June 15 news roundup and analysis

First Amendment, students and irony

Shasta High School, in Redding, Calif., recently had its school newspaper shut down, though it has gotten a reprieve.

Why? Because the top story of the last issue for 2007-08 was about flag-burning, complete with picture.

For more of the details, it’s on my blog; to send Principal Milan Woolard some cyberlove, like e-mailing him the actual First Amendment, or whatever else you can think of drop him a cyberline.

Or, e-mail him another flag-burning picture for his collection, like I did:

The clueless Kevin Drum

Why does Kevin Drum hate caribou? Beyond that, why does he continue to write neo-centrist squishy posts like this, with strawman setups of environmentalists, while believing in a Reagan-like pony of “reasonable conservatives”? For a more complete takedown of what I call not just his worst post of the week but the worst in at least a month, see my blog.

Another winner from Sean Wilentz

As I note, his “The Age of Reagan” could be subtitled “The Age of Cheney.” This is a good connect-the-dots political history of the last 35 years. It also provoked several “counterfactual history” ruminations in me.

For example, what if:
• Bush and not Rocky had been Ford’s VP appointment choice?
• Reagan had pulled off his somewhat amateurish attempt to take the 1968 GOP nomination away from Nixon?
For the answers to these, more questions Wilentz provoked, and my review, see my blog. For more on the book, go to Amazon.

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Bless His Heart

Northerners are often confused and frustrated by the native southerner’s ability to disguise “fuck you” in an apparent compliment, thus making it impossible to respond in kind.

“Bless your heart, that’s exactly the opposite of what I asked for, but thank you so much for trying.”

Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz may have been born and raised in New York City, but his years writing speeches for Arkansas boy Bill Clinton apparently taught him the art of the disguised insult.

At WashingtonMonthly.com, Wilentz ostensibly analyzes the presidential governing style in 1,174 words that are nothing but cover for condemning Barack Obama as an indecisive idealist doomed to failure.

After identifying the three types of presidencies as “strong” (FDR, Eisenhower, Nixon), “advisory” (Harding, Bush 43) and “post-partisan” (Hoover, Carter), he makes it clear that only “strong” presidents have a chance of being successful. Advisory and post-partisan presidents are disasters.

Then he writes this:

As Johnson and Reagan showed, individual presidents can, at different points in their administration, exhibit aspects of more than one of these presidential models. Some candidates, likewise, may promise to combine diverse elements of what they see as leadership, such as Obama’s blend of the aide-reliant advisory mode and the post-partisan purism of Hoover and Carter.

Or as my grandmother would have put it:

“Bless his heart, Obama’s just too trusting and good-hearted to be president.”

Oh, and Sean? The guy who won the left's heart by exposing Smirky as the worst president ever? Such a smart boy, and so talented! What a shame he destroyed his reputation whoring for Hillary Clinton.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

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