I'm just the guy that can't stand cant. ___________

 
MOVIE REVIEW OF THE YEAR: While the Self Made Pundit is generally content to limit these posts to matters political, occasionally contributions to the arts deserve recognition.

The movie review tends to generate little respect as a literary form. The great Pauline Kael, late of the New Yorker, has too few progeny among today's movie reviewers.

Yet, every now and then a movie reviewer will achieve that perfect expression of some truth or heartfelt emotion that deserves to be praised as a work of art. I believe the Dallas Observer's Gregory Weinkauf has achieved that state of grace in the closing lines of his review of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." (Link via Slate.)

Weinkauf concludes his mostly favorable review of this movie by musing on its place in the cultural landscape of today's America:

[T]he film of Chamber of Secrets is a welcome delivery of childlike wonder for a planet of ever-increasing ugliness. We've accidentally allowed a retarded monkey to rule America, but otherwise it's not such a whimsical place. Perhaps works like this can help set that to rights.

While I doubt that Warner Brothers Pictures will feature the above quote in its ads for "Chamber of Secrets," it has swayed me. I'm seeing the movie first thing tomorrow morning.
posted by Gary at 10:02 PM

 
GORE, THE REPUBLICAN PROPHET: While Al Gore may be an unlikely candidate for Republican Party prophet, the Bush administration has wandered into the very multilateral approach on Iraq proposed by Gore weeks ago. If the rest of the Democratic Party had followed Gore’s approach as much as Bush has, the Democrats would have done far better in the recent midterm elections.

As the Self Made Pundit has discussed in several recent posts, a major cause of the Democrats’ losses in the midterm elections was their timidity in confronting the Bush administration. Along these same lines, a newspaper column and a magazine article argue persuasively that the Democrats’ timorous approach in debating Iraq cost them an opportunity to advance both the national interest and their own partisan interests.

In today’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne examines how the Democrats missed a major opportunity to contribute to the formulation of policy as the Bush Administration zig-zagged between a unilateral approach aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and a multilateral approach aided at disarming Iraq of any weapons of mass destruction.

As Dionne notes, the Bush administration is currently in its multilateral phase. After threatening to go it alone in Iraq, the United States has successfully brokered a unanimous Security Council resolution demanding Iraqi compliance with weapons inspections.

Dionne rightfully castigates the Democrats for largely failing to criticize Bush’s herky-jerky approach to the vital issue of Iraq. Dionne believes that if the Democrats had urged Bush to take a more multilateral approach in the months before the midterm elections, they could have taken credit when Bush finally saw the wisdom of working through the U.N. As Dionne comments:

An effective opposition party might have something useful to say about all this uncertainty. .... But too many Democrats simply wanted to push Iraq aside so they could get to that economic message of theirs that worked so brilliantly on Nov. 5.

....

Had the Democrats made a concerted push much earlier for a tough multilateral approach to Iraq -- as former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke was urging them to do -- the party could have claimed victory when Bush turned toward the United Nations.

Dionne notes that these same points are made in Heather Hurlburt's wise article "War Torn" in the November issue of the Washington Monthly. Hurlburt also assails the Democrats’ timidity as self-defeating:

The irony is that a policy of using the threat of U.S. military power to enforce U.N. mandates in Iraq is one that both the hawks and at least some of the doves in the Democratic Party could have agreed on. Had they taken that position last spring--or even during the summer--Democrats might have helped shift the debate in a more sensible direction earlier, and served the country by limiting the negative international fallout from the hawks' unilateralism. They also might have helped themselves politically: When the president shifted his positions in September, it would have been seen, rightly, as a victory for the Democrats.

I agree with Dionne’s and Hurlburt’s analysis of the Democrats’ missed opportunity to constructively criticize Bush’s Iraqi policy. The failure of most Democrats is even more striking than Dionne and Hurlburt acknowledge, however, because Al Gore was recommending this forceful approach back in September.

On September 23, 2002, Gore made a major foreign policy speech in which he urged Congressional Democrats to push Bush to adopt the very policy that Bush eventually embraced:

I believe that the resolution that the president has asked Congress to pass is much too broad in the authorities it grants and needs to be narrowed severely.

The president should be authorized to take action to deal with Saddam Hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and therefore a continuing threat to the security of the region. To this should be added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a threat to the vital interests of the United States.

But Congress should also urge the president to make every effort to obtain a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time. If the council will not provide such language, then other choices remain open.

But in any event, the president should be urged to take the time to assemble the broadest possible international support for his course of action.

Needless to say, in the days that followed, Republicans attacked Gore’s speech as irrelevant and worse. Typical was one Republican Party hack’s comment that “It seems to be a speech that was more appropriate for a political hack than a presidential candidate, by someone who clearly failed to recognize leadership.” However, in the weeks that followed, Bush adopted the approach recommended by Gore.

Just as Gore suggested, Bush obtained “a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time.”

Such shameless disparaging of Gore’s and other Democrats’ ideas only to later embrace them is of course nothing new for the Republicans. One of the most outrageous recent examples involves the Democrats’ proposal of a Homeland Security Department. Bush spent months opposing the proposal, only to then embrace it and attack the Democrats as unpatriotic for not rubber stamping his version. Another example involving Gore was the Republicans’ ridiculing of Gore in the 2000 campaign for his suggestion that the internal combustion engine would eventually be replaced. The Bush administration has since adopted the goal of eventual replacement of the internal combustion engine.

I think I’ll watch Gore’s appearances on ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s David Letterman Show tonight to see if Gore makes any other policy suggestions that can be ridiculed by Republicans until a decent interval has passed, at which point they can be adopted by Bush.
posted by Gary at 12:22 PM

 
THE RECYCLING PRESIDENT: The Bush administration has announced a new environmental agenda that shows that President Bush is dedicated to recycling.

Unfortunately, what Bush is recycling are old strategies for studying global warming from the administration of Bush the Elder. To be fair to Bush the Younger, however, his environmental plan is substantively different from his father’s since this time around the plan ignores much of what scientists have learned in the past decade about the human causes of global warming.

As today's New York Times reports:

The Bush administration, saying there are still many uncertainties about threats posed by human-caused climate change, has outlined a broad, years-long research agenda on global warming.

Among many other goals, the draft plan calls for new work to be completed in the next four years to clarify how much of the warming since 1950 has been caused by human actions like emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide or soot; to explain differing temperature trends in the upper and lower atmosphere; and to improve computer models that simulate climate and monitoring systems for tracking the real thing.

The proposal was lauded yesterday by industry officials and some scientists who have long questioned the mainstream view that global warming is mainly caused by people and poses big risks.

But many climate experts said the proposal mainly rehashed issues most scientists consider settled. For example, they pointed out, big international and national panels of climate experts concluded in the past two years that at least half of the warming measured since 1950 was indeed caused by human actions, namely smokestack and tailpipe emissions.
....

Some experts on global change said the research plan was deeply flawed because it ignored findings of a decade-long federal assessment of potential impacts of climate change around the United States that was published in 2000 by the Environmental Protection Agency.

That assessment has been attacked by industry lobbyists and some scientists as overly apocalyptic and shaped by Vice President Al Gore, and they have strongly pressed the Bush administration to expunge it from any new documents.

Dr. Mahoney said the previous climate-impacts assessment contained much high quality work that was left out to avoid new conflicts. "The important thing is to say how can we move ahead without fighting the old battles," he said.

Other experts said they doubted the new approach would speed action. It does not differ much from strategies set more than a decade ago by the first Bush administration, which also called for reducing uncertainties and improving the accuracy of projections, some experts said.

Perhaps we will also hear President Bush echo his father’s eloquent critique of Al Gore as “Ozone Man.” On second thought, it is unlikely that this President Bush would express his views so candidly. Instead, look for more studies on the environment that Bush can point to as showing his concern while doing nothing to disturb his corporate backers.

On the issue of global warming, Bush is merely fiddling while the world burns.
posted by Gary at 10:06 AM

 
CRAFT ME A MESSAGE, VOTERS SAY: Post-election polling is confirming the view (expressed in last Wednesday’s Self Made Pundit, among other places) that the Democrats’ dismal showing in the midterm elections was more a result of their failure to craft a message than a rejection of any Democratic message.

A Newsweek poll of Americans finds that the Democrats’ failure to offer “clear alternatives” to Bush and the Republicans was a major factor in the Republicans’ electoral success:

FORTY-EIGHT PERCENT said one “major” reason was “the Democrats didn’t offer a clear alternative to the Republicans on the Bush tax cuts and other economic issues.” They said three other reasons were “major” factors: “The Democrats didn’t offer a clear alternative to Bush and the Republicans on the issue of war with Iraq” (51 percent), “President Bush’s willingness to use military force, if necessary, to disarm and remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” (59 percent) and “President Bush’s personal popularity and campaign efforts” (53 percent).

Far from giving the Republicans a ringing endorsement, the respondents of this poll also viewed the prospects of Republican control of Congress with less than enthusiasm:

Asked about the Republicans winning control of both houses of Congress, 30 percent of those polled said it was a “good thing,” 34 percent said it was a “bad thing” and 29 percent believed it will be make “no difference” either way.

Considering that only 30 percent of respondents considered it a good thing that Republicans won control of both houses of Congress, the Democrats certainly had the potential of doing much better in the election if they had articulated a clear Democratic program.

I think much of the debate now underway about whether Democrats should move to the left misses the point. The Democrats should forcefully fight for policies they believe will benefit Americans without getting bogged down in overly analytical arguments about whether a given policy is “liberal” or “conservative.”

Having a responsible economic policy that seeks to benefit the great majority of Americans strikes me as more conservative than a radical right-wing agenda that seeks to redistribute wealth to the super rich with tax cuts geared to the top 1 percent. Fighting corporate crime may be a progressive issue, but it is also a law and order issue.

The Democrats are certainly capable of crafting a message that voters will find attractive. In order for voters to hear that message, however, the Democrats need to be passionate and fight for it rather than to act shy and dispirited as they too often have during these past two years.

posted by Gary at 10:13 AM