H. L. Mencken and David Brooks on Presidential Politics

The last couple of weeks of political mudslinging between candidates who most people thought were above this stuff has been really frustrating. David Brooks wrote today about the disappointingly conventional turn McCain's historically unconventional campaigning style has taken.

McCain famously chastised himself in his book "Worth the Fighting For" for an episode during his 2000 presidential campaign in which McCain took a public position contrary to his personal beliefs, siding with conservative defenders of South Carolina's racist state flag in an effort to woo conservative voters.

So it's no surprise that he has seemed uninterested in his campaign's bullshit stunts like mocking Obama's prudent advice on tire-inflation as an energy-saving practice. Tire inflation, as many have noted, will actually make more of an impact on short term fuel expenditures than offshore drilling, which everybody admits will do nothing.

As near as I can tell, McCain's drilling plan is a naked gift to the energy lobby, and will yield no new oil for years. This kind of proposal is nakedly designed to create the illusion of doing something when there is really nothing that can be done, and anything helpful would be too complicated to explain to the average voter. The Clinton "Gas Tax Holiday," which would have saved less money than inflating tires.

McCain probably figures, when it's all over, he'll hate himself less for the compromises it will take to win than he'd hate himself for losing, and maybe he's right that the courageous, honorable, principled John McCain I've admired for years can't beat the crowd pleasing platitudes espoused by Barack Obama (who would be much more interesting if he bore a greater resemblance to Professor Obama of the U Chicago Law School). Personally, I don't see how shoehorning his maverick image into the generic Republican mold could possibly benefit McCain, because generic Republican is in for a beating by generic Democrat this year, and the name-brand Democrat is a lot stronger than John Kerry.

Mencken famously wrote about presidential politics:

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.' The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

This is the secret of Karl Rove's succes; he won in 2004 on gay panic, marshalling stupid voters from the pulpits of their stupid churches by seeding swing-state ballots with gay marriage referenda.

Maybe McCain is facing a reality, now verifiable by scientific polling, that shows he has to pander to win this election. If that's true, it means the presidency doesn't merely attract bad or mediocre people like Bush and Kerry and Carter; it ruins good ones like Clinton and McCain.

Maybe that is why Al Gore, a career politician who achieved almost as much as could be achieved in that field only made a genuinely admirable human being out of himself after he left office.

The Dark Knight: Fascist

This film is being presented as a post 9/11 allegory, and maybe it is, but the message is really unusual and controversial.

The film revolves around three main characters: Bruce Wayne is Batman, a billionaire bachelor who gets his kicks by strapping on body armor and beating up bad guys. The Joker is a psychopath in clown makeup who likes stabbing people and blowing stuff up. And Harvey Dent is the hard-driving district attorney who, after initially providing hope that his organized-crime crackdowns can clean up Gotham, is ultimately disfigured by the Joker and goes crazy, becoming the villain "Two-Face."

In the allegory here, Dent represents orderly process, Batman represents unrestrained force and Joker represents terrorism.

Dent is everyone's ideal of the solution he represents, but, when applied to the Joker problem, Dent falls short. He is ineffective against the threat and ultimately corrupted by it. The idealization of Dent and his fall both inherently reflect the filmmaker's opinion of the institutions he represents. It's all well and good to talk about rights and process and everybody wants that in an ideal world, but in Nolan's worldview those ideals can't go to where the terrorists live and put the jackboots on their throats. This is best exemplefied in the party scene, where, as soon as trouble arrives, Wayne locks Dent in a closet and starts beating the shit out of people.

This isn't countered either, by Dent's early success in locking up a bunch of mobsters; first, that achievement relied on Batman's extrajudicial kidnapping of the mob financier, and, second, that just mirrors the Bush administration-type argument that the Constitution and the mechanisms that operate within it are sufficient for ordinary problems, but that terrorism presents a special circumstance that requires special expansion of executive power.

And, granted, the Joker problem can't be solved costlessly by Batman, but it can't be solved at all by Dent, who is ultimately exploited in service of Joker's agenda. And the ultimate costs are Joker costs, rather than Batman costs; a more reasonable conclusion of this parable is that Batman gets rid of the Joker, but the city is left with a Batman who peers into bedrooms and listens to their private conversations on his Bat-wiretap, and beats up whoever he feels like.

The Joker suggests, at one point, that the Batman is bound by rules, but those rules are far less restrictive than those binding Dent and the rights-respecting process he represents. Yet Batman engages on multiple occasions in illegal and tortuous interrogations, commits a criminal, extrajudiciary kidnapping on foreign soil, and builds a rights-invasive surveillance system with the capability of producing sound and images of the entire city, a system so offensive to the basic notion of personal privacy, that Nolan had to write in Lucius Fox objecting to it on moral grounds. This Batman is the Donald Rumsfeld of superheroes. But Nolan gives a total pass to the scariness of the power exerted by Batman, by portraying Batman as being unfailingly noble and fair in his exertion of extrajudicial force and unwarranted spying.

The guy is about one temptation away from being the worst possible supervillain Gotham could have. Arguably, the only difference between Batman and the villains he fights is that Bruce Wayne's vast legitimate wealth gives him a powerful interest in maintaining stability and the status quo, which counterbalances his vengeful rage over the murder of his parents.

Yet, because Nolan makes him chaste and measured and Christlike, he undercuts the magnitude of the power Batman has seized for himself. Instead of a fascist dictator, Nolan's Batman is a philosopher-king, ultimately sacrificing himself and taking on the mantle of the outcast to protect the reputation of Harvey Dent and be "the hero the city deserves."

As a practical notion, most people to the left of Attilla the Hun would find the notion of this kind of a hero least somewhat troubling, and if Nolan invites us to take Batman seriously, he needs to address these issues.

Best 1000 movies

The New York Times lists its thousand best movies.

Apparently, the list is only through 2004, so "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille" weren't snubbed, The list is just outdated.

They like Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese. So does everyone. They like Fellini and Kurosawa. So does everyone. They include the better part of the Preston Sturges ouvre as well. Necessary and not to be omitted, but unsurprising.

They take a strong stand in favor of Clint Eastwood, which is more interesting, but you won't find me disagreeing with them on that score.

Some choices seem weird though; Terry Gilliam makes the list with "Brazil" and "The Fisher King." But "12 Monkeys" did not make the list. You might suspect them of a distaste for Bruce Willis, since "Sixth Sense" also missed the list (likely sending M. Night Shyamalan into a temper tantrum). But they paid due homage to "Die Hard," which is as it should be.

They turn up their noses at the summer blockbuster. One slot for "Star Wars." No "Empire Strikes Back." In my opinion, it's a little bit snobbish to give M. Hulot more slots on the list than Obi Won Kenobi and James Bond, who tie up with Inspector Clouseau. The one Bond inclusion, by the way, is for "Goldfinger." On a list of 1000, I would probably find room for "Dr. No," "From Russia With Love," "Thunderball," "Casino Royale" and maybe "The Spy Who Loved Me" or "Goldfinger."

Ridley Scott got skunked; they snubbed "Gladiator" and "Alien," although they included "Aliens," the James Cameron-directed sequel. But Jim shouldn't celebrate too much; there was no room on the list for "Terminator" or "Titanic."

Also omitted, "Jurassic Park," although Spielberg's "A.I" made the cut. I agree with the inclusion of AI; it's a criminally underappreciated film, but if you're worried about saturating the list with a director, you could probably slash Scorsese's weird "The King of Comedy" and Hitchcock's mean-spirited "Frenzy" before Spielberg's great American dinosaur classic.

I can't agree with the exclusion of "Braveheart" however, although it wasn't a complete loss for Mel Gibson, who got on the list with "Chicken Run" and "Mad Max."

The Coen Brothers make the list with "Raising Arizona," "Barton Fink," and "The Man Who Wasn't There." No "Miller's Crossing," however.

Similarly, the inclusion of Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt" while skipping "Election" is bizarre. I think "Sideways" would have been too late for this list.

I liked that they remembered a couple of my favorites, "Rushmore" and "Metropolitan"

I'm not going to go with a full list of the ones I would cut, though "Shrek," "Roger and Me" and "Jerry Maguire" could all take a flyer.

And where is "Lord of the Rings." There's just no excuse for leaving that off.

"Pro-life" Pharmacists

The Washington Post has a story about pharmacists who will not provide contraception. I don't think you can oppose these guys very strongly or make any serious argument that they should not be permitted to operate, while supporting abortion rights.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the underpinning theory of Roe v. Wade is that the government should not interfere in the exercise of discretion by medical professionals to determine what procedures are approriate to the individual circumstances of each patient.

If you believe that the government should not interfere in a doctor’s decision that abortion is the best treatment option for a patient, then I can’t see how you could simultaneously believe the government should compel these pharmacists to provide a treatment they object to as a matter of professional conscience, even if you disagree with their objection.

The professional freedom of a doctor to provide abortion is exactly the same as the professional freedom of a pharmacist to refuse to stock or distribute a particular treatment. You can support one use of the freedom and disagree with the other, but you can’t reasonably argue that one should be regulated and the other should be protected from regulation.

Pharmacists are professionals. These guys aren’t just desk clerks who hand out pills. The entry to the profession requires six years of higher ed and it’s considered a highly specialized job. The reason for this is, in large part, because the pharmacist faces issues of professional ethics and is expected to be able to make important decisions in the course of his business. These guys are highly-educated and well-paid to be a check on lying, drug-seeking patients and unethical doctors, and to catch medical mistakes that could endanger patients’ lives.

One common and extremely important example of a pharmacist using this discretion is if the same patient presents scrips from different doctors, and the pharmacist believes the doctors have not consulted with each other, may be unaware of the other meds, or that prescribed medications will have some dangerous interactions. In this case, the pharmacist should refuse to fill the scrips.

Similarly, if the pharmacist is getting a lot of scrips from the same doc for a powerful narcotic painkiller like Oxycontin, and he believes the doc is handing out the drug to people who don’t need it and should not be getting it, the pharmacist might refuse to fill the scrips.

Similarly, if patients who are not dangerously overweight are given a powerful prescription weight-loss drug, like the phen-fen/redux combo that was widely handed out in the 90's and turned out to be incredibly dangerous, the pharmacist might exercise his discretion and refuse to fill the scrips.

The central purpose of a pharmacist's job is the exercise of discretion, and while some may disagree with his use of it, his obligation is to his conscience and not to someone else's political agenda.

Blogs and the truth

While blogs have been around for a while, and the internet has been in use by the public for almost two decades, there's been a lot of recent proliferation of high-speed internet in offices and homes that maybe was not as common four years ago, and there's been a real boom in user-produced content.

Blogs are doing a more sophisticated version of what chain e-mails have been doing for years; dispersing questionable information to a whole lot of eyeballs. This has been used to the detriment of both party nominees:

Barack Obama's wife Michelle has been hit with rumors that she made a derisive reference to "whitey" while participating in a Trinity church panel discussion that included divisive Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

This rumor seems to have been a blogger named Larry Johnson who claims to have some unnamed friends who swore to have seen Michelle make these statements on videotape. But as, neither the friends nor the video have been forthcoming it's significantly likely that no such panel discussion ever occurred and that Mrs. Obama never said anything like that.

A similar accusation has dogged Republican nominee John McCain. Writer/blogger Cliff Schecter reports that he has anonymous sources who told Schechter that McCain called his wife Cindy a "cunt" in response to a joke she made about his thinning hair in 1992.

Both attacks rely on anonymous sources. If you ask Johnson or Schecter to verify their accusations, they will tell you that they are relying on the credibility of the sources, and if you ask who the sources are, then the writer is sworn to secrecy on the subject.

It's a mechanism rife for abuse, which is why newspaper and magazine editors have exacting policies on citing to unattributed sources, including independent corroboration. And a reputable newspaper will be very sure it trusts a reporter before it publishes a story by that writer containing unsourced claims. And readers generally know, within reason, which publications they trust not to intentionally promulgate lies.

Blogs have no such safeguards. Johnson and Schecter respectively could have fabricated these claims. No person alive will publicly claim to have heard John McCain call his wife a "cunt" or to have heard Michelle Obama refer to "whitey."

Barack Obama had to dedicate a whole section of his website to fighting the lies and questionable claims people keep making about him. McCain, whose out-of-context soundbites have been fodder for plenty of YouTube videos, will probably add a similar section soon (especially since his website has been redesigned to resemble Obama's).

You also have to wonder what the deal is with blogs who will excoriate one of these unsubstantiated viral smears while promulgating the other. Shame on the authors who publish these attacks and the bloggers who spread them.

Being better and being right means you don't have to lie about the other guy or misrepresent his positions.

This isn't that complicated

Obama wants to implement payroll taxes above $250,000 in income. He says it's unfair for lower-income earners to pay payroll taxes on every dime they make, while wealthier earners do not pay them on the majority of their income.

The thing is, it's not intended to be progressive. The idea is that you fund your own benefits. This is why people who earned more (and paid more into the system) get a larger benefit even though they are more likely to have retirement savings, investment income and other means of support than lower income workers. Social Security is a mechanism for protecting workers from becoming destitute in retirement or disability due to poor financial judgment or catastrophic events, not a mechanism for wealth redistribution.

If not for Social Security, a lot of people would spend all their money on lottery tickets, and wind up destitute in their old age, or if they became disabled.

What Obama is really proposing is that problem that will occur when the system begins paying out more in benefits than it takes in in taxes should be solved by a special tax on the wealthy.

The $175 hamburger

The Wall Street Burger Shoppe is hawking a $175 hamburger. Shock and horror has ensued.

First of all, this is clearly a publicity stunt. You can tell because it generates publicity. There are a number of restaurants in major cities where $200 a plate is pretty standard. In general, an expensive meal comprised of Kobe beef, foies gras and truffles would not raise a whole lot of notice.

But if you put it on a brioche bun and call it a burger, the obscenity and excess of extravagant dining is somehow magnified. Of course, that might just be the attraction for the people who will order this thing.

In New York, there is a high concentration of lawyers, consultants and bankers making hundreds of thousands per year, and a fair number of hedge fund and private equity managers who make millions, tens of millions, or even billions at the high end.

And many of the people eating these meals don’t end up carrying the tab, because there are lots of financial transactions that take place over ritzy expense-account lunches and dinners.

Job interviews, deal-closing dinners, performance incentives, deal pitches, celebrations of quarterly earnings, and various other events all trigger expensive restaurant trips on corporate accounts.

Blowing $1500 on dinner for four or five people seems a lot less excessive if it's part of a pitch that wins your company a deal worth millions. Networking in the financial industry can mean big bucks, and rich entertainment budgets for Kobe steaks and $300 bottles of wine are part of how deals get made in the financial industry.

There are also plenty of tourists who are willing to spend money to experience high-end restaurants, plenty of people who want to celebrate major life events or rich bonuses in high style, and people who are just so rich that their wealth will earn more than the cost of the $175 burger while they sit there eating it.

Incidentally, my favorite excessive NYC burger is the ribeye burger at Rare. A comparative bargain at $21.