Sentences should mean something

From a New York Times article about Evander Holyfield:

"Nor is it about pride or re-establishing his name, no small feat for someone so far removed from fame, other than for his “Dancing With the Stars” gig, that Google Earth would be hard-pressed to find him."

What does "So far removed from fame that Google Earth would be hard-pressed to find him." Mean. Is Google Earth good at finding famous people? No, of course not. So maybe it's a metaphor. Is Google Earth good at finding famous sites, like landmark buildings or natural wonders? Well yes. Is it bad at finding non-famous things, like your house or your hometown or some random barn in Arkansas? No. It's good at those things too, which is a good deal of its charm. So what, exactly, is the reference to Google Earth intended to do? Why is it there? I literally do not know. This is bad writing at its most blatant and it's in the New York Times and I know its a sports story but an editor should have caught this because it's a meaningless sentence. How would I fix it? Well, I would, perhaps, not accuse someone of being removed from fame when I was writing a BOXING article about him for the NEW YORK TIMES. Non-famous boxers do not get into the New York Times unless they have just beaten a famous boxer and thus become famous themselves. There are over 170 articles about Holyfield's upcoming fight in Google's news aggregator. Holyfield is less famous now than when he got his ear bitten off by Mike Tyson, but he's well remembered by boxing fans and the populace at large. I'd wager more people remember the ear biting than the Dancing appearance.

This sentence is the kind of lazy writing that a decent high school or college is supposed to beat out of you. It doesn't belong in professional writing and it certainly doesn't belong in the New York Times. It's not just that standards have slipped, it's like they barely exist anymore. You want to make a specious claim combined with an incomprehensible reference in the paper of record? Go ahead.

Shameful.

Shocking Discovery: Water Still Wet!

News articles like this one have been popping up all over the place.

The gist of it is that Al Qaeda isn't ready to make nice yet even though we elected Barack Obama who totally has a Muslim name and isn't white and is handsome and funny and erudite and not a boob. What a shocker.

Also the second in command at Al Qaeda used an ethnic slur.

Here's the thing. Al Qaeda is, literally, an evil terrorist organization bent on our destruction. We've laughed at George Bush and the conservatives for tarring all its enemies with that black-and-white designation, but for Al Qaeda it fits. Al Qaeda murders people. Its stated aims are both ludicrous and horrible. It's a bunch of bad bad fellows (and ladies.)

So why is it news that Al Qaeda doesn't like Barack Obama? The right wing may have accused him of palling around with terrorists, but they weren't radical Muslim terrorists, and only the truly insane thought he had anything but animus towards Al Qaeda. Barack Obama has stated that he will make it a priority for the U.S. to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda. Of course they aren't going to like him.

What's the news here? The ethnic slur? Al Qaeda is a group of unrepentant murderous terrorists. They murder as a matter of course. Is it really shocking that they use nasty language? Especially considering that in the part of the world from which they hail there's a lot less political correctness than there is in the West. They still won't let women drive in Saudi Arabia, and Al Qaeda hates the Saudi government because it's not fundamentalist ENOUGH.

Now I realize that Al Qaeda is our enemy and any big statement from them needs to be covered as legitimate news, but what I don't get is the tone of a lot of these pieces, implying that it's noteworthy that Al Qaeda would use an ethnic slur and that there was any other possible reaction they might have to Obama. Is the implication that Obama is so wonderful that he might win over Al Qaeda even though he openly talks about his desire to arrest or kill the group's leader? Seems unlikely. Are we offended by the term "House Negro" used by those responsible for the blowing up of buildings and ships and trains? It seems like a fairly minor crime in comparison.

Zawahiri's statement is a very minor news event, especially in a time when major important stories are not in short supply. Al Qaeda still hates America. Obama isn't getting a Christmas card from the world's premier terrorist group, nor will they offer him any suggestions about the type of puppy he should pick out for his daughters. In other news water is still wet and Glenn Beck remains batshit crazy. Nothing to see here.

The secret of his failure

I finally understand David Brooks.

It's not that he doesn't believe the things he writes, or that he is constantly looking for a way to suck up to the powerful (though he is.) It's that he is basically a functional amnesiac, who doesn't even understand the basic concept of intellectual consistency, and has no reason to want to put it into practice.

"In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life."

One of the things David Brooks loves to do is insult latte sipping, Crate & Barrel shopping effete liberal elites. In THIS column, however, he claims that the very symbols of effete liberal elitism make the United States more interesting and enliven daily life. There seems to be a conflict here, until you realize that David Brooks has, for all intents and purposes, never read a David Brooks column and doesn't know what David Brooks thinks. His memory is wiped clean every evening when he goes to sleep. Where some of us might look at things like, say, the growth of Starbucks, and see complex difficult to parse trends, David Brooks glances at them, spots one facet, comments on it, and then the next day takes another glance, spots another facet, and comments on that, without ever having to resolve the conflict between his beliefs. Through this method he manages to say a host of conflicting things that all contain a grain of truth but are, fundamentally, wrongheaded because they fail to take into account other facets of the phenomena he's describing (E.G. The fact that chain stores have driven interesting local stores out of business, which homogenizes American life rather than enlivening it, and the fact that there is not a single thing at Crate & Barrel that a sane healthy person would want to purchase.)

Let's continue.

Despite decades of affluence, longstanding issues like health care, education, energy and entitlement debt have not been adequately addressed.

But David Brooks, you support a party that does everything it can NOT to address these issues. Oh right. You don't know that. You're unaware of your own history of advocacy. Sorry. Yeah. These are serious problems. Thank you for discovering them, David Brooks.

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats [who elected Obama] will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

In other words they will have to deal with all the stuff that the Republicans let slip by the wayside for the last 8 years (as opposed to Bill Clinton who worked on balancing the budget and took a shot at health care, even though he was unsuccessful.) They will have to deal with the horrible fallout from the disaster that your chosen party visited upon America.

But you've already forgotten the Bush administration and your place among the pundocracy that supported it. You're just looking at how things are now without wondering how we got here, and whether there are any lessons we can learn from the past to help us act more wisely in the future. Because you're David Brooks. And that's what you do.

Thanks for the buck, I'll be sure to pass it.

People are demanding that irresponsible borrowers should shoulder the blame for this financial crisis along with the lenders.

These people are wrong. And they make me very angry.

First of all, lenders must take full responsibility for the people they choose to lend money to. The problem here isn't that a bunch of good bets (People who are statistically likely to pay back their mortgages) didn't pan out for unexpected reasons. It's that mortgages were given to people who they shouldn't have been given to, and then those mortgages were bought and sold with dishonest ratings by people who were making longshot bets to pad their current quarter results and obtain higher bonuses. Furthermore, if it were JUST the mortgages we were talking about then the financial crisis would not be nearly as deep and as wide as it is. There's also the matter of credit default swaps, which nobody seems to understand (I think I have a decent handle on them) but which really didn't have anything to do with the mortgages, except that they made sure that if some banks failed due to buying bad mortgage debt then ALL the banks were going to tumble down with them like a house of cards.

Totally on the shoulders of the fat cats.

Getting back to the people who shouldn't have been getting mortgages, not only were they given mortgages if they asked for them, but frequently they were lied to about the terms of the mortgages and upsold on bigger mortgages than they initially wanted. If you went into a car showroom to buy a used Honda and the salesman told you he could work out financing for you on a new Mercedes, and you end up buying the Mercedes, you are responsible for your pain when the car gets repossessed, but you have zero responsibility towards the showroom or the salesman. They told you this was alright. They tried to take advantage of you.

It has always been the responsibility of a lender to vet the people he is lending to. While people shouldn't take on debt they can't afford, it's not because they have a moral responsibility towards the bank (Though they do in an abstract sense) it's because eventually the debt will come due and you'll be screwed. The responsibility for the bank's money rests on the shoulders of the officers of that bank and they abdicated that responsibility. They couldn't have foreseen that lots of people would lie (especially when explicitly encouraged to do so) on applications for what were known as "Liar's loans?" Really? The Wall Street geniuses couldn't see that coming?

We don't all share in the blame for this financial collapse. The blame rests on two groups. The bankers who utterly failed to act responsibly because of a perverse incentive system (I'll include the creators of that incentive system in this group, because they were mostly goddamned bankers) and the government, which not only failed to properly regulate the situation but exacerbated it through terrible housing policy, encouraging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make bad loans on the theory that it would somehow lead to housing for the poor. It didn't. In fact thanks to the housing bubble it's harder than ever for the poor to find anywhere to live. Pouring money into the housing market perverted it, Wall Street preyed upon this perversion, then created insane insurance schemes to make even more money, and it all eventually blew up in everybody's face like these things always do.

Let's keep the blame where it belongs. On the bad guys. On the irresponsible thieves. On Wall Street.

David Brooks Wants His Daddy

The authors of this blog have our differences, but one thing we can both agree on is that David Brooks is awful. He's awful for a lot of reasons, but in his latest column he does something right, and admirable. He openly admits that he's the kind of beta male who, in tough times, looks for someone, ANYONE, to tell him what to do.

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt inherited an economic crisis. He understood that his first job was to restore confidence, to give people a sense that somebody was in charge, that something was going to be done.

This is meant to parallel the current situation, except that Roosevelt inherited an economic crisis that had been unfolding over a course of years rather than a couple of weeks. Note that Brooks praises Roosevelt not for actually doing anything to solve the crisis, but instead for making people feel better. The way David Brooks wishes someone would make him feel better. Someone with a strong masculine voice that would tell David Brooks that everything is going to be okay, and strong masculine arms that could wrap David Brooks up and make him feel warm, safe, and secure.

This generation of political leaders is confronting a similar situation,

No. Not at all. It's not just that the causes are somewhat different, but it's also been well under a month since all this really started to unfold. Once again, Roosevelt had years to think about his crisis, and ran on a campaign specifically targeted to deal with it.

and, so far, they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed.

David Brooks wants his daddy to make him feel like someone is in charge. David Brooks wants everyone else to know that his daddy is taking care of things. David Brooks isn't that worried that daddy get things right and actually help the crisis, just that he tell everyone he's doing something.

George W. Bush is completely out of juice, having squandered his influence with Republicans as well as Democrats.

Note that his juice was squandered by ramming through legislation that later turned out disastrous to the point where whenever he suggests doing something everyone immediately becomes suspicious of that course of action.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is a smart moneyman, but an inept legislator. He was told time and time again that House Republicans would not support his bill, and his response was to get down on bended knee before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

He proposed to her? That is a rather unexpected negotiating strategy.

House leaders of both parties got wrapped up in their own negotiations, but did it occur to any of them that it might be hard to pass a bill fairly described as a bailout to Wall Street?

Probably. Perhaps they felt pressured by the media to ram something through in order to look authoritative.

Let us recognize above all the 228 [congresspeople] who voted no — the authors of this revolt of the nihilists. They showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed.

WHY WON'T THEY FOLLOW THEIR MASTERS? What do they think, that they're elected representatives of their districts who are responsible both individually and collectively for doing what's in the best interest of the nation and their constituents? That's not the way David Brooks sees it. Their job is to get down on 'bended knee' and lick the boots of their superiors, just like David Brooks does when his mistress tells him he's been bad. Disobedience is very disrespectful.

They did the momentarily popular thing

I.E. what their constituents wanted

and if the country slides into a deep recession, they will have the time and leisure to watch public opinion shift against them.

As opposed to if they rammed the bill through, it didn't work, and the country went into recession AND the government was broke.

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame.

Bad boys and girls.

It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party.

Because that's what they're doing. Single mindedly trying to destroy the Republican Party. Not sticking up for their constituents or their beliefs or any of that foolishness. They're trying to take down the G.O.P.

Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support.

To be fair, they were really trying to keep the Hispanic support from getting into the country in the first place.

Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Anxieties like "Will my wife find out that those credit card charges at The Dungeon weren't really just a mixup with Kristoff for one of his sex slavery pieces."

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century.

A) I have a degree in political science with a concentration in American politics, so I vaguely know what the Smooth-Hawley tariff act was, but can you really use this reference with impunity in this day and age? Most Americans can't name the fourth amendment of the constitution, let alone the ninth or the sixteenth. Are we really expecting them to catch this one?

B) The Smoot-Hawley tariff act was an example of overlegislating (Raising tariffs in response to competition from imports) rather than an example of failing to act in crisis. In fact one could argue persuasively that the Smoot-Hawley tariff act is an example of why congress shouldn't always act, and certainly shouldn't act impulsively and without careful consideration.

C) You can't pluralize Smoot-Hawley like that. Smoot-Hawley was not a family name, it was the name of the act sponsored by those two men. You'd have to threaten that the congressmen would look like the Smoots and Hawleys of the 21st century, which wouldn't really work either because there was only one Smoot and one Hawley (for the purposes of this discussion) in the 20th century, but at least it would sort of work. Shouldn't the New York Times be doing a better job of copyediting, especially for a column that presumably has a decent lead time.

With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable.

God, NO! Congress taking responsibility for something and being held ACCOUNTABLE? Won't somebody think of the children? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

I’ve spoken with several House Republicans over the past few days and most admirably believe in free-market principles.

Principles? Among House Republicans? I think we may have a Jayson Blair situation here.

What’s sad is that they still think it’s 1984.

I don't think David Brooks consciously intended to reference Orwell's classic (Though I do think he is waiting for Big Brother to arrive with the fervent hope of an Evangelical waiting for Jesus, except with more erections.) but if not, why choose 1984 specifically, instead of 1983 or 1985? You have to be carefully randomly throwing that year around, just like you can't say "I hate September 11th, because I lost my wallet on that day in 1997." Someone's already called dibs on 1984.

They still think the biggest threat comes from socialism and Walter Mondale liberalism. They seem not to have noticed how global capital flows have transformed our political economy.

Whoops. Neither did anybody else.

We’re living in an age when a vast excess of capital sloshes around the world fueling cycles of bubble and bust.

It's a tsunami of money. And just like a tsunami it can only be described in passive terms because there's no group of people actually in control of this thing!

When the capital floods into a sector or economy, it washes away sober business practices, and habits of discipline and self-denial.

I love the passive language here. This tsunami of cash washes away sober business practices while bankers desperately cling to them, trying to prevent themselves from taking stupid greedy risks. But they can't. The tsunami of money MADE them do it.

Then the money managers panic and it sloshes out, punishing the just and unjust alike.

Not to burst your 'bubble' Mr. Brooks, but ummm...hasn't that been the opposite of the case? Haven't the unjust and irresponsible lost a crapload of money while those who refrained from betting heavily on unsubstantiated securities have stayed in business and in some cases even profited from the situation?

What we need in this situation is authority.

Someone to take control with a firm voice, strong words, and lots of paddlings for naughty boys like David Brooks. Seriously, though, is there a situation where David Brooks doesn't call for the consolidation of power and for someone to tell everyone what to do? Can you imagine one?

Not heavy-handed government regulation,

This is where Brooks remembers that he's supposed to be a principled Republican instead of a worm who wants somebody to order him around.

but the steady and powerful hand of some public institutions that can guard against the corrupting influences of sloppy money and then prevent destructive contagions when the credit dries up.

Heady stuff. Definitely the kind of thing you'd want to organize during a few short weeks of panic and confusion. Because making such decisions based on fear never ever goes wrong.

The Congressional plan was nobody’s darling, but it was an effort to assert some authority

Remember, asserting authority in response to economic crisis ALWAYS ENDS WELL

It was an effort to alter the psychology of the markets. People don’t trust the banks; the bankers don’t trust each other. It was an effort to address the crisis of authority in Washington.

Authority is the official word of the day.

At least it might have stabilized the situation so fundamental reforms of the world’s financial architecture could be undertaken later.

We'll get to the actual change later, now is not the time for trying to fix stuff, it's time to spend $700 billion to buy some peace of mind.

But the 228 House members who voted no have exacerbated the global psychological free fall, and now we have a crisis of political authority on top of the crisis of financial authority.

Two authorities in one sentence. I imagine David Brooks writing that sentence down, quietly high-fiving himself in his cubicle, and then furiously masturbating to the thought of a jackboot stepping softly on his scrotum.

The only thing now is to try again — to rescue the rescue. There’s no time to find a brand-new package, so the Congressional plan should go up for another vote on Thursday, this time with additions that would change its political prospects.

If at first you don't succeed, stuff the bill full of pork until everyone compromises their principles.

If that doesn’t happen, the world could be in for some tough economic times (the Europeans, apparently, have not even begun to acknowledge their toxic debt) — but also tough political times.

The American century was created by American leadership, which is scarcer than credit just about now.

And authority costs $25o an hour or $6oo for a three hour block.

David Brooks needs his credit, people.