Are they still called crocodile tears when they’re covering up for something else? Monica Crowley goes after President Obama for not intervening in Iran, and when the rest of the McLaughlin Group laughs at her, knowing that she can hardly cover up her desire for the United States to go to war with them, pseudo-righteously invokes the plight of the Iranian people in defense. This from the woman who has spent entire columns disparaging the moral worth of their religion.
Co-opting a movement to form your own agenda is common in domestic and sometimes international politics. But couldn’t Crowley give it a break? If she stepped back for a moment and truly examined the neoconservative position—which is covertly and opportunistically co-opting the revolutionary message to force war with their country—she’d be ashamed of herself. At least I’d hope she’d be.
Soon enough your blogger will be en route to our nation’s capital, where he will join the ranks of the loathsome Hill intern. To help him experience that which this great city offers, he’s looking for some District/political-type books to read, to help give him context and also to refresh his mindgears in between his academic summer reading list.
Here’s a few I’m looking to start with. Tweet your suggestions—novels, biographies, ethnographies, poetry, essays, anything—to @graisonhc or email them to graison@uchicago.edu.
Education reform: should America specialize earlier?
John McWhorter waxes reformist on the future of American education:
I see nothing disturbing in an alternate universe where most students of what we now think of as freshman age are, instead, out in the world learning to ply their trade—in an office, workshop, or conservatory. Instead, most of them spend six years after tenth grade gamely tolerating several dozen courses, most with only the vaguest relationship to the jobs they will seek—or who they will be as people. Is this really the way we would do things if we were building from the ground up? […] Think of the money that would be freed up for education at younger ages, which almost all seem to agree we need to provide more of.
McWhorter has a point. We already know that each dollar spent on early childhood education pays back ten. I’m guessing that forcing Jane College to take Intro to Chem so she can get a business degree (which she’s pursuing only because she knows that BA/BS looks better on a resume than a tech school degree) has not done the same. So, from an efficiency standpoint, it’s hard to argue against the need for such reform.
That said, I can’t help but think of how different my own education would have been under such a system. I would never have been a literature major if I hadn’t had the time to develop an interest in the humanities in the latter two years of high school and my first year of college. Today that interest shapes much of my thinking and my aspirations. What if I wouldn’t have had the time to develop that passion?
My qualm: our education system already has enough trouble teaching critical thinking skills and instilling a passion to learn in its students. Would forcing students to choose a career path at sixteen help fix that?
Proponents of such radical reform have to mount a huge burden of proof to answer that. Which is good. Because the consequences of this policy reach far beyond the economic. More important things are stake.
“I continue to be a little bit astonished by how little attention the political establishment is giving to the implications of the routinization of a 60-vote supermajority requirement for all Senate business. This is a very new “tradition” in American governance, it goes against everyone’s common understanding of how democratic procedures are supposed to work, and there’s very little reason to believe that the results will be beneficial in the long run. The fact that the Democrats currently hold 58-59 Senate seats is, I think, to some extent clouding people’s thinking about this. It’s quite rare for either party to have a majority that large. And the implication of the currently evolving norm is that a new president with a 54 or 55 copartisans in the Senate could find himself completely unable to confirm vast numbers of subcabinet nominees, rendering the country essentially ungovernable.”
Yglesias on Ambinder on the disturbing trend of holding up presidential nominees to force the ruling party to waste legislative energy.
You’ve probably already come across the figures, but in case not, First Read has the latest of public opinion on the politics of healthcare reform:
Almost three-quarters (73%) of Americans trust doctors to make the right decisions regarding reform. The Obama administration seems to understand this, given the president’s outreach to the American Medical Association. A majority — 58% — trust Obama to make those decisions.
But Congress seems to have its work cut out for it, especially the GOP. More Americans trust pharmaceutical (40%) and insurance (35%) companies to reform the health-care system than congressional Republicans (34%).
Congressional Democrats get somewhat better numbers (42%), but certainly nothing to brag about.
