IN DEFENSE OF PRISONER TUCK 'N' ROLLS. I see a convicted killer wants a sex change at taxpayer expense. Like most of you, I had at first a bad first reaction to it -- the situation carries a heavy "ick" factor, as the icky Jonah Goldberg might put it. But let's take a contrarian view (actually contrarian, not the bullshit normally peddled under that name) and see how we feel.

If we accept Ruskin's idea that the state of any society can be measured
by the condition of its prisons, we suck. But I think we are generally tilting in the right direction on that score. Even some conservatives, normally insensible to the suffering of others, have warmed to the issue of prison rape. If National Review columnists give a shit whether Guests of the State are sexually tortured, you know we've reached a watershed.

And also in general, we have for years been pushing out the boundaries as to what, medically speaking, constitutes the acceptable minimal quality of life. With close to 20 million Americans taking antidepressants, it may be that condition of mind is getting to be as significant a standard of health as condition of body was back in the days when we first started deploring rickets in children.

I know that most people hate prisoners, for reasons ranging from personal injury done by them to a free-floating and very American contempt for all unfortunates. But even the most sour apple will admit that the lowliest convict must be given food to sustain himself and perhaps a little exercise. As our MDR for a tolerable state of being is inexhorably lifted, might we one day accept that gender confusion is a cruel and unusual condition even for the least of us?

I'm inclined to think, looking more than usual at the way our society has gone during the span of my life (tomorrow is my birthday), that despite the exacerbations of our natural cruelty leaders and newsreaders try to excite at every opportunity, we will soon enough grant privileges to prisoners that are unimaginable at this moment.

Will we, nill we, we're getting kinder. You may think that's bad, criminal, idiotarian, but there it is. (Hell, with the WMD evidence looking flimsier every day, even the hardest among us point to the kindness done to Iraqis as the justification for invasion -- if that's how Republicans are turning, can you imagine what's going on with the rest of us?) You may gnash your teeth at the injustice represented by one human being getting a little break, but I am looking at the horizon, and it seems a little brighter. I've never been among that pinch-necked crew that thinks we have too many rights. Your mileage may vary, but I believe time is on my side.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. "Masturbation protects against prostate cancer." Well, that's just the icing on the cake, so to speak.

So fellas, visit this newcomer to the blogosphere and blow a wad a votre sante!

"NEVER GET OUT OF THE BOAT." Freddie Forrest in "Apocalypse Now" knew it was a bad idea, but did it anyway and almost got eaten by a tiger. I knew reading Instapundit would piss me off. When will I learn? From the Perfesser's parsing today of a Times of London story about documents that suggest Italy was also duped about Nigerian uranium:

[A reader] adds: "Let's see. Italians fooled. Brits fooled. CIA left out of the loop until it was too late and the Govt presentation was compromised... Soooo... I guess that leaves France as the perp. Which is what everybody knows already, but pretends not to." Sounds plausible. Is it true? I don't know. But somebody does.

The really maddening thing is, you can't tell whether he's kidding or not. Now, I know he used to have that quote up on his site about having a dry sense of humor that many people are allegedly unable to get -- but sometimes when people are incomprehensible, it's not because they're geniuses, but because they're incoherent. IP floats so many ridiculous ideas that there's no telling whether he means this one. I guess a "heh" or an "indeed" might help.

Aaargh! (rubbing skull, Spock-like) Forget... forget...

LAST REPLACEMENTS LYRIC OF THE NIGHT: Who will be the next to dry your lashes?/Who knows?

HEY NOW, YOU'RE AN ALL-STAR. Great game tonight. The MLB directive that this shall determine home-field advantage in the October Classic (instituted after last year's debacle -- scroll, ye bastards, to July 9, 2002!), turns out to have been brilliant. Hank Blalock's homer was a great moment, but the whole chess match was worth watching. So much is ill done, what a pleasure to see something well done. Especially when it's a ballgame.

(On the stereo: The Replacements, "Another Girl, Another Planet.")

YO EL ROY. Here's another weblog by a guy named Roy! Looks like he's doing alright. I knew nearly everyone on the web was better off than me, but to find a guy with my rarified name -- a name that means King, after all -- in that distant, high-floating, wave-at-the-drowning-man boat is... piquant.

(On the stereo: The Replacements, "Portland.")

HOUSE POOR. From a FuckedCompany discussion of the West Coast housing bubble:

"Hell, Vegas is over $220k or so for a decent new place.....Phx can't be far behind. Reno is already $300k, even fucking Fresno is $300k for a new place. WHERE THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE GETTING THE MONEY?"

"I have no idea how people who only make $45k per year are getting into $300k houses. Plus they have they obligatory GMC Yukon Denali or Hummer H2 as well..."

"For giggles, I did a search in the Washington Post's real estate section for any home in my area (Fairfax) for $125,000 or less. Six dilapidated condos were returned, tiny, in HUD areas."

"And when it all ends, those of us who still have money will be asked to bail out the banks who made loans at up to 125% of equity value, to people with shaky incomes or credit. Just like last time."

"Spoke to a guy recently who spent $650k (NYC) for a one bedroom condo. He's near panic state now thinking about real estate crashing."

Now, these seem like coastal concerns perhaps to the fat, happy Red Staters. They come mostly from angry, educated Blue Staters, whom they despise -- though this post perhaps hits a little closer to home:

"I am building in vegas. I see i every day. Its not the 300,000 houses that we wonder where the money is coming from. Its all the 2 million + houses that are being bought up. I wonder everyday where all these people are coming from and where the money is coming from."

It'll get worse and move toward the interior. Via Calpundit, we see that deficits are going through the roof, and there's not much wiggle room left in which Mr. Greenspan can do anything about it.

The housing market will crash. No one, not even Midwesterners, can afford the terms of home ownership by the standards of a generation ago, and with personal bankruptcies rising, it is questionable whether they can afford them by the standards of the present. The squeeze is on with no relief in sight. We live on a new bubble now, but without the cheerful feeling of the last one. God help us when it bursts.

CALM DOWN. Terry Teachout asks, "Am I the only person to have spotted the social significance of Roz Chast’s Cremaster-bashing back-page cartoon in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker?" I daresay he is. He goes on: "I do think there is something quite genuinely subversive about the fact that Roz Chast, of all people, felt free to make fun of Matthew Barney in the New Yorker, of all places."

If you type "art" into the search field at the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank, you will find plenty of panels lampooning artistic pretensions of all sorts. (Good example: one dog telling another, "What I do as an artist is take an ordinary object -- say, a lamppost -- and, by urinating on it, transform it into something that is uniquely my own.")

Teachout seems not have noticed. "Back in the days of Harold Ross, the New Yorker wasn’t above publishing cartoons that made fun of abstract expressionism," he reports, "but ever since Jackson Pollock became God, they’ve been careful not to make that kind of mistake again -- until now."

Well, I haven't seen any biting satires on Jackson Pollock, lately, but I imagine that's because he's been well beside the point for a long, long time.

There are a whole nest of critics who, like Teachout, seem to get a charge out of the idea that art scenes are all mobbed up to the advantage of certain deleterious movements and dogma. (Actually they are mobbed up, but to the advantage of certain individuals who are admired by the powerful -- and, of course, those thought to be bankable -- and 'twas ever thus.) I guess this makes such critics feel like rebels or something. If the magazine's management, acting as a sinister and monolithic force, roams the hallways muscling writers and artists (Mister Remnick wants you should say something nice about the Cremaster Cycle!), then to speak against Matthew Barney is something more than one man's opinion; it is an act of courageous political incorrectness.

Why Teachout, who writes and thinks well and whose present edition is otherwise a delight, needs to perpetuate this kind of juvenile fantasy is genuinely puzzling.

(Found via the Castel-Dodges)

FIELDER'S CHOICE. If you like fiction, as opposed to the chronicles of collective waking nightmare that comprise this weblog, there's a new story on my website.

I'LL WAIT TILL THE THIRD INNING. I see they yanked Zito for Clemens to start the All-Star Game. That's too bad. Yeah, I know it's Rocket's career year, but I hate the son of a bitch. He made some shitty cracks about Piazza's gender prefs on Letterman (I hate that son of a bitch, too, but that's for another time). And he throws at hitters without fear of retribution -- not because he is known for any self-defense skills, but because League rules prevent him for climbing into the batter's box to take some of what he dishes out.

In this respect he resembles his fellow Texan, George W.

UPDATE: Turns out Clemens isn't starting -- they just yanked Zito for him. An even dumber move in a game that's supposed to "count."

IF IT'LL BE LIKE THIS, PLEASE DON'T. "The North Korean problem is the most serious issue facing our country right now. Thank goodness President Bush dispatched Saddam Hussein before he became an 'imminent danger.' Korea is an imminent danger right now, and that’s exactly why it’s so hard to do anything about it. I hope to write more about Korea just as soon as I get a chance...." -- Stanley Kurtz at NRO.

THE NEW BUBBLE. We were told back then that everything had changed.

Lately when I think of the Old World I think of an insult that I mean as a tribute. It is the phrase the narcissism of small differences. In the world that has just passed, careless people--not carefree, careless--spent their time deconstructing the reality of the text, as opposed to reading the book. You could do that then. The world seemed so peaceful that you could actively look for new things to argue about just to keep things lively... You could have real arguments about stupid things... We were not serious. We were not morally serious.

In our newly-sobered media, there are hundreds of stories this week about a cute girl who, while pretending to be a sausage, was knocked over by a Pittsburgh Pirate. There are also a number of stories, less energetically pursued, about the latest attack on our troops in Iraq, a place where, you may recall, a great victory for American power and prestige was lately won.

There are also stories about the latest prospective military target in our new era of seriousness. American interests in Liberia are hard to explain, especially in light of the current Administration's previous disinterest in the region. But everything has changed, again, and keeps on a-changin', especially when there are electoral points to be scored ("Where do Janeane Garofalo, Mike Farrell, and Martin Sheen stand on intervention in Liberia?") by fresh use of the lately-sanctioned (and, given the slim chances of an economic turnaround at home, most readily available) vote-getting tool, foreign intervention.

Meanwhile patriotic writers in redoubts of high seriousness speak of the indignities suffered by privileged Americans.

It's a good thing the grown-ups are in charge.

YELLOW CAKE AND CIRCUSES. First the Bushies were telling the truth about Nigerian unanium and Iraq, then they were misled by the CIA, and now their claims are "accurate" and "supported by other British and U.S. information" (Associated Press). This is spin at its finest, folks: a zig-zag pattern that establishes the Administration as right even when it's wrong.

It doesn't just work for uranium, either: the WMD bullshit can also be treated similarly. The "even Hans Blix" argument that everybody thought the weapons were there (never mind that neither Blix nor most of the other cited sources thought their suppositions required an immediate U.S. invasion) maintains the Administration's plausible deniability (or affirmability, depending).

The mildly humorous spectacle of our leaders tossing dossiers amongst themselves, as in the old Time Bomb game -- no one wants the thing in their hands when the ticking stops -- distracts from the less humourous spectacle of the occupation, the cost and length of which looks worse everyday day. The task of the White House handlers is to make our foreign adventures look benign. Hence, Bush hugging Africans.

Meanwhile, everyone hates us and our economy is in the toilet.

ASK YO' MOMMA. At TownHall today, Jonah Goldberg says, "How come black people can say stuff about black people, but when we say it we get in trouble?"

Well, he didn't use those words. They were actually used by kids on my block when I was growing up, only they didn't use the phrase "black people." Goldberg uses several hundred other, different words, but they pretty much amount to the same thing.

What is it with this guy and peeps of color?

AVERAGE AMERICAN BLUES. Plagued by bigot and bullshit eruptions, the Right cries out that they still have the support of the Average American. Jonah Goldberg:

This crowd is always insinuating that Fox News is the tool of corporate and Republican interests. And yet, Fox is more popular among the "little guys" -- you know the people, not the powerful. If you keep in mind that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly etc represent the victory of the Republican Party to be every much as populist (not always a good thing) as the Democrats you can decipher a great deal of the grumpiness and confusion of liberals who shriek about "right wing media."

The fact that grumpy liberals "shriek" is offered, one imagines, as further proof of their unpopulism and lack of Little Guy cred. No way the Average American would hang with them! Now, another working-class hero, John Podhoretz:

The problem is that American elites are weirdly immature. They should be sophisticated enough to know these things take time, but they have no patience... What's amazing is that the ordinary American shopping at Wal-Mart and going about her daily life, with no capacity to name the head of the Iraqi National Congress (or Tommy Franks, or Jerry Bremer), does have the patience that the experts, who really should know better, sadly lack.

Boy, these liberals sound like a pain in the ass, don't they? Always showing off how much they know! Whereas in JP's portrait of America, brave shoppers neither know nor care what the hell is going on, and are better, more patient people for it.

Of course, it may be that the Average American does notice some other stories in which he is also invoked, and which may cause him to wonder if his patience is still a virtue. Anchorage Daily News:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American worker now spends 237.5 days a year on the job, about 25 days a year more than in 1973... Since 1970, the number of U.S. families that regularly eat dinner together has dropped by a third, de Graaf said. The number of families that take vacations together has also dropped by a third. "In fact, vacations for American families are starting to disappear"...

The average U.S. worker gets just 13 vacation days a year, according to a 2003 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average Western European receives almost six weeks.

Meanwhile there's this interesting bit from the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Press:

It's hard to believe that a typical American family accepts a 30-year home mortgage as normal today or that it is now possible in some cases to borrow on a home for nearly 70 years... Today it requires from 40 to 70 percent of the average American family's total income to buy an average home, even with a 30-year mortgage.

The longest term of debt God's people took on in the Bible was about seven years. During the seventh year of remission, Jews were instructed to release their brothers from any indebtedness (see Deuteronomy 15:1-2).

Well, the Average American isn't going to see any such Jubilees anytime soon.

Perennial Average-American advocate NewsMax has a story up headlined, "Average American Lifestyle Called "Total Bull---t" by Environmentalist." NewsMax sneers at such analyses, but I wonder if a lot of Average Americans aren't beginning to feel the same way themselves.

AND SHALL I COUPLE HELL? I actually liked this Randy Barnett column at NRO. So that's what they're paying him for! In this Lawrence examination, he argues that Kennedy's decision (following on his Casey opinion back in 1992) has shifted the emphasis in SCOTUS anti-sex-law matters from the right to privacy (which Barnett finds shaky) to the right to liberty (which he wholeheartedly endorses).

Barnett comes at these things from a different angle than I do, but I am astounded at the fact that I've gone through the column once and haven't found anything that really pisses me off. And it's at National Review Online! Nothing they've emitted so far on this subject has been anything but an outrage. Indeed, its editors currently mutter darkly that the aforementioned decision "called into question [the Court's] willingness to tolerate any state laws based on traditional understandings of sexual morality."

Maybe there'll be something good on ABC tonight. This is a day for miracles!

BILE-GOGGLE HANGOVER. The Classical Values guy has responded to this post, and he has a few good (not to say airtight) points. One involves my conflation of MSNBC with Fox (one of these days I have to get cable) and the other involves me saying "most of" his Lawrence post was a states-rights encomium.

I have reread his post with the bile-goggles off, and admit the piece in toto is much more nuanced than that. I didn't see that at first because the thing started with, "A lot has been said about Lawrence v. Texas, too. Tactically, I still think it would have been better to get rid of sodomy laws state by state, because that would have been a more democratic, more final, victory," and I must admit my eyes just glazed right over. A major victory won, and we start by wishing it had been won according to Marquis of Queensbury (or Scalia) rules.

But there's a lot more in it I still don't like. For example: "Government force can masquerade as an altruistic concern over the very rights many of my friends demand -- so dressed up in human rights or domestic rights drag as to be unrecognizable." Even as I am inclined to agree with the principle (I'm not big on Federal hate-crime laws, for example, that essentially legalize double-jeopardy prosecutions) I'm troubled, because it's a demurrer in an argument about sodomy laws. Really, what "altruistic" legislation is anywhere near as onerous as sexual prohibition? CV's cited example is amusing and well-observed, but the prospect of "gay alimony" just doesn't chill my blood as much as Bowers v. Hardwick did.

Perspective's the issue. Yeah, it's bad that litigiousness has so hampered human affairs, but when you bring it up as an "on-the-other-hand" sidebar in a discussion of Lawrence, a reasonable person might respond, "Jeez, are you sure you're happy about this?" It's just too much like a lot of other discussions where, for example, someone denouncing Ann Coulter feels obliged to connect her to Maureen Dowd. I don't like Dowd either, but in terms of noxious emissions, Coulter and Dowd aren't even in the same solar system.

When I hear that kind of stuff, I assume that the plaintiff is trying to defuse the historical impact of these phenomena by yoking them to mildly related liberal examples. This may not apply to CV. Well, I'll keep an eye on him. I vastly prefer making snotty comments to actually having to pay attention, but hey, the blogosphere's been good to me -- maybe it's time to give a little back.

As for the Fox thing, I suppose I could have asked instead how NewsMax got in on the scheme. Same diff.

P.S. The Michael Savage conspiracy thing is still bughouse.

NAME GAME. Hey, editor Martin sent something in, and since he is unable to manipulate Blogger (being at this point nothing more than a mouldering corpse in a Victorian breakfront), I will post some of it myself, with quotation marks so you know it's Martin speaking, not me (this device, and the word "blogosphere," were invented by Steven Den Beste, or Penelope Ashe, I forget which).

Commenting on a recent New York Times story about Major General Paul Eaton's plan to gin up a new Iraqi army, with "1,000 soldiers training by August, and 12,000 by the end of the year... [and] 40,000 by an unspecified date in 2004," Martin writes:

"Are we going to give them our stuff, or are we going to the rummage sale for some 1960s Soviet crap, so that when the new army stages a coup to set up a militant Islamic state, we can play war with them again?

"I often think about guns. AK-47s and M-16s? Isn't that a bit like typewriters and mimeographs? Where are the plasma-pulse pistols and destructor-ray rifles? Who's working on these things? They're fired. (No pun intended.) Also, have you noticed that nobody refers to the afformentioned AK-47 as such since some time last year? Now it's 'Kalashnikovs.' Why haven't we started calling M-16s by the name of their inventor, Eugene Stoner? Oh, I see, right..."

And so forth. Good show, Marty! How I wish you were not a mouldering corpse.

I think the name thing can be easily explained, though. Being older, I remember when the word "AK-47" stirred the American adrenaline -- it was like the names we gave our guns, (e.g., Colt .45, Winchester 77), but slightly more modern (and therefore slightly more cool) in that we dispensed with the words and just used letters, man. It was like gravitational measurement units (Mars, I recall, rated a G4), or the HAL9000 in 2001. It was like the X-15. It was our vision of the future. Food out of tubes, and all that.

Nowadays, we are at least as tech-mad, but we are way, way more brand conscious. In my day, brands were either simple descriptors (e.g. Keds) or evil clouds of anaesthetic gas meant to distract us from the accelerating Nazification of our country. Since Reagan, of course, brands have become objects of worship. And since we must call our beloved(s) by name, not by number, it is better to call them Skechers and Microsoft than G6 and X7. Kalashnikov might as well an edgy fashion line. Or a band.

Now fetch Old Uncle Roy the jug and he'll tell you more about life in the Rust Belt.

EDROSO.COM IS BACK UP. I feel silly announcing this because there's been nothing new there since April (though, to be fair, my back catalogue makes Glenn Reynolds look like a man of few words). But I do expect to post a new, depressing story by week's end. And my mail's up, too! I've already got two new mails: one marked URGENT, from Mr. Frank Abudu, and another from "jehanna gerry" about "Back-Door Stretched Girls." Gee, I don't know anyone named jehanna, but that's a pretty name -- maybe she's pretty, too! I better see what she wants!

I SPOKE TOO SOON! "SPEAKING OF ABORTION-FAVORING LIBERALS: The Joe Lieberman campaign is touting that last weekend, 'Hadassah Lieberman returned to Manchester's Puritan Ice Cream and Take Out to unveil two special ice cream flavors,' Cup of Joe Lieberman and Heavenly Hadassah. Isn't being associated with Puritans a bad career move on the Libertine Left side?" -- Tim "Who Me?" Graham.

Dammit, every time you hit the refresh button at The Corner, there's a new contender for Line of the Day. I got to stay away from that place.

FOR THE NEXT FEW MINUTES, AT LEAST, LINE OF THE DAY AT THE CORNER: "Has anyone else noticed that factual mistakes are now called 'lies' by the Left, and by many Democrats." -- Randy "Who He?" Barnett.

PLEASE DON'T TELL HIM ABOUT CHERRY POPTART! Buncha new guys at The Corner. This one should give you an idea of what they breed round those parts:

Flipping through the comic book before handing it over to my son, I found that smack dab in the middle of the story we find our hero naked, in bed, and engaged in unmistakeable activities (with a woman, which is why I know Spiderman is hetero)... Are there any innocent comics left? My eight-year old son could still use something that's fun and easy to read--especially now that it's summer. What superhero has forsworn soft-core porn?

There's also a lot of talk about Norman Rockwell, funny band names, and lack of patriotism. Do these guys get paid for this? I don't feel so bad now about that two-hour lunchbreak.

LIKE YOU CARE. My website edroso.com and its affiliated mail service are both down because Network Solutions didn't have my address. That's how obscure I am! But I've settled it, and they say I'll be back up within 24 hours. Why it should take longer to re-start a website than to switch off a gas line, I can't guess.

NO STRANGERS -- JUST LUNATICS I HAVEN'T MET YET. The Ole Perfesser links to this story at something called Classical Values. Oh God, I said when I first spied the masthead, please let it be a joke. Alas, it wasn't. The proprietior is a gay guy who spends most of his Lawrence v. Texas post talking about how great states' rights are. Elsewhere he states: "My life has been largely wasted opposing fanaticism. This does not mean I have no opinions."

Oh boy, does he! The aforementioned post seriously claims (and I mean seriously -- I ran the Ironometer over it several times and came up with nothing) that Michael Savage is an agent provocateur set up by the Left to discredit conservatives. (He doesn't mention how Fox got in on the scheme, though.)

He also tells us how he was pulled out the depths of despair by G. Gordon Liddy.

Well, there's my horizon expansion for the day.

FEAR AND HOPE. The Bijani twins have died in surgery. Their story touches me deeply. They had been living what many of us would consider full lives, they were bright and educated, yet they risked death rather than go on as they had. They wanted more than safety could give them, and so forsook it. The Bijanis are separated now, and one wonders if, somewhere deep inside the anaesthetic haze, they were in any way aware of it before consciousness altogether fled.

I suppose one of the many useless ways in which we may divide the world would be between those who would have had the surgery and those who would not. I shouldn't wonder if the sides in that division were highly uneven. We all make our private decisions about what we will and won't put up with, but most of us are shocked to find, when the going gets tough, that the hard lines we drew have somehow moved a great distance toward the direction of survival. When we say "life is hard," what we usually mean is that what we have to go through in ourder to sustain life -- survival, in other words -- is hard.

The struggle to survive is noble, but at least as noble are those struggles which require that survival be not a factor. These may be called struggles to live. Most of us, in most ways, are defeated in these struggles, not just by fear but also by nobler emotions like love and loyalty and fellow-feeling -- these only wheedle us, whereas fear puts in the shoulder and shoves, but they can be at least as effective.

How much anguish do we find in these struggles! Yet I should think that, once the Bijanis came to their decision, their struggles became infinitely simpler. Probably fear was not erased, but certainly neither was hope. And it may be that they thought it was just not worth losing the former at the price of the latter.

May their shades be at rest, individually and together.

CAREFUL WITH THAT AXE, EUGENE. Reading Volokh on Pat Buchanan, I unexpectedly came across a very entertaining passage. Volokh manfully challenges Buchanan's South-was-Right routine, an exercise by which many a young rightist has shown his ability to rise in the Organization; but as he pursues his prey he finds himself ensnared in thickets, not to mention brackets:

The Southern states were not ruled by the people, and as a result neither was the nation. They were ruled by white people. (I set aside here the ineligibility of women to vote, for various reasons; the chief one is that such ineligibility was nearly universal throughout the world at the time, and certainly on both sides of the Civil War, and didn't really begin to diminish in a material way for several decades [race discrimination in voting was prohibited throughout the nation de jure, if not really de facto, by the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870; sex discrimination in voting only began to erode around then, and wasn't accomplished nationally until 1920]. I'm hesitant to fault people for falling into universal errors.)...

I find it interesting that folks who get eloquently angry about affirmative action and the terrible injustices it causes white people get a little tongue-tied when special occasions force them to defend the elemental rights of unprivileged classes. So women's lack of suffrage is to one side because it was then "nearly universal" -- sounds like one o' them there "cultural" arguments to me -- and what an insult to 19th-century white males, to presume that they didn't know no better! Next thing you know, Volokh will be sanctioning ritual clitorectomies.

I kid. But I sympathize. When you're right-wing, it's never easy when the talk turns to historic injustices. By rightie lights, even laying blame for slavery on the U.S.A. as a nation is tough -- partly because American conservatives reflexively defend the U.S. no matter what, and partly because of their philosophical temperment (countries don't discriminate, autonomous individuals do!). But if they have to admit one such offense -- as the Buchanan turkey-shoot necessitated -- then, if they're at all honest with themselves, several others (women, Indians, Jews, Chinese-Americans, etc.) come tumbling out of the cupboards. And the question is begged: have we spent too much time congratulating ourselves at the injustices we have begun to redress, and not enough on those we have barely acknowledged?

KNOW WHEN TO HOLD, KNOW WHEN TO FOLD 'EM. Tommy Franks -- gooood career move. Leave as liberator, and let some other poor schmuck do the mopping up. "Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered Franks the post of Army chief of staff -- the highest job in the Army. But Franks turned it down," reports ABC. Well, of course. It's not going to be like '91, when Colin Powell won hearts and minds with the first Iraq dust-up -- this one's going to smolder and smell, and Franks is well out of it. 57's a nice age, and the man has plenty of options. Got his MBA (W's degree!) summa cum laude (not W's standing!), yet keeps the common touch, as shown by this bit from SCLM outlet PBS:

Tommy Franks, the general who will command American troops should the U.S. go to war with Iraq, speaks with a west Texas vernacular very familiar to his commander in chief.

"Mr. President, I'm finer than the hair on a frog's back," the 57-year-old Texan once responded when Mr. Bush inquired about his welfare.

As we are now in an age of endless war, might our Presidential election cycles to come feature at least some military contenders? During and after the Civil War we had McClellan and Grant. Eisenhower had two terms, and MacArthur had some traction after Korea. Wesley Clark has already been mentioned for 2004, and we all know Powell's only biding his time. Franks is telegenic, bright, and now has secured perhaps the greatest treasure a Presidential contender could have: plausible deniability.

At present, Franks lacks a McClellan letter of the sort the late candidate wrote to his Commander-in-Chief (whom he called "your Excellency") in 1862. Which is all to the good: that letter was a problem for McClellan -- it telegraphed his political ambitions, both implicitly and explicitly ("In carrying out any system of policy which you may form, you will require a Commander in Chief of the Army;  one who possesses your confidence... I do not ask that place for myself...."), and staked out a distressingly soft position on slavery. We are an even more politically opaque people than once we were. We have no way to know what Franks feels about anything, and that in itself has to have potential political masterminds salivating.

Of course all this ignores the possibility that the United States will itself be placed one day under military command, but at present it's hard to see why they would bother.

NOT AS ADVERTISED. Never read Eve Tushnet before. Had been given the impression (forget by who -- one meets so many people at detoxification centers) that she was of the reasonable sort of winger. Was unprepared, therefore, for ravings, in which a light and breezy Kinsley column,"Abolish Marriage: Let's really get the government out of our bedrooms," is denounced for promoting "ad hoc" crypto-marriages that will create ('scuse, have created) "chaotic lives, fatherless children, shattered relationships, post-abortion grief, poverty, and fatalism."

Well, at least we don't have to wonder where the next generation of Maggie Gallaghers are coming from. What I do wonder is, how can such people live so long without developing a sense of humor?

TV EYE. Boy, I enjoyed that vacation. No, not mine -- Edroso the Wrath of God does not take vacations (neither can he afford them) -- I mean Instapundit's. Even in a web world crammed to bursting with irritants, the temporary absence of the Ole Perfesser was a palpable relief. I felt like an immunocompromised patient who had suddenly found himself with one less opportunistic infection.

Alas, the Perfesser has resurfaced, and is dishing out nonsense like it was going out of style (whereas, of course, the contrary is true). Here he is on the BBC:

How about ending the public subsidy and letting the private sector take over? The likelihood that a major, state-subsidized entity with considerable political clout can actually be objective and fair over the long term is so small that it would seem better to drop the pretense, and to quit subsidizing the political views of the New Class under a threadbare cloak of public service that no longer fools anyone but the gullible.

There is, of course, not one media outlet in Christendom, subsidized or not, that could reasonably be called "objective and fair" (or for that matter, "fair and balanced") -- though some might serve as small counterweights to the larger media interests that piledrive their agenda into the public consciousness.

In the Brits' case the larger media interests more or less consist of Rupert Murdoch, or as he is known to lapsed Catholics such as myself, the Father of Lies. Since Murdoch's Sun broke ranks with the Tories to back Blair for his first term ("It's the Sun Wot Won It!" cried the tabloid's post-electoral headline), the PM has been most helpful to the SkyNews King's multifarious interests. The end of the BBC's subsidy would of course be a great boon to Murdoch, eliminating a great deal of his commercial and ideological competition. (Just in case you thought this was a principled argument we were dealing with.)

I'm not surprised that Blair is leaning this way. Nor am I surprised that the Perfesser would shout encouragement from his kudzu-covered ivory tower. But I am a little surprised at Rocky Top's last crack: "...a threadbare cloak of public service that no longer fools anyone but the gullible."

Whom does he believe is being fooled? The BBC, like PBS over here, is a known quantity, availed by those who enjoy it and ignored by those who don't. There seems to be a real niche, albeit a small one, for both the British and American state-run networks. We can argue as to whether the state should run a network at all (or a bank, or a Federal Trade Commission, or an interstate highway system, etcetera ad nauseum).

But what's inarguable is that a lot of people enjoy the BBC and PBS. Even crabby rightwing Americans have to admit that, when they visit the U.K. and turn on the tube back at the hotel, the BBC stuff beats holy hell out of our own network crap. And quality-starved Yanks aren't the only ones who notice. Last year the Beeb beat its main commercial rival, ITV, in ratings for the first time since 1954.

Ditto for PBS. Even midwestern housewives watch Bill Moyers, not because Big Brother has commanded it, but because he's an appealing presenter with an interesting viewpoint -- one that, no one needs to be reminded, is increasingly hard to find on the SCLM stations anymore.

Let's face it. State-run TV networks are magnets for culturally astute people, who usually think very differently from the corporate scumbags, giant-foam-fingered booster-boobs, hack artists, and mentally microcellular organisms that keep the Nets going. This difference is used as an excuse for getting rid of them -- they represent the "New Class," boo hiss -- but it's actually a pretty good reason to keep them. In heatwaves, the cops let the kids tap the hydrants so they can play in the water -- can't we have similar relief in the airwaves?

"'THERE IS STILL WEAKNESS IN THE EMPLOYMENT SECTOR,' said Michelle Clayman, chief investment officer at New Amsterdam Partners, which manages US$1.8 billion in New York. 'We need to see more of the underlying economic numbers turning around for the market to have legs'... The US unemployment rate jumped to 6.4 percent, the highest since April 1994, from 6.1 percent in May."

"Bush's weapon of political destruction is money, lots of it. Within five days, Mrs. Bush and Cheney raised a combined $1.4 million in separate fund-raisers in Cincinnati and Fairlawn, an Akron suburb. It’s part of $34.2 million that the Bush-Cheney ’04 re-election campaign raised during the past three months, said Dan Ronayne, campaign spokesman. Of the total, $21.7 million came from 14 fund-raising events featuring the president, Cheney or Mrs. Bush. The campaign also raised money through direct mail and contributions made over the Internet."

Who got your money?

HAWKS & DOVES. I marked Independence Day by putting on Neil Young's "Hawks & Doves." This record comes from one of Young's peripatetic periods, in which he seemed to be doing whatever struck his weed-addled fancy at any given moment, but the gesture of respect toward the American idea is genuine and often touching. The title track is real nice, and here are some of the words:

In history, we painted pictures grim
The Devil knows we may feel that way again
The big wind blows, so the tall grass bends
But for you, don't push too hard, my friend

Got people here down on their knees and prayin'
Hawks and doves are circling in the rain
Got rock 'n' roll, got country music playin'
If you hate us, you just don't know what you're saying

It's mild out this 4th of July morning, but the sun is bright and climbing. Sunlight is the reason, by the way, that the writing on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both now scientifically maintained and heavily guarded at our National Archives, is so faint. For years they were shown under glass in a public place, outdoors, so that the light that fell on the land and the citizens also illuminated those words.

The ink proved less durable than the land and the citizens. What about the ideas? Well, across the web world now you may read that we are either deprived of liberty, or supersaturated with it, in ways that would shame the Founders. Some believe it is far too difficult to get a handgun in East New York, and some lament the growing decriminalization of recreational sex.

These people are of course nuts, but many of us, maybe even most of us, are at least a little nuts in the same ways. I heard a Klansman cry once, "We carved our place in this wilderness with a Bible and a gun!" I think he was right. We love our autonomy, and the idea that with the right machines (including the kind that kill) we can do, as the lovely and supremely American phrase puts it, whatever the fuck we want. And we also believe ourselves to be the keepers of the Word, which the American accent renders pretty harsh at times, and inspires us to string up varmints.

So I can see where the wingnuts of all descriptions are coming from. In a way (just in a way) it is a marvelous thing that we are all here, grabbing at the rudder of the Ship of State.

The Puritans who settled here surely never imagined our community would be so contentious (and free of stocks and dunking-stools); perhaps neither did the Patriots, who set out from their little homes to shake a tyrant off their backs, not to establish a Federal Trade Commission. Maybe the Founders saw a little more, but I doubt they saw us, though maybe Jefferson did when he said this:

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.

Jefferson's God and mine may not exactly resemble one another (though I'm a Deist too), but I can see something in this. To his thinking liberty was natural, but also sufficiently foreign to the hearts of men that they might abuse it in their ignorance. And so he and his buddies made a Constitution that defends liberty, not any group or church or philosophy, or even the particular, now quaint, way of life these orderly men enjoyed. All that was left up to us.

Look what we've made of it. Is it good? Well, there's good and bad in it, certainly. I think those guys over the hill are ruining this country, and they think the same of me. Yet our battles haven't wrecked the joint. If the Civil War didn't wreck it, how the hell could we? Though the parchment crumbles and the ink is all but gone, the prescriptions the Founders wrote seem still to serve us well.

This is what we celebrate today. The date commemorates the Declaration and the fireworks commemorate the battles of the Revolutionary War, but this day is for America, the place, the people, and the idea. There will be mayhem and madness, some drunk will punch and maybe plug someone; when I turn on the TV some idiot will be talking. But if we are mindful of the occasion we will be somewhat easy that even this will not shake the pillars of the Republic. Hawks and doves are circlin' in the rain.

BLAIR AMERICAN STYLE. Meanwhile back in the UK, Tony Blair is hunkering down as British press and politicians, infinitely more adversarial than our own ("Blair is No Better than a Kung-Fu Monkey," howls the Telegraph), accuse him of pre-invasion prevarication.

To Yankee eyes the spectacle is surprising. Much of the current talk, as outlined by the Guardian, is centered around a claim, allegedly included in a draft of the Government's Iraq dossier, that Saddam could set off nukes on 45 minutes' notice.

Here in the good old USA, of course, the President had us scared silly of a tinpot dictator who couldn't even defend his own country, and as it becomes increasingly clear that this threat was vastly exaggerated, we treat it as an academic exercise. We sustain a long-running shell game with Iraqi WMD evidence. (As reported by CNN, the latest claim is imminent proof of a "WMD program that could have turned out an operational weapon on short notice. " Not short enough to save Saddam, apparently. Maybe the fuses rolled behind a couch?) The general presumption is that some bullshit was employed, but so what?

That the Brits are more outraged at apparently smaller distortions does not necessarily mean that they lay greater stock in truth than we do. The American people backed Bush, and identifies still with his cause, but the British public has been less convinced; we have a lot more to lose or gain, psychologically, in probing the wounds that truth sustained in prosecuting the war, while for the British it's pretty much all on Blair.

Also, MPs have a centuries-old habit of standing up and roaring at the PM. This Blair must endure, and whenever I've watched Question Time on TV he seemed to handle himself well. But I can't imagine it's much fun for him now.

Back in 1996 much was made of Blair's similarity to Bill Clinton -- centrist, smooth, modern. It's beginning to look, though, as if it's really the model of the American Presidency, irrespective of occupant, that he emulates. This is canny because, as Britain grows more Americanized, what works for the Oval Officer is a good bet to work for the Prime Minister (and what fails here will fail there, too -- poor John Major filled the befuddled Bush Sr. role as well as Blair fit challenger Clinton's). It's a little tougher now for Blair, but I would bet on him to hang in -- especially as his Government's tactics, as shown in this South Africa report from June, are obviously cued by the American style of spin:

A spokesman for Blair's office said that the government's investigation into the two trailers in Iraq was still under way.

But he also said on customary condition of anonymity that no credible evidence had been found so far to suggest they were not used as part of Iraq's chemical and biological programs.

No evidence they were not used! Shades of Charles Foster Kane telling old Mr. Thatcher, outraged by his claim of a Spanish "armada" off the Jersey coast, "Can you prove it isn't?"

TO SLEEP, NO MORE. The Wall Street Journal reports (and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel partially reprints without requiring registration) that "Less than a century ago, Americans averaged about nine hours of sleep a night." Now, it's more like seven, and "a third of the population now trudges by on six hours or less."

Enlightened, aren't we? Our parents could maintain a house and a car on a single salary -- we can't. Once, the 40-hour work week was standard -- no more. And now we can't even sleep right.

WSJ also reports that, in addition to Ambien-style sleep aids, pharm companies are now working on a new class of drug to "help people perform better on less sleep." These concoctions carry the disturbingly scientific name "wake agents."

At least in Huxley's Brave New World they gave you soma. Now we get fake speed. Crap. Even our dystopias ain't what they used to be.

STORMIN' NORMAN. Norman Mailer has made amendations to his earlier piece on Bush and war for the New York Review of Books. Like all great writers, Mailer improves his work everywhere he touches it, but this bit about a recent piece of Presidential theatre is especially good:

He chose—this overnight clone of Honest Abe—to arrive on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on an S-3B Viking jet that came in with a dramatic tail-hook landing. The carrier was easily within helicopter range of San Diego but G.W. would not have been able to show himself in flight regalia, and so would not have been able to demonstrate how well he wore the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General Eisenhower. George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.

Speaking of nonstop foulings, I hate to even use this phrase, but in this case there's no getting around it: read the whole thing.

Found via Cursor.

STUPID PREZ TRICKS. Sez K-Lo at NRO: "I suspect, although the press and others looking for the White House to take sides now, that the administration will wind up coming out for the federal marriage amendment post-Massachusetts. They would have never greenlighted Frist to embrace it if that was not the likely plan..."

How clever, if ungrammatical! Here come de Prez on Majority Leader Frist's anti-gay-marriage amendment plan: "I don't know if it's necessary yet... Let's let the lawyers look at the full ramifications of the recent Supreme Court hearing. What I do support is a notion that marriage is between a man and a woman."

As Lopez suggests, the White House and Frist are obviously in accord, but still mask their animus by playing bad-cop, slightly-less-bad-cop on the issue. Why the pretense? Isn't Bush supposed to be unbeatable in 2004?

There are all kinds of ways to interpret this, and I don't want to be too optimistic, but it's just too -- piquant to see the Fearless Leader playing grab-ass (pardon the expression, social conservatives!) with this issue. His minions have been playing at invincibility for so long that it's a pleasure to watch them wheedle.

S.W.A.T. THE MOVIE. This looks like a new low. What's next? Michael Douglas in "Matlock"?

THE TEDIOUSNESS OF TRAITOR-BAITING. Today's Richard Brookhiser column is as usual mostly gobbledegook, especially in the steam-losing last laps, but it does have a few instructive passages. One may even be instructive in a way intended by its author. It regards the good showing by Howard Dean in the recent MoveOn.org "primary," and after a few expectedly dismissive comments, asks:

Howard Dean may be a lightning bug, a bright but short-lived creature of the summer before election year. But suppose he is a portent? Barry Goldwater, the conservative conviction candidate of the early 1960’s, won his nomination in 1964, and went on to carry only six states. But he transformed the Republican Party for our lifetime. After Bill Clinton’s mini-issues and feints to the right, progressive Democrats wonder when they will get their own Goldwater. Howard Dean may be the great id of his party, rising in rebellion against its shifty Arkansas super-ego.

This may be Brookhiser's attempt at a new poison meme for Democrats: if Dean is Goldwater, he must lose as Goldwater lost -- and if Dean by some miracle takes the nomination, this only proves the point, and precertifies his failure.

But Dean-watching righties have heretofore been broadcasting a different idea -- that of Dean as McGovern. Bruce Bartlett practically starts his D-as-McG tract by stating that "Frankly, I don’t see any way that [Bush]can be beaten by any Democrat now in the field" and "I think most Democrats know this... [so] If Democrats are going down in flames anyway, the base figures that they might as well do so behind someone who speaks to their soul, rather than some pale imitation."

This idea similarly preordains defeat -- indeed, willful defeat. (Maybe these guys have been comparing Democrats to the Taliban for so long that they imagine them capable of suicide-bomb candidacies.)

But the difference in Brookhiser's Goldwater idea is that the noble Barry is generally thought to be the Godfather of the current radical-right Republican Party -- out of the ashes of 1964, goes that story, came Reagan, Falwell, and other such keepers of the flim-flam. Goldwater's losing battle, unlike McGovern's, presaged a successful war. So this is a new one: Dean as the future of the Party, rather than an annoying historic hiccup.

Could it be? Dean's Internet fundraising is impressive. But remember Jerry Brown? Back in the 1992 Time called him a "1-800 Pound Gorilla" because he kept yelling out his donation digits on TV and getting campaign bucks for his Presidential run that way. It was supposed to herald a new age in the way campaigns were financed.

Today Brown is cooling his national ambitions as the Mayor of Oakland, CA, McCain-Feingold is in the middle of possibly fatal judicial review, and both parties are even more beholden to special interests than they were eleven years ago. Whatever the Internet-changes-everything crowd may think, Dean's PayPals aren't likely to transfigure anything.

As to Dean himself, well, that's another story. I can't say I'm surprised by his popularity. What he's saying isn't so far out. Some loud voices have been making it seem so (no link needed -- just read my archives!), but I suspect their influence is dwindling.

In fact, let me go so far as to say that we may have reached a critical mass of bullshit -- a moment when so much nonsense has been ingested by the average American that, nonsense-tolerant as he may be, he grows bored enough with the current flavor to entertain alternatives. Iraq is in disarray and the economy is in the toilet -- most of the stories used by Administration supporters to misdirect us from these facts are wearing thin. And look how fast it happened! When the aforelinked Daniel Pipes screed, "Why the Left Loves Osama (And Saddam)," first ran in March, it was very much of a piece with all the other GOP traitor-baiting sideshows surrounding World War Whatever -- now it seems a quaint relic of a darker, dumber time.

Am I a touch Pollyannaish? Consider this other passage from Brookhiser as he considers Dean's anti-war cred:

Mr. Dean tells the Democratic left what it wants to hear -- fear, carping and doubt.... The truth is, we knew the truth about Saddam’s nature; the deadly flailings of his diehards is another facet of that truth, along with oppression, terror and war... Given Mr. Dean’s ignorance of these truths, what weight can we possibly assign to his belief that it’s "a good thing to have Saddam gone"? If we had let Howard Dean lead the search for the facts, Kofi Annan would still be doing shuttle diplomacy in Baghdad...

Does this not seem a little... familiar? A tad tired? A hint desperate?

NOTHING MATTERS AND SO WHAT IF IT DID. Jonah Goldberg calls Andrew Sullivan on an alleged inconsistency.

An NRO reader writes: "What I don't understand is why it matters to you that Sullivan's argument does not clarify the principle at stake. You have written extensively about the forgivability of inconsistency in argument and the usefulness of hypocrisy in public policy. Why can't Sullivan appeal to these things as well?"

Goldberg replies, "...I am judging him by his standards not my own. 2) I've never said that consistency is a useless concept or that inconsistency is necessarily preferable to consistency. Rather, I've said it depends on the circumstances. 3) Even when I've taken the position that inconsistency can be forgiven, I've also argued that inconsistency is certainly fair game for debate and discussion. It would be nuts of me to promote a position which forced me to applaud people for being inconsistent. I'll stop there."

I don't see how Goldberg's Rules of Order reduces to anything more exalted than this: I make the rules up, and apply or disallow them as I see fit.

Given with the current Administration's "la-la-I-can't-hear-you" approach to the WMD question, and the recent Volokhian deconstruction of Dick Cheney, I am beginning to think that power has affected American conservatives adversely. Are they, as one says, drunk with power? Well, in months past they seemed so, roaring and whooping about the Iraqi bonfire. But they are less cheerful now -- hungover, perhaps, or in that cold-grey-dawn stage of drunkenness that infuses any but the most boorish consciousness with existential confusion.

These guys have been pretending for so long -- about the war, about the economy, about the nature of their fellow-citizens -- that they have forgotten what reality is. It was weird enough when they told us that it didn't matter whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- all the while scouring every lead for proof that he did -- but when they begin to insist, as Volokh does, that they didn't absolutely positively say that Hussein had these weapons, we are experiencing a flight from reality resembling, in its disorderliness and desperation, Bonaparte's retreat from Russia.

Now the U.S. Government has, per Radio Free Europe (!), "suspended military assistance to more than 30 nations which have failed thus far or have refused to sign agreements with the U.S. giving Americans immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court..." International justice, it would seem, is only legitimate when pursued by U.S. military invasion.

And these guys are always talking about values.

EVEN WHEN HE'S RIGHT HE'S WRONG. You know anyone like that? People who, even when they occasionally wander over to the right side on an argument, have such bogus reasons for doing so that you can't even agree with them without wincing?


Here's Mickey Kaus on the Clinton Boom versus the Reagan Boom (a concern brought up by this Times item):

In Sunday's N.Y. Post, Rich Lowry correctly notes that the sharply rising income share of the 400 richest Americans--implicitly lamented in David Cay Johnston's latest NYT piece--occurred on Bill Clinton's watch. Why didn't Democrats denounce the Clinton years as a "Decade of Greed," Lowry asks?... Someone should defend the Clinton Boom, precisely on the grounds that '90s income inequality was relatively benign compared with '80s income inequality... The basic argument: Most of the tech geeks and stock traders of the 90s couldn't possibly have thought they were better than the non-rich -- they had so obviously lucked out into a windfall... Secondary argument: In the Clinton boom, unlike in the Reagan boom, incomes at the bottom also rose quite quickly...

Only in the world of Mickey "But Is It Good for the Welfare Reformers?" Kaus would the spiritual life of Silicon Valley schnooks constitute a more powerful defense of the Clinton boom than the fact that poor people also got a little more money from it.

WORTHY OF DERRIDA. It is refreshing to see conservatives standing up and saying, now hold on, there may be more to this than meets the eye -- let us eschew the "gotcha" politics of easy sound-bytes, and try to divine what this misunderstood fellow meant.

After all, they have in the past been quick to willfully misunderstand their enemies, and to run with the results -- as with their deliberate and shameful garbling of Paul Begala's "Red State - Blue State" comments, which remain a Republican bloody shirt to this day.

So today it was sweet to see Eugene Volokh and Andrew Sullivan attempting to explain Dick Cheney in context. When Cheney asserted that Iraq had nuclear weapons, he "misspoke," Volokh surmises. (The linguistic outrage "misspoke" is attributed to former Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, and its usage here may indicate that Volokh is showing off for the cognoscenti in the audience.) To prove this, he contextualizes Cheney's nuclear weapons statement with a bunch of Cheney statements that were almost about nuclear weapons -- "pursuit of nuclear weapons," "until he acquires nuclear weapons," etc. "He must have made a slip of the sort that people often make when they're in an extemporaneous conversation," concludes Volokh.

It does not occur to Volokh -- at least not on the page -- that there are many more uncharitable explanations for not keeping one's story straight. But who are we to split hairs? Leave it to bludgeon-brained Sullivan to forthRightly explain the import of Volokh's linguistic forensics: "The far Left, still desperate to undermine this administration and retroactively discredit the war of Iraqi liberation, is merely digging a bigger and bigger hole for itself."

Orwell was an amateur.

MOVIE NIGHT. I resigned myself to clean my place up for a family visit, but then I turned on the tube and now the place just won't be up to code. First, they had Visconti's The Damned. How'd I miss it before? It's like Shakespeare with all the poetry in your eyes. I suppose you could fault LV for letting some individual members of the damned Essenbecks get lost for a little too long, but that's all to one side when the true vice-grip of tragedy bites so hard. Then, hey! Duel in the Sun on PBS, every bit as silly as its reputation, but good fun all around -- especially when Walter Huston forces a dusky, blanket-clad Jennifer Jones (baring a lot of leg) to kneel with his hand in her hair. Boy, they knew how to make crap in those days. And now there's San Francisco with crackling Anita Loos dialogue -- and a religious angle, yet!

These movies were made between the early Thirties and 1969. Well, that speaks badly for my contemporaneity, or for movies today, depending on how you look at it.

DEMOCRACY! POPPERS! SEXY! A quick post-Lawrence troll of the conservative sites shows that, while outright anti-homosexual raving is limited, nearly every one of these guys is unhappy with a decision that, it would appear, has killed legal persecution of gay sex. Andrew Sullivan, of course, is delighted, and the normally awful Instapundit can't quite work up any of those offensive cavils which usually disfigure his other too-rare moments of sanity, but elsewise the rightists feel compelled to grumble at least a little about it.

OpinionJournal, for example, compares Lawrence to Roe v. Wade -- meaning, in the secret language of the more urbane cons who there predominate, that whatever social benefit derives from the decision is far outweighed by the judicial overreach.

If you're gay or have any friends who are gay, can you possible go for the idea that it would have been better to keep your friends and lovers under a legal shadow till such time as a bunch of dumbass cracker legislators decide to update their prejudices?

I'm willing to entertain the idea that most modern conservatives aren't outright bigots, but if they feel so little enthusiasm for the legal liberation of gay people that they must brood and sulk through an actual stateside "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" moment, how can I believe them when tell me how passionately they care about the Iraqi people -- or anyone else?

AND ANOTHER THING... Victor Davis Hanson today comes out shaking the same fist as usual at Old Europe (which collectively suffers, in his fevered imagination, from "post-Cold War teenager syndrome") and all Arabs everywhere. But toward essay's end, he finds a new and heretofore unsuspected enemy -- the Mexicans:

And if one wishes to find real anti-Americanism, there is no need to go to Brussels or Damascus. Simply peruse the Mexico City newspapers, read what Mr. Fox says to non-Americans, or listen carefully to la Raza (a blatantly racist term analogous to the old German concept of a pure Volk) dogma in the southwest. Papers in Mexico often mirror those in the Arab world — blaming the United States for Mexico City's own failure to address self-created pathologies...

One wonders why Hanson does not devote his energies to support of the U.S. space program. Clearly Americans are too good for the planet.

What a sour way to look at things -- believing that everything you do is wonderful, and that everyone should love you for it, and that those who don't are just fools requiring correction ("r" rolled as Grady does in the film of The Shining). I slip into that kind of thinking myself sometimes -- often enough that I have to pay close attention to the tendency, lest I become too moody and anti-social. But I know there's something wrong with feeling that way -- and (thankfully for all concerned, I guess) I don't have the ear of a suggestible President.

MY BLOOD RUNS COLD. Been reading Scalia's dissent on today's decision. Hair-raising. At one point he lists high-court decisions that relied upon Bowers for guidance:

It seems to me that the "societal reliance" on the principles confirmed in Bowers and discarded today has been overwhelming... See, e.g., Williams v. Pryor, 240 F. 3d 944, 949 (CA11 2001) (citing Bowers in upholding Alabama's prohibition on the sale of sex toys...)... Milner v. Apfel, 148 F. 3d 812, 814 (CA7 1998) (citing Bowers for the proposition that "[l]egislatures are permitted to legislate with regard to morality . . . rather than confined to preventing demonstrable harms"); Holmes v. California Army National Guard 124 F. 3d 1126, 1136 (CA9 1997) (relying on Bowers in upholding the federal statute and regulations banning from military service those who engage in homosexual conduct); Owens v. State, 352 Md. 663, 683, 724 A. 2d 43, 53 (1999) (relying on Bowers in holding that "a person has no constitutional right to engage in sexual intercourse, at least outside of marriage"); Sherman v. Henry, 928 S. W. 2d 464, 469, 473 (Tex. 1996) (relying on Bowers in rejecting a claimed constitutional right to commit adultery). We ourselves relied extensively on Bowers when we concluded, in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 U. S. 560, 569 (1991), that Indiana's public indecency statute furthered "a substantial government interest in protecting order and morality, ibid., (plurality opinion); see also id., at 575 (SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment). State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today's decision...

And he says it like that's a bad thing.

Elsewhere, Scalia says "there is no right to 'liberty' under the Due Process Clause, though today's opinion repeatedly makes that claim." His conclusion is just -- brrrrrrr.

About what goes on in George W. Bush's brain, we can only speculate, protected as that rat's-nest is by enablers and publicists. But Scalia's in a different line of work, and on his job he can let the slimey string all the way out. And my blood runs cold to think that a freedom-hating scumbag like this is placed so high in the government of my country.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Who wouldn't be happy about this? Well, let's not go there (and I mean that literally)...

I do note with interest that Justice Thomas' fence-straddle -- voting with the minority, but going out of his way to express disdain for regulation of "noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult" -- achieves its probable objective of playing both ends against the middle, PR-wise. Both Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan use Thomas as an exemplar of conservative tolerance -- even though he voted to uphold Bowers v. Hardwick. Talk about having it both ways!

Well, you know what; let Sullivan have it any way he wants -- this is a big day for him, and though I think he's an asshole, this is one victory I'm happy to see him celebrate.

THINKING IT THROUGH. The mystery of Lileks is solved: his wife lost her job. As one who has suffered the vagaries of the job market, I sympathize. It must make it that much harder for him that he has that large, comfortable house to maintain. And all the latest Mac gear, and a great home entertainment center. It'll be hard keeping all that together on one nationally-syndicated columnist's salary...

On second thought, fuck that asshole.

Favorite lines: "The woman who comes in once a week to do the woodwork: she’s hosed. The guys who mow the lawn: well, they’re in luck, because I’ll be damned if I push a mower up the hill. But otherwise, it’s time to cinch the belt..."

THINKING IT THROUGH II. Instapundit feels for Lileks and directs you to his Tip Jar. I mean, the suburban columnist's wife has just lost her job, folks! She's a well-connected lawyer, so who knows when she'll work again?

If your heart bleeds for them, prepare to bust out crying like a little girl for America's super-rich. Information from the IRS, reported by the New York Times, tells us that "the 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in 2000." The Four Hundred have more than doubled their cut of the American pie since 1992. But at the same time, "their taxes grew at a much slower rate, from 1 percent of all taxes in 1992 to 1.6 percent in 2000." They also paid a lower rate on their taxes in 2000 than in 1992.

Now, this is where some ombudsman, real or self-appointed, says, "Class-warfare! Tone it down with some Republican talking points!" And so the Times' report contains this demurrer:

Those same numbers can be read to show that the wealthiest, as a group, bore a disproportionate share of the overall tax burden -- 1.6 percent of all taxes, vs. 1.1 percent of all income...

Break out the facial blotters. Once again, the rich are soaked! Too bad the Times didn't run a Tip Jar for the Four Hundred with the story. Then again, I imagine we've all been hitting their Tip Jar for quite some time.

DEFINING OPPRESSION DOWN. Speaking of which, if you read conservative stuff at all, every so often you'll see a story similar to this one from today's NRO:

A few days after my [anti-affirmative action] editorial appeared, a college administrator whom I scarcely recognized approached me in the campus coffee shop. "Are you Gabe Neville?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, not sure why he was asking.

"Having identified me, he glanced furtively around and said, "Good editorial" — and quickly walked away. I never spoke with him again.

...The man was scared. A man like that, an employee without the protection of tenure, wasn't allowed to have opinions of his own.

I'm always reading in such venues about how terrified people are to have, or even approve, "politically incorrect" opinions. Apparently, America is like old Soviet Russia, where all true hearts fear the finger of the informer.

There may be some percentage in looking like a liberal on college campuses -- where it may also be prudent not to criticize the school's basketball team or the head cheerleader's appearance. But where else?

Stop, drop, and look around: conservatives literally rule our politics. No one's throwing rocks and bottles at Bush. Truly suppressed political movements are usually accompanied by legally arbitrary detentions, outlawing of political activity, etc. That sure isn't happening to these guys.

Oppression has been defined down, it seems, for conservatives. If Miguel Estrada gets filibustered, in the conservative imagination it's because "No Conservatives Need Apply" for work from bigoted Democrats. Preferring Darwin's Origin of Species to the Book of Genesis as a paleontology text means liberals "want everyone to tolerate their liberal ideas but have no tolerance for others." And, of course, if you support gay rights, be prepared to hear about "the victimization of evangelical Christians by a hostile secular culture."

It's all a tonic for the troops, I guess -- after all, nothing gets an American up off his duff better'n that someone letting him know he's been getting a raw deal, see? So, rather than let the young cons lay back and watch the Republican-run economy and polity implode, the wise ones tell them martyrdom stories to build fires of righteousness in their hearts.

WHINERS. Conservatives are an odd lot. They run the country, and seem at their pep rallies, at least, to know it, high-fiving and lustily proclaiming, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." For a winning team, though, they do a surprising amount of whining.

Yesterday's Supreme Court comments make good examples, but I must share with you this whinge from Keith Burgess-Jackson at the library of rejected thesis drafts known as Tech Central Station:

"...instead of engaging conservatives, liberals seek to crush them. It is as if conservatives are unworthy of being taken seriously. It is as if they are less than human."

Given the power disparity between the two groups, it is as if Burgess-Jackson were accusing cockroaches of plotting to send him to the ovens.

B-J has plenty of shoulders to cry on. One such is James Lileks, the cornpone vendor from Minnesota who amuses us with anecdotes about his widdle girl Gnat and lurid fantasies about Michael Moore's painful, fecally-explicit death. So Lileks likes to play rough -- "Fisking" and all that. But get a load of how he reacts when someone takes a swipe at him:

My God, people can be vile. I hate to realize sometimes how naive I can be, how I can still be surprised at someone’s ability to put the screws to their fellow man -- er, person -- for reasons so petty you couldn’t find them with an electron microscope. One silly minor person sets her jaw, decides to show someone what’s what, and the effect cascades through the lives of half a dozen other people.

But you know what they say: everytime a door closes, another one opens. So make sure when you close it, your tormentor’s foot is caught twixt door and frame. And slam it shut. Hard.

I have no idea what the beef is -- and I suppose it would be unkind, in a Lileksian way, to speculate (so unfair that I just now deleted a mean gag relating to it -- oh, by the way, UPDATE) -- but Jesus, what a whiner.

Now, I whine too. Oh boy, do I whine. But I'm one of those evil, dehumanizing liberals -- it's in character for me to whine. (And to listen to NPR, drive a Volvo, and murder unborn babies.) Lileks, on the other hand, is impeccably right-wing, and has a fine house, a nice family, a cushy gig, a loyal dog. One would expect him to look trouble in the eye with the same amused glimmer that graces the orbs of Rumsfield and Cheney when some idiot appears to expect a straight answer from them. Yet here he is, to borrow an apt phrase from one of Mike Tyson's handlers, jumping around like a little bitch.

Is that what success is like? Thank God I'm a failure!

RACE HUSTLERS. The recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action sure look like a conservative gain to me -- those guys hate diversity politics, and Gratz at least should make undergraduate programs a little less, um, diverse. Yet prominent righties are (almost literally) spitting mad at Sandra Day O'Connor for the milder Grutter decision.

"Rank perversion," says Peter Kirsanow. He argues that "while the immediate practical effect may be negligible, the long-term social cost will be pronounced." How? "It has consigned at least one more generation of minorities to hard labor under the stigma of perceived incompetency." His concern for those of his fellow African-Americans who have not been muscled onto a Federal Commission is touching. But I wonder which of the following a marginal, black college applicant would prefer: a college education with stigma, or the opportunity to write "LAST GRADE ATTENDED: 12" on job applications without stigma?

David Frum mourns "the determination of elite schools to practice racial preferences either directly or through sneaky subterfuges." Curse those elite schools! On the other hand, I imagine if they were elite country clubs, Frum might be defending them from governmental intrusion.

You can actually see beads of sweat on John Podhoretz' prose: "Sandra Day O'Connor doesn't quite understand what it means to hold a thought in her head for more than 15 seconds," he raves. "Embarrassed themselves in perpetuity... judicial cowardice... racial condescension." And, of course, the old all-ya-gotta-do-is-be-black argument: "At state colleges and law schools, the Supreme Court says, all you need to get a leg up is a non-Caucasian (and non-Asian) skin tone."

Yeesh. Does Podhoretz even know what he sounds like? Or does he know and feel good about it, believing himself bravely "politically incorrect"?

Actually, I'm beginning to think that these guys have no strong Constitutional feelings about affirmative action at all. Race is a hot-button issue, and everyone knows how to win Republican votes on that score -- when Supreme Court no kill quotas, Hulk smash!

God knows how the black rightists work up the requisite fury. Kirsanow said last year that he foresaw a "groundswell of opinion" favoring internment camps for all Arab-Americans if any more terrorist attacks took place in America -- so maybe he thinks America is race-mad (a not unfounded conclusion), and may hope, by disassociating his people from despised preferences, to shield them from the volatile animosity of crackerdom.

For the white guys, I suppose it's a lot simpler.

GEORGE AXELROD. I had no idea he was still alive, or I would have sent a fan letter before he died. Now that the screenwriter/director is gone, I'll tell you why I would have.

There's a strain in American film that has been too little examined. When we think of sex-comedy movies, we tend to think of classy, wised-up offerings like those of Preston Struges or Ernst Lubitsch. These guys couldn't show a lot of skin or use dirty words, but their characters obviously heard the old goat-song and were motivated by it to do some wacky things. A celibate professor might put a shady dame up in his sanctum sanctorum, for example, if her gams were appealing. There was a shared perception among audience and moviemaker alike that the power of sexual attraction was the topic (Topic A, Sturges used to call it) that had motivated comedy from the dawn of dramaturgy.

But in the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s, stateside sex comedies took on a deciedly neurotic aspect. I'll spare you the convoluted social and aesthetic bloodlines, but the short version might go like this: as American sexual mores began to loosen, popular artists felt the pull and felt compelled to go with it. Of course, to go all the way with it would have been too much for everyone concerned -- it's one thing for some garretted bohemian to tear the frilly nightdress off the American libido, but makers of fun entertainments for the masses didn't want to live in garrets (though they might go to parties in them) -- they wanted to stay popular.

Still, everybody knew the jig was up -- the country was rich and leisured, and not everyone was passing their suburban evenings with mah jong and Uncle Miltie. Eventually you couldn't not talk about sex, but you couldn't tell all you knew, either.

This made for what we might charitably call creative tension. Moviemakers began pushing the envelope, as we now say, but they also had to pay obesiance to the power of suppression -- the newly-hip audience may have been making new demands, but the Hayes Code was still making its old ones. So we started getting Ross Hunter movies, Good Neighbor Sam, Kiss Me, Stupid, A Guide for the Married Man, Sex and the Single Girl, Under the Yum Yum Tree, etc. -- pictures in which sex was hyped up to an alarming degree. The pursuit of partners in these pictures seems almost panic-stricken. The pull of lust was shown, not as a little spark that made the world go round, but as a tornado that blew men around like uprooted trees. Still, conventional morality was more or less restored by the end of each -- albeit a little the worse for wear.

It may be said that Axelrod was one of the founding fathers of the neurotic sex comedy. The Seven Year Itch, his first hit, was mainly about a middle-class guy ineptly trying to screw his neighbor. As the neighbor was Marilyn Monroe, not much explanation was required. In the Billy Wilder film version, made in 1955, the guy doesn't go through with it -- though in Axelrod's original Broadway play, he did. Axelrod reportedly resented this modification. Of course the play couldn't be filmed as it was. But something was eating at Axelrod. There was a wrecker in him, albeit one domesticated by an aversion to garrets.

Axelrod went west and wrote, among other films, Goodbye Charlie and How to Murder Your Wife. These pictures are at times literally astonishing -- not good, just astonishing. The men in them seem, for the most part, crazed with lust, yet highly uncomfortable with its consequences. Charlie, in which a deceased womanizer comes back to earth as Debbie Reynolds and his old pal falls in love with him/her, would give Sigmund Freud nightmares. And the courtroom scene in How To Murder Your Wife whips the vague resentments males feel toward the restrictions of marriage and social status into a delirious rage -- climaxing with Jack Lemmon convincing the male jurors that any man would kill to be freed from his marital chains. Maybe the audience was supposed to take all this as good-humored ribbing between the sexes, but my nostrils detect a whiff of gasoline and old rags when I watch them.

Axelrod did some fine things -- The Manichurian Candidate among them -- but for me his apotheosis is Lord Love a Duck. He wrote, directed, and produced it, and it failed miserably at the box office. The style is a kind of SoCal magic realism, in which the erotically compelled characters of his earlier work become almost literal automatons, mouthing conformist platitudes between eye-rolling bouts of sexual frenzy. Above all this is Roddy McDowell (!) as a living imp of the perverse -- but a curiously unsexed one. He obsesses on a shallow but ambitious California teenager played by Tuesday Weld (!), but he doesn't seem to want to fuck her -- merely to amuse and enable her with his magical power to grant all her wishes. At first he vicariously enjoys her rakette's progress through the social gauntlet of suburban life. Weld drives men literally mad, knows it, and uses it. Her very presence causes her high school principal (Harvey Korman) to devour pencils; she even vamps her estranged father, in one thoroughly unwholesome sequence, so that he'll buy her the multiple sweaters she needs to join the cool girls of the school.

McDowell hates all these people, and happily smooths her path, even arranging an advantageous marriage for her to a thoroughly hypocritical square he detests. But then he starts to crack. He slowly destroys the square, and then decides this isn't a large enough gesture of contempt -- and mows down all his adversaries by running a bulldozer into the high school graduation. The story ends with McDowell in prison, proclaiming his love for Weld -- who goes on to become a movie star.

Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.