate prognostication. Published in 1932, it touches everywhere on twenty-first-century anxieties. Perhaps the aspect of Huxley’s dystopian—what to call it: fable? prophecy? admonition?—that is most frequently adduced is its vision of a society that has perfected what we have come to call genetic engineering. It is a world in which reproduction has been entirely handed over to the experts. The word “parents” no longer describes a loving moral commitment but only an attenuated biological datum. Babies are not born but designed according to exacting specifications and “decanted” at sanitary depots like The Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre with which the book opens.

As with all efforts to picture future technology, Huxley’s description of the equipment and procedures employed at the hatchery seems almost charmingly antiquated, like a space ship imagined by Jules Verne. But Huxley’s portrait of the human toll of human ingenuity is very up-to-date.

Indeed, we have not—not quite, not yet—caught up with the situation he describes. We do not—not quite, not yet—inhabit a world where “mother” and “monogamy” are blasphemous terms from which people have been conditioned to recoil in visceral revulsion. Maybe it will never come to that. (Though monogamy, of course, has long been high on the social and sexual revolutionary’s list of hated institutions.) Still, it is a nice question whether developments in reproductive technology will not soon make other aspects of Huxley’s fantasy a reality. Thinkers as different as Michel Foucault and Francis Fukuyama have pondered the advent of a “posthuman” future. Scientists busily manipulating DNA may prove them right. It is often suggested that what is most disturbing about Brave New World is its portrait of eugenics in action: its vision of humanity deliberately divided into genetically ordered castes, a few super-smart alpha-pluses down through a multitude of drone-like Epsilons who do the heavy lifting. Such deliberately instituted inequality offends our democratic sensibilities.

What is sometimes overlooked or downplayed is the possibility that the most disturbing aspect of the future Huxley pictured has less to do with eugenics than genetics. That is to say, perhaps what is centrally repellent about Huxley’s hatcheries is not that they codify inequality—nature already does that effectively—but that they exist at all. Are they not a textbook example of Promethean hubris in action?

In the seventeenth-century, Descartes predicted that his scientific method would make man “the master and possessor of nature”: are we not fast closing in on the technology that proves him right? And this raises another question. Is there a point at which scientific development can no longer be described, humanly, as progress? We know the benisons of technology; are we about to become more closely acquainted with its depredations? For example, if, as in Brave New World, we manage to bypass the “inconvenience” of human pregnancy altogether, should we do it? If—or rather when—that is possible, will it also be desirable? Well, why not? Why should a woman go through the discomfort and danger of pregnancy if a fetus could be safely incubated, or cloned, elsewhere? Wouldn’t motherhood by proxy be a good thing—the ultimate labor-saving device? Most readers will hesitate about saying yes. What does that tell us? Some readers will have no hesitation about saying yes; what does that tell us?

As Huxley saw, a world in which reproduction was “rationalized” and emancipated from love was also a world in which culture in the Arnoldian sense was not only otiose but dangerous. (This is also a sub-theme of that other great dystopian novel, 1984.) Culture has roots. It limns the future through its implications with the past. Moving the reader or spectator over the centuries, in Arendt’s phrase, the monuments of culture transcend the local imperatives of the present. They escape the obsolescence that fashion demands, the predictability that planning requires. They speak of love and hatred, honor and shame, beauty and courage and cowardice—permanent realities of the human situation in so far as it remains human.

While you’re waiting for Roger’s book to be published, the article itself is also well worth your time.

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While I was away in New Jersey for the past week and a half, several books came in for review. I’ll get to some of these in more detail in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime, and to be fair to the authors and publishers, I thought I’d do a Glenn Reynolds-style “In the Mail” style post with Amazon links to at least help get these titles into (further) circulation:

• Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, by Jay Nordlinger.
• The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg.
• Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray.
• American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

The last title dovetails nicely with my recent interview with Thomas Hibbs, the author of the newly updated Shows About Nothing, set at the corner of Hollywood and Nietzsche.

The books by Jonah and Jay Nordlinger are due out in the spring. The titles by Hibbs, Murray and Ratner-Rosenhagen have been out for a bit. If you’ve read them, please post your thoughts in the comments.

(Cross-posted at the Tatler.)

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“Remember when no one understood why ABC asked about contraception at the NH Republican debate?” William A. Jacobson writes, adding that Newt’s comeback (posted above) “was prophetic in hindsight:”

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds.

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

Disney-ABC in tight message coordination with Democrats? Heaven forfend.

At the Tatler, Clarice Feldman adds, “It’s time the RNC asks [Stephanopoulos] if he coordinated this with the White House directly or through its media shills like Media Matters.  And if he did or refuses to answer or to offer a credible explanation, ABC should be booted from further debate moderating privileges.

Why should the RNC grow a spine now?

Earlier: “CNN Host Asks If Initial Outrage Over Contraception Mandate was ‘Manufactured’ to Hurt Obama.” Can you spell projection, boys and girls?

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Near the end of his life, Osama Bin Laden gave up on his chosen profession, and advised his relatives to enter the 21st century, Walter Russell Mead writes:

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education?  The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young?  It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?

Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren.  “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said.  “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words.  The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

They’ll give up on jihad right around the same time that ClimateGate convinces the a different group of religious zealots to change their own destructive course. (QED)

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Richard Rushfield of Ricochet paints a damning portrait of a news channel twenty-odd (very odd) years past its prime, and riding on fumes. “Tonight, in its coverage of the death of Whitney Houston, CNN gave its viewers a horrible glimpse into the hollowness at its core:”

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “NBC’s Lauer to Obama: Can Mitt Romney ‘Identify With the Middle Class?’”

– Newsbusters, February 6th.

• “Sources connected to NBC tell TMZ … Lauer was done with Today and wanted out — but the word at the network is he will now re-sign if NBC ponies up way more than the $17 mil he’s currently making, “TMZ reported yesterday. “We’re told negotiations are now ongoing — but if NBC agrees … Lauer could score as much as $30 MILLION a year.”

Related: “Multimillionaire Chris Matthews: Is Mitt Romney ‘Just Too Damn Rich?’”  Matthews’ fortune is estimated at “$16 million with an annual salary of $5 million.”

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Forget six degrees of separation — CNN’s Roland Martin is separated by only one — very famous — person away from President Obama. During the 2008 NAACP speech by Obama’s infamous, presumably former spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Martin was namechecked, along with his fellow CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien (who dubbed Wright’s speech “a home run” on the air) as a “long-term friend” by Wright. Martin has also had friendly chats on CNN with Wright’s equally inflammatory colleague Father Michael Pfleger. But just as Obama threw Wright under the bus almost immediately after the aforementioned speech — with CNN quickly following his lead — when one of Martin’s Tweets hit the fan at the start of week, Martin discovered that everybody’s expendable in the MSM:

Roland Martin, tweeted on Sunday, walked it back Monday, chastened on Tuesday, suspended on Wednesday…

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. [Not to mention the rest of the country -- Ed] He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by.

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.

But a year ago, Martin himself was eager to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility in the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw not leading to his shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, in an editorial at CNN with the now ironic title, “After Tucson, will media tone it down?”

Note the first sentence in the quoted passage below:

If we are to embrace the notion of civility and humility in our discourse, that means not falling into our old habits. I was impressed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel, relayed to Russell Simmons’ GlobalGrind.com what he told his staff after the Tucson shootings: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Who knows if this edict will be photocopied and posted in the office of every Fox talk show host, and throughout its newsroom, to serve as a reminder to everyone when the nation moves further and further away from the shooting?

And he’s correct; those who vehemently oppose the views of Fox News and conservative radio hosts must also adhere to the president’s call for civility.

Maybe what we should all do is make “Remember Gabby and the Tucson 6″ buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, as a way to stop someone in his tracks who chooses to get out of control.

Live by political correctness, die by it as well — or at least go into broadcasting purgatory. Or as Michael Graham asks at the Boston Herald, “What do the Catholic Church, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and CNN’s Roland Martin all have in common? They’ve all just been given a lesson in liberal ‘tolerance:’”

The most confused victim of the New Tolerance has to be CNN’s Roland Martin. All he did was send a tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”For reasons I don’t understand, this makes Martin a homophobe. GLAAD demanded he be pulled off the air, and his lame joke was labeled “the equivalent of cheerleading for violence against gays” in The Washington Post.

Now this isn’t David Duke. It’s Roland Martin — one of the New Tolerance thugs who has long played the race card in service of the liberal agenda.

If the left is willing to throw him under the bus, nobody is safe. Forget “Yes We Can!” Today it’s “You’ve Been Warned.”

Considering Martin’s impeccably radical chic connections, like the supine Outer Party member Parsons when he winds up in 1984′s Ministry of Love for political re-education and/or a visit to Room 101, he must have been astonished to find himself a victim of the same forces of political correctness — and correction — he’s long since championed. But then, as P.J. Salvatore writes at Big Journalism, “Nobody Expects The Progressive Inquisition.”

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“Barbara Walters, Shameless Hypocrite: Hits Kennedy Mistress for Greed, Tells Her She Should Have Stayed Quiet,” Tim Graham writes at Newsbusters:

Almost four years ago, ABC’s Barbara Walters came out with her memoir Audition, using as its selling point a tale of her tawdry 1970s affair with married black Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.). Seldom has a TV personality been a more shameless public hypocrite than Walters was on Friday with former Kennedy mistress Mimi Alford during an interview on “The View.”

Walters battered Alford four times with the notion she was greedy, with four different outbursts like “She’ll make a lot of money!” (That one came in the introduction.) Walters asked Alford why she would hurt Caroline Kennedy and her family, and then assaulted her with the reverse idea, that she could have “saved” Monica Lewinsky from ridicule if she’d talked earlier. But mostly, she insisted the book “did not have to be written” and “You could have let it go!” [Video and MP3 at Newsbusters.]

It’s always a bit amazing for a journalist, who’s supposed to want to reveal secrets, to tell people they should shut up and not tell their story. It’s more amazing to tell someone not to write a tell-all memoir after you’ve already done so, with a ka-ching. Walters was probably signaling to Alford: “I’m famous, people want to know about my fascinating life. You’re a nobody, just trying to exploit a famous man’s aura for a few bucks.”

As an elite Northeast Corridor liberal journalist, Walters is required to take one for the team on a whole host of issues — from John Edwards (keep rockin’!) to the ACORN scandal to ClimateGate, which the New York Times famously tried to bury in 2009 with this sorry defense, the mirror image of their making their bones in the WaterGate era with the publication of the Pentagon Papers:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

To which Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard responded at the time, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published.”

But for Walters and many “journalists” on the left, silence at the appropriate time, in the cause of either advancing the Official Narrative or keeping the old legends preserved intact is an even greater reward.

Or course, as my PJM colleague Andrew Klavan has noted, “just shut up” has long been the motto of the left:

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