I begin by repeating my spoiler alert from last week. This concerns the final chapters of an E.L. Doctorow novel published in 2014, the last one he published (he died the following year). IF YOU WANT TO COME TO IT FRESH, YOU WILL NOT WANT THE REVELATIONS I AM ABOUT TO MAKE! Anyone still here? Okay, then. Andrew's time as a teacher at a DC high school is brief. He soon, accidentally, and in a manner I won't relate, comes to the attention of President George W. Bush. We learn only at this point that the two knew each other -- indeed, they had been roommates at Yale as undergrads. They had both been involved in what seem like typical frat-boy hijinks, and in at least one such instance Andrew had taken the blame to help keep the Bush family crest clean re one such hijink, involving a Bunsen burner in a Yale lab. Someone in the Bush staff gets nervous that someone like that -- someone who could tell such tales to the press corps -- is in DC. So they press...
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Virginia always provides a test for a new President. Indeed, Virginia's Governorship may not run for a second term -- so there is never an incumbent advantage. As a consequence the race for the post often has a fascinatingly hot contest the year after the election of a new President to work out of the Oval office right across the river. In 2005, a year after the clear victory of George W. Bush's re-election campaign (so much clearer than the way W ended up with his first term -- but we will speak naught of that) -- Democrat Tim Kaine (pictured) won the Governor's seat in Richmond. In 2004, W had received 53.68% of the popular vote in the state, while Dem. John Kerry received just 45.48%. Kaine's victory a year later indicated the political tides were shifting, and that Bush's post-9/11 momentum was spent. Likewise, in 2021, a year after the victory of Joseph Biden over Donald Trump, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial contest. Th...
To continue on the reviewer-ish roll from yesterday. I understand the word "contemporary" in the headline to exclude any books that are primarily concerned with any events prior to the contested presidential election of 2000. And I will keep the chief focus here on U.S. politics, though I hasten to add that the concern is not insularity. At least three of them are focused on the contentious relationship of the United States to the rest of the globe. Without further ado: 1) Woodword, STATE OF DENIAL (2006). Woodward writes a fair amount of dross, but this is one of his better efforts IMHO, looking at how the Bush administration managed to persuade itself that the cause of peace required a U.S. occupation of Iraq. 2) Isikoff & Corn, HUBRIS (2006). Much the same focus as the first book. But where Woodward is concerned with showing Bush's self-delusion, this book focuses on the efforts of the group around Bush to delude the rest of us. 3) Woolen, DONALD TRUMP (2009). N...
One can hardly act surprised that Mr. Outgoing is not going to be at the inauguration of his successor this year. There have been surprisingly few comments about the LAST time that happened. So it is worth being explicit. The last such snub took place in March 1869, when Andrew Johnson left town ahead of the festivities for incoming President Ulysses S. Grant. Andrew Johnson (pictured here) and Donald Trump share a lot else for the history books, too. Each was impeached by the House during his first-and-only term in office. Each defeated the prosecutors of that impeachment in the Senate and completed his term. And now, we see that each has declined to stick around for the ceremony that would formally end that term. This means that Bill Clinton is the only impeached and tried President who did show up for his successor's inauguration, that of George W. Bush, in January 2001. And that situation was different. Clinton was impeached in his second term in office. So he se...
Both George Soros and Charles Koch believe that the foreign policy of the United States has become unhinged from any defensible conception of national interest or human rights, and together they hope to use their vast fortunes to move the US toward diplomacy and peace, away from the endless war to which it now seems committed. Charles Koch is one of the “Koch Brothers,” renowned for having long offered financial assistance to Republican and conservative candidates for public office. Soros is the Hungary-born financier who notoriously said in 2003 that removing President George W. Bush from office would be the “central focus of my life” over the following year, as it was “a matter of life and death.” A headline in the Boston Globe has called it an “astonishing turn” that these two men have teamed up. Astonishing or not: Koch and Soros are combining to endow a new foreign-policy think tank, called the “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.” The name is in homa...
A warning from the late Christopher Hitchens, one that seems especially pertinent in the light of the post-coup turmoil in Turkey these days: In a Bush speech to the new membership of NATO, delivered in Istanbul last June, one of the President's handler's was astute enough to insert a quotation from Pamuk, to the effect that the finest view of the city was not from its European or its Asian shores but from -- yes -- 'the bridge that unites them.' The important thing, as the President went on to intone from Pamuk, 'is not the clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West.' No, what is important is to recognize 'that other peoples in other continents and civilizations' are 'exactly like us.' De te fabula narratur. Human beings are of course essentially the same, if not exactly identical. But somehow this evolutionary fact does not prevent clashes of varying intensity from being the norm rather than the exception. 'Remember y...
The June cover story is a piece by David Bromwich entitled "What Went Wrong: Assessing Obama's Legacy." It is not quite as negative as the headline suggests. Bromwich, whose image you see here, considers Obama superior not only to his precursor, but almost certainly superior to whomever shall be his successor. There is a lot of quotable material here. I'll confine myself to just two quotes, though they will be substantial ones. That said, there is this: "In foreign policy, Afghanistan was the first order of business in Obama's presidency. His options must have appeared exceedingly narrow. During the campaign, he had followed a middle path on America's wars. He said that Iraq was the wrong war and that Afghanistan was the right one: Bush's error had been to take his eye off the deeper danger. By early spring of 2009, Obama knew that his judgment -- though it earned him praise from the media -- had simply been wrong. The U.S. effort in Afghanist...
Earlier this month, I wrote about a dispute over the history of HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program. This was the program supposedly designed to help homeowners who were in over the heads. A couple of those who participated in the early Obama administration, notably including Neil Barofsky, portrayed here in full smile, have since said that Geithner administered the plan in an openly cynical bankers'-ass-protecting spirit. At the time I last wrote about this, Geithner's own view of the incident was known only through bits and pieces, such as his quote to an interviewed from The New York Times that I cited in that blog post. Since then, Geithner has come out with his own book on his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. Does this shed any light? Fortunately, amazon allows me to read inside Geithner;'s book at will, so I don't actually have to buy the thing to see what he said about HAMP. He portrays himself as a faithful public servant who wo...
I have to say "cheers," and "hear!hear!" and all that to the British Parliament, and perhaps especially to those Tory party members who defied party discipline to oppose the march toward war. US Presidents are hesitant to launch such adventures without the mother country's support. I got some sense of this back when Tony Blair was acting as W's enabler. Cameron stepped up to attempt to play the same role, but it appears at the moment that Parliament has led him to back down. That is good for them and it may prove lucky for us. I'm not sure I can call any possible result of all this "lucky" for the people of Syria. Their fate looks like a dim one on almost any conceivable time line for years to come. Yet I don't believe that US/UK intervention would have made it any better. Ever since the Obama administration has been talking up a strike, I've been wondering this: when do we start calling a series of [separate?] conflicts a...
Continuing yesterday's thought under the appropriate visage of Hugo Chavez: Tom told me, "The preferred shares the government received did not represent an ownership position. Preferred shares are a type of debt instrument not equity." I was flabbergasted. The chief difference between preferred shares and common shares is that preferred shares don't vote. Preferred shareholders have to be bribed in certain ways for the denial of the franchise. The chief bribe is that, in the event of a bankruptcy/liquidation, the preferred shares are in a position just a notch better than the common shares. But both types of shares are at the bottom of the pile relative to anything else, relevant to any form of debt. The fundamental equation of accounting, after all, is this: Assets - Liabilities = Equity. Those are non-overlapping categories. If you sell a bond, you have incurred a liability. If you sell a share of stock, common or preferred, you have redistributed the...
Are accounting rules of any broader significance than just something for accountants to follow? do they themselves constitute data for the science of economics? or are they arbitrary, subject to erasure and thus re-writable at will? I've been thinking about this recently because of an argument I got into at a message-board site about the Bush adminsitration's bait-and-switch over the TARP legislation of 2008. As some of you will of course remember, the crisis-created coalition of Bush and Pelosi sold to the public and both houses of Congress a Troubled Assets Relief Program. The idea was that the government would buy up certain positions of the Wall Street banks, positions that typically involved both assets and liabilities, and that in the circumstances of the crisis involved way too much of the latter, too little of the former. But even as Congress was voting on TARP, on October 3, 2008 [a month before Obama's election, and less than a week after Congress had reje...