Stop Me Before I Vote Again

“It’s obvious that [the late David Halberstam] was probably the greatest journalist of his generation. He had a core integrity that gave him credibility and power, whether he was writing about basketball or Vietnam it carried an enormous amount of weight,” said Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist J. Anthony Lewis.... "I just didn’t know anybody who is a better representation of journalism.”

I happened to hear Halberstam being eulogized on NPR this morning. They had fished Ted Koppel out of his bottle of formaldehyde, rather like Bentham's taxidermied remains at the University of London, and hooked up a hot-air pump to him. He droned on for what seemed like an eternity in a creepy, hollow, sepulchral voice, to very little effect, except that he seemed to be making the rather startling claim that there was no anti-war movement until Halberstam's reporting caused it to spring into existence. Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος!

So now you know. It really does matter who's President and which party controls Congress. A Democratic-controlled Congress would never have passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act, which banned intact dilation and extraction abortions and, in flagrant violation of Roe v. Wade, lacked an exception to preserve the health of the woman. A Democratic President would never have signed such a bill...

There's lately been an outbreak of micro-pathologizing on the Buyer's Remorse suffered by Obama voters. It's got all the usual stuff; they're so angry! they're unrealistic! they're melodramatic! and so forth. It's all true as far as it goes, which is not very far, and as usual it elides the denouement to these affairs: the Remorseful always return to the fold. It is, in short, dull stuff.

But the outbreak does have a tiny bit of hilarity, in this very odd article by Hendrik Hertzberg, in which he appears to be warning us not to anthropomorphize the Obama regime and the Democratic majority. This is somewhat interesting, and very tempting... although it too quickly returns to familiar ground. I gather it's the system, man, the mean old system that's making everything so appalling, but not too appalling when all is said and done. We still have complete sentences. The system takes the fall for the worst of it. Human agency takes the credit for the not so worst of it.

I readily confess to reading human motivations and actions into the freak show's stars and supporting cast. It's hard to resist. They look like humans doing human things in a system designed by humans. None are being held there at gunpoint and, while there are qualities to the show that could be characterized in organic or mechanistic terms, the actors at least theoretically retain the ability to stop doing what they're doing. Methane does not choose to rise from the swamp, but Obama could resist giving speeches. I don't personalize either of those activities and I can, with some effort, tell the difference between them. Perhaps the Buyer's Remorse people can't. Perhaps they're anthropomorphizing the Obama regime. Then again, they could conceivably be genuinely alarmed, by the cruel occupations and bankster looting rampages, even if the alarm isn't going to effect any profound change in their activities.

As a footnote, there's not a lot to those complete sentences.