Daily Digest

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• AOC to Dems: Drink the Kool Aid!
• Sports Desk: “Winning Time,” Losing Tone?
• The Biden ordeal
• The upside of inflation
• D-Day at 78

AOC to Dems: Drink the Kool Aid! Posted: 06 Jun 2022 11:14 AM PDT (Steven Hayward) There is no finer representative figure for the transformation of Democrats into the party of the faculty lounge and identity politics uber alles than her self-worshipness, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Despite repeated surveys showing hispanics don’t use the term “Latinx” (with a large plurality hating the term), here we see AOC chiding Democrats for not using the term: Curiously, she more or less contradicts herself when she says Democrats should change the subject, to health care, etc. Democrats: Please PLEASE take this woman’s advice!

Sports Desk: “Winning Time,” Losing Tone? Posted: 06 Jun 2022 09:59 AM PDT (Steven Hayward) As someone who grew up in LA when the Lakers reached their first pinnacle with the great Jerry West/Wilt Chamberlain team that won a record 33 games in a row in the 1971-72 season (by an average margin of 17 points a game), and then to be around for the rise of the “Showtime” Lakers with the arrival of Magic Johnson in 1980, I have been looking forward to the HBO serial dramatization, “Winning Time.” When sports and Hollywood meet, the result is not always salutary. Such is the case with “Winning Time,” though it is thoroughly watchable and has some great moments to balance out its bad ones. That 1971-72 Lakers team is notable for being led by 33-year old Jerry West, not far from the end of his career, while Wilt was 35, and no longer the scoring powerhouse he had been a decade before. Coach Bill Sharman convinced Wilt to concentrate more on defense and rebounding, and the addition of sharp-shooting Gail Goodrich in the backcourt alongside West diversified the team’s scoring capacity, especially since Elgin Baylor was forced into retirement at the beginning of the season on account of recurring injuries. As an aside, I got to shake hands with Wilt once, though “shaking hands” is a bit of a misnomer; my not-especially-small hand disappeared inside his enormous paw.  I was dating at the time a Nike-sponsored all-American, Olympic caliber distance runner (except the U.S. didn’t send a team to the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow), and she got me into a fancy athletic event in Beverly Hills, where Wilt was the nominal host. Fish out of water, you say? Au contraire: I refer you to Exhibit #1 (left), featuring your sometimes sportswriter navigating the 3,000 meter steeplechase once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, when I also had longish hair. (I’ll add that while I could never dunk a basketball, I did dunk a couple times in the steeplechase—which is not a scoring move, needless to say.) Around the time this pic was taken in the late spring of 1977, the Lakers came to Portland for their conference championship series with the Bill Walton-led Trailblazers. The Lakers borrowed our gym to hold practice, and someone—I forget whether it was our basketball coach or someone else in the athletic hierarchy—got the Lakers to give permission for a handful of us from various spring sports at the college to sit quietly in the gym and watch the Lakers warm up and run some drills. You got to appreciate how freakishly tall Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is and how his movements were deceiving, but the real thrill was seeing Jerry West in the flesh. He was the Lakers coach that year, and the Lakers were swept badly in four straight by the Trailblazers, en route to their one magical championship over the 76ers in the finals. Walton was brilliant in that series, but it still seems incredible that a team that matched up Bobby Gross with Julius “Dr. J” Erving could possibly win in such convincing fashion, let alone with a conspicuously short sixth man from Old Dominion with the unlikely name of Dave Twardzik. There are a number of call-backs to both the 71-21 Lakers, and in a small way to the 1977 Blazers, in the early episodes of “Winning Time.” It was widely reported contemporaneously that Jerry West didn’t like being a floor coach, and before long he moved upstairs to a management role alongside GM (and his former floor coach) Bill Sharman. But was Jerry West really the sullen, temperamental jerk he is portrayed in “Winning Time”? That’s been the major controversy over “Winning Time,” as West, played brilliantly by Jason Clarke, comes off as a hot-headed, drunken a–hole. I have no idea whether there is any basis to this, but I doubt it. And there has been some talk that the portrait of West is so overdrawn that West might have sufficient cause for legal action against the filmmakers, even before the Heard-Depp verdict suggested a revival of defamation claims. (West has written to the show’s producers demanding an apology, with a hint of a possible lawsuit to follow.) A more interesting question is whether it is true that West opposed drafting Magic Johnson as he thought the team already had one of the best point guards in the league in Norm Nixon. Likewise one expects a considerable amount of dramatic license in portraying the Lakers story (did Kareem and Magic really come to blows in the locker room?), but the filmmakers also played fast and loose with the facts, or exaggerate their characterizations in ways that detract from the film. I have no doubt that legendary Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn was an egomaniac; I think it was his sometime color man Keith Erickson who quipped that Hearn had “a low threshold of interruptability.” Paul Westhead and Pat Riley are played for insecure, simpering placeholders in over their heads after they replaced new coach Jack McKinney following McKinney’s serious bicycle accident, while McKinney, who is portrayed as the real genius behind the 1977 Trailblazer’s championship as assistant coach to Jack Ramsey, is played as a badass. On the plus side of the ledger, the casting and staging of the series is superb, especially John C. Reilly playing the new and badly over-extended team owner Jerry Buss. Reilly was made for this role as much as Jack Black fit School of Rock (a role that was actually written with Jack Black in mind). The rest of the cast is also remarkable for their resemblance to the Laker stars, not only Quincy Isaiah as Magic and Solomon Hughes as Kareem, but down to the supporting Laker stars such as Jamil Atkins as Jamaal Wilkes, and Delante Desouza as Michael Cooper. The person playing Norm Nixon had an especially strong physical resemblance to the real person, and it turns out that the actor DeVaughn Nixon is indeed Norm Nixon’s son. The staged recreations of basketball game scenes are strikingly good. This is often the weakest point of sports films. And one of the very best scenes in in the series depicts Kareem instructing Magic about the skyhook. (See the scene below.) “Winning Time” has been greenlit for a second season, and I’ll be interested to see how they handle Magic Johnson demanding a trade at the beginning of the 1982 season because he didn’t like coach Westhead’s complex offensive scheme. Westhead was, if I recall correctly, removed as head coach within 24 hours with Jerry West stepping in to replace him as coach temporarily, prompting one of the greatest headlines of all time in the sports section of the Los Angeles Times: “Westhead’s Out; West Heads In—It’s Magic!” The New York Post headline writers surely looked on with envy that day.

The Biden ordeal Posted: 06 Jun 2022 06:08 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) I admired former Vice President Walter Mondale for his decency and integrity, among other things. I elaborated in “A personal note on Walter Mondale” when he died last year. Watching some old PBS retrospective on the Carter years, however, I doubted his political intelligence. He reeled off the challenges that brought down Carter in his 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan. Among them — here I am writing from memory — Mondale included the energy crisis, the horrible inflation, the historic rise in interest rates, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iranian hostage crisis. Mondale presented these setbacks and crises as something like afflictions from heaven that had no relation to the policies adopted by the Carter administration itself. You have got to be kidding me, I thought. Don’t you get it? However, Carter also did some good. He brought in Paul Volcker as Fed chairman to stem inflation. Well, that was painful, but it was what we needed, and President Reagan stuck with Volcker as the consequences of Volcker’s anti-inflationary policy followed. Carter also promoted deregulatory policies in the railroad and airline industries. See, for example, t Matt Welch’s Reason column “When Democrats loved deregulation.” I assess that Joe Biden has no constructive policies offsetting the catastrophes he has wrought. That is nevertheless not the way Biden or his daycare minders in the White House see it. Confronted by historically unprecedented disapproval ratings, they think they have a “messaging” problem. They think we don’t get it. They urge us to disbelieve our eyes. They think they only need to explain the wonders they have performed in their 18 months in office. That is my takeaway from Jonathan Lemire’s Politico story “Biden wants to get out more, seething that his standing is now worse than Trump's.” Lemire reports: The plan is to put Biden on the road to highlight progress being made, even incrementally, in meeting the series of tests, with visits this week to California, where he will preside over a summit of Western Hemisphere allies, as well as New Mexico to push for his climate agenda. The administration will also set aside its reluctance to work with "a pariah" nation with hopes to spur oil production. And it plans to sharpen its attacks on Republicans, aiming to paint the GOP as out-of-touch with mainstream America on issues like gun safety and abortion, all while hoping the upcoming Jan. 6 congressional hearings will further color the party as too extremist and dangerous to return to power. I further assess that enhanced exposure to Joe Biden will not improve his poll ratings. He presents as a senescent dolt struggling to read the text scrolling through his teleprompter. I further assess that Biden’s Saudi Arabian detour will not improve his poll ratings. Rather, it will remind us of his insane war on energy production in the United States. The cure for what ails them (and us) seems to be beyond their ken. Lemire’s story labors the comparison of Biden with Carter. I see the contrast coming into view. Joe Biden is making Jimmy Carter look like a good president.

The upside of inflation Posted: 06 Jun 2022 05:05 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) You probably missed the New York Times column last week exploring the upside of inflation. Understanding what Democrats and their supporters need to hear right now, the Times delivered Annaliese Griffin’s op-ed column “You Want to Buy Meat? In This Economy?” Like a bad cold contracted by a cigarette smoker, inflation presents a good opportunity to lose a bad habit. Griffin observes: “Meat, poultry, fish and eggs now cost 14.3 percent more than they did a year ago.” What has gone wrong? Griffin does not want to know how we got here. Rather, Griffin presents the opportunity food inflation presents for you, the reader, to reform your diet in the interest of Gaia: Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat. While hunger and food insecurity are a very real problem in the United States and globally, middle- and upper-class Americans still have more choices at the grocery store than perhaps any food shoppers in history. Climate change has motivated some to eat less resource-intensive meat and more vegetables, grains and legumes, but this movement has not reached the scale necessary to bring needed change — yet. The Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles translates Griffin: “[I]ncreasingly unaffordable food prices might just be the catalyst climate activists are seeking. Because at the moment one suspects the word ‘some’ vastly overstates the actual number of Americans whom ‘climate change has motivated’ to adjust their diets. Some New York Times readers, perhaps.” Drawing on American history, Griffin seems to promote the possibilities afforded by coercive government action before she concludes with a preview of coming attractions. Coming soon, according to Griffin, the new freedom: [O]ur food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet. While poor and food-insecure households are already stretching their grocery budgets as far as they will go, shoppers with more choices have the relative luxury to see inflation as the nudge they need to go meatless at lunch or twice a week — or to simply break out of the slab-of-meat-with-two-sides mold that has composed the American plate for decades. The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be? Free at last! If the column hadn’t appeared on the editorial pages of the New York Times, one might suspect that someone is putting us on.

D-Day at 78 Posted: 06 Jun 2022 03:54 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) My college classmate John Floberg recently retired after a distinguished career in neurology. We took Professor Peter Bien’s freshman seminar on Politics and the Novel together during our first term. John is originally from Chicago but we reconnected in the Twin Cities through Power Line 40 years after our studies with Professor Bien. Following in a family tradition, John served as a commissioned Navy officer after our graduation. In 2016 John sent me this Daily Journal article about his father’s service on D-Day and his sister Anne Wilson’s then upcoming visit to the Normandy beaches where John and Anne’s father fought. Please check out Corey Elliot’s excellent story on Frederic Floberg, the executive officer on PC-565. The story concludes: “Anne Wilson has a copy of the D-Day orders passed onto her father's ship in May of 1944. Here is the briefing all members of the United States Navy received just two weeks before D-Day, June 6, 1944.” I thought readers might enjoy a look at the call to duty: 27 May, 1944. Secret From: Naval Commander, Western Task Force To: ALL HANDS 1. We of the Western Naval Task Force are going to land the American Army in France. 2. From battleships to landing craft ours is, in the main, an American Force. Beside us will be a mainly British force, landing the British and Canadian troops. Overhead will fly the Allied Expeditionary Air Force. We all have the same mission — to smash our way onto the beaches, and through the coastal defenses, into the heart of the enemy's fortress. 3. In two ways the coming battle differs from any that we have undertaken before: it demands more seamanship, and more fighting. We must operate in the waters of the English Channel and the French coast, in strong currents and twenty-foot tide. We must destroy an enemy defensive system which has been four years in the making, and our mission is one against which the enemy will throw his whole remaining strength. These are not beaches held by apathetic Italians or defended by hasty fortifications. These are prepare[d] positions, held by Germans who have learned from their past failures. They have coastal batteries and mine fields; they have [illegible] and E-boats and submarines. They will try to use them all. We are getting into a fight. 4. But it is not we who have to fear the outcome. As the German has learned from failure, we have learned from success. To this battle we bring our tested methods, with new weapons, and overwhelming strength. Tides and currents present a challenge which, forewarned, we know how to meet. And it will take more than the last convulsive effort of the beaten "master race" to match the fighting spirit of the American Navy. It is the enemy who is afraid. 5. In this force there are battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. There are hundreds of landing ships and craft, scores of patrol and escort vessels, dozens of specials assault craft. Every man in every ship has his job. And these tens of thousands of men and jobs add up to one task only — to land and support and supply and reinforce the finest army ever sent to battle by the United States. In that task we shall not fail. I await with confidence the further proof, in this the greatest battle of them all, that American sailors are seamen and fighting men second to none. 6. Captains will please publish this letter at quarters on the day that the ships are sealed; then post on bulletin boards; and remove and burn prior to sailing. A.G. Kirk (Commander, U.S. Navy) John noted that you can find part of the rest of the story on page 369 of Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day, June 6, 1944, where Ambrose quotes ship’s cook Exum Pike. Pike’s quote concludes: “I have often told my two sons that I have no fear of hell because I have already been there.”

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