TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

The Wall Street Journal announces that Emily Zanotti has joined their staff. alicublog readers will know her as E.M. Zanotti, and perhaps recall my review of her culture-war work ca. 2007. Highlights from one Zanotti post at National Review:

There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it... Somewhere along the way, [art] became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was "counter-cultural" (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness... what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck...

Modern art, whatta racket amirite? You may wonder how National Review let this one get away: Her last post for NR, filed from the 2008 Michigan GOP primary, contains this:

McCain has added difficulties of his own making as his Michigan campaign winds down. His sudden affinity for plaid dress shirts has ensured visually painful clashes with the blue backdrops at press briefings.

We also learned from this valedictory post that "good hair and rolled-up sleeves are in the Romney blood."

Zanotti kept her own blog for a while, too, where she tackled head-on and without a helmet issues like "If [abortion] IS a killing, why don't you just throw everyone who has one in jail?!"

To answer the question outright, if its a life, then taking the life is murder. We have no problem with that assertion, and frankly, believing it to be a life makes even their arguments easier. Its hard to stand on stable ground when your fundamental argument involves a distinction you cannot prove, but allowing, for a moment, that the fetus is a human could present a wealth of not esoteric but legal defenses...

[Blah blah, Margaret Sanger, the Spartans, Peter Singer, murder, etc.]

That said, its not as though making something illegal necessarily makes it punishable. Widespread recognition of the dignity and worth of human life by making it a crime to take one isn't something we brought into being by majority vote. Its a long-standing tradition. Some might call it the "natural law." Whether humans punished it was up to them...

On and on through thousands of words of point-dodging, but nothing resembling an answer; those who hung on till the end, however, got some nice anti-feminist insults ("everything short of unfettered access is totally unreasonable to Anna [Quindlen], though she'd never care to admit it"), and were probably satisfied.

Then came years of banging out boob-bait for outlets such as the American Spectator; last week, while other outlets were covering the recent Department of Justice report on Ferguson with headlines like "DOJ Report Condemns Ferguson Police Department's Practices" (NPR) and "Ferguson Officials Suspended After DOJ Report Have Resigned, City Confirms" (NBC), Zanotti's Spectator dispatch was headlined "DOJ FERGUSON REPORT VINDICATES OFFICER DARREN WILSON." She has also served as a "strategic partner" at Republican consultant bullpen Hynes Communications, and occasionally goes on Catholic sites to bitch about "the stretch pants ladies’ substituting Maya Angelou poems for Gospel readings." Can't say she hasn't paid her dues!

Zanotti seems to have calmed down, or at least gotten hungry enough to send in better first drafts. Her first offering for WSJ is a thumb-sucker on the Chicago mayoral election -- did you folks know that progressives are dissatisfied with Rahm Emanuel? Zanotti characterizes the contest as "two unappealing candidates who are battling for the measly one-third of the electorate that hasn’t checked out completely," which may seem a strange way to describe Chuy Garcia, an activist who came out of nowhere to win 34% in a primary against a standing mayor, but Zanotti huffs that Garcia's "a man who has many progressive dreams and no idea how to pay for them," and though she currently lives in Chicago she really wants to move away (presumably to some conservative oasis like Fritters, Alabama, to serve as the village strategic partner), and what else do Wall Street Journal editorial page readers need to hear?  I predict a bright future, for Zanotti if not America.