D Is for Disgraceful
Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist of the early 20th century, referred to Philadelphia and its politics as "corrupt and contented."
THE SCRAPBOOK would like to think that the City of Brotherly Love has made some progress since Steffens's day, but we were reminded of the phrase by a turn of events last week in another old American city, Boston, where Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (D) appointed Paul G. Kirk Jr. (D) as a United States senator to succeed Edward Kennedy (D), who died last month.
No surprise there: Massachusetts and its statehouse are safely in Democratic hands, and Kirk is not only a faithful Kennedy family retainer-executor of the late senator's estate, among other things-but a veteran, um, party operative, having served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Take a look at the fine print, however, and you find the contented corruption. Kirk was appointed for the brief interregnum between now and the special election that Massachusetts law requires in January, five months after a Senate seat becomes vacant. That law was enacted in 2004 when the legislature, anticipating that Senator John Kerry (D) was about to be elected president, moved swiftly to strip then-governor Mitt Romney (R) of the governor's historic power to appoint someone to fill a Senate vacancy.
The fig leaf which Massachusetts Democrats have affixed to this obscene do-over is the notion that the Commonwealth would be facing an unprecedented "emergency" if the Bay State enjoyed the services of only one senator for the next few months during the national debate on Obamacare. (Oh yes, and Democrats in the U.S. Senate would be one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority.)
The absence of an active, voting senator did not seem to constitute an "emergency" for Massachusetts while Edward Kennedy (D) was away from the Senate for nearly a year before his death. But let's not get distracted by hypocrisy: It was Kennedy (D), after all, whose last public act was to sign a letter demanding that the 2004 law be overturned to allow Deval Patrick (D) to appoint a deserving Democrat to Kennedy's (D) soon-to-be-vacant seat.
Of course, THE SCRAPBOOK, as a small "d" democrat, bows to the inevitable: The Massachusetts legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic, and what the Democrats want the Democrats will get, no matter how cynical and corrupt.
For the sake of clarity, however, and to avoid future confusion, we would suggest that the statute be amended just one more time to make it official: In Massachusetts, Democratic governors have the right to fill U.S. Senate vacancies by appointment, but Republican governors do not have the right to fill U.S. Senate vacancies by appointment.
A little peculiar, perhaps, but honest, for a change.
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
THE SCRAPBOOK notes with regret the gradual disappearance over the past few months-as chronicled in these photographs from the New York Times-of New York governor David Paterson's beard and mustache.
Granted, as beards go, it was not much of one-more of an Arafat stubble-and the mustache never had a chance to achieve Geraldo Rivera proportions. But New York has not had a governor with a mustache since Thomas E. Dewey, or a governor with a beard since Charles Evans Hughes. In his brief tenure since succeeding the disgraced Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson has brought little distinction to the office of governor, but his hirsute status gave him a certain Trivial Pursuit-style renown.
Come to think of it, maybe it was the beard and mustache, with their echoes of Hughes and Dewey, that prompted President Obama to publicly humiliate his fellow Democrat last week by suggesting that Paterson not stand for election next year. Both Dewey (1944, 1948) and Hughes (1916) ran for president and, on two occasions, came very close to election. Maybe Obama wants to clear the field of competitors for his job. Or maybe Paterson wants to more closely resemble Fred Armisen, the Saturday Night Live actor who impersonates him. Either way, we'll miss the whiskers.
Sentences We Didn't Finish
"For many years I carried a regret, the feeling I had missed one of the great opportunities in life. It was back in 1996, and the offer I got was made by one of the most powerful men of the time: Jiang Zemin, the President of China. It was at a private meeting at the leadership compound in Beijing, in the same room where Mao had received his guests. The reason for Jiang Zemin's invitation was Megatrends, a book I had written in 1982 analyzing the economic, political, social, and . . . " (from the prologue to China's Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society, by John and Doris Naisbitt).
The Waltz of the Commissars
THE SCRAPBOOK thinks the dozens of so-called "czars" employed by the Obama White House might better be termed "commissars," in the grand old Soviet tradition of sending a party hack to make sure every factory manager, agricultural co-op boss, diplomat, army general, or other bureaucrat toes the party line. Former green-jobs commissar Van Jones, for instance, was typical of the apparatchik made famous by Tom Courtenay as Pasha Antipov in the movie version of Doctor Zhivago-right down to his little wire-rimmed glasses and spouting of Socialist nonsense.
And the ultimate goal of the Obamissars? Elementary, my dear comrades: They are merely the agents of "Change You Can Believe In," striving for that heavenly day when all American families will make $75,000 a year-no more, no less-and live in a little green house, with a little green car, and have two little green children with nice "free" health care, "free" college education, and a giant windmill in the back yard. Hooray.
Ismael Roldan,1964-2009
THE WEEKLY STANDARD is deeply saddened to learn of the loss of one of its longtime talents, caricaturist Ismael Roldan, who died in New York September 15. A frequent contributor especially during the magazine's first decade, the genial Roldan was widely admired for his witty, hard-edged likenesses and known among his peers for accessibility and encouragement.
As another of our contributing artists, Jason Seiler, put it, Ismael's "work was inspiring to look at. Great exaggeration and likeness, great structure, humor, draftsmanship, perspective-you name it, he was what I wanted to be like. . . . I feel as if I have lost a friend, a mentor, an inspiration, but mostly, a brother."