“Two Planes, Two Worlds”

January 25, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under New Reviews, Terrorism | 1 Comment 

This post by Andrew Sullivan is beautiful:

It’s funny but even during the mayhem of Inauguration week, the image of that A320 being landed safely on the Hudson kept coming back to me. And when I read that its remains had ended up floating not far from Ground Zero, I couldn’t help but marvel at the historical and civilizational symmetry of it all.

Over seven years ago, a group of religious extremists seized control of an aircraft in that same airspace, men who had very little flying experience and a philosophy of maximizing the deaths of innocent civilians on the ground. They did all they could to murder as many as they could in order to secure the maximum reward for themselves in heaven and in worldly renown.

Seven years later, two pilots who have since remained remarkably distant from media attention, were in a similar cockpit in the same crowded area and their over-riding concern was to prevent any civilian casualties at all. That’s why they even avoided small airports which might have led to a crash into inhabited neighborhoods. With enormous expertise, gained by rigorous training in a civilized society, they managed to land safely on the river and save everyone both on board and on the ground.

It seems to me that dignity and training and expertise and humaneness are the values of our society at its best. All of them are self-evidently superior to the values of vainglory, amateurism, impulsiveness and cruelty that bedevil our enemies. If these are the grounds on which we fight this war – and they are ours to choose – then we will win. And we will deserve to.

The Proof Is In The Sausage

January 24, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, New Reviews | Leave a Comment 

The New York Times has two big stories about the state’s new senator this morning. One is about how Gov. David Patterson muffed the selection process. The other is about its most excellent outcome, his choice of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, a feisty, intelligent, Mandarin-speaking centrist Democrat with Presidential ambitions who fits so perfectly with the Zeitgeist that it’s hard to imagine Patterson considered anyone else. If she’d move to California, I’d vote for her.

Obviously, he did consider someone else, because he had to, namely Caroline Kennedy. The Times suggests he has suffered political damage as a result of the Senate derby. From this distance, it’s hard to see why. Sure, it wasn’t pretty, but politics usually isn’t. The governor deserves props for keeping someone out of the Senate who wasn’t qualified and who seems to have thought (along with many of her media and political boosters) that she could gain the office by pedigree.

Amid the Times’s Saturday-morning sneers (what’s really eating ‘em, anyway?) is that Gillibrand has the support of the NRA and only votes for gay rights 80% of the time. Political insiders predict that when she no longer has to worry about what her relatively conservative rural upstate district thinks, she’ll abandon her interesting mix of positions and become a decent, unimaginative, lockstep liberal just like Caroline Kennedy. We’ll see. Says one of the downstate pols who think Gillibrand isn’t liberal enough, yet:

“If we have royalty, it’s the Kennedys,” said Assemblyman Peter M. Rivera, a Bronx Democrat and chairman of the Assembly’s Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force. “The way she was treated, the backbiting and the attacks, it was insulting,” he said….

But we don’t have royalty. We have politics. We have backbiting, attacks, and insults, and that’s just the way we like it.

How To Radicalize Moderates

October 20, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under New Reviews, Republican Party | Leave a Comment 

This New York Times hit piece on Cindy McCain stinks. The Times was harder on her than Clinton buddy Henry Cisneros who, its own bizarrely soft-pedaled reporting disclosed, did as much to ruin the economy as any other human being. Maybe the newspaper industry deserves to die after all.

Sen. Obama’s ostensible new politics is enabled by his media friends shooting from the gutter, from the Times’s unworthy late hit on Sen. McCain’s wife to Andrew Sullivan, Obama’s most reliable supporter in the new media, keeping alive a fictionalized story about Trig Palin, his mother, and his sister.

Calling Palin A Hitler is SO New Politics

September 19, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008, New Reviews, Republican Party | Leave a Comment 

Who’s really waging culture blitzkrieg? Here’s Matt Taibbi in “Rolling Stone”:

[Palin at the GOP convention] was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag….[T]here is almost nothing meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

Gawking Made Easier

May 29, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under New Reviews | Leave a Comment 

For the few TNN readers who don’t yet make a drop-by at Gawker a part of their daily media circuit, here are links to two of today’s stories.

The first is a provocative behind-the-scenes anonymously-sourced bit of gossip about how Chris Matthews bust a gasket because Arianna Huffington is supposed to have hired a private eye to spy on some major (blond? overbearing?) cable news star. Tucker Carlson makes an amusing cameo appearance.

Well. Who on Earth would Arianna be spying on? Russert? That would make Chris very, very mad, because he hearts Little Big Tim v v much. But jeez, what is there to even spy on with Russert? Who cares?

Anyway, Chris continued to be more or less a pain, though he came back and apologized for the outburst. And Tucker was apparently a real charmer! Friendly and joking! We’ve long known him to be an idiotic pain-in-the-ass, but sociopathic narcissists are often totally fun dudes when they’ve no reason to feel threatened or challenged. Unlike constantly self-doubting Chris, Tucker loves himself.

The second is of the you-couldn’t-make-this-up variety. Apparently significant numbers of graduating seniors at Northwestern University are up in arms because Mayor Richard Daley is slated to be their commencement speaker.

Students say they feel let down because the choice, announced this week, doesn’t carry the cachet of recent speakers, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, or even last year’s speaker, Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld.

Perhaps the most unbelievable part of this Northwestern story is that Henry Bienen, the school’s President, sent an email to one of the student protesters:

“Matthew, grow up,’ Bienen wrote back Wednesday morning. Bienen’s e-mail added: ‘You also sound like a very unhappy person. I am sorry for that. Hopefully things will improve for you over the years.’”

Mikulski Is the New Agnew

May 8, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, New Reviews | Leave a Comment 

The Maryland senator’s “petulant parsing pundits” compared to Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Prize Copy

April 7, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under New Reviews | Leave a Comment 

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and the arts have just been announced. The Washington Post picked up several awards. Dana Priest and Anne Hull won the Public Service award for their story “exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.”

Jo Becker and Barton Gellman won the Pulitzer for National Reporting for “their lucid exploration of Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful yet sometimes disguised influence on national policy.” Their four part feature story —”Angler”— ran last summer. And Steve Fainaru won the International Reporting prize for “his heavily reported series on private security contractors in Iraq that operate outside most of the laws governing American forces.” Another series from last summer, “Cutting Costs, Bending Rules, And a Trail of Broken Lives” opened with a convoy ambush that resulted in four Americans and one Austrian being seized as hostages.

Gene Weingarten’s interesting profile of the quirky antics of violinist Joshua Bell won for Feature Writing, and Steven Pearlstein won for “his insightful columns that explore that nation’s complex economic ills with masterful clarity.”