"Pity the poor Obama administration leakers. They impart their much-cherished secrets to make their man look good..."

"... and then, at the first chirp of criticism, are ordered to confess their (possible) crimes by the very same president they were seeking to please. In this, they are a bit like the male praying mantis. He does as asked, and then the female bites his head off."

WaPo skews presentation of a poll on the Obamacare case to bolster the argument that the Court should defer to Congress.

"Do you think the Supreme Court justices will rule on this case mainly on the basis of law or mainly on the basis of their partisan political views?" That's a question on a new WaPo/ABC poll that comes right after a question about what people want to see happen.

Only 25% of Americans — random Americans, not likely voters — want the law upheld in its entirety. 67% want it stricken down in whole (38%) or in part (29%). But the WaPo article on the poll is headlined: "More Americans expect Supreme Court’s health-care decision to be political." On the is-it-law-or-politics question, 50% think the Court will go mostly on partisan politics, and only 40% think the Court will do what it purports to do and decide the case based on the law (or even mainly based on the law).

Do you see what WaPo is doing there? Highlighting the answer to the is-it-mostly-political question serves the agenda of those who want the law upheld. These people side with President Obama, who argues, conspicuously, that if the Supreme Court strikes down the law, it will be behaving in an inappropriately political manner. By stressing the poll respondents' mistrust of the Court's neutrality, the WaPo gives the impression that they agree with people who think the Court should stand down and let the work of the democratically elected Congress prevail. After all, if the Court doesn't have a firm legal ground for an exercise of power, it makes no sense for it to trump Congress.

Now, those who want the law upheld are massively outnumbered. According to this poll, there are 2.7 times as many people who want the Court to strike the law down. But if what the Court is really doing is partisan politics, this much larger group doesn't matter. It's as if these people would like a second trip through Congress. But Congress voted, the President signed the law, and that's that, politically. In that view, the 67% don't count.

But let's examine that poll question again: "Do you think the Supreme Court justices will rule on this case mainly on the basis of law or mainly on the basis of their partisan political views?" Consider the missing detail.  I would like to see the answer to these questions: If the Supreme Court strikes down the health care law — in whole or in part — do you think that will be a decision based primarily on constitutional law or a decision based primarily on the Justices' political opinions? If the Supreme Court upholds the health care law, do you think that will be a decision based primarily on constitutional law or a decision based primarily on the Justices' political opinions?

Since we don't know what the respondents think the Court is going to do, we can't tell which Justices are being accused of behaving politically. What portion of the 50% who say it's mainly political think all 9 Justices, whichever side they take, will be mainly political? As they calculate, on the fly, what the Court "mainly" does, they could be thinking: Well, Scalia/Kagan is about 90% political, and Thomas/Sotomayor is about 30% political... etc. etc.... that seems to add up to I'd say probably, overall, 50+% political....

You see the problem! It's quite possible that many respondents were thinking of the Justices they don't like, fearing those are the ones who'll have the majority, and accusing them of deciding politically. Do the respondents have an opinion on the legal question itself? The pollsters could have asked: Do you think, purely as a matter of constitutional law, that the statute is constitutional or unconstitutional? Then: If the Supreme Court decides the case that way, do you think it will be a decision based mainly on law?

Instead, we get a crude question, with all these details hidden. On the poll results page, the first link above, we see "Questions 14 to 18 held of [sic] future release." Questions 12 and 13 are the 2 questions I've discussed here. So there is more detail, and it is now being withheld. The article, the second link above, does reveal something of what kinds of additional questions were asked:

Almost twice as many conservative Republicans think the court will decide on the basis of the law rather than politics, 58 to 33 percent. Liberal Democrats are more skeptical, saying by an equally wide margin that the court will put politics first.

That's not quite what I want to know. Perhaps there's more. I'll be interested to see when and how WaPo dribbles it out.

By the way, the photograph under the headline shows a woman holding up a sign that says "Obamacare Is Immoral," tipping the reader to think that the threatened political decision is the decision that strikes down the law. Since this, I think, is something WaPo does not want to see happen, there's a message to the Court: If you strike down the law, it will be seen as mere politics.

Did the Washington Post die?

I keep getting blank pages when I try to go there. Did Richard Cohen, biking with earbuds plugging his ears and Neil Young's "Ohio" misting up his eyes, hit a bump and wreck the whole operation or something?

"MORE VIOLENT RHETORIC: GOP takeover of Congress would mean 'hand-to-hand combat,' Obama warns."

Oh, no! This must be so upsetting to poor old bicycling-with-the-earbuds-in Richard Cohen.

Biden: "If I hear one more Republican tell me about balancing the budget, I am going to strangle them."

Interesting. I wonder if WaPo columnist Richard Cohen will struggle to repress a tear contemplating these hateful words fired like bullets.

"On the right, hateful words are fired like bullets. I still ride a bike."

Richard Cohen* still rides a bike, but his mind is going. I mean, he's riding his bike, listening to a folk rock channel he created on Pandora on his iPhone, and for some reason, instead of throwing new stuff at him, which I think is the point of Pandora, it keeps playing the old Neil Young song "Ohio."

Cohen plunges into his 40-year-old memories about how awful it was when the National Guard shot and killed 4 college students who were protesting the Vietnam War. And naturally, in Cohen's bike-drained, folk-music befuddled brain, that leads to what's wrong with... Glenn Beck!

Why don't you see? Back in 1970, the Governor of Ohio said the protesters were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent." Cohen weaves his literary magic for us dogged old WaPo readers:

That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals...

... fetishizes about liberals... To "fetishize" is to make a fetish of. How do you make a fetish of about something? Cohen's rugged bike path is studded with incomprehensible prepositions.

... and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage...

What language? You didn't even quote anything from Beck. Maybe you created a Pandora channel for Beck and you listen and ideate furiously while cycling, but I don't know what you're talking about. I don't pay much attention to the pudgy chattering TV pundit, but he doesn't seem to be raging. I have seen him crying. And oddly, in Cohen's first paragraph, he portrays himself struggling (while biking) to "repress a tear" when Neil sings "Ohio." Oh, compassion! It either builds credibility or it doesn't. (Depending on whether you're liberal or conservative.)

... that fuels too much of the Tea Party...

I'm supposed to have the right image of the Tea Party so I can just swallow that assertion whole. But I've been to Tea Party rallies — and heard about them from my husband — and the people seemed pretty nice and normal. To me, Cohen's attempt to smear ordinary people is what's ugly.

Cohen rants some more about how awful everything on the right sounds to his folk-music plugged old ears. He concludes:

I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.

Pedal on, aging columnist. Let the stream of consciousness wash down. Flow river flow. Wherever that river goes, that's where Richard Cohen wants to be.

_____________

*That's WaPo columnist Richard Cohen, or as we call him around here: the never-slept-with-Althouse Richard Cohen.

ADDED: Michael C. Moynihan:

And no, Richard Cohen doesn’t catch the irony: The dissent of Kent State protesters, he thinks, was met with deadly force because of rhetoric that “otherized them,” that turned them into a domestic enemy. Pretty much exactly what Richard Cohen is doing to the dissidents of the Tea Party movement.

Richard Cohen says "Let Polanski Go — But First Let Me At Him."

Absurd macho posturing from the liberal (?) columnist:

It’s alright with me if Roman Polanski is freed by the Swiss authorities who have detained him at the request of the United States -- if first I get a chance to bust him one in the mouth....

Ugh. This is on the level of hoping someone sent to prison gets raped. You think it's cute to flaunt your violent fantasies? I'll bet that elsewhere this guy acts as if it's important to follow the law, yet he loves the idea of punishment without due process whenever it jibes with the ebb and flow of his emotions.

I'll bet he's opposed to torture, yet he's in love with the idea of hurting someone as a way to express outrage. I'll bet he thinks that the locution "bust him one in the mouth" makes it man-to-man and somehow okay. Indeed, it's perfectly apt... to punch a 76-year-old man in the face.

Such is the fantasy of an aging major-media male opinionator. Look, either Polanski deserves to be put in prison or he does not. Take a position. Your fantasy is of committing a crime for which you would deserve to be put in prison. Yes, yes, of course, you'd never do it. Which is why you are a big hypocritical pussy.

***

This post is about the Washington Post Richard Cohen, not my ex-husband Richard Cohen. Around here, the WaPo Richard Cohen is called Richard Hasn't-Slept-With-Althouse Cohen.)

"Any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H..."

"... to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it. ... The complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy. ... Charles Dickens, either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form. My God, I salute you, Charles Dickens!"

The books Seymour asked to have sent to him, in "the longest, most pretentious (and least plausible) letter from camp ever written," the last thing J.D. Salinger published. Salinger turns 90 on New Year's Day, which provides an occasion for pondering the oft-pondered question: What's he been doing all these years?

***

Hey, I wonder if Richard Hasn't-Slept-With-Althouse Cohen is impressed by Seymour's book list?

***

Have you noticed that Instapundit always has a post that goes up in the middle of the night? Think he's really up and writing then? I'm really up now, writing. Maybe old J.D. is up and writing, adding one more sheet to the stack of pages he started piling up more than 40 years ago.

UPDATE: Instapundit awakens and answers my question:

Those are scheduled posts, for the benefit of people in the other hemisphere, or people who are up late and bored.

Tigerhawk razzes:

Is there any person with more regard for his fellow man than Glenn Reynolds? He is actually concerned with the welfare of bored people all around the world! And I agree. What with all the people worried about starvation, disease, war, and poverty, somebody has to speak out for the bored. Glenn has put his stake in the ground and said "the boredom stops here!," and I am down with that.

Much as I'm gratified by the instaänswer and tigerhawkswoopery, I'm a little sad that this discussion of boredom has occurred on the J.D. Salinger post and not yesterday's Camus post where boredom — ennui — would have fit so nicely. In Reynoldsian theory, the French existentialists must rank high, as they attend to the great problem of boredom. In Althousian theory, the blogger is not here to help you with your boredom, but to delight at serendipitous juxtapositions. So here is something Jean-Paul Sartre's blogged last October:

My sleep continues to be troubled by odd dreams. Last night I dreamt that I was a beetle, clinging to the slick surface of a water-soaked log as it careened down a rain-swollen stream toward a waterfall. A figure appeared on the horizon, and as the log drew closer I could see that it was Camus. He held out a hand and I desperately reached for it with my tiny feeler. Just as the log drew abreast of Camus he suddenly wihdrew his hand, swooped it through his hair and sneered "Too slow," adding superfluously: "Psych."

It is my belief that the log symbolizes the precariousness of Existence, while the tiny feeler represents Man's essential powerlessness. And Camus represents Camus, that fatuous ninny.

Read the whole blog, Being and Nothingness, where the tags are:

bleakness
despair
ennui
existence
meaninglessness
the bourgeoisie

Richard Cohen reacts to that Karl Rove column about how President Bush read a lot of books while he was President.

And by "Richard Cohen," I do not mean my ex-husband Richard Cohen. I mean that WaPo columnist to whom people have often asked me if I am/was married.

The never-slept-with-Althouse Cohen writes:

One of [the books Bush read] was Albert Camus' "The Stranger," with its unforgettable opening lines: "Mother died today. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I don't know." After reading Rove's Wall Street Journal column, it's clear there's much we all don't know.

Bush's choice of the Camus classic is odd on the face of it. It is a novel about estrangement, about an amoral, irreligious man (Meursault) who never shows emotion. It is a book out of my Gauloise-smoking youth, read in the vain pursuit of women of literary bent,* and not something I would think an over-60 president would read. Maybe this is what happens when you have to give up jogging.

And what's Cohen's excuse for forgetting so much of the book he claims to have read? Or did he just read the first page? Or was that just the only part of the book that was "unforgettable"? If you want to skewer Bush for reading "The Stranger," you should bring up the part where he kills an Arab for virtually no reason at all.

[T]hat Bush is a prodigious, industrial reader... does not conform at all to his critics' idea of who he is.

"Industrial reader" is a good phrase, one that makes me think I'm being too mean to RC.

They would prefer seeing him as a dolt, since that, as opposed to policy or ideological differences, is a briefer, more bloggish explanation of what went wrong.

Bloggish? Bloggish? As if your column — your column that is entirely parasitic on Rove's column (ugh! that sounds like Rove needs a medicinal ointment) — is so damned deep. Cohen, you're losing me.

[But] the books themselves reveal -- actually, confirm -- something about Bush that maybe Rove did not intend. They are not the reading of a widely read man, but instead the books of a man who seeks -- and sees -- vindication in every page....

The list Rove provides is long, but it is narrow. It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle.

Metastasized into a debacle? That's one of those dead-metaphor mixed metaphors. I wonder what George Bush thinks about mixed metaphors....

Bush read David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter," which is about the Korean War, but not on the list is Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," which is about the Vietnam War. Bush read some novels, but they are mostly pre-movies, plotted not written, and lacking the beauty of worldly cynicism. I recommend Giuseppe di Lampedusa's "The Leopard." Delicious.

Delicious? Are women attracted to men who pronounce things that are not food/drink "delicious"? I think not! And what's his point? From the novel:

"We were the Leopards, the Lions, those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth."

So... the Democrats are jackals and sheep?
_____

* That might have impressed Althouse. But the truth is that I can't think of a single time that I found a man attractive because I noticed the book he was reading. And yet there are many times when I snap-judged a man to be a fool because of the book he was reading. Be careful with the books, lads.

_____

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

"I wonder what George Bush thinks about mixed metaphors...."

Best bloggish idle musing of the year!

I really appreciate that. Meade has my number.

NOW will you sleep with me?

More things to wonder about.

Anthony said:

C'mon already, Althy, we're waiting for what books would make you throw yourself in a blind passion at he-who-would-be-reading-one.

Well, there's "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry"...

A friend once told me that (this was in the late '80s, mind you) if I just went into a local coffee shop wearing my spandex biking shorts and read Sartre I'd "get all the p*ssy you want". Maybe so, but it'd be hairy and wearing Birkenstocks. No, I never tried it.

Who wears shoes that way? Is it like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and socks? (NSFW.)

Chip Ahoy said...

Why Literature Is Bad For You, Peter Thorpe

A onetime professor of literature at CU Boulder. Here, let me save you $3.20 on the secondary market. The book amounts to a screed against the people with whom Professor Thorpe shared a Department, and the Masters students with whom he came into contact. He apparently studied their traits closely, eagerly tallied their most damaging characteristics and categorized them, then described how it was Literature that distorted otherwise perfectly good personalities. It's hilarious. It's horrible. I laughed, I cried, I couldn't eat or sleep for days. I'm fairly certain I made up this last part, or possibly I read it somewhere.

Yes, that's right, I'm doing it too. Cohen reminds me of someone I've previously met somewhere in literature. His archetype has already been perfectly delineated in a book by a writer good at describing people. I automatically subsumed Cohen to a characterization I have already meet, thus I deny his unique contribution, if there is one.

Actually, Cohen's review, which I'm smart enough to avoid, makes me go, "Gah!" Reminds me of real people I know in real life, irritating people, always eager to tell me what books I really must read, lists of them, in order to become enlightened like themselves. The unstated assumption sits flatly, that I'll remain dull and unenlightened until then. I reflexively spit on the floor and immediately regret having spit, because it is uncivilized, and because now somebody must clean it up, most likely myself.

And have you ever cleaned spit off a carpet? A dampened rag, a little Oxiclean, it's not all that bad. But I wouldn't have to do it! If everyone would just stop telling me which books I must read, and stop using words like Galuoise instead of cigarettes, industrial instead of industrious, and delicious instead of good. Yes, it reminds me of overlapping cases in Peter Thorpe's book. Students of literature, avoid them.

On the other hand, I'm reading Robert Sabuda's delicious adaption of Barrie's Peter Pan. Well, I'm not actually reading it, but rather, I'm studying the industrial pop-ups. A real tour de force in pop-uppery, and you're really not sufficiently educated in paper engineering pop-up mechanisms until you've studied Robert Sabuda.

This is a fun game to play. Let's bludgeon each other with the names of books we supposedly read, or possibly scanned the cover jackets or the Cliff Notes, or possibly heard about, and then use inappropriately artsy adjectives in an effort to elevate ourselves at each other's expense. Sniff.

Wow! Now, I think "Why Literature Is Bad For You" would work.

As for "Robert Sabuda's delicious adaption of Barrie's Peter Pan"... delicious... Chip Ahoy is named after a cookie, so it might be okay to call him delicious.

AND: About Chip's fun game — naming "books we supposedly read, or possibly scanned the cover jackets or the Cliff Notes, or possibly heard about, and then us[ing] inappropriately artsy adjectives in an effort to elevate ourselves at each other's expense" — may I suggest the adjectives "luminous" and "astonishing."