As always, the idea here is definitely not to come off as some kind of expert, but rather to stimulate discussion and sharing on some pretty-much non-poilitical topics (although more political tonight than ever before).
Wine: La Vieille Ferme, Cotes du Ventoux Rouge, 2005
If you’re looking for a wine that delivers consistent, excellent value for the money, this has got to be in your top five. Produced by the same family that makes the acclaimed high-dollar Chateau de Beaucastel line, this could be considered the ultimate peasant wine. It’s ready to drink upon purchase, offering big flavors combined with soft tannins. It’s fruity up front, but an earthiness underneath that separates it from all those similarly priced Australian fruit bombs with funny animal names. A blend of classic Rhone grape varietals including Grenache, Syrah and Carignan, it offers a surprising level of complexity to go with its easy drinkability. For me, the most fun thing about wine is the enormous variety, so I don’t have an "everyday" wine. But if I had to pick one, this would be a top contender.
Women: The newspaper clipping is from August of 1986. I’ve saved it all these years for two reasons. One, it was written by Paul Hendrickson, then of the Washington Post, who I still consider the best newspaper feature writer I have ever read. (And yes, I am quite familiar with Rick Bragg’s work, thank you. Hendrickson is better.) The other is the lesson it taught me, one that has ever greater relevance – or, perhaps more accurately, ever greater irony – with every passing year. It taught me that one can be a staunch conservative, and a fiercely partisan Republican, and still be a tower of integrity.
This is a political blog, and in this fourth installment of WW&S, I figured it was about time for a tribute to a political woman. There are a lot of Democratic women from my lifetime I consider to be truly outstanding, profoundly significant political figures: Barbara Jordan, first, foremost and always; Shirley Chisolm, Pat Schroeder, Nancy Pelosi and, yes, Hillary Clinton among them. But tonight, I give you the lady from Maine, Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith.
"I was a woman determined to make good, I suppose," she says. "I was determined to keep my word to the people I served. I wouldn’t give in once I’d made up my mind. I’d see a thing through. This continues to be true."
-- Smith to Hendrickson, at age 88
Margaret Chase Smith did not fit the mold of what today passes for "conservatism" – i.e., she was fiscally responsible, and believed a person’s faith was their own business and no one else’s. She was fiercely pro-military, and even more fiercely partisan in her denunciations of Democrats. She strongly supported the war in Vietnam. I would not have voted for her in a Senate election over most Democrats serving today. I would vote for her over Joe Lieberman in a stone cold minute.
For three decades of pre- and postwar American life, from 1940 to 1973, Margaret Chase Smith seemed her own kind of Washington monument, a hawk on defense, opposed to welfare legislation, a supporter of law-and-order bills. Military preparedness was her issue.
-- Paul Hendrickson
She was the first woman to be elected to both the U.S. House and the Senate; many people forget this – or never knew it to begin with – but she was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party convention; at the 1964 Republican convention that eventually put Barry Goldwater on the ticket.
Those are important milestones, to be sure, but I don’t put much stock in being "first" at a lot of things. She did things much more meaningful. She stood up to Dick Nixon, refusing to vote for utterly unqualified Supreme Court nominees Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, putting aside partisanship to preserve the stature of the nation’s highest court. (Sad how such notions are today considered "quaint.")
More importantly, however, years earlier she had stood up to the most fearsome, evil, dangerous bully and fraud in the history of American government. On June 1, 1950, she stood tall in the Senate chamber and delivered a speech known forever more as simply "the Declaration of Conscience."
While the men of her party – men who knew full well how dangerous Joseph McCarthy was – "cowered beneath their desks," as Hendrickson put it, Margaret Chase Smith did what even Harry Truman couldn’t bring himself to do. She gave Joe McCarthy hell.
In that historic speech, she laid out what she considered to be the basic principles of "Americanism":
• The right to criticize
• The right to hold unpopular beliefs
• The right to protest
• The right of independent thought
What Republican would stand and make such a statement today?
Are those crickets I hear?
Song: Had to Cry Today, Blind Faith
Not a lot to say in the music department tonight. I’ve blathered on long enough. Here’s a taste of British Art Rock, demonstrating how much pure soul a jam band could display back in the day.