CONQUEST. The ineffable John Derbyshire has an article up, positing Arabs as "The Irish of the World." As the Irish are to Britain, says he, so are the Arabs to everyone else. The staying power of the IRA and the intransigence of the fanatics who plot and move against America and its allies are objective correlatives.

Of course, there are a few bugs in the analogy, Derbyshire admits:

The West never ruled the Arabs in the way, or for the length of time, that Britain ruled Ireland. I cannot think of any Western leader who dealt with the Arabs as Oliver Cromwell dealt with the Irish. Nor did Ireland ever suffer the extreme misogynist neurosis that Lawrence Wright describes in Saudi Arabia [in his recent New Yorker essay]. Nor were her rulers and people ever corrupted by great wealth that required no effort on their part to generate it ? Ireland's economic problem was not wealth, but poverty.

So aside from the near-inversion of their economic and power relations, Anglo-Irish and World-Arabs is the same thing.

Oh, one other thing -- Derbyshire can see the rectification of the Anglo-Irish impasse: "...it will be the prosperity and sophistication of the modern Irish republic, her ancient and peculiar sense of nationhood dissolved by globalized economics, her religious intensity vitiated by the easy hedonism of Euro-culture, her aching sense of dwelling in the shadow of a richer, stronger power dispelled by the equalization of wealth and the shrinking of distances."

Small wonder he can see it: All this is not only possible but already visibly happening. Eire is free and engages profitably with the world and even with England; the Northern Ireland of today is nowhere near the battleground it was in, say, 1973. 350 years after Cromwell, a course correction is taking place.

The remedies that would redress the imbalance between each of the two pairs of worlds Derbyshire sees have been available in the European version for some time, and despite the many remaining impediments to success even Derbyshire, no Hibernophile, sees it going the right way.

As to the Arabs, well, we all see how that's been going. "...it is hard to see much sign of such improvements at present," Derbyshire says. "This is going to be a long, wearying fight."

What this implies, though Derbyshire doesn't speak of it, is that the stage of relations between us and not-us taking place in the Middle East is a lot further behind than the one between the Irish and the English.

To see how far back we are, entertain this message (per Gerard of Wales) from Roderic of Connaught (Rory O'Connor) to Dermot McMurrough of Leinster, whose dispute with Roderic over the High Kingship of Ireland led Dermot to invite, perhaps superfluously, the Norman invasion of Ireland:

Contrary to the conditions of our treaty of peace, you have invited a host of foreigners into this island, and yet, as long as you kept within the bounds of Leinster, we bore it patiently. But now, forasmuch as, regardless of your solemn oaths, and having no concern for the fate of the hostage you gave, you have broken the bounds agreed on, and insolently crossed the frontiers of your own territory; either restrain in future the irruptions of your foreign bands, or I will certainly have your son's head cut off, and send it to you.

This took place in the 12th Century. Today we have a corrupt and failing Saudi government desperately working its relations with the West while its brother nations come under the Coalition's wrecking balls, and mullahs and terrorists across the region brood and plot. Our killing of the Hussein boys is just a small foray into the Borgian blood-feast, the war on sons and brothers, there regnant.

Derbyshire's mention of the "easy hedonism of Euro-culture" sticks with me. American Conservatives still turn up their noses at this easy hedonism; Derbyshire himself was thrown into a snit over the recent micromarriage of Britney Spears. "...if a customary social institution is trashed and trivialized by irresponsible buffoons, we ought to exert more control over it -- to tighten access, not loosen it," he cried. That his tut-tutting from the porch is merely a quaint appurtance of our go-go culture, rather than occasion for a warrant from the Witchfinder General, seems to show how far we've come.

Yet in some corner of our planet -- a planet seemingly vast right now, its nations unfathomably disparate, despite the impression given by our President's recent call to conquer the galaxy (as if the conquest of our own little piece of it were a settled issue) -- time has not moved so quickly.

We can only be said to deal with the Arabs as the English dealt with the Irish if the struggle of mankind out of ignorance and into the light is much more retarded than is generally supposed. This is the aspect of our current foreign relations that is most disturbing --- so disturbing that it upsets such a settled mind as Derbyshire's. It's as if the Rennaisance were only a favorably settled local by-election. Now we scour the East with blood and thunder, and our troops hand out democracy like a Chick tract, and we wait for the message to take hold.

I wouldn't advise we hold our breath.

SOMETIMES, BAD SEX REALLY IS WORSE THAN NO SEX:

Anna, a 22-year-old graduate student in Manhattan, said she remembers clearly how she was introduced to one of New York's sauciest underground social scenes. It was via an instant message from a stranger who had seen her personals ad online at Nerve.com... he wanted to know if Anna would be interested in going "with me and my hot tattooed girlfriend"...

To gain entry, Anna first had to send an erotic essay and a photo of herself... Anna made the cut, was given the party's location and a pass phrase -- "untie my corset" -- and on a chilly night last year donned fishnet stockings and high heels and headed out to her first sex party....

Porn fans might be drawn on, as the promise of hotness redeems even the worst prose. But since this story appears in the New York Times, the more judicious ones will be filled by a creeping dread that the promise will be hideously betrayed:

...a quarter of the women -- most in their 20's and early 30's -- were topless, save for dabs of body paint on their nipples, to comply with the city's public nudity laws. Downstairs in the midst of a crowd of around 200, half a dozen women were packed tightly together in a sort of group rub, undulating in time with the techno soundtrack. In a corner, a stunning young woman with blond hair preppily styled like Gwyneth Paltrow's...

Well, there goes my hard-on.

"It's not just, 'I'm going to go to this party with my boyfriend to have sex in front of other people,' " said Melinda Gallagher, 30, a former graduate student in human sexuality at New York University... "The philosophy is that women need their own space to explore sexuality. The women in the room direct whatever happens."

Well, there go my next three hard-ons.

Still, given some of the pathetic stories I've been hearing about sex-averse attitudes among our young folk, it is encouraging to hear that some kids, at least, are within hailing distance of getting laid.

The orgy does sound depressingly like a launch party for some energy drink, but that's probably the fault of the writer, who approaches his urban satyrs from the Marian-the-Librarian perspective used by Times lifestyle reporters since before "boo" became "grass." He even sinks so low as to solicit a dissent to the debauchery from "a clinical psychologist and sex therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center." The swingers, says the shrink, are "so overstimulated in this environment that they may not understand sexual intimacy in a more monogamous relationship." Well, who does?

So let us be optimistic. Maybe when the kids finally get fucking right, they can work on that shitty music they've been listening to.

MY BUDDY. "Republicans giving advice to Democrats these days are usually poorly-received."

Gee, why do you think that is?

"The persecution complex and bunker mentality of so many Dem activists is so acute that we're now witnessing instances in which Republican defenses of Howard Dean are being rejected as disingenuous."

We sent a thank-you card; didn't you get it?

"Which is fine, in a sense, in that it only marginalizes the other side and makes my 288-250 prediction look better all the time."

You want to beat us? I thought you were our friends.

"But it's not fine, in a larger sense, because it's bad for the country and civic discourse."

So we're not just hurting ourselves, we're hurting America. Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one!

Tacitus, your concern is touching, but let's just keep this relationship acrimonious, shall we?

DEAR MR. PREZNIT:

my boys scholteacher red me that you was goin to give muny to peple who is havin bad marreges. espeshly if they has low incum & are not faggits. me & lucinda who is a gurl is haven bad marrage problems du to her bein a bitch LOL. but seriusly folks. my mind is not rite sincd i got layed off from the walmart on accont of it closd & move to beaufort county. sumtimes i go off on her & the kids & 2 or 3 times they call the cops & lucinda say take the baby away sumplacd safe. i think me & lucinda need yr help bad & could you put us up for the interpernsinnal relashunship clas and maybe sum samwiches & a cuple beer if you cn do it LOL. it dont have to be $1.5 bilion i will take anything LOL. Good Luck to You Sir the peple are with you & gratful you doin so much to help marrege cause we hav not had much help with marrege since the preahcer went to prisin.

yurs truly
roy edroso
brooklyn, ny
ps if you hav turkee left over i wud like sum too

FINISH THE JOB. PBS has just run a long documentary on Reconstruction. In my little Catholic parochial school many years ago, we were taught that Reconstruction was at best well-meant but overzealous, and at worst a criminal reign of terror over Southern whites. In some quarters this version of history is still taught, so it is bracing to see the means of Reconstruction's reversal, including the murder of blacks and of elected officials of both races, described in a public forum.

An especially interesting segment treats the slaughter of much of the Twitchell family in Louisiana's Red River Parish by allies of the Marston family. The Twitchell patriarch, Marshall, had headed the Freedman's Bureau in Red River, and the Marstons would not countenance his carpetbagger authority.

Interviewed on the program is a descendent of these Marstons, a lean, well-spoken fellow who speaks of his forebears' actions with obvious pride.

It is useful to note that a number of people continue to take up the Lost Cause. You can read some of these regarding the PBS doc here. Sample quote: "PBS is totally under the control of the liberal, leftist elite. They consider anything to be 'social progress' as long as it's something that destroys the fabric of traditional society, especialy that of the Confederacy."

Not Reconstructed enough, if you ask me.

HEY MOMMA EARTH, BETTER BRING ME BACK DOWN, I'VE TAKEN JUST AS MUCH AS I CAN. "Military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan have made America safer, and tax cuts have made us all richer," says Brendan Miniter, "so Mr. Bush didn't have to promise the moon to win in November. But now that he has, it's up to the Democrats to prove they're not lost in space."

This is the sort of thing a right-wing hack might get away with were jobs were plentiful and peace at hand, but when the economy is stuck like an SUV in quicksand and the terror alerts keep a-comin' despite the allegedly epochal Saddam capture ("Terror alert level lowered but nation must stay vigilant, Ridge says"), it seems rather strange.

Small wonder: OpinionJournal's resident Western-Civ scold seeks to portray Bush's space jam as a "shrewd political move."

How so? Because this plan "has allowed the president to seize the mantle of John F. Kennedy by embracing a visionary project." (Amazingly, Miniter is not the only one to make this comparison: "Both [Kennedy and Bush] were elected in a year ending in '0,'" notes Rand Simberg with interest, and adds, "(while this one hasn't yet been borne out for Mr. Bush, it's looking increasing likely) both led a realignment that made their party the national majority for years to come," suggesting, among other things, that Simberg believes he can see into the future as long as he appeases the gods by briefly switching, within magic parentheses, into a whole new tense.)

Such a bold, not to mention (if polls are any indication) groundless, assertion needs proof points, even in so forgiving a venue as OpinionJournal, so Miniter offers a f'rinstance -- the Bush plan has "potentially tremendous benefits for senior citizens":

Humans can lose more than a quarter of their bone mass just by spending a few months in space. And they often do not fully recover once they're back on Earth. It's similar to, although much faster than, the bone loss old people experience. Solving this problem could advance the quality of life for millions of Americans.

We start with bold dreams and Camelot, and end up with a medical study of the sort that recruits participants on the back page of the Village Voice, only with cool rockets and gizmos and a multi-billion-dollar price tag.

They ain't making vision like they used to.

SHIT IN A CORNER, EPISODE #1,397. One of the fun things about internecine conservative struggles -- like the current one over immigration reform -- is the resulting pissing contest at The Corner over who represents the truest conservatism (or who is most nuts, depending on your perspective).

A strong entrant is Jonathan H. Adler:

WHERE ARE THE CONSERVATIVES? [Jonathan H. Adler]
There certainly are reasonable conservative arguments both for and against more a more restrictive immigration policy, but I'm simply shocked to read certain arguments in The Corner. Coming to America to take a job is tantamount to stealing? As if anyone is somehow entitled to a given job? I'd expect to read such an argument in The Nation, but not here.

Posted at 05:59 PM

Yes, Americans, if you manage to find a job, consider yourself privileged! This guy's so far out John Fucking Derbyshire has to straighten him out.

Another strong claim is made by Jonah Goldberg, who speaks approvingly of a plan by "My old boss Ben Wattenberg" to "help maintain the demographic balance of the United States -- i.e. prop-up the share of white folks in this country," an idea which, Goldberg helpfully notes, "wasn't racist in the slightest."

Catch this breath-taking, logic-defying show while you can. They'll probably all give it up by Friday and go back to talking about Wesley Clark's sweater.

AND THIRD, WHEN DID CRYSTAL METH COME BACK, AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME? John Derbyshire says that, contrary to the assertions of "homosexualist lobbies" that AIDS "just falls from the sky" (I must have missed that paper), the disease is actually spread by gay men fucked up on crank.

Heterosexuals fucked up on crank, of course, never hurt anyone.

That Derbyshire would vomit up such a thing is not, after all this time, surprising. But I have two questions:

First, why does Derb feign ignorance of crank ("something called 'crystal meth'") when he was clearly speeding his balls off when he wrote this?

Second, when is Tacitus going to do something about it?

BLANKET DAMNESTY. Tacitus catches Hesiod referring to Colin Powell's "Stepin Fetchit routine" and calls for leftists to "do something about it," adding generically, "I'm not hopeful, but in this case, being wrong would be great."

Okay. I disapprove of the remark. (Not much else I can do about it, since I am not Hesiod's mommy.)

And since we liberals are nothing but a herd, marching blindly in lockstep behind ANSWER banners, Tacitus may assume we have all disapproved.

He may also assume that we disapprove of any regrettable remarks by people with whom we generally agree which he, Professor Reynolds, and the rest of the "truth squads" may uncover.

Henceforth I will devote myself, as previously, to the lunatic sentiments with which a good number of conservatives around these parts tend to agree.

BIG MEDIA. Soon we mom and pop weblogs will be swept away by a wave of megablogs, which will offer first-rate opinions and commentary in bulk from centralized locations. Intelligent consumers will flock to them. No zoning board can defend us; our days are numbered.

Protoype models have done well, and now the not-so-thin end of the wedge is represented by The American Street: David Niewert, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Kevin Hayden, Jeralyn Merritt, Luis Toro, with who knows whom else waiting in the wings. How can alicublog compete? Maybe we'll go for retro chic, offering handmade, personalized satire, and thus find our niche. I'll discuss it with the Board as soon as they start returning my phone calls again.

Meantime we remain open here on our dusty byway. Your patronage is appreciated.

ON TO BOB JONES! Roger Simon is mad because there was a lot of anti-war talk at an MLA conference:

The University Class is one of the most rigid in America in its thinking... At a conference like the MLA, whose primary raison d'etre is job search, the pressure to conform is compounded. Attendees with pro-war views would naturally be reluctant to express themselves for fear of losing out in the marketplace. I know I'd keep my mouth shut in such an atmosphere. I already know not to broadcast my pro-war views when going to a meeting in Hollywood.

One of Simon's commenters is surprised to hear that Simon censors himself. Oh, says Simon, "I had my tongue pretty far in my cheek to make a point. I'm not the kind of personality who could hide his views even if I wanted to."

Not like the rest of you, he might have added. You're a-scared.

Sigh. You see this kind of thing all the time now. Seen from this POV, liberals are nervous nellies for objecting to the Patriot Act, but such conservative members of the Modern Language Association as may exist are justified in fearing for their very tenures.

"I certainly don't want to be whiny and self-pitying" says one such whiny, self-pitying fellow, but in his freshman year at the University of Michigan (1982!), "there was a whiff of violence in the air, on that campus of mine. There really was. Of course, you have to be careful whom you talk to this way, because you could be marked off as an exaggerator or paranoid or worse." No shit.

His remarks were delivered at the 20th Anniversary celebration of the conservative Harvard Salient. No doubt there were a number in attendance waving prostheses and crutches, legacies of campus battles endured in the second year of the first Reagan Adminstration. Or perhaps no one was there at all, their forces long since decimated by the implacable jackboots of the Left.

Despite the miraculous survival of the Salient and its friends, some folks like David Horowitz want a form of affirmative action to get right-wingers into college professorships. As soon as that one goes through, I want a job at Fox News.

One thing has always puzzled me about this. If liberals have a hammerlock on most faculties, and this is a terrible detriment to our nation (as conservatives from Revilo P. Oliver to Megan McArdle have long known), why not let the marketplace solve the problem?

Instead of sending fat checks or resumes to hotbeds of liberalism like Harvard and Berkeley, why not build new citadels of learning upon foundations already laid by sympathetic educators? Jerry Falwell's Liberty University comes to mind. Or Hillsdale, or Wheaton, or any of a number of Catholic colleges and universities that would happily turn the best and brightest conservative minds to a higher, nobler purpose.

What a great advance for the cause it would be if some parents would find the gumption to say, "I know you've been accepted to Yale, honey, but the American Renaissance demands that we send you to Bob Jones U." Or if Harvey Mansfield were to rise up and shout, "Farewell, Harvard commies, glory calls at Magdalen College!"

The gains, admittedly, would not be immediate. But isn't conservatism about taking the long view?

THE MISANTHROPOGYNIST. I have been reading with pleasure Mencken's "Defense of Women," which seems to have been written as a deliberate outrage and would, with greater contemporary circulation, probably still do the job today.

Like most things written about women by men, the book is mainly about men, but unlike most other authors so disposed, Mencken seems to be aware of it. His playful premise is that women are in every meaningful way superior to our gender, but have been obliged by our mulish resistance to the fact, and by social customs designed to enforce our groundless ascendancy (the word "levantine" occurs frequently), to exercise authority by subterfuge, primarily via marriage.

Already there's plenty to howl over, but Mencken goes on his merry way. The things at which most men excel, he asserts, are mere bagatelles:

A man thinks he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately...and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence... it takes no more sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

Imagine Kim du Toit or Glenn Reynolds getting a load of this! But no self-respecting feminist could go for it quite, either. For one thing, Mencken was implacably at odds with the suffragette (the book was first published in 1918), whom he described as "a woman who has stupidly carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary nature." While he admits that women would soon enough "shake off their ancient disabilities" and emerge "as free competitors in a harsh world," yet "some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn't let well enough alone."

Well, I don't know about that. But what I like about this, besides the great writing, is Mencken's detachment from the ordinary terms of debate. A good deal of reason and unreason was then (as now) being employed on the topic, and Mencken just staked out his own territory and had at it. He speaks approvingly of Havelock Ellis, but in general seems not to mind what anyone else has to say on the subject, prefering to make his own judgments based on what history and observation showed him. His instinct seems to be that his own reason was authority enough, and though most of us would disagree with a large part of it, in his case the analysis is at least coherent and compelling.

Mencken is shamelessly rhetorical and his style bears him along more reliably than his reason; he's frequently disingenuous and even self-contradictory, but in a way that would leave anyone trying to pin him looking pedantic. I think that's why so many intelligent people get a kick out of him, but also why anyone who identifies too closely with him inevitably looks foolish. Columns by the awful R. Emmett Tyrell, for example, used to run with a byline picture that aped a famous Mencken photo, and Tyrell's contraction-averse style still imitates the cadences of the Baltimore master, albeit stiffly. Even the initialized first name seems a forlorn sort of tribute, as it does, doubly, for P.J. O'Rourke, another professional contrarian whose obvious striving for the mantle of misanthropist-in-chief renders the homage somewhat pathetic.

All good writers make good examples, but as we were cautioned by the old Hai Karate ads, you have to be careful how you use them. It's never a good idea to try and be the "new" anything. (Look at Jet, a band that seems to want to be the new Black Crowes, an ambition that mystifies me.) From Mencken it might be best to take the lesson that it never hurts to take the lofty perspective once in a while, especially at a time when the political weblog scene more and more resembles a giant scrum trying, with grunts and curses, to push consensus one way or the other.

SHOT BY BOTH SIDES. Michael Totten is a pro-war type who till recently identified himself as a liberal. Some people think about him the way I think about "Democrat" Orson Scott Card -- as a living straw man who serves mainly as an "even the liberal" decoy to make real liberals look bad.

Who knows. David Horowitz and Roger L. Simon love the guy, and they're fairly satanic. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, essentially, liberals don't know anything about foreign policy. To the extent that he has a public profile, it seems based on his criticism of liberals.

But I forebear to judge. Totten, however, didn't, and recently declared himself an Independent, pushed, he said, by the "heretic-banishers" who are "purging non-conformists." Unsurprisingly, he mentions Orwell.

No sooner has Totten thrown off the yoke of orthodoxy when he notices the famous Club-for-Growth ad castigating "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading... Hollywood-loving, left-wing" fellow citizens. It offends him. "Over-the-top Bush-hatred is matched by over-the-top Dean-hatred," he declares. "...the right's new bigoted ad disgusts me."

But a lot of Totten's commentators -- legacy pledges, one imagines, from his even-the-liberal days -- don't understand why he's so upset. "Whoa!" writes one, "A lotta you girls need to take a deep breath. This is political theatre, not the Nuremberg laws." "To those on the left," declares another, "saying anything that is politically incorrect but is too close to the truth is over the top."

Now, I haven't dug too deep into Totten's oeuvre, and at first glance he seems like a smart enough guy. But I find it interesting and, to use a badly overworked modifier, ironic, that the minute he declares his independence, and steps out his front door to breathe the sweet air of freedom, he runs smack into the new neighbors, who think everyone who reads, eats, and drinks like him is a menace to their way of life.

Whether that's ironic-sigh or ironic-hardeharhar-serves-ya-right I'll leave to one side for right now, but I do think it's a good picture of the state of our discourse at present.

WE TRULY LIVE IN AN AGE OF WONDERS. Well, at least now I can stop worrying about the dangers of smoking.

UPDATE. Some people think farmed salmon is still safe. I'm ignoring them. I don't want it to be true! I want my friends to come find in me in some low seafood dive, and grab my arm, crying, "You're killin' yourself with that stuff!"

ROSE'S TURN. What a lot of bullshit has been written about Pete Rose lately. The relevant part of the Hall of Fame's mission statement says that it seeks to honor "those individuals who had exceptional careers." If Rose had used babies for batting practice, he would still meet this requirement.

George Will, naturally, talks the most outright nonsense about Rose, offering this deathless example of a hack who thinks he's found a "contrarian" angle:

His dwindling band of defenders responds that it is unfair to judge Rose not by what he does but by the way he does it. Yet regarding repentance, the way you do it is what you do.

The putative point of this streak of rhetorical puke is that Rose should behave more penitently -- perhaps, in Will's imaginings, by travelling barefoot to the grave of Bart Giamatti -- to preserve the fiction that baseball cares deeply about the conduct of its players.

This and other such moral posturings share the childish premise that current residents of the Hall, and the brotherhood of baseballers generally, would be sullied by Rose's company. What a laugh this would get from Ty Cobb and other immortals who were in life a good deal more rapacious and destructive than Rose. What a laugh it would draw from the many steroid abusers in MLB, if they had a sense of humor, or less pharmacetical damage to their facial muscles.

Well, baseball's fan base is aging, and filled at this stage with a bunch of maudlin, would-be Billy Crystals blubbering over The Mick and The Babe and The Catch as superstitious Irish grandmothers once blubbered over saints and sacred relics. Such like may value tent-meeting hysteria and bathos over clear-eyed justice, but that doesn't mean I have to.

I love baseball, and I insist it needs no romanticizing -- its traditions, its place in American history, and the achievements of its players are what they are, large in actual fact, not because publicists pumped them up; no Field of Dreams mists are needed to make them interesting and worthy of respect. The current ginned-up show of moral outrage is an embarrassment, and the Rose ban absurd.

UPDATE. A commentator to this post has kindly informed me of Rule 21, which mandates ineligibility for a player caught betting on his own club. Them's the rules, and since this is baseball we're talking about, not something trivial like politics, I have to agree Rose should stay out.

Also, while in the past I have simply taken down my posts when in the sober light of morning (or afternoon) they seemed less than convincing or coherent, I'm just leaving this one be, as a monument to my own incompetence.

I still don't like Will's more mystical assault on Rose, and in another context I might argue that the rule is bad and should be changed. But Rose accepted the terms by playing in the League and didn't abide by them, so that's that.

YEAH -- ANYONE CAN DO IT, AND MOST OF IT IS CRAP. "And it inspired me to the realization that blogging is a lot like producing techno..." -- InstaPundit.

PUSSY. An article by Jed Babbin is introduced on National Review Online's front page with the tag "Air marshals are making us safer." The graphic says "Safer with AFMs." The article is entitled "Thank Your FAMs." There is, of course, nothing in the article demonstrating that air mashals have done anything at all except draw salary, but we are told why we should believe that they have: "But fortunately for us, and our economy, the skies are safe -- despite what terrorists may think." You don't think like one of those terrorists, now, do you?

More interesting than the alogical approach (which is rather common at NRO) are the purposefully butch insertions Babbin uses to bolster his non-argument. The thing is parfaited with Cheneyspeak, which attempts to convey masculinity by emulating the simple babbles of childhood. Thus Babbin refers to terrorists as "bad guys," and to American forces as "our guys"; grouped by speciality, American intelligence agents are "our intel guys," while troops trained in special operations are "spec-op guys."

The FAMs "get it," meaning "our guys know you can shoot a whole bunch of holes though the skin of an airliner without anything really bad happening," and at one point Babbin asks his subject "what message he'd pass along to the bad guys, baiting him for a growly, macho message." To be fair, Babbin does not use the phrase "big time," or go "HOO-ahh" at any point.

If want more of this kind of thing, you can go here and read Babbin on how his terrorist-attack survival methods are better than those of his effete liberal neighbors, because his "pal," a "a retired SEAL senior officer," forwarded him some advice from Red Thomas, who has "seen it all, and trained the young ’uns to fight..." The article is from last February; I wonder if Babbin still has his "go bag" of water-purification and other post-apocalyptic necessities stashed in his car.

Babbin's article, by the way, includes a picture of himself. He looks like a total pussy.

SHORTER MAGGIE GALLAGHER. This college kid I met hasn't given much thought to fatherhood, demonstrating that homosexuals are selfish destroyers of everything we hold dear.

STATES' (LAST) RITES. As is well known, our formerly solvent nation is running a record $374.2 billion deficit -- in contrast to the $230 billion surplus Clinton left us with in 2000.

But the states aren't doing much better. Not that they're getting less money from the Feds: While in 1998 the Census Bureau reported $25.3 billion in "federal government grants and other payments" to U.S. state governments ($29.8 billion went to California), in 2002 that rose to $36.2 billion for the states (and $41.6 billion to California.)

Yet state budgets are still a mess. Conservatives like to leave California as the only visible object-lesson of state spending run amok, as it had been piloted by a hapless Democrat before the telegenic Wolfcastle putsch. But Republican governors like Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and John Rowland of Connecticut are asking for tax increases to bail their asses out, reports the Christian Science Monitor, which also says we're currently seeing the "Deepest State Deficits in 50 Years."

The problem, says CSM, "is that tax revenues are way down and costs are exploding, particularly in healthcare, which represents 30 percent of state budgets." This has led to some heartwarming scenes, such as this one reported by AP:

Linda Garner of Columbus wrote [Georgia Governor Sonny] Perdue recently after the state terminated her quadriplegic daughter's benefits when she turned 21. The daughter, Melissa, was struck by a drunk driver when she was 6, and relies on a ventilator.

Perdue's reply to her was sympathetic but, after carefully explaining the state's budget difficulties, it offered her no help.

Costs are going up and revenues are going down, but no one wants to look like a tax-and-spend liberal so people get screwed. And until things gets to the Huckabee-Rowland stage, games are played to try and hide the damage for one more season. From a hilarious story in the Applebee (WI) Post-Crescent, optimistically titled "State Tax Burden Down in 2003":

The study found Wisconsin’s total tax burden was 33 percent of personal income in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2003. That’s down from 33.7 percent in 2002, 34.4 percent in 2001 and 37.4 percent in 2000.
The total tax burden is a combination of all federal, state and local taxes Wisconsin residents and businesses pay.
“That’s encouraging,” Wood County Supv. Donna Rozar said. Her county decreased its property tax levy 12.3 percent this past year, but offset about 50 percent of that loss with a half-percent county sales tax, she said. [italics mine]
“I think we’re an overtaxed people,” she said.

Total taxes down 0.7 percent! Happy days are here again! And you have to love the property tax-sales tax shuffle.

Clearly this country is, at every level, financially fucked. Yet no one from the President down to the lowliest Town Supervisor wants to face up to our impending bankruptcy. For one thing, they have jerks like this saying that the states are only suffering now because they "went on a spending binge in the 1990s," presumably on such frills as ventilators for crippled teenagers. For another, they have voters howling for reform on the cheap.

So the various government agents, excepting those who have yet to run out of bullshit, juggle and fumble like bankrupt housekeepers, hiding the credit card bills and turn-off notices from the spouse and kids, hoping to get through one more day.

Meanwhile, half a world away, we teach democracy.

PLAYING TO THE CHEAP SEATS. "My hankering for Dean is therefore a little like Bill Kristol's." -- Andrew Sullivan.

(Sound effect.)

(Rimshot!)

Yes, I'm goin' for the easy laffs, friends, because alicublog has just been nominated for the "Best Humorous Blog" Koufax Award. Nominees were restricted to leftish sites, which is as it should be, as we are all about speech codes and political correctness.

A blue ribbon panel will soon winnow the 3,429 nominees in this category down to a select few, so I will celebrate now and hopefully sober up before it comes time to drown my sorrows.

Thanks to all who supported me, and remember, if I am not among the finalists, take it out on your loved ones, not the voters.

DEAD HORSE. A guy at Tacitus talks up Seabiscuit, a movie he liked so well that he's sorry he saw it on his "decent home theater set-up" instead of in a theatre.

I can see why he liked it -- which is not to say that it's good. I saw the thing last year. A bad feeling came over me at the opening credits, when the voice of that guy who narrates PBS history specials came on over some sepia-toned stills. Did I just pay 10 bucks to watch Ken Burns' American Stories on a big screen? I wondered.

Thereafter came a story about misfits banding together and keeping their dreams alive -- kind of a cross between Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Flashdance, only not as subtle as either. Here are some quotes from Seabiscuit, and yes, these paltry examples are representative of its eloquence.

As for its visual storytelling, I will remember forever a scene in which Chris Cooper, charged with matching a jockey to his horse, regards Tobey McGuire fighting off a bunch of guys, then turns to regard Seabiscuit fighting off a bunch of guys, then faces forward and broods on the metaphor a-forming in his mind. To be fair, he did not then snap his fingers, widen his eyes, tear off his cap and light out to tell Mr. Howard, but he might as well have.

All the acting and craft elements were dandy, but the story was so hectoring on its points as to be insulting. The sad thing is, I am very susceptible to the idea of America as a land of hope and opportunity that offers even to the damaged a path to glory and redemption. But a witless repetition of cliches on the subject just makes me want to snort.

Which, come to think of it, kind of explains this weblog.

MORE OLD BUSINESS. It has been 54 days since I wondered aloud at Andrew Sullivan's description of Howard Dean as "from Vermont, one of the home bases of what's being called 'the Starbucks Metrosexual elite.'" So I went to Google to see if anyone on the Web has actually used that term in relation to anything except Sullivan's use of it.

Chirp. Chirp.

Odd, I thought the guy knew a lot of bloggers.

A GIMME -- WITH AN EXPLANATION. Tan, wretched and ready Andrew Sullivan is celebrating his return to workaday life with a long post about the NYT's alleged distortion of Bush's gay marriage statement.

The post has absolutely no significant new information and mainly repeats a previous Sullivan charge, made to shore up the insane idea that Bush is somehow sympathetic to gay marriage.

Two can play at that game, Sullivan: why waste our readers' time and our own, when we can just waste our readers'? I herewith repost what I said about Sullivan's bullshit last month.

[Sullivan reports:] "One small problem: the president did not say that ['I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman...].' He said: 'If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment...' In the context of religious right demands for immediate support for the FMA, that's a big difference."

In other words, though Bush has told the world that he's dead against gay marriage -- not even Sullivan denies this -- since he'll only use the FMA to stop it if he really needs to, the Times account is "what amounts to a lie about Bush's position"...

I wonder: were I to send Sullivan a letter, stating, "I want you dead, Sullivan. If necessary, I will kill you myself with my bare hands," he would fail to report it as a death threat, on semantic grounds.

Sullivan's so full of shit, I'm beginning to wonder is he's really gay.

Beats workin'.

OL' BLOOD 'N' GUTS' FINAL SOLUTION. I am a dedicated follower of General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters (last sighting here), and look forward to each new column as eagerly as if it were a new Lockhorns installment.

His most recent column, though, has me worried. Not that it is stylistically off the mark -- it is in some ways the apotheosis of his style. But I fear he may have shot his wad.

The column opens with a graf of breathtaking logical inversion:

It's fashionable in left-wing circles to describe anyone who admires America as a fascist. But the real totalitarian threats of our time come from the left. And no public figure embodies the left's contempt for basic freedoms more perfectly than Howard Dean.

First a grotesque mischaracterization of a mischaracterization (us dirty hippies call tough-talking law-and-order types fascists, General -- people who "admire America" we call saps!), then a sweeping and undemonstrable historical generalization, closing with an outrageous slur against Dean and all Democrats that actually mirrors the liberal name-calling Peter first complained about! It's so wrong it's beautiful, like Beavis & Butthead with battle decorations.

Peters claims that Dean supporters are against free speech because they "try to intimidate other presidential aspirants by surrounding the cars delivering them to their rallies and chanting to drown out their speech... These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts." I'm not sure what real-world events, if any, he's referring to -- the
Washington Post did report that Dean supporters chanted outside a Gephardt speech; Gephardt's people were obliged to close the windows, and his spokesperson called the act "a little bit disrespectful," which hardly summons up visions of Kristallnacht. (I can't find any reference in actual news to the car thing, which may exist only in one of Peters' brain-bubbles.)

Then Peters compares Howard Dean to Hitler, Goebbels, Big Brother, Lenin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev.

All good fun, but you see the problem, don't you? The election is ten months away, and Peters has already gone to the money shot. After you've repeatedly compared a candidate and his followers to Nazis, what else is left? Maybe you could compare them to evil space aliens who are a hundred times worse than Hitler -- or Saddam Hussein. But nothing else quite has that Hitler zing.

Now Peters is stuck with the Hitler parallel. He may try to find another metaphor -- comparing Dean to a dung-beetle, say, or an artichoke, or a stagecoach -- but Peters' gift is not so much for creative writing as for monomania, and he will revert. And after a few months of screaming Hitler at the Democrats, Peters will sound like your typical Free Republic poster talking about Lincoln.

The General has given good froth for a few seasons, but it may be that -- like that other great General, Coriolanus -- he has o'erreached.

DON'T FEED THE TROLLS, DOC. Rachel Marsden is harshing on Howard Dean. (Thanks, Kevin, for the link.) It's mostly the sort of ad hominem bilge (Democrats are "sex-starved, party-deprived" "new age hippies" who have "run out of beer money") that all right-wing pin-ups from Coulter on down use establish their media profiles.

But even ambitious up-and-comers must do their grunt work at the Mighty Wurlitzer, and Marsden takes time to assist in the now widespread misrepresentation regarding Dean's "comments... about not wanting to pin the blame for 9/11 on poor Osama bin Laden."

What Dean actually said, even as excerpted by the vile Washington Times, is very sensible: "I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found... I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

If you think about it for more than two seconds (as I know a few of us have), it shows a healthy respect for, and confidence in, our system of justice. Of course, thinking is frowned upon in the current media environment, and our outrage merchants have found Dean's comments an easy layup in the game of Gotcha, and have egregiously manipulated them.

This quickly pushed Dean into an unfortunate attempt at clarification: "As a president, I would have to defend the process of the rule of law. But as an American, I want to make sure he gets the death penalty he deserves."

AP helpfully adds that "The former Vermont governor said he was simply trying to state in The Concord Monitor interview [the original source of the first quote] that the process of trying bin Laden needs to be fair and credible." But it still sounds like backtracking: if you don't want your comments to prejudice Osama bin Laden's trial, why say you want him dead?

In the short term, Dean got the politically convenient headlines he probably wanted ("Dean: Death to Osama" -- CBS News). But you know that, once the usual suspects are convinced that the original tsimmis has been played out, this second quote will be labelled another Dean flip-flop, further proving his volatility, unreliability, insanity, or whatever. (In fact, one or two fever-swamp opinion leaders have already done so.)

This may turn out to be a worthwhile trade-off for the Doc. Dean probably remembers how bad Mike Dukakis looked when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked him, during the 1988 Presidential debates, if he would not be tempted to favor the death penalty if someone raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis, clearly blind-sided, hemmed and hawed like a second-string high-school debater with a bad flu. Maybe Dean figured a small expression of righteous indignation, however flawed, might disabuse voters who had been manipulated into thinking that he was soft on bin Laden.

The problem, as I see it, is that Dean's kill-Osama gambit doesn't address his original statement -- it addresses the misinterpretation of that statement. He's playing on his opponents' terms. He might seem more aggressive than Dukakis here because he's using aggressive language. But in the long term, the other guys could turn it all around and say that mad, red-faced Howard has been only been aggressive in defending himself.

He should have just said, "Yeah, I believe in jury trials and the American people -- you got a problem with that?" Then let the trolls tear themselves to shreds. (I'm sure that within days you'd have a nest of commentators explaining to the American people that they are not fit to serve on a bin Laden jury. That would be worth any number of "Death to Osama" headlines.)

I like Dean and applaud his success. So I'd hate to see him pecked to death on stuff like this. Dean's obviously confident enough in his views -- else why run for President? I hope he can communicate that confidence more strongly in the future.

BOOK CHAT. Aren't you tired of politics already? I sure as fuck am.

Been reading a bunch of John O'Hara stories. This guy sold a lot mid-century, and it's easy to see why. Alice in Wonderland said, "What's the use of a book without pictures and conversations?" and if O'Hara didn't provide pictures (though his descriptions of settings are often rendered in clinical detail), boy oh boy did he provide conversations. No matter how dim or introverted, his characters fill their quote marks like senators on a filibuster. During one story particularly, "Andrea," about a long-term affair between two chronic unmarriageables, I kept thinking Shut up! Shut up and get to the punch line already! The punch line, alas, is usually dreary and unsatisfying.

Every once in a while, though, he rings a bell. Gore Vidal, who summed him up in 1964, thought O'Hara rang it in "The Trip," which I haven't read. I heard the bell in "Flight," which starts with an old playwright taking a spectacular fall on an icy sidewalk and, before he (unexpectedly) dies from his injury, having a long, pertinent conversation with his ex-actress wife, and an equally pertinent monologue, addresed to his dead son in a dream:

If you lead a completely useless life, but do it with style and die young enough, you're quite likely to be remembered with more affection than the man who has a record of accomplishment. But the secret is to die young enough. If you think you're going to live to a ripe old age, it's better to pile up a record of accomplishment of some sort. It may be bridge-building, or money-making, or butterfly-collecting, but it has to be something. People don't like to see longevity wasted on a do-nothing. And as a rule, it isn't...

Vidal thought O'Hara's writing overly improvisational, without a strong sense of direction. But the most skilled and dogged improvisers do develop a knack for bringing it all back home, as they say.

Also read most of George Gissing's "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," a made-up collection of journal writings by a Grub Street hack who has found leisure to pen some arty occasional pieces in his old age. (Gissing wrote "New Grub Street," the novel that gave him a brief vogue in his own time and also in the late 1990s, based equally, one imagines, on his experiences as, well, a Grub Street hack.) It's mostly pretty dreadful -- the wheezes of a petty bourgeois playing at Thoreau -- but I find it instructive sometimes to read bad writing from a previous era. This one's sort of like "Tuesdays with Morrie" from the turn of the last Century, with treacly amateur naturalism, imbecile social analysis, and breast-clasping swoons over ancient literature ("But I am thinking of the Anabasis. Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to to learn the language in order to read it") that remind me of the insufferable David Denby after he took a course in the Great Books.

Speaking of vintage crap, I've also been leafing through "The Spike," the 1980 novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss about a Woodwardesque reporter who learns that the CIA was right about everything and that the American government is worm-eaten by Soviet moles (reaching as high as the Vice-Presidency) who yearn for a CCCP takeover. This piece of shit follows the Ludlam-Drury playbook, with villainous collectivists ("'All we need to do,' Barisov continued, 'is to help a few people -- journalists, junior officials -- to follow their own instincts'") that would make Ayn Rand blush, and softcore porn that would make anyone blush ("His hands were already moving over her slim, exquisitely molded body... Before he was sure she was ready, her deft, slender fingers pulled him deep inside her"). But the political impetus is stark and obvious: hippies and liberals are pawns of the Reds and those with some integrity left must be turned toward the light so that America can finally do something about Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia! Well, it worked, of course, and we see its bitter fruit falling around us now. Never underestimate the power of bad fiction.

There's more, but aren't you tired of art already?

2004's NEW CONVENTIONAL IDIOCIES -- FIRST TWO IDENTIFIED.
#1: Voting for Democrats is treason.

In the waning days of 2003, General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters looked forward to the year ahead with these comments:

2004 is going to be a year of decision in the War on Terror. As our presidential election approaches, the terrorists remaining at large will sacrifice their last reserves in an effort to dislodge President Bush, freedom's great crusader, from the White House.

The terrorists will seek to convince American voters that the War on Terror is failing, paving the way for the electoral victory of a weakling and allowing them to surge back into vacuums created by an American retreat.

Their last, desperate hope will be to hit us so hard that we elect a coward in place of a hero.

We are so used to hysteria from the General that it is easy to miss the meme bobbing in the ocean of froth: that the Democrats are the Party of Terror, their field workers suicide-bombers and hijackers, and their election the fondest hope of those who wish us all dead or enslaved.

Close enough to a charge of treason, and I expect they'll aim closer still next time. Meanwhile the New York Post is working #2: Running against Bush is treason, thusly:

The [Democratic] party's nominee -- and this includes those who aspire to the nomination -- must understand that the whole world is looking at this campaign.

Looking for signs of confusion, of weakness -- of a lack of American will.

Or for signs of strength and seriousness of purpose.

And so the Democrats must conduct themselves accordingly.

They must be adults, in other words.

Now, standing against Bush, in the old, polite custom of British elections, would seem to be okay, but to disagree publicly with his war policies is... well, see #1.

Boy, that was quick. One would think there's be nowhere to go from there, at least in a southerly direction. But don't bet on it.

ANOTHER TEST of a feature which may be jejune and ultimately futile, but which is also constantly improving, and that, my boy, is the secret of success:

"CONSERVATIVE MOVIES" CONT. In comments to the previous post, a careful reader points out that Brookhiser said "most conservative" rather than "best conservative" movies, a small but not irrelevant distinction.

Giving Brookhiser and those guys some slack (probably undeserved, but New Year's resolutions are still fresh in my mind), it may be that they realize a work by a gay Marxist like Visconti could evince a world view that conservatives might embrace. (I wonder what Brookhiser thinks of "The Damned," though.) A work of art presents a world view, not a bill of political particulars (unless the artist is particularly tendentious and cloying, or a satirist). I like Evelyn Waugh, for example, not because I buy his personal Tory bullshit, but because books like Decline and Fall and Scoop take a mordant view of the follies of men to which I strongly relate. They're also funny and well-crafted. What's not to like?

Also, when NR types talk about conservatism in the abstract, they define it so broadly that nearly anything fits. That's especially true of Goldberg when he starts talking about Burke, as in this passage from a dissection of (believe it or not) "Animal House":

But for the purposes of this discussion -- and for modern conservatism generally -- the most important aspect of Burkean thought is his view of tradition and change. Burke recognized the need for reform (the lack of it, he believed, forced the American colonists to revolt) and he did not fear change... But he thought haste in the realm of reform led to even greater injustice than deliberate inaction... Burke simply didn't trust the problem-solvers. No single individual is smart enough to impose changes on society willy-nilly.

Well, if that's conservatism, sign me up! This is cool-kid conservatism's version of "big-tent" Republicanism. One might call it Jeff Foxworthy Conservatism: if you're in favor of prudence and against heedless reform, y'all might a conservative!

It's a way of making the movement attractive to people who balk at its strictures on, to take one glaring example, gay marriage, which is why we find gaycon Andrew Sullivan throwing props to Neil Boortz -- the guy wants a ban on gay adoptions, but he hasn't specifically called for homosexual heads on pikes, so they're Burkean brothers, y'see.

This kind of woolly thinking has led to the ridiculous, forced phenomena of "South Park Republicanism" and "Crunchy Conservatism." And it's probably why they see validation of their world-view in movies that they like.

It's all good fun, as my mother used to say, until someone loses a legislative agenda. And it may be why many conservatives, historically tight with a buck, are relatively phlegmatic about the big-spending Bush adminisitration. Never mind the hypocracy and the ruination of our economy -- we said fuck you to France, how cool is that? Pass the popcorn.

comments please

CAN I PLAY TOO? Richard Brookhiser, having tantalized his fellow Cornerites by pronouncing Visconti's "The Leopard" "one of the two best conservative movies," finally breaks the spell by pronouncing Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" the other.

I've never seen "The Leopard," but I love "The Music Room," which is about a declining Indian rentier who persists in giving a lavish fete in his crumbling music room, even though he knows the expense will bankrupt him.

It is always hard to know what is going on in the minds of Cornerites (loud explosions and snatches of Wagner, one imagines), but perhaps Brookhiser has here displayed an intuition of the current, very conservative Administration's financial management style.

Another contributor nominates "Mrs. Miniver," perhaps because it's the sort of thing old folks like to watch. Jonah Goldberg, of all people, has some intriguing suggestions.

I've seen a few sessions of this parlor game, and I don't know why no one ever brings up "River's Edge." It's about a bunch of nihilistic teenagers, one of whom kills a girl just because he's wasted and, apparently, doesn't know what else to do with his unchannelled energies. The only meaningful authority figure is a boomer-era teacher who congratulates his own generation because "we stopped a war, man!" The teacher's airheaded idealism is sometimes countered by a values-obsessed nerd (the Ben Shapiro role), whom everyone tells to shut up. If this doesn't fit your typical talkative conservative's world-view, I don't know what would.

I like that movie, and I like Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco," which seems to me a cultural conservative's wet dream.

Well, that was kind of fun, but I think I'll go back to my usual standard, y'know, quality: how well a work of art puts over whatever ideas it happens to have.

comments please

THE BLINGOISIE. When you're very young, you run across nose-pickers who are obsessed with bling, who as they grow older suffer or thrive in direct proportion to the amount of bling they have acquired. Simple folk, God bless them.

Some of these guys, though, are slightly less simple; they need not only money, but also reassurance that everyone else in the world (or at least in their class) is just like they are. They mock the notion that there are any values beyond bling. They clap for people who tell them that yes, they're right, bling is the thing.

Thus are they spared the horrifying realization that, despite all their education and pretentions, they remain to this day nose-pickers with an adolescent spirit of entitlement and values that, however smartly they have been tricked out, are essentially barbarian.

These people are called Dynamists, or, if you want to be sloppy about it (and why not? everyone else is), libertarians, or if you want be accurate about it, assholes.
(Thanks for tip, Matt Yglesias.)

comments please

YET ANOTHER TEST.

comments please

THE OLD BLACK FLAG. UPI reports bombs delivered to the European Court of Justice and Europol in Den Hague, to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, and to Romano Prodi, Chairman of the European Commission. All the parcels share a common starting point in northern Italy, and investigators suspect an anarchist group operating thereabouts.

Some bombs came with interesting appurtances:

Italian media reports said the letter[-bomb] bore a sender's address in Bologna, and the name of Emile Henry, a French 19th century anarchist bomber who tossed a bomb into the crowded Cafe Terminus at the Gare St. Lazare railway station in Paris, killing several people. His motto was "There are no innocents"...

The book sent in the packet bomb was Gabriele d'Annunzio's erotic novel "The Child of Pleasure." D'Annunzio, an admirer and supporter of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, is a literary hero of the Italian extreme right...

UPI reports that "conspiracy-conscious Italians" think someone's trying disuade Prodi from running against Berlusconi when he leaves the Commission. The IHT entertains speculations about the old Red Brigades, and an anti-EU federation called "Euroopposizione." AP says that "An Italian group calling itself the 'Informal Anarchic Federation' took credit for setting two additional time bombs that exploded outside Prodi's house on Dec. 21, causing a small fire."

What to make of this? Setting to one side the decoy theories, it looks like some crazy fuckers are out to do mischief, and they may have gathered under the old black flag.

As chronicled by Barbara Tuchman in "The Proud Tower," the original Anarchists were genuine dead-enders. Around the turn of the last Century, their followers slew no less than six heads of state, including President McKinley. The Anarchists were not spurred by specific grievances against individual regimes, but by hopelessness bred by the elephantine indifference to their plight of all the government that they knew: "They came from the warrens of the poor," wrote Tuchman, "where hunger and dirt were king, where consumptives coughed and the air was thick with the smell of latrines, boiling cabbage and stale beer... where death was the only exit and the only extravagance and the scraped savings of a lifetime would be squandered on a funeral coach with flowers and a parade of mourners to ensure against the anonymity and last ignominy of Potter's Field."

I think it is reasonable to assume that the living conditions of the current letter-bombers are much better than those of their forebears. And at the risk of sounding insensitive to the intellectual attainments of paupers, it seems only a college man would stick D'Annunzio into an exploding package.

So why bomb? One can with a small effort come up with reasons, positive or negative, for any seemingly unreasonable act, but I think that shows more about the speculator than the assailant. I'm beginning to wonder if we're really going to figure out where Timothy McVeigh was coming from. Or Al-Qaeda. Or the Basque separatists, rich as their history may be, who recently put a bomb on railroad tracks in Spain. Or whoever tried to bomb Musharraf. Or the Hamilton County Courthouse. Or Poso, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Not to speak of Iraq.

It does appear that an alarming number of people are putting their faith in explosives these days.

comments please

Q.E. FUCKIN' D. "Goodness... another one. I suppose Ms. MacKinnon isn't 'real' either, just like Orson Scott Card was dismissed as not being 'real'." -- guest-blogger Macallan at Tacitus.

The subject is a couple of putative Dems who have publicly stated that they're voting for Bush. Card has been dealt, so to speak, with. Here's a little background on Ms. P. Amy MacKinnon, the latest alleged apostate:

March 24: "My husband is accompanying troops on the front lines, so that we on the home front can vicariously share in the fight with our soldiers... He will use his pen to empower the weak, very often, mute Iraqis who may reclaim their collective voice in a reporter's story... He, like the daring soldiers with whom he now shares tight quarters in a tank heading north through Iraq, is doing our country a noble service. He is presenting us with the truth." MacKinnon's husband is Jules Crittenden; Romanesko links to a story that mentions him under the teaser, "Crittenden wrote about drunk, vomiting U.S. soldiers."

September 25: "I had rationalized my working for a pro-choice legislator by emphasizing all of the other issues we did agree on..." (The guys at Free Republic really liked this one!)

December 18: "The feminist movement gave birth to my generation and it was our legacy to have it all... But as so often happens, the ideals of a generation clashed with their reality." Meaning, MacKinnon, now with three children, wants a "part-time reporting job," a gig hard enough for us single fellas to get, and argues that her experience of "meals, diaper changes, school buses, doctor's appointments, billing cycles, and -- most important -- bedtime" should be seen by editors as a selling point. "So, yes," she explains, "I could understand the importance of the newspaper's deadlines." And all it took was three fucking kids!

So what have we got here? A sob sister with a desire to succeed in journalism, a grudge against feminist baby-killers, and a penchant for Peggy Noonan-style gush. Clearly her best bet is to try and beat Meagan Cox Gurdon to syndication.

Was this woman ever going to vote for any Democrat in 2004? Not a chance in hell. Should we mourn her loss? Well, if we could win without longtime Democrat Strom Thurmond, we can win without her.

comments please

I.T. UPDATE. Still working on the comments feature. Its contributor has run out to buy a puppy. (Volunteer labor -- you know how it is.) We'll attend to all problems at the next big meeting.

comments please

APOLOGIES TO CHRIS WREN. I guess it had been too long since Professor Reynolds pulled out his old "Conservative? Me?" schtick.

This current McGuffin is a USA Today McArticle that refers to the Prof as "right-leaning." As is more and more frequently the case these days, the Professor allows his henchpeople to do the dirty work:

Right-leaner? I guess supporting the war makes you a right-leaner despite your stances on ANYTHING else. Sigh.

Some folks just have to push everyone into right or left labels.

Sigh. Just because I go through a bale of weed each day, dress like Jerry Garcia ca. 1973, have a "HESGONE" vanity license plate, and listen to American Beauty every single morning, people call me a Deadhead. Go figure.

Take any week's worth of the Professor's scribbles and, if you seek his conservatism, look around you.

Take this week: Europe-bashing, Sully-sucking, librul-media-bashing, librul-bias-alerting, DU-trawling, and a tribute to the global spread of Christianity.

And that's just the day after Christmas.

For every lonely pro-sex or free-the-weed reference the Prof posts, there are a couple dozen Left-slagging and Right-rousing items at least. With of course the usual wretched filler.

The only question is whether the Professor is lying to us, or to himself.

comments please

I GUESS WE JUST HAVE HIGHER STANDARDS. Hey, guys, remember when we all agreed that trawling the fever swamps for conservative nutjob quotes was declasse? Well, Mickey Kaus is doing it. Of course, there's a difference -- he's agreeing with a nut:

Hmmmm. .... Update: Freeper "Shermy" had the same reaction, word for word! [It's a one word reaction-ed Word! He had one more "m"-ed There you go. Overwriting.] 7:39 P.M.

See, this is why we have to unilaterally and preemptively invade the offices of Slate and convert them by force to our way of life.
(Thanks roger for the tip.)

comments please

WHAT A CARD! A while back I (and a host of others) marvelled at the Right's new favorite "Longtime Democrat," science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, who tells how he's disgusted with "his" Party's new-fangled ways -- which became new-fangled, judging by Card's beliefs (anti-abortion, pro-Vietnam War), about thirty years ago. Now, via Pagan Prattle, I learn that on gay rights Card may be even too far Right for most Republicans.

Card's 1990 article "Hypocrites of Homosexuality" has, one must admit, a first line worthy of David Sedaris:

When I was an undergraduate theatre student, I was aware, and not happily so, how pervasive was the reach of the underculture of homosexuality among my friends and acquaintances.

The only problem is, he's serious. Card tells us that gays give their "highest allegiance... to their membership in the community that gave them access to sex," and that their presence will cause "destruction of the Church" (in Card's case, LDS), and thereby must be banished, unless they are willing to reform.

Fear not, level-playing-field types, because Card has a keen eye for heterosexual behavior, too. Young people "will be better and happier if they have no memory of sexual intercourse with others to deal with when they finally are married." (What do Mormons use for this, I wonder -- Rohypnol, or chloroform?)

Also, "the Lord even guides the sexual behavior of those who are married, expecting them to use their sexual powers responsibly and in a proportionate role within the marriage." (Card regrettably fails to provide a detailed description of this role, though I imagine it looks pretty much like this.)

Still, it's mainly homos that exercise Card. "Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books," he decides, "...to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."

There's a lot more, including the usual complaint about being called a homophobe for his religious beliefs. (He also complained of this to Donna Minkowitz, who has more crackpot Card quotes.) What's most hilarious about all this, of course, is that Card was quoted, at length and with great approval, on the war by Andrew Sullivan -- which, given Sullivan's sexuality and position on gay rights, is rather like defending one's feelings on, say, public transportation with a quote from Adolf Hitler -- so discordant as to be absurd.

I wonder how much further word of Card's lunacy will have to spread before he will be retired as a GOP operative. If this persists, we may have to get Harlan Ellison to masquerade as a Republican.

comments please

CHRIST ON A CRECHE. Peggy Noonan is telling us about bad people again, this time the folks who want to ban nativity scenes:

They think that if only people would stop being religious, we wouldn't have religion around roiling people's emotions and making them violent. (If you say to them, "Man is prone to violence, and one of the things that tends to make his heart gentle is faith in God," their eyes widen in shock: That couldn't possibly be true!)

Ms. Noonan meets such interesting people, and says such interesting things to them. I wonder if she also sees leprechauns, and asks them where they keep their pots o' gold.

Her solution to anti-crechism is "to fill the public square with the signs and symbols of faith. It is not to banish them from the schools, it is to teach them in the schools... display a menorah and explain what it is... to display a crucifix or a cross and explain what it means to Christians. And, yes, the answer is to show a Koran and explain what it is." The kids should also sing Christmas carols and "other religious songs that are not Christian."

I'm all for it! The children can lift their voices in tribute to Buddah, and Zoroaster, and Lord Mahavira, and Gaia. And in the spirit of true ecumenicanalism, we can tell them about the worship of Satan, and crank some Black Sabbath.

Later comes my favorite line from the whole exercise:

"So I took Mary into the house, and she lived for three years in a closet. "

So that's what happened to her. Ms. Noonan also talks about the wonderful panoply of religious artifacts visible in her neighborhood, just down the road apiece from me in Cobble Hill, unmolested by the atheists who apparently all live on Park Avenue in the dark borough of Manhattan. "May the world in 2004 be more like Brooklyn," she concludes, "and may its arguments over religion and the public square be solved the Brooklyn way."

Here I must agree. Just a short distance from the madonnas and menorahs are several very nice gay bars, which coexist harmoniously with Mary Star of the Sea and the other neighborhood places of worship. If Ms. Noonan is okay with those, I'm okay with the little religious theme park she wants to set up. Just so long as she doesn't use my tax dollars to pay for it. Compassionate and conservative -- what a solution! Why, I'm feeling more Brooklyn already!

comments please

TEST. Well, as the Warden says in A Clockwork Orange, these new, ridiculous ideas have come at last:

comments please

LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME, I'm a liberal, says the Christian Science Monitor's "Are U A Neocon?" quiz in response to my answers. (Okay, I made the title up, but basically it's an egghead version of one of those Quizilla things.)

The questions pertain to pre-emptive strikes, the Axis of Evil, the defense/domestic political balance, and other hot topics. The possible results are Neo-Conservative, Isolationist, Realist (!), and Liberal. So I guess me, Wolfowitz, and Pat Buchanan are all livin' in a dream world!

I got a kick out of the Monitor's descriptors for each result. Liberals, for example, "believe political solutions are inherently superior to military solutions." Gosh, how will we ever win elections with goofy ideas like that!

But the fix is in: look at the liberal examplars:

Historical liberal: President Woodrow Wilson
Modern liberal: President Jimmy Carter

Geez, why didn't they just use Percy Dovetonsils and Alan Colmes?

Thanks to Jim at Rittenhouse for the tip.

SOLDIERS' PAY. From Phil Carter's very thoughtful weblog, a Washington Post story on how the Army's using a little-known maneuver to keep soldiers on duty for longer than they expected:

According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 -- the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"

The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.

We pay our servicemen shit; it's so bad that Wisconsin is contemplating chipping in to make up the difference between its native sons' and daughters' military pay and a living wage! And now we're holding 'em over by special request.

To be fair, an across-the-board pay raise is in the works. But it ain't much. Yes, I know that in time of war (however nebulously defined), troops may expect to be held over. But since everyone over in Iraq loves us (a highly-placed source tells me, and everyone), you'd think we'd need fewer rather than more troops.

DID YOU EVER FIND BIGS BUNNY ATTRACTIVE WHEN HE'D PUT ON A DRESS AND PLAY A GIRL BUNNY? I see the notorious homophobe John Derbyshire has proposed a "sexy-but-not-pretty" poll for males. (He ran one about women some months back. Derbyshire, by the way, is a grown man who writes books about math.)

When I read this Derb post about the male poll (ahem), I assumed his aim was to give the ladies in the audience some share of the frisson he'd enjoyed fantasizing about Ellen Barkin et alia in the previous poll. I see by his previous post, though, that he had something different in view:

Bates seems to illustrate the male side of the "pretty but not sexy" business I raised in a column some months ago. I always thought him an extremely attractive man, and supposed that if I were a woman, I would have some serious fantasies about him. Yet on the odd occasion I have raised this topic with women, I have got blank stares in return. "Alan Bates? No, nothing special. Why would you think that?...." It's an aspect of the Mars-Venus thing. Women generally have no clue what kind of woman men find attractive, and vice versa

Two things:

• Saying you would fantasize sexually about someone only under certain conditions means you're already fantasizing about him.
  
• Fantasizing about someone and then going around asking your girlfriends if they think he's cute means you want to marry him.

How long can Derb bang on that closet door before it collapses?