Our Make-It-Up World

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Do bothersome facts matter anymore?

Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.

The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable problem, and a dangerous enemy — or anything the administration wishes it to be, depending on the political climate of any given week.

Some days Americans are told there is no reason to restrict connecting flights from Ebola-ravaged countries. Then, suddenly, entry from those countries is curtailed to five designated U.S. airports. Quarantines are both necessary and not so critical, as the administration weighs public concern versus politically correct worries over isolating a Third World African country.

Ebola is so hard to catch that there is no reason to worry about casual exposures to those without clear symptoms. But then why do health authorities still try to hunt down anyone who had even a brief encounter with supposedly asymptomatic carriers?

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi were caused by a video that sparked a riot, and then apparently not. Various narratives about corruption and incompetence at the VA, IRS, NSA, GSA, and Secret Service are raised and then dropped. The larger truth is that these scandals must be quarantined from infecting the president’s progressive agenda.

Laws used to be real, not abstract. Again, not anymore. The administration sort of enacts some elements of Obamacare but ignores others. Enforcement of federal immigration law is negotiable, likewise depending on the campaign cycle.

The Tawana Brawley case, the Duke men’s lacrosse team accusations, and the O. J. Simpson verdict were constructed fantasies. No one cared much about the inconvenient facts or the lies that destroyed people’s lives — given that myths were deemed useful facts for achieving larger racial justice.

It no longer really matters much what the grand jury will find in the Michael Brown fatal-shooting case. Whether he had just robbed a store, was high on drugs, was walking down the middle of the road and prompted a violent confrontation with a police officer, or whether the officer was the aggressor in the confrontation, these have become mere competing narratives. The facts pale in comparison with the higher truth that Brown was black and unarmed, while Officer Darren Wilson was white and armed. The latter scenario is all that matters.

Language is useful for inventing new realities. “Illegal alien” is a time-tested phrase denoting foreign citizens who crossed a national border contrary to law. “Undocumented immigrant” is now used to diminish the bothersome fact that millions have broken and continue to break the law.

To play down the dangers of radical Islam, an entire array of circumlocutions — “workplace violence” (in the case of the Fort Hood shooting), “overseas contingency operations,” and “man-caused disasters” — were the euphemisms evoked by members of the Obama administration to construct an alternative reality in which radical jihadists are no more dangerous than disgruntled office workers or gale-force winds.

Many of the current campus poster icons are abject myths. Che Guevara, for all his hipster appearance, was no revolutionary hero, but a murderer who enjoyed personally executing his political opponents. Communist leader Angela Davis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the totalitarian Soviet Union.

Plagiarism and making stuff up are no longer considered serious offenses against the truth. Lots of notable columnists or historians have had to confess to lifting the work of others and passing it off as their own — Maureen Dowd, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, and the late Stephen Ambrose, to name a few. Most faced slaps on the wrist.

Even Vice President Joe Biden once had to drop a presidential bid due to accusations that he had plagiarized in law school and later had copied a speech from a British Labor politician. Barack Obama has had to acknowledge that in his autobiographical memoir, he used “composite characters” in some cases rather than actual people from his life. Sympathetic biographer David Remnick characterized Obama’s life story as “a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, re-creation, invention, and artful shaping.”

Such disregard for truth and facts is no accident, but the fruit of postmodernism. So-called “after modern” thought was a trendy late-20th-century way to reduce facts to stories.

Progressives believed that because traditional protocols, language, and standards were usually created by stuffy old establishment types, the rules no longer necessarily should apply. Instead, particular narratives and euphemisms that promoted perceived social justice became truthful. Bothersome facts were discarded.

So far, political mythmaking has been confined to popular culture and politics, and has not affected the ironclad facts and non-negotiable rules of jetliner maintenance, heart surgery, or nuclear-plant operation. Yet the Ebola scare has taught us that even the erroneous news releases and fluid policies of the CDC can be as likely based on politics as hard science.

If that is a vision of more relativist things to come, then we are doomed.

Pathetic Privilege

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 31, 2014

Lena Dunham is fond of lists. Here is a list of things in Lena Dunham’s life that do not strike Lena Dunham as being unusual: growing up in a $6.25 million Tribeca apartment; attending a selection of elite private schools; renting a home in Hollywood Hills well before having anything quite resembling a job and complaining that the home is insufficiently “chic”; the habitual education of the men in her family at Andover; the services of a string of foreign nannies; being referred to a homework therapist when she refused to do her homework and being referred to a relationship therapist when she fought with her mother; constant visits to homeopathic doctors, and visits to child psychologists three times a week; having a summer home on a lake in Connecticut, and complaining about it; writing a “voice of her generation” memoir in which ordinary life events among members of her generation, such as making student-loan payments or worrying about the rent or health insurance, never come up; making casual trips to Malibu; her grandparents’ having taken seven-week trips to Europe during her mother’s childhood; spending a summer at a camp at which the costs can total almost as much as the median American family’s annual rent; being histrionically miserable at said camp and demanding to be brought home early; demanding to be sent back to the same expensive camp the next year.

“I think I may be the voice of my generation.” So says Lena Dunham in the role of her alter ego, Hannah Horvath, in the first episode of Girls, the HBO series she has been writing and starring in since 2012. The scene is classic Dunham, if we can use “classic” to describe a phenomenon of such recent vintage. The basic sentiment is there in plain English, but it must be qualified, run through the irony dicer until it is practically a Cubist representation of the original, and held at a comfortable distance. Dunham very clearly does want to be considered the voice of her generation, as her recently published memoir — Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” — makes unmistakably clear; in fact, she has been hailed as precisely that by Time, Glamour, Today, and others. But she cannot say that herself — not with a straight face, not in Brooklyn. Instead, the line is assigned to her alter ego, who is at the time of the utterance high as a Georgia pine on opium tea and trying to convince her parents to keep supporting her financially. Having delivered the line, Hannah retreats into uncomfortable self-awareness, adding: “Or a voice of a generation.” As a literary stratagem — laying down a marker in the popular culture without making herself vulnerable to accusations that she might be taking herself too seriously — the maneuver is transparent. It is far more troubling that she uses the same technique in real life, for matters much more serious than the plot of Girls: Specifically, she uses it in her memoir to accuse a man of rape without having to take responsibility for the accusation.

In that sense, Lena Dunham may truly be the voice of her generation: The enormous affluence and indulgence of her upbringing did not sate her sundry hungers — for adoration, for intellectual respect that she has not earned, for the unsurpassable delight of moral preening — but instead amplified and intensified her sense of entitlement. The Brooklyn of Girls is nothing more or less than a 21st-century version of the Malibu Barbie Dreamhouse, with New York City taxis standing in for the pink Corvette. Writers naturally indulge their own autobiographical and social fantasies, from Brideshead Revisited to The Lord of the Rings, but Girls represents a phenomenon distinctly of our time: the fantasy not worth having.

Dunham is not satisfied with the manipulation of fantasy alone: She seeks to curate, narrate, and direct the real world as though it were an episode of her television show. The worrisome thing is that she is not alone in her apparent inability to tell the representation from the thing being represented. Hers is an endlessly mediated generation, for whose members life is increasingly lived as a performance on the stages of Instagram and Twitter.

Still, to dismiss Lena Dunham as an insulated and spoiled child of Manhattan’s ruling class is to misunderstand her story entirely. If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries. And they were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions — Lena Dunham’s sexual abuse, specifically, of her younger sister, Grace, the sort of thing that gets children taken away from non-millionaire families without Andover pedigrees and Manhattanite social connections. Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina — “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation. “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”

Dunham describes herself as an “unreliable narrator,” which in the context of a memoir or another work of purported nonfiction means “liar,” strictly construed. Dunham writes of incorporating stories from other people’s lives and telling them as though they were her own, and of fabricating details. The episode with her sister’s vaginal pebbles seems to be especially suspicious. When Dunham inspects her sister’s business, she shrieks at what she sees: “Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. . . . Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.” Dunham’s writing often is unclear (willfully so, it seems), but the context here — Grace has overheard her older sister asking whether her baby sister has a uterus — and Grace’s satisfaction with her prank suggest that Grace was expecting her older sister to go poking around in her genitals and inserted the pebbles in expectation of it. Grace is around one year old at the time of these events. There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode. As for stroking her mother’s vagina, having mistaken it for her hairless cat . . .

That Dunham’s parents tolerated this is completely in character with the portrait of them she offers. Experiencing some very common problems with the childhood fear of going to bed alone, young Lena invades her parents’ bedroom every morning at 1 a.m., evicting her father from the bed, “probably my way of making sure my parents didn’t ever have sex again.” Her father eventually reaches a strange and broken-down compromise with her: She goes to bed at 9 p.m., and he wakes every morning at 3 a.m. to carry her into his bedroom. These shenanigans went on for twelve years. Getting up in the middle of the night for a newborn is one thing; getting up in the middle of the night, every night, for an adolescent is a different class of thing.

If her family failed her, Dunham’s schools, which she seems to have attended largely in pajamas, did no better, crippling her through coddling and leaving her a graduate of a writing program at a very prestigious college who does not know the use of the subjunctive or the difference between “nauseous” and “nauseated,” though the crudeness of her memoir’s prose, in contrast with the deft writing of her television series, may very well be yet another affectation. The crudeness of her thought is inarguably genuine: In the midst of a rather detailed revenge fantasy, and having confessed the pain she feels when good things happen to those she despises, she writes airily that she is above being “jealous” (she means “envious”) and too fine ever to be “vengeful” — five pages after contemplating a future course of action that she herself describes as “vengeful.”

What she lacks in literary and intellectual sophistication she makes up for in overconfidence. She sneers that Oberlin is full of people engaged in “politically correct posturing without real politics” and relates a surprising number of anecdotes from Palestinian fundraisers. At the same time, she confesses to having no significant knowledge of economics or history, and both her book and her television show — to say nothing of her political advertisements — demonstrate a flat, bland incuriosity about the wider world. What her “real politics” are composed of is therefore mysterious. Early in Not That Kind of Girl, she devotes a fair amount of copy to her main hobby — shopping. That the shopping in question happens in thrift stores rather than at Bergdorf’s, and that she attempts to distill some sort of poetic meaning out of the ironic display of the detritus of the lives of others, serves only to underline the banality of her pursuits and the vanity with which she conducts them. She cannot be just another rich girl who whiles away the time shopping — her shopping must have cultural significance.

“I’m going to write an essay about you someday — and not change your name.” So says Hannah to her handsy employer in Girls after a very odd episode in which he sexually harasses her and she ups the ante by trying to seduce him, endures his rejection, threatens to sue him, and then attempts to blackmail him.

Lena Dunham never actually writes that she was raped by a mustachioed campus Republican named Barry at Oberlin College. She leads up to it with a long story about her childhood misuse of the word “rape” — she accuses her little sister of raping her and tells people that her father sticks a fork in her vagina when she misbehaves — and dwells on her lifelong fear of being raped. She describes two different versions of the same sexual encounter, in the latter version insisting that she did not consent to what happened. And in a remarkably dishonest turn, she has other people describe the event as “rape,” thereby dodging any intellectual or moral responsibility for making the claim herself.

It takes me about two minutes to discover a Republican named Barry whose time at Oberlin coincided with Dunham’s. A few minutes later, I know a great deal about him: Where he works, where he lives, what he majored in, his high-school-prom plans, people we know in common, and other surprising intersections between our lives. When I call him at his office, I get the distinct impression that I am not the first reporter to have done so. “I don’t have anything to say about what I know you’re calling about,” he says. We speak very briefly, and he is concerned that I will use his name. It’s a strange thing to be concerned about — his name is out there, easily found. Oberlin opened an investigation into the incident after the publication of Dunham’s book and has consulted with the local police department. The statute of limitations for rape in Ohio is 20 years, and Dunham graduated in 2008.

In Dunham’s telling, she had been at a party, drinking and taking Xanax and cocaine, and went to bed willingly with Barry. But the encounter turned rough — so rough, she says, that she required medical attention — and she noticed mid-coitus that he was not using a condom. She told him to leave; he left. She relates an encounter between the same Barry and another woman that turned so violent that it left the walls spattered in blood, “like a crime scene.” But neither Dunham nor the other woman felt the need to press charges, file a complaint, or otherwise document the encounter. The latter woman, in fact, reports that Barry accompanied her to the campus clinic the next day for morning-after pills, joking about naming the baby they weren’t going to have. If any of this is true, then there are medical records at Oberlin supporting the story, but the release of Dunham’s records would require Dunham’s consent, and the second woman’s records would require the consent of the second woman, if she exists.

Dunham’s writing all this is, needless to say, a gutless and passive-aggressive act. Barry is not a character in a book; he is a real person, one whose life is no doubt being turned upside down by a New York Times No. 1 best-seller containing half-articulated accusations that he raped a woman in college, accusations that are easily connected to him. Dunham won’t call him a rapist, but she is happy to use other people as sock puppets to call him a rapist. She doesn’t use his full name, but she surely knows how easily it can be found. She wouldn’t face him in a court of law, but she’ll lynch him in print.

A great deal has been made of Lena Dunham’s weight, not least by Lena Dunham. She may be Hollywood fat, or Manhattan–below–125th Street fat, but she is in fact an utterly ordinary specimen of American womanhood, and she would not be thought of as fat in Magnolia, Ark., or Craig, Colo., or even in the less rarefied sections of Brooklyn. She does use her weight as a kind of aesthetic cudgel — the first image we get of Hannah in Girls is of her shoveling pasta into her face while her mother scolds her, telling her to slow down.

Oddly, she herself is a pitiless enforcer of physical standards when it comes to men, complaining endlessly that her suitors are not sufficiently tall, that men who are “petite” and “minuscule” are “my lot in life.” She sneers at “girls with boyfriends who looked like lesbians,” at a man guilty of “dressing vaguely like a middle-aged lesbian,” etc. “Lesbian” is Dunham’s shorthand for “awful.” On Girls, one of the characters scoffs that “dates are for lesbians,” and Dunham describes a childhood fear that she would become “the militant lesbian leader of a motorcycle gang,” but she also describes herself as “being in possession of a gay sister,” which fact she wields like a get-out-of-women’s-prison-free card against accusations of homophobia, which wielding is occasionally necessitated by the fact that her views on sex, relationships, and sexual roles are, for all of her feminist grandstanding, utterly conventional.

“I think he thinks he was being really deep by dating a chubby girl,” she writes of one of her many romantic disappointments. But the excess of self from which she suffers most genuinely is not corporal but emotional. Emotionally, she is morbidly obese, the layers of her bloated sense of self deepening like Philip Larkin’s coastal shelf since her birth, if not in fact before, considering the daft contributions of her family. It is an easy thing to mock, and it deserves mocking, but it also deserves understanding.

She did not get this way by accident; she got this way because the series of economic and intellectual cloisters in which she has lived her life have functioned as the emotional equivalent of Song-dynasty foot-binding: Intended to bring her nearer to perfection, they have instead left her disfigured and disabled. Her ambition is palpable, but fashion dictates that she forswear ambition: She describes her memoir as her answer to Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money Even if You’re Starting with Nothing, which of course Dunham purchased ironically from the inevitable “dusty shelf” of a hipster-haunted thrift shop, where it sat next to a copy of Miss Piggy’s autobiography. But Helen Gurley Brown of Green Forest, Ark., who lost her father at ten to an elevator accident and a sister to polio a few years later, did in fact start with something close to nothing, and laboriously rose to a position of cultural prominence (from which she inflicted a tremendous amount of damage). The self-made Helen Gurley Brown, another voice of a generation of women, was in many ways the genuine version of what Lena Dunham pretends to be — at least, the woman she pretends to be on television. Brown emerged from her chrysalis at the age of 40; Dunham is busily building an ever-thicker cocoon of fantasy, prescription drugs, and weaponized celebrity, manipulating reality to her own specifications. If she is emblematic of her generation, it is in that her life, in her own telling, is a reminder that being ruined by comfort and privilege is as easy as (perhaps easier than) being crippled by privation and abuse.

Time Magazine is Attacked for Telling the Truth About Teachers Unions

By Mark Hemingway

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Time magazine has a cover story out that's causing a fair amount of outrage, but for all the wrong reasons. The story is headlined, "Rotten Apples: It's nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires may have found a way to change that." Since then, some 70,000 people signed an online petition calling for a public apology over Time's supposed smearing of teachers. Time has sensibly invited a series of responses to the piece on its website.

Now the merits of corporate meddling in public education are debatable -- see Andrew Ferguson's piece on Common Core standards for more on that -- but that's not what has allegedly enraged teachers. It is not even remotely controversial that firing teachers is notoriously difficult, but the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the union orchestrating the Time backlash, lives in some sort of fantasyland where they think that it's outrageous to tell this obvious truth. In 2010, L.A. Weekly -- no one's idea of a conservative anti-teacher, anti-union media outlet -- did a little investigation of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the largest school district in the country:

    But the far larger problem in L.A. is one of "performance cases" — the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. Their ranks are believed to be sizable — perhaps 1,000 teachers, responsible for 30,000 children. But in reality, nobody knows how many of LAUSD's vast system of teachers fail to perform. Superintendent Ramon Cortines tells the Weekly he has a "solid" figure, but he won't release it. In fact, almost all information about these teachers is kept secret.

    But the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

That's right. Out  of 33,000 teachers, only four were fired for poor performance over the course of a decade. Firing teachers is such a problem there's even a term of art, "the dance of the lemons," that refers to how bad teachers are shuffled from one school to the next as parents get wise to their professional shortcomings. After being shamed by L.A. Weekly's report, the LAUSD promised reform but the problem does not appear to have gotten better. USA Today reported earlier this year that "an average of 2.2 teachers a year are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance" in the entire state of California.

The responses published by Time from teacher representatives are both unserious and denial of an obvious problem in public education. None of them present any real facts about teacher tenure, and instead assert various other canards as being the real reason public education is failing. Here's Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT:

    Yes, there is a real problem facing America’s teaching profession, but it has nothing to do with tenure. The problem is in recruiting, retaining and supporting our teachers, especially at the hardest-to-staff schools.

    Every time we lose a teacher, it costs us. Literally. More than one-third of teachers leave the profession before they’ve taught for five years. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future estimates that the high rate of teacher turnover nationwide costs more than $7 billion per year. This only exacerbates the greatest challenges facing our public schools: underfunding and inequity.

Chronic underfunding is the problem? I hesitate to call this a lie, but the other option is that one of the biggest union leaders in the country is astoundingly ignorant. We routinely see that funding is not the problem in America's worst schools. Washington, D.C. has consistently some of the worst, if not the worst schools in the country. In 2011, D.C. schools had the worst graduation rate in the nation. In 2010, Census data showed that the D.C. was spending $29,409 per pupil, and spending has surely gone up since then while school performance remains abysmal. For comparison, Sidwell Friends, the most "elite" private school in D.C. and where Obama sends his kids, now charges around $35,000 a year in tutition. With a per pupil budget comparable to D.C. public schools, Sidwell Friends has so much extra cash laying around they're hiring a barista to make the privileged children who attend the school smoothies and lattes.

As if this weren't outrageous enough, Andrew Coulson at the CATO Institute notes that D.C.'s education "spending figure is about triple what the DC voucher program spends per pupil—and the voucher students have a much higher graduation rate and perform as well or better academically." In fact, a 2010 study showed that students in the voucher program had a 96 percent graduation rate compared to 56 percent in D.C.'s failing schools. And by the way, this is the same voucher program that Barack Obama attempted to end as one of his first actions in office. That's right -- America's first black president wanted to kill program that primarily benefited D.C.'s poor black kids, because union hacks such as Randi Weingarten siphoned off millions of the tax dollars used to pay public school teachers and used that to help Barack Obama get elected. (D.C.'s voucher program was only saved after House Republicans forced the president's hand on the issue when he attempted to phase out funding.) If "chronic underfunding" is such a problem, maybe Weingarten and other teachers union represenatives should give back the hundreds of millions they spend on political candidates and opposing sensible education reform efforts.

As for Weingarten's point that teacher churn is a serious problem, well, she's right. But pretending this has nothing to do with tenure reform is, again, dishonest. Acknowledging the problem of "bad teachers," isn't an attack on all teachers. Getting rid of bad teachers is really a way to help the good ones. Tenure and seniority rules, which unions defend vigorously, often keep talented teachers from advancing or getting the jobs they want. Reading headlines about a "Teacher of the Year" being let go due to assinine "first hired, last fired" policies is something of a regular occurance. Keeping bad teachers around just generally creates a dispiriting environment for the teachers that are working hard and doing good work educating kids, as they quickly learn they will only be rewarded for outlasting rather than outperforming their peers. I recently had the privilege of speaking with a Teach for America participant at an inner city school. This person cited the lack of enthusiasm among some of their colleagues as a major obstacle, which is in no way surprising. There's a reason no private sector enterprise has comparable tenure and seniority rules.

But despite the mendacity of these attacks on Time, the media have largely done nothing but amplify teacher union objections by covering on the supposed "anger" and the petition -- see MSNBC, Politico, Huffington Post, et al. Now let's not pretend that an internet petition is meaningful or representative of any genuine outrage teachers feel about Time's cover. Especially when it's backed by one of the nation's richest unions. After all, organizing is what they do. And yet, the self-loathing media has largely amplified the bogus union attack on Time even though their story was uncontroversial as far as education reform stories go. The Washington Post coverage of the issue by Valerie Strauss was particularly egregious. She used the occasion to argue that Time had some Teacher vendetta because they once ran favorable cover story on D.C. education reformer Michelle Rhee:

    Rhee was the vanguard of a wave of “corporate school reform” that has used standardized test scores as the chief metric for school “accountability,” promoted charter schools and vouchers, and sought to minimize or eliminate the power of teachers unions and change the way teachers are trained. Rhee was chancellor from 2007-2010, during which she fired hundreds of teachers and principals and started a program that used test scores to evaluate every adult in the building — including, for several years, the custodians. She also collected enormous sums of donations from private philanthropists to start a merit pay system for teachers (even though merit pay systems in education have a long history of failure). The achievement gap, which she said she wanted to close, didn’t budge (and remains wide). When she quit in 2010, she started StudentsFirst, an organization that funded political candidates who promoted her style of reform.

    For obvious reasons, teachers were infuriated by Time’s cover.

    And now, they are furious about  the Nov. 3  Time cover, with the title “Rotten Apples.” The blurb under it says, “It is nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher” (which Rhee proved isn’t actually true as she fired teacher after teacher). The accompanying story is about the latest effort by school reformers to reduce or end teacher job protections (and therefore reduce or destroy the power of the teachers unions), highlighted best in a recent case titled Vergara v. California, in which a judge threw out state statutes giving tenure and other job protections to teachers. Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor, has emerged as a leader of these new efforts to sue individual states with strong job protections for teachers.

For "obvious reasons" teachers were outraged by Time's cover? There's no meaningless internet petition to back it up, but I'm quite sure many, many public school teachers would agree that Time's cover was not offensive and that keeping bad teachers in the system is a major problem. Why is "accountability" in scare quotes? Since when does merit pay have "a long history of failure" in education? You know what has a really, really long history of failure in education? The ridiculous union rules that undercut any attempts at putting a real merit pay system in place. Is Michelle Rhee supposed to be suspect for lobbying for education reform? Because unions spend plenty of money on politics. Which brings us to Strauss's next ridiculous point: "Which Rhee proved isn’t actually true as she fired teacher after teacher." You know what happened to Rhee for being one of the few education officials willing to go to the mat to fire bad teachers? D.C.'s teachers union spent $1 million to defeat the mayor who appointed her and elect a corrupt mayor who is in the union's pocket. So yes, it's still nearly impossible to fire teachers.

And final word about Strauss, the Washington Post's frequent defender of teachers unions. This was from a column a few years ago:

    As I said earlier, where to send a child to school is a personal family choice.

    My two daughters went to a private school, too, Georgetown Day School in Washington D.C., a city with a public school system that has long had what I consider an unhealthy obsession with standardized tests. (Of course, I’m not trying to shove high-stakes testing policies down anyone’s throat.)

    The problem is not testing itself. What is corrupting public education is the high stakes that are put on the results of standardized tests.

If Strauss or anyone else wants to send their kids to a private school that costs $30,000+ a year and has the means to do so, I don't blame them. But if your personal politics are such that you have to tell yourself standardized testing is a better reason for avoiding public schools than the bad teachers and the corrupt unions that enable them, it's hard to even have a factual discussion. Strauss, Weingarten, and just about everyone else attacking Time magazine appear to be delusional.

Take the Hard Votes

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

‘What day is it?”

“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.

“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

As a proud member of the “don’t just do something, sit there” school of politics, I don’t fret much about partisanship and gridlock. Partisanship and gridlock aren’t bugs of our constitutional system, they’re features. And while everyone likes to see their preferred policies sail through Congress, on the whole I think we’ve been well served by those features for two centuries.

That said, in the spirit of compromise so lacking in Washington, I would like to offer a suggestion for how to fix the alleged dysfunction in Washington: Let’s have more partisanship about ideas and less about process.

You have to wonder if Harry Reid feels like an idiot yet. For years now, the Senate majority leader has been cynically protecting Democratic senators — and President Obama — from difficult votes. The rationale was pretty straightforward. He wanted to spare vulnerable Democrats named Mark — Arkansas’s Mark Pryor, Alaska’s Mark Begich and Colorado’s Mark Udall — and a few others from having to take difficult votes on issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline, EPA rules, and immigration reform.

The problem for the Marks and other red- or swing-state Democrats is that, having been spared the chance to take tough votes, they now have little to no evidence they’d be willing to stand up to a president who is very unpopular in their states.

Thanks to Reid’s strategy of kicking the can down the road, GOP challengers now get to say, “My opponent voted with the president 97 percent of the time.” Democrats are left screeching “war on women!” and “Koch brothers!”

For instance, Reid killed bipartisan legislation on energy efficiency in May by denying senators the right to offer amendments. This was a wildly partisan and nearly unprecedented move, blocking the Senate from debating important issues. He did so because he feared that GOP amendments — on the Keystone pipeline, for instance — would pass with Democratic support, angering the White House.

I’m sure Senator Mary Landrieu, (D., La.) would love to be able to tout such a vote now. But she supported Reid’s tactic, shooting herself in the foot in the process.

Of course, this assumes these allegedly independent Democrats would have broken with Obama. But whether they would have or not, wouldn’t our politics be healthier if we had an answer to that question?

Indeed, so much of Obama’s politically poisonous indecisiveness, whether on Syria, Ukraine, the Islamic State, immigration reform, or the Keystone pipeline, seems driven by a powerful desire to kick the controversial decisions down the road and simply “win” the daily spin cycle. This tactic of protecting politicians from votes is a bipartisan practice that exacerbates the worst kind of partisanship.

Under former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Republicans adopted the so-called Hastert Rule, which says no bill can be brought to the floor absent support of a majority of the majority — i.e., a majority of Republicans in the GOP-controlled House.

In 2006, even though President George W. Bush supported a hike in the minimum wage (wrongly in my view), the House refused to take it up for a vote. It could have passed with a minority of Republicans joining the Democrats. Those Republicans mostly came from states where there were minimum-wage hikes on the ballot. If they’d been allowed to vote in favor of a “clean” raising of the wage, some of them might well have kept their seats, and the GOP might have kept its majority. Instead, the Democrats were swept in that year, and they got the minimum-wage hike anyway.

This live-for-today approach — what GOP consultant Brad Blakeman calls “momentarianism” — protects the short-term interests of political elites but harms the long-term interests of just about everyone. It prevents Republicans from forging creative strategies for winning over Democrats and vice versa. But it also denies letting voters know what politicians are really for by concealing their true positions in a fog of procedural nonsense.

Gridlock is great when it reflects principled disagreements between duly elected representatives of the people, not when it’s used to protect politicians from their own constituents.