Only in America!

Lemme give you the response to the title of this post right away before you read further: NOT!

When JFK became a presidential candidate, as a Roman Catholic in a country where Protestants viewed Catholics with a great deal of suspicion, he had to go out of his ways to make sure that voters understood that he would not be a Vatican candidate.  In a stirring speech about the separation of church and state, and his Catholicism, JFK said:

contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic.

An Irish-Catholic-American was elected president.  And JFK happens to be the only Catholic ever to have been elected to the White House.

In that ancestral home of his--in Ireland--an "American" history is being created: The son of a Hindu immigrant is all set to be the next prime minister of Ireland.  He is only 38--younger than JFK's age when he was elected president.  And, oh, this young man is gay:

A gay son of an Indian immigrant is now all but certain to become the next prime minister of Ireland, a country that has rapidly been leaving its conservative Roman Catholic social traditions behind.
Leo Varadkar, who was chosen on Friday by the Fine Gael party to be its leader, and therefore the head of the center-right governing coalition, will be the first openly gay taoiseach (as Ireland’s prime minister is called), and, at 38, the youngest.

The kind of a story that we normally associate only with the US.

Who were/are his parents?

Mr. Varadkar was born in Dublin in 1979, the son of an Irish Catholic nurse from County Waterford and a Hindu doctor from Mumbai, India. His parents met in England in the 1960s and lived in India for a time before moving to Ireland.
Growing up in a country where religious divisions have historically run deep, he attended a Catholic elementary school and a Protestant high school that followed the Church of Ireland tradition. He told The Irish Times in 2015 that he was raised Catholic but was “not a particularly religious person.”

How fascinating!  Almost a made-for-movie story!

Varadkar reminds us:

“If my election today shows anything, it is that prejudice has no hold in this Republic,” Varadkar said at Dublin’s Mansion House after the results were announced, adding: “Around the world people look to Ireland as a country where it doesn't matter where you come from, only where you want to go.”

I needed such a positive news to offset the bleakness here in the land of the free.

Photo of the day: Presidents Day

Caption at the source: WASHINGTON, D.C.—John F. Kennedy visits Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960.

Did JFK tell Eisenhower "I like Ike" ....??? :)

Reaching new lows in political discussions :(

First up, Rush Limbaugh ...

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And, from across the political spectrum, well ... some unknown Dem with a warped sense of what it means to lower the tone after the Arizona shooting ...

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Word Warcraft
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And back to Colbert who does a fantastic job with this clip (his ending comments are a letdown though!)

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50th Anniversary of JFK's Inaugural Address
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BHO meet LBJ, continued

Back in January--yes, seems like eons ago now--I linked to Juan Cole's observation, which was eerily titled "BHO meet LBJ."

That theme is gaining a lot more momentum recently.  While not that specific phrase, the theme is clear.  First, here is John Kerry--yes, the same Kerry who was one of the early supporters of candidate Obama:

Before we send more of our young men and women to this war, we need a fuller debate about what constitutes success in Afghanistan. We need a clearer understanding of what constitutes the right strategy to get us there. Ultimately, we need to understand, as Gen. Colin Powell was fond of asking, "What's the exit strategy?" Or as Gen. David Petraeus asked of Iraq, "How does it end?"
Why? Because one of the lessons from Vietnam—applied in the first Gulf War and sadly forgotten for too long in Iraq—is that we should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people. Otherwise, we risk bringing our troops home from a mission unachieved or poorly conceived.

It was interesting that Kerry's op-ed was in the Wall Street Journal.  I wonder what the deal is with that.
Well, it is not that the "liberal" media is quiet about the ghost of Vietnam.  In the NY Times, Frank Rich presents the following comments in the context of Woodward "leaking" McChrystal's report, and then an unnamed White House official countering it:

it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.
Within Kennedy’s administration, most supported the Joint Chiefs’ repeated call for combat troops, including the secretaries of defense (McNamara) and state (Dean Rusk) and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s special military adviser. The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he predicted that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” In the current administration’s internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily echoes Ball’s dissenting role.
Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia” — he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but presidents decide.”
Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now.

And Ross Douthat--the conservative columnist at the NY Times who replaced William Kristol--piles on:

However serious his doubts about escalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’s assessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the last two years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan as the neglected “good war.” But if Obama takes us deeper into war out of political necessity rather than conviction, the results could be disastrous.

Meanwhile, Germany's newly (re)elected Chancellor Merkel's deputy, Guido Westerwelle, will lead the cheers for continued Afghan military engagement:

While Germany's deployment to Afghanistan has become increasingly unpopular, Mr Westerwelle has emerged as the most powerful and articulate proponent of sustained involvement in the war.

So, instead of the Anglo-US lead into the Iraq debacle, we will now have a German-American push in AfPak?

Women in the Kennedy clan

This one was too good that I decided to copy and paste the entire piece:

One thing we have lost with the passing of Edward Kennedy is a certain generational model of the proper role for the family women in public life—the mother, wife, mistress, and daughter. It’s not a model I will miss.

It starts, of course, with Rose Kennedy, described thus in a review of a book about the Kennedy women:

Rose changed from an ambitious, lively, curious girl to a wife and mother whose emotions were rigidly controlled and whose mechanisms of denial so highly refined that she could accept her husband's lovers—notably Gloria Swanson—into her home. She passed much of that legacy on to her daughters Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Jean.

In the Kennedy family, the women preened and posed, suffered mistresses, got divorced. That iconic video of Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House, recently replayed on Mad Men, is disturbing to watch today. She honestly seems as if she’s being directed by a remote control.

If they were lucky, like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, they managed to install themselves at the head of virtuous nonprofits—“charities,” we used to call them. When it came to the family’s sense of its own mission, the women were not in the picture. Here is Joe Kennedy’s line of succession, which seems medieval today:

It was understood among the children that Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the oldest boy, would someday run for Congress and, his father hoped, the White House. When Joseph Jr. was killed in World War II, it fell to the next oldest son, John, to run. As John said at one point in 1959 while serving in the Senate: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”

Now, thank god (and feminism) we have Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy, who are contained by their husbands and children, but still exist as independent women in some recognizable form.

Do recessions worsen income inequality?

I read the following sentence in Megan McArdle's post:

Most of what recessions do is deepen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

At a gut level, this has been my worry all along. For the very reasons that McArdle writes about. Earlier this morning I was at the Saturn dealership for the oil change, and the conversation with the folks there was a reminder yet again that there is a high probability that my job and income are safe, while the number of unemployed increases, and while prices are in-check or even in decline. Sure, the high-flying investment bankers have been grounded now, and therefore there is a little bit of flattening at the top of the income distribution ..... but, ....

... the researcher side in me, that is suspicious of instincts and gut-feelings, wants/wanted to find if there is evidence to support this. Don't have much time to devote to this, given that I still have 15 test papers to grade before my class meets in two-hours-plus. (well, in between I have a lunch commitment too!) However, from a quick scan of the academic literature on this, I spotted an article in the April 2004 issue of Economic Journal, where the authors (Murat F. Iyigun and Ann L. Owen):

examined the relationship between income inequality and variability in aggregate consumption growth. In low-income countries, higher levels of inequality appear to be associated with less fluctuations in consumption growth, and in high-income countries, more inequality seems to be associated with greater fluctuations.

More inequality is associated with greater fluctations. Well, we know very well that income distribution got significantly skewed during the go-go boom years. And now, the downturn is also huge.

But, the article does not say anything about whether nasty economic downturns further widen the income gaps .... if a rising tide lifts all boats, then does a rapidly falling low tide strand catamarans while yachts continue to float away?

More on this later.