IF IT SNOWS THAT STRETCH DOWN SOUTH WON'T EVER STAND THE STRAIN. I like Glen Campbell. Most news coverage of his recent arrest has focused on "Rhinestone Cowboy" (which Campbell is said to have sung in his cell), but I prefer to recall three other milestones: first, that he was a yeoman session guitarist who toured with the Champs ("Tequila") and the Beach Boys; second, that he was the star of "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour," a perfectly entertaining summer replacement for the Smothers Brothers back in the day; and third, that he did one of the few absolutely perfect pop records of the 20th Century, "Wichita Lineman."

That Jimmy Webb song is basically a dramatic fragment: a lineman in a barren stretch of the Great Plains during wintertime talks about the burdens of his business and the burdens of his love in alternating passages, but with a similar attitude: it's hard work, and things might go wrong at any time. It's pretty sophisticated for mainstream 60s pop, but it's the arrangement on this record that lifts it into glory. The orchestral sweeps and twang guitar are perfectly normal -- a little C&W, a little Living Strings -- but because the song is so weird, they actually promote rather than assuage a feeling of unease, like a haggard-looking guy at the end of a bar methodically peeling the labels off each of his beers. The main riff supports the feeling: the telegraphic guitar part, thin and insistent, cushioned in distant, ethereal strings.

Campbell fills his part beautifully: sincere and manly, not a complainer, just telling you where he's at. On those final high notes ("...still on the liiiiiiiiine") his voice is plaintive and sublime, and I imagine a lot of people who might have been puzzled by the lyrics heard those notes and suddenly understood everything.

His image is gentle (gentle on our minds?) but anyone who's knocked around the business as long as he has -- anyone who has been a session man and then a star and then a guy who occasionally had a hit but basically looked after royalty payments and played dinner shows at Branson -- is going to develop some sort of a dark side.
I mean, look at the guy:

Maybe this is where it all ended up for the "Wichita Lineman" guy, too. The job got to him, the woman got to him, he may have gotten a little physical during an argument and the goldurned troopers ran him in. Hell of a note.

Or maybe this will be a breakthrough for him. Maybe now that the mask has slipped, we'll be getting the dark Glen Campbell, doing Trent Reznor songs and hanging out with David Allan Coe. Why not? Like most of us, his depths are not half plumbed, though thanks to this little fender-bender we've had an intriguing glimpse.

DO NOT BE ALARMED. ALL IS WELL. Victor D. Hanson attempts to explain "What is going on here (Iraq)?" to the American People. "Almost everything," replies Hanson, though what he really means is, Goddamn Democrats, Goddamn allies, etc. Here's a prize passage:

Perhaps the next time a German official starts in on "the German way" or the "Bush as Hitler" metaphor, some dense American from the heartland quietly watching the emperor's parade will go agape at a naked royal and ask, "Excuse me, but why do we have thousands of troops in Germany when we have too few soldiers in Iraq?" In the new world I don't think we are ever going to go back to "Please don't insult us too much so we can continue to stay for another 60 years and spend billions to protect you." And that will be good for both us and the Germans — who, in fact, really are our friends.

I especially like the last bit -- the only proof that anyone, including editors, might have read this shit before it was printed.

Hanson's piece is meant to be reassuring, but since it consists mostly of sneers aimed at the many parties who have not supported our efforts in Iraq, he leaves a rather Nixonian impression of isolation and self-righteous brooding. Not the behavior of a winner at all. After calling Iraq "the greatest and riskiest endeavor in the last 50 years of American foreign policy," Hanson adds this disturbing clause: "Understandably, almost everyone is invested in its failure." Clearly, they're all out to get him/us.

But why would they be? And how came it so? In and among the vituperations, Hanson says something about how the old peace was a sham, because it did not last forever. I can't make head nor tail of it; if you figure it out tell me.

Clear as glass was John F. Burns on the Charlie Rose Show last night. I've long admired Burns, having first read him in a long, pellucid Times series on India some years back. Lately I'd assumed that, as people like Andrew Sullivan are always claiming Burns as one of theirs, that he had hitched, or Hitchensed, his wagon to the war train, and would be a good spokesman for that cause. So it was a shock to see last night how dour and unpromising his view of the situation was. He said he frankly didn't know how it would all come out; that the Coalition military had as much as told him that, yes, as they labored to root out the snipers and truck-bombers there would be civilian casualties, and this wouldn't do the "hearts and minds" part of the operation much good. He also said that he was beginning to see why some people were earlier asking about an exit strategy.

Burns did not, to the best of my recollection, devote any of his comments to clever insults about Germany, France, the Democratic Party, et alia. But, then, he's not trying to reassure anyone.

SOMEONE? ANYONE? "To spare you the trouble of reading comments, I am not implying that the American left as a whole will think this way. Most won't. But someone will."

What was Tacitus' subject on this occasion? That's not important. (You can find out here, though.) I grabbed the quote because it's the apotheosis of a pervasive conservative schtick these days, which works like this:

1. Find an intemperate statement from "someone" in the general vicinity of the Left.
   
2. Lay it at the doorstep of your opponents, ring the doorbell, and run like hell.

"But someone will." There's a hopeful tone to it that I especially like. There'll be another such nut somewhere we can link this to -- then, it's proof of a conspiracy!

At least Tacitus -- an honorable man -- doesn't appear to be misrepresenting his source material. Less honorable examples are abundant at Andrew Sullivan's site. Here's one utilizing right-wing whipping boy Ted Rall.

Rall's Veteran's Day column this year portrayed the POV of an Iraqi insurgent, leading many allegedly intelligent commentators to believe, or pretend to believe, that Rall was himself calling for the deaths of American servicemen.

Finding Rall guilty of treason, Sullivan dragged him around the liberal side of town, looking for co-conspirators. "After 9/11, I was roundly criticized for daring to suggest that there were some people in America who wanted the terrorists to win," says Sullivan, but he contends that Rall's piece proves that "there is a virulent strain of anti-Americanism in this country... That's where parts of the left have now come to reside. It's as sad as it is sickening."

Sullivan doesn't bother to tell us which "parts of the left" he's talking about; it's what one might call an open warrant -- fill in the names as needed. "Someone" will fit the bill.

WHERE'S MY WHITE WINE AND BRIE? The most interesting thing (okay, the only interesting thing) about R. H. Sager's recent New York Sun article -- in which he joins the tiny enclave of pro-gay-marriage conservatives currently pretending they can prevail against the Man-on-Dog wing of the Republican Party -- is its by-now familiar rendering of the traditional Liberal Dinner/Cocktail Party:

I’d stumbled into some trouble at a liberal table by disclosing my support for the pro-life side of the abortion debate... my answer caused a number of my dinner companions’ jaws to drop indiscreetly into their Arctic char.

Sensing that I was in for a long, hard slog, I unleashed the dinner conversation equivalent of Operation Iron Hammer. “But,” I said, “I’m in favor of gay marriage.” This halted a number of tongues midlashing. Heads cocked to the side as my fellow diners contemplated how one could hold such a backward position on one hot-button issue and such a progressive position on another.

“People who hold that position on abortion don’t usually hold that position on gay marriage,” one reporter from a rival newspaper said...

I love that last quote. Try speaking it aloud. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?

How come I never get invited to these parties? I've been a liberal for quite some time, yet I never get asked to scenes like this, where lefties gather to sample Arctic char (ooh, sounds fancy!) and react with comical horror when Jimmy Stewart as Brent Bozell casually announces that he wants women to bear children against their will.

I mean, while it is true that we do have parties, I can't recall a scene like the one Sagar describes. The liberals in such caricatures never argue with the conservative -- they just bray or tremble. Since there are so many more liberals at these Arctic char shindigs than there are of him, how come they don't just beat the conservative up and throw him out a window? That would be typically craven and unfair of us.

Also, how is it that these conservative writers have so many liberal "friends"? I thought there were only a couple of dozen of us left in the whole country, residing mostly on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And how, having located some, do these conservatives keep their liberal friends? Listen to this guy: "There are times when my liberal friends will not engage in debate at all. Instead, I often find myself mired down in stifled discussions, responding to insults to my intelligence. Case in point: I can't remember an occasion when I have heard a liberal friend give an honest objection to why tax cuts and sound economic policy are not synonymous."

If you were this guy's "friend," wouldn't you stop being his friend once you'd learned that he looked upon you with such stark contempt?

Also: Why hasn't WFDR fired Mallard Fillmore?

These are the thoughts that fill my long, sleepless afternoons.

LILEKS TURNS ON SALAM PAX. Once Pax was the poor guy running a blog out of the war zone. Now, per Jim, he's an ingrate and a pussy. And that's almost as bad as coming from the the wrong country. Or being Ted Rall. Sigh, I'm so glad I have no interest in politics.

ART, FOR CHRISSAKES. Another downward step in the politicization of everything: a National Review columnist tells his readers which Dr. Seuss books are conservatively correct. "So what are conservatives to do with Seuss?" ponders John J. Miller. "I say read him, because most of his books are incredible fun — but also choose wisely."

Oh, for Chrissakes. Why do people have to be protected from ideas that they might not have previously endorsed -- in children's books, no less? I read the high Tory Evelyn Waugh with great pleasure. I read Celine with pleasure, and he was a goddamned Nazi. And let us not forget the ancients, whose own political predilections have been long rejected by most of us. Who would throw out Shakespeare because he was a monarchist?

This "with us or against us" thing really has gone too far.

COCKEYED OPTIMIST. "BOORTZ ON GOODRIDGE: Another conservative keeps his cool." -- Andrew Sullivan.

"Do you want a law recognizing the value of children being raised by mothers and fathers; a law banning adoption by same-sex couples? Fine. I'm with you there too." -- Neil Boortz in the abovementioned column.

In Boortz' view, Hillary Goodridge and Julie Goodridge, the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, should be able to get married, but should also be stripped of their five-year-old daughter.

Doesn't sound so cool to me.

LYING LETTERS AND THE LIARS WHO WRITE/RECEIVE THEM. Eugene Volokh is politically astute, yet here pretends not to have heard of Astroturf.

Astroturf describes the mass-mailing of one letter to several editorial outlets in hopes of creating the fake appearance of a groundswell of opinion. This appears to be the case with an item simultaneously printed and portrayed as a personal correspondence by Volokh and K.Lo., den mother of NRO's The Corner.

"I realize that in print media, it's considered a serious faux pas when an author prints the same op-ed in two different outlets at once," sniffs Volokh. "But that may have something to do with the fact that readers generally pay money for print media, and print media generally pay money for op-eds."

The item in question appeared at Volokh's site blockquoted, under the title LONDON CALLING, and with the introduction, "A friend of mine, whose judgment and accuracy I very much trust, writes this from London." Not since the days of Addison and Steele would this be considered by any reasonable reader anything other than a letter from a friend, rather than a propaganda pass-along to be published wherever they'd have it.

Even the normally thick Instapundit seemed to have the same impression, prefacing his reprint with "Eugene Volokh posts an email from the scene."

This is a small thing, but instructive. These guys love a good soundbyte, particularly a "counter-intuitive" one (well, I live in London and everyone I know loves Bush!), and cannot stop to pick and choose. They are, after all, fighting what they believe to be the Big Lie of the Liberal Media, and their whole blogs, if not their lives, are devoted to fashioning a believable counter-narrative -- and I use the word "believable" rather than "true" advisedly: every available thread gets woven into the tapestry, and who cares whether it's the right color or even strong enough to hold? The Great Work must continue! In the blogosphere, it's all, as the saying goes, too good to check.

A BREAK FROM GAY-INDUCED MADNESS TO BE JUST PLAIN MAD. Derbyshire on why he would happier in China than in America. It's not only because they don't like homosexuals there. Derb says he must leave America because he "has Bad Thoughts."

Derb, take it from me: the Bad Thoughts will follow you wherever you go.

MORE DERB GAY HIJINX! 9:53 am: Derbyshire refreshes himself before the fire, compulsively smoothing his ermine robe as an unidentifed councilor soothes him with "what if a guy wants to marry his son?" chatter.

9:53 am (2): Another Derb lackey, identified as a citizen of Magnolia, Alabama, reads to his liege some fresh intelligence on the judicial perpetrators. Apparently they all went to college!

"The main thing to note about these people," says the Alabaman, "is that they were appointed to their posts and are not accountable to voters... Here in Magnolia, of course, we elect ours in partisan races. Doesn't always work well. But if, every once in a while we end up with a Roy Moore..."

Derbyshire sighs, wonders if it isn't time to drag the family down to some Dixie hog-wallow where no winds of libertinism intrude.

HE DOESN'T MEAN TO HURT ME! HE DOESN'T MAKE A FIST! During his several long gurgles on Goodridge, Andrew Sullivan offers this astonishing defense of his beloved President (whom, he may not have noticed, is a mortal enemy of gay marriage):

Yesterday, the president mercifully didn't commit explicitly to that. The official statement read:

Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.

I'm not sure what this can mean.

Not sure what this can mean? Sullivan must know about the Defense of Marriage Act, because only a few lines earlier he refers to it ("a drastic attempt to write the permanent disenfranchisement of gay citizens into the founding document of the entire country"). He must also know Bush that has been considering DMA if the courts pulled something like this. His fucking statement echoes the language of the DMA. And yet Sullivan acts as if it's a long shot! "It's not what many of his centrist and moderate supporters want," Sullivan writes as RNC staffers howl with laughter. "And he has far more important things to do. In those vital things, most specifically the war on terror, the last thing he needs is to polarize this country even more." Here it is Karl Rove's turn to double over and slap his knee.

But this is Sullivan's trip, isn't it -- to talk endlessly about his compassionate conservative President, while said President never comes across with any compassion, except in speeches, which Sullivan takes as evidence that his President will not forsake him. Talk about battered spouse syndrome.

DERBYSHIRE ON THE HEATH. 8:29 am: Not only the wild-eyed prose ("These wrecking crews, and their black-robed enforcers, have to be stopped"), but the fact that he finds inspiration in Maggie "All You Skinny People Stop Getting Divorced" Gallagher, convinces me that Derbyshire has flipped.

8:31 am: Derbyshire lists the traitors' enablers. Most are Republicans! This is worse than he thought; mayhap Derb will summon aid from those wonderful salt-of-the-earth conservatives he's always on about.

ENTERING THE LISTS. Politics, as Bukowski famously observed, is like trying to screw a cat in the ass, so let's take a little break from intellectual bestiality to consider normally politics-intensive Matthew Yglesias' post on some critics' idea, digested here by McPaper*, of the top albums of all time.

As MY suggests, these lists are always "a bit off." Consensus has no role in matters of the heart, and judgments on music, especially pop music, are all about love. Now, nearly everyone has a soft spot in his heart for the Beatles, so any pop fan will probably find a spot for them in his top-whatever. So whenever two or more are gathered in the name of rock, the Fab Four are probably the easiest call for the top slot.

If you've ever read the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop results, you'll notice the individual critics' ballots are usually a little eccentric, even perverse, but the consensus always comes out more or less normal, albeit cranky. Each of us imagines his own private headphone Valhalla, but group lists are about the commons, where the speakers are pointed out the windows.

This is easier to accept if music has been both a private and public passion for you. I used to go to the Cherry Tavern in the East Village, get a pitcher (usually with friends), and go to the jukebox and play "Revolution #9" from the White Album, sometimes more than once, sometimes until the bartender shut it off. "Whatsamatter?" I would say. "You don't like the Beatles?"

As for my top ten, it goes a little something like this:

1.) Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones
2.) Kings of Basement Rock, The Penetrators
3.) Live Rust, Neil Young
4.) Never Mind the Bollocks, The Sex Pistols
5.) A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles
6.) John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon
7.) Smiley Smile, The Beach Boys
8.) The Velvet Underground with Nico
9.) The Residents' Commercial Album, The Residents
10.) We're Only In It For the Money, The Mothers of Invention/The Portsmouth Sinfonia (tie)

But then, that's just me. Or you.

* Hope this doesn't get me into any trouble with any major corporations.

DERBWATCH, CONTINUED. The port is spilled, the pipe gone out, poor Tom's a-cold and Derbyshire is raving:

"We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.”

Do you, by God! Then you are construing it in a way it has never been construed before. I see nothing in your "construal" to prevent me from marrying my sister, for example. Is this actually OK in the state of Massachusetts?

Oh dear -- Derbyshire in extremis has fallen back upon the Man-on-Dog defense (not based on any judgment on Sister Derb's looks, but on the expanded definition by Senator Santorum, famed explicator of M-on-D).

This is indeed the last refuge of a dumbass. The expansion of our freedoms has taken us to places of which the Founders never dreamed: the abolition of slaves, the enfrancisement of women, the liberation of "Ulysses" et alia. To point to a line not yet crossed and cry, well, what about that one? is to misunderstand the progress of mankind upon which our very nation is predicated.

Well, he could always go back to China. I understand they have pretty good ballet.

WSJ WRITERS ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. "What planet are these people living on? No normal person in a supermarket checkout line frets over whether the clerk has health insurance." -- James Taranto, Best of the Web.

DERB LETS THE SIDE DOWN. After discharging some of his negative energy by harshing at length on a transgendered opponent, John Derbyshire returns to Goodridge with a couple of conundrums.

"1. If 'gay marriage' is legalized, will prisoners be able to marry their cell mates? If not, why not?"

Well, outside coerced unions, which are invalid anyway, why not indeed?

"2. In many jurisdictions, a marriage can be annulled if it has not been consummated. What, exactly, constitutes 'consummation' of a gay marriage?"

Oh, pussy-bumping, ass-fucking, oral sex, penetration with dildoes and/or other sex toys, etc., etc., one imagines (even if Derb can't).

Really, old stick, can't you do better than that?

WELL, THEY ARE FRENCH. Lileks discovers new enemies of Our Way of Life: the Cirque du Soleil.

Ah, crap: married to pretentious European symbolism, that’s what. When you see a bunch of guys in cardinal-red waistcoats and powdered hair running around the lip of the stage swinging censors, you know Western Civ’s going to take it in the shorts tonight.

I don't envy the guy. All that money, that nice house, that nice family, and all he can do is bitch about the service at department stores, the evil traitors in our midst, and the sub-sub-theme of a Vegas casino attraction.

FIRST RESPONSE. I've been sitting here waiting for John Derbyshire, the proudest hater of homosexuals east of the Pecos, to respond to the Massachusetts ruling. Students of dramatic construction will appreciate his first sally, which is in response to some confused "speculating" by the equally repulsive, but much less amusing, homophobe Stanley Kurtz, as to what legislative measures the ruling might mandate.

Derb, bless him, behaves like a patrician made suddenly livid, but possessing sufficient mannerliness to mask his true feelings with an icy hauteur until he has some priv-acy, whereupon he will kick a footman or something:

Stanley: You observed that: "It’s also possible that only full gay marriage will do, according to the Court, and that the legislature will be ordered to bring it about."

Could you, or some friendly reader, please instruct me as to where, in the Massachusetts State Constitution, there is a clause authorizing the judiciary of that state to "order" the legislature to legislate in a certain way?

"Could you, or some friendly reader, please instruct me as to where..." Oh, that's very good. One can almost feel Derbyshire's barely-suppressed tremors of fury, masked by his long ermine cape against which, expelled by tension, his butt-plug flies, making a small thud like a tennis ball striking a drapery.

ANTI-SEMERICANISM?. Because of his actions in the 70s and 80s, I must consider Natan Sharansky a true hero. Unfortunately, the Sharon government he now serves seems to have demoted him to the less exalted role of propagandist.

Though the subtitle of Sharansky's recent Opinion Journal piece, "The inextricable link between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism," was probably not written by him, neither is it at variance with the text -- to say the least:

Despite the differences between them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way, America embodies a different--a nonconforming--idea of the good, and refuses to abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free habits and institutions to which it has given birth... [astonished italics mine]

There are many mad presumptions at play here. For starters, Sharansky really seems to think that having the same set of opponents is grounds for spiritual brotherhood (which would have been news to Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt).

One might also vigorously question the notion that there can be no reason to oppose the actions of either the U.S. or Israeli governments outside the ancient tribal enmity of anti-Semitism. (Sharansky throughout conflates opposition to Israeli policy with anti-Semitism -- "hatred that takes as its focus the state of Israel" -- but these days this non-sequitir is so pro forma it hardly needs comment.)

Worst of all, it seems never to have entered Sharansky's thoughts that either the U.S. or the Israeli government could be capable of acting against its own moral interests. Is it really anti-Semitism (or whatever the weird hybrid proposed by Sharanksy should be called -- anti-Semericanism? anti-Ameritism?) to oppose Bush's feckless war or Sharon's Palestine-As-Prison Project? Are these not offenses to the ideals of Jefferson and Herzl, and do they not mock the very idealistic catchphrases ("light unto the nations" and "shining city on a hill") that Sharansky cites?

One can see the purpose of this shthick: to more strongly yoke, at a time of some tension between Israel and the U.S., the fortunes of one to the other in the court of public opinion. Sharansky even closes by making much of the disparity between America's might and Israel's ("...the United States has been blessed by providence with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea..."), evidentally to more strongly suggest that, as the two universally-hated kids on the block, we should stick together -- meaning that the stronger party will physically defend the weaker, and the weaker will say flattering things about the moral superiority of the stronger.

Who knows how well it will work, but whatever merits it has as spin, it is worthless as analysis.

NOTORIOUS HOMO-HATER REVEALS SECRET BRITNEY OBSESSION! Keep up the hate speech, John -- whenever I need to cite an example of conservative bigotry, you always have a fresh, steaming pile all ready for me. But please keep your strangulated, if-only-we-could-make-her-a-nice-girl crypto-porn out of it. Last thing I need when I'm watching Britney is the mental image of you in a lab coat...