Remember 9 with 90? (Nine popular policy ideas that would unite 90 percent of conservatives?)
David Brooks writes on the mood of voters today:
Their homes are bigger. They own more cars. They feel more affluent. In a segmented nation, they have built lifestyle niches for themselves where they feel optimistic and fulfilled.
But they also feel that their neighborhood happiness is threatened by global problems that are beyond their power to control: terrorism, rising health care costs, looming public debt, illegal immigration, global warming and the rise of China and India. They regard these looming problems the way people used to think about crime — as alien intrusions into their private tranquility. And government seems to be doing nothing about them.
These voters don’t believe government can lift their standard of living or lead a moral revival. They want a federal government that will focus on a few macro threats — terrorism, health care costs, energy, entitlement debt and immigration — and stay out of the intimate realms of life. They want a night watchman government that patrols the neighborhood without entering their homes.
Republicans ought to be able to do this. The issue environment for Republicans isn’t great, but it’s not the same strong wind at Democrats’ backs that they had in 2006. (If it were, Hillary would be getting more than 48 percent against Ron Paul.)
Oh, one other thing - is it just me, or is the 2008 Republican primary race full of factions insisting, “If I don’t get a candidate who agrees with my entire agenda, I’m taking my ball and going home”? I partially agree with Patrick that I hope the GOP is big enough for men as different as Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee. (He wants one of them as the running mate of his employer, John McCain.)
Folks, you don’t always get a nominee that matches up perfectly with your issue matrix. In fact, most of the time you don’t. You find the guy who agrees with your top priorities and support him. You volunteer, you talk him up, you write checks if you’re inclined. You wear your buttons and caps, and you vote for him on primary day. We’ve got a fair vote. Do your best, then honor the results. Suck it up, people. Whining gets you nowhere.
Well, another exciting humdrum World Series comes to a close, with the mighty Boston Red Sox sweeping it again. Gosh, one of these years it’d be nice to see another team win a couple of games so the boys can bring it all home in Fenway.
I noticed someone was a bit snarky about the Sox win.
The Yankee fan in me wonders if the entire season — including the Red Sox championship — has an asterisk because of Barry Bonds. But the raw baseball fan in me is forced to salute another fantastic postseason performance, first a great comeback, then sweeping what had been the team with the hottest of hot streaks. Enjoy it, Red Sox nation. Just know you’re forced to share your victory with Rudy Giuliani.
To answer your question… no, there’s no asterisk, unless you want to put one down to note that the Yankees lost in the first round of the playoffs.
As for the Rockies, I have a soft spot for them. Back in my days of doing a sports talk show, we had OSU baseball coach Tom Holliday on quite a bit, and this was about the time his son was trying to decide between going to college as a quarterback or playing professional baseball. I’d say Matt made the right decision, though he needs to watch those long leads at first.
So Jim… whatcha think of A-Rod leaving the Yankees?
Jim: I’m in an odd, conflicted state towards the Yankees right now. Torre was treated badly by management, no two ways about it. When a guy wins year in, year out, collects a slew of rings, etc., the way he has, he manages until he doesn’t want to anymore. (In football, I’d offer that setup for Belichek, Dungy, Shanahan and Billick.) Perhaps he was getting tired of it all, but it ought to have been his choice - not turning down a smaller one-year contract. And then, if he turns down the offer, you give him a send-off with all the bells and whistles, saluting him as one of the all-time great leaders in Yankee history.
Having said that, Girardi seems like a nice choice.
Rodriguez put up monster numbers, but let’s face it, his tenure with the Yankees was always surrounded by drama and controversy. After a couple of years being stuck in only moderate excellence (making the postseason, getting bounced early) I can’t help but wonder if the organization would be wise to stop trying to assemble the All-Star team every year and just put together a good group of hardworking guys who put the team first. Oh yeah, and get all the pitching you can.
In the world of sports, I’m more irked that it took the Jets a 1-7 record before they made a change I recommended at 1-3. The decision-making of Jets coach Eric Mangini has been maddening this year.
Hard to believe, but when the Cleveland Indians returned home about 4 a.m., there was only one fan there to greet them.
So Barb Kovalski, I’m going to congratulate you on being a true fan of your team.
And now I’d like to congratulate the Sox for making it back to the World Series. This might be a good time to do the following:
- officially retire my Coco Crisp t-shirt.
- petition MLB to start playing World Series games during the day again.
This response to Cam’s post got so long I made it a new post. I’ve been a father for a little over a month, so naturally I know everything I have to about the subject. 
Actually, I’ve been thinking about these topics a lot for oh, ten months or so.
Cam is an old pro at modern fatherhood, truly one of my role models in this area. Cam, I can’t help but suspect that your competence and attitudes come from taking on these responsibilities at a comparably early age - you got good at this and quick because you had to. Having done so, and seen the results in five great children, the last thing you’re going to worry about is somebody else’s evaluation of your parenting skills; the proof is in the pudding.
I’m trying really hard to avoid becoming that “New Dad” stereotype. You know that guy. Spitup on his shirt. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. Will show you dozens of photos of his child that all look the same at the drop of a hat, whether you ask him to or not. Discusses the texture of bowel movements in public in a disturbing level of detail.
While I thought the Time article was hit-and-miss, I think it accurately describes a bit of tension that most new fathers face. Very few men want to be seen as “unmasculine,” and very few want to be seen as “whupped.” Modern society doesn’t exactly help men feel like men, never mind fathers. For many of us, our jobs are not terribly rugged or jolting our testosterone. We sit in cubicles or behind desks, typing into a little box, developing carpal-tunnel and staring at a computer screen. We’re not exactly Lewis and Clark exploring the West.
So what do you do? I used to play flag football - got an awesome weekly rainbow of bruises from that (the blocking was full contact), and relished the chance to show off the hairline fractures in my fingers. Competition, teamwork, seeing your breath in cold weather, sprinting all out, trying to not get knocked on your ass by a guy twice your size, trying to catch a cold, hard football on the not-quite-frozen-tundra by the Washington Monument… that felt pretty damn manly.
Didn’t get a chance to return to it this fall; maybe in the spring.
If the worst problem American fathers have is that commercials and sitcoms perpetuate a stereotype of incompetence, things aren’t going that badly.
Having said that, who are the masculine role models of today? Obviously, a significant of professional athletes are terrible fathers, with multiple children born to multiple women, none of which they’ve married.
Stars of music? Come on. The damage that Kevin Federline has done to fatherhood is only exceeded by the damage Britney Spears has done to motherhood.
Television or movie stars? Let’s face it, Tom Cruise is making fatherhood look weird for everyone else.
Don’t get me started on political figures - Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, etc.
In terms of our pop culture heroes - which have a huge impact on a culture’s definition of manliness - the only pop culture masculine figure I could think of who is a father was Jack Bauer. And as we all know, he’s a terrible father, as his daughter is constantly stepping in bear traps and beset by mountain lions.
James Bond? Jason Bourne? The Pirates of the Carribbean heroes? Superman was depicted as a deadbeat dad in the last movie. Are any of the CSI detectives parents? (I don’t watch the shows enough to answer that. Any of the Law and Order characters?) Dr. House? For whatever reason, when Hollywood’s storytellers, scriptwriters, and myth-makers decide to create a male hero, they rarely decide to make that heroic figure a father. (Probably because they want the character to roll in the sack with the female lead character at some point, and having a baby or kid tagging along makes that scene more awkward.)
Rebecca Cusey noted on NRO that Friday Night Lights stands out on television because it portrays a strong father figure. Earlier, she had noted good dads were fairly rare on prime-time television.
By the way - great men can be bad fathers. I think Ronald Reagan would have to fit that category.
“Why, yes, my diaper bag looks just like “The Jack Sack” that Bauer carries. Why do you ask?”
When you really stop and think about it, you don’t actually experience a truly new flavor all that often.
Consider a bottle of outstanding wine. Even the myriad of flavors within can be shuffled off into descriptions that include familiar tastes — plum, apple, courant, chocolate, pear,
etc. Sometimes, discussion of a new flavor — “wow, I’ve tasted anything like that before” — is simple a proxy for a superlative that one can’t fully grasp. But rarely do we mean literally what we say.
Tonight, for the first time in many, many years, I experienced truly new flavors. A moment when the food that I was eating manifested itself in way that I had never experienced before.
My wife and I were dining at WD-50, the nearly eponymous creation of Chef Wylie Dufresne.
To my mind, Dufresne is a disciple of the school of Keller. He develops his menu with an eye toward new discovery, pushing the envelope ever forward to discover new flavors and textures.
Tonight, we enjoyed his creations, and they were extraordinary.
My first course was described in the menu as, “Slow poached egg, chorizo, pickled beets, dried black olives.” By design, the description does it no justice. But neither will mine. Indeed, no description can. It was, in short, an utterly new flavor. Unlike anything I had experienced before. To be sure, there was a soft boiled egg. There were beats. There was a hint of spicy chorizo. There were finely chopped chives. But who would assemble such things? And assemble them in just such a way — in the perfect proportions — to create something entirely new. And, lest you skeptics doubt, the entirely flavor was also entirely wonderful.
My second course was pork belly. It was accompanied by corn. And it too was extraordinary. Each bite was a different flavor. Some were familiar. Some were totally new. The pork belly was cooked to perfection. So was the corn. But what was one to make of “miso-walnut panacotta”? It doesn’t matter. It worked. Perfectly.
The last time that I experienced something entirely new was eight or nine years ago, eating octopus salami in Chef Roberto Donna’s Laboratorio del Galileo. It’s gone now. Temporarily, anyway, while the building is gutting and rebuilt. But the memory of that creation remains.
So, too, I suspect, will the memory of perfectly cooked pork belly and a masterful creation that began with a simple, humble egg.
If the dinner at WD-50 had ended just so, it would have been among the best I’ve ever experienced. But it was the final bite that vaulted it to one of the truly best.
As we finished desert, our waiter brought us what could be described, I suppose, as petit fours. The first was a marshmallow, coated in a delicious powder. It was excellent, but in the context of what had come before, ordinary.
But the second. The second was an invocation of familiar, like a cozy old chair. The waiter described it, as “Our take on sweet potato pie.” Now, sweet potato pie holds a special place in my heart. In short, it’s my favorite dessert, in a long list of favorite pies. (My first word, apparently, involved my reciting the letters p-i-e back to my mystified parents.) Dufrane’s single bite was perfection itself. The prefect flavor. An journey into long lost memories. A trip to a place of comfort.
Chef and author Tony Bourdain likes to say that great food comes at the junction of great flavor, memory and emotion. After the single bite of sweet potato pie, that’s where I found myself.
Dufresne’s ability to merge to entirely new and the mysteriously familiar are pure magic. I hope I get to experience it again someday soon.
Over at Bitter’s place, I saw this post about fatherhood and manhood. Apparently this is the subject of a piece in Time Magazine, but here’s the post that got me thinking.
“Masculinity has traditionally been associated with work and work-related success, with competition, power, prestige, dominance over women, restrictive emotionality. . . But a good parent needs to be expressive, patient, emotional, not money oriented. Basically, masculinity is bad for you.”
That comes from Time, btw, not the blog I just linked to. But the blogger responds in part by saying:
The problem with ideas like masculinity and manhood is not that they are bundles of bad behavior. The problem is that they’ve been hijacked by half-men. The droves of males we see advancing themselves in their careers by neglecting their children should not rightly be called real men. They are boys playing at the game of man. It is a man-boy who thinks money is his measure. It is a man-boy who works long hours so he can win the approval of his CEO. It is the man-boy who thinks he is something because he can get women to do his bidding.A real man, on the other hand, protects and provides for his family, and partners with his wife to train up his children in the way they should go. He isn’t necessarily gabby, but his children know in their souls that he loves them. He is patient and kind. He lays down his life for his family every day.
Fifty years ago, we all knew these things. Today, however, we are beset by a host of intellectuals who haven’t the sense to recognize that fewer and fewer males know how to become real men. The problem is not that masculinity is rotten. It is that so few men live up to it.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! This is why books like the “Dangerous Book for Boys” are so popular right now. Some of us recognize that our parents didn’t raise Generation X, they raised Generation Wuss.
But here’s the thing: you don’t get to be a man’s man by caring about being a man’s man. You don’t get there by reading Time freaking magazine say that masculinity is a bad thing. You get there by not caring. You don’t give a damn what the neighbors say, or whether or not your sister-in-law is going to cluck over your decisions. The only thing you care about is this:
“Is this the best thing for my family?”
Because being a man (once you’re a father) is all about your family. For the vast majority of us (Teddy Roosevelt not included), the legacy we will leave to the world is not our job, or our bank account. It’s our kids.
This doesn’t mean we drop everything in order to cater to the whims of our offspring… quite the opposite. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the few well-adjusted Americans that remain in this glorious Republic, you and I probably share some similar experiences from childhood.
- Our lives weren’t structured to every last minute of every last day. Sometimes we simply had to amuse ourselves.
- Our parents weren’t our friends. They were our mom and dad, and we clearly knew the difference. It was easier (and certainly more pleasurable) to imagine kissing our 2nd grade teacher Mrs. Wilcox than it was to imagine calling our mom or dad by their first name.
- We didn’t get our way. I don’t mean we didn’t get our way until we pouted for twenty minutes, or we didn’t get our way 20% of the time… I mean it was common for us to get told “No”, and that was the end of the discussion… unless we kept whining “please please please” and then we got punished for that.
- We knew our parents loved us. You don’t need a Ferrari on your 16th birthday to understand that. You need to be told, and you need to be shown. A hug and a kiss, an “I’m proud of you” or “You did a great job!” go a long freaking way.
We weren’t babied, we weren’t coddled, we had actual responsibilities and obligations even as kids. We weren’t abused, but bullshit wasn’t tolerated in large amounts. We were punished when we needed to be punished, and we got cool treats that were completely unexpected at times. And we turned out fine.
At least I think I did. Honestly, I really don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. I guess I’m secure enough in my manhood and fatherhood that I don’t ponder these things. The sad thing is, apparently enough Americans feel differently that Time Magazine devotes an entire article to this phenomenon.
You don’t need a self-help book to be a better man or a better dad (of course, I reserve the right to disavow this statement if I ever write such a book). Honestly, it’s not that freaking hard. “Is this the best thing for my family?” That’s all it takes. Well, that and the ability to answer that question without lying to yourself.
Because things things like this are becoming increasingly common.
On September 29th, 12 year old Graeme Frost of Maryland got to do the Democrats’ radio address, in which he told his story of how he and his sister were seriously injured in a car accident, and if it hadn’t been for SCHIP, they wouldn’t be here today. So who is this 12 year old? The Baltimore Sun did a story on the family, in which it stated the family couldn’t get health insurance through their work. But the article left out quite a few important, and interesting, bits of information, which Freeper, icwhatudo, managed to find while googling:
First, Mr. Halsey Frost, Graeme’s father, owns his own woodworking design studio, Frostworks, so his claim that he can’t get health insurance through work is shockingly deceptive. He chooses not to get health care for his family. Second, Graeme and his sister Gemma attend the very exclusive Park School, which has a tuition of $20,000 a year, per child. Third, they live in a 3,000+ square foot home in a neighborhood with smaller homes that are selling for at least $400,000.
From the fact that Democratic leadership tried to use a 12-year old to push for legislation (isn’t this taking the “think of the children” meme to a new an obscene level?) to the fact that this family is doing pretty damn well for themselves, yet somehow the local media reporting this story can’t bother to actually check and see if their story checks out.
You know, I’m used to politicians and the media lying to us, but it’s really insulting that they’re so easy to catch. It’s like they’re treating us as some sort of slack-jawed inbred yokels.
Maybe that’s because so many of us are acting exactly like that these days.
“19 years ago, Albequerque was kind of a dump.”
- Cam Edwards
(Note to now-annoyed Albequerque readers: Cam went onto say how beautiful the place was on his recent visit.)
Cam: Gee, that’s the quote of the day? Talk about slow news… we’ve got breaking news that bright lights are interesting and apparently the fact that Albuquerque (it’s spelled with a U, by the way) was a dump two decades ago is the most interesting thing someone’s said?
Man, just wait til I finish the post I’m working on.
By the way, the bright light thing was a joke. That’s an incredibly cute kid Jim has, and Lord knows I post enough kid pictures at my blog. 
This news update just handed to me from our three week old correspondent: Bright lights are interesting.
We’ll have further updates on this continuing story as the news develops.