Harry Reid's Nuts 4

A report on the contraction, not the possessive.

Would the voters of Nevada get rid of this guy already? I'm just glad I don't share my alma mater with him. He's an SUU & Utah St. guy. So there's that.

His memoir was just released in paperback form (not that I was waiting for the Amazon price drop or anything) and Mark Hemingway has posted his review at NRO.

I've recently become fascinated with the "blurbs" publishers or authors or whoever choose to put on their books from amongst the many reviews of their books. One that struck me as funny and not at all flattering was on the cover of the Ken Follett novel I'm reading at the moment. The New York Daily News called it "quick-paced." Wow. When that is the type of praise your book is getting, you've got problems. Fortunately, Follett was able to redeem himself with other, better books. Somehow I don't think Reid will get another shot.

Anyway, here's Hemingway on the reception/review of Reids memoir:

Every other major media outlet has been standoffish. Take this blurb from the Washington Post, proudly emblazoned on the back of the paperback edition: “Recounts fights with everyone from classmates to the man who would eventually become his father-in-law, preparing him for a senatorial life of battling the Bush White House and Republican filibusters.” Beware the value-neutral blurb: In fact, the Post never reviewed the book — the quote comes from a gossip column published a month before the book’s release. One of the most powerful men in Washington published a book, and the entire journalistic establishment’s reaction seems to have been, “If you can’t say something nice . . . ”

So he's been a belligerent cuss from day one, eh? Does that really surprise anybody?

A couple of years ago, Reid gave a speech at BYU as a part of one of their forums. Ostensibly, it was to appease all the haters who thought BYU was being partisan by having Vice President Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney give a talk at commencement (President Bush couldn't make it).

VP Cheney didn't say a single thing that could have been construed as partisan. Whereas Senator Reid, given his turn, made a complete fool of himself by giving what amounted to one of his usual senatorial rants against President Bush, Evangelical Christians, etc. He was his usual, classy self.

The best example (or worst) of Reid's classiness from his memoir is pointed out, per usual, by DrewM @ Ace:

While no one expects Reid to praise George W. Bush, the degree to which he is judgmental and catty regarding the former president pretty much speaks for itself. Three pages in, after lamely trying to establish his bipartisan bona fides by talking up George H. W. Bush, Reid shares this charming anecdote about his early days in the Senate: “[Former Texas senator and vice-presidential candidate Lloyd] Bentsen went on and on effusively about what a quality man President-elect [H. W.] Bush was. Then he paused and said, ‘But watch out for his wife; she’s a [witch].’ I have never had anything against Mrs. Bush, but guided by Bentsen’s crude advice, I’ve always said that our forty-third president is more his mother than his dad.”

What’s the purpose of recording for posterity a bit of hearsay defaming a woman Reid admits he has no cause to dislike? Is Reid really so petty as to insult someone’s mother? Why yes, yes he is.

On the one hand, I'm extremely put off by Reid's antics. On the other, I'm incredibly amused by the damage he and his partner in crime, Nancy Pelosi, do to their party. It's a commentary on the party leadership as a whole that these two are the leaders of the Democrat party in Congress.

Bravo, Democrats, bravo.

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Guy Who Said Iraq Would Be A 'Cakewalk' Endorses Obama

I catch hell from my anti-Iraq war, liberal progressive friends all the time (or at least I used to, until The Surge became such a wild success) about the supposed statement that the war would be a "cakewalk," etc. They would smugly point out that it has been anything but.

So anyway, the guy who actually made that infamous statement--not Bush, not Cheney, not McCain--KEN ADELMAN, just announced that he's supporting Barack Obama.

Now that he's for Obama, all is forgiven. Whatever.

(h/t Ace)


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Short List of Things George Bush Hates

Writing about the Rove-started fires in Southern California got us thinking about all the things George Bush hates--John Kerry, black people in New Orleans, you know, pretty much everything. And it's because there are so many things that we are making this a short list, because if we listed all of them, well, we'd be here all night.

Dick Cheney - you see, George Bush hates the Veep for different reasons than you do. He hates him because everyone gives Cheney credit for things Bush thought up--like torturing terrorists. And because strangely, the Angry Left hates Cheney more than Bush.

Children - HE VETOED S-CHIP!!!!1!!!11!!!!!ONE!!!!! What more do you need to know? He'd rather fund the war in Iraq than give children health care. Come on.

Black People in New Orleans - Why? Because Kanye said so, that's why. And we believe everything Kanye says. Because he's a legitimate source of political and social commentary. And really catchy hip hop songs.

John Kerry/John Edwards - because they have better hair, etc.

Osama Bin Laden - but not enough to catch him!

Will Ferrell - for the global warming special announcement spoof he did about President Bush.

This blog - for obvious reasons.


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I'll take sour grapes, with a skosh of schadenfreude

In our last post we referred to an impending Cambridge trip. It ended up being positive and productive for a number of reasons. With the help of a professor friend there, we pounded out an idea for a PhD proposal, attended the Intelligence Seminar and listened to a CIA historian, and sat at the high table at Corpus Christi formal hall.

These intelligence seminars are interesting affairs. All in attendance agree to abide by Chatham House rules. Essentially this means that participants can use the information they learn at these seminars (or any other setting where Chatham House rules are invoked), but cannot reveal the source. As a result, we get some fairly interesting bits of information. Since I've already revealed who the source was, I can't really post what he said, other than to say, that the CIA had more things going on in China and Tibet going on in the last 50 years than I would have ever guessed.

During the seminar he also discussed the gross innacuracies of The Good Shepherd and its treatment of what is supposed to be "the untold story of the beginning of the CIA." Sorry to burst the bubble of all you cloak-and-dagger enthusiasts, but that movie is pure fiction. He (the CIA historian) also referred us to a fantastic story about two CIA operatives who were captured by the Chinese in 1973, imprisoned for 20 years undergoing all sorts of deprivations, and finally released, quietly when relations with China "thawed" under Nixon.

There's another interesting dynamic at these meetings. Most of those in attendance have or are working on PhDs, with a few MA students and undergrads kind of in the periphery. Though the invited speaker is a guest, it is a time honored tradition to put hard questions to these speakers. Having been trained in the self-esteem society that is the American education system, it is always a little shocking to hear just about anyone sitting around the large conference table in the hollowed halls of Corpus Christi College take a CIA historian or whoever to task.

While in this seminar, we met and briefly talked to Stefan Halper. Mr. Halper was an erstwhile assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney when Mr. Cheney was White House Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford and later an assistant to Mr. Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush. Prior to the 2004 Presidential election, Mr. Halper co-authored a book critical of the "neoconservative cabal" inhabiting the halls of power in Washington DC. In his own words, his name was "stricken from dinner party lists in DC." That line sounded like it had been repeated not a few times, with great delight.

Now, we don't want to jump to any hasty conclusions, but the schadenfreude that infects Mr. Halper's voice as he talks about the difficulties of his one time Republican colleagues and friends smacks of sour grapes at not having been invited in to government when the Republicans retook the presidency with George W. Bush in 2000. Mr. Halper now hosts a show over at the BBC.

Mr. Halper pointed out, and we found it funny, that Mark Steyn, probably the most consistently funny political writer we read, "stole" his book name, America Alone. He probably wouldn't be pleased to know that Mr. Steyn's book appears #1 on an Amazon search for "americal alone," while his comes in at #6.

We suggest, therefore, that you read Mr. Steyn's column from yesterdays New York Sun about Nicolas Sarkozy's win in the French presidential election (Congrats, Mr. Sarkozy). Good stuff.

Read also John Fund, from the Opinion Journal, about the same thing.

***Update: Also worth reading, a primer on George Tenet's new "slam dunk" of a best seller by the Weekly Standard's William Kristol. Turns out (thanks Marc) the intel about al-Qaeda in Iraq was even better than we thought. Thanks Mr. Tenet for that "inadvertent truth."

Until next time, enjoy.


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Commencement Redux

First, a few quick notes.

We support Vice President Cheney speaking at BYU graduation ceremonies. Of course.

And, though we disagree with their reasoning, we support students' right to protest his visit.

Last year we referred to and included an excerpt of a speech given at our commencement by former BYU history professor, Dr. Frank Fox. We have read and re-read that speech a number of times and felt that now would be a good time to reproduce it, in full, for the benefit of the new graduates.

No Regrets
By Frank Fox

If there was a Guiness Book award for the most college students taught live, I’d win it, hands down.

Over the past twenty-five years I have taught some 65,000 students, most of them in BYU’s American Heritage Program.

One result of such a career is that you always have to be on your best behavior—your students are everywhere! Another result is that you have lots of follow-up conversations. Former students approach you at games, at restaurants, in the mall, and they often want to chat about their lives after BYU.

In a surprising number of cases, I find that they express regrets:
“I should have studied harder.”
“I should have had a different major.”
“I should have gotten married sooner.” “I shouldn’t have gotten married at all.”

And then, almost inevitably, “I wish I could go back and do it over again—knowing what I know now.”

Life regrets are a familiar refrain, especially in America. We grow up expecting perfection in all things—and life rarely affords that. The world out there is harsh. It is eminently productive of regret. If someone hasn’t told you that yet, you need to hear it now, loud and clear.

If there was a time to which adults could scroll back and do it over again, that time is probably right now—the day of graduation:

Any sooner and you wouldn’t have the background necessary for life’s important choices.

Any later and many of those choices would already be made.

So let’s call today—this hour, this minute—time zero. Just for fun, let’s date everything from the moment you receive your college diploma. In other words, regrets, if there be any, begin now.

To help you on your way, I’m going to offer you three tips. Graduation day advice is nothing new—and my three tips are nothing new. All the same, I wish someone would have given them to me on that balmy evening in the spring of 1966, precisely forty years ago, when I graduated from the University of Utah.

First, live the examined life.

“The unexamined life,” said Socrates, “is not worth living.”

Much of what you have acquired at BYU are the tools of examination. We have taught you how to examine the spatial world, the temporal world, the world of human relations, the world of thought and feeling, the world of ideas. And we have imparted gospel insights for keeping perspectives clear and priorities straight.

Yet it would surprise you to know how rare the examined life still is. Many of your predecessors have gone forth as pilgrims, never really examining anything, simply putting one foot ahead of the other, receiving whatever is offered by friends, by neighbors, by authorities, by the media, by those who are but pilgrims themselves—the blind leading the blind.

A few months ago, you put thousands of hard-earned dollars into a ponzi scheme that confidently promised to earn you 12% per day on your investment. Such are the wages of the unexamined life.

Others fall prey to different scams. Much of the academic world has embraced a view of life that asks only about gender, class or ethnicity—the things that divide us—ignoring the things that unite us, such as our common moral sense. A distinguished professor of bioethics recently stated that he saw nothing wrong with the killing of full term infants and the harvesting of their organs—yet saw plenty wrong with the eating of animals. The unexamined life strikes again!

The examined life literally examines everything. It questions everything—not in the corrosive manner that weakens faith but in the constructive manner that strengthens faith and gives it surer footing.

The examined life favors reality over appearance. Substance over style. Fact over opinion. It prefers universals to the partial, the fleeting, the fashionable—and the relative. It seeks to learn those truths which will in fact make us free.

It asks hard questions—and demands good answers. With the examined life it is never enough to say: “because someone told me so.”

Second, live beyond yourself.

You reside in a world where living beyond the self is becoming rare. We call it rugged individualism, or healthy egoism, or looking out for number one, or simply me-first. “Greed is good,” intoned a character in the movie Wall Street.

Much of your life experience has already reinforced that point of view. After all, didn’t my team beat yours? Didn’t the prom queen prefer me to you? Didn’t I have the most baptisms in the mission field? Wasn’t my GPA higher?

It has been observed that a person all wrapped up in himself makes a mighty small bundle—and so he does. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam noted that the bundles have been getting ever smaller for the past hundred years. Gone in many places is the neighborhood get-together, the Thursday night bridge club, the barbershop bull session, the local bowling league. People are simply less interested in one another.

People are warier too. We have created a world of interpersonal barriers and extreme suspiciousness—separating each from the other. To reach out and touch someone now may land you in a lawsuit.

Living beyond oneself means being interested in, and engaged with, your world. It means volunteering for civic duty. It means caring about the unfortunate. It means attention to those institutions that, among other things, safeguard our common liberty.

Living beyond oneself transformed a gifted dilettante into an Albert Schweitzer. It made an otherwise undistinguished nun into Mother Teresa. It is the magic ingredient that rendered C. S. Lewis more than simply an interesting writer—and Elder Neal A. Maxwell more than simply an engaging speaker. Living beyond oneself transformed an ordinary housewife in my acquaintance into a veritable saint. While others were content to play tennis or do scrapbooks, she chose to sacrifice 15 years of her life to the care of her elderly parents—both of whom suffered from Alzheimer’s.

So don’t confuse living beyond oneself with career advancement. The two don’t mix. Gen. George C. Marshall put the case this way: “There is no limit to the good you can accomplish,” he said, “as long as you don’t insist on taking credit for it.”

Much of your education at BYU has been about living beyond the self. In addition to school and church work, you have been called upon to take part in blood drives, big brother and sister programs, reading to the blind, comforting the sick, sheltering the homeless. One of my American Heritage classes scraped together some $18,000 to provide Christmas for more than 60 local families. (Of course they got the added benefit of watching me kiss a pig.)

Living beyond the self is the ultimate mark of humility. It concedes that the world doesn’t start and end with me. Its supreme manifestation is the insistence of the Savior that he wash the feet of his disciples in order to be their servant.

Third, stand for something.

I unashamedly borrow the phrase from President Hinckley’s book—a highly recommended read, by the way.

Just as we live in a world whose ultimate reality is appearance and whose ultimate value is the self, so too we live in a world where it is imprudent—one might say politically incorrect—to stand for anything.

Standing for something involves making waves—rocking boats. One such boat rocker—to cite but a single example—was a member of the British House of Commons back in the 1930s. The right honorable Winston S. Churchill made a career of standing for things. He stood for the British Empire when imperialism was fading away. He stood for the monarchy when the king himself had lost interest in it and abdicated his throne. Above all, he stood for opposing Hitler and his program of piecemeal conquest—when the tide of appeasement was cresting. He was bitterly scorned by his colleagues, in and out of Parliament. But when push finally came to shove (as Churchill knew it must), he was the person they all turned to. Standing for something gave him stupendous moral power.

There are plenty of things to stand for at this dawn of the 21st century. Stand up for honor and decency. Stand up for Judeo-Christian values. Stand up for a worthy political cause. Stand up for simple integrity—as one of my own students recently did.

It was necessary for me to ask this student to take a sheaf of examinations over to the Testing Center. Owing to circumstances, the student had possession of the exams over the entire weekend, delivering them to the Testing Center on Monday morning. Subsequently the student herself took the exam. She did poorly on parts of it—mostly because she was unwilling to cheat, even when to do so would have entailed no risk. I could never, of course, have taught her anything of comparable value in the class.

If we have learned anything in the years following 9/11, it is how fragile civilization truly is. Skyscrapers are vulnerable to aircraft. Aircraft are vulnerable to terrorists. Our most cherished institutions often depend on simple human trust. There cannot be a policeman on every corner—the policeman must be in every heart. Of course you can use the internet to scam people. Of course the aged and infirm can be victimized. Of course children make easy targets. Every apple orchard is filled with free fruit. Every public fountain is awaiting its box of soap. Every graduation ceremony—including this one—can be disrupted by those few who want their graduate to get the most attention. In a world where people fail to stand up—people will surely fall down.

For Socrates, the most important learning was not about being taught but about being prompted to remember. There is a higher self in all of us, Socrates argued, and that self needed only to be jogged awake from time to time. For many of you, your BYU experience has been precisely that, an awakening, a remembering, a reacquainting of the self with the person you really are. On this day and in this hour let us suppose that you know that person for the very first time.

And so, at time zero, I wish you well. May my few humble tips spare at least some of you from a lifetime of regret.

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