When liberals get in trouble, it’s never their fault. Two fresh examples: President Obama and the Senate. Obama’s poll numbers have dipped at a record pace. He’s now under water, his performance as president more disapproved than approved. But wait! Obama isn’t to blame. Todd Purdum explains in Vanity Fair that Washington is “broken.” The presidency is under too much pressure. “The modern presidency . . . has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives,” Purdum writes.
And try as the White House might, it can’t tamp down even a minor story by ignoring it. “The story will get blown up anyway,” an Obama aide tells Purdum, “and you simply have to respond.” And there’s not enough time in the day for the president . . . Well, you’ve heard all this before. It’s the too-big-for-one-person excuse first trotted out decades ago to minimize the stumbling and bumbling of Jimmy Carter. It didn’t boost Carter’s approval rating, nor is it likely to jack up Obama’s. But come to think of it, that excuse has the ring of truth. The presidency was a job too big for Carter—and it may be for Obama as well.
Then there’s the Senate, where Democrats have a whopping majority, 59-41. Guess what? It’s broken too, plus “sclerotic, wasteful, unhappy.” But not because Majority Leader Harry Reid or other Democrats have erred, according to George Packer in the New Yorker. Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are the source of the brokenness. “Under McCon-nell, Republicans have consistently consumed as much of the Senate’s calendar as possible with legislative maneuvering,” he writes. “The strategy is not to extend deliberation of the Senate’s agenda but to prevent it.”
But the Senate doesn’t have an agenda. There’s only a very liberal Democratic agenda. Packer laments it took 18 months for the Senate to pass health care and financial regulation measures and “nearly destroyed the body.” He fails to mention a majority of Americans vigorously opposed the health care bill (nearly 60 percent favor repeal). Nor does he note, even in passing, that Democrats rejected meaningful compromise with Republicans on both health care and financial regulation. That’s why Republicans filibustered both bills: to force Democrats to compromise.
The bipartisanship promised by Obama? It was a no-show. “One of the mysteries of the Senate is how Mitch McConnell has been able to keep his members in line,” Packer writes. But that’s no mystery at all. The reason is heavy-handed Democratic partisanship. He also writes, “Climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.”
How could this happen? Simple. The public is in revolt against Obama, Democrats, and liberal legislation. Since Packer is oblivious to this, he casts no blame on Obama or Democrats. Perish the thought.
What’s the Matter With Thomas Frank
The Scrapbook was perusing the Wall Street Journal the other morning and somewhere in the middle of the Opinion page noticed this sentence: “This is my last weekly column for the Wall Street Journal . . .” We were hooked.
Of course, a columnist can only write one essay with such an arresting opener, so that may well be the last thing The Scrapbook ever reads by its author, Thomas Frank. Recruited in 2008 as a successor to Al Hunt, Frank was presumably hired to offer routine contrast to the Journal’s (generally) conservative editorial pages. It was, by any measure, a bold choice: Frank had gained some renown with the publication of What’s the Matter With Kansas (2004), in which he lamented the fact that the working-class voters of his native state, by supporting Republican candidates, voted (in his view) against their own interests. It was a provocative thesis, supported with the apparatus of a doctorate from the University of Chicago, but tinctured (in The Scrapbook’s opinion) with an ill-disguised contempt for the electors of Kansas, and a full-throated hostility to conservatism, as a guiding principle, and to conservatives as human beings. The title of his next book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (2008), neatly summarized his thesis.
Conservatives are often accused of intolerance, but it has been The Scrapbook’s experience, especially recently, that the left is the real province of incivility on the battleground of ideas. Unfortunately, Thomas Frank, in the pages of the Journal, soon became Exhibit A. Not content with a reflexive partisanship and pidgin Marxism, Frank challenged conservative ideas by consistently deriding them, without elaboration, and speaking scornfully—sometimes in surprisingly ugly terms—of people who identify themselves as conservatives. This is the sort of behavior that might be expected if Frank had been holding forth at a dinner party or preaching to the choir in the pages of, say, the Nation. Readers of the Wall Street Journal, who might be interested in hearing what the other side thinks, or would appreciate a trenchant critique of this or that doctrine, soon learned that there was nothing to be learned from reading Thomas Frank.
Indeed, The Scrapbook is reminded of this trend by the recent behavior of Paul Krugman, the Princeton economics professor and Nobel laureate who writes a column in the New York Times. Krugman decided last week to evaluate Republican representative Paul Ryan’s comprehensive plan to overhaul federal spending and reduce taxes. And how did he do so? By ignoring the details of Ryan’s proposal, misrepresenting his words and actions, and referring to the congressman as a “flimflam man,” a “fraud,” and a “dope.” For this an innocent Times reader should pay two dollars?
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Sentences We Should’ve Avoided
“Then orders for [Original Plumbing No. 2], an unfinished issue vaguely themed around hair (body hair being a particular concern for people taking testosterone, as many transmen do), and including an interview with Margaret Cho, a supporter of the transgender community, began coming in at a pace that somehow crashed the magazine’s PayPal account.” (“Giving Voice to the Once-Silent,” New York Times, August 12).
Congress’s Mad Libs
Democrats were in such a hurry to pass their latest giveaway to the public employees unions—$26 billion in “emergency aid” to the states—that they forgot to name the bill allocating the new stimulus funds. For a while, it seemed the legislation, passed by 247-161 in the House and 61-39 in the Senate, would be known as the “_____ Act of _____” (H.R. 1586).
Which got us thinking: Why stop there? Below, we’ve taken two paragraphs of the law and inserted blanks in place of certain nouns and verbs.
Your task, dear reader, is to follow the prompts after the blanks to create your own version of H.R. 1586.
If you’d like to share your effort with The Scrapbook, visit http://weeklystandard.com/blogs/congress-mad-libs, copy the text posted there, paste it into an email message, and send your entry to [email protected]. Include your mailing address, and you will receive a free bumper sticker (“Don’t Blame Me—I Read The Weekly Standard”). The Scrapbook’s (PG-rated!) favorite will enjoy fame and a free, squeezable, stress-relieving ObamaHead. It’s just like a round of Mad Libs—which, come to think of it, is a pretty good description of the 111th Congress.
The “___________ Act of _____________” (H.R. 1586)
Begun and held at the City of ____________________ (PLACE) on Tuesday, the fifth day of January, two thousand and ten
AN ACT
To __________________ (verb) the _________________ (adjective) ____________________ (body part) control system, improve the ____________________ (noun), reliability, and availability of ____________________ (noun) by air in the United States, provide for ___________________ (verb ending in -ING) of the air traffic ________________ (adjective) _________________ (noun), reauthorize the ____________________ (body part), and for other ____________________ (noun, plural)….
EDUCATION JOBS FUNDS
Sec. 101. There are ____________________ (noun, plural) to be ____________________ (verb ending in -ED) and there are appropriated out of any ____________________ (noun) in the ____________________ (noun) not otherwise obligated for necessary expenses for [a/an] ____________________ (adjective) Jobs ____________________ (noun), $10,000,000,000: Provided, That the _________________ (body part) under this ______________ (noun) shall be ____________________ (verb ending in -ED) under the terms and conditions of sections 14001 through 14013 and title XV of division A of the ____________________ (adjective) Recovery and ____________________ (verb) Act of 2009.
