'Perhaps America Has Learned Some Hard-Won Wisdom from Its Folly'

Today on NRO

CHARLES C.W. COOKE: An English war for American independence. The Civil War of 1776.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The president put politics and ideology ahead of preserving hard-won gains in the Middle East. How Obama Lost the Middle East.

DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH: Feminists care more about supporting their political allies than their principles. The White House's Invisible Pay Gap.

ELIANA JOHNSON: State education officials threaten to sue over executive orders he issued against the program. Will Bobby Jindal Have to Fight Common Core in Court?

SLIDESHOW: Warriors in the Sky.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

July 3, 2014

Enjoy your Fourth of July! No Morning Jolt for Friday – NR Publisher Jack Fowler will be filling in.

'Perhaps America Has Learned Some Hard-Won Wisdom from Its Folly'

O·ba·ma: \ō-ˈbä-mə\ verb. To make a promise you have no idea how to keep.

Allow Ace from Ace of Spades to stir your heart for the United States of America and reassure your faith in your fellow citizens and in the future of our country. He's discussing the Quinnipiac poll indicating Americans are ready to write off Barack Obama as a failed president, incapable of leading or solving any of the nation's problems.

It is cathartic and reassuring for We, The Gaslighted, to finally have the majority of the public agreeing that we were essentially right all along.
That shouldn't matter — ideally, a man possessed of the truth should not care if his truth is popular or not — but as a practical matter it does.

It is an altogether unpleasant experience to be separated from one's fellows and the greater culture by knowing a truth the masses consider unspeakable. And so then it is pleasant to see the mass of humanity regain its senses.

It is good to no longer be called "crazy" by people who are themselves overtaken by madness.

So the Cult of Personality is well and truly dead. Never again will we hear Hosannas about our Great Leader's supple mind, erotically throbbing pectoral muscles, or literary genius, except perhaps from our Great Leader himself or his whispering sycophant Valerie Jarrett.

This is good for America, as well: It is a stupid and frightening and shameful thing for a people to fall so hard for a ridiculous, false-on-its-face fairy tale about a Crusading Hero Who Will Deliver Us All. This is how nations die.
Perhaps America has learned some hard-won wisdom from its folly. Perhaps there will not be a Next Charismatic Cult of Personality Hero on a White Horse, at least for a generation.

Perhaps Obama will become a shorthand for a dreadful folly, like "Ozymandias" or "Icarus."

I could scarcely imagine a man more deserving of such a fate as the Failed God Obama.

But perhaps the American public is every bit as stupid as I think they are, and will fall for the next Man on a White Horse just as easily as it did for this one.

Cleveland vs. Dallas: Winner Hosts the Republicans in 2016!

Say it with me: Hosting the GOP national convention, officially nominating the presidential candidate in a given state does not help that presidential candidate win the state. Republicans did not win Florida in 2012 (Tampa). They did not win Minnesota in 2008 (St. Paul). They did not win New York in 2004 (New York City). They did not win Pennsylvania in 2000 (Philadelphia). They did not win California in 1996 (San Diego).

So when Hugh Hewitt says picking Cleveland to host the 2016 Republican National Convention is the first step to winning Ohio, history does not bolster his argument.

And yet, if Republicans pick the other city, Dallas, the narrative for the lazy media is written: Republicans are the party of the South, the party of rural America, the party of rednecks, gun-owners, country music, J.R. Ewing and big oil companies, cowboy boots, and so on. The party may want to embrace the Texas jobs boom, the energy boom, and the fact that so many Americans are flocking to the state to live their American dream.

So then there's Cleveland.

This Lake Erie city has suffered some bad public relations over the years and has made headlines for all the wrong reasons: poverty, pollution, foreclosure, bizarre crimes and a fleeing population. Yet, thanks to billions of dollars spent burnishing the city's image and its physical face, Cleveland is one of two finalists for the Republican national convention in 2016 and a longshot candidate to host the Democrats, as well.

Hugh will be ecstatic if they pick Cleveland, of course:

I spent this past Saturday morning touring the new convention center — on Twitter @clevemtgs — built on the lakefront across from the Browns' FirstEnergy Stadium, the Great Lakes Science Center and, of course, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The lakefront sparkles as does the whole downtown.

The convention center, which would host the media stiffs, contains hundreds of thousands of square feet of exhibition space, meeting rooms, and ballrooms, and is a mere 10 minute, 0.9 mile walk from Quicken Loans Arena, where the formal proceedings would be gaveled in, a walk that goes down 4th street past the House of Blues and scores of restaurants and bars that would no doubt be second home to the scribblers and Tweet legions. Beautiful new hotels are already open and more rising and stately old ones as well, and the Tower City Center — soon no doubt to be the Manziel Center — brings the city's excellent red, green and blue lines into the heart of the center, providing the mass transit for further out delegations that St. Paul, Minn., and Tampa Bay, Fla., lacked in 2008 and 2012 respectively.

The decision should be announced and/or leaked in late July or early August.

This Section of the Morning Jolt Comes With Its Own 80s Music Playlist

The other night I caught a few episodes of National Geographic Television's series, The 80s: The Decade That Made Us and found myself feeling intense nostalgia.

We're in a boom time for 80s flashbacks. AMC is offering "Halt and Catch Fire," an intriguing drama series set in the nascent personal-computer industry in Dallas in 1983.

This is a commanding haircut.

There's a new album out from Michael Jackson. The multiplex features the Transformers again, as well as a remake of 21 Jump Street, and a slew of more 1980s remakes are on the way. A new Star Wars film will be back in a few more years. The Duke Boys are riding again in a commercial for Auto Trader. Two summers ago, Gotye gave us a song that feels like it came from a long-lost Sting or Peter Gabriel cassette. You can't tell me that those robots of Daft Punk wouldn't have fit in well with Devo's red plastic flowerpot hats, Thomas Dolby's blinding science, or Toni Basil's so-fine cheerleader Mickey.

Macintosh HD:Users:jimgeraghty:Pictures:Daft Punk x Storm Troopers.jpg
"The Emperor has judged you overplayed."

Even the iconic A-ha "Take on Me" video reappeared in the form of a Volkswagen commercial late last year.

Watching National Geographic's fast-moving documentary series on the major world events and cultural trends of the 1980s, I was struck by how many events seemed like truly nationally-shared experiences. It is entirely possible that I am misremembering and romanticizing my years of childhood and early adolescence. But am I wrong that almost everybody who was old enough to understand the event remembers the Challenger explosion? Or how about Hands Across America? Laughing about "New Coke"? I wasn't old enough to watch The Day After, but I remember some of the hubbub and news coverage of it. I was stunned to learn that an estimated 100 million Americans watched it. (The U.S. population in 1983 when it aired was 233 million!)

We have a cornucopia of entertainment, news, lifestyle, and media options that were absolutely unthinkable back in the 1980s, and there are a lot of advantages to the modern world. Today Bruce Springsteen's "57 Channels and Ain't Nothing On" would be considered a crappy basic cable package. We're in the era of a couple hundred channels, and as a result, very little, if anything, gets our collective attention anymore. This means nationally shared experiences are fewer and far between.

When VH1 creates its "I Love (whatever we end up calling this decade)," the comedians and minor celebrities will spend time discussing "major" pop culture phenomena, figures, and, trends that I simply never encounter.

For example, as far as I can tell, the Kardashian family consists of Kim . . . and the other ones. Breaking Bad was one of the most-discussed television shows of recent years — a cover subject in National Review! — and its biggest audience was . . . 6.4 million viewers.

The performers of the top five singles on iTunes right now:

1) Five Seconds of Summer
2) MAGIC!
3) Sam Smith
4) Ariana Grande
5) Nico & Vinz

I have never heard of any of these people. "Ariana Grande" is something I hear called out at Starbucks.

I don't think this just reflects me being an old fogey. ("You mean older fogey!" -- The Couch. Shut up, Jonah's couch! Get back in the Goldberg File where you belong.) This isn't me complaining that these kids today play music that sounds like noise. I'm saying that you can have a top five single in the U.S. and not permeate my cultural bubble, and I think there's a good chance that these five haven't permeated your bubble, either.

We've seen this Balkanization in the news world, where conservatives believe that there is some sort of news that they think is hugely important, and extensively covered by the media they consume — Kermit Gosnell, Benghazi, the IRS scandal — and that same news barely makes a ripple among the apolitical or "low-information voter." (Perhaps the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union prompted Americans to ensure they remained "steady-baseline-of-information voters.")

Maybe the only truly shared national experiences we have in today's America are in the realm of sports. Perhaps U.S. national-team goalkeeper Tim Howard is the new little baby Jessica stuck in the well.

ADDENDA: Check out this really important speech from Bibi Netanyahu in Israel. Daniel Pipes dissects it here. The brief version is that the fight against militant Islamism appears very dire and difficult in the near future, but the odds are with us in the long term.

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