Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 16

‘The Dadly Virtues’ Update

So first of all, the site is pretty much done. Far and away the nicest it’s every looked. I don’t even miss the fleur de lis from the original GalleySlaves.blogspot.com. Still monkeying with the type, though, to make it more readable.

Second: I ought to remind you that the dad book is less than a month away. Not that I really need to sell you: Matt Labash on giving your kids the sex talk. This thing sells itself.

Third, if you’re in D.C. on Monday May 11, you should come over to AEI for our little book event. It’s going to be great. Jonah Goldberg, P. J. O’Rourke, Steve Hayes, James Lileks, Tucker Carlson, and Rob Long will regale you with war stories and offer advice. There will be alcohol. You just have to RSVP in advance, which you can do here.

Boston Marathon Stuff

1) You can watch the livestream here. Which is awesome all on its own. But I’m pretty sure Al Trautwig (aka the J. K. Simmons of sports) is doing the call.

2) This piece on the 1982 marathon is amazing. One of my favorite pieces of sports writing ever.

Update: In case you missed it, highlights included:

* Americans simultaneously leading the men’s and women’s races, deep into the course.

* An unheralded American man (Dathan Ritzenhein) running the race of his life.

* The winning move coming from a counter-move around the 24-mile mark.

So awesome.

#TeamBritt

Years ago when we lived in Old Town Alexandria, our condo complex had a towing company that patrolled the lot for people without HOA stickers on their windshield. One night they towed my wife’s car. Which did have a sticker.

I called the company about this the next morning and politely asked them to bring the car back. They refused. They refused, even, to release the car without us paying the tow charge. They insisted that if the car had been towed, even if it had been towed in error, we still had to pay to get it out of the lot. They were not pleasant about it. Or even apologetic. I got the distinct sense that this was not a customer-oriented industry.

You can see why that might be true. A towing company has customers only in the very loosest sense. They have contracts with the controlling entities whose property they patrol, but these contracts typically involve very little money. Instead, the contracts merely act as a kind of letter of marque giving the towing companies the ability to make money from the people they tow. So the towing companies aren’t responsible to the parties with whom they interact most intimately, and are only vaguely responsible to the controlling parties, who tend to be institutions and not individuals. You can understand why towing companies behave as if they are a law unto themselves.

My story only has a happy ending because I was president of the HOA at the time. I had our management company’s GC call the towing company to inform them they were in breach of contract. At which point they relented on forcing us to pay to get the car back. But they still insisted that my wife had to pick it up.

So she goes out to Arlington to get her car and the asshat running the lot is, well, let’s just say it’s a very unpleasant experience. My wife is a saint who just wanted to get out of the situation. Any normal person would have gone somewhere in the vein of #TeamBritt.

A couple weeks later, the company started towing another car from the HOA lot, which also had a properly displayed sticker. But this time the owner came out and confronted the tow-truck diver as he was in the act. The guy refused to put the car down–he insisted that “company policy” dictated that once a car was hitched to the truck, it could not be released for any reason. They nearly came to blows; fortunately someone had called the cops and the police showed up and forced the tow-truck driver to release the car, telling him that was he was doing was essentially stealing.

Our HOA killed the towing contract at our next meeting.

So maybe Britt McHenry was being unwarrantedly abusive and vile. Or maybe she was responding to some deeply unpleasant people who had caused her material harm with total impunity.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I’ve tried to withhold, I really have. And the last trailer left me completely cold.

But this one makes me feel kind of funny. Like when we used to climb the rope in gym class.

So fine. Just take my money. I give up.

This One Goes to ’11’

Andrew Stiles and the Free Beacon take the amusing Hillary-as-Lucille-Bluth meme and turn it to 11. As the kids say, omfg.

When do we get the Hillary-Lucille-2016 T-shirts?

Site News

Yes, I know.

We’re getting very close, though. Comments are fixed! The new header will be attractive and lovely!

And by the by, you’re going to love the book.

Nixon in a Pantsuit

I’m inclined to think that the Hillary-Nixon parallels are even better than people assume. She’s secretive; she’s ambitious; she’s been around public life for forever; she’s not an innately gifted politician; she’s making one last-gasp run at the Oval Office, which she’s obviously coveted her entire life. But perhaps most importantly, she’s tough like Nixon. And I mean that in the best possible sense.

Galley Friend J.S. points us to this smart blog post exploring the likenesses at length. My favorite passage comes at the end:

I think the biggest thing with Nixon is he could plausibly argue that he was right all along. In 1964 Goldwater ran on the slogan, “In your heart you know he right.” By 1968 most people had figured that out and could see it on their TV. Nixon did not have to make the same pitch because it was manifest. Voting for Nixon was, to a small degree, about normal people regaining control of their country.

Hillary, in contrast, has always been wrong. The one and only thing she has gotten right in 40 years is that Obama was not ready for the job. That’s the one thing she can’t say in this campaign.

I’m not sure this is right, or fair to either Hillary or Obama. (She’s gotten a few other things right–marrying Bill!–and Obama would say that his presidency has turned out to be consequential in exactly the ways he had hoped, even if the rest of America doesn’t like the outcomes.) But it’s funny anyway.

Exit question: One of the things Republicans may underestimate about Hillary is this: If you went to your garden-variety Republican voter and told them that a Democrat was going to win the White House in 2016, but that they got to help choose which national Democrat it was, wouldn’t Hillary be at the top of their list? Wouldn’t Republicans vastly prefer Hillary to O’Malley, or Warren, or Harry Reid, or just about every other high-profile Democrat?

Free Advice for Jim Webb

He’s going to need a campaign theme song. And the obvious choice is the Ruby Friedman cover of “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”

That would be epic.

The Netflix ‘Daredevil’ Is Astonishingly Good

I’m only a few episodes in, but the Netflix Daredevil is an amazing piece of work. It’s instantly my second-favorite cinematic depiction of a superhero and if there’s any justice in the world, it’ll be a big hit. A few thoughts, in no specific order:

* It’s really dark. Literally. You almost have to watch it with the lights out if you have an LCD or LED screen; it rewards people with plasma because it’s shot with so much black.

* It’s also dark in the narrative sense.

* At times it feels like an R-rated version of an early Law & Order episode.

* From the beginning, Daredevil was conceived as Marvel’s answer to Batman. In the hands of different writers, that parallel has been sometimes more, and sometimes less, explicit. The Netflix Daredevil might as well be Matt Murdock: Year One.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the second episode contains my favorite line of Batman dialogue ever to make the screen. Murdock (who doesn’t even have the Daredevil monicker yet) has taken a Chechen gangster prisoner on the roof of a building. The guy is part of a human trafficking ring which has recently abducted a 7-year-old boy and is about to sell him into (heavily implied) sexual slavery. Murdock beats the living crap out of him in the course of an interrogation, including sliding a knife behind the guy’s eyeball. Makes the Batman-Joker interrogation room scene look like patty-cake.

Anyway, the Chechen guy eventually breaks (which of course would never happen in the real world because torture never, ever leads to good information!) and Murdock hauls him over to the edge of the roof, gets up into his face and whispers to him:

“This is important. Shhhh. . . Shhhhh . . . Listen—I need you to know why I’m hurting you. It’s not just the boy. I’m doing this because I enjoy it.”

And this plays even more badass than it sounds.

* In general, Charlie Cox’s Murdock is great. The perfect combination of charming, cunning, self-righteous, and slightly smug. Very much the Daredevil of the comics.

* The writers have made important changes to Jack Murdock, but I like them.

* The Catholic humor is great.

* The combat stuff is brutal. Really brutal. There’s a scene in episode 1.2 that’s an obvious homage to Old Boy.

I’ll have more thoughts as I get deeper into the series. But you should run, not walk, to this thing.

Great Moments in Law Enforcement: North Charleston Edition

The shooting of Walter Scott by police officer Michael Slager is being well chewed over. (So much so that the New York Times devoted half of it’s above-the-fold front page to it yesterday. Which seems like reasonable news judgment only if you’re working from a pretty ugly agenda.)

What strikes me about this shooting is that from an institutional perspective, the worst part of it isn’t the actual shooting. It’s the planting of evidence and attempted cover-up.

I’m willing to believe that cops can make honest, but terrible, errors in judgment when it comes to lethal force. (This case seems not to be one them, mind you.) You can see how, when confronted with split-second, life-and-death decisions, even good cops can make the wrong call.

But then Slager goes from killing a man to calmly planting evidence and then making a radio call lying about what just happened.

This proves that the shooting isn’t just bad judgment and an illegal use of deadly force, but an act of corruption. And public corruption is like plagiarism and adultery–almost nobody does it just once. (Slager’s speed and relative calmness also suggest that he’s used to not being strictly truthful.)

If I was the DA, seeing Slager plant evidence and lie about this murder would make me open up every case he’s ever been involved in. And it would make me very interested in what other officers in the department knew about Slager and what they did (or didn’t do) over the years in regards to him. Did they try to get rid of him? Did they turn a blind eye? Did that aid and abet?

But then, as Connor Friedersdorf has written, union policies make it hard for management to get rid of bad cops even if they want to.

Exit question: If Rand Paul was serious about criminal justice reform, then instead of making ludicrous statements about repealing any laws that create a disparate impact, he’s start with reforming police unions and then work his way up the chain from there. Because that’s where criminal justice reform has to start: You clean up law enforcement first, then work on prosecutorial mismanagement, and then you look at the actual laws on the books once they’re being properly and judiciously enforced.

But of course, Rand Paul doesn’t really mean “criminal justice reform” when he talks like that. What he really means is “weed!”

That said, is there any reason that the serious candidates couldn’t make criminal justice reform a component of their pitches, starting with police unions? Conservatives are for law and order, but they’re also distrustful of the government and especially public-sector unions. I suspect we may have reached a point where it’s safe to treat police unions the way they do teacher’s unions.

(Which, by the by, might be better than they deserve. Bad teachers don’t actually kill people.)