Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

Presty the DJ for May 10

May 10, 2016

Music
You may remember a couple weeks ago I noted the first known meeting of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Today in 1963, upon the advice of George Harrison, Decca Records signed the Rolling Stones to a contract.

Four years to the day later, Stones Keith Richard, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones celebrated by … getting arrested for drug possession.

I noted the 54th anniversary May 2 of WLS in Chicago going to Top 40. Today in 1982, WABC in New York (also owned by ABC, as one could conclude from their call letters) played its last record, which was …

Four years later, the number one song in America was, well, inspired by, though not based on, a popular movie of the day:

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Obama’s foreign policy, written by a novelist

May 9, 2016

media, US politics
James Taranto:

David Samuels’s lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, is meant to be a puff piece. In some ways it is: Rhodes comes across in the New York Times magazine story as very effective and powerful, but also as morally dubious. Even more dubious, in Samuels’s presentation, is the state of American journalism in the Obama era.

Consider this passage:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies.

To put it less flatteringly, Rhodes is a masterful propagandist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—an administration, like any large organization, needs people to speak to the public on its behalf, and to engage in such advocacy is not, in itself, dishonorable.

But lying to the public is. The describes what Samuels calls the “innovative campaign to sell” Obama’s Iran nuclear deal:

The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented . . . was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. . . .

In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015. . . . While the president’s statement was technically accurate . . . it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This is the section of Samuel’s profile that has received the most attention, and understandably so. “Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers,” writes John Podhoretz in the New York Post. “We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.” Make that the Obama White House and the New York Times!

The campaign for the Iran nuclear deal will likely draw comparisons with the Bush administration’s effort to promote military action in Iraq. There are similarities, but also key differences. Before joining the Obama campaign in 2007, Rhodes had worked as “chief note-taker” for the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, where, Samuels writes, he “developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour.”

The Iraq effort was promoted using false information, but even Rhodes does not claim the deception was deliberate. As Samuels writes: “For Rhodes . . . the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.” The Obama administration decision-makers aren’t morons, just con artists.

Not that the public fell for the con. Most polls found the public skeptical of the deal, and the administration succeeded in attracting only the bare minimum of support (all from Democrats) necessary to avoid rejection by Congress. In those respects it is similar to ObamaCare, passed with only Democratic votes and over strong public opposition—and sold, as we now know, though a campaign of deliberate deception that implicated the president himself.

Another similarity with ObamaCare is that the administration can count on its allies in the press to relay its propaganda uncritically. The Samuels piece describes this in especially stark terms:

Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them—”

“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.

The fault here lies not with the ventriloquist but with journalists who decide to be dummies.

Samuels observes that we no longer live “in a world where . . . carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power.” That last qualification is telling: It suggests that the Washington press corps is partisan as well as (selectively) servile, and leaves open the possibility that the journalists would some of their adversary spirit in the event of a Trump administration.

That seems likely to us, though the effect might be surprisingly similar. Candidate Trump has proved rather effective at using the press’s hostility to advance his “narrative” and “messaging.”

John Podhoretz is more scathing:

Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so. …

The mastermind of the Obama machine is Ben Rhodes, a New Yorker who joined the Obama campaign as a speechwriter in 2007 and has risen to become the most influential foreign-policy hand in the White House.

Rhodes drips with contempt for almost everyone but his boss. He consigns all those who do not share every particular of the Obama-Rhodes foreign-policy perspective to a gelatinous mass called “The Blob” — including, Samuels writes, Hillary Clinton.

He thinks as little of them as he does of the journalists he and his team must spoon-feed. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes says. “They literally know nothing.”

Then there are others his assistant Ned Price refers to as “force multipliers,” more senior reporters and pundits who parrot what they’re told. “I’ll give them some color,” Price says, using the journalistic term for juicy bits of inside-baseball detail, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.” …

Why on Earth was such conduct remotely acceptable? Because, Samuels makes clear, Rhodes and Obama believe they’re the only sensible thinkers in America and that there’s no way to get the right things done other than to spin them. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he tells Samuels. “But that’s impossible.”

Impossible? There was a sober, reasoned public debate over the Iran deal. Its opponents were deadly serious. In the end, 58 senators voted against it on sober, reasoned grounds.

What the Samuels piece shows is that the Obama administration chose to attempt to get its way not by winning an argument but by bringing an almost fathomless cynicism to bear in manipulating its own clueless liberal fan club.

The headline says it all in Foreign Policy’s piece, which is not written by a conservative:

A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru

The profile of one Ben Rhodes running in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is not unsympathetic, which makes it all the more devastating.

Perhaps the key sentence is this: “His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.”

Rhodes comes off like a real asshole. This is not a matter of politics — I have voted for Obama twice. Nor do I mind Rhodes’s contempt for many political reporters: “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.

I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial-strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.

Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.

Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds? Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.
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The failures of government, municipal water edition

May 9, 2016

US politics
The Wall Street Journal:

The Flint, Michigan, water crisis began in April 2014. This week, two years later, President Obama stood before a crowd of Flint residents and said: “I’ve come here to tell you that I’ve got your back, that we’re paying attention.”

And people wonder why Bernie Sanders is doing so well.

This being Barack Obama, he went on, embellishing his commitment to the people of Flint: “I will not rest, and I’m going to make sure that the leaders at every level of government don’t rest until every drop of water that flows to your home is safe to drink and safe to cook with and safe to bathe in, because that’s part of the basic responsibilities of a government in the United States of America.”

It’s worth parsing that last sentence about clean water being a basic responsibility “of a government in the United States of America.”

A government? Which government? Flint’s, or Michigan’s, or Barack Obama’s government in Washington?

After two years, what we know about this water crisis is that governments indeed failed at the local, state and federal level. That may have something to do with why the presidential campaign is overflowing, from right to left, with the idea that government is “failing” in virtually every imaginable respect. So maybe Mr. Obama has touched on something important, to wit: Why is it that government, whether in Flint or Washington, is in a failed state?

It looks to us as if Mr. Obama sensed that the narrative of the Flint failure was turning against his view of government, so he decided it was necessary to reframe the problem. He told the Flint residents that their crisis was the result of “a larger issue,” which was a certain mindset toward government. “It’s a mindset,” Mr. Obama said, “that believes that less government is the highest good no matter what.”

No matter what? No one believes that. The anger coursing through the electorate now is over a government that doesn’t seem to be able to do its job—no matter what.

The Flint water crisis is a case study in government that has become a morass of conflicting regulations and authorities, which in turn ensures that instead of responsibility or accountability—at any level—the agents of government spend their time buck-passing.

At congressional hearings in March, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy bucked it over to the state of Michigan, which had given her people “confusing, incomplete and incorrect information.” And so EPA staff was “unable to understand the problem” until it was too late.

But the EPA Region 5 administrator who later resigned, Susan Hedman, told Congress at that hearing she didn’t intervene in September 2015 for fear the Michigan Attorney General might sue her agency.

Worth noting here is the Clean Water Rule that Mr. Obama waved into existence in May, and with which the EPA now claims federal dominion over ditches and prairie potholes. But for Flint’s purposes, the more relevant directive is the 1991 federal Lead and Copper Rule, which gave EPA authority to control lead and copper in drinking water. Scientists have been urging a clarifying revision of that rule for the last decade. The update isn’t expected until sometime in 2017.

As to Ms. Hedman’s fear of being sued by Michigan, maybe she had a point. Another recent Obama directive, the Clean Power Plan, is creating tension with the states and has made state officials defensive about their turf.

In Mr. Obama’s telling, Flints happen because of a “corrosive attitude” that forces us to “underinvest” in pipes, bridges and roads. That is, any government failure is due to a lack of funding. And the opposite: Spend more and government failure goes away.

A counter-view would be that “we” underinvest in better infrastructure because entitlement spending has first claim on so much of the revenue taxpayers send government, at every level. In Flint, pensions and retiree health benefits consumed one-third of the city’s budget.

The default solution, for Mr. Obama, is that Washington’s rainbow pot can be expanded to pay for Flints everywhere. This is what he means by, “I’ve got your back.” The prudent might slip a hand around to their back pocket.

Last week a supposed conservative claimed the state needs to invest more in its roads. The counterargument is that (1) road construction costs are inflated by the prevailing-wage law, and (2) the state spends tax dollars that are supposed to go to roads to non-roads such as bike trails and mass transit. Near Presteblog World Headquarters the state is spending more than $600,000 to pave (an impermeable surface, of course) and light (with non-solar lights) a bike trail.
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Presty the DJ for May 9

May 9, 2016

Music
The number one single today in 1964 was performed by the oldest number one artist to date:

The number one single today in 1970:

The number one British single today in 1981:

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Presty the DJ for May 8

May 8, 2016

Music
Today in 1954, the BBC banned Johnny Ray’s “Such a Night” after complaints about its “suggestiveness.”

The Brits had yet to see Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis.

The number one British single today in 1955:

The number one single today in 1964 was from a group that had had number one with three different songs for 14 consecutive weeks:

Today in 1965, what would now be called a “video” was shot in London:

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Presty the DJ for May 7

May 7, 2016

Music
The number one single today in 1966 was presumably played on the radio on days other than Mondays:

Today is the anniversary of the last Beatles U.S. single release, “Long and Winding Road” (the theme music of the Schenk Middle School eighth-grade Dessert Dance about this time in 1979):

The number one album today in 1977 was the Eagles’ “Hotel California”:

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Country’s top four

May 6, 2016

Culture, Music
Those who are not fans of country music stereotype by creating lyrics like:

My girl left me
My dog died
My truck blew up
Mama’s goin’ back to prison
So let’s all get drunk!

Those who are not fans of today’s country music take the tack with which Peter Lewis begins:

If you know any fans of classic country music, you know how much we like to complain about today’s country scene and how it’s all gone wrong. What used to be a genre full of wry, bittersweet songs about bad luck and heartbreak, has become an endless series of interchangeable party anthems and syrupy love songs. (You could tell a similar story about R&B, but one problem at a time.)

Of course, in today’s world, no one believes anything without an infographic. And after years of waiting for Nate Silver to take an interest, I realized it was up to me to make one.

My initial plan was to take the annual Billboard country #1 hits for the last 50 years, tag every song according to its lyrical content, and then chart the trends over time. I quickly realized that would be way too much work, so I decided to use every tenth year as a sample: 2015, 2005, 1995, and so on. I made up abbreviated tags to summarize each type of song as I was going through the lists, like WCYBT (why can’t you be true) or CGOY (can’t get over you), and then tried to hammer them into a few larger categories.

What I learned is that there are four main types of country song, two sad types and two happy ones. After removing one instrumental track and a few novelty songs (mostly about truck drivers), the rest of the list fell into one of these four buckets:

1. It’s all over

What unites these songs is a core theme of regret or loss. Usually what’s over is a romantic relationship, but it could be about anything else good that the singer has lost, often by actively screwing it up. I Just Can’t Get Over You and You’ll Get Yours are among the subtypes; common elements include drinking, cheating, bad luck and bad decisions. In some ways this was once the quintessential country song, the one that spawned jokes like “What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your girl back, your job back, your dog, your truck, your house…”

2. It’s not working out

Again it’s usually about a relationship, but a little earlier in the timeline — and the main theme here is frustration. Subtypes include You Don’t Love Me Anymore, Why Can’t You Be True, Don’t Leave Me, and Why I’m Leaving You.

3. Love and devotion

I actually tagged most of these as SLS, for “sappy love song,” but decided to go with a more neutral label. It’s not so different from the same category of pop song, although some variations are particularly popular with country singers, including They Said We’d Never Make It (who did?), Back Together, and assurances of fidelity (maybe because so many country songs in the first two categories are about cheating).

4. The right way to live

The other type of upbeat country song, which turns out to be a key part of this story, has a dominant theme of pride and homespun wisdom. Other than the generic party anthem mentioned above, variants include Things Were Better Back Then, Me and My Rowdy Friends, and Let’s Get Back to Basics.

Diagnosis

There are still some common threads in the genre; one thing I noticed in going through the newer songs is how the old lyrical templates from the first two categories have been updated to be more positive. For example, “I’m over you (but clearly I’m not),” as practiced by George Jones, Connie Smith, Tammy Wynette and many others, has had the subtext stripped away in this song by Cole Swindell to become “I’m really over you, time to party” — which completely misses the central joke of the premise (why would you be singing about someone if you’re really over them?) and just comes off as mean-spirited. Or the classic “don’t screw up your life like I did,” often delivered by an old man in a bar (here are two examples from Vern Gosdin and Robbie Fulks), which has been inverted in this song by Lee Brice to make the old man a positive role model and source of trite life advice.

In any case, that chart pretty much speaks for itself: modern country fans are more interested in healthy relationships, motivational speeches and having a good time than sadness and misery. And on a certain level, who can blame them? But that tiny uptick in sad songs last year offers a ray of hope for those of us who still like a few tears in our beer now and then.

This also got picked up by MetaFilter, which included this comment …

A guy I know who works in Nashville pointed out to me that all the producers who were doing hair metal in the ’80s ended up doing country in Nashville in the 2000s. That probably explains something, but I’m not sure what. Maybe nothing? Hard to tell, without doing the same analysis for rock and pop that he’s done with country. I’d be interested in that analysis. Is it just country fans who are getting more into “healthy relationships, motivational speeches and having a good time”, or is it everybody?

… answered by Lewis:

Don’t know, but I’ve seen a few studies suggesting that pop songs are actually getting more sad over time, both in terms of more minor-key songs and more downbeat lyrics — here’s a recent podcast that discusses some of the lyrics research — so that could suggest that country music is even more of an outlier. I do feel subjectively though that country’s not the only genre that’s gotten happier, I mention R&B in the post as another potential example..

Someone else asked about the “damned drinking songs.”

I spent most of January working with someone who listened to country music all day–specifically, to a station that played the same twenty songs, over and over again, all day every day. It was my first major exposure to modern country music. One of the things that struck me (aside from how abjectly terrible and derivative the songs were), was that roughly half of them included some reference to drinking. Sometimes just a line about getting a beer with the boys, but drinking to forget also seemed to be a reoccurring theme.

Unrelatedly, there’s an actual song called She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy and I honestly cannot tell if it’s supposed to be an ironic send-up of country music themes or like a proud embrace of stereotypes or what. I’m guessing proud embrace, but it kinda breaks my irony meter.

Someone else found the need to inject politics:

I wonder whether this could be connected to the polarisation in American politics/culture/society between the blue-state/coastal/secular/liberal folks and the red-state/conservative/religious folks, with each consuming their own media and regarding the other as an alien enemy. As such, if country-listening folks are a fortified camp at war against the other side, country music (the musical genre that defines them) could be pressed into service to rally the troops and reinforce shared values that differentiate Us from Them; something that songs about The Right Way To Live are much more suited for than melancholy ballads about having lost everything.

This is probably a minority opinion today, but current country music is, to me, much better to listen to than steel guitars, fiddles and twangy singing of the heartbreaks and sucky life of the songwriter. (I am also, as you know, one of those cretins who doesn’t generally listen to the words of songs, which is how I am able to listen to music that doesn’t correspond to my worldview but sounds good to me.) Life is hard enough without being reminded of it on every song on the radio or your favorite MP3 playback device. I prefer to listen to music that doesn’t make me want to drive into a bridge support at 100 mph.

It’s not as if rock or pop are suffused with originality either. At least half, and probably more than half, of rock and pop songs since the beginning of the rock era in the 1950s have to do with love and/or sex, including lack thereof or end thereof. The other half is comprised of partying, cars (’60s), protest (late ’60s and early ’70s), shaking your booty (’70s), angst (particularly ’80s and ’90s) and weird stuff (“MacArthur Park, “Mexican Radio,” etc.).

There may be a legitimate observation about how country songs sound alike …

… but country is far from the only offender in that regard:

It may also be true that country singers are more likely to get airplay if they look like, say, Carrie Underwood or Miranda Lambert instead of Betty Friedan or Hillary Clinton. This is not a new thing. For that matter, none of the male country singers of today look like Willie Nelson or Mick Jagger.
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The cultural cold civil war, fiction edition

May 6, 2016

Culture, US politics
Because apparently everything today must be political, someone named Machine Trooper writes:

There is a surging groundswell in the grass roots of America. I’ve noticed it (I daresay I’ve been a part of it) for the last few years. It is pushing back against the left-wing cultural svengalis and their Narrative. It’s not huge or sensational (yet), but it is widespread.

Anti-war protestors in the 1960s had a saying that went something like this: “What if there was a war, but nobody showed up?” Well, I’ll tell you what happens when one side doesn’t show up: that side loses.

For generations centrists and everyone right-of-center simply have not shown up for the culture wars. Predictably, the leftists have blitzed right through battlefields of opinion and ideas unopposed–like the Red Army rolling through eastern Poland in 1939–so that their monopoly on the flow of information, including creative expression, was ironclad.

It took some irritated computer nerds to show us that the left is far from invincible.

In fact, #gamergate showed the world that the SJWs, feminists and Marxists (cultural and otherwise) are not only vulnerable, they’ve become arrogant from never being challenged for so long, and prove to be weak, inept cowards when confronted by a smart, determined opposition. They are beatable. Very much so.

But you have to actually show up to the fight if you’re going to beat them.

In greater and greater numbers, the right wing is finally showing up to fight in the war for the mind and soul of our posterity.

One of the armies joining battle now is the Conservative/Libertarian Fiction Alliance.

Looking for a good book to read, but tired of sucker punches and nihilistic misery when all you want to do is relax? You’re in luck … Behold! A gallery of conservative and libertarian-friendly fiction.

The CLFA has expanded from Facebook into their own website, and are compiling a wish-list library of books written by non-leftists (or at least sans the ubiquitous leftist Narrative rammed down our throat at every turn).

Books need not be political or moral message fiction; we’re mainly looking for good, entertaining stories that happen to embrace things we love, like individualism, self-reliance, the importance of liberty, and so on. Sometimes these books are even written by self-proclaimed leftist authors. But whatever – a good story is a good story!

Hoowah. At least one of my favorite books was written by an author who I later met, and it turned out we were quite at odds, politically.But by whatever arrangement of circumstances, he told a great story.

It’s nice to read a novel with a political slant that cuts against The Narrative. But often, it’s even nicer to read a book that’s apolitical–no message or counter-message; just a good story, told well. But even those are more and more difficult to find, so it pleases me that such books won’t be excluded from the CLFA gallery.

(BTW, have you ever noticed how right-wingers are open about their political biases, but left-wingers pretend to be impartial centrists and throw a fit when you call them out ontheir biases? Hmm…there’s at least one blog post in that curious state of things.)

CLFA’s gallery of fiction is in its infancy right now, but already it is proving to be as diverse as the right wing writ large. Authors run the gamut from “social libertarians” and “establishment conservatives” all the way to radical “religious right” rebels like me. You’ll find not only tradpubbed popular authors like Larry Correia and Andrew Klavan, but plenty of indie authors you’ve been missing out on until now.

The CLFA has also organized its own award. I believe this is the second year of said award. The finalists have been chosen for 2015 and voting begins in June to determine the winner.

WWII was the last time the USA fought a war with the intention of pursuing absolute victory. It wasn’t just the soldiers, sailors and marines committed to the war effort–the wives, children, parents, grandparents and 4Fs also did what they could. They bought War Bonds, collected cans, organized bake sales, wrote letters to GIs overseas, and fed them or danced with them when they came home.

If you are a reader, consider doing your part on the home front of the Culture War. When you’re looking for a good book, go somewhere like the CLFA first. (And buy using their links, to help them offset the cost of their website–and provide them incentive for the time and effort they put into doing this for us.) If you’re going to spend your “voting dollars” on a book anyway, why not vote for books written by authors who are fighting to take our culture back? When you discover a good read, don’t just finish it and go about your business–write a review and increase the book/author’s chances of being discovered by others who would appreciate it like you did. Then tell another reader about your discovery.

It’s natural to assume that documentary films and nonfiction books would be the most influential weapons in the culture war, but they’re not. Entertainment, in its various forms (fiction, movies, music, etc.) has been an enormous influence on how people think. Consider which political faction has dominated entertainment; then examine the state of our culture today. If that dominance isn’t challenged now, while it’s still possible, you are only going to get more of the same and worse…but to a greater degree.

The soldiers on our side in this war are marching to the sound of the guns. Your support would be dearly appreciated, down in the trenches.

There is a kind of joke called the “Russian reversal,” overattributed to Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff, that goes something like: “In America, you pick government; in Soviet Russia, government picks you!” We conservatives and libertarians may not have chosen to participate in a cultural civil war, but as Gen. Douglas MacArthur was fond of saying, in war there is no substitute for victory.
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Presty the DJ for May 6

May 6, 2016

Music
The number one British album today in 1972 was a Tyrannosaurus Rex double album, the complete title of which is “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows”/”Prophets, Seers & Sages: The Angels of the Ages.” Really.

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Nazis vs. Communists, Iran vs. Iraq, Bears vs. Vikings, Hillary vs. Trump

May 5, 2016

US politics
I came up with the brilliant insight yesterday that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

(You can decide which applies to which. I may have been inspired by an earlier Facebook comment that compared those two to Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin.)

I don’t write this because I was a fan of either Ted Cruz or John Kasich or any other presidential candidate. I only voted for Cruz to block Trump from getting the Republican nomination. Kasich might make a good president if given the opportunity, but it seems as if his inner asshole came out to campaign. For being the candidate most devoted to the Constitution, Cruz comes across as amazingly unlikable.

Never in this nation’s history have we had two worse major party candidates for president than now. Neither has the slightest clue about how to improve Barack Obama’s crappy economy. Comrade Sanders is merely wrong on everything that remotely involves economics, or for that matter math. I do not pretend to understand sympathy for Sanders based on his honesty if he is consistently wrong.

Trump has accomplished nothing that doesn’t require millions of taxpayer dollars and paid-off politicians. Anyone who claims to be a dealmaker is someone without core values (except self-interest), scruples and morals. Trump will lose so badly that he will drag down Republicans from coast to coast. (Though not, happily, Gov. Scott Walker, who as the governor with the most veto power of any governor will be able to declare stupid Democratic ideas — and I apologize for repeating myself in those past three words — dead on arrival.)

The electoral college math for Trump is nearly insurmountable, beginning in Wisconsin, reports Craig Gilbert:

The battleground state of Wisconsin is a microcosm of the stark challenge that faces presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump in trying to overcome his deep unpopularity with key voting groups this fall.

Trump, whose rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out this week, has trailed Democrat Hillary Clinton by an average of 10 points in three Wisconsin polls conducted this year by the Marquette Law School.

His average positive rating in those polls (the share of registered voters who view him favorably) is 25%.

His average negative rating is 65%.

Those numbers are unheard of for a major party nominee. …

The last GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, lost Wisconsin by seven points in 2012, despite the presence of home-state congressman Paul Ryan on the ticket.

Trump’s numbers at this point in the race are far worse than Romney’s ever were. In late March of 2012, Romney had a 32% positive and 47% negative rating in Wisconsin. Trump’s rating at the same point in the calendar four years later was 22% positive and 70% negative.

Unlike Romney, Trump has shown glaring weakness among his own party’s voters in the state, falling in the April 5 Wisconsin Primary by 13 points to Cruz and losing by landslide margins in the state’s most Republican counties.

Trump’s problems are similar to the obstacles he faces in many other battleground states, the polling suggests, though they seem especially large in Wisconsin.

One obvious ray of hope for Trump is that Clinton, the presumptive Democrat nominee, also has a negative image among Wisconsin voters.

But her numbers are not as bad as Trump’s, and she has led him comfortably in hypothetical fall matchups.

It is bad enough for Clinton that 42% of Wisconsin voters say they are “very uncomfortable” with her as president.

But 56% say they’re “very uncomfortable” with Trump.

Trump is struggling badly in Wisconsin with some very large and important demographic groups.

In a March 24-28 Marquette survey of 1,405 registered voters, Trump’s negative rating with women was 77%.

His negative rating with independents was 69%.

His negative rating with moderates was 80%.

His negative rating with suburban voters was 72%.

His negative rating with college-educated voters was 78%.

Clinton has a negative image with all of the same groups, but her negatives are lower than Trump’s. And unless things change, Trump’s unpopularity could wipe out the advantage a Republican nominee should expect among at least some of those groups.

For example, Romney beat Barack Obama by 5 points among suburban voters and 7 points among rural voters in Wisconsin in 2012, according to exit polls. Even that wasn’t enough, because he lost so badly among urban voters.

In Marquette’s polling, Trump has little or no edge over Clinton with rural and suburban voters.

Romney lost college-educated voters by 7 points to Obama, about the same as his losing margin statewide. But in Marquette’s polling, Trump is losing college voters by 22 points.

Along with his problems with swing voters, Trump has encountered real resistance within his own party in Wisconsin. Remarkably for a party frontrunner, Trump had a negative image among Republican voters in Marquette’s most recent poll: 36% viewed him favorably, 51% unfavorably. On April 5, Wisconsin dealt him what was arguably his worst primary loss, his problems compounded by the opposition of Walker, other party leaders, conservative activists and conservative media here.

Trump lost by roughly 40 points in the state’s Republican “heartland,” the ultra-red suburban counties outside Milwaukee.

Hillary Clinton is the most hate-filled presidential candidate since, well, Barack Obama. Hillary doesn’t even pretend to tolerate anyone who doesn’t share all of her political views. Seeing Obama or Hillary regard conservatives is being able to read Adolf Hitler’s thoughts about non-Aryans. Hillary is, as proven earlier by her comments about eliminating coal energy, as big a liar and flip-flopper as Trump.

Trump supporters willfully ignore Trump’s flip-flops on everything from abortion to immigration to taxes (including, yesterday, the minimum wage) by claiming that Hillary would choose left-wing Supreme Court justices. That last part is accurate. The claim that Trump would not choose left-wing Supreme Court justices cannot be proven.

The numerous reasons to vote for neither include Damon Root‘s observations:

The impending presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is depressing for many reasons. One reason it that both candidates have abysmal records on free speech and they both seem fundamentally hostile to very idea of the First Amendment placing any constitutional limits on government power.

Consider Hillary Clinton. As my colleague Matt Welch has documented, Clinton’s “long war on free speech” includes censorship crusades against rap music, video games, movies, and television. And we’re not just talking about ratings systems and warning labels here. She’s also supported federal laws that would penalize the makers and distributors of so-called offensive entertainment. Clinton is also in favor of empowering the federal government to spy on private communications through such tools as anti-encryption back doors on iPhones and other devices.

And then of course there is Hillary Clinton’s well-known view that federal authorities should be able to prevent her political opponents from distributing a documentary film that’s critical of her in the days before a federal election. That particular issue was litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court in a little case called Citizens United v. FEC. Among other things, Citizens United featured Clinton and her pro-censorship allies squaring off against the American Civil Liberties Union, which supported Citizens United and its First Amendment right to distribute a documentary film about a political candidate in the United States of America.

Now consider Donald Trump, who has effectively become the GOP nominee thanks to Ted Cruz dropping out of the race last night. Trump’s hostility to constitutionally limited government is well known (Trump has even cheered Franklin Roosevelt’s notorious internment of Japanese Americans). But Trump seems particularly antagonistic towards the First Amendment. For example, among other foul proposals, Trump has advocated the forced closing of mosques, a truly authoritarian measure that is plainly at odds with the First Amendment and its protections for religious liberty. Trump also wants the government to censor parts of the internet in order to eliminate speech that he thinks is dangerous (as does Hillary Clinton). What’s more, Trump favors gutting libel law so that it will be easier for him to sue—and thus silence—any critics who dare to write unkind things about him. Just like the biggest left-wing advocates of political correctness on campus, Trump wants to trash the First Amendment in order to create a “safe space” for himself.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have a lot in common when it comes to free speech and the First Amendment, and none of it is good.

But hardly surprising, is it, given the big-money donations of Trump to Clinton, which he has never said were a mistake.

It is said that votes for president are a choice between the lesser of two evils. I am #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary. It is evil to participate in evil. As Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Of two evils, choose neither.”

I am absolutely going to vote in November. I am absolutely not voting for Trump or Hillary under any circumstances.
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