Shocked

In Casablanca, Captain Renault is "Shocked, Shocked!" to learn that gambling is taking place at Rick's American Cafe. In reality of course, that was probably the most famous ironic joke in the whole history of film. The whole world knew that there was gambling at Rick's, that what it was there for.

And such it is with politics. Everybody is sophisticated and world-weary. Everybody expects the backroom deals, the logrolling, the perk guarding. But despite all of this, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that some things truly are shocking. And the immigration bill currently before the Senate is one of them.

It's not especially shocking that the bill survived its first cloture attempt yesterday. For those who read the tea leaves for that particular episode, it was more or less expected. No, what's suprising for me is that that this bill, which is so singularly awful in so many unique ways, horribly unpopular with the people, just refuses to die. It was easier to kill Freddy Krueger.

A substantial number of commentators have claimed that this bill represents the death knell of the modern GOP coalition. To some extent, I take a contrarian view on that. President Bush will be out of office in a year and a half, and the Republicans need to do a great deal of repair work on their brand before the next Presidential election. This is the place to start. The President is hugely unpopular, and this is his least popular issue. If the Republicans can kill this bill, they can claim that they are the pro-security party, and open a great deal of common ground between themselves and the voters as a whole.

But still, my guess is the last chance for this GOP resurrection act is tomorrow. If the bill goes any further, there will be too many Republican fingerprints on it for that to be credible. And even if cloture does fail tomorrow, the anti-amnesty base of the party has to be able to exact some kind of retribution. The whole thing has gone too far to let the guilty get away scot-free. And what pompous blubbery targets they are as well: Voinovich, Graham, Trent Lott, McCain. If we can get some scalps, the GOP can recover its ability to credibly represent its prinicples to the American people.

Btw, I would have never guessed that I would ever feel sorry for Sen. Edward Kennedy. But I saw him for a few minutes on C-Span, and I pitied him nonetheless. He was old, rambling, distracted, incoherent. The passion would return to his bearing for a phrase or two and just as quickly go away. Such are the ravages of age I suppose. It's not that I want to kick him when he's down, but it's just amazing to me that the GOP Grand Bargaineers cut such a lousy deal when that's who was on the other side of the table.

Ron Paul

No one could be better-suited as an ideal candidate for Sullivan’s rhetorical pose as the Last of the Goldwaterites than Ron Paul, who is as genuinely libertarian and constitutionalist in reality as Sullivan pretends to be during one of his “fundamentalist”-induced panic attacks, yet you will not see someone like Sullivan (or anyone else in a similarly prominent position) lift a finger to advocate for Dr. Paul’s candidacy. Why? Because he is “not serious.” Of course, candidates can never be really “serious” until large numbers of people support them, so instead of complaining about Ron Paul’s candidacy antiwar, realist, small-government and constitutionalist conservatives might actually stop whining about how the movement and candidates have failed them and back the one person who has had the integrity and willingness to defend these positions when most of them were hiding or on the other side. - Daniel Larison

Daniel Larison has been working the Ron Paul candidacy as a hobbyhorse for a while now, unfortunately he also carries with it the typical "We wuz robbed" whingeing with it.

Truth be told, I don't think he'd neceesarily be that a President. If I had to make my own personal ranking with the Three Amigos leading in the polls, I'd put Romney first, then Paul, then McCain, then Rudy. But as Daniel knows yet still finds painful to acknowledge, the reason that his candidacy is languishing isn't because of lack of respect from the pundit class, but simpler than than. Nobody, proud or humble, supports him.

Note on fusionism

Fusionism is the idea that the Right in the United States is not a atomic entity, but essentially a coalition of groups of somewhat disparate motivation. In its original form, associated with former National Review editor Frank Meyer, there were three elements; anti-communists, economic conservatives, and traditionalists. This was essentially the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan some decades later, and carried the Republican party to majority or near-majority since.

Now with the Republican reverses in 2006 and dark outlook now, there is a great deal of speculation that the "fusionist" structure of the Republican coalition is going to be realigned, much of it plausible. The overall structure of our political culture is in greater flux now than I can ever recall, so it's very likely that certain things that have held together before will be shaken loose.

But when you look at the various sources of dissatisfaction on the contemporary right (paleocons, libertarians, crunchy cons, fiscally conservative green-eyeshade types), it's at least as likely to think that that traditionalist and economic conservatives should unite against the mainstream Republican establishment as it is to think that they should split apart.

This is ridiculous

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzgxMjNlMWMzNzQ1NjlhMWI5YzNiYTM5YzdmZDdiNTQ=

This piece is salutary in that the contemporary Republican party seems to want to reincarnate itself as Alfred E. Newman. Well they ought to worry, becuase they are in very real danger of being rendered into Tory-style irrelevance. It's very difficult to overemphasize the straits the GOP has wandered into.

Nonetheless Mr. Bartlett has done it. First of all, it is a very dubious proposition that Mrs. Clinton is any kind of conservative, even relative to the other Democratic Presidential contenders. It's very plausible that she will be elected President and if she is, we'll hope for the best, but let's get real. It's not just that Hillary has walked in the circles of the hard Left for the whole of her adult life. It's not just that she has essentially had no career outside of being a proconsul for the Nanny State, though those would be bad enough. But in addition to that, ever since the health care plan debacle, all of her political maneuvers have been very carefully orchestrated for political positioning without much if any regard for what she truly believes in. Frankly she has done this for so long I don't think she knows herself what she truly believes, even if she were willing to tell you.

It's also a trope of political parties that have fallen out of favor that they try to return to favor by embracing things that are even less popular than they are. In Mrs. Clinton's case, I wonder if Mr. Bartlett is aware that there's a fairly well-known poll out that says that something like 48% of the voters won't vote for her under any circumstances.

Finally, no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, the Republican priorities in the next election cycle are clear. Win the Presidency and/or Congress, and if that isn't possible then to rehabilitate the GOP brand. The GOP needs to put aside distractions and penny ante crap, and demonstrate independently of George W. Bush, what it's willing to go to the mattresses for. When push comes to shove, I suspect it's a pretty small list: low taxes, abortion (and judges), immigration, the War on Terror. Furthermore, all of these issues are more popular than the GOP right now (even Iraq), so the Republicans have nothing to lose by embracing them.

Things are bleak at the moment, but some perspective is in order. We have had a President Bush before, and Republican credibility was at a low end then too. But he left the scene, and the party recovered. The current President Bush has hurt the party a great deal. But the damage will won't be permanent, unless those of us who are left are unwilling to stand up for what we believe in. And if that is what happens, we can only blame ourselves.

Ramesh on Fred

"But a lot of conservatives have been telling themselves that Republicans lost the election because they were insufficiently committed to conservative orthodoxy: that if they had just eschewed pork and prescription-drug benefits, the voters would have been kinder to them. It is a comforting theory with almost no basis in fact." - Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh writes an interesting article on Fred, most of which I agree with. I might get back to it later, but I wanted to touch on this a little bit, becuase I am one of the conservatives who believes this, at least to the extent that the GOP could have mitigated some of the damage of last year's election and in any case would be in much better shape than they are right now. Not necessarily because the libertarian hordes would tip the balance over the GOP, but a series of more subtle reasons.

First of all, political parties are expected to represent certain established issues and groups of people. They are charged to defend those interests in the political process, they are charged to advocate for their issues in the conversation at large. But, the attention of the public square is a finite thing, and any one political party will only have a fraction of that even. Whatever constituencies the GOP represents, pro-lifers, tax cutters, gun owners, they were all being crowded out because, in the public mind, the Republican Congress was associated with Jack Abramoff and the Bridge To Nowhere.

Second, I think we underestimate the degree to which the political fates are determined by issues of character and personality rather than policy. You would think it wouldn't be the case in a society as celebrity-obsessed as ours, but nonetheless that's the way it seems to me. Especially in a comment such as Ramesh's above. In various circumstances, you can vote for a political figure that you disagree with, or that you don't like. But it is very difficult to support someone you have contempt for. And the GOP's sins of corruption and mismanagement of the public purse has earned them a substantial measure of contempt that will be very difficult to erase.

Finally, there's a third reason that's sort of halfway between the first two. Politics is not just determined by the erstwhile personal relationship between the politicians and the voters, but also by the personal relationships among the voters themselves. Every political movement depends on the people at the grass roots level to advocate for it. And not necessarily in an organized way either, but also between friends over beer or as acquaintances sharing a bus ride. An accountant in Wichita might feel in his gut that the Republican party is the best hope for America, but if the political class is Washington is completely unaccountable, he won't be able to communicate that to his neighbor, and the other team wins by default.

Maybe we can call him Paleocon Demigod instead

"For the past few months, while he has virtually been crowned Antiwar Republican Demigod by certain enthusiasts, I have complained that Chuck Hagel said a lot of promising-sounding things but never actually did anything."
- Daniel Larison

Now you tell us

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20070425-110212-8486r.htm

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Sam Brownback said yesterday he no longer supports the immigration overhaul bill that he helped pass in the Senate.
"I would not vote for the same bill," Mr. Brownback told reporters yesterday morning, saying that after the bill passed the Senate he had a chance to study its effects and decided it led to too much immigration.

Better late than never I suppose, but why now? It's not like the problems of the current immigration regime were some big secret last year. (Hat tip to Derb)

Starving the Beast

Back to the thing about the carbon tax. Daniel is correct to think that politically speaking, the strategy is a little dated. Reflexive opposition to taxes has been a staple of GOP popularity since Reagan. But in Reagan's case, even if he didn't kill the welfare state or even seriously wound it, it was clear that regarding gov't spending, he was part of the solution instead of part of the problem. President Bush fils obviously has no such credibility, and the Republicans in Congress are no better and in some cases worse. So now we are in the unfortunate situation where the disconnect between spending and taxes is putting pressure on taxes instead of spending. But even here, to the extent that the GOP base gets a word in, it's better to keep the Norquist tax pledges and work harder to cut spending.

But why, really, can't the GOP take a "responsible" attitude toward funding the nation's public needs? It's a special case a simple reality of politics, something I plan to post more about later: big ticket issues, like the fraction of the national economy that the government is going to take for its own purposes, are never settled by horse trading. Instead, there are always a series of deals and modifications that reflect an underlying modus vivendi.

As it applies to taxes, there is very likely to be a disconnect between the collection of the tax and purpose that the tax is collected for. The money is taken away from the private economy forever (and is likely to continue to be taken away indefinitely) , but the ostensible benefits of the taxes may never come. It's famous talking point among tax protestors that one of the lines on your phone bill is a special tax to fund the Spanish-American War (ie, the one fought in 1898) which persisted for a century through the force of inertia (I think it was one of the Bush tax cuts that finally got rid of that one, though I'm not completely sure about that).

People are not going to care a whole lot about a nickel and dime item like that, but they will care very much about a gas tax, or any variant of it. It is a plausible thing to ask the American people for a collective sacrifice for a common good like environmental improvement or energy independence. But we should ask, are these goods real, or just a rationalization for the federal government to expand its power at the expense of individual Americans?

Wow, just wow

Hat tip to Steve Sailer for this. Like everybody else, there is very little that really shocks me anymore, and Ms. Giovanni's poem would be no exception but for the chilling juxtaposition.

Economic populism

Another angle on Daniel's post: I don't buy that economic populism, conventionally understood, is very popular. If you don't believe me, you can just ask President Pat Buchanan, President Harkin, and President Gephardt.

I do think that economic anxiety is very high. But the set of people who take seriously the proposition that it would be fixed if we could just put a 40% tariff on all Korean televisions is just about less than epsilon, and getting smaller every day. Because global capitalism is such a dynamic thing, it is getting more and more difficult to build a personal franchise strong enough to guarantee economic security through all the turbulence in the world at large. Therefore, even the temporarily affluent feel the anxiety because most of whatever it is they have can go away a lot quicker than it used to.

Viewed in this light, the carbon tax is a two-way loser. For the old-school truck-driving populists, the carbon tax is bad because it hurts their consumption. But for the New Economy bobos, the carbon tax hurts their production. For them, (and for the economy in general) energy is largely a capital good. Like anyother capital good, its cost can (and will) be substituted or passed on to the consumer. But before then, it will also increase the anxiety of those whose ability to make a living is put in jeopardy.

Carbon tax

Daniel Larison and Matthew Yglesias are interested in why GOP and its pundits are not in favor of some kind of energy consumption-based taxes. Larison's post in particuar touched on several things, but the immediate politics of this are fairly simple. There are essentially three reasons why one might be in favor of enacting an energy tax.

1. To raise revenue for the federal gov't.

For the GOP, this is actually a negative. The amount of revenue to be raised wouldn't significantly help solve the government's fiscal problems, and it creates a moral hazard for the gov't to enrich itself at the expense of individual Americans (or families). This would be mitigated if the gov't (or hypothetical GOP pundits) could show that the revenue generated would finance some end that widely-agreed upon and widely-distributed benefit. In practice, these things tend not to work. In particular, the tie-in to the income tax doesn't seem plausible to me. The Democratic party (and the Left in general) is not in a position to offer any kind of substantial tax relief because they will have to keep tax rates high in order to keep from cutting benefit levels in the various social welfare programs as such programs are about to go on a demographic swan dive. On a more emotional level, the Left hates tax cuts and they just bitterly earned a legislative majority.

2. To help the environment.

Given the track record of doomsday predictions by environmentalists, any Republican who went for this ought to be sued for malpractice. Among other things, there's a dirty little secret that those propping the conventional wisdom of global warming don't like to talk about. That is, if one accepts the pessimistic view of global warming, the draconian "solutions" (Kyoto, energy taxes) don't solve anything.

3. To provide energy independence from the Middle East and other politically unsavory places.

This is legit, but would probably be oversold to the voters.

In Yglesias' case, I think he might be misreading the political landscape as well. The tree-hugger types have spent so much energy hating on the Republicans, I don't think a carbon tax is enough to turn the GOP into a green brand. And even if it did, I still don't think it would be enough toflip the support of bobo-Liberals anyway.

Sneak Previews

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTkzMTZlNzQ2MWZjNzQyNDAyNjQxMWZhMDNjZGFmOTI=

In a brief note regarding the French Presidential election, Stanley Kurtz touches on the demographic angle. France, like most other European countries, is caught between declining birth rates and and burdensome entitlements characteristic of the modern welfare state. This is fairly well known.

However, there is a related phenomenon that ought to be getting more attention that it is. France is suffering the incremental corruption, not just of the political leaders, but of the culture at large. So even when the leadership (or the even voters) want real reform, the body politic is so degraded that they can't get it.

The demographic situation in the developed world is difficult but not necessarily irreparable. As Kurtz' source points out, even though the population is getting older, it is still healthy. Furthermore, over the decades, the nature of work has changed to where we as workers are still capable later in life. With smart reforms in entitlements, workforce adaptations toward the productivity of formerly-retirees, and the ingenuity of the individual, the developed world still has a fighting chance. But can the French pull it off? The field of battle runs through the heart of M. Beaucheron and his retirement benefits.

This is part of the reason why, jingoism aside, America truly is the best hope for the world as we know it. For the real big-ticket items, demographics, engagement with Islam, energy, America is in objectively better shape than the other developed nations. But at least important as that, America still has the spiritual strength to believe in fixing its problems whereas the rest of the world is largely resigned to fate.

McCain redux

I was just as surprised as Daniel Larison that George Allen failed in his reelection campaign for US Senator from Virginia, at least partially due to gaffes caught on YouTube. So maybe I'm not the one to ask either, but I'll commit a few words to pixels as well.

First of all, Daniel is quite correct that GOP primary voters oppose jihad, either Shiite or Sunni, and want to avoid appeasing it if at all possible. (This is pretty basic so far, but it seems to exasperate Daniel.) From here, Daniel reasons that the GOP primary will be a posturing contest over who can out-macho the next guy on the War on Terror, or Iran in particular.

On that score, I have to part company. Just because no one is in the market for Chuck Hagel-style anklebiting, doesn't mean the GOP base can be bought off like the AARP holding out for bigger COLAs for Social Security. The issue doesn't frame that way. Support for the War on Terror will be a plus for the candidate who can show the voters that he is tough and smart. Anything that sounds like bluster will be filtered out, unless it's too provocative, in which case it will work as a negative.

Btw, who are these voters who "think that Mr. Bush has generally done a bang-up job all around?" I don't know of any.

Back to McCain. It is true, I would guess, that those who support McCain do so because of his steadfastness on the War. But as far as getting the nomination goes (or even seriously threatening for it), I don't think it will help much. This race, especially with the presence of President Bush dominating the background, will come down to persons and personalities and who can rescue the value of Brand Republican from the bear market of the last two years.

John McCain is not the guy. He's too old, not necessarily chronologically, but whereas before he presented himself as mavericky, now he's just crotchety. And all his policy apostasies (campaign finance reform, immigration, etc.) might be forgiven except for this: he has spent the better part of a decade hating on mainstream conservatives, and they haven't forgotten.

In which I defend people other than Jonah Goldberg

I suspect this whole business is coming to an end quite soon, but before it does, I wanted to revisit the Alterman/Larison thesis from the beginning, apart from our consideration of Jonah Goldberg. Simply put, the whole thing is a crock.

After a moment's reflection, I thought of Paul Johnson, Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), Thos. Sowell, Michael Fumento, Roger Kimball, David Gelernter, George Gilder, and the late Milton Friedman for starters. These are prominent public intellectuals associated in some way with the mainstream Right (or in Friedman's case very recently so), not directly involved with politics or the Bush Administration, not directly involved with the neocon/paleocon thing or other intramural battles on the Right, and cordial to but not intimately involved with National Review or the mainstream conservative media. I'm sure others could supply other examples.

The idea that Eric Alterman is somehow above all these people is ridiculous of course, but frankly I don't think anybody expects anything from him. The idea that Daniel Larison agrees with him is not a credit to him, or at the very least was written in the flush of anger without much deliberation.

I will choose free will

"Sure, there’s a tendency among some of us, myself included, to look askance on even those traditional conservatives who continue to treat Lincoln as something other than a tyrant and even less patience for those who may now think that the New Deal was worth the trade-off of killing what little remained of the Constitution (not that these folks would acknowledge that this was the trade-off), but considering what we’re talking about paleos are quite restrained and mild in their annoyance with these folks." - Daniel Larison

Like my hero Jonah, I'm going to make a serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been advanced in such detail before. That is, I'm going to color in some of the dialog from the prior posts with a demonstration that the paleocon failure (and several other things besides) is at bottom an oblique denial of free will.

All of us realize, whether we state it this way are not, that sometimes other people's actions are contingent, and sometimes they are just facts of nature. That is we, want to imagine that another person could choose between more than one course of action (presumably between things we prefer and things we don't), and that we can mentally put ourselves in that person's place and advocate for one choice or another based on the perceived consequences. But, only some of the time.

The direct impact of any one person's actions is very small. Everything meaningful he accomplishes is necessarily filtered through other people's actions. Therefore, we want to be able to take some credit or assume some fiat power over other people's actions. But, total fiat is just as meaningless as none at all. First of all, one person's mind cannot handle the complexity of total fiat over everybody in the world. Second, analysis of human affairs reduces to triviality, eg, there is no reason to persuade President Bush to avoid war in Iraq when we could just as easily have said that Saddam Hussein should relinquish his claims to leadership there.

Taking these as boundaries, how do we tell the difference? How do we designate an action for which we should consider other possibilities versus some other action that is just part of objective reality? Frankly that's a subject that people should think about a great deal more than they do. But a big part of the answer is that we can legitimately consider alternative actions in circumstances where we have some sort of personal connection to the actor.

My favorite example of this is the pyramids of Egypt vs. your choice of breakfast cereal this morning. The reader knows, with the memory of standing in front of the kitchen cupboard, that he could have picked Froot Loops instead of Frosted Flakes. But the product of thousands of sweating slaves is just part of the landscape, like a canyon or a mountain. (Btw, if Daniel is still following, Joe Sobran makes a similar point in one of his favorite metaphors: the scene in Chinatown where Jack Nicholoson's nostril is cut is memorable not because of the amount of violence but because we identify so strongly with his character.)

From here, there are two important premises to having a sufficient personal connection to appreciate the contingency of someone else's action. First, it takes a fair amount of plain effort, and second, it means that the other party also gets to evaluate you. Let's leave that second one aside for the moment but the first is very important. Part of the effort into making a connection with another person is the willingness to accept the other person's frame of the world: his perceptions, his intentions, his constraints.

If for some reason you are unwilling to make that effort, you can't justifiably pretend to act on that person's behalf. It's as though that other person is a plastic figure who will move at our whim. (Btw, forgive the the earlier reference to Ken and Barbie, I should have explained it better.) All people have God's gift of free will, especially our antagonists.

Sticking up for Jonah

Really Daniel, I'm quite prepared to believe that Jonah displays any number of faults (or least idiosyncracies that we might not approve of), but we wouldn't know it from the examples you cite. About Lindbergh, he pretty clearly argues that he's not trying to tar Yglesias with Lindbergh, but instead attempting to at least partially rehabilitate Lindbergh.

About Rod, I have to say that Crunchy Cons is just a really awful book, precisely because Rod hints at a very real, very important phenomenon, and then says virtually nothing useful or interesting about it. Frankly whatever Jonah's point about the sacralization of politics is supposed to mean, it's giving Rod more credit than he's due. For Rod to assert boboish fashion and food choices as a sources of spiritual renewal (and I do think that's a fair description of his work) is just as bad as anything he criticizes in the book. In fact, it was following the whole Crunchy Con thing while it was hot gave me a renewed appreciation for mainstream American conservatives, for having to endure anklebiting from the likes of Rod.

In which I defend Jonah Goldberg

http://larison.org/2007/04/12/so-sorry/

Besides my other general point about paleocons, the other thing I wanted to mention wrt Daniel's response to me is that, at least in this case, he's wrong on the merits.

StarTrek in-jokes notwithstanding, Jonah does fairly engage people who disagree with him. And in fact he was doing so in the very post Daniel complains about. I have no particular beef with most of Reihan's analysis, but I've got no idea what "lower-middle reformism" and "upper-middle reformism" are supposed to mean. Suffice to say, they are not terms in wide circulation. Whatever it is, coining a neologism gives the impression that it's describing an inherent phenomenon as opposed to a very temporary alignment of some small part of the American body politic. And that's essentially what Jonah wrote, and he was well within his rights to do it.

If Daniel wants to look for lack of engagement in the contemporary Right, Derbyshire is a much better example. Even in his case, I don't think it's malicious as opposed a recognition on his part that he doesn't have the time or interest to settle every last jot and tittle. He succinctly states his case in two or three go-rounds, and if people still want to disagree after that, so be it. If you really want his attention, you've got to be able to converse intelligently about the Four-Color Theorem or the depravity of Long Island home-improvement contractors.

The problem with paleos

"Koz says that “being paleo means never having to say you’re sorry,” which I might be inclined to spin as a compliment meaning that paleos never have anything for which they should be sorry. But obviously that is not his meaning. It means that paleos should feel bad that they keep more or less accurately pointing out the grievous dangers to this country long before these evils become obvious to everyone else, while no one pays any attention to the paleos and instead listens to the impressive frauds who continue to bungle everything and fail their country on a regular basis. Daniel Larison

No, It's actually simpler than that. It means that for an intellectual movement like paleonconservatism (or even for individuals in some circumstances), it's not sufficient to be right. We are not judged just on what we think, but also what we do, and paleoconservatism has done very little. I'm sympathetic to paleos in other ways, but in on this score we must judge them harshly.

The paleo v. mainstream conservative battle has been going on for a while, though the Bush Administration has exacerbated it a great deal. The paleos have a long list of complaints against mainstream conservatives, neoconservatives, and the world in general for that matter. Some of these complaints were justified, but most of them have been forgotten by everybody except the paleos. All of their pissing matches and refusals to compromise bear a real cost, and this is theirs. A tree that falls in an empy forest doesn't make a noise.

President Fred

While reading Daniel Larison's response to another post of mine, I chased a few links and saw this:

http://larison.org/2007/03/12/carruthers-for-president-in-08-and-other-absurdities/

Enough time has passed since he wrote it that it's not completely fair for me to criticize it, since I have the benefit of a month's worth of hindsight. But leaving that aside, I will anyway.

In fact, I'll see Tom Bevan's third and raise him: if Fred Thompson gets into the race, he'll soon thereafter be the frontrunner and, I'm guessing, have a surprisingly easy path to winning the nomination. Why is this?

http://flyingspit.blogspot.com/2007/04/primaries-101.html

I'm glad you asked. Like I wrote yesterday, there's three criteria that GOP voters, if they're smart, have to have to nominate a Presidential candidate. He has to be on the right side on the half-dozen or so dealbreaker issues, he has to be a plausible demographic representative of Republican voters, and he has to have the right temperment and character for the job.

As it looks right now, Fred is the only game in town for the GOP.

The labyrinth

As I have been attempting to continue my study of the Polish language, I have come to the belated realization that in an odd way my textbook represents a microcosm of Poland. When I at college studying Polish last year, the professor assigned us a textbook "W labiryncie" based on the Polish soap opera of the same name from the late 1980's, episodes of which are used to complement the book. I have continued to use them for my independent study.

It's sort of like the Polish version of Dynasty or Dallas. It has more or less the same issues of bourgeois intrigue writ large: infidelity, the status game at the workplace, the battle between the cohesiveness of a family and outside adversity, the things that will move a woman's attention, and so on. But, compared to the American epics, the glam quotient is dialed down from 11 to 2.5, say. There's a drabness quality to everything we see, like cars or laboratories and the production values are very poor. But as important as those things are, the real drama doesn't depend upon them.