I've sometimes thought I could set up AI to keep writing this blog after I can no longer go on.

 It seems James Taranto had a similar idea...

Government gives the go-ahead for a super-spreader Christmas.

Here in Madison, Wisconsin, the Wisconsin State Journal reports: 

Less than two weeks before Christmas and with the number of new daily COVID-19 cases declining and local health providers getting the first shots of vaccine, the Madison and Dane County public health department issued a new order on Tuesday allowing indoor gatherings of up to 10 people.... Outdoor gatherings, previously limited to 10 people, will be allowed with up to 25 people.... 

The new order will be in effect for 28 days, or the length of two COVID-19 incubation periods. The health department said it’s still safest to only gather with household members, but according to a Georgia Tech risk-assessment tool, the chances that at least one person in a gathering of 10 will be COVID-19 positive has dropped from 32% when the previous order was issued on Nov. 17 to 22% today. For groups of 15 and 25, the likelihoods are currently 30% and 46%, respectively.

Things have improved because of what we've been doing, and that's a reason to stop doing what we're doing? Isn't that the cue to invoke the name Fox Butterfield? 

"The Butterfield Effect" is a term coined by James Taranto in his online editorial column of The Wall Street Journal called Best of the Web Today, typically bringing up a headline, "Fox Butterfield, Is That You?" later "Fox Butterfield, Call Your Office." Taranto coined the term after reading Butterfield's articles discussing the "paradox" of crime rates falling while the prison population grew due to tougher sentencing guidelines.

Would you go to a Christmas gathering where there's a 22% chance that somebody there has COVID? The "experts" say, go ahead go — go if it's 22%, but don't go if it's 32%. If we follow that expert advice, how long will it take before the chances go back up to 32%? Why aren't we saying what we're doing is working, so let's keep going with what's working? The answer better not be that the Electoral College has sealed Biden's victory, so we don't need to manufacture gloom anymore.  

James Taranto applies grammar-gotcha pain to Charles Blow.

"like I" https://t.co/QUtPGTW2m5 pic.twitter.com/S5aCgVx5Ap

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) May 24, 2018

It's particularly funny because Blow — in "The Elevation of Imprecision" — is trying to look down on Trump. Trump, we're told, uses "language that muddles to the point of meaninglessness, language that rejects exactitude, language that elevates imprecision as a device to avoid being discovered in his deceit."

ADDED: Much of Blow's critique of Trump's language is apt, but it's critique that would apply to most politicians. The drive to critique is extrinsic to the critique (Blow hates Trump). Trump does have his own special way of being imprecise and deceitful, so it does stand out, but that's a positive, I'd say, because: 1. It's creative, and 2. The imprecision and deceit is pretty much on the face of the text (e.g., "you look at what's happening"). It's clearly unclear. That's a plus!

"Hasn't the NYT effectively declassified an awful lot of secret info over the years?"

Hasn't the NYT effectively declassified an awful lot of secret info over the years? https://t.co/9XHMZuhrrz pic.twitter.com/DoLvJ3AxcI

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) January 30, 2018

ADDED: This makes me wonder why the memo had not already leaked to the press. Considering all the leaks we've seen, don't you think this should have leaked? Another why to look at this question is: What was true about all the things that have leaked that was not true about this memo?

What will we do without James Taranto writing Best of the Web?!

We'll have Best of the Web written by this new person, James Freeman. And we'll have James Taranto in his new Wall Street Journal incarnation, running the op-ed pages.

Here's Taranto's last Best of the Web column. Excerpt:

There is something to be said for going out on a high note, and 2016 was a great year for this column. We don’t claim to have gotten the election right—we were surprised, if only mildly, by Donald Trump’s victory—but most journalists were so spectacularly wrong that simply taking Trump and his supporters seriously was enough to put us at least in the top decile, maybe the 98th percentile, of journalistic sagacity. (In the 99th percentile we’d place cartoonist Scott Adams, reporter Salena Zito and, oddly enough, left-wing propagandist Michael Moore.)

As 2017 begins, the general mood in the so-called mainstream media is a bewildered despond, captured well in the opening of a year-end New York Times editorial:

Let’s pretend we’re in some cosmic therapist’s office, in a counseling session with the year 2016. We are asked to face the year and say something nice about it. Just one or two things.

The mind balks. Fingers tighten around the Kleenex as a cascade of horribles wells up in memory: You were a terrible year. We hate you. We’ll be so glad never to see you again. The silence echoes as we grope for a reply.

We said captured well, not written well. A cascade moves downward, not upward. Here’s an example of the correct usage: The tears of unfathomable sadness welled up in the editorialist’s eyes. She clutched a Kleenex as she prepared for them to cascade down her face....

How will we know which direction is up — or down — without Taranto's reading the web for us?

Good luck to James Freeman, and I look forward to seeing what Taranto does with the op-ed pages.

(Salena Zito is the one who wrote "Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally" in The Atlantic (back in September).)

ADDED: I went back and reread Michael Moore's "5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win." That's from back in July. Really brilliant.

James Taranto has a response to Ross Douthat's "You Must Serve Trump."

It's a cookbook! https://t.co/lg38WkOAhy

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) November 12, 2016

It's nice to get mentioned in Best of the Web.

Here.

That won't work without a subscription, but it's mostly a quote from my post "What's missing from 'Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Struggle to Be Unifying Voice for Nation' by Patrick Healy in the NYT."

James Taranto says I'm "right that the omission is glaring."

ADDED: I was wrong to say "it's mostly a quote from my post." I was only looking at the top of a column that (I didn't realize) really did go on to try to answer my question (How can we think about what Trump or Hillary could do about racial divisions unless we understand why Obama has not done more?). Taranto ends with:

The election of a black president was indeed—and still is—a sign of how far America has progressed since the 1960s, never mind the 1860s. Perhaps a nimbler politician could have dealt more effectively with the clamor of the past couple of years. But Obama is uniquely constrained by the unreasonable hopes that so many Americans placed in him.

"The best conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan belligerence."

"He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than the pluralistic American kind. Evangelicals and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism — when they have answered hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that."

Writes David Brooks, brutally, in "The Brutalism of Ted Cruz."

Who are the "happy and hopeful warriors," I wonder?  George W. Bush, I presume, but the mainstream media loved to portray him as a monster. It was convenient for them that he did not fight back, even to defend himself. Turn the other cheek. He got no credit from them for that Christian charity at the time, but he's convenient now as a model for what the staunch, hard-fighting Evangelical Ted Cruz ought to be.

"Serge Kovaleski must think a lot of himself if he thinks I remember him from decades ago — if I ever met him at all, which I doubt I did."

"He should stop using his disability to grandstand and get back to reporting for a paper that is rapidly going down the tubes."

Said Trump, quoted by James Taranto, who sides with Kovaleski, because: 1. It's believable that Kovaleski really can't remember why he wrote what he wrote about cheering in Jersey City on 9/11, and 2. The video makes it "far likelier" than not that Trump's "gesticulations" were deliberate mockery of Kovaleski's physical disability.

I've already said what I have to say about the Trump/Kovaleski matter, so I'll just move on down Taranto column and quote this:

Hypothesis and Proof...

• “American Turks Anxious About Dukakis Presidency”—headline, Times-News (Hendersonville, N.C.), Aug. 7 1988
• “Michael Dukakis Would Very Much Like Your Turkey Carcass”—headline, Boston Globe, Nov. 25, 2015

Tweeting at Taranto about Trump.

@jamestaranto Also not serious: people who knee-jerk that I'm sure to vote for Hillary (whenever I blog something negative about Trump).

— Ann Althouse (@annalthouse) November 26, 2015

Hai-kudos to James Taranto for "Bye-ku for Lincoln Chafee."

Don’t judge till you’ve walked
One point six kilometers
In his granite shoes

Brilliant.

"The USA Today opinion page scored a nice little coup yesterday, getting an op-ed by a donor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign who argues that 'there has been no evidence of criminal conduct' by the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee."

"The piece, by lawyer Anne Tompkins, appears to be part of a didactic operation the Clinton campaign undertook in the last weeks of August. In an interview with the Puffington Host’s Sam Stein, published Aug. 21, communications director Jennifer Palmieri promised, in Stein’s paraphrase, 'an end-of-summer effort to educate the public on the classification process for national security material.'" That would be the process that... Mrs. Clinton’s staffers and other defenders insist is too complicated for anyone, much less Mrs. Clinton, to understand. So when they say they’re going to 'educate the public,' it’s a safe bet they mean 'try to confuse the public.'"

From "The ‘Experts’ Spin/Mrs. Clinton faces no legal jeopardy, they say vacuously," by James Taranto. (Google some text if that link doesn't get you there.)

Try to confuse the public can be an effective strategy, and I think it may work for the email thing. The process is: 1. People realize they're supposed to be concerned about something, 2. They start to pay attention, to fulfill their civic duty to understand something that's supposed to be important, 3. They experience difficulty, confusion, and shame, 4. Now, we're ready for the lifeline to save our time and our pride: The problem has been looked at by experts, and they've said it's not a problem anymore. 5. You want to believe those other people who are still pressuring you to understand this business, or do you want to be free to move on to other things, like maybe, ha ha, did you know the sprinkler system went off at hoity-toity Hillary fundraiser in Southampton and lots of well-dressed, fancy richies like Anna Wintour and Martha Stewart got all wet? Oh, that Hillary! It's just one absurd screw-up after another, but the old dame rolls with the punches.

On the Hillary interview, James Taranto highlights a "nonsensical" remark about immigration and quotes something I said about Richard Nixon.

In yesterday's Best of the Web, Taranto analyzes Hillary Clinton’s CNN interview and says a lot of interesting things, including:

Keilar asked a specific question about immigration policy and got a nonsensical reply....

Mrs. Clinton: ...The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported.... This man had already been deported five times. And he should have been deported at the request of the federal government.

Cities, of course, cannot deport aliens; that is exclusively a federal responsibility. Sanctuary cities are those that, by policy or practice, refuse to cooperate with federal authorities in enforcing immigration laws—for instance by forbidding police officers from inquiring about criminal suspects’ immigration status. It’s unclear if Mrs. Clinton is herself confused about all this or is cynically speaking in gibberish so as to confuse the voters.

Somebody really ought to try to pin down Mrs. Clinton about her opinion of sanctuary cities. It's not just an oddball San Francisco thing. There are many sanctuary cities, and I think it has to do with some serious policing issues that you shouldn't just mouth off about.

And I'd like to see some connection to an issue that figured large in the 2012 presidential election: Arizona's heightened get-people-deported policy. (You may remember that the Obama administration fought this to the Supreme Court and won.) At the time, I asked "What's the best position for a 2012 candidate to take on the Arizona approach to immigration enforcement?" In that post, I reminded people that back in 2008, it was an immigration issue that shifted the primary race toward Barack Obama: Hillary came out in favor of states giving driver's licenses to undocumented aliens.

Anyway, back to Taranto. He ends with:

Even when dealing with...  fluff, Mrs. Clinton was laughably noncommittal: “It may be more appropriate to look at the $20 than the $10. I don’t know. We’ll see.” As for SNL: “I think I’m the best Hillary Clinton, to be honest. So I’m just going to be my own little self and kind of keep going along and saying what I believe in and putting forth changes that I think would be good for the country.”

In response to which blogress Ann Althouse quips:

Be my own little self . . . Is that something her people say behind the scenes, something like “Let Nixon be Nixon”? But Nixon never said: “I’m just going to let Nixon be Nixon.”

Never mind that, try to imagine Nixon saying “I’m just going to be my own little self.”

I'd have trouble imagining Hillary doing a little-me routine if I hadn't heard it.

Anyway, I'm not sure the phrase "Let Nixon be Nixon" is sufficiently embedded in the public mind for my use of it to be understood. It doesn't google well (like, say "I am not a crook").  I believe it's what Nixon's people said to each other as they worked on how he could present himself in the 1968 election. He had an awkward, weird quality that could not be expunged and that would only get worse if he paid attention to it. I remember that problem and non-solution from the book "The Selling of the President," but I can't find "Let Nixon be Nixon" in a search of the book. And Meade is telling me the phrase is "Let Reagan be Reagan." The phrase "Let Reagan be Reagan" does google well. (For example there's a 1987 NYT column that begins "'Let Reagan Be Reagan' has long been the cry of the President's conservative supporters.") My confidence fades, but I feel that "Let Reagan be Reagan," like many other let-X-be-X phrases was built on the original, which was "Let Nixon be Nixon."

James Taranto observes the hazing of Scott Walker...

... in yesterday's Best of the Web — enter here — which quotes my "Get used to it, coasties" post from last Saturday.

"The obvious thing to say about Jonathan Chait’s battle against the left is that we’re rooting for casualties."

"Which we suppose calls for an explanation of why we’re not simply on Chait’s side."

James Taranto takes on Jonathan Chait's "political correctness" rant.

(And I'm not just linking because it links to me. ("Blogress Ann Althouse, a law professor whose politics are heterodox and centrist, elaborates pointedly...."))

A reader emails "Why don't you start publishing Mohammed images yourself, everyday?"

"There are 1000s of images available online, from glorious Islamic portraits of the 16th century to the Danish and French cartoons.  If many people, especially people with big megaphones, did this maybe we would get to the point [slain Charlie Hebdo editor] Stephane Charbonnier aimed at, making lampooning Islam as banal as lampooning Catholicism."

I've been putting off talking about this, out of respect for the dead and out of opposition to terrorism and murder. But if I were to talk about it, I would say something similar to what I said about "Everybody Draw Mohammed" day. I wrote 2 posts, back in 2010:

1. "'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day' is not a good idea."

I have endless contempt for the threats/warnings against various cartoonists who draw Muhammad (or a man in a bear suit who might be Muhammad, but is actually Santa Claus). But depictions of Muhammad offend millions of Muslims who are no part of the violent threats. In pushing back some people, you also hurt a lot of people who aren't doing anything (other than protecting their own interests by declining to pressure the extremists who are hurting the reputation of their religion).

"Make That 6."

James Taranto's headline for this pair of headlines:

“5 Worst Right-Wing Moments of the Week—Fox News Tells Women ‘How to Get a Husband’ ”—headline, Salon.com, Jan. 5

“How to Find a Feminist Boyfriend”—headline, Washington Post, Jan. 4

I've been ignoring that WaPo article for what seems like more than a day. The main thing the author seems to view as "feminist" is a woman asking a man out. Jeez, that's one of the most conventional women's magazine topics I've seen in my years of reading women's magazines, which is more than half a century (and includes a couple years where I had a job that included reading all the women's magazines — Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Women's Day, Family Circle, Redbook, Glamour, Mademoiselle, etc.). The second-to-main thing the author seems to view as "feminist" is a man's ability to show his feelings. My reaction is the same: This is an old, old, old women's magazine topic. There's just nothing particularly feminist about it it all. The article might as well be titled "How to Find a Boyfriend." So I agree with Taranto, the WaPo article is as right-wing as any other article about advising women on how to catch a man.

"The most important single election next Tuesday is for governor of Wisconsin."

Writes James Taranto:

The incumbent, Scott Walker, was elected in the Republican wave of 2010 and embarked in 2011 on a serious, substantive program of reform. He succeeded in his effort to eliminate “collective bargaining” for most government employees, a boon to the state fisc and a blow to politicians, mostly Democrats, who benefit from public-sector electioneering at taxpayer expense.

Taranto delves into the did-Trek-fire-Mary-Burke controversy that we've been discussing on this blog and wonders why Burke relied so heavily on the "biographical campaign" that makes her vulnerable to an attack like that.

Why isn’t Burke running a substantive campaign? As Collin Roth... observed in February: “Mary Burke has been largely incoherent on Act 10,” the collective-bargaining reform law. “Sometimes she opposes, sometimes she likes the healthcare and pension provisions, sometimes she wants to reinstate collective bargaining rights, and sometimes she simply didn’t like that the law was divisive.”

One possible answer is that she doesn’t think a full-throated campaign of opposition would win the election.... Yet even if Walker’s reforms are secure, a loss for him next Tuesday would be a huge victory for Big Labor—a show of union power that would discourage other governors from undertaking similar reforms by sending the message that success is politically fatal. 

I don't see how refraining from full-throated opposition means Walker's reforms are secure. We've often seen moderation in a campaign followed by something much more skewed after the election is won. I know back in 2011, many Wisconsinites felt Scott Walker did too much, too harshly when he got elected.

I'll resist ranting about how terribly Barack Obama disappointed those who, back in 2008, believed he was offering a transcendent new and beautiful politics that would bring us peace and good... brotherhood....

"So Vox’s position is that the unjust exercise of authority causes crime in black communities but prevents it on campus."

"It’s not logically impossible that this apparent contradiction has some basis in reality, but one can be forgiven for suspecting it is the product of pure prejudice."

"Everybody says because we tried in '08 and it didn't happen, it’s not possible."

Joe Biden, blathering, seems to concede that his administration defaulted on its promise of change.



Too bad it's so hard to read Best of the Web over at the Wall Street Journal, where James Taranto seems to be saying interesting things about this.

Rush Limbaugh riffed on it at the beginning of his show yesterday:

I always thought hope and change meant change the direction of the country... Now, what if Biden is smarter than we think?

Because let's be clear, folks: There has been abundant change... The change has been fundamental. It has been significant; it has been disastrous....

[W]hy come out and say that the change "didn't happen"? Unless you are attempting to psychologically manipulate people into thinking that what's happening now isn't his fault....