Wow:

“He eliminated serving kosher food for elderly Jewish residents under [Medicaid],” Gingrich said. “I did not know this; it just came out yesterday.  The more we dig in, I understand why George Soros in Europe yesterday said it makes no difference if it’s Romney or Obama, we can live with either one.”

Newt robocall text:

As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney vetoed a bill paying for kosher food for our seniors in nursing homes. Holocaust survivors, who for the first time, were forced to eat non-kosher, because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for our grandparents to eat kosher. Where is Mitt Romney’s compassion for our seniors? Tuesday you can end Mitt Romney’s hypocrisy on religious freedom, with a vote for Newt Gingrich. Paid for by Newt 2012.

Commentary’s Alana Goodman explains why this claim is nonsense. Jonah Goldberg tweets that this accusation is “beneath him” — Gingrich, he means. I disagree. There’s very little that’s beneath Newt Gingrich. The man could stand upright under a rattlesnake’s belly and still wear his a ten-gallon hat.

In the Charles Murray thread, reader Bradley P. writes:

How is it that I’m in Murray’s top 20%, usually earn right at six figures, am in church on Sundays, have a useful college degree from a good school, have a healthy lifestyle, and live frugally–truly–but have had to rely on debt the last couple of years just to make ends meet? I live in fear of car repairs, car with 172,000 miles blowing up, house repairs, braces, insurance, clothing for my kids, and taxes. That’s all just more debt. Saving for retirement? Forget it. Saving for college for my two kids? Forget it. Vacation? Forget it. A nice date with my wife more than twice a year? Forget it. An optimistic view of the future? Forget it. I’ll retire when I’m dead.

Something tells me that the 20% is on its way to becoming the 10% or less. I’ve often read that this nation’s healthy middle class was a post-war aberration. It’s looks like we are simply in the process of returning to normal.

George Packer imagines what might happen to the GOP should Romney win the nomination but lose the general election. Excerpt:

This scenario is still the odds-on favorite. To deduce the consequences among Republican activists, let’s imagine a counter-factual from 1972: pit Nixon against Humphrey or Muskie or Jackson, a candidate imposed on the liberal Democratic base much as conservative Republicans feel Romney is being imposed on them. A Nixon win would have convinced the liberal base that the party had not been true to its core. The theology would have hardened a little more. Next time, they’d nominate a real liberal, a candidate of the grassroots.

It’s easy to picture hard-core Republicans coming to the same conclusion: Romney and the party élite betrayed the party’s principles (again, after McCain) and gave the country four more years of the hated Obama. Never again! Next time, a real conservative! (Go back another twenty years, to the G.O.P. convention of 1952, and Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, a supporter of the conservative Robert Taft, pointing at Thomas E. Dewey, the party’s moderate two-time loser, and thundering, “Don’t take us down the path to defeat again!”)

Which do you think is the greater risk to the long-term good of the Republican Party: a Gingrich general-election candidacy and certain crushing defeat this fall, or a Romney general-election candidacy and likely defeat this fall? In the case of the former, the party would be forced to have an ideological reckoning with the base that would probably make it stronger in 2016. In the case of the latter, the pain will be delayed by years, but will eventually come.

Of course, the best-case scenario for the GOP isn’t very appetizing either: a Romney victory in November. If Romney were to have a successful presidency, that would be a true game changer. But even if Romney were a saint and a statesman, the obstacles the US president, whoever he is, will face over the next four years make a successful presidency unlikely.

The Islamic jurist Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, the popular “satellite sheik” and leading light of Egyptian Islamists, says not to worry, the Islamism the Muslim Brotherhood is about to bring to Egypt won’t be sudden or otherwise jarring. For example:

“People do not understand the shari’a properly. We have to teach people the laws of the shari’aand explain them, before anything else.

“I think that in the first five years, there should be no chopping off of hands. This period should be dedicated to teaching things.”

Too right! And among those who will be taught? Goo-goo Westerners.

I have just been informed by a dissolute confederate of mine that the Zydeco Breakfast at the Cafe des Amis in Breaux Bridge is the thing to do on Saturday morning. Having just looked at the menu of the Cafe des Amis, I am inclined … well, to agree, certainly, but also to spontaneously combust with anticipation. I mean, look:

Orielle de Cochon   $9

Boudin stuffed, thinly fried dough, shaped liked pigs’ ears with powdered sugar

People. People. Gather yourselves and understand what we’re talking about here. A beignet stuffed with boudin!

A. Beignet. Stuffed. With. Boudin.

This is without question a sign that God loves us. Jane and Michael Stern, the orielle de cochon is calling you.

Twenty-five things she learned by opening a bookstore. Among them:

1.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.  Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money.  Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.

2.  While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.

5. If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can’t think of one, the person is not really a reader.  Recommend Nicholas Sparks.

15.  If you open a store in a college town, and maybe even if you don’t, you will find yourself as the main human contact for some strange and very socially awkward men who were science and math majors way back when.  Be nice and talk to them, and ignore that their fly is open.

19.  If you’re thinking of giving someone a religious book for their graduation, rethink. It will end up unread and in pristine condition at a used book store, sometimes with the fifty dollar bill still tucked inside.  (And you’re off and leafing once again).

The Browser links to the essay on Dickens that Theodore Dalrymple wrote for TAC’s previous issue. Dalrymple says that the lack of philosophical consistency in Dickens’ moral outlook is actually a strength:

Dickens is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political, and philosophical outlook. He veers crazily between the ferociously reactionary and the mushily liberal. He lampoons the disinterested philanthropy of Mrs. Jellyby (in Bleak House) with the same gusto or ferocity as he excoriates the egotism of Mr. Veneering (in Our Mutual Friend). He suggests that businessmen are heartless swine (Bounderby in Hard Times) or disinterestedly charitable (the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby). He satirizes temperance (in The Pickwick Papers) as much as he derides drunkenness (in Martin Chuzzlewit). The evil Jew (in Oliver Twist) is matched by the saintly Jew (in Our Mutual Friend). As Stephen Blackpool, the working-class hero of Hard Times says, “it’s aw a muddle.”

George Orwell, in his famous essay on Dickens, saw in this philosophical and moral muddle not a weakness but a strength, a generosity of spirit, an openness to the irreducible complexity of mankind’s moral situation, an immunity to what he called “the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls.”

Dalrymple says there is a lesson in that for us:

Under the impact of today’s economic crisis, the shrillness of opposing camps, of diagnosers, prognosticators, and curers, has increased. Even the same financial page of the same newspaper may have articles proposing diametrically opposed solutions, the only thing in common between them being the certainty with which they are offered. Each has a single simple principle, Gradgrindian or not, that is the supposed key to happiness, prosperity, economic growth. But now more than ever it is necessary to suppress our inherent tendency to seek the key to all questions, and reading Dickens may help us to do it.

Douglas LeBlanc reviews a book about a modernist cathedral (of spectacular ugliness, in my view) built for an Episcopal diocese in the Western Michigan. Thirty years after its consecration, the congregation had to abandon its grandiose building. It sold the pile to a megachurch, which thrives there. The displaced Episcopalians now worship in a space that used to be a Christian gift shop.

Metaphors usually don’t come so tidily packaged, do they?

See the cathedral’s profile above? That shot says to me, “Top of the morning to you, Mr. Sauron, sir.”

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Charles Murray’s latest book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.”  The conservative sociologist of family Brad Wilcox — what a fantastic choice of reviewers! — gives the book a positive notice in the Wall Street Journal today:

So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.

More:

Mr. Murray’s sobering portrait is of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness. And his book shows that many of these findings are also applicable to poor and working-class African Americans and Latinos. Mr. Murray notes that “family, vocation, faith, and community” have a “direct and strong relationship to self-reported happiness.” Not surprisingly, he shows that since the 1970s happiness has plummeted in working-class and poor communities—but not in affluent communities.

The economic and political success of the American experiment has depended in large part on the health of these founding virtues. Businesses cannot flourish if ordinary workers are not industrious. The scope and cost of government grows, and liberty withers, when the family breaks down. As James Madison wrote: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

David Brooks writes about the Murray book today, saying that he’ll “be shocked if there’s another book this year as important” as this one. He points out that Murray is writing only about white people, so racial differences don’t skew these results. More:

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

Nobody votes for a politician who blames them for problems — their own, or the country’s. Maybe they’ll vote for a politician who gives it to them straight, but convinces them that they, that we, can and must do better. Who is that politician? Anyway, it’s a mistake to think that the culture can be changed by politicians. The culture can be changed by culture-makers. Do you expect that Hollywood (“Hollywood” = the American entertainment industry) can be expected to change its messaging? Of course not. To do so would not only violate some of the sacred moral codes of these people — in particular, the idea that gaining and exercising maximum sexual autonomy is the pinnacle of modern democratic life — it would also not make much practical sense to them, given that they live far from the social chaos that results from poor and working-class people choosing to live by the same values they see valorized in popular culture.

Culture could be changed by religion — but as Murray shows, the lower classes have abandoned churchgoing. Besides, what does American religion increasingly characterized by the tenets of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and its core teaching that what really matters is relating to a deity that wants you above everything to feel good about yourself, have to say to people who need a radical change of life? MTD is a religious strategy for managing their decline.

A big problem here is that nobody knows what to do about this. Writing in the Journal the other day, Murray weakly offered a prescription that said the well-off (that is, the morally and culturally stable) ought to move next door to members of the other tribe. Well, maybe. But why, concretely, should a particular family choose to do that? Murray, a libertarian, suggests that it would make life more interesting for them. I bet it would, but people who have found a stable mode of life for their families don’t necessarily want interesting. If members of the first tribe are going to be convinced to make that move, it will have to come from strong moral conviction, informed either by religious commitment or a civic republicanism. (Here is a story about a Dallas man who made this kind of decision for his family, out of religious commitment). And even if they do make that move, why should members of the second tribe accept the lifestyle modeled by the new people on the block? Isn’t it possible, perhaps even likely, that they will reject bourgeois norms as elitism, as snobbery? If “respectability,” as modeled by these middle class people, is seen to be achieved only at the expense of group and class solidarity, there will be a powerful disincentive to adapt them (think of how difficult it is, culturally, for poor and working class black students to develop good academic habits, because they stand accused of “acting white.”).

Brad Wilcox suggests that Hollywood could and should change its messaging — agreed, but this is unlikely to happen — and that politicians could do more to stabilize the economic situation for the working class:

First, policy makers and business leaders need to shore up the economic foundations of working- and middle-class life. Globalization has paid huge dividends for the upper class, but it has undercut the earnings and job security of men (and their families) lower down the social ladder. Public policies designed to strengthen the educational opportunities (e.g., better vocational programs) and economic security (portable health-care plans) of ordinary Americans could help in renewing the economic foundations of the nation’s virtues.

Agreed, but from a politician’s point of view, where is the incentive to stand up against the globalism dogma preached by the GOP and the New Democrats? Besides which, as Brooks observes, it appears that neither party is focused on what really is undermining America’s foundations, but rather are all in for competing narratives that satisfy emotional needs, and have the dubious virtues of making all their problems Somebody Else’s Fault.
UPDATE: Daniel Larison is unimpressed by Brooks’s national service proposal. Excerpt:

All of this seems like a deliberate effort to avoid addressing problems of wage stagnation, rising cost of living, and other factors that prevent stable family formation.