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This week, Long is assente in Italy, Lileks is powerless on the phone, and Robinson is rolling with all of it. We’ve got Money & Politics podcaster Jim Pethokoukis to talk about the economy, the budget deficit, and the search for inflation. Then, Commentary’s Peter Wehner joins to discuss what happens when the Right turns on America. And we’re not talking about what happens at a red-light, either. Got an opinion on this one? Chime in below.
Music from this week’s’ episode:
Hanging On The Telephone by Blondie
Wrong number, EJHill
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I would remind Mr. Wehner that it was the hard-core left that turned on America. Deliberate destruction of our cultural institutions with malice and forethought is the equivalent of treason. I’m sure my comment is exactly the type vitriol that Mr. Wehner condemns, but I promise to do worse in a full post over the weekend. Our nation has climbed out of economic recessions and depressions in the past, but no republic can survive the loss of civic virtue. We are facing a moral crisis and the victory of one side or the other will determine the future of our nation.
GWB and Wehner turned on conservatism and gave us a decade in the wilderness
I’ll be looking forward to that full post this weekend, Mugwump.
I am deeply offended by James’s sense of decadigital normativity. I insist you fire him at once. And you must. After all, I used the word “offended,’ so you have no recourse but to accede to my demand.
Actually, after hearing Mr. Wehner and reading his article at Commentary, I do not share our hosts’ increased optimism [But then, it’s my job not to]. In fact, I feel some of ~Mugwump’s “vitriol” as well, and look forward to dumping a couple of hundred words of it into his upcoming post’s comments.
Peter isn’t the only one with fond Metrodome memories. I lived for a year in the Mary Tyler Moore apartments (during the last couple of years of the MTM show when she lived in the tall apartment with odd sporadic coloring) and it was a ten minute walk from the stadium. It was during the Kirby Puckett years and I could get a ticket for $3. Hideous building, but couldn’t beat the price. Even when I had paper work to do, I’d bring it to the stadium and work on it between innings. There was some strange wind phenomenons in the stadium that were kind of cool.
Peter, I think you have told the story of the speech at that now destroyed stadium by then vice president Bush before, and I think that James talked about the demolition of said stadium before as well…. or maybe it’s my memory that is going…..
Loved the podcast!
I’m flabbergasted that Peter apparently doesn’t read the Bleat.
My problem? James writes faster than I can read.
Mr. Lileks,
When you say you are “pixilated” by the power situation, do you mean you have turned low-res, or are you referring to the original meaning of “teched by the pixies?”
I’ll keep this simple.
If Peter Wehner had been writing in 1964 he would’ve dismissed Ronald Reagan’s Time For Choosing speech as alarmist, reactionary, and un-American.
Sometimes I think people here forget two things about the progressive sixties that begat a lot of what we see today. 1) They had some genuine concerns, among them more freedoms for women to choose what they want to do in life, figuring out how to incorporate gay and lesbian folks into society better, and that big one, civil rights for blacks. 2) They probably didn’t know that the movement would lead to some of the odd outgrowths we see today, several generations removed, like gender neutral pronouns.
I think its a little unfair to say that they deliberately wanted to destroy the culture. I think they wanted to change it for the better and it got out of hand.
Furthermore, the biggest change in family structure likely came from science (that is, the pill), less than from any progressive social movement. So we can’t blame the hippies too much.
Also, Peter,
The trend line for American’s approval of same-sex marriage was already over 50 percent by 2010, before the wave of court decisions we’ve seen in its favor. In the podcast you repeatedly said the courts were forcing this on the country based on voting habits, however you could also argue, conversely, that they were upholding the will of the people based on polling data.
As of 2012, the popular vote also turned in favor of gay marriage in a few states (not just one) for the first time, and it looks like November 2014 will bring more of that.
Anybody else just tired? Case in point: Pickety. I see the manifestos flying like confetti but I haven’t been able to bring myself to think about any of them, let alone read them.
Contemplating the lawlessness of the Obama administration, the doublethink the Left uses to justify their approbation of it, and the myrmidons of the media who defend it wears me out.
The virtual certainty the Republican Party will completely FUBAR their electoral prospects in 2014 and 2016; or if they don’t that their inability to govern and craving to forget their promises in favor of getting their snouts as deeply in the trough is utterly ennervating.
Can’t give up, because I have children and grandchildren to think about. So once more into the breech.
But our ruling elites are on a timer, whether they grasp that fact or not. If there is no correction of the slide to despotism in view by 2017 (giving the new president some time to work), change will come, and it may not be pretty.
Personally, I’m visiting late Eighteenth Century Denmark at the moment. They had their moments, too, of course, what with Struensee, but one hardly expects more in an absolute monarchy.
He means pixilated, not pixelated. The first refers to the work of pixies; the latter to picture elements, aka pixels. (I looked this up just the other day. That’s why I know the difference.)
I thought as much, but it can be so difficult to see his spelling in his speech.
I have no idea why my head brought up “pixilated” as a term for confusion, when 99.7% of modern ears would hear “pixelated,” but that’s what happened.
The debate is over, the science is settled, 97% of audiologists concur with the consensus.
Rawls, I’m sorry but I can’t agree with your assessment.
I could agree with your belief they had a “genuine concern” if any of them since then had come forward and said, “Wow, we didn’t know it would go this far off the rails.” Most of them are still alive, so they have the opportunity to own up. Instead, they and their descendants have gone the opposite direction–pushing the pedal to the floor. Where do you think the “War On Women” charge against conservatives comes from? All the while, the most dangerous place a woman can live in the USA is in one of the liberal parts. So, was their 60’s motivation “genuine concern” or something else?
This is similar to the current environmental movement. They have a “genuine concern” about the Earth’s temperature. However, when their data is questioned, they don’t go back and re-check their facts. Instead, deniers are called “kooks”. In the meantime, the Government enacts all sorts of legislation affecting our freedoms and the ability to create wealth. Environmentalists know this and forge ahead anyway. Once again, “genuine concern” or something else?
James and Peter thanks much for a wonderfully ‘articulated’ pod. I know it went deep into guilty waters but it served up a life raft for my observations on the marriage idea (did I really say that)? One point.. Dr. Carson used the Nazi comparison only in the observation that they proposed use of government medical takeover “take over” of all facets of citizens life. Great pod thanks again!
“I’m not in this business to protect bond investors.”
Isn’t that that truth. Neither anymore is the Federal Reserve. It’s a measure of how far we have come that this comment by Jim Pethokoukis went unremarked. It’s taken for granted nowadays, even by conservative podcasters, that the value of the dollar, and the bonds it backs, are just another knob the financial masters may twiddle in their attempts to engineer the economy. That they are twiddling with the life savings of millions, put into treasuries under the now anachronistic notion that the government recognized a virtually sacred trust to protect the value of U.S. bonds, is neither here nor there. Your granddad should have known the U.S. government was not in the business of protecting him when he bought those savings bonds for you.
We are all suckers now.
Fantastic outro. Great song, the “new” ahead of the New Wave. Deborah Harry back in the day, was, well, fascinating to an 11 year-old.
Glad to know this came out in 1978. Yikes.
cool song, and album. I remember being amused to learn a few years ago that she was born in 1945! Making her a late starter in a scene of people several years younger than her, with fans younger still. That makes her old enough to actually remember the Buddy Holly song they did on that album.
I heard “pixelated” in the sense of an interrupted download that leaves your jpeg forever not-fully-resolved.
James Pethakoukis makes the point, and it’s well taken, that these problems didn’t begin with Obama. I think though, that he’s a little too closely focused.
Remember the Tea Party? Not the candidates who take up that mantle now, but the ordinary joes who went to rallies and town halls? Obama wasn’t the only thing they were mad about; they also objected to the measures Bush took to defuse the financial crisis. Bush did a number of things well, but reining in the federal government wasn’t one of them.
Contrary to Mr. Pethakoukis, the largest systemic problem this nation faces is that the federal government is completely and totally incapable of reducing it’s spending in any meaningful way.
I mean, in a political/economic sense. In a cultural sense I think that might be a subsection of a larger problem.
Wehner and the elites among whom he circulates are the ones uncomfortable with Carson’s metaphors on the real and ongoing destruction of our nations government, policies, culture and society. He’s so profoundly in the bubble and out of touch that it is depressing, expected, and dangerous that he is represented as a voice even remotely associated with conservative thought.
Pixilated explained..
Mr. Deeds Goes To Town with Gary Cooper (1936)
[Two shy sisters testify at Deeds’s sanity hearing]
John Cedar: Suppose you just answer, Miss Jane. Now, will you tell the court what everybody at home thinks of Longfellow Deeds?
[pause; then Jane whispers to Amy; Amy whispers back]
Jane Faulkner: They think he’s pixilated.
Amy Faulkner: Oh, yes, pixilated.
Judge May: He’s what?
John Cedar: What was that you said he was?
Jane Faulkner: Pixilated.
Amy Faulkner: Mm-hmm.
John Cedar: Now that’s rather a strange word to us, Miss Jane. Can you tell the court exactly what it means?
Board member: Perhaps I can explain, Your Honor. The word “pixilated” is an early American expression derived from the word “pixies,” meaning elves. They would say the pixies had got him. As we nowadays would say, a man is “barmy.”
Judge May: Oh. Is that correct?
Jane Faulkner: Mm-hmm.
Amy Faulkner: Mm-hmm.
With Troy all across the USA
No Rob sock-less in LA
Peter’s sweater akimbo
Lileks in electrical Limbo
A Ricochet Podcast—No Way!
(self poached from Weekend Limerick post)