Petrified Truth

Winners, losers and more

So, John McCain has a decisive win in Florida today and the breaking news of an endorsement by Rudy Giuliani tomorrow looms large.

Next week should be very revealing. The political year is proving to have surprises after all.

Bush's decision

Here's Fred Barnes with the inside story: How Bush Decided on the Surge.

[W]hen the Pentagon said one or two more Army brigades would suffice, the White House consulted General David Petraeus, whose selection as the new commander in Iraq had yet to be made public. Petraeus said he'd need a minimum of five and that's what he got. "I decided to go robust," Bush said. A senior adviser added: "If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly."

For an unpopular president facing a Democratic Congress ferociously opposed to the war in Iraq, it was a risky and defiant decision.

Very interesting how little support the Commander-in-Chief had from his generals.

Obama vs Clinton

All the media are calling the SC primary for Barack Obama, powered by 80% support among black voters. That's something that seemed unthinkable just weeks ago (given historic black affection for Bill Clinton). Apparently exit polls alone can't call second place between the Clintons and John "The Ferret" Edwards.

Forced to choose between Obama and Clinton Inc., it'd be no contest in my mind.

Star Trek returns

The official site for J. J. Abrams's upcoming Star Trek movie is live, and the first teaser trailer is up. Looks... promising.

Related:

John McCain - Democrat?

Ouch. Here's George F. Will on John McCain, 33% plurality winner of yesterday's GOP primary in S.C.:

In the New Hampshire debate, McCain asserted that corruption is the reason drugs currently cannot be reimported from Canada. The reason is "the power of the pharmaceutical companies." When Mitt Romney interjected, "Don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys," McCain replied, "Well, they are."

There is a place in American politics for moralizers who think in such Manichaean simplicities. That place is in the Democratic Party, where people who talk like McCain are considered not mavericks but mainstream.

Republicans are supposed to eschew demagogic aspersions concerning complicated economic matters. But applause greets faux "straight talk" that brands as "bad" the industry responsible for the facts that polio is no longer a scourge, that childhood leukemia is no longer a death sentence, that depression and other mental illnesses are treatable diseases, that the rate of heart attacks and heart failures has been cut more than in half in 50 years.

GOP Debate in SC

Starting the debate event with the National Anthem is a nice touch.

The snakeoil salesmen

George Will examines the shared "populist delusion" being peddled by Mike Huckabee and John Edwards.

He [Mike Huckabee] and John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa, encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. [...]

According to Edwards, the North Carolina of his youth resembled Chechnya today — "I had to fight to survive. I mean really. Literally." Huckabee, a compound of Uriah Heep, Elmer Gantry and Richard Nixon, preens about his humble background: "In my family, 'summer' was never a verb." Nixon, who maundered about his parents' privations and wife's cloth coat, followed Lyndon Johnson, another miscast president whose festering resentments and status anxieties colored his conduct of office. Here we go again?

Huckabee fancies himself persecuted by the Republican "establishment," a creature already negligible by 1964, when it failed to stop Barry Goldwater's nomination. The establishment's voice, the New York Herald Tribune, expired in 1966. Huckabee says "only one explanation" fits his Iowa success "and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people." God so loves Huckabee's politics that He worked a Midwest miracle on his behalf? Should someone so delusional control nuclear weapons?

Speaking of delusions, Edwards seems unaware that the world market sets the price of oil. He says a $100-a-barrel price is evidence of — surging demand in India and China? unrest in Nigeria's oil fields? No, "corporate greed." That is Edwards' explanation of every unpleasantness. Mitt Romney's versatility of conviction, although it repelled Iowans, has been a modest makeover compared to Edwards' personality transplant. The sunny Southerner of 2004 has become the angry paladin of the suffering multitudes, to whom he shouts: "Treat these people the way they treat you!" Presumably he means treat "the rich" badly — an odious exhortation to one portion of Americans, regarding another.

Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity. Each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them, and who therefore think opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.

Each of them appears to me to be the most dangerous of the viable candidates in both parties. Edwards is a very long shot now with the rise of Barack Obama; Huckabee could become the GOP's version of Jimmy Carter. Strange days.

Tolkien's birthday

Today would have been the birthday of soldier and author J.R.R. Tolkien, and so is remembered traditionally by followers with a toast.

We'll raise our glasses later today.

On the 3rd January 1892 JRR Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. To celebrate this event, on this day each year Tolkien fans around the world are invited to raise a glass and toast the birthday of this much loved author. The toast is "The Professor".

Posted by Alan at 11:06 AM

Flashman's creator gone

Here's sad news: author George MacDonald Fraser has died at age 82. The Flashman novels for which he became famous were only some of his many creative accomplishments.

George MacDonald Fraser, who died on Wednesday aged 82, revived in a long-running series of novels the career of one of fiction’s most infamous characters, Flashman.

The fag-roasting bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes’s 1857 tribute to Dr Arnold’s Rugby, was last seen being expelled for drunkenness. Age had not improved him. Fraser’s appropriation in 1969, Flashman, joyously confirmed him as a thoroughgoing rotter and cad of the first water.

The book and its 11 sequels purported to be the memoirs of General Sir Harry Flashman, VC, discovered in a saleroom at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and entrusted to Fraser for editing. This device allowed Fraser to pilot Flashman through a picaresque series of encounters with some of the choicest episodes of Victorian history.

Thus, the first novel took as its background the First Afghan War - for Flashman an odyssey of self-preservation justified by his being the sole survivor of the Retreat from Kabul. In Royal Flash (1970), which was later made into a film, he floundered his way through the Schleswig-Holsten Question, engaging Bismarck in fisticuffs and dallying with Lola Montez. Flashman at the Charge (1973) saw him accidentally lead the Light Brigade into the "Valley of Death".

So successfully did Fraser bring off the conceit that some critics, especially in America, believed the memoirs to be authentic. A debate ensued in the New York Times, and Flashman’s concocted curriculum vitae found its way into works of biographical reference. [...]

Although some critics saw the series as a satire on Victorian morality, its continued popular success was due to Fraser’s ability to make learning history enjoyable. The richly comic narrative moved with a military dash worthy of Anthony Hope or Rafael Sabatini while spoofing the wholesome sensibilities of the heroes of Buchan and Henty.

Among his many accomplishments, perhaps my favorites (other than Flashy) were the screenplays for Richard Lester's pair of films The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, and Robin and Marian (which starred Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn). All of them exemplified his approach to fiction: steeped in historical detail and often satirical in tone, but with a serious undercurrent that never strayed too far from historical reality.

Rest in peace.

Welcome 2008

Happy New Year!