Blood & Treasure

baring all

Got to admit it, crazed as they were they had a lot of fun:

Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All, the new memoir by former GOP PR aide Lisa Baron, begins on a note both intriguing and revolting. "When people find out that I worked for Ralph Reed during the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, they always ask the same thing: Was it true Ralph told voters that Senator John McCain fathered a black child?" she writes. "And my answer is always the same, 'How would I know? I was in a Greenville hotel room giving Ari Fleischer a blow job.'"

There’s your non-denial denial. It wasn’t me who said that: my mouth was full. Ms Goldberg continues:

As a liberal, I've often wondered about the motivations of Republicans who work on behalf of a social agenda that they have no intention of abiding by in their own lives. Why would a hard-partying socially liberal woman devote herself to electing men like Reed, or like Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss? The answer, it turns out, is distressingly simple. Because she's kind of a terrible person.

Well, yes and no. The actual answer to her question is revealed later on.

Her real passion is for cocktails and designer clothes—she drops brand names like a cut-rate Bret Easton Ellis. When she does express political preferences, they're strictly self-serving. "Right or wrong, I knew that it would be near impossible for Roe v. Wade to be overturned," she writes. "But higher taxes would impale my paycheck, tomorrow, unless the right people are in office."

If you deploy blowjobs then you won’t need an abortion, and if you do you can get one anyway. But my money is my money. Ms Baron is a 21st century moderate: she weighs the issues, makes fine distinctions and resolves them in a way she believes will be unlikely to burden the taxpayers.

red song with Tibetan characteristics

Well OK, red songs after all. This is actually quite slick. The singer’s employer is the General Political Department of the PLA. Background here. And here’s the Cowellised version.

"Laundry Song" By Sonam Wangmo from HPeaks on Vimeo.

anniversary appreciation

Happy 90th birthday, Communist Party of China. As Confucious said in his interview with Johann Hari, you’re a stone killer and an all round dirty rotten bastard, though it has to be said you get a few things done and the current pile of skulls stands at a very low level indeed on past form. Why not see if you can't slap around the hostages a bit less. I was going to embed a red songfest video in honour of the occasion, but I’m not in the mood for kitsch. Have some redgrass instead. via

air vice marshal foo foo bombs presidential palace

Andrew McGregor Marshall has a summary of his ongoing epic of modern Thai monarchy and politics over here. Money shot:

One troubling insight shines through very clearly in the U.S. cables: Leading members of Thailand's establishment not only hate Thaksin, but they are terrified of the prospect of him regaining power and wreaking revenge on those who have wronged him. Moreover, with the king old and ill, the royalists do not want to risk a pro-Thaksin party holding office when he dies, as that would give Thaksin and his allies a huge advantage in determining how the succession struggle plays out. For all these reasons, if his sister Yingluck wins the election, she is unlikely to govern for long: The establishment is likely to resort again to Yellow Shirt mob violence, a judicial intervention, or even another coup to unseat her.

Or maybe they'll just cancel the elections.

barbarian affairs

Moderately interesting article on China's think tanks.  I'd be wary of giving too much credence to Shambaugh, who's infamous for valuing his Party access too highly and fantasizes about a meritocratic elite.  (Essentially, he projects onto the Party what, one suspects, he would like the US to be run like.) Fravel's South China Sea stuff looks much more interesting.

yellow school panic

I went on a tear last week in Tom Ricks' comments about the idiocy of the "Chinese education is leaving us behind!" idea, which basically depends on comparing the top 1% of Chinese schools - the ones the rich kids who make it to the US attend and that are shown to visitors - with the mainstream of American or British schools.

Anyway, I did a brief survey of friends and colleagues in their mid-to-early 20s as to class sizes as their schools, and the unsurprising consensus was that class sizes smaller than 40 were very rare, that at least half the kids basically got no education at all because they were effectively ignored by the teacher in favor of the smarter/richer kids, and the reason they'd made it through is both because they were visibly clever and because their parents bribed their teachers to sit them at the front of the class.  Everyone I asked was from an urban middle-class family, too.

the legend of koizumi

I must find an English translation of this.

The premise of the manga is that international diplomacy is settled on the mahjong table, with real-life politicians depicted as masters of mahjong.

George W: Bush: The 41st President of the United States, often referred to as "Papa Bush". In his mind, he was disgraced by the Japanese twice: the first is when he was being shot down above Ogasawara in World War II, the second is when his son was defeated in Okinawa on the mahjong table. He summoned Koizumi to the Texas Schoolbook Depository in Dallas (by kidnapping Taizō) in order to settle the score with mahjong. In the end, he sacrificed himself to save his son from dying at the mahjong table against Skorzeny. His special move is the "Apocalypse Now Ron" (where "ron" is winning by picking a discard).

Benedict XVI: The current Pope of the Vatican. Summoned Koizumi to test his strength in order to counter a new global threat. Capable of walking on thin air and reenacting the first seven days of the Genesis on the mahjong table, accompanied by a boys choir. His special moves are the "Sainte-Trinite" (DaiSanGen) and "Logos" (All honors).

 

get your party gossip here

Wikileaks gives some palace rumors about the elite (hat tip, Rob Hunwick).  The most plausible part of this to me is the sharing of mistresses, which happens all the time - there was one Shanghai lass linked to *eight* officials. (Think Christine Keeler.)  Grandfather Wen comes rather well out of the story about his wife, which makes me wonder if it's wishful thinking. 

It's a claustrophobic world at the top, too. Everyone lives together, draws from the same pool of wives and mistresses, goes on holiday to the same places, and gets escorted by a ring of security wherever they go. The detachment from reality this brings is only going to get worse with the new generation born into that world, plus a little cross-breeding with the super-rich. "Money for power" marriages are getting popular, mixing one kid from a business dynasty with another from a political family, like American heiresses marrying into British nobility in the 19th century.  I reckon in a decade, once the current crop have all been through Harvard, they'll be mixing them with the American elite too.

the friends of Gracie Harmon

I’m reading Herbert Asbury’s Gem of the Prairie, under its movie tie-in title of Gangs of Chicago (Asbury wrote Gangs of New York). Chicago was, as they say, a wide open town, wide enough to support a kind of court circular on the local prostitution scene for the men who used it, apparently also read for gossip value by the women who were objects of the coverage, and produced under various names by a fellow called Shang Andrews. The year is 1877. Some excerpts:

Lulu De Vere, the child courtesan, has removed from Goodrich’s to the Hotel de Costello.

There is a lot of snide young tid-bits at 376 State Street.

Eva Hawkins is on one of her drunks again.

Miss Kit Thompson, of 483 South Clark, had better let up on taking other girls’ men in her room and buying booze for them.

Little French Carrie is at 310 State Street.

Miss Jessie Curtis, the star boarder at 519 State Street, is looking nice and shows up fine of late. That’s right Jessie; don’t drink and you will always prosper.

Ada Huntley is now happy – she has a new lover – Miss Fresh of Pittsburgh.

Mary McCarthy has gone to the insane asylum.

Little Kittie says she has been on a big drunk. You had better look out, Kit, or the bug juice will get the best of you.

The friends of Gracie Harmon say she is not near as bad as she is painted. She is doing the best she can, and that’s all anyone can do.

sense and the other thing

Nice piece on Wen Jiabao’s visit to Stratford and China’s appreciation of Shakespeare in particular and literature in general.

I saw some polling a few years back by the British Council on attitudes to the UK in China and there was an astonishing correlation between positive attitudes to Britain and appreciation of English literature. There were no particular preferences either. What mattered was that it was big, sprawling, naturalistic and immersive. I got the impression that this was not hugely convenient for the BC, which was under orders to market Britain as a kind of pocket America, all shiny and new, that being the age of High Blairism. Yet if we had a handle on China, it was thanks to a bunch of dead scribblers.

But then on the other hand my old friend and colleague who called herself Juliet at fourteen after reading the play and being thrilled by it and wanting to learn better English to read more ended up at Deloitte, where the money was. Sense and sensibility, innit?