Ross Douthat is ready to confess his biggest mistakes for 2013.
1. In Boehner I trusted. I kicked off last January with a column hailing John Boehner, the much-maligned speaker of the House, as an "American hero" who deserved more credit than he was getting for averting shutdowns, debt-ceiling debacles and a fiscal cliff-jump in 2011 and 2012. ...
2. I underestimated Pope Francis — or misread the media. In columns pegged to Pope Benedict’s unexpected retirement and Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s elevation to the papacy, I made two claims....
There's more, but that's about the point where I lost interest. Rather than owning up to all the mistakes of the year, Douthat picked out a trio of "gee, I wasn't quite right here" moments. Believe me, thinking Boehner is going to be the hero of congress is a small mistake on the Douthat scale. I mean, we could be talking about when Douthat said that gutting the Voting Rights Act was
good for Democrats or check out any of his
GOP savior of the week columns, or even just look at
last week when Douthat waxed lyrical over what we could learn from more donkeys in the town square.
I'd be much more interested in a column from the NYT editorial team confessing that they made a mistake in handing a page to Douthat each week.
Kathleen Parker adresses her failings more succinctly
So whaddya want for a buck?
Then goes on to say she has to deal with things like word counts, and grammar, and hey, this is hard work here.
Timothy Egan has nominees for Words We Want to Forget.
With the last tick of 2013, let’s throw out the most annoying, overused and abused words of the year. A few of these terms, “twerking” or “stay classy,” die a natural death when someone like John McCain starts using them — the aural equivalent of a comb-over. Others need a push. ...
WHATEVER Long ago, “whatever” was a cover for inexpressive ignorance — Hitler invaded Poland and then, whatever. Now this word reigns as a facile dismissive: I know it’s Mother’s Day, but whatever. For the fifth year in a row, “whatever” was just rated the nation’s most annoying word in a survey done by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, beating out the hardy perennials “like” and “you know” and “just saying.”
24/7 No longer a byword for helpful availability, 24/7 evokes bad hours, poor pay and some customer service rep in India trying to explain an HDMI cable at 3 a.m. My bank is 24/7, or so they say; after a half-hour discussion with someone from this stellar institution, the “associate” said I should Google the problem. Well, yes, because Google is 24/7 in the only way that this term makes sense: It’s robotic.
WORLD-CLASS Makes the list because Donald Trump, who is decidedly not, has almost single-handedly run it into the ground. All of his casinos, golf courses, hotels and other concentrators of showy square-footage are world class, even those that ended up in bankruptcy. He is also self-declared in that realm. “I am the evidence,” he said, attacking wind turbines in Scotland that threaten his golf interests. “I am a world-class expert in tourism.” He promised that his world-class private investigators in Hawaii would expose the shocking truth of President Obama’s birth. A better use for them would be back in Scotland, on the Loch Ness case.
Maybe Donald Trump will spend 2014 in a 24/7 effort to miraculously make his gold painted junk piles world class. Or, you know, whatever...
Come on in. Let's see what else the pundits have to say on the last Sunday of this triskaidekic year.
David Firestone looks at politicians who use their power to kick those who lack power.
There is a certain personality type in politics that the public has come to know all too well. The politician, invariably male, rises to power with a gaudy indifference to manners and derision for all that came before. He is sarcastic and loves to lecture, sneers at special pleaders and whiners, and his caustic energy persuades fed-up voters that he is the one who can finally take a cattle prod to a fat and unresponsive government.
Like Chris Christie?
Once in office, however, he begins using that prod more against political enemies than problems of state, wielding his powers to punish critics, skeptics and those of questionable loyalty, while lavishly rewarding supporters. The brashness that seemed fresh and appealing in a debate loses its charm when it becomes the vengeful voice of a city or state, and voters then regret their choice. At least until the next charismatic bully comes along.
You mean, like Chris Christie?
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is the most current example. As Kate Zernike of The Times reported last week, he has had aides deliver obscenities to a union official who criticized him on the radio. His administration removed the police protection for one state senator (and former governor) after the senator was seen as too dilatory in approving the governor’s nominees. When a Rutgers political scientist serving on the redistricting commission chose a plan favored by Democrats, Mr. Christie defunded two of his programs at the state university. And his associates have recently been accused of deliberately creating traffic jams in Fort Lee, N.J., in an act of vengeance against the city’s mayor.
Yes indeed, it's a column about Chris Christie. Once we've made space by clearing out some of those oh-so-2013 words, can we just change the term for "obnoxious political bully" to the much easier "Christie?"
The New York Times editorial board takes a look at what it means to really commit to providing quality education.
Finland has for years been in the highest global ranks in literacy and mathematical skills. The reason dates to the postwar period, when Finns first began to consider creating comprehensive schools that would provide a quality, high-level education for poor and wealthy alike. These schools stand out in several ways, providing daily hot meals; health and dental services; psychological counseling; and an array of services for families and children in need. None of the services are means tested. Moreover, all high school students must take one of the most rigorous required curriculums in the world, including physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, music and at least two foreign languages.
But the most important effort has been in the training of teachers, where the country leads most of the world, including the United States, thanks to a national decision made in 1979. The country decided to move preparation out of teachers’ colleges and into the universities, where it became more rigorous. By professionalizing the teacher corps and raising its value in society, the Finns have made teaching the country’s most popular occupation for the young. These programs recruit from the top quarter of the graduating high school class, demonstrating that such training has a prestige lacking in the United States. In 2010, for example, 6,600 applicants competed for 660 available primary school preparation slots in the eight Finnish universities that educate teachers.
Jefferson Morley has a grand review of the year in punditry.
As predicted by political analyst Michael Barone, Mitt Romney arrived for the presidential inauguration in January with a mandate for change, after having won the 2012 election handily.
Romney was constrained, though, by the busted economy he inherited from President Obama — and the economic picture promptly grew worse. “Watch for unemployment to climb above 9 percent,” right-wing sage Cal Thomas wrote a year ago. He got that exactly right.
So did the analysts at Wells Fargo Securities, who shunned the irrational exuberance of some market-watchers at the end of 2012 and instead predicted that the S&P 500 would remain relatively flat this year. ...
Although it was a bad year for President Romney and the economy, Congress finally redeemed itself in 2013. Liberal talking head Bob Beckel called it. “In the aftermath of the massacre at Newtown,” Beckel said a year ago, “Congress will finally get the backbone to reinstate the assault weapons ban that ended in 2004.”
There's a lot more. Most of which comes down to that one great question we all keep asking: why in holy heck does anyone pay these people to spray their wet dreams across the editorial pages, Sunday talk circuit, and political vanity press? (And, by extension, why do I sit up on Saturday nights reading them, and why do you read what I write when I read them, and... maybe we should just stop here).
Aaron Blake says that while social conservatives may be celebrating victory in the battle of the ducks, a same-sex Appomattox may not be far away.
In the hours after the New Mexico ruling, such groups were much more focused on the controversy over “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson’s comments about homosexuality. They started petitions to end Robertson’s suspension but had almost nothing to say about the increasingly fast march toward nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage. By the end of the week, the Duck Dynasty star was reinstated. It was a high-profile and not insignificant public relations victory for social conservative groups, but it punctuated what was otherwise a disastrous week on the gay marriage front. If this past week showed us anything, it’s that social conservatives have faced such an onslaught of bad news on the marriage front that they don’t really spend much time fighting back in the court of public opinion.
Social conservatives, for losing almost every battle over same-sex marriage and then losing the will to even fight back, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.
President Romney will have something to say about that.
Eugene Robison ushers out the year with a nice GOP in disarray summary.
...the numbers do suggest that the GOP is back in the game. Voters appear willing to listen to what the party has to say.
If only the GOP had a message.
There is one proposition on which the party’s warring factions agree: "We don’t like Obama’s Affordable Care Act." But there is a lack of consensus, to put it mildly, on how this visceral dislike of a president and his signature policy initiative should translate into concrete political action.
For Republicans — to invert a classic George W. Bush bon mot — Obamacare has somehow become a divider, not a uniter. In a year when the GOP may have a legitimate chance of capturing the Senate, several primary contests appear likely to devolve into bloody battles over Obama’s health-care reforms — not whether to oppose them, but how.
By the way, George Will ends the year saying what a good year it was for Republicans. No, I will not provide a link.
Fred Pearce provides a guide to the toasty new year.
Be prepared – for anything. That will be the message of the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its first attempt in seven years to forecast the impact of climate change on specific geographical regions. Due out in March, it will emphasise versatility over any fine-tuned mitigation measures. ...
There is now increased confidence that droughts will worsen in southern Europe, the Middle East, south-western US states and probably southern Australia. Higher northern latitudes – Scandinavia, say, and Canada – can expect more rain and snow. And warnings have been ramped up about the vulnerability of world food supplies and warming in the tropics.
So... happy new year in advance.