What Would Jack Bauer Do?
By Pat Buchanan
Ex-President Palmer had saved Jack Bauer's life.
Yet, the "military option" against Iran is the talk of the town.
The Chinese wanted agent Bauer extradited to execute him for the killing of their Los Angeles consul, gunned down in a crossfire between Chinese security and Bauer's Counter-Terrorism Unit team that had penetrated the consulate on an espionage mission.
Palmer, though out of office, conspired in a CTU scheme where Jack would appear dead, to the satisfaction of the duped Chinese, and be sent to Mexico with a fake identity.
As this year's series of Fox's "24" opened Sunday, President Palmer is shot through an office window and assassinated. Word reaches Bauer, working in the California oil patch.
Emotional at the death of the president he loved, for whom he had often risked his life, Jack returns. He is intercepted and almost killed by the team that murdered Palmer. Wounding the leader of the terrorists, Bauer interrogates him, warning the bleeding man he will die unless Bauer helps him get to a hospital. The terrorist talks.
After he spills all his information, Bauer starts to walk away. The terrorist demands to be taken to the hospital.
Were you the one who shot President Palmer? Bauer asks. Yes, replies the wounded terrorist, in agony on the floor. Bauer stares at him for two seconds -- then shoots him.
It is a Jack Bauer moment, and all addicted to "24" knew what would happen to that assassin. For Bauer is a take-no-prisoners patriot who puts love of country and loyalty to friends first, and fights by his own rules. To Jack Bauer, the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist.
What is the appeal of "24"?
It is the fastest-paced, most exciting TV out there. But at bottom, the appeal is that, as in the Westerns of old and "Dirty Harry" movies of the 1970s, Jack Bauer is a flawed but good man in a struggle against evil, who is there to see that his loved ones are secure and justice is done. To Jack Bauer, as to Clint Eastwood's Detective "Dirty Harry" Callahan, vigilante justice is not only preferable to no justice at all, it is the best kind. Evil men should get what they deserve, without legal complications.
"24" satisfies the innate demand in all of us that, the law aside, evil should be punished and justice done.
That the audience for "24" is so loyal and large should tell us something about America and our divisions over the war we are in.
For weeks, Democrats and their media allies have been on Bush's case for using the National Security Agency to intercept, without warrant, phone calls and e-mails to terror suspects abroad. Before that, Bush was charged with using secret detention centers in Eastern Europe to interrogate suspects. Before that, the military was accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Afghanistan. Before that, the Justice Department was charged with violating the civil rights of Jose Padilla and the Shoe-bomber.
Bush thus stands accused of violating the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, ignoring constitutional protections of U.S. citizens, and violating international agreements prohibiting torture and the "rendition" of prisoners to countries where torture is practiced.
Where do the American people stand?
The left may be right on the law, but the people seem to be standing by Bush. Believing the character of this war, where the enemy's preferred tactic is to slaughter civilians with terror bombings, people seem to agree that we have to follow Jack Bauer's rules, not ACLU rules.
Yet one senses that Americans are conflicted. We want to think of ourselves as decent people who fight wars honorably. But we believe the enemies of 9-11 are so evil, so depraved, they forfeit the right to be treated honorably. And while we believe in constitutional rights, human rights, civil rights, Miranda warnings and all that, we also believe in winning our wars. For without victory in the war on terror, freedom may not survive.
"Success alone justifies war," said Von Moltke, as Germany prepared to violate Belgium's neutrality to outflank France in 1914. Americans appear to believe that, too.
President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and blockaded Southern ports, without congressional authorization. President Wilson locked up Eugene V. Debs in World War I and never let him out. FDR interned 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans in relocation camps, in a wartime act of racial profiling approved by the Supreme Court. Truman dropped atom bombs on defenseless cities, killing 100,000 women and children. Yet all are judged by liberal historians to be great or near-great presidents.
Now, Jack Bauer does not exist, and "24" is made-for-TV escapist entertainment. As we cheer or laugh out loud at his daring exploits, however, one wonders what liberal Democrats of the ACLU variety would do to a real-life Jack Bauer?
My guess: Put him in Leavenworth for life. But President Palmer knew his value, because President Palmer knew the real world.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
The Times of London:
Wilson Pickett
March 18, 1941 - January 19, 2006
Soul singer whose energy and rasping voice made In The Midnight Hour and Mustang Sally universal R&B anthems
WILSON PICKETT stood second only to Otis Redding among the great male soul singers of the 1960s. His vocal style was raw and earthy and few worked up a greater sweat on stage or pumped up a crowd with more vigour. His greatest records were made in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and helped to define the style that became known as “Southern soul”.
Among his most memorable hits were In the Midnight Hour, Land of 1,000 Dances and Mustang Sally. All came in the 1960s and, although nothing in his later career matched his early glory, he remained a popular draw on the live circuit.
Pickett also bequeathed a lasting legacy to the English language. During the 1960s he became known as “the Wicked Pickett”, an epithet that was initially earned due to his lecherous eye, but soon took on a wider meaning to become the first recorded example of the now common reverse slang in which “bad” translates as “good” and “wicked” means “great”.
Born in Prattville, Alabama, on March 18, 1941, the youngest of 11 children, Pickett had an unhappy childhood and later described his mother as “the baddest woman”. He was using the word in its original sense, and claimed that she beat him viciously, forcing him on many occasions to run away from home and hide in the woods with his dog. When he reached 14 he went to live with his father in Detroit.
In common with most classic soul singers of his era, he found his voice in the local church choir and soon after his arrival in Detroit in 1955 he joined a gospel group, the Violinaires. Four years later, encouraged by the example of Sam Cooke, with whom he had toured the American South, he decided to abandon the gospel circuit for the potentially more lucrative secular rhythm ‘n’ blues market, and replaced the singer Joe Stubbs in The Falcons.
Although largely forgotten today, the group’s fusion of gospel fervour and R&B grooves played a significant part in the development of the emerging style known as soul music. Pickett’s biggest hit with the Falcons came in 1962, with I Found a Love, and its success led swiftly to his first solo recording, I’m Gonna Cry, for the Correctone label. The record made no impact, but better was to follow when he signed to Lloyd Price’s Double L label. He enjoyed minor hits in 1963 with If You Need Me, a slow-burning soul ballad featuring a spoken sermon, and It’s Too Late.
He also sent a demo of If You Need Me, which he had co-written, to Atlantic Records, who promptly gave the song to Solomon Burke to record. Burke’s cover was the bigger hit and, to Pickett’s disappointment, undercut the success of his own recording, but it was sufficient to persuade Atlantic to buy out his Double L contract. Further compensation came when the Rolling Stones covered the song.
After an initial failure with Come Home Baby, a duet with Tammi Lynn produced by Bert Berns, in 1965 Atlantic put Pickett in the Stax studios in Memphis with Booker T and the MGs as his backing band. It turned out to be an inspired pairing and one of the first results was In the Midnight Hour, co-written by Pickett and the MGs’ guitarist Steve Cropper. With a strutting, funky beat, riffing horns and a passionate vocal, it topped the R&B lists, crossed over to the pop charts and remains one of the all-time classic soul records, covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Rascals.
During the same Memphis sessions, Pickett also recorded Don’t Fight It, 634-5789 and Ninety-Nine and One-Half (Won't Do), but for his next outing Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler switched to the Fame studios, Muscle Shoals. It was there that Pickett recorded his next trio of big hits, Mustang Sally (written by Mack Rice, an old colleague from the Falcons), Funky Broadway and Land of 1,000 Dances, the definitive version of Chris Kenner’s irresistible roll call of popular dance floor moves.
The 1967 album The Wicked Pickett immortalised the nickname he had been given around the Atlantic offices and he continued recordings hits at Muscle Shoals throughout the late 1960s, working profitably with the guitarist Duane Allman on covers of Hey Jude and Born to be Wild among others. Further hits included I’m A Midnight Mover (a rather blatant attempt to revive the success of In the Midnight Hour) and She’s Looking Good, but a 1970 cover of the Archies’ bubblegum hit Sugar Sugar suggested that Pickett was running out of ideas.
Atlantic’s solution was to send him to Philadelphia, where he recorded with the production team of Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble, who sharpened him up again and restored him to the charts with (Get Me Back On Time) Engine Number 9, Don’t Let The Green Grass Fool You and Don’t Knock My Love.
In 1972 he parted company with Atlantic and signed for RCA, but he was never the same force again. There were several reasons. One was simply the change in musical fashions. Pickett’s rasping vocal style was totally out of step with the disco age and he made his contempt for the new style clear. Secondly, he developed an unenviable off-stage reputation for heavy drinking, a fiery temper and general instability, evidenced in 1974 when he was arrested in New York for pulling out a gun during an argument.
He continued to release records sporadically, putting out material on his own Wicked label and even briefly signing to Motown in 1988 for a new version of In the Midnight Hour. But in later decades he became essentially a touring rather a recording act, enjoying a different kind of success on the nostalgia circuit with various soul revues.
Unfortunately, trouble never seemed to be far away and in 1987 he was put on two years, probation for carrying a loaded shotgun in his car. In a bizarre incident four years later he was arrested for yelling death threats while driving a car over the mayor’s front lawn in Englewood, New Jersey. A girlfriend brought charges of assault against him, and in 1993 he was sentenced to a year in prison for drink-driving after he hit an 86-year-old man.
The second half of the 1990s were no better: there were several arrests for cocaine possession and he spent some time in a rehabilitation facility.
Amid these lows came a few highs. In 1991 he was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame and, two years later, he was given the Pioneer award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. He returned to the studio in 1999 to record It’s Harder Now, his first album in 12 years, and was rewarded with a Grammy nomination. He continued to perform live until 2004.
On the news of his death, his friend Solomon Burke said Pickett had recently “turned his life around” and that they had been planning to record an album together with fellow old-timers Ben E. King and Don Covay.
Wilson Pickett, soul singer, was born on March 18, 1941. He died after a heart attack on January 19, 2006, aged 64.
Wilson Pickett
March 18, 1941 - January 19, 2006
Soul singer whose energy and rasping voice made In The Midnight Hour and Mustang Sally universal R&B anthems
WILSON PICKETT stood second only to Otis Redding among the great male soul singers of the 1960s. His vocal style was raw and earthy and few worked up a greater sweat on stage or pumped up a crowd with more vigour. His greatest records were made in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and helped to define the style that became known as “Southern soul”.
Among his most memorable hits were In the Midnight Hour, Land of 1,000 Dances and Mustang Sally. All came in the 1960s and, although nothing in his later career matched his early glory, he remained a popular draw on the live circuit.
Pickett also bequeathed a lasting legacy to the English language. During the 1960s he became known as “the Wicked Pickett”, an epithet that was initially earned due to his lecherous eye, but soon took on a wider meaning to become the first recorded example of the now common reverse slang in which “bad” translates as “good” and “wicked” means “great”.
Born in Prattville, Alabama, on March 18, 1941, the youngest of 11 children, Pickett had an unhappy childhood and later described his mother as “the baddest woman”. He was using the word in its original sense, and claimed that she beat him viciously, forcing him on many occasions to run away from home and hide in the woods with his dog. When he reached 14 he went to live with his father in Detroit.
In common with most classic soul singers of his era, he found his voice in the local church choir and soon after his arrival in Detroit in 1955 he joined a gospel group, the Violinaires. Four years later, encouraged by the example of Sam Cooke, with whom he had toured the American South, he decided to abandon the gospel circuit for the potentially more lucrative secular rhythm ‘n’ blues market, and replaced the singer Joe Stubbs in The Falcons.
Although largely forgotten today, the group’s fusion of gospel fervour and R&B grooves played a significant part in the development of the emerging style known as soul music. Pickett’s biggest hit with the Falcons came in 1962, with I Found a Love, and its success led swiftly to his first solo recording, I’m Gonna Cry, for the Correctone label. The record made no impact, but better was to follow when he signed to Lloyd Price’s Double L label. He enjoyed minor hits in 1963 with If You Need Me, a slow-burning soul ballad featuring a spoken sermon, and It’s Too Late.
He also sent a demo of If You Need Me, which he had co-written, to Atlantic Records, who promptly gave the song to Solomon Burke to record. Burke’s cover was the bigger hit and, to Pickett’s disappointment, undercut the success of his own recording, but it was sufficient to persuade Atlantic to buy out his Double L contract. Further compensation came when the Rolling Stones covered the song.
After an initial failure with Come Home Baby, a duet with Tammi Lynn produced by Bert Berns, in 1965 Atlantic put Pickett in the Stax studios in Memphis with Booker T and the MGs as his backing band. It turned out to be an inspired pairing and one of the first results was In the Midnight Hour, co-written by Pickett and the MGs’ guitarist Steve Cropper. With a strutting, funky beat, riffing horns and a passionate vocal, it topped the R&B lists, crossed over to the pop charts and remains one of the all-time classic soul records, covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Rascals.
During the same Memphis sessions, Pickett also recorded Don’t Fight It, 634-5789 and Ninety-Nine and One-Half (Won't Do), but for his next outing Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler switched to the Fame studios, Muscle Shoals. It was there that Pickett recorded his next trio of big hits, Mustang Sally (written by Mack Rice, an old colleague from the Falcons), Funky Broadway and Land of 1,000 Dances, the definitive version of Chris Kenner’s irresistible roll call of popular dance floor moves.
The 1967 album The Wicked Pickett immortalised the nickname he had been given around the Atlantic offices and he continued recordings hits at Muscle Shoals throughout the late 1960s, working profitably with the guitarist Duane Allman on covers of Hey Jude and Born to be Wild among others. Further hits included I’m A Midnight Mover (a rather blatant attempt to revive the success of In the Midnight Hour) and She’s Looking Good, but a 1970 cover of the Archies’ bubblegum hit Sugar Sugar suggested that Pickett was running out of ideas.
Atlantic’s solution was to send him to Philadelphia, where he recorded with the production team of Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble, who sharpened him up again and restored him to the charts with (Get Me Back On Time) Engine Number 9, Don’t Let The Green Grass Fool You and Don’t Knock My Love.
In 1972 he parted company with Atlantic and signed for RCA, but he was never the same force again. There were several reasons. One was simply the change in musical fashions. Pickett’s rasping vocal style was totally out of step with the disco age and he made his contempt for the new style clear. Secondly, he developed an unenviable off-stage reputation for heavy drinking, a fiery temper and general instability, evidenced in 1974 when he was arrested in New York for pulling out a gun during an argument.
He continued to release records sporadically, putting out material on his own Wicked label and even briefly signing to Motown in 1988 for a new version of In the Midnight Hour. But in later decades he became essentially a touring rather a recording act, enjoying a different kind of success on the nostalgia circuit with various soul revues.
Unfortunately, trouble never seemed to be far away and in 1987 he was put on two years, probation for carrying a loaded shotgun in his car. In a bizarre incident four years later he was arrested for yelling death threats while driving a car over the mayor’s front lawn in Englewood, New Jersey. A girlfriend brought charges of assault against him, and in 1993 he was sentenced to a year in prison for drink-driving after he hit an 86-year-old man.
The second half of the 1990s were no better: there were several arrests for cocaine possession and he spent some time in a rehabilitation facility.
Amid these lows came a few highs. In 1991 he was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame and, two years later, he was given the Pioneer award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. He returned to the studio in 1999 to record It’s Harder Now, his first album in 12 years, and was rewarded with a Grammy nomination. He continued to perform live until 2004.
On the news of his death, his friend Solomon Burke said Pickett had recently “turned his life around” and that they had been planning to record an album together with fellow old-timers Ben E. King and Don Covay.
Wilson Pickett, soul singer, was born on March 18, 1941. He died after a heart attack on January 19, 2006, aged 64.
Friday, January 20, 2006
From The Washington Post:
Out With A Bang
The Loss of the Classic Winchester Is Loaded With Symbolism
By Stephen Hunter
A famous ad that most boy baby boomers will recall from Boys' Life, the old scouting magazine of the '50s, showed a happy lad, carrot-topped and freckly like any number of Peck's Bad Boys, his teeth haphazardly arrayed within his wide, gleeful mouth under eyes wide as pie platters as he exclaimed on Christmas morn, "Gee, Dad . . . A Winchester!"
All gone, all gone, all gone. The gun as family totem, the implied trust between generations, the implicit idea that marksmanship followed by hunting were a way of life to be pursued through the decades, the sense of tradition, respect, self-discipline and bright confidence that Winchester and the American kinship group would march forward to a happy tomorrow -- gone if not with the wind, then with the tide of inner-city and nutcase killings that have led America's once-proud and heavily bourgeois gun culture into the wilderness of marginalization.
And now Winchester is gone too, or at least the most interesting parts of it. The traditional company whose symbol was a fringed rider flying across the plains on a pinto, gripping his trusty Model '73, is finally biting the dust. The entity -- now technically U.S. Repeating Arms, which produces the rifles and shotguns as a licensee of the Olin Corp., which still owns Winchester ammunition -- announced Monday it was closing the plant in New Haven where the rifles and shotguns have been fabricated for a century and a half. Some Winchesters will continue to be built overseas, but three guns -- the classic lever-action rifle of western fame, the bolt-action hunting rifle (called the Model 70) and the Model 1300 pump-action shotgun -- will no longer be manufactured.
That lever-gun -- the quintessential cowboy rifle, the mechanism that "won the West" and maybe helped lose it, too (ask the 7th Cavalry boys who fell to a few dozen Native Americans carrying precursors of the classic Winchester at the Battle of the Little Bighorn) -- is the primary victim of the closing.
In an era of widespread industrial retrenchment, it didn't even make much big national news. And why should it have? Economically, U.S. Repeating Arms is a small company of only some 200 employees. Who really cares? Most people will be indifferent, some glad, and only a few, like me, will mourn.
The Winchester lever-guns mean something to a variety of American imaginations. They have been manufactured in one form or another since 1849. The most abundant variant, the Model 94, has been built more than 6 million times since 1895 with only minor changes. Those 111 years span an era of extraordinary technological development. It's doubtful any other complex machine has a longer record of manufacture. Think about it: Today, in the age of the iPod and robots wandering Mars, essentially the same rattly contraption that felled troopers at the Little Bighorn is still found brand-new and brightly packaged on the shelves of most Western, Southern and Midwestern hardware stores.
If you take one down and examine it -- kids, don't do this at home, unless Dad has cleared the rifle first and made sure no moldy .30-30s from last year's hunt remain in the chamber -- you note certain things instantaneously.
How light it is, how quick to the shoulder, how pointable! It begs to come to the eye. It swiftly finds what's called the natural point of aim, the perfect equipoise between its own grace and its shooter's talent. There, it wants to be fired. It's knobless and trim yet hardly streamlined. It hails proudly from the pre-streamlined world. No ergonomic study went into its design, only the sound trial and error of Yankee genius that finally found the ideal form.
It's weirdly squarish, yet like other classic guns, it boasts an orchestration of lines of unusual harmony, which somehow seem to soothe the eye. The Colt Peacemaker revolver, the Tommy gun and the Luger have the same effect; all are instantly known and knowable. They have a design charisma that transcends their actual usage in the real world.
The funniest thing about the Winchester lever-action rifle is how American it looks. Its directness speaks to the honest greed of westward expansion, its reliability to the honest hunger of its manufacturers for the big houses it bought them, its toughness to the honest brutality by which it was employed in various arroyos and dry gulches. It lacks subterfuge, subtlety, pretension, airs. It's like the cowboy himself, elegant in its total lack of self-awareness. It's beyond irony or stylization. It's cool because it doesn't care what you or anybody thinks.
Now open it; shove the lever -- that oblong loop affixed to the trigger guard -- forward. Feel it slide-clack through a four-inch range of motion and watch the drama as the gun undergoes changes: the breech, which contains the firing pin, glides backward, ratcheting the hammer back. At that moment you can tilt it a little and peer into the opened slot in the roof of the receiver.
You see before you the gun's most private parts: the chamber, the slightly bulged space in the barrel where the cartridge is encapsulated when it fires; the follower, a little spring-powered tray that lifts a cartridge (which has just been popped aboard by the pressure of the magazine tube spring) up to the chamber; the breechface with its tiny hole out of which will pop, whack-a-mole style, the firing pin when the trigger is pulled and the hammer falls.
You see: trays, pins, holes, steel walls. You see a miracle of timing by which all these elements have been choreographed to mesh in a brilliantly syncopated sequence. But you're also looking back into the 19th century and to what it was that made this country great. For what you're seeing is a solution -- elegant as any poem, efficient as any mousetrap, smooth as any crooner -- to a set of problems that might be enumerated as follows: How do you package chemical energy of roughly 3,000 foot-pounds safely in metal that is at the same time light enough to be carried, strong enough to be operated and simple enough to be manufactured?
Then you realize you're in the cockpit of what was then the hottest, most brutally competitive arena of that portion of the Industrial Revolution -- its Silicon Valley, if you will. New Haven is where all the young Bill Gateses -- their names were Winchester, Colt, Henry, Smith, Wesson, Marlin and a few others -- went to make their fortunes as their nation grew, sometimes violently, westward.
The key gizmo behind the lever-action Winchester's genius, present from the first prototype in 1849 to the last one that will come off the New Haven line in a few weeks, is a little thing called a toggle-link, which is why the guns produce such a volume of clacking and sliding and clinking when they are worked. With this doohickey, the manual downward and forward rotation of a lever opened the breech, allowed an empty case to eject as it slammed against a prong and a fresh cartridge to come out of a tubular magazine and rest on that tray just below the action even as the rearward thrust of the breech cocked the hammer. Then the lever was rotated upward and backward, the tray was lifted, the breech came forward and moved the fresh cartridge into the chamber. That was it: two cranks of the lever, one forward a few inches, one backward the same few inches, and you didn't even have to take the gun off your shoulder. You were ready to shoot again. "It is placed beyond all competition by the rapidity of its execution. Thirty shots can be fired in less than one minute," wrote Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly in 1858.
The mechanism went through many iterations -- among the inventors and investors were men named Hunt, Jennings, Arrowsmith, Palmer and Henry. It was sometimes called the Hunt Volitional Repeater, the Smith & Wesson rifle (before Messrs. Smith and Wesson took their investment money into the handgun market exclusively), the Volcanic Navy Pistol and finally the Henry -- before it found a home under the sponsorship of capitalist, shirtmaker and business genius Oliver Winchester, who took over the company in the late 1850s and renamed it after himself in 1866. (For more on all this, see "Winchester: The Gun That Won the West" by Harold F. Williamson and "Winchester: An American Legend" by R.L. Wilson.)
Winchester produced lever-gun models of 1866, 1873 (this was the famous "Gun That Won the West"), 1886, 1892, 1894 and 1895, each an improvement upon what had come before. Probably the most radical upgrade occurred in '86, when the genius gun designer John M. Browning brought his brilliance to Winchester and found a way to strengthen the action so that it could fire high-power rifle cartridges, which made it far more useful as a hunting arm (it had fired only pistol cartridges before). When smokeless powder increased the efficiency of the cartridge in the 1890s, the 1894 Model was ideally suited to take advantage of the breakthrough, and the Model 94 in .30-30 became the preeminent deer hunting rifle of the early 20th century.
"The Winchester is by all odds the best weapon I ever had and I now use it almost exclusively," wrote Montana rancher Theodore Roosevelt in 1885. "The Winchester is the best gun for any game to be found in the United States, for it is as deadly, accurate and handy as any, stands very rough usage, and is unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded."
If the gun was a star almost from the beginning, it had a unique ability to make stars as well. I can think of a batch of men who were helped enormously by their association with Winchester. One was a fellow named Henry McCarty, or possibly William H. Bonney. Whatever he was named, he became known as Billy the Kid and the only extant picture of him shows him clutching a Model 73 almost half his size, while his other hand dangles close by, thumb cocked, fingers tensed, over his Colt Peacemaker, whose grip tilts provocatively out of the holster. Dressed for bear or Garrett's posse, the Kid looks tough, dangerous, fast and cool. Did the rifle make the Kid a star or did the Kid make the rifle a star? Who knows? He looks to me like he knows he's already a star, that hat atilt on his head, his face calm. Whether he killed 21 as legend says or only four as many historians believe, he's a deadly little tyke and his killer's intensity works a weird alchemy with the big rifle he clearly loves and trusts and has and will use again.
Then there's a taller, grave guy, better-looking, less lethal, just as entwined with the Winchester. His was a short-barreled carbine Model 92 and someone had battered the loop of the lever until it looked swollen and distended. This allowed the fellow to gracefully swing-cock it under his long arms. It was a cool move, so cool that when Pappy Ford filmed him doing it in 1939 in Monument Valley, near the Utah-Arizona border, he made John Wayne a star. Wayne used that rifle or one just like it (there seem to have been four altogether) over the years in a variety of movies, like "Hondo" and even as late as 1959's "Rio Bravo." Wayne, something of a gun expert himself, knew that a handgun's only purpose was to fight your way to the rifle you were going to win your fight with. He used the Winchester a lot.
A few years later, a cowboy from Pennsylvania helped rekindle a stumbling career by picking up a Winchester. His name was Jimmy Stewart, and the movie was called no less than "Winchester '73," in the year 1950.
Another tall fellow with another set of long arms and another Model 92 had worked the first base position for the Chicago Cubs in the '50s, to no particular distinction. He ambled westward, and in 1962 Chuck Connors became "The Rifleman" and had a few years of TV stardom plus an immortality in the baby boomer imagination.
Then a surly ex-Marine picked up a '92 that had been radically shortened at both barrel and stock so it could be carried like a handgun, and glared his way to stardom on "Wanted: Dead or Alive." His name was Steve McQueen.
The Winchester lever-action rifle was very good to these gentlemen, to thousands and thousands of ranchers, actors and hunters, more than a few lawmen, even a newer generation of Cowboy Action Shooters who used it as their enabler for a fantasy vacation in the Old West. But now it's going away for good. The tough old capitalists who invented it wouldn't shed a tear for it: If you can't sell it, dump it, was their motto. Actors, farmers, hunters and lawmen have all found better guns, and so have Cowboy Fantasy shooters.
But here's a vaya con Di os for the old smokepole. May it go to a Long Branch in the sky where the whiskey's always flowing, the gals are purty and the clock always reads High Noon.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Out With A Bang
The Loss of the Classic Winchester Is Loaded With Symbolism
By Stephen Hunter
A famous ad that most boy baby boomers will recall from Boys' Life, the old scouting magazine of the '50s, showed a happy lad, carrot-topped and freckly like any number of Peck's Bad Boys, his teeth haphazardly arrayed within his wide, gleeful mouth under eyes wide as pie platters as he exclaimed on Christmas morn, "Gee, Dad . . . A Winchester!"
All gone, all gone, all gone. The gun as family totem, the implied trust between generations, the implicit idea that marksmanship followed by hunting were a way of life to be pursued through the decades, the sense of tradition, respect, self-discipline and bright confidence that Winchester and the American kinship group would march forward to a happy tomorrow -- gone if not with the wind, then with the tide of inner-city and nutcase killings that have led America's once-proud and heavily bourgeois gun culture into the wilderness of marginalization.
And now Winchester is gone too, or at least the most interesting parts of it. The traditional company whose symbol was a fringed rider flying across the plains on a pinto, gripping his trusty Model '73, is finally biting the dust. The entity -- now technically U.S. Repeating Arms, which produces the rifles and shotguns as a licensee of the Olin Corp., which still owns Winchester ammunition -- announced Monday it was closing the plant in New Haven where the rifles and shotguns have been fabricated for a century and a half. Some Winchesters will continue to be built overseas, but three guns -- the classic lever-action rifle of western fame, the bolt-action hunting rifle (called the Model 70) and the Model 1300 pump-action shotgun -- will no longer be manufactured.
That lever-gun -- the quintessential cowboy rifle, the mechanism that "won the West" and maybe helped lose it, too (ask the 7th Cavalry boys who fell to a few dozen Native Americans carrying precursors of the classic Winchester at the Battle of the Little Bighorn) -- is the primary victim of the closing.
In an era of widespread industrial retrenchment, it didn't even make much big national news. And why should it have? Economically, U.S. Repeating Arms is a small company of only some 200 employees. Who really cares? Most people will be indifferent, some glad, and only a few, like me, will mourn.
The Winchester lever-guns mean something to a variety of American imaginations. They have been manufactured in one form or another since 1849. The most abundant variant, the Model 94, has been built more than 6 million times since 1895 with only minor changes. Those 111 years span an era of extraordinary technological development. It's doubtful any other complex machine has a longer record of manufacture. Think about it: Today, in the age of the iPod and robots wandering Mars, essentially the same rattly contraption that felled troopers at the Little Bighorn is still found brand-new and brightly packaged on the shelves of most Western, Southern and Midwestern hardware stores.
If you take one down and examine it -- kids, don't do this at home, unless Dad has cleared the rifle first and made sure no moldy .30-30s from last year's hunt remain in the chamber -- you note certain things instantaneously.
How light it is, how quick to the shoulder, how pointable! It begs to come to the eye. It swiftly finds what's called the natural point of aim, the perfect equipoise between its own grace and its shooter's talent. There, it wants to be fired. It's knobless and trim yet hardly streamlined. It hails proudly from the pre-streamlined world. No ergonomic study went into its design, only the sound trial and error of Yankee genius that finally found the ideal form.
It's weirdly squarish, yet like other classic guns, it boasts an orchestration of lines of unusual harmony, which somehow seem to soothe the eye. The Colt Peacemaker revolver, the Tommy gun and the Luger have the same effect; all are instantly known and knowable. They have a design charisma that transcends their actual usage in the real world.
The funniest thing about the Winchester lever-action rifle is how American it looks. Its directness speaks to the honest greed of westward expansion, its reliability to the honest hunger of its manufacturers for the big houses it bought them, its toughness to the honest brutality by which it was employed in various arroyos and dry gulches. It lacks subterfuge, subtlety, pretension, airs. It's like the cowboy himself, elegant in its total lack of self-awareness. It's beyond irony or stylization. It's cool because it doesn't care what you or anybody thinks.
Now open it; shove the lever -- that oblong loop affixed to the trigger guard -- forward. Feel it slide-clack through a four-inch range of motion and watch the drama as the gun undergoes changes: the breech, which contains the firing pin, glides backward, ratcheting the hammer back. At that moment you can tilt it a little and peer into the opened slot in the roof of the receiver.
You see before you the gun's most private parts: the chamber, the slightly bulged space in the barrel where the cartridge is encapsulated when it fires; the follower, a little spring-powered tray that lifts a cartridge (which has just been popped aboard by the pressure of the magazine tube spring) up to the chamber; the breechface with its tiny hole out of which will pop, whack-a-mole style, the firing pin when the trigger is pulled and the hammer falls.
You see: trays, pins, holes, steel walls. You see a miracle of timing by which all these elements have been choreographed to mesh in a brilliantly syncopated sequence. But you're also looking back into the 19th century and to what it was that made this country great. For what you're seeing is a solution -- elegant as any poem, efficient as any mousetrap, smooth as any crooner -- to a set of problems that might be enumerated as follows: How do you package chemical energy of roughly 3,000 foot-pounds safely in metal that is at the same time light enough to be carried, strong enough to be operated and simple enough to be manufactured?
Then you realize you're in the cockpit of what was then the hottest, most brutally competitive arena of that portion of the Industrial Revolution -- its Silicon Valley, if you will. New Haven is where all the young Bill Gateses -- their names were Winchester, Colt, Henry, Smith, Wesson, Marlin and a few others -- went to make their fortunes as their nation grew, sometimes violently, westward.
The key gizmo behind the lever-action Winchester's genius, present from the first prototype in 1849 to the last one that will come off the New Haven line in a few weeks, is a little thing called a toggle-link, which is why the guns produce such a volume of clacking and sliding and clinking when they are worked. With this doohickey, the manual downward and forward rotation of a lever opened the breech, allowed an empty case to eject as it slammed against a prong and a fresh cartridge to come out of a tubular magazine and rest on that tray just below the action even as the rearward thrust of the breech cocked the hammer. Then the lever was rotated upward and backward, the tray was lifted, the breech came forward and moved the fresh cartridge into the chamber. That was it: two cranks of the lever, one forward a few inches, one backward the same few inches, and you didn't even have to take the gun off your shoulder. You were ready to shoot again. "It is placed beyond all competition by the rapidity of its execution. Thirty shots can be fired in less than one minute," wrote Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly in 1858.
The mechanism went through many iterations -- among the inventors and investors were men named Hunt, Jennings, Arrowsmith, Palmer and Henry. It was sometimes called the Hunt Volitional Repeater, the Smith & Wesson rifle (before Messrs. Smith and Wesson took their investment money into the handgun market exclusively), the Volcanic Navy Pistol and finally the Henry -- before it found a home under the sponsorship of capitalist, shirtmaker and business genius Oliver Winchester, who took over the company in the late 1850s and renamed it after himself in 1866. (For more on all this, see "Winchester: The Gun That Won the West" by Harold F. Williamson and "Winchester: An American Legend" by R.L. Wilson.)
Winchester produced lever-gun models of 1866, 1873 (this was the famous "Gun That Won the West"), 1886, 1892, 1894 and 1895, each an improvement upon what had come before. Probably the most radical upgrade occurred in '86, when the genius gun designer John M. Browning brought his brilliance to Winchester and found a way to strengthen the action so that it could fire high-power rifle cartridges, which made it far more useful as a hunting arm (it had fired only pistol cartridges before). When smokeless powder increased the efficiency of the cartridge in the 1890s, the 1894 Model was ideally suited to take advantage of the breakthrough, and the Model 94 in .30-30 became the preeminent deer hunting rifle of the early 20th century.
"The Winchester is by all odds the best weapon I ever had and I now use it almost exclusively," wrote Montana rancher Theodore Roosevelt in 1885. "The Winchester is the best gun for any game to be found in the United States, for it is as deadly, accurate and handy as any, stands very rough usage, and is unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded."
If the gun was a star almost from the beginning, it had a unique ability to make stars as well. I can think of a batch of men who were helped enormously by their association with Winchester. One was a fellow named Henry McCarty, or possibly William H. Bonney. Whatever he was named, he became known as Billy the Kid and the only extant picture of him shows him clutching a Model 73 almost half his size, while his other hand dangles close by, thumb cocked, fingers tensed, over his Colt Peacemaker, whose grip tilts provocatively out of the holster. Dressed for bear or Garrett's posse, the Kid looks tough, dangerous, fast and cool. Did the rifle make the Kid a star or did the Kid make the rifle a star? Who knows? He looks to me like he knows he's already a star, that hat atilt on his head, his face calm. Whether he killed 21 as legend says or only four as many historians believe, he's a deadly little tyke and his killer's intensity works a weird alchemy with the big rifle he clearly loves and trusts and has and will use again.
Then there's a taller, grave guy, better-looking, less lethal, just as entwined with the Winchester. His was a short-barreled carbine Model 92 and someone had battered the loop of the lever until it looked swollen and distended. This allowed the fellow to gracefully swing-cock it under his long arms. It was a cool move, so cool that when Pappy Ford filmed him doing it in 1939 in Monument Valley, near the Utah-Arizona border, he made John Wayne a star. Wayne used that rifle or one just like it (there seem to have been four altogether) over the years in a variety of movies, like "Hondo" and even as late as 1959's "Rio Bravo." Wayne, something of a gun expert himself, knew that a handgun's only purpose was to fight your way to the rifle you were going to win your fight with. He used the Winchester a lot.
A few years later, a cowboy from Pennsylvania helped rekindle a stumbling career by picking up a Winchester. His name was Jimmy Stewart, and the movie was called no less than "Winchester '73," in the year 1950.
Another tall fellow with another set of long arms and another Model 92 had worked the first base position for the Chicago Cubs in the '50s, to no particular distinction. He ambled westward, and in 1962 Chuck Connors became "The Rifleman" and had a few years of TV stardom plus an immortality in the baby boomer imagination.
Then a surly ex-Marine picked up a '92 that had been radically shortened at both barrel and stock so it could be carried like a handgun, and glared his way to stardom on "Wanted: Dead or Alive." His name was Steve McQueen.
The Winchester lever-action rifle was very good to these gentlemen, to thousands and thousands of ranchers, actors and hunters, more than a few lawmen, even a newer generation of Cowboy Action Shooters who used it as their enabler for a fantasy vacation in the Old West. But now it's going away for good. The tough old capitalists who invented it wouldn't shed a tear for it: If you can't sell it, dump it, was their motto. Actors, farmers, hunters and lawmen have all found better guns, and so have Cowboy Fantasy shooters.
But here's a vaya con Di os for the old smokepole. May it go to a Long Branch in the sky where the whiskey's always flowing, the gals are purty and the clock always reads High Noon.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
From Opinion Journal:
Not a Bad Time to Take Stock
Thoughts on the decline of the liberal media monopoly and the future of the GOP.
By Peggy Noonan
I don't think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, "He's like me," and the charges they made--You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy--went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It's over.
Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry. The other day, Dana Milbank, an important reporter for the Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the capital, wrote a piece deriding Judge Alito. Once such a piece would have been important. Men in the White House would have fretted over its implications. But within hours of filing, Mr. Milbank found his thinking analyzed and dismissed on the Internet; National Review Online called him a "policy bimbo."
Could Democratic senators today torture Clarence Thomas with tales of Coke cans and porn films? Not likely. Could Ted Kennedy have gotten away with his "Robert Bork's America" speech unanswered? No.
And the end of the monopoly of course isn't only in the news, it's in all media. The other night George Clooney, that beautiful airhead, made a Golden Globe speech in which he made an off-color reference to Jack Abramoff. The audience seemed confused, as people apparently often are when George Clooney speaks. Once, his remark would have been news. Once, Marlon Brando stopped the country in its tracks when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to make his speech at the Academy Awards. Once, Vanessa Redgrave did the same when she gave a speech about Palestinians, receiving in turn a rebuke from Frank Sinatra, who didn't want some British broad telling us how to do our thing. Now, actors make their comments and it's just another airhead involved in an oral helium release. "You don't like it, change the channel," network executives used to say. But that, as they knew, meant nothing: There were only three channels. Now there are 500. And more coming.
You know who else experienced, up close and personal, the end of the information monopoly this week? Walter Cronkite. Once, he said America should leave Vietnam and the president of the United States said if we've lost him we've lost middle America. Now, Walter calls for withdrawal from Iraq and it occasions only one thing: stories about how once such a thing mattered. I saw Mr. Cronkite the other night. Frail, distinguished--big white eyebrows; soft, folded pink face--he looked like Dean Acheson grown very old. It was at a New York screening he hosted for a documentary called "Why We Fight," a piece of antiwar propaganda that will likely soon be followed by a piece of pro-war propaganda. It was like ducking a Propaganda Punch that will be answered by another Propaganda Punch you'll have to duck. Featured in the documentary is a former voice of God, Dan Rather, there to lend support to the enterprise.
What was sad about the documentary is that it did not explore what it asserted, that a military-industrial complex within the United States has more power and influence than is helpful or good. A lot of sophisticated Americans worry about this. "The military-industrial complex" is something we were warned of almost half a century ago by Dwight Eisenhower, a man who knew a few things about war and weaponry. We want our makers of weapons to be the best in the world; we do not want them to own congressmen who have an electoral stake in the pieces of weapons made in their districts. When every congressman has a piece of a project, we should worry. War should not be the health of the state.
We are in a time when the very diminution of the importance of network news leaves some old news hands to drop their guard and announce what they are: liberal Democrats. Nothing wrong with that, but they might have told us when they were in power. The very existence of conservative media--of Rush Limbaugh, of Fox, of the Internet sites--has become an excuse by previously "I call 'em as I see 'em/I try to be impartial" journalists to advance their biases. Actually, it's more Fox than anything. The existence of a respected cable network that is nonliberal and non-Democratic (or that is conservative, or Republican, or neoconservative--people on the right have polite disagreements about this) is more and more freeing news outlets, encouraging them actually, as a potential business model, to be more and more what they are. Is this good? Well, it's clearer. Then again Time magazine this week illustrated a story about Republicans in Congress with a drawing of a merry circus elephant surrounded by the Republican leadership. They were covered, I'm not kidding, in the elephant's fecal matter. (It's on page 23. Time will no doubt call it chocolate.)
But where does this leave us? With our mass media busy with reluctant reformation . . . with the old network monopoly over and done . . . with something new, we know not what, about to take its place . . . with the Democratic Party adjusting to the loss of its megaphone . . . Where does that leave us? I think it leaves us knowing that, more than ever, the Republican Party--the party ultimately helped by the end of the old monopoly and the reformation of news media--must be a good party, a decent one, and help our country.
That it regain a sense of its historic mission. That it stop seeming the friend of the wired and return to being the great friend of Main Street, for Main Street still, in its own way, exists. That it return to basic principles on spending, regulation and state authority. That it question a foreign policy that often seems at once dreamy and aggressive, and question, too, an overreaching on immigration policy that seems composed in equal parts of naiveté and cynicism. That its representatives admit that lunching with lobbyists is not the problem; failing to oppose the growth of government--so huge that no one, really no one, knows what is in its budget--is. That they reduce the size and power of government. That they help our country.
Is that a sissy thing to say? Sorry. But today is the 25th anniversary of the coming to Washington of modern conservatism, and the rise to power of a Main Street romantic who was also a skeptic and an appreciator of human nature. Not a bad time to take stock.
Republicans in Washington struggle with scandal and speak of reform, and reformation. They would better think of words like regain, refresh, rebuild. If they don't, if Republicans don't choose to lead well, and seriously, and with principle, they should ask themselves: Who will? Seriously: Who will?
Not a Bad Time to Take Stock
Thoughts on the decline of the liberal media monopoly and the future of the GOP.
By Peggy Noonan
I don't think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, "He's like me," and the charges they made--You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy--went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It's over.
Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry. The other day, Dana Milbank, an important reporter for the Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the capital, wrote a piece deriding Judge Alito. Once such a piece would have been important. Men in the White House would have fretted over its implications. But within hours of filing, Mr. Milbank found his thinking analyzed and dismissed on the Internet; National Review Online called him a "policy bimbo."
Could Democratic senators today torture Clarence Thomas with tales of Coke cans and porn films? Not likely. Could Ted Kennedy have gotten away with his "Robert Bork's America" speech unanswered? No.
And the end of the monopoly of course isn't only in the news, it's in all media. The other night George Clooney, that beautiful airhead, made a Golden Globe speech in which he made an off-color reference to Jack Abramoff. The audience seemed confused, as people apparently often are when George Clooney speaks. Once, his remark would have been news. Once, Marlon Brando stopped the country in its tracks when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to make his speech at the Academy Awards. Once, Vanessa Redgrave did the same when she gave a speech about Palestinians, receiving in turn a rebuke from Frank Sinatra, who didn't want some British broad telling us how to do our thing. Now, actors make their comments and it's just another airhead involved in an oral helium release. "You don't like it, change the channel," network executives used to say. But that, as they knew, meant nothing: There were only three channels. Now there are 500. And more coming.
You know who else experienced, up close and personal, the end of the information monopoly this week? Walter Cronkite. Once, he said America should leave Vietnam and the president of the United States said if we've lost him we've lost middle America. Now, Walter calls for withdrawal from Iraq and it occasions only one thing: stories about how once such a thing mattered. I saw Mr. Cronkite the other night. Frail, distinguished--big white eyebrows; soft, folded pink face--he looked like Dean Acheson grown very old. It was at a New York screening he hosted for a documentary called "Why We Fight," a piece of antiwar propaganda that will likely soon be followed by a piece of pro-war propaganda. It was like ducking a Propaganda Punch that will be answered by another Propaganda Punch you'll have to duck. Featured in the documentary is a former voice of God, Dan Rather, there to lend support to the enterprise.
What was sad about the documentary is that it did not explore what it asserted, that a military-industrial complex within the United States has more power and influence than is helpful or good. A lot of sophisticated Americans worry about this. "The military-industrial complex" is something we were warned of almost half a century ago by Dwight Eisenhower, a man who knew a few things about war and weaponry. We want our makers of weapons to be the best in the world; we do not want them to own congressmen who have an electoral stake in the pieces of weapons made in their districts. When every congressman has a piece of a project, we should worry. War should not be the health of the state.
We are in a time when the very diminution of the importance of network news leaves some old news hands to drop their guard and announce what they are: liberal Democrats. Nothing wrong with that, but they might have told us when they were in power. The very existence of conservative media--of Rush Limbaugh, of Fox, of the Internet sites--has become an excuse by previously "I call 'em as I see 'em/I try to be impartial" journalists to advance their biases. Actually, it's more Fox than anything. The existence of a respected cable network that is nonliberal and non-Democratic (or that is conservative, or Republican, or neoconservative--people on the right have polite disagreements about this) is more and more freeing news outlets, encouraging them actually, as a potential business model, to be more and more what they are. Is this good? Well, it's clearer. Then again Time magazine this week illustrated a story about Republicans in Congress with a drawing of a merry circus elephant surrounded by the Republican leadership. They were covered, I'm not kidding, in the elephant's fecal matter. (It's on page 23. Time will no doubt call it chocolate.)
But where does this leave us? With our mass media busy with reluctant reformation . . . with the old network monopoly over and done . . . with something new, we know not what, about to take its place . . . with the Democratic Party adjusting to the loss of its megaphone . . . Where does that leave us? I think it leaves us knowing that, more than ever, the Republican Party--the party ultimately helped by the end of the old monopoly and the reformation of news media--must be a good party, a decent one, and help our country.
That it regain a sense of its historic mission. That it stop seeming the friend of the wired and return to being the great friend of Main Street, for Main Street still, in its own way, exists. That it return to basic principles on spending, regulation and state authority. That it question a foreign policy that often seems at once dreamy and aggressive, and question, too, an overreaching on immigration policy that seems composed in equal parts of naiveté and cynicism. That its representatives admit that lunching with lobbyists is not the problem; failing to oppose the growth of government--so huge that no one, really no one, knows what is in its budget--is. That they reduce the size and power of government. That they help our country.
Is that a sissy thing to say? Sorry. But today is the 25th anniversary of the coming to Washington of modern conservatism, and the rise to power of a Main Street romantic who was also a skeptic and an appreciator of human nature. Not a bad time to take stock.
Republicans in Washington struggle with scandal and speak of reform, and reformation. They would better think of words like regain, refresh, rebuild. If they don't, if Republicans don't choose to lead well, and seriously, and with principle, they should ask themselves: Who will? Seriously: Who will?
Thursday, January 19, 2006
From the blog of David Boyd:
Biggest non-story of this past NFL weekend that should be a story
TSG:
First of all, can you imagine what would happen if Bill Belichick sent New England's punting team out and Tom Brady tried to wave it off? Actually, I know what would happen -- Belichick would immediately call a timeout, furiously motion for Brady to come over, then chew him out on national TV. That's what would happen. Second of all, if you're the other Indy players, how can you respect your coach after that? Who's running the team, Dungy or Manning? Can you name another professional athlete in any sport who acts autonomously and directly disobeys his coach? Why doesn't the national media make a bigger deal out of this? What's the difference between Manning waving the punt team off the field and Terrell Owens questioning the competency of Donovan McNabb?
One positive outcome: The Tony Dungy "I can't believe my QB just hung me out to dry on national TV" Face. Eerily reminiscent of the scene in "Scarface" when coke dealer Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia's character) shows up at the Miami nightclub, sees Tony Montana with his arm around his girlfriend (Michelle Pfeiffer's character), makes the requisite "Get your hands off my girl" comment, and not only does Tony refuse to budge, he stares him down and fires back with something along the lines of, "Hey, maybe she needs a new man, Frank." And poor Lopez just stands there for four or five seconds with the castrated deer-in-the-headlights look, debating his options before skulking away. That was Tony Dungy in the Pittsburgh game. Not good.
It may have been a story if Manning hadn't made the conversion, but it should be a story anyway. I was screaming at the TV for Dungy to call a timeout and put Manning in his place. Until Peyton Manning wins some sort of championship in football (or even a big game), no coach owes him any deference.
Of course, if Dungy had the guts to show Manning who was in charge, he'd probably have gone for the first down to begin with.
Biggest non-story of this past NFL weekend that should be a story
TSG:
First of all, can you imagine what would happen if Bill Belichick sent New England's punting team out and Tom Brady tried to wave it off? Actually, I know what would happen -- Belichick would immediately call a timeout, furiously motion for Brady to come over, then chew him out on national TV. That's what would happen. Second of all, if you're the other Indy players, how can you respect your coach after that? Who's running the team, Dungy or Manning? Can you name another professional athlete in any sport who acts autonomously and directly disobeys his coach? Why doesn't the national media make a bigger deal out of this? What's the difference between Manning waving the punt team off the field and Terrell Owens questioning the competency of Donovan McNabb?
One positive outcome: The Tony Dungy "I can't believe my QB just hung me out to dry on national TV" Face. Eerily reminiscent of the scene in "Scarface" when coke dealer Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia's character) shows up at the Miami nightclub, sees Tony Montana with his arm around his girlfriend (Michelle Pfeiffer's character), makes the requisite "Get your hands off my girl" comment, and not only does Tony refuse to budge, he stares him down and fires back with something along the lines of, "Hey, maybe she needs a new man, Frank." And poor Lopez just stands there for four or five seconds with the castrated deer-in-the-headlights look, debating his options before skulking away. That was Tony Dungy in the Pittsburgh game. Not good.
It may have been a story if Manning hadn't made the conversion, but it should be a story anyway. I was screaming at the TV for Dungy to call a timeout and put Manning in his place. Until Peyton Manning wins some sort of championship in football (or even a big game), no coach owes him any deference.
Of course, if Dungy had the guts to show Manning who was in charge, he'd probably have gone for the first down to begin with.
From TNR Online:
HOUSE REPUBLICANS ARE ABOUT TO HAND DEMOCRATS A GIFT.
Blunt Instrument
by Ryan Lizza
It looked like a wedding. The setting was the majestic Great Hall of the Library of Congress, an absurdly ornate cavern of white marble, grand staircases, brass inlayed floors, stained glass sky lights, and 75-feet high ceilings. Reporters were warned not to block one staircase landing as it was being used for the "procession." And sure enough, as a treacly orchestral soundtrack echoed through the room, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, followed by dozens of their fellow Democrats, slow-walked two-by-two down the aisle and assembled on a makeshift stage.
Everyone played to type. Charles Schumer jockeyed for a more camera-friendly position behind the podium. Joe Lieberman stood forlornly, off to the right of his colleagues, barely mustering the energy to applaud their canned lines. Hillary Clinton affixed that alien-like perma-grin on her face and stared into space. Reid, sounding a little like Izzy Mandelbaum, the elderly tough-guy who challenges Jerry to a weight-lifting competition in that famous "Seinfeld" episode, talked about his days busting mobsters in Las Vegas: "I had a bomb placed in my car." (Nobody was hurt.) Pelosi made an earnest and tiresome analogy between the Declaration of Independence, America's founding document, and the new Honest Leadership, Open Government Act, legislation concerning congressional meals and travel.
You could tell it was a big-deal event. Unlike most of the quickie pressers on the Hill, the Democrats' unveiling of their lobbying reform legislation had presidential campaign-level atmospherics--hectare-sized American flags, slogan-emblazoned banners, stage risers, little duct-tape crosses so the principals knew exactly where to stand. Reid and Pelosi were shrewd and modest enough to make Barack Obama their main voice on the issue. And he added a dose of credibility to the reform package by acknowledging, "Democrats are certainly not without sin."
As with the proposals put forth by the Republicans--who took a pathetic swat at lobbying reform a day earlier--the best way to look at what the Democrats called for yesterday is as a campaign document. As John Judis points out here, without fundamentally tackling campaign finance reform, making minor changes to how lobbyists and members interact with each other is meaningless. And as the left-leaning folks at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have noted, the Democrats' plan is silent on how to revive the ethics committee or create other enforcement mechanisms that are true watchdogs of congressional behavior.
The real point of the reform package introduced yesterday is to simply keep the light shining on the specifics of the GOP ethics scandals. So we get "The Tony Rudy Reform," named after the DeLay staffer turned lobbyist, which doubles the required length of time between a staffer's or lawmaker's Hill work and his promotion to K Street from one year to two years. Similarly there are reforms named after Ralph Reed (toughening lobbyist disclosure), Jack Abramoff (banning lobbyist gifts and travel), Frist and Hastert, Grover Norquist, Halliburton, and, of course, Brownie (requiring credentials in public safety appointments). It's hard to disagree with the details in any of the reforms in the package, but the overall strategy seems to sacrifice a more comprehensive policy for the sake of some shrewd politics.
And Republicans seem oblivious. Given the Democratic strategy on this issue--a laser-like focus on the personalities and specific practices of the current crop of Republican investigatees--it boggles the mind that GOP members are about to make Roy Blunt their majority leader. There is a reason why Howard Dean was celebrating Blunt's rise Tuesday and why some Democrats in the Great Hall yesterday were gleefully joking that they hoped to soon add a "Blunt Reform" plank to their package.
Think of just about any current scandal involving a Republican in Washington and Blunt is at the center of it. To wit:
Abramoff. Blunt signed three letters to Interior Secretary Gale Norton asking her to stop the Choctaw Indians from opening a casino that would have competed with the tables of Abramoff's Indian clients. Blunt personally met with Abramoff or his fellow lobbyists (the records are unclear) when Abramoff was working the Mariana Islands issue. Gregg Hartley, Blunt's former chief of staff and his man on K Street--his Tony Rudy--recruited Abramoff to lobbying giant Cassidy & Associates after Abramoff left Greenberg Traurig in disgrace. Best of all, and most likely to be coming to a TV screen near you in the form of a 30-second ad, Blunt had "friend of owner status" at Abramoff's Signatures restaurant, meaning he ate for free.
K Street Project. Blunt was DeLay's liaison to K Street--he was DeLay's DeLay.
Alexander Strategy Group. Blunt was closely associated with the now disbanded firm run by ex-DeLay aides who are at the center of the Abramoff investigation. A detailed report put together by Public Citizen notes that "Ten of Blunt's biggest contributors have hired the Alexander Strategy Group as their lobbying firm" and that the firm did some $500,000 in fundraising and consulting work for Blunt.
Duke Cunningham. Blunt reportedly flew four times on the corporate jets of companies run by Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor accused of bribing Representative Cunningham with millions of dollars in cash and gifts.
Pay to play. Blunt once mysteriously added a provision beneficial to tobacco giant Altria, for whom his wife and son are lobbyists, to a Homeland Security bill. (It was removed when it became public.)
US Family Network. According to Public Citizen:
USFN was the recipient of a $500,000 soft money check from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) in October 1999, whose finance chair was Abigail Perlman, who became Blunt's wife in 2003. The money was solicited by Buckham, then a USFN contractor. The USFN subsequently made a secret $300,000 transfer to Americans for Economic Growth, which used the money to run commercials attacking Democratic congressional candidates. In 2004, the FEC fined the NRCC $280,000 in connection with its transfer to the USFN.
I really don't have any idea what that means, either. But I think it's one reason that all those Democrats in the Great Hall yesterday were smiling.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS ARE ABOUT TO HAND DEMOCRATS A GIFT.
Blunt Instrument
by Ryan Lizza
It looked like a wedding. The setting was the majestic Great Hall of the Library of Congress, an absurdly ornate cavern of white marble, grand staircases, brass inlayed floors, stained glass sky lights, and 75-feet high ceilings. Reporters were warned not to block one staircase landing as it was being used for the "procession." And sure enough, as a treacly orchestral soundtrack echoed through the room, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, followed by dozens of their fellow Democrats, slow-walked two-by-two down the aisle and assembled on a makeshift stage.
Everyone played to type. Charles Schumer jockeyed for a more camera-friendly position behind the podium. Joe Lieberman stood forlornly, off to the right of his colleagues, barely mustering the energy to applaud their canned lines. Hillary Clinton affixed that alien-like perma-grin on her face and stared into space. Reid, sounding a little like Izzy Mandelbaum, the elderly tough-guy who challenges Jerry to a weight-lifting competition in that famous "Seinfeld" episode, talked about his days busting mobsters in Las Vegas: "I had a bomb placed in my car." (Nobody was hurt.) Pelosi made an earnest and tiresome analogy between the Declaration of Independence, America's founding document, and the new Honest Leadership, Open Government Act, legislation concerning congressional meals and travel.
You could tell it was a big-deal event. Unlike most of the quickie pressers on the Hill, the Democrats' unveiling of their lobbying reform legislation had presidential campaign-level atmospherics--hectare-sized American flags, slogan-emblazoned banners, stage risers, little duct-tape crosses so the principals knew exactly where to stand. Reid and Pelosi were shrewd and modest enough to make Barack Obama their main voice on the issue. And he added a dose of credibility to the reform package by acknowledging, "Democrats are certainly not without sin."
As with the proposals put forth by the Republicans--who took a pathetic swat at lobbying reform a day earlier--the best way to look at what the Democrats called for yesterday is as a campaign document. As John Judis points out here, without fundamentally tackling campaign finance reform, making minor changes to how lobbyists and members interact with each other is meaningless. And as the left-leaning folks at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have noted, the Democrats' plan is silent on how to revive the ethics committee or create other enforcement mechanisms that are true watchdogs of congressional behavior.
The real point of the reform package introduced yesterday is to simply keep the light shining on the specifics of the GOP ethics scandals. So we get "The Tony Rudy Reform," named after the DeLay staffer turned lobbyist, which doubles the required length of time between a staffer's or lawmaker's Hill work and his promotion to K Street from one year to two years. Similarly there are reforms named after Ralph Reed (toughening lobbyist disclosure), Jack Abramoff (banning lobbyist gifts and travel), Frist and Hastert, Grover Norquist, Halliburton, and, of course, Brownie (requiring credentials in public safety appointments). It's hard to disagree with the details in any of the reforms in the package, but the overall strategy seems to sacrifice a more comprehensive policy for the sake of some shrewd politics.
And Republicans seem oblivious. Given the Democratic strategy on this issue--a laser-like focus on the personalities and specific practices of the current crop of Republican investigatees--it boggles the mind that GOP members are about to make Roy Blunt their majority leader. There is a reason why Howard Dean was celebrating Blunt's rise Tuesday and why some Democrats in the Great Hall yesterday were gleefully joking that they hoped to soon add a "Blunt Reform" plank to their package.
Think of just about any current scandal involving a Republican in Washington and Blunt is at the center of it. To wit:
Abramoff. Blunt signed three letters to Interior Secretary Gale Norton asking her to stop the Choctaw Indians from opening a casino that would have competed with the tables of Abramoff's Indian clients. Blunt personally met with Abramoff or his fellow lobbyists (the records are unclear) when Abramoff was working the Mariana Islands issue. Gregg Hartley, Blunt's former chief of staff and his man on K Street--his Tony Rudy--recruited Abramoff to lobbying giant Cassidy & Associates after Abramoff left Greenberg Traurig in disgrace. Best of all, and most likely to be coming to a TV screen near you in the form of a 30-second ad, Blunt had "friend of owner status" at Abramoff's Signatures restaurant, meaning he ate for free.
K Street Project. Blunt was DeLay's liaison to K Street--he was DeLay's DeLay.
Alexander Strategy Group. Blunt was closely associated with the now disbanded firm run by ex-DeLay aides who are at the center of the Abramoff investigation. A detailed report put together by Public Citizen notes that "Ten of Blunt's biggest contributors have hired the Alexander Strategy Group as their lobbying firm" and that the firm did some $500,000 in fundraising and consulting work for Blunt.
Duke Cunningham. Blunt reportedly flew four times on the corporate jets of companies run by Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor accused of bribing Representative Cunningham with millions of dollars in cash and gifts.
Pay to play. Blunt once mysteriously added a provision beneficial to tobacco giant Altria, for whom his wife and son are lobbyists, to a Homeland Security bill. (It was removed when it became public.)
US Family Network. According to Public Citizen:
USFN was the recipient of a $500,000 soft money check from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) in October 1999, whose finance chair was Abigail Perlman, who became Blunt's wife in 2003. The money was solicited by Buckham, then a USFN contractor. The USFN subsequently made a secret $300,000 transfer to Americans for Economic Growth, which used the money to run commercials attacking Democratic congressional candidates. In 2004, the FEC fined the NRCC $280,000 in connection with its transfer to the USFN.
I really don't have any idea what that means, either. But I think it's one reason that all those Democrats in the Great Hall yesterday were smiling.
'Chocolate City' Sprinkled With Nuts
By Ann Coulter
So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about."
First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys.
As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."
Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!
Madam Hillary also said the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." While Hillary is certainly qualified to comment on what the all-time worst presidential administrations were, having had firsthand experience in one of them, I think she might want to avoid the phrase "go down in history."
All I can say is: It's a good thing we had a stealth candidate like Harriet Miers to tiptoe past these powerful, scary Democrats! Sorry if that sounds churlish, but after Judge Samuel Alito's magnificent performance last week, I think Republicans can stop being afraid of their shadows when it comes to our judicial nominees.
Ever since Bork, Republicans have been terrified of nominating candidates with something in their background that might possibly suggest the nominee did not get down on his knees (another phrase Hillary should avoid) and thank God for Roe v. Wade every night. That's how we ended up with mediocrities like David Hackett Souter and Anthony "Third Choice" Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
Besides being stunningly qualified, the characteristics of the current stellar Supreme Court nominee include these:
His mother immediately told the press, "Of course he's against abortion."
He had expressed support for the Reagan administration's positions on abortion in a 1985 memo.
He refused to accede to the Democrats' endless browbeating and tell them that Roe was "settled law."
And the Democrats couldn't lay a finger on him. Sam Alito marks the final purging of the Bork experience.
All the Democrats could do was scream about his inactive membership -- back in the '70s -- in CAP, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which had a magazine called Prospect, which once ran an article, apparently satirical, complaining about Princeton admitting co-eds. In my mind, the only potentially disqualifying aspect of Alito's record was that he wasn't a more active member of CAP, a group opposed to quotas, set-asides and the lowering of academic standards at Princeton.
Then this week, we found out Sen. Teddy Kennedy still belongs to an organization that doesn't admit women. Oh -- also, he killed a girl.
I'm fairly certain I've mentioned that before -- I don't recall, Mr. Chairman -- but I don't understand why everyone doesn't mention it every time Senator Drunkennedy has the audacity to talk about how "troubled" and "concerned" he is about this or that nominee. I bet Mary Jo was "troubled" and "concerned" about the senator leaving her in trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi.
It's not as if Democrats can say: OK, OK! The man paid a price! Let it go! He didn't pay a price. The Kopechne family paid a price. Kennedy weaved away scot-free.
But the Democrats are "troubled" about Sam Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton 30 years ago. If they're "concerned" about lifetime appointments for people with memberships in "troubling" organizations, wait until they hear about Bob Byrd! (Former Kleagle, Ku Klux Klan.)
They're a rotten bunch, these Democrats, and I'm happy to see an end to their reign of terror.
Now that Zell Miller is out of office, the only office-holding Democrat I like anymore is Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. I had never heard of him until Hurricane Katrina, but after his "gaffe" this week, he's my favorite Democrat. I like a politician who casually spouts off insanely politically incorrect remarks in front of large audiences and TV cameras.
Nagin cheerfully told a crowd gathered for a Martin Luther King Day celebration that New Orleans would soon be "Chocolate City" again. I don't know who's supposed to be offended by that. I'm not. Perhaps all the white mayors who know they couldn't have said it. True, life's unfair. Oh well.
When it comes to choice-of-word crimes, I'd prefer detente to mutually assured destruction. Lead us off the chocolate plantation, Mayor Nagin!
By Ann Coulter
So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about."
First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys.
As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."
Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!
Madam Hillary also said the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." While Hillary is certainly qualified to comment on what the all-time worst presidential administrations were, having had firsthand experience in one of them, I think she might want to avoid the phrase "go down in history."
All I can say is: It's a good thing we had a stealth candidate like Harriet Miers to tiptoe past these powerful, scary Democrats! Sorry if that sounds churlish, but after Judge Samuel Alito's magnificent performance last week, I think Republicans can stop being afraid of their shadows when it comes to our judicial nominees.
Ever since Bork, Republicans have been terrified of nominating candidates with something in their background that might possibly suggest the nominee did not get down on his knees (another phrase Hillary should avoid) and thank God for Roe v. Wade every night. That's how we ended up with mediocrities like David Hackett Souter and Anthony "Third Choice" Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
Besides being stunningly qualified, the characteristics of the current stellar Supreme Court nominee include these:
His mother immediately told the press, "Of course he's against abortion."
He had expressed support for the Reagan administration's positions on abortion in a 1985 memo.
He refused to accede to the Democrats' endless browbeating and tell them that Roe was "settled law."
And the Democrats couldn't lay a finger on him. Sam Alito marks the final purging of the Bork experience.
All the Democrats could do was scream about his inactive membership -- back in the '70s -- in CAP, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which had a magazine called Prospect, which once ran an article, apparently satirical, complaining about Princeton admitting co-eds. In my mind, the only potentially disqualifying aspect of Alito's record was that he wasn't a more active member of CAP, a group opposed to quotas, set-asides and the lowering of academic standards at Princeton.
Then this week, we found out Sen. Teddy Kennedy still belongs to an organization that doesn't admit women. Oh -- also, he killed a girl.
I'm fairly certain I've mentioned that before -- I don't recall, Mr. Chairman -- but I don't understand why everyone doesn't mention it every time Senator Drunkennedy has the audacity to talk about how "troubled" and "concerned" he is about this or that nominee. I bet Mary Jo was "troubled" and "concerned" about the senator leaving her in trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi.
It's not as if Democrats can say: OK, OK! The man paid a price! Let it go! He didn't pay a price. The Kopechne family paid a price. Kennedy weaved away scot-free.
But the Democrats are "troubled" about Sam Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton 30 years ago. If they're "concerned" about lifetime appointments for people with memberships in "troubling" organizations, wait until they hear about Bob Byrd! (Former Kleagle, Ku Klux Klan.)
They're a rotten bunch, these Democrats, and I'm happy to see an end to their reign of terror.
Now that Zell Miller is out of office, the only office-holding Democrat I like anymore is Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. I had never heard of him until Hurricane Katrina, but after his "gaffe" this week, he's my favorite Democrat. I like a politician who casually spouts off insanely politically incorrect remarks in front of large audiences and TV cameras.
Nagin cheerfully told a crowd gathered for a Martin Luther King Day celebration that New Orleans would soon be "Chocolate City" again. I don't know who's supposed to be offended by that. I'm not. Perhaps all the white mayors who know they couldn't have said it. True, life's unfair. Oh well.
When it comes to choice-of-word crimes, I'd prefer detente to mutually assured destruction. Lead us off the chocolate plantation, Mayor Nagin!
From The Washington Post:
In the Shadows of the Capital
Crime in All Four Quadrants
Sunday, January 15, 2006; BW15
The short stories in D.C. Noir (Akashic; paperback, $14.95), edited by George Pelecanos, are grouped by subject matter and neighborhood, allowing the reader to take a felonious tour of the city. Interested in the gritty side of Georgetown? Try Robert Andrews's "Solomon's Alley." Not so sure Mt. Pleasant always lives up to its name? You'll find confirmation in (The Washington Post's) Ruben Castaneda's "Coyote Hunt." You can travel vicariously to the mean streets of Petworth and Chevy Chase, Logan Circle and the Hill -- and even to K Street, maybe not the meanest but probably the crookedest area of all, thanks to formidable recent efforts by corrupt lobbyists. The noir-dealing contributors include Pelecanos himself; mystery novelist Laura Lippman, on leave from her home turf in Baltimore; and former Book World contributing editor Jennifer Howard.
Also among them is the veteran James Grady, best known for his novel Six Days of the Condor ; his "The Bottom Line" is a tour de force of narrative bravado. A story of double-dealing on Capitol Hill, it crams enough plot to power a full-length novel into a mere 30 pages. From its opening sentence -- "The Capitol building glowed in the night like a white icing cake" -- to the surprises at its finish line, this is a story that never stops barreling along. Grady seems to draw on his own resumé (former Senate aide) when he sums up a certain kind of Hill staffer's career in a single sentence: "Victory at work that day meant he . . . brokered a deal to give air polluters a six percent rollback of fines instead of the seventeen percent proposed by his Senator's opponents."
Richard Currey's "The Names of the Lost" encompasses both local details and international angst. In mid-winter its protagonist, Liebmann, takes a long walk through Shepherd Park, where he owns a liquor store. He crosses Georgia Avenue, follows the fence line of Walter Reed Hospital, returns to the intersection of Georgia and Alaska Avenues and Kalmia Road. All the while he carries with him memories of Auschwitz, along with a tattooed number. Crime happens in this story, but the pace here is measured and ruminative -- a match for the progress of an old man making his way through a tough neighborhood when he ought to know better than to be out and about.
-- Dennis Drabelle
In the Shadows of the Capital
Crime in All Four Quadrants
Sunday, January 15, 2006; BW15
The short stories in D.C. Noir (Akashic; paperback, $14.95), edited by George Pelecanos, are grouped by subject matter and neighborhood, allowing the reader to take a felonious tour of the city. Interested in the gritty side of Georgetown? Try Robert Andrews's "Solomon's Alley." Not so sure Mt. Pleasant always lives up to its name? You'll find confirmation in (The Washington Post's) Ruben Castaneda's "Coyote Hunt." You can travel vicariously to the mean streets of Petworth and Chevy Chase, Logan Circle and the Hill -- and even to K Street, maybe not the meanest but probably the crookedest area of all, thanks to formidable recent efforts by corrupt lobbyists. The noir-dealing contributors include Pelecanos himself; mystery novelist Laura Lippman, on leave from her home turf in Baltimore; and former Book World contributing editor Jennifer Howard.
Also among them is the veteran James Grady, best known for his novel Six Days of the Condor ; his "The Bottom Line" is a tour de force of narrative bravado. A story of double-dealing on Capitol Hill, it crams enough plot to power a full-length novel into a mere 30 pages. From its opening sentence -- "The Capitol building glowed in the night like a white icing cake" -- to the surprises at its finish line, this is a story that never stops barreling along. Grady seems to draw on his own resumé (former Senate aide) when he sums up a certain kind of Hill staffer's career in a single sentence: "Victory at work that day meant he . . . brokered a deal to give air polluters a six percent rollback of fines instead of the seventeen percent proposed by his Senator's opponents."
Richard Currey's "The Names of the Lost" encompasses both local details and international angst. In mid-winter its protagonist, Liebmann, takes a long walk through Shepherd Park, where he owns a liquor store. He crosses Georgia Avenue, follows the fence line of Walter Reed Hospital, returns to the intersection of Georgia and Alaska Avenues and Kalmia Road. All the while he carries with him memories of Auschwitz, along with a tattooed number. Crime happens in this story, but the pace here is measured and ruminative -- a match for the progress of an old man making his way through a tough neighborhood when he ought to know better than to be out and about.
-- Dennis Drabelle
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
From The New York Times:
Purple Heartbreakers
By JAMES WEBB
Arlington, Va.
IT should come as no surprise that an arch-conservative Web site is questioning whether Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has been critical of the war in Iraq, deserved the combat awards he received in Vietnam.
After all, in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha.
Military people past and present have good reason to wonder if the current administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and doubt about the actions of veterans who have run against President Bush or opposed his policies has been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public's appreciation of what it means to serve, and in the long term may hurt the Republicans themselves.
Not unlike the Clinton "triangulation" strategy, the approach has been to attack an opponent's greatest perceived strength in order to diminish his overall credibility. To no one's surprise, surrogates carry out the attacks, leaving President Bush and other Republican leaders to benefit from the results while publicly distancing themselves from the actual remarks.
During the 2000 primary season, John McCain's life-defining experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam were diminished through whispers that he was too scarred by those years to handle the emotional burdens of the presidency. The wide admiration that Senator Max Cleland gained from building a career despite losing three limbs in Vietnam brought on the smug non sequitur from critics that he had been injured in an accident and not by enemy fire. John Kerry's voluntary combat duty was systematically diminished by the well-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in a highly successful effort to insulate a president who avoided having to go to war.
And now comes Jack Murtha. The administration tried a number of times to derail the congressman's criticism of the Iraq war, including a largely ineffective effort to get senior military officials to publicly rebuke him (Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the only one to do the administration's bidding there).
Now the Cybercast News Service, a supposedly independent organization with deep ties to the Republican Party, has dusted off the Swift Boat Veterans playbook, questioning whether Mr. Murtha deserved his two Purple Hearts. The article also implied that Mr. Murtha did not deserve the Bronze Star he received, and that the combat-distinguishing "V" on it was questionable. It then called on Mr. Murtha to open up his military records.
Cybercast News Service is run by David Thibault, who formerly worked as the senior producer for "Rising Tide," the televised weekly news magazine produced by the Republican National Committee. One of the authors of the Murtha article was Marc Morano, a long-time writer and producer for Rush Limbaugh.
The accusations against Mr. Murtha were very old news, principally coming from defeated political rivals. Aligned against their charges are an official letter from Marine Corps Headquarters written nearly 40 years ago affirming Mr. Murtha's eligibility for his Purple Hearts - "you are entitled to the Purple Heart and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Purple Heart for wounds received in action" - and the strict tradition of the Marine Corps regarding awards. While in other services lower-level commanders have frequently had authority to issue prestigious awards, in the Marines Mr. Murtha's Vietnam Bronze Star would have required the approval of four different awards boards.
The Bush administration's failure to support those who have served goes beyond the smearing of these political opponents. One of the most regrettable examples comes, oddly enough, from modern-day Vietnam. The government-run War Remnants Museum, a popular tourist site in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, includes an extensive section on "American atrocities." The largest display is devoted to Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator and governor of Nebraska, recipient of the Medal of Honor and member of the 9/11 commission.
In the display, Mr. Kerrey is flatly labeled a war criminal by the Vietnamese government, and the accompanying text gives a thoroughly propagandized version of an incident that resulted in civilian deaths during his time in Vietnam. This display has been up for more than two years. One finds it hard to imagine another example in which a foreign government has been allowed to so characterize the service of a distinguished American with no hint of a diplomatic protest.
The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who thus far have decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.
A young American now serving in Iraq might rightly wonder whether his or her service will be deliberately misconstrued 20 years from now, in the next rendition of politically motivated spinmeisters who never had the courage to step forward and put their own lives on the line.
Rudyard Kipling summed up this syndrome quite neatly more than a century ago, writing about the frequent hypocrisy directed at the British soldiers of his day:
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!
James Webb, a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, was a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam.
Purple Heartbreakers
By JAMES WEBB
Arlington, Va.
IT should come as no surprise that an arch-conservative Web site is questioning whether Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has been critical of the war in Iraq, deserved the combat awards he received in Vietnam.
After all, in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha.
Military people past and present have good reason to wonder if the current administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and doubt about the actions of veterans who have run against President Bush or opposed his policies has been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public's appreciation of what it means to serve, and in the long term may hurt the Republicans themselves.
Not unlike the Clinton "triangulation" strategy, the approach has been to attack an opponent's greatest perceived strength in order to diminish his overall credibility. To no one's surprise, surrogates carry out the attacks, leaving President Bush and other Republican leaders to benefit from the results while publicly distancing themselves from the actual remarks.
During the 2000 primary season, John McCain's life-defining experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam were diminished through whispers that he was too scarred by those years to handle the emotional burdens of the presidency. The wide admiration that Senator Max Cleland gained from building a career despite losing three limbs in Vietnam brought on the smug non sequitur from critics that he had been injured in an accident and not by enemy fire. John Kerry's voluntary combat duty was systematically diminished by the well-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in a highly successful effort to insulate a president who avoided having to go to war.
And now comes Jack Murtha. The administration tried a number of times to derail the congressman's criticism of the Iraq war, including a largely ineffective effort to get senior military officials to publicly rebuke him (Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the only one to do the administration's bidding there).
Now the Cybercast News Service, a supposedly independent organization with deep ties to the Republican Party, has dusted off the Swift Boat Veterans playbook, questioning whether Mr. Murtha deserved his two Purple Hearts. The article also implied that Mr. Murtha did not deserve the Bronze Star he received, and that the combat-distinguishing "V" on it was questionable. It then called on Mr. Murtha to open up his military records.
Cybercast News Service is run by David Thibault, who formerly worked as the senior producer for "Rising Tide," the televised weekly news magazine produced by the Republican National Committee. One of the authors of the Murtha article was Marc Morano, a long-time writer and producer for Rush Limbaugh.
The accusations against Mr. Murtha were very old news, principally coming from defeated political rivals. Aligned against their charges are an official letter from Marine Corps Headquarters written nearly 40 years ago affirming Mr. Murtha's eligibility for his Purple Hearts - "you are entitled to the Purple Heart and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Purple Heart for wounds received in action" - and the strict tradition of the Marine Corps regarding awards. While in other services lower-level commanders have frequently had authority to issue prestigious awards, in the Marines Mr. Murtha's Vietnam Bronze Star would have required the approval of four different awards boards.
The Bush administration's failure to support those who have served goes beyond the smearing of these political opponents. One of the most regrettable examples comes, oddly enough, from modern-day Vietnam. The government-run War Remnants Museum, a popular tourist site in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, includes an extensive section on "American atrocities." The largest display is devoted to Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator and governor of Nebraska, recipient of the Medal of Honor and member of the 9/11 commission.
In the display, Mr. Kerrey is flatly labeled a war criminal by the Vietnamese government, and the accompanying text gives a thoroughly propagandized version of an incident that resulted in civilian deaths during his time in Vietnam. This display has been up for more than two years. One finds it hard to imagine another example in which a foreign government has been allowed to so characterize the service of a distinguished American with no hint of a diplomatic protest.
The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who thus far have decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.
A young American now serving in Iraq might rightly wonder whether his or her service will be deliberately misconstrued 20 years from now, in the next rendition of politically motivated spinmeisters who never had the courage to step forward and put their own lives on the line.
Rudyard Kipling summed up this syndrome quite neatly more than a century ago, writing about the frequent hypocrisy directed at the British soldiers of his day:
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!
James Webb, a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, was a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam.
From The Washington Times:
Open Borders, Closed Minds:
What Goes On at the Border, Stays at the Border
By Tony Blankley
It's not that I expect an orderly, predictable world. I have read enough of history to understand that the dynamics of the human personality in a world of constant change will yield radical, often chaotic upheavals.
But still and all, a chap doesn't expect to find a full-grown rhinoceros in his desk drawer, or a man-eating sparrow on his window ledge.
So you can imagine my astonishment when I picked up Tuesday's Washington Times and read on the front page the headline: "Mexican military incursions reported: U.S. Border Patrol alerts Arizona agents."
Even in a world gone mad we should not expect to see a headline that Mexico is invading (or even incursioning into) the United States -- unless it is in the entertainment section regarding a re-make of "The Mouse That Roared." But the article was on the front page, and written by Mr. Jerry Seper.
As the editorial page editor of the Washington Times, I am very familiar with Jerry Seper. Mr. Seper is no novice to Mexican American border issues. He is undoubtedly the nation's leading reporter on the subject. As a longtime reader of Mr. Seper's extraordinary border reporting, experience has taught me to reliably assume that when U.S. government officials deny or contradict Mr. Seper's reporting -- believe Mr. Seper.
Mr. Seper reports that: "The U.S. Border Patrol has warned agents in Arizona of incursions into the U.S. by [heavily armed] Mexican [military units] 'trained to escape, evade and counterambush' if detected . . . " The Border Patrol also cautioned its agents to keep "a low profile," to use "cover and concealment" in approaching the Mexican military units, and "to employ 'shadows and camouflage' to conceal themselves and 'stay as quiet as possible.'"
As a red-blooded naturalized U.S. citizen (OK, perhaps slightly bluish-red), I felt my questionably hued blood boiling at the report that our border patrol has been instructed to hide and stay as quiet as possible in the face of a foreign military incursion. It's not that I expected five U.S. Border Patrol agents to take on a heavily armed Mexican military unit a la John Wayne. (Well, actually, the thought crossed my mind.)
But I certainly expected the next line of the report to be that the Pentagon had been alerted and 10,000 Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton had been dispatched to drive the Mexican units back across the Rio Grande -- and then some. If Jimmy Polk was still president, the Marines would already be well on their way to Veracruz.
Instead of calling in the Marines (or any other American military fighting organization), U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Salvador Zamora confirmed the story but said the agents were given guidance on "how to react to any sightings of military and foreign police in this country and how to properly document any incursion." He then went on to excuse the incursions as taking place in areas of the border "not marked by monuments or signs."
The spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington did Mr. Zamora one better. Mr. Rafael Laveaga denied the incursions and asserted that Mexican military units have strict rules to stay at least a mile from the border. He then condescendingly suggested that some Mexican drug smugglers "wear uniforms and drive military-type vehicles" and might have been "confused" by U.S. authorities as Mexican military units.
I would suggest that Mr. Laveaga might have been confused by the fact that the men were drug smugglers into thinking they were not official Mexican military units.
Indeed, Mr. Seper went on to report the views of Mr. T.J. Bonner, 27-year veteran Border Patrol agent, and head of the 10,000-person National Border Patrol Council, that: "Intrusions by the Mexican military to protect drug loads happen all the time and represent a significant threat to the agents." He went on to say the incursions were not accidents as the Mexican military has global positioning systems.
Since 1996, 216 incursions have been documented according to the Department of Homeland Security. But yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman said she had no information on the reported incursion.
"What goes on at the border, stays at the border" would seem to be our government's guiding principle. The facts would suggest that it is the policy of the Bush administration to ignore these military raiding parties so long as they are not driving on toward Sacramento, Chicago or Washington, D.C. (They ignore the fact that an infection may intrude through a crack in the skin, and then proceed inward to the vital organs.)
The powers that be remain close-minded to the ever-growing dangers and national insults that flow from open borders.
It is said that pride goeth before the fall. But it is equally true that a nation that has so little pride in its own territorial integrity is also due for a sharp trip downward.
Open Borders, Closed Minds:
What Goes On at the Border, Stays at the Border
By Tony Blankley
It's not that I expect an orderly, predictable world. I have read enough of history to understand that the dynamics of the human personality in a world of constant change will yield radical, often chaotic upheavals.
But still and all, a chap doesn't expect to find a full-grown rhinoceros in his desk drawer, or a man-eating sparrow on his window ledge.
So you can imagine my astonishment when I picked up Tuesday's Washington Times and read on the front page the headline: "Mexican military incursions reported: U.S. Border Patrol alerts Arizona agents."
Even in a world gone mad we should not expect to see a headline that Mexico is invading (or even incursioning into) the United States -- unless it is in the entertainment section regarding a re-make of "The Mouse That Roared." But the article was on the front page, and written by Mr. Jerry Seper.
As the editorial page editor of the Washington Times, I am very familiar with Jerry Seper. Mr. Seper is no novice to Mexican American border issues. He is undoubtedly the nation's leading reporter on the subject. As a longtime reader of Mr. Seper's extraordinary border reporting, experience has taught me to reliably assume that when U.S. government officials deny or contradict Mr. Seper's reporting -- believe Mr. Seper.
Mr. Seper reports that: "The U.S. Border Patrol has warned agents in Arizona of incursions into the U.S. by [heavily armed] Mexican [military units] 'trained to escape, evade and counterambush' if detected . . . " The Border Patrol also cautioned its agents to keep "a low profile," to use "cover and concealment" in approaching the Mexican military units, and "to employ 'shadows and camouflage' to conceal themselves and 'stay as quiet as possible.'"
As a red-blooded naturalized U.S. citizen (OK, perhaps slightly bluish-red), I felt my questionably hued blood boiling at the report that our border patrol has been instructed to hide and stay as quiet as possible in the face of a foreign military incursion. It's not that I expected five U.S. Border Patrol agents to take on a heavily armed Mexican military unit a la John Wayne. (Well, actually, the thought crossed my mind.)
But I certainly expected the next line of the report to be that the Pentagon had been alerted and 10,000 Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton had been dispatched to drive the Mexican units back across the Rio Grande -- and then some. If Jimmy Polk was still president, the Marines would already be well on their way to Veracruz.
Instead of calling in the Marines (or any other American military fighting organization), U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Salvador Zamora confirmed the story but said the agents were given guidance on "how to react to any sightings of military and foreign police in this country and how to properly document any incursion." He then went on to excuse the incursions as taking place in areas of the border "not marked by monuments or signs."
The spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington did Mr. Zamora one better. Mr. Rafael Laveaga denied the incursions and asserted that Mexican military units have strict rules to stay at least a mile from the border. He then condescendingly suggested that some Mexican drug smugglers "wear uniforms and drive military-type vehicles" and might have been "confused" by U.S. authorities as Mexican military units.
I would suggest that Mr. Laveaga might have been confused by the fact that the men were drug smugglers into thinking they were not official Mexican military units.
Indeed, Mr. Seper went on to report the views of Mr. T.J. Bonner, 27-year veteran Border Patrol agent, and head of the 10,000-person National Border Patrol Council, that: "Intrusions by the Mexican military to protect drug loads happen all the time and represent a significant threat to the agents." He went on to say the incursions were not accidents as the Mexican military has global positioning systems.
Since 1996, 216 incursions have been documented according to the Department of Homeland Security. But yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman said she had no information on the reported incursion.
"What goes on at the border, stays at the border" would seem to be our government's guiding principle. The facts would suggest that it is the policy of the Bush administration to ignore these military raiding parties so long as they are not driving on toward Sacramento, Chicago or Washington, D.C. (They ignore the fact that an infection may intrude through a crack in the skin, and then proceed inward to the vital organs.)
The powers that be remain close-minded to the ever-growing dangers and national insults that flow from open borders.
It is said that pride goeth before the fall. But it is equally true that a nation that has so little pride in its own territorial integrity is also due for a sharp trip downward.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
THE WASHINGTON TIMES:
Mexican military incursions reported
By Jerry Seper
Published January 17, 2006
The U.S. Border Patrol has warned agents in Arizona of incursions into the United States by Mexican soldiers "trained to escape, evade and counterambush" if detected -- a scenario Mexico denied yesterday.
The warning to Border Patrol agents in Tucson, Ariz., comes after increased sightings of what authorities described as heavily armed Mexican military units on the U.S. side of the border. The warning asks the agents to report the size, activity, location, time and equipment of any units observed.
It also cautions agents to keep "a low profile," to use "cover and concealment" in approaching the Mexican units, to employ "shadows and camouflage" to conceal themselves and to "stay as quiet as possible."
Border Patrol spokesman Salvador Zamora confirmed that a "military incursion" warning was given to Tucson agents, but said it was designed to inform them how to react to any sightings of military and foreign police in this country and how to properly document any incursion.
Mr. Zamora added that although incursions by the Mexican military do occur, they usually have taken place in areas of the border "not marked by monuments or signs." He said U.S. military units also have crossed mistakenly into Mexico.
But Rafael Laveaga, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, denied that Mexican military personnel are crossing into the United States.
"I strongly deny any incursions by the Mexican military as inaccurate allegations," Mr. Laveaga said. "The Mexican military is a well-respected institution with strict rules on how to control Northern Mexico. It maintains a protocol of not going within a mile of the border, and those who would trespass would be severely punished."
Mr. Laveaga said some drug smugglers headed "both north and south" wear uniforms and drive military-type vehicles, and might have "confused" U.S. authorities.
"Give me a break," said T.J. Bonner, a 27-year Border Patrol veteran who heads the National Border Patrol Council. "Intrusions by the Mexican military to protect drug loads happen all the time and represent a significant threat to the agents.
"Why else would they be in the area, firing at federal agents in the United States? There is no other explanation," said Mr. Bonner, whose organization represents all 10,000 of the nonsupervisory Border Patrol agents.
He also challenged reports that Mexican military units had crossed mistakenly into the United States, saying, "Every country's military has a [global positioning system] nowadays, including the Mexicans.
"If the border is so poorly marked, why don't the thousands of Border Patrol agents working 24/7 along it ever seem to get lost, and none of us have been issued a GPS," he said.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said yesterday that she had no information on the reported incursions.
A total of 216 incursions by suspected Mexican military units have been documented since 1996 -- 75 in California, 63 in Arizona and 78 in Texas, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.
Attacks on Border Patrol agents in the past few years have been attributed to current or former Mexican military personnel. U.S. law-enforcement officials have long thought that current and former Mexican soldiers are being paid to protect drug shipments bound for the United States.
Several agents said the attacks have escalated in the past two years as U.S. security efforts on the border have increased -- including the July shooting of two agents in an ambush near Nogales, Ariz., by assailants in black commando-type clothing, who fired more than 50 rounds. Authorities said the gunmen used military-style cover-and-concealment tactics to escape back into Mexico. No one has been arrested.
Santa Cruz County, Ariz., Sheriff Tony Estrada said that at least four shooters were involved and that his deputies found commando clothing, food, water and other "sophisticated equipment" at the site.
Several former Mexican soldiers trained in the U.S. as anti-drug commandos are now part of a well-armed gang known as the "Zetas," which has been linked to hundreds of killings and kidnappings on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in southeastern Texas.
Many of the gang members have been identified as ex-members of an elite, anti-drug paratroop and intelligence battalion called the Special Air Mobile Force Group, who deserted in 1991.
Mexican military incursions reported
By Jerry Seper
Published January 17, 2006
The U.S. Border Patrol has warned agents in Arizona of incursions into the United States by Mexican soldiers "trained to escape, evade and counterambush" if detected -- a scenario Mexico denied yesterday.
The warning to Border Patrol agents in Tucson, Ariz., comes after increased sightings of what authorities described as heavily armed Mexican military units on the U.S. side of the border. The warning asks the agents to report the size, activity, location, time and equipment of any units observed.
It also cautions agents to keep "a low profile," to use "cover and concealment" in approaching the Mexican units, to employ "shadows and camouflage" to conceal themselves and to "stay as quiet as possible."
Border Patrol spokesman Salvador Zamora confirmed that a "military incursion" warning was given to Tucson agents, but said it was designed to inform them how to react to any sightings of military and foreign police in this country and how to properly document any incursion.
Mr. Zamora added that although incursions by the Mexican military do occur, they usually have taken place in areas of the border "not marked by monuments or signs." He said U.S. military units also have crossed mistakenly into Mexico.
But Rafael Laveaga, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, denied that Mexican military personnel are crossing into the United States.
"I strongly deny any incursions by the Mexican military as inaccurate allegations," Mr. Laveaga said. "The Mexican military is a well-respected institution with strict rules on how to control Northern Mexico. It maintains a protocol of not going within a mile of the border, and those who would trespass would be severely punished."
Mr. Laveaga said some drug smugglers headed "both north and south" wear uniforms and drive military-type vehicles, and might have "confused" U.S. authorities.
"Give me a break," said T.J. Bonner, a 27-year Border Patrol veteran who heads the National Border Patrol Council. "Intrusions by the Mexican military to protect drug loads happen all the time and represent a significant threat to the agents.
"Why else would they be in the area, firing at federal agents in the United States? There is no other explanation," said Mr. Bonner, whose organization represents all 10,000 of the nonsupervisory Border Patrol agents.
He also challenged reports that Mexican military units had crossed mistakenly into the United States, saying, "Every country's military has a [global positioning system] nowadays, including the Mexicans.
"If the border is so poorly marked, why don't the thousands of Border Patrol agents working 24/7 along it ever seem to get lost, and none of us have been issued a GPS," he said.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said yesterday that she had no information on the reported incursions.
A total of 216 incursions by suspected Mexican military units have been documented since 1996 -- 75 in California, 63 in Arizona and 78 in Texas, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.
Attacks on Border Patrol agents in the past few years have been attributed to current or former Mexican military personnel. U.S. law-enforcement officials have long thought that current and former Mexican soldiers are being paid to protect drug shipments bound for the United States.
Several agents said the attacks have escalated in the past two years as U.S. security efforts on the border have increased -- including the July shooting of two agents in an ambush near Nogales, Ariz., by assailants in black commando-type clothing, who fired more than 50 rounds. Authorities said the gunmen used military-style cover-and-concealment tactics to escape back into Mexico. No one has been arrested.
Santa Cruz County, Ariz., Sheriff Tony Estrada said that at least four shooters were involved and that his deputies found commando clothing, food, water and other "sophisticated equipment" at the site.
Several former Mexican soldiers trained in the U.S. as anti-drug commandos are now part of a well-armed gang known as the "Zetas," which has been linked to hundreds of killings and kidnappings on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in southeastern Texas.
Many of the gang members have been identified as ex-members of an elite, anti-drug paratroop and intelligence battalion called the Special Air Mobile Force Group, who deserted in 1991.
From The Washington Post:
Oprah's Grand Delusion
By Richard Cohen
Because she has led countless billions and billions of people to the promised land of books, because she preaches self-help and self-sufficiency and not least because she has shown that even a middle-aged person can keep weight off, I must tiptoe up to the amazing Oprah and merely whisper to her that in the case of James Frey, the liar whose memoir turns out to be as much fiction as fact, she is not only wrong, but deluded. What she needs is a session with Dr. Phil.
So important is Oprah in our culture that it is not possible to type her name and not hear the rumbling of a mighty Wurlitzer, or imagine the many antechambers that undoubtedly precede an audience with the Queen of England. Oprah is huge, powerful, akin to no one and nothing else. A mention of anything on her show will make a millionaire out of a pauper or, in the case of a writer such as the Frey the Fibber, a best-seller of undreamed proportions. The man became famous and rich on account of Oprah -- and, or so we all seem to believe, happy as well.
Frey's memoir, ``A Million Little Pieces,'' is about his recovery from drug addiction. It is apparently a hell of a read, filled with gripping, cinematic details, some of which turn out not to be true. The Smoking Gun Web site found out, for instance, that Frey had not spent three months in jail, as he wrote, but maybe a couple of hours or so waiting for a friend to post bond. His account of his stay in a treatment facility is questionable, as is his involvement in a train-car collision that took the lives of two teenage girls. These are not, as Frey keeps claiming, the usual tussle we all have between memory and fact, but veering departures from fact into fiction. It is probably significant that he first tried to sell the book as a novel.
``A Million Little Pieces'' was Oprah's selection for her book club, literally sending it off bookstore shelves and into the stratosphere: about 2 million sold after her endorsement. Recommending the book was one thing. No one expects Oprah to fact-check every book she urges her audience to read. Sticking by it is quite another matter. Even after The Smoking Gun smoked Frey, Oprah told Larry King that no matter what, the book still retained its ``underlying message of redemption." Instead of getting a magisterial rebuke, Frey had been pardoned.
Here is where Dr. Phil steps in. He might tell his friend and mentor that there is no redemption without honesty. Treatment, as one expert told me, begins with ``owning your life'' and not embellishing it for the sake of others or yourself. It was one thing when Frey's tale was believed to be 100 percent true. Now that the lie has been exposed, the message can no longer be about redemption, but about concoction -- the lies that addicts tell others, the ones they tell themselves.
As for Doubleday, the liar's publisher, it uttered all sorts of nonsense about different rules for memoirs, but no real explanation of how an hour or so in jail could be recollected as three months. In this vast corporation, there seemed to be no one who knew the difference between fact and fiction, truth and a lie. (Fiction packaged as fact is a lie.) Doubleday did not seem even a tad embarrassed that it had been snookered, that it had lent its considerable name and reputation -- built on the hard work of many an honest writer -- to a sham. What's more, it did not acknowledge that it must have suspected for some time that Frey had cooked his book. Back in 2003, for instance, the Minneapolis Star Tribune had questioned the book's factualness. (Some of ``A Million Little Pieces'' takes place in Minneapolis.) In effect, the story was dismissed -- go away silly newspaper, there's too much money at stake.
This, I know, is not a revelation. Doubleday will chase a buck like any other company. As for Oprah, that is not quite the case. Whatever happens to Frey's book will not make her richer or poorer. But fame and wealth has doped her into believing that she possesses something akin to papal infallibility. She finds herself incapable of seeing that she has been twice fooled -- once by Frey, a second time by herself.
Does Dr. Phil make house calls?
Oprah's Grand Delusion
By Richard Cohen
Because she has led countless billions and billions of people to the promised land of books, because she preaches self-help and self-sufficiency and not least because she has shown that even a middle-aged person can keep weight off, I must tiptoe up to the amazing Oprah and merely whisper to her that in the case of James Frey, the liar whose memoir turns out to be as much fiction as fact, she is not only wrong, but deluded. What she needs is a session with Dr. Phil.
So important is Oprah in our culture that it is not possible to type her name and not hear the rumbling of a mighty Wurlitzer, or imagine the many antechambers that undoubtedly precede an audience with the Queen of England. Oprah is huge, powerful, akin to no one and nothing else. A mention of anything on her show will make a millionaire out of a pauper or, in the case of a writer such as the Frey the Fibber, a best-seller of undreamed proportions. The man became famous and rich on account of Oprah -- and, or so we all seem to believe, happy as well.
Frey's memoir, ``A Million Little Pieces,'' is about his recovery from drug addiction. It is apparently a hell of a read, filled with gripping, cinematic details, some of which turn out not to be true. The Smoking Gun Web site found out, for instance, that Frey had not spent three months in jail, as he wrote, but maybe a couple of hours or so waiting for a friend to post bond. His account of his stay in a treatment facility is questionable, as is his involvement in a train-car collision that took the lives of two teenage girls. These are not, as Frey keeps claiming, the usual tussle we all have between memory and fact, but veering departures from fact into fiction. It is probably significant that he first tried to sell the book as a novel.
``A Million Little Pieces'' was Oprah's selection for her book club, literally sending it off bookstore shelves and into the stratosphere: about 2 million sold after her endorsement. Recommending the book was one thing. No one expects Oprah to fact-check every book she urges her audience to read. Sticking by it is quite another matter. Even after The Smoking Gun smoked Frey, Oprah told Larry King that no matter what, the book still retained its ``underlying message of redemption." Instead of getting a magisterial rebuke, Frey had been pardoned.
Here is where Dr. Phil steps in. He might tell his friend and mentor that there is no redemption without honesty. Treatment, as one expert told me, begins with ``owning your life'' and not embellishing it for the sake of others or yourself. It was one thing when Frey's tale was believed to be 100 percent true. Now that the lie has been exposed, the message can no longer be about redemption, but about concoction -- the lies that addicts tell others, the ones they tell themselves.
As for Doubleday, the liar's publisher, it uttered all sorts of nonsense about different rules for memoirs, but no real explanation of how an hour or so in jail could be recollected as three months. In this vast corporation, there seemed to be no one who knew the difference between fact and fiction, truth and a lie. (Fiction packaged as fact is a lie.) Doubleday did not seem even a tad embarrassed that it had been snookered, that it had lent its considerable name and reputation -- built on the hard work of many an honest writer -- to a sham. What's more, it did not acknowledge that it must have suspected for some time that Frey had cooked his book. Back in 2003, for instance, the Minneapolis Star Tribune had questioned the book's factualness. (Some of ``A Million Little Pieces'' takes place in Minneapolis.) In effect, the story was dismissed -- go away silly newspaper, there's too much money at stake.
This, I know, is not a revelation. Doubleday will chase a buck like any other company. As for Oprah, that is not quite the case. Whatever happens to Frey's book will not make her richer or poorer. But fame and wealth has doped her into believing that she possesses something akin to papal infallibility. She finds herself incapable of seeing that she has been twice fooled -- once by Frey, a second time by herself.
Does Dr. Phil make house calls?
Monday, January 16, 2006
King’s Dream
The Good Society and the Moral Law
by Charles Colson
January 16, 2006
More than forty years ago, on August 28, 1963, a quarter million people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. They marched here for the cause of civil rights. And that day they heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, a speech in which he challenged America to fulfill her promise.
“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”
While we know of the speech, most people are unaware that King also penned one of the most eloquent defenses of the moral law: the law that formed the basis for his speech, for the civil rights movement, and for all of law, for that matter.
In the spring of 1963, King was arrested for leading a series of massive non-violent protests against the segregated lunch counters and discriminatory hiring practices rampant in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail, King received a letter from eight Alabama ministers. They agreed with his goals, but they thought that he should call off the demonstrations and obey the law.
King explained why he disagreed in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “One may well ask, how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer “is found in the fact that there are two kinds of laws: just laws . . . and unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” King said, “but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
How does one determine whether the law is just or unjust? A just law, King wrote, “squares with the moral law of the law of God. An unjust law . . . is out of harmony with the moral law.”
Then King quoted Saint Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all.” He quoted Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law not rooted in eternal or natural law.”
This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters argue, simply whatever courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?
Many think of King as a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was a great conservative on this central issue, and he stood on the shoulders of Augustine and Aquinas, striving to restore our heritage of justice rooted in the law of God.
Were he alive today, I believe he would be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement and would be supporting Judge Alito. I also believe that he would be horrified at the way in which out-of-control courts have trampled on the moral truths he advocated.
From the time of Emperor Nero, who declared Christianity illegal, to the days of the American slave trade, from the civil rights struggle of the sixties to our current battles against abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and same-sex “marriage,” Christians have always maintained exactly what King maintained.
King’s dream was to live in harmony with the moral law as God established it. So this Martin Luther King Day, reflect on that dream—for it is worthy of our aspirations, our hard work, and the same commitment Dr. King showed.
The original commentary first aired on August 28, 2003.
The Good Society and the Moral Law
by Charles Colson
January 16, 2006
More than forty years ago, on August 28, 1963, a quarter million people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. They marched here for the cause of civil rights. And that day they heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, a speech in which he challenged America to fulfill her promise.
“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”
While we know of the speech, most people are unaware that King also penned one of the most eloquent defenses of the moral law: the law that formed the basis for his speech, for the civil rights movement, and for all of law, for that matter.
In the spring of 1963, King was arrested for leading a series of massive non-violent protests against the segregated lunch counters and discriminatory hiring practices rampant in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail, King received a letter from eight Alabama ministers. They agreed with his goals, but they thought that he should call off the demonstrations and obey the law.
King explained why he disagreed in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “One may well ask, how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer “is found in the fact that there are two kinds of laws: just laws . . . and unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” King said, “but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
How does one determine whether the law is just or unjust? A just law, King wrote, “squares with the moral law of the law of God. An unjust law . . . is out of harmony with the moral law.”
Then King quoted Saint Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all.” He quoted Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law not rooted in eternal or natural law.”
This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters argue, simply whatever courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?
Many think of King as a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was a great conservative on this central issue, and he stood on the shoulders of Augustine and Aquinas, striving to restore our heritage of justice rooted in the law of God.
Were he alive today, I believe he would be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement and would be supporting Judge Alito. I also believe that he would be horrified at the way in which out-of-control courts have trampled on the moral truths he advocated.
From the time of Emperor Nero, who declared Christianity illegal, to the days of the American slave trade, from the civil rights struggle of the sixties to our current battles against abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and same-sex “marriage,” Christians have always maintained exactly what King maintained.
King’s dream was to live in harmony with the moral law as God established it. So this Martin Luther King Day, reflect on that dream—for it is worthy of our aspirations, our hard work, and the same commitment Dr. King showed.
The original commentary first aired on August 28, 2003.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
From the Los Angeles Times:
The myth that shapes Bush's world
By Mark Helprin
Mark Helprin is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. His novels include "A Soldier of the Great War" and "Winter's Tale." A version of this article will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books
January 15, 2006
THE PRESIDENT believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth, that "democracies are peaceful countries." This claim, which has been advanced in the past in regard to Christianity, socialism, Islam and ethical culture, is the postulate on which the foreign policy of the United States now rests. Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions, something that would be difficult enough even with a flawless rationale because the power of even the most powerful country in the world is not adequate to transform the world at will.
Nor is the rationale flawless. It is possible to discover various statistical correlations among democracy and war and peace, depending on how they are defined and in what time frames. The chief pitfall in such social-science exercises is in weighing something such as, for example, the Mughal Campaign in Transoxiana, 1646-47, against something like, for example, World War II. Generally, a straightforward historical approach is better. And what does it show?
Even without reference to the case of a democracy that, finding self-defense insufficient justification and retaliation an insufficient end, makes war on a non-democracy so as to make the non-democracy a democracy, the postulate on which the president has in all good faith chosen to rely is contradicted by inconvenient fact.
Germany, the primary instigator of World War I, was a democracy. Although party governance weakened immediately before the war, it did so according to the popular will. When hostilities broke out, power flowed back to the Reichstag as a result of its increased belligerency in reaction to the threat of, perhaps ironically, nondemocratic Russia. Democratic Italy joined the entente because it had been spoiling for a fight to wrest South Tyrol from Austria. Extending its northern defenses to the natural Alpine barrier was obviously in Italy's interest, and popular sovereignty acted not as a break on war for this purpose but as a stimulus.
Less a democracy but a democracy nevertheless, Japan saw its parliamentary government wax and wane in the decades before World War II, losing eventually to the militarists but resurging as late as 1937 almost to regain control, with the Meiji Constitution unrepudiated and in force throughout the war.
What is one to make of the many 19th century colonial conquests on the part of democratic European powers? What is one to make of the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, in which, on the flimsiest pretexts, the United States, the leading democracy in the world, moved to war? And, four score and five years after the American founding, the most destructive war in American history arose entirely from within, in belated and necessary fulfillment of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, documents unexcelled as the guide stars of democracy itself.
Immediate counters to these examples might be that Prussian democracy is an oxymoron, Italian democracy was more feeble then than it is even now, the Japanese had made only a shadow play of Western constitutionalism, colonial conquests don't count because they had begun before the European democracies matured and were continued out of habit (oops, there goes the Congo; we did it again). And as for the United States, well, the Mexican War had something to do with Texas, the Spanish-American with the Maine, and at the time of the Civil War, not a single woman was able to vote and a large portion of the population was enslaved.
But such attempts at explaining the complexity of a democracy's relation to war — young democracies are ferocious, old ones serene; the extent and/or speed of economic development predisposes a democracy one way or another in regard to war and peace; as do limitation or extensions of the franchise; etc. etc. — tend to founder because the sample is simultaneously too varied and too small to produce valid rules.
And that is just the point. It isn't that democracies are too old or too young or too fat or too thin, but that none is perfect and that, therefore, all are subject to forces that may override the theoretical peacefulness of representative governments. Even perfect democracies, which have never been and will never be, cannot offer the kind of Pax Democratica that the United States now seeks to construct among a group of states that are famous for their immunity to liberal governance.
Other than Israel, the major countries of the region that are the most democratic are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon and Kuwait. If democracy in Turkey and Pakistan could be drawn as a horse, it would have to have a soldier in the saddle. In Lebanon, it would have a Syrian in the saddle.
And the more Turkey and Pakistan approach the genuine democracy to which American policy would direct them, the more Islamist they will become and the more they will want to do exactly the opposite of what we desire. The more Kuwait democratizes too, the more Islamist it becomes. In the 2003 elections, only 20% of contested seats went to neither traditionalists nor Islamists, and of late the democratically nascent governments of Iraq and Kuwait have had to erect a fence along their border to prevent Kuwaiti youth from crossing to join the insurgency.
Not only does the U.S. expend a great deal of effort to usher politically impure states into a form of popular sovereignty that will not stop them from acting inimically to our interests, but in distancing itself from authoritarian states that are willing to work with us, it forgoes potentially critical advantages. For the pleasure of displaying our virtue, we may someday suffer innumerable casualties in a terrorist attack that a compromised state might have helped us to prevent.
In foreign policy, carelessness and confusion often lead to tragedy. Thus, a maxim chosen to guide the course of a nation should be weighed in light of history and common sense.
Or is that too much to ask?
The myth that shapes Bush's world
By Mark Helprin
Mark Helprin is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. His novels include "A Soldier of the Great War" and "Winter's Tale." A version of this article will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books
January 15, 2006
THE PRESIDENT believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth, that "democracies are peaceful countries." This claim, which has been advanced in the past in regard to Christianity, socialism, Islam and ethical culture, is the postulate on which the foreign policy of the United States now rests. Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions, something that would be difficult enough even with a flawless rationale because the power of even the most powerful country in the world is not adequate to transform the world at will.
Nor is the rationale flawless. It is possible to discover various statistical correlations among democracy and war and peace, depending on how they are defined and in what time frames. The chief pitfall in such social-science exercises is in weighing something such as, for example, the Mughal Campaign in Transoxiana, 1646-47, against something like, for example, World War II. Generally, a straightforward historical approach is better. And what does it show?
Even without reference to the case of a democracy that, finding self-defense insufficient justification and retaliation an insufficient end, makes war on a non-democracy so as to make the non-democracy a democracy, the postulate on which the president has in all good faith chosen to rely is contradicted by inconvenient fact.
Germany, the primary instigator of World War I, was a democracy. Although party governance weakened immediately before the war, it did so according to the popular will. When hostilities broke out, power flowed back to the Reichstag as a result of its increased belligerency in reaction to the threat of, perhaps ironically, nondemocratic Russia. Democratic Italy joined the entente because it had been spoiling for a fight to wrest South Tyrol from Austria. Extending its northern defenses to the natural Alpine barrier was obviously in Italy's interest, and popular sovereignty acted not as a break on war for this purpose but as a stimulus.
Less a democracy but a democracy nevertheless, Japan saw its parliamentary government wax and wane in the decades before World War II, losing eventually to the militarists but resurging as late as 1937 almost to regain control, with the Meiji Constitution unrepudiated and in force throughout the war.
What is one to make of the many 19th century colonial conquests on the part of democratic European powers? What is one to make of the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, in which, on the flimsiest pretexts, the United States, the leading democracy in the world, moved to war? And, four score and five years after the American founding, the most destructive war in American history arose entirely from within, in belated and necessary fulfillment of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, documents unexcelled as the guide stars of democracy itself.
Immediate counters to these examples might be that Prussian democracy is an oxymoron, Italian democracy was more feeble then than it is even now, the Japanese had made only a shadow play of Western constitutionalism, colonial conquests don't count because they had begun before the European democracies matured and were continued out of habit (oops, there goes the Congo; we did it again). And as for the United States, well, the Mexican War had something to do with Texas, the Spanish-American with the Maine, and at the time of the Civil War, not a single woman was able to vote and a large portion of the population was enslaved.
But such attempts at explaining the complexity of a democracy's relation to war — young democracies are ferocious, old ones serene; the extent and/or speed of economic development predisposes a democracy one way or another in regard to war and peace; as do limitation or extensions of the franchise; etc. etc. — tend to founder because the sample is simultaneously too varied and too small to produce valid rules.
And that is just the point. It isn't that democracies are too old or too young or too fat or too thin, but that none is perfect and that, therefore, all are subject to forces that may override the theoretical peacefulness of representative governments. Even perfect democracies, which have never been and will never be, cannot offer the kind of Pax Democratica that the United States now seeks to construct among a group of states that are famous for their immunity to liberal governance.
Other than Israel, the major countries of the region that are the most democratic are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon and Kuwait. If democracy in Turkey and Pakistan could be drawn as a horse, it would have to have a soldier in the saddle. In Lebanon, it would have a Syrian in the saddle.
And the more Turkey and Pakistan approach the genuine democracy to which American policy would direct them, the more Islamist they will become and the more they will want to do exactly the opposite of what we desire. The more Kuwait democratizes too, the more Islamist it becomes. In the 2003 elections, only 20% of contested seats went to neither traditionalists nor Islamists, and of late the democratically nascent governments of Iraq and Kuwait have had to erect a fence along their border to prevent Kuwaiti youth from crossing to join the insurgency.
Not only does the U.S. expend a great deal of effort to usher politically impure states into a form of popular sovereignty that will not stop them from acting inimically to our interests, but in distancing itself from authoritarian states that are willing to work with us, it forgoes potentially critical advantages. For the pleasure of displaying our virtue, we may someday suffer innumerable casualties in a terrorist attack that a compromised state might have helped us to prevent.
In foreign policy, carelessness and confusion often lead to tragedy. Thus, a maxim chosen to guide the course of a nation should be weighed in light of history and common sense.
Or is that too much to ask?
From The New York Times:
Strat-O-Matic, the Throwback, Endures the Era of the X-Boxes
By LORNE MANLY
Stan Suderman and 66 of his friends and acquaintances gathered in Las Vegas last night, eager to jump-start three days and nights of intense fun.
These men did not come for a long weekend of casino-roaming or nightclub-hopping. Instead, they will spend 16 hours or more a day shut inside a conference room at the Desert Rose Resort playing a board game.
Members of the mostly professional group of players, which includes doctors, lawyers, and teachers, have ponied up $200 apiece for the privilege of entering the world championships of Strat-O-Matic baseball, a game that has resonated for 45 years with sports-crazy kids and the adults they grow up to become.
Somehow, in a video-game age in which the landscape is ruled by John Madden, an old-fashioned sports board game stubbornly hangs on. Hundreds of thousands of people still roll the dice and check the cards of their chosen players as they re-create whole seasons or series, pit storied teams against one another, or draft leagues of their own.
The game's realism accounts for much of its longevity. But the competition and camaraderie it breeds, the social lubricant and taunting opportunities it provides, may be just as important.
"Guys just don't call up other guys and say, 'I'm lonely, let's chat,' " said Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, the pre-eminent sports video-game maker, who still regularly plays Strat-O-Matic with friends. "It's really helpful to have something to talk about."
The godfather of this male-bonding tradition is 69-year-old Hal Richman. Growing up in Great Neck, N.Y., he found refuge from a bullying father in the imaginary world of board games. But even at the age of 11, he recognized that existing games - like All-Star Baseball, with its spinner determining the outcome of each at-bat - were lacking in verisimilitude.
Knowing nothing about statistics, he still deduced that dice would result in a more accurate game. After years of using his friends as guinea pigs while he fine-tuned the game, Richman dipped into his bar mitzvah savings and finally unveiled the first version of Strat-O-Matic in 1961.
Today's game is essentially the same as the original. Each major league player is represented by a card, on which his statistics from the previous season are crunched into various rankings and outcomes. A roll of the dice and a check of the batter's or pitcher's card then determines the result of each play.
The name for the game came to Richman while shoveling snow in his driveway after riffing on variants of the word "strategy" he had come across while leafing through a dictionary.
The early years were not particularly encouraging. According to Glenn Guzzo in his book "Strat-O-Matic Fanatics: The Unlikely Success Story of a Game That Became an American Passion" (ACTA Sports, 2005), Richman sold 350 games that first year but officially lost $2,500. He was left with an additional $500 worth of unsold boxes and game parts.
But Richman persevered. The popularity of the Yankees in the early 1960's helped because the Northeast has always been a Strat-O-Matic bastion. The company branched out into other sports, like pro football, basketball and hockey, and people across the country - from the film director Spike Lee, to the broadcasters Bryant Gumbel and Dan Patrick, to the writer Buzz Bissinger - avidly played the games, some as children, some as adults, and some as both. The company produces computer versions of all its board games, but the old-fashioned version of the baseball game is still its biggest seller.
Much like Richman, today's board-game enthusiasts started young, often in junior high school. They spent hours replaying full seasons by themselves. In the leagues they created, they named their teams, adopted theme music, even created life-size wood cutouts of their favorite players to lean next to the board. They've even held onto cards that have suffered certain indignities. In the office of Steve Wulf, an executive editor of ESPN The Magazine, one can find cards that met the urinary wrath of a former girlfriend's cat. Gerald W. DeShong, a 57-year-old semiretired salesman, has been playing nearly continuously since 1965, when he was in junior high school in Dearborn, Mich. He and his friends, baseball fans all, got a chance to be their heroes, if only for a short period of time.
DeShong, who now lives in Garden City, Mich., has formed a league with his eldest son, Dale, and two of his friends. They conduct a tournament each year that stretches from the first part of November through February. The winner gets a trophy, which they have dubbed the Silver Cup.
DeShong's team, the Fence Busters, has captured the cup twice. But, he said, "The bragging rights are a lot more fun than the cup itself."
The repartee, sophisticated or otherwise, that comes during face-to-face play is just one element that contributes to Strat-O-Matic's endurance, said Guzzo, a 54-year-old former newspaper editor who started playing at age 12 and still spends 5 to 10 hours a week playing various Strat-O-Matic computer and board games. Richman's single-mindedness kept Strat-O-Matic alive during troubled times. And the company remained true to its essence, refusing to go head-to-head with companies like Electronic Arts.
Sports video games accounted for more than $1.2 billion nationally in sales in 2004, according to the NPD Group, a research firm, and Electronic Arts, which is the maker of the Madden games, accounted for about 63 percent of that total. Madden's football game alone has sold more than 43 million copies since its debut in 1989.
Richman declined to divulge his company's revenues. But weathering baseball strikes and the computer age, a profitable Strat-O-Matic has surpassed the rival APBA Games and beat back other competitors, including Sports Illustrated. Richman put the total number of Strat-O-Matic games sold over the years in the low millions.
The bare bones of Strat-O-Matic's nine-person operation in Glen Head, N.Y., reveals itself in various ways. The graphic design of the board game's packaging - nondescript players looking vaguely as if they're in high school - has barely changed over the years.
"The products are not glossy at all," Richman acknowledged.
But the realism trumps all.
"Our customers are not into what the game looks like, but the things we can do," he said.
Strat-O-Matic enthusiasts echo one another in raving about its simulation of reality. Over the course of a season, a player's performance will hew closely to his actual statistics. And the game plays quickly and easily. "It just has a natural flow and rhythm to it," Suderman said.
Underlying Richman's creation is a somewhat arbitrary system. Deep analysis of statistics may be all the rage among baseball cognoscenti today, but Richman and his colleagues range beyond numbers in crafting the player ratings. While the numerical nitty-gritty of baseball - a batter's success against left-handed or right-handed pitching, for example - is crunched by the company's computers, certain subjective ingredients go into Strat-O-Matic.
Dispatches from beat reporters and magazine writers inform the opinions of Richman and his colleagues, as do personal insights gleaned from watching games on television and in person. After devoting a total of 1,500 hours or so to research, they gather to compare notes. Like a diving contest, the extremes are tossed out, and the remaining rankings are averaged.
When the new baseball cards are released each year on the last Friday in January - an event that hundreds of Strat-O-Matic players commemorate by showing up in the cold at the company's headquarters - controversy soon follows. Derek Jeter may pile up Gold Gloves at shortstop, for instance, but Richman is loath to award him the highest defensive ranking in his game.
The video-game revolution has aged the average Strat-O-Matic player. What used to be a game enjoyed mostly by boys from 11 to 15 is now the pastime of the middle-aged. Richman estimated the average player age at around 35. At this weekend's world championships, most players are between 30 and 40, said Suderman, who is 54. What most worries Strat-O-Matic players is the game's future; after all, Richman is already past the typical retirement age. Richman said he had given little thought to retirement, "unless someone gives me an offer I can't refuse."
Keeping the business in the family might be problematic. Richman's son doesn't share his father's love of sports and is pursuing a career as a Hollywood producer. "I'm hopeful my daughter marries the guy she's going with," Richman said. "He's a sports fan."
If no one comes forward, there is at least one Strat-O-Matic fan who would step into the breach.
"If I had to keep it going, I would," said Hawkins, the Electronic Arts founder who has moved on to start Digital Chocolate, a maker of games for mobile phones.
"I need it," he added.
Strat-O-Matic, the Throwback, Endures the Era of the X-Boxes
By LORNE MANLY
Stan Suderman and 66 of his friends and acquaintances gathered in Las Vegas last night, eager to jump-start three days and nights of intense fun.
These men did not come for a long weekend of casino-roaming or nightclub-hopping. Instead, they will spend 16 hours or more a day shut inside a conference room at the Desert Rose Resort playing a board game.
Members of the mostly professional group of players, which includes doctors, lawyers, and teachers, have ponied up $200 apiece for the privilege of entering the world championships of Strat-O-Matic baseball, a game that has resonated for 45 years with sports-crazy kids and the adults they grow up to become.
Somehow, in a video-game age in which the landscape is ruled by John Madden, an old-fashioned sports board game stubbornly hangs on. Hundreds of thousands of people still roll the dice and check the cards of their chosen players as they re-create whole seasons or series, pit storied teams against one another, or draft leagues of their own.
The game's realism accounts for much of its longevity. But the competition and camaraderie it breeds, the social lubricant and taunting opportunities it provides, may be just as important.
"Guys just don't call up other guys and say, 'I'm lonely, let's chat,' " said Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, the pre-eminent sports video-game maker, who still regularly plays Strat-O-Matic with friends. "It's really helpful to have something to talk about."
The godfather of this male-bonding tradition is 69-year-old Hal Richman. Growing up in Great Neck, N.Y., he found refuge from a bullying father in the imaginary world of board games. But even at the age of 11, he recognized that existing games - like All-Star Baseball, with its spinner determining the outcome of each at-bat - were lacking in verisimilitude.
Knowing nothing about statistics, he still deduced that dice would result in a more accurate game. After years of using his friends as guinea pigs while he fine-tuned the game, Richman dipped into his bar mitzvah savings and finally unveiled the first version of Strat-O-Matic in 1961.
Today's game is essentially the same as the original. Each major league player is represented by a card, on which his statistics from the previous season are crunched into various rankings and outcomes. A roll of the dice and a check of the batter's or pitcher's card then determines the result of each play.
The name for the game came to Richman while shoveling snow in his driveway after riffing on variants of the word "strategy" he had come across while leafing through a dictionary.
The early years were not particularly encouraging. According to Glenn Guzzo in his book "Strat-O-Matic Fanatics: The Unlikely Success Story of a Game That Became an American Passion" (ACTA Sports, 2005), Richman sold 350 games that first year but officially lost $2,500. He was left with an additional $500 worth of unsold boxes and game parts.
But Richman persevered. The popularity of the Yankees in the early 1960's helped because the Northeast has always been a Strat-O-Matic bastion. The company branched out into other sports, like pro football, basketball and hockey, and people across the country - from the film director Spike Lee, to the broadcasters Bryant Gumbel and Dan Patrick, to the writer Buzz Bissinger - avidly played the games, some as children, some as adults, and some as both. The company produces computer versions of all its board games, but the old-fashioned version of the baseball game is still its biggest seller.
Much like Richman, today's board-game enthusiasts started young, often in junior high school. They spent hours replaying full seasons by themselves. In the leagues they created, they named their teams, adopted theme music, even created life-size wood cutouts of their favorite players to lean next to the board. They've even held onto cards that have suffered certain indignities. In the office of Steve Wulf, an executive editor of ESPN The Magazine, one can find cards that met the urinary wrath of a former girlfriend's cat. Gerald W. DeShong, a 57-year-old semiretired salesman, has been playing nearly continuously since 1965, when he was in junior high school in Dearborn, Mich. He and his friends, baseball fans all, got a chance to be their heroes, if only for a short period of time.
DeShong, who now lives in Garden City, Mich., has formed a league with his eldest son, Dale, and two of his friends. They conduct a tournament each year that stretches from the first part of November through February. The winner gets a trophy, which they have dubbed the Silver Cup.
DeShong's team, the Fence Busters, has captured the cup twice. But, he said, "The bragging rights are a lot more fun than the cup itself."
The repartee, sophisticated or otherwise, that comes during face-to-face play is just one element that contributes to Strat-O-Matic's endurance, said Guzzo, a 54-year-old former newspaper editor who started playing at age 12 and still spends 5 to 10 hours a week playing various Strat-O-Matic computer and board games. Richman's single-mindedness kept Strat-O-Matic alive during troubled times. And the company remained true to its essence, refusing to go head-to-head with companies like Electronic Arts.
Sports video games accounted for more than $1.2 billion nationally in sales in 2004, according to the NPD Group, a research firm, and Electronic Arts, which is the maker of the Madden games, accounted for about 63 percent of that total. Madden's football game alone has sold more than 43 million copies since its debut in 1989.
Richman declined to divulge his company's revenues. But weathering baseball strikes and the computer age, a profitable Strat-O-Matic has surpassed the rival APBA Games and beat back other competitors, including Sports Illustrated. Richman put the total number of Strat-O-Matic games sold over the years in the low millions.
The bare bones of Strat-O-Matic's nine-person operation in Glen Head, N.Y., reveals itself in various ways. The graphic design of the board game's packaging - nondescript players looking vaguely as if they're in high school - has barely changed over the years.
"The products are not glossy at all," Richman acknowledged.
But the realism trumps all.
"Our customers are not into what the game looks like, but the things we can do," he said.
Strat-O-Matic enthusiasts echo one another in raving about its simulation of reality. Over the course of a season, a player's performance will hew closely to his actual statistics. And the game plays quickly and easily. "It just has a natural flow and rhythm to it," Suderman said.
Underlying Richman's creation is a somewhat arbitrary system. Deep analysis of statistics may be all the rage among baseball cognoscenti today, but Richman and his colleagues range beyond numbers in crafting the player ratings. While the numerical nitty-gritty of baseball - a batter's success against left-handed or right-handed pitching, for example - is crunched by the company's computers, certain subjective ingredients go into Strat-O-Matic.
Dispatches from beat reporters and magazine writers inform the opinions of Richman and his colleagues, as do personal insights gleaned from watching games on television and in person. After devoting a total of 1,500 hours or so to research, they gather to compare notes. Like a diving contest, the extremes are tossed out, and the remaining rankings are averaged.
When the new baseball cards are released each year on the last Friday in January - an event that hundreds of Strat-O-Matic players commemorate by showing up in the cold at the company's headquarters - controversy soon follows. Derek Jeter may pile up Gold Gloves at shortstop, for instance, but Richman is loath to award him the highest defensive ranking in his game.
The video-game revolution has aged the average Strat-O-Matic player. What used to be a game enjoyed mostly by boys from 11 to 15 is now the pastime of the middle-aged. Richman estimated the average player age at around 35. At this weekend's world championships, most players are between 30 and 40, said Suderman, who is 54. What most worries Strat-O-Matic players is the game's future; after all, Richman is already past the typical retirement age. Richman said he had given little thought to retirement, "unless someone gives me an offer I can't refuse."
Keeping the business in the family might be problematic. Richman's son doesn't share his father's love of sports and is pursuing a career as a Hollywood producer. "I'm hopeful my daughter marries the guy she's going with," Richman said. "He's a sports fan."
If no one comes forward, there is at least one Strat-O-Matic fan who would step into the breach.
"If I had to keep it going, I would," said Hawkins, the Electronic Arts founder who has moved on to start Digital Chocolate, a maker of games for mobile phones.
"I need it," he added.
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