Aug
26
2024

How Can We Miss Them When They Won't Go Away?

It didn't take long for the rest of the family to denounce RFKJr:

I only briefly wondered what made this statement "personal". Being posted on Twitter for the Whole Wide World to see and all.

But (in any case) it didn't take long for John Podhoretz to make the obvious response:

If you're a Kennedy, leaving a girl to drown in the car you just drunk-drove off a bridge is forgiveable. Endorsing a Republican isn't.

At National Review, Jack Butler says it: The Kennedy Legend Deserves to Fade Away.

And for actual Kennedys, “public service” has meant that they are entitled to rule over us, however they wish, and we must accept this for the sake of the myth. We must look away (with media help) as a drug-addled JFK indulges his sexual appetites while president. While perhaps acknowledging, as Charles Pierce did in a 2003 Ted Kennedy profile, that his role in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne deprived Ted of the “moral credibility” he needed to become president, we must not forget that “through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age” if Kopechne had lived. Public service has turned out to be a reliable way for the Kennedys to serve themselves. It’s Kennedys all the way down — which may help explain why in 1979 Ted could not answer the simple query of why he was running for president.

The portentous yet nebulous presentation, the arrogance disguised as selflessness, the leftism masquerading as common sense — all are meant to keep alive what remains of Camelot. It is a tenet of Arthurian legend that the king is merely resting and will return one day when the need for him is greatest. Yet the foundation of small-r republican America is a rejection of such monarchical or aristocratic pretensions. America has seen political dynasties, of course. But they have risen — and fallen — on their merits. If the Kennedy dynasty has none left, then let it fall, and take the myth of Camelot with it. We need not return. After all, it is a silly place.

I bet many readers will be able to guess where that last link will take you.

(And, sorry, I ran out of NR gift links for August. Subscribe, peon.)

Jeff Jacoby makes a related point about pols: If you're crushing on a political candidate, you're doing democracy wrong.

I've never understood the giddy rapture with which countless Americans regard political candidates and elected officials, especially at the presidential level. This is not a knock on the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. It's fine for parties to organize a few nights every four years to cherish and cheer for their standard-bearers. But in America the glorification of politicians by their adherents never seems to let up.

Certainly we need to elect men and women to public posts, just as we need to hire men and women to practice medicine, paint shingles, and prepare tax returns. What mystifies me is why people invest so much emotion and passion in the political process — emotion and passion they would never invest in the hiring of any other provider of a necessary service. Why do they embrace their preferred candidates with such elation? What explains the Obama Girl's crush? Why do MAGA stans travel the country to attend not one but dozens of Donald Trump rallies? Why would 100,000 people stand in line, sometimes for hours, to take selfies with Elizabeth Warren? Why would some devotees of Ronald Reagan have gone so overboard in their reverence that they campaigned to name something after him in every one of the nation's 3,067 counties?

And, don't worry, he gets to JFK later in the article. He doesn't get around to mentioning how the "giddy rapture" gets magically extended to envelop the family of the revered pols. That's really doing democracy wrong.

Also of note:

  • What did you expect? At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. urges us to Follow the Science: Biden Climate Policy Is a Fraud.

    Even Democrats don’t want to hear about climate change. The words were barely mentioned at the convention, and every transcript I examined omitted the once obligatory Biden modifier “existential.”

    The reason isn’t a mystery. Joe Biden’s policies are having not the slightest effect on climate change and yet somebody will still have to pay Ford’s $130,000 in losses per electric vehicle in the first quarter. This sum, a calculation shows, is equal to $64.80 per gallon of gasoline saved over four years of average driving. And yes, this amounts to a ludicrously costly subsidy to somebody else to use the gasoline that EV drivers are paid to forgo.

    Voilà, the flaw in the Biden strategy from the get-go, which completely defeats the goal of reducing emissions.

    Regular readers may feel vindicated by a new study this week in the prestigious journal Science. It examines 1,500 “climate” policies adopted around the world and finds only 63—or 4%—produced any emissions reductions. Even so, press accounts strained to muddy the study’s simple lesson so let’s spell it out: Taxing carbon reduces emissions. Subsidizing “green energy” doesn’t.

    It sounds like a real-world example of the Jevons Paradox.

    I guess this means increasing nuclear energy production, a policy I've mentioned favorably in the past, might have the same null effect on carbon emissions. (Might be desirable for other reasons, though.)

  • Diogenes shouldn't bother looking here. He won't find much honesty in the presidential campaign. Jacob Sullum finds that Trump's New Take on Crime Still Does Not Show Skyrocketing Homicides.

    Last week, the Trump campaign falsely asserted that "homicides are skyrocketing in American cities under Kamala Harris." On Tuesday, the campaign offered a more nuanced and sophisticated critique of crime data cited by the Democratic presidential nominee. But it still does not support the earlier claim, which is inconsistent with numbers from several sources.

    A "memorandum" headlined "Joe Biden's Lies on Crime" (a title that makes you wonder whether Trump forgot who his opponent is) notes that the FBI changed its crime data collection methods in 2021, switching from the old Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program to the new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The transition, which was aimed at generating "new and better data," resulted in a big decline in the number of participating law enforcement agencies. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the share of the population covered by participating agencies fell from the previous norm of about 95 percent to just 65 percent in 2021.

    If Trump wants to scare voters, he should publicize Uncle Stupid's fiscal insanity… Oh, but wait: (1) He was heavily involved in causing it; (2) he has no credible plan to fix it.