Jonathan Chait calls out Ross Douthat on his recent column, Debt-Ceiling Extortion Isn’t So Bad, Really. Douthat is arguing that forcing a Debt Ceiling crisis isn’t that bad. According to him, the problem with the Republicans is that they are asking for something that is unreasonable, the defunding of Obamacare. If they were just demanding a Grand Bargain, everything would be fine. Chait rightly notes that this is a theme with Douthat: assuming that the Republican Party was the “reasonable” party Douthat wants it to be. But I have a different issue with the man.

The second half of Chait’s article is about Douthat’s admonishment of President Obama to push for the Grand Bargain that Douthat thinks is so important. Chait goes point by point and notes that Obama has done exactly what Douthat thinks he should. This reminds me of Thomas Friedman who is now and forever claiming that we need a new centrist party that just so happens to be the Democratic Party under Obama and Clinton. But at least Friendman is (probably) a Democrat. At least he thinks that after looking at the two parties, Obama is closer to his ideal than, say, Mitt Romney.

But what are we to make of Douthat? He is a Republican. Yet apparently what he wants is what Obama is offering. He isn’t a Republican politician who pretty much has to disagree with whatever the Democrats say. So why all the posturing and pretending? Why can’t he just come out and admit that Obama is exactly what he’s looking for in a president? The answer is simple: Obama is not what he’s looking for in a president.

If you look at Douthat’s writing over time, a pattern emerges. He is for exactly the same policies as the rest of the Republican Party. But he’s not a politician, so he can be more nuanced. He doesn’t have to answer to a constituency that is calling for blood. But he wants to defund Obamacare. He wants to “reform” entitlements. He wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline. Does he really want a Grand Bargain? I figure it is a deal he thinks is worth doing but he’d much rather just have the spending cuts. So urging Obama to do what Obama has been doing almost from the moment he got into office is a kind of false equivalence: the Republicans refuse to consider a Grand Bargain but so does Obama!

This is the thing about the so called reasonable Republicans: they are for exactly what the extremists are for. But it is particularly bad coming from people like Douthat. I don’t doubt that if he were a politician facing re-election in Texas, he would sound every bit as extreme as Louie Gohmert. One of the reasons our country’s politics are so screwed up is that people like Douthat cheer lead for one side while not admitting to agreeing with it. If we are to believe his writing, Douthat (and Barro and Frum…) ought to be Democrats—conservative ones, sure, but Democrats nonetheless. But such people don’t really fit in the Democratic Party. They are very much in the mainstream of the Republican Party. But their posturing provides a patina of reasonableness to the Republican party. That’s their entire reason for existence.

I’ve just been introduced to the British television series Sherlock. Netflix estimated a ranking of 5 out of 5 stars for me. I think the only time that happened before was based upon an Akira Kurosawa film, and of course, it was right. So last week, I sat down and watched the first episode. It was good so I watched the second tonight. Based upon them, I wouldn’t give it that high a rating, but it is very good. What the producers have done is modernize the characters. This is brilliant because there is a very big problem with the old stories: Sherlock Holmes is a very unlikable character. It is Watson we like. Watson’s whole Victroian era “I was in the Anglo-Afghan War” thing probably made him very cool to readers at the turn on the 19th century. But for the modern reader (or viewer), he seems very stodgy. So naturally we gravitate toward Holmes, only to find that he really is an asshole.

Sherlock fixes these problems by making Watson a military doctor retired from the Afghanistan War, which is, you know, just perfect. And played by Martin Freeman, I think he is who most modern men wish they were: courageous, smart, and generally a decent guy. He provides the reality that the show needs. Without him, it is just another super hero action show. Or perhaps Monk without the humor.

A similar transformation is accomplished with Sherlock Holmes. Modern depictions of that character have always struggled with him because of his drug use: cocaine and (almost never mentioned in modern tributes) morphine. They have either ignored it, psychologized him, or turned him into some kind of self-destructive madman. There are basically two valid ways to read the character. Either he is just bored or it is a character flaw. Both are pretty much the same. He is a man who has an overactive mind and he simply needs to change it. Regardless, Doyle was right to understand that someone as brilliant as Holmes would certainly have aspects to his personality that most people wouldn’t like. (I wrote about this in the modern world, recently.) Sherlock does not shy away from Holmes’ antisocial tendencies, without turning him into Robert Downey Jr.

In the first episode, “A Study in Pink” (which is quite similar to A Study in Scarlet), we are introduced to two important characters. First, there is Holmes’ brother Mycroft. I suspect that the writers expected his revelation to be a surprise, since he is made out to seem like Moriarty. Anyone who knows the original, however, would not have been fooled. He is not an important character in the books, but he is ever so much fun. Sherlock seems downright normal compared to his brother. Just the same, the original character is clearly changed in Sherlock.

The other character is Moriarty, who, though only mentioned, apparently set up the villain in the first episode. I don’t much like the character. For one thing, he hardly exists in the original stories. The very idea of a criminal mastermind soils the whole thing. And then to give the character an Irish name adds racism on top of that. It is only since Doyle’s death that other writers have taken it upon themselves to turn Moriarty into a major character. I guess Sherlock wouldn’t be complete without him, but it does tire me.

In the second episode “The Blind Banker,” we get to see a graffiti artist Raz, who I think is supposed to be part of the Baker Street Irregulars. In the first episode is Inspector Lestrade, similarly modernized. Half the fun of the series is seeing what they will do with the characters and the plots (which at least thus far hearken back to original stories). For someone like me, it is perfect, because it takes away what has always bothered me with the stories. The series is effectively what Arthur Conan Doyle would be producing if he were alive today.

I’m not saying the series is great. It’s hard to say after seeing only two episodes. It also has lots of modern Steven Soderbergh like editing as well as digital images floating across the screen. None of that is necessary, I think. In fact, I find it kind of annoying. And I’m not too fond of the ticking bomb endings. But it is still quite good—better than almost all of the television that I manage to see. And it is sure to please anyone who likes the original.

On Friday, I wrote about something that is really bugging me, Debt Ceiling Crisis Options. I hate the idea that is being pushed by many conservatives that the Debt Ceiling is no big deal. On Bloomberg TV, John Boehner said, “Those who have loaned us money, like in any other proceeding, if you will—the bondholders usually get paid first.” What he means is that the United States government has a greater obligation to bond holders than it does to Social Security Recipients.

What I find so vexing about this is that there is a very casual class war going on here, “Of course the rich must be paid first!” I just don’t see any difference between the bond holders and the Social Security recipients. Both groups paid the government money in the past in exchange for returns now. It is true that if we are late, bond holders may well think twice before they loan money to the government again. But isn’t it also true that people will be less inclined to pay payroll taxes for a benefit they may or more not receive? (I have thought about this a lot. Those who would cut Social Security never seem to think that support for the highly regressive payroll tax is dependent upon a decent return.)

NPR had a very good segment on this tonight, In A Debt Crisis, US May Have To Decide Payment Priorities. It quoted Boehner, of course. But the meat of the piece was a interview with Mark Patterson who was the chief of staff at the US Treasury from 2009 until this May (now at the Center for American Progress). He said that if you asked any recent Treasury Secretary of either party they would tell you this idea of prioritizing the bond payments is “a god-awful idea.” He also provided an excellent analogy:

What this is really all about is more cover for John Boehner and the Republicans. He wants to crash the economy and then stand back and say, “Well, if you did what I said, everything would be fine! Don’t blame me.” But it is still a good talking point. I’m sure the Fox News viewers will just love up—right up to the time when their Social Security checks stop coming.

And Patterson goes further. He notes that the Treasury’s system is not designed to do what too many Americans do each month: figure out how much of each of its bills it will pay. The system is designed to pay all of its bills in full all the time. So even if Obama agreed with Boehner that the bond holders are ever so much more important than our retired citizens (and I’m very much afraid that he does), we proably couldn’t manage it. If this continues on, it will be a clusterfuck.

Chris Cillizza over at the The Fix blog has an interesting article with one of those terrible Washington Post style headlines, Want to Know Why the Government Is Shut Down? This Chart Explains it. The chart in question is not very useful. Basically it shows (The shock!) that most members of the House of Representatives are in districts that are quite safe. This is an old and very boring argument: Washington is dysfunctional because of polarization!

Excuse me while I yawn.

But it’s worse than that. There is a halfway interesting argument to be made from the data, although Cillizza completely misses it. He notes:

What I find interesting here is so many more Democrats have incredibly safe seats. Of course, there is a reason for this: gerrymandering. That’s what I wrote about last week, Gerrymandering Didn’t Make GOP Extreme. The idea behind gerrymandering is to make your own party’s seats safe enough but to make your opponents’ seats extremely safe.

So we have to ask, “With more than half of the Democratic House seats extremely safe, why don’t we see extremism on the part of Democrats?” There are a lot of reasons for that (e.g. money in politics, voter apathy), but I just want to discuss one here. Political caucuses tend to be governed by norms. That is why we don’t jump from socialism to fascism and back every time control of government switches. Those norms are very much active in the Democratic Party where I’m sure our elected official still often think, “You just don’t do that kind of thing.” Norms have completely broken down in the Republican Party. A good example is Ted Cruz. Normally, a Senator would never think to try to control the House caucus. You just don’t do that kind of thing. But now in the Republican Party you do.

What we see in his article is that Chris Cillizza is just another Villager, determined to find that Washington is messed up because, “Both sides do it!” That’s not just wrong. I have no problem with wrong. I’m wrong quite a lot. But that outlook on politics greatly limits seeing things as they are. Regardless of what happens, it gets put in their Both Sides Now box and shipped out. If Cillizza had been around for the start of World War II, he would have reported it like this, “Sure, the Germans invaded Poland, but the English are in India. Let’s not forget that!” Cillizza ought to be selling insurance somewhere.

On this day in 1892, the great film producer Dwain Esper was born. He produced Reefer Madness. The story is interesting. A church group had produced a film called Tell Your Children about the evils of cannabis that they wanted to show to parents to alert them of the threat to their children that was that the demon weed. Well, Dwain Esper saw the film and bought it. He added some more sex to it and hit the road. He was a character like William Castle, effectively creating his own market. Castle was much better, but Esper was actually the pioneer of the practice. He produced and directed a number of other drug and sex movies. I’m sure the man was a character. He lived into the 1980s.

The great Iranian singer Fereydoun Farrokhzad was born in 1938. In the video below, you will hear him sing a song that is used in Fiddler on the Roof. That goes along with what I’ve long known about the Middle East: if you take the people out of the area, they love each other because they are the same people. Of course Farrokhzad was not especially Muslim. In fact, he was jailed at the start of the Iranian revolution and once released, he fled to Germany. He’s a fascinating guy. Although he is known as one of the greatest entertainers Iran has ever produced, he had a PhD in Political Science. Sadly, he was murdered (stabbed 40 times) at the age of 53. But I always think of people like him when some conservative tells me that “those people” just hate us. Yeah, those people are all alike.

American traitor Oliver North is 70 today. He is one of the great villains of this country. But he was the leading edge of something that currently has the government shut down and headed toward default. When he testified before Congress he broke all norms of respect for elected leaders. And he did it while wearing a Marine Corps uniform. It was, of course, applauded by conservatives—the same conservatives who freaked out when Natalie Maines said, “We’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” But instead of being in jail or dead, he is said to have a net worth of $5 million. Are you not proud?

Other birthdays: Elizabethan playwright John Marston (1576); Romantic composer Felix Draeseke (1835); Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad (1897); and the great Archbishop Desmond Tutu (82).

The day, however, belongs to the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma who is 58 today. I don’t know much about him, but he really does play beautifully. It would please me if he were more varied in his repertoire. But here he is with most of the first movement of the Dvorak Cello Concerto:

Happy birthday Yo-Yo Ma!

Who’s tired of the government shutdown? It really is boring. All we see is Republican talkers repeating the same old talking points, “They won’t negotiate!” On the left, it is a bit more nuanced, but the truth is, it seems to be mostly the Republicans doing the talking. And it’s amazing that the Democrats are doing so well, because most of the media continues its knee jerk response: can’t you both just compromise? For the umpteenth time: there is no compromise with extortion. And that is especially true when the extortioners are as clueless as the Republicans seem to be.

This morning, Jonathan Chait wrote a very depressing article, How Republicans Failed to Understand the Democrats’ Debt-Ceiling Logic. He argues persuasively that it isn’t that Republicans are just pretending to not understand the Democrat’s position, they really don’t understand it. I wouldn’t go quite that far. Certainly John Boehner understands what’s going on. But as we’ve seen time and again, a lot of high profile Republicans (including Congressmen) are as ignorant as the base.

I was very interested to read this morning that Antonin Scalia reads only the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times—two very conservative newspapers. He said he used to read the Washington Post but it was so “shrilly, shrilly liberal.” That’s funny because the Post is now known as a fairly conservative paper. We can thank God that maybe some actual news articles get through to him from the WSJ, but I suspect he concentrates on the editorial pages more than anything. He also listens to at least one conservative radio ranter. So if a Supreme Court justice is getting informed about the world from such biased sources, what can we expect from some Representative from Oklahoma?

As we approach a government default, the Republicans continue to ask for even more concessions. The government shutdown isn’t working, but they act as though it is a done deal and now all Obama must decide is exactly what he wants to give up in exchange for Boehner raising the Debt Ceiling. At one time, I has relieved to hear Boehner say that he wouldn’t allow a government default. But all that really seems to mean is that he is positioning himself to blame Obama once a default happens.

Paul Krugman’s column this morning argues that the Republicans just don’t know what they are doing, The Boehner Bunglers. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it is more that Republicans don’t know what to do. They are flailing around. This goes back to my idea that the Republicans are practical nihilists. Most of them came into office promising everything. And they truly believe that they can get what they want through pure force of will. Now that this is shown to be a delusion, they don’t know what to do. It’s like at the end of Terminator 2 where the T-1000 tries various forms hoping that one of them will work.

Meanwhile, we wait as the government shutdown goes on. And we wait for a government default. But most of all, we hope that soon the Republicans will figure out that no minor tweaks of their extortion attempt will work. Then we can got back to our usual political system with the normal dysfunctional GOP. That’s a lot more fun and lot less dangerous.

I just saw The Artist for the first time. I haven’t avoided it; tonight was simply the first chance I got to see it. A number of people have recommended it to me. And let me be blunt: it is my kind of film. People like me love films about film. And The Artist is charming as hell. If for no other reason, the film should be viewed just to see the dog.

Looking through what people have said about the film, it looks like they may have taken it all too seriously. That’s especially true of the few who didn’t like it. To put it simply: it is a 1920s silent film about a 1920s silent film star’s career. And as such, the film relishes the same cliches that it parodies in films inside the film. And it is melodrama from beginning to end. Yet it is incredibly compelling.

It has me thinking how little reality we ever see in any film. But modern films work very hard to hide that fact and I guess as the audience, we play along. Still, that means that the storytelling gets clogged up with a lot of nonsense. What I felt more than anything in The Artist was how fast the story moved along. The film is the same length as both The Expendables II and A Good Day to Die Hard. Yet The Artist seemed half as long.

Part of this is undoubtedly just that The Artist is a well crafted script. Too much of these action film scripts are padded to death with explosions and so on designed to distract. The Artist is filled with wonderful comic bits, which at least tell us more about the people and the totally unreal world they live in. But it is more than just screenwriting craft. The story works because it doesn’t try to be anything but a story. Normally, I would think that would create something of limited interest, but apparently not.

It’s also nice that the film is devoid of any subplots. To me, subplots are what writers come up with when they can’t make the main story interesting (Or long!) enough. As you may have noticed, I haven’t mentioned the female lead Peppy Miller because she isn’t really all that important to the film except that she and Valentin clearly have a thing for each other and she is the counter example to his decline. There is one great scene with them in the middle of the film where he overhears her talking to reporters saying, “Out with the old, in with the new. Make way for the young!” It’s right out of All About Eve, but especially terrible because we know Valentin can hear her. So he goes up to her table and says, “I’ve made way for you.” And he walks out.

Another aspect of the film is its almost complete absence of exposition. When Valentin was arguing with Zimmer about continuing it make silent films, I thought The Artist screwed up. It didn’t need all that explaining. In fact, I thought the film could have used half as many title cards. Still, it had one-tenth the exposition of most modern films. Well crafted films don’t have to do much telling. A great example in the film was when we first meet Valentin’s wife and all we see of her is the newspaper with the headline “Who’s That Girl?” It made me think of this great “Breakfast Montage” scene from Citizen Kane. The last cut with her reading Kane’s competitor’s paper needs no words:

One more film I was reminded of was Umberto D when Valentin tries to kill himself. Sometimes the only thing between us and eternity is a little dog who teaches us the meaning of life. And that’s a very interesting contrast because Umberto D is a serious film with serious things to say. The Artist is a silly film with nothing particular to say. Yet they both do say a great deal.

Afterword

Technically, the film was wonderful as well. The music is especially important. The emotional content of almost all the scenes could have been completely changed with different music. It was wonderful.

For obvious reasons, I am behind on my writing about the various outrages that result from even a cursory attention to the news. So you will forgive me if I dig back a bit into my collection of current events. Over a week ago, Glenn Greenwald brought my attention to a bit of mainstream media propaganda that is totally unacceptable, Brian Williams’ Iran Propaganda.

On the 27 September NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams covered Obama’s historic phone call with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. He said, “This is all part of a new leadership effort by Iran—suddenly claiming they don’t want nuclear weapons!” Greenwald goes into the long history of Iran claiming this, including the fatwa by the top leadership in Iran. Iranian official Ramin Mehmanparast said, “We are the first country to call for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. When the highest jurist and authority in the country’s leadership issues a fatwa, this will be binding for all of us to follow. So, this fatwa will be our top agenda.”

More to the point: for a number of years there has been no evidence at all that the Iranians are trying to build nuclear weapons. And if you look at the world from Iran’s perspective, they are much more interested in getting nuclear weapons out of Israel than they are getting them into Iran. The big unstated fact is that Israel has lots of nuclear weapons and that has to concern the rest of the countries in the Middle East, especially considering how belligerent the Israelis are. (Not that I’m saying they don’t have some cause for that!)

None of this takes away from the fact that Iran might be working on a nuclear weapon or that they might at least want one. I’m absolutely certain that some people in Iran want nukes; there are those kinds of people everywhere (especially in the United States). But Williams’ comment is really interesting because it shows that it doesn’t much matter what Iran (or pretty much any other country) says; he doesn’t listen. If he wants to hate on Iran, fine; he could say, “Iran has long claimed they don’t want nuclear weapons, but objective journalists like me—Brian Williams—know better!” But to pretend that Iran has not been saying what they most definitely have is beneath contempt.

More than that, it is dangerous. I remember after the Iraq invasion, after it was clear there were no weapons of mass destruction, people in the mainstream press were amazed. I even remember someone on television (I don’t remember who) saying, “Why didn’t Saddam Hussein just say he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction?!” That blew my mind. I didn’t follow the news nearly as much as I now do, yet I knew that Hussein had said just that over and over and over again. Whenever it was mentioned, of course, it was ridiculed. At minimum, the subtext was, “Yeah, right!”

I suspect if the neocons got their way and we had a huge war with Iran that killed (my guess) a couple million people, we would find the same thing. It would turn out that the Iranian government had no nuclear weapons program. If that happened, I can well imagine Brian Williams saying with some shock, “Why didn’t they just tell us they had no nuclear weapons?!” And similarly ignorant American television audiences everywhere would scratch their heads, “It’s a puzzler, ain’t it?”

On this day in 1897, the great biochemist Florence Seibert was born. She isolated a pure form of tuberculin which is an important part of tuberculosis tests. You have to remember that a hundred years ago, tuberculosis was a terrible disease that killed many people in a very painful way. There is such a tendency to forget the contributions of female scientists like Dr. Seibert. I know from my own experience in academia that there are often “big men” in fields who have not done that much. And then there are others (much more likely to be women) who are not big deals despite important work. Somehow, they just don’t have “gravitas.”

Other birthdays: mathematician Richard Dedekind (1831); inventor George Westinghouse (1846); composer Karol Szymanowski (1882); pioneering astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi (82); actor Elisabeth Shue (50); and actor Jeremy Sisto (39).

The day, however, belongs to actor Carole Lombard who was born in 1908. I especially remember her for her last film To Be or Not to Be. Shortly after making it, she died in a plane crash returning from a tour selling defense bonds. It’s sad, but she left us with a whole lot of fun films from the 1930s. It is slightly ironic that her last film spoofs the Nazis. But it is as good today as ever—maybe better. The film is very funny, but there aren’t a lot of great clips. Lombard is amusing in the following clip. “This is the first time I’ve ever met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes. Bye!”

Happy birthday Carole Lombard!