You may have read this article by Howard Kurtz a couple of days ago. Kurtz is the Washington Post’s media critic, and I saw his piece linked by Drudge. Very interesting piece, on the media’s gushing treatment of President-elect Obama. Makes several good points. But what’s missing is this, I believe: something elementary, and something important. The media are liberal (in the modern American sense, of course — don’t get me started . . .); Obama is liberal. Of course the media are nuts about him!

If this could be admitted, I think life would be much sweeter, much easier. It’s the pretending — the pretending that there is no liberal media bias — that’s so bothersome. If the “MSM,” as we call them, could just say, “Yes, we’re liberal, do you want to make something of it?” it would be so much better. We could get on with life — and have an open European-style system, where there’s the Socialist newspaper, the Christian Democratic paper, the Communist paper, etc.

I work for an opinion journal, and am therefore nice ’n’ labeled: as a conservative journalist (or worse than conservative). I don’t mind the labeling (sort of). But why do so many on the left get to be unlabeled? Do you know what I mean?

End of whining, for now . . .

‐Oh, hang on, let me whine for a second longer, on this: Some weeks, Time and Newsweek are no less an opinion journal than National Review — or at least disturbingly close.

‐So, I’m on an airplane, and there’s a New York magazine jammed into the pocket. The cover shows a picture of an infant with his fist up. He is wearing a shirt that says “Obama,” three times. What we read is, “The President for Us: The triumph of the Obama idea, and the peculiar feeling of being part of America again.”

Lots of people are now admitting, or semi-admitting, that they don’t feel part of America unless their preferred candidates win. Fine. But isn’t that sort of — not so admirable?

‐Okay, another item, media-related: An American friend of mine who lives in Switzerland wrote, “I told my wife last night that there might be one positive outcome of an Obama victory: Maybe we’ll get some good news about America now and then . . .”

‐So, Greg Craig is back, as White House counsel? Wasn’t he last seen plumping for the Sandinistas — or protecting Bill Clinton from the Tripp truth-tellers? As you don’t need to hear from me, gonna be a long four — or eight — years . . .

‐You may have seen this article — also linked by Drudge, also from the Washington Post — about Obama and federal workers. It begins, “In wooing federal employee votes on the eve of the election, Barack Obama wrote a series of letters to workers that offer detailed descriptions of how he intends to add muscle to specific government programs, give new power to bureaucrats and roll back some Bush administration policies.”

Okay. Couple of points of interest, if I may. The article says, “The letters, all but one written Oct. 20, reveal a candidate adeptly tailoring his message to a federal audience and tapping into many workers’ dismay at funding cuts and workforce downsizing in the Bush years.”

You have heard my song before: By the Right, Bush is seen as a terrible big spender, the leader of bloated government. By the Left, he is seen as some Friedmanite Scrooge. (That would be Milton Friedman, not Thomas L. Friedman or Ignaz Friedman or any other.) (Ignaz Friedman was a pianist who lived from the 1880s to the 1940s.)

Have some more of the article: “Obama wrote to employees in the departments of Labor, Defense, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs, along with the TSA, the EPA and the Social Security Administration. Defense was the only area in which he did not make promises requiring additional spending, the letters show.”

But of course!

And a little more: “Obama repeatedly echoed in his correspondence the longstanding lament of federal workers — that the Bush administration starved their agencies of staff and money to the point where they could not do their jobs.” This starvation of government is something that anti-Bush conservatives would have a very, very hard time believing.

Finally, wish to make a point I have often made — and I apologize to longtime Impromptus readers for the repetition: People who want government money, or more government money, for one aspect of life should avoid making reference — especially snotty reference — to money spent on another aspect of life.

Let me explain myself, in part by quoting from the Post article — which quotes Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. He says, “A small diversion from the Iraq conflict, if they were put into Interior, EPA or NASA, those agencies would be in their salad days. The National Park Service is laboring under a [maintenance] backlog that would be cured by a month and a half of Iraq expenditures.”

Do you remember my favorite political cartoon of all time, or one of them? Comes from the 1980s. There are two panels. In the first, Tip O’Neill puts his arm around Reagan, saying, “Do you know how many hot school lunches your $100 million to the contras would buy?” In the second, the president says, “Why, yes, Tip: half as many as your $200 million in aid to Northern Ireland.”

Look, if you want more money for free false teeth (as WFB would say), just say so — put it out there. And if you don’t like the Iraq War, fine. But gimme a break . . .

Do you know what I mean?

‐Here is another pet theme: Too few people appreciate what risks Iraqi politicians take when they step up to serve. I am always hearing Iraqi politicians condemned and belittled, and often they deserve it. But a little perspective is nice. A little perspective would be nice at, for example, Davos: where I hear political leaders who know nothing but comfort knock Iraqi leaders, who are facing assassination and kidnapping and other things every day. Some of those political leaders, by the way — the knocking ones — are American.

Anyway, I thought of all this when reading this news article. It begins, “At least 12 Iraqis were killed Sunday in a spate of attacks” — and later we read,

The deadliest attack was in the town of Khalis in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad. Five civilians were killed and 10 were wounded when a bomb was detonated in the path of a car carrying the district’s top two political and military officials, according to a provincial security official.
The two officials, Uday al-Khadran, the district commissioner, and Lt. Col. Nihad al-Saadi, were wounded in the attack, the sixth attempt on Mr. Khadran’s life since he took office in 2004.

Yup. The sixth attempt on Khadran’s life since 2004. And how many such attempts have you and I faced? Last month, I watched Iraqi “carabinieri” being trained for the purpose of “dignitary protection.” And it is very, very serious business. Of course Iraqi politicians screw up — bad. And they should be called on it. But, myself, I always cut them a little slack . . .

‐Would like to share with you something from the publishing world. Book-review editors and others received an e-mail that began, “Please discard a galley we recently sent to you: HOW THEY SEE US (Atlas & Co.). We have decided (see below for the letter from Publisher Jim Atlas) to revise the book and have reset the publication date for September 7, 2009.” And that letter:

Dear Reviewer:
We were planning to publish an anthology of essays, HOW THEY SEE US: Writers from Around the Globe Reflect on America, on February 2nd, 2009. The idea was to break out of our cocoon of cultural insularity. As citizens of the greatest power on earth, we tend to “privilege” ourselves, to view other nations as precisely that: Other. From our pre-Copernican vantage, the United States is the center around which all else revolves. It was to correct this self-congratulatory isolationism that I invited twenty-one writers from around the world to tell us how we – our customs and our culture – appeared to them.
Their responses were both tough and heartening. There was a lot of sharp criticism of our government in general, and of the Bush administration in particular; and a deep resentment of the way the United States has muscled its way into every corner of the earth. But there was a lot of affection, too, nostalgia toward the mythic place they’d become conscious of in childhood – what the Rumanian writer Gyorgy Dragoman describes in this collection as “the land of Oz.” Its optimism, its absurd wealth, its belief in self-actualization was both easy to make fun and enviable. America was the fanciful country conjured up in Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika, where “everyone can be an artist” – or a capitalist.
In my introduction, I began with the fateful event that was said to have “changed everything” – 9/11. There was before and after: the moment when America’s world-dominance was shown to be vulnerable in a world that no longer had safe borders. That the attack on the World Trade Center was a cataclysmic event no one doubts; if the fear it engendered has abated, that’s only because memory is short – that fatal human flaw. But now we have another event that “changed everything.” Since this book was conceived, compiled and set in galleys, the election of Barack Obama as our 44th President has altered not only the United States, but the world, in whose eyes we are now seen as a place where sudden strange miracles occur, where literally overnight the luster of the American dream can be restored. President Obama won’t be leading us down the Yellow Brick Road; he’s just a man. But his election has transformed our image in the eyes of the world. How they see us now bears little resemblance to how they saw us then – before November 4th, 2008, that other indelible date.
A number of the writers we invited, perhaps solipsistically, to reflect on our national character produced essays that stand as written: they are personal, and revolve around no defining moment. Others were preoccupied by Bush, or by the coming election. These writers I invited to revise their essays in accordance with our new reality. The result is a book that conforms to its original intention: to put the focus as much on the contributors as on their subject. We wrote to writers we admired. They replied with essays about a country they admired in varying degrees; where the disapprobation was perhaps too strong, I proposed revision. Six months later, the title holds; what’s changed is the object of contemplation.

Many people, at home and abroad, will be greatly sympathetic to this letter. But I say what junior-high girls once did: Gag me with a spoon.

‐Friends, I have tons more for you, but I will write a column again soon. Want to end with some reflections on the National Review cruise — the one that just ended, our “post-election cruise”? It went to the Caribbean. Was a lot of fun. Wish you’d been there! And if you were — don’t you agree with me that it was fun?

Leaving aside the panels — which were first-rate — and concentrating on the itinerary, we stopped first in Turks & Caicos. It was (they were?) badly damaged by Hurricane Ike. The place is a little bit woebegone and barren at the moment. It will surely revive. But those classic Caribbean waters remain stellar, regardless.

We then went to Puerto Rico, which, of course, has trashy parts and glorious parts. Here’s something glorious: a walk along the coast, beneath Old San Juan, at twilight. You will seldom experience a more beautiful walk. And the stray cats are strangely clean, pretty, unmangy, and inviting.

Can I tell you something odd about St. Thomas? It’s in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the license plates say “America’s Paradise in the Caribbean” — but they drive on the left side of the road. As it did not take me long to discover. (And the families — the pods — of iguanas are a trip. They are a fascinating animal, evoking the prehistoric.)

Finally, Half Moon Cay, in the Bahamas. This is a pristine, picture-postcard beach. If you don’t like it — you don’t like beaches and you don’t like the Caribbean, which is fine. If you have any liking at all for beaches and/or the Caribbean: primo.

(We can talk about St. Bart’s and Mustique, those breathtaking, almost unreal places, later . . .)

‐Did you catch Impromptus yesterday? It sprinkled notes from a conversation with Jian-li Yang, the great Chinese dissident. And you may find it here.

‐Last, want to introduce you to a couple of NR cruisers — or tell you about them. I was sitting next to a lady at dinner, and she mentioned that she had grown up in a small Florida town. “Which?” I asked. She said I wouldn’t have heard of her town. I said, “Try me” — and she named Lakeland. “I know Lakeland!” I said. And she wondered why. I said she should guess — with the hint being, I’m from Michigan.

Well, she did not guess. So I said, “The Detroit Tigers have their spring training there.” Her face brightened, and she related a remarkable fact.

Her father and mother worked in a hotel. (I believe I heard that right.) And Hank Greenberg, the immortal first baseman (1911-86), stayed there. He gave the parents a pair of roller skates, to give to their girl — with the statement that every little girl should have a pair of roller skates.

So there I was, talking with a woman who had been given a pair of roller skates by Hammerin’ Hank. Astounding.

But there’s more. I related this story to another cruiser, a dear friend who’s from DeLand, Fla. Her parents were in the hotel business. And she related a fact of her own: Lou Boudreau, the immortal Cleveland shortstop (1917-2001), taught her how to play ping-pong.

I have known my friend for years and never knew that.

Finally, let me tell you about a cruiser of ours who is especially well-endowed, with good cheer and other things. She showed me a picture of herself that had been taken on the cruise — this was sort of a sideways shot — and she said, “How ’bout them knockers, huh?”

You see, it’s not all baseball stories and conservative policy talk . . .