THE VERY LATEST THING IN TRAITOR-BAITING. Tacitus: "I don't see any Democrat -- save perhaps Wesley Clark -- whose election will do anything but harm the war on terror. There, I said it."

But he makes a little joke in the next graf and in comments ("I'm just doing my best to fulfill the stereotype"), signaling that if you take exception to his statement, you're just being a humorless liberal scold.

Which is kind of like some guy saying in a light, laughing voice that he's going to kick you in the nuts, and then kicking you in the nuts.

Will they fall for it? What won't they fall for?

UPDATE. Talked to T and he says I have him all wrong. As he is a gentleman, I am obliged to believe him. The rest of you may make your own judgments. It may be that I get oversensitive when opponents, however worthy, tell me that my candidates will "harm the war on terror." (Yeah, and that's why I'm supporting them -- I hate this fucking country and want it to lose to militant Islam, which totally rocks!)

DEAR DIARY:

Well, the accommodations are decent. The staff here is curt and sometimes a little snide, but in general they treat me OK. The cell is clean and the food, while unimaginative, is hot and nutritious.

After all those months on the lam, frankly, that's a relief. Life underground was no bed of roses, let me tell you. I had always imagined that, if I had to return to the life of deprivation I knew as a boy, it would be a cleansing experience, sort of like fasting. I told myself that it would revive my natural killer instincts. (Don't laugh. Putting people in a shredder isn't the same thing as hand-to-hand fighting.) Down in the valley, scrambling from house to house, my pistol at the ready -- that's adventure! I figured I might even lose a little of that "palace flab" I'd picked up during the fat years.

I guess that's why I was so glib about the invasion. My people thought I was being brave, but I was really being reckless. I had gotten sick of thinking about how it would go when it all came down, and I wanted to get it over with. Or rather, to get on with it.

Of course, when Baghdad fell, I saw very quickly that I had been romanticizing way too much. My flight was mostly tedious and exhausting. For the first little while I was in shock, and after the boys got killed, I hardly knew who I was anymore. (Maybe that's why I was so hard to catch!)

My natural instincts did come back to me -- but not the ones I'd expected. Mostly I felt fear. I hadn't felt that -- not really -- since I was a child. When I joined the Ba'ath Party, when I became an assassin, I'd said goodbye to fear, because I fully expected to be killed at any moment. But when I was a boy, especially right after I moved in with my uncle, any little thing would scare me: howling wolves, thunderstorms. Now, lying flat under a blanket on the backseats of old cars, my ears cocked for American accents, I felt again the quivering fear of uncertainty.

But that passed, you know, just before they got me. I had a feeling it would all be over soon, and it made things much easier to bear. I wouldn't say I was at peace, quite, but I didn't worry so much.

Now I've just had my first really good night's sleep in a while, despite the fluorescent light that's always on here. Already I'm feeling stronger. This afternoon I think I'll start exercising.

I'm turning my attention to the trial. I feel pretty confident. Whether they hold it in Den Hague or Baghdad, I know the Americans will be running the show. And that's my ace in the hole. Because anxious as they are to dispatch me, they also want something that only I can give them. Wouldn't they love it if I would tell the world that I had weapons of mass destruction out the yin-yang? Or that I was the real mastermind behind 9/11? (Of course it would be very hard to make these things sound plausible, but I'll leave it to their people to invent something -- they're experts at it.) How much would Bush be willing to give me for that -- especially in October? Life in prison would be sweeter than the hangman's noose, especially if my friends can get some of that cash I made off with into the right hands.

And I do want to stick around awhile. There's no telling what the next few years will bring. When the Americans get sick of running my country, when Chalabi and the other puppets lose favor, who knows but that they might not come running to me again? Stranger things have happened. Rumsfeld may yet turn up to shake my hand one more time.

But if it doesn't work out -- eh. All told, I've had a pretty good run for a farm boy. I've done a few things I'm not proud of, but who hasn't? As for posterity, let the world turn a few more times and then we'll see. They want to make my country a laboratory for what they call a Western-style democracy. It's all bullshit, of course, but if my people decide to take it seriously, they'll start thinking about how much oil they're sitting on top of and what kind of power it represents. I assure you Assad and Khatami and the rest of them are already thinking about it. Then the Americans may wind up wishing they had me around to run the torture chambers again.

Well, no sense working myself up about it. The army barber is coming soon to shave me. Perhaps I can get them to give me a TV. If not, there's always writing. Maybe I'll work on an autobiography. Allah knows, I've no end of stories.

ROLE REVERSAL. LA Times:

Last month, the U.S. Labor Department in Washington said that employers added a net 126,000 payroll jobs in October. In all, the economy has added 286,000 positions over the last three months -- the best showing since early 2001.

But 2.4 million more jobs would be needed to regain all the ground lost since March 2001, when the last recession began. When, or even if, those positions will come back is far from clear.

Here's the problem: Many companies like the notion of a jobless recovery. The leaner they can keep their U.S. payrolls -- by using overtime, automating the production process and outsourcing jobs overseas -- the higher their profits.

See, businesses aspire to increase their profits, and if they can earn more while paying fewer people, they will. That's what drives productivity up.

Yet more and more, Bush apologists act as if productivity jumps were caused by increased self-esteem. Here's former GE head Jack Welch -- previously known as a hard-headed businessman -- telling reporters to stop talking down our Tinkerbell recovery:

Not only can millions of hardworking people celebrate -- they should. They've earned the right. That's why we can't rain all over their efforts --their motivation and innovative spirit and can-do attitudes. Those good feelings, as any economist will tell you, are key drivers of company productivity and consumer confidence. The fact is a recovery will be a lot harder if we keep saying "but" about damn good news. (Italics mine.)

"As any economist will tell you?" Sure, maybe after three hours of open bar at an AEI dinner, one of them will slur, "Yeah, it's all a buncha bullshit, who knows what makes the economy work, I sure as hell don't." But does Welch really think that happy thoughts are what squeeze extra juice out of the American worker? (Also, does he think we really "celebrate" increased productivity? Maybe he saw some white-collar slaves slogging to the bar after an 18-hour day to get drunk and pass out, and thought, "Oh look -- they're celebrating!)

Isn't there something screwy here? Liberals -- allegedly airy, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky sorts -- are patiently pointing out the common-sense fact that increased productivity will not necessarily boost employment, and may actually depress it, while conservatives -- allegedly the tough, practical, businesslike "grown-ups" -- are asking us to clap our hands if we believe.

Q&A.

Q:

The administration's note of disapproval on the upcoming Taiwan referendum and subsequent trade agreements with China struck me as decidedly odd. I thought that for sure that issue would be a no-brainer, on pure ideology... My thoughts on this matter were crystallized by a passage in a column by John Patrick Diggins:

...The American presidency remained almost as indifferent as the public when, in Hungary in 1956, the Red Army turned the Budapest uprising into a bloodbath, and when, in China in 1989, a young man stood alone and defiantly halted a tank in Tiananmen Square...

..., if we are truly interested in bringing democracy to those who want it, then why haven't we been applying that standard across the board, and stand with those opposed to communist tyranny?

A: Money.

Next question, please.

PERSPECTIVE, GUYS. If I read the esteemed Mr. Teachout correctly, and I fear that I do, he believes that the passing of the JenniCam means Internet users have moved on from gratuitous displays of pretty girls with their clothes off to sober little weblogs like, well, his.

When the blogging industry is pulling down $2.5 billion a year, give me a call.

BATTLE OF THE BARKING MOONBATS. Thanks for the tip, Jacob Sullum: Disgustipated by the evasions and tergiversations of the contemporary Right, the American Conservative Union (hey, noted below) have created their own online rag with the rhythmically awkward name of Conservative Battleline Online.

Three cheers for meathead schismatics! But is it as funny as GoPatGo's American Conservative magazine?

Let us compare features of their current issues:

CBO: "The Problem of National Review" is written more in sorrow than in anger ("National Review taught us conservatism in our youth," blubbers the unnamed author), but offers a few nice bits of incomprehensible internecine gobbledegook, e.g., "But would the editor really publicly claim that his goal is to passionately express and defend fusionist conservatism as opposed to providing journalistic objectivity from a moderately right of center position? I think not." Hear, hear!

Bob Barr weighs in, too, but not in his libertarian mode. "No F***ing Way" is a soggy, Cal Thomas-style grumble about all them swears on the TV. Only stylistic filigree: Clinton is implicated ("Clinton and his bevy of contextual lawyers would be proud"), but we don't even give points for that one anymore.

The recent Congressional Medicare rook leads Stephen Moore to declare that "We now have two big government parties in Washington." But old loyalties die hard. Says Moore of one of the Republicans who turned the tide toward financial ruin, "Poor Trent Franks looked like he was white as a ghost when he walked off the House floor. Trent is terrific guy... I have no doubt his conscience is gnawing away at him -- and will do so for a long time." Comes the revolution, comrade, you'll get off with time served (and whiteness of face, of course).

Then there's Mark Shields on.... wait, Mark Shields?

AmConMag: "In Rumsfeld's Shop" uses a brilliant device to strip the bark off neo Rummy: testimony by an actual soldier! "At this point," confides our undercover grunt (actually a Lt. Col.), "I didn’t know what a neocon was or that they had already swarmed over the Pentagon, populating various hives of policy and planning like African hybrids..." But the Lt. Col. learns good! Patriotic bureaucrats are kicked out ("Word was that he was even-handed with Israel"); an "anti-Arab orientation" is held. By nightmare's end, "I now understood that neoconservatism was both unhistorical and based on the organizing construct of 'permanent revolution.'"

Only one problem, conservatively speaking, with the witness: she's a she, Karen Kwiatkowski. What's she doin' in This Straight Man's Army? Say, maybe this permanent revolution thing goes back further than AmConMag imagines...

Big Daddy Buchanan examines Dixiephobia among his erstwhile comrades. "Why the Hollywood Left hates Dixie is easy to understand," writes Papa Pitchfork. "But why do the neocons?" After all, they have one big thing in common: "The neocons are pro-Israel. So, too, are these folks who believe in standing by Israel because the Bible tells them so." Pat aims most of his venom at Charles Krauthammer, who used the term "white trash" and has kind of a big nose, if ya know what I mean (and he called the rebel flag an "American swastika" -- need I say more?). Pat also reveals that he himself belongs to the Sons of Confederate Veterans. East-Coast Irish bully boy and an unrepentant Rebel -- why isn't this man President?

Taki is in a valedictory mood over two old chums -- no racial slurs this month. Try again later!

Conclusion: Honors are easy. AmConMag has the edge (and the head start), but CBO is a comer, and if it picks up on some of that underutilized young conservative talent that's lying around, it might steal a march.

BALANCED BUDGET SOLECISM. Cornerite Tim Graham is pissing on the fresh grave of Sen. Paul Simon. Graham says the claim, inspired by Simon's work toward a balanced federal budget, that the late Illinois Senator was a "social liberal, fiscal conservative," is bogus -- a surprising judgment, but a necessary tactic, I guess, if your job is to talk up those conservatives currently "balancing" our budget into insolvency on behalf of their greedy pals.

Graham's evidence against Simon's bifurcated designation: he had a low American Conservative Union rating ("which is partially on fiscal issues"). And he wanted single-payer health care. Within a balanced budget.

In other words, he wanted liberal programs, but only if they were within the means of the government. If that isn't "social liberal, fiscal conservative," what is?

The real money quote, though, is this breathtaking statement:

To win the battle of defining conservatism, conservatives are going to have to reject the notion that balanced-budget socialism can be defined as “fiscally conservative.” Fiscal conservatism should be defined as a preference for low taxes and strictly limited government.

When people talk about culture wars, too often they mean this: the power to "define," or rather to redefine, heretofore simple and commonly understood concepts by new and usually absurd standards. If the current program of spending rampages, from which the public is occasionally distracted by tax rebates, is what now passes for fiscal conservatism, then they certainly don't make fiscal conservatives the way they did when I was a boy.

And you have to love that syndrome from which Graham thinks we should be protected: "balanced-budget socialism." We'll get right on it, chief, as soon as someone explains what it is.

DIE, NASTY:

WOE IS WE [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Andy Pettitte is leaving the Yanks for the Astros (NBC just confirmed, too). Weeping can be heard throughout NYC. Wait with anticipation for Rich wisdom on this breaking news.

Posted at 09:29 AM


Well, "K-Lo," some of us are crying -- with laughter! As a fan who's true to the Orange and Blue, I applaud the Astros on their acquisition, and wish the Bosox luck with Curt Schilling. And I look forward to following the progress of Mr. Steinbrenner's "Dynasty" next season. The humbled shall be exalted, and the exalted shall be humbled.

PRODUCTIVITY. What Daniel Drezner takes hundreds of words to misapprehend, Ted Rall makes clear in four panels.

Yes, I know your mommy said he was a traitor. Your mommy is a cracker asshole.

THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS. "But I think it would be remarkably short-sighted for those of us on the libertarian end of the conservative movement to underestimate the amount of betrayal that many social conservatives feel... Libertarians often treat social conservatives as useful idiots -- folks who are good to have around because they tend to vote Republican, but not really the folks you want to have sitting at the 'grown up table' deciding social policy."

Let us indulge for a moment the dream-world scenario posited by this approvingly-quoted poster to Andrew Sullivan's site, and imagine a conversation at that 'grown up table' with all hands on deck:

"Come, brother conservative, let us reason together. May we have your input on gay marriage?"

"Romans 1:26-27."

(pause)

"OK, anything else?"

"Well, with all due respect to my gay brethren, same-sex marriage — by itself, and by leading to state-sanctioned polygamy and polyamory — will undermine monogamy [and] initiate a process likely to terminate in the abolition of legal marriage. It will also cause earthquakes and plagues of frogs. Ha! Just kidding. What I really mean is, Romans 1:26-27. Guards, take this man away."

(Guy wakes up in a Log Cabin, the residents of which ask him, "Is it safe to come out yet?")

(MUSIC: Little Rascals outro)

THE DEVIL PROBABLY. Last night PBS ran a little documentary about Galileo and his persecution by the Church -- simplistic and preachy, as is their wont, and Simon Callow is a terrible ham, but overall a decent, compact dramatization. It reminded me of Jonah Goldberg.

Yes, dear reader, I know how strange that sounds -- that, intellectually, Galileo and Goldberg are not even in the same time-space continuum. Let me explain: the PBS show reminded me of, and sent me back to, Goldberg's truly bizarre take on the Galileo story in 1999:

A lovable old scientist is condemned to Hell for refusing to deny the truth of the cosmos (in this case the Copernican notion of heliocentricity... The problem is, it's spin. Ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin.

Goldberg's article does not refute the well-known facts of the Galielo case, but seeks to drive them from the reader's mind with mitigating circumstances. Some of these are just irrelevant and lame: for example, that Galileo's fellow scientists were jealous and really started the campaign against him. (Perhaps, but scientists didn't run the Inquisition.) Others are inversions not only of history, but also of logic:

Galileo's James Carville was no preacher, but a scientist named Schreiner (it helps if you say his name the way Seinfeld says "Neumann"). He fanned the flames in Rome until the Pope felt obliged to call a trial under the Inquisition. The head of the Inquisition was a Galileo supporter, who hoped to get the whole thing over with quickly by just giving him a formal reprimand. Unfortunately, rabble-rousers and opportunists turned the heat up. The trial is very complicated but the result was that Galileo got house arrest, which is where he did all of his research anyway. He was permitted to correspond with any scientist he wanted and he wrote the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences while under the Man's thumb.

All the hallmarks of Goldberg's wormy style are here: the gratuitous and irrelevant personal slurs, the jarring insertion of hipster language, and the reflexive minimization of injustices suffered by others (Wow, house arrest was like that time I had detention for a week! Least it got me to read Atlas Shrugged).

Interestingly, it is in some ways comparable to the article on Galileo in the Catholic Encyclopedia, which makes a number of similar non-arguments -- here's one interesting variation:

It is in the first place constantly assumed, especially at the present day, that the opposition which Copernicanism encountered at the hands of ecclesiastical authority was prompted by hatred of science and a desire to keep the minds of men in the darkness of ignorance. To suppose that any body of men could deliberately adopt such a course is ridiculous, especially a body which, with whatever defects of method, had for so long been the only one which concerned itself with science at all.

Actually, this rather elegant sophism -- if we support scientists, we are incapable of doing anything that would harm science -- is quite beyond Goldberg's skill-set, but its author does show something of the same passion for the subversion of plain facts.

Of course, the Catholic Encyclopedia author is laboring for the world's greatest wholesale dealer of dogma. When the cause is holy, no obfuscation can be too dense, no twists of logic too tortuous. Goldberg, however, labors for National Review. Eternal salvation is not in the contract. Why then work so hard to promulgate such outright bullshit, when one could, with less trouble and spiritual damage to oneself, simply kick back and shoot spitballs at Al Gore and PETA?

In my brief time scrupling over the political writing of my time, I have often been insulting and short-tempered. This is not so much because I fault the reasoning of my subjects, in most cases, but because there seems to be no reasoning, or reason, in them at all.

But, as my good friend Bob Schaffer has observed, hell has no floor -- things can always get worse. I really believe Goldberg represents -- and he may not be the best representative, but he is the one at hand -- a newer, lower order of propagandist: one who prevaricates because he thinks it's cool.

Think of it. You're born into a prominent right-wing family. You have a facility for language, and can do tricks with it that make the grown-ups clap. No biggie, but positive attention beats negative. Over time, they put you to work in one of the acceptable venues. You shake hands with their former young, with-it guy correspondent, a tedious boomer. Dude, your thought balloon reads, you are way old and I am so not you.

So you're sitting in the office with your feet up and your "colleagues" are all clacking away at stern denunciations of the welfare state and you couldn't give a lukewarm shit. But you can still sling phrases and so, in your boredom, you decide to drop some bombs: for example, a thousand words on how the Church actually did Galilieo a favor. Audacious! Even the greybeards must applaud your chutzpah.

You keep it up. You'll see their bitching about racial sensitivity -- "There is not a college course in the humanities which does not overly dwell on race" -- and raise them: "It's so depressing that 'people of color' has replaced 'colored people.' In a very important sense, the old phrase was better..." Your gloss does not advance any argument, but gives a tingle to every staffer sick of black bellyaching. Boo-yah!

Eventually your method becomes easy: you don't have to outrage any particular constituency -- outrages to common sense will do just as well. You can give off some particularly sloppy dorm-room windbaggery about Tolkein and make it into an article; the whiplash of your train of thought will provide fans with the confused feeling they learned as undergrads to identify with big ideas.

Boredom's a bitch, though, and sometimes you stretch yourself. When the Big Boss lays down the law on A&F's pornographic catalogue, you know what you have to do: establish yourself as a connoisseur of anime and commercial fleshpix while decrying "peddling what amounts to stylized smut." Makes no sense? Dude, sense is like so over.

Well, Western Civ had a good run. I'll be interested to see what's on next.

FUZZY MATH. Brookhiser at The Corner: "Why did Gore do it?... After decades of self-discipline and deprivations, the experience of being repudiated by the voters, especially in a presidential run, has powerful and disturbing effects."

Ahem. Getting more votes than the other guy is not "being repudiated by the voters."

God, they really do hate Gore, don't they? He must have something going for him.

DID YOU MISS ME? A stomach virus plus computer problems equalled a longer than usual layoff from blogging here at alicublog, so some small inanities, like this moron who only recently discovered that Randy Newman thinks bad thoughts, went unattended. Sorry.

HOMAGE TO DUSTIN DIAMOND. Actually this David Brooks column isn't too, too terrible, but I had to notice this right-wing tic:

So when a Republican starts a perfectly normal conversation about the glories of his powerboat, snowmobile, combine or hemi, the liberal is likely to screech out something about the ozone layer.

Have you noticed that nearly every conservative characterization of everyday liberals involves screeching? There's the "santimonious [sic] liberal screech," for example, and the "whacko lefties screech." This guy claims that "the whine of the North American liberal can often be mistaken for the sound of a screech owl." Another one says "You say 'Republican' to a liberal gay activist, they'll make a face or screech or whine or say, 'Republicans cannot be good'" (though, in this case, it seems possible that the author attributes his subject's screeching to gayness rather than liberalism). Ann Coulter notes all the things "that would cause a liberal to screech."

And so on. See here for more. I guess it has something to do with the portrayal of leftism as less than manly, an electorally useful gambit in the Bible and Ethanol Belt States. (Congresscritter Evans wants to give more money to schools -- 'cuz that's where screechy types like him likes to hide, while us real men is out playin' football and makin' ethanol!). I can understand this kind of idiocy among the hoi polloi, but isn't it odd that the bespectacled, wimpish Brooks feels the need to play along? Maybe it's his way of telling his fellow conservatives, "I may have manicured nails and the speaking manner of a small-town theatre critic, but at least I don't screech!"

POTS & KETTLES, PART 7,595,044. David Brooks talks about a Presidential candidate who came from wealth and privilege yet affects the demeanor of a regular Joe. He "doesn't worry about having a coherent political philosophy," and "when you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there."

OK, you knew as soon as I said "David Brooks" that the column wasn't about our tough-talkin', silver-spoon-chewin', free-spendin', tariff-placin'-then-revokin' President. It's Howard Dean that's a phony! Whereas our Dear Leader believes in things. Like nation building. Of course, he believes different things about it at different times, but -- boy, that Dean, he's a crazy fucker, huh?

Sigh. This sort of thing makes me miss the moral clarity of Walter Duranty.

SHIT IN A CORNER, PART 3,429:

HEY THERE, BIG SPENDER [Jonathan H. Adler]
At a time when libertarians and economic conservatives are already grumbling about Republicans' profligate spending, what does the Bush Administration do? Think up new big-ticket spending items for a second term. Is KArl Rove trying to make such voters stay home in 2004?

(italics mine)

Yeah, those 300 votes might cost the GOP Nevada. Again!

EARLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT: Jesse Pandagon's "20 most annoying conservatives of 2003." Check especially the Jonah Goldberg comic, and the origin of Roy's Rock. (Thanks, Atrios from whom all blessings flow.)

LIT CORNER. I picked up some old books for a song (well, 50 cents apiece) at a sale. Fascinating specimens. One was Gene Fowler's bio of Jimmy Walker, the Roaring Twenties mayor of New York, called "Beau James." With Fowler I was previously acquainted; I'd read his cheapy bio of Jimmy Durante, "Schnozzola," and the Walker book follows a similar pattern: anecdotes and witty sayings bridged by historical data seemingly recited from imperfect, but compulsively perfecting, memory -- the polar opposite of those meticulous 800-page biographies that win the Pulitzers. Fowler seems to have been pals with both Durante and Walker, and with Damon Runyon, whose style he shares a bit. That this style also intrudes into the "quotations" of his subjects only adds to the charm, if not the versimilitude. Here's a Walker tale, via Fowler:

Whenever Jim shaved he used 'Champagne' toilet water, his only perfume, as a lotion. He paid six dollars a bottle for this dressing, which he also used after a bath. One of his servants seemed unable to buy the toilet water for less than ten dollars a bottle.

Jim was not the man to quibble about expenses, but somehow he had set his mind upon six dollars as a fair price for his favorite toilet water.

"I wonder," Jim said to the servant one day, "if we might strike a bargain, you and I? I'm going to raise your salary on the condition that you find a place that sells the toilet water for six dollars a bottle."

The servant qualified for the wage increase. "You know," Jimmy once said to his friend Johnny O'Connor, "if someone stole Brooklyn Bridge I'd be the last person in town to miss it. But when someone gyps me on toilet water, I feel that I am being more used than usual."

Does this sound stenographically accurate? Who cares?Walker had style, and so did Fowler, and if one owed some of his style to the other, I don't care to know of it. We're always hearing about how eloquent Bush is, but are offered very flat champagne (or toilet water) as evidence. At least Fowler had the decency to gussy up his subject so that we might believe him to be as smooth as advertised. Not truth, then, but legend, and we who revere "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" know what choice to make.

I also got an 1899 edition of Norris' "McTeague." This of course is the source material for von Stroheim's ill-fated "Greed," and for William Bolcom's opera (libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman!). I can see why grand stylists are attracted to this property, even though the novel's pitch is tuned to the first faint notes of naturalism coming then out of Europe. Norris seems to have caught the Zola bug bad. Every squalid flat is rendered down to the last rusted coathook and battered chair-rail, and all relations are inevitably reduced to their grubby essence, often with disdainful and sometimes horrified commentary by the author, as in this passage detailing the quack dentist McTeague's infatuation with the childlike Trina:

The poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebean tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance...

Ugh. Before McTeague first kisses Trina while she is anaesthetized in his dentist's chair (!), his inner struggle is rendered thusly:

He was alone with her, and she was absolutely without defence. Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring... it was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world -- the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be be resisted...

Double ugh. One sympathizes with Eugene O'Neill's old man, who, after seeing his son's "Beyond the Horizon," asked him, "What are you trying to do, send the audience home to commit suicide?" For there is something purposefully ugly about the early attempts of American writers to not only grab hold of the truth as they saw it, but to thrust it under the nose of the bourgeoisie.

And yet... along this muddy track the novel proceeds single-mindedly and gathers great force and even beauty. One can see where Dreiser got it from -- the ham-handed, club-footed narrative style that, seemingly by brute force, draws readers in and carries them down into the muck. Mencken, that great champion of these authors, once said of the oratory of Warren G. Harding, a very different kind of writer, that it reminded him of "a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it." I wonder if Mencken, whose aversion to poetry is legendary, might not have admired something of idiotic barking-dog grandeur in Norris and his decedents as well?

BAD SANTA? I see the ACLU has griped because a minister dressed as Santa Claus was allowed to address a Baldwin City, KS classroom about the meaning of Christmas.

The Topeka Capital-Journal dispatch doesn't give much detail on the talk, though the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World reports that the ACLU has "urged the school district to investigate elementary schools allowing a Christian minister dressed as Santa Claus to discuss the meaning of Christmas, referral of students who appear to need guidance to Christian resources and granting Christian 'missionaries' access to students in after-school programs"

Well, that's the ACLU's job, I guess. And I wouldn't presume to pronounce on this case without more evidence. Maybe the Rev was counselling persecution of homosexuals, say, while under cover of Kringle.

But more and more I figure this is the sort of case where the ACLU ought to just let go of the rope. It's a bitter thing to say, but most cowtown kids have no strong motivation to think and act freely anyway, and trying to protect them from the depradations of organized religion is probably going to work about as well as trying to protect them from Wal-Mart and reality TV shows. Meanwhile complaints like this give wingers and Jesus freaks another chance to bitch about how liberals spoiled their Christmas.

I think the ACLU should take its contingency fund for events of this sort and invest it in copies of The Origin of Species, Babbitt, A People's History of the United States et alia, and send copies to safe houses throughout the Bible and Ethanol Belts, where young people who wish to escape the stifling stupidity of their parents and warders may take refuge. The cultivation of a few free minds might do more for our freedoms in the long run than blanket deChristianization of the public square.

NOT PROFOUND, JUST HELLA CHARMING:

13 Beautiful Women Versus One Hideous President."
Thanks for the tip, World O'Crap. I just don't see how Oliver Willis has been missing this.

SHORTER JOHN DERBYSHIRE. My youngest has been enlisted into some sort of Negro musicale, and I mean to get to the bottom of it. Mayhap some of you have fought or lived amongst the fuzzy-wuzzies. Have you a notion of their dialect? I am interested in a translation of this sinister fragment: "Hakuna Matata."

(I guess it wasn't much shorter, but it was fun!)

FOX NEWS ETHICS EXPLAINED. "There is no presumption of innocence in the court of opinion... The court of opinion can convict anyone on any basis." -- Wendy McElroy, FoxNews.com.

FIRST "CRUNCHY CONSERVATIVES," NOW THIS. That awful man points us to another front organization masquerading as a hipster 'zine (not, though, the one Reynolds works for), which tries to squeeze a few more innings out of the "'South Park' Republican" thing. Key quotes:

Conservatives once defined themselves as “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” This antiquated thinking doesn’t suit (if it ever did) young generations who see the future as promising more freedom, more prosperity, and more potential. We don’t want to freeze progress; we want to unbridle it.

And:

The Republicans have a moment here that they could seize. They can dig in with the conservatives and continue to muck about with the peripheral issues; or they can shed the conservative tag, embrace the reptilian “South Park Republicans” and get to work on the fundamental issues: freedom, prosperity, promise.

It should be explained, to those who understandably wish to avoid reading a whole page of this nonsense, that the Popshot author means "reptilian" in a good way. It has something to do with P.J. O'Rourke, who is to this sort of frat-boy federalist as Raymond Carver is to that legion of workshop-haunting, chain-smoking authors who lay up in cabins for weeks at a time to purge themselves of modifiers.

Popshot's take is fairly typical, and typically thin. SPRs believe pop-culture artifacts and leisure-time options constitute a political identity. They are encouraged, for example, to hear "Sean Hannity talking about sex (gasp!) on his radio show or Pejman talking about Grand Theft Auto (whoa!), one of the most violent video games ever made, in a favorable light," taking this to mean that "free market advocates have certainly come a long way."

A long way from where to where, one wonders. If a free-market advocate prefers to live like, say, John Derbyshire, listening to Hank Williams and blissfully solving calculus problems till the sun comes up, what makes him politically distinct from the sexed-up game-boy? For SPRs to be remarkable (and it seems one of their goals is to be remarkable), they would need to offer something that plain old Republicanism can't match. What, besides a shitty attitude, would that be?

Some commentators equate SPR with libertarianism. This seems to me wishful thinking, a sort of Police Athletic League approach to libertarian recruiting: Let's just channel these hooligans' natural energy into basketball and anti-tax initiatives!

It could work, I guess. Assuming most of the SPRs are young, they wouldn't feel much immediate impact from a "starving the beast" approach to government. But that's just a passive association: I haven't seen anyone crying, "As a South Park Republican, I'm strongly opposed to pork-laden Republican budgets and Medicare plans" -- oh sure, maybe in an Andrew Sullivan "it's shameful the way my President spends money on -- oh look! a bird" way, in which the grumble is dutifully made and then ignored as weightier matters (like who's a traitor) are gleefully picked over.

Really, it seems SPRs have only one strong belief: that they should have what they want -- i.e., attention and cool stuff. So do the rest of us, of course, but their want is more mediagenic because of the man-bites-dog angle -- Betcha didn't know that the kid in the Stüssy gear thinks Bush rulez! Hella counterintuitive!

I don't know how long the thing will last. Maybe a while. Punk lasted way beyond any earthly reason; Johnny Lydon packed it in a quarter-century ago, yet we still have kids walking around with "Anarchy" tattoos and mohawks. But of course, to be a punk in the old days was a little more demanding -- what with the social unacceptability and all. Whereas SPR has a remarkably low barrier to entry, as seen by this bit from yet another TCS "Hey Kids, Join The SPR Revolution" article:

Different South Park Republicans often describe themselves as conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, pragmatists, constitutionalists, or "just your average Joe." However, when election day comes around, they all generally vote for Republican candidates.

As a wise old one said: Do the pose, all you have to do is wear the clothes.

PS: And what would a clique be without way stringent standards? Here's a guy who thinks South Park itself isn't SPR enough anymore.

A WARNING. You know, sometimes I get tired of acting like George Sanders in All About Eve, and when I read something like this...

AND FOR THE LADIES [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
The fun is not all Derb's: There are Rumsfeld and Bush in a Flight Suit talking dolls ("action figures" if you give them to your son for Christmas). Both are sitting with me as I write right now, courtesy of the TalkingPresidents.com folks. So excuse me if I sound distracted.

...I'm less likely to raise eyebrow and martini glass simultaneously and emit some sparkling aperçu, and more inclined to smash an empty rum bottle against a brick wall and yell something about cunt, ass, KY and DP.

Just a warning in case you think "Hey Salam, fuck you" is, like, cutting edge.

CORPOETRY. Coming down the elevator of the glass tower where I work, I overheard one suit say to another with no irony apparent:

"So, what's your read on our take?"

The frissons fly, and we are well advised to keep our eyes and ears open for them.

JULIA, look at the Blogroll and stop crying.

People act like this is an honor. Don't they know how worthless I am?

NUT, INTERRUPTED. TBogg, bless him:

Lileks isn't blogging for the month of December in order to work on his new book, Who Moved The DVD Racks?: An Amazing Trip To Aisle 14 At Target...

And lots more! Onto the blogroll with you!
I was kind of disappointed myself when I visited Lileks' site and saw the CLOSED sign up. He's been in rare form lately, raging at the little brown ones for not appreciating our "visit" (see a nice precis here). I had hoped he would start channeling Kipling ("Take up the Web Scribe's burden!") but I fear his momentum has been broken.

MAKE WAY, CRYBABIES! The New York Post's op-ed editor, Mark Cunningham, has for the first time I can recall (and I religiously read the piece of shit) pushed his way into the spotlight with an op-ed of his own. Don't know how his underlings felt about it, but I note with interest that Cunningham calls the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Maus "Ted Spiegelman," and it is hard to imagine that none of his colleagues noticed the mistake before it went to press.

Cunningham's theme is the pride of place to be given the 9/11 Memorial component of the new World Trade Center. This has been a bugbear of the Post's editorial pages for many months, and getting the top guy involved shows just how pissed they are about it; maybe next week Old Man Murdoch himself will pen a few stanzas, retaining some of his stateside lackeys to lard Americanisms into his text. ("'Don't go there!' By jingo, Smithers, what a corking turn of phrase!")

"The worst thing about putting the memorial first," says Cunningham, "is that it is choosing as the site's core identity -- as a definition of our city, our collective self -- the loss and grief."

One may agree, in principle, that it is no good to let the attacks overwhelm and define our lives. But one wonders: isn't Cunningham the same editor in whose Post pages 9/11 is regularly used as a bloody shirt to be flailed at all opponents, foreign and domestic, at all times and regardless of merit?

Just a few days ago the Post devoted its front page to a "dirty little secret" involving FDNY employees who fell in love with the 9/11 widows they had been assigned to comfort. As the Post will apparently wring dollars from 9/11-related stories no matter how petty and disgusting they are, where do they get room to talk down anyone else's take on it?

In the end, it's about one thing with Cunningham and his whole rag:

"Let us acknowledge that, insofar as we rebuild anything commercial at Ground Zero -- offices or stores -- we tread hard on genuine feeling. Yet rebuild we will, for other needs for that site and its future are more compelling: The need to forge an answer of life...

And the nation and the city must deny that evil its triumph... by reviving the symbol they set out to destroy, honoring the good of commerce - a good that was a central part of so many of the lives snuffed out that day."

Money, in other words. In order to commemorate the fallen properly, we must not in any way cut into the valuable square footage of retail and parking space, rights to which will be shoveled in sweetheart deals to the same moguls who made money on the old World Trade Center. So stuff your "floating trees," cry-babies, and make way for another Gap.

BLOGROLL BEGUN at lower left. I just couldn't go on being a rock, being an i-i-island. That Jim guy from Rittenhouse pushed me too far, see, by bookmarking alicublog "even though I can’t seem to find a blogroll of any kind over there." Lots of people have been that gracious, and whattaya know, nearly all of them are geniuses you should read!

THE BLOGROLL IS MERELY BEGUN, so please allow a few days for me to catch up.

AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. OpinionJournal gives the floor to Professor Robert P. George, who delivers a long philosophical assault on the Goodridge decision. He pleads for "sexually complementary spouses," which phrase summons the unfortunate image of lamb chops with mint jelly. He also claims that while the Massachusetts judges "usurped the authority of the people's elected representatives" and advocate a view "common in elite circles," there is little hope of passing a Constitutional Amendment outlawing gay marriage. Why so little hope, one wonders, if only usurping elitists would resist it?

Let us not forget where the Professor is coming from. The following is from Reason's account of a speech George gave a few years back to the American Enterprise Institute (!) entitled, "What's Sex Got to Do with It: Marriage, Morality, and Rationality":

Citing an earlier lecture by James Q. Wilson, George explained that it all went bad when individuals, not families, started to choose marital partners. Then came the "tradition-trumping rationalist impulse" of the Enlightenment and pretty soon marriage was a "mere contract," and "sex outside the bond of marriage" was "understood [as] some sort of Constitutional right."

George also informed his hearers that night that "Masturbatory, sodomitical, and other sexual acts which are not reproductive in type, cannot unite persons organically."

There's our opposition, folks. Maybe George has good reason to fret over the chances of his Amendment. The American people don't much go for "elite circles," but they don't much go for raving lunatics, either.

DÖPPELDUMBASS. In this Sunday's New York Post, TV critic Adam Buckman talks about "The Reagans" on Showtime. He castigates CBS for selling off the controversial program, pronounces the miniseries "too tame to have kicked up such a commotion," and "marvel[s]" at "the small minds that raised such a ruckus over it" and "their knee-jerk reaction."

These "small minds" remain unnamed in Buckman's column, but here's a November 5th piece that seems like a pretty relevant example, titled "It's So Pathetically Bad That It's Hysterically Funny":

IT WAS one of the funniest tapes I had ever received from a TV network.

It was a special promo reel sent over early last month for "The Reagans," a miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan -- the very same miniseries that became so embroiled in controversy that CBS finally dumped it yesterday.

I never saw the finished product, but if it were anything like the promo, this four-hour miniseries was about to go down in history as one of the worst made-for-TV movies ever. This tape was so hysterical, I thought it was a joke...

Funny as it all was, it was also seriously offensive. I thought CBS had taken leave of its senses.

Ronald Reagan will always have his detractors, but it seems that right now, at age 92 and suffering from Alzheimer's disease, he is by and large an admired figure, remembered as the man whose infectious enthusiasm restored Americans' confidence in their country following the upheavals of the 1970s - and who also finished off communism...

CBS, however, is looking like a gang of idiots for deciding that now would be the perfect time to air a miniseries attacking this elderly couple beloved by millions.

Maybe CBS got off easy, because I guarantee that, based on its production qualities alone, "The Reagans" would have been one of the most critically lambasted miniseries in many seasons.

No points for guessing that this review of a CBS promo tape of "The Reagans" is by Adam Buckman, and ran in the Post. November 5 Buckman also says that James Brolin's performance as Reagan has "all the emotion of a piece of wood," though November 30 Buckman judges that Brolin's "affable, aloof protrayal of Reagan is right on the mark."

In the newer story, Buckman never acknowledges that he was part of the "bunch of loony, paranoid alarmists" who "made such a big stink" about the show.

To be fair, Buckman never once, in either column, used the word "imminent."

THANKSGIVING MISCELLANY.While the world watched Flight Suit II, I took in much of the Fish at Dallas, and was amazed at how slow the 'Boys looked; even the superpatriotic halftime show, with lots of wildly gesticulating Cowgirls and a giant golden eagle that looked like a Simpsons prop ("From sea to shi-ning sea!") rising from the dry ice, could not rouse the home team from its torpor.

Speaking of shining sea: When I read Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander last year, I saw Russell Crowe in the lead, and last weekend I saw him again, this time for real, as Captain Jack Aubrey in the movie version. The Crowe/Aubrey I saw in my head was a good deal wilder than the thoughtful Crowe in Peter Weir's movie, and that's the crux of my problem with it. I enjoyed the film, but at times it felt as becalmed as a skiff in the Doldrums, despite a great crowding of lovely incident and detail. H.M.S. Surprise is pursuing a French warship, but most of the screen time is devoted to private crises of conscience, naturalism in Galapagos, and string duets. Couldn't "Lucky Jack" have swashed his buckle a little more? Think what Charles Laughton, who was closer in poundage to the literary Aubrey, would have made of the role! Then it all comes down to one of those modern movie battles cut so choppily and paced so fast that you can't see who's doing what.

All told, a great-looking picture and all hands did their duty, but I prefer Mutiny on the Bounty and the old style of moviemaking that took its cues from stage melodrama. These days its seems all the gasps go to the CGI effects, not to the behavior of the characters (though Maturin's self-surgery was way rad). It's more "realistic," I guess, in a narrow way, but if something's going to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I'd rather it were actors than nautical models in giant tanks of water.

Finally: I like the way these guys think.

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...

NED FLANDERS' HOLIDAY FILM ROUNDUP. "Don't they care what they show kids?" Oh, go watch your singing vegetable tapes, you fucking doofus.

P.S. I know, Julia, even lefties can love Veggie Tales, but I used all my best right-wing-nut signifiers last week and have to deploy the weak stuff until reenforcements arrive. Say this for me, though: I haven't gotten down to the easy Ann Coulter laughs yet. Forbid it almighty God!

NUKED. The $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill is the big-ticket item on which people are understandably focused. But the Bush Administration has many other ways to use our money to fuck things up. The energy bill they're about to ram through Congress gives between $16 and $20 billion in tax breaks to "producers of oil, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear energy."

Apparently the production of nuclear reactors is a dying craft, and its impoverished adherents require federal funding to keep this dark art alive. Not to worry, their plutonium rods will outlive us all.

Oh, yeah, the bill also authorizes Wildlife Refuge drilling. And for Corn Belt states, huge ethanol subsidies!

It's a good thing money grows on trees. Now if only we had more trees.

WHY THEY HATE EVERYBODY. "(Sometimes I swear that if a European hits his thumb with a hammer when no one’s around, he shouts GODDAMN JEWS!)" -- James Lileks.

Elsewhere on the page: put-downs of Michael Moore, Ted Rall, Howard Dean, and the French.

See, this is why I don't write about the guy as much as I used to: what would be the point?

YOU TAKE MY MEANING? McDonald's, you may have heard, is mad because Merriam-Webster has put "McJobs" in their dictionary, defining it the way anyone who has ever heard the word automatically and instinctually defines it -- as shitty, dead-end service jobs.

Mickey D's minions have hit the press hard with its complaints ("a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women blah blah blah"), and of course WSJ's OpinionJournal, flagship of scumbag bosses worldwide, has risen to its defense. OJ claims that M-W "misdefines" McJobs, because people do move up from burger flipping to better work. No figures at all are offered in defense of this statement, but plenty of can-do corporate-speak is: "ladder into the American workplace," "Ditto for opportunity," etc.

There is something piquant, and more, about McDonald's and the Journal's attempt to explain to the many, many people who use the word McJobs appropriately that they should be using instead as a positive term -- like McDonald's does in its jobs-for-the-handicapped program! (Turn that frown upside down, fella! You're on a ladder to the American workplace!) Kinda makes you feel like you're committing a hate crime or something if you even say the word, now, doesn't it?

And if we don't respond well to this friendly persuasion, well, both McD and OJ remind us that the term McJobs is a licensed trademark -- hint hint, see lawyer.

Does anyone else see something slightly sinister in this attempt by a corporation and its goons to change the universally accepted meaning of a word? It's one thing to work your company's image, but it seems to me that the way to remove an unflattering connotation from your nomenclature is to improve your own performance in that regard.

Instead, Mickey D (hey, am I allowed to call them that? Is it, like, racist?) goes running around the English-speaking world yelling, " McJobs good! Say it! McJobs good!" I suppose we'll find out soon if they're rich enough to pull it off, and if we're feeble-minded enough to have it pulled off on us.

If so, I expect that in the near future, Maaco or Jiffy Lube will aggressively attempt to change the popular understanding of the term "rim job."

SHORTER INSTAPUNDIT UPDATE: Ted Rall getting published in the Village Voice means all you stinking hippies want Americans to die. Conversely, you can't pin Misha's ravings on me just because he's on my blogroll. My "bad apple" theory of political life applies only to mainstream vehicles like what you hippies read, not to the Rolling Stone of the 21th Century.

(I guess I can't read the New York Times anymore since they started running David Brooks. That would make me a neo-conservative!)

SHORTER INSTAPUNDIT: This'll show Tom Tomorrow! See, warbloggers aren't the whiners with bad wrists -- Tom Tomorrow is!! Heh indeed! P.S. Ted Rall sux.

(editor's note: using the "Shorter" format on this cracker asshole really is like sticking a pin in a balloon.)