Happy Fourth of July!

And remember, let's be careful out there--particularly when shopping for the appropriate seasonal pyrotechnic devices:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

As the Mirror Universe equivalent to the history of the American left that Kathy Shaidle reviewed today, Orrin Judd has an lengthy post with multiple reviews of leftwing author Rick Pearlstein's new book on Richard Nixon, including George Will's take:

Perlstein repeatedly explains Nixon’s or other people’s behavior as arising from an Orthogonian resentment of Franklins, including establishment figures as different as Alger Hiss and Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon “co-opted the liberals’ populism, channeling it into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the ‘best circles.’” By stressing the importance of Nixon’s character in shaping events, and the centrality of resentments in shaping Nixon’s character, Perlstein treads a dead-end path blazed by Hofstadter, who seemed not to understand that condescension is not an argument. Postulating a link between “status anxiety” and a “paranoid style” in American politics — especially conservative politics — Hofstadter dismissed the conservative movement’s positions as mere attitudes that did not merit refutation. Perlstein, too, gives these ideas short shrift.

As the pollster Samuel Lubell had already noted before the 1952 election, “the inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping.” Perlstein keenly sees that some liberals “developed a distaste” for the social elements they had championed, now that those elements were “less reliably downtrodden” and less content to be passively led by liberal elites.

The masses bought television sets and enjoyed what they watched. But Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (and formerly Adlai Stevenson’s administrative assistant) declared television a “vast wasteland,” thereby implicitly scolding viewers who enjoyed it. When New York was becoming a lawless dystopia, with crime, drugs and homelessness spoiling public spaces, August Heckscher, the patrician commissioner of parks under Mayor John Lindsay, sniffily declared that people clamoring for law and order were “scared by the abundance of life.”

A Newsweek cover story on Louise Day Hicks, who led opposition to forced busing of school children in Boston, described her supporters as “a comic-strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls ... the men queued up to give Louise their best, unscrewing cigar butts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck.”

Perlstein deftly deploys such judgments to illustrate what the resentful resented. Unfortunately, he seems to catch the ’60s disease of rhetorical excess.

Orrin--who knows a thing or two about book reviews himself--also makes a great observation:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much. [That's consistent with this Time article from January of 1970--Ed]

Of course, this perspective does tend to undermine the thesis that the consensus was never retrieved, but consider too that Nixon was followed by a Democrat who ran to the Right of where he and Gerald Ford had governed. The only other Democrat elected president since 1964 was likewise an Evangelical Southern governor. And, while Carter and Clinton only won very narrowly, several Republicans since have run up pretty big margins. The problem would seem to be a reluctance on the part of Mr. Perlstein and company to accept that the consensus has been restored but has shifted back to where it was pre-Depression, fairly far to the Right side of moderate. Thus, even when Democrats won back Congress in the 2006 midterm they've ended up governing little differently than Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay did.

It is instructive also to look at where the most divisive point in our politics is today: the racial/tribal divide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This is an entirely predictable function of the identity politics that still characterizes much of the Left, although Mr. Obama tried desperately to run as a cipher, lest voters discover his pastor and his politics and, inevitably, reject him as just another Northern liberal too far out of the mainstream to elect president.

Orrin writes that he'll be posting a more detailed review soon.

In the Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes, "the GOP is now a working-class party":

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

If the first half of that equation sounds familiar, it should: it's a theme that we wrote about four years ago when the GOP, and its incumbent president were riding high. After the midterms--and with more trouble potentially on the way--Douthat adds:

The second is that the GOP can't only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future "Party of Sam's Club" Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

Hopefully it won't take another Carter-esque extended economic malaise this time.

Mark Steyn notes that, pace Obama, guns and God, and proper respect for both, are what make Red State America a much healthier--and sustainable--place than the Biggest Blue State of 'em all: Europe. Steyn writes, "In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God’n’guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion":

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: it benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe — a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism. A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. That’s what a lot of Keith Reade’s laundry list — “gun-totin’,” “military-lovin’” — boils down to. As for “gay-loathin,’” it’s Oscar van den Boogaard’s famously tolerant Amsterdam where gay-bashing is resurgent: the editor of the American gay paper the Washington Blade got beaten up in the streets on his last visit to the Netherlands.

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to cast an eye across the ocean and see that. But then he did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

Will the last person out of San Francisco please turn off the compact fluorescent light bulbs?

This is fabulous:

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Ann Althouse looks back to Time magazine's January 5th, 1970 issue, which declared "The Middle Americans" as Time's Men and Women of the Year:

Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.

The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over — the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.

But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were 'discovered' first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves. In the Administration's voices — especially in the Vice President's and the Attorney General's — in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and this began to shape the course of the nation and the nation's course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans.

Ann writes, "Read the whole, awesome essay — and marvel that we've been talking about these things for the last 40 years":

Barack Obama's recent comment about the bitterness of left-behind small-towners may seem like the latest line of dialogue in a long, long conversation.

I'm not sure what's to marvel about--Obama's rhetoric in his less guarded moments is merely another byproduct of one of the more curious aspects of what Time, almost four decades ago, called "the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young" (who are not so defiant now, merely trapped in a leftover haze of conformity): their absolute inability to advance their mindset beyond the first days of Starting From Zero.

Arlen Specter talks tough to Senate Democrats.

This just in from the Economist (via the Judd Brothers): "Why conservatives are happier than liberals: a review of Gross National Happiness by Arthur Brooks":

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%). One might think this was because liberals were made wretched by George Bush. But the data show that American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.

This is not because they are richer; they are not. Mr Brooks thinks three factors are important. Conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to be married and twice as likely to attend church every week. Married, religious people are more likely than secular singles to be happy. They are also more likely to have children, which makes Mr Brooks confident that the next generation will be at least as happy as the current one.

When religious and political differences are combined, the results are striking. Secular liberals are as likely to say they are “not too happy” as to say they are very happy (22% to 22%). Religious conservatives are ten times more likely to report being very happy than not too happy (50% to 5%). Religious liberals are about as happy as secular conservatives.

Why should this be so? Mr Brooks proposes that whatever their respective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one (in the American sense of both words). American conservatives tend to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. This makes them more optimistic than liberals, more likely to feel in control of their lives and therefore happier. American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong”.

Say it with me now, all together: I need a study to tell me this?

So as he flies the blue ladies of the Emperor's Club into the sunset, we say "aloha, 5 O'clock Elliot" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Update: With 3,000 hours a year of annual fees, Mrs. Spitzer can certainly churn 'em and burn 'em with the best of them.

William F. Buckley passed away last week, and since I was on my cruise to Mexico, I didn't have a chance to blog about the death of the man who invented modern conservatism, and for whose Website I briefly contributed articles in the summer and fall of 2001 before taking up residence in the then-nascent Blogosphere. For an extended video look at the man, it's tough to beat the above profile by Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.TV.

One of Buckley's most important decisions, as I wrote a few years ago, was "casting out the John Birchers and their anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories." That's the subject of this exceptional article by Jonathan Tobin:

The long-term implications of Buckley's stands were enormous. By remaking the conservative movement in his own image, in which the emphasis was on anti-communism and a libertarian skepticism of government power, he ensured that it, and the Republican Party, which it came to dominate, would be a place where Jew-haters were unwelcome.

That enabled liberal Jews, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, to feel comfortable making common cause with the right on a host of issues as he began his own journey away from the left. Though expectations that the Jews would ditch liberalism en masse were always unrealistic, the birth of an intellectually viable brand of Jewish conservative thought in this country wouldn't have happened had not Buckley first cleaned out the GOP stables.

In terms of practical politics, Buckley's rout of the anti-Semites made it possible for the sort of bipartisan consensus in favor of support for Israel that we now take for granted. He replaced the Buchanan-like world of American conservatism that existed before National Review with something that was not only more successful, but purged of Jew-hatred. If Israel Lobby authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt want to find the real father of the enormous support for Israel in our political system today, they can look no further than the irrepressible Buckley, whose life was a testament to the power of ideas.

His was a political faith that most Jews never embraced, but as we survey a political spectrum in which our enemies are confined to the margins, we should all remember the unique achievements of this American original. May his memory be for a blessing for all who love liberty.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Over at Pajamas HQ, there's an article by Roger L. Simon, followed by a podcast interview which I produced, and transcript, of Roger's interview with Chris Peden, the councilman in Ron Paul's district who would very much like to replace him as congressman.

Harry Reid: bringing the right and the left together!

Compare and contrast: Over at Pajamas HQ, Aaron Hanscom wonders why college kids are mocking the dead:

More proof that tolerance for murder is becoming a trend comes from the story of two Penn State students who dressed as Virginia Tech shooting victims at a Halloween party. Not even a year has passed since Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, yet one of the Penn State students was disgusted that a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group called “People Against This Costume” in response to the tasteless choice of attire.

This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed…The thing is, everybody’s making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26 thousand that happen in America everyday. That’s the problem with college students. They all live in an ivory tower of privilege.

While it’s not politically correct to make a “big stink” about the killings of privileged college students or holiday shoppers at the mall, honoring the murderers of Israelis is PC approved. Consider last year’s big college costume controversy. When Syrian-born engineering student Saad Saadi showed up at a Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann had no problem posing with him for a photograph. Gutmann later explained that she wasn’t aware of Saadi’s choice of costume even though he’s shown in the photograph with a kaffiyeh around his head, a toy Kalashnikov rifle in his hand and six plastic sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. Moreover, Saadi explained that Gutman jokingly asked, “How did they let you through security?” when he asked her to take the photograph with him.

One wonders if Gutmann would have also found the humor in the Nazi costume Prince Harry wore to a party in 2005. Harry would have fit in perfectly in the class of one Harvard University professor, who has described his shock upon learning that the majority of his students didn’t believe anybody was to blame for the Holocaust. He referred to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”

Meanwhile, James Lileks scans the boards at Fark and is disappointed--if not exactly shocked--by the nihilism he observes:

There’s a great deadness in many people, a grim harsh joy in the conviction we are just “moist robots,” to use the cynic’s phrase, living our lives in a vast factory that arose by miraculous random happenstance. Nothing amuses them more than belief, and oddly enough, nothing angers them more. It’s not even what you believe. It’s the very fact of believing in something other than Flying Spaghetti Monster photoshop contest deadlines or the enhancements on Episode IV.

Simultaneously, the Denver Post profiles Jeanne Assam:

The guard who saved untold lives at New Life Church gives credit to God for giving her cover, and boosting her firepower as she shot a heavily-armed gunman.

“I give credit to God. I say that very humbly,” said Jeanne Assam. “God was with me, the whole time I was behind cover. Based on the firepower he had, compared to mine.”

“It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God,” Assam said.

Assam spoke at a press conference in Colorado Springs this afternoon. She is one of about 12 armed security officers at New Life Church, according to Pastor Brady Boyd.

She responded when Matthew Murray, 24, began targeting church members in Colorado Springs, after a rampage hours earlier in Arvada in which two missionary training center staff members were killed and two were injured. Two teenagers at New Life were fatally shot, and three others injured before Assam could shoot Murray.

There's something that makes Assam's attitude different than those in the other two items linked above. And I just can't put my finger on it.

Don't worry; it'll come to me eventually.

Recorded last year at Duke, as the college staff and local D.A. were attempting a real life mashup of Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons:

(Many more videos to be found at Fora.TV; hat tip: The Brothers Judd.)

Details here.

(Alec Baldwin could not be reached for comment.)

David Freddoso writes, "Hastert Resigns Today":

I am told that former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is faxing his resignation letter to Gov. Rod Blagojevich this afternoon.

Once the resignation is official, the governor has five days to set the special election within 120 days of the resignation. Because filing deadlines and the like prevent it from being much earlier, the primary will probably be held Feb. 5, the same date as the presidential primary.

Hastert announced Nov. 15 that he would be resigning before the end of the year.

That's the headline on Power Line's post announcing Lott's retirement from the Senate next month. As Allahpundit writes:

Bad on pork, bad on racial issues, bad on amnesty, and hostile to the one media weapon conservatives wield simply because it dared to challenge him. Like Mark Levin, I shall not miss him.

I doubt few Republicans will.

(But his hair--the Important Southern Hair!--was perfect. Maybe he'll hand it over to his successor!)

This sounds like a worthy cause:

Join Move America Forward for the “Honoring Heroes at the Holidays Tour” this November 26th - December 16th as we cross this nation holding pro-troop events in 40 cities across America to honor and salute the men and women of the U.S. military who will be thousands of miles away from their homes and families during this holiday season. (Help us pay for the cost of this effort by making a donation - HERE).

Along the tour we will be collecting more than 100,000 Christmas, Hanukkah and holiday greeting cards for our troops that we will deliver to them in Iraq and Afghanistan. Get your kids involved, and invite local schools to participate! On the outside envelope be sure to write either: “Christmas Card for Our Troops” or “Hanukkah Card for Our Troops” or “Holiday Card for Our Troops.” Hear what legendary TV personality, Ed McMahon, has to say about the effort - CLICK HERE to LISTEN.

Visit their Website, here.

If you've ever heard on me on PJM Political or a podcast, I think I have a pretty typical middle-of-the-road northeast accent, but this poll does a great job of triangulating its origins:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Philadelphia   Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.
The Midland
The South
The Inland North
The Northeast
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I'm not from Philadelphia, but I did grow up just across the Delaware in South Jersey, and I guess it's impossible to fully shake the accent.

(Via Betsy Newmark, who has some thoughts on how accents affect the messages delivered by politicans.)

Bryan Preston compares and contrasts; Glenn Beck loses it.

Rob Port makes a great observation: America's high standard of living changes the definition of "poverty"; he links to a post by Philip Brewer, who writes:

In the 1950s and 1960s, a working man could support a family at a middle-class standard of living with just one income. It might surprise you to learn that one person working full-time, even at minimum wage, can still support a family of four at that standard of living. Nowadays we call that “living in poverty.”

Rob adds:

I’m sure that will surprise a lot of people, but it’s all a trick that has been played upon us by the politicians. After all, it’s sort of hard for them to levy more taxes and expand the size and power of government unless they convince a significant chunk of us that we’re victims and cannot possibly get by without government assistance.

In the 1930s, as Amity Shlaes discusses in The Forgotten Man, it was logical to assume that poverty was partially a result of geography. But these days, as Orrin Judd and Kathy Shaidle each note (and from across the pond, so does Theodore Dalrymple in vast tracts of his back catalog), it's very often much more a function of mindset than anything else.

Jules Crittenden writes, "Columbus Day may be the most unPC holiday of the year. That’s why I intend to celebrate it doing the most unPC thing I can think of. Working for a living."

As I've written before, I belonged briefly to an organization called "the National Writers' Union" in the late 1990s; I got a couple of fun freelance assignments from their online tip sheet. But when one of their newsletters referred to Columbus Day by the angry left PC-euphemism du jour (see: Civil War, Cold), it was time for me to bail. Cult religions are far too exclusive for my tastes.

Update: Related thoughts here.

Outtakes from The Preppie Handbook? The 1981 summer Brooks Brothers catalog? (I know, I know, Papa Bush is a J. Press man. Please! Stop your letters and emails!)

In any case, Robin Givhan's next article writes itself.

Well, it's not that new a podcast--I actually recorded this last December, just as Tech Central Station was transitioning away from podcasting back towards emphasizing traditional print articles. But I didn't want this interview with author Paul Kengor and his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism to be abandoned entirely, so I'm sharing it here, as a sort of late summer rerun. While there are a few questions near the end of my interview with the author tied to the then-recent mid-term elections, most of the material discussed is pretty timeless stuff: how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War--and spent much of his adult life preparing for the job.

27 minutes, 33 seconds in length, 25.2 MB file size, and no iPod required--virtually any PC with a broadband connection can download and play a podcast. So click here to listen!

Lots of details, and a running update, at Michelle Malkin's.

U.S. News & World Report reports, "Momentum Shifting To GOP In Iraq Debate".

Good. But somebody tell this member of the GOP.

Hot Air has the details.

Like I said when Karl Rove resigned, very few White House staffers in any administration go the distance. Snow says he's resigning for financial reasons; but I can't help but think that not having to wade into ground zero of the legacy media's attack machine every day will also be good for his health. In terms of Snow's endless public good cheer and media savvy professionalism, whoever his successor is will have some big shoes to fill.

Update: "What Will Tony Snow Do Next?", Duane Patterson asks--and suggests one possible scenario--at the newly reconstituted Radioblogger.com.

Some things are universal, whether it's over tapas in Madrid, or filet mignon in Manhattan:

Related thoughts on one of the topics that Henninger discusses, here.

"CBS 2 Exclusive: Denny Hastert Leaving Congress".

In the L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on Karl Rove's legacy, which he compares with another famous tactician of history: "Napoleon overstayed history's welcome and was treated harshly for it, first by the Russians and Mother Nature, then by his own people and, ultimately, by the historians":

Partisan victories are nice, but they aren't an end in themselves. Harry Truman, whom Rove and others see as role models for Bush, himself liked to quote Napoleon on his fateful encounter with the Russians: "I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere."

Compassionate conservatism succeeded as a political tactic by co-opting liberal assumptions in much the same way that Bill Clinton's triangulation stole conservative thunder. Rove was, famously, the architect of this strategy, and as such the left hated him not for his ideas but for his successes, which they now want to emulate at all costs. The net-root "fighting Dems" who care about partisan victory above all else are in many respects the children of Karl Rove.

"What is history," Napoleon asked, "but a fable agreed upon?" After he pens his memoirs from his Texan Elba, maybe we'll find out what fable Rove subscribes to: the one in which he was a champion for conservatism, or the one in which he liberated the GOP from conservatism.

Rove's second term fumbles are yet another reminder why so many cabinet members and White House staffers bail at the end of the first term, a mid-term election, or whenever the getting's good, rather overstaying history's welcome.

Update: Video from the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot added above. And click here for related thoughts from Power Line's Paul Mirengoff, who writes that "Karl Rove was neither a magician nor an evil genius. But he did help his candidates achieve most of what was possible."

Betsy Newmark's prediction for Karl Rove's future seems remarkably sound. Elsewhere, Rand Simberg's look at a Wall Street Journal news article on Rove's resignation brings to mind this moment from the heat of the 2004 election.

Meanwhile, Jim Treacher asks the question of the moment...

Update: More from Jules Crittenden. And Byron York writes:

He wasn’t. Beginning in late 2003, Rove became increasingly distracted by the CIA-leak investigation that would lead to his appearing not one, not two, not three, not four, but five times before prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury. Rove was first interviewed by the FBI in October 2003, first appeared before the grand jury in February 2004, and appeared for a fifth and final time in April 2006. He would have to wait until June 2006 before Fitzgerald informed him that he would not be indicted.

“Nobody on the inside would ever admit it on the record, and Karl would never admit it,” says one well-connected observer, “but when the full force of the U.S. government is bearing down on you and trying to put you in jail, trying to ruin you, and you know in your heart that you have done nothing wrong, and it drags on and on and on, and the politicians and prosecutors are coming after you — it can’t help but drain you.”

It did. In 2005 and 2006, by several accounts, Rove spent a significant amount of time accommodating the demands of the leak investigation. And any time he spent doing that was time that he did not spend looking after the needs of the White House. “Everybody in Washington who knew Karl and knew how the White House worked knew that when he was under that cloud, things started to go a little awry,” the observer says. “He had to spend a lot of time dealing with it.”

Read the whole thing, as they say in the halls of Coruscant.

As Ronald Reagan liked to say, those are the scariest words in the English language. Thomas Sowell writes that Bob Novak would agree:

Parents who want to counteract politically correct commencement speeches — often after four years of politically correct indoctrination on campus — might include among the things they give their graduate a new book titled The Prince of Darkness by columnist Robert Novak.

This book gives Novak’s eyewitness accounts of the numerous Washington politicians and bureaucrats he has dealt with as a journalist for more than half a century.

There is no way you can come away from this book thinking that there is something nobler about “public service,” as it actually exists, rather than the pretty picture painted by those who want to puff themselves up as members of a high-toned profession.

Even those of us who never had any grand illusions about politicians can come away from this book shedding any remaining illusions we might have had about some of our political heroes in both parties.

Novak covers not only what they said and did in public but also what they said and did in private — and why. He turns over a lot of rocks and shows what has been crawling underneath.

Novak became a Washington journalist back in the days of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. But neither they nor the political leaders of today escape his unsentimental scrutiny.

Most of these big political figures turn out to be very petty, self-centered, spiteful, shallow, deceitful, and incompetent. Novak spells it out in eyewitness detail from behind the scenes.

Nor does he let the media off the hook, including himself. Novak notes how often his own judgments and predictions proved to be wide of the mark, and how his drinking and other shortcomings led to bad results for himself and those around him.

This is history as it happened, without spin or an agenda.

As Sowell writes, you can get "a lot of enlightenment from a prince of darkness."

"The minority party has decided we have to get to 60 votes on almost everything we vote on of substance," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. "That's not the way this place is supposed to work."

Gee, and that's so unlike the previous five years, or even during the brief Jeffords-era when Tom Daschle was in charge.

David Frum writes that "The decision by Democratic senators to quash the so-called John Doe amendment is the first truly serious error made by the new majority":

The Democrats' decision to kill the amendment in a secretive way makes clear that they understand full well the danger of their vote. Andy McCarthy explains well over at the Corner just how outrageous this vote will sound to a typical voter:

What possible good reason is there to silence people who want to tell the police they saw suspicious behavior? Under circumstances where we are under threat from covert terror networks which secretly embed themselves in our society to prepare and carry out WMD attacks? Planet earth to the Democrats: To execute such attacks, terrorists have to act suspiciously at some point. There are only a few thousand federal agents in the country. There are many more local police, but even they are relatively sparse in a country of 300 million. If we are going to stop the people trying to kill us, we need ordinary citizens on their toes. Again, this is just common sense.

But it seems that the Democratic left cannot tolerate such sense. Forced to choose between multicultural orthodoxy or national security, the Democratic left has chosen multicultural orthodoxy. Fine. Let's ram the point home. Bring this measure to a vote again and again and again. Stamp it into the national consciousness. This is midnight basketball, Dukakis in the tank, and Willie Horton all rolled into one.

Over to you, Mitch!

Update: More from Betsy Newmark.

Fresh off his interview with Capt. Ed on Blog Talk Radio, Hugh Hewitt's "Generalissimo" Duane Patterson writes:

A remarkable thing happened in the United States Senate earlier this evening, and it occurred over a rather unremarkable piece of legislation that was being debated. Conservatives, frustrated at the lack of a genuine leader of their party, may have finally found one in Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell.

Read the whole thing.

William Kristal explains why history will be kind to President Bush.

Right--as soon as someone can find a liberal from the New York Times or The Nation who has a favorable word for Richard Nixon, I'll believe this.

Update: Here's an article which has the audacity to claim that President Reagan, a man who, if you believe many in today's media, enjoyed universal bipartisan support in the 1980s, actually had a detractor or two during the MTV decade! Heresy I know, but still, for completeness sake, we're reposting our link to it.

Meanwhile, Power Line has some related thoughts.

National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru, June 27th:

President Bush made solid gains among Hispanic voters. Hispanics gave 21 percent of their votes to Bob Dole in 1996, 35 percent to Bush in 2000, and 39 to him in 2004. That is a much larger swing toward the GOP than we saw in the electorate as a whole, and supporters of the Bush approach to issues of particular concern to Hispanics can legitimately use it to strengthen their case. But they keep claiming that Bush did even better than he did—that he got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote—and it's just not so.

National Review's Mona Charen, yesterday:

In 2004, President Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote.

But hey, what's five or six percent amongst friends?

Jim Geraghty has some thoughts on what it should contain, with a goal towards "90 for 9": that ideally, 90 percent of conservatives should agree with nine of the ten items on the list.

(Via Jim's primary blog.)

In the L.A. Daily News, Bridget Johnson compares and contrasts two very different revolutions:

ON July 4, 1776, the colonies declared independence from Great Britain. Over the next several years, thousands shed blood for the cause of freedom, resulting in the constitutional republic of the United States of America led by our first president, the noble and righteous George Washington.

On April 1, 1979, the shah had gone into exile and the Islamic Republic of Iran was created. Over the next several months, free-thinkers were executed or imprisoned, and American hostages were taken for the cause of theocracy, led by the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khomeini.

One revolution signaled a brilliant dawn for humanity; the other heralded a dark chapter in history.

Read the whole thing.