Let’s see…. billionaire (or nearly) completely out of contact with everyday people, stuck in time (acts if we are still in the Vietnam War when there was a draft – hence his idiotic statement today about staying in school in order to avoid military service), acts as if he has no culpability for the Iraq War (although he voted for it), has virtually no response to Islamic fascism, in fact acts as if it does not exist … I could go on. He’s almost too much of a sitting duck. It’s kind of amazing he was so dumb as not to apologize quickly. (No, it’s not-ed. This guy was not exactly at the top of his class at Yale. No, he wasn’t.] Will this latest Kerry fiasco rescue the Republican Party from a debacle next Tuesday? It just might help, if the Repubs can keep it in the news a few days (and Kerry certainly helped by refusing to apologize). But the Repubs don’t really deserve rescue. This is an election in which both parties deserve to lose.

Good news: I’ve lost a few pounds. Bad news: I don’t look anywhere near as good as Michelle Malkin.

… star on the ground, but his other star may be grounded.

You remember them – the three subjects your grandmother told you not to discuss at the dinner table [What else is there to talk about?-ed. Ebay.] Anyway, apparently grandmothers are back, according to this article in today’s NYT – The Elephant in the Room by Anne Kornblut. Especially with regard to politics, the Three No’s of our youth (doesn’t that sound faintly Maoist?) are being observed once again in social situations. I’m sure Anne’s right, at least to some extent. I have noticed the same thing in my social set, what’s left of it. People aren’t keen on talking politics in mixed (political) company.

Now Anne seems to think that’s a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. In my long life of dinner parties and similar events, I have noticed that people rarely succeed in convincing anyone of anything in those kinds of settings, even relatively immaterial matters like the quality of Kobe Bryant’s jump shot or whether Madonna was really a Kabballist (okay, that’s not so trivial!). Debate of serious issues like the war in Iraq make no headway in such venues. In fact the reverse – it usually devolves into a shouting much for the uninformed (sort of like Congress). So I think the grandmothers had a point. Enough of this sex, religion and politics nonsense. Relegate the serious debate of the significant issues to places where people can discuss them on a level with some modicum of depth [Like this blog.-ed. I knew I hired you for something.]

The real problem in our culture is not the lack of serious debate at the dinner table – it’s the lack of serious debate in the political arena. And just wait until you have Harry Reid as the Senate Majority Leader – now there’s a heavyweight.

The transcript of Wolf Blitzer’s interview with Lynne Cheney, now up on Drudge, borders on the comic. One of the roots of comedy is unconsciousness on the part of the protagonist and the CNN standby is sure unconscious in his pronouncements. He reminds me of no one so much as Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Herewith, some dialogue:

WOLF: All right. Well that was probably the purpose, to get people to think. To get people to discuss these issues. Because –

WOLF: This is reporting the news. Which is what we do, we are not partisan.

Not partisan, sir? Let’s start with the most obvious – the only not partisan person I’ve ever met is either dead or in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s. Everyone is partisan, almost since birth. Partisan and biased. It’s part of the human condition. And this bias often increases with age as the pressures of making a living and surviving shape us. We join cliques of like-minded people where we are cosseted and promoted. That is why people like Blitzer almost never vary their opinions. He is as predictable as a cyborg. I once substantially agreed with those opinions – now I have different opinons (biases) of my own. This is an accident of my own development. But I am partisan and Blitzer is partisan – perhaps even more than I am. After all, he works for a company whose chief news executive was so biased he was able to pronounce in public that US soldiers were deliberately targeting journalists without being able to cite any evidence of this. That’s partisanship at the level of delusion. And that was the person who gave Blitzer orders.

Of course, Blitzer is only a typical representative of his class. Nothing special or exceptional in any way, except for his success and longevity. Now some people call this class the “liberal media.” I reject that idea and terminology entirely. There is nothing liberal about them at all. They are a rich, privileged class much like the bourgeoisie in a Bunuel movie (or Moliere, of course). What is “liberal” is only a talking point to preserve their perquisites. Perhaps these values were there at some point, but that was decades ago in another universe. Now the real issues are good tailoring and homes in the country. Nothing should disturb that.

This “bad faith” informs everything they do and how they act. (When I write this, I know it infuriates them, but let me admit I am not much better.) Receiving news from Wolf Blitzer is like getting your information filtered through a highly-perfected survival machine. Well, maybe not so highly-perfected, but better than the network news, which is on the way out. (See the implosion of Katie Couric.)

Oh, by the way, Wolf, regarding that video of the snipers, there is no such thing as non-partisan film. Every frame, every camera angle, every editorial choice wreaks of partisanship – and that includes the decision to show it in a theatre or on television. Le caméra stylo, the camera is a pen, as someone quite intelligent once said. If you don’t know who that is, I’ll save you the effort. So stop lying to yourself and to others.

While the USA is deeply involved in our election follies, France appears closer than ever to serious implosion. In his column for Pajamas Media yesterday (”France Prepares 50,000 Riot Police for Muslim Attacks“) Paul Belien of Brussels Journal writes:

On Monday, Le Figaro, the leading center-right newspaper in the country, quoted a confidential report written by the Renseignements Généraux (RG), the French equivalent of the FBI. The 17-page RG report, dated 11 October, states that the root causes of last year’s riots are still in place. The authorities are especially concerned with All Saints Day when “many urban youths are left to their own and have more time to cause unrest.”

These latest “events” as the French term them, are apparently already underway with buses being torched.

As we know, the French used to blame these occurrences on “les jeunes” (youth), a kind of fancy way of saying boys will be boys, I suppose, while ignoring the obvious. But that seems to be changing. Some people there at least seem to be acknowledging they are on the brink of civil war with their growing Islamic minority, even if they do not use the “I” word (unless that stands for immigrant). As Belien writes:

Gangs of immigrant vandals operate in a paramilitary fashion. A spokesman for the French police officers union, himself a policeman, has it that France is in the midst of a “civil war.”

Interestingly, no public official said the union was exaggerating.

Where is this all headed? Intifada in France? It has been explained to me that the word Intifada itself comes from the Arabic for “sloughing off of garbage”. Quell ironie!

Again, sorry for the sparse blogging. Some day, Monsieur Godot, more words will appear at this site. For now, the work time for this writer has been overwhelmed with business concerns – Pajamas business obviously. I spent the last few days Sleepless in DC (hanging out with Rich Miniter does that to people) playing a supervisory role for our coverage of the DLA Piper pre-election breakfast at the Willard Hotel, some of which is already up over at PJ. (About the Willard: definitely a great atmospheric place to stay, especially on company money. The rubric “lobbyist” came from the Nineteenth Century schmoozers making deals behind the pillars in the hotel’s neo-Classical lobby. I made a few paltry attempts myself…. but enough about that. )

After the breakfast at which Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt were of good cheer but bemoaned the partisanship of it all, I took microphone in hand and tromped off with our video guru Andrew Marcus and our business guru Sandra Rozanski to interview some key journalists around the nation’s capital. Our purpose: a Pajamas Media series we are launching with mainstream media players discussing the way things are going between new media (blogs, etc.) and old media and whether we can work and play well with each other. Given the season, I also asked them about the coming election and got the usual round of predictions, none startling but, hey, the video cameras were rolling.

Who were the big time Fourth Estate-ists I spoke with this first round? Tony Blankley of the Washington Times, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (yes, I asked him about his appearance on Keith Olbermann in quail hunter drag), Nina Easton (Fortune’s Washington correspondent, also Fox News), Michael Barone (We could say Pajamas Media advisory board, but that would be bragging. Everyone knows Barone has more roles than Richard Burton. Minutes after I interviewed him, he was off in his capacity as Senior Writer for US News to interview this Bush guy who is trolling for votes. You could tell he was headed for something special because Michael was resplendent in a bespoke pinstriped suit with Hermes tie and matching handkerchief. Michael’s an agreeable guy but I doubt he’d be wearing duds like that for a Pajamas Media interview … yet.) Finally, I spoke with Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of The Hotline. For those who don’t know that’s the Variety of politics, where the political insiders get their dope. Pajamas Media, alas, may soon have to subscribe pero cuesta mucho, hombre – six “large” per annum. Note to Chuck: Variety costs nowhere near that much. In fact it’s free to us Academy members during Oscar season.

Not surprisingly, none of these MSMers had that much bad to say about blogs anymore (at least to me), although more than one eyebrow was raised about that old bugaboo – the lack of formal editing/fact checking in the blogosphere. But when I countered to one of those skeptics, Nina Easton, that I had received more editing on this blog than I ever did writing for mainstream publications (for simple reasons of manpower), to her credit, she took my point. Anyway, more to come, some with our redoubtable cigar-smoking Washington editor Mr. Miniter at the helm.

Claudia reminds us: not a single UN Oil-for-Food scoundrel has yet been prosecuted. More amazing yet, they have been retired with full pensions. The Mafia was never so good.

That’s valuable stuff!

But who is plotting such culinary Armageddon, you may ask? Well, consult the BBC’s own bias test, which they failed (duh!):

A truly shocking revelation to come out of the summit was expected to invoke a storm in Britain, which has already reached the boiling point with regards to the treatment of Muslims and the issue of the veil.

The executives said they would allow everything to be thrown in the garbage bin, save the Quran, for fear of offending the British Muslim community.

What always dumbfounds me about these supposed “progressives” is that the document that most blatantly discriminates againt women and gays is they one they most fear desecrating. [Why are you surprised anymore? Youve been calling them reactionaries for years now.-ed. Okay, I'm not surprised. But I'm tired of saying I'm "disgusted." How about "appalled"?]

Lost in the partisan idiocy (that’s too weak a word) that constitutes our politics these days is anything faintly resembling the discussion of ideas, especially those that deeply affect us and our children. I was reminded of this by an excellent editorial in the WSJ today (sub only, alas) – The Population Boon. It channels Nixon and Paul Ehrlich (both of whom were devoutely Malthusian… yes, Nixon) from the days when we were all worried about the population explosion. Times have changed. As the WSJ notes:

In Japan and Western Europe, population implosion has become the crisis of the moment. Birth rates in most Western European countries are now so low that governments are busily looking for ways to avoid a very different kind of demographic catastrophe. The problem posed by Europe’s aging population is exacerbated by its reliance on intergenerational transfer payments to support its public pension systems; America, with both a greater emphasis on wealth accumulation and a higher birth rate, is comparatively better off. Demographics and Social Security are on a collision course here as well, but Europe’s difficulties in this regard make America seem fortunate by comparison.

China, thanks to its draconian one-child policy, also faces a demographic challenge, embodied in the oft-heard refrain that the Middle Kingdom risks becoming the first country ever to grow old before it grows rich. Population-control measures have resulted in a shortage of women and girls, one of many unintended consequences of the population-control hysteria of the 1960s and 1970s.

A shortage of women and girls is something I personally would not like to see for a whole host of reasons. But turning back to our country, I am reminded of the Social Security debate of a couple of years ago – or the pseudo-debate, because it never happened. My former liberal allies simply shouted down the discussion before it could start. Never mind that those it might have helped most were their supposedly disadvantaged constituency. As with much affirmative action debate these days, there is a (not very) covert vested interest in failure operating whose object is to preserve the perquisites of a pseudo-liberal mandarinate.

But enough snark. Most of us know that Social Security, like most pension plans, is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Nothing wrong with that. Ponzi schemes have their place and are useful in this instance in the creation of a necessary safety net. But it would seem obvious that we cannot depend forever on an expanding population, useful as that may be, to preserve this net. 300 million now, 400 million later… where will it stop? And will even those numbers be able to sustain an aging population as medical science extends our lifespan toward 100. Doubtful.

Nevetherless, mega-capitalists like Ted Kennedy refused to countenance the idea of any part of Social Security being privatized. The implication here is that the lower classes cannot be trusted to invest in the market. The hoi-polloi just don’t understand. And the market is too volatile for them. This of course has put the kibosh on the myriad suggestions of how to preserve this safety net while allowing for market investment. I’m far from an economist and I can think of a half-dozen myself. What the Kennedys and their ilk have done in their lust for power is cut the poor out of their share in the 12,000 Dow, keeping them down on the farm as it were. Noblesse oblige, American style.