Great Advice for Republicans

This brilliant advice comes from Paul Jacob's latest article, which spend much of it's time pretending Al Gore has a chance of getting the nomination in the service of a series of lame jokes. But then it ends with this wise and sage council.

The sad note is, with John McCain as the Republican alternative, we will all surely lose anyway. There’s nothing that can be done, now. Go home. Tend to your gardens . . . and your state and local governments. Prepare for the next time. Because this election offers lovers of liberty scant hope.

That's right. Republicans should take up gardening and ignore the presidential race. I am in wholehearted support of Jacob here.

But real lovers of liberty, i.e. Democrats, should vote for one of our two, count them, two great candidates.

Final note; I used "real lovers of liberty" in the sentence above as a satirical comment on Jacob's terminology, not to imply that Conservatives don't actually love liberty. Many Conservatives actually do love liberty, but, as it turns out, mostly their own.

What makes great Music

Over at Townhall, Paul Jacob is taking on the problem or racism, or to be more frank, he's trying to argue that racism is no big deal and that Blacks can be racist too. And then he starts talking about music.

I'm more likely to listen to James Brown than Beethoven, but I'm not going to try to make the case that James Brown was the greater musician. The everyday values that determine our personal preference differ from our appreciation of greatness in art. And I don't let race have anything to do with my judgments of preference.

Or "greatness."

. . . Music evolved to greatness as a fine art tradition in Europe, not south of the Sahara or in the wilds of the Americas. That's just a fact. Most of the great composers - whom most of us don't listen to, anyway -were white Europeans.

The RZA and the Duke have written some amazingly good music, but I doubt if even they aspired to compose on the level of, say, Bach. Offenbach, maybe. To suggest a higher level of greatness takes quite a bit more chutzpah than I have.

Of course the question Jacob carefully fails to ask is "what does determine greatness." And the answer is largely "What old white guys have determined is great." That is to say Classical Music.

The truth is that Classical Music is dead music. It's been dead for a long time, which is why the bits that have stuck around look so good. It's as if some rogue medusa wandered through the garden of music and here and there petrified a piece of music here or there. It's fellow tunes long since decayed we can see this statue and forget that at one point it meant something. Instead we admire the marble finish, the solemn dignity of a piece that has "survived" through the ages.

I do appreciate Classical music, but I appreciate it for what it is. I suspect Jazz will go through the same process, although given the inherent liveliness of the music and the fact that we do have recordings of the original recordings, we probably won't end up with the same kinds of statues.

But if you consider the value of music to be it's ability to touch people, the ability to be meaningful in their lives, well Classical Music and Jazz both largely fail that test right now.

The Signing Statement Scam

Every so often you run into a Republican who is in favor of smaller government (as opposed to a Republican who likes slamming into Democrats in a framework of pretending to care about smaller government). Those Republicans who really do favor smaller government are frustrated that with a Republican President, Republican Congress and Republican Judiciary, they still don't have the desire to actually cut government spending and power.

Rather they seem to be interested in increasing it, which brings us to today's article. Paul Jacob's latest article covers President Bush's recent and notorious signing statement, attached to the torture ban.

Take a current news story, much blogged. The president recently signed the torture ban. But he did so with his fingers crossed. That is, he added a "signing statement" to the bill, explaining how he interpreted the new law: Quite broadly, in the context of his own expansive theory of presidential power.

Like other such statements, this wasn't a Post-It note scribble, but a cleverly written legal document designed to influence enforcement as well as future legal interpretation.

Anyway the article is interesting, and worth reading. Jacob isn't any liberal - he would favor several un-democratic methods to limit the power of government.