About the Philly guy who threatened Eric Cantor

Looks like the Philly man who threatened Eric Cantor doesn't discriminate on the basis of party:

According to the federal complaint against him, Norman Leboon of Philadelphia has admitted making some 2,000 videos that contained threats. A sampling of his "work" reveals rambling incoherent videos that mix pseudo-religious incantations with random warnings and threats. In one video he addresses President Obama, Vice President Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by name and says, "Your punishment is coming, the swine, it will be severe, and you will beg for mercy to your god, it will be severe, you will know god's swine, god has warned you." (Some conservatives are already chortling over the fact that Leboon contributed to Obama's 2008 campaign, though it's not clear what that's supposed to signify.)

Beyond that, though, there's a pretty clear difference -- to me, at least -- in the threats against Democratic and Republican lawmakers, in that I haven't seen any Democratic lawmakers saying (like Republicans did), "Well, yeah, violence was wrong -- but you can't blame people for being angry!" And incidentally, I haven't read all the comments by the "deranged leftists" at TPM, but they seem pretty solidly behind arresting the guy who threatened Cantor.

There's violent loopiness on both sides. The difference, from what I can tell, is that the GOP leadership does a better job of making excuses for (and even promoting) the violent loops on there side. It's kind of a critical difference.

Norman Podhoretz and other people who don't deserve to be taken seriously

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending Sarah Palin as much smarter than she seems, Norman Podhoretz can't resist getting a little dig at President Obama:

What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn.

What crap.

Podhoretz, of course, is talking about the same Barack Obama who stood in Europe and bragged about how America had saved that continent from the Nazi menace and then guaranteed security there for decades afterward to the present day. The same Barack Obama who stood before a Muslim audience at Cairo University and said, "the United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known." I'm not aware of an opportunity that the president has missed -- when given -- to talk about all the good things America has done in the world.

Podhoretz surely knows this -- and has decided to ignore it. In which case he is (despite his "intellectual" reputation) a hack, more concerned with advancing an agenda that includes painting the president as somehow insufficiently proud of America than in paying attention to the truth. In which case, he deserves to be ignored. Or maybe he doesn't know it. In which case he is too ill-informed to take as a reliable source of opinion about anything, and thus deserves to be ignored.

I'm inclined to think he's a hack. But I'm open-minded.

A lot of folks on the right continually make this charge against Obama. It's not enough for them to disagree with him on the substance of the issues: They have to portray him as probably anti-American. But it's not true. And the same logic applies to them: Either they should know better or they're liars. Truth matters.

Bag O' Books: Eating Animals

How to respond to Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Eating Animals? Let us examine the choices:

* BOREDOM: This might be your initial response. After all, the last decade has seen the rise of a new -- or maybe renewed -- literary subgenre concerned with the ethics and sustainability of how we eat. Eric Schlosser got the ball rolling with 2001's Fast Food Nation; the intervening decade has brought us Matthew Scully's Dominion and David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, among other contributions. Mark Bittman once advised us How To Cook Everything, but more recently has decided that Food Matters -- and that maybe we shouldn't be eating so much meat.

The masterpiece of this movement, of course, is Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which took its readers on a tour of 21st century "factory farming," with steps along the way for moral contemplation of meat eating, hunting and Whole Foods shopping. Pollan's tome -- and a couple of spinoff books -- was a smash hit, finding its way to the bottom of thousands of reusable cloth bags toted by enviro-foodies to farmers markets across the land.

So what's new for Foer to say? Not much, honestly. His reportage here covers much of the same ground already trod by Pollan. Factory farming -- we're told again -- is a dirty, cruel process that is awful to behold is probably making us sick. If you've read Pollan, you're likely to find yourself in the grip of a second possible reaction:

* IRRITATION: What Foer does offer is attitude and sanctimony. Where Pollan is professorial, using narrative to nudge his reader toward a conclusion, Foer comes across a smart, profane, angry undergrad -- one you might try to avoid on the quad when he starts hectoring passerby to stop and watch his Meet Your Meat video. He might be in command of the facts, but damn he's annoying.

It wouldn't be fair to compare Foer to Pollan so much, except that Pollan is one of the targets here. In Omnivore, Pollan concludes he's not willing to give up meat -- but he decides to seek it from alternative sources (local ranchers, hunters) who use sustainable practices and keep animal cruelty at a minimum. This draws Foer's moral ire, declaring that Pollan is among those who "never, absolutely never, emphasize that virtually all of the time one's choice is between cruelty and ecological destruction, and ceasing to eat animals."

There's only one problem with this critique: Foer ends the book as a committed vegetarian -- as he has to, really, once he decides he cannot justify any amount of animal suffering in the name of a good meal. Despite this decision, however, he vows that he can support efforts to create sustainable, minimally cruel family farms.

"The meat industry has tried to paint people who take this two-fold stance as absolutist vegetarians hiding a radicalized agenda," Foer writes. "But ranchers can be vegetarians, vegans can build slaughterhouses, and I can be a vegetarian who supports the best of animal agriculture."

We never really understand why Foer -- who finds any level of animal suffering to be unacceptable -- decides this approach is appropriate. But bizarrely, this conclusion is not that far from Pollan's own. The distinction, I suppose, is that Foer is really sensitive and tortured about the process. This is moral preening, and that is all it is.

This sanctimony -- replete with references to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Holocaust -- would make Eating Animals worth tossing in the trash bin at your nearest barbecue joint ... were it not for the third possible reaction to this book:

* GRUDGING ACCEPTANCE THAT FOER IS KINDA MAYBE RIGHT: Damnit, factory farming is gross. It fills our rivers and waterways with shit; it fills our air with climate-changing gases; it delivers meat filled with contaminants and antibiotics. And it is, by any rational standard, cruel: chickens have their beaks cut off; pigs live in their own waste; cattle are dismembered while alive and conscious. These are facts that should give one pause -- if not for the sake of the animals, then for the sake of our own health.

Foer, of course, wants more than a pause. He wants a halt. The environmental factors are important to his case, but it's clear he considers the moral argument most persuasive.

"Think about it," he asks. "Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?"

My first, glib answer: A little bit of both.

Less glibly, what I mean to say is that I do not grant (say) chickens the same moral weight that I do a human being. Foer presents science here that chickens -- among other animals -- share human capacities for pain, fear, reason and other cognitive processes. I don't doubt that he's right. But still: I do not grant a chicken the same moral weight as a human. I just know there's a difference between us and them. (If chickens one day rule the earth, I may regret these words.)

Until then, though, I find the example of nature too compelling. Animals eat other animals. All the time.

Foer doesn't buy this argument. "The entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what's 'natural,'" he says. And he's right. But what is interesting to me about this is that environmentalists -- and, let's face it, there's a signficant overlap between them and the vegetarian community -- make this argument in no other context. Dams are unpardonable usurpations of Mother Nature's work; so are power plants. Environmentalists usually call on us to disturb nature as little as possible, to acclimate our processes to the earth's natural rhythms. Then dinner time comes.

So where does this leave us? Probably -- if you've ever given thought to your meals -- at the same place you started.

My family already buys our meat from a halal butcher who, in turn, buys his cattle and chickens directly from nearby Amish farmers. We already have escaped the factory farm system, putting our money toward something as sustainable and minimally cruel as we can achieve while still eating meat.

But we probably don't need to eat meat as often as we do. Tonight I prepared a vegetarian stew from the Sundays At Moosewood cookbook. It was delicious, stuffed full of veggies and spices, and any concerns I had about missing meat were quickly overcome by the fact that it was super tasty.

This, of course, is what Foer misses. In his quest for moral perfection, he forgets that a good meal -- even a simple meal, even a vegetarian meal -- can bring you pleasure. Pollan never forgets that. I know whose manifesto I find more appealing.

Bag O' Books: "Bomb Power"

It is difficult not to stand in awe -- and a little envy -- of Garry Wills. His casual brilliance has made him one of the more prolific writers and thinkers of the age, and his thinking has been supple enough to carry him from an early alliance with William F. Buckley to an esoteric ideology that still seems to call itself "conservatism" while finding itself most comfortable on the pages of the lefty New York Review of Books. He's the kind of guy who appears capable of tossing off a 250-page book between lunch and dinner, while the rest of us are struggling to compose coherent blog posts in a comparable amount of time.

His new book, Bomb Power, reads a little bit like that -- a 250-page blog post. Wills makes the case that the advent of the Atomic Age also ushered in an era of presidential overreach: that Harry Truman used the prerogatives of the bomb to assert unconstitutional powers (in warmaking, foreign policy and even domestic policy) and to shield his efforts from congressional and judicial oversight; that every president since then (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter) has tried to expand on that unconstitutional foundation.

At its best, Bomb Power serves as an overview of 65 years of expanding presidential power. But Wills doesn't really pursue his own thesis with much zeal: we see the advent of the bomb at the beginning of the book, and the rise of some institutions to govern its production and use. Wills, though, doesn't do much to make the connection to the overreach he describes thereafter: Korea, the Bay of Pigs and the Gulf of Tonkin all the way up to Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

And his argument is made more difficult by a lack of context. Except for some brief references to Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln, we're not given much of a lesson in how executive power was wielded prior to World War II -- only told that the legislative branch was given more primacy than it currently exercises.. And in critiquing the unconstitutional nature of the postwar rise of the Cold War national security state, Wills doesn't bother to discuss whether the measures taken in the name of anti-Soviet national security might've been, you know, useful. This book, in other words, is written for people who already agree with Wills' point-of-view on such matters.

Wills finally peters out with a single paragraph looking to the future. "Some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution," he writes. "It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made."

As it happens, I'm pretty sympathetic to Wills' perspective. This book, however, felt like an appetizer for some other, longer and better-argued work of history.

Newt Gingrich, health reform, the Civil Rights movement and partisan rancor

I thought this was interesting framing by Newt Gingrich in this morning's Washington Post:

But former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

As writer Dan Balz notes in the next paragraph, "no one doubts that Johnson was right to push for those civil rights measures." No one does now of course -- at least not openly, if they wish to participate in mainstream politics -- but the reason the civil rights legislation was so devastating for the Democratic Party over time was that there were plenty of people who did think it was wrong for Johnson to push for those measures.

What does this have to do with the health reform debate? 

There's a lot about Republican governance the last 40 years that I've thought annoying at best and damaging to the country at worst. And yet the worst of it has never been so bad that it would justify hopping in a time machine and convincing LBJ not to pass civil rights legislation in order to keep the South in the Democratic column. The tradeoff -- 40 years in the political wilderness in exchange for a legal regime that protected and enforced the rights of African Americans for the first time in our history -- was worth it, frankly.

And if Gingrich's prediction comes true -- I'm not at all sure it will -- I suspect it will again be worth it. Millions of Americans who can't afford health insurance will finally be covered; millions of others who have paid for coverage will actually get to use that coverage instead of seeing it revoked when they get sick. A legal regime that enables all Americans to access and use health care is, frankly, the least that can happen in the richest civilization this planet has ever seen.

Republicans might be able to tap into anger among some voters to ride back into power. But it's unlikely they'll have the stones to repeal health reform -- last seen in power, of course, they were expanding the Medicare entitlement that conservatives had vociferously opposed a generation earlier. So they can have the presidency for the next 40 years, if they want. Power is important, but so is the end to which it is used. Democrats might be sacrificing their power now, but for a worthy cause. I'm OK with that.

Bag O' Books: 'Revolutionary Road'

Try as I might -- and I've tried -- I just can't get into John Updike. I know that he was one of the literary masters of the second half of the 20th century. It's just that he's so boring. Other readers, readers I like and respect, disagree with me, so I give a run at an Updike novel now and again. A few weeks ago I tried my hand at Rabbit, Run, and I didn't make it nearly as far as I should've. The pace was glacial, the dense layers of description and internal monologue acting more as an obstacle than as illumination. I couldn't go on.

For whatever reason, though, I thought I'd at least kick the tires of postwar middle-class ennui with Richard Yates' 1962 novel Revolutionary Road. Turns out I made a good choice: Yates turns out -- in this book at least -- to be closer in spirit to the wit of Philip Roth than to Updike. There's entertainment going on here, though it's the kind that'll make you wince every few pages.

Like a lot of people my age, my first awareness of Revolutionary Road came not in a bookstore or literature class, but in a movie advertisement: I've never seen the 2008 film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, but the trailers seemed to promise a been-there-done-that portrayal of the crushing soul-lessness of suburbia. I've not the seen the movie; I can tell you that the book reads more like a satire than an actual tragedy, despite some grizzliness in the last act.

And the satire is not of the suburbs, really, or the people who live in them -- but of the kind of people who live in the suburbs and think they're too good for them, folks who harbor fantasies of urban bohemia even as they go about the day-to-day drudgery of raising kids and earning money at boring jobs. Today, we call people like this "yuppies," but the term didn't really exist in 1962 -- and Yates was well ahead of his time in chronicling not just the rise of suburbia, but also the backlash.

Here's the Amazon.com synopsis of the book:

Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.

What the synopsis doesn't tell you is how thoroughly and neatly Yates depicts the pretentions of his characters. April isn't actually a good actress; Frank literally talks a good talk, but it usually amounts to a jargon-filled rant against bourgeois life that was probably articulated better in some of the books he read during a brief stint at Columbia. Yates depicts a typical dinner gathering given by the Wheelers:

And even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but enlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, American Society Today. "Oh Jesus," Shep might begin, "you know this character next door to us? Donaldson? The one that's always out fooling with his power mower and talking about the rat race and the soft sell? Well, listen: did I tell you what he said about his barbecue pit?" And there would follow an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness that left them weak with laughter.

"Oh, I don't believe it," April would insist. "Do they really talk that way?"

And Frank would develop the theme. "The point is it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so typical. It isn't only the Donaldsons--it's the Cramers too, and the whaddyacallits, the Wingates, and a million others. It's all the idiots I ride with on the train every day. It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity."

The book follows the Wheelers as they select and decorate their suburban Connecticut home in ways they hope will show themselves to be above suburbia. And when tragedy does occur, it's only because the our main characters contemplate making good on all their snooty talk. As a pretentious, city-loving wannabe urbanite who has done his fair share of suburb-dissing, I can tell you I had a rare experience with this novel: I felt indicted. Repeatedly, and at times painfully, and at a distance of a half-century.

Yates can't quite sustain the indictment; the last act of the book feels like a movie that -- having run out of things to say and do -- ends with a run-of-the-mill car chase. Until then, though, Revolutionary Road is a splendid book, well-drawn but efficiently paced. It's the kind of book I wish John Updike had written.

Bag O' Books features my thoughts about whatever I've read recently, even if I'm decades late to the table.

Andrew McCarthy is either a liar or a fool

"I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist."
Andy McCarthy, National Review's The Corner

Andy McCarthy is either a liar or a fool.

If attorneys who represent terror suspects in American courts are "pro-Qaeda," that means they were glad to see the Twin Towers come down, glad to see the Pentagon burning, glad to see a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole and glad to see the carnage and death dealt at America's African embassies in the 1990s.

If attorneys who represent terror suspects in American courts are merely "pro-Islamist," that means that they desire to see sharia law imposed on Americans and a caliphate established to rule the entire Islamic world -- which, eventually would be the entire world.

And under either scenario, the folks who want to see these things happen are embedded in the most elite precincts of the American legal system! But there is, of course, no real evidence to support either contention, just McCarthy's own speculation. The absence of such evidence -- combined with an 10-second Occam's Razor examination of why American lawyers might be offering their services to terror suspects -- renders McCarthy's theorizing dubious. He either knows this and is a liar, or he believes his own rhetoric and is a fool.

Either option renders him deserving of the utmost contempt.

To be fair, McCarthy tries to backtrack a little bit from his own statement, writing the following words later in the post:

You can be pro-Islamist, and even pro-Qaeda, without signing on to the savage Qaeda methods. And the relevant question with respect to progressive lawyers is not so much whether they are pro-Qaeda as it is whether, as between Islamists and the U.S. as it exists, they have more sympathy for the Islamists. 

Wait. What? What distinguishes Qaeda as a form of Islamism is its embrace of violent methods. Is there an un-armed Sinn Fein analogue to Al Qaeda that nobody knows about? No? OK, then: McCarthy's clearly full of crap here. The relevant question with respect to McCarthy is whether or not he knows he's full of crap. Either way, he's trying to get away with his slur on American lawyers without having to own the ramifications of his own words.

This much is clear: Andrew McCarthy is either a liar or a fool.

Related: Conor Friedersdorf on Andy McCarthy's un-American slurs.