Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Friday, June 14, 2002

The Norm! - At various times in the history of this Blog, I've mentioned my love of good public speaking. Our Senate race between incumbent ultraliberal Paul Wellstone and neocon challenger Norm Coleman puts the contrast between the Haves and Have Nots, public speaking-wise, into sharp contrast.

Did you hear Wellstone's acceptance speech at the DFL convention? He shouted himself hoarse. It was like listening to an adenoidal Mussolini. Dreadful.

Coleman is a slickster of the first order. But his speech was like his mayoral record: smooth, slick, effortlessly gliding over spots that would have sunk a less proficient political animal.

Even if the speaking styles were reversed, I'd still vote for Coleman on policy grounds. But it'll be nice having a Senator that's not painful to listen to...

posted by Mitch Berg 6/14/2002 12:45:40 PM

Heimat,Heim und Volk - that was a Nazi phrase. It means "Homeland, Home and People", but its idiomatic meaning was far deeper than that (which is why the Nazis used it). It alludes to the German cultural connection with the homeland and "volk", a word with connotations to native Germans (especially early in the last century) that don't translate to Americans. It's very exclusionary - Jews, after all, weren't part of the Volk, they didn't come from the Heimat, and had no allegiance to it.

Even in its more innocent sense, it's something that is hard to understand for Americans - our nation is united around ideas like liberty, equality and justice, rather than around some supernatural nationalism. That's why the right in Europe is gaining so much traction against Immigrants - it's impossible to immigrate, truly, to country with an ingrained, psychic sense of nationality.

All of which is part of this icky feeling I've had about the phrase "Homeland Defense", ever since it became de rigeur among the nattering classes after the war began. I haven't talked about it much - it's a hard concept to explain.

Fortunately, Peggy Noonan did it for me.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/14/2002 11:57:02 AM

Constitution 2002 - The current conflict promises plenty of wrangling about who gets what constitutional protections. Terrorists? Americans working for terrorists? Americans captured overseas fighting on the terrorists' behalf? Non-citizens engaged in attacks or planning for attacks?

Many opinions on this - and I'll start with Ruth Wedgewood.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/14/2002 11:50:46 AM

Thursday, June 13, 2002

More about Rowley - What the FBI agent's whistleblowing tells us about the media, by Ann Coulter.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/13/2002 07:12:37 AM

Adios, Bill - Bill Maher and Politically Incorrect were exasperatingly...well, politically correct. He invariably claimed "I'm a libertarian", while his rhetoric was pure liberal.

But he is a pretty sharp comic, even if I disagree with him on most things (and let's face it - if I limited my music, comedy and literature to artists I agreed with politically, I'd have a steady diet of Ted Nugent, Drew Carey and Tom Clancy. Although I don't mind Carey and Clancy...). The show was a great showcase for the vapidity of most American celebrities. Maher's panels were corrals of vacuity, groaning in self-congratulation even as their myopia made their "insights" almost too painful to laugh at.

The scary part? What will the desperate ABC come up with to replace it? The mind reels.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/13/2002 07:10:22 AM

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

The Ties that Bind - Whatever else is going on, the heart quickens (well, mine does) to note that a new Bruce Springsteen album and tour are apparently on the way.

I've seen Bruce twice, both times at pivotal periods of my life - just before I graduated from college, when I was trying to figure out if my future lay in North Dakota or elsewhere, and then a few days before my ex moved out, and I was trying to figure out what my future was at all.

Maybe this time I can just enjoy the show!

Counting the days - although no dates have been released.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/12/2002 08:19:33 AM

Horns of a Dilemma - I'm honestly not sure who to support for the GOP nomination this year.

The Reagan conservative and iconoclast in me is pulling for Brian Sullivan. His heart is in the right places on most issues, and anyone that the reflexive left hates this badly has to be good.

The GOP activist in me has his fingers crossed for Tim Pawlenty. He's the best stump speaker in Minnesota politics today - I'd just love to see his speaking style compared, side by side, with that of Paul Wellstone. Pawlenty is smooth, relaxed, natural, a genuinely funny and personable guy in a way that comes across very well onstage. Wellstone rants and shouts like Mussolini. As a student of oratory (Dad was a speech teacher), these things also matter to me.

Both are great guys - I've met 'em - and I'm as torn as I've ever been.

I think either of them, in a head-to-head, Ventura-free competition, could clobber Roger Moe. I'm not even positive that Ventura'd beat Pawlenty, but one never knows with Governor Meathead.

I'll be looking forward to the convention.

Speaking of Oratory - I'm a huge student of Winston Churchill. There has been no better political orator in modern times. In 1940, when the British Army was disarmed by its debacle at Dunkirk, and nothing stood between Britain and the Nazis but 28 miles of water and a few hundred RAF fighters, and Brit cities were being pounded to flinders nightly, it can be argued that nothing did more to keep Britain in the war than Churchill's spoken word.

Today, the situation is a little different. We are the most powerful nation in the world. But we face a zealous, intractable, negotiation-proof enemy that is as hard to find has he is mindlessly brutal.

Victor Davis Hansen notes that we need the same stuff that made Churchill what he was, today - a language of confidence and aggressiveness.

Diversions - I don't watch a lot of TV. In fact, my TV is "broken" for the summer - my kids and I spend a lot more quality time when it's "broken". Shhhh, don't tell. Even when the TV works, I rarely watch much of it. I have never seen Friends, Frazier, Everybody Loves Raymond, Ally MacBeal, Buffy, or a host of other "must see" shows.I try to catch Edand Law and Order, sometimes, but it's not something I rearrange my schedule over.

I think I saw Seinfeld maybe twice in ten years. But I have seen it in reruns a lot, lately - and realize what I missed. OK - I sort of which I had seen it in first run, and wish they were making more of them.

Tom Shales has a great idea...
posted by Mitch Berg 6/12/2002 07:56:17 AM

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Take a Look at the Strib's piece on Norm Coleman. Here's the quote that gets me:
But do his executive-style accomplishments sound like the stuff of the U.S. Senate or of the governor's office?
.
I don't recall if the Strib asked, twelve years ago,
But does Paul Wellstone's background as a third-rate, polemical college professor with a reputation for browbeating all dissent and discussion into submissionsound like a US Senator?"

This is going to be an interesting campaign.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/11/2002 12:57:39 PM

Kill the Keg - Claims that Clinton Administration staff vandalized the White House were written off as partisan political posturing in the days after Bush took office.

Not so, says the GAO.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/11/2002 12:53:01 PM

Back in the Eighties... - the joke that went around was "Who'd win a knife fight between Tiffany and Debbie Gibson". Answer? "The Whole World".

I'm not going to say another thing.

Bad Profiler. Bad. No Treat - A New Jersey police dog is accused of racial profiling.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/11/2002 12:49:55 PM

Sunday, June 09, 2002

I've Often Wondered - what it would be like to have interviewed, in 1946, someone who unwittingly sold Adolph Hitler his first tube of mustache wax in 1920.

This woman is possibly the nearest we'll get.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/9/2002 11:42:16 PM

Don't Loiter for Even a Second - The St. Paul Bomb Squad might pre-emptively detonate you. (Fourth article down on the page).

Publishing Tips for Governor Meathead - The Governor's last few books haven't sold so well.

He needs to learn from a genuine master.

Swing to the Right, Part IV- For decades, Europe has been just another synonym for "unthinking blinkered socialism". But the rise of the EU seems to have catalyzed a reaction, as the right wing surges across the continent. The spasms over Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn have been the tip of the iceberg.

Denmark is also part of the shift.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/9/2002 11:14:14 PM

Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary:

In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive