Noemie Emery

Noemie Emery: Death of the salesmen in NY 23

Can they pick them, or not? Boy, those 11 county chairmen who picked Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava to run for Congress on the Republican ticket in New York's 23rd Congressional District in the special election to succeed Rep. John McHugh have an eye for a winner. Seeking a candidate for a center-right district near the Canadian border, they picked someone well to the left of some centrist Democrats, with none of the flair or pizzazz that makes parties willing to tolerate mavericks. She excited no one, and repelled the conservatives, whom the chairmen accused of splitting the party. She was, they insisted, a fit for the district. Anyone who complained was being "divisive," and pulling...

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Noemie Emery: Obama gets Nobel Prize for war, too

Just weeks after it stunned the world by giving President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for setting a "new tone" in international relations after only 10 months (or two weeks) in office, the Nobel Prize Committee in Oslo, Norway, honored him once again by giving him yet a new one for the even stronger new tone in his domestic agenda -- the Nobel Prize for War. In an effort to adjust to the sad fact that force has its uses, the committee has decided to honor the cases in which it is justified: While the first prize is given for those who end or avoid existing contentions, the new one is given to those who escalate simmering spats into all-out, no-holds-barred battles, or better...

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Noemie Emery: Why lefties fear strong women like Liz Cheney

For a feminist party, Democrats have a problem with women, or rather, with one certain type: Young and/or youngish, cute and/or stunning, with good hair, many children, and outspoken center-right views. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann (dark hair, with five children) first roused the beast, and misogynist instincts. Now there's Liz Cheney, (blond, with five children), whom they themselves have made into a star. There she was, working away with her father on his memoir when they began to attack him, and she turned up on cable defending his record. She became a sensation, and they started to growl. Now she's founded a Web site -- Keep America Safe -- with Bill Kristol and Debra...

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Noemie Emery: Nobel panel mad about Bush

"I hate George W. Bush," New Republic columnist Jonathan Chait wrote on March 15, 2004, in a ground-breaking piece detailing a loathing unrestrained in its scope. Chait said he detested Bush's gait, voice, and posture. He had friends who found him an "oppressive force" on their spirits. "I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him," he said rather proudly, "and while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him...I would hate him even more." Apparently, Bush has the same effect on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which since 2002, has been in a frenzy about him, nominating a succession of jerks just to teach him a lesson, no...

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Noemie Emery: Time to rediscover virtues of macho

"Macho Again"' is the name of a racehorse, on whom Barack Obama seems unlikely to bet. Neither does Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria, who praised Obama's resolve to reset his song in the key of humility, by being kinder and meeker in foreign affairs. "Machismo is not a foreign policy," Zakaria said in The Washington Post, in which he claimed that a) the United Nations is a legitimate, useful, and powerful body; b) that "machismo is not foreign policy," c) that "tough and stupid" is an even worse policy, and e) that "denouncing, demeaning, and insulting other countries was a cheap and easy way to seem strong." Perhaps. But the horse found a backer in the president of...

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Noemie Emery: Obama is 'the other' than what?

As early as May, 2008, Newsweek was warning us that Republicans would try to make Obama "The Other," a strange, foreign entity, a "dangerous black man," a Muslim, an alien, a stranger to all we hold dear. We should be so lucky as that someday someone will see him as dangerous, (aside, of course, from the Israelis, the Poles, the Czechs, and other exposed and insecure allies), but some fringe elements have indeed raised questions about his birth, his nationality, his Muslim relations (his father and step-father) and his allegiance to the country he leads. Let us be clear that this is disgusting; that he was fairly elected and is really the president; that he is not an...

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Noemie Emery: Obama can thank Mrs. Colin Powell

If you are unhappy now with the way the public debate is being handled, you might try to call up the residence of retired Gen. Colin Powell, and ask to speak with his wife. By all accounts, it was she who effectively spiked the possibility in 1996 that he might run for president, and opened the way many years later for the town halls, the tea bags, "you lie," Jimmy Carter, and all of the rest. With the end of the Powell "campaign" (or was it the book tour?) went the best chance we had that our first black president would have a harmonious tenure, unmarked by hysterics and culture-war posturing. Instead, we have what looks in retrospect like a preordained train wreck,...

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Noemie Emery: Afghanistan: No longer the Dems' 'good war'?

In Afghanistan, the Democrats now have an opportunity, which is also a problem, which the problem may let blow away. The opportunity is to reclaim their old role as a party of power, established in the last century by a cadre of center-left hawks. Franklin Roosevelt was a ferocious hot warrior. Harry Truman bombed Japan, negotiated the transition into the Cold War with Russia in a stunning burst of will and creative diplomacy. He was backed from the start by then-Rep. John Kennedy, D-Mass., who ran on the missile gap, threatened pre-emptive war over missiles in Cuba, and never met an arms program he thought was enough. Then Lyndon Johnson let Vietnam turn into a quagmire, and it all...

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Noemie Emery: Return of the 'can't do' conservatives

In the wonderful spirit that burst out after the drubbing last autumn, many conservatives searched for the sane thing to do when one has just lost an election, and came up with much the same answer - throw large parts of their old coalition away. Talk radio denounced intellectual pundits.Pundits who prided themselves on reason and intellect denounced talk radio (and Sarah Palin) as being too crude, too personal, and too vitriolic, and attacked in terms that verged on unhinged. Others insisted the problem was southern conservatives, who were neo-confederates, and who squeezed out all others with their narrow and bigoted ways. Too true! Who knew that John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy...

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Noemie Emery: No time for another torch song

Bill Clinton cherished the photo of himself at 16 shaking hands with John Kennedy, and made it part of his campaign for president, incorporating it into his film biography to declare that the torch had been passed. Kennedy was long gone when Barack Obama campaigned, but he was handed the torch in person by John Kennedy's brother and daughter, making him his successor and, as Chris Matthews assures us, JFK's "brother" and heir. Obama was now the fifth Kennedy brother. "Ted ... wanted to be his brother's brother," Matthews tells us, redundantly, "and then he turned that torch over last year to Barack." But did he, and was it his torch to hand over? Ted...

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How the Right can save Justice Ginsburg

Health care complexities are summed up in the fates of two Democrats, each stricken at one time with cancer, who now have their lives on the line. One is Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 76, and two-time cancer survivor, of colon cancer, for which she had surgery in the past decade, and pancreatic cancer, for which she had surgery early this year. Pancreatic cancer is usually fatal, as it is without symptoms and is usually discovered only when it spreads widely, but with Ginsburg this wasn't the case. Hers was caught early and almost by accident, in the course of treatment for another condition, and thus her chances for being cured are much higher than in most other cases, and...

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Noemie Emery: Swing time is coming for Dems, GOP

"We're all socialists now," crowed Newsweek in springtime, but, if we were then, we are not any more. The end of the end of big government, proclaimed to have come in with Obama's election, has now itself ended. It went the way of the great Progressive Era brought in by Bill Clinton in 1992, as well as the Anti-Government Libertarian Era brought in two years later by the Republican Congress. Actually, none of these "eras" ever existed, except in the minds of the people who hyped them, and the problem each time was the American temperament: Tocqueville said about 180 years ago that American politics moves by degrees between closely placed goal posts, and he was...

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Noemie Emery: Now the Left plays the race card for Obama

America's golden age of race relations, which began when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 with a seven-point lead over Republican Sen. John McCain, came to a tragic end in July 2009. The end came, according to the Left, when the country that had elected him awoke from its state of denial or stupor and realized, to its unrelieved horror, that the man it had chosen was black. How else to explain what occurred when his poll numbers slipped from astronomical to just about 50 percent, his approval ratings for his pet projects fell even further, and his golden-tongued eloquence failed to persuade? To the saner among us, these developments were because of one of three things, or...

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Noemie Emery: Prisoners of their own narratives

Second only to the words "teachable moment," the term "narrative" has become central to the great Cambridge dust-up, as the explanation of how one's behavior is formed. In other words, one responds less to events than to the frame in which one sees them, which is based on expectations, and prior experience. When the expectations and the experience have been intense, the narratives are often compelling and powerful. But this does not mean they should always be trusted, as they can often be terribly wrong. In 1963, as explained by James Piereson in his book on the JFK murder, the meme was created that he was in danger from segregationists and/or Right-wing extremists,...

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Noemie Emery: Teachable moment for a president and a professor

Our "conversation on race" is yielding a cluster of "teachable moments," due to a break-in that wasn't, a racist who isn't, and a narrative that seemed (to some people, including the president), almost too good to be true. The president took the side of his friend, Harvard professor Henry (Skip) Gates, who said he had been accosted in his home by a "rogue" police officer and arrested by him when he protested; and condemned the policeman, who said he had answered a report of a break in (by Gates, who had locked himself out of his residence), that Gates hadn't explained, but accused him of being a racist, and that he had arrested Gates for making a public...

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Heather MacDonald: Obama's ignorant attack on cops

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s arrest outside his home on July 16 has triggered a familiar media frenzy on the topic of race and policing. Nothing that has emerged to date suggests that Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley was motivated by racial bias in arresting Gates for disorderly conduct. The broader discussion about whether the police in general are biased has been in turn characterized by two standard lacunae: Silence about minority crime rates and about the massive benefits to urban neighborhoods from proactive policing. This latter omission is particularly unfortunate. Public safety is the absolute precondition for reviving city economies once the recession...

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Noemie Emery on All of Bill's sons: Private lives in the public letters

They don't make people like William F. Buckley any more, and perhaps never did. He was one of those people who is a phenomenon, a conservative with the effect of an Oscar Wilde dandy, an opinion journalist who palled around with the (liberal) swells of Park Avenue, a political activist and policy wonk who played the harpsichord, sailed yachts across oceans, and repaired to Gstaad in the winter, where he skied, socialized with David Niven, and wrote novels about a spy as dashing as he was, who in the first book of the series, sleeps with England"s (fictional) queen. Among his peers (assuming he had them) he was a peacock plunked down in a cluster of pigeons, to other editors as...

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Noemie Emery: In praise of malaise

Mid-July 2009 is a season of milestones - the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing; the 40th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, the 10th anniversary of the death of John Kennedy Jr. - so it seems just that MSNBC decided to honor an even more poignant occasion - the 30th anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech to an incredulous nation on July 15, 1979. To most people, this was less a giant step for mankind than one of the low points in what has been justly described as a “slum of a decade,” but Hardball host Chris Matthews, a one-time speech writer for our 39th president, convened two ex-colleagues - Gerald Rafshoon and Hendrik Hertzberg (now...

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Noemie Emery on who is showing grace under what?

Sarah Palin in her announcement that she's leaving her job as Alaska's governor has certainly let some people down. One of these is Ruth Marcus, who found her emotional, and therefore unfit to seek higher office. "I think my hostility has to do with our shared gender: I'm anxious to see women succeed in the political arena as elsewhere, and I think McCain's cynical choice of Palin and her faltering performance since has served to set back that cause." Marcus said. I share her pain. I don't want "women" as such to succeed any more than I want men to, but I feel Marcus's perfomance as a columnist for The Washington Post has set back the cause of women being treated as...

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Sarah Palin hits the RESET button

Sarah Palin's early retirement from Alaska's governor's mansion has been called erratic, unhinged, and irrational, which isn't surprising: Her ten-month career as a national figure has been marked by erratic, extreme, and unhinged behavior, most of it emanating from the other side. How rational is it for a once-noted blogger to obsess for months over Palin's gynecological history, insisting that her younger son, born in April, 2008, was really born to her 18-year-old daughter, although the daughter was already pregnant with her own child, born eight months later, in December of the same year? How rational is it for a reputable pundit to call her a "cancer" on the Republican...

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Noemie Emery on unfaithful husbands can still be patriots

Mrs. Mark Sanford, as we now know, found out from a letter written to her husband that he had had an affair. This was what happened in 19l8, when Eleanor found letters from Lucy Mercer to Franklin D. Roosevelt that made it clear they had fallen in love. Franklin wanted to leave, but stayed for the sake of his career and his duty, which was to his marriage and children. Politically, the decision was right, as he did remain viable, but emotionally it was a catastrophe: The Roosevelts tormented each other for the rest of their marriage, and the children, whom nobody disciplined, could hardly have turned out much worse. Ideally, FDR could have run, and been there for Lend Lease, when it was...

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Liberal media on life support

At the White House Correspondents’ dinner a few weeks ago, ‘comedienne’ Wanda Sykes wished kidney failure on talker Rush Limbaugh as his just desserts for critiquing her hero the president. But it was the audience that was really on life support, a situation rued by itself but by few not in the business, and a few developments involving the New York Times, the industry flagship, would quickly prove why. On May 17, Edmund Andrews wrote a piece in the Times about how the mortgage meltdown and fiscal collapse of last autumn left him over-extended, facing foreclosure, and broke. He blamed himself (which was nice, since as one of the Times’ economic reporters he...

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Why the 'whys' have it

Journalists will tell you that the great key to knowledge is getting your mind around the five central critical elements: The “who, when, what, where, and why.” On the current debate about ‘torture’ inflicted or not upon terrorist suspects, most journalists have been clear on the who - evil conservatives, up to and including former President George W. Bush and former Vice-President Dick Cheney. They have overdosed on the what - water-boarding, insects, and other indignities. They’ve been somewhat informative on the when and the where, both of which have been less important. And they have ignored or elided the why. The ‘what’ matters, as we...

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Here's mud in your eye

It was always quite clear that the liberals’ efforts to wreak vengeance on President Bush for his (successful) terror war strategy would hurt the Democrats more than it hurt the ex-president, but who ever dreamed it would get quite this funny this fast? Minutes after Nancy Pelosi gave her press conference on the subject of ‘torture,’ she, and not Bush was the issue and story; she was at war with the CIA and chief Leon Panetta; she was at war with House Whip Steney Hoyer, who wants to succeed her, and she had become a huge problem for Barack Obama--- or as he might say, a ‘distraction’---who had trouble enough trying to reconcile his rhetoric with the...

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Foreign affairs need time to be clearly seen

Among his sins, which in some people’s eyes know no limits, George W. Bush trashed 200 years of diplomatic tradition and Reagan’s legacy by unleashing a “war of choice” as part of his plan to spread democracy everywhere, which conservatives know is imprudent behavior, as their hero would never have countenanced. No one knows what Reagan would have done if faced with a hole in Manhattan brought about by a stateless and shadowy enemy, but we can go back and look at Bush’s options and choices, and see how imprudent they were. At the time, it was widely believed that the war in Iraq was a war of necessity, not just by Bush, but by most leading Democrats, who...

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Left’s torture logic could kill you

We can all thank Clifford May for having gotten Jon Stewart to say (at least for a while) that President Harry S. Truman was a “war criminal” for, among other things, the two atom bombs that he ordered dropped on Japan. This is a window into what has emerged as a curious mindset, which seems to believe that a) America’s leaders owe more to the enemy than they do to their allies and people, b) that one can wage war in a fastidious manner, deterring or defeating bloodthirsty people without resorting to ugliness, and c), that anything done by Americans to win a war, end a war, or forestall an attack on the country and the people is wrong. This began to emerge even...

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Bush hatred strikes back

Bush Hatred has now claimed its ultimate victim, and it isn’t George W. Bush. This time the victim is Barack Obama, who has been pushed, seduced, tricked or merely beguiled into ripping the scab off the debate about “torture,” which is not what he needs in the least. The base simply loves it, but Democrats from red states, or states turning purple, may be turning purple themselves as they think of the consequences. According to the first polls taken on Tuesday though Friday last week, 58% of the public doesn’t want to hold hearings, and majorities don’t mind the idea of advanced interrogation if it helps prevent further attacks. Whatever Moveon.org...

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The strange disappearance of liberal hawks

For a few heady moments, after it was revealed that Barack Obama had ordered the swift termination of the Somali water-borne terrorists, one could indulge in a favorite fantasy, that the liberal hawk could revive. In the last century, the words ‘progressive’ and ‘dove’ were hardly synonymous, and a forceful defense of the national interest was a truly cross-partisan cause. Progressives Theodore Roosevelt and his protégée Franklin were among the loudest voices trying to push Woodrow Wilson into World War I. As President, FDR brought Republicans into his war cabinet; and among the strongest supporters of the Truman Doctrine, Truman being a liberal...

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Why we love Reagan, JFK, but not Carter, Nixon

President Obama’s tour of Europe and points east pleased most of his listeners in Europe when he suggested America was not all that exceptional, that this country and Britain were just two among many, and that it was ‘no loss to America’ that the old days, when FDR and Churchill decided things between them were vanished for good. “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” Obama said in Strasbourg, suggesting that a) it was all an illusion, as everyone tends to think that his country is an exception; and b) that power was transient, as each of...

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'Cosmic justice' not possible on exec pay

On March 24, the House Financial Services Committee of the United States Congress went where no government body in this country had ventured before it, and passed a bill allowing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to regulate the salaries of all of the people employed by the companies that took government money, under the terms of the bailouts beginning last year. The measure was approved a week later by the full House. Setting aside two qualifications - that someone giving money to somebody else can attach whatever conditions he wants to the bargain, and that some of these people and companies appear to deserve it -this is something that Congress should think about twice. The...

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The eyes have it

The entertaining but seldom lucid Maureen Dowd went off her meds again Sunday, taking the side of Brazil’s President Lula in his assertion that the woes of the world, financial and otherwise, have been the doings of those with blue eyes. Along with the question of why this gets printed, this raises another of rather more import: Why skin color emerged as the critical indice, while eye and hair color never quite made it among the superficial and wholly irrational measures by which prejudiced people tend to put store. No one knows really if blondes have more fun, but they have certainly been the most envied, in spite of the fact that the world’s most famous beauties have...

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Death of the Obama dream

Well, that was fast. On March 20, only two months after the cosmic anointing, Vanity Fair, of all places, unloaded on Barack Obama, in the terms it had reserved for the past four or five years for the likes of George W. Bush. Well, not the whole magazine, but one of its writers, media writer Michael Wolff, took an axe to the president, in a posting beginning “Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter,” ending “This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble,” and titled “Barack Obama is a Terrible Bore.” The same day, ex-fan Peggy Noonan called him “insubstantial and weightless...not fully focused...jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue...

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Palinphobes and the audacity of type

Now that the Obama presidency is nearing the 60-day mark, it’s time to thank those fastidious scribes on the left and the right who worked so hard to warn us against Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, and the dire things that would surely occur if she ever got close to executive power. How right they were to insist that she was unfit for high office. Let’s just imagine what she might have done: As president, she might have caused the stock market to plunge over 2,000 points in the six weeks after she assumed office, left important posts in the Treasury unfilled for two months, been described by insiders as ‘overwhelmed’ by the office, and then gone on to diss the...

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Sometimes the plumber must be fired

Suppose you called the plumber to unstop your toilet, and he ignored the toilet, and spent his time and your money building a deck in your yard. Suppose you told him you didn’t need a deck, or didn’t need a deck now, or would think about the deck later, after he unstopped the toilet. And suppose he ignored you and went on building the deck while the toilet began to back up and spill over. And when you complained, he told you the toilet was just a distraction---like a tracking poll, or whatever---and that the deck he was building was just what you needed to make property values go up. You replied that even if the back yard had a gazebo and fountain, no one would...

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Cosmic revenge is sweet

Former President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, R-AZ. have a bone to pick with the national media and they have good cause. For Bush, it is the four-plus year jihad carried on by the national media since his third year in office, including but not limited to: a) the coverage of the Iraq war, in which good news was no news and bad news was everything, b) the over-inflation of the Abu Gihrab and the Valerie Plame ‘scandals’, c) the blowing of cover of anti-terrorist measures, for no very good reason, d) and the incident late in 2004 when the star correspondent of CBS News tried to derail Bush with claims of malfeasance in the Texas Air National Guard 30 years earlier,...

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Iraq and democracy: Lessons learned

Part four of a four-part series After seven years, many set-backs, and too many dead, ex-President Bush seems to be winning his gamble, that freedom can come to Iraq. The price has been high, but not out of line with that paid by others. England took 20 years and almost one million dead to arrive at her settlement; France had the Terror, and many changes of government; the Constitutional Convention is held up as the gold standard in the peaceful construction of government, but it came between wars, not instead of them: there was a war before, and then a war later, and that one took 620,000 lives. Some small monarchies slip painlessly into becoming de facto democracies, but large...

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Iraq and Democracy: What went right and why

In December, 2006, President George W. Bush ordered a surge of American troops into Baghdad and its environs in a last hope they could buy time for the Iraqi government to broker an agreement that could then stop the violence. No deal emerged, but something else happened: the violence itself had become so extreme that the Sunnis themselves had turned on Al Qaeda, and turned to American forces for help. Life with Al Qaeda was more than the Sunnis had bargained for, with torture and murder as agents of discipline, and the two groups from the beginning had two different aims: Al Qaeda wanted a war to the death that would break up Iraq in the process, while the Sunnis wanted to exercise...

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Iraq and Democracy: What went wrong

Part two of a four-part series “The nation of Iraq---with its proud heritage, abundant resources, and skilled, educated people---is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom,’ George W. Bush said shortly before he invaded that country. He anticipating a process in which the armed forces would remove Saddam’s government, turn the country over to its political classes, oversee a short and bloodless transition, and quickly depart. This was Plan A. The problem was that there had been no good intelligence since 1991 when the first Gulf War had ended, during which sanctions on top of war and repression had wrecked the economy, impoverished the middle...

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