Out of Gas in the Golden State

By Arnold Ahlert
http://frontpagemag.com
October 9, 2012

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own set of facts.” Nowhere does that adage ring truer than in the arena of economics. Yet there is probably no other arena where facts are more susceptible to ideology. Unfortunately for Californians, facts are triumphing.

California is a state where the car is king. Beginning last week, it is now taking the proverbial king’s ransom to fill up one’s gas tank in the Golden State, where a combination of economic facts has sent gas prices soaring. The most salient facts are these: Chevron’s Richmond plant, the largest refinery in Northern California, had a fire on August 6th, and has been running at reduced capacity ever since; last Monday, the Exxon Mobil plant in Torrance that produces 150 million barrels of gas per day had a power outage; and California’s strict pollution controls that require a switch between “summer blend” gas and “winter blend” gas beginning November 1st, has refineries reducing production in anticipation of the mandated change.

Thus, there is a shortage of available gas. That shortage has triggered the most fundamental economic fact of all: when there is less of something, it costs more to get it. In Los Angeles county, gas prices rose 13 cents overnight Saturday. In Orange County, the average price is up 20 cents to $4.65 per gallon. In the Inland Empire, the price is $4.62. In California overall, the average price has hit $4.61, tying the record for the highest price ever in that state.

The shortages have also affected those who sell gasoline at the retail level. Since the refineries have begun rationing their limited supplies, pushing prices up, many gas station owners are faced with a choice–if they have a choice at all. Those with no choice, as in the smaller mom-and-pop stations, who either can’t get gas or can’t afford to pay the higher wholesale price, are simply shutting down. Other stations are buying the expensive gas at the wholesale level, and in turn, trying to pass that price increase on to irate customers, or also shutting down altogether, in order to avoid dealing with the blowback.

Independent station owner Jim Li is a typical example. He told Bloomberg News that he may stop selling gasoline at his independent station, Best Auto Care, in San Francisco, even though he’s charging $4.59 a gallon, because “I’m still losing money,” he said. Li further noted that wholesale prices are “going up so quick that there’s not even any margin to make any money at all.” Sam Krikorian, owner of Quality Auto Repair in North Hollywood, echoed that reality. “We’re going to start shutting pumps Friday,” he said. “Gas is costing me almost $4.75 a gallon with taxes. There’s no sense in staying open. The profit margins are so low it’s not worth it.”  John Ravi, who owns a Low-P gasoline station in Calabasas, California, 30 miles west of Los Angeles, stopped selling unleaded gasoline October 2nd, and ran out of high-octane and medium-octane fuel earlier last week. “I can get gas, but it’s going to cost me $4.90 a gallon, and I can’t sell it here for $5,” Ravi said. “If you come here right now, I’ve got some diesel left. That’s all. My market is open, but no gas.”

The California Independent Oil Marketers Association, which represents independent station operators, is attempting to change one of those economic facts. They have asked the state to grant a waiver and allow the sale of cheaper, winter blend gas to begin now, instead of waiting until November. “Allowing winter gasoline to be used sooner in California will certainly provide additional supply very quickly and that would help with prices,” said Gordon Schremp with the California Energy Commission (CEC). Not everyone agrees with that solution. “Cleaner-burning gasoline, or California gasoline, is a key control measure,” said Bonnie Holmes-Gen with the American Lung Association. “It cuts the emissions that cause smog and send people to hospitals and emergency rooms.”

Thus, once again, we have a difficult choice, not only with respect to the present, but the future as well. In order to provide Californians with reasonably priced gas over the long haul, the facts are once again inarguable: the state needs to build more refineries, pipelines and storage. Yet such facts are in conflict with ideological forces. “The difficulty is that Californians generally love their environment and they don’t want to have facilities that they perceive to be degrading that environment. On the other hand, they want to have cheap gas. So this is a conflict,” said Dr. Dudley Burton, who teaches environmental studies at Sacramento State.
It is a conflict whose current outcome at the very least, was decided long ago. In short, California is the most progressive, tree-huggingest state in the nation, one where gasoline prices have long been higher than the rest of the country. And as much as progressives have attempted to deflect the blame for those prices on “evil” oil companies and their “obscene” profits, or retail gas station owners and their price “gouging,” the economic facts of supply and demand, coupled with the stringent environmental regulations that progressives champion, are unassailable.
For the average Californian, the choice here is clear: if they want cheaper gas, both economic and environmental realities must be addressed, resulting in some sort of reasonable trade-off between the two. For progressives, it’s much more complicated. For years they have championed higher energy prices as a way of forcing American to embrace alternative energy solutions. Thus, if logic prevails, skyrocketing gas prices in California should be embraced by the left. They should have the political courage to tell their fellow Californians to grin and bear it for the “greater good.”
So should President Obama. The man who promised in 2008 to bankrupt the coal industry, and who earlier this year rejected the Keystone pipeline project, should be equally forthright about progressive “solutions” to the nation’s energy problems. He should explain to the American people how pushing for “green” energy solutions that don’t currently exist–even as such pushes by his administration have led to a string of Solyndra-like bankruptcies–is better than pursuing a Manhattan Project-style, no-holds-barred effort to secure domestic energy independence. He should explain why it is better to be beholden to unstable regimes in the Middle East and their environmentally suspect methods for energy acquisition, than well-regulated American energy companies, and job-producing domestic energy projects. At the very least, he should go to California and remind the residents of that state that higher gas prices are an integral part of his progressive agenda.
Make no mistake: what is currently happening to gas prices in California is the eventual end game of progressive policies. And while progressives may be reticent to express their ideological take on such economic realities, those economic realities themselves cannot be denied.
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Report: Obama Campaign Soliciting Foreign Donations (Again)

By Bryan Preston
PJ Media
October 8, 2012

The Government Accountability Institute released a blockbuster study today on the issue of foreign donations in American politics, and in particular, the Obama campaign. The study determined three key findings:

1. The absence of the industry-standard CVV and unknown use of AVS anti-fraud security for online credit card donations.
2. The presence of a branded, major third-party owned website (Obama.com) redirects its 68% foreign traffic to a campaign donation page.
3. Active foreign solicition using indiscriminate email solicitations and exposure to social media.

The branded site, Obama.com, was created in Shanghai, China, by an Obama bundler, but its present registration information is hidden.

If this story seems like a re-run, that’s because the Obama campaign also disabled the credit card verification system for online donations four years ago.

The Obama campaign had also disabled the credit card verification system this year, and was caught accepting donations from “Aunt Zeituni,” “Adolph Hitler” (occupation: dictator) and “Nidal Hasan.” “Osama binladen” also donated back in April 2012.

To understand how this happens, click on the link to our post from April 2012.  It’s standard operating practice for online donation pages to include the CVV field, which a donor would use to fill in the code on the back of their credit card for security verification. As we demonstrated in that post, the Romney campaign’s donation page included the CVV field, but Obama’s did not.

That doesn’t happen by accident. Having run an online donation page for a political party, I’ve been on the inside of this question. It’s industry standard to include the CVV field; someone typically has to disable that field intentionally. Disabling the CVV field opens the donation page up to accepting money from foreign sources and from identity thieves who may have stolen credit card information from unsuspecting innocent parties.

Interestingly, according to the GAI’s study, the Obama campaign’s online store requires the CVV for purchasing campaign swag.

Accepting foreign donations is illegal. It’s also against federal law to solicit foreign donations. Obama himself has decried the possibility of foreign money working its way into U.S. elections. In 2010, he said that American elections should not be “bankrolled by foreign entities.” Obama senior adviser David Axelrod even accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of accepting foreign donations, and when pressed for evidence, insisted that the burden of proof was on the Chamber, not the Obama campaign. Axelrod presumably would not accept that the burden of proof regarding his campaign’s evident acceptance of foreign donations is now on the campaign.

Powerline, Dan Riehl, Daily Caller, Katie Pavlich, National Review, and Hot Air all have more on this story. The Obama campaign says it raised a staggering $181 million in September. But federal law doesn’t require disclosure on donations less than $200, and guess what: Most of Obama’s donations stayed below that mark. This means the campaign doesn’t have to disclose where those small donations are coming from, or who is behind them. Americans have no reason to be confident that the president of the United States’ re-election effort is being driven by Americans donating to it.

We’re on our third iteration of this foreign donation scandal for Barack Obama. It’s about to break into the top five scandals that should sink this president.

Lara Logan Brings Ominous News From Middle East

BY LAURA WASHINGTON

Chicago Sun-Times

LauraSWashington@aol.com

Last Modified: Oct 8, 2012 02:18AM

This was no ordinary rubber chicken affair. That was my reaction to the extraordinary keynoter at Tuesday’s Better Government Association annual luncheon.

Lara Logan, a correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” delivered a provocative speech to about 1,100 influentials from government, politics, media, and the legal and corporate arenas. Such downtown gatherings are a regular on Chicago’s networking circuit. (I am a member of the BGA’s Civic Leadership Committee, and the Chicago Sun-Times was a sponsor).

Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, “The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

As a journalist, I was queasy. Reporters should tell the story, not be the story. As an American, I was frightened.

Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

In the “good old days,” reporters did not advocate, crusade or call for revenge.

In these “new” days in a post-9/11 world, perhaps we need more reporters who are willing to break the rules.

How to Read The King James Bible

The New Republic

• Robert Alter
• September 14, 2012 | 12:00 am

The English Bible, King James Version Vol. 1, The Old Testament

Edited by Herbert Marks

(Norton Critical Editions, 2,280 pp., $22.50)

Vol. 2, The New Testament and The Apocrypha

Edited by Gerald Hammond and Austin Busch

(Norton Critical Editions, 1,518 pp., $22.50)

THIS PAST YEAR, the four hundredth since the initial publication of the King James Bible, was marked by a spate of celebratorycommemorations on both sides of the Atlantic. After all, our canonical translation of the Bible is, as Herbert Marks observes in the preface to his extraordinary edition of the KJV Old Testament, “by far the most influential English book ever published, a formative presence within the history of English literature, high and low, and within the very weave of the language.” The pervasive ineptitude of the sundry English versions produced in the second half of the twentieth century by Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic scholarly ecclesiastical committees reminds us through sheer contrast of how fine was the work of the learned divines convened by King James in 1604.

Yet all the paeans delivered last year could not conceal the sad fact that the KJV has rapidly been slipping out of our cultural grasp. At the tri-centennial celebrations a hundred years ago, when the King James Version was praised by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as the sublime foundational book of English-speaking culture, it was still the version of the Bible that was almost universally familiar. But by now it has been largely replaced in homes, churches, and even in many English department courses on “the Bible as literature” by more recent translations that are deemed more accurate and, above all, more “accessible.” Accessibility seems to be a fixation in current American thinking about the Bible. Its ultimate manifestation may be a recent translation by a pastor named Eugene H. Peterson, who calls what he has done not the Bible or the Holy Bible but The Message. God, in his version of the creation story, enjoins the plants to “Green up!” and the petitioner in the Lord’s Prayer asks not for “daily bread” but for “three square meals.” The Message, not surprisingly, has been selling like hotcakes in Evangelical circles.

One must grant that there are patent problems in making general use of the KJV in the twenty-first century. The most obvious one is that the English language has changed in the course of four hundred years, so that some of the words used by the seventeenth-century translators are no longer intelligible to the general public or have shifted in meaning. Syntactic inversion and other poetic or quasi-poetic features of style are now less familiar and perhaps even disorienting to some readers. But the continuing popularity of Shakespeare’s plays on the stage, in film, and in the classroom may suggest that this linguistic archaism need not be an insuperable barrier, although modern religious leaders, unwilling to imagine even minimal literacy in their followers, tend to assume that it is.

The KJV also abounds in inaccuracies, especially for the Hebrew, because there have been enormous advances in the understanding of the biblical language since the seventeenth century, and even in its time such understanding was rather uneven in Christian Hebraist circles in comparison with the medieval and early modern Hebrew exegetes. And there is a further problem with the KJV that probably goes unnoticed by most readers, or at least is not consciously noticed. The seventeenth-century version is famously eloquent (as its twentieth-century successors egregiously are not), but the eloquence is more intermittent than we usually choose to remember. By and large, the KJV does very well with the narrative prose, in part because it emulates biblical syntax and diction, and some of its renderings of the poetry are splendid. Yet many lines of verse stumble into arrhythmic sprawls, sometimes using three or four times as many words and syllables as the beautifully compact and strongly cadenced Hebrew. This is an intrinsic structural defect that one has to live with. Also in the poetry, the KJV sometimes deploys polysyllabic Latinate terms with a certain ecclesiastical burnish (the translators were, after all, clergymen) that are alien to the concrete directness of the Hebrew. At least semantically, these are susceptible to correction through annotation, something that Herbert Marks often does.

The framework of the Norton Critical Editions, a series that has provided a valuable college classroom resource for decades, becomes in the hands of these three extremely able editors the occasion for rescuing the King James Version for general use and for serious study. The Norton Critical Editions of major literary texts aim to make them accessible—but not through the strategy of “Green up!”—by offering critically informed introductions, annotations of unfamiliar terms and significant allusions, and generous appendices that include source materials for the works, contemporaneous reviews, modern critical assessments, and other relevant documents. In all these respects, the editors of this new KJV have taken the format of the Norton Critical Edition and raised it to the second mathematical power. Whereas the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick or Crime and Punishment has one or two brief notes on a page and sometimes no notes for several pages, every page of the Norton Critical KJV is crowded with annotation, and often the notes are quantitatively far more of a page than the biblical text proper is. In this respect, as well as in the appended materials, it entirely eclipses the sundry “study Bibles” now in circulation.

What is accomplished through the generous annotation is quite remarkable. First, the notes offer a succinct guide to the precise meanings of seventeenth-century English words. Terms that have become somewhat archaic or altogether obsolete are helpfully glossed: many readers are liable to think that “froward” is a typo, so the term is explained; others probably need to be informed that “ward” means “custody,” that “wotteth not” means “give no thought to,” that “meat” is a general term for food and does not imply having come from a butcher shop. Using such annotations is hardly onerous: confronted with a linguistic perplexity, you glance down the page and can immediately see what is going on in the English of the translation.

Another pervasive issue addressed in the notes is mistakes in construing the original. The KJV abounds in misunderstandings of the original, many of them minor but some of them real howlers. When, for example, the King James translators at Job 3:8 have “who are ready to raise up their mourning,” they have badly mistaken livyatan, or “leviathan,” for an exclusively post-biblical homonym that actually means “funeral.” Herbert Marks discreetly and succinctly corrects the error, going on to explain in a few words Leviathan’s role in Canaanite mythology. The process of correcting the errors of the King James Version began in 1885 with the Revised Standard Version, but tinkering with the language of the 1611 version and slightly modernizing it were concomitant with taking away more than a little of its stylistic grandeur, and the use of corrective annotation seems a wiser strategy.

But much more is going on in these notes than glossing and correction. For both the Old Testament and the New, we are given in these important volumes a wealth of contextual information—extra-biblical sources drawn on by the writers, intra-biblical allusions, concepts and practices of the ancient Near East and of Late Antiquity that are manifested in the biblical texts, theological notions that are adumbrated in the texts, comments on the formal configurations of the texts. The three editors bring together a wide range of expert knowledge in carrying out this Herculean task of annotation. Herbert Marks is a polyglot professor of comparative literature at Indiana University with interests ranging from Homer, Virgil, and Dante to Joyce and Elizabeth Bishop, and equipped with an excellent knowledge of biblical Hebrew and of the wide field of biblical scholarship. Gerald Hammond, emeritus professor of English at the University of Manchester, has written finely on English translations of the Bible (he contributes an excellent essay on that subject to the Marks volume) as well as on sixteenth-century poetry. Austin Busch, an assistant professor of early world literatures in the English department at the State University of New York at Brockport, has a thorough grounding in classical literature and a manifest mastery of New Testament scholarship. Of the three, Marks appears to be the most deeply literary, and so there is a good deal of literary interpretation, some of it quite remarkable, in his introductions and notes. That is an aspect of the Norton Critical Old Testament that deserves closer attention, and I shall turn to it presently.

EACH OF THE TWO VOLUMES begins with a preface of more than four thousand words explaining what kind of ancient anthology is embodied in the Testament in question and, in the case of Marks, what are the issues of translation in reading the King James Version. Busch’s preface puts special emphasis on the backgrounds of the scriptural texts, providing lucid and balanced guidance to what he calls “the matrices” of the New Testament—the Hebrew Bible, the sundry Jewish communities of faith of Late Antiquity, the Greco-Roman world with its literary genres and conventions. The notes, which were evidently written collaboratively by Busch and Hammond (no explanation of the collaboration is given, though it appears to be the case that Busch played the principal role), are similarly strong on issues of context as well as on theological and thematic questions.

In each of the two volumes, the preface is followed by introductory essays on the major divisions of the Testament and then brief introductions to each of the biblical books. The Busch-Hammond essay on “New Testament Narratives,” or the four Gospels and Acts, is a model of expository clarity. It lays out the two competing theories for the compositional history of the Gospels and offers incisive accounts of the differences among the three Synoptic Gospels and then of the differences between the Synoptics and John’s Gospel. With their firm sense of historical context, Busch and Hammond make a series of plausible proposals for how the evolving relationship of Jesus’s followers to the Jewish community and to the Roman empire are reflected in the differing themes and attitudes of the four Gospels. This, in sum, is exactly what any reader—student or otherwise—would need in order to enter into the world of the New Testament.

The introductions and notes for each volume are complemented by hundreds of pages of appended texts—for the Old Testament, an abundance of ancient Near Eastern materials, Hellenistic, rabbinic, and Islamic exegesis, philosophical reflections, modern philological and literary discussions, relevant poems and parables; for the New Testament, a spectrum of Late Antique texts, patristic commentary, modern critical and literary exegesis, poems, and a sampling of English translations spanning five hundred years.

Marks’s preface and introductions exhibit similar virtues to those of Busch and Hammond. Like them, he seems to be fully abreast of all the current developments in biblical scholarship and makes judicious use of them. Only one choice strikes me as somewhat eccentric, and it concerns the compositional history of the Pentateuch. The established theory, which goes back to the eighteenth century, assumes that the Torah was woven out of four principal literary strands: the Yahwistic (J), the Elohistic (E), the Priestly (P), and the Deuteronomistic (D). There is general agreement that the core of Deuteronomy was formulated during the cultic reforms of King Josiah around 621 B.C.E., with a series of later accretions during the Babylonian exile. At an early moment in modern biblical scholarship, Julius Wellhausen dated J and E respectively to the tenth and ninth century B.C.E., though more recent studies, amid considerable debate, place both in the eighth century, which may also be the era of P (again, disagreements persist). These divisions are still by and large maintained—plausibly, in my view—by American biblical scholars, but Marks has chosen to embrace a revisionist theory more popular in German biblical studies.

In this new account, there is no clear-cut distinction between J and E. Instead, we are invited to see a contrast between the Priestly writings and a Lay narrative. Part of the latter is imagined to be the product of the Babylonian exile, perhaps even as late as the Persian period, which draws on literary documents and fragments carried into exile but is essentially a new composition. Marks speaks of “a reactive or revisionist J” in Genesis 2-4 who is responding polemically to P. This view strikes me as implausible on two grounds. J is in many ways archaic, his God palpably anthropomorphic and entrammeled in myth, especially in Genesis, and one does not readily imagine such a conception of the deity emerging in the sixth or fifth century among Judean exiles living in the age of the loftily monotheistic Second Isaiah. A writer who was active relatively early in the First Temple period seems a far more likely candidate for all of J. The other problem with the theory is linguistic, an issue to which the German scholars have paid scant attention. Biblical Hebrew, like any language, evolves through time. The Hebrew prose written in the exilic period, and especially under the Persians, demonstrably differs from the Hebrew prose of the first two or three centuries of the Davidic monarchy, and it strains credence to imagine that J’s classic style would have been fashioned in the exile, half a millennium after David.

In any case, Marks’s promotion of the two-document hypothesis for the first four books of the Torah is no more than a local oddity. Otherwise, like his two New Testament colleagues, he deploys a fine sense of balance in explaining the historical contexts, addressing the often vexed issues of dating particular books, and sifting through biblical scholarship in ways that are likely to be quite helpful to the general reader. Yet what is most impressive about his introductions and notes is their illumination of the literary aspects of the Hebrew Bible. It should be stressed that such commentary is by no means a special offering for courses on the Bible as literature, but an engagement with an essential feature of the biblical texts. 

LITERARY POWER is abundantly evident in both Testaments, but the narratives of the New Testament work with a structural limitation in their representation of character and motive because the Gospels tell the story of a more-than-human protagonist who is variously set at a distance—in John, an altogether ontological distance—from his rather less interesting followers. The Old Testament, by contrast, gives us, in the stories of Jacob and David, two of the most subtle and profound representations in ancient literature of character evolving through time and shifting circumstances, and it provides many insights elsewhere into the conflicts, the perplexities, the unfathomability, and the sheer vividness of human character. It furnishes brief but probing inside views of the characters, and invents a form of revelatory dialogue that would not be equaled in literature until the advent of the novel. Moreover, biblical poetry at its best—Job, many of the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Song of Songs—ranks among the greatest poetry composed in the ancient Mediterranean world.

I mention all this not to promote the Hebrew Bible, but simply to register a crucial fact about its formal status: these religiously impelled writers chose, for the most part, to cast their vision of God, creation, and covenantal history in narrative and in poetry, much of it remarkably artful and formally intricate. If you want to read the Hebrew Bible competently even with an intended focus on it as a set of religious documents, you have to follow closely its literary articulations, and this is what Marks’s commentary does with considerable flair.

He has learned from the various literary analysts of the Bible active over the past three decades, but many of his interpretive insights are quite original, reflecting a grasp of the narratives and the poems that is subtle and deeply meditated. Alongside the flagging of intra-biblical allusions and parallels and the tracing of formal symmetries and structural elements, Marks repeatedly puts forth ideas that throw light on the thematic and conceptual underpinnings of the biblical texts. Here is his comment on Genesis 12:1, God’s call to Abram to go forth from his land and his birthplace and his father’s house: “Like cosmic creation, sacred history begins with an act of division or separation.” In the next chapter, noting the moment when Abram and Lot decide to go their separate ways, Marks beautifully observes: “Prompted to ‘lift up his eyes,’ Lot predictably looks down to the luxurious cities of the plain (v. 10), whereas Abram lifts his eyes to the hill country of Canaan (v. 14) and eventually to the stars (15:5, cf. 22:4, 13).” On the cloud that covers the tabernacle and God’s glory that fills it, which are reported in Exodus 40:34, Marks sensitively comments: “A paradoxical figure of permanence in mobility, the tabernacle here assumes the function as well as the appearance of the fiery cloud through which the divine majesty first made itself visible at the start of Israel’s ‘journeys’ (see 13:21-22).”

As all of these examples illustrate, Marks is especially good at identifying connections within the biblical texts that bring their underlying thematic design into sharp focus. Arguing for a set of parallels between Jacob and Moses, he remarks: “Like Jacob, Moses flees after committing a crime, meets his future wife at a well, serves his protector as a shepherd, fathers offspring, has a vision and receives a promise of divine protection and a command to return home, endures supernatural attack and a genital wound, is reunited with his fraternal rival, and finally returns, this time as the leader of an incipient nation, to the site of his original solitary vision, where God addresses him once more.”

Marks’s strength as a critic is not merely in locating parallels, but also in making excellent interpretive sense out of them. The allusions to the Abraham story in the Book of Ruth have been observed by others, but Marks draws from them an incisive interpretive conclusion: “As often in the Bible, such parallels serve to highlight ideological differences. The future great-grandmother of David represents a sharp swerve from Abraham’s exclusionary insistence on marriage within the tribe. Hers is a story not of rupture, isolation, and exclusion, but of community and ‘ingathering.’” With his ample sense of the broad expanse of literature, Marks goes on to say that Ruth’s “brief chapters combine the two principal archetypes of Western narrative: the Abrahamic myth of definitive rupture, the journey forward into a world unknown; and the Odyssean myth of ultimate return, the journey home.” This is an intuition that Joyce, who reflected on these matters in Ulysses, would have relished.

Perhaps motivated in part by the constraints of space of the annotations and the brief introductions, Marks often exhibits a kind of epigrammatic incisiveness in formulating his perceptions. Thus, on Saul flung to the ground naked when seized by a devastating prophetic ecstasy and David exposing himself as he cavorts before the ark, Marks writes: “If Saul lies before us rigid in his nakedness, David’s nakedness is a dance.” One could scarcely state more precisely and evocatively the antithesis between Israel’s first two kings. Commenting on what he calls the “ritual present” of the cultic laws in Leviticus, he observes: “Set amid the flow of narrative, it offers a timeless vantage point from which identity turns not on a unique act of election or redemption, but on the continuous circulation of holiness.” Introducing the biblical histories, and with an eye to the broader ancient literary context, Marks produces a pointed aphorism: “Ancient historians, whose aim was generally didactic or apologetic, recorded ‘events’ not because they were true but because they were significant.” Again on David and Saul, he writes aphoristically: “The one seems to embody the enigma of human freedom, the other the inevitability of human fate. While the elusive David remains unpredictable, Saul’s every step only brings him closer to his predetermined end.” In keeping with this perception of David’s elusiveness, Marks tellingly observes (as I think no one before him has) that over half of David’s speeches “are built around questions.”

This commentary on the Old Testament is finely attentive to the details of the stories and the poems, but it also exhibits an enlarging richness of exegetical perspective. Here are the two concluding sentences of the introduction to Genesis: “Home for the ancestors remains a promise; what they have in its place is the desire for home, which ensures they are constantly becoming, constantly turned toward the future. In the language of Genesis, such desire is known as ‘the blessing.’” Contrasting the different challenges to the dominant biblical worldview of Job and Ecclesiastes, Marks concludes, again in his aphoristic mode, that “If Job is the Bible’s response to the despair born of privation, Ecclesiastes is the response to the despair born of affluence. Where suffering gave rise to urgent protest, ease and privilege give rise to skepticism and a caustic equanimity.”

MARKS, BUSCH, and Hammond have done splendid jobs in giving their readers an enlightened orientation to Scripture and an invaluable explication of the terms and references of the King James translation. Marks goes a step beyond his New Testament colleagues in the illuminating literary interpretations that he offers. Until this point in his career, the criticism he has published had been limited to a series of brilliant articles on the Bible and on modern literature. Now, in the somewhat unlikely vehicle of a Norton Critical Edition, he has produced a major work of literary criticism.

The series in which these two hefty volumes appear is primarily intended, of course, for the college classroom. Both volumes should be eminently usable in that setting; they certainly ought to be the text of choice for university courses on the Bible as literature. But I hope that they find a wider readership. This ambitious undertaking takes the King James Version out of the museum display-case to which it has been largely relegated, making it vividly readable again. More than any other English Bible, it gives readers the tools to understand the historical and cultural contexts of the biblical books, the debates about their nature and dating, and even what they have led to in later Western culture. But the greatest gift to readers may be Herbert Marks’s deeply instructive guidance to the meaningful literary shaping of the Hebrew Bible and its reverberating resonances in the tradition of narrative and verse from Homer to Joyce.

Robert Alter is the author, most recently, of The Wisdom Books: A Translation With Commentary (Norton). This article appeared in the October 4, 2012 issue of the magazine.

Columbus, brave and bright

By Charles C. W. Cooke
http://www.nationalreview.com
October 8, 2012

As children, my friends and I knew as a matter of indisputable rhyme that “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and that, by doing so, he both discovered America and proved that the earth was not flat. Few of us, I’d venture, ever questioned whether or not this was true.

Our ignorance was to the clear advantage of the mythmakers, for Christopher Columbus doesn’t do too well when subjected to the eagle eye of the fact-checker. First off, however you elect to parse “discovery,” Columbus wasn’t the first outsider to discover America. As early as 30,000 years ago, human beings started to move across a Siberia-Alaska land bridge named Beringia and then to fan out throughout the Americas. On the Western side of things, Leif Ericson and the Vikings made it to North America around 1000 a.d. but saw fit not to stick around. Strike one for the fable.

Strike two: Contra Mr. Gershwin, “they” did not all laugh “at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round” — primarily because they already knew that. As Stephen Jay Gould has observed, “there never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars.” They had accepted the spherical theory from the time of Socrates, and it had reigned without interruption ever since. Insinuations to the contrary, still pervasive in the public imagination, derive first from 17th-century Protestant attempts to paint Catholics as backwards, and then from the 19th-century atheist movement, which picked up the falsehood and propagated it to demonstrate the supposed benightedness of the religious.

Given that he wasn’t looking for it, Columbus’s hitting upon the New World was something of a happy accident. When he eventually bumped into land, he thought that he was in India, “but,” as the song explains, accurately this time, “India the land was not. / It was the Bahamas, and it was hot.” (This, incidentally, is why the West Indies and “American Indians” are so named.) Alas, the accident was not so happy for all. While lateness and disorientation are excusable at most affairs, it is a truth almost universally agreed upon that killing your hosts is not — which made it all the more regrettable that Columbus’s entourage brought with it the unwelcome gift of smallpox and promptly wiped out large swaths of the locals. Strike three, to be sure.

Three strikes, but not out. The explosion of certain parts of the Columbus myth, along with some more recent discoveries about his less noble proclivities, has led many to disown the man and a few more to protest against the national holiday in his honor. Berkeley, Brown, and — ironically — Columbia universities have abolished recognition of Columbus Day entirely, while others have substituted nebulous celebrations of “diversity” on that day. Journey into any trendy progressive enclave and you will find that Christopher Columbus is persona non grata.

This, like most political correctness, is a grievous mistake. As the historian William J. Connell argues, Columbus may not have been the first of the voyagers to discover America, but he was undoubtedly the most important. “His arrival,” Connell argues, “marks where we as a country and a hemisphere began our identity.” Unlike previous landings, Columbus’s mattered. It was the first to lead to a permanent settlement and the first enduring landing from a civilization that boasted modern ideas such as a belief in science, reason, individual achievement, and Christianity. Ultimately, Columbus’s story serves as the introduction to a story of immeasurable historical importance. To dismiss celebration of the man because he didn’t make it to America first would be akin to declaring that we must scorn Isaac Newton’s contribution to science because he wasn’t actually hit by an apple.

Of the charge that he brought smallpox to the New World and is thus guilty of wiping out untold numbers of the native people, Columbus must be exonerated. The vast majority of the devastation inflicted upon the Indian tribes was inadvertent: As he did not propose that the world was round, he also did not propose germ theory — that would not be proffered until after the invention of the telephone — and it is simply preposterous to postulate that he should have known what would happen when two hitherto unfamiliar worlds collided. If one is to lay the blame at Columbus’s feet for the collapse of the Indian population, one also must blame the Indians for unwittingly giving the visitors syphilis, which they took back with them and which subsequently wiped out upwards of 5 million Europeans. It was an unfortunate quid pro quo, to be sure, but not one for which either side should feel much guilt.
Okay, counter the naysayers, but Columbus was a bit of a bastard. Among the further charges leveled against him are that he considered that the natives he met “would make fine servants” and attempted to convert them to Christianity; that on his second voyage he transported slaves, many of whom died; and that, at least by one semi-reliable account, while he was serving as governor of Hispaniola, his men took to “killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples” in order to “prevent” them “from thinking for themselves as human beings.”
Heinous as this behavior was, to impose modern morality on the past is to exhibit historical illiteracy. Contrary to the picture painted by modern progressives, the Pinta, the Niña, and theSanta Maria did not sail nonchalantly through a barrier of enlightened protesters — (Don’t) Occupy America! — on their way to the shore, only to ignore their modernity. Columbus was a man of his time, and we should judge him by the standards of that age, regardless of how we assess them today. He subscribed to an internationally popular Aristotelian precept that those captured in battle were rendered slaves, which distinguished him from nobody; he was desperately ambitious and something of a social climber, qualities without which he would never have made such astonishing expeditions; he was motivated by glory and greed and evangelical fervor, as was most of the world (as is, perhaps, the world today). The fact that he reflected his society is not the interesting or exceptional thing about him. Columbus’s first voyage, like the trip to the moon, is worth celebrating in and of itself, without worrying about whether he’d be invited to the ThinkProgress annual gala.
Judging by the language used against him, one suspects that it is not really Columbus that concerns the anti-Columbus types; rather, they object to Columbus Day because they object to the colonization of America, and they disdain less Columbus qua Columbus than what subsequently flowed from the man’s exploits. There we must part company.
A peculiar but popular view holds that, until the brutish Europeans came and violated its innocence in the name of profit, American Indian culture was the last vestige of Man before the Fall. This notion replaces history with fantasy. As the European crime was not to invent but to buy into a slave trade that had afflicted Africa for almost a millennium, Columbus’s was to mirror the practices of tribal warfare and slavery that were already rife among the natives. He did not impose barbarism on the American continent, but he did fail in many instances to show the better example that many in Europe were in the process of setting. This is enough to disqualify him from being regarded as a great reformer, but it does not disqualify him from being a great explorer. Quite obviously, it is only the latter to which his champions lay claim.
Columbus’s voyage was the overture to a European colonization of the North American continent that has been a net good for the world. He may have practiced much that made the Old World execrable, but he opened the door to a New World that has set itself apart in human history as an incubator and beacon of liberty. Columbus set off a veritable scramble for America that culminated in British triumph, American insurrection, and the eventual glorification of Enlightenment values that have, by virtue of their codification, been protected at home and abroad by American predominance.
As the poem has it:

The first American? No, not quite.
But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review.

How capitalism can save art

By CAMILLE PAGLIA

  The Wall Street Journal

  October 5, 2012

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Alex Nabaum

Warhol grew up in industrial Pittsburgh. Today's college-bound rarely have direct contact with the manual trades.

Yet work of bold originality and stunning beauty continues to be done in architecture, a frankly commercial field. Outstanding examples are Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Rem Koolhaas's CCTV headquarters in Beijing and Zaha Hadid's London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

What has sapped artistic creativity and innovation in the arts? Two major causes can be identified, one relating to an expansion of form and the other to a contraction of ideology.

Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But painting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Permanence faded as a goal of art-making.

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But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)

Today's blasé liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of world religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege. This trend began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine, and was typified more recently by Cosimo Cavallaro's "My Sweet Lord," a life-size nude statue of the crucified Christ sculpted from chocolate, intended for a street-level gallery window in Manhattan during Holy Week. However, museums and galleries would never tolerate equally satirical treatment of Judaism or Islam.

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

The vulnerability of students and faculty alike to factitious theory about the arts is in large part due to the bourgeois drift of the last half century. Our woefully shrunken industrial base means that today's college-bound young people rarely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship.

Warhol, for example, grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and borrowed the commercial process of silk-screening for his art-making at the Factory, as he called his New York studio. With the shift of manufacturing overseas, an overwhelming number of America's old factory cities and towns have lost businesses and population and are struggling to stave off disrepair. That is certainly true of my birthplace, the once-bustling upstate town of Endicott, N.Y., to which my family immigrated to work in the now-vanished shoe factories. Manual labor was both a norm and an ideal in that era, when tools, machinery and industrial supplies dominated daily life.

For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the trades that would allow students to enter those fields without social prejudice (which often emanates from parents eager for the false cachet of an Ivy League sticker on the car). Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs.

Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world—which, like it or not, is modern reality.

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.

Over the past century, industrial design has steadily gained on the fine arts and has now surpassed them in cultural impact. In the age of travel and speed that began just before World War I, machines became smaller and sleeker. Streamlining, developed for race cars, trains, airplanes and ocean liners, was extended in the 1920s to appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. The smooth white towers of electric refrigerators (replacing clunky iceboxes) embodied the elegant new minimalism.

"Form ever follows function," said Louis Sullivan, the visionary Chicago architect who was a forefather of the Bauhaus. That maxim was a rubric for the boom in stylish interior décor, office machines and electronics following World War II: Olivetti typewriters, hi-fi amplifiers, portable transistor radios, space-age TVs, baby-blue Princess telephones. With the digital revolution came miniaturization. The Apple desktop computer bore no resemblance to the gigantic mainframes that once took up whole rooms. Hand-held cellphones became pocket-size.

Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.

Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders before their careers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine arts have become a wasteland?

—Ms. Paglia is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her sixth book, "Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars," will be published Oct. 16 by Pantheon.

A version of this article appeared October 6, 2012, on page C3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: How Capitalism Can Save Art.

Obama Unfiltered

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
October 6, 2012

Do you think Barack Obama knows who Ernie Banks is? Count me a skeptic. The purported White Sox fanatic couldn’t name a single player for the home team on the South Side, so I doubt he knows Wrigley Field from his beloved “Cominskey Field.” But even if the president was never gripped by the Cub slugger’s infectious calling card — “Let’s play two today!” — he has now heard the Mitt Romney version: “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

That’s how the GOP nominee bucked up a befuddled Jim Lehrer during Wednesday night’s ground-shifting debate. It was only 20 minutes in, but the moderator was fretting over the clock while the president fretted over Romney. Already, the challenger had the incumbent reminding 70 million viewers of “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” the last Chicago legend in his own mind to emerge from a decisive brawl looking like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.

Whatever you may think of the former Massachusetts governor’s politics, there should never have been any hesitation about Romney the man. This is a bright, self-made man, one whose public and private philanthropy, which puts most of us to shame, should be legendary. It is not. That’s because his good works weren’t done to burnish his political credentials and his decency discourages their exploitation toward that end. You don’t have to agree with Romney on everything to see that he is a mensch. He obviously loves the America that is — the land of opportunity that has rewarded his work ethic. Like most of us, he wants that America preserved, not “fundamentally transformed.”

Yet, for months, the Obama campaign has relentlessly portrayed Romney as an inveterate scoundrel: a dissolute shylock — maybe even a felonious one — who fleeced mom-and-pop stores, secreted his ill-gotten gains in offshore vaults, and, in his spare time, tortured his own pooch. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it” — it’s the Alinskyites following their dog-eared rule book.
The problem for our community organizer–in–chief is the debate setting. With no slavish Obamedia filter between the candidates and the viewers, the Obama campaign’s ludicrous distortion of Romney collided, one on one and for all to see, with the reality of Romney. The challenger’s upbeat energy simultaneously effused respect for the president’s office and sheerjoie de vivre at the prospect of laying bare the president’s miserable record — of forcing Obama’s vision of Euro-America to compete with Romney’s traditionally confident, self-determining America.

Romney pounced from the start: the president’s “trickle-down government”; his “economy tax” that is “crushing” ordinary families, forcing them to make do on $4,300 less income; families that were promised their health-care costs would go down by $2,500 but are finding those costsincreased by that amount; a staggering 15 million people added to the food-stamp rolls; millions left unemployed and underemployed; a planned tax hike on small business that will cost another 700,000 jobs; gas prices skyrocketing, along with food prices and electric rates; economic growth slower in each successive Obama year.

On it went, but Romney was not dour and did not rest his case on the Obama torpor. He offered a positive prescription to unshackle the economy: Stop spending money we don’t have, shove the central-planners aside, and put the American people’s unparalleled energy and ingenuity back at the helm. The last part was the best part: a bouncing confidence in what we are, not what we can be engineered into with enough czars and “teachable moments.”

It was a Romney who has appeared in flashes over the years, but then frustratingly veered away. Suddenly, he seemed comfortable and commanding — like he’d finally arrived at where he wanted to be, like he planned to be staying for a while. When his moment came, the biggest in his political life, the guy who “couldn’t connect” knew he was connecting like there was no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t. He was the very picture of the happy warrior — somewhere, at least for this night, Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley were smiling.

As Romney cruised along, Lehrer, unable to break the momentum, worried aloud that time was flying by. Romney smiled a winner’s smile: “It’s fun, isn’t it?” Let’s play two today. He pounded on jobs and prosperity and growth for another couple of minutes.
When, at last, his time came to respond, the president slumped. “Jim,” he sighed, “you may want to move on to another topic.” But, Obama being Obama, he then mindlessly rehashed the meme of Romney as George Bush 2.0, making “the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003, and we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years.” Um . . . not exactly: Those bad old days — even after a shocking terrorist attack ripped the nation’s financial capital — featured unemployment rates consistently under 6 percent. Actually, the slowest job growth in 50 years is happening now.
Are voters going to buy Obama’s sales pitch? I don’t think so. To the president’s evident chagrin, the 2012 campaign stretch run is not a 2008 rerun. He is actually being vetted this time. Americans are learning that he is not so much prodigy as media creation: the original “birther,” whose memoir turns up more fiction each time it is scrutinized.
Speaking of fiction, an inconvenient videotaperesurfaced the day before the debate. It was from 2007 in Virginia: Senator Barack Obama, presidential stars in his eyes, speaking to a largely black audience of religious leaders and inciting racial animus.
To be generous, Obama’s performance is disgusting. Cynically adopting the black dialect of the American South, a dialect utterly alien to him, he demagogues against Washington’s supposedly selective waivers of the Stafford Act — legislation that requires communities hit by disasters to match 10 percent of federal aid. They waived it for 9/11, he tells the crowd, and they waived it when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida: Those communities were allowed to keep their one dollar for every ten federal dollars. But when he comes to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the largely African-American population of New Orleans, Obama implies that Congress refused the waiver: “What’s happenin’ down in New O’leans? Where’s yo’ dollar? Where’s yo’ Stafford Act money? . . . Tells me that somehow the people down in New O’leans they don’t care about as much.”
In fact, ten days before Obama gave that speech, Congress had waived the Stafford Act requirement for Katrina. He was well aware of that fact, too. After all, he was one of only 14 senators to vote against the waiver. It was part of a bill to fund the war effort in Iraq. That is, to pander to his Bush-deranged, anti-war base, Obama decided that squeezing New O’leans was a price worth paying. Then, he lied about what happened in order to foment racial resentment — an atmosphere that he calculated would help his presidential bid.
Just as he’s doing today.
It doesn’t matter to me, though. I was already voting against Obama. Now, though, I’m voting for Romney.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at theNational Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was recently published by Encounter Books.

Will Big Bird ever leave the government nest?

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com
October 5, 2012

Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney's debate coach. As he put it about halfway through "That's Life":

"I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly ... ."

That's what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that's what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn't going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself – in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it's no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their "safe house" in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president's Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: "We've got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes." The butchers of Darfur aren't blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven't given enough cookies. I'm not saying there's a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary ... well, actually, I am.

Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So let's go back to his central thrust. The Corporation of Public Broadcasting receives nearly half-a-billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it disburses to PBS stations, who, in turn, disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. I don't know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Sen. Jim DeMint, the President of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of $956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Sen. Harry Reid embody the same mystifying phenomenon: they've been in "public service" their entire lives and have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.

Mitt's decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counter-arguments from Democrats: 1) half a billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother? 2) everybody loves Sesame Street, so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error. On the latter point, whether or not everybody loves Sesame Street, everybody has seen it, and every American under 50 has been weaned on it. So far this century it's sold nigh on a billion bucks' worth of merchandising sales (that's popular toys such as the Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.

Conversely, if this supposed "public" broadcasting brand is capable on standing on its own, then so should it. As for the rest of PBS's output – the eternal replays of the Peter, Paul & Mary reunion concert, twee Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials – whatever their charms, it is difficult to see why the Brokest Nation in History should be borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo to pay for it. A system by which a Communist Party official in Beijing enriches British comedy producers by charging it to American taxpayers with interest is not the most obvious economic model. Yet, as Obama would say, the government did build that.

(Full disclosure: Some years ago, I hosted a lavish BBC special, and, at the meeting intended to sell it to PBS, the executive from "Great Performances" said he could only sign off on the deal if I were digitally edited out and replaced by Angela Lansbury. Murder, he shrieked. Lest I sound bitter, I should say I am in favor of this as a more general operating principle for public broadcasting: for example, "A Prairie Home Companion" would be greatly improved by having Garrison Keillor digitally replaced by Paul Ryan.)

The small things are not unimportant – and not just because, when "small" is defined as anything under 11 figures, "small" is a big part of the problem. If Americans can't muster the will to make Big Bird leave the government nest, they certainly will never reform Medicare. Just before the debate in Denver, in the general backstage melée, a commentator pointed out Valerie Jarrett, who is officially "Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs," a vital position which certainly stimulates the luxury-length business-card industry. Not one in 100,000 Americans knows what she looks like, but she declines to take the risk of passing among the rude peasantry without the protection of a Secret Service detail. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a private jet to fly him home from Washington every weekend.

The Queen of the Netherlands flies commercial, so does the Queen of Denmark. Prince William and his lovely bride, whom at least as many people want to get a piece of as Valerie Jarrett or Leon Panetta, flew to Los Angeles on a Royal Canadian Air Force boneshaker. It is profoundly unrepublican when minor public officials assume that private planes and entourages to hold the masses at bay are a standard perk of office. And it is even more disturbing that tens of millions of Americans are accepting of this. The entitlements are complicated, and will take some years and much negotiation. But, in a Romney administration, rolling back the nickel'n'dime stuff – ie, the million'n'billion stuff – should start on Day One.

Mitt made much of his bipartisan credentials in Denver. So, in that reach-across-the-aisle spirit, if we cannot abolish entirely frivolous spending, might we not at least attempt some economies of scale? Could Elmo, Grover, Oscar and Cookie Monster not be redeployed as Intergovernmental Engagement Assistant Jarrett's security detail? Could Leon Panetta not fly home on Big Bird every weekend?

And for the next debate, instead of a candidate slumped at the lectern like a muppet whose puppeteer has gone out for a smoke, maybe Elmo's guy could shove his arm up the back of the presidential suit.

©MARK STEYN

FOLLOW US @OCRegLetters

Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy's performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt's assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made. "WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress's stuff leave big bird alone," tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the president mocked Romney for "finally getting tough on Big Bird" – not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.

Romney by two touchdowns

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 4

http:// www.washingtonpost.com

It was the biggest rout since Agincourt. If you insist, since the Carter-Reagan debate. With a remarkable display of confidence, knowledge and nerve, Mitt Romney won the first 2012 debate going away.

Romney didn’t just demonstrate authoritative command of a myriad of domestic issues. He was nervy about it, taking the president on frontally, not just relentlessly attacking, but answering every charge leveled against him — with a three-point rebuttal.

And he pulled off a tactical coup by coming right out of the box to undo millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads that painted him, personally, as Gordon Gekko — rapacious vulture capitalist who doesn’t just lay off steelworkers but kills their wives — and, politically, as intent on raising taxes on the middle class while lowering them for the rich.

The Romney campaign had let these ads go largely unanswered. But a “kill Romney” strategy can only work until people get to see Romney themselves. On Wednesday night, they did. Regarding the character assassination, all Romney really had to do was walk out with no horns on his head. Confident, smiling and nonthreatening, he didn’t look like a man who enjoys killing the wives of laid-off steelworkers.

Not a very high bar, I admit. But remember: It’s President Obama who set the bar. And succeeded. Romney suffers from unprecedentedly high negatives (50 percent), the highest unfavorability rating at this late date for any challenger in the past three decades.

As to the policy, Romney finally got to explain to the 60 million Americans watching that he intends to lower taxes across the board, particularly for the middle class. As for the rich, he got to explain the difference between lowering tax rates and reducing tax payments. He repeated at least twice that the rich would continue to pay the same percentage of the tax burden, while lower rates would spur economic growth.

His success in doing this against a flummoxed Obama does more than rally the conservative base. It may affect waverers — disappointed 2008 Obama supporters waiting for a reason to jump. They watch Romney in this debate and ask: Is this the clueless, selfish, out-of-touch guy we’ve been hearing about from the ads and from the mainstream media?

And then they see Obama — detached, meandering, unsure. Can this be the hip, cool, in-control guy his acolytes and the media have been telling us about?

Obama was undone on Wednesday in part by his dismissive arrogance. You could see him thinking annoyedly: “Why do I have to be onstage with this clod, when I’ve gone toe-to-toe with Putin?” (And lost every round, I’d say. But that’s not how Obama sees it.)

Obama never even pulled out his best weapon, the 47 percent. Not once. That’s called sitting on a lead, lazily and smugly. I wager he mentions it in the next debate, more than once — and likely in his kickoff.

On the other hand, Obama just isn’t that good. Not without a teleprompter. He’s not even that good at news conferences — a venue in which he’s still in charge, choosing among questioners and controlling the timing of his own answers.

By the end of the debate, Obama looked small, uncertain. It was Romney who had the presidential look.

Reelection campaigns after a failed presidential term — so failed that Obama barely even bothers to make the case, preferring to blame everything on his predecessor — hinge almost entirely on whether the challenger can meet the threshold of acceptability. Romney crossed the threshold Wednesday night.
Reagan won his election (Carter was actually ahead at the time) when he defused his caricature as some wild, extreme, warmongering cowboy. In his debate with Carter, he was affable, avuncular and reasonable. That’s why with a single aw-shucks line, “There you go again,” the election was over.
Romney had to show something a little different: That he is not the clumsy, out-of-touch plutocrat that the paid Obama ads and the unpaid media have portrayed him to be. He did, decisively.
That’s why MSNBC is on suicide watch. Why the polls show that, by a margin of at least 2 to 1, voters overwhelmingly gave the debate to Romney.
And he won big in an unusual way. This could be the only presidential debate ever won so definitively in the absence of some obvious and ruinous gaffe, like Gerald Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”
Romney by two touchdowns.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com